Not a word about the nobler Isabella, the kind-hearted lady who was always interceding for criminals or unfortunates; not a word of the Isabella of unspotted reputation in an age of demireps (naturally d’Annunzio would hush this up); not a whisper of the Isabella who felt the defence of Faenza against Cæsar Borgia “as a vindication of the honour of Italy.” Scarce a hint of the inspirer of humanism, the patroness of some of the finest artists of all time; still less any suggestion of the other Isabella, the housewife who sent salmon-trout to her friends, the philosopher who, when the King of France had entered Naples, pointed out to her lord that the discontent of the people is more dangerous to a monarch than all the might of his enemies on the battlefield, and the worldly wise woman who, when he was hesitating over an inglorious military appointment, bade him take the cash and let the credit go.
So complex an Isabella is beyond the scope of d’Annunzio, whose Isabella Inghirami is an elemental creature of passion and tragedy.
“_Forse che si, forse che no._” An inhabitant of the full world, beholding this motto written and rewritten in the ceiling-labyrinth of the Gonzaga Palace, might fall into contemplation of the labyrinth of human life, and see this device scribbled all over it; he might hail it as the philosophy of Montaigne in a nutshell, and jump, if he were a novelist, at this magnificent setting for some tale of high speculative fantasy. But for d’Annunzio there can be only one problem lying between these mighty opposites. Will a woman yield to her lover, or will virtue resist him? To this petty issue must these measureless words be narrowed. ’Tis not even a _forse_. With d’Annunzio there can be no negative in such an alternative. And so the mighty Mantuan ruin which has known so many desolations receives its last humiliation, and passes into literature as a background for lust. _Sunt lachrymæ rerum._
The true Isabella d’Este has been as much rarefied by the Renaissance legend as she has been materialised by d’Annunzio. For she cannot be wholly exonerated from d’Annunzio’s panegyric. “Would to God,” she cried at sight of her brother-in-law’s treasure, “that we who are so fond of money possessed as much.” It was this treasure of the Duke of Milan’s that did, indeed, make her sister Beatrice a thorn in her side, if also a rose in her breast, since darling Duchess Beatrice set the pace at a rate ruinous to the Marchioness of Mantua. Isabella could not even go to Venice at the same time as Beatrice, lest all that magnificence (whose very leavings overwhelmed me in her Palace) should appear shabbiness. And when she lost her mother, she appeared more anxious about the proper shade of mourning than the proper sentiment of grief. (How came d’Annunzio to have missed this trait? What a chance for analysis of the æsthetic temperament!) More pardonable was her anxiety as to the colour of the hangings in the Moro’s rooms, her hurried borrowing of plate and tapestries, when he impended with that suite of a thousand. But even for Beatrice’s death she seemed to find some satisfaction in the ultimate reversion of her much-coveted clavichord, and she found it possible to borrow a Da Vinci portrait from the Duke’s former mistress—her sister’s cross. Nor—after the Duke was in exile—does it seem very loyal to that fallen idol and faithful admirer, to have ingratiated herself with the French conqueror. That she should rejoice in the election to the papacy of her profligate kinsman, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, was perhaps not unnatural, but when every allowance is made for her virtues, it must be admitted that she was not utterly unworthy of d’Annunzio’s admiration.