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

  Publishes three-volume American edition of Evan Harrington.

  Begins working for Chapman and Hall as a reader.

  1861 Publishes three-volume English edition of Evan Harrington with Bradbury and Evans.

  Mary Ellen dies (probably from Bright’s Disease) in October.

  1862 Publishes Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads with Chapman and Hall on 28 April.

  Shares Queen’s House in Chelsea with D. G. Rossetti, W. M. Rossetti, and Swinburne.

  1864 Marries Marie Vulliamy on 20 September.

  Emilia in England appears in Revue des deux Mondes from 15 November to 15 December.

  Publishes an expanded, three-volume version of Emilia in England (renamed Sandra Belloni) with Chapman and Hall.

  1865 Publishes Rhoda Fleming in three volumes with Tinsley Brothers.

  William Maxse Meredith born to George and Marie on 26 July.

  1866 Vittoria appears in Fortnightly Review from 15 January to 1 December.

  1867 Publishes three-volume version of Vittoria with Chapman and Hall.

  Moves to Box Hill, Surrey, his home for the rest of his life.

  1870 The Adventures of Harry Richmond appears in Cornhill, illustrated by George Du Maurier, from September 1870 to November 1871.

  1871 Marie Eveleen Meredith born to George and Marie on 10 June.

  Publishes three-volume version of Harry Richmond with Smith and Elder.

  1874 Beauchamp’s Career appears in Fortnightly Review from August 1874 to December 1875.

  1876 Publishes three-volume version of Beauchamp’s Career with Chapman and Hall.

  1877 Delivers “On the Idea of Comedy, and the Uses of the Comic Spirit” on 2 February; the lecture is published in New Quarterly Magazine that April.

  1879 Sir Willoughby Patterne the Egoist appears in Glasgow Weekly Herald from 21 June 1879 to 10 January 1880.

  Publishes three-volume version of Sir Willoughby Patterne the Egoist as The Egoist with Kegan Paul.

  1880 The Tragic Comedians appears in Fortnightly Review from October 1880 to February 1881.

  Publishes two-volume version of The Tragic Comedians with Chapman and Hall.

  1883 Publishes, at his own expense, Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of the Earth (his first book of poetry since Modern Love) with Macmillan on 20 July.

  1884 Diana of the Crossways, Meredith’s first popular novel, appears in Fortnightly Review from June to December.

  1885 Publishes three-volume version of Diana of the Crossways with Chapman and Hall.

  Marie Meredith dies of cancer on 17 September.

  1887 Publishes Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life with Macmillan.

  1888 Publishes A Reading of Earth with Macmillan.

  1890 Arthur Gryffydh Meredith dies on 3 September. Publishes One of Our Conquerors in three volumes with Chapman and Hall.

  1892 Publishes Modern Love, A Reprint, to which is added The Sage Enamoured and the Honest Lady with Macmillan on 26 January.

  Publishes Poems: The Empty Purse, with Odes to the Comic Spirit, To Youth in Memory, and Verses with Macmillan in October.

  Is elected President of the Society of Authors.

  1893 Lord Ormont and His Aminta appears in Pall Mall Magazine from December 1893 to July 1894.

  1894 Publishes three-volume version of Lord Ormont and His Aminta with Chapman and Hall.

  1895 The Amazing Marriage appears in Scribner’s Magazine from January to December.

  Publishes two-volume version of The Amazing Marriage with Constable.

  1896 First volumes of Constable’s Edition de Luxe issued.

  1897 Publishes Selected Poems with Constable.

  1898 Publishes Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History with Constable on 21 October.

  1901 Publishes A Reading of Life with Constable in May.

  1905 Becomes the twelfth member of the Order of Merit.

  1909 Dies on 18 May.

  Constable publishes Poems Written in Early Youth and Last Poems.

  First volumes of Constable’s Memorial Edition are issued.

  1910 Celt and Saxon appear in Fortnightly Review from January to August, and in The Forum (New York) from January to June.

  Constable publishes Celt and Saxon in volume form.

  1911 Last volumes of Constable’s Edition de Luxe are issued.

  Introduction

  “They,” said George Meredith to his friend Edward Clodd, “say this or that is Meredithian; I have become an adjective.”1 “They” were the literary critics of Meredith’s day who had, toward the end of his life, turned from writing censorious reviews of his poetry and prose to writing countless articles and even a few books praising the work of “the sage of Box Hill.”2 No longer deemed a menace to Victorian morality, George Meredith was by the end of the nineteenth century a venerated elder statesman of English letters. He succeeded Alfred, Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors in 1892. Collected editions of his work began to appear in England and America in 1896. Numerous younger writers, including J. M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alice Meynell, and Robert Louis Stevenson, made pilgrimages to his home in Box Hill, Surrey, during the final decade of his life. And in 1905, King Edward VII made Meredith the twelfth member of the Order of Merit in recognition of his intellectual and artistic achievements. If “Meredithian” had once been an insult, it was no longer so.

  Perhaps the rehabilitation of Meredith’s literary reputation should not have surprised him, since such a process had already occurred on a smaller scale with regard to his most enduring poem, the sonnet sequence “Modern Love” (1862). Consider, for instance, the about-face performed by the Saturday Review. In 1862, an unsigned reviewer dismissed “Modern Love” as a “sickly little peccadillo,” insisting that Meredith’s decision to write a vivid sonnet sequence that thematized infidelity and sexual desire was “a mistake so grave as utterly to disqualify [him] from achieving any great and worthy result in art.”3 Yet by 1901 another critic for the Saturday Review would take the greatness and worthiness of “Modern Love” as givens. “Modern Love,” this critic wrote, is “Mr. Meredith’s masterpiece in poetry, and it will always remain, besides certain things of Donne and Browning, an astonishing feat in the vivisection of the heart in verse.”4 Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that on the occasion of Meredith’s eightieth birthday in 1908 the Saturday Review would offer the following breezy account of the shift in critical regard for the man and his work: “Everyone knows, and now everyone says, that Mr. Meredith is a genius, and supreme artist. There was a time when not everyone did know it, and when hardly anyone said it.”5

  Such a revolution in critical regard is hardly unique in the annals of literary history, but the extreme reactions to “Modern Love” tell us something about the heterogeneity that animates the poem itself, not just about a fickle readership. “Modern Love,” and the volume in which it first appeared, derives much of its power from its juxtaposition of nostalgia and prescience, its allegiance to traditional forms and playful disregard of those forms. The sonnet sequence delineates a thoroughly ambivalent set of emotions, documenting a husband’s simultaneous desire for and repulsion from his estranged wife; the couple enacts a traditional Victorian marriage—sometimes literally acting out the parts, as in Sonnet XVII—all the while demonstrating the limitations of the institution. Similar contrasts are writ large upon the Modern Love volume as a whole: while “Modern Love” foregrounds modernity in its very title, the poems that surround it evoke forms and subjects from the past, from a rusticated, rural England to Ancient Greece. Meredith deftly exploits the power of these and other contrasts, developing a unique voice that acknowledges the poetic discourse of his day and anticipates the sensibilities that defined literature for decades to come. One can trace the links between his verse and that of the Romantics, particularly John Keats, but also between his work and Charles Baudelaire’s as well as the Symbolists and Modernists who followed. Meredith’s verse d
oes not fit comfortably under any single label, as it manipulates the defining traits of all of these movements, leading to an amalgam that resists easy definition or, some would argue, easy comprehension. No wonder he has been characterized as a Pre-Raphaelite poet, a Spasmodic poet, a Victorian poet, and a proto-Modernist poet.

  Such plasticity is perhaps the characteristic of Meredith’s verse oeuvre that ensures its enduring relevance. Unfortunately, much of that oeuvre is unavailable to today’s readers. Though “Modern Love”—or more often excerpts from “Modern Love”—is frequently anthologized, the majority of the other poems in the Modern Love volume are available only in Phyllis Bartlett’s 1978 The Poems of George Meredith, which is itself out of print. Returning Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads to print, on the sesquicentennial of its original publication, allows a new generation of readers to appreciate Meredith’s early verse. Moreover, restoring the titular sonnet sequence to its original textual context allows for a richer interpretative experience. That “Modern Love” is not the first poem in the volume is just one of several indicators of the need to broaden the interpretive horizon that we have previously associated with it. As Isobel Armstrong warned in 1993, the other poems in the Modern Love volume have been “obscured” by the “dominance of the title poem in Meredith’s reputation,” a situation that “has paradoxically obscured the way in which ‘Modern Love’ itself might be read.”6 Attention to what Neil Fraistat calls the “structural framing and symmetries, as well as the development of thematic progressions and verbal echoes among the poems” in a volume such as Modern Love allows readers to view it as a “poetic aggregate” or “contexture.”7 Such an approach makes plain that “Modern Love” is both title and topic. Mixing age-old poetic tropes and structures with playful and innovative forms and images, Meredith meditates upon the relationship between idealized conceptions of romantic love and the physical sensation of sexual desire. Using similar strategies, Meredith also dissects the love of abstractions such as Country, Family, and Nature. Juxtaposing multiple versions of “modern love,” the volume thus explores a range of contemporary sociocultural issues, including English cosmopolitanism, the so-called Woman Question, and the diffusion of democratic ideas about social equality.

  A Meredithian Life

  The germs of these themes likely came from Meredith’s own background, though the details of his early life are as obscure as his most idiosyncratic metaphors. Meredith was a private man who drew from his own life for his creative work yet remained averse to providing biographers with accurate information about his childhood and adolescence. No doubt some of this reticence was due to embarrassment. Social status and class were troublesome forces in Meredith’s life from the beginning, and this is perhaps why the figures of the social climber and social outsider appear throughout his oeuvre. He was born in Portsmouth on 12 February 1828 to Augustus Meredith, a reluctant tailor, and Jane Eliza Meredith (née Macnamara), the daughter of an innkeeper. Despite their lower-middle-class status, the Merediths were a proud family who traced their lineage back to Welsh princes. Meredith himself was not immune to the stories his father liked to tell of their royal ancestry. The sons of the other Portsmouth tradesmen gave him the nickname “Gentleman Georgy” in consequence of his well-made clothes and affable yet aloof demeanor.8 Financial hardship loomed on the horizon, however. Augustus had inherited a popular shop that specialized in naval uniforms from his own flamboyant father, Melchizedek Meredith. Melchizedek—the model for Evan Harrington’s “The Great Mel”—was handsome and dashing, though an indifferent businessman. Along with Melchizedek’s shop, good looks, and deep pride, Augustus had also inherited his father’s spending habits. Making matters worse, the business that Melchizedek bequeathed to his son was not nearly as prosperous as it had seemed. When George was nine, Augustus declared bankruptcy, losing the family business and home. Thanks to a small inheritance left to him by his mother (who died when he was five) and her sister, young George was still able to attend the Moravian Brothers school in Neuwied, Germany, from 1842 to 1844, an experience that not only erased his Hampshire accent, but also provided him with a cosmopolitan outlook, profoundly shaped his progressive views on the education of women as well as his more retrograde ones about male courage, and planted seeds for his philosophical interest in nature.

  These interests would later sound as keynotes in his creative work, and the writerly phase of his life began around the same time that he met the woman who inspired “Modern Love.” When Meredith returned to England he was articled to Richard Stephen Charnock, a London solicitor with literary ambitions. Soon the two men were involved with a manuscript journal called the “Monthly Observer,” to which they and a small group of friends were the sole contributors. The only woman belonging to this group was a young widow and mother named Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls. She was witty, intelligent, and beautiful, like so many of the heroines Meredith would later create. George and Mary Ellen married on 9 August 1849, the same year that George published his first poem, “Chillianwallah” in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. After a brief honeymoon in Germany and a short residence in London, the young couple settled in to The Limes in Weybridge, Surrey. They were inspired by their new surroundings and the creative energy derived from the community of writers, artists, and musicians living there. Mary Ellen wrote her own poetry, published articles and reviews, and collaborated on a cookbook with her father, the English satirist Thomas Love Peacock. George read widely—including the works of Tennyson, Keats, and Shelley—and “applied himself to a course of self-training in poetic forms,” particularly the English and Scottish folk ballad.9 Under the guidance of the poet Edmund Hornby, Meredith began to bring more “modern ingredients” to bear on his poetry.10 Soon he published his first collection, Poems (1851). Although the volume was published at his own expense, it was relatively well received.

  Despite these successes, and despite George and Mary Ellen’s much-noted physical attraction to each other, their marriage was a volatile one haunted by poverty and filled with sorrow and resentment. The money that the couple earned from their writing was not enough to support them comfortably. No doubt Meredith’s refusal to allow Peacock to obtain for him an appointment in the East India House exacerbated household tensions. Moreover, Mary Ellen was continuously pregnant, giving birth to several stillborn children between 1850 and 1852; their son, Arthur Gryffydh Meredith, was not born until 13 June 1853. Living in a small home with frustrated ambitions and decreasing sympathy for each other, George and Mary Ellen, according to Mary Ellen’s daughter from her first marriage, “sharpened their wits on each other”11 and began to isolate themselves socially. By the end of 1856 the couple spent more time apart than they did together. Yet when a pregnant Mary Ellen left him for the Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis in 1858, Meredith was devastated. Although he never forgave her, prevented her from seeing their son, and would in later years imply that she suffered from hereditary madness,12 Meredith never sought to divorce her. As the excerpt from John Paget’s essay on English divorce law makes clear (see “Contexts”), to have attempted to do so would have likely amplified the scandal and may not have even resulted in a legal separation.

  The trials of their marriage served as inspiration for the emotional currents in much of his later prose and verse and the seductive, lively, progressive, and intelligent Mary Ellen seems to have been the model for Meredith’s most notable female characters, including the wife in “Modern Love.” Written in the wake of Mary Ellen’s premature death in 1861, “Modern Love” unquestionably recalls Meredith’s experiences with her. To this day, many scholarly assessments of the poem are built upon the assumption that it is autobiographical, with some critics ascribing the power of the poem—and its continued popularity—to the emotional precision that could only be drawn from experience. Yet while the Victorians understood the sonnet form as “a site of privileged autobiographical utterance,”13 to understand “Modern Love” only as thinly
veiled autobiography risks undervaluing its ironic distance, its narratorial ambiguity, and its position within the volume.

  Unillustrated and containing a total of twenty-three heterogeneous yet thematically linked poems, Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads was published on 28 April 1862 by Chapman and Hall in a small print run. It was Meredith’s second volume of poetry. He dedicated it to Frederick Maxse, a naval officer and reformer he had met toward the end of 1858, who would become his lifelong friend and advocate. By this time, Meredith was regularly publishing poems in Samuel Lucas’s journal Once a Week, many of which were illustrated by artists connected with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (see figs. 3, 5–8, and 10). Nine of these poems—“The Meeting,” “Juggling Jerry,” “The Old Chartist,” “The Beggar’s Soliloquy,” “The Patriot Engineer,” “The Head of Bran,” “Autumn Even-Song,” “Phantasy,” and “By the Rosanna”—were collected in Modern Love. The titular sonnet sequence, first referred to as “The Love-Match” in 1861, was the result of relatively quick work. By January 1862, Meredith sent Maxse proofs of thirty-six of the final fifty sonnets, by then called “A Tragedy of Modern Love.” Three months later, upon its publication, the title was truncated to “Modern Love.”

  Since its initial release in 1862, “Modern Love” has stood apart from the other poems in the volume, receiving the lion’s share of scorn and—later—of praise. That said, the poem’s situation within the collection is as important as the poem itself; Meredith was particular about how he ordered his poems, giving his publishers careful instructions. As its full title suggests, Modern Love is divided into several parts. Preceding the sonnet sequence are “Grandfather Bridgeman” and “The Meeting.” Following “Modern Love” is the “Roadside Philosophers” section, comprising “Juggling Jerry,” “The Old Chartist,” “The Beggar’s Soliloquy,” and the “Patriot Engineer.” The remaining poems in the volume fall under the heading “Poems and Ballads,” an organizational strategy that suggests that “Grandfather Bridgeman” and “The Meeting,” along with those poems spoken by Meredith’s Roadside Philosophers, are to be understood collectively as “Poems of the English Roadside.” As a group, these poems balance the abstractions of the later poems in the collection as well as the structural and thematic difficulty of “Modern Love.” That said, one must not dismiss the Roadside poems because of their accessibility; the feelings of regret, anticipation, religious faith, and unsanctioned love that define these poems also define “Modern Love” as well. Although contemporary reviewers described the Roadside poems as “wholesome,” Meredith himself called them “flints perhaps, and not flowers.”14 Indeed, despite the seemingly stark differences in tone, form, and content between “Modern Love” and the Roadside poems, Meredith saw them as united by frank depiction seated in observation and experience: “Thus my Jugglers, Beggars, etc., I have met on the road, and have idealized but slightly. I desire to strike the poetic spark out of absolute human clay.”15 The Roadside poems are not caricatures or fanciful idylls; they depict characters attempting to reconcile their traditional lifestyles and ideologies with a changing world.