George Meredith’s “Modern Love”

Background

• Written 1862, revised 1892
• Cecil Day-Lewis shows three types of critiques of it: moral judgment, morbid psychological case study, beautiful style and imagery
• The reviews, Spectator, Saturday Review, Athanaeum, excoriated it for its apparent lack of morality (cf Jude the Obscure)
  • “a grave moral mistake”
  • “unpleasant”
  • “meddling”
  • Compared unfavorably to Don Juan (this work pales against Byron’s, apparently)
• Lack of a firm and obvious moral tended towards decadence, says Day-Lewis, though the deeper moral is really equality of the sexes; but nonetheless “without a mediating moral code”
• Swinburne, Rossetti, and Browning loved it, though
• Biography
  • Unpleasantly married with Mary, daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, highly strung beautiful and passionate
  • Both criticized each other mercilessly in the midst of poverty and stillbirths
  • She ran away with a man, was deserted, refused return by Meredith, and died
  • Meredith began the sonnet sequence a little before she died
  • Their marriage isn’t just recorded here, of course; he fictionalized and depersonalized

Content

• Plot: Husband and wife fall out, take lovers, try to reconcile, but they just aren’t happy together in the lifeless marriage, she she commits suicide
  • To the outside world, they look completely happy and play the part of happy lovers
• No villain except for one’s own temperament
• Infidelity
  • Comparison of affair to: “eat[ing] our pot of honey on a grave” and “having Love upon a mortal lease”
  • It ruins marriage
  • Yet he doubts whether loyalty in love is possible
    • Says humans are animals before rational creatures
  • Compare to A Handful of Dust, which also has a surprisingly harsh judgment of infidelity even while it coats it in lithe cynicism
• Terrible fate of being trapped in a bad marriage
  • Marriage itself flawed: “Tis ordered for the world’s increase! / Small flattery”
  • Love compared to seasons (only lasts a little while)
  • Similar to feminist critiques of marriage
• Failed attempts to deal with problems “rationally” and honestly, a true effort of the rational British temperament
• “Pure daylight of honest speech” was the “fatal draught”
  • Intelligence and questioning only hurt their relationship more
  • Won’t just blame her or the Devil or Fate, but instead wants to take responsibility for his own faults honestly and wants to forgive charitably
  • Cf Passage to India
• Haunting Past
  • Sonnet 12: you can’t get rid of the past
  • Nature can get over things (doesn’t mourn dead flowers), but Love is different

Style

• Sonnet sequence
  • Fifty sixteen-line sonnets
  • Rhyme structure: abba, cddc
  • Can you pack in melodrama into the “meditative” sonnet style?
    • Day-Lewis says that it is “strained” and almost vulgar because the content needs a different structure
• Poor Choices
  • “Trick of false ornamentation,” said one reviewer
  • “Grand manner” and rhetoric and “garishness,” says Day-Lewis, but these problems make it have “variety” and “humanity”
  • Romantic capital letters, interjections, conceits, etc
• Strange mixture of the casual vernacular with the overwrought Romanticism and outpourings of 19th c poetry
• Certainly Hardy is more modernist

Quotes and Memorable Moments

• Sonnet 1: They lie in bed, motionless “like sculptured effigies,” wishing that anything would save them from their marriage
• Sonnet 8: “We are two reed-pipes, coarsely stopped”
  • Difficulty of communication
• Morality
  • Sonnet 8: “In this unholy battle I grow base”
  • Sonnet 10: “My crime is that…/ I plotted to be worthy of the world.”
• Sonnet 25: On suitability of his subject for poetry: “Unnatural? My dear, these things are life: And life, some think is worthy of the Muse.”
• About love, but I say it’s On the necessity of Character in literature: Sonnet 38: “Give to imagination some pure light / In human form to fix it”
• Exchange Value Love
  • The woman is a commodity
  • Sonnet 41: “We grasp at all the wealth it is to them; / And by reflected light its worth is found.”
  • Only in a market does value arise
  • For Meredith, this “false appreciation quickly fades,” but like Marx, he doesn’t know the power of the commodity yet…
    • He admits that most people will never understand it, that therefore most people have their emotions in a marketplace, have emotions as a commodity.

Modernity or Not?

• Uses sonnet conventions of Renaissance and his contemporaries, so innovative
• Lack of answers points to modernity
• Struggle with morals hints towards it: “I see no sin,” he says, but he’s still in a violent struggle, still blames the passions, still sees that something’s irrevocably broken, so he’s not modernist
• Form of using poem as a novel is popular at this time in Victorian poetry (Locksley Hall, Maud, Aurora Lee), so it’s Victorian too
• A hybrid: “modern” for him means a scornful critique of the “modern,” which supposedly is corrupted and disloyal and dirty; but his narrator’s reticence to clearly damn either one or the other is pretty novel and progressive; and yet the form is so old and dry…!