Mrs. Lovell was something of a gambler, and though there is no trace of a taste in Mary Ellen for wagers or cards, she was a gambler too, in the important ways:
The thirst for shows of valour and wit was insane with her, but she asked for nothing that she herself did not give in abundance, and with beauty superadded. Her propensity to bet sprang of her passion for combat; she was not greedy of money, or reckless in using it; but with a difference of opinion arising, her instinct forcibly prompted her to back her own. If the stake was the risk of a lover’s life, she was ready to put down the stake, and would have marvelled contemptuously at the lover complaining. “Sheep! sheep!” she thought of those who dared not fight, and had a wavering tendency to affix the epithet to those who simply did not fight.
Withal, Mrs. Lovell was a sensible person; clear-headed and shrewd; logical, too, more than the run of her sex: I may say, profoundly practical. So much so, that she systematically reserved the after-years for enlightenment upon two or three doubts of herself, which struck her in the calm of her spirit, from time to time.
•
Although Eddy was drowned in 1844, and we do not hear of Mary Ellen again until 1848, we may conclude she was up to something in the interval.
She seems, after leaving the Nicolls’s, to have gone with her new baby back to Lower Halliford at first, to Papa, where fond Rosa Jane and May could help with Baby, and the quiet Thames could ease her memory of the turbulent Shannon and restore her confidence in rivers. The flow of time—she read, sewed, chatted, went to parties at the houses of their neighbors, sparkled wittily at her own table with the great men Papa brought down from London. Took up writing during this time. Healed. Sometimes went with Edith to visit the Nicolls. Rode horses; maybe bet.
She was not happy. At times great bitterness, great melancholy, would overwhelm her. In a day when resignation was the approved posture against adversity, Mary Ellen was not good at resignation.
She would fling herself into things. Sometimes she would go to London, where Papa was Somebody, and the conversation was good and people were amusing. She would visit and gossip with their friends. Old Hogg amused her with his stories—she was a married woman now, and had a certain license to listen to racy stories, even to tell them, or to read French novels. She was beautiful and witty. She was not happy. She did not soon forget Edward; on the other hand she would think twice before sacrificing this freedom for another marriage.
She kept busy. Here as in other things she was not typical of the female half of mankind in her time, for women then were fascinating in their indolence. Indeed, they had to be specially trained to endure it. But Mary Ellen had her child, her writing, her cookery experiments, good company.
Sometimes in London she stayed with her brother Edward, who, after several unsuccessful attempts at this and that—school, the Navy—had gotten an appointment at India House, no doubt through the offices of Peacock, who had also found places for the sons of scores (it seems) of other old friends; Hilary St. Croix, for example, one of the St. Croix family whose Marianne had refused Peacock thirty years before.
Ned Peacock and Hilary had a lot of lively friends, among them a Bohemian solicitor named Charnock and an artist, Peter Austin Daniel (who also worked at India House), and a young clerk in Charnock’s offices—George Meredith.
Mary was twenty-seven. George Meredith was then twenty; by all accounts handsome, demonstrably brilliant, and charming. Mary did not fall in love with him at once.
•
George fell in love with Mary Ellen at once. Like the young hero of Rhoda Fleming, “He lost altogether his right judgement; even the cooler afterthoughts were lost. What sort of man had Harry been, her first husband? A dashing soldier, a quarrelsome duelist, a dull dog. But, dull to her? She, at least, was reverential to the memory of him.
“She lisped now and then of ‘my husband,’ very prettily and with intense provocation; and yet she worshipped brains. Evidently she thirsted for that rare union of brains and bravery in a man, and would never surrender till she had discovered it. Perhaps she fancied it did not exist. It might be that she took Edward [read George] as the type of brains, and Harry [read Edward] as of bravery, and supposed that the two qualities were not to be had actually in conjunction.”
As wicked Bella Mount seduced Richard Feverel, so Mary Ellen (or so George implies by his vivid recollection of the process) ensnares George:15
Though this lady never expressed an idea, Richard was not mistaken in her cleverness. She could make evenings pass gaily, and one was not the fellow to the other. She could make you forget she was a woman, and then bring the fact startlingly home to you. She could read men with one quiver of her half-closed eye-lashes. She could catch the coming mood in a man, and fit herself to it. What does a woman want with ideas, who can do thus much? Keenness of perception, conformity, delicacy of handling, these be all the qualities necessary to parasites.
Love would have scared the youth: she banished it from her tongue. It may also have been true that it sickened her. She played on his higher nature. She understood spontaneously what would be most strange and taking to him. . . . She had opened a wider view of the world to him, and a colder. He thought poorly of girls. A woman—a sensible, brave, beautiful woman seemed, on comparison, infinitely nobler than those weak creatures.
•
George and Mary Ellen and Hilary and Peter Daniel occupied themselves with a literary project, a little magazine they took turns editing. The Monthly Observer. This magazine has been of great interest to Meredith scholars because it contains his earliest known work, but we see Mary here too, in her role of noble, melancholy woman, writing in a philosophe frame of mind about death. Here it is in English; see here and here for the original French text—mistakes and all.
DEATH16
What is death? A passage, a strange grief we live in the middle of, which we all fear. And where does this fear come from? for we find it in everybody’s heart—even those who most want to die; they want to be dead, but they fear dying. Isn’t this fear a sort of guard which God has placed at the door of the afterlife, or as we call it, the “other world”; it is there to forbid us entrance until our time comes. When one presents a ticket signed by the Eternal, perhaps the sentinel will depart from the door.
We usually see death as final, as the end of life, the end of all we have known and felt, followed by a new state where we have none of the things which made us happy or sad here below. But it cannot be that. We see that in nature, all death is birth. Even the most dreadful corruptions—are they finished when they are finished on earth? No. One sees on the contrary that the earth benevolently changes them into new life. Do not the petals of the pretty flower fall in order to provide for the new fruit? and does not the fruit yield its rich juices so that the seed may take root. And doesn’t it, when it falls, fall in order to create a new life? For nature, which so often through its beautiful analogies reveals the supernatural to us, does it not show us the infallibility of this principle, that death is also birth. When our souls are ripe, when they have gained from the passions and indifferences of this world all that can either sustain or destroy them, do they not break the bonds which can no longer contain them? Death is only a crossing, a moment, but it is followed by eternity! And in this eternity there is as much joy for him who has just been born as there is sadness here below for him who has died.
But there is much that is unknown and mysterious for us in this crossing. Who knows what change, what division, it puts between us and those whom we have lost sight of through this strange procedure. Are they carried off forever? Do they follow with the same affection they did here below? We know nothing about it, but though we want certainty we have the spirit of Faith, that tells us that God never created anything in vain, and assures us that He has not given us the capacity to love only for a moment, only as a joke.
Mary Nicolls
Monthly Ob
server #11, Jan. 1849
•
Young George was very enthusiastic about Mary Ellen’s writing. He was already smitten with this beautiful lady, her tragic past, her good literary connections, and her intellect, too, for he had the old Romantic notion, as Shelley had, of a spiritual and intellectual, as well as a physical mate, or thought he had. This was about the time that everybody was reading Tennyson’s poem, The Princess, which had as its subject the education of women, and as its heroine, a beautiful bluestocking princess named Ida. The admiring young man gave Mary Ellen a copy, dedicated “To Cornelia,”—another famous lady intellectual—“as the Lady most ambitious and best endowed to take fair Ida for a prototype, this volume from One who trusts some day to sing her praises/Albeit in humbler measures.” Of brains in a lady, he was later to write, “we are to learn the nature of this possession in the lady who is our wife.” But now, though he was not called upon to comment on Mary Ellen’s essay on death, his French being, perhaps, not so good as his German, he waxes ecstatic about a little sad and not very good poem she had written about a Blackbird, perhaps with poor drowned Edward still in mind:
THE BLACKBIRD
Being the true history of a blackbird known to me.
Rains of sorrow, fruitful showers,
Calling forth the leaves and flowers
Of holy charity,
That unwept from ductless eyes,
In the spirit do surprise
Germs of mystery;
Not alone in human bosoms
Flourish the immortal blossoms
Of divinity,
But in earth’s most careless creature
Dwells a link or blooms a feature,
Of immortality.
They shot the happy blackbird’s mate,
Long rose the heart cry, desolate,
From his golden bill;
Dimly an angel voice is heard
In the bosom of the bird,—
“There are sadder still,
“Of love, and liberty that be
“Chief blessings unto thine and thee
“One leaveth thee,
“Look down, where hung by yonder cot,
“A caged brother knoweth not
“What either be,
“To him the pulse of love doth seem
“The vision of a hopeless dream
“And mockery,
“That sea of air where others sport
“To him a mist where shadows float
“No verity.”
Whisper of the viewless angel,
Uttered he in clear evangel,
From his quiv’ring throat,
And ever round the caged bird
His legendary song is heard
On the breeze to float,
And to the loveless prisoner
Choice blackbird dainties, quaint, and rare,
He with care doth bring;
Sorrow from his heart departeth
At each solace he imparted
In his communing.
The enamored young man is rapturous in his praises:
This is a beautiful Poem. A melancholy subject touched by a loving hand and were it not for a slight mysticism in the opening verse—would be throughout delicious. It is true also! —A black-bird is called by the Poetess from the mourning for his mate, to behold another imprisoned bird of his own species, whose heart has never known the Divinity of Love—whose wing has long ceased to feel the liberty to which it was born—whose song is a blind song—a fluting of notes and nothing more—“There are sadder still.” He can instantly comprehend the weight of these words when he sees the poor blackbird in the Cage—O not to have loved, never to have Loved! That must be infinitely worse than but to mourn the absence of a mate—for it is but absence. He flies down from his Liberty to console the unhappy bird, bringing her choice “blackbird dainties.” Does the Prisoner repay the bereaved bird with her Love? It will suggest itself. The second verse is lovely. . . . —Yes! The Universe is but a succession of links and we are all united—in nobility—and gentleness and Love. All that is brutish is alien of kin—but gentle Love uniteth all. And this the Poet hath sung and sung most worthily and well—We hope for more of these true touches of Beauty from the Lady lyrist. And tho’ we cannot say that she eclipses her prose articles thereby, at all events she refreshes her mind and feathers her genius at the same time that to us she “imparteth true solace in her communing.”
The direction of George’s praise is clear enough. “Does the Prisoner repay the bereaved bird with her love? It will suggest itself.” In a few years George rewrites this poem and publishes it as his own.
•
But now he was in love, and meant to be taken seriously. “A brilliant, witty, beautiful woman,” says Cousin Stewart Ellis, George’s first biographer (and second cousin). “Meredith was immediately attracted by Mrs. Nicolls and she to him, but the mutual attraction was probably only of a physical nature.” Unhallowed attractions of this kind were, as every Victorian knew, doomed to failure. Years later a little acrimonious debate sprang up over the circumstances surrounding the engagement of Mary Ellen and George. Little Edith remembered that the voluble young poet proposed six times before Mary Ellen could conquer her wary sense of the unlikeliness of the whole thing—he so much younger, unsettled, she a mother, a widow—and her love of freedom, for she had apparently come to enjoy the freedoms that having been married conferred upon a female and that being a widow enhanced.
But George in later years was given to ungenerous remarks about the entire affair—if he spoke of it at all, and he almost never did; he hinted that he had been ensnared in some way he could not honorably escape from.
In any case, 1849 was an exciting year for both of them. In June, George sent a poem, “Chillianwallah,” which he had contributed to the Monthly Observer, to a real magazine and it was accepted! Chamber’s Edinburgh Magazine had recognized him as a genuine poet! And this must have lent force to his conviction—perhaps to Mary Ellen’s too—that his literary career was launched. His fame would be only a matter of time, and they hoped not too long in coming. High hopes. In July, Mary Ellen went to France on an unknown errand—probably to visit the Nicolls, who lived at times in Normandy, and there to discuss with them her remarriage. She had remained close to Lady Nicolls and “Fighting Nicolls,” and they were fond of her and loved their granddaughter Edith.
When Mary returned she took Meredith to Lower Halliford to get acquainted with Papa. It was here, Edith remembered, that she ran into the drawing room and caught George and Mama in a passionate embrace. “Mama,” she wailed afterward, “I don’t like that man.”
Neither did Thomas Love Peacock, but then he didn’t like anyone his children married, except, presumably, Eddy Nicolls. He came to the wedding, though: at St. George’s, Hanover Square, on August 9th, 1849. Meredith’s father, the tailor, had left England a few months before to settle in Cape Town, so the groom gratefully identified himself, without fear of contradiction, as the son of Augustus Meredith, “Esq.,” and now that he had freed himself from his article to Charnock, he was free of all taint of trade and of any profession but letters.
The young couple went on a honeymoon to Germany, where George wrote rhapsodical poems; the marriage was clearly a success:
RHINE-LAND
We lean’d beneath the purple vine,
In Andernach, the hoary;
And at our elbows ran the Rhine
In rosy twilight glory.
Athwart the Seven-hills far seen
The sun had fail’d to broaden;
Above us stream’d in fading sheen
The highway he had trodden.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
No longer severing our embrace
Was Night a sword betwe
en us;
But richest mystery robed in grace
To lock us close, and screen us.
Five years later he would write:
Like sculptured effigies they might be seen
Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between.
•
After the wedding trip, George and Mary Ellen came back to take up their respective literary careers, or rather, what they thought of as one literary career, in London. The groom was promising, but there was no money, so at first they lived in Peacock’s London quarters, and Peacock (probably) commuted to Lower Halliford. And very soon the Merediths moved near Lower Halliford themselves, into a fascinating boardinghouse, The Limes, in Weybridge.
This was a good place for a literary couple. Tom Taylor, a successful dramatist, lived at The Limes too, along with some artists and musicians; there was the good conversation of the landlady, a Mrs. Macirone, the singing of her gifted daughters, Giulia and Emilia, and some aristocratic neighbors, the Duff Gordons, and nearby were Peacock and his important visitors. “Meredith and his talented wife found a congenial link in their literary pursuits. They were both writing a good deal of poetry, and sometimes they collaborated,” Cousin Stewart says.
And they had another stroke of luck. George was a particular admirer of an important poet of the time, Richard Henry Horne, who was a great friend of Elizabeth Barrett’s, the author of an important critical work, A New Spirit of the Age, and of some much admired epic poems—and Horne had been encouraging. Now Charles Dickens was starting his magazine Household Words, and Horne recommended George as someone to do some writing for it. Dickens paid hard cash. George also had poems published in The Leader in 1850, and possibly in the Manchester Guardian. Hopefully, George and Mary Ellen began to think of bringing out a volume of George’s poems; they were sure his reputation would soon be made.
Apparently Mary Ellen was launched on a writing career too. She and Papa collaborated on an amusing, long article, “Gastronomy and Civilisation,” which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine, and on a cookery book,17 for which a publisher had advanced thirty pounds, and Mary Ellen wrote a long review of another contemporary cookery book, Soyer’s Modern Housewife, for Fraser’s. Hogg writes to her that he will “be happy to read your next article in Fraser’s Magazine. . . . When I receive the Laureat’s [sic] poems [George’s], I will try hard to read myself young again. . . .” by enjoying their praise of Mary Ellen’s charms. Mary Ellen was apparently writing poems too, because George published a spate of poems in periodicals about then, which he later repudiated by saying that some had been written by Mary, and moreover that he didn’t remember which were which.18
The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives Page 9
