Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

III

It was these conversations that set in motion the wave of Platonism which swept over the surface of society for two or three centuries, until it lost itself in the pale inanities and vapid phrases of the précieuses. We find it difficult now to conceive of a company of grave dignitaries old and young, statesmen, wits, men of letters, and clever women, chasing theories of love through an infinity of shades and gradations, as seriously as we talk of trusts, strikes, education, and the best means of making everybody happy. The subject had a perennial interest for them. They considered it mathematically as to quantity, spiritually as to quality. They quoted Plato on love and divine beauty, but no one would have been more surprised at the application than the philosopher himself. They proposed to do away with all the chagrins and disenchantments of love, by making it altogether a dream, beautiful, no doubt, but shadowy. As a last refuge, they put terrestrial love into celestial robes and drowned themselves in illusions. Bembo wished to serve Isabella d’Este “as if she were Pope,” but he sends her quite tenderly the kiss of his soul, which she, no doubt, took gracefully and at its value. She was not a sentimental woman; a clear, vigorous intellect is a very good antidote against false sensibility. But these other vigorous intellects were so busy weaving the tissue of their dreams that they did not trouble themselves much about possible applications.

This Platonic mania, which ran through Italian society, and, if it did nothing else, tempered its grossness and spiritualized its ideals, did not originate at Urbino, though it probably blossomed into a fashion there. Petrarch found the germ in Plato, but he developed it into fruit of quite another color, and furnished the poets after him with a new background for their fantasy-flowers. The magnificent Lorenzo, poet, ruler, patron of letters, Platonist, and buffoon, went into poetic raptures at the sight of the beautiful face of “la belle Simonetta” as she lay white and cold on the bier that passed him in the street. He dreamed of it, apostrophized it, grew melancholy over it, until he found a living face almost as lovely about which to drape the pearls of his poetic fancy. He wrote sonnets à la Petrarch, without the genuine ring of Petrarch. It was all moonlight, the pale copy of a paler emotion. But he did not in the least lose control of what he called his heart, as he dutifully married the woman his clear-headed mother chose for him; she was not at all a figure of romance and, it is to be hoped, had small knowledge of the vagaries of her theoretically Platonic husband. In any case, it was the destiny of her sex to submit to the inevitable.

But the dreams of the poets naturally found an echo in the hearts of lonely women and artless maidens. When marriage was a matter of bargain and sale, a union of fortune and interest in which love played no part, sensibility was a subtle factor difficult to reckon with. A man had legally, as well as morally, supreme control over his wife. He might happen to love her and be kind to her, but if he chose to neglect her or beat her, there was no one to find fault with him. This “divine right” of man was the foundation-stone of society, and it was no more possible to question it than it was to question the divine right of popes and kings. Princesses were privileged beings who were both useful and ornamental, but this did not save them from being ill-treated to the last degree. No one thought of interfering when one of the later Medici, angry at his sister, sent for her husband and, after telling him that her frivolous conduct reflected on the decorum of his very disreputable court, bade him remember that he was a Christian and a gentleman, placed a villa at his disposal, and the hapless but too gay Isabella, who went there with suspicious reluctance, suddenly died of a convenient apoplexy, and appeared no more on this earthly scene to be a thorn in the side of her brother’s favorite, the very beautiful but too aspiring Bianca Capello. His sister-in-law, a much-wronged Spanish princess, was invited to a gloomy old castle among the hills at the same time, and disposed of in a similar way, by her amiable husband, who asked forty thousand ducats for the deed, and expiated it at once by a prayer to the Virgin, and a vow which he forgot.

With all these tragic possibilities, it was out of the question to secure a divorce for any incompatibility of temper, small or great, unless his Holiness saw that it would serve some interest or caprice of his own, and incidentally add to the glory of the church. But pent-up emotions are apt to be troublesome, and it is hardly strange that these women, with an abyss on one side and a vacuum on the other, sought a way of reconciling matters that infringed visibly on no man’s rights. They adopted the fashion of supplementing a terrestrial love that was not very comfortable with a celestial one which, if rather attenuated, seemed quite innocent and harmless, and gave them something pleasant to think about. These airy and Platonic sentiments had a much more substantial character among men and women who lived at a high mental altitude. It is to live confessedly on a very low plane to deny that there is a tie of the intellect which tends only to fine issues, and is a source of light and inspiration. But this implies first of all an intellect of distinct range, and a clear moral sense, that are not always forthcoming. The friendship between Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna was a sympathy between two exalted souls who dwelt habitually on the heights, far above the mists of sense and the banalities of lesser minds. “Friendship is not a sentiment without fire,” wrote the cold and skeptical Buffon to Mme. Necker, nearly four centuries later; “it is rather a warming of the soul, an emotion, a movement sweeter than that of any other passion, and also quite as strong.” But this passion of friendship can exist in its perfection only between those in whom sensibility lights the intellect without submerging it; on a lower plane it has its dangers.

In the days of the précieuses, the apostles of Platonic love cut the cord that bound them to reality, and floated away on a cloud of pure emotionalism. Merged in affectations, it finally evaporated in phrases on the lips of sighing youths and romantic maidens. In the Anglo-Saxon world it never had a very strong foothold. The race is not sufficiently imaginative.

There is no doubt that there has been a great deal of senseless talk about Platonic love, and that it drew after it much that was far from Platonic. We all know that one of the most conspicuous daughters of devotion is hypocrisy, but who can hold religion responsible because its garb is put on to disguise sin? The trouble is that the finest spirits are apt to be measured by the standards of the lowest. It is not easy to convince people of material ideals that all things are not to be brought to their level. But this curious agitation had its place and did its work. We may smile at the finely drawn sophistries of a Bembo, who pointed to an ideal he sometimes failed to reach. It is easy enough for cynics to say that Beatrice, the apotheosis of spiritual love, died early, and was worshiped, not as a woman, but as a star shining from inaccessible heights; that Laura, the ideal of the high priest of Platonism, was simply a dream, intangible as the moonlight and cold as the everlasting snows; that it is not good for every-day men and women to see such visions, even if it were possible, nor to dream such dreams, nor to live at such an altitude—all of which no doubt has its side of truth. But the fact remains that it was largely through the inspired vision, which looked past the entanglements of sense into the pure heart and transparent soul of an idealized womanhood, that the long-enduring sex came into its intellectual kingdom. To the old ties of interest, passion, and habit, were added those of the intellect and spirit. In this new contact of intelligences society had its birth, women took their rightful places, and the world found a new regenerating force.