



Produced by Charles Bowen from page scans provided by
Google Books (University of Virginia)











Transcriber's Notes:
   1. Page scan source: Google Books
              https://books.google.com/books?id=hLFEAAAAYAAJ
     (University of Virginia)
   2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].






Mary _of_ Burgundy.

_By_
G. P. R. James


London
George Routledge
and Sons Limited.
MDCCCCIII.




_The Introduction is written by_ Laurie Magnus, M.A.;
_the Title-page is designed by_ Ivor I. J. Symes.






INTRODUCTION.


George Payne Rainsford James, Historiographer Royal to King William
IV., was born in London in the first year of the nineteenth century,
and died at Venice in 1860. His comparatively short life was
exceptionally full and active. He was historian, politician and
traveller, the reputed author of upwards of a hundred novels, the
compiler and editor of nearly half as many volumes of letters,
memoirs, and biographies, a poet and a pamphleteer, and, during the
last ten years of his life, British Consul successively in
Massachusetts, Norfolk (Virginia), and Venice. He was on terms of
friendship with most of the eminent men of his day. Scott, on whose
style he founded his own, encouraged him to persevere in his career as
a novelist; Washington Irving admired him, and Walter Savage Landor
composed an epitaph to his memory. He achieved the distinction of
being twice burlesqued, by Thackeray, and two columns are devoted to
an account of him in the new "Dictionary of National Biography." Each
generation follows its own gods, and G. P. R. James was, perhaps, too
prolific an author to maintain the popularity which made him "in some
ways the most successful novelist of his time." But his work bears
selection and revival. It possesses the qualities of seriousness and
interest; his best historical novels are faithful in setting and free
in movement. His narrative is clear, his history conscientious, and
his plots are well-conceived. English learning and literature are
enriched by the work of this writer, who made vivid every epoch in the
world's history by the charm of his romance.


The great passage in this book is so magnificently dramatic that James
feels it due to his conscience as an historian to apologise for its
excellence in a footnote. "It may be necessary," he writes at the foot
of page 234, "to inform those who are not deeply read in the
chronicles of France that this fact is minutely accurate." We are
glad of the reminder, for without it the reader might have thought
that here was something fictitious, or at least exaggerated and
'worked-up,' so intense and true is the tragic setting of the scene.
But if Mary of Burgundy's bearing at the execution of the Lord of
Imbercourt, and her grand historical utterance, recorded on page 305,
"You have banished my best friends, and slain my wisest counsellors,
and now what can I do to deliver you?" if these public appearances of
the heiress of Charles the Bold, and the love which she cherished for
the husband who was chosen for her on political grounds, justify James
in raising her to the title-role in this romance, it must be conceded
that the real hero is Albert Maurice, citizen of Ghent, a noble
mediæval prototype of the _citoyens_ of the French Revolution,
Whatever defects in character-study have been ascribed to James, no
one can deny that in Albert Maurice his skill was equal to its
material. The figure of the young President is firmly and consistently
drawn, and the conception touches considerable heights of human daring
and aspiration. Albert Maurice at the time of his fall was many years
younger than Wolsey, but he could say as genuinely as the Cardinal, "I
charge thee, fling away ambition!" In his story we realize to the full
the tragic import of that warning. His splendid dream of patriotism
was fulfilled by blunders and crimes, committed _per se_ or _per
alios_, for which he felt the responsibility, and at the end the
people of Ghent discovered the ancient truth, that worse than the
tyranny of tyrants is the tyranny of tyrannicides. But by that time
Maurice was dead; the victim of self-delusion would not survive his
disappointment; in the sudden knowledge that his goal was
unattainable, he became aware that his steps to it had been unjust.
This romance of the fifteenth century--Mary of Burgundy was married in
1477--is in what Matthew Arnold called the "grand style," and it is
therefore singularly free from faults of diction and false notes of
any kind. It has a certain attractive naturalness from beginning to
end, and it is one of the best,