Part 21 (2/2)

One could make as good music as that out of a milk-cart. One would accept such musicless verse only from a man of genius. But even here Mr.

Hardy takes us home with him and makes us stand by his side and listen to the clucking stream. He takes us home with him again in the poem called _Overlooking the River Stour_, which begins:

The swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam In the wet June's last beam: Like little crossbows animate, The swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam.

Planing up shavings made of spray, A moor-hen darted out From the bank thereabout.

And through the stream-s.h.i.+ne ripped her way; Planing up shavings made of spray, A moor-hen darted out.

In this poem we find observation leaping into song in one line and hobbling into a hard-wrought image in another. Both the line in which the first appears, however--

Like little crossbows animate,

and the line in which the second happens--

Planing up shavings made of spray,

equally make us feel how watchful and earnest an observer is Mr. Hardy.

He is a man, we realize, to whom bird and river, heath and stone, road and field and tree, mean immensely more than to his fellows. I do not suggest that he observes nature without bias--that he mirrors the procession of visible things with the delight of a child or a lyric poet. He makes nature his mirror as well as himself a mirror of nature.

He colours it with all his sadness, his helplessness, his (if one may invent the word and use it without offence) warpedness. If I am not mistaken, he once compared a bleak morning in _The Woodlanders_ to the face of a still-born baby. He loves to dwell on the uncomfortable moods of nature--on such things as:--

... the watery light Of the moon in its old age;

concerning which moon he goes on to describe how:

Green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past where mute and cold it globed Like a dying dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave.

This, I fear, is a failure, but it is a failure in a common mood of the author's. It is a mood in which nature looks out at us, almost ludicrous in its melancholy. In such a poem as that from which I have quoted, it is as though we saw nature with a drip on the end of its nose. Mr.

Hardy's is something different from a tragic vision. It is a desolate, disheartening, and, in a way, morbid vision. We wander with him too often under--

Gaunt trees that interlace, Through whose flayed fingers I see too clearly The nakedness of the place.

And Mr. Hardy's vision of the life of men and women transgresses similarly into a denial of gladness. His gloom, we feel, goes too far.

It goes so far that we are tempted at times to think of it as a fact.i.tious gloom. He writes a poem called _Honeymoon Time at an Inn_, and this is the characteristic atmosphere in which he introduces us to the bridegroom and bride:

At the s.h.i.+ver of morning, a little before the false dawn, The moon was at the window-square, Deedily brooding in deformed decay-- The curve hewn off her cheek as by an adze; At the s.h.i.+ver of morning, a little before the false dawn, So the moon looked in there.

There are no happy lovers or happy marriages in Mr. Hardy's world. Such people as are happy would not be happy if only they knew the truth. Many of Mr. Hardy's poems are, as I have already said, dramatic lyrics on the pattern invented by Robert Browning--short stories in verse. But there is a certain air of triumph even in Browning's tragic figures. Mr.

Hardy's figures are the inmates of despair. Browning's love-poems belong to heroic literature. Mr. Hardy's love-poems belong to the literature of downheartedness. Browning's men and women are men and women who have had the courage of their love, or who are shown at least against a background of Browning's own courage. Mr. Hardy's men and women do not know the wild faith of love. They have not the courage even of their sins. They are helpless as fishes in a net--a scarcely rebellious population of the ill-matched and the ill-starred.

Many of the poems in his last book fail through a lack of imaginative energy. It is imaginative energy that makes the reading of a great tragedy like _King Lear_ not a depressing, but an exalting experience.

But is there anything save depression to be got from reading such a poem as _A Caged Goldfinch_:--

Within a churchyard, on a recent grave, I saw a little cage That jailed a goldfinch. All was silence, save Its hops from stage to stage.

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