Chapter II: Moral Influence (1)

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]