also a grim rebuke to those once opulent. The Immanent Will is indiffer-
ent to human desires, and it is exactly because this is so that conscious
creatures cannot but feel it cruel. ‘I do not expect that much notice will be
taken of these poems’, Hardy gloomily noted about the publication of
Moments of Vision, for ‘they mortify the human sense of self-importance
by showing, or suggesting, that human beings are of no matter or
appreciable value in this nonchalant universe’.^36 ‘Nonchalant’ is no less
anthropomorphic for denying it, but if this tone of mournful self-regard
seems at odds with the declaration of human irrelevance, that is exactly
Hardy’s point. His stylistic awkwardness is therefore a protest against the
Will’s indifference towards human affairs at the same time as it is a
demonstration of it.
This diremption in Hardy’s aesthetics is all the more striking when
compared with his chief philosophical sources for idea of the Will,
Schopenhauer and von Hartmann. Although Hardy was a believer in
Fate long before he read either of them, their ideas are often transparent
in his work; the notion that humans are puppets animated by a force
within, for example, is taken directly from Schopenhauer:
If we conceive the human race and its activitiesas a whole and universally, it does
not present itself to us, as when we have in view individual actions, like a puppet-
show, the dolls of which are pulled by strings in the ordinary way. On the
contrary, from this point of view, it presents itself as puppets that are set in
motion by an internal clockwork... this human race is innumerable through its
being constantly renewed; it is incessantly astir, pushes, presses, worries,
struggles, and performs the whole tragic-comedy of world history.^37
But Schopenhauer and von Hartmann’s German Idealist heritage is
evident in the way their different philosophies both attribute to art a
miraculous power to harmonise things that are left manifestly separate in
Hardy’s poetry. For Schopenhauer, the will must always develop itself
without regard to the supposed needs and desires of its conscious sub-
jects, because it belongs to an essentially different order of being. His
division is based upon Kant’s fundamental split between the unknow-
able world as it is in itself, and the phenomenal world which we experi-
ence in a certain way because our bodies intuit it like that or, in
Schopenhauer’s terms, the world as will and representation. Like Kant,
Schopenhauer’s world of phenomena/representation is a determined one
where everything has a necessary cause, whereas the realm of the timeless
and undetermined will is free. Unlike Kant, though, Schopenhauer
thought causality as much as space and time a category of bodily intui-
tion, so that our logic of reasons why is also limited to the phenomenal
Hardy’s indifference 159