LUCRETIA. BORGIA.* THE interesting monograph of Gregorovius on Lucretia Borgia
is already known to historical students in the original German, but this, we believe, is the first time it has been translated into English. We may as well say at once that the book is not what it has sometimes been represented to be,—an attempt, not only to whitewash Lucretia from the foul crimes which have been imputed to her, but to paint her portrait as a morally good and virtuous woman, almost a saint, instead of the fiendish daughter of the most shamelessly wicked of the Borgias. Gregorovius, with his passion for truth and justice and his keen historical instinct, is by no means alone in modern days in his view of Lucretia as rather the passive victim than the active sharer of the iniquities of Alexander VI, and Caesar 'Borgia. The worst accusations levelled against Lucretia took their rise from the malignant gossip of Rome, preserved by the scandalous pens of those who, while justly
• Lucretia Borgia: according to Original Documents and Correspondence of her Day. By Ferdinand Gregorovius. Translated from the Third German Edition by John Leslie Garner. With Portraits and Illustrations. London: John Murray. [ION. ad. net.1
bating the Borgias, were not very much superior to them in morals or humanity. Gregorovius does not, and cannot, entirely whitewash Lucretia. His picture of society at the Vatican in her girlish days, society in which the Pope made his daughter a leading figure, suggests that it would have been a miracle if any young woman had preserved her modesty and her moral sense in such an atmosphere.
The absolute change in ways of life and public opinion makes the solution of such a problem very difficult. Probably Lucretia's character and conduct had more of the " grey sheep " than the black ; few students of the time would dare claim whiteness for her, certainly not Gregorovius. He is satisfied to do what he can towards clearing her from the worst slanders ; there are other things at which he shrugs his shoulders, perhaps a little too indulgently. The tragedies of her youth affect him with pity ; he is touched by her grace, gentleness, and amiability, as well as by the fair, golden-haired, blue-eyed beauty which was not, it appears, quite classical enough to please all her contemporaries. He seems to con- clude that she was in her youth a beautiful but harmless animal, living in the very centre of a most sinful society with-
out either realising its badness or being specially blackened by it:— "She was neither better nor worse than the women of her time. She was thoughtless and was filled with the joy of living. We do not know that she ever went through any moral struggles or whether she ever found herself in conscious conflict with the
actualities of her life and of her environment If she had not been the daughter of Alexander VI. and the sister of Caesar Borgia she would have been unnoticed by the historians of her age, or, at most, would have been mentioned only as one of the many charming women who constituted the society of Rome. In the hands of her father and her brother, however, she became the tool and also the victim of their political machinations, against which she had not the strength to make any resistance."
It was in the course of these political intrigues that Lucretia's first husband was divorced and her second murdered,
and the apparently slight impression made on her by such events as these necessitates her biographer's conclusion that she was at best a frivolous, shallow creature. As to compari- son with women of her time, his remark appears almost too favourable. If Lucretia was superior to such as Giulia Farnese, it must be remembered that Isabella d'Este and Vittoria Colonna were also her contemporaries. The best that can be said for her is that, considering her parentage and the surroundings of her youth, she might well have been the wretch that gossip and fiction have represented her, a view which modern criticism is inclined to declare false. It is a surprising fact, indeed, that her later years, as the wife of Alfonso d'Este, were above reproach, so that she gained, to a certain extent, the respect and esteem of her distinguished sister-in-law, Isabella. She always, of course, cared more for dress and pageantry than for art and learning, and thus never followed the highest fashions of the day. But here Lucretia is not singular in any age. Her character did not change with that third marriage which removed her from the black depths of the worst Roman society. " From her father Lucretia had inherited, if not inexhaustible vitality, at least the lightness of mind which her contemporaries, under the name of joy of living, discovered
in her and in the Pope." It is something to say for Lucretia —though this very " lightness of mind" may account for it—
that she apparently found it easy to lead a decent life of good works as Duchess of Ferrara. During this time scandal seems to have fallen asleep, and it was only after her death that it revived, to live indeed and flourish for centuries. Nobody will grudge the late arrival of what seems like justice to the un- happy daughter of Alexander VI. and Vannozza, the sister of that marvellous Caesar who overran Italy like a mediaeval Napoleon, and treated on equal terms with Princes on whose birth and reputation there was no stain.
This book is a kind of offshoot from Gregorovius's great history of Rome. He tells us in the introduction how it came to exist. He had already made use of a large amount of material for the history of the Borgias in treating the period during which they flourished, but there was so much of personal and biographical interest left untouched that he determined to write a separate book either on Caesar or Lucretia, and chose Lucretia because of the mystery that has always hung about her unfortunate name. The fair and un- biassed study of his materials led him in the direction of an apology, just as it had led other modern historians, English, French, and Italian, among whom may be mentioned Roscoe, Gilbert, Armand Baschet, Pere 011ivier (who went consider- ably too far with his whitewashing, making a good man of Alexander), Cittadella, Campori, Zucchetti.
To say that a book is by Gregorovius is equal to saying that from an historical point of view it is as good as it can be. Not only is this monograph full of interesting personal detail regarding the extraordinary family which ruled Italy and the Church during the latter part of the fifteenth century, but it is a most vivid though dark and terrible picture of the Christian world and Italian society of that time. As Gregorovius points out, the wickedness of the Borgias and their followers, great as it was, takes its especial and awful luridness from the fact that they represented religion to the men of their day, and that the world around them permitted them to do so. Alex- ander himself will never cease to be one of the strangest psychological puzzles in human history,—an extremely bright, pleasant, and agreeable person, of whom it was written, not long before his death, that he grew younger every day, with no moral sense whatever, and no conception of any duty except that of enjoying life in his own degraded way. As the historian says, plenty of Princes have led his kind of life and committed his crimes, but religion was not even supposed to have any hold over them. But we are not to imagine that Alexander was an atheist, or a materialist, or a mocker of religion. As the Pope, he had an "amazingly simple faith" in himself and his Church, and considered himself under the special pro- tection of the saints. To modern minds the whole thing seems incomprehensible.
Such a book as this is at least a help in understanding one of the most extraordinary periods in European history, and a few of the most striking figures that moved in it. The trans- lation is %veil done and very welcome.
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