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.

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.”