I think it _is_ decidedly the
most important,--not the most entertaining nor the most readable, but
the one in which the largest things are attempted and grasped. The
figure of Savonarola, subordinate though it is, is a figure on a larger
scale than any which George Eliot has elsewhere undertaken; and in the
career of Tito Melema there is a fuller representation of the
development of a character. Considerable as are our author's qualities
as an artist, and largely as they are displayed in "Romola," the book
strikes me less as a work of art than as a work of morals. Like all of
George Eliot's works, its dramatic construction is feeble; the story
drags and halts,--the setting is too large for the picture; but I
remember that, the first time I read it, I declared to myself that much
should be forgiven it for the sake of its generous feeling and its
elevated morality. I still recognize this latter fact, but I think I
find it more on a level than I at first found it with the artistic
conditions of the book. "Our deeds determine us," George Eliot says
somewhere in "Adam Bede," "as much as we determine our deeds." This is
the moral lesson of "Romola." A man has no associate so intimate as his
own character, his own career,--his present and his past; and if he
builds up his career of timid and base actions, they cling to him like
evil companions, to sophisticate, to corrupt, and to damn him. As in
Maggie Tulliver we had a picture of the elevation of the moral tone by
honesty and generosity, so that when the mind found itself face to face
with the need for a strong muscular effort, it was competent to perform
it; so in Tito we have a picture of that depression of the moral tone by
falsity and self-indulgence, which gradually evokes on every side of the
subject some implacable claim, to be avoided or propitiated. At last all
his unpaid debts join issue before him, and he finds the path of life a
hideous blind alley. Can any argument be more plain? Can any lesson be
more salutary? "Under every guilty secret," writes the author, with her
usual felicity, "there is a hidden brood of guilty wishes, whose
unwholesome, infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The
contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than in
the consequent adjustment of our desires,--the enlistment of
self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the
purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by
it th