Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/233

 make correct Sapphic stanzas sound smooth in English (which Swinburne proved could be done), but the perplexity of the reader begins before he has had time to recognize the metrical scheme. The word chancefulness stops him almost as soon as he begins to read. He then stumbles a bit over unchosen, but reads on, until stopped again by fellowlike. Upon repeated readings he will, if he is persistent, gradually divine the poet's meaning, grow accustomed to the curious cadences of the verse, and finally will experience a distinct pleasure in re-perusing the piece. The cardinal stumbling-block to an appreciation of Hardy's lyric poetry is undoubtedly the effort exacted of the reader by the seemingly uncouth words habitually employed. Trained linguists have observed, however, that Hardy is very rarely indeed responsible for the actual coinage or invention of a new word, and that in the few cases in which he produces a new form, it is invariably evolved logically out of established and known elements of the language. His practice is not, for the most part, that of word-manufacture, but of word-preservation. Unconsciously following the example of the celebrated Hariri and other Arabic poets and men of letters who devoted their lives to the preservation of their ancient language in all its marvellous flexibility, he attempts to enliven the English of modern poetry through the systematic but always felicitous introduction of antique and pseudo-antique forms and expressions. In the fulfilment of this aim he consistently reverts to the native, or Anglo-Saxon, element of the language, and very rarely resurrects an old French derivative. The hapax legomena of Hardy are almost