"The History of Error": Hardy's Critics and the Self Unseen

For one thing, many fine poems that have lyric moments are not entirely lyrical; many largely narrative poems are not entirely narrative; many personal reflections or meditations in verse hover across the frontiers of lyricism.

———Thomas Hardy, in the "Preface"
to Select Poems of William Barnes¹

Recalling a Gothic arch straying hazardously over its bounds, or the abrupt blankness of a wall where pattern anticipates a window, Hardy believed his poetry to reveal architectural moments of "cunning irregularity."² For Hardy, the "unforeseen" arises as poetic conventions yield to the jarring peculiarities of the words themselves. Hardy's language radically displaces the speaking "I," so that past and present subjects are distinct and often contradictory rather than continuous with the speech that renders them. Playing upon the Victorian convention of a speaker in a location, Hardy eschews topographical coherence to redefine the poetic "I" as a subject misplaced in time, continually looking backward yet unseeing in the present moment. These lyric voices are not of the Victorian tradition from which they arise, nor do they anticipate a strictly modernist destruction of selfhood. Hardy's subjects are not fractured in a traditional sense, but are rather a response to the aberrances of their language. Distortion in poetic voice echoes the gaps of narrative sequence and idiom that so often appear in the poems. It is then neither language nor narrative voice that lends us a grammar of Hardy's poetry, but the way these structures stray out of their bounds, unfolding against one another.

Yet Hardy's language has often gained the criticism that it hovers across poetic norms through ignorance and clumsiness not "cunning irregularity." The critical reception of Hardy's poetry has attracted notice for such rancor, one stemming from a misguided elitism that spurred even Lytton Strachey to uncharacteristically sour remarks.³ From the outset, F. R. Leavis found Hardy's unconventional language to be full of "gauche unshrinking mismarriages" of words, of the "prosaic banal, the stilted literary, the colloquial" jumbled together in a seemingly random process.⁴ What Leavis called a "style out of stylelessnesss" had been less vehemently articulated by William Archer as a lack of "local and historical perspective in language, seeing all the words in the dictionary on one plane, so to speak, and regarding them all as equally available."⁵ For the earliest reviewers, Hardy's poetry was to be valued in spite of its language: the best poems were those that managed to shrug off such a handicap, so that a select canon of works might emerge unscathed from their marred diction and syntax.

More recently, critics have found themselves praising Hardy's language for the awkwardness that was once condemned. Such purposeful moments of gracelessness are read as "authentic," and thus closer to the speech of a rural working-class, one that sits opposed to a purely literary language.⁶ In the end, Archer and Leavis seem closer to the truth after all, albeit inadvertently. Hardy's language acts on many different literary and historical planes indeed; it includes classes of language whose interactions are far too systematic to be simply "authentic." Ralph Elliott charts these linguistic features in Thomas Hardy's English (1984) proving Hardy's lexical irregularities to fall into patterns with specific literary purpose.⁷ Elaborating on the findings of Elliott in a more theoretical bent, Dennis Taylor's Hardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philosophy turns against critical tradition to show how Hardy's language is contextualized by its past and future, so that "awkwardness reflects those points where language is changing and where language is seeking new possibilities of precision" (p. 378). This is not double language—a pairing of learned and local, scholarly and sincere. Instead, it is one that works on historical levels, extending to use dialect falling in and out of usage, words old and new, familiar and coined. Thus, what Leavis calls the "mismarriage" of words keeps language from settling in a crystallized moment in history. This interaction is at once reaching out towards a past, acknowledging a philological history, and then acting...