And Heaven is weary, of the hollow words
Which States and Kingdoms utter when they talk
Of truth and justice.”
But even the Old Testament is comparatively sophisticated. This extinction of the native tribes of Palestine is enjoined, not on political grounds but on religious. It is not that Palestine, which offers the most convenient territory for the refugees from Egypt, happens unfortunately to be densely populated. No, virtue must be vindicated, not brute force. But one cannot too much admire that the Biblical historian chose the less nauseous of the two morals open to him. “Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land; but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.” By a remarkable exception in epics, Israel is the villain, not the hero, of his own story. But all the same, the story has to be coloured in the interests of righteousness. His successors in invasion have not been content to blacken the autochthones, they have brightened themselves. It is for their own uprightness that the Lord casts out the tribes before them or sets them to rule over the heathen. The Lord calls them to spread His word in countries closed to their commerce. He ordains they should bear the White Man’s burden—the Black Man’s ivory and gold are indeed no light weight. Pah! let us talk of politics like Machiavelli or forever hold our peace.
And yet something can be said for the world’s hypocrisy. It is the homage which the Relative pays to the Absolute, part of that yearning of mankind for indefectible ideals, for Luther’s “pearl of certainty.” Its Right must be Right in all circumstances under the stars, nay, before the stars were born. Ethics shall not be a child of conditions; what holds between man and man, must obtain equally between ruler and ruled, even between State and State. But what is to be done when ethics demands one thing and necessity the opposite? Necessity wins of course, but on condition of not blazoning its victory. The Church, forbidden to shed blood, exacts an expiation from its indispensable warriors, or gravely invents the bloodless stake for its heretics, or with an even more humorous preference of the letter to the spirit forbids its priests to practise surgery. The negro, enfranchised by the Quixotic theory of the American constitution, is disestablished by the Sancho Panzas who miscount his votes. The Jew, commanded to rid himself of leaven during Passover, sells his stock of groceries to an accommodating Christian till the Festival be over. The Christian, to whom money-lending is a sin against nature, hands over the necessary function to the accursèd Jew with the sanction of St. Thomas Aquinas, or founds the Monte di Pietà which Leo X permits to exact a fee on its loans to cover the cost of its officials. Ethics, like the old astronomy, complicates itself with the cycles and epicycles of practice, but the theory of the perfect circle of planetary motion remains immutable. In Lombardy, in Florence, under the very eye of the Pope, the industrial system of modern Europe founds itself on money-lending, but no Encyclical removes the prohibition or condones the sacrilege, or grants Christian burial to the impenitent financier. The irresistible force of facts comes into collision with the immovable body of principles, but the crash is soundless, and by a delicate instinct Society looks the other way. The immortal principle is buried silently—not a drum is heard, not a funeral note. For later generations its deadness is a matter of course.
Even so mankind founds its social systems upon beautiful ideals and averts its eyes from the rotten places of the fabric. It will concede almost anything to practice, if practice will only remain under the rose. This Social Conspiracy is sub-conscious. In war or in religion, in sex or even the smaller animal functions, it works towards a harmony of seeming, an artistic selection of the beautiful or the perfect with rejection of the ugly or the jarring. Is not this indeed our highest art, this art of civilisation, which, out of the raw stuff we are, fashions us into the figures of an heroic and poetic masque? Costumed in the skins of our fellow beasts or in the spoils of our vegetable contemporaries, our dames pranked in the web of a worm, we ruffle it in drawing-rooms as gods and spirits, no terrestrial weakness bewrayed. Our true superiority to the brutes is that we are artists, and they are naturals. Man will not be a creature of Nature, as Coleridge noted. All the world’s a stage and all the men and women players, or—to say it in Greek—hypocrites. It is for bad manners that Machiavelli has been boycotted.
LUCREZIA BORGIA: OR THE MYTH OF HISTORY
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.