Indecision and Insight

269 Lance St. John Butler emphasizes Hardy's importance as, a poet (pp. 3. l6l) but does not hesitate to devote only eighteen feeble pages to the poetry. In a superficial way he writes on "Hardy's Love Poetry," "Nature in Hardy's Poetry," and "Hardy's negative metaphysics." Butler completely fails to take Hardy's short stories seriously. In his chapter on "The Minor Fiction" he gives a brief sketch of some stories just "to show the relationship they bear to the novels" (p. 159)· Very often the author's tone resembles that of the tea-table talker or the class room philosopher (e.g., "So the world goes," "Among all creatures man alone has a view of the possible," "We sow the seeds of our own disasters") Butler's unsatisfactory book ends in a strange and inept reading list. In this "small selection from the great mass of critical and biographical work concerned with Hardy" (p. 181) the major works (the bibliographies by Purdy, Weber, Gerber and Davis; the handbook and commentary on Hardy's poetry by J. 0. Bailey; The Literary Notes of Thomas Hardy by Lennart A. Bjork) are not mentioned. Universität Trier (West Germany) Werner Bies 2. Indecision and Insight Susan Dean. Hardy's Poetic Vision in "The Dynasts": The Diorama of a Dream TPrinceton: Princeton UP, 1977)· Susan Dean's is the first full-length study of Hardy's vision, as vision, in The Dynasts. Earlier studies of the poem - for example J. 0. Bailey's Thomas Hardy and the Cosmic Mind, Harold Orel's Thomas Hardy's Epic-Drama, and Valter Wright's The Shaping of "The Dynasts" - have attended mainly to its sources and themes. Professor Dean approaches the poem through what she calls its dioramic vision. Her argument is that the poem is a multilayered projection of a dream vision into which the reader must learn to look in order to understand Hardy's fourfold way of perceiving things, which is, Dean says, as follows: First and farthest from the eye in the diorama is to be seen the Will, a vast palpitating force imaged as an evolving brain directing all things. Second and nearer the viewer-reader in time and space is humanity , which, though subject to the Will, is unique because aware of its dependency and yet capable of illusions of independence. Third and at the same distance as humanity from the eye of the viewer are the non-human children of the Will, but presented more for their kinships with men and women than for their own intrinsic interest. 270 Fourth and occupying no stable place in the dioramic perspective are phenomena on "the periphery of vision," things of interest to the viewer not for their dependence on the Will nor for their likeness to men, but entirely for their own sakes. These four perspectives, which we might call the deterministic , the illusive, the analogical, and the detached or aesthetic , make up the dioramic vision of The Dynasts. If we can see them all simultaneously, then we can see "all the complexity and magnitude, illusion and irrationality, that Hardy had come to see in his subject." And if we can see the palimpsest that Hardy came to see, then we will know that in The Dynasts Hardy exhibited only possibilities, not verities; the poem's meaning (s), given its dioramic perspectivism, must change from reader to reader. Thus, though Professor Dean personally favors a melioristic reading of the poem, she accepts a sceptical reading as "equally valid - or invalid" - both readings existing as possibilities, not necessities, within the layered vision of the poem. Dean's critical relativism is certainly invited by the structure of the poem, and by Hardy's avowals elsewhere that his was a tentative approach to things. But it will probably not help the reader trying to get a firm grasp on a difficult poem. The gap that now exists between the enthusiasm for The Dynasts of a few and the scepticism of the many, a number of devout Hardyans among them, will probably not be bridged by a critic who has decided to be indecisive about the poem's meaning. Though Hardy may...