[In the following essay, Jacobson states that reviewers have often ignored the sophisticated philosophy which led Hardy to test the limits of the use of language in his poetry.]

Hardy as philosopher? The philosophizing of Thomas Hardy? Say the words out loud or write them down—and a series of other words and phrases follows inexorably. Pessimism. Gloom. Melancholy. Fate. Meaninglessness. The impossibility of faith. The mysterious workings of chance. The malignity of coincidence. Tragedy. Morbidity. Decadence. (That last term is T. S. Eliot's contribution, in After Strange Gods, to the critical lexicon.) Sooner or later Edmund Gosse's famous put-down is also bound to come to mind: “What has Providence done to Mr. Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?”

Even readers devoted to Hardy's work will know why it provokes responses of this kind. Angel Clare's woebegone parody of Browning—“God's not in his heaven: all's wrong with the world”—may be dramatically appropriate to his character and to the critical moment in Tess of the d'Urbervilles at which he utters it. But we can hardly doubt that Clare is speaking there not just for himself but for his creator too; that he is expressing an attitude, an emotion, a belief, even a kind of proselytizing impulse, that is found almost everywhere in the oeuvre. There is something damagingly recognizable in the half-conscious enthusiasm of Clare's reflection—in the relish, at once minatory and faintly comic, with which it enunciates its own despair.

In any case, Hardy frequently expresses similar sentiments in both the novels and the poems without making any attempt to “mediate” them through the consciousness of a fictional character. The final, famous comment on the execution of the heroine of Tess of the d'Urbervilles “‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess”—is a case in point. So is the passing reference in The Mayor of Casterbridge to “the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum.” (Offered as an explanation, almost as throttling as the noose looped around Tess's neck, of why Henchard will make no further effort to resist the successive blows that life, or the novelist, has dealt against him.) Or to take almost at random an example from the poems:

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass casualty obstructs the sun and rain
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. …
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

—“Hap” (The ellipsis in the passage is Hardy's own.)

The persistence of these attitudes, emotional prepossessions, and habits of mind—and the depth at which they were held—certainly entitles them to the dignity of being described as “a reaction to the universe.” That was a phrase that John Middleton Murry coined in trying to explain why each of Hardy's works affects us as part of “a vaster and more comprehensive whole.” Although he was writing at that point about the poetry, Murry was convinced that the verse and the fiction were essentially of a piece; and, on the face of it, there is enough misery, regret, chagrin, and wistfulness in both bodies of writing, as well as a sufficient supply of wretched coincidences and unhappy endings, to justify this view. Nevertheless, I want to argue that some of the poems, at least, have an additional quality that is peculiar to them alone. Hardy's overall “reaction to the universe” is certainly discernible in them. But so is something else. In mode and intention, these poems manage to be genuinely philosophical as well.

Traditionally the philosopher's task has been that of trying to develop articulate, settled systems of thought about the nature of the world, about the moral constitution of mankind, and about the grounds and modalities of knowledge itself. Traditionally, too, it was expected that the arguments advanced by a thinker within any one of these areas of inquiry would be coherent not just with themselves, as it were, but also with those put forward in the other two, regardless of the differences in emphasis between them.

Obviously no such system, or interlocking set of systems, is to be found in Hardy's poems. So what justification is there for the claim I have just made about them, or some of them? For an answer, I turn first to Schopenhauer—a grand philosophical system builder in the traditional manner, who, as it happens, used to be held in special esteem by literary people, among them Tolstoy and Hardy himself. “The philosophical disposition,” Schopenhauer wrote, “consists especially in our being capable of wondering at a commonplace thing of daily occurrence, whereby we are induced to make the universal [i.e., the entire class] of that phenomenon our problem.” (Italics in the original.)

In starker (or more Hardyesque) terms, Schopenhauer goes on:

Undoubtedly it is the knowledge of death, and therewith the consideration of the suffering and misery of life that give the strongest impulse to philosophical reflection and metaphysical explanations of the world. If our life were without end and free from pain, it would possibly not occur to anyone to ask why the world exists, and why it does so in precisely this way.

And again:

Not merely that the world exists, but still more that it is such a miserable and melancholy world, is the punctum pruriens [tormenting problem] of metaphysics.

For the mass of people, Schopenhauer then suggests, the “wonder” and “torment” of which he speaks can be allayed only by religious belief and practice. For a much smaller, more reflective number, however, nothing will suffice but the development of, or an adherence to, a metaphysical system of the kind he himself had already developed when he wrote the above words. (The quotations have been taken from volume 2, chapter 7, of The World as Will and Representation.) Nothing else had the power to free them from their “perplexity,” as he puts it on another page, about the world in which they find themselves. We have, on the one hand, therefore, the majority who have to rely on religious dogma and ritual, and, on the other hand, philosophers and their followers. And the rest of us? I mean those people who experience something of the wonder and the torment Schopenhauer has described, who reject the consolations of religious belief, and yet who lack the capacity or the appetite for sustained, abstract argumentation with themselves and their peers that is necessary for the creation, or the sympathetic comprehension, or the critical destruction, indeed, of a fully fledged metaphysical system. What are they to do? How are they to cope?

Well, they can always fall back on their habitual reaction to the universe, whatever that may be—as Hardy often did in his novels and poems; and as most of us do, in quasi-automatic fashion, both at times of crisis and in states of mere reverie. In other poems, however, we find Hardy doing something else, something more surprising. It is as if the brevity of the poetic forms he customarily adopted, the concentration it permitted on single episodes and single issues—rather than on entire lives or groups of lives—enabled him to go back to the original condition from which Schopenhauer insists all philosophical thought springs; and not only to go back to it but, remarkably enough, to remain there.

I quote Schopenhauer's words again: “The philosophical disposition consists especially in our being capable of wondering at a commonplace thing of daily occurrence, whereby we are induced to make the universal [the entire class] of that phenomenon our problem.” Surely that sentence can in itself be thought of as an accurate and even touching description of the movement of mind and emotion we find over and over again in the most impressive of Hardy's poems.

Hardy wrote verse from his adolescence onward, though he began bringing out his poems only after his last-published, though not his last-written, novel, The Well-Beloved, had appeared in 1897. In the remaining twenty years of his life, he published nine more volumes of poetry, his final collection, Winter Words, coming out posthumously in 1929. He also wrote a verse-drama on the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts, which appeared in three parts between 1904 and 1908. His decision to abandon fiction and confine himself to verse owed something to the hostile reception given to Jude the Obscure, on the grounds of the novel's supposed obscenity; but the biographical and literary evidence shows that poetry was anything but a pis aller for him. Rather, it could be called his earliest as well as his last calling.

Anyone looking into an edition of the collected poems for the first time might be struck by two apparently contradictory features of the large volume. The first is the uniformity of Hardy's poetry; the second is its variety. By uniformity I mean that it is impossible to trace any kind of development, any growth or decline in power, any change in subject matter, technique, or even emotional tone, from the beginning to the end of his poetic career. No doubt this is in part due to the fact that he had been accumulating poems or drafts of poems for so long before appearing in public as a poet; these were then drawn in irregular fashion into his successive books. The result is that the felicities of his verse are found as frequently in the first collection as in the last; so are the lapses into awkwardness and bathos to which he was always prone; so are those turns of phrase and rhyme that somehow combine the felicitous and the awkward in a manner unlike anything to be found elsewhere in English poetry.

There are of course sequences of poems that plainly belong to one or another specific period of Hardy's life—those he wrote during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), for example; or, even more notably, those written after Emma Hardy's death in 1912, which celebrate and mourn the brief period of happiness he and she had known together, as well as the decades of conjugal misery that followed. (Readers of the available accounts of Hardy's life are likely to feel that they can hardly imagine a more unhappy marriage than his to Emma. Then they go on to learn about his second marriage, to Florence.) However, groups of poems like those just mentioned do not differ in style or vocabulary from the rest of his output; they appear intermixed with others that could have been produced at any time during his adult life; even the themes, moods, and preoccupations that they explore with their own special intensity are familiar from other contexts and in other guises.

So much for what I have called the “uniformity” of the verse. As for its “variety,” he wrote hundreds of dramatic, descriptive, and meditative poems of all kinds, lyrics, love songs, ballads, sonnets, drinking songs, character sketches, poems on public issues and events (the sinking of the Titanic, the outbreak or the ending of wars, an eclipse of the moon), tributes to other poets (Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Swinburne), as well as poems that combine these genres, or elements of them, in unexpected ways. The verse forms, rhythms, and rhyme schemes he used vary from poem to poem in what seems to be a positively compulsive manner. No particular form is matched consistently to any particular genre or type of subject matter. (Blank verse, however, appears only in The Dynasts; all of Hardy's other poetry is rhymed.) To complicate matters still further, he will frequently begin a poem in one elaborate stanzaic form, frequently a form newly invented for the occasion, only to switch to another halfway through; sometimes he will then return to the original form before the end of the poem, sometimes not.

The effect of all this is bound to be, intermittently at least, one of “toomuchness.” The formal restlessness of the poet, and the ingenuities of rhyme and syntax into which it frequently drives him, can make an almost childlike impression at times. Nor is it unfair to call childlike some of the delight that Hardy takes in his dramatic and narrative verse especially, in melodramatic coincidences very much like those to be found in the novels, or in a sepulchral spookiness, also reminiscent of much to be found in the prose. However, the word “childlike” can be used with a more interesting and honorific purpose in mind—one that has a direct relevance to the claims I am making here.

I refer once again, and for the last time, to Schopenhauer's “wonder” at “a commonplace thing of daily occurrence” and at the human capacity to make “the universal of that phenomenon our problem.” Consider “Proud Songsters”:

The thrushes sing as the sun is going,
And the finches whistle in ones and pairs,
And as it gets dark loud nightingales
          In bushes
Pipe, as they can when April wears,
          As if all time were theirs.
These are brand-new birds of twelve-
          months' growing,
Which, a year ago, or less than twain,
No finches were, nor nightingales,
          Nor thrushes,
But only particles of grain,
          And earth, and air, and rain.

The “commonplace” here is the annual din of birdsong that rises to the ears even of city dwellers every spring. To define the “entire class” of the phenomenon that has become “our problem” is a more difficult matter. We can come closest to it, I believe, by way of a question—a childlike question, if you like. Where were we, what were we before we came into existence? (“We,” here, refers to all living things.) Alternatively that question could be put in terms more abstract or general still: one might say that the poem speaks of the baffling incommensurability between life (with all its movement and purposes) and the insentient matter out of which it emerges, by which it is surrounded, and to which it eventually returns. However, a complementary and more familiar question in this context is bound to be suggested by my last phrase; Shakespeare's Hamlet, among many others, was famously tormented by it. What becomes of us, what transformations does the material of which we are composed undergo after our death? And what do such transformations tell us about the sense of individual selfhood that we prize so highly while we possess it—or are possessed by it? Not surprisingly, Hardy deals more often in his poems with the question in this form than he does with the startling inversion of it—the unique inversion of it, so far as I know—presented in “Proud Songsters.”

Moving as they constantly do from the commonplace occurrence to the general case, and back again, many of Hardy's poems grapple with a variety of other childlike questions of this kind. What is it like to be dead? What is it like never to have lived? How much of the dead lives in us and how does it show itself? Why is it, or how is it, that I can become aware of this rock or leaf or table when it knows nothing of me? How is it that I can retrace my steps in space and can never go back in time? Or is it actually easier for me to retrace my steps in time because of the memories I carry with me; whereas the person who originally walked this way has already vanished, since (being here) I am no longer what he was? Why can I see so far ahead of me in space and not even an hour ahead of me in time? Where does time go when it has passed, or when we have passed through it? Why is there so much of it on either side of our meager life spans? And so much space around the little area each of us occupies? Are memories real? If so, why are they so impalpable? If not, why do they affect us so deeply? What becomes of them when the person who possessed them has died? How do we arrive at the limits of our knowledge, and how do we recognize those limits when we get there? What does that act of recognition feel like? What is it like to be a cow, or a hedgehog? Or creatures humbler still?

“AN AUGUST MIDNIGHT”

I

A shaded lamp, and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter—winged, horned, and
          spined—
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While 'mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly that rubs its hands …

II

Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point of space.
—My guests besmear my new-penned line,
Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.
“God's humblest, they!” I muse. Yet why?
They know earth-secrets that know not I.

No doubt the idea of a fly or a moth knowing “earth-secrets” that a human cannot know may seem merely whimsical to some readers; just as the questions asked previously may appear too simple for serious grown-ups to bother with. Still, on the subject of the moths and flies, it was Wittgenstein (usually considered to have been a deeply serious grown-up) who remarked in The Philosophical Investigations, “If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand it.” And as for the childishness of the questions asked earlier—or their pointlessness, as some down-to-earth or ruthlessly positivistic readers may feel them to be—it was Wittgenstein, again, who said (in the Tractatus): “In order to put a limit to thinking, we have to think on both sides of the limit.”

That is precisely what Hardy is trying to do in the two poems I have quoted and in many others that are both like them and yet, always, fluctuatingly different. Because of the intimate terms in which the problems are posed and the homely contexts in which he seeks to find answers to them, the intellectual sophistication of what is at stake has gone unnoticed—as indeed has the quasi-instinctive movement of his mind away from the “architectural” ambitions of the philosophers of the nineteenth century to the piecemeal linguistic worryings of their successors. (From Schopenhauer to Wittgenstein, as it were.)

One of the central issues that Hardy addresses again and again is this: How is it that we can conceive, talk about, and even base our calculations on aspects of the universe that, by their very nature, defeat both our understanding and our imagination? The expanses of geological or cosmological time (“At Castle Boterel”) might be cited here; or the expanses of astronomical space (“At a Lunar Eclipse”); or, for that matter, the large, undifferentiated oppositions—life and death, matter and creatureliness, knowledge and nescience—that manifest themselves in such different forms wherever we look. (Notice the care with which in “Proud Songsters” Hardy distinguishes by sound and habitat between the various species of bird he mentions. Once nothing more than “particles,” they now “sing” or “whistle” or “pipe” as each in its kind has immemorially done; they hide in bushes or show themselves in ones and twos as their respective natures compel them.) He reaches outward to ask whether our capacity to conceive and talk about that which we cannot understand or imagine should be considered a failure of the human mind—or its greatest triumph. And he reaches inward to ask how the different modes of awareness and ignorance to which we are committed, from which we cannot escape, affect our most intimate apprehensions of our individual lives. Why, for example, are we so prone to valuing in retrospect that which we barely noticed when it was present in its fullness and presentness before us? Or can it be that, because of some other, inexpressible failure in our capacities, fullness and presentness belong exclusively to retrospect and never to the unmediated, extempore event itself?

All this may help us to understand better one of the most striking stylistic features of Hardy's poems: a feature, moreover, that is often dismissed as a sign of the poet's naïveté (not to say childishness), his simplicity of mind, his rurality, his failure fully to recover from his provincial, lower-class upbringing. I refer to the extraordinary number of neologisms to be found in the verse. Anyone who opens the collected poems at random and goes through a handful of pages in cursory fashion will come on a host of these. My own trawl of three or four minutes' duration produced the following: fellow-yearsman, wistlessness, crumb-outcaster, outleant, fervorless, riverooze, God-obeyer, unhope, circleted, The To-Be, unvisioned, ill-motherings, corpse-thing, forthshown, edgewise, Time-outrun, time-torn.

Several things are noticeable about this list, which obviously could be replaced with equal ease by an entirely different one—and so on, almost indefinitely. First, many of the words are compounds; second, many of them are negative, not to say gloomy, compounds; third, such words are relatively rarely found in Hardy's novels. (Dialect terms are another matter.) The first two observations are perhaps self-explanatory. The English language lends itself more readily to the invention of compounds than to that of wholly new terms; and Hardy's temperament—his reaction to the universe—for the most part encouraged him to construct gloomy ones. But something much more important is involved here. In the poems I am speaking of, Hardy was working at the very limits of the thinkable—of that which it is possible for our brains to encompass. In order to do this, he was also compelled to work at the very limits of the language—of that which it is possible for us to say. Hence the necessity he felt constantly to invent new words.

As readers we witness his attempts to create a language that would enable him to say not only everything he wanted to say, but also, more remarkably still, everything he knew he would never be able to say.