Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/67

 Through his mother, then, Hardy gained his affection for the soil and its creatures, his subjective appreciation for their emotions and reactions, his fiery strain of humanitarianism, his artistic taste, in the superficial sense of the expression. This emancipated countryman-spirit of his can account for the craftsman in him, but never for the imaginative psychologist. It can account for the ambitious writer, determined to make his mark in the London reviews, but never for the cosmic poet. It can account for many of his affections, perhaps, but not for his detached realization of all-too-human motives. The responsibility for these latter endowments rests largely with the French nobility transmitted through Hardy the master-builder. Partially overshadowing the yeoman's spiritual harmony with the commoner and the peasant is the overlord-adventurer's intolerance of the villein's naïveté, the occasional cruel sneer in his attitude towards the serf.

The combination of these two inherited planes, each with its own particular breadth as well as restriction, enabling the poet to view and to criticise his world objectively while experiencing it to the full subjectively, has had a mighty share in making Hardy the full-dimensioned genius he is.

But the necessary third dimension, to provide body, solidity, and the feel and flavor of genuine reality to the quality of Hardy's poetic, is perforce discoverable only in his environment. That "Wessex" which first deter-