Masterpieces of the masters of fiction

by William Dudley Foulke

In the meantime Dolpho Spini, the leader of the Compagnacci, who have instigated the riot, learns that Tito has also been false to that faction, and orders him to be seized. He escapes, leaps into the Arno and swims down the river in the darkness, but when, exhausted and fainting, he reaches the shore, there is waiting for him among the rushes the old man Baldasarre, who has found the opportunity for vengeance, and under whose hand he falls at last.

Romola has drifted to a little village on the coast which the plague had emptied of most of its inhabitants. Here for a while she tends the suffering, and finally, reconciled again with life, she feels that she must return. When she reaches Florence and learns of her husband’s death, she seeks the helpless little Tessa and her children and takes them under her protection.

And now Savonarola, amid the agonies of the torture, has confessed that he was not a prophet, and he is condemned to death. She is present at the solemn scene of execution, awaiting from him some word, free from constraint, which should tell the final truth of his past life. But he is silent upon the scaffold.

It is in the Epilogue that it first clearly appears that “Romola” is a novel with a purpose, for here the heroine, many years afterwards, in an earnest talk with Tessa’s boy, thus tells him the moral of his father’s life:

“There was a man to whom I was very near, so that I could see a great deal of his life, who made almost every one fond of him, for he was young and clever and beautiful, and his manners to all were gentle and kind. I believe, when I first knew him, he never thought of anything cruel or base. But because he tried to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing else so much as his own safety, he came at last to commit some of the basest deeds, such as make men infamous. He denied his father, and left him to misery; he betrayed every trust that was reposed in him, that he might keep himself safe and get rich and prosperous. Yet calamity overtook him.”

The account of the gradual degeneration of the character of Tito Melema is, indeed, the strongest feature in the book. Tito was a man of sunny disposition, who never made himself disagreeable, never boasted of his own doings, was generous in small things, gave others the credit to which they were entitled, and claimed little for himself, was frank and engaging in manners, subtle in thought, supple in conduct, and had an innate love of reticence, which often acted as other impulses do, without any conscious motive. This was the character selected by the author for her story of degradation and ruin.

The painter Piero foreshadows the outcome when he desires the face of Tito as a model for his picture of Sinon deceiving old Priam: “A perfect traitor,” says Piero, “should have a face which vice can write no marks on—lips that will lie with a dimpled smile—eyes of such agate-like brightness and depth that no infamy can dull them—cheeks that will rise from a murder and not look haggard.”

The character of Romola herself is a very interesting one. She is full of womanly dignity and genuine nobility of soul, honorable, proud, self-sacrificing, devoted to her duty, but she is too clear-headed to deceive herself as to her husband’s baseness. At first, although her dreams of happiness have not been fulfilled, she makes every excuse; and even afterwards she seeks a return of his confidence. But when that is impossible, her love becomes entirely extinct.

Running side by side with the character of Romola, and in sharp contrast to it, is that of Tessa, the innocent peasant girl, with a baby face. In her presence, Melema finds no reproaches, nothing but artless affection. It was pity more than anything else which first induced Tito to take her under his protection, and his relations with her have been developed so unconsciously that there seems very little guilt in each particular act. No doubt the author’s purpose was to describe the almost imperceptible steps by which men pass from virtue to crime.

“Romola” is a historical novel, and the part of it which deals with Savonarola is history itself, or perhaps more properly biography. George Eliot has not created the character of the Florentine monk; she has merely analyzed and interpreted that character by the light of her own imagination. Whether the man she has thus drawn is the real Savonarola or not, he is a very interesting personage, who, with many inconsistencies and shortcomings, is essentially a great man, as well as a benefactor of mankind. He is often a hero, though he falls short of heroism at the supreme moment; and his last words, written in prison before his execution, the outpouring of self-abasement, fill us with added sympathy for his misfortunes.