CHAPTER II

MORAL INFLUENCE

The moral purification of society is assuredly one of the conditions of happiness; hence it was one of the chief ends of platonism. The 16th century, unfortunately, was one of the most corrupt periods known to our history, an undisputed fact from which some people have concluded that art was the cause of moral decadence, because art in itself is unmoral, and never acts otherwise than as “a stimulus to debauchery.” These good paradoxical souls had ancestors as long ago as the 15th and 16th centuries—ancestors who held the same theory and saw in aestheticism a fatal blight to humanity. They refused to acknowledge the idea of the beautiful: and the belief that a careful observation discovers some trace of beauty everywhere—that even in the mind of a criminal there are sometimes uncommon, indeed splendid faculties, unhappily turned to evil—seemed to them, as it seems to their successors to-day, a miserable error calculated to lead mankind to perdition. Platonist women and the Roman world saw in it, on the contrary, a pledge of regeneration and civilisation.

We have already said that the world needed no further urging on the downward path; love was only understood apart from marriage, and all that remained to settle was whether this love should remain material or might possibly become spiritual.

All the contemporaries of platonism who regretted the “good old times” (and in France they were many)—Marot, Rabelais, Collérye nicknamed Roger Bontemps, Coquillart the sworn foe of the fashionable world, “bucks” as he called them—all these clearly explain their position; they lamented the disappearance of love “_à la française_,” a whole-hearted love without qualifications and periphrases; a love that was very pleasant if not very moral. And as to the folk who believed that virtue was corrupted by the salons, they had only to stroll through the fairs, look in at the rustic festivities and balls, and chat with one or two tavern wenches or a village “old wife,” or even to penetrate into some of the country houses. In Germany, where morals retained their antique savour, it cannot be pleaded that Dr. Faustus, with the little crippled love who waits on him, or the coarse bourgeois Venuses of Wohlgemüth or Albert Dürer, existed only in imagination!

The first contact with Italy, so far from purifying these manners, only brought about the exaltation of sensualism; one of the most popular of French writers, Octavien de Saint-Gelais, had no scruple in raising a statue to “Sensuality.” The French saw in Italy only the pagan side of the Renaissance, that of the Malatestas[292] and others, and, as often enough happens when the field of contemplation is so narrow, they perceived nothing but the more striking and startling phenomena—the flash of daggers, the poison bowl; so much that an excellent young man, Louis de Beauvau, who had wedded a young person of humble rank against the wishes of his family, and repented of it, profited by the expedition of Charles VIII. to get together a fine collection of poisons as he went from town to town. Certain Italians who had come to France were regarded as so many jinnish heralds of moral anarchy. “The only way to escape women is not to see them at all,” exclaims one of them, Andrelini. In truth, it was not long before Italian society presented a lamentable spectacle of decomposition; observers felt painful heart-burnings and overwhelming disgust. “This is too much,” cries Palingenius, dubbed the Star of the Renaissance: “let me flee away to some peaceful, solitary shore.”

From the year 1515 onwards the court of France advanced boldly along the same path, dragging the country with it. “Paris is a fair city to live in, but not to die in.” What a pass things had come to! When five years had elapsed, Lemaire, who had been one of the prophets of the new order, paints the situation in terrible colours, demanding as remedy a convocation of the Courts of Love. Charming tribunals, indeed: but what good would they serve? In the forefront of this corrupt and putrid society the official poet shows us his young king, with his coarse sensual lips wrinkled in a hideous smile, “consumed by women” body and soul.

Free love flourished. The saying, “In case of love, one dame doth not suffice,”[293] answered to the accepted axiom on the fickleness of women. The noblest of ladies declared themselves “lieutenants of Venus.” It was love in its basest form, a matter of trade and barter, cold as ice; nothing was wanting to its degradation—diplomatic husbands, women who were “merchandise for kings,” but a merchandise which proffered itself! It is alleged that Louis XII. in his decrepitude knew not in Italy how to defend the virtue of which he was so tenacious. The excellent Margaret of France was amazed when a young girl of good family did not rush to sacrifice herself to a caprice of her brother.[294] Young or old, it made no difference. Women were known to get up bogus law-suits for the pleasure of corrupting the judges. Others, with greater attractions, flocked to the favourite or the minister of the day; others, more numerous, threw themselves at the moneyed men, as rivers rush to the sea. No one would guess what shameful shifts masked some lives that seemed a brilliant round of music and receptions and play; or what a singular population of waiting-maids, pimps, and procuresses of all ranks, forced their unwelcome services upon a respectable man—

Piteulx comme ung beau crucifix![295]

Vice was everywhere the same, except for some trifling shades. If an Italian and a Frenchman told the same story of an honest woman seduced by means of gold, they practically differed in nothing but the tariff; the Italian lady exacts a thousand crowns and disappoints the purchaser, the Frenchwoman asks only a hundred and faithfully keeps her word. When the matter comes to light, the Italian husband is very deferential to the seducer, but poisons the lady; the French husband contents himself with sending her home to her parents for a time.

We must not be understood to believe that honest women no longer existed: on the contrary, there were still many. The only difficulty was to find them, because they kept out of sight, or, at any rate, were too apt to regard the exercising of an influence as beneath them.

Good women are often passive, incredulous, or at least resigned in regard to evil. Many of them, brought up on the ancient principle of subjection and abnegation, would ask nothing better than to shut eyes and ears with the quasi-felicity of mummies petrified in an eternal sleep, and to decline to believe in evil. There the evil is, under their own roof, touching them closely, wounding them: yet still they smile and smile, wishing to appear crowned with roses, and doing their best to fancy they are happy.[296] What delightful reasoning, and how precious to feeble and timid women who would fain eschew strife, and love always!

Vittoria Colonna, for instance, feigned sleep one night while her husband, by her side, indulged in wild antics that pained her deeply. Nifo relates, with the perfect serenity of an egoist, an incident that happened to himself. He had shut himself up in his study to write a _Thesserologia astronomica_. After some days his wife grew anxious, and employed all kinds of stratagems to induce him to relax the rigour of his seclusion. Not succeeding, poor woman! she went in search of a young lady in the neighbourhood, of whom she knew her husband was enamoured, and whom, after she had given her a piece of her mind, she brought back with her. She shut the two up together, with the simple happiness of a faithful dog, flattering herself on having discovered the solution of the puzzle. But no, Nifo remained glued to his _Thesserologia_. Then the good woman lost her head, vowed herself to saints innumerable, made pilgrimage after pilgrimage, and gave many a votive offering. Three months afterward, Nifo, when he had written his last line, issued tranquilly from his tomb, and condescended (so he assures us) to raise his wife from her depression.

Devotion of this kind was apparently not rare among the women of old. There was indeed a classical little story which passed from hand to hand about a Madame de Varambon. Monsieur de Varambon (so the story ran: we must do him at least this justice) was a thrifty fellow, and his wife was grieved to know that his mistress’s apartments were rather poorly furnished. She ended by going herself to look after the furnishing, in profound secrecy. This story excited the hilarity of men every time it was told; some of them regarded Madame de Varambon as an old humbug; others, as a poor godly old soul;[297] and that was the sole reward of her virtue!

Apart from this bent of women themselves for submission and seclusion, we must note also that Frenchmen formed themselves into a sort of league, by no means chivalrous, against women who got “talked about.” If a woman was talked about, it seemed a necessary deduction that there was something bad to say about her, and the mere fact of a lady acquiring any sort of public reputation, though entirely to her honour, apparently gave everyone the right to fling mud at her. This was one of the most formidable obstacles to the moral influence of women. It seemed to many people, in short, that there was no choice between virtue starched, prosaic and wearisome, or no virtue at all: that it consisted for women in the simple devotion to an ideal of family duty—in which, however, they did not always find happiness, and which religion did not always succeed in beautifying, for the family affections are terrestrial, and doubtless will not survive the earth. Husbands maintained this position, finding it convenient. Vice and virtue in all their coarseness (there is a coarseness of virtue) were each shut up, so to speak, in a water-tight compartment: “to each his calling”; no compromise, no nuance, no degree was acknowledged; virtue is always represented by Titian and others with harsh malevolence as uncouth and ill to look upon, while opposite her they represent the true woman as an embodied caress.

Untrue and untenable as this distinction was, no one cared to seek a way out of the dilemma, not even the moralists. Lotto as well as Titian represents the virtuous woman as a goose-girl, in conflict with Venus! And indeed the singular comparison in course of time penetrated to the core of platonist society, though it was softened down like a much attenuated echo. Raphael, then a charming boy of twenty, fresh moulded by the tender hands of two princesses, was conscious of the same thing in his _Vision of a Knight_ in the National Gallery.

To him also the grave woman holding a sword and a book seems a timid creature; he leaves her in the background as though unwilling to show herself, and limns behind her only a rocky steep and a church spire soaring into the sky. The other lady, on the contrary, graceful in form and feature, stands out distinctly before lovely meadows sloping down to a swift-flowing stream. What does she hold? A flower, no more. This is love indeed, but eminently tender, eminently reasonable, almost ineffectual. Raphael was so young!

Why then, even in the eyes of this delicate-minded stripling, does virtue keep this character of ungainliness and frigidity? Were there in his day none of those women of sound mind and steadfast soul who, while knowing how to leave men undisturbed in their pride, how (so to speak) to respect them, knew also how to stimulate them to set happiness above the woes of life? It is not even the lash of passion we are speaking about; great love has some trenchant quality that cleaves a way through materialities; it is purification _par excellence_; it would remove mountains and still the waves. Happy the woman who has once encountered it, thrice happy she who has been able to recognise it and seize it ere it passed! For it has but one defect, its exceeding rarity; and if the moral regeneration of society were absolutely dependent on it, a woman would do better to fling up the struggle, encase herself in triple brass, mystically shut her eyes to evil, await a miracle, and hope for nothing on this earth but the repentant tears of her husband!

We are speaking merely of women of vigour, made to support and guide men—the women whom men style “dragons.” They are a species which achieves little success in the world; men regard them as somewhat too masculine, and are constantly making fun of them, especially when there are good reasons for so doing. At Naples, for instance, one of these dragons—Doña Maria d’Aragona, a respectable mother of seven—created no little amusement because (so the story ran), in her desire for a large experience, she had wished to live with her husband three years as a wife, three as a sweetheart, and three as an enemy. Men do not understand such women; it is a sense they are deficient in. These women were out of date,—women of the 15th century, of the time before Savonarola. They remind one of those old, high, rugged ramparts which perforce crumble away, and to which we prefer a spick-and-span, vulgar boulevard, blocked up with gingerbread stalls.

And yet the moral influence of women, from a social and general standpoint, did make itself felt, especially in Italy. “You must not judge men from the crust,” as Anne of France very well said. The opposing parties were so little divided from each other that it is not easy to distinguish them; there were materialists who did not scorn the ideal, and idealists by no means unsympathetic to the material, and it was that which gave an opening to the moral preacher.

For instance, Nifo, whom we have mentioned as a personal foe to Plato, had begun by fighting against Thomas of Aquinas in the materialist camp; but on being shown his folly by the Bishop of Padua, a prelate of parts, he changed sides with a great flourish of trumpets, fell lustily upon his master Pomponazzi, and became a Roman count with the name and the arms of the Medici: to his own satisfaction and delight, for logical minds love success. And by and by we discover him, folios in hand, falling at the feet of female beauty with surprising agility,—quite eclipsing Victor Cousin, whose passions were of the mere milk-and-water order and very much behind the times. Renan, who has left us an excellent appreciation of Nifo, reproaches him with the somewhat wobbly character of his doctrine; but this is the very thing that interests us. If men were not inconstant, platonism would have no further utility. Nifo, in short, was a converted character. If men are bent on fighting, we must not complain that a woman’s hand can sometimes draw them into the crack regiments.

This means, someone will say, that the conscience and the lofty deductions of a serious or even a distinguished man depend on the rustle of a petticoat or the colour of certain eyes? Even so; if the woman stands for more than a petticoat and two bright eyes, if she really has a heart, ardent and vigorous affections in which the man’s spirit finds refreshment, what could be more natural or moral?

Look at Nifo again. Ugly, hideous, untractable as he was, he completely changed his tune under the influence of a few artificial (perhaps too artificial, indeed!) courtesies; if he retained some of the claws of the primitive man, some thorns of the wild stock which it was so difficult to graft, what does that prove but that under a woman’s fingers the roughest bushes burst into brilliant flower? Nifo even came to wear almost the same moral livery as Bembo. He speaks of Plato only with respect, and of materialism only with disdain as a not very formidable doctrine from which good taste and spiritual refinement cannot but preserve women; he pretends to go as far as the “imaginatives” in the direction of sociological love; he adopts in principle Plato’s theory of love as an intermediary between the Creator and the creature; “beauty—aye, I gladly confess it—is that which produces love.” His only weakness (a very natural one) is that he cannot arrive at the Absolute, as Socrates understood it, without traversing this earth; that he prefers to vague, immaterial, supersensual dallying with love the personal encounter of two living beings. On this head the meanest logicians do not allow themselves to be silenced. They unreservedly, enthusiastically recognise the religion of beauty and love, and its admirable effects on society and the world; but at the same time they are not quite at one about definitions. They pause in a sort of numb fascination before a pretty little piece of piety who suddenly pretends she forgets her body and is only a soul; they are like Dante in Purgatory, when he opened his arms and clasped nothing but air. They do not prostrate soul and body in adoration before a shadow, a reflection, a transient gleam of beauty; it seems good to them to love a particular woman in virtue of a special affinity, or a need of settling down; and in these circumstances they would in good sooth think it great folly to torture themselves under the fallacious plea that sweet love if gratified is slain. Love, they say, is one and indivisible, not too base nor too divine: “You may cite me your heroes, your saints, your angels: you may explore the whole realm of antiquity to unearth types like Socrates and Anaxarchos (or, if you please, Xenocrates, who spent a whole night in tranquil admiration of Phryne): everything is possible. I myself furnish a magnificent example in loving Fulvia without any base desire. But these are masterly achievements of saints or philosophers, and St. Jerome shows a keen insight into humanity when he ordains that men shall either regard all the Lord’s virgins with a generic affection, or shall not love any of them. Horace maintained that with greybeards the flesh is dead; St. Jerome replies: ‘You say that the flesh is dead, and I tell you that the devil is eternal.’ Love must be distinguished from friendship.”[298]

In France it was another story. Men were much more self-assertive. We do not find them appealing to these circumlocutions or these tender ironies. The annihilation of matter would have struck them as almost an outrage. Among them things took an entirely different complexion from that which we have indicated in the feminist society of Italy. Being the masters, they regarded love as indispensable, and beauty as always good: “If we thought ladies were without love, we should long for death”; only, adds Erasmus, “they grant women nothing but from love of sensual pleasure”; and the more highly placed they happened to be, the more natural it seemed to them to degrade love. “To gratify a prince”—we know what that means; there is no question here of an elevated love like the love which fills princesses’ dreams.

The moral conflict on this point was in France acute. When Margaret essayed to purify the society of her court by a leaven of beauty, her entourage checked her, refusing to allow any effort towards embellishing human life with the ideal. These men held too closely to the old logical and realist spirit. They loved Plato, but truth still more. They did not realise that their brutal realism had the effect of throwing women off at a tangent, for a religion of some sort is always necessary; to save themselves from men, women of high birth and noble bearing, carried away by an enthusiasm in some sort heroic, attained to a mystic conception of a life of pure sensibility.

But then what is the beginning and what the end of the dream? Without touching on the cruel questionings of philosophy about the reality of our physical perceptions, or on many of the ambiguous phenomena, where does the vision begin in the moral life, if life involves so many fancies, illusions, loves, gleams, which act upon us but have no real existence?—so many vague aspirations, admirable but unsubstantial? To fall headlong from a height into an abyss is a violent experience which kills too quickly; the mystic vision is only possible on condition of coddling the soul within the four walls of a convent; out in the world it falls and is lost: that was the opinion of the logicians. When Margaret relates with what energy of virtue she escaped the realistic assaults of Bonnivet, and how, at the cost of a few scratches, she has reduced him to the cold comfort of the Ideal, her husband is the first to laugh, saying: “If I had got so far, I should think myself disgraced to fail of attaining my goal.”[299]

It is a cynical saying, and raises a general protest; but Henri d’Albret explains it very placidly, and we cannot give the gist of his retort better than in the following sentence of M. Bourget: “You have the morality of life, without having the morality of the heart.” Henri rejoices to see his wife keep up appearances, but, from the moral standpoint, he finds no great difference between her and himself, except in practical conduct: “She and I are both children of Adam and Eve.” He laughs and sneers at the nebulous philosophical aspirations of the princess, and is not the only man who has got this strange impression that the sins of the spirit and the sins of the flesh are equipollent. “A fortress which parleys is half won,” says with feigned good-humour one of the speakers in the _Heptameron_, appearing to forget that Margaret as an inveterate gossip had readily accepted the sobriquet of Parlamente.[300]

Not merely did the adversaries of platonism accuse it of being only moral in appearance, but this very semblance of morality, resting on a misapprehension, seemed to them an hypocrisy that aggravated the fault. They regarded platonism as evil and wanting in seriousness; Louise of Savoy, an inveterate kill-joy, at once sour and sympathetic in regard to pleasures she is past enjoying, inveighs bitterly against love that is only skin-deep—the vanities and tricks, the husk and chaff of love that is simply a comedy in which two actors show their skill; she prefers a fault without scandal to a scandal without fault. However, the issue seems to her perfectly clear: “Either you love, or you do not. If you love, why impose on yourself the torment of Tantalus? If you do not, why impose it on others?” She would rather succeed in a piece of folly than fail in a virtuous action, however logical and practical.

She has a way all her own of squelching the fancies of her daughter; she allows them to swell and swell, and then gives the merest little pin-prick. Someone speaks, for instance, of a queen clever enough to impose seven years’ preliminary probation on her lover: “Then she didn’t wish to love or be loved!”[301] If someone feelingly exclaims: “When love is strong, the lover knows no meat and drink but the look and voice of the loved one,” she retorts that she would much like to see how he looked on such fare![302] At the conclusion of a droll story, a maid of honour who is a little over-excited declares that she would rather be flung into the river than live in intimacy with a Franciscan; and Louise replies with her placid smile: “Then you can swim well?” The other retorts in great irritation: “I know some who have resisted more prepossessing men than a Franciscan, without blowing their own trumpets about it.” Louise, laughing more than ever, replies, “Still less do they beat the drums about what they have done and granted.”[303] She is a sceptic and a logician; with all her boldness of speech, she is never over-paradoxical. Moreover, she applied her principles to herself, and had such a way of encouraging her daughter’s lovers that they quite naturally paid their addresses to her. At the opening of the _Heptameron_, for instance, one of Margaret’s numerous admirers, furious to see his princess receive a passionate declaration with laughter, hies him to the mother.

Almost everybody in France shared the views of Henri d’Albret and Louise of Savoy. Platonism sprang up among thorns. And so far from there being any bias in its favour, there awoke a reaction against the finnikin absurdities of bygone days,—for instance, against the “bashful knights” who sported furs in summer, and summer cloaks in winter, in order to give ocular demonstration that “love was all-sufficient.” That sort of mysticism struck men as sickly. They preferred frankness and vivacity,—the frothy sparkle of champagne to the sugared liqueur, golden, soft, limpid, heavy, old in bottle, which bore the Italian label. Rabelais, who is our Michelangelo, takes great care not to dive into the mysteries in Ficino’s way, or to pile up a heap of folios after the example of Nifo. Look at him, with his learning and his consummate intellect, sitting before a dish of peas fried in fat, seized with inextinguishable laughter as he thinks of the “celestial and priceless drug” of Plato’s _Symposium_, and deriding all the Picos della Mirandola past and future in the person of Messire Pantagruel, who maintains against all opponents 9764 conclusions, some of them highly platonic, on “the philosophical cream of encyclopaedic questions,” on “the platonic idea, hovering dexterously under the orifice of chaos.” Rabelais dedicates his _Life of Gargantua_ to topers and the gouty.

And then you hear the loud chant, the babel noise, of gold, of Plutus, rising above and drowning all other sounds. Artists no longer cling to the old shabby studio in which they strove after the ideal: they have now come to dwell in palaces, and some there are whose art consists in coining false money or running after the philosopher’s stone—if not in worse occupations. Even where men are wistful and dream, in the heart of melancholy Brittany, the poor human soul, compared by a preacher to a runner started upon the long race for eternal life, halts and stoops at every moment like Atalanta, to pick up apples of gold.[304]

Thus the battle was joined on all sides at once, and the struggle was fierce. Among so many ingratitudes, so many keen-pointed shafts, women needed a proud courage to continue imperturbably spreading through the world the spirit of love, the religion of beauty.

They did not succeed in subduing mankind at large, nor in directing their moral energies. That dream had to be relinquished. They resigned themselves to the thankless task of individually doing what little they could do through their sympathy and tenderness. This was all they could give, and it cost them dear, for it too often involved concessions, many bitter and secret tears, a love mingled with disgust, an unavoidable duplicity!

They had perforce to content themselves, then, with this measure of success. To show clearly in what this success consisted, we shall divide our brief account into two parts; for their sensibility was exerted in two directions. Under their influence virtue and vice became each an art: their defects and excesses were moderated. On the one hand the over harsh virtues were softened, or, if we may coin a word, de-austerified, and endowed with a cheerfulness of aspect they had formerly lacked; on the other, vice was ennobled, and the gap between vice and virtue thereby diminished. In brief, women tried to make life beautiful rather than good, and piously to rehabilitate everything which had possibilities of beauty, in virtue of the principle that the Beautiful _is_ good and purifies all things.

1. THE SOFTENING OF VIRTUE.

The principles already established are, briefly, as follows: happiness resides in love, love consists in self-surrender. Of this there are several modes: one may surrender body and soul, or soul alone—or nothing at all! To give the soul is the true platonism; to give nothing is the false. The surrender of the body is the time-honoured sacrament of marriage.

How did they set about reconciling these various elements? In a manner that was simplicity itself.

We have said that marriage had become a human and reciprocal contract, concluded with a definite object between two fellow-creatures; and logically there was no reason why it should not have ended as it began, by mutual consent, that is, in the community of women[305] according to Plato’s idea.

But on the contrary the platonists, who looked for no poetry in the prose of wedlock, regarded one marriage as quite sufficient, if not excessive. Further, the institution was an ancient one; it was a matter of use and wont. To maintain the organisation of society and the foundations of aristocracy, it was necessary to retain the formula and merely to draw from it the moral consequences implied in the principle of equality of rights.

Up to that time the morality of marriage had been regulated by the authority or even the caprice of the husband. A bastard (provided he was begotten by the husband) had almost the status of a legitimate child; in many cases he was bred at the paternal hearth, away from his mother, under the charge of his father’s wife; and in Italy he very easily secured legitimation,[306] and, if other heirs failed, carried on the family. What was much worse than deceiving his wife, the husband believed he had the right to neglect her. From that time forward retaliation appeared to be the guiding principle; instead of remaining head-nurses, of adopting children from heaven knows where, of toiling to efface all signs of the caprices of their lords and masters, women “unhappily married” no longer saw the necessity of fettering themselves, of refusing their share of happiness, of carefully guarding what was despised.

Luther gave material fixity to this principle by permitting divorce; he maintained marriage, but at the same time allowed re-marriage; in other words, he retrograded as far as possible towards the manners of the past. In case of default, even involuntary, on the part of one of the contracting parties, he thought it quite right to replace “Vashti by Esther.” We know what fortune attended these ideas. Melander,[307] when blessing a “duplicate” marriage of the Landgrave of Hesse, proceeded to say that everything in this world wears out, and that monogamy had had its day. A book of extremely liberal views attributed to Bugenhagen[308] adduced examples of bigamy among the early Christians. Polygamy met with some support; near the end of his life, Ochino[309] became its advocate.

The platonists, however, allowed no retouching. The ancient doctrine that the body, with all its weaknesses and infirmities, received with marriage an indelible brand, as in former days convicts were marked, after all seemed to them to be salutary, since the end of marriage was obedience to the physical law “increase and multiply.” But, the law once fulfilled, by what strange aberration did they wish to bind souls to this abandoned body, truly a derelict of life? So far as heart and soul were concerned, the community of women (or rather, the community of men) seemed a moral reality, constituting indeed the clearest distinction that could be drawn between mankind and the animals. This “spiritual libertinage” was condemned. Calvin flouted it and preferred divorce—a singular taste, not very refined, eminently worthy of countries where fleshly love was cultivated, with rope-ladders and without platonism.[310] Wedlock has its good points, but, as everyone knows, it is never supremely delightful; love ought to be a delight and a religion. The wife, stepping forth in her turn into life, has a right to think a little about herself and her highest needs, to cultivate her heart and soul, to blossom out and complete herself. “Complete herself!” some one will say: “then ’tis a question of a subsidiary marriage?” Yes, but of a marriage wholly moral, in which the carnal concessions are purely aesthetic and ostensible,—in which she boasts (so far as essential points are concerned) of a platonism as perfect in regard to her lover as in regard to her husband.

In the year of grace 1523, a young lady of the Roman aristocracy, whom history names Costanza Amaretta, pretty, refined, and pious, made a journey of devotion to Florence for the Easter festivals, and there met her ideal in the shape of a cultivated and distinguished man named Celso. They lived together under the same roof in perfect chastity. When Easter was past, they set out with four kindred spirits for a country house of Celso’s, and there, in the joyous spring weather, among the cypresses and tufted pines and early flowers, this idyllic society of platonists gave themselves up to the delights of poetising and philosophising at large. Costanza, elected queen of the coterie, unbosomed herself to them. She had been married when very young, as the custom was, to a man of business with little of the ethereal in his composition—a man of eminently practical mind, and manners almost intolerable. With him she had contracted no real moral ties. “But for this man’s desire of having children by me—for he thought me beautiful—we should have felt nothing but hatred for each other.” In Celso’s company, however, the path of virtue seems to Costanza covered with roses instead of thorns, and hence to-day her eyes are opened to the truth, she perceives with perfect clearness the moral utility of the platonist distinction between the two kinds of love, the one bestial, matrimonial, fraught with peril, a thing of this world, perishable,—the other celestial, life-giving, a foretaste of Paradise, a love that enraptures the soul and fills it in truth with a radiance divine.

Perfect lovers thus found perfect pleasure in making an offering, but not a sacrifice, of their flesh—in deliberately lifting themselves above gross physical rules and living delicately as angels incarnate. Castiglione with extravagant eulogy reminds us of the wonderful feat accomplished by two of these dilettanti of love, who spent six months in conjugal intimacy and perfect continence; that was what he calls love, the ideal existence, pure beauty! There was even, at Milan, a religious order devoted to the mutual edification of the sexes on these lines, but after a time the archbishop decreed its dissolution.[311]

Truth to tell, we do not know exactly how far this species of platonism extended; it is a land difficult to map out; in such matters no statistics are available, and even in these days when we can reel off the number of bushels of wheat or dozens of eggs France can produce in any month, there is no official return on the virtue of women.

But we are not indisposed to believe that the platonic life _à deux_ numbered more adepts than might be imagined. So many women of loveless heart aspired to the happiness of finding for it some safe repository, and regarded the body as so much dross, infinitely inferior. The example of Judith struck them as not only above criticism, but sublime. If one had groaned under the burden of the first marriage, surely it was all the more needful to set the second upon a pedestal, and so to preserve above everything the illusions, the dreams, the anticipations, however vague, which bring us out of moral and physical distress into light and life! The young platonist lady, all soul, who lived in the arms of her lover and relinquished nothing but her soul, fancied that she was realising a holy and religious dream; love, which purifies all things, wafted her in peace and confidence towards the celestial spheres; for faith, hope, love—what are they but the sheet anchors of the soul? That was her whole position. If by this means she could enter into fulness of life, was she so very foolish in availing herself of it?

Unhappily, love sought as a rule only its own abasement, and the mission of these fair apostles declared itself rather in aggressive sallies than in spiritual edification. Platonism had to come down a peg, and to meet the demands of men it had to turn distrustful, descend to trivialities and deceit,—to place reliance on artifice. Thus was born a new species of platonism—more popular, and more open to criticism in point of morality.

This secondary art of platonism was hardly known beyond the borders of Italy; it demanded a patience and a consummate suppleness which we do not possess. The impatience of Frenchmen in matters of love was proverbial; they would rather seize than woo; they would boil and chafe, utterly unable to appreciate the wily tactics of Ovid or Martial, very often expecting to begin at the end without any preliminary finessing, and making flirtation altogether impossible. And Frenchwomen, too,—must we confess it?—were but poor hands at the game. Some of them caught fire instead of winning love without loving, and there were young girls like Mademoiselle de Piennes who wrung their hands before the whole Court in despair at a lover’s desertion. The French were so constituted; they applied principles they did not possess, while the Italians excelled in holding principles without applying them. And thus, whatever else they did, the former were not very successful in finding salvation through chimerical ideals, and virtue had infinite trouble to convince them of her intoxicating charm: they could not manage to persuade themselves that stones and arabesques are man’s proper sustenance, but remained faithful to the realities they knew through the senses. Everything else was only ridiculed, and, as few women are insensible to mockery and a cutting phrase, the ladies were sometimes led where their own hearts would not have taken them.

Platonic love, then, was regarded in France as a complicated business. The women had to confess that no means had yet been discovered of crystallising the things of life apart from the dispensation of Providence which has given us bodies, nor of curbing men by the mere vision of the ideal.

So, as we have seen, Margaret of France strove to make her body the transparent vesture of her soul. We have seen, too, what tender familiarities the ladies authorised at their morning toilet, and at other times.

Modesty to them consisted not in the more or less brutal systems of the “all in all or not at all,” but simply in remaining women.

Chary of making a confidant of doctor or chaplain, because unwilling to subject themselves to either, they valued the man who regarded them as women and had eyes only for them; as a reward for his exclusive attentions they certainly thought they owed him some little privilege beyond what they allowed to others. It was they who were the doctors, the confessors, or rather the rescuers; they sprang into the water to save the drowning man. To save him by bestowing on him the true gift, a little of themselves, appeared to them a good, a moral, a meritorious work! This was far, you perceive, from the commonplace, masculine handshake which women nowadays grant to all and sundry! Seriously, they fancied they were thus winning heaven; their own hearts constantly heard echoes of the sweet strains of Plato’s _Phaedo_ or _Crito_; his exquisite distinction between soul and body made music in their ears, and the familiar spirit of Socrates bound them to an immaterial world, whispering his counsels and intuitions.[312] They saw no harm in bestowing their indulgent favour, their smile, and a little more. It was enough for them “to hold fast unto the end,” and to remain firm as rock on the essential; they were innocent of “false scruples,” and would have thought it cruel and ridiculous to torture a man by refusing him “familiarities that Nature has permitted to beauties,” now that this small change cost them so little, and above all touched them so little. Ah! that was not where the temptation lay! At the bottom of their hearts, how they despised the shallow, insignificant men who, with their large and canting talk of love and sentiment, could be caught like gudgeon with this paltry physical lure!

The critics of a certain lady went so far as to accuse her of “losing all shame,” because when receiving one of her friends, as she lay in bed in the morning, she tolerated not a few familiarities, “without any offence to my honour,” as she observed. She replied with heat that she saw in her conduct nothing but what was excellent; her friend would esteem her doubly for having seen body and soul united in her “in one strain of chaste beauty.” As to the danger of this familiarity, listen to her subtle and delicious reply: “The man I love, the man I dread is not he; it is another who has laid siege, not to my body, but to my soul. Ah! if I did not keep a rein on my heart, it would long ago have spoken to me in favour of the other man!”[313] This is the cry of the fastidious woman who dreads only the rape of the mind! We do not discuss her moral scheme, we pass no judgment; we confine ourselves to relating.[314] Her end was to make herself loved, and in a manner which would be worth the trouble.

It is not hard to believe that the bounds were sometimes overstepped: some men abused their privileges, especially with regard to princesses of literature like Louise Labé;[315] and sometimes it happened, indeed, that cries a little too genuine broke from the lips of women, and were heard above this tender, philosophic poetry, and this scorn of earth. Yet many women, in their devotion for spreading pure happiness, for holding men captive lest they sold themselves, would often have preferred that conversation should be the sum total of their intercourse, and that their friends should be content to dip in their eyes and their soul.

Their aim was to reduce everything to conversation; they had little love for a contemplative silence, for songs without words: conversation allowed opportunities of probing, caressing, penetrating the soul, turning it inside out without the least inconvenience and with many benefits. Among close friends they showed their art by getting someone to sing to them the old cantilena, “I die of thirst beside the gushing fount”; sometimes they held under their eyelids a large unsuspected tear. They made a hungry man forget his food; “they contented their lovers with words, promised a reward, and deferred it till to-morrow.”

The Italians, as we have said, delighted in tasting love thus at leisure in little sugared sips; they were not gluttons like the French: they appeared born, not to construct railways or to inflate balloons, but simply to love, to love loving, to nourish themselves on futilities and surprises, to sing always the same meaningless song. They cut marvellous figures at the feet of those women “before whom desire burnt away like candles at a shrine”; they glossed over realities, as if they really believed more in happiness that came from the unknown than from the known, as the great scorner of women, La Rochefoucauld, has well said; to such an extent that the inexhaustible springs of the heart were sufficiently depleted, so far as they were concerned, to spare them the risk of embarrassment from love, and to enable them safely to find the recreation necessary to the overtaxed human mind. Happy creatures, these men without a care! The narrow world in which they fluttered seemed too big for them, and their long wings touched the ground; they were young, yet old; they were gay with brilliant, yet faded colours; a woman could take their arm in complete confidence that all would end where it began. Life was for them one aimless flirtation, a mere battle of flowers.

Love, as thus carried to extreme perfection in society, came in for no little mockery. No one was under any illusion as to the impossibility of finding in it a secret source of strength and life; it was a mere avocation, a little intellectual pastime—with no overpowering demand on the intellect.

The Italian “cicisbeo” or “death of love” became a sort of amiable spectre, a harmless necessary cat; he was practically non-existent to his friends, and had the right of not answering his letters. Sweetly scented, with a well-hosed leg, a rose in his hand and a flower at his ear, his lips pursed up, his bearing graceful and gallant, at his heels a lackey whose duty was to flick off the least speck of dust—there you have him, always the same, whoever the object of his passion. All he troubled about was rightly to place his glances and sighs, his nods and salutations, and when he had been rewarded with a gracious smile or an arch look, he would go off humming to indite a sextain or a madrigal.

The mawkish execrable creature! more womanish than women, a woman spoilt in the making, a half-woman! Sticking like a shadow to the lady of his thoughts, his functions were to carry her lapdog, her prayer-book, or what else she pleased. At her house he installed himself as the centrepiece of her receptions, kept the conversation alive, and overwhelmed the husband with affectionate attentions.

He was a hypocrite, a rakish fop! In the Roman aristocracy he usually took the shape of a sanctimonious recluse; at Naples he was a man of energy and go; at Venice a man of mystery; in Lombardy he had the joyous self-assurance of the North;[316] at Florence he was a vivacious talker, responding to the challenges of silvery voices with audacious quips. He took everything as it came; he had not an ounce of sincerity: his cleverness consisted first in adapting himself entirely to the beloved object, in abdicating all individuality, in being hers and hers alone; secondly, in proceeding platonically and without passion, with extreme prudence, trusting to suavity and tenderness, always securing a line of retreat, and striving above all to melt the obdurate heart. In all this part of the programme the eyes often were better servants than the tongue.

This point rounded, every man for himself! An eclectic, a hot lover, an abstract philosopher, a symbolist, an idealist—let him be any of these if his heart bids him. He is a fine talker; well, ’tis a great talent, which will permit him to turn to account a thousand little incidents, but will often (let him not deceive himself) lead to only superficial successes. A wary woman holds fine talkers in awe; with them, she thinks, there is all the making of domestic broils; she knows how indiscreet they are, and she smiles on them and keeps them at a distance, knowing that this is the way to set them proclaiming her virtue abroad. Often she prefers a taciturn, above all a bashful man, “a lenten lover,” as someone said, easy to feed.[317]

But it is impossible to enumerate all the eccentricities that were part and parcel of this flirtation. The ridiculous became the rule: it was an afflicting spectacle for human dignity. Old men cut capers, young men lost their heads, the witty turned imbecile, the imbecile set up for wits. What a masquerade! The lugubrious blubbered about their love, sighed in prose and verse; the sincere embraced a whimsey—adopted a colour, for instance. One of these, having vowed himself to green, so strictly embargoed the rest of the spectrum that not only was everything on him green, even to his shirt-buttons, but he ate out of none but green plates, drank out of none but greenish glasses, never rested till he had discovered green bread, and made green meadows and groves the exclusive burden of his song.

Happily, conversation somewhat raised the level of this extravagant and lamentable affectation. Surrounded by a circle of friends, a man would amuse himself by launching a graceful declaration concealed in an aphorism or a double entendre; it sometimes happened that a lady who had never entered the speaker’s head fancied that hers was the heart aimed at, and that was provocative of fun. Or perhaps they would linger out the pleasure of a tête-à-tête reel off their witticisms[318] and amiable compliments, and unravel little puzzles in sentimental casuistry. Sometimes they reached the stage where the tête-à-tête that was really delightful was one in which neither said a word.

Here some one will stop us and ask whether all this did not have an end. Bless you, no! An end was in no wise necessary; genuine platonic romances never end.[319] And what years and years they may last! A clever woman excels precisely in spinning them out; if she feels that the fire is burning low, she has a thousand means of fanning it into flame—a word, a tender gesture,[320] a little present, a gracious act here, a secret gentleness there, a touch of jealousy; and then she suggests that you should recommence the little game—church, the park, sighs, tears, oaths. And thus you may go on for ever.

There are, however, some romances which do end, well or ill. As a rule the event is announced by rolling clouds and a lightning-flash. The majority of men only enter the platonic life with the idea of an early departure, and implicitly believe that in the life of every woman—even though she be a “dragon”—there is one inevitable, irrefragable hour. Psychologists, philosophers, poets, preachers[321] all have repeated _ad nauseam_ the saying of Ovid: “A chaste woman is she whom none has tempted,”[322] or, as La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère will phrase it later: “An insensible woman is she who has not yet found the man she must love.”

The lady affects not to see the storm brewing; she bears up against it gallantly; gentle banter is her cue; she declares that talk of love is very pleasant to her, but ’tis well known among decent people what that word signifies; there is no question of a coarse, sensual love, but only of amorous discourses. The man gives himself up to demonstrating his love anew; his plaints become louder, his tears more copious; his lady-love never gets to sleep o’ nights without hearing serenades or “Spanish lamentations” beneath her window, or sighs that would seem belled out by some familiar spirit, but which are really a performance got up by obliging neighbours, for a consideration. All day, at church, in the ballroom, in the street, under the thin disguise of masks, he is here, there and everywhere, never out of her sight.

One morning the maid announces to her mistress that the gentleman is at the door with something most urgent to say—here he is, indeed, pushing past the girl; and he will be eloquent, you may be sure. Or he resorts to the grand means of melodrama—false keys, rope-ladders, narcotics, sorcery, lying confessions of apostate monks; or to the stale and hackneyed devices of comedy; he enlarges eloquently on his high qualities, proffers a thousand services, and even opens his purse; full of promises the while, erecting beautiful castles in the air. One will employ menace, another will boldly haggle and argue with father or husband. What a warmth of language, what sighing and sobbing, what fretting and fuming! “Fulvia being come on horseback to see me, I straightway feigned a superb wrath, as though her action seemed to me that of too forward a minx. And this fine choler of mine was of great avail in my courting.” There are some who carry the fortress by dint of lavish praises, superlative verses, outbursts of jealousy. Others by continual dropping wear away the stone.

If a princess had the idea that her rank would prove a sufficient rampart against this final assault, she had to find out her mistake, especially in France. Why should not the man she loved—the dear good fellow!—after so many labours, and discreet frenzies, and stratagems, and covert approaches, expect an advancement he so well deserved?

A bien servir et loyal estre, De serviteur on devient maistre![323]

“Madam,” proudly says one of the young nobles of Margaret of France, “when our mistresses stand on their dignity in halls and assemblies, seated at their ease as our judges, we are on our knees before them; we lead them out to dance with fear and trembling; we serve them so sedulously as to anticipate their requests; we seem to be so fearful of offending them and so desirous of doing them service that those who see us have pity on us, and very often esteem us more simple than foolish,” and sing the praises of ladies able thus to win service. “But when we are by ourselves, and love alone doth mark our looks, we know right well that they are women and we are men, and then the name of liege lady is converted into sweetheart, and the name of servitor into lover.”[324]

And it need not be supposed that in such circumstances they remained satisfied with words or menaces, even in dealing with ladies of the most exalted station. There were violent characters who stuck at nothing, like Bonnivet! It also happened at critical moments, even in the most platonic of circles, that love turned into rage. “Unico Aretino,” one of the Urbino talkers, upset by what he thought a piece of base ingratitude on the part of the charming duchess Elizabeth, got so beside himself with anger as to call his sovereign lady “Urbino’s traitress, witch, trickster.” (Aretino was an exceedingly clever man, but after all he was only the fourth part of a prelate; he filled at Rome the fourth-rate office of “apostolic abbreviator,” and pretty badly at that; but as he afforded the Sacred College a deal of amusement he was licensed to indulge in all sorts of jocularities.) He never forgave the duchess, and even after her death pursued both her and her daughter with persistent rancour.[325]

The ideas of men in these matters simply beggar imagination. They fancied that they erred on the side of bashfulness, that they suffered wrong when ladies suggested “reckonings,” to use their term. They thought it would be ridiculous to die of despair like the heroes of romance, and that it was “folly and cruelty” to praise the beauty of a fountain to a poor, thirsty fellow and then kill him because he wished to drink.[326] “Whom will you get to believe,” cries Henri d’Albret, “that we ought to die for women, who were made for us, and that we should hesitate to require of them what God bids them give us?”[327] That was the conclusion that must be expected: everyone knows, in Calvin’s words, whither “all roads” lead. So a woman was neither surprised nor panic-stricken in the hour of battle. She had taken or ought to have taken her precautions; her first care, as we have said, was to distribute her favours. She went forth to the fight with a gallantry which some old fogies called impudence; her sins were no longer sins of omission, like those of her grandmothers. And that she often triumphed there is no manner of doubt. Margaret of France, at the turning-point of the battle, is found as firmly fixed on principles as Anne of France. Billon assures us that in Normandy, a land of pretty women, where he would not care to go bail for a single man, he would not hesitate to name a very large number of women whose virtue he could guarantee with every confidence. Assuredly there existed stainless women,—just the women to play with fire!

But did they always come off scatheless? No one will believe it.

Further, it must be remarked that the point of view of casuistry had changed. The body was, so to speak, the sign-manual of the soul; just as the base, passionless, sensual vice prevalent in the world seemed ignoble and disgusting, so it was remembered that love had a purifying power. The merciful words of the Gospel were recalled, and, remarkably enough, it was those who were most rigorous in regard to themselves who showed the most indulgence towards an error springing from sincere affection.

Margaret of France spreads her nets, like the Gioconda, but for the good of others, for she knows whither the mist-enveloped paths lead; she cannot tear her eyes from the vast and gloomy background of life, and all that passes in front of it inspires her at times with cruel loathing. She loves mankind, but without the least touch of fetishism; to look aloft and not believe in any individual man is the condition of her love; her sole consolation is the thought that Italian morals are worse than French. Her approval of a German husband, who had the fantastic notion of locking his wife up along with the skeleton of her lover,[328] was so exaggerated that all her friends were compelled to laugh. And yet, when pulled up short about the ethics of love, and asked if the sin is venial or worse, she gets a little muddled. Assuredly, nothing is more “untuneable and harsh” among the joyous strains of the divine concert than the frailty of the flesh: “truth compels us to condemn it”; but is there any need to get huffy, to decline to see any extenuating circumstances, because the spiders web that has been centuries aweaving is rent by one dab of the paw—because, in spite of all the cooings and flutings, no one has succeeded in turning men into big babies instead of villains, or even (I go this length) because in the heat of the battle some women may have lost their heads and gone over to the enemy? Is the conclusion inevitable that the outcome of platonism is necessarily evil—more evil than anything else?

How stood the fashionable ladies who rebelled against platonism?... On the principle that “the honour of a man and that of a woman are the same,” and that a wife, whether from love or vengeance, has a right to the same independence as her husband, it was the husbands’ game to wink at things. Far from making an outcry and playing the Othello, they meditated philosophically on their own position[329] and the virtue of silence, and, drawing in their horns with something of fatalism, could not find fault with their wives for “using their power” as they themselves did. It was rare for a husband to kill his wife; wedlock had become a stagnant pool of mutual indulgence, in which unlawful love was but an incident so long as it left no more trace than a pebble cast into the surface slime, or a bird flitting through the air. As to believing that Lauras or Beatrices could still exist, not only did the sceptics deny it outright, but they even declared that if Laura or Beatrice were to revisit the glimpses of the moon, great would be her disillusionment.[330]

The only matter that Louise of Savoy troubled about was to keep things dark.[331]

Can we wonder that, in an atmosphere so saturated with immorality, many even of the best-intentioned women allowed themselves to drift with the tide, or that Salel, the Attic friend of Margaret, represents them even on the shore of Acheron as still enchained to ungovernable love, and imploring pardon for their tyrant?

When they succumbed, it was with a sublimity of passion which the world almost always misconstrued. “The fortress of the heart, where honour dwells, was so battered that the poor lady granted what she was never a whit inclined to refuse.”[332] “You mean to say, then,” says a lady, “that all is lawful to those that love, provided no one knows?” “In good sooth,” replies the other, “’tis only fools who are found out.”[333] Their love, fashioned out of dreams, thus dissolves into reality. Pure women, platonists armed at all points, let themselves go from a spirit of gentleness (“for pity in their spirits rules”), from a tenderness of compassion, out of charity toward others, if not for themselves. They are almost martyrs of love or kindliness, since their kindliness goes such lengths as to be taken for love, just as their love, reserved as it is, may be taken for kindliness. Unlike the anti-platonists, though they may perchance be surprised into a fault, they surprise no one, they commit no follies. It is the fault of poor human nature that platonic love does not remain always a “stork love,”[334] as Montaigne calls it. There is never a battle but some dead and wounded are left on the field. Pity the dead by all means, but the survivors are already inviting those who have never sinned to cast the first stone!

A woman “so cozened,” concludes Castiglione philosophically, unquestionably merits such indulgence as is accorded to _messieurs les assassins_. She was toiling, as Michelangelo said, “to lift souls to perfection. Sensuality slays the soul.”

And hence Margaret of France, in her profound yearning to blot out and pardon the sins of the world, is herself inspired with a tender, helpful tolerance. Assuredly the wounds she observes are deplorable, but they do not necessarily point to absolute frowardness of heart; they may result from a “naïve folly,” from “the misfortune of loving not wisely but too well”; in other words, from an over-abundance of natural goodness, the very consequence of our organisation. The perfect being would clearly be an androgyne; but we are imperfect beings, an odd mixture, godlike, and yet profoundly, lamentably human. The power of love

vient de la divinité, Et son tourment de nostre humanité.[335]

We seem to hear this spotless woman crying to God: “O Christ, Christ of the Magdalene, gasping and crucified, how Thou didst suffer, how Thou didst love! This streaming blood, these wounds gaping eternally,—these are the handiwork of the hate of men, whom Thou didst bid to love one another with a pure heart. Thou wilt not pardon their hate! Thou wilt not pardon their fierce lust of wealth, nor their pride and naughtiness of heart, nor their wild anger, nor their shameful sloth of soul. Thou wilt pardon nothing but the error of love, the error of a moment, since this is but the overflow of the goodness Thyself hast given, the wofulness of too great love!”

2. THE ENNOBLEMENT OF VICE.

The second moral effect of the theory of beauty and love was still more pertinent than the first. It consisted in an extraordinary levelling up of purely terrestrial and unlawful loves. From the principle, with which we are already acquainted, that the virginity of the heart survives the professional ordeals in which the heart has no concern, we shall find that moral deductions were drawn, in Italy and even in France, so important that we cannot pass them by in silence.

In Italy, among the women whose trade was pleasure, there was formed an aristocracy so real that some of them presided over salons, were part and parcel of the court world, and truly merited the name of “courtesans.” Their bearing was irreproachable, their distinction extreme; we are bound to say, indeed, that, apart from their origin, they were absolutely indistinguishable from virtuous women—except that perhaps their manners were a trifle more correct.

Their high influence is explained by the fact that in the official world of Rome there was a plentiful lack of women. Etiquette required that none but birds of passage should be seen at court, a restriction which gave cruel but entirely honourable pain to the heart of more than one platonic prelate. It was believed for a moment that the half-sister of Leo X., Philiberta of Savoy, was about to take up her abode at the Vatican: “God be praised!” cried Bibbiena exultantly, “all we lack is a court with women!” This happiness was not realised; women continued to be conspicuous by their absence. We see how it was that, in the supreme sanctuary of human glory, in the Eternal City that served as beacon to the world, the Ninons de l’Enclos,[336] for want of better women, fulfilled in their own way a singular apostolic mission by playing the part of court ladies, and by magnificently entertaining the pick of poets, savants, artists, prelates and diplomatists, at a period when every man plumed himself on bearing one of those labels and on sporting it about some petticoat.

Bewitching pictures of the receptions of these ladies have been bequeathed to us; many a poet who knew the world chiefly in this quarter has vaunted with enthusiasm the aroma of grace pervading their noble salons, the honour of admission to them, the relations established there, the superb fêtes which consecrated their charm and set a seal upon the connection. This was no new thing; Socrates and Pliny testify how keenly the society of ancient Greece and Rome had felt the need of guidance by women more deeply experienced in life and more naturally active than high-born ladies are likely to be. To name these ladies Ninons de l’Enclos, however, would be to give a very imperfect and mean idea of them, for their influence was at once moral and intellectual. Doubtless they could pretend to no virginity but that of the heart, but since that was the better part, they honoured pure love quite as conscientiously, if not more than others did. Energy of a very special and sincere kind impelled them to react strongly against the scorn of a world they had an equal right to scorn; and further, they felt the necessity of stopping their ears if they were to save themselves from blank hopelessness, and of setting up noble illusions about themselves.

Several of them were genuine patricians, whose only possible reproach was a tincture of pride. One would flaunt her descent, which she possibly traced back to the Colonna or even the Massimo[337]; another would modestly sign herself “Roman patrician.” The entrée to their salons was particularly difficult; some of them imposed somewhat rigorous conditions, insisting for instance that a man should mount guard for two months with the Swiss at the palace gate, or should pay his devoir on his knees. The style of their houses and appointments left nothing to be desired; they maintained an extreme decorum. It is not for us to boast of their virtue: their talent consisted in being as virtuous as possible and getting rich more particularly by way of legacies; it would have been a great mistake to deal with them cavalierly. Tullia d’Aragona, who thoughtlessly allowed some rather broad pasquinades to be addressed to her, was unfortunate enough, on a visit with which she honoured the court of Ferrara, to turn all the gentlemen’s heads. But the most diverse ordeals found her inflexible; she rejected with indignation the miserable offer of a golden necklace worth three hundred crowns. The daughter of another of these ladies had been so excellently brought up that she has a place among the martyrs of virtue and patriotism; she slew herself to escape the importunities of the governor of Sienna.

They were queens of elegance, and never a brunette among them. At their houses people discoursed most excellent music. They were great dancers. They were the happy owners of fine jewels, fine pictures, fine statuary; on their tables might be seen the newest books, choice editions, sometimes adorned with a manuscript dedication in verse. They knew Greek and Latin; they corresponded with their absent friends in gracious and affectionate letters, Ciceronian in style, and with no lack of wit. In conversation it required very little pressure to tap a bountiful spring of elegant extracts from the classics—most often got second-hand from Petrarch or Boccaccio—or even, on occasion, a learned disquisition on Roman archaeology. Sometimes they shot out a phrase in the high pietistic fashion of the day. What lady of recognised position could have written more charming sonnets than Imperia or Veronica Franco?

They excelled in keeping wit in play: Aretino confesses that, without an incentive of this sort, he would have been good for nothing. Occasionally some poor devil was graciously permitted to give a taste of his quality, but, as a rule, the mistress of the house preferred to inspire men who had well-lined purses. Yes, it was a grave and distinguished society, and if sometimes the conversation touched on subjects but indifferently mystical, what immaculate drawing-room but was open to the same reproach?

On saints’ days these ladies went to pay their devotions at the neighbouring basilica, and if they were not very devout they were at any rate beautifully dressed. Their accustomed air of good breeding and conscious dignity, which drove many ladies to despair, gave them genuine rank, and made them the indispensable ornaments of important festivities. Thus several of them lent lustre to the magnificent reception given in 1513 by the Cardinal of Mantua to young Federico Gonzaga, then in his fourteenth year, as he passed through on the way to Rome. In truth, there were some who behaved exactly like high-born dames, and were pre-eminent in all deeds of devotion, whole-hearted love, and even disinterestedness. Poets innumerable have vouched for their virtue. Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo dedicated sonnets to them.

Not infrequently they ended their days in the odour of piety, and were buried in the churches[338]; to this day prayers are offered in the shadow of their tombs. Michelangelo wrote an epitaph for one of them. Others prosaically married men of the world, and these ladies, as a rule, took rather a superior pride in their virtue and their coat-of-arms. A clever woman of the time philosophically hit off the subject: “Life is a comedy: so long as the last act is successful, the whole piece is fine.”

Nevertheless these interesting creatures necessarily had their detractors. They have been accused of trickery and deception. With all allowance for the prejudice of their enemies, it cannot be denied that eccentricities here and there gave a handle to the slanderers. The lady, for instance, who wore slippers covered with diamonds, and made men kiss her feet (like the pope), alleging that her foot too was beautiful enough to merit adoration, was considered to have overstepped the bounds. But with the general public, and even with connoisseurs, such dainty exactions did not produce the same astonishment that they would produce to-day. The religion of beauty touched such deep chords that the beautiful appeared always beautiful under all forms, so much so that in certain Italian collections of “Lives of illustrious women,” saints and courtesans stand cheek by jowl.

Men professed for these ladies the same veneration and idolatrous respect as for a princess; they plied them with the same sighs, the same verses, the same little tendernesses. The game cost a little dearer, but in reality they were not unwilling to regard a courtesan’s drawing-room as more moral than certain reputable drawing-rooms, since a man was not likely to meet a ridiculous husband there, or embarrassing young cousins of both sexes, or certain fashionable girls whose tongues had a tang. And it was much less compromising.

Was there a moral advantage in elevating what had till then been so degraded? For a long time it was sincerely believed there was, and this belief was held almost throughout Italy. On this point it is sufficient to read a very curious letter addressed by some unknown person, concealing himself under the pseudonym “Apollo,” to the witty and eminently virtuous Isabella d’Este. It is dated Ferrara, June 13, 1537, and refers to a visit then being paid to the city by Tullia d’Aragona. It runs: “There has just arrived here a very pretty lady, so staid in deportment, so fascinating in manner, that we cannot help finding in her something truly divine. She sings all sorts of airs and motets at sight; her conversation has matchless charm; she knows everything, and there is nothing you cannot talk to her about. There is no one here to hold a candle to her, not even the Marchioness of Pescara.” An ambassador exceeded even these rhapsodies, and wrote gravely to his government that he was composing his despatches under the eye of this pretty woman, who assisted him with her advice.

Tullia d’Aragona, who was, we may remark, very proud of the noble blood in her veins, thus played Egeria to the most exalted personages, and they had no hesitation in comparing her to a mother of the church like Vittoria Colonna, or in placing her even higher. She justified this enthusiasm, not only by her physical beauty and her wit, but by real moral qualities. She proved that the spirit of the beautiful elevates the basest things, and if she did not turn Trappist, if she continued to live the life she was born to, she brought to it a contempt of money which was itself a purifying virtue. This admirable creature, after holding all Italy spellbound by the charm of her velvety eyes, died in destitution; she gave instructions that she should be buried in the quietest way beside her poor mother in the church of Sant Agostino, where she had endowed masses; her belongings had to be sold by auction, and they realised twelve crowns and a half.

Imperia attained even a higher place than Tullia, and we are compelled to believe that the aegis of virtue, like charity, can cover a multitude of sins, since we find Sadoleto, the type of sincere piety, singing the praises of this amiable woman, and Raphael setting her, so it is said, at the foot of his Parnassus in the apartments of Julius II.

We do not know (and it is almost better so) what Imperia had done to excite so general an enthusiasm: she died at twenty-six! All that we know is that August 15, 1511, the day of her death, was observed at Rome as a day of public mourning. On her tomb was engraved an epitaph in the purest lapidary style. The poets, maybe with a very subtle irony, lauded her to the skies as a new goddess of Latium: we hardly need to repeat these fine phrases. “Our fathers mourned the Empire (_Imperium_); we mourn Imperia. They had lost the world: we have lost our hearts, our very selves.” “The whole city was moved when this young deity was snatched away on Tiber banks,” exclaims Vitalis—“the whole city, even the old pagan walls, even the _fasti_ of the consuls!” “No longer is she beneath this marble,” cries Silvanus; “henceforth she holds her place among the constellations, she will guide our fleets.” But Silvanus becomes a little mixed in his mythology, and in connection with the new star unaccountably couples the names of Julius II. and Jupiter.

For all this glory and honour, Imperia and her kind inevitably became rather burdensome, and the most aesthetic of the popes, Leo X., struck them a fatal blow when he expelled them from Rome in 1520. They took refuge at Venice, despite the heroic opposition of the senate.

But at Venice they lost all their peculiar charm: Venice, the metropolis of pleasure, “the foam of the sea,” set its stamp upon them. Venice was the earthly paradise of matter-of-fact folk like Brantôme and Aretino. The latter wrote to an amiable lady: “You cannot picture these water-parties in the open air, these coaching expeditions on _terra firma_, these secluded groves, these banquets, these unaccustomed consolations.... From your windows you will have a panorama of musicians, singers and buffoons,” a tempest of pleasure. “You would fancy yourself a queen.” But at Venice such queens did not govern, as at Rome; men added them to their collection, that was all.

Thus disappeared one of the most striking curiosities of the platonist society,—the one which has left the most vivid memories. It was only possible under the caressing warmth of the Roman sky.

Leo’s decree evoked loud cries of distress, and the loudest of all came from the French, who, though they had never understood this art of harlotry and had made great fun of it, thought it a capital thing all the same. Rome, they as good as said, was no longer Rome: “How doleful the Jubilee will be!” cries a pilgrim: “what shall I do in Rome now?” Du Bellay, while a melancholy guest of the gloom-beclouded city, apostrophised this new ruin in well-known verses. (O Rome, sad, tender Rome, to whom every passing generation must needs bequeath a new triumphal arch, new catacombs!) Many years later, distinguished travellers like Henri III. and Montaigne did their best to hunt up the last of the courtesans.

We cannot but confess that the attempt to rehabilitate the demi-monde and to employ it in the heavenward voyage strikes us as extremely venturesome; the younger Dumas, like a true Frenchman, was not bold enough to persevere. Our ancestors felt the same qualms: unhappily, it was not from virtuous scruples. They recognised the work accomplished by platonism, so bent were they on transfiguring love through coquetry,[339] and so hopeful, in the interests of humanity, of rendering virtuous women more come-at-able. But when it was suggested to them, as necessary to complete their work, that they should render come-at-able women more virtuous, they were steadfast as rock.

They discovered another way of giving an aristocratic stamp to things that could not be spiritualised. We are bound to touch upon it, because this also throws back a vague reflexion of platonism; besides, in approaching these delicate problems in morality, which it is so expedient to look at dispassionately, we have no intention of dedicating our work to girls.

It was sought to blend the idea of an immaterial union of hearts—an idea borrowed from platonism, and one whose beauty and importance were not disputed—with the other idea that such a compact must necessarily be sealed by an absolute and unreserved intimacy, or it would remain chimerical and oppressive. This idea the French could not part with; and consequently there arose the notion of what may be called a second marriage, supplementary to the authorised marriage—a union _de facto_, recognised, acknowledged, declared, and so highly honoured that one would be tempted to call it an eighth sacrament. Similar unions, recognised by the world, were still known at the end of the 18th century, and even under the Restoration during the early years of the 19th, having survived the worst trials of the Revolution, the Emigration, penury, and exile, to say nothing of the still more ruthless test of time.

This custom of giving publicity to secret unions was not a direct outgrowth of platonism; yet platonist women looked on it by no means unfavourably. In the first place, they thought it rather lucky that their husbands, enjoying an irregularity in some sort regularised, more highly respected their wives’ dignity, quiet and health.[340] Secondly, we have already shown how little platonism there was in morals under Francis I., and what unbridled licence reigned at court. Melin de Saint-Gelais portrays the king as a cock in a hen-run—or as a sun in a firmament of stars, amid Canaples, star of the morning; the lovely Saint-Paul, star of evening; Diana, the crescent-moon; and many other stellar beauties eager to shine—Helly, Rieux, Tallard, Lestrange—who, if their names were not mentioned, “would have thought it strange.”

Francis I. said plainly that a man without a mistress was only a nincompoop. In that case was it not a mark of progress to arrive at the institution of a regular mistress, recognised and with no rivals? Margaret of France would have been only too glad to see her brother fix his affections prudently on some eminent lady, who would rank next the queen and might be called the queen and “mirror of all propriety.” That explains, no doubt, the affectionate, obsequious, humble welcome she gave to the duchess d’Etampes, whose reign seemed for a moment likely to be lasting. She wrote for this noble lady the _Coche_ or _Débat d’Amour_, a little treatise intended to prove that, apart from pure platonism, there can still exist a laudable love; and in the presentation copy Margaret, the king’s sister, had herself represented, in complete black, before the queen of the day in all the brilliance of her beauty and her jewels, and saying to her: “_Plus vous que moy_”; in other words, “You are more than I.”

With a like feeling of feminine delicacy, perhaps somewhat exaggerated, Veronica Gambara, who was probably virtuous and quite certainly platonic, went into raptures over the good fortune of the “siren” who succeeded in holding for some time the volatile heart of Aretino; the words of Laura and Beatrice rose instantly to her lips, as if the ideal were on the point of attainment.

Henri II. showed himself a platonist in this sense; his double establishment did not constitute an infidelity. He was faithful to two wives, one official, responsible for perpetuating his dynasty and acting for him in affairs, after the old tradition; the other personal, to satisfy his heart as a man.

Diana of Poitiers, it must be admitted, besides her beauty which long retained its ripeness, had all the qualities for beguiling and captivating a lofty heart—birth almost as good as the queen’s (who was only a Medici), wit, warm-heartedness, self-devotion. She has herself explained, in excellent verse, how her position, false as it seems to us, was born of a genuine passion. One fine morning, she tells us, a young Cupid in all his fresh, light-footed, bashful youth came roaming in her neighbourhood, filling her mantle with marjoram and jonquilles, casting a spell upon her. She resisted, shutting eyes and ears against him, though she felt her heart melting; she would listen to no promises, no oaths. He held out to her a wonderful laurel wreath, a queen’s crown. “No,” she replied, “better far be good than a queen,” and yet she felt herself “thrilling and trembling.”

Et comprendrez sans peine Duquel matin je prétends reparler.[341]

Love did not speak her false: he offered her a kingdom, a great part to play, and kept his word, as the walls of the Louvre testify. To all her contemporaries the position of Diana appeared magnificent, divine. Du Bellay has sung of it as the most beautiful of marriages, the marriage of true minds:

Dieu vous a fait entre nous Comme un miracle apparoistre, Afin que de ce grand Roy, D’une inviolable foy, Vous peussiez posséder l’âme, Et que son affection, Par vostre perfection, Brulast d’une sainte flamme. Les Roys monstrent aux humains De Dieu l’exemple et l’image.[342]

To the French, this was the perfect type of platonism, at once practical and sacred.

Vous avez acquis le cœur de toute la France.[343]

And Ronsard is not less explicit:

Seray-je seul, vivant en France de vostre âge, Sans chanter vostre nom, si craint et si puissant? Diray-je point l’honneur de vostre beau croissant? Feray-je point pour vous quelque immortel ouvrage?[344]

In spite of all these dithyrambs, it is very clear that the platonism of Diana of Poitiers is a sign of decadence. It was the ideal of platonist women to be loved for their soul; men’s ideal being the opposite, there had been a compromise.[345]

The compromise, indeed, was greater than they were willing to admit, even in Italy, and in the purest centres of platonism. Our readers are already acquainted with the charming Bembo, the quintessence of platonism, the admirable chiseller of phrases, the secretary of Leo X., the friend of everything beautiful, noble and aesthetic, the magnificent collector, the apostle of Plato and Petrarch, of Boccaccio and Dante, the idol of the ladies, in short, one of the men who clung to the skirts of princesses, parading their everlasting sentimentalities under the most perfect, exquisite, elevated form. We have a moving letter of his. Among that numerous bevy of princesses who nourished him on ethereal glances from their bright eyes, there was one he loved, the Morosina, a pure and charming woman, to whom, as Monsignor Beccadelli has said, “he had the good sense to devote himself,”[346] and who had given him, in the most common, everyday fashion, a goodly number of children. He lost her. The unhappy man was stricken to the core; his whole being bled. What a state in which to find the divine Bembo, the prophet of the celestial felicities! Death has plunged a knife into his heart. Love—yes, he too had loved. He unbosoms himself to one of his friends, Gabriele Trifon. We were struck with surprise when we first came upon the letter; it was the intimate revelation of a soul; a Bembo of real flesh and blood, grief-stricken, palpitating. “You,” he writes, “have softened the anguish which overwhelms me, in speaking to me as a man, not as a philosopher platonic and divine.”

He adds that he has sought to reason with himself, to preach himself lessons of wisdom, to find relief in his passion for work; but the most delightful book slips from his hand. Between the book and his eyes the sweet image re-appears to him in a mist of tears; and as he makes this confession, tears gush out afresh and soil the paper, his heart is stripped bare; the whole man is before us. “I have lost the dearest heart in the world, a heart which tenderly watched over my life, which loved it and sustained it neglectful of its own; a heart so much the master of itself, so disdainful of vain embellishments and adornments, of silk and gold, of jewels and treasures of price, that it was content with the single and (so she assured me) supreme joy of the love I bore it. This heart, moreover, had for vesture the softest, gracefulest, daintiest of limbs; it had at its service pleasant features, and the sweetest, most graciously endowed form that I have ever met in this country. I cannot forbear lamenting, I cannot but curse the stars that have deprived us of enjoying each other in so innocent a life.”

What a singular underside of platonism! What a warmth of grief! Where is all the platonic paraphernalia—the beautiful ladies all smiles and ice, the careless disdain of physical beauty, the adoration of social life, the horror of solitude? Where are the many-faceted phrases, the philosophic dissertations? Bembo has turned pious like all the unhappy; he will not accuse Providence unjustly; though it has snatched happiness from him, he gives thanks for the happiness enjoyed. But sentiments are not snapped in a moment—sentiments “which with time have rooted themselves so deeply in our humanity that ’twould seem impossible to eradicate them.” He writes, effusively, thanking the friend whom he knew to have been bound by genuine friendship “to this beautiful and precious lady.” He speaks of the children; he will care for them, since he is their father, and because ere she died the Morosina, having fulfilled her religious duties, had faintly whispered these words, which pierced his soul like a hot iron: “‘I commend our sons to you, and beseech you to have care of them, both for my sake and for yours. Be sure they are your own, for I have never done you wrong; that is why I could take our Lord’s body just now with soul at peace.’ Then after a long pause she added: ‘Rest with God,’ and a few minutes afterwards closed her eyes for ever, those eyes which had been the clear-shining faithful stars of my weary pilgrimage through life.”

Ah, these tears! They had hearts, then, these fashionable platonists. Never in any of his fine discourses has Bembo touched us, nor even (if we may say so) rejoiced us as by this simple stifled cry, these tears of solitude. He is prone upon the earth, having lost the wings that bore him on from flower to flower.... Four years after the death of the Morosina, we find that, despite his good resolutions and the counsels of his friends, he is as profoundly crushed as on the first day. He seeks consolation from poetry; he has begun a canzone on the death of his “fair and good Morosina”; he has finished the first strophe and sketched out the second, and he sends these still formless attempts to his intimates, to show them all that his feeble faltering hand can accomplish.

To sum up, the great moral movement of platonism resulted in a wide dissemination of sensibility, and a general softening—a softening of virtue and vice, of women and men. This was no small thing; there is certainly an advantage in cutting the claws of men but scantly idyllic, and in doing nothing rather than in doing ill.

This softening was often only external, and not without an admixture of hypocrisy. But why deplore it? For men to appear worse than they are is no proof that they are better. Men showed signs of sensibility, even though they knew little of love. Under a mask of amiability and tenderness their egotism remained intact; they talked of contemplation, of devotion, of the worship beauty required,—without conviction, it may be; but then they might have employed their time worse, and they unconsciously contributed to spread salutary ideas. One of those ridiculous creatures who spent their lives in haunting their idols like a shadow, perceived with horror that on entering a church his lady refused alms to a beggar. He was so deeply shocked that one of his friends had much ado to prove to him, while chafing him back to life, that the beggar was ill-bred, importunate, impudent, and unworthy of assistance. Here at any rate was a man of sensibility.

But an untoward thing happened. In cultivating sensibility to the utmost, women enfeebled men instead of forming them. Anne of France undoubtedly foresaw this danger when she so ardently commended vigorous and matter-of-fact occupations, and uttered a warning against the abuses of the religion of beauty. Many other ladies, unhappily, genuine artists in refinement, took a complacent pleasure in the very perfection of their conduct, with the result that always ensues in such cases: their art became degraded, and in sinking into a matter of routine, came to ruin. In true love there is, as it were, an outpouring of one’s nature, a vivifying joy, a sort of intense feeling which strengthens; but in love in the more vulgar sense there is a spurious and meretricious poetry which enervates. An old French proverb ran: “When the woman rules the man, he hasn’t much will of his own.” This the anti-feminists repeated, with too much reason. “Ah yes!” cries Nifo, “’tis in good sooth a fine dream of yours. What a magnificent moral state if all men loved one another! No more war, no more crime!... But is that the result you have obtained? You have distilled I know not what mawkishness. Where are the energetic, young-witted, happy, high-minded men born of your affections?” And what was the age of love which was to spring from this generation?

We cannot impute to platonism the creatures of watery blood and hang-dog look who were to form the nucleus of the court of the Valois—these Panurges, false from top to toe, who had early wasted their substance physical and moral—these young tired-eyed voluptuaries whom Lotto paints so well, too weak to pluck the petals of a rose, their hand on their heart as though to point out the source of the mischief. But alas! we cannot but ascribe to sheer gallantry the mob of carpet knights, pale-faced, gilded cap-a-pie, gay ornaments of tourneys, sleek and fawning, ready like Ariosto to sing imaginary exploits, “provided that beauty, which every hour robs them of some fresh portion of intelligence, leaves them enough for the fulfilment of their promise.” They are rigged out as elaborately as the ladies, if not more elaborately (save that instead of displaying the bosom they display the leg), with flying plumes; in winter, smothered under furs; in summer all unbraced, not being able to endure even a loose garment; loaded with diamonds, so that you would take them for walking showcases of the king of Naples or the duke of Berry. They are philosophical, in the sense that they soar high above ideas of patriotism, and prove it by disguising themselves in costumes of all nations, the Turks included. They are learned, that is to say, they think it smart to stuff the French language with heteroclite words, as though eager to tear from it its pith and heart, and make this also a delusion and a snare, as universally acceptable as blonde wigs and padded busts.

The great, wonderful reform effected by platonism in the higher ranks of society was—that the men, copying the ancient sages and the orientals, let their beards grow! Up till then, no man could pretend to style unless he shaved, or even, for the sake of greater perfection, depilated his chin; there had been one cry of horror when Cardinal Bessarion appeared with his beard at the court of Louis XI. But now that Castiglione, the Roman prelates, and the high platonist society sported the philosophic beard, there was a sudden craze for going unshorn among the young snobs of Louis XII.’s court,—the Bonnivets and others.

This reform, strange to say, excited between the higher and lower clergy one of the most acrimonious disputes with which we are acquainted. Vicars and curates belaboured the bishops with texts against the beard. The prelates parried with abstruse disquisitions; they claimed that a good beard did no offence to honour and probity; they sifted the sentiments of the ancient Romans in regard to the beard and found them in sympathy with their own; they made out that the apostles had never dreamt of shaving, and proved to demonstration that a decree of a council of Carthage, appealed to by the lower clergy, was an interpolation, and in any case was of no authority, the infallibility of the Church not dating back so far; and a decree of Alexander III., which they were also clamorous about, applied only to the hair of the head.

For the other part, to say nothing of the beard of Julius II.,[347] one only had to turn over the leaves of church history to find on every page bearded saints, sometimes of high eminence; bearded hermits, strangers alike to the care of the body, to Plato, and to women. The dispute occasioned a terrible waste of eloquence, erudition, vivacity, irony and earnestness. It was of the highest importance, and bore on the most sacred interests of what some eminent personages called platonism.

And now it cannot fail to be asked by what strange and cruel logic a century, cradled at its birth in the idea of the beautiful, of love and happiness, was to become a hotbed of hatred, the arena in which the most savage animosities were implacably to contend. Must we believe that in throwing down the barriers of a rigorous code and invoking liberty we must inevitably bruise ourselves against force, rendered thereby freer and more ferocious? That would be a sad and disheartening conclusion, for then we should have to consider human progress as a perpetual recommencement, seeing that, though the lawless rise insurgent against tender hearts, though gospel wisdom warns us of the eternal despotism of the violent, there are still found and will ever be found among us incorrigible wretches, hungering for sympathy, and unable to live without a ray of love.