George Meredith's unorthodox poetic project Modern Love (1862) is one of the bleakest depictions of love and marriage in nineteenth-century literature. The poem opens onto a disintegrating union between an anonymous husband and wife. The wife, we find out, has a lover, and the husband, on the advice of his doctor, responds by taking his own. Shortly after an overture for a return to monogamy on the wife's part, her suicide dissolves the relationship. Filling in the space between these sparse plot points are tableau-like episodes and passages of intense lyric density, which often recount the husband's psychological and emotional processing of small events in more detail than the events themselves. As a poet and a novelist, Meredith had particular reason to think about the differences between extended narrative and lyric forms and the effect of running those modes together in Modern Love. Formally, Modern Love sits uneasily in the gray area between a thematic collection of fifty sixteen-line sonnets and a variation on novelistic marriage and adultery plots. With this structural ambivalence, Meredith unfolds the answer to the poem's already grim animating question--how might we crawl out of this tragedy?--at a painfully halting pace. At the very center of the poem, for example, Meredith stalls the already stalling narrative to offer a metacommentary on the adultery plot, taken from a French novel. This sonnet condenses into sixteen lines what I argue is Modern Love's generic argument for the limitations of the novel in representing marriage. Though the husband avows appreciation for the naturalness of the French novel's subject, the sonnet also parodies its narrative logic, which depends on a sequence of cause and effect: You like not that French novel? Tell me why. You think it most 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 overfond: 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, they say, is worthy of the Muse. (Sonnet XXV, 11. 1-16) (1) If the husband wants to praise the naturalness of the adultery plot over the implied unnaturalness of English propriety or romanticized ideals, then why does Meredith comment on that form in the very middle of his narrative poem--instead of writing an adultery novel, for example? Meredith had in fact written a novel about adultery: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, published in 1859, a few years before Modern Love and a few years after one such "French novel," Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856). Meredith's experience writing a novel about adultery sharpens Sonnet XXV's specific critique of novelistic narrative, a critique that applies to both French and English novels, marriage and adultery plots: its causal logic. That is, he requires not an adultery novel but a uniquely narrativized sonnet collection to make his case against the novel's forward-looking narrative logic. In the first three quatrains of Sonnet XXV, Meredith laughs at cause and effect: Edmond's diet of blanc-mange and absinthe, an emphatically minute detail that parodies the naturalistic mode, leads to his pale aspect, which leads to the wife's admiration, which leads to his change in diet to rosbif, which leads to the termination of the affair. For a moment, of course, this conclusion is unclear, and that lack of clarity tellingly reflects Modern Love more closely: "Then hangeth all on one tremendous If:--/ If she will choose between them." A marriage whose future appears to be contingent on the wife's decision: the similarity of this situation to the husband's sobers the otherwise dark comedy of the sonnet. …

中文翻译：

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在乔治梅雷迪思的现代爱情中寻找正当理由

乔治·梅雷迪思 (George Meredith) 的非正统诗歌项目《现代爱情》（1862 年）是 19 世纪文学中对爱情和婚姻最黯淡的描写之一。这首诗开启了匿名丈夫和妻子之间正在瓦解的结合。我们发现，妻子有一个情人，而丈夫根据医生的建议，以自己的方式回应。在妻子提出恢复一夫一妻制的提议后不久，她的自杀解除了这段关系。填补这些稀疏情节点之间的空间是画面般的情节和抒情密集的段落，它们往往比事件本身更详细地叙述丈夫对小事件的心理和情感处理。作为诗人和小说家，Meredith 有特别的理由去思考扩展叙事和抒情形式之间的差异，以及在《摩登爱情》中将这些模式结合在一起的效果。从形式上讲，《现代爱情》令人不安地处于 56 行十四行诗的主题收藏与小说婚姻和通奸情节的变体之间的灰色地带。带着这种结构上的矛盾心理，梅雷迪思以一种令人痛苦的停顿的速度展开了对这首诗已经严峻的动画问题的答案——我们如何才能从这场悲剧中爬出来？例如，在这首诗的中心，梅雷迪思暂停了已经停滞不前的叙述，对通奸情节进行了元评论，取自一部法国小说。这首十四行诗浓缩为十六行，我认为这是现代爱情对小说在表现婚姻方面的局限性的一般论点。虽然丈夫承认欣赏法国小说主题的自然，但十四行诗也模仿了它的叙事逻辑，这取决于因果关系：你不喜欢那部法国小说吗？告诉我为什么。你觉得最不自然。让我们来看看。演员似乎是通常的三个：丈夫、妻子和情人。她——可是，飞！在英国，我们不会听说它。爱德蒙，爱人，她虔诚的懊恼；Blanc-mange 和苦艾酒是他忏悔的食物，直到他苍白的面容让她过分喜爱：所以，为了排除新的罪孽，他尝试了 rosbif。与此同时，丈夫不再受到虐待：奥古斯特在泪流满面之前原谅了她。然后挂在一个巨大的如果：-- 如果她会在它们之间做出选择！她确实选择了；把她的丈夫当成一个合格的妻子。不自然？亲爱的，这些东西就是生活：而生活，他们说，不愧为缪斯。(十四行诗 XXV, 11. 1-16) (1) 如果丈夫想赞美通奸情节的自然性，而不是英国礼节或浪漫理想的隐含不自然性，那么梅雷迪思为什么要在他的中间评论这种形式？叙事诗——而不是写通奸小说，例如？事实上，梅雷迪思写了一部关于通奸的小说：《理查德·费弗勒的考验》，出版于 1859 年，比现代爱情早几年，也比这样的“法国小说”福楼拜的包法利夫人 (1856) 晚了几年。梅雷迪思撰写通奸小说的经历强化了十四行诗二十五对小说叙事的具体批评，这种批评适用于法国和英国小说、婚姻和通奸情节：其因果逻辑。那是，他需要的不是通奸小说，而是独特的叙事十四行诗集，以反对小说的前瞻性叙事逻辑。在十四行诗 XXV 的前三首绝句中，梅雷迪思嘲笑因果关系：埃德蒙的白芒果和苦艾酒的饮食，一个模仿自然主义模式的强调细节的细节，导致他苍白的面容，导致妻子的钦佩，导致到他的饮食改变为 rosbif，这导致了婚外情的终止。当然，有那么一刻，这个结论还不清楚，而这种不清晰更清楚地反映了现代爱情：“然后把一切都挂在一个巨大的如果：-/如果她会在它们之间做出选择。” 未来似乎取决于妻子决定的婚姻：这种情况与丈夫的相似之处 s 使十四行诗的黑色喜剧变得清醒。…