The Life of Cesare Borgia
- Pages
- about 437
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 8 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
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.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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