The Romans would never have subdued the Italian tribes if they had not
boldly left Italy and conquered foreign nations, and so, at last, crushed
their next-door neighbours by external pressure.
_April _24. 1833.
WEDDED LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS.--TENNYSON'S
POEMS.
Except in Shakspeare, you can find no such thing as a pure conception of
wedded love in our old dramatists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher,
it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. There is
scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose _abilities_ are not discussed
by the lady or her waiting-woman. In this, as in all things, how
transcendant over his age and his rivals was our sweet Shakspeare!
* * * * *
I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to
me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I
have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without
very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and
approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you
will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without
considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would,
with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson,--indeed without it he
can never be a poet in act,--is to write for the next two or three years in
none but one or two well-known and strictly defined metres, such as the
heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octo-syllabic measure of the
Allegro and Penseroso. He would, probably, thus get imbued with a
sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys
get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is,
I can scarcely scan some of his verses.
_May _1. 1833.