And hence Margaret of France, in her profound yearning to blot out and

pardon the sins of the world, is herself inspired with a tender, helpful

tolerance. Assuredly the wounds she observes are deplorable, but they do

not necessarily point to absolute frowardness of heart; they may result

from a “naïve folly,” from “the misfortune of loving not wisely but too

well”; in other words, from an over-abundance of natural goodness, the

very consequence of our organisation. The perfect being would clearly be

an androgyne; but we are imperfect beings, an odd mixture, godlike, and

yet profoundly, lamentably human. The power of love

vient de la divinité,

Et son tourment de nostre humanité.[335]

We seem to hear this spotless woman crying to God: “O Christ, Christ of

the Magdalene, gasping and crucified, how Thou didst suffer, how Thou

didst love! This streaming blood, these wounds gaping eternally,—these

are the handiwork of the hate of men, whom Thou didst bid to love one

another with a pure heart. Thou wilt not pardon their hate! Thou wilt not

pardon their fierce lust of wealth, nor their pride and naughtiness of

heart, nor their wild anger, nor their shameful sloth of soul. Thou wilt

pardon nothing but the error of love, the error of a moment, since this

is but the overflow of the goodness Thyself hast given, the wofulness of

too great love!”

2. THE ENNOBLEMENT OF VICE.

The second moral effect of the theory of beauty and love was still more

pertinent than the first. It consisted in an extraordinary levelling up

of purely terrestrial and unlawful loves. From the principle, with which

we are already acquainted, that the virginity of the heart survives

the professional ordeals in which the heart has no concern, we shall

find that moral deductions were drawn, in Italy and even in France, so

important that we cannot pass them by in silence.

In Italy, among the women whose trade was pleasure, there was formed an

aristocracy so real that some of them presided over salons, were part and

parcel of the court world, and truly merited the name of “courtesans.”

Their bearing was irreproachable, their distinction extreme; we are bound

to say, indeed, that, apart from their origin, they were absolutely

indistinguishable from virtuous women—except that perhaps their manners

were a trifle more correct.

Their high influence is explained by the fact that in the official world

of Rome there was a plentiful lack of women. Etiquette required that

none but birds of passage should be seen at court, a restriction which

gave cruel but entirely honourable pain to the heart of more than one

platonic prelate. It was believed for a moment that the half-sister

of Leo X., Philiberta of Savoy, was about to take up her abode at the

Vatican: “God be praised!” cried Bibbiena exultantly, “all we lack is a

court with women!” This happiness was not realised; women continued to

be conspicuous by their absence. We see how it was that, in the supreme

sanctuary of human glory, in the Eternal City that served as beacon

to the world, the Ninons de l’Enclos,[336] for want of better women,

fulfilled in their own way a singular apostolic mission by playing the

part of court ladies, and by magnificently entertaining the pick of

poets, savants, artists, prelates and diplomatists, at a period when

every man plumed himself on bearing one of those labels and on sporting

it about some petticoat.

Bewitching pictures of the receptions of these ladies have been

bequeathed to us; many a poet who knew the world chiefly in this quarter

has vaunted with enthusiasm the aroma of grace pervading their noble

salons, the honour of admission to them, the relations established there,

the superb fêtes which consecrated their charm and set a seal upon the

connection. This was no new thing; Socrates and Pliny testify how keenly

the society of ancient Greece and Rome had felt the need of guidance

by women more deeply experienced in life and more naturally active

than high-born ladies are likely to be. To name these ladies Ninons de

l’Enclos, however, would be to give a very imperfect and mean idea of

them, for their influence was at once moral and intellectual. Doubtless

they could pretend to no virginity but that of the heart, but since that

was the better part, they honoured pure love quite as conscientiously,

if not more than others did. Energy of a very special and sincere kind

impelled them to react strongly against the scorn of a world they had an

equal right to scorn; and further, they felt the necessity of stopping

their ears if they were to save themselves from blank hopelessness, and

of setting up noble illusions about themselves.

Several of them were genuine patricians, whose only possible reproach was

a tincture of pride. One would flaunt her descent, which she possibly

traced back to the Colonna or even the Massimo[337]; another would

modestly sign herself “Roman patrician.” The entrée to their salons

was particularly difficult; some of them imposed somewhat rigorous

conditions, insisting for instance that a man should mount guard for

two months with the Swiss at the palace gate, or should pay his devoir

on his knees. The style of their houses and appointments left nothing

to be desired; they maintained an extreme decorum. It is not for us to

boast of their virtue: their talent consisted in being as virtuous as

possible and getting rich more particularly by way of legacies; it would

have been a great mistake to deal with them cavalierly. Tullia d’Aragona,

who thoughtlessly allowed some rather broad pasquinades to be addressed

to her, was unfortunate enough, on a visit with which she honoured the

court of Ferrara, to turn all the gentlemen’s heads. But the most diverse

ordeals found her inflexible; she rejected with indignation the miserable

offer of a golden necklace worth three hundred crowns. The daughter of

another of these ladies had been so excellently brought up that she has

a place among the martyrs of virtue and patriotism; she slew herself to

escape the importunities of the governor of Sienna.

They were queens of elegance, and never a brunette among them. At their

houses people discoursed most excellent music. They were great dancers.

They were the happy owners of fine jewels, fine pictures, fine statuary;

on their tables might be seen the newest books, choice editions,

sometimes adorned with a manuscript dedication in verse. They knew Greek

and Latin; they corresponded with their absent friends in gracious and

affectionate letters, Ciceronian in style, and with no lack of wit. In

conversation it required very little pressure to tap a bountiful spring

of elegant extracts from the classics—most often got second-hand from

Petrarch or Boccaccio—or even, on occasion, a learned disquisition on

Roman archaeology. Sometimes they shot out a phrase in the high pietistic

fashion of the day. What lady of recognised position could have written

more charming sonnets than Imperia or Veronica Franco?

They excelled in keeping wit in play: Aretino confesses that, without an

incentive of this sort, he would have been good for nothing. Occasionally

some poor devil was graciously permitted to give a taste of his quality,

but, as a rule, the mistress of the house preferred to inspire men who

had well-lined purses. Yes, it was a grave and distinguished society,

and if sometimes the conversation touched on subjects but indifferently

mystical, what immaculate drawing-room but was open to the same reproach?

On saints’ days these ladies went to pay their devotions at the

neighbouring basilica, and if they were not very devout they were at

any rate beautifully dressed. Their accustomed air of good breeding and

conscious dignity, which drove many ladies to despair, gave them genuine

rank, and made them the indispensable ornaments of important festivities.

Thus several of them lent lustre to the magnificent reception given in

1513 by the Cardinal of Mantua to young Federico Gonzaga, then in his

fourteenth year, as he passed through on the way to Rome. In truth,

there were some who behaved exactly like high-born dames, and were

pre-eminent in all deeds of devotion, whole-hearted love, and even

disinterestedness. Poets innumerable have vouched for their virtue.

Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo dedicated sonnets to them.

Not infrequently they ended their days in the odour of piety, and were

buried in the churches[338]; to this day prayers are offered in the

shadow of their tombs. Michelangelo wrote an epitaph for one of them.

Others prosaically married men of the world, and these ladies, as a rule,

took rather a superior pride in their virtue and their coat-of-arms. A

clever woman of the time philosophically hit off the subject: “Life is a

comedy: so long as the last act is successful, the whole piece is fine.”

Nevertheless these interesting creatures necessarily had their

detractors. They have been accused of trickery and deception. With all

allowance for the prejudice of their enemies, it cannot be denied that

eccentricities here and there gave a handle to the slanderers. The lady,

for instance, who wore slippers covered with diamonds, and made men

kiss her feet (like the pope), alleging that her foot too was beautiful

enough to merit adoration, was considered to have overstepped the

bounds. But with the general public, and even with connoisseurs, such

dainty exactions did not produce the same astonishment that they would

produce to-day. The religion of beauty touched such deep chords that the

beautiful appeared always beautiful under all forms, so much so that in

certain Italian collections of “Lives of illustrious women,” saints and

courtesans stand cheek by jowl.

Men professed for these ladies the same veneration and idolatrous respect

as for a princess; they plied them with the same sighs, the same verses,

the same little tendernesses. The game cost a little dearer, but in

reality they were not unwilling to regard a courtesan’s drawing-room as

more moral than certain reputable drawing-rooms, since a man was not

likely to meet a ridiculous husband there, or embarrassing young cousins

of both sexes, or certain fashionable girls whose tongues had a tang. And

it was much less compromising.

Was there a moral advantage in elevating what had till then been so

degraded? For a long time it was sincerely believed there was, and

this belief was held almost throughout Italy. On this point it is

sufficient to read a very curious letter addressed by some unknown

person, concealing himself under the pseudonym “Apollo,” to the witty and

eminently virtuous Isabella d’Este. It is dated Ferrara, June 13, 1537,

and refers to a visit then being paid to the city by Tullia d’Aragona.

It runs: “There has just arrived here a very pretty lady, so staid in

deportment, so fascinating in manner, that we cannot help finding in her

something truly divine. She sings all sorts of airs and motets at sight;

her conversation has matchless charm; she knows everything, and there

is nothing you cannot talk to her about. There is no one here to hold

a candle to her, not even the Marchioness of Pescara.” An ambassador

exceeded even these rhapsodies, and wrote gravely to his government that

he was composing his despatches under the eye of this pretty woman, who

assisted him with her advice.

Tullia d’Aragona, who was, we may remark, very proud of the noble blood

in her veins, thus played Egeria to the most exalted personages, and

they had no hesitation in comparing her to a mother of the church like

Vittoria Colonna, or in placing her even higher. She justified this

enthusiasm, not only by her physical beauty and her wit, but by real

moral qualities. She proved that the spirit of the beautiful elevates the

basest things, and if she did not turn Trappist, if she continued to live

the life she was born to, she brought to it a contempt of money which was

itself a purifying virtue. This admirable creature, after holding all

Italy spellbound by the charm of her velvety eyes, died in destitution;

she gave instructions that she should be buried in the quietest way

beside her poor mother in the church of Sant Agostino, where she had

endowed masses; her belongings had to be sold by auction, and they

realised twelve crowns and a half.

Imperia attained even a higher place than Tullia, and we are compelled

to believe that the aegis of virtue, like charity, can cover a multitude

of sins, since we find Sadoleto, the type of sincere piety, singing the

praises of this amiable woman, and Raphael setting her, so it is said, at

the foot of his Parnassus in the apartments of Julius II.

We do not know (and it is almost better so) what Imperia had done to

excite so general an enthusiasm: she died at twenty-six! All that we know

is that August 15, 1511, the day of her death, was observed at Rome as a

day of public mourning. On her tomb was engraved an epitaph in the purest

lapidary style. The poets, maybe with a very subtle irony, lauded her to

the skies as a new goddess of Latium: we hardly need to repeat these fine

phrases. “Our fathers mourned the Empire (_Imperium_); we mourn Imperia.

They had lost the world: we have lost our hearts, our very selves.” “The

whole city was moved when this young deity was snatched away on Tiber

banks,” exclaims Vitalis—“the whole city, even the old pagan walls, even

the _fasti_ of the consuls!” “No longer is she beneath this marble,”

cries Silvanus; “henceforth she holds her place among the constellations,

she will guide our fleets.” But Silvanus becomes a little mixed in his

mythology, and in connection with the new star unaccountably couples the

names of Julius II. and Jupiter.

For all this glory and honour, Imperia and her kind inevitably became

rather burdensome, and the most aesthetic of the popes, Leo X., struck

them a fatal blow when he expelled them from Rome in 1520. They took

refuge at Venice, despite the heroic opposition of the senate.

But at Venice they lost all their peculiar charm: Venice, the metropolis

of pleasure, “the foam of the sea,” set its stamp upon them. Venice

was the earthly paradise of matter-of-fact folk like Brantôme and

Aretino. The latter wrote to an amiable lady: “You cannot picture these

water-parties in the open air, these coaching expeditions on _terra

firma_, these secluded groves, these banquets, these unaccustomed

consolations.... From your windows you will have a panorama of musicians,

singers and buffoons,” a tempest of pleasure. “You would fancy yourself a

queen.” But at Venice such queens did not govern, as at Rome; men added

them to their collection, that was all.

Thus disappeared one of the most striking curiosities of the platonist

society,—the one which has left the most vivid memories. It was only

possible under the caressing warmth of the Roman sky.

Leo’s decree evoked loud cries of distress, and the loudest of all

came from the French, who, though they had never understood this art

of harlotry and had made great fun of it, thought it a capital thing

all the same. Rome, they as good as said, was no longer Rome: “How

doleful the Jubilee will be!” cries a pilgrim: “what shall I do in

Rome now?” Du Bellay, while a melancholy guest of the gloom-beclouded

city, apostrophised this new ruin in well-known verses. (O Rome, sad,

tender Rome, to whom every passing generation must needs bequeath a

new triumphal arch, new catacombs!) Many years later, distinguished

travellers like Henri III. and Montaigne did their best to hunt up the

last of the courtesans.

We cannot but confess that the attempt to rehabilitate the demi-monde

and to employ it in the heavenward voyage strikes us as extremely

venturesome; the younger Dumas, like a true Frenchman, was not bold

enough to persevere. Our ancestors felt the same qualms: unhappily, it

was not from virtuous scruples. They recognised the work accomplished by

platonism, so bent were they on transfiguring love through coquetry,[339]

and so hopeful, in the interests of humanity, of rendering virtuous women

more come-at-able. But when it was suggested to them, as necessary to

complete their work, that they should render come-at-able women more

virtuous, they were steadfast as rock.

They discovered another way of giving an aristocratic stamp to things

that could not be spiritualised. We are bound to touch upon it, because

this also throws back a vague reflexion of platonism; besides, in

approaching these delicate problems in morality, which it is so expedient

to look at dispassionately, we have no intention of dedicating our work

to girls.

It was sought to blend the idea of an immaterial union of hearts—an

idea borrowed from platonism, and one whose beauty and importance were

not disputed—with the other idea that such a compact must necessarily

be sealed by an absolute and unreserved intimacy, or it would remain

chimerical and oppressive. This idea the French could not part with;

and consequently there arose the notion of what may be called a second

marriage, supplementary to the authorised marriage—a union _de facto_,

recognised, acknowledged, declared, and so highly honoured that one would

be tempted to call it an eighth sacrament. Similar unions, recognised

by the world, were still known at the end of the 18th century, and even

under the Restoration during the early years of the 19th, having survived

the worst trials of the Revolution, the Emigration, penury, and exile, to

say nothing of the still more ruthless test of time.

This custom of giving publicity to secret unions was not a direct

outgrowth of platonism; yet platonist women looked on it by no means

unfavourably. In the first place, they thought it rather lucky that their

husbands, enjoying an irregularity in some sort regularised, more highly

respected their wives’ dignity, quiet and health.[340] Secondly, we have

already shown how little platonism there was in morals under Francis

I., and what unbridled licence reigned at court. Melin de Saint-Gelais

portrays the king as a cock in a hen-run—or as a sun in a firmament of

stars, amid Canaples, star of the morning; the lovely Saint-Paul, star of

evening; Diana, the crescent-moon; and many other stellar beauties eager

to shine—Helly, Rieux, Tallard, Lestrange—who, if their names were not

mentioned, “would have thought it strange.”

Francis I. said plainly that a man without a mistress was only a

nincompoop. In that case was it not a mark of progress to arrive at

the institution of a regular mistress, recognised and with no rivals?

Margaret of France would have been only too glad to see her brother fix

his affections prudently on some eminent lady, who would rank next the

queen and might be called the queen and “mirror of all propriety.” That

explains, no doubt, the affectionate, obsequious, humble welcome she gave

to the duchess d’Etampes, whose reign seemed for a moment likely to be

lasting. She wrote for this noble lady the _Coche_ or _Débat d’Amour_, a

little treatise intended to prove that, apart from pure platonism, there

can still exist a laudable love; and in the presentation copy Margaret,

the king’s sister, had herself represented, in complete black, before the

queen of the day in all the brilliance of her beauty and her jewels, and

saying to her: “_Plus vous que moy_”; in other words, “You are more than

I.”

With a like feeling of feminine delicacy, perhaps somewhat exaggerated,

Veronica Gambara, who was probably virtuous and quite certainly platonic,

went into raptures over the good fortune of the “siren” who succeeded in

holding for some time the volatile heart of Aretino; the words of Laura

and Beatrice rose instantly to her lips, as if the ideal were on the

point of attainment.

Henri II. showed himself a platonist in this sense; his double

establishment did not constitute an infidelity. He was faithful to two

wives, one official, responsible for perpetuating his dynasty and acting

for him in affairs, after the old tradition; the other personal, to

satisfy his heart as a man.

Diana of Poitiers, it must be admitted, besides her beauty which

long retained its ripeness, had all the qualities for beguiling and

captivating a lofty heart—birth almost as good as the queen’s (who was

only a Medici), wit, warm-heartedness, self-devotion. She has herself

explained, in excellent verse, how her position, false as it seems to us,

was born of a genuine passion. One fine morning, she tells us, a young

Cupid in all his fresh, light-footed, bashful youth came roaming in her

neighbourhood, filling her mantle with marjoram and jonquilles, casting a

spell upon her. She resisted, shutting eyes and ears against him, though

she felt her heart melting; she would listen to no promises, no oaths.

He held out to her a wonderful laurel wreath, a queen’s crown. “No,” she

replied, “better far be good than a queen,” and yet she felt herself

“thrilling and trembling.”

Et comprendrez sans peine

Duquel matin je prétends reparler.[341]

Love did not speak her false: he offered her a kingdom, a great part to

play, and kept his word, as the walls of the Louvre testify. To all her

contemporaries the position of Diana appeared magnificent, divine. Du

Bellay has sung of it as the most beautiful of marriages, the marriage of

true minds:

Dieu vous a fait entre nous

Comme un miracle apparoistre,

Afin que de ce grand Roy,

D’une inviolable foy,

Vous peussiez posséder l’âme,

Et que son affection,

Par vostre perfection,

Brulast d’une sainte flamme.

Les Roys monstrent aux humains

De Dieu l’exemple et l’image.[342]

To the French, this was the perfect type of platonism, at once practical

and sacred.

Vous avez acquis le cœur de toute la France.[343]

And Ronsard is not less explicit:

Seray-je seul, vivant en France de vostre âge,

Sans chanter vostre nom, si craint et si puissant?

Diray-je point l’honneur de vostre beau croissant?

Feray-je point pour vous quelque immortel ouvrage?[344]

In spite of all these dithyrambs, it is very clear that the platonism of

Diana of Poitiers is a sign of decadence. It was the ideal of platonist

women to be loved for their soul; men’s ideal being the opposite, there

had been a compromise.[345]

The compromise, indeed, was greater than they were willing to admit, even

in Italy, and in the purest centres of platonism. Our readers are already

acquainted with the charming Bembo, the quintessence of platonism, the

admirable chiseller of phrases, the secretary of Leo X., the friend of

everything beautiful, noble and aesthetic, the magnificent collector,

the apostle of Plato and Petrarch, of Boccaccio and Dante, the idol

of the ladies, in short, one of the men who clung to the skirts of

princesses, parading their everlasting sentimentalities under the most

perfect, exquisite, elevated form. We have a moving letter of his. Among

that numerous bevy of princesses who nourished him on ethereal glances

from their bright eyes, there was one he loved, the Morosina, a pure

and charming woman, to whom, as Monsignor Beccadelli has said, “he had

the good sense to devote himself,”[346] and who had given him, in the

most common, everyday fashion, a goodly number of children. He lost her.

The unhappy man was stricken to the core; his whole being bled. What a

state in which to find the divine Bembo, the prophet of the celestial

felicities! Death has plunged a knife into his heart. Love—yes, he too

had loved. He unbosoms himself to one of his friends, Gabriele Trifon.

We were struck with surprise when we first came upon the letter; it was

the intimate revelation of a soul; a Bembo of real flesh and blood,

grief-stricken, palpitating. “You,” he writes, “have softened the anguish

which overwhelms me, in speaking to me as a man, not as a philosopher

platonic and divine.”

He adds that he has sought to reason with himself, to preach himself

lessons of wisdom, to find relief in his passion for work; but the most

delightful book slips from his hand. Between the book and his eyes the

sweet image re-appears to him in a mist of tears; and as he makes this

confession, tears gush out afresh and soil the paper, his heart is

stripped bare; the whole man is before us. “I have lost the dearest heart

in the world, a heart which tenderly watched over my life, which loved

it and sustained it neglectful of its own; a heart so much the master

of itself, so disdainful of vain embellishments and adornments, of silk

and gold, of jewels and treasures of price, that it was content with the

single and (so she assured me) supreme joy of the love I bore it. This

heart, moreover, had for vesture the softest, gracefulest, daintiest of

limbs; it had at its service pleasant features, and the sweetest, most

graciously endowed form that I have ever met in this country. I cannot

forbear lamenting, I cannot but curse the stars that have deprived us of

enjoying each other in so innocent a life.”

What a singular underside of platonism! What a warmth of grief! Where

is all the platonic paraphernalia—the beautiful ladies all smiles and

ice, the careless disdain of physical beauty, the adoration of social

life, the horror of solitude? Where are the many-faceted phrases, the

philosophic dissertations? Bembo has turned pious like all the unhappy;

he will not accuse Providence unjustly; though it has snatched happiness

from him, he gives thanks for the happiness enjoyed. But sentiments

are not snapped in a moment—sentiments “which with time have rooted

themselves so deeply in our humanity that ’twould seem impossible to

eradicate them.” He writes, effusively, thanking the friend whom he knew

to have been bound by genuine friendship “to this beautiful and precious

lady.” He speaks of the children; he will care for them, since he is

their father, and because ere she died the Morosina, having fulfilled her

religious duties, had faintly whispered these words, which pierced his

soul like a hot iron: “‘I commend our sons to you, and beseech you to

have care of them, both for my sake and for yours. Be sure they are your

own, for I have never done you wrong; that is why I could take our Lord’s

body just now with soul at peace.’ Then after a long pause she added:

‘Rest with God,’ and a few minutes afterwards closed her eyes for ever,

those eyes which had been the clear-shining faithful stars of my weary

pilgrimage through life.”

Ah, these tears! They had hearts, then, these fashionable platonists.

Never in any of his fine discourses has Bembo touched us, nor even (if

we may say so) rejoiced us as by this simple stifled cry, these tears

of solitude. He is prone upon the earth, having lost the wings that

bore him on from flower to flower.... Four years after the death of the

Morosina, we find that, despite his good resolutions and the counsels of

his friends, he is as profoundly crushed as on the first day. He seeks

consolation from poetry; he has begun a canzone on the death of his “fair

and good Morosina”; he has finished the first strophe and sketched out

the second, and he sends these still formless attempts to his intimates,

to show them all that his feeble faltering hand can accomplish.

To sum up, the great moral movement of platonism resulted in a wide

dissemination of sensibility, and a general softening—a softening of

virtue and vice, of women and men. This was no small thing; there is

certainly an advantage in cutting the claws of men but scantly idyllic,

and in doing nothing rather than in doing ill.

This softening was often only external, and not without an admixture

of hypocrisy. But why deplore it? For men to appear worse than they

are is no proof that they are better. Men showed signs of sensibility,

even though they knew little of love. Under a mask of amiability and

tenderness their egotism remained intact; they talked of contemplation,

of devotion, of the worship beauty required,—without conviction, it

may be; but then they might have employed their time worse, and they

unconsciously contributed to spread salutary ideas. One of those

ridiculous creatures who spent their lives in haunting their idols like a

shadow, perceived with horror that on entering a church his lady refused

alms to a beggar. He was so deeply shocked that one of his friends had

much ado to prove to him, while chafing him back to life, that the beggar

was ill-bred, importunate, impudent, and unworthy of assistance. Here at

any rate was a man of sensibility.

But an untoward thing happened. In cultivating sensibility to the

utmost, women enfeebled men instead of forming them. Anne of France

undoubtedly foresaw this danger when she so ardently commended vigorous

and matter-of-fact occupations, and uttered a warning against the abuses

of the religion of beauty. Many other ladies, unhappily, genuine artists

in refinement, took a complacent pleasure in the very perfection of

their conduct, with the result that always ensues in such cases: their

art became degraded, and in sinking into a matter of routine, came to

ruin. In true love there is, as it were, an outpouring of one’s nature, a

vivifying joy, a sort of intense feeling which strengthens; but in love

in the more vulgar sense there is a spurious and meretricious poetry

which enervates. An old French proverb ran: “When the woman rules the

man, he hasn’t much will of his own.” This the anti-feminists repeated,

with too much reason. “Ah yes!” cries Nifo, “’tis in good sooth a fine

dream of yours. What a magnificent moral state if all men loved one

another! No more war, no more crime!... But is that the result you have

obtained? You have distilled I know not what mawkishness. Where are the

energetic, young-witted, happy, high-minded men born of your affections?”

And what was the age of love which was to spring from this generation?

We cannot impute to platonism the creatures of watery blood and hang-dog

look who were to form the nucleus of the court of the Valois—these

Panurges, false from top to toe, who had early wasted their substance

physical and moral—these young tired-eyed voluptuaries whom Lotto paints

so well, too weak to pluck the petals of a rose, their hand on their

heart as though to point out the source of the mischief. But alas!

we cannot but ascribe to sheer gallantry the mob of carpet knights,

pale-faced, gilded cap-a-pie, gay ornaments of tourneys, sleek and

fawning, ready like Ariosto to sing imaginary exploits, “provided that

beauty, which every hour robs them of some fresh portion of intelligence,

leaves them enough for the fulfilment of their promise.” They are rigged

out as elaborately as the ladies, if not more elaborately (save that

instead of displaying the bosom they display the leg), with flying

plumes; in winter, smothered under furs; in summer all unbraced, not

being able to endure even a loose garment; loaded with diamonds, so that

you would take them for walking showcases of the king of Naples or the

duke of Berry. They are philosophical, in the sense that they soar high

above ideas of patriotism, and prove it by disguising themselves in

costumes of all nations, the Turks included. They are learned, that is to

say, they think it smart to stuff the French language with heteroclite

words, as though eager to tear from it its pith and heart, and make this

also a delusion and a snare, as universally acceptable as blonde wigs and

padded busts.

The great, wonderful reform effected by platonism in the higher ranks of

society was—that the men, copying the ancient sages and the orientals,

let their beards grow! Up till then, no man could pretend to style unless

he shaved, or even, for the sake of greater perfection, depilated his

chin; there had been one cry of horror when Cardinal Bessarion appeared

with his beard at the court of Louis XI. But now that Castiglione, the

Roman prelates, and the high platonist society sported the philosophic

beard, there was a sudden craze for going unshorn among the young snobs

of Louis XII.’s court,—the Bonnivets and others.

This reform, strange to say, excited between the higher and lower clergy

one of the most acrimonious disputes with which we are acquainted. Vicars

and curates belaboured the bishops with texts against the beard. The

prelates parried with abstruse disquisitions; they claimed that a good

beard did no offence to honour and probity; they sifted the sentiments of

the ancient Romans in regard to the beard and found them in sympathy with

their own; they made out that the apostles had never dreamt of shaving,

and proved to demonstration that a decree of a council of Carthage,

appealed to by the lower clergy, was an interpolation, and in any case

was of no authority, the infallibility of the Church not dating back

so far; and a decree of Alexander III., which they were also clamorous

about, applied only to the hair of the head.

For the other part, to say nothing of the beard of Julius II.,[347] one

only had to turn over the leaves of church history to find on every page

bearded saints, sometimes of high eminence; bearded hermits, strangers

alike to the care of the body, to Plato, and to women. The dispute

occasioned a terrible waste of eloquence, erudition, vivacity, irony

and earnestness. It was of the highest importance, and bore on the most

sacred interests of what some eminent personages called platonism.

And now it cannot fail to be asked by what strange and cruel logic a

century, cradled at its birth in the idea of the beautiful, of love and

happiness, was to become a hotbed of hatred, the arena in which the most

savage animosities were implacably to contend. Must we believe that in

throwing down the barriers of a rigorous code and invoking liberty we

must inevitably bruise ourselves against force, rendered thereby freer

and more ferocious? That would be a sad and disheartening conclusion,

for then we should have to consider human progress as a perpetual

recommencement, seeing that, though the lawless rise insurgent against

tender hearts, though gospel wisdom warns us of the eternal despotism

of the violent, there are still found and will ever be found among us

incorrigible wretches, hungering for sympathy, and unable to live without

a ray of love.

CHAPTER III

INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE

Women approached intellectual questions in the same dilettante spirit

as questions of affairs; and this dilettantism was their chosen method.

It was waste of time to speak to them of discoveries, creations,

speculations, ventures, struggles—of the scientific furniture of life, of

all the irksome material tasks on which the intellectual existence itself

is based. They sought only to crown the edifice with happiness, which

does not concern those who clear the ground.[348] La Bruyère fancied he

was saying a very cutting thing when he declared that “women are cured

of idleness by means of vanity and love”; it is really very amiable;

would to heaven the same might be said of certain men! Women are cured

of idleness by sentiment; they reason with their feelings. You must not

ask them to pry and delve into the stubborn heart of things; they look

at the bright surface, and penetrate what yields to the touch. And by

this simple method they perceive things that escape the microscope,

things that defy analysis, thanks to an intuitive impressionability

which enables them to see rather than to know, and which would be wholly

admirable if it were never misused. Further, they have a marvellous and

mysterious talent for expressing their enthusiasm; a phrase feelingly

quoted by a lady strikes our mind with a quite peculiar force when we

afterwards come upon it in the pages of a book. Again, they love the men

who love what they love. How strong and firm a bond is a common love!

And how delightful to make mind the handmaid of love, and perhaps even

to make love the handmaid of mind! To live happy, what does it matter

whether you have an exact knowledge of a peacock’s or a nightingale’s

anatomy? Similarly women do not want you to pull words to pieces and

set them in accurate alphabetical order, but to place them in a living

order, so as to draw from them their vital force. As they ascribe

everything to love, and believe the establishment of a balance in human

affairs absolutely necessary, so they think also that their duty in

intellectual matters is to foster men’s productivity, their beautiful

art is concerned with men. Hence they do not trouble to investigate very

profoundly the secret significance of surrounding nature; it is of little

moment to them whether an artist seeks to reproduce natural forms with

photographic fidelity—which is in any case impossible—but they insist on

a general resemblance, they require the artist to indicate how a tree or

a landscape reflects itself in man, and what impression it produces. In

a word, they charge themselves with the mission of elevating our views,

whether by developing by means of artistic sensibility the ideas that lie

in germ in material nature, or by constantly renewing our thoughts by

means of a liberal philosophy.

The Italian women who at the end of the 15th century devoted themselves

to this intellectual programme were legion; or rather, they all did so.

There was no maiden, however modest her station, who did not consider

herself in a measure responsible for the future, and who did not make

real preparation for becoming the intellectual queen of a salon, or

of some sort of home of her own, while her husband attended to his

external occupations. And when her parents were happy enough to detect

in their little daughter the mysterious spark of the beautiful, far

from mistrusting it, they welcomed it with rapture as a sacred gift of

Providence and left nothing undone to develop it. Signorina Trivulzi, a

spoilt child of fortune, was in all seriousness thus “consecrated” to the

Muses at the age of fourteen.

Impressionability is a gift of nature; but that does not imply that there

is no need to strengthen it by means of an earnest intellectual culture.

People were only too well convinced of the necessity of this precaution

when they saw women who were impressionable and nothing else spinning

round like weathercocks. The Italian ladies of the classic generation

had known how to take a firm stand and a steady hold on life, so that

they united to perfection the eminently becoming qualities of solid

intelligence and modesty with an ardent impulse towards beauty in its

philosophic, religious, or artistic form.

If examples were necessary, our only difficulty would be to choose among

women like Cassandra Fideli, Costanza Varano, Isotta Nugarola, and many

another worthy of honour. There is little risk in our indicating among

the queens of the period Isabella d’Este, marchioness of Mantua.

Isabella, who was born in 1474, and died in 1525, belongs in time to

the earlier generation, of whose characteristics she was thoroughly

representative; that is to say, along with a transparent soul, a heart

full of passion, and a quick intelligence, she retained virtues which

were to become rare—individuality of mind and sureness of taste. She was

not one of those impressionable women who are inevitably caught by the

glamour of established reputations, and who urge men on to achieve a

noisy notoriety; she could form her own estimate of things, and become

the originator rather than the follower of a movement. She travelled

frequently and to good purpose; her friends and agents, scattered as

far as the East, kept her informed of every event which might have any

bearing on the cult of beauty, such as the bringing-out of notable books

or fine editions, the works issued from great studios, excavations,

sales of collections. At the sale of the celebrated Vianelo collection

at Venice in 1505, she followed with the liveliest emotion the bidding

for a certain _Passage of the Red Sea_ by Jean de Bruges, which she

passionately coveted, and which Andrea Loredano remorselessly ran up

to a hundred and fifteen ducats. An antique Venus which much occupied

her thoughts happened unluckily to be in too good hands—those of Caesar

Borgia; but Caesar was not immortal, and one day the Venus rejoiced the

heart of a new owner, the duke of Urbino. Before long Cardinal d’Este

had willy-nilly to gird up his loins in pursuit of it. (What a lucky

windfall the sack of Rome in 1527 was to collectors!) The marchioness,

at the moment, emptied her purse, indeed, rather more than emptied

it,—always pretty easy to her; she had to charter a boat to carry off all

her treasures, but alas! the boat was seized by some rascally pirates,

and was never heard of again! For all these little vexations, those

were glorious days! One person’s calamity was another’s opportunity,

and as the result of the growth of culture, a stone newly unearthed, a

well-turned verse seemed diamonds of happiness.

Isabella was a royal, frank, delicate patroness of the human intellect.

She cherished in undisturbed harmony around her the _Sleeping Cupid_ of

Michelangelo and a choice collection of antique statues; she covered

her walls with the works of Mantegna, Costa, and Correggio; Leonardo da

Vinci and Titian were her portrait painters; she herself painted her soul

in two words: “Neither by hope nor by fear.” As an ideal for life and

an emblem for her house, she commissioned of the great idealist master

Perugino a _Combat between Love and Chastity_,[349] and wished to arrange

its composition to the minutest details; but poor Perugino, whose soul

was as simple and unspoiled as his head was thick, got a little befogged

in so intricate a scheme, so utterly unlike his usual Madonnas; and

for all his good will, perhaps he did not on that occasion produce his

masterpiece.

In France, the notable women of the generation of Isabella d’Este did

not plume themselves on playing a similar part; they rather avoided

it, whether because as partisans of physical activity they feared to

carry too much dilettantism into life, or because circumstances did

not strike them as favourable. Queen Anne of Brittany, in spite of her

surname of “refuge of learned men,” never regarded art as anything but

a royal and magnificent superfluity. Anne of France made her court a

veritable nursery-garden of literary men and artists; many works of

real magnificence were added to the library at Moulins; but Moulins did

not radiate an influence like Mantua. It was only the next generation

that saw the appearance of women of the Italian type, those queens

of the intellect of whom Mary Stuart was to leave us the enchanting

memory—Mary, to whom Ronsard could say without undue exaggeration—

Le jour que vostre voile aux vagues se courba,

Et de nos yeux pleurans les vostres deroba,

Ce jour, la mesme voile emporta loin de France

Les Muses qui souloient y faire demourance.

Depuis, nostre Parnasse est devenu stérile;

Sa source maintenant d’une bourbe distile ...

Son laurier est séché, son lierre est destruit![350]

Then the taste for pure art and the influence of the South towards

preciosity came in with a flourish of trumpets. The first French

Renaissance, in close contact with rural traditions, had devoted itself

mainly to the development of force of intellect. It had attached only a

secondary value to the worship of form and to external beauty; persons

who composed verses, like Charles of Orleans, did not proclaim the fact.

Classical relations were established with ancient Rome, the city which

drove its iron into the soul and left indestructible landmarks on the

soil of France. A ready assent would have been given to the saying of

Seneca: “There is only one art that is truly liberal and makes a man

free, and that is the study of wisdom; all other arts are base and

puerile.... I cannot give the name of liberal arts to painting, statuary,

and the decorative arts.”

This prejudice was persistent, with the result that, even while yielding

unreservedly to the religion of beauty, people could not bring themselves

to grant the plastic arts the same pre-eminence as in Italy. Moreover,

even in Italy, painting had had much difficulty in securing a footing:

many people at any rate gave sculpture the preference, that being plastic

indeed, but less decorative, more scientific, durable, and complete. The

comparison served as a theme for _jeux d’esprit_. Some people amused

themselves with defending the superiority of painting, by calling God

the first of painters, the sublime decorator; others carried the paradox

to the point of demonstrating that painting is necessary to war, if only

for drawing up plans or making sketches; that it evoked the enthusiasm

of the greatest conquerors, like Alexander the Great, and Demetrius,

who relinquished the siege of Rhodes rather than risk setting fire to a

district of the city where a picture by Protogenes might have perished

in the flames. In reality the Italians were fond of painting because

they found in it one of the most tender and delightful forms of poetry.

Castiglione well expressed this feeling to the sculptor Cristoforo

Romano: “It is not my friendship for Raphael that leads me to prefer

painting: I know Michelangelo, I know you, I know all these masters!

But I find in painting a marvellous charm; it has its plays of light,

its chiaroscuro; it demands as much skill in design as sculpture, and

offers special difficulties in regard to foreshortenings and perspective.

It gives us the colours of reality; it renders more satisfactorily the

flesh, the eyes, the sheen of armour, the delicious golden hues of hair,

the radiance of love. It alone can speak to us of Nature, reproduce for

us the starry skies, the hurricanes and tempests, the rosy dawn, the

earth and sea, hills and woods, meadows and gardens, rivers, cities and

houses.”

Among the French, on the contrary, the triumph of aestheticism led to

the lowering of the plastic arts in general esteem; painters, sculptors

and architects no longer received the same personal and affectionate

support from high-born ladies as formerly from Anne of France or Anne of

Brittany; they lost caste at the court of Francis I., and gained nothing

but higher wages; they were treated rather like house-decorators or

upholsterers. People applied to art the general principle: Seek ye first

intellectual beauty. All were agreed that thought must be worshipped in

its highest possible purity; and as thought nevertheless needs a material

vesture, poetry was its fitting garb, as “daughter of the skies”; and

consequently the movement followed a bent almost exclusively literary

and philosophico-poetical. It is hardly necessary for us to say that we

are here confining ourselves to the sphere of feminine illusions. No one

disputes the beneficial effect of mountain air on certain complaints;

but it would be exceedingly tiresome if all mankind were condemned to

live on the summit of the Righi.

Margaret of France set herself in opposition to these Alpine ladies, who

took such delight in the ever-receding altitudes of the intellect. She

was driven to adopt this attitude of temerity partly by her position. As

sister of the king, she had to fill the part of “queen of the sex,” and

so far as higher matters were concerned, it appeared natural and right

that her brother should follow her advice.[351] This explains why the

poets so decorously did homage to her: “heroine of the age,” they called

her, “mind and knowledge in person ... flower of flowers, the choicest of

the choice ... less human than divine.”

Apart from the inconveniences of too lofty a station, Margaret suffered

from those arising from her training, having like many women the

misfortune of being particularly sensible to influences; her flights are

often those of someone else. She remained unswervingly faithful to the

habits of her childhood, in other words, to a brilliant and sceptical

environment, in which ready wit was regarded as the supreme gift, and

liberty consisted in seeing everything, reading everything, hearing

everything from a detached eminence, superficially, and without caring

for anything in particular except the satisfaction of a sense of form.

The only dogma tenaciously held was the pre-eminence of women, and it was

an accepted maxim in that society that one woman of real accomplishment

conduces more effectually to human happiness than all the lumber of

sciences and all the litter of books.

Margaret was thus a philosopher, generous and variable, sceptical and

enthusiastic, somewhat visionary, because the speculative spirit spells

freedom and distinction. But she was lacking in that ballast of serious

studies[352] which, after all, alone permits the development of one’s

personality.

Thus lost in the clouds, unstable and vacillating, in reality she took

no one intellectual party under her wing; she smiled on everything that

was beautiful or pleasant, in other words, on every means of acting on

men. She was fond of the music of that period, a wholly psychological

art with very little to tickle the ears of the groundlings, but speaking

to the soul; she loved any product of the intellect provided the setting

was worthy of the gem—ribald stories if they were witty, the drama,

lofty speculations on the emotional life, thoughts of divine love, the

religious contemplation of God. All these manifestations of the soul,

so little alike, she regarded as forming a single philosophic chain, a

chain of beauty leading up to God. This idea enabled her to link together

conceptions which appear to us disconcerting in juxtaposition, and which

her contemporaries themselves were at a loss to reconcile.

Her patronage was above all an art, the art of playing upon the human

intelligence as on the finest of keyboards, as on a magnificent and

genuinely divine instrument, and of drawing from it the grand harmonies

of which it is capable, the tones with which the Supreme Artist has

endowed it. Here she strikes a grave and profound note, there a note

shrill or thin; she sets men vibrating. “What!” she seems to say, “they

say that love deadens! No, no! People of feeling may find their joy in

their own natures, but that does not hinder them from finding it outside

themselves.” Bouchet and Rabelais, two men of the traditional school,

were dependents of Margaret, as well as Charbonnier and Marot, the poets

of the day, or Du Bellay and Ronsard, the poets of the morrow. Surrounded

by Catholic prelates, herself the intellectual lieutenant of a king

hostile to the Reformers, the princess interested herself in everything:

Lefèvre d’Etaples and Vatable discussed the Bible with her, Nicolas

Mauroy translated the Psalms for her; Jean Brèche translated Plutarch,

and Le Masson, Boccaccio. Her own intellect volatilised itself, and was

content to perfume the atmosphere.

It was the same in regard to persons; she admitted to intimate fellowship

with her the most diverse personages provided they were able to love;

and freedom of sentiment was apparently the essential condition of life.

Moreover, the intellectual life had not yet assumed the rectangular and

rigid forms under which we know it; and as people were particularly

eager for impressions, they were on their guard against all the checks

by which we so cleverly destroy them. A ruined wall was a ruin, moss

and neglect were part of its being; no one dreamt of scraping it,

ticketing it, surrounding it with an iron fence and a ring of pebbles.

An ancient monument showed itself as it was, covered with all the

vegetation which gave, so to say, artistic expression to the life of

succeeding generations; no one dreamt of rebuilding it as it originally

stood; objects of art _were_ objects of art, which people left in the

places they were made for, well in view and fittingly displayed, instead

of carting them away and piling them up in gold frames and lifeless

desolation on the walls of a museum.

To understand the intellectual dilettantism of Margaret we must steep

ourselves in these ideas of liberty and life, which are so alien to our

modes of thought, and which even then were on the point of disappearing.

Margaret loved to make an emotional impression on others, but she was

not at all anxious to guide their reason, any more than she was anxious

to be guided herself. Her zest for liberty, pushed to its extreme limit,

went almost as far as anarchy. What a singular intellectual harem was

hers! Here was a gay dog whose humour had a touch of obscenity; there

was a dear friend, the protonotary D’Anthe, author of witty trifles

particularly wanton, for instance the _Blason d’une jeune fille_, which

we could hardly venture to reproduce; or again, in an entirely different

direction, the oppressively virtuous Lavardin, a mighty fang-extractor,

whose special duty was to expurgate improper books; or the squeamish La

Perrière, who was a century behind the times, apologised for employing

the names of mythology, and had the worst of all defects, that of being

a bore. These various minds, working symmetrically, produce somewhat the

same effect as those many-paned mirrors set revolving by an invisible

hand, which might flash for ever without luring an eagle, but are very

serviceable for catching larks. The defect of this society was that

it attracted second-rate personages, pushing men, notoriety hunters.

Moreover, platonist society had always a strong tendency to degenerate

into snobbery; it had too much worldliness of character not to suit

drawing-room intriguers and men who knew how to get on in the world.

Platonism knew nothing of the modest and intelligent men who kept in the

background to enjoy the human comedy. This defect amused Castiglione: “To

be learned,” he said, “you must belong to the learned set.” The result

was sometimes amusing blunders; through being attributed to the wrong

author a poem or a piece of music would be received with hearty applause,

but afterwards, when better informed, the applauders would hiss, or vice

versa. It is the same with everything: wine is good or bad according to

the label; Castiglione guarantees he will present you any fool and get

you to believe him a genius.[353]

Margaret of France had a taste for notoriety, and sought to bring

together all the men who could voice the various opinions of France. She

showed them so much affectionate attention that each believed himself

to be the favourite, and every cause looked on her as an adherent; to

this day, after three centuries and a half, the witchery of the princess

remains so potent that everyone loves her and lays claim to her; the

platonic think she was a platonist, Rabelaisians rank her as one of

themselves, Protestants call her a Protestant. She contented herself with

disseminating love, with reconciling and discreetly moderating bitter

differences without ever bemoaning those which had brought suffering to

herself. It is a singular thing that at a distance she is sometimes taken

for a domineering, masculine blue-stocking, one of those women who shake

men as the wind shakes the trees, stripping them of leaf and blossom;

whereas near at hand she was all softness and loving-heartedness. The

most ardent declarations brought no frown to her brow (and left her heart

untouched); she pardoned them, laughed at them, sometimes received

them with a smile of pleasure. Thus a nobody named Jacques Pelletier

permits himself to call her “the half of my soul,” and boasts of her

“bitter-sweet favours,” by which he means tender and coy. But Margaret

for all her bashfulness does not care for bashful men; she prefers

energetic and robustious men who set the pulses beating, who even make

themselves tiresome and are not incapable of follies. A certain M. de

Lavaux swears he will die if she does not take pity on his martyrdom;

she promises him an admirable _De Profundis_. The amiable Hugues Salel

praised her pretty hand in extremely graceful little verses;[354] she

sends him a pair of scented gloves and a bracelet. But she never forgets

Marot; beyond the tomb, when all follies are over, she still proves her

sympathy for him.

Apart from this spirit of love you will probe the depths of her soul in

vain; there is nothing else to be found.

Margaret has photographed herself in her dressing-gown, surrounded by

her intimate friends, in the _Heptameron_;[355] the authenticity of the

portrait is guaranteed by herself and her daughter. And what strikes

one most forcibly in her doctrine is a pretty style and an excellent

solicitude to avoid dulness.

Her gospel was, in heaven God, on earth Francis I.; after them the

Beautiful, in which she believed with all her heart as the source of all

goodness and all truth. So far as happiness was concerned, she boldly

steered for love, which she regarded as the port for the Good and the

True. But she had little faith in passion, and confined herself to

drawing a most careful distinction between sentiment, which she praised,

and sensation, which she condemned; her system was built up on casuistry.

She thought that a woman might frankly accept the offer of a virtuous and

perfect love; if the man secretly harboured any carnal design, so much

the worse for him! Having never loved deeply herself, while on the other

hand she had heard so much talk of love, she believed that love was not

fatal and that a woman was by no means bound to push charity to the point

of absolute self-sacrifice. But remember, she did not commingle the ideas

of love and marriage, which were absolutely distinct. As no one can love

God without first loving one of His creatures, her design was to lure

men thus towards the perfect love of God, and then towards a mystic and

philosophical contemplation of the Godhead.

Unluckily, she did not reach her goal, or even get within sight of it.

Not for want of ardour: it may well be said of her: “Woman is a flame

flaming for ever.” For Bonnivet, “even in their ashes” lived her “wonted

fires,” lighting up in him the happy memories of youth. She spoke with

fervour, overwhelmed the sceptics with biting taunts or lofty deductions,

stimulated the timid by a cheering word, a flight of sentiment. But she

wore herself out in this perpetual skirmishing; what she lacked was the

will and the intellectual power to effect a sharp, decisive stroke.

As for those on whose conversion to the system of beauty and love she

uselessly spent her strength, she got little satisfaction from them.

Attached to her car she dragged along two lovers, who ought to have been

the apostles of her philosophy. In reality these very men resisted her.

One of them, the steward Jean de Montausé,[356] an excellent type of

official, gallant, frank of speech, amiable in manner, and infinitely

courteous, never succeeded in realising the transcendent and virtuous

object she had in view. Learning, he finds, is turned to bad uses:

religion he respects on principle, without studying it deeply, and

laughing in his sleeve at certain mysteries; but virtue he recognises in

Madame de Montausé (he is married), not elsewhere. How Margaret exclaims

at him may be imagined! Louise of Savoy takes Montausé under her wing.

The other lover, Nicolas Dangu, bishop of Seez, possesses all the

princess’s affection. He follows her to watering-places, sentiment oozing

at every pore. He has good sense, modesty, and so eminently conciliatory

a spirit that he does not deny intelligence to monks and the common

people; he even has a profound admiration for the genius of certain

malefactors. What a delightful creature is the genuine platonic prelate,

so polished, so amenable! How tender, how honeyed, how bland! But he too

opposes an almost insurmountable obstacle to her philosophy in practice;

he dares not love her love, think her thoughts; he _does_ think, but it

is of dying of love, and he has a thousand ways of doing that. He is

always dying; he would die rather than say a foolish thing or betray a

secret; he dares not put woman’s love to the test, for fear of finding it

wanting; if it proved real, he would die of joy. He gets angry with Henri

d’Albret, but personally seems quite content with what he has _not_ got;

he is the perfection of wisdom and prudence! Yet he gently insinuates

that too coy a virtue may become cruel. Margaret is a little troubled;

she replies that before she can trust men she requires good sureties,

and meanwhile she forgives Dangu’s rash speech because he speaks well

of women. That is all she has been able to get out of him, the perfect

platonist! But that also is all she gives him.

This social governance, then, does not go to the heart of the question at

issue, and does not even convert those who from the first were apostles

of the dawn, still less the indifferent, the soi-disant serious men of

the world who are met with almost everywhere. The _Heptameron_ presents

us with several types, eminently true to life, who clearly show that

conversation is not to be relied on to propagate the philosophy: a trim

little widow, Madame de Longray, infatuated about her dead husband and

very bewitching to other women’s husbands, a veritable scatter-brain

in all purity and honour; Mademoiselle Françoise de Clermont,[357] a

plump little soul, a bit of a goose, who loves naughty anecdotes, but

is extremely shocked at the naturalistic theories of Henri d’Albret and

Louise of Savoy; the hoary Burye, who has lost all his illusions with his

teeth, convinced by experience of the necessity of platonism, without

feeling the want of a brand-new deity expressly manufactured for him;

Mademoiselle de Clermont calls him “Old Father Virtue.” Then there is the

mother of the famous Brantôme, Anne of Vivonne,[358] the _fin de siècle_

woman, a friend of canons, but a foe to monks; virtuous in principle, but

so kind, so very kind! She cannot understand how a woman can live without

being loved; she can refuse nothing to anybody; she has a warm affection

for St. Magdalene.

“Saffredent,” a well-preserved white-headed beau, cannot make head or

tail of all the new theories, and does not mean to. They humiliate

him. Do people take him for a mummy, a valetudinarian, a blown-out

salamander—for one of those golden-tongued Italians who are all

tongue and nothing else? For a dull student with no wants beyond his

water-bottle and his cook? He is a knight, esteems only valour and

daring and integrity. His speech is like a clarion-call; true virtue, he

maintains, consists in loving according to the law of nature,—in loving

one woman with all one’s heart rather than in idolising thirty-six on

paper. Use is better than abuse. At this unkind and clinching phrase

there is a general outcry, and Madame de Longray sighs.

Philosophy limits itself to these extremely superficial passages at arms.

Margaret takes pleasure in them; she resembles a blue, transparent sea,

chafed and rippled by the sportive breezes, every moment glistening and

changing form; but the wind is not set nor the sunlight steady.

She has left us a large number of writings, in which we might at least

hope to find or to seek for a more definite groundwork of ideas.

M. Le Franc has devoted himself to the difficult task of examining

them all, and in these, again, he has found something of

everything—philosophical mysticism, solemn farces, pious impieties,

moralities half moral, aristocratico-democratic diversions. The only note

common to all is a profound sense of the emptiness of things—which has

nothing in common with happiness! Sometimes through the most magnificent

fantasies one catches sight of a big rolling tear. Margaret tells us that

she knew three lives: a life of love, an intellectual life, and a life of

contemplation. But she is lost, as it were, in the desert of her thought,

and when her god on earth, the big, jovial, sensual Francis I., dies, she

breaks down altogether, and falls back almost desperately upon religion

with its terrors.

Life is an instrument of vulgar joy, which exalts only those who humble

themselves; Margaret’s mistake was in wishing to remain always on the

heights.

Her maxim was to distinguish flesh from spirit, “darkness from light,”

and to love love for love’s sake: “Thy love loves thee.” But, apart from

the fact that these ideas were not absolutely her own, and that the

second already denotes a declension from platonism, we are disturbed on

perceiving here and there a strange finger-mark. Margaret had for her

private secretary and collaborator a sort of scoundrel, a demon of wit,

but one who believed in nothing, not even in his “Minerva.” On reading

the _Mirror of the Soul_, her first work, and one which betrays the

prentice hand, Bonaventure des Périers at once perceived that there was

a place to be filled about the author; he plied her with entreaties, and

with puns, and thus became a lieutenant of platonism. The princess showed

him infinite kindnesses; in his _Cymbalum_, in which he flouted the only

principles on which men were still at one—the existence of God and a few

truths of elementary morality—Des Périers was mean enough to hold her up

to ridicule; he represented her as seeking to imbue poets with a “chaste

and divine” spirit, and sending to Pluto (with a _u_) to ask at once for

news of the painter Zeuxis and for patterns of tapestry.[359] Margaret

forgave everything; she granted the villain a “prison” in her house,

and tried again to improve him by setting him to translate the Dialogues

of Plato. But Des Périers, not finding in them the secret of happiness,

escaped for good and all by suicide in 1544, and Margaret once more

showed her pity by patronising a posthumous edition of his works. That

was the man who had doubtless a most intimate part in the composition

of writings which he heartily despised, and which he called a “Pactolus

of verse and prayer.” He boasted of being their “miscreator,” and in

offering one of them to the author he said, with matchless impudence,

“Here is your immortal book, and you will find my faults there.”

Thus, if you come near Margaret of France, who appears to govern

everything, you find nothing but a mere dilettantism, a manifestation of

intellectual epicurism, which influences either ideas or the expression

of them. She fixed her eyes not on truth, but on happiness.

As a guiding force Diana of Poitiers showed more precision and vigour.

Having innumerable reasons for leaning less towards the Medici, with

more physical beauty than Margaret, more highly endowed in respect of

will, she did not devote herself exclusively to the cultivation of the

intellect; she loved all the arts, the plastic included, in the good old

way. She had a pretty skill in poetry, and appreciated books, especially

beautiful manuscripts and fine bindings. She had in her library the

Bible, the church Fathers, and books on mystic theology, alongside of

her favourite romances, particularly the _Amadis_, which she recommended

to the King; to these, as an eminently practical woman, she added books

on medicine and natural history; no philosophy to speak of; a copy of

Politian, a few treatises on history and geography, a Plutarch, a fair

amount of poetry. For her, Philibert Delorme built Anet, Jean Goujon

wrought sculptures for it, Jean Cousin, Leonard Limosin, and Bernard

Palissy decorated it. She was in fact a French counterpart of Isabella

d’Este, a marvellous type of the “lady art patron.” Without aiming at

the quintessences of pure love, she really and practically laboured to

elevate the cult of beauty.

Women who feel within themselves the power to bear on the sacred torch

and to draw minds directly towards the idea of the beautiful certainly

ought not to hesitate. But after all, to appreciate art in its practical

results, to criticise it, to support it by one’s approbation, is a

very noble end, and one suited to any woman, however retiring. History

and experience show that these practical influences are often the most

effective. This secret society, that religious association accomplish

more by simply living their creed day by day than by all your dogmatic

teaching. What extraordinary power might not women wield if they were all

animated by one spirit urging them towards a common end! And what a noble

end—to sustain in the world the healthful principles of beauty, to fill

the life of men really and truly with things they can love! To assign to

art this social mission, to carry out in regard to it this magnificent

part of “patron,” would be to vivify it! Vivify! Let us say rather save

it from itself and its abuses! Art would speedily come to ruin if the

whims, fads, and prejudices which creep into the studios were not held

in check by the necessity of reckoning with the individual and original

judgment of experts.

Alas! this is an evil of our present-day society,—this awful slough of

commonplace in which we are floundering—a cause or an effect of our

moral degeneration and our utter depravity of taste. Big houses built to

a specification, decorated at so much a yard, invisibly heated on some

patent system you never heard the name of, peopled by lackeys whom you

don’t know and only see when they open the doors! Dolly women, clothed by

their tailors, a pattern or a copy of their neighbours, with the habits

of their callers, the ideas of the men they know, and the conversation of

their grooms,—with nothing of their very own; not women at all! People

in olden days were so thoroughly persuaded of the real social necessity

of forming “amateurs” that the old Italian educators of the fifteenth

century wished men to be brought up with that end. How much more women,

who have leisure and an inborn refinement! It is very easy to demand that

an object, however simple and unpretentious one may suppose it, should

bear a stamp of originality and good taste. Is it not at least possible

to insist on simplicity in all things, to banish tinsel and brummagem

and all our horrible pretentious magnificence?—to seek breadth instead

of narrowness?—to give ourselves the pure free air of the Beautiful?—and

further, to put writers and artists in a position to express wholesome

things with sincerity, in other words, to see things healthily? It

would be foolish, deplorable, fatal to ask them to express what they do

not feel; but they must be made to feel what they are to paint. There

is here an important task to accomplish, and, to a certain extent, an

easy one. Everyone knows how sensitive mental toil, particularly if

excessive, makes the man who devotes himself to it. Taine goes so far as

to consider us the direct products of the influences that encompass us!

It is certain that we borrow much from our environment, that the dulness

or cheerfulness of the sky, for instance, tinges our thoughts with very

different colours; how much more does the sadness or joy of those whom

we love? We must create then for art a good moral atmosphere. And when

Castiglione writes: “God is only seen through women,” he is not wrong in

crying up this spy-glass of his, he understands the need of which we have

just spoken; it is as if, on entering a cathedral, he were inviting us to

look into the _bénitier_, as if he were showing us a picture in a mirror.

There are women’s souls, clear, thrilling, passionate, which reflect

things with a distinctness and a vividness of colour that would otherwise

be unsuspected. And without launching out into speculations as lofty as

those of Margaret of France, mere “women amateurs” can play an artistic

part of the first order.

As a rule, Egerias have less need of a transcendent intellect than of an

ample provision of good sense, tact, and above all patience, for they may

look forward to struggling against terrible temptations.

The intellectual and artistic tribe of the Renaissance was no better

than any other. It teemed with crotchety species; it included the usual

specimens—the pedant, the man with a grievance, the ingenuous prig, the

strutting peacock, the matter-of-fact aesthete always on the look-out

for a place or a pension. The proud were always the best, and the least

troublesome. Play their cards never so carefully, women found this

society difficult to rule; in general, to govern well you have only to

make your subordinates discontented, but here you can only reign on

condition of satisfying them.

The first step in the intellectual tutelage consisted sometimes in doing

little material services, in a quite friendly and natural way (for you

can’t live on love). To give “a few crumbs from her table,” to aid the

friends of her friends, to look after orphans,—nothing was simpler or

less remarkable in a lady: many men would have done as much. Bembo,

badly treated by a farmer who owed him two hundred and thirty ducats in

“broad gold,” did not hesitate a moment to tear Vittoria Colonna from her

celestial preoccupations, to beg her to deal with this little matter.

To venture on this ground, however, demanded no little caution. Aretino

has shown how easy it was to make a simple expression of friendliness an

opportunity for self-advertisement and extortion. What a perfect master

he was! Titian applied to him for assistance in disposing of a certain

_Annunciation_ which was hanging fire. This was how Aretino proceeded.

He issued a flaming advertisement, which fairly hooked the Empress

Isabella of Portugal, who raked up from her husband’s cash-box the sum

demanded, two thousand crowns. Aretino instantly unmasked and offered to

her “sacred and renowned Majesty his inkpot and pens”; in plain English,

asked for a pension. What a fine tooth-puller he would have made!

This Aretino fluttered about Vittoria Colonna, whom he sought to capture

through her vanity. “Read my books,” he writes to her; “read the

_Courtesan_: you will see if your praises were not always at the point of

my pen.”

Everybody knows how deeply impressed Aretino always was by the honours

of the marchioness, and when his style is defective, there is abundance

of will to make up for it. “I have always known you to be of a generous

spirit, a magnanimous nature, an active mind, an absolute virtue, a noble

faith, a good life. If it were not so, I would have told you.”

That was the beginning of the oddest of correspondences. The lady naïvely

thought that she could content the monster with fair words; but he

undeceived her by the present of a highly seasoned book, with an explicit

request for commendation and money. So far as commendation was concerned,

Vittoria thought the request very natural; but the excuse for asking

money she thought rather thin. However, she promised sixty crowns, and

even fancied she was only acting the great lady in at once sending him

thirty, accompanied by some gentle advice. Aretino, in his turn deeply

wounded, did not quarrel with “the most excellent lady”; he confined

himself to dotting the i’s. “I have to consider the tastes of our

contemporaries,” he said; “amusement and scandal are the only things that

pay; people burn with concupiscence, as you burn with an inextinguishable

angelic flame; for you sermons and evensong, for them music and the

play!” Why write serious books? He had sent one to Francis I. five years

before, and was still awaiting acknowledgment; he had just addressed his

_Courtesan_ to the king, and by return of post received a gold chain:

“after all, I write for my bread.”

Vittoria’s purse remained shut. Our fine gentleman would have liked to

return the thirty crowns; unluckily he had spent some of them, and he

sent back only some epigrams. The marchioness suggested that he should

give the balance to the poor, hinting that no worldly pelf was worth as

much as the love of God. In consideration of a recommendation to the

duchess of Urbino, Aretino condescended to keep what was not already

spent. “I too,” he writes with his habitual impertinence,—“I too am a

virtuous and Christian beggar, and deserving of your alms; I do not think

the poor of Ferrara, of whom you speak, so poor that you cannot assist

one of the poor here, since for you it suffices to be rich in spirit

through the grace of Christ.”

This little dialogue will show whether women needed an angelic soul to

influence for good rarely-gifted men on whom pure love had no hold. But

lofty motives must have sustained them; there was really some truth in

Aretino’s plea; yes, fortune and glory are only reached by devious paths.

Little sketches and dialogues in the taste of the day paid Aretino very

well, without great labour on his part; a bookseller in the Rue St.

Jacques at Paris made his fortune merely by retailing them, and in the

simplest way. He would sell to a lady a book more or less licentious, and

as such books are never lent, by and by another lady was sure to pay him

a visit. “Madam, here’s one that’s much worse,” whispers the good man in

his half Italian jargon, slipping into her hand another very expensive

book. It was just the same in the artists’ studios; Ledas and Venuses

went off like hot cakes, but Titian’s _Annunciation_ gathered dust on the

easel, and Carpaccio had infinite difficulty in selling at so much a foot

a religious picture which he considered one of his best.

In France, the position was for a long time not quite so bad, in the

sense that the men of letters, excellent fellows who mixed little

with the world, esteemed themselves infinitely lucky to receive after

solicitation an ecclesiastical benefice which made them independent.

One historian becomes incoherent in pouring out his gratitude because a

good book, the fruit of many years’ toil and travel, has secured him a

life-annuity. But this patriarchal simplicity also disappeared in the

end. Publishers had to cater for the public, and one curious affair shows

us how they taught authors their trade.

Vérard, the famous publisher whose magnificent productions are still

a joy to connoisseurs, had agreed to publish in 1500 a book by Jean

Bouchet, entitled _The Foxes traversing the Perilous Ways_. The author

was already received at court, the book had an excellent title, piquant

and suggestive. Nevertheless, Vérard began by erasing the name of

Bouchet, and substituting that of Brandt, a German as well known to the

French as the Scandinavians are to-day, and whom, moreover, Bouchet had

sought to imitate.

The young poet durst not complain; however, when he read the volume

in print, he noticed that Vérard had unceremoniously cut out entire

passages, replacing them with passages pillaged from right and left.

Bouchet seized the occasion and commenced an action: whereupon Vérard,

utterly surprised at so much virtuous indignation, came to terms like a

lord; he paid over a good round sum, and asked for no receipt.

Still, this sort of thing was rudimentary, and, apart from the question

of private morals, harmless. What was much less inoffensive was the

passion of the authors themselves, once they had learnt their cue, for

the novel, obscene, or sensational effects which alone secured the

attention of the public. They speedily got level with the Italians.

Ulrich von Hütten gave an admirable send-off to his _Epistles of Obscure

Men_ by surreptitiously putting manuscript copies in circulation.

Bonaventure des Périers almost attained to Aretino’s skill. The alleged

official destruction of his _Cymbalum_ justified a clandestine second

edition, which of course was priceless. “Let us write some vile thing,”

he says in one of his dialogues, “and we shall find a bookseller who’ll

give us ten thousand crowns for the copy.” That is true; the public only

buys and circulates and really cries up the books it contemns. Many

notorious books of that time, which we take seriously to-day, probably

had no other origin.

An author, indeed, has a perfect right to desire to live at the expense

of his readers. But, after all, he must beware, in matters of art,

of commercial inducements, and the more indifference, weakness, and

unconcern the good public displays, the more one ought to thank the

distinguished women who undertake to oppose the high bids of naturalism

or extravagance. They do not always succeed; they are sometimes the

dupes of noise and fashion; let us forgive them for what they have given

us, for the sake of what they have spared us. In these days, people are

ready enough to abuse the old system of patronage, which they charge with

subverting the dignity of man; to seek something from the State, from a

member of the Government, seems natural enough, but many writers would

think themselves humiliated by submission to any social patronage—which,

however, society is not eager to offer. In the 16th century, among

intellectual circles, men were republicans even in a monarchy: they

were not enamoured of the idea of the State. And private patronage,

in spite of its imperfections, often served as a home for meditation,

a shelter for independent men who preferred high thinking to popular

applause; if it proved deadening, it was only on mediocre minds. When we

see what circumlocution, and what subtle diplomacy the most influential

princesses had to employ to gain admission to Raphael’s or Giovanni

Bellini’s studio, we have no further misgiving as to the disadvantages

of patronage. For a lady to send a poet in distress “a little sugared

solace” as Des Périers said, and with so much discretion that the source

of the gift remains unknown, or to express her sympathy in the form of

a costly present—in this we see nothing to impair the dignity of man;

indeed, to be frank, it appears to us delightful.

Moreover, patronage did not confine itself to a purely material and

administrative support, as the State necessarily does. Besides sending

a present in season, the ladies were still more ready to distribute the

small but not less precious coin of tendernesses and compliments. We are

here returning into their proper domain, and an intellectual man capable

of withstanding this influence would be a rarity. The lady author who

praises a writer smacks a little of her trade; Veronica Gambara, after

overwhelming Aretino with rhapsodies, cries naïvely, “Praised by you, I

shall live a thousand years!” It was “Kae me, I’ll kae thee.” But from a

genuine lady of rank, eminent and bountiful, who asks for nothing, one

charming phrase, even though it be qualified and far from flattering, is

glory, and a glory that can be solicited without humiliation. “They say

I am an aristocrat,” wrote Taine, and he was, as we all are who pretend

to lead men’s minds. That is why we need this sybaritism,—need to be

sustained and perchance guided by a smile. There is hardly a philosopher

or poet of the 16th century whose pages are not illuminated and gladdened

by the smile of some high-born lady.

How can we analyse this smile? We could not without seeing it, and

we only know it very indirectly. We divine it under an infinitely

caressing word; in a pretty diminutive, “my little sister,” “wifie”; in

an affectionate superlative; Vittoria Colonna calls her friend Dolce

“Dolcissimo,” and speaks to him, with a quite natural grace and without

apparent exaggeration, of his “divine sonnets,” for which she has not

words enough to thank him; with her friend Bembo she permits herself to

gush forth familiarly in artless enthusiasm. What a curious litany is

the correspondence addressed to that “very magnificent” rogue Aretino,

who highly valued the honour done him, and took all possible advantage

of it! The writers are the marchioness of Mantua, with her grace and

reserve; Mary of Aragon, “the sovereign marchioness of Avalos,” on

particularly good terms with him because she has not altogether given up

hope of turning him into a monk; the duchess of Urbino, warm, gushing,

who calls him “my magnificent most loving lover”; then the good ladies

who have lost their hearts to the man of the hour, who take him as he is,

a scoundrel but famous, and who write to him as the “fount of eloquence,

astonishing, admirable, miracle of nature, most virtuous, (yes, you are!)

most wise, my father, my brother.”[360]

The relations of a lady with her protégés were established by slow

degrees, or simply through her chancing to hear of a work that bespoke

her practical interest. The lady learns through her secret agents that

a book is about to appear, in prose perhaps, perhaps a history; she

wishes to have the first peep at it; the author, taken by surprise, makes

excuses with profound modesty, but sends his manuscript all the same; and

the ice is broken, the circuit is complete. The connection will continue

under various forms; the writer tells her in confidence of his various

works, then in his turn begins to beat the coverts for talents of hers

that are lying concealed. In return the lady announces his work _urbi

et orbi_, and takes his friends to her heart. A real intimacy is set up

between them, sometimes so entirely spiritual that they never even see

each other. Thus, before publishing his _Courtier_, Castiglione submitted

the manuscript to Vittoria Colonna under the seal of the profoundest

secrecy. Vittoria kept it rather a long time, and when at last she had

to return it, she excused herself very prettily, being still, as she

says, only half-way through the second part: she omits to add that

she had lent it rather indiscreetly. She has no suggestion to make,

except perhaps that he should not give the names of the ladies whose

beauty he is praising in a book intended for the public. Otherwise she

applauds everything with all her soul: the freshness of the subject, the

refinement, elegance and animation of the style. She is horribly jealous

of the persons whose words are quoted in such a book, even if they are

dead. As to the passages on the virtue and impeccable chastity of women,

she adores them and considers herself, as a woman, honoured by them; but

on this point she prefers not to say all that is in her mind.

With Michelangelo she exercises the same supervision; she begs him, in a

charming note, to send her a crucifix he is working at, and to come and

have a chat.[361]

Far from dissembling the patronage of which they were the objects,

the writers and artists boasted of it. In all sincerity they believed

women to have been created and sent into the world to inspire them

with intelligence. If they had their portraits painted seated in their

studies, it was not in the midst of a litter of books, weapons, or

carpets, nor even with an air of deep thought or abstraction; it was

simply as natural men, writing beside a little Cupid who serves them as

tutelary deity. It was accepted without question that a woman’s hand

must shake the bough to set the mind winging its flight. “My mind,

my strength, my Pallas, is Lydia,” exclaims Catti.[362] Antonio de

Gouvea[363] declares that he had no suspicion of what was in him till the

fair-haired Catherine of Bauffremont discovered him as one discovers a

treasure under the snow: “I should have thought the snow cold, but lo!

it was fire.” Michelangelo sings the same song in every key: “Through

your fair eyes I see a tender light which my blinded eyes could not have

seen.... Wingless, I fly with your wings; through your quick spirit I am

unceasingly uplifted towards heaven.... I have no other will than yours;

in your soul my thought has birth; my words are moulded in your mind.

I am like the moon, who never shines in the sky but as reflecting the

brilliance of the sun;” and he adds this profound saying: “O Lady, who by

fire and water refinest and purgest the soul for happy days, ah! grant me

to return never more to myself!” That was the simple method by which many

women in those days directed the minds of men.

We must not exaggerate: we do not pretend that you must everywhere

_chercher la femme_, that without her nothing is possible, that she has

confiscated the key to all human learning. On the contrary, she has done

little for the exact sciences; she has contented herself with piercing

the heavens or clambering in somehow or other. But the great kindred of

impressionable beings, every man who has lived by beauty and sought after

happiness, from philosopher to artist, from talker to poet, every man

capable of feeling an emotion, has owed much to women. “Emotion, which is

only an accident in the life of man, is it not woman’s whole existence?”

And in such a matter, can a better judge be found? Woman is freer from

prejudice than man: “she does not need to give abstract reasons for her

enthusiasms: her passion, her pity well up spontaneously while man is

still discussing and deliberating. And in so doing, she almost always

sees more truly.”[364]

Women are the eternal guardians of the Beautiful, and it cannot be said

that in this respect the Renaissance introduced any absolutely new idea.

Long before, noble châtelaines used frequently to shelter under their

roofs the churchman employed to illuminate their Books of Hours, and

princesses encouraged the ballad-monger and the image-vendor. Women have

always cultivated their souls! But it was a new thing to devote this

fervour and enthusiasm to a religion of beauty. In other directions,

the women have been condemned; but their aesthetic influence has seemed

legitimate; and, in a word, “the works they patronised, the châteaux

built for them, have endured, when the doughty deeds of knights on the

battlefield have hardly left a trace.”

CHAPTER IV

INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE (_Continued_)

The influence of women declared itself in certain well-marked results.

In the first place, it led to the germination of what may be called a

technical literature: that is, of works intended to prove the legitimacy

and necessity of feminine sway.

The classical type of this literature is Boccaccio’s book, _Of

Illustrious Women_. Boccaccio lived in a backward age, which is the

excuse for certain epigrams of his; but he remained none the less the

women’s favourite writer, because he had had the courage to ransack

antiquity, to quarrel with Virgil, to extol Dido, and to collect for

the first time a multitude of immortal examples—Cleopatra, Lucrece,

Semiramis, Sappho, Athaliah. Nothing, therefore, was safer than to

republish, amplify, and imitate his work in every shape and form, and the

opportunity was not lost, God knows!

In addition to this Boccaccian literature, which was already extensive,

we must note the appearance of a numerous family of semi-philosophical,

semi-historical writings, devoted to the glorification of the reigning

sex; winning causes never lack defenders. The names of Bruni, Portio,

Lando, Domenichi, and many others would certainly merit a page in the

annals of feminism; Benedetto da Cesena specially demonstrates the honour

and virtue of women, Capella their excellence, Luigini their beauty. The

feature common to the most of these works is that while claiming to be

very lofty, abstract and impersonal speculations, they are all the time

aimed more or less covertly at the heart of one woman in particular.

If Firenzuola discourses like Plato himself, it is because he has the

countess of Vernio as his ideal. Nifo compiled his treatise _On the

Court_ under the auspices of the prince and princess of Salerno, but

his ardour was more especially inspired by the charms of Phausina Rhea.

Ravisius Textor wrote his _Memorable and Illustrious Women_ because there

happened to be one Jeanne de Vignacourt, wife of President Gaillard.

We ourselves ought to have conformed to this fascinating custom and to

have inscribed a lady’s name on the title-page of this book; but we are

writing for fair readers of the 20th century.

Except in size, the books we allude to were as like as two peas. Chénier

might well have called them “old thoughts new versified.” To see one is

to see a thousand. The upshot of them all is the equality, if not the

superiority, of woman in regard to man. To give an idea of them it will

be enough to mention one, of no great renown (it has never been printed,

and no complete manuscript exists, to our knowledge), but linking the

names of two personages of the first rank. It was written for Vittoria

Colonna by her cousin the famous Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, vice-chancellor

of the Church of Rome.

The Cardinal begins by very gravely preparing to crush under a weight

of learning various anti-feminist propositions, almost all drawn from

the antiquated repertoire of the Middle Ages; for instance, is woman an

imperfect animal, an inferior being, unfit for public duties, good for

nothing but to gad about and commit indiscretions? Is it not the custom,

even in everyday talk, to say “men” when meaning the human species? Are

not the Bible and Plato agreed in teaching that man is the prototype of

creation, the receiver and the transmitter of life? Having settled these

and a few other questions, the cardinal proceeds to his demonstration of

the merits of womankind.

He finds it much to the point to invoke evidence from the pagan world.

He sets defiling before us the Sauromathian women, the warrior Amazons,

the women of the Balearic isles, every one of them esteemed equal to

three or four men in the exchanges of war; the Lycian dames, through

whom nobility was transmitted, and the Celtic ladies, who exercised the

functions of diplomatists and arbitrators. On this evidence he declares

himself an out-and-out feminist; an advocate for the admission of women

to all occupations; gymnastics and military service, commended by Plato,

have no terrors for him; he would have been an enthusiastic apostle of

cycling for both sexes. If some timorous objector hints at the moral

perils of launching women into public life, he almost angrily laughs the

objection to scorn, zestfully seizing the occasion to show what men are

good for when left entirely to themselves. His type is the strong woman,

sure of herself and cased in the armour of her modesty, the energetic

woman who fends off the light strokes of stratagem as well as the heavy

strokes of violence, the woman who is generous and just, with something

of that young Spartan captive who had the force of soul to feign love for

her vanquisher and to persuade him with her caresses that she was endowed

with a marvellous secret of invulnerability, and who thus got her head

cut off. “Heaven above!” ends the cardinal suddenly, “where could one

find a more accomplished type of strength and magnanimity than yourself,

O Vittoria! It is you, you, O ideal of noble virtues, who sustained your

husband, guided him, exalted him!” Pompeo has so many things to attend

to that he excuses himself from here working out this theme; he begs the

marchioness to accept his modest little work, the homage of an ardent and

sincere affection.

We are bound to add that women showed themselves duly grateful; this

kind of literature was not love’s labour lost, and many insignificant

men found in it the road to success. A Bohemian, half magian and wizard

(common enough in those days), a soldier as well as a “doctor in both

faculties,” Cornelius Agrippa, was elected professor of Cabala at the

University of Dole. Not long afterwards he dedicated to his sovereign,

Margaret the regent of the Netherlands, a bulky book on the _Preëminence

of the Feminine Sex_, a learned and convincing work, though in places

somewhat gross. The chaste Margaret was no more shocked than Vittoria

Colonna appeared to be angered at some indecorous details in the work of

cardinal Pompeo. She obtained a good appointment for Agrippa, and later

on, though a good deal had happened in the interim, she gave him the

title of imperial historiographer to Charles V.

Apart from these special productions, which in date almost all belong

to the early days of the decadence, the influence women exercised on

intellectual productivity ran through two very different channels.

The primitive Frenchwomen, who loved breadth and vigour, the women of

passion, mistrusted works of mere imagination; they sought for truth.

Philosophy and history were their intellectual pabulum, owing to their

taste for the clear light of truth, however solidly, even heavily

expressed. To become wrapped up, entangled, lost in art and mawkish

sentiment appeared to them the proof of inferior minds; to them the

supreme art was to be without art; they loved the beautiful simplicity

and impressiveness natural to minds that have mastered the subjects with

which they are dealing, and are masters of themselves.

But these women were not numerous, and are soon lost sight of. Nor were

there many men capable of meeting their views.

History and philosophy had their charlatans who brought discredit on them

sooner or later—pedants, perpetrators of futile and vapid euphuisms, not

to speak of fantastics and high genealogists like Féron, who carefully

describes the armorial bearings of Adam.

Lemaire de Belges, who worked constantly under the eye of grave women

and dedicated to them all his writings of whatever description, even a

_Treatise on Ancient and Modern Funeral Ceremonies_, is one of those who

carried erudition too far. He has a superb equipment of learning, which

he displayed with a magnificent and conscientious tediousness; how could

Margaret of Austria, Anne of Brittany, and Claude of France distrust a

person of so excellent an appearance! Lemaire loses no opportunity of

rendering homage to the sex; if none occurs naturally, he invents one.

He cites only women of beauty and intelligence. In the service of Anne

of France he extols honour and virtue: with Anne of Brittany he sings

the past history of her realm;[365] and when all is said and done he was

nothing but a dull courtier. And yet he made his mark.

Philosophy comes better out of the ordeal. It was not divorced from

literature, and, like the literature, it wore a pleasing and cheerful

aspect. Laughter was then the fashion, even in the most serious clubs.

The Florentine academy flourished under the title of the “Academy of

the Damp,” each of its members bearing the name of some fish; and

when, as pretty generally happens, its founder, Lasca, was expelled,

he established another academy, under quite as facetious a name, the

“Academy of Bran,” the Dellacrusca.[366]

We have shown what an unrivalled position philosophy obtained in the

society of that epoch; many people preferred it to history because they

fancied they were more certain of finding truth in it. They found it

also of very practical utility; thanks to some familiarity with the

ideal, more than one philosophical husband could say, “All is lost, save

honour.” From the moment when the women began to subsist on philosophy,

there was a run upon theoretical wisdom. Happy the man whose academic

discourses suggested a comparison with Plato, or merely with Pythagoras!

Philosophy bore everywhere the torch of happiness; it gave props to

faith, and represented Paradise as the sum and crown of aesthetic joy;

the noble bishop Guevara exclaims with enthusiasm, “God was the first

lover in the world; it is from him that we have learnt to love”; and

grave professors on formal occasions waxed eloquent on the mystery

of love. Cornelius Agrippa opened a course of lectures on Plato’s

_Symposium_ with this declamation: “I come to expound to you the doctrine

set forth by the divine Plato in his _Symposium_, on love. My discourse

has Love for its author and cause; I myself, inflamed by the beams of

love, preach Love to you. Far from here, far from this respectable

lecture-room, let others, stuck fast in the miry paths of the world,

creatures of Bacchus or of the god of gardens, trample this divine gift,

love, in the mud, like dogs or swine. You, my pure men, votaries of Diana

and Pallas, hail to you! Come and lend attentive ears to this divine

mystery.”

Filippo Beroaldo goes farther; he undertakes “without false shame”

to expound to his young pupils the philosophy of Propertius: “Yes,”

he exclaims with fervour, “we shall give praise to love, the one god

laudable above all things, pre-eminently laudable; we shall show you that

the poetry and the poets of love consort with the gravest professors,

and that this sort of poem is worthy to serve as subject for a public

and complete course in a university of letters.” And forthwith we see

him occupied for a whole year in drawing a distinction between the work

and the writer, conformably to the aphorism of Catullus, that a poet

may perfectly well pass for a decent, chaste, and pious man, though his

works may not have the same reputation, provided they have salt and wit.

Ovid also had said: “My pen is lascivious, but my life is not.” Beroaldo

insists very strongly on this tutelary principle, and to add force to his

demonstration he casually reads the broadest passages in Plato and the

Scriptures: “Yet,” he adds proudly, “everybody reads the Bible.”

In addition to disseminating thus the doctrine of Love, the religion of

the Beautiful naturally delighted in beauty of form, and gave a very

decided lead on this point also.

In the first place, it brought into high favour a kind of literature

which, for brevity’s sake, we shall call the literature of conversation.

There is nothing surprising in this, since conversation served at once

as a means and an end, and appeared to be the realisation of Platonic

happiness. Those who had the misfortune to be writers took at least all

possible precautions not to show it, and certainly many authors of the

dialogues, novels, and various narratives of the time committed them to

paper only to keep a permanent record of actual conversations, or at

any rate because, in temporary distress for want of someone to talk to,

they found themselves reduced to taking up their pens to keep themselves

in practice. The critics of our day, who prefer to say their say by

themselves, in the form of lectures or articles, are disposed to see in

this dialogical method a trick of rhetoric; they regard the dialogues

of Plato in the same light, and we see very learned platonists quoting

indifferently the thoughts of the various speakers as the thoughts of

Plato himself, without remarking that in the same dialogue the different

speakers give sincere expression to different ideas. The majority of

16th century dialogues are real conversations,[367] and claim to be

more or less accurate notes of both sides, with the perfect liberty of

movement impossible in didactic exposition. Bembo, in his capacity as

an eminent talker, has accepted the responsibility for more than one

written dialogue. And thus, the practice was quite the reverse of that

which obtains in our drawing-rooms to-day, where, if the conversation

happens to rise above the commonplace, we borrow our ideas from the

morning’s leading article or the last successful play; in those days the

drawing-room made the book—a system extremely favourable to the influence

of women.

The masterpiece of this literature of conversation is unquestionably

the _Courtier_ of Castiglione, of which more than eighty editions or

translations are known, and which retained almost undiminished popularity

for more than a century.

In proportion, however, as women fell into mere fashionable sensibility,

the literature they inspired became an art of form rather than of

thought, and soon there was no longer room for anything but poetry.

Poetry flooded everything. We are not speaking here, of course, of the

high heroic poetry intended for robust appetites: people revelled in the

luxury of a beautiful musical phrase which soothed without awakening

emotion, in a sort of splendid unreality, in glittering frivolities

calculated to give a fillip to conversation.

There was high honour for the improvisatore who, in the decorated hall

of the château, whilst in the streets there arose a vague hubbub of

music, song, or passing feet, could on the spur of the moment chisel or

crystallise a happy thought, and shoot out his little verse, light as

an arrow, brilliant as a sky-rocket. Such a man was fêted everywhere,

and saw a welcome smiling in every eye. Into a goblet of rare crystal he

poured, as it were, but one drop of elixir, but it was an elixir that

exhilarated; he was master of his world. With a tender or witty verse a

man could do anything. A phrase of Bembo’s is very typical. When Vittoria

Colonna had just lost her husband, he told her that the flood of sonnets

on that occasion had reconciled him to the age! Vittoria Colonna herself,

whose ideas were of quite a different order in theological matters,

wrote to a prelate: “I received your letter this morning, and in your

madrigals I saw the force of truth.” Poetry was so much a maid of all

work that a luckless ambassador, at his wit’s end for a new way of asking

for his arrears of salary, ended by addressing a dispatch in verse to

his sovereign, Margaret of Austria. Another dropped into poetry in his

dispatches with the simple object of paying court to his princess. A

business agent, instructed to send some information to Vittoria Colonna,

declares that, writing to so illustrious a lady, he hardly knows what he

is about, and that he cannot refrain from writing in verse: hitherto,

he says, his higher faculties have been dormant, and the name of the

marchioness has roused them to activity. Admirable effect of feminine

influence, galvanising even auctioneers’ clerks! Ladies wrote in verse

to their children, sent their friends verses—sometimes, it must be

confessed, borrowed.[368]

In all this wealth of poetical production the sonnet ranked as the most

profitable, because, thanks to its terse and sparkling form, it did

well in a glass case among a woman’s little love trophies. It admirably

hit the tastes of the ladies; it was short and concise, it centred on

one idea, and allowed the most diverse and fugitive sentiments to find

expression.

In these days we cannot really understand the success which certain

occasional verses met with, for example, the rhapsodies of Molinet[369]

whenever Margaret of Austria took her walks abroad. These gems of other

days have the same effect on us as pearls removed from their settings,

lying robbed of all their lustre on a dealer’s counter. For that matter,

they never had the glow of passion; all that was asked of them was to

show a certain uniformity of sparkle, and they were strung one after

another in the belief that so many languidly gleaming brilliants would

in the long run form a pretty set. What charming and unexceptionable

ornaments were the waggeries of Saint-Gelais or of Michel d’Amboise,

or the “Hundred and Five Love Rondeaux” published by M. Tross, or the

_Hecatomphile_ (_i.e._ the hundred loves), and so many more![370] Such

writers had ringing in their ears an air from Ovid[371] or Petrarch,

a mawkish air, with all the sublimity of commonplace, already utilised

a thousand times; and they continued to grind out the song of the

“exquisite” bard of Laura, to steal from it, comment on it, torture it,

raising their eyes to heaven like Greuze’s girls; and so they thought

themselves deities. “I hope,” cries Aretino, with a burst of laughter,

“that the soul of Petrarch is not tormented in the other world as it is

in this!” They were a long way from the vigorous inspirations craved by

Pompeo Colonna. Some repining souls made secret reservations against

the seductive force of this sensibility. Vittoria Colonna and Isabella

d’Este kept a corner of their heart for Dante; but what could they do to

stem the tide? They tried, very clumsily. In France a league of terrible

pedants was formed,—“skimmers of Latin,” who, to separate themselves

from the vulgar, employed a sort of pretentious and intolerable jargon.

In Italy, Spagnuoli shouted himself hoarse in thundering against the

Franco-Italian alliance, and all in vain. Capilupi,[372] still less

adroit, committed the unpardonable folly of finding fault with the women.

At bottom he was right.

It was women’s duty to warn the world off so disastrous a reef.

Unhappily, in consequence of that eternal timidity and that want of

energy which were to kill their influence, they allowed themselves to be

utterly bewitched. It was written that they should be able to conquer,

but not to profit by victory: that, once mistresses of the world,

feebleness would regain the upper hand; that being no longer under the

spur of passion, they would come to a stand before a sweetstuff shop.

The masterpiece of these pretentious confectioneries was a monument of

verse erected to the glory of some particular lady.

Jeanne of Aragon was during her lifetime the object of a deification of

this sort, in which the Academy _de’ Dubbiosi_[373] at Venice proceeded

according to the forms employed at Rome in the ceremony of canonisation.

There was first a preliminary decree, then a discussion on the proposal

made by some member to share the apotheosis between the exquisite Jeanne

and her sister the Marchesa dal Vasto; then a decree, based with great

parade of learning on the opposition of Roman pontiffs in bygone days

to Marcellus’ project of dedicating a temple to Glory and to Virtue in

conjunction, and enacting that the honour was to be reserved for Jeanne

alone, and that it would be enough to offer incense to the Marchesa dal

Vasto in sundry allusions.

The temple was erected. It was in the purest Renaissance style;

cosmopolitan, artistic, feminist. Its contents were pretty enough:

Ruscelli celebrated the charming, adorable and divine Jeanne in

respectable verse. But that only shows how the finest things suffer most

when reality is replaced by sham. Miscellaneous heaps of poems in all

languages known or unknown, Hungarian, Hebrew, Syriac, Slavonic—what was

it but sham? In reality, the truly artistic idea was absent.

There was also, especially in France, a whole literature dealing with

poodles and little birds, which was not lacking in charm, and above all

in sensibility, for it was generally elegiac. Saint-Gelais, Eustorg de

Beaulieu and Marot, like Catullus, mourned sparrows, such as that of the

unfeeling Maupas:

Las, il est mort (pleurez-le, damoyselles),

Le passereau de la jeune Maupas;

Ung aultre oiseau, qui n’a plume qu’aux aisles,

L’a dévoré: le congnoissez-vous pas?

C’est ce fascheux amour ...

... Par despit, tua le passeron,

Quand il ne sçeut rien faire à la maistresse.[374]

Vert-Vert,[375] whose misfortunes touch us to this day, was a direct

descendant of the parrot of Margaret of Austria, which, having been

allowed to die during the absence of its mistress, was consequently

regarded as having died of despair. Du Bellay has devoted some of his

most exquisite verses to the memory of a little dog.[376] In short, as we

see, all these writings were inspired by a sentiment of tenderness, in

the manner of Berquin[377] or Florian. The Cardinal de’ Medici loved to

style himself “the knight errant.” Under the dainty hand leading them,

men seemed like meek and gentle sheep, somewhat emasculate perhaps,

incapable of a strong diet, but polished, sweet, gracious! Twit them with

losing their claws, they reassure you! If their interests or their pride

are ever so little touched, they are still masters of a pungent rhetoric!

Listen, behind the scenes (or even before), to Politian, that charming

angel,[378] calling an obscure antagonist named Mabillius, “scurvy knave,

carcase, lousy dog,” and so on.

But let us finish our portrait of women from the intellectual point of

view.

They did more than rub their faithful friends to a fine polish: they were

gradually drawn on and impelled to take up the pen themselves, cherishing

the secret idea of enabling the public to profit by the treasures of

their sensibility.

To write a book, even in verse, is not a crime. But how was it that the

women did not understand that in coming like professionals before the

public they were precisely breaking away from their own system?

They could, it is true, invoke the example of Spain, where women

displayed their learning openly and unabashed. But the position of Spain

was altogether different; there the women in question were ladies of

lofty imagination, who threw themselves with extraordinary energy into

regions of pure erudition; brilliant and famous women of high rank—the

marchioness of Monteagudo, Doña Maria Pacheco de Mendoza, the pretty

Isabel of Cordova, far richer in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew than in worldly

possessions; Catherine Ribera, the bard of love and faith; the two

“professors” of rhetoric at the Universities of Salamanca and Alcala;

Beatrice of Galindo, who taught the queen Latin; Isabella Rosera, who

preached in Toledo cathedral and went to Rome to convert the Jews and

to comment on Scotus Erigena before an array of dumbfounded cardinals;

Loysa Sygea, again, the most illustrious of them all, an infant prodigy

to begin with, then a Father of the Church, who could speak the most

outlandish tongues. These were women full of sap and energy, whom no one

was astonished to see taking by main force the first rank in the spheres

of literature, philosophy and theology; but were they really and truly

women? or rather, did they bring any new thing to humanity? Were they

apostles of happiness? No, they advocated the claims of reason as men

did, perhaps better, perhaps worse—that is all. The ideal of France and

Italy was different: it demanded more discretion. Women might be quite

as accomplished; the knowledge of Latin was so widely diffused among

them, even in the depth of the country,[379] as to be quite a matter

of course; many grappled with Hebrew; some people went so far as to say

that rhetoric was a virtue as necessary to them as chastity, if not

more so. Only, everybody was steadily faithful to the maxim that women

ought to rule by charm rather than intellectual accomplishment; and if

it was necessary to arm them for the strife, their supreme skill would

always lie in appearing unarmed, in keeping their minds free and winsome,

preserving unsoiled all the bloom of their excellent education, remaining

great ladies and “amateurs.”

Ought the women, at the time when the ultra-refined shrank from appearing

in print as a lapse from taste, as what Montaigne called an “idle

business,” to have descended into the arena and addressed themselves to

the heart of the commonplace and heedless man in the street? Ought they

to have done violence to their thought by printing it? You may address

the public in regard to the stern things of life, draw your logical

deductions from truth, hammer out your arguments, discuss history,

philosophy, theology, everything that is of iron and rock. But sentiment

has graces which only flourish well under glass; the true women of the

Renaissance were like orchids, choice and rare and delicately perfumed,

which close their petals at the first breath of air. The same modesty

which defended the purity of their bodies against every indiscreet

eye, and which smiled only on friends, seemed to envelop their souls.

They were not displeased to hear themselves called the depositaries

of “good doctrine,” or even to see jestingly attributed to them some

pretty work which obviously they had not written: Aretino was a very

clever and amusing flatterer when he made the actor in the prologue of

one of his most spicy comedies ask if the author of the piece were not

Vittoria Colonna or Veronica Gambara. But the most accomplished and

instructed woman of the world, Margaret of Savoy for example, never

tired of boasting of her “divine goodness.” Noble ladies did not take up

the pen, any more than a good housewife needs to handle a broom; they

readily dictated even private letters, with the splendid indifference of

Talleyrand, who, we may say in passing, knew his business very well. If

they are ever caught writing, it was for mere amusement, when they were

tired of painting, carving, working tapestry, playing the harp, singing,

maybe of dancing and riding; then they thought of their souls, if they

had time; they would read a psalm or a story; or to “escape idleness,”

to banish an idea that oppressed and persecuted them, they would

artistically chisel their idea in the form of a sonnet. Thus understood,

poetry is the divine art, and very few women have been able to resist it

from the moment when it appears to them the same thing as painting a fan!

Margaret of Austria delighted in etching in little poems her

recollections of the trials of her life, and (in absolute privacy) did

not even disdain to address some epistles in verse to her devoted friends

or her functionaries. The amiable Graville, the fair Chateaubriand, so

dear to Francis I., excelled in this pastime, and when we see Suzanne

de Bourbon herself contributing her share, we may well believe that the

fashion was general. But between that and proclaiming oneself a poet

there was a wide gulf, and when this was crossed, it was the beginning of

decadence, because the exquisite freshness and simplicity of the art soon

gave place to affectation. To women of simple artless charm succeeded

blue-stockings like Madame de Morel and her three daughters, or Madame

des Roches. Women writers arose, and the Academy of the Valois found it

quite natural to admit them.

Lyons was the capital of feminine poetry, and certainly it is there that

we can best appreciate how and why the women fell into the unfortunate

mistake of becoming professional writers. It was not wholly their fault:

they only succumbed to the temptation when they could no longer exert

their influence otherwise.

Lyons was the city of wealth and pleasure and elegance, the rival of

Paris in fashion, the “Florence of France.” It was often the headquarters

of the court.

Anne of France, as sovereign of the surrounding country, had at first

exercised there a very direct influence; and afterwards Margaret of

France went there more than once, and gladly, as into a friendly land.

The ladies of Lyons, envious of the “great and immortal praise” their

neighbours of Italy had acquired, were desirous of making their

influence also felt on men, and of doing honour to France in the

present and the future. It was nothing but music and poetry, poetry

and music.[380] Margaret of France smiled broadly at the universal

babblement. Up to a certain point, save for the somewhat excessive

development of sensibility, nothing was more legitimate or natural: the

husbands acted as archivists, piously classifying their wives’ papers

and cultivating their reputations. But a time came when it appeared

calamitous to leave to husbands alone the care of so many treasures. Du

Moulin, Margaret’s secretary, ventured to aim a blow at feminine modesty:

at the express request of her husband he published the works of Madame

Pernette du Guillet, recently deceased, taking good care to indicate his

intention of thus paying collective homage to “so many fair and virtuous

ladies of Lyons.” He encouraged others to make similar confidences.

The somewhat tame and sublunary verses of Pernette du Guillet were not

particularly flattering to the husband who had so well preserved them.

Pernette avows in all sincerity that she had never known happiness; how

could she have known it? She divided her abilities among so many things.

She spoke all languages, played every instrument, and was beautiful

in addition. The sentiments she expressed oscillate between a tender

sensuousness and bitterness of soul.

Louise Labé, the glory of Lyons, did better service for her cause. The

list of her virtues would fill several pages. Fair, rich, and well-bred,

a singer, a dancer, a horsewoman, and an Italianist, she drew in her

train such a flock of admirers, commentators, panegyrists, biographers,

and glossarists that her death did not quench the enthusiasm, but

occasioned a perfect mausoleum of poetry.

There has been endless discussion in regard to this fascinating woman.

Many a lance has been broken in regard to her virtue, of which the late

M. de Ruolz was formerly the self-constituted guarantor and paladin, but

against which, since his time, two erudite writers, themselves natives

of Lyons, Messieurs Gaullieur and Gonon, have brought heavy batteries

to bear. But that little concerns us, for we do not claim Louise Labé,

even theoretically, as one of the glories of pure platonism; she is

too self-confident and cock-a-hoop, has such airs of swagger and mock

languor; she smacks of decadence. And yet, though she did not, like

Pernette du Guillet, make the slight effort needed to defer publication

till she was dead, she does affect a modesty which is itself unpleasing.

It was not her husband who impelled her to appear before the world, it

was her friends; they insisted, swore to “drink the half of the shame”;

and then, “not to take the plunge alone,” she dedicated her book to

another lady, Clémence of Bourges.

These simpering affectations apart, Louise was sincerely convinced of

the benefits of feminine domination, and one feels that in boldly facing

publicity she was obeying a sentiment of duty. She resolutely encounters

the enemy, like a brave captain who dashes out of cover to rally his

disordered troops. She conjures women not to allow themselves to be

despoiled of the “honest liberty” so painfully acquired—liberty to know,

to think, to work, to shine. Happiness!—she no longer deludes herself

with the idea that she can promise it with certainty, or at least she has

awakened from the dream of attaining the absolute; but she tells herself

that “one can at least sweeten the long voyage.” She does not lose sight

of the fact that it is women’s function to diffuse sweetness and poetry,

to mitigate unsociabilities, to inspire men with energy. The experience

already gained does not strike her as discouraging; quite the reverse;

the intellectual life takes from day to day a more splendid amplitude,

and this amplitude results from the action of women. The moments of all

great intellectual vitality are marked by love. So said Louise Labé.

Tullia d’Aragona, who sustained the same theory in other terms, was

one of the few Italian women who did not fear to be reputed authors,

probably because her place was already only on the fringe of society.

In general she employs few circumlocutions, but goes straight to the

point with a vigorous eloquence. Her poems, almost all addressed to men,

deal with subjects of the gravest kind, particularly with religion.

Tullia had the inestimable advantage of knowing humanity from top to

bottom. Beside her, Calvin and Ochino are as innocent as babes, and she

taunts them, not unfairly, with dealing their blows blindly without

distinguishing between what is serious and what is harmless. Her own

wisdom is wonderful! The poet Arrighi cannot help exclaiming, “Vittoria

Colonna is a moon, Tullia a sun.” She celebrates pure love in the true

lyrical and forceful strain, as “the magnificent, the admirable madness

which alone produces great enterprises.” Whilst immaculate women like

Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara too often stifle us with languorous

sensibility (“When I was a happy lover, I exhaled the harmonies of my

heart in calm and pious accents”), Tullia, who has long ago lost this

tranquillity and these religious illusions, knows that will and action

are needed; she does not ask for the impossible, but on the other hand

she valiantly excommunicates Boccaccio with his “villanous novels,”

before whom the coy ladies of fashion bow their faces to the earth. In a

dialogue with two gentlemen, she discourses on love in quite a platonist

key; she investigates its casuistry: “Is the end of love its limit? Is

it better to love or to be loved?” She prefers to be loved, this fair

artist, because in loving we are acted on by the motive force, while in

being loved we exert it. Women who have really loved will perhaps be of

a different opinion; nevertheless there in one line we have stated the

great contention of the time. The art of women ought to have been to make

themselves loved and to constrain men to love; they were often caught in

their own toils; they loved, and consequently instead of receiving they

gave. “The heart has reasons reason never knows.”

These few notes on the literary work of women suffice to show that, on

the whole, feminine literature, except in Spain, sprang from love, to

return to love again. No great influence in the intellectual crisis

of the Renaissance can be attributed to these various writings; they

scarcely did more than develop more or less intuitively the platonist

philosophy.

On the other hand, women exercised an enormous intellectual influence

through their individual and personal action, especially in Italy. They

carried their charm into quarters which the mediaeval theologians,

so ready to style themselves the “doctors of the poor,” never

penetrated,—namely, among the poverties of the heart. They overlaid life

with that varnish of wonderful, singular sweetness which has never been

wholly rubbed off; they intellectualised society, and, in a country

essentially marked out as a prey for gold and luxury, they delayed the

moment when men were to be estimated merely by the gilding of their

ceilings or the thickness of their carpets.

The effects of their work north of the Alps are not very easily measured.

Resistance there was too strong; the masculine world was not easily

won over; men growled, for it seemed to them that women were plucking

their souls out, or wishing to degrade them, in proposing that they

should submit to—what? a sort of intellectual goodness. They refused to

hear women and intellect spoken of together. The Germans recognised no

intelligence in them apart from their domestic duties. What the Italians

called intelligence a German would call tittle-tattle, trickery, the

spirit of contradiction. They rejected such gratifications, and had no

intention of allowing Delilah to shear them. They would readily have

declared, like an arrogant character of M. de Curel, that there is

nothing in the world but egotism, and that the egotism which creates life

is of more worth than that which employs itself in providing life with

consolations. As to poetry, forsooth, they were tempted to receive love

serenades with a bucket of water. And if the Italians sneered at them

as barbarians, “brainless people,” they would answer them on the day of

battle by demonstrating how far mere brains and sensibility served a

nation. Erasmus dubbed “any man who was honest and learned” an Italian;

precisely, but what had the Italians come to with their beautiful ideas?

They wrangled, but they no longer fought.[381] “Don’t talk to me of the

Venetians,” said Louis XII.; “they don’t know how to die.” To know how to

die—that is life.

Virile, stern, frugal, poor, rustic often to boorishness, Germany in this

way kept up against the intellectual paradox the old disdainful warfare

of the empire against the priesthood, and once more the gulf was dug out

between body and mind, between matter and spirit, force and liberty. From

the banks of the Rhine a furious hail of missiles was directed against

the fragile aspirations of Italianism. Brandt published his famous _Ship

of Fools_,[382] reissued seventeen times between 1494 and 1520, a work as

much translated, copied and imitated in the Germanic world as Petrarch

was in the Latin world; a pungent and unjust work in which defile, as

in a booth at the fair, all the little grotesques which bring joy to

mind and heart—not merely, needless to say, old Turk’s heads like the

physician or the astrologer, but new types—the spectacled scholar, busy

nursing his own reputation under colour of Plato or Menander; the man of

the world, oiled and curled indeed, but a wit, a lover, a giddy-pate,

and a firm believer in the black art; no one is missing, not even the

explorer, at a period when the world was dreaming of free exchanges and

the demolition of frontiers, the age of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. In

the greater part of these adventurers the old German sees only arm-chair

travellers or tap-room oracles, and among the genuine travellers he

anticipates Sterne in distinguishing idle loungers, curiosity hunters,

liars, braggarts, conceited puppies, windbags, travellers in their own

despite, travellers fleeing from justice, felons, the innocent and

unfortunate traveller, the traveller for his own amusement. Hardly any is

forgotten but the sentimental traveller.

As to the poets, needless to say whether a genuine German scoffs at these

“gentlemen in _-us_,” a sort of intellectual Tartarins, who in actual

life lead old and even wealthy women to the altar.[383]

And thereupon heads grew hot, and men pointed to the decadence of morals,

the desertion of the country, the flocking of people into the towns,

and they laid the blame on Rome, the head of the movement—Rome without

a rudder, without a compass, drawn helplessly along by the new spirit

through which she was to perish.

Some years later, when in spite of everything the rising tide at last

made its force felt, the opposition changed front. People began to

twit Italian learning with superficial ostentation. A love for books

was laughed at. Ptolemy Philadelphus was a wonderful man, to be sure,

to collect forty thousand volumes at Alexandria! An ass might just as

well load himself with guitars and set up for a musician! That may be

admitted; but they did not stop there; and, notwithstanding all we

know of the violences of party spirit, we cannot help feeling somewhat

astonished when we hear a man like Marot contemptuously flinging the

epithet of “ignoramus” at the Rome of Leo X., or Melanchthon talking of

Italy as “Egyptian darkness, a prey to the worst enemies of literature

and study.” That seems the very last accusation that might have been

expected.

These German ideas were half French too, and consequently, in the hot

give-and-take of battle, imperial Germany and papal Italy, in spite of

some shrewd blows, maintained their positions well enough, whilst France,

caught between two fires, was shattered. At the very gates of Lyons, the

sweet city of feminism, the Germanists and Huguenots brutally replied to

all the poetry of the women with the jest of D’Aubigné: “When the eggs

are hatched, the nightingale stints his song.”

In addition to many earnest men and almost all politicians, believers

in authority and even in force, Italian dilettantism found other ardent

adversaries in France in the champions of the old _gauloiserie_, who

continued to dote on naturalism naked and unadorned, the syntheses or

analyses of the flesh. They felt insulted that anyone should wish to

impose on them a strained and uncomfortable Petrarchism with the idea of

toning them down. However, Petrarchism did not effect very much, and it

was assuredly not guilty of softening certain crudities and of replacing

by its mawkishness the twaddle of illustrious nobodies like Jean Picart,

Etienne Clavier and others.

Hence, in so disturbed an atmosphere as France then was, we should be led

to conclude that the influence of women was negative, in the scientific

sense of the word. Their work was like M. Pasteur’s. The soul of man was

stirred, agitated, overwhelmed by a host of imperceptible microbes; the

women did not furnish an infallible specific for preserving the health,

but sought to sterilise the noxious germs, to make the air pure and the

water clear.

Even after the squalls of the 16th century it cannot be said that no

vestige of their effort remained. For it is the characteristic of France

to be a complex and accommodating country, where nothing triumphs, but

everything succeeds, where nothing abides, but nothing is lost. To this

very day, an hour’s carriage drive through Paris takes you through the

last four or five centuries of our history. The feminism of the 16th

century brought down and deposited a new stratum of traditions: nothing

more could be expected.

The violence of the opposition prompts us also to find some excuses for

the timidity we have pointed out in high-placed women. Women genuinely

frank and fearless could only be found in humbler life. We have seen how

much difficulty Margaret of France, called to live in a circumscribed and

select society, had in determining her precise whereabouts, since she

met with nothing but contradiction around her. When her scared platonism

came at last, about 1540, to formulate as in Italy definite principles

of guidance through the pen of Héroët de la Maisonneuve, and a heated

contention was the result, Margaret prudently tacked about, and smiled,

now upon Héroët, now upon his adversary La Borderie.[384] And yet the

rein was felt,[385] and in her circle it became necessary to sing of love

in a more philosophic key. The fierce Des Périers himself, type of the

man who loves to bite, saw himself reduced to translating the _Lysis_ of

Plato, under the insipid title, “The Quest of Friendship.”

The victory thus remained a moderate and indecisive one, somewhat out

of proportion to the great enthusiasm displayed. The fine triumphant

treatises on the excellence and transcendent merit of women, those sacred

stones, relics of a forgotten worship, deserted dolmens, were almost all

Italian. Margaret showed some displeasure when she heard women ill-spoken

of; but she did not inspire glorious rhapsodies, like Vittoria Colonna

and many others. In France free discussion on the merits and demerits of

women continued rife.

Such wrangling was indeed an old French social pastime: everyone said his

say, with perfect liberty to change his mind, and a host of well-worn

sentiments more or less amusing were bandied about: “Eve was a woman, God

made himself man! There are no women among priests. It is very seemly

to sleep alone. I have never been in love or married, thank God!” In

the 15th century people succeeded for a moment in believing that the

intellectual level of their little pastime might be raised till it at

last attained the Italian perfection; a Norman named Martin Le Franc,

whom his duties as secretary to Felix V. had made half a pontiff, at one

moment threw out the grand phrase which was to set Italy on fire: “Women

are the apostles of happiness, because they are the apostles of universal

and necessary love.” A few little academies or _puys d’amour_,[386]

scattered here and there in Picardy and Flanders, caught eagerly at the

idea, but without deriving from it anything better than an encouragement

to the flowery verbosities of dead-and-gone chivalry, which they plumed

themselves on continuing. Then came the wild outbreaks in Germany to give

the finishing stroke, and when Brandt and Geyler[387] became the idols

of public opinion the French feminists blushed and turned tail. No more

monuments were erected to the glory of women, and even a masterpiece of

our art of engraving, an absolutely charming _Ship_[388] that appeared

about 1500, was devoted to their disparagement. It is a series of little

pictures, representing, to begin with, the inevitable Eve, and then

coquetry, music, dinners, perfumes, love. The author does not go so far

as to say that all these things are unutterably wearisome to him, but he

insinuates that in his opinion it is useless to look for any serious idea

among such frivolities.

The French were quite ready to admit that women had certain moral

qualities, like goodness and devotion; a woman who had only one shift

would give it away, they knew. A writer puts into Eve’s mouth a cry of

sublime self-sacrifice at the moment of her expulsion from the garden:

“Slay me,” she cries to Adam: “perhaps God will restore you to Paradise!”

And yet it was to her that he owed his expulsion. But the great

majority of Frenchmen very unjustly believed frivolity, inconstancy,

lack of originality to be defects inherent in the sex, and not merely

the result of an unfortunate education. If accomplished women quoted

Plato or St. Thomas they were laughed at, no one would believe that

they had an opinion of their own, but declared that they had got some

one to coach them, that “the doctrine was no deeper than their lips,

that they had no naturalness, that they disappeared under art.” A woman

was believed to be afflicted with the radical incapacity to acquire an

individual idea. Montaigne, who nevertheless boasts of being platonic and

anti-epicurean,[389] sums up all these old prejudices in flatly refusing

to regard woman as anything but a pretty animal. Virtue (the woman’s,

that is; Montaigne has different ideas) is corporeal fidelity: his ideal

is Anne of Brittany weaving tapestry in the conjugal bedroom. Montaigne

reluctantly admits that feminine coquetry may end in ennobling love,

but without changing its destination: “You can do something without the

graces of the mind, but nothing without bodily graces.” Thus, when Roman

and papal society claimed for women the absolute right to have done with

paint and powder, it fell foul of a host of preconceived ideas.

Frenchwomen did not firmly enough assert themselves. Their services

were accepted for domestic tasks, often delicate and difficult, which

necessitated much intelligence, but were considered servile or at least

inferior. Further, when they endeavoured to rise above this state of

bondage, they were checked, sent back to their idleness and frivolity,

persuaded that it was no duty of theirs to defend the great causes men

too often deserted; and they believed it. Here is a mass of useless

men, says the world: go to, let us match them with useless women! But

was it not a mistake thus to bury them alive, so as to prevent their

being too much in evidence? Was it right to inflict on the half of the

human species a malaise the more terrible because for the most part

the victim was unable to account for it? A woman who had all that is

apparently necessary for perfect happiness, and who nevertheless was

sick and unhappy by reason of the emptiness of her life, exclaimed:

“I feel I lack something. In my soul there are faculties stifled and

useless, too many things that are undeveloped and of no service to

anyone.” How many like her have there been at all times—women of deep,

vacant, ever virgin souls, who suffer through not giving themselves, and

live in maiden meditation, fancy free! And why? For the sole profit of

the selfishness of men! “No, this ought not to be,” warmly rejoined a

convinced spiritualist: “if men complain of seeing themselves equalled

or surpassed, more’s the pity: they have only themselves to blame. ’Tis

that they are unworthy of their women!” This was not the speech of a

Frenchman, but of a Roman prelate, Giovanni Monti, secretary to the pope.

CHAPTER V

RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE

The great effort that we have sought to portray resulted finally in a

profound religious revolution; starting from a crisis in belief, it led

to a transformation of Christianity through the ministry of women.

In reality, feminism exalted the soul rather than the woman. Woman is

born to cling to somebody; if man fails her she seeks a stay in God.

It was thus inevitable that her religion of beauty should end in a

mystic marriage, in a great dramatic act of religious sensibility, in a

development of charity and hope on the basis of definite dogma, in the

skilful interpretation of impressions of the unseen by means of external

signs.

That women would fling themselves passionately into religious sensibility

was only to be expected. This is their way.[390] Leaving out of account

those who are never happy out of church, women love to fancy themselves

queens by the grace of God. The incomprehensible, which irritates men,

fascinates them, and they experience a singular joy in rummaging the

mysteries. As we have already said, at the moment of the religious crisis

a courtesan proffered the most judicious advice on the direction of

ecclesiastical affairs.

In the Church, to mistrust the intrusion of women was a peremptory

tradition, and indeed the ecclesiastical world may well be considered the

citadel of anti-feminism. Religion had taken a logical and theological

bent; it recognised only one morality, applying to noble ladies and

eminent intelligences the rules taught to plainer folk. Erasmus repeats

approvingly the maxim of St. Paul: “Christ is the head of man, man the

head of woman; man is the image and glory of God; woman the glory of

man.” With the Church Fathers it had been a long-established custom

(going back to the wisest of the wise, Solomon) to compare women, and

even the Virgin, to the moon. From sacred literature this comparison

passed into profane literature, which employed it in season and out.

Rabelais declares that women play hide and seek with their husbands, as

the moon with the sun; Boccaccio and Brantôme revive the old proverb

about the virtue of women needing to renew itself every month like the

moon. One poet decries the moon, pale like woman’s love; another adores

her, pure like his well-beloved.

The platonists were well content with this phantasmagoric comparison,

which represented to them in all likelihood a whole world of freshness

and domestic joys.

Dolce himself deems that the moon is feminine. “At night,” he says, “she

streams through every chink and cranny, spite of blinds and shutters; she

inspires the imagination of husbands.” In France, during the period of

the fair Diana’s ascendency, the moon quite eclipsed the sun; the king

sported a device of interlaced crescents.[391] But the Church did not

go so far. It excluded women from the priesthood; its tradition granted

them nothing except personal piety, or at most heroism like that of St.

Catherine of Sienna of unfading memory. In order, therefore, to secure a

place in an absolutely new order of ideas, women had to wash their hands

once for all of eminent dogmaticians and subtle moralists, and to effect

a complete change.

Many enlightened minds in the Church itself called for this renovation.

The weariness and disgust generally felt in regard to certain

trivialities in religious observance, to the apologetics and the frigid

ethics of the time, had caused the spirit of faith and faith itself

almost entirely to disappear; and thus the Beautiful easily became the

guiding principle of theology. Only, some people sought their theology

in abstractions, others in the joys of art. The fall of Savonarola

precipitated the movement in the direction of art. His friends were

downhearted. Michelangelo clave to the Man of sorrows, the crucified

Christ, “as a skiff to the harbour”; his faith became confidence, and

dogmatic theology had no further interest for him.

So far from feeling itself harmed by this breath of philosophy, Rome,

ancient and eternal, regarded itself as invigorated thereby. “I am a

Christian platonist,” had been the saying of the early platonists.

Too proud to have any love for the petty arguments and the material

extravagances of every-day religion, these philosophical prelates wished

to establish the authority of the Church on the liberty, not the anæmia,

of the conscience.