George Eliot (30 page)

As the uncanny similarities between Lewes’s intellectual history and her own became clear during the winter of 1852–3, Marian must have felt as if she had found her soulmate. Her family history, in particular her abbreviated relationship with her mother, left her always hungry for that rapt merging. At first she found it with Isaac, and later in her intense friendships with Maria Lewis and Sara Hennell. Her early relationships with men outside the family were likewise marked by this intensity: losing Chapman and Spencer had sent her into a numb slump from which only this new attachment roused her. But with Lewes she finally found a man who was able to give her the kind of reassurance, attention, support – in fact, the mothering – which she craved. Far from frustrating her, their isolated life provided the exclusivity and intensity which she desired so badly and which had evaded her for so long. When she talked of herself and Lewes as ‘Siamese twins’, it was with pride and complacency in her voice.

There were sufficient contrasts, too, in Marian’s and Lewes’s backgrounds to ensure that tedium did not set in. Friends noticed how Marian listened with rapt attention to Lewes’s funny, unlikely tales of theatrical life. Tom Trollope, a close friend of both, suggested: ‘It must have offered so piquant a contrast with the middle-class surroundings of her early life.’
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Lewes’s sparkling gaiety had a well-attested capacity to enchant those who found it hard to be light-hearted. The solemn Herbert Spencer described Lewes as ‘full of various anecdote; and an admirable mimic; it was impossible to be dull in his company’.
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Even Eliza Lynn, who bore Lewes and Eliot a strange, pointless grudge, acknowledged that ‘wherever he went there was a patch of intellectual sunshine in the room’.
⁵⁷
Now Marian Evans, that intense and serious woman, had also fallen under the spell of the man who would famously be described as ‘the mercurial little showman’.

By the summer of 1853 Lewes was, for those in the know, a highly visible fixture in Marian’s life. Coventry still got the coded version, but nevertheless it is possible to work out from Marian’s
letters to Rosehill that Lewes visited her during her six-week holiday on the south coast. Marian’s mood in St Leonards could not have been more different from the one in Broadstairs the previous year. On that earlier occasion Herbert Spencer had been a reluctant and chilly visitor, bringing final confirmation of his lack of sexual feeling for her. Her letters to him had been beseeching, to Coventry watchful and resigned. But twelve months on there has been a transformation. Her happiness spills out of her letters to the Brays. There are the usual little hints and nudges that Lewes has come down from town to see her. But the main evidence comes in her warm descriptions of her surroundings. From her cottage at St Leonards she describes ‘a vast expanse of sea and sky for my only view … The bright weather and genial air – so different from what I have had for a year before – make me feel as happy and stupid as a well-conditioned cow. I sit looking at the sea and the sleepy ships with a purely animal
bien-être
.’
⁵⁸

Away from London’s prying eyes and blessed with weather that was almost Continental, it was quite possibly now that Marian and Lewes began to discuss the possibility that one day they might live together. It would be hard to overestimate the seriousness of this decision. The Fallen Woman was a figure which haunted the mid-Victorian imagination. Not a prostitute exactly, she was conceived as a woman who had allowed herself to become sexually intimate with a man who could not or would not marry her. Cast out from society, her only way of living was quietly and anonymously. Either she could become the man’s common-law wife, take his name, and hope that no one found out about the true nature of her situation. Or she could move to a new neighbourhood and start again, claiming either to be a widow (if there was a child) or else a spinster of the parish. But none of these options was open to Marian. She and Lewes needed to live in London for their work, and they were too notorious to be able simply to disappear to a new part of town. If they decided to cohabit, the price they would pay would be utter notoriety and the effective ending of any public life for Marian.

For this reason it made sense to have a trial run abroad where they – and their status – were either not known or not bothered about. Germany was an obvious destination, since Marian had
already translated two of its most important theological works and Lewes was preparing a biography of its greatest intellectual figure, Goethe. In addition, Germany had the practical advantage of being cheap – an important consideration, as Lewes would still be responsible for supporting Agnes and her family financially.

Viewed retrospectively, it looks as if Marian and G. H. Lewes were destined to be together. But such a happy ending was hardly certain as they lived through these first eighteen months of their relationship. Although he was separated from his wife, Lewes did not yet consider the arrangement permanent. Indeed, it was not until the autumn of 1854 that it seems to have become quite clear that Agnes did not want him back. In a letter to Charles Bray from Weimar Marian wrote mysteriously, ‘Circumstances, with which I am not concerned, and
which have arisen since … [Mr Lewes] left England
[my italics], have led him to determine on a separation from Mrs Lewes.’
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We do not know what these circumstances were, nor why their timing was so significant. But it is a shock to realise that it was only at this late stage that Marian considered herself able to make permanent plans to be with Lewes.

Although it would always be crucially important to Marian’s self-image that she had not carried off another woman’s husband, this odd letter to Bray makes it clear that when she left for Germany Lewes did not yet know if he would at some point return to his wife. Far from being an informal honeymoon to confirm the new ‘marriage’, this Continental holiday appears more in the light of a trial cohabitation. The fact that it went well pushed Lewes into making a final and decisive break from his wife. Although in the years that followed Agnes would never accuse Marian of breaking up her marriage, there would be plenty who would do just that. Marian Evans became known not just as the woman who lived with a man without being his wife, but as one who took another woman’s husband.

Given that Lewes did not make a final commitment to the relationship until they were already in Weimar, Marian’s decision to travel with him to Germany was extremely brave. Agnes might change her mind and want Lewes back, or the relationship might simply run its course. While Marian did not doubt Lewes’s sincerity, she knew that those who had her best interests at heart
worried that he would tire of her as he had of so many before. Since the holy war she had learned to live with the censure of conventional society, but it was one thing to do so with the man she loved beside her and quite another to live the rest of her life as a jilted, untouchable woman. Once the news was out that she had spent the summer living as Lewes’s ‘wife’, she would never be allowed to return to her status as an unusual but respectable woman. ‘Spent Christmas Day alone at Cambridge St,’ she wrote in her journal in December 1853,
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the only entry from this time to survive Cross’s savage pruning. It was a glimpse of what life might be like if the coming gamble did not pay off.

During the months when Marian was deciding whether to risk making her relationship with Lewes public she was sustained by her work on Feuerbach, which Chapman was finally committed to publishing. Feuerbach’s
Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity)
(1841) was an attempt to salvage the spirit of Christianity in an intellectual landscape for ever changed by Strauss. If the Bible was no longer a literal account of faith, then what was left? Feuerbach suggested that religion was a psychological necessity for man, who projected the best of himself upon God and then proceeded to worship his own magnificence. Far from resulting in an arid solipsism, Feuerbach’s Christianity was a warm and generous humanism, which saw acts of love between men as the building blocks of faith: ‘Love is God himself, and apart from it there is no God.’
⁶¹
Most relevantly for Marian, Feuerbach included sexual love in his definition of the sacred. What mattered was not the legal forms which contained that love, but the quality of the attachment. According to Feuerbach the only ‘religious’ marriage was one which was ‘spontaneously concluded, spontaneously willed, self-sufficing’. A marriage ‘the bond of which is merely an external restriction … is not a true marriage, and therefore not a truly moral marriage’.
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It was the clearest theological justification Marian would find for her coming decision to live with Lewes.

Marian followed the same system with Feuerbach as she had used with Strauss. As soon as she had finished a passage she sent it to Sara in Coventry, who checked her work against the original. The process was less painful this time, partly because the German was easier and partly because she was in greater sympathy with
Feuerbach than she had been with Strauss. This time there were no letters about her being ‘Feuerbach-sick’. The translation was published in mid-July and for the first and only time in her career she allowed her real name ‘Marian Evans’ to appear on the flyleaf. In this way she publicly identified the moral basis of the extraordinary step she was about to take of starting her own ‘marriage’ to G. H. Lewes.

There were other less esoteric sources to which Marian turned in an attempt to find justification for the pandemonium she was about to create. On 10 July she wrote to Sara to prepare her for her departure, declaring, ‘I shall soon send you a good bye, for I am preparing to go to “Labassecour”.’
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Labassecour was Charlotte Brontë’s name for Brussels, the country to which Lucy Snowe travels in
Villette
in an attempt to find a richer, more authentic life. She also finds Paul Emanuel, the difficult and unsuitable man with whom she falls in love. The unconventional passion of Brontë’s third book was far more to Marian’s taste than
Jane Eyre
, which she had read in 1847 during the ghastly holiday at St Leonards. In
Villette
, equally admired by Lewes, Marian found the endorsement she had been looking for. She would have been even more intrigued to learn that Lucy Snowe’s highly charged relationship with M. Emanuel was based on Brontë’s own love for a married man, her employer Constantin Heger.

As the time approached when they would have to reach a decision about whether to make the relationship public or abandon it as impossible, both Marian’s and Lewes’s health gave way. The strain of keeping her intentions secret from Cara and Sara, not to mention the prospect of losing their friendship, brought Marian the usual cycle of nervous and physical symptoms. In a letter written to Sara she touched directly on the isolation she was feeling and the even greater isolation which she feared was to come: ‘I am terribly out of spirits just now and the pleasantest thought I have is that whatever I may feel affects no one else – happens in a little “island cut off from other lands”.’
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These remarks rang warning bells with Sara, who thought she sensed a return to the intense morbidity of the Geneva letters. She alerted her sister, who immediately wrote to Marian asking how on earth she could consider herself an island when she had so many good
friends. In replying carefully to Cara, Marian moved from her own circumstances to a consideration of the general human condition in a way which prefigures the wise narrator of her novels.

Lewes was in an even worse state. In April he had collapsed with dizziness, headaches and ringing in the ears. It might seem as if he had less to lose than Marian, having no good name to impugn. None the less, it was a huge step for him to separate publicly from Agnes and the children whom he loved. The responsibility of providing for them would not stop and it was hard to see how he could afford to set up a separate home with a new partner. And careless though he often was about these things, he was aware that he was asking Marian to give up a great deal by coming with him to Germany. At some point they would be obliged to return to London and face the fact that she was now a social exile. If his feelings for her faded after a year or two then he would be forced to bear the hideous knowledge that the world held him responsible for ruining the reputation of London’s cleverest woman. Under the strain of these considerations, Lewes eventually ground to a halt and was ordered to the country for a month by his doctor. This, however, did not do the trick because, explained Marian, ‘His poor head – his only fortune – is not well yet.’
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He was soon sent off again, this time to try the famous water cure at Malvern.

While Lewes languished in the country, Marian undertook to do his
Leader
work for him. Several of the pieces which appeared in the magazine during these weeks have her stamp on them. Given that she was still struggling with the Feuerbach proofs, it confirms that by now she thought of herself and Lewes as a unit. Six months earlier she had sprung to his defence like a terrier when Chapman proposed to publish a review by T. H. Huxley of Lewes’s translation of Comte’s
Philosophy of the Sciences
and Harriet Martineau’s abridged translation of
Positivist Philosophy
. Comte’s attempt to study mankind by taking God out of the picture and seeing what was left was guaranteed to appeal to those two stringent atheists George Henry Lewes and Harriet Martineau. Positivism, as Comte’s philosophy was called, concerned itself with classifying and describing the social organisation of human life along lines which Herbert Spencer had already found highly suggestive when writing his
Social Statics
. In other words, Positivism was an embryonic sociology which promised to reveal the new, secular secrets of man’s existence.