Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/54

 through simple illiterate "Hodges." This is untrue. The Hardys have always been, and still are, a class apart from what W. S. Gilbert called "the common country folk" of an "insipid neighborhood." The complete genealogy of the main limbs of the family can be set down only by means of an elaborate and imposing table; only a minute fraction of that great tree has been indicated here. And our Thomas Hardy has always been intensely alive to the quality of the blood of his fathers.

Superficially, this tribal consciousness has cropped out in The Trumpet-Major and in The Dynasts, in both of which his kinsman (although not his direct ancestor) Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy appears as a dramatis persona. Sir Thomas was a Dorset man; he was a Napoleonic hero: these things in themselves would be sufficient to endear him to the Wessex poet. But above all, he was a relative, a Hardy. As such, he was rated glorification, almost deification. The death of Nelson and the attendance of Sir Thomas is in The Dynasts portrayed in a series of scenes which stand out as unforgettably thrilling, superlatively pathetic and beautiful even in a framework which is itself full of incomparable thrill, beauty and pathos. They are a monumentum aere perennius, a perhaps undeservedly lasting tribute, to the memory of the gallant officer, whose share in the picture was, after all, fundamentally passive. They are the result of a very definite fermentation, for several decades, of varied feelings: love of military pomp and glitter, attachment to the soil over which dead Hardys had pridefully stalked, unavoidable interest in a namesake, deep-seated aristocratic arrogance, perhaps only semi-con-