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

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 mystic form the foremost bore
the development of the conception of God through human history is presented with skill in concision. He was man-like at first, then an amorphous cloud, then endowed with mighty wings, then jealous, fierce, yet long-suffering and full of mercy.
And, tricked by our own early dream?And need of solace, we grew self-deceived,?Our making soon our maker did we dream,?And what we had imagined we believed.
Till, in Time's stayless stealthy swing,?Uncompromising rude reality?Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning,?Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to