It was agreed that a lady must be gracious, affable, discreet, of character above reproach, free from pride or envy, and neither vain, contentious, nor arrogant. To speak of the failings of others, or listen to reflections upon them, was taken as an indication that one’s own follies needed a vindication or a veil. This model lady must dress with taste, but not think too much about it, and she was forbidden to dye her hair, or use cosmetics and other artificial aids to beauty. Her personal distinction lay in an elegant simplicity, without luxury or pretension. She must know how to manage her children and her fortune, as well as her household; but she was expected to be versed in letters, music, and the arts, also to be able to converse on any topic of the day without childish affectation of knowledge which she did not possess. Modesty, tact, decorum, and purity of thought were cardinal virtues, and religion was a matter of course. Noisy manners, egotism, and familiarity were unpardonable. Dignity, self-possession, and a gentle urbanity were marks of good breeding. No license in language was permitted, but we cannot help wondering what they called license. Men, it must be added, could be about as wicked as they liked, and, if history is to be trusted, many in high places were very wicked indeed. The latitude of the best of them in speech would be rather embarrassing to the sensitive woman of our time; but the days of the précieuses had not dawned, and no one hesitated to call a spade a spade, even if it were a very black one. Women might blush and be silent, but further protest was set down as disagreeable prudery. Perhaps the frank naturalism of the Latin races must be taken into account, as it often quite unconsciously shocks our own more delicate tastes even to-day. But it was conceded that no man was so bad as not to esteem a woman of pure character and refined sensibilities.
These men and women who lived on the confines of two great centuries and tried to introduce a finer code of manners and morals, touched also on the equality of the sexes, a question which agitated that world as it does our own. Some one asks, one evening, why women should not be permitted to govern cities, make laws, and command armies.
Giuliano de’ Medici, who was an ardent champion of the dependent sex, replies that it might not be amiss. Many of them he declares to be as capable of doing these things as men, and he cites history to show that they have led armies and governed with equal prudence. To a friend who mildly suggests that women are inferior, he says that “the difference is accidental, not essential,” adding that the qualities of strength, activity, and endurance are not always most esteemed, even in men. As to mind, “whatever men can know and understand, women can also; where one intellect penetrates, so does the other.... Many have been learned in philosophy, written poetry, practised law, and spoken with eloquence.”
A gentleman of the party ungallantly remarks that women desire to be men so as to be more perfect.
Giuliano wisely answers that it is not for perfection, but for liberty to shake off the power that men assume over them. He says they are more firm and constant in affection, as men are apt to be wandering and unsettled. When asked to name women who are equal to men, he replies that he is confounded by numbers, but mentions, among others, “Portia, Cornelia, and Nicostrata, mother of Evander, who taught the Latins the use of letters.” “Rome,” he adds, “owes its greatness as much to women as to men.... They were never in any age inferior, nor are they now.” He goes on to cite Countess Matilda, Anne of France, wife of two kings in succession, and inferior to neither, Marguerite, daughter of Maximilian, famed for prudence and justice, Isabella of Mantua, singularly great and virtuous, with many other noted women of his time. “If there are Cleopatras, there are multitudes of Sardanapali who are much worse.”
The limits of this paper permit only the suggestion of a few points in a long conversation which touched the subject on every side. It was interspersed with thoughtful questions from the duchess, who did not fail to interfere if it took too free a turn, also with brilliant sallies of wit from Emilia Pia, and spicy comments from the less serious members of the party. They were not all in accord with the opinions quoted here, but, on the whole, Giuliano de’ Medici and his supporters, who paid a fine tribute to the abilities of women without wishing to impose upon them heavier duties, had the best of the argument.
From men, women, and manners, the transition to love was an easy one, and this fifteenth-century coterie discussed it in all its variations, as we discuss the last play, or the last novel, or the last word in sociology, or the misty era of universal peace. It was not a new thing to discourse upon the most interesting of human passions. Men had talked of it centuries before on the banks of the Ilissus; but when they passed from its lowest phases they lost themselves in metaphysical subtleties. It became an intellectual aspiration, a “passion of the reason,” without warmth or life. Diotima, a woman quoted by Socrates, called it “a mystic dream of the beautiful and good”; but if she was not a myth herself, she could not join the symposia of philosophers. Outside of the circle of Aspasia, no respectable woman was admitted to the conversations of men; indeed, these finely drawn dissertations on love had small reference to her. In the classic world women had no part in the marriage of souls. Love, when not purely a thing of the senses, was a worship of beauty, and the Greek ideal of beauty was a masculine one. They might die for a Helen, but it was not for love. These wise talkers sent the flute-players to amuse their wives and daughters in the inner court, while they considered high things, as well as many not suitable for delicate ears. The coarser Romans treated love as altogether a thing of the senses, with Ovid as a text.
But in the golden age of the Renaissance, women no longer stayed in the inner court, to gossip and listen to flute-players, while their husbands talked on themes high or low. The worship of the Madonna, if it had done little else, had idealized the pure affection of an exalted womanhood. Chivalry following in its train had made the cult of woman a fashion by giving her more or less of the homage already paid to her divine representative, though this sentiment was less active in Italy than in Provence or among the more romantic races. It was a tribute of strength to helplessness, and had its roots in the finest traits of men; but it exalted moral qualities rather than intellectual ones, and was largely theoretical outside of a limited class. Now that men had begun to dip into classic lore, however, they found a valuable ally in women, and the old cult became a companionship. To be educated and a princess was to be doubly a power, to have opinions which it was worth while to consider.
The princesses of Urbino had doubtless read Plato. In an age, too, that occupied itself with Boccaccio, who had glorified the senses and written books that no pure and refined woman could read, they had turned to Dante and the spiritual love which was an inspiration and a benediction. In the white soul of Beatrice they found the exquisite flower of womanhood. They caught also the subtle fragrance of the ideal love which Petrarch gave, first to a woman, then to an unfading memory. It was of such a love they dreamed and liked to talk. Then one of the chief apostles of Platonism was the brilliant Bembo, who was the star of this company. “Through love,” he says, “the supreme virtues rule the inferior.” He puts on record and dedicates to Lucrezia Borgia the conversations of three days on its joys and sorrows; but the subject was evidently exhausted, as, at the end, a hermit gives a homily on the vanity of the world. He closes an eloquent apostrophe, however, with these words: “Chase away ignorance and make us see celestial beauty in its perfection. Love, it is the communion with divine beauty, the banquet of angels, the heavenly ambrosia.” On this theme his listeners rang the changes, but not always on so ethereal a plane. The relative constancy of the sexes, the divine right of man, the passive nature of woman, who was called a pale moon to the masculine sun, and various other points, had their fair share of discussion. Between terrestrial and celestial love there are many gradations, and the character and temperament of the men were clearly revealed in their opinions. Some were disposed to be autocrats, others took issue with masculine egotism, and still others dwelt on the sentimental side of the question. One of the Fregosos rather ungraciously assumed the traditional attitude of his sex and contended that women are “imperfect animals,” not at all to be compared with men. But he was in an unpopular minority. The Duchess Elisabetta was a well-poised, discreet woman, who was devoted to her invalid husband, kept her admirers at a prudent distance, and was in no wise a victim to superfluous sensibility. The effusive Bembo, who was given to friendships touched with the fire of the imagination, was untiring in his devotion to this Minerva, but he confessedly adored her as a goddess from afar. The witty and brilliant Emilia Pia had a temperament the reverse of sentimental, and was ready to demolish any castle of moonlight with a shaft of merciless satire. Both brought a solid equipment of common sense into an analysis that often reached a very fine point. But this friendship that was not love, this love that was a sublimated friendship, appealed to them as it did to many others besides poets in a grossly material age. To separate the soul from the senses and intellectualize the emotions, was the natural protest of intelligent women against the old traditions that considered them only as servants or toys of men’s fancies. It took them out of the realm of the passions and “gave them wings for a sublime flight.” The mysticism of love is closely related to the mysticism of religion, and the faith that sees God in ecstatic visions is not far from the love that feeds itself from spiritual sources. These rambling talks, to which the young ladies listened curiously and with interest, though usually in discreet silence, proved so absorbing that on the last of a series of evenings devoted to the subject, the party forgot its usual gaieties, and did not disperse until the birds began to sing in the trees and the rosy dawn shone over the rugged heights of Monte Catri.