There was a curious book written early in the sixteenth century by a savant of Cologne, on “The Superiority of Women over Men.” It was one out of many that were devoted to the glorification of the long-secluded sex, but its title serves to indicate the nature of the epidemic of eulogies that raged more or less for nearly two hundred years after Boccaccio set the fashion. This he did by singing the praises of the great heroines he brought out from the shadows of the past to adorn the pages of his “Illustrious Women.” It seemed as if men had been struck with a sudden remorse for the unkind things they had been saying about women since the dawn of the world, and were trying to make amends by puttingthem, theoretically at least, on a pinnacle of glory. Some celebrated their beauty, others their virtues, and still others their talents, while a few did not stop short of awarding them all the graces and perfections. Paul de Ribera published “The Immortal Triumphs and Heroic Enterprises of Eight Hundred and Forty-five Women,” which was comprehensive if not convincing. Hilarion of Coste devoted two large volumes to eulogies of women of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, finding nearly two hundred to put into his Temple of Fame. What their special claims to glory may have been I do not know beyond the fact that they were pious and devout Catholics. One man who had contended for the equality of the sexes tried afterward to refute himself; but his recantation was half-hearted, as he confessed his private conviction that logic was against him.
Cardinal Pompeo Colonna takes it upon himself to demolish the old creed that a woman is an inferior creature, convenient in the house, but unfit for any large responsibility. He proves her capacity for public life by many examples, treats lightly the plea of the moral dangers that would beset her, and shows what men become when left to their own devices. After giving exalted praise to the masterful, accomplished women of his time, he cites his beautiful cousin, the “divine Vittoria,” as a living model of talent and strength, as well as ofvirtue, magnanimity, and devotion. More pointed and concise, though less definite, was Monti, a famous Roman prelate, who said: “If men complain of seeing themselves equaled or surpassed by women, so much the worse for them. It is because they are not worthy of their wives.” The climax of praise was reached in a work written to prove that women are “nobler, braver, more tactful, more learned, more virtuous, and more economical than men.” Such a pitch of adulation could hardly be maintained without a protest, and there were a few men ungallant enough to say that the best proof of their own sovereignty was the effort needed to combat it.
It is pleasant to record that the most ardent champions of feminine ability were men of more than ordinary caliber. As men rarely exaggerate the talents of women, though they sometimes make goddesses of them, we may safely conclude that their pictures were not overdrawn on that side. Truth, however, compels me to say that some of the eulogists were accomplished courtiers with special appreciation of queens and princesses who might make or mar their fortunes; also that this complaisance was by no means universal. Whether the satirists, novelists, and minor poets found the wicked more effective, from a dramatic point of view, than the good, as many of their successors do to-day, or the sensual age was more interested inpretty sinners than in saints, it is certain that these writers paid scant honor to women, and delighted to put them in the worst light, though satire was in the main directed against the ignorant and the frivolous, not against the intelligent or the strong. Even Montaigne refused to look upon a woman otherwise than as a useful but inferior animal, though he inconsistently chose one of these “inferior animals” as his confidante and literary executor, because she was the “only person he knew in whose literary judgment he could confide.” The scholarly Erasmus said she was “a foolish, silly creature, no doubt, but amusing and agreeable.” He was happy in the belief that “the great end of her existence is to please men”; but he pays his own sex a poorer compliment than we should like to when he adds that “she could not do this without folly.”
So much for the man’s point of view. But the women were not silent, and a few glorified themselves as naïvely as some of their modern sisters have done. If we ever had any doubts as to our own modesty they ought to convince us of it. Lucrezia Marinelli, a clever Venetian and a poet, defined herself quite clearly in a work entitled “The Nobleness and Excellence of Women and the Faults and Imperfections of Men.” As a comparison this seems rather unfair, but considering the fact that men had for ages given themselves all the noblequalities and women all the weak ones, they could not take serious exception to it. Indeed, they evidently found it refreshing. It furnished them with a new sensation, and was quite harmless on the practical side, as they still held the reins of power. Marguerite of France, the brilliant and lettered wife of Henry IV, tried to prove that women are very superior to men, but, unfortunately, in her category of superiorities morals had no place.Mlle.de Gournay was more generous, as well as more just, and declared herself content with simple equality, though one cannot help wondering how she settled that matter with her friend Montaigne. ButMlle.Schurmann of Cologne thought that even this was going too far. It seems as if she might fairly have claimed to be the peer of the average man, since she spoke nine languages and was more or less noted as painter, musician, sculptor, engraver, philosopher, mathematician, and theologian. Just how much solid learning was implied in this formidable list of accomplishments we cannot judge, but it is clear that there has been a time before to-day when women aimed to know everything, though there was a safeguard against shattered nerves in the fact that there were not so many books to read nor so many brain-splitting problems to solve. It is fair, however, to suppose that this learned lady did not waste much time on clothes or five-o’clock teas. Louise Labé, the poetand savante of Lyons, takes a more modern tone. In claiming intellectual equality for women, she begs them not to permit themselves to be despoiled of the “honest liberty so painfully won—the liberty of knowing, thinking, working, shining.” In spite of her courageous words, however, this paragon of so many talents and virtues, the glory of her sex and the pride of her city, asserts herself in a half-deprecating way, as if she were asking pardon for presuming to publish her little verses, and shelters herself behind the admiring friends who are willing to “take half the shame.” But she was a Frenchwoman, and her day was not yet. Women had so long hidden their light, if they had any, that it blinked perceptibly when exposed to the winds of heaven or the more chilly breezes of masculine criticism.
It is needless to extend the list of writers on this subject, but it is a long and remarkable one. The books would make rather interesting reading to-day, whatever we might think of their quality, as problems familiar to us were pretty thoroughly if not always ably discussed, and apparently with great good nature. A distinguished Frenchman, well known in the salons of the eighteenth century, unearthed a great many curious facts and opinions hidden away in these books, which are now mostly buried too deep in the dust of old libraries for resurrection, and his own wise and quite modernconclusions entitled him to more consideration than he received from the women of his time. But this rapid glimpse will suffice, perhaps, to show the spirit in which latter-day questions were treated four or five centuries ago; also to throw a strong light on the position of women during the period, without very precise limits, known as the Renaissance—a period of special interest to us, as it marks the dawn of a new era of feminine intelligence.
We do not know how it happened that Bitisia Gozzadina stepped out of the traditional seclusion of her sex as early as the benighted thirteenth century, to be made doctor of civil and canon law in the University of Bologna at the age of twenty-seven. She had already pronounced a funeral oration in Latin and otherwise distinguished herself several years before. It is no longer the fashion to give Latin orations outside of the universities, but we know how women fared a few decades ago, when they tried to speak publicly in their own language. It was perfectly understood that women of such oratorical proclivities forfeited all right to social consideration. They were practically ostracized. Happily, now they are treated about as well as they were six hundred years ago, when people crowded the university halls and eventhe public squares to listen to this remarkable woman. We do not hear that she was called any disagreeable names, not even a bas-bleu, though there is a vague tradition that she had peculiar notions about dress. It is said that she had rare beauty, but her charm and esprit made people forget it.
There is nothing in the medieval ideals of womanhood to suggest such a phenomenon, still less its cordial acceptance. Not even in the early poets is there a trace of the type of woman which played so distinguished a part in the golden age of the Renaissance. Beatrice was little more than a beautiful abstraction, the spiritual ideal of a man who dwelt mainly upon other-worldly matters. Petrarch found it interesting to kneel before Madonna Laura in the clouds, and sing hymns in her praise; but she was only an elusive figure on which to drape poetic fancies. In these days, when it is quite the fashion to pull the halos from the saints and put them on the sinners,—when even the wicked Lucrezia Borgia has become a respectable wife and a particularly good mother, who expiated the sins of her youth, if she had any, by her pious devotion, her kindness to the poor, and her patronage of art and literature,—it is not surprising to hear that Laura was a common-place matron, “fair, fat, and forty,” who would have found it difficult to live up to the ideals of her adorer,—even if she had known what they were,—andprudently kept out of so rarefied an air. This blending of chivalry and mysticism made fine poetry but not very substantial women.
Boccaccio paid a generous tribute to the heroic qualities of the women of the past, but he evidently preferred them at a distance or in books. Personally he seems to have had no more taste for savantes than for saints. He belonged to the new age, which glorified the joys of life and liked to sing love-songs—not of the choicest—to frail beauties. Fiammetta was, no doubt, a clever woman and a beautiful one, but she was no divine Egeria to inspire him with high thoughts. If he did brilliant things at her bidding, the trail of the serpent was over them all. Perhaps he aimed to suit the taste of the day, which was neither delicate nor moral; or he may have lived in bad company from which he took his models. We should be sorry to take as representative the heroines of the Decameron, who must have brought blushes, which the twilight could not hide, to the faces of the little coterie of friends that sat on the grass telling or listening to these tales during the long summer evenings at Florence, when men and women were dying all about them. But they give us one phase of the life of the time, and reflect the taste of an audience composed mainly of men who laughed at morals and deified art, regardless of its aim or its subject. The age was not strait-laced, but Italianladies were not permitted to read Boccaccio. One story, however, they might read. When the poet wished to portray a good woman, for a change, he made a fine little picture of Griselda, the patient, who was duly thankful for every indignity her amiable lord chose to offer, mainly because she thought her sufferings made him happy. When these incredible cruelties culminated in sending her away loaded with unmerited disgrace, she still thanked him like a good wife who was grateful for being trampled upon, even when her innocent heart was breaking. It was a fine object-lesson for the proper education of girls, and this marvel of self-sacrifice was held up from one end of Europe to the other as a model of womanhood. Poets painted her over and over again, with race variations; moralists praised her; and men quoted her to their wives. Some instinct of justice prompted Boccaccio to reward her in the end for all this useless misery, which was simply a test of her servile quality, by putting her again, after a series of years, into the good graces of her inhuman husband; but it is needless to say that such rewards of virtue, if they could be considered rewards, are not in the way of a world in which these lessons are read.
All this shows how far the heroines of the early poets, whether good or bad, differed from the strong, able, and accomplished women who were recognized as the glories of the Renaissance. Itsuggests also the lurid or colorless background against which the latter were outlined. The cynical bachelor in Molière’s comedy summed up the whole duty of woman according to the gospel of the middle ages—and, it might be added, of many other ages—when he said that his wife must know only how to “pray to God, love, sew, and spin.” The last three qualifications were necessary for his own comfort, and he had the penetration to divine that she might have ample need of the first on her own account. Then it gave him an agreeable sense of security to have a certain proprietorship in some one mildly affiliated with the next world. “In thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” says Hamlet to the fair Ophelia. A man might be the worst of sinners himself, but he liked a seasoning of piety in his wife, provided it was not too aggressive and left him free to be wicked if he chose. It was like having an altar in the home, and gave it a desirable flavor of saintliness.
Beyond the fireside and the docile domestic slave, however, there was another medieval ideal of womanhood, areligieusewho prayed and sang hymns in the cloister. Aside from this, it was her special mission to help the poor, care for the sick, console the sorrowful, and advance the interests of the church. But these women of the cloister, who had the altar without the home, found a possible outlet for their imprisoned intellects, if they had sufficientnatural force. The Roman Church, which had always frowned upon any exercise of a woman’s mental gifts in a worldly sphere, was glad to avail itself of them in its own interest, and there were a few women more or less distinguished both as leaders of religious organizations and counselors of ecclesiastics, who kept alive the prestige of their sex through centuries of darkness. It was one of the strange paradoxes of that age, as of many others, that a woman is an irrational being, too fragile to bear distinction of any sort, except when her talents make for the glory of men or the church. Activity in public affairs, so long as they were religious ones, was not considered unwomanly, notwithstanding the conservative opinions ofSt.Paul. No one took it amiss when Catherine of Siena used her wisdom and eloquence in persuading the Pope to return from Avignon to Rome after men’s counsels had failed. No one found fault because her emotional exaltation was tempered by a vigorous intellect. She was a thinker and seer, and wrote ably on political as well as ecclesiastical questions. Her style was simple and classic; indeed, she was altogether phenomenal, and had strange influence over the popes and kings to whom she did not hesitate to tell unpleasant truths. It was quite fitting that she should devote these gifts to the interests of her church and incidentally of her country. Men honored her for it, and canonized her.
This was a hundred and fifty years or so before the beautiful Isabella of Cordova, who was more learned and less mystical, gave up mundane pleasures for the classics and a degree in theology; and Isabella Rosera devoted herself to the conversion of the Jews, dazzled multitudes with her eloquence in the cathedral at Barcelona, and expounded the subtleties of Duns Scotus before prelates and cardinals at Rome. But in that interval women had made great strides in intelligence, and the talents that shone so conspicuously in great moral and religious movements had become a powerful factor in other directions. Bitisia Gozzadina had multitudes of successors to her honors.
That women emerged so suddenly from a state of ignorance, superstition, and mystic dreams to a position of intellectual distinction and virtual though not legal equality with men, is one of the marvels of the Renaissance. The change was as rapid and complete as that which came over the women of the nineteenth century. It is scarcely less remarkable, in the light of our own experience, that their new-born passion for learning met with so little opposition. They did not find it necessary to fight their own battles. There was no question of asserting their right to the higher education, as we havebeen forced to do. This was taken as a matter of course and without controversy. They were educated on equal lines with men, and by the same masters; nor were the most distinguished teachers of the age afraid of being enervated by this contact with the feminine mind, as certain modern professors claim to be. Doubtless they would have smiled at such a reflection on their own mental vigor.
One is constantly surprised by the extraordinary precocity of the young girls. Cecilia, the daughter of an early Marquis of Mantua, was trained with her brothers by the most famous master in Italy, and wrote Greek with singular purity at ten. She refused a brilliant but distasteful marriage, and devoted her life to literature. The little Battista, whose talents descended to her illustrious granddaughter, Vittoria Colonna, was chosen, at an age when girls are usually playing with dolls or learning their letters, to greet Pius II in a Latin address. Anna d’Este, who became the wife of the Duke of Guise, and in later life was so prominent a patroness of letters in France, translated Italian into Latin with ease at ten, and was otherwise a prodigy. One might imagine these children to have been insufferable little prigs, but such does not seem to have been the case. So far as we can learn, they did not lose their simplicity, and grew up to be capable, many-sided, and charming women,quite free from pedantry or affectation of any sort. Without attaching too much importance to these childish efforts, which were by no means uncommon, they are of value mainly in showing the care given to the serious education of girls.
It is certain that the place held by educated women was a new and exceptional one. They filled chairs of philosophy and law, discoursed in Latin before bishops and cardinals, spoke half a dozen or more languages, understood the mysteries of statecraft better than any of us do to-day, and were consulted on public affairs by the greatest sovereigns of their age. Nor do we hear that they were unsexed or out of their sphere. On the contrary, men recognized their talents and gave them cordial appreciation. While the shafts of satire fell thick and fast upon the follies peculiar to ignorance and weakness, they were rarely aimed at those who, even to-day, would be more or less stigmatized as strong-minded. Possibly a clue to this may be found in the fact that in training the intellect they did not lose their distinctive virtues and graces; they simply added the cult of knowledge, which heightened all other charms. We find constant reference to their attractions of person and character, as well as of mind. Novella d’Andrea took her father’s place in his absence and lectured on jurisprudence at the University of Bologna; but, either from modesty or from the fear of distractingthe too susceptible students, she hid her lovely face behind a curtain. At a later time Elena Cornaro—who was not only versed in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, theology, and six languages, but sang her own verses, gave Latin eulogies, and lectured on various sciences—was crowned doctor of philosophy at Padua. She took her honors modestly, and is said to have been as pious as she was learned.
In these days of specialties one looks with distrust on so formidable an array of accomplishments. We are apt to think of such women as either hopelessly superficial, or pedants without any fine human quality. A few salient points from the life of one of the most distinguished may serve to correct this impression.
Olympia Morata deserves, for her own sake, more than a passing mention. She was by no means a simple receptacle of heterogeneous knowledge, but a woman as noted for feminine virtues and strength of character as for the brilliancy of her intellect. Her father was a distinguished professor in the University of Ferrara, and his gifted daughter was fed from infancy on the classics. At six she was taught by a learned canon who advised her parents to put a pen in her hand instead of a needle. At twelve she was well versed inGreek, Latin, and the sciences of the day, petted and flattered by scholars old and young, compared to the Muses and to all the feminine stars of antiquity, and in the way of being altogether spoiled. In the midst of this chorus of praise she donned the habit of a professor at sixteen, wrote dialogues in the language of Vergil and Plato, a Greek essay on the Stoics, and many poems. She also lectured without notes at the academy, before the court and the university dons, on such themes as the paradoxes of Cicero, speaking in Latin, and improvising at pleasure with perfect ease. The great Roman orator was her model of style, and in a preface to one of her lectures she says: “I come to my task as an unskilled artist who can make nothing of a coarse-grained marble. But if you offer a block of Parian to his chisel, he will no longer deem his work useless. The beauty of the material will give value to his production. Perhaps it will be so with mine. There are some tunes so full of melody that they retain their sweetness even when played upon a poor instrument. Such are the words of my author. In passing through my lips they will lose nothing of their grace and majesty.”
This brilliant and classical maiden passed eight or ten years of her youth at the court of Ferrara in intimate companionship with Anna d’Este and her mother, the “wise, witty, and virtuous” Duchess Renée. These were the days when the latter hadBernardo Tasso, a fashionable poet who was eclipsed by his greater son, for her private secretary, and delighted to fill her apartments with men of learning. The little Anna, too, a child of ten, had been brought up on the classics, and the two girls, who studied Greek together, liked to talk of Plato, Apollo, and the Muses much better than to gossip about dress and society, or the gallants of the court. Even their diversions had a pagan flavor. When Paul III came on a visit, the royal children played a comedy of Terence to entertain his eighteen cardinals and forty bishops, with all the magnates and great ladies that usually grace such festivities. It is quite probable that the clever Olympia had much to do in directing it.
The literary academy of the duchess had a singular fascination for the gifted young girl, who was one of its brightest ornaments. “Her enthusiasm over antiquity became an idolatry, and badly prepared her intellect for the doctrines of grace,” wrote one of her friends. “She loved better the wisdom of Homer and Plato than the foolishness ofSt.Paul.” She says of herself that she was full of the vanities of her sex, though it is difficult to conceive of this worshiper of poets and philosophers as very frivolous. That she had many attractions is certain, as she won all hearts. “Thy face is not only beautiful and thy grace charming,” said one of the great scholars of the time, “but thou hast beenelevated to the court by thy virtues.... Happy the princess who has such a companion! Happy the parents of such a child, who pronounce thy beautiful name within their doors! Blessed the husband who shall win thy hand!”
But this sunny life could not go on forever. The “Tenth Muse” was called home to care for her father in his last illness, and proved as capable in the qualities of a nurse as in those of a muse. At his death the little family was left to her care. To make the prospect darker, her friend Anna d’Este had just married and gone off to her brilliant but not altogether smooth career in France, and the duchess gave her a chilling reception that boded no good; indeed, night had overtaken her, and she found herself cruelly dismissed in her hour of sorrow and trouble.
Other subjects had been discussed in this literary circle besides Greek poetry and Ariosto and the courtly Bembo and the rising stars of the day. Calvin had been there in disguise, and they had talked of free will, predestination, and like heresies, much to the discomfiture of the orthodox duke, whose interests did not lie in that direction. The young savante had listened to these things, and her eager mind had pondered on them. Perhaps, too, she was one of the group that discussed high and grave themes when Vittoria Colonna was there. At all events, the duchess had fallen into disgracefor her Protestant leanings, and could do no more for her favorite, who was branded with a suspicion of the same heresy. Indeed, she was herself confined for a time to one wing of the palace and forbidden to see her children lest she should contaminate them with her own liberal views. The only powerful friend left to the desolate girl in her adversity was Lavinia della Rovere of the ducal family of Urbino, who had shared her tastes, sympathized with her views in happier times, and now proved her loyalty in various ways that sustained her drooping heart. But there was another, equally helpful if not so powerful, a young German of good family, who had been a medical student in the university, and fallen in love with this paragon of learning and accomplishments. He was true when others fell away, and she gave him the devotion of her life. Both were under the same ban, and soon after their marriage fled to Germany, with the blessing of Lavinia and some valuable letters to her friends.
It was a strange series of misfortunes that pursued this brave couple. After drifting about in the vain search for a foothold in an unsympathetic world, where they could think their own thoughts and satisfy their modest wants, they found at last a home in which they set up their household goods and gathered their few treasures with their much-loved books. But when kings fall out other peoplesuffer. No sooner were they settled than the small city was besieged, and for many months they went through all the horrors of war, famine, pestilence, and, in the end, fire, which destroyed their small possessions, and compelled them to flee for their lives through a hostile country, scantily clothed, unprotected, and penniless.
It is needless to follow their dark wanderings. Suffice it to say that they found refuge at last in Heidelberg, where the husband was given a professorship, and the wife, too, was offered the chair of Greek, which she was never able to take. Her health had succumbed to her many sufferings and hardships, and she died before she was twenty-nine. But her strong soul rose above them all. “I am happy—entirely happy,” she said at the close. “I have never known a spirit so bright and fair, or a disposition so amiable and upright,” wrote her husband, who could not survive her loss and followed her within a few months.
There is more than the many-colored tissue of a life as sad as it was brilliant in these records. They carry within them all the possibilities of a strong and symmetrical womanhood. The rare quality of her scholarship was never questioned. She was the admitted peer of the most learned men of her time, one of whom expects her to “produce something worthy of Sophocles.” But she was clever, winning, and fascinating, as well as serious. Living for yearsamong the gaieties of a court, she went out into a world of storms and gloom without a murmur or a regret, buoyed up by her love and unquestioning faith. She refers more to the joys than to the sorrows of this tempestuous time. Lavinia and the Duchess of Guise, the friends of her youth, were true to the end. In her letters to them and to the learned men who never lost sight of her, we have curious glimpses of the home of a woman who was a disciple of the Muses and a savante of intrinsic quality. While her husband prepares his lectures, she puts the house in order, buys furniture, and manages servants who were about as troublesome as they are to-day. One asks a florin a month, and reserves a part of the time for her own profit. Others insist upon staying out late and running in the streets. Most of them are grossly incompetent. Poor as she is, she is always ready to help those who are in greater need, and is constantly imposed upon. She even borrows money to send to an old servant in distress.
Then there are the evenings when grave professors come in, and they talk in Latin of the affairs of the day, the religious persecutions, or some disputed dogma. Sometimes they sing one of her Greek psalms which her husband has set to music. She has her heart full with the care of her young brother and the little daughter of a friend, who has been sent to her for instruction. But her life isbound up in that of her husband, whom she “cannot live without.” A pure and generous spirit, happy in her sacrifices, and true to every relation, she is a living refutation of the fallacy, too often heard even now, that learning and the gentler qualities of womanhood do not go together.
There were many other women of great distinction in the universities, whose names still live in enduring characters after four or five centuries—professors, and wives of professors who worked side by side with their husbands, and received their due meed of consideration. We have women of fine scholarly attainments to-day, though in the great universities they are mostly relegated to the anterooms and honored with second-class degrees; but fancy the consternation of the students of Harvard or Oxford if asked to listen to the lecture of a woman on law or philosophy, or, indeed, on any subject whatever! Yet there were great men and great scholars in Italy, possibly too great to fear competition. Society was in no sense upset, and, so far as women were concerned, the harmony of creation was not interfered with. Indeed, the best mothers and the most devoted, helpful wives in Italy of whom we have any knowledge were among the women who spoke Latin, read Greek, and worshiped at the shrine of the Muses—all of which may be commended to the college girls of to-day as well as to their critics.
In other fields there were equally accomplished women. Cassandra Fidelis was the pride and glory of Venice in the days when Titian walked along the shores of the Adriatic, absorbing the luminous tints of sea and sky, and picturing to himself the faces that look out upon us to-day from the buried centuries, instinct with color and the fullness of life. Poet and philosopher, she wrote in many languages, even spoke publicly at Padua. She caught, too, the spirit of beauty and song, and was as noted for her music and her graceful manners as for her learning. Men of letters paid court to her, Leo X wrote to her, and Ferdinand tried to draw her to Naples; but the Doge refused to part with this model of so many gifts and virtues. She lived a century divided between literature and piety, but drifted at last, in her widowhood, to the refuge of so many tired souls, and ended her brilliant career in a convent.
This remarkable flowering of the feminine intellect was not confined to Italy. Besides the noted Spanish women already mentioned, there were celebrated professors of rhetoric in the universities of Alcala and Salamanca. Even more distinguished was Aloysia Sigea, a poet and savante of Toledo, who surprised Paul III with a letter in five languages, which he was able to answer in only three.Just why she found it necessary to put what she had to say in five languages, instead of one, does not appear, but she proved her right to be considered a prodigy. Her fame was great, and she died young.
Frenchwomen were less serious and made a stronger point of the arts of pleasing. They approached literature with the air of a dilettante, who finds in it an amusement or accomplishment rather than a passion or an aim. At a later period they brought to its height a society based upon talent and the less tangible quality of esprit. But we have the virile intellect and versatile knowledge of the Renaissance inMlle.de Gournay, who aspired to the highest things, including the perfection of friendship, which she said her sex had never been able to reach; and the famous Marguerite, the witty, learned, independent, and original sister of Francis I, who aimed at all knowledge, and tried her hand at everything from writing verses and tales, patronizing letters, and gathering a society of philosophers and poets, to reforming religion and ruling a state.
In England we find Lady Jane Grey at sixteen a mistress of many languages and preferring Plato to a hunting-party; the Seymour sisters, who were familiar with the sciences and wrote Latin verses; the daughters of Sir Thomas More, whose talents and accomplishments were only surpassed by theirvirtues; and many others, by no means least Queen Elizabeth herself, whose attainments were overshadowed by her genius of administration. The taste for knowledge was widely spread, and it would take us far beyond the limits of this essay to recall the women of many countries who were noted for learning and gifts that must always be relatively rare in any age, though pretenders may be as numerous as parrots in a tropical forest.
But it is mainly the women of Italy, where this movement had its birth, that we are considering here, and their talents were not confined to the acquisition of knowledge. There were many poets among them. To be sure, we find no Dante, or Petrarch, or Ariosto, or Tasso. Of creative genius there was very little; of taste and skill and poetic feeling there was a great deal. Domenichi made a collection of fifty women poets who compared well with the average men of their time and far surpassed them in refinement and moral purity. In their new enthusiasm for things of the intellect, they never lost their simplicity of faith, and were infected little, if at all, with the cynical skepticism of the age. Some of these numerous poets were connected with the universities, others belonged to the great world, and still others were women of moderate station, who were honored at the various courts for their gifts of mind.
No doubt much of this poetry was mediocre.Indeed, men, aside from the greatest, wrote very little that one now cares to read. It is a truism that “poets are born, not made,” and they are not born very often. But the work of women which was not even of the best received high consideration. Tarquinia Molza, a maid of honor at Ferrara,—who held public discussions with Tasso, wrote sonnets and epigrams, and translated the dialogues of Plato,—was so celebrated for her learning and poetic gifts that the Senate of Rome conferred upon her the title of Roman Citizen. Laura Battiferri, one of the ornaments of the court of Urbino, was spoken of as a rival of Sappho in genius and her superior in modesty and decorum. She was an honored member of the Academy of the Intronati at Siena. There were no women’s clubs in those days. They were not needed when women were admitted to many of the academies on equal terms with men. The number may have been small, but evidently the way was clear. They were barred, if at all, by incapacity, not by sex.
One of the most celebrated of these numerous poets was Veronica Gambara, Countess of Correggio, a woman of fine gifts, many virtues, and great personal charm, who was left a widow after nine happy years of marriage. Like her friend Vittoria Colonna, she spent the rest of her life in mourning her husband, draping herself, her apartments, and everything she had in black, and refusing all offersof a second marriage. But this sable grief did not prevent her from managing her affairs, her little state, and her two sons, both of whom reached high positions, with great judgment and ability. Her husband had trusted her implicitly, and left her in full control at his death. It was largely to his memory that she devoted her poetic gifts. She did not write a great deal, but her verses were simple and showed masculine vigor. Many of them were tender, though by no means sentimental. She wrote on the vanity of earthly things, a subject on which women have always been specially eloquent, as they have so often written out of their own sad experience. Her home at Bologna was a sort of academy, where the most distinguished men of the age met, and it was noted as a center of brilliant conversation. One of its chief attractions was Cardinal Bembo, a lifelong friend, to whom she addressed a sonnet at ten. Philosopher, high priest of Platonism, critic, poet, and man of the world, this famous cardinal paid the highest tributes to the distinguished women of his time. Intellectually he lived in an air that was somewhat tenuous, but he sought the society of those who loved things of the spirit—especially princesses. It was a convenient fashion among these diplomats and churchmen to have two lives—one poetic, Platonic, with ecstatic glimpses of the celestial, the other running through various grades of the terrestrial. The versatileBembo was no exception. Veronica Gambara, who combined grace and delicacy with a distinctly mundane vigor, sat metaphorically at his feet, and was an ardent disciple of the new Platonic philosophy. She had natural eloquence, and gave a charm to the serious discussions at her house. Among her noted visitors was Charles V, who was fascinated by her talents and gracious manners. She reproached him and Francis I with the quarrels that had flooded Europe with tears, and wrote him a poem fired with patriotic ardor, in which she asks peace for Italy and protection against the infidel. In her poetry and her letters she followed Petrarch. Without commanding genius, and less mystical than Vittoria Colonna, but with possibly more strength in a limited range, she was greatly considered for her learning, her poetry, her social graces, her practical ability, and her spotless character.
These are a few out of a multitude of poets and savantes who are of little interest to-day, except as showing the notable attainments of women in a new field and the drift of public sentiment regarding them.
There is one, however, who calls for more attention, not only because of her enduring fame, but because she stood in a light so strong as to make her, even at this distance, a living personality to us;also because she represents the best phases of the Renaissance, its learning, its intelligence, its enthusiasm, its subtle Platonism, combined with a profound religious faith and a trace of the mysticism of a simpler age. We are apt to recall Vittoria Colonna as half poet, half saint. Her spiritual face looks out of a century of vice and license, crowned with the delicate halo of a Madonna brooding tenderly over the sins of the world in which she lives with an air of apartness, as if she were in it but not of it. Whether we see her under the soft skies of Ischia, happy and a bride, or seeking solace among its orange-scented groves for the lost joys of her youth; at Naples, holding a lettered court with the beautiful and accomplished Giulia Gonzaga; at Rome, talking on high themes with a group of serious and thoughtful men in the cool shadows of the Colonna gardens; at Ferrara, discussing the new thought, receiving the homage of a distinguished circle, and generously using her great name to shield the persecuted and unhappy; or kneeling at prayers and chanting Misereres in the cloisters where, at intervals, she hid a sorrowful heart—there is always the same flavor of purity and saintliness in her character and personality as in her genius.
The romance of her life is well known. She was born in 1490,—just before Lorenzo de’ Medici died and Savonarola expiated the crime of being too good for his time,—in a gloomy old Colonna castlethat towers picturesquely above the rambling, medieval town of Marino among the Alban hills. But she did not stay there long, as she was betrothed at four to the Marquis of Pescara, and, for some inexplicable reason, sent away to the sunny island of Ischia to be educated with him by his sister Costanza d’Avalos, Duchess of Francavilla, a woman so noted for wisdom, ability, and virtue that she was made governor, or châtelaine, of the island at her husband’s death. For once, this commercial arrangement proved a fortunate one, as the brilliant duchess was as famous for her culture and the lettered society gathered about her as for her practical talent in ruling. The gifted child grew up among poets and men of learning, with her future lord as her playmate and a woman of intellect as her guide. Add to this the changing splendors of sea and sky, the haunting memories of the beautiful shore that curves away from the headlands of Misenum to the Isles of the Sirens, the repose broken only by the cool dripping of fountains, the plashing of the indolent waves on the beach, and the plaintive songs of the boatmen floating at evening across the tranquil water to find a sweet refrain in the music of the vesper bell—and we have themilieuof the poet. There were royal festivities when the king came to break the monotony of the days, occasional glimpses of the magnificent court pageants at Naples, and rare visits to the somberancestral home on the Alban Lake. But the mind of the thoughtful maiden was more in harmony with the quiet scenes among which most of her days were passed, and had taken its permanent tone when the youthful lovers were married at about eighteen, or possibly nineteen.
Two or three years of unclouded happiness, and this idyllic life came to an end. The marquis was called to the army, and the devoted wife saw him only at long intervals during his brilliant career, which he closed some fifteen years later with a tarnished name. The blow that shattered the hopes of Vittoria came near costing her life. In the first agony of her grief she fled to a convent, and wished to take the veil of a nun; but she was too valuable in her own sphere to be lost to the world, and Clement VII forbade it. Her only resource was to consecrate herself to the memory of one she never ceased to callmio bel sole, to religion, and to matters of the intellect.
How she reconciled her undying love with the faithless and treacherous character of her Spanish husband, who was willing to sell his loyalty for a kingdom, we do not know. That she was ignorant of his disgrace is not probable. She had given him high counsel, putting honor and virtue above titles and worldly grandeur, and saying that she had no wish to be the wife of a king, since she is already the wife of a captain who has vanquished kings, notonly by his bravery, but by his magnanimity. But she had, to a marked degree, the fine idealism that gives vitality to a sentiment. It is shown in the poise of the shapely head, in the broad, high, speculative forehead that hid a wealth of imagination and exalted feeling, in the large, soft, penetrating dark eyes, lighted with sensibility, which relieved the delicately chiseled features and firm but beautiful mouth from a tinge of asceticism. She was tall, stately, and graceful, with a fair, variable face of pure outlines, and hair of Titian gold. Her picture is one of a rare woman, capable of high thought, great generosity, great sacrifice, and great devotion. This love of her youth was interwoven with every fiber of her being. The child with whom she had wandered hand in hand by the sea; the youth who had responded to her every taste and thought, poetic like herself, proud, accomplished, handsome, and knightly; the man who had whiled away the hours of his captivity in writing for her a rather stilted Dialogue of Love, were alike transfigured in her memory. If she heard that he was a traitor, probably she did not believe it, and the very fact of unmerited disgrace would have been an added claim upon her affection. She was young, and naturally slow to think that an act which Pope and cardinals had assured him was quite consistent with the finest honor could be treasonable at all, though she had a keen moral sense that led her straight to the heart ofthings. Then the harshness and cruelty for which he was noted belonged to the exigencies of war, which is never merciful. It was easy to malign him there. At all events, it is certain that the faults of this brilliant cavalier of very flexible honor were swept away in a flood of happy memories and imperishable love. Many were the suitors who presented themselves to the gifted, rich, and beautiful princess, who was scarcely past thirty-five; but she had gathered the wealth of her affections in a vase that was broken, and for her there was no second gathering. The spirit that held captive her own still shone in the heavens as a sun that lighted the inner temple of her soul and made its hidden treasures luminous.
When she rallied a little from the first stunning blow, she began to write. This had been one of the diversions of her youth, and she had often sent tender verses to her husband. Now it offered an outlet to her sorrows, and, at the same time, a tribute to his memory. Never was such a monument dedicated to a man as this series of more than a hundred sonnets. Her love colored all her thoughts, and gave to her clear, strong intellect a living touch that comes only from the heart. If one misses in these verses the fire of Sappho, one is conscious of coming in contact with a pure and lofty soul in which earthly passion has been transformed into a glow of divine tenderness. But the note oflonging and loneliness is always there. Laura was no more idealized by her poet lover than was this unworthy man by his desolate wife. For seven years her poems were a series of variations on the same theme. The sun shone no longer for her; there was no more beauty in tree, or flower, or sparkling waves; the birds were mute, and nature was draped in gloom. In death only there was hope; but even here was the dreadful possibility that she might not be perfect enough to meet this paragon of all noble qualities in heaven. So Mrs. Browning might have written. She had the same tendency to transfigure her idols in the light of the imagination, the same meditative quality, the same fine idealism. But she lived and died a happy wife, while her sister poet spent lonely years in the companionship of a memory.
Time, however, which tempers all things, if it does not change them, brought a new element into her thoughts, and her elegiac songs rose to cathedral hymns. In her religious sonnets she reveals the intrinsic quality of her mind and its firm grasp of spiritual things. Some of them touch on forbidden questions, and wander among the dangerous heresies of the new age. Theology and poetry are not quite in accord, and these are of value mainly as showing the liberal drift of her opinions. Others are the spontaneous outpouring of a full and ardent soul. Rich in thought, alive with feeling, and lighted withhope, they soar on the wings of an exalted faith far above the heavy and sin-laden air of her time.
And, as the light streams gently from above,Sin’s gloomy mantle bursts its bonds in twain,And robed in white, I seem to feel againThe first sweet sense of innocence and love.
This gentle-hearted poet was a purist in style, and chiseled carefully the vase in which she put her thoughts, not for the sake of the vase, but reverently, to make it worthy of the thought. These hymns fall upon the ear like some thrilling strain from Palestrina, who translated into song the dreams, the aspirations, the baffled hopes, the sorrows of a race in its decline, and sent it along the centuries with its everlasting message of love and consolation. There was something akin in the two spirits that lived at the same time, though Palestrina was young when the poet neared the evening. It was he who first gave to music a living soul. Vittoria gave the world its first collection of religious poems, and poured her own heart into them. Both vibrated to the deepest note of their age. Only the arts differed, and the quality of thought, and the outer vestments of life.
But we are far from the days when this beautiful woman in her magnificent robes of crimson velvet and gold, attended by six ladies in azure damask and as many grooms in blue and yellow satin, wasone of the central figures in some royal wedding festivities at Naples. Mundane pleasures had long ago lost their charm, and the still lovely poet in her sable costume finds her consolation in ministering to the poor and suffering, and in an active interest in all the intellectual movements of her time. She was the friend of great men and distinguished women. Cardinal Bembo, the famous “dictator of letters,” lauds her virtues and her genius while he craves her favor. She writes of the gifts of her “divine Bembo,” addresses sonnets to him, and receives his “celestial, holy, and very Platonic” affection with gracious dignity. Castiglione sends her his manuscript of “Il Cortegiano” for criticism, and complains that she held it too long and copied it for other eyes. She gives discriminating praise of the “subject as well as the tact, elegance, and animation of the style,” but she suggests the wisdom of dwelling less persistently on the beauty and virtue of living women. The unscrupulous but keen-witted Aretino pays her compliments and begs her aid. “One must count with the tastes of one’s contemporaries,” he writes, in half-apology for his own base standards; “only amusement or scandal are lucrative; they burn with unholy passions, as you do with an inextinguishable angelic flame. Sermons and vespers for you, music and comedy for others.... Why write serious books? After all, I write to live.” This was the note of the newage in an ever-descending scale—the death-knell of all that is fine and noble in any age. It is needless to ask what this high-souled woman thought of sordid motives that were by no means confined to the Italian decadence; but she managed the vain and vindictive man, who held reputations in the hollow of his hand, with graceful dignity and infinite tact. Living at a time when the great poets were passing, and literature was fast becoming the trade of artisans who appealed to the lowest passions of a sense-intoxicated people, or the tool of cynics and courtiers, she held her own way serenely, superior to worldly motives and worldly entanglements. There are numerous glimpses of her in the poems and letters of her time, but the chorus of praise was universal. “She has more eloquence and breathes more sweetness than all other women,” says Ariosto, “and gives such force to her lofty words that she adorns the heavens in our day with another sun.” And again: “She has not only made herself immortal by her beautiful style, than which I have heard none better, but she can raise from the tomb those of whom she speaks or writes, and make them live forever.”
It was her sympathy with all high things that made her so warm a friend to the apostles of the new religious thought. Though an ardent Catholic, she was no bigot to be held within the iron-bound limits of a creed which had lost its moral force, no beauty-lovingdisciple of an estheticism that veiled crime and corruption with the splendors of a ceremonial, sang Te Deums over the triumphs of the wicked and Misereres while plotting assassination. She felt the need of a purer morality and a deeper spirituality, though, like Savonarola, she wished reform within the church, not outside of it. We find her always in the ranks of the thinkers. She was the devoted friend of Contarini, the broad-minded cardinal, who grieved so sincerely over the universal corruption, and died, possibly of that grief and his own helplessness, before the hour came when it was a crime to speak one’s best thoughts. He should have been Pope, she said in her sonnet on his death, to make the age happy. It was a striking tribute to the vigorous quality of her intellect that he dedicated to her his work “On Free Will.” Fra Bernardino she defended when he fled to Switzerland and joined the Lutherans, but she was powerless to help him in his hours of darkness. Even this brought her under the suspicion of heresy. Carnesecchi, another of her friends, was burned, and one of the chief accusations against a Florentine who was condemned to a like fate years afterward was that he belonged to her circle. “It is an inexpressible pleasure to me that my counsels are approved by a woman of so much virtue and wisdom,” wrote Sadolet to Cardinal Pole. She sustained these powerful prelates by the prestige of her name andthe fullness of her sympathy. The liberal circle of her friend Renée attracted her to Ferrara, but the air was full of suspicion. They talked much and pleasantly of literature, poetry, and the arts; when they touched upon the new thought which was revolutionizing the world, it was behind closed doors, and with the vivid consciousness that the walls had ears which stretched to Rome.
But to-day Vittoria Colonna is known best as the friend of Michelangelo, to whom she was a polar star, an inspiration, an everlasting joy. “Without wings, I fly with your wings; by your genius I am raised toward the skies,” he writes. “In your soul my thought is born; my words are in your mind.” It was the perfect sympathy of finely attuned spirits, the divine friendship that exists only between men and women who live at an altitude far above the things of sense. The age was full of talk about Platonic love. A few reached it, and they were of the spiritual elect; but they did not talk much about it. To this solitary artist, who dwelt on lonely heights, the divining and sympathetic spirit of a thoughtful woman was a revelation. He wrote sonnets to her, sometimes calm and philosophical, sometimes fiery and passionate. He also sent her poems and sketches for criticism. The tact with which she drew out the best in this colossal man is shown by a conversation in the softly lighted Chapel of San Silvestro, as recordedby an artist who was present. She had been listening to a private exposition ofSt.Paul, but when Michelangelo came in, she delicately turned the conversation upon the subject nearest his heart, on which it was not easy to lead him to talk. Both were apart from the spirit of an age that was fast tearing down the few ethical standards it had, and virtually taking for its motto the most dangerous of fallacies, “Art for art’s sake.” “True painting is only an image of the perfection of God, a shadow of the pencil with which he paints, a melody, a striving after harmony,” said the master. And the lady, in her turn, spoke, until the tears fell, of the divine message of art that “leads to piety, to glory, to greatness.” They discussed, too, her project of building a convent on the spot where Nero had watched the burning of Rome, that “virtuous women might efface the memory of so wicked a man.”
No shadow ever rested on this friendship. Michelangelo was past sixty and Vittoria was not far from forty-seven when they met. There is no trace of tender sentiment in their brief correspondence, though a deep and abiding friendship is apparent. Once she playfully writes him to curtail his letters lest they interfere with his duties atSt.Peter’s and keep her from the Chapel ofSt.Catherine, “so that one would fail in duty to the sisters of Christ and the other to his Vicar.” She said that those who knew only his workswere ignorant of the best part of the man. When she lay dead before him he kissed her hand reverently, and went out in inconsolable grief to regret the rest of his life that he had not dared to leave a kiss on the pure forehead.
In early life, Vittoria, having no children of her own, had undertaken the care of her husband’s cousin, the Marchese del Vasto, a boy of singular beauty, fine gifts, but wild and passionate temper, which no one had been able to control. Under her gentle and wise influence he had grown to be a brilliant and accomplished man, who never ceased to regard her with the greatest affection. She said that she could not be considered childless after molding the moral character of this son of her adoption. It was one of her great griefs that he died in the flower of his manhood, when the shadows were darkening about her and she needed more than ever his sympathy and support.
At this time fate laid upon her a heavy hand. When Rome became unsafe, she joined the devoted group that surrounded Cardinal Pole at Viterbo; but the last years before her final illness were spent in the Benedictine convent ofSt.Anne, where she prayed and wrote devotional poems. When she grew ill a celebrated physician said that the fairest light in this world would go out unless some physician for the mind could be found. Her friends were scattered or dead; the misfortunes of her family weighedheavily on her spirit; the cruelties of the new régime had crushed the lives of many whom she loved; she had been forced to stifle her purest convictions and to turn away from the falling fortunes which she had no power to save. It was only a joy to lay down the burden of her fifty-seven years, surrounded by the few who were left to her. She ordered a simple burial, such as was given to the sisters in the convent. There was no memorial, and, strange to say, no one knows where she lies.
No woman better refutes the theory that knowledge makes pedants, that the gentler qualities fade before the cold light of the intellect. To a vigorous, versatile mind, and the calm courage of her convictions, Vittoria Colonna united a tender heart, fine sensibilities, and broad sympathies. Her clear judgment was tempered by a winning sweetness. The age of specialties was still in the distance, and the woman was superior to any of her achievements. In a period that was notably lax in morals, she carried herself among crowds of adorers with such gentle dignity that no cloud ever shadowed her fair fame. With this rare harmony of intellect, heart, and character, she held the essentials of life above all its decorations; but she retained to the end the simple graces, the flexible tact, and the stately manners of thegrande dame.
This literary woman, great lady, anddévoteofcenturies ago belongs to a type that is out of fashion to-day; it was not common even then. She was the perfected fruit of the finest spirit of her time. She did not write for money or fame; she sought neither honors nor society nor worldly pleasures, though she was a social queen by right of inheritance. She loved high things for their own sake and because she was akin to them. She loved her friends, too, for what they were, not for what they brought her, and gave them of her best, even to her own hurt. If she tried to reconcile her beliefs and her environment, it was a fault of sanity and loyalty; to break with her church traditions was to lose her influence and gain nothing. Possibly this is not the spirit of a reformer, but it is the spirit of those who trust to the saving quality of light rather than of heat. No doubt the conflict helped to wear out her waning forces. In this restless age the world praises such women from afar. They appeal to it as do the pictures of Raphael and Fra Angelico, which we are quite ready to adore as they hang in gallery or drawing-room, for some subtle quality of beauty consecrated by the homage of centuries, though their underlying significance we may have long outgrown. If they are seen at rare intervals in real life, we give them a certain tribute of admiration, no doubt, but we are apt to speak of them personally as visionary, antiquated, or other-worldly. The lofty sentiment, the stateliness, therepose, the indefinable distinction, are not in the line of modern ideals.
It is worthy of note that in an age which was essentially devoted to beauty and a glorification of the senses, women almost invariably wrote on sacred or ethical themes. Even love they transfigured into something divine. The first-fruits of their intelligence were offered on the shrine of a purer morality. As a rule, too, they were women of serious tastes and conspicuous virtues.
There was one poet, however, of some note who may be mentioned as an exception to the consistently high character of the literary women of a notably wicked period; but even her poems were largely religious in tone. Tullia d’Aragona, who discussed affairs in Latin and wrote Greek when a child, was a wit, a genius, and a brilliant woman. She had a bad father, though he was a cardinal, and a mother who was beautiful but is not plainly visible at this distance. The clever Tullia, who had a questionable salon at Rome, with plenty of cardinals and princes in her train, carried with her to other courts a certain prestige which they did not scrutinize too closely, and she fascinated many men who were not quite equal to the moral and intellectual altitude of a Vittoria Colonna or an Olympia Morata. “Vittoria is a moon, Tullia a sun,” said an enthusiasticadmirer and fellow-poet. But in the waning of her charms she turned seriously to literature, and wrote a poem of thirty thousand lines, besides a curious dialogue on “The Infinity of Love,” and many sonnets. At this time in her life, which verged toward the twilight, she had put off frivolous things and was disposed to moralize. In the preface to her poem she says that reading is a resource for women when everything else fails; but she mourns over the fact that Boccaccio, who claimed to write for them, said so many things not fit to be read; that even Ariosto was not above reproach; and closes by declaring that she has not put down a word that might not be read by “maiden, nun, or widow at any hour”—all of which goes to show the final tendency of women toward moral ideals, in spite of the entanglements of very mundane surroundings. They take refuge in charity and religion from a world that has ceased to charm, as men do in cynicism and stimulants.
This versatile poet of more esprit than decorum had a great deal of incense offered her, and in the end won even the patronage of the grave, virtuous, and sorrowful Eleanor of Toledo, but she died in penitence and misery. As she lived and shone in the most dissolute society of her day, and was trained from childhood with special reference to pleasing men of brilliant position and gifts but low morals, she by no means fitly represents thelearned women of Italy, whether of court or university. She belonged to a class apart. We lift our eyes at the laxity of a society which could receive and smile upon her, but we have not far to go to find the same complaisance even in a period that prides itself on its superior morals. Our censor of the twenty-fifth century may find here a text for a sermon on the wickedness of the scientific age, which he will otherwise prove by copious quotations from the glaring headlines of our daily journals.
So far as appears, in an age when no man’s life was secure and no woman’s honor was quite safe, when men in power did not scruple to send those who were in their way out of the world, atoning for it, if it needed atonement, at least celebrating it, by a grand Te Deum, or a De Profundis,—which seems more suitable though less cheerful,—it was the women of the highest intelligence who held the balance of humanity and morals. There were wicked ones, no doubt, in abundance, as the more facile and helpless sex was not free from the subtle influence of the spirit of the age against which good men with all their vaunted strength struggled in vain. But it can hardly be disputed that the virtues and graces of character blossomed in the most significant profusion among women of distinctly scholarly tastes, who found in the pleasures of the intellect an unfailing resource against the vices as well as the sorrows and disappointments of a bad and pitiless world.