Of the noble ladies who presided over the literary courts, the few we have recalled were among the greatest, and, with one exception, it is generally conceded that their lives were without reproach. Others were victims of a power over which they had no control. It must be remembered that these women, however capable or high in place, were in the last resort subject to the will of men. Their new intelligence had made them helpers to be respected, and tempered a little the possible tyranny of their self-constituted masters, but men themselves, the nobler and wiser, saw the dangers in the abuse of their own power. “If women corrupt, they have first been corrupted by their age,” said Giuliano de’ Medici, the best and purest of his family, in one of the conversations at Urbino, which, thanks to its women, had not only the most intelligent but the most virtuous court in Italy.
When a Borgia or some other pope equally devoid of moral sense, who sits at the head of Christendom and directs its conscience, orders at pleasure the marriage and divorce of his own daughter, or of any other woman who can serve his political or mercenary ends, giving her no choice and no recourse; when Imperias and Tullias preside over the salons of Rome because etiquette forbids a pure and high-minded woman to live in this lax society of prelates and cardinals, which she would be likely to find neither safe nor agreeable, there is little to be said about the connection between woman’s intelligence and moral decadence. Imperias and Tullias have lived in all ages, and they have flourished best where good women were the most ignorant and colorless. Some of them have had talent and esprit. They have sung, acted, danced, written sonnets, affected learning, patronized the arts, even put on the garb of virtue and piety; but they can be no more cited as representatives of the women of centuries ago than the same class to-day can be taken as a measure of our own moral standards, which is clearly impossible. Intelligence was never a guaranty of morals, as the mind can be sharpened for bad ends as well as good ones. It is even possible that the woman of education and strong mental fiber may be more easily led into the sins of ambition, but she is far less likely to drift into the follies of vanity, passion, and a weak will than the ignorant one who has no rational outlet for her energies and her untempered sensibilities. The faults, too, of a luminous age are seen in a glare of light that is wholly wanting in periods of darkness when vice shelters itself behind closed doors upon which it too often hangs the drapery of virtue.
It is difficult to measure the intellectual value of the women of the Renaissance, as their influence went out in a thousand rills, seen and unseen, to fertilize after-ages, and not least our own. There were many good writers, but no great ones, unless we except Vittoria Colonna, whose poems, though unequal, were of a high and intrinsic literary as well as moral quality. As an in memoriam her sonnets to her husband are not likely to die, and as the first collection of sacred poems her later work has a distinct and honorable place on the world’s records. Why there were no artists of note is a problem not easy to solve, as the field is one in which women seem especially fitted to excel. Elisabetta Sirani might have won a high place on the roll of fame, as great critics were struck with her vigor, her grasp of large subjects, her facile style, and her careful finish; but she lived in the decline of art, and died at twenty-six. Women were more famous as scholars, and many of them stood on a level with distinguished men. Educated with them in the best schools, their tastes were formed on the best models. A lady who converses or lectures before learned dons in Latin, and writes the purest Greek, is not a shallow pretender, though she may be neither original nor profound. Nor do they seem to have been pedants, though much of the phraseology of both men and women strikes us now as stilted and inflated; it was the style of the day. No doubt there was more or less dilettantism, which was a weakness of the time that ended in the destruction of literary values; it is quite possible, too, that many liked what it was the fashion to like, as they have done in all ages, without any clear tastes or convictions of their own, though this foible is by no means confined to women. That period, like our own, had its army of pale imitators who follow in the wake of every movement that is likely to reflect on them a small degree of honor, and in the end sink its finest standards in hopeless mediocrity.
But the influence of a multitude of highly educated and intelligent women is too subtle and far-reaching to put into definite terms. To trace it in its large results, even if this were possible, would take us far beyond our present limits. It is felt at every moment, in the home, in society, in amusements, in the church. It directs the currents of men’s lives from the starting-point, it infolds them like light, it is a stimulant and an inspiration. But no one knows precisely where it begins or ends. This is why it has been so ignored, why men, except in individual cases, have so persistently depreciated the qualities that opened for them the way to the finest issues.
The direct power of the learned princesses of the literary courts is more readily seen. By virtue of their position, as well as their talents, they created a society, spread a taste for things of the intellect, and did a great deal to curb the vice and cruelty which pressed with special severity on their own sex. If they could not change the drift of the age, and were subject to conditions which good men were unable to control, they tempered and modified them. The whole Platonic movement, which they did so much to foster, was a protest against the sensualism that has always been their worst enemy. To sustain a spiritual cult in a race that worshiped, before all things, material beauty was not easy. It had a tendency always to lose itself in phrases and mystical subtleties, but it put woman on a new pedestal, and social life on a higher plane. We have only to note the bacchanalian revels of the poets, wits, and philosophers of Florence, the orgies of folly, vulgarity, and sin which the great Lorenzo led and the very wise Platonic Academy smiled upon, to learn the difference between a lettered society of men without the tempering influence of high-minded women, and the brilliant circles we have seen gathered about princesses of learning, refinement, and grace, who guided its amusements and restrained its license. No woman of conspicuous virtue and ability has left a permanent stamp on the social life of Florence. Clarice, the wife of the versatile Lorenzo, had many virtues, but she was evidently in no sense a leader. Poliziano has no prejudice against learned women, as he falls in love with the gifted and beautiful Alessandra Scala and is inconsolable because she will not marry him. He also pays court to Cassandra Fidelis, and corresponds with Lucrezia, the mother of his patron, who is finely educated and writes poetry; but he is angry when Clarice interferes with his manner of training her children, “because she is a woman and unlettered”; indeed, he quarrels with her about it and goes away. She, in her turn, finds fault with his pagan morals, and is glad to be rid of his presence, no doubt with good reason. But whatever she may have been as a mother, she seems to have lacked the talent or the desire to gather about her a lettered society, and the result is seen in the disgraceful orgies of her husband and his clever satellites, with no advantage to the “unhampered intellects” of these poets and savants, but with a decided disadvantage to their manners and morals.
It was during the reign of pure, highly educated, and able women that the Italian courts reached their highest point of power and brilliancy. When, by the accident of succession, those of smaller caliber and more frivolous tastes took the scepter, they invariably declined and lost their prestige.
It is quite superfluous to cast a mantle of charity, or any mantle whatever, over the crimes of the Renaissance, but I have tried in a small way to recall another side of its abounding life, which had its roots largely in the character of its forceful and intelligent women. The age that gave us a Bianca Capello gave us also a Vittoria Colonna. The one has long since been consigned to the fitful oblivion of infamy; the other holds her imperishable place among the stars, still lighting the sorrowful and world-weary with her messages of love and hope. The centuries of beauty and sin when men like to say that woman lost her birthright of virtue—a birthright which they never ceased to invade from their own stronghold of power—saw her transfigured by the imagination of Michelangelo into the immortal sibyls who sit side by side with the prophets in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, pure and passionless, with the brooding eyes that long ago fathomed all the secrets of a suffering world, read in the mystic leaves the records of nations still unborn, and saw from afar the light of the ages—unchanging types of the wisdom and divination that lie in the feminine soul. It saw, too, the Virgins of Fra Angelico, unfading symbols of purity as of angelic sweetness; and the Madonnas of Raphael, looking wistfully out of their repose with a ray of celestial love in their eyes and a smile of eternal beauty on their lips.
VIII
It is no part of the plan here to trace the causes of the decadence in which men lost their liberty of thought and women their position. Greed of money, greed of power, love of pleasure, the growth of luxury, and the low ideals that surely follow in their train, brought their logical results. The flower of estheticism that expands in the rich splendors of its ripe perfection verges already toward its dissolution. Then the Roman Catholic reaction, which forbade men to think, sent women back to prayers and seclusion, as a business instead of a resource; it was becoming, and quite safe. But the Italian princesses had set a fashion of knowledge, and of putting society on an intellectual plane, with what trimming of beauty and adornment of manners they could add. The irrepressible and many-gifted Marguerite of Navarre took it up with various changes and originalities of her own. The clever Frenchwomen saw their opportunity, and when the courts were sunk in vice and inanities, they drew out of the past its secret of social power, and created the literary salon, which was one of the glories of the golden age of France. The wave of knowledge which had raised the Italian women so high, and then so strangely receded, culminated again in the intellectual brilliancy and unparalleled influence of the Frenchwomen of the eighteenth century. The rise and fall of this movement and its central figures I have treated quite fully elsewhere. Again the wave receded, with the coming of the republic, to revive under other forms in our own country and our own day. Will another decadence follow? The future alone can tell, and no prophetic sibyl has read the secret of that future. Possibly it will depend largely upon the poise and sanity of women themselves.