The Life of Thomas Hardy
styles, of a particularly atrocious variety imported directly out of Germany, were then in fashion. Down came the priceless old walls, traceries and carvings, to he replaced by hideous modern travesties of the genuine mediæval article. The mutilation of the ancient churches was terrific, brutal, heartless.
Vandalism of this kind filled Hicks's tin money-boxes and kept his staff of assistants and apprentices busy. They were dispatched out into the country, to sketch, measure and survey. Copying the designs of the old churches down to the last exact and particular detail was of course wonderful training for a young man with artistic inclinations. Hardy made the most of it. Indeed, if he had been financially independent and had had the desire and the liberty to study art when, where and how he chose, he could not have employed his time to better advantage. Many of the things he copied were shortly afterwards demolished.
Here is a picture of the young apprentice at work, as the novelist reconstructed it some years later:
The sketcher still lingered at his occupation of measuring and copying the chevroned doorway—a bold and quaint example of a transitional style of architecture, which formed the tower entrance to an English village church. . . .
He took his measurements carefully, and as if he reverenced the old workers whose trick he was endeavoring to acquire six hundred years after the original performance had ceased and the performance passed into the unseen. By means of a strip of lead called a leaden tape, which he pressed around and into the fillets and hollows with his finger and thumb, he transferred the exact contour of each moulding to his drawing, that lay on a sketching-stool a few feet distant; where were also a sketching-block, a[90]
