re.

And both of these poets, Shakspeare always and Wordsworth often, sinned
as Milton did not against the true genius of the sonnet. No doubt they
had nearly all precedent with them, and their successors down to
Rossetti {134} and Meredith have followed in the same path. But not
even Shakspeare and Petrarch can alter the fact that the genius of the
sonnet is solitary and self-contained. A series of sonnets is an
artistic contradiction in terms. There may be magnificent individual
sonnets in it which can stand alone, without reference to those that
precede or follow; and so far so good; but on the bulk of the series
there inevitably rests the taint of incompleteness. They do not
explain themselves. They are chapters not books, parts of a
composition and not the whole. It is scarcely possible to doubt that,
fine as they may be, the effect they produce is not that of the finest
single sonnets, beginning and ending within their own limits. Milton
may never have been under any special temptation to write a set of
consecutive sonnets; but it is in any case like his habitual submission
of all authority to his own judgment that he wrote sonnets and yet
defied the tradition of writing them as a continuous series, as he had
also disdained the amorous affectations which had been their
established subject. But in this, as in everything else where art was
concerned, he was as much a conservative as a revolutionary. And so
his scholarly interest in the Italian sonnet, and, we may be sure, his
consummate {135} critical judgment, made him set aside the various
sonnet forms adopted by Shakspeare, Spenser and other famous English
poets, and follow the original model of Petrarch more strictly than it
had been followed by any English poet of importance before him; for the
Petrarchan sonnets of Sidney, Constable and Drummond all end with the
unItalian concluding couplet. But here again Milton's example has not
proved decisive. Wordsworth did not always follow it, though he never
deserted it with success. Keats began with it and gave it up for the
Shakspearean model with the concluding couplet. But of him again, it
may be said that, while he only wrote three great sonnets and two of
them are Shakspearean, his single masterpiece is Petrarchan or
Miltonic. Rossetti, on the other hand, has no Shakspearean sonnets,
and his finest are among the best proofs of how much a sonnet gains in
unity by the single pause between the eight l