Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (980 page)

The conception of Tito as one great central figure in a work of art would scarcely, we think, have occurred to any one whose moral aim was other than that which it is the endeavour of these remarks to trace out in George Eliot’s works.  The working out of that conception, as it is here worked out, would, we believe, have been impossible to any one who had less strongly realised wherein all the true nobleness and all the true debasement of humanity lie.

Outwardly, on his first appearance, there is not merely nothing repellent about Tito; in person and manner, in genial kindly temper, in those very forms of intelligence and accomplishment that specially suit the city and the time, there is superficially everything to conciliate and attract.  It is almost impossible to define the subtle threads of indication through which, from the first, we are forced to distrust him.  Superficially, it might seem at this time as if with Tito the probabilities were equal as regards good and evil; and that with Romola’s love thrown into the scale, their preponderance on the side of good were all but irresistible.  Yet from the first we feel that it is otherwise — that this light, genial, ease-loving nature has already, by its innate habitude of self-pleasing, foreordained itself to sink down into ever deeper and more utter debasement.  With the “slight, almost imperceptible start,” at the accidental words which connect the value of his jewels with “a man’s ransom,” we feel that some baseness is already within himself contemplated.  With the transference of their price to the goldsmith’s hands, we know that the baseness is in his heart resolved on.  When the message through the monk tells him that the ransom may still be available, we never doubt what the decision will be.  Present ease and enjoyment, the maintaining and improving the position he has won — in short, the “something that is due to himself,” rather than a distant, dangerous, possibly fruitless duty, howsoever clear.

The one purer feeling in that corrupt heart — his love for Romola — is almost from the first tainted by the same selfishness.  From the first he recognises that his relation to her will give him a certain position in the city; and he feels that with his ready tact and Greek suppleness this is all that is needed to secure his further advancement.  The vital antagonism between his nature and hers bars the possibility of his foreseeing how her truthfulness, nobleness, and purity shall become the thorn in his ease-loving life.

In his earlier relations with Tessa, there is nothing more than seeking a present and passing amusement, and the desire to sun himself in her childish admiration and delight.  He is as far as possible from the intentional seducer and betrayer.  But his accidental encounters with her, cause him perplexity and annoyance; and at last it seems to him safer for his own position, especially in regard to Romola, that she should be secretly housed as she is, and taught to regard herself as his wife.  Soon there comes to be more of ease for him with the bond-submissive child-mistress, than in the presence of the high-souled, pure-hearted wife.  In the first and decisive encounter with Baldassarre, the words of repudiation which seal the whole after-character of his life, apparently escape from him unconsciously and by surprise.  But it is the traitor-heart that speaks them.  They could never even by surprise have escaped the lips, had not the baseness of their denial and desertion been already in the heart consummated.

We need not follow him through all his subsequent and deepening treasons.  They all, without exception, want every element that might make even treason impressive.  They want even such factitious elevation as their being prompted by hatred or revenge might lend; — even such broader interest as their being done in the interest of a party, or for some wide end, could confer.  They have no fuller or deeper import than the present ease, present safety, present or future advantage, of that object which fills up his universe, — Self.  He would rather not have betrayed the trust reposed in him by Romola’s father, if the end he thereby proposed to himself could have been attained otherwise than through such betrayal.  His plot with Dolfo Spini for placing the great Monk-prophet in the hands of his enemies, has no darker motive than the getting out of the way an indirect obstacle to his own advancement, and a man whose labours tend to make life harder and more serious for all who come under his influence.  Bernardo del Nero, with his stainless honour, has from the first taken up an attitude of tacit revulsion toward him; but there is no revenge prompting the part he plays towards the noble, true-hearted old man.  He would rather that he and his fellow-victims were saved, if his own safety and ultimate gain could be secured otherwise than through their betrayal and death.  There is no hardness or cruelty in him, save when its transient displays toward Romola are necessary for furthering some present end: he never indulges in the luxury of unnecessary and unprofitable sins.  The sharp, steadfast, unwavering consistency of Tito is even more marked than that of Romola, for twice Romola falters, and turns to flee.  The supple, flexible Greek follows out the law he has laid down as the law of his life, — worships the god he has set up as the god of his worship with an inexorable constancy that never for one chance moment falters.  That god is self; that law is, in one word, self-pleasing.  Long before the end comes, we feel that Tito Melema is a lost soul; that for him and in him there is no place for repentance; that to him we may without any uncharity apply the most fearful words human language has ever embodied; — he has sinned the “sin which
cannot
be forgiven, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”

“Justice,” says the author, as the dead Tito is borne past still locked in the death-clutch of the human avenger — “justice is like the kingdom of God: it is not without us as a fact; it is within us as a great yearning.”  In these solemn truthful words we have suggested to us how feebly mere physical death can shadow forth that spiritual corruption, that “second death,” which we have seen hour by hour consummating in him who has lived for self alone.

Few of the great figures which stand up amid the dimness of medieval history are more perplexing to historian and biographer than Savonarola.  On a first glance we seem shut up to one or other of two alternatives — regarding him as an apostle and martyr, or as a charlatan.  And even more careful examination leaves in his character and life anomalies so extraordinary, contradictions so inextricable, that most historians have fallen back on the hypothesis of partial insanity — the insanity born of an honest and upright but extravagant fanaticism — as the only one adequate to explain the mystery.  Whether George Eliot has in this work produced a more satisfactory solution, we do not attempt formally to determine.  We are sure, however, that every thoughtful reader will recognise that the solution she offers is one in strict and deep consistency with all the laws of human action, and all the tendencies of human imperfection; and that the Savonarola she places before us is a being we can understand
by sympathy
— sympathy at once with the greatness of his aims, and still more fully with the weaknesses that lead him astray.

The picture is a very impressive one, alike in its grandeur and in its sadness, speaking its true, deep, universal lesson home to us and to our life: alike when it shows us the strength and nobleness of life attuning itself to the highest good, and battling on toward the highest right; and when it shows us how self, under a form which does not seem self, may steal in to sap its strength and to abase its nobleness.

The great Monk-prophet comes upon the scene a new “voice crying in the wilderness” of selfishness and wrong around him — an impassioned witness that “there is a God that judgeth in the earth,” protesting by speech and by life against the self-seeking and self-pleasing he sees on every side.  To the putting down of this, to the living his own life, to the rousing all men to live theirs, not to pleasure, but to God; merging all private interests in the public good, and that the best good; looking each one not to his own pleasures, ambition, or ease, but to that which shall best advance a reign of truth, justice, and love on earth, — to this end he has consecrated himself and all his powers.  The path thus chosen is for himself a hard one; circumstanced as our humanity is, it never has been otherwise — never shall be so while these heavens and this earth remain.  Mere personal self-denials, mere turning away from the outward pomps and vanities of the world, lie very lightly on a nature like Savonarola’s, and such things scarcely enter into the pain and hardness of his chosen lot.  It is the opposition, — active, in the intrigues and machinations of enemies both in Church and State — passive, in the dull cold hearts that respond so feebly and fitfully to his appeals; it is the constant wearing bitterness of hope deferred, the frequent still sterner bitterness of direct disappointment, — it is things like these that make his cross so heavy to bear.  But they cannot turn him aside from his course — cannot win him to lower his aim to something short of the highest good conceivable by him.  We may smile now in our days of so-called enlightenment at some of the measures he directs in pursuance of his great aim.  His “Pyramid of Vanities” may be to our self-satisfied complacency itself a vanity.  To him it represents a stern reality of reformation in character and life; and to the Florentine of his age it symbolises one form of vain self-pleasing offered up in solemn willing sacrifice to God.

One trial of his faith and steadfastness, long expected, comes on him at last.  The recognised head of that great organisation of which he is a vowed and consecrated member declares against him, and the papal sentence of excommunication goes forth.  We, looking as we deem on the Papacy trembling to its fall, can very imperfectly enter into the awful gravity of this struggle.  To us, the prohibition of an Alexander Borgia may seem of small account, and his anathema of small weight in the councils of the universe.  But it was otherwise with Savonarola: the Monk-apostle, trained and vowed to unqualified obedience, has thus forced on him the most difficult problem of his time.  This to him more than earthly authority, the visible embodiment of the Divine on earth, the direct and only representative of the one authority of God in Christ, has declared his course to be a course of error and sin.  Shall he accept or reject the decision?  To reject, is to break with the supposed tradition of fourteen centuries, and with all his own past training, predilections, and habits of thought; it is to nullify his own voluntary act of the past, accepting implicit obedience, and to go forth on a path which has thenceforth no outward guidance, light, or stay.  To accept, is to break with all his own truest and deepest past, to abandon all that for him gives truth and reality to life, and to retire to his cell, and limit his attention thenceforth — if he can — to making the “salvation” of his own soul secure.  We may safely esteem that this is the culminating struggle of his life.  We may well understand the solemn pause that ensues, the retirement to solitude, there to review the position before the only court of appeal that remains to him, — that inward voice of conscience, that inward sense of right, which is the immediate presence of God within.  But we never doubt what the decision will be.  “I must obey God rather than man; I cannot recognise that this voice — even of God’s vicegerent — is the voice of God.  Necessity is laid on me, which I dare not gainsay, to preach this Gospel of God’s kingdom, as, even on earth, a kingdom of righteousness, truth, and love.”

Such is one phase of the Savonarola here portrayed to us; and herein is placed before us the secret of his greatness and strength.  This firm assertion of the highest right his consciousness recognises, amid all difficulty, hardness, and disappointment; this persistent endeavour by precept and example to rouse men to a truer and better life than their own varied self-seekings; this unflinching struggle against everything false, mean, and base, — these things make him a power in the State before which King and Pope are compelled to bow in respect or fear.  Over even the larger nature of Romola his words at this time have sway, — the sway which more distinct perception of
all
the relations of duty gives over a spirit equally earnest to seek the right alone.

In time there comes a change, almost imperceptibly, working from within outwards, first clearly announced through the changed relations of others to him, though these are but symptomatic of change within himself.  The political strength of his sway is broken, its moral strength is all but gone.  The nature of the change in himself he unwittingly defines in those last words to Romola already quoted, “The cause of
my party
is the cause of God’s kingdom.”  Various external circumstances have contributed to bring about the result thus indicated; but on these it is unnecessary to dwell.  God’s kingdom has lowered and narrowed itself into his party.  The spirit of the partisan has begun to overshadow the purity of the patriot, to contract and abase the wide aim of the Christian; and he has come to substitute a law of right modified to suit the interests of the party, for that law which is absolute and unconditional.  He whom we listened to in the Duomo as the fervid proclaimer of God’s justice, stands now before us as the perverter of even human justice and human law.  The very nobleness of Bernardo del Nero strengthens the necessity that he should die, that the Mediceans may be thus deprived of the support of his stainless honour and high repute; though to compass this death the law of mercy which Savonarola himself has instituted must be put aside.  As we listen to the miserable sophistries by which he strives to justify himself — far less to Romola than before his own accusing soul — we feel that the greatness of his strength has departed from him.  All thenceforth is deepening confusion without and within.  Less and less can he control the violences of his party, till these provoke all but universal revolt, and the “Masque of the Furies” ends his public career.  The uncertainties and vacillations of the “Trial by Fire,” the long series of confessions and retractations, historically true, are still more morally and spiritually significant.  They tell of inward confusion and perplexity, generated through that partial “self-pleasing” which, under guise so insidious, had stolen into the inner life; of faith and trust perturbed and obscured thereby; of dark doubts engendered whether God had indeed ever spoken by him.  We feel it is meet the great life should close, not as that of the triumphant martyr, but amid the depths of that self-renouncing penitence through which once more the soul resumes its full relation to the divine.