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What hired amanuensis can be equal to the scribe who loves the words that grow under his hand, and to whom an error or indistinctness in the text is more powerful than a sudden darkness or obstacle across his path? And even these mechanical printers who threaten to make learning a base and vulgar thing - even they must depend on the manuscript over which we scholars have bent with that insight into the poet’s meaning which is closely akin to the mens divinior o f the poet himself; unless they would flood the world with grammatical falsities and inexplicable anomalies that would turn the very fountain o f Parnassus into a deluge o f poisonous mud. ’^

With these words Bardo clarifies his point o f view and his role in the novel. He belonged to the old generation o f humanists; he conceived his work as a careful study o f the ancient literatures, which brought him to love and admiration for them, and to a separation from the external world. George Eliot says that ‘... Romola and her father sat among the parchment and the marble, aloof from the life o f the streets on holidays as well as on common days’ The use o f the term ‘aloof to describe the intellectual’s attitude towards the external world reminds o f Matthew Arnold’s discussion about the flmction o f culture. As 1 will show below, in the Preface to Culture and Anarchv he used the same term ‘aloof when talking o f the intellectuals’ relation with politics. The question o f the role o f culture in society was widely debated during the Victorian age; in this respect, therefore, George 32_{G. Eliot, Romola, op. cit.,p.50}

Eliot emphasises once more the connection she saw between the Renaissance and Victorian England. Bardo says to Romola that

...even when I could see, it was with the great dead that I lived; while the living often seemed to me mere spectres - shadows dispossessed of tme feeling and intelligence...! have returned from the converse o f the streets as from a forgotten dream and have sat down among my books, saying with Petrarca, the modern who is least unworthy to be named after the ancients.,.’'*

Furthermore, he points out how ‘fervid’ his study o f the Greek tongue had been, thanks to the teaching o f the younger Crisolora, Filelfo and Argiropulo. R.H. Hutton in his review notes that one o f the great features o f the age o f the revival o f learning George Eliot points out through Bardo and Baldassarre was

...that sense o f large human power which the mastery over a great ancient language, itself the key to a magnificent literature, gave, and which made scholarship then di. passion.

” ibid.,p.ll4 ibid.,p.51

As an example from the novel, the critic chose the passage where George Eliot describes Baldassarre’s regaining o f memory, the consequent regained command o f Greek learning, and ‘the sense o f power which thus returned to him’; George Eliot writes:

The words arose within him, and stirred innumerable vibrations o f memory. He forgot that he was old: he could almost have shouted. The light was come again, mother o f knowledge and joy!

and still:

...he was once more a man who knew cities, whose sense o f vision was instructed with large experience, and who felt the keen delight o f holding all things in the grasp o f language. Names! Images! - his mind rushed through its wealth without pausing, like one who enters on a great inheritance.'^

But Bardo underlines also the failure o f his studies, the inability to reach a constructive aim. He maintains

ibid.,p.58

G. Eliot, Romola. op. dt.,p.334 38_{ibid.,pp. 334-5}

For why is a young man like Poliziano (who was not yet born when I was already held worthy to maintain a discussion with Thomas o f Sarzana) to have a glorious memory as a commentator on the Pandects - why is Ficino, whose Latin is an offence to me, and who wanders purblind among the superstitious fancies that marked the decline at once o f art, literature, and philosophy, to descend to posterity as the veiy high priest o f Platonism, while I, who am more than their equal, have not effected anything but scattered work, which will be appropriated by other men?

The reason he gives for his failure is the fact that his son Dino had forsaken him in the name o f religion. However, the reader cannot fail to notice the hints given by the narrator through the parts o f the novel concerned with Bardo in order to point out the incompleteness, the lack o f something important characterising the way he carried out his work. The picture the reader is given o f Bardo’s libraiy is that o f a room full of incomplete objects; a ‘feminine torso’/** ‘a headless statue’,"** ‘a bladeless sword’,'*^ ‘infantine limbs severed from the trunk’,**’ ‘Roman busts’,'*'* objects whose colours was ‘pale or sombre’.**^ Moreover, the narrator notices that ‘the vellum bindings...gave little relief to the marble, livid with long burial’,'*'’ that the patch o f the carpet ‘had long been

ibid.,pp.52-3 ibid.,p.47 ” ibid.,pp.47-8 ibid., p.48 ibid. ibid. ibid. ibid.

worn to dimness’/^ that ‘the dark bronzes wanted sunlight’/*^ Furthermore, and more important, it is not a coincidence, it is rather coherent with the development o f the story, that Bardo is blind, and that the other humanist o f the older generation, Baldassarre, suffers from amnesia. Bardo’s blindness, like the presence in his library o f fragmentary objects, symbolises his inability ‘to grasp problems in their entirety’; the view he has o f things, situations and persons is wrong and false. What he thinks o f Tito is false; it is the artist’s Piero di Cosimo’s vision which provides the reader with the right track to follow in the understanding o f his character. Lawrence Poston suggests that

...Bardo, a kind o f preliminary study for Casaubon, is the scholar who possesses a somewhat astigmatic integrity and has lost sight o f the broader issues toward which scholarship should lead. His physical blindness is almost too obvious a symbol for his intellectual deficiency. O f all the characters in the novel, he perhaps best reflects the decline o f Florence. His weariness is contrasted with the restless, creative energy o f his ancestors.^'*

This treatment o f the character o f Bardo has a coherent meaning and role in the development o f the story o f Tito and Romola, in the search for an ethical code o f values which is implied throughout the novel. Bardo conceives his work as segregated from the rest o f the external world, he does not put it to the service o f mankind. As I have noted,

ibid. ibid.

he despises the hired amanuensis and the mechanical printers, whose role in the history of the word’s culture had been to diftuse knowledge to a wide audience. What is more important to George Eliot, he is not able to extrapolate from his vast knowledge and culture the values inherent in the ancient world and make them active in his own world. He lives separated from the external world and from his contemporaries, whom he considers mere shadows, and builds a continuous dialogue with the great ancestors. This dialogue does not have positive results and consequences on the external world. Through Romola, through her Bildung, George Eliot wanted to point out which moral and ethical values could be considered valid, and, certainly, the attitude towards life o f a man who lived aloof from the rest o f the world, who did not bring anything constructive in the world he lived in, could not be portrayed as a positive figure.

Two other important figures in the delineation o f the cultural context George Eliot described in Romola are Nello, the barber, and Piero di Cosimo. The presence o f Nello is relevant in the novel because the function he and his shop have is to gather Florentine intellectuals together and to house cultural discussions. The 15**' centuiy Florentine cultural context had to be rich, if a barber’s shop was the place where different and important personalities, like Poliziano, Machiavelli and the same Piero di Cosimo, could meet and discuss contemporary historical, political or literary subjects. O f Poliziano, for example, Nello describes