2.  A POET IN WINTER

In the last poem in his last book, Moments of Vision, Mr. Hardy meditates on his own immortality, as all men of genius probably do at one time or another. Afterwards, the poem in which he does so, is interesting, not only for this reason, but because it contains implicitly a definition and a defence of the author’s achievement in literature.  The poem is too long to quote in full, but the first three verses will be sufficient to illustrate what I have said: 

    When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
      And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
    Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the people say: 
      “He was a man who used to notice such things”?

    If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
      The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
    Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, will a gazer think: 
      “To him this must have been a familiar sight”?

    If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
      When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
    Will they say:  “He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
      But he could do little for them; and now he is gone”?

Even without the two other verses, we have here a remarkable attempt on the part of an artist to paint a portrait, as it were, of his own genius.

Mr. Hardy’s genius is essentially that of a man who “used to notice such things” as the fluttering of the green leaves in May, and to whom the swift passage of a night-jar in the twilight has “been a familiar sight.”  He is one of the most sensitive observers of nature who have written English prose.  It may even be that he will be remembered longer for his studies of nature than for his studies of human nature.  His days are among his greatest characters, as in the wonderful scene on the heath in the opening of The Return of the Native.  He would have written well of the world, one can imagine, even if he had found it uninhabited.  But his sensitiveness is not merely sensitiveness of the eye:  it is also sensitiveness of the heart.  He has, indeed, that hypersensitive sort of temperament, as the verse about the hedgehog suggests, which is the victim at once of pity and of a feeling of hopeless helplessness.  Never anywhere else has there been such a world of pity put into a quotation as Mr. Hardy has put into that line and a half from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which he placed on the title-page of Tess of the D’Urbervilles:—­

    Poor wounded name, my bosom as a bed
    Shall lodge thee!

In the use to which he put these words Mr. Hardy may be said to have added to the poetry of Shakespeare.  He gave them a new imaginative context, and poured his own heart into them.  For the same helpless pity which he feels for dumb creatures he feels for men and women: