The Life of Thomas Hardy
Friends Beyond with its ghostly but nevertheless very human characters, and Winter in Durnover Field, with its bird-speakers, are delightful essays in the form of the lyric "mime." The lure of the stage is the prime motive of the action of The Noble Lady's Tale. It is possible then, to assert with some show of reason that Hardy was not a bungling and untried novice in the field of the drama, even though he did not at first intend ever to have The Dynasts actually presented before an audience, even in part.
Nothing exactly like The Dynasts in form has ever been written before. Any analysis of the work, no matter from what point of view, must take cognizance of the fact that, as it stands, it is a unification of two great themes, the War and the Will,—and that this dualism in idea or content has caused a corresponding dualism in form, machinery, and even expression. First there is the human story—the historical drama—with its human agents, motives, and actions, playing upon the stage of Europe. Surrounding and permeating this clash of peoples and ideals there is the philosophical action, with its machinery of allegorical figures, playing in an "Overworld," in the unlimited universe of pure Idea. The first element in the Epic-Drama finds expression in the dialect, prose, or blank verse of the human actors and in the Hardyan prose of the stage-directions and "dumb shows"; the second element is presented through exceedingly various types of lyric measures, punctuated occasionally by the "familiar" prose of the Spirit Ironic. The dramatis personæ of the terrestrial action consist of kings, princes, councillors, generals, admirals, armies,
[228]
