G.K.C. and Hardy
Sir: In his review of Professor Millgate's biography of Thomas Hardy, Dr A. L. Rowse sadly misquotes G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton did not write: 'The village atheist blaspheming against God' but, in The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), `Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot.'
Hardy's presumed resentment of this criticism surfaced in one of two epitaphs (the other on George Moore) dictated by him when he was dying in 1928 and printed for the first time nearly 50 years later in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy edited by James Gibson in 1976.
Chesterton who, of course, never saw the epitaph, wrote in his Autobiography (1936): 'I have been blamed for an alleged attack on Hardy.....: But this is not an at- tack on Hardy; this is the defence of Hardy. The whole case for him is that he had the simplicity and sincerity of the village atheist; that is, that he valued atheism as a truth and not a triumph.'
John Sullivan
The Chesterton Society, 61 Witley Court, Coram Street, London WC I
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