Yours, J.H.E.
To A.E.
July 30, 1880.
Oh, with what sympathy I hear you talk of Shakespeare. Nay! not Dante and not Homer—not Chaucer—and not Goethe—"not Lancelot nor another" are really his peers.
Here blossom sonnets that one puts on a par with his—there, in another man's work the illimitable panorama of varied and life-like men and women "merely players," may draw laughter and tears (Crabbe, and much of Dickens and other men, and Don Quixote). His coarse wit and satire and shrewdness, when he is least pure, may I suppose find rivals in some of the eighteenth or seventeenth century English writers, and in the marvellous brilliancy of French ones. When he is purest and highest I cannot think of a Love Poet to touch him. Tennyson perhaps nearest. But he seems quite unable to fathom the heart of a noble woman with any strength of her own, or any knowledge of the world. "Enid" is to me intolerable as well as the degraded legend it was founded on. Perhaps the brief thing of Lady Godiva is the nearest approach, and Elaine faultless as the picture of a maiden-heart brought up in "the innocence of ignorance." But he can write fairly of "fair women." Scott runs closer, but his are paintings from without. "Jeanie Deans" is bad to beat!!
Shelley comes to his side when weirdness is concerned.
"Five fathom deep thy father lies," etc.,
is run hard by—