Part 17 (2/2)
That was fame. The doctrine became notorious. Moreover, there was in it something so old that it seemed quite new. Society, always avid of novelties, adopted it. But presently fresher fas.h.i.+ons supervened. In France these were originated by the Regent, in England by Germany.
At the accession of Louis XIV, Germany, for nearly thirty years, had been a battlefield. The war waged there was in the interests of religion. The Holy Office was not unique in its pastimes. There was fiendishness everywhere, cruelty married to mania, in which Germany joined. Germany employed the serviceable rack, the thumbscrew, the wheel, vats of vitriol, burning oil, drawing and quartering. Occasionally there were iron cages in which the wicked were hung on church steeples with food suspended a little higher, just out of reach. Occasionally also criminals were respited and released when, through some miracle of love there were those that agreed to marry them.[70]
That indulgence occurred after the Peace of Westphalia. Germany, then, decimated and desolate, was so depopulated that the Franconian Estates legalized bigamy. Every man was permitted two wives. Meanwhile barbarism had returned. Domestic life had ceased. Respect for women had gone. Love had died with religion. From the nervous strain recovery was slow. It was a century before the pulse of the people was normal. Previously love, better idealized by the Minnesanger than by the minstrel, had been put on a pedestal from which convulsive conditions shook it. Later, when it arose again, it was in two forms which, while distinct, were not opposed. In one was the influence of France, in the other the native Schwarmerei. The former affected kings, the latter appealed to urbaner folk among whom it induced an att.i.tude that was maudlin when not anarchistic. The anarchistic att.i.tude was represented by artists generally. For these love had no laws and its one approach was the swift current running from New Friends.h.i.+p to Tenderness-on-Inclination. Similarly the conservatives landed at a village that Clelie overlooked, Tenderness-on-Sympathy, a spot where, through sheer contagion, everybody engaged in duels of emotion during which princ.i.p.als and seconds fell on each other's neck, wept, embraced, swore affection auf immerdar--beyond the tomb and, in the process, discovered elective affinities, the Wahlverwandtschaften of which Goethe later told, relations.h.i.+ps of choice that were also anarchistic.
The influence of France brooded over courts. At Versailles love strolled on red heels through a minuet. In the grosser atmosphere of the German Residenzen it kicked a chahut in sabots. In all the world there was but one Versailles. In Germany there were a hundred imitations, gaunt, gilded, hideous barracks where Louis Quatorze was aped. In one of them, at Karlsruhe, the Margrave Karl Wilhelm peopled a Teuton Trianon with nameless nymphs. In another, at Dresden, the Elector Augustus of Saxony became the father of three hundred and fifty children. At Mannheim, Bayreuth, Stuttgart, Brunswick, Darmstadt, license was such that the Court of Charles the Second would have seemed by comparison puritan. Beyond them, outside their gates and garden vistas, the people starved or, more humanely, were whipped off in herds to fight and die on the Rhine and Danube. But within, at the various Wilhelmshohe and Ludwigsl.u.s.t, kinglets danced with their Frauen. At Versailles it was to the air of Amaryllis that the minuet was walked. In the German Residenzen it was to the odor of schnapps that women chahuted.
The women lacked beauty. They lacked the grace of the Latin, the charm of the Slav, the overgrown angel look of the English, the prettiness that the American has achieved. But in girlhood generally they were endearing, almost cloying, naturally constant and, when otherwise, made so by man and the spectacle of court corruption.
European courts have always supplied the neighborhood with standards of morals and manners. Those of eighteenth-century Germany were coa.r.s.e. The tone of society was similar. ”Berlin,” an observer wrote, ”is a town where, if fortis may be construed honest, there is neither vir fortis nec foemina casta. The example of neglect of all moral and social duties raised before the eyes of the people by the king show them vice too advantageously.[71] In other words and in another tongue, similar remarks were made of Hanover.[72] From there came George the First. After him trooped his horrible Herrenhausen harem.
Since the departure of Charles the Second, London life had been relatively genteel. Throughout the Georgian period it was the reverse. The memoirs of the period echo still with shouts and laughter, with loud, loose talk, with toasts bawled over br.i.m.m.i.n.g cups, with the noise of feasting, of gaming and of pleasure. The pages turn to the sound of fiddles. From them arises the din of an immense Sir Roger de Coverley, in which the dancers go up and down, interchanging hearts and then all hands round together. In England at the time a king, however vulgar, was superterrestrial, a lord was sacro-sanct, a gentleman holy and a lady divine.
The rest of the world was composed of insects, useful, obsequious, parasitic that swarmed beneath a social order less coa.r.s.e than that of Germany, less amiably than that of France, but as dissolute and reckless as either, a society of macaronis and rouged women, of wits and prodigals, of dare-devils and fatted calves, a life of low scandals in high places, of great fortunes thrown into the gutter, of leisurely suppers and sudden elopements--runaways that had in their favor the poetry of the post-chaise, pistol-shots through the windows and the dignity of danger--a life mad but not maudlin, not sober but strong, free from hysteria and sentimentality, and in which, apart from the baccha.n.a.lian London world, there must have been room, as there always is, for real love and much sweetness besides, yet which, in its less alluring aspect was very faithfully followed by colonial New York. Meanwhile the world that made the pace and kept it, saw it reflected back from boards and books, in plays and novels, some of which are not now even mentionable. That pace, set by a boozing sovereign is summarizable in a scene that occurred at the death-bed of Queen Caroline, when the latter told old George II. to marry again, while he blubbered: ”Non, non, j'aurai des maitresses,” and she retorted, ”Ah! mon Dieu! Cela n'empeche pas.”[73]
These Germans talked French. It was the fas.h.i.+on, one adopted in servile homage of the Grand Monarque. At the latter's departure the Regency came.
With the Restoration England turned a moral handspring. With the Regency, France turned a double one. The Regency was the first act of the Revolution. The second was Louis Quinze. The third was the Guillotine--a climax for which great ladies rehea.r.s.ed that they might die, as they had lived, with grace.
Moscow, meanwhile, was a b.l.o.o.d.y sewer, Vienna a reconstruction of the cities that overhung the Bitter Sea. In Paris were the beginnings of humanitarianism, the commencements of to-day, preludes quavering and uncertain, hummed over things intolerably base, but none the less audible, none the less there. In them was the dawn of liberty, the rebirth of real love, an explosion of evil but also of good.
Said Tartuffe:
Le scandale du monde est ce qui fait l'offense Et ce n'est pas pecher que pecher en silence.
Under the Maintenon regime the theory had been very fully exploited.
Multiple turpitudes were committed but in the dark. Under the Regency they occurred openly, unhypocritically, in the daylight. The mud that was there was dried by the sun. It ceased to be unwholesome. Though vile it was not vicious. Moreover, in the air was a carnival gayety, put there by the Regent, who, while not the best man in the world was not the worst, an artistic Lovelace that gave the tone to a Neronian society, already in dissolution, one that Law tossed into the Niagara of bankruptcy and Cartouche held up, a society of which Beranger said:
Tous les hommes plaisantaient, Et les femmes se pretaient A la gaudriole.
Mme. de Longueville being in the country was asked, would she hunt. Mme.
de Longueville did not care for hunting. Would she fish, would she walk, would she drive? No, she would not. Mme. de Longueville did not care for innocent pleasures. Mme. de Longueville was a typical woman of the day.
Life to such as she was a perpetual bal d'opera and love, the image of Fragonard's Cupid, who, in the picture of the Chemise enlevee, divested it of modesty with a smirk.[74]
Modesty then was neither appreciated nor ingrained. The instinct of it was lacking. It was a question of pins, a thing attachable or detachable at will. Women of position received not necessarily in a drawing-room, or even in a boudoir but in bed. In art and literature there was an equal sans-gene. In affairs of the heart there was an equivalent indifference.
There was no romance, no dream, no beyond. Chivalric ideals were regarded as mediaeval bric-a-brac and fine sentiments as rubbish. Even gallantry with its mimic of being jealous and its pretended constancy was vieux jeu.
Love, or what pa.s.sed for it, had become a fugitive caprice, lightly a.s.sumed and as readily discarded, without prejudice to either party.
On s'enlace. Puis, un jour, On s'en la.s.se. C'est l'amour.
It had, however, other descents, a fall to depths of which history hitherto had been ignorant. Meanwhile the Regent had gone. Louis XV had come. With him were the real sovereigns of the realm, Mme. de Chateauroux, Petticoat I; the Pompadour, Petticoat II; the Du Barry, Petticoat III--legitimatized queens of love, with courts of their own, with the rights, prerogatives and immunities of princesses of the blood, the privilege of dwelling with the king, of receiving foreign amba.s.sadors and of pillaging France.
”Sire,” said Choiseul, ”the people are starving.” Louis XV answered: ”I am bored.”
The boredom came from precocious pleasures that had left him, without energy or conviction, a cold, dreary brute, Asiatic and animal, a sort of Oriental idol gloomy and gilded, who, while figuratively a spoke in the wheel of monarchy then rolling down to '89, personally was a minotaur in a feminine labyrinth which he filled, emptied, renewed, indifferent to the inmates as he was to his wife,[75] wringing for the various Petticoats prodigal sums from a desolate land, supplying incidentally to fermiers generaux and grands seigneurs an example in Tiberianism which, a.s.sured of immunity, they greedily followed and, generally, making himself so loathed that when he died, delight was national.
It was in those days that Casanova promenaded through palace and cottage, convent and inn, inveigling in the course of the promenade three thousand women, princesses and soubrettes, abbesses and ballet girls, matrons and maids. The promenade, which was a continuous sin, he recited at length in his memoirs. During the recital you see a hideous old man, slippered and slovenly, fumbling in a box in which are faded ribbons, rumpled notes, souvenirs and gages d'amour.
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