The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives

by Diane Johnson

  The picture was an enormous success. It was bought by Augustus Egg, another painter, who printed a pamphlet announcing that “The Death of Chatterton painted by H. Wallis, Esq., now the property of Augustus Leopold Egg, Esq., A.R.A. To Be Engraved in the Highest Style of the Art, by T. P. Barlow Esq. (artists proofs 8/8/0: proofs before letters: 6/6/0; proofs 4/4/0 and prints 2/2/0) with etchings and coloured copies, five guineas each.” A great commercial success evidently; these same prints would probably not fetch so much today.

  Many will rejoice to know that the talented Mr. Barlow is engaged to reproduce an important plate from this picture, which is precisely one of that class of subjects better suited to the engraver than to receive the charm of colour from the painter. Others, no doubt, will suppose that a picture portraying “The Death of Chatterton” will be painful: nothing of the kind;—here the most refined and sensitive cannot be offended. The Artist has invested his subject with a charm, a fascination that binds you to it, and is beyond description. It is the essence of poetry and teaches a moral beyond the power and capabilities of language.

  Everyone was sure that Henry Wallis would become a great painter.

  XVI

  In our old shipwrecked days there was an hour,

  When in the firelight steadily aglow,

  Joined slackly, we beheld the red chasm grow

  Among the clicking coals. Our library-bower

  That eve was left to us: and hushed we sat

  As lovers to whom Time is whispering.

  From sudden-opened doors we hear them sing:

  The nodding elders mixed good wine with chat.

  Well knew we that Life’s greatest treasure lay

  With us, and of it was our talk. ‘Ah, yes!

  Love dies!’ I said: I never thought it less.

  She yearned to me that sentence to unsay.

  Then when the fire domed blackening, I found

  Her cheek was salt against my kiss, and swift

  Up the sharp scale of sobs her breast did lift:—

  Now am I haunted by that taste! that sound!

  —from Meredith’s Modern Love22

  •

  The Historian cannot capture a process so slow as the death of a marriage. He would need some other medium than the pen to do it with—perhaps one of those cameras that photograph the growing of a plant and the unfolding of its blossoms. With such a camera we could see the expressions change, telescoping the imperceptible changes of seven years into a few moments. We watch the passionate adoring glances glaze to cordiality, grow expressionless, contract with pain. The once ardent glances are now averted; fingers disentwine and are folded behind the separate backs. Backs are turned.

  “They sharpened their wits on each other,” Edith explained it. They had too many debts and miscarriages; their rooms were too dreary and narrow to remain cheerful in. You cannot live on love. Mary Ellen was often ill, pregnancy after pregnancy. George was passionately ambitious for literary fame and would not jeopardize it by everyday work. He could not eat her “delicate meats.” They were too clever and high-strung for each other. Mary Ellen supposedly got religious and George made fun of her.23 Mary Ellen’s views on marriage were too “fast” and French for George, who was after all a tailor’s son and a Victorian. All these, and other, explanations have been offered. All, no doubt, are partly right and partly wrong.

  •

  The Biographer, the Historian, never mentioned a certain side of marriage. We are told that people were “very happy,” or that they had “marital difficulties,” or that they became “estranged”; not a word about a certain side of marriage, though. It is as if all grown-up people knew, and it need be mentioned no further, what marriage is also about, and what it really means to be “very happy,” or “estranged.” And they do know, no doubt, when it comes to themselves, but it is easy to forget that historical people embrace too. Socrates and his blushing maiden bride, Xantippe.

  Certainly nobody mentioned it during the Victorian period, except for nasty people like Rossetti, whose “Nuptial Sleep”24 is still left out of its place in his sonnet sequence when it is printed in college anthologies. And George. George wrote a sonnet sequence that shocked everybody: Modern Love. It told about the end of a marriage, and it began with our couple in bed:

  By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:

  That, at his hand’s light quiver by her head,

  The strange low sobs that shook their common bed

  Were called into her with a sharp surprise,

  And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,

  Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay

  Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away

  With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes

  Her giant heart of Memory and Tears

  Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat

  Sleep’s heavy measure, they from head to feet

  Were moveless, looking through their dead black years,

  By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.

  Like sculptured effigies they might be seen

  Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between;

  Each wishing for the sword that severs all.

  A literary description. But for George and Mary Ellen the long, wakeful nights and cold embraces were real.

  •

  Here let us close the curtain. Behind it we hear a scraping of chairs, the scratch of a pen, feet moving. When the curtain opens, half a century has passed. George Meredith, the great man, is gazing off in profile. He is vain of his profile and allows photographers and official painters only that view of him. It is handsome, with its white beard and truly chiseled lineaments. In the gray eyes: wisdom and suffering. Meredith, lion, great writer, venerable, testy, renowned for the obscurity and impenetrability of his works, and his tenacity in keeping to his own line when no one could understand him. Artistic integrity, vision, Meredith had. People sitting at his feet.

  1906. A young man is sitting at his feet today, an interviewer, an admirer, the Biographer perhaps. (Though this young man is too timid to make a good biographer.) He has been privileged to chat with Mr. Meredith this afternoon, which means to listen a lot, for Meredith is quite deaf and talks nonstop. The young man hopes to shout a question or two into his ear trumpet. They are in the garden; they have had tea. Other people are present; his daughter Riette, that “frank, cold, spoiled, shallow” girl, as another visitor called her, and his son Will. His poor second wife Marie had been dead a number of years now.25 People know—remark it in his countenance—that he has suffered. In his youth, the tale was, he suffered neglect and an unhappy marriage. Poor man. But now it is the modern world, and people take him for rides in automobiles. He suffers from deafness and an affliction of the spine, but he has lived to enjoy the fruits of an immense fame.

  The young man, seeing his moment—the ladies are taking a turn around the garden—leans forward. An awkward subject; his voice is low and hesitant. The early marriage—the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock—a separation?

  A thunderous roar. The voice recovers its modulation. Then it slides up shrilly. The ladies, hearing the shrill cry, come back across the grass with speedy swishes; the daughter’s arms are outstretched in an attitude of alarm. The master’s glance at her is for an instant imploring. What has been said? What will happen? The heart of the timid visitor pounds in shame. Now Meredith recovers his majesty, except for a slight purple around the wattles. The pursed lips affect a musing expression, the expression of a man who is trying to remember a forgotten and trivial incident of his youth. But the eyes belie him; they have a bitter glint. They have a bitter, bitter glint never unlearned. He picks up his ear trumpet and leans toward the timid interviewer:

  “What did you say?”

  It is too late to unsay. The Timid rephrases the question. Were you not marrie
d once, sir, very young, before you were married to the late Mrs. Meredith?

  Ah, yes. Too young. While a mere boy still articled to a solicitor. Entrapped into it, really. A sad affair. She was mad, you know. Madness on her mother’s side of the family. And she was nine years—nearly a decade!—older than me. A mistake, a sad mistake. No sun warmed my rooftree.

  This is the version the timid interviewer conveyed to the waiting world. The Biographer repeated it. The world is sympathetic. To be married to a madwoman in his youth is just the thing for a writer, though. Formative. A mad old woman, think of that. (Someone would eventually figure out that Mary Ellen was only six and a half years older than George.) His exaggeration of her age was certainly ungenerous, but it was whispered that she had run off with a minor Pre-Raphaelite, which proves that George was correct on the detail of her madness. What woman altogether sane would leave a man so clearly destined to be great? A man who would be called the “champion of women,” would be considered a great feminist whose ability to understand and portray women—particularly lively, independent ones—suggested a wisdom and maturity almost unrivaled among the dogmatic, insecure males of the nineteenth century. How could anyone leave a man like that?

  •

  The sun a half-century before shone as bright, perhaps brighter; the air was less full of soot and railway grime. Women’s clothes had not changed much by 1906, so it is not necessary to revise in memory the costumes of the women as they moved gracefully along the Seaford walks. It was as yesterday.

  1856. Mary Ellen and her children: Edith, who was twelve, and three-year-old Arthur in his sailor suit. People no doubt looked at them with pleasure; nothing so pleased the Victorian eye as the sight of a beautiful young matron with her children. The husband was away as usual. Some would have condemned but most would have secretly sympathized with the slight frivolity implied by the French novel in her reticule. Many nice women one knew read French novels, reflecting aloud to their intimate friends their relief that the English were not French. And after all, this lovely, slim young matron did not neglect her children for French novels. The children were cheerful and pretty.

  George was away as usual. He had not gotten a position they had been hoping for—what sort of place is not certain—but he had not gotten it, and Mary Ellen was “racking her brain” to see what she could do to get some money. They were as usual low on money.

  It was now August. The year 1856 had begun very well. Their dimmed prospects had brightened; they had their fine son, and now they had their book, The Shaving of Shagpat, and this book had been received very well; had been reviewed enthusiastically by George Eliot, for example, and by Charles Kent, to whom Mary Ellen writes a thank-you that sounds both strangely proprietary and very proud. Clearly her confidence in George’s literary abilities was undiminished—or had revived:

  Lower Halliford

  January 24 [1856]

  Dear Mr. Kent,

  I was quite sure that I was indebted to your friendly hand for the three Suns and I thought it very kind of you, for the review was so appreciative and full that I was very glad to have so many copies to lend among my friends. I am as much surprised as gratified to find the book so well received, for the work is so unlike modern literature that I expected it would not be understood. The first notice was in the Spectator and just of the kind I had expected from all sides, flippant, disparaging, ignorant, and assuming; I knew it required courage and honesty to review so unusual a book well and to these first favourable reviews I shall always feel it owes the most, whatever subsequent notices may say.

  I hope your health is quite restored and that Mrs. Kent has that great reward for her devoted nursing and care of you. Pray remember me very kindly to her and believe me

  Faithfully yours,

  Mary Meredith

  P.S. I should have explained that I did not know till Mr. Meredith came down this week where I should write to you.

  M. M.

  The postscript is significant: we note that George had been away. In the spring he begins a new work of fiction which they call The Fair Frankincense, on whose behalf Mary Ellen writes the publisher Edward Chapman, her friend; this letter too suggests that she and George are not much together:

  Dear Mr. Chapman,

  On my return yesterday evening I found a letter from George in which he directs me to ask you for the remainder of the money you were so kind as to advance to him.

  I am obliged to go to the City this morning and shall not be back in time to see you today, will you therefore be so good as to forward the money to me here, as I am to make a payment, to which George is pledged, with it before 12 tomorrow. If you should find that you know any of the Parthenon Club and can help us with them I think you will not need much asking to do so.

  In haste, I am

  Faithfully yours,

  Mary Meredith

  In the late spring they moved from Lower Halliford again, first to Felixstowe, and then to Seaford for the summer, where they stayed in cheap lodgings amongst a “straggling row of villas facing a muddy beach.” George was enthusiastic for a while. He wrote to their friend Eyre Crowe, inviting him down: “Here is fishing, bathing, rowing, sailing, lounging, running, pic-nicing, and a cook who builds a basis of strength to make us equal to all these superhuman efforts.” Their baby Arthur was a wise little fellow, who remarked, “Pussy can sing, but Pussy can’t laugh. And the poor old Donkey can’t sing and he can’t laugh.” One day he woke up to see Mary Ellen preparing to go out: “Don’t yoo go, Mama, from yoo baby. Yoo bed will cry for yoo, Mama dear,” he said.

  •

  That spring Mary Ellen fell ill again, perhaps in connection with another pregnancy, and George found a pressing need to go somewhere else.

  She convalesced slowly, and wracked her brain for something to do about their financial straits, and wrote sprightly letters to their friends. Henry Wallis writes from Spain, and Mary Ellen, in replying, speaks of his letter: “I cannot help rejoicing to have it, a description written on the spot & impressions noted as they occur are so much more graphic than any after recollection of either can be. Then again your handwriting offers more conclusive evidence of the heat of Bayonne than any after assurance would do. With all my longing for Spain I don’t think, with that racked handwriting before me, I would go there in August. In respect of climate Bayonne may be said to have come to England as Birnam Wood came to Dunsidane [sic]. In London on Saturday the thermometer was 84 in the shade, & here the whole town has turned into the sea.”

  Henry was off painting Montaigne’s study, among other things, for he was fond of doing the rooms and birthplaces of famous writers, especially after his great success with The Death of Chatterton. He evidently had had a problem getting into Montaigne’s rooms. Mary Ellen remarks, with characteristic irony, “What a misfortune that Montaigne’s tower should have fallen into the hands of such a brute. I am very glad you insisted on having admittance. I have no doubt your moral force controlled the wretched slave into yielding the miserable two hours he dared not withhold.”

  Because George had not gotten his place, Mary Ellen had been trying to repair the family fortunes by writing, but with little success. She writes disconsolately to Henry: “Whether all the intelligence I ever possessed is quite swallowed up by my long illness, or whether the attempt to begin work in this tremendous heat is the cause of failure I have not yet made up my mind, but I am much discouraged that it is ten days since I began to hunt for an idea and that I have not found one.”

  George is not there. It is lonely. She invites Wallis to stay with them on his way back—“if you come back by way of Dieppe of course we shall see you.” And she sends a message from Arthur which might wistfully echo her own thoughts: “Edith is at a picnic or she would have a message. George [has?] not returned. Arthur sends his love and a kiss,” and says “for yoo to come to me when yoos done yoo painting, cos I wants me W
allis.” And perhaps Henry did come back by way of Dieppe.

  It is not clear when Henry and Mary Ellen reached their “understanding.” The autumn passed, and winter. George was now at Seaford, beginning Richard Feverel, and Mary Ellen had gone to Blackheath with Arthur and Edith, to visit Lady Nicolls. At Christmas George writes to a friend, “Mrs. Meredith is staying at Blackheath. Don’t wait to send by her, as I am anxious she should spend Christmas in town. Dulness [sic] will put out the wax lights, increase the weight of the pudding, toughen the turkey, make lead of the beef, turn the entire feast into a nightmare, down here, to one not head and heel at work. . . .”

  SONNET XXIII

  ’Tis Christmas weather, and a country house

  Receives us: rooms are full: we can but get

  An attic-crib. Such lovers will not fret

  At that, it is half-said. The great carouse

  Knocks hard upon the midnight’s hollow door,

  But when I knock at hers, I see the pit.

  Why did I come here in that dullard fit?

  I enter, and lie couched upon the floor.

  Passing, I caught the coverlet’s quick beat:—

  Come, Shame, burn to my soul! and Pride, and Pain—

  Foul demons that have tortured me, enchain!

  Out in the freezing darkness the lambs bleat.

  The small bird stiffens in the low starlight.

  I know not how, but shuddering as I slept,

  I dreamed a banished angel to me crept:

  My feet were nourished on her breasts all night.

  —from Meredith’s Modern Love

  •

  We shall pause here to introduce Henry. He is about to let himself in for a whole lot of trouble. For instance, for his indiscretion, he has been strangely excised from the family photograph of British history, rather as if George Meredith’s censorious friends had gone back and cut him out with a pair of scissors, or perhaps it is owing to the gentlemanly reticence of Henry’s own friends. He does not appear in the Dictionary of National Biography (begun by Meredith’s friend Leslie Stephen) for example, although his paintings hang in the Tate and other important galleries, and were twice called “Picture of the Year” by Ruskin; and although he became a major authority on Far Eastern ceramics, and wrote a lot of books about them, and donated heavily from his valuable collection of pieces to the Victoria and Albert Museum (which argued fiercely with the British Museum for the rest at his death), and did a lot of other things that usually get you in the DNB, or at least an obituary in The Times. Rather, though he was to live beyond the First World War, sixty years longer than the faintly remembered Victorian lady he once loved, his name turns up only briefly, fugitively now, in biographies of Meredith and Peacock, as a treacherous person who appeared at an inopportune moment to seduce Mrs. Meredith, father a child with her, and vanish like an incubus at her death.