Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/225

 A steady growth of self-consciousness as a literary artist seems to have taken place in Hardy, from the time of his first "disillusioned" verses onwards. Like his own "Immanent Will" he seems very gradually to have gained cognition and consciousness of the movements of which he was a part. By the late nineties he probably realized, not that he was part of a movement of scepticism and pessimism, hut that the freedom from illusion of the time was, curiously, in agreement with the sardonic point of view that he had already developed and expressed.