The Cosmic Poet (1903-1908)
of George's foreign troops; and A Tradition of 1804, told in dialect by old Solomon Selby, a one-time smuggler, recounts the actual landing of "Boney," "the Corsican ogre," in the night with a French officer, to discover a suitable place on the Wessex coast for the landing of his army of invasion.
Parallel to this gradual development of interest in the subject, and, one may reasonably suppose, the accumulation of a great amount of historical and legendary material, there developed in the poet's mind a conception of history—indeed of all human activity—as the manifestation of one mysterious immanent causality, which is finally termed "Will." This philosophical concept is made the intellectual basis by which the historical events are interpreted, and is invested with a lyric and dramatic machinery of its own.
Why Hardy chose the form of a gigantic poetic drama instead of that of the historical romance or of the epic poem is a question that the critic must answer as best he can. The best point of departure for a discussion of Hardy in his new role of dramatist is undoubtedly the set of his own opinions delivered to the Pall Mall Gazette in August, 1892. William Archer in an article in the Fortnightly Review had urged the desirability of a reunion between literature and the drama; had suggested that living novelists were to blame for the poor quality of the writing for the stage of the time, and that they owed it to themselves and to literature to make some essay in dramatic form. Thereupon the Pall Mall Gazette invited the leading novelists to answer these questions:
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