The Dynasts Study Day

The Dynasts Study Day April 6 2024       Dorchester Library

We are but thistle-globes on Heaven’s high gales,
And whither blown, or when, or how, or why,
Can choose us not at all!...
                                    - Napoleon          Part 2 Act 2 Scene 6

            If ever Thomas Hardy himself were to attend a Hardy Conference and if ever someone were to ask him which of his works gave him most pride, he is likely to have replied, ‘The Dynasts.’ Despite the very lukewarm reception that Part 1 of The Dynasts received following its publication in 1904, by the time of its completion on 1908 and its publication as ‘an epic drama’ in the collected edition of 1910, it had established his reputation as a major literary figure, gained the admiration of his fellow poets and, arguably, led directly to King George V awarding him the Order of Merit. This was the verse drama that the Hardy Society gathered to discuss on 6 April 2024 at the Dorchester Library on one of our study days.

         And yet of all Hardy’s works The Dynasts is probably the least read. This is both understandable and regrettable: understandable because its three volumes of 19 acts and 133 scenes make it a challenging proposition, even if Dr Tony Fincham did admit to all our admiration of once having read it in one 24 hour sitting, and regrettable because, despite its length and occasional clumsiness, it does at its best contain some of the Hardy magic which still makes him popular today and which justifies a society like ours. It was indeed Hardy’s Paradise Lost, his Prometheus Unbound, his Icelandic saga, his Iliad of Europe – all terms he used to describe it in his prologue to the 1910 three volume edition.

         One of the things which at first may deter a modern reader is the other worldly opening with its world of spirits and their references to an all controlling but indifferent Immanent Will hovering there in the background. The concept will be familiar to readers of Hardy’s Hap or the closing lines of Tess or the brooding presence of ‘fate’ overhanging Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native, a fate which is neither benign or malign but which is indifferent to man crawling like caterpillars on the surface of the world below (as in the retreat from Moscow) or ants (as in Hardy’s overview of Waterloo). The Immanent Will never speaks but is referred to eleven times: the other spirits – ‘the Ancient Spirit and Chorus of the Years, the Spirit and Chorus of the Pities, the Shade of the Earth, the Spirits Sinister and Ironic with their Choruses, Rumours, Spirit- Messengers, and Recording Angels’ – do. Of these it is the Spirit of the Pities which is closest to the authentic voice of the Hardy we know – ‘the melioristic pacifist’ of Tony Fincham’s title, the man who wrote novels as ‘a plea against man’s inhumanity to man, to woman and to the lower animals,’ the man who abhorred all suffering and whose driving principle was the need for more loving kindness in the world. As so often with Hardy The Dynasts is both a warning, a plea for peace and ‘a way to the better.’ By the end of The Dynasts though the battle against the natural pessimism that he confessed to sharing with his mother was challenged with a hint in the after scene that the collective will of men might change the world for the better, so that finally ‘Consciousness the Will informing’ will ‘fashion all things fair.’ It was a momentary glimmer of hope that would be snuffed out on the battlefields of Flanders and the Somme and endure only for the few short years of the Georgian high summer which followed the 1910 publication of this epic drama in one volume.

         Yet important as the philosophical background is to The Dynasts I would argue that there is a presence brooding over the verse drama which is just as important, namely the Wessex of Hardy’s childhood. It was here that the seeds were sown of a lifelong fascination with the Napoleonic Wars. T.E.Lawrence said of him, "Napoleon is a real man to him, and the country of Dorsetshire echoes that name everywhere in Hardy's ears. He lives in that period, and thinks of it as the great war.” The two were of course inextricably linked. His fascination can be traced to the anecdotes and songs passed down to him by his parents and grandparents, the Veterans valley at the end of which he lived, the stand of Wellingtonia pines in nearby Thorncombe Woods thought to be a war memorial and renamed after the hero of Waterloo when Hardy was a boy of 12, the material culture of rusting pikes, faded uniforms and tattered flags in churches, the remnants of the warning bonfire keepers huts on the Rainbarrows above his home, the memory of his grandfather who was in the ‘Bang Up Locals’ or Puddletown Volunteer militia as they were more officially known. It was his true story of the lighting of the bonfires to say that the French had landed which is referred to in The Dynasts and which gave Hardy both the poem The Alarm and the incident in The Trumpet Major which foregrounded Festus Derriman’s cowardice. His grandmother would have told him of the figure of terror that Buonaparte had become, even to the extent of supplanting the Reddleman as the bogeyman of childhood nightmares and the ultimate deterrent of nursery maids and school teachers. Perhaps the defining moment though was his discovery, as a nine year old, of an 1817 collection of periodicals which had belonged to his grandfather, entitled A History of the Wars Occasioned by the French Revolution, stashed away in a cupboard in his Bockhampton home. He was smitten from an early age.

         In his Preface to the first part of The Dynasts in September 1903 Hardy attributed ‘the choice of such a subject’ as ‘mainly due to three accidents of locality.’ These he identified as the proximity of King George III’s watering place, where of course he would live for a time; the fear of invasion that had ‘animated’ the district of his birth and been passed down through his family, referred to above, and the countryside of Dorset which ‘happened to include the village which was the birthplace of Nelson’s flag-captain at Trafalgar.’ As a small child he would have seen the monument rising on a distant hillside from a few hundred yards behind his house and forever associated this with the hero of Trafalgar whom he liked to own as a distant relative. Captain Hardy is never very far from the pages of The Dynasts in part one. It was a fascination fed and watered by a lifetime of reading and research which would find expression in seven of the fifty-one poems published in 1898, in at least three short stories and in his one historical novel, but which would only be fully realised in the epic drama published under that name in one volume in 1910.

         The Dynasts though is also, as Tony Fincham pointed out in the title of his talk, ‘a rattling good history’. Historians will find that Hardy’s research into the major events of the war was both accurate and detailed with all the major events from the end of the Peace of Amiens on 18 May 1803 to the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 included. Nor does Hardy stint on the details of the battle scenes and the human cost this inevitably involve. His attitude to warfare, even though a pacifist, was still somewhat ambivalent,’ as his letter to Florence Henniker about the Boer War reveals: ‘I take a keen pleasure in war strategy and tactics, following it as if it were a game of chess, but all the while I am obliged to blind myself to the human side of the matter: directly I think of that the romance looks somewhat tawdry, and worse.’ The Dynasts ends with Napoleon in Jude-John Antell- like ‘Sic placet’ despair in the wood of Bossu rather than on St. Helena ‘standing against the sky - dark and motionless’, a ironically fateful position he had already given to young George in Far From The Madding Crowd. Yet it is a despair still tempered with the arrogance of power ‘Great men are meteors that consume themselves To light the earth. This is my burnt-out hour,’ bemoans the defeated emperor. Cue In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations' first composed at the time of the final act of a later and final Napoleonic war.

         In between these dates the war rages, with scenes of high diplomacy, the courtrooms of Europe and memorable battles – Jena, Wagram, Walcherem; the battles of the Peninsula campaign – Vimiero, Corunna, Talavera and Albuera; and the disastrous invasion of Russia, the retreat from Moscow, Leipzig and finally Waterloo. His thorough research had taken him to the battlefield of Waterloo twice, with a new Baedecker each time to annotate and illustrate, and to the interviewing of veterans whenever the opportunity arose whether at the Chelsea Pensioners Hospital and the nearby Turks Head Inn in London or, closer to home at the Old Ship Inn in High West Street Dorchester where he was given a detailed account of the battle of Leipzig by the son of a veteran. You will recognise it as Leipzig Thomas Hardy (1813) Scene: The Master-tradesmen's Parlour at the Old Ship Inn, Casterbridge. Evening from his 1898 Wessex poems collection.

         Yet even in the height of battle Hardy never loses sight of the human cost of warfare – ‘the peoples, distressed by events which they did not cause, are seen writhing crawling, heaving, and vibrating in their various cities and nationalities.’ Using the cinematic technique found in his novels, Hardy first gives the overview of a landscape and then zooms in to a particular scene and then to the individuals within that scene. It is this series of vignettes that makes The Dynasts so accessible even for those who want to dip into it rather than read it from cover to cover (and I realise of course that many people reading this will have done this many times already). There are so many cameo moments from which to choose: the homely scenes on Rainbarrows with Private Cantle (later Granfer Cantle in The Return of the Native) and his outspoken wife Kezia, based on his grandmother; the pathetic scenes of the bleeding of poor mad King George at Windsor; the painful scenes between Napoleon and Josephine when they discuss their childlessness, ‘that worm/ Time ever keeps in hand for gnawing me!—/The question of my dynasty—which bites/ Closer and closer as the years wheel on’, a topic so very close Hardy’s heart; the death of Nelson and the comic account of the ‘broaching’ of the admiral when ‘the grog ran short, because they’d used near all they had to ‘peckle’ his body in, a scene set in the warmth and familiarity of the Old Rooms Inn in Weymouth that Hardy would have known so well; the drunk deserters on the retreat from Corunna lying in the straw, one next to a dead woman – ‘If I didn’t think that her poor knees felt cold!... And only an hour ago I swore to marry her!’, and careless about whether they are shot by their captain for desertion or by the French; the women and young girl who have been searching for their loved ones and assisting the surgeon on the battlefield of Waterloo ‘twas worse than opening innerds at a pig-killing,’ one of the many homely images scattered throughout the drama All have the authentic voices of the people Hardy would have known or of those whom he had encountered in the hospitals and hostelries where veterans gathered.

         And then there are all those songs and poems which are both integral to the drama and yet can stand alone as examples of Hardy’s poetry – the soldiers’ nostalgic longing from the plains of Vittorio for the girls they left behind them in Weymouth
         When we lay where Budmouth Beach is,
         O, the girls were fresh as peaches,
         With their tall and tossing figures and their eyes of blue
              and brown!
       And our hearts would ache with longing
       As we paced from our sing-songing,
       With a smart CLINK! CLINK! up the Esplanade and down,

or the Night of Trafalgar ballad which links the storm at Cadiz Bay which occurred after the battle with the storm that was said to have raged sympathetically over Weymouth at the same time. Then there is Chorus of the Pities commentary often anthologised as The field of Waterloo. It begins with the English soldiers on the eve of battle lying down and huddled together in their wet blankets, trying to sleep by the dying embers of their fires -
       The eyelids of eve fall together at last,
       And the forms so foreign to field and tree
       Lie down as though native, and slumber fast!

and then goes on to describe the devastation that the battle will wreak on the living things affected by it. It contains this particularly poignant triplet -

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.

No wonder that Siegfried Sassoon was such an admirer.

         The Dynasts has never been filmed and very rarely acted although there were three productions that Hardy saw in his lifetime. The biggest and most extravagant of these was that produced by Granville Barker at the Kingsway Theatre as a patriotic fund-raiser at the height of the Great War and was followed by a similar production put on by the Oxford University Dramatic Society which again focused on the global conflict. It was, however, the third production by the Hardy players based on the Wessex Scenes that Hardy most enjoyed. He even went so far as to write some extra scenes for Gertrude Bugler to perform. In the end despite its global range and historical depth it was these homely scenes which Hardy warmed to most.

         It was appropriate then that our study day should end at one of these Wessex locations found in The Dynasts. Before the battle of Waterloo there is a lull before the storm and in true Shakespearian fashion a comic interlude involving ‘rustics’ (Hardy’s own word, and again Shakespearian). This is set in Durnover Green, Casterbridge, today known as Salisbury Field, near the site of executions now marked by the Frink sculptures of the martyrs. Here an effigy of Napoleon was burnt: there is also a case for identifying the location as Fordington Field, but as always Hardy was never afraid to mix and match. Mark Chuter’s walk led us to Fordington so that we could imagine the Reverend Mr Palmer, vicar of the parish, leaning against his garden door post, smoking a clay pipe of preternatural length as the burning is prepared. Here the Dorchester locals, among them the recycled Private Cantle and Solomon Longways, have fun at the expense of the disgruntled ‘yokel’ from distant Sturminster Newton who was convinced that Bonaparte had landed and was going to get burnt alive in Casterbridge.

         ‘Then there’s no honesty left in Wessex folk nowadays at all! “Boney’s going to be burned on Durnover Green to-night,”— that was what I thought, to be sure I did, that he’d been catched sailing from his islant and landed at Budmouth and brought to Casterbridge Jail, the natural retreat of malefactors!—False deceivers—making me lose a quarter who can ill afford it; and all for nothing!’

Like the inhabitants of Casterbridge we have little sympathy for this ignorant ‘stunpoll’ despite his loss of a day’s wages.

            The scene ends though not with a moment of comedy but with the plaintive song of one of the woman left behind as she reflects on her soldier lover far away ‘on battle’s red brink’ now ‘facing carbine and ball’. The final two acts which follow devote 16 scenes to the full horror and historical detail of Waterloo, ending with Napoleon’s defeat. Life will go onward the same though Dynasties pass. The Dynasts is indeed both a rattling good history by a melioristic pacifist and a work of epic proportions with its roots in the Wessex of Hardy’s childhood. Hardy was justifiably proud of his achievement. It certainly deserves to be read either in its entirety or in selection, and discussed more often.                                                                                                                     Alban O’ Brien

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