defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to
enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that
preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the
period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be
formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching
is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that
must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them
--the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like
distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a
lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into
disrepute. Many writers frankly make no pretence--leastways none that
can be discerned--of aiming at historical precision; others, however,
invest their work with a spurious scholarliness, go the length of citing
authorities to support the point of view which they have taken, and which
they lay before you as the fruit of strenuous lucubrations.

These are the dangerous ones, and of this type is Victor Hugo's famous
tragedy Lucrezia Borgia, a work to which perhaps more than to any other
(not excepting Les Borgias in Crimes Célèbres of Alexandre Dumas) is due
the popular conception that prevails to-day of Cesare Borgia's sister.

It is questionable whether anything has ever flowed from a distinguished
pen in which so many licences have been taken with the history of
individuals and of an epoch; in which there is so rich a crop of crude,
transpontine absurdities and flagrant, impossible anachronisms. Victor
Hugo was a writer of rare gifts, a fertile romancer and a great poet, and
it may be unjust to censure him for having taken the fullest advantages
of the licences conceded to both. But it would be difficult to censure
him too harshly for having--in his Lucrezia Borgia--struck a pose of
scholarliness, for having pretended and maintained that his work was