THE DYNASTS
By Thomas Hardy
AN EPIC-DRAMA OF THE WAR WITH NAPOLEON,
IN THREE PARTS, NINETEEN ACTS, AND
ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY SCENES
The Time covered by the Action being about ten Years
“And I heard sounds of insult, shame, and wrong,
And trumpets blown for wars.”
PREFACE
The Spectacle here presented in the likeness of a Drama is concerned with theGreat Historical Calamity, or Clash of Peoples, artificially brought about somehundred years ago.
The choice of such a subject was mainly due to three accidents of locality. Itchanced that the writer was familiar with a part of England that lay withinhail of the watering-place in which King George the Third had his favouritesummer residence during the war with the first Napoléon, and where he wasvisited by ministers and others who bore the weight of English affairs on theirmore or less competent shoulders at that stressful time. Secondly, thisdistrict, being also near the coast which had echoed with rumours of invasionin their intensest form while the descent threatened, was formerly animated bymemories and traditions of the desperate military preparations for thatcontingency. Thirdly, the same countryside happened to include the villagewhich was the birthplace of Nelson’s flag-captain at Trafalgar.
When, as the first published result of these accidents, The TrumpetMajor was printed, more than twenty years ago, I found myself in thetantalizing position of having touched the fringe of a vast internationaltragedy without being able, through limits of plan, knowledge, and opportunity,to enter further into its events; a restriction that prevailed for many years.But the slight regard paid to English influence and action throughout thestruggle by those Continental writers who had dealt imaginatively withNapoléon’s career, seemed always to leave room for a new handling of the themewhich should re-embody the features of this influence in their true proportion;and accordingly, on a belated day about six years back, the following drama wasoutlined, to be taken up now and then at wide intervals ever since.
It may, I think, claim at least a tolerable fidelity to the facts of its dateas they are give in ordinary records. Whenever any evidence of the words reallyspoken or written by the characters in their various situations was attainable,as close a paraphrase has been aimed at as was compatible with the form chosen.And in all cases outside the oral tradition, accessible scenery, and existingrelics, my indebtedness for detail to the abundant pages of the historian, thebiographer, and the journalist, English and Foreign, has been, of course,continuous.
It was thought proper to introduce, as supernatural spectators of theterrestrial action, certain impersonated abstractions, or Intelligences, calledSpirits. They are intended to be taken by the reader for what they may be worthas contrivances of the fancy merely. Their doctrines are but tentative, and areadvanced with little eye to a systematized philosophy warranted to lift “theburthen of the mystery” of this unintelligible world. The chief thing hoped forthem is that they and their utterances may have dramatic plausibility enough toprocure for them, in the words of Coleridge, “that willing suspension ofdisbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.” The wide prevalenceof the Monistic theory of the Universe forbade, in this twentieth century, theimportation of Divine personages from any antique Mythology as ready-madesources or channels of Causation, even in verse, and excluded the celestialmachinery of, say, Paradise Lost, as peremptorily as that of theIliad or the