When Queen Victoria died in January 1901, a short poem by Hardy saluted her as ‘serene, sagacious, free’. She had won the heart of the world, he wrote, with ‘deeds well done’. His poem appeared in The Times. With the Boer War and the new century a transformation was taking place, the shocking novelist and out-rager of bishops emerging in a fresh light as a grand old man of English letters, confidently addressing the nation from its most respected newspaper, no longer as a novelist but as a poet.
He remained practical about the business of selling his work, and the twentieth century prompted him to put his publishing affairs in order. The failure of Harper’s, his American-based publishers, allowed him a change of direction, and he decided to transfer all the British rights in his work to the house of Macmillan, the firm to which he had shyly and unsuccessfully submitted his first novel in 1868, and which was now headed by the shrewd Frederick Macmillan. Kipling and Wells were on their list, and they had already acquired, in 1894, the right to publish a ‘Colonial Edition’ of Hardy’s novels. A new agreement was signed early in 1902, a year in which Hardy noted that his investments had depreciated in value. He negotiated for himself with Macmillan, bargaining hard for his royalties. 1 He got 25 per cent on any of his books sold at 6 s., 20 per cent on those sold at 4 s. and 5 s., and 16½per cent on cheaper ones. 2 From now on a stately procession of Uniform Edition, Pocket Edition, Wessex Edition and Mellstock Edition kept all his prose, and his poetry as he produced it, available to the public in handsome volumes. Hardy himself had already suggested the marketing strategy of presenting his fiction as a unified series of ‘Wessex Novels’, and it worked still better when readers could collect complete sets and study a special map in each volume showing North Wessex, Mid Wessex, Lower, Upper and Outer Wessex. The many young women, mostly schoolteachers and musicians, he said, who wrote to him asking how they might return to country life could pick their location from it if they chose. Tourists came to see for themselves where Bathsheba and Tess had lived, and there was a steadily growing interest in attaching the fictional names of towns and villages to their originals. 3 This was a game Hardy enjoyed playing, sometimes insisting that the link was tenuous, at other times pointing out to favoured friends particular houses or places he had used. His friendship with Hermann Lea, farmer, builder and keen photographer, who settled in Dorset in the 1890s and became one of his bicycling companions, led to Lea’s Handbook to the Wessex Country of Thomas Hardy in 1904, and a larger guide, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, was published by Macmillan in 1913 – and reprinted in the 1960s.
He also made the Wessexconnection with his first published collection of poetry in 1898, Wessex Poems and Other Verses. 4 It contained fifty-one poems: a third were gathered from as far back as the 1860s and were mostly written in London; others were recent. Some, but not all, have dates assigned. They are written in a great variety of styles, from the expansive ballad narrative to the intensely concentrated utterance, and they are arranged with no regard for chronology. From the 1860s, ‘Neutral Tones’ is one of the best in the volume. 5 There are four sonnets in the voice of a woman, the first a free reworking of Ronsard’s ‘Lorsque vous serez vieille’. There is a batch of run-of-the-mill historical verses, several set during the Napoleonic Wars, and a group of sprightly and entertaining Dorset ballads, ‘The Dance at the Phœnix’, ‘The Bride-Night Fire’, ‘Her Death and After’ and ‘Friends Beyond’. Personal poems crop up randomly, several easily linked with known incidents and people such as Horace Moule (‘A Confession’), Mary Hardy (‘Middle-Age Enthusiasms’) and cousin Tryphena (‘Thoughts of Phena’), the young Emma (‘Ditty’) and Florence Henniker (‘At an Inn’). 6 Emma was upset by allusions and tributes to other women and took ‘The Ivy-Wife’ to be an attack aimed at her, although it seems no more than a jeu d’esprit about a woman who tries to climb to fame by attaching herself to a series of men, destroying one of them in the process. The volume ends triumphantly with ‘I Look into My Glass’, which suggests that Hardy knew how good it was. 7 Only 500 copies were printed, and the book had a poor reception, but it was a difficult collection to review. The inclusion of his own illustrations was a distraction. They are the work of a skilful draughtsman, but some are distinctly weird, especially the drawing of a dead woman lying under a sheet accompanying the poem addressed to his late cousin Tryphena, and the blank humanoid shapes manoeuvring a coffin on a staircase to illustrate a grim architectural joke in a poem dedicated to Blomfield. You have to admire Hardy’s determination to extend his range by providing decorative drawings, but it is a relief that he did not repeat the experiment. All Hardy’s eight collections, making up something like 1,000 poems, were presented in the same jumbled way, partly divided into sections but made up of poems taken from different decades, with few signposts and no notes for the reader, and it took time for the world to see that something remarkable was in the making.
His second collection, Poems of the Past and the Present, published at the turn of 1901 and 1902, is richer than the first. It contains ‘Drummer Hodge’, ‘Wives in the Sere’, ‘The Darkling Thrush’, ‘The Ruined Maid’, all discussed already. There are witty and elegantly constructed triolets and songs like ‘I Need Not Go’ and ‘At a Hasty Wedding’. ‘A Broken Appointment’ is here, and the three ‘De Profundis’ poems. So is ‘An August Midnight’, written at Max Gate in 1899, which reveals Hardy sitting in his study, working late as he so often did. The clock beat he hears is likely to come from the grandfather clock in the hall downstairs, the lamp is an oil lamp, and the ink is liquid from the inkwell on his desk, given to him by Mrs Henniker. A dumbledore is a cock-chafter or maybug, a large insect with a hard shell that flies about on warm summer nights in the country. Hardy’s courtesy to his animal visitors – ‘my guests’ – comes naturally to him, along with his appreciation that life is lived on different scales, and that their ‘Earth-secrets’ are as significant to them as his ink markings on the page are to him. It shows him at his most tender, at ease in what still sometimes seemed to him to be God’s creation:
A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter – winged, horned, and spined –
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While ’mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands…
II
Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
– My guests parade my new-penned ink,
Or bang at the lamp-glass, whirl, and sink.
‘God’s humblest, they!’ I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.
Hardy’s public persona was now secure. He remained hard to know. The poet in him was developing; the man avoided intimacy. None of his friends quite fathomed him. Gosse, one of the oldest, found him ‘sphinx-like’ and ‘unrevealed’, his genius a mystery. 8 Yet, although he resented intrusions into his privacy, he accepted a surprising number of visitors and allowed himself to be much painted, photographed and drawn. Most of those who came to see him spoke of his gentleness and sensitivity, although H. G. Wells was aghast to see that the brave author of Tess and Jude was nothing more than ‘a little grey man’. 9
In February 1901 William Archer, a friend since Hardy sent him a copy of Tess in 1892, stayed at Max Gate to conduct a formal interview, intended for publication. Hardy spent a sleepless night afterwards, worrying whether he had been guilty of ‘self-conceit’. He had not: when Archer praised the depths of his knowledge of ‘Wessex’, he modestly replied, ‘some of what you take for my knowledge may be “only my artfulness”.’ Much of their exchange was about local lore and legend, and Archer tactfully kept off family history. The one subject on which Hardy was categorical was war, still being waged in southern Africa, and on this subject he expressed a most surprising optimism about human behaviour: ‘Oh yes, war is doomed. It is doomed by the gradual growth of the introspective faculty in mankind… Not to-day, nor tomorrow, but in the fullness of time, war will come to an end, not for moral reasons, but because of its absurdity.’ 10 A year after Archer’s interview a literary journalist, Desmond MacCarthy, made the first of several visits. He found Hardy
very small, very quiet, self-possessed and extraordinarily unassuming. I seem to remember that his laughter made no sound… a gentle eagerness which was very pleasing showed in his manner when he wanted sympathy about some point. He would instantly recoil on being disappointed. I observed in him once or twice a look, a movement, too slight to be called a wince but not unlike the almost imperceptible change one sees in a cat when a gesture has perturbed it. 11
MacCarthy also picked up ‘a glint in his eye which one might have associated with slyness in a mindless and insensitive man’. Where he saw a cat, the artist William Rothenstein made Hardy into a bird, with ‘a small dark bilberry eye which he cocked at you unexpectedly’. 12 Another visitor found that ‘the whole face gave the impression of a bird.’ 13 And a young woman, taken by the Lord-Lieutenant of the county to one of Emma’s garden parties, liked Mrs Hardy’s ‘homely welcome’ and long table spread with jam, scones and ‘large Mad-Hatter sandwiches’, but thought the great writer himself resembled nothing so much as ‘an ancient moulting eagle, with… his bald peering head moving ceaselessly from side to side’. 14 Turning him into a bird, an animal or a sphinx was one way of dealing with his elusiveness.
Gosse had angered Hardy when, after his good review, he spoke rudely of Jude to Hardy’s face at the Savile Club, but he was too buoyant to allow him to escape from his proprietorial friendship. Appointed librarian of the House of Lords in 1904, he was in a still better position to promote the careers and reputations of his literary friends, and he enjoyed nothing more. That summer he invited Hardy to tea at the House of Lords with the Conservative leaders Lord Salisbury and Balfour. A few months later Gosse arranged a meeting with Asquith, leader of the Liberal Party, already slightly known to Hardy, and Asquith marked Hardy down as a Liberal supporter.
An account of Hardy in conversation at a literary gathering in 1904 comes from Arthur Benson, who had recently left a teaching post at Eton to settle in Cambridge. Benson was an expansive diarist and a shameless snob, and both his virtue and his vice appear here:
Entered Henry James, Thomas Hardy and another… Hardy came up and sat down… looked at me, then looked away, suffused by a misty smile and I presently gathered that this was a recognition – he seemed hurt by my not speaking. I watched his seamed, pale, shy, kindly face; which yet always to me has something inherently shabby and undistinguished about it: it is the face, not of a peasant, like old Carlyle, but of a village tradesman. Then we had an odd triangular talk. Hardy could not hear what Henry James said, nor Henry James what Hardy said; and I had to try to keep the talk going. I felt like Alice between the two Queens. Hardy talked rather interestingly of Newman; he has read the Apologia & I thought he said ‘I joined the RC church for a time, but it has left no impression whatever on me now.’ Then he said very firmly that Newman was no logician; that the Apologia was simply a poet’s work, with a kind of lattice-work of logic in places to screen the poetry… Then Hardy went away wanly and kindly. 15
In 1905 the University of Aberdeen proposed to confer an honorary doctorate on him. This gave him intense pleasure. It was his first degree – his and Jude’s, you might say – and soothed his pride after the long years of condescension. He travelled north in April, to be cheered by the students, spoken of in the same breath as George Eliot and Balzac, and praised for having done for Wessex what Scott did for the Borders and Highlands. The granite city was still under snow and crowded with eminent visitors assembled for the opening of a new sculpture gallery; and he was splendidly entertained by the senior members of the university with receptions, eulogies, dinners, pipers and ‘Auld Lang Syne’. While he was there, he insisted on visiting the grave of a friend from the 1870s, William Minto, who had given him a good review for Far from the Madding Crowd. Hardy did not forget these things. And he gave a provocative interview to a journalist, declaring strong views on the duties of the state towards children, and that ‘illegitimacy – so far from being the blackest blot in a community – may be regarded in one aspect as a form of virtue’. 16 Among people interested in ideas, his spirits rose, and he was ready to speak out as he rarely did in Dorset or London, and on this topic he was in the forefront of a subject that was attracting attention in intellectual circles. Within two years Dr David Eder published his pamphlet The Endowment of Motherhood, arguing for state support for single mothers, and there were debates at the Fabian Society on this subject and on marriage reform. Hardy was never going to join a political association, but his views had their influence.
As his fame brought him rewards, the life of the Hardys as a couple lost its momentum, shrank and decayed. He did not take Emma to Aberdeen, and there were no more holidays together, either abroad or in England. She became less willing to spend time in London and found the running of a second house or flat burdensome. She began to worry about crossing the streets in town, as her eyes and her limp gave trouble, and, when she did venture there, she was sometimes ‘very languid’ and hardly went out. 17 This was how it was in 1901. In 1902 they kept away from London on account of the coronation and reduced investment income. The next year Hardy took bachelor rooms in St John’s Wood for himself, and that autumn Emma, determined to follow her own advice about separate lives, set off with her niece Lilian for Dover, crossed the Channel and settled in Calais for three weeks. It was a brave move, although it fell short of venturing as far as Paris, which she had so much enjoyed before. Hardy reacted uneasily and took himself to a London hotel, where he fell ill with influenza, returning miserably to Max Gate. He disliked being alone at home.
Emma went to Calais again in the autumn of 1908, on her own this time, and stayed away for nearly two months, taking pleasure in French hotel life. She had a good practical reason for going then – her attic rooms were being redecorated and improved – but Hardy fussed in his letters, warning her against being friendly with strangers, ‘as you don’t know who’s who in a town through which the worst (and no doubt best) of the earth pass on their way out of our country when it gets too hot for them’. He kept her up to date with the doings of the cats and the drowning of the latest batch of kittens at Max Gate, and then suggested a return date, saying, ‘It is very dull staying here alone,’ which was perhaps what she hoped to hear; and she did return a little sooner than she had planned. Only to be affronted. Mr Asquith, as Prime Minister, offered Hardy a knighthood, an honour Englishmen traditionally accept with the excuse that they are doing so to please their wives. Hardy sent a curious reply to Asquith, expressing his warm admiration for his policies, but saying he would like to think over the proposed knighthood for a year. Although this was politely agreed to, it does not seem to have been brought up again, and Emma remained plain Mrs Hardy. She felt this as a deliberately aimed slight, especially when two years later he accepted the Order of Merit, a much more distinguished award but one that carried no ‘Sir’ or ‘Lady’. The nearest she got to her wish was that among her Dorset neighbours some of the children called her ‘Lady Emma’ behind her back, in mocking tribute to her sense of her own importance. 18
One of the activities she kept up determinedly was party-giving, and the Max Gate garden parties were a feature of every summer. There are photographs showing large groups of assembled guests, all in the thickly layered clothing favoured by the middle classes of the period, even when the thermometer soared upwards, and the women under elaborate hats. In June 1901 a journalists’ group, the Whitefriars’ Club, insisted on travelling down from London en masse to pay their respects to Hardy. There were a hundred of them, and a tent was put up in the garden to receive them. The last part of their journey was made in open carriages, and the most interesting feature of the occasion was that Hardy’s mother heard of their visit and insisted on being wheeled in her chair down Bockhampton Lane to see the carriages go past. Her daughters reluctantly agreed to her plan, and the three women waited under the trees, Mrs Hardy with a hat to keep off the sun and a rug over her knees in view of her advanced age – she was nearly ninety. She told Mary and Kate she intended to wave her handkerchief at the carriages. They said it was not the thing to do, but, as the last carriage passed, she drew out her handkerchief all the same and waved it defiantly. 19 This was perhaps what she had done when she saw Princess Victoria driven past in the 1830s, and, while a group of journalists hardly equalled a princess, they were there to honour her famous son. She was not invited to Max Gate to meet them, because Emma refused to have his family there. And why did Hardy not for once override Emma’s prohibition? Reluctance to do battle with her was probably the chief reason, but he may also have been ambivalent about bringing his admirers face to face with his old mother.
When Jemima Hardy entertained at Bockhampton, she served tea in the garden with dough cake, raspberries and blue vinney cheese, according to one of her brother William Hand’s granddaughters, who remembered such an occasion in 1900 and described her great-aunt wearing a tight-fitting bodice of blue satin with tiny buttons down the front. The four Hardy uncles and aunts were all there, and Thomas Hardy presented the child, Lillie May, with a two-shilling piece. She came from sophisticated Weymouth, and the local children asked, ‘Towner, bain’t’ee?’ when they heard her speak. 20 Jemima’s last years were spent, as her husband’s had been, confined to the cottage at Bockhampton, served and nursed by Mary – in her sixties herself – and Kate. Early in 1904 she heard of the death of Henry Moule, whom she had known for most of his life, and decided to send a wreath to his funeral from her sickbed. Hardy described how she made one from their own meagre winter flowers with her daughters and, finding there was not enough greenery to finish it, sent one of them out in the dark with a lantern to cut more, so that it would be ready to be taken to the Moule house early in the morning. In less than a month she was dead herself. As a mother she had been powerful, rather than tender, with her dark streak of gloom and anger, but Hardy wrote to a friend, ‘I shall miss her in many ways – her powers in humorous remark, for instance, which were immediate. It took me hours to be able to express what she had at the tip of her tongue.’ He also talked of her always thinking of him as ‘her rather delicate “boy” ’ and said the gap she left was ‘wide, and not to be filled. I suppose if one had a family of children one would be less sensible of it.’ 21
His poem ‘Shut Out That Moon’ was written this year. It speaks of the failure of love and writes a line under the past – as the death of a mother does. 22 It also draws on the imagery of the Romantic poets:
Close up the casement, draw the blind,
Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.
What is the moon stealing? Hearts, hopes, time, dreams, even wits: dangerous but also stealing like a lover, pleasurably. Lovers steal kisses, and the moon reminds us of the pleasures of youth, of music once made, of people known and loved who are now lying under gravestones. The poem goes on to warn against looking at the stars (‘Immense Orion’s glittering form’) as well as the moon, and against ‘midnight scents’ in the summer garden and their power to arouse feeling; and, in doing so, it becomes more of a tribute to romanticism than a warning against it. The last stanza speaks of the unromantic world, the ‘common lamp-lit room’ that prisons ‘eyes and thought’, the ‘mechanic speech’ that replaces music and lyricism and laughter. These are the prosaic, limited options of adulthood, set against youthful romantic values, and Hardy seems to suggest they are a way of dealing with the disappointments of life. He ends the poem with bitter words:
Too fragrant was Life’s early bloom,
Too tart the fruit it brought!
Yet Hardy himself never allowed his eyes or thought to be imprisoned or his speech to become mechanic, and if, as he suggests, romantic values lead to disappointment, the poem chiefly invokes the exquisite pleasure they give. He might appear as a bald old eagle and be unreadable as a sphinx, but he kept his direct access to the world of nature and feeling as freshly as a young man.
Emma did not go to her mother-in-law’s funeral, any more than Hardy attended her family funerals. Soon she had her own intimations of mortality. In May 1906, while Hardy was in London, she was at Max Gate on her own for a few days. Working in the garden, she had a fainting fit. ‘My heart seemed to stop; I fell, and after a while a servant came to me.’ 23 Whatever the cause of her collapse, which does not seem to have been investigated but sounds as though it could have been a small stroke, it may have contributed to her becoming more eccentric in conversation and style. Gosse wrote a merciless description of her in the last year of her life, ‘absurdly dressed as a country lady without friends might dress herself on a vague recollection of some nymph in a picture by Botticelli’. 24 More kindly, the French portait painter Jacques Blanche caught the pathos of her appearance: ‘Nothing remained to her of the full-blooded, rosy, jovial freshness attested by those who had seen her while still young. Instead, shrunken as if age had made her smaller, she adopted a defensive shield, retaining in stereotyped form the smile of former days as if fixed for all time by a photographer.’ 25 Photographs of her in old age still show two curls emerging from the cap on her forehead, curls that had once pleased Hardy so much he gave them to Anne, the pretty heroine of The Trumpet-Major.
Emma was surely never mad, although Mary and Kate Hardy were not the only ones to suggest she was. She was eccentric, sometimes to the point of absurdity, her conversation could be dismayingly inconsequential, but she was always able to organize her own life and activities, to make travel arrangements, to write, to run the house and to communicate with her few friends and her maids. The most disconcerting and upsetting part of her behaviour was her open display of hostility towards Hardy, her snobbish claims for her own family and her dismissal of his family as ‘peasants’. Married people are known to make covert attacks on one another in company, but Emma’s attacks were not covert. In 1909 Hardy wrote to a friend explaining that ‘my domestic circumstances… make it embarrassing for me to return hospitalities received, so that I hesitate nowadays to accept many.’ 26 The friend was the rationalist banker Edward Clodd, who regularly invited Hardy to Aldeburgh for house parties where he gathered congenial intellectuals, occasions much enjoyed by Hardy, who went without Emma.
Her far from mad interest in the question of women’s suffrage led her to support the suffragette movement. Hardy was in general agreement with the principle, although cautious as always about making any public commitment to it. But Emma joined marches in London in 1907, went to rallies, and wrote a long and well-argued letter on the importance of women’s participation in government to the Nation in 1908. 27 The following year she resigned from the London Society for Women’s Suffrage, but purely because she disapproved of militancy; she continued her allegiance to the cause itself. She kept abreast of current affairs in other ways: sending a donation to Israel Zangwill for the Zionist movement, with a letter of support; and writing various letters to the press about the conditions endured by the children of the poor – urging better care, better food, better schools, better housing – and about specific cruelties to animals, such as circus tigers and bulls in bullfights. Less sensibly, she also submitted poems to magazines, none of them even competently written; a few were printed because she was ‘Mrs Thomas Hardy’. She lacked judgement to assess her own efforts, but this is a common fault, and she had the spirit to keep trying.
She made friends with one of her husband’s most ardent American admirers, rich Rebekah Owen from New York, a repeated visitor to England who got herself and her sister an introduction to the Hardys in 1892 and thereafter put in frequent appearances at Max Gate. Emma was hospitable to them and kept up a correspondence with Rebekah that to a degree deflected her from bothering Hardy directly. Miss Owen was happy to accept Emma’s kindness and her confidences and at the same time to gossip about her being ‘half-cracked’ and ‘phenomenally plain’ behind her back with other Dorset acquaintances.
When Hardy took holidays with other friends, Emma made her own arrangements. At sixty-eight she went bicycling alone round Dorset, sometimes stopping at roadside cottages for meals. She kept up her painting, her sewing and her music. She refused to become an invalid, making light of her physical problems and pains. At sixty-nine she sat down to produce Some Recollections, her best piece of writing, entirely on her own. What she could never do was to rediscover in her own mind what had made her proud of Hardy, or restore in her behaviour what had made her dear to him. And so they remained locked in mutual incomprehension.
With the twentieth century Hardy had put novel writing behind him, and there were to be no more shockers to upset Emma or the public. Instead he devoted much of the first decade of the century to a project to which no one could take exception, a work historical and patriotic in theme, composed largely in blank verse. The Dynasts could be seen as a fitting and respectable crown to the career of a man of letters. He had for many years been turning over in his mind the idea of writing about the Napoleonic Wars. As early as June 1875, when he had taken Emma with him to visit Waterloo veterans at the Chelsea Hospital on the anniversary of the great battle, and one old soldier had put his arm round her waist and called her ‘my dear young woman’, Hardy had thought of writing ‘A Ballad of the Hundred Days. Then another of Moscow. Others of earlier campaigns – forming all together an Iliad of Europe from 1789 to 1815’. 28 In 1889 he was planning ‘A Drama of Kings’, and in 1896 it was to be ‘Europe in Throes’. He did some research and writing in 1897 but did not settle to steady work until 1902. What emerged from his long labours became The Dynasts: An Epic-Drama, which absorbed him until 1908. It was history but also a vehicle in which he expressed his views about human motivation, how people are driven by the Immanent Will even when they think they are making their own choices. It was published in three parts, in 1904, 1906 and 1908. It was not intended for performance – Hardy took Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound as his model here – and he hoped it would be read like a novel. As it turned out, this was a vain hope, and today it is among the least read of his works.
The scope of what he took on was ambitious: he started from the invasion scare in England in 1805, when Napoleon assembled an army on the French coast and Pitt and Sheridan clashed in the House of Commons, and covered all the main events in the European wars over the next ten years to the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The best effects are the cinematic stage directions in which we are given aerial views of Europe, looking down from a great height at advancing or retreating armies moving like caterpillars across the various landscapes, and at the great land and sea battles: Trafalgar, Ulm, Jena, Austerlitz, Corunna, Talavera, the retreat from Moscow and Waterloo. They are an extraordinary feat of imagination, original and dramatic. Moving the scale from the panoramic to the minute, there is an account of the effect of battle on animal, vegetable and insect life at Waterloo which no one but Hardy could have thought of and where his poetic voice is perfectly pitched:
The mole’s tunnelled chambers are crushed by wheels,
The lark’s eggs scattered, their owners fled;
And the hedgehog’s household the sapper unseals.
The snail draws in at the terrible tread,
But in vain; he is crushed by the felloe-rim;
The worm asks what can be overhead…
Trodden and bruised to a miry tomb
Are ears that have greened but will never be gold,
And flowers in the bud that will never bloom. 29
These are the two best features of the vast enterprise in which Hardy asks his reader to take on nearly 300 characters, ranging from kings and emperors to common soldiers and Dorset rustics, as well as a group of presiding spirits, or ‘phantom intelligences’, who hover about commenting on the action, some sympathetically, some with irony or gleeful hostility. They are there to explicate the workings of the Immanent Will through humanity, but as celestial machinery they are feeble. Where Homer and Wagner made their gods into glorious and badly behaved beings with instantly recognizable feelings and behaviour, Hardy offers etiolated voices speaking without urgency or beauty. The demands of research and the scale of his enterprise seem to have absorbed his energy, so that when it came to writing there was little left to give life to the language. With a few exceptions like the passage above, it plods along, worthy and banal. Occasionally it becomes ludicrous. Blank verse needs a spring in it, and this has neither spring nor strength, but feebly apes Shakespearean historical writing:
The hostile hatchings of Napoleon’s brain
Against our Empire, long have harassed us,
And mangled all our mild amenities.
So, since the hunger for embranglement
That gnaws this man, has left us optionless,
And haled us recklessly to horrid war,
We have promptly mustered our well-hardened hosts,
And, counting on our call to the Most High,
Have forthwith set our puissance face to face
Against Napoleon. – Ranksmen! officers!
You fend your lives, your land, your liberty.
I am with you. Heaven frowns on the aggressor. 30
It would be cruel to quote more. The first part was not received with much enthusiasm, although Max Beerbohm was fascinated by the thought that it was the ‘first modern work of dramatic fiction in which free will is denied to the characters’, set on their courses by the Immanent Will. He veered between finding it a ‘quite fugitive and negligible little piece of work’ and deciding he had been reading ‘a really great book’. He mocked gently, talking of the ‘autumnal works of great writers’ and suggesting it would have required ‘a syndicate of much greater poets than ever were born into the world, working in an age of miracles’ to carry out Hardy’s intentions. He asked himself why Hardy had written it and wished it had been in prose, yet in the end he was won over. 31
By the time Part III appeared the critics were generally respectful, and it was greeted as ‘a great work of art’ and ‘the most notable literary achievement of the last quarter-century’ and proof of ‘undoubted genius’. 32 Hardy, now approaching seventy, had earned the right to be taken seriously. It has never been popular, however much respected, and it is quite hard to find anyone who has read it for pleasure for many years. Still, there have always been those whose love and commitment to his work have caused them to embrace The Dynasts. 33 Granville-Barker put on a dramatized version in the early years of the Great War, and there have been more adaptations for stage performance since, and for radio. A Major-General, Sir Harry Marriott Smith, who lived near Hardy in the 1920s, had bought and read it between the retreat from Mons and the landing in Gallipoli; he decided it was the greatest book written in his lifetime, because of its uncanny knowledge of how soldiers think and behave. When he asked Hardy how he knew about such things, Hardy replied, ‘Oh, well, I just knew it. I didn’t read that anywhere, I just knew it.’ Marriott Smith saw this as evidence of genius, and it is not for a civilian to argue with his opinion. 34
Macmillan brought out a complete edition of The Dynasts in November 1910. It is in small type and runs to 525 pages, and it has a portrait of Hardy, engraved from a painting made by his sister Mary, as frontispiece. He is almost smiling, and his hair, eyebrows and moustache are now quite white and look as soft as cotton wool.