Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (979 page)

The three in whom this great lesson is most prominently illustrated in the work before us are, of course, Romola herself, Tito Melema, and Savonarola.  And in each the illustration is so modified, and, through the three together, so almost exhaustively accomplished, that some examination of each seems necessary to our main object in this survey of George Eliot’s works.

Few, we think, can study the delineation of Romola without feeling that imagination has seldom placed before us a fairer, nobler, and completer female presence.  Perfectly human and natural; unexaggerated, we might almost say unidealised, alike in her weaknesses and her nobleness; combining such deep womanly tenderness with such spotless purity; so transparent in her truthfulness; so clear in her perceptions of the true and good, so firm in her aspirations after these; so broad, gentle, and forbearing in her charity, yet so resolute against all that is mean and base; — everything fair, bright, and high in womanhood seems to combine in Romola.  So true, also, is the process of her development to what is called nature — to the laws and principles that regulate human action and life — that, as it proceeds before us, we almost lose note that there is development.  The fair young heathen first presented to us, linked on to classic times and moralities through all the surroundings of her life, passes on so imperceptibly into the “visible Madonna” of the after-time, that we scarcely observe the change till it is accomplished.  From the first, we know that the mature is involved in the young Romola.  The reason of this is, that from first to last the essential principle of life is in her the same.  Equally, when she first comes before us, and in all the after-glory of her serene unconscious self-devotedness, she is living to others, not to herself.

Her first devotion is to her father.  Her one passion of life is to compensate to him all he has lost: the eyes, once so full of fire, now sightless; the son and brother, who, at the call of an enthusiasm with which their nobler natures refuse to sympathise — for it was, in the first instance, but the supposed need to save his own soul — has fled from his nearest duty of life.  To this devotion she consecrates her fair young existence.  For this she dismisses from it all thought of ease or pleasure, and chooses retirement and isolation; gives herself to uncongenial studies and endless labours, and accepts, in uncomplaining sadness, that which to such a nature is hardest of all to bear — her father’s non-appreciation of all she would be and is to him.  From the first, her life is one of entire self-consecration.  The sphere of its activities expands as years flow on, but the principle is throughout the same.  In the exquisite simplicity, purity, and tenderness of her young love, she is Romola still.  There is no self-isolation included in it.  Side by side with satisfying her own yearning heart, lies the thought that she is thus giving to her father a son to replace him who has forsaken him.  Her first perception of the want of perfect oneness between Tito and herself dawns upon her through no change in him towards herself, but through his less sedulous attendance on her father.  And when at last the conviction is borne in upon her that between him and her, seemingly so closely united, there lies the gulf that parts truth and falsehood, heaven and hell, it is no perceptible withdrawal of his love from her that forces on her this conviction.  It is his falseness and treason to the dead.  Then comes the crisis of her career; her flight from the unendurable burden of that divided life; her meeting with Savonarola; and her being through him brought face to face with the Christian aspect of that deepest of all moral truths, — the precedence of duty above all else.  Savonarola’s demand might well seem to one such as Romola laying on her a burden too heavy to be borne.  It was not that it called her to return to hardness and pain; she was going forth unshrinking into the unknown with no certainty but that these would find her there; it called her to return to what, with her high ideal of love and life, could not but seem degradation and sin, — according in the living daily lie that they two, so hopelessly parted, were one.  To any lower nature the appeal would have been addressed in vain.  It prevails with her because it sets before her but the extension and more perfect fulfilment of the life law toward which she has been always aiming, even through the dim light of her all but heathen nurture.

She goes back to reassume her cross: sadly, weariedly forecasting, as only such a nature can do, all its shame and pain; and even still only dimly assured that her true path lies here.  The very nobleness which constrains her return makes that return the harder.  The unknown into which she had thought to flee had no possibility of pain or fear for her, compared to the certain pain and difficulty of that life from which all reality of love is gone: where her earnest, truthful spirit must live in daily contact with baseness, — may even have, through virtue of her relation to Tito, tacitly to concur in treason.  She goes back to what, constituted as she is, can be only a daily, lifelong crucifying, and she goes back to it knowing that such it must be.

Thenceforth goes on in her that process which, far beyond all reasonings, makes the mystery of sorrow intelligible to us, — the “making perfect through suffering.”  It is not necessary we should trace the process step by step.  It is scarcely possible to do so, for its stages are too subtle to be so traced.  We see rather by result than in operation how her path of voluntary self-consecration — of care and thought for all save self — of patient, silent, solitary endurance of her crown of thorns, is brightening more and more toward the perfect day.  In the streets of the faction-torn, plague-stricken, famine-wasted city; by the side of the outraged Baldassarre; in the room of the child-mistress Tessa; most of all in that home whence all other brightness has departed, — she moves and stands more and more before us the “visible Madonna.”

How sharply the sword has pierced her heart, how sorely the crown of thorns is pressing her fair young brow, we learn in part from her decisive interview with Tessa.  She, the high-born lady, spotless in purity, shrinking back from the very shadow of degradation, questions the unconscious instrument of one of her many wrongs with the one anxiety and hope that she may prove to be no true wife after all; that the bond which binds her to living falsehood and baseness may be broken, though its breaking stamp her with outward dishonour and blot.  Otherwise there is no obtrusion of her burning pain; no revolt of faith and trust, impeaching God of hardness and wrong toward her; no murmur in His ear, any more than in the ear of man.  Meek, patient, steadfast, she devotes herself to every duty and right that life has left to her; and the dark-garmented Piagnone moves about the busy scene a white-robed ministrant of mercy and love.  Ever and anon, indeed, the lonely anguish of her heart breaks forth, but in the form of expression it assumes she is emphatically herself.  In those frequent touching appeals to Tito, deepening in their sweet earnestness with every failure, we may read the intensity of her ever-present inward pain.  In them all the self-seeking of love has no place.  The effort is always primarily directed, not toward winning back his love and confidence for herself, but toward winning him back to truth and right and loyalty of soul.  Her pure high instinct knows that only so can love return between them — can the shattered bond be again taken up.  She seeks to save
him
— him who will not be saved, who has already vitally placed himself out of the pale of possible salvation.

One of the most touching manifestations in this most touching of all records of feminine nobleness and suffering, is the story of her relations to Tessa.  It would seem as if in that large heart jealousy, the reaching self-love of love, could find no place.  Her discovery of the relation in which Tessa stands to Tito awakens first that saddest of all sad hopes in one like Romola, that through the contadina she may be released from the marriage-bond that so galls and darkens her life.  When that hope is gone, no thought of Tessa as a successful rival presents itself.  She thinks of her only as another victim of Tito’s wrong-doing — as a weak, simple, helpless child, innocent of all conscious fault, to be shielded and cared for in the hour of need.

At last, after the foulest of Tito’s treasons, which purchases safety and advancement for himself by the betrayal and death of her noble old godfather, her last living link to the past, the burden of her life becomes beyond her bearing, and again she attempts to lay it down by fleeing.  There is no Savonarola now to meet and turn her back.  Savonarola has lost the power, has forfeited the right, to do so.  The pupil has outgrown the teacher; her self-renunciation has become simpler, purer, deeper, more entire than his.  The last words exchanged between these two bring before us the change that has come over the spiritual relations between them.  “The cause of my party,” says Savonarola, “
is
the cause of God’s kingdom.”  “I do not believe it,” is the reply of Romola’s “passionate repugnance.”  “God’s kingdom is something wider, else let me stand without it with the beings that I love.”  These words tell us the secret of Savonarola’s gathering weakness and of Romola’s strength.  Self, under the subtle form of identifying truth and right with his own party — with his own personal judgment of the cause and the course of right — has so far led
him
astray from the straight onward path.  Right, in its clear, calm, direct simplicity, has become to her supreme above what is commonly called salvation itself.

It is another agency than Savonarola’s now that brings her back once more to take up the full burden of her cross.  She goes forth not knowing or heeding whither she goes, “drifting away” unconscious before wind and wave.  These bear her into the midst of terror, suffering, and death; and there, in self-devotedness to others, in patient ministrations of love amid poverty, ignorance, and superstition, the noble spirit rights itself once more, the weary fainting heart regains its quiet steadfastness.  She knows once more that no amount of wrong-doing can dissolve the bond uniting her to Tito; that no degree of pain may lawfully drive her forth from that sphere of doing and suffering which is
hers
.  She returns, not in joy or hope, but in that which is deeper than all joy and hope — in love; the one thought revealed to us being that it may be her blessedness to stand by him whose baseness drove her away when suffering and loss have come upon him.  But Death — the mystery to which we look as the solver of all earthly mysteries — has resolved for her this darkest and saddest perplexity of her life.  Tito is gone to his place: and his baseness shall vex her no more with antagonistic duties and a divided life.  There is no joy, no expressed sense of relief and release; no reproach of him other than that implied one which springs out of the necessities of her being, the putting away from her, quietly and unobtrusively, the material gains of his treasons.  The poor innocent wrong-doer, Tessa, is sought for, rescued, and cared for; and is never allowed to know the foul wrong to her rescuer of which she has been made the unconscious instrument.  Even to her the language is that “Naldo will return no more, not because he is cruel, but because he is dead.”

One direct trial of her faith and patience remains, through the weakness and apparent apostasy of Savonarola.  Has he, through whom first came to her definite guidance amid the dark perplexities of her life, been always untrue? has the light that seemed through him to dawn on her been therefore misleading and perverting?  In almost agonised intentness she listens for some word, watches for some sign, which shall tell her it has not been so.  She outrages all her womanly sensibilities by being present at the death-scene, in hope that something there, were it but the uplifting of the drooping head to the clear true light of heaven, shall reassure her that the prophet was a true prophet, and his voice to her the voice of God.  But she watches in vain.  Without word or sign that even her quick sure instinct can interpret, Savonarola passes into “the eternal silence.”  What measure of overshadowing darkness and sorrow then again fell over her life we are not told: we only know how that life passed from under this cloud also into purer and serener light.  This perplexity also solves itself for her in the path of unquestioning acceptance of duty, human service, and human love; and as she treads this path, the mists clear away from around Savonarola too, and she sees him again at last as he really was, in the essential truthfulness, nobleness, and self-devotedness of his life.

Of the after-life little is told us, but little needed to be told.  We have followed Romola thus far with dulled intelligence of mind and soul if we cannot picture it clearly and certainly for ourselves.  Love that never falters, patience that never questions, meekness that never fails, truth clear and still as the light of heaven, devotedness that knows no thought of self, a life flowing calmly on through whatever of sorrow and disappointment may remain toward the perfect purity and blessedness of heaven.  Few, we think, can carefully study the character and development of Romola del Bardo and refuse to endorse the verdict that Imagination has given us no figure more rounded and complete in every grace and glory of feminine loveliness.

The sensational fiction of the day has laboured hard in the production of great criminals; but it has produced no human being so vitally debased, no nature so utterly loathsome, no soul so hopelessly lost, as the handsome, smiling, accomplished, popular, viceless Greek, Tito Melema.  Yet is he the very reverse of what is called a monster of iniquity.  That which gives its deep and awful power to the picture is its simple, unstrained, unvarnished truthfulness.  He knows little of himself who does not recognise as existent within himself, and as always battling for supremacy there, that principle of evil which, accepted by Tito as his life-law, and therefore consummating itself in him, “bringeth forth death;” death the most utter and, so far as it is possible to see, the most hopeless that can engulf the human soul.