Ferment (1863-1870)
every mind his choice between truth and repose. Take which you please—you can never have both," then Thomas Hardy has forever forsworn the delights of repose and calm. Particularly in his earlier work, the scientific spirit of fearless inquiry which, in its psychological bearings, he applied to his literary creations, often led him to the expression of conclusions concerning the heart of man and the government of the universe that have served to brand him as the arch-pessimist of his time.
This spirit has certain resemblances to the earlier stages of Shelley's revolutionary enthusiasms, in which the doctrines of Necessity, Atheism, and Vegetarianism roughly correspond to Hardy's ideas of Time and Chance, the Unconscious Will, and Pity for all living beings. The Romantic poet, however, later showed that he had scarcely digested the iconoclastic arguments which he advanced with such fervor, and by the time he was writing The Triumph of Life, he had outgrown nearly all of his early and half-baked agnosticism and pessimism. Hardy's early conceptions, derived chiefly from himself, and representing a reaction to the spirit of his time rather than to a reading of exotic literatures as was the case with Shelley, kept growing with him, finding always a wider application to the life of humanity and the world, and means of expression ever increasing in beauty and force.
The extreme unpopularity of the attitude and system of ideas adhered to by Hardy might have made him the leader of a later "Satanic school" of poetry had his early verses been published soon after their writing.
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