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Affecting authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2002 by Houston, Natalie M
At dinner, she is hostess, I am host.
Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps
The Topic over intellectual deeps
In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.
...
But here's the greater wonder; in that we,
Enamoured of an acting nought can tire,
Each other, like true hypocrites, admire;
...
We waken envy of our happy lot. (1-4, 9-11, 14)
For Meredith, Victorian society's need to affirm the possibility of marital happiness blinds it to the realities of authentic modern love, including the adulterous affairs, sexual violence, and fatal self-recrimination detailed in Modern Love, which functions primarily as an anti-amatory sequence. Thus the explicit sexuality occurring outside the marriage bond is, for Meredith, another mark of authenticity, which he asserts in sonnet XXV:
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 ....
Unnatural? My dear, these things are life:
And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse. (XXV. 1-5, 15-16)
Here Meredith anticipates the reactions of many of his critics who denounced Modern Love: "So far from a condition of doubt and uncertainty on the general tone of matrimonial morality being in any sense an interesting or attractive thing, it is one of the most disastrous calamities that can befall a nation" (Rev. 106). Meredith insists that the modern sonnet series can interrogate the issues of real life rather than simply conforming to our literary expectations. Most nineteenth-century novels end with one or more marriages, and rarely detail the reality of married life, much less its possible deviation from the ideal of domestic bliss. Most Renaissance sonnet sequences yearn toward the realization of desire, even within social structures that guard against it. Modern Love critiques the expected teleology of romance as a destructive idealization. This critique becomes, then, the mark of the poem's modernity-the vision of love in its absence-- which disrupts the conventions of both the sonnet and the novel.
In sonnet XXX, Meredith deliberately questions the appropriateness of the amatory sonnet tradition for the scientific, modern Victorian age:
What are we first? First, animals; and next
Intelligences at a leap,...
Into which state comes Love, the crowning sun:
Beneath whose light the shadow loses form.
We are the lords of life, and life is warm.
Intelligence and instinct now are one.
But Nature says: "My children most they seem
When they least know me: therefore I decree
That they shall suffer." Swift doth young Love flee,
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
Then if we study Nature we are wise.
Thus do the few who live but with the day:
The scientific animals are they
Lady, this is my sonnet to your eyes. (XXX.1-2, 9-16)
In an age beginning to theorize about the relation of biological instinct to social behavior, the findings of nature were often at odds with the decrees of morality. Where Barrett Browning's sonnets seemed to justify Victorian social conventions by drawing on an older idealized model, Meredith instead claims that such modern romantic conventions overlaid on the ways of Nature are just as false or inauthentic as the Renaissance conceits of the literary tradition. Meredith thus criticizes the very foundation of Victorian sonnet theory by insisting that what can be truthfully spoken through the amatory sonnet tradition is always constructed and therefore never entirely authentic.
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