Dogma and Belief in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy

DOGMA AND BELIEF IN THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY By Dwayne Howell (Georgia Institute of Technology) Thomas Hardy once claimed that, "on account of his inconsistencies," he was actually an "irrations list" instead of a rationalist.1 This evasive logic grows out of his reluctance to profess his deepest intellectual convictions, but it hardly persuades us to accept his argument. There are, however, substantial grounds in Hardy's personal experience to support a view of him as a non-rationalist: he often attempted to revive his distant past by journeying to places associated with it; he visited graveyards and other secluded places, hoping to discover a ghost; and he began, shortly after her death, frequent visits, or "pilgrimages" (a word whose religious character must have attracted him), to the grave of his first wife, from whom he had been estranged for years. Certainly these activities were motivated by non-rational habits of mind. Nevertheless, in his life and in many of his poems Hardy assumed that rationalistic thought, not his frequent and intrusive non-rational viewpoints, was the genuine source of cognitive truth. The ineradicable conflict between his desparate states of mind has important bearings on Hardy's poetry. I propose to clarify how Hardy's personal states of mind relate to those which are manifested in some of his autobiographical poetry, and then to demonstrate, through examination of several poems, how their relation is reconstituted by it. •5 Scattered throughout the Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy, these autobiographical poems expose the dual character of the mind of the persona Thomas Hardy, for they delineate the painful relation of two mental dispositions that Hardy experienced frequently in his lifetime but could never reconcile. These dispostions are the conflicting , yet coexistent, tendencies of his mind to validate different modes of perception: a way of perceiving that is shaped exclusively by the processes of rational thought, and a way that is shaped by the antithetical processes of extra-rational feeling, intuition , and vision.^ Hardy's cultivated, rationalistic disposition - what I name his "dogma" - pre-determined that efficacy obtains only in those perceptions which can be verified through empirical reasoning. However, his native and spontaneous "belief" attested with equal insistence to the value of perceptions which the mind experiences but which cannot be tested in verifiable ways. Most of the criticism on Hardy identifies the beliefs articulated in the autobiographical poems with the poet's own scientific-determinist view (a view that is, according to my terms, a component of Hardy's dogma). This is the approach of Delmore Schwarz, who argues rightly, I think, that in much of the poetry Hardy presents the conflict between recent scientific views, in which he "believed," and traditional religious views, which he inherited but did not share.5 In this present essay, however, I use the term be 1ief to refer to Hardy's psychological tendency to be attracted to the extra-rational and to trust in the efficacy of extra-rational perceptions. This tendency is, of course, far different from a literal acceptance of traditional religious views, and is the aspect of his mind that Hardy probably referred to when he described himself as "churchy." Hardy's dogma prescribed that his personal act of faith restrict itself to what can be proven by empirical tests or the rationalistic formulas consistent with them. Consequently, it supported the skepticism that has long been recognized in his works. That he vested his dogma with supreme authority is revealed by his personal writings, as well as by many other sources. In a letter of 1915» for instance, he argues that the "poetical mind" of Henri Bergson is deficient for a reasoner and that this philosopher's theories actually signify an "ingenious fancy without real foundation." In Hardy's view, Bergson's thinking leads to "only our old friend Dualism ," which proposes dangerously seductive illusions because it does not spring from "the germs of a true system," as does the positivism of Auguste Comte (Life. pp. 146, 369-70). Clearly implicit within these comments is Hardy's stubborn contention that neither a poetic "fancy" nor a belief in dualism, whose common source is found in human emotions and imagination, can...