of poetry is one of the most notable features of his originality. It
marked his work from the beginning, as in the early ballad of "The
Widow," where the sudden damping of the wooer's amatory ardour in
consequence of his jealousy of the child is rendered with extraordinary
refinement. The difficulty of course is to know when to stop. There is
always a danger that a poet, in his search after the infinitely
ingenious, may lapse into _amphigory_, into sheer absurdity and
triviality, which Cowper, in spite of his elegant lightness, does not
always escape. Wordsworth, more serious in his intent, fell headlong in
parts of _Peter Bell_, and in such ballads as "Betty Foy." Mr. Hardy,
whatever the poverty of his incident, commonly redeems it by the oddity
of his observation; as in "The Pedigree":--
"I bent in the deep of night
Over a pedigree the chronicler gave
As mine; and as I bent there, half-unrobed,
The uncurtained panes of my window-square
Let in the watery light
Of the moon in its old age:
And green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past
Where mute and cold it globed
Like a dying dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave."
Mr. Hardy's love of strange experiences, and of adventures founded on a
balance of conscience and instinct, is constantly exemplified in those
ballads and verse-anecdotes which form the section of his poetry most
appreciated by the general public. Among these, extraordinarily
representative of the poet's habit of mind, is "My Cicely," a tale of
the eighteenth century, where a man impetuously rides from London
through Wessex to be present at the funeral of the wrong woman; as he
returns, by a coincidence, he meets the right woman, whom he used to
love, and is horrified at "her liquor-fired face, her thick accents." He
determines that by an effort of will the dead woman (whom he never saw)
shall remain, what she seemed during his wild ride, "_my_ Cicely," and
the living woman be expunged from memory. A similar deliberate electing
that the dream shall hold the place of the fact is the motive of "The
Well-Beloved." The ghastly humour of "The Curate's Kindness" is a sort
of reverse action of the same mental subtlety. Misunderstanding takes a
very prominent place in Mr. Hardy's irony of circumstance; as, almost
too painfully, in "The Rash Bride," a hideous tale of suicide following
on the duplicity of a tender and innocent widow.
The grandmother of Mr. Hardy was born in 1772, and survived until 1857.
From her lips he heard many an obscure old legend of the life of Wessex
in the eighteenth century. Was it she who told him the terrible Exmoor
story of "The Sacrilege;" the early tale of "The Two Men," which might
be the skeleton-scenario for a whole elaborate novel; or that
incomparable comedy in verse, "The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's," with its
splendid human touch at the very end? We suspect that it was; and
perhaps at the same source he acquired his dangerous insight into the
female heart, whether exquisitely feeble as in "The Home-coming" with
its delicate and ironic surprise, or treacherous, as in the desolating
ballad of "Rose-Ann." No one, in prose or verse, has expatiated more
poignantly than Mr. Hardy on what our forefathers used to call "cases of
conscience." He seems to have shared the experiences of souls to whom
life was "a wood before your doors, and a labyrinth within the wood, and
locks and bars to every door within that labyrinth," as Jeremy Taylor
describes that of the anxious penitents who came to him to confession.
The probably very early story of "The Casterbridge Captains" is a
delicate study in compunction, and a still more important example is
"The Alarm," where the balance of conscience and instinct gives to what
in coarser hands might seem the most trivial of actions a momentous
character of tragedy.
This is one of Mr. Hardy's studies in military history, where he is
almost always singularly happy. His portraits of the non-commissioned
officer of the old service are as excellent in verse as they are in the
prose of _The Trumpet-Major_ or _The Melancholy Hussar_. The reader of
the novels will not have to be reminded that "Valenciennes" and the
other ballads have their prose-parallel in Simon Burden's reminiscences
of Minden. Mr. Hardy, with a great curiosity about the science of war
and a close acquaintance with the mind of the common soldier, has
pondered on the philosophy of fighting. "The Man he Killed," written in
1902, expresses the wonder of the rifleman who is called upon to shoot
his brother-in-arms, although
"Had he and I but met,
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin."
In this connection the _Poems of War and Patriotism_, which form an
important part of the volume of 1918, should be carefully examined by
those who meditate on the tremendous problems of the moment.
A poet so profoundly absorbed in the study of life could not fail to
speculate on the probabilities of immortality. Here Mr. Hardy presents
to us his habitual serenity in negation. He sees the beautiful human
body "lined by tool of time," and he asks what becomes of it when its
dissolution is complete. He sees no evidence of a conscious state after
death, of what would have to be, in the case of aged or exhausted
persons, a revival of spiritual force, and on the whole he is
disinclined to cling to the faith in a future life. He holds that the
immortality of a dead man resides in the memory of the living, his
"finer part shining within ever-faithful hearts of those bereft." He
pursues this theme in a large number of his most serious and affecting
lyrics, most gravely perhaps in "The To-be-Forgotten" and in "The
Superseded." This sense of the forlorn condition of the dead, surviving
only in the dwindling memory of the living, inspires what has some
claims to be considered the loveliest of all Mr. Hardy's poems, "Friends
Beyond," which in its tenderness, its humour, and its pathos contains in
a few pages every characteristic of his genius.
His speculation perceives the dead as a crowd of slowly vanishing
phantoms, clustering in their ineffectual longing round the footsteps of
those through whom alone they continue to exist. This conception has
inspired Mr. Hardy with several wonderful visions, among which the
spectacle of "The Souls of the Slain" in the Boer War, alighting, like
vast flights of moths, over Portland Bill at night, is the most
remarkable. It has the sublimity and much of the character of some
apocalyptic design by Blake. The volume of 1902 contains a whole group
of phantasmal pieces of this kind, where there is frequent mention of
spectres, who address the poet in the accents of nature, as in the
unrhymed ode called "The Mother Mourns." The obsession of old age, with
its physical decay ("I look into my glass"), the inevitable division
which leads to that isolation which the poet regards as the greatest of
adversities ("The Impercipient"), the tragedies of moral indecision, the
contrast between the tangible earth and the bodyless ghosts, and endless
repetition of the cry, "Why find we us here?" and of the question "Has
some Vast Imbecility framed us in jest, and left us now to
hazardry?"--all start from the overwhelming love of physical life and
acquaintance with its possibilities, which Mr. Hardy possesses to an
inordinate degree.
It would be ridiculous at the close of an essay to attempt any
discussion of the huge dramatic panorama which many believe to be Mr.
Hardy's most weighty contribution to English literature. The spacious
theatre of _The Dynasts_ with its comprehensive and yet concise
realisations of vast passages of human history, is a work which calls
for a commentary as lengthy as itself, and yet needs no commentary at
all. No work of the imagination is more its own interpreter than this
sublime historic peep-show, this rolling vision of the Napoleonic
chronicle drawn on the broadest lines, and yet in detail made up of
intensely concentrated and vivid glimpses of reality. But the subject of
my present study, the lyrical poetry of Mr. Hardy, is not largely
illustrated in _The Dynasts_, except by the choral interludes of the
phantom intelligences, which have great lyrical value, and by three or
four admirable songs.
When we resume the effect which the poetry of Mr. Hardy makes upon the
careful reader, we note, as I have indicated already, a sense of unity
of direction throughout. Mr. Hardy has expressed himself in a thousand
ways, but has never altered his vision. From 1867 to 1917, through half
a century of imaginative creation, he has not modified the large
outlines of his art in the smallest degree. To early readers of his
poems, before the full meaning of them became evident, his voice sounded
inharmonious, because it did not fit in with the exquisite melodies of
the later Victorian age. But Mr. Hardy, with characteristic pertinacity,
did not attempt to alter his utterance in the least, and now we can all
perceive, if we take the trouble to do so, that what seemed harsh in his
poetry was his peculiar and personal mode of interpreting his thoughts
to the world.
As in his novels so in his poems, Mr. Hardy has chosen to remain local,
to be the interpreter for present and future times of one rich and
neglected province of the British realm. From his standpoint there he
contemplates the wide aspect of life, but it seems huge and misty to
him, and he broods over the tiny incidents of Wessex idiosyncracy. His
irony is audacious and even sardonic, and few poets have been less
solicitous to please their weaker brethren. But no poet of modern times
has been more careful to avoid the abstract and to touch upon the real.
SOME SOLDIER POETS
The two years which preceded the outbreak of the war were marked in this
country by a revival of public interest in the art of poetry. To this
movement coherence was given and organisation introduced by Mr. Edward
Marsh's now-famous volume entitled _Georgian Poetry_. The effect of this
collection--for it is hardly correct to call it an anthology--of the
best poems written by the youngest poets since 1911 was two-fold; it
acquainted readers with work few had "the leisure or the zeal to
investigate," and it brought the writers themselves together in a
corporate and selected relation. I do not recollect that this had been
done--except prematurely and partially by _The Germ_ of 1850--since the
_England's Parnassus_ and _England's Helicon_ of 1600. In point of fact
the only real precursor of Mr. Marsh's venture in our whole literature
is the _Songs and Sonnettes_ of 1557, commonly known as _Tottel's
Miscellany_. Tottel brought together, for the first time, the lyrics of
Wyatt, Surrey, Churchyard, Vaux, and Bryan, exactly as Mr. Marsh called
public attention to Rupert Brooke, James Elroy Flecker and the rest of
the Georgians, and he thereby fixed the names of those poets, as Mr.
Marsh has fixed those of our youngest fledglings, on the roll of English
literature.
The general tone of the latest poetry, up to the moment of the outbreak
of hostilities, was pensive, instinct with natural piety, given somewhat
in excess to description of landscape, tender in feeling, essentially
unaggressive except towards the clergy and towards other versifiers of
an earlier generation. There was absolutely not a trace in any one of
the young poets of that arrogance and vociferous defiance which marked
German verse during the same years. These English shepherds might hit at
their elders with their staves, but they had turned their swords into
pruning-hooks and had no scabbards to rattle. This is a point which
might have attracted notice, if we had not all been too drowsy in the
lap of our imperial prosperity to observe the signs of the times in
Berlin. Why did no one call our attention to the beating of the big drum
which was going on so briskly on the Teutonic Parnassus? At all events,
there was no echo of such a noise in the "chambers of imagery" which
contained Mr. Gordon Bottomley, or in Mr. W.H. Davies' wandering "songs
of joy," or on "the great hills and solemn chanting seas" where Mr. John
Drinkwater waited for the advent of beauty. And the guns of August 1914
found Mr. W.W. Gibson encompassed by "one dim, blue infinity of starry
peace." There is a sort of German _Georgian Poetry_ in existence; in
time to come a comparison of its pages with those of Mr. Marsh may throw
a side-light on the question, Who prepared the War?
The youngest poets were more completely taken by surprise in August 1914
than their elders. The earliest expressions of lyric military feeling
came from veteran voices. It was only proper that the earliest of all
should be the Poet Laureate's address to England, ending with the
prophecy:--
"Much suffering shall cleanse thee!
But thou through the flood
Shalt win to Salvation,
To Beauty through blood."
As sensation, however, followed sensation in those first terrific and
bewildering weeks, much was happening that called forth with the utmost
exuberance the primal emotions of mankind; there was full occasion for
"exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind."
By September a full chorus was vocal, led by our national veteran, Mr.
Thomas Hardy, with his _Song of the Soldiers_:--
"What of the faith and fire within us,
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray,
To hazards whence no tears can win us;
What of the faith and fire within us,
Men who march away?"
Already, before the close of the autumn of 1914, four or five
anthologies of war-poems were in the press, and the desire of the
general public to be fed with patriotic and emotional verse was
manifested in unmistakable ways. We had been accustomed for some time
past to the issue of a multitude of little pamphlets of verse, often
very carefully written, and these the critics had treated with an
indulgence which would have whitened the hair of the stern reviewers of
forty years ago. The youthful poets, almost a trade-union in themselves,
protected one another by their sedulous generosity. It was very unusual
to see anything criticised, much less "slated"; the balms of praise were
poured over every rising head, and immortalities were predicted by the
dozen. Yet, as a rule, the sale of these little poetic pamphlets had
been small, and they had been read only by those who had a definite
object in doing so.
The immediate success of the anthologies, however, proved that the war
had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse, an attention
anxious to be stirred or soothed by the assiduous company of poets who
had been ripening their talents in a little clan. These had now an
eager world ready to listen to them. The result was surprising; we may
even, without exaggeration, call it unparalleled. There had never
before, in the world's history, been an epoch which had tolerated and
even welcomed such a flood of verse as was poured forth over Great
Britain during the first three years of the war. Those years saw the
publication, as I am credibly informed, of more than five hundred
volumes of new and original poetry. It would be the silliest
complaisance to pretend that all of this, or much of it, or any but a
very little of it, has been of permanent value. Much of it was windy and
superficial, striving in wild vague terms to express great agitations
which were obscurely felt by the poet. There was too much of the bathos
of rhetoric, especially at first; too much addressing the German as
"thou fell, bloody brute," and the like, which broke no bones and took
no trenches.
When once it was understood that, as a cancelled line in Tennyson's
_Maud_ has it,
"The long, long canker of peace was over and done,"
the sentiments of indignation and horror made themselves felt with
considerable vivacity. In this direction, however, none of the youngest
poets approached Sir Owen Seaman in the vigour of their invective. Most
of them seemed to be overpowered by the political situation, and few
could free themselves from their inured pacific habit of speech. Even
when they wrote of Belgium, the Muse seemed rather to weep than to
curse. Looking back to the winter of 1914, it is almost pathetic to
observe how difficult it was for our easy-going British bards to hate
the Germans. There was a good deal of ineffective violence, and
considerable misuse of technical terms, caused, in many cases, by a too
hasty reference to newspaper reports of gallantry under danger, in the
course of which the more or less obscure verbiage of military science
was picturesquely and inaccurately employed. As the slightly censorious
reader looks back upon these poems of the beginning of the War, he
cannot resist a certain impatience. In the first place, there is a
family likeness which makes it impossible to distinguish one writer from
another, and there is a tendency to a smug approval of British
prejudice, and to a horrible confidence in England's power of "muddling
through," which look rather ghastly in the light of subsequent
struggles.
There was, however, a new spirit presently apparent, and a much
healthier one. The bards became soldiers, and in crossing over to France
and Flanders, each had packed his flute in his kit. They began to send
home verses in which they translated into music their actual experiences
and their authentic emotions. We found ourselves listening to young men
who had something new, and what was better, something noble to say to
us, and we returned to the national spirit which inspired the Chansons
de Geste in the eleventh century. To the spirit--but not in the least to
the form, since it is curious that the war-poetry of 1914-17 was, even
in the most skilful hands, poetry on a small scale. The two greatest of
the primal species of verse, the Epic and the Ode, were entirely
neglected, except, as will later be observed, in one notable instance by
Major Maurice Baring. As a rule, the poets constrained themselves to
observe the discipline of a rather confined lyrical analysis in forms of
the simplest character. Although particular examples showed a rare
felicity of touch, and although the sincerity of the reflection in many
cases hit upon very happy forms of expression, it is impossible to
overlook the general monotony. There used to be a story that the
Japanese Government sent a committee of its best art-critics to study
the relative merits of the modern European painters, and that they
returned with the bewildered statement that they could make no report,
because all European pictures were exactly alike. A student from
Patagonia might conceivably argue that he could discover no difference
whatever between our various poets of the war.
This would be unjust, but it is perhaps not unfair to suggest that the
determined resistance to all restraint, which has marked the latest
school, is not really favourable to individuality. There has been a very
general, almost a universal tendency to throw off the shackles of poetic
form. It has been supposed that by abandoning the normal restraints, or
artificialities, of metre and rhyme, a greater directness and fidelity
would be secured. Of course, if an intensified journalistic impression
is all that is desired, "prose cut up into lengths" is the readiest
by-way to effect. But if the poets desire--and they all do desire--to
speak to ages yet unborn, they should not forget that all the experience
of history goes to prove discipline not unfavourable to poetic
sincerity, while, on the other hand, the absence of all restraint is
fatal to it. Inspiration does not willingly attend upon flagging metre
and discordant rhyme, and never in the whole choral progress from Pindar
down to Swinburne has a great master been found who did not exult in the
stubbornness of "dancing words and speaking strings," or who did not
find his joy in reducing them to harmony. The artist who avoids all
difficulties may be pleased with the rapidity of his effect, but he will
have the vexation of finding his success an ephemeral one. The old
advice to the poet, in preparing the rich chariot of the Muse, still
holds good:--
"Let the postillion, Nature, mount, but let
The coachman, Art, be set."
Too many of our recent rebellious bards fancy that the coach will drive
itself, if only the post-boy sticks his heels hard into Pegasus.
It is not, however, the object of this essay to review all the poetry
which was written about the war, nor even that part of it which owed its
existence to the strong feeling of non-combatants at home. I propose to
fix our attention on what was written by the young soldiers themselves
in their beautiful gallantry, verse which comes to us hallowed by the
glorious effort of battle, and in too many poignant cases by the
ultimate sacrifice of life itself. The poet achieves his highest meed of
contemporary glory, if
"some brave young man's untimely fate
In words worth, dying for he celebrate,"
and when he is himself a young man striving for the same deathless
honour on the same field of blood it is difficult to conceive of
circumstances more poignant than those which surround his effort. On
many of these poets a death of the highest nobility set the seal of
eternal life. They were simple and passionate, radiant and calm, they
fought for their country, and they have entered into glory. This alone
might be enough to say in their praise, but star differeth from star in
brightness, and from the constellation I propose to select half a dozen
of the clearest luminaries. What is said in honest praise of these may
be said, with due modification, of many others who miss merely the
polish of their accomplishment. It is perhaps worth noticing, in
passing, that most of the poets are men of university training, and that
certain literary strains are common to the rank and file of them. The
influence of Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti is almost
entirely absent. The only one of the great Victorians whom they seem to
have read is Matthew Arnold, but it is impossible to help observing that
the _Shropshire Lad_ of Mr. A.E. Housman was in the tunic-pocket of
every one of them. Among the English poets of the past, it is mainly the
so-called "metaphysical" writers in the seventeenth century whom they
studied; Donne seems to have been a favourite with them all, and Vaughan
and Treherne were not far behind.
The spontaneous instinct of readers has taken the name of Rupert Brooke
to illustrate the poetic spirit of the great war in a superlative
degree. His posthumous volume, brought out in May 1915, a few weeks
after his death, has enjoyed a success which is greater, perhaps, than
that of all the other poems of the war put together. He has become a
sort of symbol, even a sort of fetish, and he is to English sentiment
what Charles Peguy is to France, an oriflamme of the chivalry of his
country. It is curious, in this connection, that neither Peguy nor
Brooke had the opportunity of fighting much in the cause; they fell, as
it seemed for the moment, obscurely. Rupert Brooke was a pawn in the
dark and dolorous flight from Antwerp. He died in the AEgean, between
Egypt and Gallipoli, having never seen a Turkish enemy. So Peguy faded
out of sight on the very opening day of the battle of the Marne, yet
each of these young men was immediately perceived to have embodied the
gallantry of his country. The extraordinary popularity of Rupert Brooke
is due to the excellence of his verse, to the tact with which it was
presented to the public, but also to a vague perception of his
representative nature. He was the finest specimen of a certain type
produced at the universities, and then sacrificed to our national
necessity.