ralph pite
Accordingly, not only are the great British-ledvictories of Trafalgar and Waterloo
culminating points in the work, but Napoleon also complains repeatedly that the
Russian and Austrian armies are funded by English money.^31 The detailed historical
accuracy ofThe Dynastsis remarkable, but within it, nonetheless, Edwardian
anti-German feeling is discernible. Hardy presents the wars as a clash between a
sea-based power and a land-based one, so that his new handling encourages the
reader to see something of Bismarck in Napoleon.
Similarly, Samuel Hynes has drawn attention to the post-Boer War desire
for national regeneration, typified by Baden-Powell, a hero of the war, and his
founding of the Scout movement in 1908.^32 The Dynastsis in many respects
an inspiriting and patriotic work. George Orwell, who complained about the
‘debunking version of war’ endemic among left-wing intellectuals during the
1920s—‘the theory that war is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any
good result’—also grumbled that Hardy’s writing, like A. E. Housman’s, was
‘not tragic, merely querulous’; ‘one ought’, he did however concede, ‘to make an
exception ofThe Dynasts.’^33 Orwell, during a war, singles out this part of Hardy’s
œuvrefor praise, convinced of the encouragement it offers to those enduring
wars. Harley Granville-Barker responded to the same quality in it when he put
on a version ofThe Dynastsin the West End during the first winter of the Great
War. This openness to patriotic feeling has helped to makeThe Dynastsappear
suspect to those still wedded to ‘the debunking version of war’; equally, its links
with Edwardian nation building make it look worryingly at odds with Hardy’s
otherwise pronounced dislike of war mongering, of military conflict—‘the old
& barbarous’ way, as he called it, of ‘settling disputes’^34 —and his suspicion of
nationalist allegiances.
YetThe Dynastsis nothing like an Empire Day pageant, not least because it
presents such a strikingly nuanced picture. Nelson may be an unambiguously noble
figure, and Wellington the epitome of phlegmatic English resolve. Prime Minister
Pitt, though, is caught up with George III, otherwise a genial and unpretentious
monarch, in a master–servant relationship that wears Pitt down, consigning him
to an early grave. On the other side, Napoleon, even if lawless and vain, is never
the monster of legend. Hardy makes fun, in fact, of the English wish to believe in a
baby-eater across the Channel. Increasingly, instead, Napoleon speaks of himself as
powerless. When he is watching his army setting out in 1812 to invade Russia, for
instance, he wonders at what is taking place:
(^31) ‘What cares England...|Hergolditisthatformstheweftofthis|Fair tapestry of armies
marshalled here!’, and ‘Even here Pitt’s guineas are the foes:|’Tis all a duel ’twixt this Pitt and me’
(The Dynasts,1,iv. v. 40, 42–3 andvi.i.78–9).
(^32) See Samuel Hynes,The Edwardian Turn of Mind(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968),
26–9.
(^33) George Orwell, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ (1943) and ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940), inThe
Penguin Essays of George Orwell(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 217 and 114.
(^34) Hardy to Florence Henniker, 11 Oct. 1899, inCollected Letters, ii. 232.