SOURCE: Ostrom, Hans. “The Disappearance of Tragedy in Meredith's Modern Love.” The Victorian Newsletter 63 (spring 1983): 26-30.

In the following essay, Ostrom suggests that the “incomplete tragic resolution” of Modern Love demonstrates the particularly Victorian sensibility of the poem and is linked to the Victorian loss of faith in meaning.

Critics have struggled with George Meredith's Modern Love on virtually every front: besides being explicated as a whole work and through considerations of individual sonnets, it has been variously discussed as fiction, as a sonnet sequence that turns the tradition of the sonnet sequence inside out, as a “game of sentiment,” and as a “humanistic document.”¹ The very terminology of this last reading suggests at least the possibility of a useful comparison to the work of Matthew Arnold, especially to “Dover Beach”: the anxiety detectable in the famous entreaty, “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!” poignantly...