The Sun.
London, England, 1863-08-03 00:00:00

LITERATURE,

Romola. By George Elliot, author of " Adam
Bede." 3 vols. Smith and Elder.
We do not expect that "Romola" will be as
widely read or as generally admired as "Adam
Bede" or " The Mill on the Floss." The historical
epoch selected for the story is not of itself one
likely to be a popular favourite. The intrigues and
animosities of the Florentines of the 15th century,
the heart-burnings of the Mediceans on the death
of their great chief, the " Magnificent" Lorenzo, the
passionate philippics of the enthusiast Savonarola,
alternate intervals of popular excitement and de-
pression, revolting instances of individual treachery,
and terrible but well-merited retribution—such
scenes and such characters, admirably well described
though they be, are not themes most attractive to
the novel-reader, and such are the contents of the
greater portion of these volumes of " Romola."
The domestic story with which the political events
are interwoven is very remarkable as an evidence of
the writer's wonderful power in the development
of character. Tito Melema, the Greek hero—gay,
handsome, fascinating, eager to enjoy the pleasure
of the hour, winning all hearts, or rather attracting
all admiration, and yet in the pursuit of his own plea-
sure forgetful of every claim of gratitude or duty—is
a masterpiece. He begins his career by one fatal
error, and step by step is led on till he becomes the
very embodiment of treachery and falsehood. The
gradual development of the seeds of evil in the
fertile ground of that unprincipled heart is admir
ably well described. When we first behold Tito
asleep in the public thoroughfare, exhausted with
the perils of his recent escape from shipwreck, when
he rises at the summons of the itinerant Bratto and
falls into the friendly hands of the benevolent
barber, Nello—the very prince of gossips and of
barbers ! we do not foresee that we shall hereafter
look upon him with loathing, and turn from him
with indignation. We pity his youth and his mis-
fortunes—we are charmed with his gaiety and his
good humour, and we sympathise heartily with the
open welcome accorded to him on all hands by the
nobles and scholars of Florence. Tito Melema has
escaped from shipwreck, his only property being
some rare and valuable gems. These he disposes of to
great advantage, and is told, according to a phrase
of the day, they are worth "a man's ransom !"
At this unwary remark he startles, and then we learn
the secret of his history. His foster father, the
protector of his youth, BaldassarreCalvo,the scholar,
to whom he owes his education and his great
scholarship—to whom, in fact, he owes everything,
and who is the real owner of the gems in Tito's pos-
session, had been the companion of his voyage, but
was carried off a prisoner, while the .younger Tito
escaped. " A man's ransom !" suggests to fito that
the price of the gems, the property of Baldassarre,
should be devoted to his ransom from captivity, if,
as in all probability is the case, he is a prisoner at
Antioch, The duty on the one side is obvious, but
on the other hand the temptation is strong. Tito
is just becoming popular at Florence ; an influential
position is in his grasp. He is a welcome guest in
the studio of old Bardi, and the charms of the fair
Romola Bardi have not failed to impress his suscep-
tible heart. Tito puts off the evil day of decision.
At last the money is in his hand, and a prudent
friend offers to invest it for him. Then comes the
struggle. It is the turning point of his career.
" Behold this day, I have set before thee good and
evil!" The conflict of his mind is so powerfully
because so naturally described, that we cannot do
better than transcribe the passage
" Far in the backward vista of his remembered life,
when he was only seven years old, Baldassarre had rescued
him from blows, had taken him to a home that seemed like
opened paradise, where there was sweet food and soothing
caresses, all had on Baldassarre's knee ; and from that time
till the hour they had parted, Tito had been the one centre
of Baldassarre's fatherly cares.
" And he had been docile, pliable, quick of apprehension,
ready to acquire : a very bright lovely boy, a youth of even
splendid grace, who seemed quite without vices, as if that
beautiful form represented a vitality so exquisitely poised
and balanced that it could know no uneasy desires, no un-
rest—a radiant presence for a lonely man to have won for
himself. If he were silent when his father expected some
response, still he did not look moody ; if he declined some
labour—why, he flung himself down with such a charming,
half-smiling, half-pleading air, that the pleasure of looking
at him made amends to one who had watched his growth
with a sense of claim and possession—the curves of Tito's
mouth had ineffable good humour in them. And then, the
quick talent to which everything came readily, from philo
sophic systems to the rhymes of a street ballad caught up at
a hearing 1 Would any one have said that Tito had not
made a rich return to his benefactor, or that his gratitude
and affection would fail on any great demand ?
" He did not admit that his gratitude had failed; but it
was not certain that Baldassarre was in slavery, not certain
that he was living.
"'Do I not owe something to myself ?' said Tito, in-
wardly, with a slight movement of his shoulders, the first
he had made since he had turned to look down at the
florins. ' Before I quit everything, and incur again all the
risks of which I am even now weary, I must at least have
a reasonable hope. Am Ito spend my life in a wandering
search ? I believe he is dead. Cennini was right about
my florins : I will place them in his hands to-morrow,'
" 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 pre-
cise facts of his conduct should not remain for ever con-

cealed.
" 'Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of
guilty wishes, whoseunwholesome infecting life is cherished
by the darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds often
lies less in the commission than in the consequent adjust-
ment of our desires-4-the enlistment of our self-interest on
the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the purifying in-
fluence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it
the hope in lies is for ever swept away, and the soul recovers
the noble attitude of simplicity.
" Besides, in this first distinct colloquy with himself the
ideas which had previously been scattered and interrupted
had now concentrated themselves : the little rills of selfish-
ness had united and made a channel, so that they could
never again meet with the same resistance. Hitherto Tito
had left in vague indecision the question whether with the
means in his power, he would not return and ascertain his
father's fate : ho had now made a definite excuse to himself
for not taking that course—he had avowed to himself a
choice which he would have been ashamed to avow to others,
and which would have made him ashamed in the resurgent
presence of his father. But the inward shame, the reflex of
that outward law which the great heart of mankind makes
for every individual man, a reflex which will exist even in
the absence of the sympathetic impulses that need no law,
but rush to the deed of fidelity and pity as inevitably as the
brute mother shields her yourg from the attack of the here-
ditary enemy—that inward shame was showing its blushes
in Tito's determined assertion to himself that his father was
dead, or that at least search was hopeless."
Onward and downward the career of Tito Melema
is rapid enough. When Baldassarre, at length
escaped from prison, arrives at Florence, his adopted
child does not dare to confess his own iniquity, and
denounces the friend and protector of his youth as
an impostor and a madman ! Fortune favours Tito,
but happiness, we need hardly say, does not attend
him. Very different is the gay adventurer of the
first volume from the treacherous coward of the
concluding chapters. " Falsehood,' remarks the
faithful historian of his despicable career, "had
prospered and waxed strong, but it had nourished
the twin life Fear." Turn we now to a more noble
and attractive character—Romola, the faithful
daughter of the old blind scholar Bardi. Here is
the first glimpse we have of her, in a chapter entitled
THE BLIND STUDENT AND HIS DAUGHTER
" The voice came from the farther end of a long, spacious
room, surrounded with shelves, on which books and anti-
quities were arranged in scrupulous order. Here and there,
on separate stands in front of the shelves, were placed a
beautiful feminine torso ; a headless statue, with an up-
lifted muscular arm wielding a bladeless sword, rounded,
dimpled, infantine limbs severed from the trunk, inviting
the lips to kiss the cold marble : some well-preserved
Roman busts, and two or three vases of Magna Orecia. A
large tabla in the centre was covered with antique bronze
lamps and small vessels in dark pottery. The colour of
these objects was chiefly pale or sombre: the vellum bind.
ings, with their deep• ridged backs, gave little relief to the
marble, livid with long burial—the once splendid patch of
carpet at the farther end of the room had long been worn
to dimness ; the dark bronzes wanted sunlight upon them
to bring out their tinge of green, and the sun was not yet
high enough to send gleams of brightness through the nar •
row windows that looked on the Via do' Bardi.
"The only spot of bright colour in the room was made
by the hair of a tall maiden of 17 or 18, who was standing
before a carved leggio, or reading-desk, such as is often seen
in the choirs of Italian churches. The hair was of a red
dish gold colour, enriched by an unbroken small ripple,
such as may be seen iu the sunset clouds on grandest
autumnal evenings. It was confined by a black fillet above
Ler small ears, from which it rippled forward again, and
made a natural veil for her neck above her square-cut gown
of black rocia, or serge. Her eyes Were bent on a large

volume placed before her : one long white hand rested o
the reading-desk, and the other clasped the back of her
father's chair.

" The blind father sat with uplifted head and turned a little
aside towards his daughter, as if he were looking at her.
His delicate paleness, set off by the black velvet cap which
surmounted his:drooping white hair, made all the more per-
ceptible the likeness between his aged features and those of
the young maiden, whose cheeks were also without any
tinge of the rose, There was the same refinement of brow
and nostril in both, counterbalanced by a full though firm
mouth and powerful chin, which gave an expression of
proud tenacity and latent impetuousness : an expression
carried out in the backward poise of the girl's head, and
the grand line of her neck and shoulders. It was a type of
face which one could not venture to say whether it would
inspire love or only that unwilling admiration which is
mixed with dread : the question must be decided by the
eyes, which often seem charged with a more direct
message from the soul. But the eyes of the father had long
been silent, and the eyes of the daughter were bent on the
Latin pages of Politian's Miscellanea from which she was
reading aloud."

Itomola's character acquires depth and strength
before our eyes, as with interest we follow her tale
of suffering. At first a studious girl, ignorant of
the world as Miranda on i er island, then a loving,
suffering woman, shrinking with natural dread
from the heavy burden imposed upon her. Very
effective is the scene where she flies from her un-
happy home at Florence, and is arrested by the
way-side by the warning voice of Savonarola.
" My daughter," exclaims the impassioned preacher,
in words of truthful eloquence that convince and
convert the unhappy Romola, " my daughter, every
bond of your life is a debt ; the right lies in the
payment of that debt ; it can lie nowhere else. In
vain would you wander over the earth, you will be
nowhere at peace." Romola returns, and in the
pursuit of duty finds the only alleviation to he
painful lot. We will not dwell further upon her
history. It will be read with a very vivid interest
by many who will be indifferent to the political
chapters. The opening description of the dawn is
very felicitous :
" More than three centuries and a half ago, in the mid
spring of 1492, we are sure that the angel of the dawn, as
he travelled with broad slow wing from the Levant to the
Pillars of Hercules, and from the summits of the Caucasus
across all the snowy Alpine ridges to the dark nakedness
of the Western isles, saw nearly the same outline of firm
land and unstable sea—saw the same great mountain
shadows on the same valleys as he has seen to-day--saw
olive mounts, and pine forests, and the broad plains, green
with young corn or rain-freshened grass—saw the domes
and spires of cities rising by the river sides or mingled with
the sedge-like masts on the many-carved sea coast, in the
same spots where they rise to-day. And as the faint light
of his course pierced into the dwellings of men, it fell, as
now, on the rosy warmth of nestling children; on the
haggard waking of sorrow and sickness; on the hasty up-
rising of the hard-handed labourer; and on the late sleep
of the night-student, who had been questioning the stars or
the sages, or his own soul, for that hidden knowledge
which would break through the barrier of man's brief life,
and show its dark path, that seemed to bend no whither, to
be an arc in an immeasurable circle of light and glory. The
great river courses which have shaped the lives of men
have hardly changed ; and those other streams, the life-
currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the
same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As
our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we
are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot,
which never alters in the main headings of its history—
hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death."

The moral of the story enforced by Ramola's ad-
vice to the youthful Lillo in the concluding chapter is
a most noble one• The author of "Adam Bede" has
done wisely and well in employing great intellectual
gifts in the development of a high principle—to
exhibit the fatal effect of a selfish seeking of our own
pleasure contrasted with the happy results of a
noble performance of our duty to our fellow-men;
For this lesson apart from its high literary merits
" Romola" is entitled to admiration and approval.

THE WEATHER AND THE CROPS.