Thea Calida

With apologies to @jchelle36 on Tik Tok.

Miss Brooke among the Florentines

In the beginning of George Eliot’s Romola, we’re introduced to the blind Florentine Bardo de’ Bardi. Bardo feels his life to have been wasted: his once-promising son has joined the Dominicans and burnt away his learning for the sake of fanatical holiness. And though in his youth Bardo was moved by affection for the visible world, and eager to seek out the literary beauties of the past and present, now he’s sightless and embittered, and ‘embedded in dark mines of books’. But at least (like John Milton) he has a meek and faithful secretary in his daughter Romola. When we meet these two characters, Romola is reading to Bardo out of Politian’s Miscellanea:   

A blind man, Politian wrote, is cut off from gaudy outer beauty, but in exchange he may forever be lit up by intellectual light; by the pure vision of the goddess Mind. This possibility has consoled many poor souls, in the fifteenth century as in ours; and some of them were not literally blind, but only wanted refuge in their books from the unresponsive coldness of the outer world. 

The thought is beautiful, but it truly contained in Politian? Ordinarily in an historical novel set among foreigners, you have to take it on faith that the author is faithfully translating the characters’ speech. But here George Eliot is translating an original source that can actually be consulted, so we have a means of measuring her faith. Here is what Politian really wrote:

In English:

Indeed in the fifth book of his Dionysiacon, Nonnos makes Actæon call Tiresias happy, for that he beheld naked Minerva on this side of death, and only lost his eyes, and that she even transferred his lost sight into his soul. And thus he spoke:

Happy Tiresias, who undestroyed didst behold the naked form of merciful Minerva, and she willed it not.

And a little later:

Thou didst live, though wrecking the light of thine eyes; but Minerva moved the gleam of thy sight into thy mind.

It turns out that Eliot mostly missed the point of Politian’s citation. Where Politian had written: [Minerva] even transferred [Tiresias’] lost sight into his soul, Eliot translated: [Tiresias] could forevermore carry [Minerva’s] image in his soul. Evidently she was tripped up by Politian’s Latin; mistakenly thinking that ipsius referred to Minerva, not Tiresias, and so understanding lumen ipsius to mean ‘the image of Minerva’, not ‘Tiresias’ sight’. Then, bound to the conceit of her misconstrued translation, she made the further blunder of taking transtulerit to refer to Tiresias’ ‘carrying’ the image of Minerva in his soul. Eliot’s rendering contains a touching and poetic image, but it is founded on a basic grammatical mistake.

Now, this is just a slip in Latin syntax. But it hints at a deeper problem with Eliot’s treatment of the Renaissance, which is that for all her heaped-up ‘period details’ – for her close observations of clothing, pottery, architecture, political intrigues, religious festivals, cookery, dynastic families, paintings, mendicant sermons, and Tuscan turns of speech – one is left to wonder how much of the literature of the period she read at length in its original languages, and more importantly, how much she read while bearing the possibility in mind that the men who lived in the time of Politian were not only different in their outer habits, but in their innermost minds and feelings, to southern Englishmen of the nineteenth century.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to George Eliot’s treatment of religion. Some of her characters are simply not Christian; like Bardo himself, who delights in profane literature, never mentions the Scriptures, and bewails ‘men who know of no past older than the missal and the crucifix’. Then there’s Tito Melema the Epicurean. Such people were vanishingly rare in the fifteenth century, if they existed at all then; but George Eliot can be forgiven for including them in her novel, for historians were already maintaining by the 1860s; wrongly and tendentiously, but seductively, that the most brilliant men of the Renaissance were secret scoffers.

What really unsettles me, though, is not the presence of atheists in Romola, but the falseness with which the sacred lives of the truly pious characters are presented. Either they’re superstitious simpletons, like Tessa, or else their sacred feelings are nothing more than the clothing of fundamentally non-religious passions. Romola and Savonarola in particular are described in rich detail; in their inner as well as their outer lives. Still, they do not adore God, or the Virgin, or the Saints in themselves, but treat them as personifications of concepts like purity and self-abnegation. The result is that not once in the whole novel does a character, however God-fearing, beg a saint for protection, or make a votive gift to a church, or pray for a dead person’s welfare, or even take communion. These Florentines undergo internal religious strife, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the religious content of their meditations is only a cipher for what Eliot considered to be their deeper, more understandable human feelings. Like this paragraph about Romola’s attraction to Savonarola:

Sorrow and joy have each their peculiar narrowness; and a religious enthusiasm like Savonarola’s which ultimately blesses mankind by giving the soul a strong propulsion towards sympathy with pain, indignation against wrong, and the subjugation of sensual desire, must always incur the reproach of a great negation. Romola’s life had given her an affinity for sadness which inevitably made her unjust towards merriment. That subtle result of culture which we call Taste was subdued by the need for deeper motive; just as the nicer demands of the palate are annihilated by urgent hunger. Moving habitually amongst scenes of suffering, and carrying woman’s heaviest disappointment in her heart, the severity which allied itself with self-renouncing beneficent strength had no dissonance for her.

Notice the phrase ultimately blesses mankind by—. George Eliot did not have the patience to reflect that the enthusiasts of the 1490s might have lived according to their religion for its own sake, and not as a path to the human good of something like ‘sympathy with pain’ and ‘the subjugation of sensual desire’. In fact, doesn’t the Gospel itself take the opposite view; that sympathy with pain and the subjugation of sensual desire are the means of seeing God?

And on the subject of sensual desire: at one point Savonarola is described as having ‘a mind possessed by a never-silent hunger after purity and simplicity’. Well, surely the real Savonarola hungered for those things, but what of his never-silent hunger after Christ? What of his affection for the gentle Virgin? It would admittedly have been hard for a nineteenth-century liberal like George Eliot to grasp that a person could really be in love, body and soul, with his God. But at the least we should expect an historical novelist to make her characters mention him, if only for ‘period flavour’. Here’s some quantitative literary analysis that I’ve carried out on my powerful computer: the words ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ are together mentioned precisely eight times in the whole novel, and always in passing. 

Before writing any of her novels, George Eliot had translated Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity into English. And the basic thesis of that book is detectable in her treatment of Christianity throughout Romola. Namely, the things which Christianity reveres as mysteries are only our inborn human values, but alienated from us and given heavenly names. But nothing heavenly is real, and therefore if we want to interpret religion properly we must work out what earthly truths its symbols really refer to.  

Thus, in George Eliot’s mind, the men of fifteenth-century Florence suffered the same human passions as the townsmen of Middlemarch, but they interpreted those passions in ecclesiastical terms. Dorothea Brooke longs to be gripped by wide feelings and to be the bed for a torrent of human kindness. So does Romola, only she speaks Italian and gets bewitched by a fiery Dominican rather than an English Wilhelm Meister. 

So even when it comes to Girolamo Savanarola, an unearthly mystic if there ever was one, Eliot cannot preserve interest in the substantial content of his beliefs for any length of time without turning her attention to his Middlemartian calculations. For example, when Savonarola hands the Host to a fellow Dominican who is about to walk through fire, Eliot tells us that it is only part of a stratagem to win credibility:

The idea that the presence of the sacred Mystery might in the worst extremity avert the ordinary effects of fire hovered in his mind as a possibility; but the issue on which he counted was of a more positive kind.

Of a more positive kind! Who is George Eliot to tell us what Savonarola considered real and positive, and what he considered half-believable fantasy? Auguste Comte was a wise man in his generation, but neither he nor anybody like him lived in the fifteenth century, and nobody drew his distinctions between what was there and what was not.

The characters in Romola, the spiritually sensitive ones at any rate, live in desperate longing for purity, goodness, justice, and beauty, and all impersonal glories of that kind – but never for their visible and three-personed God. George Eliot’s imagination was humane and sympathetic enough to grasp the minutest variations of feeling between any two of her countrymen, but for all her subtlety she could not see the starkest differences between two centuries.

Now, Romola, like Middlemarch and Silas Marner – and like Anna Karenina too – is a stinging moral admonition under the guise of a literate novel. It is like a cup of bitter medicine with honey smeared on its rim. Its lesson is this: one lives on one’s love for others, and that there is no happiness for a person too concerned with his own comfort. This lesson is indeed necessary to the salvation of a person’s soul this side of the Industrial Revolution. But it cannot be found unalloyed in the late middle ages unless one wills oneself into seeing something that was not really there. Five centuries ago the teaching of sympathy-for-sympathy’s sake was only one thread of a religion that was bursting with demons and saints, magic and miracles. To medieval people, salvation was not sympathy, or justice, or subjugation of the flesh: salvation was Christ, and Christ was in his church. 

To get across a literary conceit that she’d hit upon, George Eliot made Politian say something that he had never really written.  And then in her eagerness to teach a moral lesson of immense grandeur, she mistook the whole spiritual consciousness of the Renaissance. We do not distort the past for selfish or political reasons alone: just as often it’s our need for beauty and goodness that makes us do it.