'Ecstatic Sound'

Music and Individuality in the Work of Thomas Hardy

John Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351941747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

This book studies the ways Hardy writes about music, and argues that this focus allows for a close and varied investigation of the affective dimensions of his poetry and fiction, and his recurrent preoccupations with time, community and love. Throughout his work Hardy associates music with moments of individual expression and relatedness. For him, music provokes a response to life that is inseparable from what gives life value, as well as being incompatible with his increasingly conscious vision of personal and social limitation. The first two chapters trace how this ironic disjunction is evident in the novels and the tales, while exploring in detail how they represent and evoke the spiritual and emotional transports of musical experience. In a corresponding way, the third and fourth chapters concentrate on how, within the poetry, music works as a vehicle of inspiration and memory, recurrently surprising the conscious self with intimations of other potentials of expression. In the fifth chapter, the focus falls on Hardy's own philosophical reading, and thus on his notebooks and letters, so as to revisit in an altered context many of the issues that have been opened up by the book's emphasis on his literary representations of musical experience-issues of individuality, of unconscious and bodily experience, of literary language. Finally, although the book does incorporate some biographical detail about Thomas Hardy's lifelong passion for playing and collecting music, it predominantly works through close reading, while also drawing at points on literary theoretical texts, where these offer ways of articulating the broad questions of literary convention and representation that arise.

Chapter 3
‘The Beats of Being’

In an essay of 1925, R. W. King suggested that the lyrical functions of Hardy’s poetry principally involved the registering of a ‘momentary sensation’ or ‘a brief incident’, so that it becomes shaped as:

a significant anecdote, chosen, or invented, not merely for its own sake, but for its value as a symbol, as a ‘moment of vision’, which gathers up the emotional experience of years. ‘Beeny Cliff, for instance, not only renders the radiance of that March day in 1870, but suggests the whole course of the poet’s life since then.

Likewise, he wrote:

To Hardy the commonest object - a garden seat, a ‘little old table’, a signpost or an almanack - may have tremendous significance, may carry memories and associations of a lifetime’s love, with all its joys and sorrows. He says truly of himself: ’ only need the homeliest of heartstirrings.’¹

Today King’s emphasis may seem overly biographical, but it indicates the familiar way in which Hardy’s poems often turn on his receptivity to ‘seemings’, ‘impressions’, to phenomena which telegraph a kind of message to his ‘idiosyncratic mode of regard’ (Life, p. 225), like the coffin lid of William Barnes in ‘The Last Signal’, as it catches the light of the setting sun:

Thus a farewell to me he signalled on his grave-way, As with a wave of his hand. (Complete Poems, p. 473)

What is important and characteristic is the way in which the poem unpacks its dimension of meaning from such an accidental effect. The reflection from a coffin lid becomes a kind of hieroglyph, expanding in Hardy’s mind into an intimate and many-sided meditation on his relation to Barnes. In another poem, the Roman coin shown to Hardy by a little girl in Fiesole is identical to ‘coins of like impress’ buried at home, and consequently:

her act flashed home In that mute moment to my opened mind

The power, the pride, the reach of perished Rome. (Complete Poems, p. 102)

These cases usefully show how Hardy’s creativity is fundamentally not a matter of free invention, but of his capacity for finding an adequate language for such ‘moments of vision’. A humble phenomenon, perceived or imagined, will act like a genie’s lamp, releasing a cloud of significant emotion which gradually takes on definition and intelligibility as the poet translates it into poetry. This chapter explores the role of music in this context, since countless poems originate with moments of musical inspiration. Inspiration, in fact, is the key idea throughout the chapter, chosen since it preserves obvious links with the concept of individuation, as well as because it has specific applications to the affirmative aspects of Hardy’s poetry. Like individuation, inspiration is a way of describing enhancements and renewals of self-expression that depend on extra-subjective modes of relatedness or transmission.

The more one contemplates Hardy’s ‘moments of vision’, indeed, the more musical experience appear to have an exemplary status for Hardy as he focuses on the happiness and pleasure, and the experiences of transcendence, that it carries with it. In many such scenes in poems, music creates incidental and surprising effects of concordance and significance, within an otherwise discordant, prosaic mise-en-scène. Music’s ‘insistent calls of joy’ produce a real rapture, even though such magical effects tend to be transient and inconsequential, ironically encroached upon by loss, betrayal, forgetfulness, and death. The phrase is from the closing lines of ‘After the Burial’, where Hardy writes of the joyful peals of the church bells, as heard by the mourners:

Nor window did they close, to numb

The bells’ insistent calls Of joy;

but suffered the harassing din to come

And penetrate their souls. (Complete Poems, p. 876)

Beyond the scenic and dramatic effects of these musical interludes, an invasive musicality will manifest itself for the reader in complementary ways at the level of hearing, as unpredictable, intensive features of metre or sound off-set the otherwise disharmonious texture of the verse. So, it is a typical experience (and a tantalizing and pleasurable one) when reading Hardy’s poetry, to find for an ephemeral, virtual instant that an evocative power of sound has abolished one’s distance from the scene, turning the poem inside out, so that the reader is introduced into its world of perception and feeling before the effect vanishes again. The ecstatic responsiveness which a poem plays out as a major element of its drama is thus effected in a similar way in this corresponding transfer - rush - between the forms of content and expression. These lines, from ‘The Fiddler’, are a clear example of this:

There’s many a heart now mangled,

And waiting its time to go,

Whose tendrils were first entangled

By my sweet viol and bow!’ (Complete Poems, p. 248)

The seductive arabesques of sound entangle the reader, inspiring an instantaneous sense of immediate connection to the scene as surely as the ‘blaze’ of Barnes’s coffin-lid did for Hardy in the other poem.

In such ways, the ‘Lyric Ecstasy inspired by music’, in Hardy’s phrase, can be importantly referred both to the musical transports of the dramatis personae of the poems, and to their formal correlates for the reader in effects of sound. This phrase, from a note in the Life, records a collection projected in 1892 as a set of songs (as the furore over Tess broke out):

Title: - “Songs of Five-and-Twenty Years”. Arrangement of the songs: Lyric Ecstasy inspired by music to have precedence. (Life p. 243)

‘Lyric ecstasy’ here is a power of transformative expression, occasioned by music, that the poems as songs explicitly aspire to reproduce in their own lyricism. At the same time, the concentration on music also implies how musical experience offers Hardy himself both an important source for his own poetic inspiration, and also, as in the fiction, a template or analogue for his thinking about it. In this respect, the poems can be read as auto-meditations - through music as metaphor - on the mysterious processes of inspiration that provoke them, as well as expressions and dramatizations of these processes.

So far as the poet’s own experiences and reflections on lyrical composition are concerned, Hardy is himself often explicit about its involuntary and inspirational features, as in his description of the writing of The Dynasts:

Lyrical activity was essential for my existence - and The Dynasts was crying for materialization, crying to be born, for many years. I wrote it because I had to, because of orders from within. (Life, p. 334)

For Hardy, qua poet, the art of writing is always a form of automatic writing, however much it entails conscious challenges and satisfactions of its own (as in Davie’s notion that Hardy as a poet be considered primarily as an engineer of words, metres and verse forms).² The technical emphasis on control, that is, cannot account for the poet’s own experience of yielding to the incalculable imperatives, the strange transpositions of mind, associated with inspiration. On Christmas Day 1890, Hardy records:

While thinking of resuming “the viewless wings of poesy” before dawn this morning, new horizons seemed to open, and worrying pettinesses to disappear. (Life, p. 230)

In terms of Hardy’s own life, such effects of imaginative and spiritual enlargement can be seen as evidence of the ‘developing sense of a liberated subjectivity’ that Tim Armstrong identifies in Hardy’s turning to poetry.³ Implicit also in this, and in these associations of ecstasy, lyricism and inspiration, is the affirmative ethical strain in Hardy’s work, his desire to celebrate life. An early critic, Arthur S. Macdowall, referred to such an innate vitality, as Hardy’s ‘immediate response to life’,⁴ and Armstrong writes of how ‘Life calls him to song’, and of ‘the moments of revivification’ which are central to Hardy’s work.⁵ Musical experience is implicitly ethical, as well as aesthetic, for Hardy because for him goodness and joy are inseparable from the reanimating events and processes of self-expression through which ‘new horizons’ seem ‘to open, and worrying pettinesses to disappear’. Further, ethics is inseparable from the social, even the ecological, because self-expression is always a function of relations with other people and nature. For this reason, this study puts what is seen as a corrective emphasis on the side of the evaluation of life that Hardy’s poetry implicitly affirms.⁶

Further, it is one of the fascinations of music for Hardy that its experiences of joy are undeniably physical and mundane, even as they appear also to have metaphysical import. But to stress physicality is not to deny transcendence, although it makes it essential to understand in what sense the idea of transcendence is being used. John Lucas links the question to the more specific issue of what Hardy’s relation to Romanticism might be. He writes:

Hardy is too intelligent to indulge in a timeless, idyllic past, a golden world from which he has been thrust out into the cold hillside.⁷

One could even identify Hardy in these terms as a great poet of ‘the cold hillside’. However, in his lyricism he remains a residual romantic, and his work can be seen as carrying on a subtle dialogue with these more remote forebears, as well as with Browning, Barnes, or Swinburne. Lucas in fact more than any critic indicates how Hardy’s poetry is written around - out of - ‘moments of vision’. The apparent paradox - on which Lucas insists - is that Hardy’s world-view refuses any notion of a transcendent ‘golden world’ from which one is exiled, while his poetic work remains fascinated by, shot through with, glimmers of the ideal. My account of this paradox is that Hardy’s work depends not on a secondary transcendent domain, but on transcendent moments. In these the limits of chronology and identity are opened up to ecstatic affirmations of those subsistent, virtual powers of relatedness and self-differentiation which define the ‘soul’ for Hardy. Transcendence is a function of the immanent, of mobile sensory and affective moments, of significant events that introduce the respondent into a momentarily expanded and real (however temporary and unsustainable) sense of connection and expression. Hardy’s apparent lack of belief in immortality, in myth or religion, or in any form of enduring happiness, did not prevent him acknowledging the reality of experience as punctuated by such events. Moreover, in these inspiring passages are repeated what Lucas also sees as ‘timeless’, ideal, potentials of relatedness and creativity. Music offers in this context potent and irrefutable signs of transcendence through physical connection. The captivating effects of rhythm and melody may be impermanent, but they return, and in doing so, repeat these inexhaustible possibilities.

So, the desires and pleasures associated with music off-set the reality principle operative in the poems. A poem seeks to capture this intensity and promise of longing, and to make it endlessly repeatable within its own substance. Often, of course, the circumstances are unpropitious, as in ‘On Stinsford Hill at Midnight’, where, the speaker feels compelled, with mounting desperation, to call out to the singing woman, though she remains oblivious or unheeding:

Her voice swam on; nor did she show

Thought of me anyhow.

I called again: ‘Come nearer; much

That kind of note I need!’

The song kept softening, loudening on

In placid calm unheed.

‘What home is yours now?’ then I said;

‘You seem to have no care.’

But the wild wavering tune went forth

As if I had not been there.

‘This world is dark, and where you are,’

I said, ’ cannot be!’

But still the happy one sang on,

And had no heed of me. (Complete Poems, p. 597)

At the end of the poem, the poet registers his mortification, as the ‘wild wavering tune’ torments him in his compulsive desire to connect. However, as the language recurrently and teasingly evokes her song (’softening, loudening on’), so thereby this disappointment is turned into an endlessly renewable erotic drama of possibility: poetry, like music or desire in this case, exploits the flirtatious time of the continuous present. Although the poem results in disappointment and frustration for the poetic figure who narrates it, it is still constitutively organized around music as innately a sign of longed-for ecstasy.

These preliminary remarks make it possible now to describe the main ways in which the topic of inspiration organizes the following sections. Firstly, musical incidents in Hardy’s poetry set up scenes of identification, whereby the distinction of self and other is suspended, and through these the poetry investigates ethical and political possibilities obscured by custom: music provides a powerful way of feeling with or as another person. Secondly, such inspiring augmentations of identity are constantly evident in erotic terms too in the Complete Poems, and the chapter explores the links between music and love, and the loss of love. Thirdly, there are many poems which involve what can be...