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