George Eliot (65 page)

But in the end it is Gwendolen who is forced to submit to Grandcourt. A sudden change in family fortunes means that her glittering maidenhood is set to end in the ignominy of a position as governess in a bishop’s family. Instead of facing that terrible duty, Gwendolen accepts Grandcourt’s proposal of marriage despite knowing that there is another woman he has promised to marry, the mother of his illegitimate son. In becoming Grand-court’s wife, Gwendolen is able to secure financial independence for her mother and half-sisters, the first truly selfless act she has ever done.

But unlike Hetty or Rosamond, Gwendolen achieves moral growth. She follows Dorothea in moving beyond her own narcissism to learn about ‘that unmanageable world which was independent of her wishes’.
⁸²
As with Dorothea, her lessons come through the discipline of a dreadful marriage and the inspiring friendship of a man nearer her own age. Even before the wedding, Grand-court’s cold mastery begins to pinch. He takes particular pleasure in Gwendolen’s humiliating knowledge that he already has a mistress and a family. Outwardly passive, he brings the full weight of his terrible will to bear, crushing her spirit while leaving her brilliant exterior intact.

Gwendolen is a magnificent creation, quite possibly the best character Eliot ever drew. Deepening and refining her portrayal of Esther Lyon in
Felix Holt
, another pretty, selfish girl who learns there is more to life than the admiration of others, Eliot shows the full range of a contradictory personality constantly in flux. Gwendolen is heartless, frightened and disengaged; but she is also capable of becoming loving, engaged and real. Although she fantasises constantly about Grandcourt dying, when the moment comes during a sailing accident she is racked with remorse. She longs to see him drown, yet is anguished by the thought that she could have done something to save him. Like Bulstrode in
Middlemarch
, she must constantly weigh up her culpability for a death that would pass in the wider world as an accident.

Gwendolen confesses her ‘crime’ to Daniel Deronda, the man whom she has made her saviour. The enigmatic young Englishman has been brought up as the ward of Sir Hugo Mallinger, the baronet from whom Grandcourt will inherit most of his land and his title. Handsome and good, Deronda takes it upon himself to disapprove of Gwendolen the moment he first sets eyes on her, gambling feverishly at the roulette table in a German casino. He is, in truth, as restless as she, unable to settle to any profession or course of action. As the story unfolds, the reason for this dilatoriness becomes clear: Deronda has been kept in ignorance of his Jewish parentage. In the terms of Eliot’s moral world the consequences are clear: a man who does not know where he comes from is unable to lead a morally integrated life. It is only once Deronda discovers the truth about his birth that he can
commit himself to love and to work. He marries the Jewess Mirah Lapidoth and sets off to found a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

While the character of Gwendolen Harleth is magnificently concrete, Deronda’s remains unsatisfyingly vague. Like Will Ladislaw in
Middlemarch
, he is a man waiting to happen, whose life will begin only when the book has ended. Yet he has none of Ladislaw’s charm or Lydgate’s moral mix. Like that other prig Felix Holt, his flaws are of the kind that would be a virtue in anyone else: unflinching honesty and a need to put others first.

The other Jewish characters are even harder to like. Working against a prevailing anti-semitism, which labelled the entire race tricky and coarse, George Eliot created a couple of saints in Mirah Lapidoth and her brother Mordecai. Mirah is humble and good, loyal to a father who has treated her badly, sexually chaste despite a degrading upbringing. Mordecai is a scholar and a seer, a man whose whole life is devoted to the Jewish cause. Physically feeble and soon to die, he charges Daniel Deronda with the task of travelling to the Near East to found a Jewish homeland. Readers followed Blackwood in remaining unmoved by Deronda’s attachment to this displaced couple and the gradual discovery of the truth about his birth. This strand of the novel had all the hallmarks of being, in Eliot’s famous distinction, a diagram rather than a picture: abstract, didactic and dull. The ‘English’ chapters involving Grandcourt and Gwendolen were, by contrast, full of the vigorous oddness of real life.

Eliot’s decision to put Judaism at the heart of a novel was a brave one, anticipated only by Disraeli back in the 1840s with the hugely sentimental
Coningsby
. She was motivated partly by the anti-semitism she saw all around her. ‘Can anything be more disgusting’, she asked Mrs Beecher Stowe, author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, ‘than to hear people called “educated” making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting?’
⁸³
But she was also interested in the model which a new Jewish state might offer a degenerated Christian Britain. She is careful to make it clear that Mordecai and Deronda are not anticipating the fierce exclusiveness of Zionism, but look forward instead to a blend of ‘separateness and communication’.
⁸⁴
Only
once it is secure in its location and national identity will the Jewish race be able to leave behind the unpalatable defences it has developed in scattered exile.

If British audiences were bored by the Jewish part of
Daniel Deronda
, Jewish readers were delighted with it. Rabbis, scholars, cultural leaders and politicians wrote to thank Eliot for a version of themselves that went far beyond the cringing shopkeeper or vulgar banker. Her vision of an independent Jewish nation was heady stuff: it would be another twenty years before Theodor Herzl set out the arguments clearly in his hugely influential
The Jewish State
.

The weaknesses in Eliot’s vision have long been pointed out. Jewish history is as bloody and shameful as Christianity’s. There is no reason to believe that a Jewish nation would run its affairs any better than Catholic Spain or Protestant Sweden. Eliot was herself famously agnostic, so it is hard to see why anyone should take her endorsement of the religiously committed life seriously. Finally, and most important, why can nothing be done to regenerate society from within? Are the Philistine British doomed to tear each other to pieces at the roulette table? Why has Eliot’s long line of doctrinally lax but morally engaged clergy ended up in the worldly figure of Mr Gascoigne, a rector whose main concern is how to get his niece Gwendolen married off to a rich man whom he knows to be a libertine? Always before, Eliot has offered us a hopeful ending in which the small kindnesses of a Dorothea or a Dinah gently tip the scales towards the greater good. But while Gwendolen has made an internal moral shift, she ends the book barely able to hold her fragile psyche together. ‘I shall live,’ she tells her mother, ‘I shall be better.’
⁸⁵
But it will be a long time before she is fit to work for others.

Running alongside the idealisation of the Jew as a man of culture, faith and purpose is Eliot’s equal veneration of the artist. Dedication to music, and especially singing, come to stand as a metaphor for all kinds of vocation. The centrepoint of this equation is Herr Klesmer, the professional musician who is currently in residence at Quetcham, the Arrowpoints’ cultured and magnificent home. Based partly on Anton Rubinstein, whom the Leweses had met in Weimar in 1854 and later in London, Klesmer is both a Jew and a dedicated artist. Heedless of social
rank and convention, he is an abrupt, aloof man who venerates only talent. It is for this reason – and not her fortune – that Klesmer falls in love with and proposes to his pupil Catherine Arrowpoint. Equally committed to music, she accepts, much to the horror of her parents, who condemn Klesmer as ‘a gypsy, a Jew, a mere bubble of the earth’.
⁸⁶

Catherine Arrowpoint’s humble dedication to art, in her case the piano, is made to contrast with Gwendolen’s shallow, exploitative approach. Indifferently taught and only amateurishly competent, Gwendolen fondly believes that she can support her family by becoming a professional singer. Appealing to Klesmer for advice, Gwendolen is shocked to hear that ladylike manners and a charming warble are not enough. He tells her sternly that she lacks both the talent and the ‘inward vocation’ to achieve anything ‘more than mediocrity’. In desperation, she accepts Grandcourt’s proposal of marriage.
⁸⁷

Mirah Lapidoth, by contrast, has the singer’s true vocation. Trained from an early age, she has only to audition for Herr Klesmer for him to announce, ‘Let us shake hands: you are a musician.’
⁸⁸
Unlike Gwendolen, Mirah loathes the idea of scrutiny during public performance and would prefer to make her living either by teaching or giving drawing-room recitals in front of a few people she already knows. Her motive for singing professionally is to save herself from destitution and there is no question of her continuing after her marriage to Daniel. In this respect she ends the book like all Eliot’s heroines, with her sphere of action much diminished. From now on her job will be to love Daniel and raise his children, while he dedicates himself to founding the Jewish state.

Should Mirah ever consider putting her vocation before her marriage, there is a terrible warning on hand in the shape of the book’s third female singer, Daniel’s mother. The Princess Halm-Eberstein summons the son she has not seen for twenty-five years to hear the story of her – and his – life. She reveals that as a young woman she was the renowned singer and actress Alcharisi: ‘All the rest were poor beside me. Men followed me from one country to another.’ Dedicated to her art, Alcharisi married her husband on condition that he would ‘put no hindrance in the way of my being an artist’.
⁸⁹
When a baby is born
– Daniel – she gives the child away to one of her greatest admirers, Sir Hugo Mallinger, to be raised as an English gentleman. Free of all ties, she spends the next nine years living entirely for her art. It is only once her voice begins to fade that she seriously considers domestic duties. Rather than endure the humiliation of a dwindling career, she marries a Russian prince by whom she has five children. Now dying, she reveals to Daniel that he is fully Jewish.

Women are given difficult lives in
Daniel Deronda
. Reprising ‘Armgart’, Eliot explores the sacrifices a woman must make if she wishes to be an artist: ‘you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you,’ Daniel’s mother tells him fiercely, ‘and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl’.
⁹⁰
When Lydia Glasher likewise gives up her husband and child – in this case to be with Grandcourt – she is condemned to a ghastly wilderness of waiting and wondering. ‘I am a woman’s life,’ her pinched face and hard figure seem to say to a terrified Gwendolen.
⁹¹
Only Mirah, with her face turned towards a new beginning in the East, seems to have any kind of viable future.

As always, Marian wrote the final pages of her book in a frenzy of speed and tears. She would not even break for lunch when Blackwood and his son visited the Priory on 6 June. Emotions were running high, with both Marian and Lewes inclined to cry at the final interview between Gwendolen and Daniel, and the death of Mordecai. Two days later the book was finished and they set off for a recuperative trip to Switzerland. For the first few days both were sluggish and ill, but by the time they got to Ragatz they were having fun, with Marian trying to teach Lewes Hebrew.

They reached home on 1 September 1876, ‘both the better for our journey,’ Marian told Blackwood, though accepting that no amount of nasty-tasting water and mountain air was going to make them young again.
⁹²
Their illnesses were nagging all the time now and Marian was conscious of a pain in her side, which never went away. Five days after their return she wrote in sombre mood to Barbara Bodichon, ‘Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.’
⁹³

T
HE
L
EWESES SPARED
no expense in fitting out the Heights, certain that this was the last home they would ever be called upon to furnish. Although Marian declared herself bored and fidgeted by the details, especially when they interfered with work on her new book, she enjoyed the game of creating the perfect country house environment. There was even going to be a billiard table, for any guests who found themselves at a loose end on a rainy day.

So it was a pity that Lewes was dying. His guts and bowels were in spasm all the time now. The only relief came at dawn, when he threw off the bed covers, woke Polly and set out for a ramble through the patch of woodland attached to the house. Visitors were shocked by how gaunt he looked, while London gossips who caught an occasional glimpse of him speculated about whether, this time, he was actually dying. The man himself was as jaunty as ever, joking and telling stories, and on one occasion singing his way through
The Barber of Seville
to the astonishment of a visiting Johnny Cross.
¹
If all this pluck was for Marian’s benefit it worked: the letters she wrote that summer of 1878 reported him as suffering from nothing more ominous than
‘gout’. Domestic life went on almost as usual: literary neighbours and nuisances continued to call, and on one occasion Lewes found himself at Tennyson’s house, trying to be kind about the Laureate’s latest venture, a plodding drama on the life of Thomas à Becket.
²

Beyond Witley it was another matter. The annual trip to Oxford during Whitsun had been spoiled by Lewes’s poor health. Ordinary irritations like jostling tourists and vanishing luggage had become intolerable to the crampy invalid and his increasingly anxious partner. In July they accepted Blackwood’s invitation to visit his estate in Scotland, then thought better of it. ‘You do not realize my state,’ Lewes explained to his disappointed host. ‘If I could even read an amusing book for three hours I should consider myself strong enough to come. But I can’t work at all, and can’t read for more than an hour.’
³
In the end, the furthest the Leweses got that year was to Newmarket, where they spent a few days during October with the Bullock-Halls.

They were drawn there by Turgenev, an old friend and admirer, who was to be among the house party at Six Mile Bottom. Newer faces, no matter how talented, did not have the same power to break through their increasing self-absorption. On 1 November Henry James paid a dismal call to the Heights. Instead of the warm and admiring reception he was expecting –
The Europeans
was just out – he found two chilly, elderly people sunk in misery. Sitting in a ‘queer, bleak way’, one on each side of the fireplace, the Leweses barely greeted him, failed to offer tea and clearly could not wait for him to leave.
⁴

On 11 November the Leweses left Witley for the last time to spend a week in Brighton. They saw Marian’s niece Emily Clarke, treating her to dinner and a trip to the Aquarium. Emily had always adored Lewes and he, genuinely thoughtful, had recently provided her with an ear trumpet to help with her deafness. Despite breezy walks along the sea front, Lewes was in worse pain than ever, though in his journal he put it down to nothing more sinister than ‘piles’. Back in London, Sir James Paget diagnosed that old and vague friend, ‘a thickening of the mucous membrane’.

Despite increasing incapacity, it was business as usual at the Priory. Lewes intervened in a crisis over his nephew Vivian,
whose proposal to a girl called Constance had been turned down by her father. Lewes sent an encouraging letter to the doubtful paterfamilias, which must have worked, for the couple married soon afterwards. Then, on 21 November, Lewes wrote to Blackwood, enclosing the manuscript of Marian’s new book,
Impressions of Theophrastus Such
, sketching arrangements for its publication.
⁵

After another week of excruciating pain, Lewes acknowledged that he was dying. On the 29th Johnny Cross was summoned for a final summit about Marian’s investments and business affairs. As a parting gift Lewes handed the younger man his stock of prized cigars to pass on to Willie Cross, an enthusiastic smoker.

Marian also recognised that Lewes was on his way out. On 25 November she wrote to Blackwood asking him to postpone the publication of the new book. She had a horror of the public assuming that she had been busily working away on her manuscript all the while that Lewes was dying. Later that evening she wrote to Barbara Bodichon of her ‘deep sense of change within, and of a permanently closer companionship with death’.
⁶

On 30 November, just before six in the evening George Henry Lewes died. He was sixty-one. The certificate gave the cause as enteritis, but Paget told Charles that his father had been suffering from cancer, which ‘would have carried him off within six months’.
⁷
Charles kept news of the death and the funeral quiet, perhaps at Marian’s request. As a result only a dozen people turned up at Highgate Cemetery Chapel for the funeral on 4 December. Old friends – and there were many – were naturally upset to discover that they had been deprived of the chance to pay their last respects. The service, a kind of watered-down Anglican one, was conducted by Dr Sadler of the Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel. The Harrisons and the Burne-Joneses were there. Herbert Spencer broke the habit of a lifetime and attended. Marian did not go and nor, probably, did Agnes. The chief mourners were Charles Lewes and Johnny Cross. John Blackwood, heading for death himself, was represented by Joseph Langford.

Without George Henry Lewes there could have been no George Eliot. Lewes gave Eliot his Christian name, introduced him to a publisher and managed his career shrewdly over twenty
years. He got the best financial and distribution deals for Eliot, yet never once put him under pressure to write for money. He understood
The Spanish Gypsy
, as well as
Adam Bede
, and delighted in them equally. In short, Lewes provided just that kind of committed, discriminating, selfless support which authors dream of.

But none of this would have counted for anything without the corresponding caretaking which Lewes performed in Marian Evans’s private life. It was his encouragement which enabled her to make the break from poorly paid periodical journalism to highly profitable fiction writing. His deep understanding of her contradictory emotional needs allowed him to provide exactly what she required to continue working in the face of self-distrust and despair. Observing that his early comment on her lack of dramatic power unsettled her, Lewes was careful to keep all such further thoughts to himself. His doubts about
The Mill, Romola
and
The Spanish Gypsy
went straight into his journal, while he drip-fed Marian a diet of sunshiny approval. When that was not enough he chivvied Blackwood into boosting the message with a stream of detailed and fulsome letters.

Lewes has been criticised for the way he kept Marian aloof from the professional and lay criticism which might have steered her away from the eccentric detours of her mid-career. Although he maintained that he never showed or told her anything, he was always careful to communicate any bits and pieces that he knew would keep her buoyant. A nice comment from a clever man or news of a peak in sales always found its way back to Marian. What detractors from this method missed was that if Lewes had ceased to wrap Marian in cotton wool she would have stopped writing completely. Without his mothering there would have been no
Spanish Gypsy
, but there would have been no
Middlemarch
either.

Lewes’s professional life, away from Marian’s, was something extraordinary. The early years of journalistic ducking and diving showed an intellectual range that few could equal. If some of his editors, Marian included, found him slipshod, this was because he was under pressure to publish and move on quickly. None the less, his best work from this period was to become hugely influential. His biography of Goethe remained the standard work
for decades and his enthusiastic, fluent writings on science, especially
The Physiology of Common Life
, nudged hundreds of young men, including Pavlov, towards careers which would have been unthinkable a few decades earlier.

Once Lewes was relieved from the need to make money by Marian’s growing wealth, he showed himself quite able to settle down and specialise. Even those who disliked him had to admit that by the 1860s he had become much more than a versatile hack. ‘I have heard both Darwin and Sir Charles Lyell speak very highly of the thoroughness of his knowledge in their departments,’ admitted Charles Norton through clenched teeth.
⁸
And those who liked Lewes found it easier to go further. According to William Bell Scott, the old intellectual sparring partner of his youth, Lewes was ‘nearly the only man among all my friends who has never ceased to advance’.
⁹
The project he was working on when he died,
Problems of Life and Mind
, was to set out an agenda which shaped research in the physiological and psychological sciences for the first two decades of the next century.

It was this classic tale of the clever outsider who penetrates the Establishment that gave rise to rumours that Lewes was Jewish. These reached a climax with the publication of
Daniel Deronda
, which had American biographers making facile connections between the subject matter and the racial origins of George Eliot’s partner. It was more than the fact that Lewes had not gone to university – practising Jews could not attend Oxford or Cambridge – that made people think this way. There was also the fact that in 1866 he had written a piece in the
Fortnightly
about his student days at the Philosophers Club in Red Lion Square, where he had learned about Spinoza from the watchmaker Cohn. And finally there was his dark, grubby appearance, which chimed with popular racial stereotypes. Far from improving with age, Lewes looked more unwholesome than ever. Catching sight of him in the street in the mid-seventies, Edmund Gosse described a ‘hirsute, rugged, satyr-like’ little man.
¹⁰
An enduring dandiness in the form of fancy waistcoats only added to the impression that he must surely be a cousin of Disraeli.

Then there was Lewes’s behaviour, which continued to be the antithesis of the English gentleman’s. Wealth and success had not left its usual polish. Right up to his death he was chatting
away in French, noticing pretty girls and cracking
risqué
jokes. He seemed always, metaphorically, to be winking and poking you in the ribs. Observers found it odd and often resented that such a rake should be the partner of the earnest, moral George Eliot: Mrs Gaskell wondered how such a wholesome woman could be attracted to such a ‘soiled’ man.
¹¹
But closer friends, Eliot’s as well as Lewes’s, understood that he provided the crucial airy counter-balance to her marshy gloom.

Lewes and Marian admired, as well as loved, one another. He honoured her genius without resenting it, while she saw that behind the flippant mask was a man of enormous personal integrity. Lewes’s conduct as a family man was irreproachable. When the experiment in Shelleyan living broke down in the mess of Agnes’s affair with Thornton Hunt, Lewes accepted his part in the whole unhappy business. He continued to support his wayward wife who, as the daughter of a landowning MP, might be expected to find resources of her own. He worked himself into chronic ill-health to provide not just for his own sons, but for the batch of children Hunt had sired on Agnes. And despite the latter’s hopelessness with money, Lewes never went beyond the odd snappy comment, even helping her get her affairs in order when Hunt died having long since left her. In addition, Lewes kept a watching financial brief over his mother, and his brother’s widow and son. As a father he was loving and involved, and his decision to send his three sons to school in Switzerland, well away from gossipy London, was a logical one, even if it also allowed him to concentrate on his new relationship with Marian.

These were the qualities which Marian turned over in her mind as she sank deep in mourning. For a week she kept to her room, poring over Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ and other verse of consolation. Meanwhile, hundreds of letters of condolence arrived at the Priory, to be intercepted and sifted by Charles. In his note of 5 December Herbert Spencer tried his best to get beyond his own self-involvement by assuring Marian, ‘I grieve with you.’
¹²
Turgenev, writing from Paris two days earlier, said that he hoped that Marian would ‘find in your own great mind the necessary fortitude to sustain such a loss! All your friends, all learned Europe mourn with you.’
¹³
Anthony Trollope wrote a touching obituary – one of many – in the
Fortnightly Review
.

What eventually got Marian out of her bedroom was her determination to finish the fourth volume of Lewes’s
Problems of Life and Mind
. Although it was still at note stage, this was not the frozen pedantry of a ‘Key to All Mythologies’ waiting for the organisational skills of a widowed Dorothea. Lewes’s intentions were advanced and reasonably clear, and Marian was familiar enough with the subject to be able to assemble and order the material. Despite offers of fact-checking from Lewes’s old scientist friends, Marian was beset with the fear that she might misrepresent him in some way. Or worse still, that some textual error of hers might be ascribed to him. Although
Problems
I and II came together relatively quickly,
Problem
III proved to be trickier, and much of February was spent in headachy despair. In the end Marian decided to publish
Problem
I separately in May, under the title
The Study of Psychology
, with the rest of the work following a few months later.