[NOVEMBER, 1919.

We have read these poems of Thomas Hardy, read them not once, but many times.  Many of them have already become part of our being; their indelible impress has given shape to dumb and striving elements in our soul; they have set free and purged mute, heart-devouring regrets.  And yet, though this is so, the reading of them in a single volume, the submission to their movement with a like unbroken motion of the mind, gathers their greatness, their poignancy and passion, into one stream, submerging us and leaving us patient and purified.

There have been many poets among us in the last fifty years, poets of sure talent, and it may be even of genius, but no other of them has this compulsive power.  The secret is not hard to find.  Not one of them is adequate to what we know and have suffered.  We have in our own hearts a new touchstone of poetic greatness.  We have learned too much to be wholly responsive to less than an adamantine honesty of soul and a complete acknowledgment of experience.  ‘Give us the whole,’ we cry, ‘give us the truth.’  Unless we can catch the undertone of this acknowledgment, a poet’s voice is in our ears hardly more than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.

Therefore we turn—­some by instinct and some by deliberate choice—­to the greatest; therefore we deliberately set Mr Hardy among these.  What they have, he has, and has in their degree—­a plenary vision of life.  He is the master of the fundamental theme; it enters into, echoes in, modulates and modifies all his particular emotions, and the individual poems of which they are the substance.  Each work of his is a fragment of a whole—­not a detached and arbitrarily severed fragment, but a unity which implies, calls for and in a profound sense creates a vaster and completely comprehensive whole His reaction to an episode has behind and within it a reaction to the universe.  An overwhelming endorsement descends upon his words:  he traces them as with a pencil, and straightway they are graven in stone.

Thus his short poems have a weight and validity which sets them apart in kind from even the very finest work of his contemporaries.  These may be perfect in and for themselves; but a short poem by Mr Hardy is often perfect in a higher sense.  As the lines of a diagram may be produced in imagination to contain within themselves all space, one of Mr Hardy’s most characteristic poems may expand and embrace all human experience.  In it we may hear the sombre, ruthless rhythm of life itself—­the dominant theme that gives individuation to the ripple of fragmentary joys and sorrows.  Take ’The Broken Appointment’:—­

      ’You did not come,
  And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.—­
  Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
  Than that I thus found lacking in your make
  That high compassion which can overbear
  Reluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake
  Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
      You did not come.