The Life of Thomas Hardy
brated the early victory of western over eastern civilization in wondrous fashion, may form the subject of a close comparison with The Dynasts, which aimed to celebrate a democratic British victory over the imperialism of Napoleon. But of still greater interest than this comparison, which will be treated in detail in the sequel, is the similarity of the great problems with which both writers were primarily concerned. The late Professor Wheeler, in summing up the inner subject matter of the Greek tragedians, has used expressions which might very well have been written by a reviewer of The Dynasts:
The Greek tragic poets were earnest students of the problems and mysteries of human life. Man's relation to the universe about him, his obligation to the unseen powers which control the universe, his duties to his fellow-beings, the seeming conflicts between human and divine law, all these form the material of the Greek tragedy.
Thomas Hardy as well as Æschylus brooded on the mysteries of life and the world, the general riddle of existence, and the validity of the moral law; and it is striking that after a lapse of twenty-four centuries a work appears similar to an ancient predecessor not only in the treatment of these ideas, but even in the terrestrial and celestial machinery employed for the outward clothing of the problems. When we think of the personified spiritual essences invoked by Hardy and governing his great panoramic show, continually making their presence and influence felt in the action of the human puppets below, we are elevated to the sphere of Æschylus' sublime imagination, where the elemental forces of the
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