General Practice

Abstract

This quotation occurs in isolation as a separate paragraph in an entry in The Early Life dated 9 May 1890, three weeks before Hardy’s fiftieth birthday; it does not apparently relate to any of the material around it and Hardy offers no explanation. The only clue may lie in the final sentence of the preceding paragraph: ‘Yes, man has done more with his materials than God has done with his.’ Hardy is, I believe, seeing his role as a writer as analogous to that of a doctor: the poet cannot find an answer for life (that role belongs to God who is disinterested or dead), but he may be able to alter man’s understanding of it and thus ameliorate his suffering a little. It is pertinent that Hardy saw himself as a kind of spiritual or psychological physician because doctors in general do not fare well in his fiction. Hardy would indeed have felt some empathy with them because in his own craft, he was very much a General Practitioner — a poet, a novelist, a dramatist, a musician, an historian, an artist, an architect and a naturalist.

A physician cannot cure a disease, but he can change its mode of expression. (EL 295)