There were other women who, for other causes, did likewise. In particular,

there was Radegonde who founded a cloister of her own, one that within

high walls had the gardens, porticoes, and baths of a Roman villa, but

which in the deluge of worldly sin, was, Thierry says, intended to be an

ark. There Radegonde received high ecclesiastics and laymen of position,

among others Fortunatus, a poet, young and attractive, whom the abbess,

young and attractive herself, welcomed so well that he lingered, supping

nightly at the cloister, composing songs in which were strained the honey

of Catullus, and, like him, crowned with roses.[32]

But Radegonde was not Lesbia, and Fortunatus, though a poet, confined his

licence to verse. Together they collaborated in the first romance of pure

sentiment that history records, one from which the abbess passed to

sanctity, and the poet to fame. Thereafter the story persisting may have

suggested some one of the pedestals that antiquity never learned to

sculpture and to which ladies were lifted by their knights.

Meanwhile love had assumed another shape. Radegonde, before becoming an

abbess, had been a queen. As a consequence she had prerogatives which

other women lacked. It was not every one that could entertain a tarrying

minstrel. It was not every one that would. The nun generally was

emancipated from man as thoroughly as the hetaira had been from marriage.

But the latter in renouncing matrimony did not for that reason renounce

love and there were many cloistered girls who, in renouncing man, did not

renounce love either. One of them dreamed that on a journey to the

fountain of living waters, a form appeared that pointed at a brilliant

basin, to which, as she stooped, Radegonde approached and put about her a

cloak that, she said, was sent by the girl's betrothed.

Radegonde was then dead and a saint. The dream of her, particularly the

gift, more especially its provenance, seemed so ineffable that the girl

could think of nothing else save only that when at last the betrothed did

come, the nuptial chamber should be ready. She begged therefore that there

be given her a little narrow cell, a narrow little tomb, to which, the

request granted, other nuns led her. At the threshold she kissed each of

them, then she entered; the opening was walled and within, with her mystic

spouse, the bride of Christ remained.[33]

At Alexandria, something similar had already occurred. There another

Hypathia, fair as she, refused Christianity, refused also marriage. God

did not appeal to her, man did not either. But a priest succeeded in

interesting her in the possibility of obtaining a husband superior to

every mortal being on condition only that she prayed to Mary. The girl did

pray. During the prayer she fell asleep. Then beautiful beyond all beauty

the Lord appeared to whom the Virgin offered the girl. The Christ refused.

She was fair but not fair enough. At that she awoke. Immortally lovely and

mortally sad she suffered the priest to baptize her. Another prayer

followed by another sleep ensued in which she beheld again the Christ who

then consenting to take her, put on her finger a ring which she found on

awakening.

The legend, which afterward inspired Veronese and Correggio, had a

counterpart in that of St. Catherine of Sienna. To her also the Christ

gave a ring, yet one which, Della Fonte, her biographer, declared, was

visible only to herself. The legend had also a pendant in the story of St.

Theresa, a Spanish mystic, who in her trances discovered that the

punishment of the damned is an inability to love. In the _Relacion de su

vida_ the saint expressed herself as follows:

"It seemed to me as though I could see my soul, clearly, like a mirror,

and that in the centre of it the Lord came. It seemed to me that in every

part of my soul I saw him as I saw him in the mirror and that mirror, I

cannot say how, was wholly absorbed by the Lord, indescribably, in a sort

of amorous confusion."

The mirror was the imagination, the usual reflector of the beatific. It

was that perhaps to which Paul referred when he said that we see through a

glass darkly. But it was certainly that which enabled Gerson to catalogue

the various degrees of ravishment of which the highest, ecstasy,

culminates in union with Christ, where the soul attaining perfection is

freed.

Gerson came later but theories similar to his, which neoplatonism had

advanced, were common. In that day or more exactly in that night, the

silver petals of the lily of purity were plucked so continuously by so

many hands, so many were the eyes strained on the mirror, so frequent were

the brides of Christ, that the aberration became as disquieting as

asceticism. Then through fear that woman might lose herself in dreams of

spiritual love and evaporate completely, an effort was attempted which

succeeded presently in deflecting her aspirations to the Virgin who,

hitherto, had remained strictly within the limits originally traced.

Commiserate to the erring she was Regina angelorum, the angel queen. In

the twelfth century suddenly she mounted. From queen she became sovereign.

Ceremonies, churches, cathedrals, were consecrated uniquely to her. In

pomp and importance her worship exceeded that of God. When Satan had the

sinner in his grasp, it was she who in the prodigalities of her divine

compassion rescued and redeemed him.[34]

In the art of the period, such as it was, the worship was reflected. The

thin hands of saints, the poignant eyes of sinners, were raised to her

equally. The fainting figures that were painted in the ex-voto of the

triptiques seemed ill with love. The forms of women, lost beneath the

draperies, disclosed, if anything, emaciation. The expression of the face

alone indicated what they represented and that always was adoration. They

too were swooning at the Virgin's feet.

Previously Paul had been studied. It was seen that a thorn had been given

him, a messenger of Satan, from which, three times he had prayed release.

But the Lord said to him: "My grace is sufficient to thee, for my strength

is made perfect in weakness." "Wherefore," said Paul, "most gladly will I

glory in my infirmities."[35]

Precisely what the apostle meant is immaterial. But from his words the

inference was drawn that in weakness is salvation and in sin the glory of

God.

The early Church had not interpreted the evangels with entire correctness.

It is possible that in the Graeco-Syrian dialect which the apostles

employed, their meaning was sometimes obscure. It is presumable for

instance that the coming of the Kingdom of God which they proclaimed was

not the material termination of a material world but the real Kingdom

which did really come in the hearts of those that believed. "Comprends,

pecheur," Bossuet thundered at a later day, "que tu portes ton paradis et

ton enfer en toi-meme." The patricists were not Bossuets. They were

literal folk. They stuck to the letter. Having discovered what they

regarded as a divine command for abstinence, asceticism in all its rigors

ensued. Subsequent exegetes finding in Paul a few words not over precise,

discovered in them a commendation of sin as a means of grace. The

discovery, amplified later by Molinos, had results that made man even less

attractive than he had been.

Meanwhile, between insanity and disorder, woman, indifferent as always to

texts, had found a form of love which, however impossible, was one that in

its innocence obscured the stupidities and turpitudes of the day. Then,

after the substitution of the Rosa mystica for the mystic lily,

tentatively there began an affranchisement of communes, of women and of

thought.

Hitherto it had been blasphemy to think. The first human voice that the

Middle Ages heard, the first, voice distinguishable from that of kings,

of felons and of beasts, was Abailard's. Whatever previously had been said

was bellowed or stuttered. It was with the forgotten elegance of Athens

that Abailard spoke, preaching as he did so the indulgence of God, the

rehabilitation of the flesh, the inferiority of fear, love's superiority.

Abailard, fascinating and gifted, was familiar with Greek and Hebrew,

attainments then prodigious to which he added other abilities, the art of

calming men while disturbing women--among others a young Parisian,

Heloise, herself a miracle of erudition and of beauty.

Abailard at the time was nearly thirty-eight, Heloise not quite eighteen.

Between them a liaison ensued that resulted in a secret marriage which

Abailard afterward disavowed and which, for his sake, Heloise denied. It

ruined their lives and founded their fame. Had it been less catastrophic

no word or memory of them could have endured. Misfortune made immortal

these lovers, one of whom took the veil and the other the cowl and whose

story has survived that of kingdoms.

In separation they corresponded. The letters of Heloise are vibrant still.

Only Sappho, in her lost songs to Phaon, could have exceeded their fervor.

"God knows," she wrote, "in you I sought but you, nothing but you. You

were my one and only object, marriage I did not seek, nor my way but

yours uniquely. If the title of wife be holy, I thought the name of

mistress more dear. Rather would I have been called that by you than

empress by an emperor."

Abailard's frigid and methodical answers were headed "To the bride of

Christ," or else "To my sister in Christ, from Abailard, her brother." The

tone of Heloise's replies was very different. "To my master, no; to my

brother, no; to my husband, no; his sister, his bride, no; from Heloise to

Abailard." Again she wrote: "At every angle of life God knows I fear to

offend you more than Him, I desire to please Him less than I do you. It

was your will not His that brought me where I am."

It was true. She took the veil as though it were poison. She broke into

the priory violently as the despairful plunge into death. Even that could

not assuage her. But in the burning words which she tore from her breaking

heart the true passion of love, which nothing earthly or divine can still,

for the first time pulsated.

II

THE PURSUIVANTS OF LOVE

There is no immaculate history. If there were it would relate to a better

world. Unable to be immaculate, history usually is stupid, more often

false. Concerning the Middle Ages it has contrived to be absurd. It

attributed the recovery of light to the Tiers etat. Darkness was dispersed

by love, whose gereralissimi were the troubadour and the knight.

Concerning the latter history erred again. Tacitus aiding, it derived

chivalry from Germany. Chivalry originated in the courts of the emirs. The

knight and the troubadour came from Islam. Together they resummoned

civilization.

The world at the time was divided. Long since Europe and Asia had gone

their separate ways. When at last they caught sight of each other, the

Church sickened with horror. There ensued the Crusades in which the Papacy

pitted Christianity against Muhammadanism and staked the authenticity of

each in the result. The result was that Muhammadanism proved its claim. On

the way to it was Byzance.

Beside the bleak burgs, squalid ignorance and abysmal barbarism of Europe,

Byzance isolated and fastidious, luxurious and aloof, learned and subtle,

Roman in body but Greek in soul, contrasted almost supernaturally. Set

apart from and beyond the mediaeval night, her marble basilicas, her golden

domes, her pineapple cupolas covered with colors, her ceaseless and

gorgeous ceremonials, gave her the mysterious beauty of a city shimmering

on uplands of dream. It was a dream, the final flower of Hellenic art. The

people, delicately nurtured on delicate fare, exquisitely dressed in

painted clothes, rather tigerish at heart but exceedingly punctilious,

equally contemptuous and very well bred, must have contrasted too with the

Crusaders.

Contiguous was Persia which, taken by Muhammad, had, with but the magic

wand of her own beauty, transformed his trampling hordes into a superb and

romantic nation, fanatic indeed, quick with the scimitar, born fighters

who had passed thence into Egypt, Andalusia, Syria, Assyria and beyond to

the Indus. The diverse lands they had subjugated and united into one vast

empire. Baghdad was their caliphate.

Before the latter and on through the Orient were strewn in profusion the

marvellous cities of the Thousand and One Nights, the enameled houses of

the Thousand and One Days. There, in courtyards curtained with cashmeres,

chimeras and hippogriffs crouched. The turbans of the merchants that

passed were heavy with sequins and secrets. The pale mouths of the

blue-bellied fish that rose from the sleeping waters were aglow with gems.

In the air was the odor of spices, the scent of the wines of Shiraz.

Occasionally was the spectacle of a faithless favorite sewn in a sack and

tossed by hurrying eunuchs into the indifferent sea.

The sight was rare. The charm of Scheherazade and Chain-of-Hearts

prevailed. The Muslim might dissever heads as carelessly as he plucked an

orange, they were those of unbelievers, not of girls. Among the peris of

his earthly paradise he was passionate and gallant. It is generally in

this aspect that he appears in the _Thousand and One Nights_, which, like

the _Thousand and One Days_, originally Persian in design, had been done

over into arabesques that, while intertwisting fable and fact, none the

less displayed the manners of a nation. Some of the stories are as

knightly as romaunts, others as delicate as lays; all were the

unconsidered trifles of a people who, when the Saxons were living in huts,

had developed the most poetic civilization the world has known, a social

order which, with religion and might for basis, had a superstructure of

art and of love.

It was this that louts in rusty mail went forth to destroy. But though

they could not conquer Islam, the chivalry of the Muslim taught them how

to conquer themselves. From the victory contemporaneous civilization

proceeds.

With the louts were women. An army of Amazons set out for the Cross where

they found liberty, new horizons, larger life, and, in contact with the

most gallant race on earth, found also theories of love unimagined. In the

second crusade Eleanor, then Queen of France, afterward Queen of England,

alternated between clashes and amours with emirs. The example of a lady so

exalted set a fashion which would have been adopted any way, so

irresistible were the Saracens.[36]

It was therefore first in Byzance and then in Islam that the Normans and

Anglo-Normans who in the initial crusade went forth to fight went

literally to school. They had gone on to sweep from existence inept bands

of pecculant Bedouins and discovered that the ineptity was wholly their

own. They had thought that there might be a few pretty women in the way,

only to find their own women falling in love with the foe. They had

thought Tours and Poictiers were to be repeated.

It was in those battles that Europe first encountered Islam. Had not the

defeat of the latter resulted, the world might have become Muhammadan, or,

as Gibbon declared, Oxford might to-day be expounding the Koran. But

though the Moors, who otherwise would have been masters of Europe,

retreated, it is possible that they left a manual of chivalry behind. Even

had the attention been overlooked, already from Andalusia the code was

filtering up through Provence. Devised by a people who of all others have

been most chivalrous in their worship of women it surprised and then

appealed. Adopted by the Church, it became the sacrament of the preux

chevalier who swore that everywhere and always he would be the champion of

women, of justice and of right.

The oath was taken at an hour when justice was not even in the

dictionaries--there were none--at an epoch when every man who was not

marauding was maimed or a monk. At that hour, the blackest of all, there

was proposed to the crapulous barons an ideal. Thereafter, little by

little, in lieu of the boor came the knight, occasionally the paladin of

whom Roland was the type.

Roland, a legend says, died of love before a cloister of nuns. Roland

himself was legendary. But in the _Chanson de Roland_ which is the right

legend, he died embracing his sole mistress, his sword. Afterward a girl

asked concerning him of Charlemagne, saying that she was to be his wife.

The emperor, after telling of his death, offered the girl his son. The

girl refused. She declined even to survive. In the story of Roland that

is the one occasion in which love appeared. It but came and vanished with

a hero whose name history has mentioned but once and then only in a

monkish screed,[37] yet whose prowess romance ceaselessly celebrated,

inverting chronology in his behalf, enlarging for his grandiose figure the

limits of time and space, lifting his epic memories to the skies.

What Jason had been in mythology, Roland became in legend, the first

Occidental custodian of chivalry's golden fleece, which, he gone, was

found reducible to just four words--Death rather than dishonor.

Dishonor meant to be last in the field and first in the retreat. Honor

meant courage and courtesy, the reverencing of all women for the love of

one. It meant bravery and good manners. It meant something else. To be

first in the field and last in the retreat was necessary not merely for

valor's sake, but because courage was the surest token to a lady's favor,

which favor fidelity could alone retain. Hitherto men had been bold,

chivalry made them true. It made them constant for constancy's sake,

because inconstancy meant forfeiture of honor and any forfeiture

degradation.

When that occurred the spurs of the knight were hacked from his heels, a

ceremony overwhelming in the simplicity with which it proclaimed him

unfit to ride and therefore for chivalry.

Yet though a man might not be false to any one, to some one he must be

true. If he knew how to break a lance but not how to win a lady he was

less a knight than a churl. "A knight," said Sir Tristram, "can never be

of prowess unless he be a lover." "Why," said the belle Isaud to Sir

Dinadan, "are you a knight and not a lover? You cannot be a goodly knight

except you are?" "Jesu merci," Sir Dinadan replied. "Pleasure of love

lasts but a moment, pain of love endures alway."

Sir Dinadan was right, but so was Sir Tristram, so was the belle Isaud. A

knight had to be brave, he had to be loyal and courteous in war, as in

peace. But he had to be also a lover and as a lover he had to be true.

"L'ordre demande nette vie

Chastete et curtesye."

The demand was new to the world. Intertwisting with the silver thread

which chivalry drew in and in throughout the Middle Ages, it became the

basis of whatever is noble in love to-day. The sheen of that thread,

otherwise dazzling, shines still in Froissart and in Monstrelet, as it

must have shone in the tournaments, where, in glittering mail, men dashed

in the lists while the air was rent with women's names and, at each

achievement, the heralds shouted "Loyaute aux Dames," who, in their

tapestried galleries, were judges of the jousts.

Dazzling there it must have been entrancing in the halls and courts of the

great keeps where knights and ladies, pages and girls, going up and down,

talked but of arms and amours, or at table sat together, two by two, in

hundreds, with one trencher to each couple, feasting to the high

flourishes of trumpets and later knelt while she who for the occasion had

been chosen Royne de la Beaulte et des Amours, awarded the prizes of the

tourney, falcons, girdles or girls.

Life then was sufficiently stirring. But the feudal system was not devised

for the purposes of love, and matrimony, while not inherently prejudicial

to them, omitted, as an institution, to consider love at all. Love was not

regarded as compatible with marriage and a lady married to one man was

openly adored by another, whom she honored at least with her colors, which

he wore quite as openly in war and in war's splendid image which the

tournament was.

In circumstances such as these and in spite of ideals and injunctions, it

becomes obvious if only from the _Chansons de geste_, which are replete

with lovers' inconstancies, that the hacking of spurs could not have

continued except at the expense of the entire caste. The ceremony was one

that hardly survived the early investitures of the men-at-arms of God. It

was too significant in beauty.

The fault lay not with chivalry but with the thousand-floored prison that

feudalism was. In it a lady's affections were administered for her.

Marriage she might not conclude as she liked. If she were an heiress it

was arranged not in accordance with her choice but her suzerain's wishes

and in no circumstances could it be contracted without his consent. Under

the feudal system land was held subject to military service and in the

event of the passing of a fief to a girl, the overlord, whose chief

concern was the number of his retainers, could not, should war occur, look

to her for aid. The result being that whatever vassal he thought could

serve him best, he promptly gratified with the land and the lady, who of

the two counted least.[38]

The proceeding, if summary, was not necessarily disagreeable. Girls whose

accomplishments were limited to the singing of a lai or the longer romaunt

and who perhaps could also strum a harp, were less fastidious than they

have since become. Advanced they may have been in manners but in delicacy

they were not. Their conversation as reported in the fabliaux and novelle

was disquietingly frank. When, as occasionally occurred, the overlord

omitted to provide a husband, not infrequently they demanded that he

should. As with girls, so with widows. Usually they were remarried at once

to men who had lost the right to kill them but who might beat them

reasonably in accordance with the law.[39]

The law was that of the Church who, in authorizing a reasonable beating,

may have had in view the lady's age, which sometimes was tender. Legally a

girl could not be married until she was twelve. But feudalism had evasions

which the Church could not always prevent. Sovereign though she were over

villeins and vassals and suzerains as well, yet the high lords, sovereign

too, married when and whom they liked, children if it suited them and

there was a fief to be obtained.

They married the more frequently in that marriage was easily annulled.

Even the primitive Church permitted divorce. "Fabiola," said a saint,

"divorced her husband because he was vicious and married again."[40] In

the later Church matrimony was prohibited within the seventh degree of

consanguinity in which the nominal relationship of godfather and godmother

counted equally with ties of blood and created artificial sets of

brothers, sisters, cousins and remoter relatives, all of whom stood within

the prohibited degrees. Relationship of some kind it was therefore

possible to discover and also to invent, or, that failing, there was yet

another way. A condition precedent to matrimony was the consent, actual or

assumed, of the contracting parties. But as in the upper classes it was

customary to betroth children still in the cradle, absence of consent

could readily be alleged. As a consequence any husband that wished to be

off with the old wife in order to be on with the new, might, failing

relationship on his part, advance absence of consent on hers, the result

being that the chivalric injunction to honor all women for the love of

one, continued to be observed since one was so easily multiplied.[41]

Thereafter began the subsidence of the order which at the time represented

what heroism had in the past, with the difference, however, that chivalry

lifted sentiment to heights which antiquity never attained. The heights

were perhaps themselves too high. On them was the exaltation of whatever

is lofty--honor, courage, courtesy and love. It was the exaltation of love

that made Don Quixote station himself in the high road and prevent the

merchants from passing until they acknowledged that in all the universe

there was no one so beautiful as the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso. But it

was the exaltation of humor that made him answer a natural inquiry of the

merchants in regard to the lady by exclaiming: "Had I shown her to you

what wonder would it be to acknowledge so notorious a truth? The

importance of the thing lies in compelling you to believe it, confess it,

swear it, and maintain it without seeing her at all."

Exaltation lifted to a pitch so high could but squeak. The world laughed.

Chivalry outfaced by ridicule succumbed. It had become but a great piece

of empty armor that needed but a shove to topple. In the levelling

democracy of fire-arms it fell, pierced by the first bullet, yet surviving

itself in the elements of which the gentleman is made and in whatever in

love is noble.

III

THE PARLIAMENTS OF JOY

The decalogue of the Zend-Avesta mentions many strange sins. The strangest

among them is sorrow. The Persian abhorred it. His Muhammadan victor, who

had learned from him much, learned also its avoidance. If it ever

perturbed the Moors, by the time Andalusia was theirs it had vanished. Joy

was a creed with them. Their poets made it the cardinal virtue. The

Aragonese and Provencals, whom they indoctrinated, made it the basis of

the _gaya cienca_--the gay science of love, and chivalry the parure of the

knight.

Before chivalry departed and very shortly after it appeared, that joy,

lifted into joie d'amour, glowed like a rose in the gloom of the world. It

humanized very notably. It dismissed much that was dark. It brought graces

hitherto unknown. It inspired loyalty, fealty and parage--the nobility of

noble pride--but particularly the worship of woman.

In the East, woman had also been worshipped. But not as she was in Europe

at this period. At no epoch since has she been as sovereign. Set

figuratively with the high virtues in high figurative spheres, she ruled

on earth only less fully than she reigned in heaven. The cultus,

instituted first by the troubadours, then adopted by royals, connected

consequently with pride of place, became fashionable among an aristocracy

for whose convenience the rest of humanity labored. Too elevating for the

materialism of the age that had gone and too elevated for the democracy of

the age that followed, it was comparable to a precipitate of the chemistry

of the soul projected into the heart of a life splendid and impermanent, a

form of existence impossible before, impossible since, a social order very

valiant, very courteous, to which the sense of rectitude had not come but

in which joy, unparalleled in history, really, if unequally, abounded.

Never more obvious, never either was it more obscure. It was abstruse. It

had its laws, its jurists, its tribunals and its code.

Chivalry required of the novice various proofs and preliminaries before

admitting him to knighthood. The gay science had also its requirements,

preparatory tests which young men of quality gave and primary instruction

which they received, before their novitiate could terminate. The tests

related to women married and single. By address in the lists, by valor in

war, by constant courtesy and loyalty, it was the duty of the aspirant to

please them. Pending the novitiate no word of love was permitted and any

advancement might be lost through an awkwardness of speech or gesture. But

the caprices of a lady properly endured and the tests undergone

unfalteringly, relations might ensue, in which case, if the lady were

single, the connection was not thought contrary to the best traditions,

provided that it was a prelude to marriage, nor, if the lady were already

married was it thought at variance with those traditions, provided that

the articles of the code were observed.[42]

Concerning the origin of the code history stammers. The chief authority,

Maitre Andre, said that in Broceliande--a locality within the confines of

the Arthurian myth--a vavasour--quidam miles--met a lass--formosa

puella--who agreed to accept his attentions on condition that he

outjousted the Knights of the Round Table and got a falcon from them for

her. These labors accomplished and the vavasour rewarded--plenius suo

remuneravit amore--there was found attached to the falcon's claw, a

scroll, a holy writ, a code of love, a corpus juris amoris.[43]

The story is as imaginary as Broceliande. The code was probably derived

from some critique of pure courtesy then common in manuals of chivalry.

But its source is unimportant. Gradually promulgated throughout

Christendom it resulted in making love the subject of law for the

administration of which courts open and plenary were founded. These courts

which were at once academies of fine sentiments and parliaments of joy,

existed, Maitre Andre stated, before Salahaddin decapitated a Christian

and lasted, Nostradamus declared, until post-Petrarchian days.[44]

The code is as follows:

I. Causa conjugii ab amore non est excusatio recta.

II. Qui non celat amare non potest.

III. Nemo duplici potest amore ligari.

IV. Semper amorem minui vel crescere constat.

V. Non est sapidum quod amans ab invito sumit amante.

VI. Masculus non solet nisi in plena pubertate amare.

VII. Biennalis viduitas pro amante defuncto superstiti

praescribitur amanti.

VIII. Nemo, sine rationis excessu, suo debet amore privari.

IX. Amare nemo potest, nisi qui amoris suasione compellitur.

X. Amor semper ab avaritia consuevit domiciliis exulare.

XI. Non decet amare quarum pudor est nuptias affectare.

XII. Verus amans alterius nisi suae coamantis ex affectu non cupit

amplexus.

XIII. Amor raro consuevit durare vulgatus.

XIV. Facilis perceptio contemptibilem reddit amorem, difficilis

eum parum facit haberi.

XV. Omnis consuevit amans in coamantis as pectupallescere.

XVI. In repentina coamantis visione, cor tremescit amantis.

XVII. Novus amor veterem compellit abire.

XVIII. Probitas sola quemcumque dignum facit amore.

XIX. Si amor minuatur, cito deficit et raro convalescit.

XX. Amorosus semper est timorosus.

XXI. Ex vera zelotypia affectus semper crescit amandi.

XXII. De coamante suspicione percepta zelus interea et affectus

crescit amandi.

XXIII. Minus dormit et edit quem amoris cogitatio vexat.

XXIV. Quilibet amantis actus in coamantis cogitatione finitur.

XXV. Verus amans nihil beatum credit, nisi quod cogitat amanti

placere.

XXVI. Amor nihil posset amori denegare.

XXVII. Amans coamantis solatiis satiari non potest.

XXVIII. Modica praesumptio cogit amantem de coamante suspicari

sinistra.

XXIX. Non solet amare quem nimia voluptatis abundantia vexat.

XXX. Verus amans assidua, sine intermissione, coamantis imagine

detinetur.

XXXI. Unam feminam nihil prohibet a duobus amari, et a duabus

mulieribus unum.

Of these articles, the translation of a few may suffice.

The allegation of marriage is an insufficient plea against love.

No one should love two people at the same time.

Without exceeding good reason no one should be forbidden to love.

No one need love unless persuasion invite.

It is not seemly to love one whom it would be unseemly to marry.

A new love banishes an old one.

Love readily yielded is lightly held.

The establishment of courts for the maintenance of principles such as

these may seem unnecessary. Yet they had their raison d'etre. In cases of

tort and felony the lord of a fief possessed the right of justice high and

low. There are crimes now which the law cannot reach. It was the same way

then. There were controversies which no mere man could adjust. To remedy

the defect the wives of the lords created tribunals of their own.

In the English dominions on the Continent generally, as also in Flanders,

Champagne and Provence, these courts were frequent. In describing them

Nostradamus said that "disputes arising from the beautiful and subtle

questions of love were submitted to illustrious ladies who, after

deliberation, rendered judgments termed, 'Lous arrests d'amours.'"

Of the beautiful and subtle questions here is one: A confidant charged by

a friend with messages of love found the lady so to his liking that he

addressed her in his own behalf. Instead of being repulsed he was

encouraged. Whereupon the injured party brought suit. Maitre Andre,

prothonotary of the court, relates that the plaintiff prayed that the

fraud be submitted to the Countess of Champagne, who, sitting in banco

with sixty ladies, heard the complaint and, on deliberation, rendered

judgment as follows: "It is ordered that the defendants henceforth be

debarred the frequentation of honest people." Here is another instance. A

knight was charged by a lady not to say or do anything in her praise. It

so fell about that her name was lightly taken. The knight challenged the

defamer. Thereupon the lady contended that he had forfeited all claim to

her regard. Action having been brought the court decided that the defence

of a lady being never illicit the knight should be rehabilitated in favor

and reinstated in grace. Which, the prothonotary states, was done.

It was over these delicate matters, over others more delicate still, that

the Courts of Love claimed and exercised jurisdiction. Execution of the

decrees may seem to have been arduous. But judgments were enforced not by

a constabulary but by the community. Disregard of a decision entailed not

loss of liberty but loss of caste. In the case of a man, entrance was

denied him at the tournaments. In the case of a woman, the drawbridges

were up. Throughout the land there was no one to receive her. As a result

the delinquent was rare. So too was contempt of the jurists. Sometimes a

girl appeared before them. Sometimes a king.

To-day it all seems very trivial. But at the time marriage was a matter

concerning which the party most interested had the least to say. Love was

not an element of it and disinclination a detail. Moreover in the

apoplectic conditions of the world a woman's natural guardians were not

always at hand, the troubadour always was; the consequence being that a

lady was left to do more or less as she saw fit and it was in order that

she might do what was fittest that decretals were made.

They served another purpose. They set a standard which is observed to-day.

Article XI of the code: Non decet amare quarum pudor est nuptias

affectare,--It is not seemly to love one whom it would not be seemly to

marry, is one of the pivots of modern ethics. On it was constructed _Ruy

Blas_. The tale is tragic but then the entire realm of love is choked

with tragic tales, though it is less so when the precept is observed and

still less when there is regard for the injunction against double loving.

In addition, the provisions of the code were instrumental in originating

that regard for appearances which society previously had neglected and

from which contemporaneous refinement proceeds. Chivalry came with the

crusades; with the Courts of Love, good manners.

They had another merit. In guiding the affections they educated them. To

love and to be loved is not simple but complex. Love may come from mutual

attraction. That is common. It may come of natural selection, which is

rare. Natural selection presupposes a discernment that leads a man through

mazes of women to one woman in particular, to a woman who to him is the

one woman in all the world, to the woman who has been awaiting him and who

recognizes him when he comes. Or _vice versa_. In the Middle Ages it was

usually from the woman that the initial recognition proceeded. It was she

who did the selecting. In the best society she does so still.

To encourage her the Courts of Love authorized a form of contemplative

union in which lovers exchanged vows similar to those taken at the

investiture of a vassal. The knight knelt before the lady, put his hands

in hers and acknowledged himself her liegeman. The homage was formally

accepted. The knight received a kiss which was renewable every year. But

nothing more. In theory at least. Any further reward of fealty being due

to the sheer generosity of the lady who then was lord. The kiss however

was collectable. In the event of deferred payment action could be brought.

One was. By way of defence the defendant alleged that Mr. Danger was

present. Mr. Danger was the defendant's husband.[45]

These hymens of the heart, instituted by virtue of Article I, Causa

conjugii ab amore non est excusatio recta--Against love marriage is an

insufficient excuse--resulted in a sort of moral bigamy that was

sanctioned generally by custom, in Provence by the clergy, and which, like

marriage was contracted in the presence of witnesses. Gerard de

Roussillon, a mediaeval writer, described a lady who while marrying one man

coincidentally gave a ring and promise of love to another. The proceeding

was strictly in accordance with the sentiment of the day which regarded

love as incompatible with marriage.

A case in point is contained in the reports of Martial d'Auvergne. A

knight loved a lady who could not accept his vows inasmuch as she loved

some one else. But she promised to do so if it so happened that she lost

the other man--a contingency which to-day would mean if he died or ran

away. Very differently the jurisprudence of the epoch interpreted it. The

lady married the man she loved whereupon the knight exacted fulfilment of

the agreement. Queen Eleanor, before whom the case was heard, decided in

his favor, on the ground, perhaps subtle, that the lady's husband, in

becoming her husband, became _ipso facto_, by that very act, amatorially

defunct.

In a case not similar but cognate, judgment rendered by the Countess of

Champagne was as follows: "By these presents we declare and affirm that

love cannot exist between married people for the reason that lovers grant

everything unconstrainedly whereas married people are obliged to submit to

one another. Wherefore shall this decision, reached prudently in

conformity with the opinion of many other ladies, be to you all a constant

and irrefragible truth. So adjudged in the year of grace 1174, the third

day of the calends of May, seventh indiction."

In another case Ermengarde of Narbonne decided that the addition of the

marriage tie cannot invalidate a prior affair, _nisi_--unless the lady has

in mind to have done with love forever.

Decretals of this nature, however absurd they may seem, were at least

serviceable in the reforms they effected. According to the civil law if a

husband absented himself for ten years, the wife had the right to remarry.

According to the law of love, the absence of a lover, however prolonged,

did not release the lady from her attachment. The civil law authorized a

widow to remarry in a year and a day. The law of love exacted for the

heart a widowhood of twice that period. The civil law permitted a husband

to beat his wife reasonably. The law of love enforced for the lady

respect.[46]

The resulting conditions, perhaps analogous to those of eighteenth-century

Italy where every woman of position had, in addition to a husband a

cavaliere servente, succeeded none the less in developing outside of

marriage and directly in opposition to it, the ideal of what marriage is,

the union not only of hands but of hearts. The Courts of Love might go,

their work endured. They made woman what she had been in republican Rome

and what she is to-day, the guide and associate of man.

Slowly thereafter they followed knight-errantry to its grave without

however meanwhile becoming what Hallam described as "fantastical

solemnities." "I never had," Hallam declared, "the patience to look at the

older writers who discussed this tiresome subject." In view of which his

opinions are not important, particularly as the Courts of Love so far from

becoming fantastic went to the other extreme. Instead of questions

beautiful and subtle, there arose others, highly realistic, together with

investigations _de visu_ which young gentlewomen treated in terms precise.

Before decadence set in, at a time when these establishments were at their

best and notwithstanding the ethical purport of their decisions,

misadventures occurred. Of these, one, commonly reported by all

authorities, is curious.

The Lord Raymond of Castel-Roussillon had for wife the Lady Marguerite.

Guillaume de Cabstain, a lad of quality came to their court where he was

made page to the countess and where, after certain episodes, he composed

for her the lai which runs:

"Sweet are the thoughts

That love awakes in me."

Etc. When Raymond heard the song he led Guillaume far from the castle, cut

his head off, put it in a basket, cut his heart out, put it also in a

basket, returned to the castle, had the heart roasted and had it served at

table to his wife. The Lady Marguerite ate without knowing what it was.

The repast concluded, Raymond stood up. He told his wife that what she had

eaten was the heart of the page. He fetched and showed her the head and

asked how the heart had tasted.

The Lady Marguerite, recognizing the head, replied that the heart had been

so appetizing that never other food or drink should take from her its

savor. Raymond ran at her with his sword. She fled away, threw herself

from a balcony and broke her skull.

The story, though commonly reported, has not been substantiated. It

occurred a long time ago and, it may be, never occurred at all. But as a

picture of mediaeval love, life and death, it is exact. If it did not

occur, it might have. Joy's fingers are ever at its lips bidding farewell.

It was in that attitude that its parliaments departed.

IV

THE DOCTORS OF THE GAY SCIENCE

Before joy and its parliaments had dispersed the general gloom, minstrels

went about singing distressed maidens, imprisoned women, jealous husbands,

the gamut of love and lore. Usually they sang to ears that were

indifferent or curious merely. But occasionally a knight errant overheard

and at once, lance in hand, he was off on his horse to the rescue. The

source of the minstrel's primal migration was Spain.

In the mediaeval night, Spain, or, more exactly Andalusia, was brilliant.

On the banks of the Great River, Al-Ouad-al-Kebyr, subsequently renamed

Guadalquivir, twelve hundred cities shimmered with mosques, with enamelled

pavilions, with tinted baths, alcazars, minarets. From three hundred

thousand filigree'd pulpits, the glory of Allah and of Muhammad his

prophet were daily proclaimed.

At Ez Zahara, the pavilion of the pleasures of the Caliphs of Cordova,

forty thousand workmen, working for forty years, had produced a stretch

of beauty unequalled then and unexceeded since, a palace of dream, of

gems, of red gold walls; a court of alabaster fountains that tossed

quick-silver in dazzling sheafs; a patio of jasper basins in which floated

silver swans; a residence ceiled with damasquinures, curtained with

Isfahan silks; an edifice filled with poets and peris, an establishment

that thirteen thousand people served.[47]

Ez Zahara, literally, The Fairest, a caliph had built to the memory of a

love. It was regal. The caliphs were also. The reigns of some of them were

so prodigal that they were called honeymoons. At Seville and Granada were

other palaces, homes as they were called, but homes of flowers, of

whispers, of lovers or of peace. Throughout the land generally there was a

chain of pavilions and cities through which minstrels passed, going up and

down the Great River, serenading the banks that sent floating back wreaths

of melody, the sound of clear voices, the tinkle of dulcimers and lutes.

But most beautiful was Cordova. Under the Moors it eclipsed Damascus,

surpassed Baghdad, outshone Byzance. It was the noblest place on earth.

Throughout Europe at that time, the Moors and the Byzantines alone had

the leisure and the inclination to think. They alone read and alone

preserved the literature of the past. Together they supplied it to the

Renaissance. But from the Moors went poetry of their own. It was they who

invented rhyme.[48] Charmed with the novelty, they wrote everything in it,

challenges, contracts, treaties, diplomatic notes, and messages of love.

The composition of poetry was an occupation, usual in itself, which led to

unusual honors, to the dignity of office and high place. Ordinary

conversation not infrequently occurred in verse which was otherwise

facilitated by the extreme wealth of the language. Some of the

dictionaries known generally from their immensity as Oceans--which,

escaping later the unholy hand of the Holy Office,[49] the Escorial

preserved, were arranged not alphabetically but in sequence of rhyme. In

addition to the latter the Moors invented the serenade and for it the

dulcimer and guitar. They not only lived poetry and wrote it and talked it

but died of it. The unusual honors to which it led and which resulted in a

government of poets left them defenceless. Verse which was their glory was

also their destruction. Meanwhile it was from them that the world got

algebra and chivalry besides.

Chivalry has been derived from Germany. The Teutons invented the false

conception of honor--revenge for an affront, the duel and judgment by

arms. That is not chivalry or even bravery, it is bravado. Bravery itself,

perhaps the sole virtue of the early Teuton, was not the only one or even

the first that was required of the Moorish Rokh. To merit that title which

was equivalent to that of knight, many qualities were indispensable:

courtesy, courage, gentility, poetry, diction, strength, and address. But

courtesy came first. Then bravery, then gentility, in which was comprised

the elements that go to the making of the gentleman--loyalty,

consideration, the sense of justice, respect for women, protection of the

weak, honor in war and in love.[50]

These things the Teutons neither knew nor possessed. The Muslim did. Prior

to the first crusade, the male population of Christendom was composed of

men-at-arms, serfs, priests, monks. The knight was not there. But in

Sicily, at the court of the polished Norman kings where Saracens had

gone, particularly in Spain, and certainly at Poictiers, the knight had

appeared. The chivalry which he introduced was an insufficient gift to

barbarism. To it the Moors added perfumery and the language of flowers.

Muhammad's biographers state that there were but two things for which he

really cared--women and perfume. His followers the Moors could not do more

than do better. Other inventions of theirs being inadequate, they joined

to them the art of preserving perfume by distillation and the art, higher

still, of perfuming life with love. Muhammad was unable to convert

humanity to a belief in the uniqueness of Allah, but the Moors, for a

while at least, converted Europe to a belief that love was unique.

Muhammad created a paradise of houris and musk. More subtly the Moors

created a heaven on earth. It had its defects as everything earthly must

have, but such were its delights that the courtesan had no place in its

parks. For the first time in history a nation appeared that renounced

Venus Pandemos. For the first time a nation appeared among whom woman was

neither punished nor bought.[51]

In the Koran it is written: "Man shall have pre-eminence over woman

because of the advantages wherein God hath caused one of them to excel

the other. The honest women are obedient, careful in the absence of their

husbands. But those whose perverseness ye shall be apprehensive of,

rebuke, remove into separate apartments and chastise."

The Moors were devout. They were also schismatic. They had separated from

Oriental Islam. Even in the privacy of the harem they would not have

struck a woman with a rose.

The harem was not a Muhammadan invention. It was a legacy from Solomon.

Originally the Muslim faith was a creed of sobriety that included a

deference to women theretofore unknown. Its subsequent corruption was due

to Assyria and the ferocious apostolicism of the Turk. The Islamic

seclusion of women came primarily from an excess of delicacy. It was

devised in order that their beauty might not excite desires in the hearts

of strangers and they be affronted by the ardor of covetous eyes. That

ardor the Moors deflected with a talisman composed of the magic word

Masch-Allah which, placed in filigree on the forehead of the beloved was

supposed to indicate--and perhaps did--that her heart was not her own. In

Baghdad where men are said to have been so inflammable that they fell in

love with a woman at the rumor of her beauty, at even the mere sight of

the impress of her hand, it was not entirely unnatural that they should

have secluded those for whom they cared. With finer jealousy the Moors

suggested to the women who cared for them the advantage of secluding

themselves. To-day a woman who loves will do that unprompted.

In the suggestion of the Moors there was nothing emphatic. Usually girls

of position saw, to the day of their marriage, but relatives and womenfolk

whom the husband and his friends then routed with daggers of gold. But

access to Chain-of-Hearts was not otherwise always impossible. In default

of gold daggers there were silk ladders let down from high windows and up

which one might climb. In the local tales of love and chivalry, in the

story, for instance, of _Medjnoun and Leilah_, in that of the _Dovazdeh

Rokh_--the Twelve Knights--many such ladders and windows appear, many are

the kisses, multiple are the furtive delights. Apart from them history has

frequent mention of Andalusian Sapphos, free, fervid, poetic, charming the

leisures of caliphs, or, after an exacter pattern of the Lesbian,

instructing other girls in what were called the keys of felicities--the

_divans_ of the poets, the art and theory of verse; more austerely still,

in mathematics and law.[52]

To please young women of that distinction, a man had to be something more

than a caliph, something else than violently brave. Necessarily he had to

be expert in fantasias with arms and horse, but he had to be also

discreet; in addition he had to be able to contend and successfully in the

moufakhara, or tournaments of song--struggles of glory that proceeded

directly from Mekke where the verses of the victors were affixed with gold

nails to the doors of the Mosque. From these tournaments all modern poetry

proceeds. Acclimatized, naturalized and embellished in Andalusia, they

were imitated there by the encroaching Castilians who proudly but falsely

called themselves _los primeros padres de la poesia vulgar_.

At that time, the Provencal tongue, called the Limosin or Langue d'oc, was

spoken not only throughout the meridional provinces of France but

generally in Christian Spain.[53] Whatever was common to Spanish poetry

was common to that of Provence: both drank from the same source, the

overflowing cup of the Moors. The original form of each is that employed

in the _divans_ of the latter. There is in them also the tell-tale novelty

rhyme which, unknown to Greece and Rome, lower Latinity had not achieved.

In addition the Provencal and Spanish tensons, or contentions of song,

are but replicas of the moufakhara, or struggles of glory, while the

minstrel going up and down the Great River is the obvious father of the

itinerant poets whom Barbarossa welcomed in Germany and from whom the

Minnesaenger came. In Italy, Provencal verse was the foundation of that of

Dante and Petrarch. From it in England Chaucer proceeds. In Aragon it

founded the _gaya cienca_--the gay science, which passing into Provence

overspread the world. The passing was effected by the troubadour, a title

derived from _trobar_, to compose, whence troubadour, a composer of verse.

Technically the troubadour was not only a composer but a knight and not

merely that but the representative of chivalry in its supreme expression.

Poetry was the attribute of his order as joy was the parure of the preux

chevalier. But though except in bearing and appearance the knight did not

have to be poetic, the troubadour had to be poetic and chivalrous as well.

The vocation therefore, which in addition to these characteristics

presupposed also rank and wealth, was such that while a troubadour might

disdain to be king, there were kings, Alfonso of Aragon and

Coeur-de-Lion among others, who were proud to be troubadours.

Rank was not essentially a prerequisite. Poetry, exalting and fastidious,

occasionally stooped, lifting from the commonality a man naturally though

not actually born for the sphere. The Muse aiding, Bernard de Ventadour, a

baker's son; was raised to the lips of the rather volatile Queen Eleanor.

But the process, hazardous in itself, was infrequent. Royals were not

necessarily on a footing with troubadours, but the latter, who were the

peers of kings, required, for the maintenance of their position, abundant

means. They held it becoming to be ceaselessly lavish, to play high and

long, to dazzle not only in the tensons but in the banquets and jousts.

Impoverishment supervening they went forth in the crusades to die, or,

less finely, dropped back among the jongleurs, minstrels, strollers and

mere poets with whom subsequently they were generally confused. These

latter, sometimes stipendiary, sometimes donatable like jesters and fools,

told in their verse of great ladies whom they had never seen, or in the

quality of handy man attached themselves to women of rank, to whom they

gave songs in return for graces which included largesse, acquiring in

their society a knowledge more or less incomplete of the niceties of love

and occasionally, if their verse were good, the title of Maestro d'Amor.

Even so, only in the embroidery of legend were they troubadours.

The troubadours, the true masters and real doctors of the gay science, in

full armor, the visor up, the lance in bucket, rode from keep to keep,

from court to court, from one to another of the long string of castles

that stretched throughout Provence, throughout the English districts on

the Continent, throughout England as well, celebrating as they passed the

beauty of this chatelaine and of that, breaking lances for women, devising

new lays to their eyes, contending with rivals in duels of song,

challenging them in the tourneys, singing and killing with equal

satisfaction, leading generally a life vagabond, prodigal, puerile,

delightful, absurd and humanizing in the extreme.

Previously keeps and castles were lairs of rapine and of brutes,

conditions which chivalry and the Courts of Love remodelled. But the

coincidental influence of poetry expressed by the best and richest men of

the day had an effect so edulcifying that whatever crapulousness the

knight overlooked the troubadour extinguished.

Nothing is perfect. The system like all others had its defects. In keeps,

when tilts, feasts, and entertainments were over, the boudoir's more

relaxing atmosphere, that of the adjoining balconies and outlying gardens

as well, had also their effect. The presence there of a man whose one

object was to sing love and make it, the fact that he was a stranger and

of all men the stranger who but comes and passes, disturbs the

imagination most; the further fact that if he but so pleased he could in

his lays trail the fame of a lady from Northumbria to Lebanon, the

perfectly natural wish for such renown, the equally feminine

disinclination to be ignored when others were praised, the concomitant

desire to have a troubadour or a part of one, as one's very own, these

stimulants had consequences that were not always very ethical.

The troubadour's religion, intoxicating in itself, was love. That was his

creed, his vocation, his life, his death. Song was its vehicle, his

presence its introduction. He exhaled it. The perfume, always heady, but

which in its first fragrance had mended manners, turned acid and ended by

dissolving morals. They melted before it. The social conditions that

prevailed in the Renaissance and later in the Restoration and Regency,

proceeded directly from these poets who, meanwhile, in a cataclysm had

vanished.

Their terrific ablation was due to an interconnection with the Albigenses,

a Languedoc sect who, in a jumble of Gnosticism and Manicheism, professed

that since evil is coeval with good it must be just as justifiable; hence

there is nothing blamable, everything is relative and morality--

unobligatory--a matter of taste.

Provence, always receptive to Orientalisms, was charmed with theories

that gave a mystic sanction to troubadourian views. Caught up and

repeated, discussed in tournament and tenson, the opinions of ladies and

lovers on the subject would have disturbed nobody, history would have

ignored them, had the original heretics been satisfied with the plaything

they had found. But they compared it to official religion. They also

questioned the prerogatives of the Holy See.

Indignantly the Papacy pitted Christianity against it, as already it had

pitted the latter against Islam. In this instance with greater success.

From a thousand pulpits a new religious war was preached. The fanaticism

of Europe was aroused. Provence was stormed. Chateaux were levelled, vines

uprooted, the harvests of poetry and song destroyed. Sixty thousand people

were massacred. The Inquisition was founded. Plentifully the doctors of

the gay science were burned. In spite of chivalry, in spite of love, in

spite of verse, in spite of Muhammad, the Moors and the Madonna, Europe

was barbarous still.

The smoke, obscuring the sky, left but darkness. If anywhere there was

light, it was in Sicily, always volcanic, or in Tuscany, another Provence.

There surviving troubadours escaped and left a legacy which Dante,

Petrarch and Boccaccio diversely shared.

V

THE APOTHEOSIS

In the boyhood of Dante, Florence, the Flower City, was a place of much

beauty, of perfect calm, of almost perfect equality, of pleasurable and

polished life. There a brigade, the _Brigata Amorosa_, formed of a

thousand people, had a lord who was a Lord of Love. During one of their

recurrent festivals an entertainment was held at the home of Folco

Portinari. To such entertainments Boccaccio said that children frequently

accompanied their parents. To this particular entertainment, Dante, then a

lad of nine, came with his father. He found there a number of boys and

girls, among whom was Folco's daughter, Beatrice, a child with delicate

features whose speech and attitude were perhaps superserious for her age.

Dante looked at her. "At that moment," he afterward, wrote, "I may truly

say that the spirit of life which dwells in the most secret chambers of my

heart, trembled in such wise that the least pulses of my being shook....

So noble was her manner, that assuredly one might repeat of her the words

of Homer: 'She seemed born not of mortal but of God.'"

Years passed during which often he encountered her, without, however, a

word being interchanged. Subsequently, at a festival, she recognized him

and bowed--"so virtuously," he said, "that I thought myself lifted to the

limits of beatitude."

Another interval ensued. Again she met him. Dante was then twenty,

Beatrice nineteen. On this occasion she omitted to bow. The omission

affected him profoundly. It was even inspirational. He began to write, "so

well" said Boccaccio "that he effaced the fame of poets that had been and

menaced that of those to be."

In promenading his young glory he again encountered Beatrice, this time in

a house where a betrothal was being celebrated. On entering he was so

emotionalized that he had to lean against a wall. The women who were

present divined the reason. Beatrice was there. The situation amused them.

They laughed. Beatrice also laughed.[54] Whether or not it was her

betrothal that was being feted is uncertain. It may have been. Shortly she

became the wife of Simon dei Bardi, _gentiluomo_.

Dante more profoundly affected than ever cursed the day on which they met:

Io maledico il di ch'io vidi imprima

La luce de' vostri occhi traditori.

To the melody of the imprecation, Petrarch, in honor of Laura, added a

variant:

Benedetto sia l'giorno, e l'mese, e l'anno.

Both were unfortunate in their loves but of the two Dante's was the least

favored. It had nothing for sustenance. Yet, save for that one reproach,

it persisted. Its continuance was fully justified by the code, though, in

the absence of any reciprocity whatever, it was perhaps more vaporous than

any that the codifiers had considered.

Hitherto Dante had hoped but for a bow. Thereafter the hope seemed

ambitious. He ceased to expect so much. A woman, cognizant, as all

Florence was, of the circumstances said to him: "Since you barely dare to

look at Beatrice, what can your love for her be?" Dante answered: "The

dream of my love was in her salutation but since it has pleased her to

withhold it from me, my happiness now resides in what cannot be

withdrawn." "And what is that?" the donna asked. "In words that praise

her," he replied.

Seemingly instead of that, instead rather of limiting his previous

ambition to a salutation he might have supplanted Dei Bardi. Dante too was

_gentiluomo_. In addition he was famous. Had he asked, doubtless it would

have been given. But Dante, nourished on troubadourian verse and views,

held love to be incompatible with marriage. Afterward, if any Provencal

suggestion of extra-matrimonial possibilities presented itself, it was too

incongruous with the ideal to be detained. Even otherwise, shortly and

speedily Beatrice died and he very nearly died also.

The distraction of writing of her, of drawing angels that resembled her,

these occupations, combined with other incidents, consoled. Then presently

he had visions, among them one in which he saw that which decided him to

write nothing further until he could do so more worthily. "To that end,"

he said, "I labor all I can, as she well knows. Wherefore if it please

Him, through whom all things live, that my life be suffered to continue

yet awhile, I hope one day to say of her what has not been said of any

woman. After which may it please the Lord of Grace that my soul go hence

in quest of the Blessed Beatrice who now gazes continuously on the

countenance of Him qui est omnia secula benedictus. Laus Deo!"

With these words, with which the _Vita Nuova_ ends, the _Divina Commedia_

is announced. Voltaire commended an imbecile for calling the latter a

monster. It is regrettable that there are not more like it. Other

imbeciles have called Beatrice an abstraction. That she lived is fully

attested. Dante admired a child who became a young woman from whom he

asked next to nothing, which, being refused, he asked nothing at all,

contenting himself with laudations. From that moment, Beatrice, who had

really been, ceased to really be. She became a personified worship.

Finally she died and her death was her assumption, an apotheosis in which

typifying the Eternal Feminine, she lifted the poet from sphere to sphere,

from glory to glory, to the heights where, imperishable, he stands.

Said Tennyson:

King that hast reigned six hundred years and grown

In power and ever growest ...

I, wearing but the garland of a day

Cast at thy feet one flower that fades away.

The tribute, perfect in itself, was perfectly deserved. There never was

such tenderness as Dante's. There never was such intensity. Save only in

the case of the human oceans that men call Homer and Shakespeare, there

never has been such greatness.

Homer engendered antiquity. From Dante modernity proceeds. Of

Shakespeare, England was born. Without resemblance to one another, on

their thrones in the ideal each sits alone. Behind them is the past, at

their feet the present, before them the centuries unroll. They are the

immortals. They have all time as we all have our day. It is from them we

get our daily bread. Their genius feeds our starving soul. Talent has

never done that. Talent makes us laugh and forget and yawn. Talent is

agreeable, it provides us with pleasures, with means of getting rid of

time. But to the heart it brings no message, for the soul it has no food.

It is ephemeral, not eternal. Only genius and its art endure.

The genius of Dante, Beatrice awoke, of his art she was the inspiration.

For that be she, as he called her, Blessed,--thrice Blessed since she did

not love him. Had she loved him, he could not have done better, that is

not possible, and he might have omitted to do as well.

Dante made Francesca say of Paolo:

Questi che mai da me non fia diviso,

La bocca mi bacio tutto tremente.

Francesca added:

_Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante_--we read no more that day. Nor on

any other. Had she, from whom Dante is equally inseparable, tremblingly

kissed his mouth, it may be that not their reading merely but his writing

would have ceased. But Dante, whom Petrarch called a miracle of nature,

was not Paolo. Far from attempting to kiss Beatrice he did not even aspire

to such a grace. He had, as the genius should have, everything, even to

sex, in his brain, a circumstance that might have preserved him from Gemma

Donati and la Gentucca,--the first, his wife; the second, another's--dual

infidelities for which, at the summit of Purgatory, Beatrice, who, in the

interim, had become very feminine, reproached him with slow scorn.

For punishment he beheld her. The spectacle of her beauty was such that

memories of his sins seared him like thin flames. He was in Purgatory. But

Beatrice who in a cloud of flowers--_un nuvola di fiori_--had come,

forgave him. Together then their ascension began. _Ella guardava suso, ed

io in lei._ She looked above and he at her. In the mounting his sins fell

by. As they did so her beauty increased. In proportion to his redemption

she became more fair.

That picture, at once real and ideal, displayed in its exquisiteness the

miracle of two hearts saving and embellishing each other. Set at the

threshold of modern life it prefigured what love was to be, what it is now

when it truly appears, but what it was long in becoming.

It had no part in the conceptions of Cecco Angioleiri, a poet

contemporaneous, very vulgar, consequently more popular, who "sat" his

heart on a donna and flung at her cries that were squeaks.

Io ho in tal donna lo mio core assiso,

Che chi dicesse: Ti fo imperadore,

E sta che non la veggi per due ore,

Io li direi: Va che to sia ucciso.

Other was Petrarch,

From whose brain-lighted heart were thrown

A thousand thoughts beneath the sun,

Each lucid with the name of One.

The One was Laura. Petrarch, young, good-looking, already aureoled, saw

her first at matins in a church at Avignon. She too was young. Married, a

woman of position, of probable beauty, she was dark-eyed, fair-haired,

pensive, serene. With spells as gossamer as those of the Monna Bice, at

once she imparadised his heart. Precipitately he presented it to her. She

refused it.

Hughes de Sade, her husband, was a perfectly unsympathetic person, jealous

without reason, notoriously hard. Yet his excuse, if he had one, may have

resided in local conditions. Avignon stately and luxurious, was, Petrarch

declared, the gully of every vice. "There is here," he said, "nothing

holy, nothing just, nothing human. Decency and modesty are unknown."[55]

Yet he found them there. Laura represented both. In the profligacy of the

Papal city she at least was pure. She would have none of Petrarch, or,

more exactly, so little that hardly can it be said to count. Rebuffed he

departed. She beckoned him back, rebuffed him again and, alternately, for

twenty-one years, rebuffed and beckoned, preserving his love without

according her own, giving him an infrequent smile, now and then a nod from

a window, on one memorable occasion as much as the touch of her hand. Once

only, and that at their last interview her eyes looked longly in his. That

was all.

To be near her he purchased at Vaucluse an estate so gloomy that his

servants forsook him and where, such women as he saw, it mortified him to

look at. The expression is his own. Day after day he stood before her

gates, which he never entered, fully repaid, if among the orange trees

there, he but caught sight of her. On one occasion he met her by accident,

on another he was fortunate enough to be able to restore a glove which she

had dropped, again in a reunion where were assembled the ladies of

Avignon, a foreign prince marched up to the woman whom Petrarch's verses

had made famous and kissed her on the eyes. It was a prince's privilege.

Petrarch related the occurrence in a sonnet. It was incidents of this

character that form the bundle of poetry that immortalized them both.

Sometimes he rebelled. He went away, travelled, studied, worked. Whatever

he did, where-ever he were, always, in haunting constancy, she was before

him. Always her presence inhabited his eyes. He tried to vanquish the love

of woman in the love of God. In the struggle it was he who was defeated.

Even age, even death could not aid him. Laura ultimately had nine

children. She was growing old, certainly she was worn. To Petrarch always

she was in the first festival of her beauty.

Blessed be the day and the month and the year,

And the season, the hour, the minute,

And the fair land and the spot itself where

Her beautiful eyes subjected my spirit.

It was that which he had ever before him. It was that which made him what

he was, the foremost personality of his day. It was that which

distinguished him from other poets. Unlike anybody, every one wanted to

resemble him. It was love that did it. Dante told of love with an

intensity that was divine. Petrarch wrote with a comprehensiveness that

was human. There have been thousands of poets and but one Dante, myriads

of lovers and but one Petrarch. Whether Laura deserved his devotion must

be a matter of opinion. This alone is obvious. She made his life a combat

which antiquity would not have understood, which chivalry would not have

appreciated and which Dante did not experience. In antiquity love had for

form but the senses. That form chivalry draped with graces and Dante

dematerialized. In Petrarch, love was both of the flesh and of the spirit

in addition to being sincere. That was a great step. With him for the

first time there entered into history an honest man ardently in love with

an honest woman. To the superficial she has seemed but a coquette and he

merely sentimental. He were perhaps better regarded as creative, the

founder of the real love which is the love of the heart, the "_amour

eternel en un moment concu_."

The quality of Laura's love, whether she loved him or whether she did not,

whether for that matter she was capable of loving at all, whether on the

other hand while loving him wholly she, like the woman in the sonnet of

Arvers who inspired the "_amour eternel_" preferred to remain "piously

faithful to the austere devoir," is immaterial and unimportant. Another

man would have abandoned her completely or carried her violently away.

Petrarch, too sincere for treason and too poetic for vulgarity, unfit in

consequence for either enterprise, became obsessed with a love that

developed into a delicate malady, a disease that sent him from his

studies, tormenting him into an incessant struggle with the most terrible

of all combatants--one's self. The malady had its compensations. It made

him the source of modern lyricism and the most conspicuous figure of his

day. In Milan when he appeared every head was uncovered. On the Po, a

battle was interrupted that he might pass. At Venice his seat was at the

right of the doge. Rome's ghost revived in beauty for him and put a laurel

on his brow. It was his verse that induced these tributes. The verse was

inspired by love.

To Dante, love was what it had been to Plato, a mysterious initiation into

the secrets of the material world. To Petrarch it was a rebellion against

those very things. In Dante it was sublimated, in Petrarch it was

distilled. Laura stood at the parting of the roads, midway between the

symbolism of the _Divina Commedia_ and the freedom of the _Decamerone_.

The _Decamerone_ is the chronicle of a society in extremis of which the

Divine Comedy is the Last Judgment. One is the dirge of the past, the

other the dawn of the future. Between the gravity of the one and the

unconcern of the other is the distance of the poles. Separated but by

half a century the cantos are the antipodes of the novellas. In the former

is gloom, palpable and thick. In the latter is light, frivolous and clear.

One is mediaeval, the other, modern. But one was constructed for all time,

the other for a day. If the _Decamerone_ still survive, it is through one

of Time's caprices.

Boccaccio wrote endlessly. He produced treatises theological, historical,

mystical. With his pen he built a vast monument. Time passed and in

passing loosed from the edifice a single stone. The rest it reduced to

dust. But that stone it sent rolling into posterity, regarding it, wrongly

or rightly as a masterpiece. A masterpiece is a thing that seems easy to

make and which no one can duplicate. The Queen of Navarre tried and failed

augustly. Indolent reviewers have summarized both efforts as gossip.

Boccaccio's work was at once that and something else. It was a viaticum

for the Middle Ages and a signal for the Renaissance.

Through Florence at that hour stalked the Black Pest. The narrow streets

were choked with corpses. The people were dying. So too was an epoch.

While grave-diggers were at work a page of history was being turned. On

the other side was a dawn which now is day. The knell of expiring night

Boccaccio answered with laughter. Into a shroud he tossed flowers. Of

these many were frail, some blood-red, others toxic; a few only were

white. From them come the odors that formed the moral atmosphere of

indifferent Italy, of careless France, of England after the Restoration.

They were the parterre on which gallantry grew.

VI

BLUEBEARD

Before the parterre of gallantry budded, at an epoch when the Middle Ages

were passing away, there appeared a man, known to amateurs of light opera

and of fairy tales as Bluebeard, but who, everywhere, save in the nursery

and the study, has been regarded as unreal.

Bluebeard was no more a creation of Perrault or of Offenbach than Don Juan

was a creation of Mozart or of Moliere. Both really lived, but Bluebeard

the more demoniacally. According to the documents contained in what is

technically known as his _proces_, his name was Gilles de Retz and, at a

period contemporaneous with the apparition of Jehanne d'Arc, he was a

great Breton lord, seigneur of appreciable domains.[56]

At Tiffauges, one of his seats, the towers of the castle have fallen, the

drawbridge has crumbled, the moat is choked. Only the walls remain. Within

is an odor of ruin, a sensation of chill, a savor of things damned, an

impression of space, of shapes of sin, of monstrous crimes, of sacrilege

and sorcery. But in his day it probably differed very little from other

keeps except in its extreme fastidiousness. Gilles de Retz was a poet. In

a land where no one read, he wrote. At a time when the chief relaxation of

a baron was rapine, he preferred the conversation of thinkers. Very rich

and equally sumptuous, the spectacle which he presented must have been

that of a great noble living nobly, one who, as was usual, had his own

men-at-arms, his own garrison, pages, squires, the customary right of

justice high and low, but, over and above these things, a taste for

elegancies, for refinements, for illuminated missals, for the music of

grave hymns. He was devout. In addition to a garrison, he had a chapel

and, for it, almoners, acolytes, choristers. Necessarily a soldier, he had

been a brave one. In serving featly his God he had served loyally his

king. At the siege of Orleans, Charles VII rewarded him with the title and

position of Marechal de France. It was lofty, but not more so than he.

Meanwhile, during the progress of the war, for which he furnished troops;

subsequently, in extravagant leisures at court; later, at Tiffauges, where

he resided in a manner entirely princely, he exhausted his resources.

The one modern avenue to wealth then open was matrimony. Gilles followed

it. But insufficiently. The dower of one lady, then of others, however

large, was not enough. He needed more. To get it he took a different

route. Contiguous to the avenue was a wider highway which, descending from

the remotest past, had at the time narrowed into a blind alley. In it was

a cluster of alchemists. They were hunting the golden chimera which Hermes

was believed to have found, and whose escaping memories, first satraps,

then emperors, had tried vainly to detain.

These memories Bacon sought in alembics, Thomas Aquinas in ink.

Experiments, not similar but cognate, had resulted in the theory that, at

that later day, success was impossible without the direct assistance of

the Very Low. The secret had escaped too far, memories of it had been too

long ablated to be rebeckoned by natural means. For the recovery of the

evaporated arcana it was necessary that Satan should be invoked. Satan

then was very real. The atmosphere was so charged with his legions, that

spitting was an act of worship. In the cathedrals, through shudders of

song, his voice had been heard inviting maidens to swell the red

quadrilles of hell. From encountering him at every turn man had become

used to his ways, and had imagined a pact whereby, in exchange for the

soul, Satan agrees to furnish whatever is wanted.

To get gold, Gilles de Retz prepared to enter into that pact. What were

the preliminary steps, more exactly, what were the preliminary thoughts,

that led this man, who had been devout and a poet, into the infamies which

then ensued, is problematic. It is the opinion of psychologists that the

most poignant excesses are induced by aspirations for superterrestrial

felicities, by a desire, human, and therefore pitiable, to clutch some

fringe of the mantle of stars. Psychologists may be correct, but

pathologists give these yearnings certain names, among which is

haematomania, or blood-madness. Caligula, Caracalla, Attila, Tamerlane,

Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Philip II had it. Complicated with

another disorder, it manifested itself in the Marquis de Sade. It was that

which affected Gilles de Retz.

Actuated by it, he lured alchemists to Tiffauges. With them from the

confines of the Sabbat, magicians came. Conjointly it is not improbable

that they succeeded then in really evoking Satan, whose response to any

summons consists, perhaps, not in a visible apparition, but in making men

as base as they have conceived him to be.

In the horrible keep something of the kind must have occurred. Gilles de

Retz became actually obsessed. His soul turned a somersault. Where the

scholar had been, a vampire emerged. Satan was believed to enjoy the blood

of the young. To minister to the taste, Gilles killed boys and girls. For

fourteen years he stalked them. How many he bagged is conjectural. He had

omitted to keep tally.

His first victim was a child whose heart he extracted, and with whose

blood he wrote an invocation to Satan. Then the list elongated

immeasurably. That lair of his echoed with cries, dripped with gore,

shuddered with sobs. The oubliettes were turned into cemeteries, the halls

reeked with the odor of burning bones. Through them the monster prowled,

virtuoso and vampire in one, determining how he might destroy not merely

bodies but souls, inventing fresh repasts of flesh, devising new tortures,

savoring tears as yet unshed, and, with them, the spectacle of helpless

agony, of unutterable fear, the contortions of little limbs simultaneously

subjected to hot irons and cold steel. Witnesses deposed that some of the

children cried very little, but that the color passed from their eyes.[57]

There is a limit to all things earthly. Precisely as no one may attain

perfection, so has infamy its bounds. There are depths beneath which there

is nothing. To their ultimate plane Gilles de Retz descended. There,

smitten with terror, he tried to grope back. It was too late. Leisurely,

after fourteen years of Molochism, the echo of the cries and odor of the

calcinated reached Nantes, with, for result, the besieging of Tiffauges,

the taking of Gilles, his arrest, trial, confession--a confession so

monstrous that women fainted of fright, while a priest, rising in horror,

veiled the face on a crucifix which hung from the wall--a confession

followed by excommunication and the stake.[58]

In this super-Neronian story Bluebeard is not apparent. Yet he is there.

It is he that is Gilles de Retz. Years ago at Morbihan in a Breton church

that dates from the fourteenth century, there was found a series of

paintings. One represents the marriage of Trophine, daughter of the Duc de

Vannes to a Breton lord. In another the lord is leaving his castle. As he

goes he warningly intrusts to his wife the key to a forbidden door. It is

spotted with blood. The scenes which follow represent the lady opening the

forbidden door and peering into a room from the rafters of which six women

hang. Then come the return of the lord, his questioning and menacing

glance, the tears of the lady, her prayers to her sister, the alarm given

by the latter, the irruption of her brothers and her rescue from that

room.

The story which the paintings tell still endures in Brittany. It has

Gilles de Retz for villain. Yet for the honor of his race and of the land,

instead of his name that of Bluebart, the cognomen of a public enemy, was

given.[59]

In the story, Gilles de Retz, after marrying Catherine de Thouars, one of

the great heiresses of the day, subsequently and successively married six

other women. Whether he murdered them all or whether they died of delight

is not historically certain. The key spotted with blood obviously is

fancy. But like other fancies it might be truth. It symbolizes the eternal

curiosity of the eternal Eve concerning that which has been forbidden.

VII

THE RENAISSANCE

Nominally with Bluebeard the Middle Ages cease. In the parturitions of

that curious period order emerged from chaos, language from dialects,

nations from hordes, ideals from dirt. Mediaevalism was the prelude,

mediocre and in minor key, to the great concert of civilization of which

the first chorus was the Renaissance, the second the Reformation, the

third the Revolution, and of which Democracy, the fourth, but presumably

not the last, is swelling now.

Meanwhile the world was haggard. The moral pendulum, that had oscillated

between mud and ether, was back again at the starting point. Death,

Fortune, Love, the three blind fates of life, were the only recognized

divinities. But beyond the monotonous fog that discolored the sky beauty

was waiting. With the fall of Constantinople it descended. The result was

the Renaissance. To the Renaissance many contributed; mainly the dead, the

artists of the past, but also the living, the prophets of the future.

Mediaevalism was a forgetting, the Renaissance a recovery. It was an epoch

from which the mediocre, in departing, saw as it went the re-establishment

of altars to beauty. In the midst of feudal barbarism, at an hour when

France was squalid, Germany uncouth, when English nobles could barely

read, when Europe generally had a contempt for letters which was not due

to any familiarity with them, but when Italy--a century in advance of

other lands--was merely corrupt, at that hour, the wraiths of Greece

mingling with the ghosts of Rome, made the mistress of the old world

sovereign of the new. Not in might but in art and intellect, again the

Eternal City ruled supreme.

From the annals of the epoch bravi peer and swarm--soldati di gran

diavolo, men more fiendish than animal, artists that contrived to drape

the abominable with cloths which, if crimson, were also of gold; poets

refined by generations of scrupulous polish but disorganized by a form of

corruption that was the more unholy in that it proceeded not from the

senses but the mind.

For centuries luxury had been reaccumulating about them. To it, after the

fall of Byzance, an unterrified spirit of beauty came. In between was a

sense of equality, one that a recently discovered hemisphere was to

assimilate, but which meanwhile enabled a man of brains to rise from

nowhere to anything, permitting a mercer to breed popes and an apothecary

Lorenzo the Magnificent. These factors, generally unconsidered, induced a

tone that could change instantly from the suave to the tragic, the tone of

a people that had no beliefs except in genius and no prejudices except

against stupidity, a tone ethically nul and intellectually great, the only

imaginable one that could produce combinations artistic and viperish as

the Borgias, aesthetic and vulperine as the Medici. Monsters such as they,

did not astonish. Columbus, in enlarging the earth, and Copernicus in

unveiling the skies, had so astounded that the ability to be surprised was

lost. Men could only admire and create.

These occupations were not hindered by the pontiffs. What the latter were,

diarists and historians--Infessura and Gregorovius--have told. As their

pages turn, pagan Rome revives. The splendid palaces had crumbled, the

superb porticoes were dust. The victorious eagles of the victorious

legions had flown to their eyries forever. The shouting throngs, the ivory

chariots, the baths of perfume and of blood, these things long since had

vanished. There were friars where gladiators had been, pifferari in lieu

of augurs, imperias instead of vestals, in place of an emperor there was a

pope. In details of speech, costume and mode there were further

differences. Otherwise Rome was as pagan, murderous and gay. In the thick

air of the high-viced city the poison of the antique purple dripped.

But into the toxic a new ingredient had entered, a fresh element, a modern

note. In the Rome of Nero a sin was a prayer. In the Rome of Leo X it was

a taxable luxury. Anything, no matter what, was lawful provided an

indulgence were bought. The Bank of Pardons was established for the

obvious proceeds, but the latter were sanctified by their consecration to

art. Among the results is St. Peter's.

It was in a very different light that Luther contemplated them. The true

founder of modern society, radical as innovators must be, dangerous as

reformers are, it was with actual fury that he attacked the sale, attacked

confession, the entire doctrine of original sin. The hysteria of

asceticism was as inept to him as the celibacy of the priesthood; love he

declared to be no less necessary than food and he preached to men, saying,

"If women are recalcitrant, tell them others will consent; if Esther

refuse, let Vashti approach."[60]

Beauty, emerging meanwhile from her secular tomb, had uttered a new Fiat

Lux. Spontaneously as the first creation there resulted another in which

art became an object of worship. Suddenly, miraculously yet naturally,

there sprang into being a race of sculptors inferior only to Pheidias, a

race of painters superior even to Apelles, real artists who were great men

in an epoch really great. It was said of Raphael that he had resuscitated

the corpse of Rome. Benvenuto Cellini was absolved of a murder by Paul III

on the ground that men like him were above the law. Julius II launched

anathemas at any sovereign who presumed, however briefly, to lure from him

Michel Angelo. Charles V, ruler of a realm wider than Alexander's, stooped

and restored a brush which Titian had dropped, remarking as he did so,

that only by an emperor could an artist be properly served.

The epoch in which appeared these exceptional beings and with them

lettered bandits comparable only to tigers in the gardens of Armide--the

age which produced in addition to them, others equally, if differently,

great, approached in its rare brilliance that of Pericles. Even Plato was

there.

"Since God has given us the Papacy," said Leo X, "let us enjoy it." In the

enjoyment he had Plato for aid. An estray from Byzance, tossed thence on

the shores of the mediaeval Dead Sea, translated in the Florentine Academy,

printed in the Venetian metropolis of pleasure and dedicated to the

scholar pope, no better aid to enjoyment could he or any one have had. In

the mystic incense of the liturgy to Aphrodite was what prelates and

patricians, the people and the planet long had needed, a doctrine of love.

In the _Republic_ Plato stated that those who contemplate the immutable

essence of things possess knowledge not views. That was precisely what was

wanted. But what was wanted Plato did not perhaps very adequately supply.

Hitherto love had been regarded sometimes as the fusion of souls sometimes

as that of the senses. There had been asceticism. There had also been

license. Plato, from whom something more novel was wanted, seemed to offer

but an antidote to both. In the _Symposion_ love was represented as the

rather vulgar instinct of persistence and beauty, one and indivisible,

alone divine. Moreover, from the austere regions of that abstraction came

no explanation of the charm which feminine loveliness exercises over man.

On the other hand, Plato had told of two Aphrodites, one celestial, the

other common, a distinction which doctors in quintessences utilized for

the display of two forms of love, one heavenly, the other mundane,

simianizing in so doing, what is human, humanizing that which is divine

and succeeding between them in producing for the world the modern

conception of platonic affection, which, in so far as it relates to the

reciprocal relations of men and women, not for a moment had entered

Plato's sky-like mind.

The doctors were Ficino--a Hellenist whom Cosmo dei Medici had had

trained for the sole purpose of translating Plato--and Bembo, a prelate,

who already had written for Lucrezia Borgia a treatise on love. What

Ficino advanced Bembo expounded.

Bembo's commentary was to the effect that earthly loveliness is a

projection of celestial beauty irradiated throughout creation. Falling as

light falls it penetrates the soul and repercuted creates love, which

consequently is a derivative of divine beauty transmitted through a

woman's eyes. To man the source of that beauty is, however, not the soul

but the flesh. From this error disillusion proceeds. For the rightful

enjoyment of beauty cannot consist in material satisfaction from which

satiety, weariness, and aversion result, but rather in disinterestedness,

which is the chief factor in abiding delight.[61]

The theory, casuistic and subtle, appealed momentarily to a society that

had no theories at all. It particularly appealed to women. Matrimony had

not always been propitious to them. Barring death or annulment the brand

of the ceremony was ineffaceable. In England Henry VIII maintained the

brand but, by means of divorce which he prescribed for himself, he

rendered it cumulative, a process which Parliament, subsequently

petitioned by Milton, regularized. In Italy meanwhile the pseudo-platonism

which Ficino and Bembo were expounding, omitted any interference with it.

In the corpus juris amoris matrimony was held to be incompatible with love

and pseudo-platonism, going a step further, eliminated even the

possibility of it. Pseudo-platonism maintained that if happiness consists

in love and love consists in yielding, yielding itself has its degrees.

There is the yielding of the body and of the soul, the yielding of the one

without the other, the yielding of the second without the first.

Platonism, as interpreted by pseudo-platonists, was the yielding of the

second, matrimony the yielding of the first. But into that yielding it had

already shown that not delight but its contrary enters.

On fanciful tenets such as these the moral bigamy of Provence returned,

with the difference that it enabled a lady to be as intangible to her

husband as she had supposedly been to her knight. A historian has related

that a woman of position, married to a man morally inferior and otherwise

objectionable, encountered these tenets and coincidentally, in a person of

greater distinction, encountered also her ideal. Together, in the most

perfect propriety, they departed and, with analogous couples of their

acquaintance, assembled in a villa where, reversing the _Decamerone_,

they philosophized agreeably on the charm of the new distinction between

love and love, one of which, the love matrimonial, was worldly and mortal

while the other, vivifying to the soul, was divine.[62]

Thereafter spiritual elopements became frequent. But not general. It was

not every woman that was capable of putting but her soul in the arms of a

lover nor was it every lover whom the ethereality of the proceeding

pleased. Dilettantes of crystal flirtations became, like poets,

omnipresent and yet rare. The majority that entered the mazes of the

immaterial did so with no other object than that of getting out. When one

of the parties did not lose her head the other lost his temper.

La Bruyere had not then come, but there are maxims which do not need

expression to be appreciated and then as since men contended that when a

woman's heart remained unresponsive it was because she had not met the one

who could make it beat. Others, less finely, insisted that a woman who

could love and would not should be made to. Love then had its martyrs,

platonism its agnostics. That, though, was perhaps inevitable. Platonism,

whether real or imaginary, has always been less a theory than a melody; as

such unsuited to every voice. But at the time it was serviceable. It

deodorized, however partially, an atmosphere supercharged with pagan

airs. It turned some women into saints, others into sisters of charity

that penetrated the poverties of the heart and distributed there the

fragrance of a divine largesse. In that was its beauty and also its

defect. Being in its essence poetic, it could appeal only to epicures. To

mere kings like Henry VIII, to felons like Henri III, to the vulgar

generally, to people incapable of sentiment and eager only for sensations,

as the vulgar always are, it was Greek, unapproachable when not unknown.

There were virtuose that drew from it delicious accords, there were others

that with it executed amazing _pas seuls_. Otherwise its exponents in

attempting to convert life into a fancy ball and love in a battle of

flowers failed necessarily. The flowers wilted, the dancers departed, the

music ceased. The moral pendulum swung again from ether to earth.

In the downward trend Venice perhaps assisted. Venice then was a salon

floored with mosaics where Europe and Asia met. Suspended between earth

and sky, unique in construction, orientally corrupt, byzantinely fair, a

labyrinth of liquid streets and porphyry palaces in which masterpieces

felt at ease, it was the ideal city of the material world, a magnet of

such attraction that the hierodules of the renaissant Aphrodite, whose

presence Rome had found undesirable, made it their home. Qualified,

naively, perhaps, but with much courtesy, as Benemeritae, they exercised a

sway which history has not forgotten and became the renegades of

pseudo-platonic love. To enjoy their society, to sup for instance with the

bella Imperia, whose blinding beauty is legendary still, or with Tullia

d'Aragona, who had written a tract of the "Infinity of Perfect Love,"

princes came and lingered enchanted by their meretricious charm.

Platonism had its renegades but it had also its saints--Leonora d'Este,

Vittoria Colonna, Marguerite of France, the three Graces of the

Renaissance.

Marguerite of France, surnamed the Marguerite des Marguerites, was a

flower that had grown miraculously among the impurities of the Valois

weeds. Slightly married to a Duc d'Alencon and, at his death, as slightly

to a King of Navarre, she held at Pau a little court where, Marot, her

poet and lackey, perhaps aiding, she produced the _Heptameron_, a

collection of nouvelles modelled after the _Decamerone_, a bundle of

stories in which the characters discuss this and that, but mainly love,

particularly the love of women "qui n'ont cherche nulle fin que

l'honnestete."

Honnestete was what Marguerite also sought. In days very dissolute, a

sense of exclusiveness which whether natural or acquired is the most

refining of all, suggested, it may be, her device:--_Non inferiora

secutus_. She would have nothing inferior. One might know it from her

portraits which bear an evident stamp of reserve. In them she has the air

of a great lady occupied only with noble things. All other things,

husbands included, were to her merely abject.

The impression which her portraits provide is not reflected in the

phraseology of the _Heptameron_. The fault was not hers. She used the

current idiom. Prelates at the time employed in the pulpit expressions

which to-day a coster would avoid. Terms that are usual in one age become

coarse in the next. But, if her language was rude, her sentiments were

elevated. In her life she loved but once and then, idolatrously. The

object was her brother, the very mundane Francois I{er}, who, on a

window-pane wrote with a diamond--the proper pen for a king--Toute femme

varie, an adage to which legend added Bien fol est qui s'y fye and

Shakespeare variously adapted.

Neither the adage nor its supplements applied to Marguerite. The two loves

of pseudo-platonism she disentangled from their subtleties and, with

entire simplicity, called one good, the other evil. Hers was the former.

She was born for it, said Rabelais.

In the _Heptameron_ it is written: "Perfect lovers are they who seek the

perfection of beauty, nobility and grace and who, had they to choose

between dying and offending, would refuse whatever honor and conscience

reprove."

There is the _Non inferiora secutus_ expounded. The device may have

appealed to Leonora d'Este. Tasso said that when he was born his soul was

drunk with love. Leonora intoxicated it further. Of a type less

accentuated than Marguerite she was not more feminine but more gracious.

At Ferrara, in the wide leisures of her brother's court, Tasso,

Stundenlang, as Goethe wrote, sat with her.

"Vita della mia vita," he called her in the easy rime amorose with which

in saluting her he saluted the past, Dante and Petrarch, and saluted too

the future, preluding behind the centuries the arias wherewith Cimarosa,

Rossini and Bellini were to enchant the world. A true poet and a great

one, Byron said of him:

Victor unsurpassed in modern song

Each year brings forth its millions but how long

The tide of generations shall roll on

And not the whole combined and countless throng

Compose a mind like thine?

The treasures of that mind he poured at Leonora's feet. The cascade

enraptured her and Italy. Rome that for Petrarch had recovered the old

crown of pagan laurel saw there another brow on which it might be placed.

Before that supreme honor came Leonora died and Tasso, who for fifteen

years had served her, was insane.

Beauty may be degraded, it cannot be vulgarized. With the beauty of their

lives and love, time has tampered but without marring the perfection of

which both were made and to which at the time the love of Vittoria Colonna

and Michel Angelo alone is comparable.

Michel Angelo, named after the angel of justice, as Raphael was after the

angel of grace, separated himself from all that was not papal and

marmorean. Only Leonardo da Vinci who had gone and Ludwig of Bavaria who

had not come, the one a painter, the other a king, but both poets were as

isolating as he. He was disfigured. Because of that he made a solitude and

peopled it grandiosely with the grandeur of the genius that was his,

displaying in whatever he created that of which art had hitherto been

unconscious, the sovereignty not of beauty only but of right.

Balzac wrote abundantly to prove the influence that names have on their

possessors. In the curious prevision that gave Michel Angelo his name

there was an ideal. He followed it. It led him to another. There he knelt

before Vittoria Colonna who represented the soul of the Renaissance as he

did the conscience. The love that thereafter subsisted between them was,

if not perfect, then almost as perfect as human love can be; a love

neither sentimental nor sensual but gravely austere as true beauty ever

is.

Since the days of Helen, love had been ascending. Sometimes it fell.

Occasionally it lost its way. There were seasons when it passed from

sight. But always the ascent was resumed. With Michel Angelo and Vittoria

Colonna it reached a summit beyond which for centuries it could not go. In

the interim there were other seasons in which it passed from sight.

Meanwhile like Beauty in the mediaeval night it waited. From Marguerite of

France it had taken a device:--_Non inferiora secutus_.

VIII

LOVE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The modern history of love opens with laughter, the rich faunesque laugh

of Francois I{er}. In Italy he had lost, as he expressed it,

everything--fors l'honneur. For his consolation he found there gallantry,

which Montesquieu defined as love's light, delicate and perpetual lie.

Platonism is the melody of love; gallantry the parody. Platonism

beautifies virtue, gallantry embellishes vice. It makes it a marquis,

gives it brilliance and brio. However it omit to spiritualize it does not

degrade. Moreover it improves manners. Gallantry was the direct cause of

the French Revolution. The people bled to death to defray the amours of

the great sent in their bill. Love in whatever shape it may appear is

always educational.

Hugo said that the French Revolution poured on earth the floods of

civilization. Mignet said that it established a new conception of things.

Both remarks apply to love. But before it disappeared behind masks,

patches, falbalas and the guillotine, to reappear in the more or less

honest frankness which is its Anglo-Saxon garb to-day, there were several

costumes in its wardrobe.

In Germany, and in the North generally, the least becoming fashions of the

Middle Ages were still in vogue. In Spain was the constant mantilla.

Originally it was white. The smoke of the auto-da-fe had, in blackening

it, put a morbid touch of hysteria beneath. In France, a brief bucolic

skirt, that of Amaryllis, was succeeded by the pretentious robes of

Rambouillet. In England, the Elizabethan ruff, rigid and immaculate--when

seen from a distance--was followed by the yielding Stuart lace. Across the

sea fresher modes were developing in what is now the land of Mille Amours.

In Italy at the moment, gallantry was the fashion. Francois I{er} adopted

it, and with it splendor, the magnificence that goes to the making of a

monarch's pomp. In France hitherto every castle had been a court than

which that of the king was not necessarily superior. Francois I{er} was

the first of French kings to make his court first of all courts, a place

of art, luxury, constant display. It became a magnet that drew the

nobility from their stupid keeps, detaining them, when young, with

adventure; when old, with office, providing, meanwhile, for the beauty of

women a proper frame. Already at a garden party held on a field of golden

cloth the first Francis of France had shown the eighth Henry of England

how a king could shine. He was dreaming then of empire. The illusion,

looted at Pavia, hovered over Fontainebleau and Chambord, royal residences

which, Italian artists aiding, he then constructed and where, though not

emperor, for a while he seemed to be.

Elsewhere, in Paris, in his maison des menus plaisirs--a house in the rue

de l'Hirondelle--the walls were decorated with salamanders--the fabulous

emblems of inextinguishable loves; or else with hearts, which, set between

alphas and omegas, indicated the beginning and the end of earthly aims.

The loves and hearts were very many, as multiple as those of Solomon.

Except by Brantome not one of them was compromised. Francois I{er} was the

loyal protector of what he called l'honneur des dames, an honor which

thereafter it was accounted an honor to abrogate for the king.[63]

"If," said Sauval, "the seraglio of Henri II was not as wide as that of

Francois I{er}, his court was not less elegant."

The court at that time had succumbed to the refinements of Italy. Women

who previously were not remarkable for fastidiousness, had, Brantome

noted, acquired so many elegancies, such fine garments and beautiful

graces that they were more delectable than those of any other land.

Brantome added that if Henri II loved them, at least he loved but one.

That one was Dianne de Poytiers. Brantome suspected her of being a

magician, of using potable gold. At the age of seventy she was, he said,

"aussy fraische et aussy aymable comme en l'aage de trente ans." Hence the

suspicion, otherwise justified. In France among queens--de la main

gauche--she had in charm but one predecessor, Agnes Sorel, and but one

superior, La Valliere. The legendary love which that charm inspired in

Henri II had in it a troubadourian parade and a chivalresque effacement.

In its fervor there was devotion, in its passion there was poetry, there

was humility in its strength. At the Louvre, at Fontainebleau, on the

walls without, in the halls within, on the cornices of the windows, on the

panels of the doors, in the apartments of Henri's wife, Catherine de'

Medici, everywhere, the initials D and H, interlaced, were blazoned.

Dianne had taken for device a crescent. It never set. No other star

eclipsed it. When she was sixty her colors were still worn by the king who

in absence wrote to her languorously:

Madame ma mye, je vous suplye avoir souvenance de celuy quy n'a

jamais connu que ung Dyeu et une amye, et vous assurer que n'aurez

poynt de honte de m'avoyr donne le nom de serviteur, lequel je vous

suplye de me conserver pour james.[64]

Dianne too had but ung Dyeu et un amy--one God and one friend. It was not

the king. More exactly it was a king greater than he. This woman who

fascinated everybody even to Henri's vampire-wife was, financially,

insatiable. The exactions of the Pompadour and the exigencies of the Du

Barry were trumpery beside the avidity with which she absorbed castles,

duchies, provinces, compelling her serviteur to grant her all the vacant

territories of the realm--a fourth of the kingdom. At his death, beautiful

still, "aussy fraische et aussy belle que jamais," she retreated to her

domain, slowly, royally, burdened with the spoils of France.

Brantome was right. She did drink gold. She was an enchantress. She was

also a precedent for women who in default of royal provinces for

themselves got royal dukedoms for their children.

By comparison Catherine de' Medici is spectral. In her train were perfumes

that were poisons and with them what was known as moeurs italiennes,

customs that exceeded anything in Suetonius and with which came

hybrid-faced youths whose filiation extended far back through Rome,

through Greece, to the early Orient and who, under the Valois, were

mignons du roi. Apart from them the atmosphere of the queen had in it

corruption of decay, an odor of death from which Henri II recoiled as from

a serpent, issued, said Michelet, from Italy's tomb. Cold as the blood of

the defunct, at once sinister and magnificent, committing crimes that had

in them the grandeur of real majesty, the accomplice if not the instigator

of the Hugenot massacre, Satan gave her four children:--Francois II, the

gangrened husband of Mary Stuart; Charles IX, the maniac of St.

Bartholomew; Henri III who, pomp deducted, was Heliogabalus in his quality

of Imperatrix, and the Reine Margot, wife of Henri IV.

It would have been interesting to have seen that couple, gallant,

inconstant, memorable, popular, both, to employ a Gallicism, franchement

paillards. But it would have been curious to have seen Margot, as a

historian described her, carrying about a great apron with pockets all

around it, in each of which was a gold box and in each box, the embalmed

heart of a lover--memorabilia of faces and fancies that hung, by night, at

her bed.[65]

"All the world published her as a goddess," another historian declared,

"and thence she took pleasure all her life in being called Venus Urania,

as much to show that she participated in divinity as to distinguish her

love from that of the vulgar, for she had a higher idea of it than most

women have. She affected to hold that it is better practised in the spirit

than in the flesh, and ordinarily had this saying in her mouth:

'Voulez-vous cesser d'aimer, possedez la chose aimee.'"[66]

The historian added: "I could make a better story about it than has ever

been written but I have more serious matters in hand."

What Dupleix omitted Brantome supplied. To the latter the pleasure of but

beholding Margot equalled any joy of paradise.

Henri IV must have thought otherwise. He tried to divorce her. Margot

objected. The volage Henri had become interested in the beaux yeux of

Gabrielle d'Estrees. Margot did not wish to be succeeded by a lady whom

she called "an ordinary person." But later, for reasons dynastic, she

consented to abdicate in favor of Marie de Medici, and, after the divorce,

remained with Henri on terms no worse than before, visited by him, a

contemporary has stated, reconciled, counselled, amused.[67]

Gabrielle, astonishingly delicate, deliciously pink, apparently very

poetic, but actually prosaic in the extreme, entranced the king who

ceaselessly had surrendered to the fair warriors of the Light Brigade.

But to Gabrielle the surrender was complete. He delivered his sword to mes

chers amours, as he called her, mes belles amours, regarding as one yet

multiple this fleur des beautes du monde, astre clair de la France, whose

portrait, painted as he expressed it in all perfection, was in his soul,

his heart, his eyes--temporarily that is, but, while it lasted, so

coercive that it lifted this woman into a sultana who shared as consort

the honors of the triumphal entry of the first Bourbon king into the Paris

that was worth to him a mass.

"It was in the evening," said L'Estoile, "and on horseback he crossed the

bridge of Notre Dame, well pleased at the sight of all the people crying

loudly 'Live the King!' And, it was laughingly, hat in hand, that he bowed

to the ladies and demoiselles. Behind him was a flag of lilies. A little

in advance, in a magnificent litter, was Gabrielle covered with jewels so

brilliant that they offended (offusquoient) the lights."

However much or little the gems then affected the lights, later they

pleased the Medician Marie. She draped herself with them. In the interim a

divorce had been got from Margot. Death had brought another from

Gabrielle. The latter divorce poison probably facilitated. Gabrielle,

through the sheer insolence of her luxury had made herself hated by the

poverty-stricken Parisians. The detail is unimportant. There was another

hatred that she had aroused. Not Henri's however. When she died he

declared that the root of his love, dead with her, would never grow

again--only to find it as flourishing as ever, flourishing for this woman,

flourishing for that, budding ceaselessly in tropic profusion, until the

dagger put by Marie in the hand of Ravaillac, extirpated it, but not its

blossoms, which reflowered at Whitehall.

Henri's daughter, Henriette de France, was mother of Charles the Second.

The latter's advent in Puritan England effected a transformation for which

history has no parallel. In the excesses of sanctimoniousness in which the

whole country swooned, it was as though piety had been a domino and the

Restoration the stroke of twelve. In the dropping of masks the world

beheld a nation of sinners where a moment before had been a congregation

of saints.

Previously, in the Elizabethan age, social conditions had made up in

winsomeness what they lacked in severity. Whitehall, under James, became a

replica, art deducted, of the hermaphroditisms of the Valois court.

Thereafter the quasi-divinity of the sovereign evaporated in a contempt

that endured unsatiated until Charles I, who had discovered that a king

can do no wrong, discovered that he could lose his head. In the amputation

a crown fell which Cromwell disdained to gather. Meanwhile the false

spirit of false godliness that generated British cant and American

hypocrisy made a nation, as it made New England, glum. In Parliament where

a Bible lay open for reference, it was resolved, that no person should be

admitted to public service of whose piety the House was not assured. In

committees of ways and means, members asked each other had they found the

Lord. Amusements were sins; theatres, plague-spots; trifles, felonies; art

was an abomination and love a shame.[68]

Israel could not have been more depressing than England was then. A

reaction was indicated. Even without Charles it would have come. But when

the arid air was displaced by the Gallic atmosphere which he brought,

England turned a handspring. The godliness that hitherto had stalked

unchecked was flouted into seclusion. Anything appertaining to Puritanism

was jeered away. Only in the ultra-conservatism of the middle-classes did

prudery persist. Elsewhere, among criminals and courtiers, the new fashion

was instantly in vogue. The memoirs and diaries of the reign disclose a

world of rakes and demi-reps, a life of brawls and assignations, much

drink, high play, great oaths, a form of existence summarizable in the

episode of Buckingham and Shrewsbury in which the former killed the

latter, while Lady Shrewsbury, dressed as a page, held the duke's horse,

and approvingly looked on.

The Elizabethan and intermediate dramatists, mirroring life as they saw

it, displayed infidelity as a punishable crime and constancy as a

rewardable virtue. By the dramatists of the Restoration adultery was

represented as a polite occupation and virtue as a provincial oddity. Men

wooed and women were won as readily as they were handed in to supper,

scarcely, Macaulay noted, with anything that could be called a preference,

the men making up to the women for the same reason that they wore wigs,

because it was the fashion, because, otherwise, they would have been

thought city prigs, puritans for that matter. Love is not discernible in

that society though philosophy is. But it was the philosophy of Hobbes who

taught that good and evil are terms used to designate our appetites and

aversions.

Higher up, Charles II, indolent, witty, debonair, tossing handkerchiefs

among women who were then, as English gentlewomen are to-day, the most

beautiful in the world, was suffering from that nostalgia for mud which

affected the fifteenth Louis.

The Du Barry, who dishonored the scaffold as well as the throne, has a

family likeness to Nell Gwynne. Equally canaille, the preliminary

occupations of these grisettes differed only in taste. One sold herrings,

the other hats. The Du Barry's sole heirs were the cocottes of the Second

Empire. From Nell, the dukes of St. Albans descend. From Barbara Palmer

come the dukes of Grafton; from Louise de la Querouaille, the dukes of

Richmond; from Lucy Walters, the dukes of Buccleuch. These ladies, as Nell

called them, were early miniatures of the Chateauroux and the Pompadour.

Like them they made the rain and the fine weather, but, though dukes also,

not princes of the blood. Charles cared for them, cared for others, cared

for more but always cavalierly, indifferent whether they were constant or

not, yet most perhaps for Nell, succumbing ultimately in the full

consciousness of a life splendidly misspent, apologizing to those that

stood about for the ridiculous length of time that it took him to die,

asking them not to let poor Nelly starve and bequeathing to the Georges

the excellence of an example which those persons were too low to grasp.

Anteriorly, before Charles had come, at the period of London's extremest

piety, Paris was languishingly sentimental. Geography, in expanding

surprises, had successively disclosed the marvels of the Incas, the elder

splendors of Cathay and the enchantments of fairyland. Then a paradise

virgin as a new planet swam into the general ken. In Perrault's tales,

which had recently appeared, were vistas of the land of dreams. Directly

adjoining was the land of love. Its confines extended from the Hotel de

Rambouillet.

In that house, to-day a department store, conversation was first

cultivated as an art. From the conversation a new theory of the affections

developed. For the first time people young and old learned the precious

charm of sentiment. The originator, Mme. de Rambouillet, was a woman of

much beauty who, in days very lax, added to the allurement of her

appearance the charm of exclusiveness. It was so novel that people went to

look at it. Educated in Italy, imbued with its pretentious elegancies,

saturated with platonic strains, physically too fragile and

temperamentally too sensitive for the ribald air of a reckless court, she

drew society to her house, where, without perhaps intending it she

succeeded in the chimerical. Among a set of people to whom laxity was an

article of faith she made the observance of the Seventh Commandment an

object of fashionable meditation. She did more. In gallantry there is a

little of everything except love. To put it there is not humanly

possible. Mme. de Rambouillet did not try. She did better. She inserted

respect.

In her drawing-room--historically the first salon that the world

beheld--this lady, in conjunction with her collaborators, exacted from men

that deference, not of bearing merely, but of speech, to which every woman

is entitled and which, everywhere, save only in Italy, women had gone

without. Hitherto people of position had not been recognizable by their

manners, they had none; nor by their language which was coarse as a string

of oaths. They were known by the elegance of their dress. In the Hotel de

Rambouillet, and thereafter little by little elsewhere, they became known

by the elegance of their address. It was a great service and an enduring

one and though, through the abolition of the use of the exact term, it

faded the color from ink, it yet induced the lexical refinement from which

contemporaneous good form proceeds. In polishing manners it sandpapered

morals. It gave to both the essential element of delicacy which they

possess to-day. Subsequently, under the dissolvent influences of

Versailles and through ridicule's more annihilating might, though manners

persisted morals did not. But before the reaction came attar of rose was

really distilled from mud. Gross appetites became sublimated. Instead of

ribaldry there were kisses in the moonlight, the caress of eyes from which

recklessness had gone. Petrarchism returned, madrigals came in vogue, the

social atmosphere was deodorized again. Into gallantry an affected

sentimentality entered, loitered awhile and languished away. Women,

hitherto disquietingly solid, became impalpable as the Queens of Castile

whom it was treason to touch. Presently, when, in the _Precieuses

Ridicules_, Moliere laughed at them, the shock was too great, they

disintegrated. In the interim, sentiment dwindled into nonsense and love,

evaporating in pretentiousness, was discoverable, if anywhere, only on a

map.

That surprising invention was the work of Mlle. de Scudery, one of the

affiliated in the Hotel de Rambouillet. A little before, Honore d'Urfe had

written a pastoral in ten interminable volumes. Entitled _Astree_ it was a

mirror for the uncertain aspirations of the day, a vast flood of

tenderness in which every heart-throb, every reason for loving and for not

loving, every shape of constancy and every form of infidelity, every joy,

every deception, every conscience twinge that can visit sweethearts and

swains was analyzed, subdivided and endlessly set forth. To a world still

in fermentation it provided the laws of Love's Twelve Tables, the dream

after realism, the high flown after the matter of fact. Its vogue was

prodigious. Whatever it omitted Mlle. de Scudery's _Clelie_, another

novel, equally interminable, equally famous, equally forgotten, supplied.

The latter story which was translated into all polite tongues, Arabic

included, taught love as love had never been taught before. It taught it

as geography is taught to-day, providing for the purpose a Carte du

Tendre, the map of a country in which everything, even to I hate you, was

tenderly said.

A character described it.

The first city at the lower end of the map is New Friendship. Now,

inasmuch as love may be due to esteem, to gratitude, or to

inclination, there are three cities called Tenderness, each situated

on one of three different rivers that are approached by three

distinct routes. In the same manner, therefore, that we speak of

Cumes on the Ionian Sea and Cumes on the Sea of Tyrrhinth, so is

there Tenderness-on-Inclination, Tenderness-on-Esteem, and

Tenderness-on-Gratitude. Yet, as the affection which is due to

inclination needs nothing to complete it, there is no stopping place

on the way from New Friendship there. But to go from New Friendship

to Tenderness-on-Esteem is very different. Along the banks are as

many villages as there are things little and big which create that

esteem of which affection is the flower. From New Friendship the

river flows to a place called Great Wit, because it is there that

esteem generally begins. Beyond are the agreeable hamlets of Pretty

Verses and Billets Doux, after which come the larger towns of

Sincerity, Big Heart, Honesty, Generosity, Respect, Punctuality, and

Kindness. On the other hand, to go from New Friendship to

Tenderness-on-Gratitude, the first place reached is Complaisance,

then come the borough of Submission, and, next, Delicate-Attentions.

From the latter Assiduousness is reached and, finally, Great

Services. This place, probably because there are so few that get

there is the smallest of all. But adjoining it is Obedience and

contiguous is Constancy. That is the most direct route to

Tenderness-on-Gratitude. Yet, as there are no routes in which one may

not lose one's way, so, if, after leaving New Friendship, you went a

little to the right or a little to the left, you would get lost also.

For if, in going from Great Wit, you took to the right, you would

reach Negligence, keeping on you would get to Inequality, from there

you would pass to Lukewarm and Forgetfulness, and presently you would

be on the lake of Indifference. Similarly if, in starting from New

Friendship you took to the left, one after another you would arrive

at Indiscretion, Perfidiousness, Pride, Tittle-Tattle, Wickedness

and, instead of landing at Tenderness-on-Gratitude, you would find

yourself at Enmity, from which no boats return.

The vogue of _Astree_ was enormous. That of _Clelie_ exceeded it.

Throughout Europe, wherever lovers were, the map of the Pays du Tendre was

studied. But its indications, otherwise excellent, did not prevent Mlle.

de Scudery from reaching Emnity herself. The Abbe d'Aubignac produced a

history of the Kingdom of Coquetry in which were described Flattery

Square, Petticoat Lane, Flirtation Avenue, Sweet Kiss Inn, the Bank of

Rewards and the Church of Good-by. Between the abbe and the demoiselle a

conversation ensued relative to the priority of the idea. It was their

first and their last. The one real hatred is literary hate.

Meanwhile the puerilities of _Clelie_ platitudinously repeated across the

Channel, resulted at Berlin in the establishment of an Academy of True

Love. Then, into the entire nonsense, the _Cid_ blew virilly a resounding

note.

In that splendid drama of Corneille, Rodrigue and Chimene, the hero and

heroine, are to love what martyrs were to religion, all in all for it and

for nothing else whatever. They moved to the clash of swords, to the

clatter of much duelling, a practice which Richelieu opposed. Said

Boileau:

En vain contre le Cid un ministre se ligue,

Tout Paris pour Chimene a les yeux de Rodrigue.