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

by George Meredith

  5. Coan drapery: the look of sheer, draped fabric achieved in classical statuary, which allows all the contours of the body beneath to be visible

  William Sharp, from Sonnets of This Century (1886)1

  Scottish poet William Sharp’s (1855–1905) Sonnets of This Century is an anthology introduced with an essay on the nature and structure of the sonnet, with particular emphasis on the English sonnet. Given that Sharp offers a list of “ten commandments” of the sonnet, a list that includes a length of fourteen lines and an octave/sestet organization, it does not surprise that he selects Meredith’s “Lucifer in Starlight,” from Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, over any of the “Modern Love” sonnets for inclusion in the main text of his volume. The excerpt that follows is drawn from a note on George Meredith in the appendix of Sharp’s anthology.

  Mr. Meredith’s fame—a steadily, and rapidly increasing fame—as the most brilliant living master of fiction, has overshadowed his claims as a poet. Out of the hundreds who have read and delighted in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, in Evan Harrington, in Rhoda Fleming, etc., there are probably only two or three here and there who before the recent issue of Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth knew that Mr. Meredith had written verse at all. Yet two very noteworthy little volumes had previously—the first a long time before—seen the light. In the second, entitled Modern Love: and other Poems, [sic] there is a very remarkable sequence of sixteen line poems comprised under the heading “Modern Love.” A sad enough story is told therein, with great skill, and much poetic beauty. I had always imagined them to have been sonnets on the model of the Italian “sonnet with a tail,” but Mr. Meredith tells me that they were not designed for that form. As, however, for all their structural drawbacks they are in other things essentially “caudated sonnets,” I may quote the following fine examples:—

  [quotes “Modern Love” XVI, XXIX, XLIII, XLIX, and L in their entirety]

  As to the single sonnet proper by Mr. Meredith which I have given in my selection, it is quite unnecessary to point to its imaginative power—its sense of vastness. It is from his Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth.

  Notes

  1. William Sharp, “George Meredith,” in Sonnets of This Century (London: Walter Scott, 1886), 299–301.

  Arthur Symons, from Westminster Review (1887)1

  Arthur Symons (1865–1945), a British poet and literary critic, was a longtime admirer of Meredith’s work. His own poetry was deeply influenced by the French symbolists, including Charles Baudelaire. Toward the end of the century, Symons emerged as a key figure in the Art for Art’s Sake movement. His influential 1893 essay, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” is often anthologized. The excerpted review that follows was occasioned by the 1887 publication of Meredith’s Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life. Here Symons praises the originality and intensity of Meredith’s verse.

  “. . . Modern Love,” by far the greatest of [all of Meredith’s poems], stands almost by itself as an analytical study of contemporary life and manners; the “Roadside” poems deal synthetically with country humours and country pathos; there is a number of romantic poems and ballads, and these have at least two remarkable divisions among themselves. “Modern Love,” Mr. Meredith’s longest poem—it is written in fifty sonnet-like stanzas of sixteen lines—is also, beyond a shadow of doubt (so it seems to us), by far his best work in verse. It is a most remarkable poem, and it has never received anything like due recognition at the hands of critics or public. We trace to it, perhaps wrongly, but we think not, the origin or suggestion of at least the manner of two subsequent poems of considerable importance and merit, James Thomson’s “Story of Weddah and Om-el-Bonain”2 and Mr. W. S. Blunt’s “Love Sonnets of Proteus.”3 We have no authority but internal evidence for this supposition, though we know that James Thomson had a very great admiration for “Modern Love,” and used often to speak of it. In certain qualities both “Weddah and Om-el-Bonain” and the “Love Sonnets of Proteus” are superior to Mr. Meredith’s poem; but besides the extremely important fact that Mr. Meredith was first in the field, his poem as a whole is to our mind decidedly superior to either of those with which we have classed it. We have never been able to tell quite what it is that gives to these sonnet-like stanzas (with all their obscurities of allusion and their occasional faults in versification) a certain charm and power which fascinate and fasten upon mind and memory at once. Mr. Meredith has never done anything else like it; this wonderful style, acid, stinging, bittersweet, poignant, as if fashioned of the very moods of these “modern lovers,” reappears in no other poem (except faintly in the “Ballad of Fair Ladies in Revolt”).4 The poem stands alone, not merely in Mr. Meredith’s work, but in all antecedent literature. It is altogether a new thing; we venture to call it the most “modern” poem we have.

  “Modern Love” is a poem of the drawing-rooms; it is tinged throughout with irony; it moves by “tragic hints.” In the same volume we have a group of “Poems of the English Roadside,” studies, as they are also termed, of “Roadside Philosophers.” Here we are in a new atmosphere altogether, an atmosphere in which we can breathe more freely, under the open sky, upon the road and the heath. This little group of homely poems, to which should be added “Martin’s Puzzle,”5 a poem of the same period, seems to us, after “Modern Love,” perhaps the most original and satisfying contribution made by Mr. Meredith to the poetry of his time. One poem at least is an absolute masterpiece, and of its kind it is almost without a rival. There is a sly and kindly humour in “The Beggar’s Soliloquy,” a quaint wit in “The Old Chartist,” a humourous wisdom tinged with pathos in “Martin’s Puzzle”; each of these poems is a greater or less success in a line of work which is much more difficult than it looks; but “Juggling Jerry,” notwithstanding a flaw here and there in the rhythm, quickens our blood and strikes straight from the heart to the heart as only a few poems here and there can do. We said that of its kind it is almost without a rival; we may say, indeed, quite without a rival, outside Burns.6

  Allied to both “Modern Love” and the “Poems of the English Roadside” by the intensity of their emotion, but in tone and manner and subject removed equally from either, four or five poems, wonderfully powerful and original, form another distinct group. These are “Cassandra,” in the volume of 1862, and “The Nuptials of Attila,” “The Song of Theodolinda,” “King Harald’s Trance,” and “Aneurin’s Harp,” in the new volume. There is something fierce, savage, convulsive almost, in the passion which informs these poems; a note sounded in our days by no other poet, not even by M. Leconte de Lisle7 in the Poèmes Barbares. The words rush rattling on one another like the clashing of spears or the ring of iron on iron in a day of old-world battle. The lines are javelins, consonated lines full of savage power and fury, as if sung or played by a Northern Skald harping on a field of slain. And this is the poet of the joy of Earth!

  Notes

  1. Arthur Symons, “Meredith’s Poetry,” Westminster Review (September 1887): 695–97.

  2. James Thomson (1834–1882), pessimistic Scottish poet who wrote under the pseudonym Bysshe Vanolis, was best known for his 1874 poem “The City of Dreadful Night.” “Weddah and Om-el-Bonain” is a tragic story of two lovers. Meredith admired his work.

  3. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922), English writer and poet, published Sonnets and Songs by Proteus in 1875 and The Love Songs of Proteus in 1880. Symons seems to have conflated the two titles here.

  4. “A Ballad of Fair Ladies in Revolt” initially appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1876; it was later collected in Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of the Earth (1883).

  5. “Martin’s Puzzle” initially appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1865; it was later collected in Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of the Earth (1883), before finally appearing alongside “Juggling Jerry” and “The Old Chartist” in the Edition de Luxe.

  6. Robert Burns (1759–1796), a Scottish poet widely regarded as a precursor of the Romantics.

  7. Leconte de
Lisle (1818–1894), French poet of the Parnassian school.

  From Unsigned Review, Travelers Record (1892)1

  Debuting in 1865 with a print run of 50,000 and published by Travelers Insurance, the Travelers Record was one of the world’s first industrial in-house magazines. It featured letters purportedly from satisfied customers, articles about the dangers of modern life, literary and fine-arts reviews, and poetry, some of which was reprinted in British periodicals. This review addresses the 1891 pirated edition of “Modern Love,” published by Thomas Mosher, which included a foreword by the poet Elizabeth Cavazza. Only 400 copies of this edition were printed. Critical of Meredith’s peculiar variation on the sonnet form, this review is largely negative. It is, however, unique for its attempt to imagine what motivates the wife’s behavior. Readers will note that although this reviewer blames both husband and wife in “Modern Love” for their marital unhappiness, s/he—like Ellis (see “Advice Manuals and Social Commentary” in the next section)—insists that wives would do well to resign themselves to being ignored by their husbands.

  Strictly speaking, it is not a poem, but a set of fifty detached scenes, exactly corresponding to the sets of panels in the comic papers which tell stories without words. The intent is a narrative; the plan is a series of photographs of various occasions during the story, mixed with reflections by the hero and the author, and independent description. Whether this is the ideal form of poetical narrative might be questioned; but an author has a right to choose his own form. It gives a Carlylean effect of seeing the action by occasional flashes of lightening, and is not favorable to obvious sequence and consequently to intelligibility of motive; it makes the action seem arbitrary and capricious beyond need. The stanzas are of sixteen lines each, rhymed in fours. Mr. Swinburne allows that they are sonnets, and in spirit and genesis they are; but in metrical and artistic effect they are certainly not, with all deference to Mr. Swinburne and Mrs. Cavazza. The four groups of lines are often not “quatrains” at all, unless any four inter-rhyming lines from any poem are a quatrain: their burden does not always begin or end with themselves, and they have no relation except to the general sense of the stanza. The question would not be of much importance except that the lack of definition of quatrains robs the strophes2 of much potential beauty of form. But enough is left to make them exceedingly rich. By far the most luxurious in melodic beauty is No. 11, so delicious that it angers one with him. The man who can write poetry like that, and will not, deserves all the ills he has to bear. We would gladly swap all his “fire-bringing” for a hundred such poems. There are more philosophers now than the world knows what to do with; creators of beauty are always scarce, and he is a traitor to his mission in pouring out crabbed similes to be forgotten, in place of visions of loveliness to be a joy forever. The first parts of Nos. 39, 44, 45, and 47 are also very beautiful in different ways. In striking novelty and fierce strength of thought, none surpass Nos. 20 and 38, which make one wince with personal shame, like Hartley Coleridge’s terrible sonnet “If I have sinned.”3 But lack of ideas is nowhere Meredith’s fault.

  The title assumes the story to be typical of modern love in general, the motto assumes it to concern only a few finely strung natures; and the motto is correct. Ordinary human nature even now is grosser in action and duller in feeling; both the motive and the conduct of the poem would be unintelligible to the crowd. That does not make the story not worth telling; but it prevents extracting any general formula from it (though the author deduces one which in fact has nothing at all to do with the story). Not that the situation is very rare; but the ideality of action is, though by no means unknown. (Parenthetically, we cannot but smile at the way he, like all writers who deal with strong emotions, takes care to have no children to embarrass the story, though children are inherently probable. They make havoc with heroics and hysterics, and a melodramatic story-writer nearly always makes his married couples barren, often in defiance of all probability.) The root of the trouble is a wife’s unwillingness to have life progress beyond the days of courtship. This is common enough; but here the wife goes further, and reverses a woman’s usual position. She is hurt and jealous that her husband wishes to do a man’s work in the world, and have a life, outside hers and unshared by her, of manly activities and worldly interest; for herself she does not wish to face the realities of life’s work and duties. She wishes that both should live their whole lives in a haze of sentimentalities, possible and true for brief periods of delight, but as a continuous existence unreal and impossible. She does not tell him this, but broods over it in silent discontent; and at last he finds to his horror that she is burning incense to a new idol, not with any intent of gross infidelity, but simply to have a focus for her inner life of sentiment. The new is probably not finer than the old, but in her fancy of him his life is all her own. The husband has perfect and just confidence in his wife’s virtue, even when he gets hold of love-letters she has written to his rival; but that does not content him with the loss of her love, and he values her judgment too highly even to feel superiority to the rival,—a rather overstrained modesty, seeing how wholly subjective her fancy was, and how many Titanias have loved how many Bottoms with the ass’s head plainly visible.4 Violence would be wasted, for he could not reclaim her soul with a revolver. Finally they settle down to live a whited sepulchre of a life, unchanged in surface amity but icily apart beneath; which also is not novel. This becomes so intolerable that the wife makes repeated efforts to break the barrier of silence and once more talk heart to heart; and if he really wanted back her love he would have welcomed the chance. But rankling hurt for the past, and suspicion for the present and future, are stronger than tenderness, or than his intellectual judgment that he cannot blame her when he has a certain perfumed glove in his desk; and he rebuffs all overtures. Then he takes a sentimental mate of his own to match hers, and once the two couples pass each other—a pleasant meeting. Finally she leaves him and goes into hiding, to enable him, as she believes, to possess his new love. After long search he finds her dying by the sea; and in a last kiss and a last look into each other’s eyes, the truth as to both hearts and the long heart-break is revealed, too late for any further joy on earth.

  The author sums up by saying that “They fed not on the advancing hours”; or in other words, would not trim their course by the sweep of life’s own channel as it momently revealed itself, but tried to make the river flow in circles where they liked best to stay. This is true of the wife, but hardly just to the husband, who fed on the advancing hours till he was wronged and endangered. His fault, it is intimated, was in not pretending unconsciousness of any change in his wife, and waiting patiently till she outgrew her folly and gave back her love; but what security had he that it would ever have come back? The end of that path is usually the divorce court or the devil; and the higher a man’s nature, the less can he be satisfied with mere chastity, and let love come or go as it will. Both parties are unreal. A woman so obstinately unreasonable would not have been so high-minded and pure; a man willing to keep up the phantom of a home with his wife nestling to a neighbor, for any motive but to welcome the first hint of return, justifies her. The action will do for a poem; but it is not life.

  The author draws the further deduction that the soul should not be “hot for certainties in this our life.” But this is gratuitous and irrelevant, for certainties (ultimate truths) were exactly what the wife did not want, and the husband only wanted rational probabilities. It is, however, the author’s grand discovery, which constitutes him a “fire-bringer”; this and that we need “more brain.” That is, we take it, Accept the inevitable calmly and keep your soul at peace, for you can gain nothing and find out nothing by its tumult. Whatever comes is probably best and certainly unavoidable, so what is the good of worrying over it? Don’t blink facts, don’t shirk truth, but don’t kick at them, nor forego possible solutions in despair of fathoming all.

  Now, this in our judgment is much superior to Browning’s theorem. It is emi
nently sensible, practical, and healthy; the soundest of advice. But novel or deep or satisfying—No! It is an insult to a struggling and aspiring soul to put that before it as a solution of its problem. It begs the very questions asked by millions of souls in this unsettled age,—by what token they may know if life is worth living, or the universe only a giant sweep of aimless forces; if effort pays in the finest sense, if duty pays, if righteousness pays, if heed to conscience pays. Once men were sure, and now they are not sure; perhaps again they will be sure. But there is no help in a seer who only tells us to be satisfied not to know, and that “the universe is all right.” He is not God, and no one else can assure us of that. A great thinker and artist Mr. Meredith may be, a strong thinker and fine poet he certainly is; but we cannot accept him as a “fire-bringer” on the evidence of this poem. He brings none to us.

  Notes

  1. “George Meredith’s ‘Modern Love,’” Travelers Record (February 1892): 6.

  2. strophe: usually refers to a section of a choral ode in Greek drama; perhaps the author is using its more general connotation from the Latin—to turn or twist—to refer to the volta of a sonnet.

  3. David Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849), the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poet and critic.

  4. Titanias . . . Bottoms: referring to characters from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Titania is the beautiful queen of the fairies, whose attraction to Nick Bottom, the arrogant and rude weaver whose head has been turned into that of an ass, is attributable only to a magic potion.

  Advice Manuals and Social Commentary

  Many of the central emotive themes of “Modern Love”—the angst and frustration of disconnection, the jealousy precipitated by adultery or fear of adultery, the desire to assign blame in the aftermath of the breakdown of a relationship—are so universally familiar that they can be immediately appreciated. Understanding the particular social context of the middle- and upper-class Victorian couple nevertheless helps to account for the strength and intensity of those emotive themes. Sarah Stickney Ellis’s conduct manual articulates some of the expectations the Victorian bride faced, and frames the wife’s proper role as one of constant self-effacement in support of her husband and family. While acknowledging that the role will be difficult at times, Ellis suggests that the only real happiness available to a wife is the satisfaction of fulfilling her domestic duties. William Cobbett also frames the role of husband in terms of duty, and encourages men to tend to the emotional needs of their wives, if only to prevent possible adultery. In both manuals, the inherent inequality of the Victorian marriage is evident, as is an emphasis on dutiful obedience to social expectations. These texts, along with John Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens,” from Sesame and Lilies, indicate how fraught ideas of feminine desire were in the mid-nineteenth century: Ellis’s manual suggests a complete repression of a wife’s desire; Ruskin, by suggesting that women are only passive beings, affirms Ellis’s rejection of feminine desire; and Cobbett implicitly brings women’s purported penchant for cheating to the forefront through his repeated insistence that a man must guard against his wife’s infidelity. These texts help to explain why the husband in “Modern Love” is so troubled by his wife’s infidelity, why he does not regard his own as similarly problematic, and why his wife might opt for suicide rather than face life after the breakdown of her marriage: the wife not only violated her marriage vows, but rejected the very definition of woman’s position in the family unit and in society beyond.