Notes

1. Holman Hunt remembers her as a “dashing horsewoman” in his memoirs. Sir Edmund Hornby says, in his Autobiography, “there are only three poets whose poetry I can appreciate, and they are Pope, Dryden, and Oliver Goldsmith. Tennyson, Swinburne, Morris & Co. I simply do not understand. Perhaps Mrs. Meredith, the wife of George Meredith, was right when she declared I had a ‘Manchester mind.’” Clodd says in his Memories that those “who knew her say she was charming, with intellectual gifts far above the average.”

2. The belongings described here were carefully kept by Henry Wallis after Mary Ellen’s death. Fireside Reverie, like many of Wallis’s important paintings, seems to have disappeared.

3. We are so used to the paradigm of family conflict in the modern family—conservative parents and radical children—that it is hard for us to remember that in the mid-nineteenth century the situation was almost exactly reversed. That is, the hard-working, serious, earnest, increasingly proper young people must have sometimes been scandalized by the wicked and irreverent older generation, with its eighteenth-century heritage of individualism, atheism, freedom, and defiance. The Victorian Mr. L’Estrange, for example, wrote to Peacock’s granddaughter in 1875 that Peacock’s dear old friends, “the Shelley group were ‘a rum lot,’” and that old T. J. Hogg was one of the “monsters of the male sex.” “But let these riff-raff rest.” What the granddaughter, Edith Nicolls, thought, who had been bounced on the knees of this kindly riff-raff, is not recorded. It is easy to see Mary Ellen having more in common with them than with her own generation—being born too late, perhaps, rather than having been born too early, though in many ways she was a modern woman. Her conflict with George Meredith, then, can be seen as a conflict between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modes of life, whose tragic outcome ironically had the effect, via Meredith’s novels, of in some degree influencing social theory to return to values that she would have found more comprehensible.

4. This obituary of Mrs. Love is printed in K. N. Cameron’s Shelley and His Circle (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 284–285. The same volume also contains Dr. Eleanor Nicholes’s useful short biography of Peacock, to which, together with Edith Nicolls’s “Biographical Notice” in the Cole edition (1875), and the “Biographical Introduction” in the Halliford edition (1924–1934) of Peacock’s works, I am chiefly indebted for details of Peacock’s life. The principal biography of Meredith is Lionel Stevenson’s The Ordeal of George Meredith. Because all of these biographies are standard and easily available, I have not burdened the text with specific sources.

I do refer in the text, however, to a hypothetical composite figure, the Biographer, who is responsible for handing down traditional biographical information. Without meaning to impugn individual real biographers, I am sometimes severe upon the Biographer, for he is the purveyor of received attitudes and accepted traditions that often turn out to be misinformed or even willfully benighted. This is usually a function of his imprisonment in a curious set of Victorian attitudes, which seems to plague modern biographers as well as Victorian ones.

5. Here, for instance, the Biographer is actually Mr. L’Estrange, mentioned above, and to whom we will return later.

6. We might ask here what, if any, are the special problems and responsibilities of the Biographer? Biographies of literary figures seem fraught with special perils because they do have an obligation to literary criticism. Some literary critics would deny this; in an effort to avoid the obvious pitfalls of the “biographical fallacy” and its tendency to make facile connections, especially reductivist, Freudian ones, criticism has exerted a great deal of effort to develop ways of looking at literature and leaving the writer out of it. Biographers of literary figures have often erred in the opposite direction, revealing that at such-and-such a time the writer was engaged in such-and-such a work, without imagining that there was much connection between that work and the writer’s ongoing life experiences, except when the subject matter of the work is too autobiographical to be ignored—as in Meredith’s Modern Love. But this is wrong, and Mr. L’Estrange (see here and here) was on the right track when he inquired of Edith Nicolls whether “the Disappointment you speak of might explain the querulous tone of the greater part of his [Peacock’s] prose. Does it do so?” Very likely. Disappointments affect tone. The people the writer knows may affect or alter the controlling themes and metaphors of his works. That they do so is really the ultimate reason for concerning ourselves with the lives of writers at all, and would be the ultimate justification for books such as this one.

Admittedly, the present work carries the assumption about the relation of the writer and his work to its logical extreme by using literary works to comment upon lives with no qualifying commentary at all. This can be more easily justified on artistic grounds than as sound biographical methodology. Literary works are reality digested, not transcribed. But this work, really, has an axe to grind in the service of the Lesser Lives, and I have been more concerned to attend to its coherence as a work of art. I shall refer to biography considered as art, specifically fictional art, presently.

This is partly just an argument for attention by literary critics to what Frederick Crews has aptly called “a sense of historical dynamics,” or, more simply, plain sense about the realities of human nature and human experience, which must shape literary works. Literary critics are often colossally insensitive to even the most ordinary considerations—let us say chronological and spatial ones; a literary work must be composed somewhere, takes a certain amount of time to do, will turn out differently if written longhand or typed on a typewriter. This is not an argument for straightforward biographical criticism, whose problems are well known, but for requiring of literary critics that they be something of the psychologist, and more controversially, of the novelist.

Like the critic, the biographer should have in him something of the psychologist and the historian, and he should have something of the novelist in him too, which seems on the face of it to be a heretical remark, for everyone knows that the biographer cannot make anything up. A biography is not and should not be fiction, precisely because a balanced and accurate biography must be at the service of the literary critic who hopes correctly to discern the operative pattern of works, or groups of works. This view, of course, tends to see biography wholly as the tool of the critic and to ignore its artistic function, to which we will return.

The critic of literature, and especially of Victorian literature, is still largely at the mercy of the Victorian biographer whose prudery, reticence, and, from the twentieth-century point of view, lack of common sense are well known. This being the case, the extent to which biographical traditions established in the Victorian era are still upheld is truly astonishing. The Merediths are a case in point, but almost any Victorian figure is another. Peacock’s relationship with his wife, for example, has been left undisturbed by the reticent Biographer, who does not stop to inquire, say, into the emotional and physical probabilities of the behavior of a man only forty, a “pagan,” moreover, unconstrained by religion or Victorian mores—a worldly man whose wife became mad. Is it likely that he spent the next forty years in disappointed chastity? Is it important? Or, take the assertion of the biographical tradition, unchanged until the 1950’s, that Peacock never saw Mary Ellen again after her sexual adventure with Wallis. Its importance is easier to see: it has had the effect of ascribing to Peacock a completely different set of moral values than he in fact held, making the sophisticated, eighteenth-century gentleman into a Victorian Heavy Father because rigid unforgivingness was the only sort of behavior a Victorian biographer could imagine. And thinking of Peacock as being full of moralistic vindictiveness cannot but affect a critical evaluation of his works. (Peacock himself, it should be noted, was a firm believer in reticence in biography and would take great issue with these remarks. It is said he was vigorously indignant when Trelawney wrote about Byron’s deformity.)

The tradition of Peacock’s reticence provides another case in point. Reticence, vaguely equated with modesty, seems to be a quality attributed to all famous people by their biographers. Peacock’s, it is said, was so extreme that he would allow no one in his library. But a recent critic, Carl Dawson, in His Fine Wit, makes the sensible speculation, based on the poet Robert Buchanan’s disapproving remark that Peacock’s mind was a “terrible ‘thesaurus eroticus,’” that the library was full of dirty books—ribald classics, anyway—which Peacock was fully aware were not compatible with bourgeois Victorian notions of decency. (Mary Ellen, and later her daughter, Edith, were given full run of the place, in any case.)

Biographers, especially Victorian but modern ones too, favor reticence and inattention to emotional realities or probabilities—but they are also afflicted by the literary conventions operative when they are writing. This is the oddest part of all. We are familiar with the circular relation of life and art, and the difficulty sometimes in telling which is which. Although fictional characters ostensibly behave like real people the author has seen, people do sometimes behave like people in books they have read. It would be difficult to analyze the relationship among (1) Anne Brontë’s description of the death of her heroine, the wicked Lady Lowborough (see here or here), who after an elopement like Mary Ellen’s, “died at last . . . in penury, neglect, and utter wretchedness,” and (2) S. M. Ellis’s description of Mary Ellen’s end: “But the poor woman never found happiness, and her short, tragic life was nearing the end. . . . Ever restless, she wandered from place to place, seeking to drown bitter memories and regrets. . . .” And “all those who remember Mrs. Meredith in the last years of her life state that she was always sad and constantly in tears. Her warm, vehement nature could not meet sorrow with resignation or be softened by it. She would pace up and down the room in uncontrollable emotion,” and so on, straight down to the unmarked grave. Needless to say that Debt, that awful Victorian specter, was also present, and (3) Mr. Justin Vulliamy’s notion that the adulterous wife going home to live with her father, was “unaccountable,” inexplicable.

There is a relationship among these three attitudes. Fictional endings are dictated by a sense of retributive justice; the interpretation of a real life, by both Mr. Vulliamy and the Biographer, appears to be influenced by notions of decorum and retribution, but also by fictional convention.

Biography, being affected by the fictional conventions with which it is contemporary, thus can be seen to have the same function as fiction, especially for the reader. In a sense it is fiction. Fiction, conversely, presents itself as “real,” as a version of reality. In either case the controlling vision or imaginative grasp of the writer in managing the materials of human experience will produce an effective (or ineffective) work of art, whose origins in the verifiable life of a historical figure, or in the same material controlled by the “imaginative” writer—put through his personal systems of defense and so on—are probably a matter of very little importance to the reader. As far as the reader’s responses are concerned, there is finally very little difference. It is in this sense that the biographer is after all a novelist, as far as his responsibilities, if not his powers, go—and in this sense that the critic must also be one. Like the biographer, the critic, in commenting upon fiction, must perform an empathetic (fictional) act. This is especially demanded of a critic if he does not have at his service reliable biography: that is, undistorted by factual error or by a really unreliable sensibility on the part of the biographer. Good critics would no doubt be better off with mechanically compiled lists of “facts” from which to work, rather than with those persuasive, interpretive fictional biases that are often so hard to spy out.

But what, anyway, are the “facts” of a writer’s life? That George Meredith had an erring wife is a “fact,” but for him, the existence of those fictional heroines Mrs. Mount and Mrs. Lovell is also “fact.” The one is an external, the other an interior fact. The danger for the biographer, or critic, lies in mismatching external and interior equivalents. I suppose there is no safeguard against doing this except, one hopes, common sense and a (no doubt) suspect degree of empathy, especially with the “seamy” side of human nature; it is this side of himself the writer is likely to be in conflict about, and to find himself impelled to deal with—or to sedulously avoid dealing with—in his works. The writer is more likely to treat, directly or between the lines, his relationship with his wife than the one with his grocer. Which returns me to my point: the biographer must be a historian, but also a novelist and a snoop.

7. It seems, in fact, to have been Dr. Gryffydh’s neck which was almost broken. Here is Peacock’s story of his adventure in a letter to a friend.

The other day I prevailed on my new acquaintance, Dr. Griffith [sic], to accompany me at midnight to the black cataract, a favorite haunt of mine, about 2¼ miles from hence. Mr. Lloyd, whom I believe I have mentioned to you more than once, volunteered to be of the party; and at twenty minutes past eleven, lighted by the full-orbed moon, we sallied forth, to the no small astonishment of mine host, who protested he never expected to see us all again. —The effect was truly magnificent. —The water descends from a mountainous glen down a winding rock, and then precipitates itself, in one sheet of foam, over its black base, into a capacious bason [sic], the sides of which are all but perpendicular, and covered with hanging oak and hazel. —Evans, in the Cambrian Itinerary, describes it as an abode of damp and horror, and adds, that the whole cataract cannot be seen in one view, as the sides are too steep and slippery to admit of clambering up, and the top of the upper fall is invisible from below. —Mr. Evans seems to have labored under a small degree of alarm, which prevented accurate investigation, for I have repeatedly climbed this unattemptable rock and obtained this impossible view; as he or any one else might do with very little difficulty; though Dr. Gryffydh, the other night, trusting to a rotten branch, had a fall of fifteen feet perpendicular, and but for an intervening hazel, would infallibly have been hurled to the bottom.

8. Maid Marian, a Robin Hood story, contains another of the sprightly, independent, and intellectual heroines Peacock so admired. When she grew old enough to read, Peacock gave a copy of this work to his own Mary Ellen:

To Miss Mary Ellen Peacock

From the Author, her dear Papa.

Later, George Meredith writes a poem entitled “Marian,” which describes Mary Ellen. It has been suggested that he meant to associate the heroine of the poem with Peacock’s heroine. Still later, after Mary Ellen has left him, Meredith calls a succession of mad or degenerate women in his books “Marian.”

9. Hogg never seemed to follow his minister’s advice and associated all his life with “advanced” women. So did Peacock, feeling, in the words of his own fictional character, “I can answer for men, Miss Melincourt, that there are some, many I hope, who can appreciate justly that most heavenly of earthly things, an enlightened female mind; whatever may be thought by the pedantry that envies, the foppery that fears, the folly that ridicules, or the wilful blindness that will not see its loveliness.” (Melincourt: Works, 2, p. 167.)

10. It is hard for us not to wonder at the conventions of Victorian domestic address. Here is a fictional episode from Charlotte Yonge’s Heartsease, which Mary Ellen read. A young couple has been married for a few weeks and is just coming home to meet his relatives for the first time. The husband is the younger son, not technically entitled, according to Victorian usage, to be called “Mr. Martindale”; he would be called “Mr. Arthur.”

“I am glad I have seen Mr. John Martindale,” sighed she.

“Don’t call him so here. Ah! I meant to tell you you must not Mr. Martindale me here. John is Mr. Martindale.”

“And what am I to call you?”

“By my name, of course.”

“Arthur! Oh! I don’t know how.”

“You will soon. And if you can help shrinking when my aunt kisses you, it will be the better for us. . . .”

11. As an index of Peacock’s own views on female dress and nudity, we may perhaps consult Mr. Crotchet, in Crotchet Castle:

MR. CROTCHET: Sir, ancient Sculpture is the true school of modesty. But where the Greeks had modesty, we have cant; . . . And, sir, to show my contempt for cant in all its shapes, I have adorned my house with the Greek Venus, in all her shapes, and am ready to fight her battle against all the societies that ever were instituted for the suppression of truth and beauty.

THE REV. DR. FOLLIOTT: My dear sir, I am afraid you are growing warm. Pray be cool. Nothing contributes so much to good digestion as to be perfectly cool after dinner.

MR. CROTCHET: Sir, the Lacedaemonian virgins wrestled naked with young men: and they grew up, as the wise Lycurgus had foreseen, into the most modest of women, and the most exemplary of wives and mothers.

THE REV. DR. FOLLIOTT: Very likely sir; but the Athenian virgins did no such things, and they grew up into wives who stayed at home,—stayed at home sir; and looked after the husband’s dinner,—his dinner, sir, you will please to observe.

MR. CROTCHET: And what was the consequence of that, sir? that they were such very insipid persons that the husband would not go home to eat his dinner, but preferred the company of some Aspasia, or Lais.

THE REV. DR. FOLLIOTT: Two very different persons, sir, give me leave to remark.

MR. CROTCHET: Very likely, sir; but both too good to be married in Athens.

THE REV. DR. FOLLIOTT: Sir, Lais was a Corinthian.

MR. CROTCHET: ‘Od’s vengeance, sir, some Aspasia and any other Athenian name of the same sort of person you like—

THE REV. DR. FOLLIOTT: I do not like the sort of person at all: the sort of person I like, as I have already implied, is a modest woman, who stays at home and looks after her husband’s dinner.

MR. CROTCHET: Well, sir, that was not the taste of the Athenians. They preferred the society of women who would not have made any scruple about sitting as models to Praxiteles; as you know, sir, very modest women in Italy did to Canova: one of whom, an Italian countess, being asked by an English lady, “how she could bear it?” answered, “Very well; there was a good fire in the room.”

THE REV. DR. FOLLIOTT: Sir, the English lady should have asked how the Italian lady’s husband could bear it. The phials of my wrath would overflow if poor dear Mrs. Folliott—: sir, in return for your story, I will tell you a story of my ancestor, Gilbert Folliott. The devil haunted him, as he did Saint Francis, in the likeness of a beautiful damsel; but all he could get from the exemplary Gilbert was an admonition to wear a stomacher and longer-petticoats.

MR. CROTCHET: Sir, your story makes for my side of the question. It proves that the devil, in the likeness of a fair damsel, with short petticoats and no stomacher, was almost too much for Gilbert Folliott. The force of the spell was in the drapery.

THE REV. DR. FOLLIOTT: Bless my soul, sir!

MR. CROTCHET: Give me leave, sir, Diderot. . . .

THE REV. DR. FOLLIOTT: . . . Sir, Diderot is not a man after my heart. Keep to the Greeks, if you please; albeit this Sleeping Venus is not an antique.

MR. CROTCHET: Well, sir, the Greeks: why do we call the Elgin marbles inestimable? Simply because they are true to nature. And why are they so superior in that point to all modern works, with all our greater knowledge of anatomy? Why sir, but because the Greeks, having no cant, had better opportunities of studying models?

THE REV. DR. FOLLIOTT: Sir, I deny our greater knowledge of anatomy. But I shall take the liberty to employ, on this occasion, the argumentum ad hominem. Would you have allowed Miss Crotchet to sit for a model to Canova?

MR. CROTCHET: Yes, sir.

God bless my soul, sir!” exclaimed the Reverend Doctor Folliott, throwing himself back into a chair, and flinging up his heels. . . .

12. The first of the two letters that follow (addressed to “My kind dear father”) is not, in fact, in Mary Ellen’s hand, and seems to have been copied by someone else (perhaps Peacock), perhaps with a view to suppressing some passage in it. Victorian families were most unscrupulous in this respect. It is just possible that the second letter (to “My own darling Eddy”) is written to her brother Edward rather than to her fiancé, for Victorian siblings were effusively affectionate and loverlike in their addresses. Both letters are unpublished and are quoted here by permission of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library.

13. Victoms. “I fear,” remarks his descendant, Lady de Montmorency, “that his early entrance into Service did not improve his spelling.” That Fighting Nicolls was a man of action is demonstrated by this account, from Colonel C. Field’s Britain’s Sea-Soldiers, pp. 237–239.

It was the year 1803, and the Blanche frigate, Captain Zachery Mudge, was cruising off the Island of San Domingo. Intelligence had been received that the French armed cutter Albion was at moorings in the roadstead of Monte Christi on the North coast of the Island, and an attempt was made to cut her out by daylight, three boats being sent in under Lieut. Braithwaite, R. N., but the boats were driven off by the fire of a battery which covered her. It was in the early part of November, the nights were long, and it was determined to take advantage of them, and make another attempt to cut her out under cover of the darkness. Lieutenant Nicolls of the Royal Marines volunteered to carry out the job if he could have one of the cutters and twelve men. His offer was accepted, and late on the evening of the 4th of the month, he shoved off from alongside the Blanche on his little expedition. He had not long left the ship when Captain Mudge, fully aware of Nicolls’ daredevil disposition, conceived the idea that he might attempt more than his diminutive force would possibly be able to do, for the object of their attack was lying within a hundred yards of a shore battery, mounting four 24-pounders and three field guns. He therefore called away the barge with her crew of twenty-two men, and putting Lieutenant the Hon. Warwick Lake, R. N., in charge of her, ordered him to reinforce Nicolls and take personal charge of the attack. The bigger boat having come up with the Red cutter—Nicolls’ boat—the two pulled steadily in together until the Marine officer was able to point out the dim form of the Albion as she lay close under the land. He had probably located her before he volunteered to cut her out and had taken her bearings. Lake, however, would not have it that the craft they could see was the one of which they were in search. He maintained that the Albion was lying right away at the opposite side of the Bay. However, although he was in command, he did not insist on the red cutter accompanying him when he headed his boat in the new direction, but told Nicolls to keep an eye on the vessel they had already discovered. This was about half past two in the morning, and though the bay was overshadowed by high mountains there was not very much time to waste if the Albion was to be captured and taken out before there was a glimmer of light in the East. Besides, there was now a favourable breeze for bringing her out, and this might very likely drop or change its direction at daybreak. Anyway, Nicolls felt quite certain that the vessel he was watching was the Albion and headed his boat towards her. An attack was evidently looked for—the Blanche had probably been seen standing off and on in the offing at sundown, and as soon as the red cutter was within pistol shot she was hailed by the French look-outs. Three rousing cheers was the answer from the little boat, whose crew, bending to their oars, dashed along-side. One volley from the Albion whistled overhead, a second badly wounded the coxswain, the bow oar and a Marine. Before the compliment could be repeated the red cutter had hooked on, and Nicolls had sprung on board. As he jumped on deck the French Captain’s pistol cracked and the ball pierced the skin of the Marine’s stomach, came out and lodged in his sword arm. Nicolls, or one of his men, instantly shot the French officer, and after a short scuffle with cutlass, bayonet and boarding pike, the crew were driven below with the loss of five men wounded, one mortally. So far, so good; the Albion was taken and Nicolls now had to get her out. But the battery close by could easily blow her out of the water, once the gunners became aware of Nicolls’ success. A stratagem was necessary to throw dust in their eyes, and Nicolls therefore ordered his Marines to continue to discharge their muskets in the air in order to produce the impression that the French crew was still holding its own, while the seamen of his little party cut the cables and got sail on the prize. All would have been well, had not the barge, attracted by the firing, now come bumping alongside. Lake, of course, at once assumed command. There was nothing for him to do, but he, by way of taking a hand in the proceedings, ordered the Marines to cease firing. Instantly followed the red flash and boom of the battery guns, round and grape shot came humming and whistling on board, and two of the Blanche’s seamen fell dead. But the wind was fair, and with both boats towing ahead the Albion was soon out of gunshot, and lost in the darkness.

There is no doubt that Nicolls had done the whole thing “off his own bat,” but Captain Mudge, in his report, put quite a different colour on the affair. He said that the Albion was “gallantly attacked” by two boats, Lieutenant Lake in the cutter, and Lieutenant Nicolls of the Marines, in the barge. Here are no less than three misstatements to begin with. Neither did he make any mention of Nicolls being wounded, although he had been pretty seriously hurt. The Admiralty, misled by Zachery Mudge’s “terminological inexactitudes,” naturally selected Lieutenant Lake, the senior of the two officers, for promotion, while the Committee of the Patriotic Fund, although they presented Nicolls with a sword of the value of £30 for “having commanded one of the boats,” gave Lake one valued at £50 for “his gallantry.” How the latter could have accepted it, without suggesting that it ought to have been given to Nicolls, is a question which can never be answered.

14. Of course, we all know that experiences described by novelists in their novels are not often verbatim accounts of things that have happened to them. Strictly speaking, it is not fair to infer Mary’s lifestyle from George’s books. At the same time, it is true that a writer has nothing but his own experience to fuel his imagination; when certain scenes or characters recur in his work, and when they resemble the people he is known to have known in his life, it is fairly safe to say that the latter inspired the former. We may say that the scenes in a novel are fundamentally true to the life experience of the author and superficially distorted. Meredith’s witty femmes du monde have different coloring, various personal histories. But consider how their names—Bella, Mary, Marian—play variations on “Mary Ellen.”

15. And Mary Ellen must have been like Bella and Mrs. Lovell; “She was a brilliant, witty, beautiful woman, thirty years of age, and a widow. . . . Meredith was immediately attracted by Mrs. Nicolls and she to him, but the mutual attraction was probably only of a physical nature,” explains Cousin Stewart Ellis disapprovingly (George’s second cousin and first biographer).

16. I have provided the translation for Mary Ellen’s essay that appears in the text, with thanks to Toni Roby:

LA MORT

Qu’est-ce que la mort? Ce voyage, cette peine inconnue au milieu de laquelle nous vivons, mais que nous craignons tous; et cette crainte d’où vient-elle? car nous la trouverons dans le coeur de tous les hommes, même dans ceux qui désirent le plus d’être morts; ils désirent être morts, mais ils craignent de mourir. Cette crainte n’est-elle pas une sentinelle que Dieu a placee à la porte de la seconde vie, ou comme nous la nommons l’autre monde, elle est là pour nous en défendre l’entrée jusqu’à ce que notre heure nous appelle et quand elle arrivera peut-être cette crainte abandonnera-t-elle la porte qu’elle ne devait plus garder quand on présente le billet d’admission signé du doigt de l’Éternel.

Ordinairement on regarde la mort comme un arrêt final, comme la fin de la vie, la cessation de tout ce que nous avons connu et senti: arrêt suivi d’un état nouveau où nous n’avons rien de ce qui fait notre bonheur ou notre malheur ici-bas; mais il ne peut en être ainsi, nous voyons que dans la nature toute mort est naissance. La plus vilaine corruption qui pourri [sic] sur la terre a-t-on fini avec elle? Non, et on voit au contraire que la terre bienfaisante la change en quelque nouvelle vie. Les feuilles de la jolie fleur ne tombent-elles pas pour donner place à la nouvelle vie du fruit? et le fuit ne jette [sic] il pas ses riches sucs pour que la graine prende [sic] naissance? et elle, quand elle tombe, n’est-ce pas pour créer une nouvelle vie? Or la nature qui par ses belles analogies nous révèle si souvent le surnaturel, ne nous montre elle pas l’infaillibilité de ce principe, que la mort est aussi la naissance. Quand nos âmes sont mûres, quand elles ont gagné des chaleurs ou des froids de ce monde tout ce [sic] peuvent ou les nourrir, ou les détruire, la nouvelle naissance ne brise-t-elle pas les liens qui ne peuvent plus la contenir; la mort n’est qu’un passage, un moment, mais elle est suivie de l’éternité! Et dans cette éternité autant de joie pour celui qui vient de naître, qui’ici-bas de douleur pour celui qui vient de mourir.

Mais, pourtant il y a beaucoup d’inconnu, de mystérieux pour nous dans ce passage de la vie. Qui sait quel changement, quelle division elle a pu mettre entre ceux que nous avons perdus de vue par cette action étrange: nous sont-ils enlevés à jamais? nous poursuivent-ils avec les mêmes regards d’affection qu’ils nous prodiguaient ici-bas? nous n’en savons rien, mais pour donner ce qui manque à la connaissance avons l’ange de la foi, et elle nous enseigne que Dieu n’a créé rien en vain, et assure qu-il ne nous a pas donné les affections que pour un moment ou pour un jeu.

17. The cookery book was probably The Science of Cookery, which is mostly in Peacock’s hand, but which Mary Ellen was apparently readying for print by adding a preface and more recipes. Among his wise sayings in the Preface:

It is said that there are Seven chances against even the most simple dish being presented to the mouth in absolute perfection; for instance a Leg of Mutton

1st—The mutton must be good

2nd—Must have been kept a good time

3rd—Must be roasted at a good fire,

4th—By a Good Cook

5th—Who must be in good temper,

6th—With all this felicitous combination you must have good luck, and

7th—Good appetite—the meat and the mouths which are to eat it must be ready for each other.

Clement Shorter, in The Sphere (vol. 64, March 25, 1916, p. 328), remarks of a cookery article of Mary’s, “Here Mrs. Meredith shows so amazing a knowledge of cookery that one half suspects that she inspired the book, although the fact that much of it is in Mr. Meredith’s hand-writing suggests a joint authorship.” This remark, in turn, suggests a second cookery manuscript, with more evidence of participation by George; the one from which I have quoted above is largely Peacock’s. But I have been unable to locate this second manuscript, which was sold at Maggs in 1916. The Maggs catalog describes it as extracts from an unpublished manuscript in Meredith’s hand, “extending to some 19 pages, and interspersed with occasional notes” by Mary Ellen.

18. Perhaps George is fibbing about Mary Ellen having written some of his early poems. Scholars since have preferred to think that he himself wrote all of them. His son and first editor, Will, who is not credited with having a reliable character, appears to believe his father in the matter; he at least believes in collaboration between his father and his father’s first wife. So, too, does Cousin Stewart, who says, “It is possible that some of the intervening numbers [of Household Words poems] were the work, wholly, or in part, of Mrs. Meredith.” It may well be, then, that some of the unpublished early poems were Mary Ellen’s, or part hers, but the only poem she is known certainly to have written is The Blackbird.

One poem George disowned, The Gentleness of Death, in Household Words for October 4, 1851, is reminiscent of Mary Ellen’s essay on the subject, and begins:

It is equally hard to discover her prose works. It would appear from Dickens’s plain reference to her work and from the circumstance that only George’s name shows up in the contributor’s book, that George was paid for both of them. Articles in British periodicals at this time were, of course, usually unsigned.

19. Mary Ellen was by all accounts an exquisite cook, but I do not know that we would care to drink her coffee:

The proportion of one ounce of coffee must be allowed to make two breakfast cups. When it is ground, mix it thoroughly with beat-up egg, so that each grain is equally moistened; then pour boiling water on it, and suffer it to boil up three times; let it stand a minute or two after the last boiling up, and it will be fit to pour out, requiring neither filtering nor straining.

Here are two of Peacock’s recipes for salmon:

2 T liquor [stock] boiled in 1 T of salad oil

a dessert-spoon of chili vinegar

1 dessert-spoon of Cucumber vinegar

a tsp of Capers, a tsp of anchovy sauce.

Mix, marinate salmon, mix sauce with breadcrumbs and cover fish. Warm.

mix oil, parsley, gherkin, shallot, and anchovy chopped fine, with ½ tsp cayenne sauce. Mix, rub over fish, wrap in buttered paper and bake.

20. Retrospective diagnoses are of course highly conjectural, but it does sound as if Meredith had an ulcer, to go with his ambitions and anxieties. It is certain that doctors subsequently recognized the nervous basis of his stomach affliction, whatever it was.

21. The “Anapestic Ode to Christ” is not printed in the Halliford Works, but its story is told under a section devoted to “Lost” works (vol. 8, p. 46), and is cautionary for those who have learned to be wary of the Biographer. In 1862, Peacock, in the bitterness of his spirit after Mary Ellen’s death, wanted to have this ode printed up, and mentioned it to Mr. L’Estrange, with whom he corresponded. After his death, L’Estrange asked Edith for a copy, which Edith sent him; she could not read it anyway because it was in Greek. “He translated the closing words,” the Halliford Biographer continues, “to show the uncomplimentary nature of the ode,” and evidently thought it too controversial for the projected edition of the Works. Edith was “rather shocked,” and, the Biographer speculates, destroyed Peacock’s Greek text. Mr. L’Estrange’s translation is all that survives.

22. One of the functions of these notes and of this work is to suggest an interpretation of George’s great poem, Modern Love, rather different from the one critics have usually given. It is most often seen as “modern” because of its psychological subtlety and daring theme—an adulterous marriage—in which Meredith, having achieved a remarkable detachment from his tragic experience, skillfully analyzes the mutual guilt of the pair in the face of Victorian moral attitudes—which would have unquestioningly blamed the woman. Rather handsome of Meredith, it is felt, to confess a measure of personal responsibility for the whole mess, and to express, for a Victorian, an impressive degree of charity. He seems to blame the inadequacy of the education of Victorian females (“More brain, O Lord, more brain”) and his own over-idealistic attitude toward Love. A magnanimous poem.

But George, as we shall see, was vindictive not magnanimous, and he was bound to have written this poem in a mood of self-vindication, for it would be read by people who knew his personal history. It is not a modern but a Spasmodic poem, in a mode then current.

What Meredith meant by “Modern,” in his title, is not that he was treating adultery—that is very old indeed. By “Modern Love” he meant sentimental love, the “morbid passion of our day,” as he called it. The narrator of the poem has too exalted a notion of Love, as something holy and enduring in a real world where real women are faithless and over-sophisticated. “Madam,” the heroine of the poem, like Mary Ellen reads French novels, emblematic of worldly cynicism.

Of course the Victorian reader had the same exalted notion of pure and holy wedded love that the narrator condemns in himself. Meredith is seeming to say, “Perhaps I was wrong to feel as I did, considering how it turned out,” and his readers would be sympathetic. They would secretly approve his idealism. You are too hard on yourself, dear George, we can hear them saying. Your sentiments do you honor. The woman was unfaithful. Do not apologize.

At the same time that the poem makes a serious statement condemning notions of Romantic love, it assuages George’s stung male vanity by making the narrator a bit of a rake with a mistress and a desk full of old “wanton-scented tresses,”—something George was apparently not. The ending of the poem, in which the wife magnanimously kills herself in order to make way for his pursuit of a new love, is sheer wish-fulfillment, but George may unconsciously have hoped it would suggest to his friends that Mary Ellen had left him for something like the same reason. It is sometimes more bearable to think of yourself as the sinner than the sinned against.

If notions of Meredith’s farsighted modernity—which, after all, he never showed again—are dismissed, it is easy to see the relation of Modern Love with the Spasmodic poetry, for instance with Tennyson’s contemporary “Maud” (1856), with which it shares the neurotic, overwrought, self-dramatizing hero. It is easier to see Meredith in this tradition than to explain why he was able to write a highly innovative and capable early poem and never come close to it again. Though he was to write some good poetry later, Modern Love is unique among his accomplishments.

23. Mary Ellen’s religiosity seems to have been an invention either of Cousin Stewart Ellis, Meredith’s first biographer, or of Meredith. In one letter to her, T. J. Hogg remarks, “Duty to Our Future Laureate, and Love to the child of Wrath, about to become a Son of Adoption and Grace,” which implies no more than that they were having Arthur baptized. Her letters and Commonplace Book are rather strikingly free of religious allusions, and her behavior was clearly not derived from any prevailing Christian ethic.

25. George was unlucky in this wife too. Marie Meredith, apparently a pleasant and docile woman, died of cancer when she was forty-five, after two painful operations and a long illness, during which she could not move or speak, and so met her end, with whatever emotions of resentment and despair, literally uncomplaining.

26. The affair probably did not begin until some time after February 1857. Meredith records in his notebook little remarks by Arthur, aged three years, seven months, to his nurse. This suggests that they were all sharing the same household as late as February, and that the marriage was therefore officially intact.

27. If she removed them. Ladies often wore no drawers in those days, for drawers, though known, were new in 1856, and were thought to be “masculine,” in that they imitated trousers. So the whole thing may have been simpler than we think. Not much is known about Victorian notions of propriety in dress for erotic occasions. Did they remove their clothing? Or only the better classes? Or only prostitutes? Much would depend too, no doubt, upon the season of the year.

28. This friend is a Mr. Evans, perhaps F. M. Evans, publisher of Once a Week. This, as well as later, friendly letters to the Chapmans, suggest that Mary Ellen remained on friendly terms with many of the Merediths’ acquaintance, even those who were in contact with George too, and this despite Victorian conventions of social ostracism.

29. “We are marrying Mademoiselle Corneille to a neighborhood gentleman, a dragoon officer, wise, gentle, courageous, a fine figure, loving the service of the king and of his lady, having about ten thousand pounds of yearly income, near Ferney. I am putting both of them up. We are all happy. I am ending up a patriarch.

“Our intended’s name is Dapuits. Brother Thériot must be happy about Mademoiselle Corneille’s good fortune. She deserves it. Are you aware that that child supported her father and mother for a long time by work done with her own little hands? And now she is rewarded. Her life is a novel.” Translated by Toni Roby.

30. The name Felix was perhaps appended to Harold after Mary Ellen’s death, for she never refers to him as Felix. But one hopes the name was prompted by the felicity he brought to her as well as to Henry.

31. “Has she been paid for her paper or papers? This passage in her note looks to me as if she had not been paid.” This passage in Dickens’s note looks to me as if Mary Ellen had written some things for Household Words, but what they were is not known.

32. Her affiliation to what we can call, for convenience, the eighteenth-century tradition, and the inability of either Meredith or his Victorian biographers to understand this, has led to the subtle but interesting distortions in the biographical account of Mary Ellen’s “elopement.” The actual circumstances of female life in the nineteenth century were such that an elopement was a frequent and almost the only way out of a marriage. Women, at least in the middle class, who were not protected legally and who had no financial recourse in case of marital difficulties—unable to own property and unable to get jobs—had almost no other way out of an unhappy marriage except to throw themselves on the “protection” of another man. (Neither aristocrats nor the very poor were constrained by the same realities, it would seem.) The “other man,” in fiction but no doubt in life too, typically deserted the flighty woman later on. This was the inevitable fictional outcome, given the moral aims of Victorian novelists and the expectations of the audience. It was therefore integral to the Biographer’s conception of the situation that Mary Ellen, who was known to have gone to Capri, must have eloped there, and it was also likely that her solitary return was owing to desertion by her lover. The figure of the guilty, repentant, and doomed wife emerges from the biographical tradition to form our view of Madam in Modern Love, and, by extension, our idea of what the facts must have been.

The actual circumstances were somewhat different. It appears that Mary Ellen simply left George, intending to live by her writing and on a small private income. Her involvement with Henry was not necessarily even related to her separation from George.

Certain other aspects of her mad “elopement” remain distorted, or at least mysterious; for instance, the custody and whereabouts of Arthur. Meredith’s earliest biographer, Stewart Ellis, reports that Mary Ellen did not desert him, but left him with Lady Nicolls, the mother of her first husband. This detail is repeated by at least two subsequent biographers, Sassoon and Clodd. But Lionel Stevenson, “believing it unlikely,” left it out of his “definitive” biography of Meredith. He felt it unlikely, no doubt, that a respectable Lady Anybody would babysit while her former daughter-in-law ran off on an adulterous impulse. Such, however, seems to have been the case, quite as Meredith’s Cousin Stewart reported. It is thought to be the case, too, by descendants of the Nicolls, who point out that while General Sir Edward and Lady Nicolls would never have approved of adultery, they were always most fond of Mary Ellen, and, of course, of their own granddaughter Edith, who stayed with them often. They were quite fond of Edith’s little half-brother Arthur, too, and enjoyed his frequent visits, and need not necessarily have known what Mary Ellen was up to.

This is a matter of some, if slight, importance as an example of ways in which biographical tradition subtly changes. The idea that Mary Ellen deserted her little boy has earned for her much undeserved opprobrium, and reinforced George’s pose of rectitude; and these attitudes, as I have argued earlier, greatly influence our interpretation of George’s writing, whether we mean them to or not. My version of how George came by Arthur (here and here) is merely conjecture.

33. The biographical tradition must again be questioned about the place of Mary Ellen’s death. It is traditional that Mary Ellen lived in Grotto Cottage, but Grotto Cottage is too tiny to contain her ménage, which seems to have included at least Harold, his nurse, and a maid; it is possible that she lived in another, larger cottage on the Oatlands grounds. It is also possible that Harold lived with Nurse Bennet nearby, not an unusual arrangement at the time. Grotto Cottage is, however, a poetically tiny and wretched place for a wicked heroine to expire.

34. George’s books are full of erring wives, and recastings of the story, for instance, from Richard Feverel:

The outline of the baronet’s story was by no means new. He had a wife, and he had a friend. His marriage was for love; his wife was a beauty; his friend was a sort of poet [read, “sort of painter”]. His wife had his whole heart, and his friend all his confidence. . . . A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in moral stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who, now that her first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn off, and her fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are not instinctively responded to, is thrown into no wholesome household collision with a fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme. Lady Feverel, when she first entered on her duties at Raynham, was jealous of her husband’s friend. By degrees she tolerated him. In time he touched his guitar in her chamber, and they played Rizzio and Mary together.

“For I am not the first who found

The name of Mary fatal!”

says a subsequent sentimental alliterative love-poem of Diaper’s.

Such was the outline of the story. But the baronet could fill it up. He had opened his soul to these two. He had been noble Love to the one, and to the other perfect Friendship. He had bid them be brother and sister whom he loved, and live a Golden Age with him at Raynham. In fact, he had been prodigal of the excellence of his nature, which it is not good to be, and, like Timon, he became bankrupt, and fell upon bitterness.

The faithless lady was of no particular family; an orphan daughter of an admiral who educated her on his half-pay, and her conduct struck but at the man whose name she bore.

After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin was left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love upon save a little baby boy in a cradle. He forgave the man: he put him aside as poor for his wrath. The woman he could not forgive; she had sinned every way. Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a pardonable transgression, for he was not one to recount and crush the culprit under the heap of his good deeds. But her he had raised to be his equal, and he judged her as his equal. She had blackened the world’s fair aspect for him.

In these stories, George indulges in punitive fantasies. The errant Lady Feverel, for instance, becomes a pitiful old crone, despised by her son:

Her heart had almost forgotten its maternal functions. She called him Sir, till her bade her remember he was her son. Her voice sounded to him like that of a broken-throated lamb, so painful and weak it was, with the plaintive stop in the utterance. When he kissed her, her skin was cold. Her thin hand fell out of his when his grasp relaxed. “Can sin haunt one like this?” he asked, bitterly reproaching himself for the shame she had caused him to endure, and a deep compassion filled his breast.

And the lover became “prematurely aged, [an] oily little man; a poet in bad circumstances; a decrepit butterfly chained to a disappointed inkstand, [who] will not put strenuous energies to retain his ancient paramour. . . .”

35. Will Meredith was George’s son by the second marriage. Will did not fare altogether well with his father either. Richard Le Gallienne, Meredith’s great admirer, describes a scene in which he met “Mr. Meredith’s beautiful young daughter, and his son, really a very modest and wholesome young Englishman, whom he had a rather cruel way of teasing and addressing as the ‘Sagamore.’ With a kingly wave of his hand towards him he would say: ‘Behold the Sagamore! Mark that lofty brow! Stand in awe with me before the wisdom that sits there enthroned . . .’ and so he would proceed mercilessly to improvise on the sublime serenity of Wise Youth, seated there so confidently at the top of the world, till the poor tortured Sagamore would blush to the roots of his hair.”

36. Here are some of Peacock’s recipes Edith printed in her book Fancy Cookery:

WATER SOUCHY

Ingredients

Fish, Perch or Flounders.

Fish Liquor.

Four Parsley plants, roots and leaves.

One teaspoonful of grated Horse-radish.

One teaspoonful of Shalot Vinegar.

One teaspoonful of Cayenne Sauce.

One teaspoonful of Walnut Ketchup.

Stew the fish slowly, in just enough fish liquor to cover them, with the parsley, the horse-radish and above sauces. When the fish are done, lay them in a deep dish, with a teaspoonful of chopped parsley; strain the liquor in which the fish were cooked over them, and serve, adding a little more fish liquor to them if there is not enough left after the cooking to cover them.

FILETS DE BOEUF AUX HUITRES

Ingredients

One pound of Fillet Steak.

One Spanish Onion.

Two pickled Walnuts.

Two tablespoonfuls of Mushroom Ketchup.

One dessertspoonful of Walnut Ketchup.

One teaspoonful of Worcester Sauce.

One dozen Oysters.

One ounce of Butter.

Half an ounce of Flour.

Mix the butter and flour together in a stewpan; peel and chop up the onion, cut up the walnuts, put them into the stewpan, also the ketchup and worcester sauce. Lay the steak on these and let it stew for an hour, turning it every twenty minutes; it must not boil. Just before serving, put in the oysters, bearded, with their liquor strained through a fine strainer.

MINCED VEAL

Ingredients

One pound Minced Veal.

One tablespoonful of Mushroom Ketchup.

The grated peel of half a Lemon.

One teaspoonful of Cayenne Sauce.

One blade of Mace.

Half pint of Stock.

Two dozen of Oysters.

Sippets of Toast.

Mince the veal and make it hot in the stock with the ketchup, cayenne sauce, lemon peel, and mace. When thoroughly hot, take out the mace; scald the oysters in their own liquor, taking off the beards; put the mince on a hot dish, the oysters in the centre and the sippets of toast round.

ATHENIAN EEL AND SAUCE

Ingredients

Half a pint of good Stock.

One tablespoonful of Mushroom Ketchup.

One tablespoonful of Onion Vinegar.

One mustardspoonful of Mustard.

One dessertspoonful of Shalot Vinegar.

One dessertspoonful of Anchovy Sauce.

One dessertspoonful of Worcester Sauce.

Marjoram and Parsley.

Mix these all well together in a stewpan, and when hot stir in a dessertspoonful of chopped sweet marjoram and a dessertspoonful of chopped parsley. Serve very hot in a sauce tureen; the eels, cut in pieces, to be baked, each piece to be rolled in oiled paper.

BREAM OR JOHN DORY PIE

Ingredients

Two pounds of Bream or John Dory.

Four Eggs (hard-boiled).

Two Shalots (chopped fine).

Two ounces of Butter.

Three ounces of Bread-crumbs.

Half a teaspoonful of Thyme and Marjoram.

One teaspoonful of chopped Parsley.

One teaspoonful of Anchovy Sauce.

One teaspoonful of Worcester Sauce.

Cayenne Pepper.

Salt.

One gill of Stock.

Cut the bream in slices. Mix the butter, breadcrumbs, shalot, and seasoning together, and make into small balls. Cut the eggs in quarters. Lay the bream in a pie-dish, and then a layer of egg and seasoning, balls, &c., and, if liked, some pieces of lobster. Cover with a crust of rough puff-paste, and bake in a moderate oven one hour and a half. Mix the Worcester and anchovy sauce with the stock, and pour into the pie, after it is baked. A glass of Sherry or Chablis may be added.

STEWED TROUT

Ingredients

One Trout.

Four Shalots.

One pint of Fish-Stock.

One ounce of Butter.

Two Cloves.

One teaspoonful of Salt.

A few grains of Cayenne.

One Carrot.

One Bay-leaf.

One tablespoonful of Basil and Thyme mixed.

A bunch of Parsley.

Chop up the shalots and carrot, put them in a stewpan with the butter and parsley; let them get hot, add the stock, cloves, herbs and seasoning; let all this simmer for one hour. Clean and wash the trout, tie round with broad tapes to prevent it breaking. Put the trout into a stewpan, strain the stock over it, add three glasses of port wine; let it simmer gently till the fish is cooked; it will take about half an hour. Take off the tapes carefully so as not to break the fish, reduce the stock it was cooked in, and pour over it. Hand a quartered lemon round with this dish.

SALMI OF COLD WILD DUCK

Ingredients

Wild Duck and the gravy left, or half pint of Stock.

Two glasses of Port Wine.

Four Shalots.

One ounce of Butter.

Half ounce of Flour.

The rind of one Orange.

The juice of one Lemon.

Half teaspoonful of Cayenne.

A sprig of Thyme.

Cut up the duck into neat pieces, and stew the trimmings of the duck in the gravy, with the Port wine, shalots, orange rind cut very thin, the lemon-juice, cayenne, and thyme, thicken with the butter and flour worked together. Stew this till reduced to half its quantity, then strain over the pieces of duck, warm all together without boiling, and serve.

37. Henry’s correspondence with Holman Hunt, from 1865 to 1896, attests a long, cheerful friendship and reveals the appealing personality of Hunt. The letters are intermittent but suggest a continuing intimacy. In 1874 Hunt sends Henry a “New Civil Service” ticket which F. G. Stephens has told him Henry wants, and says, “When I can get past some bothering tasks I shall come and look you up.”

An interesting letter of 1886 reflects on some sidelights of British art at the time. An exhibition of French paintings had been badly hung and the indignant French artists had looked to Hunt to support their complaints, but he has trouble feeling enthusiastic: “The impressionists whose works I saw in King St. two years ago seemed to me to be the kind of artists who make you declare that both Art and Nature are hideous and intollerable [sic] still of course they ought to have no reasonable grievance. A fool the name of Chesneau wrote to ask me to go and see the works: when I went . . . I could really scarcely believe that he was serious in speaking of them as deserving attention.”

Hunt was at this time engaged in a public altercation, via newspaper correspondence, regarding the Royal Academy, which Hunt had always attacked as being too exclusive and unfair in keeping people out. Henry, one of those kept out, was vitally interested in this subject. Hunt writes to Henry that their side, the Independent,

has this weakness that directly any one of the body [of independent artists] becomes really popular the R. A. will entice him over and then the public will say “As the strongest go the independent group is confessed to be the inferior exhibition.” I am lugubrious because at the present time I see English honor so vitiated. Every one (with very few exceptions) acts for him self only—and when a glaring case of repudiation of all the pledges of a life time comes the world says “I don’t blame him. He did the best for himself.” Nevertheless I think it wholesome to fight the cause even tho we lose for the time. I believe a great crash is coming on Europe and afterwards men will try to reconstitute society on a firm basis—and what we do now will stand as proof how corrupt matters were in Art.

And gossip. If you go to Egypt this year, 1886, “you will meet bridegroom and his bride, G. F. Watts and the lady who has adored him for twenty five years. The world gets funnier as it gets more tragic.”

the long tension I suffered with that Jerusalem canvas, and all the lamentable consequences sleeplessness and incessant vomitings have so racked my breathing tubes that nothing but balmy and soothing air and life could afford me the rest necessary to allow me to recuperate. The constant drain on my purse nearly maddened me. Even now great bills come in, and I have to pay them when under ordinary circumstances I might expect payments that would more than free me from the losses I have suffered. Don’t say anything of this but I am teased out of my life by People saying “Oh I thought you were going to Egypt” as if I was doing them great wrong by not having kept my promise, and I don’t want you to think that I act waywardly without the guidance of reason.

You will be amused to learn that Wells has presented a great scheme of reform for the Academy to adopt, it was announced in last nights’ [sic] Pall Mall Gazette, and the writer speaks of it as the great project which he inaugrated [sic] and he adds that he cannot repine at the great pains he unceasingly took to bring about this grand end. (I quote from memory but it is at least as strong as this.) I am too lazy at this moment to get the paper, but as far as I remember the plan is to have 150 or more outside members of the R.A. who shall have special claims upon space for exhibition, and they will have the first chance of election as A.R.A.’s. It is amusing and it goes some way to confirm me in a suspicion that there is not much hope for England until it has met with tremendous trials and humiliation to shake the Almighty humbug out of it.

You will have heard of Watts’s marriage, and of his honeymoon in Egypt. The gay deceiver had been making love to several ladies, and he never let them meet. One now is in the greatest distress, confined to her bed. She had courted him for years and she did not know of the existence of this rival.

Yours affectionately,

W. Holman Hunt

It is in 1894 that he writes after the scarf, which not Henry but another friend managed to procure for him, as he writes to Henry later. Henry is evidently involved in writing another book on ceramics, which prompts from Hunt the startling remark, “Your book, judging from your previous volume, cannot but be extremely precious and beautiful, yet I do begrudge the time it will take from you, which otherwise would be spent in poetic work.” Perhaps to Hunt, painting and drawing is “poetic work.” Hunt is, as usual, discouraged about the state of the world: “Half the rule of the world is in the hands of newspaper young graduates, who learn the views that will be thought smart and state these smartly. . . . Now the only hope is . . . that the rebellious [emerging nations] will justify their independence by success. I have great admiration of heroism in war, yet I think the time has come for courage now to declare for its abolition by the union of all European states.”

NOTES