Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/157

 heightened through the very skilful use of the alternating refrains: "Wearily waiting" and "cheerfully mating!"

Confession to a Friend in Trouble, an adventure in psychology, is a sonnet that foreshadows the "magician in character" of the later novels in its attempt to get at a half-hidden and subtle moral and mental phenomenon. It is the expression of a vague and shamefully selfish half-thought, which has visited the poet uninvited, and is a striking monument to his great and, in the end, successful struggle against a total loss of faith in human nature.

In Revulsion, a very fine presentation of a theme that is not very pleasing to the general reader, one can observe how early a disillusioned conception of the emotion of love had taken hold of the writer. Realizing that love is the great disturber and tormentor of man, through the agency of alluring woman, the poet shrinks from feeling its devastating power, and prays:

In this Schopenhauerian outcry against the instinct of love which brings only distress and trouble in its wake, Hardy hints at a conscious renunciation of life, with all its toil, passion, tragedy, and beauty, as being unworthy of the pain and distress encountered in living it—and this is the very essence of his early pessimism.

The tender emotion is not quite so drastically or callously treated in the series of four sonnets entitled She, to Him, in which the ideas and the situation are about equally important. The motif of the first is one found frequently in the poems, even in those of the twentieth