Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/137

 It was around this time also that Hardy began his wanderings through the art museums and picture galleries of the town. He rapidly acquired the invaluable ability to lose all consciousness of himself when yielding to the influence of an effective work of art. The impressions thus gained he retained in a memory startlingly photographic. He began, then, to realize that art was more than mere craftsmanship, that its ultimate value lay largely in the emotion and feeling that vitalized, as by a miracle, the product which permeated the senses of its audience.

Upon this realization, coming with the freshness and vividness of a novelty, followed a natural desire: the desire to express it in as direct a way as possible. Hardy was beginning to sense his limitations as a pencil or brush-artist, and to feel more and more distinctly the appeal of literary composition. His temperament was strongly reflective or philosophical; he was forming the habit of analysing his reactions, and of squaring them with general concepts created out of experiences and self-education. Thus he began to harbor the ambition of becoming an art-critic, and maintained this ambition for many weeks. To this end he studied intensively all the schools of sculpture and painting that he saw represented in Victorian London.

It was not until he had evolved a complete theory of art, which included the worlds of all the Muses, and until he had absorbed a vast store of useful images that had their life in these worlds, that he finally abandoned his dream of becoming an art-expositor for the press. The theories he formed in 1862, however, were destined to