possible. As commentators have asked, where would the self-consciousness
necessary to grasp the self in renunciation come from?^39 Art seems to need
us to become one with the will (as Schopenhauer argues happens parti-
cularly in the emotional experience of hearing music, which is the expres-
sion of ‘the will itself ’ (II: 448 )) and simultaneously see the will for what
it is. In lyric poetry or song, for example, the singer experiences an alter-
nation of ‘pure, will-less knowing’ and ‘willing, desire, and the recol-
lection of our own personal aims’, and the lyric is the ‘expression or
copy of this mingled and divided state of mind’ (I: 250 ). Yet the fact that
these moods are ‘blended with one another’ to any degree contradicts
what Hardy noted as one of the basic principles of Schopenhauer’s system,
namely the complete separation of the will and any kind of purposive
intellect.^40 Art, in the grand tradition of post-Kantian aesthetics, turns out
to be a reconciliation of things separated in all other circumstances. In fact,
we are back on the familiar ground of Schiller’s naı ̈ve genius and all its
organic corollaries, for in art we return to a lost unity:
The identity of the subject of knowing with the subject of willing can be called
the miraclekat’’exown[par excellence], so that the poetical effect of the song
really rests on the truth of that principle. In the course of life, these two subjects,
or in popular language, head and heart, grow more and more apart; men are
always separating more and more their subjective feeling from their objective
knowledge. In the child the two are fully blended; it hardly knows how to
distinguish itself from its surroundings; it is merged into them.(I: 250 – 1 )
But willing and knowing, heart and head, are matters that Hardy’s
aesthetic strives to keep firmly apart. What the regular metre suggests as
the will’s force, the actual stress pattern is always tugging away from. It is
especially evident in the ungainliness of the word ‘yes’, which frequently
stands out as an extra stress in a line, as it stands out as a moment of
reflection out of step with the poem’s onward march. Hardy’s own
favourite poem, ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’, places the word at the
fateful moment when the trampwoman’s flirting with another to arouse
her lover’s jealousy goes awry:
Then in a voice I had never heard,
I had never heard,
My only Love to me: ‘One word,
My lady, if you please!
Whose is the child you are like to bear? –
His? After all my months o’ care?’
God knows ’twas not! But, O despair!
I nodded – still to tease.Hardy’s indifference 161