One is constrained to believe in the possibility of a fresh Renaissance that will bring us further on our way towards the gates of Paradise, for have we not learnt since that earlier attempt, that happiness must be built on happiness, not on sacrifice and burnt offerings? This at least is certain: human cruelty leads to human woe. The misery and the cruelty below the glitter of a brilliant civilisation gnaws like some evil creature at its heart.
There was the flaw in that splendid claim on life made by the men and women of the Renaissance. Each age brings its contributions and commits its errors. But it is stupid to go on committing the old errors over and over again.
Maulde de la Clavière describes the attitude of the women during all these times of movement, which is very curious, very subtle, and very modern. "Properly to understand their spiritual condition," he says, "we should have to do as they did: solve the problem of feminism in the feminine way; be women, and more than women—arch-women. It was the conviction of all the sons of the Renaissance," he goes on, "that sentiment has higher lights than reason, and that certain intuitions of the heart unfold to us, as in bygone days to Socrates, horizons hitherto beyond our ken—a foretaste of the divine.... And now the new generations were no longer willing to regard earthly happiness as an illusion, ... and flattered themselves on finding a means of building life upon liberty.... People wished to live henceforth under a calm and radiant sky; they talked of taking the gifts of God as they found them, idealising everything. From that time it belongs truly to women to govern the higher world, the realm of sentiment.... So many noble things lack the sap of life! They will give that sap, that vitality, that soul. The sap of love brings grapes from thorns. And thereby the transformation of the world is to be achieved."
In short, women were to take life into their hands and turn it into a fine art. They were to become priestesses in the Temple of the World, and the object of worship was to be the Beautiful. They were to become the creators of no less a thing than happiness. Our author quotes Ruskin's saying about a woman that "the violets should not droop when she passes, but burst into flower."
"Love is the sum of genius," the writer further quotes from Schiller, apropos of this astonishing outbreak of romantic thought. "The formula," he says, "is this: to live, that is, to love life, to attain a mastery of life, without allowing it to crush or dominate us.... In those days they sincerely studied to love life; they loved it, rejecting all negations and obstructions, all that overwhelms and paralyses...."
To treat existence—as some tried to treat it in the sixteenth century in Italy—from the point of view of the artist, must at least bring rich fruits—though it depends perilously upon the artist!
It was to the newly liberated women of the chivalrous age that all instinctively turned for the realisation of the universal longing. It was for them to add some treasure to the world that they had so lately entered. And more was done than perhaps we shall ever realise to make life liveable and human by the women of the troubadour days and their successors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Unhappily they lived too near to barbaric times, with the blood of mediæval savages still running in their veins, to be able to understand one essential ingredient in the magic philtre that they sought so eagerly.
They could not follow the counsel of their historian, who says "the woman must steep her hands in beauty, fill her eyes with love, and then look at things courageously and truthfully."[33] They followed and worshipped Beauty, but they terribly sinned against Love.
"The first duty of woman," the author says, "is to exhibit in themselves every lovable quality."