unaware of the results of its actions, which include humankind. As a
result, ‘humanity and other animal life (roughly, though not accurately,
definable as puppetry) forms the conscious extremity of a pervading
urgence, or will’ ( 200 ) and hence is helplessly determined by a force to
which it owes its very being but to which it is also ethically superior, an
idea St Paul would not have countenanced. Hardy would not have called
himself a complete determinist, but his concession to ‘a modicum of free-
will conjecturally possessed’ in the ‘Apology’ toLate Lyricsis countered by
his own explanatory metaphor:
This theory, too, seems to me to settle the question of Free-will v. Necessity. The
will of a man is, according to it, neither wholly free or wholly unfree. When
swayed by the Universal Will (as he mostly must be as a subservient part of it) he
is not individually free; but whenever it happens that all the rest of the Great
Will is in equilibrium the minute portion called one person’s will is free, just as a
performer’s fingers will go on playing the pianoforte of themselves when he talks
and thinks of something else & the head does not rule them.^33
But a distracted pianist’s fingers aren’t free, in the sense that a head-
less chicken isn’t free. They will continue to play the piece they were
playing beforehand, or something known by heart, or even if we grant
some improvisation, finger chords and runs long practised. Without the
possibility of choice, their freedom is inseparable from automatism.
It is almost irresistible to see Hardy’s predetermined forms as an
expression of exactly such a determining Will, which acts without regard
for the conscious pain or pleasure of its subjects. No matter what shape
the material would take if left to its own devices, the form will have its
way, and Hardy’s insistent rhythms, the very arbitrariness of his pre-
planned verse skeletons, would testify to the casual, blind forces of an
Immanent Will in which chance and destiny come to mean the same
thing. Everything must happen because the Will makes it so, but since it
has no forethought, everything happens without a reason either. Hence
events are simultaneously determined and random, and, in James
Richardson’s acute observation, ‘the very artifice of his chains of events
calls attention to their arbitrariness’.^34 As Hardy complained: ‘The emo-
tions have no place in a world of defect, and it is a cruel injustice that they
should have developed in it. If Law itself had consciousness, how the
aspect of its creatures would terrify it, fill it with remorse!’^35
And yet the attractiveness of the parallel runs into the difficulty inher-
ent in Hardy’s insistence that predestination is immanent. If human
events are really entirely predestined from within, how could we ever
know it? The more Hardy knows about the cruelties of the Will, the less
Hardy’s indifference 157