Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

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Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) Page 796

by Thomas Hardy

Seamen of the French and Spanish Navies.

  Regiments of the French Army.

  COURIERS.

  HERALDS.

  Aides, Officials, Pages, etc.

  ATTENDANTS.

  French Citizens.

  ..........

  CARDINAL CAPRARA.

  Priests, Acolytes, and Choristers.

  Italian Doctors and Presidents of Institutions.

  Milanese Citizens.

  ..........

  THE EMPEROR FRANCIS.

  THE ARCHDUKE FERDINAND.

  Prince John of Lichtenstien.

  PRINCE SCHWARZENBERG.

  MACK, AUSTRIAN GENERAL.

  JELLACHICH.

  RIESC.

  WEIROTHER.

  ANOTHER AUSTRIAN GENERAL.

  TWO AUSTRIAN OFFICERS.

  ..........

  The Emperor Alexander.

  PRINCE KUTUZOF, RUSSIAN FIELD-MARSHAL.

  COUNT LANGERON.

  COUNT BUXHOVDEN.

  COUNT MILORADOVICH.

  DOKHTOROF.

  ..........

  Giulay, Gottesheim, Klenau, and Prschebiszewsky.

  Regiments of the Austrian Army.

  Regiments of the Russian Army.

  WOMEN

  Queen Charlotte.

  English Princesses.

  Ladies of the English Court.

  LADY HESTER STANHOPE.

  A LADY.

  Lady Caroline Lamb, Mrs. Damer, and other English Ladies.

  ..........

  THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE.

  Princesses and Ladies of Josephine's Court.

  Seven Milanese Young Ladies.

  ..........

  City- and Towns-women.

  Country-women.

  A MILITIAMAN'S WIFE.

  A STREET-WOMAN.

  Ship-women.

  Servants.

  FORE SCENE

  THE OVERWORLD

  [Enter 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.]

  SHADE OF THE EARTH

  What of the Immanent Will and Its designs?

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  It works unconsciously, as heretofore,

  Eternal artistries in Circumstance,

  Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote,

  Seem in themselves Its single listless aim,

  And not their consequence.

  CHORUS OF THE PITIES [aerial music]

  Still thus? Still thus?

  Ever unconscious!

  An automatic sense

  Unweeting why or whence?

  Be, then, the inevitable, as of old,

  Although that SO it be we dare not hold!

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  Hold what ye list, fond believing Sprites,

  You cannot swerve the pulsion of the Byss,

  Which thinking on, yet weighing not Its thought,

  Unchecks Its clock-like laws.

  SPIRIT SINISTER [aside]

  Good, as before.

  My little engines, then, will still have play.

  SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

  Why doth It so and so, and ever so,

  This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel?

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  As one sad story runs, It lends Its heed

  To other worlds, being wearied out with this;

  Wherefore Its mindlessness of earthly woes.

  Some, too, have told at whiles that rightfully

  Its warefulness, Its care, this planet lost

  When in her early growth and crudity

  By bad mad acts of severance men contrived,

  Working such nescience by their own device.—

  Yea, so it stands in certain chronicles,

  Though not in mine.

  SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

  Meet is it, none the less,

  To bear in thought that though Its consciousness

  May be estranged, engrossed afar, or sealed,

  Sublunar shocks may wake Its watch anon?

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  Nay. In the Foretime, even to the germ of Being,

  Nothing appears of shape to indicate

  That cognizance has marshalled things terrene,

  Or will [such is my thinking] in my span.

  Rather they show that, like a knitter drowsed,

  Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness,

  The Will has woven with an absent heed

  Since life first was; and ever will so weave.

  SPIRIT SINISTER

  Hence we've rare dramas going—more so since

  It wove Its web in the Ajaccian womb!

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  Well, no more this on what no mind can mete.

  Our scope is but to register and watch

  By means of this great gift accorded us—

  The free trajection of our entities.

  SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

  On things terrene, then, I would say that though

  The human news wherewith the Rumours stirred us

  May please thy temper, Years, 'twere better far

  Such deeds were nulled, and this strange man's career

  Wound up, as making inharmonious jars

  In her creation whose meek wraith we know.

  The more that he, turned man of mere traditions,

  Now profits naught. For the large potencies

  Instilled into his idiosyncrasy—

  To throne fair Liberty in Privilege' room—

  Are taking taint, and sink to common plots

  For his own gain.

  SHADE OF THE EARTH

  And who, then, Cordial One,

  Wouldst substitute for this Intractable?

  CHORUS OF THE EARTH

  We would establish those of kindlier build,

  In fair Compassions skilled,

  Men of deep art in life-development;

  Watchers and warders of thy varied lands,

  Men surfeited of laying heavy hands,

  Upon the innocent,

  The mild, the fragile, the obscure content

  Among the myriads of thy family.

  Those, too, who love the true, the excellent,

  And make their daily moves a melody.

  SHADE OF THE EARTH

  They may come, will they. I am not averse.

  Yet know I am but the ineffectual Shade

  Of her the Travailler, herself a thrall

  To It; in all her labourings curbed and kinged!

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  Shall such be mooted now? Already change

  Hath played strange pranks since first I brooded here.

  But old Laws operate yet; and phase and phase

  Of men's dynastic and imperial moils

  Shape on accustomed lines. Though, as for me,

  I care not thy shape, or what they be.

  SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

  You seem to have small sense of mercy, Sire?

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  Mercy I view, not urge;—nor more than mark

  What designate your titles Good and Ill.

  'Tis not in me to feel with, or against,

  These flesh-hinged mannikins Its hand upwinds

  To click-clack off Its preadjusted laws;

  But only through my centuries to behold

  Their aspects, and their movements, and their mould.

  SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

  They are shapes that bleed, mere mannikins or no,

  And each has parcel in the total Will.

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  Which overrides them as a whole its parts

  In other entities.

  SPIRIT SINISTER [aside]

  Limbs of Itself:

  Each one a jot of It in quaint disguise?

  I'll fear all men henceforward!
>
  SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

  Go to. Let this terrestrial tragedy—

  SPIRIT IRONIC

  Nay, Comedy—

  SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

  Let this earth-tragedy

  Whereof we spake, afford a spectacle

  Forthwith conned closelier than your custom is.—

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  How does it stand? [To a Recording Angel]

  Open and chant the page

  Thou'st lately writ, that sums these happenings,

  In brief reminder of their instant points

  Slighted by us amid our converse here.

  RECORDING ANGEL [from a book, in recitative]

  Now mellow-eyed Peace is made captive,

  And Vengeance is chartered

  To deal forth its dooms on the Peoples

  With sword and with spear.

  Men's musings are busy with forecasts

  Of muster and battle,

  And visions of shock and disaster

  Rise red on the year.

  The easternmost ruler sits wistful,

  And tense he to midward;

  The King to the west mans his borders

  In front and in rear.

  While one they eye, flushed from his crowning,

  Ranks legions around him

  To shake the enisled neighbour nation

  And close her career!

  SEMICHORUS I OF RUMOURS [aerial music]

  O woven-winged squadrons of Toulon

  And fellows of Rochefort,

  Wait, wait for a wind, and draw westward

  Ere Nelson be near!

  For he reads not your force, or your freightage

  Of warriors fell-handed,

  Or when they will join for the onset,

  Or whither they steer!

  SEMICHORUS II

  O Nelson, so zealous a watcher

  Through months-long of cruizing,

  Thy foes may elide thee a moment,

  Put forth, and get clear;

  And rendezvous westerly straightway

  With Spain's aiding navies,

  And hasten to head violation

  Of Albion's frontier!

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  Methinks too much assurance thrills your note

  On secrets in my locker, gentle sprites;

  But it may serve.—Our thought being now reflexed

  To forces operant on this English isle,

  Behoves it us to enter scene by scene,

  And watch the spectacle of Europe's moves

  In her embroil, as they were self-ordained

  According to the naive and liberal creed

  Of our great-hearted young Compassionates,

  Forgetting the Prime Mover of the gear,

  As puppet-watchers him who pulls the strings.—

  You'll mark the twitchings of this Bonaparte

  As he with other figures foots his reel,

  Until he twitch him into his lonely grave:

  Also regard the frail ones that his flings

  Have made gyrate like animalcula

  In tepid pools.—Hence to the precinct, then,

  And count as framework to the stagery

  Yon architraves of sunbeam-smitten cloud.—

  So may ye judge Earth's jackaclocks to be

  No fugled by one Will, but function-free.

  [The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone and

  emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and the

  branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau of

  Spain forming a head. Broad and lengthy lowlands stretch from

  the north of France across Russia like a grey-green garment hemmed

  by the Ural mountains and the glistening Arctic Ocean.

  The point of view then sinks downwards through space, and draws

  near to the surface of the perturbed countries, where the peoples,

  distressed by events which they did not cause, are seen writhing,

  crawling, heaving, and vibrating in their various cities and

  nationalities.]

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS [to the Spirit of the Pities]

  As key-scene to the whole, I first lay bare

  The Will-webs of thy fearful questioning;

  For know that of my antique privileges

  This gift to visualize the Mode is one

  [Though by exhaustive strain and effort only].

  See, then, and learn, ere my power pass again.

  [A new and penetrating light descends on the spectacle, enduring

  men and things with a seeming transparency, and exhibiting as one

  organism the anatomy of life and movement in all humanity and

  vitalized matter included in the display.]

  SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

  Amid this scene of bodies substantive

  Strange waves I sight like winds grown visible,

  Which bear men's forms on their innumerous coils,

  Twining and serpenting round and through.

  Also retracting threads like gossamers—

  Except in being irresistible—

  Which complicate with some, and balance all.

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  These are the Prime Volitions,—fibrils, veins,

  Will-tissues, nerves, and pulses of the Cause,

  That heave throughout the Earth's compositure.

  Their sum is like the lobule of a Brain

  Evolving always that it wots not of;

  A Brain whose whole connotes the Everywhere,

  And whose procedure may but be discerned

  By phantom eyes like ours; the while unguessed

  Of those it stirs, who [even as ye do] dream

  Their motions free, their orderings supreme;

  Each life apart from each, with power to mete

  Its own day's measures; balanced, self complete;

  Though they subsist but atoms of the One

  Labouring through all, divisible from none;

  But this no further now. Deem yet man's deeds self-done.

  GENERAL CHORUS OF INTELLIGENCES [aerial music]

  We'll close up Time, as a bird its van,

  We'll traverse Space, as spirits can,

  Link pulses severed by leagues and years,

  Bring cradles into touch with biers;

  So that the far-off Consequence appear

  Prompt at the heel of foregone Cause.—

  The PRIME, that willed ere wareness was,

  Whose Brain perchance is Space, whose Thought its laws,

  Which we as threads and streams discern,

  We may but muse on, never learn.

  ACT FIRST

  SCENE I

  ENGLAND. A RIDGE IN WESSEX

  [The time is a fine day in March 1805. A highway crosses the

  ridge, which is near the sea, and the south coast is seen

  bounding the landscape below, the open Channel extending beyond.]

  SPIRITS OF THE YEARS

  Hark now, and gather how the martial mood

  Stirs England's humblest hearts. Anon we'll trace

  Its heavings in the upper coteries there.

  SPIRIT SINISTER

  Ay; begin small, and so lead up to the greater. It is a sound

  dramatic principle. I always aim to follow it in my pestilences,

  fires, famines, and other comedies. And though, to be sure, I did

  not in my Lisbon earthquake, I did in my French Terror, and my St.

  Domingo burlesque.

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  THY Lisbon earthquake, THY French Terror. Wait.

  Thinking thou will'st, thou dost but indicate.

  [A stage-coach enters, with passengers outside. Their voices

  after the foregoing sound small and commonplace, as from another

  medium.]

  FIRST PASSENGER

  There seems to be a deal of traffic over Ridgeway, even at this t
ime

  o' year.

  SECOND PASSENGER

  Yes. It is because the King and Court are coming down here later

  on. They wake up this part rarely!... See, now, how the Channel

  and coast open out like a chart. That patch of mist below us is the

  town we are bound for. There's the Isle of Slingers beyond, like a

  floating snail. That wide bay on the right is where the "Abergavenny,"

  Captain John Wordsworth, was wrecked last month. One can see half

  across to France up here.

  FIRST PASSENGER

  Half across. And then another little half, and then all that's

  behind—the Corsican mischief!

  SECOND PASSENGER

  Yes. People who live hereabout—I am a native of these parts—feel

  the nearness of France more than they do inland.

  FIRST PASSENGER

  That's why we have seen so many of these marching regiments on the

  road. This year his grandest attempt upon us is to be made, I reckon.

  SECOND PASSENGER

  May we be ready!

  FIRST PASSENGER

  Well, we ought to be. We've had alarms enough, God knows.

  [Some companies of infantry are seen ahead, and the coach presently

  overtakes them.]

  SOLDIERS [singing as they walk]

  We be the King's men, hale and hearty,

  Marching to meet one Buonaparty;

  If he won't sail, lest the wind should blow,

  We shall have marched for nothing, O!

  Right fol-lol!

  We be the King's men, hale and hearty,

  Marching to meet one Buonaparty;

  If he be sea-sick, says "No, no!"

  We shall have marched for nothing, O!

  Right fol-lol!

  [The soldiers draw aside, and the coach passes on.]

  SECOND PASSENGER

  Is there truth in it that Bonaparte wrote a letter to the King last

  month?

  FIRST PASSENGER

  Yes, sir. A letter in his own hand, in which he expected the King

  to reply to him in the same manner.

  SOLDIERS [continuing, as they are left behind]

  We be the King's men, hale and hearty,

  Marching to meet one Buonaparty;

  Never mind, mates; we'll be merry, though

  We may have marched for nothing, O!

  Right fol-lol!

  THIRD PASSENGER

  And was Boney's letter friendly?

  FIRST PASSENGER

  Certainly, sir. He requested peace with the King.

  THIRD PASSENGER

  And why shouldn't the King reply in the same manner?

  FIRST PASSENGER

  What! Encourage this man in an act of shameless presumption, and

  give him the pleasure of considering himself the equal of the King

  of England—whom he actually calls his brother!

  THIRD PASSENGER

 

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