CHAPTER I

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

Margaret of France said, very incisively: “The defect of women is timidity.” They are born to fear.

Women had become habituated to a passive and secondary part. They desired to escape from it, they felt the need of activity and a freer air, their wings were growing and they adored intellectual liberty, at any rate they said so—and they had in fact already snapped many of their chains; but when you come to close quarters and exchange confidences with them, you perceive that they are still held fast by a multitude of secondary diffidences, by tenuous invisible threads starting often enough from social conventions of little or no importance. They are unable to wing their flight, or they require a man to go first and shew them the way; or an absolute necessity, an enthusiasm, an impulse of devotion is necessary to start them off.

They move at last, not through reasoning, but as the result of the more or less vague sentiment that while their home-life has brought them no love, yet they are made for love and have a love mission to fulfil. A modern aesthetic writer—but a man after all and only moderately sensible—has thus explained the appeal of grace as it affected himself: “I had nothing to love. For me my parents were in some sort only the visible powers of Nature.”[124] How much more does this apply to women! They want something to love! Separated from her family the wife finds in her husband the incarnation, in the fullest sense of the word, of the visible power of Nature, and so it is that the ardent instinct drawing her towards the light is very complex, much interwoven with pain and passion; it is a thirst for love almost cruel in its intensity. Just as the husband wins honour for himself by means of external activity and public service, so the wife hears destiny making a similar appeal to her. Around her there is a life to diffuse, a sweetness to sow, hungry folk to feed, wounds to dress, a great cry of distress and hardship to soothe; and act she must. A tradesman’s wife may shut herself up in the narrow egotism of her back shop. Could a woman of heart shut her eyes to the profound unrest of society? Ought she to remain a helpless pawn on the board, a mere victim? Was she not called to take her share, as an intelligent and free creature? Willy nilly, she must step forth from her house—burst her shell and wing away! At twenty it is excusable to confuse one’s ideals with life; ten or fifteen years later this illusion has dissolved. One feels then the need of setting one’s heart upon some firm, sure, noble spot out of reach of the swirling tide of existence; and a day thus arrives when every woman capable of reflecting and of loving throws a questioning look on what is around her.

And then, what answer does she get from the great mystery of life? She sees a gigantic system of force and matter in interaction, set in motion, working, displaying itself under the silent impulse of an invisible power, and having neither existence nor beauty apart from an end external to itself. The governor of this world is man, endowed with an intelligence more potent than matter, so that he finds himself placed here below as the ambassador of life and the type of beauty. He himself obeys practically one only motive power, love; he cannot be strongly stirred save by passion. Thus the whole world obeys the law of beauty and of love. Truth and goodness form, so to speak, its skeleton; beauty is its life; love, the instrument of its life. Certain modern aesthetes, seeking to establish an antinomy between man and Nature, represent man as a foe who in employing Nature necessarily violates and deforms her, whereas left to herself she would be always lovely.[125] To subordinate man to Nature in this way seems to us untrue and disastrous. Surely the contrary is the case: we may put anything to wrong uses, but material forces cannot but gain if we direct them aright. Our part is to live in harmony with Nature, conformably to the magnificent and universal law that love grows by spending itself. “Go and give all your goods to feed the poor,” says the Gospel: that is nobility! Sow, give: give always! Give the labour of the arm to the fields as yet sterile; give your heart to hearts that are dull and dead! Beauty and niggardliness cannot live together. At one end of the scale there are those who are incapable of giving, frozen hard, as it were, against love: at the other are those who in a splendid profusion of generosity pour out their gifts without taking count of them: and the whole world lies between. From the pebble sensible only to mechanical attraction, to the flower that scents the air, one profound idea holds good, one great song rises, all mortal things cry in unison, and the burden of their united voices is, love. Every moving thing tends to entwine itself about something else, to unite inextricably with it; all life tends to pour itself into another, to surrender itself, and thereby it has a second birth, and all individual vibrations coalesce into one grand note. And, above this symphony of material things, the heart of man outpours itself in similar strains in the spiritual spheres of true life which stretch up to God. The love of man, to adopt the phrase in the _Imitation_, is a cry flung out towards God.

Love, then, is the ruling principle of the world, a noble, superb, necessary thing; extending its broad wings it easily dominates the littlenesses and conventions of life, responds to all needs, whether of the individual soul or of society, sets frail hearts athrob with life. But it is obvious, too, what a strife it is sure to excite, by its double nature, between spirit and matter—a strife wonderful and delightful and fierce.

Women are so constituted as to understand this sharp antagonism between material love and spiritual love—women, who, at a certain crisis of life, feel so strongly the contrast between the cruelties and ironies of material things and the refinements of the heart. They drag about a body often feeble, suffering, wretched, a misshapen, bleeding, shamefast body, a pain-stricken body, born for love and worship, but subdued to the surgeon. There comes a time when they would fain forget the animal and wash it of its impurities if possible; their soul has become more intensely spiritual. If they shudder at the recollection of certain physical necessities, through that very fact the secret of happiness appears to them simpler, more luminous, less clogged with matter; branded by life, as certain mystics bore the brands of divine love, with sides pierced and limbs explored and broken by the hands of men, they are athirst for love, enthusiasm and worship, they understand that no intellectual hair-splitting, no doctrinal analysis, is worth a snatch of love. They know the sweetness of things. I will go farther: they know the extraordinary influence of moral forces on physical health; the body, like society at large, needs to be reinvigorated by soul and heart.

The truth strikes upon them vividly by a sort of intuition. But it is far from being the case that all women are able to profit by it, because they have to reckon with a thousand practical obstacles: they require great liberty of mind and a large share of energy if they are to avoid being restrained by a host of more or less respectable prejudices, conventions, and usages. After all, timidity, indifference and frivolity are very natural things.

Particularly in France, women needed genuine courage to assert their resolution to act and take part in social work, in the midst of a society essentially constituted to prevent them from giving effective expression to their ideas—a society that was strenuous, Philistine, utterly strange to philosophy and imaginative thinking, hidebound to traditions of very rudimentary common-sense and a proud simplicity, composed of families desirous of living in their own fashion under the direction of their head, with no grand notion of forming parts of one stupendous whole. The king was the head of the principal family; on this account, men showed the most artless veneration for his person, but so long as the army was duly organised and the frontiers properly defended at the least possible expense, they troubled themselves very little about their sovereign’s existence. So the despotic power of the husband was not merely domestic, but political: the man was lord of the lands and the village as he was of his wife, and he administered the whole without stirring up many ideas, in intimate communion with his oxen and his oaks. Again and again we find in portraits the rubicund faces of these honest-eyed country squires. There was nothing extraordinary or gigantic about such a man; he was a man of iron, that was all; and beside this substantial creature vegetated, half-stifled, that fine and precious flower his wife, sometimes a frail delicate thing with liquid eyes charmingly veiled, all compact of concentrated passion, placid tenderness, and impressionability.

On the other hand, in strange contrast with this individualistic society which lived in isolation as a matter of principle, there then flourished at court, in the cities, and in certain great châteaux an extremely active society, that of the salons. Effervescent, noisy like fresh arrivals, ceremonious, gilded, of a refined and factitious elegance, it represented what many writers called the “theatre of the world”: marvellous stage scenery, which underwent remarkable transformations under the shifting play of the side-lights, forming a background against which the players strutted through their parts. Who were these actors? Whence came they, whither were they going? These were questions about which often enough there was little information and less concern; sometimes it was thought best to ignore them altogether, for, thank heaven! it was not to grow mouldy in the depths of the country that a man intrigued, nor was assassination a means towards opening a grocer’s shop. Occasionally, and usually when the curtain fell on a financial act, someone disappeared, but without tragic accompaniments, and then (except Semblançay,[126] who was hanged) he reappeared and went on with the pantomime. There was nothing but praise for the noble use Admiral de Graville made of his princely fortune, which was the object of some discussion. Du Plessis so cleverly extricated himself from the toils of justice that he could bequeath to us the admirable Cardinal Richelieu. The Bohiers, Briçonnets, Robertets, Duprats,[127] and many another, small or great, erected in all security their splendid châteaux, triumphs of art, but a sort of affront to the old machicolations crumbling in cold neglect under the moss. In those days Gold was king.

All this splendour and grace, this brilliant life, which seemed bound to make everything around dim by comparison, nevertheless by no means dazzled the common herd, but at first aroused a feeling of repulsion, if not of jealousy. Outcries arose. Wealth was apparently losing its character of a kindly and patriarchal simplicity, to bring into greater prominence the figures of proud and self-important men who believed their wealth would purchase everything—virtue, wit, honour, as easily as a rare picture. A poor man accordingly was set down as a “soulless body”; the virtuous man was one who lived in a palace, while the man who gave a dinner-party was a master-mind.

To tyranny of this sort there was added the individual or social misfortunes of a society naturally unstable and continually recruiting itself by means of speculation. Thence arose outcries: “You make so many poor folk cry alack! alack! that we long to see you fall headlong in the dust!”[128]

Gold and pleasure were the deities to whom we owe the charming eighteenth century. But they lead to revolutions. This fact came out clearly, too clearly in fact, in Italy, and compelled men to endeavour to restrain these two great world forces within wholesome limits. In the fifteenth century Christian socialism reared its head high at Florence and Rome, and under stress of its menaces a science of philosophy came to birth.

In presence of this social peril, certain men, compelled to issue from their egotism, pointed out the road for timid women to follow to avoid vengeful reprisals. Men of affairs, bankers, notaries and others banded themselves together with the firm resolution of forgoing business, interests, ambitions, even their for the most part despotic hopes in state intervention, of seeking to practise self-devotion, and of borrowing, if necessary, something of the idealism of philosophers and artists, so that they might give a practical sanction to their high station by working to raise others. The Florentine people swallowed the bait; at once ardent and refined, they admirably blended practical reasoning with ideal aspirations. And so the first step was taken.

However, it was more particularly at Rome that this idea, still rudimentary and ill-defined, of purifying life and pursuing social happiness by means of the tender charm of the Beautiful made progress. It found there a well-prepared soil. Intellectual culture and elegance of speech did not represent at Rome, as they did elsewhere, a mere ornamentation, they were the very substance of the state. Money was intellectualised as regards its origin and its end, and nowhere had men a better conception of an oligarchical society, a republic regulated by absolute power. The heads of the church formed a unique world of their own, as little tainted by the military or frivolous character with which certain aristocracies were reproached as by the taste for coarse pleasures natural to some self-made men. They showed indeed a living example of a true aristocracy, in the exact signification of the word, that is to say, a body of men of varied degrees of rank, raised high above the common run of men by some eminent gift—some by high political position or distinguished birth, others by a large fortune, others by great accomplishments, renowned virtue, profound learning, striking talents. They abhorred cliques and their pettinesses; to greatness of position should correspond greatness of ideas. And this splendid aristocracy, thus composed of the choice flower of society, delighted in tracing its descent from remote ancestors. It set no store either on high ancestry (though some were of brilliant descent), or on a display of wealth (though some had enormous fortunes); it ventured to connect itself with all the most illustrious and conspicuous names in the past history of the human race from the time of the Greeks and Romans: Plato, Socrates, Archimedes, and Cicero were its ancestors. And thus, with a strange persistence, it constantly tended to lift into its own ranks by its example, its doctrines and its easy accessibility all men who felt within themselves a spark of genius or talent, or even ambition merely.

This atmosphere was very favourable to the development of the theory of social aesthetics of which Castiglione has etched the principal features. “Luxury must be opposed, even if we have recourse to law; social life must be given a moral and governmental goal; to keep the appetites under, the laws must find effectual support in custom. The power of a single ruler fosters corruption; but it has this advantage—that wisdom, goodness and justice are more easily found in a single individual supported by strong traditions than in a fortuitous assemblage of obscure citizens.” What is wanted is to institute a kingship in the world for which justice and beauty are the qualifications, and which is thus more real and of a diviner right than any other. Mammon, that is, the love of gold, the love of power and pleasure, can only reign in a world of night, when we have eyes but cannot see, when we have lips from which no human cry issues, when we are dead to enthusiasm, and when our whole life consists in eating and drinking.

In France the socialist danger, presenting itself in a much less acute form, could not produce the same effects. The people who were to show their teeth fifty years later were as yet silent, and there was no anxiety about the future except among the cultivated classes. Moneyed people bore themselves with becoming modesty, and remained on the best of terms with the most notable representatives of the old nobility. But the nobility, being no longer feudal, was no longer of much account, and a moral crisis of exceeding gravity took place in the ranks of this aristocracy based wholly on birth and fortune. Sheer vanity took the place of pride; the “smoke”[129] of titles became a more powerful motive than the love of glory.

The great financiers almost all became barons, in order to get above finance; the holders of fiefs became barons, counts and marquises. Ordinary mortals came to hold fiefs; the most insignificant dovecot was transformed into a château. Society moved on a step, and everybody was satisfied. It was quite a steeplechase in the Italian style. Pontanus,[130] for all his malicious ridicule of it, had himself vainly solicited the title of baron. The good duke of Urbino, a great philosopher whose elevation was of very recent date, employed the assassin’s knife to put out of the way a girl of the lesser nobility whom his eldest son loved and wished to marry, and Louise of Savoy warmly approved of this magnificent implacability.[131]

Pedigrees assumed wonderful proportions. Only those who had the moral simplicity of Margaret of Austria were content with the ancient kings of Germany for ancestors; every Scottish archer, no matter how insignificant, claimed descent from the ancient kings of Scotland. Louise of Savoy made a beginning by modestly connecting the French house with the most ancient of royal dynasties, that of Babylon.

Some went even farther. They dived into the remote and shadowy depths of history, the ages of stone and iron, when some wild girl became their ancestress through a chance meeting with a savage in a wood, and when five minutes’ rain instead of sunlight would have been enough to wash a whole race of men from the page of immortality. Anne of Brittany was descended from one of the giants sprung direct from mother Earth. Rabelais with great gravity presents his hero to us in his exact style as son of one of the original sons of Earth: “Would to God,” he adds, “that everyone was as well acquainted with his pedigree from the time of the Flood!”

But in reality, under cover of these novel and pedantic vanities, money, with its brutality and vulgarity and appeal to vulgar minds, led the dance and dragged the pick of the nation pellmell after it. The Balsac of the time, Robert de Balsac, fills a good many pages with examples of the crowd of worldlings who, as he expresses it, hurried in unbridled, almost frantic haste on the road to beggary.[132] There are voluptuaries, debauchees, spendthrifts, men gorged with gold, yet athirst for more, tumultuously dashing on and upwards in frightful torment and agitation towards a will o’ the wisp; one after another they fall headlong into the gulf, while the foreground is filled with the eternal procession moving on with slow pace and clockwork regularity. Alongside of this mad insolent triumph of gold fierce hatreds develop, and men begin to speak under their breath of the horrible triumph of wretchedness approaching, and can foretell the hour when materialism from below will make its awful response to materialism from above.

Women ought to have remedied this state of things. They ought to have prevented men from becoming besotted and ruining themselves. Anne of France dared not suggest to all these idle nobles that they might occupy themselves with intellectual things, but she was anxious at least to brace them up by a life of physical endurance. Without military courage, she declares, the nobility resembles “a withered tree,” without valour “it is nothing worth.”

What she was losing hope of, a fraction of the clergy set themselves to win. There was, among the mass of cassocked peasants and rochetted aristocrats, a small group of cultivated men drawing its inspiration from the Cardinal of Amboise,[133] less audacious than Rome, less retrograde than Germany. These recognised the traditional merits of military glory, birth, and money, but would have liked to reconcile them with the newer virtues, blend them together into one radiance, homogeneous like the sunbeam, which is composed of colours so various; they would have liked to see all these glories combining, as at Rome, into one rainbow-like effulgence. A monk of Cluny, Clichtoue, begs, beseeches well-born young men to shun the enervating paths of infatuation, idleness and vice. He has endless examples showing the possibility of alliance between literary tastes[134] and the military life; he reveres the principles of rank so highly as to discern them in application everywhere, even among the metals; but he longs ardently to bind into one sheaf all the vital forces of society; he is a philosopher, one may even say a sort of John the Baptist. He proclaims Plato; he is more scriptural than Luther, and has as much antique culture as any Roman prelate;[135] to him the future seems to outline itself clearly. “After virtue,” he says, “a noble can have no comelier ornament than letters. Philosophy is not the recipient, but the source of nobility.” He adjures distinguished men to pay real attention to the social obligations incumbent on them, under penalty of losing their rank. He does not disavow the natural pleasure a man takes in the thought that he has had ancestors and will have descendants, but to him this does not seem a sufficient though an honourable aim in life. If no means are found of uniting the two nobilities, that of the body and that of the mind, no doubt (in his opinion) the nobility of the mind will get the upper hand; Solomon, who is not generally considered a modern or even a socialist, had already said so long ago: “I myself also am mortal, like to other men, and am sprung from the terrestrial lineage of the first man. And in the womb of a mother was I moulded into flesh. And I also, when I was born, drew in the common air and fell upon the kindred earth, uttering, like all men, for my first voice the self-same wail: in swaddling clothes was I nursed, and with watchful cares. Who among the kings had any other beginning? All men have one entrance into life, and a like departure.”

Clichtoue, however, as well as his friends the Lamennais and Montalemberts of the period, confined himself to counsels and prognostics, which indeed the future was in great part to justify; he had not yet discovered the exact formula. He had it at the tip of his tongue, but could not give it utterance; it seemed as though in France the words ‘beauty’ and ‘love’ were no words for a man or a churchman. These noble and lofty words were to come from a higher sphere, and from women’s lips.

It was Margaret of France who at last uttered them, and they were echoed around her.

Here we find the remedy so ardently sought for against materialism, as Jean Bouchet explains it on Margaret’s behalf: “To purify the world, to eliminate its coarser elements; to give wealth only the lowest place as a source of social distinction, and even then only on condition that the plutocrat lives nobly, that is to say, unselfishly, and makes noble deeds his constant study.” True nobility is not a cockade, a label, a name, but a moral reality; “it springs from the soul, and not from wealth.” Noble and lofty spirits are recognised precisely by their innate simplicity; they leave the gildings, the pompous blazonments, to “the sons of swineherds, sempsters, stockingers, and other mechanical folk. But those who are illustrious by long descent reveal their nobility beyond possibility of mistake, for they have in them something, I know not what, of naïve goodwill that manifestly separates them from the arrogant assumptions of false nobles.” Spirited, showy, a genuine blue-blood, restive under marital authority, but quivering to her inmost fibres at the slightest appeal of a refined sentiment, Margaret of France remained obstinately faithful to these principles, finding in them the pole-star that guided her steps throughout life. The words we last quoted were uttered in circumstances which give them a special force, namely, in the funeral oration of Scaevola de Sainte-Marthe, who thought he could cast upon the princess’s tomb no sweeter flowers, none more likely to blossom eternally. Margaret herself never lost an opportunity of emphasising with all her force the terrible fear she had of the power of money.

Aimer l’argent, Sinon pour s’en aider, c’est servir les idoles![136]

In regard to those who deal with humanity like brokers, and believe that happiness is purchasable, she gives vent to passionate apostrophes worthy of the most ardent Christian socialists:

Ilz ont plaisirs tant qu’ils en veulent prendre, Ilz ont honneurs s’ilz y veulent prétendre, Ilz ont des biens plus qu’il ne leur en fault.[137]

And this was precisely what men were aiming at. The military framework of society was broken; to replace it by a financial framework would have been considered almost criminal; and that was where the great danger lay. To employ a comparison approved by Francis I., two cars are running the world’s course side by side; a choice must be made between them. One is the car of Plutus, filled with gold, lechery, vice; the other is the car of Honour and Love, thronged about by all the virtues.[138] The choice is clear: for its own happiness, for its own glory, the world must reject the worship of money, trample on the power of money, and proclaim the power of virtuous love.

Thus, little by little, the formula sought for emerges into view. A wonderful light is thrown on the problem when it is admitted that to be happy it is necessary to rise above material things, and establish society upon a philosophy of love. Life and beauty, they are the true riches! The feeblest of men, the most hopeless invalids, the vilest outcasts, woman with her feeble body and ardent soul, are richer than a nugget of gold, more eternal than the Alps, greater than the sea and the vast realm of nature, for this very reason that they have in them life, the true life, that is, consciousness of life, confidence in life, and love of life.

And the same idea that happiness must be sought through true life, led men to recognise the necessity of considering the ‘hygiene’ of this life. Medicine, care and pity had been up to that time only for the ills of the body, for the gaping, gory wounds that came under the eye; the wounds of heart and spirit had been forgotten. To render life sumptuous and brilliant, to fritter it away in a sort of giddy excitement or intoxication, was the utmost of men’s achievement. The heart cannot be bought; there is no specific for healing its wounds; they must heal themselves.

The art will consist then, in realising as far as may be the plenitude of life; in other words, in extracting from Christianity, which is Hope and Charity, an aesthetic philosophy. “I am the God of the living,” said the Master. If we combine the sayings on life scattered through the gospels we obtain a true code of aestheticism, while the sayings on love form the warp and woof of the doctrine. On the morrow of the Resurrection, when the rude fishers chosen to disseminate the sacred tidings are in utter ignorance of the event, the Master shows Himself first of all to Love; He appears at the gates of a mysterious garden by which Mary Magdalene is about to pass—Mary, a woman pardoned, glorified, because she loved much, because she sinned through superabundant kindliness.

This doctrine of love had not prospered in the world, where it found briers too deeply rooted, thorns too cruel; it had become a supernatural and sacred thing, so sublime that it fled the world and took refuge in the cloister, like a sickly plant in a hothouse, leaving a free field for vice. Tenderness seemed to come only from feebleness; every form of art seemed immoral, all love a degenerate and ill-balanced thing, and no one realised the need goodness has of intelligence. The pettinesses of feminine religiosity, encouraged, unhappily, by a section of the clergy, tended to make divine love itself ineffectual and almost ridiculous. Yet the author of the _Imitation_ has defined love as the true source of activity:

“Nothing is there in Heaven or earth sweeter than love, nothing stronger, broader, higher, fuller, better, or more winsome, for love is of God, nor can it rest but in Him, above the world created. The lover runneth and flieth, and is alive with joy; he is free, and nothing restraineth him; he giveth all for all, hath all in all, because he resteth above all things in the one sovereign good whence all other goodnesses proceed and flow. He looketh not to gifts, but raiseth himself above all to look only to the giver. Love often knoweth no limit, but its fervour carrieth it far above measure. Love feeleth no weight, making light of toil, would do more than it is able, pleadeth no impossibility, because it thinketh it may and can do all. Wherefore it is strong for anything, and where he that loveth not doth faint and fail, love doeth and achieveth many things.”[139]

Why then had not this beautiful religion, this beautiful philosophy become the religion and philosophy of the world? Why had they not sent their streams of activity flowing in ever-widening channels? Men wished to solve this problem, and restore to the world the philosophy it had so misunderstood—to interpret love as it should be interpreted, through impressions and sensibility, and not through the intellect. Hence Castiglione’s saying, “God is only seen through women.”

This saying, it is clear, does not apply to all women; it has reference to those who are worthy to exercise an active influence.

Natural obstacles oppose themselves to this mission of philosophically raising the world to nobler ideas by the social religion of beauty. The French are a matter-of-fact, practical, sceptical people; between the peasant and his cattle, the lord and the peasant, there exists a solid and after all a pleasant relationship. Further, the French are specially hostile to ideas of an intellectual hierarchy, they lack sensibility, the beautiful displeases and shocks them, and when a revolution gives them what they call a moment’s freedom, they amuse themselves by defacing as many statues as possible, destroying their cathedrals, burning their historical monuments with all the enthusiasm of hate a personal grievance can inspire. Likewise, in regard to love, modesty, the ideal, and all refined and aesthetic sentiments, we experience a certain pleasure in scouting them; when we have won any sort of diploma, that is the use we make of it.

And yet, do what we may, lofty things alone can elevate us: on the mountain-top we breathe a different air from that in the valley.

We must raise on heights above us eminent women who will crucify themselves, if need be, to draw soil-stained men to them, according to Christ’s words, “I will draw all things unto me”—women endowed with all that glorifies—money (to scorn money is the luxury of the rich); a noble blood clarified on stricken fields, or through intellectual wrestlings, a spirit original and pure. Christ was at once the son of kings and the Son of God! This is the consecration of happiness through a philosophy of emotion and sentiment. Plato said that what was needed for the happiness of humanity, was “philosophers who rule, or kings who philosophise.” Do not believe it! What is wanted is kings who govern, and women who philosophise. Men will always imagine that liberty and equality are established by act of Parliament; philosophy is to them only a means of livelihood. Cremonini, a famous professor, but a wit, said when he took leave at the close of his lectures: “All that I have taught you is true according to Aristotle, but not in an absolute sense: you might as well believe St. Roch or St. Anthony.” Nifo[140] contradicted himself with charming serenity, though he allowed no one else to contradict him. In truth, how were these excellent professors of philosophy to know that, three and a half centuries later, a Mabilleau, a Fiorentino, or a Ferri would doggedly set themselves to unearth their unpublished lucubrations from the dust of libraries, and throw on them the searchlight of criticism?

Men had reached that stage of lassitude and of wisdom when one understands perfectly how vain, how unworthy of occupying a thoughtful man, are the vagaries of logic-chopping. There are only two vital forces: ambition and love. Anne of France reckons four: beauty, youth, wealth, and ambition; but these four terms are reducible to the former two. A doctrine of love, therefore, was necessary, and it was discovered in Plato.

Thus there were two masters in opposition, Plato and Machiavelli.

Plato is as much a poet as a philosopher, as worthy of admiration for his impressions and intuitions as for his ideas. He believes in beauty. It had been said that beauty was of no account, that it had no place in the gospels, that form signified nothing except perhaps by way of symbol, that truth was metaphysical. That error had to be dismissed. Beauty has a real existence, and plays a supreme part in this world. God has not disowned it, Scripture reveals Him as bestowing life bountifully, and as taking pleasure in man as His own image. Plato in effect develops this same theory; what is more, he sings the praises of aestheticism in one of the finest languages ever lisped by human tongue. It was he then who furnished the desired formula. With him, men thought only of loving their fellows, of expelling evil passions by means of pure love. A sweet breath of spring fanned men’s hearts; it was philosophical and Christian. Did Luther conceive a reform as trenchant, as vital as that? Men went back to that blessed time when, without employing the quiddities of the Sorbonne and of German science, Heaven spoke the simple words to us: “Love one another.” They believed they had found the secret of rejuvenescence, of re-birth, and there were men so intoxicated that they went so far as to ask themselves whether Charity countenanced trade or taxes. The whole idea is summed up in a single line: power results in barbarism, civilisation is the product of beauty.

This formula suits both strong and weak, everyone, indeed; it belongs neither to men nor to women, hails neither from north nor from south. The northern peoples, however, looking at Plato with a purely philosophical and technical eye, failed to discover it; at Venice, the headquarters of perfect editions of Plato, and at Paris, where he was acclaimed as a prophet, an ancestor of Christianity, where Florentine commentaries on him poured fast from the press, and where even a neglected commentary of Ficino[141] was published, no one dreamed of seeking the recipe for happiness in Plato’s philosophy. So greatly was he distrusted that the Italian Vicomercati, appointed in 1542 to the professorship of philosophy at the College of France, thought it his duty by way of returning thanks to immolate Socrates in his inaugural lecture.

It was the Florentines, with their keen appreciation of the good things of life, who discovered the artistic side of the platonic life. Women did not count for nothing in their first deduction, which consisted in so linking the objects of nature to the human personality that they should form thenceforth nothing but one long procession of the affections. At Florence this new religion was observed with tender and pleasing rites.

On the anniversary of Plato’s death, the master’s bust was crowned with laurel by invited guests, and then at a magnificent banquet spread under the pleasant shade, _laudes_ and _canzoni_ were sung in honour of the new spirit. Almost all were poets, and Lorenzo de’ Medici chiefest among them. They maintained a strict conformity with Christian ideas. The young Giovanni de’ Medici, the future Leo X., who was brought up among them, received at the age of seven valuable benefices with the ecclesiastical tonsure, and at thirteen was given the cardinal’s hat. All the leaders of the movement, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola,[142] Politian, were honoured with pontifical patronage. Rome also was the centre of a similar movement; there the academy of Pomponius Laetus[143] resuscitated the grand days of the republic; there men breathed as at Florence an intellectual air, light, keen and eminently free. To the _Facetiae_ of Poggio, babbled out in a room at the Vatican before a select circle of jovial monsignors, corresponded the joyous atrocities of Panormita, the boon companion of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Everyone smiled, everyone was happy: the very _bezants_ or golden pieces, the glory of the Medici escutcheon, sparkled in the sun like flashes of their wit.

The luscious warmth of the air, shady groves, birds, gardens, statues, antique marbles, thus played an indispensable part in the platonic philosophy. A banquet in honour of the nine Muses served us as a map of this new world; Marzilio Ficino, chosen by lot, chanted to the glory of the divine character of love a superb song whose echoes were long to resound.

Learned critics have sometimes reproached Ficino with not sticking close enough to the text of the master, and with permitting himself outbursts of virtuosity tinctured (so they say) with Alexandrinism. Likely enough; Ficino was Ficino, a man, independent, enthusiastic, no fanatic; he steered for happiness, and whatever his admiration for Socrates, he did not imagine that that great man had necessarily said the last word about everything, any more than he believed men eternally committed to Corinthian capitals. His dream was of a human dwelling-house, noble, comfortable, habitable for us all, a living shelter for life! While pushing out glorious reconnaissances along the roads to heaven, Plato had clearly left men’s minds undecided on some points of great importance to their happiness, and it seemed wise to supply his deficiency by accepting with closed eyes the explanations furnished by Christianity.

A thousand voices exclaim, like Montaigne and Charron, that the immortality of the soul cannot be proved by sheer force of reasoning. In any case, how long we have to wait! cries Margaret of France. For how many centuries have some who have fallen asleep looked for their awakening!

The Middle Ages replied to this question with their own terrible logic. They set us on the edge of the abyss, and there told us that in this world there is no happiness, but merely consolations; they linked us with a supreme life lying beyond us, like those hard, emaciated, immovable statues incorporate with the stone of cathedrals and themselves of the same stone. We live, they told us, with another life than our own, and love with another love; if we lose one dear to us we may cast flowers on the vacant chair or the needless cradle, altars of true life! Platonism prefers to take us for what we are. Not supposing that Providence sets man upon the earth to struggle against its own blessings, the platonists believed that in making religion more lovable they would make the world less pagan, and that in giving it a philosophical cast they would make it acceptable to unbelievers. Love seemed to them to be a reservoir of life, like those noble springs which leap down in some shady nook of a park, and flow on through a network of arteries more or less conspicuous, to give life even to the desert. Soon we shall no longer be; the hours of our life are sacred: what is the good of ruffling them with so many disquietudes? It is a law of our life to yearn for Paradise, and there is nothing to hinder us desiring it in this present world.

The study of Plato, then, was entered upon freely, with the addition of anything that could throw light upon the doctrines which that great man had founded—the Bible, for instance, which in the Roman world men prided themselves on consulting directly; then Arabic and even Mussulman philosophy, with which it was fashionable to claim acquaintance. And it was well understood that a quest pursued with so subtle a magnificence, in scorn of realities and brutal sensualism, demanded a keen and eminently free intelligence, a soul at leisure, and a great loathing of the flesh; otherwise all hope of falling under the exquisite fascinations of love at once terrestrial and quasi-divine must be abandoned. That explains why from the outset this philosophy addressed itself to women and to the salons. Plato began to be talked about as we in our day have heard Schopenhauer and other eminent thinkers talked about by persons who have been at little pains to read them. It was known that Plato harped on the necessity of love, that his smile was less forbidding than that of S. Francis of Assisi, and that his method was dialogue, so naturally dialogues and conversations became the methods of the new platonists. From these tender colloquies the vulgar were excluded; they could make nothing of them; one could not expect common folk to apprehend the delicate devices by which love is etherealised and rendered impalpable; from these they would only have got a theme for gross perversions. Those who had the gift of knowledge and understanding ascended the Acropolis like M. Renan, to chant their canticles in a little temple of their own, whose dimensions seemed to them sufficient; the aristocratic mystery replaced the old priestly mystery; so Cataneo whispered, as it were under his breath, his book on love addressed only to the priests and temple choristers. Bembo took great care not to name the interlocutors male and female of the _Asolani_, “so as not to scandalise the populace”; all were agreed in religiously respecting the ignorance of the people, as to-day we respect the ignorance of young girls. And for the same reason, again, they made too prodigal a use of that strange mythological jargon which appears to us in these days so entirely pathetic. Mythology has its aesthetic advantages; it is an incarnation of the passions; but that would not suffice to explain its sickening vogue in a society full of taste, scepticism and levity, if it had not presented the one special advantage of furnishing a sort of technical slang by which the initiated recognised one another, and which sifted out the vulgar. The princes of wit felt so strongly the need of such distinctions that before adopting this garb for their works they began by muffling their own identity in an antique livery: a Greek or Latin name served them as a uniform,[144] as when San Severino called himself Pomponius Laetus, the old aristocratic pride yielding before this new-fangled vanity. Artistic glory donned the conventional garb; no one had the preposterous notion of lamenting in Raphael the exquisite interpreter of Madonnas; what was deplored was the rival of Nature, the painter after the antique. “Raphael has resuscitated ancient Rome,” exclaims Castiglione, “he has recalled to life and glory that Rome of old, that corpse devoured by sword and fire and time.” That was the language of the courts, the ladies and the princes of the church; they had said all when they compared Raphael to the painters of the Augustan age (with whose works we are not very well acquainted), and when they remembered that the new Rome was only a degenerate if not a moribund Rome.

We dwell at some length on a state of mind of such peculiarity and complexity as this, and from which contradictory deductions were sometimes drawn, because we find in it the only possible explanation of the movement about to arise in France. Platonism was an impression, an essence of free-thought, purely aesthetic, Christian in principle though sometimes pagan in its results, warranted platonic in label and origin though somewhat eclectic in composition; a mystic incense in the worship of Venus, a subtle aroma floating in the air both of churches and of theatres; breathed in assemblies in the city; dominating the effluences of Nature under the shadow of country villas; open a book, and one caught a breath of it; even painting and music strove to interpret it fittingly; at the dinners and dances and in the thousand avocations of fashionable life it filled the air; it exhaled as it were an immortal savour of orange blossoms; this was what they called a philosophy.

The platonist spirit, as Plato understood it, was often exactly the opposite. The women and the poets whom Plato condemned,[145] the prelates who were the heads of Christendom, were its propagators. They were not greatly enamoured of Plato’s somewhat socialistic theories. They went to Plato as we go to Nice, to obtain a little sunshine and escape the incessant din of controversy. It is a profound saying of Plato that “those who see the absolute and eternal and immutable may be said to know, and not to have opinion only.” That is what men desired: they would have run after illusions and even errors if only they made for happiness. What is the good of pursuing mutabilities? The wise man clings to that which tranquillises. Others may wear themselves out with anxiety and restlessness, but he enjoys his life of placid ease; in the end they die and he dies, and there is nothing to choose between them.

Before it could be turned to profitable account, platonism thus underwent a long and difficult preparation to bring it into line with the tastes of the day. The work was accomplished in Italy, whence the product was sent to us in a finished state. Good Plato, with his rather old-fashioned eyes, had seen beauty only in man; from one man he passed to the species, then from the species to the soul, that is, to intellectual beauty, which to him appeared the only true beauty. It was necessary to bring this doctrine into line with the practical doctrine of the special attraction exercised on man by the beauty of woman. Now Plato, besides giving man the beauty and woman the love, attributed to love the secondary character of a sensual and egoistic phenomenon in which no spiritual element was discoverable save perhaps the instinct of immortality. Of this very instinct, however, Plato had an imperfect appreciation, for the immortality we might hope to gain by replacing our decayed bodies with the fresh young lives of our offspring, if it serves the interests of the human race, does not much serve those of the individual; at any rate, Plato considered it at once vulgar—everyone or nearly everyone being able to aspire to it—and incomplete, for transmission and conservation of life are not the same thing, and only a person very barren of intellectual resources could content himself with so modest a glimmer of immortality. A man only survives through his thoughts. The last shreds of the thoughts of Homer or Hesiod will live long, and will long cause temples to spring from the earth; what child of flesh and blood is likely to bear his father’s glory thus on through the ages?

The earliest interpreters of Plato, Ficino and Politian, had departed with no little timidity from his teaching; the one eclectic and cautious, the other adventurous, they went nevertheless not much beyond formulating a general doctrine of love. Ficino exalted love as the supreme wisdom, the creator and preserver _par excellence_; the link binding earthly things together, and the earth itself with heaven; the inspirer of great deeds and noble thoughts, a necessary element of life. He preached the love of love itself: “The man who loves, loves love above all; love is sufficient unto itself and finds its goal within itself; it is true and good and pure.” But in order to bring himself into conformity with the new spirit, Ficino admitted as derived from Plato (though as a matter of fact it is not to be found in his works)[146] a capital distinction upon which the platonism of the Renaissance was entirely to rest: there are two loves, different in degree, the one heaven-born and fixing its gaze upon heaven, the other born of Jupiter and seeking only to produce a form like him.

Francesco Cataneo insisted strongly on this invaluable distinction. Analysing man, he found in him a mind, the source of true spiritual love, and a sort of intermediate force hard to define, a “soul or life” whence sensual or, if the term be preferred, profane love has its being. Cataneo moreover dealt hardly with profane love, representing it as bare-footed to indicate its foolishness, lean for lack of nourishment, and winged, for it is evanescent, dependent on physical beauty, on “worthless dross”; and it was because the world knew no other love that the preaching of a Reformation became necessary. As to women, Cataneo never ceased to consider them as stones of stumbling; inheriting all the old prejudices of the schoolmen, he saw in women nothing but imperfect men created for the sole end of perpetuating the race, and man ever seemed to him the perfect type.

But with what warmth, with what passion Bembo, the Roman prelate and future cardinal, expounds the modern principles before the charming coterie of Urbino, and, flinging away the swaddling bands of early days, confesses himself frankly a feminist![147]

“The terrestrial beauty that excites love,” he says, “is an inflowing (_influsso_) of divine beauty irradiating all creation. It rests like a beam of light on regular, graceful and harmonious features; it beautifies this countenance, shining in it, attracting all eyes to it, and through them penetrating, stirring, delighting the soul and bringing desire to birth therein. Love is thus really born of a ray of divine beauty, caught through the medium of a woman’s face. Unhappily the senses interpose: a man sees in the body itself the source of beauty and longs to enjoy it. How deceived he is! It is not beauty that is thus enjoyed; an appetite is appeased, and soon comes satiety, weariness and often aversion. These deceptions and regrets abundantly prove what an error has been made, for a man must needs have found joy and restfulness if he had sought the true end, whereas on the contrary love gives rise to a thousand ills—griefs and torments, vexation and sullen fits, despondency, catastrophes even; the heart never attains the limit of its desires, or perhaps the man is so sunk in sensual love, declines so far towards the level of the beasts, as to become incapable of comprehending the supreme radiance. All these experiences are dearly purchased. Knowledge how to love comes only in ripe manhood: only the old indeed really have it, and their skill lies in eluding the impulse of the senses, in fleeing from all that is vulgar. If he can do no otherwise, a man must set his face steadfastly towards love divine, taking reason for his guide.”

True love, then, is a disinterested love inspired in man by woman. And therefore Bembo, who was the more knowing in these things because he had loved deeply, was still young, and had not yet heard his own clear call towards love divine, lifts up his voice in a passionate prayer: “O love, most good, most beautiful, most wise, thou that comest from divine goodness and wisdom, and returnest thither again, O thou cord binding us poor terrestrial and mortal folk one to another, thou bendest the higher virtues to dominate the lower! Thou dost unite the elements, thou dost perpetuate the life that perisheth, thou makest imperfection perfect, thou bringest discords into harmony, thou turnest foes into friends, thou givest fruit to the earth, peace to the waves, and to heaven its light of life! O father of true pleasures, of grace and peace, of lowliness and goodwill, O enemy of wildness and pride and slothfulness, thou art the alpha and omega of all good!

“Thou dost reveal thyself in terrestrial beauty! Hear our prayers, lighten our darkness, guide us through the mazes of this world, rectify the falseness of our senses. Humbly we beg of thee balmy breath from the spiritual world, a touch of celestial harmony, an inexhaustible fount of true contentment! Purge our eyes of ignorance, and make us to see in its perfection the beauty of on high! Love is communion with the divine beauty, the banquet of the angels, immortal ambrosia!”

It is now time to answer an objection which the reader has no doubt formulated long ago, and which Bembo very clearly perceived.

Assuredly it is woman’s mission among us to represent beauty, and consequently love, and love is the inspiration of noble thoughts and great actions. But these are such old truths that to find them hardly needed so much intellectual and poetic effort, or the harking back to Plato.

The learned book _On the Nature of Love_, in which Equicola essays simply an enumeration of the different species of love known since the thirteenth century, resembles a collection of butterflies. Every colour is there, brilliant or dull; the sentimental view is there represented in almost infinite shades, from the magnificent love of Boucicaut, who served all women for the love of one, the Holy Virgin, to the art of loving for love’s sake, always fashionable in the salons, and sedulously cultivated as an excellent prescription for innocuous emotions and a cheap renown. Men well knew how to love, to be sure!

But love is rarely reciprocal; as someone has said, one loves and the other takes the kisses. So far, it was the woman who was recognised as the beauty, and consequently as the loved one, and who took the kisses.

The novelty of Plato’s system was to transfer the beauty to men, which ran counter to all accepted notions. To Bembo this theory seemed intolerable. That women are capable of loving he firmly believed and rejoiced to believe. But to give up loving women appeared to him too cruel. He would much rather give platonism the go-by and acknowledge the reciprocity of beauty and love. In short, he fell back on Petrarchism.

Michelangelo proclaimed the true modern platonism with extraordinary ardour in professing a love at once virile and pure. “I have often heard him reason and discourse on love,” writes Condivi, “and I learnt from persons present that he spoke of it no otherwise than may be read in Plato. I do not know what Plato says, but I know well, having long had intimate intercourse with Michelangelo, that I never heard issue from his mouth aught but the most becoming words, apt to repress the lawless and unbridled desires that might spring up in the hearts of young men.”

Michelangelo said more than once that God is seen in terrestrial beauty; love is only a hymn to the Creator; “for if every one of our affections is displeasing to heaven, to what end would God have created the world?” A great love makes only for the highest morality, it provides man with wings for a sublime flight:[148]

Thy wondrous beauty, image of the grace That fills all heaven with glory, to us shown By the Eternal Artist’s hand alone, When time and age have worn it from thy face, Nor age nor time can from my heart displace, But ever deeplier graven shall it be; For in my thought that beauty I shall see Which Time’s cold finger never can erase.

If the soul were not created in the image of God it would seek after nothing but external beauty; but it does in truth penetrate beyond this deceptive outer form, to fix itself on the essential, to rise until it attains the ideal or universal form: _Transcende nella forma universale_.[149] Thus beauty elevates and quickens us into the world of spirits and the elect. Many of Michelangelo’s verses convey the same idea under different forms:

The fount that feeds my love is not my heart, For though I love thee, yet my love withal Is not to heart of flesh and blood in thrall, But ever yearneth toward a goal apart, Where no base mortal passion dare intrude, Nor any guilty thought nor impulse rude.

A love without heart! Here indeed is the formula of the new platonism![150]

Unfortunately, Michelangelo is a striking and titanic exception. He can scarcely be considered the head of a school: and platonism became for the most part nothing more than a fashionable science, the antidote to marriage; an intellectual union between a hard-headed, lusty-armed man and a woman all tenderness and wisdom; the formula of the government of man by woman. Its origin and its end remained equally philosophic; in short, it was a sentimental sociology. If it had been a question of philosophy, no one could better have represented Plato than Savonarola.[151] But Savonarola did not represent the intellect of society; behind him men thought they caught a whiff of all the wretched tatterdemalions in revolt at Rome against the Academy of Laetus, at Florence against the Medici. On the other hand, Tullia d’Aragona, a courtesan, exercised a platonic influence through her excellent book _On the Infinity of Perfect Love_. Others unceremoniously dismissed Socrates and Plato as liars and knaves, and yet passed for good platonists since they extolled the religion of beauty, and woman as essentially its priestess; and since they saw in love the chain binding earth to heaven, and the bulwark against socialism. In short, platonism and feminism are one and the same. It is quite possible to believe implicitly in the dogma of love without splitting love in two and pinning ourselves on an impossible dilemma—matter without spirit or spirit without matter. This latitude of appreciation is not to be called materialism, but merely the need of a material perception in order to arrive at the idea of beauty.

This explains why the platonist spirit was so coldly received in France. Platonism was the art of rendering virtue pleasant and contagious; but in France it was the conviction that virtue needed to defend itself like the fretful porpentine.[152]

No one troubled about spiritualising love; the inferior clergy, parish parsons, applying in every matter a rough-and-ready system of ethics, drew no distinction between sentiment and sensation, but proscribed everything. They summed up the religious life in a multitude of observances all having for result the subjection of women—a contracted morality which gave rise to startling inconsequences. It was pretended that the mere sight of a lady fidgeting about on her balcony was enough to tell you she was a Frenchwoman.[153]

Anne of France forbade lovemaking between fiancés, the best, most innocent, most legitimate in the world, just as strictly as the grossest intrigue; but Louise of Savoy was as little shocked at the one as the other.

There was bitter hostility between the two camps.

Madame de Taillebourg remorselessly turned her back on her nieces, Louise of Savoy and Margaret of France, as being tainted with the new spirit. Queen Anne personally led the crusade in favour of the old ideas; Antony du Four, her almoner, published semi-officially a collection of the lives of ninety-one pious women, as a counterblast to the Italian collections; and he implored ladies not to succumb to the new contagion, not to run out of their salutary groove, for, he said, France had never produced “more wise and good women than at present,” beginning with Queen Anne, “a bottomless well of virtue.” “Under the mask of science and philosophy” all these “prating and scribbling fellows” who wished to give women a great part to play were only seeking, declared Du Four, to sap their modesty and wreck their good name.

In these criticisms there was certainly a modicum of truth. But they went too far in anathemising the good and the evil without distinction.

France, like Italy, had its “primitive” women—philosophers, apostles of the philosophy of love; but their numbers and above all their influence, owing to the opposition we have just indicated, were very small. They were women of admirable endowments and sterling qualities, highly educated, afire with energy of that somewhat melancholy cast necessarily developed by contact with a stern world. It is natural to cite, by way of example, that sometime lady of Beaujeu, Anne of France, a figure after Michelangelo’s own heart, grand and severe as a cathedral.

We picture her always in her capacity as regent—the politician, soldier, and diplomate upholding the fortunes of France, and displaying in the greatest difficulties her incomparable genius. And yet her heart was not in this work; she filled her part as a family duty, she devoted herself to it entirely, but it was the cross of her life. As soon as she could she forsook her toilsome life of affairs, for no other reason than to return to the life of the affections. She shirked neither toil nor responsibilities, and understood perhaps more fully than anyone else the profound and mysterious joy experienced by lofty souls in impressing their own individuality widely upon others. But she was only too conscious that in plying a man’s trade she was acting like a widow or an elder sister, not like a free woman or a princess, and that neither politics nor military service was directly conducive to happiness. She knew that in crushing rebels she would not make them happy, and that she herself would be the first victim of her devotion.

She was right. We know how, in the swing of the political pendulum, she fell beneath the strokes of Louise of Savoy,[154] who owed everything to her. Wounded in her liveliest interests, in her dearest affections, in the sentiment of dignity she held so high, she died proudly, as Caesar died, with her mantle wrapped about her:

Elle attendoit venir l’heure opportune Que la justice ou Dieu y mist la main,[155]

as a servant of Francis I. wrote.

Her coldness then was assumed, but she kept up the appearance of Stoicism so well that many a man, even among her friends and admirers, really believed in this lamentable insensibility. Again, Anne of France had no love for the vanities, the whole trivial round of court life; “she dismissed Cypris to Paphos,” for which some persons found it difficult to forgive her, particularly Octovien de Saint-Gelais, who nevertheless has extolled her sweetness, calling her “a second Semiramis, a new Queen of the Amazons, come to life again to establish peace.” Her vigorous intellect, her frank and remorselessly sincere disposition, her way of treating everything on broad and general lines, puzzled the rude yet feeble folk around her. The only thing she lacked, as one of her friends said, was love:

S’elle avoit un peu de cella, Ce seroit la plus accomplye A qui Dieu donna oncques vie.[156]

She had a large, indeed an immeasurable quantity of “that,” but she took it seriously; it might well be said that she did not set “her whole imagination spinning round problems of sentiment.” She had no idea of bringing imagination into her affections, but distrusted it; it was through the soul and the real needs of the soul that she caught glimpses of the ideal life of which we have just spoken. But having faith in, rather than enthusiasm for, these ideas, and considering as she did that the heart’s activities were perfectly reasonable, beneficent and necessary, she saw no reason for ruffling, gilding or engarlanding them. She was somewhat lacking in suppleness, self-sacrificing, of unbounded good-heartedness, staid in demeanour, firm in resolution, but also warm, passionate, loving to devote herself to others and not doing so by halves. In her heart of hearts she adored all that a good woman adores—her son, a poor child whose death almost killed her, her daughter, her son-in-law, whom she loved as a son; she took an ardent delight in friendship, and above all in that special, delicate, tender, profound affection which is only established between a man and a woman; to win love was her sole ambition.[157] She buried deep down in her heart an innocent romance which no historian has related and which even her intimates appear never to have suspected—a reserve which paints her to the life! Till the day of her death she wore a ring on her finger. We have discovered her secret: the ring was the pledge of her betrothal to a young duke of Calabria from whom her father had separated her, who had soon afterwards died, but whom she was never able to forget.

This certainly was one of the women most likely to understand and to promulgate throughout France the programme of the quest for happiness. She did not believe with Du Four that a sort of passive naïveté was the ultimate expression of virtue; she sought another goal, anxious, doubtless, that love should give a powerful stimulus to woman’s activities, as it had done for the women of Spain, whose imagination was filled with Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. Her friend Champier has rounded off her thought by recalling Plato’s saying that “the lover is dead to himself and lives in another.” Deeply read in the church fathers and the philosophers, she hailed with joy the principle of platonic love, “the love of which the philosopher speaks, that is, a love founded on purity.”

For all her lofty station, however, Anne of France never found herself able to popularise her ideas in a country where an idea only succeeds when it becomes a fashion; the new philosophy had perforce to come like a flood, sweeping good and evil along with it, and imposing itself by the authority of the court. That is what happened around Francis I.; as soon as it became a mark of good taste to talk philosophy and occult sciences,[158] Hellenism,[159] and above all Italianism, and to adopt ultramontane fashions wholesale, people chattered about Plato. The king dearly loved the ladies, and could not despise anything that glorified the sex. He set some store by “Noble-Heart,” “Feminine Noblesse,”[160] and other subtle evocations of the old chivalry; he hoped that platonism might succeed in renewing them, and requested Castiglione, the oracle of the new school, to furnish a pendant to his _Courtier_, to be called “The Courtesan.” Castiglione declined this flattering invitation.

When Francis I. ascended the throne it was as a member of a sort of triumvirate, the other two being ladies—“a single heart in three bodies.”

Louise of Savoy, aged and old-fashioned, reserved politics as her sphere, as far as possible; Francis retained the pageantry, the money, the passages at arms, the material satisfactions of power; Margaret of France, in the Italian style, assumed the direction of men’s minds and souls; she was far more queen of intellectual France than Duchess of Alençon or Queen of Navarre.

She so completely identified herself with her brother as avowedly to borrow from him her whole status, and particularly her name. People have called her by the most various names without really understanding why, owing to the fact that she usually adopted her brother’s name, which frequently changed. As sister of the count of Angoulême she called herself Margaret of Angoulême; under Louis XII., as sister of the Duke of Valois and the heir to the throne, she called herself Margaret of Valois or of Orleans; as sister of the king she became Margaret of France, her definitive name, under which she accomplished her mission.

For thirty years she presided thus over an amazing intellectual movement; the whole thinking soul of France hung upon her smile. She was the incarnation of platonism.

In one of the galleries of Chantilly, that sanctuary of the Renaissance, her grand face, with its long, severe, clean-cut, distinguished features, somewhat hard as though chiselled out of alabaster, continually smiles upon us and encourages us. Her eyes are clear and full of fire; her mouth is fine, intellectual, with something of irony, of benevolence and of reserve; something at once yielding and defensive, acerbated and enthusiastic, a singular sibylline countenance, the enigma of a spiritual governance—the rule of mind and heart; a woman to the core, attractive and wishing to attract, but two personalities in one, each interpenetrating the other, concealing her real self within two or three inner entrenchments after the old feudal tactics, like St. Theresa in her “fortresses of the soul.”

She reigned with undivided sway, with all the powers of her affection, with her infinite womanly delicacy, with triumphant skill.

She was in very truth a woman of fire, this woman who wrote to her brother while a prisoner in Spain: “Whatever may be required of me, though it be to fling to the winds the ashes of my bones to do you service, nought will be strange, or difficult, or painful to me, but solace, ease of mind, honour.”

And she was loved; men never tired of praising her. Her name became a household word, and lives on even in our own day in charming books, like that devoted to her by a lady of rare genius, chosen by Nature to revive the traditions of woman’s influence—the Countess d’Haussonville. And yet we are always wondering what is behind that smiling countenance at Chantilly.

Margaret is doubly complex, first as a woman, and then as a typical woman of the sixteenth century. She is essentially a woman of her period, and that is why she cannot but interest us. Her thoughts, somewhat hazy, and sometimes wrapped in rather odd garbs, are difficult to co-ordinate because, unlike those of Anne of France, they have no spontaneity or originality. Almost all of them are derived from without. Her lovable mind is like a mountain peak of fair height, with nothing rugged or bleak about it: it promises no sublime effects, no Pisgah sights; it pleases and interests us precisely because we can reach its summit by an easy road, for which many of us are grateful. Is not that better for poor tired folk than lofty masculine heights profitless and perilous to scale? It springs gently from the landscape, like the pleasant mountains in the heart of France, and while enabling us to take observation of the sky, keeps in touch with the earth, and from this standpoint we can contemplate, spread out like a map, a smiling country and highly decorative craters. It is the “Belvedere” _par excellence_. Nowhere could we judge her period better than from the vantage ground of her mind.

But it is very clear that it would be a mistake persistently to look for in her the peaks and abysses she does not possess. It has been proved to demonstration that, given certain circumstances—if, for example, he had only been killed at the siege of Toulon—Napoleon would have died a captain of artillery; and doubtless Margaret of France, but for the accession of her brother, the wave of feminine Italianism, and possibly many other circumstances, would have died wife of the Duke of Alençon or the King of Navarre, or even less. Yet we can realise better than ever to-day how vastly important her leadership was. Her generation was that from which we are sprung, to which we owe our blood and sinews. Our society is experiencing almost the same uncertainties and the same attacks; it needs intelligent and active women as much as ever. Margaret was less bent on being an exceptional woman than on fulfilling her part as first lady of France. She played her part very well; she had her Pléiade.[161] And at her side she brought up as her successor another Margaret, her niece, the future Duchess of Berry and of Savoy, who did in fact continue the tradition—not less amiable, not less distinguished, but coming later and consequently more charming still, and above all, more calm and self-contained.

Margaret of France had never read Plato until towards the end of her life, and then, when she discovered him, she believed she had found her guiding star. On the other hand, she did not permit Boccaccio to be forgotten. Her philosophy, then, was not very psychological, but it was eminently social. The theories of Bembo seemed to her to endow women with a large and beneficent measure of power; and that was enough. It must be confessed, however, that she looked at social questions themselves from a somewhat superior standpoint, and with a necessarily discriminating favour. She knew but one person, her brother, who even in the most manifest errors appeared to her the ideal of perfection, “the true Christ.” Apart from him she loved none but God, and she adopted as her emblem a marigold turned towards the sun, indicating her purpose to live and breathe only “for high, celestial and spiritual things”; other things, husbands included, seemed to her paltry and mean. And thus, as a woman of intelligence, she hoped to reign through the affections; her most assiduous flatterers only extolled her heart; even after her death a pious respect continued to watch over her works, of which a selection was published. And yet she gave only her intelligence to the world.

Her theory of love is peculiar enough. Love of course appears to her the corner-stone of the social edifice: in itself it is always good, only becoming bad by the use made of it. Margaret is eminently platonist in the sense that she proclaims the existence of two loves, a good and a bad; but to her the distinction between them is simplicity itself: the one is man’s love, the other, woman’s; men love with an evil, earthly love, women alone can love celestially. Sometimes they chance to allow themselves to be caught in the snares of men; let them flee then, for “briefest follies are always the best.” Thus loving is for women. The love of a woman, established firmly in God and on honour, the same love that Henri d’Albret styles “hypocrisy or covert malice,” forges a divine and holy chain. Margaret never tires of expatiating on the virtues of women’s love, a pure and ardent love, the instrument and the end of civilisation, the highest form of human activity, the prayer admirable beyond all other prayers that a living creature can address to the Creator. In the nineteenth tale of the _Heptameron_ she gives this love a very catholic definition, borrowed almost word for word from Castiglione:

“I call perfect lovers those who seek some perfection, either goodness, beauty or grace, in the object of their love, those who incline always to virtue and have so lofty and refined a heart that, even at the price of death, they would not aim at base things that honour and conscience condemn. The soul was created but to return to the supreme good, and so long as it is encased in the body, it can only long and strive for holiness. But the sin of our first parent has rendered dark and sensual the senses, the soul’s inevitable intermediary; seeing only through them the visible objects which approach perfection, the soul hastens to find in outward beauty, in visible grace and the moral virtues, the sovereign beauty, grace, and virtue. It seeks them, and finds them not, and passes by; it essays to mount higher, like children who, as they grow bigger, must needs change their dolls. And when at length mature experience shows that neither perfection nor felicity is to be met with in this world, the soul pants after the great Author and the very source of the beautiful. But then may God open its eyes! otherwise it must speedily stray into the paths of false philosophy. For faith alone can reveal and bestow what is good, which carnal, natural man by himself never could attain.”

Thus the worship of beauty is not necessarily mystical, but it is a true religion. We come from God, and we return to God through hope and love much more surely than through any sort of reasoning. The holy love of the beautiful, of perfection, purifies the soul better than any practical efforts, and little by little raises it to the ideal perception of perfect beauty. The soul then wings its flight towards God, sustained by faith above unfathomable abysses.

And so it is necessary to proclaim happiness, peace, gentleness, joy to men of good will, and even to others, if they are to be lifted above themselves, their ambitions, their hatreds, their coarsenesses. What a mistake it is to preach a religion of terror to poor creatures too wretched as it is!

Oh, que je voy d’erreur la teste ceindre A ce Dante, qui nous vient icy peindre Son triste Enfer et vieille Passion.[162]

Let women learn their duty!

They are priestesses in the religion of Beauty.

They must win love, they must themselves love! They must be balm poured upon aching wounds, the beauty that soothes, the love that accomplishes a new Passion, taking upon itself all the sorrows of others. Of old, a great noble had been recognised by his knowing how to give, and by his giving, not of his superfluity, but a portion of himself—his blood to his country, his strong arm or his affection to his brethren. It only remained to feminise and spiritualise this superb tradition. Women will give their hearts, in other words, they will diffuse happiness, fellowship in the supreme life, life itself! “Love is that which really makes a man, and without which he is nought.”

Life! Alas! at this word Margaret shudders. She longs to penetrate the great secret of our destiny. She stoops over one of her gentlewomen lying at the point of death, to see if she can catch the passing of her soul! She receives a lover at the tomb of the lady he came to meet, and with a tragic gesture cries “She is there!” She loves and preaches nothing but life. She knows that death is inevitable, but hopes that this accident may come to her without lingering in long “suburbs,” and she casts herself with confidence upon the God of platonism whom she believes in, whom she feels to be all love. From terrestrial love she expects to escape at one bound into the arms of the other, the Great Love; “from the felicity which alone in this world can be called felicity, to fly suddenly to that which is eternal.”[163] And thus in her eyes man’s natural end is enfolded in love and hope resting on faith. There, in the heart of the villages, covered with moss and honeysuckle, are the humble tombs, the sacred shelter of those we have loved, clothed all about with life hard by the radiant crucifix! A sunbeam floods them in light, like a stream of love from on high. The same ray penetrates our hearts, telling us that all is not ended, and that a little joy is still blossoming upon this spot of earth. Let us leave God to count the flying moments—leave it to Him in full confidence and peace!

Like all human things, platonism cannot attain perfection; it necessarily has little to say in regard to man’s birth and death. To complete the reformation it would perhaps be necessary, as Goethe suggests in the second part of _Faust_, to discover a means of manufacturing _homunculus_, in other words, of effecting human reproduction in some other way than the old; moreover, instead of being allowed to die, men might comfortably be translated to other worlds. But, meanwhile, platonism is the philosophy of the living, and in truth it is remarkable to see a secular movement basing itself on such lofty systems, and turning to such noble account, intellectually, morally and religiously, the natural desire which the world always has of amusing itself.

A strange generation was arising. Between 1483 and 1515 Luther, Calvin and St. Ignatius, Rabelais and St. Theresa, were born pell-mell. And yet, thanks to this philosophy, everyone wore the livery of happiness. Dagger and poison hid themselves in the shade. Never were the most agitating problems more cheerfully discussed. Yes; women know the real value of the visionary and the immaterial, of something higher than hoards of mere gold and silver—the value of the riches of the soul. The Latin world was at this moment becoming a vast workshop of beauty, the real worker being no longer the digger or the merchant, the mason or the hodman, but whatever man lived a life of thought and love. There was extension and broadening out in all directions; material barriers were being overthrown; the religion of Beauty was bringing nations as well as individuals together. And the women, the ministers of the affections, had for their mission to watch, to judge, to temper, to develop the faculties of men. They thought it a beautiful mission. Can we wonder at it? They burned with the ardour of paladins; they fancied themselves knights-errant, and displayed devices—_Non inferiora secutus_, a masculine hemistich which men had relinquished, but which Margaret of France resumed, to show that she bore high her white petals and her heart of gold: “Love and Faith,” in other words, “Women and God,” the motto of Madame de Lorraine—a motto full of joy and charm, for if men love because they believe, and believe because they love, life becomes an unalloyed delight.

Between mysticism and debauchery a middle term had been found, namely, love.

When women know how to attach men to them by means of pure love, all individual forces gain vigour, a nation flourishes, and the people are at peace.

That, at any rate, was the new conviction.