What I Remember, Volume 2

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

But it was not so. She slept well under the care of the Franciscan nuns, who managed to get her a cup of milkless coffee in the morning, and so save her from the necessity of again climbing the hill. A charming drive through the Casentino, or valley of the Upper Arno, showing us the aspect of a Tuscan valley very different from that of the Lower Arno, brought to an end an expedition which has always remained in my memory as one of the most delightful of my life.

I had much talk with George Eliot during the time—very short at Florence—when she was maturing her Italian novel, Romola. Of course, I knew that she was digesting the acquisitions of each day with a view to writing; but I had not the slightest idea of the period to which her inquiries were specially directed, or of the nature of the work intended. But when I read Romola, I was struck by the wonderful power of absorption manifested in every page of it. The rapidity with which she squeezed out the essence and significance of a most complex period of history, and assimilated the net results of its many-sided phases, was truly marvellous.

Nevertheless, in drawing the girl Romola, her subjectivity has overpowered her objectivity. Romola is not—could never have been—the product of the period and of the civilisation from which she is described as having issued. There is far too much of George Eliot in her. It was a period, it is true, in which female culture trod upon the heels of the male culture of the time perhaps more closely than it has ever done since. But let Vittoria Colonna be accepted, as probably she may be, as a fair exponent of the highest point to which that culture had reached, and an examination of the sonnets into which she has put her highest thoughts and aspirations together with a comparison of those with the mental calibre of Romola will, I think, support the view I have taken.

Tito, on the other hand, gives us with truly wonderful accuracy and vigour "the very form and pressure of the time." The pages which describe him read like a quintessential distillation of the Florentine story of the time and of the human results which it had availed to produce. The character of Savonarola, of course, remains, and must remain, a problem, despite all that has been done for the elucidation of it since Romola was written. But her reading of it is most characteristically that which her own idiosyncrasy—so akin to it in its humanitarian aspects, so superior to it in its methods of considering man and his relations to the unseen—would lead one to expect.

In 1869-70, George Eliot and Mr. Lewes visited Italy for the fourth time. I had since the date of their former visit quitted my house in Florence, and established myself in a villa and small podere at Ricorboli, a commune outside the Florentine Porta San Niccolò. And there I had the great pleasure of receiving them under my roof, assisted in doing so by my present wife. Their visit was all too short a one—less than a week, I think.

But one knows a person with whom one has passed even that short time under the same roof far better than can ever be the result of a very much longer acquaintanceship during which one meets only in the ordinary intercourse of society. And the really intimate knowledge of her which I was thus enabled to obtain has left with me the abiding conviction that she was intellectually by far the most extraordinarily gifted person it has ever been my good fortune to meet. I do not insist much on the uniform and constant tender consideration for others, which was her habitual frame of mind, for I have known others of whom the same might have been said. It is true that it is easy for those in the enjoyment of that vigorous health, which renders mere living a pleasure, to be kindly; and that George Eliot was never betrayed by suffering, however protracted and severe, into the smallest manifestation of impatience or unkindly feeling. But neither is this trained excellence of charity matchless among women. What was truly, in my experience, matchless, was simply the power of her intelligence; the precision, the promptitude, the rapidity (though her manner was by no means rapid), the largeness of the field of knowledge, the compressed outcome of which she was at any moment ready to bring to bear on the topic in hand; the sureness and lucidity of her induction; the clearness of vision, to which muddle was as impossible and abhorrent as a vacuum is supposed to be to nature; and all this lighted up and gilded by an infinite sense of, and capacity for, humour,—this was what rendered her to me a marvel, and an object of inexhaustible study and admiration.

To me, though I never passed half an hour in conversation with her without a renewed perception of the vastness of the distance which separated her intelligence from mine, she was a companion each minute of intercourse with whom was a delight. But I can easily understand that, despite her perfect readiness to place herself for the nonce on the intellectual level of those with whom she chanced to be brought in contact, her society may not have been agreeable to all. I remember a young lady—by no means a stupid or unintelligent one—telling me that being with George Eliot always gave her a pain in "her mental neck," just as an hour passed in a picture gallery did to her physical neck. She was fatigued by the constant attitude of looking up. But had she not been an intelligent girl, she need not have constantly looked up. It would be a great mistake to suppose that George Eliot's mental habits exacted such an attitude from those she conversed with.

Another very prominent and notable characteristic of that most remarkable idiosyncrasy was the large and almost universal tolerance with which George Eliot regarded her fellow creatures. Often and often has her tone of mind reminded me of the French saying, "Tout connaître ce serait tout pardonner!" I think that of all the human beings I have ever known or met George Eliot would have made the most admirable, the most perfect father confessor. I can conceive nothing more healing, more salutary to a stricken and darkened soul, than unrestricted confession to such a mind and such an intelligence as hers. Surely a Church with a whole priesthood of such confessors would produce a model world.

And with all this I am well persuaded that her mind was at that time in a condition of growth. Her outlook on the world could not have been said at that time to have been a happy one. And my subsequent acquaintance with her in after years led me to feel sure that this had become much modified. She once said to me at Florence that she wished she never had been born! I was deeply pained and shocked; but I am convinced that the utterance was the result, not of irritation and impatience caused by pain, but of the influence exercised on the tone of thought and power of thinking by bodily malady. I feel sure that she would not have given expression to such a sentiment when I and my wife were subsequently staying with her and Lewes at their lovely home in Surrey. She had by that time, I cannot but think, reached a brighter outlook and happier frame of mind.

We had as neighbours at Ricorboli, although on the opposite bank of the Arno, our old and very highly-valued friends, Mr. G.P. Marsh, the United States Minister, and his charming wife, to whom for the sake of both parties we were desirous of introducing our distinguished guests. We thought it right to explain to Mrs. Marsh fully all that was not strictly normal in the relationship of George Eliot and G.H. Lewes before bringing them together, and were assured both by her and by her husband that they saw nothing in the circumstances which need deprive them of the pleasure of making the acquaintance of persons whom it would be so agreeable to them to know. The Marsh's were at that time giving rather large weekly receptions in the fine rooms of their villa, and our friends accompanied us to one of these. It was very easy to see that both ladies appreciated each other. There was a large gathering, mostly of Americans, and Lewes exerted himself to be agreeable and amusing—which he always was, when he wished to be, to a degree rarely surpassed.