Department of English, College of Education for Humanities, University of Kerbala, Kerbala
Students, as well teachers and researchers, study Thomas Hardy as a novelist-turned-poet, focusing on his social or industrial novels and love poems. For example, fourth-year-students get access to the Victorian Age and come to know Hardy as an important and major English novelist of the period. However, this short essay invites students as well researchers to Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts: An Epic-Drama of the war with Napoleon, in three parts, nineteen acts, & one hundred & thirty scenes, the time covered by the action being about ten years.
The Dynasts is a remarkable achievement, painted with an extraordinary energy and sureness of touch, and based on an extensive, sagacious study of the history of the Napoleonic Wars. Epic drama, for Hardy, is the highest form of art; it is the kind of literature he aspires to originate. For more than three decades he contemplated a large work, a drama on the epic scale, which he devoted his life to its completion. Thus, The Dynasts is what Hardy’s entire career tended to, and for him it represents the sublime artistic work and his magnum opus.
Thomas Hardy has undertaken The Dynasts after a lifelong preparation. He esteemed “epic-drama” as the best form for dramatizing the philosophical conception of man’s will on the basis of the huge theme of historical events and the struggle of nations during the Napoleonic Wars. Hardy started composing The Dynasts as soon as he felt that he accumulated enough material of the Napoleonic Wars, believing that it is the First Great War to deal with, which gave him a justification for abandoning prose in favor of poetry. He succeeded in bringing new means into modern epic-drama or anti-war poetry.
Hardy’s involvement lies in “non-rational” subjects which is, for Hardy, the dominant doctrine of the Cosmic Mind. Hardy’s “non-rationality” comes as a compromise of emotionality and rationality. It expresses Hardy’s hope in progression of human consciousness by means of mental development which is sufficiently supported by the plot, characters, and events in the epic-drama. Moreover, Hardy presented an interesting and a novel mythology of Phantoms as impersonated abstractions which are representatives of the philosophical matters. Although Hardy considered the idea of growing consciousness of the Will new, its familiarity with Spinoza’s philosophical concept is unequivocal. By means of the Platonic philosophy, Hardy elaborated his own philosophical doctrine. He believed that he has the right to create a new philosophy out of his experience. Thus, the philosophy of The Dynasts is an original and a modern one. Thus, The Dynasts becomes an introduction to the poetry of the modern Great Wars.
Hardy’s effort to maintain realistic approach in stage-directions and Dumb Shows as well as his endeavour to describe real historical facts is in accordance with the title “epic-drama”. Hardy, in The Dynasts also proves his mastery of impressive blank verse and he achieves music in verse very often, as for example, describing realistic pictures of war suffering, as in Captain Hardy’s memories during the battle at Trafalgar or in the verse depicting the atmosphere of the night before the battle at Waterloo.
The optimistic impression included in the epic-drama stems from Hardy’s religious attitude and from his belief in the indispensability of Christianity as unchallenged law, though his disappointment with it is also documented as in the scene of crowning Napoleon. Moreover, Hardy’s warmth and love are apparent in his patriotism, his relations to his native country Dorset (called Wessex in Hardy’s fiction) and its inhabitants. The optimistic framework is shaped by Hardy’s impressive sensibility of ending suffering of individuals and nations in wars believing in a surely, though slow, raising self-consciousness.
Hardy succeeds in developing the complex personality of characters, in integrating two opposing tendencies of mankind, love and aggression, courage and cowardice, and in a living portrait of characters. Hardy succeeds also to receive the reader’s emotional involvement and add another more significant value by his mastery of visual imagination and creation of a new camera-like perspective in the construction of the epic-drama before the film as a form of art.
To conclude, The Dynasts is a work of exceptional power. Itis the greatest appearance of Napoleon in English poetry, while the Romantic and Victorian poets took no need of the Napoleonic theme. It is a great modern epic of amazing originality and amazing significance compact with imagination. The Dynasts is unquestionably an extremely remarkable and powerful piece of work, as full of ideality, artistic skill with which the poet has treated the most striking episodes of the Napoleonic Wars. Hardy’s epic-drama is a monument of true poetic feeling and deep study of human nature. The form, the manner, and the theme are not only original, but of absorbing interest.
