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

by George Meredith

  [quotes “Modern Love” XVII and XXIII in their entirety]

  Where every stanza is a mosaic of the closest setting, a miniature of the finest drawing, quotation is powerless or impertinent. Still, to impart some notion of this wonderful production, we give the following:—

  [quotes “Modern Love” XLVI, XLVII, XLIX, and L in their entirety]

  If the ode we first spoke of shows Mr. Meredith’s poetical sympathy for and love of Nature, we think there can be no doubt that in “Modern Love” he has entered into the subtlest workings of two human hearts, and expressed the whole in the most gorgeous verse.

  We have left ourselves but little space to dwell on the many other attractions of this volume. The whole series called “Poems of the English Roadside” is particularly worthy of attention. “Juggling Jerry,” the first, is inimitable in its way. The worn-out old juggler coming to die on the common he had lived on as a boy, his reflections and jokes and manly resignation to his lot, are given with a broad, genial power of characterization very noteworthy. How well it begins:—

  [quotes “Juggling Jerry,” lines 1–4 from stanza I,

  and stanzas II and III in their entirety]

  We have spoken of these poems in terms of warm commendation, but not with one epithet more than they deserve, in our opinion. The probable addition of a new original genius to the goodly company of England’s poets is not a matter on which it is easy to speak with stoical calmness. “Take special care of the beautiful,” said Goethe, “for the useful can take care of itself.”6 Fully believing that Mr. Meredith is a true priest of the beautiful, ordained by Nature herself, we consider it a pleasure and a duty to give him a sincere welcome.

  Notes

  1. “Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads. By George Meredith. Chapman and Hall,” Parthenon (17 May 1862): 71–72. Maurice Buxton Forman identifies the authors of this review as J. C. Morison and N. E. S. A. Hamilton in Meredithiana: Being a Supplement to The Bibliography of Meredith (London: Dunedin Press, 1924), 15. We have been unable to corroborate this attribution.

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

  3. Thomas Hood (1799–1845), a British poet, illustrator, and humorist.

  4. gorse: evergreen bush with yellow flowers

  5. arrière pensée: afterthought or doubt

  6. A common misquotation from the second volume of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Thomas Carlyle translates the sentence thusly: “The useful encourages itself; for the multitude produce it, and no one can dispense with it: the beautiful must be encouraged; for few can set it forth, and many need it” (London: Chapman and Hall, 1824), 132.

  R. H. Hutton, Spectator (1862)1

  Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897) was an English theologian, editor, and journalist. He rose to prominence thanks to his contributions to The National Review, a journal he coedited with Walter Bagehot from 1855 to 1862. By the time he wrote this scathing review of Modern Love, he had also become a coeditor and proprietor of the Spectator, a politically influential, liberal journal. Hutton scorned Meredith’s decision to write a poem about marriage and sexual desire, denounced almost all of the volume’s poems as “meretricious,” and chided Meredith for failing to bring “original imaginative power or true sentiment” to the task of poetic creation. To obtain a better understanding of the kinds of ideas informing Hutton’s critique, readers should refer to Massey’s discussion of the Spasmodic school, Wilson’s discussion of the difference between the sense of sight and the sense of hearing, and Bain’s discussion of metaphor (see “On the Senses” and “Nineteenth-Century Poetics” sections).

  Clever bold men with any literary capacity are always tempted to write verse, as they can say so much under its artistic cover which in common prose they could not say at all. It is a false impulse, however, for unless the form of verse is really that in which it is most natural for them to write, the effect of adopting it is to make the sharp hits which would be natural in prose, look out of place—lugged in by head and shoulders—and the audacity exceedingly repellent. This is certainly the effect upon us of this volume of verse. Mr. George Meredith is a clever man, without literary genius, taste, or judgment, and apparently aims at that sort of union of point, passion, and pictorial audacity which Byron attained in “Don Juan.”2 There is, however, no kind of harmonious concord between his ideas and his expressions; when he is smart, as he is habitually, the form of versification makes the smartness look still more vulgar, and the jocularity jar far more than it would in prose. On the whole the effect of the book on us is that of clever, meretricious,3 turbid4 pictures, by a man of some vigour, jaunty manners, quick observation, and some pictorial skill, who likes writing about naked human passions, but does not bring either original imaginative power or true sentiment to the task. The chief composition in the book, absurdly called “Modern Love,” is a series of sonnets intended to versify the leading conception of Goethe’s “elective affinities.”5 Mr. Meredith effects this with occasional vigour, but without any vestige of original thought or purpose which could excuse so unpleasant a subject, and intersperses it, moreover, with sardonic grins that have all the effect of an intentional affection of cynicism. This is not quite always the case, however, or we should soon throw the book contemptuously aside; for the jocularities are intolerably feeble and vulgar. The best, or one of the best sonnets, describes the concealed tragedy of social life when the hero (if he is to be so called) with his wife and the lady for whom he has since formed a passion are walking on the terrace before dinner with a brilliant party:

  [quotes “Modern Love” XXXVII in its entirety]

  There is considerable vividness in this description, especially of the “grey seniors” who “question Time in irritable coughings,” but the intended poetry is meretricious; no one who feels truly can help feeling that to speak of “the low, rosed moon” as “the face of Music mute,” is a snatch at the glitter and varnish of apparent, not real poetry. There is no analogy, subtle or otherwise, between the round simplicity of the moon’s face and the spirit of music, which always involves the unity of melodious variety. A true poet has said,

  Slow, slow, fall

  With indecisive motion eddying down,

  The white-winged flakes, calm as the sleep of sound,

  Dim as a dream;6

  and this is beautiful, for it really translates the language of hearing into the language of sight. But to speak of the moon as “[the] face of Music mute,” appeals to no subtle analogy at all, and is a mere unmeaning eulogium on that admirable planet. Such a criticism is doubtless small,—but in these minute touches lies the true distinction between a poet and one

  Who hides with ornament his want of Art.7

  Mr. George Meredith has a sense of what is graphic, but he never makes an excursion beyond that into what he intends for poetry without falling into some trick of false ornamentation. For one more example we will take the most reflective of these sonnets, in which Mr. Meredith is teaching us how to learn from Nature not to attach ourselves irretrievably to any mortal thing. The idea is forcibly expressed till it is intended to rise into a sort of tragic climax at the end, when it soars into an absurd parody of Tennysonian metaphor that is a perfect specimen of the foolish-sublime:

  [quotes “Modern Love” XIII in its entirety]

  What is the “forever of a kiss”? Is Mr. Meredith trying to distinguish between “the transient” and “the permanent” in kisses, “das reine seyn” and “reine nichts” as the German sages say,8 and to single out the permanent element, that which expresses “the infinite.” If this rash suggestion be at all near the mark, we are still painfully in the dark as to the force of the word “renewed.” If the “renewed forever of a kiss” in any way refers to the renewal of this infinite element, as ordinary people would suppose—why is this the moment when we are exhorted to “lose calmly love’s great bliss”? If it be a leave-taking the f
orce of the word “renewed” on this particular crisis is hid from us. And what are we to say of the last line? Surely the “sound” of a kiss is not the true poetic and permanent element therein? If there is a “forever”—an eternal element—in these expressive symbolic actions at all, we submit that it is not in the sound,—that on the contrary the sound is an accidental and rather unfortunate adjunct and accident in them. And what can Mr. Meredith mean to suggest by speaking of them as sounding through a “listless hurricane of hair”? That which is heard through a hurricane—though we will not rashly answer for a “listless” hurricane, hurricanes usually appearing to us quite too much in earnest,—is usually a thunderclap and nothing less,—and if Mr. Meredith really means to be sentimental about a kiss that in any way resembles a thunderclap, we fear few will fall into his mood. Probably the “listless hurricane of hair” was meant as a gorgeous metaphor addressed to the eye and not to the ear—the hair being a non-conductor of sound, softening or smothering the loud report alluded to, and resembling a “listless hurricane,” only in the tumultuous tangle of agitated locks, expressive of the abandon of great grief. But turn it how you will we fear this meretricious piece of fine writing turns out to mean that some very loud sound has been heard in spite of great obstacles—which sound and which obstacles are supposed to heighten the anguish of renunciation. We fear there was something of a “listless hurricane” of ideas in the author’s mind when he extemporized this very noble language.

  This, it will be said, is verbal criticism; but that is not so. No clever man who prizes grandiloquent ornament above modest meaning is guilty of a mere verbal negligence, for this goes to the heart of the matter. Mr. Meredith, too (though, so far as we understand the intended drift of his “Modern Love,” we can accuse it of nothing worse than meddling causelessly, and somewhat pruriently, with a deep and painful subject, on which he has no convictions to express), sometimes treats serious themes with a flippant levity that is exceedingly vulgar and unpleasant, and perhaps even unjust to himself:

  [quotes “Modern Love” XXV in its entirety]

  This is wretched jocularity, as pointless as it is coarse, and though it is certainly the worst sonnet in the series, after reading the whole through several times, there seems to us no more purpose, poetic or moral, to be got out of the series, than out of this single sonnet,—the general drift being that there is a good deal of tragic misunderstanding, leading to desperate unfaithfulness in the marriage of proud minds who might have been very happy if they had so chosen;—a common-place which is illustrated with a freedom that mistakes itself for courage, and is simply bad and prurient taste. The thing has no kind of right to the title “Modern Love”: “Modern Lust” would be certainly a more accurate though not a true title, there is something of real love, but more of the other embodied in the sonnets.

  In the verses which do not hinge on this sort of subject, there is the same confusion between a “fast” taste and what Mr. Meredith mistakes for courageous realism,—poetic pre-Raphaelitism. For instance, Mr. Meredith has, in some verses on a scene in the Alps, given us a vision of the spirit of Beauty, whom he proposes in a vehement kind of half-and-half enthusiasm, one half sentiment the other half beer, to introduce to a London cabman. The poem is long and rambling, but we extract such verses as bear upon this great idea. The poet is speaking at first,—as we gather,—of the spirit of poetic beauty:

  [quotes “By the Rosanna,” lines 57–64, 73–80, 91–96, 109–18, and 137–44]

  This is not intellectual courage, nor buoyancy of spirit, nor anything but a spasmodic ostentation of fast writing.9 There are moods in which a man of high animal spirits is apt to think that any nonsense which amuses himself in an irrational moment is good enough to amuse the world; and because Mr. George Meredith was amused for the moment with the incongruity of fancying a greasy-coated cabman with his arm round Calliope,10 and with his own poor pun on that person’s “driving the world,” he thought it, we suppose, a mark of intellectual pluck to print it. It really is only noisy vulgarity, which, in so clever a man—for he is clever and graphic in his way—is exceedingly unworthy. There is a deep vein of muddy sentiment in most men, but they should let the mud settle, and not boast of it to the world. Mr. Meredith evidently thinks mud picturesque, as, indeed, it may be, but all picturesqueness is not poetry. One gains a graphic picture of a good deal of interior mental mud without verse to help us. Mr. Meredith thinks we do not get enough, and the solution given here is sometimes a very thick one indeed. The best thing in the book is “Juggling Jerry,” which is not vulgar nor tawdry, as so much of the volume is.

  Notes

  1. R. H. Hutton, “Mr. George Meredith’s ‘Modern Love,’” Spectator (24 May 1862): 580–81.

  2. “Don Juan”: a playful long poem by Byron in which the legendary womanizer becomes a man who is continually seduced by women

  3. meretricious: tastelessly showy

  4. turbid: unclear, hazy

  5. “elective affinities”: Goethe’s 1809 novella Elective Affinities was named after the scientific term that describes the tendency of certain chemicals or compounds to unite with others. Goethe used the term as a metaphor for exploring the emotional chemistry between individuals, and the novella explored the institution of marriage.

  6. From David Gray’s The Luggie and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1862).

  7. A slight misquotation from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711).

  8. “das reine seyn” and “reine nichts”: These are Hegel’s terms: “the pure being” and “the pure nothing.”

  9. See excerpt from Massey’s essay in the “Nineteenth-Century Poetics” section for more details regarding the Spasmodic school of poetry.

  10. Calliope: Greek muse of heroic poetry

  J. W. Marston, Athenaeum (1862)1

  John Westland Marston (1819–1890) was an English critic, poet, and playwright whose intellectual circle included Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Philip Bailey, and D. G. Rossetti. In 1856 he co-founded The National Magazine, a journal that published the work of Pre-Raphaelite and Spasmodic poets, and he wrote for the Athenaeum from 1850 to 1875. The Athenaeum was established in 1828 with the avowed aim of becoming “the resort of the distinguished philosophers, historians, and orators and poets of our day.” In its early years, it took a stand against “logrolling,” that is, publishing uncritically positive reviews of work by friends and business associates, and by the 1840s it had become one of England’s most influential journals devoted to literature, science, and the fine arts. Criticizing the poems in Modern Love for their vulgarity as well as their obscurity, Marston, like those who decried the Spasmodic school and the unnamed reviewers that Hallam criticizes in his essay on Tennyson’s poetry (see “Nineteenth-Century Poetics” section), insists that good poetry ought to be immediately intelligible to readers.

  The story of “Modern Love” is rather hinted at than told. There is nothing of orderly statement and little of clear and connected suggestion. These sonnets resemble scattered leaves from the diary of a stranger. The allusions, the comments, the interjections, all refer to certain particulars which are not directly related, and have to be painfully deduced. We are not sure that, after great labour, we have arrived at Mr. Meredith’s drift; but we are quite sure that, if we have, we do not care for it. So far as we have groped our way, the tale seems that of a man who is jealous of his wife. It appears that she is still faithful to the bonds of wedlock, though not to those of love. The phases of the husband’s torture are elaborately set forth—often with spasmodic2 indistinctness, but now and then with real force and imagination. A May-day recalls the Spring when she yet loved him. At a village festival he sardonically contrasts his refined misery with the coarse happiness of the revellers. At dinner the wedded pair play host and hostess, and mask their wretchedness with smiles. Here is a recollection of past joy, which appeals to the heart through ear and eye, like an echo from a ruin:

  [quotes “Modern Love” XVI i
n its entirety]

  Few of the sonnets, however, are so intelligible as the foregoing. The abrupt and obscure style which too often prevails may be learnt from the next example. Yet, whoever has patience to spell out its meaning, may catch a fine image in the closing lines:—

  [quotes “Modern Love” V in its entirety]

  It would seem—but we still write under correction—that the husband strives to console himself by the stimulant of a new passion. We infer that the expedient is a double failure. Yielding no relief to the conscientious husband, it revives, through jealousy, the all-but-dead affection of his wife. But her contrition apparently comes too late, for we think she takes poison. Still, this is a mere conjecture, from a dark hint or two, which the reader can interpret for himself:—