by Rebecca Mead
Lewes’s vivacity and informality impressed themselves upon others in even the briefest of encounters. In her biography of Lewes, Rosemary Ashton highlights a conversation between Thomas Carlyle and the much younger Lewes, as witnessed by a friend. During the interview, which took place on a hot July evening, Carlyle sat upright in a chair “with his deep stock and high waistcoat,” while Lewes lounged in an easy chair, “his frock coat thrown open, and revealing the greater amplitude of shirt front from the fact that he had no waistcoat.” He sounds like one of the Romantic poets he admired, conspicuously careless of social convention.
He was quick and clever. The novelist Eliza Lynn Linton, who was not fond of Lewes and thought him coarse and vulgar, nonetheless said that wherever he went there was “a patch of intellectual sunshine in the room.” His air of confidence rubbed some acquaintances the wrong way, among them Margaret Fuller, the American journalist, who described him as “a witty, French, flippant sort of man.” Lewes wasn’t French, but as a child he had lived in France and upon the Channel Island of Jersey, mastering the language fluently and without an accent; he retained an exotic aura amid his more stolid English brethren. In letters and in conversation he slipped easily from English into French, not for the sake of inserting a pretentious mot juste, but because he was equally lucid and at ease in both languages. (He also knew German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek.)
Lewes had grown up under unconventional circumstances, which added to his status as an outsider. His father and mother were never married. John Lee Lewes had fathered four children with his legal wife, whom he then abandoned in favor of Elizabeth Ashweek, Lewes’s mother, who bore him three children before being abandoned herself when George Henry was just a baby. As a small boy Lewes acquired a hated stepfather, and was obliged to move frequently—from Gloucestershire to Nantes to Saint Helier and eventually to London, where he went to a school described by a contemporary as huge and unregenerate, where boys were bullied by each other and kept half-starved by the masters. He did not go to university, though he did think of attending medical school, but by his early twenties he was making a very modest living through his writing. In a novel called Ranthorpe, published four years before he first encountered Eliot, Lewes drew on his own experience to portray a young clerk with “a passion for books—no matter what editions, what bindings,” who hungrily spends his last sixpence on a tattered edition of Shelley’s poetry.
Lewes’s bohemian manners and radical precepts were partly inspired by Shelley, of whom as a young man he had described himself as a worshipper, and whose biography he had tried to write when he was just twenty, a project that foundered because he could not get the approval of Mary Shelley, the poet’s widow. Lewes’s manners were also influenced by the customs of the theater, with which he had close links as a critic, a playwright, a theatrical translator, and an actor. Rosemary Ashton notes that his sympathetic portrayal of Shylock, whom he played in a provincial production as a young man, was highly intelligent and unusual for its time. (“I say if Shylock be not represented as having the feelings of our kind, ‘The Merchant of Venice’ becomes a brutal melodrama,” Lewes wrote.) One contemporary reported that Lewes had “a wonderful gift for dramatic representation, and could tell a story, reproducing the dialect and gestures of each actor in it, with lifelike effect.” He was at home in the theater in a way that made an impression on Eliot. A few weeks after their encounter in the Burlington Arcade, Lewes joined her, Chapman, and Herbert Spencer in their box at an inept production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and made jokes all evening at the actors’ expense. It could have been obnoxious, but Eliot found it amusing.
Their acquaintance grew at a trying time for both. Lewes had separated from Agnes, and later spoke of the year 1851 as “a very dreary wasted period of my life. I had given up all ambition whatever, lived from hand to mouth, and thought the evil of each day sufficient.” Eliot, meanwhile, was being squired by Herbert Spencer—and then smarting from Spencer’s rejection. In the wake of that experience, she was not inclined to fall in love with Lewes, or anyone. “If you insist on my writing about ‘Emotions,’ why I must get some up expressly for the purpose,” she wrote to Charles Bray from her summer retreat at Broadstairs in July 1852. “But I must own I would rather not, for it is the grand wish and object of my life to get rid of them as far as possible, seeing they have already had more than their share of my nervous energy.”
But Lewes’s good nature impressed itself upon her, and in letters to Coventry over the next few months she dropped his name with an increasing note of arch fondness. On passing on some literary gossip, she wrote, “I am frightened to have told you this, for everything I say to any one at Rosehill gets around by some incomprehensible means to Lewes—Lewes can tell you the whole state of your domestic affairs, if you like, of course with additions, if not emendations, by the editor or editors.” By the spring of 1853 the archness had dissipated, and her friends could not but have noticed his growing significance in her life. To Cara Bray she wrote, “Mr. Lewes especially is kind and attentive and has quite won my regard after having a good deal of my vituperation. Like a few other people in the world, he is much better than he seems—a man of heart and conscience wearing a mask of flippancy.”
By the autumn of that year Eliot had moved out of Chapman’s house to rented rooms in Cambridge Street. She and Lewes were discreet, but the degree of their intimacy would have been obvious to their more sophisticated friends. (A neighbor observed that Lewes called there every day; after his visits Eliot would be left in tears.) Discretion was dispensed with in July 1854, when Eliot boarded a steamer to Antwerp, destined for Weimar and what would turn out to be an eight-month tour through Belgium and Germany, the ostensible reason for which was Lewes’s research on Goethe. In her anxiety Eliot had arrived early to the ship, and spent twenty anxious minutes waiting for Lewes. “But before long I saw his welcome face looking for me over the porter’s shoulder, and all was well,” she wrote in her diary. From the deck they watched the sunset, and the sunrise, too.
Landing in Antwerp they checked into the Hôtel du Rhein and strolled through streets and squares, visiting the cathedral and the museum to look at the works of Rubens; in Brussels they bought cheap French novels at the market and walked in the Galérie de la Reine, an arcade similar to the one in which they had been introduced. Unlike some celebrated diarists and letter writers Eliot rarely describes sensual experience, and the general absence of such accounts emphasizes her braininess, as if she were divorced from the lower instincts. But in Brussels she tells of drinking chocolate, of taking “rambles in the morning, lying melting on our beds through the middle of the day”—moments suggestive of the wondrous and exhausting pleasures of the honeymoon.
She wrote to Charles Bray from Weimar, which she and Lewes eventually reached in the first days of August. “I have had a month of exquisite enjoyment, and seem to have begun life afresh,” her letter reads. “I am really strong and well and have recovered the power of learning in spite of age and grey hairs.” Even her predictable self-disparagement cannot obscure her radiant happiness.
“FEW women, I fear have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age,” Eliot wrote in her diary on the last day of 1857. She was thirty-eight, and even if today’s thirty-eight-year-old might hope to fend off an acknowledgment of middle age for another couple of years, in the mid-nineteenth century a woman was thought matronly at least by her early thirties. Eliot had long been taken for older than her years: as a thirteen-year-old student at the Miss Franklins’ school in Coventry she had been mistaken by a visitor for one of the Misses Franklin, who were about twenty years older. George Combe, the phrenologist friend of Charles Bray, thought the first time he met her that she was forty; she was thirty-one.
The notion of middle age as a distinct stage of life was a relatively recent concept; its onset was earlier than would be reckoned today, and much more of middle life wou
ld fall within it. (An American commentator writing in 1828 placed its outer boundaries at twenty-five and sixty, demarcating the interval during which one has achieved independence and acquired responsibilities.) Eliot did not regard twenty-five as middle-aged, but she did recognize that a shift from youth into something else happened not long thereafter. In her case, it was not an unwelcome progress. “One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy,” Eliot wrote to Sara Hennell, when she was twenty-four. Childhood, she contended, is only glorious in retrospect—to the child it is full of deep, incomprehensible sorrows, and old age is even worse. “All this dear Sara, to prove that we are happier than when we were seven years old, and that we shall be happier when we are forty than we are now, which I call a comfortable doctrine and one worth trying to believe.”
Eliot drew upon her intense recollection of the sorrows of childhood in The Mill on the Floss, and in that novel, too, she gave a defense of middle age, an argument for its virtues and usefulness. A man or woman in middle age, she said, could remember youth well enough to have sympathy with the troubles of the young, but had experience enough to know that those troubles would pass, however severe they might seem now. “The middle-aged, who have lived through their strongest emotions, but are yet in the time when memory is still half passionate and not merely contemplative, should surely be a sort of natural priesthood whom life has disciplined and consecrated to be the refuge and rescue of early stumblers and victims of self-despair,” she wrote.
Ladislaw is one of those early stumblers when the reader meets him at the outset of Middlemarch. He does not have a middle-aged priest-figure offering him kindly advice—on the contrary, the middle-aged priest-figure in his life, the Reverend Edward Casaubon, is disapproving and judgmental. But it’s not clear Ladislaw would listen to a more sympathetic authority figure even if one presented him- or herself. He is impetuous, mercurial, and very confident of his as yet unproven abilities. “He seems to me a kind of Shelley, you know,” Mr. Brooke says. “I don’t mean as to anything objectionable—laxities or atheism, or anything of that kind, you know … But he has the same sort of enthusiasm for liberty, freedom, emancipation.”
Ladislaw cuts a striking and unusual figure in the town of Middlemarch, with hair curling off his brow (“John Bull doesn’t do much of that,” one observer comments) and habits that make certain of the townsfolk compare him to a gypsy. He has a clouded, if not actually dishonorable, parentage. His grandmother was disinherited for marrying the man of her choice, an impoverished Polish musician, whom Mrs. Cadwallader disparages as “a rebellious Polish fiddler or dancing master.” His mother voluntarily left her family, too, though Ladislaw knows less about his maternal ancestors, at least at the beginning of the novel. Mrs. Cadwallader, who gives voice to the conservative outlook of Tipton’s gentry—and is, in fact, rarely very far off in her insights about character—calls Ladislaw himself “a dangerous young sprig … with his opera songs and his ready tongue. A sort of Byronic hero—an amorous conspirator, it strikes me.”
Being viewed as an outsider, Ladislaw defiantly embraces the identity. In one particularly striking departure from convention he leads a group of ragged children on an expedition to gather nuts, providing a feast of gingerbread and performing a Punch and Judy show with homemade puppets, as if he were a benign Pied Piper. Later in the novel, there is a rumor among residents of Middlemarch that Ladislaw is of Jewish descent—the ultimate in outsider status for a provincial English town.
Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel’s publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw—that she fell in love with her creation in a way that shows a lack of artistic control and is even unseemly, like a hoary movie director whose lens lingers too long on the young flesh of a favored actress. Lord David Cecil called Ladislaw “a schoolgirl’s dream, and a vulgar dream at that,” while Leslie Stephen complained “Ladislaw is almost obtrusively a favorite with his creator,” and depreciated him as “an amiable Bohemian.” Another grand man of letters, Henry James, was similarly skeptical of Ladislaw. James found Dorothea entirely credible—“we believe in her as in a woman we might providentially meet some fine day when we should find ourselves doubting of the immortality of the soul,” he wrote—but said that Ladislaw’s characterization was a failure, “vague and impalpable to the end.”
I find James’s failure to grasp Ladislaw entirely incomprehensible. (But then I think James was fundamentally wrong in his appraisal of Middlemarch, which he admired as “a treasure-house of details” but called “an indifferent whole.”) Ladislaw is very vividly drawn; what vagueness there is about him is a deliberate element of his characterization—an indication of his unformed future, as well as a suggestion of the persistent mobility one sometimes sees in the faces of the young before they have set into the contours of maturity. “Surely, his very features changed their form; his jaw looked sometimes large and sometimes small; and the little ripple in his nose was a preparation for metamorphosis,” Eliot writes, and anyone who has watched a young man go through adolescence will recognize this phenomenon.
“When he turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation,” Eliot writes. Like Lewes, who shone a patch of intellectual sunshine wherever he went, Ladislaw is charismatic and magnetic. He is capable of conventional charm, as his thoughtless flirtation with Rosamond shows, and one can only imagine what a spell he has cast over female members of the bohemian demimonde in which he has moved, beyond the pages of the novel, experimenting with opium and other interesting means of intoxication. But Ladislaw does not seek to charm Dorothea. Rather he adores her, and he does so long before it occurs to her to imagine that he might.
In depicting Ladislaw’s devotion to Dorothea, Eliot shows what it is like to be fallen in love with—the delight of discovering oneself to be the object of love, not just its troubled subject. Ladislaw was not manly enough for Henry James, who used that term approvingly to describe Lydgate, whose characterization he admired as “powerful, ambitious, sagacious, with the maximum rather than the minimum of egotism, strenuous, generous, fallible, and altogether human.” But Ladislaw’s masculinity is of an order that Eliot knew from experience to be immensely powerful in its own way. It is that of a man who can make a woman feel beloved.
Those who think Eliot dotes too much on Ladislaw miss this, and they also seem to miss the undernote of affectionate skepticism with which he is portrayed. Ladislaw’s youthful egoism and lightness of temperament are observed by the knowing eye of the novel’s much older author: “Sometimes when he took off his hat, shaking his head backward, and showing his delicate throat as he sang, he looked like an incarnation of the spring whose spirit filled the air—a bright creature, abundant in uncertain promises.” This is another of Eliot’s deliciously subversive sentences, worth the close attention of any would-be writer: it seems to be heading in an extravagantly sentimental direction, but then punctures its own inflated rhetoric with the simple, devastating word “uncertain.” No less than Fred Vincy, whose fecklessness is more categorically delineated, Ladislaw is a young man who remains unworthy of his projected prize, but is more than certain of his own worthiness.
The sixth volume of Middlemarch, “The Widow and the Wife,” is bookended by two parallel chapters, both of which depict charged encounters between Ladislaw and Dorothea. When the first encounter takes place, Ladislaw is still in ignorance of the codicil to Casaubon’s will that attempts to thwart a possible marriage between himself and Dorothea. He has come to say good-bye for what he says must be many years. But despite insisting that he must leave town, Ladislaw is not able to bring himself to do so for some weeks. He determines that he must see Dorothea once again before really departing—although, as he realizes, “a first farewell has pathos in it, but to come back for a second lends an opening to comedy.” By the time of the second encounter h
e has learned about the codicil and has discovered more about his family origins; this time, he says, he must bid her farewell forever.
Both scenes are masterpieces of misunderstanding, with Dorothea and Ladislaw speaking at entirely crossed purposes. In the first, Ladislaw has told himself that he might become worthy of marrying Dorothea if he goes away first, and he is anguished by the apparent moderation of her emotion at the prospect of his departure. Dorothea—who has been longing to see Ladislaw, but has barely registered that what she feels for him is love—thinks, mistakenly, that he knows of the codicil, and she interprets his coming to her as demonstrating no more than friendly feeling. “Something was keeping their minds aloof, and each was left to conjecture what was in the other,” Eliot writes.
In the second meeting, Ladislaw tries to makes it clear that he is beset by a forbidden love, but deliberately does not tell Dorothea that she is its object, leaving her to deduce what he thinks must be obvious. “It could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her that he would never woo her,” Eliot writes. Dorothea has by now begun to realize that she is attached to Ladislaw; however, she misinterprets his words. She does not realize that he is in love with her, but instead imagines that the forbidden love of which he speaks is for Rosamond, with whom she has encountered him playing the piano.
Both scenes are charged with sublimated passion: one critic, David Trotter of the University of Cambridge, has made the striking observation that a moment in chapter 54, in which Ladislaw rises from his chair, face and neck flushed with frustrated anger, “may be the closest the Victorian novel ever came to describing an erection.” And both scenes are powerful evocations of the intensity of first love: what one feels when one has no prior experience of either love’s sad dwindling or its satisfying maturation, and feels only its consuming heat.