Let me begin in Hardy’s study at Max Gate, in the late evening probably as the year ebbed into autumn. Here the poet describes the scene evocatively:
‘A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter – winged, horned and spined –
A longlegs, a moth and a dumbledore;
While ‘mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands……
Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
– My guests besmear my new–penned line,
Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.
“God’s humblest, they!” I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.’
Here is Hardy writing in 1899, almost sixty years old. Emma, his semi-estranged first wife is still alive, living a separate existence elsewhere in the house that Hardy – the ‘failed architect’ – had built for himself. They are wistful lines, as his poetry could often be, and it is no accident that ‘Earth-secrets’ in that final line begins with a capital letter. There is something of the metaphysical about this poem.
Hardy was at root a troubled soul, what one of Tennyson’s biographers described as ‘an unquiet heart.’ The son of a journeyman builder, his childhood was spent in the semi-wooded country of Higher Bockhampten wedged between Dorchester and Egdon Heath in the heart of Dorset. He writes warmly of it in his poem Domicilium:
‘………A stunted thorn
Stands here and there, indeed; and from a pit
An oak uprises, springing from a seed
Dropped by a bird a hundred years ago.
In days bygone
Long gone – my father’s mother, who is now
Blest with the blest, would take me out to walk.’
Hardy loved his county of birth and rarely could resist placing his own life on the canvas of eternity – ‘blest with the blest’ and remembering a seed ‘dropped by a bird a hundred years ago.’
Yet his rural and relatively humble origins would trouble him too. His talent brought aspirations which made his semi-idyllic birthplace a mixed blessing. It all increased his personal insecurity. He never felt accepted by cultured and privileged society, despite his later celebrity status.
Part of his struggle with faith issued from the snobbishness of the established church. Jude, his final novel, is at least semi-autobiographical; it reflects his own incipient vocation to priesthood and then a later confusion about faith. Even the complications of marriage, seen in Jude’s relationship with Sue Bridehead, mirror the sadnesses of his own first marriage to Emma whose brother-in-law was himself a clergyman.
Emma became increasingly eccentric and religiously extreme; when she died, to compound the misery, he took Florence – his new wife and former secretary – around the scenes of his first courtship. Here was the wellspring for some of his tenderest verse.
Hardy never gave up on religion despite all this. His own Bible is annotated relentlessly. One of his favourite passages was that which was read for our first lesson – Elijah and the ‘still small voice.’ Perhaps an echo here of the source of ‘Earth-secrets.’ Certainly lots of his verse is wistfully casting after faith. Perhaps best known is The Oxen:
‘………Yet I feel,
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.’
Elsewhere different echoes of the countryside prompt similar heart searching, faith-seeking wistfulness, so in The Darkling Thrush, it is the bird who sings the uncertain message:
‘So little cause for carolings
of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around.
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.’
‘Hope’ is capitalised –again an almost metaphysical reference. But on other occasions the hope turns into the reality of a capricious god. This vision offers almost a fatalism in which mortals are left powerless in the face of a wilful and indifferent deity. It is there in the famous lines at the end of Tess:
‘“Justice” was done; and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.’
Or there is his chilling poetic reflection, presumably from 1912, on the loss of the Titanic. It is titled simply The Convergence of the Twain. The President of the Immortals is now ‘the Spinner of the Years.’
‘In shadowy silent distance the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said “Now!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and joins two hemispheres.’
Despite all this, however, as I’ve hinted, faith and Hardy could never be finally sheared apart. In 1922, when he was 82 and just six years before his death, he wrote the preface to a new set of poems Late Lyrics and Earlier. In this he referred to the Catholic Modernists – Roman Catholic scholars who had sought a new and radical apologetic, which would bring church and world into closer conversation.
It was a move which doomed them to be suppressed cruelly by the Vatican. He talks of ‘religion, which must be retained unless the world is to perish.’ Almost up to the year of his death, in 1928, he would cycle across the fields from Max Gate to Stinsford, the church of his youth, to attend Evensong.
Claire Tomalin, in her recent and otherwise excellent biography of Hardy, fails to come to terms with Hardy’s tortured floundering after faith – maybe that is a result of her own lack of belief. On his deathbed, Hardy got Florence, his second wife, to read a stanza from Fitzgerald’s translation of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam. It runs:
‘Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make
And who with Eden didst devise the Snake;
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken’d, Man’s Forgiveness give – and take.’
Instead of Khayyam’s frequent cynicism, here is a lapse back into theology and metaphysics.
Perhaps your anthem The Choirmaster’s Burial, set to music by Benjamin Britten, another troubled soul, hints at Hardy’s inner searching. It is almost a mystical scene:
‘The vicar looked out,
There struck on his ken
Thronged roundabout,
Where the frost was graying
The headstoned grass,
A band all in white
Like the saints in church-glass,
Singing and playing
The ancient stave
By the choirmaster’s grave.’
Such the tenor man told
When he had grown old.
I mentioned Hardy’s love for the Elijah passage but let me finish with Luke’s parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector. As with so much Lucan narrative God’s generosity in Jesus is to the fore. Here is a humble sinner tentatively seeking after God in contrast to the stridently self-regarding professionally religious man. We need no sophisticated interpretation of the gospel to realise who has come closer to his creator and redeemer.
What might this say of Hardy’s tortured, strained and uncertain faith? It may be that he was not as far from God as even he himself often assumed. My hunch is that he was kneeling there with the oxen, at the very least, ‘hoping it might be so.’
Amen.
Readings:
I Kings. 19. 9-18
Luke. 18. 9-14