Those who dissent from Byron’s dictum that Keats was “snuffed out by an article” usually add that no author was ever killed by criticism; yet there seems little doubt that the critics killed Thomas Hardy the novelist, and our only consolation is that from the ashes of the novelist, phœnix-like rose Thomas Hardy the Poet. As a novelist, Hardy began and finished his career in the days of Victoria, but though he has only been asserting himself as a poet since then, his earliest verse was written in the sixties; his first collection of poetry, the “Wessex Poems,” appeared in 1898, and his second in the closing year of the Queen’s reign. These facts should give us pause when we are disposed to sneer again at Victorian literature. Even the youngest scribe among us is constrained to grant the greatness of this living Victorian, so if we insist that the Victorians are over-rated we imply some disparagement of their successors, who have admittedly produced no novelists that rank so high as Hardy and few poets, if any, that rank higher. Born at Upper Bockhampton, a village near Dorchester, on the 2nd June, 1840, Mr. Hardy passed his childhood and youth amid the scenes and people that were, in due season, to serve as material for his stories and poems. At seventeen a natural bent drew him to choose architecture as a profession, and he studied first under an ecclesiastical architect in Dorchester, then, three years later, in London, under Sir Arthur Blomfield, proving his efficiency by winning the Tite prize for architectural design, and the Institute of British Architects’ prize and medal for an essay on Colored and Terra Cotta Architecture. But he was already finding himself and realizing that the work he was born to do was not such as could be materialized in brick and stone. He had been writing verse in his leisure and, in his twenties, “practised the writing of poetry” for five years with characteristic thoroughness; but, recognizing perhaps that it was not to be taken seriously as a means of livelihood, he presently abandoned that art; to resume it triumphantly when he was nearing sixty.
