ralph pite
Hardy’s scene endings evidently continue this alternation of viewpoint. For the
samereasons, he offers a series of disruptively discordant similes for the grand
armies of the campaigns—marching columns of men look like caterpillars, their
ships are moths, weaponry glitters ‘like a display of cutlery at a hill-side fair’,
and aides rushing to and fro are ‘like house-flies dancing their quadrilles’ (Part
3,vii. i, stage directions and,vii. ii, stage directions). The grotesqueness of these
comparisons appears to betray a wish to demean their subjects. At moments of
highest intensity, and when Hardy’s English readership is likely to be at its most
fervently patriotic, he introduces thesereminders of a perspective from which wars,
like all human activity, appear infinitely trivial.
The similes may appear, initially at least, to share and endorse the perspective
of the Spirit of the Years, soberly concerned to deflate human self-importance.
The curious achievement ofThe Dynasts, however, is to make such elevation above
events continuous with pity. From on high, Europe appears like one weakened
human being, and as, time and again, the reader is immersed in carnage only to
be released from it at the end of a scene, the difference between participating and
witnessing is felt more keenly. Seeing it whole is made part of learning to pity it all,
every single person involved and the historical catastrophe.
For Hardy, then, though war can achieve nothing, perhaps war poetry can achieve
something. He endsThe Dynasts, famously, on a note of wider optimism.
But—a stirring thrills the air
Like to sounds of joyance there
That the rages
Of the ages
Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that were,
Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair!
(Part 3, After Scene, 105–10)There is just the possibility that the universe will one day operate more justly and
kindly than at present. Hardy expressed the same tentative hope in ‘The Darkling
Thrush’ and one or two other pieces inPoems of the Past and the Present.^36 In
The Dynasts, the source of hope lies in Pity (it is the Chorus of the Pities which
speaks the final lines), and the consciousness that they foresee informing the will
is compassionate. ‘[M]ust not Its heart awake,’ they ask, ‘Promptly tending|To Its
mending |In a genial germing purpose, and for loving-kindness’ sake?’ (Part 3,
After Scene, 96–9).The Dynastsis written in such a way that it can take part in, and
even perhaps bring forward minutely, this transformation of things.
More usually, Hardy’s war poetry offers no such hope. The wives, waiting for
their husbands to return in ‘The Going of the Battery’, resist despair by believing in
Providence, and then discover that that belief is precarious:
(^36) It is a recurrent sentiment, though never again put as ardently as inThe Dynasts. Compare ‘God’s
Education’, inComplete Poems, 278–9.