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

by George Meredith

  After what has been said respecting the obligation of obedience, it is almost superfluous to say anything concerning the more special point included in the general one—a woman’s right to her own property; for I need not hope that this treatise can make any impression upon those who need anything to convince them that a woman’s inheritance or gains ought to be as much her own after marriage as before. The rule is simple: whatever would be the husband’s or wife’s if they were not married, should be under their exclusive control during marriage; which need not interfere with the power to tie up property by settlement, in order to preserve it for children. Some people are sentimentally shocked at the idea of a separate interest in money matters, as inconsistent with the ideal fusion of two lives into one. For my own part, I am one of the strongest supporters of community of goods, when resulting from an entire unity of feeling in the owners, which makes all things common between them. But I have no relish for a community of goods resting on the doctrine, that what is mine is yours but what is yours is not mine; and I should prefer to decline entering into such a compact with anyone, though I were myself the person to profit by it.

  This particular injustice and oppression to women, which is, to common apprehensions, more obvious than all the rest, admits of remedy without interfering with any other mischiefs: and there can be little doubt that it will be one of the earliest remedied. Already, in many of the new and several of the old States of the American Confederation, provisions have been inserted even in the written Constitutions, securing to women equality of rights in this respect: and thereby improving materially the position, in the marriage relation, of those women at least who have property, by leaving them one instrument of power which they have not signed away; and preventing also the scandalous abuse of the marriage institution, which is perpetrated when a man entraps a girl into marrying him without a settlement, for the sole purpose of getting possession of her money. When the support of the family depends, not on property, but on earnings, the common arrangement, by which the man earns the income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to me in general the most suitable division of labour between the two persons. If, in addition to the physical suffering of bearing children, and the whole responsibility of their care and education in early years, the wife undertakes the careful and economical application of the husband’s earnings to the general comfort of the family; she takes not only her fair share, but usually the larger share, of the bodily and mental exertion required by their joint existence. If she undertakes any additional portion, it seldom relieves her from this, but only prevents her from performing it properly. The care which she is herself disabled from taking of the children and the household, nobody else takes; those of the children who do not die, grow up as they best can, and the management of the household is likely to be so bad, as even in point of economy to be a great drawback from the value of the wife’s earnings. In an otherwise just state of things, it is not, therefore, I think, a desirable custom, that the wife should contribute by her labour to the income of the family. In an unjust state of things, her doing so may be useful to her, by making her of more value in the eyes of the man who is legally her master; but, on the other hand, it enables him still farther to abuse his power, by forcing her to work, and leaving the support of the family to her exertions, while he spends most of his time in drinking and idleness. The power of earning is essential to the dignity of a woman, if she has not independent property. But if marriage were an equal contract, not implying the obligation of obedience; if the connexion were no longer enforced to the oppression of those to whom it is purely a mischief, but a separation, on just terms (I do not now speak of a divorce), could be obtained by any woman who was morally entitled to it; and if she would then find all honourable employments as freely open to her as to men; it would not be necessary for her protection, that during marriage she should make this particular use of her faculties. Like a man when he chooses a profession, so, when a woman marries, it may in general be understood that she makes choice of the management of a household, and the bringing up of a family, as the first call upon her exertions, during as many years of her life as may be required for the purpose; and that she renounces, not all other objects and occupations, but all which are not consistent with the requirements of this. The actual exercise, in a habitual or systematic manner, of outdoor occupations, or such as cannot be carried on at home, would by this principle be practically interdicted to the greater number of married women. But the utmost latitude ought to exist for the adaptation of general rules to individual suitabilities; and there ought to be nothing to prevent faculties exceptionally adapted to any other pursuit, from obeying their vocation notwithstanding marriage: due provision being made for supplying otherwise any falling-short which might become inevitable, in her full performance of the ordinary functions of mistress of a family. These things, if once opinion were rightly directed on the subject, might with perfect safety be left to be regulated by opinion, without any interference of law.

  Notes

  1. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1870), 83–90.

  2. John Morley, Recollections (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 47.

  On the Senses

  Is poetry, as John Stuart Mill suggested, the “logical opposite” of science? While the methods and goals of each discipline may be very different, the influence of nineteenth-century science on the literary arts cannot be underestimated. It is clear from the excerpts that follow that the ways in which Victorian scientists and physiologists understood sensory experience directly influenced the ways in which poets composed verse and readers conceived of their encounters with poetry.

  Victorian treatises on the material processes of sensory perception are particularly relevant with regard to Meredith’s poetry. As detractors and devotees alike noted, Meredith’s poetry is filled with sensuous detail. Recalling the representational strategies of Pre-Raphaelite painting, the poems of Modern Love render the material world as it appears to the senses—minutely, colorfully, and without conventional judgment. Meredith invites his readers to see, hear, touch, and smell worlds both ancient and modern. The excerpts included in this section reveal the ways that Meredith’s use of sensory detail engages with contemporary efforts to theorize the relationship between intellectual understanding and the body.

  What readers of these extracts may find most surprising is that even scientists insist that comprehending poetry is more than just an intellectual activity; it is also a physical one. Alexander Bain, for instance, explains that since the “essence of cerebral action” is “the transmission of influence along the nerve fibres from place to place,” cerebral life isolated from the body does not exist; even when we reminiscence, the brain communicates with the rest of the body. The body is thus important to his understanding of a person’s emotional experience of art. Bain also discusses the implications that his theory has for understanding literary tropes like metaphor, and he articulates his position on the standards by which one adjudicates art. Against those who claim that art should reflect nature and represent truth, Bain maintains that art should gratify “the senses and the aesthetic sensibilities,” leaving the precise rendering of revolting facts to science. Like Bain, Alexander Bryan Johnson is particularly concerned with the difficulty of communicating sensory experience via language. He offers metaphor as a solution to this problem, arguing that our ability to create and understand metaphors is rooted in sensory experience. Johnson offers a three-part taxonomy of knowledge—“sensible” knowledge (what one can learn through sensory experience), “intellectual” knowledge (what one understands verbally or intellectually), and “emotional” knowledge (the compensatory knowledge that we gain through analogy)—which seems almost postmodern. Using highly figurative language, the excerpts from George Wilson’s introduction to The Five Senses: Or, Gateways to Knowledge and his chapter on hearing focus on a concept central to the aforementioned discussions, most of the revi
ews of Modern Love, and the “Nineteenth-Century Poetics” selections: aesthetic pleasure. Although Wilson opens his chapter on hearing by describing how the ear works, he ends the chapter with a discussion of imagined sounds and his reasons for deeming hearing the most poetical of the five senses.

  Together these selections illuminate the connections between Victorian poetic and scientific discourses, reminding readers that the boundaries between the disciplines were less rigid then than they are today.

  Alexander Bain, from The Senses and the Intellect (1855)1

  Alexander Bain (1818–1903), one of the founders of modern psychology, was a Scottish natural philosopher, writer, and academic. A materialist and an associationist, Bain maintained that understanding how humans process sensory experiences was key to constructing a viable theory of mental life. Previously experienced sensations are revived as ideas according to “laws” of association, including the “Law of Contiguity,” “Law of Similarity,” and “Law of Contrast.” In the excerpts that follow, Bain explains why mental life necessarily involves the body, and he describes the relationship between his model of mind and artistic creation. Against those who regard fidelity to nature as the most important standard by which to judge poetry, Bain insists that the poet’s standard ought to be feeling. The numbers preceding each section are from Bain’s original; we retain them here for readers’ convenience.

  From “Of the Nerve Force and the Course of Power in the Brain”2

  25. . . . The organ of mind is not the brain by itself; it is the brain, nerves, muscles, and organs of sense. When the brain is in action, there is some transmission of nerve power, and the organ that receives or that originated the power is an essential part of the mechanism. A brain bereft of the spinal cord and spinal nerves is dead though the blood continues to flow to it; and these nerves,3 if plucked out of the limbs and other parts where they terminate, would probably not suffice to sustain the currents associated with mental life.

  It is, therefore, in the present state of our knowledge, an entire misconception to talk of a sensorium within the brain, a sanctum sanctorum,4 or inner chamber, where impressions are poured in and stored up to be reproduced in a future day. There is no such chamber, no such mode of reception of outward influence. A stimulus or sensation acting on the brain exhausts itself in the production of a number of transmitted currents or influences; while the stimulus is alive, these continue, and when these have ceased the impression is exhausted. The revival of the impression is the setting on of the currents anew; such currents show themselves in actuating the bodily members,—the voice, the eyes, the features,—in productive action, or in mere expression and gesture. The currents may have all degrees of intensity, from the fury of a death struggle to the languor of a half-sleeping reverie, or the fitful flashes of a dream, but their nature is still the same.

  We must thus discard for ever the notion of the sensorium commune, the cerebral closet, as a central seat of mind, or receptacle of sensation and imagery. We may be very far from comprehending the full and exact character of nerve force, but the knowledge we have gained is sufficient to destroy the hypothesis that has until lately prevailed as to the material processes of perception. Though we have not attained a final understanding of this obscure and complicated machinery, we can at least substitute a more exact view for a less; and such is the substitution now demanded of current action for the crude conception of a central receptacle of stored up impressions. Our present insight enables us to say with great probability, no currents, no mind. The transmission of influence along the nerve fibres from place to place, seems the very essence of cerebral action. This transmission, moreover, must not be confined within the limits of the brain: not only could no action be kept up and no sensation received by the brain alone, but it is doubtful if even thought, reminiscence, or the emotions of the past and absent, could be sustained without the more distant communications between the brain and the rest of the body—the organs of sense and of movement. It is true that between the separate convolutions of the brain, between one hemisphere and another, between the convoluted hemispheres and the corpora striata, thalami optici, corpora quadrigemina, cerebellum, medulla oblongata,5 and spinal cord, influence might be imagined to pass and repass without flowing into the active extremities or to the five senses, and might thus constitute an isolated cerebral life; but it is in the highest degree improbable that such isolation does or can exist. Nervous influence, rising in great part in sensation, comes at last to action; short of this nothing is done, no end served. However feeble the currents may be, their natural course is towards the organs accustomed to their sway. Hence the reason for adopting language, as we have done throughout the present chapter, to imply that the brain is only a part of the machinery of mind; for although a large part of all the circles of mental action lie within the head, other parts equally indispensable extend throughout the body.

  From “Illustrative Comparisons and Literary Art”6

  43. Of the Tropes and Figures described in Rhetoric, the largest half turn upon comparison.7 The metaphor, the simile, the allegory—are all forms of illustration by similitude, sometimes serving for clearness, or intellectual comprehension, at other times producing animation and effect. Their invention is due to the identifying intellect, which breaks through the partition caused by difference of subject to bring together what is similar in some one striking aspect or form. The literary and poetic genius of ages has accumulated a store of such comparisons; many of them have passed into common speech to enrich the dialects of everyday life. No man has ever attained rank in literature, without possessing in some degree the power of original illustration; and the reach or interval of disparity through which new similes are brought, makes a fair measure of the intellectual force of the individual mind in one of the leading characteristics of genius. The original fetches of Homer, of Aeschylus, of Milton, and above all of Shakespeare (I do not pretend to exhaust the list even of the first-rate minds), are prodigious. How remote and yet how grand the simile describing the descent of Apollo from Olympus: “he came like night.”8 The identifying faculty, be it never so strong, would hardly suffice to bring together things so widely different, but for some previous preparation serving to approximate the nature of the two things in the first instance, as we have already had occasion to remark of some of the scientific discoveries. Night itself must have been first personified in the mind to some extent, thereby reducing the immense disparity between the closing day and the march of a living personage down the mountain slopes. But with all due allowance for the highest susceptibility of mind to the poetic aspects of things, the power of adducing comparisons from remote regions, such as we find it in the greatest literary compositions, is stupendous and sublime.

  From “Fine Art Constructions—Imagination”9

  26. The Fine Art emotions properly so called, the emotions of harmony, beauty, sublimity, picturesqueness, pathos, humour, become associated in the artistic mind with the objects that radiate the influence on the beholder, and from the materials thus stored up and reproduced by association the artist makes his constructions. . . . The labour consists in getting up the constituent parts from the repositories of the mind, and in choosing and rejecting until the end in view is completely answered. Because the imaginations of a dreamer are easy and fluent, it does not follow that the imaginations of a musician, an architect, or a poet, shall be equally easy, although in principle the same, being governed by an emotion powerfully developed and richly associated with material. The artist has more stringent conditions to fulfill than the dreamer. He has to satisfy the reigning feeling of his piece,—the melody, harmony, pathos, humour,—of the composition; he has also to make this effect apparent to the minds of others; he has moreover to exclude many effects discordant to the taste of his audience; and if his work be the decoration of some object of common usefulness, he has to save the utilities while in search of the amenities. Every new restriction adds to the difficulty of a combining effort; and an arti
st may be so trammelled with conditions, that the exercise of imagination shall be rendered as laborious as any construction of the reason.10 To call up combinations that produce powerful and rich effects upon the minds of men is not easy in any art; but the gathered abundance of the artistic intellect is the secret of the power. The more rich the granary11 of material, the more is the artist prepared to submit to the numerous conditions involved in a really great performance.

  27. I do not purpose at present to enter upon a minute illustration of the mental processes of art-construction. Not only would a large space be requisite for spreading out the examples in detail, but there would soon come to be involved a strenuous polemical discussion in consequence of the prevalence of theories of art that seem to me erroneous. Conceiving as I do that the first object of an artist is to gratify the feelings of taste, or the proper aesthetic emotions, I cannot assent to the current maxim that nature is his standard, or truth his chief end. On the contrary, I believe that these are precisely the conditions of the scientific man; he it is that should never deviate from nature, and who should care for truth before all other things. The artist’s standard is feeling, his end is refined pleasure; he goes to nature and selects what chimes in with his feelings of artistic effect, and passes by the rest. He is not even bound to adhere to nature in her very choicest displays; his own taste being the touchstone, he alters the originals at his will. The scientific man, on the other hand, must embrace every fact with open arms; the most nauseous fungus, the most loathsome reptile, the most pestilential vapour, must be scanned and set forth in all its details.