Thomas Hardy

From Philosopedia

Hardy, Thomas (2 June 1840 - 11 January 1928)

A pessimistic humanist deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, a non-theist (according to Robert Graves), and a determinist, Hardy looked upon man as a puppet of fate and the cosmos as “a viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel.”

Without Christian supernaturalism, in short, some still retain an outlook of defeatism regarding man’s hopes and man’s progress on earth. Hardy’s novels show how indifferent nature joins with the narrow views of 19th-century humanity to bring human lives to disaster in a godless universe. His “Oxen” is a poetic statement of the loss which one realizes when he gives up the psychological comfort and social cohesiveness that had been possible in the Christian era, but the small hope Hardy offers is that in a rural setting man might possibly be able to live meaningfully, that if the native returns to his roots he will be shaped positively by the seasons and the local traditions; but Hardy’s pessimism persists, realizing that those traditions are vanishing.

His Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896) are set against a forbidding Dorset landscape (called Wessex in the novels) whose physical harshness echoes that of an indifferent, if not malevolent, universe. In the former, he has a reference to the kinds of hell-fire preachers who left messages of doom and damnation painted on walls and gateposts in rural Britain. Some considered the latter book immoral, because it dealt with sexual relations at a time when novelists avoided such.

The Return of the Native (1878) describes the inability of people to adapt to other parts of the world, and it introduces the element of chance - if an important note is slipped under the door, but slides under the rug and is not seen, an entire plot can turn on the accident. For Hardy, people’s lives are ruled not only by nature and fate but also by Victorian social convention, which is in keeping with his reference to “a being who had rejected with indifference the attitude of sex for the loftier quality of abstract humanism.”

According to Jim Herrick, when he was editor of New Humanist, Hardy, “was an impassioned if bleak novelist who had a slight connection with the Rationalist Press Association," a member of the British Humanist Association.

Martin Seymour-Smith’s Hardy (1994) suggests that Hardy was attracted “to a form of gnosticism, associated with the Manichaean belief in the power of the principle of evil in the world. His reply to the well-meaning Rev. A. B. Grosart in February 1888 asking his view on the possibility of reconciling awareness of ‘the horrors of human and animal life’ emphasised by Darwinism with the belief in ‘the absoluteness and non-limitation of God’ is deadly” and is as follows:

• 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. Perhaps Dr. Grosart might be helped to a provisional view of the universe by the recently published Life of Darwin and the works of Herbert Spencer and other agnostics.

To the critic Peter Faulkner, that letter suggests a Hardy well on the way to humanism. Already, Hardy was the friend of rationalists Leslie Stephen and Edward Clodd . However, in 1899 Hardy turned down the invitation of the Rationalist Press Association that he should become an Honorary Associate, arguing that he preferred to remain detached, that belonging to a philosophic association could be mis-read as propagandizing whereas his intent was “to be simply artistic & delineative. While thanking you for the proposal I will therefore decline associationship for the present.”

Faulkner notes that in 1920 Hardy was invited to have himself included in Joseph McCabe’s A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists. Again, Hardy declined, on the grounds that he was “an irrationalist rather than a rationalist, on account of his inconsistencies . . . he thinks he could show that no man is a rationalist, and that human actions are not ruled by reason in the last resort.”

In short, Hardy wanted to avoid categorization. He regularly went to church but was not a Christian. “I dream of an alliance between religions freed from dogmas,” he said. In the “Apology” to Late Lyrics and Earlier, he flirted with categorizations, stating that he believed in an “evolutionary meliorism,” a kind of Stoicism.

In Christmas (1924), he wrote

• “Peace on earth!” was said. We sing it And pay a million priests to bring it. After two thousand years of mass We’ve got as far as poison gas.

Faulkner differs from others by declaring that “Hardy, then, despite his antipathy to aspects of Christian dogma and his sceptical view of the Nature of God, was no humanist. Seymour-Smith’s summing up is justified by all the evidence that he gives: ‘He was an uneasy man whose emotionally religious heart was divided from his agnostic head. . . . Tom’s intellect stood bravely aloof from inventing, yet could not help yearning for, a “proof” of the existence of a universe that was ultimately benign.’ ” Critic Karl E. Meyer has pointed out a reason Hardy was known as such a brooding figure:

• He not only destroyed the “diabolical diaries” of his first wife, Emma, but also dictated his memoirs to his second wife, Florence. She published them as her own life of the novelist after his death in 1928, enabling Hardy to design his own posthumous pedestal. (Three years after Florence’s demise, the bibliographer Richard Purdy finally revealed the truth in a 1940 lecture.)

Claire Tomalin's 2008 work, Thomas Hardy, details the author's extended family where illegitimate births and poverty were commonplace. She also writes that his Poor Man and the Lady was controversial because, as Hardy admitted, it was a

• dramatic satire of . . . the vulgarity of the middle class, modern Christianity . . . and political and domestic morals in general, . . . the tendency of the writing being socialistic, not to say revolutionary.

Hardy's Death and a Gruesome Bit of Surgery

Philip Norman, Awful Moments:

• "When Thomas Hardy died in 1928, his will directed that he be buried unostentatiously in the churchyard at Stinsford, deep in his beloved Wessex. However, just before the funeral, a suggestion came from Stanley Baldwin's government that so great a novelist and poet - whatever his own wishes - deserved no less a burial-place than Westminster Abbey.

"Between Hardy's widow and the government, a compromise was reached. The great man's body would be interred at Westminster - but first his heart would be removed and, in a private ceremony following the public one, be buried at its symbolic home, Stinsford.

• "There then arose the question of who should remove the heart. Hardy's family doctor refused, but a young assistant volunteered in his stead. The heart was cut out at the surgery, and the body honours.

• "Since the heart was not to be buried until the next day, some method of storing it had to be found. Finally, the doctor's maid came up with the answer - a biscuit-tin.

"The biscuit-tin was sealed and placed in a garden-shed to await the morrow's poignant and poetipoetic interrment of Thomas Hardy's heart. Unluckily, during the night it was got at [eaten] by the doctor's cat."

Hardy was the first novelist buried at London’s Westminster Abbey since Charles Dickens. That part of his heart, that had not been eaten by the cat and which a surgeon had removed and stored in a cookie can, was buried in Dorset at a Stinsford churchyard.

{CB; CE; CL; EU, Victor N. Paananen; Peter Faulkner, New Humanist, May 1994; Robert Graves, speaking at John Masefield’s memorial, is in Corliss Lamont, Remembering John Masefield; Karl E. Meyer, The New York Times, 7 February 1998; TRI; TYD}