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Notes mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love.
I know it may be very dear—but it murders our marriage—and then the marriage stays with us
like a murder—and everything else is gone. And then our husband—if he loved and trusted us,
and we have not helped him, but made a curse in his life—”
If Marian Evans rejected the sanctions which society has imposed on thelove of man and woman
in the legal forms of marriage, it was not in awilful and passionate spirit. There are reasons for
believing that she was somewhat touched in her youth with the individualistic theories of the
time, which made so many men and women of genius reject the restraints imposed by society, as
in the case of Goethe, Heine, George Sand, Shelley and many another; yet she does not appear to
have been to more than a very limited extent influenced by such considerations in regard to her
own marriage. The matter for surprise is, that one who regarded all human traditions, ceremonies
and social obligations as sacred, should have consented to act in so individualistic a manner. She
makes Rufus Lyon say—and it is her own opinion—that “the right to rebellion is the right to seek
a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness.” Her marriage, after the initial act, had in
it nothing whatever of lawlessness.
She believed there exists a higher rule than that of Parliament, and to this higher law she submitted.
To her this was not a law of self-will and personal inclination, but the law of nature and social
obligation. That she was not overcome by the German individualistic and social tendencies may
be seen in the article on “Weimar and its Celebrities,” in the Westminster Review, where, in
writing of Wieland as an educator, she says that the tone of his books was not “immaculate,” and
that it was “strangely at variance, with that sound and lofty morality which ought to form the
basis of every education.” She also speaks of the philosophy of that day as “the delusive though
plausible theory that no license of tone, or warmth of coloring, could injure any really healthy and
high-toned mind.” In the article on “Woman in France,” she touches on similar theories. As this
article was written just at the time of her marriage, one passage in it may have a personal interest,
and shows her conception of a marriage such as her own, based on intellectual interest rather
than on passionate love. She is speaking of the laxity of opinion and practice with regard to the
marriage tie.
Heaven forbid [she adds] that we should enter on a defence of French morals, most of all in
relation to marriage! But it is undeniable that unions formed in the maturity of thought and
feeling, grounded only on inherent fitness and mutual attraction, tended to bring women into
more intelligent sympathy with men, and to heighten and complicate their share in the political
drama. The quiescence and security of the conjugal relation are, doubtless, favorable to the
manifestation of the highest qualities by persons who have already attained a high standard of
culture, but rarely foster a passion sufficient to rouse all the faculties to aid in winning or retaining
its beloved object—to convert indolence into activity, indifference into ardent partisanship, dullness
into perspicuity.
Her conception of marriage may have been affected by that presented by Feuerbach in his Essence
of Christianity. In words translated into English by herself, Feuerbach says, “that alone is a religious
marriage which is a true marriage, which corresponds to the essence of marriage—love.” Again,
he says that marriage is only sacred when it is an inward attraction confirmed by social and
personal obligations; “for a marriage the bond of which is merely an external restriction, not the
voluntary, contented self-restriction of love—in short, a marriage which is not spontaneously
concluded, spontaneously willed, self-sufficing—is not a true marriage, and therefore not a truly
moral marriage.” As a moral and social obligation, marriage is to be held sacred; its sacredness
grows out of its profound human elements of helpfulness, nurture and emotional satisfaction,
while its obligation rises from its primary social functions. It does not consist in any legal form,
but in compliance with deep moral and social responsibilities. Some such conception of marriage
as this she seems to have accepted, which found its obligation in the satisfaction it gives to the

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