CHAPTER IX.
ROMOLA.
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THE inference which I have just suggested may seem
to be contradicted by facts. While at Florence George
Eliot conceived "a great project," of which she wrote
to Blackwood during her homeward journey. She is
anxious to keep it secret, and it will require a great
deal of "study and labour," but she is "athirst
to begin." The project, as she shortly afterwards
explains, is for a historical novel, the scene to be
Florence, and the period that of Savonarola's career.
She postponed the work, however, till she had finished
Silas Marner, and then made another visit to Florence
in the spring of 1861. She spent thirty-four days
there in May and June, devoting the morning hours
to "looking at streets, books, and pictures, in hunting
up old books at shops and stalls, or in reading at the
Magliabecchian Library." She feels "very brave,"
and enjoys the thought of work. "It may turn out,"
she adds, "that I can't work freely and full enough
in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must
give it up; for I will never write anything to which
my whole heart, mind, and conscience don't consent;
so that I may feel it was something--however small--which
wanted to be done in this world, and that
I am just the organ for that small bit of work."
Nobody, it may safely be said, could have undertaken
a great task in a more conscientious spirit. She was,
as usual, tormented by "hopelessness and melancholy."
In August I "got," she says, "into a state of so much
wretchedness in attempting to concentrate my thoughts
on the construction of my novel, that I became desperate,
and suddenly burst my bonds, saying, I will not
think of writing." A week later, however, she conceives
her plot "with new distinctness." Gradually
she gets to work, and "crams"--if the word may pass--with
amazing diligence. A list of the books which
she read during the last half of 1861 gives some
illustration of the course of study. Among them are
Villari's and Burlamacchi's lives of Savonarola, Machiavelli,
Petrarch, and other Italian authors, Sismondi's
history of the Italian republics, besides various excursions
into Gibbon, Hallam, Heeren, and Muratori, and
occasional digressions into other literary regions. She
began Romola "again" on January 1, 1862, and a note
of three weeks later is suggestive. She has been "detained
from writing by the necessity of gathering particulars,
first, about Lorenzo de' Medici's death;
secondly, about the possible retardation of Easter; third,
about Corpus Christi Day; fourthly, about Savonarola's
preaching in the Quaresima of 1492." She also
finished La Mandragola--a second reading for the sake
of Florentine expressions--and began La Calendra.
The question will intrude, What would have become of
Ivanhoe if Scott had bothered himself about the possible
retardation of Easter? The answer, indeed, is obvious,
that Ivanhoe would not have been written. One of the
results to George Eliot of this excessive conscientiousness
is what might be anticipated. She has looked
into some of the notebooks in which she recorded her
former fits of depression; "but," she says, "it is
impossible for me to believe that I have ever been
in so unpromising and despairing a state as I now
feel." She has, however, made a start, and is as usual
encouraged by Lewes's applause.
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Soon after this George Smith, the eminent publisher,
offered £10,000 for the copyright of the new
novel, of which some report had got abroad. He
wished it to appear in the Cornhill Magazine, which
was still in its brilliant youth. Thackeray was just
retiring from the editorship, but he and many others
of the most eminent writers of the day were still
contributors. George Eliot had only written about
sixty pages of her story, and was still in the depths of
depression. She doubted whether it would ever be
finished or ever good for anything. Offers of £10,000
are cheering even to the most high-minded authors.
Greater sums have been made by successful novelists
in recent years, but at that time the proposal was one,
as Lewes said, of "unheard-of magnificence." She
declined it at first on the ground of her unwillingness
to begin the publication at the early date first fixed by
Smith (May). Afterwards, however, she accepted
£7000 for its appearance in the Cornhill, where it
accordingly came out in fourteen parts, from July
1862 to August 1863. She had finished the last
number on the 9th June 1863. Lewes advised her to
accept this periodical mode of publication, because he
thought that the book would have the advantage of
being studied slowly and deliberately, instead of being
read at a gallop. It is understood that the experiment
was not a success in the magazine from the commercial
point of view. To make up in some degree
for this disappointment, she made a present to the
Cornhill of Brother Jacob--the short and not very
satisfactory story previously written. Romola was not
well adapted for being broken up into fragments, and
some people, it appears, evaded Lewes's ingenious trap.
They waited till the work came out as a whole, or
preferred not reading it at all to reading it "slowly."
Perhaps it was too good for an audience of average
readers. She received a great deal of pretty encouragement
"from immense big-wigs--some of them
saying that Romola is the finest book they ever read."
Some "big-wigs" were less enthusiastic, but the more
orthodox opinion was that Romola was a literary
masterpiece, though full recognition of its merits was
a proof of superior taste. The success, to whatever it
amounted, had been won at a heavy cost. She felt at
times as though she were working under a heavy
leaden weight. The writing "ploughed into her"
more than any of her other books. She began it, she
said, as a young woman, and finished it as an old
woman.
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It would be absurd to speak without profound
respect of a book which represents the application of
an exceptionally powerful intellect carrying out a
great scheme with so serious and sustained a purpose.
The critic may well be unwilling to place himself in
the seat of judgment, or to suppose that he can divine
with any confidence what will be the opinion of
posterity, if that vague and multitudinous body
troubles itself to arrive at any definite opinion on the
matter. On the other hand, it is not very difficult to
say what one thinks oneself, and one may hope to
suggest a remark or two which may be worth at least
the trouble of refuting. Romola is to me one of the
most provoking of books. I am alternately seduced
into admiration and repelled by what seems to me a
most lamentable misapplication of first-rate powers.
I will speak frankly on both topics, without pretending
to reach a precise valuation of merits.
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The "historical novel " is a literary hybrid which
is apt to offend opposite sides. Either the historian
condemns it for its inaccuracy, or the novel-reader
complains of its dulness. It is hard to avoid that
Scylla and Charybdis. In my youth, I remember that
classical students used to pore over two lively works,
Gallus and Charicles, which represented the efforts of a
German professor to empty a dictionary of classical
antiquities into the framework of a novel. They were
no doubt accurate, but I don't know whether anybody
ever read them through. Scott's historical romances,
on the other hand, fascinated the world, but are
generally marked by a gallant indifference to any
quantity of anachronisms. A historical critic, I
suppose, would tear Ivanhoe to pieces, and forbid any
student to read a book which would confuse his
ideas in direct proportion to the literary attractiveness.
Of course, we may request the historical critic to mind
his own business. I have often thought that the
beginning of Ivanhoe, the scene in the forest where
Gurth and Wamba are chatting at the foot of the old
barrow, and encounter the Templar and the Prior on
their way to Cedric's house, is the best opening of a
story ever written. It is inimitably graphic and
picturesque, and introduces us at once to a set of
actors most dramatically contrasted. Moreover, the
interest does not flag till certain unfortunate concessions
to the old-fashioned rules of story-telling
spoil the concluding scenes. Still it is true that the
indifference to accuracy, or even possibility, forces one
to admit that it requires a rather juvenile readiness to
accept the obvious unrealities. It suggests the thought
that the charm might be even heightened if, for example,
Robin Hood and Friar Tuck had a little stronger
resemblance to real or at least possible outlaws. The
problem had been attacked by two or three of George
Eliot's contemporaries. Bulwer in Rienzi had, like
George Eliot, found a theme in Italian history, besides
dealing with Harold and with Warwick the Last of the
Barons. Though Freeman admired Harold, and George
Eliot read Rienzi respectfully, I do not suppose that
these rapid dashes into a mixture of fiction, history,
and political philosophy can now interest any one.
Kingsley in Hypatia and Westward Ho! had shown
abundant vigour as a story-teller, in spite of a large
infusion of the religious and political pamphleteer;
but did not convince readers that he had given the
true spirit of his periods. Charles Reade's remarkable
novel The Cloister and the Hearth, which appeared in
1861, was a more serious attempt to make general
history into fiction, and has been greatly admired by
some eminent critics, such as Mr. Swinburne, who
possibly have in mind the comparison with Romola. I
only mention these books, however, to justify the
remark that, in a period when the serious study of
history was developing, the attempt to combine the
vigour of Scott with more thorough knowledge of
facts represented a very natural and plausible enterprise.
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It may be taken for granted that the first condition
of success is that you should become a contemporary
of the society described. It is no easy task to go
back for some centuries; to immerse yourself so
thoroughly in the extinct modes of thought and
sentiment that you can instinctively feel what the
actors would have felt under the supposed circumstances.
You can see into the mind of a British rustic
of sixty years ago, especially if you happen to have
been his daughter; but to get back to the inhabitant
of Florence in the fifteenth century requires a more
difficult transformation. Did George Eliot achieve it
even approximately? To that, as it seems to me,
there can be but one answer. She saw most clearly
that the feat was necessary. She tried to qualify
herself most industriously, but the very nature of her
preparation shows the extreme difficulty, or, as I think,
the impracticability of the task. "She spent," says
an admiring critic, "six weeks" (really seven) "in
Florence in order to familiarize herself with the
manners and conversation of the inhabitants." In
spite of this, it is said, her characters, when she began
to write, not only "refused to speak Italian to her,
but refused to speak at all." By hard reading, however,
she reduced "these recalcitrant spirits to order,"
and "succeeded so well, especially in her delineation
of the lower classes, that they have been recognized
by Italians as true to life." The Italians are
an eminently intelligent as well as an eminently
courteous people; and we will hope that these
anonymous critics had not to put any great strain
upon their consciences. Yet one cannot help contrasting
this initiation into the Italian characteristics
with the unconscious process which had lasted for
twenty years at Chilvers-Coton. Seven weeks is
a brief period for acclimatization in a new social
atmosphere. If an intelligent Italian lady had spent
seven weeks at the Charing Cross Hotel, walked
diligently about Leicester Square and the Strand,
read steadily at the British Museum, and rummaged
old bookshops in back streets, how much knowledge
would she have acquired of the British costermonger?
No doubt with the help of a few books on London
labour, and study of Sam Weller's cockney slang,
she might manage to make him talk and behave himself
in such a way that a critic could not put his finger
upon any directly assignable blunder. There is, too,
a certain likeness between human beings everywhere,
which might save the costermonger from being a mere
monstrosity. But one would not expect a very vivid
realization of the genuine Englishman; nor can I
see any indications that the description of the Italian
"lower classes" in Romola gets beyond careful observance
of costume and commonplace. George Eliot had
not, like some novelists, been primarily interested in
a period, steeped her mind in its literature simply for
the love of it, and then felt a prompting to give form
to her impressions. "They," said Scott, speaking of
certain imitators, "have to read old books and consult
antiquarian collections to get their knowledge. I write
because I have long since read such works, and possess,
thanks to a strong memory, the information which they
have to seek for." [Journal, i. 275.] George Eliot had, it is
to be presumed, a fair knowledge of the general outlines of
history. She came to Florence as a highly intelligent
sightseer; and it then struck her that "the place would
make a picturesque background, and that the Savonarola
period offered a number of interesting situations.
She proceeded to get up the necessary knowledge;
but with the result like that which happens when a
manager presents Julius Caesar or Coriolanus in the
costume "of the period." The costume may be as correct
as the manager's archaeological knowledge allows,
but Julius Caesar and Coriolanus remain what Shakespeare
made them, not ancient Romans at all, but
frankly and unmistakably Elizabethans.
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Meanwhile the attempt to be historically accurate
has a painfully numbing effect on her imagination. She
seems to be always trembling at the possibility of an
intruding anachronism. She tells an admirable critic,
R. H. Hutton, that "there is scarcely a phrase, an incident,
an allusion [in Romola] that did not gather its
value to me from its supposed subservience to my main
artistic purpose." She always strives after as full a
vision of the medium in which a "character moves
as of the character itself. The psychological causes
which prompted me to give such details of Florentine
life and history as I have given are precisely the same
as those which determined me in giving the details
of English village life." That, no doubt, is perfectly
true; but then she had seen the English details with her
own eyes, and she only makes a judicious selection from
authorities when describing Florentine details. There
was, it appears, an article of dress called a "scarsella,"
which always gets upon my nerves in Romola. The
thing will intrude without any (to me) perceptible
relation to her "main artistic purpose." The scarlet
waistcoats and brand-new white smock-frocks in Adam
Bede make a picture at once. We see the rustics on
their way to the squire's feast; but this wretched
scarsella worries me, and only suggests a hint for
Leighton's illustrations. A more important result
of this weakness is shown in another case defended
by George Eliot herself. She complains that "the
general ignorance of old Florentine literature" and
other causes have led to misunderstandings of many
parts of Romola--"the scene of the quack doctor
and the monkey, for example, which is a specimen
not of humour as I relish it, but of the practical
joking which was the amusement of the gravest old
Florentines, and without which no conception of them
would be historical. The whole piquancy of that scene
in question was intended to lie in the antithesis
between the puerility which stood for wit and humour
in the old republic, and the majesty of its front in
graver matters." She appeals to the precedent of the
chase of the false herald in Quentin Durward, which
makes Louis XI. and Charles of Burgundy "laugh even
to tears." Now, I am quite unable to speak of the
historical accuracy. All one can say is that if the
ancient Florentines laughed so heartily at the dreary
joke of imposing a monkey upon a quack for a baby,
they must have been duller than one would have
supposed. The precedent from Scott is curiously inapplicable.
The scene in Quentin Durward is effective
and an essential part of the story, because the "joke"
shows both the brutality of the performers and the
cunning of Louis XI. The king is skilfully getting rid
of a cast-off agent in his intrigues against Charles with
the help of Charles himself. To detail a wearisome
practical joke in all its native unadulterated badness in
order to make a contrast with other parts of the book
is a hazardous experiment. It is to be deliberately
dull, because history proves that people could be dull
four centuries ago. The truth is that in her English
books George Eliot can make bad joking amusing,
because she makes us smile not at the joke, but at the
jokers. The talkers at the "Rainbow" are inimitable,
because their talk is so pointless. Here the incongruity
which is to interest us has to be gradually
inferred from subsequent reflection, and the writer
falls into the common error of boring us by describing
bores.
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These are trifling illustrations of the more general
difficulty. Romola is to give us the spirit of the
Renaissance. It requires no dissertation to show
why the Renaissance should have a surpassing charm
for the imagination. There is, I suppose, no book
which opens the eyes of the respectable modern reader
with more startling effect than the autobiography of
Benvenuto Cellini in the next generation. The combination
of artistic inspiration, intellectual audacity,
gross superstition, and supreme indifference to morality,
gives the shock of entering a new world where
all established formula break down, or are in a chaotic
state of internecine conflict. When we take up a book
in which one is to be a contemporary with the Borgias,
and to have personal interviews with Machiavelli,
we may expect a similar sensation. We are to be
spectators of a state of things in which the elementary
human passions have been let loose, when violence
and treachery are normal parts of the day's work, where
new intellectual horizons have opened, and yet the
old creeds are still potent, and there is the strangest
mingling of high aspirations and brutal indulgence,
when the nobler and baser elements of belief are so
strangely blended that the ruffian is still religious, and
the enlightened reformer fanatically superstitious. If
anybody derives any vivid impressions of such a world
from Romola, his eyes must be much keener than mine.
George Eliot has, it must be noticed, chosen one of
the two alternatives which are open to the historical
novelist. She deals with a private history and the
great public characters, and their political proceedings
remain for the most part in the background.
Savonarola, indeed, has to act in the story as well
as in the history. Hutton considers the portrait of the
reformer to be one of George Eliot's great triumphs,
and appeals especially to one scene. I am the more
glad to be able to point to an appreciative and
genial criticism, as I have to confess my inability to
accept it. I should have taken the same scene for
the clearest illustration of failure. The prophet is in
his cell. He is trying to make up his mind to accept
the test proposed by his enemies. Representatives
of both parties are to walk through fire, counting upon
a miraculous intervention; the flames are to burn
the heretic and spare the orthodox. Savonarola's
enthusiasm prompts him to run the risk; but when
he tries to imagine the scene, the flesh shrinks, he
begins to suspect that the appeal may be presumptuous,
and is well aware at the bottom of his mind that it
is a trap devised by his enemies. To show Savonarola
tortured by these conflicting impulses would no doubt
require the highest dramatic genius. What we really
have is not the concrete man at all, but a long and very
able psychological analysis of his mental state. A
bit of it gets into inverted commas to pass for a soliloquy;
but instead of seeing and hearing Savonarola,
we are really listening through several pages to a
highly intelligent lecture upon an interesting specimen.
The style becomes cumbrous and flagging. I venture
to quote a long sentence as a specimen of George Eliot
at her worst. The acceptance of the ordeal is inevitable:
"Not that Savonarola had uttered and written
a falsity when he declared his belief in a future supernatural
attestation of his work; but his mind was so
constituted that while it was easy for him to believe
in a miracle which, being distant and undefined, was
screened behind the strong reasons he saw for its
occurrence, and yet easier for him to have a belief in
inward miracles such as his own prophetic inspiration
and divinely-wrought intuitions, it was at the same
time insurmountably difficult to him to believe in the
probability of a miracle which, like this of being carried
unhurt through the fire, pressed in all its details on his
imagination and involved a demand not only for belief
but for exceptional action." Savonarola's mind was
surely, in this respect, constituted like most people's;
we all think that we can bear the dentist's forceps till
we get into his armchair; but this almost Germanic
concatenation of clauses not only puts such obvious
truths languidly, but keeps Savonarola himself at a
distance. We are not listening to a Hamlet, but to a
judicious critic analysing the state of mind which
prompts "to be or not to be." The same languor
affects all the historical framework of the story. We
come upon many scenes which seem to demand a
forcible presentation: the entry of the French into
Florence; the "bonfire of Vanities"; and the strange
tragicomedy of the ordeal; but when we want to see
the crowd and bustle and the play of popular fun and
passion, we get careful narrative; and as half of it,--we
do not know which half,--is obviously only fiction,
we think that we might as well have been reading
Guicciardini or Professor Villari. The story of the
political intrigues is necessary to determine the fate
of the characters; but it is as dull as any of the
ordinary history books. Machiavelli talks, but he
talks like a book, and does not manage one really good
bit of Mephistophelian cynicism. The great men of
Florence seem to be as prosy when they are feasting
as when they are playing practical jokes. One of them
receives credit for "short and pithy" speech to which
the "formal dignity" of his interlocutor is an amusing
contrast. This short and pithy gentleman manages to
take a page to say that he takes the Savonarola party
to be composed of psalm-singing humbugs, not to be
trusted by men of sense.
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If my irreverence reveals a real defect in my author
instead of myself, I think that the defect is explicable.
George Eliot, I have suggested, was a woman; a woman,
too, of rather delicate health, exhausted by hard work;
and, moreover, a woman who, in spite of her philosophy,
was eminently respectable, and brought up in a quiet
middle-class atmosphere. "To bring in a lion among
ladies is a most dreadful thing," we know, "and there
is not a more fearful wildfowl than your lion living."
Benvenuto Cellini would certainly have been "a fearful
wildfowl" in St. John's Wood; and though by dint of
conscientious reading George Eliot knew a great deal
about the ruffian geniuses of the Renaissance, she
could not throw herself into any real sympathy with
them. Such a feat required the audacity of a Victor
Hugo and, perhaps, the indifference to propriety of a
modern realist. The criticism would be summed up
by calling the book "academic"; meaning, I take it,
that it suggests the professor's chair; and implies the
belief that a careful study of authorities, and scrupulous
attention to aesthetic canons, will be a sufficient
outfit for a journey into the regions of romance.
George Eliot was not blind to such considerations; and
George Lewes, in his capacity of critic, could put them
very keenly in writing of other people. His enthusiastic
admiration for George Eliot perhaps obscured to
him what he would have been the first to see elsewhere;
and, anyhow, he encouraged her tendencies to
a questionable direction of her genius.
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Yet I do not deny that there was much to be said
for the judgment of the contemporary critics who held
that Romola would be one of the permanent masterpieces
of English literature. Before I can adjust my own
impressions to theirs, I must be allowed to remove
from my mind any lingering impression that Romola
and Tito lived at Florence in the fifteenth century.
They were only masquerading there, and getting the
necessary "properties" from the history-shops at
which such things are provided for the diligent
student. Romola was, I take it, a cousin of Maggie
Tulliver, though of loftier character, and provided with
a thorough classical culture. The religious crisis
through which she had to pass was not due to
Savonarola, but to modern controversies. The antagonistic
principles which were in conflict in the
Renaissance period are still in existence, though they
have entered into different combinations, and are
tested by different issues. There are still Machiavellians,
I believe, in politics, and Epicureans in art and
morals, and the tender soul still finds something of the
charm in the Catholic ideal of life which appealed to
Romola through Savonarola. If, therefore, we venture
to drop the history, or to consider it as a mere conventional
background, we can still be interested in the
real subject of the book, the ordeal through which
Romola has to pass, and the tragedy of a high feminine
nature exposed to such doubts and conflicting impulses
as may still present themselves in different shapes. I
could wish, indeed, that there were a good deal less
history, or that it had been handled with more audacity.
But for all that, Romola and her immediate surroundings
make a very impressive group, which may affect us like
some masterpiece in which a painter has made use of
conventional and unreal accessories. The central idea,
or, if we choose to say so, the "moral" of the book,
is clearly indicated. The pressing problem for Romola,
we are told, when she comes under the influence of
Savonarola, is not to settle questions of controversy,
but "to keep alive that flame of unselfish emotion by
which a life of sadness might well be a life of active
love." She is so moved by the "grand energies" of
the prophet's nature that she can listen patiently even
to his prophecies. She is profoundly impressed in the
scene in which he comes nearest to being a living
person; and tells her that to run away from her husband
is really to be self-willed and moved by selfish purposes.
She is to "make her marriage-sorrows an offering"
and to live for Florence, where she has been placed by
God, who addresses her through her teacher. The
light abandonment of ties because they have ceased
to be pleasant is "the uprooting of social and personal
virtue." Her marriage has ceased to be for her the
"mystic union which is its own guarantee of
indissolubleness"; and there is no compensation "for the
woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has
been no more than a mistake." She has lost her crown.
The deepest secret of human blessedness has half
whispered itself "to her and then for ever passed
away." She accepts the position till presently even
Savonarola ceases to command her confidence. She
finds that he can hoodwink his conscience for the
benefit of his sect. "No one who has ever known
what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has
profoundly loved and reverenced will lightly say that
the shock can leave the faith in an Invisible Goodness
unshaken." Romola despairs of finding any consistent
duty. "What force was there to create for her that supremely
hallowed motive which men call duty, but which
can have no inward constraining existence save through
some form of constraining love?" The solution, so
far as there is one, comes in a form which one cannot
altogether admire. Poor Romola, in her despair, gets
into a miscellaneous boat lying ashore; and the boat
drifts away in a manner rarely practised by boats in
real life, and spontaneously lands her in a place
where everybody is dying of the plague, and she can
therefore make herself useful to her fellow-creatures.
She clearly ought to have been drowned, like Maggie,
and we feel that Providence is made to interfere rather
awkwardly. Perhaps, too, Romola's sentiments show
rather too clearly that she has been prematurely impressed
by the Positivist "religion of humanity." But
a fine nature torn by conflicting duties and ideals, and
endeavouring to find some worthy conciliation, presents
an admirable theme, and often enables George Eliot
to show her highest powers of delineation. Readers
in general cannot feel quite so warmly to Romola as
to the childish Maggie; she is a little too hard and
statuesque, and drops her husband rather too coolly
and decisively as soon as she finds out that he is
capable of disregarding her sentiments. Still she is
one of the few figures who occupy a permanent and
peculiar niche in the great gallery of fiction; and if
she is a trifle chilly and over-dignified, one must admit
that she is not the less lifelike. She is, moreover, the
only one--to my feeling--of George Eliot's women
whose marriage has not something annoying. She
marries a thorough scoundrel, it is true, but the misconception
to which she falls a victim is one which we
feel to be thoroughly natural under the circumstances.
Her husband, Tito, is frequently mentioned as one of
George Eliot's greatest triumphs. The cause of her
success is, as I take it, that Tito is thoroughly and
to his fingers' ends a woman. I do not intend to
condemn the conception, for undoubtedly there are
men whose characters are essentially feminine. Tito
is of the material of which the Delilahs are made, the
treacherous, caressing, sensuous creatures who involve
strong men in their meshes as Tito fascinates the rather
masculine Romola. In several of her novels George Eliot
contrasts the higher feminine nature with this lower
type. Dinah Morris is relieved against the "kitten-like"
Hetty; Maggie against Lucy Deane; and Dorothea
against Celia Brooke; and in Romola itself we have
Tessa, who, indeed, is so much of a kitten that she
approaches very nearly to be an idiot. Tito is the
kitten, or rather the panther-cub, grown to full size,
and showing all the grace and malignity of his kind.
He has the feminine nervousness, and "trembles like a
maid at sight of spear and shield." When he catches
sight of an enemy with a dagger, his face at once
commends itself to a painter for the exhibition of the
passion of fear. He is not cruel out of mere badness,
but from effeminacy; he dislikes the sight of suffering,
and would rather not inflict it where he must be a
witness of it; but he can suppress the sympathy
instead of the suffering, and does not mind how much
his victims suffer so long as they are out of his sight.
He has "a native repugnance to sights of death and
pain," and would rather get rid of an enemy by exiling
him than by putting him to death. But when the
sentence is passed, he is comforted by reflecting
upon the security which will come to him when the
enemy's head is well off his shoulders. He is so
thoroughly feminine that we have to be reminded
that he could on occasion show "a masculine effectiveness
of intellect and purpose." When he is
fairly driven into a corner, that is, he can show his
claws and act, for once, like a man. But his general
position among his more violent associates is like
that of a beautiful and treacherous woman who makes
delicate caressing and ingenious equivocation do the
work of the rougher and more downright masculine
methods. He is most admirably adapted to impose
upon his high-minded wife, who has the reluctance
to admit suspicion which marks noble and simple
characters, but is also apt, unfortunately, to imply
a deficiency of common sense. The tragedy which
follows for Romola is inevitable, and is developed
with George Eliot's full power. If we can put
aside the historical paraphernalia, forget the dates
and the historical Savonarola and Machiavelli, there
remains a singularly powerful representation of an
interesting spiritual history; of the ordeal through
which a lofty nature has to pass when brought into
collision with characters of baser composition; thrown
into despair by the successive collapses of each of the
supports to which it clings; and finding some solution
in spite of its bewilderment amidst conflicting gospels,
in each of which truth and falsehood are strangely
mixed. There is hardly any novel, except the Mill on
the Floss, in which the stages in the inner life of a
thoughtful and tender nature are set forth with so
much tenderness and sympathy. If Romola is far less
attractive than Maggie, her story is more consistently
developed to the end. She may remind us of another
heroine who once set everybody weeping--although
the histories of the two are in most respects diametrically
contrasted. Clarissa Harlowe had very different
troubles to undergo; she was too well instructed in
the doctrines of the Church of England to be bothered
by any religious doubts; and the respectable society
in which she was brought up had no affinity to the
Renaissance. The similarity is chiefly confined to the
fact that both stories have a moral and a unity of
interest, dependent upon a model young woman as
the central figure, but there is one other resemblance:
Clarissa's troubles, like Romola's, raise the question
whether the moral conventions of the society in which
she lives have a sanctity which should forbid the
individual woman ever to defy them on behalf of
her own happiness. It is curious that upon that
point George Eliot seems on the whole to agree with
Richardson. Romola is perplexed by the thought that
the "law is sacred," but that "rebellion may be sacred
too." There are moments in life when the soul must
dare to act on its own "warrant," though the punishment
may be incurred if the warrant has been false.
Clarissa incurs all her troubles by running away from
home, and Romola by her revolt against her husband;
and though Romola finally escapes with her life, she
has to suffer a heavy penalty. It is only, however,
upon the general point that I mean to insist. Hardly
any heroine since Clarissa has been so effective a centre
of interest as Romola; and if I regret that she was
moved out of her own century and surrounded by a
mass of irrelevant matter of antiquarian of sub-historical
interest, I will not presume to quarrel with people
who do not admit the incongruity.
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