british poetry in the age of modernism

might just as suitably have chosen millions of other stones from a quarry
whereon to display its beauties.^30

But for the architect as restorer the material of the church has existed
uniquely through time, and hence cannot be simply replaced. ‘No man
can make two pieces of matter exactly alike’, concedes Hardy, and
moreoever, exact form is unreproducible because it has ‘an indefinable
quality... which never reappears in the copy’ ( 251 ). For the churchgoer,
too, the building’s actual stones have associations of memory which the
form’s ‘aesthetic phantom’ cannot maintain. And hence Hardy concludes
dispiritedly that ‘in short, the opposing tendencies excited in an architect
by the distracting situation can find no satisfactory reconciliation’. Ori-
ginally he added, ‘all he can do is of the nature of compromise’, but
crossed it out.

the immanent will

Why, then, might Hardy wish to insist so deliberately on the irreconcil-
able opposition between the demands of form and substance, if doing
so makes him look like the epitome of bad art? One very plausible answer
is to argue that the disjunction itself is part of the poem’s message. ‘Art’,
an entry in theLifemuses, ‘is a disproportioning – (i.e., distorting,
throwing out of proportion) – of realities, to show more clearly the
features that matter in those realities, which, if merely copied or reported
inventorially, might possibly be observed, but would more probably be
overlooked’.^31 The primary reality that needed pointing out was above
all for Hardy the Immanent Will, otherwise formulated as the ‘Prime
Mover’, ‘Hap’, ‘Necessity’, the ‘All-One’ and various other guises, which
manifested itself as the determining force behind the events of the world:

The Philosophy ofThe Dynasts, under various titles and phrases, is almost as old
as civilization. Its fundamental principle, under the name of Predestination, was
preached by St. Paul. ‘Being predestinated’ – says the author of the Epistle to the
Ephesians, ‘Being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh
all things after the counsel of His own Will’; and much more to the same effect,
the only difference being that externality is assumed by the Apostle rather than
immanence.^32

Hardy’s theology is pointedly inaccurate, since the crucial difference
between him and St Paul is not merely over the externality or immanence
of God’s will in human affairs, but the responsibility of God himself. For
Hardy this Will is unconscious – it cannot but do what it does – and

156 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism