1893

1910

1919

Portraits of Hardy by William Strang

HARDY'S POETRY, 1860-1928 Second Edition

Dennis Taylor

palgrave macmillan

© Denni s Taylor , 1981 , 198 9

All right s reserved . N o reproduction , cop y o r transmissio n of this publicatio n ma y b e mad e withou t writte n permission .

No paragrap h o f this publicatio n ma y b e reproduced , copie d or transmitte d sav e wit h writte n permissio n o r i n accordanc e with th e provision s o f the Copyrigh t Ac t 195 6 (a s amended) .

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First Editio n 198 1 Second Editio n 198 9

Published b y T H E MACMILLA N PRES S LT D Houndmills, Basingstoke , Hampshir e RG2 1 2X S and Londo n Companies an d representative s throughout th e worl d

British Librar y Cataloguin g i n Publicatio n Dat a Taylor, Dennis , 1940-Hardy's poetry , 1860-1928.—2n d ed . 1. Poetr y i n English . Hardy , Thomas , 1840 -1928 - Critica l studie s I. Titl e 821' .8

ISBN 978-0-333-45901-0 ISB N 978-1-349-20253-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20253-9

To Mary

Contents

Frontispiece

List ofPlates

Acknowledgements

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction

1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF HARDY'S MEDITATIVE

Vlll

IX

xi

xxvii

LYRIC 1 A Mature Meditative Model 1 The Romantic Meditative Tradition 5 Nineteenth-Century Poems 8 Poems of1904-11 16 'Poems of1912-13' 22 Moments of Vision, 1917 30

2 THE PATTERNS IN HARDY'S POETRY 39 Hardy and the Gothic Revival 48 From Architect to Poet 52 The Intellectual and Literary Traditions 59 The Pattern Gestalt: Gothic Lights 65 Hardy and Art 67 The Development ofHardy's Patterns: The Novels 82 The Development of Hardy's Patterns: The Dynasts and the Poems 85

3 HARDY'S APOCALYPSE 88 Ballad Memory, 1866-1912 93 Visionary Memory, 1913-27 97 Hardy and the Grotesque 102 The Visionary Grotesque 108 ~ar 115

Epilogue: INDIAN SUMMER: HARDY'S PASTORAL POETRY 139

Notes 156

Bibliography 189

Index 193

vii

List of Plates

Frontispiece: portraits of Hardy by William Strang 1 Hardy's graveyard drawing for 'Her Death and After' 2 Hardy's drawing for 'Her Dilemma' 3 'The Abbey Mason' and the Gloucester transept 4 Hardy's family pedigree in his handwriting 5 Darwin's diagram of the Pedigree of Species 6 Gerome: 'Golgotha: "It is Finished"' 7 Hobbema's 'The Avenue' and Hardy's drawing for 'Her Death and

After' 8 Baldini's 'Morning Stroll' and Hardy's drawing for 'The Burghers' 9 Strang's 1910 Order of Merit portrait of Hardy

10 Strang's 'The End' 11 Hardy's drawings for 'Leipzig' and 'San Sebastian' 12 Cathedral Fa~ade at Salisbury 13 Hardy's drawing, following 'In a Eweleaze Near Weatherbury' 14 Pugin's Contrasts: 'The Catholic Town in 1440 ... The Same Town

in 1840' 15 'The Four Horsemen' from Diirer's Apocalypse 16 'The Beautiful Rosine' from Wiertz Museum 17 Strang's 'Grotesque' 18 Strang's 'Danse Macabre' 19 William Blake's 'Pity' 20 Strang's 'War'

viii

Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material:

Faber and Faber Ltd. and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., for an extract from 'Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket' from Poems 1938-1949 (in the U.S., Lord Weary's Castle), by Robert Lowell.

Faber and Faber Ltd. and Random House Inc. for an extract from 'On This Island' from Collected Shorter Poems (in the U.S., Collected Poems) by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson.

Houghton MifHin Company for an extract from 'Ars Poetica' in New and Collected Poems 1917-1976, by Archibald MacLeish.

The Trustees of the Thomas Hardy Memorial Collection in the Dorset County Museum for the extracts from the reels of The Original Manu-scripts and Papers of Thomas Hardy.

Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

ix

Preface to the Second Edition

Hardy's poetry has a way of deepening and expanding, the more it is studied. The purpose of this new introduction is to summarise some of the claims made in this book, and within the summary to make note of new discoveries and additional material. Some of this material is in the five additional volumes of Hardy's Collected Letters, edited by Richard Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978-87) and in Lennart Bjork's completed two-volume edition of the Literary Notebooks (New York University Press, 1985).

Hardy's central lyric, in which the lyric recapitulates the life, still seems to me an unparalleled achievement. In Taine's History ofEnglish Literature, from which Hardy quoted (see Bjork's account, I, 308, 348), Taine wrote: 'our powerful sensations deserve to be exhibited, because they recapitu-late our whole existence' (IV, 1, v). Hardy achieves a wonderful parallel of a moment's sensation and a lifetime's experience. Interruption is a richly suggestive theme in Hardy, as the smaller interruption of a momentary reverie, often by the scene outside, portends the larger interruption of an entire life. A forerunner of this lyric of interruption is Tennyson's 'In Memoriam XII' with its expansive reverie ('I leave this mortal ark behind') ending with an awakening ('and learn/That I have been an hour away'): the interruption of the surmise parallels the interruption which Hallam's death meant for Tennyson. This kind of lyric is an important development of the 'greater romantic lyric' where setting conditions and finally jars with reflection. For another discussion of this theme, see my 'Hardy and Wordsworth', Victorian Poetry, 24 (1986), 441-54.

Hardy more and more deeply explores the principle of interruption in his own life and art. As he moves from novel to poem, he moves from externally described interruptions, like the opening description in A LAodicean, to internally realised ones, like 'Copying Architecture in an Old Minster'. (In 1893 Hardy will acknowledge that 'the opening of "A Laodicean" is generally considered good' - Letters II, 25). He progres-sively internalises what he had externally projected onto his novelistic characters. In The Hand ofEthtlberta, for example, he describes Ethelberta

xi

xu PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

musing: 'Once among the towers above, she became so interested in the windy corridors, mildewed dungeons, and the tribe of daws peering invidiously upon her from overhead, that she forgot the flight of time' (31, p. 260). Such an observation is common enough in Hardy's novels; but it becomes the basis of a new meditative lyric as the novelistic character, often subject to the absent-mindedness of reverie, becomes lyric speaker. Such reveries evoke ancient themes, like that of the Seven Sleepers cited in The Mayor ofCasterbridge, Chapter 2, which also suggests a Rip Van Winkle atmosphere. In jude the Obscure, Sue says ofher need to return to Phillotson: 'it was only an impression with me then; I feel more and more convinced as time goes on that - I belong to him, or to nobody' (VI, 3, p. 419). How an impression grows stealthily upon the mind until it preempts reality, and how reality eventually interrupts- is a kind oflife-long experience for which Hardy finds a model in his lyric poem, where the absentness of a few minutes parallels the absentness of a lifetime.

As a poet, Hardy experienced his own version of a road to Damascus experience which helped lead to what he called a 'new' poetry, new aesthetic forms for lyric interruption. The experience was the death of his wife the vulnerable myths, whose interruptions he had seen in others, were now experienced fully within himself. The death of Emma made Hardy for the first time see the myth of old romance in which he had been caught, a myth which had stayed in place for twenty years and then became troubled by unreality for another twenty years. Her death was like the final collision of myth and reality, a convergence of the twain. The letters, in connection with the poems, shed more light on this major evolution in Hardy. In his letters he continually emphasises surprise: 'What you say on the incredibility of this event I feel even now - it seeming sometimes for a moment that it cannot have happened, and that I shall see her coming in from the garden' (Letters IV, 242). Gradually, an idea expressed in the letters becomes the basis for some of his greatest lyrics. He describes in a letter how a 'great blank has now come into my life', repeats this in two further letters (Letters IV, 250-1), and then explores the sensation in 'The Going': 'The yawning blankness I Of the perspective sickens me!' Hardy leads us to a precise and delicate evaluation of his belated remorse. He was now reluctant to reprint his 'satires of circum-stance', because their objectivity seemed pseudo-superior. In 1920, Hardy said of Swithin in Two on a Tower: 'Perhaps when Lady C. was dead he grew passionately attached to her again, as people often do' (Letters VI, 44-5). This was generally Florence's view of Hardy's regret for Emma, but not Hardy's view. Even Florence was drawn to qualify, when she described Hardy's memorial return to Cornwall: 'He says that he is going

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION XlU

down for the sake of the girl he married, and who died more than twenty years ago. His family say that girl never existed, but she did exist to him, no doubt' (quoted in Michael Millgate's Thomas Hardy (Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1982], p. 488).

For Hardy, the story of his love for Emma was not a story of mere fancy and neurosis; it was a tragedy of subdy incremental blindness followed by the expiation of shocked realisation. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, he had observed: 'There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause thrown by chance into their keeping, long after their judgement has pronounced it no rarity' (42, p. 348); but in his own experience now, Hardy discovers a deeper necessity in such mental evolution, transcending an arbitrary exercise of will. Hardy's memorial journey to Cornwall was extremely painful: 'The visit to this neighbourhood has been a very painful one to me, and I have said a dozen times I wish I had not come. What possessed me to do it! ... Looking back it seemed such a cruel thing altogether that events which began so auspiciously should have turned out as they did' (Letters IV, 260). The 'Poems of 1912-13' focus less and less on how the marriage turned sour in the middle years, than on the stark contrast between those early auspicious times and the sudden interruption experienced at the end - as though the reverie had lasted forty years. 'One forgets all the recent years and differences, and the mind goes back to the early times when each was much to the other- in her case and mine intensely much' (Letters IV, 239). Then the phenomenology of the gap becomes overwhelming: 'The strange thing is that the gap caused by such a loss becomes more apparent and grievous after a few months have passed than it seems at first' (Letters IV, 298). Hardy's best novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, is an uncanny prophecy of Hardy's experience of 1912-13: Angel's seeing too late, followed by his expiation, Tess's mental imbalance in her last days, their belated honeymoon when 'the gloomy intervening time seemed to sink into chaos, over which the present and prior times closed as if it never had been'- 58, p. 498). In 1912 and thereafter, Hardy would live out his novel. The culminating poem of this personal and aesthetic insight is 'During Wind and Rain' about which Hardy said that it was 'possibly among the best I have written' (Letters VI, p. 96). The fictional structure of reverie and interruption, explored in novels and early poems, now becomes verified in Hardy's experience of 1912. This life-enriched structure then becomes the basis of a 'new' lyric which recapitulates the life. Life and art cooperate in a strikingly integrated way in Hardy, whose deepening realisation about the meaning of his own life gradually finds its precise aesthetic form in the lyric of interruption.

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Hardy's developing skill in the lyric enabled him to analyse and combine, more and more richly, the spells that obsess both self and society. Waking from a brief reverie, and waking from a system of myth, are parallels richly explored. In 'The Epic', Tennyson makes a kind of joke of such a double awakening, both personal and universal. The speaker dozes during the parson's sermon: 'Until I woke, and found him settled down I Upon the general decay of faith'. It is not at first apparent that the strange fit which drives Lucy's lover is related to the strange fit which drives the light brigade, and that both are subject to parallel awakenings: but Hardy teaches us these connections as he finds them in himself. Visions, however wonderful, can too easily turn into obsolete myths preventing growth and causing destruction. Hardy's critique of the war mentality, via an exploration of his own imaginings, is an important one for our century. Earlier in The Return of the Native, such an imagination is illustrated in Eustacia: 'But do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life- music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that is going on in the great arteries of the world? That was the shape of my youthful dream.' (IV, 6, p. 335). In Jude the Obscure, Hardy's hero gives us a list which includes 'excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people's ... class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues' ( V, 3, p. 330), all delusions full of power and paralysis, and leading to Hardy's version of 'Apocalypse'. Apocalypse for Hardy is repressed interruption; Chapter 3 explores the potential for this apocalypse in remembering, romance, visionariness, and patriotism. War is the ultimate return of this repressed interruption.

The cut-out of an 1892 poem which he put in his Notebooks (II, 115) illustrates Hardy's early attraction to military romance: 'Give us war, 0 Lord, I For England's sake, I War righteous and true, I Our hearts to shake. . .. • 'Channel Firing' is the first of Hardy's mature war poems where reality is made grotesque by the distortions of apocalyptic vision, which for Hardy is imagination grown rigid. The glebe cow drooling draws on Browning's 'How They Brought the Good News From Ghent to Aix': 'the cattle stood black every one, I To stare through the mist at us galloping past'. The poem's grotesque conversation is modelled on Fitzgerald's Rubtiiyat, especially stanza 88:

'Why,' said another, 'Some there are who tell 'Of one who threatens he will toss to Hell

'The luckless Pots he marr' d in making - Pish! 'He's a Good Fellow, and 't will all be well.'

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION XV

From Margaret Woods (Notebooks II, 10-11), whose 1889 poem 'Again I saw Another Angel' he quoted, Hardy may have taken some of the dark humour of her vision of another failed apocalypse. The ground shuddered '[a]s though the dead stirred in the ground', and the Angel cried;' "Come forth ye dead!" Yet no man came':

Then there was silence overhead; But far below the ancient dead Muttered as if in mockery; And there was darkness in the sky, And rolling through the realm of death, Laughter and some obscure reply, With tongues that none interpreteth.

In its phrasing, the poem is an interesting bridge between 'Channel Firing' and Hardy's climactic war poem, '"And There Was a Great Calm"': 'all was hushed. . .. There was ... silence in the sky ... The Sinister Spirit sneered: "It had to be".' The bomb-caused lull in the latter poem borrows not only from Hellas, which Hardy read 'many times' (Letters II, 157), but also from Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall': 'When the ranks are rolled in vapour, and the winds are laid with sound'. For Hardy this lull depends on a confusion of perceptions (mistaking the lull following the bomb for the lull preceding it) symbolismg the larger confusion of visionary trance and the real world. Gradually Hardy came to see war as a dream interrupted by its own plot.

'In Time of"The Breaking of Nations"' would seem simply to contrast pastoral vision with war vision. For this poem we must also cite as a possible source an excerpt from Charles Reade which Hardy quoted ca. 1882 in his Notebooks I, 148: 'The chronic history ofWaterloo field is to be ploughed and sowed and reaped and mowed: yet once in a way these acts of husbandry were diversified with a great battle, where hosts decided the fate of Empires. After that agriculture resumed its sullen sway.' The poem also needs to be connected with Hardy's 18% walk in the field of Waterloo (Life, 284) and the battlefield scenes in The Dynasts. And behind all these is Virgil's classic image in the Georgics: 'agricola incurvo terram molitus aratro I exesa inveniet scabra robigine pila' ('The farmer working the soil with crooked plough I Will come on spears eaten up with rust') (I, 494-5). Another interesting source of both poem and Dynasts is Mary's 'Magnificat' in the Greek language of Luke's Gospel: 'I was ... thinking of ... where the word 8uva<M'acr occurs in the Magnificat - "He hath cast down the dynasts from their thrones"' (Letters III, 197). The word

XVI PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

connects Hardy's epic with his poem: 'Yet this will go onward the same I Though Dynasties pass.' Hardy's title borrows from the title of the poem preceding, 'In Time of Wars and Tumults', which in tum borrows from the title of a prayer in the Book of Common Prayer. Hardy may be alluding to the slight militaristic tinge in the prayer ('that we, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved'). In his late assessment in the Life where he draws the connections between affairs of the heart and affairs of state (below, Chapter 3), Hardy cites the Horatian counterpart to Virgil's image: 'Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi'. Carlyle had trans-lated this line in Sartor Resartus ('The Centre of Indifference'), where Teufelsdroch reflects on war: 'what devilry soever Kings do, the Greeks must pay the piper!' For Hardy the piper plays a variety of tunes; and what he plays to the spellbound lovers is not unlike what he plays to the spellbound warriors. This convertibility gives 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations'" its odd quality. Hardy is extremely sensitive to the point where the visionary becomes engulfing and paralysing; thus, in this poem the pastoral vision tends to teeter into apocalyptic vision not unlike that which fuels the dynasts.

In Nietszche, Hardy found a kind of anti-type to himself. To my own treatment of this subject should be added Eugene Williamson's 'Thomas Hardy and Friedrich Nietszche: The Reasons', Comparative Literature Studies, 15 (1978), 403-14, an important article not listed in the MLA and standard Hardy bibliographies. Hardy's ambivalent attraction to Nietszche is also illustrated in the Letters (III, 163): 'Cliffe's views ... rather attracted one to him', Hardy said, referring to the character, Geoffrey Cliffe, in Mrs Humphrey Ward's The Marriage of William Ashe (London, 1905), who believes: 'The modem judges for himself- makes his own laws, as a god, knowing good and evil.' Hardy cited this passage which Ward connected with the 'Nietzsche doctrine of self-development at all costs, and the coming man' (Chapter xxii). More characteristically, Hardy, commenting on Henley's 'lnvictus', said: 'No man is master ofhis soul: the flesh is master of it' (Millgate, Thomas Hardy, p. 295).

For Hardy, vision was essentially memory, almost frighteningly so for him in that late-life plunge which seemed momentarily to efface the difference between memory and reality. Another example of this period of absences in Hardy's life is in 1919 when Hardy heard read a chapter from job and exclaimed that the passage was the same one he heard from the Vicar of Fordington about 1860: 'And I can hear his voice repeating the text as the sermon went on - in the way they used to repeat it in those days- just as if it were but yesterday' (Letters V, 315; also see VI, 276). In his exploration of out-of-date visions, Hardy creates a distinctive and new

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION XVll

form of personalised grotesque, as when a present landscape is seen through vision-paralysed eyes. 'A Merrymaking in Question' is typical of such poems in which the grotesque is a dream which refuses to wake up to its interruption and so becomes more and more distorted by reality. An early version of the last line ('And crossbones that clicked to the tune') allies the poem even more to William Strang's etching, 'Danse Macabre'. In the discussion of 'Hardy and the Grotesque' more emphasis should be given to Dickens, who illustrates the history of the 'grotesque' as it evolved from its association with satiric caricature (cited by Ruskin as noted below) to its association with romantic distortions of mind. When Hardy said in 1915, 'The Curiosity Shop is excellent in the grotesque parts relating to the wax-work' (Letters V, 74), he was referring to the earlier sense of grotesque. Great Expectations illustrates the later sense, with its portrait of Miss Havisham, an arrested bride in withered bridal dress, like 'some ghastly waxwork at the Fair' (Chapter 8). Frozen in time, Miss Havisham is a symbol of Hardy's paralysed reveries.

We are fortunate in Hardy's case to be able to trace his poetic career for almost seventy years, i.e '1860 to 1928'; he is a poet who is singularly fitted to this kind of scrutiny, for his lyrics age with him. That is, they mature and condense and fuse more and more material, more layers of past reading and experience. Hardy seemed to foresee the course of his life when next to a passage in Mahaffy's Social Life in Greece arguing that 'this very burden of long experience perplexes the mind', Hardy wrote 'confused reasoning' (Notebooks I, 58). In Hardy long experience, with later impressions building on earlier ones, clarifies the mind; and the lyric forms of clarification are made consistent with the aging process in all its post-hoc clarity. These impressions are derived both from literature and personal experience and their intermingling. His continuous process of self-revision is suggested in a simple way in Hardy's remark to Siegfried Sassoon in 1920: 'At this moment ... I am reading over proofs for a reprint of a novel suggested by an experience I had exactly 50 years ago -in its bare outline I mean- "A Pair of Blue Eyes". The people shadowed forth in the story being now all, alas, dead, I am able to give lights here & there on the locality, &c., which I had to obscure when the book was written' (Letters VI, p. 3). A Pair of Blue Eyes is re-experienced by Hardy over the years, along with a multitude of other writings, his own and others; and the original 'bare outline' becomes layered with multiple combinations of later readings and experiences, which include the re-experience of localities. The locality in question is Cornwall, revisited so intensely in 1913.

'A Singer Asleep' is also about the intermingling oflife and literature, as

xviii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Hardy relates his life history to Swinburne; indeed the poem exemplifies the process of intermingling. It draws upon Swinburne's own elegy to Baudelaire, 'Ave Atque Vale', which inspired Hardy in the 1860s with its images of Sappho, promontory, sea and garland, its metrical structure (pentameter lines punctuated by a concluding trimeter), and its naturalis-tic conclusion: 'For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, I All waters as the shore'. Hardy's naturalistic conclusions are always informed with literary as well as personal experience. Hardy was such a composite of influences that he would attempt to minimise some, as when in 1922 (through Florence) he denied he had read Lorna Doone, forgetting his letter of1875 to Blackmore: 'I have just read your finest book (as I think) - Lorna Doone' (Letters VI, 155; 1, 37). 'What an advantage it was to be Shakespeare, who borrowed where he liked from men long since forgotten', Hardy said (Weber, 136). If he was defensive about his borrowings, his critics laboured under simplistic notions of originality. Hardy's career is a model of the intellectual life, fuelled by literature, locked in experience.

In ending his career as a novelist and returning full-time to poetry in the 1890s, Hardy was greatly influenced by Henry Vaughan, whose poems he marked extensively in his 1897 edition. Two of these poems, 'Silence, and stealth of days' and 'Vanity of Spirit', in which Hardy marked the line 'I summoned nature: pierced through all her store', seem to be the proxi-mate literary sources for 'A Sign-Seeker' and 'A Meeting with Despair'. 'The Bird', especially its first eight lines which Hardy marked, parallel several elements in 'The Darkling Thrush'. 'During Wind and Rain' may have been influenced by Vaughan's 'Burial'; the speaker asks God to watch over his body, an 'empty house, I Which I sometimes lived in'. Hardy marked the first two lines from the stanza following:

It is (in truth!) a ruined piece Not worth thy Eyes,

And scarce a room but wind, and rain Beat through, and stain The seats, and cells within.

Finally, the last marking Hardy made in the edition was next to the last of the following lines from '"Daphnis" An Elegiac Eclogue', which typify that archetypal situation in Hardy, a meditation which loses trace of the time:

But see, while thus our sorrows we discourse Phoebus hath finished his diurnal course. The shades prevail, each bush seems bigger grown.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION XlX

Another source of 'During Wind and Rain' is the act of present-tense remembering, interrupted by a more present storm, in David Copperfield,

Chapter 2: 'And now I see the outside of our house, with the latticed bedroom-windows standing open. . .. Now I am in the garden at the back .... A great wind rises, and the summer is gone in a moment. We are playing in the winter twilight, dancing about the parlour .... That is among my very earliest impressions.'

One has to include Hardy as an important link in a large number of traditions, such as those of the meditative lyric, of war poetry, of pastoral poetry. Hardy's late pastoral lyrics illustrate a similar intermingling of experience and reading. They are a return to ancient sources in pastoral and romantic nature lyrics, and to antique (almost) sources in his own life: the cider-maker of 'Shortening Days at the Homestead' is drawn from Hardy's father (Life, 96), while 'Childhood Among the Ferns' repeats the kind of experience his father loved, 'lying on a bank of thyme or camomile with the grasshoppers leaping over him' (Life, 21). The telling phrase, 'great green vase' (in which Fitzpiers and Grace find themselves enclosed in The Woodlanders) evokes Spenser's pastoral image in his 'December' eclogue: the 'green cabinet' (1. 17). His early pastoral poem of 'Dream of the City Shopwoman' also evokes Andrew Marvell's fancies. Though Hardy denied Bergsonian influence (Letters VI, 259), the Note-books II, 215-22, contain several pages of a clipping and notes showing Hardy's fascination with him. The pastoral dimension in Hardy, dis-cussed in my 'epilogue', may be the most significant element. For in pastoral, and in complementary traditions like georgic and loco-descrip-tive poetry, we find traditions for art finding itself moulded by an external world. Hardy's pastoral also reflects the ancient theme that the cycle of human life matches the cycles of a year from spring to winter, a parallel intimated in the first paragraph of Book IV of The Return of the Native. Shakespeare's sonnet, 'That time of year', brilliantly condenses this theme and has an important influence on Hardy's 'Poems of 1912-13'. A next stage of influence is Keats's 'To Autumn' where the season subtly changes from its early to late stages, even as the speaker talks about it. Such a pastoral moulding comes to a dark fulfilment in Hardy's lyrics of interruption, where description of the seasons is itself moulded by those seasons.

In the tradition of the connections between poetry and painting, poetry and architecture, Hardy's poetry is also important in the way it internal-ises these connections. How he transfers to lyric realisation the painterly play with light and shade, near and distant, provides continuous surprise. When in the Life (7), he said his great-grand-uncle had his portrait

XX PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

'painted when he was about eighty by Sir Charles Eastlake', the famous director of the National Gallery, Hardy was acknowledging an important development in English painting collections which influenced his art. J. B. Bullen has also traced Hardy's allusions to paintings (in The Expressive Eye, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). The importance of the South Kensington Museum for Hardy is confirmed by a letter of 1894 when he says that it is 'an instructive place to wander in' (Letters II, 55). The 1863 architectural prizes, however qualified (see Millgate, Thomas Hardy, 79-81), must have been gratifying to the ambitious Hardy; Michael Brooks's John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), especially Chapter 9, 'The 1860s: Triumph and Dispersal', should also be consulted for Hardy's Gothic background. In an 1861 address to the Architectural Association, A. W. Blomfield, Hardy's boss, proclaimed the apparent victory of Ruskin's Gothic principles:

his call has been answered by some at least. A band earnest, if small, and though small, ever increasing, have girded themselves for the work and are again pressing steadily onwards. After the long night in the trampled plain, they are again climbing the mountain side; the mists are rising, they see clearly before them the point where travellers of another day began to descend, and to their upward gaze a new morning is already gilding the summits of more distant and more glorious heights.

(Brooks, 226)

Blomfield's enthusiasm may have penetrated the offices where Hardy worked. But Brooks (179) also cites the severe strains within the Gothic Revival movement, antiquarian, Victorian, eclectic, innovative - strains which have some parallel to strains in Hardy's writing. In a letter of1908, Hardy describes one such strain: 'to prevent it [a fourteenth-century chapel] falling, the alternatives are the Scylla and Charybdis of putting in new stones, or cementing over the old ones, exposure having crumbled them a good deal' (Letters III, 337). The Gothic connection is most important for Hardy, not because of analogies between the two arts but because of Hardy's internalising of Gothic patterns from architecture and Gothic novels and poems. In 1920, he would write: 'My interest in Salisbury Cathedral, which is of course architectural, has lasted ever since 1860, when it began with me, on visiting it as an architect's pupil; & I remember well my first sight of its unrivalled outline- through a driving mist that nearly hid the top of the spire' (Letters VI, 30). For Hardy, that outline, like others, becomes associated with ancient patterns grown

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION XXI

rigidified and phantasmal; his various descriptions of Gothic as an 'aesthetic phantom', 'a medievalism whose spirit has fled', were influenced by Froude's words which he found quoted in H. H. Statham's 'Modern English Architecture' in the Fortnighly Review, 20 (1876), pp. 479-95:

The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the faith and life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the Abbey and the Castle were soon together to crumble into ruins, and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return .... In the fabric of habit in which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer.

And now it is all gone - like an insubstantial pageant faded. . ..

Hardy quoted from other parts of the article in his Notebooks (1, 82). Another city silhouette that stayed with Hardy was that of Winchester. Hardy said in 1915: 'It was the merest chance that I did not settle at Winchester instead of Dorsetshire many years ago . . . and it has often been a matter of regret with me that I decided not to do so' (Letters V, 82). The final panorama ofWintoncester in Tess is an amazing combination of Hardy's love of the sight, plus his coalescence of Pugin's famous contrasting views of a similar town. (Hardy also invokes Pugin in The Hand ofEthelberta, 38, p. 329 and in]ude v, 6, p. 369).

'The Abbey Mason' is peculiarly Hardy's ars poetica, because the poem dramatises the germination and discovery of a style; indeed the poem itself had germinated in Hardy for a long time. Thus, in 1898, he went to Gloucester Cathedral, 'a most interesting building, for it was there that the Perpendicular style was invented: you can see how it grew in the old masons' minds' (Letters II, 197); in the poem Hardy will change this communal anonymity to the anonymity of a single unknown inventor. Hardy revisited the cathedral in 1911, at which time he ascertained that the south transept was the likely specific place where the new style developed, 'a fact long known probably to other investigators' (Life, 357). We now know these other investigators included the following. John Parker's ABC ofGothic Architecture (London: Parker, 1903), from Hardy's library collection (at the University ofTexas) and signed by Florence Hardy, discusses 'the gradual change from the Decorated to the Perpendicular style' in the choir and transepts of Gloucester Cathedral, 'the earliest known example of this great change of style' (pp. 176-7). Also, Henri Masse's The Cathedral Church ofGloucester (London: Bell, 1910), in the collection

XXII PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

of Hardy books at the British Library, includes a photograph of the south transept and cites the theory that 'the Perpendicular style, which else-where - e. g. in the north transept and the choir - is completely developed, may have had its origin in this south transept'. In 1911 Hardy was given a book on Gothic architecture, probably George West's Gothic Architecture in England and France (London, Bell; Letters IV, 151-2); this was probably the immediate inspiration of the poem. West's series of pictures showing the development of English window tracery may have stirred Hardy's imagination (pp. 136-7); and West reminded Hardy that 'the name of the [Perpendicular] style comes of course from the character of the windows, in which the mullions run straight up to the arch head, the earliest example of which is found in the south transept of Gloucester' (p. 289). West also compared the fourfold classification of English Gothic to Linnaean classification which gives 'the impression that each style was sharply separated from its neighbour, just as in early geology we used to be taught that the periods were separated from each other by great catastrophes' and so 'gives no account of the causes or history of that evolutionary process which governs the works of man' (p. xxiii). This opening statement by West may have been the spur for Hardy to give his evolutionary gradualist account of the formation of the Perpendicular style. Finally, Hardy's insight in 'The Abbey Mason' was also moulded by Ruskin's essay 'The Nature of the Gothic' which we now know Hardy read, or re-read, in the same year he revisited Gloucester and wrote 'The Abbey Mason' (Letters IV, 178).

Hardy's visual patterns are, in a sense, what his lyric meditations 'see'. The hidden interruption which haunts those meditations is represented in the rigidity of the patterns described. That rigidity represents the point where a complex mental perception is realised, but realised belatedly with a tragic obsolescent clarity. To explore Hardy's patterns, as is done in Chapter 2, is to explore the multiple ways in which his mental reflections intersect with the manifold variety of the world he observes. The seeing of these patterns is at once a realisation and an interruption, as at the end of 'The Pedigree' when the hereditary pattern is seen at its most intense, just before the vision dissolves. In Tess, there is an interesting fore-shadowing of this patterning plot, when Angel's wilful rejection ofTess changes from 'passionateness' to a binding pattern of mind and will: 'He thus beheld in the pale morning light the resolve to separate from her ... standing in its bones; nothing but a skeleton, but none the less there.' (37, p. 210). Nevertheless, Angel does not yet fully see the extent and significance of the pattern which binds him. He will not see clearly until it is too late, and the pattern of his life stands fully revealed.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xxiii

One of the more persistent traditions in Hardy criticism is emphasis on gaps, awkwardness, over-reachings and under-reachings. Partly, this tradition is a reflection of the 'good little Thomas Hardy' school which emphasises Hardy's background, his education and class, supposedly leading to mechanisms of style, uncertainties of diction, rigidities of ideology. The tradition (and its perennial qualification) is also expressed in a wonderful comment by Mark Van Doren:

The immense, rambling country house of his Collected Poems has so many rooms that one could live in it forever. I have heard it called too large a house, with too many low rooms in it where the furniture is old and ugly, and where there is the odor of rats in the wainscot. Too many of Hardy's poems, that is to say, are not 'good.' And I agree; but I am always changing my mind as to which ones those are; I never tire of opening old doors that resist me a little; and my conclusion is that the building as a whole should be left just as it lies, hugging the dark ground over which Hardy's eyes wandered for decades, peering at every visible shape, human or unbreathing. (Autobiography [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958], pp. 167-8)

Recently, such criticism is a reflection of current critical interest in deconstruction. In his preface to the 1975 edition of The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth Century Writers, J. Hillis Miller chafes under the 'unitary, single, "monological"' view of mind in his book and seeks a more language-centred dialogical deconstructive mode of criticism. Hardy, he says in a recent book (The Linguistic Moment [Princeton University Press, 1985]) is precisely a figure of radical heterogeneity: 'there is no such thing as . . . the mind of Thomas Hardy'. It is still not clear whether this disunity is Hardy's, or our incomprehension before a poet whose breadth and variety escapes our categories. This issue was very much with me as I wrote about Hardy's imagery of patterns. We speak of image patterns in poetry; and Hardy is a good subject for such scholarly study. His uniqueness is that his image patterns are of maximum generality, being images of patterns themselves. The pattern is the organising image for what Geoffrey Hartman (in Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814) and Miller (in The Disappearance of God), study as the 'structure of consciousness' in poets: these are among the critical works that most influenced this study. At the same time, Hardy's 'structure of consciousness' is such that it seems to accommodate a maximum degree of reforming and deconstructing. But such deconstruction is not facile in Hardy; the gaps occur when the completed patterns of tneaning reveal

XXIV PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

their vulnerability. Our focus on the theme of patterns points to maxi-mum coherence, the pattern as continuous 'underthought' in Hardy, and maximum heterogeneity, since the theme includes multiple patterns and multiple materials being patterned.

Hardy's patterns are a coalescence of internal and external, spatial and temporal, present and ancient, biblical and classical, the lived and the literary; they suggest the enormous capaciousness of Hardy's mind and its enormous concentration. To the literary sources of Hardy's pattern, we should add Browning's play with the imagery to represent the patterning activity of the mind, as in 'Two in the Campagna':

For me, I touched a thought, I know, Has tantalized me many times,

(Like turns of thread the spiders throw Mocking across our path) for rhymes

To catch at and let go.

But where Browning's patterns tend to dissolve ('Where is the thread now? Off again! The old trick!'), Hardy's tend to lock in and deepen. In Hardy, patterns are applied to things as concrete as cobwebs and abstract as frames of thought. We should also connect Hardy's interest in patterns with the problem of distanced versus participant views in fiction, the problem of how panoramic overviews by a detached narrator can be made consistent with particularities of detail and character point of view. Recent discussions of this problem (for example, by Jonathan Arac) have cited the influence of the panorama, first patented in 1787, on the nineteenth-century novel. We should also note here that Pugin was influenced by the development of the panorama, an influence also reflected in Hardy's aerial view of 'Wintoncester' and of landscape generally; thus he called The Dynasts a 'panoramic show' (preface). When Hardy goes from novel to poem, he continues to meditate on the meaning and adequacy of patterns. The pattern inscribed on the page might be an architectural design, a sketch of a figure, a family tree, a naturalist diagram, a geographical map, a novel plot, an inscribed name, a silhouette of a city. If we imagine the poet drawing patterns ofletters on the page (as in 'An August Midnight'), conceiving patterns of meaning, and being drawn into patterns of reality, which may or may not jar with his mental patterns, we can sense the multiple layers of Hardy's patternings. 'An August Midnight', with bugs smearing the poet's ink, is a humorous allegory of this process of making and unmaking patterns in Hardy. A most interesting place where these interruptions occur is in the interstices of Hardy's language, a place of

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION XXV

jostling categories and chronologies of diction, which represent Hardy's profound insight into the patterning and unpatterning activity of lan-guage. For a preliminary statement, see my 'Victorian Philology and Victorian Poetry', Victorian Newsletter (Spring, 1978), 13-16.

Chapter 2, then, accumulates its significance as we see the pattern image take on more and more resonance, connect more fields of thought, and become the ultimate image for writing itself. One of the key poems in this ongoing synthesis is 'The Figure in the Scene', which Hardy also included in the list of those which are 'possibly among the best I have written'. This poem also leads us to Hardy's fascination with the visible shape of his poems, the way those shapes reflect tradition but also seem to be moulded by outer forces. Again, the Gothic analogy proves most pertinent. Brooks (pp. 271-2) quotes Ruskin from an 1861 lecture:

Every portion of the work bore the impress of the individual acting with mind and hand, - of the mind and hand of the individual acting upon the stone .... no great art existed which did not carry with it some expression of the tenderness and of the thoughtfulness of the man, - that was to say, the handwriting of the man on his work; and, unless they had got the handwriting, they had not got the art.

No analogy for Hardy is more powerful than this: the poem as a series of marks carved in material, the fossil remains of a personal indent.

This introduction has suggested bits and pieces of things which should be incorporated with the body of the text. The book itself is a part of a larger project on Hardy which includes the forthcoming Hardy's Metres and Victorian Prosody and the not yet completed Hardy's Language and Victorian Philology. I am grateful to Macmillan for allowing me to make some minor changes in the text of the first edition. The book represents the state of Hardy scholarship of its time; material taken here from Hardy's Literary Notes and miscellaneous collections ofletters should now be taken from the new editions of the Literary Notebooks and Collected Letters; only the most necessary references to these have been incorporated into the present text.

Introduction

A man sits in an old church and sketches on a large architectural pad. He begins to muse about the many dead who lie buried there under stone effigies. He then thinks about the world outside the church, a world full of war and personal tragedy. He thinks also about himself and the gloomy setting of the church seems to harmonise with his reflections. Suddenly he looks up. His pencil and pad have slipped to the floor. It is much later. He feels stiff. He looks outside and discovers that the late evening fog has come up and engulfed the church.

This is a central type of experience in Hardy's poetry. As he meditates about the world, the world changes around him and intrudes on the meditation.

What happens in the course of a few minutes is the model for what happens in the course of years. A man walks along the beach and sees the woman he loves. She rides horseback and the rhythm of her riding and her singing blends with the rhythm of the tide. But a noise of waves jars the image. The ocean is all too real, the woman is dead, the man is forty years older than when he first saw her there.

The interruption of the reverie in the church is like the interruption of a forty-year-old habit of thought and feeling. The plot of the reverie, indeed, seems to repeat - recapitulate - the plot of a lifetime.

This is the plot I find most interesting in Hardy's poetry and whose implications for his development and his style of writing I find most fruitful. It is a plot which took Hardy a lifetime to develop. At the climax of this development, he could make brief moments of perception parallel the experience of years. We may be able to see the development quite dramatically in the following example. Perhaps as early as 1874 Hardy wrote the following stanzas:

On the flat road a man at last appears: How much his whitening hairs

Owe to the settling snow's mute anchorage, And how much to a life's rough pilgrimage,

One cannot certify.

xxvii

XXVlll INTRODUCTION

A second man comes by; His ruddy beard brings fire to the pallid scene:

His coat is faded green; Hence seems it that his mien Wears something of the dye

Of the berried holm-trees that he passes nigh.

The snow-feathers so gently swoop that though But half an hour ago

The road was brown, and now is starkly white, A watcher would have failed defining quite

When it transformed it so. 1

These lines are interesting in themselves but their implications are perhaps not fully clear. The speaker cannot discern two things: whether snow or age is whitening the hair of the first passer-by, and when the road changes from brown to white. What is the connection between these two questions=?

In 1890 Hardy finished writing Tess of the d'Urberoilles. Describing a winter scene at Flintcomb-Ash farm, he wrote: 'Cobwebs revealed their presence on sheds and walls where none had ever been observed till brought out into visibility by the crystallizing atmosphere, han~ing like loops of white worsted from salient points of the outhouses, posts, and gates.' 2

In 1925 Hardy published 'A Light Snow-Fall after Frost' .3 The poem contains a new stanza added some time after Hardy wrote the first three. It is possible that in rereading his novels Hardy noticed the image in Tess and added it to the poem where it clarifies and confirms the relation between the earlier stanzas. The new stanza becomes the second stanza of the poem:

The frost is on the wane, And cobwebs hanging close outside the pane Pose as festoons of thick white worsted there, Of their pale presence no eye being aware

Till the rime made them plain.

Hardy has modified the Tess image so that not only do we look at the pattern of cobwebs, we look through it.

The addition of this image makes clear the relationship between the two questions by posing a third: when does the speaker realise that he is looking through cobwebs? The poem becomes a poem about realisations, realisations of changes taking place in the passers-by, in the road, and in the

INTRODUCTION XXIX

speaker. The parallels suggest a little allegory. The two passers-by are journeying two roads, the road outside the window, the road which is their pilgrimage through life. Their lives are changing. They seem to represent two stages of life, the one ruddy like the berried holm trees with which he shares a 'buried' life; the other with hair whitening from both age and snow, just as changes come mysteriously from both inside and outside. What is happening to the speaker in this half-hour parallels what is happening to the men outside. This parallel suggests the poem's ultimate question: when do we realise that our lives have changed, that we have grown old? This question is now implicit in the question about the scene: when do we realise that the scene in front of us has changed? The eye cannot see what is happening in front of it until something strikes the attention and reveals what has been changing for many moments. In a parallel way, a man ages and only at certain striking moments does he truly realise how many years have elapsed and how far he has come.4 The cobwebs were there all along as we looked through the window, but their pattern only comes clear after a while. The window we look through is ultimately our own mind. In the small experiences, and in the larger ones, there are elements present, of whose 'pale presence' no eye is aware until nature's 'rime' makes them plain. Only then can they be quite defined.

I would suggest that this pattern of definition conditions Hardy's style of writing: his way of structuring his poems, his favourite images, his choice of words, his metres. The final definition of an experience is the poem. It is what Hardy called an 'expiation', a model of a late discovery, an imitation of a person coming to know himself within a reality which is much larger and more intricate than himself.

The gradual development of' A Light Snow-Fall after Frost' is typical of the development of many of Hardy's poems. An initial impression is modified, abandoned, taken up again. It is influenced by what Hardy reads and what he has written. Gradually, its full import is realised after the experience and reflection of years.

'DEVELOPMENT'

The central issue in Hardy studies is what happens to an experience as it is made into literature, the experience remembered, the literature reread, a similar experience undergone, the whole made into more literature. While most of this book bears on this topic, the topic still needs much more exploration. At certain important moments in his poetic career, Hardy reread his works in order to prepare them for collected editions. He found

XXX INTRODUCTION

it a tedious chore but at times, he said, a 'gleam of interest arises' .5 Such major rereadings occurred for the Wessex Novels (London: Osgood, Mcilvaine, 1895-6) shortly before Hardy resumed his career as a full-time poet; again for the Wessex Edition (London: Macmillan, 1912-14 with later volumes to be incorporated) which coincides with the major turning-point of Hardy's poetic career; then for the Mellstock Edition (London: Macmillan, 1919-20), as Hardy began his last decade of poetry. More rereading of the poems occurred for the collected editions of 1919, 1923, 1928 and even mysteriously 1930 - these last two incorporating changes Hardy made before his death and for the preparation of a last selected edition, Chosen Poems, not published until 1929.6 So far these multiple collections have given work to those who have traced variant readings of individual lines; and the definitive variorum edition has now (after some delay) been published. But there also needs to be considered how the entire conception of new poems derived from multiple revisitations of old poems and novels. Hardy's last decade also saw him preparing his official biography, which entailed more reading of past works, as well as corres-pondence, diaries, etc. And at various stages throughout his career he reconsulted his notebooks. To follow an experience from its initial inception through these multiple revisitations and modifications makes for delight and discovery.

Development is a controversial word in discussions of poetry, and particularly in discussions of Hardy. 7 Several of the reviews in Hardy's collection, including Gosse's important Edinburgh Review article written with Hardy's help, assert some development, but in the vaguest of terms.8

Hardy wrote many varieties of poems during each decade of his career and many of his later poems are like his earlier poems. His poetry does not dis-play the obvious and clearly defined stages we find in certain other poets. Looking back over Hardy's poetry in 1922, Gosse decided that Hardy's talent had 'suffered very little modification in the course of sixty years' (Sunday Times, 28 May). This has remained the standard view. It is an unfortunate view because it reinforces other traditional views of Hardy's verse. A poet whose style is 'fixed' by the seventies and who continues to write poems for another sixty years can reasonably be thought of as a poet of 'perverse consistency', fixed ideas, cranky language habits, stereotyped plots, mechanical contrivances of metre. Success for such a poet is likely to be rare - a handful of the 900 poems - and will be due to 'escape from the governing frame', an overwhelming sincerity which is indescribable.

Nevertheless Hardy asserted that there was an important development in his poetry. Returning to poetry in 1897, 'he had found an awkwardness in getting back to an easy expression in numbers after abandoning it for so

INTRODUCTION xxxi

many years; but that soon wore off' .9 Two years later he compared himself to Verdi who, according to the art histories, 'had only just arrived at maturity at the age of threescore and ten or thereabouts' (Life, 300). In an unpublished 1904 preface to the poems of 'Lawrence Hope' (Adela Nicolson), Hardy regretted the young writer's death and the relative immaturity of her poems, though he recognised 'their purely dramatic or personative character. But all such would have fallen naturally into their evolutionary place and value had they been succeeded by less wayward performances of larger scope and schooled feeling, such as would in the probable order of things have come from her hand if she had survived to philosophic years.' 10 In 1906 Hardy wrote: 'I prefer late Wagner, as I prefer late Turner, to early .... When a man not contented with the grounds of his success goes on and on, and tries to achieve the impossible, then he gets profoundly interesting to me' (Life, 329). In 1909, Hardy wrote in his preface to Time's Laughingstocks: 'As a whole they will, I hope, take the reader forward, even if not far, rather than backward.' In this same year he wrote to Henry Newbolt: 'Happily one can afford to dismiss the fear of writing oneself out, which we used to hear so much of.' 11

Hardy's practice refutes the romantic myth which says just the opposite. In 1917, the year of his supreme poetic volume, Moments of Vision, he reflected more deeply than usual over his career: 'I was quick to bloom; late to ripen'; 'I was a child till I was 16; a youth till I was 25 [the year he wrote 'Amabel']; a young man till I was 40 or 50 [the latter being the year he wrote 'Thoughts of Phena']' (Life, 378). In 1920 Hardy said: 'The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to complete their job.' 12 The year before Hardy had dictated: 'Speaking generally, there is more autobiography in a hundred lines of Mr. Hardy's poetry than in all the novels' (Life, 392). In a sequence of letters in 1920 Hardy re-asserted his perennial claim that his poetic fancies were 'impressions of the moment', 'impressions that frequently change' .13

It is important to connect Hardy's theory of 'impressions' with the other remarks he makes about the autobiography and development in his poetry. An impression for Hardy is not exactly a 'relative' or arbitrary point of view - though this may apply to some of his philosophic fancies. An impression, as applied to the bulk of his poetry, is more properly an impression of the autobiographical moment. It reflects a period of the life, and as the life changes, the nature of Hardy's impressions will change. By life I mean Hardy's mental and emotional life, which does not have a one-to-one correspondence with his external biographical experience whose

XXXll INTRODUCTION

import he might realise much later. An impression can be nurtured and preserved through the years until all of its significance is realised. 14 At that moment, a pattern emerges and a literary form is discovered.

In tracing Hardy's development, I have tried to be mindful of Ruskin's observation about his own development in Praeterita (I, 10):

Some forces are failing while others strengthen, and most act irregularly, or else at uncorresponding periods of renewed enthusiasm after intervals of lassitude. For all clearness of exposition, it is necessary to follow first one, then another, without confusing notices of what is happening in other directions.

The ways in which Hardy's development takes place are numerous: in the growing economy and dramatic effect of the meditative poem, in the use of a favourite image of patterns, in the consistency of language and theme, in the technical and imitative possibilities of metrical rhythm, in choices of subjects and poetic forms which match stages of developing interest, in the synthesis of subjects and forms. At certain points, various of these 'forces' are realised together and at such points important advances in the lyric poem occur. Hardy illustrates the point well expressed by J. Hillis Miller in his introduction to The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century

Writers:

The unity of a human life, like the unity of the writings which express it, is not something fixed and unchanging. A human life is a dynamic process which moves through various phases, while returning often to earlier ones, in the search for a full comprehension of its 'organizing principles.' Only through development can the nature of these principles be gradually revealed, for they cannot be completely expressed in any single form.

In Hardy's case, the sequence of phases is not merely dialectical; its chronological points can be specified as well. The development Hardy illustrates is consistent with his philosophy of meaning as that which develops slowly but reveals itself at certain dramatic instances, so that it illuminates the entire lifetime's work.

Since Hardy revisited his novels in order to write more poems, I have also occasionally considered how certain aesthetic elements in the novel receive their consummate development in the poem. In several cases, the vantage-point of the poems can make us see an interesting development through the novels.

INTRODUCTION xxxm

PRECIS

I suggested above that at the end of a long process in Hardy's development a remembered impression is exhumed, a pattern is realised, and a literary form is achieved. The first chapter of this book considers Hardy's most im-portant literary form, the meditative lyric. I attempt to trace its develop-ment within a circumscribed number of poems and within a circumscribed period, roughly 1890 to 1917. The second chapter casts a wider net and traces throughout Hardy's works an imagery of patterns. The widespread occurrence of this imagery, which symbolises the way impressions develop, is a kind of symbolic matrix in which the meditative lyric is firmly lodged. The imagery links Hardy's interest in the meditative poem with many currents of nineteenth-century intellectual history. The third chapter considers Hardy's long career as a poet, from 1860 to 1928, and focuses on the paradox that he is a poet of developing memories. His career shows a remarkable consistency by which a memory lyric of 1866 can develop, by a series of traceable steps, into a grand war poem of 1921. Gradually Hardy discovers the deep connections between the plot of his life and the plot of Victorian life - both caught up in fifty-year-old dreams soon to be interrupted by the realities of 1912-14. Hardy's lyric vision climaxes in the image of a grotesque nightmare apocalypse haunted by a changed world. The Epilogue discusses a brief pastoral period in Hardy's career, a late contemplative revisitation of his past which he experiences in the 1920s.

Each of the chapters and epilogue can be seen as focusing on some aspect of Hardy's relation to the romantic literary tradition - to the romantic meditative poem and traditions of reverie, to romantic aesthetics and its connections with the Gothic Revival, to the romantic visionary sensibility and its relation to theories of the grotesque, to the romantic version of the pastoral ideal. In developing his poetry, Hardy develops these traditions in important ways. In his notebooks Hardy quoted from an article on Turner: 'An artist must be able to persuade himself either that he is carrying to completion something begun by his forerunner, or that it is his to denounce the fraud of his predecessor, and to discover afresh the secret of art.' 15 Many of the traditions which Hardy carried on or reacted against underwent important developments in the 1860s. Indeed the decade was a decisive stage in the evolution of architecture, in the growth of public art collections, in discussions of the grotesque, in the collecting of ballads, in the Victorian novel, in philosophy and epistemology, in philology and prosody, in archaeology and history, even in photography. These developments profoundly impressed Hardy's mind at a formative stage.

xxxiv INTRODUCTION

His poetry was 'fixed' in the sixties only in the sense that the sixties gave him enough to think about for a lifetime. The manuscript for this book originally included discussions of Hardy's language, metrics, and the dating of his poems. But these subjects proved too extensive for inclusion here. In this book I have generally relied on poems whose date of composition can be reasonably assigned to a given year or period. It is true that many Hardy poems derive from old notes and are given many revisions through the years. But when Hardy decided that a poem was substantially written at an early date or was substantially changed by subsequent revisions, he usually indicated this fact in a postscript. There are many poems which can, with reasonable probability, be assigned to a given year or period.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The lack of a good critical tradition for Hardy's poetry has long been a puzzle. He has been a striking example of a poet's poet, read and loved by dozens of major modern poets but subject to a generally lukewarm critical commentary. 16 This situation has improved only in very recent years with the appearance of some perceptive books on the poetry. But in America at least Hardy has yet to attract a reading public like that which most other major modern poets have enjoyed. The 1930 edition of the Collected Poems, which is the more accurate edition and includes the posthumous Winter Words, has never been published in America. The recent (1976) definitive edition of the Complete Poems, which in England sold out its first printing of 10,000 copies well within a year, could not find an American publisher. One reason for this astonishing 17 situation is that the process which has popularised other poets - namely their introduction to a large body of graduate and undergraduate students by the universities - has never worked for Hardy. In many college corridors I find a sense of bewilder-ment, among those who care about Victorian and modern poetry, about how Hardy can best be presented. It has remained difficult to resolve certain paradoxes about Hardy's poetry, its variety and consistency, its privacy and its learning, its uniqueness and its representative character, its sincerity and its reliance on literary sources, its sense of tradition and its break with tradition, its constant experimentation and its emphasis on memory.

At the same time, we have seen recently much interesting analysis, particularly of Hardy's habits of perception and his relation to romantic, Victorian, and modern poets. Many poems have been explicated. I have

INTRODUCTION XXXV

tried to avoid retracing these steps. Valuable studies using portions of Hardy's notebooks have been made. I am thinking especially of Wright on The Dynasts, Millgate on the novels, Beatty on the architectural notebook, Gittings on the life, and Bjork's annotations on the major notebooks. Helpful compendiums of background material for the poems have been made by Pinion, Bailey, and Gerber. Purdy's Bibliog,.aphical Study remains a model of care .18 A collected edition of Hardy's letters is now being published and edited by Purdy and Millgate. I have included in this book additional background information and citations from the notebooks which are relevant to the poems. Much valuable work relevant to Hardy has also been done on the nature of romantic and modern meditative poetry, on Gothic and Pre-Raphaelite art, on the intellectual and philological backgrounds of the Victorian age, on the history and theory of metrics, on ballads, war poetry, photography and the grotesque. The Life of Thomas Hardy remains an extraordinarily rich resource where profoundly interesting insights are likely to go unnoticed in the rush of social detail. It represents Hardy's last major assessment of his life and work and I refer to it as such even though he let Florence Emily Hardy's name stand as the author's. 19 Hardy's mind is not the amateur affair which less well-read critics have made of it. It is enormously wide-ranging and synthetic. The Life, which occasionally cites Hardy's reading lists (48, 59, 203, 212, 230), in fact touches only the surface of what he read and copied. His unpublished letters and notebooks are still, as Purdy said in 1954, 'an incomparable mine for the student of Hardy' (Purdy, p. viii). Most of the notebooks have recently become available in microfilm.20 Also important is a wide variety of uncollected material including prefaces, annotations in books, interviews and recollec-tions, though the latter, when uncorroborated, must be treated cautiously. The Variorum Edition of the Complete Poems, edited by James Gibson, was published too late for full consideration here. It will, however, prove invaluable for further study of Hardy's language and metrics. In all cases of poems whose early dating is important, I have used the early versions as described in the Variorum. Therefore, the reader will find a few discrepancies between the versions quoted here and those given in the 1976 Complete Poems.

This book, which I began writing in the late sixties, has gone through a number of versions. Many colleagues have read portions of earlier versions, though by now they may have forgotten and will be surprised to find themselves listed. Yet many of their comments have haunted me for a long time. At Yale, Louis Martz, Dwight Culler, William Kinsley, and Ed Reno helped me with a 1965 dissertation. At the University of California,

XXXVI INTRODUCTION

Santa Barbara, Benjamin Sankey, Alan Stephens, Elizabeth Schneider, Frank Cousens, Fred Turner, Walter Davis; and at Boston College Anne Ferry and Paul Doherty read earlier versions of the present manuscript. George Goldsmith and the Audio-Visual Department at Boston College assisted me with the photographs. Portions of Chapter 1, in earlier form, appeared in Victorian Poetry, 11 (1973), and the Colby Library Quarterly, XI

(1975). An early short version of Chapter 2 appeared in English Literary History, 42 (1975).

The Consortium libraries of Boston (especially those at Boston College, Brandeis, Boston University, and the Boston Public Library), the Boston Athenaeum, Houghton and Widener libraries, the libraries at Yale, Johns Hopkins and Colby College, the New York Public Library, the University of California libraries at Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and Berkeley, the Huntington Library, the Dorset County Museum and the public library at Concord, Massachusetts, have provided vital assistance. I am grateful to the reference librarians at Bapst Library who wrote dozens of letters on my behalf. Only The Book of Baby Pets (cf. below, p. 147) eluded them and me. I am particularly grateful to James Gibson who assisted me with his encouragement in the final st"ages and who introduced me to Macmillan.

I had hoped to get my family, both sides, into a dedication by !Dounting their names on the ogees and mullions of the illustration of Gloucester Cathedral, in the manner of a Hardy pedigree (cf. Illustrations 3 and 4). But I cannot make them fit and they are much too alive to be so engraved. They also helped keep me alive during these several years. But I must acknowledge the contributions made by John, Frank Matthew, Kathryn Elizabeth, and Mary Rebecca, all of whom are younger than this book. My parents should know that an earlier version was dedicated to them but they will understand that the old order changeth and a man must cling to his wife.