The burial of Thomas Hardy in Westminster Abbey was in effect a sufficient answer to his own philosophy. It was a strange spectacle touched with something of the bleak irony of a scene from his own Dynasts. It would be merely conventional to pretend that his burial was anything but what Thomas Hardy╒s own family affirmed it to be. And it had something of the effect that might have been produced by the burial of Gibbon in the Holy Sepulchre with Voltaire as one of the pall-bearers. It was the funeral of a man who had been loaded with earthly honours for his exposition of their emptiness and for his affirmation that they never came to those who deserved them. It was the funeral in the central shrine of this country of a man who had renounced all hope both for himself and for the race: a man who in his wish for 1867 had written, ╘I could only ask thereof that my worm should be thy worm, love╒; and his words were annulled at his own grave-side by words that are more certain of immortality than his own: ╘I know that my Redeemeth liveth; and though, after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God.╒ It was the funeral of a man whose heart had been cut out so that only his ashes should receive the ashes of honour and repose by those of Dickens and Browning. And his own sense of emptiness of these things seemed to chill the whole ceremony. It was ╤ for most of those present ╤ a ritual, a temporal tribute, the best that an essentially pagan intellectualism could offer in an externally Christian country.
Outside the Abbey there was a bleak drizzle which was in harmony with the mental atmosphere. Yet from the point of view of the religion which did him the honour there was something majestic in its utter indifference to his own words and his own philosophy. It was an indifference that would have appealed to Hardy himself. In the very face of all that he had written and of all the Agnostics gathered around him there were uttered once again the sublimest words in the English language: ╘I am the resurrection and the life.╒ The cross was carried before him, and after the Dorset earth was thrown into the grave the sure and certain hope which he had so emphatically repudiated in life was uttered again in ringing tones over his body. It was a ceremony that defied all logic, and illustrated the intellectual and religious confusion of our time as nothing else but the British Constitution itself is capable of doing. Thomas Hardy had drawn a circle around his imagination which shut out almost everything that was assumed in the ceremony, but the faith that had been shut out calmly drew a wider circle which included him and all his doubts and grief.
