Even his use of irony verges on the superstitious. Artistically, at least in the shorter poems, it may be sound, and is certainly effective, as where the old man laments on learning that his wife is to be in the same wing of the workhouse, instead of setting him “free of his forty years’ chain.” But the frequent use and abuse of it change the reader’s smile into a laugh at the perversity.
Mr. Hardy must have discovered the blindness of Fate, the indifference of Nature, and the irony of Life, before he met them in books. They have been brooded over in solitude, until they afflict him as the wickedness of man afflicts a Puritan. The skull and crossbones, Death the scythed skeleton, and the symbolic hour-glass have been as real to him as to some of those carvers of tombstones in country churchyards, or to the painter of that window at St. Edmund’s in Salisbury who represented “God the Father ... in blue and red vests, like a little old man, the head, feet, and hands naked; in one place fixing a pair of compasses on the sun and moon.” If I were told that he had spent his days in a woodland hermitage, though I should not believe the story, I should suspect that it was founded on fact.
But the woodland, and the country in general, have given Mr. Hardy some of his principal consolations. And one, at least, of these is almost superstitious. I mean the idea that “the longlegs, the moth, and the dumbledore” know “earth-secrets” that he knows not. In the “Darkling Thrush” it is to be found in another stage, the bird’s song in Winter impelling him to think that “some blessed Hope” of which he was unaware was known to it. He compares town and country much as Meredith does. The country is paradise in the comparison; for he speaks of the Holiday Fund for City Children as temporarily “changing their urban murk to paradise.” Country life, paradise or not, he handles with a combination of power and exactness beyond that of any poet who could be compared to him, and for country women I should give the palm to his “Julie-Jane,”—
“Sing; how ’a would sing,
How ’a would raise the tune,
When we rode in the wagon from harvesting
By the light of the moon....
Bubbling and brightsome eyed,
But now—O never again!
She chose her bearers before she died