The Life of Cesare Borgia | Page 6

be cleared up, but the Verdict of History
assigns the guilt to Cesare Borgia."
Behold how easy it is to dispense with evidence. So that your tale be
well-salted and well-spiced, a fico for evidence! If it hangs not
overwell together in places, if there be contradictions, lacunae, or
openings for doubt, fling the Verdict of History into the gap, and so

strike any questioner into silence.
So far have matters gone in this connection that who undertakes to set
down to-day the history of Cesare Borgia, with intent to do just and
honest work, must find it impossible to tell a plain and straightforward
tale--to present him not as a villain of melodrama, not a monster,
ludicrous, grotesque, impossible, but as human being, a cold, relentless
egotist, it is true, using men for his own ends, terrible and even
treacherous in his reprisals, swift as a panther and as cruel where his
anger was aroused, yet with certain elements of greatness: a splendid
soldier, an unrivalled administrator, a man pre-eminently just, if
merciless in that same justice.
To present Cesare Borgia thus in a plain straightforward tale at this
time of day, would be to provoke the scorn and derision of those who
have made his acquaintance in the pages of that eminent German
scholar, Ferdinand Gregorovius, and of some other writers not quite so
eminent yet eminent enough to serve serious consideration. Hence has
it been necessary to examine at close quarters the findings of these
great ones, and to present certain criticisms of those same findings. The
author is overwhelmingly conscious of the invidious quality of that task;
but he is no less conscious of its inevitability if this tale is to be told at
all.
Whilst the actual sources of historical evidence shall be examined in
the course of this narrative, it may be well to examine at this stage the
sources of the popular conceptions of the Borgias, since there will be
no occasion later to allude to them.
Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it
may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be
one of the most valued and valuable expressions of the literary art. To
render and maintain it so, however, it is necessary that certain well-
defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to
enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that
preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the
period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be
formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more
far-reaching is the novel than any other form of literature, the good
results that must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The
neglect of them --the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends,

the like distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out
of a lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into
disrepute. Many writers frankly make no pretence--leastways none that
can be discerned--of aiming at historical precision; others, however,
invest their work with a spurious scholarliness, go the length of citing
authorities to support the point of view which they have taken, and
which they lay before you as the fruit of strenuous lucubrations.
These are the dangerous ones, and of this type is Victor Hugo's famous
tragedy Lucrezia Borgia, a work to which perhaps more than to any
other (not excepting Les Borgias in Crimes Célèbres of Alexandre
Dumas) is due the popular conception that prevails to-day of Cesare
Borgia's sister.
It is questionable whether anything has ever flowed from a
distinguished pen in which so many licences have been taken with the
history of individuals and of an epoch; in which there is so rich a crop
of crude, transpontine absurdities and flagrant, impossible
anachronisms. Victor Hugo was a writer of rare gifts, a fertile romancer
and a great poet, and it may be unjust to censure him for having taken
the fullest advantages of the licences conceded to both. But it would be
difficult to censure him too harshly for having--in his Lucrezia
Borgia--struck a pose of scholarliness, for having pretended and
maintained that his work was honest work founded upon the study of
historical evidences. With that piece of charlatanism he deceived the
great mass of the unlettered of France and of all Europe into believing
that in his tragedy he presented the true Lucrezia Borgia.
"If you do not believe me," he declared, "read Tommaso Tommasi,
read the Diary of Burchard."
Read, then, that Diary, extending over a period of twenty-three years,
from 1483 to 1506, of the Master of Ceremonies of the Vatican (which
largely contributes the groundwork of the present