George Eliot (32 page)

Likewise, Harriet Martineau’s reaction to Marian’s ‘elopement’ was fuelled by her rivalry with Lewes over who was the greater authority on Auguste Comte. Stirred up by a flabby intervention from John Chapman, Martineau retreated into paranoid fantasy. She put around the story that Marian had written her an ‘insulting’ letter from Weimar, presumably crowing about her life with Lewes. Unlikely though this was, in London’s overheated atmosphere this scrap was sufficiently plausible to get repeated at the Reform Club. Martineau had always been pathologically jealous of women who acted on their sexuality: she fell out with Elizabeth Barrett when she went off with Browning and thought that her good friend Charlotte Brontë had spoiled
Villette
by going on too much about love. Now she became apoplectic at the thought that Miss Evans was enjoying sexual happiness with that little mountebank Lewes. Seldom nice about anyone, Martineau specialised in the long-held grudge. Her autobiography, written fifteen or so years before her death but published posthumously, was full of jibes, spites and rages against all those who had crossed her, particularly her brother James. Marian hated its score-keeping, but was perhaps relieved to find that she was not
mentioned. So it was lucky that she never saw a letter which Martineau wrote to a friend during Lewes’s long decline: ‘Do you know that Lewes is likely to die?… What will … [Miss Evans] do? Take a successor, I shd expect.’
¹⁸

News of the Harriet Martineau complication arrived in Weimar on 11 October in the form of ‘a painful letter from London [which] caused us both a bad night’.
¹⁹
It had come from Thomas Carlyle, the veteran writer and Germanist who had been one of Lewes’s mentors ever since his arrival in London almost twenty years ago. In his letter Carlyle raised the more general accusation that Marian had taken Lewes away from his wife and family. Lewes’s response has been lost, but it seems to have done the trick, because Carlyle’s next letter is much more sympathetic. This in turn prompted Lewes to explode in a baroque expression of relieved thanks. ‘I sat at your feet when my mind was first awakening; I have honoured and loved you ever since both as teacher and friend, and
now
to find that you judge me rightly, and are not estranged by what has estranged so many from me, gives me strength to bear what yet must be borne!’ He then goes on to reassure Carlyle that ‘there is no foundation for the scandal as it runs. My separation was in nowise caused by the lady named, nor by any other lady.’ As for the whole Martineau business, he promises Carlyle that Marian ‘has
not
written to Miss Martineau at all – has had no communication with her for twelvemonths – has sent no message to her, or any one else – in short this letter is a pure, or impure, fabrication – the letter, the purport, the language, all fiction’.
²⁰

Although Carlyle was apparently appeased by this explanation – he knew just how odd Miss Martineau could be – a note which he added on the bottom of Lewes’s second letter suggests that he continued to disapprove of Marian, whom he sniggeringly dubbed ‘the strong-minded woman’. This was not out of any loyalty to Agnes – indeed, he had urged Lewes to part from her. But the idea that Miss Evans was now in Weimar working with Lewes on Goethe unsettled him. More than anyone, Carlyle had been responsible for introducing the great man’s life and work to Britain. He looked upon Lewes as his natural heir and was happy for him to write the first biography of Goethe in English. But it was quite a different matter to contemplate an interloper
– albeit a supremely well-qualified one – admitted to the sacred cause. Having the Goethe biography dedicated to him may have gone a long way towards reconciling Carlyle to Lewes, but he never learned to like – or approve of – his strong-minded companion.

Painful though all this gossip was, it may have provided the necessary spur for Lewes to separate formally from Agnes. For it was on 23 October that Marian wrote her oblique letter to Bray in which she hinted that ‘circumstances with which I am not concerned, and which have arisen since he left England, have led him to determine on a separation from Mrs Lewes’.
²¹
Could it be that those ‘circumstances’ were the surprising severity of London’s reaction to Lewes’s and Marian’s departure, including some nasty speculation that this might be a temporary arrangement? Was it at this point that Lewes realised that his strategy of acting with tact and discretion towards the two women in his life had only increased the scope for vicious rumours about them? Whatever the exact reasoning, it was now that George Henry Lewes told Marian Evans that his future lay with her alone.

Lewes was welcomed in Weimar with a respect and affection that would have surprised and annoyed literary London. His interest in German philosophy and literature went back to 1838 when he had spent nine months in Berlin and Vienna learning the language. Armed on that occasion with a letter of introduction from Carlyle, the young Lewes adopted his usual strategy of making contacts, flirting with women and reading frantically. With the Shelley biography abandoned, he had turned to Germany’s greatest poet and literary figure instead. Over the next ten years Lewes fitted bits and pieces of research on Goethe into his crazy schedule, but never managed to go beyond secondary sources. Now, finally, he was returning to Germany in an attempt to fill out and finish a book that lay close to his heart.

Marian recorded her impression of Weimar in three separate and overlapping accounts. As was to become her habit, she wrote up her journal retrospectively, organising ‘Recollections of Weimar 1854’ at a distance of a few weeks in Berlin, the city to which she and Lewes travelled next. From this seedbed she wrote two money-spinning articles about Weimar which appeared in
Fraser’s Magazine
in June and July 1855.
²²
The result is an unusually detailed account of the first three months of her full-time life with Lewes.

Marian’s first reaction to Weimar when she arrived on 2 August was: ‘how could Goethe live here in this dull, lifeless village?’ Although the sleepy atmosphere and old-fashioned buildings reminded her of an English market town, there was none of the plump prosperity she was used to in Warwickshire. The local sheep were ‘as dingy as London sheep and far more skinny’. Still, the lodgings which she and Lewes quickly found were comfortable, even if the landlady and her maid had the freakish features of pantomime peasants.
²³

Lewes, the accomplished networker, started making calls immediately. Armed with a letter of introduction from Strauss he contacted Gustav Scholl, director of the Art Institute, who had edited Goethe’s letters and essays. Scholl was at the heart of Weimarian society and through him Lewes and Marian met the resident intellectual community. No one, not even the two Englishmen who lived permanently in Weimar and almost certainly knew that Marian was not married, cared about her unusual situation. She was included in every invitation issued to Lewes and was soon absorbed in the kind of semi-public social life which was now closed to her in London.

But it was Lewes who came up with the introduction that meant most. During his 1839 stay in Vienna he had met Franz Liszt. Now the composer had been reincarnated as the Duke of Weimar’s kapellmeister, a post which had once been held by Bach. Marian approached the maestro with something approaching rapture. To Charles Bray she confided that Liszt was ‘the first really inspired man I ever saw’, while to Bessie Rayner Parkes she gushed, ‘he is a glorious creature in every way’.
²⁴

While Marian was partly responding to Liszt’s musicianship – ‘for the first time I heard the true tones of the piano’ – it was the parallels between the great man and her own dear Lewes which fired her imagination.
²⁵
Liszt was a plain man in whose ‘divine ugliness’ she insisted on seeing a great soul breaking through. This, she claimed unsurprisingly, ‘is my favourite kind of physique’ and went on to use it as a model for the musician Klesmer in
Daniel Deronda
.
²⁶
The similarities between Liszt and
Lewes went further: the composer was living with a woman to whom he was not married. Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein had recently left her husband and, although in Russia her infidelity was punished by the confiscation of her estates, in Weimar she was treated with common sense and courtesy. Although Marian responded to the Princess with her usual defensiveness – ‘she is short and unbecomingly endowed with embonpoint’ – not to mention the ‘blackish’ teeth and ‘barbarian’ profile, the likeness in their situation soon softened her.
²⁷
Before long, Lewes and Marian were meeting Liszt and his Princess every couple of days and through them were introduced to Clara Schumann and Anton Rubinstein, as well as to the work of Wagner. The first two they found interesting, the third – billed as ‘the music of the future’ – puzzling.

What shines through Marian’s accounts of this first month in Germany is her intense pleasure at finally being openly and fully close to the man she loved: ‘I am happier every day and find my domesticity more and more delightful and beneficial to me,’ she sang to John Chapman.
²⁸
For the first time since she had met Lewes she was enjoying the everyday intimacies of married life: waking up together, taking a picnic in the park, wandering to nowhere in particular. They even carved their initials in the little wooden hut where Goethe spent his summers. Lewes, his health better than at any time in the previous year, was back to his usual buoyant self, entertaining her with his impressions of Edmund Kean, recounting a dreadful night spent trying to lecture the working class of Hackney on
Othello
. Under the spell of their emotional and sexual compatibility, what had first seemed charmless and provincial about Weimarian culture now revealed itself as unpretentiously joyful. Marian noted with pleasure how the people flocked to the park in the evenings to take coffee and how they attended the nearby theatre without any fuss as to dress or etiquette. When she wrote up her recollections retrospectively, the park at Weimar became a symbol of the new freedom in her relationship with Lewes: ‘Dear Park of Weimar! In 1854, two loving, happy human beings spent many a delicious hour in wandering under your shade and in your sunshine, and to one of them at least you will be a “joy for ever” through all the sorrows that are to come.’
²⁹

But by the time she came to write these words these sorrows were more than distant phantoms. Marian and Lewes arrived in Berlin on 3 November in search of good libraries and new Goethe contacts. Under the charm of their love for one another the unpromising Duchy of Weimar had been turned into a little paradise full of kind-hearted friends and simple goodness.
³⁰
Their Weimarian friends had given them a touching send-off. Liszt had turned up the night before with a bag of sweets for the journey, Scholl had insisted on ‘kissing G again and again on the lips’. Even Lora, the ugly little maid, appeared on the station platform with a bouquet for Marian clutched in her grimy hand.

Berlin could not have been more different, with its modern buildings, expensive lodgings, bad beds and streets clogged with overdressed tourists. The season was on the turn and soon heavy snow would blast through the city, making even the short walk from their lodgings to the hotel where they took dinner a chilly ordeal. By this time the painful news from London had trickled in and Marian and Lewes were in the middle of their highly charged correspondences with Thomas Carlyle, John Chapman and Charles Bray. As the reality of their situation broke in upon their dreamy happiness, even the surrounding buildings and streets started to seem oppressive. Hordes of soldiers – ‘300,000 puppets in uniform’ – marched menacingly through the streets.
³¹

Still, with George Henry Lewes around it was impossible to be gloomy for long. ‘The day seems too short for our happiness, and we both of us feel that we have begun life afresh – with new ambition and new powers,’ insisted Marian to John Chapman.
³²
On their first morning – a Sunday – they were walking along Unter den Linden when Lewes was accosted by Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, the Goethe scholar whom he had met on his first trip to Germany sixteen years ago. Varnhagen, though elderly, was still a key player in Berlin’s intelligentsia and through him Marian and Lewes found themselves with a ready-made social life. At a party which Varnhagen threw for them four days later Marian met Henriette von Solmar, a distinguished hostess who invited the couple to attend one of her near-nightly salons where intellectually minded Berlin gathered for conversation.

No one was bothered by the fact that Marian and Lewes were not married, not even Varnhagen, who had always taken an
avuncular interest in Agnes. Likewise Fräulein von Solmar who, as Marian was quick to point out to Charles Bray, moved in ‘the best society of Berlin’.
³³
Painters, sculptors and scientists, both bachelors and family men, happily welcomed the couple without comment into their homes.

One of these homes, which particularly charmed Marian, belonged to Professor Otto Friedrich Gruppe, a man even more versatile than Lewes, who had written on everything from Greek drama to contemporary politics. In the short piece she wrote on Gruppe for the
Leader
in July 1855 Marian, clearly thinking of Lewes, took the opportunity to point out the advantages of this kind of easy facility. ‘Those who decry versatility … seem to forget the immense service rendered by the
suggestiveness
of versatile men, who come to the subject with fresh, unstrained minds.’
³⁴
But Marian also responded well to Gruppe the specialist, writing favourably of his latest book,
The Future of German Philosophy
, which rejected metaphysics in favour of solid empiricism. Yet more than anything else it was Gruppe’s domestic life which caught her imagination. He had married a woman thirty years younger than himself by whom he had two children, and his humble flat at the top of several flights of stairs seemed a perfect tableau of domestic contentment. By this time Marian and Lewes had probably reached the decision not to have children, which may account for Marian’s sometimes sentimental accounts of happy German families in her journal entries of these weeks.