Thomas Hardy

On 8 June 1896 the Bishop of Wakefield wrote a letter to the Yorkshire Post. He had bought, he said, "one of Mr. Hardy's novels, but was so disgusted with its insolence and indecency that I threw it into the fire."¹² The novel was taken to be Jude the Obscure, published the November before, and the bishop was not alone. The press attack on the book was, the author thought, unequalled in violence since Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, and from America someone sent him a packet of ashes said to be those of his novel.³

Thomas Hardy was fifty-five. He had been a boy who read the Morning Prayer standing on a chair in a tablecloth, a young man who planned to be ordained, and for thirty years a writer whose doubts had stayed mostly in his notebooks. After Jude he wrote no more novels. He wrote poems instead, many of them about the loss of God, and he went on going to church. This chapter follows the boy who wanted to be a parson to the man who wrote "God's Funeral," and asks why he could neither believe nor let belief go.

A parson's dream

He was born about eight in the morning of 2 June 1840, in the last house at the east end of Higher Bockhampton, in the parish of Stinsford, Dorset.⁴ Church was the family's music. His grandfather played the bass viol in the west gallery of Stinsford church from about 1801, and his father and uncle played beside him; the three Hardys made the church's music for a little under forty years.⁵

As a small boy he would stand on a chair wrapped in a tablecloth and read the Morning Prayer, with a cousin as his clerk, and "everybody said that Tommy would have to be a parson, being obviously no good for any practical pursuit."⁶⁷ He was "kept strictly at church on Sundays" and knew the morning and evening services and their rubrics by heart; at about fifteen he taught in the Stinsford Sunday school with the vicar's sons.⁸⁹ Looking back in old age, he wrote that "to be a parson had been his dream."¹⁰

At sixteen, in July 1856, he was articled to John Hicks, a Dorchester architect who restored churches, and "he had sometimes, too, wished to enter the Church."¹¹ Much of his account of these years comes from The Early Life of Thomas Hardy (1928), which carries his second wife Florence's name on the title page; her note says Hardy supplied the chapter headings and his memories, and later scholars say that he wrote most of it himself.¹² It is his own story, told in the third person.

The Greek Testament and the new criticism

In Hicks's office he found a fellow pupil, Henry Bastow, who had become a Baptist, and the two argued about infant baptism. Hardy read the Greek Testament with him, sometimes sitting on a gate in the fields, and from six to eight in the morning before work. He could find "not a shred of evidence for infant baptism in the New Testament," but he decided that "Christianity did not hang on temporary details."¹³¹⁴ When Bastow emigrated to Tasmania, Hardy, "like St. Augustine, lapsed from the Greek New Testament back again to pagan writers."¹⁵

The friend who mattered most was Horace Moule of Queens' College, Cambridge, a Dorchester man who was just beginning to write and review. On walks with Moule Hardy met the books that shook his generation, and two impressed him most: Walter Bagehot's essays and "the newly published Essays and Reviews," the volume of 1860 in which seven liberal writers, nicknamed "the Seven against Christ," applied modern criticism to the Bible.¹⁶ Hardy wrote later that "as a young man he had been among the earliest acclaimers of The Origin of Species."¹⁷

In May 1862 he went to London as an assistant in the office of Arthur Blomfield, a church architect and the son of the late Bishop of London.¹⁸ On 2 July 1865 he worked through Newman's Apologia, wanting to be convinced: "A great desire to be convinced by him, because Moule likes him so much." He was not. "Only — and here comes the fatal catastrophe — there is no first link to his excellent chain of reasoning, and down you come headlong."¹⁹²⁰

He still hoped for a while to combine poetry and the Church. He wrote to a friend at Cambridge about matriculating, and thought of a country curacy. The scheme fell through, he wrote, "less because of its difficulty than from a conscientious feeling, after some theological study, that he could hardly take the step with honour while holding the views which on examination he found himself to hold."²¹²² Accounts differ a little on how far he went; late in life he said he had "begun reading for Cambridge with a view to taking Orders."¹⁰ In London he still went to the Abbey and stayed for the Sacrament.²³

"Hap"

In 1866, at twenty-six, he wrote a sonnet he kept in manuscript for more than thirty years. It says that he could bear his suffering if some vengeful god would laugh at him from the sky: "Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die, / Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited." But there is no such god. "Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, / And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . . / These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown / Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain."²⁴²⁵²⁶ That was the private break: not a cruel God, but chance.

The next year he copied into his notebook a list of "cures for despair," among them Wordsworth and the chapter on individuality in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, and went home to Dorchester to work for Hicks again.²⁷²⁸ In September 1873 Horace Moule died suddenly, three months after a cheerful parting at Cambridge, and Hardy went to his burial at Fordington; the Life calls it only a "tragic death."²⁹

Leslie Stephen

The man who did most to shape Hardy's thinking in the years that followed was Leslie Stephen, the editor of the Cornhill, who had been a clergyman and had lost his faith. Stephen asked Hardy for a serial in 1873, and Hardy said he came "to be mentally influenced by him so deeply."³⁰ On 23 March 1875, Hardy remembered, "I received from Stephen a mysterious note asking me to call in the evening." When he got there, "he wanted me to witness his signature to what, for a moment, I thought was his will; but it turned out to be a deed renunciatory of holy-orders under the act of 1870."³¹³²³³ Stephen told him that night that he had "wasted" much time on systems of religion and metaphysics.³⁴

In April 1882 Hardy went to Darwin's funeral in Westminster Abbey.¹⁷ In January 1888 a clergyman, the Reverend Dr Grosart, wrote to him in good faith asking how to reconcile the horrors of nature "with the absolute goodness and non-limitation of God."³⁵ Hardy's answer was brief and polite: "Mr. Hardy regrets that he is unable to suggest any hypothesis which would reconcile the existence of such evils as Dr. Grosart describes with the idea of omnipotent goodness." He pointed him to the life of Darwin and the works of Herbert Spencer "and other agnostics."³⁶³⁷

Tess and Jude

The novels carried the doubt into public. Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) ends with a hanging and a sentence that offended many readers: "'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess."³⁸ When a critic complained, Hardy answered that "to exclaim illogically against the gods, singular or plural, is not such an original sin of mine as he seems to imagine," and added, "a novel is an impression, not an argument."³⁹⁴⁰⁴¹ On Good Friday 1892, after reading a hostile review, he wrote: "no more novel-writing for me."⁴²

Jude the Obscure came out on 1 November 1895. It is the story of a working man who dreams of the university and the priesthood and loses both, and it ends with Jude dying alone with the words of Job: "Let the day perish wherein I was born."⁴³⁴⁴ Hardy called the book "simply an endeavor to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions."⁴⁵ Many reviewers read it as a manifesto against marriage, which Hardy denied.⁴⁶ Margaret Oliphant, in "The Anti-Marriage League," an essay unsigned in Blackwood's that her own letter later acknowledged, condemned what she called "the curious development of shameless Innocence, more dangerous than folly, more appalling almost than vice," though she admitted she could not tell what Hardy's motive was.⁴⁷⁴⁸ Then came the bishop's letter. The letter itself names only "one of Mr. Hardy's novels"; the Life takes it to be Jude, and adds that he persuaded W. H. Smith's library to withdraw the book.¹

Hardy thought that if the bishop had known him, he would have found a man whose "views of morality, and of the vital facts of religion, hardly differed from his own."⁴⁹ He noted the trap he was in: "Tragedy may be created by an opposing environment either of things inherent in the universe, or of human institutions. If the former be the means exhibited and deplored, the writer is regarded as impious; if the latter, as subversive and dangerous."⁵⁰⁵¹ The attacks, the Life says, "well-nigh compelled him" to give up the novel, and he went back to the verse he had been writing since 1865.⁵²⁵³

The impercipient

His first book of poems, Wessex Poems (1898), printed "Hap" at last, and beside it a poem set at a cathedral service. In "The Impercipient" he stands among worshippers whose faith he cannot share: "That from this bright believing band / An outcast I should be, / That faiths by which my comrades stand / Seem fantasies to me, / And mirage-mists their Shining Land, / Is a drear destiny."⁵⁴ He does not mock them. He asks for their sympathy, and resents only their charge "that blessed things / I'd liefer have unbe."⁵⁵⁵⁶

At the very end of 1900 he wrote "The Darkling Thrush," in which an old bird sings into a dead winter landscape, and the poet wonders at "Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware."⁵⁷⁵⁸ In The Dynasts (1904–08) he gave the universe a governing "Immanent Will" that "works unconsciously"; critics took it for a cruel God, and he answered that he had never held a "malignant and fiendish" God, only "an indifferent and unconscious force at the back of things 'that neither good nor evil knows.'"^59606162

Between 1908 and 1910 he wrote "God's Funeral," printed in 1914. A procession of mourners carries the body of God, and they understand at last what they have been worshipping: "O man-projected Figure, of late / Imaged as we, thy knell who shall survive? / Whence came it we were tempted to create / One whom we can no longer keep alive?" and "Our making soon our maker did we deem, / And what we had imagined we believed."⁶³⁶⁴⁶⁵ The poet walks with them but is not one of them, and he closes in his own voice: "I could not prop their faith: and yet / Many I had known: with all I sympathized; / And though struck speechless, I did not forget / That what was mourned for, I, too, once had prized."⁶⁶

Churchy

He did not stop going to church, and he kept saying why. In January 1907 he wrote a note on "the hard case of the would-be-religious": "We enter church, and we have to say, 'We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep', when what we want to say is, 'Why are we made to err and stray like lost sheep?'" Then "we have to sing, 'My soul doth magnify the Lord'," when what he wanted was this: "O that my soul could find some Lord that it could magnify! Till it can, let us magnify good works." If the services could not change, "we must leave. And if we do, we reluctantly go to the door, and creep out as it creaks complainingly behind us."^67686970

During the war he wrote "The Oxen," on the belief, which the poem calls a fancy, that the cattle kneel in their stalls on Christmas Eve: "If someone said on Christmas Eve, / 'Come; see the oxen kneel / In the lonely barton by yonder coomb / Our childhood used to know,' / I should go with him in the gloom, / Hoping it might be so."⁷¹⁷²

About the labels, he was exact. In 1917 he wrote that "no modern thinker can be an atheist in the modern sense, while all modern thinkers are atheists in the ancient and exploded sense." Critics had called him nonconformist, agnostic, atheist, infidel, immoralist, heretic and pessimist, but "they had never thought of calling him what they might have called him much more plausibly — churchy; not in an intellectual sense, but in so far as instincts and emotions ruled."¹⁰⁷³⁷⁴ He was not a pessimist either, he insisted: his creed was "evolutionary meliorism," the belief that "if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst."⁷⁵⁷⁶⁷⁷ In the same 1922 preface he hoped the Church might yet open its doors to doubters, "with the gathering of many millions of waiting agnostics into its fold," and asked what other English institution was left "to keep the shreds of morality together."⁷⁸⁷⁹ Poetry and religion, he wrote, "touch each other, or rather modulate into each other; are, indeed, often but different names for the same thing."⁸⁰

The critics

G. K. Chesterton, the critic and Christian apologist, was not persuaded. He wrote in 1913 that "Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot," and that "Mr. Hardy is anthropomorphic out of sheer atheism. He personifies the universe in order to give it a piece of his mind."⁸¹⁸² Hardy's friend Frederic Harrison, a Positivist, said simply, "This view of life is not mine."⁸³ A kinder judgment came after his death from a clergyman writing in the journal Theology, who said that from Hardy a reader "would learn the essential dignity of country people and what deep and often passionate interest belongs to every individual life."⁸⁴

Two burials

On 23 December 1927 carol-singers from St Peter's, Dorchester came to Max Gate and sang "While Shepherds Watched" to the tune his father and grandfather had played in the Stinsford gallery.⁸⁵ Three days later, hearing the Nativity read, he remarked "that there was not a grain of evidence that the gospel story was true in any detail."⁸⁶⁸⁷ He died at Max Gate shortly after nine in the evening of 11 January 1928.⁸⁸

He had wished to be buried at Stinsford, among his family and beside his first wife.⁸⁹ But the Dean of Westminster consented to a burial in the Abbey. So his heart was removed and his body cremated, and at two o'clock on 16 January there were services at once in the Abbey, at Stinsford and in Dorchester: his ashes went into Poets' Corner, with Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald, Kipling, Barrie, Shaw and Housman among the pall-bearers, and his heart was buried at Stinsford, "where Hardy was baptized, and where as boy and man he had often worshipped," in the grave of his first wife.⁹⁰⁹¹⁹²

What he left

Hardy's unbelief changed shape less than his reputation did. The boy lost the faith of the gallery and the Sunday school in his twenties, through the new criticism, Darwin, and a reading of Newman whose chain of reasoning, he found, had no first link; he kept the loss to himself for thirty years; and when he finally said it in public, first in a novel and then in poems, he said it as grief rather than triumph. He would not call himself an atheist, because he thought the word belonged to an older quarrel, and he would not stop loving the church he could not believe in. Leslie Stephen, whose deed renouncing holy orders Hardy witnessed, had taken the same road more quietly, and he has his own chapter in this book.