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The Life of Cesare Borgia By: Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950) |
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Of France, Duke of Valentinois and Romagna, Prince of Andria and Venafri
Count of Dyois, Lord of Piombino, Camerino and Urbino, Gonfalonier and
Captain General of Holy Church A History and Some Criticisms
By Raphael Sabatini
PREFACE This is no Chronicle of Saints. Nor yet is it a History of Devils. It is
a record of certain very human, strenuous men in a very human, strenuous
age; a lustful, flamboyant age; an age red with blood and pale with
passion at white heat; an age of steel and velvet, of vivid colour,
dazzling light and impenetrable shadow; an age of swift movement,
pitiless violence and high endeavour, of sharp antitheses and amazing
contrasts. To judge it from the standpoint of this calm, deliberate, and correct
century as we conceive our own to be is for sedate middle age to judge
from its own standpoint the reckless, hot, passionate, lustful humours
of youth, of youth that errs grievously and achieves greatly. So to judge that epoch collectively is manifestly wrong, a hopeless
procedure if it be our aim to understand it and to be in sympathy with
it, as it becomes broad minded age to be tolerantly in sympathy with the
youth whose follies it perceives. Life is an ephemeral business, and
we waste too much of it in judging where it would beseem us better to
accept, that we ourselves may come to be accepted by such future ages as
may pursue the study of us. But if it be wrong to judge a past epoch collectively by the standards
of our own time, how much more is it not wrong to single out individuals
for judgement by those same standards, after detaching them for the
purpose from the environment in which they had their being? How false
must be the conception of 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... Continue reading book >>
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