Page:The Poet's Chantry pg 138.jpg

138 weak, without despising the flesh. But if there be one line of development perceptible throughout our poet's work, it is an increasing tendency toward the human and concrete. It is a long, long cry from the "proud and lonely scorn" of temptation that goes singing through his youthful "Ideal," to the humbled yet resolute wrestling of his "Dark Angel." For the rest, we shall have to admit that Lionel Johnson's song was for the few rather than the many—that the nun-like delicacy and austerity of his muse made any popular recognition quite improbable.

As critic, Johnson has met with a more liberal appreciation. The Art of Thomas Hardy, upon which that reputation rests mainly, is universally recognised as one of the sanest and most scholarly pieces of work called forth by recent fiction. The subject of this first volume testifies very clearly to its author's singular openness of mind: "I remember," he says, "but few of Mr. Hardy's general sentiments, about the meaning of the unconscious universe, or of conscious mankind, with which I do not disagree his tone of thought neither charms nor compels me to acquiesce; but it is because I am thus averse from the attitude of a disciple, that I admire Mr. Hardy's art so confidently." Here, in truth, is the perfect critical temper—leading the artist to whom spiritual laws were the prime realities to lay his tribute at the shrine of another artist, of another philosophy. But in Hardy, Lionel Johnson recognised the essential humanist, the legitimate descendant of a noble line of English novelists, a master of constructive art, and a truthful portrayer of Wessex life and thought.

"He dwells, in a dramatic meditation, upon the earth's antiquity, the thought of the world's grey fathers,' and, in particular, upon certain tracts