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The Cosmic Poet (1903-1908)

was, as Alfred Noyes put it, "a general disposition among critics to 'hum' and 'ha.'" "The furtive yelp of the masked and writhing poeticule"—as another Victorian poet exuberantly described it—"did not fail, however, to testify to the real greatness of the strange intruder." The change in the attitude of reviewers from disapprobation and dismay at the immense proportions, the mighty themes, and the iconoclastic methods of the work, to sympathy and understanding, draws the attention of the investigator immediately. In the London Nation, for instance, the review of the first part was frankly hostile. Mr. Hardy was brusquely ordered to return to novel-writing—being definitely pigeonholed in which field, presumably, he would be powerless to annoy the critic with fresh demands upon the intellect or imagination. The remarks which appeared in the same periodical after the publication of the third part, are worth repeating as an admirable summary of the course of critical opinion during the four years which intervened between the publication of the first and last sections.

Four years ago we gave a dazed and tentative notice to the first part of Thomas Hardy's huge closet drama. . . . As a whole it seemed to us as a succes manque, a piece of imaginative incunabula, the characteristic product of a moody, or, as Mr. Hardy calls it, a "nervous and quizzical age," a product which might some day, in an age of stronger artistic feeling, be made by another hand the basis of a masterpiece. On the appearance of the second part, two years later, we found ourselves still more deeply impressed with the things that were striking in the first part. Now, with the publication of the third and last part, that suspicion has become a certainty. We have read the final volume with the complete absorption of every faculty, and going back

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