Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/217

 nitely to call his verse "emotional," if by that term is meant the unpremeditated overflow of feeling, untinctured by reason. Romantic love is conspicuously absent from the scheme of The Dynasts, and when it is treated in the lyrics, there is nearly always running through it that kind of matured and disillusioned insight that finds its classic expression in Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes. Of course, this does not mean that emotion is absent—the poet shows unmistakably that he feels, but he cannot help showing at the same time that he knows the "whence" and the "wherefore" of his feeling. This may help one to understand Springrove's statement that the writing of emotional verses was a stage that some types of young men must pass through, as they pass through the stage of shaving for a beard.

Besides his opposition to sentimentalism in modern poetry, Hardy sometimes expressed a total lack of appreciation of the production of beautiful sounds in poetry for their own sake. The sense, the idea of a composition was to him the main consideration, and was not to be subordinated to the texture of the material with which it was presented. The form should always suit the matter; therefore a poet must be a master of the technique of his craft; but his technical dexterity should never be permitted to detract the reader's attention from the things he really wants to say; if he has nothing to say, he should not manufacture beautiful sounds in order to say it. Thus we find him writing, four years after the first Poems and Ballads of Swinburne had started a cult of sound for sound's sake, "The conversation was naturally at first of a nervous, tentative kind, in which, as in