The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter [antikvár]

On a Criticism of Thomas Hardy The Bishop of Wakefield, after reading Thomas Hardy's latest (and as it proved, his last) novel, Jude the Obscure, threw it in the fire, or said he did. It was a warm midsummer, and Hardy suggested that the bishop may have been speaking figuratively, heresy and bonfires being traditionally associated in his mind, or that he may have gone to the kitchen stove. The bishop wrote to the papers that he had burned the book, in any case, and he wrote also to a local M.P. who caused the horrid work to be withdrawn from the public library, promising besides to examine any other novels by Mr. Hardy carefully before allowing them to circulate among the bishop's flock. It was a good day's work, added to the protests of the reviewers for the press, and twenty-five years of snubbing and nagging from the professional moralists of his time; Thomas Hardy resigned as novelist for good. As in the case of the criticism presently to be noted, the attack on his book included also an attack on his personal character, and the bishop's action wounded Thomas Hardy. He seems to have remarked in effect "that if the bishop could have known him as he was, he would have found a man whose personal conduct, views of morality, and of vital facts of religion, hardly differed from his own." This is an indirect quotation by his second wife, devoted apologist and biographer, and it exposes almost to the point of pathos the basic, un-teachable charity of Hardy's mind. Of all evil emotions generated in the snake-pit of human nature, theological hatred is perhaps the most sav-