"Arguing About the Eastward Position": Thomas Hardy and Puseyism

"Arguing About the Eastward Position": Thomas Hardy and PuseyismAuthor(s): Raymond ChapmanSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Dec., 1987), pp. 275-294Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045264 .

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"Arguing About the Eastward Position": Thomas Hardy and Puseyism RAYMOND CHAPMAN

J ?H A-T has Providence done to Mr. Hardy that he should rise up in the arable

land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?" asked Edmund Gosse. A modern critic is less inclined to ask so straight a question or to suggest a single answer. Hardy's attitude to the Christian faith, and to the Church of England which principally represented it in the England of his time, was ambivalent. Words like "atheist" or even "agnostic" are too constricting to describe him. He has suffered from quotation of phrases like the notorious "President of the Immortals," taken out of context. Greater appreciation of his poetry in recent years can point to pieces like "The Imper- cipient" and "The Oxen" as indicating a desire at least to believe in belief.

Hardy certainly kept a sense of Christianity as an ethical guide and a regard for the Church of England as a valuable na- tional institution that gave continuity and community focus. In 1885 he could write to John Morley of his dream for a disendowed Church that would be "an undogmatic, non-theological establish- ment for the promotion of that virtuous living on which all honest

0 1987 by The Regents of the University of California

275



276 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

men are agreed."1 He suffered no spectacular "loss of faith" like the crisis which afflicts the characters of many Victorian novels and drives his own Jude Fawley to a ritual burning of theological books. By about 1865 he was questioning many of the doctrinal tenets that he had been taught, and his churchgoing began to decline. Yet he was still attending services from time to time in the last decade of his life, regarding it as "a moral drill," and he was willing to act as a godfather at a child's christening.2 It seems reasonable for a modern critic to say that "although a Christian at heart and a lover of church services all his life, Hardy found much that was unacceptable in the Christian Church."3 A contemporary recorded his "curiously shy avowal that he was a practising and believing communicant of the Church of England" and com- mented that "criticize as he might the temporal dispositions of the Anglican Church, he remained a Believer."4

Perhaps such remarks should not be allowed to carry more weight than passages that suggest the contrary. We have learned not to think that we can put Hardy into a containing frame either as a simple realist or as a writer who used the novel to propound plain messages and solutions. His view of life was tentative and provisional; his art selected and gave imaginative shape to various and sometimes conflicting experiences. It is certain that the Church of England was a strong influence on his early years, that he was steeped in the language of the King James Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and that he seriously considered ordination until he was well into his twenties. He continued for many years to note the passages for the day when he had been to a church service. Biblical and liturgical references are abundant in his novels, and he could apply them to his own con- dition as well.5 At the same time, he was continually interested in

IRichard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, eds., The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, 6 vols. to date (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978- ), I, 136.

2Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), P. 539.

3F. B. Pinion, A Hardy Companion: A Guide to the Works of Thomas Hardy and their Background (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 167.

4Ford Madox Ford, Mightier Than the Sword: Memories and Criticisms (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938), p. 139.

5See Kenneth Phelps, Annotations by Thomas Hardy in his Bibles and Prayer-Book, Presented against the Background of Hardy's Life, Work and Loves, with New Lights on



THOMAS HARDY AND PUSEYISM 277

new movements of religious and philosophical thought. Leslie Ste- phen, who published Far from the Madding Crowd in the Cornhill, discussed such matters with him. In 1875 he was a witness to Ste- phen's renunciation of holy orders.6 He met Matthew Arnold and made use in A Laodicean of the essay "Pagan and Medieval Reli- gious Sentiment," but he was somewhat distrustful of "the opti- mistic ideal of a modern secular and rational culture."7

There is work still to be done on Hardy's personal attitude to faith.8 One thing that he could not control was the speed of change within the Church that he valued for its stability and sense of shared belonging. How did he regard the principal ecclesiastical movement that began seven years before he was born and continued to exert its influence throughout his life? In his twenties he heard of the impact of new critical methods upon Biblical the- ology, made public with the publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860. Over the previous twenty-five years it was the Oxford Move- ment that chiefly aroused passions of approval or hostility. The first or Tractarian phase of the Movement was drawing to a close in his infancy; after the secession of Newman in 1845, with others following, the influence of the Tracts opened out into the parishes. Coming to be known as "Puseysim" after E. B. Pusey who was now the leader, it added elaborate ceremonial in public worship to the sacramental and sacerdotal influence of the Trac- tarians. Scandals, protests, riots, prosecutions, and also staunch support marked the ensuing period. Accusations of crypto- Romanism, already levelled against the Tractarians, became more frequent after the outcry of "Papal Aggression" when the Roman Catholic hierarchy was restored in 1850 and when further seces- sions followed the Gorham judgment in the same year.9

Certain Poems (Guernsey: Toucan Press, 1966). Hardy was always particularly moved by the story of Elijah in 1 Kings 19, a passage "which I always notice" (Phelps, Annotations, p. 5); see also his poem "Quid Hic Agis?".

6Millgate, Thomas Hardy, p. 171. 7David J. DeLaura, "The Ache of Modernism in Hardy's Later Novels," ELH,

34 (1967), 380-99. 8A recent short but perceptive study is that by Ian Gregor, "Contrary Imag-

inings: Thomas Hardy and Religion," The Thomas Hardy Journal, 2 (May 1986), 13-36.

9A definitive history of the Oxford Movement remains to be written. The best




It is unlikely that much of this filtered through to the parish of Stinsford where Hardy and his family worshipped. He could recall seeing the burning of effigies of the Pope and Cardinal Wiseman in the Roman amphitheater at Dorchester in 1861.10 In the nearby diocese of Exeter, Phillpotts ruled as Bishop from 1830 to 1869; High Church rather than strictly Tractarian, he had been brought to public notice by his fight with Gorham. In 1852 W.J.E. Bennett, an advanced Puseyite, took refuge from riots in his Lon- don parish and went to Frome just across the Somerset county border. After much initial opposition, including objections in the House of Commons, he won local support even to the extent of placing a modified version of the Stations of the Cross in the churchyard." Dorset itself lay in the Diocese of Salisbury, whose Bishop from 1854 to 1869 was W. K. Hamilton. He was the first of the genuinely Tractarian bishops, chosen, it was said, without the Queen's knowledge of his theological inclination.

When Hardy came to London in 1862 he must at least have been aware of the Oxford Movement as a strong and controversial force in the Church. During his time with Blomfield he would have heard much more, not only because the doings in London "ritualistic" churches were a topic for newspapers and conversa- tion. The Gothic revival in architecture predated the Oxford Movement and was never monopolized by it. However the efforts of men like Pugin and the members of the Cambridge Camden Society (later the Ecclesiological Society) meant that Gothic came to be closely associated with Catholic churches, whether Roman or Anglican.12 Blomfield, son of the Bishop of London who had

fairly recent study is to be found in Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols. (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1966), I, sections I and III. Older but still useful books are S. L. Ollard, A Short History of the Oxford Movement (London: Mowbray, 1915) and Yngve Brilioth, The Anglican Revival: Studies in the Oxford Movement (Lon- don: Longmans, Green, 1925).

I0Michael Millgate, ed., The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 26.

"Frederick Bennett, The Story of W.J.E. Bennett (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), pp. 159-87.

12See Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (London: Murray, 1928); James F. White, The Cambridge Movement: The Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962); and George L. Hersey,




been confronted with some of the problems over ritualism, was not himself of the school that led from Pugin to Anglican church builders like Street and Scott. Yet any young architect who spent much of his time drawing Gothic features and restoring old churches would be closely in touch with what was going on and would know that architecture was not untouched by the current odium theologicum.

In fact Hardy had been working with Gothic ever since he began his pupilage with Hicks at Dorchester in 1856. Gothic was the accepted style for church building, and the fashion was for "restoration" of as many medieval features as possible in old parish churches. Hardy was trained in the neo-medieval style, in which Hicks himself specialized, and was employed in surveying and making preliminary studies of churches marked for restoration. When he moved to London, it was specifically as "a young Gothic draughtsman who could restore and design churches and rectory-houses."' 3 He is credited with the design of All Saints', Windsor, a Gothic church consecrated in 1864, with medieval tra- cery and a large rose window.'4 In old age, Hardy recalled his years as an architect: "When I was young, French architecture of the best period was much investigated, and selections from such traceries and mouldings as those at Reims delineated with the greatest accuracy by architects' pupils, myself among the rest."''5

Thomas Hardy came to the work of fiction well acquainted with at least the basic points at issue within the Church of En- gland, and close familiarity with some of its visible results. His attitude to what he generally calls "High Church" principles and practices tends to be cool. It is in essence the attitude of a con- servative churchman of the time, inclined toward the Evangelical emphasis that was strong in his wife Emma, but preferring the

High Victorian Gothic: A Study in Associationism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972).

13Millgate, Thomas Hardy, p. 75. 14Ellen Dollery, "The Windsor All Saints' Church," The Thomas Hardy Journal,

3 (January 1987), 37-39. Millgate thinks that Hardy's part in the design was con- fined to a few details (Thomas Hardy, p. 81).

'5Letter to The Times (London), 7 October 1914, about the plans to restore the war-damaged cathedral at Rheims.




middle of the road and the old tradition to any extremes. Yet the aftermath of the Oxford Movement has its place in his imagined world, both in London and in Wessex. His distaste for it is not a simple antipathy to change; rather does he see it as a false anti- quarianism, destroying the familiar without rediscovering the hid- den roots of the past. It satisfies neither of the polarities that were important in his own philosophy. They were, on the one hand, a deep sense of the continuity of life and of the strata of history that were the foundations of the present. He did not share the hankering of many of his contemporaries for an imagined golden age in any period, but he drew a sense of stability and even of comfort from the evidence of human patterns constantly re- peated. On the other hand, he was uneasily accepting the new age, the "ache of modernism" which might bring forth terrible but essential changes.

The Tractarians and their successors looked to the primitive Church for evidence of undivided and uncorrupted catholicity, and to the Caroline period for evidence that such catholicity had been possible in a reformed Church of England. Only Hurrell Froude among the founders of the movement was a staunch me- dievalist as well as a Laudian, but as Tractarian principles were put into effect it was the medieval Church that gave the pattern for worship with strong sacramental emphasis. Gothic was the style for vestments and ornaments as well as architecture. All this seemed to Hardy a waste of spirit, a failure to resolve or even to meet the real tension between old and new. It was as barren as the statues of saints, imagined as lamenting in the night wind

At the ancient faith's rejection Under the sure, unhasting, steady stress Of Reason's movement, making meaningless The coded creeds of old-time godliness.'6

A frequent metaphor to express Hardy's distaste for Puseyism and its visible signs is provided by architecture and the associated art of sculpture. The passion for "restoring" churches to the stan- dards of Scott and Street seemed to him part of a false roman-

16"A Cathedral Facade at Midnight," in The Variorum Edition of the Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 703.




ticism, ignorant of the realities pressing on men and women. In the preface to the 1895 edition of A Pair of Blue Eyes Hardy wrote that "to restore the grey carcases of a mediavalism whose spirit had fled seemed a not less incongruous act than to set about ren- ovating the adjoining crags themselves."'17 A sense of penitence for some of his own work as an architect's assistant moved him eventually to join the Society for the Protection of Ancient Build- ings, and to assert in print that what "appealed to us in the (may be) clumsy outlines of some structure which had been looked at and entered by a dozen generations of ancestors outweighs the more subtle recognition, if any, of architectural qualities."'18 In fiction it is the fussy and narrow-minded Swancourt who feels no regret at the substitution of a false medievalism for a genuine antiquity. The irony is authorial when Elfride exclaims, "The church restorers have done it!" as the tower of the church is brought down. For Swancourt it has been "A very successful job- a very fine job indeed!"

"Poor old tower!" said Elfride. "Yes, I am sorry for it," said Knight. "It was an interesting piece

of antiquity-a local record of local art." "Ah, but my dear sir, we shall have a new one," expostulated

Mr Swancourt; "a splendid tower-designed by a first-rate London man-in the newest style of Gothic art and full of Christian feeling."

(A Pair of Blue Eyes, pp. 311-12)

The personal touch of the semi-autobiographical story is heightened by the fact that Smith comes at first to Endelstow because "six-and-thirty old seat-ends, of exquisite fifteenth-century workmanship, were rapidly decaying" and drawings of them were to be made (p. 74). Hardy was sent to St. Juliot's to work on restoration, one of the problems being that "the carved bench-ends rotted more and more."'19

'7Quotations from Hardy's novels are from the New Wessex Edition, P. N. Furbank, General Editor (London: Macmillan, 1974-79), and page references are cited in the text.

'8Cornhill Magazine, August 1906; reprinted in Harold Orel, ed., Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 215.

19Emma Hardy, Some Recollections, ed. Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings (Lon- don: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 48.




Church restoration became for Hardy an image of disregard for the ancient pieties coupled with insensitivity to the living and to posterity. G. E. Street is often taken to be the culprit who de- stroyed the church at Marygreen, where the well-shaft "was probably the only relic of the local history that remained absolutely unchanged."

Above all, the original church, hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteenpenny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five years.

(Jude the Obscure, pp. 35-36)

A similar indictment is made in the poems "The Levelled Church- yard" and "The Obliterate Tomb."

The "battle of the styles" in architecture began seriously in 1862, the year of Hardy's first residence in London, when Scott's Gothic design for new government buildings was rejected. The battle is given a provincial setting in A Laodicean, where the pref- erence for Gothic or classical becomes symbolic of other clashes of character and attitude. People seem to choose their faith on grounds as arbitrary as those that govern their choice of architectural style. False medievalism and regression from reality are shown by addiction to the Gothic, and some themes in the novel are almost like a satirical gloss on Pugin's Contrasts.20 One such contrast is between the old Gothic church on which the sun is setting, and the new Baptist chapel, modern and ugly, but with a minister who is more dynamic in defense of his faith. It is Paula Power, the "Laodicean" dilettante, who craves the medieval. Har-

20For a detailed study of this point see J. B. Bullen, The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 122; also references to architecture in Joan Grundy, Hardy and the Sister Arts (London: Macmillan, 1979).




dy's respect for the Baptist dissenter above the lukewarm and ro- mantic adherent of the established Church may have been a mem- ory of his fellow-pupil with Hicks who worried him over the validity of infant baptism until he troubled his vicar for an answer and was advised to go away and read Hooker.2' This contemporary, William Perkins, was a son of the Baptist minister in Dor- chester, who was perhaps a model for Woodwell in the novel. The youthful friendship had an echo when Perkins sent Hardy a card on his eighty-fourth birthday.

The observation of ecclesiastical parties was by no means lim- ited to their architectural manifestations. In Two on a Tower traces of High Church doctrine are associated with characters who undergo a degree of authorial judgment. It would be tempting to see the Bishop of Melchester as a portrait of Hamilton, but there are differences as well as some likenesses. Hamilton was a married man, without the harshness and pomposity of Bishop Helmsdale. The choice of name is indeed the sort of echo which Hardy liked to choose in his Wessex placenames, and perhaps some of Hamilton's Puseyite traits are hinted at in the novel. Helmsdale takes a high view of confirmation, is prepared to come for the ceremony to a small village church, and sternly rebukes a candidate whom he believes to be living in sin. One of the achieve- ments of the Oxford Movement was to emphasize the importance of confirmation after proper instruction and to improve on the huge, unedifying, and infrequent episcopal visits of the previous generation. Readers of Charlotte M. Yonge will know how Keble taught her to place great importance on confirmation. It is sig- nificant that Hamilton was noted for being, unlike his immediate predecessors, willing to come and confirm wherever he was asked.22 However we cannot fully equate the real and the fictional bishops. Perhaps Hamilton is closer to the "good bishop" of Melchester in whose cathedral evensong-so named rather than "evening prayer"-is carefully conducted (The Hand of Ethelberta). Hardy loved the cathedral in Salisbury-though Sue Bridehead regards the railway station as more relevant-and attended even-

21Millgate, ed., Life and Work, pp. 33-34. 22Chadwick, Victorian Church, I, 515.




song several times during a visit in 1897. As late as 1923 he stopped to look at the cathedral as he "always loved doing."23

Viviette Constantine in Two on a Tower is one of Hardy's recurring women-impetuous, organizing, and influential on their acquaintances, but indecisive and self-doubting. The Bishop praises her for her "steady adherence to church principles and your interest in ecclesiastical polity" when he asks her to marry him (p. 208). "Church principles" is a good Tractarian phrase and "ecclesiastical polity" recalls Hooker, source of support for High Church apologists and the antidote suggested to Hardy for temp- tations to dissent in his youth. She is serious about confirmation- "without the Church to cling to, what have we?" (p. 154). In her words to Swithin about their secret marriage she speaks almost like a character from Charlotte M. Yonge-if we could ever sup- pose one of her heroines to be in such a compromising situation:

a certain levity which has perhaps shown itself in our treatment of the sacrament of marriage-by making a clandestine adventure of what is, after all, a solemn rite-would be well atoned for by a due seriousness in other points of religious observance ... do be a good boy, and observe the Church's ordinances. (p. 154)

In the same novel the parish clergyman Mr. Torkingham is praised in the preface to the 1895 edition as "one of its most estimable characters." He shows no sign of High Church principles, but is not so clearly Low Church as Mr. Clare in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, who is described as:

a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty years, has well- nigh dropped out of contemporary life. A spiritual descendant in the direct line from Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man of Apostolic simplicity in life and thought.... He despised the Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles. (p. 186)

This is one of Hardy's most overt and enthusiastic portraits of a traditional clergyman. The Tractarians and their successors appealed to the Church Canons of 1604 and the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer to justify catholic practice, and were defensive

23Millgate, Thomas Hardy, p. 388; Richard H. Taylor, ed., The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 71n.




about the more protestant Thirty-Nine Articles to which Newman had labored to give a catholic interpretation in the ninetieth and last of the Tracts for the Times. "All about here be what they call High" is what Tess hears from one of the other milkmaids at Talbothays (p. 141). Poor Tess herself is nonplussed when Angel asks her whether she is an Evangelical:

she did not know whether her principles were High, Low, or Broad. He himself knew that, in reality, the confused beliefs which she held, apparently imbibed in childhood, were, if anything, Tractarian as to phraseology, and Pantheistic as to essence. (p. 200)

The growing incursion of High Church clergy into Wessex seems to Hardy an undesirable tendency. They introduce new practices and different nomenclature, upsetting the familiar, homely churchmanship of the older clergy and the "workfolk". Mercy Chant, who has a marital eye on Angel Clare, is viewed with mixed feelings by his father:

It is true that my neighbour Chant's daughter has lately caught up the fashion of the younger clergy round about us for decorating the Communion-table-altar, as I was shocked to hear her call it one day-with flowers and other stuff on festival occasions. (p. 192)

However, Mercy is not a very advanced Puseyite and is shocked when Angel speaks of the possibility of a cloister, which she says "implies a monk, and a monk Roman Catholicism," concluding, "I glory in my Protestantism!" (p. 291). The new parson who will not bury Tess's baby in consecrated ground after the "irregular administration" of private baptism and who holds "strict notions" on the matter may be seen as a High Churchman. Hardy's respect for the Evangelical spirit, however, owes more to the man than to the principle. Mr. Clare is praised by all, but Alec's conversion by him is brief and without lasting effect.

Puseyite developments toward the end of the century are most strongly observed in Jude the Obscure. The whole novel was condemned on its publication for scepticism as well as other of- fenses; a modern scholar finds in it a specific and sustained attack on Christian doctrine.24 It is in fact the High Church-more ex-

24Norman Holland, Jr., " 'Jude the Obscure': Hardy's Symbolic Indictment of Christianity," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 9 (1954), 50-60; for further examination




treme in Christminster than in rural Wessex-that carries the main weight of Hardy's satire and that serves as a narrative sign of the changes in the spiritual lives of Jude and Sue. The successors of the Tractarians had left their mark more clearly in Ox- ford than anywhere. Keble College was founded in 1866 and the nascent Community of the Resurrection at Pusey House in 1892, with various other communities in the city and its vicinity.25 The fears of Mercy Chant for Angel Clare could easily have been re- alized in Oxford. When Jude and Sue live in Christminster they have lodgings "in the direction of Beersheba, and not far from the Church of Ceremonies-Saint Silas" (p. 351). Beersheba is the new suburb on the west of Oxford known as "Jericho," and Saint Silas is Saint Barnabas built by Hardy's old master Blomfield: a great Anglo-Catholic center then and until after the Second World War.

Hardy was well acquainted with Oxford during the years of Puseyite development. He responded to the toast to "literature" at the Mitre Hotel (the Crozier of Jude) in 1875 and also watched the inter-college boat races that make an ironic background to the end of the novel. He was in the city when his last novel was being planned and drafted in 1892, and again in 1893. On the second visit he witnessed the ceremonies of Commemoration-the occasion of Jude's bitter outburst to the watching crowd.26 He was able to observe not only the activities of the living but also the Gothic styles of the past: "crocketed pinnacles and indented battlements... porticoes, oriels, doorways of enriched and florid middle-age design" Jude, p. 103). The power of medievalism con- tinues to shape the modern city, an image of outmoded but still constricting beliefs, for when Jude visits the mason's yard to seek work he finds

new traceries, mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and battlements standing on the bankers half worked, or waiting to be removed. They were marked by precision, mathematical straightness, smooth- ness, exactitude: there in the old walls were the broken lines of the

of theological themes and traces of a cruciform structure in Jude see Pinion, Hardy Companion, pp. 54-55.

25011ard, Short History, p. 250. 26Millgate, Thomas Hardy, pp. 175-76, 328, 342.



THOMAS HARDY AND PUSEYISM 287 original idea; jagged curves, disdain of precision, irregularity, disarray. (p. 108)

As Sue crumples under her own pressures and the terrible death of her children, her move away from independent ration- ality is marked by her adherence to High Anglicanism. When Jude first sees her at Christminster she is working for a firm of Anglo- Catholic ecclesiastical suppliers-"a perfect seed-bed of idolatry" in the opinion of Jude's aunt. When Jude sees her at work he, still pious, reflects, "A sweet, saintly, Christian business, hers!" (p. 11 1). The business in question was probably based on the firm of Mowbray, founded in 1858, active when Hardy wrote Jude the Obscure and today one of the leading Anglican publishers. Its owner, Miss Fontover, may be intended for Susan Mowbray, the widow of the founder, who was running the business in the latter part of the century.27 Hardy's description of the shop is detailed and convinces by its precision. It could almost have come from a Victorian "church novel" of the type sympathetic to Tractarian influences but suspicious of excesses in devotion:

The shop seemed to be kept entirely by women. It contained An- glican books, stationery, texts, and fancy goods: little plaster angels on brackets, Gothic-framed pictures of saints, ebony crosses that were almost crucifixes, prayer-books that were almost missals.

(p. 111)

Sue in fact is thoroughly hostile to the place and to the evo- catively named Miss Fontover, who is "a dab at Ritual, as became one of her business, and a worshipper at the ceremonial church of St Silas ... which Jude also had begun to attend" (p. 1 17). The ultimate symbol of Sue's rebellion, and the cause of her leaving the firm, is her purchase of statuettes of Venus and Apollo, which she at first passes off as Saints Peter and Mary Magdalen. They stand in her room:

in odd contrast to their environment of text and martyr, and the Gothic-framed Crucifix-picture that was only discernible now as a Latin cross, the figure thereon being obscured by the shades.

(p. 118)

27William Purcell, The Mowbray Story (Oxford: Mowbray, 1983), pp. 13-14. I am indebted to Kenneth Baker, Managing Director, Publishing, of A. R. Mowbray, for this source of information.




It is a sharp, but perhaps not very subtle, picture of the extremes to which Sue goes in her life. Even before her loss of employment she has been reading Gibbon and Swinburne, while Miss Fontover "knew the Christian Year by heart" (p. 117). John Keble's volume of poems, The Christian Year, was first published in 1827 and had gone through over ninety editions by the end of the century. It was regarded almost with reverence by admirers of the Tractar- ians, like Charlotte M. Yonge who wrote a series of "musings" on it, but it was also popular in a much wider circle.28 Hardy himself read and annotated the poems in his early manhood. As G. B. Tennyson has pointed out, Jude seems to hear the shade of Keble murmuring the opening lines of the poem for the twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity: "Why should we faint, and fear to live alone, / Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die."29 Jude does indeed die "all alone" at the end, in a more material sense than Keble intended.

After the tragedy of the children, Sue starts attending St. Silas. The change in Jude is shown when he detects the smell of incense on her clothes-"a sort of vegetable scent, which I seem to know, yet cannot remember" (p. 354). Later he finds her in the church at night prostrate before the huge ornamental cross that dominates the building. Anglo-Catholicism is made the token of the loss of personal initiative and direction, of a futile withdrawal from reality. The greatest irony of all comes just after the children have been found dead when Sue hears two men talking in the street outside:

"They are talking about us, no doubt!" moaned Sue. "We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!"

Jude listened.-"No-they are not talking of us," he said. "They are two clergymen of different views, arguing about the eastward position." (pp. 346-47)

28A full survey of Victorian knowledge and reputation of Keble's poetry is given in G. B. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981), Appendix C, "The Christian Year in the Victorian Age," pp. 226-32.

29Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry, p. 230; Tennyson also makes the interesting suggestion that Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" is intended as a reply to poem no. 89 in Keble's volume Lyra Apostolica (Tennyson, p. 134).




The eastward position-the celebrant with his back to the people at the eucharist-was considered one of the six points of catholic ceremonial by Puseyite priests. It was ruled to be illegal in 1871 but continued to be used and eventually became almost universal in the Church of England, although now largely replaced by the westward position. By mentioning it at this point in the narrative, Hardy makes perhaps his most forceful statement about what seemed to him the remoteness and irrelevance of High Church matters.

There is another reference to a Tractarian principle which is less apparent but which shows Hardy's familiarity with the theological thought of his time. It occurs in The Hand of Ethelberta at the point when Ethelberta is debating whether to reveal the truth about her humble family to Lord Mountclere before marrying him. She first looks at J. S. Mill's Utilitarianism and is convinced that the principle of general happiness should make her give her family the advantage of a rich match. This Hardy calls "a sorry but unconscious misapplication of sound and wide reasoning" (p. 285). His admiration for Mill-who of course is Sue's guide in her "enlightened" years-was strong; in 1906 he recalled seeing and hearing Mill speak at an election in 1865-"personified ear- nestness surrounded for the most part by careless curiosity."30 But Mill does not show Ethelberta whether to tell the whole truth. As his influence is later contrasted with that of Puseyism in Jude the Obscure, so now:

An old treatise on Casuistry lay on the top shelf. She opened it- more from curiosity than for guidance this time, it must be observed-at a chapter bearing on her own problem, "The disciplina arcani, or, the doctrine of reserve". (p. 285)

Whether or not Hardy had any particular "old treatise" in mind, the most famous nineteenth-century exposition of reserve had been produced by Isaac Williams in numbers 80 and 87 of Tracts for the Times-"On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge." The principle, which Williams found in the early Church and for which he produced much scriptural and patristic

30Letter to The Times (London), 21 May 1906; Millgate, ed. Life and Work, p. 356.




support, was a favorite of the Tractarians. Briefly, it suggested that not all religious teaching was to be given immediately and openly, but that there should be careful regard to the state of mind and disposition of the hearers, as well as the suitability of the occasion. It was in fact a sound enough educational principle, well attuned to the quiet nature of the leading Tractarians and to their deep concern for reverence in discussing matters of faith, and it appears frequently in their writings. It was, however, the Tracts by Williams which aroused controversy far beyond Oxford, particularly among the Evangelicals who believed that preaching should be full and open; but the opponents of the Movement were united in seeing the principle of reserve as further evidence that the Tractarians were deceitful, and probably concealed papists. The phrase disciplina arcani dates from the seventeenth century, with reference to practice of the primitive Church, various the- ories of which later developed in controversy. "Reserve" was used as a word for the withholding of complete truth as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century; it was the Tractarians who brought it out of technical writing on casuistry into the popular arena, and it was to their work that Hardy's readers would have been immediately directed by the phrase "the doctrine of reserve."3'

What Ethelberta reads in the "old treatise on Casuistry" is partially reminiscent of Williams on reserve, but also of an even more recent theological fight. As is well known, Newman's Apo- logia pro Vita Sua was provoked in 1864 by a remark from Charles Kingsley in a review that "Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not be." The ensuing book slaughtered Kingsley intellectually, but it was surrounded by a considerable amount of discussion on whether partial suppression of the truth could ever be justified. Ethelberta finds the theological author to be "not so tolerable" as Mill, puts the book aside and

3'See references to "Reserve" in Brilioth, The Anglican Revival; Raymond Chap- man, Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence of the Oxford Movement (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970); 0. W. Jones, Isaac Williams and his Circle (London: SPCK, 1971); Robin C. Selby, The Principle of Reserve in the Writings of John Henry Cardinal Newman (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975); and Tennyson, Victorian De- votional Poetry.




resolves to tell Mountclere the truth about herself. In telling the reader what she has read, Hardy gives a rather slanted but not entirely misleading summary of what both Williams and Newman had claimed:

she read that there were plenty of apparent instances of this in Scrip- ture, and that it was formed into a recognized system in the early Church. With reference to direct acts of deception, it was argued that since there were confessedly cases where killing is no murder, might there not be cases where lying is no sin? (p. 285)

There is no evidence that Hardy had actually read any of the Tracts, though he could scarcely have been unaware of the controversy surrounding them, which lingered long after the last of them was published. We know that he was reading Newman's Apo- logia in 1865, "which we have all been talking about lately":

A great desire to be convinced by him because Moule likes him so much. Style charming, and his logic really human, being based not on syllogisms but on converging probabilities. Only-and here comes the fatal catastrophe-there is no first link to his excellent chain of reasoning, and down you come headlong. Poor Newman! His gentle childish faith in revelation and tradition must have made him a very charming character.32

Even more significantly, Newman was one of several authors whom Hardy was reading "in a study of style" in 1875, at the time when The Hand of Ethelberta was being written.

Reserve at a secular level is certainly practiced by many of Hardy's characters. Ethelberta conceals her origins for a long time, until the moment of her failure to be convinced by reading the disciplina arcani.33 Concealment is the support of the plot in Desperate Remedies; marriage or true parentage is deliberately hid- den in Far from the Madding Crowd, Two on a Tower, and The Mayor of Casterbridge. Marty South conceals her love for Giles in The Woodlanders. Sue Bridehead dissembles about both her loss of faith

32Millgate, ed., Life and Work, pp. 50-51; the same passage in the Early Life omits "poor Newman" and the words following.

33See John H. Schwarz, "Misrepresentations, Mistakes and Uncertainties in The Hand of Ethelberta," The Thomas Hardy Journal, 1 (May 1985), 53-62. Schwarz makes an interesting analysis of evasions in the novel, but curiously does not make much of the disciplina arcani passage.




and the pagan statues which are its symbol. The silence of Tess, encouraged by her mother and broken too late, is perhaps the most famous example. After their estrangement Knight says to Stephen "The system of reserve began with you" (A Pair of Blue Eyes, p. 348). It would be absurd to suggest that Hardy derived this recurring theme from the Tractarian doctrine of reserve; rather, his own interest in the tragic theme of concealment and its consequences gave him a critical interest in the idea, and the opportunity of referring to it specifically as yet another example of the dangerous detachment from reality of High Church principles.

Yet, like many of his contemporaries, he could reject the principles while still respecting the great Tractarians, both those who had passed to Rome and those who had stayed. He could indeed include Newman with Carlyle in a common deflation, dismissing him 1891 as "an enthusiast with the absurd reputation of a logical reasoner," but "Lead Kindly Light" was one of his favorite hymns.34 This is the hymn which Gabriel and Bathsheba hear the children practicing in the church a short time before his last, successful proposal to her (Far from the Madding Crowd, pp. 412-13). It has connections with the theme of light and darkness in this novel,35 but it also has a special significance for Bathsheba, as she listens to the second stanza:

I loved to choose and see my path; but now Lead Thou me on. I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.

Among the ghosts who haunt the streets of Christminster,

the most real to Jude Fawley were the founders of the religious school called Tractarian; the well-known three, the enthusiast, the poet, and the formularist, the echoes of whose teachings had influ- enced him even in his obscure home. (p. 104)

Suitable objects of admiration for a young man attending the church of St. Silas, and evidence that Tractarian ideas did pen-

34Millgate, ed., Life and Work, pp. 305, 291. 35See Bullen, The Expressive Eye, p. 83.




etrate into rural Wessex. In the course of time, Pusey and New- man join earlier divines in the burning of Jude's theological books and his release into a state that perhaps says something of Hardy's own development: "He might go on believing as before, but he professed nothing" (p. 235). Hardy does not seem to have per- formed any ritual action as spectacular as the burning of books, or to have experienced any sudden liberation of the spirit. His estrangement from orthodox dogma was quieter, and perhaps never complete.

Hardy increasingly regarded Puseyite teaching and practice as a sign of the futility of trying to keep faith alive by external stimuli and new sensations. It tended to disrupt country life by breaking the familiar patterns of worship, while failing to come to terms with the real demands of the new age. He ignored what it was doing in the slum parishes of many towns, and also the quiet influence that was restoring a central sacramental emphasis to the Church of England. His poem "An East-End Curate" is a rather conventional, though not unsympathetic caricature of the priest with his "long, pallid, devoted face" (Complete Poems, p. 713). It gives no hint either of the level of churchmanship or of any charitable activity. Hardy himself, deep though his personal com- passion ran, was not drawn to formal movements for social ame- lioration. He remained an exception to the general assertion that, in the nineteenth century, "when childhood faith is impaired or disappears, it is replaced most often by the strong impulse towards social benevolence."36

Despite its occasional excesses and its personal tragedies, the Oxford Movement was proved to be no mere antiquarian fancy, but a force which helped to produce the revived Church which Hardy cautiously praised in the "Apology" prefaced to Late Lyrics in 1922, albeit with a cautious footnote that "one must not be too sanguine in reading signs": "what other purely English establish- ment than the Church, of sufficient dignity and footing, with such strength of old association, such scope for transmutability, such

36Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian En- gland (London: John Murray, 1977), p. 504. Wolff's book is a valuable survey of responses to the Oxford Movement and other aspects of religious thought in the nineteenth century.




architectural spell, is left in this country to keep the shreds of morality together?" (Complete Poems, p. 561). By that time he had long ceased to write fiction and no longer needed the activities of the Puseyites to give him metaphors for his novels. His real love was always with the Church of his boyhood, the Church of Under the Greenwood Tree, "A Church Romance" and "Afternoon Service at Mellstock". He cared for the traditional language and its as- sociations. Whatever his mature feelings about the Christian faith-and he kept them mostly to himself-it may be confidently suggested that he would not have approved of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book.

The London School of Economics, University of London



Documents

"Arguing About the Eastward Position": Thomas Hardy and Puseyism