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De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 43 (1928)

De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 43

(1928)– [tijdschrift] Nieuwe Gids, De–rechtenstatus Gedeeltelijk auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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[De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 43. Nummer 12]

The poetry of Thomas Hardy by Dr. J.A. Russell.

Thomas Hardy is so immeasurably the greatest of recent English writers that an American estimate of him goes so far as to say that ‘five hundred years from now, our guess is, there will remain in English Literature Shakespeare, Milton, Hardy and Kipling.’ The inclusion of Kipling tends to nullify all critical perspective in this hazardous attempt to forecast literary immortality; we can scarcely conceive of Shelley and Wordsworth forgotten while Kipling survives. At the same time the alliance of Hardy with names that have survived three hundred years to date is not at all fantastic. Time may deceive the most perspicacious, but it can at least be said that no writer of our time seems more certainly destined to have ‘rosemary for remembrance’ than this humble son of Wessex, who even in his lifetime was honoured with the totally ungrudging homage of the literary world, who in his death drew prime ministers, world-famed scholars and great-minded colleagues as his pall-bearers, who through the sheer genius of his art may now calmly await the verdict of posterity.

 

Hardy's gift to mankind is represented by seventeen volumes of fiction, seven of poetry1) and that solitary epic of the modern age, ‘The Dynasts’. So supremely great is the work he has left in every department of art which he essayed that every form finds its supporters for supremacy. Undoubtedly it is by the broadest road of fiction that he is best, most universally, known, but about this part of his magnificent achievement we

shall not speak here except to emphasize that since his death the novelistic art in England has been without an acknowledged head. What person with any pretension to literary culture and humanitarian outlook but has joined issue with the tragic sorrows of the ‘poor wounded name’ of Tess, and pridefully sustained the agony of pitiable Jude, left wretched to die! Who has not felt nobler for reading of the self-sacrificing death of Giles Winterborne - most honourable of heroes - who has not wept over the poignant words of farewell of Marty South - truest of heroines! Books like ‘Tess of the D'Urbervilles’, ‘Jude the Obscure’, ‘The Woodlanders’, ‘The Return of the Native’, ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’, ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ have their place already within the inner circle of great novels.

 

Yet, if it is by his novels that Thomas Hardy will chiefly live on, it can be safely asserted that his poetic output will occupy a large and exalted place in the literature of his own country at least. He was, like Ibsen, like Victor Hugo, essentially the poet, for even in his novels it is his poetic utterance, conveyed with all the universality that poetry can contrive, that shines out most clearly.1) Often that poetry is anything but cheerful or agreeable reading; but always it is heroic to the core. Foremost in his absorption with the cosmic problem is his apprehension of man as a sort of helpless creature against the relentless onslaught of fate or chance; to man all his immense pity goes forth for what fate, instinct, neglect, the irony of things does for him. Here life's processes are criticized with a Tolstoyan width and force and knowledge of mankind. What English writer, indeed, since Shelley himself, has ever confronted the implications of existence so unflinchingly! The charge of pessimism so insistently levelled against him may be just enough according to ordinary definitional practice, but it may also be regarded as a sincere and utterly courageous reading in history of a purposelessness which the more super-

ficial part of his audience at least had not the detachment of mind even to consider. For the poet that tragedy had been age-long, had never lessened in intensity, but at all times the actors in it had lived their lives out and met the slings and arrows of malevolent fortune with fortitude and humour. If he saw any escape from the struggle, any evasion of the ultimate doom, it was but in the vaguest way: he looked for no millennium. Through education, through ‘consciousness the will informing till it fashion all things fair’, he had hopes that the burdens of the world would gradually be eased by attrition. Often, however, he was void of hope and came into direct clash with the Victorian belief in a scientific world marching along the highway of progress to some far-off perfection. In such moments his conclusion was that the inner life is ‘the only remedy for such an abdication by man in the face of the monsters he has released.’ Whatever his attitude, however, he made it quite clear that only through the possession of some belief, some philosophy which has the driving power of a passionate conviction, can independence become possible.

 
‘What of the faith and fire within us
 
Men who march away?’

he questions in his ‘Song of the Soldiers’, and adds in reply: -

 
‘Press we to the field ungrieving,
 
In our heart of hearts believing
 
Victory crowns the just.’

That is what he has transcendently declared. Victory, he holds, lies not in success, but in steadfast holding by whatever belief is in your heart, and, for the preservation of that, that whatever life may bring may be met ‘ungrieving’. So Hardy believed, despite the belief of all others: so he acted, so he wrote, and so became, to his own and future generations, an inspiration to literary independence.

It was thoroughly in consonance with the numerous tributes paid to Hardy's personal kindliness and large- hearted consi-

deration that a clause in his will should have stipulated for a cheap edition of his collected poems. This desirable volume has now appeared1) and its timely publication serves to bring closer to the reader his sense of personal bereavement: -

 
‘Who shall proclaim now the right that gained for us needful remission,
 
Since hushed is his rolling voice and never again resounds?’

The work itself runs to over 800 pages, and contains the various volumes of Hardy's poetry in the order in which they appeared. A word seems necessary on the general approach to this vast and diversified field. In the first place it must be kept in mind that Hardy counted it more important to write down the impression while its vividness still lasted than to ignore the fresh response in order that his verses might be polished more smoothly. The qualities of his poetry, so unlike most other poetry, carries in this no real contradiction, although, of course, it bears the defects of these qualities. ‘We should seek him almost in vain,’ says a particularly reasoned criticism, ‘for that natural magic, that seemingly effortless colour and flowering of words, which has been a charm and glory of English poetry. His utterance will often appear dry and halting by comparison. Many a poem seems a curious mixture of the formal and the casual or prosaic; there is no entire certainty that his expression will rise and no security that it may not fall.’2) Such a criticism would implicate portions of Shelley's work, and taken by itself it means that in the poetry of Hardy there is more rough-hewn thought, more specific philosophy, more direct satirising of social institutions and stupid conventions than there has been since ‘Prometheus Unbound’. In musical effects Shelley otherwise leaves him infinitely far behind, and even Browning and Swinburne, also philosophic poets, easily outvie him. But in a sense all technical comments on Hardy's poetry are fairly unimportant. They certainly show its texture, but they are a clue to its relative rather than its

absolute value. What may be termed its absolute value lies in the recognition that he possesses the feeling and thought of a major poet: a human preception of the smallest things, an imaginative vision of the smallest and the greatest. The tragic philosopher speaks out in him above all, urged by a rare sense of the unseen but immanent limits set by fate and a hurt-scorning passion to realize man's predicament in the universe which modern science has made known.

Not directly, but by tragic implication, he has deliberately staked his whole poetic reputation on his profound personal exploration of the cosmic problem. Deep-questioning, however, as he was, his self-depreciation was such that to his friend Mr. T.P. O'Connor he confessed ‘that he did not care if every line he had ever written were destroyed.’1) The question arises, of course, as to whether a poet - even one working on such avowedly individualistic investigations as Hardy - should posit his theories with the precision of the professional metaphysician, for despite his known deprecation of all attempts to read into his work the systematic conclusions of the academic philosopher, the philosopher, persists and predominates to such an extent that his attitude has a far more philosophic cast than is at all common in poetry.2) In treating with a writer of marked tendency we reach admittedly a peculiar danger-point, for nothing in easier than to fix on opinions, convict him of a creed, confine him to a consistent point of view. Yet, in Hardy's case it must be said quite deliberately that he practically stands or falls by his sustained enunciations. Even in their poetic form these have always the force and weight of wellpondered conclusions rather than of impressions, which are generally the finalities of the imaginative writer. Impression, when it is seized by a Shelley or a Shakespeare, will transcend argument, but it is just because there are many moments in Hardy's verse when its statement seems too biased for truth, since too bald for poetry, that it is essential to stress the philosophic note, so intellectually sounded. This becomes strikingly apparent if we consider the view which mainly colours his imaginings. His

view-point is that of a closed, monistic universe, and if this is out-dated, like Milton's anthropomorphic theology in ‘Paradise Lost’, his poetry will fail correspondingly. The lines of England's Homer, her ‘mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies’, will be sustained though the philosophers storm Parnassus itself, but who will contend that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have not often said better in prose what Hardy has endeavoured to say in poetry. Intellectually, such a giant is ahead of his time, but conceivably his verse will yet have need of all its felicities; for not always can it be said that it ‘looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold’, but merely on a sad-coloured landscape of Wessex. Yet, though his poetics and his philosophies are broken on the wheel of criticism, such touching humanity, such boundless pity, and such tender humour perade his utterance that through it we should come back as with a balance-stroke to what is universal in the heart of man. Whatever his poetry may lack, it has the power to make the world look different, and we shall read acknowledging that such instancy of feeling quickens our awareness of life.

Hardy's first volume of poetry was ‘Wessex Poems and Other Verses’, which appeared in 1898. In the preface the author mentions that only four pieces had been published - an indication of the modest estimate held by him of his own work. Elsewhere he has recorded that he confidently anticipated the return of his submitted poems by enclosing with each an envelope stamped and addressed to himself - in which expectation he was not often disappointed! Yet, although many of these earliest poems are dated 1866, his work at this stage already reflects the possession of mature powers of thought, just as in his first novel, ‘Desperate Remedies’, all the possibilities of ‘Tess’ are already apparent. In this work of his literary nonage the potentiality of the creator of ‘The Dynasts’ is quite realizable. His sonnets have often a ring of Shakespearean regret and wistfulness, and one, ‘Her Dilemma’, has something of his Hamletion despair. A lady is asked by her dying lover for a profession of her love, and torturingly grants the kindly but weak compromise: -

 
‘She would have given a world to breathe “yes” truly.
 
So much his life seemed hanging on his mind,
 
And hence she lied, her heart persuaded throughly
 
'T was worth her soul to be a moment kind.
 
 
 
But the sad need thereof, his nearing death,
 
So mocked humanity that she shamed to prize
 
A world conditioned thus, or care for breath
 
Where Nature such dilemmas could devise.’

There is the dry humour of Hood at his best in ‘Valenciennes’, but ‘The Peasant's Confession’, ‘Her Death and After’ and ‘The Dance at the Phoenix’ have, beneath their light touches, the sob-subdued pathos of the ironist. The greatest and most characteristic poems of all, however, are ‘Nature's Questionings’ and ‘The Impercipient’. In the first he speaks his doubtings outright: -

 
‘We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here!
 
Has some Vast Imbecility,
 
Mighty to build and blend,
 
But impotent to tend,
 
Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardy?
 
 
 
Or come we of an Automaton
 
Unconscious of our pains?......
 
Or are we live remains
 
Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone?
 
 
 
Or is it that some high Plan betides,
 
As yet not understood,
 
Of Evil stormed by Good,
 
We the Forlorn Hope over which Achievement strides?
 
 
 
Thus things around. No answerer I....
 
Meanwhile the winds, and rains.
 
And Earth's old glooms and pains
 
Are still the same, and Life and Death are neighbours nigh.’

In 1901 ‘Poems of the Past and of the Present’ came out. Apart from the beautiful ‘Tess's Lament’, the finest poems in this series are again those of a speculative order, in which are found some of his most wistful questionings and tersest repudiations. In these it is strikingly evident that he had no belief in the Christian deity or in Christian doctrines: even his morality is more often the pagan heroism and steadfastness. Scarcely an English critic has cared to mention, in the face of the interment accorded him in the shrine of Westminster, how complete was Hardy's repudiation of the Christian view of life. The fact remains, however, that though he was never in any sense a militant, anti-clerical writer, he never protested against the freethinking opinions ascribed to him. In a letter to Sir Edmund Gosse, indeed there is the merest suggestion of perverse pride in finding himself associated with Swinburne as an iconoclast. ‘Swinburne told me,’ he writes, ‘that he read in some paper: “Swinburne planteth, and Hardy watereth, and Satan giveth the increase!”’ In ‘God-Forgotten’ he writes thus daringly: -

 
‘I towered far, and o! o! I stood within
 
The presence of the Lord Most High,
 
Sent thither by the sons of Earth to win
 
Some answer to their cry.
 
 
 
- “The Earth, sayest thou? The Human race?
 
By Me created? Sad its lot?
 
Nay: I have no remembrance of such place:
 
Such world I fashioned not.”’

‘The Respectable Burgher on “The Higher Criticism”’ is also inoffensively mocking. The Burgher, after enumerating a long string of Bible stories,

 
‘writ to make old doctrine wear
 
Something of a romantic air,’

concludes:

 
‘Since thus they hint, nor turn a hair.
 
All churchgoing will I forswear,
 
And sit on Sundays in my chair,
 
And read that moderate man Voltaire.’

‘The Church-Builder’ shows him in one of his truest rôles as tragic ironist. There is but one end for the disillusioned donor, who says in utter abandonment of faith:

 
‘My gift to God seems futile, quite;
 
The world moves as erstwhile;
 
And powerful Wrong on feeble Right
 
Tramples in olden style.
 
My faith burns down,
 
I see no crown;
 
But Cares, and Griefs, and Guile.’

‘Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses,’ collected in 1909, also contains many poems evidential of his dissatisfaction with the formulated tenets of orthodox religion. As has been noted, he professed an intense admiration for the Schopenhauerian philosophy, for his personal melancholy found ready acquiescence with the high-souled pessimism of the great German idealist. To each, at all times,

 
‘The miseries of the world
 
Are misery, and will not let him rest.’

Superficial solutions in terms of ‘revelation’ were at their beck and call had they elected for the inevitable capitulation of the believer. But seeing ‘a world governed by theoretical piety and practical atheism,’ the claims of Christianity as a world-religion in the strictest sense of the word, explaining the mysteries of the whole universe of unlimited space in endless time, were preposterous assumptions. To the poet the great Western religion is merely ‘a local cult called Christianity.’1) No more than Schopenhauer can he reconcile the idea of an omnipotent and merciful Deity with the human sufferings that he witnesses daily, and in the same way as his philosopher-counterpart, he rules out at the very start the conceptions of an external, supermundane First Cause or Deity. If he uses the term ‘First Cause’, it is never in the traditional sense: more often ‘Immanent Will’ or ‘Fundamental Inherent Energy’ serves his purpose better. At the same

time he does not hesitate to present the idea of a distinctly personal God when his satiric needs can be met through some such popular conception. In these expositions - as found, for example, in ‘New Year's Eve’ and ‘God's Education’ - he justifies his sceptical principles by endowing this God with all ‘the unfeelingness of Nature’:

 
‘He sank to raptness as of yore,
 
And opening New Year's Day
 
Wove it by rote as theretofore,
 
And went on working evermore
 
In his unweeting way.’

Needless to say this God is no more than the ‘viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel’ of ‘The Dynasts’. In speaking of Christ, however, Hardy, though an adherent of ‘Jesus-a Myth’ school, is always too wistfully resigned to be otherwise than reverent. Thus, his ‘Panthera’ - a legend accepted from writings so famous as the Talmud, the Apocryphal gospels, the works of Strauss and Haeckel - is a really beautiful poem. No line in it perhaps is so haunting as Swinburne's

 
‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, the world has grown
 
gray from thy breath,’

but the balance between modern expression and ancient love is admirably preserved throughout.

‘Satires of Circumstance’, as its name betokens, is compact of spirited defiance of life's futile yet cruel forces. Here the poet, however, waxes curtly sardonic over the most desired - and, therefore, often most disastrous - of human relationships. This part of his work would be, without the saving grace of humour, the poetry of sheer disillusion. Curiously enough, however, by far the greatest piece in this section - and one of the greatest poems ever penned by this master - is the one that bears the daring title of ‘God's Funeral’. In this poem there lurks an almost heart-breaking pathos. Memories of the days of inexperience of credal discrepancies steal over the poet as he watches the mourners attending the obsequies of God,

 
‘One whom we can no longer keep alive.’

As, all cheerlessly,

 
‘.... Toward our myth's oblivion,
 
Darkling, and languid-lipped, we creep and grope
 
Sadlier than those who wept in Babylon,
 
Whose Zion was a still abiding hope,’

the vision uprises of the time of innocence:

 
‘How sweet it was in years far hied
 
To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer,
 
To lie down liegely at the eventide
 
And feel a blest assurance he was there!’

Then comes the eternal question of spiritual compensation:

 
‘And who or what shall fill his place?
 
Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes
 
For some fixed star to stimulate their pace
 
Towards the goal of their enterprise?’

In a last desperate effort to hold on to what he ‘long had prized’, he strives to discern some ‘pale yet positive gleam low down behind,’ but to this ‘each mourner shook his head.’ The poem concludes, therefore, in courageously-accepted defeat, especially since regret is modified by the knowledge that

 
‘....They composed a crowd of whom
 
Some were right good, and many nigh the best....
 
Thus dazed and puzzled 'twixt the gleam and gloom
 
Mechanically I followed with the rest.’

That Hardy was prepared for a virulent reception for this poignant poem, despite his vindication of ‘Tess’ and ‘Jude’, is shown by his writing to Gosse about it as ‘enough in itself to damn me for the Laureateship, even if I had tried for or thought of it, which of course I did not....’

‘Moments of Vision’, the next volume, is a multifarious record of personal impressions - of places as much as of persons - and it is a record that makes fairly quiet reading. Here the unusual is rarely forced on him, and he shows that he can achieve his readiest effect with a sheer simplicity, especially as a poet of love. Suspense and disillusion have a voice here, but despite his ceaseless brooding over the inexorable limit of things, in lyric after lyric he breathes the passion or wistfulness of love. His sense of human charities and loyalties does not falter after all, for even if happiness may not make for him the whole of life, love may certainly be universalised as the summit of all terrestrial happiness:

 
‘Yonder a maid and her wight
 
Come whispering by:
 
War's annals will fade into night
 
Ere their story die.’1)

In 1922 when a volume of ‘Late Lyrics and Earlier’ appeared, it at once became famous for its preface, in which the poet replied to the persistent charge of pessimism brought against him. This element in his work, he maintained, is ‘only such “questionings” in the exploration of reality, and is the first step towards the soul's betterment, and the body's also.’ In support of his contention he makes use of a quotation from an early poem, ‘In Tenebris’:

 
‘If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.’

Pessimism to him connotes the full ‘exploration of reality’, the sheer impossibility of seeking to ‘avert his ken from half of human fate.’ ‘He wanted,’ writes his friend Sir George Douglas, ‘to do more than be an artist, wanted to right wrongs, to pillory abuses, to make the world a better place.’2) It is customary to allege, of course, that he is too determinedly despondent in seeming

to see no escape from the ultimate doom, but it was just such a facile argument that has turned (in England at least) Zola, a writer of the highest morality, into an ignoble pornographer whose works are to be purchased for the satisfaction of a vile curiosity. Actually Hardy could conceive of himself with some degree of consistency as an optimist, for to him, in turn, the ordinary optimist is a sort of materialist, refusing to face what is unduly harsh, painful or irreconcilable. And, without the least attempt at definitional equating here, it can well be argued that his ‘sad science of renunciation’ has left no ultimate record of failure ‘to exalt and crown the hour that girdles us.’ Remorseless though he thinks man's physical environment, harsh though he thinks the dealings of ‘whatever gods may be’, sceptical though he waxes over ‘Nature's holy plan’, apocalyptic as are his typifications of ‘the coming universal will not to live’,1) he never bids man in his long martyrdom abandon the fight. The philosophic notion in all this may be no more than an incitement to make the best of a bad job, but when art conspires through pity and admiration to exalt man's giant toilings against the unknown blind will, it reaches a plane that renders life sublimely rich:

 
‘O the dream that thou art my Love, be it thine,
 
And the dream that I am thy Love, be it mine,
 
And death may come, but loving is divine.’2)

Before these poems are left, mention must be made of the extremely skilful versification of ‘Faintheart in a Railway Train’, in which the jolting movement of a re-starting train is simulated with perfect effect:

 
‘....I kept my seat in my search for a plea,
 
And the wheels moved on. O could it but be
 
That I had alighted there!’

Finally, we have a volume of multiple title, ‘Human Shows. Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles’. Here the poet - the least

obscure of English writers - shows himself clear-thinking and quietly unrepentant to the end. All his moods are displayed still with powers of concentration and heroic detachment scarcely diminished. ‘The Turnip-Hoer’, ‘Plena Timoris’ and ‘The Fight on Durnover Moor’ reveal the master of tragic irony; ‘At Wynyard's Gap’ is a comedy in most realistic dialogue; ‘The Graveyard of Dead Creeds’, ‘A Night of Questionings’ and ‘The Absolute Explains’ reflect characteristically his immersion in the perplexities subtended by the inscrutable nature of ‘the hidden force’. Most mocking piece of all is ‘A Refusal’, in which for a moment he is invested with the sardonic spirit of Dean Swift. The ‘refusal’ is that of ‘the grave Dean of Westminster’ to allow a memorial within the Abbey to Lord Byron:

 
‘That such a creed-scorner
 
.........
 
Should claim Poet's Corner.’

Doubtless not all in the holy precincts bear names of honourable fame, yet

 
‘.... They but leaven
 
The others in heaven
 
In just true proportion,
 
While more mean distortion.
 
'Twill next be expected
 
That I get erected
 
To Shelley a tablet
 
In some niche or gablet.
 
Then - what makes my skin burn,
 
Yea, forehead to chin burn -
 
That I ensconce Swinburne!’

Surely if the cremated ashes of a scorner of meaningless shibboleths could smile, they would have done so that dank day in January last when these poor pagan remains of his were accorded ‘Christian burial’

 
‘.....in the best minster
 
Seen in Great Britain.’

Hardy has been well described as the greatest tragic writer among English novelists, and if no such topmost pinnacle can be claimed for him in the ranks of the poets, it is just that English literature finds its greater glory in its poetry, not in its prose. Yet, of Hardy's poetry it has been equally well remarked that ‘it was the vehicle for a last, concentrated truth of things. The art and the truth in it would not be severed.’1) By the average person his absolute sincerity, the first quality of the truth in his poetry, is difficult to realize, for in his own life surely he witnessed few vicissitudes and hard experiences. Why, then, this assumption of a sorrowful and brooding spirit? Yes, for himself, externally, he asked nothing. But internally he allied himself with the great, suffering soul of humanity; so that all through ‘the melancholy marching of the years’ his heart was breaking beneath the oppression of Life, Life ‘cruel as the grave’, Life about which ‘his opinions were so extreme that he did not dare to declave them entirely.’2) In this saddest of minds ever known to mankind what infinite pity was given to the sufferings of men and women! From it has sprung a vision of the world and of man's stern lot as they revealed themselves to a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul. The focal points in the stages of that prolonged vision be never sought to co-ordinate into a system, but already (in his own words)

 
‘The Great Adjustment is taking place,’

for in the grave harmony of his art the eternal element is (most splendid of tributes) ‘in the way in which he makes chaos itself into a pattern.’3)


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