rather have had than yours... [and whom] above all he would have felt
honoured by. For him you were the master of living poets and he your
endless disciple.’^19 Thomas’s poetic discipleship emerges in the parallel
titles and themes of ‘The Thrush’ with Hardy’s famous darkling thrush,
or the similarity of theme and metre between Thomas’s ‘The Penny
Whistle’ and Hardy’s ‘The Night of the Dance’. Yet his reviews show a
marked antipathy to Hardy’s stylistic totalitarianism, which permits no
surprises. ‘There is no ecstasy or glory or magic for him to lose, save what
is in the things themselves’, Thomas complained: ‘As a rule Mr Hardy’s
poems are the sum of their parts, and it would be easy to show what it is
that produces their strong calm effect. Seldom does anything creep in
from Nature or the spirit of humanity to give his work a something not to
be accounted for in what he actually says.’^20 Hardy has understood
everything, but this means that he is also much too conscious of what
he is doing. ‘Other poetry allows great richness and diversity of interpret-
ation; Mr Hardy’s allows none...wecannot think of any other poetry so
tyrannous’, wrote Thomas in an earlier review.^21 Like de la Mare, too,
Thomas noticed this oppressive control of his material exactly because
Hardy’s form fits its material so badly. ‘It is possible to wonder if he is
poking fun at verse by first making it so unwontedly substantial, then
adding a considerable amount of rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, as
frills’, he commented in 1913 ; the result of this technique is that ‘a certain
awkwardness is almost as constant in his work as truth is’.^22
Linking ‘awkwardness’ to ‘truth’ and ‘mastery’ to ‘difficulty’ show
Thomas and de la Mare struggling to find a reason for Hardy’s manifest
divergence of style and content, and their comments articulate a problem
for Hardy readers which has persisted: how to put his poetry back
together again. If Hardy meant to write as he did, then he was laying
himself open to the charge of writing with stunning insensitivity towards
his topic. This is obviously not true, and so one solution was to say that
the disparity is unwitting, and hence testimony to Hardy’s unconscious
capacity to register the awkwardness of life in collision with itself, an
option pursued latterly by John Bayley and Samuel Hynes, but first
mooted in a backhanded review by Lytton Strachey in 1914 :
And he speaks; he does not sing. Or rather, he talks – in the quiet voice of a
modern man or woman, who finds it difficult, as modern men and women do, to
put into words exactly what is in the mind. He is incorrect; but then how unreal
and artificial a thing is correctness! He fumbles; but it is that very fumbling that
brings him so near to ourselves... And who does not feel the perplexity, the
Hardy’s indifference 153