George Eliot (56 page)

Just as with
Romola
, Marian knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the piece. Lewes’s renewed dyspepsia – he had fattened up wonderfully in Spain, despite worries about the food – also suggested that he was far from easy. By the beginning of July they were off again in search of health, this time for a fortnight at the Isle of Wight. When that failed to work, they decided to try to recover the happiness of their honeymoon days by returning to Weimar, where they had first lived together in 1854. They repeated walks, re-inhabited lodgings, re-created schedules all in the hope that some of that easy flow would return. But by the time they were back in London on 1 October it was clear that Marian was once again facing the kind of paralysis which had preceded
Romola
. When she struggled to the close of part one by the end of the month, Blackwood suggested setting it in print, complete with possible variations, so that she might get a realistic sense of how it might read.
⁸¹
It was a kind gesture, particularly since he obviously did not like it. For the first time ever he avoided making a direct comment about Marian’s work and offered her only £300, a fraction of the £5000 he had given for
Felix Holt
.

If
The Spanish Gypsy
had been written by anyone else, Blackwood
would not have published it. The poem is strained and plodding, clever and dull. The influence of the Leweses’ new friend Robert Browning is clear, especially his dramatic monologues ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’. But Marian’s vision did not lend itself to verse. Although she could manage metre as well as the next man, the compressed form did not allow her to build character or create landscape with the fullness she had achieved in her novels. Instead of intricate descriptions of inner worlds and psychological states, there are only rough approximations of mood and type. Even the heroine, Fedalma, feels like a pencil sketch. And, just as in
Romola
, far too much energy has gone into re-creating a world which, despite Marian’s best endeavours, remains distant and dead.

Still,
The Spanish Gypsy
makes interesting reading because of the way it both develops and anticipates typical George Eliot themes.
⁸²
Fedalma is made to choose between duty and desire. She may either marry her beloved Duke Silva or take up her hereditary role as a gypsy princess, destined to lead her people to a better life in Africa. Fedalma’s decision to honour the obligations of family and race recall Eppie’s renunciation of life at the Red House and Esther’s rejection of the ease of Transome Court. Both girls, like Fedalma, choose to put their duties as daughters, fathers’ daughters, over social status. Fedalma’s renunciation of an ordinary woman’s satisfactions in favour of an exceptional destiny – just like Titian’s Virgin she will not experience mortal childbirth – anticipates Alcharisi in
Daniel Deronda
, who sacrifices motherhood to her singer’s vocation. And the position of the gypsies as a disinherited and despised race points the way to Marian’s growing interest in the Jews as the inheritors of true culture.

Publicly people said they liked the poem, in private they were not so sure. Frederic Harrison, who had gushed over
Felix Holt
and urged Marian to try poetry, thought that it was a mess. Professional critics like Henry James and Richard Holt Hutton realised that verse simply was not her medium and looked forward to the time when she would return to what she did best.
⁸³
But by some fluke of a capricious market,
The Spanish Gypsy
actually sold well and brought Marian a modest profit. People wrote suggesting that she turn it into a play, or asking permission to set the minstrel songs to music.
⁸⁴

With hindsight, these mediocre middle years, which saw the publication of
Romola, Felix Holt
and
The Spanish Gypsy
, are redeemed by what came after, the magnificent
Middlemarch
. But what would have happened if Marian had simply stopped writing in 1868, silenced by death or despair? She would be remembered for the great trio of English provincial novels,
Adam Bede, The Mill
and
Silas Marner
, and perhaps for the minor triumph that is
Felix Holt
. But she would have been set down as a medium talent, to stand alongside Elizabeth Gaskell. As it was, she continued to write, producing a few more so-so poems until at the beginning of 1869 she began to plan the book which would elevate her to the rank of the Immortals.

Marian’s increasingly public life was buttressed by a domestic happiness which grew more secure as the years passed. So it is odd that this was the time when London gossip was busy putting Lewes down as unfaithful. It is possible to see how the rumour started. The little man was out on his own virtually every evening, flirting, chatting, always managing to end up next to the prettiest woman. The fact that he had not divorced Agnes and married Marian, despite having the money to explore and exploit any legal loophole, suggested to some that he liked the situation the way it was. Clearly Marian and Lewes were both aware of the rumours, because on one occasion when Lewes was away Marian explained her decision not to attend a lecture by Richard Congreve on the grounds that people might jump to false conclusions about her ‘husband’s’ absence.
⁸⁵

We don’t know if any of Lewes’s flirtations ever ended in sex, but they certainly never developed into relationships. Lewes was as staunch as ever in his love and admiration for the woman he called ‘Polly’, always delighted when the dinner conversation turned to the subject of her genius. Whenever he came across an interesting new face, he immediately issued an invitation to the Priory so that she could share his discovery. The Sunday At Homes increasingly came to resemble a cross between a court and a church service, in which the best minds in London paid homage to George Eliot. It was now that Lewes was dubbed the ‘mercurial little showman’ by George Meredith as he bobbed and weaved around the room, making sure that Marian was neither
bored nor overwhelmed by the people he ushered to her side. If he occasionally had sex with other women – and there is no direct evidence that he did – it never came close to threatening his relationship with ‘the best of women’. Marian’s dedication at the front of the manuscript of
Felix Holt
suggests her sense of absolute security: ‘From George Eliot (otherwise Polly) to her dear husband, this thirteenth year of their united life, in which the deepening sense of her own imperfectness has the consolation of their deepening love.’
⁸⁶

Aside from their undimmed affection for one another, joint responsibility for young and old strengthened Marian’s and Lewes’s commitment to one another. Early in 1864 Captain Willim had died, bringing to an end a painful marriage of over thirty years. For Lewes’s mother it was a relief to be free of this angry man who had tried to control every aspect of her existence. For her son and his partner it meant extra work. The Captain’s tangled business affairs were sorted out by the end of March, but that didn’t resolve the problem of how and where the old lady was to live. In the end Mrs Willim seems to have continued in Kensington, but she made an increasing number of visits to the Priory. Sometimes she joined Lewes and Marian on their daily walks round Regent’s Park Zoo, once taking fright when Lewes got a couple of bear cubs out of their cage.
⁸⁷
During the remaining six years of her life she put pressure on her son not to spend too much time away from her on the Continent. This, maintained Marian, was the reason why they never made their planned trip to the East.

Charlie was as easy as ever. His close relationships with Marian and Agnes, together with his obvious love of domestic life, made him a candidate for early marriage. When his parents returned from their trip to Italy in 1864 he told them that he had become engaged to Gertrude Hill, granddaughter of the public health reformer Dr Southwood Smith. Gertrude was four years older than Charlie, pretty and with an excellent contralto voice – all factors which made Lewes and Marian unflatteringly surprised that she would want to marry ‘our amiable bit of crudity’.
⁸⁸
Marian, as always, lost no time in playing the part of concerned mother and expert moral voice: ‘One never knows what to wish about marriage,’ she intoned to D’Albert Durade, ‘the evils of
an early choice may be easily counterbalanced by the vitiation that often comes from long bachelorhood.’
⁸⁹

The two aunts who had raised Gertrude seem to have had no worries about her marrying into one of the most notorious households in the land. The one bit of curiosity came from Gertrude’s sister Octavia Hill, later well known for her work in public housing, who asked about Mrs Lewes’s religious beliefs. By now Marian had had enough practice to play the role of concerned moral matriarch to perfection. Although on 21 September 1866 she admitted in a letter to François D’Albert Durade that she and Lewes ‘enjoy our tête-à-tête too much’ to be looking forward to becoming grandparents, by the time Gertrude had lost her first baby a week later she was writing with all the grief of a concerned mother-in-law.
⁹⁰

Thornie and Bertie were off their hands, too. Thornie had left for Durban on 16 October 1863 in his usual bouncy way. During the three-month journey he scandalised his fellow passengers by dressing up as the devil, and editing a robust and saucy ship’s newspaper.
⁹¹
His first couple of years in Africa were spent getting into scrapes and sniffing at different possibilities, until he decided finally on farming. On 9 September 1866 Bertie was removed from his pupillage in Warwickshire and shipped out to join his elder brother.

We do not know much about the next two years except that by the end of them all the money was gone. In October 1868 a pathetic letter arrived at the Priory from Thornie asking for a loan. In the first instance he wanted a modest £200 to cover his losses on a wild scheme to trade blankets for ivory with the local tribesmen. But then he went on to more serious matters. He was, he told his father, ‘gradually wasting away. I eat almost nothing, nothing but delicacies tempt me, and those we can’t afford.’ He described the fearsome pain which racked his back and chest, making him shout out in agony. Were he fifty instead of twenty-four, he said, he would have walked over the nearest waterfall by now. His only hope was to return to Britain and consult the best doctors. ‘I know this trip, seeing physicians etc, perhaps undergoing some operation will cost a great deal of money, but – que voulezvous. It is my last chance in life, and you are the only person I can apply to, so I don’t hesitate to make the application.’
⁹²

Of course Lewes sent the money immediately, haunted by the vision of his jaunty boy crushed by pain. But nothing had prepared him for his first sight of Thornie eight months later. For once, the boy had not exaggerated: he had lost four stone and was barely able to stand, let alone walk. The day after his arrival his condition suddenly deteriorated to the point where all he could do was lie on the ground and scream. But this was Sunday and guests were due. Into the crisis walked two American women, Grace Norton and Sara Sedgwick, accompanied by their friend, the young writer Henry James, who had already written three reviews of George Eliot and was all agog to meet the literary mother whom he had come to kill. Marian tried bravely to carry on something approaching ordinary conversation, chatting about their recent trip abroad. But soon all pretence at normality was given up and James knelt on the floor trying to soothe Thornie, while Lewes rushed to the chemist for some morphine.
⁹³

It was the lack of a clear diagnosis which made Thornie’s decline so difficult to deal with. Perhaps it was only a kidney stone, in which case something might be done. Even the best doctors, including the Queen’s physician Sir James Paget, admitted they were stumped. ‘We feel utterly in the dark as to the probabilities of his case,’ Marian wrote to Cara on 21 August, ‘and must resignedly accept what each day brings.’
⁹⁴
When Charlie arrived back from a holiday in June, unaware of his brother’s condition, the sight of the skeletal Thornie shocked him into a faint. One afternoon Agnes came to visit, at which point Marian tactfully went out, leaving the legal Mrs Lewes alone with her child. Pigott came in to play cards. Barbara Bodichon, who had done so much to set Thornie up in Africa with letters of introduction, also popped in twice a week to distract him.
⁹⁵

By the end of August it was clear that Thornie was dying. This was no kidney stone but tuberculosis of the spine, a horrible condition in which the backbone gradually crumbled away. Marian already knew something of the terrible devastation it could wreak on a merry disposition: the January 1856 edition of the
Westminster
had carried her essay on Heinrich Heine, the German wit and philosopher who was tortured by this ‘terrible nervous disease’.
⁹⁶
Mercifully Thornie did not follow Heine’s
example and linger agonisingly for a decade. He died, in
Mutter
’s arms, on 19 October.

Although Thornie resembled his father, Marian had never liked the boy. It is possible that once his noise and bluster had been tempered by life she would have learned to love him, but at this point he was still an annoying, disruptive pup. And yet there can be no doubt about her grief when he was gone, ‘still a boy’ at only twenty-five. This time she had no need to think herself into the role of pious mother; the words and feelings came easily. ‘This death’, she wrote in her journal, ‘seems to me the beginning of our own.’
⁹⁷

T
HE DAY AFTER
Thornie’s funeral – at Rosslyn Hill Unitarian chapel, the parish church for unbelievers – Lewes and Marian left London for the country. For three weeks they hid themselves and their grief away at a farmhouse in Limpsfield, Surrey. Lewes told Blackwood that Marian had taken the loss hardest, having ‘lavished almost a mother’s love on my dear boy, and felt almost a mother’s grief. I was better prepared, having never from the first held much hope of his recovery.’
¹

The next few months were scrappy and bleak. Christmas was subdued – dinner with Charles and Gertrude in Hampstead and a walk over the Heath to visit Thornie’s grave in Highgate Cemetery. In March they decided to try the cure of a trip to Germany, still their special place. But the magic was running out: ‘wandering to and fro upon the earth’, in Marian’s disenchanted phrase, no longer answered.
²
The lionising was gratifying but wearing: in Berlin Marian was mobbed by a mass of women each wanting to have ‘a peck’ at her.
³
Princes begged to be introduced, scientists threw open their laboratories and ambassadors queued up for an audience. By now, Lewes’s researches had moved to the fledgling discipline of psychiatry and he spent much time closeted with
mad doctors, a preoccupation which struck Marian as macabre. Perhaps it was the dull ache of Thornie’s death, or maybe, as Marian maintained, Europe had become a tourist hell-hole, but these weeks away failed to take off. Tried and tested comforts, like a trip to the concert hall to tackle Wagner once again, resulted only in ‘hours of noise and weariness’.
⁴

Marian’s writing life was likewise fitful. Ever since the publication of
The Spanish Gypsy
in the summer of 1868 she had been pottering on minor projects while cogitating big ones. The entry for 1 January 1869 laid out a confident new programme for the year ahead, comprising ‘A Novel called Middlemarch, a long poem on Timoleon, and several minor poems’.
⁵
But although Marian did a lot of background reading in Greek history through the first half of 1869, Timoleon never materialised. This is lucky, because the subject and form threatened to produce another
Spanish Gypsy
– long, learned and dull.

But despite Marian’s declaration to Blackwood in February 1869 that ‘I mean to begin my novel at once, having already sketched the plan’, she stayed mainly with verse.
⁶
In the first months of the year she produced two short poems, ‘Agatha’ and ‘How Lisa Loved the King’. The American publisher James Fields paid an extravagant £300 for the first, John Blackwood a more temperate £50 for the second. Returning from their Italian trip on 5 May, Marian again tried to settle to
Middlemarch
, but the usual despair about her capabilities was this time capped by agonies about Thornie. The experience of watching and waiting by a sickbed took her back to Griff, or maybe it was the meditations preliminary to
Middlemarch
that were stirring up memories. Whatever their precise reason for coming now, the eleven ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets which Marian wrote during July show her still ‘yearning in divorce’ for reconciliation with her brother.
⁷

The intensity and compression of verse suited a writing life fragmented by nursing duties. As Thornie withered away, Marian started another poem, ‘The Legend of Jubal’.
⁸
Less obviously autobiographical than the ‘Brother and Sister’ sequence, ‘Jubal’ none the less resonates with Marian’s increasing anxiety about her status as an artist. Jubal is an old man who returns to his people expecting their thanks for his great gift to them – the lyre.
But while his memory is cherished, Jubal’s physical presence goes unrecognised to the point where he himself begins to wonder whether he exists at all. Marian, too, was struggling with the fact that while George Eliot’s stock had never been higher, her own creativity was at an all-time low. She was failing to make headway on
Middlemarch
and was haunted by the usual terror that her previous books had all been flukes. Like Jubal, she sometimes wondered whether she existed at all. Clearly
Macmillan
’s thought she did, for they paid a handsome £200 for the piece, while the
Atlantic Monthly
in America managed £50.

The next and final poem written during this creatively scrappy time was ‘Armgart’, put together during another break at Limpsfield in the late summer of 1870. Like ‘Jubal’, it deals with the subject of the musician whose music has fled, but this time Eliot turns to the particular problem of the female artist.
⁹
Armgart is a supremely talented opera singer who has dedicated herself to public performance. Count Dornberg wants to marry her on condition that she gives up her vocation, since he believes that a woman is ‘royal’ only when she expresses ‘the fulness of her womanhood’.
¹⁰
Armgart is not prepared to compromise – ‘I am an artist by my birth’ – and insists that ‘The man who marries me must wed my Art/Honour and cherish it, not tolerate.’
¹¹
When Armgart loses her voice permanently, her friends suggest that there is nothing now to stop her marrying. She, however, insists that she is still worth more than ‘“The Woman’s Lot”: a Tale of Everyday’.
¹²
It is only through her (female) cousin’s urging that she agrees eventually to follow the example of her old singing master and dedicate herself to a life of service, teaching others.

Armgart’s renunciation of a woman’s life in favour of that of the professional singer anticipates the choice made by Alcharisi in
Daniel Deronda
. But Marian was also considering her own situation as an artist who has been struck dumb. For two years now, she had been struggling with
Middlemarch
in one form or another and the result was still nothing more than a few chapters. If something did not change soon, then she too would be obliged to settle for ‘a Tale of Everyday’, a companionable life of financial ease but creative deadness. Unlike Armgart, she had not had to face the agonising choice between her man and her art, but that
did not mean that she relished returning full circle to those Griff years when she had longed to write but could not. Was her life to be confined once again to housekeeping, sick-nursing and attendance on a much-loved man?

The death of a young person is the ultimate test for all shades of faith and Marian was no exception in finding it difficult. Although it would have been a comfort now to believe that there was a benevolent being who had planned Thornie’s end for some higher purpose, she refused to take refuge in that consoling delusion. Nor did she, like so many Victorian agnostics, try to fill the void by turning to spiritualism. As she made clear to a new correspondent, the American novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, the whole business of table rapping struck her as nothing but ‘the lowest charlatanerie’.
¹³
Mrs Stowe, though, remained firmly convinced of the value of talking to the spirits and even suggested to Marian in June 1872 that she had managed to have a conversation with the long-dead Charlotte Brontë.

Marian was tactfully non-committal about Miss Brontë’s chatty ghost. She understood that in its most well-meaning form spiritualism offered as great a comfort to human yearning as any other variety of belief. She continued to attend Unitarian chapels in Hampstead and in Little Portland Street from time to time, went to hear the celebrated preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon (concluding that he was even more awful than she had anticipated) and followed with interest Barbara Bodichon’s increasing attachment to Catholicism, on one occasion even accompanying her to High Anglican mass.

But still Marian’s greatest wish was to move beyond the easy consolations of orthodox faith. What was needed now, she told Mrs Stowe, was a religion which would inculcate ‘a more deeply-awing sense of responsibility to man, springing from sympathy with … the difficulty of the human lot’.
¹⁴
This was a restatement of the principles she had set before Clifford Allbutt the previous year, when she had urged upon him the need ‘Never to beat and bruise one’s wings against the inevitable but to throw the whole force of one’s soul towards the achievement of some possible better’.
¹⁵
Agonising over the meaning of Thornie’s death would, in Marian’s stringent terms, be to give in to the endless demands
of the ego. Her job now was to love more fully those who were left behind.

Marian’s posing and partial answering of the question ‘how shall we live now?’ brought her a status somewhere between savante and saint. Hundreds of people wrote to her with their religious difficulties; the lucky few got to pose their questions face to face. Always she told them the same thing: resign yourself to suffering, wean yourself off the hope of a future life and nourish your fellow feeling towards the men and women you encounter every day. Ever since
Romola
her work had been viewed as deeply moral: early disgust at Hetty’s bastard and Maggie’s flight with Stephen Guest had long dissolved. Improvement Societies put George Eliot on the syllabus and one enterprising lady suggested that extracts from her books should be displayed prominently in railway waiting-rooms instead of the usual Bible texts.
¹⁶
Likewise, the whiff of infidelity, which had followed Marian ever since her translation of Strauss, no longer seemed to bother even the most orthodox. Clergymen were known to quote George Eliot from the pulpit and one pious visitor to the Priory confided that she had copied passages from
Romola
into her New Testament.

In part, this devotional atmosphere was created by Lewes, who was delighted to see Marian treated with reverence after years of ostracism. He increasingly called her ‘Madonna’, liked the conceit that they lived at the ‘Priory’ and enjoyed Charles Dickens’s joke that the regular Sunday gathering was nothing less than a ‘service’.
¹⁷
But no amount of stage management by ‘the mercurial little showman’ could have sustained an image based only on word play. There was something about Marian’s combination of rigorous intellectual analysis and warm empathy that drew men and women to confide the state of their troubled souls. On her first meeting with Marian at the Priory in March 1873, the Hon. Mrs Henry Frederick Ponsonby, wife of Queen Victoria’s Private Secretary, found herself compelled first to drop a deep curtsy (a style of greeting which was going out of fashion) and then to confide ‘all that was lying deepest in one’s heart and mind without reserve’. Listened to in the ‘kindest and most sympathetic way’, Mrs Ponsonby followed up her audience with a twenty-four-page letter to Marian detailing her religious difficulties. The courtier’s
wife was convinced that the farmer’s daughter was ‘in possession of some secret’ about how to live a good life at a time when science was reducing humanity to a bundle of selfish impulses.
¹⁸
It was the beginning of a correspondence which lasted until Marian’s death.

Marian’s status as the Sage of Unbelief was further boosted by the publication of a volume of her
Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings
in 1871. The idea for the book came from her newest and most adoring fan, a young Scotsman called Alexander Main. Main had written to her in the summer asking for confirmation that the proper way to pronounce
Romola
was with the stress on the first syllable. Marian was delighted with his detailed and thoughtful response to this most difficult of her novels, and quickly wrote back to tell him so, falling naturally into the role of confessor: ‘I shall always be glad to hear from you when you have anything in your mind which it will be a solace to you to say to me.’
¹⁹
Main did not need to be told twice and immediately sent off two long letters on
The Spanish Gypsy
, which Marian said made her cry because: ‘You have thoroughly understood me … you have put your finger on the true key.’
²⁰
Two weeks later Main sent a sample of extracts from Marian’s work suggesting that they would make a good separate publication, along the lines of a commonplace book. If it had been left to Marian she probably would not have agreed: her novels grew organically out of her moral vision and to reduce them to a series of platitudes, even striking ones, ran counter to the way she wanted her work to be understood. But Lewes could see the boost that Main’s adoration was giving to Marian’s tottering confidence as she struggled with
Middlemarch
. So he asked Blackwood to meet the young man and see if he could consent to let the book go ahead. For several reasons Blackwood was not keen. First there was the matter of the copyrights, which still belonged to the firm. Then there was Main’s fervent devotion to Marian. Meeting Main in person at the Edinburgh office did nothing to dispel the impression that there was something repellent about him: the young man revealed that he was thirty years old, lived with his mother and liked to walk the sea shore reading aloud from the works of George Eliot.
²¹
In private, Blackwood dubbed Main ‘the Gusher’, but agreed to bring out the book in time for Christmas 1871. Marian declared
herself delighted with the selected texts which Main forwarded for her approval, but secretly disliked the oleaginous Preface which went through without either her or Lewes having the chance to veto it.

It was probably lucky that the Gusher never got South to meet Marian – he would probably have bubbled over with the excitement. The Sunday At Homes had begun again on the Leweses’ return from the Continent in May 1870. As befitted a household frequented by the great and the good, the Priory was currently being upgraded under the discriminating eye of Owen Jones. The interior was to be repainted and a new bathroom installed. Not only did this cost the Leweses a massive £500, it also involved them moving into a cottage in the country for several months while the work was being completed. But this wasn’t the only change. In September 1871 the old servants, Amelia and Grace, gave notice. Although Marian had always counted on them seeing out their days with her, their departure was a great relief.
²²
The grumpy sisters had refused to let her hire a much-needed third servant and had made life very difficult for the woman employed to nurse Thornie. Now they were gone, Marian was able to start again from scratch, hiring three excellent employees of Mrs Call, the former Rufa Hennell. Later an extra parlourmaid was added, bringing the indoor staff to a highly prosperous four.