Romola Book

The GRAND NOVEL goes on The GRAND TOUR


In a deep curve of the mountains lay a breadth of green land, curtained by gentle tree-shadowed slopes leaning towards the rocky heights. Up these slopes might be seen here and there, gleaming between the tree-tops, a pathway leading to a little irregular mass of building that seemed to have clambered in a hasty way up the mountain-side, and take a difficult stand there for the sake of showing the tall belfry as a sight of beauty to the scattered and clustered houses of the village below.

The Grand Tour or tourism with style. This mode is gone now.


But this agreeable and leisurely read has felt like a reward since it is no longer possible to travel in such a style. With this novel I have travelled to the Florence of the end of the 15C holding the hand of Mary Ann Evans. Having visited the place recently--also with an imaginary Renaissance as my objective--with her Romola, I was eliminating one and a half centuries in the time gap, and able to enjoy a different perspective to my own.

No Florence-card, no museum lines, no ubiquitous photographing, no queuing at Il Due Fratellini to grab a cheap panini to eat sitting down on the stairs of the Loggia dei Lanzi. Instead, I could enjoy a serene dilation, a grandeur in observation, ample panoramas, expanded time, careful inspection of details, profound insight, and thorough knowledge. And this even though Evans occasionally makes the reader aware that, no matter how closely to the Florentine Renaissance she strives to take us, the text is dealing with a foregone age.

As victim of the hurried cadence of my age, my first impression was that the novel would be thin, in spite of its length. Its first pages felt like watercolours, with diffuse forms and too much gentleness. It took me a while to tune into its amiable, distended, dilated pace. But when I finally did I could then treasure Evans' erudition, imagination, and sharpness of mind.

Evans took on a challenging task by choosing a very complicated period in the history of Florence. The aftermath at the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico saw the messy attempt at a new Republic; the invasion by the French king Charles VIII; the return to a fundamentalist and apocalyptic practice of religion; the political machinations of the Pope Alexander VI, etc. This is a period that often historians just brush through; the complexities are so controversial. But it was after all the fertile ground for Machiaveli to develop his political thought. Bravely setting her story in such a scenario Evans does not skirt the issues.

She travelled three times to Tuscany to supplement her already astoundingly strong education in the classics --we would now qualify her as a scholar. She was still very young when she first visited, in 1840, but she returned twice in the very early 1860s, spending several weeks in preparation for her novel. This is her only work that is set outside of England and in a somewhat remote age. It was first published in 1862 in serialized form in a magazine.




Her confidence in treating this complex and rich period shows throughout the book. She distinguishes comfortably between the differing modes of government of the various republics, as well as between the different religious orders, major and minor. She gives us a fascinating good account of the functioning and origins of the circle of Neo-platonic humanists gathering around the Orci Rucellai. She gets close to the conspiracy against the Republic that brought the execution of five illustrious men who were close to the Medici. She keeps a steady pace when tackling the precise state of the complex classical revival, aware, for example, that Homer was a new discovery. There is no need to wait for a feminist revival to learn about the existence of the extraordinary Cassandra Fedele. I was also very intrigued by her choice of the idiosyncratic painter, Piero di Cosimo (1462-1521), out of the overwhelming array of superb painters from that time.





In realizing her sound command of her material, we cannot forget that Evans was writing before Walter Paters' The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), the critic who first singled out Botticelli (and now part of the kitschy repertoire), before Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was translated into English, and at the time when Jules Michelet, the man who coined the word 'Renaissance', was still working on his massive Histoire.

Writing this fictional approach to the period, at the time she did, Evans demonstrates what an extraordinary woman she was.

For she certainly had her own ideas. And these she could develop because she gave herself time to observe, time to think, time to ponder. Hers was Grand Time. For example, she is critical of Machiavelli, for he is too much bitten with notions, and has not your power of fascination....He has lost a great chance in life.... She also gives a fascinating portrayal of the controversial Girolamo Savonarola, now enveloped in his black legend and easily derided, but who emerges through her pen as an unquestionably remarkable man.

To expanded time she could weld her most outstanding gift, her acute perception. She had complemented her studies and reading with a power of observation, of objects, settings, customs, clothing, that had impressed Anthony Trollope. But the full expansion in her observation is devoted to the human soul. With her writing it becomes a landscape of wide and profound vistas. Consequently, her main characters, the fictional ones, engage her reader for their complexity.

It is true that her Romola has been criticized because she remains well footed in the age in which she was really born. She is a Victorian sweet young lady and we suspect that she is made out of Evans' own nature. And yet, Romola, in spite of her sweetness and initial gullibility, draws the interest of a 21st century reader because her personality develops along the copious pages. She undergoes a gradual éducation sentimentale. With the dilation of the grand manner we follow her as she questions many given values and social structures, matrimony being one of them, and she keeps our interest because she does not fall prey to black & white doubts. There is always subtlety in her reactions and her thinking.

For me the most interesting character, though, was Tito, the non-villain villain, because he is, despairingly, so highly believable. His moral deterioration is not entirely blameworthy. Clad in overpowering charm, amorality can be so irresistible, that it will gain the upper hand.

As a Grand Novel, Romola, has the unquestionable Grand Narrator, the omniscient voice that moves seamlessly in and out of the minds of the characters. And concomitant with it, the charged morals pepper the text for they were the alibi that sustained and defended fiction as a worthy literary genre.

The moralistic maxims feel like the classical ruins dispersed the landscapes of the Grand Tour. Signs of permanence.




With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that is also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled.
Laws that govern human behaviour.

As a strong body struggles against fumes with the more violence when they begin to be stifling, a strong soul struggles against fantasies with all the more alarmed energy when they threaten to govern in the place of thought. .
But in Florence, in spite of Savonarola, in spite of Evans' morality, and like everywhere else, Vanities have not left the Piazza della Signoria. If Savonarola tried to destroy them with his Bonfires of Vanities, and Evans attempted to dissolve them with her edifying novel, the façades around the square are now lined up with the Vanities on display and on offer at the Gucci, Vuitton et al shops..., around the plaque on the floor indicating where he he was burnt, in his own bonfire.

Some aspects of humanity, in spite of differences in the geographical and historical contexts, do not seem to change.