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.”
II
Parisina, the Marchioness d’Este, that other heroine whom Ferrara has contributed to romance, or—if you will—to history, for she makes her first English appearance in Gibbon’s “Antiquities of the House of Brunswick,” has been less fortunate in finding defenders; perhaps because her guilt was less. Very shadowy appears that ill-starred Malatesta bride, of whom nothing seems recorded save that she and her paramour, Hugo, her husband’s natural son, were beheaded by her righteously indignant spouse. Yet she grew suddenly solid when I found a scribble of hers neighbouring Lucrezia Borgia’s washing-list. “Mandate per lo portatore del presente dieci ducati d’oro per una certa spesa la quale habiamo fatto.” It sounds suspiciously vague, I fear. “For a certain expense.” What could Parisina have bought with those ten ducats?
But for aught we know they may have been dispensed in charity. And for aught history can tell us, she may have been as spotless as Desdemona. Gibbon, mark you, is by no means convinced of her guilt. If the couple were innocent, he observes oracularly, the husband was unfortunate; if they were guilty, he was still more unfortunate. “Unfortunate” is a mild word for the Margrave, as if his begetting of Hugo were a mere casualty. It is true that at this period in Italy there was little discrimination against bastards, especially those of Popes and Princes. Still Nicholas had only himself to blame for thrusting his Hugo into the contiguity of his wife. Byron, indeed, in his mediocre poem of “Parisina,” makes Hugo offer vivid reproaches to his father (mellifluously transformed to Azo, which the poet omits to say was really the name of the first Margrave of the line). But though these reproaches are comprehensive enough:
“Nor are my mother’s wrongs forgot,
Her slighted love and ruined name,
Her offspring’s heritage of shame,”
and embrace even the charge that Parisina was originally destined for Hugo himself, but refused to him by the father on the brazen ground that his birth was unworthy of her, nevertheless Byron, like most vicious men, preserves the conventional view of the husband’s rights.
In his poem Parisina’s fate is left artistically uncertain.