Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences. Ed by Harold Orel. Repr of the 1966 Ed

Thomas Hardy, born in 1840, died in 1928, does not fit comfortably into the categories of English literature. For a start, he was (most unusually) both novelist and poet, both experimentalist and traditionalist, in form as much as in content. He was a poet from his youth, a novelist in middle age, and a poet again until his death.

The ideas about poetry which he articulated in diaries, notes and prefaces were simple and direct – ‘poetry is emotion put into measure’; or, ‘the mission of poetry is to record impressions, not convictions’. Some critics and readers of his own day commented adversely on his technique, not understanding what he was trying to do, and on his ideas, wrongly considering him a pessimist.

He tried to explain the technique: ‘As to rhythm’. Years earlier he had decided that too regular a beat was bad art…He knew that in architecture cunning irregularity is of enormous worth, and it is obvious that he carried this into his verse, perhaps in part unconsciously, the Gothic art-principle in which he had been trained – the principle of spontaneity, found in mouldings, tracery and such-like – resulting in the ‘unforeseen’ character of his metres and stanzas, that of stress rather than of syllable…’ (Life of Thomas Hardy). And he defended himself against the charge of pessimism: ‘that these impressions have been condemned as “pessimistic” – as if that were a very wicked adjective – shows a curious muddle-mindedness. It must be obvious that there is a higher characteristic of philosophy than pessimism, or than meliorism – which is truth…’ (General Preface, 1912).

Yet it remains the case that the dominant note of Hardy’s poetry is an acute sense of loss – loss of faith, loss of love. For Hardy, time and human insensitivity combine to destroy the person and his personality: if, as Larkin says, the essential instinct of art is to ‘preserve’, then this is certainly true of Hardy. The poem itself is an act of defiant preservation, asserting the value of the human spirit in spite of all that time and its agents can do:

Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the raindrop ploughs.

The ‘names’ represent individuals – feelings, people – while the impersonal rain-drop, agent of what Housman calls ‘heartless, witless nature’, embodies all that opposes the precious, albeit transient, in human life.

It was only after Hardy’s death that the literary world began to realise what it had lost. W.H. Auden commented favourably on Hardy’s ‘hawk’s vision, his way of looking at life from a very great height’; Ezra Pound said that nobody had taught him anything about writing after Thomas Hardy died; and Philip Larkin declared that Hardy’s Collected Poems were ‘many times over the best body of poetic work this century has so far to show’.

Adverse critical comment has resulted from a common modernist misconception of what makes great poetry – John Crowe Ransom, for example, in claiming that Hardy was ‘a great minor poet…and a poor major poet’ clumsily mistakes the personal, idiosyncratic, small-scale voice of Hardy for ‘minor’ work, failing to realise that greatness has to do with expression, feeling and insight, not ‘big’ ideas, clever literary allusions and selfconscious importance.

When the work of T.S. Eliot (and Ezra Pound) has dulled into datedness, Hardy’s will survive, and be loved. Perhaps we should leave the last word to F.R. Leavis, not normally known as an admirer of Hardy: ‘the singleminded integrity of his preoccupation with a real world and a real past, the intentness of his focus upon particular facts and situations, gives this poetry the solidest kind of emotional substance. There is no emotionality. The emotion seems to inhere in the reality recognized and grasped.’

Notes by Perry Keenlyside