“The Spectator,” July 5, 1913

If it be a fact, as Carlyle said, that “History is the essence of innumerable biographies,” it is very necessary that the biographies from which that essence is extracted should be true. It was probably a profound want of confidence in the accuracy of biographical writing that led Horace Walpole to beg for “anything but history, for history must be false.” Modern industry and research, ferreting in the less frequented bypaths of history, have exposed many fictions, and have often led to some strikingly paradoxical conclusions. They have substituted for Cambronne's apocryphal saying at Waterloo the blunt sarcasm of the Duke of Wellington that there were a number of ladies at Brussels who were termed “la vieille garde,” and of whom it was said “elles ne meurent pas et se rendent toujours.” They have led one eminent historian to apologise for the polygamous tendencies of Henry VIII.; another to advance the startling proposition that the “amazing” but, as the world has heretofore held, infamous Emperor Heliogabalus was a great religious reformer, who was in advance of his times; a third to present Lucrezia Borgia to the world as a much-maligned and very virtuous woman; and a fourth to tell us that the “ever pusillanimous” Barere, as he is called by M. Louis Madelin, was “persistently vilified and deliberately misunderstood.” Biographical research has, moreover, destroyed many picturesque legends, with some of which posterity cannot part without a pang of regret.