The drawing room at the Priory was long and bow-windowed, and underfurnished by the tastes of the times; a room in which many people could stand but not many sit. Lewes kept up a flow of talk, greeting his guests and making people laugh off in the corners, but the novelist herself didn’t participate in anything like a general conversation. She sat instead at the room’s very center, in a chair across from the fireplace, to which her visitors were led up, one at a time. James’s account of his own initial entrée remains evocative: “I had my turn at sitting beside her and being conversed with in a low, but most harmonious tone; and bating a tendency to aborder only the highest themes I have no fault to find with her.” Every record agrees with his sense of the hushed elevation of the Leweses’ household; Dickens wrote to them, only half-jokingly, that he hoped “to attend service.”
Nor was he the only one. Almost anyone with a claim to distinction might appear in Regent’s Park, and Lewes kept an occasional record of those who did. The painter Edward Burne-Jones came regularly, so did Anthony Trollope, and on one Sunday the guests included both the historian Lord Acton and the military hero Sir Garnet Wolseley, who would later become commander-in-chief of the British army and a friend of James’s own. James himself remembered a conversation with the philosopher Herbert Spencer, with whom the young Mary Ann Evans had once been in love. Many of George Eliot’s visitors left an account of her talk, and as James did, they noted first the music of her voice, and then the force of her ideas, the details of what she said about Spain or truth or God. Most callers also recorded their impression of her looks. She was famously horse-faced; though they often said she wasn’t as plain as they had expected.
About that the young James was only a partial exception. One of the things he most wanted on his first adult trip to England was the chance to meet her, and in May 1869 he got it. Grace Norton was a friend of the older writer’s, and brought James along to call. But their visit coincided with a medical emergency. Lewes’s son Thornton, who would soon die of tuberculosis of the spine, lay writhing in agony in the drawing room, and James almost immediately went in search of a doctor. Still, he saw enough in those few minutes to describe George Eliot to his father, a description that begins in callow convention and then reverses itself. She had a dull eye and a mouth of crooked teeth, but her speech soon began to charm him with an “underlying world of reserve, knowledge, pride and power,” and by the time he left, he thought her the greatest woman he had ever met. Almost ten years later he went with one of the Leweses’ country neighbors for a rainy afternoon at their house in Surrey, and in his autobiography turned the moment into an anecdote at his own expense. His friends had sent the two volumes of The Europeans ahead, but no one referred to it and he soon realized that the Leweses would be happier alone. At the end of the visit James stood ready to climb into the carriage when Lewes gestured for him to wait, and then appeared at the door with the books in his hand, begging him to “take them away, please, away, away!” James left believing they hadn’t connected “book with author, or author with visitor,” but in truth they had other things to worry about. Lewes had been ill for months, and in just a few weeks would be dead.
George Eliot probably read some of James’s early stories and essays, but I think it’s unlikely she read his reviews of her own work. They are just hedged enough to make me suspect that Lewes held them back. In his seventies James wrote with full-throated admiration of the effect her books had had upon him. To read Middlemarch was to be soaked through with some sustaining essence, and “we of the faith” went to her not only for the pleasures of narrative but also for lessons in how to live. Yet if the old James had shaken off what he called “the anxieties of circumspection and comparison,” the young writer found George Eliot’s influence strong enough to feel he had better resist it.
“‘Middlemarch’ is at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels.” So James began his 1873 review of a novel that he judged both “a treasure-house of details . . . [and] an indifferent whole.” He was still not thirty and had yet to publish any significant fiction of his own, but he already had a distinctive line in ambivalence and wasn’t shy about rolling it out. George Eliot’s panoramic account of an English country town offered too many seemingly separate plots, too many distractions from what he took to be its core. Its center lay in the story of Dorothea Brooke’s two marriages, and yet the novel appeared to treat her tale as but one episode among many; the character herself remained of more consequence than the action around her. James admitted that the tight focus he sought would have cost us many of the book’s best moments, and he admired its account of the soul-murdering marriage that the young doctor, Lydgate, contracts with the town beauty, Rosamond Vincy. He could not, however, reconcile himself to the way George Eliot had matched Dorothea’s story to Lydgate’s. She had given the book “two suns . . . each with its independent solar system” of orbiting characters, and yet the two stars rarely touch; the drama of their possible relations never quite catches hold.
James had similar reservations about George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, another book evenly split between two characters who hardly ever meet. One is the beautiful Gwendolen Harleth, who marries for money even while knowing of her husband’s mistress and their children, and the other is the title character, a young Englishman who late in the novel discovers his Jewish ancestry. Most readers have followed James in finding Gwendolen the more interesting of the two, but his account of George Eliot’s work depends upon something more than a preference for one narrative line over another. James had little interest in the multiplotted novel that stands as the mid-Victorian norm. The slow episodic meander of Dickens or Thackeray may have spelled enchantment to him as a child, but the adult’s taste rejected them, and over thirty years after reviewing Middlemarch he returned to the burden of his critique in the preface to his own Tragic Muse.
In that book James chose, for the first and only time in his career, to run the centrifugal risks of his Victorian predecessors by yoking together two originally separate narratives. He laid one scene in the theater, the other in English parliamentary politics, and worked throughout in the fear that the seam which joined them might not hold, that he might not be able to fuse these disparate lives into a unified composition. Painters had an easier time of it, he thought. The eye can move from point to point in an instant, and so they can give us two pictures in one; he marveled at the way Tintoretto could depict “without loss of authority half a dozen actions separately taking place.” But he could not envision so varied a coherence in prose, and in writing about The Tragic Muse he worries at the question until it resolves itself in one of his greatest phrases, his necessary if inaccurate description of Victorian fiction as a menagerie of “large loose baggy monsters.”
Middlemarch sometimes puts Dorothea aside for many pages at a stretch, and on some of her reappearances the reader does have to work to reconnect her to the rest of the novel. Still, we now find George Eliot’s special glory in precisely the spot where James thought her weakest—in the very plurality of her narrative, with its attendant sense of all her characters’ missed chances. Nevertheless, his review of Middlemarch tells us more about the book than any other contemporary account, and if the best of James’s own novels are in contrast marked by what he called the “deep-breathing economy” of a single story, it’s because he had what he saw as her own limitations before him. He wrote in conclusion that the book “sets a limit . . . to the development of the old-fashioned English novel.” That judgment holds. Members of the following generation like Hardy or James himself drew heavily on George Eliot’s work, albeit in very different ways; but in neither case did they imitate her sense of narrative structure.
James’s several pieces on her raise other questions as well. In 1866 the very young critic lamented her decision to run the plot of Adam Bede on past its climactic pitch, to tie the book off with fifty pages of reconciliation. Anyone could see what would pr
obably happen next—did the novel really have to spell it out? George Eliot made things too easy for us. The ideal reader he wished her pages had implied would be someone engaged enough to deduce it all for himself; an active, inference-drawing reader for whom no meaning need be underlined. This question will return to us when we consider the ending of The Portrait of a Lady, and James himself came back to the issue in a later review of Cross’s biography. The conclusion of Adam Bede exemplified the popular belief that a story should end with “marriages and rescues in the nick of time.” Yet such incidents as Hetty Sorrel’s reprieve on the scaffold did not belong to nature, “by which I do not mean that they belong to a very happy art.”
The American recognized that George Eliot’s reliance on such forms of resolution grew from something deeper than mere convention. She thought of herself as a teacher, and believed that what she called “aesthetic teaching” was the highest form of instruction. She also thought, however, that if it ceased “to be purely aesthetic—if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram—it becomes the most offensive.” Any lesson she might offer must develop out of the picture itself, rather than precede it. At the end of Middlemarch, Dorothea helps another woman at what she believes will be the cost of her own happiness. That moment of charity, however, is not the point of the narrative, but rather its product. It proceeds from the logic of the character’s development, and George Eliot’s words imply that she would have failed if it looked as though she had worked the other way around. But James thought that she did sometimes lapse, that she stylized her picture of life in order to make it fit her lesson. He saw her as an idealist who had “commissioned herself to be real,” and his account points to both the risks and the peculiar genius of her narrative voice, to the often intrusive commentary, usually in the first-person plural, that she offers upon her characters. It is a voice at once earnest and shrewd, not quite omniscient but certainly wiser than any of us in canvassing the choices those characters face. Even as he acknowledged the perils of her style, however, James admired the way that her best work pushed beyond didacticism, and he praised her ability to combine her love of an individual character’s “special case” with the force of her “generalizing instinct.”
His own books would be different. He thought she gave English fiction a claim to both rigor and respect that it had earlier lacked, but he did not simply want to fill her chair, and hoped his stories would “have less ‘brain’ than Middlemarch but . . . more form.” In The Portrait of a Lady he found that form by taking George Eliot as a negative example. James gave his own heroine the centrality he felt she deserved, and the novel comes to us without any rival plots or competing points of interest; he never allows our curiosity about Lord Warburton’s parliamentary career or Henrietta Stackpole’s newspaper to distract us from the subject of the portrait herself. Isabel isn’t always onstage, and she isn’t the only character whose mind James allows us to enter. But she’s what the other characters talk about, even, or especially, when she’s off the page.
James’s preface to the novel acknowledges what he owed George Eliot, but though he summons her heroines by name he also misquotes a line from Daniel Deronda. “In these frail vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection”; she had actually written, not “frail,” but “delicate.” Memory does that, though the slip might also point to James’s sense of both his debt and his difference. His early critics, Howells among them, had stressed that debt, linking Isabel to Deronda’s Gwendolen Harleth, comparing the difficulties each heroine faces in maintaining her independence of mind and spirit. And both Isabel and Dorothea are liable to the strictures that George Eliot herself laid down in her 1856 essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Written before she had ever tried a story of her own, the essay attacks what she calls the “mind and millinery” school of fiction, books in which the heroine dazzles with both her wit and her eyes; a girl whose nose and morals alike remain perfectly straight and fine. James’s Isabel has fixed her mind on bravery and beauty and truth. She sees herself as good company, she believes herself a pattern of consistency, and she longs for the chance to display what she never doubts is her own capacity for the heroic. Yet her story is not a silly novel, even if she does at first seem very young. The heroines George Eliot disparages never receive their comeuppance, but James knows that his own protagonist, with her scant knowledge and inflated ideals, would be an easy victim for a “scientific criticism, if she were not intended to awaken . . . an impulse more tender and more purely expectant.”
“Scientific” is an Eliotic word, one we can associate with the author who in Middlemarch took her metaphors from physiology and optics. “Expectant” is, however, all James, the word of a novelist who asks us to wonder, with Ralph Touchett, about just what Isabel will do.
6.
PROPOSALS
IN THE OPENING chapter of Middlemarch, George Eliot raises the question that shadows almost every heroine of nineteenth-century British fiction: “And how should Dorothea not marry?—a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes.” Marriage is the expected fate of young women, or at least of young women in novels, the point toward which all narrative tends. Austen does it, Dickens palms a few cards to make it come right at the end of Bleak House, and we all know about Jane Eyre. Dorothea will prove no exception, even if her choice of a husband does betray that taste for extremes: a parched scholar, a clergyman more than twice her age. Yet those marriage plots are an English oddity, and don’t have anything like the same purchase in the Continental novels that James himself admired. Balzac’s women find their careers in adultery. For them as for Emma Bovary a wedding serves only to inaugurate a series of love affairs, and in Turgenev marriage remains ancillary to other longings, to a passion for justice or truth. James was impatient with the Anglo-American expectation that a book’s last chapters should provide a grab-bag of “husbands, wives, babies, millions”: impatient with both the reader’s demand for such treats and the writer’s willingness to feed it. That’s one reason he admired George Eliot. For Austen’s heroines a wedding may stand as an end to experience, but for Dorothea it is only the beginning. She marries for the first time in the book’s tenth chapter, and in both that novel and in Daniel Deronda, a part of Eliot’s greatness lies in charting the inner contours of unions gone wrong, of marriages that should never have been.
James had a different specialty. His early books are often about weddings that don’t happen, novels in which nobody ever quite gets to church. And he begins Isabel’s story by making her choose to have a story in the first place. She decides to go to Europe with her Aunt Lydia instead of allowing Caspar Goodwood to foreclose her fate. Still, it’s not immediately clear that this new plot will be any different than the one she’s escaped, and when in the summer of 1906 James paced out the tale of his own intentions, he found himself remembering his difficulty in giving her another kind of narrative. “Millions of presumptuous girls” might affront their destiny each day, and yet what were the possible fates that awaited them? He wanted a heroine who would be the novel’s “all-in-all” but that begged the question of what he could make her do. “We women can’t go in search of adventures,” George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth had said, can’t become explorers or go out to hunt tigers, and when James wrote the Portrait, he had Daniel Deronda very much on his mind. He knew that Isabel’s range of action was circumscribed by her sex, and knew as well that those actions might seem mild in comparison to the masculine world of “flood and field . . . of battle and murder and sudden death.” Even a trip to Europe looked tame—an event too familiar to be interesting. Yet James had found a solution, and in his preface the memory of it makes his prose grow tense with excitement. He could fix the problem by placing “the centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness,” by resting his gaze upon her ever-developing understanding of her relation to herself. Her adventures would lie not in the outward
events of her life, but rather in her comprehension of them, in an inner drama that might, to her, seem as enthralling as any tale of pirates or caravans. To her—and to us insofar as James could make us care about her.
James here overstates his own originality. That attention to the unhistoric acts of ordinary life may not have featured heavily in the American romances of Melville or Cooper, but earlier English novelists like Elizabeth Gaskell or George Eliot herself had already put their narrative weight upon the heroine’s understanding of her own situation. James here bends American fiction in their direction, and his difference from them in the Portrait’s opening chapters is one of degree only. So we come back to a version of that question about Dorothea. Admit, with Ralph Touchett, that Isabel has intentions of her own: still, how should she not marry? She may have sent Goodwood away, but Gardencourt is the start of a new story, and when old Mr. Touchett tells Lord Warburton that he “must not fall in love with my niece,” it looks like a command to be broken. But as we hold this thick volume in our hands, we also know that his path, that anyone’s path, will not be smooth; we know that the drama will lie in Isabel’s resistance to the plot laid down before her.
Of course, Austen gives us many heroines who refuse a suitor or two, and yet none of them seem suspicious of marriage in itself. James’s heroine does, and he links her opinion of it to her admiration of the happily self-sufficient Henrietta. Isabel thinks the subject vulgar—vulgar to worry over, to be eager for, or even to think about. She believes “a woman ought to be able to make up her life in singleness, and that it was perfectly possible to be happy without the society of a more or less coarse-minded person of another sex.” None of the men in this book can be fairly described as coarse-minded, though James was perfectly capable of creating such figures; Morris Townsend in Washington Square is perhaps the best example. The term belongs to Isabel, and points to her conventional understanding of the difference between the sexes. What’s less conventional is her apparent willingness to accept the consequences of it: if that’s what one thinks about men, then why not stay single indeed? Isabel also believes, however, that “if a certain light should dawn she could give herself completely.” Yet she cannot hold that image of surrender steady. It always ends by frightening her, and her belief in that light paradoxically serves as a warning. It reminds her that experience has its costs. For she could give her self—could relinquish not just the body but the soul.
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