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

  The Critics Respond

  The Roadside poems were favorites among the Victorian critical establishment. J. W. Marston, writing in the Athenaeum, called them “wholesome” and claimed to have turned to them with a “sense of relief,” and the critic for the Saturday Review suggested the Roadside poems showcased the “racy and vigorous style of composition” which was Meredith’s “real forte.”16 To the extent that early reviews praised the Roadside poems (“Juggling Jerry” and “The Old Chartist” were especially admired), they protested against the others. “Modern Love” received the most attention and the most sharply derisive reviews. Critics did not merely dislike the sequence; they reviled it, finding it an affront to prevailing moral and aesthetic sensibilities. More than a few contemporary critics resorted to the rhetoric of disease to justify their negative response to the sonnet sequence’s subject matter. Answering Meredith’s claim in Sonnet XXV that “these things are life: And life, they say, is worthy of the Muse,” the Saturday Review’s critic objected, “A more flimsy sophism could hardly be devised. The Muse is undoubtedly concerned with all forms of life, but these things are decay, and deformity, and death.” It would be just as reasonable, the critic concludes, “to compose a sonnet to the gout or an ode on the small-pox.”17 The Athenaeum was slightly more measured. Good poetry often reveals “the diseases of our nature,” its critic admitted, yet in so doing, such poetry shows “the virtue of the antidote”; the problem with “Modern Love” is that it shows us “disease, and nothing else.”18

  In addition to Meredith’s choice of content, reviewers responded negatively to the poem’s stylistic obscurity, a trait that they associated with the so-called Spasmodic school of poetry. Made popular by poets Alexander Smith, Sidney Dobell, and Philip James Bailey, Spasmodic poetry sought to evoke visceral responses in readers by advancing the Romantic cultivation of heightened sensory perception and subjective points of view. It was initially welcomed by writers such as George Henry Lewes, Arthur Hugh Clough, and George Gilfillan, who praised its edifying vividness. Others regarded Spasmodic poetry with suspicion and even derision, characterizing it as egoistic, overwrought, and dangerously focused on the body. The Spasmodic display of embodied emotions was viewed by some critics as science masquerading as art. Coventry Patmore, for instance, claimed that poets had no business writing about “the facts of science” unless they related those facts to “universal truth and permanent humanity.”19 “Mere physical interests are best discoursed in prose,” Patmore insisted.20 More common objections were leveled at Spasmodic obscurity, not its physical specificity: according to this line of reasoning, poetry that appeals to a reader’s sensory experience or organic reactions, as opposed to a reader’s intellect, often does so at the expense of clarity. Charges of Spasmodic obscurity thus became synonymous with charges of self-indulgence or writerly laziness. J. W. Marston contrasted the “real force and imagination” that he found in some parts of “Modern Love” with the “spasmodic indistinctness” that he felt characterized most of it.21 R. H. Hutton, writing for the Spectator, complained that the energy of Meredith’s verse was not produced by “intellectual courage” or “buoyancy of spirit,” but rather by “a spasmodic ostentation of fast writing.”22

  Although Hutton’s comment implies that Spasmodism was anti-intellectual and unsophisticated, recent critical reappraisals suggest otherwise. Jason Rudy writes that Spasmodic poetry “operated very much within the mainstream of mid-Victorian philosophy and social science,”23 a claim supported by the selections from the work of Bain, Johnson, and Wilson included in the “Contexts” section of this volume. And, as Herbert Tucker has demonstrated, the Spasmodists’ interest in “embodied intuition” and their efforts to lyricize narrative were taken up by a number of now-canonical Victorian poets24—including George Meredith, particularly in “Modern Love.” Putting Victorian critiques of the movement into sociopolitical perspective, Tucker reminds us that “the premium that spasmodist poetry placed in theory on subjective power, and exemplified in the rolling fluency of its creative practice, bespoke cultural values” that many Victorian conservatives associated with Chartism as well as “sexual and other kinds of emancipation.”25

  Freighted with intertwining aesthetic and political meanings, the label “Spasmodic” nevertheless functioned as shorthand for poorly written poetry. This seems to be the way poet Algernon Swinburne understood Hutton’s use of the term. Rebuking Hutton’s old-fashioned and thoughtless response to Modern Love, Swinburne described “Modern Love” as a serious and “progressive poem” displaying “the finest and most studied workmanship.” He exhorted readers to value poets such as Meredith for writing verse that looked beyond the “nursery walls.”26 Swinburne’s praise of the sonnet sequence did not come at the expense of the Roadside poems, however. He found “The Beggar’s Soliloquy” and “The Old Chartist” to be particularly “valuable,” commending them for their “completeness of effect,” “exquisite justice of style,” and “thorough dramatic insight.”27

  Swinburne’s assessment of “Modern Love” was, as it turns out, prophetic. And while this critical resuscitation has been welcomed by those who admire the sonnet sequence, the remaining poems in the volume—which were almost universally regarded as superior to “Modern Love” in early reviews—have fallen into obscurity. To this day, scholarly considerations of Meredith’s verse oeuvre reflect and perpetuate this lopsided approach.

  The Roadside Poems

  The structure of the volume itself—with the sharp contrast between the homespun warmth and formal familiarity of the “Poems of the English Roadside,” the experimental and progressive feel of “Modern Love,” and the richly textured abstraction of many of the other poems—may well have led critics to evaluate the work comparatively. If critics regarded “Modern Love” as needlessly obscure and focused on a needlessly prurient topic, the Roadside poems served as a counterpoint, offering easily accessible verse detailing rustic, wholesome characters; it is no surprise that many contemporary critics regarded the Roadside poems as the best in the volume. Contributing to this sense of accessibility is a general lack of the formal innovation that often appears in Meredith’s more-complex poems. Most of the Roadside poems eschew literary allusions and imagistic or sensual description in favor of contemporary or recent events—such as the Crimean War or Chartist uprisings—that would have been widely if not intimately known by readers, and most adopt comfortable and familiar patterns of meter and rhyme. These poems attempt to absorb the diction and rhythm of working-class speech, creating metrical irregularities that some thought unwitting.28 “The Road” is a rich trope, associated with cross-class encounters, chance, and adventure; thus, the Roadside poems as a group seem to comprise a kind of poetic exploration of the world beyond the libraries, bedrooms, and dining rooms of “Modern Love.” If there is a sensibility uniting these poems, it seems that of a unique Englishness conferred through their speakers, social outliers though they may be. Notions of direct patriotism, expressed often by speakers who have left England, permeate the poems: “Grandfather Bridgeman” offers a glimpse of the experience of a soldier injured in the Crimean War, as related through the expectations and longing of those at home; the title character of “The Old Chartist,” having returned to England after a life of exile in Australia following a conviction for inciting a Chartist riot, muses that after all, England is still his “dam”; and in “The Patriot Engineer,” an expat waxes nostalgic on the greatness of the oaklike English character to bemused British passengers in his boat.

  The nature of the national character gives way to its singular incarnations in “The Meeting,” “Juggling Jerry,” and “The Beggar’s Soliloquy.” “The Meeting,” a brief encounter between erstwhile lovers, is a scene perfectly at home in a Thomas Hardy novel. “Juggling Jerry,” a favorite among early readers, details the final thoughts of an old carnival performer. His metaphysical theory figures a god in terms he knows best: as a great juggler who must keep a number of sph
eres moving continuously. Thus imagining himself as part of a cosmic continuum, the juggler elevates himself to an equality with all other individuals. In “The Beggar’s Soliloquy,” the beggar stands outside of a church, pondering the seeming disconnect between Christian charity and the unwillingness of those he entreats to give him money. In each instance, the context is always expressly English: the juggler revels in the English countryside of willows, sheep, and “thatch’d ale-houses,” and even the beggar at the church imagines his plight in the binary terms of the Conservative and the Radical, and takes pride in his passing connection with the “Lord Mayor o’ London,” whose title he invokes for effect.

  The Roadside poems represent Meredith’s deployment of the dramatic monologue, a peculiarly Victorian form that multiplies voices and perspectives while purporting to be the utterance of a single speaker. The form developed at the same time as theories of the mind and consciousness were exploding, “driven,” as Linda Hughes writes, “by intensified interest in introspection as both a philosophical and scientific method.”29 Meredith’s use of the form, then, subtly unites the Roadside poems to the introspective, sense-based explorations of other poems in the volume. Moreover, like the form of “Modern Love,” the formal qualities of the Roadside poems are also an expression of Meredith’s ambivalent embrace of Modernity. On the one hand the quotidian narrative situations of these poems establish their contemporary-ness, yet on the other, they suggest a class- and location-based nostalgia, one that regards rural people from the lower classes as a source of national strength because they live perpetually in a more innocent time.

  On “Modern Love”

  The relative innocence of the rural lifestyle depicted in the Roadside poems is emphasized through the subject and title of the sonnet sequence “Modern Love.” Simply put, the sonnets tell the story of a marriage in crisis, precipitated by the husband’s realization of his wife’s infidelity. The sonnets detail the husband’s ambivalent feelings about his wife, working through his alternating sense of physical attraction and emotional repulsion. In between moments of introspection and reflection, touchstones of plot arise: the wife—called “Madam” throughout the poem—focuses her attention on household matters to assuage her guilt (V); the husband finds a letter his wife has written to her lover (XV); the husband and wife host a dinner party, convincingly playing happily married host and hostess (XVII); the husband takes a mistress—whom he calls “Lady”—of his own (XXXII); the wife and the mistress meet (XXXVI); the husband and wife attempt to resume sexual relations (XLII); finally, the wife commits suicide (XLIX). Complicating an easy understanding of the plot is the frequently shifting narratorial perspective: some sonnets present the husband’s point of view, others employ a third-person narrative stance, and in some cases multiple perspectives are used in the same sonnet.

  Meredith’s adaptations of the sonnet form demonstrate the way he leverages formal choice to further his thematic interests. Perspectival shifts are only one of his deviations from the traditional sonnet form, a form so heavy with history that understanding its provenance is essential to recognizing Meredith’s interventions. One of the oldest poetic forms in English verse, the sonnet was brought from Italy to England in the sixteenth century by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542), who translated sonnets written by the poet and humanist Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) and circulated them among his aristocratic friends in manuscript form. The credit for inventing what we now call the “Shakespearean” sonnet pattern, named after the man most believe to be the greatest practitioner of the form in English, goes to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (ca. 1517–1547), another sixteenth-century English translator of Petrarch’s sonnets. The English sonnet is traditionally regarded as a fixed or closed form that follows a normative rhyme scheme and consists of fourteen lines in iambic pentameter. Nevertheless, sonneteers have tinkered with it from the beginning—a situation that led some English poets/critics, among them Leigh Hunt, to refer to the Petrarchan pattern as “the Sonnet Proper” or “the Legitimate Sonnet.”30 There are now numerous acknowledged variants of the sonnet form, including the Spenserian, the caudate sonnet, the curtal sonnet, the enclosed sonnet, and the reversed sonnet, among others.31

  To obtain a better grasp of what’s at stake in Meredith’s idiosyncratic variant of the sonnet form, it is useful to think more carefully about the two most popular sonnet patterns: the Italian/Petrachan and the English/Shakespearean. As with any closed form, the Italian and English sonnet patterns establish a tight relationship between formal structure and content—usually a single idea, articulated in several stages. Normative rhyme schemes draw attention to a sonnet’s functional parts, enhancing the reader’s ability to chart the development of its argument. In the Italian pattern, for instance, a sonnet’s fourteen-line stanza divides into two semantic units: an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet that begins with a “volta” (turn) in thought. The octave is further subdivided into two four-line quatrains, and the sestet is subdivided into two three-line tercets. A poet may use syntax and grammar to draw attention to or detract from these subdivisions. As a whole, the octave states a dilemma or proposition and follows a brace rhyme scheme of abbaabba. The sestet, the first line of which enacts the volta, offers a solution to the dilemma or confirmation of the proposition and follows a cdecde or cdcdcd rhyme scheme. In contrast, the Shakespearean pattern—abab cdcd efef gg—invites the poet to articulate her sonnet’s controlling idea in four stages. Each of three quatrains describes the sonnet’s dilemma or central proposition in different ways, highlighting variations in content by introducing new rhyme schemes. A rhyming couplet concludes a Shakespearean sonnet.

  The “Modern Love” sonnets are sixteen lines long and feature four rhyme schemes (abba cddc effe ghhg), each of which signals a new shift in thought. At least one contemporary assumed that Meredith was using a version of the caudate form, a form of the sonnet that we now associate with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Taking its name from the Latin cauda (tail), the caudate sonnet adds a “tail” (or tails) of a half line plus a couplet to the traditional fourteen-line sonnet. Hopkins, a contemporary of Meredith, used this form to create strikingly weird poems that defy nearly every aspect of the conventional sonnet. His poem “Harry Ploughman” and his letter to Robert Bridges describing his intentions in writing “Harry Ploughman” can be found in the “Contexts” section of this volume. Meredith denied using this form for his “Modern Love” sonnets.32 Indeed, the “Modern Love” sonnets are better understood as combining aspects of both the Italian and the Shakespearean sonnet. Their extended length allows them to appropriate the Shakespearean organizational pattern while avoiding the glibness sometimes associated with concluding couplets. And, as a formal structure, the sequence as a whole draws heavily from the formal conventions of the Petrarchan pattern, though multiple readings are likely necessary to grasp how “Modern Love” recycles Petrarchan conceits and conventions to dissect Victorian “sentimental passion.”33

  The Victorian reader would have had no difficulty identifying these conceits and conventions, although they may be obscure to most twenty-first-century readers. To understand not only why Meredith would have regarded the sonnet form as an effective dissection tool, but also the kinds of ideals against which the husband in “Modern Love” struggles, one must familiarize oneself with these conventions. Petrarchan sonnets purport to be confessional and are conventionally associated with an ennobling love. The speaker in such sonnets is usually a man; his sonnets address a cold, beautiful, and unattainable woman who is, of course, not his wife.34 The poet-lover may idealize his beloved, reproach her for her indifference, plead with her, reflect upon his own poetic activity, and/or reflect upon his feelings and thoughts about his unrequited love. The poet-lover often spiritualizes his desire, making his love object an inspiration for faithfulness and adherence to the moralized codes of behavior associated with courtly love. He is inspired by her beauty and purity and bewitched by her eyes, bosom, lips, and hair. He will, over
the course of many lines, draw elaborate parallels (for example, the poet-lover is a ship in a storm, the lady is a sun), paradoxes, and oxymora. By the end of the sequence, the poet-lover may, thanks to his lady’s angelic purity, become a better man and earn his place in heaven.

  Meredith’s poet-lover meditates upon the real-life actions that correspond to these Petrarchan conventions. For instance, in Sonnet XXIX: “Am I failing? for no longer can I cast,” the speaker reworks the beloved-as-sun convention, troping the despondency that he feels about his relationship with his blond mistress as an inability to “cast / A glory round about this head of gold” (lines 1–2). Moreover, as Cynthia Tucker explains, by repeatedly citing Petrarchan conventions, Meredith is able to highlight the gap between “the ideals which sonnets normally celebrated” and the reality of unrequited love, allowing Petrarchan “standard expressions of woe” to “become unmetaphored and moved into a bleak and untraditional reality.”35