Thomas Hardy remains the greatest poet and novelist of the England of
our age. His poetry, Wessex Poems, Poems of Past and Present, Time's
Laughing-Stock, Satires of Circumstance, make up the most powerful and
original contribution to modern verse, produced recently, either in
England or America. Not to value Hardy's poetry as highly as all but
his very greatest prose is to betray oneself as having missed the full
pregnancy of his bitter and lovely wisdom.
He has, like Henry James, three "manners" or styles--the first
containing such lighter, friendlier work, as "Life's Little Ironies,"
"Under a Greenwood Tree," and "The Trumpet Major"--the second being
the period of the great tragedies which assume the place, in his work,
of "Hamlet," "Lear," "Macbeth" and "Othello," in the work of
Shakespeare--the third, of curious and imaginative interest, expresses
in quite a particular way, Mr. Hardy's own peculiar point of view. The
Well-Beloved, Jude the Obscure, and the later poems would belong to
this epoch.
At his best Hardy is a novelist second to none. His style has a
grandeur, a distinction, a concentration, which we find neither in
Balzac nor Dostoievsky.
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