I saw a thrush light on a hawthorn spray,
One moment only, spilling creamy blossom,
While the bough bent beneath her speckled bosom,
Bent, and recovered, and she fluttered away.
The branch was still; but in my heart, a pain
Than the thorn'd spray more cruel stabbed me, only
Remembering days in a far land and lonely,
When I had never hoped for summer again.
All his deepest feelings—patriotism, love, friendship—are interwoven with natural beauty. In Testament he leaves to his friend the common memory of a summer in the Cotswolds: sunlight on the gables of Evesham, a boat on the cool water of Avon, sunsets over Bredon, evening stocks and the scent of hay; and in the most eloquent close, putting the most beautiful scenes of earth behind him to sing of spiritual beauty, he lingers on them to describe them. But his descriptions are always prompted and suffused by emotion: like Brooke in The Happy Lover and Mr. Masefield in Biography, he catalogues the scenes, the fields, trees, flowers, and faces that live sweetly in his memory, and his affection is communicated. He is poles away from the "careful nature poet" who makes a neat drawing of anything that at all interests him. Emotion selects his subjects; he does not manufacture. He writes clearly too and unaffectedly. Except in Thamar—the most ambitious poem in the book, but promising a greater success than it achieves—he is never obscure for a moment. And his simplicity of expression conceals a good deal of technical effort. The longer pieces—such as The Leaning Elm—are elaborately musical, and an examination of the first poem quoted above will reveal studied, though not obtrusive, assonances and internal rhymes which show that Mr. Brett Young (it might be deduced elsewhere from his metres) has not read his Bridges in vain. There is scarcely a bad poem in the book, or one without an interest peculiar to itself. Several beyond those we have mentioned—the best are the exquisite Prothalamion and Invocation—are to be found in the recent Georgian book. The poem on prehistoric remains on the battlefield might well have been added, and Bête Humaine:
Riding through Ruwu swamp, about sunrise,
I saw the world awake; and as the ray
Touched the tall grasses where they dream till day,
Lo, the bright air alive with dragonflies,
With brittle wings aquiver, and great eyes
Piloting crimson bodies, slender and gay.
I aimed at one, and struck it, and it lay
Broken and lifeless, with fast-fading dyes.
Then my soul sickened with a sudden pain
And horror, at my own careless cruelty,
That where all things are cruel I had slain
A creature whose sweet life it is to fly:
Like beasts that prey with bloody claw: Nay, they
Must slay to live, but what excuse had I?
This is a book which excites great curiosity about its author's future; but at present his verse, beautiful as it is, lacks energy.
COLLECTED POEMS OF THOMAS HARDY. Macmillan. 8s. 6d. net.
RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE: INCLUSIVE EDITION, 1885–1918. Three vols. Hodder & Stoughton. 63s. net.
It is always a satisfaction to have in one volume—or in two or three uniform volumes—the verses of a poet which we have previously had to search for in self-contained books. The publication of a collected edition of Mr. Hardy's poems is welcome for another reason. In the last few years his reputation as a poet—quite apart from the fact that he has continued, right up to his eightieth year, to produce novel and beautiful work—has greatly increased. Critics may now be found who even hold that Mr. Hardy's chief claim to greatness will rest, in the eyes of posterity, upon his poems (including The Dynasts) rather than upon those novels which in themselves made him one of the two or three most conspicuous writers of his generation. But even now we do not think that his stature as a poet is widely realised, the volume and quality of his poetical work generally known: and there will probably be many who, in perusing this "collected" volume, will be struck for the first time with the fact that here alone, leaving all the prose out of the question, is work sufficient, and sufficiently good, to place its author among the greatest English writers of the last century. There are hundreds of pages of short poems, some of them exquisitely beautiful, and all of them so direct and fresh that even the most faulty are worth having. Faults—though we might rather call them idiosyncrasies—Mr. Hardy certainly has. His language is sometimes bald and sometimes cumbrous; his consistent pessimism sometimes leads him, in the dramatic poems, to extremes of deliberate gloom. But can we regret a sad philosophy which has enabled a sweet and sensitive spirit to shine with such uninterrupted brightness amid that gloom? And can we regret a habit of phraseology which has enabled Mr. Hardy to win some of his greatest technical triumphs (for he makes music out of scientific or journalistic words which would ruin an ordinary lyrist) and which will probably have direct results in the way of enlarging the poetic vocabulary, which is in constant need of oxygenation? It is inevitable that a collected edition in one volume should be printed in smaller type than is entirely comfortable, and the text of this edition is not so attractive as that of the separate volumes. But it is all here, and when the reader compares the volume to some of its companion Macmillan collections (Clough, for instance, falls into nothingness) he comprehends that in the history of English literature Mr. Hardy will rank above many of the supposedly established classics. He is a great poet.
The Kipling collection is luxuriously got up, but unfortunately the covers are not all they might be, and the reader is irritated throughout by the presence on the top of every right-hand page of "Inclusive Edition" in large black capitals. Mr. Kipling would show up far better in a selection than in a complete edition, so much of his verse is at best vigorous journalism. Were a good selection made we believe that some of those who depreciate him would admit for the first time that he has a fine poet in him; a collected edition merely shows that he does not know the poet in him from the rhymer. The greater one's admiration for his best work the greater the irritation one sustains when reading through the great body of his jingling journalism and pompous sermonising. Had he written nothing but the Ballad of East and West, the songs from Puck and a few more he would be as well remembered as he will be now with all this mass of versification to his name.