There have been many poets among us in the last fifty years, poets of sure talent, and it may be even of genius, but no other of them has this compulsive power. The secret is not hard to find. Not one of them is adequate to what we know and have suffered. We have in our own hearts a new touchstone of poetic5 greatness. We have learned too much to be wholly responsive to less than an adamantine honesty of soul and a complete acknowledgment of experience. 'Give us the whole,' we cry, 'give us the truth.' Unless we can catch the undertone of this acknowledgment, a poet's voice is in our ears hardly more than sounding brass6 or a tinkling7 cymbal8.
Therefore we turn—some by instinct and some by deliberate choice—to the greatest; therefore we deliberately9 set Mr Hardy among these. What they have, he has, and has in their degree—a plenary vision of life. He is the master of the fundamental theme; it enters into, echoes in, modulates10 and modifies all his particular emotions, and the individual poems of which they are the substance. Each work of his is a fragment of a whole—not a detached and arbitrarily severed11 fragment, but a unity12 which implies, calls for and in a profound sense creates a vaster and completely comprehensive whole His reaction to an episode has behind and within it a reaction to the universe. An overwhelming endorsement13 descends14 upon his words: he traces them as with a pencil, and straightway they are graven in stone.
Thus his short poems have a weight and validity which sets them apart in kind from even the very finest work of his contemporaries. These may be perfect in and for themselves; but a short poem by Mr Hardy is often perfect in a higher sense. As the lines of a diagram may be produced in imagination to contain within themselves all space, one of Mr Hardy's most characteristic poems may expand and embrace all human experience. In it we may hear the sombre, ruthless rhythm of life itself—the dominant16 theme that gives individuation to the ripple17 of fragmentary joys and sorrows. Take 'The Broken Appointment':—
'You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb18.—
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion19 which can overbear
Reluctance20 for pure lovingkindness' sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.
'You love not me,
And love alone can lend you loyalty21
—I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe22 a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me?'
On such a seeming fragment of personal experience lies the visible endorsement of the universe. The hopes not of a lover but of humanity are crushed beneath its rhythm. The ruthlessness of the event is intensified23 in the motion of the poem till one can hear the even pad of destiny, and a moment comes when to a sense made eager by the strain of intense attention it seems to have been written by the destiny it records.
What is the secret of poetic power like this? We do not look for it in technique, though the technique of this poem is masterly. But the technique of 'as the hope-hour stroked its sum' is of such a kind that we know as we read that it proceeds from a sheer compulsive force. For a moment it startles; a moment more and the echo of those very words is reverberant24 with accumulated purpose. They are pitiless as the poem; the sign of an ultimate obedience25 is upon them. Whence came the power that compelled it? Can the source be defined or indicated? We believe it can be indicated, though not defined. We can show where to look for the mystery, that in spite of our regard remains26 a mystery still. We are persuaded that almost on the instant that it was felt the original emotion of the poem was endorsed27 Perhaps it came to the poet as the pain of a particular and personal experience; but in a little or a long while—creative time is not measured by days or years—it became, for him, a part of the texture28 of the general life. It became a manifestation29 of life, almost, nay30 wholly, in the sacramental sense, a veritable epiphany. The manifold and inexhaustible quality of life was focused into a single revelation. A critic's words do not lend themselves to the necessary precision. We should need to write with exactly the same power as Mr Hardy when he wrote 'the hope-hour stroked its sum,' to make our meaning likewise inevitable31. The word 'revelation' is fertile in false suggestion; the creative act of power which we seek to elucidate32 is an act of plenary apprehension33, by which one manifestation, one form of life, one experience is seen in its rigorous relation to all other and to all possible manifestations34, forms, and experiences. It is, we believe, the act which Mr Hardy himself has tried to formulate35 in the phrase which is the title of one of his books of poems—Moments of Vision.
Only those who do not read Mr Hardy could make the mistake of supposing that on his lips such a phrase had a mystical implication. Between belief and logic36 lies a third kingdom, which the mystics and the philosophers alike are too eager to forget—the kingdom of art, no less the residence of truth than the two other realms, and to some, perhaps, more authentic37 even than they. Therefore when we expand the word 'vision' in the phrase to '?sthetic vision' we mean, not the perception of beauty, at least in the ordinary sense of that ill-used word, but the apprehension of truth, the recognition of a complete system of valid15 relations incapable38 of logical statement. Such are the acts of unique apprehension which Mr Hardy, we believe, implied by his title. In a 'moment of vision' the poet recognises in a single separate incident of life, life's essential quality. The uniqueness of the whole, the infinite multiplicity and variety of its elements, are manifested and apprehended39 in a part. Since we are here at work on the confines of intelligible40 statement, it is better, even at the cost of brutalising a poem, to choose an example from the book that bears the mysterious name. The verses that follow come from 'Near Lanivet, 1872.' We choose them as an example of Mr Hardy's method at less than its best, at a point at which the scaffolding of his process is just visible.
'There was a stunted41 hand-post just on the crest42.
Only a few feet high:
She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest,
At the crossways close thereby43.
'She leant back, being so weary, against its stem,
And laid her arms on its own,
Each open palm stretched out to each end of them,
Her sad face sideways thrown.
'Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day
Made her look as one crucified
In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way,
And hurriedly "Don't," I cried.
'I do not think she heard. Loosing thence she said,
As she stepped forth44 ready to go,
"I am rested now.—Something strange came into my head;
I wish I had not leant so!'…
'And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see
In the running of Time's far glass
Her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be
Some day.—Alas45, alas!'
Superstition46 and symbolism, some may say; but they mistakenly invert47 the order of the creative process. The poet's act of apprehension is wholly different from the lover's fear; and of this apprehension the chance-shaped crucifix is the symbol and not the cause. The concentration of life's vicissitude48 upon that white-clothed form was first recognised by a sovereign act of ?sthetic understanding or intuition; the seeming crucifix supplied a scaffolding for its expression; it afforded a clue to the method of transposition into words which might convey the truth thus apprehended; 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, 'Satires49 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, strictly50, indifferent. The other part is an esthetic51 apprehension of significance, the recognition of the all in the one. This is a specifically poetic act, or rather the supreme52 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 peculiar53 privilege of great poets. We have here, at least a principle of division between major and minor54 poetry.
Mr Hardy is a major poet; and we are impelled55 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 precisely56, 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 determined57 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 limbo58 into forgetfulness.
Mr Hardy stands high above all other modern poets by the deliberate purity of his responsiveness. The contagion59 of the world's slow stain has not touched him; from the first he held aloof60 from the general conspiracy61 to forget in which not only those who are professional optimists62 take a part. Therefore his simplest words have a vehemence63 and strangeness of their own:—
'It will have been:
Nor God nor Demon64 can undo65 the done,
Unsight the seen
Make muted music be as unbegun
Though things terrene
Groan66 in their bondage67 till oblivion supervene.'
What neither God nor Demon can do, men are incessantly68 at work to accomplish. Life itself rewards them for their assiduity, for she scatters69 her roses chiefly on the paths of those who forget her thorns. But the great poet remembers both rose and thorn; and it is beyond his power to remember them otherwise than together.
It was fitting, then, and to some senses inevitable, that Mr Hardy should have crowned his work as a poet in his old age by a series of love poems that are unique for power and passion in even the English language. This late and wonderful flowering has no tinge70 of miracle; it has sprung straight from the main stem of Mr Hardy's poetic growth. Into 'Veteris Vestigia Flammas' is distilled71 the quintessence of the power that created the Wessex Novels and 'The Dynasts'; all that Mr Hardy has to tell us of life, the whole of the truth that he has apprehended, is in these poems, and no poet since poetry began has apprehended or told us more. Sunt lacrim? rerum.
[NOVEMBER, 1919.
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1
hardy
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| adj.勇敢的，果断的，吃苦的；耐寒的 | |
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2
purged
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| 清除（政敌等）( purge的过去式和过去分词 )； 涤除（罪恶等）； 净化（心灵、风气等）； 消除（错事等）的不良影响 | |
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3
submission
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| n.服从，投降；温顺，谦虚；提出 | |
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4
poignancy
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| n.辛酸事，尖锐 | |
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5
poetic
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| adj.富有诗意的，有诗人气质的，善于抒情的 | |
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6
brass
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| n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器 | |
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7
tinkling
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| n.丁当作响声 | |
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8
cymbal
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| n.铙钹 | |
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9
deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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10
modulates
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| 调整( modulate的第三人称单数 )； （对波幅、频率的）调制； 转调； 调整或改变（嗓音）的音调 | |
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11
severed
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| v.切断，断绝( sever的过去式和过去分词 )；断，裂 | |
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12
unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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13
endorsement
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| n.背书；赞成，认可，担保；签(注)，批注 | |
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14
descends
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| v.下来( descend的第三人称单数 )；下去；下降；下斜 | |
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15
valid
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| adj.有确实根据的；有效的；正当的，合法的 | |
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16
dominant
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| adj.支配的，统治的；占优势的；显性的；n.主因，要素，主要的人(或物)；显性基因 | |
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17
ripple
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| n.涟波，涟漪，波纹，粗钢梳；vt.使...起涟漪，使起波纹； vi.呈波浪状，起伏前进 | |
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18
numb
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| adj.麻木的，失去感觉的；v.使麻木 | |
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19
compassion
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| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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20
reluctance
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| n.厌恶，讨厌，勉强，不情愿 | |
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21
loyalty
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| n.忠诚，忠心 | |
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22
soothe
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| v.安慰；使平静；使减轻；缓和；奉承 | |
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23
intensified
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| v.（使）增强， （使）加剧( intensify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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24
reverberant
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| a.起回声的 | |
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25
obedience
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| n.服从，顺从 | |
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26
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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27
endorsed
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| vt.& vi.endorse的过去式或过去分词形式v.赞同( endorse的过去式和过去分词 )；在（尤指支票的）背面签字；在（文件的）背面写评论；在广告上说本人使用并赞同某产品 | |
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28
texture
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| n.(织物)质地；(材料)构造；结构；肌理 | |
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29
manifestation
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| n.表现形式；表明；现象 | |
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30
nay
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| adv.不；n.反对票，投反对票者 | |
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31
inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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32
elucidate
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| v.阐明，说明 | |
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33
apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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34
manifestations
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| n.表示，显示（manifestation的复数形式） | |
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35
formulate
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| v.用公式表示；规划；设计；系统地阐述 | |
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36
logic
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| n.逻辑(学)；逻辑性 | |
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37
authentic
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| a.真的，真正的；可靠的，可信的，有根据的 | |
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38
incapable
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| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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39
apprehended
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| 逮捕，拘押( apprehend的过去式和过去分词 )； 理解 | |
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40
intelligible
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| adj.可理解的，明白易懂的，清楚的 | |
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41
stunted
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| adj.矮小的；发育迟缓的 | |
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42
crest
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| n.顶点；饰章；羽冠；vt.达到顶点；vi.形成浪尖 | |
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43
thereby
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| adv.因此，从而 | |
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44
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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45
alas
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| int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
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46
superstition
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| n.迷信，迷信行为 | |
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47
invert
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| vt.使反转，使颠倒，使转化 | |
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48
vicissitude
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| n.变化，变迁，荣枯，盛衰 | |
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49
satires
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| 讽刺，讥讽( satire的名词复数 )； 讽刺作品 | |
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50
strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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51
esthetic
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| adj.美学的，审美的；悦目的，雅致的 | |
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52
supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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53
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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54
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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55
impelled
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| v.推动、推进或敦促某人做某事( impel的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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56
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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57
determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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58
limbo
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| n.地狱的边缘；监狱 | |
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59
contagion
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| n.(通过接触的疾病)传染；蔓延 | |
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60
aloof
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| adj.远离的；冷淡的，漠不关心的 | |
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61
conspiracy
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| n.阴谋，密谋，共谋 | |
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62
optimists
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| n.乐观主义者( optimist的名词复数 ) | |
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63
vehemence
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| n.热切；激烈；愤怒 | |
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64
demon
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| n.魔鬼，恶魔 | |
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65
undo
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| vt.解开，松开；取消，撤销 | |
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66
groan
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| vi./n.呻吟，抱怨；(发出)呻吟般的声音 | |
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67
bondage
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| n.奴役，束缚 | |
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68
incessantly
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| ad.不停地 | |
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69
scatters
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| v.（使）散开， （使）分散，驱散( scatter的第三人称单数 )；撒 | |
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70
tinge
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| vt.(较淡)着色于，染色；使带有…气息；n.淡淡色彩，些微的气息 | |
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71
distilled
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| adj.由蒸馏得来的v.蒸馏( distil的过去式和过去分词 )；从…提取精华 | |
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