Or again, he may be compared with the great Florentine painter Masaccio, who introduced the reality of life into Italian art, or with even greater Fleming, Jan van Eyck, who invented, or any rate inaugurated, painting in oils as now understood: though he too of course had his predecessor, even as Masolino foreshadowed Masaccio, and the monk Theophilus foretold the discovery that is commonly attributed to Hubert van Eyck and his more famous brother. Guittone was like the first man who adventured frequently upon the waters in a wedge-shaped craft, after whom every one agreed that grooved and narrow bows were better than the roundness of a tub or the clumsy length of a hollowed tree-trunk. It has withstood the severest test that any form can be put to: it has survived the changes of language, the fluctuations of taste, the growth of culture, the onward sweep and the resilience of the wave of poetry that flows to and fro, "with kingly pauses of reluctant pride," across all civilised peoples: for close upon six hundred years have elapsed since Guittone and Dante and Petrarca found the perfected instrument ready for them to play their sweetest music upon. Any form of creative art, to survive, must conform to certain restrictions: would Paradise Lost hold its present rank if Milton had interspersed Cavalier and Roundhead choruses throughout his epic? What would we think of the Æneid if Virgil had enlivened its pages with Catullian love-songs or comic interludes after the manner of Plautus or Terence? The structure of the sonnet is arbitrary in so far that it is the outcome of continuous experiment moulded by mental and musical influences: it is not a form to be held sacred simply because this or that great poet, or a dozen poets, pronounced it be the best possible poetic vehicle for its purpose. Those who complain seem to forget that the epic, the tragedy, the ode, are also arbitrary forms, and that it is somewhat out of place to rail against established rules of architecture in the erection of a cottage, and to blink those in the building of a mansion or a palace. In the sense that a steersman must abide by the arbitrary law of the compass, in the sense that the engine-driver must abide by the arbitrary machinery of the engineer, in the sense that the battalion must wheel to the right or the left at the arbitrary word of command-in this sense is the sonnet an arbitrary form.
The commonest complaint against the sonnet is its supposed arbitrariness-a complaint based on a complete misconception of its nature. Even among verse-writers themselves there is some vagueness on this point: I have heard one well-known writer say that so-and-so's sonnet was a fine one, when the piece in question consisted of three octosyllabic quatrains another spoke of In Memoriam as made up of a number of linked sonnets and one of the contributors to this volume lately remarked to me that any one could write a sonnet-it was simply to say something in fourteen lines instead of in ten or twenty! I have heard it described as any short poem of one or more stanzas used for filling up blank spaces in magazine pages-a definition not so very absurd when we remember that a poet and critic like Coleridge pronounced it "a medium for the expression of a mere momentary burst of passion." But the majority of readers of poetry know that it is limited to fourteen lines in length: beyond this the knowledge of all save a comparative few does not go. It is a matter of surprise that even now there are many well-read people who have no other idea of what a sonnet is than that it is a short poem-what kind of short poem they very vaguely apprehend. The Sonnet: Its Characteristics and History (Part 3) The Sonnet Its Characteristics and History (Part 3) William Sharp From Sonnets of This Century