THE MISSION OF BEAUTY
Before we can make others happy we must draw upon the sources of
happiness in our own nature and in the world around. It is reason’s
ungracious way to show us the realities of life in the mass, and even in
their darker aspects; it is aestheticism that turns their bright side to
us. Absolute ugliness does not exist, any more than absolute beauty, and
a careful analysis detects an element of beauty and love in everything.
The quest for this element is women’s work. In moulding us into beings
sensitive to the least manifestation of happiness, they restore us to
health.
Their first duty is to exhibit in themselves every loveable quality,
physical and moral; for platonism is not the art of loving, but the art
of guiding men towards happiness through love. Their second duty is to
make good use of the elements at their disposal, and force life to yield
the very pith and essence of the Beautiful. Or we may liken them to
conductors of orchestras, who draw unexpected tones out of space. How
noble, how difficult is the task! Surely there is enough in it to fill a
lifetime! What intelligence, what knowledge, what skill, even to charming
sympathetic accents from a stone, are needed! Platonism would be narrow
and inadequate indeed—would be indistinguishable from the most hackneyed
sentiments—if it were satisfied with the triumph of feminine coquetry,
and did not extend its mission to the whole of nature.
To render themselves beautiful and admirable, therefore, women will have
to make the most of their resources. Whatever their occupation, they can
always mingle with it something of the ideal, or turn it to the glory
of their sex, even if it is a mere matter of dining or of walking in a
meadow; how much more so if it is a question of the manifold usages of
social life, and more especially of its intellectual occupations! Through
their fostering care all things should become imbued with a sentiment of
peace and love, and tend in common towards happiness. That is where their
talent lies.
Clearly the method employed will vary according to circumstances,
situation, possibilities, temperaments. Different women will pursue
different aims, and avail themselves of different weapons; but, in the
long run, none was neglected. While therefore we cannot hope to produce
a thoroughly accurate picture, we shall pass in review the principal
circumstances which provide a lady with her means of action, starting in
logical order with the material and proceeding to the intellectual facts.
In the material universe, it is woman’s capital duty to possess what
pleases men; for here we are entering a purely practical field, and the
quest of the ideal is of much less moment than the skilful dressing of
the hook!
Physical beauty is not an indispensable condition of pleasing; on
the contrary indeed, a certain homely plainness does not come amiss,
platonically speaking. If many of the celebrated women whom we know only
in their portraits were to come to life again, perhaps we could not
resist their fascinations; but they are dead, and to us they are plain;
their plainness served them as a sort of lightning-conductor. We may go
even farther; true beauty was held suspect. As Anne of France severely
says, it is the most prejudicial and least valuable grace that God
can bestow on a woman, especially a princess. It is made too much of;
it inevitably jumbles the sentiments, mixing with the purest an alloy
of instability; there is always a risk of its upsetting the best-laid
schemes. A princess acknowledged as a beauty cannot choose her servitors;
she knows neither how far they will go nor perhaps how far she will go
herself. She seats her empire on very precarious foundations, since the
less sensual love is, the longer it endures. In fine, women are what
they are, and it is impossible to ask them to change. But any woman who
knows her duty may be asked to practise the feminine art, and this art is
called charm.
Many men do not know the meaning of the word “charm”; they speak of
beauty as savants or as grocers might, not as faithful worshippers.
If you pull women to pieces, if you judge them as you would a yard of
calico, a donkey or a slave, you will see naturally but a form of flesh;
you may estimate its geometrical dimensions, count on your fingers
thirty or thirty-six special beauties; if you profess an intellectual
standpoint, you will perhaps go so far as to measure the cranium,
and that will be all. You will be content as an artist to produce a
“semblance of life,” by dint of scrupulous attention to detail; you will
not perceive what it is that speaks to us, fascinates us. Charm is not
expressed in terms of arithmetic or algebra: it is an art, perhaps the
highest of all arts, because more than any other, more even than poetry
or music, it speaks from soul to soul; it is a sort of witchery, a
woman’s knack, as it were, of enveloping all around her in an invisible
net. It is not purely intellectual, but avails itself of physical means
and disdains everything in the way of formulae. The Italians, adoring
this delightful art, have vainly devoted innumerable and often very
prolix writings to the attempt to fathom it. All their reasonings are
condensed in this vague sentence of Firenzuola:[170] “A beautiful woman
is one who is universally pleasing”; and Firenzuola is no better able
than the rest to say why she is pleasing. If we were speaking of a good
housewife, it would be easy to catalogue her virtues: the talents of a
managing woman, a woman who can look after one’s health, keep the books
and train the children, have often been computed. Of a charming woman,
never! Each one has her own secret. And yet the art of charming is very
widespread. To that art the Italian women owed their positions as queens
of the world (or, to satisfy Montaigne, let us say the “regents”); they
were not superior to Frenchwomen in beauty of form or in originality
of soul, but among them there were more “beautiful women,” that is to
say, captivating women, than elsewhere. They were imbued with platonic
sweetness, had acquired an indescribable magnetism, a perfume of human
graciousness, so holy, so all-pervading that it seemed to purify the air
and make the world a temple instead of a hospital: like the precious
spikenard poured long ago upon the feet of the Saviour, all soiled with
the dust of the world.
Like all other arts, charm is a gift of nature. The first rule for a
woman is to know herself thoroughly, so that she may bring her individual
gifts discreetly into play, especially those which affect the man she has
in view. It will not do to let her art appear. A woman’s charm depends
upon her acting spontaneously, even though imperfectly; it is impossible
to insist too strongly on this principle, which of itself explains the
evolution of women’s power in the sixteenth century. So long as women
frankly assert their personality in their actions, taking counsel only
of themselves, their power never ceases to grow, and produces excellent
results; but when, whether from indifference, timidity, the instinct of
submission, or a mistaken education, they no longer see in platonism
anything but an art to learn, a lesson to rattle off, a conventional
pose, all is over; men of real virility escape their influence, and
deride their charm as a puerile thing, and the women find no men to
govern but the insignificant herd whom they do not care a straw for,
and who are distinguished one from another only by the colour of their
pantaloons. This is the practical result of the parallel instituted
between true platonism and the platonism of convention, between
Michelangelo and Bembo, between the vigorous Anne of France, who was
willing to assimilate certain delightful principles of the new spirit so
long as no sacrifice of character or caste was involved, and the amiable
Margaret of France, who was much more inclined to go over bag and baggage
to the Italian methods, in order to obtain in France the same results as
in Italy.
Nevertheless, apart from originality, which is indispensable, and
diversity, which is essential, it is possible to mention some elements
that go to the making of charm, consecrated, apparently, by experience
or tradition. Of these, some are physical, some intellectual; for the
present we shall speak only of the former.
It is a general rule (if we may speak of rules) that the physical charm
of a woman springs entirely from whatever accentuates her feminine,
arch-feminine character. Thus it must above all express the completest,
most absolute sweetness.
For a long time this characteristic sweetness appeared to spring from
gracefulness of form and feature: a face of aristocratic oval; a swan
neck, a wasp waist; in short a general effect of reed-like slightness
and fragility, a veritable mantel ornament, so delicately balanced that
to touch it was more than one dared, and that one was puzzled how so
frail a thing had ever managed to stand on such tiny feet, to hold out
such a poor little hand—a virginal figure of fifteen years.[171] This
wonderfully pure ideal persisted in Spain; but in Italy one of the
first signs of decadence was the preference for more sensual forms.
The Florentines, with their fastidious ideal of elegance, were almost
alone in resisting the current; good Firenzuola did not yield to it to
any extent, and at most there was at Florence a small section in favour
of muscle and robustness, of whom Michelangelo is the representative.
But at Venice, a fine opulence of flesh, luminous and warm, wonderfully
substantial and soft, “full of a delicious comfortableness,” carried all
before it—a beauty such as the pagans have celebrated in their lyrics and
such as the East adores: nothing seemed more charming.
In France, the national spirit, always eclectic and vacillating, was
neither idealistic nor materialistic enough to take any side in this
dispute.
Autant me plaist la grassette,
Comme me plaist la maigrette.[172]
—_Ronsard._
The great goddesses who ruled and dominated the classical epoch, Madame
de Chateaubriand, Madame de Canaples,[173] Diana of Poitiers, were
representatives of vigorous stocks; an old lusty blood coursed visibly
enough through their veins; but they mastered it as they mastered
everything, diluting it with an effeminacy which had, however, a charm of
its own.
The colour of the hair and eyebrows always appeared a characteristic
factor in a woman’s expression; without fair hair there was no charm.
According to a twelfth-century chronicler, the sweet Saint Godeliva
of Bruges was called a “horrid crow” by her hag of a stepmother on
account of her dusky hair; it was to her hair indeed that she owed
the tribulations that won for her the aureole of sainthood. In all
probability the dukes of Burgundy, when they created the order of the
Golden Fleece, were thinking rather of the charming women with heads like
a golden harvest-field than of the exploits of Jason. It is impossible to
imagine Botticelli crowning Spring with black, or Raphael representing
his Virgins as goddesses of night. The blonde had it all her own way.
And yet even in this matter the fastidious Florentines did not commit
themselves, and had something to say for the pretty dainty little dark
heads that were to be met in the fields of Umbria. In France the chestnut
locks which set off so many charming faces were greatly admired.
But there was absolute unanimity in favour of a soft complexion of
creamy white. All men, whatever their nationality, whether idealists
or not—poets and aesthetes, dandies, elegant or melancholy men, as
Firenzuola and Tibaldeo[174] called themselves—united in praise of the
charm and sweetness of the lily and the rose.
As for the eyes, they are the very fount of charm; by their aid heart is
linked with heart in exquisite communings, in them the soul ranges the
whole compass of its utterance. The Italians were particularly fond of
speaking eyes, black, velvety, dreamy or deep; the French, while by no
means insensible to the charm of languorous Creole eyes, much preferred
eyes full of animation and intelligence, and these were usually of a
light grey or brownish colour. On one point they were almost unanimous: a
French girl of piquant expression and mobile features, all sparkle from
eyes to lips, was the top of admiration.
Such are the few summary and exceedingly vague notions of charm, from the
physical point of view, to which women could look for inspiration.
They could choose among these various characteristics, or they could at
least go some way towards them. There is no mystic virtue in the advice;
the important thing is to succeed; but if a woman lacks any one of the
recognised instruments of charm, it is better to look for another than to
attempt the impossible. Women have been known to delight men merely by
the beauty of a wide intellectual brow: Mademoiselle de Vieilleville’s
charm lay in a sweet little lisp, and the fair Chanteloup’s in her
delicious little mouth. A pretty pout, a little wanton laugh, lips fine
and so red that a man asks himself “which is the cherry and which is the
mouth?” the carriage of the body, the play of the features—all these and
many other things may become the “fount of amorous sweets.” All that is
necessary is that in one way or another a woman should enwrap herself
with her sweetness, as with a goddess’s veil.
Leonardo da Vinci sometimes painted good housewives, frank and precise in
countenance, but he took no pleasure in them; he hardly regarded them as
women: a bold look, he said, only suits women who are no longer women.
Whenever he was in love with his model he has given her a modest port,
one arm shielding her breast, and he has half submerged her in a kind
of penumbra. In France a trim, sprightly, noticeably handsome woman was
obliged to disguise herself in an air of languorous affability. The most
stony-hearted of Frenchmen surrendered to “a sweet and gentle face,” “a
sweet look, a sweet bearing, a sweet countenance.”
Another quality which idealists regarded as conducive to charm was a
certain stiffness and reserve of manner. Woman, like the ark of the
covenant, was to be worthy of all respect. She was not thought the worse
of if, like a mimosa, she shrank within herself when the sun’s rays were
no longer there to warm her, and if she was afraid of the dark. The woman
chary of her smile was considered a delightful creature. In platonist
circles they would scarcely even admire the beauty of the shoulders, and
indeed there were no longer seen flaunted in the streets or churches,
under the eyes of the common herd, certain liberties in costume, from
time immemorial the despair of preachers—low-cut dresses, like that of
good Isabel of Bavaria, whom the monk Jacques Legrant admonished from
the pulpit for showing everything “down to her navel”: robes scalloped
at the sides; long-pointed shoes so much in the way that a woman had to
lift her petticoats very high to be able to walk. Castiglione goes into
raptures about the simple little velvet boot of a lady who, on going
to mass one morning, fancied she had to spring lightly across a brook.
Aretino, naturally an expert in such a matter, declares that no one has
a greater horror of a gratuitous display of her charms than a courtesan!
Refinement and delicacy seemed to make women more fastidious and more
shy, because they realised their value, and because they wished to be
loved, principally at least, for their soul. And then great ladies, like
everyone else, come in time to the verge of forty, and their taste and
discretion are remarkable. Persuaded that perfection is always rare in
this poor world, they appreciate the importance of a good appearance,
especially in a blasé society, and they are not unaware how much they owe
to the skill of the dressmaker.
Here, however, there arises a question on which a few words must be said,
for it not only occupies a certain place in the history of art, but it
commonly leads to what appears to us a not very correct estimate of the
aesthetic rôle of the women of the Renaissance: the mistake has perhaps
been made of not treating it as seriously as it deserves.
It is well known that the sixteenth century displayed an immoderate fancy
for Venuses, delighting in them, going into ecstasies over them, setting
them here, there and everywhere with a sort of intoxication,—like a man
issuing from a too long seclusion into fresh air.
It must indeed be confessed that the grave, austere art of the Middle
Ages had erred a little in the opposite direction. The influence of
asceticism had generated the absurdly exaggerated desire to put out
of sight the existence of matter; artists attenuated corporeal forms
until on their canvases the body represented merely a thought; and the
raiment, consequently, in which the body was delicately and gracefully
draped, served as vesture to this thought, and contributed, so to speak,
to immaterialise it. The influence of Greek art was needed to effect a
reversion and to set upon physical beauty the stamp of a living art.
The platonist aesthetics contributed in large measure to strengthen this
movement, since it brought into favour the theory that the human body
is the perfect type of terrestrial beauty, just as the human soul is
the queen of the universe. Thanks to Plato, man, full of wit and love
and liberty, appeared in his single self more intelligent, more free,
more worthy of worship than all the rest of nature; and as the Bible
reveals him also as the image of God, it seemed right to pay him honour.
It cannot then be said, even on this matter, that to break with the
aesthetic traditions of the Middle Ages necessarily involved breaking
with their traditions in psychology and morals; platonism believed it
was merely developing and amplifying Christian art, gaining for it all
the superb expansion of which it was capable; and consequently, in the
early days, it was often with perfect good faith and highly spiritual
intentions that artists deified the vital forces of the world in the
nude. Michelangelo is there to prove to us that it was possible to
glorify the human figure fearlessly and unblushingly without weakening
in any way the general conception of vigour and chastity. Whether he
paints men or women, the result is the same: in bringing his wrestlers
upon the scene he seems to fling at them this old apostrophe of a mystic:
“I love you, not because of your fine garments, but because you have
suffered much.” Who would ever say that his Eve in the Sistine chapel
is yielding, through any languor whatever, to the suggestions of the
serpent! This woman of his has assuredly strength enough to withstand a
serpent unaided! She goes resolutely to meet the knowledge of good and
evil, with the perfect freedom of an accomplished athlete, with more
determination than curiosity, because she feels that her body is capable
of every endurance; and besides, no one has yet told her that children
are brought forth in anguish. Michelangelo has clothed with purity even
the lamentable mother of mankind!
And assuredly when an artist of the same school pushes the audacity of
realism so far as to stretch openly on the royal tomb in the cathedral
of St. Denis nude effigies of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany, of Henri
II. and Catherine de’ Medici, he is giving a lesson in morality, lofty,
stern, admirable, and of splendid eloquence.
From this standpoint, the sight of the human form appeared absolutely
conformable to aesthetics and philosophy, so much so that a whole
generation of well-intentioned tutors, at whom Ulrich von Hütten pokes
a little fun, set themselves ingeniously to explain to young people the
religious significance of nudities. It was on the same principle that
François de Moulins, the excellent cleric specially entrusted with the
moral instruction of young Francis I., inserted in his manuscripts a
picture of the Graces, and taught his young pupil that Charity is rightly
represented as a nude figure, in order to symbolise her generosity, or
rather to bring it more vividly home to one.
It is hardly necessary to add that if the spiritualistic and platonist
school derived these noble effects from the new aesthetic idea, there was
another school of artists and amateurs, much more numerous, which saw
in the exhibitions of the academies only an entertainment of a wholly
different order. We cannot know (and we do not ask) what was Dürer’s
secret feeling when he thought, as even he did, to imitate Michelangelo;
but what can be affirmed is that he is not altogether successful; he
cannot get away from domesticity; the good ladies he presents to us have
nothing superhuman about them; far from it, they are women just escaped
from their shop-counters (and their corsets!), or very matter-of-fact
bathers, or a statuesque “Fortune,” who, despite her broad wings, yet
appears ill at ease in what Montaigne calls her “animal’s costume.” The
Italian artists, except for a few of the early ones, have not in similar
cases allowed a like embarrassment to appear. By their own account, they
moved with the greatest ease among these physical beauties, like perfect
aesthetes. Undoubtedly many of them believed men, and more especially
women, to be the loveliest of created things, and in fact they display
them to us everywhere, with striking ability. Salons, public resorts,
promenades, even the walls of churches and cathedrals in those days
looked more or less like a pseudo-paradise. The triumph of the flesh was
pealed forth with a brave clarion call. And we must not forget that this
sort of painting formed a capital trade, which brought in both money and
honour.
By degrees, however, this licence evoked murmurings, which grew stronger
day by day, and as Michelangelo more than anyone else had ennobled
the practice, by inscribing above the private altar of the popes the
sublimest and most terrible page of philosophy ever written by painter’s
brush, he was specially marked out for attack. Undoubtedly he was
generally recognised as the responsible enunciator of this new principle
of art, and it is a clear proof of the general and almost unopposed
onslaught on him that the man most keenly alive to the drift of fashion,
Aretino, ventured to indulge in virulent invective against him upon this
subject. After the Council of Trent, a veritable crusade was organised
with the noble end of purging the churches of too lifelike anatomies. It
is the correct thing, in the _Joanne_,[175] to make merry at the expense
of Pope Paul IV., dubbed by facetious and satirical people with the
humiliating sobriquet of the “breeches maker,” because he caused some
veracious but really unessential details in the work of Michelangelo to
be timidly covered with gauze, and because he generously presented the
Holy Virgin with the dress she badly wanted. At the risk of incurring the
same reproaches and of becoming a by-word to guide-books past, present,
and future, we shall here confess that it seems difficult to blame him.
The _Last Judgment_, though absolutely pure in intention, became for
the popes quite a stumbling-block from the moment they entered upon the
highly legitimate crusade of artistic purification; when in 1573 Veronese
was reproached for introducing into _Last Suppers_ details little tending
to edification, he did not fail to plead the example of the Sistine
chapel. There is not a doubt but that Calvin would have shown himself
much more rigorous than Paul IV.
This fascination for the symphonic harmonies of the body was not only
an anxiety to the popes; it distressed also the noble women who wished
to constitute themselves directors of the aesthetic movement, or rather
to become the very incarnation of beauty and love. How far these women,
possessed by the desire of securing the triumph of intellectual beauty,
found themselves compelled to make certain concessions, is a knotty
question to which, as it seems to us, people have as a rule furnished
somewhat too liberal answers. So far as the men were concerned, there is
no possible doubt about their materialistic tastes; we have, in a by no
means small number of records and anecdotes, not to speak of legends,
excellent evidence of their partiality for lifelike representations; they
demanded them, insisted on having them. To satisfy them, art set itself
to picture the unclothed; it is plain that the platonist women had no
option but to rise in revolt. But there exist some Venuses, sculptured
or painted, to which the artist undoubtedly intended to give the spicy
attractiveness of portraits. The figures show realistic touches,
sometimes positive deformities; there are hump-backed Venuses, emaciated
Venuses, Venuses of mountainous bulk. They invariably wear beautiful
jewellery, a necklace, for example, and have their little dog beside
them. A characteristic detail is that their hair has been the object of
the most sedulous painstaking; it is a masterly scaffolding of crimped
and waved and curled locks, interspersed with jewels in such a way as
to make quite clear that this is no shy woodland nymph, but a woman of
fashion, a woman of wealth, and even, as far as that can be shown, of
birth and breeding. This class of figure is admirably represented on
certain of Titian’s canvases, and it is an almost immemorial tradition
to take them as the painter seems to intend, namely, as portraits of
distinguished women.
Are we to believe that the religion of beauty, in purifying all things,
led women to adopt so extreme a custom? We do not believe it.
That would have been the total failure of all their tactics, and on this
point Plato was beaten out and out. Even in that coterie at Urbino where
to cultivate the purest platonism was the delightful occupation of life,
there was a general smile when one of the company, smiling discreetly
himself, reminded them of the Master’s recommendation that young girls
should practise gymnastics in a costume of primitive simplicity. Ladies
were not at all enamoured of a troglodytic beauty, and anyone who fancied
that the contemplation of Michelangelo’s or Signorelli’s, works would
turn their heads would have been greatly mistaken. Julian de’ Medici,
on being bantered by his friends about the way he kept his fair lady
out of sight, humorously replies: “Madam, if I thought her beautiful
I would show her without her finery, as Paris insisted on seeing the
Three Goddesses; but in that case she would need to be attired by those
divinities themselves; and since ’tis thought she is pretty, I prefer to
take care of her.”[176]
Platonist women felt extreme repugnance for anything resembling publicity
or vulgarisation—anything likely to come under the common gaze. One day,
at a ball, a young girl seemed a prey to a gloomy pre-occupation from
which nothing could rouse her, and her friends wore themselves out in
vainly conjecturing the reason. At last they got the key to the mystery:
“I was pondering,” she said, “a notion which haunts and worries me, and I
cannot rid my heart of it. All our bodies have to rise at Judgment Day,
and stand naked before the judgment seat of God, and I cannot bear the
distress I feel at the thought that I too must appear stark naked.”[177]
It cannot be denied, of course, that there exists a certain number of
Olympian portraits. But these have nothing to do with platonism, and
further, many of them were executed without assistance from the model.
When a fashionable woman was having her portrait painted, she did not
pretend to patience, and would not sit. Proof enough, surely! The
artist had to dash off a hurried sketch with the speed of a present-day
photographer; the portrait was afterwards worked up from this sketch in
the studio, and a succession of replicas was made from it. It is obvious
that, getting possession of fashionable ladies’ heads in this way, the
artists had every opportunity of making an ill use of them, and supplying
them with a costume not bargained for.
Nowadays the fun would strike us as in rather doubtful taste; but women
were in those days so good-natured and quick-witted that they were the
very first to laugh at a sorry jest of this kind, especially if their
personal rank placed them above suspicion, and still more if the portrait
was pretty and flattering.
The poet Michel d’Amboise relates how he gallantly offered the lady
he idolised a portrait of herself as Venus. The fair damsel looked at
the object with not a little pleasure; but as it was necessary for the
sake of principle to reprimand the painter, she asked him where he had
managed to see her in this unusual guise. He replied, like a genuine
courtier:
J’ay ta façon sceue par celuy
Qui est à toy trop plus qu’il n’est à luy.[178]
“Indeed!” she cried. “But he has never seen me either.”
We owe to Ronsard, to whom it was an every-day affair to be in love, a
description of the lover’s method. He goes to Janet Clouet,[179] and
requests a portrait of his lady-love with every possible charm. Actually
he has seen no more of her than the graceful oval of her face and her
lithe swan-neck, but that does not prevent his describing the rest of
her, and bespeaking for the portrait, with the fullest confidence, the
most ravishing details. Clouet sets to work there and then on a very
charming portrait, which will perhaps not be a very striking likeness
after all.
In such a case (from a sentiment that sufficiently explains itself),
when the desire was to do homage in some way to the presumptive beauty
of some particular lady, the most elementary idea of discretion prompted
the artist to idealise her features a little, with the result that,
the features being all there is to guide us, we may say that pictures
of this kind are not, strictly speaking, portraits; they are ideas,
_arrière-pensées_, illusions more or less transparent. If tradition
could be trusted, how many portraits should we have, for instance, of
Diana of Poitiers? That noble lady herself commissioned a fair number of
Dianas, which may pass for symbols, for the glorification of her name and
work. But, without speaking of likenesses that are more than doubtful,
among all those which M. Guiffrey has so ably catalogued, even those
signed by the most illustrious names, we do not find one that is really
a likeness. This defect might be pardoned in the enamels, even those
signed by Leonard Limosin,[180] but what excuse can be made for Jean
Goujon?[181] Look for instance at the superb Diana in the Louvre: done
for Anet, it triumphantly challenged all heaven to surpass this human
beauty, synthetised in one vigorous woman, one true divinity, monumental,
imposing, of commanding port between her deer and her hounds, in no wise
voluptuous—a remote cousin of Michelangelo’s Eve, though degraded to rule
over forests and dogs and men. Clearly it was the châtelaine’s own wish
to glorify her creed, her ideal, her patroness; Jean Goujon has deified
her, sung her praises, interpreted her; and yet we have no difficulty in
recognising, from certain realistic touches, how careful he is to remind
us that he was celebrating a terrestrial divinity. Is this a portrait?
No. It is enough to compare this statue with the authentic likeness of
Diana of Poitiers on medallions. If Jean Goujon has suggested anything of
the duchess’s beauty in the head, it is with a restraint well calculated
to baffle us.
Besides the portraits on canvas or in marble there were also others,
pen portraits, which were all the rage; and indeed in after years we
find painters complaining of the competition thus set up against them by
writers. Though portraits of this kind were necessarily less agitating,
people amused themselves by seeking physical details in them; it was
a feast for fine wits to “blazon,” as they said, this or that part of
the body, and it may be that certain _blasons_[182] were less anonymous
than they seem. This special art has given us one celebrated portrait
which has not ceased to pique the curiosity and stimulate the sagacity
of critics. The philosopher Nifo, a welcome guest in the house of the
young Jeanne of Aragon, where he justified his presence by platonically
courting one of the ladies-in-waiting, wished to offer the princess,
with the orthodox dedication, a concise treatise on the Beautiful, and,
to give his folio a certain piquancy, he inserted in it a portrait,
complete, circumstantial, ruthless, a study in pathology and anatomy,
of all the endowments visible and invisible of the young lady to whom
the book was dedicated. In accepting the dedication, the princess
took upon her shoulders the responsibility for the work. How could she
approve of this dedication?—a remarkable problem which commentators have
endeavoured to solve in every way but the right one. To us, at any rate,
the explanation is very simple.
All the critics have set out with the idea that Nifo was rashly
indiscreet—a position difficult enough to defend, since a liberty
officially sanctioned is one no longer, and, if fault it was, there
is no trace of absolution. Now what was this alleged impudent fellow?
A fortunate and braggart lover, say some. Can we conceive this old
simpleton, forsooth, hideous, gouty, a mountain of flesh, a trifle
ridiculous—who was overjoyed at courting a waiting-maid (who laughed
in her sleeve at him)—boasting thus publicly of a conquest over the
impeccable virtue of a young girl of eighteen, the pearl of Italy! That
would have been no occasion for self-glorification: if the conquest had
been really his, the book would have appeared without dedication.
Bayle has offered another explanation, still more amusing: he has simply
translated by “médecin” Nifo’s honorary appellation of “Medici,” and
founding on this little slip of his, he takes occasion to thunder against
physicians who abuse the confidence of their fair clients. Even so, there
would still have been no liberty! Besides, Nifo was not a physician, and
even if he had been, he would not have found himself much further on; for
ladies, as we have shown, had no belief in the neuter sex of the experts
who tended them, and were wonderfully ready to regard them as veterinary
surgeons rather than philosophers. They always drew a distinction between
the nude and the unclothed! Nifo simply ventured on the same pleasantry
as Michel d’Amboise and Ronsard and all the second-rate idealists, ready
to pay intellectual adoration to a woman, and yet susceptible to her
physical charms—if only like a fish on a baited hook. He ascribes to
his platonic princess, but in an aesthetic and abstract sense, a beauty
well calculated to increase the number of her courtiers and shed lustre
upon her philosophical activity; he acts like a good lieutenant and
henchman, rendering her a philosophical service of which she cannot but
show herself sensible. Those who have the patience to read Nifo will
find later in his book an explicit corrective, the strict necessity of
which, however, is by no means obvious. In another chapter, to remove
all misapprehension, he enlarges with fervour on the moral virtues of
Jeanne of Aragon, putting in the forefront the two which seem to him the
most salient—the beauty which attracts, enflames, enraptures, elevates
men; the modesty which serves her as breastplate and armour: “In these
two points,” he cries, “you eclipse all other women!” Poor Nifo! Even of
Phausina Rhea, the waiting-maid to whom he declared his love without any
beating about the bush, he knew nothing but her chignon! And it was just
this perfect, if a little vexatious, security that gave such a zest to
his pleasantry about the princess.
In the seventeenth century also, a century of masculine predominance,
people fancied they were deifying men, and especially princes, by
representing them nude. La Bruyère was compelled to laugh when at a
street corner he contemplated the head of the state, the grave Louis
XIV., posed as a stone Apollo. The idea may be as ridiculous as you
please, but who would ever dream of being disturbed at the sight? Did La
Bruyère himself imagine for a single moment that Louis XIV. had taken the
trouble to leave an authentic torso to posterity?
Margaret of France, however, who was all soul, had a singular idea in
regard to this subject. She was patently shocked at the mere thought that
anyone could say he had admired some Italian princess or duchess lying in
the most voluptuous simplicity in the midst of a beautiful landscape, set
off by drapery that only half covers her. To this fascinating, but as she
thought degrading, spectacle she resolved to oppose another—the spectacle
of the soul. The project occurred to her, it is true, at an age when all
her charms but those of the soul were dead; she had herself painted,
therefore, like the others, before a landscape on which the sun is rising
(or setting), and in front of a curtain; but instead of lying at length,
she stands erect. She is clothed in her shift, transparent enough indeed,
but carefully fastened about the neck, and, to give greater point to
the interpretation, she is admiring herself in a little hand-glass, in
allusion no doubt to her book _The Mirror of the Soul_. She wears neither
necklace nor jewels; a few ordinary trinkets negligently placed on her
toilet-table alone indicate her quality. Her whole body in its tender
austerity is a revelation of her soul. And the moral effect of this
representation appeared so lofty that this little portrait was treasured
in the princess’s family as her true likeness, the portrait at once
authentic and piously esoteric.[183] Margaret thus drew from art its
ethical teaching, and gave a lesson to ladies who rely too much on mere
beauty of form.
Such is, we believe, the key to the enigma. To win their triumph
platonist women do not fling away their weapons, as someone has wittily
said; they lay them by.
On the other hand, in the second half of the century, when platonism had
disappeared along with feminism, the scruples of the women underwent
considerable modification. A compromise was effected; the body was,
so to speak, cut in two. The lower part remained inferior, but the
upper, the bust namely, was regarded as superior and of a beauty that
might fitly be exhibited. At the end of the century we have portraits
of great ladies conforming to this new fashion. Perhaps also, out of a
spirit of mischief, people amused themselves by distributing under this
form portraits of ladies who enjoyed almost a public reputation for
beauty, such as Gabrielle d’Estrées and her sister. The more masculine
society becomes, the more do women become fleshly. And we should only
have to point out another instance of this phenomenon if we were not
convinced that the fashion of which we speak sprang up in an atmosphere
of semi-platonism. Diana of Poitiers, apparently, was delighted to
exhibit her bust, and indeed it is this peculiarity which led M. Vitet
to believe that he recognised her in a family portrait of Henri II., at
present in England, which includes all the royal family, namely, Henri
II., Catherine, his official wife, Diana, spouse of his heart, and his
children. We have not had the opportunity of seeing this portrait, and
consequently cannot verify M. Vitet’s conjecture. But we think we have
sufficiently proved that, even from the purely aesthetic standpoint, the
platonist ladies did not depart from the practical principles of conduct
they deemed the best and most profitable; the solitary example of Diana
of Poitiers, who cannot be cited as a thorough platonist, does not strike
us as sufficient to prove the contrary.
It is true that sometimes the ladies had to yield to the exigencies of
their time, and tolerate, on the part of the men about them, customs and
a style of talk in which they could take no pleasure. They had to do so
or risk being neglected and causing often worse evils.
The intimacies of family life sanctioned in those days truly astonishing
liberties. Thus, on the morning of Innocents’ Day in December, a man
would consider himself entitled to surprise in her bed a lady of the
family, or a woman of the household (generally a young woman), and to
administer a slap with the open hand, which was called “giving the
innocents.”[184]
In one of the stories of the _Heptameron_,[185] a husband gravely
announces to his wife “that he means to go at daybreak and give the
innocents to her waiting-maid, to teach her not to be so lazy,” and the
good lady is blissfully unsuspicious.
In vain did the women most liable to such treatment have recourse to all
sorts of subterfuges—sleeping elsewhere that night, or rising at dawn;
escape was almost impossible. Margaret of France knew all about it; for
all her demureness, Clément Marot wrote a scrap of verse expressly to
threaten “to give her the innocents” and “see that comely body.” Her
nephew Charles of Orleans made merry at her expense because, “having
risen too late” on Innocents’ Day, he impudently made up for it next day
with his poor aunt and another lady: “I won’t tell you just now,” he
wrote, “all that I saw.” His letter tells a good deal as it is. It is
not surprising that a princess habituated to such buffooneries strove at
least to raise their level a little.
As there was no help for it but to exercise their charm on man the
brute by such proceedings, the women displayed neither pedantry nor
affectation. Besides, if the sensualists thought only of the body, women
thought only of the soul; and here, under a new form, we again trace the
idea that in giving heart and mind and soul to the man of her choice
a woman had really given him all that was dearest, most precious to
her, all that constituted her personality, and that the rest had only a
secondary importance. She had lent her material person to a husband who
had not troubled himself about fathoming her soul: why then should she
think of refusing favours of no consequence to the man who had really
gathered the early blossom of that soul? Just as the most trifling
familiarity disgusted her when it sprang from a vulgar material motive or
was forced, so the greatest seemed to her legitimate and even pleasant
if it was spontaneous, if it consecrated a genuine affection. The lady
who, while taking her bath, would have thought it more seemly to dismiss
her maid, did not fear to receive there in all honour a visit from a
gentleman.
Why should distinguished ladies have deprived themselves, at the levee
they held on rising and retiring, of the pleasure of an intimate bedside
conversation with their lover? In their eyes it had exquisite advantages:
first, the very intimacy of the conversation; then the intellectual and
emotional relish it imparted to the purely physical operations of the
toilet; finally, for the favoured visitor, there was the tiny reward of
platonic love, the little personal token, the special bond which no one
else had. Margaret of France tells us explicitly that she could not have
insulted a man of position and a friend of the king, like Bonnivet, by
excluding him from her “dressing and undressing”; that, further, there
was no harm in Bonnivet’s “taking this opportunity to increase his
affection,”[186] seeing that platonic love consists precisely in loving
up to the very verge of the forbidden.
In short, women genuinely platonic used their physical beauty as a
first means of developing their charm. In this respect they were at
odds with the mystics, who regarded the body as a negligible quantity
and an encumbrance; but they were still more sharply divided from the
sensualists. Their idea was to deify the body, enshrine it, so to speak,
and glorify it as the vesture of the soul, the servant of the heart.
Platonists of a lofty flight pushed this idea as far as possible:
Michelangelo so closely identified soul and body as not even to admit
that the face could have wrinkles when the soul had none; so great was
his enthusiasm for the beauty and youthfulness of Vittoria Colonna’s
soul, that he had that strange artist fancy never to perceive a line
on her face. He himself, when a scarred and battered octogenarian,
never felt withered; to his last day he never ceased to ascend with
shining countenance the altar of the Beautiful, like those priests who
bow hoary heads before the altar of the Eternal Beauty, the Eternal
Sacrifice, as they invoke “the God who rejoiced their youth.” He has
sometimes been twitted with having represented the Virgin as a woman
of thirty, even after the death of Christ; he did so, it is true, and
to him nothing appeared more natural. To him such a woman was always
thirty. On this point Anne of France did not quite agree with him; it
was one of her favourite maxims that a woman had much better accept
the inevitable with a stout heart; conceal nothing, dress to suit her
age, and persuade herself that wisdom is worth as much as beauty. But
Margaret of France could not bring herself to believe that a few marks
of physical deterioration dim the radiance of a woman’s moral beauty or
impair her charm. That such is not the case was the assured conviction
of these noble princesses. Unhappily it was not easy to persuade men
so. La Rochefoucauld retorts: “There are few women whose worth survives
their beauty.” To men a woman no longer exists if she can say: “When I
was younger”; every possible defect is then laid to her charge; she is
found to be ugly, jealous, washed out, viperous. Wisdom may be worth as
much as beauty, but what can she do with her wisdom? In Italy a woman was
reckoned to have reached the wisdom stage at thirty, and Anne of France
only consented as a great favour to allow her another ten years.
Apart from any sort of notion of coquetry, it was therefore of the
greatest importance to a woman, from a mere sentiment of her duty and
her mission, never to be forty; the theory of charm would not have been
complete without the addition of the science of never growing old.
This accessory science was, so to speak, a traced copy of that of love;
it also had its two schools: the school of truth and candour, the
“honest skill” which consists in keeping old age at bay; and the school
of cleverness and subtlety, which seeks to recover the lost youth, to
employ a little trickery, to repair time’s ravages—“a perpetual optical
illusion,” as Erasmus calls it.
The first demanded much forethought and prudence. From the earliest years
of wedlock, with no immediate cause for alarm, it was an unremitting
mortal struggle against a foe as yet imaginary. The wife found her
weapons in solemn tomes and in the prescriptions she herself had
collected. A firm opposition to her husband formed part of her scheme. As
to special modes of treatment, they comprised aromatic baths, massage,
and so forth, means which were very restrictive and mundane and tiresome,
but wonderfully effective.
A lady of that period could write in all pride and truthfulness, “Women
remain almost always young.” There were some who, when close upon
seventy, still merited the good opinion of connoisseurs.
Others allowed themselves to be lulled asleep in the joy of youth, and
only awoke under the stroke of some sharp warning; but then they sprang
erect to their full height like a wounded tiger, and there was no act of
unquenchable courage they did not accomplish. They had their teeth drawn,
their skin scraped till it bled, they reduced their colour by dint of
gulping down sand or cinders. They were heroines of unselfishness!
But if, alas! decay proved in the end irresistible, and they had to
resort to sham, how disastrous was the result! Around a made-up face
ill-natured folk saw nothing but shams—sham tapestry, sham bronzes, sham
conversation; art and platonism alike were banished:
Ostez luy le fard et le vice,
Vous luy ostez l’âme et le corps.[187]
—_Ronsard._
The dressing-room became like a universal factory of pinchbeck. On the
door might have been written the dictum, in general so utterly false,
of Cennino Cennini:[188] “Art consists in creating, or at least in
persuading men that that which is not, is.” Let us drop the subject.
It is evident, on the contrary, that the honest art of dressing played
an important part in practical platonism, so long as it was not carried
too far.
Since women were messengers of joy to the world, it followed that this
mission must be declared by outward signs. What more natural than to
give a princess a magnificent trousseau! It was not a luxury, it was the
implement of her profession. Anne of France was sure that simplicity had
been formerly pushed too far: everyone, she said, ought to maintain his
rank and perform his duty in it; the world has a right to what belongs
to it, that is, to everything save a woman’s heart: to neglect to study
appearances, to cultivate false simplicity, is to commit an “unseemly and
most dishonest” act. To dress must be considered a duty.
A simple little “mirror of the soul,” like that of Margaret of France,
was not sufficient for an apostle of beauty. Mirrors of every kind and
style, hollow or pyramidal like factory chimneys, circular, angular, in
columns or spirals, rightly absorbed her attention every morning and gave
her a philosophical and serious conception of her person. It is not at
all to be wondered at that the lady whose appearance was to thrill the
world should begin by setting all this machinery in motion.
The care of the complexion, and especially of the hands, naturally took
some time to begin with, not to speak of hygienic attentions. A delicate
little touch with the brush on the face is quickly given, but it demands
wonderful skill: it is nothing, and it is all.
But the hair required an exemplary patience. Remember what we have said
about the infallible charm of light hair. At Venice Veronese never met
a brunette! When a brunette was mentioned everybody understood that
she was a woman who had given up dyeing and all pretensions to beauty!
That is why the Roman ladies, whom Tertullian reproached with flaunting
“barbarous colours,” and why our modern artists in hair-dressing, have
never discovered any more beautifully effective recipes for golden
tresses than those furnished by Marinello[189] or Cennini to many a
convinced devotee of platonism. The Venetian blonde, with her beautiful,
glossy, golden-brown locks, enjoys even to-day a renown so much the more
legitimate in that Nature has never succeeded in imitating her.—When the
hair had received its golden hue, it was spread at length in the sunlight
to dry, and then began the real operation of the day—the grand masterly
operation of hair-dressing.
In France, singular customs in regard to this matter had long prevailed.
A lady would run a comb through her hair, probably quite perfunctorily,
slip on a hood, which she would keep on the whole day, and trip off to
Mass. This was still common as late as Anne of Brittany’s time: that good
queen herself was faithful to the hood to her dying day.
By Heaven’s favour, Mary of England brought Louis XII. beautiful fair
locks, quite genuine too, and the fashion of wearing hats. Then, despite
the invectives of a few insignificant people like the poet Coquillart,
the feminine head-dress attained altitudes more and more complicated:
crimpings came in, and curling irons, paddings of false hair, huge coils
stuck with jewels in the Italian fashion. The quest of intellectual charm
displayed itself in some ladies by an artificial broadening of the brow;
to become philosophic, it sufficed slightly to shave off the hair in
front and pile it up high behind. The hair-dressers, who had now become
men of substance and repute, lengthened their showcases, and invented
those charming wooden heads which we have not ceased to admire.
That the hair-dressing operation lasted three hours need not surprise us;
but how mortally tedious these hours would have appeared without the help
of conversation! The fair patient settled herself accordingly, garbed
in a chemisette of fine linen, cut pretty low at the neck and in no way
impeding her movements; and that was the hour when she showed her heart
to her friends.
She had then only to dress herself, that is, to put on a wide-sleeved
cloak of damask, with a very low, square-shaped opening in which the
waiting-women slipped a plastron, usually red; this they laced with care
so as to fit the figure exactly; if necessary they inserted an artificial
bust, and remorselessly tightened the waist.
In the great old-world houses, the last of these evolutions was
superintended by the master of the robes in person. Saluting with a low
bow, he announced the costume for the day. The serving maids, aided by
the squires, busied themselves about the lady, and packed her into a
doughty accoutrement of crimson and cloth of gold, a sort of clumsy
casing, a veritable strait-jacket, treacherously supported since the
close of the fifteenth century by busks or whale-bones, the furtive
origin of the corset. Around her neck was thrown a necklace of gold,
rubies, emeralds or diamonds, and on her head was set a sort of tiara.
Not one of these details is unimportant, since the whole performance had
a lofty aim. And this is just the opportunity we have been waiting for
to judge the women; or rather, their dress passes judgment upon them.
Will they, we ask, have the courage to make their clothing expressive of
their own individuality, to render their garments in some sort living
and personal, or will they, with mere vulgar coquetry, copy and wear the
costume that may be seen trailing in any street? The courage to indulge
an individual taste in dress seemed a thing of no consequence; it is,
really, a great and a rare virtue; it stamps a woman at once, shows
if she has a soul above her tailor, if she has self-knowledge, if she
reflects, if she has a feeling for art, if she is determined to show the
world her own intelligence, her own beauty. Hands all round for liberty
and truth! Anne of France and many others rebelled against the craze
for a slim figure, stifling in summer, freezing in winter, regardless
of the claims of physical health, and even seeking to conceal the signs
of motherhood. How they wished that aestheticism would lead them back
to the Greek art, that is to say, to wide flowing garments, dignified,
comfortable, healthy, elegant! Or, as Louise Labé[190] poetically
besought, that women, instead of fastening themselves in a strait-jacket,
would condescend to resemble a leaf-cone, which opens spontaneously to
bear its fruit! But no; the only approach they made to Greek art was that
they sought to indicate the lines of the figure through close-fitting
casings, but the casings were whalebone and artificial. Health, even life
itself, was of no account; to graces which, however imperfect, had all
the attractions of naturalness they preferred a stuffed and padded ideal.
For alas! with the majority of women, a dialogue of Plato could not hold
a candle to a conversation with a dressmaker. Fashion was omnipotent;
under Louis XII. there was nothing but high-starched neck-ruffs; under
Francis I. nothing but low-necked dresses cut square in front, and boldly
gored to a point behind.
The philosophic spirit, untrammelled by physical barriers, manifested
itself in the internationalisation of fashions.
It was known throughout western Europe that a fashion adopted by Isabella
of Mantua was one to be followed, and that the ladies of Paris were
adepts in matching bright colours, and ridiculously concealed their faces
under thick veils. It was the acme of good style to dress one day like a
Frenchwoman, the next like a German, Italian or Greek.
The platonists somewhat resented this vulgar application of their ideas;
that was not their conception of cosmopolitanism. To weld the minds of
men, to introduce into men’s hearts far and wide the truly refining
leaven of affection, fraternal concord and tenderness, by means of the
common love of the beautiful—that they could applaud. But masquerades
like these—what a mockery! In this matter, however, their authority was
ineffectual; a stronger was required. Francis I. knit his brows when
Spanish mantillas made their appearance at his court; he had his own
reasons for not being fond of them. He said that he believed himself
among a rout of devils. This one saying accomplished what no arguments
would ever have succeeded in doing: the Spanish frippery was packed away
in the wardrobes until the political sky changed.
Nevertheless, the intellectual preoccupation made its way, and people
were willing to pay regard, up to a certain point, to Plato’s principle
that the soul rather than the body is to be clothed: in other words they
proclaimed a correlation between the colour of the petticoats and the
state of the soul. Everybody knew that there are physical harmonies which
hold absolutely; that sober tints suit the pale, dull colours people of
bilious complexion, and bright tones faces inclined to ruddiness. But
people rarely thought—they did not trouble to think—that there might be
for souls a similar harmony, much loftier, of much greater importance,
and much more necessary to observe; for the complexion may be improved
by a touch of the paint-brush, while the soul must be kept as it is. M.
Jules Lemaître, whose genius is thoroughly French and whose opinion it
is always a pleasure to quote in matters of good sense, has in our own
time this quaint idea: “Our fathers, who wore lace and feathers, coats
red, blue, dove-coloured, apple-green, and soft-hued lilac, could not but
feel more disposed to joy, seeing each other blooming like flower-beds.
If fashion should some day make us walk the streets in purple silks, we
should forthwith be rescued from doubt and despair.”
That is philosophically true. It must be remembered that we cannot
isolate ourselves; we are dependent in a high degree on the world around
us. The inward joy we seek to create needs an external joy for its
support; the sun, the blue sky, the luxuriance of flowers, the clearness
of the air, the boundless gaiety and infinite cordiality of Nature
quicken and penetrate us; a grey sky and a dull horizon will never kindle
glowing reflections in our soul.
It is needful and right that men, and above all women, should display
an infectious joy and vitality also, that we should not have to puzzle
out the real person under the tasteless guise of a vulgar fashion-plate,
cut from a price list and flung over the shoulders. Everyone should make
his dress a palpable expression of his life and joy, like the flowers
and birds and fruits. The Catholic religion intuitively seized on this
profound truth; it retained and developed, with the pageantry of its
ceremonies, the gold-embroidered copes flashing with sombre brilliance,
and all this red and white and blue the purpose of which is to make
us forget that these celebrants singing as they move are men, and to
represent them to us as the very flower of our ideas, as the essence
of our tenderest prayers and affections. Of this admirable demand for
the embellishment of life we have preserved only one melancholy symbol,
mourning. Men, with their customary suits of solemn black, may be said
to carry everywhere with them the idea of disenchantment, of the awful
paltriness and the perpetual mournfulness of the soul: there is nothing
of a man about them; they go about the streets like the scattered parts
of one huge machine.
And this self-abnegation has nothing to do with material questions
of comfort or economy; there is no woman so poor that she cannot, if
she wishes, rise above her wretchedness by means of these external
symbols. Such at least was the opinion of the sixteenth-century women.
To them every colour spoke of the soul and to the soul; it was the
ensign of one’s spiritual fatherland, or, to use a modern metaphor, a
railway signal-light; white, the line is clear! it signifies a heart
free as air, a soul unappropriated or at any rate overflowing with
youthfulness; green, it is springtime with the soul, in the full vigour
of sweet acknowledged hopes; red, an utter despair! The cloth of gold,
the golden jewels then so much in vogue, represented the rich glow of
sunlight, the spacious joy of life! Whoever wished might approach and
find warmth and gladness. Celestial blue meant to the Italians soft
ethereal happiness; to the French, a tender and fortunate love. Black was
regarded as melancholy: yet this colour, incapable of fading, symbolised
constancy, firmness, and had its friends in consequence. Why restrict
it to mourning, as though our feelings for our dead are alone eternal?
Margaret, who loved and encouraged the use of black, protests:
Le noir, souvent, se porte pour plaisir,
Et plus souvent que pour peine et tourment.[191]
However, people generally preferred not to take their pleasure in black.
Rabelais allowed in the Abbey of Thelema none but brilliant costumes: he
wished to have one colour a day, and that the days should be told off as
white, pink, yellow, red, green—never black.
Thus the sartorial art, in spite of little encouragement, itself came at
last to exhale a perfume of life and the ideal. Unhappily it had a cruel,
powerful foe, which was incessantly to check its aspirations and keep it
in perpetual bondage to materialism. This foe was the vulgar passion for
sumptuous display, the terrible taste that substituted a mere ostentation
of wealth for a garb expressive of art and sentiment.
The French never recovered from that fever.
When Charles VIII. found himself face to face with the court of Ludovico
Il Moro,[192] sinking under the weight of golden shoulder-knots and
jewellery, a thrill shot through the French army.
From that time it was vain for the preachers to join hands with the
philosophers and demonstrate the infinite vulgarity of luxuriousness and
its deplorable moral effects; it was vain for the legislators to enact
laws; the die was cast.
People were dazzled, fascinated by wealth: they knew not nor wished
to know what wretchedness it cloaked, how many women, and some of the
noblest of them, ruined themselves in their vanity, how many others lived
by expedients that would not bear the light.[193]
Assuredly, magnificence had a glory of its own: there was no lack of
gazetteers to applaud to the echo the marvels seen on great occasions:
“Signorina Bulcano, in white cloth with gold trimmings and a golden
girdle; her Excellency the Countess Maddaloni in red velvet; her
Excellency the Countess du Rugo, in red cloth with large gold necklace.”
There is this to be said, indeed, that these chroniclers, superior in
this respect to some of ours, were destined to come down to posterity.
Nevertheless, this was inevitably the death of platonism, the ruin of
all it loved and all it desired. A fine thing to characterise a lady by
the cloth or velvet with which she garbed her bust or limbs! In this
profound decadence of taste people came to see some good in the general
worship of close-fitting garments, for, now that women were nothing but
dolls, it was certainly better that they should appear jointed. And
what seriousness could be expected of, what noble idea or worthy aim
could be suggested to, a woman who was a slave to her gloves, her hats,
her jewels, who spent part of her day in close confabulation with her
dressmaker or jeweller?
Cest anneau est du temps passé,
Ce ruby est mal enchassé,
Ce saintureau n’est pas fort gent.
Ma troussoire n’est que d’argent,
J’en veuil une batue en or....[194]
and so on indefinitely: that was how she talked; she was no longer her
own, she was a slave. Satan in the pit of hell was bewailing, it seems,
the fact that he no longer saw rustling about, as formerly, dresses
“open down to the waist”; and he cursed platonism! He might make himself
easy, there were still most melting sights for him! And his colleague
Lucifer sets himself to cheer him, showing him the league of vanity
mounting to the assault of the Beautiful, the almost invincible might
of money, combated and proscribed above, triumphing and swarming on all
sides under the most pitiful forms of jealousy and coquetry: among good
housewives, who have neither grasped nor retained anything of the new
ideas but an instinct for rigging themselves out to play the countess
or the duchess—among kitchen wenches who deck themselves in fallals and
furbelows in apish imitation of their mistresses.
Unhappily, the king went over to the side of vanity; official France
allied itself with the most dangerous adversaries of Roman philosophism
and intellectual splendour: with the Milanese, whose tinsel and
fripperies amused all Italy; and the Venetians, a people of large
expense. The struggle was thus fought out between sensuous gratification
and aestheticism. It did not alarm the platonists: they were prepared for
it; as Castiglione says: “There are fools everywhere.”
But this was of all battles the most arduous, because the dividing line
between coquetry and a woman’s duty to be pleasant was not always very
clearly marked. A few exceptional persons had the gift of admirably
combining the two tendencies; these as a rule were Italian women. At a
celebrated ball given by the court of France in 1518, two ladies, Italian
both, were queens—queens of beauty and of charm; the one, Clara Visconti
Pusterla, devoted to white, made a brilliant figure with her silver
embroideries and ropes of pearls; the other, a sister of Count Borromeo
of Milan, was a dazzling apparition in cloth of gold and diamonds. Yet
it was felt how secondary and precarious were successes of this external
kind, and how wrong it would be for women to regard them as the real
basis of their influence. They were only one means.
The fashion in regard to dwelling-house and furniture followed almost the
same rules as that of costume; for in a well-ordered house everything
harmonised with the people inhabiting it. The house is, so to speak, a
magnificent garment, the garment defending our existence against the
weather, the night, the intrusions of external life. Here, too, symmetry
of arrangement and studied designs are of little moment: the house should
exercise a charm, and there are ugly houses which are infinitely pleasing.
A house is pleasing when its appearance is original and homogeneous;
when its inhabitant has lovingly put into it something of his own
individuality, when it is not merely a classical and regular arrangement
of stones erected on some vacant spot, or a gimcrack toy with pretentious
and purposeless decorations; it pleases if serious thought has gone to
the arrangement of its parts, if it has projections, angles, recesses
judiciously contrived, and making it, so to speak, a living, breathing
thing. This is the first rule: a masculine purposefulness.
The second and the feminine rule is that the house should present a
great aspect of pleasantness, an appearance of amiability. It is of vast
importance that it should not clash with the landscape; it should fuse
with it, espouse in some sort circumambient nature, so as to radiate an
influence far beyond its actual site. This harmony results as a rule from
mutual accommodations; a gloomy house, for instance, will not be planted
in a smiling landscape; in a wooded or rugged but spacious locality a man
will set an extensive abode, without fantastic decorations, a house which
dominates outbuildings and approaches; no gildings, no polychrome effects
will be thrown up against a leaden sky: a church will not be constructed
in the style of a hammam, nor a stock-exchange in the form of a Greek
temple. The house, whatever it be, must smile, with a frank and loyal
smile, speaking through its façade and its approaches to the good folk
who pass, and beaming on them a look of friendliness.
In the interior, to furnish it, that is to say, to render it habitable,
all smiles and happy memories,—this again is to enlarge oneself,
to complete oneself: and it is here that woman’s art is absolutely
indispensable. A human dwelling in the nature of the case can make no
claim to a proud immortality. Every passing season attacks and tends to
destroy it; whilst the objects of nature renew themselves unceasingly
by the automatic movement of their latent vitality, it is needful for
us at every moment more or less to reconstruct our shelter, under pain
of seeing it crumble and fall before our eyes. It is like one of the
fruits of our life. Thus, while it should be as solid as possible, while
reminding us of the persons with whom it has successively lived, it must
show itself supple and give expression to our present life, if only by
fleeting suggestions, corresponding to the various impressions of our
existence, and dying when we die.
It was in this direction that the fine taste of prelates and ladies gave
itself free and glorious scope. A lover of the beautiful is so keenly
conscious that everything about him ought to be the manifestation of
some flash of thought! A chair, a couch, a piece of tapestry, all must
speak to us and exhort us to live the life of the heart, without allowing
ourselves to be crushed or numbed. At Rome, the home of this dominant
spirit, and even at Naples, the rays of its influence extended almost
inimitably; and it so well attained its object that a people wonderfully
sensitive, amiable, enthusiastic, ignorant of physical wants, became
enamoured of these glories of high culture of which, however, it barely
caught the reflection, and attuned itself to them. Men hoped the time
was at hand when all mankind would delight in beauty, they fancied
that they were born to live under glorious ceilings, among palm-trees,
gushing fountains and marvels of art. To this day the humblest of flymen
dilates with pride in the artistic treasures of his city. And how
diplomatically Isabella of Mantua went to work to surround herself with
splendid objects! What care Vittoria Colonna took in the mere ordering
of a casket! They appreciated equally the charm of collecting antiques,
diamonds, pictures, pottery, plate; the sole desideratum was that the
object of their quest should be beautiful or rare, the expression of an
artistic idea or an evocation of the past, that it should add to the
Attic charm of life, play its part in the cultivation of taste; in a
word, that it should be loved. Life thus, in its superb radiance, assumed
a grandeur and delightfulness of which we too caught the secret, in those
days when the palaces at Rome still had their galleries, the villas their
delightful rows of oleanders, the ruins their majesty. It was a genuine
and glorious sumptuousness, well calculated to elevate men’s minds! No
wonder that the desire of sharing in it spread through the world, and
that, unchecked by natural divisions, men’s hearts were simultaneously
possessed by one grand impulse towards beauty. This embroidery of life
contributed in large measure to the sentiment of the brotherhood of man
which then declared itself, and which appeared so singular; to-day we
do not truly realise its importance, because, thanks to the mechanical
lessening of distances, all men have become neighbours (and unpleasant
neighbours at that): a varnish of uniformity has spread itself over
everything; milkmaids and princesses often read the same books, wear
almost the same hats, marry at the same age and with the same ideas. But
in those days it was an absolutely new thing, when national diversities
and individual liberties were so strongly accentuated, to create a
harmony of ideas and a fellowship in love, of which the women were the
natural harbingers.
Enter the palace of Margaret of Austria at Brussels, and, if you do not
find yourself back in Rome or Florence, yet you will at once perceive
that the remarkable mind of a princess has there gathered together all
that gives charm to life: a vast library, well supplied with romances,
history and poetry; furniture of priceless value, stately busts,
brilliant mirrors, portraits of all the princes and princesses of the
time, and by their side the portraits of notorious fools: a medley of
life and ideas; various pedigrees of the house of Austria, a trophy of
Indian feathers of brilliant colours, fierce shaggy heads of wolves,
broad fans, glistening armour, crystals, priceless caskets, medallions,
majestic chandeliers, articles in jasper and adamant; on the walls,
admirable Flemish tapestries spangled with gold or silver; on the floor,
warm, thick-piled carpets; here and there valuable pictures in profusion.
The visitor’s curiosity, solicited on all sides, knows not at first where
to stop to admire. And these various objects, individual as they are,
become animate and dwell together in a sort of high, grand, collective
existence: the one mind which discovered their affinities seems to
permeate them, sets them vibrating in unison, and thus penetrates the
soul of the visitor.
Through this great science of intellectually adorning the material
conditions of life a first result was obtained: men loved life. Sadness
concealed itself, joy kept the whole world dancing to its merry pipe. It
was impossible to be anything but gay and amiable. If it chanced that
someone was to be buried, it was with full orchestral accompaniment,
amid the twinklings of a thousand tapers, and with a ceremony quite
lyrical. If perchance a man desired a melancholy funeral, he would do
well to say so in his will and prescribe the number of candles; but most
often men set their hearts on dying gallantly, and did not dream of
depriving their friends of an honourable entertainment or of economising
on behalf of their heirs.