The Life of Thomas Hardy
up and highly developed by him without any outside assistance worth mentioning. Largely self-educated in literature, art, and science, he showed at times the small and characteristic defects of training usual to those who have been thrown back upon their own resources for a higher education; hut these faults were greatly outweighed by the advantages which such conditions usually prove to present to ardent and creative spirits: an imperishable interest in knowledge for its own sake, and a continually fresh desire for the investigation of anything and everything that seems to possess beauty or utility—a desire that was never dulled or oversatiated by the blight of the rigid enforcement of the uncongenial academic point of view.
It is not surprising to find that his tastes ran to Greek tragedy, with which his own work has been compared more often, perhaps than has that of any other modern English author. Of the three great tragic writers of Athens, he showed a marked preference for the earliest and most austere, Æschylus. It is perhaps remarkable that he did not develop a greater enthusiasm for the more unorthodox and revolutionary Euripides, but he must have felt a closer kinship between himself and the oldest member of the illustrious triumvirate, preoccupied as the latter was with the problems of Destiny and the justification of the ways of Providence to man. There is also a decided affinity of poetical style between the two, both having been much criticised by their contemporaries for their harshness, obscurity, and general unconventionality of language. Among Latin authors Hardy found no such heroes or models, although now and then he betrayed
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