The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century | Page 7

wished to produce
something classic in form and Christian in spirit. He found an
admirable solution of his problem in a double invocation--first of the
Heavenly Muse of Mount Sinai, second, of the Holy Spirit. In the
composition of In Memoriam, Tennyson knew that an invocation of the
Muse would give an intolerable air of artificiality to the poem; he
therefore, in the introductory stanzas, offered up a prayer to the Son of
God. Now it was impossible for Mr. Hardy to make use of Greek
Deities, or of Jehovah, or of any revelation of God in Christ; to his
mind all three equally belonged to the lumber-room of discredited and
discarded myth. He believes that any conception of the Primal Force as
a Personality is not only obsolete among thinking men and women, but
that it is unworthy of modern thought. It is perhaps easy to mistake our
own world of thought for the thought of the world.
In his Preface, written with assurance and dignity, Mr. Hardy says:
"The wide prevalence of the Monistic theory of the Universe forbade,
in this twentieth century, the importation of Divine personages from
any antique Mythology as ready-made sources or channels of Causation,
even in verse, and excluded the celestial machinery of, say, Paradise
Lost_, as peremptorily as that of the _Iliad or
the Eddas. And the
abandonment of the Masculine pronoun in allusions to the First or
Fundamental Energy seemed a necessary and logical consequence of
the long abandonment by thinkers of the anthropomorphic conception
of the same." Accordingly he arranged a group of Phantom
Intelligences that supply adequately a Chorus and a philosophical basis
for his world-drama.

Like Browning in the original preface to Paracelsus, our author
expressly disclaims any intention of writing a play for the stage. It is
"intended simply for mental performance," and "Whether mental
performance alone may not eventually be the fate of all drama other
than that of contemporary or frivolous life, is a kindred question not
without interest." The question has been since answered in another way
than that implied, not merely by the success of community drama, but
by the actual production of The Dynasts on the London stage under the
direction of the brilliant and audacious Granville Barker. I would give
much to have witnessed this experiment, which Mr. Barker insists was
successful.
"Whether The Dynasts will finally take a place among the
world's
masterpieces of literature or not, must of course be left to future
generations to decide. Two things are clear. The publication of the
second and third parts distinctly raised public opinion of the work as a
whole, and now that it is ten years old, we know that no man on earth
except Mr. Hardy could have written it." To produce this particular epic
required a poet, a prose master, a dramatist, a philosopher, and an
architect. Mr. Hardy is each and all of the five, and by no means least
an architect. The plan of the whole thing, in one hundred and thirty
scenes, which seemed at first confused, now appears in retrospect
orderly; and the projection of the various geographical scenes is
thoroughly architectonic.
If the work fails to survive, it will be because of its low elevation on the
purely literary side. In spite of occasional powerful phrases, as
What corpse is curious on the longitude
And situation of his
cemetery!
the verse as a whole wants beauty of tone and felicity of diction. It is
more like a map than a painting. One has only to recall the
extraordinary charm of the Elizabethans to understand why so many
pages in The Dynasts arouse only an intellectual interest. But no one
can read the whole drama without an immense respect for the range and
the grasp of the author's mind. Furthermore, every one of its former

admirers ought to reread it in 1918. The present world-war gives to this
Napoleonic epic an acute and prophetic interest nothing short of
astounding.
A considerable number of Mr. Hardy's poems are concerned with the
idea of God, apparently never far from the author's mind. I suppose he
thinks of God every day. Yet his faith is the opposite of that expressed
in the Hound of Heaven--in few words, it seems to be, "Resist the Lord,
and He will flee from you." Mr. Hardy is not content with banishing
God from the realm of modern thought; he is not content merely with
killing Him; he means to give Him a decent burial, with fitting
obsequies. And there is a long procession of mourners, some of whom
are both worthy and distinguished. In the interesting poem, God's
Funeral, written in 1908-1910, which begins
I saw a slowly stepping train--
Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and
bent and hoar--
Following in files across a twilit plain
A strange
and