The Life of Cesare Borgia | Page 4

them thus obtained! We view the
individuals so selected through a microscope of modern focus. They
appear monstrous and abnormal, and we straight-way assume them to
be monsters and abnormalities, never considering that the fault is in the

adjustment of the instrument through which we inspect them, and that
until that is corrected others of that same past age, if similarly viewed,
must appear similarly distorted.
Hence it follows that some study of an age must ever prelude and
accompany the study of its individuals, if comprehension is to wait
upon our labours. To proceed otherwise is to judge an individual
Hottentot or South Sea Islander by the code of manners that obtains in
Belgravia or Mayfair.
Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of
the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and
immortal part of it; and in the literature of the Cinquecento you shall
behold for the looking the ardent, unmoral, naïve soul of this
Renaissance that was sprawling in its lusty, naked infancy and
bellowing hungrily for the pap of knowledge, and for other things. You
shall infer something of the passionate mettle of this infant: his
tempestuous mirth, his fierce rages, his simplicity, his naïveté, his
inquisitiveness, his cunning, his deceit, his cruelty, his love of sunshine
and bright gewgaws.
To realize him as he was, you need but to bethink you that this was the
age in which the Decamerone of Giovanni Boccaccio, the Facetiae of
Poggio, the Satires of Filelfo, and the Hermaphroditus of Panormitano
afforded reading-matter to both sexes. This was the age in which the
learned and erudite Lorenzo Valla--of whom more anon--wrote his
famous indictment of virginity, condemning it as against nature with
arguments of a most insidious logic. This was the age in which Casa,
Archbishop of Benevento, wrote a most singular work of erotic
philosophy, which, coming from a churchman's pen, will leave you
cold with horror should you chance to turn its pages. This was the age
of the Discovery of Man; the pagan age which stripped Christ of His
divinity to bestow it upon Plato, so that Marsilio Ficino actually burnt
an altar-lamp before an image of the Greek by whose teachings--in
common with so many scholars of his day--he sought to inform
himself.
It was an age that had become unable to discriminate between the
merits of the Saints of the Church and the Harlots of the Town.
Therefore it honoured both alike, extolled the carnal merits of the one
in much the same terms as were employed to extol the spiritual merits

of the other. Thus when a famous Roman courtesan departed this life in
the year 1511, at the early age of twenty-six, she was accorded a
splendid funeral and an imposing tomb in the Chapel Santa Gregoria
with a tablet bearing the following inscription:
"IMPERIA CORTISANA ROMANA QUAE DIGNA TANTO
NOMINE, RARAE INTER MORTALES FORMAE SPECIMEN
DEDIT."
It was, in short, an age so universally immoral as scarcely to be termed
immoral, since immorality may be defined as a departure from the
morals that obtain a given time and in a given place. So that whilst
from our own standpoint the Cinquecento, taken collectively, is an age
of grossest licence and immorality, from the standpoint of the
Cinquecento itself few of its individuals might with justice be branded
immoral.
For the rest, it was an epoch of reaction from the Age of Chivalry: an
epoch of unbounded luxury, of the cult and worship of the beautiful
externally; an epoch that set no store by any inward virtue, by truth or
honour; an epoch that laid it down as a maxim that no inconvenient
engagement should be kept if opportunity offered to evade it.
The history of the Cinquecento is a history developed in broken
pledges, trusts dishonoured and basest treacheries, as you shall come to
conclude before you have read far in the story that is here to be set
down.
In a profligate age what can you look for but profligates? Is it just, is it
reasonable, or is it even honest to take a man or a family from such an
environment, for judgement by the canons of a later epoch? Yet is it not
the method that has been most frequently adopted in dealing with the
vast subject of the Borgias?
To avoid the dangers that must wait upon that error, the history of that
House shall here be taken up with the elevation of Calixtus III to the
Papal Throne; and the reign of the four Popes immediately preceding
Roderigo Borgia--who reigned as Alexander VI--shall briefly be
surveyed that a standard may be set by which to judge the man and the
family that form the real subject of this