Music and Hardy's Poetry

Music and Hardy's Poetry By P. E. Mitchell University of Toronto From his first appearance before the public as a poet in 1899, Hardy's readers and critics have commented upon the roughness of his verse—the absence of smooth, polished surfaces and eccentricities of diction. This stylistic angularity was often accounted for by reference to Hardy's "lack of technical accomplishment."1 F. R. Leavis, in a characteristically contentious yet influential judgment, perhaps best summed up this view when he asserted that, although Hardy had written half a dozen poems that must be considered of the first order, to read him in bulk was for the most part to be confronted by "a countryman," "a naive conservative" with a "pre-critical" mind.2 This has become the most common opinion among readers who are not "Hardy specialists." It may, therefore, surprise general readers who, like Leavis, are in the habit of thinking of Hardy as a "countryman" to find that many of his most eminent critics have seen his rugged poetic surfaces as convincing evidence, not of his conservatism and rural origins, but of his modernity. Lytton Strachey, for example, conceded that the poetry was "full of ugly and cumbrous expressions, clumsy metres and flat prosaic turns of speech," but he saw these characteristics as functional: ... he speaks; he does not sing. Or rather, he talks—in the quiet voice of a modem man or woman, who finds it difficult, as modem men and women do, to put into words exactly what is in his 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.3 For Strachey, Hardy's "clumsy metres"—seen as quietly hesitant— are an index of his modernity. Nor has it been only Hardy's contemporaries who have seen him as a poet of peculiarly modem consciousness. Samuel Hynes, for example, one of the most influential and representative critics of Hardy's poetry in recent years, has continued to see Hardy as a modem, though from a greater historical distance than critics like Strachey. "We can say of Hardy's style," Hynes says, "that it is assertively unmusical and often harsh" because "he could not write poems of song or celebration—in his experience he found nothing to sing about and nothing to celebrate."4 Hardy's style is, in Hynes' view, a "metaphor for belief," a belief which places him "in the main line of Victorian rational308 Mitchell: Hardy's Poetry This, often with minor variations, has become the most widely accepted critical view of the poetry. Hardy's style is characterized as harsh and angular, rugged and cacophonous: the style of a deracinated, post-Darwinian modem. This is, of course, a view which gains some support from Hardy himself. In a 1919 letter addressed to Edmund Gosse, Hardy wrote that his "instinctive feeling has been to avoid the jewelled line in poetry" as being effeminate.6 What we notice in all this, however, is that champions of Hardy's poetry have been concerned to give an account of his style which will show that it is not a consequence of mere technical incompetence, but rather a result of certain beliefs about and attitudes toward modem existence. One of the foremost characteristics of Hardy's poetic style, viewed in this way, is that it is "unmusical" and prosaic. Although it was right to point out Hardy's desertion of Tennysonian mellifluousness , we must still ask whether Hardy's poetry does not possess musical qualities. For to say that his poetry is not at all musical and to say that it is not musical in the way Tennyson's poetry is, are two very different propositions . And the importance of distinguishing clearly between the two goes to the very heart of our response to the poetry. Reading Hardy's critics, it is clear that in excluding "poetic music" from the poetry, we are being asked to note not only the absence of a merely decorative euphony, but also the absence of certain fundamental attitudes and beliefs for which "music" in poetry is taken to stand...