Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1016 page)

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 time

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!"