mission they do not humble us; on the contrary, we can have no higher ambition than to desire peace, no action can less degrade us than to bend in respect before the noblest things in the world-weakness and sentiment. It was the conviction of all the sons of the Renaissance, and of its great-grandsons (even the last and most sceptical of them, like M. Mérimée), that sentiment has higher lights than reason, and that certain intuitions of the heart unfold to us, as in bygone days to Socrates, horizons hitherto beyond our ken-a foretaste of the divine. Tired of spinning round in the vain and narrow circle of reasoning, these men, sceptics in their own despite, come to place their trust in sentiment, in hope and love: they lean upon women who see things with the eyes of love. In this they find a certain happiness, and at all events the secret of strength. No doubt the men of the fifteenth century did not attach to the idea of number the philosophic importance given it since their time; it was recognised that in the name of the rights of intelligence a general should command a whole army, a professor direct his pupils, a master his workmen; three robbers united against one honest man, though in the majority, did not appear to have right on their side; but it is none the less true that intellectual isolation has always created a situation of difficulty. "The vulgar may judge me as they please and take me for what they will," heatedly exclaims Tiphernus, the professor of whom we have already spoken; "let others please the multitude! As for me, I pride myself on pleasing two or three." All the clever men who speak so eloquently are sure to be in bondage to some woman; for, after all, the approbation of two or three men, howsoever intelligent, would not carry them very far, while with the enthusiasm of two or three women one can at a pinch be satisfied. And thus the work of civilisation is accomplished; vulgarity, even the vulgarity of common sense, is hidden under a coating of the ideal, women having a horror of force, of the law of number, of all that is banal and coarse. Such was the atmosphere, absolutely new and somewhat overheated, in which the influence of women developed and flourished. The revolution was a profound one: hitherto the social system had turned entirely on the principle of the good and the true, from which a practical and utilitarian morality was derived. The idea of the beautiful was utterly mistrusted, and, far from believing in its purifying force, many people saw in it only a cause of moral enfeeblement. Men had preached a religion of gloom and manifold observances; it seemed that there was no mean in life between the virginal precepts of a catechism of Perseverance1 and the lowest stages of vice. And now the new generations were no longer willing to regard earthly happiness as an illusion, nor the love inculcated by the Gospel as a snare, and flattered themselves on finding a means of building life upon liberty. A mysticism, compact of snow and mist, had glorified selfrepression, scepticism in regard to earthly things, the joys of suffering or at least the quest of happiness through resignation; and its effect had been to raise a select few to a state of ethereal perfection, and to unloose the mass of mankind to an unbridled savagery. The moral pendulum had oscillated violently between ether and mud, mud and ether, a condition of instability like that described by M. Huysmans to-day. And on the other hand people wished to live henceforth under a calm and radiant sky; they talked of taking the gifts of God as they found them, denying neither body nor soul, but idealising everything. They contented themselves with affirming the pre-eminence of the soul; apparently the science of happiness was to consist in abstracting themselves from the material and the personal and in going straight back to ideas. From that time it truly belongs to women to govern the higher world, the realm of sentiment. They will lull the appetites to sleep; they will charm men of dull burdened soul subdued to earth by daily toil; they will choose out the refined, the buoyant in soul, to form them into an intellectual aristocracy: the others will at least be lifted a little above themselves. The refined are recognised by their thirst for the ideal. At first blush one might suppose they will be met especially among men of the upper classes, or at least among men of leisure, for these are fortunate in being able to look into their own hearts and to follow their own bent, and i opportunities for gaining impressions. They are not deformed by drudgery, they have bathed their souls in the great sights of Nature; the Mediterranean, delicious and ['The manual of religious instruction given to French girls on attaining the age of twelve.] bewitching, has cradled them on her kindly bosom, and has already accomplished for them half of the task by reflecting the sky in her feminine smile. But no; for lack of discipline, the idle tend toward sensuality. Consequently, women will address themselves more especially to the men who can work. And their scheme will be this. They will interpose, almost like angels, between heaven and earth; they will love us and we shall love them; they will gently invert the order of things, so as to make of life a work of art. They will efface two of the three blind forces which govern usDeath, Fortune, and Love. If they do not prevent all failures and weaknesses, they will cheer and comfort them by means of a potent elixir, obtained from a God of philosophy, like physicians who cure by allopathy. So many springs are creaking and snapping for want of a drop of oil! they will pour out that drop. So many noble things lack the sap of life! they will give them that sap, that vitality, that soul. The sap of love brings grapes from thorns! Si l'amour fault, la foy n'est plus chérie ; Si foy périt, l'amour s'en va périe. And thereby the transformation, or at any rate the amelioration, of the world is to be achieved. Men are not, perhaps, so intractable and brutal as they pretend; by their own account they would be quite content to accomplish the journey of life eating and sleeping behind drawn curtains. We must not believe them. They have shut themselves up in a bare workshop: throw open the windows, let the sun stream broadly in, bringing light and warmth and the balmy breath of nature. The effects of the old system of morality, with its bolts and bars, have been seen only too often; the loathing of vice, the noble pride of virtue and aesthetic intelligence are also forces; and they alone can make of our terrible abode a truly sacred dwelling, open, free, dear to our hearts, the monument of human affection and of happiness. 1 Clément Marot on the motto of Madame de Lorraine : [If love fail, faith is surely slain; Thus, briefly, the conclusion was reached that women can transform themselves and become the chief element in human society, that of happiness. Hitherto they had been understudies to their husbands; they had believed themselves bound to take an interest in the work, ideas, and tastes of a man, with no other recompense than the satisfaction derived from a duty done. They had to issue forth like butterflies from the chrysalis, and to become women full of charm, in order to direct the affairs which men believed they had in their own hands, and in order to fascinate, to enfold, to struggle if need be, but without violence or parade. Then they had to rise a step higher, become objects of love, propagate love, and bring all things into harmony. Thanks to these ideas, Italy at the end of the fifteenth century had taken a marvellous bound towards the beautiful.1 Spain likewise had leapt towards chivalry; it was like the raising of a curtain, so sudden was the change: women, hitherto shut up in their boudoirs, appeared in all their radiance like goddesses. France, on the contrary, viewed these new ideas with profound mistrust, and long rejected them because of their Italian origin. We knew Italy, but under very false colours; she gloried in rising superior to wealth and rank, in the importance of women, prelates, and artists in her life; while we only knew her through merchants and soldiers. Her bankers established in our towns-"Lombards," as they were scornfully called-passed in the eyes of the people for men without a country, for birds of prey akin to the Jews; our knights, still bewitched by the joys of their expeditions, spoke carelessly only of a people without weapons and of defenceless women. The French clergy chimed in with their note of bitter opposition to Rome. And thus Italy was readily imagined as a hot-bed of pleasure: but to go there in quest of the philosophic secret of happiness seemed absurd. In the intellectual point of view, Italy created a wrong impression among us through the persons she sent us: 1 One of the most distinguished women of Italy to-day, the Countess Pasolini, assures us that the great influence still exercised by women in Italy springs from their approximating more closely than men to fifteenth-century ideas. 2 professors more or less broken down,' exiles more or less voluntary; impecunious, ravenous, and pretentious characters, not very philosophic in their attitude towards their rivals: all those also who rang the changes on the honour we had had in beating them, the Stoas, Soardis, Equicolas, wonderfully assiduous in making Louis XII. out to be a second Charlemagne (in those days Charlemagne was still a Frenchman); Caesar Borgia and his brilliant retinue, at whose brief passage we looked on in contemptuous unconcern. Because Caesar Borgia did not take our fancy, or because some of us had met light women on the highway to Italy, any Italian idea appeared to us a false one; we shut ourselves up in what Pontanus, Julius II., and other Italians remaining in Italy called our "barbarism," and as we plumed ourselves on our logic, we only abandoned our antagonism to adopt all the Italian fashions completely and indiscriminately. To that end, Louis XII. had to oblige by dying, and Francis I. by reigning; so at least Castiglione, the master of the new school, formally declared after the accession of Francis. So it actually turned out. "It is Thus women are queens; they move like fairies. a small thing to say of a woman that she does not destroy the flowers on which she sets her foot; she must refresh 1 We may say, in passing, that the Italianism of the end of the fifteenth century, usually regarded as originating with the Italian expedition of Charles VIII., really goes back to Louis XI. Louis was Italian in education and tastes. Italians flocked into France during his reign. 2 Cornelius Vitelli, styled Corythius by the public, came to France in 1482, for the simple reason that his own country had become unsafe for him. We have not many details about him or about his colleague, Girolamo Balbi, a pompous and quarrelsome character. A third Italian, Fausto Andrelini, made his appearance in 1488, under the auspices of the Marquis of Mantua. Andrelini, who lived very comfortably at Paris till his death in 1518, had no other effects than the memories of a little love-affair, which he confided to us in three books of verses, his " pages of youth," as we should say to-day. Exiled, penniless, almost naked, but a poet, he was, as soon as he arrived, petted, adopted, and idolised, the favourite of Chancellor Guillaume de Rochefort and of fortune. 3 Fausto Andrelini was the object of incredible adulation; Erasmus, wise man, simply calls him " divine," but some did not hesitate to proclaim that "he alone had rendered France filled instead of famishing, cultivated instead of waste, verdant instead of barren, Latin instead of barbarous." One of the noblest characters of the time, Guillaume Budé, actually dedicated to him this amazing epitaph: "Here lies Fausto. If the Fates had not given him to us, Gaeta herself would not have been more barbarous than France." But he was no sooner buried than everyone regarded him as a knave. B |