THOMAS HARDrS "POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT." *

Tars collection does not, of course, mark Mr. Hardy's first appearance in the ranks of the poets. In 1898 he put out a volume entitled Wessex Poems, and other Verses, of much the same size and character as that before us. It differed, however, from the present book in that it contained thirty illustrations by the author and also a preface, which stated that some of the pieces included had previously been turned into prose and printed as such. Both had their significance. The illus- • Poems of the Past and the Present. By Thomas Hardy. London : Harper and Brothers. fee.]

trations showed force, character, and individuality; but they were obviously not the work of an artist working in his proper medium. Mr. Hardy's poems display, if not so con- spicuously, the same defect. Poetry is not his proper medium.

He is not at home, he does not move easily, in it. Mr. Hardy undoubtedly has genius ; he is a master of fiction. And poetry is a kind of fiction. Dante, indeed, defined it as being fiction, but "fiction set to music," the music, that is, of language. Mr. Hardy is a master of fiction, but not a master of music.

Not that he has no music, for he has at times a haunting rhythm and a wild, eerie, melancholy timbre and ring all of his own. But either he is not certain of his effects, or else he deliberately chooses to be harsh and rough, uncouth and uncanny, and thinks that his style suits his theme. "Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me P " he would very likely say, ironically, with Walt Whitman. The reader certainly gets neither dulcet rhymes nor dulcet themes from Mr. Hardy. For in his poetry as in his prose ; nay, in his poetry even more than in his prose, Mr. Hardy seems to prefer the unpleasant to the pleasant, the ugly to the fair. He is very much of what is called a realist. That is to say, he prefers

the seamy to the smooth side of life, and appears to think that it is necessarily the more real, or, at any rate, the more important. Life, he holds, is a poor business at best. The one consolation is that it will not last, things will be all the same a hundred years hence, for we, at any rate, shall be dead, buried, and done for. He has many fine and original ideas and much sombre strength. But he has a morbid taste for the ghastly and the gruesome. This appeared in the illustrations as well as in the poems themselves in his first volume. He is specially attracted by the charnel-house. He cannot picture a wedding in a village church without laying bare the crypt and the graveyard and imagining the bride a corpse and the bride- groom a skeleton. Tennyson knew this mood. His wild song in the "Vision of Sin," while much more artistic, leaves Mr.

Hardy far behind in his own vein. He, too, could "bob and nob with brother Death" :—

"Death is king and Vivat Rex! Tread a measure on the atones. Madam—if I know your sex

From the fashion of your bones."

So he sings. But this is not Tennyson's prevailing note. It was perhaps frequent with him in his youth. But he soon outgrew it, just as Scott outgrew the German horrors of Burger's "Lenore." Shakespeare, too, of course, knew the mood, as he knew every mood, and has rendered it with surpassing force in the well-known grave-digger's scene in Hamlet ; but with him it is one of a thousand moods, and to dwell on it overmuch he makes a sign of madness. Poor Lamb, like so many of earth's wittiest and

most humorous spirits, a "man of humorous-melancholy mark," had much to make him melancholy. But his writing is full of healthy sanity. In one of his most characteristic pieces, his lines on a young girl lately taken from the living, the sprightly Quakeress "Hester," he says :—

"A month or more bath she been dead,

Yet can I not by force be led To think upon the wormy bed And her together."

Mr. Hardy needs no forcing, he is always thinking of the "wormy bed." He cannot describe a charming maid or happy wife without the "wormy bed" rising in his mind.

But indeed, apart from this, he describes too seldom either charming maid or happy wife. "God-Forgotten," "The Bedridden Peasant," "To an Unknowing God," "The Ruined Maid," " Tess's Lament," "The Tree" (or an old man's story of how his love revealed to him that she had agreed with a previous lover that she would many him if be murdered his wife, but unfortunately "he wived the gibbet-tree"), "The Church-Builder," who lavishes his all on building a church, and then becomes bankrupt and hangs himself on the rood,— these are typical names and themes of his vein. It must be admitted that the war seems to have stirred him to a nobler spirit, to a kind of grim resolve, if not to any enthusiasm. One of the best and most powerful pieces is that called the "Souls of the Slain," where he imagines himself standing on Portland Bill and seeing the ghosts of those who had died in South Africa flit honie to England to find their reward or disap- pointment, not in their own fame or shame, but in the love or coldness of their nearest and dearest.

The death of the great and good Queen, again, moves him to something like a generous Hush of loyalty, though strangely expressed. What are we to say of lines like these :—

" Let one be born and throned whose mould shall constitute The norm of every royal-reckoned attribute"?

Are they graceful poetry or odd prose? The pieces called "A Man" and "At the Pyramid of Cestius " are also really fine in idea. But the one thing that really seems to lift Mr. Hardy out of himself and inspire him is the sight of the starry heavens. One of the most touching pieces in this book is that on the "Comet at Yalbury, or Yellham," one of the finest that on a "Lunar Eclipse" :— "Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea,

Now steals along upon the Moon's meek shine In even monochrome and curving line Of imperturbable serenity.

How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry With the torn, troubled form I know as thine.

That profile, placid as a brow divine With continents of moil and misery ?

And can immense Mortality but throw

So small a shade, and Heaven's high human scheme Be hemmed within the coasts your an; implit ?

Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show, Nation at war with nation, Brains that tPem, Heroes, and women fairer than the skies ? "

That is fine; a fine thought and forcibly expressed. And yet it is barely poetry. The fact is, as we said at the beginning, Mr. Hardy is barely a poet. His verse has many of the quali-

ties of poetry, such as are often found in what Dryden called "the other harmony of I prose." He has a wonderful, almost

too great, command of vocabulary. His diction bristles with rare words, but, if far-fetched and bizarre, they will always be found to be the words of a scholar, and of good pedigree. He occasionally strikes out a really poetic phrase of his own, such as the " mothy curfew tide." He can describe in verse as in prose the Wessex scenery, the misty water-meadows in lush Dorsetshire vales, the crisp turf on the bare Wiltshire downs; but he doss it best as a prose poet. And there is less of real poetry in this volume than in the last. There is no tale so moving as the "Dance at the Phoenix," no country song so good as "Friends Beyond," with its true rustic echo.

And even when Mr. Hardy is good he is liable to be coarse, and in one piece in this collection permits himself a

Swiftian turn such as was pardonable, or at least not surprising, in Swift two centuries ago, but which we do not expect, and which ought not to be sprung upon us in a book by an English writer of repute in the

twentieth century. At the end of the volume are some "Imitations," as Mr. Hardy calls them, of Sappho and Catullus, Schiller and Heine, and Victor Hugo. They are not very close, but are interesting as exhibiting Mr. Hardy as an accomplished scholar, and that not only in English.