If you’re looking to read your first George Eliot, don’t start with Romola. In 1866, Henry James called it Eliot’s greatest novel to date (and that means greater than The Mill on the Floss, which opinion is goofy). “It is decidedly the most important,” he wrote of the novel, “--not the most entertaining nor the most readable, but the one in which the largest things are attempted and grasped.” James persevered in this opinion, calling it a “rare masterpiece” in 1873 and in 1876 ranking it above Daniel Deronda, which he called the weakest of her books. He did admit, however, that Deronda was not so “lacking current” as Romola.* Things had gone so much downhill for Romola by 1985 that Harold Bloom, writing in The New York Review of Books (September 26), said that “Romola…is rightly forgotten.” Critics today pretty universally deplore it as a failure. I can’t disagree. But if you’re wending your way through Eliot’s complete works, Romola is a safe fourth or fifth stop on the journey. It has enough of what’s good in Eliot to keep your interest, and since you already know the brilliance she’s capable of from your reading of Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and The Mill on the Floss, Romola’s weaknesses won’t deter you from finishing your trip.I came to Romola because I was trying to fill in a picture of late quattrocento Florence. I’d just finished reading Ronald Lightbown’s Botticelli: Life and Work, which had sent me back to Christopher Hibbert’s The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall to read up on Savonarola. I wanted more, and who better than Eliot, I thought, to bring to life the period between the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent (1492) and the death of Savonarola (1498)? As it turns out, Eliot didn’t bring Botticelli into the book at all; the revival of his reputation would have to wait a few more decades. But she does make a vivid character of Piero di Cosimo, who plays a small but crucial role in the story. In his case, Eliot was able to transform Vasari’s snippets of gossip about Piero into some of the most concrete, lively pages of the novel, and the scene of Tito Melema’s commissioning from Piero the decoration of a small case with the triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne captures the delight that Renaissance scholars and artists must have felt in telling again the myths of ancient Greece and Rome.But that successful transformation is an exception in the novel. Much of the time Eliot has not prevented the dead hand of history from stopping her story cold. Her description of the Bonfire of the Vanities, for example, fails to catch fire. And she sometimes spreads her research in too thick a layer of local color, as she does with the Tuscan saws and sayings that suffocate the dialogue of Bratti the ragpicker and Nello the barber--a strange case of tin ear in an author who is famous for getting the cadences of farmers and workmen exactly right. Her Proem to the novel makes much of the fact that “we still resemble the men of the past more than we differ from them.” I wish she had acted on that belief and made her Florentines speak the way the folks speak in her English Midlands. Frequently the lumbering machinery of plot and coincidence built to bring her characters into contact with one another creaks too loudly to be ignored. That is easily forgiven when turns in the plot result in brilliant scenes of the sort Eliot can achieve. But there’s nothing in Romola to match, say, the dying Peter Featherstone offering Mary Garth his fortune in Middlemarch, or in the same novel, Rosamond obstinately refusing to hear Lydgate’s plea that she economize. There are in fact too few scenes in which characters are allowed to develop and reveal themselves, and it’s on that level of fictional lives imagined and acted out that Romola’s failure is most conspicuous and most disappointing. On the level, however, where, to return to James’s estimate, “the largest things are attempted and grasped,” the novel can generate real interest. Eliot’s psychological and moral analyses of her characters are often acute and profound, especially her analyses of Savonarola and Romola’s husband, Tito Melema. Tito is the most successful creation of the book. Handsome, talented, ambitious, and totally self-centered, he is a young man on the make who thinks the world owes him a living. He is a “tool with a smooth handle” (Chapter 45) who knows how to insinuate himself among the powerful and become their indispensable adjunct. And he is, most fatefully, a man who prefers to take the easy way to reach his goal of a life lived for pleasure and profit. If Eliot’s imagination had followed Tito’s career more closely, so that we saw him wheeling and dealing among the Florentine factions, the Piagnoni, Mediceans, and Compagnacci, we would have had a picture of quattrocento politics and history much more incisive than what Romola actually gives us; a different novel entirely, in fact, with Machiavelli as its muse (yes, he’s here, but he has only a few lines--good ones, however, and in a convincingly Machiavellian voice). But Eliot was attempting things even larger than political history: it’s the conflict between the “clashing deities” (Chapter 17) of Christianity and paganism that really captures Eliot’s imagination and underlies the conflicts within her main character. Romola’s dilemma in its broadest outline is the dilemma of Renaissance culture. Paganism and the Revival of Learning, as embodied by Tito and Romola’s father (a rigid, unproductive scholar who, tellingly, is blind), is not just the hoarding of antique busts and gems or the indulgence in antique fantasies such as fascinate Piero di Cosimo. At its best, it seems to be a program of rational choice and enlightened materialism that Eliot invokes with imagery of light and joy and buoyant animal spirits, as here when Romola pictures her life with her handsome young husband:Purple vines festooned between the elms, the strong corn perfecting itself under the vibrating heat, bright winged creatures hurrying and resting among the flowers, round limbs beating the earth in gladness with cymbals held aloft, light melodies chanted to the thrilling rhythm of strings--all objects and all sounds that tell of Nature revelling in her force. (Chapter 17)But Romola, with a need as strenuous as her creator’s to define a purpose for life beyond mere selfish satisfaction, is unable to rest long in hedonism; and the effect of Tito’s moral failures, which are seen to arise from a weakness and egoism that his classical education and pagan outlook are helpless to correct, is to send his wife in search of a cause that will give her a difficult duty to fulfill. Enter Savonarola. Christianity in Romola of course takes the form of the only religion on offer in 15th-century Italy: Roman Catholicism. This must have given Eliot the good Englishwoman no end of problems, and in Romola’s struggle to accept Savonarola’s moral authority I think I see Eliot’s own struggle to save the friar’s genuine reformist zeal from infection by the other aspect of his crusade, the nonsense she clearly sees as irredeemably papist and retrograde: the visions, the prophecy, the promise of miracles. The pages in which Eliot offers her analysis of Savonarola, the holy man in possession of great power, if the least novelistic, are nevertheless some of the most persuasive in their psychology and most moving in their rhetoric, especially Chapter 64, “The Prophet in his Cell,” and Chapter 71, “The Confession,” which she ends by exonerating him: “Power rose against him not because of his sins, but because of his greatness--not because he sought to deceive the world, but because he sought to make it noble” (Chapter 71). Unsatisfactory as she is as a representation of a woman, Romola is an almost allegorical portrait of a consciousness toiling in the vale of soul-making. Eliot occasionally achieves grandeur in depicting Romola’s interior struggles and the courage she summons to act in conformance with her stringent ideals. But she out-Dorotheas Dorothea Brooke. She is hardly real, and the more closely the book focuses on her, the more unsatisfactory as a novel the book becomes. Even the other people in the novel have trouble seeing Romola as real; statuesque and blonde, she often startles them like an apparition of the B.V.M. Her education by her father in rational paganism saves her from succumbing to the worst excesses of Catholic superstition, so she’s uniquely suited to see what’s right and just in Savonarola’s mission and utterance. And since by temperament she’s a kind of one-woman NGO, she’s primed to accept his call to renounce vanities and serve the lowest and poorest of her fellow citizens.Piling ideal upon ideal, Eliot makes of Romola not only a Madonna, but an Antigone as well. Early in the book Piero paints Romola as that heroine in a double portrait with her blind father as Oedipus (a very unlikely subject, I believe, in 15th-century Italian art). Much later, in Chapter 56, this foreshadowing is fulfilled in a climactic scene where we seem to watch the Protestant individual conscience dawning in Romola: The law was sacred. Yes, but rebellion might be sacred too. It flashed upon her mind that the problem before her was essentially the same as that which had lain before Savonarola--the problem where the sacredness of obedience ended, and where the sacredness of rebellion began. To her, as to him, there had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in the face of a law which is not unarmed with Divine lightnings….There is another moment when Romola acts on her own warrant, when I thought the novel was going to take off in an unexpected, exhilarating direction: Romola decides to leave Florence, alone, and set out on a journey to consult “the most learned woman in the world, Cassandra Fedele, at Venice, and ask her how an instructed woman could support herself…” (Chapter 36). What’s this? I thought. George Eliot is going to give us a female picaresque? On the road with Romola? Alas, it works out otherwise. Rather than pattern the resolution of this moment on a classical source, the Crossing of the Rubicon, when the individual seizes his destiny and goes on to conquer the world, Eliot chooses instead to pattern the moment on one that's exemplary of Christian humility and submission: the Road to Damascus. Nearly a decade later, in 1871, we find Eliot still under the spell of this image, imagining again this road, and though Christian still, it leads not to submission, but to an “epic life” of “illimitable satisfaction”--the famous picture in the Prelude to Middlemarch of St. Theresa as a little girl setting out on crusade. That road, too, is never taken. * James’s quotations are from his reviews gathered in A Century of George Eliot Criticism, Gordon Haight, editor, 1965: Houghton Mifflin; pp. 52, 80, 101, 98.
My second date with my new best friend George Eliot. I didn't love it like I loved The Mill on the Floss, which is fine. I'm not sure that I want to love all things that way. I'm rounding up the rating here because though it was a much more difficult read, I have near as much awe for what she is capable of. The thing that I find in George Eliot, and in almost nothing else, is a telling of the truth that sounds like a magic, definitive lesson. Her statements are just and perfect. And in both books, the conflicts have somehow made me feel the story touches my life deeply. As an adult, I find very few stories strong enough to reach there.Here, she brings across important thinking about duty and debt and trust, belonging and home, self-interest on a macro level. The truth of some conclusions on those subjects were painful to read. I will need to revisit these thoughts. And parentage seems to be important here -- I noticed there are four father figures in the book: Romola's, her husband's, her godfather, and her converter and "father" Savonarola. The comparison between them is not explicitly drawn, but I paid it attention anyway. In the end, Romola herself seems to belong on that list symbolically as well. It's a good ending.But. Very long stretches of this book are very hard to read. I felt exasperated by the entire first half. 50% of a pretty long book is a lot of distaste, so some more balanced presentation of character insight would have been good for me. I felt like I waited forever to see what Romola was like, and why the book is named after her. And something about the style in which Eliot delivers the bulk of the setting -- the history lessons, the political goings-on, the inhabitants and aspect of Florence at the turn of the 16th century -- just did not go, for me. I did not befriend it. It was far, far too dry and exact to enjoy.Which is ok, actually; that is just my reading. But it was strange feeling the parts of the book I really valued were often being eclipsed by her accuracy. And yet, it is perfectly right for her to have worked so hard to achieve it, and that's the way it should be.Thanks to Shannon for the birthday present.
What do You think about Romola (2015)?
Nope: didn't like it one bit, but sat and read through almost 600 pages of historical setting while Eliot spun a flimsy, barely coherent plot over top of her beloved research. Stock characters became parodies - see Baldassarre or Romola - and decently fleshed out characters disappeared into the haze of Eliot's sympathy project - see Tito. Add to this the horrifically patronizing, and sublimely insulting portrayal of the beautiful woman Tessa, another one of Eliot's ongoing projects of demonification, and you have the major characters of Romola. Savonarola? The guy who got a few inner monologues? See "an apologist's revisionism of Italian history 1490's" ... well, almost. Eliot's too good a novelist to be a so transparent. But still, I found very little to like in this, her justly least read novel.
—Leif
The GRAND NOVEL goes on The GRAND TOUR In a deep curve of the mountains lay a breadth of green land, curtained by gentle tree-shadowed slopes leaning towards the rocky heights. Up these slopes might be seen here and there, gleaming between the tree-tops, a pathway leading to a little irregular mass of building that seemed to have clambered in a hasty way up the mountain-side, and take a difficult stand there for the sake of showing the tall belfry as a sight of beauty to the scattered and clustered houses of the village below.The Grand Tour or tourism with style. This mode is gone now. But this agreeable and leisurely read has felt like a reward since it is no longer possible to travel in such a style. With this novel I have travelled to the Florence of the end of the 15C holding the hand of Mary Ann Evans. Having visited the place recently--also with an imaginary Renaissance as my objective--with her Romola, I was eliminating one and a half centuries in the time gap, and able to enjoy a different perspective to my own.No Florence-card, no museum lines, no ubiquitous photographing, no queuing at Il Due Fratellini to grab a cheap panini to eat sitting down on the stairs of the Loggia dei Lanzi. Instead, I could enjoy a serene dilation, a grandeur in observation, ample panoramas, expanded time, careful inspection of details, profound insight, and thorough knowledge. And this even though Evans occasionally makes the reader aware that, no matter how closely to the Florentine Renaissance she strives to take us, the text is dealing with a foregone age. As victim of the hurried cadence of my age, my first impression was that the novel would be thin, in spite of its length. Its first pages felt like watercolours, with diffuse forms and too much gentleness. It took me a while to tune into its amiable, distended, dilated pace. But when I finally did I could then treasure Evans’ erudition, imagination, and sharpness of mind.Evans took on a challenging task by choosing a very complicated period in the history of Florence. The aftermath at the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico saw the messy attempt at a new Republic; the invasion by the French king Charles VIII; the return to a fundamentalist and apocalyptic practice of religion; the political machinations of the Pope Alexander VI, etc. This is a period that often historians just brush through; the complexities are so controversial. But it was after all the fertile ground for Machiaveli to develop his political thought. Bravely setting her story in such a scenario Evans does not skirt the issues. She travelled three times to Tuscany to supplement her already astoundingly strong education in the classics --we would now qualify her as a scholar. She was still very young when she first visited, in 1840, but she returned twice in the very early 1860s, spending several weeks in preparation for her novel. This is her only work that is set outside of England and in a somewhat remote age. It was first published in 1862 in serialized form in a magazine.Her confidence in treating this complex and rich period shows throughout the book. She distinguishes comfortably between the differing modes of government of the various republics, as well as between the different religious orders, major and minor. She gives us a fascinating good account of the functioning and origins of the circle of Neo-platonic humanists gathering around the Orci Rucellai. She gets close to the conspiracy against the Republic that brought the execution of five illustrious men who were close to the Medici. She keeps a steady pace when tackling the precise state of the complex classical revival, aware, for example, that Homer was a new discovery. There is no need to wait for a feminist revival to learn about the existence of the extraordinary Cassandra Fedele. I was also very intrigued by her choice of the idiosyncratic painter, Piero di Cosimo (1462-1521), out of the overwhelming array of superb painters from that time. In realizing her sound command of her material, we cannot forget that Evans was writing before Walter Paters’ The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), the critic who first singled out Botticelli (and now part of the kitschy repertoire), before Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was translated into English, and at the time when Jules Michelet, the man who coined the word ‘Renaissance’, was still working on his massive Histoire.Writing this fictional approach to the period, at the time she did, Evans demonstrates what an extraordinary woman she was.For she certainly had her own ideas. And these she could develop because she gave herself time to observe, time to think, time to ponder. Hers was Grand Time. For example, she is critical of Machiavelli, for he is too much bitten with notions, and has not your power of fascination....He has lost a great chance in life.... She also gives a fascinating portrayal of the controversial Girolamo Savonarola, now enveloped in his black legend and easily derided, but who emerges through her pen as an unquestionably remarkable man. To expanded time she could weld her most outstanding gift, her acute perception. She had complemented her studies and reading with a power of observation, of objects, settings, customs, clothing, that had impressed Anthony Trollope. But the full expansion in her observation is devoted to the human soul. With her writing it becomes a landscape of wide and profound vistas. Consequently, her main characters, the fictional ones, engage her reader for their complexity.It is true that her Romola has been criticized because she remains well footed in the age in which she was really born. She is a Victorian sweet young lady and we suspect that she is made out of Evans’ own nature. And yet, Romola, in spite of her sweetness and initial gullibility, draws the interest of a 21st century reader because her personality develops along the copious pages. She undergoes a gradual éducation sentimentale. With the dilation of the grand manner we follow her as she questions many given values and social structures, matrimony being one of them, and she keeps our interest because she does not fall prey to black & white doubts. There is always subtlety in her reactions and her thinking.For me the most interesting character, though, was Tito, the non-villain villain, because he is, despairingly, so highly believable. His moral deterioration is not entirely blameworthy. Clad in overpowering charm, amorality can be so irresistible, that it will gain the upper hand.As a Grand Novel, Romola, has the unquestionable Grand Narrator, the omniscient voice that moves seamlessly in and out of the minds of the characters. And concomitant with it, the charged morals pepper the text for they were the alibi that sustained and defended fiction as a worthy literary genre. The moralistic maxims feel like the classical ruins dispersed the landscapes of the Grand Tour. Signs of permanence. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that is also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled.Laws that govern human behaviour. As a strong body struggles against fumes with the more violence when they begin to be stifling, a strong soul struggles against fantasies with all the more alarmed energy when they threaten to govern in the place of thought..But in Florence, in spite of Savonarola, in spite of Evans’ morality, and like everywhere else, Vanities have not left the Piazza della Signoria. If Savonarola tried to destroy them with his Bonfires of Vanities, and Evans attempted to dissolve them with her edifying novel, the façades around the square are now lined up with the Vanities on display and on offer at the Gucci, Vuitton et al shops..., around the plaque on the floor indicating where he he was burnt, in his own bonfire. Some aspects of humanity, in spite of differences in the geographical and historical contexts, do not seem to change.
—Kalliope
Romola marks a significant shift in George Eliot's career. At first glance, this shift appears radical. Whereas her first four works (Scenes of Clerical Life followed by the three early novels, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner) all document life in rural England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Romola takes place in late 15c. Italy. That is to say, while her early works can all be read in line with the project of realism she outlines in her early essay, "The Natural History of German Life," Romola certainly marks a shift to new and different concerns. At the same time, however, there is still much continuity with her earlier (and later) work in its exploration of human relationships, moral action, and religious sentiment. The shift is not one of tone or theme but rather of scope, as Romola has the same expansiveness of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. What makes this novel so difficult and rewarding (and perhaps why it is not widely read) is its dense historical embedment. Why Romola's life is fictional, the period of Florentine history that the novel presents is not. The complex social world that the novel presents is a rich portrait, though perhaps one that borders on overwhelming the reader rather than moving him or her.Personally, I love Eliot's work, and this novel has all the lovely passages that characterize her greatest work. It is certainly a great and difficult work, and if it had been written by someone else, might actually be more widely read. It has everything the 19c. novel shouldh have and more: Niccolo Machiavelli as a character, a monkey riding a horse, Dominicans (almost!) walking through fire, and plenty of deceit and intrigue. However, considering that Eliot would later write two of the greatest novels in the English language, it is easy to see why this novel is relegated to obscurity.
—adam
