Modern Love in Context
Readers familiar only with the sonnet sequence “Modern Love” might be surprised to learn that the last poem in the Modern Love volume recounts a rustic family’s encounter with a deer. The volume’s variety is, however surprising, an indicator of the complexity and idiosyncrasy of Meredith’s poetry. The supplementary prose and verse selections in the “Contexts” section of this edition are intended to complement the Modern Love poems by providing insight into the social, cultural, and aesthetic landscape of Meredith’s time. In addition to social commentary and texts on poetic and sensory theory, the “Contexts” section includes contemporary reviews of Modern Love, along with a number of poems by contemporary writers. Baudelaire’s sonnet “Causerie,” as mentioned previously, offers one touchstone; others include two sonnets by Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s innovative “Harry Ploughman,” as well as selections from Tennyson’s Maud, Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, and Christina Rossetti’s “Monna Innominata.” These poems exemplify several key themes in nineteenth-century poetry. Compare, for example, the sublimity of nature in Keats’s “On the Sea” to its more intimate depiction in Meredith’s “Autumn Even-Song,” the unhinged speaker in Tennyson’s Maud to the hysterical Margaret who collapses on her wedding night in “Margaret’s Bridal-Eve,” or the faithful Honoria of Patmore’s “The Angel of the House” to the inconstant “Madam” of “Modern Love.” In each instance, Meredith recuperates an image while transforming it, lovingly ironizing the tropes, stretching standard forms and thematic expectations to accommodate the demands of a modern life defined by evolving pressures and endless changes—the “On-on-on” described in “By the Rosanna.” Modernity in Modern Love is not merely shocking, overtly sexual, or intentionally amoral. The poems are equally nostalgic, idyllic, and sometimes even a little cheesy. While other poets may adopt a single affective register more consistently, one of the great achievements of the Modern Love volume is its sustained ambivalence toward contemporary life and literature, an ambivalence that is at once sincerely Victorian and vividly fresh.
This introduction has enumerated only some of the connections between Meredith’s poems and these supplementary texts, but scholars, students, and interested readers alike are sure to draw additional parallels. Much of the complexity and richness of Meredith’s poetry arises from his ability to synthesize the many, varied sources that influenced his writing, so that their traces are evident even as his poetry is unmistakably his. Meredith had indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, “become an adjective,” but it is a testament to the quality of his writing that the connotations of that adjective—“Meredithian”—are myriad. To be “Meredithian” is to be penetrating, ironic, obscure, witty, acerbic, intellectual, imaginative, eccentric, sensitive, or playful. Today’s reader will doubtless find these traits and more in this complete edition of Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads.
FIGURE 2: Title page of Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads, inscribed in the author’s hand to Robert Browning. Image courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. BEIN Meredith 862 Copy 1.
Notes
1. Edward Clodd, Memories (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 146.
2. Alice Gordon, “The First Meeting between George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson,” Bookman (January 1895): 111.
3. “Mr. George Meredith’s Poems,” Saturday Review (24 October 1863): 562. See “Contemporary Reactions” in “Contexts” section for full review.
4. “George Meredith as Poet,” Saturday Review (13 July 1901): 49.
5. “Notes of the Week,” Saturday Review (15 February 1908): 192.
6. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics. (London: Routledge, 1996), 441.
7. Neil Fraistat, “Introduction,” in Poems in their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 5–6. See also Jerome McGann’s, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), for a consonant discussion of the importance of apprehending poems within their original textual context.
8. Stevenson, 8.
9. Ibid., 32.
10. Letters, I.8.
11. Stevenson, 47.
12. See for example his 3 June 1864 letter to William Hardman in Letters, I.262.
13. Joseph Phelan, The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 43.
14. Letters, I.110.
15. Ibid.
16. J. W. Marson, “Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads,” Athenaeum (31 May 1862): 719; “Mr. George Meredith’s Poems,” Saturday Review (24 October 1863): 562. For full versions of these reviews, see “Contemporary Reactions.”
17. “Mr. George Meredith’s Poems,” 563.
18. Marston, 720.
19. Coventry Patmore, “Art II. Festus: A Poem,” Edinburgh Review 104 (October 1865): 338.
20. Ibid.
21. Marston, 719.
22. R. H. Hutton, “Mr. George Meredith’s ‘Modern Love,’” Spectator (24 May 1862): 580–81. See “Contemporary Reactions” for full review.
23. Jason Rudy, “Rhythmic Intimacy, Spasmodic Epistemology,” Victorian Poetry 42, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 453.
24. Herbert Tucker, “Glandular Omnism and Beyond: The Victorian Spasmodic Epic,” Victorian Poetry 42, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 430, 444.
25. Ibid., 441–42.
26. Algernon C. Swinburne, “Letter to the Editor,” Spectator (7 June 1862): 632–33. See “Contemporary Reactions” for full review.
27. Ibid., 632.
28. “I claim rather to be something of a metricist,” wrote Meredith, “as you would see, if you came across a boyish volume of poems of mine. . . . I wish to [see the proofs], especially as I want to turn a phrase of or two in ‘Juggling Jerry,’ which piece, remember, must not be too rigidly criticised in its rhythm, being the supposed speech of a vagabond freethinker.” Letters, I.38.
29. Linda K. Hughes, The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 16.
30. Leigh Hunt and S. Adams Lee, The Book of the Sonnet (Boston: Robert’s Brothers, 1867), 9.
31. Mid-nineteenth-century poets frequently modified these structures: for example, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote several curtal sonnets—e.g., “Pied Beauty,” which has only eleven lines—and Charles Baudelaire used the enclosed sonnet, which sandwiches tercets between the quatrains, and the reversed sonnet (also called the sonettessa) in which the sestet precedes the octave.
32. See William Sharp’s Sonnets of This Century in “Contemporary Reactions” section and, for a contrasting view, Kenneth Crowell’s “Modern Love and the Sonetto Caudato: Comic Intervention through the Satiric Sonnet Form” in Victorian Poetry 48, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 539–57.
33. Meredith claimed that “Modern Love” was “a dissection of the sentimental passion of these days” and insisted that it “could only be apprehended by the few who would read it many times.” Letters, I.160. For an alternate take on the relationship between “Modern Love” and the Petrarchan sonnet, see Alison Chapman, “Sonnets and Sonnet Sequences,” in A Companion to Victorian Poetry (London: Blackwell, 2002), 111: “The extra two lines attempt to delay the sonnet’s traditional volta and closure, just as the tortured speaker attempts to postpone the final dissolution of his marriage. . . . ‘Modern Love’ is a sustained and tortured parody of Petrarchanism (see in particular sonnet 30), which mourns figuratively and literally the fruitless, barren marriage.”
34. For detailed information on mid-century challenges by female poets to this particular convention, see Marianne Van Remoortel’s “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and Women’s Sonnets of the 1800s–1840s,” in Lives of the Sonnet, 1787–1895 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 89–114.
35. Cynthia Tucker, �
��Meredith’s Broken Laurel: ‘Modern Love’ and the Renaissance Sonnet Tradition,” Victorian Poetry 10, no. 4 (Winter 1972): 354. See also Stephen Regan, “The Victorian Sonnet, from George Meredith to Gerard Manley Hopkins,” Yearbook of English Studies 36, no. 2 (2006): 17–34; and Dorothy Mermin, “Poetry as Fiction: Meredith’s Modern Love,” ELH 43 (1976): 100–19. On the numerous efforts to narrativize “Modern Love,” see Van Remoortel’s “The Inconstancy of Genre: Meredith’s Modern Love,” in Lives of the Sonnet, 115–39.
36. Cf. Sonnet V.4–5: “She treated him as something that is tame, / And but at other provocation bites.”
37. Norman Friedman, “The Jangled Harp—Symbolic Structure in Modern Love,” Modern Language Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1957): 12.
38. W. E. Aytoun, “Ancient and Modern Ballad Poetry,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 379 (May 1847): 623.
39. Algernon Swinburne, “The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” in Essays and Studies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), 87.
40. Marston, 720.
41. In a letter to Augustus Jessopp, 13 November 1861, Meredith writes: “Apropos of the ‘Rosanna,’ it was written from the Tyrol, to a friend, and was simply a piece of friendly play. Which should not have been published, you add? Perhaps not, but it pleased my friend, and the short passage of description was a literal transcript of the scene. Moreover, though the style is open to blame, there is an idea running through the verses, which, while I was rallying my friend, I conceived to have some point for a larger audience.” Letters, I.109.
42. Arthur Simpson, “Meredith’s Alien Vision: ‘In the Woods,’” Victorian Poetry 20, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 113.
43. “By the Rosanna,” line 30.
44. For more on this connection, see Carl Ketcham, “Meredith and the Wilis,” Victorian Poetry 1, no. 4 (November 1963): 241–48.
MODERN LOVE AND POEMS OF THE ENGLISH ROADSIDE, WITH POEMS AND BALLADS
Affectionately Inscribed
to
Captain Maxse, R.N.1
Notes
1. Frederick Augustus Maxse (1833–1900), lifelong friend of Meredith. Though eventually a Rear Admiral in the Royal Navy, Maxse turned to Radical politics after becoming disillusioned during his service in the Crimean War. He would be the model of the hero of Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career (1875). Meredith’s son William takes his middle name from Maxse.
Grandfather Bridgeman
I.
“Heigh, boys!” cried Grandfather Bridgeman, “it’s time before dinner to-day.”
He lifted the crumpled letter, and thump’d a surprising “Hurrah!”
Up jump’d all the echoing young ones, but John, with the starch in his throat,
Said, “Father, before we make noises, let’s see the contents of the note.”
The old man glared at him harshly, and, twinkling made answer: “Too bad!
“John Bridgeman, I’m always the whisky, and you are the water, my lad!”
II.
But soon it was known thro’ the house, and the house ran over for joy,
That news, good news, great marvels, had come from the solider boy;
Young Tom, the luckless scapegrace,1 the offshoot of Methodist John;
His grandfather’s evening tale, whom the old man hail’d as his son.
And the old man’s shout of pride was a shout of his victory, too;
For he call’d his affection a method: the neighbours’ opinions he knew.
III.
Meantime, from the morning table, removing the stout breakfast cheer,
The drink of the three generations, the milk, the tea, and the beer,
(Alone in its generous reading of pints stood the Grandfather’s jug)
The women for sight of the missive came pressing to coax and to hug.
He scatter’d them quick, with a buss2 and a smack; thereupon he began
Diversions with John’s little Sarah: on Sunday, the naughty old man!
IV.
Then messengers sped to the maltster,3 the auctioneer, miller, and all
The seven sons of the farmer who housed in the range of his call.
Likewise the married daughters, three plentiful ladies, prime cooks,
Who bow’d to him while they condemned, in meek hope to stand high in his books.
“John’s wife is a fool at a pudding,” they said, and the light carts up hill
Went merrily, flouting the Sabbath: for puddings well made mend a will.
V.
The day was a van-bird of summer:4 the robin still piped, but the blue,
A warm and dreamy palace with voices of larks ringing thro,’
Look’d down as if wistfully eyeing the blossoms that fell from its lap:
A day to sweeten the juices: a day to quicken the sap!
All round the shadowy orchard sloped meadows in gold, and the dear
Shy violets breathed their hearts out: the maiden breath of the year!
VI.
Full time there was before dinner to bring fifteen of his blood,
To sit at the old man’s table: they found that the dinner was good.
But who was she by the lilacs and pouring laburnums5 conceal’d,
When under the blossoming apple the chair of the Grandfather wheel’d?
She heard one little child crying, “Dear, brave Cousin Tom!” as it leapt:
Then murmur’d she: “Let me spare them!” and pass’d round the walnuts, and wept.
VII.
Yet not from sight had she slipped ere sharp feminine eyes could detect
The figure of Mary Charlworth. “It’s just what we all might expect,”
Was utter’d: and: “Didn’t I tell you?” Of Mary the rumour resounds,
That she is now her own mistress, and mistress of five thousand pounds.
’Twas she, they say, who cruelly sent young Tom to the war.
Miss Mary, we thank you now! If you knew what we’re thanking you for!
VIII.
But, “Have her in: let her hear it,” call’d Grandfather Bridgeman, elate,
While Mary’s black-gloved fingers hung trembling with flight on the gate.
Despite the women’s remonstrance, two little ones, lighter than deer,
Were loosed, and Mary imprison’d, her whole face white as a tear,
Came forward with culprit footsteps. Her punishment was to commence:
The pity in her pale visage they read in a different sense.
IX.
“You perhaps may remember a fellow, Miss Charlworth, a sort of black sheep,”
The old man tuned his tongue to ironical utterance deep:
“He came of a Methodist dad, so it wasn’t his fault if he kick’d.
“He earn’d a sad reputation, but Methodists are mortal strict.
“His name was Tom, and, dash me! but Bridgeman I think you might add:
“Whatever he was, bear in mind that he came of a Methodist dad.”
X.
This prelude dismally lengthen’d, till Mary, starting, exclaim’d,
“A letter, Sir, from your grandson?” “Tom Bridgeman that rascal is named,”
The old man answer’d, and further, the words that sent Tom to the ranks,
Repeated as words of a person to whom they all owed mighty thanks.
But Mary never blush’d: with her eyes on the letter, she sate,
And twice interrupting him falter’d, “The date, may I ask, Sir, the date?”
XI.
“Why, that’s what I never look at in a letter,” the farmer replied:
“Facts first! and now I’ll be parson.” The Bridgeman women descried
A quiver on Mary’s eyebrows. One turn’d, and while shifting her comb,
Said low to a sister: “I’m certain she knows more than we about Tom.
“She wants him now he’s a hero!”6 The same, resuming her place,
Begg’d Mary to check them the moment she found it a tedious case.
XII.
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Then as a mastiff swallows the snarling noises of cats,
The voice of the farmer open’d. “‘Three cheers, and off with your hats!’
“—That’s Tom! ‘We’ve beaten them, daddy, and tough work it was, to be sure!
“‘A regular stand-up combat: eight hours smelling powder and gore.
“‘I enter’d it Serjeant-Major,’—and now he commands a salute,
“And carries the flag of old England! Heigh! see him lift his foes on his foot!
XIII.
“—An officer! ay, Miss Charlworth, he is, or he is so to be;
“You’ll own war isn’t such humbug: and Glory means something, you see.
“‘But don’t say a word,’ he continues, ‘against the brave French any more.’
“—That stopt me: we’ll now march together. I couldn’t read further before.
“That ‘brave French’ I couldn’t stomach. He can’t see their cunning to get
“Us Britons to fight their battles, while best half the winnings they net!”
XIV.
The old man sneer’d, and read forward. It was of that desperate fight;—
The Muscovite7 stole thro’ the mist-wreaths that wrapp’d the chill Inkermann8 height,
Where stood our silent outposts: old England was in them that day!
O sharp work’d his ruddy wrinkles, as if to the breath of the fray
They moved! He sat bare-headed: his long hair over him slow,
Swung white as the silky bog-flowers in purple heath-hollows that grow.
XV.
And louder at Tom’s first person: acute and in thunder the ‘I’
Invaded the ear with a whinny of triumph, that seem’d to defy
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