it proceeds from a sheer compulsive force. For a
moment it startles; a moment more and the echo of those very words is
reverberant with accumulated purpose. They are pitiless as the poem; the
sign of an ultimate obedience is upon them. Whence came the power that
compelled it? Can the source be defined or indicated? We believe it can
be indicated, though not defined. We can show where to look for the
mystery, that in spite of our regard remains a mystery still. We are
persuaded that almost on the instant that it was felt the original
emotion of the poem was endorsed Perhaps it came to the poet as the pain
of a particular and personal experience; but in a little or a long
while--creative time is not measured by days or years--it became, for
him, a part of the texture of the general life. It became a
manifestation of life, almost, nay wholly, in the sacramental sense, a
veritable epiphany. The manifold and inexhaustible quality of life was
focused into a single revelation. A critic's words do not lend
themselves to the necessary precision. We should need to write with
exactly the same power as Mr Hardy when he wrote 'the hope-hour stroked
its sum,' to make our meaning likewise inevitable. The word 'revelation'
is fertile in false suggestion; the creative act of power which we seek
to elucidate is an act of plenary apprehension, by which one
manifestation, one form of life, one experience is seen in its rigorous
relation to all other and to all possible manifestations, forms, and
experiences. It is, we believe, the act which Mr Hardy himself has tried
to formulate in the phrase which is the title of one of his books of
poems--_Moments of Vision_.

Only those who do not read Mr Hardy could make the mistake of supposing
that on his lips such a phrase had a mystical implication. Between
belief and logic lies a third kingdom, which the mystics and the
philosophers alike are too eager to forget--the kingdom of art, no less
the residence of truth than the two other realms, and to some, perhaps,
more authentic even than they. Therefore when we expand the word
'vision' in the phrase to 'aesthetic vision' we mean, not the perception
of beauty, at least in the ordinary sense of that ill-used word, but the
apprehension of truth, the recognition of a complete system of valid
relations incapable of logical statement. Such are the acts of unique
apprehension which Mr Hardy, we believe, implied by his title. In a
'moment of vision' the po