Hardy’s verse sounds predestined exactly because it is unhappily rhymed,
because it registers fate by persisting remorselessly with double and triple
rhyme schemes, of which ‘listlessness’ / ‘wistlessness’ in ‘The Voice’ is only
the most infamous example, or repeating the same rhyme to obsession, as in
‘she’ and ‘me’ in the stanza above, which is one of thirty-two insistent long ‘e’
rhymes in the ballad. The fixedness of the schema is then brought out even
more by using occasional rhymes such as ‘agony’ and ‘wantonly’, which
rhyme on an unstressed syllable (like ‘The Convergence of the Twain’,
above), not so much ringing the rhyme as wringing it out of the word.
For von Hartmann too, art is a unifying of elements which, for Hardy,
should be kept separate. His influence on Hardy’s philosophy of events is
well documented, as for example inThe Dynastswhen the Spirit of the
Years explains how the Will can be both blind to human consequence
and given any kind of cognitive ability:
In that immense unweeting Mind is shown
One far above forethinking; processive,
Rapt, superconscious; a Clairvoyancy
That knows not what It knows, yet works therewith.^41
This idea is based on a note Hardy made of a paragraph from von
Hartmann, though his ‘processive’ alters von Hartmann’s ‘purposive’ with
its implications of intention:
This unconscious intelligence is anything but blind, rather far-seeing, nay, even
clairvoyant, although this seeing can never be aware of its own vision, but only of
the world, and without the mirrors of the individual consciousnesses can also not
see the seeing eye. Of this unconscious clairvoyant intelligence we have come to
perceive that in its infallible purposive activity, embracing out of time all ends
and means in one, and always including all necessary data within its ken, it
infinitely transcends the halting, stilted gait of the discursive reflection of
consciousness, ever limited to a single point, dependent on sense-perception,
memory, and inspirations of the Unconscious. We shall thus be compelled to
designate this intelligence, which is superior to all consciousness, at once
unconscious andsuper-conscious.^42
Knowing no difference between means and end, though, is one way of
describing the perfectly organic poem, and we do not have to note
retrospectively what Freud made of von Hartmann’s Unconscious to see
how close itsmodus operandiis to post-Kantian notions of artistic pro-
duction. The Unconscious is where aesthetic feeling originates (I: 274 ),
and like the naı ̈ve genius, those who act in accordance with it ‘live in
eternal harmony with themselves, without ever reflecting much what
Hardy’s indifference 163