The Life of Thomas Hardy
ance with the arguments and counter-arguments for infant baptism which he displays in his discussion with the aged Baptist parson in A Laodicean seems to reflect similar encounters on the part of Hardy with the polemic paraphernalia of modern organized religion. Here not only the Bible, but the works of the Church Fathers are handled with a fair degree of familiarity. In dealing with Hardy's attitude on religious questions as encountered in his poems and in his fiction, it will be seen that his equipment for their attack is decidedly not that of a shallow dilettante or of a superficial amateur.
His information was not acquired, nor his opinions developed, in the usual or conventional ways, with the single exception of his study of architecture. Just as his great interest in religion was plainly not fostered by his attentive listening to pious pulpit discourses from the position of an occupant of a pew in church, so was his philosophical reaction to life formed independently of any influence from intellectual books or journals. Throughout his life he seems to have observed or read nothing that would cause him to change materially the viewpoint he instinctively assumed when he began to write—or even before, although there are evidences that he gradually developed a philosophical phraseology for the expression of that viewpoint, in close relationship to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.
Of great importance to the study of his development is his interest in music, although in this field the technical terms do not flow from his pen with anything like the same frequency and ease as they do when he discusses painting and archæology. The names of composers are
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