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

by Diane Johnson

  Of course it was not like that at all. Literary history and literary convention conspire to project into our minds at the idea of a lover—a painter, a seducer—an unscrupulous and cynical young man, doubtless dark, who took advantage of the wretchedness of Mary Ellen and George to lure her away for his selfish sexual purposes and to discard her when he tired. Literary history and literary convention do Henry Wallis much injustice.

  For Henry was a decent fellow who lived sixty more years, devotedly raised their little illegitimate child in full view of his London acquaintance (which was rather larger than George’s), and perhaps raised his hat to George, if they were ever so unlucky as to meet in after-years. When Mary Ellen died, Henry Wallis did not disappear at all, but instead let his apartment to the Burne-Joneses and took the baby to Capri for his health.

  And what is Henry like? He has not entered the story like the villain of fiction in any very swashbuckling way, though he may wear a long black cloak, an artist’s hat, perhaps. He does not dash; rather, he is small and amiable. He is young, almost nine years younger than Mary Ellen. He cares passionately about the cause of freedom, and about the Worker’s Lot, and about Art. In his early twenties, he is already an antiquarian in his soul, likes old houses where the famous dead were born, likes bits of old lace, the feel of velvet. He is attracted to the meticulous medievalizing of the Pre-Raphaelites, and to their ways, and they like him too. He is a Pre-Raphaelite brother in the second degree. He is rich, the son of a successful architect. He has been to Paris and studied art there. He hopes to become a great artist, but he has too much money, is too much the dilettante, too fond of travel and strange sights. Not driven like George by the inner goad of humble origins, or by a need for money, the compulsions that produce greatness. Henry is a charming friend of the family.

  •

  And sometime between August 1856 and July 1857, Mary Ellen and Henry began an adulterous affair.26 We may only guess at the agitation, the confusion, remorse or exultation, furtive, fugitive pleasure or long, languid sensual afternoons, impulse or deliberation that accompanied this desperate action. We can only guess whether it was with happy heedlessness or with a self-justified feeling of bitter rectitude that Mary Ellen removed her camisole, chemise, corset, six petticoats, stockings, and garters to make love to Henry.27

  SONNET XXII

  What may the woman labour to confess?

  There is about her mouth a nervous twitch.

  ’Tis something to be told, or hidden:—which?

  I get a glimpse of hell in this mild guess.

  She has desires of touch, as if to feel

  That all the household things are things she knew.

  She stops before the glass. What sight in view?

  A face that seems the latest to reveal!

  For she turns from it hastily, and tossed

  Irresolute steals shadow-like to where

  I stand; and wavering pale before me there,

  Her tears fall still as oak-leaves after frost.

  She will not speak. I will not ask. We are

  League-sundered by the silent gulf between.

  You burly lovers on the village green,

  Yours is a lower, and a happier star!

  —from Meredith’s Modern Love

  •

  It was a happy time in the spring of 1857 for little Arthur, who was three and a half, and learned to whistle. He can “be a poor moosic man, now.”

  •

  Mary Ellen became interested in courtesans, “lost women,” and the like, and reread Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias, and mused about it:

  Manon Lescaut is most certainly the most beautiful book of the heart that has ever been written, the most earnest anatomy of passion that has been done. I have said earlier that I have much indulgence for courtesans; this indulgence stems especially from my frequent reading of Manon.

  Marguerite, a sinner like Manon, and perhaps converted like her, had died in a sumptuous bed (it seemed, after what I had seen, the bed of her past), but in a desert of the heart, a barren, a vaster, a more pitiless desert than that in which Manon had found her last resting-place.

  Is there anything sadder in the world than the old age of vice, especially in a woman? She preserves no dignity, she inspires no interest. . . . What sublime childishness is love.

  Do not let us despise the woman who is neither mother, sister, maid, nor wife.

  Mary Ellen copied these passages out to remember them.

  •

  One of the most interesting of Mary Ellen’s surviving documents is her Commonplace Book, which, though it was in no sense a diary, reveals her in many ways. It was her custom, as it was the custom of many Victorians, to keep such a book of “extracts” from things she had been reading. Perhaps their Bible-reading English forefathers had given people the feeling that things written down had a special veracity; a scriptureless generation compiled Bibles of its own: collections of maxims, moving passages, recipes, things “worth copying,” as “Henry Ryecroft” put it—things sufficiently true, untrue, or interesting to sanctify them by one’s labor and to keep permanently accessible in a day when most books went back to the lending library.

  By means of her Commonplace Book, we know what Mary Ellen was reading in 1856, about the time she left George. We know what things particularly struck her, though we cannot know if she agreed or disagreed with the passages she copied out, or if she only meant to use them some way in her own writing. A very brief study of the marginal remarks in the volumes along the shelf at the public library suggests that readers tend to underline or annotate the things they agree with (How true! Well put!) and that is probably true of Mary, too. How Mary Ellen’s Commonplace Book survived the subsequent Meredithian bonfires is not clear—it was perhaps in Edith’s hands, or some other of the Peacocks.

  •

  The themes of Mary Ellen’s notes reveal an intellectual woman, with a taste for aphorism, in extreme agitation of mind. In a day when women did not admit such things to themselves, she had admitted that she did not love her husband. In a day when such things were never done, she recognized that she wanted to leave him. That she had been, or wanted to be, unfaithful to him. That their marriage was a mistake. Moreover, a woman struggling with extreme feelings of guilt about these discoveries, struggling to subdue guilt, to feel herself not a victim of the narrow Victorian moral code but somehow above it, observant of a higher morality in which love and independence had a place—in which people were not bound legalistically to other people, in which people were not to be martyrs to other people, or to rules. An educated and witty woman. And yet, withal, a Victorian woman, convinced at heart of the superiority of men, a little ashamed of being prey to powerful emotions and powerful convictions. Mary Ellen sought self-respect and justification, and, perhaps, an ideal of love. The themes of her notes are recurring: a woman having doubts about a man she loves; the nature of marriage; the loss of illusion about love; deceitful women; the necessity of suffering to achieve moral perfection; adultery; courtesans. She reads Camille, Manon.

  George was evidently around some of the time this book was being filled, for he has copied out a poem in it. Mary Ellen does not care if he reads what she has copied from other people’s words: “From her book he gained no insight into herself. There was no character bearing any evidence of self-perturbation, or veiled complaint, or confession. His fancy had run off to a new, untrodden field, there it could gather fresh flowers at its will; only leaving the traces of its whereabouts like the gypsies—You may tell where we have been/By the burnt spot on the green, that is, by quotation and allusion to things he knew she had read of, and studied”—a passage Mary Ellen found in Mme. Clarinda Singleheart.

  •

  EXTRACTS FROM MARY ELLEN’S COMMONPLACE BOOK OF EXTRACTS

  Terrible moment when we first dare to view with feelings of repugnance the being t
hat our soul has long idolised. It is the most awful of revelations; we start back in horror as if in the act of profanation.

  “All you value is a slave with no will of her own.”

  “One who has a will, but knows how to resign it.”

  “That you may have the victory.”

  “No, but that you may be greater than he that taketh a city.”

  He opened “The Baptistry” as it lay on the table, & pointed to the sentence—“If thou refuseth the cross sent thee by an angel, the devil will impose on thee a heavier weight.”

  “Are humility & submission my cross, asked she?”

  If you would only so regard them you would find the secret of peace. If you would only tame yourself before trouble is sent to tame you.

  —Charlotte Yonge

  Heartsease or The Brother’s Wife

  “What good is it?” she says: “You see me dead since you have spoken to me. I have done everything possible in order to rekindle some human feeling within myself, but I find nothing. Love, oh, it is dead: compassion, dead; between the two extremes, what scattering of illusions! . . . That’s the misfortune of these kinds of experience.”

  —Alexandre Dumas

  Olympe de Clèves

  I was tired,—mind-weary: the temper is easily irritated in such a state.

  What are those political revolutions, whose strange & mighty vicissitudes we are ever dilating on, compared with the moral mutations that are passing daily under our own eyes; uprooting the hearts of families, shattering to pieces domestic circles, scattering to the winds the plans and prospects of a generation & blasting as with a mildew the ripening harvest of long cherished affection.

  “Isn’t it a shame that a mature man, as I am at present, submits like a child to the whim of a woman?” “No, it is not at all a shame.”

  I, who am used to questioning myself about everything and to governing myself, how can you want me to take as a master a man who submits to instinct and who is guided by chance?

  —George Sand

  Mauprat

  Say what they like, there is a pang in balked affection, for which no wealth, power, or place, watchful indulgence, or sedulous kindness, can compensate.

  William represented the woman of Endor an awful sybil—a woman endowed, perhaps, at first, with all that could endear her to others, and make her happy in herself; but severed, it might be, by some disappointed affection or evil passion, from communion and sympathy with her kind, & impelled her by her own disordered longings, to penetrate into the unknown.

  In circumstances of difficulty of any kind the advance always comes from the woman. Because she is naturally more ingenuous, courageous & generous than the man.

  —Wearyfoot Common

  “Only a little headache.” How often the heart lays its griefs upon the head.

  Give unto me, made lowly wise

  The spirit of self-sacrifice.

  —Charlotte Yonge

  Heartsease

  The intimacy between Claudia & Robert seemed at first to be merely a contact of the two intellectual natures; but opinions on the most abstruse subjects; are so much modified by personal character. Literature besides is a sort of freemasonry, which sets aside conventionalities, & brings individuals together on a common ground & more than common sympathy.

  —Wearyfoot Common

  It is seldom sympathy and help go together: those who can give us help often cannot, or will not, give us sympathy; & those who sympathize most with us can frequently help us the least.

  —Selina Bunbury

  Our Own Story

  Right is right, and wrong is wrong: and right and wrong admit not of either exchange or compromise.

  —D. Gifford

  St. James’ Chronicle

  . . . I felt at this hour that man was not made for this selfish preservation of despair which we call self-denial or stoicism. No one can abandon the care of his honour without abandoning respect for the principle of honour. If it is noble to sacrifice personal life and glory to the mysterious lapses of the conscience, it is a cowardice to abandon one and the other to the madness of unjust persecution. I felt myself restored again in my own eyes and I passed the rest of this important night seeking ways of rehabilitating myself—with as much perseverance as I had devoted to abandoning myself to fate. With a feeling of strength I felt the rebirth of hope.

  —Translated from George Sand

  Mauprat

  Conventionalism is the slave of the prudent, not the master. It is for ever crouching in the eye of the world, befits only a timid spirit, ignorant that the world’s applause always waits on noble action, when justified by the emergency and magnitude of the stake.

  —Wearyfoot Common

  In some things unhappiness is good, for him who knows how to think; the more I saw how painful and grievous it was to have severed such ties, the more I felt what had been lacking in the marriage,—the elements of happiness and equity of a too-exalted order, so that the real society does not concern itself with them. Society endeavours, on the contrary, to belittle this sacred institution, by likening it to a contract which involves material interests; it attacks it from all sides at once, by the spirit of its manners, by its prejudices, by its hypocritical disbelief. The ideal in love is certainly eternal faithfulness. Moral and religious laws have tried to consecrate this ideal: material matters trouble it, civil laws are created in such a manner that they are often rendered impossible or illusory.

  —George Sand

  Mauprat

  Patience, if you believe it is your duty to denounce me, go ahead, do it: all that I desire, is that I not be condemned without having been understood; I prefer a trial by law to one by opinion!

  The human heart at the best presents a fearful spectacle: & few suspect the close & sisterly relationship that exists between the Genii who govern it—Vice and Virtue.

  He had for some time reconciled his mind to entertain the idea of Henrietta’s treachery to him. Softened by time, atoned for by long suffering, extenuated by the constant sincerity of his purpose, his original imprudence, to use his own phrase, [?] his misconduct, had gradually ceased to figure as a valid & sufficient cause for her behavior to him. . . .

  Meadows started with nothing better nor worse than a commonplace conscience. A vicious habit is an iron that soon scars that sort of article. . . . And one frightful thing in all this was that his love for Susan was not only strong but in itself a good love. I mean it was a love founded on esteem; it was a passionate love and yet a profound and tender affection. It was the love which under different circumstances has often saved men, aye and women too, from a frivolous, selfish and sometimes from a vicious life. This love Meadows thought & hoped would hallow the unlawful means by which he must crown it. In fact he was mixing vice & virtue. The snow was to whiten the pitch not the pitch to blacken the snow. Thousands had tried this before him and will try it after him. Oh, that I could persuade them to mix fire and gun powder instead!

  “Don’t talk so, George. True pals like you & me never reproach one another. They stand & fall together like men.”

  “It is never too late to mend”

  Driftwood’s air could never be otherwise than truthful because when he told a lie he was always the first to believe it.

  The parting was not so bad as the anticipation. It never is. The very effort to conceal the feelings divides them, if the heart is shared between grief and pride, desolation and triumph.

  “I shouldn’t like to do anything too bad.”

  “What d’ye mean by too bad?”

  “Punishable by law.”

  “Is it not your own conscience you fear, then?” asked Meadows gloomily.

  “Oh dear me, Sir, only the Law.”

  He does not accomplish anything to pry too much into what was before, in a pretty woman’s life: we must take her as we fin
d her, however we may find her, and never ask her any of those indiscreet questions which would embarrass her or make her day-dream. What good would it be? You won’t prevent what already has been, and it is a great folly to wish to base the future on the past.

  —Paul de Kock

  L’amour qui passe et L’amour qui vient

  The victim had unwittingly revenged herself. He had stabbed her heart again and again, and drained it. He had battered this poor heart till it had become more like leather than flesh and blood, and now he wanted to nestle in it and be warmed by it: to kill the affections and revive them at will, No!!!!

  When the story is blown and laughed over, this man’s vanity will keep my name out of it. He won’t miss a chance of telling the world how clever he is. My game is to pass for honest, not clever.

  The wicked are in earnest and the good are lukewarm.

  •

  Marriage was holy. Love was altered by it, for the Victorian, from something a bit nasty to something pure and wonderful. The Victorian anticipated in the state of Holy Matrimony the most serious emotional experience of his life—quite a different attitude from that of casual eighteenth-century people, with their arrangements, contracts, practicalities. Ah, sacred love.