George Eliot (38 page)

But relief comes too late. Milly, exhausted by the extra work that her thoughtless guest and complacent husband have created, gives birth prematurely and dies a few days later. Only now does Amos begin to grasp how hurtful his behaviour towards his uncomplaining wife has been. His parishioners, previously alienated by his tactless behaviour, set aside their disapproval and rally round the curate and his family. ‘Cold faces looked kind again, and parishioners turned over in their minds what they could best do to help their pastor.’
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The squire tucks a twenty-pound note into his letter of condolence and offers to find a place at school for the two eldest girls. Neighbouring clergy collect forty pounds between them. The previously disapproving Hackits invite Dickey, one of the Barton boys, to stay, while one of the other clergy families make ‘particular pets’ of Fred and Sophy.
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The whole community demonstrates Feuerbach’s doctrine of human love in action and in a bit of underlining Marian makes the point that Barton’s ‘recent troubles had called out their better sympathies, and that is always a source of love. Amos failed to touch the spring of goodness by his sermons, but he touched it effectually by his sorrows; and there was now a real bond between him and his flock.’
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Marian and Lewes had agreed that if the story seemed to work, they would send it to
Blackwood’s Magazine
. Lewes picked on
Maga
, as it was familiarly known, because he had recently enjoyed a run of luck there with his own pieces and was on increasingly good terms with its editor, John Blackwood. As far as the history of English literature is concerned, it was a stroke of huge fortune that Marian’s first work was entrusted to the one publisher in Britain whose tact, faith and patience were equal to the battering which Marian would inflict on her way to becoming the greatest novelist of the age.

John Blackwood was the sixth son of the Edinburgh publisher who had founded
Blackwood’s Magazine
and the associated publishing house. He was not an obvious candidate to midwife Marian’s career, being highly conventional in both his religious and political beliefs. This, after all, was the man who christened each of his successive pet dogs ‘Tory’. But by the time publisher and author came together – and it was not until 1858 that Blackwood officially learned the identity of ‘George Eliot’ – they had both matured to a point where they were able to perceive and value the integrity of the other. Blackwood, who was only a year older than Marian, responded to her moral and intellectual seriousness, even while he deplored her ‘unfortunate’ situation: as late as 1861 he could be heard to mutter, ‘I never can think of her situation without positive pain.’
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Marian, meanwhile, was drawn to Blackwood’s patent sincerity and to a conservative outlook which was not so very far from her own. He was a natural Anglican, but remained tolerant of other sects, honouring the social and psychological comfort which they offered to their followers. He would have been horrified to think himself a Feuerbachian but that, intuitively, is what he was.

If anyone was the odd one out in this relationship it was Lewes, whose hustling instincts sometimes threatened a relationship which lasted, more on than off, until Blackwood’s death in 1879. At this stage, though, Lewes’s clever salesmanship was exactly what was needed to get Marian into print. On 6 November he sent ‘Amos’ off to Blackwood, describing it as the manuscript of ‘a friend who desired my good offices with you’.
²³
His covering letter puffs the story by ‘confessing’ that he first had doubts about ‘my friend’s power as a writer of fiction’. This all changed,
however, when he read the manuscript and developed a ‘very high admiration … [for the] humour, pathos, vivid presentation and nice observation’.
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He goes on to explain that the ‘Scenes’ – he manages to make it sound as if there are others already written – are intended to illustrate ‘the actual life of our country clergy about a quarter of a century ago; but solely in its
human
and
not at all
in its
theological
aspect’. This, he believes, has not been done since the work of Jane Austen fifty years earlier. Despite the fact that his ‘friend’ is a new author, Lewes finishes with a brisk discussion of copyright details, which cleverly introduces the idea that if Blackwood does not wish to serialise the stories in the magazine, there are plenty of others who will.
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The first sentence of Blackwood’s prompt reply must have filled Marian and Lewes with delight: ‘I am happy to say that I think your friend’s reminiscences of Clerical Life will do.’ Practised editor that he was, though, Blackwood made it clear that he would need to see other ‘Scenes’ before he could make a definite offer. He then proceeded to put forward a few valid criticisms of the piece – there was a tendency to describe characters rather than showing them in action, the conclusion is ‘the lamest part of the story’, the Barton children are unnecessarily individualised. However, he finishes generously: ‘If the author is a new writer I beg to congratulate him on being worthy of the honours of print and pay. I shall be very glad to hear from you or him soon.’
²⁶

With a touchiness that was increasingly to mark her professional relationships as well as her personal ones, Marian insisted on reading rejection into Blackwood’s generally approving comments. On this occasion Lewes, too, seems to have thought the publisher disappointingly lukewarm and in his next letter he has another go at talking up ‘Amos Barton’: ‘It struck me as being fresher than any story I have read for a long while, and as exhibiting in a high degree that faculty which I find to be the rarest of all, viz. the dramatic ventriloquism.’
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Blackwood was too much his own man to be influenced by such blatant tactics, but a promised second look at ‘Amos’ did result in him agreeing to publish it without seeing any companion pieces.

This was lucky, since none were written. Moreover, Marian was now obliged to put down the ‘Scenes’ and return to a long
Westminster
article on the Evangelical poet Edward Young, which she had begun back in April.
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Once again, her journalistic preoccupations paralleled and developed the ideas she was working on in her fiction. Young’s stickily sententious poetry, especially his ‘Night Thoughts’, had been a favourite of hers in adolescence. Returning to it now she found herself repelled by its hazy grandiloquence, its inability to capture the concrete glory of either God or the natural world. Young, in short, is the eighteenth-century clerical male equivalent of the lady novelist, incapable of identifying a single authentic thought or feeling.

With the Young essay dispatched on 4 December, Marian stayed on in London over Christmas to write the second ‘Scene of Clerical Life’. This was the first December that she had not gone home to Warwickshire, choosing instead to spend it alone at Richmond, while Lewes twinkled his way through two weeks at Vernon Hill, Arthur Helps’s country residence. Apart from being the natural star of the house party, Lewes read ‘Amos’ out loud to the assembled company and was quick to pass on the favourable comments to Blackwood. If people guessed it was the work of the unofficial Mrs Lewes they were too polite to say so. Blackwood himself, meanwhile, was canvassing opinions among his own circle. One close friend, W. G. Hamley, with whom he usually found himself agreeing, came out ‘dead against Amos’, finding the true-to-life style depressing.
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The novelist Thackeray was diplomatically non-committal, while the urbane Albert Smith reported that members of the Garrick ‘generally seem to have mingled their tears with their tumblers over the death bed of Milly’.
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But while Blackwood was shrewd enough to take soundings from men whose judgement he trusted, he still did not fully understand what his new author – who had declared a wish to be known only by the pseudonym ‘George Eliot’ – was about. He was puzzled by Amos’s unheroic life and nagged by the persistent worry that some slight on the clergy might be implied. Disappointed to discover that Blackwood did not empathise completely with the kind of fiction she wanted to write – or rather, that he was not the soulmate she had been looking for since her earliest days – Marian took the strangely sideways and snubbing step of sending a letter to his brother and colleague, Major William Blackwood, explaining her literary philosophy. Just as some
one who does not like the Dutch school of realist art will never like a particular example of the genre, so, says Marian, readers who long for idealistic and unrealistic novels are not going to warm to her brand of slice-of-life fiction. The only kind of criticism she is interested in, she maintains with all the authority of an established writer of fiction, is the sort which assesses her writing in terms of what it has set out to do.
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In light of this letter the Blackwoods were probably dreading that the next ‘Scene’ would have even more drippy noses, cold houses and bad grammar. So ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ must have come as a pleasant surprise. The setting and the plot were straight out of one of the ‘Silly Novels’, which Marian had so recently lampooned. The idea, if not the personality, of Mr Gilfil is based on the Revd Bernard Gilpin Ebdell, who had been vicar of Chilvers Coton and Astley until his death in 1828. Ebdell was the protégé of Sir Roger Newdigate, who owned the magnificently modernised Arbury Hall where the young Mary Anne had accompanied her father on estate business. Ebdell had married Sally Chilton, a local collier’s daughter whose beautiful singing voice had persuaded Lady Newdigate informally to adopt and educate the girl. In Marian’s story the details have been changed. Sir Christopher Cheverel and his wife find little Caterina Sarti in Naples and take the orphaned baby back home to Cheverel Manor to be raised as something between a daughter, servant and pet. Although Caterina is expected to marry Gilfil, who openly adores her, she is actually in love with Captain Wybrow, the weak, shiftless heir to the Cheverel estate, who is a prototype of all those unsatisfactory young men in George Eliot’s mature fiction: Arthur Donnithorne, Godfrey Cass, Tito Melema. Frenzied with jealousy when she discovers that Wybrow is to marry a woman from his own class, Caterina takes a dagger and plans to stab him. She is saved only by the fact that he dies before she can reach him, killed by a congenitally weak heart. The ever-devoted Gilfil hears Caterina’s confession of murderous thoughts and absolves her of all guilt, believing that, when the moment came, she would not have been able to use the dagger. Soon after, he weds her but, unlike the real marriage between Ebdell and Sally which lasted twenty-three years, Gilfil’s happiness is cut short when Caterina fails to flourish as a country clergyman’s wife and dies soon after.

‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ does not work. The plot is melodramatic and fantastical – the climax has Caterina plucking a dagger from the gallery wall before rushing out into the gracious grounds to stab the philandering Wybrow. Blackwood hated this bit too, but not so much on the grounds of improbability as the fact that his readers were just as unlikely to warm to a Latin murderess as they were to a sniffing curate. He urged Marian – still in the guise of ‘George Eliot’ – to touch up the character of Caterina, ‘giving a little more dignity to her character’.
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Marian replied – grandly, given that this was only her second piece of fiction – that she was unable to alter anything ‘as my stories always grow out of my psychological conception of the dramatis personae … My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgement, pity, and sympathy.’
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A month later, still not having got the point, Blackwood suggested obliquely to Lewes that the scene in which Caterina planned to stab Wybrow should be changed to a dream sequence.
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‘George Eliot’ wrote back sternly, ‘it would be the death of my story to substitute a dream for the real scene. Dreams usually play an important part in fiction, but rarely, I think, in actual life.’
³⁵

If Blackwood was now wishing that he had stuck to his original and usual plan of not accepting a new writer’s work without having seen the complete manuscript, he was good enough not to say so. Still, he was even more bemused when presented with the heroine of the next ‘Scene’, ‘Janet’s Repentance’. Janet Dempster is a middle-class woman, a battered wife and an alcoholic. The only thing which stops her leaving her brutal lawyer husband is a deep self-loathing which tells her that she is not good enough for anything else. Her one lifeline is her friendship with the local Evangelical clergyman Edmund Tryan, whose brand of energised Christianity has galvanised the religious life of Milby, a barely disguised Nuneaton. While the ladies of the parish have immersed themselves enthusiastically in a programme of private prayer and public good works, a faction led by Janet’s husband supports orthodox Anglicanism. This leads to public rioting, as the anti-Tryanites campaign to keep the ‘cant’ of fashionable Evangelicalism out of their pulpits. As part of an overcrowded
background, Marian sketches in the several nonconformist sects that also claim part of the Milby population as their congregation. Writing from what she emphasises to Blackwood is ‘close observation … [from] real life’, she shows how these groups interact at the social as well as the theological level.
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For instance, while it might appear as if the town were bitterly split on doctrinal issues such as infant baptism, nothing was going to stop the Anglican doctor Mr Pilgrim from treating dissenters or the local grocer from selling them candles. Likewise, it is not Mr Tryan’s particular beliefs that save Janet, so much as the empathy he is able to extend to her as a result of his own tragic experiences. Feuerbach seeps into the narrator’s voice when ‘he’ declares: ‘Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and work, the life and death struggles of separate human beings.’
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