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PARTISAN REVIEW
Carlyles, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Middleton Murry and Katherine
Mansfield-the literary couple, that peculiar English domestic manu–
facture, useful no doubt in a country with difficult winters. The damp
window outside and within, before the bright fire at tea-time, we can
see these high-strung men and women clinging together, their inky
fingers touching. No "partnership" was more fantastic than that of
George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. Heroic, slightly grotesque, nearly
the last thing one can imagine is that these two creatures would become
a public institution. Edmund Gosse describes the great pair driving home
in a victoria. "The man, prematurely ageing, was hirsute, rugged,
satyr-like, gazing vivaciously to left and right; this was George Henry
Lewes. His companion was a large, thickset sybil, dreamy and immo–
bile, whose massive features, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were
incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height of the Paris
fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense ostrich
feather; this was George Eliot. The contrast between the solemnity of
the face and the frivolity of the headgear had something pathetic and
provincial about it."
Her husband: George Henry Lewes. He was witty, lively, theatrical,
industrious, a very conspicuous figure in London intellectual life. Lewes
sometimes went about lecturing, liked to produce and act in his own
plays, and was successful as an important editor. As a literary man he
displayed the same animation and variety for which he was known in
the drawing rooms of his friends. To give but the slimmest idea of his
production one can mention farces by the titles of
Give a Dog a Bad
Name
and
The Cozy Corner,
a novel called
Rose., Blanche and Violet,
a large undertaking like the
Biographical History of Philosophy,
separate
lives of Robespierre and Goethe, books on the drama, innumerable ar–
ticles on literature and philosophy-this husband knew all about the
pains of a life of composition. Leslie Stephen speaks of Lewes as "one
of the most brilliant of the literary celebrities of the time."
Lewes was not exactly the person a match-maker would seize upon
as a suitable husband for George Eliot. There is a marked strain of
recklessness and indiscretion in his charm; he was, as a temperament,
extremely informal-Jane Carlyle called him "the Ape" and found
him
"the most amusing little fellow in the world." Lewes was not a hand–
some man, indeed he was "the ugliest man in London," according to
Douglas Jerrold. George Eliot herself was somewhat put off by his un–
important appearance and had prejudice in that direction to overcome
before she could entirely accept him. The impression he made was an
odd one, well enough perhaps for literary circles but not up to snuff
for conventional social life. "He had long hair and his dress was an un-
