CHAPTER I
POLITICAL INFLUENCE
The foregoing pages will have enabled the reader to see how little the platonist women sought to exert a direct influence in affairs. They aimed rather at moral and social influence. In no sense were they women of action, believing likely enough that the course of events would become modified naturally when men had changed. Conforming to the aphorism, “Woman is supreme only as woman,” they devoted themselves to the skilful development of the sources of their superiority, leaving their inferiorities carefully in the shade. They avoided all masculine modes—the rustic sort of sexless unattractive women, most at home in the stables, strong-minded creatures who looked for a love they never inspired; they studiously left to men the keen-edged activities of life—law, politics, military service, all the needful barriers against social inundation. Louise of Savoy was almost the only woman who so far cherished the old ideas as to regret that she was a woman; who loved to play a part in politics, and whose intelligence and energy won praise in terms that recalled the great women of the past, notably Blanche of Castile. She was a realist of the old type, who had lovers as a matter of course, but gave scant thought to winning hearts: thus wholly differing from the new order of women. And yet, by a singular chance in the working of the old laws of monarchical succession, the world has perhaps never seen more women called to till the places of men in the sphere of statecraft. After all, monarchy is not a principle of pure reason: it is incapable of mathematical demonstration: it is a principle springing wholly from sentiment. Its advantage lies in this—that in a world of tragic pettiness it gives a nation something to love.
Many women played important parts in these masculine struggles, among which they were thrown in their own despite. The period was one of constant turmoil, and they had no opportunity of enjoying a life of quiet secluded happiness.
Among them was that unhappy mother, Isabella of Aragon, who was persecuted by Ludovico il Moro, the uncle, and, as some said, the assassin of her husband, and held captive in France by Louis XII.—a luckless, warm-hearted, valiant figure who, in the effort to win Milan back for her son, maintained a desperate struggle with the whole of Europe.
Then too there was Jeanne of Aragon, that beautiful sunny-haired woman, with features of rare distinction and sweetness, in her day the idol of Nifo and the prototype of beauty. She had married Ascanio Colonna, a soldier of fortune who had brought his affairs to a desperate pass. Poor woman! On every side she saw blank desolation. She had just lost her eldest son by a sudden death when creditors began to harass her and drive her second son to ruin; and from the magnificent windows of the Colonna palace, where she was imprisoned by order of Pope Paul IV., she saw the pontifical troops marching by on the way to seize her castles. She could endure it no longer. One morning she disappeared, no one knows how, but probably in disguise: at one of the gates of Rome she found a horse ready saddled, and she performed the astonishing feat of riding to Naples without drawing rein. At Naples she became the centre of a cruel strife: her husband had her son arrested, and the son denounced the father. Ascanio fell, struck by an unknown dagger. And when his charming wife, whose golden hair had never a fleck of grey, came in her turn to die, they must bury her with her husband, and could find for the shuddering tomb no inscription but the touching words: “A great-hearted woman, a very loving wife.”
In a higher sphere even Margaret of Austria was but a genuine woman, an admirable mother who never had any children. Compelled by family duty to rule the Netherlands during the long minority of her nephew Charles the Fifth, through all those years of toil and difficulty she set but one aim before her, the preservation of peace. She was good, benevolent, intelligent, but not happy: “Twice married and yet a maid,”[280] as she said, then the widow of the handsome Philibert of Savoy, she would have preferred the ‘tiniest grain’ that satisfied her heart’s craving to the dignities that were poisoning her life; and she made no secret of it. On her tomb she ordered to be set this striking emblem of disillusionment: ‘_Fortune, Infortune!_’[281]
And the great Anne of France, ‘the lady of Beaujeu,’ condemned to an attitude of ‘knitted brows’ and drawn sword as a means of reassuring her good subjects and keeping the bad in awe, that haughty, ambitious, close-fisted, masculine woman, as she was called by those whom she had reduced to a proper sense of the duty of prompt obedience—no one was in reality less like the cold statue she appeared in official life. It was enough to watch her features in the hour of strife, and of triumph even; they twitched and quivered, and were only controlled by a visible effort.[282] A modest, it might almost be said a humble woman, she was constantly a prey to self-distrust, never acting without advice, almost heart-broken at her victories, for her one dream was of quenching animosities; caring for nothing but peace, justice, and a well-ordered State, and carrying her loathing of extreme ideas to the point of appearing obtuse.
When her brother was able to assume the government she disappeared from the scene, quietly, with the least possible display, happy to seek retirement at her splendid place at Moulins, amid all she held dear. She had conceived so little taste for political life that she gave her daughter a forcible recommendation to avoid its mazes: “Mind your own business,” she said; in other words, keep strictly to your own part, and if duty demands a temporary withdrawal, resume it as quickly as possible, and be egoistic enough to make the winning of love your sole quest.
Such was the attitude towards civil emancipation and the careers proper to men that was taken up by women of the highest distinction, whom glory might well have led off in the wrong direction. La Rochefoucauld could hardly have had them in mind when he enunciated the unsound maxim: “There is no renouncing ambition for love.” To renounce ambition was all that these women desired, or rather their ambition was love itself; when the chances of life forced them upon the stage, their one desire was for a man to lean upon. Diplomatists, of necessity psychological folk, were under no delusion in the matter; when they had dealings with a princess, forthwith we see them on the look-out for the man or men behind. “Giacomo Feo appears to me the pivot of the State,” wrote Prudhomme, ambassador at the court of Catherine Sforza; the poor man had just made the discovery that Feo’s will was law. The great trouble of Anne of France was that she could find no support in her husband, a man of complete integrity and excellent disposition, but unstable as water.
On the other hand, among women of but average intelligence, there were busy bodies with a lust for notoriety, parade, admiration, always ready to interfere in anything and everything, to the utter despair of serious workers. Of these Renée of France, duchess of Ferrara, may serve as an example. Born a daughter of France, she considered that her insignificant husband had been too highly honoured in wedding her, denied him her bed, lived in her own circle, and entered into diplomatic relations on her own account. Not that she had any definite political aims: her method was the simple one of pulling in opposite directions to her husband, which at a distance gives her conduct a look of inconsistency. Did she hold with Rome, or Geneva? She would receive Ignatius Loyola in the morning, Calvin in the afternoon, and anyone else when the fancy took her. To her France was all in all; but the French government had only to request someone to cross the frontier for her to receive the exile with open arms. In somewhat limping verse Marot acknowledged her grant of a pension (diminutive, it is true) which entailed upon him no duties but those of a lover:
Mes amis, j’ai changé ma dame; Une autre a dessus moi puissance, Née deux fois, de nom et d’âme.[283]
Re-born indeed both were, and it may even be said that their life was a constant succession of re-incarnations, in creeds and amours of hues as shifting as the chameleon’s; for Marot notoriously proved faithful to nothing but his pensions. Neither of them had any part or lot in platonism. Marot chose to become its recognised flouter; Renée was merely a woman of a restless spirit, without any solid abilities. In public ceremonies she appeared at her husband’s side; within their own doors she was perpetually at odds with him: an exasperating woman indeed, dead to the finer feelings. The duke of Ferrara was not master in his own duchy. One day he banished one of the most obnoxious of his wife’s ladies, a Madame de Soubise: the lady instantly proceeded to arrange an interview between the duchess and the King of France, and it was with the utmost difficulty that this menacing combination was prevented from becoming an accomplished fact.
The duchess had a lover, by no means of the platonic order, in the son-in-law of this Madame de Soubise. He was a M. de Pons, a scion of a family which enjoyed the singular privilege of rendering services of this nature to royal ladies. Again the duke of Ferrara had much ado to stifle scandal in this direction. Having recourse to the time-honoured method, he sent M. de Pons on a mission to France, with sufficiently general instructions, which found a natural reflection in the vagueness of the official despatches. But the private letters of the duchess to the ambassador were explicit enough in all conscience. She tells him, for instance, that she is giving the hospitality of her bed to the little poodle he had left behind at Ferrara, fondling it and kissing it, “since,” she adds, “I have no one else here now.” Now, mark the complexity of this feminine diplomacy! Attached to the service of our gay ambassador was a spy in the duchess’s pay. But this was matched by the fact that her own letters were intercepted and read in the “dark closet” of Ferrara, with the result that the duke lost whatever remnant of doubt he may perchance have nourished, but had the charming consolation of locking up in his archives the journal in which she set down her doings and secret thoughts for the sole benefit, as she imagined, of her absent lover. The inevitable outcome of this game of cross purposes was the impossibility of foreseeing when the mission of M. de Pons would be concluded. But it would argue great simplicity not to imagine that the duchess also had her “dark closet”; and in fact, she had arranged for the interception and perusal of letters addressed to the lucky Pons by one of her own ladies of honour, letters which, like hers, embodied a private diary, and were as ardent as her own. It remains only to add that Pons had left at Ferrara a lawful wife (the inspiration of Giraldi’s muse) who loved him with equal warmth and devotion, and bore him beautiful children. But all things come to an end, even diplomacy when there are more reasons for concluding negotiations than for commencing them. So it came about that M. de Pons returned, and the duke philosophically shut his eyes and stopped his ears until the day when he took the liberty of turning the key on the daughter of France whom he had been so much honoured in espousing.
The duchess of Ferrara belonged to a school which was unhappily of large extent, and was in great measure the cause of the ruin of feminism: the school namely of women who were somewhat intoxicated with their power, and who forced their way by hook or crook into politics and life. In France more than one woman of this sort might be cited from the reign of Henri II.
Serious women, however, very clearly saw that if they were to avoid a fall they must take only an indirect part in affairs. When the great sculptor Sansovino appeared on the point of sinking under a moral crisis, it seemed quite natural that Aretino should appeal to his young wife to come to his aid! There you have the woman’s rôle! Vittoria Colonna, likewise, restrained her husband in the flush of an intoxicating and perhaps perilous triumph, by a letter which has justly remained celebrated: “Not by the greatness of your domains or titles, but by your virtue, will you win the honour which your descendants may make their boast. For my part I have no desire to be the wife of a king; I am the wife of the great captain who has vanquished all kings, not by his valour merely, but by his magnanimity.”
Such was the language of a philosophical woman, accustomed to take lofty views of things, and to live in the atmosphere of the Beautiful, that is to say, a life of mingled serenity and strength. Her reserve of energy, lying hid under a wealth of kindliness, could only show itself in times of difficulty: “The tongue is feminine, the arm is masculine,” said an old Italian proverb.[284] The tongue directs the arm; there are circumstances in which the tongue may sustain the arm, but that is not its chief duty.
Woman’s part, it is admitted, is to act as a moderating influence in joy or grief. We shall therefore not dwell upon that point, but confine ourselves to answering a question of some delicacy. Women have been reproached with misusing their powers, and with holding men too much under their thumb.
To loathe war, to advocate perpetual peace, conciliation, hatred of everything resembling an appeal to force, is admirable enough; but this advocacy itself has its limits. Is not war also a salutary thing? Does it not brace up nations sunk in the torpor of bourgeois materialism? War has a nobleness and beauty of its own. And indeed, are we to degrade men into carpet knights, jousting in cap and feather before a court deliciously feminine? Horses, standards, heraldic devices, the sheen of armour, the clash of weapons, the din of clarions and trumpets, of flutes and hunting-horns and all the instruments that stir the blood,—inspiriting as all these are supposed to be, and well as they may symbolise courage, are they sufficient to preserve the masculine virtues? Love is often enervating. Where will the army be,[285] what will become of the country, if women carry us up with them into the clouds? Mantegna replies by showing us Samson and Delilah,[286] Botticelli with his picture of the cupids stripping Mars of his armour as he lies sleeping by Venus’ side.[287]
But we have already given the true answer.
Certainly woman’s place is not in the camp. The virago has no vogue: men do not fight women nor take them prisoners. Women do in truth loathe war. But when the war is noble they become its advocates. War is a noble thing when it is waged in self-defence, when honour and life and liberty are at stake. Then, be sure, women are not lagging in the rear. Beatrice d’Este with a stout heart dragged Ludovico il Moro to the camp facing the French; and there, showing him an army quaking for all its cheers at that solemn hour the eve of battle, she set the feeble heart of her husband beating in time with her own. In November 1502 the ladies of Urbino besieged the ducal palace with offers of their jewels for the purpose of repelling Caesar Borgia. At Sienna, the women, led by ladies of the highest rank, set to work to carry baskets of earth upon their heads, and, what is still more extraordinary, they agreed to perform this service systematically under the orders of three lady captains recognisable by their satin petticoats. One young girl pushed her enthusiasm to such a length as to disguise herself in a soldier’s uniform in order to pass the night on the ramparts. Monluc[288] himself, that hardened old warrior, waxed enthusiastic in praise of such notable courage, and promised eternal glory to these fair ladies. And was not Anne of France familiar with the camp? Have we not told the story of that Françoise d’Amboise who raised a troop to repel a band of brigands!
But to fire a woman’s heart a just cause is needed, otherwise she execrates war. Clever people may talk as they please,—praise the Amazons of Georgia, the ancient Ligurian women who tilled their fields, or recall the visions of Plato in the fifth book of the _Republic_ or the seventh of the _Laws_ on the military and political aptitudes of women: these are paradoxes which influence no one. Maria Puteolana, who attained the rank of captain in the Italian army, was laughed at; and, to tell the truth, the military inspiration of certain heroines at critical moments was regarded as purely adventitious. It came to St. Catherine of Sienna “by the riches of grace”; to Joan of Arc “by divine grace, by mystery divine.” So strong was the belief in Joan’s saintship that it brought her to the stake. She resembled Deborah and Judith; her story was repeated in the most insignificant hamlets, and all France gave ceaseless thanks to God for so clearly manifesting Himself through the feeble arm of a woman, a shepherd-lass: “_sicut populum tuum per manum feminae liberasti_.” But this was only an additional stanza in the love litany (long enough already) lisped by poets and the faithful to the Virgin of Virgins: a love-poem, but at the same time a malediction on war and the spirit of conquest.
When men spoke, even in favourable terms, of the women who had been thrown by the force of circumstances among tragic incidents like these, it was as though they were celebrating a sort of suicide. Castiglione has devoted verses charged with real emotion to the memory of a young girl who was mortally wounded at the storming of Pisa in 1499, at the moment when she was leading on the defenders. She was carried away dying, he says, and as she lay upon her mother’s bosom, she exclaimed that her country owed her no other bridal! “Virago,” he adds, wiping his eyes. The last word on these military women was said by a woman, the charming Isabella Villamarina, who was resolved to don man’s clothes and start for the army like the wife of Mithridates, with no thought of fighting, but to be with her husband, the prince of Salerno, whom she madly loved. But the prince insisting on her staying at home, it occurred to her to pass the whole of the day in bed, hoping to see her husband in her dreams!
It was not simply by dint of philosophical reasoning that women avoided active and masculine occupations. They were well aware that they had everything to lose if they lived the life of men. Men rode rough-shod over them. Such women as an evil star did actually fling into the vortex—and these were rare—were invariably women of a robust and sensuous type.
Could a more striking example be cited than Catherine Sforza, a luckless princess perpetually condemned to stand on the defensive, and on this account fated to remain on the outskirts of the world in which she might have played so lofty a part? A notable woman, endowed with nature’s most prodigal and magnificent gifts; tall, strong, good-looking enough, with a clear, superb complexion; in speech warm, forceful, impulsive, her voice ringing out for the most part like a trumpet call, but capable also of enchanting caresses. There was nothing theatrical in her wonderful force of mind, which asserted itself in grand outbursts on all occasions, as when, for instance, she wrote to her sons from the depth of her dungeon in the castle of Sant’ Angelo, bidding them not to be concerned for her. “I am habituated to grief,” she said; “I have no fear of it.” Or on that other occasion, the day of the storming of her capital, when the boldest of the French, forcing their way into the innermost entrenchments, succeeded finally, after unheard-of exertions, in capturing her, like a lioness caught in a snare. Here we have the reverse of the medal: strip her of her armour and she is a woman, one of the feeblest of her sex. Catherine exhausted all her vigour in politics: she was swayed by her senses; almost unknown to herself she imparted to all about her the unquenchable thirst for sensual pleasure by which she was herself devoured. Her first three husbands died by the assassin’s knife. The magnificent Ordelaffi, one of her foes, would never have wrested the county of Imola from her by mere force of arms; but to vanquish the woman herself by the magnetism of the senses was but the sport of an afternoon. And when Catherine, hopelessly entangled in these toils, heard the people discussing her, the lioness roared: sentences of imprisonment and the strappado were the outward and visible signs of her love. The scene changes; the amiable Ordelaffi gives place to a lover more worthy of her. Before the virile force of this man, threatening constantly to sell his soul to the devil, and (a more serious matter) the state to the Turks, Catherine is subjugated: she marries him. Feo becomes an odious tyrant: denunciations, persecutions, tortures are his wedding gifts. As was to be expected, Feo fell stabbed to the heart under the very eyes of his sovereign, and then Terror spread her vampire wings, and the silent prisons swam with holocausts of blood.
Were we wrong in saying, at the outset, that under the exquisite charm of life’s manifestations, the brute in man was struggling all the time! Possibly it was imagined that in muzzling the brute, women were obeying a natural instinct, and that there were certain sensualities and bestial horrors little to be feared in regard to women brought up in an atmosphere refined almost to rarefaction. According to Nifo and others, all that was wanted was to encourage recourse to the platonist theories. And yet here we see, in appalling contradiction, this great figure of Catherine Sforza dominating her epoch, as though to show to what a pitch the intoxication of masculine women could rise. For at bottom she was a woman of an excellent heart—this Catherine who died under the name of Medici; a genuine sister of mercy, thoughtful, generous, diligent in feeding the poor in time of famine, and, when an epidemic was raging, marvellous as a sovereign and a sick-nurse! And how lovely she was! How well she knew, in the intervals of her frenzied existence, how to enjoy life, when she gave herself up to the beauty of her flowers, the charm of her gardens, the delight of seeing her splendid drove of cattle peacefully grazing in her parks! Dogs never had a more tender protectress. She evoked her people’s enthusiasm and applause when, riding in a red skirt at the head of her huntsmen, like a legendary fairy, and reining up her horse with her delicate scented hand, she smiled upon them all, her beautiful white teeth flashing between her full ruby lips.
What did she lack, then, to make her in very truth a woman? Only womanliness, and the exquisite power of using love as a quickening instead of a destroying spirit. With her, it was quite useless to assume airs of ethereality. The style she needed is that which we find in the letters of one of the men she loved, Gabriele Piccoli. This Piccoli served her as ambassador, and one day Catherine scolded him for making too free a use of poetry in his despatches. Upon that, he lost his head; he felt that his heart was all aflame, “boiling over” he says; he was beside himself with exultation, speaking of his Divinity, his Hope, anxious to take flight and abandon everything in order to live “under the shadow and in the confidence of his princess”; then, with a sudden transition, he reports in the most precise terms various diplomatic schemes, not a little complicated. In reality, the letter is that of a man speaking to a woman of forty, and seeing her as she was, good-hearted and tender, yet vigorous and virile. Why did he love her? Because, all said and done, she intoxicated men. In the evening she would dance like a mad thing,[289] and next morning go on a pilgrimage: a strange wild creature. She ended by marrying a Medici, a man of delicate, idealistic, almost effeminate temperament. There is nothing so strange as the colloquy which took place between her and Savonarola. She had written to the monk to request his prayers, and he replied in a charming letter, of mingled serenity and strength, in which he takes high ground in rebuking her life. This letter is dated June 18, 1497, the very day on which all the churches in Florence were thundering with the papal proscription launched against him. Ah! how tragic, how impressive an encounter was this, between two souls equally belated, though in a different sense: the pure monk face to face with death: the woman, born too soon or too late, the prey of destiny! The French formed an excellent judgment of this woman of bronze and thunder, who had ceased to be a woman: they called one of their most formidable pieces of artillery “Madame de Forli.”
There was one woman, perhaps, who diffused through the camps a real chivalrous enthusiasm: but this was in Spain, and faith and fatherland were concerned. Isabella the Catholic ordered that she should be buried on the battlefield of Grenada, wrapped in the broad folds of her royal mantle, as though to preach lessons of valour even after her death. To this day her great soul appears to hold sway in Spain.
She was a wonderful mixture of different kinds of heroism. She was brave and resolute without a touch of the virago. After a night spent in dictating orders, she would tranquilly resume a piece of church embroidery, or, like Anne of France, the practical education of her daughters. In her own private affairs she was plain and simple, in public she was all ostentation. She was a conversationalist of the first order, and loved to attack high philosophical questions, here and there dropping into a discussion some original phrase, some bold and clear-cut thought, while her deep blue eyes lit up and darted upon her company a certain glance of warmth and loyalty the renown of which still clings to her name. A strange woman! ardent like Anne of France, guileless, straightforward, somewhat starched perhaps, but all heart for her friends, so fond a mother that she died of the loss of her children, so thorough a woman that she declared she knew only four fine sights in the world: “a soldier in the field, a priest at the altar, a beautiful woman in bed, a thief on the gibbet.”
No king could ever have exercised the same ascendancy. Spain is too proud a country! A Spaniard to whom you speak of an army will tell you with perfect coolness that it consisted of 3000 Italians, 3000 Germans, and 6000 soldiers, that is to say, 6000 Spaniards. Isabella and Anne of France were of a style which could only succeed in Spain or France. Castiglione himself shrinks in awe before such figures, declaring that he knows nothing like them in Italy.
Michelangelo showed himself to be less pessimistic, and has constantly endowed his women with ideal traits of greatness of soul. His _Virgin_ of the Casa Buonarotti, with the profile of a Roman matron, holds herself erect and looks straight before her with the forceful eye of a woman who would dare anything in defence of her treasure, this feeble little man to be, gathered so close to her breast that but little of his back is visible: in very truth, _fructus ventris tui_.
Every lady must have seen the exquisite _Pietà_ in St. Peter’s at Rome.[290] It is the finest monument ever erected to the honour of the sex. Overwhelmed by the tragedy of Savonarola, Michelangelo has given utterance in that picture to the cry of his soul: he makes his appeal to women in the name of Christ.
On her knees, with simplicity, without sensible effort, the Mother bears her dead Son—a cruel burden! Her wide-flowing drapery, her beautiful form, the purity of the lines of her face, all reveal so great a force of soul that the fact of her appearing as youthful as her son causes no surprise. But the Christ is not, for His part, pressing heavily upon her. Though He is dead, one feels that He still lives, from the love which speaks forth from His wan, worn features: by the power of love He has vanquished divine Death, a death He sought, and almost loved. And the pure, grave mother, filled with a profound compassion, seems yearning to bring Him forth a second time, into a complete imperishable life: hers is an impersonal type, not representing this or that woman, this or that mother:
Le corps, enfin vaincu, recule devant l’âme, Et la terre, ayant vu cette Vierge et ce Dieu, Va comprendre l’Amour et respecter la Femme.[291]
Michelangelo exalts the eternal woman, sustaining the Man of Sorrows by the strength of love. He has left us as his final bequest, as it were, the symbol of all the strenuous women of the fifteenth century, who had just run so glorious a race in Italy, and who saw from serene heights the suffering they themselves never felt—the ancestors of Vittoria Colonna and Margaret of France. And yet he had no wish to exaggerate. When he came to paint the _Last Judgment_, he no longer set woman in the foreground, like the naïve old masters; he placed her respectfully in the rear, giving her an attitude of humility, suppliance, and compassion, because, even for him, woman was before all things the incarnation of sweetness and kindliness, and because, in those dread hours when it is for power and justice to pronounce the final doom, every woman must needs stand in the shade.