George Eliot (50 page)

For once, Lewes’s understanding of what Marian needed to hear had deserted him. In Florence he had tried to cheer her up with the odd suggestion that Savonarola was a topic no more distant to her than the late eighteenth-century Midlands of
Adam Bede
or
Silas Marner
. Missing the intense connection between her and Marner, he confided to Blackwood that ‘she knows infinitely more about Savonarola than she knew of Silas, besides having deep personal sympathies with the old reforming priest which she had not with the miser’.
⁵⁵

If Lewes was unable to find the right thing to say, he at least grasped that John Blackwood might do better. The publisher had come to visit them immediately on their return to London and had sent his wife a report of Marian’s struggles. ‘Her great difficulty seems to be that she, as she describes it, hears her characters talking, and there is a weight upon her mind as if Savonarola and friends ought to be speaking Italian instead of English.’
⁵⁶
While Marian had been able to imagine Lisbeth Bede’s speech by thinking back to the way her father spoke when he got together with his northerly brothers, she had no point of reference for the priests, scholars and merchants of Renaissance Florence.

By Christmas 1861 Lewes sensed that Marian’s paralysis was now unprecedented, and he persuaded Blackwood to make several visits over the holiday period in order to ‘discountenance the idea of a Romance being the product of an Encyclopaedia’ and get her to begin.
⁵⁷
Blackwood responded to the challenge creatively, grasping that the roots of the block went deep into the most troubled layers of Marian’s psyche. On one of the three visits he made during this fortnight he brought his wife Julia with him, a sign of social acceptance which may actually have annoyed Marian by its heavy-handedness, since she barely mentions it in her journal. A more welcome gesture was the china dog which he produced as a reminder of beloved Pug, whose name suddenly disappears from the Leweses’ letters and journals after their move to central London in September 1860.
⁵⁸
Equally gratifying was a letter which he produced from the great French author Montalembert, praising
Silas Marner
. One or more of these tactics worked because, on New Year’s Day, Marian was able to record
in her journal that she had begun ‘my novel of Romola’.
⁵⁹

Unfortunately, the fresh start petered out quickly, despite Blackwood appearing for another visit on the 12th. By the end of the month Marian was already recording her ‘malaise and despair’ in her journal. Although Lewes gallantly expressed himself delighted with the Proem and opening scene, she was still not able to take flight: by the middle of February she had managed only two chapters, held back by ‘an oppressive sense of the farstretching task before me’.
⁶⁰
This mood of despair was to last for another miserable eighteen months until the novel lurched to a finish. It was a time of headache, depression, sparse journal entries and only minimal correspondence with friends. Years later Marian was to confide to John Cross: ‘I began … [
Romola
] a young woman – I finished it an old woman.’
⁶¹

It is hardly surprising that
Romola
turned out to be lengthy, laboured and dull. There is much to admire in it, but admiration is not what keeps readers going. The historical detail is as bright and particular as the background of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. The door-knockers, head-dresses, friars, barbers, and carnivals are, according to Anthony Trollope, ‘wonderful in their energy and their accuracy’.
⁶²
Where textual sources proved mute, Marian had relied on the encyclopaedic knowledge of the Florence-raised artist Frederic Leighton, who had been engaged to draw the illustration, as well as the helpful Tom Trollope. But no amount of documentary detail could disguise the fact that the novel was dead at its centre. Marian’s early worry that she could not hear her characters speak turned out to be an indication of major problems to come. Instead of using a supple, colloquial English, her Florentines speak in a literal translation of classical Italian. A phrase like ‘A bad Easter and a bad year to you, and may you die by the sword!’ comes straight from
Decameron
and has none of the immediate liveliness which, in her essay on von Riehl, Marian had argued was the mark of spoken idiom.
⁶³
Compared with the Raveloe villagers, the Dodson aunts or Mrs Poyser, the characters in
Romola
speak a creaky, made-up kind of language which, according to the review in the
Spectator
, is ‘a blank to us’.

The plot and the characters work better. Our way into the city is through Tito Melema, an educated young Greek who has
recently been shipwrecked off the Tuscan coast. He finds the place in an uproar following the death of Lorenzo de Medici. On the one side are the scholars keen to continue Medici’s programme of intellectual and scientific revival. On the other is Savonarola, the Dominican monk intent on reforming the Church by emphasising its mystical and miraculous origins.

Tito has all the qualities needed to succeed in this fluctuating, treacherous environment. His good looks, learning and charm allow him to move easily between the two camps, exchanging information and disinformation with calculating ease. His lack of fixed principles, suggests the narrator, comes from denying the obligations of his own past. Unlike Silas Marner, whose dormant good nature can be revived by an appeal to the emotional and moral learning of childhood, Tito remains a stranger to the family piety which, for every Eliot narrator, is the root of adult integrity. Tito’s crime is that he has abandoned his adoptive father to slavery and sold his jewels. Just like Arthur Donnithorne and
Middlemarch
’s banker Bulstrode, his past now pursues him in the form of the very person whom he has wronged. Crazed with grief and a hunger for vengeance, the old man Baldassarre has tracked his adopted son down to Florence, where he publicly confronts him with his crime.

Tito’s easy manner and accommodating conscience allow him to brush off the embarrassment. Like Bulstrode and Donnithorne before him, he is not a vicious man, simply one used to equivocation. ‘Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves … Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition: he had won no memories of self-conquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could have a sense of falling.’
⁶⁴
Years of deceit have impaired the young man’s ability to act properly in the present. As well as exploiting the factionalism in Florence for his own purposes, he is a callous husband to his new wife, the virtuous and beautiful Romola Bardi.

Romola is the daughter of a blind scholar who is one of the main opponents of the increasingly fundamentalist Savonarola. She is as clever as the son whom her father never had. But like all Eliot’s educated heroines, she is not permitted a life of significant endeavour. Just as the young Marian Evans sat day after day reading to the ungrateful Robert Evans, so Romola is content to
be her cantankerous father’s eyes, translating the ancient texts that he is no longer able to read for himself. Essentially naïve, she is attracted to Tito by his plausible kindness to her father. It is only once they are married that she begins to realise his capacity for deception, in particular his relationship with Tessa, a servant girl by whom he has several children.

Romola’s gradual disillusionment with Tito is wonderfully done, and anticipates those other terrible marriages – of Rosamond and Lydgate, and Grandcourt and Gwendolen. The sweetness of his manner when he wooed her now reveals itself as moral emptiness. Tito, for his part, begins to hate Romola because her palpable integrity is a silent reproach to his shoddiness. The marriage unravels as Romola comes increasingly under the influence of the charismatic Savonarola. She ends the book as an unlikely Madonna, tending to the needs of the inhabitants of a plague village and helping Tessa to look after her children by Tito.

It is possible that Marian might have abandoned a novel which so obviously wasn’t working were it not for the fact that by the time she was half-way through, the first chapters were already appearing in print. After floating the idea with
Adam Bede
, and considering it seriously for
The Mill
, she was finally bringing out a novel in instalments. But
Romola
did not appear in the form of Lewes’s old scheme of shilling parts, nor was it serialised in
Maga
. Instead it was published over twelve months in one of
Maga
’s newest rivals, the
Cornhill Magazine
. The Leweses’ relationship with the Blackwoods, viewed as one of the most successful in the publishing industry, had foundered.

In the months leading up to the rupture John Blackwood had been his usual thoughtful self. While dealing with the illness and death of his brother and business partner at the age of only forty-eight, he had helped find Thornie somewhere to live, sent consistently encouraging news about
The Mill
and had answered repeated summonses to Blandford Square to try to shake Marian out of her creative block. In addition he had encouraged two senior members of his staff, Simpson and Langford, to do the Leweses a great many little services, from befriending the ‘amiable and troublesome’ Thornie to hunting down references for
the interminable
Romola
. He was generous with money too. He offered to bring forward one of the payments on
The Mill
to help with the moving costs to Harewood Square and had even allowed Marian to keep a bit of extra money which had been incorrectly calculated as profit on the twelve-shilling edition of
The Mill
.

But still this was not enough for Marian, who could not forgive John Blackwood for seeming to undervalue her work during those tense negotiations over
The Mill
. Although he was probably unaware that anything was wrong, there are signs that by the end of 1860 Marian was once again feeling aggrieved. In early October 1860 she turned down an offer from Blackwood of £3000 for the remaining copyright on all her books from
Scenes
to
Silas Marner
. The reason isn’t clear, but the fact that in her journal she links her decision to a letter from Bradbury and Evans, the publishers who had courted her over
The Mill
, suggests that Blackwood’s offer struck her as below the market price. She expressed her dissatisfaction in her usual way, by finding the tiniest flaws in Blackwood’s immaculate dealing. In January 1862, having read rejection into something he had said during one of his morale-boosting visits to Blandford Square, she wrote a complaining letter about the arrangements for a new cheap edition of her work.
⁶⁵
A few weeks later she was gripped by the sudden certainty that Simpson was not bothering to publicise this new edition. It was only when she was presented with an exhaustive list of the advertisements which had been placed that she was forced to admit that her accusations of indifference were misplaced.
⁶⁶

It was during these anguished first few weeks of 1862 when
Romola
would not catch fire and nothing Blackwood did was right, that George Smith reappeared in the Leweses’ life. He had been circling ever since those difficult days of negotiation over
The Mill
. Buoyed up by a remarkable overseas investment income, his company of Smith and Elder not only published novels, but the previous year had set up the
Cornhill Magazine
, edited by William Thackeray. With plenty of money in his pocket, Smith was exactly that kind of high-spending, head-hunting publisher with whom John Blackwood had made it clear that he could and would not compete.

But Smith did not initially receive a warm welcome when he
appeared at Blandford Square. The previous year he had cancelled a series in the
Cornhill
by Lewes on ‘Animal Life’ because of a worry that its evolutionary assumptions might offend orthodox readers. Since then the magazine had been floundering, much to the satisfaction of Lewes, who had pointedly refused to make any further contributions. However, the terms of the original agreement for the ‘Animal Life’ pieces meant that Smith and Elder had the right to publish them in book form, and this was what Smith now came on 23 January 1862 to discuss. During his visit Smith sounded out Lewes as to whether Marian was open to a magnificent offer for her new work, and a month later returned to propose the extraordinary sum of £10,000 which, as Lewes recorded in his journal, would be the largest sum ever paid for a novel.
⁶⁷
But timing was the problem, just as it had been two years earlier when Dickens tried to get Marian to serialise a novel in
Household Words
. Smith would need to start publishing
Romola
in the April or May issue, so that Marian would be writing only a few weeks ahead of each deadline. Both she and Lewes agreed that it would impose too great a strain on a process which was already painful enough. Marian then suggested that the unpublished ‘Brother Jacob’ might do as a three-month filler until she was ready to start publishing
Romola
in the autumn, but Smith was not keen. Naturally Lewes was disappointed to lose such a magnificent deal, but recorded that he was ‘just as well pleased that Polly should not be hurried or flurried, by being bound to appear at an earlier date than she would like’.
⁶⁸

Smith was a man of business, not books. He had not yet read a word of
Romola
, but he knew the value of the name ‘George Eliot’. Marian could not but be flattered by this contrast with the attitude of John Blackwood, who had always seemed to find her name such an embarrassment. But Smith’s designs on the Leweses went further. On 8 April he arrived at Blandford Square to propose that Lewes should take over the editorship of the
Cornhill
, which had been left vacant by the hurried departure of Thackeray. Lewes had no desire for a job that would not leave him enough time for his scientific work, but he did agree to the very congenial role of consulting editor.
⁶⁹
For £600 a year he would suggest topics and select articles while a hard-working sub-editor of his own choosing managed the daily grind.