George Eliot (24 page)
Authors: Kathryn Hughes
Marian no longer felt the need to match Bessie’s anxious ardour. The days of leaning heavily on another woman as if she were a kindred spirit, a husband, were gone for good. From now on a different pattern emerged in her relationships. It would be she who decided how close to allow a younger, admiring woman to come. A letter Bessie wrote to her friend, Barbara Leigh Smith, on 12 February 1853 shows the kind of reverential awe which Marian’s reputation for moral wisdom was already capable of inspiring in others.
Do you know, Marian Evans has changed to me lately, has seemed to have finally made up her mind to love me … She said the other day, having made me sit close to her, and looking full into my eyes: ‘I thought when I first knew you, you had a great deal of self-esteem in the sense of putting forth your own opinions, but I have quite lost the impression. I suppose when we love people, we lose the sense of their faults.’ I was inexpressibly touched. I nearly cried. The odd mixture of truth and fondness in Marian is so great. She never spares, but expresses every opinion, good and bad, with the most unflinching plainness, and yet she seems able to see faults without losing tenderness.
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Barbara Leigh Smith was to become an even greater friend of Marian’s, and perhaps the only one whom she looked upon as
her intellectual and moral equal. Her background was as sophisticated and progressive as Marian’s was provincial and conventional. Like Bessie, Barbara came from a distinguished family of Unitarian reformers, men and women who had been at the forefront of virtually every progressive campaign and good cause since the beginning of the century. What made her odd was her illegitimacy. Her father, Benjamin Leigh Smith, a Radical MP, felt unable to marry her mother because she was a milliner. None the less he looked after her, and the five children they had together, with generous tenderness. Although the Leigh Smith tribe would always be tainted with illegitimacy – even their progressive Bonham Carter and Nightingale cousins steered clear – they were furnished with a privileged, enlightened childhood. Following her father’s and grandfather’s great interest in art, Barbara had taken lessons from William Henry Hunt. Unlike many another ‘young lady painter’ of her generation, she was not a dabbler, but persevered to become a fine artist. When she came of age in 1848 she was provided with £300 a year which, unlike Marian’s ninety pounds, was enough to release her from having to earn a living. She spent her time and money usefully, continuing her artistic training and, together with Bessie, working energetically to open up educational and job opportunities to women.
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These friendships with Barbara and Bessie opened up a new kind of social life to Marian. For the past ten years she had been used to sitting down to supper with clever men, but the atmosphere had always been informal, bohemian, even chaotic. Susanna Chapman was usually in such a muddle that it was not unusual for the dinner to arrive an hour late. The conversation at the Leigh Smiths and the Parkeses was no less intellectual, but it was set on an entirely different scale. At the Parkes mansion in Savile Row and the Leigh Smith establishment in Blandford Square there were huge rooms, fine china and a flock of servants. The Parkes mansion was big enough to hold huge balls, to which Marian was twice invited. On these occasions she refused, knowing that this was not an environment in which she did well. The dancing, the flirtation, the quick repartee made her feel like the plain teenager who had brought the party to a stop with her hysterics all those years ago in Warwickshire. She made her
scrappy wardrobe the excuse for not going. ‘It would be a crucifixion of my own taste as well as other people’s to appear like a withered cabbage in a flower garden.’ What she liked and where she shone was in the intimacy of a dinner party where ‘people think only of conversation, [and] one doesn’t mind being a dowdy’.
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She dined regularly at both the Parkeses’ and the Leigh Smiths’, becoming a particular favourite of Joseph Parkes. Writing years later, Bessie remembered how
from 1851 to 1855, she used to wear black velvet, then seldom adopted by unmarried ladies. I can see her descending the great staircase of our house in Savile Row (afterwards the Stafford Club), on my father’s arm, the only lady, except my mother, among the group of remarkable men, politicians, and authors of the first literary rank. She would talk and laugh softly, and look up into my father’s face respectfully, while the light of the great hall-lamp shone on the waving masses of her hair, and the black velvet fell in folds about her feet.
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Here was Marian in her element. Released from the need to compete with other women on grounds of dress or beauty, she used her intellect and her intensity to captivate whichever man she had set her heart on.
One of those men was Herbert Spencer, to whom she had been introduced during her visit to London in the August of 1851. As sub-editor of
The Economist
, Spencer lived and worked just over the road from the
Westminster
. The previous year Chapman had published Spencer’s
Social Statics
, a hugely influential book, which applied the concept of evolution and adaptation to questions of social organisation. Spencer believed that the human race was moving slowly towards political freedom, which he defined as the right of every man ‘to do whatsoever he wills provided he does not infringe the equal freedom of any other man’. Despite the excluding pronoun, Spencer believed that both sexes should share in this freedom, since ‘no woman of truly noble mind will submit to be dictated to’. However, he was sufficiently a man of his time to balk at giving the vote to women, no matter how noble-minded they might be.
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Like so many other significant people in her life – Chapman
and Bessie especially – Spencer also came from the Midlands, in this case Derby. He was the only child of an intelligent, energetic Wesleyan couple. His uncle, the Revd Thomas Spencer, was a clergyman who used the pulpit to campaign for the abolition of the Corn Laws and the ending of slavery. The Revd Spencer also believed that the English working class would never be free from their masters while they stayed muddle-headed with drink. In 1845, during a visit to Coventry, he had spoken so passionately for teetotalism that Marian had to be restrained by Cara from running up to the front of the hall and adding her name to the pledge.
Despite coaching from his Cambridge-educated uncle, Herbert Spencer did not shine at classics, taking more naturally to mathematics and science. At seventeen he joined the railways as a civil engineer, before gravitating to London where he fiddled with mechanical inventions and tried his hand at periodical writing. Gradually his interest broadened from technical subjects to social ones, or rather he applied his ‘scientific’ discipline to the study of man’s social organisation, out of which emerged the new discipline of sociology. By the time Marian met him, the thirty-one-year-old Spencer was recognised as one of the cleverest men in London, a genuinely original mind among the synthesisers. Over the next fifty-two years of his long life there was hardly a subject which he did not colonise, including philosophy, biology, statistics and ethics. He was, as
Social Statics
demonstrated, an enthusiastic believer in evolution well before
Origin of Species
appeared in 1859, and it was he rather than Darwin who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’.
Although his modern, non-university education was typical of the men with whom Marian was involved throughout her life, Spencer’s emotional make-up could not have been more different from Bray’s, Chapman’s or Lewes’s. Celibate where they were sexual, cold where they were warm, detailed where they were broad, he had a rigid, chilly personality. Perhaps it was the result of being the only surviving child of a brood of nine, but Spencer saw danger in everything. Emotional attachment spelled chaos, and whenever a love affair threatened the loss of his carefully composed self, he scuttled back into the intricate theoretical world, which was the shape and content of his working life.
Rather than pursuing relationships with real women, he postulated endlessly about the conditions necessary for an ideal love. Although he worried about his bachelor status, whenever a suitable partner presented herself he came up with perfectly good reasons why it would never work. Either he did not have enough money to marry, or he was too busy, or the woman in question was unsuitable. The fact was that although Herbert Spencer loved to study humanity, his self-engrossment made any kind of real contact with another human being impossible.
But if he was incapable of emotional closeness, there was nothing Spencer liked more than intellectual contact. Miss Evans was a delightful person with whom to spend time, being not only cleverer than many of his friends, but female to boot. Spencer’s preoccupation with his bachelorhood meant that he was keen to be seen around town with a woman. The possibility of having a lover, and having others witness that possibility, was enough to take the edge off his fearful recognition that he would never marry. As arts critic for
The Economist
he received free press tickets for the theatre and the opera, and he often invited Marian to accompany him to Covent Garden. As the evenings lengthened, their friendship moved from the semi-professional to something which passed for intimacy. By April they were meeting regularly for long, sunshiny chats on the terrace of Somerset House, to which Chapman had a private key.
But if Marian was busy falling in love, Spencer was already retreating into cold calculation. On 23 April he wrote to his friend Edward Lott, carefully setting out the terms of his new attachment: ‘Miss Evans, whom you have heard me mention as the translatress of Strauss and as the most admirable woman, mentally, I ever met. We have been for some time past on very intimate terms. I am frequently at Chapman’s, and the greatness of her intellect conjoined with her womanly qualities and manner, generally keep me at her side most of the evening.’
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Marian’s affection for Spencer was characteristically ardent. For the first time in her life she was involved with a man who, on the face of it, was entirely suitable. Not only was he free to marry, but his background was close to hers. Like her, he was an original thinker in areas where Bray, Chapman and Brabant were second-rate. She was perceptive enough to know that his
intellectual rigidity – trimming empirical evidence to fit prearranged theories – would clash with her growing respect for the integrity of the specific and individual. But her need for a soulmate, never deeply buried, had resurfaced with a vengeance, leading her to sexualise this most unsexual of men. Old emotional patterns were reanimated as she rushed into love with a man who could not return her affection.
By the time Spencer wrote to Lott praising Marian’s virtues, he had already told her that there could be no question of romance between them. In a letter to another friend, written after her death, he reported what happened next.
After a time I began to have qualms as to what might result from this constant companionship. Great as was my admiration for her, considered both morally and intellectually, and decided as was my feeling of friendship, I could not perceive in myself any indications of a warmer feeling, and it occurred to me that mischief would possibly follow if our relations continued. Those qualms led me to take a strange step – an absurd step in one sense. I wrote to her indicating, as delicately as I could, my fears. Then afterwards, perceiving how insulting to her was the suggestion that while I felt in no danger of falling in love with her, she was in danger of falling in love with me, I wrote a second letter, apologising for my unintended insult. She took it all smilingly, quite understanding my motive and forgiving my rudeness. The consequence was that our intimacy continued as before. And then, by and by, just that which I had feared might take place, did take place. Her feelings became involved and mine did not. The lack of physical attraction was fatal. Strongly as my judgement prompted, my instincts would not respond.
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When Marian received her first rejection from Spencer in April she did indeed take it ‘smilingly’ – at least on the surface. Her reply to him, on the 21st, makes a self-deprecating joke about how it had never crossed her mind that his intentions might be other than platonic. ‘I felt disappointed rather than “hurt”’, she wrote with forced lightness, ‘that you should not have sufficiently divined my character to perceive how remote it is from my
habitual state of mind to imagine that any one is falling in love with me.’
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Nothing could be further from the truth. On 30 March, just before Spencer declared himself, Marian had revealed in a heavy-handed joke to Cara just where her hopes were heading: ‘I had two offers last night – not of marriage, but of music – which I find it impossible to resist.’
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Once Spencer’s intentions became clear, Marian back-pedalled with the Brays to hide her humiliation. On 27 April she wrote a dishonest letter to Coventry in which she made out that Spencer’s desire to keep the friendship platonic was a joint one: ‘We have agreed that we are not in love with each other, and that there is no reason why we should not have as much of each other’s society as we like.’
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By agreeing to be friends with the man whom she wanted as her lover, Marian was ensuring that their daily intimacy continued. In time, once the pressure of the situation had eased, she hoped that the jumpy Spencer might move slowly towards her. And indeed, over the late spring, they did continue to meet regularly. More trips to Covent Garden and roof-top chats were followed, in June, by a trip to Kew to examine the flowers for signs of evolutionary adaptation.
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The Brays knew well by now that the more studiedly casual Marian’s tone when talking about a man, the more deeply she was involved with him. As keen as ever to foster a romance which might lead to an offer of marriage, they suggested inviting Spencer up to Rosehill when she was there, hoping that the bear rug under the acacia tree might do the trick. Marian’s response to the suggestion was a tangle of denied desire and defensive posturing.
