The impact of this loss on Hardy cannot be overestimated. It is a critical commonplace that at the beginning of his literary career Hardy experienced a loss of belief in a divinely ordered universe. Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928), in both philosophical attitude and artistic technique, firmly belongs in this modern tradition. In The Courage to Be (1952), Paul Tillich asserts that “the decisive event which underlies the search for meaning and the despair of it in the twentieth century is the loss of God in the nineteenth century.” Most critics of the literature of the nineteenth century have accepted this notion and have established a new perspective for studying the period by demonstrating that what is now referred to as the “modern situation” or the “modern artistic dilemma” actually began with the breakup of a value-ordered universe in the Romantic period.
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