Affective Coherence, a Principle of Abated Action, and Meredith's "Modern Love"

Abstract

George Meredith's idiosyncratic notions about sentimentalism, egoism, comedy, and the harmony of blood, brain, and spirit have been thoroughly explicated. But a closer investigation of Meredith's formal idiosyncrasies may lead to a better understanding of his works and perhaps even to a new path of inquiry into the elusive principle of coherence in many Victorian novels.1 Love, for example, receives praise for its artistry, but critics stress that the husband is a sentimentalist and egoist and then emphasize the autobiographical ramifications of the poem.2 Comments by biographers, however, indicate very clearly that in Love Meredith successfully integrates personal emotional history with his artistic design. Lionel Stevenson says: The whole group takes rank with the great sonnet sequences as a personal record of passion presented in a condensed and vivid series of emotional glimpses.3 And Siegfried Sassoon's remarks suggest that the artistic design dominates the personal history: Meredith's wife's death, Sassoon says, had come as a relief, causing him no disintegrating emotion. Hence his ability to produce Love, refashioning his own love tragedy with the control of art, intellect, and irony to a human drama from which, in his creative capacity, he could stand aside.4 In spite of one critic's curious inability to enjoy Meredith's artful transformation of somewhat sordid and confessional material, I think few readers would argue with one implication of Stevenson's and Sassoon's comments: because of its artistry, the poem moves us regardless of how much we know about Meredith's life and philosophy and, furthermore, about peculiarly Victorian attitudes toward love and marriage.6 Years ago Ernest Baker remarked that Modern Love is like a novel in having a plot;' yet only a few critics-primarily Norman Friedman