Each passage is happily selected to contribute its share to the general plan; each is a miniature drama in itself, with its own plot and climax; and it is only the stage directions, as a rule, that remind the spectator that he is "sitting up aloft." At the end of the drama the author tries to set all his scenes in proper focus, and to relate them to eternity—exhibits all the fret and fuss of the Napoleonic pageant as a wrinkle on the face of Time, and Bonaparte himself as but a "plaything in the hands of the Immortals." Fortunately Hardy cannot long deal with human nature without forgetting his theories in his sense of kinship. For though he may show us from some point in mid-air the Grand Army crawling "like a dun-piled caterpillar," back to shame and disintegration from Moscow, he takes us close enough to see all the horrors of that retreat—its episode of gallant soldiers abandoned and driven mad by hunger and frost on the plains of Lithuania. If, again, we watch from the clouds big moves in the game of war, such as the Peninsular campaign, we are permitted to descend and sit by the deathbed of Josephine, and are given in that scene poetry of an exceeding poignancy. Lastly, while Hardy can conjure before us in their due perspective the manœuvres and mutations of the struggle at Waterloo, he allows himself to turn aside from the clash of battle and present a delightful picture of old-world Wessex in which "Boney" is burnt in effigy.
The blank verse of the play is not remarkable; it is of the facile, jog-trot sort, and some indication of its facility is afforded by the fact that it is employed to paraphrase a debate in the House of Commons. Once, however, it rises to heights of eloquence and pathos, in the speech put into the mouth of the dying Josephine. Otherwise it is in the lyrical snatches—in the Wessex girl's song for instance, My Love's Gone A-fighting, that Hardy's muse is happiest. Such things as that remind one that it is not only by the wide sweep of his imagination, but also by the occasional capacity he evinces for giving perfect expression to a mood, that the author of The Dynasts may call himself a poet.
