Vol. VI No. 1 - Modernist Magazines Project

THE BOOKSHELF
The other goes to the heart of all our madness:
"Peace upon earth!" was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We've got as far as poison-gas.
"Winter Words" will, I fear, add little to a great poet's reputation, but
it cannot detract from it. The old fire and the same touch are to be found
somewhere in even the least successful of the poems; and there are a few
as perfect as a great poet could make them. We take our leave of the poet
in this volume and our stand on this; that in due time Thomas Hardy will be
assigned one of the highest places among the poets, a place perhaps even
higher than that already given to him among the novelists.
THE EARLY LIFE OF THOMAS HARDY (1840-1891). By
FLORENCE EMILY HARDY (Macmillan).
In this interesting biography of Thomas Hardy the author has, rightly
or wrongly, adopted a form which makes any adverse criticism difficult. The
form is that of diaries and documents, conversations etc. The main result
is a very definite dullness, but against this must be placed the advantage
of many vivid and interesting personal expressions on things by Thomas
Hardy which help one to understand him better. Whether these are enough
in a biography of so famous a man is doubtful and may make many wish
that the book had taken another shape.
What, for example, would Mr. A: E. Housman have made of the life?
Unquestionably he could have given us an immortal picture of a lonely soul,
a great questioning mind, and brought to life to those to whom Thomas
Hardy was but a vague name, a personality among the most interesting in
our literature. He would have given us the background which this work
lacks. The life within and outside the life. Without these things no biography
of Thomas Hardy can be said to be satisfactory.
But this is merely a personal view, hardly valid perhaps when it is made
clear that Thomas Hardy had no great desire to have his life written.
I think one reason for this (as this book shows) lay in the fact that he knew
his life had been strangely uneventful. His life was one long mental adventure.
It is true that he lived and worked in London for a few years—but this made
no impression upon him save a desire to escape to the country and the
formation of the opinion that it was "a city of four million lost souls/'
The boyhood here described is what we would have expected—ordinary
and uneventful—revealing no marked signs of high talent. There are, however,
many signs of a mind growing to something far beyond the ordinary
when Thomas Hardy's early days of training as an architect are described.
He was setting down many thoughts about life and could attain early to the
truth of this;
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