I
It was with a thrill that I came upon a holograph of Lucrezia Borgia in
the library of the University of Ferrara. I had already seen in a little
glass case at Milan, in the Ambrosian library, a lock of her notorious
yellow hair, and this wishy-washy tress, so below the flamboyance of its
fame, should have prepared me for the Ferrara relic. For the document
was—of all things in the world—a washing list! The lurid lady—the
heroine of Donizetti’s opera, the Medea of Victor Hugo’s drama—checked,
perhaps mended, her household linen! It has been sufficiently washed in
public since her day. But this list alone should serve to cleanse her
character. Indeed Pope Alexander’s daughter does not lack modern
whitewashers—what ancient disrepute is safe from them? Roscoe, Gilbert
and Gregorovius defend her, and even in her lifetime she had her circle
of court laureates that included Ariosto himself. Her platonic
friendship with Cardinal Bembo is rather in her favour. The copiously
grey-bearded ecclesiast in cap and robe, whose portrait may be seen at
Florence in the corridor between the Pitti and the Uffizi, does not look
like a man who would consort with the legendary Lucrezia. Yet even a man
of letters of Bembo’s status is liable to colour-blindness when the
Scarlet Woman is a reigning duchess. Bembo, we know, was afraid to read
the Epistles of St. Paul, for fear of contaminating his Latin; we are
less certain that any fear of contaminating his character would keep him
from reading the epistles of Lucrezia. But it seems fairest to accept
the view that once freed by her third marriage from the vicious
influences of the Vatican and the company of the Pope’s concubines, she
became _rangée_, steadying herself into an admirable if pleasure-loving
consort of the ruler of Ferrara! Nevertheless even in Ferrara rumour
connected her with the murder of the poet Ercole Strozzi, and the guides
used to count among their perquisites the blood-flecked wall of the
Palace in which, by way of revenge for her extrusion from a respectable
Venetian ball-room, she poisoned off at a supper-party eighteen noble
Venetian youths, including a natural son of her own whom she poignarded
in the frenzy of the discovery.
And Addington Symonds, even after the huge monograph of Gregorovius in
her favour, can only exchange the idea of “a potent and malignant witch”
for “a feeble woman soiled with sensual foulness from the cradle,” a
woman who could look on complaisantly at orgies devised for her
amusement, applauding even when Cesare chivied prisoners to death with
arrows.
But it was reserved for the latest biographer of the Borgias (Frederick
Baron Corvo) to write of her: “She was now the wife of royalty, with a
near prospect of a throne, worshipped by the poor for her boundless and
sympathetic charity, by the learned for her intelligence, by her kin for
her loving loyalty, by her husband for her perfect wifehood and
motherhood, by all for her transcendent beauty and her spotless name.
Why it has pleased modern writers and painters to depict this pearl
among women as a ‘poison-bearing mænad,’ a ‘veneficous Bacchante’
stained with revolting and unnatural turpitude, is one of those riddles
to which there is no key.” As for there being no key to it, that is
nonsense, for naturally Lucrezia Borgia would share in the opprobrium
due to the pravity of Cesare Borgia and Pope Alexander VI, and Corvo
himself claims that Gregorovius proves that these calumnious inventions
came from the poisoned pens of her father’s enemies. This judgment of a
reckless writer may however be discounted, for Corvo throughout defends
that papal Antichrist, Lucrezia’s father, in a spirit which Machiavelli,
to whom “virtù” and “magnanimità” meant efficiency whether for good or
evil, could not possibly better. And he gaily announces in his preface
that he does not write to whitewash the House of Borgia, “his present
opinion being that all men are too vile for words to tell.” In such a
darkness, in which all cats are grey, Lucrezia Borgia might well seem as
white as a blue-eyed Persian. But the paradox remains that Corvo may not
impossibly be right. As, but for superhuman strainings, Dreyfus might
have gone down to history as a traitor to France, so may the Borgian
Lucrezia have been as blameless as the Tarquinian to whom indeed Ariosto
boldly compares her. The woman who protected the Jews during a famine,
provided poor girls with dowries, passed evenings over her embroidery
frame and held the esteem of the greatest poet and the greatest stylist
of her day, may really have lived up to that washing list. _Chose jugée_
is never absolutely true in history, and there is no trial but is liable
to revision. Even the saints are not safe; the devil’s advocate may
always appeal. Sir Philip Sidney himself has been sadly toned down in
his latest biography, and _per contra_ it may well be that Lucrezia
Borgia has innocently shared in the blackness of the Borgias. But how
shall we ever know? How is it possible—especially considering the
public and private conspiracy of falsification and suppression—to
uncover the truth even about our contemporaries? Our very housemates
elude us. The simplest village happening is recounted by the onlookers
in a dozen different ways; an historic episode varies according to the
politics of the recording newspaper. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
recount their great story, each after his own fashion, so that even
“gospel truth” is no synonym for objective veracity. Letters are taken
as invaluable evidence in past history, yet every letter involves a
personal relation between the writer and the receiver, is written in
what the logicians in a narrower sense call “the universe of discourse,”
so that words written to one man differ from the same words written to
another man, and still more from the same words written to a woman.
Facetiousness, exaggeration, under-statement, pet-words, words in
special meanings, are the note of intimate intercourse. ’Tis a cipher to
which nobody else has the key, and which can never be read by the
chronicler. “Our virtuous and popular Gloster” might mean “our vicious
and universally odious Gloster.” How shall the peering student of musty
records behold the wink in the long-vanished eye of the writer, the
smile on the skull of the reader? A frigid note may veil a burning love;
a tropic outburst disguise a dying passion. Who has the clue to these
things? And in the literature of an age the things that are understood
are exactly the things that are not written down, and thus the things
that are written down are the things that are not understood. What would
we not give for a little realistic description of houses, clothes and
furniture in the Bible! But such information only drifts into the text
indirectly and by accident. Official documents are the bed-rock of
history, yet even such formal things as birth-certificates are
unreliable, for did not the wife of my dearest friend momentarily forget
where her own baby was born? Suppose Peggy grows up a celebrity, an
Academician or even a Prime Minister, what is to prevent her
birth-plaque being affixed to the wrong house?
Once, and once only, did I strive to penetrate to the sources of
history—it was the life of Spinoza—and I found to my amaze that the
traditional detail of his doings and habits rested on little more solid
than the mistranslated scribblings of a Lutheran pastor who had occupied
his lodging a generation after his death. And once in my life did I
examine State papers. It was in the Archives of Venice; and as I
wandered through the two hundred and ninety-eight rooms of the Recording
Angel—though I did not verify the statement that there are fourteen
million documents—I saw enough chronicles and certificates, enough
Orators’ letters in cypher from every court in Europe (with inter-bound
Italian translations) to keep in life-long occupation a staff of
Methuselahs. And this for only one town, or, if you will, for one
empire! Who is it that has the patience to sift this mammoth dust-heap,
or who, having the patience, is likely to have the insight to interpret,
or the genius to embody its essence? How shall we know which ambassador
lied abroad for his country’s good, and which for his own? How shall we
abstract the personal equation from their reports? How allow for their
individual prejudices, jealousies, stupidities, rancours,
mal-observations and dishonesties?
As the wise Faust pointed out, History is a subjective illusion.
“Mein Freund, die Zeiten der Vergangenheit
Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln;
Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst,
Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist
In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.”
Or as honest Burckhardt puts it more prosaically in his preface to his
“Renaissance in Italy”: “In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the
possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have
served for this work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a
wholly different treatment and application, but lead also to essentially
different conclusions.”
This would be the case even were our information on the past complete.
The reduction of this wilderness of material to ordered statement and
judgment would permit innumerable ways of seeing and summarising. But
consisting as our knowledge does for the most part of mere ruins and
shadows, or worse, of substantial falsities, such infinite perspectives
of misreading are opened up that the bulk of written history can be only
an artistic manipulation of hypotheses. What wonder if the original
research and original insight of successive historians is constantly
changing the colours and perspectives? Read Pope Gregory’s letter to the
German princes describing the humiliation of Henry IV, and judge for
yourself whether the famous story of the three days’ penance can really
be built up out of “_utpote discalciatus et laneis indutus_,” &c. or
whether it should be blotted out from the history-books as some modern
writers demand. Is there, indeed, any episode to which we can pin a
final faith? Has history bequeathed us anything on which the duty to
truth is not so large as almost to swallow up the legacy? Popular wisdom
in insisting that “Queen Anne is dead” selects the only sort of historic
affirmation which can be made with certainty. As for any real picture of
a period, how can the manifold currents of the ocean of life be
represented in a single stream of words?
No; the truth about Lucrezia Borgia will never be known. But what
imports? Our librettists and dramatists need themes, our novelists
cannot do without “veneficous Bacchantes.” If Lucrezia Borgia was not a
“poison-bearing Mænad,” somebody else was. Perhaps that other has even
annexed the reputation for virtue that should have been Lucrezia’s! What
matters who is which? Let them sort themselves out. If the Mænad or the
Bella Donna is indispensable to the novelist or the dramatist, so is the
Vestal Virgin and the Saint, and though his models may have exchanged
names, he keeps his canvas true to reality. Cleopatra, to judge by her
coins, had a face of power, not beauty, but shall the artist therefore
surrender the conceptual Cleopatra? Assuredly there has been no lack of
beautiful women to sterilise statesmen! Great figures are even more
necessary in life than in art. Life would indeed be a “Vanity Fair” if
it were “a novel without a hero.” We need monuments, memorials, masses,
days of commemoration—for ourselves, not for the heroic dead. Dead men
hear no tales. Posthumous fame is an Irish bull. We cannot atone to the
dead for our neglect of them in their lives, but we need the memory of
their lives to uplift ourselves by, we need the outpour of reverence for
nobility of soul, we need to lose ourselves in the thought of greatness.
But whether we are worshipping the right heroes is comparatively
immaterial. Let us not be depressed, then, at the dubiety of history or
at that labyrinth of Venetian archives. We can do without the belief
that history is a just tribunal, so long as we preserve the belief in
justice, and keep a sufficient store of heroes to applaud and villains
to hiss. “_La vie des héros a enrichi l’histoire_,” said La Bruyère,
“_et l’histoire a embelli les actions des héros_.” It is a fair give and
take.
Peculiarly immaterial, so long as we preserve an ennobling conception of
majesty, is the real character of that most embellished class of
heroes—the Kings. Were we pinned down to drab reality, popular loyalty
would not infrequently be paralysed. For that on the hereditary
principle a constant and unfailing succession of genius and virtue
should be supplied to a nation, contradicts all biological experience,
yet nothing less than this is demanded by the necessities of State and
the yearning of every people for wise and righteous leadership. In truth
heredity is ruled out of court. Kings are not born but made. By a
marvellous process of mythopoiesis the monarch is manufactured to suit
the national need, and from the most unpromising materials prodigies of
goodness and genius are created, or, in the case of female sovereigns,
paragons of beauty. It is wonderful how far a single feature will go
with a princess, and what crumbs of sense and courage will suffice for
the valour and wit of a prince. Bricks can be made—and of the highest
glaze—without a single wisp of straw. Of course a neutral character
supplies the best basis for apotheosis: traits too positive for evil or
for ugliness would render the material intractable. But there are few
things too tough for the national imagination to transform. Perhaps the
manufacture of monarchs is thus facile because the article is not
required to last. The duration of the myth need not exceed a couple of
reigns, nor need it be robust enough for exportation. Humanity, while
insisting on the perfection of its own monarchs, is prepared to admit
that prior generations and foreign peoples have not been so fortunate:
indeed my school history of England made out that the country had been
governed up till the Victorian era by a succession of monsters or
weaklings. ’Tis distance lends disenchantment to the view. Even,
however, when the hero is real, he never bulks as large as the phantasy
of his idolaters. Napoleon himself was a pigmy, compared with the image
in the heart of Heine’s “_Zwei Grenadiere_.”