Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  Lewes joined her in letting Blackwood know that other publishers wanted her. His phrasing was unfortunate: ‘My precious time is occupied with declining offers on all sides – every one imagining that he can seduce George Eliot.’45 This remark passed between the Blackwood’s offices in Edinburgh and London, creating outrage everywhere. If many people were trying to seduce George Eliot, well, no wonder, since Mr Lewes himself had shown the way, said an employee less gentlemanly than Mr Blackwood. The favoured metaphor in the Blackwood offices for what was happening was that George Eliot was selling herself to the highest bidder.

  George Eliot stayed with Blackwood for The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, but she gave Romola to Smith and Elder for the immense sum of £7,000. The transaction was not a pleasure. She felt guilty towards Blackwood, who had always treated her well, and she felt guilty towards Smith who, she thought, had given her too much money. In a sense she was right, for Romola was not a popular success. Smith lost money on it. After that unsatisfactory fling, and for the rest of her career, she stayed happily with Blackwood, for, as she had written to him when she first thought of leaving him for another publisher, ‘I prefer, in every sense, permanent relations to shifting ones.’46

  If their dual solitude was anchored on one side by their mutual devotion to her work, it was also anchored by their devotion to Lewes’s three sons, who called Marian ‘Mutter’ and seem to have been closer to her than they were to their natural mother. After being educated in Switzerland, two of the boys wound up in Natal, but Charles Lewes came to London to take up a junior position in the post office, which Anthony Trollope, the novelist and a friend of the family, had been able to secure for him. At a time in their lives when both would have preferred to live in the country, convinced that Marian suffered in health and spirits in the city, the Leweses nevertheless resolved to make a home there for young Charles. ‘I languish sadly for the fields and the broad sky; but duties must be done, and Charles’s moral education required that he should have at once a home near his business.’47 George Eliot was the kind of person to welcome duties and obligations of that sort. Not only were they a spiritual discipline, they also gave shape to a life which might otherwise be paralysingly subject to whim. Fortunate are those, she said, who have a peremptory reason for living in one place rather than another.

  By turning their backs on the search for happiness in their daily lives, by committing themselves to each other, to their work and to Duty, the Leweses managed to be as happy together for the twenty-four years they lived together as any two people I have heard of outside fantasy literature. Of course, theirs was not the happiness of fantasy literature at all: not passionate, not romantic, not played out upon the peaks of life but on its plains. It was founded on a stoical, a tragic sense of life. ‘There comes a season when we cease to look round and say “how shall I enjoy?” but as in a country that has been visited by the sword, pestilence and famine, think only how we shall help the wounded and how find time for the next harvest – how till the earth and make a little time of gladness for those being born without their own asking.’48 There was something mournful in George Eliot’s contentment. She never knew the exhilaration, let us say, of an opera singer who has given a splendid performance and been applauded by thousands. Although she became the most lauded and respected female novelist in England, she found that ‘the merely egotistical satisfactions of fame are easily nullified by a toothache’.49 Her pleasure came from daily life and from the abiding sense of the worth of her writing. What better sources?

  She asked for little partly because she knew she was not beautiful; she did not consider herself, in worldly terms, a prize. She asked for little, too, because the experience of loss and death had tempered her expectations. Her mother died when she was seventeen, and her father, to whom she was even more strongly attached, renounced her when she was twenty-one over her loss of faith, reconciled with her uneasily, then died when she was thirty. The only way she could reconstruct the network of love she had known as a child in her family was through marriage. So she came to that relationship with the utmost seriousness and the intention that she and the man she chose would be twin pillars supporting all meaning in life – he the centre of her life as she was of his. She didn’t look for excitement. She didn’t look for happiness, although she found it. She looked to be of use to someone who in turn would find her existence indispensable. Lewes, for different reasons, approached his second marriage with a chastened set of expectations. Asking for little, they secured for themselves a joint life of exceptional richness.

  Ill health was the tax they believed they paid for their contentment. ‘We have so much happiness in our love and uninterrupted companionship, that we must accept our miserable bodies as our share of mortal ill.’ And, ‘We are always the same – happy in everything except our livers and stomaches.’50 Lewes, like Carlyle, was cursed with chronic dyspepsia and rarely got through a day without discomfort. ‘O dear O dear when will people leave off their foolish talk about all human lots being equal? as if anybody with a sound stomach ever knew misery comparable to the misery of a dyspeptic.’51 She suffered periodically from incapacitating illnesses which aspirin and antibiotics might have cured. Lacking routinely useful medications, they sought health in Continental spas. They travelled whenever George Eliot finished a book, having then the time and additional motive – to avoid reviews.

  Their health seems consistently to have improved in warm climates, and one wonders why they did not, like the Brownings, simply leave England. Harriet Beecher Stowe assumed it was only a question of money, and she rejoiced at the success of Middlemarch, among other reasons, because it would allow her friend to buy a place in the sun. But that was not it. Their moral roots were English. They refused to cut themselves off. George Eliot feared becoming selfish if she lived in too pleasant a climate. In her bargain with life, the body’s humiliation was the soul’s enrichment; one prospered at the other’s expense. As her lack of beauty was connected with her spiritual radiance, her domestic happiness seemed connected with the bodily misery she shared with her husband. By 1873 she was comparing the two of them to two medieval saints painted by a very naïve master. ‘Our bodies seem to shrink, like the Peau de Chagrin, with every year of happiness.’52

  Even before Thornton Lewes returned from Natal in 1869, sick with the spinal disease of which he would shortly and excruciatingly die, death was in her thoughts. The Queen, who had been widowed in 1861, was mourning on the grand scale by withdrawing from most of her public duties. When her journal was published, George Eliot read it with particular sympathy, because, as she said, ‘I am a woman of about the same age, and also have my personal happiness bound up in a dear husband whose loss would render my life simply a series of social duties and private memories.’53 Thornton’s death, devastating in itself, seemed to her also the beginning of their own. Her ponderous but deeply feeling mind began to make its way towards another truth about the nature of emotional life, and, as so often with George Eliot, the metaphor was commercial: loving someone is like an increase of property – at the same time that it brings joy, it brings fears about loss. Sometimes, in the midst of her happiness, she would cry suddenly at the thought of the necessary parting from Lewes that lay in the future. Like everyone else in the world who has lived in harmony with someone for a very long time, she wondered – even while he was alive and well – how she would live without him. She wondered which of them ought to die first. On the whole she thought she would prefer the pain of being left behind for the sake of being able to nurse him. ‘Death seems to me now a close, real experience, like the approach of autumn or winter, and I am glad to find that advancing life brings the power of imagining the nearness of death I never had of late years.’ She thought continually of death, almost to the eclipse of life, ‘as if life were so narrow a strip as hardly to be taken much reckoning of’. For the blessedness of loving, she said, we pay a heavy price in anxiety.54

  In 1877, when Lewes was sixty and
she was almost as old, she was suffering horrible pain from kidney stones and he was barely able to walk. She recovered, but Lewes seemed to get worse. One person who saw him at this time said he looked like he’d been gnawed by rats. George Eliot watched his health with a grieving heart. The man whose lightness of step had so delighted her in their prime could hardly get around. In late November 1878, after a short bout of enteritis, Lewes died. He also had cancer and would soon have died of that, if not the other.

  John Blackwood, though sickly himself, thought about descending from Scotland to take care of the author he had worked with for so many years. He did not know how she could manage herself and her grief. She never left the house. The servants heard her crying and sometimes screaming. She saw no one except Charles Lewes, who handled her daily affairs as his father had done. At first, she could not bear even to read the letters of condolence; Charles merely informed her who had written them. She was a ‘bruised creature’, shrinking from even the tenderest touch. She wanted to live only to do certain things for Lewes’s sake: she wanted to ready for publication the manuscript he had been working on, and she wanted to establish a fellowship in physiology in his name. So she watched her diet and she did enough work to keep her mind from imbecility. But her attachment to life was fragile. By the following July, she had diminished to 103 pounds.

  Except for the three men she consulted about setting up the Lewes Studentship, one of whom was John Walter Cross, who handled her investments, she saw no friends until March – four months after Lewes’s death. She could not pretend to be interested in anything but thinking of Lewes, of her own past happiness, of her grief. She feared that even her closest friends would find her sorrow wearisome. She did not want to pain them, but she could not relinquish her grief, so she stayed alone. The more she realised how thoroughly her happiness for twenty-four years had been founded on securing Lewes’s happiness rather than her own, the more her desolation increased. She did not know how to seek happiness directly.

  Oblivion through work was impossible. She could barely summon up strength and concentration to do the editing of Lewes’s manuscript. Work of her own was out of the question. She had finished Impressions of Theophrastus Such before Lewes’s death; in fact, sending the manuscript to Blackwood was practically Lewes’s last action. But afterwards, George Eliot refused to let Blackwood bring the book out: it would seem disrespectful to Lewes. The type had been set, but no books could be printed. Eventually, feeling guilty about keeping all that type tied up, she allowed Blackwood to print the books but not to distribute them. When the book finally appeared in May, it bore a note from the publisher explaining that the manuscript had been in his hands since the previous year but its publication had been delayed because of the ‘domestic affliction’ of the author. The unsentimental Scotsman did this entirely to soothe the feelings of the widow, whose prolonged mourning he had by March begun to consider morbid, and encouraged by ‘pretended sympathisers’.55

  In the eyes of the world, there seems to be no right way of handling bereavement. If you are rendered incapable of living by grief – like Victoria and George Eliot – you are thought morbid. If you smile to hide tears and go on as best you can, you are likely to be thought unfeeling. If you re-marry quickly you are suspected of having been insufficiently attached to your first spouse, and if you don’t, you are insufficiently committed to the business of living. Wisely, George Eliot followed the path of her own grief to its natural conclusion. Although that winter seemed the end of her life, spring followed.

  She was rebellious. That was a good sign. Although everything seemed difficult which before had seemed easy, although she now had to find reasons for continuing in life when before Lewes had supplied the reason, she could not bring herself to feel that her life was no use. She could not resign herself to continuing her death-in-life. She found herself repeatedly turning for help with financial matters to John Walter Cross, a forty-year-old banker whose mother the Leweses had befriended ten years before. Cross, whom George Eliot called variously ‘Johnny’ and ‘nephew’, handled her investments, helped with the drafting of the Lewes memorial fellowship and advised her about the many requests for loans she got from friends and relatives. She was by now quite wealthy, and since she was resolved to continue Lewes’s support of his wife, children and grandchildren, her financial arrangements were complicated and extensive.56

  Cross was young. He was useful. He worshipped her. And his mother, to whom he had been devoted, had died a week after Lewes. Each of them felt maimed. Each lacked a crucial emotional support. Grief, unless for the loss of the same person, is not a particularly binding emotion, but the determination to recover from it is. Johnny, perhaps because he was younger, was the more determined to discipline himself and to find new interests for his life. He thought it might be good to read Dante. Marian agreed. She would even do it with him. For the next twelve months, they read together through the Inferno and the Purgatorio, construing and discussing every line. She was the teacher, and the man of business became her pupil. She had the pleasure of watching her own experience kindle enthusiasm and understanding in him. He had the pleasure of feeling himself in the control of a woman in some ways more powerful than himself, who, nonetheless, depended on him in other ways. Somewhere in this strangely shifting duet of dominance, the erotic spark was struck. Like Paolo and Francesca (though not, like them, mournfully) they credited the book. ‘The divine poet took us into another world,’ wrote Cross. ‘It was a renovation of life.’ By May, he had induced her to play the piano again. ‘I am much stronger than I was,’ she said, ‘and am again finding interest in this wonderful life of ours.’57

  A year and a half after Lewes’s death, in April 1880, she agreed to marry Cross and the wedding took place shortly thereafter, on May 6, in St George’s, Hanover Square. Marian was given away by her stepson, Charles Lewes, and the other people present were all members of John Cross’s family. They left almost immediately for the Continent. She had tried, obliquely, to prepare her closest friends for this shocking development. Two weeks before the wedding, for example, she went to say goodbye to Georgiana Burne-Jones, who knew only that Marian was going abroad. Mrs Burne-Jones felt (but who knows with what retrospective insight) that her friend had something on her mind she wasn’t saying. ‘I have always remembered though the weariness she expressed of the way in which wisdom was attributed to her. “I am so tired of being set on a pedestal and expected to vent wisdom – I am only a poor woman” was the meaning of what she said if not the exact phrase, as I think it was.’58 But she told no one explicitly of her wedding plans. Instead she left notes for five close friends to be delivered on the day of the wedding. Clearly she felt she was doing something of which her friends would not approve. But the furtiveness in her wedding plans and departure for the Continent may have been part of the pleasure, if it really is true, as one expert has said, that guilt is the cutting edge of sex. She had lived guiltily for twenty-four years with Lewes in one way. Now she had another. For although Cross was an old friend, wealthy, eligible – in all those ways a suitable person for Marian Evans to marry – he was twenty years younger than she. Again she had managed to find an object for her love which defied easy social acceptance.

  Anne Thackeray, the novelist’s daughter, had done something similar three years before. At the age of forty, she married Richmond Ritchie, twenty-four, just barely out of university.59 George Eliot had reacted with tolerance. She knew Miss Thackeray and Ritchie, and thought the nearly twenty years’ difference between them might be bridged by his solidity and gravity. ‘This is one of several instances that I have known of lately,’ she wrote at the time, ‘showing that young men of even brilliant advantages will often choose as their life’s companion a woman whose attractions are wholly of the spiritual order.’60

  Now, with the newly married couple on their honeymoon, Charles Lewes went about London explaining his stepmother’s action, generously, sympathetically, for he felt he owed her everythin
g good in his life. One of the people he called upon was Anne Thackeray Ritchie and she related the ‘thrrrrrrilling’ conversation to her absent husband. Lewes had said he regarded Mr Cross as an elder brother. He said that his father had not a grain of jealousy in him and would only have wanted her to be happy. He said his stepmother was of such a delicate and fastidious nature that only the most ideal tête-à-tête would satisfy her.

  I asked him if she had consulted him and he said no, not consulted, but that she had told him a few weeks ago. She confided in Paget (her doctor) who approved and told her that it wouldn’t make any difference in her influence. Here I couldn’t stand it, and said of course it would, but it was better to be genuine than to have influence, and that I didn’t suppose she imagined herself inspired, though her clique did. It rather shocked him, and he mumbled a good deal…. George Eliot said to him if she hadn’t been a human with feelings and failings like other people, how could she have written her books.61

  Lewes could not have felt he needed to justify to Anne Ritchie his stepmother’s marrying a man so much younger than herself. There was something else, another ‘failing’: that she had re-married at all. Some people still thought that fidelity should extend beyond the grave. Hamlet, perhaps, was extreme in thinking that none doth wed the second but who killed the first; still, if love is unique, as the romantic tradition supposes it is, how could you love a second time? It seemed retroactively to dilute the importance of the first attachment.62