Old and New Masters Part 22

There was inquiry in its wistful eye.

And once it tried to sing; Of him or her who placed it there, and why, No one knew anything.

True, a woman was found drowned the day ensuing, And some at times averred The grave to be her false one's, who when wooing Gave her the bird.

Apart even from the ludicrous a.s.sociations which modern slang has given the last phrase, making it look like a queer pun, this poem seems to one to drive sorrow over the edge of the ridiculous. That goldfinch has surely escaped from a Max-Beerbohm parody. The ingenuity with which Mr.

Hardy plots tragic situations for his characters in some of his other poems is, indeed, in repeated danger of misleading him into parody. One of his poems tells, for instance, how a stranger finds an old man scrubbing a Statue of Liberty in a city square, and, hearing he does it for love, hails him as "Liberty's knight divine." The old man confesses that he does not care twopence for Liberty, and declares that he keeps the statue clean in memory of his beautiful daughter, who had sat as a model for it--a girl fair in fame as in form. In the interests of his plot and his dismal philosophy, Mr. Hardy identifies the stranger with the sculptor of the statue, and dismisses us with his blighting aside on the old man's credulous love of his dead daughter:

Answer I gave not. Of that form The carver was I at his side; His child my model, held so saintly, Grand in feature.

Gross in nature, In the dens of vice had died.

This is worse than optimism.

It is only fair to say that, though poem after poem--including the one about the fat young man whom the doctors gave only six months to live unless he walked a great deal, and who therefore was compelled to refuse a drive in the poet's phaeton, though night was closing over the heath--dramatizes the meaningless miseries of life, there is also to be found in some of the poems a faint sunset-glow of hope, almost of faith.

There have been compensations, we realize in _I Travel as a Phantom Now_, even in this world of skeletons. Mr. Hardy's fatalism concerning G.o.d seems not very far from faith in G.o.d in that beautiful Christmas poem, _The Oxen_. Still, the ultimate mood of the poems is not faith. It is one of pity, so despairing as to be almost nihilism. There is mockery in it without the merriment of mockery. The general atmosphere of the poems, it seems to me, is to be found perfectly expressed in the last three lines of one of the poems, which is about a churchyard, a dead woman, a living rival, and the ghost of a soldier:

There was a cry by the white-flowered mound, There was a laugh from underground, There was a deeper gloom around.

How much of the art of Thomas Hardy is suggested in those lines! The laugh from underground, the deeper gloom--are they not all but omnipresent throughout his later and greatest work? The war could not deepen such pessimism. As a matter of fact, Mr. Hardy's war poetry is more cheerful, because more heroic, than his poetry about the normal world. Destiny was already crueller than any war-lord. The Prussian, to such an imagination, could be no more than a fly--a poisonous fly--on the wheel of destiny's disastrous car.