' Unless we can catch the undertone of this
acknowledgment, a poet's voice is in our ears hardly more than sounding
brass or a tinkling cymbal.
Therefore we turn--some by instinct and some by deliberate choice--to
the greatest; therefore we deliberately set Mr Hardy among these. What
they have, he has, and has in their degree--a plenary vision of life. He
is the master of the fundamental theme; it enters into, echoes in,
modulates and modifies all his particular emotions, and the individual
poems of which they are the substance. Each work of his is a fragment of
a whole--not a detached and arbitrarily severed fragment, but a unity
which implies, calls for and in a profound sense creates a vaster and
completely comprehensive whole His reaction to an episode has behind and
within it a reaction to the universe. An overwhelming endorsement
descends upon his words: he traces them as with a pencil, and
straightway they are graven in stone.
Thus his short poems have a weight and validity which sets them apart in
kind from even the very finest work of his contemporaries.
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