The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century | Page 9

highest peaks of
poetry, any more than it served Caponsacchi in his spiritual crisis. He
thinks interesting thoughts, because he has an original mind. It is
possible to be a great poet without possessing much intellectual wealth;
just as it is possible to be a great singer, and yet be both shallow and
dull. The divine gift of poetry seems sometimes as accidental as the
formation of the throat. I do not believe that Tennyson was either
shallow or dull; but I do not think he had so rich a mind as Thomas
Hardy's, a mind so quaint, so humorous, so sharp. Yet Tennyson was
incomparably a greater poet.
The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and reread
the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention--I find even the drawings
in Wessex Poems so fascinating that I wish he had illustrated all his
books--I am always conscious of the time and the place. I never get the
unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough a command of his
thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar away with him.
Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession. Mr. Hardy is too
keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the fact that he has written
verse all his life, he seldom writes unwrinkled song. He is, in the last
analysis, a master of prose who has learned the technique of verse, and
who now chooses to express his thoughts and his observations in rime
and rhythm.
The title of Mr. Hardy's latest volume of poems, _Moments of Vision_,
leads one to expect rifts in the clouds--and one is not disappointed. It is
perhaps characteristic of the independence of our author, that steadily
preaching pessimism when the world was peaceful, he should now not
be perhaps quite so sure of his creed when a larger proportion of the
world's inhabitants are in pain than ever before. One of the fallacies of
pessimism consists in the fact that its advocates often call a witness to
the stand whose testimony counts against them. Nobody really loves
life, loves this world, like your pessimist; nobody is more reluctant to

leave it. He therefore, to support his argument that life is evil, calls up
evidence which proves that it is brief and transitory. But if life is evil,
one of its few redeeming features should be its brevity; the pessimist
should look forward to death as a man in prison looks toward the day of
his release. Yet this attitude toward death is almost never taken by the
atheists or the pessimists, while it is the burden of many of the
triumphant hymns of the Christian Church. Now, as our spokesman for
pessimism approaches the end--which I fervently hope may be afar
off--life seems sweet.
"FOR LIFE I HAD NEVER CARED GREATLY"
For Life I had never eared greatly,
As worth a man's while;
Peradventures unsought,
Peradventures that finished in nought,
Had kept me from youth and through manhood till
lately
Unwon by its style.

In earliest years--why I know not--
I viewed it askance;
Conditions of doubt,
Conditions that slowly leaked out,
May haply have bent me to stand and to show not
Much zest for its dance.

With symphonies soft and sweet colour
It courted me then,
Till evasions seemed wrong,