Conscious Artistry in The Mayor of Casterbridge

Abstract

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein recorded this magisterial dismissal of Ezra Pound: he was, she wrote, ‘a village explainer’ and she appended the following carefully expository snub, ‘excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not’.¹When G. K. Chesterton anathematised Hardy as ‘a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot’,² his epigram contained an additional objection to the primary theological distaste for the cosmic pessimist that the Roman Catholic Chesterton shared with the Anglo-Catholic T. S. Eliot. This secondary objection, mining the first, is to Hardy’s provincialism and is related closely to Gertrude Stein’s put-down of Ezra Pound. In After Strange Gods, Eliot’s theological orthodoxy is, we can see, underpinned by a similar social orthodoxy: ‘the work of the late Thomas Hardy represents’, wrote Eliot, ‘an interesting example of a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs’.³ In 1933, of course, when Eliot delivered these words as part of the Page-Barbour lectures at the University of Virginia, he had submitted his own powerful personality to the curb of institutional attachment by becoming a convert.