The Soil (. . . 1850)
graph in the preface which he wrote in 1908 for the Select Poems of Barnes reads:
Dialect, it may be added, offered another advantage to him as a writer, whatever difficulties it may have for strangers who try to follow it. Even if he often used the dramatic form of peasant speakers as a pretext for the expression of his own mind and experiences—which cannot be doubted—yet he did not always do this, and the assumed characters of husbandman and hamleteer enabled him to elude in his verse those dreams and speculations that cannot leave alone the mystery of things—possibly an unworthy mystery and disappointing if solved, though one that has a harrowing fascination for many poets,—and helped him to fall back on dramatic truth, by making his personages express the notions of life prevalent in their sphere.
There can certainly be no doubt about the harrowing fascination that the mystery of things has always possessed for Hardy, and none about the vigorous and outspoken way he sometimes chose to express his personal reaction to it.
Widely separated as the two poets were in the matter of faith and its expression in their literary works, they approached each other very closely when they turned the eye of sympathetic observation upon the simple people and the simple details of country life. Here we find the effect of the older man's kindly attitude to have been a mighty influence over the young iconoclast. Outside of his admiration for recognized masters, such as the Greek tragic dramatists, the Old Testament poets, Shakespeare, Shelley, Goethe and Schopenhauer, the only great literary enthusiasm displayed by Hardy was for the unassuming work of Barnes—and this despite the self-evident
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