A Selection of the Philosophical Poems of Thomas Hardy
Section 1
1. What this section is about
This is a study of a small selection of Hardy's poems, mostly written between the end of the Great War in 1918 and the poet's death in 1928. Hardy was about 74 years old when the war broke out and 78 when it ended. In those four years the world irrevocably changed. What is remarkable is that Hardy changed too, with the questionings of his pre-war days taking on a wider and more penetrating aspect, one which resonates even today, although not in a way everyone will find convenient.
Section I is an extended introduction indicating the problems Hardy had in being understood and accepted. Section II is an analysis of the relevant poems.
i. The Collapse of Certainty
As the Great War had shaken the political, social and moral foundations of England, so neo-Darwinism and Einstein's Theory of Relativity shook its intellectual ones. It is remarkable that although ensconced in rural Dorset Hardy kept himself informed of intellectual developments. In response, he wrote a number of philosophical poems and a number of others in which such influences can be discerned.
Exactly how and when Hardy accessed current material is not precisely known but can be inferred. For instance, Einstein formulated his theories in 1905, but experimental support was not available until 1919, and this was not made public until the end of the year.
In the poem 'The Absolute Explains' (722), manuscript dated to New Year's Eve 1922, Hardy includes Einstein's 'The Fourth Dimension' in the final stanza. In a poem dated 1920, 'Our Old Friend Dualism', Hardy includes in the second line 'Spinoza and the Monists', a possible but not certain reference to the philosopher who most influenced Einstein (see below). What we can be certain of is Hardy's interest in relativity between the end of 1919 and the end of 1922. Hardy was fully aware, as was Q, of living in radically changing times.
In Human Shows of 1925, there are three poems relating to questions of time:
'Free the Fret of Thinking' (721)
'The Absolute Explains' (722)
'So, Time, (The Same Thought Resumed)' (723 ), possibly early 1923
In the posthumously published collection Winter Words of 1928 are two more general works:
'Our Old Friend Dualism' (881), dated 1920
'Drinking Song' (896)
ii. Q and the Demise of the Prophetic Poets
In the printed lecture The Victorian Age of 1921, Q looks back to a pre-war time of 'confident hope', a moral, intellectual and political confidence, when the culture of Western Europe prided itself on holding a pre-eminent position in the world and assumed a civilizing mission.
This confidence the war shattered in a welter of unprecedented barbarity. In his lectures on 'Byron' (I) and 'Shelley' (3), Q unleashes his fury that the prophetic vision of social justice and harmony, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution which, they preached, had been betrayed after the Napoleonic War and again after the Great War: the 'prophecy has come nowhere near fulfilment' (Quiller-Couch, 1922, p.4).
Byron took on the Establishment orthodoxy of his day, becoming its 'deadliest denouncer'. Q brought it up to date with: 'In our hearts we all know it; that orthodoxy is, with many, a lie of the soul' (ibid., p.16).
Q is employing Byron and Shelley as a vehicle for attacking post-war establishment orthodoxy. Those who should have attacked it, 'our true poets are prophets' (ibid., p.42), had been killed in the trenches. What remained was not prophetic literature, but the pedants' 'way of convention', the philosophers' 'military road of logic' ('Seventeenth Century Poets') and the truncated ideas of 'Hegel or Comte or Bergson' who think they can 'comprehend' the world as opposed to 'apprehending' it (Quiller-Couch, 1919, p. 129).
Q could not have known, certainly at the time, that Einstein was not of a radically different opinion, as indicated by Hoffman and Dukas: Science is 'a matter of faith and intuition . . . great science is not built on cold logic' (p. 193) and 'he knew too the frailty of all theories' (p. 257).
In his post-war lectures Q was trying to focus the minds of questioning students, some who had fought and others who had been too young. Yet there was another questioning mind, some distance to the south, the octogenarian Thomas Hardy in rural Dorset.
In a letter to Q of October 1916, Hardy wondered whether the 'world' had become too steeped in blood to be civilized by literature: 'Literature . . . ought to hold its peace for ever' (Seymour-Smith, p. 827). Hardy, like Q, had a belief in the civilizing role in society of great literature. Science had no such intention of holding its peace.
At the time of the letter, Einstein in Berlin, through Willem de Sitter in neutral Leiden, managed to contact Arthur Eddington in Cambridge University with details of his theory of relativity (Hoffman and Dukas, p. 129). Addington and Lyson were able to experimentally support the theory in May 1919. This was about the time Q was giving his 'Shelley' lectures, Hardy was seeing an apparition in Stinsford churchyard (Seymour-Smith, p. 829) and reading J.M. Keynes' Economic Consequences of the Peace (ibid., p. 851; Harrod, Ch. 7).
iii. Challenging Establishment Elites
J.M. Keynes
Keynes attended the Peace Conference at Versailles in the spring of 1919, but left in despair in early June to write a critique, which was published that December. He had witnessed 'the general election of 1918 (which) involved a vulgarization of British public life', (Harrod, p. 311), followed by a vindictive peace conference. His publication of The Economic Consequences of the Peace made him 'an outlaw from British official circles for many years afterwards' (Harrod, p. 297). The rot came from the top.
The Huxleys
The problem Hardy faced coming from rural Dorset, as identified by Q, is indicated in a review by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Literary Review of September 2022. It is of the recently published An Intimate History of Evolution: the Story of the Huxley Family by Alison Bashford. Starting with Thomas Henry Huxley in 1825, it concludes with Sir Julian Huxley in 1975.
Seymour-Smith reveals the influence of T.H. Huxley, 'Darwin's Bulldog', on Hardy. Huxley was one of those who had undermined Hardy's belief in 'revealed religion' (Seymour-Smith, p. 114-5). Huxley's influence was all pervasive in Victorian England.
His grandson, (Sir) Julian Huxley, was born in 1887, when Hardy was about 47 and Q 24 years old. His was the standard route into the intellectual elite, Eton and Oxford, where in 1908 he became a lecturer in zoology and subsequently a professor at King's College, London, and the Royal Institution. Between 1946 and 1948 he stood at the centre of international science as Director-General of UNESCO. Those of us who are old enough can remember Sir Julian Huxley's regular appearances on radio and television, especially The Brains Trust, where he was one of a distinguished panel of intellectuals and academics.
An Intimate History of Evolution, according to Douglas-Fairhurst's review, shows the continuity of thought between T.H. Huxley and Sir Julian Huxley, including 'Thomas's popularization of the idea of natural selection and Julian's theoretical application of it to breeding programmes for humans' (Literary Review, Sept 1922).
Douglas-Fairhurst identifies 'racism' as a theme, from the assertion by Thomas that the idea that 'the negro is the equal of a white man' as 'unworthy of serious discussion', to Julian's articles in the 1920s on 'the Negro Problem'. Later Julian was to say, 'human beings are not born equal in gifts or potentialities, and human progress stems largely from the very fact of their inequality.'
In other words, there is a genetically determined intellectual elite which drives progress, with steps descending downwards to the negro at the bottom, no doubt with working-class boys from Dorset somewhere in between.
F. Galton
One of the leaders in this field was Charles Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911). Following Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) Galton worked to prove that mental attributes such as intelligence are inherited, publishing his findings in Inquiries into the Human Faculty and its Development (1883). He argued the need for selective breeding, 'eugenics', founding a professorship in eugenics at University College, London. (See The History Today: Who's Who in British History).
Contemporary Darwinists reject this as a valid interpretation of Darwin's writings. However, this is how they were interpreted, even to the point of a 'Mental Deficiency Bill' being presented to Parliament in 1912, a bill Q publicly opposed. (Brittain, pp. 51-2).
Neo-Darwinism
In the lecture 'Shelley I', Q returns to the attack on the interpretations of Darwinism: 'then came along the Darwinian hypothesis, to be interpreted pretty swiftly into struggle-for life competition, Nature's first law' (Quiller-Couch, 1922, p.45). In a statement of 1860, in Leonard Huxley's biography of his father, H.H. Huxley wrote: 'But the "fittest" which survives in the struggle for existence may be, and often is, the ethnically worst' (Huxley, p. 303).
In a letter of June 1893 is found: 'My lecture is really an effort to put the Christian doctrine that Satan is the Prince of this world upon a scientific foundation' (ibid., p. 359).
C. Burt
One result of this was a strict division in educational provision, as A.J.P. Taylor described in English History, 1914-45, between the 'privileged' and the 'masses': 'The two systems of education catered for different classes and provided education, different in quality and content, for rulers and ruled' (Taylor, p. 171).
One of the most important educational thinkers of the time was Sir Cyril Burt (1883-1971), who was educational psychologist to the London County Council from 1913 to 1932, and Professor of Psychology at University College, London, from 1932 to 1950. He linked intelligence and aptitude to heredity, claiming they could be assessed by 'Intelligence Tests', leading to the 'Eleven Plus' tests in Butler's Education Act of 1944.
Hardy would have been perceived by the Elite, and possibly by himself, as coming from an inferior level of society with a degenerate culture dominated by myth, superstition and immorality. Elite attitudes extended to Shakespeare, where doubts were raised about the authorship of the plays attributed to him – Francis Bacon, 1st Baron Verulam, Viscount St Albans, or Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, being thought more appropriate – and about the simple fisherman who could not have written John's Gospel. The inferior intellectual status of women is a subject in itself.
It would be comforting to think such opinions to be of the past. However, in Serving the Reich. The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler, Philip Ball, a former editor of Nature, states that a lecture at the London Science Museum in 2007 by James Watson, a Nobel prizewinner in molecular biology, had to be cancelled. Apparently, 'in a newspaper interview (he claimed that 'people who have to deal with black employees' know the assumption of equal intelligence among races to be untrue)'. Ball continues that this is 'anecdotal prejudice rather than a scientific hypothesis' (Ball, p. 253).
iv. N. Chomsky and Received Opinion
The problem of challenging received opinion was examined by American linguist Noam Chomsky in a lecture given at the University of Sienna in November 1999 and published in On Nature and Language. The published lecture or 'essay' was called 'The Secular Priesthood and the Perils of Democracy'. One section deals specifically with England, using quotations from the introduction to Animal Farm by George Orwell which was not published until after his death.
Chomsky says:
...in free England, he [Orwell] wrote, censorship is "largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark without any need of any official ban'. The result is that 'Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness'
Later in the essay Chomsky uses quotations from an article by Harold Lasswell in The Encyclopedia of Social Sciences of 1933 where it talks of the 'ignorance and stupidity of the masses' and a 'democratic dogmatism about men being the best judges of their own interests' (Chomsky, p. 182).
Q was fortunate in having distinguished forebears, such as his grandfather Dr Jonathan Couch, FLS.. He himself had attended Clifton College, where MacTaggart was also educated, and Oxford. Hardy simply attended a rural grammar school, having to build everything himself.
Hardy read Darwin's Origin of Species sometime after its publication in 1859 (Seymour-Smith, p. 30). He came to Einstein late in life. (Seymour-Smith, p. 809). This must have been after his confirmation of the General Theory of Relativity through observations of an eclipse on May 29, 1919. The news was not made official until November 6, 1919, when it was announced that the results of the observations favoured Einstein rather than Newton. In a letter to Einstein in December 1919, Arthur Eddington wrote: '. . .all England has been talking about your theory. It has made a tremendous sensation. . .'. (Hoffman & Dukas, p. 131-3). This interest must have hardened following an article Einstein had written in The Times of November 28, 1919, with Hardy as possibly one of the readers.
On June 10, 1921, Einstein gave a lecture, in German, at King's College, University of London, with Viscount Haldane in the chair. Haldane had been a member of the Liberal administration of Asquith and became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first Labour government of 1924. Einstein also spoke at the University of Manchester.
v. Postmodernism and Science
To understand Hardy's philosophical poems it is necessary to appreciate how Darwin and Einstein were perceived from 1919 to 1923, rather than how they are perceived today in the writings of popular scientists with their own agendas. A useful publication detailing how Darwin and Einstein were understood and subsequent changes up to 2002 is Postmodernism and Big Science, edited by Richard Appignanesi.
The introduction by Christopher Horrocks explains how even the word 'science' has become increasingly problematic: many challenge 'claims to authority' and declare 'facts are uncertain, values in dispute'( Appignanesi, p. 6). This process of questioning the very nature and methodology of science goes back to the First World War and even beyond. Hardy's poems and Q's lectures may be seen as a part of that questioning process.
This questioning is further explored in the study Thomas Kuhn and the Science Wars by Ziauddin Sardar and is a theme in Einstein and the Birth of Big Science by Peter Coles, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Nottingham – where Q gave his lecture on Byron in 1918. Coles argues that science has developed in the direction of elitism and exclusivity: '. . .the more ambitious scientists become, the further their theoretical ideas lie beyond the grasp of the general public' (Coles, pp. 21-2).
Hardy's 'The Absolute Explains' of New Year's Eve 1922, has Einstein's 'The Fourth Dimension', or space-time, as the focus of stanza sixteen, where Hardy sees 'Being' transcending time and space. This is Hardy's understanding of what he read.
Hardy and Einstein were similar in having original minds in conflict with received opinion. Einstein dropped out of school in 1984, failed the first entry examination to the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich and was unable to secure a job in a Swiss University. A junior patent clerkship in Bern was the sum total of his efforts (Ibid., pp. 15-16). When the General Theory was published in 1905, he was fortunate that it came to the notice of more distinguished associates.
Arthur Eddington, a Quaker pacifist and Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge, received Einstein's ideas through Willem De Sitter in 1916. Eddington and the Astronomer Royal Sir Frank Dyson arranged for the theory to be tested at an eclipse of the sun on May 29, 1919.
The June issue of Observatory carried the first positive news of the test in its 'Stop-Press'; although this was overshadowed by the signing of the Peace Treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on June 28. Detailed results were not made public until a joint meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society of London on November 6. On November 7, The Times carried an account of the joint meeting under the heading: 'REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE. NEW THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE'.
On November 28, 1919, an article by Einstein appeared in The Times. Not everyone was convinced, but test results from Australia in 1922 convinced more. Hardy's poem 'The Absolute Explains' is dated to the last day of 1922.
Coles concludes his study with a caution in 'The Press, Science and Truth'. He states how Einstein did not prove Newton wrong, but provided a theory more appropriate for certain situations although it 'breaks down when matter is so dense that quantum effects become important....The more esoteric the theory, the further it is beyond the grasp of the non-specialist, the more exalted is the . . . scientist as priest' (Coles, pp.46 & 47).
vi. The Question of Time
One central plank of received opinion in academia was the notion of absolute space and time, which derives from the Judaeo-Christian tradition but was taken as a self-evident truth and underlies the thinking of Newton and Darwin. Folk culture does not, one reason for its having been derided.
John M.E. Mac or McTaggart challenged this notion. Hardy was in correspondence with the Cambridge philosopher. (Seymour-Smith, p. 336 ff.). In March 1955, Einstein wrote: 'For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one' (Hoffman & Dukas,, p. 258). It has certainly been 'stubborn' in academic circles that the thinking of MacTaggart and Einstein does not necessarily justify the folk position is not in itself damning. It opened a door which previously had been locked and bolted. When Hardy saw a figure in 18th-century costume in Stinsford Church (Seymour-Smith, p. 829) and when he twice saw a 'dark man' foretelling his death – effect preceding cause! – time and space were being relativized in accordance with an observed phenomenon, one as real as a 'red shift' to Eddington and Dyson.
vii. Challenging the Elites
The problem of challenging received opinion is as Chomsky stated it. The History Today Who's Who reveals how evidence that Sir Cyril Burt 'faked some of the data' did not emerge until after his death – over 27 years after the Butler Education Act, necessitating a radical reform of secondary educational provision. J.M. Keynes was officially ostracised following the publication of The Economic Consequences of the Peace. MacTaggart's death went virtually unreported (Seymour-Smith, p.673). Hardy's own death was reported in a way that trivialized him and incensed Q, as Q's subsequent lectures reveal. It is only now that the nature and significance of the Huxleys are coming to full public attention, even if previously acknowledged.
Thomas Hardy was perceived as coming from a repository of inferior genetic material which expressed itself in superstition, credulity and moral instability, at least according to the elitism of the day and long days afterwards. Q's lectures show Hardy's struggle, first to establish himself as a novelist against his natural bent, what Q called a 'desperate remedy' for his financial woes, secondly to achieve 'authenticity' in the face of conventional critical opinion, thirdly to establish himself as a poet, and finally, at the age of 77, to liberate a true lyrical voice from the soil of rural Dorset.
Hardy's philosophical poems come from the post-war period when he felt fully justified in challenging received opinion and elitist attitudes. He had proved his own worth, while that of the Establishment had been severely shaken, however much it was endeavouring to reassert itself. Hardy's questioning went to one of the roots of academic thinking, the notion of linear time. With the Judaeo-Christian tradition overturned, linear time had become problematic.
Section II: Analysis of Poems
The Philosophical Poems of Human Shows
The collection preceding Human Shows is Late Lyrics and Earlier, with its preface or 'Apology' dated February 1922. This was just over three years after the Armistice of November 1918 and at a time when the post-war boom had come to an end. Late Lyrics contains '"'And There Was a Great Calm"' which was written '(On the Signing of the Armistice, 11 Nov. 1918)'. Few war poems are included, suggesting a desire to turn away from the conflict. It was during this period that Einstein's revolutionary ideas were popularized in England.
Hoffman and Dukas suggest that as Einstein was Swiss and a pacifist, and promoted by another pacifist, Arthur Eddington, bleak post-war England saw in Einstein's work the possibility of scientific advance and a better world. This helps explain a popularity which 'was a puzzle to Einstein as his theory was to the layman' (Hoffman & Dukas, p. 134).
This popularity came when Hardy was writing the last poems to appear in Late Lyrics and the first in Human Shows. Seymour-Smith notes Hardy's interest in 'Einstein' and 'notions of time' (Seymour-Smith, p. 809), but does not date when this was. The first overt reference in the poetry is 'The Fourth Dimension' or Einstein's space-time in 'The Absolute Explains' (722) dated 'New Year's Eve 1922'. This is one of a group of poems (721 to 724) in the middle of Human Shows. The forerunner of this group is 'Waiting Both' (663), the first of the collection.
'Waiting Both' (663)
Human Shows opens with the undated 'Waiting Both', a poem in two stanzas, in which the poet dialogues with a 'star'. In later poems, the poet is the questioner in any dialogue, but in 'Waiting Both' the star is the questioner. Both the star and the poet refer to themselves in the first person singular 'I'. They agree to await in the passing of time for a 'change', although what the 'change' will consist of is not stated, with extinction as a possibility.
This seems to take the reader back to the passage from Two in a Tower quoted by Q in 'The Earlier Novels of Thomas Hardy' referring to the burning out of stars to 'cinders'. Today, this burning out is termed a black hole, a vortex attracting everything within its parameter of influence through the force of gravity.
In 'Waiting Both', the star and the poet are mutually imbued with consciousness. The dialogue takes place in a universe of matter and spirit, as in the folk tradition, but not as in a secular materialistic universe. This poem probably owes more to the thinking of MacTaggart than of Einstein.
'There Seemed a Strangeness' (695)
It is tempting to speculate that Hardy wrote 'There Seemed a Strangeness' at about the time he was becoming aware of relativity theory and a 'Great Adjustment' was taking place in scientific thinking. The 'Voice' claims that an opaqueness existing from earlier times 'I uncloud', with reality appearing through the mist.
'Waiting Both' and 'There Seemed a Strangeness' lead into the main philosophical poems of the collection, commencing with 'Freed the Fret of Thinking' (721).
'Freed the Fret of Thinking' (721)
'Freed the Fret of Thinking' opens with an invocation of instinctual life as in the later poem 'Proud Songsters' (816) from Winter Words. As in 'Proud Songsters' where the young thrushes and finches sing of an April evening heedless of time, so in 'Freed the Fret of Thinking' the poet lived from instinct before the development of reflective thought. The knowledge of time and measurement resulted in the realization of age and death: the 'From dust we come and to dust we shall return' of the funeral service.
In the third and last stanza Hardy uses the rhyme 'reason', 'treason' and 'season' to encapsulate 'Creation's groan' of the previous stanza.
It is a poem of concise thought, imagery and controlled emotion. This is far from true of the next poem, in which Hardy seems to be struggling with ideas improperly understood, resulting in a longer, rather rambling work.
There seems to be a line of demarcation in Hardy's creative imagination between 'Freed the Fret of Thinking', and possibly 'Our Old Friend Dualism' (881) a poem dated to 1920 but not published until later, and the next three poems 'The Absolute Explains' (722), 'So Time' (723) and 'An Inquiry' (724), which includes new material.
'The Absolute Explains' (722)
This poem can be dated to New Year's Eve, 1922.
Einstein's Theory of Relativity first came to public notice in England in November 1919, where it probably resulted in some intellectual confusion. Coles includes a statement of the time in which Einstein says that the German physicist Max Planck failed to understand the General Theory of Relativity (Coles, p. 41). It was not generally accepted, even if little more understood, until the observation of an eclipse in Australia in 1922.
In 'The Absolute Explains', Hardy seems to be struggling to understand the implications of Einstein's ideas in the light of his correspondence with MacTaggart and his Dorset background. It is unsurprising if the poem lacks clarity.
The dating suggest composition took place in one day, presumably after a period of cogitation, with minor revisions afterwards.
The poem is a dialogue between 'The Absolute' or 'It' and the poet. The poet asks the questions and 'it' responds, although obscurely. Quotation marks are necessary for twelve stanzas, but not for the four spoken by the poet. The poet's first question is not given in the text. It is as though the reader intrudes upon a conversation. The questioner seems to be Thomas Hardy, with Emma Hardy as the unnamed subject.
Stanzas I to III
The initial and unstated question almost certainly relates to the condition of Emma Hardy following her death. The possible answers are extinction, heaven or another state, with extinction as the suggested one.
'The Absolute' replies in the negative. What is created, 'her lifedoings', exists 'Eternally', beyond 'Time's touch', as Time is 'phasmal' or illusory. Emma lives in a 'Void. . .unalloyed'. The word 'Void' may have been used for the purpose of rhyme, with Hades as possibly more appropriate.
Stanzas IV to V
'The Absolute' uses the image of a road at night which in itself is endless but with a small section visible in 'lantern light'.
Stanzas VI to X
Quotation marks are not used in this section.
'The Absolute' opens the past to the poet with its 'songs', 'laughters' and 'love-making', all 'Unhurt by age'.
Stanzas XI to XII, line 2
This section is centred on 'her' or Emma Hardy, who 'still shines on'.
Stanzas XII, line 3 to XIII
'The Absolute' refuses to open the 'Future' to the poet in answer to an unrecorded question. 'The Absolute' seems to suggest that the future, seen by the poet in time, is predetermined. To 'The Absolute' past, present and future are eternally present, time and space being meaningless human concepts.
Stanzas XIV to XVI
In stanza XIV, 'The Absolute' describes how belief in linear time is being challenged by science. Hence, Emma still exists 'in me', in 'the Absolute', with 'Being' transcending 'Time'.
There remains the two final and obscure lines of the poem, the penultimate including 'The Fourth Dimension' or space-time, whose 'fame/Bruits as its name'. Bruit derives from the French 'bruire' or roar, but in English indicates a report or rumour. Hardy's meaning is obscure.
Conclusion
What is remarkable about the poem is Hardy's realization, in the face of rigid academic opinion, that traditional understandings of space and time, as found in Dorset folklore, may not be far from the truth after all.
'So, Time' (723)
Below the title and in brackets is written '(The Same Thought Resumed)', implying a continuation of 'The Absolute Explains', so it was probably written early in 1923.
It is a short work of two stanzas but covers the same ground. The phrase 'my loves adornings/Despoiling her' clearly relates to Emma Hardy. Her continuing existence is supported by the 'sound philosopher', presumably J.M.D. MacTaggart. Emma is in 'placid permanence' and 'close to us'.
It is nothing less than a love poem to his first wife, irrespective of his second marriage; a presence who is still 'close'. The rationalist will claim Hardy to be imagining her because he is unable to accept her extinction. This ignores the number of poems dealing with the phenomena of death and the spirit world.
If there is a challenge in the poem it is to academic received opinion. Some may argue that we cannot comment on the poem as it relates to paranormal or supernatural phenomena. Hardy, and Q, see such phenomena as natural and open to observation, even if in contradiction to the theory of rationalism. Fact has to trump theory.
In his lecture 'The Earlier Novels of Thomas Hardy', Q argues that Hardy was 'possessed with a self-conscious indignation which distressed and haunted him almost throughout his life', quoting 'slow rises worth by poverty depressed'; but Hardy was also haunted after Emma's death by the 'pure fairy-tale . . . bathed in romantic colour' of their courtship with St Juliot (Quiller-Couch, 1934, p. 207) . 'So, Time' suggests that behind the fairy-tale there was something more.
The idea of union beyond death comes in some versions of Tristan and Iseult, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Q's The History of Joseph Lacquedem.
'An Inquiry' (724)
The subtitle is 'A Phantasy', linking it to the later 'A Philosophical Fantasy' (884), although with an alternative spelling. There is an implied link to 'So, Time', the preceding poem. Again, a question-and-answer form is used. The questioner is wanting greater clarity on the subject of death, specifically the statement 'Death the King of the Firmament'. As the responder claims it to have no meaning the reader is little further forward.
The real intention of the poem appears to be to illustrate an interpretation of Einstein's theory of relativity. The questioner and the responder do not exist in absolute space and time as in Newtonian physics, but relative to each other as with Einstein.
The responder decides to defer any answer until having made a circumnavigation of the Universe, promising to be 'back in a moment'. To the questioner this is 'many years', although to the responder it is an 'instant'. If both possessed synchronized clocks, each clock would show a different time.
The question of time was important to Hardy, as the correspondence with MacTaggart shows. For instance, how could Hardy speak to a figure in 18th-century dress walking through Stinsford churchyard if time and space are absolute? If time and space are relative it is not so absurd.
Einstein might have been somewhat surprised at his theory being used in such a way. Hardy could respond that it is based on an observed phenomenon as with the 'red-shift' observed by Eddington and Lyson, both observations being made a few months apart. 'An Inquiry' is a more significant poem than at first appears.
Hoffman and Dukas inform us that not everyone in Newton's time accepted absolute space and time, notably the philosopher Bishop Berkeley and the philosopher and mathematician Leibnitz; however, it soon 'acquired the status of scientific dogma'. The Couch tradition bases itself on observed fact, not on theory or dogma.
The Philosophical Poems of Winter Words
'Our Old Friend Dualism' (881)
From Winter Words, published posthumously in 1930. Most of the poems were written between 1925, when Human Shows came out, and 1928, the year of Hardy's death. 'Our Old Friend Dualism' is dated to 1920, but was not included in Human Shows.
Information
Monism: the philosophical belief in the unity of time and matter, with all phenomena explicable in terms of one substance; or the theological belief in one supreme being. It includes materialism, as held by Bertrand Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, and idealism, as with Bishop George Berkeley's mind of God. Berkeley lived from 1685-1753 and Russell from 1872 to 1970.
It was also held by Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), a philosopher who turned away from the dualism of Descartes. Spinoza favoured a form of pantheism where God is immanent within nature and not external to it, as in theism. He was a rationalist and a determinist. Einstein was influenced by Spinoza's thought:
I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists', a 'determinist constraint' which 'treat(s) values and moral obligations as a purely human problem (Hoffman & Dukas, p. 195).
According to Seymour-Smith, Hardy regarded The Dynasts as 'monist' (Seymour-Smith, p. 672).
Dualism:
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) started from the certainty of his own conscious experience. From this, he deduced the dualist notion of mind and matter. The idea of two independent principles is the basis of all dualism: in philosophy of mind and matter or form and content; in theology of good and evil. Henri Bergson (1859-1941) held to consciousness and matter, but not to scientific materialism or Darwinism. William James (1842-1910) was a pragmatist.
According to Seymour-Smith, Hardy read Bergson's Creative Evolution in 1915. He was sympathetic but saw it as speculative (ibid., p. 673). MacTaggart was more influential. In the Bergson assessment is included the phrase 'our old friend Dualism' (ibid., p. 672).
Proteus in Greek mythology is a sea-god with the powers of prophecy but who changes appearances to avoid answering direct questions. In western British pagan mythology, the sea symbolizes the underworld, the place of mermen and mermaids who foretell storms and shipwrecks, and is the repository of mariners' souls. They can still call to the living using the correct name. Almost all Q's Quiller forebears were lost at sea, with sea lore a part of their inheritance.
Analysis
When Hardy refers to dualism as 'an old friend' there is a sense of irony to it. The poem is dualist, with Monism in opposition to Dualism.,a conflict unresolved at the end.
'Spinoza and the Monists' endeavour to win the intellectual argument by calling dualists such as Bergson and James 'progmatic cheats'; but dualism has the ability to endlessly reinvent itself – as Proteus is able to endlessly change appearances. At the conclusion of the poem, Proteus and his 'flamens' or cult priests hit back, calling the Monists not 'worth believing'. It is as though Monism existed in Hardy's conscious, while dualism existed unwanted but inexpungeable in the watery underworld of his subconscious.
The poem is dated to 1920 but was not prepared for publication until 1928. Maybe Einstein's scientific ideas, based on Spinoza, had given Hardy pause for thought. The poem's dramatic tension is left unresolved.
'A Philosophical Fantasy' (884)
Three poems after 'Our Old Friend Dualism' comes 'A Philosophical Fantasy'. It was first drafted in the same year of 1920, two years before 'The Absolute Explains' and So, Time, but was not completed until 1926.
Much happened between 1920 and 1926. The expectations of the Peace Conference failed to materialize, the USA moved into isolation, the Bolshevik revolution succeeded with Communism as an international force, while in Britain the class-system and imperialism, supported by elements of Neo-Darwinsim, re-established themselves through the ascendancy of political conservatism.
Between 1918 and 1922, Oswald Spangley published his influential The Decline of the West. In Chapter 15 of Millenium, The Graveyard of Certainty, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto writes:
It is tempting to see the terrible catastrophe of 1914-1918 – cataclysmic, unpredicted, destructive of four empires and a whole generation of Europe's elite – as a volcano which buried and lingering feeling of security . . . By the mid-1920s, Einstein was feeling alienated from a tradition he had started, as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg worked towards a principle actually called "Uncertainty". (Fernanadez-Arnesto, p. 445).
Bohr and Heisenberg were later to part company. Bohr escaped from Denmark in 1943 to work on the development of the atomic bomb in the U.S.A. (Oxford English Ref. Dict.) Heisenberg remained in Nazi Germany as head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (Holland, pp. 444-5, 640).
Karl Popper sees 1925 as the crucial date when the 'turmoil' in 'modern physics' was created: 'Quantum mechanic had been created by Werner Heisenberg in 1925' (Popper, p. 90).
The philosophical poems of Thomas Hardy seem to reflect this 'turmoil', however much he was able to access and understand the actual arguments. Einstein continued to be in the news because in 1926, the year 'A Philosophical Fantasy' achieved its final form, Einstein was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Hardy's writings show a remarkable development, although in some ways a conservative one, from Tess through to 'The Absolute Explains' and 'So, Time,' and on to 'A Philosophical Fantasy' and 'Drinking Song'. 'The President of the Immortals' at the conclusion of Tess is different from the 'Absolute' of 'The Absolute Explains', while the 'Absolute' is not the same as the 'Causer' of 'A Philosophical Fantasy' or the near void at the centre of Drinking Song.
Form and Structure
The poem as printed in The Complete Poems is in eight stanzas. There is a questioner and a responder. Whether the questioner is imagined or the poet himself is unclear. The responder is referred to as the following:
I
me, my, mine,
It
Causer
blind force persisting
dream projected
god
also: marshall, planner
The questioner has a central question relating to the meaning of the Universe. Following an acknowledgement of the question and various digressions, the answer is none or none accessible to the human mind outside of the parameters of an impersonal and value free science. The poem is something of a ramble, far longer than necessary to deliver the information.
1. The Causer agrees to respond to the questioner.
2. The central question – 'unfulfilled intention'.
3. Digression I.
4. A return to the question – 'aim'.
5. Digression ii.
6. Digression iii.
7. A return to the question iii – 'unfulfilled intention'.
8. Conclusion – 'purposeless propension'.
Each section centres on the original question or on material tangential to it. As this relates to controversies of the time the thrust of the argument has been partially lost. The poetic structure is irregular. Each line has three beats and seven to nine syllables, with run-on lines providing variations of pace. There is no rhyme scheme. Couplets and triplets are frequent, as is ABAB. Some of the rhymes have a 'Gilbert and Sullivan' element, as with 'stories' and 'core is', 'Sir or Madam' and 'Adam', and 'forgotten' and 'life-shotter' (shorten?), along with patters such as 'parted', 'fainthearted', 'thwarted', 'diminished', 'unfinished'.
The work combines the serious with the farcical, as with the Irish dramatist Samuel Becket, and could be played for laughs by an actor from the 'Theatre of the Absurd'.
Hermann Lea said of Thomas Hardy:
Hardy possessed a sense of humour both subtle and whimsical: I never knew him to be conventional about any subject – except perhaps "with his tongue in his cheek" – and he was certainly not orthodox (Seymour-Smith, p. 606)
Seymour-Smith quotes from a passage in Hardy's autobiographical Life: 'Hence it unfortunately happened that verses of a satirical, dry, caustic, or farcical cast were regarded by them [editors] with the utmost seriousness'(p. 607).
Hardy's sense of reality was rooted in rural Dorset, although not dictated by it, while many editors, academics and intellectuals have no such root. Q did, which is why Hardy respected him, especially because they shared a similar sense of humour, even if they disagreed intellectually.
Analysis of the Poem
The initial quotation by Walter Bagehot 'Milton . . .made God argue', sounds that Milton did something unique, when it is found with the prophets of the Old Testament.
Section I
The questioner importunes the 'Causer' who, in spite of having 'A Universe to Marshall' and little interest in 'frail Earth', agrees to respond within 'my limitations'. The 'Causer' is the first cause and sustainer of the Universe.
Section II
The poet's question relates to the idea of an 'unfulfilled intention', which is in italics, presumably of intellectual concern at the time. The 'Causer' rejects any notion of being the Biblical God: with an 'intention' (?)
Section III
The 'Causer' now becomes 'It' or 'I'.
'It' dismisses the presence of a directing influence in the Universe, only 'blind force persisting', which contradicts the notion of being the 'marshall'. The word 'persisting' is rhymed with 'unlisting', an obscure or invented word.
The 'blind force' fails to result in chaos is not explained.
The phrase 'dream-projected' is also accepted by 'It', but projected by who is not explained – the 'Causer' or the poet or humanity. Yet anthropomorphic terminology is rejected, which 'dream-projected' is.
Section IV
'It' rejects the biblical creation, being capable of endless creations. Humans return to 'dust', with some element persisting 'where suns glow not', which seems to contradict what is found in 'So, Time'.
Section V
The world derives from 'maleable matter', which should be investigated scientifically, containing no 'moral features'.
Section VI
Time is a human invention, while 'suffering' is no concern of 'It'.
Section VII
Again 'It' dismisses 'unfulfilled intention'. The human condition is 'mindlessness', although rectification is possible.
Section VIII
'It' emphasises 'purposeless propension', which is italics'
Conclusion
The poem 'A Philosophical Fantasy' was not written in an academic community or on a university campus, but, presumably, at Max Gate in Dorset, with the wind blowing in the trees and the farmers sowing and reaping in the fields beyond.
The title combines two words normally taken as antithetical. One meaning of fantasy in 'whimsical speculation', taking us back to Lea's remark. Philosophy denotes reasoned argument, the pursuit of truth. The phrase 'dream-projected' supports the notion of fantasy, while 'treatment scientific' supports philosophy.
The poem is a paradox. The two aspects are kept in balance throughout the poem, just as there is a balance between regular and irregular form. It probably reflects a paradox in Hardy's mind, something reflecting itself in many of the quotations given in Seymour-Smith's biography. There is no evidence of the paradox having been resolved. Hardy's late flowering seems to have been an expression of the dramatic tension which might have torn a lesser man apart, but which he turned into art.
There are aspects of the poem looking back to the novel of 1882 Two in a Tower, particularly its observations of the universe. As a countryman with no 'light pollution' to distort his gaze, Hardy would have been familiar with the heavens, as would Q. Seymour-Smith informs us of how he supplemented his knowledge by reading and by a visit to Greenwich Observatory (p. 285).
In his Cambridge lecture 'The Earlier Novels of Thomas Hardy', Q takes Hardy to task for failing to recognise the orderly nature of the Universe and a 'regulating purpose'. Just as fishermen have to be guided by stars when out of sight of land and as farmers are dependent on the order of the seasons – an order found in the pagan and the Anglican calendar – Hardy's position is counter-intuitive. It also runs in the face of Newton and Einstein. Yet when Einstein claimed that 'God does not play dice', some such as Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were less that convinced. (Einstein, p. 193)
Q had a deeper point. In The Art of Reading and other works, Q argued that human rationality is a reflection of a universal order. If the universe is not rational, scientific knowledge is partial and scientific method minimally applicable.
Q is not alone in believing this. As Karl Popper states in Unending Quest in 1934:
I had written about a realist argument of mine that it "expresses the metaphysical faith in the existence of regularities in our world (. . . without much practical action which is hardly conceivable)" (Popper, p. 150).
Hardy and Q adopted opposite positions on this matter, as did others in the scientific and artistic communities, even if they understood the argument and its implications only in part.
In his lecture on the early novels, Q includes a lengthy quotation from Two in a Tower starting with: 'And to add a new weirdness to what the sky possesses in its size and formlessness there is involved the quality of decay.' This is not the view of shepherd Gabriel Oak in Far From the Madding Crowd who tells time by the stars in true country fashion.
In 'A Philosophical Fantasy', there is no 'intention', nor 'Time', nor 'substance' only 'purposeless propension', 'dreaming' and 'blind force'. This seems to be looking back to Two in a Tower rather than to Far From the Madding Crowd. In Far From the Madding Crowd, the sky is a friend to Oak, but in Two in a Tower, 'Of all sciences, it alone deserves the character of the terrible'. In 'A Philosophical Fantasy' the sky is not so much 'terrible' as absurd. This neutralizes the idea of the Universe as the object of 'treatment scientific' suggested by the Causer in section eight.
There is evidence in 'A Philosophical Fantasy' and 'Drinking Song' of Hardy being a forerunner of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1896-1989) who questioned any connection between events and the place of man in a dehumanized landscape. Seymour-Smith notes a connection between Hardy and Beckett (p. 116), but does not explore it further. From Hardy to Beckett is to look geographically westwards, as this study has repeatedly done.
'Drinking Song' (896)
'Drinking Song' is a work of Hardy's last year or two. Presumably, it was written at Max Gate, maybe not far from the local inn where drinking songs could still be heard. Doubtless, young Thomas would have taken part in pub singing, being familiar with the folk songs later collected by Cecil Sharp. After marriage to Emma pub singing might not have been approved of.
The poem suggests a group of local labourers, deep in their cups, maybe with the main part taken by a solo voice and the chorus sung lustily by all. Yet the words hardly relate to anything Cecil Sharp would have heard. The words and the setting contradict.
If the labourers were satirizing the local governing class, the work might have come from the pen of Bertholt Brecht. As it stands it suggests Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd. In that sense it is an extension of 'A Philosophical Fantasy'.
We are familiar with Hardy satirizing editors, literary critics, the Anglican clergy, and the 'pens and politics' of his poem of 1918 'The Peace Peel'. But the names included in 'Drinking Song' as Thales, Copernicus, Hume, Darwin, Cheyne and Einstein, figures at the centre of the western intellectual tradition. To include them in a drinking song appears almost sacrilegious.
Three of them, Darwin, Cheyne and Einstein, were controversial figures in Hardy's lifetime, while Hume's influence was still strong. Dr Jonathan Couch absorbed Hume's empiricism while training in London from 1808 to 1810, with its influence permeating down to Q.
There is nothing careless about the construction of 'Drinking Song', a certain roughness and a certain naivety being deliberate. It must have gone through a number of drafts. The work has to be taken with due seriousness even if satirical. It cannot be dismissed as an anomaly.
Analysis of the Stanzas
Stanza I
The poem opens with the fairy-tale like 'Once on a time' before centring on the Greek philosopher, mathematician and astronomer Thales (c. 624-547 BC) who believed the Earth to be floating on water. Plato saw Thales as the first of the seven wise men of Greece. In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell identifies Thales as the first western philosopher, therefore a foundation stone of western secular thought. Hardy presents him as a humanist observing 'vast truths' of which man lies at the centre with everything revolving around. The chorus relates the warning that such a comforting notion have become 'less'.
Stanza II
The descent begins with Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) who overthrew geocentric cosmology.
Stanzas III and IV
Hardy does not name but obviously refers to the thinking of:
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) who discovered the law governing planetary motion;
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) who applied the telescope to astronomy;
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) who formulated what is called Newtonian physics.
Hardy appears to see these intellectual developments as reducing the importance of man and man's place in the Universe, as originally perceived by Thales.
Stanza V
This relates to the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-76) who rejected the idea of certainty – 'The eyes deceive' – and the miraculous.
However, there is a certain ambiguity in the stanza, with it being open to more than one interpretation, especially as the phrase 'God's clockwork' conflicts with Hardy's questioning of time.
Stanza VI
Hardy moves from Hume to Darwin (1809-82), seemingly unaware that Hume had dismissed induction or inductive inference, the method employed by Darwin and which underlay his ideas. (see Popper, p. 81: 'induction was a myth which had been exploded by Hume'.)
Hardy sees Darwin asserting that man has kinship with 'apes' and 'reptile(s)' and was not the product of a divinity.
Stanza VII
Dr Cheyne was Thomas Kelly Cheyne (1841-1915), a controversial and unconventional Old Testament scholar, whose Encyclopaedia Biblica, in four volumes, came out from 1899 to 1903. According to Hardy, he denied the virgin birth, and by implication Christ's full divinity.
Stanza VIII
The last named is Einstein (1879-1955); Hardy was nearly 40 and writing The Trumpet Major when Einstein was born.
Hardy sees Einstein's theory of 'no time, no space, no motion', only 'a bending ocean', as 'not yet quite clear'. The drinkers certainly find it so. In fact, the image 'a sort of bending-ocean', with its swells and undulating surface, shows a remarkable imaginative grasp of Einstein's idea. In Fig. 4 (p.28), Peter Coles illustrates 'curved space and the bending of light' by using a flat surface weighed down at its centre by a heavy ball.
The first eight stanzas are a journey through the western intellectual tradition from Thales of ancient Greece to Einstein of post-war Europe, one normally celebrated as the world's richest achievement. In the final stanza Hardy sees it differently, or at least his drinkers do. Far from celebrating they are drowning their sorrows at the insignificance of themselves. This leads on to the real thrust of the poem. If the drinkers have been diminished, so have those named and the whole western intellectual tradition itself.
Stanza IX
The state of the drinkers is 'piteous'. They have not been elevated but deracinated. Hardy presents the image of the butterfly above an Alpine glacier seeking:
To fly and cower
In some warmer bower.
In south-west folklore, the butterfly and the moth are symbols of the soul or spirit on its release from the body.
On page xxxiii of The Collected Poems is the picture of an hour-glass which Hardy drew to illustrate the poem 'Amabel' in Wessex Poems. It was written in 1865, apparently in response to a woman's death. The hour-glass has virtually run out and two moths or butterflies, one on the glass, the other on a flat surface, balance the illustration. Presumably, the one on the glass symbolizes the soul of Amabel as she leaves the body. The final stanza presents the picture of the drinkers as the souls of the dead fluttering over a dead and frozen terrain with little hope of solace. It could not be a bleaker image.
In certain respects the poem takes us back to Q's quotation from Two in a Tower where the stars 'burn out like candles . . .Imagine them all extinguished, and a mind feeling its way through a heaven of total darkness . . .' With the burning out of the stars the Universe must be cold, while 'mind' is no more than a soul fluttering.
In 'Drinking Song', there is no 'magnipotent will', as Q expressed it, frustrating human aspirations and predestinating tragedy; the western intellectual tradition has become its own 'magnipotent will'.
The Final Chorus
Each of the first eight stanzas ends in a chorus of the two lines denoting a step in the marginalizing of humanity. The final stanza ends in a chorus of three lines, which endeavours to say something positive, but only by changing the ground of the argument.
As against other world cultural traditions, the west has drawn a strict division between fact, discovered scientifically, and value, seen as opinion, attitude or faith. The concentration of the thinkers from Copernicus onwards has been on fact. How do we know something to be factually true. The last chorus turns this on its head. With 'all our great thoughts shrinking less', the drinkers 'feel no distress' because 'we'll do a good deed nevertheless'.
More important than, then, the ideas of Einstein, Darwin, Hume and the like is goodness. Dorset village life is still retained as a moral basic the virtue of community, the poor helping each other to survive, sometimes in difficult circumstances. This is very different from competitive individualism and material self-interest. It is ecological not exploitative, co-operative not 'survival of the fittest, nature's first law'. It does not lead to nuclear devices, weapons of mass destruction and pollution.
Conclusion
In February 1922, a little over three years after the Armistice, Hardy wrote an introduction to Late Lyrics under the heading 'Apology', the dictionary definition of which is 'an explanation or defence'. Maybe he had Newman's Apologia of 1864 in mind. Unfortunately, it lacks Newman's clarity of thought, or indeed Q's, being steeped in allusions, antitheses and generalizations. There is one reference to the 'Darwinian theory' and one to Einstein as a 'philosopher' not a scientist.
In the 'Apology', Hardy refers to the 'barbarizing of taste in the younger minds', the 'cultivation of selfishness in all classes' and the 'plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom' which seems to threaten a 'new Dark Age'. The poems discussed above came after he wrote those words. It is difficult to know whether he considered his fears justified.
Hardy also quotes from his poem 'In Tenebris' to defend himself against accusations of 'pessimism': 'If way to the Better there be, it extracts a full look at the worst'. He then quotes the phrase 'evolutionary meliorism'.
The problem here is that Hardy did not know the worst. Shortly before the Second World War there was published Twenty Years After. The Battlefields of 1914-18: Then and Now, edited by Maj. Gen. Sir Ernest Swinton, K.B.E., C.B. Chapter XLIV is headed 'The Poetry of the Great War'. Had Bevil Quiller-Couch survived the flu epidemic of 1919, he would have recognised many of the places and scenes included, as he served on the Western Front from late 1914 until the Armistice. The chapter is anonymous but was clearly by someone who had fought at the front. It makes a distinction between the poetry of those who had fought and those who wrote from home.
Of those who wrote from home, Laurence Binyon, the 'late Poet Laureate' Robert Bridges, A.E. Housman and Thomas Hardy are mentioned. Against those are placed the men who experienced war at first hand, such as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and 'the greatest of them all' Wilfred Owen, who 'was killed at the crossing of the Sambre Canal on November 4th, 1918'.
Hardy was not an Establishment poet. When he compromised, as in his Great War poems, his authenticity deserted him, as those who fought realised.
It is noticeable that those mentioned in 'Drinking Song', apart possibly from some of the drinkers who might have served at the front, lived lives of relative privilege. In fact, the Western intellectual tradition has not been the product of the poor, the starving, the slaughtered, and the victims of genocide, but of a privileged elite.
The Italian-Jew Primo Levi wrote after having spent time in Auschwitz concentration camp: 'We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses . . . we are those who through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or are wordless' (Hobsbawm, p. xiii). If the many millions, in the 20th century, who saw the 'face of the Gorgon' were to return, the western intellectual tradition might sound very different.
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