"Across the Twilight Wave" : a Study of Meaning, Structure, and Technique

“ACROSS THE TWILIGHT WAVE”: A STUDY OF MEANING, STRUCTURE, AND TECHNIQUE IN MEREDITH’S MODERN LOVE By WILLIE DUANE READER A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA April, 1967 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the many persons and Institutions which have assisted me in preparing this dissertation. Thanks are due to the libraries of the University of Florida, the Uni- versity of South Florida, the University of Texas, Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, and the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, whose resources were made available to me, and to the librarians of these institutions for whose unfailing courtesy and patience I am grateful. An extra debt of gratitude is owed to Professor C. L. Cline of the University of Texas, who made available to me the resources of his per- sonal collection of Meredithiana, and who provided me with specialized information on Meredith which he had gathered while preparing a new edition of Meredith's letters. A similar debt of gratitude is owed to Professor Phyllis Bartlett of Queens College, who provided me with information gathered while preparing a new edition of Meredith's poems. Finally, I would like to express my very great appreciation to the faculty members of the University of Florida who are members of the com- mittee which has guided me in the present work: Professors Ants Oras, William Ruff, and Leland L. Zimmerman. To Professor Oras I am especially grateful, both for his detailed supervision of this work and for his great kindness to me during several years of study at the University of Florida. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ±± I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. A SURVEY AND ANALYSIS OF PREVIOUS CRITICISM 5 III. AN EXPLICATION AND ANALYSIS OF THE TEXT 29 Introduction to Explication and Analysis 29 Stanza by Stanza Explication and Analysis 57 IV. AN ANALYSIS OF THE DRAMATIC STRUCTURE 194 The Basic Dramatic Structure 194 The Contribution of Seasonal Imagery 233 The Contribution of Shifts in Point of View 242 V. AN ANALYSIS OF THE STANZA FORM 252 VI. THE LITERARY MERITS AND THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MODERN LOVE 257 BIBLIOGRAPHY 275 ill . ' CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION George Meredith's Modern Love was first published in London in 1862 as the title poem of Meredith's second volume of poetry: Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside: With Poems and Ballads . Since that time, besides inclusion in volumes of Meredith's "complete" poetical works, ^ it has appeared once in Modern Love : A Reprint : To which is added The Sage Enamoured and the Honest Lady (London and New York, 1892) ; twice in "selections" of Meredith's poetry: Selected Poetical Works of George Meredith . Edited by G. M. Trevelyan (London, 1955) , and Selected Poems of George Meredith . Edited with an introduction by Graham Hough (London, 1962) ; and four times in editions devoted solely to it : Modern Love , with Foreword by E. Cavazza (Portland, Maine, [1891]); Modern Love , with an introduction by Richard Le Galllenne (New York, 1909); L Amour Moderne : Poeme traduit de 1' Anglais par Andre Fontainas (Paris, 1920); and Modern *The accepted text for Meredith's "complete" poetical works is The Poetical Works of George Meredith With Some Notes by G. M. Trevelyan (London, 1912) . M. B. Forman, in A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of George Meredith (Edinburgh, 1922), lists also four "collected" editions of Meredith's works— [The Edition de Luxe, 1896-1912]; [The Library Edition, 1897-1910]; [The Pocket Edition, 1901-1906]; and [The Memorial Edition, 1909-1911] —all of which apparently contain volumes of the poems. The Trevelyan 1912 volume, however, supersedes all of these. 1 2 Love , with an introduction by C. Day Lewis (London, 1948). ^ in addition, it has appeared in numerous general anthologies and, with the one excep- tion of "Lucifer in Starlight," is the most frequently anthologized, either in part or in whole, of any of Meredith's poetical works. Almost universally recognized as Meredith's most significant poetical work, it has undoubtedly received the greatest total volume of criticism and analysis of any of his poems, attracting the praise and attention of a long list of critics and men of letters in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—including Algernon Charles Swinburne, Arthur Symons, Edward Dowden, Sir William Watson, Richard Le Gallienne, G. M. Trevelyan, Arthur Clutton-Brock, J. B. Priestley, E. K. Chambers, C. Day Lewis, Siegfried Sassoon, Lionel Stevenson, and Norman Friedman, ^ just to mention some of the better known figures who have dealt with the poem. Meredith himself also reported, in separate letters to his friend Maxse, that 2All of the above works, plus The Poetical Works of George Meredith (mentioned in the first footnote) , are listed in the Bibliography under the editions of Meredith. However, any references to the various 'Introductions,' 'Forewords,' and 'Notes' to these works will be cited hereafter in footnotes according to the last name of the author of such 'Introduction,' 'Foreword,' or 'Notes,' with additional information given only if the author has other works cited in this study—e.g., Hough, p. ; Cavazza, p. ; or Trevelyan, "Notes," The Poetical Works . p. As an added guide, any of these authors who are cited in footnotes will be listed in the Bibliography in their own right with a note: "See entry under the editions of Meredith." ^For references to the commentaries of these critics, see the Bibli- ography; the listing here is roughly chronological, according to the dates of publication of the commentaries. Inclusion in (or exclusion from) this list is not intended as an indication of the amount or quality of critical analysis of Modern Love itself; it is simply intended as an indication of interest in the poem shown by writers generally well known in areas other than Meredith criticism. A more comprehensive review of Modem Love scholarship may be found in Chapter II. — 3 Modern Love had received the commendation of D. G. Rossetti and Robert Browning;^ Arthur Symons reports it to have been greatly admired by James Thomson;^ and Siegfried Sassoon reports it to have been a "perennial favourite" of T. H. Huxley. 6 And yet, despite the relatively wide circulation it has received, and the relatively large amount of critical interest it has attracted. Modern Love has never been really thoroughly explicated and perhaps , — because of the difficulty of explication—has received almost no detailed analysis and evaluation of such important technical elements as its dramatic structure; the structure afforded by its seasonal imagery; the highly complex structure of its point of view; or even the prosodic structure of its stanza form. The purpose of this dissertation will be, then, to present (1) a survey of the previous analytical work done on Modern Love , together with a discussion of its limitations; (2) an extended and relatively exhaustive stanza-by-stanza (and sometimes image-by-image) explication of the poem together with a running commentary on the technical devices within each stanza, and on the relationship of the imagery and thought of one stanza to that of another and to that of Meredith's poetry and philosophy in general; (3) an analysis and evaluation of its dramatic structure, together with an analysis of the structural elements of seasonal imagery and point ^Letters of George Meredith : Collected and Edited by His Son . 2 vols. (New York, 1912), I, 57 and 73, hereafter cited as Letters . ^"George Meredith's Poetry," Westminster Review . CXXVIII (September 1887), 696. Meredith (New York, 1948), p. 51. 4 of view; (4) a brief analysis of the peculiarities and artistic merits of its stanza form; and (5) an evaluation of the literary merits and the historical significance of the poem as a whole. In this final section, I shall demonstrate that although Modern Love is widely recognized as Meredith's most significant poetical work and that although it has been highly praised in an absolute sense, its general rank and significance as a continuous narrative-dramatic poem has never been well-established. I shall further propose that the over-all literary reputation of Modern Love has perhaps suffered by the very lack of major literary works with which it can be meaningfully compared—that it has been very inaccurately and Inadequately defined as a sonnet sequence and that it stands, in fact, largely alone as a literary type. I shall also suggest that in technique, as well as in thought, it is still an intensely modern poem, and that although its techniques have not been widely imitated in the twentieth century, its peculiar lyric-dramatic point of view and its intricate symbolic-ironic patterning of imagery may yet offer a significant model for extended psychological-dramatic narratives in verse. CHAPTER II A SURVEY AND ANALYSIS OF PREVIOUS CRITICISM The previous commentary on Modern Love falls almost entirely into the categories of summary and general critical evaluation rather than of specialized technical analysis. The exceptions to this are two articles on the image patterns—Norman Friedman's "The Jangled Harp: Symbolic Struc- 1 ture in Modern Love" and Elizabeth Cox Wright's "The Significance of the Image Patterns in Meredith's Modem Love" ^—and one article by William T. Going on a possible autobiographical source for one of the secondary characters in the poem: "A Note on 'My Lady' of Modem Love. The Fried- man article I shall discuss at length later, and the other two I shall refer to more briefly. Other than these specialized articles, the previous commentary has appeared in the form of reviews; of introductions to editions of the poem, and notes thereto; of chapters or passages dealing with the poem in larger books or articles devoted to Meredith's life, work, and/or thought in general; and of essays devoted more or less exclusively to the poem, but *MLQ .

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