it suggested an equivalence.  The distinction may appear to be hair-drawn, but we believe that it is vital to the theory of poetry as a whole, and to an understanding of Mr Hardy’s poetry in particular.  Indeed, in it must be sought the meaning of another of his titles, ‘Satires of Circumstance,’ where the particular circumstance is neither typical nor fortuitous, but a symbol necessary to communicate to others the sense of a quality in life more largely and variously apprehended by the poet.  At the risk of appearing fantastic we will endeavour still further to elucidate our meaning.  The poetic process is, we believe, twofold.  The one part, the discovery of the symbol, the establishment of an equivalence, is what we may call poetic method.  It is concerned with the transposition and communication of emotion, no matter what the emotion may be, for to poetic method the emotional material is, strictly, indifferent.  The other part is an esthetic apprehension of significance, the recognition of the all in the one.  This is a specifically poetic act, or rather the supreme poetic act.  Yet it may be absent from poetry.  For there is no necessary connection between poetic apprehension and poetic method.  Poetic method frequently exists without poetic apprehension; and there is no reason to suppose that the reverse is not also true, for the recognition of greatness in poetry is probably not the peculiar privilege of great poets.  We have here, at least a principle of division between major and minor poetry.

Mr Hardy is a major poet; and we are impelled to seek further and ask what it is that enables such a poet to perform this sovereign act of apprehension and to recognise the quality of the all in the quality of the one.  We believe that the answer is simple.  The great poet knows what he is looking for.  Once more we speak too precisely, and so falsely, being compelled to use the language of the kingdom of logic to describe what is being done in the kingdom of art.  The poet, we say, knows the quality for which he seeks; but this knowledge is rather a condition than a possession of soul.  It is a state of responsiveness rather than a knowledge of that to which he will respond.  But it is knowledge inasmuch as the choice of that to which he will respond is determined by the condition of his soul.  On the purity of that condition depends his greatness as a poet, and that purity in its turn depends upon his denying no element of his profound experience.  If he denies or forgets, the synthesis—­again the word is a metaphor—­which must establish itself within him is fragmentary and false.  The new event can wake but partial echoes in his soul or none at all; it can neither be received into, nor can it create a complete relation, and so it passes incommensurable from limbo into forgetfulness.

Mr Hardy stands high above all other modern poets by the deliberate purity of his responsiveness.  The contagion of the world’s slow stain has not touched him; from the first he held aloof from the general conspiracy to forget in which not only those who are professional optimists take a part.  Therefore his simplest words have a vehemence and strangeness of their own:—­