Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/247



Thus runs the poem in its final state, as found in the Collected Poems. On its first appearance in Satires of Circumstance, however, it bore the note "Written before the War," possibly to defend the rather patent cynicism of the original final stanza, omitted in the definitive edition, in which "he is set right by a wise man who pities his blindness," and which reads:

It is futile to speculate on the reasons why a writer who had the courage to publish Jude, and, during the war, The Pity of It, should have seen fit to "censor" this original conclusion to the poem. So let us proceed to the blasts of the Hardyan bugle that accompanied the early stages of the greatest Historical Calamity, or Conflict of Peoples—to quote from the Preface of The Dynasts—"artificially brought about in our own times."

As might have been expected of a man of seventy-four, Hardy in this later group was no longer attracted by the merely picturesque aspects of war. His utter repugnance to the methods of modern warfare was strongly brought out in Then and Now (1915), which set in con-