My Life in Middlemarch (23 page)

“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 he 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.

The chapters are also both deeply comic. When Ladislaw declares, “There are certain things which a man can only go through once in his life; and he must know some time or other that the best is over with him,” or when he feels, wildly, that something must hinder their parting—“some miracle, clearly nothing in their own speech”—Eliot strikes a distinct note of humor, distancing her authorial self from the consciousness of her protagonists. But this humor is not necessarily something a young reader appreciates. I know I didn’t. When I read these passages in my early twenties they seemed entirely fraught, and not at all funny. The way that
Ladislaw feels is the way I felt during my first serious love affair, with a fellow student toward the end of my time at Oxford, when our impending parting was built into the drama of our days together. (He sent me poems not by Shelley but by Baudelaire, whom I am sure Ladislaw would have approved had their dates lined up.) There is a self-involved intensity to young love that cannot imagine the world without it, and it’s one of the peculiarities of modern life that—unlike Dorothea and Ladislaw—young people go through that experience with a residual consciousness that this love affair will not be their last. Many of us do not end up marrying—or staying married to—the person we loved in school or college. But even with this awareness of young love’s transience, it’s hard at twenty-one or at twenty-three to imagine that love might strike us just as intensely later in life, too—even when we’re middle-aged, and in spite of gray hairs, as Eliot put it.

In the fall of 1872, Eliot wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, with whom she had developed a rewarding epistolary relationship, to caution her against thinking that the Dorothea-Casaubon marriage was drawn from her own experience. “Impossible to conceive any creature less like Mr. Casaubon than my warm, enthusiastic husband, who cares much more for my doing than for his own, and is a miracle of freedom from all author’s jealousy and all suspicion,” Eliot went on. Sometimes in his own letters Lewes did compare himself comically to Casaubon, referring to his unfinished work,
Problems of Life and Mind,
as “the Key to All Psychologies.” Eliot he cast as Dorothea, who, Lewes told Blackwood, “is more like her creator than anyone else and more so than any other of her creations.”

But for all Lewes’s comical affectation of seeing himself
represented in the toiling scholar it seems unlikely that he missed the tribute that Eliot made to him in the bright portrait of Ladislaw. Ladislaw is not entirely Lewes; he lacks Lewes’s abundant generosity of spirit, and he does not share Lewes’s miraculous deficit of egoism in the primary relation of his life. But there is enough of Lewes in Ladislaw—who is disparaged for lightness, frivolity, foreignness, and dilettantism—to suggest that Eliot meant him to be her beloved’s vindication. No wonder Eliot loved the character she created. In Ladislaw, she reimagined the aging, unprepossessing Lewes as a young, handsome, passionate lover. Or perhaps in the loving eyes of Eliot Lewes simply was all those things, whatever he might have looked like to others.

O
F
course, they never married. Former friends and acquaintances were aghast at Eliot’s departure for Weimar with Lewes, and cold upon her return. George Combe, the phrenologist who had previously examined Eliot’s head and detected only low degrees of “amativeness,” or sexual feeling, demanded to know whether there was any madness in her family. Cara Bray, Eliot’s close friend, was a long time coming round. To Cara, Eliot wrote an eloquent defense, saying, “If there is any one action or relation of my life which is and always has been profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr. Lewes.” The tears shed in the rooms on Cambridge Street show the gravity with which Eliot regarded her choice. “Light and easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically,” she continued, with a touch of proud sarcasm. “Women who are satisfied with such ties do
not
act as
I have done—they obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner.”

Being excluded from dinner parties turned out not to be such a bad thing. Their life together took its own course, free of the necessity to observe propriety. They read widely, wrote copiously, talked endlessly. They traveled often, sometimes to the English seaside, sometimes on tours through Italy. “How I worship his good humour, his good sense, his affectionate care for everyone who has claims on him!” Eliot wrote in her journal in 1865. An American visitor to the Priory, the writer Annie Fields, wrote of being taken by Lewes into the room in which he worked, where he drew back a curtain obscuring some shelves, upon which the bound manuscripts of Eliot’s novels were arranged. “She was his chief topic of conversation, the pride and joy of his life, and it was quite evident that she returned his ardent devotion with a true love,” Fields recalled.

My favorite image of Eliot and Lewes is provided by a neighbor who used to see them out walking Pug, and reported, Mrs. Cadwallader-like, “They were both very unattractive people to look upon, and they used to wander about the neighbourhood, the biggest pair of frights that ever was, followed by a shaggy little dog who could do tricks.” The censorious glimpse from behind the net curtain is a peculiarly English phenomenon, and I derive delicious pleasure from the two Georges’ carelessness about the judgment delivered by smaller minds and smaller hearts than their own.

To later generations untroubled by the notion of cohabitation, Eliot and Lewes provide a model of coupled contentment. The
critic Phyllis Rose has written that “the Leweses managed to be as happy together for the twenty-four years they lived together as any two people I have heard of outside fantasy literature.” Robert Lowell, in an unrhymed sonnet about George Eliot, called their union “Victorian England’s one true marriage.”

I’m inclined to join in this celebration of Eliot and Lewes’s life together, and I cherish their late love all the more because it was not until I was thirty-five that I met the man who was to become my husband—a kind, optimistic man whose strengths include the gentle power of making me feel beloved. He is a writer, too, and on those days when we are working in different corners of our house, or traveling together for research, or reading one another’s work before any other editor has seen it, I think I have a glimpse of what Eliot and Lewes’s writerly companionability must have been like: “working, reading, correcting proofs, traveling, entertaining, receiving and writing letters, planning literary projects, worrying, doubting their powers, experiencing a delicious hypochondria,” as Elizabeth Hardwick described it, with almost concupiscent precision. Hardwick was married to Robert Lowell when she wrote her essay on Eliot, and in her description of Victorian literary couples—“Before the bright fire at tea-time, we can see these high-strung men and women clinging together, their inky fingers touching”—there seems to be a touch of admiring identification, too. It would be hard to find a happier model for a writers’ marriage than that of Eliot and Lewes.

They were unconventional, and unashamed to be so, but Eliot didn’t remain unmarried as a feminist act, or as deliberate social defiance. It is difficult to appreciate today the boldness that it took to make her choice, which met with such widespread censure from
close friends as well as from titillated onlookers. She became notorious in an age when notoriety could not be transformed by the alchemy of public relations into a tarnished badge of honor, and in later years she would write of herself ruefully as “the criminal usually known under the name of George Eliot.”

Eliot was not at all opposed to the institution of marriage. She took very seriously its commitment—“its demand for self-suppression and tolerance,” as she characterized it in
Middlemarch.
But she believed that there was a limit to the degree of self-suppression and tolerance that even marriage could demand. In
Middlemarch,
Eliot dramatizes the question of how much a woman should submit in marriage by showing Dorothea wrestling with a dilemma: should she agree to continue her husband’s work on his behalf after his death? “She pictured to herself the days, and months, and years which she must spend in sorting what might be called shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins—sorting them as food for a theory which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child,” Eliot writes. Dorothea is spared the necessity of promising Casaubon that she will submit: he dies before she is able to. Appalled by the discovery of his jealous codicil, she declines to look anymore at his documents. “The living, suffering man was no longer before her to awaken her pity: there remained only the retrospect of painful subjection to a husband whose thoughts had been lower than she had believed.”

Dorothea is saved by Casaubon’s death, but Eliot also believed that a marriage could be dead while both partners were still living. In a critique of
Jane Eyre
she made when she was in her late twenties, she wrote, “All self-sacrifice is good—but one would like it to
be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcase.” We might wish that the young Eliot had extended a little more sympathy to poor Bertha Mason, the unfortunate Mrs. Rochester, but her perspective upon matrimony—viewing it not as an eternal sacrament, but as a construct of sometimes erring law—anticipated the way she would later regard Lewes’s obsolete union with Agnes. In 1855, a year after she and Lewes took off together to Weimar, Eliot wrote a review for the
Leader
of a biography of John Milton, by Thomas Keightley. In it, she addressed Milton’s
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,
approvingly quoting Milton’s wish “not that licence and levity and unconsented breach of faith should herein be countenanced, but that some conscionable and tender pity might be had of those who have unwarily, in a thing they never practised before, made themselves the bondmen of a luckless and helpless matrimony.”