On Thomas Hardy's View of Napoleon in The Dynasts

Abstract

Thornas Hardy's The Dynasts is, according to Edmund Blunden, one of the three masterpieces in the who1e range of literature, both English and American, the other two being King Lear and Moby Dick. This vast, original work of 709 pages (Macmillan edition) centres on the figure of Napoleon as an outstanding military tactician, a political intriguer, and a cold-hearted man who wagedwars for realizing his insatiable desire of conquering nearly all Europe. In this work, Hardy extends his sympathy with human victims, to all other living things-horses killed on the battlefield, and even to small animals that were crushed under the cannon-wheels or trampled upon by contending armies.Iadmire Hardy for his universal sympathy, but I cannot help thinking that the way he deals with Napoleon is too one-sided, although I know that The Dynasts is a literary work instead of a historical thesis.Hardy's view of Napoleon seems to represent the bad feelings of the English people toward him during and after the Napoleonic wars, but they got over such feelings during and after the World War I.After 1914, most English people have come to lessen the wonder of Napoleon, and consider that it was the French Revolution that generated his power.In his letters to his relatives and friends, Napoleon uses some fatalistic words like ‘the Great Mover’ ‘inexplicable fate’, ‘this resistless fate’, ‘a Higher Intelligence’, ‘the Prime Mover of the Universe’, ‘blind chance. ’ He says that he is in the clutch of some unknown powers which willy-nilly he must obey. Such power-Destiny as he calls it-1ed him to dash across the bridge of Lode in northern Italy amld the shower of bullets from the Austrian army on the opposite bank of the river, Again Destiny drove him to start on a long, bleak passage to Moscow, and finally led to his downfall.Just before I finished writing this thesis, I happened to read R. J. White's Thomas Hardy & History, in which he says (p. 100) : ‘He (Hardy) seems to have thought one of those purposes (the purposes of his art) was to blacken the character of Napoleon even beyond the bounds of historical evidence. It was a mistake. ’