With loving-kindness fully blown,
And visioned help unsought, unknown.
Other poems that express what is and what ought to be the attitude of man toward God are New Year's Eve, To Sincerity, and the beautiful lyric, Let Me Enjoy, where Mr. Hardy has been more than usually successful in fashioning both language and rhythm into a garment worthy of the thought. No one can read The Impercipient without recognizing that Mr. Hardy's atheism is as honest and as sincere as the religious faith of others, and that no one regrets the blankness of his universe more than he. He would believe if he could.
Pessimism is the basis of all his verse, as it is of his prose. It is expressed not merely philosophically in poems of ideas, but over and over again concretely in poems of incident. He is a pessimist both in fancy and in fact, and after reading some of our sugary "glad" books, I find his bitter taste rather refreshing. The titles of his recent collections, Time's Laughingstocks and Satires of Circumstance, sufficiently indicate the ill fortune awaiting his personages. At his best, his lyrics written in the minor key have a noble, solemn adagio movement. At his worst—for like all poets, he is sometimes at his worst—the truth of life seems rather obstinately warped. Why should legitimate love necessarily bring misery, and illegitimate passion produce permanent happiness? And in the piece, "Ah, are you digging on my grave?" pessimism approaches a reductio ad absurdum.
Dramatic power, which is one of its author's greatest gifts, is frequently finely revealed. After reading A Tramp-woman's Tragedy, one unhesitatingly accords Mr. Hardy a place among the English writers of ballads. For this is a genuine ballad, in story, in diction, and in vigour.
Yet as a whole, and in spite of Mr. Hardy's love of the dance and of dance music, his poetry lacks grace and movement. His war poem, Men Who March Away, is singularly halting and awkward. His complete poetical works are interesting because they proceed from an interesting mind. His range of thought, both in reminiscence and in speculation, is immensely wide; his power of concentration recalls that of Browning.
I have thought sometimes, and thought long and hard.
I have stood before, gone round a serious thing,
Tasked my whole mind to touch and clasp it close,
As I stretch forth my arm to touch this bar.
God and man, and what duty I owe both,—
I dare to say I have confronted these
In thought: but no such faculty helped here.
No such faculty alone could help Mr. Hardy to the highest peaks of poetry, any more than it served Caponsacchi in his spiritual crisis. He thinks interesting thoughts, because he has an original mind. It is possible to be a great poet without possessing much intellectual wealth; just as it is possible to be a great singer, and yet be both shallow and dull. The divine gift of poetry seems sometimes as accidental as the formation of the throat. I do not believe that Tennyson was either shallow or dull; but I do not think he had so rich a mind as Thomas Hardy's, a mind so quaint, so humorous, so sharp. Yet Tennyson was incomparably a greater poet.
The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and reread the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention—I find even the drawings in Wessex Poems so fascinating that I wish he had illustrated all his books—I am always conscious of the time and the place. I never get the unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough a command of his thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar away with him. Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession. Mr. Hardy is too keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the fact that he has written verse all his life, he seldom writes unwrinkled song. He is, in the last analysis, a master of prose who has learned the technique of verse, and who now chooses to express his thoughts and his observations in rime and rhythm.
The title of Mr. Hardy's latest volume of poems, Moments of Vision, leads one to expect rifts in the clouds—and one is not disappointed. It is perhaps characteristic of the independence of our author, that steadily preaching pessimism when the world was peaceful, he should now not be perhaps quite so sure of his creed when a larger proportion of the world's inhabitants are in pain than ever before. One of the fallacies of pessimism consists in the fact that its advocates often call a witness to the stand whose testimony counts against them. Nobody really loves life, loves this world, like your pessimist; nobody is more reluctant to leave it. He therefore, to support his argument that life is evil, calls up evidence which proves that it is brief and transitory. But if life is evil, one of its few redeeming features should be its brevity; the pessimist should look forward to death as a man in prison looks toward the day of his release. Yet this attitude toward death is almost never taken by the atheists or the pessimists, while it is the burden of many of the triumphant hymns of the Christian Church. Now, as our spokesman for pessimism approaches the end—which I fervently hope may be afar off—life seems sweet.