The Life of Thomas Hardy
It is rather remarkable to find such praise from an avowed modernist and iconoclast bestowed upon a writer whose early work drew the admiration of Tennyson and Stevenson. Time has never outstripped Mr. Hardy to leave him behind as an interesting but valueless relic of a past generation. Beginning with some faint traces of the school of Tennyson, he quickly managed to forge his way out of Victorianism, nor did he succumb to the seductive but cloying strains of the "fleshly school," nor was he carried away by the revived medievalism of the latter part of the century. Bridging a dangerous period of doubtful taste with his attention concentrated on his fiction, he developed independently an uncompromising terseness and swiftness of poetic language, coupled with an imaginative fire and pungency of thought that carries his latest work along in the van of modern poetry. His verse has its roots far back in the Romantic revolt of the early years of the Nineteenth Century and in the rediscovery of the lyric and dramatic ecstasy of the Elizabethans—and its branches embrace the latest discoveries and developments of the Twentieth Century renaissance, particularly that of the younger group of American poets, and they extend at times far into the future of the art. As has been pointed out before, he is at once the oldest and the youngest of our poets.
Whether or not the world of to-day will be found justified in showing itself far more grateful for Thomas Hardy's novels than for his poems, there is no doubt about his own opinion in the matter: in his poetry he has consummated his earliest and latest literary ambition. General opinion agrees with Dr. William Lyon Phelps,
[218]
