3 - Art and aesthetics

Summary

Some of Hardy's most striking dicta seem designed to make it difficult to speak of his aesthetics - seem, indeed, to embody a dogged or defiant anti-aestheticism. For, while some of his finest work, including two of his greatest novels and his first volume of verse, appeared in the 1890s, he was decidedly not of the nineties; and while he would never have come out in favor of “art for my sake” as aggressively as D. H. Lawrence, he would surely have given this stance his quietly firm endorsement. “The beauty of association,” he declares in a notebook entry dated 28 September 1877 and quoted in his autobiography, “is entirely superior to the beauty of aspect, and a beloved relative's old battered tankard to the finest Greek vase” (LW, p. 124). Such a statement implies aesthetic judgments based on criteria that are subjective, even secret, rather than those shared by any school, movement, period, or culture: as so often with Hardy, solipsism is not far away.