Part 20 (2/2)
We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If some one said on Christmas Eve, ”Come; see the oxen kneel
”In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.
The mood of faith, however--or, rather, of delight in the memory of faith--is not Mr. Hardy's prevailing mood. At the same time, his unfaith relates to the duration of love rather than to human destiny. He believes in ”the world's amendment.” He can enter upon a war without ironical doubts, as we see in the song _Men who March Away_. More than this, he can look forward beyond war to the coming of a new patriotism of the world. ”How long,” he cries, in a poem written some years ago:--
How long, O ruling Teutons, Slavs, and Gaels, Must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these, That are as puppets in a playing hand?
When shall the saner softer polities Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land, And Patriotism, grown G.o.dlike, scorn to stand Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?
But, perhaps, his characteristic att.i.tude to war is to be found, not in lines like these, but in that melancholy poem, _The Souls of the Slain_, in which the souls of the dead soldiers return to their country and question a ”senior soul-flame” as to how their friends and relatives have kept their doughty deeds in remembrance:--
”And, General, how hold out our sweethearts, Sworn loyal as doves?”
”Many mourn; many think It is not unattractive to prink Them in sable for heroes. Some fickle and fleet hearts Have found them new loves.”
”And our wives?” quoth another, resignedly, ”Dwell they on our deeds?”
”Deeds of home; that live yet Fresh as new--deeds of fondness or fret, Ancient words that were kindly expressed or unkindly, These, these have their heeds.”
Mr. Hardy has too bitter a sense of reality to believe much in the glory of war. His imagination has always been curiously interested in soldiers, but that is more because they have added a touch of colour to the tragic game of life than because he is on the side of the military show. One has only to read _The Dynasts_ along with _Barrack-room Ballads_ to see that the att.i.tude of Mr. Hardy to war is the att.i.tude of the brooding artist in contrast with that of the music-hall politician.
Not that Mr. Kipling did not tell us some truths about the fate of our fellows, but he related them to an atmosphere that savoured of beer and tobacco rather than of eternity. The real world to Mr. Hardy is the world of ancient human things, in which war has come to be a hideous irrelevance. That is what he makes emphatically clear in _In the Time of the Breaking of Nations_:--
Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch gra.s.s: Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pa.s.s.
Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by; War's annals will fade into night Ere their story die
It may be thought, on the other hand, that Mr. Hardy's poems about war are no more expressive of tragic futility than his poems about love.
Futility and frustration are ever-recurring themes in both. His lovers, like his soldiers, rot in the grave defeated of their glory. Lovers are always severed both in life and in death:--
Rain on the windows, creaking doors, With blasts that besom the green, And I am here, and you are there, And a hundred miles between!
In _Beyond the Last Lamp_ we have the same mournful cry over severance.
There are few sadder poems than this with its tristful refrain, even in the works of Mr. Hardy. It is too long to quote in full, but one may give the last verses of this lyric of lovers in a lane:--
When I re-trod that watery way Some hours beyond the droop of day, Still I found pacing there the twain Just as slowly, just as sadly, Heedless of the night and rain.
One could but wonder who they were And what wild woe detained them there.
Though thirty years of blur and blot Have slid since I beheld that spot, And saw in curious converse there Moving slowly, moving sadly, That mysterious tragic pair, Its olden look may linger on-- All but the couple; they have gone.
Whither? Who knows, indeed.... And yet To me, when nights are weird and wet, Without those comrades there at tryst Creeping slowly, creeping sadly, That love-lane does not exist.
There they seem brooding on their pain, And will, while such a lane remain.
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