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قراءة كتاب The Ethics of George Eliot's Works
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
id="pgepubid00043"/>pleasure, and chooses retirement and isolation; gives herself to uncongenial studies and endless labours, and accepts, in uncomplaining sadness, that which to such a nature is hardest of all to bear—her father’s non-appreciation of all she would be and is to him. From the first, her life is one of entire self-consecration. The sphere of its activities expands as years flow on, but the principle is throughout the same. In the exquisite simplicity, purity, and tenderness of her young love, she is Romola still. There is no self-isolation included in it. Side by side with satisfying her own yearning heart, lies the thought that she is thus giving to her father a son to replace him who has forsaken him. Her first perception of the want of perfect oneness between Tito and herself dawns upon her through no change in him towards herself, but through his less sedulous attendance on her father. And when at last the conviction is borne in upon her that between him and her, seemingly so closely united, there lies the gulf that parts truth and falsehood, heaven and hell, it is no perceptible withdrawal of his love from her that forces on her this conviction. It is his falseness and treason to the dead. Then comes the crisis of her career; her flight from the unendurable burden of that divided life; her meeting with Savonarola; and her being through him brought face to face with the Christian aspect of that deepest of all moral truths,—the precedence of duty above all else. Savonarola’s demand might well
seem to one such as Romola laying on her a burden too heavy to be borne. It was not that it called her to return to hardness and pain; she was going forth unshrinking into the unknown with no certainty but that these would find her there; it called her to return to what, with her high ideal of love and life, could not but seem degradation and sin,—according in the living daily lie that they two, so hopelessly parted, were one. To any lower nature the appeal would have been addressed in vain. It prevails with her because it sets before her but the extension and more perfect fulfilment of the life law toward which she has been always aiming, even through the dim light of her all but heathen nurture.
She goes back to reassume her cross: sadly, weariedly forecasting, as only such a nature can do, all its shame and pain; and even still only dimly assured that her true path lies here. The very nobleness which constrains her return makes that return the harder. The unknown into which she had thought to flee had no possibility of pain or fear for her, compared to the certain pain and difficulty of that life from which all reality of love is gone: where her earnest, truthful spirit must live in daily contact with baseness,—may even have, through virtue of her relation to Tito, tacitly to concur in treason. She goes back to what, constituted as she is, can be only a daily, lifelong crucifying, and she goes back to it knowing that such it must be.
Thenceforth goes on in her that process which, far beyond all reasonings, makes the mystery of sorrow intelligible to us,—the “making perfect through suffering.” It is not necessary we should trace the process step by step. It is scarcely possible to do so, for its stages are too subtle to be so traced. We see rather by result than in operation how her path of voluntary self-consecration—of care and thought for all save self—of patient, silent, solitary endurance of her crown of thorns, is brightening more and more toward the perfect day. In the streets of the faction-torn, plague-stricken, famine-wasted city; by the side of the outraged Baldassarre; in the room of the child-mistress Tessa; most of all in that home whence all other brightness has departed,—she moves and stands more and more before us the “visible Madonna.”
How sharply the sword has pierced her heart, how sorely the crown of thorns is pressing her fair young brow, we learn in part from her decisive interview with Tessa. She, the high-born lady, spotless in purity, shrinking back from the very shadow of degradation, questions the unconscious instrument of one of her many wrongs with the one anxiety and hope that she may prove to be no true wife after all; that the bond which binds her to living falsehood and baseness may be broken, though its breaking stamp her with outward dishonour and blot. Otherwise there is no obtrusion of her burning pain; no revolt of faith and trust, impeaching God of hardness and
wrong toward her; no murmur in His ear, any more than in the ear of man. Meek, patient, steadfast, she devotes herself to every duty and right that life has left to her; and the dark-garmented Piagnone moves about the busy scene a white-robed ministrant of mercy and love. Ever and anon, indeed, the lonely anguish of her heart breaks forth, but in the form of expression it assumes she is emphatically herself. In those frequent touching appeals to Tito, deepening in their sweet earnestness with every failure, we may read the intensity of her ever-present inward pain. In them all the self-seeking of love has no place. The effort is always primarily directed, not toward winning back his love and confidence for herself, but toward winning him back to truth and right and loyalty of soul. Her pure high instinct knows that only so can love return between them—can the shattered bond be again taken up. She seeks to save him—him who will not be saved, who has already vitally placed himself out of the pale of possible salvation.
One of the most touching manifestations in this most touching of all records of feminine nobleness and suffering, is the story of her relations to Tessa. It would seem as if in that large heart jealousy, the reaching self-love of love, could find no place. Her discovery of the relation in which Tessa stands to Tito awakens first that saddest of all sad hopes in one like Romola, that through the contadina she may be
released from the marriage-bond that so galls and darkens her life. When that hope is gone, no thought of Tessa as a successful rival presents itself. She thinks of her only as another victim of Tito’s wrong-doing—as a weak, simple, helpless child, innocent of all conscious fault, to be shielded and cared for in the hour of need.
At last, after the foulest of Tito’s treasons, which purchases safety and advancement for himself by the betrayal and death of her noble old godfather, her last living link to the past, the burden of her life becomes beyond her bearing, and again she attempts to lay it down by fleeing. There is no Savonarola now to meet and turn her back. Savonarola has lost the power, has forfeited the right, to do so. The pupil has outgrown the teacher; her self-renunciation has become simpler, purer, deeper, more entire than his. The last words exchanged between these two bring before us the change that has come over the spiritual relations between them. “The cause of my party,” says Savonarola, “is the cause of God’s kingdom.” “I do not believe it,” is the reply of Romola’s “passionate repugnance.” “God’s kingdom is something wider, else let me stand without it with the beings that I love.” These words tell us the secret of Savonarola’s gathering weakness and of Romola’s strength. Self, under the subtle form of identifying truth and right with his own party—with his own personal judgment of the cause and the course of
right—has so far led him astray from the straight onward path. Right, in its clear, calm, direct simplicity, has become to her supreme above what is commonly called salvation