It was in allowing for such divergences from the normal that the Dark Ages surpassed our electric-lit era, whose logic confounds the optional with the compulsory, and the individual with the general. It was not pretended that every woman can or must be a warrior, but she who had military genius was not debarred from developing it. It was not claimed that every woman can or must be a saint, but St. Clara stood equal with St. Francis, and St. Catherine of Siena with St. Dominic. And at the Renaissance Boccaccio devotes a book to celebrated females, and Michelangelo writes most humble love-sonnets to the poetess, Vittoria Colonna (whose Rime still sell, and who unlike Matilda stood for religious reform). Vittoria’s noble classic head, especially as seen helmeted in Michelangelo’s design, suggests a very Minerva, and from various quarters we hear of the political woman, the learned woman, the patroness of the arts, and the female physician, while at the foot of the staircase of Padua University stands a statue of a lady Professor, a happier Hypatia. I forget if this is Lucrezia Cornaro, who was made a Doctor of this University and a member of so many learned societies throughout Europe, but no enumeration of Italian heroines should omit her brilliant ancestress, Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, whose court at Asolo was one of the centres of the Renaissance.
“The education given to women in the upper classes,” says Burckhardt, the learned historian of “The Renaissance in Italy,” “was essentially the same as that given to men. . . . There was no question of ‘women’s rights’ or female emancipation, because the thing in itself was a matter of course. The educated woman no less than the man strove naturally after a characteristic and complete individuality.”
When one remembers the struggle in nineteenth century England for the higher education of women, and particularly the desperate resistance to their studying and practising medicine, one realises the fallacy of expecting melioration from the mere movement of time. There is no automatic progress. What is automatic is retrogression, so that the price even of stability is perpetual vigilance.
But what has St. Giulia, born at Carthage and crucified in Corsica, to do with Brescia? I have already pointed out the free trade in saints, by which they were liable to posthumous export. St. Giulia’s body was transported from Corsica by Desiderio, a noble Brescian, who ascended the Longobardian throne in 735. She was placed in the church dedicated to St. Michael, the patron saint of the Longobardi, whom she ousted in 915, from which date the Church was known as St. Giulia’s. A Nunnery of S. Giulia had existed from about 750, and remained in being for over a thousand years, till its suppression in 1797 by the inevitable Napoleon. Coryat, who visited it in 1608, describes it as having been in time past “a receptacle of many royall Ladies.” It is now a Museum of Christian Art, and there I saw St. Giulia depicted in sculpture by Giovanni Carra, her figure nude to the waist and stretched on a real wooden cross with real nails in her hands and feet. Alas for Christian Art!
To-day our St. Giulias, in revolt against a social order founded on prostitution and sex-inequality, demand political rights as leverage for a nobler society, and, despite the advice of kindly Rulers, they are as ready as in the seventh century to be martyred for their faith, though they have replaced the passivity of St. Giulia by measures of aggression. Guariento foresaw the modern militant type when he drew those charming female angels with red and gold shields and long lances, and wings of green and gold, who stand on clouds—“suffragette” seraphs, they seem to me. You may see a battalion of them in the Museo Civico of Padua, filling a whole corridor, like a procession in the lobby at Westminster. One of these fair warriors trails by a cord a black demon with two quills like white horns, doubtless some literary Cabinet Minister. Another weighs two souls on scales, and Female Suffrage does indeed weigh men’s souls in the balance, to find them mostly wanting. For of all forms of modern vulgarity, I deem nothing more dreadful than the scoffing callousness towards the sufferings of the “Suffragettes.” They are only self-inflicted, we are told, as if this was not their supreme virtue. That in this age of blatant materialism women should still show that they possess souls is wondrous comforting to the idealist, tempted to believe that the fount of living waters had run dry, and that Giulia’s only travels were now made by motor-car to smart country houses.
There is nothing which at first sight seems more puzzling than the wickedness of good people. For it has often been said that the truly devout and respectable Christians are the very ones who would crucify Christ afresh if he appeared again, as indeed Arnold of Brescia, who had a touch of his spirit, was crucified by Emperor, Pope, and Church. And St. Bernard, the inspirer of the Second Crusade to recover the dead bones of Christ, played a leading part in hounding him down, as the Franciscans played a leading part in hounding down Savonarola.
Now why was St. Bernard—that santo sene who was chosen by Dante to induct him into the last splendours of the Paradise, and whose noble hymns to Jesus still edify the faithful—so blind to the divine aspects of his victim? And why is it that the citizens of Ferrara, whose excellent statue and eloquent tribute to their illustrious townsman Savonarola faced my hotel window, could not be trusted not to stone their next prophet in a cruder sense of the words?
A converse question will conduct us to the answer. Why is the hooligan in the gallery of the theatre ever the chief friend of virtue? Why is the wife-bruiser the most fervid applauder of the domestic sentiment? Because the man in the gallery looks down on the tangle of life like the god his name implies: he sees it in as clear perspective as the aeronaut sees the network of alleys through which the pedestrian blunders; the plot is straightened out for him, the villain duly coloured, virtue in distress plainly marked by beauty and white muslin, and through no mists of prejudice or interest or passion he beholds the great outlines of right and wrong. ’Tis to the credit of human nature that, confronted with the bare elementals of ethics, and freed from egoistic bias, the human conscience, even the conscience most distorted in life, reacts accurately and returns a correct verdict with the unfailingness of a machine. This it is that preserves the self-respect of the blackest of us, this capacity of ours for seeing our neighbours’ sins, which is the chief bulwark of public virtue. Wherefore, could St. Bernard have seen Arnold of Brescia as history sees him, or as a dramatist of insight would have drawn him, St. Bernard would have been the first to be horrified at St. Bernard’s behaviour. But a Saint, no more than a hooligan, is free from passions, interests, and prejudices of his own, especially an ecclesiast and a theologian and a founder of monasteries. Wilful and obstinate as are all the saints of my acquaintance, the most domineering are the clerical. For all St. Bernard’s genius and holiness, he could not endure a rival point of view. By him, and not by this interloping Italian monk, this pupil of the critical Abélard, must the world be turned to righteousness; nay the heresies of Abélard himself—“who raves not reasons”—must be condemned by the Council of Sens.
St. Bernard, if he lived to-day, would write the life of Arnold of Brescia with holy horror at his tragic fate, and to-morrow, when the passions and mists of to-day are cleared away, some future Asquith will find a fresh stimulus to rebellion against the Peers in the noble sufferings of some St. Giulia of the Suffrage.