Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  By the way – have you heard of two blackguard literary fellows, Lewes and Thornton Hunt? They seem to have used wives on the ancient Briton practice of having them in common: now blackguard Lewes bolted with a — — and is living in Germany with her. I believe it is dangerous to write facts of anyone nowadays so I will not any further lift the mantle and display the filthy contaminations of these hideous satyrs and smirking moralists – these workers in the Agepomone – these Mormonites in another name – stink pots of humanity.32

  George Combe, the great phrenologist and Charles Bray’s mentor in that science, was mortified by the news of Miss Evans’s elopement. Believing as he did in the physiological basis of all behaviour, he wondered if there was a history of insanity in her family. ‘An educated woman who, in the face of the world, volunteers to live as a wife, with a man who already has a living wife and children, appears to me to pursue a course and to set an example calculated only to degrade herself and her sex, if she be sane.’33 He thought that Hunt, Lewes and Miss Evans (he did not distinguish among them) had greatly hurt the cause of religious freedom, and he, for one, intended to cancel his subscription to The Leader.

  His irritation forced his disciple, Bray, into an interesting defence of Miss Evans. Combe thought that believers in the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’ principle had all the more to fulfil the obligations of married life. Bray, in Miss Evans’s defence, replied that she and Lewes intended to fulfil the obligations of married life: the nature of those obligations was the issue. Showing he had understood Miss Evans’s argument even if he didn’t approve, he invoked the concept of natural law to distinguish between Lewes’s state in regard to Agnes – legally married but unmarried in natural law – and his relationship to Miss Evans – legally unmarried but married in natural law.

  But Combe remained unconvinced. Would it be doing justice to his own female domestic circle, he asked Mr Bray, to re-admit this tainted woman to it? How would the other ladies feel about entering a circle which makes no distinction between women who act disreputably and those who keep their honour unspotted? The vulgar implication here, to be sure, is that if no social distinction were made between the spotted and the unspotted, a lady would hardly go to the trouble of keeping herself pure. There must have been, then as now, many people for whom the fear of social ostracism acted as the only check on behaviour, as well as many more who simply took care that their indiscretions not be known. Marian Evans was particularly concerned to distinguish between her behaviour and unprincipled hedonism. ‘Light and easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done – they obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner.’34

  But easy stories drive out complicated ones, and the most familiar and vulgar version of the matter will gain the widest currency. It was almost impossible for Miss Evans and Mr Lewes to substitute for the popular tale of a femme fatale stealing another woman’s husband the much subtler story of a husband, abandoned by his wife, refusing to abandon his own responsibilities to her, unable to divorce her yet unwilling to live with her, unable to re-marry yet constructing a relationship which was equivalent to marriage. Almost no one could accept the crucial point that Lewes was not really married at all.

  ‘I do not well understand how a good and conscientious woman can run away with another woman’s husband,’ said kindly Mrs Jameson, who had, by her own choice, been separated from her own husband for twenty years. To her correspondent in Germany, Ottilie von Goethe, Goethe’s daughter-in-law, Mrs Jameson described Lewes’s companion as first-rate in intellect and science and attainments of every kind, but ‘very free in all her opinions as to morals and religion’.35 One of the noteworthy things about the gossip occasioned by the Lewes elopement was how rarely the gossipers drew any connection between the scandalous story and the facts of their own lives. The closer people’s plight to Miss Evans’s or Lewes’s, the more they seemed to cling to the differences. No wonder George Eliot would make a point in her fiction of the moral necessity of comparing experience. No wonder she understood so thoroughly the failure of most people to see their lives as analogous to anyone else’s, and that this was the greatest failure of the imagination. Perhaps it was her experience of being the centre of scandal that made her elevate tolerance and sympathy to the highest of virtues.

  Over and over she asserted how serious, how moral (if rightly understood) her union was. She insisted she had nothing to hide. ‘I have done nothing with which any person has the right to interfere. I have surely full liberty to travel in Germany and to travel with Mr Lewes. No one here seems to find it at all scandalous that we should be together.’36 That, to Chapman. To Bray she insisted she was her own master. She was too old, she told him, for people to suppose he was answerable for her. ‘So far as my friends and acquaintances are inclined to occupy themselves with my affairs, I am grateful to them and sorry they should have pain on my account, but I cannot think their digestion will be much hindered by anything that befalls a person about whom they troubled themselves very little while she lived in privacy and loneliness.’37 Although she realised how unconventional her behaviour was, she had taken the measure of her infraction and was prepared to pay, without irritation or bitterness, the price of renunciation by all her friends, certain in the knowledge that the person she devoted herself to was worth any sacrifice. (Certain, too, that what she gave up was inessential to her, ‘a person about whom her friends troubled themselves very little while she lived in privacy and loneliness’.) Friends to whom she wrote explaining her behaviour were sometimes offended by the self-congratulation they detected in her words.

  That any unworldly, unsuperstitious person who is sufficiently acquainted with the realities of life can pronounce my relation to Mr Lewes immoral I can only understand by remembering how subtle and complex are the influences that mould opinion. But I do remember that, and I indulge in no arrogant or uncharitable thoughts about those who condemn us, even though we might have expected a somewhat different verdict. From the majority of persons, of course, we never looked for anything but condemnation. We are leading no life of self-indulgence, except indeed, that being happy in each other, we find everything easy. We are working hard to provide for others better than ourselves, and to fulfill every responsibility that lies upon us. Levity and pride would not be a sufficient basis for that.38

  Levity? Perhaps not. But pride? Certainly.

  She was proud of herself. She had acted according to her principles. She had had the courage to scorn conventional behaviour, conventional rewards, conventional approval. Her union with Lewes was a triumph of natural morality in the face of absurd and tyrannical laws. Those of her friends who could understand this redefinition of moral behaviour were worthy of being kept; the others were a loss she could accept. Had she pretended to shame and remorse, conforming herself to the popular plot that she had sinned and needed to be forgiven, I think her union with Lewes would have been found more acceptable. It was ‘the pretence of a sanctioned union’, in the jealous words of the novelist Eliza Lynn Linton, which was most offensive, and which, morally speaking, was the most serious and challenging aspect of the affair. What makes a marriage valid? its endorsement by church or state? or the commitment of the people involved? That was the question her behaviour posed, and her radical stance was calculated to undermine morality as it had been known and to re-establish it on a more serious, a more existential, basis.

  allies

  George Eliot’s fame had little effect upon the way she and Lewes lived together. They had always kept to themselves and lived quietly. Because of the irregularity of their marriage, George Eliot could not be received in society, although Lewes, according to the strange moral logic of the time, was acceptable and frequently invited to dine out. In the early years they did not entertain at all and received even the closest friends rarely. They refused in general to put people up at their house. Sara Henn
ell, virtually a member of the family, was offered a bed for one night only. George Eliot realised they were ‘brutally inhospitable’, but claimed it was in the interest of their work. Solitude, at first the product of ostracism, turned out to have advantages, and it is a question whether in fact the world banished her or she the world. At one point, there seemed to be a chance of Lewes’s obtaining a divorce abroad, but the chance fell through and his companion was not sorry. ‘I prefer excommunication. I have no earthly thing that I care for, to gain by being brought within the pale of people’s personal attention, and I have many things to care for that I would lose – my freedom from petty worldly torments, commonly called pleasures and that isolation which really keeps my charity warm instead of chilling it, as much contact with frivolous women would do.’39

  Like Traddles and Sophie, like David Copperfield and Agnes, like Walter Gay and Florence Dombey, like the happy couple at the end of almost any Dickens novel, these two display towards each other nothing but goodwill, affection, an urge to self-sacrifice and gratitude. No rosy children surround them, as the happy couple should be surrounded in a Dickens novel. Instead, books are their children. They embody all the ideals and principles of that most assertive of Victorian tracts on marriage, David Copperfield, which repeatedly told its readers that ‘there can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose’.40 If ever a couple was united in purpose it was Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes, dedicated to Duty, to Work, to Love, spreading warmth and light from their domestic hearth in the most approved style of Victorian domestic fiction. They were the perfect married couple. Only – they weren’t married. One cannot help but wonder how different things might have been had they been married in accordance with, and not in opposition to, the customs of their culture. How much did their happiness depend upon the irregularity of their union?

  Because they were not respectable, they were spared the burdens of respectability. They did not have to be nice to each other’s friends. They did not have to give dinner parties. They did not have to put up with guests for the weekend. They did not have to appear together in public. Treated as sinful lovers, they remained lovers. Since their union was disapproved by society, their energies went into justifying it, enjoying it, making other people believe in it – not wishing there were less of it, wishing themselves more free. For some people stability flourishes where the apparatus of stability is absent. Simone de Beauvoir, whose lifelong relationship with Sartre was in many ways similar to that of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, says that she and Sartre thought of themselves ‘as’ married, gave their relationship a name (morganatic marriage) even before they had worked out its details, and played at being a particular petit bourgeois couple, Monsieur and Madame M. Organatique, but ‘by wriggling into their skins for a joke we emphasised the difference’. Once, when it seemed they could be saved from a painful separation by dual appointments that legal marriage could make possible, Sartre urged de Beauvoir to marry him. She said no immediately. ‘Any modification of the relationship we maintained with the outside world would have fatally affected that existing between the two of us.’41

  George Eliot knew her priorities. Her work and her intimacy with Lewes were most important; both were served by being cut off from the world. All she gave up was a superficial social intercourse which she did not much enjoy, preferring a walk with Lewes in the Zoological Gardens to pallid conversations over clear consommé. Ill health also kept her close to home. She had no carriage and was too frail to go walking far in London. Gradually they developed the rule of never paying visits; anyone who wanted to see them had to come to their house, which, from 1863 on, was The Priory, a two-storey structure in the St John’s Wood district near Regent’s Park, sufficiently remote to ensure quiet, surrounded by a brick wall. She was at home every Sunday, and brilliant people came to call, but the women were either so emancipated as not to mind what was said about them or they had no social position to maintain.

  One of the guests who made his way to the Leweses’ door in 1869 was Charles Eliot Norton, an American gentleman, later a Harvard professor, accompanied by his wife, Susan. They were received by Lewes at the door of The Priory with characteristic animation. By this time the woman living in sin had become Britain’s voice of morality. George Eliot had written Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Felix Holt, and her fame had quite eclipsed her husband’s.

  There was nothing formidable about George Henry Lewes. He was not dignified or stately. What you noticed about him was rapid motion. To a fastidious man like Professor Norton, he seemed slightly vulgar, like an old-fashioned French barber or a dancing master. He was ugly, vivacious and entertaining; you expected him to take up a fiddle and start to play. His talk, in its liveliness and the gestures which accompanied it, seemed more French than English, and both mind and mouth seemed always to be running over. He was amazingly versatile, able to talk equally well about philosophy, science and literature, but perhaps for that very reason you tended to suspect his depth. Professor Norton had to remind himself that both Darwin and Lyell had spoken highly of Lewes’s accomplishments. ‘Not a man who wins more than a moderate liking from you,’ he concluded.42 He did not say that such a frivolous-seeming man was hardly a fit mate for George Eliot, but others thought it. George Eliot herself seemed aware of an incongruity, and in describing Lewes to her friends invariably pointed out that his impact was not weighty. It was, in fact, the lightness and buoyancy of his spirits that made him attractive to her, so dreadfully given herself to despondency. Sometimes she had to summon her deepest resources to make the coming day seem worthy of its inevitable weariness, whereas Lewes was cheerful even in ill health, was never a prey to moods and was healthy in his relationship to his work, which he enjoyed in the doing and whose presentation to the public he faced without anxiety.

  Although the Leweses had much in common, although they shared all their intellectual pursuits – reading books together, learning languages together, following each other’s work – their attraction for each other was, like many erotic ties, based upon the differences between them, differences of bearing and of temperament. What made Lewes suspect in the eyes of the visiting American scholar – his light-heartedness, his good cheer, his Gallic pose of frivolity – had initially made him unimpressive to Marian Evans, too. Yet it was what she came to find most appealing in him.

  Before Lewes, she had been attracted to men who demanded looking up to, men who would require sacrifices and were prepared to give little in return: Dr Brabant, Chapman, Herbert Spencer. Towards these men she experienced the impulse towards self-surrender which she portrayed so brilliantly in Dorothea Brooke’s response to Mr Casaubon, the feminine impulse to over-value a man’s work and to derive one’s identity from it. But Lewes never inspired such feelings. ‘Do not for a moment imagine that Dorothea’s marriage experience is drawn from my own,’ George Eliot wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe after the publication of Middlemarch. ‘Impossible to conceive any creature less like Mr Casaubon than my warm, enthusiastic husband, who cares more for my doing than for his own.’43

  He was prepared to devote himself to her, and she accepted an immense amount of devotion. It became understood between them that without his help she could not write. Her fear of failure almost stifled her; she needed him to deflect the world’s dislike. Her first book, Scenes of Clerical Life, which consists of three sketches, was originally supposed to be longer, but Blackwood, her publisher, unwisely admitted that he didn’t like the third story so much as the first two, and his sensitive author insisted on stopping right there. Early in their relationship, Lewes warned Blackwood in a letter to refrain from saying anything unpleasant to George Eliot.

  Like ‘Oliver Twist’ he is for ever ‘asking for more’. He seems to me a sort of obverse of that Roman Emperor who had a slave at his elbow to whisper constantly to him ‘Remember you are mortal’. He wants a friend at his elbow to whisper ‘You see, George, you really are not a confounded Noodl
e’.44

  Lewes was the consoling slave at her elbow.

  To her friends, even her closest friends and for the entire length of her career, he had to repeat warnings such as the one he gave Blackwood about suppressing any negative response to her work. Only the most effusive praise was acceptable. Lewes went to extraordinary lengths to keep hostility from her. Once he went so far as to misread a letter which contained some criticism, omitting an entire section and then conveniently ‘losing’ it. He also intercepted newspaper reviews, allowing her to see only the laudatory ones. You can easily imagine the risks of practising this sort of vigilance on behalf of someone beloved: benevolence can lead to contempt; the protector can grow to resent the inequality of the burden, his or her unvarying strength, the other’s weakness. If this does not happen you can be sure that the pattern of dependence has not been adopted unilaterally, and it becomes ambiguous who is dependent on whom for what. One can need to be needed. George Henry Lewes seems to have been this sort of person, and George Eliot was wise enough not to be too strong. Her need meshed with his, making him an equal partner in her acts of creation. For twenty-four years he went on cheerfully deflecting criticism, helping her with business matters, answering mail, being indispensable.

  Writing is usually a lonely profession, but George Eliot had the knack of turning men into collaborators. In addition to Lewes, there was John Blackwood, her excellent Scottish editor and publisher. Without the intermediary of an agent, except Lewes, she corresponded with Blackwood in Edinburgh on matters of content, printing, sales, distribution. She entered enthusiastically into all these business affairs, when she allowed herself to enter at all. She was a difficult author, rejecting any interference with her text and subject to unaccountable resentments in business matters, but Blackwood handled her with tact and patience. The relationship between them was stormy and in some ways more overtly flirtatious than her relationship with Lewes. After the great success of Adam Bede, her second book, she began to think of changing publishers. She felt he was beginning to take her for granted. She thought someone else would appreciate her more. Although Blackwood had generously and spontaneously doubled her royalty for Adam Bede, she was angry at him; he had insufficiently exercised himself on her behalf when rumours spread that a Mr Liggins was the author of Adam Bede and when a sequel to the book was announced by an unscrupulous publisher.