"The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I,"
he tells us in The Darkling Thrush, which is a kind of personal parable.
It is his melancholy severity that gives much of its quality to a book otherwise of varying merit. Hardy has never written with flowing rhythms, either in verse or in prose, and his verse often halts or dances in hobnails. But he has studied the technique of verse more carefully than most of his critics seem to be aware of, and he has a command of very difficult metres which, if it were unvarying, would be really remarkable. But his command of his materials is uncertain. He crowds syllables together inharmoniously. He is always experimenting in metrical effects, and he has made some perfectly successful experiments of a very unusual kind; but he is too fond of long lines, in which the cadence gets lost by the way. He sometimes writes gaily and trippingly, as in the delightfully naughty jingle of The Ruined Maid, which Congreve could not have done better.
Neither in verse nor in prose is Hardy a master of style. Both in prose and in verse he has interesting things to say, and he can say them in an intensely personal way. He can force words to say exactly what he wants them to. But their subjection is never even willing, they seem to have spite against him because he is stronger than they. That is why they have never given him all their souls along with their services. Some of their magic remains over: his verse does not sing. But so far as it is possible to be a poet without having a singing voice, Hardy is a poet, and a profoundly interesting one.
After Hardy carried out his ambitious design, The Dynasts: a Drama in Three Parts, it was easily seen that his instinct was right when he brushed aside the remonstrances of his critics and admirers, and persisted with his plan of making the Napoleonic era the subject of a vast puppet drama. Those who discouraged his enterprise, and wished instead for another Tess or Jude the Obscure, owned that had this world-drama of The Dynasts remained an unrealized dream or a fragment, they would have missed a manifestation of its
