ecessary to communicate to others the sense of a quality in
life more largely and variously apprehended by the poet. At the risk of
appearing fantastic we will endeavour still further to elucidate our
meaning. The poetic process is, we believe, twofold. The one part, the
discovery of the symbol, the establishment of an equivalence, is what we
may call poetic method. It is concerned with the transposition and
communication of emotion, no matter what the emotion may be, for to
poetic method the emotional material is, strictly, indifferent. The
other part is an esthetic apprehension of significance, the recognition
of the all in the one. This is a specifically poetic act, or rather the
supreme poetic act. Yet it may be absent from poetry. For there is no
necessary connection between poetic apprehension and poetic method.
Poetic method frequently exists without poetic apprehension; and there
is no reason to suppose that the reverse is not also true, for the
recognition of greatness in poetry is probably not the peculiar
privilege of great poets. We have here, at least a principle of division
between major and minor poetry.

Mr Hardy is a major poet; and we are impelled to seek further and ask
what it is that enables such a poet to perform this sovereign act of
apprehension and to recognise the quality of the all in the quality of
the one. We believe that the answer is simple. The great poet knows what
he is looking for. Once more we speak too precisely, and so falsely,
being compelled to use the language of the kingdom of logic to describe
what is being done in the kingdom of art. The poet, we say, knows the
quality for which he seeks; but this knowledge is rather a condition
than a possession of soul. It is a state of responsiveness rather than a
knowledge of that to which he will respond. But it is knowledge inasmuch
as the choice of that to which he will respond is determined by the
condition of his soul. On the purity of that condition depends his
greatness as a poet, and that purity in its turn depends upon his
denying no element of his profound experience. If he denies or forgets,
the synthesis--again the word is a metaphor--which must establish itself
within him is fragmentary and false. The new event can wake but partial
echoes in his soul or none at all; it can neither be received into, nor
can it create a complete relation, and so it passes incommensurable from
limbo into forgetfulness.

Mr Hardy stands high abov