Part 12 (1/2)
Eight years more pa.s.sed, years marked by the stupendous effort of _The Dynasts_, before Mr. Hardy put forth another collection of lyrical poems. _Time's Laughingstocks_ confirmed, and more than confirmed, the high promise of _Wess.e.x Poems_. The author, in one of his modest prefaces, where he seems to whisper while we bend forward in our anxiety not to miss one thrifty sentence, expresses the hope that _Time's Laughingstocks_ will, as a whole, take the ”reader forward, even if not far, rather than backward.”
The book, indeed, does not take us ”far” forward, simply because the writer's style and scope were definitely exposed to us already, and yet it does take us ”forward,” because the hand of the master is conspicuously firmer and his touch more daring. The _Laughingstocks_ themselves are fifteen in number, tragical stories of division and isolation, of failures in pa.s.sion, of the treason of physical decay. No landscape of Mr. Hardy's had been more vivid than the night-pictures in ”The Revisitation,” where the old soldier in barracks creeps out on to the gaunt down, and meets (by one of Mr. Hardy's coincidences) his ancient mistress, and no picture more terrible than the revelation of each to the other in a blaze of sunrise. What a doc.u.ment for the future is ”Reminiscences of a Dancing Man”? If only Shakespeare could have left us such a song of the London in 1585! But the power of the poet culminates in the pathos of ”The Tramp Woman”--perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hardy's lyrical poems--and in the horror of ”A Sunday Morning's Tragedy.”
It is noticeable that _Time's Laughingstocks_ is, in some respects, a more daring collection than its predecessors. We find the poet here entirely emanc.i.p.ated from convention, and guided both in religion and morals exclusively by the inner light of his reflection. His energy now interacts on his clairvoyance with a completeness which he had never quite displayed before, and it is here that we find Mr. Hardy's utterance peculiarly a quintessence of himself. Especially in the narrative pieces--which are often Wess.e.x novels distilled into a wine-gla.s.s, such as ”Rose-Ann,” and ”The Vampirine Fair”--he allows no considerations of what the reader may think ”nice” or ”pleasant” to shackle his sincerity or his determination; and it is therefore to _Time's Laughingstocks_ that the reader who wishes to become intimately acquainted with Mr. Hardy as a moralist most frequently recurs. We notice here more than elsewhere in his poems Mr. Hardy's sympathy with the local music of Wess.e.x, and especially with its expression by the village choir, which he uses as a spiritual symbol. Quite a large section of _Time's Laughingstocks_ takes us to the old-fas.h.i.+oned gallery of some church, where the minstrels are bowing ”New Sabbath” or ”Mount Ephraim,” or to a later scene where the ghosts, in whose melancholy apparition Mr. Hardy takes such pleasure, chant their goblin melodies and strum ”the viols of the dead” in the moonlit churchyard. The very essence of Mr. Hardy's reverie at this moment of his career is to be found, for instance, in ”The Dead Quire,” where the ancient phantom-minstrels revenge themselves on their gross grandsons outside the alehouse.
Almost immediately after the outbreak of the present war Mr. Hardy presented to a somewhat distraught and inattentive public another collection of his poems. It cannot be said that _Satires of Circ.u.mstance_ is the most satisfactory of those volumes; it is, perhaps, that which we could with the least discomposure persuade ourselves to overlook. Such a statement refers more to the high quality of other pages than to any positive decay of power or finish here. There is no less adroitness of touch and penetration of view in this book than elsewhere, and the poet awakens once more our admiration by his skill in giving poetic value to minute conditions of life which have escaped less careful observers. But in _Satires of Circ.u.mstance_ the ugliness of experience is more accentuated than it is elsewhere, and is flung in our face with less compunction. The pieces which give name to the volume are only fifteen in number, but the spirit which inspires them is very frequently repeated in other parts of the collection. That spirit is one of mocking sarcasm, and it acts in every case by presenting a beautifully draped figure of illusion, from which the poet, like a sardonic showman, twitches away the robe that he may display a skeleton beneath it. We can with little danger a.s.sume, as we read the _Satires of Circ.u.mstance_, hard and cruel shafts of searchlight as they seem, that Mr. Hardy was pa.s.sing through a mental crisis when he wrote them. This seems to be the _Troilus and Cressida_ of his life's work, the book in which he is revealed most distracted by conjecture and most overwhelmed by the miscarriage of everything. The wells of human hope have been poisoned for him by some condition of which we know nothing, and even the picturesque features of Dorsets.h.i.+re landscape, that have always before dispersed his melancholy, fail to win his attention:--
”Bright yellowhammers Made mirthful clamours, And billed long straws with a bustling air, And bearing their load, Flew up the road That he followed alone, without interest there.”
The strongest of the poems of disillusion which are the outcome of this mood, is ”The Newcomer's Wife,” with the terrible abruptness of its last stanza. It is not for criticism to find fault with the theme of a work of art, but only to comment upon its execution. Of the merit of these monotonously sinister _Satires of Circ.u.mstance_ there can be no question; whether the poet's indulgence in the mood which gave birth to them does not tend to lower our moral temperature and to lessen the rebound of our energy, is another matter. At all events, every one must welcome a postscript in which a blast on the bugle of war seemed to have wakened the poet from his dark brooding to the sense of a new chapter in history.
In the fourth year of the war the veteran poet published _Moments of Vision_. These show a remarkable recovery of spirit, and an ingenuity never before excelled. With the pa.s.sage of years Mr. Hardy, observing everything in the little world of Wess.e.x, and forgetting nothing, has become almost preternaturally wise, and, if it may be said so, ”knowing,” with a sort of magic, like that of a wizard. He has learned to track the windings of the human heart with the familiarity of a gamekeeper who finds plenty of vermin in the woods, and who nails what he finds, be it stoat or squirrel, to the barn-door of his poetry. But there is also in these last-fruits of Mr. Hardy's mossed tree much that is wholly detached from the bitterness of satire, much that simply records, with an infinite delicacy of pathos, little incidents of the personal life of long ago, bestowing the immortality of art on these fugitive fancies in the spirit of the j.a.panese sculptor when he chisels the melting of a cloud or the flight of an insect on his sword hilt:--
”I idly cut a parsley stalk And blew therein towards the moon; I had not thought what ghosts would walk With s.h.i.+vering footsteps to my tune.
”I went and knelt, and scooped my hand As if to drink, into the brook, And a faint figure seemed to stand Above me, with the bye-gone look.
”I lipped rough rhymes of chance not choice, I thought not what my words might be; There came into my ear a voice That turned a tenderer verse for me.”
We have now in brief historic survey marshalled before us the various volumes in which Mr. Hardy's lyrical poetry was originally collected.
Before we examine its general character more closely, it may be well to call attention to its technical quality, which was singularly misunderstood at first, and which has never, we believe, been boldly faced. In 1898, and later, when a melodious _falsetto_ was much in fas.h.i.+on amongst us, the reviewers found great fault with Mr. Hardy's prosody; they judged him as a versifier to be rude and incorrect. As regards the single line, it may be confessed that Mr. Hardy, in his anxiety to present his thought in an undiluted form, is not infrequently clogged and hard. Such a line as
”Fused from its separateness by ecstasy”
hisses at us like a snake, and crawls like a wounded one. Mr. Hardy is apt to clog his lines with consonants, and he seems indifferent to the stiffness which is the consequence of this neglect. Ben Jonson said that ”Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging”; perhaps we may go so far as to say that Mr. Hardy, for his indifference to a mellifluous run lays himself open to a mild rebuke. He is negligent of that eternal ornament of English verse, audible intricacy, probably because of Swinburne's abuse of it. But most of what is called his harshness should rather be called bareness, and is the result of a revolt, conscious or unconscious, against Keats' prescription of ”loading the rifts with ore.”
In saying this, all has been said that an enemy could in justice say in blame of his metrical peculiarities. Unquestionably he does occasionally, like Robert Browning, err in the direction of cacophony.
But when we turn to the broader part of prosody, we must perceive that Mr. Hardy is not only a very ingenious, but a very correct and admirable metricist. His stanzaic invention is abundant; no other Victorian poet, not even Swinburne, has employed so many forms, mostly of his own invention, and employed them so appropriately, that is to say, in so close harmony with the subject or story enshrined in them. To take an example from his pure lyrics of reflection first, from ”The Bullfinches”:--
”Brother Bulleys, let us sing From the dawn till evening!
For we know not that we go not When the day's pale visions fold Unto those who sang of old,”
in the exquisite fineness and sadness of the stanza we seem to hear the very voices of the birds warbling faintly in the sunset. Again, the hurried, timid irresolution of a lover always too late is marvellously rendered in the form of ”Lizbie Browne”:--
”And Lizbie Browne, Who else had hair Bay-red as yours, Or flesh so fair Bred out of doors, Sweet Lizbie Browne?”
On the other hand, the fierceness of ”I said to Love” is interpreted in a stanza that suits the mood of denunciation, while ”Tess's Lament”
wails in a metre which seems to rock like an ageing woman seated alone before the fire, with an infinite haunting sadness.
It is, however, in the narrative pieces, the little _Wess.e.x Tales_, that Mr. Hardy's metrical imagination is most triumphant. No two of these are identical in form, and for each he selects, or more often invents, a wholly appropriate stanza. He makes many experiments, one of the strangest being the introduction of rhymeless lines at regular intervals. Of this, ”Cicely” is an example which repays attention:--
”And still sadly onward I followed, That Highway the Icen Which trails its pale riband down Wess.e.x O'er lynchet and lea.
”Along through the Stour-bordered Forum, Where legions had wayfared, And where the slow river up-gla.s.ses Its green canopy”;
and one still more remarkable is the enchanting ”Friends Beyond,” to which we shall presently recur. The drawling voice of a weary old campaigner is wonderfully rendered in the stanza of ”Valenciennes”:--
”Well: Heaven wi' its jasper halls Is now the on'y town I care to be in..
Good Lord, if Nick should bomb the walls As we did Valencieen!”
whereas for long Napoleonic stories like ”Leipzig” and ”The Peasant's Confession,” a ballad-measure which contemporaries such as Southey or Campbell might have used is artfully chosen. In striking contrast we have the elaborate verse-form of ”The Souls of the Slain,” in which the throbbing stanza seems to dilate and withdraw like the very cloud of moth-like phantoms which it describes. It is difficult to follow out this theme without more frequent quotation than I have s.p.a.ce, for here, but the reader who pursues it carefully will not repeat the rumour that Mr. Hardy is a careless or ”incorrect” metricist. He is, on the contrary, a metrical artist of great accomplishment.