like Vittoria Colonna and many others. In France free discussion on the merits and demerits of women continued rife. Such wrangling was indeed an old French social pastime: everyone said his say, with perfect liberty to change his mind, and a host of well-worn sentiments more or less amusing were bandied about: "Eve was a woman, God made himself man! There are no women among priests. It is very seemly to sleep alone. I have never been in love or married, thank God!" In the 15th century people succeeded for a moment in believing that the intellectual level of their little pastime might be raised till it at last attained the Italian perfection; a Norman named Martin Le Franc, whom his duties as secretary to Felix V. had made half a pontiff, at one moment threw out the grand phrase which was to set Italy on fire: "Women are the apostles of happiness, because they are the apostles of universal and necessary love." A few little academies or puys d'amour,1 scattered here and there in Picardy and Flanders, caught eagerly at the idea, but without deriving from it anything better than an encouragement to the flowery verbosities of dead-and-gone chivalry, which they plumed themselves on continuing. Then came the wild outbreaks in Germany to give the finishing stroke, and when Brandt and Geyler 2 became the idols of public opinion the French feminists blushed and turned tail. No more monuments were erected to the glory of women, and even a masterpiece of our art of engraving, an absolutely charming Ships that appeared about 1500, was devoted to their disparagement. It is a series of little pictures, representing, to begin with, the inevitable Eve, and then coquetry, music, dinners, perfumes, love. The author does not go so far as to say that all these things are unutterably wearisome to him, but he insinuates that in his opinion it is useless to look for any serious idea among such frivolities. The French were quite ready to admit that women had certain moral qualities, like goodness and devotion; a [The puy was properly a mound or other elevated place on which com. petitions in poetry and song were held-eisteddfoddi.] [A racy preacher whose sermons on Brandt's Ship of Fools were very popular. He preached on "subjects of the day."] Stultifere naves. woman who had only one shift would give it away, they knew. A writer puts into Eve's mouth a cry of sublime self-sacrifice at the moment of her expulsion from the garden: Slay me," she cries to Adam: "perhaps God will restore you to Paradise!" And yet it was to her that he owed his expulsion. But the great majority of Frenchmen very unjustly believed frivolity, inconstancy, lack of originality to be defects inherent in the sex, and not merely the result of an unfortunate education. If accomplished women quoted Plato or St. Thomas they were laughed at, no one would believe that they had an opinion of their own, but declared that they had got some one to coach them, that 'the doctrine was no deeper than their lips, that they had no naturalness, that they disappeared under art." A woman was believed to be afflicted with the radical incapacity to acquire an individual idea. Montaigne, who nevertheless boasts of being platonic and anti-epicurean,1 sums up all these old prejudices in flatly refusing to regard woman as anything but a pretty animal. Virtue (the woman's, that is; Montaigne has different ideas) is corporeal fidelity: his ideal is Anne of Brittany weaving tapestry in the conjugal bedroom. Montaigne reluctantly admits that feminine coquetry may end in ennobling love, but without changing its destination: "You can do something without the graces of the mind, but nothing without bodily graces." Thus, when Roman and papal society claimed for women the absolute right to have done with paint and powder, it fell foul of a host of preconceived ideas. Frenchwomen did not firmly enough assert themselves. Their services were accepted for domestic tasks, often delicate and difficult, which necessitated much intelligence, but were considered servile or at least inferior. Further, when they endeavoured to rise above this state of bondage, they were checked, sent back to their idleness and frivolity, persuaded that it was no duty of theirs to defend the great causes men too often deserted; and they believed it. Here is a mass of useless men, says the world: go to, let us match them with useless women! But was it not a mistake thus to bury them alive, so as to prevent their being too much in evidence? Was it right to inflict on the half of the human species a malaise the more terrible because 1 Bk. i. cap. li. ; bk. iii. cap. v. for the most part the victim was unable to account for it? A woman who had all that is apparently necessary for perfect happiness, and who nevertheless was sick and unhappy by reason of the emptiness of her life, exclaimed: "I feel I lack something. In my soul there are faculties stifled and useless, too many things that are undeveloped and of no service to anyone." How many like her have there been at all times-women of deep, vacant, ever virgin souls, who suffer through not giving themselves, and live in maiden meditation, fancy free! And why? For the sole profit of the selfishness of men! "No, this ought not to be," warmly rejoined a convinced spiritualist: "if men complain of seeing themselves equalled or surpassed, more's. the pity they have only themselves to blame. 'Tis that they are unworthy of their women!" This was not the speech of a Frenchman, but of a Roman prelate, Giovanni Monti, secretary to the pope. CHAPTER V RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE THE great effort that we have sought to portray resulted finally in a profound religious revolution; starting from a crisis in belief, it led to a transformation of Christianity through the ministry of women. In reality, feminism exalted the soul rather than the woman. Woman is born to cling to somebody; if man fails her she seeks a stay in God. It was thus inevitable that her religion of beauty should end in a mystic marriage, in a great dramatic act of religious sensibility, in a development of charity and hope on the basis of definite dogma, in the skilful interpretation of impressions of the unseen by means of external signs. That women would fling themselves passionately into religious sensibility was only to be expected. This is their way. Leaving out of account those who are never happy out of church, women love to fancy themselves queens by the grace of God. The incomprehensible, which irritates. men, fascinates them, and they experience a singular joy in rummaging the mysteries. As we have already said, at the moment of the religious crisis a courtesan proffered the most judicious advice on the direction of ecclesiastical affairs. In the Church, to mistrust the intrusion of women was a peremptory tradition, and indeed the ecclesiastical world may well be considered the citadel of anti-feminism. Religion had taken a logical and theological bent; it recognised only one morality, applying to noble ladies and eminent intelligences the rules taught to plainer folk. Eras 1 One of the peculiarities of the Albigensian heresy was that it developed through the apostleship of women. mus repeats approvingly the maxim of St. Paul: "Christ is the head of man, man the head of woman; man is the image and glory of God; woman the glory of man." With the Church Fathers it had been a long-established custom (going back to the wisest of the wise, Solomon) to compare women, and even the Virgin, to the moon. From sacred literature this comparison passed into profane literature, which employed it in season and out. Rabelais declares that women play hide and seek with their husbands, as the moon with the sun; Boccaccio and Brantôme revive the old proverb about the virtue of women needing to renew itself every month like the moon. One poet decries the moon, pale like woman's love; another adores her, pure like his well-beloved. The platonists were well content with this phantasmagoric comparison, which represented to them in all likelihood a whole world of freshness and domestic joys. Dolce himself deems that the moon is feminine. "At night," he says, "she streams through every chink and cranny, spite of blinds and shutters; she inspires the imagination of husbands." In France, during the period of the fair Diana's ascendency, the moon quite eclipsed the sun; the king sported a device of interlaced crescents.1 But the Church did not go so far. It excluded women from the priesthood; its tradition granted them nothing except personal piety, or at most heroism like that of St. Catherine of Sienna of unfading memory. In order, therefore, to secure a place in an absolutely new order of ideas, women had to wash their hands once for all of eminent dogmaticians and subtle moralists, and to effect a complete change. Many enlightened minds in the Church itself called for this renovation. The weariness and disgust generally felt in regard to certain trivialities in religious observance, to the apologetics and the frigid ethics of the time, had caused the spirit 1 With this motto: Donnez puissance souveraine Au croissant de France, tel cours |