Hardy's Mayor: Notes on Style

Abstract

S IGHING ABOUT Hardy's style is fairly old game aiimonig critics of the novel, and one could make quite an anthology of despairing and witty observations about Hardy's verbal manners. One could start with Lascelles Abercrombie and Arthur Symons and come on through George Moore to d'Exideuil and Katherine Anne Porter and Albert Guerard, who has made an informal collection of head-shaking regrets over the way Hardy wrote. Instead of being simply condemnatory, however, most critics tend to note the contradiction between the general air of quality in Hardy's work and the frequent ineptitude of the style. There is prevailing sense of such doubleness in Hardy, of the problematic failure of his work to be all of piece. Morton Zabel entitles his Southern Review essay Aesthetics of Incongruity; Guerard entitles clhapter Conflicting Impulses and speaks of radical unevenness; Virginia Woolf observes the discrepancy between lumpishness and vision in Hardy. She approaches the Hardy duality in another way when she remarks that his greatest, he gives us impressions; at his weakest, arguments. Likewise, D. H. Lawrence insists that as metaphysician Hardy makes a poor show and adds, His feeling, his instinct, his sensuous understanding is, however, apart from his metapliysics, very great and deep. The general subject that we touch on is the singular Hardian discord-be it the discord between penseur and artist, between superiority of achievement and only too obvious flaws in the instruments used, between different artistic tools, between inconsistent uses of such tool as style. In perspective and workmanship he is highly variable. He can shift without warning from selfless