british poetry in the age of modernism

they do, or even experiencing difficulty or toil’ (II: 40 ). It is entirely
opposed to the discursive virtues of judgement and reflection, which
would imply self-division; rather, like the genius, it works only according
to its own inner laws, with ‘unity so perfect that it can only be compared
to the unity of natural organisms’ (I: 279 ). In fact, Hardy himself made
the comparison:

It works unconsciously, as heretofore,

Eternal artistries in Circumstance,

Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote,

Seem in themselves Its single listless aim,

And not their consequence.^43

The Immanent Will here produces events in a mode identical to the
genius producing art: it works in an ‘aesthetic’ fashion, purposively yet
without a purpose, acting as if the artistic patterns of circumstance were
their own point, as if their formweretheir content. In other words, von
Hartmann’s unconscious and immanent will acts exactly like the kind of
unified, unmediated artist Hardy did not want to be.

melancholy

Nevertheless, this does not quite solve the difficulty of Hardy’s conscious,
conspicuous control of his material. For if his awkwardness indicates
any kind of resistance to his all-encompassing Will, by the same token
he cannot claim utter helplessness. One might suspect that a situation
in which the same style collapses heroic resistance to Fate and utter
helplessness before it is obeying the logic of the psychoanalytic symptom,
a compromise between two quite opposing wishes. Such conspicuous
disharmony would allow the author simultaneously to satisfy uncons-
cious sadistic urges towards the human content while consciously blam-
ing them on the powers that be. Or, as Florence Hardy complained in
1920 , ‘he is now – this afternoon – writing a poem with great spirit: always
a sign of well-being with him. Needless to say, it is an intensely dismal
poem.’^44 But it may not be necessary to attribute so pathological a split to
Hardy’s psyche to understand how persistent self-assertion is compatible
with a belief in the Immanent Will, for the definition of tragedy that
Hardy copied from Schopenhauer has a similar covert yet persistent self-
assertion within it. If tragedy is ‘the point where the vanity of all effort is
manifest, & the will proceeds to an act of self-annulment’, then it remains
a question how the tragic drama is actually to take place. How can the will

164 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism