CHAPTER VI

RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE (_Continued_)

Scorners of mystic liberalism—The savants—Reproaches addressed to the liberal party: paganism, materialism—Women’s struggle against these tendencies—The monks: the monastic spirit—Struggle against the monks: the pros and cons—Rabelais—Folengo—The German monks—Rising of the lower clergy against liberalism and aestheticism: Luther, Calvin—Struggle of the Reformers against women and liberty of thought—Vittoria Colonna and Ochino—Direction of the liberal and aesthetic party in France—Margaret of France and her active rôle—Feminist theory of Postel—Replies of Luther, the Sorbonne, the theological parties. Pages 454-474

CONCLUSION

Total want of success of the feminist movement—Disappointments of Margaret of France—Reaction against cosmopolitanism and intellectualism—The spirit of the Pléiade—Love of free air—Margaret of Savoy—Fall of the Roman spirit—Montaigne—Last effects of feminism—The triumph of Death—The mistakes of the Renaissance feminism—Disappearance of the aesthetic system—Sensualism of the 18th century—The naturalism of Ruskin. Pages 475-503

INDEX. Pages 504-510

PREAMBLE

The woman question—what is more absorbing?

What do women want? What do they demand? They have been shamefully neglected. To judge by the code, there never were such beings on earth. But the code has hallowed iniquities. The education of women is pitiable. They ought to know every thing—and are taught nothing. They are deficient in intelligence—they are too intelligent. They ought to have their separate careers, their separate circles, their independence—to be the equals of their husbands, to be men and yet remain women. They ought to have votes—that, it appears, forms one element of happiness. Many people in England are even dreaming of suppressing marriage; and it must be observed that, as Englishmen largely expatriate themselves, there is no lack of involuntary spinsters, who are by no means the least ardent in prosecuting the campaign. In short, it is a very babel. Everyone has something to say. The press, the stage, the pulpit, all resound with these questions—to say nothing of public meetings, private meetings, at-homes, lectures. The subject is well-nigh done to death; it has, moreover, a special tendency to lose itself in mist, and there is no sort of cohesion in outlook or aim.

Nowhere is this anarchy more patent than in education. How are you to tell young girls what they ought to be, what they ought to learn and think and know, when you are absolutely in the dark as to what you want to make of them? Are they to play the same part in life as men, or to perform public duties, equal, perhaps superior, to theirs, but different? Are they to marry early, or late? Ought they to see and know, before marriage, all there is to see and know? Or is it their blissful privilege to enjoy the pleasant things of life in deliberate ignorance of all the rest, and, in their piping time of peace, to turn the divine hours of youth to the best advantage? Once married, what is their mission to be? How far will it profit them to have learnt the whole art of household management? Should they exercise any influence out of doors? If so, what? Will their influence consist in preserving their good looks and their skill in dancing? Or is their influence to be a serious thing? Is it to be intellectual, or religious, or moral, or artistic, or scientific? These questions jostle one another in some confusion.

And the confusion is irritating, because it compels us to grope our way haphazard. The education of girls has seriously suffered thereby; it has been frittered away, has bred a habit of easy contentment with superficial ideas rather than of resolutely, earnestly, thoroughly mastering what it is proper to know. The mind, like the body, has its nervous system, and to obtain its full measure of energy it is needful to husband its resources.

Now, we may get some light on this complicated problem if we refer it to experience, or, in other words, apply the lessons of the past. We often encounter in the world, in regard to history, and more especially the history of morals, a singular prejudice in the form of a certain optimism (or pessimism) which imbues us with the idea that we are the first or almost the first denizens of the globe—that all the generations whose blood flows in our veins, whose feelings throb in our breasts, whose traditions govern our thoughts, were composed of beings essentially unlike ourselves, upon whom things must necessarily have made different impressions. This idea is not absolutely correct; in reality, we depend on our ancestors to an almost incredible degree. We are fettered by innumerable bonds of their bequeathing—bonds of love and hate, and prejudices of every kind; they hold us in leash as we ourselves hold our descendants. The generations flit by so swiftly that they have barely time to transmit life ere they are gone.

Especially in regard to the condition of women, the questions that are agitated to-day with more or less airiness or vehemence are almost as old as the hills. At certain periods they have been investigated more closely than at others, and then learning, philosophy, and experience have said their say.

The Renaissance was one of the epochs at which these questions pushed to the front. Like our own age, it was a period of transition; its conclusions were often very different from our own, but in some points it bore a wonderful likeness to the present day. The position of women then underwent an almost inevitable transformation, both material and moral. Up to that time women had been regarded as inferior to men; opinion was built up on the practical and utilitarian basis still cherished in the Anglo-Saxon countries: all modes of activity belonged to the men, while the women’s duty was to remain at home as domestic ornaments, precious, but fragile.

Yet society was not wholly averse to granting women what we call the right to a career. The Salic law was exclusively a French invention, and the product of special circumstances; in the political world there was nothing to prevent the acceptance of aid from women, even in the midst of the gravest perils. It was a woman—and a woman to the finger-tips—Isabel of Bavaria, who all but ruined us; Joan of Arc was our salvation. It is not too much to say that, in later years, the honour and might of France were saved by Anne of Beaujeu and Louise of Savoy. The same thing holds from top to bottom of the social ladder. In certain towns women might have been seen taking part in elections in the public square;[1] in many of the châteaux the lady of the place, in the absence of her husband, fulfilled the most trying and masculine of tasks, administering justice, commanding the men-at-arms. Christine de Pisan speaks of this, not as a right, but as a rigorous duty.[2] Among the working classes female labour was extensively employed, at a fairly high rate of pay.

But no one saw in this, as the opinion of Christine de Pisan shows, a direct and natural outlet for women’s activities. A woman was regarded as the subject of her husband, and his deputy in case of need; hers was not a personal part; she was only the shadow or the extension of another person—a sort of half-man, or, as caustic folk said, an _homme d’occasion, mas occasionnatus_—a man marred in the making. (It must be confessed that this idea is rather hard on the ladies, and even on us men, more particularly because Providence does not take us into consultation in these matters, and all of us, men and women alike, have the assurance of remaining to the end of our days male or female as God made us.) On that system, it was allowable for women in cases of absolute necessity to perform the tasks of men, though the men could scarcely offer to reciprocate; if there was no help for it, women might adopt a trade or profession, but that appeared undesirable. All the countries faithful to these ideas were utilitarian countries, where men had incontestably the upper hand, and where no great need was felt for lofty flights.

In the countries of Latin blood and spirit they start from a principle absolutely the reverse. Women are not at all “men for the nonce”; in the picturesque words of good François de Moulins, addressed to his pupil Francis I., “Never forget that women came from Adam’s side, not from his feet.” They are not substitutes for men, but have their own proper sphere. Castiglione has given us the typical formula in his famous book _The Courtier_. “Man,” says he, “has for his portion physical strength and external activities; all doing must be his, all inspiration must come from woman.” She is, in his own words, the “motive force.” One recalls the smiling remark of the charming Duchess of Burgundy: “I am always delighted when it is women who govern, because then it is men who direct.” But according to Castiglione, the world ought to show the very opposite: men should govern and women direct; men act, women think, or mayhap dream. The former should have the material tasks of administration and practical affairs; the latter the spiritual and idealist realm. Looked at in this way, it is obvious how much larger the woman’s part suddenly becomes, and what supreme importance it holds in the life of the world. Instead of serving her husband merely as the material replenisher of his stock and an under-manager for his affairs, the woman will carve out her own path and enjoy personal freedom, and will be the better able to lift up her head at home and in society for knowing that she represents there something more than the flesh; she will be the soul, the seeker after noble thoughts—thoughts necessary to happiness, but which the practical spirit of men scarcely permits them to pursue. There will be no question (to the great disappointment of certain modern aesthetes, who after all profit very largely by the railways and telegraphs) of declaring a relentless war against industry, manufactures, the business of administration; this unpleasing but serviceable sphere must simply be left to men, and upon this sordid earthly existence must be erected the frail edifice of general happiness—the true life—a life of enthusiasm, beauty, and thought; in other words, we must relax the bonds of the material life, take time to fetch our breath, and infuse into realism a new and brighter spirit by means of the love of the beautiful. That is women’s task; in the words of Ecclesiastes, “Their hearts are snares and nets, their hands are as chains.” They are the queens of happiness, and they must compel us to be happy and to enjoy the happiness necessary to us.

With this end in view, the women of the Renaissance formed a league: they accomplished on behalf of the rights of the heart a sort of _coup d’état_, the story of which we are about to relate. Finally, no one was happy after all. But it is interesting to know why.

First, let us explain in a few words how it came about that in a country like France women were able to assume so important a part. Then, we shall proceed to show how vast was their effort, how ardent their quest for happiness, and we shall see why the formula they discovered has not come down to us.

INTRODUCTION

France is a singular country. We are slightly Greek, half Latin or Ligurian, very Gallic or very German, and in the West, the country of an intellectual gulf-stream, we are dreamers—the Celts of M. Legouvé’s enthusiasm. All of us, whatever our stock, professed in the Middle Ages to adore women; the author of an old _fabliau_ makes the Virgin ask of one of our gallant knights the subtle and searching question, “Is thy lady fairer than I?” But in practice—in other words, in our home life—we treated women like animals, with the whip.

We must remark also that, during the whole course of the fifteenth century, France had no time for philosophising: the Hundred Years War and the awful distresses resulting from it; the iron hand and heavy taxation of Louis XI., whose rule was regenerative but very severe; then the Civil War and the Italian expedition—all these circumstances left us no breathing-space, and are in some measure the justification of an aftermath of brutality. It was only in the last years of the century that peace allowed us to reflect, and then activity, prosperity, and happiness burst out like a lightning-flash. Louis XI., who had clear and definite rights over France, had dealt with her like a strenuous husband; Louis XII., who wedded her by chance, treated her with the delicate worship of a lover who has thrown off the every-day concerns of life.

By what happy chance did the French, till then so apt, whatever they professed, to value women only on the physical side, take under the influence of kindly peace and individual well-being a step further towards the South, and come to think that women might serve as social guides? The genesis of these ideas was very remarkable.

They came from elsewhere.

During our convalescence, Italy had become transformed. A great revolution, moral, religious, scientific, and above all aesthetic, had brought once more upon the arena the two eternal protagonists—the Roman spiritualists, and the friends of material force, that is, of imperial Germany.

Men are in general inclined to the side of force; their idea of happiness consists in imposing their will upon others, no matter how brutally, or at any rate in donning a uniform—they are born fighters or jockeys.

Women, on the contrary, can only hope to exert direct and effectual action by the spiritualising of society; and it is not by handing themselves over to the tender mercies of men, whoever they may be—husbands, lovers, doctors, hydrotherapists—or by aping the manners and talk of men, that they acquire their liberty. They are taken at their own valuation, provided they accentuate their purely feminine qualities.

This was thoroughly understood by the women of Italy, who managed so well that the crisis turned quite naturally to their advantage, without any theories whatever.[3] Neither the accepted classics nor Plato gave them any assistance; they triumphed of themselves, and often at their own cost, because they accomplished their own education before undertaking that of others. Many of them, instructed, stout-hearted, nobly generous, while men were wasting their activities abroad, consistently embodied at home the superb saying of Christ, “Let not your heart be troubled”—the only prescription yet discovered for the cure of neurasthenia. People poked fun at them, accused them of “wanting to wear the breeches.”[4] Italian husbands were no more inclined than others to fall at their wives’ feet and proclaim their divinity: they accustomed themselves to them gradually, almost unawares. It was natural that the disappointments, vexations and trials of politics or business should throw them in this direction; what was more fortunate and less expected was that, women having monopolised all that made life worth living, men one day awoke to the fact that women were the glory of all distinguished families, and that, thanks to them, life had become an art, a passion.

They began, then, by shedding a domestic radiance; it was by filling their own home with light and hope and joy that they began to quicken the world at large. The science of happiness established itself under a wholly practical and empirical form, like the science of medicine; for the heart needs the ministry of healing, a more difficult and perhaps more delicate art than that of the body. Where can you apply a thermometer to test the temperature of the soul? Moral sufferings have the peculiarity of concealing themselves, even when physical collapse is the result; they are not easily diagnosed, and no one understands them: and, further, they manifest themselves oddly. It is in the pride of life, when one feels strongest, that one is weak and in danger; peace is more treacherous than strife, health more perilous than sickness, strength feebler than weakness. Or, if one is conscious of the mischief, one despairs of finding the remedy, which consists of compassion and generosity. Woman’s medicines are love and hate.

Love—that is to give something derived from herself; to act, not through that long-armed vulgar charity (though this, too, has its merits—and is often very tiresome) which aims at heading a subscription list or presiding at a public meeting, but through that modest individual charity which humbly and quietly diffuses a little affection, cheerfulness, and enthusiasm. These are the real great ladies; to them, giving is a necessity, a second nature. They are born generous. They seek their own happiness in the happiness of others, without stopping to ask themselves if their conduct is philosophic.

Hate! They detest and resolutely combat the elements of force in which men most delight, but which, as women believe, produce the worst ills; and these are, the power of money, the power of war.

The egotism of wealth they regard as the very source of materialism, against which they cannot but struggle. On this point the women of the Renaissance bore the brunt of a long and skilfully fought battle, which we shall follow in all its phases.

As for war, that is the arch-enemy against which their first blows are aimed. The little Italian wars of the Middle Ages did not resemble the vast hecatombs of to-day, but they bred a swarm of atrocities, tumults and feuds; war is less cruel, perhaps, when it is not a mere pastime. To storm a place at the opening of a campaign is regarded as a humane act and good tactics, since in the long run it shortens the struggle; but the horror of it! Naturally, women are the worst sufferers. In vain do they push their way through the flames to the feet of some cold stone angel or some Madonna with her eternal smile; you see poor girls flinging themselves into the water, and noble ladies going about serenely and deftly to save what can be saved—their husbands’ lives or their own fortunes. Many centuries had passed since St. Augustine had offered his tender consolations to the victims of the barbarians; they might appropriately have been offered when the French captured Padua or the Germans Rome, or even at that obscure assault of Rivolta in 1509, when an Italian captain devoured the heart of one of his political enemies, disembowelled the man’s wife, and made horse-troughs of their corpses.

Even if we ignore gross infamies like these, war was not more humane. The historian of Bayard cannot find words to celebrate the magnanimity of his hero in so generously respecting two high-born maidens of Brescia who had received him into their house, tended him and healed his wounds with the devotion of sisters of mercy. And even in times of peace military habits were commonly so intolerable that quiet folk fervently prayed for a war to bring them relief.

For centuries sages and philosophers had been expatiating on the evils of war; councils had attempted to intervene; but war continued to flourish. The idea of suppressing it seemed a mere Utopian dream.

They might have tried at least to stem its flood by an appeal to the co-operation of moral forces; but, singularly enough, the more brilliant the fifteenth century in Italy became in art and intellect, the more its moral forces appeared to decline.

Christianity, too often sunk into mere mechanical routine, teeming with abuses, overloaded with observances, had practically lost all influence. Side by side with a few clergy somewhat above the rank and file in culture, there was a crowd of empirics who rarely troubled their heads with thinking things out for themselves; they discoursed, not of love or hope, but only of faith—a faith which brutish men wished to destroy, and the more refined few wished to vivify, and which was thus doubly imperilled. The common people were indifferent, and allowed themselves still to be lulled by the old crooning melodies to which they were accustomed; they remained Christian from sheer indolence, like many men of quality; but it was open to question whether the first shock would not set them clamouring for a more lively tune—an “air of flutes and violins,” as Heine said; paradise instead of hell.

As to learning, the cultured were agreed in recognising its failure; that, indeed, was beyond question. Men were tired of reasoning, reading, writing, worrying! Learning in tragic dismay sought only to prostrate itself before faith; or rather, men asked themselves whether learning really existed. Tiphernus, an eminent professor at the Sorbonne, and in high favour at Rome, confesses that all this learning so much belauded and paraded seemed to him nothing but a means of earning a living for professors, a combination of all the vanities, the technical slang of a crowd of pedants, critics more or less ignorant, and shameless imitators, who formed little cliques beyond whose pale there was no salvation. “To believe them,” he exclaimed, “we are not equal to the ancients”: then lions forsooth have lost their ferocity, and hares their cowardice, for Providence shines for the whole world, and it cannot be that man alone has degenerated! A league of falsehood! he reiterates. Under cloak of high culture men conceal their vices, and especially their idleness. Do what we may, we are progressing: every one of us is conscious of a forward impulsion. The pontiffs of reason, who have painfully climbed the steep ascent, wish to keep everything to themselves, and to set up their books as a balk to the world, but all in vain; they will never persuade us that their collapse is that of nature.

Tiphernus died about 1466. From that time forth science was flouted. It gave the world, nevertheless, what it was destined to give—fire-arms, Greece, many admirable things—everything but happiness, which it had never undertaken to provide. And it was precisely on this point that the great mistake was made. What, men asked, is the good of learning, money, labour, or even semblances of joy, if we are oppressed by a life of contention and heaviness? Why are we born with wits, why should we rule multitudes, thrill men’s souls, dwell in palaces, if our hearts are empty? Suppose we wrest Nature’s secrets from her, work every vein of ore, crop every blade of grass: suppose the race of men to form one magnificent herd, fat and flourishing, and even peaceably inclined—what is the good of it all if there is no joy? All things live by love; the heart makes itself heard above the claims of work, above the intellect, demanding for life a recompense, a goal. We perish for lack of something to love; out of mere self-pity we ought to bestow on ourselves the alms of life, which is love. All is vanity save this vanity, for before our birth, until our death, throughout our whole existence, it bears in front of us the torch of life.

Perhaps it might be better if men could be governed mechanically and reasonably from an armchair in the library by dint of syllogisms. Unhappily, they love only what pleases them; they are big, greedy children, listless and lazy if you talk to them of reason, but ready to break their necks in pursuit of an illusion. Hence it is very necessary to choose one’s illusions well, and well to employ them.

The eternal illusion is love.

But what _is_ love? That is the real question. If it is a Petrarchan flower, we crush it under our steel-tipped boots; if it is a coarse sensation, it crushes us, and we have to wrestle with it. Thus we must arrive at a new fact—a love which is neither a beautiful superfluity nor a vile sensual thing; which, in short, is a direct outcome of the worship of beauty.

We must discover a new sensibility, lofty, strong, fruitful, spiritual, almost sacerdotal, which serves to link minds together in their common pursuit of a high ideal. To us French this intricate problem seemed highly discouraging and perhaps silly, but its importance was recognised in Italy, the classic ground of love’s quintessences, where even to-day a candidate for Parliament had better speak of love than of the sugar bounties.

The science of sensibility is to most men a fountain sealed; they always fancy themselves to be too robust! They march straight on in parallel lines; military devotion is their virtue; women alone can serve as a bond of union, soften and beautify everything, cover with a varnish of glory and disinterestedness the things that need it. Hence, besides their mission at home, they may be said to have a social part of the first importance to play; the more sensible men become to their social influence, the higher is man’s civilisation.

Now at the very period when France decided to move, the women of Italy had long since shown what could be expected of women in this direction. They often flaunted sentiments which are open to the charge of audacity or naïveté, primitive sentiments, à la Botticelli or Perugino, crude to a degree; there were manifestly many women of young and fresh affections who opposed to the simplicity of brute force that charming form of simplicity, that adorable confidence in the things of life, which the worship of the beautiful gives to unsoiled souls. They are to the women of the eighteenth century what Memling is to Watteau. Properly to understand their spiritual condition we should have to do as they did—solve the problem of feminism in the feminine way, be women, and more than women—arch-women.

The fulfilment of their natural vocation, namely, to look after the amenities of life, was a pretty extensive office, in a country where art and taste had so prominent a place. But they went farther. They inculcated moral strength through beauty; they dreamt of raising men, of plunging into their life like rescuing angels. Some critics say that the intervention of women is always a proof of men’s decadence, and that when they save us, we are in parlous need of saving. Unhappily that is our normal state. Women assuredly represent the Red Cross of society; it is the duty of us men to be purblind and case-hardened to the brutalities of life, or even to find a certain happiness therein, and to remain cold like a sword-blade; women have no right to escape wounding by the despicable and shameful things among us. They would prefer, you say, to remain quietly gathering flowers behind their park walls; that is perfectly true; they only act from a sense of duty, because they no longer wish to serve as the stake of battles, because there is no misery, no injustice, no disgrace for which a woman of heart does not feel responsible. In fulfilling this mission they do not humble us; on the contrary, we can have no higher ambition than to desire peace, no action can less degrade us than to bend in respect before the noblest things in the world—weakness and sentiment. It was the conviction of all the sons of the Renaissance, and of its great-grandsons (even the last and most sceptical of them, like M. Mérimée), that sentiment has higher lights than reason, and that certain intuitions of the heart unfold to us, as in bygone days to Socrates, horizons hitherto beyond our ken—a foretaste of the divine. Tired of spinning round in the vain and narrow circle of reasoning, these men, sceptics in their own despite, come to place their trust in sentiment, in hope and love: they lean upon women who see things with the eyes of love. In this they find a certain happiness, and at all events the secret of strength. No doubt the men of the fifteenth century did not attach to the idea of number the philosophic importance given it since their time; it was recognised that in the name of the rights of intelligence a general should command a whole army, a professor direct his pupils, a master his workmen; three robbers united against one honest man, though in the majority, did not appear to have right on their side; but it is none the less true that intellectual isolation has always created a situation of difficulty. “The vulgar may judge me as they please and take me for what they will,” heatedly exclaims Tiphernus, the professor of whom we have already spoken; “let others please the multitude! As for me, I pride myself on pleasing two or three.” All the clever men who speak so eloquently are sure to be in bondage to some woman; for, after all, the approbation of two or three men, howsoever intelligent, would not carry them very far, while with the enthusiasm of two or three women one can at a pinch be satisfied. And thus the work of civilisation is accomplished; vulgarity, even the vulgarity of common sense, is hidden under a coating of the ideal, women having a horror of force, of the law of number, of all that is banal and coarse.

Such was the atmosphere, absolutely new and somewhat overheated, in which the influence of women developed and flourished. The revolution was a profound one: hitherto the social system had turned entirely on the principle of the good and the true, from which a practical and utilitarian morality was derived. The idea of the beautiful was utterly mistrusted, and, far from believing in its purifying force, many people saw in it only a cause of moral enfeeblement. Men had preached a religion of gloom and manifold observances; it seemed that there was no mean in life between the virginal precepts of a catechism of Perseverance[5] and the lowest stages of vice. And now the new generations were no longer willing to regard earthly happiness as an illusion, nor the love inculcated by the Gospel as a snare, and flattered themselves on finding a means of building life upon liberty. A mysticism, compact of snow and mist, had glorified self-repression, scepticism in regard to earthly things, the joys of suffering or at least the quest of happiness through resignation; and its effect had been to raise a select few to a state of ethereal perfection, and to unloose the mass of mankind to an unbridled savagery. The moral pendulum had oscillated violently between ether and mud, mud and ether, a condition of instability like that described by M. Huysmans to-day.

And on the other hand people wished to live henceforth under a calm and radiant sky; they talked of taking the gifts of God as they found them, denying neither body nor soul, but idealising everything. They contented themselves with affirming the pre-eminence of the soul; apparently the science of happiness was to consist in abstracting themselves from the material and the personal and in going straight back to ideas. From that time it truly belongs to women to govern the higher world, the realm of sentiment. They will lull the appetites to sleep; they will charm men of dull burdened soul subdued to earth by daily toil; they will choose out the refined, the buoyant in soul, to form them into an intellectual aristocracy: the others will at least be lifted a little above themselves.

The refined are recognised by their thirst for the ideal. At first blush one might suppose they will be met especially among men of the upper classes, or at least among men of leisure, for these are fortunate in being able to look into their own hearts and to follow their own bent, and in opportunities for gaining impressions. They are not deformed by drudgery, they have bathed their souls in the great sights of Nature; the Mediterranean, delicious and bewitching, has cradled them on her kindly bosom, and has already accomplished for them half of the task by reflecting the sky in her feminine smile. But no; for lack of discipline, the idle tend toward sensuality. Consequently, women will address themselves more especially to the men who can work.

And their scheme will be this. They will interpose, almost like angels, between heaven and earth; they will love us and we shall love them; they will gently invert the order of things, so as to make of life a work of art. They will efface two of the three blind forces which govern us—Death, Fortune, and Love. If they do not prevent all failures and weaknesses, they will cheer and comfort them by means of a potent elixir, obtained from a God of philosophy, like physicians who cure by allopathy. So many springs are creaking and snapping for want of a drop of oil! they will pour out that drop. So many noble things lack the sap of life! they will give them that sap, that vitality, that soul. The sap of love brings grapes from thorns!

Si l’amour fault, la foy n’est plus chérie; Si foy périt, l’amour s’en va périe. Pour ce, les ay en devise liez: _Amour et foy_.[6]

And thereby the transformation, or at any rate the amelioration, of the world is to be achieved. Men are not, perhaps, so intractable and brutal as they pretend; by their own account they would be quite content to accomplish the journey of life eating and sleeping behind drawn curtains. We must not believe them. They have shut themselves up in a bare workshop: throw open the windows, let the sun stream broadly in, bringing light and warmth and the balmy breath of nature. The effects of the old system of morality, with its bolts and bars, have been seen only too often; the loathing of vice, the noble pride of virtue and aesthetic intelligence are also forces; and they alone can make of our terrible abode a truly sacred dwelling, open, free, dear to our hearts, the monument of human affection and of happiness.

Thus, briefly, the conclusion was reached that women can transform themselves and become the chief element in human society, that of happiness. Hitherto they had been understudies to their husbands; they had believed themselves bound to take an interest in the work, ideas, and tastes of a man, with no other recompense than the satisfaction derived from a duty done. They had to issue forth like butterflies from the chrysalis, and to become women full of charm, in order to direct the affairs which men believed they had in their own hands, and in order to fascinate, to enfold, to struggle if need be, but without violence or parade. Then they had to rise a step higher, become objects of love, propagate love, and bring all things into harmony.

Thanks to these ideas, Italy at the end of the fifteenth century had taken a marvellous bound towards the beautiful.[7]

Spain likewise had leapt towards chivalry; it was like the raising of a curtain, so sudden was the change: women, hitherto shut up in their boudoirs, appeared in all their radiance like goddesses.

France, on the contrary, viewed these new ideas with profound mistrust, and long rejected them because of their Italian origin. We knew Italy, but under very false colours; she gloried in rising superior to wealth and rank, in the importance of women, prelates, and artists in her life; while we only knew her through merchants and soldiers. Her bankers established in our towns—“Lombards,” as they were scornfully called—passed in the eyes of the people for men without a country, for birds of prey akin to the Jews; our knights, still bewitched by the joys of their expeditions, spoke carelessly only of a people without weapons and of defenceless women. The French clergy chimed in with their note of bitter opposition to Rome. And thus Italy was readily imagined as a hot-bed of pleasure: but to go there in quest of the philosophic secret of happiness seemed absurd.

In the intellectual point of view, Italy created a wrong impression among us through the persons she sent us: professors more or less broken down,[8] exiles more or less voluntary;[9] impecunious, ravenous, and pretentious characters,[10] not very philosophic in their attitude towards their rivals: all those also who rang the changes on the honour we had had in beating them, the Stoas, Soardis, Equicolas, wonderfully assiduous in making Louis XII. out to be a second Charlemagne (in those days Charlemagne was still a Frenchman); Caesar Borgia and his brilliant retinue, at whose brief passage we looked on in contemptuous unconcern. Because Caesar Borgia did not take our fancy, or because some of us had met light women on the highway to Italy, any Italian idea appeared to us a false one; we shut ourselves up in what Pontanus, Julius II., and other Italians remaining in Italy called our “barbarism,” and as we plumed ourselves on our logic, we only abandoned our antagonism to adopt all the Italian fashions completely and indiscriminately. To that end, Louis XII. had to oblige by dying, and Francis I. by reigning; so at least Castiglione, the master of the new school, formally declared after the accession of Francis. So it actually turned out.

Thus women are queens; they move like fairies. “It is a small thing to say of a woman that she does not destroy the flowers on which she sets her foot; she must refresh them. The violets should not droop when she passes, but burst into flower.”[11]

We do not claim that this system is perfect; our aim is precisely to examine with the utmost care its strong and its weak points; but it is certain that, to begin with, by the side of almost all the illustrious men who then flourished in such numbers, we see the indispensable woman silhouetting herself, not as tyrant or even director, but as mentor and guide—as mother, rather, since she brings them forth into the higher life; or, still better, as light and sun, as reinvigorating, vivifying warmth: according to the saying of Schiller, “Love is the sun of Genius.” “Without women,” says Castiglione, “nothing is possible—neither military courage, nor art, nor poetry, nor music, nor philosophy, nor even religion: God is only truly seen through them.” This was no new observation: Solomon had already said the same thing; but we must believe there were new conclusions to be drawn from it, since men hoped to find in it the answer to that vexed question of happiness which has been put in vain since the foundation of the world.

To realise how women transformed themselves, we must follow their example and open our minds. They had the courage so to do: they looked life fairly in the face—with their woman’s eyes, it is true, fine, subtle, and complex; they looked, and often they did not really understand their own impressions, vivid, and rather strong than clearly defined. Often, also, under the impulse of these impressions, they acted in the genuine woman’s way, with tricks and reservations, evading the consequences of their own theories, going round the obstacle they advanced to attack in front. Their achievements and thoughts are difficult to determine. We cannot here, as in an ordinary history, be satisfied with a mere string of facts; we must play the chemist, analyse these various and complex elements, and seek to evolve a general formula.

That formula is this: to live, that is, to love life, to attain a mastery of life without allowing it to crush or dominate us. The attainment of this result is well worth the trouble of deciphering a few women’s hearts, even though the handwriting should be less clear than our ordinary manuscripts. In those days they sincerely studied to love life; they loved it, rejecting all negations and obstructions, all that overwhelms and paralyses, scouting death itself! Instead of yielding to scepticism in regard to things, they wished to push love to the stage of Stoicism, to lift the heaviest burdens, to gaze upon the star of consolation which speaks to us of love eternal.

Every woman will begin with her own redemption. She is at first thrown out into the world while still a child, almost in childish innocence: very soon rigorous duties, material and oppressive in character, seize upon her: she is, so to speak, battered and rolled out by very rough forces—the firm authority of her husband, the idea of obedience, the trials of motherhood, fruitful in joys, but also in hardships and cares. Whilst her will is annihilated and enslaved, and her heart often remains an undiscovered country, she assists with pain and disgust at the downfall of her flesh—that flesh which has become the abode of pain, a body of death, to give birth to life.

How is the sudden thrill brought about, turning the dull, torpid larva into the bright butterfly? How do women succeed in drawing from this essentially human condition something of the divine, passing from physical production to spiritual production? These above all are the questions we must seek to determine.

It must not be expected that we shall present to our readers fair barristers, or engineers, or professional scholars, still less pedants. No; these ladies were simply modest women, who took their share in the humblest duties of everyday life, but discovered, apart from charity in the material sense, the absolute necessity of another charity, moral charity for moral and spiritual penury, for those destitute of happiness, so numerous and found everywhere, even within the walls of the Louvre.

If they accomplished a revolution, it was a peaceful and internal one. They piled up no barricades, issued no manifestos, launched no declaration of their rights as women and citizens. Though the laws were not generally favourable to them, they demanded no amendment of the laws; the same magistrates continued as in the past to deliver the same judgments from the same benches, politicians still made their fortunes, ploughmen still followed the plough, engineers continued to construct bridges and make roads, notaries to scan the cause-lists. Nothing was changed, in appearance, in the material course of the world, except that a moral power had come into being, and that women, like the goddesses of happiness painted by Nattier, under the cloak of indifference had taken into their keeping a mysterious urn, whence life seemed to gush in a spontaneous stream, without the help of judges, engineers, or notaries, yet continually sending out the current essential to the sweetness and fruitfulness of the world.

BOOK I. FAMILY LIFE