INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES
It is all very well for a woman to be beautiful, to lend grace to the
world, to diffuse sweetness and light; but this would be but a vain show
if she did not with jealous care nourish in herself the flame of love of
the Beautiful. Castiglione, who liked to give a mathematical precision
to his definitions, tells us: “Woman must nourish herself on the life
of the world and the life of the arts”—thus in appearance relegating
the aesthetic life to a second place; but he is very careful to add:
“She must occupy herself with literature, music, painting, dancing,
and entertaining”; in other words, the heart must reverse the parts,
and in the conscience secret preoccupations must come before visible
occupations, His view is logical. How could women govern the world if
they were in reality its slaves? The first necessity for a lighthouse is
a light.
Further, we ourselves have a right to ask where these ladies think of
leading us. Their art consists in pleasing us and in indoctrinating us
with their principles. To please is their secret, with which we do not
meddle; it is of little consequence to know if Lucretia Borgia cut out
her own dresses, where and by whom Mary Stuart had her hats made, or if
women always please by what pleases their husbands. But when they speak
of ruling our intelligence, it becomes of very great importance to know
how they will deal with us.
The intellectual provision of the Renaissance women consisted chiefly
of impressions of art, in accordance with Castiglione’s prescription.
In this, painting (still more the inferior manual arts—lace-making,
embroidery, tapestry) held the lowest rank, on the principle
universally accepted in the platonic world that the less an art needs
the co-operation of the senses to touch the soul, the greater is its
excellence. Music stood higher than painting, because it directly
transmits an impression; vocal music in particular represents almost
the speech of soul to soul, with but an insignificant admixture of
materiality. Poetry was the supreme art, the truly aristocratic thing; no
one would have dreamt of comparing it to painting or any manual art. The
poet with one stroke paints soul and body; in Ronsard’s words, “he paints
in the heavens.”
To lay in her stock of happiness, a woman will begin by living in close
communion with the Beautiful. Sciences are useless to her; she has little
taste, and still less time, for their cultivation. But just as she finds
breakfast a necessity, so she ought every morning to give her soul
nourishment, if it be only one sip of the beautiful. Louise of Savoy on
rising used to read a psalm, “to perfume her day,” as she put it. These
few moments’ reading were sufficient to flood her soul with a radiance to
light her through the day.
Further, reading is a duty having special claims on women. Not only is
there always some new thing to learn, some new chord to touch, but the
intellectual life demands a constant outgoing of energy,—I will venture
to say, a continual “education.” Could a tree flourish and bear fruit if
it refused to suck up its sap? How long would it be before it stood a
bare skeleton against the sky?
Thus, with complete independence of mind, as great as her material
liberty but much more difficult to acquire, a woman will supply herself
with spiritual food; she will seek Beauty in truth stripped of all
conventions. The real foe to women’s freedom is not this or that man,
but themselves, because of their frivolity, their inconsequence, and
their innate passion for the superficial; in other words, for the
conventional or fashionable. They need a real force of soul to go deeply
into anything; they are perfectly happy in yielding to the glitter of
a thought which, though obscure at bottom, is dazzling on the surface.
When the taste for precision has not been carefully instilled into them
in childhood, they run a great risk of wasting their minds in habits of
cursory curiosity, like many men of the world.
Books played a prominent part in the psychology of the Renaissance. They
were regarded as the highest type of luxury; a house was characterised as
much by its library as by its plate. Among the ladies, Anne of Brittany,
Louise of Savoy, and many others are essentially deserving of the name of
bibliophiles, nobly loving the beautiful books with beautiful miniatures
produced for them. They were even accused of reading them. In that epoch,
the artistic aroma exhaled from a fine edition seemed necessarily to
accentuate the written thought, just as music accentuated the uttered
thought. We have become wiser; we have discovered that beautiful books
are herbariums in which ideas must be left to dry, for their better
preservation.
There was no lack of scoffers to make mock of this “bookish sufficiency.”
“What a heap of books!... These folk must surely mean to carry the world
on their backs! What a frittering away of intellectuality!” And, indeed,
Margaret of France not only believed in books, but doted on them; to her
a library seemed a sanctuary.
“Tant y en a que le seul remembrer
Et les nommer n’est pas en ma puissance,
Mais il faisoit beau voir leur ordonnance ...
Et du scavoir qui est dedans
J’en laisse aux folz craindre les accidens ...
Des livres fiz ung pillier, et sembloit
Que sa grandeur terre et ciel assembloit.”[228]
We writers think it natural enough that people should buy our books,
keep them, and even cut a few pages; if it is women who show us this
attention, we do not complain. We dig away in darkness under the soil,
labouring like a miner with his pick; why should we complain that above
us, in the bright sunshine, someone sifts and mints our metal, and
circulates part of it through the world?
It is even a not wholly disagreeable surprise to meet in an odd place
here and there one’s own ideas, which have flitted away and found warm
foster-parents in people who have so far adopted them as to believe them
their own. Sometimes it is another writer who is good enough to saddle
himself with them thus, and in that case our feeling is not perhaps
unalloyed pleasure; but if it is a reader, man or woman, we are well
rewarded. Often, too, our idea as it goes round has altered in feature,
and if it now and then appears to us enfeebled, it also happens sometimes
to have gained strength.
Everyone cannot be a writer! ‘Amateurs’ have a rôle of their own, which
is not that of ‘stickit’ authors—a rôle of synthesis, generalisation,
criticism, support, sanction!
The end we pursue—thought, namely, and truth—can only be attained by the
aid of conversation,—only if distinguished and enthusiastic women set
themselves to distil from our books any good they may contain, and to
diffuse its essence around them.
From this almost indispensable collaboration between pure learning
and its popular interpretation results a vigorous life. As Madame
d’Haussonville has so well said: “An eager desire for knowledge possessed
the entire sixteenth century. The quick and supple intellect of the women
was carried away in the general current. Erudition was the passion of
the age, not that cold and microscopic erudition which arises in ages
of decadence, and which is often only the useless lumber of scholastic
pedantry, but an erudition living, intelligent, and animated”—animated,
that is by aestheticism.
By the side of exquisites like Bembo, laborious students like Lefèvre
d’Etaples, Hebraists, and exegetists cultivating their little patch with
dogged tenacity, there were brilliant minds, perhaps more brilliant
than profound, but unprejudiced, who synthetised particular studies and
started them on an unlooked-for career. For the Hebraists, exegetists,
philosophers, and historians of every description, the spread of
intelligence would of course have been fatal; but it was the _raison
d’être_ of a lady whose mission was to put in circulation the results of
her individual study.
Thus the aim which women had to set before themselves in their reading
was twofold: first, a personal, aesthetic aim, the reinvigoration and
refreshment of their own souls; secondly, an aim relating to their
apostolic mission, the art of understanding men’s souls, then of
charming and leading them by means of conversation.
But it is impossible, by merely scanning a man’s bookshelves, to form
an idea of the man. In great houses, the king’s, for example, some of
the books were inherited, others were presents, others were books that
no gentleman’s library could have been without. Francis I. bought the
Italian novelties, Bembo, Pontanus, and Politian. In reality his chief
reading was the Arthurian romances.
The princesses had also, besides the books of the hour, books that
they had been obliged to buy or accept, books left to them—those which
were kept “for their backs,” as Montaigne said. The bookshelves made
a brilliant display in a spacious gallery adorned with the choicest
objects of art. The bulk of the library usually consisted of books on the
elements of religion, history, and morals; it also contained romances,
poetry, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and books with engravings, which too often
replaced those charming manuscripts of which Louise of Savoy was one of
the last protectors.
The books that were read were treatises on history, especially Roman
history, and on practical medicine.[229] But custom varied.
Certain ladies, like Anne of France, browsed on the early fathers, the
philosophers, and the moralists. Many, while loving studies of this kind
and calling themselves highly philosophic, preferred to have their food
peptonised, and to be furnished with ready-made convictions which only
required ventilating and disseminating in conversation. A number of
Italian treatises proffered themselves for this little service, the best
of which was Castiglione’s book, _The Courtier_. To name Castiglione is
to name the Bible of platonism, the code of aestheticism, the Machiavelli
of anti-machiavelism; Castiglione was in the hands of every woman who
meditated on the ideal.
From a purely aesthetic standpoint the classics were in favour, except
Virgil, to whom only the Mantuans remained faithful, probably from
local feeling. Ovid, who speaks so well and so much about women, ranked
very high. He had been popularised in France by the translations of
Octovien de Saint-Gelais and André de la Vigne; illustrated editions went
off rapidly, even though the engravings were old. In the very highest
artistic spheres, people swore by Cicero.[230] In Margaret of France’s
circle the favourite names were Terence and Cicero, Castiglione and
Boccaccio.
On the reading days, which were principally (we are bound to say) the
grey days of existence, when one feels abandoned by God and men, when
one is left to “one’s own devices,” people rather sought for light
entertainment, if possible gently emotional, or at any rate lively,
cheering, affecting. The Bible was very useful for getting glimpses of
Heaven without having to run to a monk or a parson, for an intelligent
woman cared for nothing lower than a bishop. If they wanted psychology,
they went to poetry, novels, romances. A mere sonnet, a little story,
very short but with movement and savour, would suffice to cure a casual
fit of dumps; in more complicated cases they took up some voluminous
romance, which engrossed the attention for long hours and reflected life
for the nonce in warm and sunny hues.
The literature of the Renaissance was well provided with _Nouvelles_ and
_Facéties_, answering all the demands for spiced and piquant reading made
even by the platonist ladies.
They revelled in such works with no touch of coyness; it was a mark of
breeding to discuss them, laugh at them, and quote from them. Often some
courtly abbé, the spiritual director of these ladies, and soon to be a
full-blown bishop, undertook explanation or translation.
Some persons have questioned whether the custom of reading narratives
so strongly spiced did not in the long run obliterate the moral sense,
especially among women. Brantôme maintains that this was the cause of
all moral obliquities. Margaret of France did not believe it; her faith
in art was so ardent that she regarded it as a proof of mental vigour to
face all sorts of literature without blenching. Her friend Marot told her
so with a smile, for in the contest between flesh and spirit he held
with the flesh; he mentions a select list of the works reputed the most
naughty, and adds:
Tout cela est bonne doctrine,
Et n’y a rien de deffendu![231]
Margaret, brought up on Saint-Gelais and Boccaccio, was in truth
inoculated. Further, like some other women of narrow mysticism, she was
not afraid of contrasts;—soul and body in opposite pans of the scale,
Petrarch as a corrective to Boccaccio, and vice versa. Good humour and
gaiety were part of the platonist hygiene, and ladies took them where
they found them. Coarse pleasantries did not amuse, as a German[232]
who had spent great pains in writing a _Eulogy of Baldness_ frankly
confessed. “We are ridiculous even when we write of serious things, but
we are never gay. When we try to be jocular it is, in the words of the
proverb, like setting an elephant to dance.” Professed humorous writers
are such bores!—a crusty old philosopher like Nifo, to wit, or that
excellent La Perrière, a friend of Margaret, who dedicated his lascivious
verses, his _Hundred Considerations of Love_, to a clerk in the Woods and
Forests!
There was no help for it, ladies had to return to Boccaccio, since
amusement was his monopoly! The chance discovery of a by no means
remarkable unpublished fragment of Boccaccio covered Claricio of Imola
with glory, and was published at the expense of a Milanese Maecenas,
Andrea Calvi, under the auspices of Leo X. and Francis I. Castiglione
and Margaret were not disposed to attack such a renown: their ambition
was to eclipse it. Margaret had a fresh translation of Boccaccio made.
She herself, as we know, was ambitious to imitate the master; and to
do so was really a profitable business: by donning Boccaccio’s mantle
Firenzuola became a dignitary of the church, and Bandello became bishop
of Nérac; while a common saddler, Nicolas, gained the favour of the king.
The test of skill was to tell true stories under transparent pseudonyms.
Yet Louise of Savoy was almost as fond of the Acts of the Apostles.
The Facétie had a less brilliant fate. Poggio and Cornazano, always
dear to the ladies, handed down many of their stories to imitators like
Domenichi, Delicado, Boistuau, who in their turn passed them on to
Shakespeare, La Fontaine, and others.
The old romance continued in high favour—a favour that was so far
merited in that the romance combined with the sentimentalism of chivalry
sufficient spiciness to induce a good lady to leave it lying on her
table. Women doted on the venerable romance of cloak and sword,[233]
long, diffuse, and heroic; it had long ago captured Italy. It delighted
princesses by its idealism, and peasant girls by its flavour of mystery
and marvel. When the efflorescence of humanism, aestheticism and the new
ideas was at its height, the _Romaunt of the Rose_ made its reappearance,
and year in, year out men saw defiling past, as though resuscitated by
some terrible incantation, all the old knights of ecstatic or sorrowful
countenance, the champions of the Holy Grail and of Melusina—Lancelot of
the Lake and Perceforest, Fier-à-bras and Percival, Ponthus, Meliadus,
Pierre de Provence, all that Gothic world which was believed to be dead
and buried. With them they brought their friends and relatives—_The Fair
Elaine_, _Theseus_, _The Destruction of Troy_, _The Doughty Hector_,
_Oedipus_, _Alexander the Great_, these worthy, up to a certain point, of
rubbing shoulders with Plato; but also _Baudouin_, _Le Grant Voyage de
Jherusalem_, _La Conqueste de Trébisonde_, in an age when people troubled
themselves very little about Crusades! Even the Italians went mad over
Charlemagne. It was like an electric spark—a reciprocal attraction.
France lost her heart to Italy, and Italy opened wide her arms to France;
the women of the south, the men of the north. In vain did the platonist
men ridicule the event; in vain did their spokesman, Pulci, at the court
of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the sanctuary of platonism, empty the vials of
their wrath and give the paladins a terribly hot time of it; nothing
could stem the tide, and a romance—a shockingly bad one—entitled _I reali
di Francia_, became the germ of a whole new literature.
Men succumbed to this craze because the women drove them to it. Besides,
nations, like widows, love the dear departed. Since chivalry had
ceased to exist, people naturally swore by nothing else. The more our
activities decline, the more we gloat over the memory of past excesses.
Charlemagne, then, filled the horizon; doting looks were cast at rusty
old sword-blades, and while works of quite charming beauty left women
almost unmoved, spectres had only to appear, to vanquish them. Sometimes
these showed themselves naked and unadorned, in all the strange dignity
of their powerful frames; at other times an intelligent editor paid some
attention to their toilet, smartened them up, decked them with little
rosettes of pink or blue. How many times was _Amadis_, perhaps the most
famous of these romances, thus tittivated! No one remembered that France
had given it birth; it was re-imported into France by way of Spain and
Italy through a translation of Herberay des Essarts, with fabulous
success: “Any one who spoke ill of the Amadis romances would have been a
hissing and a by-word.” Out of four books it grew into a dozen; it might
well have lengthened itself indefinitely, like some law-suits in our own
time.
These old romances are to-day scarcely known except by scholars. If we
open any one of them at hazard—_Lancelot of the Lake_ for instance, one
of the most classic[234]—we find that the colouring is crude. Side by
side with mystic virginities we see the reek of coarse appetites. Wives
and maidens have blood in their veins, and, like all persons of rather
primitive education, do nothing by halves; her husband has only to turn
his back for a moment and queen Guinevere is feeling her way towards a
reconciliation with Lancelot (bearded like the pard), and the gallant
knight has no need to supplicate to get the window opened. Sir Gawain
holds very brief parley with the daughter of the king of North Wales,
when he surprises her extended on her ermine couch in a virginal but
ravishing deshabille! Arthur very quickly forgets Queen Guinevere amid
the solace brought him in his cell by a damsel “courteous and fair of
speech.”
As it mixed in the best platonist society, the old romance of chivalry
picked up more refined manners. King Arthur ends by gathering about him a
noble enough company; Roland leaves Charlemagne in the lurch, to hasten
after his well-beloved; and (horror of horrors!) Angelica philanders
prettily with a Saracen page! The old torrential romance ended like the
Rhone—fell into a tranquil lake.
And yet the dignitaries of the church invariably denounced it, and had
the courage to break with the women on this point. They countenanced
neither the old masters nor the new—the eloquent Cataneo, the gay
Boiardo. Nothing disarmed their opposition—neither the success of
romances like _La Célestine_,[235] nor blandishments. When Ariosto
offered to Cardinal d’Este his masterpiece packed with dithyrambs in
honour of all the Estes past, present, and to be, the amiable prelate
said to him: “Where on earth did you get all this nonsense?”[236]
In short, women who read, read what spoke of love: that was what they
set store by. Philosophy spoke of love—they were philosophers; romances,
facéties, novels, poetry spoke of love—they sipped also of that
philosophy. But in some cases it was philosophy that bred the spirit
of love, in other cases it was the spirit of love that led them to
philosophy; and from this wide differences resulted.
The first class were coldly sentimental,—but no real sway is exerted
through coldness; they lived in the absolute,—but the absolute lends no
governing force. They lost touch with things, they had nothing of the
communicable warmth which makes apostles. They were princesses, sacred
beings, to be admired but not touched.
Plato had not evolved a practical rule for happiness, and his best
friends agreed that his social ideas presented many chimerical sides.
But the ladies who learnt their philosophy from love were the ardent,
active women who knew that the world is swayed by passions, good or bad,
and that the secret of feminine power lies far more in that than in any
amount of reasoning. Reason may produce an artless blissfulness, but
passion has lynx eyes. Love is not reasoned out or manufactured, it is
a give and take; life also is only a perpetual exchange, and happiness
comes from life, while Plato seeks it in self-contemplation and egoism.
To act on another, one must be acted on; to make others happy we must
gain happiness through others. An illogical process? What if it is?
Nothing is more illogical and more relative than happiness, since it has
to do with us. That is for many women the science of life, and they love
romances as a pictorial philosophy—not cold precept, but a living force—a
philosophy in which the heart cries out instead of patiently suffering
dissection.
Books appealed to the feelings. Poggio tells the story of a worthy man,
a merchant and a Milanese, and therefore doubly unemotional, who almost
died of grief after reading about the death of Roland: yet Roland had
been dead seven hundred years! Much more were women justified in showing
their sensibility!
So, when they read, they attached the highest value to the external forms
which produce impressions: they were affected more by these than by
ideas. The wife of Guillaume Budé declared that she loved her husband’s
books, not for their contents, but because she regarded them as his
offspring. Women adored magnificence of expression—the rhetoric, the
rhythm, the “gay trimmings” of style; poetry seemed to them the supreme
enchantment, because it answered at once to their personal craving for
“sensibility” and to their mission, which consisted precisely in sowing
a little charm in life, that is, in garnishing life externally with a
little poetry.
However, what they called poetry we should rather call music. Poetry in
those days was only a perpetual libretto; there was rhythm and cadence in
the arrangement of the words, and the impression they gave was a musical
one. Perfect clearness was not insisted on; the thought was allowed to
remain in semi-obscurity, like a melody flowing uncertainly through a
strain of music, rather betrayed than revealed by the harmony. Our great
Lamartine, with his lofty but indefinite thought, has been regarded
even by us as the first of poets. On the other hand, the aim of musical
melody was boldly to seize all these words, to give them a precise
value, intensity, brilliance, and force. The employment chiefly, or
indeed exclusively, of human voices brought this quality still further
into prominence; the delicate modulations of the voice, thrown out with
matchless skill, seemed to outline the very soul of the singer, like
traceries against the sky.
The admirable inspirations of Vittoria and her predecessors will never
cease to touch us. In that old idealistic music there lies a whole
intangible world; our vows, our love, our poignant sorrows, our prayers
gush forth in it like a fountain, flash like a bursting rocket in the
sky: “God has given us nothing more pleasant, nothing more sweet,”
exclaimed a poet: “music is a messenger from heaven, the solace of all
our woes.”[237]
The sonnets of Petrarch were set to music and sung; they had indeed been
composed for that purpose. Teodoro Riccio furnished an accompaniment
to the famous romance, _Italia mia_, and Ciprian van Rore one to the
sonnet, _Fontana di dolore, Albergo d’ira_. Ronsard, too, wrote his
sonorous rhymes for music; Baïf, as is well known, went so far as to
propose to turn writing into a sort of notation, and when his academy
was instituted, composers of music and even mere singers were admitted
on equal footing with poets. The art of music consisted in giving to
thought all the external beauty of which it was capable. Philosophers
counted metrical music (in other words, poetry) or vocal music as a part
of philosophy. The art thus intellectualised became quite a religion. In
his painting of Parnassus at the Vatican, Raphael shows us Apollo singing
like an ancient bard. In all the pictures of Paradise that we have seen
we have never found a palette, or a sculptor’s point, or even a rostrum
or an inkstand; nothing but direct and pure communion with God through
contemplation and music. And what could be more delicious than the little
choirs of angels which Giovanni Bellini’s imagination placed at the feet
of his Madonnas, like an incense of homage from the world! Melozzo gives
a queen an organ as her emblem,[238] and Titian one to his Venuses. Music
would seem to have been the very breath of happiness.
The common people themselves were strangely enamoured of intellectual
harmonies. In Italy a number of poets spent their life in the
market-places, like Homer. Aurelio Brandiolini, for example, who sang in
the squares of Verona the praises of antique heroes, went on, stimulated
by popular applause, to execute veritable _tours de force_, such as
singing in verse the thirty-seven books of Pliny’s _Natural History_. The
celebrated Bernardo Accolti wandered from town to town giving recitals
in the principal squares. The moment he arrived, people flocked about
him, business was suspended, far-distant shops were shut, lights began to
appear on the balconies, and the police hastened up to keep order. Making
way through the crowd by favour, the notables formed up round the poet
as a guard of honour; and then, under the lamp of some sleeping Madonna,
amid breathless silence, the poet’s voice arose towards the starry sky,
singing love to the accompaniment of a guitar.
Nothing more truly characterises the period than this popular passion for
musicians, poets, and buffoons. Far from becoming degraded by contact
with the mob, poetry seemed thereby to gain in breadth. A pure Virgilian
named Andrea Marone (Virgil’s surname) never felt at ease unless sitting
on a stone post; in that position inspiration seized him like an ancient
sibyl or a fakir; his veins dilated, drops of sweat stood on his brow,
his whole being expressed itself in gestures which gave emphasis to his
song, lightning flashed from his eyes; it seemed as though a part of his
individuality left him and shed itself upon his audience like a rain of
fire.
Almost all women were fond of music, for men were very accessible to
ear-charming sound. Even in France, in spite of the poverty of aesthetic
education, the villages harboured a surprising number of harpists and
taborers. The duchess of Orleans patronised at Blois a crowd of more or
less official “gitternists,” fiddlers, and trumpeters, without reckoning
strolling guitarists, always sure of a warm welcome. Like all the
princesses she had her private band, and also two taborers, magnificent
in their crimson badge,—so magnificent that during her lyings-in she had
them to play at the foot of her bed. It was a great sorrow to her to have
to dismiss, from a prudent motive of economy, the ducal choir and even
one of the taborers; Pierre de Vervel, once her master of music, always
remained her friend.
We have in a former volume shown Louise of Savoy, a cithara in her hand,
surrounded by a harp, an organ, and a complete orchestra. Louise Labé
approved of young girls devoting to music the best part of their time.
It was incomprehensible how any lady who possessed this divine means of
fascination[239] could neglect it; when a Mademoiselle de Hauteville had
to be pressed to display her magnificent voice, her false modesty was
censured as a sort of professional error. Mary of England, accompanying
herself on a guitar, used to sing of a morning to Louis XII., her
doddering old husband, and the poor prince felt himself revived, such
“wondrous pleasure did he take therein.” Margaret of France, who has left
us thousands of verses, evidently betook herself to poetry as nowadays we
go to the piano, to let her thoughts wander at large; instead of singing
with her lips, she sang with her pen. It is highly probable that many
ladies abandoned themselves thus to their inspirations, half music, half
poetry.
Sometimes people had too much of it. It was irritating to meet certain
people perpetually humming a refrain. As soon as you entered a
drawing-room, you saw an instrument looming menacingly before you, and
you had to perform. And then, how many amateurs would do better to muzzle
themselves than to go quavering out their little songs!
Music also was charged with enervating effects; some went so far as to
call it an art of decadence, and maintained that the ancient Medes had
perished through love of music. Castiglione almost gets into a passion
on this subject. “What! Music effeminating! But, I ask you, were not
Alexander, Socrates, Epaminondas, Themistocles musicians? Lycurgus was
almost one! Did the harp prevent Achilles from shedding blood—if that is
what you are driving at? Effeminating! Why, without music how can you
praise God? What would comfort the sunburnt labourer at his plough, the
peasant woman at her wheel, the sailor in the storm, the traveller on
his weary way, the nurse in her tiring night-watches by a cradle? Music,
on the contrary, is the charm of life—its light, its sunny grace! No
art responds better to the demands of our emotional nature, none more
liberally brings us vivid and various impressions. It softens, calms,
penetrates us, it moves, indeed enraptures us; it raises us to heaven
with the rapid, vehement, urgent beating of its wings!”
Castiglione almost regards music as love itself: they were to him such
nearly related terms that we cannot be sure but that in his opinion song
was more excellent than love.
In regard to what was expected of it, namely, a little happiness, music
was a performance of feeling rather than of skill. Notes a little
venturesome or even imperfect were pardoned if they blended, and had
resonance and passion. People would boldly attack and smoothly carry to
its conclusion a two-part fugue. The ideal was to hear in a drawing-room
a pure and mellow voice, supported by a single lute; or rather to see the
voice, for the lute, not an ungraceful instrument like the piano, seemed
a living thing, and became one body with the fair singer; it was one
personality thrilling with song.
To idealists of the very highest order, Flemish, French, and German
music was far superior to Italian music, because it expressed ideas,
whilst Italian music barely went beyond sentiment or even sensation. Rome
herself fell a willing victim to the northern races.[240] Among many
distinguished and often admirable artists, the great figure of John of
Ockeghem,[241] who died at Tours in 1495, stands out as that of the old
master who more than anyone else ennobled his art.
His successor, Josquin Desprez, a Fleming trained in the same school
(the very name of which has been lost in the loss of its tradition), and
a member of the choir of Sixtus IV., became a Roman by adoption, and
only left Rome in 1508 to proceed to Ferrara. Josquin was a stickler for
correctness and perfection, skilful in linking discords and in combining
independent parts. From the dim arcana of a sanctuary his profound
inspiration rose into the clear light of day, blossoming out in soft and
brilliant colours. His phrases are like many-coloured curves of light
shot into space, describing their several parabolas without confusion and
without clashing; there is white and green and red, but they all spring
from the same flame.
Many Italians censured, as fit for dreamers and doctrinaires, the
exclusive employment of the human voice. They wished to have at least one
instrument: the bass viol (developed into our violoncello), or the viol,
from which the famous Amati, about 1540, derived the violin. It is a viol
that Raphael places in the hands of his singers, who seem to identify
themselves with the instrument with a passionate ardour.[242]
In the smaller courts chamber-music was cultivated. Happy states! Nothing
took precedence of the quest for a good musician; dilettantism reigned
supreme. The court of Ferrara was practically a conservatoire; it had a
celebrated orchestra, from which Caesar Borgia borrowed violinists when
starting for France. Care was taken that the performance of music should
take place in the most favourable circumstances and amid the profoundest
respect; there was no question of being stacked in a hall, too hot or too
cold, of being tight wedged and sitting askew to hear music by the hour.
Lorenzo Costa depicts a very different concert-hall. Peacefully reclining
on a grassy lawn, beneath the shade of light-foliaged trees, sheltered
from sun and breeze, the ladies form the centre; they are discoursing
of pure love. Their own sweetness seems to envelop everything. They are
crowning a lamb or an ox with flowers; the landscape seems to spread
life out into almost boundless space, intersected by a sheet of limpid
water as blue as the sky. In the middle some persons are unobtrusively
performing music or writing verses. No one pays any attention (so
profound is the spell!) to a troop of soldiers in the distance repelling
an incursion, nor to a handsome chevalier, a solitary and elegant figure,
occupied in daintily killing a reptile, nor to certain groups which have
wandered away beneath the leafy shade, towards the extreme verge of
platonism.
Purely instrumental music, the music of a full orchestra, appealed to the
commoner feelings; it served for dinners and dances, as in the banquets
depicted by Veronese. It represented the voices of nature. It was best
understood on the water, and then the most staid and stolid of people
found it one of the joys of life. It was the delight of pleasure-loving
nations: “Abolish music, and we must e’en fall to prayers.”[243] At
Venice, as soon as the old cupolas, the tall statues and the long
façades—decorations for a dance in motley—became blurred in the evening
haze, the city seemed to swim in music: a thousand bells chimed out
the _Ave Maria_; jangled sounds of serenades and concerts rose from
the palaces, the alleys, every nook and cranny; the sea sent back its
response; noisy parties lightly skimmed the glistening surface of the
Grand Canal; illuminated barges splashed their oars under a window,
with an orchestra or band of singers. Strange intoxication! Many pious
Italians, like Alberto Pio, thought it so delightful that they loved to
transfer it into the churches. Why not? These thrilling symphonies did
not follow the sacred texts very closely, it was said; they were not
always of the highest class. “You hear the boys whinnying, the tenors
bellowing, the counters braying, the altos bawling, the basses scraping
the bottom of a well,” and in all this the Puritans could see no trace
of deep religious feeling, “no well-modulated pronunciation, the perfect
enunciation which brings the words home to the soul.”[244] It was a
deafening, stupefying music. But if it is necessary for our happiness
that senses and emotions should be appealed to simultaneously, why say no?
Even dance music may ennoble the dance and become an element of
enthusiasm, peace, and joy. This was admirably expressed by one Madame
de Sillé. A canon sitting beside her was laughing at the sight of men
leaping about, while another was bursting his lungs blowing into a hollow
stick. “What!” she said, “aren’t you aware then of the power of music?
The sound from this stick penetrates the mind, the mind directs the
body, and these buffooneries are the expression of the soul! Would you
prefer to play at tennis?” The canon held his tongue, more especially
as he caught oblique glances in his direction, and had premonitions of
being dragged into the dance by way of reprisal. Even from all this
racket of the dance—from the harps, lutes, organs, manichords, checkers,
psalteries, rebecks, guitars, tabors, bass viols, flageolets—a measure of
expression was demanded. The harpist whom Mantegna shows us setting the
Muses to dance is throwing his whole soul into his work; he is leading
the dance.[245]
Here we should properly say something about the drama, but we shall treat
it briefly, seeing that in those days it was very far from displaying
the same activity as at present. In particular, the women’s share in the
drama was only that of a section of the public. It was above all the
art of the prelates, who devoted as much care to altering its character
as the women did to preserving the old romances. Thus the two great
forces of platonism were pitted against each other—the prelates eager to
advance, the women anxious to hang back.
The drama with its modern tendencies took possession of Italy in the
15th century, and Rome was almost its birth-place. Pomponius Laetus,
officially licensed to produce the plays of Plautus and Terence, died a
few days after Savonarola. The ashes of the monk had been scattered to
the winds; but all Rome was eager to accompany the remains of Laetus to
Ara-Coeli, since it was a work of true piety to increase the joy of life.
The palm for dramatic art was, with one consent, awarded to Bernardo
Dovizio da Bibbiena, who had the happy notion to shake off the yoke
of translation and to write a new piece in imitation of Plautus—the
_Calandra_.
Bibbiena[246] is one of the best types of this prelatic world, which
after all cannot be dissociated from the world of women. He belonged to
the inner circle of Leo X.’s friends, having been brought up with him,
though the son of a peasant. He had a spirit and verve which, according
to Paul Jove, “carried the gravest of people off their feet.” He was
supremely in his element at the table. Moreover, he was one of those
astonishing men who live at the same time a life of toil and of pleasure.
On becoming a cardinal he displayed vast activity—acted as legate,
preached a crusade, and died at fifty. He has left a goodly number of
treatises, poems, and letters; but it was the drama that made him famous.
It is impossible to describe the stir the first representation of his
_Calandra_ made at Urbino, the home of platonism. Everything was planned
with the care and skill of perfect “amateurs.”
The stage represented stucco monuments and other scenic illusions
executed by such artists as that age afforded. The auditorium, which was
not marked off from the scenery, represented fortifications, and the
spectators lolled there at their ease on excellent carpets, amid lustres
and garlands of flowers. The orchestra, placed out of sight, was heard
now on one side, now on the other.
Nor had the organisers neglected any means of strengthening the play
itself by a great variety of spectacles—a prelude played by children; a
prologue; four pantomimes between the acts, representing the story of
Jason, with bulls made of stuffed hides, their nostrils flaming, Venus
surrounded by Cupids, Neptune drawn through the flames by fantastic
monsters, Juno encircled by a flight of birds so natural that even
Castiglione, who had had them made, for a moment believed them to be
real. These pantomimes were danced through in the cleverest fashion, with
wonderful mechanical effects. At the close a Cupid recited some verses,
concealed viols gave forth a ‘song without words,’ and a quartette of
voices concluded with a hymn to Cupid.
And after all, if the ladies had not actually the direction of this
platonic entertainment, they lost nothing thereby; it was dedicated to
them, and the whole performance had for its aim the glorification of
ideal love. Such a representation assumed an elevated and almost solemn
character, similar in kind to the performances at Bayreuth in these days.
Was the _Calandra_ a masterpiece? No. The plot turned upon the difficulty
of distinguishing between two twins, brother and sister, who changed
clothes as circumstances demanded; from this Bibbiena derived risky
situations, broad jokes, and a complicated dénoûment. But it achieved
an immense success. It was represented again at Urbino in 1513, and
afterwards at the Vatican on the occasion of a visit from Isabella
d’Este. On that supreme stage its licenses came under the fierce light
of criticism, and scandalised some of the cardinals; but on the other
hand it was so magnificently interpreted, it was so excellent “in
dramatic elegance, in wit, well-knit construction, and gaiety,” that the
enthusiasm was unbounded. The marchioness Isabella did not rest till she
had organised a similar performance, an event which took place in 1520.
From that time innumerable editions popularised the _Calandra_, which was
chosen many years afterwards by the town of Lyons for its festivities in
honour of Catherine de’ Medici.
The drama of the time attained its highest perfection at the Vatican
under Leo X. The skill of the actors, all men of fashion, their sober
Attic style, without a trace of the mere craftsman, made the drama an
artistic delight. As yet no women appeared on the stage. Their parts were
sustained by men, and in this connection we must present to our fair
readers a young prelate named Tommaso Inghirami, who was the coryphaeus
of female parts at the court of Leo X. A Florentine and an intimate
friend[247] of the pope, who, as everyone knows, had his own portrait
painted along with Inghirami by Raphael,—so perfect a writer that Erasmus
calls him “the Cicero of the age,”—Inghirami could have taken one of the
most notable positions in this illustrious generation if his amiable and
indolent dilettantism had not led him to believe that writing books was
carried to excess. He was satisfied with shining in conversation, and in
that he was inimitable: Bembo and Sadoleto constantly speak of him with
enthusiasm, and, moreover, in one of the most appreciative but critical
societies that ever existed, he won for himself as a conversationalist
a European renown. If he had not the extraordinary gaiety of Bibbiena,
he spoke with dazzling passion, wit, and fire; his large coal-black eyes
have an astonishing power: looking at them, one feels light flashing from
his soul.
He had an ardent love for the theatre. One day, when playing the part
of Phaedra in the _Hippolytus_ of Seneca before Cardinal St. George, he
so captivated the spectators by his distinction, and especially by his
passion, that the name of “Phaedra” became inseparably fastened to him.
He was a preacher, the learned librarian of the Vatican, the dignified
Bishop of Ragusa; but, for all that, from one end of Europe to the other
he was no longer known except as “Phaedra,” or at most “Thomas Phaedra.”
Only, the name was masculinised: thus Erasmus wrote: “I knew and loved
_Phaedrum_.”
Unhappily, about 1505, letters from Rome spread a deplorable piece of
news: Phaedra is putting on flesh, Phaedra is big. “So much the better,”
retorts Bembo in Greek, “we wish she may have twins!” The portrait in
the Pitti Palace shows him to us, indeed—this superb platonist type of
the pseudo-woman—as by no means a slender man. There is no doubt he had
been handsome! His eyes continue to flash and throw their unabated fire
towards the ceiling; he still has his fair, plump hand, his fine mouth;
and yet, seated at his table, he no longer looks anything but a handsome
prelate.
Radiating from Rome under the auspices of ladies like Isabella d’Este
or connoisseurs like Ludovico Gonzaga, bishop of Mantua, the dramatic
art reigned nobly in the courts and castles of Italy, without losing
anything of its elegant and artistic cachet. It adapted itself to all
circumstances with marvellous flexibility, ranging from the opera-ballet
played in the open air[248] to genuine comedy and tragedy. But, like the
Novels and Romances, it assumed a licentious and even cynical character,
which everybody regarded as natural. Thus at Turin, in the early days of
Lent in the year 1537, a comedy of the most daring kind was performed:
“How warmly the ladies here received it!” exclaims an eye-witness. At
Foligno, the pontifical prefect, a certain Orfino, superintended in
person the staging of _Marescalco_, an extremely light production of
Aretino; and soon after the performance this worthy pillar of pontifical
“tyranny” wrote to the author, begging another piece of the same stamp.
The _Ruffiana_ of Salviano and many other pieces of a salacious turn won
tempestuous applause. Some people took alarm and declared the theatre to
be a hotbed of immorality. The Senate of Venice, by decree of December
29, 1509, forbade any performance, even the recitation of an eclogue in a
private drawing-room, under penalty of a year’s imprisonment and exile,
“irremissible,” in the wording of the decree. (However, in a secret
addendum, the Senate reserved the right of pronouncing the penalty, and
by a large majority.) In spite of this, the _Calandra_ was performed at
Venice in 1524 without any difficulty arising.
The Italian drama, lacking the support of the ladies, had little success
in France.[249]
They lived there on the old Mysteries. The performance of these was
usually got up in a convent, or by a city; and, unlike the Italian drama,
it retained a character of patriotic and moral instruction rather than
of a work of art.[250] Thus we find Louis XII. bestowing a pardon on
an _impresario_ guilty of some criminal peccadillo, on account of his
excellence in his profession.
Italianists and French platonists respected this tradition. In 1506
the town of Amboise got up a performance before Louise of Savoy of the
Mystery of the Passion, “the most beautiful that could be discovered.”
A priest played the part of Christ; the performance lasted a week, and
was so successful that two years afterwards M. de Longueville wished
to repeat it at Châteaudun, and engaged in a somewhat acrimonious
correspondence on the subject with the functionaries of Amboise, whom
he accused of purloining the copy. This performance was very costly;
the town took five years (which seemed an enormous period in those
days) to liquidate a debt of four thousand livres contracted on the
occasion. It does not appear that Louise of Savoy, who was then residing
at the château, contributed in any way towards the expenses, as M. de
Longueville did at Châteaudun; but she certainly did not disapprove of
it; and towards the middle of the century it was again in the presence
of a thoroughly platonist woman, the second Margaret of France, that the
last known representations of the art of the Mysteries are said to have
taken place.
With all her daring on other points, the first Margaret maintained a
remarkable attitude of reserve in regard to the theatre. She contented
herself with experiments in an intermediate style of drama,—religious
comedies, a sort of Italianised ‘morality,’ easier to produce and not so
long-drawn-out as the ancient Mysteries, yet neither very pious, nor very
amusing, nor much calculated to take the public by storm. The result was
that the drama long retained traces of its original character. So late
as the 18th century Voltaire dedicated a tragedy to the pope, and fumed
at not being able to get it performed at Geneva. The only cosmopolitan
kind of piece was that of the farces, knockabouts,[251] harlequinades,
carnival drolleries, to which the most illustrious platonists of Florence
attached their names.[252] Harlequin and Punch were always a success
in France: “They have something that sets you laughing without being
amused”; but they introduced nothing new. The French farce had long been
flourishing on the boards; the Italian was only a competitor.
To sum up, the women of the Renaissance, as we see, did not try to be
savants or blue-stockings. They skimmed the cream off books and works of
art so as to get what suited their mission, that is, something to talk
about and to go into raptures over. They did not rise to what was called
“humanism,” like the prelates; they stopped short at loving intellectual
beauty more than plastic beauty; they cultivated a literature of
sentiment and passion, and took a keen delight in beauty of form. They
behaved as instructed women, and above all as women of feeling, as women
who wished to please, nobly faithful to their single-eyed pursuit of
elevated love.