I read Romola recently in an edition that had turned
up in the local Salvation Army: volume V of the Harper & Brothers set of
the Novels of George Eliot (1899) which includes the illustrations after
designs by Frederic Leighton, so formal and statuesque, that had accompanied the novel’s serial
publication in Harper’s Magazine. Leighton made chalk drawings which he then
recast on woodblocks before turning them over to the engravers, Joseph Swain
and W. J. Linton. Leighton’s home, now a
museum, offers visitors to London today a fascinating display of Orientalist
and aestheticist décor.
Romola has excited extreme critical reactions. For the author herself as well as for some readers, it represents her best work, while for others it is an almost unreadable failure. A contradiction was apparent even to the novel’s first reviewers. While the critics at both the Westminster Review and the Spectator thought Romola Eliot’s “greatest” work, the first found a contradiction between its achievement and its cool reception while the other gently suggested that, despite its excellence, it could never be her “most popular” work. [1] A few decades after Eliot’s death Leslie Stephen found the book “provoking,” noting “I am alternately seduced into admiration and repelled by what seems to me a most lamentable misapplication of first-rate powers.” [2] A peculiar qualification persists even among Romola’s admirers. Henry James praised the book as “decidedly the most important” of her works, yet hedged by saying that it excelled “less as a work of art than as a work of morals.” [3]
The most apparent
way in which Romola stands apart from Eliot’s other novels is the
historical setting. Whereas in earlier
Gothic novels, Italy had been a largely fantastic locale populated by malicious
aristocrats and corrupt Roman Catholics, the country had acquired a slightly
more accurate and considerably more positive reputation by Eliot’s time as more
and more middle-class Britons, including Eliot and her illustrator Frederic
Leighton, visited there. [4]
Some critics have
thought she used the foreign setting as a discreet way of addressing her own
age. Encouraged perhaps by the statement
in the “Proem” noting that “we are impressed with the broad sameness of the
human lot, which never alters,” they have cited parallels such as the
nineteenth century crisis of faith, though the followers of Savonarola have
little in common with the Oxford Movement.
Likewise the struggles over the Reform Bills in Eliot’s time seem to
have little to do with the jockeying for power in Renaissance Florence among
followers of the Dominican friar, the Mediceans, and other aristocrats.
The general
interest in the period in the latter half of the nineteenth century had more to
do with contrast than similarity. With
the publication of Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
Renaissance Italy gained a particular charm for the Victorians, inspiring many
writers and artists including Augustus
Pugin’s enthusiasm for a Gothic revival (Contrasts, 1836), Ruskin’s The
Stones of Venice (1853), Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1869), Pater’s
The Renaissance (1873), as well as the pre-Raphaelite movement. Reacting against the ugliness of nineteenth
century industrialism, many found in fifteenth century Italy a model of taste
and aesthetic achievement worthy of emulation, at once sublime and sensual.
There can be no
doubt that Eliot did considerable research to include historically accurate
period detail: mentioning not only political events and articles of clothing and even using a
few Italian expressions. The death of
Lorenzo de Medici and the following political strife sets the era at the
story’s outset. Savonarola plays a
considerable part in the plot, and Machiavelli appears repeatedly, while lesser
figures such as Poliziano wander through its scenes like movie extras. The author took great care over her story’s
authenticity, noting in her journal that she had been “detained from writing by
the necessity of gathering particulars.” [5] For some readers, her careful study may have
been obtrusive. To Stephen Romola
“suggests the professor’s chair,” while to Henry James it “smells of the lamp.”
[6]
For many the
densely specified background of the book slows the action. Romola includes the same willingness
to adopt such conventions as unlikely coincidence and retributive justice that
characterize her other novels, but the action in Romola does seem bogged
down by the historical setting. Lengthy
intervals separate the passages that advance the plot.
Apart from that, the
thematic emphasis on Romola’s concept of wifely duty and of Christian (or
simply moral) self-sacrifice are unlikely to appear as attractive to moderns as
to the book’s original audience. Even
after she loses her faith in Savonarola, Romola seems motivated by God’s words to
Eve “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Once she realizes that Savonarola’s decisions
arise, as others’ do, in part out of a desire for power, such acts as his refusal to move
against Bernardo di Nero’s execution seem more pragmatic than principled. Yet, as James had noted, morality is
foregrounded in Romola’s story, and the heroine herself is clearly meant to be
exemplary, a kind of saint though in the end her virtue is semi-secular.
Not only does Romola lose her own evangelical
fervor, she comes to think that Savonarola himself acts as much from egotism as
from piety. She seeks then to retain the
ideal of philanthropic service endorsed by Christianity while shedding its
supernatural justification. The author’s
own ambivalence toward religion had long been evident. Though an atheist, her lover George Henry
Lewes called her Madonna. Yet she is
enough of a public critic of organized Christianity to call the popular cleric
John Cumming deceitful and unscrupulous, lacking any “genuine charity,” most
false when he sets himself up to interpret prophecy as Savonarola did. She discloses her fundamental distaste for
faith by a declaration that , “so long as a belief in propositions is regarded
as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth as such is not possible.”
[7]
In spite of her dim view if such popular preachers of her own day, her devotion to morality was as strong as any believer’s, and, though she did not devote herself to charitable works as Romola did, the fictional character reflected the views of her creator. A sympathetic friend recalled Eliot’s statement of agnostic principles.
I remember how, at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the
Fellows’ Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred
somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have
been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men—the words God,
Immortality, Duty—pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was
the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the
third. [8]
The self-sacrificing moral fervor that
governs Romola’s life is confused both by an intensity unsympathetic to most
readers and by the lack of a suitable exemplar or teaching once Christianity is
disregarded.
Many readers have felt they were treading
water in a high tide of historical circumstance, while others have been
repelled by a theme built around such an exceedingly severe concept of virtue,
unpalatable to many (and, indeed, considering her personal life, to the author
as well). [9] For at least one twenty-first century reader,
these issues amplify each other, as the heroine is found to be incongruous with
her “delicately described historical environment.” [9] Yet the fact is that each of these two
elements – the imagined Italian city and the female exemplar of noble
submission rivaling Griselda’s – need not represent anything factual about
authentic about history or prescriptive about morality. It is sufficient that, however ill they may
seem to mix, they form significant parts of the artist’s worldview, and both
setting and protagonist contribute to characterize her vision. The reader who appreciates Romola will
relish both, though for others this book will remain a “failure" or simply “most obscure.” [10]
Romola’s virtues may lie neither in the
grand morality its author envisioned nor in any specific light that Renaissance
Florence may shed on nineteenth century London.
One who appreciates George Eliot’s sensibility will make the most of the
period detail, as though browsing an account of local antiquities by an
overeducated and underemployed curate.
Such a reader will savor the pathos of the learned and principled Bardo
de' Bardi and, later Baldassarre Calvo and the creepy charm of Tito Melema, as
talented if less violent than Miss Highsmith’s Mr. Ripley. The swelling political and religious passions
generate an air of unceasing drama behind the main players, a tide of
self-interest and self-deception that regularly accompanies “who loses and who
wins, who's in, who's out.” As long as
that apocalyptic holy man, the Pope Angelico, has not yet arrived, people will
toss and turn and flail in the effort to remain afloat, and the likeliest
redemptive sign, alight like a nimbus, will remain the qualities of compassion
that illuminate the heroine through turmoil and doubt, preserving her and
making of her a beacon that shines as clearly as anything may in this fallen
world.
1. Westminster
Review, October 1, 1863 and R. H. Hutton in the Spectator July 18,
1863.
2. Leslie Stephen, George
Eliot (1902), 126. Sir Leslie Stephen
had married Thackeray’s daughter and was the father of Virginia Woolf by his
second wife.
3. Henry James, Views
and Review by Henry James, intro. LeRoy Phillips (1908).
4. Eliot herself had
visited Italy four times during the 1860s and her illustrator Frederic Leighton
had studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and frequently visited
the city in later years.
5. The Journals of
George Eliot, ed. by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, 108.
6. Leslie Stephen, George
Eliot (1902), 126 and Henry James, review of George Eliot’s Life as
Related in her Journals and Letters ed. John Cross (1885), Atlantic
Monthly, May 1885, pp. 668 ff.
7. "Evangelical
Teaching: Dr. Cumming." Westminster Review, vol. LXIV, October 1855.
8. F. H. W. Myers,
“George Eliot,” The Century Magazine (November, 1881). Myers himself had abandoned Christianity and
founded the Society for Psychical Research in part to pursue unorthodox proofs
for the soul’s immortality.
9. Julia Straub, “George Eliot’s Romola and Its
Shattered Ideals,” Nineteenth Century Gender Studies 4.1 (Spring 2008).
10. “Failure” is from George Knoepflmacher, Eliot's early novels; the limits of realism; “most obscure” from Jaqueline Bohn Donada, “George Eliot's Brazilian Brazilian Critical Fortune and the Case of Romola,” The George Eliot Review 2013.
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