Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“ROMOLA” by ‘George Eliot’ (first published
in serial parts 1862-63; first published in book form 1863)
If you have been
aware of this blog for a while, you will probably know my track record when I
deal with one of the great masters of English literature in this “Something
Old” section. I tend not to deal with the works for which that particular
author is best known, but with the ones that are either disregarded or seen as
lesser fare. Partly this is because I do not wish to bore you by telling you
what you already know. Partly it is because, after all, I have not read all the
language’s masterpieces. And partly, because the more obscure books seem the
ones most worth bringing to light. So when I broach Joseph Conrad, I deal not
with the undoubtedly great stuff like Lord
Jim, The Secret Agent or Heart of Darkness, but with Victory
(look it up on the index at right),
which I personally regard as a failure. Likewise, in dealing with Thackeray I
don’t deal with Vanity Fair, but with
the much under-rated The Newcomes (look it up ditto). As
for Henry Fielding, I’ve so far had a whack on this blog at his Joseph
Andrews, Amelia, Tom Thumb and Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (index ditto
for all of them), but have left Tom
Jones out of play. Of Dickens, I’ve commented only on his Christmas
Books and The Old Curiosity Shop (index ditto) even though I’ve read
nearly all his corpus and know he wrote greater things than these. This doesn’t
mean that at some future date I won’t deal with the acknowledged masterworks
(especially if I am beginning to run out of material to cannibalise from my
reading diaries!). It just means that for the moment I have more fun dealing
with the various authors’ less celebrated stuff.
But, unlike most
readers of Eliot, I have actually read George Eliot’s only bona fide historical novel, Romola.
And thereby hang a number of tales. I was first attracted to this Victorian
novel because I was studying church history at the time and I wanted to know
more about Girolamo Savonarola. I read a number of biographies and histories of
the man (Michael de la Bedoyere’s The
Meddlesome Friar is still a good starting point, even if it was published
way back in 1957) and I noted that a number of them mentioned Eliot’s novel as
an interesting Victorian perspective, even if not to be trusted too much as
history. So I read it, in the closely-printed 600-odd pages of the old Nelson
and Sons hardback that still sits on my shelf. I quite enjoyed it, too.
I already knew
the general reputation of this novel. It was seen as an aberration into
historical romance from an author who was better suited to stories of
contemporary society (a bit like the reputation of Flaubert’s historical novel Salammbo after his masterpiece Madame Bovary). It was also seen as a
novel with such an impossibly high-minded heroine that she was seen as somewhat
incredible – the type of paragon put forward to inspire well-behaved Victorian girls
by their right-thinking parents. Two or three times I had the pleasure of teaching
George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara
to senior high-school classes. It is a play which also has a high-minded
heroine, but Shaw includes in it a joke at the expense of Eliot’s novel.
There’s a scruffy, rumpled and dishonest Cockney woman who goes by the name of
‘Rummy’ Mitchens and who seeks help in a Salvation Army shelter. When another
Cockney character asks her about that name ‘Rummy’, she says it is really
‘Romola’, and “It was out of a new book.
Somebody me mother wanted me to grow up like.” In 1905, when Shaw’s play
was first produced, sophisticates would have snickered at that one as Romola was already over forty years old
and already seen as a piece of outdated and righteous moralising which only the
lower classes would still see as acceptably highbrow.
Poor Romola.
The novel is
actually better than that, but its reputation is understandable.
It is set in
late 15th century Florence, at the time of the decline of the Medici
and rebellions against them, the wars with French kings like Charles VIII and,
more centrally, the influence and reforming zeal of Savonarola. Eliot
apparently spent some years researching assiduously the novel’s setting in time
and place – including making a number of trips to Florence. This shows in the
long and detailed descriptions of buildings and art-works that pepper the text,
which are not always an asset in a novel. Quite a number of historical figures
feature as characters – not only Savonarola and Charles VIII (displayed in one
chapter passing through Florence with much pomp and splendour when the Medici
are expelled); but also Niccolo Machiavelli, depicted as a witty and cynical
young man who has not yet been soured by events; and the painter Piero di
Cosimi, who becomes the novel’s representative of Renaissance art in his
torment over whether he should stick to religious art or deal with secular
subjects and commissioned portraits.
The central
characters are, however, Eliot’s fictions. Romola
is the virtuous and dutiful daughter of the blind Renaissance humanist
scholar Bardo de’ Bardi, whose
lifelong ambition is to keep together his library. At one point in the novel,
Piero di Cosimi paints the daughter as Ariadne and the father as Tiresias. Old
Bardo dies about halfway through the novel. Romola’s brother Dino is a friar, Fra Luca, who has deserted humanist
scholarship to live the life of a penitent. Fra Luca dies about a quarter of
the way through the novel, but not before having a prophetic vision which
indicates disaster for Romola. The disaster turns out to be Romola’s marriage
to Tito Melema, a facetious and
successful young Greek scholar who gains public position in Florence on the
expulsion of the Medici. Step by step, the superficially attractive character
of Tito proves to be very flawed. Not only has he forsaken and left in slavery
his loving adoptive father (who – neatly – ends up as his nemesis); not only is
he involved in the sleaziest sort of politics simply through his lust for
power; but he consistently cheats on Romola. He has made a second “marriage” with
the pretty, innocent, empty-headed young peasant girl Tessa and is in effect keeping her as his second wife.
As it is
structured, the novel is an intellectual “quest” story. Its implicit central
question seems to be “What is a worthy
and rightful object for a woman’s sense of duty?”, a question which exercised
George Eliot more than once. In its three broad sections, Romola’s story
represents the progressive stripping away of unworthy (or incomplete) objects
for duty.
First there is
her sense of filial piety in being a
dutiful daughter to Bardo. But this is undercut by the half-humorous depiction
of Bardo (much of whose scholarship is fatuous), as well as by Bardo’s death.
(The relationship of daughter and pedantic father sometimes resembles the relationship
of Dorothea Brooke and the pedantic “scholar” Casaubon in Middlemarch.)
Then there is
her wifely sense and fidelity to her
husband. But she discovers first that Tito has not kept faith with her father’s
express wish (to keep his library together) and then that her marriage to Tito
is a sham anyway.
Finally, there
is Romola’s adherence to Savonarola’s reforming
zeal. This is the most satisfying and attractive of Romola’s “temptations”,
but again it is found to have its limitations. Savonarola’s wish to reform a
corrupt state and a corrupt church is shot through with fanaticism. Romola also
discovers that Savonarola’s idealism is mingled with personal pride and
compromised by power politics in the city-state. (Eliot’s ambiguous judgment of
Savonarola is best expressed at the end of Chapter 25, where she discusses the
mixed effects of his preaching.) Savonarola is on one level an enemy of vice
(in which particular both George Eliot and Romola agree with him). But as he
attacks and makes a bonfire of “vanities” he is also the enemy of humanist
scholarship and art.
When Savonarola
allows Romola’s godfather, the scholar Bernardo del Nero, to be sacrificed for
the sake of political stability, Romola loses all faith in him, succumbs to
despair and attempts suicide. She hops into a boat which she hopes will carry
her down the Arno to the sea, where she can drown. (In doing this, she is
copying the actions of a character in Boccaccio’s Decameron.) Instead, the boat strands her in a village stricken
with plague. Here live Tessa (the faithless Tito’s other “wife”) and her
family. Romola at once realizes what her duty is. It is to relieve the
suffering of her fellow human beings. So she settles into a life of looking
after Tessa, whom she sees not as a rival but as another innocent woman who has
been exploited. Although it may sometimes be painful, selfless altruism is the
final rightful object of one’s duty.
I’ve sometimes
noted that some 19th century works of literature anticipate what we
think of as 20th century perceptions. (Robert Browning’s Childe Roland To the Dark Tower Came,
with its desolate landscape, has always seemed to me a foretaste of T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land). I’m
therefore not squeamish about saying that Romola
reminds me of an existentialist fable. Only when
the void is faced, when reliance on the moral compass of others proves
inadequate, can one find a true object for faith and a life’s work. Romola has
to be brought to a position of despair, of seeing everything as pointless and
valueless, before she can discover true value. Unlike the mid-20th
century existentialists, however (Camus, Sartre and company), George Eliot sees
us as having an innate sense
of duty (conscience?), this being perhaps a survival of the evangelical Christian
faith she had abandoned.
The novel’s
secondary matter is its depiction of the Renaissance, and about this George
Eliot is curiously ambivalent. Renewed scholarship is seen as virtuous and
positive in comparison with medieval scholasticism, but (and you can read this
in Chapter 7) Eliot is aware of how petty and self-serving scholarship can
become. Savonarola’s urge to reform is approved, but Savonarola is both marred
by fanaticism and too good for his followers who miss the point of his mission
and expect him to perform miracles. Textbook fashion (all those descriptions
cluttering the book!), Eliot acknowledges the achievements of Renaissance art,
but clearly sees Renaissance revelry as unpleasant licence (see the opening of
Chapter 20 for her disapproving description of a carnival). It is at this
juncture that I hear most clearly the voice of a moral Victorian lady as she
wags an admonishing finger. One wholly commendable matter, however, is the
author’s frank acknowledgement that not everybody is made for a life of stern moral
purpose. This is seen in the novel’s sympathetic portrayal of Romola’s
likeable, empty-headed middle-aged aunt Monna Brigida, whose sole concern is
the fashions of the day. As a side issue, I note that Romola’s care for Tessa
and Monna Brigida and for other women less intellectually endowed than she,
often comes close to what I see as a subsumed yearning for motherhood on the
part of the author.
There are,
however, many weaknesses in the structure of this story. Even more than in the
average novel, coincidence plays a huge part. Tito’s abandoned stepfather just
happens to arrive in Florence at the very time that it is right for Tito to be
pursued and have revenge wrought on him. Later Tito just happens to be swept
down the river to land exactly where nemesis is waiting for him. At one point
in the novel, Savonarola just happens to meet Romola, when she is running away
in disguise, and recalls her to her duty. Most egregiously Romola, attempting
to float into oblivion, just happens to land at the village which needs her
altruism. Perhaps the idea of a fate or “higher purpose” shaping our destinies
is thematically important; but these are still jarring incidents in a
naturalistic sense.
In terms of
narrative, the best element of the novel is the progressive revelation of
Tito’s flawed character. His descent into moral torpor is so finely contrived
that it is hard to tell at exactly what point we cease to sympathise with him.
Indeed, to the very end, he still has attractive “public” qualities.
And yet there is
still that huge stumbling block of Romola herself. She is too perfect. Eliot never exactly makes Romola her
mouthpiece. Most of Romola’s moral hesitations are reported rather than given
as soliloquies, but even so, Romola is so prescient about the historical period
in which she is living, is able to see “contemporary” events with such
detachment and from such a rational perspective, that she becomes an idealised
version of George Eliot’s favourite qualities. She is an Italian Renaissance
woman wearing a crinoline. An intelligent, intellectual Victorian woman in the
wrong century. This impression is reinforced by the clearly agnostic humanism
in which Romola has been reared.
I don’t want to
be unfair to this very flawed and long novel. George Eliot imposes Victorian
values and attitudes on Renaissance Italy much less than most current
historical novelists impose current attitudes on the past. Even so, this is a
very righteous and stately novel, out of tune with our age and unlikely to
enjoy a revival any time soon.