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touched us, nor even (if we may say so) rejoiced us as by this simple stifled cry, these tears of solitude. He is prone upon the earth, having lost the wings that bore him on from flower to flower. Four years after the death of the Morosina, we find that, despite his good resolutions and the counsels of his friends, he is as profoundly crushed as on the first day. He seeks consolation from poetry; he has begun a canzone on the death of his " fair and good Morosina"; he has finished the first strophe and sketched out the second, and he sends these still formless attempts to his intimates, to show them all that his feeble faltering hand can accomplish.

To sum up, the great moral movement of platonism resulted in a wide dissemination of sensibility, and a general softening-a softening of virtue and vice, of women and men. This was no small thing; there is certainly an advantage in cutting the claws of men but scantly idyllic, and in doing nothing rather than in doing ill.

This softening was often only external, and not without an admixture of hypocrisy. But why deplore it? For men to appear worse than they are is no proof that they are better. Men showed signs of sensibility, even though they knew little of love. Under a mask of amiability and tenderness their egotism remained intact; they talked of contemplation, of devotion, of the worship beauty required,-without conviction, it may be; but then they might have employed their time worse, and they unconsciously contributed to spread salutary ideas. One of those ridiculous creatures who spent their lives in haunting their idols like a shadow, perceived with horror that on entering a church his lady refused alms to a beggar. He was so deeply shocked that one of his friends had much ado to prove to him, while chafing him back to life, that the beggar was ill-bred, importunate, impudent, and unworthy of assistance. Here at any rate was a man of sensibility.

But an untoward thing happened. In cultivating sensibility to the utmost, women enfeebled men instead of forming them. Anne of France undoubtedly foresaw this danger when she so ardently commended vigorous and matter-offact occupations, and uttered a warning against the abuses of the religion of beauty. Many other ladies, unhappily,

genuine artists in refinement, took a complacent pleasure in the very perfection of their conduct, with the result that always ensues in such cases: their art became degraded, and in sinking into a matter of routine, came to ruin. In true love there is, as it were, an outpouring of one's nature, a vivifying joy, a sort of intense feeling which strengthens; but in love in the more vulgar sense there is a spurious and meretricious poetry which enervates. An old French proverb ran: "When the woman rules the man, he hasn't much will of his own." This the anti-feminists repeated, with too much reason. "Ah yes!" cries Nifo, "'tis in good sooth a fine dream of yours. What a magnificent moral state if all men loved one another! No more war, no more crime! . . . But is that the result you have obtained? You have distilled I know not what mawkishness. Where are the energetic, young-witted, happy, high-minded men born of your affections?" And what was the age of love which was to spring from this generation ?

We cannot impute to platonism the creatures of watery blood and hang-dog look who were to form the nucleus of the court of the Valois-these Panurges, false from top to toe, who had early wasted their substance physical and moral-these young tired-eyed voluptuaries whom Lotto paints so well, too weak to pluck the petals of a rose, their hand on their heart as though to point out the source of the mischief. But alas! we cannot but ascribe to sheer gallantry the mob of carpet knights, pale-faced, gilded cap-a-pie, gay ornaments of tourneys, sleek and fawning, ready like Ariosto to sing imaginary exploits, "provided that beauty, which every hour robs them of some fresh portion of intelligence, leaves them enough for the fulfilment of their promise.' They are rigged out as elaborately as the ladies, if not more elaborately (save that instead of displaying the bosom they display the leg), with flying plumes; in winter, smothered under furs; in summer all unbraced, not being able to endure even a loose garment; loaded with diamonds, so that you would take them for walking showcases of the king of Naples or the duke of Berry. They are philosophical, in the sense that they soar high above ideas of patriotism, and prove it by disguising themselves in costumes of all nations, the Turks included. They are learned, that is to say, they think it smart to stuff the French language

with heteroclite words, as though eager to tear from it its pith and heart, and make this also a delusion and a snare, as universally acceptable as blonde wigs and padded

busts.

The great, wonderful reform effected by platonism in the higher ranks of society was-that the men, copying the ancient sages and the orientals, let their beards grow! Up till then, no man could pretend to style unless he shaved, or even, for the sake of greater perfection, depilated his chin; there had been one cry of horror when Cardinal Bessarion appeared with his beard at the court of Louis XI. But now that Castiglione, the Roman prelates, and the high platonist society sported the philosophic beard, there was a sudden craze for going unshorn among the young snobs of Louis XII.'s court, the Bonnivets and others.

This reform, strange to say, excited between the higher and lower clergy one of the most acrimonious disputes with which we are acquainted. Vicars and curates belaboured the bishops with texts against the beard. The prelates parried with abstruse disquisitions; they claimed that a good beard did no offence to honour and probity; they sifted the sentiments of the ancient Romans in regard to the beard and found them in sympathy with their own; they made out that the apostles had never dreamt of shaving, and proved to demonstration that a decree of a council of Carthage, appealed to by the lower clergy, was an interpolation, and in any case was of no authority, the infallibility of the Church not dating back so far; and a decree of Alexander III., which they were also clamorous about, applied only to the hair of the head.

For the other part, to say nothing of the beard of Julius II.,1 one only had to turn over the leaves of church history to find on every page bearded saints, sometimes of high eminence; bearded hermits, strangers alike to the care of the body, to Plato, and to women. The dispute occasioned a terrible waste of eloquence, erudition, vivacity, irony and earnestness. It was of the highest importance, and bore on the most sacred interests of what some eminent personages called platonism.

1 Before becoming pope Julius had shaved. It was during his pontificate that the discussion waxed bitter. Clement VII. lent his name to the tractate Pro sacerdotum barbis of Piero.

And now it cannot fail to be asked by what strange and cruel logic a century, cradled at its birth in the idea of the beautiful, of love and happiness, was to become a hotbed of hatred, the arena in which the most savage animosities were implacably to contend. Must we believe that in throwing down the barriers of a rigorous code and invoking liberty we must inevitably bruise ourselves against force, rendered thereby freer and more ferocious? That would be a sad and disheartening conclusion, for then we should have to consider human progress as a perpetual recommencement, seeing that, though the lawless rise insurgent against tender hearts, though gospel wisdom warns us of the eternal despotism of the violent, there are still found and will ever be found among us incorrigible wretches, hungering for sympathy, and unable to live without a ray of love.

CHAPTER III

INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE

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WOMEN approached intellectual questions in the same dilettante spirit as questions of affairs; and this dilettantism was their chosen method. It was waste of time to speak to them of discoveries, creations, speculations, ventures, struggles of the scientific furniture of life, of all the irksome material tasks on which the intellectual existence itself is based. They sought only to crown the edifice with happiness, which does not concern those who clear the ground.1 La Bruyère fancied he was saying a very cutting thing when he declared that women are cured of idleness by means of vanity and love"; it is really very amiable; would to heaven the same might be said of certain men! Women are cured of idleness by sentiment; they reason with their feelings. You must not ask them to pry and delve into the stubborn heart of things; they look at the bright surface, and penetrate what yields to the touch. And by this simple method they perceive things that escape the microscope, things that defy analysis, thanks to an intuitive impressionability which enables them to see rather than to know, and which would be wholly admirable if it were never misused. Further, they have a marvellous and mysterious talent for expressing their enthusiasm; a phrase feelingly quoted by a lady strikes our mind with a quite peculiar force when we afterwards come upon it in the pages of a book. Again, they love the men

"Well may a piece of marble raise your because you have repaired a piece of an old ditch, but men of judgment will never do it."

titles as high as you list, wall, or cleansed a common (Montaigne, III. x.)

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