Born, in London, 18 April 1817. At school in London, Jersey, Brittany, and Greenwich. For a time worked in a lawyer’s office; afterwards studied medicine. After some years spent in France and Germany, became an actor. Acted in London at various times, 1841–50. Play, “The Noble Heart,” produced in Manchester, 16 April 1849; at Olympic, London, Feb. 1850. Married Agnes Jervis, 18 Feb. 1841. Adopted literary career. Contributed to various periodicals. Wrote various plays and farces. Editor of “The Leader,” 1850. Met Mary Ann Evans (“George Eliot”), 1851; lived with her, July 1854 till his death. To Germany with her, July 1854. Returned to England, March 1855. Editor of “Fortnightly Review,” May 1865 to Dec. 1866. Died, in London, 30 Nov. 1878. Works: “Biographical History of Philosophy” (4 vols.), 1845–46; “The Spanish Drama,” 1847; “Ranthorpe” (anon.) 1847; “Rose, Blanche and Violet,” 1848; “Life of Maximilien Robespierre,” 1849; “The Noble Heart,” 1850; “A Chain of Events” (under pseud. “Slingsby Lawrence” with Charles J. Mathews, 1852); Comte’s “Philosophy of the Sciences,” 1853; “Life and Works of Goethe,” 1855; “Seaside Studies,” 1858; “Physiology of Common Life” (2 vols.), 1859–60; “Studies in Animal Life,” 1862; “Aristotle, 1864; “Problems of Life and Mind” (5 vols.), 1874 [1873]–79; Selections from the “Modern British Dramatists” (2 vols.), 1867; text to “Female Characters of Goethe” [1874]; “On Actors and the Art of Acting,” 1875. [Also several plays and farces, pubd. in Lacy’s Acting Edition, written under pseud. of Slingsby Lawrence.] Posthumous: “The Study of Psychology,” 1879. He edited: J. F. W. Johnston’s “Chemistry of Common Life,” 1859.
Personal
I was introduced to Lewes the other day in Jeff’s shop—a sort of miniature Mirabeau in appearance.
No one could say that he was handsome. The long bushy hair, and the thin cheeks, and the heavy moustache, joined as they were, alas! almost always to a look of sickness, were not attributes of beauty. But there was a brilliance in his eye, which was not to be tamed by any sickness, by any suffering, which overcame all other feelings on looking at him. I have a portrait of him, a finished photograph, which he gave me some years since, in which it would seem as though his face had blazed up suddenly, as it often would do, in strong indignation against the vapid vauntings of some literary pseudo-celebrity. But the smile would come again, and before the anger of his sarcasm had had half a minute’s play, the natural drollery of the man, the full overflowing love of true humour, would overcome himself, and make us love the poor satirised sinner for the sake of the wit his sin had created.
A sort of untamed lion he was in my day, sturdy, well set up, with a mop of curly, brown-coloured hair, worn long. He had a lion-like trick of shaking his mane—head, I mean—when the hair would fall round his face, over his collar and shoulders. Then he would throw his head well back with a vigorous jerk, and show a row of strong white teeth in a well-formed mouth, a broad forehead, and well-developed intellectual organs. I can see him now, standing just so at the piano, rolling out some jolly song, with powerful voice and good enunciation.
About Lewes’s ugliness there could be no two opinions. There was not a good feature in his face, yet his face as a whole, was one which you would look twice at and which had at any rate the merit of not being commonplace.
Few men of his time excelled him as a converser. He had a large fund of anecdote at his command, and could tell a story so as to render it interesting to every hearer…. The richly stored mind and the seductive tongue of Lewes made him acceptable to any woman who could be impressed through the intellect rather than the eye; his face was his greatest defect, though it is an exaggeration to style him, as has been done, the ugliest man of his day.
The most alert, the most universal mind of his generation, equally remarkable as a critic, as a physiologist and as a philosopher, a brilliant talker, whose dazzling wit played over an abyss of deep reflection.
Among others I fell in with that notorious group of Free Lovers, whose ultimate transaction was the most notable example of matrimony void of contract in our day. But though those who floated on the crest of the wave, [Lewes and George Eliot]—and whose informal union came to be regarded as a moral merit, even by the strait-laced, had the more genius and the better luck, he who made personal shipwreck,—[Thornton Hunt]—and from whose permitted trespass the whole thing started, had the nobler nature, the most fruitful heart, the more constant mind, and was in every way the braver and the truer man. He whom society set itself to honour, partly because of the transcendent genius of his companion, partly because of his own brilliancy and facility, was less solid than specious. The other, whom all men, not knowing him, reviled, was a moral hero. The former betrayed his own principles when he made capital out of his “desecrated hearth,” and bewildered society by setting forth ingenious stories of impossible ceremonies which had made his informal union in a certain sense sacramental, so that he might fill his rooms with “names,” and make his Sundays days of illustrious reception.
Mr. Lewes was quite as good in a company of three as in a company of thirty. In fact, he was better, for his verve was not in the least dependent on the number of his audience, and the flow was less interrupted. Conversation was no effort to him; nor was it to her so long as the members engaged were not too many, and the topics were interesting enough to sustain discussion.
Lewes had plenty of egotism, not to give it a more unamiable name, but it never mastered his intellectual sincerity. George Eliot describes him as one of the few human beings she has known who will, in the heat of an argument, see, and straightway confess, that he is in the wrong, instead of trying to shift his ground or use any other device of vanity.
Conceive a little, narrow-shouldered man of between forty and fifty, with long straight hair, a magnificent forehead, dark yet brilliant eyes, and a manner full of alertness and intellectual grace. This was George Lewes, whom Douglas Jerrold had once stigmatised as “the ugliest man in London,” averring at the same time that he had caused the chimpanzee in the Zoological Gardens to die “out of jealousy, because there existed close by a creature more hideous than itself!” But George Lewes, though not an Adonis, was certainly not ugly. The great defects of his face were the coarse, almost sensual mouth with its protruding teeth partly covered by a bristly moustache, and the small retreating chin; but when the face lighted up, and the eyes sparkled, and the mouth began its eloquent discourse, every imperfection was forgotten.
If any man could ever be said to have lived in another person, Lewes in those days, and to the end of his life, lived in and for George Eliot. The talk of worshipping the ground she trod on, and the like, are pretty lovers’ phrases, sometimes signifying much, and sometimes very little. But it is true accurately and literally of Lewes. That care for her, at once comprehensive and minute, unsleeping watchfulness, lest she should dash her foot against a stone, was never absent from his mind. She had become his real self, his genuine ego to all intents and purposes. And his talk and thoughts were egoistic accordingly. Of his own person, his ailments, his works, his ideas, his impressions, you might hear not a word from him in the intercourse of many days. But there was in his inmost heart a naïf and never-doubting faith that talk on all these subjects as regarded her must be profoundly interesting to those he talked with.
After George Eliot saw Lewes for the first time, she described him as “a sort of miniature Mirabeau in appearance.” As in Mirabeau’s case, the ugliness and the remains of the ravages of the smallpox were undoubtedly there, but Lewes had a fine eye and an expressive countenance, which when lighted up by a smile was far from disagreeable. However it was Lewes’s plainness of visage that led the Carlyles, as will be seen further on, to speak of him, though only for a time, as “The Ape.”
Lewes’s health had been often feeble during his later years. He had, however, a remarkable buoyancy of spirit, and was, till the last, most brilliant and agreeable in conversation. Whatever his faults, he was a man of singular generosity, genial and unpretentious, quick to recognise merit, and ready to help young authors. Though an incisive critic he was never bitter, and was fair and open-minded in controversy. His extraordinary versatility is shown by his writings, and was, perhaps, some hindrance to his eminence in special departments. He was short and slight, with a fine brow and very bright eyes, but the other features were such that Douglas Jerrold is said to have called him too unequivocally the “ugliest man in London;” yet in animated talk his personal defects would vanish.
Mr. Lewes was very clever, acute and vivacious, with an essentially all-round intelligence; a ready man, able to turn the talent that was in him to full and immediate account.
The last time that my father saw George Henry Lewes, husband of George Eliot (Miss Mary Evans), he was standing, like Collier, at Charing Cross, and presented a singular appearance, being dressed from top to toe in white, and the only thing about him that was not white was his red hair and beard.
History of Philosophy, 1845–46
A distinctive characteristic of Mr. Lewes’s work is, that it is written to prove that philosophy, properly so called, is impossible. It is a curious thing to find a history of metaphysics laboriously produced by an author who avows his belief in the utter futility of metaphysics, and who denies even the superior grandeur of the speculations through which that misty science leads. Most men, whether speaking or writing, are wont to begin a discussion of any subject by maintaining its vast importance and utility: Mr. Lewes writes his book to show that his subject is of no importance or utility at all. Any interest which philosophy may still retain, he holds to be purely historical.
Mr. G. H. Lewes’ “History of Philosophy” is in some respects more erudite and acute than the work of Mr. Maurice, but it is written too decidedly in the negative spirit of the positive school to inspire entire confidence, especially as it is a cardinal doctrine of this school that philosophical speculation is vain and profitless.
Mr. Lewes lacks the vocation of the scholar, which indeed is generally wanting in original minds. His history resembles rather that of Hegel, than that of Ritter. His review of the labours of philosophers is rather occupied with that which they have thought, than with their comparative importance. He judges rather than expounds: his history is fastidious and critical. It is the work of a clear, precise, and elegant mind, always that of a writer, often witty, measured, possessing no taste for declamation, avoiding exclusive solutions; and making its interest profitable to the reader whom he forces to think. There are many ideas in this book.
It was a more characteristically audacious thing to attempt to cram the history of philosophy into a couple of medium-sized volumes, polishing off each philosopher in a few pages, draining him, plucking out the heart of his mystery and system, and stowing him away in the glass jar designed to exhibit him to an edified class of students. But it must be admitted that the “History of Philosophy” is a genuine and a valuable study, although the author, not then in the calmer maturity of his powers, crumples up the whole science of metaphysics, sweeps away transcendental philosophy, and demolishes a priori reasoning in a manner which strongly reminds one of Arthur Pendennis upsetting, in a dashing criticism, and on the faith of an hour’s reading in an encyclopædia, some great scientific theory of which he had never heard before, and the development of which had been the life’s labor of a sage.
One of the chief notes of this book—in its earliest and latest form alike, its characteristic note—was its antipathy to philosophical theology, and to all the fundamental conceptions on which it rests. Mr. Lewes’s idea of the history of philosophy was very like the popular notion of the play of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet missed out. He did not believe in any higher or spiritual thought. All metaphysic was to him an absurdity. It was merely “the art of amusing one’s self with method”—“l’art de s’égarer avec méthode.” No definition can be wittier or truer, he thought.
This is undoubtedly a work of great importance and of considerable merit. The narrative is usually careful and sufficiently attractive, and the judgments for the most part well weighed and impartial. Some of the earlier articles on the Greek writers, the chapter devoted to the Sophists in particular, show a liveliness of style which brings us quite into the sphere of light reading; but there is plenty of good heavy solidity to counterbalance this. Yet the information and even the instruction is, as a rule, pleasantly conveyed.
Though occasionally superficial, and too much tinged with a sort of second-hand Positivism, had, as the qualities of these defects, an excellent though sometimes a rather treacherous clearness, and a unity of vision which is perhaps more valuable for fairly intelligent readers than desultory profundity. But it can hardly take rank as a book of philosophical scholarship, though it is almost a brilliant specimen of popular philosophical literature.
A work lacking in weight and authority in the philosophical part, but undoubtedly interesting in its sketches of famous philosophers, ancient and modern, from Thales and Pythagoras to Hegel and Comte.
Life of Goethe, 1855
Read in Lewes’s “Life of Goethe,”—a very clever and judicious book. The best we have had as yet, giving the great German as he really was.
It is by this biography, perhaps, that he is best known to general readers. As a critical biography of one of the great heroes of literature it is almost perfect. It is short, easily understood by common readers, singularly graphic, exhaustive, and altogether devoted to the subject. It is one of these books of which one is tempted to say, that he who had it before him to read, is to be envied.
Perhaps no other man then living could have shown himself competent to deal with Goethe’s many-sidedness—to discuss “Faust” and “Tasso,” “Hermann und Dorothea” at one moment, the poet’s biological and botanical discoveries the next, and to estimate at their true worth the speculations on colours, which Goethe held to be more calculated than his poems to secure him immortality. The book remains the standard life of the great Weimar sage in this country, and is popular in Germany, in spite of a vast Goethe literature which has been published since its appearance.
Problems of Life and Mind, 1874–79
Although Mr. Lewes has retained the name of Metaphysics, and offers his solution of what are universally called the problems of Metaphysics, he shows himself from title-page to colophon an unflinching adherent of the positive methods, and never travels a hair’s-breadth from his canons which bind truth to experience. In his claim to have swept metaphysics into the fold of science, he is never found to be using metempirical expedients. Whether or not he has domesticated the untamed metaphysical Pegasus, and harnessed him to the car of terrestrial science, we leave to the future to decide; but we can say at once that he himself has never mounted the wild charger into the realms of cloudland, and if he has really got Pegasus as completely in hand as he thinks, he himself is certainly safe on mother earth.
In the last chapter Mr. Lewes considers the place of sentiment in philosophy. What he has to show is that Sentiment, or Emotion, is one important source of knowledge. But what he says is more likely to impress his readers with its power of obscuring vision and obstructing research.
In the first volume Mr. Lewes was chiefly occupied with forging new weapons for the armoury of empirical thought: in this he shows us how they can be used. Chief among these is the theory of abstraction: a theory more or less perceived and acted upon by all empirical philosophers, but now wrought into a finished instrument of various application and exceeding power. But any theory of abstraction, it may be said, must be still only an affair of logic: and how shall a purely logical doctrine throw light upon problems such as those of Matter, Cause, and Things in Themselves? The answer is short: By dispelling logical illusions. And in fact Mr. Lewes lets in light upon a whole series of metempirical phantoms in a manner of which we can here only give the slightest hints. One feels at the end that one has travelled a good way along the road which Mr. Lewes truly says that the scientific study of metaphysic has to pursue, namely the substitution of intelligible for unintelligible questions.
These five volumes [“Problems of Life and Mind”] conserve the well-matured thought of one who has hardly an equal in recent philosophical literature in breadth and accuracy of knowledge, and to whose restless and versatile mind originality of conception was a necessity. Combining this volume of special knowledge, biological, psychological, historical, and literary, with a high degree of generalising power, he has struck out conceptions which, while closely related to the scientific ideas of the hour, are also far in advance of them. Thus he is commonly looked on as heterodox in biology, though some of his ideas, as, for example, that of the fundamental identity of all nervous structures, are slowly being taken up by specialists. Whether such a range of exact special information as Mr. Lewes possessed is compatible with the highest quality of philosophical synthesis may perhaps be doubted…. Throughout, the writer never fails to be luminous and stimulating in thought and picturesque and forcible in language. No student of psychology who wants to be abreast with recent researches will be able to dispense with a repeated reference to this concluding volume of the series. Though deprived of artistic completeness, it is a worthy conclusion to a literary activity of a remarkable range and of a uniformly sustained earnestness.
General
Execrable, [“Rose Blanche”] that is; I could not have suspected even the ape of writing anything so silly. Lady H. read it all the way down, and decided it was “too vulgar to go on with.” I myself should have also laid it aside in the first half volume if I had not felt a pitying interest in the man, that makes me read on in hope of coming to something a little better. Your marginal notes are the only real amusement I have got out of it hitherto.
I have a very high opinion of his literary judgment.
What man of our day has done so many things and done them so well? He is the biographer of Goethe and of Robespierre; he has compiled the “History of Philosophy,” in which he has something really his own to say of every great philosopher, from Thales to Schelling; he has translated Spinoza; he has published various scientific works; he has written at least two novels; he has made one of the most successful dramatic adaptions known to our stage; he is an accomplished theatrical critic; he was at one time so successful as an amateur actor that he seriously contemplated taking to the stage as a profession, in the full conviction, which he did not hesitate frankly to avow, that he was destined to be the successor to Macready…. There was a good deal of inflation, and audacity, and nonsense in it; [“Ranthorpe”] but at the same time it showed more brains and artistic impulse and constructive power than nine out of every ten novels published in England to-day.
Almost any one of the essays [“On Actors and the Art of Acting”] would have sufficed to prove that Mr. Lewes was a competent theatrical critic, and as far as Mr. Lewes is personally concerned, the whole volume proves little more.
He is, I think, the acutest critic I know—and the severest. His severity, however, is a fault. His intention to be honest, even when honesty may give pain, has caused him to give pain when honesty has not required it. He is essentially a doubter, and has encouraged himself to doubt till the faculty of trusting has almost left him. I am not speaking of the personal trust which one man feels in another, but of that confidence in literary excellence which is, I think, necessary for the full enjoyment of literature.
Of these critical writings the most valuable are those on the drama, which were afterwards republished under the title “Actors and Acting.” With this may be taken the volume on “The Spanish Drama.” The combination of wide scholarship, philosophic culture, and practical acquaintance with the theatre gives these essays a high place among the best efforts in English dramatic criticism.
Mr. Lewes was not only an accomplished and practised literary critic, but he was also gifted with the inborn insight accompanying a fine artistic temperament, which gave unusual weight to his judgment.
He originated no special line of thought. He was the bold usher of the modern scientific spirit, and his influence chiefly consisted in the unalloyed enthusiasm with which he pushed its premisses to their legitimate conclusion…. He had admirable gifts as a writer, whatever we may think of his powers as a thinker. His exposition was marked by a rare lucidity, and had the charm of interest, even when least satisfactory. Much of a Frenchman in many of his ways, he had the French gift of facile and happy expression.
Of course, writing thus much and on such a great variety of themes, Lewes was not always effective. All along, indeed, he contributed more to “the literature of knowledge” than to “the literature of power.” But whatever he wrote displayed a certain originality of view. Whether he was dealing with literature, philosophy, or science, he was never an echo of his predecessors or contemporaries. Lewes was no worshipper of great names, and had in a singular degree the courage of his opinions.
He was, despite his freakishness, probably the most highly-trained thinker who ever applied himself to the study of theatrical art in England. It was a happy chance which superadded to his other gifts that innate passion for the stage which is the condition precedent of helpful dramatic criticism.
