Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/214

 only the more "literary" types of poetic composition claim his attention, but also such things as the old ballads, folk-plays and the saints' legends. The great Elizabethan outburst of literature fascinated him, and Shakespeare is mentioned in nearly every novel. With Milton he was, of course, familiar, and, among a host of other well-known figures that appear in his pages, he singled Defoe out for his especial admiration. Of the leaders of the great Romantic movement of the early Nineteenth Century he was particularly fond of Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats; and Wordsworth stimulated his interest, if not always his approval. Tennyson and Browning came in chiefly for criticism of their "optimism," Rosetti for his typically Pre-Raphaelitish absurdities of expression. Of American writers he mentioned Poe and Whitman. Although Hardy, as a writer, was singularly independent of "literary influences," echoes of Shakespeare, Milton (especially in The Dynasts), and Shelley can sometimes be heard in his poems, and his enthusiasm for the matter-of-fact but vivid and individual prose style, and the fearless realism of Defoe was undoubtedly responsible in large measure for those qualities as they are found in his fiction.

The modern literary world is presented from the amateur writer's standpoint in most interesting fashion in the discussion of Elfride's Gothic Romance: The Court of Kellyon Castle, and of Ethelberta's publication of her efforts in the writing of vers de societé, a book "teeming with ideas bright as mirrors and just as unsubstantial . . . to justify the ways of girls to men."

Hardy had very little to say directly of his opinions on