THOMAS HAROY’S PHILOSOPHY

Evening Star, Issue 19778, 31 January 1928, Page 11

THOMAS HAROY’S PHILOSOPHY

THE CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT SERMON BY ARCHDEACON WHITEHEAD In tho course of a sermon preached in All Saints’ Church on Sunday, from the text Proverbs sx., 27, “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord,” Archdeacon Whitehead said;— Thomas Hardy was one of the most brilliant literary men of modern times. But it is not ot him as a novelist or as a poet that 1 wish to speak. 1 intend rather to say something of what his life and its philosophy signify for the religious thought of our day. Quite apart from his literary achievements, Hardy has characteristics which ought to command the greatest respect. Underlying all his work is a large-hearted humanity, a profound pity for the sufferings and sorrows of his fellow-creatures, human and subhuman, and a conviction that “ man’s greatest enemy is man.” He was a prince in modern literature, attired in the noblest purple and fine linen, yet with a broken heart, streaming eyes, and soul harrowed by the endless horrors of sentient existence.

Hardy claimed that his novels were not didactic—i.e., their author did not set out to teach anything; they had no lesson, no moral. But, despite this disavowal, we cannot escape from seeing the author’s passionate convictions, which are forced upon us in every story by a series of tragic incidents, so that w© feel that Hardy’s gospel is that “we are as flies to the gods, who kill us for their sport.” “The play is the tragedy—man, and the'hero—the conqueror worm.” In the greater part of Hardy’s novels and poems we seem to see a fairly coherent philosophy, which, in many respects, has a great resemblance to the doctrines of the famous or notorious German pessimist, Schopenhauer. Without wishing to be systematic where no system is, we can find traces of at /east FOR LEADING IDEAS.

(1) The world and all that is in it owe their existence to a,n indwelling Will. This Will is both blind and deaf. There is no justice in the nature of things, no Father God sits on the throne of the world. “Wo are the sport of malign circumstance, the victims of its reckless freaks, and our best and most honorable intentions all tend to one miserable end of defeat and shame.” Poor Tess, who had life-long good intentions, is finally hanged as a murderess (‘The Dynasts,’ p. 517). (2) We are all creatures of fate—our wishings and our wiilings have nothing to do with our destiny. 0 innocents, can ye Forget, That things to be were shaped and set Ere mortals and this planet met? Stand ye apostrophising That Which, working all, works hut thereat Like some sublime fermenting vat? —‘The Dynasts’ (1., 6, iii.).

Again, in ‘ Jude the Obscure,’ we find the hero, or rather victim, carried into the arms of the woman who ruined him by irresistible fa.fo. ‘‘A compelling arm of extraordinary muscular power seized hold of him—something which had nothing in common with the spirits and influences that had moved him hitherto. Th;s seemed to care so little for his reason and will, nothing for his socalled elevated intentions, and moved him along, as a violent school master a boy he has seized by the collar, in a direction which tended towards the embrace of a woman for whom he had no respect, and whose life had nothing in common with his own, except locality.” (3) The utter absence of purpose in the world—c.g., in ‘The Dynasts’ we read

Of Its doings if It knew, What It does I would not do! Since It knows not, whac for sense Speeds Its spinnings in the Immense P None; a fixed foresightless dream Is Its whole philosopheme. Just so, an unconscious planning, Like a potter raptly panning! (4) Hence the utter cruelty of things; Hardy represents the odds as always against virtue, innocence and unselfishness. Of Jude he writes: “He was the sort of man born to ache a good deal before the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all was well with him again.” “Pictures of animals suffering are introduced to show that all parts of Nature are much of a. muchness with human society itself. . . . Virtuous, well-meaning, pitiful souls, who are the sport of merciless forces, stand upon a higher moral plane than the powers which dominate Nature, and are under just the same doom as snared rabbits, stuck pigs, pelted dogs, wounded pheasants.” HARDY’S GROUNDS OF HOPE. Does our poet-novelist have any grounds of hope for humanity? He looks forward with complacency, if not with delight, to a time when all conscious beings will have ceased to exist, and unbroken silence'will fall upon the universe. Our greatest hope is that all creatures capable of feeling will “ Merge into nought, meekly and gently as a breeze at eve.” As an alternative to this Hardy entertains the hope that the Indwelling Will may some day wake to consciousness and right the wrongs of the world, and thus bring universal happiness. But—a stirring thrills the air Like to sounds of joyancc there That the rages Of the ages Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that were, Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair! As a third prospect Hardy sometimes entertains the idea of the gradual improvement of life through the efforts of enlightened men and women. THE ULTIMATE BELIEF. In an apology prefixed to his volume of poems published in 1922, Mr Hardy says an alliance between religion and complete rationality mfist come unless the world is to perish. The whole tone of his writing here is much more sympathetic towards institutional religion (the Church of England in particular)than I know elsewhere in his published works.

Even more remarkable still is the hymn which appears in- ‘ Songs of Praise.’ Here Hardy gives expression to what we may call the ultimate belief. No longer does every poor mortal appear as shut up in the finality of tragedy and death. A Vo see the poet here trusting the larger Hope more than faintly. His argument is an old one—one on which, since human reason first opened its eyes, faith must finally come to rest. It is this; in a scheme so vast as that of the universe there is always room for hope; we cannot build a doctrine of desnair on what we do not k-.ow; a world which is a rational system must in the end be the scene of triumphant justice; so for every wound there h a healing; however harsh the means, the result will justify them; eve 17 one of the pale, panting multitudes of earth shall find their joy in the great Wellwisher, the kindly Might, in whom all living live; and in whom all dying die. If this striking poem is really an expression, as it would seem, of the poet’s final faith, it is an example of bow a man of powerful mind, sceptical. Honest, and tender-hearted, after a long life and much insight into human nature, is driven to find no hope for the world but in accepting some of the major implications of theism, or, to speak more simply, in accepting a doctrine which is really a belief in the providence of God. Without this faith, as Mr Wells, in one; of his most enlightened moments, has said: “The service

of man is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or an hypocrisy, in the undisciplined prison of-the mortal Me. When, in his earlier writings, Hardy emphasises the truth that the world is a “question chamber of torture by rack and fire,” he tells Christians what they ought always to recognise, that life is an opportunity for courage, for heroism, for loving service; we live to suffer- and to conquer suffering. In the last pages of his novel, ‘ Tess, Hardy paints for us a picture of the beauty displayed by city and countrys' 1 -, where the poor girl was to meet a criminal’s death. Beauty and terror, permanent features of the world we know, arc here brought before us with unsurpassed poignancy. One feels that in tliis story the author, consciously or unconsciously, tries to show us the helplessness of our mortal lot. _ But Hardy’s condemnation of life is itself a witness to the truth that there is a higher existence than that of Nature. No w’orld can be wholly bad that contains within itself even one who can imagine something better. This knowledge that wo live in a world of tragedy, but that tragedy is not the final truth of things, comes from the spirit of man, which is the candle of the Lord —a candle whose beams lighten, however feebly, the darkness of time with the halo of eternity.