Part 6

Take the last first. Grant all the honour paid by Cosmo and Lorenzo to the learned men of all nations, especially to Greek scholars who, in the first fervour of the Renaissance, were as sons of the gods to those thirsting for the waters of the divine spring. Grant, too, the example set by Bartolommeo Scala, who had given his beautiful daughter Alessandra in marriage to the "soldier-poet" Marullo; was it likely that even an eccentric old scholar like the blind Bardo de' Bardi should have so unreservedly adopted a nameless Greek adventurer, flung up like a second Ulysses from the waves, unvouched for by any sponsor and unidentified by any document? We allow that Bardo might have taken Tito as his scribe and secretary, seeing that the Cennini had already employed him, waif and stray as he was; but that he should have consented to his daughter's marriage with this stranger, and that her more conservative and more suspicious godfather, Bernado del Nero, should have consented, even if reluctantly, was just about as likely as that an English country gentleman should allow his daughter to marry a handsome gipsy.

If we think for a moment of what citizenship meant in olden times, the improbability of the whole of Tito's career becomes still more striking. As, in Athens, the Sojourner never stood on the same plane with the autochthon, so in Rome the Peregrinus was ineligible for public office or the higher kind of marriage; and though the stricter part of the law was subsequently relaxed in favour of a wider civic hospitality, the sentiment of exclusiveness remained, and indeed does yet remain in Italy. It seems more than improbable that Tito, a Greek adventurer, should have been employed in any political service, save perhaps as a base kind of scout and unhonoured spy. That he should ever have taken the position of an accredited public orator was so contrary to all the old traditions and habits of thought as to be of the same substance as a fairy tale.

The character of Bardo, too, is non-Italian; and his modes of life and thought were as impossible as are some other things to be hereafter spoken of. The Church had a long arm, as we said, and a firm grip; and while it blinked indulgently enough at certain aberrations, it demanded the show of conformity in essentials. Lorenzo was a pagan, but he died receiving the Sacraments. The Borgias were criminals, but their professions of faith were loud-voiced and in true earnest. Men might inveigh against the evil lives of the clergy and the excesses of monks and nuns, but they had to confess God and the Church; and their diatribes had to be carefully worded--as witness Rabelais--or a plea would certainly be found for the fire and faggot--as with Fra Dolcino and Savonarola. So with conformity to the usages of life which, then and now, are considered integral to morality. It could not have been possible for Bardo to bring up his daughter "aloof from the debasing influence" of her own sex, and in a household with only one old man for a servant. The times did not allow it; no more than we should allow it now in this freer day. This womanless home for an Italian girl at any time, more especially in the Middle Ages, when even young wives were bound to have their companions and duennas, is a serious blot in workmanship. So, indeed, is the whole of Romola's life, being anachronism and simply nineteenth-century English from start to finish.

The things which both she and Tessa did, and were allowed to do, are on a par with "Gulliver's Travels" and "Peter Wilkins." It was as impossible for Tessa, a pretty young unmarried girl, contadina as she was, to come into Florence alone, as for a peasant child of three years old to be sent with a message on business into the City of London alone. To this day well-conducted women of any class do not wander about the streets of Italian cities unaccompanied; and maidenhood is, as it always was, sacredly and jealously guarded. Nor could Romola have gone out and come in at her desire, as she is allowed by the author. With streets filled by the turbulent factions of the Bianchi and Neri, always ready for a fight or for a love-adventure, what would have happened to, and been thought of, a beautiful young woman slipping about within the city and outside the gates at all hours of the day and night? She is said to be either quite alone (!), as when she goes to Tessa's house, or merely accompanied by Monna Brigida, as when she goes to the convent to see her dying brother--which also, by the way, was impossible--or attended, at a distance, by old Maso when she attempts her flight as a solitary nun. She would have lost name and state had she committed these eccentricities; and had she persisted in them, she would have been sent to a convent--that refuge for sorrow, that shelter from danger, that prison for contumacy--and her godfather would have been the first to consign her to what was then the only safe asylum for women. The scene she has with Tito before Nello's shop is ludicrously impossible--as is their English-like return home together, without retinue or lights, just like a man and wife of to-day when she has been to fetch him from the public-house, or, if she be of the better class, from his club. English, too, is Romola's sitting up for her husband in her queer womanless establishment, and opening the door to him when he comes home late at night. For the matter of that, indeed, Tito's solitary rambles are as much out of line with the time, and the circumstances of that time, as is Romola's strange daring. No man of any note whatever appeared alone in the streets when out on a midnight expedition, either to commit murder or break the seventh commandment. He took some one with him, friend or servant, armed; and to this day you will not find Italians willingly walk alone at night. The whole of this kind of life, if necessary for the story, is dead against truth and probability. So is Romola's flight, disguised as a nun. Splendid as is the scene between her and Savonarola, the _vraisemblance_ is spoilt by this impossibility of condition. Nor could any woman of that time, brought up in a city, have felt a sense of freedom when fairly outside the walls by herself on a strange road, going to meet an unknown fate and bound to an unknown bourne. She would have felt as a purdah woman of India suddenly turned loose in the streets and environs of Delhi--as felt all those women whose evidence we read of in matters of crime and murder, when they came face to face with the desolation of unprotectedness. Modern women call it freedom, but in the Middle Ages such a feeling did not exist. All these things are anachronisms; as much so as if a novelist of the twentieth century, writing of English life in the eighteenth, should clothe his women in knickerbockers, mount them on bicycles, and turn them into the football field and cricket-ground.

These exceptions taken to the scaffolding of the book, we are free to admire its glorious nobility of sentiment, its lofty purpose, its perfection of character-drawing, and the dramatic power of its various scenes. Nothing can excel the power with which Tito's character is shown in its gradual slipping from simple selfishness to positive criminality. The whole action may be summed up in George Eliot's own words.

"When, the next morning, Tito put this determination into act, he had chosen his colour in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his wishes. He had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth desire it to be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of his conduct should not remain for ever concealed. Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than in the consequent adjustment of our desires--the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact that by it the hope in lies is for ever swept away, and the soul recovers its noble attitude of sincerity."

But, giving every weight to the natural weakness, sweetness and affectionateness, as well as to the latent falsity of Tito's character, we cannot accept the Tessa episode as true to life in general, while it is eminently untrue to Italian life, especially of those times. Tessa herself, too, is wearisome with her tears and her kisses, her blue eyes and baby face, so incessantly repeated and harped on. She is as nauseating as she is impossible; and the whole story from first to last is an ugly blot on the book.

In Romola and in Savonarola we touch the heights. The "tall lily" is an exquisite conception and is supreme in human loveliness. Her two interviews with Savonarola are superbly done, and the gradual crushing down of her proud self-will under the passionate fervour of the priest is beyond praise both for style and psychology. So, too, are the changes in the great preacher himself--the first, when his simple earnestness of belief in his mission degenerates into self-consciousness and personal assumption, as is the way with all reformers--the second, when he abandons his later attitude, and the dross is burnt away as the hour of trial comes on him, and the World no longer stands between God and his soul. The final scenes of the Frate's public life are powerfully wrought, with all George Eliot's mastery and eloquence and deep religious fervour; but it is in scenes and circumstances of this kind that she is ever at her best. In humour and psychologic insight she is greater than any English woman writer we have had; in aphorisms she is unrivalled; but in playfulness she is clumsy, and in catching the moral, intellectual and social tone of the times of which she writes, she is nowhere.

Contrast Romola's character and manner of life--above all those two thoroughly English letters of hers--with all that we know of Vittoria Colonna, the purest and noblest woman of her day--which was Romola's--and at once we see the difference between them--the difference wrought by four centuries--Vittoria being essentially a woman of the time, though a head and shoulders above the ruck; while Romola is as essentially a product of the nineteenth century. In spite of the local colour--which, after all, is only a wash--given by the descriptions of pageants and processions, and by the history of which George Eliot so ably mastered the details, the whole book is nineteenth century, from Monna Brigida's characteristically English speech about Tessa's place in the house and the children's sweets, to Romola's as characteristically English attitude and hygienic objections--from a little maiden, without a caretaker, carrying eggs to Piero, to Romola's solitary visit to the studio and night perambulations about the city.

All these shortcomings notwithstanding, "Romola" will ever remain one of the noblest works of our noblest author; and, after all, did not Shakspere make Hector quote Aristotle, and show all his Greeks and Romans and outlandish nondescripts from countries unknown to himself, as nothing but sturdy Englishmen, such as lived and loved in the times of the great Eliza? Where we have so much to admire--nay, to venerate--we may let the smaller mistakes pass. Yet they must be spoken of by those who would be candid and not fulsome--just and not flattering. By the way, did George Eliot know that "Baldassare" is the name of one of the devils invoked to this day by Sicilian witches?

* * * * *

The longest of all the novels, "Middlemarch," is the most interesting in its characters, its isolated scenes, its moral meaning and philosophic extension; but it is also the most inartistic and the most encumbered with subordinate interests and personages. The canvas is as crowded as one of George Cruikshank's etchings; and the work would have gained by what George Eliot would have called fission--a division into two. The stories of Dorothea and Casaubon and of Rosamond and Lydgate are essentially separate entities; and though they are brought together at the last by an intermingled interest, the result is no more true unification than the Siamese twins or the Double-headed Nightingale represented one true human being. The contrast between the two beautiful young wives is well preserved, and the nicer shades of difference are as clearly marked as are the more essential; for George Eliot was far too good a workman to scamp in any direction, and the backs of her stories are as well wrought as the fronts. But if one-third of the book had been cut out--failing that fission, which would have been still better--the work would have gained in proportion to its compression.

The character of Dorothea marks the last stage in the development of the personality which begins with Maggie Tulliver, and is in reality Marian Evans's own self. Maggie, Romola and Dorothea are the same person in progressive stages of moral evolution. All are at cross corners with life and fate--all are rebellious against things as they find them. Maggie's state of insurgency is the crudest and simplest; Romola's is the most passionate in its moral reprobation of accepted unworthiness; Dorothea's is the widest in its mental horizon, and the most womanly in the whole-hearted indifference to aught but love, which ends the story and gives the conclusive echo. In its own way, her action in taking Will Ladislaw is like Esther's in marrying Felix Holt; but it has not the unlikelihood of Esther's choice. It is all for love, if one will, but it runs more harmoniously with the broad lines of her character, and gives us no sense of that dislocation which we get from Esther's decision. And in its own way it is at once a parallel and an apology.

The most masterly bits of work in "Middlemarch" are the characters of Rosamond and Casaubon. Rosamond's unconscious selfishness, her moral thinness, and the superficial quality of her love are all portrayed without a flaw in the drawing; while Casaubon's dryness, his literary indecision following on his indefatigable research, and his total inability to adjust himself to his new conditions, together with his scrupulous formality of politeness combined with real cruelty of temper, make a picture of supreme psychologic merit. They who think that Casaubon was meant for the late Rector of Lincoln know nothing about George Eliot's early life. They who do know some of those obscurer details, are well aware of the origin whence she drew her masterly portrait, as they know who was Mrs. Poyser, who Tom Tulliver, and who Hetty Sorrel. Hetty, indeed, is somewhat repeated in that amazingly idiotic Tessa, who is neither English nor Italian, nor, indeed, quite human in her molluscous silliness; but there are lines of relation which show themselves to experts, and the absence of the "cherry stone" does not count for more than the dissimilarity always to be found between two copies.

No finer bit of work was ever done than the deep and subtle but true and most pathetic tragedy of Lydgate's married life. The character of Rosamond was a difficult one to paint, and one false touch could have been fatal. To show her intense selfishness and shallowness and yet not to make her revolting, was what only such a consummate psychologist as George Eliot could have done. And to show how Lydgate, strong man as he was and full of noble ambition and splendid aims, was necessarily subdued, mastered and ruined by the tenacious weakness and moral unworthiness of such a wife, yet not to make him contemptible, was also a task beyond the power of any but the few Masters of our literature. All the scenes between this ill-assorted pair are in George Eliot's best manner and up to her highest mark; and the gradual declination of Rosamond's love, together with Lydgate's gradual awakening to the truth of things as they were, are portrayed with a touch as firm as it is tender.

That scene on the receipt of Sir Godwin's letter is as tragic in its own way as Othello or a Greek drama. It has in it the same sense of human helplessness in the presence of an overmastering fate. Rosamond was Lydgate's Fate. Her weakness, tenacity and duplicity--his stronger manhood, which could not crush the weaker woman--his love, which could not coerce, nor punish, nor yet control the thing he loved--all made the threads of that terrible net in which he was entangled, and by which the whole worth of his life was destroyed. It is a story that goes home to the consciousness of many men, who know, as Lydgate knew, that they have been mastered by the one who to them is "as an animal of another and feebler species"--who know, as Lydgate knew, that their energies have been stunted, their ambition has been frustrated, and their horizon narrowed and darkened because of that tyranny which the weaker woman so well knows how to exercise over the stronger man.

Casaubon is as masterly in drawing as is Rosamond or Lydgate. We confess to a sadly imperfect sympathy with Dorothea in her queer enthusiasm for this dry stick of a man. Learned or not, he was scarcely one to whom a young woman, full of life's strong and sweet emotions, would care to give herself as a wife. One can understand the more impersonal impulse which threw Marian Evans into an attitude of adoration before the original of her dry stick; but when it comes to the question of marriage, the thing is simply revolting as done by the girl, not only of her own free-will but against the advice and prayers of her friends. Tom was to be excused for his harshness and irritation against Maggie; and Celia's commonplaces of wisdom for the benefit of that self-willed and recalcitrant Dodo, if not very profound nor very stimulating, nor yet sympathetic, were worth more in the daily life and ordering of sane folk than Dorothea's blind and obstinate determination. Beautiful and high-minded as she is, she is also one of those irritating saints whose virtues one cannot but revere, whose personal charms one loves and acknowledges, and whose wrongheadedness makes one long to punish them--or at least restrain them by main force from social suicide. And to think that to her first mistake she adds that second of marrying Will Ladislaw--the utter snob that he is! Where were George Eliot's perceptions? Or was it that in Ladislaw she had a model near at hand, whom she saw through coloured glasses, which also shed their rosy light on her reproduction, so that her copy was to her as idealised as the original, and she was ignorant of the effect produced on the clear-sighted? Yet over all the mistakes made by her through defective taste and obstinate unwisdom, the beauty of Dorothea's character stands out as did Romola's--like a "white lily" in the garden. She is a superb creature in her own way, and her disillusionment is of the nature of a tragedy. But what could any woman expect from a man who could write such a love-letter as that of Mr. Casaubon's?

The canvas of "Middlemarch" is overcrowded, as we said; yet how good some of the characters are! The sturdy uprightness, tempered with such loving sweetness, of Cabel Garth; the commonplace negation of all great and all unworthy qualities of the Vincys--Celia and Sir James--Mr. Farebrother and Mr. and Mrs. Cadwallader--all are supreme. We confess we do not care much for the portraiture of Mr. Bulstrode and his spiteful delator Raffles--George Eliot is not good at melodrama; also the whole episode of Mr. Featherstone's illness, with his watching family and Mary Garth, too vividly recalls old Anthony Chuzzlewit and all that took place round his death-bed and about his will, to give a sense of truth or novelty. George Eliot's power did not lie in the same direction as that of Charles Dickens, and the contrast is not to her advantage. Great humorists as both were, their humour was essentially different, and will not bear comparison.

No book that George Eliot ever wrote is without its wise and pithy aphorisms, its brilliant flashes of wit, its innumerable good things. Space will not permit our quoting one-tenth part of the good things scattered about these fascinating pages. Celia's feeling, which she stifled in the depths of her heart, that "her sister was too religious for family comfort. Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading or sitting down, or even eating:"--(But, farther on, what an unnecessary bit of pedantry!--"In short, woman was a problem which, since Mr. Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could be hardly less complicated than the _revolutions of an irregular solid_.")--Mrs. Cadwallader's sense of birth, so that a "De Bracy reduced to take his dinner in a basin would have seemed to her an example of pathos worth exaggerating; and I fear his aristocratic vices would not have horrified her. But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred:"--"Indeed, she (Mrs. Waule) herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's intentions about families:"--"Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native merit has urged itself in vain:"--"Ladislaw, a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley:"--"But it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences"--an observation wrung out of her own disturbed and inharmonious experience:--"That controlled self-consciousness of manner which is the expensive substitute for simplicity:"--These are a few picked out at random, but the wealth that remains behind is but inadequately represented by stray nuggets.

Before we close the volume we would like to note the one redeeming little flash of human tenderness in Mr. Casaubon when he had received his death-warrant from Lydgate, and Dorothea waits for him to come up to bed. It is the only tender and spontaneous moment in his life as George Eliot has painted it, and its strangeness makes its pathos as well as its truth.

* * * * *

The last of the lengthy three, and the last novel she wrote, "Daniel Deronda" is the most wearisome, the least artistic, and the most unnatural of all George Eliot's books. Of course it has the masterly touch, and, for all its comparative inferiority, has also its supreme excellence. But in plot, treatment and character it is far below its predecessors. Some of the characters are strangely unnatural. Grandcourt, for instance, is more like the French caricature of an English milord than like a possible English gentleman depicted by a compatriot. Deronda himself is a prig of the first water; while Gwendolen is self-contradictory all through--like a tangled skein of which you cannot find the end, and therefore cannot bring it into order and intelligibility. Begun on apparently clear lines of self-will, pride, worldly ambition and personal self-indulgence--without either conscience or deep affections--self-contained and self-controlled--she wavers off into a condition of moral weakness, of vagrant impulses and humiliating self-abandonment for which nothing that went before has prepared us.