We are no great admirers of the sonnet at its best—concurring in Dr. Johnson's opinion that it does not suit the genius of our language, and that the great examples of Shakespeare and Milton have failed to domesticate it with us. It seems to be, even in master hands, that species of composition which is at once the most artificial and the least effective, which bears the appearance of the greatest labour and produces the least pleasure. Its peculiar and unvaried construction must inevitably inflict upon it something of pedantry and monotony, and although some powerful minds have used it as a form for condensing and elaborating a particular train of thought—an Iliad in a nutshell—yet the vast majority of sonneteers employ it as an economical expedient, by which one idea can be expanded into fourteen lines—fourteen lines into one page—and, as we see, fifty-four pages into a costly volume.
The complex construction, which at first sight seems a difficulty, is, in fact, like all mechanism, a great saving of labour to the operator. A sonnet almost makes itself, as a musical snuff-box plays a tune, or rather as a cotton Jenny spins twist. When a would-be poet has collected in his memory a few of what may have struck him as poetical ideas, he puts them into his machine, and after fourteen turns, out comes a sonnet, or—if it be his pleasure to spin out his reminiscences very fine—a dozen sonnets.
Mr. Moxon inscribes as a motto on his title-page four lines of Mr.
Wordsworth's vindication of his own use of the sonnet-form—
In truth, the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence to me,
In sundry moods 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground.
Yes, Mr. Moxon, to him perhaps, but not to every one—the "plot of ground" which is "scanty" to an elephant is a wilderness to a mouse; and the garment in which Wordsworth might feel straitened hangs flabby about a puny imitator. There seems no great modesty in the estimate which Mr. Moxon thus exhibits of his own superior powers, but we fear there is, at least, as much modesty as truth—for really, so far from being "bound" within the narrow limit of the sonnet, it seems to us to be
—a world too wide For his shrunk shank.
Ordinary sonneteers, as we have said, will spin a single thought through the fourteen lines. Mr., Moxon will draw you out a single thought into fourteen sonnets:—and these are his best—for most of the others appear to us mere soap bubbles, very gay and gaudy, but which burst at the fourteenth line and leave not the trace of an idea behind. Of two or three Mr. Moxon has kindly told us the meaning, which, without that notice, we confess we should never have guessed.
* * * * *
Another of the same genus—though, he had just told us
My love I can compare with nought on earth—