interprets Bacon's saying that in poetry we have "the shows of things submitted to the desires of the mind"-in that sense and not in the careless sense that some people would give it that poetry deals in comfortable things: for comfortable things would not be the desire of the mind but of the senses. And on the basis of this theory Mr. Abercrombie even ventures to restore that venerable and Platonic phrase, “absolute beauty." Perhaps as a speculative possibility rather than as, for us, a fact. But, he tells us, the word beauty, in its strict sense, is simply the name for the state of mind of one who judges that expression has been successful; beauty is a judgment just as truth is. And, if a possible god could see the universe at once on the æsthetic level, could envisage it all as pure experience, see it in every part interdependent, with all that is to us contingent and chaotic seen to fit in, to belong, to be necessary to the functioning of the whole, that experience of that being would be an experience of absolute beauty. But for us, art alone can give the experience of beauty, because art is the only realm in which man can fully realize that state of unity to which, in all other planes of living, he can only strive, and that at a distance, to approximate. LLEWELLYN JONES. THE PHILOSOPHY IN THOMAS HARDY'S POETRY BY ROBERT M. SMITH LOVERS of the Wessex novels are legion. Every year increases their number; every birthday of the greatest living master of English fiction brings heartfelt tributes to Max Gate; and in the course of the years to come, nothing seems more certain than that the novels of Thomas Hardy like their neighbors, the monoliths of Stonehenge, will stand as enduring records of humanity in its elemental and universal strivings. Admirers of Hardy's poetry, however, even readers familiar with it, are few. Not many of that legion who read and reread the novels have followed the author farther than 1898, when he definitely abandoned fiction for poetry. Since that date Thomas Hardy has been for them, as for readers at large, the last of the Victorians, whose fire has gone out, a querulous old man who could write great fiction if he would, but who still perversely issues volumes of poetry, the flickering embers of a dying genius. Now and then one of the younger poets or critics takes a hurried excursion into Hardy's poetry, but quickly retreats, repelled by the mortuary atmosphere, or by the cramped and freakish versification, or perhaps by the many misgivings, the many wistful recollections, and the many regrets of the He and She who mourn and sigh through the volumes. The poems of Hardy, it is true, may never win the hearty approval of even that ever increasing group of thoughtful readers. Lyrics, narrative poems, ballads, reveries-all sound a dominant minor key. Their atmosphere is persistently heavy with gloom. Here are no "aching joys and dizzy raptures", no ecstasies over the beauty of the natural world, no rush of warm and happy love, no greetings of comradeship and good cheer, no enchanting music to beguile a weary hour. Here on the contrary are a series of "life's little ironies", of "satires of circumstance" in the toils of which the fairest hopes of patient humanity are strangled. The poems offer no such rounded pictures of village life as are found in the novels; there are no sombre landscapes of Egdon Heath awakening at sundown, no rich and eldritch comedy of Wessex peasants arguing religion over their beer mugs, no superb dramatic pictures of Gabriel Oak on the hayrick in the thunder storm, no fateful scenes of Tess and Angel Clare groping for shelter amid the monoliths of Stonehenge while the night winds hum about their heads. For want of such riches, for lack of sunlit gleams among the shadows, Hardy lovers have often doubtless shut his volumes of poetry with a sense of disappointment, tired out with his doleful dreeing of the weird. One need not reprehend nor chide those who have had this experience with Hardy's poetry, but for those of more speculative mind there are rich compensations, because to any one who would understand the philosophy of Thomas Hardy in its maturity, the poetry is indispensable. I refer especially to those poems, rightly termed reveries, which conform to the definition of poetry that Hardy accepts with Matthew Arnold-"the powerful application of ideas to life". In these poems, setting aside for the nonce his time's laughing stocks, Hardy puts forth sometimes to himself or sometimes to the Almighty various philosophical queries, and then propounds tentative answers to these riddles of man's destiny. Although these poems are, it is true, few in number, rarely more than four or five in a single volume, they afford when gathered together an inner history of the poet's mind as it has journeyed down the years, searching through the reaches of time and space for an answer to the eternal question, "Why?" To Wessex Poems and Poems of the Past and of the Present have now been added Time's Laughing Stocks, Satires of Circumstance, Moments of Vision, and the recent Late Lyrics and Earlier. In addition there is the colossal poetic drama of the Napoleonic wars, The Dynasts, which Mr. Wells in his Outline of History justly terms "one of the great stars of English Literature, too little known as yet to the general public". Hardy's persistent inquiries and sombre answers concerning the ways of destiny are not as some have said the pervasive melancholy of a recluse that clings to Wessex and shrinks from contact with the hurly-burly world; nor is Wessex itself, as others have said, with its sinister Egdon Heath, its Druidical monuments and Roman ruins, responsible for the poet's sense of the futility of existence. Even less can we find anything in the events of Hardy's life that would warrant such an outlook. Unlike the careers of his heroes and heroines, his life as a whole has fallen in pleasant paths, and received its rich rewards. Nor however much the conclusions of his philosophy may seem to be derived from the same Zeitgeist that produced a Schopenhauer, the differences between the two men, apart from their mutual conception of an Immanent Will, are so marked as to refute the contention sometimes made that Hardy is merely an offspring of the German cynic. The Immanent Will is rarely conceived by the poet as deliberately malignant, but supremely blind and therefore indifferent; and his feeling for humanity is never tinged with the egotism, misanthropy, and rancor of Schopenhauer; but on the contrary is replete with sorrow, sympathy, and admiration for its brave but helpless struggles. The roots of Hardy's philosophy lie deeper than any of these explanations; they are inextricably a part of his natural endowment-an artistic sensitiveness and an acute vision; a probing intelligence and an imaginative sympathy that knows no bounds. With such endowments Hardy is destined to behold pain and suffering wherever he turns. If he takes a walk in the fields, he does not like Wordsworth see or The young lambs bound As to the tabor's sound, Land and sea Give themselves up to jollity. On the contrary the dumb creatures of nature appear to him like chastened children crying, We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here! If he goes forth to observe the life of his fellow men, he returns sorely depressed by what "man has made of man". Every wind seems to bear to his listening ears the groan of all creation; and destined to perceive these things, his questioning spirit is equally destined to seek some explanation. His efforts to answer the age-old problem of "the presence of evil and the incongruity of penalizing the irresponsible" assume two phases around which these poems of philosophical reverie may be conveniently grouped. The first group embraces all those poems that question the orthodox theism of Hardy's early years; and when this phase has finally been discarded the second group puts forward various tentative solutions which are finally gathered together and woven into the great philosophic web of The Dynasts. I From such poems as "The Impercipient" and "God's Funeral" we may judge that the loss of the Christian faith was attended with a spiritual struggle. Hardy was brought up with the expectation of entering the ministry, and even now expresses a lingering admiration for the Established Church. At just what time Christianity became for him a meaningless fable we shall, perhaps, never know, but these lines from "God's Funeral" breathe the story: How sweet it was in years far hied To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer, To lie down liegely at the eventide And feel a blest assurance He was there! In the poem "A Sign Seeker", as well as from his conversation with William Archer, we perceive with what passion he sought to escape the conclusions of scientific materialism, and to discover some certitude for the existence of a genuine supernatural. He has lain in dead men's beds, have walked The tombs of those with whom I'd talked, If perchance the wise and powerful God of Love exist, in spite of all searchings, why does He allow this vale of misery? And receiving no reply, Hardy calls upon Him to inquire. These persistent queries and answers are originally conceived, subtly phrased, and powerfully suggestive; they differ markedly from the familiar verdicts of preceding thinkers. Hardy cannot |