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

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

  MODERN LOVE AND POEMS OF THE ENGLISH ROADSIDE, WITH POEMS AND BALLADS

  George Meredith

  EDITED BY Rebecca N. Mitchell and Criscillia Benford

  Yale

  UNIVERSITY PRESS

  NEW HAVEN & LONDON

  IN ASSOCIATION WITH

  THE BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY

  Frontispiece: Portrait of George Meredith by Jacques Reich, pencil on paper, before 1910. Image courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. MS Vault Shelves Meredith Notebooks 1–10, 10A.

  Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College.

  Copyright © 2012 by Yale University.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers . .

  Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office).

  Set in Fournier MT type by Newgen North America.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Meredith, George, 1828–1909.

  Modern love and Poems of the English roadside, with poems and ballads / George Meredith ; edited by Rebecca N. Mitchell and Criscillia Benford.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-300-17317-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-300-18910-0 (e-book)

  I. Mitchell, Rebecca N. (Rebecca Nicole), 1976–. II. Benford, Criscillia. III. Meredith, George, 1828–1909. Poems of the English roadside. IV. Title.

  PR5008.M6 2013

  821′.8—dc23

  2012012358

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  List of Plates

  Note on the Text

  Acknowledgments

  List of Abbreviations

  George Meredith: A Brief Chronology

  Introduction

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

  Grandfather Bridgeman

  The Meeting

  Modern Love

  Roadside Philosophers

  Juggling Jerry

  The Old Chartist

  The Beggar’s Soliloquy

  The Patriot Engineer

  Poems and Ballads

  Cassandra

  The Young Usurper

  Margaret’s Bridal-Eve

  Marian

  The Head of Bran

  By Morning Twilight

  Autumn Even-Song

  Unknown Fair Faces

  Phantasy

  Shemselnihar

  [A roar thro’ the tall twin elm-trees]

  [When I would image her features]

  [I chafe at darkness in the night]

  By the Rosanna

  Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn

  The Doe: A Fragment (From “Wandering Willie”)

  Contexts

  CONTEMPORARY REACTIONS

  Unsigned Review, Parthenon (1862)

  R. H. Hutton, Spectator (1862)

  J. W. Marston, Athenaeum (1862)

  A. C. Swinburne, Spectator (1862)

  Frederick Maxse, Morning Post (1862)

  From Unsigned Review, Westminster Review (1862)

  Unsigned Review, Saturday Review (1863)

  William Sharp, from Sonnets of This Century (1886)

  Arthur Symons, from Westminster Review (1887)

  From Unsigned Review, Travelers Record (1892)

  ADVICE MANUALS AND SOCIAL COMMENTARY

  Sarah Stickney Ellis, from The Wives of England (1843)

  William Cobbett, from Advice to Young Men, and (Incidentally) to Young Women, in the Middle and Higher Ranks of Life (1862)

  John Paget, from “The English Law of Divorce” (1856)

  John Ruskin, from Sesame and Lilies (1865)

  John Stuart Mill, from The Subjection of Women (1869)

  ON THE SENSES

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

  A. B. Johnson, from The Physiology of the Senses (1856)

  George Wilson, from The Five Senses (1860)

  NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETICS

  Arthur Henry Hallam, from “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry” (1831)

  Matthew Arnold, from “Preface” to Poems (1853)

  Gerald Massey, from “Poetry—The Spasmodists” (1858)

  Henry James, from “Charles Baudelaire” (1876)

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Author’s Preface” (1883)

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, Letter on “Harry Ploughman” (1887)

  OTHER POETRY

  John Keats, from “Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain . . .” (1817) and “On the Sea” (1817)

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)

  Coventry Patmore, from The Angel in the House (1854–62)

  Charles Baudelaire, “Causerie” (1857)

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from Maud (1859)

  Christina Rossetti, from “Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets” (1881)

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Harry Ploughman” (1887)

  Textual Variants

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Index of First Lines

  Subject Index

  Plates

  Fig. 1 (frontispiece). Portrait of George Meredith by Jacques Reich

  Fig. 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

  Fig. 3. Illustration for “The Meeting” by John Everett Millais

  Fig. 4. Saint Michael striking down the Demon by Raphael

  Fig. 5. Illustration for “The Last Words of Juggling Jerry” by Hablot Knight (H. K.) Browne

  Fig. 6. Illustration for “The Old Chartist” by Frederick Sandys

  Fig. 7. Illustration for “The Beggar’s Soliloquy” by Charles Keene

  Fig. 8. Illustration for “The Patriot Engineer” by Charles Keene

  Fig. 9. Portrait of Annie Miller as Cassandra by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  Fig. 10. Illustration for “The Head of Bran” by John Everett Millais

  Fig. 11. Title page from A Tragedy of Modern Love, autograph manuscript, signed by George Meredith

  Fig. 12. Sonnet XXV from A Tragedy of Modern Love, autograph manuscript signed by George Meredith

  Note on the Text

  In honor of the 150th anniversary of its first publication, Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads has been newly edited and annotated. Our goal has been twofold: 1) to return Meredith’s poetic masterpiece “Modern Love” to its original textual context, allowing Modern Love to be received, once again, as a meaningful whole; and 2) to provide readers with a readable and reliable reprint of Meredith’s second volume of poetry, one that is suitable for classroom use, scholarly work, and pleasure reading.

  Our copy-text is
Chapman and Hall’s 1862 edition of Modern Love. To facilitate discussion of the kinds of revisions Meredith made to his poetry, we have collated the poems in this text with manuscript versions held by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and by the New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, as well as the versions of the poems that appear in Constable’s The Works of George Meredith, the last edition of these poems that Meredith saw through the press. Commonly referred to as the Edition de Luxe, Constable’s The Works of George Meredith was edited by Meredith’s son William Maxse Meredith and appeared in thirty-six volumes from 1896 to 1911. Meredith oversaw his son’s work through volume 32. Meredith’s poetry appears in volumes 29–31 (1898) and 33 (1910); these volumes are also titled Poems, Volumes 1–4. Poems that were first published in the journal Once a Week have been collated with the version published in that periodical. Readers will find the results of our collation work in our “Textual Variants” appendix.

  Because, as Meredith’s letters document, he and his son were imperfect proofreaders, we have also emended the text to reflect the hand corrections that Meredith made to presentation copies of the 1862 edition, where appropriate. We have refrained from making silent corrections, instead opting to note changes based upon these sources in our “Variants” appendix. In poems more than one page long, we include an ornament . . . to indicate when the page break in the current volume corresponds to a stanza break in the original.

  We are indebted, as is any scholar of Meredith’s work, to Phyllis Bartlett’s The Poems of George Meredith (Yale University Press, 1978). Her edition, with its extensive notes and detailed variants, was a foundational resource for our work. Further, she narrates the composition and publication history of each poem; we have not reproduced those narratives here. We encourage anyone interested in further exploring these issues to consult Bartlett.

  This edition includes a “Contexts” section designed to situate Modern Love within contemporary debates about poetics, sensory perception, and marriage. These supplementary readings have been reprinted faithfully, with few exceptions: when Meredith’s verse is quoted, we have standardized the quotations to reflect the 1862 copy text. We reprint quotations of two lines or fewer; for longer quotations, we direct readers to the appropriate lines in the full poems. We have standardized notation of the title “Modern Love,” using quotation marks when the sonnet sequence is cited and italics when the volume title is intended. We have also standardized punctuation order and removed quotation marks around block quotations. We have used [sic] sparingly, only in cases when an author’s mistakes might otherwise lead to readerly confusion. All other instances of variation in capitalization and spelling, as well as Victorian syntactic idiosyncrasies and penchant for misquoting, are rendered as in the originals. For corrected clarifications and versions of content-related misquotations, see footnotes.

  In helping readers create a rich context for Modern Love, we hope that this edition will allow a fuller appreciation of its “modernity,” emotional complexity, and playful weirdness. We have annotated most obscure or confusing words, allusions, and some matters of historical context. Still, Meredith’s poetry is infamously difficult; no amount of annotation can obviate the need for careful reading.

  Acknowledgments

  The editors would like to thank the staff of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, especially Eva Guggemos, Anne Marie Menta, Ellen Doon, and Timothy Young. A special thanks is due to the late Frank Turner, who championed this project from the start. The staff of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library was also helpful in facilitating our access to Meredith’s manuscripts, especially Dr. Isaac Gerwirtz and Anne Garner.

  Thanks to John E. Donatich, Dan Heaton, and Niamh Cunningham at Yale University Press. We’d also like to thank our assiduous copy editor, Kate Davis. Thanks also to Kathy Psomiades, for her valuable input on the proposal, and to Alison MacKeen, without whom this project would not have come to fruition.

  Mrs. P. M. Sedgwick, great-granddaughter of George Meredith, generously granted permission from Meredith’s estate to reprint pages from the holograph “Modern Love” manuscript held in the Beinecke Library. We sincerely thank her for this graciousness.

  For permission to reprint Sir John Squire’s translation of Baudelaire’s “Causerie” from Poems and Baudelaire Flowers, we are indebted to his estate, and especially to his grandson, Roger Squire.

  The letter from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges appears by permission of Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Province of the Society of Jesus. The images from Once a Week and the edition of Modern Love inscribed to Robert Browning are held in Yale University’s Beinecke Library, which granted permission for their reproduction here.

  We also thank Marty Gould for his inimitable wit and moral support. Criscillia Benford would like to thank Duke and Stanford Universities for their financial and practical support, as well as William Softky for his impressive power to amuse and his patience with having George Meredith as his rival for so very long. To the “old friends of her halts”—Danika Brown, Ljiljana Coklin, Susan Derwin, Anna Maria Jones, Marci McMahon, Ivan Montiel, Anna Tillett, and Kay Young—Rebecca Mitchell sends the “kind thanks” she owes them.

  Abbreviations

  1862 Meredith, George. Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads. London: Chapman and Hall, 1862.

  Beinecke The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Berg Interleaved “Copy 7” of Meredith’s Poems in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature of the New York Public Library.

  EdL Meredith, George. The Works of George Meredith. Ed. William Maxse Meredith. London: Constable, 1898–1911. Known as the Edition de Luxe. The poems are contained in volumes 29–31 (also numbered 1–3), published in 1898 under GM’s supervision, and volume 33 (also numbered 4), published posthumously in 1910.

  errata “Errata in the Poems.” Bibliography and Various Readings. Volume 36 of The Works of George Meredith.

  GM George Meredith.

  Johnson Johnson, Diane. The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives. New York: Knopf, 1972.

  Letters Cline, C. L. The Letters of George Meredith. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.

  ms manuscript.

  NB A Early notebook belonging to George Meredith held by the Beinecke Library, beginning after endpaper with bookplate.

  NB B Opposite end of NB A.

  OaW Once a Week.

  PB Meredith, George. The Poems of George Meredith. Ed. Phyllis B. Bartlett. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Based upon Edition de Luxe versions, the poems from Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads are contained in volume 1.

  Poems Meredith, George. Poems. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1851.

  Stevenson Stevenson, Lionel. The Ordeal of George Meredith: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953.

  BEIN MSS 7 BEIN GEN MSS 7: George Meredith’s copy of 1862 edition with his ms corrections. Bookplate of Paul Lemperly, hand-corrected by Meredith.

  BEIN 862.1 BEIN Meredith 862, Copy 1: 1862 edition presentation copy inscribed to “Robert Browning from the author” in Meredith’s hand. Hand-corrected errata.

  BEIN 862.2 BEIN Meredith 862, Copy 2: 1862 edition corrected by GM. Cross-referencing these changes with those in the EdL and PB, these changes seem to be his revisions for the EdL. They are extensive and do not appear in any other presentation copy. Revisions are, alas, undated.

  BEIN 862.5 BEIN Meredith 862, Copy 5: 1862 edition presentation copy inscribed to “Mrs. Thomas Carlyle, from the author” in Meredith’s hand. Hand-corrected errata.

  BEIN 862.6 BEIN Meredith 862, Copy 6: 1862 edition autograph copy, corrected in Meredith’s hand.

  BEIN Purdy BEIN Purdy 433: 1862 edition presen
tation copy inscribed to William Virtue by GM with notation “Full of errata, too numerous to indicate,” though some are indeed indicated. On frontispiece: “Meredith’s 2nd book of poems. This is the original binding, and rare.” (Copies are sometimes found in a much more modern-looking blue cloth binding, which was used in later years for the copies sold after GM’s poetry had become appreciated.)

  George Meredith: A Brief Chronology

  1828 Born in Portsmouth on 12 February.

  1842–44 Studies at a school run by the Moravian Brothers in Neuwied, Germany.

  1845 Is articled to Richard Charnock (a London solicitor).

  1849 First published poem, “Chillianwallah,” appears in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal on 7 July.

  Number 11 (the first of five numbers) of the “Monthly Observer,” a handwritten journal started by Meredith and his friends, appears in January; subsequent numbers appear in March, April, June, and July.

  Marries Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls on 9 August.

  1851 Publishes Poems with John W. Parker and Son at his own expense in May.

  1853 Arthur Gryffydh Meredith born on 13 June.

  1856 Publishes The Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian Entertainment with Chapman and Hall.

  1855 Sits for Henry Wallis’s Chatterton, a painting exhibited to much acclaim at the Royal Academy in 1856.

  1856 Mary Ellen and Wallis begin their affair sometime between July and August; by this time she is no longer living with George Meredith.

  1857 Publishes Farina: A Legend of Cologne with Chapman and Hall.

  Takes over “Belle Lettres” section from George Eliot in Westminster Review in April.

  1858 Stops writing “Belle Lettres” for Westminster Review in January.

  Harold Meredith (nicknamed Felix), son of Mary Ellen and Wallis, born on 18 April.

  Mary Ellen elopes with Wallis to Capri that autumn.

  Begins life-long friendship with Captain Frederick Augustus Maxse.

  1859 Publishes The Ordeal of Richard Feverel in three volumes with Chapman and Hall.

  Mary Ellen returns to England without Wallis.

  1860 Evan Harrington appears in Once a Week from 11 February to 13 October.