as a denial of ‘casualty.’  To envisage an accepted truth from a new angle, to turn it over and over again in the mind in the hope of finding some aspect which might accord with a large and general view is the inevitable movement of any mind that is alive and not dead.  To say that Mr Hardy has finally discovered unity may be paradoxical; but it is true.  The harmony of the artist is not as the harmony of the preacher or the philosopher.  Neither would grant, neither would understand the profound acquiescence that lies behind ‘Adonais’ or the ’Ode to the Grecian Urn.’  Such acquiescence has no moral quality, as morality is even now understood, nor any logical compulsion.  It does not stifle anger nor deny anguish; it turns no smiling face upon unsmiling things; it is not puffed up with the resonance of futile heroics.  It accepts the things that are as the necessary basis of artistic creation.  This unity which comes of the instinctive refusal in the great poet to deny experience, and subdues the self into the whole as part of that which is not denied, is to be found in every corner of Mr Hardy’s mature poetry.  It gives, as it alone can really give, to personal emotion what is called the impersonality of great poetry.  We feel it as a sense of background, a conviction that a given poem is not the record, but the culmination of an experience, and that the experience of which it is the culmination is far larger and more profound than the one which it seems to record.

At the basis of great poetry lies an all-embracing realism, an adequacy to all experience, a refusal of the merely personal in exultation or dismay.  Take the contrast between Rupert Brooke’s deservedly famous lines:  ‘There is some corner of a foreign field ...’ and Mr Hardy’s ’Drummer Hodge’:—­

  ’Yet portion of that unknown plain
    Will Hodge for ever be;
  His homely Northern heart and brain
    Grow to some Southern tree,
  And strange-eyed constellations reign
    His stars eternally.’

We know which is the truer.  Which is the more beautiful?  Is it not Mr Hardy?  And which (strange question) is the more consoling, the more satisfying, the more acceptable?  Is it not Mr Hardy?  There is sorrow, but it is the sorrow of the spheres.  And this, not the apparent anger and dismay of a self’s discomfiture, is the quality of greatness in Mr Hardy’s poetry.  The Mr Hardy of the love poems of 1912-13 is not a man giving way to memory in poetry; he is a great poet uttering the cry of the universe.  A vast range of acknowledged experience returns to weight each syllable; it is the quality of life that is vocal, gathered into a moment of time with a vista of years:—­

  ’Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,
    The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,
  Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
    For the stars close their shutters and the
        Dawn whitens hazily. 
  Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours
    The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again! 
      I am just the same as when
  Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers.’