From The Cornhill Magazine. fountain head. It is not wonderful, thereTHE ENGLISH SONNET. fore, that our poets in their eager admiraTHE Sonnet, as our readers know, owes tion of Italian literature, should have its birth-place to Italy and its earliest seized upon one of the most characteristic fame to the exquisite productions of Pe- features of Italian poetry, and have transtrarch. Dante, Tasso, and indeed all the planted the sonnet to their native land. worthiest poets of that land have com- They made it their own, however, in the posed sonnets of high, some of supreme process, gave to it greater elasticity, and excellence, but so readily does the Italian produced in this shape such gems of Englanguage adapt itself to this form of poet-lish art, that it would be as reasonable to ical composition, that the wit, the courtier, complain that English watches were not and the lover, became unfortunately as genuine, because the first watch was infamiliar with it as the poet, and in the vented by a German, as that the sonnet sixteenth century, the infection spread so does not form a genuine portion of English rapidly that, as Mr. Hallam has pointed verse, because the first sonnets were writout, it would demand the use of a library ten by Italians. No doubt this idea has been formed peculiarly for this purpose, as well encouraged by Dr. Johnson's Dictionary as a vast expenditure of labour, to read assertion, that the sonnet is not very suitthe volumes which the Italians filled with able to the English language; but the their sonnets. For our purpose, at this worthlessness of the criticism is proved by time, there is only one point about the the lexicographer's miserable estimate of Italian sonnet that requires to be men- Milton's majestic sonnets as deserving no tioned. In form it is what is generally particuliar comment, since "of the best it known as legitimate, that is to say, the can only be said that they are not bad." first eight lines, called the Octave, pos- It is a significant fact and an ample refusess only two rhymes, and the six conclud-tation of Dr. Johnson's belief that the ing lines, called the Sestette, never possess more than three. We may add that the poets of Italy were in the habit of closing the second quatrain with a full stop, so that with the ninth line commenced a new train of thought.

The revival of intellectual activity in the sixteenth century, which produced such glorious fruit in this country, led, as was natural enough, to an ardent study of the best authors of Italy, and it is impossible to read any of the Elizabethan poets and dramatists without observing how vast and profound was the influence exercised over them by the wealth of fancy and imagination, of romantic narrative and history, stored up in the rich granary of Italian literature. Shakespeare, the greatest and most original writer of that age, or of any, lays the scenes of several of his plays on Italian soil, and derives the plots of them from Italian sources. For one he goes to Ariosto, for another to Boccaccio, for a third to Cinthio; and if we examine with this design the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Ben Jonson, of Massinger, of Webster, and of Ford, we shall be struck by their common partiality for the same

structure of the English language is unfavourable to this kind of composition, that from Spenser downwards it has been employed, with scarcely an exception, by our greatest poets, and this not merely as a poetical exercise, but because in certain moods of feeling they found in it the fittest vehicle of expression.

Assuredly this was the case with Shakespeare, whose sonnets, illegitimate in shape, are marvels in their wealth of thought and felicity of language; with Milton, in whose hands "the thing became a trumpet ; " with Wordsworth, who often felt it

of the whole; and the exquisite delicacy
of the workmanship should not lessen, but
should rather assist in increasing the sta-
bility of the structure. A sonnet, brief
though it be, is of infinite
compass. What

That I shall be past making love

When she begins to comprehend it.

We may add, before dismissing Surrey, that if it be true, as has been suspected,

depth of emotion, what graceful fancy, that the deadly hate of King Henry VIII. what majestic organ notes, what soft flute- was roused against him by his sonnet On like music, is it incapable of expressing? Sardanapalus, the might wielded by the The amatory sonneteers of Italy become sonnet writer was early and fatally apprefrequently monotonous by harping too ciated. 66 Drenched in sloth and womanish long upon one string, but in England our delight, feeble of spirit, impatient of pain," poets have rarely fallen into this error, his regal heart"- these are some of the and enervated by "filthy lusts that stained and the variety to be found in the English sonnet is one of its great charms. terms used with regard to the Assyrian monarch which Henry might fitly apply to himself.

Sir

mere

The earliest of our sonneteers
Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey -
friends in life, as well as in the art they
practised, acknowledged Petrarch as their
master, and the latter, who has been
termed "the English Petrarch," deserves
attention for the harmony of his versifica-
tion, as well as for his originality of
thought. In avoiding the quirks and
quibbles recommended by the example of
the Italian poet, the unfortunate Surrey
shows that he possessed good taste, as well
as poetical feeling. Surrey was a
boy when he was married to Lady Fran-
ces Vere; and the love that finds utter-
ance in his verse is, doubtless, for the wife
of his youth. He had, besides, a poetical
mistress, the Lady Geraldine, whose name
is almost as familiar to English ears
that of Petrarch's Laura; but since Lady
Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the Geraldine of the
poet, was a mere child at the time when
Surrey, a married man, professed to be
dying for her love, it is evident that the
fair girl had no real place in his affections.
It was like the pretty love-making of Prior
"To a Child of Quality: "—

Nor quality nor reputation
Forbid me yet my flame to tell;
Dear five years old befriends my passion,
And I may write till she can spell.

She may receive and own my flame:

as

died of a fever in 1542; but the births of Surrey was executed in 1547, Wyatt Sir Walter Raleigh in 1552, and of Sir Philip Sidney in 1554-(men who added to the chivalric qualities which have made their names immortal, the gift of poesy)

sustained the line of our sonneteers.

Leigh Hunt points out, and the remark is ducers of the sonnet in England, Sir noteworthy, that the "first three introThomas Wyatt, the Earl of Surrey and Sir Philip Sidney, were all knightly and accomplished men; but it will be seen that he omits the name of Raleigh, who wrote one sonnet at least, that leaves upknowledges, the impression of triumphon the mind, as Mr. Hunt elsewhere aoant force. The fame of these heroic men preserves their poetry, not their poetry their fame. But no reader can pass by with indifference Sir Walter Raleigh's bold and flattering judgment of the Faerie Queene, or Sidney's beautiful sonnet addressed To Sleep, or that to the Moon, remarkable for its fine opening: —

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies,

How silently, and with how wan a face!

"The best of Sidney's sonnets,” said Elia, with something of the generous ex

For though the strictest prudes should know aggeration with which he was apt to

it,

She'll pass for a most virtuous dame,

And I for an unhappy poet.

For as our different ages move,

write of the merits of our elder poets, "are among the very best of their sort; and he adds that "the verse runs off swiftly and gallantly," and "might have been tuned to the trumpet." Here is

'Tis so ordained (would fate but mend it!) one written upon obtaining a prize at a

tournament, admirably characteristic of scribed with such prodigal felicity of lan

rest of his poetry, and were dedicated to a real woman, it is evident that the larger portion of them, written as they are in the artificial diction of the period, must be chiefly regarded as clever exercises in verse. His heart was not in them as it is in the incomparable Epithalamion, one of the loveliest surely of all lovely poems, which he sang upon the eve of his marriage.

seeming bondage of the sonnet. Words-in her own and her husband's life-time; worth found in its brief space true solace and although Spenser's are as pure as the and delight, and proved a perfect master of the instrument upon which he played; but Spenser, although using to the full the licence of the times, appears, even in his loose sonneteering, to be like a man who is cramped and fettered with unaccustomed garments. These sonnets, eighty-eight in number, sing the cruelty and charms of his mistress in the conventional style so frequently adopted in that age. Her beauty is dissected in fantastical phraseology; her eyes, her teeth, her breath, her smile, her frown, are compared with lightning, with pearls, with the scent of flowers, with sunshine, with storms. The hardest steel wears in time, he says, but nothing can soften her hard heart; the lion disdains to devour the lamb, but she, more savage wild, "taketh glory in her cruelness;" she is a new Pandora, sent to scourge mankind; she is an angler, catching weak hearts, and then killing them with cruel pride; she is like a panther, who allures other beasts with his beauty, and then preys upon them. At the same time, she is her lover's sovereign saint, the idol of his thoughts, born "of the brood of angels," the Fairest Fair, who contains within herself all the world's riches, and her bosom is

The nest of Love, the lodging of Delight.

The bower of Bliss, the paradise of Pleasure. Spenser's biographers, like Shakspeare's, in the dearth of much actual knowledge, have searched the poet's sonnets for additional information. The pursuit is alluring, but dangerous. The highest truths of poetry are generally uttered through a fictitious medium, but in the Elizabethan age the poet, following the fashion of the time, was ready to invent a love-passion and to create a mistress in order to serve the purposes of his verse. Spenser, it would seem, courted his divinity at the mature age of forty, and one feels quite sure that at that age no man with any mettle in him would undergo in reality the agonies Spenser underwent in verse for the sake of an obdurate mistress. It was the style of poetical phraseology current in that day, and Spenser made use of it, like others, without a feeling of its worthlessness such as we may harbour now. If these remarks were not generally true, it would speak ill, indeed, for the morality of the sonnet-writers. Petrarch's Laura and Dante's Beatrice, were married women. Sir Philip Sidney's love-sonnets were addressed to Lady Rich, and were published

Drummond, of Hawthornden, a poet known chiefly by his sonnets, thought so meanly of Spenser's as to doubt whether they were really his productions. "They are so childish," he said, "that it were not well to give them so honourable a father." Drummond's early love was doomed to disappointment; but, like Spenser, he married in mature life, being fascinated with his second mistress from the resemblance she bore to the first. Immeasurably inferior as he is to the great poet of the Faerie Queene in all other respects, his superiority as a sonnet-writer is beyond question. His versification is singularly mellifluous, his thoughts are rarely injured by conceits, and many of the poems possess a symmetry and finish, which makes us forget while reading them that Drummond is divided from us by the wide gap of three centuries. Take but one specimen out of many of equal worth that might readily be selected: Look how the flower which lingeringly doth fade, The morning's darling late the summer's queen,

Spoiled of that juice which kept it fresh and

As doth the pilgrim therefore, whom the night
Hastes darkly to imprison on his way,
Think on thy home, my soul, and think aright

Of what yet rests thee of life's wasting day;
Thy sun posts westward, passed is thy morn,
And twice it is not given thee to be born.

One of the pleasantest among the many pleasant excursions that can be made from Edinburgh is a ramble through Hawthornden, and the biography of our Elizabethan poets contains few facts of more interest than the visit paid by Ben Jonson to the Scotch poet in his lovely retreat, then, of course, far more retired from the haunts of men than it is now. The long journey from London was made on foot, and to this visit we are incidentally indebted for nearly all our knowledge of "Rare Ben."

99

Drummond kept the dramatist under his well in the hundred and fifty-fourth sonroof for some weeks, and, Boswell-like, net and truth, we all know, is said to be jotted down his conversations.* Drum- at the bottom of a well. Our readers, we mond's sonnets were published in 1616, suspect, will prefer taking a less exalted Shakspeare's in 1609, and it will be seen, view of these extraordinary productions. therefore, that in this hasty glance at a few No doubt in many of his sonnets, Shakof the Elizabethan poets, we have not kept speare "unlocked his heart," and it is this strictly to chronological order. It is, how- which makes them so interesting to us, but ever, better, perhaps, to dismiss the small- there are many of them that seem to be of er sonnet-writers before referring to Shak- an opposite character, and in which he exspeare's wonderful productions in this de- presses himself more like a dramatist than partment of poetry. They open a wide like a lyrical poet. If this be not the case, and difficult discussion upon which we do and if each one of the sonnets express the not propose to enter. It has bewildered personal feeling of the writer, our high estisome of our greatest writers, it has called mate of Shakspeare's character must be inforth some of the most grotesque opinions evitably lowered by the perusal. An imever uttered on a matter of literary criti- pression of this kind was left upon the mind cism; it has exercised the infinite ingenui- of Mr. Hallam, who expressed his wish ty of commentators without any satisfac- that Shakspeare had never written them. tory result, and it has led, as we think, to "There is," he says, "a weakness and inferences as to the poet's personal charac- folly in all excessive and misplaced affecter, which will not readily be admitted by tion, which is not redeemed by the touches those who know how often the love-son- of nobler sentiments that abound in this nets of that age expressed an artificial long series of sonnets;" and he adds, "so passion, and not the real feelings of the many frigid conceits are scattered around, writer. One recent writer regards them that we might almost fancy the poet to as a burlesque upon "mistress sonnetting," have written without genuine emotion, did and another, an American, propounds a not such a host of other passages attest the still stranger theory. These sonnets, he contrary." Happily these "other passages asserts, are hermetic writings, and the pas-abound; if they did not we might be alsion uttered in them is expressed for the most tempted to take as low an estimate Divine Being. "Beauty's Rose," mention- of these "sugared sonnets" as Stevens himed in the first sonnet is the spirit of hu- self; but may not the difficulty which bemanity, and the "master-mistress" of the sets the student of Shakspeare be considpoet's passion addressed in the twentieth, erably lessened, his faith in the noble means simply the writer's inward nature, spirit of the great master sustained, by the as influenced by the reason and the affec- belief, a quite reasonable belief under the tions which are alluded to elsewhere under circumstances, that the larger portion of the figure of his mistress's eyes. The word what is repellent in these poems, is due to love, we are told, as used in the sonnets the custom of the age rather than to the must, in the main, be understood as reli- feeling of the writer? Be this as it may, gious love; and in fact the poems are mys- and the question will always be an obscure tical throughout, having one meaning for one, the richness of thought, the enchantthe eye and another for the heart. The ing felicity of language which distinguish climax of folly is perhaps reached in the the best sonnets of the series, make them following passage. "In the hundred and worthy of the writer, and deserving, therefifty-third sonnet, Cupid signifies love in fore, of repeated perusals. Hallam thinks a religious sense; the Maid of Dian is a they do not please at first, and Archbishop virgin truth of nature; the cold valley-foun- Trench has said finely: "Shakspeare's sontain is the letter of the law, called a cold nets are so heavily laden with meaning, so double-shotted, if one may so speak, with thought, so penetrated and pervaded with a repressed passion, that packed as all this is into narrowest limits, it sometimes imparts no little obscurity to them." It follows that the careless reader will gain little pleasure from them, and that their fulness of beauty cannot be appreciated until they have been read and re-read, or better still, committed to memory. We do not intend to select even one sonnet for quotation out of the hundred and fifty-four which Shak

• One differs most unwillingly from a critic so distinguished as M. Taine, but when he calls Drummond "a vigorous and malicious pedant who has marred Ben Jonson's ideas and vilified his character," we are bound to say that in our opinion this harsh judgment cannot be sustained by an impartial estimate of the Notes. It should be remembered, too, that Drummond had no hand in the publica

tion.

The difficulty that besets the modern reader is to ascertain how much in them is conventional, how much due to genuine emotion. "Would it not be rash," asks George Eliot, "to conclude that there was no passion behind those sonnets to Delia which

strike us as the thin music of a mandolin?"