Chapter I: The Philosophy of Life (2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was bitter hostility between the two camps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

as a servant of Francis I. wrote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let women learn their duty!

They are priestesses in the religion of Beauty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That, at any rate, was the new conviction.