world, and since the will lies beyond that world, it is groundless, time-
less and purposeless, an endless desire without aim or satisfaction. What-
ever the world we experience and represent to ourselves indicates, the
reality is determined by the perpetually striving will, which animates the
laws of physics, biology and human desire equally, so that physical and
emotional stasis or satisfaction is impossible. For Schopenhauer, we are
products of this restless, aimless will, and so our whole lives are spent
hopelessly desiring new things. All life is perpetual wanting, bound in
what Schopenhauer called ‘the penal servitude of willing’ (I: 196 ). How-
ever, art can be a way to escape our jail-term. In contemplating the
aesthetic, a ‘miracle’ takes place (I: 251 ):
We forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject,
as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed
without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the
perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one... what is thus
known is no longer the individual thing as such, but theIdea, the eternal form,
the immediate objectivity of the will at this grade. Thus at the same time, the
person who is involved in this perception is no longer an individual, for in such
perception the individual has lost himself; he ispure, will-less, painless, timeless
subject of knowledge.(I: 178 – 9 )
Losing our individuality and becoming will-less, in the experience of art
we gain a release from the ground of being and prepare ourselves for
what Schopenhauer thought the ultimate point of his philosophy, to
renounce willing altogether. This is why tragedy was such an important
art-form for his system, for by revealing the hopelessness of the human
situation it would compel the audience to recognise the necessity of
resignation. Hardy thought enough of this definition to copy the passage
into his literary notebook:
Tragedy. Only when the intellect rises to the point where the vanity of all effort
is manifest, & the will proceeds to an act of self-annulment, is the drama tragic
in the true sense.^38
So far Hardy’s art could be thought of as completely faithful to
Schopenhauer’s programme, for it is nothing but a revelation of the will’s
workings designed to manifest the hopelessness of the human situation.
But the strange thing about Schopenhauer’s theory of artistic contem-
plation is the way that its supposed release from the will seems to take
place exactly as the subject becomes one with the true forms of that will.
If the artist or spectator becomes one with the ‘immediate objectivity
of the will’, then no reflection, no sense of separate will-less self should be
160 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism