University of Virginia Library

PREFACE

The author of these books of drama is dead. He had been slowly dying for some years: then, of a sudden, he started on a journey of desire to Rome, that he might reach it before he died. Soon after his arrival death came; and he is buried in an uninscribed grave under Roman cypresses. He had always said he should go to Rome to die; and he carried out his dream with his will. Before starting he had revised and printed most of the work he felt he had but short time to care for. It is probable he intended to issue the two volumes at different times: the weight of circumstance has compelled the friend, who is now acting for him, to publish at once all the work that lay in sheets or was still in the Press.

Among the papers left at home a sketch was found of a play entitled The Temple, designed to complete the Herodian series, that began with Mariamne, published in 1908, and was continued in The Accuser, among the plays now published. The unfinished play dealt with the effort of Herod Agrippa to preserve the Jewish Temple from the pollution of a

statue of Caligula, set up to be worshipped as divine. It promised a vivid presentation of the mad Emperor. The sketch found was incomplete, but it is believed that a complete, but unrevised, copy is in existence. The author was so secret in all his ways, almost stealthy, that hidden manuscripts may be found, like a squirrel's hoard; they may even be lying forgotten in some publisher's drawer.

The subject of Tristan always had for the author of Borgia a haunting incitement. He felt he could treat the story from many points of view. Two essays of varied interpretation are to be found in these volumes, and were set in separate volumes by the dramatist himself.

So intense was his desire to be nameless that those to whom his memory is a force on their love cannot bring themselves to divulge a personality so guarded from discovery.

The friend who writes this note is as unskilled in words as Horatio; but, unlike Horatio, has had no charge to tell the story of Hamlet, no injunction to speak out anything of truth before that breadth of finality:

‘The rest is silence.’