Part 19

With all these tragic possibilities, it was out of the question to secure a divorce for any incompatibility of temper, small or great, unless his Holiness saw that it would serve some interest or caprice of his own, and incidentally add to the glory of the church. But pent-up emotions are apt to be troublesome, and it is hardly strange that these women, with an abyss on one side and a vacuum on the other, sought a way of reconciling matters that infringed visibly on no man’s rights. They adopted the fashion of supplementing a terrestrial love that was not very comfortable with a celestial one which, if rather attenuated, seemed quite innocent and harmless, and gave them something pleasant to think about. These airy and Platonic sentiments had a much more substantial character among men and women who lived at a high mental altitude. It is to live confessedly on a very low plane to deny that there is a tie of the intellect which tends only to fine issues, and is a source of light and inspiration. But this implies first of all an intellect of distinct range, and a clear moral sense, that are not always forthcoming. The friendship between Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna was a sympathy between two exalted souls who dwelt habitually on the heights, far above the mists of sense and the banalities of lesser minds. “Friendship is not a sentiment without fire,” wrote the cold and skeptical Buffon to Mme. Necker, nearly four centuries later; “it is rather a warming of the soul, an emotion, a movement sweeter than that of any other passion, and also quite as strong.” But this passion of friendship can exist in its perfection only between those in whom sensibility lights the intellect without submerging it; on a lower plane it has its dangers.

In the days of the précieuses, the apostles of Platonic love cut the cord that bound them to reality, and floated away on a cloud of pure emotionalism. Merged in affectations, it finally evaporated in phrases on the lips of sighing youths and romantic maidens. In the Anglo-Saxon world it never had a very strong foothold. The race is not sufficiently imaginative.

There is no doubt that there has been a great deal of senseless talk about Platonic love, and that it drew after it much that was far from Platonic. We all know that one of the most conspicuous daughters of devotion is hypocrisy, but who can hold religion responsible because its garb is put on to disguise sin? The trouble is that the finest spirits are apt to be measured by the standards of the lowest. It is not easy to convince people of material ideals that all things are not to be brought to their level. But this curious agitation had its place and did its work. We may smile at the finely drawn sophistries of a Bembo, who pointed to an ideal he sometimes failed to reach. It is easy enough for cynics to say that Beatrice, the apotheosis of spiritual love, died early, and was worshiped, not as a woman, but as a star shining from inaccessible heights; that Laura, the ideal of the high priest of Platonism, was simply a dream, intangible as the moonlight and cold as the everlasting snows; that it is not good for every-day men and women to see such visions, even if it were possible, nor to dream such dreams, nor to live at such an altitude--all of which no doubt has its side of truth. But the fact remains that it was largely through the inspired vision, which looked past the entanglements of sense into the pure heart and transparent soul of an idealized womanhood, that the long-enduring sex came into its intellectual kingdom. To the old ties of interest, passion, and habit, were added those of the intellect and spirit. In this new contact of intelligences society had its birth, women took their rightful places, and the world found a new regenerating force.

IV

The life at Urbino, with its literary flavor, its refined manners, its serious conversations, and its Platonic dreams, took another tone at Ferrara. This court was gayer, but hardly less noted as a center of culture. No one chronicled its conversations, but the fame of its poets illuminated it. Boiardo lived and wrote and administered affairs in the magnificent old castle whose four towers frown to-day in lonely grandeur over the silent and grass-grown streets of the once lively city; Ariosto immortalized the women “as fair as good, and as learned as they were fair,” who gathered artists, men of letters, statesmen, cardinals, and philosophers within its tapestried walls; and the genius of Tasso still sheds over it a melancholy splendor strangely contrasting with the tragedy that left so dark a cloud on the last days of its glory.

The Duke Hercules I did a wise thing for the brilliancy of his reign when he chose for his wife the learned and accomplished Leonora of Aragon, who had grown up in the intellectual atmosphere of her royal father’s court at Naples. She was a versatile princess, a lover of art, a patron of letters, and an able, efficient woman, who gave equal care to the fostering of talent and the practical interests of her people. The art of gold and silver metal work, on which she was an authority, reached great perfection under her patronage, and she gave her personal supervision to the skilled embroiderers whom she brought from elsewhere to stimulate the native artists. When her husband was absent he left the government in her charge. Nothing shows more clearly the masterful ability of these Italian princesses than the wisdom and facility with which they managed public affairs, and the confidence reposed in them. In this model republic of the twentieth century, who would think of intrusting matters of State to the wife of president or governor in any emergency whatever? Let us admit that women are not trained here for such responsibilities, even if they cared to assume them; but why treat us to a homily on their natural incapacity for affairs of State, in the face of innumerable examples in the past that prove the contrary?

And these women lost neither their charm nor their essentially feminine qualities. Certainly there was no wiser mother than this same Duchess Leonora. Her daughters had the best of masters, and were versed in all the knowledge of the day, as well as in the lighter accomplishments. They were schooled also in the duties of their high position, and were never permitted to neglect their serious studies for amusement. While they were busy with their tapestries some man of letters recited or read to them. Perhaps it was Boiardo, perhaps another of the literary stars of the court. The untiring mother had her reward in the fame and virtuous character of these children. One of them, the beautiful and gifted Isabella d’Este, had a brilliant career as the Marchioness of Mantua, and her scarcely less fascinating sister Beatrice carried the tastes of her own youth to the more splendid but corrupt court of the Sforzas at Milan.

The enlightened duchess, who seems to have been as kind as she was capable, did not escape calumny, as few did in that age of license; but she has a blessed immortality in the glowing lines of Ariosto, who paid an eloquent tribute to her talents and virtues at her death. The court of Ferrara never lost the lettered tone which she gave it, though its fashions of living and thinking changed from time to time.

One cannot quote her son’s wife, the fair-haired Lucrezia Borgia, as a model princess, though in later years she partly redeemed the faults of her past by her kindness to the poor, her intelligent patronage of art and letters, and her devotion as wife and mother. It is not likely that she was as black as she has been painted, or, as has been suggested by later historians, Ariosto, with all his courtier love for paying pretty compliments to women, especially princesses, would hardly have dared to put her on a level with the Roman Lucretia in “charms and chastity,” in a country where satire was merciless and scandal many-tongued. In her tragical youth she was possibly more sinned against than sinning. With a father who was the embodiment of all the vices, and brothers as powerful as they were infamous, one can readily imagine that she had little choice in her manner of life. It was quite in the interest of this terrible trio that her three husbands were disposed of in one way or another, and it was equally in their interest that the widowed Duke Alfonso was virtually forced to marry her, though evidently against his inclination. The wishes of a Holy Father with unlimited power were compelling. And so it happened that this beautiful, clever, and much-talked-of woman went to Ferrara with a flourish of trumpets, as became a pope’s daughter. She was only twenty-five, though she had seen tragedies enough to color a lifetime. On her way she visited Urbino with her two thousand attendants,--princesses were costly guests in those days,--and the good Duchess Elisabetta, by command of this wicked and grasping Holy Father, who had designs on her own domains that might be furthered by her absence, went with the much heralded bride to take part in the magnificent wedding festivities. There was little in the entry of this brilliant but very much clouded Lucrezia on her white jennet, resplendent in satin and gold and flashing jewels, to suggest the beauty and desirableness of “plain living and high thinking.” To be sure, she had university dons to support her canopy, and all the learning of Ferrara in her train; but it was a fashion of these princesses to honor scholars. Then there were comedies of Plautus to give the occasion a classic flavor, besides music, dancing, medieval combats, Moorish interludes, and more barbaric amusements for the multitude. The splendors of dress, the wealth of velvets, brocades, gold, and gems, were all duly chronicled by the society reporter of the time, and the descriptions of modern court balls seem modest and tame in comparison. The good Duchess Leonora had been sleeping in her tomb with the other princesses many a year, duly labeled by Ariosto. But the pure-souled Isabella d’Este was there with a new and regal costume for every scene, and no doubt various misgivings about her imposing sister-in-law which she thought best to say nothing about.

This dangerous Lucrezia, however, had her serious moments. After the pageants were over, she took out of her traveling-case the Dante and Petrarch she had brought for her daily reading, also some histories, with her manual of devotion. She had, too, her literary circle of poets, savants, men of letters, prelates, cardinals, and clever women who spoke in Latin and wrote Greek quite naturally and as a matter of course. They talked of manners, art, and philosophy, as at Urbino, but perhaps not quite so seriously; they talked also of love, spiritual and otherwise. The inevitable Bembo was there for a time, and afterward wrote Platonic letters about literature to the friend of his soul, which she answered with insight and discrimination as well as matronly discretion. These letters were preserved, with a lock of her golden hair.

There is little trace of the early Lucrezia in her later years. No more worldly vanities. She prayed a great deal, and spent her evenings in working beautiful designs in embroidery with the ladies of her court. “Her husband and his subjects all loved her for her gracious manners and her piety,” we are told. She was not old when she died,--two or three years past forty,--leaving an inconsolable husband and several children. In a letter of condolence the Doge of Venice gives great praise to her devotion and her fine qualities of character. The most distinguished prelates of the day pay a tribute to her many virtues. The experiences of her life, which were dark enough at its beginning and too surely not blameless, are wrapped in a mystery so deep that we cannot fairly judge them to-day.

If the court of Ferrara was gay, literary, artistic, with more or less of a dilettante tone under Lucrezia, it took quite another color in the reign of her daughter-in-law, the serious and thoughtful Renée. This princess had more solid qualities of intellect, but less beauty and less charm. “She was good and clever, with a mind the best and most acute possible,” says Brantôme. Her father was Louis XII, and her mother Anne of Bretagne, whose talent and independent spirit she inherited. She had Protestant tendencies, and brought strange guests to these stately halls and haunts of poets. Calvin was among them. He was young then, and came under the name of Charles d’Espeville--which was much safer for an arch-heretic. With him came Clément Marot, a poet and a heretic of milder type, who shone brilliantly at the court of the clever Marguerite of Navarre. The stern moralist and ascetic reformer was no friend to women, except as convenient appendages, and these were apt to be troublesome unless kept in their lowly place. He looked upon their government as “a deviation from the original and proper order of nature, to be ranked no less than slavery among the punishments consequent upon the fall of man.” In this case he evidently found the punishment rather pleasant, as he stayed many months in a court where the power of women was very much _en évidence_, though it fell under an eclipse because of him. Perhaps he modified his opinions for the moment in so stimulating an atmosphere. While he never fails to denounce the “inferior sex” in plain terms, he is kind enough to make discreet exceptions as to women in high places, who were not made of common clay. It was certainly inconvenient for the duke to have a wife with convictions, who persisted in compromising him with the higher powers; but what would have become of the superior Calvin, with the door closed upon him and the Inquisition on his track, if this incapable being had been superintending the cook and the maids or working patterns in embroidery, as she plainly ought to have been, instead of courageously and with clear foresight despatching some trustworthy friends to liberate the reverend suspect from his dangerous and uncomfortable surveillance, and send him on his way to a freer air?

There was much talk on free will and election, as well as of sinners in power, and the need of grace and reformation, when Vittoria Colonna came, a little later, to enjoy the liberty of thought and literary discussion for which this court was famous, also to forward the interest of her friend, the eloquent Fra Bernardino, who wished to found here a Capuchin convent. It was quite safe to sit on the grass or in the gardens during the long summer evenings, listening to a Greek play, and talking about the respective merits of Homer and Petrarch, who had been dead a long time, or the genius of Ariosto, who had just closed his eyes after charming his age and saying so many agreeable things about its women. But it was not so safe to reflect on wicked popes, or call in question whatever dogma they might choose to present to a credulous world. The Duchess Renée was made sadly conscious of this fact, as was her gifted protégée, Olympia Morata. Her mind had a mystical quality, and the germs of a more spiritual faith had taken root there. But her amiable husband applied the screw as he was told. To have one’s children taken away and to be confined in a remote corner of one’s castle was too much to bear, and a suspiciously sudden conversion under good orthodox ministrations was the result, with convenient mental reservations to serve until the duke died and the lady was safely back in France with her royal kin and the protecting sympathy of her heretical friend, the gifted and powerful Marguerite of many-sided fame.

But in the meantime the literary talks went on, led by her brilliant daughters, who contented themselves with topics that were less explosive. Tasso said that Lucrezia and Leonora d’Este were “so well versed in affairs of State and literature that no one could listen to their conversation without amazement.” Here, as elsewhere, they talked a great deal about matters of sentiment. Tasso held a controversy at the academy on “Fifty Points of Love.” One of them was a question whether men or women love the more constantly and intensely. Orsini Cavaletti, a lady of distinction in literature and philosophy, claimed the palm for her own sex, and came off with equal if not superior honors before a learned and brilliant audience. What the other points were I do not know. The amount of energy expended on such trivial themes was curiously illustrated a few years before by Isotta Nogarola, a lady of Verona, who discussed with learned men the question as to whether Adam or Eve was the more guilty, and wrote a defense of Eve which must have created more than a ripple of interest, as it was printed a century afterward. This champion of justice was not a reformer nor an _emancipée_, but a woman of rank and a friend of popes, who had the courage to come to the rescue of her sex from the denunciations of ages. Doubtless the discussion was largely a play of wit and an exercise in analysis that applied itself to small things, since it was not safe to attack great ones.

But our unfortunate poet did not confine himself to theory, and love proved a more disastrous subject for him than did religion for some of his friends. It was to this same brilliant Leonora, whom he lauded to the skies, that Tasso dared lift his eyes in too familiar or ambitious a fashion before he was shut out of the world seven years as a madman. Whatever the facts of this tragical romance may have been, we know that the lady died at forty-five, in the odor of sanctity and unmarried, while her gayer but equally clever sister became the wife of the last Duke of Urbino, whom she found so dull and tiresome that she returned after three years to her brother’s court, where the livelier tastes were more to her liking. But its glories had already paled and its stars had mostly set. Tasso was the last.

The traveler of to-day looks with curious eye on the faded splendors of the grim old castle, and speculates idly upon the tragedies that have been acted within its silent walls. But he goes away to the poor little cell at the hospital of St. Anna and drops a tear over the fate of the poet who ate his heart out there. Time brings strange reparations, but they are always too late.

V

In the days when they were talking of men, women, and manners at Urbino, and the brilliant Bembo was writing high-flown letters about literature and celestial love to Lucrezia Borgia, or discoursing upon the same themes, in the intervals of many graver ones, at Ferrara, and Alexander VI was making the society of Rome as wicked as he knew how, which was very wicked indeed, Isabella d’Este, wife of the Marquis of Mantua, was the central figure of one of the most charming and intellectual courts in Italy. This “noble-minded Isabel,” of whom Ariosto says,

I know not well if she more fair May be entitled, or more chaste and sage,

carried with her to the banks of the Mincio, already made classic as the birthplace of Vergil, the literary tastes which had been nurtured in the scholarly air of Ferrara. We have seen her developing as a child under the care of the wise Leonora. At six she astonished the envoy sent to arrange her betrothal, by her precocious intelligence, engaging conversation, and graceful manners. It was a kindly fate that led her to the court of the Gonzagas, which was famous for the learning and culture of its women.

Of all the princesses who shed such luster on this period she had, perhaps, the most personal distinction. To the wisdom and force of her mother she added more esprit and a warmer temperament. In tact, dignity, learning, and the virtues of a well-poised character, she did not surpass her husband’s sister, the much-loved Duchess Elisabetta of Urbino, but she seems to have had more native brilliancy of intellect. Living from 1474 to 1525, she was brought into familiar contact with the most famous men and women of the golden age of the Renaissance, and played an important part in many of its stormy crises, but, under all conditions, one is impressed with her strong individuality, her versatility, her intrepid spirit, and her unfailing charm. She combined the tenderness of a woman with the mental vigor of a man. Fair, witty, gracious, and a noted beauty, she was equally at home discussing art and literature with the masters, and grave political problems with popes and kings, arranging fêtes, ordering a picture, selecting a brocade, or playing with a child.

The old and imposing palace of Mantua to this day shows traces of the taste and generosity of its most distinguished mistress. She filled it with rare books, exquisite tapestries, and curios of all sorts, chosen with the discrimination of a connoisseur. Its walls were decorated with the masterpieces of Correggio, Mantegna, Perugino, and other great artists whom she was proud to call her friends. Chief among those in whose conversation she delighted were Titian and Leonardo da Vinci, who immortalized her. A living portrait by the latter is still one of the treasures of the Louvre. Her keen critical taste was quick to divine intrinsic values, and she was always on the alert for fresh talent to add to the glories of her little court. It was not rich, and we find her troubled at the prospect of entertaining her sister’s magnificent husband, Lodovico Sforza, who proposed to visit her with a retinue of a thousand or so. But her money went freely for everything pertaining to matters of intellect and taste. She sent her agents in all directions, even to the far East, and a new-found statue, a rare bit of tapestry, or a precious mosaic was an event of joy. Her own teeming imagination was full of pictures, and she liked to suggest themes to artists, which were not always easy to put into living form. But her sympathetic and intelligent enthusiasm was in itself an inspiration.

This critical, art-loving Isabella, however, was more than a dilettante. Her heart went out to every form of suffering. Running over with kindness, and always ready to help the needy and deserving, her sympathies sometimes got the better of her judgment, and more than once she had to regret enlisting her friends in the cause of the unworthy. This generous quality was a part of her rich temperament. With her intellectual tastes, and the many cares and responsibilities of her position, she was no grave and cold Minerva. We find her everywhere entering into the sports and gaieties of her age with the zest of a woman abounding in spirit, vitality, and the joy of life. When she went to see her sister at Milan, she rode, danced, hunted, made impromptu verses, dazzled her friends with flashes of wit, and fascinated old and young alike with her winning, lively ways. Her powerful brother-in-law was always glad to consult her on serious questions of State, as well as on his vast plans for making a beautiful and artistic city. The things that were shaping themselves in the minds of great artists appealed to her ardent imagination. “This is the school of the _master_ and of those who _know_, the home of art and understanding,” she wrote from there.

Her letters to her family are always full of vivacity, clear and to the point, but glowing with affection. The friendships she inspired were devoted, even passionate. “It seems as if I had lost not only a tenderly loved sister, but a part of myself,” wrote the Duchess Elisabetta, after one of her visits. “I long to write to you every hour.... If I could clearly express to you my grief, I am sure it would have so much force that compassion would bring you back.” In such a spirit these women wrote to one another. The Latin race is effusive, and the art of expression, which is its supreme gift, no doubt often ran ahead of the feeling or the thought; but these familiar letters bear the stamp of sincerity and help us to know the manner of woman that wrote them.