remained a miser. It was not his will alone that revolutionized
his life; what some would call luck was at work there. In "Silas
Marner" the teaching is of a piece with that of all her
representative work.

But when we reach "Romola" there is a change, debatable ground
is entered upon at once. Hitherto, the story-teller has mastered
the preacher, although an ever more earnest soul has been
expressing itself about Life. Now we enter the region of more
self-conscious literary art, of planned work and study, and
confront the possibility of flagging invention. Also, we leave
the solid ground of contemporary themes and find the realist
with her hang for truth, essaying an historical setting, an
entirely new and foreign motive. Eliot had already proved her
right to depict certain aspects of her own English life. To
strive to exercise the same powers on a theme like "Romola" was
a venturesome step. We have seen how Dickens and Thackeray
essayed romance at least once with ringing success; now the
third major mid-century novelist was to try the same thing.

It may be conceded at the start that in one important respect
this Florentine story of Savonarola and his day is entirely
typical: it puts clearly before us in a medieval romantic mis-en
scene, the problem of a soul: the slow, subtle, awful
degeneration of the man Tito, with its foil in the noble figure
of the girl Romola. The central personality psychologically is
that of the wily Greek-Italian, and Eliot never probed deeper
into the labyrinths of the perturbed human spirit than in this
remarkable analysis. The reader, too, remembers gratefully, with
a catch of the breath, the great scenes, two of which are the
execution of Savonarola, and the final confrontation of Tito by
his adoptive father, with its Greek-like sense of tragic doom.
The same reader stands aghast before the labor which must lie
behind such a work and often comes to him a sudden, vital sense
of fifteenth century Florence, then, as never since, the Lily of
the Arno: so cunningly and with such felicity are innumerable
details individualized, massed and blended. And yet, somehow it
all seems a splendid experiment, a worthy performance rather
than a spontaneous and successful creative endeavor: this, in
comparison with the fiction that came before. The author seems a
little over-burdened by the tremendousness of her material.
Whether it is because the Savonarola episode is not thoroughly
synthetized with