George Eliot (67 page)

Marian Lewes was never a romantic conservative of the unthinking kind. The Young England movement of the 1840s, which clung to an imagined feudal past and suggested turnip growing as the answer to the social ills caused by industrialisation, struck her as ludicrous. She was a modern woman who, pushed along by Lewes, was interested in the technological developments unfolding around her. Shortly before his death they had both attended a demonstration of the prototype of the telephone. Marian’s concern, echoed in Theophrastus’s wordy essays, was how to find a way of preserving the best of the past while embracing the benefits of the future.

Marian was diffident about publishing
Theophrastus Such
, tormented by the usual worries that it was not good enough, together with a new concern that it might be disrespectful to Lewes’s memory. In the end she made Blackwood affix the cumbersome notice, ‘The Manuscript of this Work was put into our hands
towards the close of last year, but the publication has been delayed owing to the domestic affliction of the Author.’ Blackwood extended her every kindness, not fussing too much over the fact that she was holding up the type and letting her read the proofs in her own time. In the end, his assessment of the book was nearer the mark than hers: when it was published in July it quickly ran into three editions and sold 6000 copies in the first four months.

Around the time that
Theophrastus Such
was published Blackwood had a heart attack. Although he recovered sufficiently to spend the summer at St Andrews, even the gentlest round of golf was now out of the question. At the end of September he had another attack and Marian wrote sweetly to him, ordering him to ‘be a good, good patient and cherish your life wisely’ for the sake of Mrs Blackwood.
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She wrote to her old friend again on 28 October, but he died before he could read her letter. For Marian it was the second bereavement within a year – the third if you count the passing of her ‘Maman’, Madame D’Albert Durade. ‘He will be a heavy loss to me,’ she told Charles Lewes of John Blackwood. ‘He has been bound up with what I most cared for in my life for more than twenty years and his good qualities have made many things easy to me that without him would often have been difficult.’
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Once Marian had done her duty by lunching Eliza and the ‘little Africans’ on 28 April 1879, she was free to leave town for Witley. Sir James Paget arranged for her to be looked after by a local GP and sent her off to the country with the jolly prescription of a pint of champagne a day. Marian arrived at the Heights at the sunny end of May, opening up the house for the first time since she and Lewes had left the previous sad autumn. Once or twice a week Johnny Cross came over by train from Weybridge. Although she seldom mentions his visits in her diary, Marian dropped hints to her correspondents about the ‘devoted friend’ who looked after her every need, just as she had at the beginning of her love affairs with Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes.

Cross’s comforting presence soothed Marian into something approaching a normal life. On 27 May he persuaded her to open the piano again and she played for the first time in months.
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But
it was over Dante that they fell in love. To distract himself from his mother’s death, Cross had started to struggle through the
Divine Comedy
in the original, with Carlyle’s translation as his only guide. When Marian heard she offered to help. Throughout that spring and summer of 1879 she sat with Cross in the summer-house at the Heights, patiently taking him through line by line. For Cross it was a revelation: ‘The divine poet took us into a new world. It was a renovation of life.’
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This was not a meeting of minds of the kind that had made Marian’s relationship with Lewes so rich. She was the teacher and Cross, educated but not agile, stumbled along behind her as best he could. Later he was to describe their relationship to Henry James as being like ‘a carthorse yoked to a racer’.
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Letters from this time have been lost and Cross is inevitably reticent in his
Life
, so we do not know exactly how companionship deepened into love. It looks, though, as if Cross confided his feelings for Marian some time in August, only to have them embarrassedly pushed away. There followed a couple of difficult months in which Marian withdrew emotionally, plunged into panic by this unexpected declaration. By October, however, she had resolved to meet Cross’s request for emotional intimacy. On the 16th she sent him a love letter – written on black-bordered mourning paper – which still startles by its intensity. We have to go back to the summer of 1852 and those anguished outpourings to Herbert Spencer to find anything similar, although who knows what her correspondence with Lewes, which went to the grave with her, might have revealed.

The letter starts, ‘Best loved and loving one – the sun it shines so cold, so cold, when there are no eyes to look love on me.’ But although Marian uses the lovers’ rapturously intimate ‘thou’, she is sufficiently clear-sighted to refer to the differences between them, starting with the intellectual. ‘Thou dost not know anything of verbs in Hiphil and Hophal or the history of metaphysics or the position of Kepler in science, but thou knowest best things of another sort, such as belong to the manly heart – secrets of lovingness and rectitude.’ Marian then proceeds to acknowledge the twenty-year age gap – ‘Consider what thou wast a little time ago in pantaloons and back hair’ – before signing off as ‘thy tender Beatrice’, Dante’s heroine.
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To those who were to ask themselves over the next year ‘how could Marian Evans Lewes fall in love with John Cross?’ one might answer, ‘how could she not?’ From her earliest years she had needed to feel deeply attached to another person, male or female. Before she joined her life to Lewes’s at the age of thirty-four she had charged recklessly after love with Robert Brabant, Herbert Spencer and John Chapman. She had stuck with Lewes because he was the first person able to respond to her demands for an all-consuming, symbiotic attachment. Now that he was gone she felt even more than most bereaved lovers that she was only half a person. It was inevitable that the need to bind herself to another human soul would quickly reassert itself. Some biographers have suggested that the discovery of an old infidelity by Lewes tipped Marian towards accepting Cross as her new lover.
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Even if this is the meaning behind that single-word diary entry ‘Crisis’ for 16 May 1879, Marian needed no such disenchantment with the past before she could love again.

John Cross struck Marian’s friends as unsuitable, but then so had Lewes. By the time the little man had died it was hard to remember just how horrified liberal spirits like Barbara and Bessie had been by the idea of their Marian shackled to a shady rake. Cross’s private life, by contrast, was unimpeachable. He was that rare thing, a forty-year-old bachelor without a ‘past’. There were no former wives or illegitimate children waiting to ambush this new relationship. While he was not especially clever, he had a gentleman’s education and a genuine interest in music and literature. He might not be able to jump from Hiphil to Kepler, but nor did he crack
risqué
jokes or elbow himself to the front of your attention. Tall, with a neatly trimmed beard, Cross was exactly that kind of dignified, eligible presence which Marian’s friends had longed for her to find twenty-five years ago.

More baffling altogether is why Cross fell in love with Marian. As far as we know, he had not loved any other woman in this way before. He was not a man driven by strong sexual needs: apart from (and possibly as well as) the eight months of his marriage to Marian, he remained celibate until the end of his long life in 1924. Nor did he need her money, having both capital and income of his own. The obvious answer is that he had just lost his adored mother and was looking for a replacement. Marian
was twenty years older, had long called him ‘nephew’, and by her own admission delighted in playing mother-teacher to young men.

Just because Marian and Cross came together out of pressing emotional needs does not mean that the relationship was not productive for both of them. Knowing that Cross loved her allowed Marian to begin to move through the stages of bereavement. By the time the first anniversary of Lewes’s death came round she was able to write, ‘I spent the day in the room where I passed through the first three months. I read his letters, and packed them together, to be buried with me.’
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At this point Marian was still poised between wanting to move ahead and guilt about being able to do so: she goes on to speculate whether she will be dead by the time the second anniversary comes round. This worry that she might be dishonouring Lewes’s memory by becoming attached to someone else is there, too, in the poem on ‘Remembrance’ by Emily Brontë, which she copied into her diary a couple of weeks later.

That Christmas, 1879, Marian stayed alone at the Priory. The letter she wrote on Christmas Eve to Cross, who was visiting his sister in Lincolnshire, shows how much she had come to depend on him. She asks whether he will be back in time to have dinner with her on Tuesday and, if not, Wednesday, then shares an intimate joke by signing herself ‘Your obliged ex-shareholder of A and C Gaslight and Coke’ in reference to some shares he had recently sold for her.
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Publicly Marian was not so keen to acknowledge Cross as her lover. Although Sundays at the Priory restarted in a small way, it was Charles and not Cross who took on Lewes’s old duties as master of ceremonies. The new couple steered clear of concert halls, too, preferring art galleries where there were no sharp-eyed audience members waiting with a sketch pad.

By now, Cross was pressing Marian to become his wife. Initially reluctant, she was gradually coming round to the idea.
After years of not being married and wanting it badly, it felt sweet to have the choice. There is a story that once the engagement had been agreed Marian took a young girl’s delight in preparing her trousseau. She was spotted in the swankiest shops being measured and fitted for the elaborate new wardrobe which every bride was assumed to need. Nothing could be more unlike the furtive rush for Germany in 1854 when she and Lewes left with little more than the clothes they stood up in. Nasty-minded gossips, naturally, thought the results of her shopping spree pathetic. According to Mrs Lionel Tennyson, who met the couple at dinner shortly after their return from honeymoon, Marian’s new clothes were obviously designed ‘to show her slenderness, yet hiding the squareness of age’. No amount of high fashion, sneered the young Mrs Tennyson, could disguise the fact that a rickety woman of sixty was marrying a sporty man of forty.
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Having turned down Cross’s proposal twice, by March 1880 Marian was again considering the situation. What may finally have tipped her in his favour was a weekend spent in Weybridge at the end of the month. Marian had always loved families, or at least the idea of them, and the thought of becoming part of Cross’s close clan was a great inducement. Writing to Eleanor Cross a few days after the marriage had been agreed, Marian said sweetly that she was longing to be called ‘sister’ again, a name she had not heard ‘for so many, many years’.
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On 9 April Marian called in Sir James Paget to ask whether her health could stand the excitement of such a dramatic change of regime. He must have dealt with her worries optimistically, for that night she wrote in her diary, ‘My marriage decided’.
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In her letter to Eleanor Cross of 13 April Marian admitted, ‘I quail a little in facing what has to be gone through – the hurting of many whom I care for.’
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She was perfectly aware that many of the people who had an investment in the George Eliot story would be angry and disappointed if it turned out to have a different ending from the one they had imagined. That story involved a woman of integrity enduring social ostracisim for the sake of a moral principle. Different groups had filled in the details in different ways. Feminists like Clementia Taylor and Bessie Belloc were keen to see in Marian’s decision to live with Lewes a rejection of legal marriage on the grounds that it was oppressive to
women. Positivists like the Harrisons and the Congreves subscribed to the idea of perpetual widowhood, and wanted to see Marian spending the rest of her days dedicated to the memory of Lewes. Sentimental romantics, meanwhile, liked the idea of a love affair, which had started so scandalously, enduring exclusively beyond the grave. For all three groups the thought that Marian Lewes might get married within eighteen months of her beloved’s death ran counter to everything they wanted for her and for themselves.

So it was hardly surprising that for the second time in her life Marian chose to start her new partnership with an unannounced dash to the Continent. She was particularly worried about the reaction of those devoted women friends who had been able to accept and honour Lewes as the very first worshipper, but might have a problem with a Johnny-come-lately like Cross. Thus she resorted to the strategy she had used when she was frightened of telling the Brays about her plan to go off with Lewes – she dropped hints. In a letter to Elma Stuart on 23 April she asked ‘whether your love and trust in me will suffice to satisfy you that, when I act in a way which is thoroughly unexpected there are reasons which justify my action, though the reasons may not be evident to you’?
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Georgie Burne-Jones likewise got an oblique nudge. When Marian called upon her that same day she seemed, remembered Georgie, ‘loth to go, and as if there was something that she would have said, yet did not’. With what must surely be
post hoc
insight, Georgie adds that Marian sighed wearily on that occasion: ‘I am so tired of being set on a pedestal and expected to vent wisdom.’
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