BOOKS.
THE ENGLISH SONNET.*
THERE have been many apologists for the sonnet, but Mr. Crosland is not one of them. He is its champion and eulogist.. All the critics, in his opinion, have erred in belittling the sonnet as if it were a small thing, because it is short. It has had nothing but apologists even among the greatest sonneteers, notably Wordsworth, whenever realized the importance of their instrument. Mr. Crosland loses no time in divorcing himself whole-heartedly from this cautious or patronizing view. For him the sonnet is the corner- stone of English poetry ; a high flight in decasyllables, "in which practically all the great English poetry has been written." Chaucer owed much to it, though he did not use the form, from his instinctive preference for narrative as opposed to reflective poetry. Surrey, who with Wyatt introduced the sonnet itself into England, was also the introducer of blank verse. The age of Shakespeare would have been made "a stimulant, mirabilio [sic] by its sonnet literature alone," which proves that when poetry flourishes so does the sonnet. Even the sonnetless writers of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries " could not have existed at all without the sonnet line." Here Mr. Crosland diverges to venture the theory that a very large part of what is admitted to be the loftiest poetry belongs essentially to the sonnet form, and quotes freely from Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton for this " sonnet stuff "—" onsets " and endings, some- times nearly complete sonnets save for rhyme. High flights seldom, in his view, exceed fourteen decasyllabled lines. If it is objected that his contention means that any or all poetry in the decasyllabic line is virtually sonnet poetry, he limits his claims on its behalf by ruling out all great poetry falling under the heads of unreflective description, plain relation, and sheer drama or declamatoriness. These claims are then summed up under fifteen heads. Some of these we have already anticipated, but we may note his contentions that the sonnet is a form of absolute freedom for the very largest kindof utterance; that it is neither a convention nor an arbitrary or pedantical contrivance ; that all the finest poets have been either fine sonneteers Or unconscious workers in the sonnet movement ; that there are occasions upon which poetry demands and insists on the sonnet form as properly and imperatively as upon any form ; and that when these occasions occur, and only when they occur, great sonnets are written.
The chapter on " Sonnet Legislation " is designed to prove that the " absolute freedom " of the form for the largest kind of utterance does not mean lawlessness. On the contrary, "the standards have been set up and are irremovable." All the great English sonnet writers have deviated from the Petrarchan norm, but their deviations have not been radical, though they have often proved an exemplar vitiis imitabile. Mr. Crosland calls Shakespeare's form " the English sonnet pure and simple," because it was "the first perfect form to take root in the language," but " it is doubtful whether since the time of Shakespeare a really satisfactory sonnet in that form has been written." We must turn to Milton, who fell back on the Italians, in the main, for " the prescriptive rhyming of the modern English sonnet," and also for " the rough draft of seine of the most important laws of its structure." Of these latter the most important, in Mr. Crosland's view, is that of the break or pause in melody and content between the octet and sestet. This law Milton has been charged with disregarding, but Mr. Crosland is at pains to show that, if lax in its application, Milton understood it none the less, and that his lapses can be explained as overfiowings or underflowings of the content of the octet. So he asserts that the Miltonic sonnet must be taken as an abiding precept for the formulae, which he lays down as follows : " Octet : (invariably) a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a. Pause. Sestet : c-d-c-d-c-d or c-d-e-c-d-e. Deviation from the octet rule is absolutely impermissible. Deviations from the sestet are undesirable, and when they run to couplets, final or otherwise, altogether vicious." In Wordsworth ho recognizes the next great sonneteer, and in some ways the greatest of all. In spite of underrating its importance, and in spite of faulty technique and inequality—he wrote, " alas ! too many "—Wordsworth en- larged its scope, handled it with consummate power and large spiritual effect, and in its essentials settled its form for ever. " We • The English Sonnet. By T. W. 11. Crosland. London : Martin Seeker. Des. 6d. nct.1 now know what can be said of no other form in English poetry, what it should be in its perfection." Mr. Crosland denies this cer- titude in regard to blank verse. No two critics agree as to the perfect lyric ; but for the sonnet " the legislation is fixed, established, stable and unassailable." Mr. Crosland has clearly no sympathy with the apostles of vent libre, though he admits that nearly all the great examples of the sonnet prove the rule by their defects. All the essen- tials are to be found even in the Shakespearean sonnet, including the pause, though his scheme admits of other subdivisions; but Mr. Crosland asserts that even the final rhymed couplet is "only part of the force of the sestet and not separate from it." Discussing the nature of the sonnet as set forth by various critics, Mr. Crosland effectively combats the " wave theory" of the late Mr. Watts- Dunton, in which the sonnet is compared to a wave that swells and declines or suddenly subsides, as irreconcilable with the view, which he energetically upholds, of the sonnet as an " onset," a pause, and a higher flight. " There has never been a poet born who will not make the second part of a poem greater than the first if he can ; and the sonnet form is virtually the outcome of the poetic desire for attainment on attainment." Tho sonnet, he goes on to remark, warns off all bad and trivial and penny- a-lining poets, "for the very good reason that it requires a certain amount of writing and takes up only a little print when written. . . . So that the sonnet is unpopular in all the right quarters, and Parnassus rejoices accordingly."
Mr. Crosland frames no definite or absolute rule of sonnet subjects, contenting himself with observing that Wordsworth showed us that they were limited only by the bounds of human observation, human emotion, and human imagination, but holds that the rule of abstention should apply to themes already per- fectly and exhaustively dealt with. " The modern sonnet must be a proud and independent poem."
The remainder of the volume is occupied with brief appreciations of the chief sonnet writers, with examples. In his notice of the minor Elizabethan sonnet cycles Mr. Crosland does well to print Daniel's magnificent sonnet on Sleep, and repairs the injustice done to Sylvester by a biographer who asserted that he succeeded " neither as merchant nor poet " by quoting the lines " Were I as base as is the lowly plain" with the characteristic comment : "There is a simple honesty of emotion about that which, to our mind, is worth a wilderness of ornate protestation." In dealing with Sir Philip Sidney, of whom he is a great admirer, he notes that the finest formal specimens of his art are to be found in Arcadia, though ho is inclined to think that " of all the so-called sequences Astrophel and Stella is perhaps the most delicate and simply and sincerely human." He praises Drayton for his superb " onsets " ; indeed, he counts the famous " Since there's no help, Come let us kiss and part," as fine as Shakespeare at his finest. Spenser, for all his delicacy, he finds monotonous and wanting in force. The estimate of Shakespeare is chiefly noteworthy for an extremely spirited, vigorous, and ingenious attack on the view that the sonnets are autobiographical or a revelation of Shakespeare the man. The dedication of the Folio of 1609 he conjectures to have been written by Shakespeare himself as a blind ; " Mr. W. H. was a figment," and he will have none of the " heart-unlocking " in the confessional autobiographical sense. Mr. Crosland holds that for all Milton's lapses from strict sonnet legislation, of which he gives a minute recital, his services to the English sonnet would be impossible to overvalue. And he says practically the sane, only that his praise is higher, of Wordsworth. After convicting him of " pretty well every modern sonnetal abuse," Mr. Crosland stuns up : " Emotion. ally he lifted the sonnet to heights never before attained, and sounded with it depths never before plumbed. He made it an affair of the intellect and the brooding spirit as well as of the fancy and the passions. In his hand the thing became an ecstasy as well as a trumpet, a vision and a tenderness as well as an austerity." That is finely and truly said, and for these and many other generous and well-earned eulogies we may overlook the occasional truculenees by which this stimulating work is disfigured.
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