George Eliot (33 page)

Equally interesting was the relationship of Adolf Stahr, a scholar who specialised in Spinoza and Goethe. For the last nine years the still-married Stahr had been living with Fanny Lewald, a feminist and novelist whom Lewes had met during a second trip to Germany in 1845. Although Lewes and Marian had reservations about the pretentious, gossipy couple, they embarked on a cautious friendship with them. One day – 6 February – they arrived at the home they shared only to find that Stahr’s divorce had come through and he and Lewald had ‘gone to be married at last’.
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Was it with some wistfulness that Marian later noted that they ‘seemed the happier for it’?

Germany was never meant to be a holiday. Lewes and Marian were there to work. Agnes and her expanding brood gobbled up
money, and Thornton was following in the Hunt family tradition of flagrant irresponsibility: his financial contributions were sketchy in the extreme. Despite having come to Germany to finish his book, Lewes still needed to generate short-term income. During these months he knocked off two translations of French farce and managed to keep his regular column on the
Leader
ticking over, arranging for his twenty-pound fee to be sent directly to Agnes.

But the main project was Goethe. Surprisingly, there was no good biography in either German or English. Lewes quickly set about gathering the primary material – mainly recollections from people who had known the poet – which would distinguish his book from the lacklustre versions that had gone before. He interviewed two frail old men who had worked as Goethe’s secretary before his death, as well as a woman who had been at the court when Goethe first came to Weimar. In Berlin he spoke to the sculptor Christian Rauch, who emphasised just how lovable the great man had been. In Weimar Goethe’s daughter-in-law Ottilie arranged for Lewes to see the poet’s study and bedroom. Together Marian and Lewes made day trips to the Duke’s summer residence, where Goethe had masterminded chamber-scale theatricals, and to Ilmenau, where his small wooden house was set in idyllic surroundings.
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Marian’s Dorothea-like wish to help a man with his work had at last been granted. Although when she had first met Lewes she was far from thinking anything about him great, observing him work at close quarters had changed her mind. His enthusiasm for Goethe was raw and real, with nothing of the ‘bread scholar’s’ careful calculation. Of course, identification played a part. The German writer’s ability to move elegantly between poetry and science helped Lewes find an authority for his own much-mocked versatility. And in Lewes’s account of why Goethe broke off his engagement to Frederika Brion – ‘he was perfectly right to draw back from an engagement which he felt his love was not strong enough to fulfil’ – one hears a coded justification of his ending of the marriage to Agnes.
³⁷

Although Marian was not instinctively drawn to Goethe, she naturally considered it her duty to become interested. Her insight into his two great novels,
Wilhelm Meister
and
Elective Affinities
– often dismissed as immoral and boring to boot – enriched Lewes’s treatment of them and became the basis of an important article she would write for the
Leader
on their return home.
³⁸
In addition she supplied the English translation for the passages that Lewes wanted to extract, as well as for the complicated genealogical tables that appear in the book. For all this she received a credit in the final footnotes as an ‘accomplished German translator’.

While Lewes was welcomed in Germany as an old friend and distinguished scholar, Marian was (barely) known as the English translator of Feuerbach and Strauss. Their relative positions in London, with Miss Evans as the highly respected editor of the
Westminster Review
and Lewes as the pushy hack, had been reversed. On the surface this did not bother her. Love had made her temporarily content and happy to take dictation when Lewes’s headache stopped him from writing his regular pieces for the
Leader
. Yet only a few months earlier, while in the depths of her own headache, she had written to Cara from London of her ‘despair of achieving anything worth the doing’.
³⁹
How long would it be before that restless ambition, part of her nature since her very first day at school, would insist on making itself known once again?

The tensions in Marian’s position spilled out in a piece she wrote for the
Westminster Review
from Germany on Victor Cousin’s book on Madame de Sablé and other literary women of seventeenth-century France. It is an odd, uneven article, less a review than an essay which uses the three books it is supposed to be noticing as a peg on which to hang a bigger argument. Writing, as always, anonymously, Marian starts with the bold assertion that ‘our own feminine literature is made up of books which could have been better written by men’.
⁴⁰
The only country where this is not the case is France, where ‘if the writings of women were swept away, a serious gap would be made in the national history’.

What makes Frenchwomen so different from everyone else? Marian embarks on a strange (to us) physiological argument that the Frenchwoman’s ‘small brain and vivacious temperament’ is better for the business of literature than the English and German woman’s more ‘dreamy and passive’ constitution. She then shifts
to ground that sounds familiar, which seems, in fact, like a defence of her own unusual experience of living and working among men. In seventeenth-century France, Marian explains, women ran salons into which they invited the cleverest men of art and science, and so gained a unique access ‘to a common fund of ideas, to common objects of interest with men’. The result was not simply beneficial to the women themselves, but allowed them to develop relations with men formed ‘in the maturity of thought and feeling, and grounded only on inherent fitness and mutual attraction’. This in turn had an enriching effect on the culture, allowing both men and women to develop their highest potential and write novels out of a sense of their own gendered fullness. Marian ends with a barely disguised plea for her kind of female, one who has used her access to high culture to turn herself into a woman whose intellectual and emotional difference delights the best kind of man. ‘Then we shall have that marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of human happiness.’

Chapman did not like the article, annoyed by the way his former assistant editor had hijacked a routine commission and turned it into a manifesto for her own scandalous position. Her heavy-handed distancing device – ‘heaven forbid that we should enter on a defence of French morals, most of all in relation to marriage!’ – was, in the circumstances, plain embarrassing.
⁴¹
Chapman was currently under pressure from the high-minded Unitarians to distance himself from the scandalous atheism implied by Miss Evans’s decision to live with a man outside marriage. Although he paid her the agreed fifteen pounds for it, he did not write to thank her, nor did he ask her to do any more – a serious blow at a time when she desperately needed to make money. Chapman may also have been piqued by her revelation that she had revised her final draft along lines suggested by Lewes. Even when he was her lover, Chapman would never have presumed to offer Marian advice on her writing, nor would she have accepted it.

During these months in Germany Marian’s confidence as a writer fell in proportion as her personal happiness rose. At home the Feuerbach translation had been met either with stony silence
or, from James Martineau writing in the
Westminster
, with sneering hostility. Now Marian was facing the realities of life as a free-lance writer, without the prestige of a leading publication behind her. She was dependent on Chapman for any commissions he put her way, a reverse of the previous power balance between them, which showed up in the gushing way she acknowledged his first letter to her at the beginning of August asking her to write the piece on Madame de Sablé. Chapman’s cool response to the finished piece made her wary of suggesting other topics, even though, as she told Sara, there were ‘plenty of subjects suggested by new German books which would be fresh and instructive in an English Review’.
⁴²
In January she finally plucked up courage to suggest ‘Ideals of Womanhood’ for the
Westminster
and, when that failed to take, ‘Woman in Germany’.
⁴³
Chapman turned this down too, perhaps sensing another strident manifesto on the way, and grudgingly agreed only to a piece on Eduard Vehse’s
Memoirs of the Court of Austria
, a cut-and-paste job which hardly stretched her, but did at least pay.

After six months in Germany, Marian had succeeded in producing only a handful of magazine articles. This was not going to be enough to keep her, let alone Lewes’s family in London. So when Lewes told her that he had an outstanding contract with a London publisher to produce a translation of Spinoza’s
Ethics
she leaped at the chance to do the work for him. ‘I cannot bring myself to run the risk of a refusal from an editor,’ she explained to Sara, ‘so I am working at what will ultimately yield something which is secured by agreement with Bonn [the publisher].’
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She started work on 8 November and although money was her prime motive, she was far from regarding this as routine work. She had long been interested in the philosopher’s clear, logical thought, which had had such an obvious impact on both Feuerbach and Strauss, not to mention Goethe. Almost ten years previously she had started translating Spinoza during a particularly unsettled time in her life and later while she was waiting for her father to die. Now she was to take him up again at a time of great happiness. There was something satisfactory about having come full circle.

Although Marian produced little finished work during these months, still she was reading more than ever before, soaking up
material that would feed a burst of creativity once she returned to London. At their lodgings in the Dorotheenstrasse Marian and Lewes set up the routine which they would follow for most of their lives. They wrote and translated in the morning, walked in the afternoon and either visited friends or read in the evening, working through Shakespeare, Heine, Lesser, Macaulay and the inevitable Goethe.

By the time Marian came to record her recollections of these evenings in the lodgings, made cosy with coffee, gingerbread and rolls, she was already back in England. After a final hectic week of cultural tourism, she and Lewes had set out for Calais on 11 March 1855, travelling via Brussels and Cologne. This return journey could not have been more different from the one they had made eight months before. On that occasion the Channel had been as smooth and perfect as glass. Now it was sufficiently choppy to make them both sick. On 13 March they got to Dover and spent a queasy night in a hotel before finding lodgings the next day for Marian in Sydney Place. She stayed here alone working on Spinoza, while Lewes went up to London to sort out his family affairs and make arrangements for their future life together.

As Marian reworked her experience of the past few months in her journal she became increasingly aware of how much she had lost by coming home. The Germans might be a coarse, vulgar people who put their knives in their mouths, told unfunny jokes and said what they thought, but they were ‘at least free from the bigotry and exclusiveness of their more refined cousins’.
⁴⁵
Just how bigoted and exclusive those cousins could be she was about to find out.

The month in Dover went miserably. After nearly a year of sociable living with a merry man it was hard to be alone. Marian had not been so isolated since those early years at Griff keeping house for her father and brother. Now once again in exile, she filled her days writing, reading and taking blustery walks over the cliffs.

Working on her journal recollections of Berlin allowed her to revisit the past for a while. But the moment she finished, on 27 March, migraine overwhelmed her. Three solid weeks on Spinoza
provided a kind of cure, allowing her to follow the thread back to a more certain time. She continued, too, with the ambitious reading plan begun in the Dorotheenstrasse. Still, it was not enough. She was hankering for Labassecour, for anywhere but this dreary boarding-house where, presumably, she had either to present herself as the spinster ‘Miss Marian Evans’ or as the married lady ‘Mrs George Lewes’, when in fact she was neither. Already she was planning a future far away from here, announcing to Bray that the moment Goethe and Spinoza were safely through the press, she and Lewes would take off on ‘a new flight to the south of Germany and Italy, for which we both yearn’.
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The uncertainty of these few weeks pressed on old and aching bruises. Abandonment was the black thread which ran through Marian’s life like a curse. First her mother, then Isaac, then Chapman, Brabant and Spencer had all rejected her demands for love. It was what she knew and what she dreaded. Only two and a half years earlier she had sat alone in a cottage in another southcoast town and begged Herbert Spencer to let her have a corner of his life. Over these recent months in Germany she had finally come to know the pleasure of a mutual love. It was exactly the kind of relationship which suited her: exclusive, isolated, rapt. Now that she was back in Britain, reality pressed down in the shape of other people and circumstances that she could not control. Had she known what London gossip was saying about her situation, she would have felt even greater despair. Speculation was mounting that Lewes would, in the words of Joseph Parkes, ‘tire of & put away Miss Evans – as he has done others’.
⁴⁷

On 9 April Marian received a ‘painful letter’ which for the next week made her ‘feverish and unable to fix my mind steadily on reading or writing’.
⁴⁸
Since none of the correspondence between Marian and Lewes has survived, it is impossible to know what it contained. Was Lewes trying to withdraw from Marian? Surely not. Whatever else he might have been, he was a man of his word. Gordon Haight suggests that the problem may have been Agnes, from whom Marian had asked for a definite undertaking that the marriage was over. But years later Cara Bray told Edith Simcox that, far from being tricky, Agnes had sent a message saying that she ‘would be very glad if he could marry Miss Evans’.
⁴⁹
The last time Marian had used the word ‘painful’ to
describe a letter it had been from Thomas Carlyle, repeating Harriet Martineau’s wild babblings. Perhaps the April letter was not from Lewes at all, but from a third party repeating some hurtful gossip about her situation.