nate and less expected was that, women having monopolised all that made life worth living, men one day awoke to the fact that women were the glory of all distinguished families, and that, thanks to them, life had become an art, a passion. They began, then, by shedding a domestic radiance; it was by filling their own home with light and hope and joy that they began to quicken the world at large. The science of happiness established itself under a wholly practical and empirical form, like the science of medicine; for the heart needs the ministry of healing, a more difficult and perhaps more delicate art than that of the body. Where can you apply a thermometer to test the temperature of the soul? Moral sufferings have the peculiarity of concealing themselves, even when physical collapse is the result; they are not easily diagnosed, and no one understands them: and, further, they manifest themselves oddly. It is in the pride of life, when one feels strongest, that one is weak and in danger; peace is more treacherous than strife, health more perilous than sickness, strength feebler than weakness. Or, if one is conscious of the mischief, one despairs of finding the remedy, which consists of compassion and generosity. Woman's medicines are love and hate.

Love-that is to give something derived from herself; to act, not through that long-armed vulgar charity (though this, too, has its merits-and is often very tiresome) which aims at heading a subscription list or presiding at a public meeting, but through that modest individual charity which humbly and quietly diffuses a little affection, cheerfulness, and enthusiasm. These are the real great ladies; to them, giving is a necessity, a second nature. They are born generous. They seek their own happiness in the happiness of others, without stopping to ask themselves if their conduct is philosophic.

Hate! They detest and resolutely combat the elements of force in which men most delight, but which, as women believe, produce the worst ills; and these are, the power of money, the power of war.

The egotism of wealth they regard as the very source of materialism, against which they cannot but struggle. On this point the women of the Renaissance bore the brunt of a long and skilfully fought battle, which we shall follow in all its phases.

As for war, that is the arch-enemy against which their first blows are aimed. The little Italian wars of the Middle Ages did not resemble the vast hecatombs of to-day, but they bred a swarm of atrocities, tumults and feuds; war is less cruel, perhaps, when it is not a mere pastime. To storm a place at the opening of a campaign is regarded as a humane act and good tactics, since in the long run it shortens the struggle; but the horror of it! Naturally, women are the worst sufferers. In vain do they push their way through the flames to the feet of some cold stone angel or some Madonna with her eternal smile; you see poor girls flinging themselves into the water, and noble ladies going about serenely and deftly to save what can be saved-their husbands' lives or their own fortunes. Many centuries had passed since St. Augustine had offered his tender consolations to the victims of the barbarians; they might appropriately have been offered when the French captured Padua or the Germans Rome, or even at that obscure assault of Rivolta in 1509, when an Italian captain devoured the heart of one of his political enemies, disembowelled the man's wife, and made horse-troughs of their corpses.

Even if we ignore gross infamies like these, war was not more humane. The historian of Bayard cannot find words to celebrate the magnanimity of his hero in so generously respecting two high-born maidens of Brescia who had received him into their house, tended him and healed his wounds with the devotion of sisters of mercy. And even in times of peace military habits were commonly so intolerable that quiet folk fervently prayed for a war to bring them relief.

For centuries sages and philosophers had been expatiating on the evils of war; councils had attempted to intervene; but war continued to flourish. The idea of suppressing it seemed a mere Utopian dream.

They might have tried at least to stem its flood by an appeal to the co-operation of moral forces; but, singularly enough, the more brilliant the fifteenth century in Italy became in art and intellect, the more its moral forces appeared to decline.

Christianity, too often sunk into mere mechanical routine, teeming with abuses, overloaded with observances, had practically lost all influence. Side by side with a few

clergy somewhat above the rank and file in culture, there was a crowd of empirics who rarely troubled their heads with thinking things out for themselves; they discoursed, not of love or hope, but only of faith-a faith which brutish men wished to destroy, and the more refined few wished to vivify, and which was thus doubly imperilled. The common people were indifferent, and allowed themselves still to be fulled by the old crooning melodies to which they were accustomed; they remained Christian from sheer indolence, like many men of quality; but it was open to question whether the first shock would not set them clamouring for a more lively tune-an "air of flutes and violins," as Heine said; paradise instead of hell.

As to learning, the cultured were agreed in recognising its failure; that, indeed, was beyond question. Men were tired of reasoning, reading, writing, worrying! Learning in tragic dismay sought only to prostrate itself before faith; or rather, men asked themselves whether learning really existed. Tiphernus, an eminent professor at the Sorbonne, and in high favour at Rome, confesses that all this learning so much belauded and paraded seemed to him nothing but a means of earning a living for professors, a combination of all the vanities, the technical slang of a crowd of pedants, critics more or less ignorant, and shameless imitators, who formed little cliques beyond whose pale there was no salvation. "To believe them," he exclaimed, "we are not equal to the ancients": then lions forsooth have lost their ferocity, and hares their cowardice, for Providence shines for the whole world, and it cannot be that man alone has degenerated! A league of falsehood! he reiterates. Under cloak of high culture men conceal their vices, and especially their idleness. Do what we may, we are progressing: every one of us is conscious of a forward impulsion. The pontiffs of reason, who have painfully climbed the steep ascent, wish to keep everything to themselves, and to set up their books as a balk to the world, but all in vain; they will never persuade us that their collapse is that of

nature.

Tiphernus died about 1466. From that time forth science was flouted. It gave the world, nevertheless, what it was destined to give-fire-arms, Greece, many admirable things-everything but happiness, which it had never

undertaken to provide. And it was precisely on this point that the great mistake was made. What, men asked, is the good of learning, money, labour, or even semblances of joy, if we are oppressed by a life of contention and heaviness? Why are we born with wits, why should we rule multitudes, thrill men's souls, dwell in palaces, if our hearts are empty? Suppose we wrest Nature's secrets from her, work every vein of ore, crop every blade of grass: suppose the race of men to form one magnificent herd, fat and flourishing, and even peaceably inclined-what is the good of it all if there is no joy? All things live by love; the heart makes itself heard above the claims of work, above the intellect, demanding for life a recompense, a goal. We perish for lack of something to love; out of mere self-pity we ought to bestow on ourselves the alms of life, which is love. All is vanity save this vanity, for before our birth, until our death, throughout our whole existence, it bears in front of us the torch of life.

Perhaps it might be better if men could be governed mechanically and reasonably from an armchair in the library by dint of syllogisms. Unhappily, they love only what pleases them; they are big, greedy children, listless and lazy if you talk to them of reason, but ready to break their necks in pursuit of an illusion. Hence it is very necessary to choose one's illusions well, and well to employ them.

The eternal illusion is love.

But what is love? That is the real question. If it is a Petrarchan flower, we crush it under our steel-tipped boots; if it is a coarse sensation, it crushes us, and we have to wrestle with it. Thus we must arrive at a new fact—a love which is neither a beautiful superfluity nor a vile sensual thing; which, in short, is a direct outcome of the worship of beauty.

We must discover a new sensibility, lofty, strong, fruitful, spiritual, almost sacerdotal, which serves to link minds together in their common pursuit of a high ideal. To us French this intricate problem seemed highly discouraging and perhaps silly, but its importance was recognised in Italy, the classic ground of love's quintessences, where even to-day a candidate for Parliament had better speak of love than of the sugar bounties.

The science of sensibility is to most men a fountain sealed;.

they always fancy themselves to be too robust! They march straight on in parallel lines; military devotion is their virtue; women alone can serve as a bond of union, soften and beautify everything, cover with a varnish of glory and disinterested. ness the things that need it. Hence, besides their mission at home, they may be said to have a social part of the first importance to play; the more sensible men become to their social influence, the higher is man's civilisation.

Now at the very period when France decided to move, the women of Italy had long since shown what could be expected of women in this direction. They often flaunted sentiments which are open to the charge of audacity or naïveté, primitive sentiments, à la Botticelli or Perugino, crude to a degree; there were manifestly many women of young and fresh affections who opposed to the simplicity of brute force that charming form of simplicity, that adorable confidence in the things of life, which the worship of the beautiful gives to unsoiled souls. They are to the women of the eighteenth century what Memling is to Watteau. Properly to understand their spiritual condition we should have to do as they did-solve the problem of feminism in the feminine way, be women, and more than women-arch-women.

The fulfilment of their natural vocation, namely, to look after the amenities of life, was a pretty extensive office, in a country where art and taste had so prominent a place. But they went farther. They inculcated moral strength through beauty; they dreamt of raising men, of plunging into their life like rescuing angels. Some critics say that the intervention of women is always a proof of men's decadence, and that when they save us, we are in parlous need of saving. Unhappily that is our normal state. Women assuredly represent the Red Cross of society; it is the duty of us men to be purblind and case-hardened to the brutalities of life, or even to find a certain happiness therein, and to remain cold like a sword-blade; women have no right to escape wounding by the despicable and shameful things among us. They would prefer, you say, to remain quietly gathering flowers behind their park walls; that is perfectly true; they only act from a sense of duty, because they no longer wish to serve as the stake of battles, because there is no misery, no injustice, no disgrace for which a woman of heart does not feel responsible. In fulfilling this