352
PARTISAN REVIEW
In that case ... A cItIzen of a democracy shouldn't be alarmed, of
course, to find himself belonging to a minority; though he might get ir–
ritable. If a century can be compared to a political system, a significant
portion of this one's cultural climate could well qualify as a tyranny: that
of modernism. Or, to put it more accurately, of what sailed under that
pennant. And perhaps my thoughts went to Hardy because at about that
time - a decade ago - he habitually began to be billed as a "pre-mod–
ernist."
As definitions go, "pre-modernist" is a reasonably flattering one,
since it implies that the so-defined has paved the road to our just and
happy - stylistically speaking - times. The drawback, though, is that it
pensions an author off squarely into the past, offering all the fringe bene–
fits of scholarly interest, of course, but robbing him in effect of rele–
vance. The past tense is his equivalent of a silver watch.
No orthodoxy, especially not a new one, is capable of honest hind–
sight, and modernism is no exception. While modernism itself presumably
benefits from applying this epithet to Thomas Hardy, he, I am afraid,
does not. In either case, this definition misleads, for Hardy's poetic out–
put, I daresay, has not so much foreshadowed as overshot, and by an
awfully wide margin at that, the development of modern poetry. Had
T.
S. Eliot, for instance, at the time he read Laforgue, read Thomas Hardy
instead (as, I believe, Robert Frost did), the history of poetry in English
in this century, or to say the least its present, might be somewhat more
absorbing. For one thing, where Eliot needs a handful of dust to per–
ceive terror, for Hardy, as he shows in "Shelley's Skylark," a pinch is
enough.
n
All this no doubt sounds to you a touch too polemical. On top of
that, you may wonder whom it is that the man in front of you is argu–
ing with. True, the literature on Thomas Hardy the poet is fairly negli–
gible. There are two or three full-length studies; they are essentially doc–
toral-dissertations-turned-books. There are also two or three biographies
of the man, including one he penned himself, though it bears his wife's
name on the cover. They are worth reading, especially the last if you be–
lieve - as I expect you do - that the artist's life holds the key for the
understanding of his work. If you believe the opposite, you won't lose
much by giving them a miss, since we are here to address his work.
I am arguing, I suppose, against seeing this poet through the prism
of those who came in his stead. First, because, in most cases, those who
came in his stead were operating in relative or absolute ignorance of
Hardy the poet's existence - on this side of the Atlantic particularly. The
