“Literature bores me, especially great literature,” the narrator of one of John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” says. George Eliot sometimes bores me, especially the George Eliot draped in greatness. Think of the extremities of nineteenth-century fiction: labile Lermontov; crazy, visionary Melville; nasty, world-hating Flaubert; mystic moor-bound Brontës; fanatical, trembling Dostoyevsky; explosive Hamsun. There’s enough wildness to destroy the myth of that stable Victorian portal “classic realism.” It was not classic—certainly not then—and not always particularly “real.” Instead, it was a storm of madness, extravagant allegory, tyrannical ambition, violent religiosity, violent atheism. Amid this tableau, at the calm median of the century’s religious belief and its unbelief, is wise, generous George Eliot: the saintly oracle consulted and visited by young Henry James and many other important admirers (Wagner, Emerson, Turgenev), sitting on her moral throne like a more interesting Queen Victoria (the Queen was, in fact, one of her eager readers), in her distinguished house in Northwest London, named, fittingly, the Priory.
It was this George Eliot whom Virginia Woolf had in mind when she wrote, in 1919, that the long-faced, oracular Victorian had become, for Woolf’s generation, “one of the butts for youth to laugh at.” When George Eliot became respectable, she became very respectable indeed. In the eighteen-seventies, at the height of her career, she received visitors at the Priory on Sunday afternoons. Her devoted husband, George Henry Lewes, who was known to call his wife Madonna and these Sunday audiences “religious services,” bossily hovered and hosted, sometimes drawing guests to his study, where, beneath a portrait of the novelist, her manuscripts were covered, shrinelike, by a curtain. This George Eliot was not only the celebrated author of “Adam Bede” (1859), “The Mill on the Floss” (1860), and “Middlemarch” (1871) but the purveyor of “Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings” (1872), a briskly selling book of extracts from her work compiled and prefaced by a young devotee who thanked her for having “sanctified the Novel by making it the vehicle for the grandest and most uncompromising moral truth.”
Even now, in a world of quite different pieties, it can be difficult to disinter George Eliot from our reverence, to rediscover the writer who had enough radical daring and agnostic courage to take on the whole sniffing righteousness of Victorian England. Clare Carlisle’s eloquent and original book, “The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), allows us to do that, by placing at the center of her inquiry the abiding preoccupation and scandal of George Eliot’s life and work: marriage. In an age that sanctified marriage, George Eliot was nearly the most sublimely married person in the land. In her letters and journals, in the manuscripts she unceasingly dedicated to her husband, she gave thanks for her marital fortune, for the beautifully sympathetic “double life” she shared with George Lewes, a distinguished essayist and thinker in his own right. Her journals describe the tranquillity of their shared days in London, or deep in the English countryside, or travelling in Germany and Italy: mornings reserved for writing, a walk or a museum visit in the afternoon, evenings for reading, often aloud to each other—a strenuous ease she called “a happy solitude à deux.”
Yet George Eliot wasn’t legally married to George Lewes, who was separated from, but could not divorce, his wife, Agnes Jervis. George Eliot wasn’t always George Eliot, either: she was Marian Evans when she first eloped for the Continent with Lewes, in July of 1854, escaping English judgment for European indifference. Born as Mary Anne Evans in 1819, the same year as the future Queen Victoria, she grew up in the rural Midlands, a settled and conservative region that she would later fictionalize as Loamshire—the stubborn stomach of England, slow to digest politics into action. Her father, whose formal education was basic, was a shrewd and trusted estate manager for an aristocratic Warwickshire family. Mary Anne’s brother, Isaac, apparently as averse to change as his father, succeeded him in the same job. But Mary Anne couldn’t stay put. She was a restless reader who had an aptitude for languages (one of her early crushes was on a private tutor who taught her Italian and German), and she possessed, even as a teen-ager, the kind of scorching, radical austerity that turns intellectuals into prophetic outsiders, a status she awarded to several of her fictional protagonists—Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, and Daniel Deronda. The adolescent Mary Anne was herself a fervently pious evangelical, seething with Calvinist fatalism, wary of non-sacred music, and forswearing her attraction to her tutor by quoting a verse from the Book of Isaiah: “Cease ye from man.”
But on Sunday, January 2, 1842, something wondrous and strange occurred. As if the new year demanded from her a new soul, the twenty-two-year-old Mary Anne Evans, who still lived at home as her father’s housekeeper, announced that she would not go to church. In the nineteenth century, there were at least three reliable germs of religious doubt; all three infected some people at once. You might brood over theodicy (how to reconcile God’s supposedly providential goodness with the pain of the world); you might brood over evolution and the long history of the world (this sometimes overlapping with theodicean anxieties, since the long history of the world would appear to be an epic of suffering and extinction); and you might start reading the Bible stories as if they were stories, rather than divine revelation. Mary Anne Evans succumbed to the third illness. Around this time, she read Charles Hennell’s “Enquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity,” published three years earlier, and concluded that the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ ministry were “histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction.”
The Scriptures might not be divinely authoritative, she told her bewildered father, but there was much about Jesus’ moral teaching that she found admirable. Here was the characteristic overcorrection of the mid-century: a slightly nervous compensation for sudden loss, like overpraising a relative at his funeral. The German scholar David Friedrich Strauss similarly compensates for the loss of God in his immensely influential revaluation of the Biblical narratives, “The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined” (1835); Ernest Renan does the same in his popular biography “The Life of Jesus” (1863). The air had gone out of the theology, but the moral cushions could still be plumped up. That inflation repelled Nietzsche, who, in “Twilight of the Idols” (1889), attacks George Eliot as one of those Victorian moralists who have “got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality.”
Renan, a flowery stylist who splashes consoling perfume over Christ’s corpse as he flees, deserves Nietzsche’s hammer. But George Eliot was intensely sincere in both her agnosticism and her moralism. And, more than just sincere, she was strict, searching, systematic, scholarly. She had thought her way into evangelicalism; now she thought her way out of Christian belief. She translated David Strauss in the eighteen-forties. In the early eighteen-fifties, she would translate Ludwig Feuerbach’s “The Essence of Christianity” (originally published in German, in 1841), a prescient work in the literature of atheism which argues with a brisk and almost jaunty logic that the love of God is really just the love of man; that we project onto the divine those qualities which we cherish in ourselves. And she read Baruch Spinoza, beginning in the eighteen-forties with the Dutch philosopher’s “Theological-Political Treatise” (originally published in 1670) and moving on to the “Ethics” (1677), which she arduously translated from the Latin in the mid-eighteen-fifties.
Spinoza was infamous for his sometimes inscrutable variety of pantheism, in which God no longer sits outside Nature, paring his fingernails (James Joyce’s joke), but effectively is Nature, inextricable from it. The supernatural, miracle-working, interventionist God, loaded up with human attributes and projections, slips away into Nature. For all practical religious purposes—prayer, comfort, salvation, immortality—Spinoza kills off God, as many humans would understand the notion. Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656, and could probably still get himself excommunicated somewhere today. But he had his own way of compensating for theological lack, and its clearest articulation is to be found in his earlier work the “Theological-Political Treatise.” In that incandescent text, Spinoza argues, among other things, that the Biblical miracles were not miraculous; that divinity is at bottom the moral law; that the essence of that law consists of loving God and loving one’s neighbor; that right living therefore has nothing to do with one’s beliefs or doctrines but is simply a matter of obeying and piously enacting the law; and that this law is divinely inscribed in our hearts. All of which raises the haunting question of whether this universal moral law needs Scripture or the Almighty at all. Does the Good need God—or, rather, “God”? Not for a twentieth-century writer like Iris Murdoch, a novelist who is, in some ways, George Eliot’s nearest intellectual successor, and who writes, “The image of the Good as a transcendent, magnetic centre seems to me the least corruptible and most realistic picture for us to use in our reflections upon the moral life.” George Eliot was always drawn to the magnetic center of the Good. It’s easy to see how appealing this kind of idea might have seemed to an intensely religious, morally provoked, and theologically dispossessed Victorian intellectual, one who was, furthermore, not many years away from attempting to write her own kind of Scripture, Scripture in a different, newer language: the sanctified novel.
This was the writer and thinker who crossed paths with George Lewes, in a Piccadilly bookshop, in 1851: fierce, unrespectable, uninsured. She had arrived in London at the start of that year, had changed her name to Marian, and by the end of it was the de-facto editor of the capital’s leading progressive journal, The Westminster Review. During the next few years, she published there a series of brilliant essays, the most exciting of which belongs in the annals of anti-religious complaint, her decapitation of the evangelical preacher Dr. Cumming, with its devastating opener: “Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society?”
One can forget what a funny satirist George Eliot was. In “Adam Bede,” for instance, the once religious writer, who knew exactly how dreary Sundays could be, tells us that even the farmyard animals appeared to recognize the Sabbath: “The cocks and hens seemed to know it, and made only crooning subdued noises; the very bull-dog looked less savage, as if he would have been satisfied with a smaller bite than usual.” Anyone who has read “Middlemarch” remembers these formidable words about Mr. Casaubon, the parched parson and scholar: “With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.” But funnier and more compact is this addition, several paragraphs later: “ ‘Yes,’ said Mr Casaubon, with that peculiar pitch of voice which makes the word half a negative.” Casaubon, though, is almost avuncular when set alongside the loathsome Henleigh Grandcourt, from “Daniel Deronda” (1876). Like Henry James’s Gilbert Osmond, Grandcourt is terrifying in his very calm, “a handsome lizard,” a bully incapable of love who speaks to his abused wife, Gwendolen, in “an adagio of utter indifference.” And he has many dogs: “Grandcourt kept so many dogs that he was reputed to love them.”
Carlisle vividly animates this dangerous writer, and sets before us, in her early chapters, the young woman of letters before she became “George Eliot”—the tyro editor glimpsed, for instance, by a colleague on The Westminster Review, correcting proofs in the evenings, sitting sideways in an easy chair with her legs over the arms, and her long hair over her shoulders. Lewes might have seemed her opposite, at least temperamentally. He was buoyant and confident; she was given to despondency and uncertainty. He was the kind of journalist who could write about anything, and did so; her work has a holy coherence. But, as Marian wrote in a letter, Lewes’s flippancy masked great conscience and heart. And they had shared intellectual and literary interests, particularly in philosophy and contemporary German thought. Like Marian, George Lewes had studied Spinoza with the utmost admiration. In his popular and still very readable “Biographical History of Philosophy” (1845-46), Lewes praised Spinoza for creating a body of thought that had been accused for nearly two centuries of the most wicked blasphemy but that had turned out, in the past sixty years, to become “the acknowledged parent of a whole nation’s philosophy,” by which he meant Germany’s.
He and Marian read slightly different Spinozas, Carlisle suggests. Lewes used Spinoza to confirm his atheism, while Marian used him to question her faith. Lewes wrote that Spinoza was not one of those philosophers who “deride or vilify human nature: in his opinion it was better to try to understand it.” Marian would continue to play the serious agnostic to her husband’s unruffled atheist. And perhaps she was always the austere religionist to his worldly humanist. The humanist takes human nature as it comes; the religionist tries to improve it, starting with herself. George Eliot’s novels are full of personal renunciations and reformations. Adam Bede wins the joyous ending of marrying Dinah Morris only by undergoing a moral transformation that earns an authorial blessing churchy enough to sound like something from the marriage service itself: “What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?” Both Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth, in “Middlemarch” and “Daniel Deronda,” respectively, learn to become better people by, essentially, wanting less. Carlisle, indeed, offers the rather brilliant insight that the relationship between Dorothea Brooke and her less morally intense sister Celia, in “Middlemarch,” may echo an element of Eliot’s marriage to Lewes: Lewes as Celia, content enough to take reality as it is, and Eliot as Dorothea, impatient to change it.