Chapter VI: RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE (Continued)

“I would a thousand times rather believe in and pursue an ideal, even though too high, than miss or betray it,” said Montalembert. Many persons in the 16th century were of a different opinion. They deemed aesthetic religion too frivolous or too worldly a thing, above all, too chimerical. The adversaries of the religion of beauty split up into two categories: some opposed it from reasoned conviction, others from social jealousy and incompatibility of temper.

The first, of whom Alberto Pio[429] and Budé,[430] eminent and estimable men, may serve as specimens, scouted the very idea of any connection between philosophy and religion, between aesthetics and morals; in their opinion religion did not tend to satisfy the reason, nor beauty to purify the conduct. The suggested reconciliation was to them an ill-disguised reversion to paganism, and in practice led to scandals like the representation of Machiavelli’s _Mandragora_[431] at the Vatican.

As we have seen, persons of this same opinion had already demonstrated the irrationality and inadequacy of reasoning; they had thereby relieved the world of a serious embarrassment; sensibility was henceforth to be the sole guide of life. But now we find others wishing to destroy this sensibility also, and to strip us of everything. At the idea that love is born of beauty such people veil their faces, and beg us to take away this thing they cannot bear to look upon, that is neither moral nor religious!

Assuredly it is impossible to commend everything in the Roman movement. Far from it! There is only too large a scope for criticism. Aestheticism was carried too far: it was, for example, a singularly wild notion to consider the building of St. Peter’s at Rome a social necessity of the first importance, and to sacrifice a part of the Catholic world to the desire of completing the Vatican. Antiquity, to be sure, evoked a quite exclusive enthusiasm, and it was singular to see the headquarters of Christianity going crazy about Pomponius Laetus, calling him “the glory of the age,” “Caesar,” because he was unearthing pagan catacombs. Not that mythology, as then cultivated, aimed at bringing back a real, lively faith in the Olympian deities! Isis, Apollo, Venus, on the walls of the Vatican or the churches, stood only for symbols and types of philosophy: Jean Bouchet very happily styled them “the aristocracy of the world.” Men thought, with Plato, that the beauty of things can only be gauged by comparing them with an eternal type; as Margaret of France said: “The Beautiful is seen in all forms of beauty.” Further, morality, without divorcing itself officially from Christianity, sometimes was pretty completely disjoined from it; to many people virtue consisted in wearing a good coat and keeping up a good style. Montaigne, Aretino, and Benvenuto Cellini, for example, passed for virtuous men.

To protest against this paganism was a right and proper thing. But was it necessary to forbid Christianity to secure a rational appreciation, and even to win our love by working upon our emotions? An ineradicable instinct prompted the Latin races to believe through love; “Italy will be un-christianised, not Calvinised,” as Azeglio admirably said. To invest worship with mundane pomp and circumstance is as profoundly human an idea as it is to keep the clock at a railway station a few minutes behind time.

The Middle Ages, however, kept strict time: materialistic as they were, they erected cathedrals, the baser instincts avenging themselves by affixing to the cornices, or even to the porches, in full view, ornamental details cynically human. The Renaissance, for all its mysticism, was not partial to the dim religious light, or the mysteries shadowed in lofty arches far out of eyeshot; it loved clearness, daylight, illumination. It built only châteaux, even to the glory of God. St. Peter’s at Rome is a château; the eye detects nothing abnormal in it; and there man feels himself at home.

It was thus with the religion of prelates and women. It was lofty, sometimes loftier than Gothic arches, but so broad, so clear, so full of unity, of so human a hospitality that no one felt he had to do with the unknown, the unfathomable. It was a reflection of life itself, but with added brilliance and decoration; it aimed at attracting man, when he had performed his material functions in eating, drinking, loving his wife, to a banquet of spiritual fare and spiritual love. We look to women to quicken our perception. In spiritual concerns the parts are reversed.

Now, men spent their lives in an atmosphere of materialism and unbridled sensuality. Melin de Saint-Gelais declared nudities “heavenly objects, worthy of altars.”[432] Coyness was unknown. “Happy the people who have only God to deal with,” cries a young lady: “with men it is enough to save appearances.”[433] In the view of many, morality found only an insufficient sanction in religion; the third Margaret of France wrote, with a modesty unhappily too well justified: “Some consider that God holds the great in his special protection.” And on the other hand, the laws of society did not always oppose a very solid barrier: it was easy to a noble lady to override them. Renée of France took a manifest pleasure in running atilt against popular conventions; Marot had only to set the mob against him as “a lascivious pagan,” to merit her indulgence. Apparently she was even tempted to believe a daughter of France so superior to humanity at large that she could have only lovers.

However, it was sincerely believed that, for people of refinement and distinction, good style and good taste rendered many artistic things inoffensive. So (to select one example among a thousand) no one was shocked when the Abbé de Maupas gave his approval to some neat verses in which Gilles d’Aurigny boasted his conquest of a “sweet pale Margaret.” The gentle spotless Vergerio very gaily accepted the title of “bishop of Aretino.” Margaret compliments her brother on retaining his faith through all his sin. Does she praise the sin? Not at all: but she praises the king for what is praiseworthy, the remaining a Christian. Vergerio would have shrunk with horror from certain of Aretino’s books, but he considered the man as a force, of as much importance as any diocese, while many of the episcopal boroughs contained as many vices with less wit. And he tries to coax some good thing out of this diocese. On the same principle Margaret set Vauzelles to translate some of Aretino’s devotional works. Indulgence thus shown in practice had no modifying effect on principles, and besides, men were particularly careful not to extend it to the masses. Among them, as everybody knows, there is no such thing as sentiment, but only sensations, and with them, consequently, the fetters of a material morality were still found serviceable. The same Caterina Cibo who highly approved Firenzuola’s book on love, severely reproached the bishop of Camerino for his slackness in reforming the morals of his clergy, and succeeded in obtaining from the pope a rigorous brief on the subject.

In society it happened that pagan sensation and Christian sentiment all but touched; it seemed prudent, advantageous, and politic not to accentuate the difference between them. Many people, like true gourmets, let themselves swing gently between mysticism and materialism; perhaps it was just as well not to compel them to decide one way or the other. It has been well said that “faith has this peculiarity, that when it has vanished, it influences still: grace survives by force of habit from a once living sentiment.”[434] The logical Germans proceeded to deduce from this spiritual condition the system of “faith without works.” But folk remained satisfied with “confidence without works.” It was in these practical considerations that an answer was found to Budé’s objections.

However, Budé was a friend, and sought only to point out abuses. The real and invincible adversaries of the religion of beauty, those who hoped to destroy it, came from below. They were such as society scouted—the vulgar, the superstitious, the material-minded, the street as against the salon: in short, the men. When Vergerio went to Germany to discourse of love, he was answered in a strain that disconcerted him: the Germans talked politics to him. “I am tortured,” he cries, “to see the cause of Jesus Christ treated with so much indignity; it appears to me that to-day this is not the real explanation of the immense trouble taken with so many people: it is assuredly only a pretext. The main thing considered under the cloak of zeal for Christ is, I believe, nothing but the private interests of a few individuals.”

The clergy did not follow the religious lead of the prelates. The whole of the middle or lower orders among them, the country parsons, the monks, made common cause, some in a materialist direction,[435] others as visionaries, against the philosophic group, the higher prelacy, and the priesthood of women.

The monk was a man of different stamp. Margaret petting Rabelais resembles, if we may be allowed the expression, a hen mothering a duck. Look at the man of fustian, whom one pious author liked to call “God’s nightingale,” there in his pulpit, fist on hip, vulgar, impassioned, ranting, preaching terrible doctrines with sonorous voice. The antagonism between him and the platonist women is easily realised. He did not bother his head about beauty or love; instead of an amiable liberality which would suit a sceptical audience, it seemed as though with his wild declamations he had no other aim than to quench the embers still smouldering. It was more than a treason, it was a folly. He did not mince matters; he reviled the bishops and great ones of the earth; talk to him of love, he replied with retribution, toil, eternal torments, the glories of poverty, the agonies of the animal man. Savonarola himself, so warm and passionate, so much loved and worthy of love, brandished with scriptural fervour the great popular weapons, the prophecies and the wrath to come. In France, Oliver Maillard, Ménot, Rabelais himself (though misguided) possessed a breezy eloquence, rugged, turbid, picturesque, censorious, verbose, nowhit metaphysical, the opposite of the official Ciceronianism:

Il presche en théologien;
Mais pour boire de belle eau claire,
Faites-la boire à vostre chien,
Frère Lubin ne le peult faire.[436]

Maillard went so far as to sing songs of his own in the pulpit! Others indulged in wearisome or tasteless jests, in the most aristocratic of churches,[437] and before a queen.

Ignorant of the world and its refinements, the monks and parsons applied to distinguished consciences the casuistry of the suburbs: their morality smacked of the natural man. It proscribed refined joys: a man should be “an ox or an ass,” as Savonarola said. Not that the monks were ill-natured: they were hospitable; they would console an unhappy wife; they would assist a widow to find a gem of a son-in-law. But there their understanding of the feminine nature stopped. For the rest they saw in women only Satanic lures, false chignons, perfumes, all the fripperies of which Savonarola had made so magnificent a holocaust in the great square of Florence! Amiability was quite beyond them. Fra Inigo, in one of the streets of Toledo, happened to be walking behind some ladies whose trains were raising clouds of dust. They good-naturedly stopped to let him pass. Fancying he was the very pink of courtesy he said: “I kiss your hands, ladies; proceed, I beg you: the dust raised by the sheep doesn’t annoy the wolf.” In the pulpit it was the same; if they spoke of social necessities, it was like the peasants they were; they preached poverty and chastity without qualification; they had no eye for fine shades, but bedaubed the most delicate façades with their garish colours. “Are you in fit state to die? You women who display your beautiful bosoms, your necks, your throats, would you wish to die in your present condition? And you priests, would you like to die with your conscience burdened with the masses you have said? Not four out of a thousand, I believe, would be found ready. If the last trump here assailed our ears, we should then see who would respond to its appeal!”[438]

The monastic spirit was indestructible; Spagnuoli[439] and Du Four carried it into the courts. Adrian VI., coming between two Medicean popes, cherished this spirit at the Vatican.[440] During three reigns Francis de Paul remained faithful to it at the court of France. Once before, as he passed through Rome, St. Francis had ventured to upbraid a cardinal lolling in a sumptuous equipage, and the prelate, bending forward over the door, had replied with a fine and courtly smile that it was very necessary to inspire the children of that generation with respect. How much St. Francis was idolised by the ladies it is beyond us to tell: in all circumstances of gravity they claimed his intercession, and yet he did not flatter them. He would never give audience to them. Women and wealth, said he, are the two scourges of the Church—and especially devout women: them he called “vipers.”

How the world flung back these invectives! Ladies and prelates vied with one another in mocking at the lower monastic orders—those shaven scurvy bald-pates who stood in the way of all spiritual regeneration; ill-bred, material-minded fellows, uneducated, coarse, fat, full-blooded, brimming over with a hot, carnal vitality, gay to the core and therefore prompt to sin, much “more attentive to the life active than to the life contemplative”—those easy-going vagabonds who, awaiting eternity, “do not weary their minds overmuch by perusal of a heap of books,” for fear lest the lore they might imbibe from them should puff them out with pride, like Lucifer, and “make them decline from monastic learning.” The pallid platonists, “crushed under their trappings,” called them fanatics, hypocrites, misers, gluttons, and above all filthy and disgusting wretches. It was a singular idea the Prince da Carpi had—to be buried in a monk’s fustian frock, and thus “turn monk beyond the tomb.” That was clean contrary to the mode!

Margaret lampooned the monks. Alexander VI. called them tyrants, and declared he would much rather offend the greatest of kings than the least of these mendicants. At a carnival at Rome, Bibbiena, galloping along under his mask, caught sight of a monk, and swooped down on him like a hawk upon its prey. “I know you,” he cries tragically: “the provost is after you to arrest you, but I will save you; I will carry you off to the chancellor’s”; and thereupon he grabs the unlucky monk, hoists him on to the crupper all shivering and shaking, and off they go amid the hoots and yells and gibes of the mob, under a shower of eggs! Soon Bibbiena was yolk of egg from head to heel,—and was privately accusing the people of uncommonly bad marksmanship. At last, when the city had had its fill of laughter, he deigned to yield to the supplications of his victim and set him down. Then the other broke a few more eggs over him, flung off his frock, and with a low bow said, “I am your groom.” Bibbiena galloped on.

We need not, of course, take literally the jests of that period against the monks. There were good and bad monks; the good were those least in evidence. But Guy Juvenal, who was an active and honest worker for monastic reform, winds up his enquiry[441] with a phrase as old as St. Augustine: “You find in the convents the best and the worst.”

However, the adversaries of the monks do them justice themselves, unintentionally. The company in the _Heptameron_, for instance, are much amused at the idea that some monks may possibly have overheard their ribald talk. One of the Urbino coterie traces a portrait of the monks from the outside which leaves us musing. Gross and plump, he says, they were hypocrites: little mortification of the flesh there! Emaciated and unkempt, they were false hounds who distinguished between sins secret and sins open. Elegant, well-trimmed, scented—these were everything that was vilest and most antagonistic to platonism! But what then ought their style to have been?

Trithemius, however, defined the monastic life in a highly platonist phrase: “To love is to know.” How came, then, the idea that monks could not actively mingle in the life of the world, since St. Ignatius proved the contrary when he founded an order in harmony with the new spirit? The convents of old were peopled with distinguished intellects; Luther, Calvin, Erasmus, Jean Thenaud, André Thevet,[442] and a thousand others sprang from these decried lower clergy. How can we believe that the monks were by their tenets at odds with aestheticism, when the Italian Dominicans monopolised the charming art of mosaic in wood and almost monopolised also that of painting on glass—when St. Mark’s at Florence, impregnated with the fragrant inspirations of the Fra Angelicos and the Fra Bartolomeos, stands forth to this day, in the profound simplicity of neglect, one of the most delightful refuges of human thought?

Certain of the more cultured orders had a bent for learning. And these were expelled; the Jacobins were harried away by the cardinal of Amboise because they lived outside their convent walls in order to dance attendance at court, and neglected the offices of the church. There was a striking repetition of this quarrel in the 17th century, between Dom Mabillon, who advocated a learned monkhood, and the fiery abbé of Rancé, who wished to maintain the monasteries in the simple practice of piety; and in this contest also a woman (the duchess of Guise) took part.

Yet many of the monks, from a godly desire for success, strove earnestly to suit themselves to the fashion; they freely cited the Olympian deities and quoted Ovid and Virgil; in spite of the counsels of Savonarola, they exerted themselves to please, even though at the expense of “the divine.” One preacher draws an ingenious parallel between the Virgin and Isis. Others discourse on beauty or coquetry, its benefits and perils. Some maintain that the Virgin was not pretty, because she was lowly and not in society; others, on the contrary, nourished on the _Song of Songs_ and other aesthetic authorities, depict her as “clothed with the sun” according to the phrase in the Apocalypse—dark-skinned perhaps, being a Jewess, but a woman to be admired nevertheless!

But the monks, do what they might, scatter a thousand flowers of mythology and rhetoric as they pleased, never acquired the lightness of touch the least of the sonneteers possessed.

Rabelais opens with a polemic on the merit of women, a stale subject, but impossible to avoid. He loves the world and mocks at the “molish monk”; he extols, on the other hand, the monk “young, gallant, dexterous, bold, adventurous, resolute, tall, lean, voluminous in chaps, well-favoured in nose, who smartly patters his prayers and polishes off his masses ... moreover, a clerk to the finger-tips in point of the breviary.” He admits both sexes to his abbey of Thelema, on proof of perfect beauty. It is laved and perfumed, this modern abbey—full of gold and jewels, of beauteous garments, of music, of things sumptuous and comfortable, of books: nothing is wanting there: it has nine thousand three hundred and thirty-two chapels, and a single swimming bath under the watchful eye of a statue of the Three Graces. No one there is irked by theology!

And yet Rabelais was absolutely at sea in regard to the platonist spirit, to these mystic abstractions: “To have a woman is to have her for the use wherefor Nature created her ... for the delectation of man.” If anyone speaks to him of the “devotion of love” he laughs and sets himself down at the table: “Drink,” cries the Sibyl in his ear, “drink!” Drunkenness—that is mysticism enough for him! He leaves the convent to become a physician. He commends none but the natural sciences, and the only one he cannot away with is the only one that women accept—prophetic astrology. He was bound to end as a parson!

Even in Italy, the monk always smacked of his convent. Folengo[443] spent his life in going in and out of it. His works also are nothing but one everlasting buffoonery. In his _Moscheid_, he appears to depict the conspiracy of monks against fine ladies—an epic complot of all creeping things—ants, bugs, spiders—against the winged race of bees and butterflies. The royal head of the chancellery, Spingard, sets off on a lean-ribbed mare, bearing splendid letters under the great seal of the Senate (an image of Liberty and Justice), in order to entice men into a spider’s web.

But the Italian monks accepted their rout; they derided the antiquated “subtleties of St. Thomas,” as well as visions of God without intermediaries, and hatred of indulgences. Their solace was a splendid ignorance, Neapolitan, epicurean.

In Germany, on the contrary, they triumphed. Despite the recommendations of Leo X. and the passionate objurgations of Erasmus, the Germans refused to admire the works of the hour, the _Epistles_ of Eoban,[444] for instance, in which the holy women of the New Testament are represented as writing in the style of Ovid. They waged implacable war against aestheticism and dilettantism, and the bitterness of the struggle was only accentuated every time they came in contact with Rome. Burckhardt, writing his memoirs day by day about a splendid epoch, is incessantly bemoaning its corruption: does he perceive the existence of a spiritual movement at Rome? He sees nothing of liberty but the scandals; he does his duty like a painstaking but muddle-headed corporal. Erasmus himself is blind to all but the humanities, while Luther finds only horrors. They spoke with different tongues. When Hoogstratten, a German monk, impeached Reuchlin, who had ventured to defend certain Jewish books on scientific grounds, Rome was utterly unable to make out the bearings of this Teutonic quarrel: she procrastinated, and let the matter drop.

Ulrich von Hütten tried to Italianise himself at the little court of the archbishop of Mayence, which claimed to be a copy of Urbino, but all they did there was to play billiards and abuse the monks behind their backs. He returned to Rome in 1516, one of the years of triumph; and there, son of a sturdy and poor country where the lord ruled and even robbed people at his pleasure, and where woman was emphatically the weaker vessel, he, the old and unknown student, found himself excluded from that superb court,[445] from those “false gods” as he called them, and relegated to the society of a German financier of low degree; he had no recommendation but his birth; and he could barely succeed in finishing his studies in law. He took his revenge in abuse. “I have human feelings,” he wrote to Luther.

With lofty eloquence and burning zeal he preached the necessary war. The apostles of love had called war a brigandage. Hütten denounced as brigands the non-combatants—merchants, advocates, and priests. His motto was: a beautiful woman, gold, and indolence. In 1522 he took up arms, and with a magnificent gesture pointed out the splendid churches to the mob.

Luther, too, protests against the philosophic spirit. He checks liberty at a certain point, forbidding the mind to emancipate itself further. From a thinker he becomes a man of action, and joins hands with the great lords.

There was an explosion of anti-feminist and anti-liberal sentiments—war to the knife. It took place, like all great moral outbursts, under the banner of religion, because religion possessed organised battalions, a force ready at call, and, above all, excellent pretexts with which to veil struggles entered into on behalf of selfish interests.

“Talk of household concerns is women’s affair,” said Luther: “they are mistresses and queens there, and more than a match for Cicero and the finest orators.... But take them from their housewifery and they are good for nothing.... Woman is born to manage a household: ’tis her lot, her law of nature: man is born for war and polity, to administer and govern states.” As a model for the sculptor woman delighted Luther; but that was all; he denied her physical and moral vigour; the less her moral strength, the more he congratulates her. Evidently the intellectual pretensions of feminism constituted in his eyes an absurdity and a peril. Calvin went still farther. Whatever was pleasing to women he proscribed, even aesthetic emotions however inoffensive, however religious in character. He would hardly deign to believe that women are really good hands at puddings! Some ladies, in their noble devotion to his cause, had found a common prison in the Châtelet; he sent them somewhat grim felicitations. “If men are frail and easily shaken, the frailty of your sex is still greater.... God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty, and base things of the world, and things which are despised, to bring to nought those that are great and of high worth.”

There was nothing for Luther to invent. Everyone desired a reformation, like himself. The cardinal of Amboise and the traditional school wished to try back and restore discipline; the philosophic women and the Roman world were for pushing ahead, and saw salvation in the rejuvenescence of faith through liberty.[446] But neither party was eager for a schism, above all the Liberals of Rome, who not only stood for unity, which was their breath of life, but also gladly washed their hands of pure theology.

Luther invented nothing. All that he said, and even more, had been said at Rome for fifty years before him. He caught certain floating ideas, and fixed those which had passed into current morality. This was to attack dilettantism. The gentle feminist and Latinist prelates, with their tolerance, their openness of mind and intellectual freedom—Sadoleto, the friend of Melanchthon, Contarini, Pole, the kindly scholar ruled by Vittoria Colonna, Flaminio, Vergerio—all deplored the degradation of their handiwork: they felt as a Raphaelite painter would feel if he found his dreams copied in a picture by Espinal. Yet, while lamenting this use made of liberty, they respected it; at bottom they considered Zwingle and Melanchthon as two of themselves, and they did not despair of achieving the triumph of freedom by freedom itself. Such was, as we know, the policy of Pole at Ratisbon, and of Vergerio at Worms; but despite the support of Vittoria Colonna, Margaret of France, and a whole band of enthusiastic and ardent women, they did not succeed; they were caught between two fires.

Women threw themselves into the fray with enthusiasm.

We might fancy ourselves looking at the Sabine women of David’s famous picture: daughters of the Roman Church, very devoted, very judicious (at least in their own opinion), and yet ready in the name of freedom to defend and love their adversaries.

Vittoria Colonna always believed herself as orthodox as the Holy See itself, and more clever, even when in the heat of the battle she put forth opinions somewhat questionable.

She sang the barque of Peter triumphing over all the billows of the world’s vileness and ill-will, and she received the papal benediction. But yet, in the great religious struggle of the 16th century, she could never realise that genuine difficulties of doctrine were involved; she saw nothing but a medley of personal intrigues, rivalries, jealousies, offended susceptibilities, good intentions bungled; excellent judges have shared her impressions. Entirely new circumstances had to arise, the fiercest moment of the battle had to come, before the court of Rome at last repudiated retrospectively all fellowship with Vittoria. And yet events seemed to justify the thesis of love—a thesis neither Protestant nor strictly Catholic.

Attached to a religion of intuition and sentiment, the women aimed at saving the guilty by the love of the innocent; they put into practice a doctrine rather divine than religious; their scheme was that of Henri IV.: “Those who unswervingly follow their conscience are of my religion, and I am of the religion of all who are brave and good.”

Vittoria Colonna took a very special interest in a celebrated Capuchin, the ardent and eloquent Ochino, who had formed at Naples a sort of liberal triumvirate. Somewhat intoxicated with his popularity and the warm sympathies of the feminist group, Ochino bitterly attacked Paul III. about certain measures of reform directed against the Capuchins. The marchioness hastened to prevent a rupture; she issued a great liberal manifesto addressed to Contarini, and at the same time urged Ochino to come to Rome. Paul smiled at the manifesto, and sent the author a pilgrim’s passport, for herself and a Capuchin. Ochino, however, made a rancorous reply. Women put forth indescribable efforts to bring back to the fold this sheep who was threatening to wander away! Thanks to the feminine freemasonry, Ochino, though openly at odds with the pope, still occupied with brilliance the principal pulpits of Verona, Venice, Bologna and Mantua, until at last he took to flight. Vittoria never lost sight of him; at Venice, she got secret information as to his welfare from Bembo, who had just been raised to the cardinalate.[447] Later, by means of anonymous letters in which she told her old protégé that she was buying his books and getting insight into his views, flattering him, calling herself his “very obedient daughter and disciple,” she did her utmost to bring him to reason. Vain illusion! Ochino was a monk, Vittoria a noble lady; they belonged to two jarring worlds.

Margaret of France wished to play the same part, but she found herself in a more embarrassing situation, and understood still less, if possible, the real bearing of the struggle. She dreamed of reforming humanity, not dogmas; she left to God the task of winning the victory and causing the “word of truth” to shine forth. Why limit the range of these dreams? “The Church is a living and active voice, which is its own explanation, and can always express itself anew and more abundantly.” Why this procreation of rigorous dogmas, to the ruin of the feminine apostleship? Margaret pressed towards synthesis; she wished to know, to co-ordinate, to succeed. Briçonnet wrote to her smilingly: “If there were at the end of the earth a learned doctor who, by means of a single compendium, could teach the whole art of grammar, besides rhetoric, philosophy and the seven liberal arts, you would rush to him as a cold man rushes to the fire.”

Where then was she to seek the illumination of love and faith if not in that religious philosophy towards which she had always inclined? In regard to faith, still more than in social matters, she felt how good it was to soar into the heights of abstraction, to go direct to the verities without troubling about men. How cramping it would have seemed to her to embody all theology and all faith, both Paradise and Hell, in one man, in one priest! She smiled on men, provided they were men of good-will, even if they burnt others, as Francis I. did, but still more if they were burnt or in danger of burning, like “that poor Berquin,” or the chaplain Michel, or the canons of Bourges, or Farel, Vatable, Gerard Roussel.[448] A man might translate the Thomist work the _Mirror of Ladies_; might call himself Lefèvre d’Etaples, _faber ingeniorum_, or Dolet; might be a witty libertine like Pocques or Duval—no matter, he had claims on her affection, if he was well disposed. She delighted in hearing Erasmus and Luther discuss the question of free-will. She looked on at these passages at arms with the same satisfaction as others witnessed a tourney. In concert with a lady of influence, she dragged the king to St. Eustace, to hear a sermon by a whirlwind of a parson who preached peace and _sursum corda_. She was anxious to arrange at Paris a controversial meeting with Melanchthon, but the Faculty of Theology was not agreeable. The theologian really after her own heart was the amiable prelate Nicolas Dangu, who followed her everywhere like a perfect lover.

There was yet another man able to please her; a sort of magian, remarkable in spite of his wild notions, who carried feminine theology to the pitch of absurdity. This was Guillaume Postel, a workhouse foundling, a nobody, a village brat and then a lackey, half oriental, half Italian, though a Frenchman: a man of eminent learning and enlightened mind, the fine essence of eclecticism. He wrote in twelve languages on the most various subjects, in support of the most diversified theses. He advocated a universal monarchy which he offered to Francis I., and a universal religion, genuinely catholic and Roman, the papacy of which he reserved for himself. He based it upon the doctrine of infinite love (if need be, a somewhat sensual love), and upon an aesthetic philosophy which should solve all mysteries by applying the formula of the Beautiful. According to this religion, it was for women to regenerate the world; wherefore he salutes with ardent sympathy the Mothers of the Church whom he sees budding forth almost everywhere—More’s daughters in England; Isabella Rosera in Spain; in Portugal Loysa Sygea who at the age of twenty-two honoured Pope Paul III. with her advice in five little-known languages. Paul replied in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but excused himself in regard to Chaldean and Arabic, and instructed Postel to take the pen.

Postel’s strange work[449] appeared after the death of Margaret of France, under the auspices of Margaret of Savoy. Postel announced the discovery of a new Eve, whom he extolled above all other women, even above Vittoria Colonna. She was an aged sorceress of Venice, endowed with second sight, who read through paper as if she had the Röntgen rays at her disposal. Unhappily the Venetians sent her about her business.

To sum up, the women believed and maintained that, in dealing with the people, the only language they understood must be employed—that of force; but that for the elect there was only one real weapon—the matchless one, liberty. The first of liberties is that of talking nonsense. It was needful, then, to be able to tolerate freedom in others, one’s own friends included.

The practical result of women’s intervention was in France insignificant enough.

The long-standing hostility of the French clergy to the court of Rome had burst out so glaringly in the reign of Louis XII., it displayed itself so vigorously in the more or less official dithyrambs of Andrelini, Villebresme, De Mailly, Gringoire, Jean d’Auton, Seyssel, against the “Roman profligacy,” that Leo X. became alarmed and very prudently abandoned in 1515 the real bone of contention, the right to dispose of benefices. From that moment the Church, fused with the State, became a national machine, and no philosophic argument could in future shake an organisation so solid. Luther gave wide application to the same system in secularising the property of the clergy. The ruck of men left the business of dealing with these religious questions to the higher powers; they held to their creed either out of a taste for ignorance or from scepticism; the learned were quite content to smile and call theology a “poesy”—like vine-growers who sell a certain doctored wine, but keep the genuine locked up in their cellars—the wine they alone are sure of because they cut the grapes.

Liberalism was supported, then, by only a few timid and affectionate voices, like that of Longueil, the friend of Bembo and Pole, who said in his _Letter to the Lutherans_: “I take no side in the struggle: a simple citizen of the Christian republic, neither gratitude, nor hate, nor ambition impels me to one side or the other.” Unhappily, it is not with lofty language like this that you can rouse a mob!

Is it necessary to recall what followed? It was at all points the reverse of what the feminists had hoped. “Our adversaries say of us,” wrote Calvin, “that we have begun a sort of Trojan war, on account of women, _mulierum causa_.” And in truth, as in the wars of the past, women had again become to a certain extent the gage of battle. Religion declared war on platonism, just as platonism had declared war on religious virginity; instead of draping women in inaccessibility, people contented themselves with making matrimony easier. That was a simple solution of the difficulty. And yet it took longer than might be supposed to get back to this solid ground of matter-of-fact. The first woman espoused by an Archbishop of Canterbury was obliged, it appears, to travel like an animal in a chest pierced with holes, so as to escape the buffooneries of the mob; the second went to court; but when Queen Elizabeth saw her she bit her lips: “What am I to call you? Madam I cannot, and Mistress I dare not.”

Catholicism, roused to action, henceforth asked for nothing except to condemn. It was a sudden drop from the ideal back again to earth, a dreadful battle of personalities, a life and death struggle with mythical or literal methods of exegesis for weapons. Erasmus was already writing: “These interpreters of the language of Heaven go off like gunpowder, they frown most terribly. What is Hütten to me? Shall I prefer the authority of Luther to that of the pope? If we had not received a pope from Christ, we should have to invent one.” “They scream and scuffle and insult one another,” sneers Des Périers, who no longer believed even in the existence of God. Blessed are the poor in spirit, concludes Agrippa; blessed are illiterate people like the apostles; blessed is the ass!