Unnatural? My dear, these things are life - a look at "Modern Love"

George Meredith has been propped up a bit by his biography.  After nine years of marriage, his wife ran off with a painter.  Whatever might be the usual response by a Victorian of his class, Meredith chose to write a novel (The Ordeal of Richard Feverel) and a fifty poem sonnet sequence, “Modern Love.”

Unusually, in both works Meredith makes the character in his own position, the wronged husband, look as bad as (in the poem) or worse than (in the novel) the straying wife.  I thought writers were supposed to use their books for revenge, not self-mortification and compassionate understanding.

Colleen of Jam and Idleness read the new critical edition of “Modern Love.”  She is skeptical of the edition, asking good “Who is this for?” questions, but enthusiastic about the poetry.  She points out the irony of how Meredith takes “a poetic form traditionally devoted almost exclusively to romantic love, and uses it to present and dissect the recriminations, miscommunications, small pettiness and large jealousies that contribute to the slow cracking of two once loving hearts.”

The story of “Modern Love”: the wife has an affair, then the husband, who mostly narrates, has an affair of his own.  The couple attempts to reconcile, but it is too late.  The wife kills herself, perhaps to allow the husband to remarry, or so the husband thinks, although I have doubts.

At its best, I think, the story is told through scenes that have some novelistic qualities:

'Tis Christmas weather, and a country house
Receives us:  rooms are full:  we can but get
An attic-crib.  Such lovers will not fret
At that, it is half-said.  The great carouse
Knocks hard upon the midnight's hollow door,
But when I knock at hers, I see the pit.
Why did I come here in that dullard fit?
I enter, and lie couched upon the floor.  (XXIII)

This could be a scene from a much later American novel, from Revolutionary Road, at a point in the story where the friends do not know how bad things have become for the couple.

Here the husband and wife discuss a novel:

You like not that French novel?  Tell me why.
You think it quite unnatural.  Let us see.
The actors are, it seems, the usual three:
Husband, and wife, and lover.  She--but fie!
In England we'll not hear of it.  Edmond,
The lover, her devout chagrin doth share;
Blanc-mange and absinthe are his penitent fare,
Till his pale aspect makes her over-fond:
So, to preclude fresh sin, he tries rosbif.
Meantime the husband is no more abused:
Auguste forgives her ere the tear is used.
Then hangeth all on one tremendous IF:-
IF she will choose between them.  She does choose;
And takes her husband, like a proper wife.
Unnatural?  My dear, these things are life:
And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse.  (XXV)

I should try to summarize plots with sonnets.  That could be good for a laugh. 

I have read this sonnet enough times that I am no longer sure how obscure it is.  The husband is always speaking,  The wife’s side of the conversation is implied.  The novel is described in a mocking way that is a passive-aggressive bullying of the wife at a point in the story when, ironically, the husband has begun to realize that he is no more committed to the marriage than she is.

What us really interesting to me is that, if you noted the sonnet numbers, you saw that there is only a single sonnet between the Christmas party scene and the novel-reading scene.  There is no transition in between.  Meredith changes settings with a snap.  Sometimes the chronology is scrambled.  “Modern Love” does what I take for granted in modern novels, presenting the events of the story in an order that is psychologically meaningful and assuming their readers can leap over the gaps.  Another way Meredith was ahead of his time.

Good George Meredith lines - autumn, a curvy owl, the long noon coo

George Meredith’s selected poems are in some danger of shrinking to two pieces, the anthology standard “Lucifer in Starlight” and the sonnet sequence “Modern Love,” a little novel in fifty sonnets.  I have read more Meredith than that, but not a lot more.  My edition of Meredith’s Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2001) only has seventy pages of poetry, with “Modern Love” filling twenty of them.  All of this from eight books published over the course of fifty years.

I would read more.  Maybe not too many more.  Let’s hunt for good lines.

“Lucifer in Starlight” (1883) is a Miltonic sonnet that works a lot like “Dirge in Woods” from yesterday – nature capped with Reflections, except it is more mysterious and ambiguous.  Lucifer is the morning star, and also Milton’s anti-hero, and also whatever the panicky Brit Lit II student can come up with.  It famously ends:

Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.

Although I prefer the description of the stars as “the brain of heaven.”

“The Old Chartist” (1862) is a Browning-like dramatic monologue, not at all typical for Meredith, about an old political radical who has finally returned to England after being transported to Australia.  He still has his beliefs, and pride, and can still enjoy a walk in the field, where he comes across a kindred soul, a muskrat:

His seat is on a mud-bank, and his trade
    Is dirt:- he’s quite contemptible; and yet
The fellow’s all as anxious as a maid
    To show  a decent dress, and dry the wet.
       Now it’s his whisker.
    And now his nose, and ear: he seem to get
        Each moment at the motion brisker!

A humane poem about an old man watching a muskrat wash himself.

But Meredith is usually more abstract in his nature writing (from “Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn,” 1862):

Behold, in yon stripped Autumn, shivering grey,
    Earth knows no desolation.
    She smells regeneration
    In the moist breath of decay.

If I were a different, better reader of poetry, I would memorize these lines and trot them out every October to the gradually increasing annoyance of meine Frau.

“Love in the Valley” (1883), now this is an interesting poem, a love poem where the valley is as interesting as, somehow mingled with, the young woman:

Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
   Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.

The woman, the love object is mentioned in the previous line, so the loveliness, and the curves, are meant to be associated with her, too.  As Victorian poems go, this is one of the sexy ones.  “This I may know: her dressing and undressing,” referring, of course, to “Earth” at harvest-time, of course, what else.

This bit is pure sound and vowels, a ripoff of the Greatest Poem of the 19th Century:

Doves of the fir-wood walling high our red roof
    Through the long noon coo, crooning through the coo.
Loose droop the leaves, and down the sleeping roadway
    Sometimes pipes a chaffinch; loose droops the blue.

A footnote suggests that “the blue” is the sky.  Perhaps Meredith goes too far, bringing the doves back at the end there.  Perhaps he already went far too far with the second line.  I love that line.  Hoo can you noot loove it?

Doglike, hoglike, horselike now he raced - describing George Meredith's poetry

Wasn’t that fun, writing about those amusing Dickens stories that once were and could still be read and enjoyed by ordinary, non-obsessive readers?  Let’s make sure we never do that again.  Now: the poetry of George Meredith.

“Dirge in Woods” (1870) is a good one.  It will give both the right and wrong idea about Meredith.

A wind sways the pines,
                       And below
Not a breath of wild air;
Still as the mosses that glow
On the flooring and over the lines
Of the roots here and there.
The pine tree drops its dead;
They are quiet, as under the sea.
Overhead, overhead
Rushes life in a race,
As the clouds the clouds chase;
                        And we go,
And we drop like the fruits of the tree,
                        Even we,
                        Even so.

The first lines are banal but the moss is good and the pine needles excellent.  The move underwater is surprising.  The meaning of the end is a commonplace, but here musically expressed.

The right idea about Meredith: this is one of his great subjects, and this is his kind of thinking.  Nature as some sort of commentary on human meaning.  Thomas Hardy greatly valued Meredith, and I believe this poem shows the affinity well.  The inventiveness with form shown here is also typical, just as it is with his peers Swinburne and the Rossettis.

The wrong idea: the poem is short and clear.  A Meredith poem is usually long or cryptic or both.  Where Swinburne is characterized by a baroque too-muchness, Meredith’s signature is compression.  The ballad “King Harald’s Trance” (1887) is a good example:

Sword in length a reaping hook amain
Harald sheared his field, blood up to shank:
       ‘Mid the swathes of slain,
       First at moonrise drank.

Thereof hunger, as for meats the knife,
Pricked his ribs, in one sharp spur to reach
        Home and his young wife,
        Nigh the sea-ford beach.

I feel like words are missing, but it seems they are not.  King Harald, after a successful battle, becomes hungry and wants to go home.  Once he is home (I am moving forward), he eats so much that he falls into a trance (“Mountain on his trunk \ Ocean on his head”).  He can still hear, however, so he discovers that his subjects mock him and his wife has a lover.  The story will obviously end badly for several of the characters.  This is the mockery:

Burial to fit their lord of war,
They decreed him: hailed the kingling: ha!
        Hateful! but this Thor
        Failed a weak lamb’s baa.

And this is the king in the trance, a description of his internal state:

Doglike, hoglike, horselike now he raced,
Riderless, in ghost across a ground
        Flint of breast, blank-faced,
        Past the fleshly bound.

The king is animal and human, still yet in motion, flesh and spirit.  Pretty strange and possibly, at least in that dog-hog line, ridiculous, but interesting, in this sense exactly like Meredith’s novels.

Meredith's storm scene - speculating on how the butterflies and moths saved their coloured wings from washing

The artificiality of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is most obvious in the chapters where he suddenly switches rhetorical modes, when his writing no longer looks like it belongs in a novel of 1859, or any time.  A chapter title like “Ferdinand and Miranda” (I.18), for example, is a signal.  To portray the hero and heroine falling in love, he drops them into The Tempest.  This is the opposite of allegory.  Objects outside of the novel are made to refer to things inside it.

I want to skip to another example, another tempest, my favorite part of the novel, right at the end, Chapter III.11, “Nature Speaks.”  Richard Feverel has gone to Germany for flimsy reasons – it is part of his ordeal – and upon hearing bad, or actually, good, news he plunges into the moonlit Rhineland woods, accompanied only by a little dog, previously unmentioned.  “Something of a religious joy – a strange sacred pleasure – was in him.”  So this is why the scene has shifted to Germany, to plunge into Romantic Nature at its source.

Here where the brook tinkled it was no cool-lipped sound, but metallic, and without the spirit of water.  Yonder in a space of moonlight on lush grass, the beams were as white fire to sight and feeling…  Now and then a large white night-moth flitted through the dusk of the forest…  On a barren corner of the wooded highland looking inland stood grey topless ruins set in nettles and rank grass-blades.  Richard mechanically sat down on the crumbling flints to rest, and listened to the panting of the dog. Sprinkled at his feet were emerald lights: hundreds of glow-worms studded the dark dry ground.

Of course, a ruin, what else.  Perhaps Romanticism is not the right reference.  Richard seems to have wandered in to a Poussin painting, or a Giorgione.  Perhaps I need to drag in Edmund Burke again.  So far, so Picturesque.  It is time for some Sublime.

All at once the thunder spoke. The mountain he had marked was bursting over him.

Up startled the whole forest in violet fire.  He saw the country at the foot of the hills to the bounding Rhine gleam, quiver, extinguished.  Then there were pauses; and the lightning seemed as the eye of heaven, and the thunder as the tongue of heaven, each alternately addressing him; filling him with awful rapture.

Yet the experience of the storm is also an “awful pleasure.”  Soon, “groping about” in the dark, Richard discovers and picks up a living creature, “a tiny leveret” (to the footnotes: “A young hare”).

Now things get really strange:

The rain was now steady; from every tree a fountain poured. So cool and easy had his mind become that he was speculating on what kind of shelter the birds could find, and how the butterflies and moths saved their coloured wings from washing. Folded close they might hang under a leaf, he thought. Lovingly he looked into the dripping darkness of the coverts on each side, as one of their children. He was next musing on a strange sensation he experienced. It ran up one arm with an indescribable thrill, but communicated nothing to his heart. It was purely physical, ceased for a time, and recommenced, till he had it all through his blood, wonderfully thrilling.

The latter is the little bunny licking Richard’s hand.  “What did it say to him?”  The rain passes, Richard comes across a forest chapel , and he exits the woods.  The ordeal is over.  Whatever it was.

So I barely understand what is going on in this scene.  It is amazing but baffling.  I am convinced that it is full of referents that I have not caught.  The famous storm from Virgil’s Georgics, Book I, is in there:

Earth feels the motions of her angry god:
Her entrails tremble, and her mountains nod,
And flying beasts in forests seek abode:
Deep horror seizes every human breast;
Their  pride is humbled and their fear confessed  (tr. John Dryden)

But there must be a number of other storms and forest idylls blended in, poems, paintings, songs, ideas.  Did Meredith invent that bunny, or borrow it?  Or experience it himself, but now it is in fiction, so he converted into invention.

One of the most puzzling mixes of the familiar and the strange that I have ever come across, and thus an achievement.  That is not a bad description of the entire novel.

George Meredith mocks Jane Austen's favorite novel - The clean-linen of her morality was spotless as his

The key to The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is its deliberate artificiality.  George Meredith’s conception of the novel is unusual.  He fits patterns onto the novel in peculiar ways.  The lead character of The Egoist, which came twenty years Ordeal, is actually named Willoughby Pattern.  He is so named because the motif of willow pattern china runs through the novel, providing an arbitrary structure independent from the action.  It is an advanced technique.

Oh, it is so tempting to hash out the whole thread of eighteenth century literature that runs through The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, one of the novel’s substitutes for china patterns.  I mentioned the parodies of eighteenth century pedagogy, like Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (1762).  I mentioned that there is a character actually called the Eighteenth Century (“The Eighteenth Century wondered whether she should live to see another birthday,” Vol. II, Ch. 4).

Most amazing is the thoroughgoing parody, or even travesty, of the novels of Samuel Richardson, particularly of Jane Austen’s favorite novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753), Richardson’s enormously long attempt to portray the ideal man after creating one of English literature’s greatest villains in his previous novel, Clarissa.  Richard the Knight, the Hero, to use Meredith’s epithets, is meant by his father to be another ideal man.  Since Meredith does not believe in perfection, the plan goes topsy turvy.

Sir Charles, for example, demonstrates his virtue by refusing to fight a duel, while Feverel actively incites a duel.  Sir Charles and his correspondents spend what must end up being hundreds of pages discussing in detail whether he can marry a Catholic.  Richard Feverel’s true love is, it turns out, Catholic, but since they are young and in haste the issue is simply brushed aside.   Both heroes make plans to reform prostitutes – guess which one succeeds?

You think I am making this up, but look in Book II, Chapter 3, where we meet a mother with some daughters who might be suitable for Richard Feverel.  She is:

Mrs. Caroline Grandison, said to be a legitimate descendant of the great Sir Charles: a lady who, in propriety of demeanour and pious manners, was the petticoated image of her admirable ancestor.  The clean-linen of her morality was spotless as his.  As nearly she neighboured Perfection, and knew it as well.  Let us hope that her History will some day be written, and the balance restored in Literature which it was her pride to have established for her sex in Life.

Mrs. Grandison ensures the virtues of her eight daughters by dosing them with patent medicine and enforcing an exercise regime that features “swing-poles, and stride-poles, and newly invented instruments for bringing out special virtues: an instrument for the lungs: an instrument for the liver: one for the arms and thighs: one for the wrists: the whole for the promotion of the Christian accomplishments.”

Any time the Grandison family appears, all too infrequently, the comedy is excellent.  The gag culminates in a scene with the youngest daughter Carola, a thirteen year-old who wishes she were a boy and would rather be known as Carl (“That’s the German for Charles”).  Another rarity in Victorian novels.

So this is one complex but highly artificial strand that runs through the whole book.  One more tomorrow, and that will be enough suffering.

One of Meredith’s more baffling sentences - perhaps more than one

Meine Frau has described Thomas Bernhard as the anchovy of German literature, meaning that although many people savor him, for others even the smallest taste of his style ruins the dish.  George Meredith is, let’s say, the Brussels sprout of the Victorian novel.  His style is very much his own.

I switched to a vegetable in deference to the veganism of Colleen of Jam & Idleness, who wrote this encomium to an obscure 1864 Meredith novel.  She is responding with enthusiasm to the powerful flavor of Meredith.  Look at how long her excerpts are (I understand the problem).  Look at this fragment:  “then, like the wise ancients, we should be able to tell to a nicety how far we had advanced in our dithyramb to the theme of fuddle and muddle,” from the middle of a long paragraph about hats.

This is the beginning of Chapter II, when we have been introduced to the hero’s father and little else:

Fame, the chief retainer of distinguished families, has first sounded the origin of the Feverels where their line of Ancestry blossoms with a Baronet; and Rumour, the profane vagabond, who will not take service in any respectable household, whispers that he was a Villain.  At all events, for this proud race, behind his dazzling appearance sits Darkness and democratic Adam, and they cling to him as an ark of pure aristocracy.

The editor of the Penguin Classics editions adds a footnote: “One of Meredith’s more baffling sentences.”  The next page or so of the paragraph makes clearer that Meredith is describing the antique origins of the family.  Although some were hearty enough to fight on “Marston Moor, that great field of phlebotomy,” the family has just barely kept enough sons alive to perpetuate the line, perhaps because of “the Apple-Disease.”  That mysterious concept will not be explained, or mentioned again, for another twenty-five chapters, although the earlier mention of Adam should suggest that Meredith is referring to some aspect of original sin (sexual knowledge, specifically).

Here we see one of the distinctive tics of Richard Feverel, the continuous use of shorthand and nicknames.  The tutor becomes the Wise Youth, the Baronet’s pedagogical method is the System, the hypochondriac uncle is the Dyspepsia, the struggle between right and wrong is the Magian Conflict, and an elderly relative is the Eighteenth Century (“Adrian had to sit alone with Hippias and the Eighteenth Century”).

Those of us who are devoted fans of Thomas Carlyle’s prose will recognize the technique, as in The French Revolution where everything ends up with two names, the invented driving out the actual.  I was amazed to see someone bring this into a novel.

Virginia Woolf, in “The Novels of George Meredith” (1928, in The Second Common Reader), describes Richard Feverel this way:

The style is extremely uneven.  Now he twists himself into iron knots; now he lies as flat as a pancake.  He seems to be of two minds about his intention.  Ironic comment alternates with long-winded narrative.

But:

He has been, it is plain, at great pains to destroy the conventional form of the novel.  He makes no attempt to preserve the sober reality of Trollope and Jane Austen; he has destroyed all the usual staircases by which we have learnt to climb.

I would not want to advise a reader who hates Brussels sprouts to put them on his anchovy pizza.  I enjoy it all well enough myself, but once I realized how deliberately artificial the entire novel was, in style, story and structure, it began to be pretty interesting.  So for tomorrow, the artificial Meredith.

Hippy verteth, Ricky sterteth, Sing Cuckoo! - George Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, a novel by George Meredith published in 1859.  Meredith would later be not only famous but regarded as a great Victorian sage, but this novel was not the one that made his reputation.  On the verge of popularity, it was accused of obscenity and pulled from Mudie’s lending library, making it possibly the only novel in history whose sales were damaged by being thought of as a dirty book.  It actually is kind of naughty in places.  Meredith is the most French Victorian novelist I have come across.

The story:  Sir Austin Feverel has been abandoned by his wife (she ran off with a poet).  He is raising his son Richard according to a System, his own personal blend of Rousseau and Lord Chesterfield.  The comic, even mocking tone is instantly identifiable, so the surprise is not going to be if the System falls apart, but how and also who it will crush when it collapses.

Most of the conflict is over choice of mate.  While the father and his System are interviewing suitable candidates, Richard, who is going through a “Romantic poet” phase, wanders into a pastoral poem and meets the dairymaid of his dreams.  Has the System failed?  No, the dairymaid would be perfect of only the strict father could relax for a minute.

The resulting complications should be sufficient to fill out a novel, but instead there is an enormous twist, or at least bend, maybe more than one, leading to some strange scenes and surprises that of course culminate in a terrible ironic crash.

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel contains things I have never seen in a Victorian novel.  At the end of Chapter XIX, a young man is caught reading a pornographic novel:

Mr. Thompson, without any notion of what he was doing, drew the book from Ripton's hold; whereupon the two seniors laid their grey heads together over the title-page.  It set forth in attractive characters beside a coloured frontispiece, which embodied the promise displayed there, the entrancing Adventures of Miss Random, a strange young lady.

Exactly how pornographic the book might be is left to the imagination or independent knowledge of the reader.  Miss Random becomes a symbol of the sexual dangers facing young men (I mean a symbol for the characters, a shorthand they use), as seen in another novel chapter where Richard and poor Ripton attend a party of the London demi-monde, minor nobility and their kept women and courtesans, like something from a Maupassant or Balzac story.  Who knew, from Victorian novels at least, that London even had a demi-monde?

And how many Victorian novels have this – no, I have to set it up.  Richard’s incessantly ironic tutor Adrian sings a parody of a medieval folk song that includes the lines:

Hippy verteth,
Ricky sterteth,
   Sing Cuckoo!  (Ch. 10)

Ricky is of course Richard, and Hippy is Uncle Hippias, who is with them.  Move the scene to a train compartment, just a bit later:

Hippias, on finding the carriage-door closed on him, became all at once aware of the bright-haired hope which dwells in Change; for one who does not woo her too frequently; and to express his sudden relief from mental despondency at the amorous prospect, the Dyspepsy [i.e., Hippias] bent and gave his hands a sharp rub between his legs: which unlucky action brought Adrian's pastoral,

          "Hippy verteth,
          Sing cuckoo!"

in such comic colours before Richard, that a demon of laughter seized him.

          "Hippy verteth!"

Every time he glanced at his uncle the song sprang up, and he laughed so immoderately that it looked like madness come upon him.

This is an actual fart joke, disguised in archaic language (“verteth”), but repeated several times and emphasized by a teenage boy’s laughter at the idea of his uncle’s flatulence.  Even stranger, Richard’s laughter is used in the plot.

To the reader who could not find the joke because of the impenetrable opening prose – “the bright-haired hope which dwells in Change” and so on – let’s talk about that tomorrow.