Yet no one reading the sonnets of these years can fail to mark the impress of an individual personality. The effect is, at times, curious and impressive in the extreme. We almost feel that Mr Hardy is bringing some physical compulsion to bear on Shakespeare and forcing him to say something that he does not want to say. Of course, it is merely a curious tweak of the fancy; but there comes to us in such lines as the following an insistent vision of two youths of an age the one masterful, the other indulgent, and carrying out his companion's firm suggestion:--
'Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame That Sportsman Time rears but his brood to kill, Knowing me in my soul the very same-- One who would die to spare you touch of ill!-- Will you not grant to old affection's claim The hand of friendship down Life's sunless hill?'
But, fancies aside, the effect of these early poems is twofold. Their attitude is definite:--
'Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain And dicing time for gladness calls a moan ... These purblind Doomsters had as readily thrown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.'
and the technique has the mark of mastery, a complete economy of statement which produces the conviction that the words are saying only what poet ordained they should say, neither less nor more.
The early years were followed by the long period of the novels, in which, we are prepared to admit, poetry was actually if not in intention incidental. It is the grim truth that poetry cannot be written in between times; and, though we have hardly any dates on which to rely, we are willing to believe that few of Mr Hardy's characteristic poems were written between the appearance of _Desperate Remedies_ and his farewell to the activity of novel-writing with _The Well-Beloved_ (1897). But the few dates which we have tell us that 'Thoughts of Phena,' the beautiful poem beginning:--
'Not a line of her writing have I, Not a thread of her hair....'
which reaches forward to the love poems of 1912-13, was written in 1890.
Whether the development of Mr Hardy's poetry was concealed or visible during the period of the novels, development there was into a maturity so overwhelming that by its touchstone the poetical work of his famous contemporaries appears singularly jejune and false. But, though by the accident of social conditions--for that Mr Hardy waited till 1898 to publish his first volume of poems is more a social than an artistic fact--it is impossible to follow out the phases of his poetical progress in the detail we would desire, it is impossible not to recognise that the mature poet, Mr Hardy, is of the same poetical substance as the young poet of the 'sixties. The attitude is unchanged; the modifications of the theme of 'crass casualty' leave its central asseveration unchanged. There are restatements, enlargements of perspective, a slow and forceful expansion of the personal into the universal, but the truth once recognised is never suffered for a moment to be hidden or mollified. Only a superficial logic would point, for instance, to his