Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/229

 'Resolution and Independence.' The poet, wandering on the moor in richly gloomy thought, comes upon a poor old man, bent, broken, leaning over a pool, gathering leeches for his livelihood. The poet questions him how it goes with him. The old man replies, quietly enough, that it goes pretty hard, that it is going rather worse; but that he still perseveres and manages to get on, in one way or another. Whereupon Wordsworth falls into a kind of visionary trance. The old peasant looms for him to a gigantic stature. He becomes the heroic 'man with the hoe'; a shadowy shape against the sky; man in the abstract, clothed in all the moral splendor of the poet's own imagination.

This same trick of the fancy Hardy plays with his famous dairy-maid, Tess of the D'Urbervilles. She is but an ignorant, instinctive, erring piece of Eve's flesh. Yet, says Hardy, drawing upon the riches of his own poetic associations, 'The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.' Thereupon he proceeds to invest the dairy-maid with the tragic emotions and import of a heroine of. Thebes or Pelops' line. He infers, by a poetic fallacy, that she is as interesting and as significant to herself as she is to him.