The Honeymoon (25 page)

In Weimar, George set about researching his Goethe book. They’d been there only a few days when Franz Liszt came calling on them in their rooms on the Kaufgasse. George had met Liszt before in Vienna and written a “letter” from “Vivian” about him for the
Leader
.

When Liszt walked in the door, the sight of him struck her with physical force. Here was the man for whom women wore bracelets made from the pianoforte strings he broke in the intensity of his playing. He reminded her for a moment of Chapman, in his height, his angularity, his penetrating gaze. But Chapman was a second-rater, and this — this man was a god. He sat and chatted with them in a warm, free manner. She couldn’t quite believe that he was sitting there, in his black frock coat with his long hair flowing to his shoulders, on a chair in their sitting room, in human time and space. He joked about
Nélida
, the novel written about him a few years before, by his former mistress Madame D’Agoult, the mother of his three children, who
had pilloried him for his philandering. It had caused a scandal, but Liszt just laughed at it.

Liszt was living with the Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein now, in a house she’d rented for them on the outskirts of the city. “My poor princess,” he said, “she’s trying day and night to obtain an annulment of her marriage to Prince Nikolaus, so we can marry in the church — we’re both devout Catholics. Fortunately, people here in Weimar are very open-minded and they accept us. They don’t have these stupid prejudices.”

Then, suddenly, he threw aside his gloom and smiled again. “You must come at once, this morning, to the Villa Altenburg. The princess is dying to meet you.”

An hour later, as their carriage pulled into the circular driveway of the yellow mansion on Jenaer Strasse, the air was thick with the threat of rain. It was a rather plainly drawn, beige-and-yellow building, standing by itself on a hill at the edge of a pine forest with a view overlooking Weimar.

The butler, Heinrich, greeted them and showed them to the garden, where other guests were waiting for the Maestro at a long table under a canopy of trees, set with bread and smoked meats and cheese. There was a Herr Hoffman von Fallersleben, a poet, and a Dr. Schade, who’d written something about Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, and Liszt and the princess’s secretary, Herr Cornelius, and Joachim Raff, a musician and expert on Richard Wagner, who was Liszt’s main preoccupation at the moment.

As they waited for Liszt to appear, the guests chatted among themselves. Marian kept glancing up at the thick sky, praying it wouldn’t rain and spoil the party.

Liszt made his grand entrance. On his arm was the teenage Princess Marie, the Princess Wittgenstein’s daughter, dressed in white, an ethereal, wraithlike girl. Behind him trotted his Scotch terrier, Rappo. A few moments later, the princess appeared.

“I’m delighted!” the princess said warmly, extending her hand to Marian and making a little curtsy. Marian was taken aback. She’d expected that Liszt’s mistress would be a great beauty, but the princess was a short, fat little thing, wearing a white morning robe of a semitransparent material. When she smiled, Marian saw that her teeth were black. Well, she did have a rather exotic profile and bright, dark hair, and very dark eyes.

Heinrich brought out pastries. Liszt passed around cigars. The princess took one — perhaps that accounted for her black teeth. Cigars gave Marian a terrible headache and she hoped she could endure the smoke filling the air. Liszt asked Herr von Fallersleben to recite some of his poetry and the poet, a big man, began declaiming some sort of bacchanalian piece in a gusty voice, but she couldn’t concentrate on it. All of them, she realized, were hanging on the unanswered question: would Liszt play for them? Nobody said anything for fear perhaps of disrupting some plan that the Maestro had made. George was telling the princess about his Goethe biography and Marian heard her cry, “But Goethe was such an egoist!”

All she could do was stare at Liszt, who was sitting back in his chair, legs crossed, enjoying Herr von Fallersleben’s recital and benevolently surveying his guests. The little dog cavorted among them. Liszt fed him scraps from the
table. “He completely spoils that animal!” the princess said. “When he’s upstairs composing, Rappo stands down in the garden barking up at him.”

“He’s my harshest critic,” Liszt said, smiling and giving the dog a pat.

“So much for genius,” said the princess.

Marian felt a drop of rain on her cheek, then another. They all glanced at one another. Soon the rain was pelting down on them and the princess was hurrying them up a flight of stairs at the rear of the house. Liszt and the princess led the way into a drawing room, which opened into the music salon, in which stood two grand pianos. “Please, sit,” Liszt said, indicating chairs placed around the edges of the room.

He sat himself down at one of the pianos. “This is a piece I wrote during my first winter at Woronince, the princess’s estate in the Ukraine,” he said. “It’s called ‘Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude.’ It’s inspired by Lamartine’s poem of the same name.”

The only sound now was the rain pouring down outside the windows. Then, just as Liszt was settling himself on the bench, Marian quickly, fearfully, stood up and dared to move her chair forward closer to his piano. She wanted to see his hands. He didn’t seem to notice, thank goodness, and wasn’t annoyed.

The beginning of the piece was slow, almost naive, like a child’s song. There was a clear melody underneath it, the undercurrent of a gently trilling stream, lyrical and melodic, repeated in a minor key, the themes earnest and supplicating. Gradually, though, the music rose to an ecstatic pitch as Liszt played, his long hair flew around his
shoulders, he threw back his head, compressed his lips, his nostrils dilated. His hands were a blur.

There were pauses, contemplative and thoughtful. And it was done. Liszt lifted his hands from the keys and held them in midair, on his face an expression of transcendence.

Returning to their rooms in their carriage, she and George sat in a stunned state. They didn’t speak.

Then she broke the silence. “I think that’s the first time in my life that I’ve beheld true inspiration,” she said, “the perfect fusion of inspiration and execution.”

“You’ve got it in you,” George said. “You have that gift in your writing.”

“You have no evidence of that.”

“I have complete and utter confidence in you.” He grasped her hand and held it tightly the rest of the way back to the city, as they gazed out at the pine woods and the meadows glittering green and washed fresh by the rain.

For the rest of their stay in Weimar, George ran about the city doing his research on Goethe’s life, inflamed with purpose, so happy to be immersed in it.

They went on to Berlin. The weather was bitingly cold, snow alternating with rain. George had friends in Berlin from previous visits, the art historian Adolf Stahr and his mistress, the novelist Fanny Lewald, another champion of the women’s cause. They had lived together as man and wife for nine years while Stahr tried to get a divorce from his wife. In Berlin, the couple’s union was accepted and they went about freely.

At night in their rooms on the Dorotheenstrasse, as the wind howled and the snow built up outside their window, she and George sat cozily while she translated Goethe for him for his book.

Meanwhile, letters were coming from London with news of gossip about them. People were saying George had abandoned Agnes and seduced Marian and he would surely abandon Marian next. Carlyle wrote and reported that people were saying Marian had made him leave Agnes.

That night they lay together in bed in the darkness. She could tell by the silence and stillness of his breathing that he wasn’t asleep either.

“I can’t sleep,” she told him.

“Neither can I,” he said. “I’ll write to him in the morning and set it right.”

The next day he showed her the letter he had written:
“My separation was in no ways caused by the lady named. It has always been imminent, always threatened.”

She wrote to Chapman in an effort to get paid for an article she had written, and added at the end,
“I have counted the cost of the step that I have taken and am prepared to bear, without irritation or bitterness, renunciation of all my friends.”

Only Barbara Smith wrote to say how wonderful it was that she’d decided to live with George. Marian was so profoundly grateful to Barbara, always there when she needed courage, supporting her with an almost physical lift. Barbara was irresistible. She made her ashamed of being afraid. Marian wrote back at once that the letter was
“a manifestation of your strong, noble nature.”

Every day she loved him more, and the more she loved him, the more frightened she was that one day she could
lose him. She knew now that she needed something, which, unlike love, unlike George himself, could never be taken from her: the indestructible attributes of talent and genius, the ability of intellect and imagination to forge a link between present and past, between the pain and the happiness she had known; the capacity to give coherence to her existence through language, through the music and the variability and the flexibility of words. She wanted to write from her imagination, but she was afraid that she lacked the talent to do so.

They stayed in Germany eight months. In early spring, they sailed back to England, husband and wife now, in their own eyes. They found rooms for “Mr. and Mrs. Lewes” on Park Shot in Richmond. It was an out-of-the-way place, where they were unlikely to run into any acquaintances. There was always the danger that the landlady, Mrs. Croft, would discover they weren’t married and throw them out, so Marian warned those few friends who knew about them to be careful to address all letters to her as “Mrs. George Lewes.”

That autumn, George’s
Life and Works of Goethe
was published. The
British Quarterly
praised it for a felicity “
rare in the annals of biography
.” It sold a thousand copies in the first three months, but it didn’t make them rich. Still, it surrounded George with the warm glow of success.

At Park Shot, they established a beloved routine, up at half past eight, quiet reading until ten a.m., writing until half past one, a walk in the park, back for supper at five.

She plowed on, churning out articles to make money. She wrote a review of Ruskin’s
Modern Painters
for the
Westminster
:
“The truth of infinite value he teaches is
realism,” she
said,
“the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling.”
If she ever became a real writer, she’d adopt these words as her code. She sent funds to Chrissey and gave part of her earnings to George for his boys and for Agnes and her other children with Thornton.

Amid the piles of books that arrived daily for review she came across a novel,
Compensation
, by an anonymous author — a woman, it was said. In it a four-year-old child supposedly says ridiculous things such as
“Oh, I am so happy, dear gran’mamma; — I have seen, — I have seen such a delightful person: he is like everything beautiful, — like the smell of sweet flowers, and the view from Ben Lomond …”
The silliness of these female authors, their fatuous dialogue.

She wrote an essay for the
Westminster
on “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” novels of
“the mind and millinery species,”
she called them, with their frothy heroines, their manly heroes, their insipid curates. It wasn’t as if women couldn’t write great works. Look at Mrs. Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, and Currer Bell. Surely, even she could do better than these women who’d published such nonsense.

George, having published his Goethe biography, decided that he wanted to write a book on science, on marine biology. They went down to Devon so he could do research for it. She was thirty-six now and he was thirty-nine, but they were like two children that spring, clambering over the rocks in their fishermen’s boots, she carrying the landing net and he the hamper with the specimen jars.

“Look!” he cried, spotting a sea anemone with long, swirling tentacles. “It’s an
Anthea Cereus
, I think.” There
was such joy in naming things, defining them, categorizing them, creating order and meaning through language.
“Anthea,” “Cereus.”
All things on God’s earth could be given names and thereby made part of the larger whole.

At night, their room was stacked with jars filled with specimens of sea creatures. George read
Coriolanus
aloud to entertain her, in full voice with all dramatic emphasis, making her laugh.
“Thus we debase the nature of our seats!”
he declaimed,
“and make the rabble call our cares fears …”

They fell asleep in one another’s arms, lulled by the rustling of the waves below their window. In the morning they were awakened by the cries of the gulls.

They moved on to Tenby. On Saturday, Barbara Smith arrived to visit. She’d become increasingly active on “the woman question.” That winter she’d persuaded Marian to sign a petition to Parliament demanding that married women be granted the right to own their own property. Despite Marian’s worries about the radical emancipation of women, that it would come too fast and interfere with their roles as mothers, as keepers of their families, the laws on property rights were so unjust that she’d had no trouble joining Barbara’s petition.