[From _The Quarterly Review_, July, 1837]
_Sonnets by_ EDWARD MOXON. Second Edition. London, 1837.
This is quite a _dandy_ of a book. Some seventy pages of drawing-paper--
fifty-five of which are impressed each with a single sonnet in all the
luxury of type, while the rest are decked out with vignettes of nymphs
in clouds and bowers, and Cupids in rose-bushes and cockle-shells. And
all these coxcombries are the appendages of, as it seems to us, as
little intellect as the rings and brooches of the Exquisite in a modern
novel. We shall see presently, by what good fortune so moderate a poet
has found so liberal a publisher.
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.
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