TAT', WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE.*

WE will say at once that M. de Maulde's book would be the better for bold pruning. It is too long ; and, though matter and manner are always good, both tend to repeat themselves unnecessarily, with a result that is sometimes bewildering and sometimes fatiguing. But this criticism passed, we have only admiration to bestow upon a most intricate and masterly analysis of the great feminine Revolution or Renaissance of the sixteenth century. M. de Maulde begins by describing

the position of woman in France and Italy before the Renais- sance; when the daughters of great houses were betrothed in their cradles—sometimes before birth—and marriage was celebrated at fourteen or even twelve years of age. The marriage was a contract—a bargain struck between the men of the two families—and all the pomp and circumstance attending the wedding were contrived so as to magnify to the uttermost the importance of the family honour that was to be propped up or carried on, and to reduce to the utmost insignificance the poor little woman-child who was the sacrifice :—

"The young woman appears on this great day for the first time in her life. If she has been brought up according to the old method, many people have scarcely suspected her existence. There she is, at the door, or under the porch of the church, standing beside her husband, involuntarily, with no desires of her own, passive,—an offering, as it were, to the race. In this strong light of publicity she alone seems ill at ease, blushing at the exhibition, agitated at this unknown something which the rest are so joyfully celebrating. The priest comes down the nave just as at funerals, receives the young couple's whispered I will,' sprinkles them lightly as they stand with a little lustral water, ceases them; and then the procession is formed, to wind its way up to the altar where the nuptial benediction mass will be sung—a long noisy procession, ponderous, Gothic, all stiff with velvets, monumental stuffs, and gilded draperies ; thirty, forty, sometimes three hundred persons, none but members of the family ; but in these circumstances of parade and pleasure the family becomes extraordinarily multiplied. At the head of the procession, buried under trappings of superb finery representing a fortune, the little bride is scarcely visible; she is for all the world like the clapper of a bell. And verily under that golden robe there is after all nothing—but a woman."

M. de Maulde's book is the story of the struggles of the woman's soul under the golden robe to emerge into the sun- shine of a more spiritual realisation of the rite which, at its

worst, still meant the best lot earth held for her; and of the strange jangling that happened among wedding-chimes when the clapper began to move the bell instead of waiting patiently to be moved by it. The description of the merry- makings filling up the wedding-day and the brutalities of the wedding-night makes an English reader glad to remember that it was also in the sixteenth century that Spenser wrote his " Epithalamion." The splendours and the brutalities over, the wife subsided into a condition of domestic dulness, in

• ne Women of the _Renaissance: a Study of Feminism. By R. de Maulde la ClavIEre. Translated by George Herbert Ely. London : Swan Sonuenacheln and Co. L104. 641.]

which the wise and good found comfort in knowing that, after all, their state was sacramental and their duties were plain.

And M. de Maulde, with the kindly irony that characterises all he writes, dwells pleasantly on the way in which the wife

who had only dreaded her lord and master in the days of his health and strength, became in sickness his most affectionate and efficient nurse, and when he was dead an inconsolable and very proud widow :—

"Of all the species of husbands, the dead husband is the one who would require the most special monograph. However little heroic his life may have been, his widow made it her business to sing his praises in public. A woman whose married life had notoriously been one of discreet indifference, if not of discord, would spend her nights and days in celebrating the glory and the memory of the dead man. So profoundly would she identify herself with him in heart, that ere long she would develop into the widow of a great man and rise into a superior atmosphere. The greatnesses which the deceased perhaps never possessed she first gave him and then appropriated herself, and in the fire of this love she was gradually consumed."

But she took care to remain a widow ; occupied herself with maternal duties and works of charity, and generally showed herself a great administrator ; the only drawback in her life being that she became "a sort of man, and acquired some of the defects by which she had suffered at the hands of her husband." The Renaissance woman was a woman of sense as well as heart, and she knew better than to speak or think ill of marriage as an institution. She no more wished to give up marriage than to give up eating and drinking. Her mission was to spiritualise a state which man had brutalised. But the Renaissance woman did not conceive it possible to do this in the simple way of direct Christianity. She must have a semi- pagan philosophy of Love and Beauty, a religion of semi- bility, a school for men in which the art of loving purely should be taught by women, and in which woman should be worshipped for the beauty of her soul through the charms of her body. " Platonism " supplied the need ; and M. de Maulde gives a most interesting account of the various exponents, male

and female, of this new philosophy. Among a great variety of word-portraits, those that stand out with most vividness are the characters of Margaret of France, who wrote the Heptameron, Anne of France, the Lady of Beaujeu, and Catherine Sforza. These three great women are the dominant types of the book. Anne of France is described as "a figuve after Michelangelo's own heart, grand and severe as a

Cathedral,"—Regent of France, politician, soldier, diplomat, showing genius incomparable in all she did, yet with her heart not in this public work, but in the life of the affections. She professed the "science of Platonism," and taught that women were invulnerable and that men must be content to adore them spiritually. And she kept up the appearance of stoicism so well that men believed in her insensibility, though the secret of her life was a real passion, and her austerity was necessary self-defence. Margaret, on the other hand, M. de Maulde estimates as a less real woman. Platonism was with

her the natural expression of a cold and artificial tempera- ment. Her intelligence was lovable, but her intelligence was all she had to give. Catherine Sforza dominated her epoch,— "as if to show to what a pitch the intoxication of masculine women could rise." But— "At bottom she was a woman of an excellent heart,—this Catherine who died under the name of Medici ; a genuine sister of mercy, thoughtful, generous, diligent in feeding the poor in time of famine, and, when an epidemic was raging marvellous as a sovereign and a sick-nurse How well she knew in the intervals of her frenzied existence how to enjoy life, when she gave herself up to the beauty of her flowers, the charm of her gardens, the delight of seeing her splendid drove of cattle peacefully grazing in her parks. Dogs had never a more tender protectress. She evoked her people's enthusiasm and applause when, riding in a red skirt at the head of her huntsmen like a legendary fairy, and reining up her horse with her delicate, scented hand, she smiled upon them all, her beautiful white teeth flashing between her full, ruby lips. What did she lack then to make her in very truth a woman ? Only womanliness, and the exquisite power of using love as a quicken- ing instead of a destroying spirit.

M. de Maulde's own conception of what a great lady shou;d be is very pretty :— " To give something derived from herself; to act, not through that long-armed vulgar charity (though this too has its merits, —and is often very tiresome) which aims at heading a subscrip- tion list, or presiding at a public meeting, but through that modest individual charity which humbly and quietly diffuses a little affection, cheerfulness, and enthusiasm. These are the

real great ladies ; to them giving is a necessity, a second nature. They seek their own happiness in the happiness of others, with- out stopping to ask themselves if their conduct is philosophic."

And yet for the "philosophic " great ladies of the Renais- sance, and of all time, he is full of benignant sympathy. Their mission of love and beauty aimed at reforming marriage; it succeeded in softening manners, and manners wanted softening. True, it softened virtue as well as vice, and austerer censors of manners than Brant6me agree with Branttome that it had its part in producing the corruption of

the Court of Charles IX. As M. de Maulde vigorously puts it, the Platonism of the Renaissance— "Found a society in the plenitude of vigour. and save for a few elect souls it left it dead. As a philosophy, it resulted in perfect scepticism ; as a social panacea, in the wars of religion. It slew art, it slew literature, through the idea of seeking beauty in itself, in other words by academism, by art for art's sake : the testhetic Utopia alongside of the philosophic Utopia! Still further, in place of the exquisite, enthusiastic, ardent, adorable women who were the queens of the world, it gave us, as time went on, women without energy, without activity, case-hardened with the idea of selfish happiness ; it left behind it a progeny of coquettes, precieuses, or else of Delilahs and sensual women."

All this is true. And yet there is justice in M. de Maulde's defence of the noble-hearted, if misguided, women who led the movement :— " They ought to have saved us from sensualism and meta- physics, and they ran aground on both reefs. How bitterly they have been reproached ! We have done them the high honour of throwing upon them and their ideas the blame of all our calamities, as though they were exclusively at fault. As if it would not have been allowable, after all, to combine common- sense with the spirit of kindliness and love. If there were, then as always, silly women, profligate women, insatiate cormorants, why take Platonism to task, why blame women alone ? "

There are chapters of M. de Maulde's book which we find ourselves wishing that everybody might read,—the admir- able essay, for instance, on "The Embroidery of Life," and that other chapter discussing the influence of Platonism on conversation, especially the passages touching on the indiscriminate reading of the ladies who made it their business to refine the taste of men. But M. de Matilde says expressly that he does not dedicate his book to girls. And a conscientious reviewer is bound to say that the volume is not quite one to put into every girl's hand. Its treatment is "naked," though neither coarse nor immoral. It is a book to be much pressed upon every young woman who thinks she "knows life," but perhaps to be kept back from the one who modestly confesses that she would rather not know.