Rosalind Walker explains why English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy is her Humanist Hero.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy is my Humanist Hero. Throughout his long life, the themes which his poetry and novels passionately engage with are those we now call ours as humanists.

As a stone mason whose work was largely church restoration, he loved churches, and the music of the village church choirs. But he saw the Christian establishment as the promoter of a harsh judgemental ‘middle class morality’ which imposed itself on older rural communities with their own more tolerant ways. Hardy’s most famous protagonist Tess (of the d’Urbervilles) and her fatherless child are absorbed back into the peasant community without fuss, but the dying baby is refused baptism by the clergyman, and the vicar’s son she marries rejects her when he learns she had borne an illegitimate child.

Hardy argues for the rights of the underprivileged: women, the rural poor and conscripts. In Jude the Obscure he calls for wider access to education and attacks the ‘double standard’ which penalises women in all areas of life. The poem “Drummer Hodge”, requires that we identify with the common soldier who dies on the African veld, in a campaign he doesn’t understand.

Hardy is a Darwinian who enters a wood and sees the struggle for survival:

Even the rank poplars bear

Lothly a rival’s air,

Cankering in black despair

If overborne.

But Hardy the humanist turns back to society: in contrast with nature, ‘There now and then are found / Life loyalties.’ Man, though, is not the ‘Lord of creation’: animals are his fellows. Hardy couldn’t endure seeing animals suffer. His work calls passionately for their proper treatment. The pig slaughtering scene in Jude the Obscure is unforgettable, as is the one in Tess when she finds herself in a wood surrounded by wounded and dying game birds.

Hardy’s cosmic vision is of a world which could not possibly be the work of a loving God. In his poem about the sinking of the Titanic, it operates with seeming malevolence:

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

In spite of all, Hardy can acknowledge that there are times when the loss of faith may feel like a loss, and I imagine some atheists would identify with the nostalgia in his poem The Oxen:

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.

This post is part of a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association about their own “humanist heroes”.

You can find out more at www.humanism.org.uk/humanism/humanist-tradition/heroes

Rosalind Walker is a member of the British Humanist Association and a humanist funeral celebrant.