De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 44

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‘The dynasts’
Thomas Hardy's epic-drama by Dr. J.A. Russell.

In a previous essay on ‘The Poetry of Thomas Hardy’, mention of ‘The Dynasts’ was made only to except it there from critical commentary. That work necessarily demanded separate consideration, both on account of its great bulk and its essential unity. The lack of popular appeal in the poetry of Hardy has been acknowledged: against that failure in public response must be set the author's own belief in his verse as the vehicle for a last, concentrated truth of things. Let it be recalled that of his Hardy's large poetic output about a half is represented by ‘The Dynasts’, and it will be conceded that the vision of its great design must outsoar all else in the united value of its spiritual significances. It was characteristic of Hardy's mind that at all times he turned to the workings and incidents of life to embrace in his verse all its cardinal situations. But if the miscellany of his shorter poems constitutes an imaginative record of experiences, the immense, single work of ‘The Dynasts’ displays an apprehension of experience in the widest sense. The ultimate question

‘..... of what life was,
And why we were there, and by whose strange laws
That which mattered most could not be,’

is never long absent from his muse; but in ‘The Dynasts’ the motif is conveyed by supernaturals who contest the eternal problem of good and evil. The human characters become mere accessories,

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for an unconscious Destiny is so immanent in their actions that the real protagonists are shadowy figures of this Will or Fate. In a work so mixed and voluminous we do not, of course, expect unity of action any more than perfect unity of style, but just as there is a growing sense that ‘The Dynasts’, despite its broken conventions, is informed by a style, so the drama's vast and complex aim surely unfolds itself as ‘a methaphysic of the real, abstracting and yet visualizing life as a tenuous screen of the invisible.’¹⁾

‘The Dynasts’ is the full harvest of the poetic planting which exercised the poet almost from his nonage, but the mature philosophy that is there displayed is nascent in his earliest poems, just as, in the reverse direction, his genius in ‘Tess of the D'Urbervilles’ and ‘Jude the Obscure’ has not outgrown the courageous perversities of the young author, ‘feeling his way to a method,’ of ‘Desperate Remedies’. ‘The Dynasts,’ therefore, is the culmination of a life of cosmic reflection. The author himself, though he called it an ‘epic-drama’ later, described it in his original preface as a ‘drama’. To that term needless criticism was directed, for Shelley showed that a drama, ‘intended simply for mental performance,’ need be no anomaly. To call it an ‘epic’ would seem to invite strong criticism, on structural grounds, but in point of conception this designation is wholly apposite: ‘The Dynasts’ is in all but the exact, formal sense an epic - the only one in English literature since ‘Paradise Lost’ - and it is an epic of England.

In his preface Hardy refers to the subject-matter as being concerned with ‘the Great Historical Calamity, or Clash of Peoples, artificially brought about some hundred years ago.’ Since then we have had another Great War - one that seems likely in our repudiating revulsion to be known as the Great Madness - but Hardy's cryptic capitals sufficiently indicate his line of treatment even where past wars are concerned. His reaction here was inevitably the embodiment of the tragic elements he so persistently discerned in human destiny. Yet, just because he was so eminently a teller of tales he drew his illustrations from

1) ‘The Times Literary Supplement’, 26 January, 1928.

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memories of his native soil and wove them into a great national story - for ‘The Dynasts’ has been well called the greatest story in all his verse or prose. Here is pictured a mighty struggle of the nations, with the part of Britain necessarily emphasized. And when we have followed the large chronicle through to the long, last agony of Waterloo, where shall we turn to find a parallel if not to the histories of Shakespeare, with Henry V's and Talbots for Wellingtons and Nelsons and faint-hearted Nyms and Pistols for stragglers on the dark Coruña road.

‘The visionary splendour’ that pervades ‘The Dynasts’ so intensely, is seen from the ‘stage directions’ that elaborate the Fore Scene. The Shade of the Earth puts the transcendent question that impresses the outward and inward movements of the poetry of the drama as one rhythm:

‘What of the Immanent Will and Its designs?’

To which the Spirit of the Years makes Hardian reply:

‘It works unconsciously, as heretofore,
Eternal artistries in Circumstance,
Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote,
Seem in themselves Its single listless aim,
And not their consequence.’

The Chorus of the Pities suggests a gleam of hope for man in the celebrated lines:

‘Still thus? Still thus?
Ever unconscious!
An automatic sense
Unweeting why or whence?
But then, the inevitable, as of old,
Although that SO it be we dare not hold!’

But the Spirit of the Years makes inexorable answer:

‘Hold what ye list, fond unbelieving Sprites,
You cannot swerve the pulsion of the Byss’

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To which piece of finality the Spirit of the Pities can only ask in despairing tones:

‘Why doth it so and so, and ever so,
This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel?’

Thus Hardy posits dramatically the crux of all knowledge and wisdom. But in making a philosophical symbol of nature's unfeelingness by summoning spirits that can mock or remain passive and indifferent spectators of the drama enacted beneath them, he throbs with solicitude for the lot of man and gives him his ‘ministering angels’ in the Pities, conceived in the Schlegelian fashion as ‘the Universal Sympathy of human nature - the spectator idealized.’

‘The Dynasts’ comprehends three great divisions, these in turn being arranged in acts and scenes. In Part 1 perhaps the most impressive scene is that of the coronation ceremony of Napoleon and Joséphine in Milan Cathedral. But into its solemn pageantry Hardy cannot refrain from obtruding a personal dissent, for to him ‘the creed that these rich rites disclose’ is no more than

‘A local cult, called Christianity.’

A dire forecast of the impending carnage soon provides the type of contrast the author so loved to make for, pronounce the Semichorus of the Years,

‘Ere systemed suns were globed and lit
The slaughters of the race were writ,

And wasting wars, by land and sea,
Fixed, like all else, immutably!’

In Part 2 the nations ‘are enmeshed in new calamity,’ for now are presented a series of terrific battles - Jena, Coruña, Wagram, Talavera. The prolonged misery of the ill-fated expedition to Walcheren is touchingly told. For those who ‘now rot upon this Isle’ the Chorus of the Pities speaks:

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‘We might have fought, and had we died, died well,

 

Even if in dynasts' discords not our own;

 

Our death-spot some sad haunter might have shown,

 

Some tongue have asked our sires or sons to tell

 

The tale of how we fell;

 

 

 

But such bechanced not. Like the mist we fade,

 

No lustrous lines engrave in story we,

 

Our country's chiefs, for their own fames afraid,

 

Wil leave our names and fates by this pale sea

 

To perish silently!’

But in this Part is also broached the diplomatic dissolution of Napoleon's marrige with Joséphine, and this makes intensely human reading, especially where the coquettish Empress pleads to be told the name of her supplanter. A few scenes later we find the conscienceless Emperor exulting over the birth of a son, for

‘What's one woman's fortune more or less
Beside the schemes of kings!’

Part 3 takes us again to Spain where, round old Salmantica,

‘The skies fling flame on this ancient land.’

But from the clash of the field of Salamanca we are at length called, and with the attendant aerial apparatus of the drama we move to the still grimmer Muscovite lands. Napoleon's far-flung genius has miscarried completely, but against the appalling consequences he frames a personal vindication. He has been subdued, it is true,

‘But by the elements; and them alone.
Not Russia, but God's sky has conquered me!’

Back in the Tuileries, the sardonic Corsican coolly proposes to dismiss the whole black record by having the dome of the Invalides gilded,

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‘To give them something

 

To think about. They'll take to it like children

 

And argue in the cafés right and left

 

On its artistic points - So they'll forget

 

The woes of Moscow.’

Back in the Peninsula, we spectate tremulously at Vitoria. Back, then, to the hampered line of Napoleon's Russian retreat: to the hosts of the nations surging round Leipzig. But the check given to ‘this Christ of war’ is not Chauvenistisally asserted: the battle becomes an envisagement of the sheer horror of concentrated warfare; a presentation of frightfulness not surpassed in the whole drama:

‘There leaps to the sky an earthen wave,

And stones, and men, as though

Some rebel churchyard crew updrave

Their sepulchres from below.’

Bonaparte's abdication follows, but above the turmoil the Spirit of the Pities proclaims with scarcely hopeful intent:

‘Yet it is but Napoleon who has failed.
The pale pathetic peoples still plod on
Through hoodwinkings to light!’

For, thereafter, as the Chorus of Ironic Spirits sings:

‘The Congress of Vienna sits,
And war becomes a war of wits,’

till

‘Priests of Peace prepare once more
To fight as they have fought before!’

With Napoleon's coup de main the stage is set for the greatest and last scene of Waterloo.

Wellington considers his army infamous and ill-equipped and his staff unpractised, but directs the colossal operations quite

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unmoved, by the Farm of the Holy Hedge, and in desperate resolve might be the reincaration of Henry V before Harfleur. Even the cold, spiritual commentators are moved by the bitter fury of the fray to consider its corporeal agonies:

‘One needs must be a ghost,’ says the Spirit Sinister,
To move here in the midst 'twixt host and host!
Their balls scream brisk arid breezy tunes through me
As I were an organ-stop. It's merry so;
What damage mortal flesh must undergo!’

Soo too, when things are at their hottest, the Spirit of the Pities is contained to ask:

‘Is this the last Esdraelon of moil
For mortal man's effacement?’

But the Spirit Ironic this time gives reply:

‘Warfare mere,

‘Plied by the Managed for the Managers;
To wit: by frenzied folks who profit nought
For those who profit all!’

As the battle breaks in vindictiveness and baffled rage the Spirit of the Pities presses its humanitarian argument:

‘Why prompts the Will so senseless-shaped a doing?’

This time a Semichorus of Ironic Spirits echoes that

‘A fixed foresightless dream
Is Its whole philosopheme.’

And the last scene of all presents Napoleon in the wood of Bossu, where by a veritable posse of spirits he is made to feel that, though overthrown by the adjusted interests of ‘the dull peoples and-the Dynasts,’ he is the victim of the Will. For him, as for less epoch-making mortals,

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‘Last as first the question rings

 

Of the Will's long travailings;

 

Why the All-mover,

 

Why the All-prover

 

Ever urges on and measures out the chordless chime of Things.’

Yet, only such an honest and drastic creed can satisfy the intellectual requirements of a philosophical drama. If any dénouement in the dramatic sense be looked for, it can only be found in the last, most rapturous, full chorus of the tutelary Spirits:

‘But - a stirring thrills the air
Like to sounds of joyance there

That the rages

Of the ages

Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from from the darts that were,
Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair!’

In the whole range of drama there is nothing that can be set alongside ‘The Dynasts’: novelistically, only a work of such epic proportions as Tolstoi's ‘War and Peace’ is its legitimate counterpart, both in alluring vastness of scene and cosmic reach. Hardy's philosophic media, however, necessitate the subordination of the theme of love. Here there can be so little appeal to Aphrodite that only in the purposively lewd lyric of the Chorus of Ironic Spirits could M. Pierre D'Exideuil's estimate of Hardy as a franker Zola be at all supported.¹⁾ In this fateful conflict our sterner sympathies are ever enlisted for men who suffer infinities of mental and physical anguish. The lofty dignity of the style, trained amazingly to all weathers, is well illustrated in these lines.

‘Snows incarnadined are thine, O Eylau, field of the wide white spaces,
And frozen lakes, and frozen limbs, and blood iced hard as it left the veins:

1) In ‘Le Couple Humain dans l'Oeuvre de Thomas Hardy.’

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Steel-cased squadrons swathed in cloud-drift, plunging to doom through pathless places,

 

And forty thousand dead and near dead, strewing the early-nighted plains.’

The cumulative effect is the conviction of a fearlessly faithful, if not a pleasing, account of the destinies of men and women. And if the unrelieved scene seems through the mixture of pathos and irony that commemorates the general human lot to reveal too acutely ‘the hearth-break in the heart of things,’ there is an atmosphere surrounding the world we know which is of far greater importance: empires perish, dynasties die, but the attitude of a supreme poet to the central issues of life is a boundless bequest to humanity.