Thomas Hardy
Sir: In his appreciative and most thoughtful summing up of Hardy (11 March), Christopher Booker does not mention one metaphysical watershed in Western history, the publication of The Origin of Species, Which to intelligent nineteenth-century man meant the shattering of religion and the abolition of the soul. I have always underStood that Hardy found this a shocking blow, and it was a formative influence in his
development. (He was twenty when it was published.) In Hardy's friendship with the son of the vicar of a Dorchester suburb, he was in touch with the arguments of the religion v, science debate that raged. His natural melancholy was not helped by the suicide of his friend at university.
I do not believe that Darwin's theories undermine Christian belief, but many at the time did. Christopher Booker is right to connect Hardy's lost innocence with our own malaise, as we long for the rooted, timeless world of rural England. But has not mankind always suffered that 'lost innocence' since that spiritual tragedy, whatever it was, took place in the Garden of Eden, the echoes of which still dog us?
It is a measure of Hardy's stature that he brings us back again and again to life's enigma.
(Mrs) Marjory Heath-Gracie Shorms, Stockland, Honiton, Devon
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