The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives

by Diane Johnson

  18.Perhaps George is fibbing about Mary Ellen having written some of his early poems. Scholars since have preferred to think that he himself wrote all of them. His son and first editor, Will, who is not credited with having a reliable character, appears to believe his father in the matter; he at least believes in collaboration between his father and his father’s first wife. So, too, does Cousin Stewart, who says, “It is possible that some of the intervening numbers [of Household Words poems] were the work, wholly, or in part, of Mrs. Meredith.” It may well be, then, that some of the unpublished early poems were Mary Ellen’s, or part hers, but the only poem she is known certainly to have written is The Blackbird.

  One poem George disowned, The Gentleness of Death, in Household Words for October 4, 1851, is reminiscent of Mary Ellen’s essay on the subject, and begins:

  Who that can feel the gentleness of Death

  Sees not the loveliness of Life? and who,

  Breathing content his natural joyous breath,

  Could fail to feel that Death is Nature, too?

  And not the alien foe his fears dictated,

  A viewless terror, heard but to be hated.

  It is equally hard to discover her prose works. It would appear from Dickens’s plain reference to her work and from the circumstance that only George’s name shows up in the contributor’s book, that George was paid for both of them. Articles in British periodicals at this time were, of course, usually unsigned.

  19.Mary Ellen was by all accounts an exquisite cook, but I do not know that we would care to drink her coffee:

  The proportion of one ounce of coffee must be allowed to make two breakfast cups. When it is ground, mix it thoroughly with beat-up egg, so that each grain is equally moistened; then pour boiling water on it, and suffer it to boil up three times; let it stand a minute or two after the last boiling up, and it will be fit to pour out, requiring neither filtering nor straining.

  Here are two of Peacock’s recipes for salmon:

  2 T liquor [stock] boiled in 1 T of salad oil

  a dessert-spoon of chili vinegar

  1 dessert-spoon of Cucumber vinegar

  a tsp of Capers, a tsp of anchovy sauce.

  Mix, marinate salmon, mix sauce with breadcrumbs and cover fish. Warm.

  or

  mix oil, parsley, gherkin, shallot, and anchovy chopped fine, with ½ tsp cayenne sauce. Mix, rub over fish, wrap in buttered paper and bake.

  20.Retrospective diagnoses are of course highly conjectural, but it does sound as if Meredith had an ulcer, to go with his ambitions and anxieties. It is certain that doctors subsequently recognized the nervous basis of his stomach affliction, whatever it was.

  21.The “Anapestic Ode to Christ” is not printed in the Halliford Works, but its story is told under a section devoted to “Lost” works (vol. 8, p. 46), and is cautionary for those who have learned to be wary of the Biographer. In 1862, Peacock, in the bitterness of his spirit after Mary Ellen’s death, wanted to have this ode printed up, and mentioned it to Mr. L’Estrange, with whom he corresponded. After his death, L’Estrange asked Edith for a copy, which Edith sent him; she could not read it anyway because it was in Greek. “He translated the closing words,” the Halliford Biographer continues, “to show the uncomplimentary nature of the ode,” and evidently thought it too controversial for the projected edition of the Works. Edith was “rather shocked,” and, the Biographer speculates, destroyed Peacock’s Greek text. Mr. L’Estrange’s translation is all that survives.

  22.One of the functions of these notes and of this work is to suggest an interpretation of George’s great poem, Modern Love, rather different from the one critics have usually given. It is most often seen as “modern” because of its psychological subtlety and daring theme—an adulterous marriage—in which Meredith, having achieved a remarkable detachment from his tragic experience, skillfully analyzes the mutual guilt of the pair in the face of Victorian moral attitudes—which would have unquestioningly blamed the woman. Rather handsome of Meredith, it is felt, to confess a measure of personal responsibility for the whole mess, and to express, for a Victorian, an impressive degree of charity. He seems to blame the inadequacy of the education of Victorian females (“More brain, O Lord, more brain”) and his own over-idealistic attitude toward Love. A magnanimous poem.

  But George, as we shall see, was vindictive not magnanimous, and he was bound to have written this poem in a mood of self-vindication, for it would be read by people who knew his personal history. It is not a modern but a Spasmodic poem, in a mode then current.

  What Meredith meant by “Modern,” in his title, is not that he was treating adultery—that is very old indeed. By “Modern Love” he meant sentimental love, the “morbid passion of our day,” as he called it. The narrator of the poem has too exalted a notion of Love, as something holy and enduring in a real world where real women are faithless and over-sophisticated. “Madam,” the heroine of the poem, like Mary Ellen reads French novels, emblematic of worldly cynicism.

  Of course the Victorian reader had the same exalted notion of pure and holy wedded love that the narrator condemns in himself. Meredith is seeming to say, “Perhaps I was wrong to feel as I did, considering how it turned out,” and his readers would be sympathetic. They would secretly approve his idealism. You are too hard on yourself, dear George, we can hear them saying. Your sentiments do you honor. The woman was unfaithful. Do not apologize.

  At the same time that the poem makes a serious statement condemning notions of Romantic love, it assuages George’s stung male vanity by making the narrator a bit of a rake with a mistress and a desk full of old “wanton-scented tresses,”—something George was apparently not. The ending of the poem, in which the wife magnanimously kills herself in order to make way for his pursuit of a new love, is sheer wish-fulfillment, but George may unconsciously have hoped it would suggest to his friends that Mary Ellen had left him for something like the same reason. It is sometimes more bearable to think of yourself as the sinner than the sinned against.

  If notions of Meredith’s farsighted modernity—which, after all, he never showed again—are dismissed, it is easy to see the relation of Mod­ern Love with the Spasmodic poetry, for instance with Tennyson’s contemporary “Maud” (1856), with which it shares the neurotic, overwrought, self-dramatizing hero. It is easier to see Meredith in this tradition than to explain why he was able to write a highly innovative and capable early poem and never come close to it again. Though he was to write some good poetry later, Modern Love is unique among his accomplishments.

  23.Mary Ellen’s religiosity seems to have been an invention either of Cousin Stewart Ellis, Meredith’s first biographer, or of Meredith. In one letter to her, T. J. Hogg remarks, “Duty to Our Future Laureate, and Love to the child of Wrath, about to become a Son of Adoption and Grace,” which implies no more than that they were having Arthur baptized. Her letters and Commonplace Book are rather strikingly free of religious allusions, and her behavior was clearly not derived from any prevailing Christian ethic.

  24.This is Rossetti’s sonnet “Nuptial Sleep”:

  At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart:

  And as the last slow sudden drops are shed

  From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,

  So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.

  Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start

  Of married flowers to either side outspread

  From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red,

  Fawned on each other where they lay apart.

  Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams,

  And their dreams watched them sink, and slid away.

  Slowly their souls swam up again, through gleams

  Of watered light and dull drowned waifs of day;

  Till from some wonder of new woods and streams

  He w
oke, and wondered more; for there she lay.

  25.George was unlucky in this wife too. Marie Meredith, apparently a pleasant and docile woman, died of cancer when she was forty-five, after two painful operations and a long illness, during which she could not move or speak, and so met her end, with whatever emotions of resentment and despair, literally uncomplaining.

  26.The affair probably did not begin until some time after February 1857. Meredith records in his notebook little remarks by Arthur, aged three years, seven months, to his nurse. This suggests that they were all sharing the same household as late as February, and that the marriage was therefore officially intact.

  27.If she removed them. Ladies often wore no drawers in those days, for drawers, though known, were new in 1856, and were thought to be “masculine,” in that they imitated trousers. So the whole thing may have been simpler than we think. Not much is known about Victorian notions of propriety in dress for erotic occasions. Did they remove their clothing? Or only the better classes? Or only prostitutes? Much would depend too, no doubt, upon the season of the year.

  28.This friend is a Mr. Evans, perhaps F. M. Evans, publisher of Once a Week. This, as well as later, friendly letters to the Chapmans, suggest that Mary Ellen remained on friendly terms with many of the Merediths’ acquaintance, even those who were in contact with George too, and this despite Victorian conventions of social ostracism.

  29.“We are marrying Mademoiselle Corneille to a neighborhood gentleman, a dragoon officer, wise, gentle, courageous, a fine figure, loving the service of the king and of his lady, having about ten thousand pounds of yearly income, near Ferney. I am putting both of them up. We are all happy. I am ending up a patriarch.

  “Our intended’s name is Dapuits. Brother Thériot must be happy about Mademoiselle Corneille’s good fortune. She deserves it. Are you aware that that child supported her father and mother for a long time by work done with her own little hands? And now she is rewarded. Her life is a novel.” Translated by Toni Roby.

  30.The name Felix was perhaps appended to Harold after Mary Ellen’s death, for she never refers to him as Felix. But one hopes the name was prompted by the felicity he brought to her as well as to Henry.

  31.“Has she been paid for her paper or papers? This passage in her note looks to me as if she had not been paid.” This passage in Dickens’s note looks to me as if Mary Ellen had written some things for Household Words, but what they were is not known.

  32.Her affiliation to what we can call, for convenience, the eighteenth-century tradition, and the inability of either Meredith or his Victorian biographers to understand this, has led to the subtle but interesting distortions in the biographical account of Mary Ellen’s “elopement.” The actual circumstances of female life in the nineteenth century were such that an elopement was a frequent and almost the only way out of a marriage. Women, at least in the middle class, who were not protected legally and who had no financial recourse in case of marital difficulties—unable to own property and unable to get jobs—had almost no other way out of an unhappy marriage except to throw themselves on the “protection” of another man. (Neither aristocrats nor the very poor were constrained by the same realities, it would seem.) The “other man,” in fiction but no doubt in life too, typically deserted the flighty woman later on. This was the inevitable fictional outcome, given the moral aims of Victorian novelists and the expectations of the audience. It was therefore integral to the Biographer’s conception of the situation that Mary Ellen, who was known to have gone to Capri, must have eloped there, and it was also likely that her solitary return was owing to desertion by her lover. The figure of the guilty, repentant, and doomed wife emerges from the biographical tradition to form our view of Madam in Modern Love, and, by extension, our idea of what the facts must have been.

  The actual circumstances were somewhat different. It appears that Mary Ellen simply left George, intending to live by her writing and on a small private income. Her involvement with Henry was not necessarily even related to her separation from George.

  Certain other aspects of her mad “elopement” remain distorted, or at least mysterious; for instance, the custody and whereabouts of Arthur. Meredith’s earliest biographer, Stewart Ellis, reports that Mary Ellen did not desert him, but left him with Lady Nicolls, the mother of her first husband. This detail is repeated by at least two subsequent biographers, Sassoon and Clodd. But Lionel Stevenson, “believing it unlikely,” left it out of his “definitive” biography of Meredith. He felt it unlikely, no doubt, that a respectable Lady Anybody would babysit while her former daughter-in-law ran off on an adulterous impulse. Such, however, seems to have been the case, quite as Meredith’s Cousin Stewart reported. It is thought to be the case, too, by descendants of the Nicolls, who point out that while General Sir Edward and Lady Nicolls would never have approved of adultery, they were always most fond of Mary Ellen, and, of course, of their own granddaughter Edith, who stayed with them often. They were quite fond of Edith’s little half-brother Arthur, too, and enjoyed his frequent visits, and need not necessarily have known what Mary Ellen was up to.

  This is a matter of some, if slight, importance as an example of ways in which biographical tradition subtly changes. The idea that Mary Ellen deserted her little boy has earned for her much undeserved opprobrium, and reinforced George’s pose of rectitude; and these attitudes, as I have argued earlier, greatly influence our interpretation of George’s writing, whether we mean them to or not. My version of how George came by Arthur (here and here) is merely conjecture.

  33.The biographical tradition must again be questioned about the place of Mary Ellen’s death. It is traditional that Mary Ellen lived in Grotto Cottage, but Grotto Cottage is too tiny to contain her ménage, which seems to have included at least Harold, his nurse, and a maid; it is possible that she lived in another, larger cottage on the Oatlands grounds. It is also possible that Harold lived with Nurse Bennet nearby, not an unusual arrangement at the time. Grotto Cottage is, however, a poetically tiny and wretched place for a wicked heroine to expire.

  34.George’s books are full of erring wives, and recastings of the story, for instance, from Richard Feverel:

  The outline of the baronet’s story was by no means new. He had a wife, and he had a friend. His marriage was for love; his wife was a beauty; his friend was a sort of poet [read, “sort of painter”]. His wife had his whole heart, and his friend all his confidence. . . . A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in moral stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who, now that her first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn off, and her fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are not instinctively responded to, is thrown into no wholesome household collision with a fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme. Lady Feverel, when she first entered on her duties at Raynham, was jealous of her husband’s friend. By degrees she tolerated him. In time he touched his guitar in her chamber, and they played Rizzio and Mary together.

  “For I am not the first who found

  The name of Mary fatal!”

  says a subsequent sentimental alliterative love-poem of Diaper’s.

  Such was the outline of the story. But the baronet could fill it up. He had opened his soul to these two. He had been noble Love to the one, and to the other perfect Friendship. He had bid them be brother and sister whom he loved, and live a Golden Age with him at Raynham. In fact, he had been prodigal of the excellence of his nature, which it is not good to be, and, like Timon, he became bankrupt, and fell upon bitterness.

  The faithless lady was of no particular family; an orphan daughter of an admiral who educated her on his half-pay, and her conduct struck but at the man whose name she bore.

  After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin was left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love upon save a little baby boy in a cradle. He forgave the man: he put him aside as poor for his wrath. The woman he
could not forgive; she had sinned every way. Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a pardonable transgression, for he was not one to recount and crush the culprit under the heap of his good deeds. But her he had raised to be his equal, and he judged her as his equal. She had blackened the world’s fair aspect for him.

  In these stories, George indulges in punitive fantasies. The errant Lady Feverel, for instance, becomes a pitiful old crone, despised by her son:

  Her heart had almost forgotten its maternal functions. She called him Sir, till her bade her remember he was her son. Her voice sounded to him like that of a broken-throated lamb, so painful and weak it was, with the plaintive stop in the utterance. When he kissed her, her skin was cold. Her thin hand fell out of his when his grasp relaxed. “Can sin haunt one like this?” he asked, bitterly reproaching himself for the shame she had caused him to endure, and a deep compassion filled his breast.

  And the lover became “prematurely aged, [an] oily little man; a poet in bad circumstances; a decrepit butterfly chained to a disappointed inkstand, [who] will not put strenuous energies to retain his ancient paramour. . . .”

  35.Will Meredith was George’s son by the second marriage. Will did not fare altogether well with his father either. Richard Le Gallienne, Meredith’s great admirer, describes a scene in which he met “Mr. Meredith’s beautiful young daughter, and his son, really a very modest and wholesome young Englishman, whom he had a rather cruel way of teasing and addressing as the ‘Sagamore.’ With a kingly wave of his hand towards him he would say: ‘Behold the Sagamore! Mark that lofty brow! Stand in awe with me before the wisdom that sits there enthroned . . .’ and so he would proceed mercilessly to improvise on the sublime serenity of Wise Youth, seated there so confidently at the top of the world, till the poor tortured Sagamore would blush to the roots of his hair.”