INTRODUCTION I It is not proposed here to enter into the vexed question of the sonnet's origin. The matter often and learnedly treated still offers scope for conjecture and research, though it may be doubted whether the theory which would attribute it like other ingenious and complicated forms of verse to Provençal invention can ever be more than a pious opinion, permissible to French sentiment. The early Italian poets believed their art to have been derived from Sicily, and modern writers have attempted to trace it thence a step further back to the Arabs, by whom the island was occupied in the tenth century. It is to the Italians at any rate that the sonnet owes its consecration as a literary form. In Italy it had been practised with assiduity and precision for several generations before Petrarch, and its use by Dante would have secured its immortality. But it is in reality to one poet alone that its universal currency is due. The father and patron of all sonneteers is Francesco Petrarca, and hither as to their fountain' they have repaired ever since. In the sonnet Petrarch found ready to his hand an instrument which exactly suited his genius. During a long course of years he worked with unremitting care and conscience to perfect it. His reward was that his sonnets have been the admiration and study of generations of poets. It has been doubted whether such a thing as a perfect sonnet is possible. A seventeenth century poet, Godeau, Bishop of Vence, declared that the reign of the sonnet was not of this world, and that to make one without fault would pass the wit of man; and it may be remembered how Boileau concludes his exceedingly clever verse definition of a sonnet : Un sonnet sans défaut vaut seul un long poëme. La mesure est toujours trop longue ou trop petite. Petrarch we may believe would have been as ready as his minutest commentators to recognise flaws in his most finished compositions. From the very curious annotations of his MSS. we know what prodigious pains he took, how constant, how searching was his self-criticism. He devoted Friday, as a day of fasting and penitence, to the task of revision, and he would return to the same piece, the same line, at long intervals of time, till he had satisfied himself that his idea had received the most harmonious, moving, and appropriate expression. By the common consent of the ages he has come as near to the impossible perfection as it is given to mortal sonneteer to do. The sonnet is sometimes spoken of as a difficult form. It is not so much difficult as exacting. It is perilously easy even in English, doubly so in Italian, to write bad sonnets; the strictness of the construction, the prescription of length and rhymes, solicit, prompt, support What is difficult is to preserve the the poetaster. perfect balance between the form and the content, which the sonnet above all demands; to give the sense at once of inevitable law and absolute freedom, of probity and choice; so that the reader, if he likes to dwell for a moment on one aspect rather than the other, may rest content with that, but may also taste the complex satisfaction of their reconciliation. Neither one nor the other must be allowed to get the upper hand. The misfortune is that one or the other almost always does. With poets of Latin race, in whom the classical tradition is more innate and binding, it is more apt to be the one; with English poets the other. In Petrarch's sonnets, or the best of them, this proportion and harmony are admirably achieved. The distinction, charm and pathos of their thought and expression is matched by the clarity and precision, the almost 'geometrical beauty,' of their form. The wrought cup, by all the Muses filed,' brims but does not spill. These poems have a gravity and maturity of tone by which the average French and English imitations seem timid, insipid, insincere, puerile. And their technical perfection gives to the others an air almost of improvisation. Sometimes no doubt in Petrarch the workmanship surpasses the material, though differences of time, race, manner and feeling partly exaggerate this effect for us, and the extravagances of his followers have reflected on the master. Those who come to Petrarch from the Petrarchisti are surprised to find how much more serious and humane, even how much less monotonous and mannered he is than they. The transcendent prestige of great works of art often creates a confusion between their essential and accidental elements. In this case the art and the special subject-matter had been so consummately fitted together that admirers accepted the infallibility of both, and imagined an echo of 'poor Petrarch's longdeceased woes' the only proper argument for sonneting. The Tudor and Valois poets were for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in' and nothing else ; they would have deemed it unorthodox that their 'amours in quatorzains' should do aught but pine, a misunderstanding productive of much tedium. That the sonnet need not inevitably reflect a blighted passion or even a 'mood of love' at all, but that any other single poetical motive, or 'lonely feeling' in Coleridge's phrase, will do as well,-for example one of vigorous hatred and indignation, they might have learned from Petrarch's own example in his denunciatory sonnets on the Court at Avignon. (With few exceptions, however, such as Surrey's fine rhetorical sonnet on Sardanapalus (written perhaps with an eye on his sovereign liege Henry VIII.), sonnets on stock themes like Sleep and Lust, and dedicatory sonnets to patrons, the earlier English poets ran in a rut of imaginary frustration. Their mistresses are all in accessible as Laura, their burthen is for ever that of Sidney : And, ah, what hope that hope should once see day II WHEN at the beginning of the sixteenth century the movement of the Renaissance reached the northern nations, they turned to Italy, the precursor and discoverer, the home of an art and beauty hitherto undreamt of, with filial homage. Italian literature imposed a sanction and authority next to that of antiquity itself. Dante, the supreme poet of the mediæval world, could not be expected to appeal to a generation athirst for the new wine of humanism, but Petrarch was accepted as a classic. Ronsard, Du Bellay and the other learned poets of France studied him as they did Homer, Virgil and Ovid. He and the later Italian sonneteers were imitated with ostentatious zeal. In the first book which contains English sonnets, Tottel's Miscellany (1557), published under Queen Mary, but mostly written under Henry VIII., 1 For an account of the sonnet in France during the sixteenth century, see Mr. Sidney Lee's Life of Shakespeare, p. 442; and for the influence of French sonnet-writers on the Elizabethans, the same work, p. 101. Prof. Saintsbury states that Wyat adapts from Mellin de Saint-Gelais, the earliest French sonneteer (circa 1530) (Earlier Renaissance, p. 181). |