Chapter XXIV: Conclusion (1)

Nothing now remains but to relate the conclusion of the dream.

A dream indeed—all these schemes of happiness which had flashed across the gloomy background of realities like dissolving views on the wall of a lecture-room: the blue sea, the blazing sun, appearing but for a moment, left the blackness deeper still.

Margaret, the great organiser of happiness, never found the secret of happiness for herself. Her last days were vexed with the most poignant sorrows: the court, Calvin, the people, well-nigh the whole world, cast her off and treated her as a Utopian dreamer: her husband went the length of striking her, her daughter was torn from her, and Henri II. sent her into exile; several of her friends, such as Ramus and Dolet, were persecuted, alas! from motives far from sincere: it was, in truth, what she called “the suburbs of death.” By divine mercy her heart, incessantly a prey to anxieties, at length parted company with a life that was anything but love. She perished, poor duchess, at her post as charitable vendor of love—perished in flames, like the salamander! No man came to her aid, none even paused to mourn her. Three young English maidens named Seymour erected to her a frail monument of verse under the auspices of her niece; but save for one devoted friend, Sainte-Marthe, whose enthusiastic funeral oration nevertheless provoked the liveliest criticisms, men maintained a remarkable silence. The princess had greatly erred in scattering her affections and seeking to create a sociology of the heart. Men do not care for love, they wish to fear and obey! There is no true love but the love of an individual.

The Saint-Gelais, the Héroëts, the Salels, all those exquisite hearts bubbling over with sentiment when a smile from Margaret could lead them to fortune, now remained mute; the drum had to be set a-beating, and then at length there appeared a volume of elegies, a subtle fantasia in many tongues, which would have been cold as ice but for the vigorous beam Ronsard shot into the midst of the medley—a tiny volume, brilliant, ingenious, perverse, like the princess’s soul, full of pretty verses all alike—alike in expression, with the same silvery veneer of tenderness—the very image of the somewhat phantasmagoric and unreal romanticism in which some mystic women delighted: brightness, but no warmth or life. Yes, Margaret was too fond of these intense lights and shades. A thousand causeless murmurings woke echoes in her soul. She sustained herself upon the subtle aroma wafted on certain nights upon the breath of the quickening world. She never heard the full, resounding roar of the sea in the darkness, but was content to see the fringe of foam.

At the moment when Margaret disappeared, the power of women in France seemed at its apogee; in reality, it was on the wane. It was attacked more especially on the moral side. According to so-called Puritans like Agrippa, the influence of women resulted in the declension of morals; and what a declension! Everything converged towards the joys of the senses; painters could no longer paint anything but boudoir scenes, architects could only open doors or pierce balconies, husbands only speculate on the exploits of their wives, Luther only recommend the reading of stories (sometimes astonishing) from the Bible.

Unquestionably, feminine influences, even the purest, seemed soft and enervating. The energetic spirit of old France, of the time before Francis I., sprang suddenly to life again. A country gentleman, Du Bellay, sounded the charge against Roman cosmopolitanism by claiming France for the French. At one stroke, as J. M. de Heredia has said, his clear and picturesque style clean obliterated Marot, Saint-Gelais, and the whole of Margaret’s school. Du Bellay would have loved Savonarola: he speaks the same tongue as the friends of Anne of France; he has sworn implacable hatred against platonism with its cloying sweetness, against the languors of petrarchism: “He has not breathed in the ardour that sets Italy in flame.” Though he has seen Rome, decadent Rome, he has not caught her infection; it is she that he blames, and yet the “bashful squires,” the “exiles from joyance,” and other vulgar “fantasticals,” whom he flagellates and sends packing along with the Round Table, were very often French. He has in his veins the proud and lusty blood of a soldier. Like Anne of France he worships truth, and candour, and lucidity.

Ronsard too, of like blood and ancestry, advocates truth: “I love not the false, I love the true.” He overwhelms with his vigorous eloquence all sham loves, “Cupids with curled love-locks, but broken arrow”; all the platonic cant, so virtuous in show and so little virtuous in fact: and all these refinements, and hypocrisies, and conceits on twofold incorporeal love!

Aimer l’esprit, Madame, c’est aimer la sottise.[450]

The voices of these two men stirred up no little commotion among a large number of the lesser nobility or quasi-nobility, men of middling station, less sensible to high-falutin’ than to the spirit of frankness and independence—“gaillards,” as they styled themselves, who loved women as they loved “daylight and the sun,” but as men, by no means with an idea of “playing lackey to a mistress,” particularly one who was wrinkled, painted, or terribly accomplished.

De Junon sont vos bras, des grâces vostre sein,
Vous avez de l’aurore et le front et la main,
Mais vous avez le cœur d’une fière lionne.[451]

That was their type. And they laughed at the Vadiuses and Trissotins[452] of their day, at all the fine carollings that Du Bellay amused himself by imitating, forgotten tunes of long ago, the faded frippery of the ballroom. What merriment there is when a belated poet returns from Italy with another _Amadis_! Neither Olivier de Magny nor Baïf will take the moon for the sun, or love for a mere ornamentation.

The men of the Pléiade had no love for patronage or the Medici species. They hated and abhorred the Jews. Ronsard would have liked to see a fine St. Bartholomew butchery of them, and could not forgive Titus for wasting his chances: his gorge rises at the thought of a Leo the Hebrew[453] figuring among the sages of platonism. Good decent fellows, they drape themselves in their somewhat rustic free-and-easiness. From their modest snuggeries they proudly tell the king “Nature has made us of the same flesh and blood as you”;[454] they do not hesitate to write to a Medici lady that the finest royalty is to be “king of oneself.”[455] They vie with one another in launching their epigrams against the court, the salons, the ruling women;[456] they sing of woods and dales, even of the wild untrammelled life—

O bienheureux le siècle où le peuple sauvage
Vivoit, par les forêts, de gland et de fruitage.[457]

—_Ronsard._

They sing praise to Nature their mother, not an abstraction, an infinity, but immeasurable:[458] the lines of the horizon, it would seem, spring from their hearts, and like an outspread fan gather up the whole immensity of life. How remote this from the gardens of philosophy ordered so delicately, with their shimmering fountains, their shivering Venuses![459]

When under a clear Roman sky Du Bellay is sauntering in pleasant indolence amid all the pomp and luxury of cultured prelates, enjoying the serene life of country villas; when, as a background to the picture, behind carriages and laurels, fashionable women and noble statues, he sees flushed in a golden haze the forest of towers, and pediments, and obelisks, and St. Peter’s in all its majesty, the glory of the world, what does his heart say to him?

Quand reverray-je, hélas! de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée?[460]

Such was the sentiment of the Pléiade.

Social philosophy had changed all at once. People were weary of the idea of the beautiful, and henceforth the wind was to set towards scepticism: no longer an airy, Ciceronian, superficial scepticism, the scepticism of Cardan, or of Erasmus, the jabberer of Latin, the flouter of monks, often madder than the madmen he derides, but a masculine aggressive scepticism, which believes in nothing in this world, not even in love, and is incredulous about the other world and the immortality of the soul. Yet it feels an “impression” of the unseen: deprived of an ideal for this life, it must willy-nilly suppose another apart from mortal men, and thus yearningly, gropingly, unawares, it takes a step towards Christ.

And then those who are still reasoning in this untoward generation laugh or weep. What a harsh harrowing laugh is that of Boistuau,[461] who had nevertheless been a friend of Margaret! Boistuau speaks to us of love, and tells us that it is a distressing malady of the mind, characterised by symptoms of agitation and disorder, and exhausting all its energies, physical and moral. You hear those attacked by it groaning and dropping words like “coral, alabaster, roses, lilies”; they have lost all individuality; they sob and abase themselves and are a continual supplication. The cause of the malady is obscure; some speak of magnetism, others of microbes, others of the influence of the stars.

It was this kind of scepticism which was destined to lead us to the morality of Charles IX.’s court.

Then it was seen how fatal had been the disease of sensibility, and the profound soul-weariness which resulted from imaginative pleasures, from the mirage which overlay the things of life since women had undertaken to interpret everything through the affections. It had been a woful error to create an art of sensibility! Sensibility serves to attract men, but cannot hold or guide them. Women believe in sensibility because they always consider the heart of a man as a reservoir of moral strength. It is the other way about; men for the most part err through weakness; it is that which renders them inconstant and vicious. They would gain in steadfastness and goodness if women, less timid and more active, had strength rather than tenacity, and a real energy under an appearance of tenderness.

An attempt was made, but too late, to show that the feminist spirit could display energy as well as tenderness.

A certain Almanque Papillon[462] proposed a new formula of love, more robust than platonism, and bound, as he thought, to render men truly “virtuous and not effeminate.” François Billon, one of the royal secretaries, wandering one evening amid the ruins of Rome, felt the touch of grace within himself. He dreamed of writing a book entitled _The Impregnable Fortress of the Female Sex_. He descried and saluted among the shadows a number of vigorous women—Catherine de’ Medici and Jeanne d’Albret, more valorous than any man; Mesdames de Berry and de Nevers, surpassingly witty; Anne d’Este, duchess of Guise, the eloquence of fleshly beauty. Billon made his book, but not his fortune. Under the Valois, many women were not anxious to be too well defended.

Ronsard and Du Bellay triumphed, then: and yet, to all appearance, their triumph troubled them; they hankered after ideas they had gone about to destroy; they mistrusted themselves, their friends, their principles. Ronsard had an admirable genius, but he hesitated between an attempt to satisfy the popular naturalism with the crudities so much in request, and an instinctive thirst for an aristocratic spiritualism. He followed rather than led the movement; both he and Du Bellay, in spite of their robust breezy energies, remained more sensitive than they cared to acknowledge to the charm of classical art and the graciousness of the salons.

Further, an eminent woman kept a tight rein on the Pléiade, and showed them that graciousness was not necessarily tameness, that there were women’s hearts at once ardent and strong, that it is possible to retain practical views of life while “rising wholly towards spiritual things.” This woman was the niece and goddaughter of Margaret of France, her spiritual daughter and the faithful guardian of her fame—the second Margaret of France, duchess of Berry and afterwards duchess of Savoy.

She pursued a totally different method from her aunt. She abandoned philosophy, intuitions, mystic professions of faith: instead of wearing black she dressed fashionably, tricking herself out with jewels and brightly-coloured materials: thus (pardon the detail) she used handkerchiefs of crimson silk: that formed part of her psychology. Her household was maintained on a very princely scale, and directed by the solemn Madame de Brissac, who never shifted her quarters without taking with her a huge pile of dresses and especially a terribly big bed, which alone required several mules to carry it; the moment the destination was reached, Madame de Brissac’s bed had to be set up with infinite precautions, as though it were a shrine. One can guess how the treasurer, among many other people, grumbled; but the princess was so kind!

With this system of simplified morals and external complexity, Margaret of Savoy exercised extraordinary fascination over men’s affections. She had adopted as emblem an olive branch guarded by serpents, with the motto, “_Sagesse, gardienne des choses!_” She resembled, as a poet tells us, “a rose-bud, nourished on celestial dew,” and received the nickname of Pallas. She was just the woman to govern vigorous men: a woman of taste and intelligence, who had a passion for winning love, but with much breadth and dignity, and without recourse to the spiritual and material experiments of her aunt. Her secret she had not gone far to seek, but had found simply in her woman’s heart; her Machiavelism consisted in a kindliness carried to perfection, intelligent, active, ingenious—a refined good-heartedness, which embraced both rich and poor. Des Périers himself could not refrain from speaking of it in a tone of respect and sympathy quite unusual in him; Brantôme has painted the princess in one magnificent phrase: “She was _the_ goodness of the world.”

And we must not forget that life had not spared her hard lessons. The poor woman’s greatest ambition was to root and ground herself in the family affections, and these affections had been torn from her one by one with her heart’s blood. Her father Francis I. had as little to do with her as possible, indeed, but scantily appreciated her. She lost her brother Charles miserably enough; at that period it was not the custom to care for life’s halt and maimed, yet Margaret sedulously watched over servants who were out of employment. Her heart was wrapped up in her sister Madeleine. Madeleine coveted a crown; she went to Scotland, and six months afterwards came news of her death. Margaret was so grievously stricken that she remained in utter prostration, and it was doubtful for some time whether her health would recover from the shock. Her aunt Margaret had to intervene to insist on her taking care of herself, and going for long morning walks in the park of Fontainebleau.

Thus, instead of “devouring her heart,” in the forcible phrase of Pythagoras, this noble princess made existence a song of grave and warm passion, not a song of love.

Her disappointments were no fewer, it is true, since it is a natural law for the heart to be deceived in its hopes, like the reason; but she found less bitterness and more grief; the wholesome contact with real suffering, in bringing out the true power of sympathy, saved her from social and intellectual extravagances, and bred in her that perfection of tenderness which no one could resist; for the world itself loves to be treated seriously.

The passion Du Bellay felt for her in no way resembles either the flowery sentimentalism to which princesses had till then been accustomed, or the coarse freedom of Marot’s school: it was a constant, sincere, and lasting passion. On returning from Italy, he exclaims with the same emotion as at his departure:

Alors, je m’aperçus qu’ignorant son mérite,
J’avois, sans la connoistre, admiré Marguerite,
Comme, sans les connoistre, on admire les cieux.[463]

And these are not mere idle words. Many years afterwards, when it came to Margaret’s turn to leave her country, the poor poet, struck, no doubt, with presentiments of an imminent death, shed real tears, “the truest tears that e’er I shed.”

The great sense of truth and constancy that Margaret carried into the concerns of the heart she applied also to the concerns of the mind. She showed, like Anne of France, how women were slandered, how they slandered themselves when they fancied they were incapable of a genuine effort; instead of pouring out a stream of conversation and writings like her aunt, and of trusting to her impressionability merely, she applied herself with all the force of a fine intellectual health to the most rigorous tasks involved in the discipline of truth. Many scholars by profession would not have pushed solicitude for the niceties of truth so far. She got her reader, for instance, to buy for her at Paris three different editions of Cicero’s _Offices_; she read Aristotle’s _Ethics_ simultaneously in Greek and in a Latin translation; she collated six commentaries on Horace.

Although entirely French—she was much more French than her aunt—she set herself to stem the somewhat too violent tide of reaction setting in against Italy. Like Louis XII. before her, she thought there was much in Italy and the classics that was worth adopting; while she read Aristotle she proclaimed Urbino the “school of knowledge,” and Du Bellay had to draw in his horns and, under her gentle guidance, acknowledge the charm which he did not feel spontaneously. He not only translated Bembo and Naugerius,[464] but went so far as to agree that time would never extinguish the fame of Boccaccio, and that the laurels of Petrarch would remain for ever green.

She did more (for the words “art” and “patriotism” cloaked in reality questions infinitely smaller, and larger—questions of personal jealousies); she had the courage to keep by her side an Italian, Baccio del Bene, an enthusiastic worshipper of the “pearl of the West,” who declared he had been saved by her bright eyes, “his stars,” from the direst of shipwrecks. Ronsard undertook, against wind and tide and his own convictions, to rehabilitate this relic of the past, and to proclaim that Del Bene was the only Italian for two centuries who was worth consideration.

Margaret long remained the tutelary “virgin,” the spirited “unbacked colt,” running where frolic fancy led her, unfretted by the “spurs of love.” Whatever the inevitable malignity of mankind may have said, she was a perfect type of platonism, basking in her many warm friendships with men, and in no hurry to be married. Too much attached to France to go far away, too thoroughly a princess to wed one of her brother’s subjects, she fixed her choice on the heir of Savoy. On one occasion she did not hesitate to accompany her aunt to Nice and present herself in person, in defiance of the elementary rules of etiquette; but as politics, the bane of sentimental princesses, threw obstacles in the way, she possessed her soul in patience, and waited twenty-one years. She was married in 1559.

The king of France ordered a magnificent trousseau, an exact copy of that of Madame de Lorraine—gold-embroidered dresses, laces, jewels; he chose for the bridal dress a robe of yellow satin with bodice embroidered in gold, a regal mantle trimmed with lace a foot wide, an evening cloak in silver cloth, lined with lynx fur. He commanded splendid entertainments. Everyone knows what followed—Henri II. mortally wounded in the official tournament; this long-desired marriage consecrated at midnight beside a bed of anguish. Here truly was something to amaze and strike with awe. Anyone with a touch of superstition would have attributed to the princess the evil eye.

They knew better, to be sure.

If she was loved, it was because she had the very uncommon talent of loving her friends.

No sooner was she in Piedmont than she seemed to have thoughts only for them. She wrote to Catherine de’ Medici commending Ronsard to her notice, and the poet, much moved, hastened to reply with a noble apostrophe to the royal house of France, “happy and fruitful ... mother of such a line of kings.”

From time immemorial France and Piedmont had played in the world the somewhat ungrateful part of quarrelsome lovers. Margaret, like a true woman, patched up this quarrel; while she lived there was no open rupture. Still more, every Frenchman who visited Turin was conscious of being anticipated by a gentle and invisible protecting hand. Presented to the duchess, often lodged and entertained at her cost, he would receive in addition, anonymously, a purse to defray his travelling expenses.

France did not, therefore, lose Margaret altogether; but she planted in Savoy the sweetness of Urbino with the sparkling brilliance of her own land. At the gates of Geneva she caused the most perfect religious peace to flourish; it was there that Francis de Sales was born. Without flinging heart and mind piecemeal to the winds, like her aunt, we see her in a corner of that violent 16th century, a radiant centre of kindliness and spiritual illumination, surrounded by testimonies of gratitude as by a modest and glorious retinue. She often received thanks at that supreme moment when all men speak the truth. In his last hour Du Bellay wept for her; an ambassador of France at Constantinople left her his fortune; L’Hôpital declared in his will that to her he owed his whole career. She herself on her deathbed heaved, so to speak, the last breath of the feminist spirit.

Il ne restoit rien d’entier de la France,
De pur, de saint, d’une antique bonté,
Que Marguerite, humaine déité.[465]

And now what more is to be said? The hateful orgies of the 16th century were unchained! Here and there in the turmoil some few feeble shoots of platonism continued to appear[466] under the form of preciosity or literary feminism, till we come to the hôtel de Rambouillet.[467] Women of energy and activity were still seen. But fate willed that the 17th century, magnificent, wholly masculine,[468] should be ushered in with terrible convulsions. It was a momentous and appalling epoch, and bore out the prediction of the _Heptameron_: “The best things are those from which, when abused, result the worst ills.”[469] What a spectacle is the court of the Valois![470]—all these sly, knowing women, talking in a way to make the shades of their grandmothers blush, running after men who wish them further! How little the third Margaret of France, the first wife of Henri IV., resembles her earlier namesakes! She was as highly gifted, prettier, as accomplished, as witty, as fascinating, as noble, as thoroughly a princess—so princely indeed that she thought herself quite entitled to love gipsies and let prejudices go hang! Fair as a lily, too, polished, wonderfully polished, bathed and perfumed! All she saw was that platonic love had broken down, and of the other love she said: “Nothing could be so sweet, if it were not so short.”

Even in Spain platonism perished, or rather it winged its flight towards God with zest and ardour, often worthy of the Song of Songs:[471] “A love redeemed from all terrestrial things, and having only God for its object,” exclaims St. Theresa, “is like an arrow shot by man’s will towards his God with all the force of which he is capable.” Or else it was flung out of window. When the cook and the niece of Don Quixote make a bonfire of the _Amadis_ romances and other illustrious annals of pure love and valiant exploits, the good Spanish curate, who assists at the auto-da-fé, momentarily hesitates before a volume bearing the name of Ariosto. He opens it, to burn it if it is a Spanish translation, to kiss it if it is the Italian text. O relic of old Spain! O son of the Cid!

In Italy the crisis could not take a tragic development, as in Germany, but men felt the need of returning to anonymity, to placid affection, to love without any twaddle. “The learned are so mad after love,” writes Nelli, “they have so pounded and minced and dissected it, that it is altered out of all knowing.” Petrarch was blasphemed: everyone was eager to revile him as a flashy rhetorician, to sneer at his so-called purity. They declared that they preferred to the sighs of love-sick princesses and the sentimental romances, the bold, frank love of a coster-wench.

Farewell to the dream! It dissolved in a religious crisis. Rome herself recovered from her intoxication, and no longer existed as the nursery of sentimental philosophy and the liberal-minded instructress of mankind.

La paix et le bon temps ne règnent plus icy;
La musique et le bal sont contraints de s’y taire.[472]

Attacked, Catholicism had stood to the defence in the armour of authority. It was fighting for life, and was bent only on self-discipline and purification. One good soul devoted himself to the task of spiritualising the writings of Bembo.

The tender imaginings of art disappeared. The time was coming for art itself to return to scenes of domestic commonplace, as in Holland, or of pure reason, as in France. The sole impression Brantôme received as he viewed the Coliseum was that its ruined condition was most strikingly apparent at the top—as was seen also with women.

The mortification would have been less acute if people had not really expected to find happiness, and if they had begun by looking painful realities square in the face as they did afterwards. The 17th century left philosophy to the philosophers; it believed in suffering as a gift of God: Pascal coldly investigated only the secret of the anxieties which hold us by the throat; and so that admirable time of vigorous action and patient endurance led us to philosophy.

Platonist tenderness resulted in nihilism. And then how sad a spectacle was the spiritual Sahara! And how well men understood, as soon as women had disappeared, that they were right in believing them necessary! Our great Montaigne, who arises at this moment, is a splendid eulogist of the cold and colourless in life. He is the perfect son of this respectable land of France, where wisdom consists in settling down in a benevolent neutrality, without hating, and without loving: life being such, without restraints, without illusions, nothing is left, surely, but to die.

Montaigne, in his cool, common-sense way, delights in making mincemeat of everything that has given women faith and enthusiasm and an object in life.

The heart! what a dangerous organ, essentially a thing to keep under restraint! Better forgive a folly than a victory!

Love! After having distilled out its quintessence, after having discovered “three, four, or five degrees of superior things” external to ourselves capable of producing it, is it not found that wisdom lies in looking after one’s own interests, in loving as little as possible, in loving one’s children perhaps, but even then with sufficient tranquillity “to live comfortably after their loss”?

Goodness!—that does not exist in the pure state, but contains always some taint of corruption, a savour of mortality, which Plato should have discerned: “Man is but patchwork and motley.”

The quest for the Beautiful! How conventional! Let us hear no more of Bembo or Equicola! “When I write, I do very well without the company and the stay of books!”

Fame! A mere bubble, at the mercy of every puff of wind, dissolving under our own eyes, ere we reach the grave! Fame!—for books or ideas which are fated to disappear as everything has disappeared!—a name which changes and will pass to others!

The charm of original thought! Ah! the ridiculous pretension of wishing to transcend the current opinions, the common sense of one’s fellows, and to fancy oneself “capable of all things.” It is on this head that we must hear Montaigne; he has no more illusions about the mind than about the heart: he warms up, and celebrates in Shakespearian accents the immensity of the human void.

And is he wrong when he tells us that we are our own deceivers?—that we are unwilling to confess our ignorance lest we scare our children? “Overmuch knowledge is harmful, as in virtue. Keep in all points to the common highway: ’tis not good to be so subtle and nice.... Shun all novelty and oddity.... All extravagant ways vex me.... In my time, those who have some rare excellence beyond others, and some extraordinary sprightliness of mind, we see as it were overflowing into license in opinion and morals.... We are right to set upon the human mind the rigidest barriers we can.”[473]

The traitor! How he laughs at himself and his friends! At bottom he is a son of women[474] and of love, but he has lost women and love. The shallow epicurism with which his doctrine may be reproached is also the weak side of feminism, which had already shown us the madness and error of the idea of saddling the few years we have to spend on earth with fatigue, tribulation, vanities. And yet, while inheriting this need for living the easy impressionist life, Montaigne revolts with characteristic feeling and vigour against women, because he belongs to a disillusioned generation which feels constrained to wreak personal vengeance against those who had been confounding the religion of beauty with the religion of happiness. Religion consists in resignation to unhappiness, while beauty and happiness are in truth somewhat loosely connected. The keeper of a museum who spends his life among masterpieces will acknowledge, if you put it to him, that one can be very unhappy there. Further, perched in his rustic turret, between his few books and a large farmyard, Montaigne is one of those peaceable and self-satisfied country folk who have not succeeded in understanding what all the pother is about, or how women could ever pass for priests or physicians. He considers them as objects serviceable, even necessary, to men, but socially speaking he chants their _De Profundis_.

His bile is moved at the sight of the grand duchess taking the head of the table in the ducal palace at Florence. What a rage he flies into! “She has wheedled the prince”; is it by “her pleasant and commanding features,” or her beautiful bosom? Don’t talk to him of the ideal. Take a peep into this dressing-room—rouge-pots, false teeth, second-hand lures, perfumes like musk derived from the “discharge of animals,” and all the rest: this is the ideal, forsooth, you think of making the axis of life! To him (the phrase will serve, it is homely but exact) platonism is the art of palming off paste for diamonds.

Yet the same scoffer Montaigne has for aide-de-camp a simple maiden, Mademoiselle de Gournay; and, after all, his whole system comes to this—that we should do well to be women, nay children; and that the best thing for us would be to live like the bird on the bough, with no other care than the due round of the seasons.

But no: this is an impossibility! There are no seasons for us, we have no right to expect seasons! or rather, we have only a summer,—life; only a winter,—death! And this winter lies hungrily in wait for us! It comes to this—that the science of life is the science of death! “The continual work of our life is to build up death.” Since there is neither beauty nor love, in other words no life, we are but animated corpses: our life plunges into the stream of death, emerges, and disappears again; we live on death as a tulip lives in its water, or corn in its refuse. Then, like the tulip and the corn, we go through the inverse process: “Your death is part of the order of the universe, a piece of the life of the world.” From your disintegrated flesh the vital energy will spring up and pass into the larva, into the sap of plants, to die yet again and nourish afresh the butterfly or the bird or the ox, continuing thus its endless transmigrations. Without hailing death as it passes, like the mystics, Montaigne is continually brooding upon it, and holds it “in particular affection,” since that is the only sure conclusion and all the rest is chimera. Wherever he goes, a grinning spectre seems to go before to show him the way. Of what account are the fashionable quintessences beside the clear and insistent spectacle of a bed “surrounded by physicians and parsons, by creatures all mazed and quaking, by pale-faced lackeys ... and the room without daylight, the candles lit!” It is just that! And “the leap to be made with lowered head and dazed brain ... into a depth of silence and obscurity!” Yes, that is death, as said (merely adding a word of immortality and hope) those humble monks of the early days of the century, so violently excluded from philosophic religion; men had stopped up their ears so as not to hear them, and yet now return soberly to their scheme of morality, which grips one round like a ring of iron! What does Ménot say?—

“We die all of us, and like water sink into the earth and return no more to the surface. Yea, Lord, we all step on towards death. The water of the Loire ceases not to flow, but is it the water of yestereve that passes under the bridge to-day? The folk who to-day dwell in this town were not here a hundred years ago. Now, I am here; next year you will have another preacher. Where is king Louis, but late so dread a monarch, and king Charles, who in the flower of his youth set Italy aquake? Alas! the earth has already rotted his corpse. Where are all these damsels of whom we have heard so much? Have you not the Romance of the Rose, and Melusina, and many another far-famed beauty? Behold, we all die, and like the water we enter into the earth, to return no more for ever.”

Montaigne is right. Whether we like it or not, we have to live in contact with the enemy, that is, with reality. Only, is it absolutely necessary to look at reality so mistrustfully, and to ask of it but gloomy impressions? All the enemies of faith maintain that faith cannot but be sombre and melancholy; in making itself pleasant and speaking of a God of Love, religion, it seems, would lie and do them wrong, would trench on their domain, would go beyond its part, which consists in expiation and sacrifice. Material joy—that is their creed; and at the same time they believe it is a great mistake to wish to rule the world by love; men are not held by spiritual systems; you buy them, crush them, oppress and coerce them.

Nevertheless, all was not false in the delicious dream of prelates, women, platonists. Pure love is too exquisite a thing ever to exist in this world. But it is the business of women to strive towards it, and to show that we have need of it. The idea of dividing the world, of leaving bodies to men and souls to women, had something to be said in its favour. Men are sometimes too philosophical, women never philosophical enough.

The convulsions which broke out every time men wished to turn the tables on women, in the 16th century, and in the 18th, are not sufficient to convince us that the unmitigated employment of force is the ideal of politics. What human being is there, even with all the sentiment crushed out of him, who does not feel an unquenchable thirst for happiness! Nations also feel this thirst. No, it cannot be said that the need of happiness is but an empty dream: it is a real need, sincere, imperious, natural, a moral and physical need which takes entire possession of us, in which all things are summed up—this need in which we live and die.

We live and die in it! We should have to remain always children, or strangely to shut our eyes, not to see falling around us the victims of life’s ironies, felled by Montaigne’s philosophy as surely, as clearly, as by a dagger-thrust.

A proverb says that one does not die of love: perhaps; but what we know with absolute certainty, what stares us everywhere in the face in letters of fire and blood, is that one dies of the absence of love, one dies of inanition.

Hence it will always be necessary to ascend to the source of life, to fix ourselves firmly at the fountain-head: in other words, to nourish ourselves on beauty. Philosophically, “beauty” and “life” are synonymous terms; so we have already said, and we shall not cease to revert to this thought, because it appears to us clear and salutary. All the possible definitions of beauty apply also to life; life and beauty are one and the same thing.

Beauty and life generate love and are themselves born of love, so that love does no more than forge links in the immeasurable chain of life and beauty. And what men call happiness is the perfect joy of life.

Why did they fail in their schemes of love and peace—these timid women of the 16th century, who had all that was necessary for success—a heart, boundless, bottomless ocean of kindliness; an admirable intelligence; and in many cases knowledge, beauty, wealth? They lacked the courage to be themselves; they were wanting in passion. Instead of taking their rightful place they fell back into obedience,—half-hearted dilettanti, caught in their own snares. Why?

Medieval Christianity was not hostile to the idea of the beautiful, but it had unduly neglected it, for the purely scholastic and traditional reason that, strictly speaking, no theory of the beautiful is to be found in the Gospels.

No, you will not find a theory of the beautiful there. But the Renaissance unquestionably was right in saying that you find assurances of life. And how many assurances of love? Christianity is of hope and love all compact. Love speaks on every page of its early lessons, and at every moment of its history. The Magdalene, St. Augustine, and many another—have they not marked stages on the road to heaven? St. Francis of Sales, Fénelon—were they not yet to cheer by affection the victims of pure reason?

The Renaissance, then, accomplished a very great advance when, with Plato’s aid, it instituted the religion of beauty, and in this respect we certainly cannot reproach the platonists of the 16th century with having followed a wrong bent. They were right to believe that happiness and peace can only be effectually secured if men can be induced to turn their eyes towards the beautiful, to adopt beauty as the beacon of their lives, to believe through love, act through love, live through love. That, in truth, is the common substance underlying both Christianity and platonism.

But how then are we to explain the phenomenon we have noted?

Plato, so far as theory and literary style are concerned, is admirable; why does his teaching end in negative results whenever it is enforced? Why could he himself deduce from it only a sociology embroidered with Utopian dreams? Why are those who live familiarly with him and upon him tortured by the consciousness of the emptiness of things, as was seen in the 16th century, and as we may see still?

The platonism of the Renaissance had a strange fate. It found a society in the plenitude of vigour, and save for a few elect souls it left it dead. As a philosophy, it resulted in perfect scepticism; as a social panacea, in the wars of religion. It slew art, it slew literature through the idea of seeking beauty in itself, in other words, by academism, by art for art’s sake: the aesthetic Utopia alongside of the philosophic Utopia! Still further, in place of the exquisite, enthusiastic, ardent, adorable women who were the queens of the world, it gave us, as time went on, women without energy, without activity, case-hardened with the idea of a selfish happiness; it left behind it a progeny of coquettes, _précieuses_, or else of Delilahs and sensual women. The woman of vigorous and irradiant affection, the woman who used to shed life and happiness around her, has disappeared. And, finally, we observe that at the very moment of Plato’s greatest glory, few women steadfastly pursued the path of happiness: with some, goodness had disappeared in feebleness, with others intelligence had evaporated in reasoning. They ought to have saved us from sensualism and metaphysics, and they ran aground on both reefs. How bitterly they have been reproached! We have done them the high honour of throwing upon them and their ideas the blame of all our calamities, as though they were exclusively at fault. As if it would not have been allowable, after all, to combine common sense with the spirit of kindliness and love!

If there were, then as always, silly women, profligate women, insatiate cormorants, why take platonism to task, why blame women alone?

Certain personages of that time, and some of the most notable, refused to admit any division of responsibility. To them, all that had happened was bound to happen; the origin was patent, the year 1515; when women of high rank, admitted to court, determined to devote themselves personally to the apostolic mission of love, all France took the cue, so that the idea of love, which issued to begin with from a source insufficiently philosophic, as it flowed downwards gained nothing and became no purer. It is very curious to find this line of argument proceeding from Brantôme’s pen; he is not generally a preacher of virtue, and has indeed enunciated this eminently courtier-like maxim: “The cast-offs of great kings could not but be excellent.” According to Brantôme and his friends, men had undergone an irresistible infatuation for which they were not to be blamed: thus, he says, no one would regard Francis I. as a Heliogabalus or accuse him of having employed violence: he was a victim. All men are victims. It is very true that the frightful demoralisation of the 16th century sprang from the court, which set the example and persistently dragged the nation after it. But we shall be permitted to think that Francis I. and the other victims among his circle, without being Heliogabaluses, were not anchorites either; which is capable of demonstration. In any case, it seems to us very difficult to characterise the doings of the court as platonic: platonism, on the contrary, was a barrier, and the only reproach we can bring against it is that it was often leaped.

But the real question is not to know whether there were women of average or cheap virtue at the court of France, and whether they gave the tone to others. We want to know whether women like Anne of France, Vittoria Colonna, Margaret of France, Margaret of Savoy, and their likes were wrong to strive after high ideals, and whether they did what was necessary to succeed. This question is much more delicate than the first, because it really touches platonism and shows how it came to grief.

Women can be reclaimed from sensualism; their necessarily refined feelings, the passive part they play, the disparity between the advantage and the disadvantage, conduce easily to disgust. But they never revert from mysticism to love. The Gospels mention no Jewesses converted by mysticism, whilst the Magdalene, the Woman of Samaria, the Woman taken in Adultery, see Heaven’s light while in the full flush of sensualism. Men, on the contrary, often get the better of mysticism, because their instincts scarcely lie that way, and moreover the throng and press of realities only too easily brings them down to earth.

Now, Plato, even when rendered practical by the theory of two loves, which sanctioned curious concessions, represented the algebra of the beautiful; but you cannot make algebra your daily bread.

Women of the highest distinction, and especially those we have named, lived with Plato as it were in a balloon: there was no more actual communication with the world, no more really practical energy, no more heat and flame! The rope was cut; they were adrift in the clear and rarefied atmosphere of an altitude of thousands of feet. What an illusion, and how disastrous! Instead of elevating the world, this was the very means of abandoning it to itself. How many strange visions this dizzy height brought before their eyes!

First, the idea of living face to face with the absolute, and of importing the absolute into life—pride of thought of the vainest kind! To adopt St. Augustine’s figure, you might as well shut up the ocean in a hole in the sand! As De Musset said: “My glass is small, but from my glass I drink.” The realms of space do not furnish a substantial love, and it is vexatious enough to leave that love grovelling on the earth.

Secondly, along with this supramundane mysticism, platonism developed the exclusive contemplation of self, another deplorable mistake. We live in virtue of a continual exchange, as physiological and moral laws equally prove. God alone can rejoice in perfect independence of life and happiness; the condition of us men is to be happy through give and take; we have to receive everything, but also to give everything. To search for happiness within oneself allows no room for enthusiasm or an enlarged current of life, nor, consequently, for life itself: one withers up like a tree which should forbid its roots to imbibe moisture from the soil, its branches to breathe.

The poor dear women, once isolated in the boundless tracts of their imagination, became giddy, fell a prey to needless torments, lost the precious gift of simplicity, which was so natural to them in their capacity as great ladies—that excellent and wise simplicity of mind which assigns us our place in the vast sequence of things, according to the will of God. They hovered too far out of touch with realities, they generalised, wished to grasp too much, they grew restless and uneasy, which rendered them a prey to intriguers: their sensibility had no ballast. To influence humanity, they had first to influence the human beings they had at hand. So long as their mission remained individual, private, concrete, intimate, it produced satisfactory results. How many men did they carry up with them into the heights! But when they wanted to act upon mankind at large, the game was up. Trying to influence everybody, they ended by influencing nobody. Thus Vittoria Colonna gave to her beloved Michelangelo forces which he turned to admirable account; but in her abstract efforts towards public regeneration she completely failed.

Let us add that Frenchwomen had a much more difficult mission to fulfil than the Italian women. Spell-bound by the example of Italy, they fancied that what had succeeded there was sure to succeed here, and they did not even see (so great was their taste for blind imitation) that they were behind the fair, that they were importing among us the imitation of a decadent art, the imitation of an imitation, a counterfeit love, a counterfeit curiosity, a counterfeit scheme of life. What they should have done was to inspire robust activities, to cause, no matter whence or how, a gush of ideas beautiful, striking, original, soul-stirring; instead, they refined and subtilised and complicated, they wasted their ingenuity in seeking to discover which was the more aesthetic, poetry or painting; complication seemed to them to be art, and not the apprentice stage of art: they never attained that noble logic which is art itself. Truly strong souls know well that you cannot nourish the world on sweetstuffs merely, that a decided will is needed in life, and that the beautiful becomes one with the true when truth has all its potency. Happy are those who skilfully draw love from truth!—the ploughman who loves his furrow, the poor man who loves his poverty, the maiden who loves her purity! We find among women many valiant souls of the stamp of Anne of France, able thus to lay hold of life. As to those who allow themselves to be led astray by the obsession of an abstract and too lofty ideal, they die.

Platonism, then, marked a great advance towards the idea of beauty, but it did not accomplish any striking progress towards the idea of happiness, and Nifo was not far wrong in predicting that the doctrine of two loves, the one celestial, immaterial, good, and desirable, the other terrestrial and carnal, would result in mere negation, by setting men between impossible alternatives—a colloquy of angels, or, as M. France says, a colloquy of chimpanzees. We may regret our condition, but how escape from it? Natural law (that is, divine law) bids us disdain none of the gifts of God, but to obtain from each its particular beauty. Happiness consists really in loving what we have round about us, in appropriating therefrom all that is beautiful and congenial, and in affectionately conforming to Nature without coercing her, so as to nourish ourselves upon her spiritual and physical forces, and to assimilate her warmth and energy and her universal harmony.

In our own day John Ruskin has been one of the apostles of happiness under this aspect, and though his doctrine may be difficult to define, he has unquestionably carried the idea of platonism a stage further, in harmony with the saying of Plato which we have already quoted: “Those who know have impressions.”

The impressions on which he lived were often inconsistent, and still more often nebulous, one might almost say musical. He has been taunted with his apparent lack of logic, though the glitter of his thought by its very brilliance often conceals a logic that is sufficiently real. But, after all, he has unduly neglected the spiritual side of Nature, in particular the human soul. While we cannot shut our eyes to the existence of the body and the utility of earthly possessions, it is at the same time good and necessary for happiness to keep the body and material well-being on the lower plane. The body is essentially localised, wealth is limited, and, for both, giving spells exhaustion; only the soul can spend itself unceasingly, and grow the richer thereby. And thus social happiness results, so to speak, from the socialism of souls.

Ruskin belongs to the old Venetian school, materialistic, and pagan; his heart has echoed to physical harmonies, and to him a certain material socialism would not have been unpleasing. Yet he has well shown what we ought to feel in our communion with Nature, he has glorified the worship of beauty and happiness, which consists in guessing at God, in seeing Him, in acclaiming Him in the beauty of mountains as in the beauty of a heart overflowing with tenderness and love, in all that is beautiful, and beautiful for us. His essential idea is that everything around us produces an impression upon us, and that we ourselves have a duty to our environment. Gardens are no longer a mere setting of life, they are alive. Ruskin goes so far as to extol the idea of sacrificing ourselves for posterity—to plant forests under whose shade our descendants may live, to build cities in which future nations will be able to dwell.

It is a far cry from these undulatory but noble theories to the egoistic enjoyment of oneself; yet it is very certain that to carry them into practice in reasonable measure is the way to find happiness.

That is essentially the moral system which women ought to teach—women born for impressions, for devotion, generosity, the higher life.

Unhappily, Ruskin, little conversant with love and altogether unacquainted with the domestic affections, never showed in his own life a really high appreciation of women’s rôle, nor has he less misconstrued it from the theoretical standpoint. Apart from some sonorous phrases in which he recommends them to be queens, but in submission to their husbands, or to practise good social economy in relation to their dressmakers, it may be said that he did not understand the charm of women, and that he felt no attraction for their particular beauty. When he speaks of beauty, whether in regard to modern painters or to the Greeks, it is always in general terms, without indicating in any way whether the feminine expression of the beautiful has for him a special signification. In his enthusiasm for the aesthetics of the Middle Ages he even admires masculine beauty above all: his type in that case is the beauty of a stalwart knight.

M. Bourget, for example, has more clearly conceived and accurately interpreted the necessity of harmony with Nature; his sensations or sentiments approximate to the philosophy of the Renaissance, and reflect the spirit of penetrating sweetness which women had undertaken to develop.