Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads

by George Meredith

  Exploiting the tension between narrative progression and lyric stasis, Meredith’s expansion of the sonnet form becomes a necessary part of his effort to reinvest Petrarchan conceits with modern emotions. Dividing his sonnets into four semantic units, each of which corresponds to a quatrain, gives them a dynamic quality. Consider the four quatrains that make up Sonnet IX: “He felt the wild beast in him betweenwhiles.” In the first, the omniscient speaker informs readers that the “wild beast” within the husband is “masterfully rude,” posing a threat to the wife’s safety. The second quatrain subjects this portrait to comic deflation by incorporating dialogue and converting the fact of the husband’s violent desire (articulated without equivocation in the first quatrain) into an enigma: “Had he not teeth to rend, and hunger too?” The husband would surely answer yes! He regards himself as a model of masculine strength and control, as is clear when he asks his wife, “Have you no fear?”; her laughing response—“No, surely; am I not with you?”—simultaneously invokes an image of masculinity consonant with the husband’s self-conception (the husband/protector) and dissonant with it (the emasculated husband).36 The third quatrain, also in the voice of the omniscient speaker, fills in the latter portrait by describing the husband in thrall to his wife’s posture, tone, and facial expressions. The final quatrain enacts the semantic “turn,” and is also the site of transition from the unconventional “omniscient” speaker to the Petrarchan “I,” the distressed poet-lover. Here the husband insists upon his self-mastery and the supremacy of his physical strength.

  Like so many nineteenth-century narratives, the end of this sonnet appears to be the mirror image of the beginning, one that represents a restoration of order. The two quatrains calling attention to the wife’s subtle, feminized powers are sandwiched between two quatrains about the husband’s sense of his own masculinized strength. And yet, the formal dynamics of this sonnet work to destabilize such a reading at the same time that they prompt it. The structure of the sonnet allows readers to regard the husband from his own perspective and from an externalized perspective, one that hints at his delusions of power. Eschewing enjambment between quatrains emphasizes their distinctness, inviting the reader to linger over each shift in thought and perspective. The grammatical complexity of the second and fourth quatrains not only calls attention to the husband’s mental confusion, but also the plurisignificance of key words and phrases. What does the wife mean by her answer? What does Meredith mean by ending this sonnet with the word supreme? Although the husband insists in the final quatrain that by mastering his inner beast he keeps his wife safe, these claims cannot overwrite the third quatrain’s depiction of his wife’s powerful wit and beauty. Much more than the mere depiction of a psychologically significant event in a story about a troubled marriage, this sonnet meditates on the difference between mastering one’s impulses and being mastered by an external force. Here and elsewhere, Meredith uses poetic form to render adulterated, “modern” emotions.

  “Modern Love” also explores marriage/gender roles while mixing avantgarde and traditional poetic techniques to express the emotional conflict and intersubjectivity at its center. It is indeed more than simply a story about a troubled marriage, but the union at the center of its plot links the sonnets not only to a poetic tradition centuries old, but also to the very real, very pressing issues of the day. Women’s idealized love was a common subject of Victorian writing. Perhaps the best known poetic example is Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House, excerpts of which appear in the “Contexts” section. This poem’s title became shorthand for the stereotypical adoring, self-abnegating Victorian wife. John Ruskin echoes Patmore’s portrait in his lecture “On Queens’ Gardens” from Sesame and Lilies, a lecture that describes a woman’s role as being the passive complement to her husband’s active will. A woman’s infidelity, on the other hand, was unconventional fodder for poetry, but an ideal platform for exploring social anxiety and/or progress. Laws and social expectations alike accorded disproportionate attention to women’s adultery. Though a woman could not seek a divorce based solely on her husband’s infidelity, a man could divorce his wife if she was unfaithful, and as the complex legal system allowed an accused wife little recourse, it was relatively easy for a man to manipulate the bureaucracy. Paget’s explanation of the divorce process offers insight into the complexity and overwhelming gender disparity of the Victorian divorce process. Conduct manuals for both men and women warned against a wife’s infidelity in the strongest possible terms: William Cobbett’s manual for husbands (also in the “Contexts” section) argues that a wife’s adultery is far more pernicious than a man’s, not only because of the affective transgression, but because it opened the family to the social and economic degradation of bastard children. Meredith’s engagement with female adultery bears the mark of these conventional attitudes: after all, the husband has been unfaithful before (as evidenced by the lock of hair he finds in Sonnet XX, a remembrance from a former dalliance) and is having an affair in the course of events depicted in the sonnets, but he seems to be untroubled by the effect of his infidelity on his wife, focusing solely on how her infidelity affects him. Nevertheless, the sonnets present a remarkably nuanced understanding of the conflicting emotions arising from the marriage’s dissolution, especially when compared to works like Patmore’s or Ruskin’s. The husband details his conflicting feelings toward a wife he still finds desirable and alluring, even as he is pained by her actions. Yet, questions of blame arise frequently in the sonnets (Sonnets X, XIX, and XLIII), and the husband concludes that neither individual is solely responsible.

  Probing the complexity of mutual affection and disaffection is the most identifiable trait of the sonnets’ engagement with modernity; Meredith challenges the simple binary formulation of male/female gender and marital roles, even as he demonstrates the power and appeal of those binaries. The sonnets evince an uneasy relationship to modernity in other ways. Nature, to whom the Romantics would look for a mirroring of their own situation, no longer mirrors the husband’s anxieties, and instead of providing respite, seems to mock him. Past notions of love—recalled from courtly romances, fairy tales, and classical myths—no longer remain relevant, even if they provide tropes the poet can deploy. Nostalgia permeates the poem, both for the shared past of the husband and his wife and for a time and place where the intrusions of the present, with its uncertainty and pain, are absent. Consider Sonnet XVIII, where the speaker regards the rural revelers at a country fair as happy in their simple ignorance. Even that nostalgic drive, though, is short-lived; in the opening line of the following sonnet the speaker insists that “No state is enviable.” Indeed, to value the happiness of Jack, Tom, Moll, and Meg is to assume that their exterior pleasure belies no interior pain, a belief challenged throughout the sequence, as when the husband and wife are regarded as an ideal couple by their dinner guests (Sonnet XVII). This attempt to depict the insurmountable psychological differences between the agents, mirrored in the shifting narratorial perspective and polyvocality, situates the sequence as a precursor to the psychological probing of works written much later. Norman Friedman, in his seminal reading of “Modern Love,” compares the investigation of the protagonist’s consciousness to “the manner of Henry James.”37

  “Modern Love” renders this exploration of interiority in terms of the physical manifestations of psychical experience; Meredith draws from current Victorian sensory theory to invigorate his depiction of emotions. From the very opening of the sequence, intellectual or emotional cognition is couched firmly in the body. In Sonnet I, for example, the psychical devastation felt by the wife is evidenced by the sobs shaking her body even as she sleeps. Her husband witnesses that physical manifestation of tortured emotion, and the impact of those sobs on him is rendered through a striking visual image—“gaping snakes”—that has little to do with the literal action in the scene, but communicates the poisonous impact of the wife’s actions as well the impact of her own emotional pain on the husband. The
couple remain “moveless,” asleep, yet “looking thro’ their dead black years” and seeing their regret “scrawl’d over the black wall.” If the couple imagines their unhappiness visually, as a sign, so too can the reader. The sonnet ends with a picture of the pair: “Like sculptured effigies they might be seen / Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between.” The sense of sight is called upon to render the emotional landscape of the couple’s interiority; the senses, the intellect, and the emotions present ways of knowing, and Meredith is careful not to privilege one epistemological mode over another. Recalling Alexander Johnson’s division of man as tripartite, and depending variously on the emotions, intellect, and senses for distinct though interrelated information, Meredith shows that these modes of knowing are mutually constitutive.

  It makes sense, then, that many of the interpretive mistakes that the husband makes arise through his reliance on sight to the exclusion of his other faculties. He is an astute reader, to be sure, and often an insightful one, recognizing mutual pleasure in the couple’s performance at a dinner party (see Sonnet XVII), recognizing her handwriting on a letter to her lover (Sonnet XV), and even recognizing that though his moods might change, his interiority is not reflected in nature: “What’s this, when Nature swears there is no change / To challenge eyesight?” (Sonnet XI). Nevertheless, he is often blind to similarly obvious facts: though he keenly feels the impact of her affair, as when prompted by the errant love letter, he does not imagine the impact of his affair on her, even when he comes across a reminder in his own desk (Sonnet XX). He imagines that he “can interpret where the mouth is dumb” (Sonnet XXVI), yet is caught off guard by her suicide. Despite constant evidence to the contrary, he insists on believing that physical affection—touch—will provide the comfort he seeks (Sonnet XXXII).

  These limitations, though, are perhaps not a failing on the husband’s part, but rather an indication of the ultimate impossibility of the senses to facilitate intersubjectivity, a theme that is emphasized through form as well as through narrative. In Sonnet V, for example, the husband’s old desire is ignited, and he is caught off guard by his wife’s inability to recognize it. The sonnet features four semantic shifts, but they do not correspond to the quatrains. The first point (“She treated him as something that is tame”) is made in lines 1–4; the shift in line 5 (“but at other provocation bites”) is followed by the fact that her body inspires tender feelings in him, a sentiment that bleeds over into the third quatrain by one line; the first line of the fourth quatrain completes grammatically the thought that ends the last line of the third quatrain: “Love’s inmost sacredness, / Call’d to him, ‘Come!’” Allowing the semantic content of the quatrains to bleed over in this way throws the first line of each quatrain into stark relief, highlighting the husband’s desire, a desire that he believes his wife understands as dangerous (“but at other provocation bites”) and that he feels to be both sinful (“tempting”) and sanctified (“Love’s inmost sacredness”). Only after this virtuosic presentation of ambivalence, does the volta begin, in which the wife cannot see his momentary desire to repair their relationship:

  —In that restraining start,

  Eyes nurtured to be look’d at, scarce could see

  A wave of the great waves of Destiny

  Convulsed at a check’d impulse of the heart.

  As is clear in these lines, the depiction of the limits of the senses is made possible through Meredith’s use of shifting narratorial perspectives, for though the wife’s insight is necessarily thwarted by the limitations of her subjectivity, the poetic voice is able to render what she cannot see. The ease of movement between first- and third-person narrators, and between distanced reflection and direct reporting of ideas spoken or thought, signifies a development in poetics that was not Meredith’s alone. Such shifts in point of view are, for example, one link between emerging theories of the mind and emerging theories of poetry, links that other poets exploited. In his verse, Baudelaire similarly combined introspection and reported dialogue or conversation; other elements of Baudelaire’s style—a strict and relatively conservative poetic structure with synesthesia-driven images, a predilection for shifts in temporal order, and a penchant for drawing his subjects from the lower classes—resonate with Meredith’s work as well as ongoing discussions about the proper content for poetry (See Arnold, Hallam, and Massey’s excerpts in the “Contexts” section).

  Poems and Ballads

  If Meredith links the Roadside Philosophers—the Juggler, the Chartist, the Beggar, and the Engineer—through their use of the dramatic monologue and cannily manipulates the sonnet structure in “Modern Love,” in the volume’s other poems, collected under the heading “Poems and Ballads,” he demonstrates his command of an impressive variety of poetic forms. Meredith’s ballads are, like the Philosophers’ monologues, more folksy than urban, more nostalgic than experimental; and while they bear self-conscious traces of oral transmission, their diction is more elevated than that of the Roadside poems. Like so many Victorian ballads, Meredith’s are essentially narrative poems, sometimes spoken by an impersonal voice—the public voice made univocal as in a Greek chorus. They focus on a single episode and usually thematize the relationship between violence and love. They feature repetition, avoid exploring the psychological motives of their dramatis personae, and lead toward an emotional climax. These aspects are obvious in a poem like “Cassandra” but evident in “Margaret’s Bridal-Eve” and “Grandfather Bridgeman” as well. The ballad is a form that had become extremely popular in the Romantic period, thanks to Bishop Percy’s anthology of British balladry. As W. E. Aytoun quipped in an 1847 review on a series of books published on the ballad, “ballad poetry in all its forms and ramifications has become inconceivably rampant.”38 More important than the fashion, however, were the poets who influenced Meredith, adepts at the form: Goethe, Wordsworth, and Keats. Meredith’s own ballads earned praise from his contemporaries: Swinburne thought that “Margaret’s Bridal-Eve” was “pathetic and splendid,” one of the best examples of the form in English.39 The Athenaeum found “Cassandra” to be “free from the blemishes of caprice and obscurity” that ruined so many of the volume’s poems.40

  With the ode, Meredith introduces “high” poetry to the volume. The ode is a term used to describe a complexly organized lyric poem, serious and meditative in tone. While at first glance “Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn” may seem to resonate more with the nature poetry Meredith wrote in later years, in fact its inclusion in the Modern Love volume casts into sharper relief the role of nature in poems throughout the collection: for Meredith, nature functions not as something to be conquered, but rather as a retreat from the vicissitudes of a society defined by institutions and progress, a retreat that is only sometimes effective. In light of the odes, the philosophies forwarded throughout the volume can be understood as more than simple folksiness: they also function as social commentary. In “Margaret’s Bridal-Eve,” for example, the garden becomes a site of constricting cultivation, where flowers—and young women—are grown only to be plucked, a state of affairs that leads to the death of both.

  The promise of nature also figures in “By the Rosanna,” a poem often criticized for being too cryptic. It was originally written as a “rallying” cry to raise the spirits of Meredith’s friend Maxse, though in subsequent editions it was cut down dramatically to eliminate the more opaque content.41 The version of “By the Rosanna” found in Modern Love can be read as a meditation upon the compensatory power of nature, and offers an example of a recurring idea in Meredith’s poetry: an emphatic insistence on the disparity between “human values and the facts of Nature.”42 Those facts of nature arise, in part, through descriptions rife with a Keatsian sensuousness that annoyed many contemporary readers. He invokes the rushing movement of both London traffic and the unbridled waters of the Rosanna, in order to frame a choice: “Life, or London.”43 That contrast persists through the poem: turning from social life toward the solitude of the river,
the speaker imagines the Rosanna becomes a “nymph” capable of giving much more fulfillment, if less stability, than the “Season-Beauty.”

  The attention accorded Meredith’s powerful natural philosophy, both here and in his later works, must not overwhelm our recognition of his use of similar poetic strategies in poems that treat other subjects. Those that deal with legends and ancient texts are, for example, woefully ignored in critical treatments of Meredith’s verse. “Cassandra” is replete with arresting imagery that is enhanced by the refusal of chronological narrative. “The Head of Bran” similarly marshals the resources of rhythm to convey a sense of Bran’s legendary power. In “Shemselnihar,” the speaker highlights the bodily effects of her anguished longing for her lover and her freedom by metaphorizing her body as various forms of desiccated plant life and refusing to describe in visual terms her luxurious surroundings. We find a similarly effective use of selective sensory description in “Phantasy,” a poem that seeks to translate two fantastical worlds—that of the Wilis described in Heinrich Heine’s De l’Allemagne and Giselle, the ballet based on the story—into a dream vision.44

  If the senses can provide an avenue for the individual to commune with nature and to explore the exotic, they also provide a basis for poetic explorations of introspection and alienation: in a series of three lyric poems, each originally untitled, Meredith leverages a single sense over others to communicate the unbreachable alterity of the other. In “When I would image her features,” the speaker fails to banish feelings of alienation by conjuring a vision of his beloved’s face. In “A roar thro’ the tall twin elm-trees,” the speaker imagines that the sound of wind outside his home voices the estrangement it feels from him, an estrangement that is ironically similar to what he feels from his beloved. And, finally, “I chafe at darkness” uses the sense of touch to articulate the emotional feeling of disconnection. “The Doe” can be understood as offering a response to these failures. In this narrative poem, we find nature (as represented by a doe named Nancy) in Wordsworthian sympathy with a small group of country folk.