The Architect (1856-1863)
Hardy's use of pictorial and plastic art in his literary work is a subject that can hardly be exhausted in a short study. Any reader will be able to find almost innumerable evidences of the artist's mind behind the pencil of the story-teller and poet. For our present purpose it will suffice finally to mention two of the more striking of these instances that appear in his later work. In The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid the life of the Baron is described as "a vignette, of which the central strokes only were drawn with any distinctness, the environment shading away to a blank." And art-terminology skilfully applied to natural changes appears in this excerpt from The Woodlanders:
To Grace these well-known peculiarities were as an old painting restored.
Now could be beheld that change from the handsome to the curious which the features of a wood undergo at the ingress of the winter months. Angles were taking the places of curves, and reticulations of surfaces—a change constituting a sudden lapse from the ornate to the primitive on Nature's canvas, and comparable to a retrogressive step from the art of an advanced school of painting to that of the Pacific Islander.* *
*
It is not very generally known that Hardy actually loved to dabble in drawing and painting, merely for his own amusement. Ideas which were later clothed in verse or prose frequently presented themselves to him at first
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