’It will have been: 
  Nor God nor Demon can undo the done,
      Unsight the seen
  Make muted music be as unbegun
      Though things terrene
  Groan in their bondage till oblivion supervene.’

What neither God nor Demon can do, men are incessantly at work to accomplish.  Life itself rewards them for their assiduity, for she scatters her roses chiefly on the paths of those who forget her thorns.  But the great poet remembers both rose and thorn; and it is beyond his power to remember them otherwise than together.

It was fitting, then, and to some senses inevitable, that Mr Hardy should have crowned his work as a poet in his old age by a series of love poems that are unique for power and passion in even the English language.  This late and wonderful flowering has no tinge of miracle; it has sprung straight from the main stem of Mr Hardy’s poetic growth.  Into ‘Veteris Vestigia Flammas’ is distilled the quintessence of the power that created the Wessex Novels and ‘The Dynasts’; all that Mr Hardy has to tell us of life, the whole of the truth that he has apprehended, is in these poems, and no poet since poetry began has apprehended or told us more. Sunt lacrimae rerum.

[NOVEMBER, 1919.

* * * * *

POSTSCRIPT

Three months after this essay was written the first volume of the long awaited definitive edition of Mr Hardy’s works (the Mellstock Edition) appeared.  It was with no common thrill that we read in the precious pages of introduction the following words confirming the theory upon which the first part of the essay is largely based.

’Turning now to my verse—­to myself the more individual part of my literary fruitage—­I would say that, unlike some of the fiction, nothing interfered with the writer’s freedom in respect of its form or content.  Several of the poems—­indeed many—­were produced before novel-writing had been thought of as a pursuit; but few saw the light till all the novels had been published....

’The few volumes filled by the verse cover a producing period of some eighteen years first and last, while the seventeen or more volumes of novels represent correspondingly about four-and-twenty years.  One is reminded by this disproportion in time and result how much more concise and quintessential expression becomes when given in rhythmic form than when shaped in the language of prose.’

Present Condition of English Poetry

Shall we, or shall we not, be serious?  To be serious nowadays is to be ill-mannered, and what, murmurs the cynic, does it matter?  We have our opinion; we know that there is a good deal of good poetry in the Georgian book, a little in Wheels.[13] We know that there is much bad poetry in the Georgian book, and less in Wheels.  We know that there is one poem in Wheels beside the intense and sombre imagination of which even the good poetry of the Georgian book pales for a moment.  We think we know more than this.  What does it matter?  Pick out the good things, and let the rest go.