Origins (1360-1772)
der age. And yet—one must remember what curious pranks, to our thinking, our ancients in their eighties can sometimes play. They live in a world apart; their standards are often more flexible, more ethically "enlightened" and "progressive" than those of the most ardent youthful anarchs and iconoclasts.
If his grandmother thus provided the raw materials for his cold X-ray studies of character under the bombardment of environment and circumstance, it was Hardy’s mother who stimulated his earliest impulses to translate them into artistic entities. This mother was a woman who had found it possible to add immeasurably to her perhaps meagre experience of life by losing herself in the perusal of what was best in the literature of the past. She indulged a taste for the classical Latin poets, notably Virgil, and for French romances and tragedies. She was ambitious in a literary way.
There can be little doubt that that ambition, in a lady of her circumstances and position, was not untouched by a bit of literary snobbishness. Her artistic polish could be little more than a patina on the surface of her personality, and her enthusiasm for Horace, Catullus and the English Cavalier poets could scarcely reach down deeply enough to disturb her subsoil of simple yeoman sentiment and idealism.
The sharp hatred of class prejudice, also, that acrid distaste for polite society which permeates The Hand of Ethelherta, is just the type of social liberalism that almost invariably accompanies the "literary" flair of the ardent amateur—and this trait in the novelist is distinctly traceable to the elder Mrs. Hardy. It is, in these
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