The new philosophy declared itself to be more Christian than that of

Aristotle, and bowed before the official dogmas, like the priest before

the altar, declaring itself “unworthy”—before dogmas of almost insolent

authority, stern, inexorable, but modified by tenderness. The new

religion was the philosophy of the Lord’s Prayer. It sufficed to recite

the Paternoster in the spirit of love harmonising with it; regarding God

as the good Father, who gives life because He is life,—God, the celestial

and ideal, whose will should be done because it is the very essence of

love to seek its motives in the will of the beloved one. We love, not the

idols of the world, silver and gold, but love and mercy; our daily bread

is sufficient for us, love has loosened in us the springs of ambition;

filled with tenderness and dignity, foes to intrigue, we have to spread

abroad in the world this same tenderness and the tolerance it implies;

may God in like manner pardon the evil we may do. We beseech Providence

not to put temptation in our way, so that we may be saved from falling!

God is all love and all life. It is not His will to betray us by laying

snares for us; His religion can be only the perfect manifestation of

natural law. Goodness and piety do not mean pessimism and self-abdication.

The positive side of religion, namely, the creed, may well be left to

reasoners and theologians, for it gives rise to insoluble problems. But

religion also includes principles of practical morality, which have for

object the happiness of man.

In regard to the second point, the Gospel leaves us great liberty.

It lays down no dogmas in regard to beauty; it confines itself to

bequeathing us love, not a love more or less alloyed with selfishness,

vanity or interest, but a general love for God and our neighbours,

resulting from an inward spirit of devotion.

That being so, what is the good of quirks and quiddities? What is

the good of tight fetters? Love, and go straight on your way—that is

the new formula,—a very effective one, since it converts dogmas into

sentiments, and consequently gives them a direct bearing upon life;

a very philosophical one, for nothing is so personal, so individual

as sentiment. And, as Montaigne says, “it is a most excellent and

commendable enterprise properly to accommodate and fit to the service of

our faith the natural helps and human implements which God hath bestowed

upon us.... Had we fast hold on God by the interposition of a lively

faith; had we fast hold on God by Himself, and not by us; the love of

novelty, the constraint of princes, the good success of one party, the

rash and casual changing of our opinions, should not then have the power

to shake and alter our belief.”[392]

Faith is the best and almost the only guarantee of liberty of thought.

That explains why, in the official apartments of the pope, the _School

of Athens_, an eclectic homage to the philosophic spirit, is a companion

picture to the _Controversy on the Holy Sacrament_, the synthesis of

the spirit of faith, and why the _Parnassus_ appears to unite them. No

one found anything to object to in this alliance. Erasmus insists on

the fact that Christianity and Plato are in wonderful accord in regard

to happiness; Cornelius Agrippa himself, who ventured to call Plato a

“master of errors,”[393] attributes to Socrates inspiration from on high.

Leo X. acted as pope in countenancing Plato.

Mitigating circumstances have been urged in his favour; as the Roman

tradition excels in accommodating itself to the needs of each successive

age, some Catholic writers have thought that the alliance between

Roman prelates and the new aesthetic cult was a prudent concession to

circumstances. Our opinion, on the contrary, is that Rome, under the

influence of a century and a half of ardent study, deliberately placed

herself at the head of the movement. Rightly or wrongly, she believed

that religion is the art of living freely and in peace. “The soul is far

above the intellect.”

In virtue of this maxim there appeared, closely leagued with the prelates

for the purpose of reforming the Christian practice and restoring to it

its primitive motive force, the women, whether platonist or not, who

have been called _bibliennes_, but whom we would rather call Mothers of

the Church. In these days we stick pretty closely to the external and

picturesque features of the Bible; we read it as a story that has come

true, and love a realistic illustration. The _bibliennes_, too, after

their fashion, sought impressions, rather than a doctrine; for what they

called “my religion” was the doctrine of others, on which they drew their

own patterns, like figure-skaters. What concerned them in the Gospel was

its philosophy.[394] They wished to profit by it on their own system,

that is, by intuition, by inspiration from on high. Faith in witchcraft

flourished more than ever, and it seemed quite natural to regard women

as the special interpreters of the unseen.[395] The bloody persecutions

of the 16th century did not succeed in uprooting the belief in witches,

who sometimes indulged in horrid midnight abominations, but who were the

more habitually consulted by people who wanted to have their fortunes

told, to have their ailments treated,[396] to obtain good weather,

etc.[397] The boundless ambition of Julius II. sprang, it was said, from

the prediction of a sorceress, who had told him to be of good cheer,

for he would obtain the tiara and world-wide sway. The witches loosed

or bound the devil at pleasure. Their power was evil, but supernatural.

People said “witch”; in some parts the word “wizard” did not even exist.

If the witch was to credulous people the incarnation of women’s special

aptitude for medicine and religion, there was a good deal of truth in the

idea, and women might well be supposed capable of exercising supernatural

power. It was fashionable to extol the ancient sibyls in the same terms

as the prophets. These celebrated beings formed the connecting link

between antiquity and Christianity; instead of doing as Julius II.

wished, and painting the twelve apostles, in other words, the active

ministers of faith, Michelangelo boldly and triumphantly displayed on

the vaulted arches of the Sistine chapel seven prophets and five sibyls,

that is, the ministers of intuition.

Thus women substituted themselves for priests as they did for doctors,

from a horror of materialism and professionalism, from a sense of duty,

an idea of liberty, a spirit of charity, making no professions of

profound study, but with the wholesome aim of protecting the youthfulness

and beauty of their souls. Apostles of the religion of love and joy, they

addressed themselves to the miseries that befall especially those whom

the world calls happy; the unfortunate doubtless have no time to think of

their woes; it has always been much more difficult to convert the rich,

the healthy, and the young.

The idea of the feminine priesthood very easily made headway in Italy:

“God is only seen through women.” Women addressed themselves to chosen

spirits—philosophers, writers, preachers, men of action—who wished to see

God, but were too short-sighted. In the religious as in the other arts,

every prelate of importance had one woman, if not several, behind him.

Bembo was the friend of Olympia Morata[398]—what could be more natural?

A fiery, proud, austere monk like Ochino, with his large, bloodless face

and long, shaggy white beard, hardly seemed likely to prove a grand

master in the feminine freemasonry; yet he came in the end to lean upon

a bevy of ardent women, with Caterina Cibo, one of the pope’s ladies, as

their brilliant head. The pope himself came to terms with the ladies:

Paul III. displayed his deference for them on various occasions, and

especially by a visit to Ferrara, the notable seat of a feminist council.

Vittoria Colonna shines in the front rank of these Mothers of the Church;

she is the classical woman _par excellence_. She got up lectures at

Naples and Rome. She sustained and consoled prelates of the highest

eminence. “Since the hatred of others, the price I pay for my devotion,

has not bereft me of your Excellency’s good-will,” wrote Giberto from the

chancellery at Rome, “every other loss seems to me but a trifle. Your

Excellency can do me no more singular favour than to command me.”

Bishop Selva wrote to Cardinal Pole: “Thanks for the copy of your letter

to the marchioness of Pescara on recent events; it is worthy of that

Christian lady.” And the good Sadoleto, writing also to Pole, said: “I

have read the letter addressed to you by the very saintly and prudent

lady the marchioness of Pescara, in which she speaks of me and appears to

approve of our staying here; it is an indescribable pleasure to me to see

my counsels approved by so much virtue and wisdom.”

The holy passion of the marchioness for Cardinal Pole burned with a

highly mystical glow. Vittoria wrote to this beloved prelate “as the

intimate friend of the Bridegroom, who will speak to me through you, and

who calls me to Him, and whose will it is that I should converse on this

subject for my own encouragement and consolation.”

Religious feminism acclimatised itself in France with considerable

difficulty, through the fault of the women themselves. They were

habituated to tread unswervingly the authorised paths to Paradise—fasts

and abstinences, indulgences and pardons, relics, vows and pilgrimages.

To follow in the procession of Corpus Christi among their lackeys bearing

torches emblazoned with their arms, to wash the feet of the poor on

Good Friday and hand the poor a basket of provisions, never to miss a

sermon, to have a mass said every morning at a private altar, to purchase

indulgences—that was the religion of the great ladies of France. This

religion was accused of proceeding from a somewhat mechanical severity,

and of proving nothing; and indeed there were among those old-style

ladies some who were virtuous without purity, and some who were devout

without piety. Among the middle classes it was still worse: “angels

at church, devils at home, apes in bed!” How many husbands lost their

tempers at finding dinner not ready, and learning that Madame was at

her prayers or “slobbering over images”! An old writer declares that

there is no mean with religious women; they are either sour-tempered,

peevish or disagreeable, or adulteresses. And yet the same preachers

whom we have already seen obstinately bent on preserving the dead level

of morality vaunted equally the dead level of religion; they were

desperately afraid of getting above it. They liked women to remain

little girls, incessantly tormented by infinitesimal scruples; their

narrowness of thought, their passive and minute obedience were precisely

what the preachers praised, such were the traits they pretended to admire

in the Clotildes and Theodelindes.[399] And if the Saviour after His

resurrection went first of all to knock at the gate of the Magdalene’s

garden, that boon, according to them, was motived solely by the purely

passive and docile spirit of women. At Paris, where women were said to be

deficient in high philosophy, “there were more works of charity done and

more masses said than were done or said between Paris and Rome.” However,

certain flatterers saw virtue everywhere, and went so far as to cite

Charles VIII. as an angel, and the boulevards of Paris as a sanctuary.

Such reasonings naturally ended _in statu quo_.

At Rome the exact contrary was the case; liberty was especially rife

among the mob of functionaries, and their contempt for the easy-going

government they served was unmistakeable. Far back in the 15th century

Lorenzo Valla, to hasten his advancement, declared publicly that this

government rested on a usurpation and a lie. It was all so peaceful

and happy! More than one man, like Burckhardt, would kiss the pope’s

toe in the morning, and in the evening utter blasphemies. The dogma of

infallibility served as a shelter and defence. Just as Titian sent to

the Emperor a _Trinity_ and a _Venus_ together; or Sigismundo Malatesta

had a portrait painted showing him on his knees before madonnas; or

the irreverent Poggio destined his sons to the priesthood: so Aretino,

speaking of Saints and Venuses, lumped them all as “these ladies,” and

confessed before he died.

Far from being disturbed by theological attacks or stale criticisms, Rome

thought of nothing but displaying her Atticism and rescuing antiquity

from its submergence by medievalism, as she had already saved it from its

submergence by the barbarians.

The Spirit of God bloweth where it listeth![400]

As said the father of one of the cardinals, no man was a gentleman unless

he hazarded some heresy or other. The sceptic represented by Raphael

in the _Miracle of Bolsena_ is a man of high distinction. Ideas, men,

nothing was safe from ridicule. Two cardinals were chaffing Raphael for

having, as they said, given S. Peter and S. Paul rather too ruddy a

complexion. “Bah!” retorted the painter, “they are blushing to see you

ruling the Church.” Castiglione one day asked ‘Phaedra’ Inghirami, with a

smile, why on Good Friday, when heathens and Jews, heretics and bishops

are prayed for, there is no prayer for the cardinals. “Because,” replied

Inghirami with great readiness—“because they are included in the prayer

for heretics and schismatics.” The same Castiglione found the Duke of

Urbino’s chaplain to be rather long over mass, and begged for a more

expeditious celebrant. “Impossible,” replied the chaplain, and stooping

to the ear of his critic added: “Why, man, I don’t say a third part of

the _secretae_.”

The Lateran council in 1512 had, indeed, prescribed canon law and

theology as part of the course of study for priests. It recommended them

also to believe in the immortality of the soul. But these were only very

light fetters on liberty of thought. When Pomponazzi denied in set terms

the immortality of the soul, the Venetians, who had the logical minds

of the northern peoples, condemned his book to the flames; but Leo X.

did not even reply to the demand for his excommunication. Were there not

many like him at the Vatican? Were ceremonial and dogma spoken of much

otherwise there? The judgment we can pass on Rome is that of Talleyrand:

the man who does not know Rome does not know the sweetness of life.

At one time Adrian VI. was anxious to restore severer modes of thought,

but his aim did not please the prelates, and Clement VI. hastened to

bring back the spirit of the Medici, a “sentimental deism,” to adopt

the apt phrase of M. d’Haussonville, and to send “the imbeciles,

the ninnies,” as Bembo called them, about their business. The pope

supported the Protestants against Charles V. He was quite willing to

hear Firenzuola, in his Benedictine’s gown, read him fragments of his

dissertations on love. Paul III. plumed himself on continuing this

charming system. Bembo became a sort of patriarch; his _Asolani_ served

as well for a religious breviary as for a philosophic formulary.

Delightful age, in which nothing was hopelessly stranded in mediocrity!

in which the religion of beauty seemed to sum up all aspirations human

and divine, all the sanctities!

The cardinals displayed a reasonable magnificence because princes and

lords were essential to the kingdom of God on earth.

These were Christian prelates, charged with the duty of guiding a

somewhat pagan world. Among them we necessarily meet again the learned

doctors of love and wit—Bibbiena, for instance, his Plautus in his

pocket, always smiling, always amusing, and philosophising with gusto on

the oddities of the moment. “What folly!” is his incessant exclamation.

A priest, but one of the fashionable variety! Steeped to the lips in

mythology, and so refined, so delicate, that the naïve emotions of

a primitive Madonna leave him untouched! Wishing with his exquisite

politeness to offer a royal present to Francis I., he ordered, not a

Madonna, but a portrait of the beautiful Jeanne of Aragon. That is the

man who in the portrait of Leo X. stands near the pope’s chair as the

heart of his heart.

And Bembo, who invokes Olympus and speaks of the supreme Beauty, how

does he regard the sacred hierarchy? He writes to Isabella d’Este that

he “desires to serve her and please her as if she were the pope.”...

“Far better to speak like Cicero than to be pope.” And he adds this

postscript: “Isabella, my dear, my dear, my dear, I kiss thee with all

my heart and soul, and beg thee to remember me, as my big, big love for

thee merits.” That was his interpretation of charity! But people were

not particularly scandalised at these youthful sallies, any more than it

occurred to them to be shocked at finding a bishop’s palace peopled with

mythological personages,[401] or the Corso, on a carnival day, gay with

masked cardinals.

This intellectual indifference would have had graver consequences if,

knowing theology so badly as they did, the clergy had attempted to

expound it; but as a matter of fact they only scratched the surface of

dogmas; they were far too sensible to speak of things they knew nothing

about. The watchword was to render religion lovable. In what respect was

Sadoleto, for example—that Fénelon of the 16th century—a worse priest

because he was so passionately devoted to the humanities and the arts!

Take liberty away, and the degeneracy of Catholic countries was assured.

To-day everything is changed; if Leo X. or Bembo returned to the world,

they would be utterly nonplussed by the complete alteration that has

taken place. It is in Germany, among their whilom adversaries, that they

would recognise the doctrine dear to them, and a freedom of mind that

allows a man to call himself a Christian though rejecting the divinity of

Jesus Christ. To many present-day Germans, the kingdom of God stands for

the whole community of those who believe in the principle of love. God

is love: the kingdom of God—that is, a state in which everyone’s actions

would be prompted by love—is the final end of God, and at the same

time the most universal moral ideal, the sum and crown of morality and

religion. Singularly enough, people are apt to imagine—not, of course,

that the founders of the Reformation professed this doctrine (the mistake

would be too glaring), but—that they opened the door, cut the first notch

in the tree, by starting the private reading of the Scriptures. Thus

Protestant orthodoxy, which holds by a priestly and quasi-infallible

tradition, would appear as a pseudo-catholicism, whilst liberal

Protestantism, which pushes forward with open mind in a boundless field

of thought, would represent the logical outcome of the work of Luther and

Calvin.

On the other hand, it is believed by some that the armour of authority,

the spirit of narrowness and officialism sometimes adopted by

Catholicism since the struggles of the 16th and 18th centuries, are

indispensable to it, and that the Reformation was calculated to rid it of

that spirit.

On the contrary, it was at Rome that liberal ideas with the utmost

audacity secured a footing. They were vanquished, it is true, and

disappeared; but if Luther and Calvin had the glory of defeating them,

time in its turn has brought in its revenges, and, of Luther as of

Calvin, there is very little now remaining.

The liberal Protestantism of the present day is the antithesis of the

primitive spirit of the Reformation.

The Reformation had political and social sides, of which this is not

the place to speak; in matters religious, the reformers felt a need of

disciplinary reorganisation, very natural, but not peculiar to them;

but their essential aim was to create a reaction against free thought,

to return as far as possible towards the Middle Ages, to rescue the

world from the Roman idealism, which was the work of prelates and women,

and had sunk into an intellectual dilettantism. Old Germany desired

matter-of-fact, or at any rate well-advertised virtues, a quasi-military

pietism, and theological reasoning. It revolted against life in the

sunlight.

Frenchwomen were not thwarted by their husbands in regard to their

patronage of the aesthetic cult, as they were in matters of morality.

The majority of men professed a benevolent scepticism, which made them

what we call “moderates,” that is, not warm partisans of moderate ideas,

but moderate or even negative partisans of any idea whatever; and

consequently they were open to any sort of impulsion, even from women.

Montaigne wanted but one thing to make him a mystic—namely, mysticism:

and the Montaignes are legion; only we do not come across them; in their

characters of moderates they keep in the shade.

In this case the obstructors were the clergy, the mass of whom in France,

as in England or Germany, made common cause with the nation, instead of

the nation making common cause with them, as at Rome. They possessed

about a fifth part of the land, and found themselves tied to it. The

village parson, sprung from the soil, and presented to a benefice on

leaving school, did his duty there without hope of advancement, in the

same spirit that the lord performed his feudal duties—rather like a

superior farm-hand, much less accomplished in theology or in platonism

than in mixing a sauce for a choice carp, or in roasting to a turn the

pullet he brought home under his arm on his return from administering the

last rites to a dying parishioner; a jolly good fellow, and a capital

gossip, but as far from a mystic movement or a crusade on behalf of the

ideal as the poles. If there was to be a Reformation, the only one that

would have struck him as useful would have been to authorise him to

marry; and French statesmen, although very good Catholics, were very much

of the same opinion. Obviously it was still more impossible to depend,

for upholders of the ideal, on a mob of artisans, tradesmen, peasants

even, highly practical people, who had got their poles shaven in order to

come under the jurisdiction of the church courts, and who, though clerks

only in name, still helped to root the Church among the people.

To meddle with this obscure and doltish mass with the idea of implanting

in it the germ of the beautiful was the last thing women would have

thought of.

There remained the world of distinguished abbés, the higher clergy, the

court prelates; but, as benefices served to reward merit of the most

various kinds rather than to encourage a philosophic system, the upper

ranks of the French clergy showed a curious mixture—eminent priests,

venerable monks, younger sons or merrybegots of great nobles, professors,

judges, men of letters. No one who did not know would ever have suspected

that Melin de Saint-Gelais was an abbé.

Fausto Andrelini was not at all ashamed to publish a letter to his

mistress side by side with an address to the Cardinal of Amboise, in

which he solicited ecclesiastical preferment.

The _bibliennes_ put themselves at the head of this motley crew of

great churchmen; they were “clergywomen,” as someone satirically said,

and formed the new priesthood, the Salvation Army of that time. Their

simple ambition was to raise these men, these priests, by one stroke

of their pinions, into the empyrean, as in Italy. Convinced doubtless

that—to adopt the phrase of a distinguished lady—“the law of sex and its

pious mysteries lead to great sanctity,” they saw shining in the supreme

light various groups united by sympathy and tenderness—old St. Jerome

sustained by young Paula, Francis of Assisi by sweet Clara; following

their example, Francis de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal, Vincent de Paul

and Louise de Marillac were going to lend each other mutual support,

obedient to the eternal law—to say nothing of innumerable holy maidens

who were lovers of Christ “in His sacred humanity,” like St. Theresa, or

who encircled their finger with the ring of a mystic marriage, as Jeanne

de France did when founding the Annunciade.[402] Faith must needs become

love and diffuse a thrilling charm:[403] the priest must cease to fancy

himself a policeman. How many poor souls, athirst for love, have fallen

very low simply from want of an ideal! There are sick ones who might

become artists in sensibility! Women stretch out beseeching hands to God,

that He may help them to regard life with confidence, with joy, with love.

Margaret of France was, in the highest degree, one of these French

_bibliennes_, no debater and indeed sceptical as to the existence

of absolute truth and goodness in this world, but a woman of quick

intuitions and contemplative mind. She had faith; she believed in the

sacraments,[404] and did not deny purgatory; she in no manner sought with

the ladders of reasoning to scale the verities that tower far above our

reach; she preferred to take to herself wings and fly aloft. Men appeared

to her so petty, so feeble, such ants, that a few merits more or less on

their part were but insignificant stages in the long road between them

and perfect goodness; she represented God to herself as pure kindliness,

indulgence and love, wherefore it was necessary to fly towards him on

wings of love. She clung to St. Catherine of Sienna, not as a theologian,

but because “nothing but love was her argument.”

This simple explanation of their principles will clearly show in which

species of clergy the women would seek their allies; they loved those

who loved them. They did not appreciate the courtier bishop who played

the hunter or the warrior. Their friends were the scholarly prelates;

they knew well that platonic love had little hold, alas! on the brilliant

youth of France, and that divine love would not easily subdue them; yet

by dint of tenderness they did not despair of success. The protonotary

D’Anthe fell sick, and Margaret at once sent him the following

prescription—a decoction of “pleasant recollections and sure hope of

love,” a little “powder of laughter,” a drop of “true felicity,” an

extract of “apple of love,” in short, remedies not in the least heroic.

The gay Bandello’s cure was effected with a rich bishopric, that of Agen.

Grave charges have often been brought against this combination of piety

and love, and naturally, anyone who does not understand platonism

will see a multitude of more or less deplorable _arrière-pensées_ in

these “spiritual gallantries.” In the 17th century indeed the grave

Nicolle[405] found a happy phrase to describe ecclesiastics who dangled

about the petticoats; he calls them “half-married priests.” “Marriage”

would be an inept name for the unions of which we speak. It is very

natural, surely, that women of feeling should seek their friends and

fellow-workers among feeling souls! Besides, experience proves that you

can do nothing with reasoners except by force; only the sensitive are

converted; only St. Augustines have capabilities for good.

The practical programme of the women consisted first of all in their

attaching an extreme value to the development of the sensuous elements

in worship; the severity of the Reformers, crudeness and bareness of

ceremonial, could never attract them; they loved pomp and decorum.

Religion to them was the very essence of art; art in becoming elevated

shaded off into religion; only the inexplicable thrill of the awakening

aesthetic sense can waft the soul from the expressed to the unexpressed.

Pleasure is not the end of art; it is only its vehicle. The end of art is

God.

Eglises viz, s’écrie Marguerite, belles, riches, anticques,

Tables d’autelz fort couvertes d’ymaiges

D’or et d’argent....

Je prins plaisir d’ouyr ces chants nouveaulx,

De veoir ardans cierges et flambeaulx,

D’ouyr le son des cloches hault sonnantes

Et par leur bruyt oreilles estonnantes:

C’est paradis icy, me dis-je alors....[406]

One Good Friday, at Brionne, a Norman châtelaine was highly scandalised

at the fantastic manner in which the parson rendered the Litany of the

Passion; and on leaving the church, she sent for him and the following

dialogue ensued: “My dear sir, I don’t know where you learnt to officiate

on such a day as this, when people should be in the depths of humility;

but to hear you render the service, all our devotional thoughts have been

put to flight.” “What do you mean, Madam?” said the parson. “Mean! you

have sung the Passion all the wrong way. When our Lord speaks, you bawl

as if you were in a market; and when ’tis Caiaphas speaking, or Pilate,

or the Jews, you speak as gently as any blushing bride. A fine sort of

parson! If you had your deserts, you’d be unfrocked!” The parson wriggled

out of the difficulty like a true Norman, with a gibe at the Jews: “My

dear lady, I wanted to show that with me Christ is master and the Jews

are subject to Him.”[407]

A sort of external sensuousness in worship, therefore, formed an integral

part of the feminist religion. As to the substance of that religion, it

varied according to the women, and even according to the days, for it was

a matter of impressions.

It was fed principally by the reading of the Scriptures.

It is a common error to believe that Luther’s great reform consisted in

inculcating the direct and free reading of the Scriptures. The study of

the Bible was, one may say, carried to excess among Catholic women. Vivès

went so far as to make it one of his principal rules for the education

of young girls.[408] And some people even vigorously protested against

the abuse of such reading. Before Luther’s time, about 1504, the French

satirist Gringoire, as well as certain preachers, denounced it as a

positive scourge.[409] Later, Brantôme waxed indignant at seeing the

Bible in the hands of children, and Montaigne at finding it discussed at

street corners or in back-shops.

But the women in their turn were irritated at the attempts to curb their

zeal. These criticisms of men recalled to them that contemptible sneak

Adam, who made excuses for himself and shuffled on to his wife the

responsibilities of their common thirst for knowledge.

Was their imagination distrusted? they asked. Were they thought incapable

of distinguishing between “ancient rubbish and modern trash”? They

found in the Old Testament rare beauties, to be sure, but they were

very far from admiring everything blindly—the exploits of some of the

patriarchs—the inconsistencies even of the Deity himself, who forbids

slaughter and yet slew! No, no, the Bible is not the book of love; it

is the first of books, but one mustn’t go there to find the secret of

“changing all strifes into sovereign charity.”

The Old Testament pleased the friends of the religion of

terror—Savonarola, and some French ladies of the old style, devout and

mystical at certain moments, but in reality highly materialistic in their

tastes and their practical ideas.

Others criticised the Bible as they did everything else. In the Bible,

as in other things, what struck them most was the light it threw on

life. An artist stops before a landscape, not to analyse the chemical

action of the trees, or to discourse on the species of grasses, but to

seize the charm of an effect of light, of a picturesque undulation of

the ether; at another time, when the light falls differently, the very

same landscape would not even attract his attention, because its garb

would be less striking. We do not well understand the synthetic religion

of these women, we men of “fluid and curt speech,” habituated to analyse

everything with mathematical precision—and not to look for grand opera at

St. Paul’s. The practised eye of a Renaissance princess allowed itself

to be caressed by tints, while our own seeks geometrical outlines. For

the Italians and their friends to love was to pray:[410] so that in the

_Heptameron_ conversations half philosophic, half ribald, come naturally

between mass and vespers, and Louise of Savoy mingles with them a feeling

homily, or reads a passage from St. John, “meat so tender ... full of

love.”[411]

The reader will understand how difficult it is to state with any

exactitude the developments of such a doctrine; they were different with

different people, and are to be felt rather than explained. We have not

to do here with students shut up in a smoke-filled hall to construct

their theses; it is a question of ladies, very great ladies, habituated

to the most perfect liberty of action, and permitted by their rank and

intelligence to hold direct communion with God, by vision, by intuition

of love. They are recognisable by this characteristic. In her work the

_Adoration of the Magi_ (a subject well worthy of her pen) Margaret

of France gives us her formula: “To initiate oneself into the divine

verities, first by philosophy, then by intuition, then by inspiration.”

Do not mistake, this is not illuminism or pride: it is simply candour.

These noble ladies do not grudge their pity to human misery, though

the sight of wretchedness is shocking to their nerves; but they set

themselves high above these miseries, just as they do above discussion.

Their religion is distinguished. They live on sovereign heights, where

they have no trouble from men and are in touch with their goal. God is

the first link in a chain, and man the last. As Gerbert said: “In matters

of action, mankind holds the first place: in pure speculation, God comes

first.” It is meet to follow God rather than man. And those who are

able to mount high are compelled by conscience to go to the fount and

origin of things, and look ideas square in the face. In this respect the

truly primitive women of the 16th century are sharply distinguished from

their daughters of the 18th, whom it is natural to compare to them. The

exquisite and delightful woman of the 18th century was very superficial:

she loved life and the world for their own sake. A few hours before she

died Madame Geoffrin,[412] hearing at her bedside a discussion on the

best means of securing general happiness, roused herself once more to

exclaim: “Add the diligent quest of pleasure, a thing not sufficiently

attended to.” A profound and true saying, remarks D’Alembert, and one

that Plato himself might have envied. The 16th-century women had a less

sparkling wit, but a much more strongly marked temperament. They were

concerned only with brotherly love, and instinctively recoiled from

intolerance in any form; they wished to fuse the church with the ideal;

to them every idealist was religious; but they also carried into the

world the pursuit of this high aim of their aesthetic religion—to live

for the soul, for God, to live a secret inward life along with the actual

life. We may justly praise their piety, their charity towards the poor;

and yet they were a mixture: external observances were repugnant to them

as being material and obligatory; they loved the large philosophical

faith, God and His works.

Here there is more than ever reason to speak of a “stork-love.” What

platonism had attempted, religious idealism effected—the superposition

of two different worlds. It was vain to expect these great ladies to

throw any ardour into terrestrial controversies: Renée of France made her

protégé Richardot a Calvinist or a Catholic bishop, indifferently. The

material mechanism of divine grace appeared to them to have been devised

for the vulgar, and to be of a quite relative truth. They did not see why

the delicate ray of grace, the impalpable word of consolation, before it

could penetrate into the dark haunts of wretchedness, should necessarily

have to borrow the form of a bearded monk or an unkempt parson splashed

to the chin. They would rather hear with their own ears that still small

voice which said to St. Theresa: “I will not henceforth that ye commune

with men, but only with angels.”

Priests were men appointed to the service of the Church, and not

demi-gods. Some were pleasant and cultured, just as there were excellent

abbesses; but to spend one’s life in the vestries, or not to be able

to move a finger without referring to one’s clergyman, struck Margaret

as sheer insanity. For herself, she would rather talk with a sceptic

or a clever atheist than with a vulgar parson, because after all the

atheist would aid her to accomplish her end, namely, to draw near to God

through the Beautiful. Nothing was more natural than to love God and

abase oneself in deed and in truth before Him, God being intelligence and

King of kings; but what was the good of intermediaries, often so gross?

Clément Marot, who saw through Margaret with wonderful acumen, defines

her as “woman in body, man in heart, angel in head.” The friends of

the princess declare that “from the age of fifteen she seemed directly

inspired by the spirit of God, in eyes and features, in gait and speech,

in all her actions.”

The Bishop of Meaux assures her that by reading a translation of the

Gospels he offers her she will be as a holy apostle and will receive

directly the Spirit of God, just as well, he adds, “as when we” (that is,

the common herd) “receive Him in the Eucharist.”

Thus the women aimed at being angels and the word of God. In this lofty

mysticism, they exhibited a striking contrast to the easygoing and

lukewarm Catholicism of the mob.

Some of their writings permit us to recognise how, little by little, this

great religious work was accomplished in their emotional life.

Vittoria Colonna has left us the type of the final prayer of the

Renaissance: a petition for peace and happiness in this world and the

next.[413] It is an aspiration, a strain of sweet and tender music,

a melody of Gounod, rather than a doctrine: it is the result of the

co-operation of souls in one common striving toward the most perfect joys.

We have under our eyes the works of three Frenchwomen who, though

contemporaries, show us the progressive stages of this co-operation.

The first, Gabrielle de Bourbon, Dame de la Trémoille, still preserves

in her _Château_, “a feminine work,” as she says, a character of

morality rather than art. The spirit which will renew everything, chisel

everything, which is gaily to open doors and windows, has not yet come

by. Within, no doubt, there are ravishing delights—apostolic visions,

prophets and sibyls on the vaulted arches as at the Sistine; angel’s food

distributed amidst a floating radiance of light! But all is regular,

inflexible, and severe; the contemplative heart has begun by employing

the besom of discipline.

And externally this castle of the Christian soul, somewhat resembling the

Alhambra, shows a rugged and bristling front. Love fires the cannon on

the ramparts, whilst Inspiration surveys the country round, and in the

tiny garden of Felicity where flows the stream of Pity, good souls gather

exquisite white flowers, luscious fruits, and leafy branches.

In another work, the _Spiritual Journey_, a story of the adventures of

a soul wandering upon the earth, Gabrielle undisguisedly raises her

standard against the new divinities—Presumption who loves flowery paths;

Self-love, hostile to terrible dogmas; Vain-glory, uncommonly like

Margaret of France. Poverty and Virginity are still her friends, and she

gives a naïve, heart-breaking, monstrous description of the world—a giant

with innumerable hands, each quivering tentacle of which, at odds with

the rest, brandishes some weapon, a book or a sword. Charity defeats this

monster, Faith triumphs. Gabrielle de Bourbon, as she herself said, wrote

for the simple; she did not plume herself on “understanding Holy Writ.”

But ere long comes a genuine noblewoman, Catherine d’Amboise, lady of

Beaujeu, who in her _Devout Epistles_ utters this loyal cry:

J’ay transgressé tous les commandemens ...

Pour abréger, aucun je n’en excepte.[414]

She has only one noble thing left to her—her heart; and that she offers

to God. Then follow effusions in a lofty strain, full of antiquity,

biblical allusions, “sibyl songs,” a plea for mercy and love; and Christ

puts on her finger the ring of peace, benediction, and remission of sins;

He becomes her spouse and lover, and for guardian gives her an angel.

With Catherine d’Amboise we win to a wondrous pleasant and aristocratic

paradise, composed of “fair manors and castles.” To the 15th-century

woman has succeeded the _biblienne_.

Margaret gives the last upward impulse above the anonymous and often

ill-thought-out work of the crowd: to prove her independence, she adopts

an abstract and lofty aim.

Not that everything is admirable or even comprehensible in her mystical

works. Her correspondence with Briçonnet, where, in interminable

letters of eighty or a hundred pages, she twaddles about “confection of

tribulations,” “old skins” of the spirit; various writings of hers—_The

Mirror of the Sinful Soul_, the _Strife between Flesh and Spirit_, the

_Orison to Jesus Christ_, the _Orison of the Faithful Soul_—these are

very curious, precisely as types of incomprehensibility and the despair

of reason. They do not evidence a very placid psychology: “Worse than

dead, worse than sick”—such is the author, according to her mottoes;

there were days when she hated doctrine of any kind, the Bible, the

Gospels included.[415]

She learnt the death of her brother intuitively, in a dream. From that

time the world crushed her; mystics know that thus “the incorporate soul

makes her course for the port of salvation.” Margaret’s mysticism became

a blind infatuation,[416] a drunkenness of love, in which divine and

human elements were commingled,[417] and which manifestly had for object

to banish from sight many of the miseries of life.

It is in the book entitled _The Triumph of the Lamb_ that we see best

delineated the Christ of her heart, her divine Saviour and emancipator,

shedding a radiance above the grimy factory of life. Death itself becomes

lovely, and, like a “courteous friend,” opens the gates of heaven to

well-nigh all mankind.[418]

Mankind has a right to clemency, unstinted, immeasurable; in fashioning

us of a somewhat coarse clay, Heaven did not mean to make us all unhappy.

Margaret has a horror of death.[419] But Love reassures her, helps her

to pierce the mystery. Not as an avenger, but as a lamb will Christ

render justice at the Judgment Day. Men were complaining of the facility

of indulgences; Margaret settles the question off-hand; she proposes a

general pardon.

Of mysticism, as well as of love, there were already innumerable

varieties known. Perugino, Averulino,[420] the preachers of the royalty

of Christ, St. Bernardin of Sienna, Savonarola, and many another,

carried on the great traditions of Italy. France too, though more

stubborn, had her mystics, especially at Rouen and in Picardy, where the

palinodists,[421] elects souls, magistrates, municipal counsellors, had

long been singing praise to the Virgin and reviling the body:

La chair, quoy? nourriture mortelle!

L’esprit d’amour nourrit le cueur fidèle![422]

These palinodists were men of intelligence and ardour. Asking nothing of

the clergy, whom they riddled with pungent epigrams, they had recourse to

worldly means to spread their ideas, such as competitions and dramatic

performances. They resembled the women in their excessive cult of the

intellect, their unceasing itch for writing and speaking, their taste for

mystery and incognito. It was the same in regard to their impressions:

they desired to bring into relief the true life of Christ, that is,

the mystic and inward life which they held the rude apostles to have

overmuch neglected. Assuredly theirs was a noble aim. Margaret was on

excellent terms with the palinodists. Yet the mysticism of platonism was

different, implying a much more general abstraction: it mistrusted the

senses, the material form, desirous of seeing the reality of things,

the essence of God. Among the prelates it gave rise to that exquisite

academy of devotion and prayer, the Oratory of the Divine Love, which met

at Rome in the church of SS. Silvester and Dorothea Transtevera during

the pontificate of Leo X., and which numbered among its members sixty

priests and prelates, Sadoleto being one of the chief. They gave all

their thoughts to the reformation of morals, and among them prayer rose

delicately to Heaven, like those wreaths of fire the Bible shows us on

altars pleasing to the Lord.

Feminine mysticism was broader: its aim was to develop happiness, in

other words, to lead us to the summit of an ideal world, full of love

and purity. Love, having lost the egotistic and licentious character

without which the French mind refused to understand it, having become an

aspiration for the French as well as for the idealist races, represented

the very substance of the world; it was divine and eternal; it gathered

up all things, even men, into the heart of God. The Gospel was only the

practical expression of this high natural law, of which the pagans long

ago had caught glimpses, and to which Seneca ventured darkly to allude

when he wrote, “When, tell me, will you love one another?” The Gospel

was the sum and crown of human wisdom. Hence Erasmus wished to canonise

Virgil, and to add to the Litany a new response—“St. Socrates, pray for

us.” Plato was quoted in the pulpit; Anne of France, who was orthodoxy

itself, took pains to mingle the philosophers with the Fathers. Trajan

was regarded as a model; Louis XII. and Guevara, the tutor of Charles V.,

lived on the maxims of Marcus Aurelius.

They aimed at a sort of natural mysticism, the object of which would be

to express the essence of mundane things. “It is God,” said Rivio,[423]

“who giveth to the sky its splendours, to the trees their shade, to the

cheering vines their clusters and fruit. It is He who clotheth the earth

with fruitful crops, who causeth the trees to bud and the crystal streams

to gush forth, who covereth the meadows with a carpet. Wherefore to hunt

and fish and reap, to fulfil all the conditions of life,—this is to be a

Christian.”

No one had any bent towards naturalism, or imagined that everything that

is natural should be regarded as good or beautiful; on the contrary, men

wished to elevate and improve Nature, even to excess. Your vineyard, say,

always yields bad wine; M. Zola would tell you to drink it, Rousseau to

drink water: but these folk of the Renaissance would tell you to distil

it into brandy. From Nature they wished to borrow certain quasi-mystical

powers which exist in her in force. Hence this mysticism did not, like

that of St. Theresa, lead to the deliberate rejection of all earthly

satisfactions, to the adoration of death, suffering and humiliation.

_Carpe diem_ was their motto, as it was of Horace and Lorenzo de’ Medici.

They left to Albert Dürer and other Germanic artists the monopoly of

dances of death and maidens carried off in the arms of skeletons.

“For loss of servitors we need not despair, for many others are to be

had”: so spoke the fair ladies, not out of indifference, but out of fear

lest the mournful idea should trouble their hearts: for “there is none

of us, if she regards her loss, but has occasion for deep sorrow.”[424]

When we ask history or romance or the drama to carry us for a time out of

ourselves, do not we too seek, in reality, the satisfaction of forgetting

death—perchance, of forgetting life?

That was the very human root of this mysticism. In turning back to the

page of love, no one wished to feel under the fingers the page of death.

Far from forgetting life, they affirmed it: the secret of life was life

itself. They mocked at death. A skeleton at the feast, a spectre at the

ball, were subjects for laughter. Like Boccaccio, Machiavelli sets his

gayest stories in a horrible framework of pestilence; rich folk laugh

and make love under cool leafy shades; and their excuse is that, but a

few paces off, death is grinning at them. Such is the key to this novel

mysticism. It is a tragic dance of fragilities; but the dancers see

nothing fragile. They forge for themselves an artificial weapon, they

prefer beauty to truth.

It followed from the same ideas that they held direct communion with

God. The tender worship of the Virgin, fallen a little out of use, no

longer throve except stealthily in a corner, like the beautiful plant

which the Flemish painters loved to represent in a crystal vase.[425]

Communication with heaven was opened by means of conspicuous semaphores,

though these unhappily were irregular and far apart. St. Theresa, like

a genuine freelance, might speak of storming heaven, and carrying its

successive redoubts one by one; but the philosophic idea was different—a

simple canter in a friendly country. On some beautiful day in May, when

Nature, overflowing with love, scatters her gifts in careless profusion,

a certain Knight, Beau-Doulx by name, sets off among the flowery meadows

to conquer this “noble and delectable castle of Love,” all sapphires and

emeralds from base to turret. He bears with him no cannon, no scaling

ladders. Arrived beneath the walls, he sinks on his knees and declares

his love. That is all. That is “the realm of Paradise, wherein is love

divine.”

Nature hails God in us, and reveals God to us. The song that rises

from the sea soars even to the stars; the luxuriant warmth of the air

is a symbol of mercy. Such a temple was better loved than the frantic

mysticism of certain northern cathedrals. As for the rites of this

worship, they were those of platonism. Salvatorio wrote a _Treasury

of Holy Scripture after the Poems of Petrarch_: Fra Feliciano Umbruno

offered to the ladies of Rome a _Dialogue on the sweet death of Jesus

Christ_, this too inspired by Petrarch. Fra Malipiero presented the

famous _Spiritual Petrarch_, which appeared at Venice in 1536 and ran

into the tenth edition. The spiritualisation of sonnets was effected

easily enough: but anyone who wished to amend the _canzoni_ and

miscellaneous poems had a troublesome task.

The religion of love found an incomparable interpreter in Correggio.

Correggio is _the_ painter of women. How wonderfully he translates their

dream of love and confidence, in harmony with the code of aesthetic

Christianity! In his _Saint Jerome_, the Virgin is beautiful to look

upon, of a human, piquant, smiling beauty; but the whole effect of the

picture is derived from the face of the Magdalene, and her intensely

caressing attitude: it is the apotheosis of the caress! Never, perhaps,

has love all-embracing, soft as velvet, been so warmly expressed: prayer,

passion, all is cast into the shade by this contemplation of pure love,

this contact, enchanting, radiant, of two beings united by a magnetic

tenderness. The child Jesus has behind Him an angel representing heaven;

before Him St. Jerome holds an open book; but He turns about, bestowing

His gracious smile upon the Magdalene, whom He prefers to all human

learning because she is Love.

At the Louvre, too, the _Mystic Marriage_ fills one’s heart with a

golden, sunny vision. “It is impossible,” says Vasari, “to see more

beautiful hair, lovelier hands, a more natural and charming colouring.”

In this ardent “conversation” life seems to be suspended: “The will

is changed to love, the memory appears to have vanished, and the

understanding has ceased to act.”

Devotion is often accused of being tiresome. It is true that God has

no revelation to make to Himself; He is the immortality of the known.

The women who lived on such lofty ideas readily assumed a profound and

pensive air, an expression of intelligence and trenchancy rather than

tenderness. Like the wounded soldier at Austerlitz of whom Tolstoï

speaks, they awoke in the vast silence of the night, alone with the clear

bright stars.

Where men would have brought their pride, women brought their sweetness.

Their language was a little involved and “precious.”

Yet we can see from the correspondence of Margaret of France and Vittoria

Colonna, how sincerely they thought themselves happy. These two ladies

never saw each other. Vittoria writes that while awaiting the infinite

happiness of a meeting, she ventures to reply to the “high and religious”

words of the princess, so as to act as balance-weight to that celestial

timepiece. “In our day, the long and difficult journey of life compels

us to have a guide; it seems to me that everyone can find in his own sex

the most appropriate models.... I turned towards the illustrious ladies

of Italy to find examples for imitation, and though I saw many virtuous

among them ... yet one woman alone, and she not in Italy, seemed to me

to unite the perfections of the will with those of the intellect; but

she was so high placed and so far away that my heart was filled with the

gloom and fear of the Hebrews when they perceived the fire and glory

of God on the mountain-top, and durst not draw near because of their

imperfection.”

In this first letter the marchioness contents herself with glorifying the

humility and charitableness of her noble correspondent, whose daughter

she humbly calls herself, or better, her John Baptist, her Forerunner:

these personal compliments always play an important part in feminine

diplomacy, full of splendid courtesy. She speaks of her group of friends;

she often enjoys, she adds, the conversation of Pole, who “is always in

the heavens, and only descends to earth to do service to others,” and

that of Bembo, one of the labourers of the eleventh hour, perhaps, but

eminently worthy, by reason of his ardour, of the wages of the first; and

all these friends of hers unite in contemplating from afar this queen of

gems, so rich in radiance that she enriches others.

In another letter Vittoria grapples more closely with the burning

questions of the day. She affirms her respect for reason, but she prefers

religion, “the supreme perfection of our soul,” the perfect beauty. For

the better unfolding of her theme she encloses a copy of her sonnets.

This copy, though addressed to the sister of the king, was intercepted

in the post by order of the Constable de Montmorency. Whether he read

the sonnets or not is very doubtful; in any case he judged them to be

pernicious stuff, and seized the opportunity of indulging in the luxury

of an explosion. He only gave up the book after a stormy scene at the

king’s table.

Vergerio,[426] the amiable prelate who was the pope’s nuncio in France,

had great difficulty also in meeting Margaret. How ample was his reward

when he succeeded! His first audience, which lasted not less than four

hours, seemed to him far too short to satisfy his “spiritual enthusiasm.”

He lost not a moment in committing to paper all that had been said, in

order to show to what altitudes of Grace and divine Love “mounts the

spirit of the queen.” But how was it possible to transfer to paper so

much spontaneous eloquence, so much fervour, so potent a charm?... It was

not a very comfortable conversation. Margaret could speak no language

but French, and as Vergerio was hardly at home in it, she spelt out her

words, so to speak, mingling with them as much Latin and Italian as she

could. For all this, when Vergerio took his leave, in his ravishment he

fancied he saw the glaciers of the human heart melting under the hot

beams of faith, and breathed the wonderful breath of God. Whence came

this miracle? “Praise be to Jesus Christ, who in our troublous times

hath raised up such intelligences—here the queen of Navarre, of whom I

speak; at Ferrara the lady Renée of France; at Urbino the lady Leonora

Gonzaga,[427] both of whom I have seen here, with whom I conversed for

several hours, and who seemed to me endowed with eminently lofty minds,

filled with charity, all on fire with Christ; at Rome the lady Vittoria

Colonna—to speak of none but your own sex.” And he repeats that the

thorns in the Saviour’s vine are fast disappearing; thanks to women, he

sees the radiance of light and peace.

Vergerio continued to converse with the queen of Navarre with

ever-renewed joy. One is almost ashamed to transcribe with a cold pen

phrases so ardently trustful and palpitating: “I have in sooth no greater

wealth, no greater consolation than this queen; she has words of infinite

warmth, and marvellous means for uplifting to the service of God hearts

that are cold and dead. It happens that for eighteen days I did not

appear at court, but dwelt in sweet retirement, busy cultivating my soul

and sowing within myself the word of God. Then went I where the queen’s

glowing charity was found, and I felt that she caused the seed to spring

up and wax strong and bring forth fruit, in other words the knowledge of

God and the fervent desire to serve Him, and Him alone.”

Such were these lofty spirits, so enthusiastic for the beautiful. They

lived on poetry in a sphere apart, cheering one another, mutually calmed

and comforted; it was after her interviews with Vergerio that Margaret

declared herself a platonist and shook off the yoke of the court. No one

hoped, of course, that the whole world would chime in tune; they well

knew that when these abstractions filtered down to the mob they would

become materialised, and love itself would ofttimes become tainted.

But was it not a beautiful thing to sow love broadcast with no hope of

reaping, and to go forth like angels of God to pour a little dew on the

parched ground?

This was not destined to prevent the wars and massacres of the 16th

century; but a glance at the map will show that Catholicism triumphed

in the countries where women triumphed; fog and beer and men turned

Protestant.

Further, these ideas, crushed as people fancied them, reappeared by

degrees everywhere, as from the effect of a resistless germination. From

them sprang the 18th century; with them our own age also, for all its

matter-of-fact bent, is still entirely impregnated.

And Sadoleto the friend of Melanchthon, the liberal-minded Contarini,

the amiable Reginald Pole so much influenced by Vittoria Colonna,

Flaminio,[428] Vergerio, would all smile at certain reconciliatory

schemes of to-day.

CHAPTER VI

RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE (_Continued_)

“I would a thousand times rather believe in and pursue an ideal, even

though too high, than miss or betray it,” said Montalembert. Many persons

in the 16th century were of a different opinion. They deemed aesthetic

religion too frivolous or too worldly a thing, above all, too chimerical.

The adversaries of the religion of beauty split up into two categories:

some opposed it from reasoned conviction, others from social jealousy and

incompatibility of temper.

The first, of whom Alberto Pio[429] and Budé,[430] eminent and estimable

men, may serve as specimens, scouted the very idea of any connection

between philosophy and religion, between aesthetics and morals; in their

opinion religion did not tend to satisfy the reason, nor beauty to purify

the conduct. The suggested reconciliation was to them an ill-disguised

reversion to paganism, and in practice led to scandals like the

representation of Machiavelli’s _Mandragora_[431] at the Vatican.

As we have seen, persons of this same opinion had already demonstrated

the irrationality and inadequacy of reasoning; they had thereby relieved

the world of a serious embarrassment; sensibility was henceforth to be

the sole guide of life. But now we find others wishing to destroy this

sensibility also, and to strip us of everything. At the idea that love is

born of beauty such people veil their faces, and beg us to take away this

thing they cannot bear to look upon, that is neither moral nor religious!

Assuredly it is impossible to commend everything in the Roman movement.

Far from it! There is only too large a scope for criticism. Aestheticism

was carried too far: it was, for example, a singularly wild notion to

consider the building of St. Peter’s at Rome a social necessity of the

first importance, and to sacrifice a part of the Catholic world to the

desire of completing the Vatican. Antiquity, to be sure, evoked a quite

exclusive enthusiasm, and it was singular to see the headquarters of

Christianity going crazy about Pomponius Laetus, calling him “the glory

of the age,” “Caesar,” because he was unearthing pagan catacombs. Not

that mythology, as then cultivated, aimed at bringing back a real,

lively faith in the Olympian deities! Isis, Apollo, Venus, on the walls

of the Vatican or the churches, stood only for symbols and types of

philosophy: Jean Bouchet very happily styled them “the aristocracy of

the world.” Men thought, with Plato, that the beauty of things can only

be gauged by comparing them with an eternal type; as Margaret of France

said: “The Beautiful is seen in all forms of beauty.” Further, morality,

without divorcing itself officially from Christianity, sometimes was

pretty completely disjoined from it; to many people virtue consisted in

wearing a good coat and keeping up a good style. Montaigne, Aretino, and

Benvenuto Cellini, for example, passed for virtuous men.

To protest against this paganism was a right and proper thing. But was

it necessary to forbid Christianity to secure a rational appreciation,

and even to win our love by working upon our emotions? An ineradicable

instinct prompted the Latin races to believe through love; “Italy will be

un-christianised, not Calvinised,” as Azeglio admirably said. To invest

worship with mundane pomp and circumstance is as profoundly human an idea

as it is to keep the clock at a railway station a few minutes behind time.

The Middle Ages, however, kept strict time: materialistic as they

were, they erected cathedrals, the baser instincts avenging themselves

by affixing to the cornices, or even to the porches, in full view,

ornamental details cynically human. The Renaissance, for all its

mysticism, was not partial to the dim religious light, or the mysteries

shadowed in lofty arches far out of eyeshot; it loved clearness,

daylight, illumination. It built only châteaux, even to the glory of God.

St. Peter’s at Rome is a château; the eye detects nothing abnormal in it;

and there man feels himself at home.

It was thus with the religion of prelates and women. It was lofty,

sometimes loftier than Gothic arches, but so broad, so clear, so full of

unity, of so human a hospitality that no one felt he had to do with the

unknown, the unfathomable. It was a reflection of life itself, but with

added brilliance and decoration; it aimed at attracting man, when he had

performed his material functions in eating, drinking, loving his wife,

to a banquet of spiritual fare and spiritual love. We look to women to

quicken our perception. In spiritual concerns the parts are reversed.

Now, men spent their lives in an atmosphere of materialism and unbridled

sensuality. Melin de Saint-Gelais declared nudities “heavenly objects,

worthy of altars.”[432] Coyness was unknown. “Happy the people who have

only God to deal with,” cries a young lady: “with men it is enough to

save appearances.”[433] In the view of many, morality found only an

insufficient sanction in religion; the third Margaret of France wrote,

with a modesty unhappily too well justified: “Some consider that God

holds the great in his special protection.” And on the other hand, the

laws of society did not always oppose a very solid barrier: it was easy

to a noble lady to override them. Renée of France took a manifest

pleasure in running atilt against popular conventions; Marot had only to

set the mob against him as “a lascivious pagan,” to merit her indulgence.

Apparently she was even tempted to believe a daughter of France so

superior to humanity at large that she could have only lovers.

However, it was sincerely believed that, for people of refinement and

distinction, good style and good taste rendered many artistic things

inoffensive. So (to select one example among a thousand) no one was

shocked when the Abbé de Maupas gave his approval to some neat verses in

which Gilles d’Aurigny boasted his conquest of a “sweet pale Margaret.”

The gentle spotless Vergerio very gaily accepted the title of “bishop

of Aretino.” Margaret compliments her brother on retaining his faith

through all his sin. Does she praise the sin? Not at all: but she praises

the king for what is praiseworthy, the remaining a Christian. Vergerio

would have shrunk with horror from certain of Aretino’s books, but he

considered the man as a force, of as much importance as any diocese,

while many of the episcopal boroughs contained as many vices with less

wit. And he tries to coax some good thing out of this diocese. On the

same principle Margaret set Vauzelles to translate some of Aretino’s

devotional works. Indulgence thus shown in practice had no modifying

effect on principles, and besides, men were particularly careful not to

extend it to the masses. Among them, as everybody knows, there is no such

thing as sentiment, but only sensations, and with them, consequently, the

fetters of a material morality were still found serviceable. The same

Caterina Cibo who highly approved Firenzuola’s book on love, severely

reproached the bishop of Camerino for his slackness in reforming the

morals of his clergy, and succeeded in obtaining from the pope a rigorous

brief on the subject.

In society it happened that pagan sensation and Christian sentiment

all but touched; it seemed prudent, advantageous, and politic not to

accentuate the difference between them. Many people, like true gourmets,

let themselves swing gently between mysticism and materialism; perhaps

it was just as well not to compel them to decide one way or the other.

It has been well said that “faith has this peculiarity, that when it has

vanished, it influences still: grace survives by force of habit from

a once living sentiment.”[434] The logical Germans proceeded to deduce

from this spiritual condition the system of “faith without works.” But

folk remained satisfied with “confidence without works.” It was in these

practical considerations that an answer was found to Budé’s objections.

However, Budé was a friend, and sought only to point out abuses. The real

and invincible adversaries of the religion of beauty, those who hoped

to destroy it, came from below. They were such as society scouted—the

vulgar, the superstitious, the material-minded, the street as against

the salon: in short, the men. When Vergerio went to Germany to discourse

of love, he was answered in a strain that disconcerted him: the Germans

talked politics to him. “I am tortured,” he cries, “to see the cause of

Jesus Christ treated with so much indignity; it appears to me that to-day

this is not the real explanation of the immense trouble taken with so

many people: it is assuredly only a pretext. The main thing considered

under the cloak of zeal for Christ is, I believe, nothing but the private

interests of a few individuals.”

The clergy did not follow the religious lead of the prelates. The whole

of the middle or lower orders among them, the country parsons, the monks,

made common cause, some in a materialist direction,[435] others as

visionaries, against the philosophic group, the higher prelacy, and the

priesthood of women.

The monk was a man of different stamp. Margaret petting Rabelais

resembles, if we may be allowed the expression, a hen mothering a duck.

Look at the man of fustian, whom one pious author liked to call “God’s

nightingale,” there in his pulpit, fist on hip, vulgar, impassioned,

ranting, preaching terrible doctrines with sonorous voice. The antagonism

between him and the platonist women is easily realised. He did not

bother his head about beauty or love; instead of an amiable liberality

which would suit a sceptical audience, it seemed as though with his

wild declamations he had no other aim than to quench the embers still

smouldering. It was more than a treason, it was a folly. He did not mince

matters; he reviled the bishops and great ones of the earth; talk to

him of love, he replied with retribution, toil, eternal torments, the

glories of poverty, the agonies of the animal man. Savonarola himself,

so warm and passionate, so much loved and worthy of love, brandished

with scriptural fervour the great popular weapons, the prophecies and

the wrath to come. In France, Oliver Maillard, Ménot, Rabelais himself

(though misguided) possessed a breezy eloquence, rugged, turbid,

picturesque, censorious, verbose, nowhit metaphysical, the opposite of

the official Ciceronianism:

Il presche en théologien;

Mais pour boire de belle eau claire,

Faites-la boire à vostre chien,

Frère Lubin ne le peult faire.[436]

Maillard went so far as to sing songs of his own in the pulpit! Others

indulged in wearisome or tasteless jests, in the most aristocratic of

churches,[437] and before a queen.

Ignorant of the world and its refinements, the monks and parsons applied

to distinguished consciences the casuistry of the suburbs: their morality

smacked of the natural man. It proscribed refined joys: a man should

be “an ox or an ass,” as Savonarola said. Not that the monks were

ill-natured: they were hospitable; they would console an unhappy wife;

they would assist a widow to find a gem of a son-in-law. But there their

understanding of the feminine nature stopped. For the rest they saw in

women only Satanic lures, false chignons, perfumes, all the fripperies

of which Savonarola had made so magnificent a holocaust in the great

square of Florence! Amiability was quite beyond them. Fra Inigo, in one

of the streets of Toledo, happened to be walking behind some ladies whose

trains were raising clouds of dust. They good-naturedly stopped to let

him pass. Fancying he was the very pink of courtesy he said: “I kiss your

hands, ladies; proceed, I beg you: the dust raised by the sheep doesn’t

annoy the wolf.” In the pulpit it was the same; if they spoke of social

necessities, it was like the peasants they were; they preached poverty

and chastity without qualification; they had no eye for fine shades, but

bedaubed the most delicate façades with their garish colours. “Are you

in fit state to die? You women who display your beautiful bosoms, your

necks, your throats, would you wish to die in your present condition? And

you priests, would you like to die with your conscience burdened with the

masses you have said? Not four out of a thousand, I believe, would be

found ready. If the last trump here assailed our ears, we should then see

who would respond to its appeal!”[438]

The monastic spirit was indestructible; Spagnuoli[439] and Du Four

carried it into the courts. Adrian VI., coming between two Medicean

popes, cherished this spirit at the Vatican.[440] During three reigns

Francis de Paul remained faithful to it at the court of France. Once

before, as he passed through Rome, St. Francis had ventured to upbraid

a cardinal lolling in a sumptuous equipage, and the prelate, bending

forward over the door, had replied with a fine and courtly smile that

it was very necessary to inspire the children of that generation with

respect. How much St. Francis was idolised by the ladies it is beyond us

to tell: in all circumstances of gravity they claimed his intercession,

and yet he did not flatter them. He would never give audience to them.

Women and wealth, said he, are the two scourges of the Church—and

especially devout women: them he called “vipers.”

How the world flung back these invectives! Ladies and prelates vied

with one another in mocking at the lower monastic orders—those shaven

scurvy bald-pates who stood in the way of all spiritual regeneration;

ill-bred, material-minded fellows, uneducated, coarse, fat, full-blooded,

brimming over with a hot, carnal vitality, gay to the core and therefore

prompt to sin, much “more attentive to the life active than to the life

contemplative”—those easy-going vagabonds who, awaiting eternity, “do

not weary their minds overmuch by perusal of a heap of books,” for fear

lest the lore they might imbibe from them should puff them out with

pride, like Lucifer, and “make them decline from monastic learning.” The

pallid platonists, “crushed under their trappings,” called them fanatics,

hypocrites, misers, gluttons, and above all filthy and disgusting

wretches. It was a singular idea the Prince da Carpi had—to be buried in

a monk’s fustian frock, and thus “turn monk beyond the tomb.” That was

clean contrary to the mode!

Margaret lampooned the monks. Alexander VI. called them tyrants, and

declared he would much rather offend the greatest of kings than the least

of these mendicants. At a carnival at Rome, Bibbiena, galloping along

under his mask, caught sight of a monk, and swooped down on him like a

hawk upon its prey. “I know you,” he cries tragically: “the provost is

after you to arrest you, but I will save you; I will carry you off to the

chancellor’s”; and thereupon he grabs the unlucky monk, hoists him on to

the crupper all shivering and shaking, and off they go amid the hoots and

yells and gibes of the mob, under a shower of eggs! Soon Bibbiena was

yolk of egg from head to heel,—and was privately accusing the people of

uncommonly bad marksmanship. At last, when the city had had its fill of

laughter, he deigned to yield to the supplications of his victim and set

him down. Then the other broke a few more eggs over him, flung off his

frock, and with a low bow said, “I am your groom.” Bibbiena galloped on.

We need not, of course, take literally the jests of that period against

the monks. There were good and bad monks; the good were those least

in evidence. But Guy Juvenal, who was an active and honest worker for

monastic reform, winds up his enquiry[441] with a phrase as old as St.

Augustine: “You find in the convents the best and the worst.”

However, the adversaries of the monks do them justice themselves,

unintentionally. The company in the _Heptameron_, for instance, are much

amused at the idea that some monks may possibly have overheard their

ribald talk. One of the Urbino coterie traces a portrait of the monks

from the outside which leaves us musing. Gross and plump, he says, they

were hypocrites: little mortification of the flesh there! Emaciated and

unkempt, they were false hounds who distinguished between sins secret

and sins open. Elegant, well-trimmed, scented—these were everything that

was vilest and most antagonistic to platonism! But what then ought their

style to have been?

Trithemius, however, defined the monastic life in a highly platonist

phrase: “To love is to know.” How came, then, the idea that monks could

not actively mingle in the life of the world, since St. Ignatius proved

the contrary when he founded an order in harmony with the new spirit?

The convents of old were peopled with distinguished intellects; Luther,

Calvin, Erasmus, Jean Thenaud, André Thevet,[442] and a thousand others

sprang from these decried lower clergy. How can we believe that the

monks were by their tenets at odds with aestheticism, when the Italian

Dominicans monopolised the charming art of mosaic in wood and almost

monopolised also that of painting on glass—when St. Mark’s at Florence,

impregnated with the fragrant inspirations of the Fra Angelicos and the

Fra Bartolomeos, stands forth to this day, in the profound simplicity of

neglect, one of the most delightful refuges of human thought?

Certain of the more cultured orders had a bent for learning. And these

were expelled; the Jacobins were harried away by the cardinal of Amboise

because they lived outside their convent walls in order to dance

attendance at court, and neglected the offices of the church. There was

a striking repetition of this quarrel in the 17th century, between Dom

Mabillon, who advocated a learned monkhood, and the fiery abbé of Rancé,

who wished to maintain the monasteries in the simple practice of piety;

and in this contest also a woman (the duchess of Guise) took part.

Yet many of the monks, from a godly desire for success, strove earnestly

to suit themselves to the fashion; they freely cited the Olympian deities

and quoted Ovid and Virgil; in spite of the counsels of Savonarola, they

exerted themselves to please, even though at the expense of “the divine.”

One preacher draws an ingenious parallel between the Virgin and Isis.

Others discourse on beauty or coquetry, its benefits and perils. Some

maintain that the Virgin was not pretty, because she was lowly and not

in society; others, on the contrary, nourished on the _Song of Songs_

and other aesthetic authorities, depict her as “clothed with the sun”

according to the phrase in the Apocalypse—dark-skinned perhaps, being a

Jewess, but a woman to be admired nevertheless!

But the monks, do what they might, scatter a thousand flowers of

mythology and rhetoric as they pleased, never acquired the lightness of

touch the least of the sonneteers possessed.

Rabelais opens with a polemic on the merit of women, a stale subject, but

impossible to avoid. He loves the world and mocks at the “molish monk”;

he extols, on the other hand, the monk “young, gallant, dexterous, bold,

adventurous, resolute, tall, lean, voluminous in chaps, well-favoured

in nose, who smartly patters his prayers and polishes off his masses

... moreover, a clerk to the finger-tips in point of the breviary.” He

admits both sexes to his abbey of Thelema, on proof of perfect beauty.

It is laved and perfumed, this modern abbey—full of gold and jewels, of

beauteous garments, of music, of things sumptuous and comfortable, of

books: nothing is wanting there: it has nine thousand three hundred and

thirty-two chapels, and a single swimming bath under the watchful eye of

a statue of the Three Graces. No one there is irked by theology!

And yet Rabelais was absolutely at sea in regard to the platonist

spirit, to these mystic abstractions: “To have a woman is to have her

for the use wherefor Nature created her ... for the delectation of man.”

If anyone speaks to him of the “devotion of love” he laughs and sets

himself down at the table: “Drink,” cries the Sibyl in his ear, “drink!”

Drunkenness—that is mysticism enough for him! He leaves the convent to

become a physician. He commends none but the natural sciences, and the

only one he cannot away with is the only one that women accept—prophetic

astrology. He was bound to end as a parson!

Even in Italy, the monk always smacked of his convent. Folengo[443]

spent his life in going in and out of it. His works also are nothing

but one everlasting buffoonery. In his _Moscheid_, he appears to depict

the conspiracy of monks against fine ladies—an epic complot of all

creeping things—ants, bugs, spiders—against the winged race of bees and

butterflies. The royal head of the chancellery, Spingard, sets off on a

lean-ribbed mare, bearing splendid letters under the great seal of the

Senate (an image of Liberty and Justice), in order to entice men into a

spider’s web.

But the Italian monks accepted their rout; they derided the antiquated

“subtleties of St. Thomas,” as well as visions of God without

intermediaries, and hatred of indulgences. Their solace was a splendid

ignorance, Neapolitan, epicurean.

In Germany, on the contrary, they triumphed. Despite the recommendations

of Leo X. and the passionate objurgations of Erasmus, the Germans refused

to admire the works of the hour, the _Epistles_ of Eoban,[444] for

instance, in which the holy women of the New Testament are represented

as writing in the style of Ovid. They waged implacable war against

aestheticism and dilettantism, and the bitterness of the struggle was

only accentuated every time they came in contact with Rome. Burckhardt,

writing his memoirs day by day about a splendid epoch, is incessantly

bemoaning its corruption: does he perceive the existence of a spiritual

movement at Rome? He sees nothing of liberty but the scandals; he does

his duty like a painstaking but muddle-headed corporal. Erasmus himself

is blind to all but the humanities, while Luther finds only horrors.

They spoke with different tongues. When Hoogstratten, a German monk,

impeached Reuchlin, who had ventured to defend certain Jewish books on

scientific grounds, Rome was utterly unable to make out the bearings of

this Teutonic quarrel: she procrastinated, and let the matter drop.

Ulrich von Hütten tried to Italianise himself at the little court of the

archbishop of Mayence, which claimed to be a copy of Urbino, but all they

did there was to play billiards and abuse the monks behind their backs.

He returned to Rome in 1516, one of the years of triumph; and there, son

of a sturdy and poor country where the lord ruled and even robbed people

at his pleasure, and where woman was emphatically the weaker vessel, he,

the old and unknown student, found himself excluded from that superb

court,[445] from those “false gods” as he called them, and relegated to

the society of a German financier of low degree; he had no recommendation

but his birth; and he could barely succeed in finishing his studies in

law. He took his revenge in abuse. “I have human feelings,” he wrote to

Luther.

With lofty eloquence and burning zeal he preached the necessary war.

The apostles of love had called war a brigandage. Hütten denounced as

brigands the non-combatants—merchants, advocates, and priests. His motto

was: a beautiful woman, gold, and indolence. In 1522 he took up arms, and

with a magnificent gesture pointed out the splendid churches to the mob.

Luther, too, protests against the philosophic spirit. He checks liberty

at a certain point, forbidding the mind to emancipate itself further.

From a thinker he becomes a man of action, and joins hands with the great

lords.

There was an explosion of anti-feminist and anti-liberal sentiments—war

to the knife. It took place, like all great moral outbursts, under the

banner of religion, because religion possessed organised battalions, a

force ready at call, and, above all, excellent pretexts with which to

veil struggles entered into on behalf of selfish interests.

“Talk of household concerns is women’s affair,” said Luther: “they are

mistresses and queens there, and more than a match for Cicero and the

finest orators.... But take them from their housewifery and they are good

for nothing.... Woman is born to manage a household: ’tis her lot, her

law of nature: man is born for war and polity, to administer and govern

states.” As a model for the sculptor woman delighted Luther; but that

was all; he denied her physical and moral vigour; the less her moral

strength, the more he congratulates her. Evidently the intellectual

pretensions of feminism constituted in his eyes an absurdity and a peril.

Calvin went still farther. Whatever was pleasing to women he proscribed,

even aesthetic emotions however inoffensive, however religious in

character. He would hardly deign to believe that women are really good

hands at puddings! Some ladies, in their noble devotion to his cause,

had found a common prison in the Châtelet; he sent them somewhat grim

felicitations. “If men are frail and easily shaken, the frailty of your

sex is still greater.... God hath chosen the foolish things of the world

to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the

things which are mighty, and base things of the world, and things which

are despised, to bring to nought those that are great and of high worth.”

There was nothing for Luther to invent. Everyone desired a reformation,

like himself. The cardinal of Amboise and the traditional school wished

to try back and restore discipline; the philosophic women and the Roman

world were for pushing ahead, and saw salvation in the rejuvenescence of

faith through liberty.[446] But neither party was eager for a schism,

above all the Liberals of Rome, who not only stood for unity, which was

their breath of life, but also gladly washed their hands of pure theology.

Luther invented nothing. All that he said, and even more, had been said

at Rome for fifty years before him. He caught certain floating ideas, and

fixed those which had passed into current morality. This was to attack

dilettantism. The gentle feminist and Latinist prelates, with their

tolerance, their openness of mind and intellectual freedom—Sadoleto,

the friend of Melanchthon, Contarini, Pole, the kindly scholar ruled

by Vittoria Colonna, Flaminio, Vergerio—all deplored the degradation

of their handiwork: they felt as a Raphaelite painter would feel if he

found his dreams copied in a picture by Espinal. Yet, while lamenting

this use made of liberty, they respected it; at bottom they considered

Zwingle and Melanchthon as two of themselves, and they did not despair of

achieving the triumph of freedom by freedom itself. Such was, as we know,

the policy of Pole at Ratisbon, and of Vergerio at Worms; but despite

the support of Vittoria Colonna, Margaret of France, and a whole band of

enthusiastic and ardent women, they did not succeed; they were caught

between two fires.

Women threw themselves into the fray with enthusiasm.

We might fancy ourselves looking at the Sabine women of David’s famous

picture: daughters of the Roman Church, very devoted, very judicious (at

least in their own opinion), and yet ready in the name of freedom to

defend and love their adversaries.

Vittoria Colonna always believed herself as orthodox as the Holy See

itself, and more clever, even when in the heat of the battle she put

forth opinions somewhat questionable.

She sang the barque of Peter triumphing over all the billows of the

world’s vileness and ill-will, and she received the papal benediction.

But yet, in the great religious struggle of the 16th century, she could

never realise that genuine difficulties of doctrine were involved; she

saw nothing but a medley of personal intrigues, rivalries, jealousies,

offended susceptibilities, good intentions bungled; excellent judges

have shared her impressions. Entirely new circumstances had to arise,

the fiercest moment of the battle had to come, before the court of Rome

at last repudiated retrospectively all fellowship with Vittoria. And yet

events seemed to justify the thesis of love—a thesis neither Protestant

nor strictly Catholic.

Attached to a religion of intuition and sentiment, the women aimed at

saving the guilty by the love of the innocent; they put into practice a

doctrine rather divine than religious; their scheme was that of Henri

IV.: “Those who unswervingly follow their conscience are of my religion,

and I am of the religion of all who are brave and good.”

Vittoria Colonna took a very special interest in a celebrated Capuchin,

the ardent and eloquent Ochino, who had formed at Naples a sort of

liberal triumvirate. Somewhat intoxicated with his popularity and the

warm sympathies of the feminist group, Ochino bitterly attacked Paul III.

about certain measures of reform directed against the Capuchins. The

marchioness hastened to prevent a rupture; she issued a great liberal

manifesto addressed to Contarini, and at the same time urged Ochino

to come to Rome. Paul smiled at the manifesto, and sent the author a

pilgrim’s passport, for herself and a Capuchin. Ochino, however, made

a rancorous reply. Women put forth indescribable efforts to bring back

to the fold this sheep who was threatening to wander away! Thanks to

the feminine freemasonry, Ochino, though openly at odds with the pope,

still occupied with brilliance the principal pulpits of Verona, Venice,

Bologna and Mantua, until at last he took to flight. Vittoria never lost

sight of him; at Venice, she got secret information as to his welfare

from Bembo, who had just been raised to the cardinalate.[447] Later, by

means of anonymous letters in which she told her old protégé that she

was buying his books and getting insight into his views, flattering him,

calling herself his “very obedient daughter and disciple,” she did her

utmost to bring him to reason. Vain illusion! Ochino was a monk, Vittoria

a noble lady; they belonged to two jarring worlds.

Margaret of France wished to play the same part, but she found herself in

a more embarrassing situation, and understood still less, if possible,

the real bearing of the struggle. She dreamed of reforming humanity, not

dogmas; she left to God the task of winning the victory and causing the

“word of truth” to shine forth. Why limit the range of these dreams? “The

Church is a living and active voice, which is its own explanation, and

can always express itself anew and more abundantly.” Why this procreation

of rigorous dogmas, to the ruin of the feminine apostleship? Margaret

pressed towards synthesis; she wished to know, to co-ordinate, to

succeed. Briçonnet wrote to her smilingly: “If there were at the end of

the earth a learned doctor who, by means of a single compendium, could

teach the whole art of grammar, besides rhetoric, philosophy and the

seven liberal arts, you would rush to him as a cold man rushes to the

fire.”

Where then was she to seek the illumination of love and faith if not

in that religious philosophy towards which she had always inclined? In

regard to faith, still more than in social matters, she felt how good it

was to soar into the heights of abstraction, to go direct to the verities

without troubling about men. How cramping it would have seemed to her to

embody all theology and all faith, both Paradise and Hell, in one man,

in one priest! She smiled on men, provided they were men of good-will,

even if they burnt others, as Francis I. did, but still more if they were

burnt or in danger of burning, like “that poor Berquin,” or the chaplain

Michel, or the canons of Bourges, or Farel, Vatable, Gerard Roussel.[448]

A man might translate the Thomist work the _Mirror of Ladies_; might

call himself Lefèvre d’Etaples, _faber ingeniorum_, or Dolet; might be

a witty libertine like Pocques or Duval—no matter, he had claims on her

affection, if he was well disposed. She delighted in hearing Erasmus and

Luther discuss the question of free-will. She looked on at these passages

at arms with the same satisfaction as others witnessed a tourney. In

concert with a lady of influence, she dragged the king to St. Eustace, to

hear a sermon by a whirlwind of a parson who preached peace and _sursum

corda_. She was anxious to arrange at Paris a controversial meeting

with Melanchthon, but the Faculty of Theology was not agreeable. The

theologian really after her own heart was the amiable prelate Nicolas

Dangu, who followed her everywhere like a perfect lover.

There was yet another man able to please her; a sort of magian,

remarkable in spite of his wild notions, who carried feminine theology to

the pitch of absurdity. This was Guillaume Postel, a workhouse foundling,

a nobody, a village brat and then a lackey, half oriental, half Italian,

though a Frenchman: a man of eminent learning and enlightened mind,

the fine essence of eclecticism. He wrote in twelve languages on the

most various subjects, in support of the most diversified theses. He

advocated a universal monarchy which he offered to Francis I., and a

universal religion, genuinely catholic and Roman, the papacy of which he

reserved for himself. He based it upon the doctrine of infinite love (if

need be, a somewhat sensual love), and upon an aesthetic philosophy which

should solve all mysteries by applying the formula of the Beautiful.

According to this religion, it was for women to regenerate the world;

wherefore he salutes with ardent sympathy the Mothers of the Church whom

he sees budding forth almost everywhere—More’s daughters in England;

Isabella Rosera in Spain; in Portugal Loysa Sygea who at the age of

twenty-two honoured Pope Paul III. with her advice in five little-known

languages. Paul replied in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but excused himself

in regard to Chaldean and Arabic, and instructed Postel to take the pen.

Postel’s strange work[449] appeared after the death of Margaret of

France, under the auspices of Margaret of Savoy. Postel announced the

discovery of a new Eve, whom he extolled above all other women, even

above Vittoria Colonna. She was an aged sorceress of Venice, endowed with

second sight, who read through paper as if she had the Röntgen rays at

her disposal. Unhappily the Venetians sent her about her business.

To sum up, the women believed and maintained that, in dealing with the

people, the only language they understood must be employed—that of force;

but that for the elect there was only one real weapon—the matchless

one, liberty. The first of liberties is that of talking nonsense. It

was needful, then, to be able to tolerate freedom in others, one’s own

friends included.

The practical result of women’s intervention was in France insignificant

enough.

The long-standing hostility of the French clergy to the court of Rome had

burst out so glaringly in the reign of Louis XII., it displayed itself

so vigorously in the more or less official dithyrambs of Andrelini,

Villebresme, De Mailly, Gringoire, Jean d’Auton, Seyssel, against the

“Roman profligacy,” that Leo X. became alarmed and very prudently

abandoned in 1515 the real bone of contention, the right to dispose of

benefices. From that moment the Church, fused with the State, became a

national machine, and no philosophic argument could in future shake an

organisation so solid. Luther gave wide application to the same system

in secularising the property of the clergy. The ruck of men left the

business of dealing with these religious questions to the higher powers;

they held to their creed either out of a taste for ignorance or from

scepticism; the learned were quite content to smile and call theology

a “poesy”—like vine-growers who sell a certain doctored wine, but keep

the genuine locked up in their cellars—the wine they alone are sure of

because they cut the grapes.

Liberalism was supported, then, by only a few timid and affectionate

voices, like that of Longueil, the friend of Bembo and Pole, who said in

his _Letter to the Lutherans_: “I take no side in the struggle: a simple

citizen of the Christian republic, neither gratitude, nor hate, nor

ambition impels me to one side or the other.” Unhappily, it is not with

lofty language like this that you can rouse a mob!

Is it necessary to recall what followed? It was at all points the reverse

of what the feminists had hoped. “Our adversaries say of us,” wrote

Calvin, “that we have begun a sort of Trojan war, on account of women,

_mulierum causa_.” And in truth, as in the wars of the past, women had

again become to a certain extent the gage of battle. Religion declared

war on platonism, just as platonism had declared war on religious

virginity; instead of draping women in inaccessibility, people contented

themselves with making matrimony easier. That was a simple solution of

the difficulty. And yet it took longer than might be supposed to get

back to this solid ground of matter-of-fact. The first woman espoused by

an Archbishop of Canterbury was obliged, it appears, to travel like an

animal in a chest pierced with holes, so as to escape the buffooneries of

the mob; the second went to court; but when Queen Elizabeth saw her she

bit her lips: “What am I to call you? Madam I cannot, and Mistress I dare

not.”

Catholicism, roused to action, henceforth asked for nothing except to

condemn. It was a sudden drop from the ideal back again to earth, a

dreadful battle of personalities, a life and death struggle with mythical

or literal methods of exegesis for weapons. Erasmus was already writing:

“These interpreters of the language of Heaven go off like gunpowder,

they frown most terribly. What is Hütten to me? Shall I prefer the

authority of Luther to that of the pope? If we had not received a pope

from Christ, we should have to invent one.” “They scream and scuffle and

insult one another,” sneers Des Périers, who no longer believed even in

the existence of God. Blessed are the poor in spirit, concludes Agrippa;

blessed are illiterate people like the apostles; blessed is the ass!

CONCLUSION

Nothing now remains but to relate the conclusion of the dream.

A dream indeed—all these schemes of happiness which had flashed across

the gloomy background of realities like dissolving views on the wall of a

lecture-room: the blue sea, the blazing sun, appearing but for a moment,

left the blackness deeper still.

Margaret, the great organiser of happiness, never found the secret of

happiness for herself. Her last days were vexed with the most poignant

sorrows: the court, Calvin, the people, well-nigh the whole world, cast

her off and treated her as a Utopian dreamer: her husband went the

length of striking her, her daughter was torn from her, and Henri II.

sent her into exile; several of her friends, such as Ramus and Dolet,

were persecuted, alas! from motives far from sincere: it was, in truth,

what she called “the suburbs of death.” By divine mercy her heart,

incessantly a prey to anxieties, at length parted company with a life

that was anything but love. She perished, poor duchess, at her post as

charitable vendor of love—perished in flames, like the salamander! No

man came to her aid, none even paused to mourn her. Three young English

maidens named Seymour erected to her a frail monument of verse under the

auspices of her niece; but save for one devoted friend, Sainte-Marthe,

whose enthusiastic funeral oration nevertheless provoked the liveliest

criticisms, men maintained a remarkable silence. The princess had greatly

erred in scattering her affections and seeking to create a sociology of

the heart. Men do not care for love, they wish to fear and obey! There is

no true love but the love of an individual.

The Saint-Gelais, the Héroëts, the Salels, all those exquisite hearts

bubbling over with sentiment when a smile from Margaret could lead them

to fortune, now remained mute; the drum had to be set a-beating, and

then at length there appeared a volume of elegies, a subtle fantasia in

many tongues, which would have been cold as ice but for the vigorous

beam Ronsard shot into the midst of the medley—a tiny volume, brilliant,

ingenious, perverse, like the princess’s soul, full of pretty verses all

alike—alike in expression, with the same silvery veneer of tenderness—the

very image of the somewhat phantasmagoric and unreal romanticism in which

some mystic women delighted: brightness, but no warmth or life. Yes,

Margaret was too fond of these intense lights and shades. A thousand

causeless murmurings woke echoes in her soul. She sustained herself

upon the subtle aroma wafted on certain nights upon the breath of the

quickening world. She never heard the full, resounding roar of the sea in

the darkness, but was content to see the fringe of foam.

At the moment when Margaret disappeared, the power of women in France

seemed at its apogee; in reality, it was on the wane. It was attacked

more especially on the moral side. According to so-called Puritans like

Agrippa, the influence of women resulted in the declension of morals; and

what a declension! Everything converged towards the joys of the senses;

painters could no longer paint anything but boudoir scenes, architects

could only open doors or pierce balconies, husbands only speculate on the

exploits of their wives, Luther only recommend the reading of stories

(sometimes astonishing) from the Bible.

Unquestionably, feminine influences, even the purest, seemed soft and

enervating. The energetic spirit of old France, of the time before

Francis I., sprang suddenly to life again. A country gentleman, Du

Bellay, sounded the charge against Roman cosmopolitanism by claiming

France for the French. At one stroke, as J. M. de Heredia has said, his

clear and picturesque style clean obliterated Marot, Saint-Gelais, and

the whole of Margaret’s school. Du Bellay would have loved Savonarola:

he speaks the same tongue as the friends of Anne of France; he has sworn

implacable hatred against platonism with its cloying sweetness, against

the languors of petrarchism: “He has not breathed in the ardour that

sets Italy in flame.” Though he has seen Rome, decadent Rome, he has not

caught her infection; it is she that he blames, and yet the “bashful

squires,” the “exiles from joyance,” and other vulgar “fantasticals,”

whom he flagellates and sends packing along with the Round Table, were

very often French. He has in his veins the proud and lusty blood of a

soldier. Like Anne of France he worships truth, and candour, and lucidity.

Ronsard too, of like blood and ancestry, advocates truth: “I love not

the false, I love the true.” He overwhelms with his vigorous eloquence

all sham loves, “Cupids with curled love-locks, but broken arrow”; all

the platonic cant, so virtuous in show and so little virtuous in fact:

and all these refinements, and hypocrisies, and conceits on twofold

incorporeal love!

Aimer l’esprit, Madame, c’est aimer la sottise.[450]

The voices of these two men stirred up no little commotion among a large

number of the lesser nobility or quasi-nobility, men of middling station,

less sensible to high-falutin’ than to the spirit of frankness and

independence—“gaillards,” as they styled themselves, who loved women as

they loved “daylight and the sun,” but as men, by no means with an idea

of “playing lackey to a mistress,” particularly one who was wrinkled,

painted, or terribly accomplished.

De Junon sont vos bras, des grâces vostre sein,

Vous avez de l’aurore et le front et la main,

Mais vous avez le cœur d’une fière lionne.[451]

That was their type. And they laughed at the Vadiuses and Trissotins[452]

of their day, at all the fine carollings that Du Bellay amused himself

by imitating, forgotten tunes of long ago, the faded frippery of the

ballroom. What merriment there is when a belated poet returns from Italy

with another _Amadis_! Neither Olivier de Magny nor Baïf will take the

moon for the sun, or love for a mere ornamentation.

The men of the Pléiade had no love for patronage or the Medici species.

They hated and abhorred the Jews. Ronsard would have liked to see a fine

St. Bartholomew butchery of them, and could not forgive Titus for wasting

his chances: his gorge rises at the thought of a Leo the Hebrew[453]

figuring among the sages of platonism. Good decent fellows, they drape

themselves in their somewhat rustic free-and-easiness. From their modest

snuggeries they proudly tell the king “Nature has made us of the same

flesh and blood as you”;[454] they do not hesitate to write to a Medici

lady that the finest royalty is to be “king of oneself.”[455] They vie

with one another in launching their epigrams against the court, the

salons, the ruling women;[456] they sing of woods and dales, even of the

wild untrammelled life—

O bienheureux le siècle où le peuple sauvage

Vivoit, par les forêts, de gland et de fruitage.[457]

—_Ronsard._

They sing praise to Nature their mother, not an abstraction, an

infinity, but immeasurable:[458] the lines of the horizon, it would

seem, spring from their hearts, and like an outspread fan gather up the

whole immensity of life. How remote this from the gardens of philosophy

ordered so delicately, with their shimmering fountains, their shivering

Venuses![459]

When under a clear Roman sky Du Bellay is sauntering in pleasant

indolence amid all the pomp and luxury of cultured prelates, enjoying

the serene life of country villas; when, as a background to the picture,

behind carriages and laurels, fashionable women and noble statues, he

sees flushed in a golden haze the forest of towers, and pediments, and

obelisks, and St. Peter’s in all its majesty, the glory of the world,

what does his heart say to him?

Quand reverray-je, hélas! de mon petit village

Fumer la cheminée?[460]

Such was the sentiment of the Pléiade.

Social philosophy had changed all at once. People were weary of the idea

of the beautiful, and henceforth the wind was to set towards scepticism:

no longer an airy, Ciceronian, superficial scepticism, the scepticism

of Cardan, or of Erasmus, the jabberer of Latin, the flouter of monks,

often madder than the madmen he derides, but a masculine aggressive

scepticism, which believes in nothing in this world, not even in love,

and is incredulous about the other world and the immortality of the soul.

Yet it feels an “impression” of the unseen: deprived of an ideal for this

life, it must willy-nilly suppose another apart from mortal men, and

thus yearningly, gropingly, unawares, it takes a step towards Christ.

And then those who are still reasoning in this untoward generation

laugh or weep. What a harsh harrowing laugh is that of Boistuau,[461]

who had nevertheless been a friend of Margaret! Boistuau speaks to us

of love, and tells us that it is a distressing malady of the mind,

characterised by symptoms of agitation and disorder, and exhausting

all its energies, physical and moral. You hear those attacked by it

groaning and dropping words like “coral, alabaster, roses, lilies”; they

have lost all individuality; they sob and abase themselves and are a

continual supplication. The cause of the malady is obscure; some speak of

magnetism, others of microbes, others of the influence of the stars.

It was this kind of scepticism which was destined to lead us to the

morality of Charles IX.’s court.

Then it was seen how fatal had been the disease of sensibility, and the

profound soul-weariness which resulted from imaginative pleasures, from

the mirage which overlay the things of life since women had undertaken to

interpret everything through the affections. It had been a woful error

to create an art of sensibility! Sensibility serves to attract men, but

cannot hold or guide them. Women believe in sensibility because they

always consider the heart of a man as a reservoir of moral strength. It

is the other way about; men for the most part err through weakness; it

is that which renders them inconstant and vicious. They would gain in

steadfastness and goodness if women, less timid and more active, had

strength rather than tenacity, and a real energy under an appearance of

tenderness.

An attempt was made, but too late, to show that the feminist spirit could

display energy as well as tenderness.

A certain Almanque Papillon[462] proposed a new formula of love, more

robust than platonism, and bound, as he thought, to render men truly

“virtuous and not effeminate.” François Billon, one of the royal

secretaries, wandering one evening amid the ruins of Rome, felt the

touch of grace within himself. He dreamed of writing a book entitled

_The Impregnable Fortress of the Female Sex_. He descried and saluted

among the shadows a number of vigorous women—Catherine de’ Medici and

Jeanne d’Albret, more valorous than any man; Mesdames de Berry and de

Nevers, surpassingly witty; Anne d’Este, duchess of Guise, the eloquence

of fleshly beauty. Billon made his book, but not his fortune. Under the

Valois, many women were not anxious to be too well defended.

Ronsard and Du Bellay triumphed, then: and yet, to all appearance, their

triumph troubled them; they hankered after ideas they had gone about to

destroy; they mistrusted themselves, their friends, their principles.

Ronsard had an admirable genius, but he hesitated between an attempt to

satisfy the popular naturalism with the crudities so much in request,

and an instinctive thirst for an aristocratic spiritualism. He followed

rather than led the movement; both he and Du Bellay, in spite of their

robust breezy energies, remained more sensitive than they cared to

acknowledge to the charm of classical art and the graciousness of the

salons.

Further, an eminent woman kept a tight rein on the Pléiade, and showed

them that graciousness was not necessarily tameness, that there were

women’s hearts at once ardent and strong, that it is possible to retain

practical views of life while “rising wholly towards spiritual things.”

This woman was the niece and goddaughter of Margaret of France, her

spiritual daughter and the faithful guardian of her fame—the second

Margaret of France, duchess of Berry and afterwards duchess of Savoy.

She pursued a totally different method from her aunt. She abandoned

philosophy, intuitions, mystic professions of faith: instead of wearing

black she dressed fashionably, tricking herself out with jewels

and brightly-coloured materials: thus (pardon the detail) she used

handkerchiefs of crimson silk: that formed part of her psychology. Her

household was maintained on a very princely scale, and directed by the

solemn Madame de Brissac, who never shifted her quarters without taking

with her a huge pile of dresses and especially a terribly big bed, which

alone required several mules to carry it; the moment the destination

was reached, Madame de Brissac’s bed had to be set up with infinite

precautions, as though it were a shrine. One can guess how the treasurer,

among many other people, grumbled; but the princess was so kind!

With this system of simplified morals and external complexity, Margaret

of Savoy exercised extraordinary fascination over men’s affections. She

had adopted as emblem an olive branch guarded by serpents, with the

motto, “_Sagesse, gardienne des choses!_” She resembled, as a poet tells

us, “a rose-bud, nourished on celestial dew,” and received the nickname

of Pallas. She was just the woman to govern vigorous men: a woman of

taste and intelligence, who had a passion for winning love, but with much

breadth and dignity, and without recourse to the spiritual and material

experiments of her aunt. Her secret she had not gone far to seek, but

had found simply in her woman’s heart; her Machiavelism consisted in

a kindliness carried to perfection, intelligent, active, ingenious—a

refined good-heartedness, which embraced both rich and poor. Des Périers

himself could not refrain from speaking of it in a tone of respect and

sympathy quite unusual in him; Brantôme has painted the princess in one

magnificent phrase: “She was _the_ goodness of the world.”

And we must not forget that life had not spared her hard lessons. The

poor woman’s greatest ambition was to root and ground herself in the

family affections, and these affections had been torn from her one by

one with her heart’s blood. Her father Francis I. had as little to do

with her as possible, indeed, but scantily appreciated her. She lost her

brother Charles miserably enough; at that period it was not the custom

to care for life’s halt and maimed, yet Margaret sedulously watched over

servants who were out of employment. Her heart was wrapped up in her

sister Madeleine. Madeleine coveted a crown; she went to Scotland, and

six months afterwards came news of her death. Margaret was so grievously

stricken that she remained in utter prostration, and it was doubtful

for some time whether her health would recover from the shock. Her aunt

Margaret had to intervene to insist on her taking care of herself, and

going for long morning walks in the park of Fontainebleau.

Thus, instead of “devouring her heart,” in the forcible phrase of

Pythagoras, this noble princess made existence a song of grave and warm

passion, not a song of love.

Her disappointments were no fewer, it is true, since it is a natural

law for the heart to be deceived in its hopes, like the reason; but she

found less bitterness and more grief; the wholesome contact with real

suffering, in bringing out the true power of sympathy, saved her from

social and intellectual extravagances, and bred in her that perfection of

tenderness which no one could resist; for the world itself loves to be

treated seriously.

The passion Du Bellay felt for her in no way resembles either the flowery

sentimentalism to which princesses had till then been accustomed, or the

coarse freedom of Marot’s school: it was a constant, sincere, and lasting

passion. On returning from Italy, he exclaims with the same emotion as at

his departure:

Alors, je m’aperçus qu’ignorant son mérite,

J’avois, sans la connoistre, admiré Marguerite,

Comme, sans les connoistre, on admire les cieux.[463]

And these are not mere idle words. Many years afterwards, when it came to

Margaret’s turn to leave her country, the poor poet, struck, no doubt,

with presentiments of an imminent death, shed real tears, “the truest

tears that e’er I shed.”

The great sense of truth and constancy that Margaret carried into the

concerns of the heart she applied also to the concerns of the mind. She

showed, like Anne of France, how women were slandered, how they slandered

themselves when they fancied they were incapable of a genuine effort;

instead of pouring out a stream of conversation and writings like her

aunt, and of trusting to her impressionability merely, she applied

herself with all the force of a fine intellectual health to the most

rigorous tasks involved in the discipline of truth. Many scholars by

profession would not have pushed solicitude for the niceties of truth

so far. She got her reader, for instance, to buy for her at Paris three

different editions of Cicero’s _Offices_; she read Aristotle’s _Ethics_

simultaneously in Greek and in a Latin translation; she collated six

commentaries on Horace.

Although entirely French—she was much more French than her aunt—she

set herself to stem the somewhat too violent tide of reaction setting

in against Italy. Like Louis XII. before her, she thought there was

much in Italy and the classics that was worth adopting; while she read

Aristotle she proclaimed Urbino the “school of knowledge,” and Du Bellay

had to draw in his horns and, under her gentle guidance, acknowledge the

charm which he did not feel spontaneously. He not only translated Bembo

and Naugerius,[464] but went so far as to agree that time would never

extinguish the fame of Boccaccio, and that the laurels of Petrarch would

remain for ever green.

She did more (for the words “art” and “patriotism” cloaked in reality

questions infinitely smaller, and larger—questions of personal

jealousies); she had the courage to keep by her side an Italian, Baccio

del Bene, an enthusiastic worshipper of the “pearl of the West,” who

declared he had been saved by her bright eyes, “his stars,” from the

direst of shipwrecks. Ronsard undertook, against wind and tide and his

own convictions, to rehabilitate this relic of the past, and to proclaim

that Del Bene was the only Italian for two centuries who was worth

consideration.

Margaret long remained the tutelary “virgin,” the spirited “unbacked

colt,” running where frolic fancy led her, unfretted by the “spurs of

love.” Whatever the inevitable malignity of mankind may have said, she

was a perfect type of platonism, basking in her many warm friendships

with men, and in no hurry to be married. Too much attached to France

to go far away, too thoroughly a princess to wed one of her brother’s

subjects, she fixed her choice on the heir of Savoy. On one occasion

she did not hesitate to accompany her aunt to Nice and present herself

in person, in defiance of the elementary rules of etiquette; but as

politics, the bane of sentimental princesses, threw obstacles in the way,

she possessed her soul in patience, and waited twenty-one years. She was

married in 1559.

The king of France ordered a magnificent trousseau, an exact copy of that

of Madame de Lorraine—gold-embroidered dresses, laces, jewels; he chose

for the bridal dress a robe of yellow satin with bodice embroidered in

gold, a regal mantle trimmed with lace a foot wide, an evening cloak in

silver cloth, lined with lynx fur. He commanded splendid entertainments.

Everyone knows what followed—Henri II. mortally wounded in the official

tournament; this long-desired marriage consecrated at midnight beside a

bed of anguish. Here truly was something to amaze and strike with awe.

Anyone with a touch of superstition would have attributed to the princess

the evil eye.

They knew better, to be sure.

If she was loved, it was because she had the very uncommon talent of

loving her friends.

No sooner was she in Piedmont than she seemed to have thoughts only for

them. She wrote to Catherine de’ Medici commending Ronsard to her notice,

and the poet, much moved, hastened to reply with a noble apostrophe to

the royal house of France, “happy and fruitful ... mother of such a line

of kings.”

From time immemorial France and Piedmont had played in the world the

somewhat ungrateful part of quarrelsome lovers. Margaret, like a true

woman, patched up this quarrel; while she lived there was no open

rupture. Still more, every Frenchman who visited Turin was conscious of

being anticipated by a gentle and invisible protecting hand. Presented to

the duchess, often lodged and entertained at her cost, he would receive

in addition, anonymously, a purse to defray his travelling expenses.

France did not, therefore, lose Margaret altogether; but she planted

in Savoy the sweetness of Urbino with the sparkling brilliance of her

own land. At the gates of Geneva she caused the most perfect religious

peace to flourish; it was there that Francis de Sales was born. Without

flinging heart and mind piecemeal to the winds, like her aunt, we see her

in a corner of that violent 16th century, a radiant centre of kindliness

and spiritual illumination, surrounded by testimonies of gratitude as by

a modest and glorious retinue. She often received thanks at that supreme

moment when all men speak the truth. In his last hour Du Bellay wept for

her; an ambassador of France at Constantinople left her his fortune;

L’Hôpital declared in his will that to her he owed his whole career.

She herself on her deathbed heaved, so to speak, the last breath of the

feminist spirit.

Il ne restoit rien d’entier de la France,

De pur, de saint, d’une antique bonté,

Que Marguerite, humaine déité.[465]

And now what more is to be said? The hateful orgies of the 16th century

were unchained! Here and there in the turmoil some few feeble shoots

of platonism continued to appear[466] under the form of preciosity or

literary feminism, till we come to the hôtel de Rambouillet.[467] Women

of energy and activity were still seen. But fate willed that the 17th

century, magnificent, wholly masculine,[468] should be ushered in with

terrible convulsions. It was a momentous and appalling epoch, and bore

out the prediction of the _Heptameron_: “The best things are those from

which, when abused, result the worst ills.”[469] What a spectacle is the

court of the Valois![470]—all these sly, knowing women, talking in a way

to make the shades of their grandmothers blush, running after men who

wish them further! How little the third Margaret of France, the first

wife of Henri IV., resembles her earlier namesakes! She was as highly

gifted, prettier, as accomplished, as witty, as fascinating, as noble, as

thoroughly a princess—so princely indeed that she thought herself quite

entitled to love gipsies and let prejudices go hang! Fair as a lily, too,

polished, wonderfully polished, bathed and perfumed! All she saw was that

platonic love had broken down, and of the other love she said: “Nothing

could be so sweet, if it were not so short.”

Even in Spain platonism perished, or rather it winged its flight towards

God with zest and ardour, often worthy of the Song of Songs:[471] “A

love redeemed from all terrestrial things, and having only God for its

object,” exclaims St. Theresa, “is like an arrow shot by man’s will

towards his God with all the force of which he is capable.” Or else it

was flung out of window. When the cook and the niece of Don Quixote make

a bonfire of the _Amadis_ romances and other illustrious annals of pure

love and valiant exploits, the good Spanish curate, who assists at the

auto-da-fé, momentarily hesitates before a volume bearing the name of

Ariosto. He opens it, to burn it if it is a Spanish translation, to kiss

it if it is the Italian text. O relic of old Spain! O son of the Cid!

In Italy the crisis could not take a tragic development, as in Germany,

but men felt the need of returning to anonymity, to placid affection, to

love without any twaddle. “The learned are so mad after love,” writes

Nelli, “they have so pounded and minced and dissected it, that it is

altered out of all knowing.” Petrarch was blasphemed: everyone was eager

to revile him as a flashy rhetorician, to sneer at his so-called purity.

They declared that they preferred to the sighs of love-sick princesses

and the sentimental romances, the bold, frank love of a coster-wench.

Farewell to the dream! It dissolved in a religious crisis. Rome herself

recovered from her intoxication, and no longer existed as the nursery of

sentimental philosophy and the liberal-minded instructress of mankind.

La paix et le bon temps ne règnent plus icy;

La musique et le bal sont contraints de s’y taire.[472]

Attacked, Catholicism had stood to the defence in the armour of

authority. It was fighting for life, and was bent only on self-discipline

and purification. One good soul devoted himself to the task of

spiritualising the writings of Bembo.

The tender imaginings of art disappeared. The time was coming for art

itself to return to scenes of domestic commonplace, as in Holland, or of

pure reason, as in France. The sole impression Brantôme received as he

viewed the Coliseum was that its ruined condition was most strikingly

apparent at the top—as was seen also with women.

The mortification would have been less acute if people had not really

expected to find happiness, and if they had begun by looking painful

realities square in the face as they did afterwards. The 17th century

left philosophy to the philosophers; it believed in suffering as a gift

of God: Pascal coldly investigated only the secret of the anxieties which

hold us by the throat; and so that admirable time of vigorous action and

patient endurance led us to philosophy.

Platonist tenderness resulted in nihilism. And then how sad a spectacle

was the spiritual Sahara! And how well men understood, as soon as women

had disappeared, that they were right in believing them necessary! Our

great Montaigne, who arises at this moment, is a splendid eulogist of the

cold and colourless in life. He is the perfect son of this respectable

land of France, where wisdom consists in settling down in a benevolent

neutrality, without hating, and without loving: life being such, without

restraints, without illusions, nothing is left, surely, but to die.

Montaigne, in his cool, common-sense way, delights in making mincemeat

of everything that has given women faith and enthusiasm and an object in

life.

The heart! what a dangerous organ, essentially a thing to keep under

restraint! Better forgive a folly than a victory!

Love! After having distilled out its quintessence, after having

discovered “three, four, or five degrees of superior things” external to

ourselves capable of producing it, is it not found that wisdom lies in

looking after one’s own interests, in loving as little as possible, in

loving one’s children perhaps, but even then with sufficient tranquillity

“to live comfortably after their loss”?

Goodness!—that does not exist in the pure state, but contains always

some taint of corruption, a savour of mortality, which Plato should have

discerned: “Man is but patchwork and motley.”

The quest for the Beautiful! How conventional! Let us hear no more of

Bembo or Equicola! “When I write, I do very well without the company and

the stay of books!”

Fame! A mere bubble, at the mercy of every puff of wind, dissolving under

our own eyes, ere we reach the grave! Fame!—for books or ideas which are

fated to disappear as everything has disappeared!—a name which changes

and will pass to others!

The charm of original thought! Ah! the ridiculous pretension of wishing

to transcend the current opinions, the common sense of one’s fellows, and

to fancy oneself “capable of all things.” It is on this head that we must

hear Montaigne; he has no more illusions about the mind than about the

heart: he warms up, and celebrates in Shakespearian accents the immensity

of the human void.

And is he wrong when he tells us that we are our own deceivers?—that

we are unwilling to confess our ignorance lest we scare our children?

“Overmuch knowledge is harmful, as in virtue. Keep in all points to the

common highway: ’tis not good to be so subtle and nice.... Shun all

novelty and oddity.... All extravagant ways vex me.... In my time, those

who have some rare excellence beyond others, and some extraordinary

sprightliness of mind, we see as it were overflowing into license in

opinion and morals.... We are right to set upon the human mind the

rigidest barriers we can.”[473]

The traitor! How he laughs at himself and his friends! At bottom he is

a son of women[474] and of love, but he has lost women and love. The

shallow epicurism with which his doctrine may be reproached is also the

weak side of feminism, which had already shown us the madness and error

of the idea of saddling the few years we have to spend on earth with

fatigue, tribulation, vanities. And yet, while inheriting this need for

living the easy impressionist life, Montaigne revolts with characteristic

feeling and vigour against women, because he belongs to a disillusioned

generation which feels constrained to wreak personal vengeance against

those who had been confounding the religion of beauty with the religion

of happiness. Religion consists in resignation to unhappiness, while

beauty and happiness are in truth somewhat loosely connected. The keeper

of a museum who spends his life among masterpieces will acknowledge, if

you put it to him, that one can be very unhappy there. Further, perched

in his rustic turret, between his few books and a large farmyard,

Montaigne is one of those peaceable and self-satisfied country folk who

have not succeeded in understanding what all the pother is about, or how

women could ever pass for priests or physicians. He considers them as

objects serviceable, even necessary, to men, but socially speaking he

chants their _De Profundis_.

His bile is moved at the sight of the grand duchess taking the head of

the table in the ducal palace at Florence. What a rage he flies into!

“She has wheedled the prince”; is it by “her pleasant and commanding

features,” or her beautiful bosom? Don’t talk to him of the ideal. Take a

peep into this dressing-room—rouge-pots, false teeth, second-hand lures,

perfumes like musk derived from the “discharge of animals,” and all the

rest: this is the ideal, forsooth, you think of making the axis of life!

To him (the phrase will serve, it is homely but exact) platonism is the

art of palming off paste for diamonds.

Yet the same scoffer Montaigne has for aide-de-camp a simple maiden,

Mademoiselle de Gournay; and, after all, his whole system comes to

this—that we should do well to be women, nay children; and that the best

thing for us would be to live like the bird on the bough, with no other

care than the due round of the seasons.

But no: this is an impossibility! There are no seasons for us, we have

no right to expect seasons! or rather, we have only a summer,—life; only

a winter,—death! And this winter lies hungrily in wait for us! It comes

to this—that the science of life is the science of death! “The continual

work of our life is to build up death.” Since there is neither beauty

nor love, in other words no life, we are but animated corpses: our life

plunges into the stream of death, emerges, and disappears again; we live

on death as a tulip lives in its water, or corn in its refuse. Then, like

the tulip and the corn, we go through the inverse process: “Your death

is part of the order of the universe, a piece of the life of the world.”

From your disintegrated flesh the vital energy will spring up and pass

into the larva, into the sap of plants, to die yet again and nourish

afresh the butterfly or the bird or the ox, continuing thus its endless

transmigrations. Without hailing death as it passes, like the mystics,

Montaigne is continually brooding upon it, and holds it “in particular

affection,” since that is the only sure conclusion and all the rest is

chimera. Wherever he goes, a grinning spectre seems to go before to show

him the way. Of what account are the fashionable quintessences beside

the clear and insistent spectacle of a bed “surrounded by physicians and

parsons, by creatures all mazed and quaking, by pale-faced lackeys ...

and the room without daylight, the candles lit!” It is just that! And

“the leap to be made with lowered head and dazed brain ... into a depth

of silence and obscurity!” Yes, that is death, as said (merely adding a

word of immortality and hope) those humble monks of the early days of the

century, so violently excluded from philosophic religion; men had stopped

up their ears so as not to hear them, and yet now return soberly to their

scheme of morality, which grips one round like a ring of iron! What does

Ménot say?—

“We die all of us, and like water sink into the earth and return no more

to the surface. Yea, Lord, we all step on towards death. The water of the

Loire ceases not to flow, but is it the water of yestereve that passes

under the bridge to-day? The folk who to-day dwell in this town were not

here a hundred years ago. Now, I am here; next year you will have another

preacher. Where is king Louis, but late so dread a monarch, and king

Charles, who in the flower of his youth set Italy aquake? Alas! the earth

has already rotted his corpse. Where are all these damsels of whom we

have heard so much? Have you not the Romance of the Rose, and Melusina,

and many another far-famed beauty? Behold, we all die, and like the water

we enter into the earth, to return no more for ever.”

Montaigne is right. Whether we like it or not, we have to live in contact

with the enemy, that is, with reality. Only, is it absolutely necessary

to look at reality so mistrustfully, and to ask of it but gloomy

impressions? All the enemies of faith maintain that faith cannot but be

sombre and melancholy; in making itself pleasant and speaking of a God

of Love, religion, it seems, would lie and do them wrong, would trench

on their domain, would go beyond its part, which consists in expiation

and sacrifice. Material joy—that is their creed; and at the same time

they believe it is a great mistake to wish to rule the world by love; men

are not held by spiritual systems; you buy them, crush them, oppress and

coerce them.

Nevertheless, all was not false in the delicious dream of prelates,

women, platonists. Pure love is too exquisite a thing ever to exist in

this world. But it is the business of women to strive towards it, and to

show that we have need of it. The idea of dividing the world, of leaving

bodies to men and souls to women, had something to be said in its favour.

Men are sometimes too philosophical, women never philosophical enough.

The convulsions which broke out every time men wished to turn the tables

on women, in the 16th century, and in the 18th, are not sufficient to

convince us that the unmitigated employment of force is the ideal of

politics. What human being is there, even with all the sentiment crushed

out of him, who does not feel an unquenchable thirst for happiness!

Nations also feel this thirst. No, it cannot be said that the need of

happiness is but an empty dream: it is a real need, sincere, imperious,

natural, a moral and physical need which takes entire possession of us,

in which all things are summed up—this need in which we live and die.

We live and die in it! We should have to remain always children, or

strangely to shut our eyes, not to see falling around us the victims of

life’s ironies, felled by Montaigne’s philosophy as surely, as clearly,

as by a dagger-thrust.

A proverb says that one does not die of love: perhaps; but what we know

with absolute certainty, what stares us everywhere in the face in letters

of fire and blood, is that one dies of the absence of love, one dies of

inanition.

Hence it will always be necessary to ascend to the source of life, to

fix ourselves firmly at the fountain-head: in other words, to nourish

ourselves on beauty. Philosophically, “beauty” and “life” are synonymous

terms; so we have already said, and we shall not cease to revert to this

thought, because it appears to us clear and salutary. All the possible

definitions of beauty apply also to life; life and beauty are one and the

same thing.

Beauty and life generate love and are themselves born of love, so that

love does no more than forge links in the immeasurable chain of life and

beauty. And what men call happiness is the perfect joy of life.

Why did they fail in their schemes of love and peace—these timid women

of the 16th century, who had all that was necessary for success—a heart,

boundless, bottomless ocean of kindliness; an admirable intelligence;

and in many cases knowledge, beauty, wealth? They lacked the courage to

be themselves; they were wanting in passion. Instead of taking their

rightful place they fell back into obedience,—half-hearted dilettanti,

caught in their own snares. Why?

Medieval Christianity was not hostile to the idea of the beautiful, but

it had unduly neglected it, for the purely scholastic and traditional

reason that, strictly speaking, no theory of the beautiful is to be found

in the Gospels.

No, you will not find a theory of the beautiful there. But the

Renaissance unquestionably was right in saying that you find assurances

of life. And how many assurances of love? Christianity is of hope and

love all compact. Love speaks on every page of its early lessons, and

at every moment of its history. The Magdalene, St. Augustine, and many

another—have they not marked stages on the road to heaven? St. Francis

of Sales, Fénelon—were they not yet to cheer by affection the victims of

pure reason?

The Renaissance, then, accomplished a very great advance when, with

Plato’s aid, it instituted the religion of beauty, and in this respect we

certainly cannot reproach the platonists of the 16th century with having

followed a wrong bent. They were right to believe that happiness and

peace can only be effectually secured if men can be induced to turn their

eyes towards the beautiful, to adopt beauty as the beacon of their lives,

to believe through love, act through love, live through love. That, in

truth, is the common substance underlying both Christianity and platonism.

But how then are we to explain the phenomenon we have noted?

Plato, so far as theory and literary style are concerned, is admirable;

why does his teaching end in negative results whenever it is enforced?

Why could he himself deduce from it only a sociology embroidered with

Utopian dreams? Why are those who live familiarly with him and upon him

tortured by the consciousness of the emptiness of things, as was seen in

the 16th century, and as we may see still?

The platonism of the Renaissance had a strange fate. It found a society

in the plenitude of vigour, and save for a few elect souls it left it

dead. As a philosophy, it resulted in perfect scepticism; as a social

panacea, in the wars of religion. It slew art, it slew literature through

the idea of seeking beauty in itself, in other words, by academism, by

art for art’s sake: the aesthetic Utopia alongside of the philosophic

Utopia! Still further, in place of the exquisite, enthusiastic, ardent,

adorable women who were the queens of the world, it gave us, as time

went on, women without energy, without activity, case-hardened with the

idea of a selfish happiness; it left behind it a progeny of coquettes,

_précieuses_, or else of Delilahs and sensual women. The woman of

vigorous and irradiant affection, the woman who used to shed life and

happiness around her, has disappeared. And, finally, we observe that at

the very moment of Plato’s greatest glory, few women steadfastly pursued

the path of happiness: with some, goodness had disappeared in feebleness,

with others intelligence had evaporated in reasoning. They ought to have

saved us from sensualism and metaphysics, and they ran aground on both

reefs. How bitterly they have been reproached! We have done them the

high honour of throwing upon them and their ideas the blame of all our

calamities, as though they were exclusively at fault. As if it would not

have been allowable, after all, to combine common sense with the spirit

of kindliness and love!

If there were, then as always, silly women, profligate women, insatiate

cormorants, why take platonism to task, why blame women alone?

Certain personages of that time, and some of the most notable, refused

to admit any division of responsibility. To them, all that had happened

was bound to happen; the origin was patent, the year 1515; when women of

high rank, admitted to court, determined to devote themselves personally

to the apostolic mission of love, all France took the cue, so that the

idea of love, which issued to begin with from a source insufficiently

philosophic, as it flowed downwards gained nothing and became no

purer. It is very curious to find this line of argument proceeding

from Brantôme’s pen; he is not generally a preacher of virtue, and has

indeed enunciated this eminently courtier-like maxim: “The cast-offs of

great kings could not but be excellent.” According to Brantôme and his

friends, men had undergone an irresistible infatuation for which they

were not to be blamed: thus, he says, no one would regard Francis I. as a

Heliogabalus or accuse him of having employed violence: he was a victim.

All men are victims. It is very true that the frightful demoralisation

of the 16th century sprang from the court, which set the example and

persistently dragged the nation after it. But we shall be permitted to

think that Francis I. and the other victims among his circle, without

being Heliogabaluses, were not anchorites either; which is capable of

demonstration. In any case, it seems to us very difficult to characterise

the doings of the court as platonic: platonism, on the contrary, was a

barrier, and the only reproach we can bring against it is that it was

often leaped.

But the real question is not to know whether there were women of

average or cheap virtue at the court of France, and whether they gave

the tone to others. We want to know whether women like Anne of France,

Vittoria Colonna, Margaret of France, Margaret of Savoy, and their likes

were wrong to strive after high ideals, and whether they did what was

necessary to succeed. This question is much more delicate than the first,

because it really touches platonism and shows how it came to grief.

Women can be reclaimed from sensualism; their necessarily refined

feelings, the passive part they play, the disparity between the advantage

and the disadvantage, conduce easily to disgust. But they never revert

from mysticism to love. The Gospels mention no Jewesses converted by

mysticism, whilst the Magdalene, the Woman of Samaria, the Woman taken

in Adultery, see Heaven’s light while in the full flush of sensualism.

Men, on the contrary, often get the better of mysticism, because their

instincts scarcely lie that way, and moreover the throng and press of

realities only too easily brings them down to earth.

Now, Plato, even when rendered practical by the theory of two loves,

which sanctioned curious concessions, represented the algebra of the

beautiful; but you cannot make algebra your daily bread.

Women of the highest distinction, and especially those we have named,

lived with Plato as it were in a balloon: there was no more actual

communication with the world, no more really practical energy, no

more heat and flame! The rope was cut; they were adrift in the clear

and rarefied atmosphere of an altitude of thousands of feet. What an

illusion, and how disastrous! Instead of elevating the world, this was

the very means of abandoning it to itself. How many strange visions this

dizzy height brought before their eyes!