appearances is aleitmotifof Hardy’s: an out-of-season flower is ‘but one
mask of many worn / By the Great Face behind’ in ‘The Last Chrysan-
themum’, and theComplete Poemsare chock-full of metaphors comparing
things to the stage: life is a ‘masquerade’ in ‘She, to Him [II]’, the world is
‘that show of things’ in ‘While Drawing in a Churchyard’, ‘some dim-
coloured scene’ on which ‘my briefly raised curtain’ lowers (‘In Tenebris
III’). The world ofThe Dynastsis variously a ‘diorama’, ‘puppet-show’, a
‘magic-lantern show’, ‘phantasmagoric show’ and ‘galanty-show’. In fact,
the magic-lantern show provides the central visual message behindThe
Dynasts, for every so often a new light will shine on the participants to
reveal the underlying Immanent Will: ‘A new and penetrating light
descends on the spectacle, enduing men and things with a seeming
transparency, and exhibiting as one organism the anatomy of life and
movement in all humanity and vitalized matter included in the display.’^50
This kind of effect – from face to skeleton and back – was indeed achieved
by magic-lantern shows using dissolving slides. For Benjamin’s melan-
cholic, this sense of the transparency of things ‘can increase the distance
between self and surrounding world to the point of alienation from the
body’ ( 140 ), a sense of utter disjunction well expressed in a famous passage
from theLife:
For my part, if there is any way of getting a melancholy satisfaction out of life it
lies in dying, so to speak, before one is out of the flesh; by which I mean putting
on the manners of ghosts, wandering in their haunts and taking their views of
surrounding things. To think of life passing away is a sadness; to think of it as
past is at least tolerable. Hence even when I enter into a room to pay a simple
morning call I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if I were a
spectre not solid enough to influence my environment, only fit to behold and
say, as another spectre said: ‘Peace be unto you’.^51
Nevertheless, so casual a slander on orthodox faith at the end sheds
doubt on Hardy’s claim that he regards the world as a ghost ‘uncon-
sciously’: feeling like the resurrected Christ would be more likely to
induce a marked self-consciousness, and indeed without the possibility
of absorption into practical affairs, anything the ghost is aware of can do
nothing but reveal its isolation. Hardy’s melancholy spectatorship is
consciouslyself-removed, and such conspicuous detachment is equally
the essence of Hardy’s style. Like BaroqueTrauerspielwhich has ‘artifice
as its god’ ( 82 ), his unlyrical forms emphasise themselves as the stage-
machinery of his fate-driven world because they display a melancholy
awareness of the loss of the real one, so that the more contrived and
Hardy’s indifference 167