The Life of Thomas Hardy
as pictures, and were first set down actually as pen-and-ink or pencil drawings. A large quantity of these curious compositions gradually accumulated.
A number of them were offered to public inspection when the Wessex Poems first appeared, in 1898, illustrated by the author. These illustrations are striking and memorable—frequently no more than the barrenest sketches, they produce effects which sometimes become more deeply engraved in the mind than the lyrics which they illustrate.
One recalls a teeming landscape, seen shrunkenly through a huge pair of spectacles; a pair of moths, alighting upon an hour glass; a coffin being carried down a flight of steps by curious, naked, primitive Greek, male figures; a couple conversing in a Gothic cathedral, unconscious of the bone-filled vaults underneath them, shown in an architect's "elevation"; a sheeted female figure, lying on a bier; the lights of a town, blinking strangely through a pitch-black night; a Napoleonic infantryman, stalking along a hard and narrow Dorset highway, through the bleak, chilled country, a profile-sketch of Bonaparte.
Naturally these pictures do not in themselves spell greatness; they are, it is true, conceived with a preternaturally sharp vision, but executed without very much feeling for finish or for superficial effectiveness. They sometimes almost border on the ridiculous or childish, but are saved by an abiding sense of dignity, even in the grotesque. They form an illuminating commentary on the many-sidedness of an artist who was interested in a variety of things, but who forced himself to concentrate
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