From the archives: Thomas Hardy on village labourers
In an "interview" that is published in Saturday's Pall Mall Gazette Mr Thomas Hardy, "of Casterbridge", the novelist, says some interesting things about the rural labourer and parenthetically, about himself.
What he has to say of the labourer is important not for its novelty but for the great authority of the observer who says it. "These village councils of which they talk" (he says) "will be grand engines in the way of restoring the centrality of the old English village life. The men already talk of them with interest."
Lord Salisbury thought that the men were more likely to talk with interest of a village circus. Some of his friends have inclined to believe that the rural labourer, as a person capable of taking a lively interest in anything, does not exist, and that those who apparently sat down to breakfast in London the other day were a fiction of the "the wirepullers", who would do anything.
Mr Hardy, again, gives in one sentence the complete case against the existing poor-law, and we may almost say, the complete case for the substitution of an insurance system on a well-considered basis. "It is complained," he said, "that they (the younger labourers) are improvident, but as a man once cynically remarked to me, 'What is the good of our saving? We should never save as much as the parish would allow us."'
The parson, he thinks, is disliked, where he is disliked at all, chiefly "on account of his friendship with the squire and the powers that be, and because he teaches a theology which they cannot square with the facts of life".
Mr Hardy is of course very much in the right where he gives full credit to the parsons, "educated, sympathetic, original-minded, as many of them are", for their value as centres of civilisation and of intelligent interests. But would dis- establishment "banish" those men from the villages, as Mr Hardy, perhaps loosely reported, seems to believe?
That belief would indicate a rather low estimate of the strength of "vocation" which calls a Gilbert White or an Augustus Jessopp to the cure of a village. One does not hear of a falling off in education, sympathy, or originality among Irish Protestant clergymen since the disestablishment.