THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY I TN speaking to you, the other day, Gentlemen, on the poetry of George Meredith, I admitted how faulty one's judgment may be-nay almost must needs be-upon all modern work. 'Still,' I went on, 'the task of appraising it has to be done, for the books of our time are the books of our time. They tell us in their various ways "How it strikes a Contemporary."' Yes: but I deferred a qualification of this a somewhat important qualification-to which I shall begin today by asking your assent. My qualification is this:-We elders-from among whom, for various reasons, your professors are chosen as a rule-may hope to help you in understanding poets long since dead. For Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, are removed almost as far from us as from you. They have passed definitely into the ward of Time. What was corrupt or corruptible in them is now dust, though we embalm it in myrrh, sandal-wood, cassia: dust equally for us and for you: what was incorruptible flowers as freshly for you as for us. We have but the sad advantage of having studied it a little longer. Now when we come to poets of the time of Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, our difference of age asserts itself; middle-aged men of the 'sixties, young men of the 'nineties, children of this century, read them at correspondent removes, perceptible removes. And, though you may like it not, it is (I believe) good that we seniors should testify to you concerning these men who were our seniors, yet alive when we were young, and gave us in youth, believe me, even such thrills, such awed surmises, such wonders and wild desires as you catch in your turn from their successors. Nay, it is salutary, I believe; for the reason that it appears to be the rule for each new generation to turn iconoclast on its father's poetic gods. You will scarcely deny that on some of you the term 'Victorian' acts as a red rag upon a young bull of the pasture: that, to some of you, Tennyson is 'that sort of stuff your uncle read.' Well, bethink you that the children of yet another generation will deal so and not otherwise with your heroes: that it is all a part of the continuous process of criticism through which our roseate raptures and our lurid antipathies pass, if not into the light of common day, into that of serener judgment. Blame not your uncle that at the age of fourteen or earlier, in the walled garden screened from the windows of the house, he charged among the vegetables chanting A bow-shot from her bower-eaves, Strew no more red roses, maidens, I forgot, thou comest from thy voyage— Yes, the spray is on thy cloak and hair. or And the tent shook, for mighty Saul shuddered: and sparkles 'gan dart From the jewels that woke in his turban, at once with a start, All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart. For to dream of these things, and to awake and find oneself an uncle-that is the common lot. Nor blame him that he continues loyal to them. It keeps him human: it may set you pondering, reconsidering a little; and so may help to advance the true business of criticism. I come down a little further; past Morris and Swinburne to Yeats (say) or Francis Thompson. We admired and admire them as generously as, I hope, you admire them; but I think not quite in the same way. To us, their almost exact contemporaries, their first poems appealed as youth to youth; with none of the authority they exercise, I dare to say, upon you. To us they carried no authority at all. They carried hope, they bred ardour: but we criticised them freely as poems written by the best of us. They have to wait a few years for the race to deify them. You and we possess them by a different line of approach. Now take the young poets who are your contemporaries. Of them I say sadly, resignedly, that a man even of my years has no right to speak, or very little power to speak usefully. Young poets write not for antiquity, nor for middle-age. They write for you: their appeal is to you. All that we can do is to keep our hearts as fresh as we may; to bear ever in mind that a father can guide a son but some distance on the road, and the more wisely he guides the sooner (alas!) must he lose the fair companionship and watch the boy run on. It may sound a hard saying, but we can only keep him admiring the things we admire at the cost of pauperising his mind. It may sound another hard saying, that the younger poets do not write for us old men; yet it is the right course of nature. I hope William Cory's apophthegm is not strictly true: One's feelings lose poetic flow Soon after twenty-seven or so; Thenceforth admire what pleased them then. But if it be (though I plead for some rise in the age-limit), then poetry but consents with the rule of Nature whose highest interpreter she is. Deepest in her too-in Meredith's phrase Deepest at her springs Most filial, is an eye to love her young. II After this somewhat wistful opening, let me claim an exception for my subject this morning. Thomas HardyI cannot call him Doctor Hardy even in a university which not long ago did itself honour in complimenting him— Thomas Hardy (long may he live!) is my elder, and so much my elder that for thirty years I have reverenced him as a master: that is, as a master of the Novel. His first novel Desperate Remedies dates back to 1871: his first artistic triumph Under the Greenwood Tree, to 1872. Pass intervening years and come to the grand close in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895): on that last date his career as a novelist ceases, and at the age of fifty-five. Three years later, in 1898, he publishes his first book of verse. Now any pettifogging fellow can point out that this volume, entitled Wessex Poems, contains many poems composed long before 1898-some so far back as 1865; and the more easily because Hardy is careful to print the dates1. So for that matter do some of Hardy's later volumes contain early poems, either printed as first written, or as revised. But no petty fog can obscure the plain fact that in 1895, or a little later, Hardy definitely turned his back on prose fiction and started to appeal to a new generation in verse; as a writer of high poetical verse if the gods should allow. To this purpose he has held. A second volume, Poems of the Past and the Present followed in 1901; The Dynasts, Part I in 1903, Part II in 1906, Part III in 1908, Time's Laughing Stocks in 1909. Satires of Circumstance were collected in 1914. His latest volume Moments of Vision appeared but the other day, and bears 1917 on its title-page. So, seeing that all this, including that great epical drama, The Dynasts, falls within the ken of the last twenty years, and not without it, you may allow perhaps that it concerns men of your age and mine, equally if not similarly. III Ah, but you may answer, 'By all means let it concern you. The point is, can a man of Thomas Hardy's age write what appeals to us?' Well, yes, I think his poetry may appeal to you, as it certainly concerns you. That his Muse is predominantly melancholy I brush aside as no bar at all. If youth do not understand melancholy, why then the most of Shelley, the most of Byron, a great part of Keats, or to come to later instances-a great, if not the greater, part of Francis Thompson and Yeats and most of 1 So that, as Whistler said of an art-critic who judged a water-colour for an oil-painting, 'it was accurately described in the catalogue and he had not even to rely on his sense of smell.' |