The Life of Thomas Hardy
the works of some minor poets, the sense was considerably led by the sound." The same opinion was expressed somewhat later in An Imaginative Woman, in which the poetic activities described as belonging to Robert Trewe might be considered as rather faithful reflections of the author's:
Being little attracted by excellences of form and rhythm apart from content he sometimes, when feeling outran his artistic speed, perpetrated sonnets in the loosely rhymed Elizabethan fashion, which every right-minded reviewer said he ought not to have done.
Hardy's description of other aspects of the poetry of the fictitious Robert Trewe opens the general question of the relationship between poetry and life, and brings one again to the scarred battlefields where the opposing armies of realism and romanticism have fought many a fight:
Trewe's verse contrasted with that of the rank and file of recent minor poets in being impassioned rather than ingenious, luxuriant rather than finished. Neither symboliste nor decadent, he was a pessimist in so far as that character applies to a man who looks at the worst contingencies as well as the best in the human condition.
Hardy's own opinion in the matter is perhaps more directly and forcibly expressed in Tess, when, in dealing with the miserable and undeserved lot of the children of the shiftless Durbeyfields in being born into the world in such circumstances as theirs, he remarks, with a quite perceptible sneer, "some people would like to know
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