She was already revered for her novels (even before Middlemarch was published in 1871-72 she was immensely famous), while he was an aspiring writer with little yet published.
Writing about Eliot in 1885, James described her as a women "before whom, at middle age, all the culture of the world unrolled itself, and towards whom fame and fortune... pressed with rapidity".
But while James’ visits made such an impression on him that he was still talking about Eliot on his deathbed, there's no evidence that she took much notice of him.
James met Eliot on three occasions, as far as we know. Two were at her secluded house near Regent's Park, The Priory, where she lived with her life partner, George Henry Lewes. Because of their unconventional living arrangements (not being married), there was a frisson of scandal about the place, which also meant that invitations were issued with some diplomacy.
These visits were precious moments for those who were granted an audience.
James paid Eliot backhanded compliments in his detailed accounts of his visits. He was clearly torn between hero worship and his high opinion of himself. He seems to have resented her influence.
James gossiped eagerly about the first meeting, on 9th May 1869, in a letter home the following day. As he explained, "she is much hedged about with sanctity and a stranger can go only under cover of a received friend". This was the art critic Charles Eliot Norton. "I was immensely impressed, interested & pleased" he wrote, noting she has "a broad hint of a great underlying world of reserve, knowledge, pride & power". But he describes her in an enthusiastic series of contrasts, as if he resents the hero worship welling within him.
Eliot, he says, is "magnificently ugly", yet "in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty" that makes him "fall in love" with her: "behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced blue-stocking." She has "a great feminine dignity & character in these massively plain features, a hundred conflicting shades of consciousness & simpleness — shyness & frankness — graciousness & remote indifference." And "her manner is extremely good tho’ rather too intense".
In return, we know almost nothing of what Eliot thought of him. Although we know she did read The Europeans at least, in all of her correspondence there is just one reference to him. In 1880, while on honeymoon with John Cross (Lewes had died two years previously) , she noted "a graceful letter of congratulation from Mr Henry James".
James' visit was actually also rather dramatic. In his letter home he explains that "Mr Lewes’s second son [Thornie], an extremely pleasant looking young fellow of about twenty four, lay on the drawing-room floor, writhing in agony from an attack of pain in the spine to which he is subject. We of course beat a hasty retreat, in time to have seen G. H. Lewes come in himself in all his ugliness, with a dose of morphine from the chemist’s."
Thornie had just arrived home the day before. Eliot wrote in her journal: "Poor Thornie arrived from Natal, sadly wasted by suffering" but she says nothing about the day of James's visit. No doubt she and Lewes were much more preoccupied with Thornie than their probably inconvenient visitors.
[Indebted to this article by Rosemary Ashton]
