Hardy. As de la Mare commented, ‘poem after poem reiterates that this
poor scene of our earthly life is a “show God ought surely to shut up
soon” ’, and Hardy’s ironies are so endlessly hammered home that after a
while the effect draws ‘a laugh at the perversity’, as Edward Thomas
noted, rather than compelling assent.^47 However, reducing Hardy’s
poems to a psychological study of their author’s unhappiness would be
to miss Benjamin’s point, since the laws that govern it are not ‘concer-
ned with the emotional condition of the poet or his public, but with a
feeling which is released from any empirical subject and is intimately
bound to the fullness of an object’ ( 139 ). Benjamin’s interest in melan-
cholia lies instead in its distinctive way of relating to objects, characterised
by a belief that the world is illusory, has no shaping reality of its own,
and is instead fundamentally controlled by destiny’s machinations. Hence
in the world of the mourning plays, nothing is left to chance, for
‘everything intentional or accidental is so intensified that the complexi-
ties... betray, by their paradoxical vehemence, that the action of the
play has been inspired by fate’ ( 130 ).
This way of thinking is visible in Hardy’s insistence on seeing the
machinations of destiny at work in the tiniest affairs. His friend Gosse
noted his way of making poems about the eternal from the trivial – flotsam,
a dropped pencil, a rotted sunshade or half a Bible – and the attitude
emerges even more clearly in this unintentionally comic passage from the
Life: ‘Hurt my tooth at breakfast-time. I looked in the glass. Am conscious
of the humiliating sorriness of my earthly tabernacle, and of the sad fact
that the best of parents could do no better for me.’^48 Toothache makes
Hardy mourn his mortal situation, not think about going to the dentist.
But this ability to see in the minute a cosmic despair does not mean that
the minute is actually important; its meaning lies rather in the weight of
attention paid to it which it cannot bear. In the melancholic perspective,
everything becomes equally artificial and stagey (‘images are displayed in
order to be seen, arranged in the way they want them to be seen’ ( 119 ))
because such artificiality manifests the essential emptiness of the world
itself. Benjamin remarks on the melancholic’s ‘self-absorption, to which
these great dramas of worldly life seem but a game’ ( 140 ); Hardy, too, had
copied down Arthur Symons’s summary of Nietzsche’sBirth of Tragedy,
where ‘the object of the tragic myth is precisely to convince us that even
the horrible & the monstrous are no more than an aesthetic game, played
with itself by the Will’.^49 As Benjamin elegantly says, it is ‘the state
of mind which revives the empty world in the form of a mask and derives
an enigmatic satisfaction in contemplating it’ ( 139 ). This unreality of
166 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism