Romola

Eliot remains my favorite Victorian novelist. "Romola" was the last of her "big" novels that I had not read, and the first two thirds of the book is a slog-a-thon that poses considerable frustrations. However, the end third is one stunning revelation after another, and it's easy to see why Eliot loved it more than anything else she had written.

Read more at: http://thegrimreader.blogspot.com/2012/11/i-am-stunned-by-romola.html ( )

Wrapping-up a massive read has aspects of tending the earthly remains of the departed friend or relative, a praiseworthy practice alive and well in many traditions today. The grossly necessary and the pious, the mournful and the tender all meet in a series of acts both practical and symbolic, public and ultimately as private as can be. There is a compression of time, rather a re-definition of time, a re-setting of time-contexts that is, emotionally at-least, incomprehensible apart from the departure of the dear one, and the inevitable reflections upon that and all it means, most obviously the thought that things can never be the same again.
And so, Romola, by George Eliot: written in early mid-career when she was in her forties, published at a time when much of her carefully delineated setting would have been wildly at variance with the interests even of well-intentioned readers, and demanding the endurance of a marathon athlete. With no reference books to refine this comparison, the thought occurs to me that in its immensity alone – I put aside the density for the moment – it is right up there with The Brothers Karamazov and An American tragedy. A little shorter than À la recherche du temps perdu, or War and peace, it becomes, if not exactly a life-commitment, nonetheless a serious endeavour, a voyage, an engagement if not an outright union. Consequently, upon completion, there is a little something of death, and in my case, more than a little. Despite – or perhaps because of – my passionate reaction to the book, I cannot really imagine reading it again. Yet, having read it, I am grateful for the experience, and delighted to recommend it to others, though I am vain enough to offer this informal Operating Manual.
Between the mechanical complexity and the litigiousness of our times, Operating Manuals are often more than half warnings of all the horrid things that can happen to the user, who was just hoping for clearer computer prints or an easier way to open the dog-food can without opening a thumb. Incidentally, during the time my days with Romola, I actually did buy a can-opener with such a set of instructions, strapped to it with a heavy polyethylene strap of such density as almost to guarantee serious injury in its removal, regardless of what havoc the implement itself might wreak on the now duly-warned user. God willing, I skip any further negative stuff and simply offer some thoughts on what’s really going-on in the novel, and in at-least one reader’s head, thoughts which might carry other readers over some of the many rough spots in the book.
Romola is titled after the character -- though some might reasonably argue not the principal character -- a brilliant girl born in the late fifteenth century in High-Medicean Florence, who is raised, after the premature death of her Mother, by her Father, a humanist-classicist in those happy days when one could actually live by pursuing the humane disciplines, more-or-less for their own sake. She is taught the classical languages, and through them, the classical virtues as they were understood by the early humanists: joy, reason in harmony with wonder, delight in discovery, and pride in the possibilities of humankind. Upon the departure, more exactly the desertion of her brother, she becomes the invaluable collaborator of her Father, who meanwhile slowly loses his sight. She has thus grown up in extreme narrowness, rarely leaving the parental abode, and rarely seeing any other living beings except visiting enthusiasts of the New Learning. All this happens amid the broader physical and political context of Florentine life, at a time of the convergence, unforeseen by anybody, of three enormous historical forces: a two-centuries’ tradition of violent (often street-centered) politics, a renewed inter-dynastic struggle among foreign powers for the control of northern Italy, and an up-rush of discontent over the state of the Church, a discontent expressed in preaching and soon in organized action by the charismatic Dominican Frate Girolamo Savonarola.
Meanwhile, Romola is introduced to a young polyglot Greek adventurer, Tito, of whom her Father heartily approves, first as fellow-humanist, and ultimately as husband for his daughter. The Father dies, but the young couple, now married, has hardly grown to know each other before complications arise. Tito’s foster-Father, Baldassare, from whom he had been separated, but whom, in an ultimate ethical sense, he had deserted, appears, seeking to destroy him in revenge. Then too, the city is invaded, and Tito, with his charm, and his gift of language, assumes what turns-out to be an ever-more complex and self-serving rôle as diplomat and what we might call today, “political consultant”. That life is dangerous enough, but to add to his load, he is confronted by his deranged foster-Father whose intention is at-first plainly murderous, but later grows into a desire to discredit Tito, not least-wise because he finds that Tito has another woman in his life, and children to prove it.
While significant action occurs right from the first page, as the narrative develops, so does the author’s close and relentless psychological and ethical commentary, and one realizes that almost a third of the narrative has been as much scene-setting as story-telling proper. That may give a sense of the pace, the density, and the quality of light (metaphorically speaking) to which one must adjust if attempting to read Romola. While it has moments of high-level excitement, and even wit, it’s never fun, and even by the broadest definition of “entertainment”, it only qualifies as such by courtesy. Its purpose is to edify, and to skim it would be as fruitless as playing a set of Wagner’s Ring at 300 rpm, or “studying” the Sistine Chapel frescoes in a ten-minute slide-show. Assuming an Eliot-worthy patience in the current reader, I promise more on edification later.
Meanwhile, not knowing about Tito’s dual life, but growing suspicious, then contemptuous of him for other reasons, Romola is attracted to the visionary revolutionary movement of Savonarola, with whom she has a series of close, compelling encounters which overcome her natural humanistic skepticism at his apparent hard edge and his contempt for the freedom which she seeks from the chaos in her heart and in the world around her. The story works itself out, according to one’s lights, with gravity, or even grimness. The broad outlines of the story of Savonarola were and remain familiar enough, but Eliot is at no pains to spare us any of the horror, adding a fitting end for the duplicitous Tito and the almost comically inescapable Baldassare. Romola in the end recalls that she had truly loved Savonarola for what he offered her spiritually, even though his road had lead to the destruction of many whom she knew, and some whom she had loved, not to speak of himself. Her peroration on the Frate Girolamo – to a fifteen-year-old boy at that – is exalted, tender, almost impossibly righteous, and yet convincing, if not necessarily in terms of the readers’ lives, then in terms of Romola’s life as the author depicts it, and that is no mean accomplishment.
The historicity of the novel is astonishing, and I write this as some one with more than a passing interest in and knowledge of the period in question. Again, without immediate access to reference materials, I cannot help but believe that the author combined huge personal experience of Florence with research far beyond the run of Nineteenth-century historical fiction: surely superior to Bulwer-Lytton, to Dickens, or even to Scott. This even conceding her obvious debt to the powerful biography of Savonarola by Professor Villari, a debt she freely acknowledges in a long footnote.
If I have a complaint about that richness of detail, it is that it has a repetitiousness and opacity which are serious distortions in a work which would already be demanding without them. Consider this from another time and place. After the Russian Revolution, the old Russian-language spelling and typography were stream-lined in a variety of ways, most by notably the abolition of the old tvordy znak, the utterly superfluous “hard sign”. I believe it was the fashion then to point-out that this reform meant the shrinking of War and peace by twenty-three pages, and using the same reasoning, I suspect that my 888-page Standard Edition of Romola might easily have been shrunk at-least twenty pages by the complete abolition of all the details of the streets, alleys, and bridges of old Florence, details which would be superfluous to those who know that city, and meaningless to those who don’t. Historical colour has its charm, but I will not say the same for historical geography.
It is not mal-apropos at this point to ask what is the allure of historical fiction, not to the writer, but to the reader. The answer must vary from age to age, and I think that the answer in George Eliot’s day was rather different from what we feel today. I believe that historical fiction then was ultimately just another genre, like social satire, the moralizing (and morale-building) tale, or the picaresque romance, of which we might take Austen, Dickens, and Charles Reade as distinguished practitioners. On the other side of the desk, novelists writing in that genre wrote as much because they wanted-to as because they suspected the public wanted it. That George Eliot was far more interested in her own vision than playing to a particular audience is suggested to me by my sense that at the time Romola was published, the educated English public had yet to be fully conversant with the fascination of the Renaissance, and such interest as Italy held then was far more closely tied to the unfolding story of the Risorgimento than it was to what the late Twentieth Century might call the “culture wars” of the end of the Fifteenth Century.
So the question arises, what was the author’s particular vision? In anything as complex as this novel, one simplifies and generalizes at one’s peril, but even so, I see the vision as an exploration of what a real person would do in a real situation, which, as bizarre as it was, was real, and not merely real in the history-text sense. Precisely because the facts were pretty-well out there already, the situation could be explored for its moral message. The novel then, is an inquiry into the nature of virtue, not merely as defined in books – which is how Romola first learned as a girl– but as it is lived – as she was forced to learn anew as a woman. In a search for the real, our age crosses Eliot’s, though once that crossing happens, the two vectors keep on their own ways in radically different directions. Under the heading, “Unprovable Speculations”, I would offer that the present yen for historical fiction – and there is a steady stream of it, thin and unpalatable as much of it may be – results from a latter-day search for something approaching certainty, if only the temporary comfort of thinking that things might be thus-and-so, which in a chaotic age is better than utter spiritual floundering. The recurrent inability of too many purveyors of highly psychologized literary fiction to create plausible or engaging characters and situations has driven many readers to historical (or at-least nominally) historical writing for its unspoken assurance that in some sense this really happened (or could have). Try that test on children some day: tell them a story, then wait for one of them to ask, wide-eyed, “Is that true?” Say Yes, and that child is in the palm of your hand.
The paradox with Romola is that despite its intense emotionalism, its extraordinary historicity, and its sweep, it is, in many senses not believable, despite its advantages. Put aside Eliot’s prose, much of which must have sounded stilted even to her contemporaries, both in its recurrent fussiness and its contradictory quest for definition and clarity even amidst a fog of vague qualifiers like “perhaps”, “somehow”, and “possibly”. Put aside too the microscopic detail of her psychological and ethical dissections. Forgive, if you can, the over-burdened sentences which leave one exhausted after trying to determine whether the dissection was of the consciousness of the character or of the restlessly questing author. It is hard work to read this novel, and to borrow Dr Johnson’s immortal line (in another context), “One never wished it longer.”
All that being conceded, there is an unexpected allure to the work, one that certainly would have astonished its author, even had she been spared to live a few more years, say into the days of the Dreyfuss affair. The phenomenon of Savonarola and his movement have more than a little similarity to latter-day demagogic and charismatic movements, and her speculations, based on centuries-old accounts, have an aptness and accuracy for modern readers. Quite apart from her descriptions of the preacher’s style and his hold over listeners, she is very shrewd in her portrayal of this man’s particular genius in a variety of situations, and in those portrayals she suggests some truths about demagogues which can never be repeated too much.
In the scenes between Romola and Savonarola alone, he is shown as being highly attuned to her extraordinary high-mindedness, ethical culture, and courage, even if each of those characteristics is antagonistic to his apparent purpose. Because he too is a visionary, with a deep ethic and courage of his own, he makes no effort to talk to her on any level except that height which they share, and by so doing, in fact disarms her more than once, at least emotionally. In other situations, where he is involved with small groups, or with people who are plainly of thinner stuff than he, he pitches his discourse accordingly lower, according to what will work, without compromising the image he has cultivated carefully, and one might say, albeit paradoxically, sincerely. From the pulpit, he speaks in great waves of emotion to the crowds, in images that can be carried away by his listeners in slogans, in a language absolutely accessible to all, no matter what their spiritual or intellectual development.
To many modern readers, this is simply an elaborate way of describing opportunism, and indeed, though that word per se isn’t used in Romola, that analysis of the Dominican spell-binder is put into the mouth of none other than Niccolò Macchiavelli, who was there after all. But Eliot is shrewd enough to let us know, knowing that we have the benefit of historical hindsight, that despite its considerable perception, Macchiavelli’s observation hardly began to explain why the opportunism worked, or what Savonarola’s enemies could do with any certainty of thwarting it. Even so, after generations of oratorical wizards, from comparatively harmless crooks like Father Divine, to monsters like Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, some questions can never be asked too often.
The mention of Machiavelli brings up another of the book’s charms. Naturally, a book which begins with the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and introduces, in varying degrees of detail some of the great painters, poets, and Popes, ought to be as engaging for us as it was for the people who lived the real thing and lived among those people. But easier said than done, say I, after more than a few excursions in late-Twentieth Century portrayals of the Renaissance, among which I might note The Birth of Venus, The Tabernacle of the Sun, and even --mutatis mutandis – that otherwise noble work The Time before you die. Fun is about the last thing anybody associates with George Eliot, and yet if she didn’t have fun, at-least for herself, in her evocation of the eccentric painter Piero di Cosimo, I’ll eat my becchetto. Incidentally, whether or not it was deliberate – and I rather think that George Eliot, to borrow Radek’s words at his trial, never did an undeliberate thing in her life – the views of Savonarola by Piero and Macchiavelli, taken together add-up to a picture of Savonarola which is at-least as comprehensive and credible as any reader might ask.
Closing thoughts, suggested by the matter of credibility. It is ironic indeed that this author, who was so strong and so brave in making her own path as a woman in a man-ruled world, fell so utterly flat in what we might call “gender-psychology”. The gender-roles and attitudes in this novel are not simply those of the era she depicts: one could forgive that, and read beyond it. No, Romola herself is simply sexless, while the other women are ineptly-drawn embarrassing caricatures, not of certain female types, but of one specific female author. Additionally, even though an adult reader must assume that sex and desire are indispensable energizing elements in the story, there is absolutely none of either, even by implication. One almost wonders how Tito’s love-children managed to be born at-all. Even so, for this, and for other thorny areas like the succession of unlikely coincidental meetings, the author has given a simultaneous warning and consolation by citing the old Florentine proverb, solco torto, sacco dritto: a crooked furrow yields a full sack. Characteristically, we only get the benefit of this admonition two-thirds of the way through the book.
The final pages of the book are a discourse – I repeat, to an unlikely kid-audience --about pleasure, duty, happiness, and the hard path of honest living. After all those earlier pages, the author still had something up her sleeve, and not simply for a parlour-trick, but to get our attention for the consideration of great questions of life. No matter if it is rather heavy-handed for the author to speak over the heads of her own characters, so-to-put, and address the reader through Romola. The little speech is touching, well worth reading on its own, and, almost miraculously, a satisfying distillation of all that the author has attempted to show in the various situations in which she has placed her characters. Simply to have been consistent over eight-hundred some pages is an accomplishment in itself, but to have ended with such purity and persuasiveness is nothing short of miraculous.
Under the heading of “Plausible But Ultimately Unprovable”, I would suggest that there are probably more extant copies of Romola, exponentially more, than there are persons who have read it. I might even make even so bold as to back-date that comparison a couple of generations. For reasons which only a bile-specialist could understand, my household has multiple versions of this novel, call them "Home" and "Road" copies. I had to read my Standard Edition with pen-knife in hand, as the pages hadn’t been cut in the five generations since its printing and binding. If I am correct in my speculations, it is a partly the turn of the Wheel of Time, partly a judgment on its author, but even more on the culture which followed her. While I know that a steady diet of George Eliot’s righteousness would gag a maggot, I nonetheless regret that little bit of cultural malnutrition which has invariably followed the neglect of such a subtly-imagined and energetically-written historic epic. ( )

Romola was a tremendous undertaking – both to write and to read. As historical novels go, it is one of a kind. In telling the story, Eliot provides a crash course in Florentine history circa 1492. In fact, she filled several notebooks (one of which is in my collection) preparatory to writing it. Come to find out, 1492 was significant for more than one reason – to the Florentines, at least – the other reason being the death of Lorenzo de Medici, “the Magnificent.” His death initiated a period of political uncertainty in Florence which included many dramatic events such as an invasion by the French King Charles VIII in 1494, a period of plague and the rise and fall of Savonarola. These events are played out in high relief against the remarkable story of Romola, the heroin who showed all the outward signs of saintliness without actually being one.

My edition (Modern Library Classics) is excellent for the introduction and notes, which are indispensible for the modern reader who may be unfamiliar with Florentine history. Many people find notes to be off-putting. I do not.

While I enjoyed Romola very much, I dare not recommend it because it is – you must be warned – heavy going, perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea. But if you have a taste for the Renaissance and George Eliot, I say, give it a go. It is a painless way to absorb plenteous information about the Florentine Renaissance. At least the introductory proem should not be missed – a prose poem that presents Eliot at the height of her literary powers. ( )

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. ( )