John Crombie Brown

“ There is not even any true ground of womanhood on which Rosamond can meet Dorothea; for she is nearly as far removed from womanhood as Tito Melema is from manliness or manhood. Yet even here the tender pitifulness of Dorothea overpasses a barrier that to any other would be impassable. In her sweet, instinctive, universal sympathy for human sorrow and pain, she finds a common ground of union; and in no fancied sense of superiority—solely from the sense of common human need—she strives to console, to elevate, to lead back to hope and trust, with a gentle yet steadfast simplicity all her own. ”

“ The practical doctrine that with them underlies all others is, “Love not pleasure—love God. Love Him not alone in the light and amid the calm, but through the blackness and the storm. Though He hide Himself in the thick darkness, yet” give thanks at remembrance of His holiness. “Though He slay thee, yet trust still in Him.” The hope to which they call us is not, save secondarily and incidentally, the hope of a great exhaustless future. It is the hope of a true life now, struggling on and up through hardness and toil and battle, careless though its crown be the crown of thorns. ”

“ And this thirst for the highest alike in love and life includes her lover as well as herself. The darkest terror that overtakes her in all those after-scenes comes when he is about to abjure country, honour, and God on her account. To her, the Gypsy, without a country, without a faith save faithfulness to the highest right, without a God such as the Spaniards’ God, this might be a small thing. But for him, Spanish noble and Christian knight, she knows it to be abnegation of nobleness, treason to duty, dishonour and shame. ”

“ Now the light and the darkness, the joy and the sorrow, the love whose earthly life she is slaying, and the life of lonely, ceaseless, lingering pain before her, stand, as it were, visibly and tangibly side by side. On the one hand her father, with his noble presence, his calm unquestioning self-devotion, his fervid eloquence, and his withering scorn of everything false and base, represents that deepest in humanity—and in her—which impels to seek and to cling to the highest good. ”

“ But the palace of art, made the palace of the soul, becomes its dungeon-house, self-generating and filling fast with all loathsome and deathly shapes; and the heaven of intellectual joy becomes at last a more penetrative and intenser hell. The “Idylls of the King” are but exquisite variations on the one note—that the only true and high life of humanity is the life of full and free obedience; and that such life on earth becomes of necessity one of struggle, sorrow, outward loss and apparent failure. ”

“ Can the true artist err in aiming, according to his nature or to the purity and elevation of his genius, to approach in his portraitures such ideals as this great typical exemplar of our humanity, whose influence has for eighteen centuries been stealing down into the hearts and souls of men to elevate and refine, and who is now, and who is more and more becoming, the paramount factor in individual character, and in social and political relations? ”

“ Conscious of her want of mere æsthetic culture—neglected in the past as a turning aside from life’s highest aims—she has looked forward to his guidance and support for the supply of this want as enlarging her whole being; broadening and deepening, refining and elevating all its sympathies. For all shadow of aid or sympathy here, she finds herself as utterly alone as if she were in a trackless and uninhabited desert. Nay, more: he who sits by her side is as cold and dead to all sensations or emotions that art can enkindle, as the glorious marbles amid which they wander. ”

“ She strives, as many an earnest impassioned nature like hers has done in similar circumstances, to fashion her own cross, and to make it as hard as may be to bear. She would deny to herself the very beauty of earth and sky, the music of birds and rippling waters, and everything sweet and glad, as temptations and snares. From all this she is brought back by Philip. But he, touching as he is in the humility and tender unselfishness of his love, is too exclusively of the artist temperament to give direction or sustainment to the deeper moral requirements of her being. ”

“ Then follows the long and painful struggle,—a struggle so agonising to such a nature, that only one nearly akin to her own can adequately conceive or picture it. For it is a struggle not primarily to forego any certain or fancied mere personal good. On one side is ranged tenderest pitifulness over her husband’s wasted life and energies, even though she knows those energies have been wasted—that life has been thrown away—on an object in which there is no gain to humanity, no advancement of human well-being, no profit even to himself, save, perchance, a barren and useless notoriety at last ”

“ Mere personal self-denials, mere turning away from the outward pomps and vanities of the world, lie very lightly on a nature like Savonarola’s, and such things scarcely enter into the pain and hardness of his chosen lot. It is the opposition,—active, in the intrigues and machinations of enemies both in Church and State—passive, in the dull cold hearts that respond so feebly and fitfully to his appeals; it is the constant wearing bitterness of hope deferred, the frequent still sterner bitterness of direct disappointment,—it is things like these that make his cross so heavy to bear. ”

“ The Jew lived on through it all,—lived, multiplied, and prospered, and became more and more emphatically the Jew. Is it too much to say that in the West in particular, where this contrast and contest were keenest, Judaism was, during these long ages of terror and darkness, the great conservator of the vital truth of the Divine unity, under whatever forms science or philosophy may now attempt to define this; and in being so, became the conservator of that thought, without the vivifying power of which, howsoever imperfectly apprehended, all human advance is impossible? ”

“ Love that never falters, patience that never questions, meekness that never fails, truth clear and still as the light of heaven, devotedness that knows no thought of self, a life flowing calmly on through whatever of sorrow and disappointment may remain toward the perfect purity and blessedness of heaven. Few, we think, can carefully study the character and development of Romola del Bardo and refuse to endorse the verdict that Imagination has given us no figure more rounded and complete in every grace and glory of feminine loveliness. ”

“ His answer to her question already quoted, reveals a love which the world’s judgment may rank as the best and noblest, but reveals a principle which, applied to aught beneath the only and supremest good, makes love only a more insidious and deeply corrupting form of self-pleasing: “’Tis what I love determines how I love.” Love is his “highest allegiance”; and it becomes ere long an allegiance before which truth, faith, and honour give way, and guidance and control of conscience are swept before the fierce storm of self-willed passion that brooks no interposition between itself and its aim. ”

“ Very touching are those heart-wrung pleadings by which she strives to avert the sacrifice; and we are oppressed almost as by the presence of the calm, loveless, hateless Fate of the old Greek tragedy, as Zarca’s inexorable logic puts them one by one aside, and leaves her as sole alternatives the offering up every hope, every present and possible joy of the love which is entwined with her life, or the turning away from that highest course to which he calls her. ”

“ There is no hardness or cruelty in him, save when its transient displays toward Romola are necessary for furthering some present end: he never indulges in the luxury of unnecessary and unprofitable sins. The sharp, steadfast, unwavering consistency of Tito is even more marked than that of Romola, for twice Romola falters, and turns to flee. The supple, flexible Greek follows out the law he has laid down as the law of his life,—worships the god he has set up as the god of his worship with an inexorable constancy that never for one chance moment falters. That god is self ”

“ It is the saviour of an oppressed, degraded, outcast race, who calls to share his mission her who could feel the brightness of her joy of love brightened still more by the hope of assuaging sorrow and redressing evil. It is the appeal through the father of that which is highest and noblest in humanity to that which is most deeply inwrought into the daughter’s soul. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The whole scheme of Judaism, as first promulgated in all the stern simplicity of its awful Theism, where the Divine is fundamentally and emphatically represented as the Omnipotent and the Avenger, was an emphatic protest against that self-isolation in which the man folds himself up like a chrysalid in its cocoon whenever his individual happiness—the so-called saving of his own soul—becomes the aim and aspiration of his life. In one sense the Jew of Moses had no individual as apart from a national existence. ”

“ Those who read works of fiction merely for amusement, may be surprised that it should be thought possible they could be vehicles for conveying to us the deepest practical truth of Christianity,—that the highest life of man only begins when he begins to accept and to bear the Cross; and that the conscious pursuit of happiness as his highest aim tends inevitably to degrade and enslave him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The very nobleness of Bernardo del Nero strengthens the necessity that he should die, that the Mediceans may be thus deprived of the support of his stainless honour and high repute; though to compass this death the law of mercy which Savonarola himself has instituted must be put aside. As we listen to the miserable sophistries by which he strives to justify himself—far less to Romola than before his own accusing soul—we feel that the greatness of his strength has departed from him. All thenceforth is deepening confusion without and within. ”

“ The picture is a very impressive one, alike in its grandeur and in its sadness, speaking its true, deep, universal lesson home to us and to our life: alike when it shows us the strength and nobleness of life attuning itself to the highest good, and battling on toward the highest right; and when it shows us how self, under a form which does not seem self, may steal in to sap its strength and to abase its nobleness. ”

“ Even for her “pulpy” uncle she has no supercilious contempt—no sense of isolation or separation; not even the consciousness of toleration toward him. Toward Celia, with her delicious commonplace of rather superficial yet naïve worldly wisdom, her half-conscious selfishness, her baby-worship, and her inimitable “staccato,” she is more than tolerant. She looks up to her as in many respects a superior, even though her own far higher instincts and aims of life cannot accept her as an aid and guidance toward the realisation of these. ”

“ The hardness is essentially against the wrong-doing, not against the doer of it; and against it rather as it affects others than as it burdens, worries, or overshadows his own life. It subsists in and springs from the intensity with which, in a nature robust and energetic in no ordinary degree, right and wrong have asserted themselves as the realities of existence. Even Seth can be more tolerant than Adam, because the gentle, placid moral beauty of his nature is, so far as this may ever be, the result of temperament ”