et recognises in a single separate incident of
life, life's essential quality. The uniqueness of the whole, the
infinite multiplicity and variety of its elements, are manifested and
apprehended in a part. Since we are here at work on the confines of
intelligible statement, it is better, even at the cost of brutalising a
poem, to choose an example from the book that bears the mysterious name.
The verses that follow come from 'Near Lanivet, 1872.' We choose them as
an example of Mr Hardy's method at less than its best, at a point at
which the scaffolding of his process is just visible.

'There was a stunted hand-post just on the crest.
Only a few feet high:
She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest,
At the crossways close thereby.

'She leant back, being so weary, against its stem,
And laid her arms on its own,
Each open palm stretched out to each end of them,
Her sad face sideways thrown.

'Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day
Made her look as one crucified
In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way,
And hurriedly "Don't," I cried.

'I do not think she heard. Loosing thence she said,
As she stepped forth ready to go,
"I am rested now.--Something strange came into my head;
I wish I had not leant so!'...

'And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see
In the running of Time's far glass
Her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be
Some day.--Alas, alas!'

Superstition and symbolism, some may say; but they mistakenly invert the
order of the creative process. The poet's act of apprehension is wholly
different from the lover's fear; and of this apprehension the
chance-shaped crucifix is the symbol and not the cause. The
concentration of life's vicissitude upon that white-clothed form was
first recognised by a sovereign act of aesthetic understanding or
intuition; the seeming crucifix supplied a scaffolding for its
expression; it afforded a clue to the method of transposition into words
which might convey the truth thus apprehended; it suggested an
equivalence. The distinction may appear to be hair-drawn, but we believe
that it is vital to the theory of poetry as a whole, and to an
understanding of Mr Hardy's poetry in particular. Indeed, in it must be
sought the meaning of another of his titles, 'Satires of Circumstance,'
where the particular circumstance is neither typical nor fortuitous, but
a symbol n