The Life of Thomas Hardy
"I think he is so disliked, where he is disliked, more on account of his friendship with the squire and the powers that be; because he teaches a theology which they cannot square with the facts of life. The Liberationist Society are on the wrong tack; let them liberate the parson from his theology, not the parish from the parson."
Throughout his literary career, indeed, Hardy continually recognized the great power of the parson for both good and evil in the community. His first picture of the pastor, in Desperate Remedies, is a consistently sympathetic one. Contrasted with this presentation of the clergyman as a force which worked for good in the physical and spiritual life of the district is the portrait of Mr. Swancourt in A Pair of Blue Eyes, a petty dignitary whose social prejudices and altogether selfish propensities have much to do with the hastening on of the catastrophe of the story, and constitute proper vehicles for a cynical presentation of the futility and occasional malignity of the representatives of the Church. The more neutral characterizations of Angel Clare's father in Tess and of Parson Maybold in Under the Greenwood Tree are indicative of Hardy's more tolerant moods when reacting to the country clergy—although the picture is scarcely complete without the addition of that biting "satire of circumstance,” In Church, a truly diabolical, sardonic glimpse:
And his voice thrills up to the topmost tiles;
Each listener chokes as he bows and bends,
And emotion pervades the crowded aisles.
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