The Dynasts: An Epic-Drama of the War with Napoleon

Thomas Hardy

The Dynasts

An Epic-Drama of the War with Napoleon

Published by Good Press, 2022

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EAN 4057664636324

Table of Contents

PREFACE

DETAILED CONTENTS.

PART FIRST

FORE SCENE

ACT FIRST

ACT SECOND

ACT THIRD

ACT FOURTH

ACT FIFTH

ACT SIXTH

PART SECOND

ACT FIRST

ACT SECOND

ACT THIRD

ACT FOURTH

ACT FIFTH

ACT SIXTH

PART THIRD

ACT FIRST

ACT SECOND

ACT THIRD

ACT FOURTH

ACT FIFTH

ACT SIXTH

ACT SEVENTH

AFTER SCENE

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

Table of Contents

The Spectacle here presented in the likeness of a Drama is concerned with the Great Historical Calamity, or Clash of Peoples, artificially brought about some hundred years ago.

The choice of such a subject was mainly due to three accidents of locality. It chanced that the writer was familiar with a part of England that lay within hail of the watering-place in which King George the Third had his favourite summer residence during the war with the first Napoleon, and where he was visited by ministers and others who bore the weight of English affairs on their more or less competent shoulders at that stressful time. Secondly, this district, being also near the coast which had echoed with rumours of invasion in their intensest form while the descent threatened, was formerly animated by memories and traditions of the desperate military preparations for that contingency. Thirdly, the same countryside happened to include the village which was the birthplace of Nelson's flag-captain at Trafalgar.

When, as the first published result of these accidents, The Trumpet Major was printed, more than twenty years ago, I found myself in the tantalizing position of having touched the fringe of a vast international tragedy 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 the struggle by those Continental writers who had dealt imaginatively with Napoleon's career, seemed always to leave room for a new handling of the theme which 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 was outlined, 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 date as they are give in ordinary records. Whenever any evidence of the words really spoken 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 existing relics, my indebtedness for detail to the abundant pages of the historian, the biographer, and the journalist, English and Foreign, has been, of course, continuous.

It was thought proper to introduce, as supernatural spectators of the terrestrial action, certain impersonated abstractions, or Intelligences, called Spirits. They are intended to be taken by the reader for what they may be worth as contrivances of the fancy merely. Their doctrines are but tentative, and are advanced with little eye to a systematized philosophy warranted to lift the burthen of the mystery of this unintelligible world. The chief thing hoped for them is that they and their utterances may have dramatic plausibility enough to procure for them, in the words of Coleridge, that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. The wide prevalence of the Monistic theory of the Universe forbade, in this twentieth century, the importation of Divine personages from any antique Mythology as ready-made sources or channels of Causation, even in verse, and excluded the celestial machinery of, say, Paradise Lost, as peremptorily as that of the Iliad or the Eddas. And the abandonment of the masculine pronoun in allusions to the First or Fundamental Energy seemed a necessary and logical consequence of the long abandonment by thinkers of the anthropomorphic conception of the same.

These phantasmal Intelligences are divided into groups, of which one only, that of the Pities, approximates to the Universal Sympathy of human nature—the spectator idealized1 of the Greek Chorus; it is impressionable and inconsistent in its views, which sway hither and thither as wrought on by events. Another group approximates to the passionless Insight of the Ages. The remainder are eclectically chosen auxiliaries whose signification may be readily discerned. In point of literary form, the scheme of contrasted Choruses and other conventions of this external feature was shaped with a single view to the modern expression of a modern outlook, and in frank divergence from classical and other dramatic precedent which ruled the ancient voicings of ancient themes.

It may hardly be necessary to inform readers that in devising this chronicle-piece no attempt has been made to create that completely organic structure of action, and closely-webbed development of character and motive, which are demanded in a drama strictly self- contained. A panoramic show like the present is a series of historical ordinates [to use a term in geometry]: the subject is familiar to all; and foreknowledge is assumed to fill in the junctions required to combine the scenes into an artistic unity. Should the mental spectator be unwilling or unable to do this, a historical presentment on an intermittent plan, in which the dramatis personae number some hundreds, exclusive of crowds and armies, becomes in his individual case unsuitable.

In this assumption of a completion of the action by those to whom the drama is addressed, it is interesting, if unnecessary, to name an exemplar as old as Aeschylus, whose plays are, as Dr. Verrall reminds us,2 scenes from stories taken as known, and would be unintelligible without supplementary scenes of the imagination.

Readers will readily discern, too, that The Dynasts is intended simply for mental performance, and not for the stage. Some critics have averred that to declare a drama3 as being not for the stage is to make an announcement whose subject and predicate cancel each other. The question seems to be an unimportant matter of terminology. Compositions cast in this shape were, without doubt, originally written for the stage only, and as a consequence their nomenclature of Act, Scene, and the like, was drawn directly from the vehicle of representation. But in the course of time such a shape would reveal itself to be an eminently readable one; moreover, by dispensing with the theatre altogether, a freedom of treatment was attainable in this form that was denied where the material possibilities of stagery had to be rigorously remembered. With the careless mechanicism of human speech, the technicalities of practical mumming were retained in these productions when they had ceased to be concerned with the stage at all.

To say, then, in the present case, that a writing in play-shape is not to be played, is merely another way of stating that such writing has been done in a form for which there chances to be no brief definition save one already in use for works that it superficially but not entirely resembles.

Whether mental performance alone may not eventually be the fate of all drama other than that of contemporary or frivolous life, is a kindred question not without interest. The mind naturally flies to the triumphs of the Hellenic and Elizabethan theatre in exhibiting scenes laid far in the Unapparent, and asks why they should not be repeated. But the meditative world is older, more invidious, more nervous, more quizzical, than it once was, and being unhappily perplexed by—

Riddles of Death Thebes never knew,

may be less ready and less able than Hellas and old England were to look through the insistent, and often grotesque, substance at the thing signified.

In respect of such plays of poesy and dream a practicable compromise may conceivably result, taking the shape of a monotonic delivery of speeches, with dreamy conventional gestures, something in the manner traditionally maintained by the old Christmas mummers, the curiously hypnotizing impressiveness of whose automatic style—that of persons who spoke by no will of their own—may be remembered by all who ever experienced it. Gauzes or screens to blur outlines might still further shut off the actual, as has, indeed, already been done in exceptional cases. But with this branch of the subject we are not concerned here.

T.H.

September 1903.

FOOTNOTES

DETAILED CONTENTS.

Table of Contents

THE DYNASTS: AN EPIC-DRAMA OF THE WAR WITH NAPOLEON

Preface

PART FIRST

Characters

Fore Scene. The Overworld

Act First:—

Scene I. England. A Ridge in Wessex

" II. Paris. Office of the Minister of Marine

" III. London. The Old House of Commons

" IV. The Harbour of Boulogne

" V. London. The House of a Lady of Quality

" IV. Milan. The Cathedral

Act Second:—

Scene I. The Dockyard, Gibraltar

" II. Off Ferrol

" III. The Camp and Harbour of Boulogne

" IV. South Wessex. A Ridge-like Down near the Coast

" V. The Same. Rainbarrows' Beacon, Egdon Heath

Act Third:—

Scene I. The Chateau at Pont-de-Briques

" II. The Frontiers of Upper Austria and Bavaria

" III. Boulogne. The St. Omer Road

Act Fourth:—

Scene I. King George's Watering-place, South Wessex

" II. Before the City of Ulm

" III. Ulm. Within the City

" IV. Before Ulm. The Same Day

" V. The Same. The Michaelsberg

" VI. London. Spring Gardens

Act Fifth:—

Scene I. Off Cape Trafalgar

II. The Same. The Quarter-deck of the Victory"

III. The Same. On Board the Bucentaure"

IV. The Same. The Cockpit of the Victory"

" V. London. The Guildhall

" VI. An Inn at Rennes

" VII. King George's Watering-place, South Wessex

Act Sixth:—

Scene I. The Field of Austerlitz. The French Position

" II. The Same. The Russian Position

" III. The Same. The French Position

" IV. The Same. The Russian Position

" V. The Same. Near the Windmill of Paleny

" VI. Shockerwick House, near Bath

" VII. Paris. A Street leading to the Tuileries

" VIII. Putney. Bowling Green House

PART SECOND

Characters

Act First:—

Scene I. London. Fox's Lodgings, Arlington Street

" II. The Route between London and Paris

" III. The Streets of Berlin

" IV. The Field of Jena

" V. Berlin. A Room overlooking a Public Place

" VI. The Same

" VII. Tilsit and the River Niemen

" VIII. The Same

Act Second:—

Scene I. The Pyrenees and Valleys adjoining

" II. Aranjuez, near Madrid. A Room in the Palace of

Godoy, the Prince of Peace

" III. London. The Marchioness of Salisbury's

" IV. Madrid and its Environs

" V. The Open Sea between the English Coasts and the

Spanish Peninsula

" VI. St. Cloud. The Boudoir of Josephine

" VII. Vimiero

Act Third:—

Scene I. Spain. A Road near Astorga

" II. The Same

" III. Before Coruna

" IV. Coruna. Near the Ramparts

" V. Vienna. A Cafe in the Stephans-Platz

Act Fourth:—

Scene I. A Road out of Vienna

" II. The Island of Lobau, with Wagram beyond

" III. The Field of Wagram

" IV. The Field of Talavera

" V. The Same

" VI. Brighton. The Royal Pavilion

" VII. The Same

" VIII. Walcheren

Act Fifth:—

Scene I. Paris. A Ballroom in the House of Cambaceres

" II. Paris. The Tuileries

" III. Vienna. A Private Apartment in the Imperial Palace

" IV. London. A Club in St. James's Street

" V. The old West Highway out of Vienna

" VI. Courcelles

" VII. Petersburg. The Palace of the Empress-Mother

" VIII. Paris. The Grand Gallery of the Louvre and the

Salon-Carre adjoining

Act Fifth:—

Scene I. The Lines of Torres Vedras

" II. The Same. Outside the Lines

" III. Paris. The Tuileries

" IV. Spain. Albuera

" V. Windsor Castle. A Room in the King's Apartments

" VI. London. Carlton House and the Streets adjoining

" VII. The Same. The Interior of Carlton House

PART THIRD

Characters

Act First:—

Scene I. The Banks of the Niemen, near Kowno

" II. The Ford of Santa Marta, Salamanca

" III. The Field of Salamanca

" IV. The Field of Borodino

" V. The Same

" VI. Moscow

" VII. The Same. Outside the City

" VIII. The Same. The Interior of the Kremlin

" IX. The Road from Smolensko into Lithuania

" X. The Bridge of the Beresina

" XI. The Open Country between Smorgoni and Wilna

" XII. Paris. The Tuileries

Act Second:—

Scene I. The Plain of Vitoria

" II. The Same, from the Puebla Heights

" III. The Same. The Road from the Town

" IV. A Fete at Vauxhall Gardens

Act Third:—

Scene I. Leipzig. Napoleon's Quarters in the Reudnitz Suburb

" II. The Same. The City and the Battlefield

" III. The Same, from the Tower of the Pleissenburg

" IV. The Same. At the Thonberg Windmill

" V. The Same. A Street near the Ranstadt Gate

" VI. The Pyrenees. Near the River Nivelle

Act Fourth:—

Scene I. The Upper Rhine

" II. Paris. The Tuileries

" III. The Same. The Apartments of the Empress

" IV. Fontainebleau. A Room in the Palace

" V. Bayonne. The British Camp

" VI. A Highway in the Outskirts of Avignon

" VII. Malmaison. The Empress Josephine's Bedchamber

" VIII. London. The Opera-House

Act Fifth:—

Scene I. Elba. The Quay, Porto Ferrajo

" II. Vienna. The Imperial Palace

" III. La Mure, near Grenoble

" IV. Schonbrunn

" V. London. The Old House of Commons

" VI. Wessex. Durnover Green, Casterbridge

Act Sixth:—

Scene I. The Belgian Frontier

" II. A Ballroom in Brussels

" III. Charleroi. Napoleon's Quarters

" IV. A Chamber overlooking a Main Street in Brussels

" V. The Field of Ligny

" VI. The Field of Quatre-Bras

" VII. Brussels. The Place Royale

" VIII. The Road to Waterloo

Act Seventh:—

Scene I. The Field of Waterloo

" II. The Same. The French Position

" III. Saint Lambert's Chapel Hill

" IV. The Field of Waterloo. The English Position

" V. The Same. The Women's Camp near Mont Saint-Jean

" VI. The Same. The French Position

" VII. The Same. The English Position

" VIII. The Same. Later

" IX. The Wood of Bossu

After Scene. The Overworld

PART FIRST

Table of Contents

CHARACTERS

I. PHANTOM INTELLIGENCES

THE ANCIENT SPIRIT OF THE YEARS/CHORUS OF THE YEARS.

THE SPIRIT OF THE PITIES/CHORUS OF THE PITIES.

SPIRITS SINISTER AND IRONIC/CHORUSES OF SINISTER AND IRONIC SPIRITS.

THE SPIRIT OF RUMOUR/CHORUS OF RUMOURS.

THE SHADE OF THE EARTH.

SPIRIT-MESSENGERS.

RECORDING ANGELS.

II. PERSONS [The names in lower case are mute figures.]

MEN

GEORGE THE THIRD.

The Duke of Cumberland

PITT.

FOX.

SHERIDAN.

WINDHAM.

WHITBREAD.

TIERNEY.

BATHURST AND FULLER.

Lord Chancellor Eldon.

EARL OF MALMESBURY.

LORD MULGRAVE.

ANOTHER CABINET MINISTER.

Lord Grenville.

Viscount Castlereagh.

Viscount Sidmouth.

ANOTHER NOBLE LORD.

ROSE.

Canning.

Perceval.

Grey.

Speaker Abbot.

TOMLINE, BISHOP OF LINCOLN.

SIR WALTER FARQUHAR.

Count Munster.

Other Peers, Ministers, ex-Ministers, Members of Parliament,

and Persons of Quality.

..........

NELSON.

COLLINGWOOD.

HARDY.

SECRETARY SCOTT.

DR. BEATTY.

DR. MAGRATH.

DR. ALEXANDER SCOTT.

BURKE, PURSER.

Lieutenant Pasco.

ANOTHER LIEUTENANT.

POLLARD, A MIDSHIPMAN.

Captain Adair.

Lieutenants Ram and Whipple.

Other English Naval Officers.

Sergeant-Major Secker and Marines.

Staff and other Officers of the English Army.

A COMPANY OF SOLDIERS.

Regiments of the English Army and Hanoverian.

SAILORS AND BOATMEN.

A MILITIAMAN.

Naval Crews.

..........

The Lord Mayor and Corporation of London.

A GENTLEMAN OF FASHION.

WILTSHIRE, A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN

A HORSEMAN.

TWO BEACON-WATCHERS.

ENGLISH CITIZENS AND BURGESSES.

COACH AND OTHER HIGHWAY PASSENGERS.

MESSENGERS, SERVANTS, AND RUSTICS.

..........

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

DARU, NAPOLEON'S WAR SECRETARY.

LAURISTON, AIDE-DE-CAMP.

MONGE, A PHILOSOPHER.

BERTHIER.

MURAT, BROTHER-IN-LAW OF NAPOLEON.

SOULT.

NEY.

LANNES.

Bernadotte.

Marmont.

Dupont.

Oudinot.

Davout.

Vandamme.

Other French Marshals.

A SUB-OFFICER.

..........

VILLENEUVE, NAPOLEON'S ADMIRAL.

DECRES, MINISTER OF MARINE.

FLAG-CAPTAIN MAGENDIE.

LIEUTENANT DAUDIGNON.

LIEUTENANT FOURNIER.

Captain Lucas.

OTHER FRENCH NAVAL OFFICERS AND PETTY OFFICERS.

Seamen of the French and Spanish Navies.

Regiments of the French Army.

COURIERS.

HERALDS.

Aides, Officials, Pages, etc.

ATTENDANTS.

French Citizens.

..........

CARDINAL CAPRARA.

Priests, Acolytes, and Choristers.

Italian Doctors and Presidents of Institutions.

Milanese Citizens.

..........

THE EMPEROR FRANCIS.

THE ARCHDUKE FERDINAND.

Prince John of Lichtenstien.

PRINCE SCHWARZENBERG.

MACK, AUSTRIAN GENERAL.

JELLACHICH.

RIESC.

WEIROTHER.

ANOTHER AUSTRIAN GENERAL.

TWO AUSTRIAN OFFICERS.

..........

The Emperor Alexander.

PRINCE KUTUZOF, RUSSIAN FIELD-MARSHAL.

COUNT LANGERON.

COUNT BUXHOVDEN.

COUNT MILORADOVICH.

DOKHTOROF.

..........

Giulay, Gottesheim, Klenau, and Prschebiszewsky.

Regiments of the Austrian Army.

Regiments of the Russian Army.

WOMEN

Queen Charlotte.

English Princesses.

Ladies of the English Court.

LADY HESTER STANHOPE.

A LADY.

Lady Caroline Lamb, Mrs. Damer, and other English Ladies.

..........

THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE.

Princesses and Ladies of Josephine's Court.

Seven Milanese Young Ladies.

..........

City- and Towns-women.

Country-women.

A MILITIAMAN'S WIFE.

A STREET-WOMAN.

Ship-women.

Servants.

FORE SCENE

Table of Contents

THE OVERWORLD

[Enter the Ancient Spirit and Chorus of the Years, the Spirit

and Chorus of the Pities, the Shade of the Earth, the Spirits

Sinister and Ironic with their Choruses, Rumours, Spirit-

Messengers, and Recording Angels.]

SHADE OF THE EARTH

What of the Immanent Will and Its designs?

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

It works unconsciously, as heretofore,

Eternal artistries in Circumstance,

Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote,

Seem in themselves Its single listless aim,

And not their consequence.

CHORUS OF THE PITIES [aerial music]

Still thus? Still thus?

Ever unconscious!

An automatic sense

Unweeting why or whence?

Be, then, the inevitable, as of old,