Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes Part 27

[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 c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.ls. And all these c.o.xcombries 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 nutsh.e.l.l_--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 t.i.tle-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--

is like _nought on earth_ we ever read but Dean Swift's song of similes.

I _will prove_, he says, that

A swan-- A fawn-- An artless lamb-- A hawthorn tree-- A willow-- A laburnum-- A dream-- A rainbow-- Diana-- Aurora-- A dove that _singeth_-- A lily,--and finally, Venus herself!

--I in truth will prove These are not _half_ so _fair_ as she I love.

_Sonnet_ iii, p. 43.

Such heterogeneous compliments remind us of Shacabac's gallantry to _Beda_ in _Blue Beard:_ "Ah, you little rogue, you have a prettier mouth _than an elephant_, and you know it!"--A _fawn-coloured_ countenance rivalling in _fairness a laburnum_ blossom, seems to us a more dubious type of female beauty than even an elephant's mouth.

_Love_, it may be said, has carried away better poets and graver men than Mr. Moxon seems to be, into such namby-pamby nonsense; but Mr.

Moxon is just as absurd in his _grief_ or his _musings_, as in his _love_.

When he hears a nightingale--"sad Philomel!"--he concludes that the bird was originally created for no other purpose than to prophesy in Paradise _the fall of man_, or, as he chooses to collocate the words,

_Prophetic_ to have mourned of _man_ the _fall_,--p. 9.

but he does not tell us what she has been doing ever since.

When he sees two c.u.mberland streams--the Brathay and Rothay--flowing down, first to a confluence, and afterwards to the sea, he fancies "a _soul-knit_ pair," man and wife, mingling their waters and gliding to their final haven--

in kindred love, The haven Contemplation sees _above_!

_Below_, he would--following his allegory--have said; but rhyme forbade-- and _allegories_ are not _so headstrong_ on the banks of the Brathay as on those of the _Nile_.

A sonnet on Thomson's grave is a fine specimen of empty sounds and solid nonsense:--

Whene'er I linger, Thomson, near thy tomb, Where _Thamis_--

"_Cla.s.sic Cam_" will be somewhat amazed to hear his learned brother called _Thamis_--

Where Thamis urges his majestic way, And the Muse loves at twilight hour to stray, I think how in thy theme ALL _seasons_ BLOOM;--

What, all four?--_autumn_, nay, _winter_--blooming?

What _heart_ so cold that of thy fame has _heard_, And _pauses_ not to _gaze_ upon each scene.

We are inclined to be very indulgent to what is called a confusion of metaphors, when it arises from a rush of ideas--but when it is produced by an author's having no idea at all, we can hardly forgive him for equipping the _Heart_ with eyes, ears, and legs:--he might just as well have said that on entering Twickenham church to visit the tomb, every _Heart_ would take off _its hat_, and on going out again would put _its hand_ in _its pockets_ to fee the s.e.xton.

And pauses not to gaze upon each scene That was familiar to thy raptured view, Those walks beloved by thee while I pursue, Musing upon the years that intervene--

Why this line _intervenes_ or what it means we do not see--it seems inserted just to make up the number--

Methinks, as eve descends, a hymn of praise To thee, their bard, the _sister Seasons_ raise!

That is, as we understand it, ALL the _Seasons meet together_ on one or more evenings of the year, to sing a hymn to the memory of Thompson.

This _simultaneous entree_ of the Four Seasons would be a much more appropriate fancy for the opera stage than for Twickenham meadows.

Such are the tame extravagances--the vapid affectations--the unmeaning mosaic which Mr. Moxon has laboriously tesselated into fifty and four sonnets. If he had been--as all this childishness at first led us to believe--a very young man--we should have discussed the matter with him in a more conciliatory and persuasive tone; but we find that he is, what we must call, an old offender. We have before us two little volumes of what he ent.i.tles poetry--one dated 1826, and the other 1829--which, though more laughable, are not in substance more absurd than his new production. From the first of these we shall extract two or three stanzas of the introductory poem, not only on account of their intrinsic merit, but because they state, pretty roundly, Mr. Moxon's principles of poetry. He modestly disclaims all rivalry with Pope, Byron, Moore, Campbell, Scott, Rogers, Goldsmith, Dryden, Gray, Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare; but he, at the same time, intimates that he follows, what he thinks, a truer line of poetry than the before-named ill.u.s.trious, but, in this point, _mistaken_ individuals.

'Tis not a poem with learning fraught, To that I ne'er pretended; Nor yet with Pope's fine touches wrought, _From that my time prevented_.

We skip four intermediate stanzas; then comes

Milton divine and great Shakespeare With reverence I mention; My name with theirs shall ne'er appear, _'Tis far from my intention!_ If poetry, as one _pretends, Be all imagination!_ Why then, at once, _my bardship ends-- 'Mong prose I take my station._

_Moxon's Poems, p. 81, Ed. 1826._

But as _"common sense"_ must see, says Mr. Moxon, that _imagination_ can have nothing to do with _poetry_, he engages to pursue his tuneful vocation, subject to _one_ condition--

You'll hear no more from me, If _critics prove unkind;_ My next _in simple prose_ must be, _Unless I favour find!_

We regret that some _kind_--or, as Mr. Moxon would have thought it, _unkind_--critic, did not, on the appearance of this first volume, confirm his own misgivings that he had been all this time, like the man in the farce, talking not only _prose_, but _nonsense_ into the bargain: this disagreeable information the pretension of his recent publication obliges us to convey to him. The fact is, that the volume at first struck us with serious alarm. Its typographical splendour led us to fear that this style of writing was getting into fashion; and the hints about _"cla.s.sic Cam"_ seemed to impute the production to one of our Universities: on turning, with some curiosity, to the t.i.tle-page, for the name of the too indulgent bookseller who had bestowed such unmerited embellishment on a work which we think of so little value--_we found none_; and on further inquiry learned that _Dover Street, Piccadilly_, and not the banks of _"cla.s.sic Cam"_ is the seat of this sonneteering muse--in short, that Mr. Moxon, the bookseller, is his own poet, and that Mr. Moxon, the poet, is his own bookseller. This discovery at once calmed both our anxieties--it relieved the university of Cambridge from an awful responsibility, which might have called down upon it the vengeance of Lord Radnor; and it accounted--without any imputation on the public taste--for the extraordinary care and cost with which the paternal solicitude of the poet-publisher had adorned his own volume.

Mr. Moxon seems to be--like most sonneteers--a man of amiable disposition, and to have an ear--as he certainly has a _memory_--for poetry; and--if he had not been an old hand--we should not have presumed to say that he is incapable of anything better than this tumid commonplace. But, however that may be, we do earnestly exhort him to abandon the self-deluding practice of being his own publisher. Whatever may have been said in disparagement of the literary taste of the booksellers, it will at least be admitted that their experience of public opinion and a due attention to their own pecuniary interest, enable them to operate as a salutary check upon the blind and presumptive vanity of small authors. The necessity of obtaining the _"imprimatur"_ of a publisher is a very wholesome restraint, from which Mr. Moxon--unluckily for himself and for us--found himself relieved. If he could have looked at his own work with the impartiality, and perhaps the good taste, that he would have exercised on that of a stranger, _he_ would have saved himself a good deal of expense and vexation--and _we_ should have been spared the painful necessity of contrasting the ambitious pretensions of his volume with its very moderate literary merit.

ON "VANITY FAIR" AND "JANE EYRE"

[From _The Quarterly Review_, December, 1848]