Boer War had cut across the poet's dream of Europe a hundred years ago,
and a group of records of the Dorsetshire elements of the British army
at the close of 1899 showed in Mr. Hardy's poetry what had not been
suspected there--a military talent of a most remarkable kind. Another
set of pieces composed in Rome were not so interesting; Mr. Hardy always
seems a little languid when he leaves the confines of his native Wessex.
Another section of _Poems of the Past and Present_ is severely, almost
didactically, metaphysical, and expands in varied language the daring
thought, so constantly present in Mr. Hardy's reverie, that God Himself
has forgotten the existence of earth, this "tiny sphere," this "tainted
ball," "so poor a thing," and has left all human life to be the
plaything of blind chance. This sad conviction is hardly ruffled by "The
Darkling Thrush," which goes as far towards optimism as Mr. Hardy can
let himself be drawn, or by such reflections as those in "On a Fine
Morning":--
"Whence comes Solace? Not from seeing
What is doing, suffering, being;
Not from noting Life's conditions,
Not from heeding Time's monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing on the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem."
Eight years more passed, years marked by the stupendous effort of _The
Dynasts_, before Mr. Hardy put forth another collection of lyrical
poems. _Time's Laughingstocks_ confirmed, and more than confirmed, the
high promise of _Wessex Poems_. The author, in one of his modest
prefaces, where he seems to whisper while we bend forward in our anxiety
not to miss one thrifty sentence, expresses the hope that _Time's
Laughingstocks_ will, as a whole, take the "reader forward, even if not
far, rather than backward."
The book, indeed, does not take us "far" forward, simply because the
writer's style and scope were definitely exposed to us already, and yet
it does take us "forward," because the hand of the master is
conspicuously firmer and his touch more daring. The _Laughingstocks_
themselves are fifteen in number, tragical stories of division and
isolation, of failures in passion, of the treason of physical decay. No
landscape of Mr. Hardy's had been more vivid than the night-pictures in
"The Revisitation," where the old soldier in barracks creeps out on to
the gaunt down, and meets (by one of Mr. Hardy's coincidences) his
ancient mistress, and no picture more terrible than the revelation of
each to the other in a blaze of sunrise. What a document for the future
is "Reminiscences of a Dancing Man"? If only Shakespeare could have left
us such a song of the London in 1585! But the power of the poet
culminates in the pathos of "The Tramp Woman"--perhaps the greatest of
all Mr. Hardy's lyrical poems--and in the horror of "A Sunday Morning's
Tragedy."
It is noticeable that _Time's Laughingstocks_ is, in some respects, a
more daring collection than its predecessors. We find the poet here
entirely emancipated from convention, and guided both in religion and
morals exclusively by the inner light of his reflection. His energy now
interacts on his clairvoyance with a completeness which he had never
quite displayed before, and it is here that we find Mr. Hardy's
utterance peculiarly a quintessence of himself. Especially in the
narrative pieces--which are often Wessex novels distilled into a
wine-glass, such as "Rose-Ann," and "The Vampirine Fair"--he allows no
considerations of what the reader may think "nice" or "pleasant" to
shackle his sincerity or his determination; and it is therefore to
_Time's Laughingstocks_ that the reader who wishes to become intimately
acquainted with Mr. Hardy as a moralist most frequently recurs. We
notice here more than elsewhere in his poems Mr. Hardy's sympathy with
the local music of Wessex, and especially with its expression by the
village choir, which he uses as a spiritual symbol. Quite a large
section of _Time's Laughingstocks_ takes us to the old-fashioned gallery
of some church, where the minstrels are bowing "New Sabbath" or "Mount
Ephraim," or to a later scene where the ghosts, in whose melancholy
apparition Mr. Hardy takes such pleasure, chant their goblin melodies
and strum "the viols of the dead" in the moonlit churchyard. The very
essence of Mr. Hardy's reverie at this moment of his career is to be
found, for instance, in "The Dead Quire," where the ancient
phantom-minstrels revenge themselves on their gross grandsons outside
the alehouse.
Almost immediately after the outbreak of the present war Mr. Hardy
presented to a somewhat distraught and inattentive public another
collection of his poems. It cannot be said that _Satires of
Circumstance_ is the most satisfactory of those volumes; it is, perhaps,
that which we could with the least discomposure persuade ourselves to
overlook. Such a statement refers more to the high quality of other
pages than to any positive decay of power or finish here. There is no
less adroitness of touch and penetration of view in this book than
elsewhere, and the poet awakens once more our admiration by his skill in
giving poetic value to minute conditions of life which have escaped less
careful observers. But in _Satires of Circumstance_ the ugliness of
experience is more accentuated than it is elsewhere, and is flung in our
face with less compunction. The pieces which give name to the volume are
only fifteen in number, but the spirit which inspires them is very
frequently repeated in other parts of the collection. That spirit is one
of mocking sarcasm, and it acts in every case by presenting a
beautifully draped figure of illusion, from which the poet, like a
sardonic showman, twitches away the robe that he may display a skeleton
beneath it. We can with little danger assume, as we read the _Satires of
Circumstance_, hard and cruel shafts of searchlight as they seem, that
Mr. Hardy was passing through a mental crisis when he wrote them. This
seems to be the _Troilus and Cressida_ of his life's work, the book in
which he is revealed most distracted by conjecture and most overwhelmed
by the miscarriage of everything. The wells of human hope have been
poisoned for him by some condition of which we know nothing, and even
the picturesque features of Dorsetshire landscape, that have always
before dispersed his melancholy, fail to win his attention:--
"Bright yellowhammers
Made mirthful clamours,
And billed long straws with a bustling air,
And bearing their load,
Flew up the road
That he followed alone, without interest there."
The strongest of the poems of disillusion which are the outcome of this
mood, is "The Newcomer's Wife," with the terrible abruptness of its last
stanza. It is not for criticism to find fault with the theme of a work
of art, but only to comment upon its execution. Of the merit of these
monotonously sinister _Satires of Circumstance_ there can be no
question; whether the poet's indulgence in the mood which gave birth to
them does not tend to lower our moral temperature and to lessen the
rebound of our energy, is another matter. At all events, every one must
welcome a postscript in which a blast on the bugle of war seemed to have
wakened the poet from his dark brooding to the sense of a new chapter in
history.
In the fourth year of the war the veteran poet published _Moments of
Vision_. These show a remarkable recovery of spirit, and an ingenuity
never before excelled. With the passage of years Mr. Hardy, observing
everything in the little world of Wessex, and forgetting nothing, has
become almost preternaturally wise, and, if it may be said so,
"knowing," with a sort of magic, like that of a wizard. He has learned
to track the windings of the human heart with the familiarity of a
gamekeeper who finds plenty of vermin in the woods, and who nails what
he finds, be it stoat or squirrel, to the barn-door of his poetry. But
there is also in these last-fruits of Mr. Hardy's mossed tree much that
is wholly detached from the bitterness of satire, much that simply
records, with an infinite delicacy of pathos, little incidents of the
personal life of long ago, bestowing the immortality of art on these
fugitive fancies in the spirit of the Japanese sculptor when he chisels
the melting of a cloud or the flight of an insect on his sword hilt:--
"I idly cut a parsley stalk
And blew therein towards the moon;
I had not thought what ghosts would walk
With shivering footsteps to my tune.
"I went and knelt, and scooped my hand
As if to drink, into the brook,
And a faint figure seemed to stand
Above me, with the bye-gone look.
"I lipped rough rhymes of chance not choice,
I thought not what my words might be;
There came into my ear a voice
That turned a tenderer verse for me."
We have now in brief historic survey marshalled before us the various
volumes in which Mr. Hardy's lyrical poetry was originally collected.
Before we examine its general character more closely, it may be well to
call attention to its technical quality, which was singularly
misunderstood at first, and which has never, we believe, been boldly
faced. In 1898, and later, when a melodious _falsetto_ was much in
fashion amongst us, the reviewers found great fault with Mr. Hardy's
prosody; they judged him as a versifier to be rude and incorrect. As
regards the single line, it may be confessed that Mr. Hardy, in his
anxiety to present his thought in an undiluted form, is not infrequently
clogged and hard. Such a line as
"Fused from its separateness by ecstasy"
hisses at us like a snake, and crawls like a wounded one. Mr. Hardy is
apt to clog his lines with consonants, and he seems indifferent to the
stiffness which is the consequence of this neglect. Ben Jonson said that
"Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging"; perhaps we may go
so far as to say that Mr. Hardy, for his indifference to a mellifluous
run lays himself open to a mild rebuke. He is negligent of that eternal
ornament of English verse, audible intricacy, probably because of
Swinburne's abuse of it. But most of what is called his harshness should
rather be called bareness, and is the result of a revolt, conscious or
unconscious, against Keats' prescription of "loading the rifts with
ore."
In saying this, all has been said that an enemy could in justice say in
blame of his metrical peculiarities. Unquestionably he does
occasionally, like Robert Browning, err in the direction of cacophony.
But when we turn to the broader part of prosody, we must perceive that
Mr. Hardy is not only a very ingenious, but a very correct and admirable
metricist. His stanzaic invention is abundant; no other Victorian poet,
not even Swinburne, has employed so many forms, mostly of his own
invention, and employed them so appropriately, that is to say, in so
close harmony with the subject or story enshrined in them. To take an
example from his pure lyrics of reflection first, from "The
Bullfinches":--
"Brother Bulleys, let us sing
From the dawn till evening!
For we know not that we go not
When the day's pale visions fold
Unto those who sang of old,"
in the exquisite fineness and sadness of the stanza we seem to hear the
very voices of the birds warbling faintly in the sunset. Again, the
hurried, timid irresolution of a lover always too late is marvellously
rendered in the form of "Lizbie Browne":--
"And Lizbie Browne,
Who else had hair
Bay-red as yours,
Or flesh so fair
Bred out of doors,
Sweet Lizbie Browne?"
On the other hand, the fierceness of "I said to Love" is interpreted in
a stanza that suits the mood of denunciation, while "Tess's Lament"
wails in a metre which seems to rock like an ageing woman seated alone
before the fire, with an infinite haunting sadness.
It is, however, in the narrative pieces, the little _Wessex Tales_,
that Mr. Hardy's metrical imagination is most triumphant. No two of
these are identical in form, and for each he selects, or more often
invents, a wholly appropriate stanza. He makes many experiments, one of
the strangest being the introduction of rhymeless lines at regular
intervals. Of this, "Cicely" is an example which repays attention:--
"And still sadly onward I followed,
That Highway the Icen
Which trails its pale riband down Wessex
O'er lynchet and lea.
"Along through the Stour-bordered Forum,
Where legions had wayfared,
And where the slow river up-glasses
Its green canopy";
and one still more remarkable is the enchanting "Friends Beyond," to
which we shall presently recur. The drawling voice of a weary old
campaigner is wonderfully rendered in the stanza of "Valenciennes":--
"Well: Heaven wi' its jasper halls
Is now the on'y town I care to be in..
Good Lord, if Nick should bomb the walls
As we did Valencieen!"
whereas for long Napoleonic stories like "Leipzig" and "The Peasant's
Confession," a ballad-measure which contemporaries such as Southey or
Campbell might have used is artfully chosen. In striking contrast we
have the elaborate verse-form of "The Souls of the Slain," in which the
throbbing stanza seems to dilate and withdraw like the very cloud of
moth-like phantoms which it describes. It is difficult to follow out
this theme without more frequent quotation than I have space, for here,
but the reader who pursues it carefully will not repeat the rumour that
Mr. Hardy is a careless or "incorrect" metricist. He is, on the
contrary, a metrical artist of great accomplishment.
The conception of life revealed in his verses by this careful artist is
one which displays very exactly the bent of his temperament. During the
whole of his long career Mr. Hardy has not budged an inch from his
original line of direction. He holds that, abandoned by God, treated
with scorn by Nature, man lies helpless at the mercy of "those purblind
Doomsters," accident, chance, and time, from whom he has had to endure
injury and insult from the cradle to the grave. This is stating the
Hardy doctrine in its extreme form, but it is not stating it too
strongly. This has been called his "pessimism," a phrase to which some
admirers, unwilling to give things their true name, have objected. But,
of course, Mr. Hardy is a pessimist, just as Browning is an optimist,
just as white is not black, and day is not night. Our juggling with
words in paradox is too often apt to disguise a want of decision in
thought. Let us admit that Mr. Hardy's conception of the fatal forces
which beleaguer human life is a "pessimistic" one, or else words have no
meaning.
Yet it is needful to define in what this pessimism consists. It is not
the egotism of Byron or the morbid melancholy of Chateaubriand. It is
directed towards an observation of others, not towards an analysis of
self, and this gives it more philosophical importance, because although
romantic peevishness is very common among modern poets, and although
ennui inspires a multitude of sonnets, a deliberate and imaginative
study of useless suffering in the world around us is rare indeed among
the poets. It is particularly to be noted that Mr. Hardy, although one
of the most profoundly tragic of all modern writers, is neither
effeminate nor sickly. His melancholy could never have dictated the
third stanza of Shelley's "Lines written in Dejection in the Bay of
Naples." His pessimism is involuntary, forced from him by his experience
and his constitution, and no analysis could give a better definition of
what divides him from the petulant despair of a poet like Leopardi than
the lines "To Life":--
"O life, with the sad scared face,
I weary of seeing thee,
And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobbling pace,
And thy too-forced pleasantry!
"I know what thou would'st tell
Of Death, Time, Destiny--
I have known it long, and know, too, well
What it all means for me.
"But canst thou not array
Thyself in rare disguise,
And feign like truth, for one mad day,
That Earth is Paradise?
"I'll tune me to the mood,
And mumm with thee till eve,
And maybe what as interlude
I feign, I shall believe!"
But the mumming goes no deeper than it does in the exquisite poem of
"The Darkling Thrush," where the carolings of an aged bird, on a frosty
evening, are so ecstatic that they waken a vague hope in the listener's
mind that the thrush may possibly know of "some blessed hope" of which
the poet is "unaware." This is as far as Mr. Hardy ever gets on the
blest Victorian pathway of satisfaction.
There are certain aspects in which it is not unnatural to see a parallel
between Mr. Hardy and George Crabbe. Each is the spokesman of a
district, each has a passion for the study of mankind, each has gained
by long years of observation a profound knowledge of local human
character, and each has plucked on the open moor, and wears in his coat,
the hueless flower of disillusion. But there is a great distinction in
the aim of the two poets. Crabbe, as he describes himself in _The Parish
Register_, was "the true physician" who "walks the foulest ward." He was
utilitarian in his morality; he exposed the pathos of tragedy by
dwelling on the faults which led to it, forgetful of the fatality which
in more consistent moments he acknowledged. Crabbe was realistic with a
moral design, even in the _Tales of the Hall_, where he made a gallant
effort at last to arrive at a detachment of spirit. No such effort is
needed by Mr. Hardy, who has none of the instinct of a preacher, and who
considers moral improvement outside his responsibility. He admits, with
his great French contemporary, that
"Tout desir est menteur, toute joie ephemere,
Toute liqueur au fond de la coupe est amere,"
but he is bent on discovering the cause of this devastation, and not
disposed to waste time over its consequences. At the end he produces a
panacea which neither Crabbe nor Byron dreamed of--resignation.
But the poet has not reached the end of his disillusion. He thinks to
secure repose on the breast of Nature, the _alma mater_, to whom Goethe
and Wordsworth and Browning each in his own way turned, and were
rewarded by consolation and refreshment. We should be prepared to find
Mr. Hardy, with his remarkable aptitude for the perception of natural
forms, easily consoled by the influences of landscape and the inanimate
world. His range of vision is wide and extremely exact; he has the gift
of reproducing before us scenes of various character with a vividness
which is sometimes startling. But Mr. Hardy's disdain of sentimentality,
and his vigorous analysis of the facts of life, render him insensible
not indeed to the mystery nor to the beauty, but to the imagined
sympathy, of Nature. He has no more confidence in the visible earth than
in the invisible heavens, and neither here nor there is he able to
persuade himself to discover a counsellor or a friend. In this
connection, we do well to follow the poet's train of thought in the
lyric called "In a Wood," where he enters a copse dreaming that, in that
realm of "sylvan peace," Nature would offer "a soft release from man's
unrest." He immediately observes that the pine and the beech are
struggling for existence, and trying to blight each other with dripping
poison. He sees the ivy eager to strangle the elm, and the hawthorns
choking the hollies. Even the poplars sulk and turn black under the
shadow of a rival. In the end, filled with horror at all these crimes of
Nature, the poet flees from the copse as from an accursed place, and he
determines that life offers him no consolation except the company of
those human beings who are as beleaguered as himself:--
"Since, then, no grace I find
Taught me of trees,
Turn I back to my kind
Worthy as these.
There at least smiles abound,
There discourse trills around,
There, now and then, are found,
Life-loyalties."
It is absurd, he decides, to love Nature, which has either no response
to give, or answers in irony. Let us even avoid, as much as we can, deep
concentration of thought upon the mysteries of Nature, lest we become
demoralised by contemplating her negligence, her blindness, her
implacability. We find here a violent reaction against the poetry of
egotistic optimism which had ruled the romantic school in England for
more than a hundred years, and we recognise a branch of Mr. Hardy's
originality. He has lifted the veil of Isis, and he finds beneath it,
not a benevolent mother of men, but the tomb of an illusion. One short
lyric, "Yell'ham-Wood's Story," puts this, again with a sylvan setting,
in its unflinching crudity:--
"Coomb-Firtrees say that Life is a moan,
And Clyffe-hill Clump says 'Yea!'
But Yell'ham says a thing of its own:
It's not, 'Gray, gray,
Is Life alway!'
That Yell'ham says,
Nor that Life is for ends unknown.
"It says that Life would signify
A thwarted purposing:
That we come to live, and are called to die.
Yes, that's the thing
In fall, in spring,
That Yell'ham says:--
Life offers--to deny!'"
It is therefore almost exclusively to the obscure history of those who
suffer and stumble around him, victims of the universal disillusion, men
and women "come to live but called to die," that Mr. Hardy dedicates his
poetic function. "Lizbie Browne" appeals to us as a typical instance of
his rustic pathos, his direct and poignant tenderness, and if we compare
it with such poems of Wordsworth's as "Lucy Gray" or "Alice Fell" we see
that he starts by standing much closer to the level of the subject than
his great predecessor does. Wordsworth is the benevolent philosopher
sitting in a post-chaise or crossing the "wide moor" in meditation. Mr.
Hardy is the familiar neighbour, the shy mourner at the grave; his
relation is a more intimate one: he is patient, humble, un-upbraiding.
Sometimes, as in the remarkable colloquy called "The Ruined Maid," his
sympathy is so close as to offer an absolute flout in the face to the
system of Victorian morality. Mr. Hardy, indeed, is not concerned with
sentimental morals, but with the primitive instincts of the soul,
applauding them, or at least recording them with complacency, even when
they outrage ethical tradition, as they do in the lyric narrative called
"A Wife and Another." The stanzas "To an Unborn Pauper Child" sum up
what is sinister and what is genial in Mr. Hardy's attitude to the
unambitious forms of life which he loves to contemplate.
His temperature is not always so low as it is in the class of poems to
which we have just referred, but his ultimate view is never more
sanguine. He is pleased sometimes to act as the fiddler at a dance,
surveying the hot-blooded couples, and urging them on by the lilt of
his instrument, but he is always perfectly aware that they will have "to
pay high for their prancing" at the end of all. No instance of this is
more remarkable than the poem called "Julie-Jane," a perfect example of
Mr. Hardy's metrical ingenuity and skill, which begins thus:--
"Sing; how 'a would sing!
How 'a would raise the tune
When we rode in the waggon from harvesting
By the light o' the moon!
"Dance; how 'a would dance!
If a fiddlestring did but sound
She would hold out her coats, give a slanting glance,
And go round and round.
"Laugh; how 'a would laugh!
Her peony lips would part
As if none such a place for a lover to quaff
At the deeps of a heart,"
and which then turns to the most plaintive and the most irreparable
tragedy, woven, as a black design on to a background of gold, upon this
basis of temperamental joyousness.
Alphonse Daudet once said that the great gift of Edmond de Goncourt was
to, "_rendre l'irrendable_." This is much more true of Mr. Hardy than it
was of Goncourt, and more true than it is of any other English poet
except Donne. There is absolutely no observation too minute, no flutter
of reminiscence too faint, for Mr. Hardy to adopt as the subject of a
metaphysical lyric, and his skill in this direction has grown upon him;
it is nowhere so remarkable as in his latest volume, aptly termed
_Moments of Vision_. Everything in village life is grist to his mill; he
seems to make no selection, and his field is modest to humility and yet
practically boundless. We have a poem on the attitude of two people with
nothing to do and no book to read, waiting in the parlour of an hotel
for the rain to stop, a recollection after more than forty years. That
the poet once dropped a pencil into the cranny of an old church where he
was sketching inspires an elaborate lyric. The disappearance of a rotted
summer-house, the look of a row of silver drops of fog condensed on the
bar of a gate, the effect of candlelight years and years ago on a
woman's neck and hair, the vision of a giant at a fair, led by a dwarf
with a red string--such are amongst the subjects which awaken in Mr.
Hardy thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears, and call for
interpretation in verse. The skeleton of a lady's sunshade, picked up on
Swanage Cliffs, the pages of a fly-blown Testament lying in a railway
waiting-room, a journeying boy in a third-class carriage, with his
ticket stuck in the band of his hat--such are among the themes which
awake in Mr. Hardy's imagination reveries which are always wholly
serious and usually deeply tragic.