CHAPTER V

INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES

It is all very well for a woman to be beautiful, to lend grace to the world, to diffuse sweetness and light; but this would be but a vain show if she did not with jealous care nourish in herself the flame of love of the Beautiful. Castiglione, who liked to give a mathematical precision to his definitions, tells us: “Woman must nourish herself on the life of the world and the life of the arts”—thus in appearance relegating the aesthetic life to a second place; but he is very careful to add: “She must occupy herself with literature, music, painting, dancing, and entertaining”; in other words, the heart must reverse the parts, and in the conscience secret preoccupations must come before visible occupations, His view is logical. How could women govern the world if they were in reality its slaves? The first necessity for a lighthouse is a light.

Further, we ourselves have a right to ask where these ladies think of leading us. Their art consists in pleasing us and in indoctrinating us with their principles. To please is their secret, with which we do not meddle; it is of little consequence to know if Lucretia Borgia cut out her own dresses, where and by whom Mary Stuart had her hats made, or if women always please by what pleases their husbands. But when they speak of ruling our intelligence, it becomes of very great importance to know how they will deal with us.

The intellectual provision of the Renaissance women consisted chiefly of impressions of art, in accordance with Castiglione’s prescription. In this, painting (still more the inferior manual arts—lace-making, embroidery, tapestry) held the lowest rank, on the principle universally accepted in the platonic world that the less an art needs the co-operation of the senses to touch the soul, the greater is its excellence. Music stood higher than painting, because it directly transmits an impression; vocal music in particular represents almost the speech of soul to soul, with but an insignificant admixture of materiality. Poetry was the supreme art, the truly aristocratic thing; no one would have dreamt of comparing it to painting or any manual art. The poet with one stroke paints soul and body; in Ronsard’s words, “he paints in the heavens.”

To lay in her stock of happiness, a woman will begin by living in close communion with the Beautiful. Sciences are useless to her; she has little taste, and still less time, for their cultivation. But just as she finds breakfast a necessity, so she ought every morning to give her soul nourishment, if it be only one sip of the beautiful. Louise of Savoy on rising used to read a psalm, “to perfume her day,” as she put it. These few moments’ reading were sufficient to flood her soul with a radiance to light her through the day.

Further, reading is a duty having special claims on women. Not only is there always some new thing to learn, some new chord to touch, but the intellectual life demands a constant outgoing of energy,—I will venture to say, a continual “education.” Could a tree flourish and bear fruit if it refused to suck up its sap? How long would it be before it stood a bare skeleton against the sky?

Thus, with complete independence of mind, as great as her material liberty but much more difficult to acquire, a woman will supply herself with spiritual food; she will seek Beauty in truth stripped of all conventions. The real foe to women’s freedom is not this or that man, but themselves, because of their frivolity, their inconsequence, and their innate passion for the superficial; in other words, for the conventional or fashionable. They need a real force of soul to go deeply into anything; they are perfectly happy in yielding to the glitter of a thought which, though obscure at bottom, is dazzling on the surface. When the taste for precision has not been carefully instilled into them in childhood, they run a great risk of wasting their minds in habits of cursory curiosity, like many men of the world.

Books played a prominent part in the psychology of the Renaissance. They were regarded as the highest type of luxury; a house was characterised as much by its library as by its plate. Among the ladies, Anne of Brittany, Louise of Savoy, and many others are essentially deserving of the name of bibliophiles, nobly loving the beautiful books with beautiful miniatures produced for them. They were even accused of reading them. In that epoch, the artistic aroma exhaled from a fine edition seemed necessarily to accentuate the written thought, just as music accentuated the uttered thought. We have become wiser; we have discovered that beautiful books are herbariums in which ideas must be left to dry, for their better preservation.

There was no lack of scoffers to make mock of this “bookish sufficiency.” “What a heap of books!... These folk must surely mean to carry the world on their backs! What a frittering away of intellectuality!” And, indeed, Margaret of France not only believed in books, but doted on them; to her a library seemed a sanctuary.

“Tant y en a que le seul remembrer Et les nommer n’est pas en ma puissance, Mais il faisoit beau voir leur ordonnance ... Et du scavoir qui est dedans J’en laisse aux folz craindre les accidens ... Des livres fiz ung pillier, et sembloit Que sa grandeur terre et ciel assembloit.”[228]

We writers think it natural enough that people should buy our books, keep them, and even cut a few pages; if it is women who show us this attention, we do not complain. We dig away in darkness under the soil, labouring like a miner with his pick; why should we complain that above us, in the bright sunshine, someone sifts and mints our metal, and circulates part of it through the world?

It is even a not wholly disagreeable surprise to meet in an odd place here and there one’s own ideas, which have flitted away and found warm foster-parents in people who have so far adopted them as to believe them their own. Sometimes it is another writer who is good enough to saddle himself with them thus, and in that case our feeling is not perhaps unalloyed pleasure; but if it is a reader, man or woman, we are well rewarded. Often, too, our idea as it goes round has altered in feature, and if it now and then appears to us enfeebled, it also happens sometimes to have gained strength.

Everyone cannot be a writer! ‘Amateurs’ have a rôle of their own, which is not that of ‘stickit’ authors—a rôle of synthesis, generalisation, criticism, support, sanction!

The end we pursue—thought, namely, and truth—can only be attained by the aid of conversation,—only if distinguished and enthusiastic women set themselves to distil from our books any good they may contain, and to diffuse its essence around them.

From this almost indispensable collaboration between pure learning and its popular interpretation results a vigorous life. As Madame d’Haussonville has so well said: “An eager desire for knowledge possessed the entire sixteenth century. The quick and supple intellect of the women was carried away in the general current. Erudition was the passion of the age, not that cold and microscopic erudition which arises in ages of decadence, and which is often only the useless lumber of scholastic pedantry, but an erudition living, intelligent, and animated”—animated, that is by aestheticism.

By the side of exquisites like Bembo, laborious students like Lefèvre d’Etaples, Hebraists, and exegetists cultivating their little patch with dogged tenacity, there were brilliant minds, perhaps more brilliant than profound, but unprejudiced, who synthetised particular studies and started them on an unlooked-for career. For the Hebraists, exegetists, philosophers, and historians of every description, the spread of intelligence would of course have been fatal; but it was the _raison d’être_ of a lady whose mission was to put in circulation the results of her individual study.

Thus the aim which women had to set before themselves in their reading was twofold: first, a personal, aesthetic aim, the reinvigoration and refreshment of their own souls; secondly, an aim relating to their apostolic mission, the art of understanding men’s souls, then of charming and leading them by means of conversation.

But it is impossible, by merely scanning a man’s bookshelves, to form an idea of the man. In great houses, the king’s, for example, some of the books were inherited, others were presents, others were books that no gentleman’s library could have been without. Francis I. bought the Italian novelties, Bembo, Pontanus, and Politian. In reality his chief reading was the Arthurian romances.

The princesses had also, besides the books of the hour, books that they had been obliged to buy or accept, books left to them—those which were kept “for their backs,” as Montaigne said. The bookshelves made a brilliant display in a spacious gallery adorned with the choicest objects of art. The bulk of the library usually consisted of books on the elements of religion, history, and morals; it also contained romances, poetry, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and books with engravings, which too often replaced those charming manuscripts of which Louise of Savoy was one of the last protectors.

The books that were read were treatises on history, especially Roman history, and on practical medicine.[229] But custom varied.

Certain ladies, like Anne of France, browsed on the early fathers, the philosophers, and the moralists. Many, while loving studies of this kind and calling themselves highly philosophic, preferred to have their food peptonised, and to be furnished with ready-made convictions which only required ventilating and disseminating in conversation. A number of Italian treatises proffered themselves for this little service, the best of which was Castiglione’s book, _The Courtier_. To name Castiglione is to name the Bible of platonism, the code of aestheticism, the Machiavelli of anti-machiavelism; Castiglione was in the hands of every woman who meditated on the ideal.

From a purely aesthetic standpoint the classics were in favour, except Virgil, to whom only the Mantuans remained faithful, probably from local feeling. Ovid, who speaks so well and so much about women, ranked very high. He had been popularised in France by the translations of Octovien de Saint-Gelais and André de la Vigne; illustrated editions went off rapidly, even though the engravings were old. In the very highest artistic spheres, people swore by Cicero.[230] In Margaret of France’s circle the favourite names were Terence and Cicero, Castiglione and Boccaccio.

On the reading days, which were principally (we are bound to say) the grey days of existence, when one feels abandoned by God and men, when one is left to “one’s own devices,” people rather sought for light entertainment, if possible gently emotional, or at any rate lively, cheering, affecting. The Bible was very useful for getting glimpses of Heaven without having to run to a monk or a parson, for an intelligent woman cared for nothing lower than a bishop. If they wanted psychology, they went to poetry, novels, romances. A mere sonnet, a little story, very short but with movement and savour, would suffice to cure a casual fit of dumps; in more complicated cases they took up some voluminous romance, which engrossed the attention for long hours and reflected life for the nonce in warm and sunny hues.

The literature of the Renaissance was well provided with _Nouvelles_ and _Facéties_, answering all the demands for spiced and piquant reading made even by the platonist ladies.

They revelled in such works with no touch of coyness; it was a mark of breeding to discuss them, laugh at them, and quote from them. Often some courtly abbé, the spiritual director of these ladies, and soon to be a full-blown bishop, undertook explanation or translation.

Some persons have questioned whether the custom of reading narratives so strongly spiced did not in the long run obliterate the moral sense, especially among women. Brantôme maintains that this was the cause of all moral obliquities. Margaret of France did not believe it; her faith in art was so ardent that she regarded it as a proof of mental vigour to face all sorts of literature without blenching. Her friend Marot told her so with a smile, for in the contest between flesh and spirit he held with the flesh; he mentions a select list of the works reputed the most naughty, and adds:

Tout cela est bonne doctrine, Et n’y a rien de deffendu![231]

Margaret, brought up on Saint-Gelais and Boccaccio, was in truth inoculated. Further, like some other women of narrow mysticism, she was not afraid of contrasts;—soul and body in opposite pans of the scale, Petrarch as a corrective to Boccaccio, and vice versa. Good humour and gaiety were part of the platonist hygiene, and ladies took them where they found them. Coarse pleasantries did not amuse, as a German[232] who had spent great pains in writing a _Eulogy of Baldness_ frankly confessed. “We are ridiculous even when we write of serious things, but we are never gay. When we try to be jocular it is, in the words of the proverb, like setting an elephant to dance.” Professed humorous writers are such bores!—a crusty old philosopher like Nifo, to wit, or that excellent La Perrière, a friend of Margaret, who dedicated his lascivious verses, his _Hundred Considerations of Love_, to a clerk in the Woods and Forests!

There was no help for it, ladies had to return to Boccaccio, since amusement was his monopoly! The chance discovery of a by no means remarkable unpublished fragment of Boccaccio covered Claricio of Imola with glory, and was published at the expense of a Milanese Maecenas, Andrea Calvi, under the auspices of Leo X. and Francis I. Castiglione and Margaret were not disposed to attack such a renown: their ambition was to eclipse it. Margaret had a fresh translation of Boccaccio made. She herself, as we know, was ambitious to imitate the master; and to do so was really a profitable business: by donning Boccaccio’s mantle Firenzuola became a dignitary of the church, and Bandello became bishop of Nérac; while a common saddler, Nicolas, gained the favour of the king. The test of skill was to tell true stories under transparent pseudonyms. Yet Louise of Savoy was almost as fond of the Acts of the Apostles.

The Facétie had a less brilliant fate. Poggio and Cornazano, always dear to the ladies, handed down many of their stories to imitators like Domenichi, Delicado, Boistuau, who in their turn passed them on to Shakespeare, La Fontaine, and others.

The old romance continued in high favour—a favour that was so far merited in that the romance combined with the sentimentalism of chivalry sufficient spiciness to induce a good lady to leave it lying on her table. Women doted on the venerable romance of cloak and sword,[233] long, diffuse, and heroic; it had long ago captured Italy. It delighted princesses by its idealism, and peasant girls by its flavour of mystery and marvel. When the efflorescence of humanism, aestheticism and the new ideas was at its height, the _Romaunt of the Rose_ made its reappearance, and year in, year out men saw defiling past, as though resuscitated by some terrible incantation, all the old knights of ecstatic or sorrowful countenance, the champions of the Holy Grail and of Melusina—Lancelot of the Lake and Perceforest, Fier-à-bras and Percival, Ponthus, Meliadus, Pierre de Provence, all that Gothic world which was believed to be dead and buried. With them they brought their friends and relatives—_The Fair Elaine_, _Theseus_, _The Destruction of Troy_, _The Doughty Hector_, _Oedipus_, _Alexander the Great_, these worthy, up to a certain point, of rubbing shoulders with Plato; but also _Baudouin_, _Le Grant Voyage de Jherusalem_, _La Conqueste de Trébisonde_, in an age when people troubled themselves very little about Crusades! Even the Italians went mad over Charlemagne. It was like an electric spark—a reciprocal attraction. France lost her heart to Italy, and Italy opened wide her arms to France; the women of the south, the men of the north. In vain did the platonist men ridicule the event; in vain did their spokesman, Pulci, at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the sanctuary of platonism, empty the vials of their wrath and give the paladins a terribly hot time of it; nothing could stem the tide, and a romance—a shockingly bad one—entitled _I reali di Francia_, became the germ of a whole new literature.

Men succumbed to this craze because the women drove them to it. Besides, nations, like widows, love the dear departed. Since chivalry had ceased to exist, people naturally swore by nothing else. The more our activities decline, the more we gloat over the memory of past excesses. Charlemagne, then, filled the horizon; doting looks were cast at rusty old sword-blades, and while works of quite charming beauty left women almost unmoved, spectres had only to appear, to vanquish them. Sometimes these showed themselves naked and unadorned, in all the strange dignity of their powerful frames; at other times an intelligent editor paid some attention to their toilet, smartened them up, decked them with little rosettes of pink or blue. How many times was _Amadis_, perhaps the most famous of these romances, thus tittivated! No one remembered that France had given it birth; it was re-imported into France by way of Spain and Italy through a translation of Herberay des Essarts, with fabulous success: “Any one who spoke ill of the Amadis romances would have been a hissing and a by-word.” Out of four books it grew into a dozen; it might well have lengthened itself indefinitely, like some law-suits in our own time.

These old romances are to-day scarcely known except by scholars. If we open any one of them at hazard—_Lancelot of the Lake_ for instance, one of the most classic[234]—we find that the colouring is crude. Side by side with mystic virginities we see the reek of coarse appetites. Wives and maidens have blood in their veins, and, like all persons of rather primitive education, do nothing by halves; her husband has only to turn his back for a moment and queen Guinevere is feeling her way towards a reconciliation with Lancelot (bearded like the pard), and the gallant knight has no need to supplicate to get the window opened. Sir Gawain holds very brief parley with the daughter of the king of North Wales, when he surprises her extended on her ermine couch in a virginal but ravishing deshabille! Arthur very quickly forgets Queen Guinevere amid the solace brought him in his cell by a damsel “courteous and fair of speech.”

As it mixed in the best platonist society, the old romance of chivalry picked up more refined manners. King Arthur ends by gathering about him a noble enough company; Roland leaves Charlemagne in the lurch, to hasten after his well-beloved; and (horror of horrors!) Angelica philanders prettily with a Saracen page! The old torrential romance ended like the Rhone—fell into a tranquil lake.

And yet the dignitaries of the church invariably denounced it, and had the courage to break with the women on this point. They countenanced neither the old masters nor the new—the eloquent Cataneo, the gay Boiardo. Nothing disarmed their opposition—neither the success of romances like _La Célestine_,[235] nor blandishments. When Ariosto offered to Cardinal d’Este his masterpiece packed with dithyrambs in honour of all the Estes past, present, and to be, the amiable prelate said to him: “Where on earth did you get all this nonsense?”[236]

In short, women who read, read what spoke of love: that was what they set store by. Philosophy spoke of love—they were philosophers; romances, facéties, novels, poetry spoke of love—they sipped also of that philosophy. But in some cases it was philosophy that bred the spirit of love, in other cases it was the spirit of love that led them to philosophy; and from this wide differences resulted.

The first class were coldly sentimental,—but no real sway is exerted through coldness; they lived in the absolute,—but the absolute lends no governing force. They lost touch with things, they had nothing of the communicable warmth which makes apostles. They were princesses, sacred beings, to be admired but not touched.

Plato had not evolved a practical rule for happiness, and his best friends agreed that his social ideas presented many chimerical sides.

But the ladies who learnt their philosophy from love were the ardent, active women who knew that the world is swayed by passions, good or bad, and that the secret of feminine power lies far more in that than in any amount of reasoning. Reason may produce an artless blissfulness, but passion has lynx eyes. Love is not reasoned out or manufactured, it is a give and take; life also is only a perpetual exchange, and happiness comes from life, while Plato seeks it in self-contemplation and egoism. To act on another, one must be acted on; to make others happy we must gain happiness through others. An illogical process? What if it is? Nothing is more illogical and more relative than happiness, since it has to do with us. That is for many women the science of life, and they love romances as a pictorial philosophy—not cold precept, but a living force—a philosophy in which the heart cries out instead of patiently suffering dissection.

Books appealed to the feelings. Poggio tells the story of a worthy man, a merchant and a Milanese, and therefore doubly unemotional, who almost died of grief after reading about the death of Roland: yet Roland had been dead seven hundred years! Much more were women justified in showing their sensibility!

So, when they read, they attached the highest value to the external forms which produce impressions: they were affected more by these than by ideas. The wife of Guillaume Budé declared that she loved her husband’s books, not for their contents, but because she regarded them as his offspring. Women adored magnificence of expression—the rhetoric, the rhythm, the “gay trimmings” of style; poetry seemed to them the supreme enchantment, because it answered at once to their personal craving for “sensibility” and to their mission, which consisted precisely in sowing a little charm in life, that is, in garnishing life externally with a little poetry.

However, what they called poetry we should rather call music. Poetry in those days was only a perpetual libretto; there was rhythm and cadence in the arrangement of the words, and the impression they gave was a musical one. Perfect clearness was not insisted on; the thought was allowed to remain in semi-obscurity, like a melody flowing uncertainly through a strain of music, rather betrayed than revealed by the harmony. Our great Lamartine, with his lofty but indefinite thought, has been regarded even by us as the first of poets. On the other hand, the aim of musical melody was boldly to seize all these words, to give them a precise value, intensity, brilliance, and force. The employment chiefly, or indeed exclusively, of human voices brought this quality still further into prominence; the delicate modulations of the voice, thrown out with matchless skill, seemed to outline the very soul of the singer, like traceries against the sky.

The admirable inspirations of Vittoria and her predecessors will never cease to touch us. In that old idealistic music there lies a whole intangible world; our vows, our love, our poignant sorrows, our prayers gush forth in it like a fountain, flash like a bursting rocket in the sky: “God has given us nothing more pleasant, nothing more sweet,” exclaimed a poet: “music is a messenger from heaven, the solace of all our woes.”[237]

The sonnets of Petrarch were set to music and sung; they had indeed been composed for that purpose. Teodoro Riccio furnished an accompaniment to the famous romance, _Italia mia_, and Ciprian van Rore one to the sonnet, _Fontana di dolore, Albergo d’ira_. Ronsard, too, wrote his sonorous rhymes for music; Baïf, as is well known, went so far as to propose to turn writing into a sort of notation, and when his academy was instituted, composers of music and even mere singers were admitted on equal footing with poets. The art of music consisted in giving to thought all the external beauty of which it was capable. Philosophers counted metrical music (in other words, poetry) or vocal music as a part of philosophy. The art thus intellectualised became quite a religion. In his painting of Parnassus at the Vatican, Raphael shows us Apollo singing like an ancient bard. In all the pictures of Paradise that we have seen we have never found a palette, or a sculptor’s point, or even a rostrum or an inkstand; nothing but direct and pure communion with God through contemplation and music. And what could be more delicious than the little choirs of angels which Giovanni Bellini’s imagination placed at the feet of his Madonnas, like an incense of homage from the world! Melozzo gives a queen an organ as her emblem,[238] and Titian one to his Venuses. Music would seem to have been the very breath of happiness.

The common people themselves were strangely enamoured of intellectual harmonies. In Italy a number of poets spent their life in the market-places, like Homer. Aurelio Brandiolini, for example, who sang in the squares of Verona the praises of antique heroes, went on, stimulated by popular applause, to execute veritable _tours de force_, such as singing in verse the thirty-seven books of Pliny’s _Natural History_. The celebrated Bernardo Accolti wandered from town to town giving recitals in the principal squares. The moment he arrived, people flocked about him, business was suspended, far-distant shops were shut, lights began to appear on the balconies, and the police hastened up to keep order. Making way through the crowd by favour, the notables formed up round the poet as a guard of honour; and then, under the lamp of some sleeping Madonna, amid breathless silence, the poet’s voice arose towards the starry sky, singing love to the accompaniment of a guitar.

Nothing more truly characterises the period than this popular passion for musicians, poets, and buffoons. Far from becoming degraded by contact with the mob, poetry seemed thereby to gain in breadth. A pure Virgilian named Andrea Marone (Virgil’s surname) never felt at ease unless sitting on a stone post; in that position inspiration seized him like an ancient sibyl or a fakir; his veins dilated, drops of sweat stood on his brow, his whole being expressed itself in gestures which gave emphasis to his song, lightning flashed from his eyes; it seemed as though a part of his individuality left him and shed itself upon his audience like a rain of fire.

Almost all women were fond of music, for men were very accessible to ear-charming sound. Even in France, in spite of the poverty of aesthetic education, the villages harboured a surprising number of harpists and taborers. The duchess of Orleans patronised at Blois a crowd of more or less official “gitternists,” fiddlers, and trumpeters, without reckoning strolling guitarists, always sure of a warm welcome. Like all the princesses she had her private band, and also two taborers, magnificent in their crimson badge,—so magnificent that during her lyings-in she had them to play at the foot of her bed. It was a great sorrow to her to have to dismiss, from a prudent motive of economy, the ducal choir and even one of the taborers; Pierre de Vervel, once her master of music, always remained her friend.

We have in a former volume shown Louise of Savoy, a cithara in her hand, surrounded by a harp, an organ, and a complete orchestra. Louise Labé approved of young girls devoting to music the best part of their time. It was incomprehensible how any lady who possessed this divine means of fascination[239] could neglect it; when a Mademoiselle de Hauteville had to be pressed to display her magnificent voice, her false modesty was censured as a sort of professional error. Mary of England, accompanying herself on a guitar, used to sing of a morning to Louis XII., her doddering old husband, and the poor prince felt himself revived, such “wondrous pleasure did he take therein.” Margaret of France, who has left us thousands of verses, evidently betook herself to poetry as nowadays we go to the piano, to let her thoughts wander at large; instead of singing with her lips, she sang with her pen. It is highly probable that many ladies abandoned themselves thus to their inspirations, half music, half poetry.

Sometimes people had too much of it. It was irritating to meet certain people perpetually humming a refrain. As soon as you entered a drawing-room, you saw an instrument looming menacingly before you, and you had to perform. And then, how many amateurs would do better to muzzle themselves than to go quavering out their little songs!

Music also was charged with enervating effects; some went so far as to call it an art of decadence, and maintained that the ancient Medes had perished through love of music. Castiglione almost gets into a passion on this subject. “What! Music effeminating! But, I ask you, were not Alexander, Socrates, Epaminondas, Themistocles musicians? Lycurgus was almost one! Did the harp prevent Achilles from shedding blood—if that is what you are driving at? Effeminating! Why, without music how can you praise God? What would comfort the sunburnt labourer at his plough, the peasant woman at her wheel, the sailor in the storm, the traveller on his weary way, the nurse in her tiring night-watches by a cradle? Music, on the contrary, is the charm of life—its light, its sunny grace! No art responds better to the demands of our emotional nature, none more liberally brings us vivid and various impressions. It softens, calms, penetrates us, it moves, indeed enraptures us; it raises us to heaven with the rapid, vehement, urgent beating of its wings!”

Castiglione almost regards music as love itself: they were to him such nearly related terms that we cannot be sure but that in his opinion song was more excellent than love.

In regard to what was expected of it, namely, a little happiness, music was a performance of feeling rather than of skill. Notes a little venturesome or even imperfect were pardoned if they blended, and had resonance and passion. People would boldly attack and smoothly carry to its conclusion a two-part fugue. The ideal was to hear in a drawing-room a pure and mellow voice, supported by a single lute; or rather to see the voice, for the lute, not an ungraceful instrument like the piano, seemed a living thing, and became one body with the fair singer; it was one personality thrilling with song.

To idealists of the very highest order, Flemish, French, and German music was far superior to Italian music, because it expressed ideas, whilst Italian music barely went beyond sentiment or even sensation. Rome herself fell a willing victim to the northern races.[240] Among many distinguished and often admirable artists, the great figure of John of Ockeghem,[241] who died at Tours in 1495, stands out as that of the old master who more than anyone else ennobled his art.

His successor, Josquin Desprez, a Fleming trained in the same school (the very name of which has been lost in the loss of its tradition), and a member of the choir of Sixtus IV., became a Roman by adoption, and only left Rome in 1508 to proceed to Ferrara. Josquin was a stickler for correctness and perfection, skilful in linking discords and in combining independent parts. From the dim arcana of a sanctuary his profound inspiration rose into the clear light of day, blossoming out in soft and brilliant colours. His phrases are like many-coloured curves of light shot into space, describing their several parabolas without confusion and without clashing; there is white and green and red, but they all spring from the same flame.

Many Italians censured, as fit for dreamers and doctrinaires, the exclusive employment of the human voice. They wished to have at least one instrument: the bass viol (developed into our violoncello), or the viol, from which the famous Amati, about 1540, derived the violin. It is a viol that Raphael places in the hands of his singers, who seem to identify themselves with the instrument with a passionate ardour.[242]

In the smaller courts chamber-music was cultivated. Happy states! Nothing took precedence of the quest for a good musician; dilettantism reigned supreme. The court of Ferrara was practically a conservatoire; it had a celebrated orchestra, from which Caesar Borgia borrowed violinists when starting for France. Care was taken that the performance of music should take place in the most favourable circumstances and amid the profoundest respect; there was no question of being stacked in a hall, too hot or too cold, of being tight wedged and sitting askew to hear music by the hour. Lorenzo Costa depicts a very different concert-hall. Peacefully reclining on a grassy lawn, beneath the shade of light-foliaged trees, sheltered from sun and breeze, the ladies form the centre; they are discoursing of pure love. Their own sweetness seems to envelop everything. They are crowning a lamb or an ox with flowers; the landscape seems to spread life out into almost boundless space, intersected by a sheet of limpid water as blue as the sky. In the middle some persons are unobtrusively performing music or writing verses. No one pays any attention (so profound is the spell!) to a troop of soldiers in the distance repelling an incursion, nor to a handsome chevalier, a solitary and elegant figure, occupied in daintily killing a reptile, nor to certain groups which have wandered away beneath the leafy shade, towards the extreme verge of platonism.

Purely instrumental music, the music of a full orchestra, appealed to the commoner feelings; it served for dinners and dances, as in the banquets depicted by Veronese. It represented the voices of nature. It was best understood on the water, and then the most staid and stolid of people found it one of the joys of life. It was the delight of pleasure-loving nations: “Abolish music, and we must e’en fall to prayers.”[243] At Venice, as soon as the old cupolas, the tall statues and the long façades—decorations for a dance in motley—became blurred in the evening haze, the city seemed to swim in music: a thousand bells chimed out the _Ave Maria_; jangled sounds of serenades and concerts rose from the palaces, the alleys, every nook and cranny; the sea sent back its response; noisy parties lightly skimmed the glistening surface of the Grand Canal; illuminated barges splashed their oars under a window, with an orchestra or band of singers. Strange intoxication! Many pious Italians, like Alberto Pio, thought it so delightful that they loved to transfer it into the churches. Why not? These thrilling symphonies did not follow the sacred texts very closely, it was said; they were not always of the highest class. “You hear the boys whinnying, the tenors bellowing, the counters braying, the altos bawling, the basses scraping the bottom of a well,” and in all this the Puritans could see no trace of deep religious feeling, “no well-modulated pronunciation, the perfect enunciation which brings the words home to the soul.”[244] It was a deafening, stupefying music. But if it is necessary for our happiness that senses and emotions should be appealed to simultaneously, why say no?

Even dance music may ennoble the dance and become an element of enthusiasm, peace, and joy. This was admirably expressed by one Madame de Sillé. A canon sitting beside her was laughing at the sight of men leaping about, while another was bursting his lungs blowing into a hollow stick. “What!” she said, “aren’t you aware then of the power of music? The sound from this stick penetrates the mind, the mind directs the body, and these buffooneries are the expression of the soul! Would you prefer to play at tennis?” The canon held his tongue, more especially as he caught oblique glances in his direction, and had premonitions of being dragged into the dance by way of reprisal. Even from all this racket of the dance—from the harps, lutes, organs, manichords, checkers, psalteries, rebecks, guitars, tabors, bass viols, flageolets—a measure of expression was demanded. The harpist whom Mantegna shows us setting the Muses to dance is throwing his whole soul into his work; he is leading the dance.[245]

Here we should properly say something about the drama, but we shall treat it briefly, seeing that in those days it was very far from displaying the same activity as at present. In particular, the women’s share in the drama was only that of a section of the public. It was above all the art of the prelates, who devoted as much care to altering its character as the women did to preserving the old romances. Thus the two great forces of platonism were pitted against each other—the prelates eager to advance, the women anxious to hang back.

The drama with its modern tendencies took possession of Italy in the 15th century, and Rome was almost its birth-place. Pomponius Laetus, officially licensed to produce the plays of Plautus and Terence, died a few days after Savonarola. The ashes of the monk had been scattered to the winds; but all Rome was eager to accompany the remains of Laetus to Ara-Coeli, since it was a work of true piety to increase the joy of life.

The palm for dramatic art was, with one consent, awarded to Bernardo Dovizio da Bibbiena, who had the happy notion to shake off the yoke of translation and to write a new piece in imitation of Plautus—the _Calandra_.

Bibbiena[246] is one of the best types of this prelatic world, which after all cannot be dissociated from the world of women. He belonged to the inner circle of Leo X.’s friends, having been brought up with him, though the son of a peasant. He had a spirit and verve which, according to Paul Jove, “carried the gravest of people off their feet.” He was supremely in his element at the table. Moreover, he was one of those astonishing men who live at the same time a life of toil and of pleasure. On becoming a cardinal he displayed vast activity—acted as legate, preached a crusade, and died at fifty. He has left a goodly number of treatises, poems, and letters; but it was the drama that made him famous.

It is impossible to describe the stir the first representation of his _Calandra_ made at Urbino, the home of platonism. Everything was planned with the care and skill of perfect “amateurs.”

The stage represented stucco monuments and other scenic illusions executed by such artists as that age afforded. The auditorium, which was not marked off from the scenery, represented fortifications, and the spectators lolled there at their ease on excellent carpets, amid lustres and garlands of flowers. The orchestra, placed out of sight, was heard now on one side, now on the other.

Nor had the organisers neglected any means of strengthening the play itself by a great variety of spectacles—a prelude played by children; a prologue; four pantomimes between the acts, representing the story of Jason, with bulls made of stuffed hides, their nostrils flaming, Venus surrounded by Cupids, Neptune drawn through the flames by fantastic monsters, Juno encircled by a flight of birds so natural that even Castiglione, who had had them made, for a moment believed them to be real. These pantomimes were danced through in the cleverest fashion, with wonderful mechanical effects. At the close a Cupid recited some verses, concealed viols gave forth a ‘song without words,’ and a quartette of voices concluded with a hymn to Cupid.

And after all, if the ladies had not actually the direction of this platonic entertainment, they lost nothing thereby; it was dedicated to them, and the whole performance had for its aim the glorification of ideal love. Such a representation assumed an elevated and almost solemn character, similar in kind to the performances at Bayreuth in these days.

Was the _Calandra_ a masterpiece? No. The plot turned upon the difficulty of distinguishing between two twins, brother and sister, who changed clothes as circumstances demanded; from this Bibbiena derived risky situations, broad jokes, and a complicated dénoûment. But it achieved an immense success. It was represented again at Urbino in 1513, and afterwards at the Vatican on the occasion of a visit from Isabella d’Este. On that supreme stage its licenses came under the fierce light of criticism, and scandalised some of the cardinals; but on the other hand it was so magnificently interpreted, it was so excellent “in dramatic elegance, in wit, well-knit construction, and gaiety,” that the enthusiasm was unbounded. The marchioness Isabella did not rest till she had organised a similar performance, an event which took place in 1520. From that time innumerable editions popularised the _Calandra_, which was chosen many years afterwards by the town of Lyons for its festivities in honour of Catherine de’ Medici.

The drama of the time attained its highest perfection at the Vatican under Leo X. The skill of the actors, all men of fashion, their sober Attic style, without a trace of the mere craftsman, made the drama an artistic delight. As yet no women appeared on the stage. Their parts were sustained by men, and in this connection we must present to our fair readers a young prelate named Tommaso Inghirami, who was the coryphaeus of female parts at the court of Leo X. A Florentine and an intimate friend[247] of the pope, who, as everyone knows, had his own portrait painted along with Inghirami by Raphael,—so perfect a writer that Erasmus calls him “the Cicero of the age,”—Inghirami could have taken one of the most notable positions in this illustrious generation if his amiable and indolent dilettantism had not led him to believe that writing books was carried to excess. He was satisfied with shining in conversation, and in that he was inimitable: Bembo and Sadoleto constantly speak of him with enthusiasm, and, moreover, in one of the most appreciative but critical societies that ever existed, he won for himself as a conversationalist a European renown. If he had not the extraordinary gaiety of Bibbiena, he spoke with dazzling passion, wit, and fire; his large coal-black eyes have an astonishing power: looking at them, one feels light flashing from his soul.

He had an ardent love for the theatre. One day, when playing the part of Phaedra in the _Hippolytus_ of Seneca before Cardinal St. George, he so captivated the spectators by his distinction, and especially by his passion, that the name of “Phaedra” became inseparably fastened to him. He was a preacher, the learned librarian of the Vatican, the dignified Bishop of Ragusa; but, for all that, from one end of Europe to the other he was no longer known except as “Phaedra,” or at most “Thomas Phaedra.” Only, the name was masculinised: thus Erasmus wrote: “I knew and loved _Phaedrum_.”

Unhappily, about 1505, letters from Rome spread a deplorable piece of news: Phaedra is putting on flesh, Phaedra is big. “So much the better,” retorts Bembo in Greek, “we wish she may have twins!” The portrait in the Pitti Palace shows him to us, indeed—this superb platonist type of the pseudo-woman—as by no means a slender man. There is no doubt he had been handsome! His eyes continue to flash and throw their unabated fire towards the ceiling; he still has his fair, plump hand, his fine mouth; and yet, seated at his table, he no longer looks anything but a handsome prelate.

Radiating from Rome under the auspices of ladies like Isabella d’Este or connoisseurs like Ludovico Gonzaga, bishop of Mantua, the dramatic art reigned nobly in the courts and castles of Italy, without losing anything of its elegant and artistic cachet. It adapted itself to all circumstances with marvellous flexibility, ranging from the opera-ballet played in the open air[248] to genuine comedy and tragedy. But, like the Novels and Romances, it assumed a licentious and even cynical character, which everybody regarded as natural. Thus at Turin, in the early days of Lent in the year 1537, a comedy of the most daring kind was performed: “How warmly the ladies here received it!” exclaims an eye-witness. At Foligno, the pontifical prefect, a certain Orfino, superintended in person the staging of _Marescalco_, an extremely light production of Aretino; and soon after the performance this worthy pillar of pontifical “tyranny” wrote to the author, begging another piece of the same stamp. The _Ruffiana_ of Salviano and many other pieces of a salacious turn won tempestuous applause. Some people took alarm and declared the theatre to be a hotbed of immorality. The Senate of Venice, by decree of December 29, 1509, forbade any performance, even the recitation of an eclogue in a private drawing-room, under penalty of a year’s imprisonment and exile, “irremissible,” in the wording of the decree. (However, in a secret addendum, the Senate reserved the right of pronouncing the penalty, and by a large majority.) In spite of this, the _Calandra_ was performed at Venice in 1524 without any difficulty arising.

The Italian drama, lacking the support of the ladies, had little success in France.[249]

They lived there on the old Mysteries. The performance of these was usually got up in a convent, or by a city; and, unlike the Italian drama, it retained a character of patriotic and moral instruction rather than of a work of art.[250] Thus we find Louis XII. bestowing a pardon on an _impresario_ guilty of some criminal peccadillo, on account of his excellence in his profession.

Italianists and French platonists respected this tradition. In 1506 the town of Amboise got up a performance before Louise of Savoy of the Mystery of the Passion, “the most beautiful that could be discovered.” A priest played the part of Christ; the performance lasted a week, and was so successful that two years afterwards M. de Longueville wished to repeat it at Châteaudun, and engaged in a somewhat acrimonious correspondence on the subject with the functionaries of Amboise, whom he accused of purloining the copy. This performance was very costly; the town took five years (which seemed an enormous period in those days) to liquidate a debt of four thousand livres contracted on the occasion. It does not appear that Louise of Savoy, who was then residing at the château, contributed in any way towards the expenses, as M. de Longueville did at Châteaudun; but she certainly did not disapprove of it; and towards the middle of the century it was again in the presence of a thoroughly platonist woman, the second Margaret of France, that the last known representations of the art of the Mysteries are said to have taken place.

With all her daring on other points, the first Margaret maintained a remarkable attitude of reserve in regard to the theatre. She contented herself with experiments in an intermediate style of drama,—religious comedies, a sort of Italianised ‘morality,’ easier to produce and not so long-drawn-out as the ancient Mysteries, yet neither very pious, nor very amusing, nor much calculated to take the public by storm. The result was that the drama long retained traces of its original character. So late as the 18th century Voltaire dedicated a tragedy to the pope, and fumed at not being able to get it performed at Geneva. The only cosmopolitan kind of piece was that of the farces, knockabouts,[251] harlequinades, carnival drolleries, to which the most illustrious platonists of Florence attached their names.[252] Harlequin and Punch were always a success in France: “They have something that sets you laughing without being amused”; but they introduced nothing new. The French farce had long been flourishing on the boards; the Italian was only a competitor.

To sum up, the women of the Renaissance, as we see, did not try to be savants or blue-stockings. They skimmed the cream off books and works of art so as to get what suited their mission, that is, something to talk about and to go into raptures over. They did not rise to what was called “humanism,” like the prelates; they stopped short at loving intellectual beauty more than plastic beauty; they cultivated a literature of sentiment and passion, and took a keen delight in beauty of form. They behaved as instructed women, and above all as women of feeling, as women who wished to please, nobly faithful to their single-eyed pursuit of elevated love.