ass casualty' leave its central asseveration
unchanged. There are restatements, enlargements of perspective, a slow
and forceful expansion of the personal into the universal, but the truth
once recognised is never suffered for a moment to be hidden or
mollified. Only a superficial logic would point, for instance, to his

'Wonder if Man's consciousness
Was a mistake of God's,'

as a denial of 'casualty.' To envisage an accepted truth from a new
angle, to turn it over and over again in the mind in the hope of
finding some aspect which might accord with a large and general view is
the inevitable movement of any mind that is alive and not dead. To say
that Mr Hardy has finally discovered unity may be paradoxical; but it is
true. The harmony of the artist is not as the harmony of the preacher or
the philosopher. Neither would grant, neither would understand the
profound acquiescence that lies behind 'Adonais' or the 'Ode to the
Grecian Urn.' Such acquiescence has no moral quality, as morality is
even now understood, nor any logical compulsion. It does not stifle
anger nor deny anguish; it turns no smiling face upon unsmiling things;
it is not puffed up with the resonance of futile heroics. It accepts the
things that are as the necessary basis of artistic creation. This unity
which comes of the instinctive refusal in the great poet to deny
experience, and subdues the self into the whole as part of that which is
not denied, is to be found in every corner of Mr Hardy's mature poetry.
It gives, as it alone can really give, to personal emotion what is
called the impersonality of great poetry. We feel it as a sense of
background, a conviction that a given poem is not the record, but the
culmination of an experience, and that the experience of which it is the
culmination is far larger and more profound than the one which it seems
to record.

At the basis of great poetry lies an all-embracing realism, an adequacy
to all experience, a refusal of the merely personal in exultation or
dismay. Take the contrast between Rupert Brooke's deservedly famous
lines: 'There is some corner of a foreign field ...' and Mr Hardy's
'Drummer Hodge':--

'Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern heart and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.'

We know which is the truer. Which is the more beautiful? Is it not Mr
Hardy? And which (s