George Eliot (35 page)

In the event, the Goethe biography needed no pre-publication push from Marian. It was a magnificent book, showing Lewes at his best: lucid, humane, agile. It would be hard to think of anyone better able to follow Goethe through every aspect of his versatile life, from the stage to science, from poetry to philosophy. Lewes’s
Goethe
did more than any other book of the century to bring German culture to the middling mass of Britons. A popular and critical success, it sold quickly and garnered admiring reviews from the quality press. It turned out to be a major money-spinner, too, bringing Lewes a significant income for the rest of his life.
But this was not why Marian thought so highly of the book. ‘I can’t tell you how I value it’, she wrote to Bray, ‘as the best product of a mind which I have every day more reason to admire and love.’
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Goethe was one of those people whom the subject of Marian’s next
Westminster
piece would have consigned to the everlasting flames. Dr John Cumming was a minister of the Scottish National Church whose hell-fire-and-brimstone sermons typified the rigid, ungenerous version of Protestant Christianity which Marian had embraced in her youth.
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Cumming concentrated his attention lovingly on what hell would feel like, and little time on what a life dedicated to Christ would entail. He disregarded the small virtues of everyday life – a conjugal kindness, a voluntary honesty – in favour of an all-embracing duty to give one’s life to the Lord. Instead of reaching the divine through loving her husband, a wife should be careful that she was not distracted from her love of God. It would be hard to imagine a greater antithesis to Feuerbach.

Cumming’s hell was kept alight not only with Puseyites who had gone over to Rome but with the souls of doubters, those men and women like Marian who wanted to believe, but who wrestled daily with the implications of revealed religion. Instead of a helping hand, Cumming offered them only gleeful spite. ‘Nowhere in his pages have we found a humble, candid, sympathetic attempt to meet the difficulties that may be felt by an ingenious mind,’ reported Marian. ‘Everywhere he supposes that the doubter is hardened, conceited, consciously shutting his eyes to the light.’
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The piece is confident, probably because Marian had only to think herself back into the ‘dogmatic perversions’ of her youth to experience the kind of mind which could have produced such an unlovely doctrine: small, hard, frightened. Lewes was stunned by its fluency, and during a walk in Richmond Park told her that he was convinced ‘of the true genius in her writing’.
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Others thought so too. Back in Coventry, Mary Sibree, now Mrs John Cash, whose life had been so profoundly touched by the holy war, read the piece out to the Brays, who all agreed that ‘it must be yours … No one else
could
do it.’
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It was fortunate that Marian scored such a success so soon
after coming back from Germany, because only five months later she experienced her first major publishing set-back. With Lewes’s ‘big book’ now safely through the press, it was time to pay attention to Marian’s. She finished translating Spinoza’s
Ethics
in February 1856 and looked forward to her reward. ‘You don’t know what a severely practical person I am become, and what a sharp eye I have to the main chance,’ she wrote to Bray. It was probably money matters which lay behind her request to him in the same letter to ‘be so good as not to mention
my
name in connection with … [Spinoza]. I particularly wish not to be known as the translator of the Ethics.’
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It was Lewes, after all, who had the contract with the publisher, not she. As far as we know, his plan was to fudge the issue of authorship when he presented the finished work to Bonn.

But it never got that far. Since 1854, when the arrangement had been made, Bonn senior had grown lukewarm about publishing Spinoza and used the fact that Lewes had made an oral contract with his son as a justification for renegotiating the price. Writing to Lewes, he asked him to come and see him with the manuscript ‘and we will then enter into a proper agreement’. At this Lewes took great offence and dashed off an angry letter: ‘I altogether decline to have transactions with a man who shows such wonderful facility in forgetting … I beg you will send back my m.s. and consider the whole business at an end between us.’
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Punchdrunk on his success with Goethe, Lewes may have believed that he could afford to swagger. But despite approaching another publisher, he failed to get the
Ethics
published.

It was an extraordinary episode. In the
Westminster-Leader
circle, there were plenty of pompous men only too ready to huff and puff when they considered themselves insulted. But Lewes was not one of them. Nimble and pragmatic, he was used to dealing with publishers and editors who played it less than straight. So why did he fly off the handle at a little sharp practice? Guilt may have been part of it, the recognition that he himself was going to effect a sleight of hand by implying that Marian’s work was his own. But he may also have taken offence at the implication that Bohn was not keen to publish a book about ethics from London’s most notorious adulterer.

If it had been any other man in Marian’s life who had sabotaged
fifteen months’ solid work it would be tempting to see envy at work. But in their twenty-five years together Lewes never said or did a nasty thing towards Marian. He honoured her talent as the greater, but refused to feel dwarfed by comparison. He had lived long and hard enough to be simply grateful when her work turned out to generate sufficient income to allow him to give up journalism and turn to the kind of serious scientific work he had so longed to do. Perhaps in these post-Germany months he had grown as touchy as Marian about imagined slights. Never in the least protective of his own reputation, he none the less felt responsible for hers. If he had the faintest suspicion that Bonn knew that the translation was by Marian and had rejected it because of her ‘unfortunate’ situation he would have rushed into the fray like the shaggy Skye terrier he physically resembled.

For Marian the Spinoza incident must have seemed like a bad omen for her new life with Lewes, which she had always envisaged as a blending of personal affection and shared intellectual endeavour. She had published two translations without the help of a ‘husband’, and must surely have wondered what lesson could be learned from Lewes’s failure to complete on a deal which had seemed so certain.

The loss of income from fifteen months’ worth of work could not have come at a worse time. While Marian and Lewes had been in Germany Agnes Lewes had run up a big debt. Her emotional generosity towards her husband and his new partner was part and parcel of an optimistic personality, which assumed that there would always be enough to go round – with some to spare. This contrasted sharply with Marian, who had grown up in a household where love and money were carefully measured out. Even at her wealthiest she kept a sharp eye on her accounts. Still, she never took refuge in the resentful carping of a second wife, nor in the farmer’s daughter’s disapproval of the feckless gentry. Even after Lewes’s death she continued to pay Agnes an annual allowance.

In the circumstances it was easier for Marian and Lewes to focus their angry feelings on Thornton Hunt. Despite the fact that he now had a regular wage from his post at the
Telegraph
, Hunt showed little inclination to provide for the three children
he had so far fathered by Agnes. Lewes remained legally responsible for the support of all the offspring who bore his name, as well as Agnes’s outstanding debt. To tide him over he took out a loan, but continued to press Hunt to fulfil his responsibilities. Finally, on 16 December 1856 Hunt panicked, snapped and responded with a display of injured innocence and a challenge to a duel. It was a silly, flamboyant gesture, typical of the whole self-dramatising Hunt clan.

Concentrating his resentment on Hunt allowed Lewes to remain on cordial, if occasionally exasperated, terms with Agnes. He visited his three sons once a week and until 1859 kept some of his books at Bedford Place, a point which has sometimes puzzled biographers. Although the children were old enough, at thirteen, eleven and nine, to wonder why their father lived apart from their mother, they seem to have inherited his constitutional gaiety and determination never to be a drag on others. Lewes had not spoken about his new domestic situation to the boys and the occasional surviving letter to them makes no mention of Marian. When he took them to the beach at Margate for a week in 1855 she stayed behind in Richmond. As far as the boys were concerned, life went on much the same with Mama, their nurse Martha Baker (‘Nursie’), a string of new babies and regular visits from Uncle Thornton and Papa.

It is a credit to Lewes that he remained an active, loving father to his sons. His letters to them are affectionate, playful and respectful, quite unlike anybody’s idea of a remote Victorian papa. From Germany he wrote: ‘Here I am in the capital of the Grand duchy of Weimar, about which you, Thornie, know something already, I have no doubt – or soon will. It is a very queer little place although called the “Athens of Germany” on account of the great poets who have lived here; one of them, the greatest of all, you know already by the portraits and little bust in our house – I mean
Goethe
.’
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But jolly letters from a glamorous father were not going to constitute a sufficient education for the Lewes boys. The problem of where to send them to school was looming. Charles and Thornie were presently at Bayswater Grammar, but Lewes did not think it would do for much longer. Marian was clearly involved in the discussion too, for in April 1856 she wrote to
Charles Bray asking if he thought her old friend John Sibree would be prepared to tutor the boys.
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Having given up the ministry, Sibree now made his living by that precarious mix of tutoring and translation. His free-thinking credentials were impeccable and his published work on Hegel well regarded. It would be hard to think of a more erudite, sceptical, authentic man to whom to trust the education of the sons of G. H. Lewes.

But Sibree said no, perhaps out of a reluctance to become involved once more with the woman whom his parents blamed for ruining his life. Sara Hennell stepped in with details of Hofwyl, a Swiss school run along Pestalozzian lines which the Noel brothers had attended. It was perfect for the Lewes boys, offering the kind of liberal, wide-ranging and above all European education which had so distinctively shaped their father. It was also far enough away from London to keep them clear of painful gossip about their parents’ situation. On 25 August 1855 Lewes picked up his sons at London Bridge station and took them via Paris to Berne. He stayed for three days to settle them in at the school, before returning to a toothachy Marian who always found separation from Lewes painful, especially when it was caused by his previous life.

Besides paying the school fees, Lewes gave Agnes an annual allowance which was never less than £250. In 1855, a good year thanks to Goethe, his income was only £430 13s. This meant that he and Marian had to live in an extremely modest way. The house at Richmond was small, and Marian later recalled how difficult it was to concentrate on her writing with Lewes’s pen scratching away on the other side of the room. Their diet was meagre to the point where they often felt faint. Marian’s early experience as a housekeeper enabled her to budget effectively and with a certain grim pleasure she told Bray, ‘I keep the purse and dole out sovereigns with all the pangs of a miser.’
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Holiday plans were often changed at the last minute because of a lack of funds. In Germany, for instance, the original idea had been to go to Dresden from Weimar, but the money would not stretch to it and they travelled straight to Berlin instead. Staying in Ilfracombe for seven weeks in early summer 1856, Marian rationed them to just two trips up the Tor, because the threepence-a-head charge was too expensive to allow for any more visits.
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Money and family were equally entwined in Marian’s life, and had been ever since that day in 1841 when Isaac had shouted that her odd behaviour was draining her father’s capital. As a woman she did not have direct access to her own income and depended on her brother to deliver her twice-yearly interest payments. Disapproving of what he knew of her life in London, Isaac did his best to make things difficult. Preparing to leave for Weimar, she had asked him to make sure that her next instalment was paid to Charles Bray promptly on the due date, 1 December. Isaac, reluctant to write letters, or at least to write them to Marian, sent a message via Chrissey that he would pay the interest when he received it and no sooner.
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This put her in an awkward situation with Charles Bray, who was no longer wealthy enough to accommodate a shortfall, and who had already kindly advanced her December payment. So when some months later, now in anxious exile in Dover, Marian wrote to Isaac to ask him from now on to pay her income straight into the Coventry and Warwickshire Bank, she had little confidence that he would do as she asked since, as she told Bray, ‘he is not precise in answering letters (mine at least) [so] it is difficult to know what he will do’.
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This time, though, he seems to have done as she requested and the arrangement held for the next two years, until her momentous decision to tell him of her ‘marriage’ and consequent request to pay her money directly to Lewes.

Out of her late-arriving and thinly stretched income Marian sent occasional gifts of five or ten pounds to Chrissey, to help with the school fees for the eldest girl, Emily. They were much needed. The good news that the two eldest Clarke boys had been found ‘situations’ – as what we don’t know – was spoiled by hearing later that the eldest, Robert, had proved ‘so naughty that he has had to leave his situation and they are determined to send him to sea’.
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Six months later, while they were preparing to leave Weimar, the sad news came that ‘naughty’ Robert had drowned.
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