Part 12 (2/2)
The conception of life revealed in his verses by this careful artist is one which displays very exactly the bent of his temperament. During the whole of his long career Mr. Hardy has not budged an inch from his original line of direction. He holds that, abandoned by G.o.d, treated with scorn by Nature, man lies helpless at the mercy of ”those purblind Doomsters,” accident, chance, and time, from whom he has had to endure injury and insult from the cradle to the grave. This is stating the Hardy doctrine in its extreme form, but it is not stating it too strongly. This has been called his ”pessimism,” a phrase to which some admirers, unwilling to give things their true name, have objected. But, of course, Mr. Hardy is a pessimist, just as Browning is an optimist, just as white is not black, and day is not night. Our juggling with words in paradox is too often apt to disguise a want of decision in thought. Let us admit that Mr. Hardy's conception of the fatal forces which beleaguer human life is a ”pessimistic” one, or else words have no meaning.
Yet it is needful to define in what this pessimism consists. It is not the egotism of Byron or the morbid melancholy of Chateaubriand. It is directed towards an observation of others, not towards an a.n.a.lysis of self, and this gives it more philosophical importance, because although romantic peevishness is very common among modern poets, and although ennui inspires a mult.i.tude of sonnets, a deliberate and imaginative study of useless suffering in the world around us is rare indeed among the poets. It is particularly to be noted that Mr. Hardy, although one of the most profoundly tragic of all modern writers, is neither effeminate nor sickly. His melancholy could never have dictated the third stanza of Sh.e.l.ley's ”Lines written in Dejection in the Bay of Naples.” His pessimism is involuntary, forced from him by his experience and his const.i.tution, and no a.n.a.lysis could give a better definition of what divides him from the petulant despair of a poet like Leopardi than the lines ”To Life”:--
”O life, with the sad scared face, I weary of seeing thee, And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobbling pace, And thy too-forced pleasantry!
”I know what thou would'st tell Of Death, Time, Destiny-- I have known it long, and know, too, well What it all means for me.
”But canst thou not array Thyself in rare disguise, And feign like truth, for one mad day, That Earth is Paradise?
”I'll tune me to the mood, And mumm with thee till eve, And maybe what as interlude I feign, I shall believe!”
But the mumming goes no deeper than it does in the exquisite poem of ”The Darkling Thrush,” where the carolings of an aged bird, on a frosty evening, are so ecstatic that they waken a vague hope in the listener's mind that the thrush may possibly know of ”some blessed hope” of which the poet is ”unaware.” This is as far as Mr. Hardy ever gets on the blest Victorian pathway of satisfaction.
There are certain aspects in which it is not unnatural to see a parallel between Mr. Hardy and George Crabbe. Each is the spokesman of a district, each has a pa.s.sion for the study of mankind, each has gained by long years of observation a profound knowledge of local human character, and each has plucked on the open moor, and wears in his coat, the hueless flower of disillusion. But there is a great distinction in the aim of the two poets. Crabbe, as he describes himself in _The Parish Register_, was ”the true physician” who ”walks the foulest ward.” He was utilitarian in his morality; he exposed the pathos of tragedy by dwelling on the faults which led to it, forgetful of the fatality which in more consistent moments he acknowledged. Crabbe was realistic with a moral design, even in the _Tales of the Hall_, where he made a gallant effort at last to arrive at a detachment of spirit. No such effort is needed by Mr. Hardy, who has none of the instinct of a preacher, and who considers moral improvement outside his responsibility. He admits, with his great French contemporary, that
”Tout desir est menteur, toute joie ephemere, Toute liqueur au fond de la coupe est amere,”
but he is bent on discovering the cause of this devastation, and not disposed to waste time over its consequences. At the end he produces a panacea which neither Crabbe nor Byron dreamed of--resignation.
But the poet has not reached the end of his disillusion. He thinks to secure repose on the breast of Nature, the _alma mater_, to whom Goethe and Wordsworth and Browning each in his own way turned, and were rewarded by consolation and refreshment. We should be prepared to find Mr. Hardy, with his remarkable apt.i.tude for the perception of natural forms, easily consoled by the influences of landscape and the inanimate world. His range of vision is wide and extremely exact; he has the gift of reproducing before us scenes of various character with a vividness which is sometimes startling. But Mr. Hardy's disdain of sentimentality, and his vigorous a.n.a.lysis of the facts of life, render him insensible not indeed to the mystery nor to the beauty, but to the imagined sympathy, of Nature. He has no more confidence in the visible earth than in the invisible heavens, and neither here nor there is he able to persuade himself to discover a counsellor or a friend. In this connection, we do well to follow the poet's train of thought in the lyric called ”In a Wood,” where he enters a copse dreaming that, in that realm of ”sylvan peace,” Nature would offer ”a soft release from man's unrest.” He immediately observes that the pine and the beech are struggling for existence, and trying to blight each other with dripping poison. He sees the ivy eager to strangle the elm, and the hawthorns choking the hollies. Even the poplars sulk and turn black under the shadow of a rival. In the end, filled with horror at all these crimes of Nature, the poet flees from the copse as from an accursed place, and he determines that life offers him no consolation except the company of those human beings who are as beleaguered as himself:--
”Since, then, no grace I find Taught me of trees, Turn I back to my kind Worthy as these.
There at least smiles abound, There discourse trills around, There, now and then, are found, Life-loyalties.”
It is absurd, he decides, to love Nature, which has either no response to give, or answers in irony. Let us even avoid, as much as we can, deep concentration of thought upon the mysteries of Nature, lest we become demoralised by contemplating her negligence, her blindness, her implacability. We find here a violent reaction against the poetry of egotistic optimism which had ruled the romantic school in England for more than a hundred years, and we recognise a branch of Mr. Hardy's originality. He has lifted the veil of Isis, and he finds beneath it, not a benevolent mother of men, but the tomb of an illusion. One short lyric, ”Yell'ham-Wood's Story,” puts this, again with a sylvan setting, in its unflinching crudity:--
”Coomb-Firtrees say that Life is a moan, And Clyffe-hill Clump says 'Yea!'
But Yell'ham says a thing of its own: It's not, 'Gray, gray, Is Life alway!'
That Yell'ham says, Nor that Life is for ends unknown.
”It says that Life would signify A thwarted purposing: That we come to live, and are called to die.
Yes, that's the thing In fall, in spring, That Yell'ham says:-- Life offers--to deny!'”
It is therefore almost exclusively to the obscure history of those who suffer and stumble around him, victims of the universal disillusion, men and women ”come to live but called to die,” that Mr. Hardy dedicates his poetic function. ”Lizbie Browne” appeals to us as a typical instance of his rustic pathos, his direct and poignant tenderness, and if we compare it with such poems of Wordsworth's as ”Lucy Gray” or ”Alice Fell” we see that he starts by standing much closer to the level of the subject than his great predecessor does. Wordsworth is the benevolent philosopher sitting in a post-chaise or crossing the ”wide moor” in meditation. Mr.
Hardy is the familiar neighbour, the shy mourner at the grave; his relation is a more intimate one: he is patient, humble, un-upbraiding.
Sometimes, as in the remarkable colloquy called ”The Ruined Maid,” his sympathy is so close as to offer an absolute flout in the face to the system of Victorian morality. Mr. Hardy, indeed, is not concerned with sentimental morals, but with the primitive instincts of the soul, applauding them, or at least recording them with complacency, even when they outrage ethical tradition, as they do in the lyric narrative called ”A Wife and Another.” The stanzas ”To an Unborn Pauper Child” sum up what is sinister and what is genial in Mr. Hardy's att.i.tude to the unambitious forms of life which he loves to contemplate.
His temperature is not always so low as it is in the cla.s.s of poems to which we have just referred, but his ultimate view is never more sanguine. He is pleased sometimes to act as the fiddler at a dance, surveying the hot-blooded couples, and urging them on by the lilt of his instrument, but he is always perfectly aware that they will have ”to pay high for their prancing” at the end of all. No instance of this is more remarkable than the poem called ”Julie-Jane,” a perfect example of Mr. Hardy's metrical ingenuity and skill, which begins thus:--
”Sing; how 'a would sing!
How 'a would raise the tune When we rode in the waggon from harvesting By the light o' the moon!
”Dance; how 'a would dance!
If a fiddlestring did but sound She would hold out her coats, give a slanting glance, And go round and round.
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