CHAPTER IV

INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE (_Continued_)

The influence of women declared itself in certain well-marked results. In the first place, it led to the germination of what may be called a technical literature: that is, of works intended to prove the legitimacy and necessity of feminine sway.

The classical type of this literature is Boccaccio’s book, _Of Illustrious Women_. Boccaccio lived in a backward age, which is the excuse for certain epigrams of his; but he remained none the less the women’s favourite writer, because he had had the courage to ransack antiquity, to quarrel with Virgil, to extol Dido, and to collect for the first time a multitude of immortal examples—Cleopatra, Lucrece, Semiramis, Sappho, Athaliah. Nothing, therefore, was safer than to republish, amplify, and imitate his work in every shape and form, and the opportunity was not lost, God knows!

In addition to this Boccaccian literature, which was already extensive, we must note the appearance of a numerous family of semi-philosophical, semi-historical writings, devoted to the glorification of the reigning sex; winning causes never lack defenders. The names of Bruni, Portio, Lando, Domenichi, and many others would certainly merit a page in the annals of feminism; Benedetto da Cesena specially demonstrates the honour and virtue of women, Capella their excellence, Luigini their beauty. The feature common to the most of these works is that while claiming to be very lofty, abstract and impersonal speculations, they are all the time aimed more or less covertly at the heart of one woman in particular. If Firenzuola discourses like Plato himself, it is because he has the countess of Vernio as his ideal. Nifo compiled his treatise _On the Court_ under the auspices of the prince and princess of Salerno, but his ardour was more especially inspired by the charms of Phausina Rhea. Ravisius Textor wrote his _Memorable and Illustrious Women_ because there happened to be one Jeanne de Vignacourt, wife of President Gaillard. We ourselves ought to have conformed to this fascinating custom and to have inscribed a lady’s name on the title-page of this book; but we are writing for fair readers of the 20th century.

Except in size, the books we allude to were as like as two peas. Chénier might well have called them “old thoughts new versified.” To see one is to see a thousand. The upshot of them all is the equality, if not the superiority, of woman in regard to man. To give an idea of them it will be enough to mention one, of no great renown (it has never been printed, and no complete manuscript exists, to our knowledge), but linking the names of two personages of the first rank. It was written for Vittoria Colonna by her cousin the famous Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, vice-chancellor of the Church of Rome.

The Cardinal begins by very gravely preparing to crush under a weight of learning various anti-feminist propositions, almost all drawn from the antiquated repertoire of the Middle Ages; for instance, is woman an imperfect animal, an inferior being, unfit for public duties, good for nothing but to gad about and commit indiscretions? Is it not the custom, even in everyday talk, to say “men” when meaning the human species? Are not the Bible and Plato agreed in teaching that man is the prototype of creation, the receiver and the transmitter of life? Having settled these and a few other questions, the cardinal proceeds to his demonstration of the merits of womankind.

He finds it much to the point to invoke evidence from the pagan world. He sets defiling before us the Sauromathian women, the warrior Amazons, the women of the Balearic isles, every one of them esteemed equal to three or four men in the exchanges of war; the Lycian dames, through whom nobility was transmitted, and the Celtic ladies, who exercised the functions of diplomatists and arbitrators. On this evidence he declares himself an out-and-out feminist; an advocate for the admission of women to all occupations; gymnastics and military service, commended by Plato, have no terrors for him; he would have been an enthusiastic apostle of cycling for both sexes. If some timorous objector hints at the moral perils of launching women into public life, he almost angrily laughs the objection to scorn, zestfully seizing the occasion to show what men are good for when left entirely to themselves. His type is the strong woman, sure of herself and cased in the armour of her modesty, the energetic woman who fends off the light strokes of stratagem as well as the heavy strokes of violence, the woman who is generous and just, with something of that young Spartan captive who had the force of soul to feign love for her vanquisher and to persuade him with her caresses that she was endowed with a marvellous secret of invulnerability, and who thus got her head cut off. “Heaven above!” ends the cardinal suddenly, “where could one find a more accomplished type of strength and magnanimity than yourself, O Vittoria! It is you, you, O ideal of noble virtues, who sustained your husband, guided him, exalted him!” Pompeo has so many things to attend to that he excuses himself from here working out this theme; he begs the marchioness to accept his modest little work, the homage of an ardent and sincere affection.

We are bound to add that women showed themselves duly grateful; this kind of literature was not love’s labour lost, and many insignificant men found in it the road to success. A Bohemian, half magian and wizard (common enough in those days), a soldier as well as a “doctor in both faculties,” Cornelius Agrippa, was elected professor of Cabala at the University of Dole. Not long afterwards he dedicated to his sovereign, Margaret the regent of the Netherlands, a bulky book on the _Preëminence of the Feminine Sex_, a learned and convincing work, though in places somewhat gross. The chaste Margaret was no more shocked than Vittoria Colonna appeared to be angered at some indecorous details in the work of cardinal Pompeo. She obtained a good appointment for Agrippa, and later on, though a good deal had happened in the interim, she gave him the title of imperial historiographer to Charles V.

Apart from these special productions, which in date almost all belong to the early days of the decadence, the influence women exercised on intellectual productivity ran through two very different channels.

The primitive Frenchwomen, who loved breadth and vigour, the women of passion, mistrusted works of mere imagination; they sought for truth. Philosophy and history were their intellectual pabulum, owing to their taste for the clear light of truth, however solidly, even heavily expressed. To become wrapped up, entangled, lost in art and mawkish sentiment appeared to them the proof of inferior minds; to them the supreme art was to be without art; they loved the beautiful simplicity and impressiveness natural to minds that have mastered the subjects with which they are dealing, and are masters of themselves.

But these women were not numerous, and are soon lost sight of. Nor were there many men capable of meeting their views.

History and philosophy had their charlatans who brought discredit on them sooner or later—pedants, perpetrators of futile and vapid euphuisms, not to speak of fantastics and high genealogists like Féron, who carefully describes the armorial bearings of Adam.

Lemaire de Belges, who worked constantly under the eye of grave women and dedicated to them all his writings of whatever description, even a _Treatise on Ancient and Modern Funeral Ceremonies_, is one of those who carried erudition too far. He has a superb equipment of learning, which he displayed with a magnificent and conscientious tediousness; how could Margaret of Austria, Anne of Brittany, and Claude of France distrust a person of so excellent an appearance! Lemaire loses no opportunity of rendering homage to the sex; if none occurs naturally, he invents one. He cites only women of beauty and intelligence. In the service of Anne of France he extols honour and virtue: with Anne of Brittany he sings the past history of her realm;[365] and when all is said and done he was nothing but a dull courtier. And yet he made his mark.

Philosophy comes better out of the ordeal. It was not divorced from literature, and, like the literature, it wore a pleasing and cheerful aspect. Laughter was then the fashion, even in the most serious clubs. The Florentine academy flourished under the title of the “Academy of the Damp,” each of its members bearing the name of some fish; and when, as pretty generally happens, its founder, Lasca, was expelled, he established another academy, under quite as facetious a name, the “Academy of Bran,” the Dellacrusca.[366]

We have shown what an unrivalled position philosophy obtained in the society of that epoch; many people preferred it to history because they fancied they were more certain of finding truth in it. They found it also of very practical utility; thanks to some familiarity with the ideal, more than one philosophical husband could say, “All is lost, save honour.” From the moment when the women began to subsist on philosophy, there was a run upon theoretical wisdom. Happy the man whose academic discourses suggested a comparison with Plato, or merely with Pythagoras! Philosophy bore everywhere the torch of happiness; it gave props to faith, and represented Paradise as the sum and crown of aesthetic joy; the noble bishop Guevara exclaims with enthusiasm, “God was the first lover in the world; it is from him that we have learnt to love”; and grave professors on formal occasions waxed eloquent on the mystery of love. Cornelius Agrippa opened a course of lectures on Plato’s _Symposium_ with this declamation: “I come to expound to you the doctrine set forth by the divine Plato in his _Symposium_, on love. My discourse has Love for its author and cause; I myself, inflamed by the beams of love, preach Love to you. Far from here, far from this respectable lecture-room, let others, stuck fast in the miry paths of the world, creatures of Bacchus or of the god of gardens, trample this divine gift, love, in the mud, like dogs or swine. You, my pure men, votaries of Diana and Pallas, hail to you! Come and lend attentive ears to this divine mystery.”

Filippo Beroaldo goes farther; he undertakes “without false shame” to expound to his young pupils the philosophy of Propertius: “Yes,” he exclaims with fervour, “we shall give praise to love, the one god laudable above all things, pre-eminently laudable; we shall show you that the poetry and the poets of love consort with the gravest professors, and that this sort of poem is worthy to serve as subject for a public and complete course in a university of letters.” And forthwith we see him occupied for a whole year in drawing a distinction between the work and the writer, conformably to the aphorism of Catullus, that a poet may perfectly well pass for a decent, chaste, and pious man, though his works may not have the same reputation, provided they have salt and wit. Ovid also had said: “My pen is lascivious, but my life is not.” Beroaldo insists very strongly on this tutelary principle, and to add force to his demonstration he casually reads the broadest passages in Plato and the Scriptures: “Yet,” he adds proudly, “everybody reads the Bible.”

In addition to disseminating thus the doctrine of Love, the religion of the Beautiful naturally delighted in beauty of form, and gave a very decided lead on this point also.

In the first place, it brought into high favour a kind of literature which, for brevity’s sake, we shall call the literature of conversation. There is nothing surprising in this, since conversation served at once as a means and an end, and appeared to be the realisation of Platonic happiness. Those who had the misfortune to be writers took at least all possible precautions not to show it, and certainly many authors of the dialogues, novels, and various narratives of the time committed them to paper only to keep a permanent record of actual conversations, or at any rate because, in temporary distress for want of someone to talk to, they found themselves reduced to taking up their pens to keep themselves in practice. The critics of our day, who prefer to say their say by themselves, in the form of lectures or articles, are disposed to see in this dialogical method a trick of rhetoric; they regard the dialogues of Plato in the same light, and we see very learned platonists quoting indifferently the thoughts of the various speakers as the thoughts of Plato himself, without remarking that in the same dialogue the different speakers give sincere expression to different ideas. The majority of 16th century dialogues are real conversations,[367] and claim to be more or less accurate notes of both sides, with the perfect liberty of movement impossible in didactic exposition. Bembo, in his capacity as an eminent talker, has accepted the responsibility for more than one written dialogue. And thus, the practice was quite the reverse of that which obtains in our drawing-rooms to-day, where, if the conversation happens to rise above the commonplace, we borrow our ideas from the morning’s leading article or the last successful play; in those days the drawing-room made the book—a system extremely favourable to the influence of women.

The masterpiece of this literature of conversation is unquestionably the _Courtier_ of Castiglione, of which more than eighty editions or translations are known, and which retained almost undiminished popularity for more than a century.

In proportion, however, as women fell into mere fashionable sensibility, the literature they inspired became an art of form rather than of thought, and soon there was no longer room for anything but poetry. Poetry flooded everything. We are not speaking here, of course, of the high heroic poetry intended for robust appetites: people revelled in the luxury of a beautiful musical phrase which soothed without awakening emotion, in a sort of splendid unreality, in glittering frivolities calculated to give a fillip to conversation.

There was high honour for the improvisatore who, in the decorated hall of the château, whilst in the streets there arose a vague hubbub of music, song, or passing feet, could on the spur of the moment chisel or crystallise a happy thought, and shoot out his little verse, light as an arrow, brilliant as a sky-rocket. Such a man was fêted everywhere, and saw a welcome smiling in every eye. Into a goblet of rare crystal he poured, as it were, but one drop of elixir, but it was an elixir that exhilarated; he was master of his world. With a tender or witty verse a man could do anything. A phrase of Bembo’s is very typical. When Vittoria Colonna had just lost her husband, he told her that the flood of sonnets on that occasion had reconciled him to the age! Vittoria Colonna herself, whose ideas were of quite a different order in theological matters, wrote to a prelate: “I received your letter this morning, and in your madrigals I saw the force of truth.” Poetry was so much a maid of all work that a luckless ambassador, at his wit’s end for a new way of asking for his arrears of salary, ended by addressing a dispatch in verse to his sovereign, Margaret of Austria. Another dropped into poetry in his dispatches with the simple object of paying court to his princess. A business agent, instructed to send some information to Vittoria Colonna, declares that, writing to so illustrious a lady, he hardly knows what he is about, and that he cannot refrain from writing in verse: hitherto, he says, his higher faculties have been dormant, and the name of the marchioness has roused them to activity. Admirable effect of feminine influence, galvanising even auctioneers’ clerks! Ladies wrote in verse to their children, sent their friends verses—sometimes, it must be confessed, borrowed.[368]

In all this wealth of poetical production the sonnet ranked as the most profitable, because, thanks to its terse and sparkling form, it did well in a glass case among a woman’s little love trophies. It admirably hit the tastes of the ladies; it was short and concise, it centred on one idea, and allowed the most diverse and fugitive sentiments to find expression.

In these days we cannot really understand the success which certain occasional verses met with, for example, the rhapsodies of Molinet[369] whenever Margaret of Austria took her walks abroad. These gems of other days have the same effect on us as pearls removed from their settings, lying robbed of all their lustre on a dealer’s counter. For that matter, they never had the glow of passion; all that was asked of them was to show a certain uniformity of sparkle, and they were strung one after another in the belief that so many languidly gleaming brilliants would in the long run form a pretty set. What charming and unexceptionable ornaments were the waggeries of Saint-Gelais or of Michel d’Amboise, or the “Hundred and Five Love Rondeaux” published by M. Tross, or the _Hecatomphile_ (_i.e._ the hundred loves), and so many more![370] Such writers had ringing in their ears an air from Ovid[371] or Petrarch, a mawkish air, with all the sublimity of commonplace, already utilised a thousand times; and they continued to grind out the song of the “exquisite” bard of Laura, to steal from it, comment on it, torture it, raising their eyes to heaven like Greuze’s girls; and so they thought themselves deities. “I hope,” cries Aretino, with a burst of laughter, “that the soul of Petrarch is not tormented in the other world as it is in this!” They were a long way from the vigorous inspirations craved by Pompeo Colonna. Some repining souls made secret reservations against the seductive force of this sensibility. Vittoria Colonna and Isabella d’Este kept a corner of their heart for Dante; but what could they do to stem the tide? They tried, very clumsily. In France a league of terrible pedants was formed,—“skimmers of Latin,” who, to separate themselves from the vulgar, employed a sort of pretentious and intolerable jargon. In Italy, Spagnuoli shouted himself hoarse in thundering against the Franco-Italian alliance, and all in vain. Capilupi,[372] still less adroit, committed the unpardonable folly of finding fault with the women. At bottom he was right.

It was women’s duty to warn the world off so disastrous a reef. Unhappily, in consequence of that eternal timidity and that want of energy which were to kill their influence, they allowed themselves to be utterly bewitched. It was written that they should be able to conquer, but not to profit by victory: that, once mistresses of the world, feebleness would regain the upper hand; that being no longer under the spur of passion, they would come to a stand before a sweetstuff shop.

The masterpiece of these pretentious confectioneries was a monument of verse erected to the glory of some particular lady.

Jeanne of Aragon was during her lifetime the object of a deification of this sort, in which the Academy _de’ Dubbiosi_[373] at Venice proceeded according to the forms employed at Rome in the ceremony of canonisation. There was first a preliminary decree, then a discussion on the proposal made by some member to share the apotheosis between the exquisite Jeanne and her sister the Marchesa dal Vasto; then a decree, based with great parade of learning on the opposition of Roman pontiffs in bygone days to Marcellus’ project of dedicating a temple to Glory and to Virtue in conjunction, and enacting that the honour was to be reserved for Jeanne alone, and that it would be enough to offer incense to the Marchesa dal Vasto in sundry allusions.

The temple was erected. It was in the purest Renaissance style; cosmopolitan, artistic, feminist. Its contents were pretty enough: Ruscelli celebrated the charming, adorable and divine Jeanne in respectable verse. But that only shows how the finest things suffer most when reality is replaced by sham. Miscellaneous heaps of poems in all languages known or unknown, Hungarian, Hebrew, Syriac, Slavonic—what was it but sham? In reality, the truly artistic idea was absent.

There was also, especially in France, a whole literature dealing with poodles and little birds, which was not lacking in charm, and above all in sensibility, for it was generally elegiac. Saint-Gelais, Eustorg de Beaulieu and Marot, like Catullus, mourned sparrows, such as that of the unfeeling Maupas:

Las, il est mort (pleurez-le, damoyselles), Le passereau de la jeune Maupas; Ung aultre oiseau, qui n’a plume qu’aux aisles, L’a dévoré: le congnoissez-vous pas? C’est ce fascheux amour ... ... Par despit, tua le passeron, Quand il ne sçeut rien faire à la maistresse.[374]

Vert-Vert,[375] whose misfortunes touch us to this day, was a direct descendant of the parrot of Margaret of Austria, which, having been allowed to die during the absence of its mistress, was consequently regarded as having died of despair. Du Bellay has devoted some of his most exquisite verses to the memory of a little dog.[376] In short, as we see, all these writings were inspired by a sentiment of tenderness, in the manner of Berquin[377] or Florian. The Cardinal de’ Medici loved to style himself “the knight errant.” Under the dainty hand leading them, men seemed like meek and gentle sheep, somewhat emasculate perhaps, incapable of a strong diet, but polished, sweet, gracious! Twit them with losing their claws, they reassure you! If their interests or their pride are ever so little touched, they are still masters of a pungent rhetoric! Listen, behind the scenes (or even before), to Politian, that charming angel,[378] calling an obscure antagonist named Mabillius, “scurvy knave, carcase, lousy dog,” and so on.

But let us finish our portrait of women from the intellectual point of view.

They did more than rub their faithful friends to a fine polish: they were gradually drawn on and impelled to take up the pen themselves, cherishing the secret idea of enabling the public to profit by the treasures of their sensibility.

To write a book, even in verse, is not a crime. But how was it that the women did not understand that in coming like professionals before the public they were precisely breaking away from their own system?

They could, it is true, invoke the example of Spain, where women displayed their learning openly and unabashed. But the position of Spain was altogether different; there the women in question were ladies of lofty imagination, who threw themselves with extraordinary energy into regions of pure erudition; brilliant and famous women of high rank—the marchioness of Monteagudo, Doña Maria Pacheco de Mendoza, the pretty Isabel of Cordova, far richer in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew than in worldly possessions; Catherine Ribera, the bard of love and faith; the two “professors” of rhetoric at the Universities of Salamanca and Alcala; Beatrice of Galindo, who taught the queen Latin; Isabella Rosera, who preached in Toledo cathedral and went to Rome to convert the Jews and to comment on Scotus Erigena before an array of dumbfounded cardinals; Loysa Sygea, again, the most illustrious of them all, an infant prodigy to begin with, then a Father of the Church, who could speak the most outlandish tongues. These were women full of sap and energy, whom no one was astonished to see taking by main force the first rank in the spheres of literature, philosophy and theology; but were they really and truly women? or rather, did they bring any new thing to humanity? Were they apostles of happiness? No, they advocated the claims of reason as men did, perhaps better, perhaps worse—that is all. The ideal of France and Italy was different: it demanded more discretion. Women might be quite as accomplished; the knowledge of Latin was so widely diffused among them, even in the depth of the country,[379] as to be quite a matter of course; many grappled with Hebrew; some people went so far as to say that rhetoric was a virtue as necessary to them as chastity, if not more so. Only, everybody was steadily faithful to the maxim that women ought to rule by charm rather than intellectual accomplishment; and if it was necessary to arm them for the strife, their supreme skill would always lie in appearing unarmed, in keeping their minds free and winsome, preserving unsoiled all the bloom of their excellent education, remaining great ladies and “amateurs.”

Ought the women, at the time when the ultra-refined shrank from appearing in print as a lapse from taste, as what Montaigne called an “idle business,” to have descended into the arena and addressed themselves to the heart of the commonplace and heedless man in the street? Ought they to have done violence to their thought by printing it? You may address the public in regard to the stern things of life, draw your logical deductions from truth, hammer out your arguments, discuss history, philosophy, theology, everything that is of iron and rock. But sentiment has graces which only flourish well under glass; the true women of the Renaissance were like orchids, choice and rare and delicately perfumed, which close their petals at the first breath of air. The same modesty which defended the purity of their bodies against every indiscreet eye, and which smiled only on friends, seemed to envelop their souls. They were not displeased to hear themselves called the depositaries of “good doctrine,” or even to see jestingly attributed to them some pretty work which obviously they had not written: Aretino was a very clever and amusing flatterer when he made the actor in the prologue of one of his most spicy comedies ask if the author of the piece were not Vittoria Colonna or Veronica Gambara. But the most accomplished and instructed woman of the world, Margaret of Savoy for example, never tired of boasting of her “divine goodness.” Noble ladies did not take up the pen, any more than a good housewife needs to handle a broom; they readily dictated even private letters, with the splendid indifference of Talleyrand, who, we may say in passing, knew his business very well. If they are ever caught writing, it was for mere amusement, when they were tired of painting, carving, working tapestry, playing the harp, singing, maybe of dancing and riding; then they thought of their souls, if they had time; they would read a psalm or a story; or to “escape idleness,” to banish an idea that oppressed and persecuted them, they would artistically chisel their idea in the form of a sonnet. Thus understood, poetry is the divine art, and very few women have been able to resist it from the moment when it appears to them the same thing as painting a fan!

Margaret of Austria delighted in etching in little poems her recollections of the trials of her life, and (in absolute privacy) did not even disdain to address some epistles in verse to her devoted friends or her functionaries. The amiable Graville, the fair Chateaubriand, so dear to Francis I., excelled in this pastime, and when we see Suzanne de Bourbon herself contributing her share, we may well believe that the fashion was general. But between that and proclaiming oneself a poet there was a wide gulf, and when this was crossed, it was the beginning of decadence, because the exquisite freshness and simplicity of the art soon gave place to affectation. To women of simple artless charm succeeded blue-stockings like Madame de Morel and her three daughters, or Madame des Roches. Women writers arose, and the Academy of the Valois found it quite natural to admit them.

Lyons was the capital of feminine poetry, and certainly it is there that we can best appreciate how and why the women fell into the unfortunate mistake of becoming professional writers. It was not wholly their fault: they only succumbed to the temptation when they could no longer exert their influence otherwise.

Lyons was the city of wealth and pleasure and elegance, the rival of Paris in fashion, the “Florence of France.” It was often the headquarters of the court.

Anne of France, as sovereign of the surrounding country, had at first exercised there a very direct influence; and afterwards Margaret of France went there more than once, and gladly, as into a friendly land.

The ladies of Lyons, envious of the “great and immortal praise” their neighbours of Italy had acquired, were desirous of making their influence also felt on men, and of doing honour to France in the present and the future. It was nothing but music and poetry, poetry and music.[380] Margaret of France smiled broadly at the universal babblement. Up to a certain point, save for the somewhat excessive development of sensibility, nothing was more legitimate or natural: the husbands acted as archivists, piously classifying their wives’ papers and cultivating their reputations. But a time came when it appeared calamitous to leave to husbands alone the care of so many treasures. Du Moulin, Margaret’s secretary, ventured to aim a blow at feminine modesty: at the express request of her husband he published the works of Madame Pernette du Guillet, recently deceased, taking good care to indicate his intention of thus paying collective homage to “so many fair and virtuous ladies of Lyons.” He encouraged others to make similar confidences.

The somewhat tame and sublunary verses of Pernette du Guillet were not particularly flattering to the husband who had so well preserved them. Pernette avows in all sincerity that she had never known happiness; how could she have known it? She divided her abilities among so many things. She spoke all languages, played every instrument, and was beautiful in addition. The sentiments she expressed oscillate between a tender sensuousness and bitterness of soul.

Louise Labé, the glory of Lyons, did better service for her cause. The list of her virtues would fill several pages. Fair, rich, and well-bred, a singer, a dancer, a horsewoman, and an Italianist, she drew in her train such a flock of admirers, commentators, panegyrists, biographers, and glossarists that her death did not quench the enthusiasm, but occasioned a perfect mausoleum of poetry.

There has been endless discussion in regard to this fascinating woman. Many a lance has been broken in regard to her virtue, of which the late M. de Ruolz was formerly the self-constituted guarantor and paladin, but against which, since his time, two erudite writers, themselves natives of Lyons, Messieurs Gaullieur and Gonon, have brought heavy batteries to bear. But that little concerns us, for we do not claim Louise Labé, even theoretically, as one of the glories of pure platonism; she is too self-confident and cock-a-hoop, has such airs of swagger and mock languor; she smacks of decadence. And yet, though she did not, like Pernette du Guillet, make the slight effort needed to defer publication till she was dead, she does affect a modesty which is itself unpleasing. It was not her husband who impelled her to appear before the world, it was her friends; they insisted, swore to “drink the half of the shame”; and then, “not to take the plunge alone,” she dedicated her book to another lady, Clémence of Bourges.

These simpering affectations apart, Louise was sincerely convinced of the benefits of feminine domination, and one feels that in boldly facing publicity she was obeying a sentiment of duty. She resolutely encounters the enemy, like a brave captain who dashes out of cover to rally his disordered troops. She conjures women not to allow themselves to be despoiled of the “honest liberty” so painfully acquired—liberty to know, to think, to work, to shine. Happiness!—she no longer deludes herself with the idea that she can promise it with certainty, or at least she has awakened from the dream of attaining the absolute; but she tells herself that “one can at least sweeten the long voyage.” She does not lose sight of the fact that it is women’s function to diffuse sweetness and poetry, to mitigate unsociabilities, to inspire men with energy. The experience already gained does not strike her as discouraging; quite the reverse; the intellectual life takes from day to day a more splendid amplitude, and this amplitude results from the action of women. The moments of all great intellectual vitality are marked by love. So said Louise Labé.

Tullia d’Aragona, who sustained the same theory in other terms, was one of the few Italian women who did not fear to be reputed authors, probably because her place was already only on the fringe of society. In general she employs few circumlocutions, but goes straight to the point with a vigorous eloquence. Her poems, almost all addressed to men, deal with subjects of the gravest kind, particularly with religion. Tullia had the inestimable advantage of knowing humanity from top to bottom. Beside her, Calvin and Ochino are as innocent as babes, and she taunts them, not unfairly, with dealing their blows blindly without distinguishing between what is serious and what is harmless. Her own wisdom is wonderful! The poet Arrighi cannot help exclaiming, “Vittoria Colonna is a moon, Tullia a sun.” She celebrates pure love in the true lyrical and forceful strain, as “the magnificent, the admirable madness which alone produces great enterprises.” Whilst immaculate women like Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara too often stifle us with languorous sensibility (“When I was a happy lover, I exhaled the harmonies of my heart in calm and pious accents”), Tullia, who has long ago lost this tranquillity and these religious illusions, knows that will and action are needed; she does not ask for the impossible, but on the other hand she valiantly excommunicates Boccaccio with his “villanous novels,” before whom the coy ladies of fashion bow their faces to the earth. In a dialogue with two gentlemen, she discourses on love in quite a platonist key; she investigates its casuistry: “Is the end of love its limit? Is it better to love or to be loved?” She prefers to be loved, this fair artist, because in loving we are acted on by the motive force, while in being loved we exert it. Women who have really loved will perhaps be of a different opinion; nevertheless there in one line we have stated the great contention of the time. The art of women ought to have been to make themselves loved and to constrain men to love; they were often caught in their own toils; they loved, and consequently instead of receiving they gave. “The heart has reasons reason never knows.”

These few notes on the literary work of women suffice to show that, on the whole, feminine literature, except in Spain, sprang from love, to return to love again. No great influence in the intellectual crisis of the Renaissance can be attributed to these various writings; they scarcely did more than develop more or less intuitively the platonist philosophy.

On the other hand, women exercised an enormous intellectual influence through their individual and personal action, especially in Italy. They carried their charm into quarters which the mediaeval theologians, so ready to style themselves the “doctors of the poor,” never penetrated,—namely, among the poverties of the heart. They overlaid life with that varnish of wonderful, singular sweetness which has never been wholly rubbed off; they intellectualised society, and, in a country essentially marked out as a prey for gold and luxury, they delayed the moment when men were to be estimated merely by the gilding of their ceilings or the thickness of their carpets.

The effects of their work north of the Alps are not very easily measured. Resistance there was too strong; the masculine world was not easily won over; men growled, for it seemed to them that women were plucking their souls out, or wishing to degrade them, in proposing that they should submit to—what? a sort of intellectual goodness. They refused to hear women and intellect spoken of together. The Germans recognised no intelligence in them apart from their domestic duties. What the Italians called intelligence a German would call tittle-tattle, trickery, the spirit of contradiction. They rejected such gratifications, and had no intention of allowing Delilah to shear them. They would readily have declared, like an arrogant character of M. de Curel, that there is nothing in the world but egotism, and that the egotism which creates life is of more worth than that which employs itself in providing life with consolations. As to poetry, forsooth, they were tempted to receive love serenades with a bucket of water. And if the Italians sneered at them as barbarians, “brainless people,” they would answer them on the day of battle by demonstrating how far mere brains and sensibility served a nation. Erasmus dubbed “any man who was honest and learned” an Italian; precisely, but what had the Italians come to with their beautiful ideas? They wrangled, but they no longer fought.[381] “Don’t talk to me of the Venetians,” said Louis XII.; “they don’t know how to die.” To know how to die—that is life.

Virile, stern, frugal, poor, rustic often to boorishness, Germany in this way kept up against the intellectual paradox the old disdainful warfare of the empire against the priesthood, and once more the gulf was dug out between body and mind, between matter and spirit, force and liberty. From the banks of the Rhine a furious hail of missiles was directed against the fragile aspirations of Italianism. Brandt published his famous _Ship of Fools_,[382] reissued seventeen times between 1494 and 1520, a work as much translated, copied and imitated in the Germanic world as Petrarch was in the Latin world; a pungent and unjust work in which defile, as in a booth at the fair, all the little grotesques which bring joy to mind and heart—not merely, needless to say, old Turk’s heads like the physician or the astrologer, but new types—the spectacled scholar, busy nursing his own reputation under colour of Plato or Menander; the man of the world, oiled and curled indeed, but a wit, a lover, a giddy-pate, and a firm believer in the black art; no one is missing, not even the explorer, at a period when the world was dreaming of free exchanges and the demolition of frontiers, the age of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. In the greater part of these adventurers the old German sees only arm-chair travellers or tap-room oracles, and among the genuine travellers he anticipates Sterne in distinguishing idle loungers, curiosity hunters, liars, braggarts, conceited puppies, windbags, travellers in their own despite, travellers fleeing from justice, felons, the innocent and unfortunate traveller, the traveller for his own amusement. Hardly any is forgotten but the sentimental traveller.

As to the poets, needless to say whether a genuine German scoffs at these “gentlemen in _-us_,” a sort of intellectual Tartarins, who in actual life lead old and even wealthy women to the altar.[383]

And thereupon heads grew hot, and men pointed to the decadence of morals, the desertion of the country, the flocking of people into the towns, and they laid the blame on Rome, the head of the movement—Rome without a rudder, without a compass, drawn helplessly along by the new spirit through which she was to perish.

Some years later, when in spite of everything the rising tide at last made its force felt, the opposition changed front. People began to twit Italian learning with superficial ostentation. A love for books was laughed at. Ptolemy Philadelphus was a wonderful man, to be sure, to collect forty thousand volumes at Alexandria! An ass might just as well load himself with guitars and set up for a musician! That may be admitted; but they did not stop there; and, notwithstanding all we know of the violences of party spirit, we cannot help feeling somewhat astonished when we hear a man like Marot contemptuously flinging the epithet of “ignoramus” at the Rome of Leo X., or Melanchthon talking of Italy as “Egyptian darkness, a prey to the worst enemies of literature and study.” That seems the very last accusation that might have been expected.

These German ideas were half French too, and consequently, in the hot give-and-take of battle, imperial Germany and papal Italy, in spite of some shrewd blows, maintained their positions well enough, whilst France, caught between two fires, was shattered. At the very gates of Lyons, the sweet city of feminism, the Germanists and Huguenots brutally replied to all the poetry of the women with the jest of D’Aubigné: “When the eggs are hatched, the nightingale stints his song.”

In addition to many earnest men and almost all politicians, believers in authority and even in force, Italian dilettantism found other ardent adversaries in France in the champions of the old _gauloiserie_, who continued to dote on naturalism naked and unadorned, the syntheses or analyses of the flesh. They felt insulted that anyone should wish to impose on them a strained and uncomfortable Petrarchism with the idea of toning them down. However, Petrarchism did not effect very much, and it was assuredly not guilty of softening certain crudities and of replacing by its mawkishness the twaddle of illustrious nobodies like Jean Picart, Etienne Clavier and others.

Hence, in so disturbed an atmosphere as France then was, we should be led to conclude that the influence of women was negative, in the scientific sense of the word. Their work was like M. Pasteur’s. The soul of man was stirred, agitated, overwhelmed by a host of imperceptible microbes; the women did not furnish an infallible specific for preserving the health, but sought to sterilise the noxious germs, to make the air pure and the water clear.

Even after the squalls of the 16th century it cannot be said that no vestige of their effort remained. For it is the characteristic of France to be a complex and accommodating country, where nothing triumphs, but everything succeeds, where nothing abides, but nothing is lost. To this very day, an hour’s carriage drive through Paris takes you through the last four or five centuries of our history. The feminism of the 16th century brought down and deposited a new stratum of traditions: nothing more could be expected.

The violence of the opposition prompts us also to find some excuses for the timidity we have pointed out in high-placed women. Women genuinely frank and fearless could only be found in humbler life. We have seen how much difficulty Margaret of France, called to live in a circumscribed and select society, had in determining her precise whereabouts, since she met with nothing but contradiction around her. When her scared platonism came at last, about 1540, to formulate as in Italy definite principles of guidance through the pen of Héroët de la Maisonneuve, and a heated contention was the result, Margaret prudently tacked about, and smiled, now upon Héroët, now upon his adversary La Borderie.[384] And yet the rein was felt,[385] and in her circle it became necessary to sing of love in a more philosophic key. The fierce Des Périers himself, type of the man who loves to bite, saw himself reduced to translating the _Lysis_ of Plato, under the insipid title, “The Quest of Friendship.”

The victory thus remained a moderate and indecisive one, somewhat out of proportion to the great enthusiasm displayed. The fine triumphant treatises on the excellence and transcendent merit of women, those sacred stones, relics of a forgotten worship, deserted dolmens, were almost all Italian. Margaret showed some displeasure when she heard women ill-spoken of; but she did not inspire glorious rhapsodies, like Vittoria Colonna and many others. In France free discussion on the merits and demerits of women continued rife.

Such wrangling was indeed an old French social pastime: everyone said his say, with perfect liberty to change his mind, and a host of well-worn sentiments more or less amusing were bandied about: “Eve was a woman, God made himself man! There are no women among priests. It is very seemly to sleep alone. I have never been in love or married, thank God!” In the 15th century people succeeded for a moment in believing that the intellectual level of their little pastime might be raised till it at last attained the Italian perfection; a Norman named Martin Le Franc, whom his duties as secretary to Felix V. had made half a pontiff, at one moment threw out the grand phrase which was to set Italy on fire: “Women are the apostles of happiness, because they are the apostles of universal and necessary love.” A few little academies or _puys d’amour_,[386] scattered here and there in Picardy and Flanders, caught eagerly at the idea, but without deriving from it anything better than an encouragement to the flowery verbosities of dead-and-gone chivalry, which they plumed themselves on continuing. Then came the wild outbreaks in Germany to give the finishing stroke, and when Brandt and Geyler[387] became the idols of public opinion the French feminists blushed and turned tail. No more monuments were erected to the glory of women, and even a masterpiece of our art of engraving, an absolutely charming _Ship_[388] that appeared about 1500, was devoted to their disparagement. It is a series of little pictures, representing, to begin with, the inevitable Eve, and then coquetry, music, dinners, perfumes, love. The author does not go so far as to say that all these things are unutterably wearisome to him, but he insinuates that in his opinion it is useless to look for any serious idea among such frivolities.

The French were quite ready to admit that women had certain moral qualities, like goodness and devotion; a woman who had only one shift would give it away, they knew. A writer puts into Eve’s mouth a cry of sublime self-sacrifice at the moment of her expulsion from the garden: “Slay me,” she cries to Adam: “perhaps God will restore you to Paradise!” And yet it was to her that he owed his expulsion. But the great majority of Frenchmen very unjustly believed frivolity, inconstancy, lack of originality to be defects inherent in the sex, and not merely the result of an unfortunate education. If accomplished women quoted Plato or St. Thomas they were laughed at, no one would believe that they had an opinion of their own, but declared that they had got some one to coach them, that “the doctrine was no deeper than their lips, that they had no naturalness, that they disappeared under art.” A woman was believed to be afflicted with the radical incapacity to acquire an individual idea. Montaigne, who nevertheless boasts of being platonic and anti-epicurean,[389] sums up all these old prejudices in flatly refusing to regard woman as anything but a pretty animal. Virtue (the woman’s, that is; Montaigne has different ideas) is corporeal fidelity: his ideal is Anne of Brittany weaving tapestry in the conjugal bedroom. Montaigne reluctantly admits that feminine coquetry may end in ennobling love, but without changing its destination: “You can do something without the graces of the mind, but nothing without bodily graces.” Thus, when Roman and papal society claimed for women the absolute right to have done with paint and powder, it fell foul of a host of preconceived ideas.

Frenchwomen did not firmly enough assert themselves. Their services were accepted for domestic tasks, often delicate and difficult, which necessitated much intelligence, but were considered servile or at least inferior. Further, when they endeavoured to rise above this state of bondage, they were checked, sent back to their idleness and frivolity, persuaded that it was no duty of theirs to defend the great causes men too often deserted; and they believed it. Here is a mass of useless men, says the world: go to, let us match them with useless women! But was it not a mistake thus to bury them alive, so as to prevent their being too much in evidence? Was it right to inflict on the half of the human species a malaise the more terrible because for the most part the victim was unable to account for it? A woman who had all that is apparently necessary for perfect happiness, and who nevertheless was sick and unhappy by reason of the emptiness of her life, exclaimed: “I feel I lack something. In my soul there are faculties stifled and useless, too many things that are undeveloped and of no service to anyone.” How many like her have there been at all times—women of deep, vacant, ever virgin souls, who suffer through not giving themselves, and live in maiden meditation, fancy free! And why? For the sole profit of the selfishness of men! “No, this ought not to be,” warmly rejoined a convinced spiritualist: “if men complain of seeing themselves equalled or surpassed, more’s the pity: they have only themselves to blame. ’Tis that they are unworthy of their women!” This was not the speech of a Frenchman, but of a Roman prelate, Giovanni Monti, secretary to the pope.