The Religion of Beauty in Woman

I SUSPECT that my title may lead to a false impression. It seems to promise something of the ecstatic kind on which John Ruskin used to discourse. But really I mean the phrase, religion of beauty in woman, with prosaic literalness. I mean that in the Renaissance, in the later fifteenth century and after, there developed actually a kind of divine worship of beauty, and more especially of beautiful women. This “ new religion ” had its Peter, the rock on which it was foucded, in Cardinal Pietro Bembo; its messiah, in Plato; its first and greatest commandment, in platonic love. The term platonic love has been spoiled for us. We smile at its mention. To our downright common sense, platonic love is wooden iron: it is either too nice to be platonic, or too platonic to be nice. Even in the Renaissance it too often meant something silly or worse. Bembo himself was no unspotted prophet; and some of the female “ saints ” of the “ new religion ” were as sepulchres but thinly whited. Yet a creed with such apostles as Castiglione, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, Margaret of France, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, is not lightly to be scoffed away.

The creed took form in Italy. Plato’s idealism is behind it; but it is the passion for beauty of the Renaissance itself, and no mere metaphysical system, that gives fervor to the mood, is the sold within the doctrine. The Italian of the Renaissance, however, was also an exceedingly concrete person; to parody Meredith,—

He meant by beauty, for all Plato, sensuous beauty, the beauty he could touch, see, hear, smell, taste. From his passionate sensuousness derived his supremacy in the plastic arts, the pictorialism of his poetry, and its deficiency in imaginative suggestion. Taking for granted that we are as much in love with the sensuously beautiful thing as he is, he spares us no detail of it. In a pastoral allegory, the Nymphal of Admetus, Boccaccio describes seven charming nymphs, one after another. They differ in type only as the superlatively beautiful differs from the supremely beautiful; yet we are treated to a complete list of specifications for each. We feel at last like judges at a strange beauty-show. But Boccaccio was justified of his own generation, and of some five generations more. Early in the fifteenth century, about 1430, Lorenzo Valla, who loved, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, to épater le bourgeois, wrote in Latin a dialogue On Pleasure, or Concerning the True Good. Pleasure, he says, is the true good; virtue for its own sake is an empty word. And the most pleasure-giving things are health and beauty, — especially beauty: for the more health we have, the less we know it; but the possession of beauty is a conscious joy forever. And of all beauty best is the beauty of women. “ What,” he asks, “ is sweeter, what more delectable, what more adorable, than a fair face ? ” And since beauty is not of the face merely, he would have beautiful women in summer go lightly clad, or clad not at all. It is an artist of the beautiful that speaks, not a voluptuary; only the man that hath no beauty in himself will misconceive him. “ He that rejoices not in beauty, is blind either of soul or of body; and if he have eyes, they should be put out, for he knows not how to use them.”

This absorbing passion for feminine beauty reveals itself everywhere. With Fra Lippo’s wistful girl-faces it invades religious painting, before dominated by the hieratic, inaccessible, scarcely human, type of Byzantine symbolists. And from Fra Lippo to Titian, Italian religious art is mostly a vision of fair women, labeled saints, madonnas, what you will, but conceived and valued as fair women. On April 15, 1485, as Burckhardt relates, an interesting thing happened. There was found in a marble sarcophagus on the Appian Way the body of a young Roman girl, so marvelously embalmed that she seemed alive. Her eyes were half open; her lips parted as if smiling; her cheeks rosy. The body was laid in state in a palace on the Capitol. All flocked to look, painters among the rest; “ for,” says the chronicler, “ she was more beautiful than can be said or written, and, were it said or written, it would not be believed by those who had not seen her.” Very likely all this did not happen quite as it is reported for us; but that does not matter. The interesting thing is, that whereas their grandfathers would have worshiped this seeming resurrection as miracle, or anathematized it as witchcraft, these artists of the Renaissance prostrated themselves before a miracle indeed — the miracle of a pretty woman!

While Italian hearts were warming to this particular kind of miracle, two things came to pass which focused their diffused sentiment to a practical end, and justified this practical end to the intelligence. I mean the rehabilitation of Plato, and the social emancipation of women.

Plato had not been without influence, indeed, during the earlier Christian period or the Middle Ages. From Augustine to Gerson, on the contrary, his thought had impregnated Christian doctrine. But from the ninth century to the fifteenth, the authority of his rival, Aristotle, was absolute, dwarfing every other human authority whatsoever. Aristotle was not only, as Dante hailed him, “ master of them that know,” he was also preceptor of them that would be saved. To reconcile faith and reason, Thomas Aquinas found it sufficient to reconcile faith and Aristotle. Aristotle was the adopted doctor evangelicus of the Christian Church; Plato remained a mere pagan philosopher.

First to protest against this mediæval order of precedence is Francis Petrarch. In his Triumph of Fame, Plato walks before Aristotle: —

And elsewhere Petrarch notes that Plato appeals to princes and potentates, Aristotle to the vulgar herd: Ego arbitror quod inter duos, quorum alterum principes proceresque, alterum universa plebs laudat.

In the fifteenth century the issue thus raised became an all-absorbing interest. The centre of dispute was Florence; and Plato’s partisans were, in the first instance, prominent Greeks drawn there by the patronage of Cosmo de’ Medici, or attendant upon their Emperor John Palæologos, when he came to discuss with the Roman Pope a possible harmonization of East and West in faith. Out of the interest in Plato, revived by these Greeks, grew the so-called Platonic Academy of Florence, of which the leading spirits were Marsilio Ficino and young Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. These two men devoted their learning and talents to the reconciliation of faith and reason; but for them no longer Aristotle, but Plato, sums all that reason can. Plato’s triumph is complete; he is now the doctor evangelicus whom Ficino preaches in the Church of the Angels in Florence. “ Within this church we would expound the religious philosophy of our Plato. We would contemplate divine truth in this seat of Angels. Enter in, dear brethren, in the spirit of holiness.” And Ficino’s later patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, adds the practical sanction, “ Without the Platonic discipline, no one can be either a good citizen, or a good Christian.”

But Plato’s doctrines were given a markedly mystic significance by these Florentines, fresh from the Church Fathers, vitally interested in the metaphysics of love of Dante and his circle, drawn, above all, to the dreamy speculations of the half-oriental Plotinus. These side influences tended to make paramount in their new religion that element of platonism which finds chief utterance in the Symposium,: that love is the supreme force, cosmic, moral, religious; that there are two loves, heavenly and earthly, the one a desire of the beauty of sense, the other a desire of the beauty above sense; and that, as sensuous beauty is the shadow of super-sensuous, or spiritual, beauty, therefore by following the shadow we may ultimately attain to the reality behind the shadow, and in an ecstasy possess divine beauty itself.

Thus fatally, as if by preëstablished harmony, this whole body of exotic doctrine came to sanction and codify the mastering instinct of these beauty-loving Florentines, avatars in so many respects of Plato’s own people. But like the Greeks themselves, the Florentines, much as they might speculate upon the supremacy of abstract beauty, the beauty visible only to the mind’s eye, actually responded how much more sincerely, passionately, to concrete beauty, beauty visible to the eye of sense. To a few, in moments of speculative exaltation, this earthly beauty might dissolve away to the shadow their creed declared it to be; but to most of them, in effect, the visible, tangible, audible shadow was the reality they loved, whether purely or impurely. Yet contemplation of beauty, living with beauty, as a moral tonic, a discipline of excellence, might indeed be sincerely realized and fervently advocated, even by men-of-the-world for whom mystic passion for a supersensuous ideal was, though not necessarily mere shamming, yet an emotional state of which they were by temperament incapable altogether, or capable only in rare passing moods.

Any one conversant with the character of Lorenzo the Magnificent, for instance, would hardly credit him with more than a verbal comprehension of any mystic passion. I do not mean because he was a man of loose morals: a man may feel, as well as see, the better, and yet follow the worse. I mean that Lorenzo’s temperament was too exclusively Latin, too clearsighted, logical, positive. Yet we have no reason to doubt his sincerity when he urged the moral efficacy of love against any who might censure his love-poetry as vain and amatorious writing. “ I believe,” he says, “ that so far from being reprehensible, love is a necessary and indeed certain evidence of force, of gentleness, of dignity of character, and is more than all else occasion of leading men on to things high and excellent, and of bringing into action powers latent in our souls. For whoever diligently seeks the true definition of love, finds it to be not other than the desire of beauty. And if this be so, necessarily all things deformed and ugly displease him who loves.” Excellent next to the love of God, he continues, is that “ rare kind of love ” which is of one person and for always. And such love cannot be unless the beloved “ possess, humanly speaking, highest perfection; and unless there be met together in her, besides physical beauty, a lofty intelligence, modest and refined habits and ways, elegant mien and manners, suavity in address and winning speech, love, constancy, and faith.”

Lorenzo seems to say long, very long, little more than Goethe said short in

There is, however, an important difference. For Goethe the potency of the Ewigweibliche is all in “ love, constancy, and faith; ” for the rest, his Gretchen is a simple, unlettered village-girl. Such a priestess of love did not exist for the despot of Florence and his fellow-platonists. As little would ancient Romans have thought of choosing a vestal from the kitchen. For the Renaissance, das Ewigweibliche came at times perilously near being translatable into the Everladylike. “ Love, constancy, and faith" are part of her theoretical equipment; but in Lorenzo’s list, they tail off his specifications rather weakly after his emphasized particularity anent the social graces, the perfections of the inner circle, the salon. Petrarch was prophetic when he said that Plato was the philosopher for “ princes and potentates; ” in the Renaissance the priestess of platonic love was the fine lady. She was the Everwomanly; the rest were practicable females. The young platonist, Edmund Spenser, under the exigencies of the pastoral manner, called his “ Rosalind” a shepherdess and a “ widow’s daughter of the glen; ” but, lest we forget even for a moment, his confidential editor makes haste to reassure us that the convenances have not really been violated. " He calleth Rosalind the Widowes daughter of the glenne, that is of a country Hamlet or borough, which I thinke is rather sayde to coloure and concele the person, then simply spoken. For it is well knowen, even in spighte of Colin and Hobbinoll, that shee is a Gentlewoman of no meane house, nor endewed with anye vulgare and common gifts, both of nature and manners: but such indeede, as neede nether Colin be ashamed to have her made knowen by his verse, nor Hobbinol be greved that so she should be commended to immortalitie for her rare and singular vertues.”

If we are curious to know just what the Renaissance thought of when it described a lady as not “ endewed with anye vulgare and common gifts, both of nature and manners,” there are at hand dozens of contemporary books to enlighten us. The sixteenth century was indefatigable in its eagerness to define, to form, and to inform its lady worthy to be loved. It measured her from top to toe; it put the right words into her mouth; it scaled to a hair-line the boundary between coquetry and cocotterie. Among others, Messer Angelo Firenzuola sets her physical type with accuracy. (I condense for convenience from Burckhardt’s summary.) “ Her hair should be a soft yellow, inclining to brown; the forehead just twice as broad as high; skin transparent, not dead white; eyebrows dark, silky, most strongly marked in the middle, and shading off toward the ears and nose; the white of the eye faintly touched with blue, the iris not actually black, but soft deep brown; the lids white, and marked with almost invisible tiny red veins; the hollow round the eye of the same color as the cheek; the ear, of a medium size, with a stronger color in the winding than in the even parts, with an edge of the transparent ruddiness of the pomegranate; the nose to recede gently and uniformly in the direction of the eyes; where the cartilage ceases, there may be a slight elevation, but not so marked as to make the nose aquiline; the lower part to be less strongly colored than the ears, but not of a chilly whiteness, and the middle partition above the lips to be lightly tinted with red; the mouth smallish, neither projecting to a point, nor quite flat, with lips not too thin, and fitting neatly together; except in speaking or laughing never more than six upper teeth should be displayed. As points of finesse may pass a dimple in the upper lip, a certain fullness of the lower lip, a tempting smile in the left corner of the mouth.” And so on; for our connoisseur continues his minuscular analysis incorrigibly to the bitter end, — and with gravity, for to him there are sermons in looks.

Others delineate with similar particularity the spiritual woman. Count Baldassare Castiglione is the most worth listening to; for it is his gentleman and his lady, as characterized in the Libro del Cortegiano, that European high life in the sixteenth century labored to reproduce and in some measure did reproduce. According to Castiglione, the soul of gentility in man or woman is grazia, grace. At bottom, grace is the trained instinct which can do or say difficult things with apparent ease. In the lady, grace involves moreover una certa mediocrità difficile, “ a certain golden mean of unapproachableness,”perhaps. Her demeanor should spell the maxim —

No timid shrinking Gretchen she, but skilled in “ a certain pleasing affability,” and adept in ragionamenti d’amore, “ conversings of love,” which “ every gentle sir uses as means to acquire grace with ladies . . . not only when impelled by passion, but often as well to do honor to the lady with whom he speaks, it seeming to him that the pretence of loving her is a testimony of her worthiness to be loved.” So gently courted, she will, while she can, “ seem not to understand; ” or, that ruse failing, will “ take all as a merry jest.” Singing, playing, dancing, — all the parlor accomplishments must be in her repertory of fascination; but she must not be forthputting in them, rather, after a not excessive pressing, should yield “ with a certain coyness ” (con una certa timidità).

Enough: we begin to recognize her, this fine lady of the Italian Renaissance. She is a work of art, of a subtle artistry

The natural woman is to her as the rough-hewn block to the finished statue. She could apprehend with enthusiasm Keats’s apothegm, “Beauty is truth;” but she would have shrugged her powdered shoulders at the complementing, “ Truth beauty.” In her pragmatic way she identified truth with tact. No doubt the ladies of Castiglione’s generation had quite too robust nerves to be altogether precious dolls. We hear how Isabella of Este used to put on the gloves with her pretty cousin, Beatrice, and once with a clever counter floored her. Despite Castiglione’s protest against such “ strenuous and rough mannish sports,” the term “ virago ” was not yet one of contumely : Britomart the bold had her votaries as well as Amoret the amiable; but none the less, eighteenth-century Belinda is already in sight, — Belinda, whose “little heart” but turns to thoughts of beaux, and whose

to conquer — Sir Fopling Flutter!

It was a recognition, just if partial, of this manifest tendency in the Renaissance “ religion of beauty,” artificial beauty, that drew from moral John Ruskin many a tirade. “ All the Renaissance princi ples of art tended,” he exclaims, “ as I have before often explained, to the setting Beauty above Truth, and seeking for it always at the expense of truth. And the proper punishment of such pursuit — the punishment which all the laws of the universe rendered inevitable — was, that those who thus pursued beauty should wholly lose sight of beauty. . . . The age banished beauty, so far as human effort could succeed in doing so, from the face of the earth, and the form of man. To powder the hair, to patch the cheek, to hoop the body, to buckle the foot, were all part and parcel of the same system which reduced streets to brick walls, and pictures to brown stains. One desert of ugliness was extended before the eyes of mankind; and their pursuit of the beautiful, so recklessly continued, received unexpected consummation in high-heeled shoes and periwigs, — Gower Street and Gaspar Poussin.” This is perhaps like judging apples ripe by apples rotten; yet it does nevertheless put finger on a rotten spot in the Renaissance passion for beauty.

But I digress too far. In my effort to picture the ideal “ beauty ” of the period as she was, and as she threatened to become, I have forgotten our present concern wdth her, namely, how her emergence acted upon the platonic cult, and how she in turn was reacted upon by that cult.

The story of her emergence itself can here only be hinted at. The woman of the earlier fifteenth century, even in Italy, was, so far as social activity went, still in the kindergarten stage, Luther, who in this respect remained obstinately old-fashioned, expressed the earlier Italian view of her whole duty, when he said in his Table Talk, “ Take women out of the household, and they are good for nothing. . . . Woman is born to keep house, it is her lot, her law of nature.” Unhappily for such masculine ruling, however, woman has shown at several periods of her history a disposition — and a faculty — for overruling this particular law of her nature. She has uniformly appealed to another law, equally of her nature, which went into operation with Adam. “The woman tempted me;” and so Adam yielded to the woman — against his better judgment. So long as Luther can keep his woman in the household, that “ law of nature ” of hers is safe. Luther also is safe, — as a bird is safe from a serpent inexperienced in fascination. But the instinct and the power are there, and on provocation may grow dangerous.

In this fifteenth-century Italy, woman’s provocation came in the form of the higher education, the awakening and training of that “ ingegno grande,” that “ lofty intelligence,” which Lorenzo de’ Medici found so essential to the ideal loved one. The wisdom of the serpent was once more to subjugate man. The new learning, based as it was upon belles lettres, appealed to girlish minds. The old scholastic régime of logic and dialectic, if it reached them at all, hardened and unsexed them; but the new literature warmed their imaginations, touched their sympathies, lubricated their tongues. Tales of precocious maids becoming, while still in their teens, accomplished orators, poets, scholars in Latin, even in Greek, go the rounds of Italy. Teachers, pleased and flattered, egg on their pupils to emulation. The femme savante appears. If she is high-born and rich and ambitious, she sets up her salon. There she can meet men on equal terms, for wit and learning; and, if she happens to be a pretty woman also — well, Luther and all his “ laws of nature ” cannot put her back into the household to stay. The odd thing is that these very humanists, who were so largely responsible for letting woman out of the household, were all the while theoretically urging the necessity of keeping her in there. One of the foremost of them, Leo Battista Alberti of Florence, in his famous Treatise on the Family, draws his ideal girl-bride meekly making obeisance to her husband. “ She told me,” this lordly personage remarks, “ that she had learned to obey her father and mother; and had received their injunction always to obey me; and accordingly was prepared to do whatever I might command.” Yet it was good Leo Battista and his kind who were responsible for Beatrice, the girl-let-out-of-thehousehold, answering Benedick’s pathetic “ Do you not love me ? ” with her “ Why, no; no more than reason. . . . I would not deny you; but, by this good day, I yield upon great persuasion; and partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption,”

Now, by the end of the fifteenth century, Beatrice was become for Italy a fact, the paramount fact, socially speaking. In the person of Castiglione’s Emilia Pia — first cousin moral of Beatrice — mad and merry wit rules it over the brilliant group in the salon at Urbino; she and Signor Gasparo “ never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them.” To such clever women, sure of themselves and so daring much, the new Renaissance literature is being dedicated and devoted. Their influence is in all and over all, making for social rightness and mostly — it is fair to say — for righteousness. There is no longer question of their right to influence men, but only what to do with that influence, how to direct it, and to what end. And Pietro Bembo, élégant and poet, theologian and wit, is ready with an answer, blending metaphysics wdth gallantry, with a spice of anti-matrimonial cynicism. This last, this odium attaching to marriage, came to the Renaissance from several quarters of influence: from the practical and theological arguments of the Fathers, especially Ambrose and Augustine, against marriage; from the fanatic asceticisms of morbid Eastern anchorites, and their monkish disciples in the West; from the fantastic code of the thirteenth-century chivalric love, with its statute as redacted by Chaplain Andrew, — Dicimus enim et stabilito tenore firmamus amorem non posse inter duos jugales suas extendere vires: “ we say and legally resolve that love cannot extend its dominion over two joined in matrimony;” from the interminable line of travesties on marriage from Jean de Meung to Eustache Deschamps; from the idealism of Cavalcanti and Dante, and the sentimentalism of Petrarch; from, finally, Plotinus of Alexandria, next revered after Plato, who, without exactly condemning marriage, yet commends as the higher love that which rests in passionless contemplation of womanly beauty.

But although Plotinus emphasizes the virtue of such contemplative love, he is far from making feminine beauty its principal object. His conception of beauty, on the contrary, is more abstract even than Plato’s. Nor were the earlier Florentine platonists, Ficino, Pico, Benivieni, and the rest, thinking of feminine beauty as the supreme beauty this side heaven. Lorenzo carefully distinguished between Plato’s divine love, which is the highest good, and love for a human creature, which is a good only after a finite manner of speaking. But Cardinal Bembo, in his Gli Asolani, definitively identifies platonic love with love of ladies, finds man’s summum bonum, as Browning put it playfully, “ in the kiss of one girl.” In Bembo’s philosophy there was indeed much virtue in a kiss.

In a fair garden of the Queen of Cyprus at Asolo, three high-born maidens and as many youths while away the hour of siesta with talk of love. As the custom was, they elect one of the maidens to preside over their debate. One of the youths, Perottino, as “ devil’s advocate,” attacks love, adducing many plausible reasons why love should be held dangerous and hurtful, occasion of many ills. Whereupon another youth, Gismondo, defends love, matching each and every allegation of ill by a joy won through loving; so that, whereas Perottino concluded love to be wholly bad, Gismondo proves love to be wholly good. Both cannot be right; so the queen calls upon Lavinello, the third youth, to break, if possible, the deadlock. Love, he replies, is good or bad according to its object; the object of the love which is good is beauty alone. True beauty man perceives through eye and ear and mind; through these come those immortal harmonies which delight and do not pall. The desire which is not of such beauty, is but

Such is the practical gist of Bembo’s elegant sermon, — stripped of the graces of style, of poetry, of eloquence, lavished by the courtly churchman. It was this gist that these cultivated, enthusiastic, ambitious ladies of the Renaissance took to heart, and made practical trial of. Bembo’s book was to them what La Nouvelle Héloïse was to the ladies of French salons three centuries later, — a more intimate bible. And presently they were to hear the “ Matthew Arnold ” of that day actually substituting this new gospel according to Peter of Venice for the old gospel of Peter of Galilee.

Bembo’s Gli Asolani was published in 1505. During the winter of that year the conversation was supposed to take place which Castiglione records in his Libro del Cortegiano. The book is an epitome of the cultivated life, touching and illustrating every function of that life from boudoir and drawing-room to cabinet and throne. Last of all, and highest function of all, is naturally religion. And here, at the close of the book, where we might expect an exhortation to Christian love, we find instead an apostrophe to platonic love. Bembo himself is the officiating priest; and when at the last he comes down from the ecstatic vision he has himself evoked, he is like Moses returned from Sinai: “He seemed as if transported and spellbound, and stood mute and immobile, his eyes turned heavenward, as if he were distraught; until the Lady Emilia . . . took him by the hem of his garment, and plucking it gently, said, ' Have a care, Messer Pietro, lest with these thoughts your own spirit be reft away from the body.’ — ‘ Madam,’replied Messer Pietro, ‘ nor would that be the first miracle which love hath worked in me.’ ”

Here in a single situation is the keynote of nearly all, — in truth a discordant note, sounding, or pretending to sound, high piety and light gallantry at once and in one. Ruskin is in so far right: the Renaissance religion of beauty started wrong. Whatever truth may lie in the notion of the platonic “ ladder of love,” the way towards the supra-mundane is unlikely to pass through the salon of la grande mondaine.

Still, however crossed at birth by a malignant spirit of levity, there is truth and beauty in Castiglione’s ideal itself. “ Who does not know,” he asks, “ that women cleanse our hearts of all evil and low thoughts, of cares, of troubles, and of those heavy dejections that follow in the train of these ? And if we consider well, we shall recognize also, that in respect to the knowledge of high things, so far from turning away men’s minds, women rather awaken them.” Upon this faith as a corner-stone Castiglione builds his theory of the state. God has deputed the government of peoples to princes; princes should lean upon wise counselors, mature enough in years to have outlived their own misguided passions, but fresh in spirit to feel and follow the perfecting influence of beauty. The function of women in society, therefore, is by their beauty, of body and mind conjoined, to lead upward and onward such men. The Middle Ages, the age of Aristotle, had called woman confusio hominis, the " confusion of man; ” the Renaissance, the age of Plato, now hailed her in effect as illuminatio Dei, ” the illumination of God.” So Michelangelo: —

It was as if the mood of such men, like a prism, refracted the figure of Mary, dearer divinity of mediæval Christendom, into many gracious and beneficent living images, before each one of which men might kneel and say, as Michelangelo himself to Vittoria Colonna, —

She sustains him: —

To her he prays: —

Through her is salvation: —

But on few descended the “ radiance of the stars ” as on this magnificent old man, so voicing his spiritual love at past sixty-three. Castiglione had indeed said “ that old men can love blamelessly and more happily than young; by this word ‘ old ’ meaning indeed not decrepit, nor when the bodily organs are so weak that the soul cannot longer exercise its functions through them, but when wisdom in us is in its fulness.” Michelangelo justifies the opinion; and so, from the other side, does Sir Philip Sidney, whose illumination from his Star, Stella, is shot through with the smoky passions of undisciplined youth. For long he cannot find peace in the platonic — or shall we say sisterly — love Stella offers him; —

Service and Honour, Wonder with Delight,
Fear to offend, will worthy to appear,
Care shining in mine eyes, Faith in my sprite :
These things are left me by my only Dear.
But thou, Desire ! because thou wouldst have all,
Now banisht art: but yet, alas, how shall ?

Yet he too at the last professes conversion in his sonnet, —

Beyond question, few converts to the Renaissance religion of beauty stood on the heights with Michelangelo and Sidney. Most of these — most professional poets, at any rate — remained in the comfortable valleys of patronage. For instance, Dr. John Donne writes to Lucy Harrington, Countess of Bedford: —

How different is this gallant metaphorical piety from Michelangelo’s quiet intensity ! And Dr. Donne’s list of “worthiest things ” to which he has been “ refined ” — “ virtue, art, beauty, fortune ” — leads by its apparent order of climax to the disquieting doubt that “ Madam ” has been to him less Saint Beauty than Saint Bounty. Indeed, too many a poet of the sixteenth century was a pilgrim to the latter’s shrine; his platonic patron saint achieved sainthood only in the degree of her good works — toward him. Poets had to live; paying public there was none; so they borrowed from patrons and repaid with thanks keyed, as with these of Donne’s, to the emphasis of spiritual love. Especially adapted for such amorous notes-of-hand was the sonnet as Petrarch wrote it, — a form brief, ingenious, pointed, pithy, a style all tender, obsequious, yet within bounds, delicate, a passion which flattered without compromising, in fine, a strictly legal currency for all compliment, or, in the platonic manner of speaking, a hymnal for the “ new religion in love.” Strange to say, the aptest description of Petrarch’s lovepoetry as conceived by the salon is by uncouthly pedantic Gabriel Harvey, Spen ser’s friend: “ Petrarch was a delicate man, and with an elegant judgment gra ciously confined Love within the terms of Civility.” His poetry is “ the grace of Art, a precious tablet of rare conceits, and a curious frame of exquisite workmanship; nothing but neat Wit, and refined Elegance.” Do we not hear, and see, the petit maître of the salon! Petrarch wrote of himself, —

His mendicant followers reduced his stock of sentiment to sweet water, cooking this into sonnets of sugar-candy; and too many a “ Sacharissa ” was by nature, as well as by name, as Dr. Johnson said, “ derived from sugar.” Until John Cleveland might well cry out, —

The platonic religion of beauty far from died out with the Renaissance. It was given finical propagation during the early seventeenth century throughout Europe. Preciously modish in the Hôtel de Rambouillet, it was thence grafted afresh upon English high society by Henrietta Maria, full alumna of the French school. In Italy, meanwhile, it had degenerated into the silly institution of the cicisbeo, or platonie “ servant,” who was attached to every fashionable matron. Byron has drawn his portrait in Beppo:

The cicisbeo was regularly picked out, along with the husband, by the lady’s family; and was supposed to exercise a kind of spiritual influence over her, untainted by the material bondage of matrimony.

As was natural, the platonic fashion spread downward from the court. Molière’s précieuses ridicules and femmes savantes are of the bourgeoisie. We catch echoes of the cicisbeo even in England, and as late as Sheridan. “ You know,” protests innocent young Lady Teazle to insinuating Joseph Surface, “ I admit you as a lover no farther than fashion requires.” — “True,” replies Joseph,— “a mere Platonic cicisbeo, what every wife is entitled to.” — “ Certainly,” assents the ingenuous lady, “ one must not be out of the fashion.”

The breaking down of such fashions was undoubtedly one of the many reactions against the artificial and unnatural, which, taken together, we call the Romantic Movement. Castiglione’s Cortegiano was the gospel of the Renaissance religion of beauty; the gospel of the Romantic religion of passion was Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse. Rousseau swept away the whole code of gallant fencing, of suprasensuous ecstasies, of artificial courtesies; he took his lovers out of doors, out of over-heated salons, not into smug gardens of trimmed box and simpering marbles, but into the presence of real nature, and real human nature, even if a little overwrought; and the fine fantastical French ladies and their beribboned gallants sighed over his pages and, even while remaining fine fantastical ladies and beribboned gallants, at least played at being ingenuous children of nature.

It would be interesting to trace the development from these play children of nature, these masqueraders in fêtes galantes, of the real child of nature, the ideal woman-type of the Romanticists. It would be interesting again to set beside the Renaissance belle, mistress of herself and men, shaving her forehead to appear intellectual, and graduating Connoisseur in Hearts, — to set beside her the Romantic heroine, Yirginie, Dorothea, Gretchen, Cythna, Haidee, and all their sisters of drama and fiction, — innocent children, artless and helpless, who can only love, and, when their love is hurt, can only pine away with it, like Shelley’s Sensitive Plant. One might also show reaction on reaction, and illustrate the child-woman of Goethe growing into the “ interesting matron,” la femme de trente ans, of Balzac and George Sand; or illustrate occasional reversion in our own time to the platonic ideal itself, as in the apostrophe of Jane in L’ami des Femmes of Dumas fils. “ Let us forget earth,” she sighs, “ let us realize heaven; let us share our thoughts, our joys, our griefs, our aspirations, our tears, so that in this unfleshly communion of minds and souls there may be in our eyes pride, in our heart-throbs purity, in our speech chastity, in our consciences calm.” So history — and women — repeat themselves. But all this would be another story.