Old and New Masters — 38 - Ch.27.ii - Mr Thomas Hardy: 2. A Poet in Winter

2. A POET IN WINTER

In the last poem in his last book, _Moments of Vision_, Mr. Hardy meditates on his own immortality, as all men of genius probably do at one time or another.

_Afterwards_, the poem in which he does so, is interesting, not only for this reason, but because it contains implicitly a definition and a defence of the author's achievement in literature.

The poem is too long to quote in full, but the first three verses will be sufficient to illustrate what I have said: When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the people say: "He was a man who used to notice such things"?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink, The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, will a gazer think: "To him this must have been a familiar sight"?

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, Will they say: "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them; and now he is gone"?

Even without the two other verses, we have here a remarkable attempt on the part of an artist to paint a portrait, as it were, of his own genius.

Mr. Hardy's genius is essentially that of a man who "used to notice such things" as the fluttering of the green leaves in May, and to whom the swift passage of a night-jar in the twilight has "been a familiar sight."

He is one of the most sensitive observers of nature who have written English prose.

It may even be that he will be remembered longer for his studies of nature than for his studies of human nature.

His days are among his greatest characters, as in the wonderful scene on the heath in the opening of _The Return of the Native_.

He would have written well of the world, one can imagine, even if he had found it uninhabited.

But his sensitiveness is not merely sensitiveness of the eye: it is also sensitiveness of the heart.

He has, indeed, that hypersensitive sort of temperament, as the verse about the hedgehog suggests, which is the victim at once of pity and of a feeling of hopeless helplessness.

Never anywhere else has there been such a world of pity put into a quotation as Mr. Hardy has put into that line and a half from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, which he placed on the title-page of _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_:-- Poor wounded name, my bosom as a bed Shall lodge thee!

In the use to which he put these words Mr. Hardy may be said to have added to the poetry of Shakespeare.

He gave them a new imaginative context, and poured his own heart into them.

For the same helpless pity which he feels for dumb creatures he feels for men and women: ...

He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them.

It is the spirit of pity brooding over the landscape in Mr. Hardy's books that makes them an original and beautiful contribution to literature, in spite of his endless errors as an artist.

His last book is a reiteration both of his genius and of his errors.

As we read the hundred and sixty or so poems it contains we get the impression of genius presiding over a multitude of errors.

There are not half a dozen poems in the book the discovery of which, should the author's name be forgotten, would send the critics in quest of other work from the same magician's hand.

One feels safe in prophesying immortality for only two, _The Oxen_ and _In Time of "the Breaking of Nations"_; and these have already appeared in the selection of the author's poems published in the Golden Treasury Series.

The fact that the entirely new poems contain nothing on the plane of immortality, however, does not mean that _Moments of Vision_ is a book of verse about which one has the right to be indifferent.

No writer who is so concerned as Mr. Hardy with setting down what his eyes and heart have told him can be regarded with indifference.

Mr. Hardy's art is lame, but it carries the burden of genius.

He may be a stammerer as a poet, but he stammers in words of his own concerning a vision of his own.

When he notes the bird flying past in the dusk, "like an eyelid's soundless blink," he does not achieve music, but he chronicles an experience, not merely echoes one, with such exact truth as to make it immortally a part of all experience.

There is nothing borrowed or secondhand, again, in Mr. Hardy's grim vision of the yew-trees in the churchyard by moonlight in _Jubilate_: The yew-tree arms, glued hard to the stiff, stark air, Hung still in the village sky as theatre-scenes.

Mr. Hardy may not enable us to hear the music which is more than the music of the earth, but he enables us to see what he saw.

He communicates his spectacle of the world.

He builds his house lopsided, harsh, and with the windows in unusual places; but it is his own house, the house of a seer, of a personality.

That is what we are aware of in such a poem as _On Sturminster Foot Bridge_, in which perfect and precise observation of nature is allied to intolerably prosaic utterance.

The first verse of this poem runs: Reticulations creep upon the slack stream's face When the wind skims irritably past.

The current clucks smartly into each hollow place That years of flood have scrabbled in the pier's sodden base;

The floating-lily leaves rot fast.

One could make as good music as that out of a milk-cart.

One would accept such musicless verse only from a man of genius.

But even here Mr. Hardy takes us home with him and makes us stand by his side and listen to the clucking stream.

He takes us home with him again in the poem called _Overlooking the River Stour_, which begins: The swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam In the wet June's last beam: Like little crossbows animate, The swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam.

Planing up shavings made of spray, A moor-hen darted out From the bank thereabout.

And through the stream-shine ripped her way;

Planing up shavings made of spray, A moor-hen darted out.

In this poem we find observation leaping into song in one line and hobbling into a hard-wrought image in another.

Both the line in which the first appears, however-- Like little crossbows animate, and the line in which the second happens-- Planing up shavings made of spray, equally make us feel how watchful and earnest an observer is Mr. Hardy.

He is a man, we realize, to whom bird and river, heath and stone, road and field and tree, mean immensely more than to his fellows.

I do not suggest that he observes nature without bias--that he mirrors the procession of visible things with the delight of a child or a lyric poet.

He makes nature his mirror as well as himself a mirror of nature.

He colours it with all his sadness, his helplessness, his (if one may invent the word and use it without offence) warpedness.

If I am not mistaken, he once compared a bleak morning in _The Woodlanders_ to the face of a still-born baby.

He loves to dwell on the uncomfortable moods of nature--on such things as:-- ...

the watery light Of the moon in its old age;

concerning which moon he goes on to describe how: Green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past where mute and cold it globed Like a dying dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave.

This, I fear, is a failure, but it is a failure in a common mood of the author's. It is a mood in which nature looks out at us, almost ludicrous in its melancholy.

In such a poem as that from which I have quoted, it is as though we saw nature with a drip on the end of its nose.

Mr. Hardy's is something different from a tragic vision.

It is a desolate, disheartening, and, in a way, morbid vision.

We wander with him too often under-- Gaunt trees that interlace, Through whose flayed fingers I see too clearly The nakedness of the place.

And Mr. Hardy's vision of the life of men and women transgresses similarly into a denial of gladness.

His gloom, we feel, goes too far.

It goes so far that we are tempted at times to think of it as a factitious gloom.

He writes a poem called _Honeymoon Time at an Inn_, and this is the characteristic atmosphere in which he introduces us to the bridegroom and bride: At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn, The moon was at the window-square, Deedily brooding in deformed decay-- The curve hewn off her cheek as by an adze;

At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn, So the moon looked in there.

There are no happy lovers or happy marriages in Mr. Hardy's world.

Such people as are happy would not be happy if only they knew the truth.

Many of Mr. Hardy's poems are, as I have already said, dramatic lyrics on the pattern invented by Robert Browning--short stories in verse.

But there is a certain air of triumph even in Browning's tragic figures.

Mr. Hardy's figures are the inmates of despair.

Browning's love-poems belong to heroic literature.

Mr. Hardy's love-poems belong to the literature of downheartedness.

Browning's men and women are men and women who have had the courage of their love, or who are shown at least against a background of Browning's own courage.

Mr. Hardy's men and women do not know the wild faith of love.

They have not the courage even of their sins.

They are helpless as fishes in a net--a scarcely rebellious population of the ill-matched and the ill-starred.

Many of the poems in his last book fail through a lack of imaginative energy.

It is imaginative energy that makes the reading of a great tragedy like _King Lear_ not a depressing, but an exalting experience.

But is there anything save depression to be got from reading such a poem as _A Caged Goldfinch_:-- Within a churchyard, on a recent grave, I saw a little cage That jailed a goldfinch.

All was silence, save Its hops from stage to stage.

There was inquiry in its wistful eye.

And once it tried to sing;

Of him or her who placed it there, and why, No one knew anything.

True, a woman was found drowned the day ensuing, And some at times averred The grave to be her false one's, who when wooing Gave her the bird.

Apart even from the ludicrous associations which modern slang has given the last phrase, making it look like a queer pun, this poem seems to one to drive sorrow over the edge of the ridiculous.

That goldfinch has surely escaped from a Max-Beerbohm parody.

The ingenuity with which Mr. Hardy plots tragic situations for his characters in some of his other poems is, indeed, in repeated danger of misleading him into parody.

One of his poems tells, for instance, how a stranger finds an old man scrubbing a Statue of Liberty in a city square, and, hearing he does it for love, hails him as "Liberty's knight divine."

The old man confesses that he does not care twopence for Liberty, and declares that he keeps the statue clean in memory of his beautiful daughter, who had sat as a model for it--a girl fair in fame as in form.

In the interests of his plot and his dismal philosophy, Mr. Hardy identifies the stranger with the sculptor of the statue, and dismisses us with his blighting aside on the old man's credulous love of his dead daughter: Answer I gave not.

Of that form The carver was I at his side;

His child my model, held so saintly, Grand in feature.

Gross in nature, In the dens of vice had died.

This is worse than optimism.

It is only fair to say that, though poem after poem--including the one about the fat young man whom the doctors gave only six months to live unless he walked a great deal, and who therefore was compelled to refuse a drive in the poet's phaeton, though night was closing over the heath--dramatizes the meaningless miseries of life, there is also to be found in some of the poems a faint sunset-glow of hope, almost of faith.

There have been compensations, we realize in _I Travel as a Phantom Now_, even in this world of skeletons.

Mr. Hardy's fatalism concerning God seems not very far from faith in God in that beautiful Christmas poem, _The Oxen_.

Still, the ultimate mood of the poems is not faith.

It is one of pity, so despairing as to be almost nihilism.

There is mockery in it without the merriment of mockery.

The general atmosphere of the poems, it seems to me, is to be found perfectly expressed in the last three lines of one of the poems, which is about a churchyard, a dead woman, a living rival, and the ghost of a soldier: There was a cry by the white-flowered mound, There was a laugh from underground, There was a deeper gloom around.

How much of the art of Thomas Hardy is suggested in those lines!

The laugh from underground, the deeper gloom--are they not all but omnipresent throughout his later and greatest work?

The war could not deepen such pessimism.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Hardy's war poetry is more cheerful, because more heroic, than his poetry about the normal world.

Destiny was already crueller than any war-lord.

The Prussian, to such an imagination, could be no more than a fly--a poisonous fly--on the wheel of destiny's disastrous car.

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