Hardy’s Measures

Tate, Gregory

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_7

Gregory Tate⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

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Abstract

This concluding chapter explores Thomas Hardy’s preoccupation with scientific and poetic measurement. It contends that the metres (or measures) of Hardy’s poetry, regular yet idiosyncratic, embody his understanding of a material universe which is uniform and quantifiable but at the same time inexplicable: while the methods of science enable the precise measurement of natural phenomena, those measurements are incommensurable with subjective sensation and emotion. This view of nature, articulated in poems written in the first decades of the twentieth century, was underpinned by Hardy’s knowledge of nineteenth-century physics and poetics. And it was further supported by his reading in Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, which affirmed the view, expressed throughout Hardy’s poetry, that the observations of different perceivers are irreconcilable with one another.

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Notes

1.
Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London: Macmillan, 1984), 324.
2.
Hardy, The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Lennart A. Björk, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1985), 1:210.
3.
Hardy, Preface to Poems of the Past and the Present, in The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, ed. Samuel Hynes, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–95), 1:113.
4.
See Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy’s Library at Max Gate: Catalogue of an Attempted Reconstruction, http://hardy.library.utoronto.ca (accessed 8 March 2019).
5.
Hardy, Life, 270, 317, and 349.
6.
All line references to Hardy’s poetry are from Complete Poetical Works and will be cited in the text.
7.
Matthew Campbell, Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 222.
8.
Anne DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 98 and 122.
9.
Andrew Radford, “Making the Past Wake: Anthropological Survivals in Hardy’s Poetry,” in Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions, ed. John Holmes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 174.
10.
Hardy, “The Science of Fiction,” in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 106.
11.
Ibid., 107–8.
12.
Linda M. Shires, “Matter, Consciousness, and the Human in Wessex Poems,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 55 (2015): 918.
13.
Tim Armstrong makes a similar argument, suggesting that, for Hardy, nineteenth-century science and philosophy configure both the physical universe and the mind as simultaneously material and spectral (and therefore unknowable). See Armstrong, Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 30–38.
14.
See Hardy, Complete Poetical Works, 2:257.
15.
Dennis Taylor, Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 109.
16.
Peter Howarth, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 151.
17.
Hardy, Literary Notebooks, 1:177.
18.
Thomas Henry Huxley, “Science and Morals,” Fortnightly Review 40 (1886): 795.
19.
See Thomas Hardy’s “Poetical Matter” Notebook, ed. Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 40–41 and 50.
20.
See Hardy, Complete Poetical Works, 1:317.
21.
Hardy, “Recollections of Leslie Stephen,” in Public Voice, 263–64.
22.
Stephen may have learned about the vortex-ring theory from his friend William Kingdon Clifford, who summarises it in his review of Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, The Unseen Universe, Fortnightly Review 17 (1875): 782–84. For a discussion of the theory, and of its influence on The Unseen Universe, see Mark Blacklock, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 44–48.
23.
The “mystery” in “A Dream Question” also echoes Hardy’s reference to “the ‘mystery of radium’” (the headline of an article about the radioactive element in the Times ) in a 1903 letter. See The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate, Richard Little Purdy, and Keith Wilson, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–2012), 8:70.
24.
Marjorie Levinson, “Object-Loss and Object-Bondage: Economies of Representation in Hardy’s Poetry,” ELH 73 (2006): 561.
25.
E. Armitage, “The Scientists and Common Sense,” Contemporary Review 87 (1905): 729–30; Hardy, Literary Notebooks, 2:418.
26.
Armitage, “Scientists,” 731.
27.
Hardy, Preface to The Dynasts, in Complete Poetical Works, 4:6–7.
28.
Hardy to Edward Clodd, 22 March 1904, in Letters, 3:117.
29.
Seamus Perry, “Hardy’s Imperfections,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 542.
30.
Catherine Maxwell, Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 205.
31.
Hardy, Life, 192.
32.
Clifford, “On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves,” in Lectures and Essays, ed. Frederick Pollock and Leslie Stephen, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1879), 2:85. These sentences are (mis)transcribed in Hardy, Literary Notebooks, 2:108.
33.
Hardy to Roden Noel, 3 April 1892, in Letters, 1:261–62. In 1901 he similarly expressed his preference for “an idealism in which Fancy is no longer tricked out and made to masquerade as Belief, but is frankly and honestly accepted as an imaginative solace.” See Public Voice, 210.
34.
See Thomas Hardy’s “Facts” Notebook, ed. William Greenslade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 313; and Hardy, Life, 338.
35.
Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joseph McCabe (London: Watts, 1900), 224 and 229.
36.
Ibid., 21.
37.
Ibid., 249. Hardy notes this sentence, as quoted in a review of Haeckel’s book, in Literary Notebooks, 2:99.
38.
Robert Gittings, The Older Hardy (London: Heinemann, 1978), 114.
39.
For a discussion of the influence of nineteenth-century neurology on The Dynasts, and on Hardy’s writing more generally, see Suzanne Keen, Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014).
40.
References to The Dynasts identify part, act and scene (or the Fore Scene or After Scene), and line numbers.
41.
Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 600.
42.
Oxford English Dictionary, “coil.”
43.
For details of Hardy’s copy of In Memoriam, now at the Dorset County Museum, see Millgate, Library.
44.
Hardy to Caleb Saleeby, 2 February 1915, in Letters, 5:79.
45.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 63.
46.
Hardy, Literary Notebooks, 2:221.
47.
Gillian Beer, “Hardy and Decadence,” in Celebrating Thomas Hardy: Insights and Appreciations, ed. Charles Pettit (London: Macmillan, 1996), 97.
48.
Haeckel, Riddle, 252–53.
49.
Hardy, Apology, Late Lyrics and Earlier, in Complete Poetical Works, 2:319.
50.
Ibid., 2:325.
51.
Hardy, Life, 363–64.
52.
Quoted in Gittings, Older Hardy, 193.
53.
Michael Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 111.
54.
Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, a Popular Exposition, trans. Robert W. Lawson (London: Methuen, 1920), 45–46. For details of Hardy’s copy, now at the Dorset County Museum, see Millgate, Library.
55.
Haeckel, Riddle, 215.
56.
Einstein, Relativity, 94–95.
57.
Ibid., 35.
58.
Hardy, Literary Notebooks, 2:228–29.
59.
Arthur Eddington, “Einstein on Time and Space,” Quarterly Review 233 (1920): 234.
60.
Ibid., 231.
61.
Adela Pinch, ‘Rhyme’s End,’ Victorian Studies 53 (2011): 488.
62.
Einstein, Relativity, 55.
63.
Oliver Lodge, “Outlook on the Universe,” Nineteenth Century and After 95 (1924): 141–42.
64.
Einstein, Relativity, 53.
65.
Eddington, “Einstein,” 235
66.
Lodge, “Outlook,” 143–44.
67.
The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard H. Taylor (London: Macmillan, 1978), 77.
68.
Arthur Balfour, Introduction, in Science, Religion and Reality, ed. Joseph Needham (London: Sheldon Press, 1926), 16.
69.
Hardy to J. H. Morgan, 12 January 1926, in Letters, 7:3.
70.
Eddington, “The Domain of Physical Science,” in Science, Religion and Reality, ed. Joseph Needham (London: Sheldon Press, 1926), 202.
71.
For a detailed discussion of Eddington’s idealist interpretation of relativity, see Katy Price, Loving Faster than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
72.
Eddington, “Domain,” 217.
73.
Ibid., 199.
74.
Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake, 4.
75.
Eddington, “Domain,” 200.
76.
Hardy, Literary Notebooks, 2:229.
77.
Anna Henchman, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 228.
78.
Hardy to J.M.E. McTaggart, 31 December 1919, in Letters, 5:353.
79.
See Hardy, Complete Poetical Works, 3:249 and 331.
80.
Armstrong, Haunted Hardy, 186.

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School of English, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
Gregory Tate

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Tate, G. (2020). Hardy’s Measures. In: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_7
Published: 18 June 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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