Regarding France we read in Compayré that “Even in the higher classes, woman held herself aloof from instruction, and from things intellectual. Madame Racine had never seen played, and had probably never read, the tragedies of her husband.” Mme. de Lambert “reproaches Molière for having excluded women from recreation, pastime, and pleasure.” Fénelon advised girls to learn to read and write correctly and to learn grammar, which “surpassed in the time of Fénelon the received custom.” “No one knew better than Fénelon the faults that come to woman through ignorance—unrest, unemployed time, inability to apply herself to solid and serious duties, frivolity, indolence, lawless imagination, indiscreet curiosity concerning trifles, levity, and talkativeness, sentimentalism, and ... a mania for theology: women are too much inclined to speak decisively on religious questions.”
PERSONAL BEAUTY
Rarer even than feminine culture, Personal Beauty appears to have been throughout the Middle Ages. Most of the portraits of women and men, as well as the ideal heads and figures in paintings and sculpture, are repulsively ugly and inexpressive of higher traits. The general causes of mediæval ugliness—neglect of personal hygiene and sanitary measures, hard manual labour, prevention of love-matches, etc.—will be considered elsewhere. In this place only one cause need be alluded to. The old Church Fathers, it is well known, were not only unæsthetic but positively anti-æsthetic. Everything pleasing to the senses was denounced by them, especially the physical beauty of women, which they looked upon as a special gift of the devil. Such an attitude on the part of the leading social class could hardly tend to encourage the cultivation of personal charms; and during the trials for witchcraft special efforts appear to have even been made to eliminate beauty forcibly; for the mere possession of unusual beauty sometimes sufficed to bring a poor girl to trial, outrage, torture, and death.
It may have been due partly to a natural reaction against asceticism, partly to the rarity of spiritual beauty, that the mediæval poets in enumerating the charms of their mistresses, confine themselves almost exclusively to their physical features. Professor Scherr, after quoting Ariosto’s description of his heroine Alcina in Orlando Furioso (vii. 11, seq.), for comparison with similar efforts of German poets, observes: “It is very remarkable that, as in this female portrait sketched by Ariosto, so with mediæval poets in general, including those of Germany, the principal accent is placed on the bodily charms of the women. Almost all sketches of this kind are purely material. Intellectual beauty, as expressed in the features, is barely mentioned. These old romanticists were much more sensual than modern writers would have us believe.”
SPENSER ON LOVE
That Love, too, continued to be looked at from a material point of view, long after the chivalric efforts to idealise it, is shown strikingly by the way in which Spenser compares love with friendship and family affection. In the fifth book of the Faery Queene he asks—
“Whither shall weigh the balance down; to wit,
The dear affection unto kindred sweet,
Or raging fire of love to womankind,
Or zeal of friends, combined by virtues meet?”