One curious feature of this training may be seen in Hardy's
sympathy and reverence for any church building. As Professor William
Lyon Phelps very aptly says of Hardy: "No man to-day has less respect
for God and more devotion to his house."
The antipathy of Hardy to any kind of publicity has kept the facts of
his life in the background, but it is an open secret that much of the
longing of Jude for a college education was drawn from his own
boyhood. It is also a matter of record that as a boy he served as
amanuensis for many servant maids, writing the love letters which
they dictated. In this way, before he knew the real meaning of sex and
the significance of life he had obtained a deep insight into the
nature of women, which served him in good stead when he came to draw
his heroines. All his women are made up of mingled tenderness and
caprice, and though female critics of his work may claim that these
traits are over-drawn, no man ever feels like dissecting Hardy's
women, for the reason that they are so charmingly feminine.
One may fancy that Hardy took great delight in his architectural work,
for it required many excursions to old churches in Dorsetshire to see
whether they were worth restoring. When he was thirty-one Hardy
decided to abandon architecture for fiction. His first novel,
_Desperate Remedies_, was crude, but it is interesting as showing the
novelist in his first attempts to reveal real life and character.
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