[OCTOBER, 1919.

The Poetry of Mr Hardy

One meets fairly often with the critical opinion that Mr Hardy’s poetry is incidental.  It is admitted on all sides that his poetry has curious merits of its own, but it is held to be completely subordinate to his novels, and those who maintain that it must be considered as having equal standing with his prose, are not seldom treated as guilty of paradox and preciousness.

We are inclined to wonder, as we review the situation, whether those of the contrary persuasion are not allowing themselves to be impressed primarily by mere bulk, and arguing that a man’s chief work must necessarily be what he has done most of; and we feel that some such supposition is necessary to explain what appears to us as a visible reluctance to allow Mr Hardy’s poetry a clean impact upon the critical consciousness.  It is true that we have ranged against us critics of distinction, such as Mr Lascelles Abercrombie and Mr Robert Lynd, and that it may savour of impertinence to suggest that the case could have been unconsciously pre-judged in their minds when they addressed themselves to Mr Hardy’s poetry.  Nevertheless, we find some significance in the fact that both these critics are of such an age that when they came to years of discretion the Wessex Novels were in existence as a corpus.  There, before their eyes, was a monument of literary work having a unity unlike that of any contemporary author.  The poems became public only after they had laid the foundations of their judgment.  For them Mr Hardy’s work was done.  Whatever he might subsequently produce was an interesting, but to their criticism an otiose appendix to his prose achievement.

It happens therefore that to a somewhat younger critic the perspective may be different.  By the accident of years it would appear to him that Mr Hardy’s poetry was no less a corpus than his prose.  They would be extended equally and at the same moment before his eyes; he would embark upon voyages of discovery into both at roughly the same time; and he might find, in total innocence of preciousness and paradox, that the poetry would yield up to him a quality of perfume not less essential than any that he could extract from the prose.

This is, as we see it, the case with ourselves.  We discover all that our elders discover in Mr Hardy’s novels; we see more than they in his poetry.  To our mind it exists superbly in its own right; it is not lifted into significance upon the glorious substructure of the novels.  They also are complete in themselves.  We recognise the relation between the achievements, and discern that they are the work of a single mind; but they are separate works, having separate and unique excellences.  The one is only approximately explicable in terms of the other.  We incline, therefore, to attach a signal importance to what has always seemed to us the most important sentence in Who’s Who?—­namely, that in which Mr Hardy confesses that in 1868 he was compelled—­that is his own word—­to give up writing poetry for prose.