The Book of the Courtier
enjoy the splendour of his lady, her grace, her amourous sparkle, the
laughs, the ways and all the other pleasant ornaments of her beauty.
Likewise with his hearing let him enjoy the sweetness of her voice, the
concord of her words, the harmony of her music (if his beloved be a
musician). Thus will he feed his soul on sweetest food by means of these
two senses—which have little of the corporeal and are ministers of
reason—without passing in his desire for the body to any appetite less
than seemly.
“Next let him obey, please and honour his lady with all reverence, and
hold her dearer than himself, and prefer her convenience and pleasures
to his own, and love in her not less the beauty of mind than that of
body. Therefore let him take care not to leave her to fall into any kind
of errour, but by admonition and good advice let him always seek to lead
her on to modesty, to temperance, to true chastity, and see to it that
no thoughts find place in her except those that are pure and free from
every stain of vice; and by thus sowing virtue in the garden of her fair
mind, he will gather fruits of fairest behaviour too, and will taste
them with wonderful delight. And this will be the true engendering and
manifesting of beauty in beauty, which by some is said to be the end of
love.
“In such fashion will our Courtier be most acceptable to his lady, and
she will always show herself obedient, sweet and affable to him, and as
desirous of pleasing him as of being loved by him; and the wishes of
both will be most virtuous and harmonious, and they themselves will thus
be very happy.”
63.—Here my lord Morello said:
“To engender beauty in beauty, forsooth, would be to beget a beautiful
child in a beautiful woman; and pleasing him in this would seem to me a
much clearer token that she loved her lover than treating him with the
affability of which you speak.”
Bembo laughed, and said:
“You must not go beyond bounds, my lord Morello; nor does a woman give
small token of her love when she gives her lover her beauty, which is so
precious a thing, and by the ways that are the avenues to her soul (that
is, sight and hearing) sends the glances of her eyes, the image of her
face, her voice, her words, which strike home to the lover’s heart and
give him proof of her love.”
My lord Morello said:
“Glances and words may be, and often are, false proofs; therefore he who
has no better pledge of love is, in my judgment, far from sure; and
truly I quite expected you to make this lady of yours a little more
courteous and generous to the Courtier than my lord Magnifico made his;
but methinks that both of you are in like case with those judges who
pronounce sentence against their friends for the sake of appearing
wise.”
64.—Bembo said:
“I am very willing that this lady should be much more courteous to my
unyouthful Courtier, than my lord Magnifico’s is to the youthful
Courtier; and with reason, for my Courtier will desire only seemly
things, and therefore the lady can grant him all of them without blame;
while my lord Magnifico’s lady, who is not so sure of the youthful
Courtier’s modesty, ought to grant him only seemly things, and to refuse
him the unseemly. Hence my Courtier, to whom is granted what he asks, is
more happy than the other, to whom part is granted and part refused.
“And to the end that you may still better understand that rational love
is happier than sensual, I say that the same things ought sometimes to
be refused in sensual love and granted in rational love, because they
are unseemly in the one and seemly in the other. Thus, to please her
worthy lover, besides granting him pleasant smiles, familiar and secret
discourse, and leave to joke and jest with her and to touch her hand,
the lady may in reason even go so far as kissing without blame, which is
not permitted in sensual love according to my lord Magnifico’s rules.
For since the kiss is the union of body and soul, there is danger lest
the sensual lover incline more in the direction of the body than in that
of the soul; while the rational lover perceives that although the mouth
is part of the body, yet it gives issue to words, which are interpreters
of the soul, and to that inward breath which is itself even called soul.
Hence a man delights to join his mouth to that of his beloved in a kiss,
not in order to arouse any unseemly desire in him, but because he feels
that bond to be the opening of a passage between their souls, which,
being each drawn by desire for the other, pour themselves each into the
other’s body by turn, and so commingle that each has two souls, and a
single soul (thus composed of these two) rules as it were over two
bodies. Hence the kiss may be oftener said to be a joining of soul than
of body, because it has such power over the soul that it draws her to
itself and separates her from the body. On this account all chaste
lovers desire to kiss as a joining of the soul; and thus the divinely
enamoured Plato says that in kissing the soul came to his lips to escape
his body. And since the separation of the soul from things material, and
its complete union with things spiritual, may be denoted by the kiss,
Solomon, in his divine book of the Song, says: ‘Let him kiss me with the
kiss of his mouth,’ to express desire that his soul might be so
transported with divine love to the contemplation of celestial beauty,
that by joining closely therewith she might forsake the body.”
65.—Everyone gave closest heed to Bembo’s discourse; and he, having made
a little pause and seeing that no one else spoke, said:
“As you have made me begin to teach our unyouthful Courtier happy love,
I fain would lead him a little farther; for it is very dangerous to stop
at this stage, seeing that the soul is very prone to the senses, as has
many times been said; and although reason and argument choose well and
perceive that beauty does not spring from the body, and although they
therefore put a bridle upon unseemly desires, still, always
contemplating beauty in the body often perverts sound judgment. And even
if no other evil flowed therefrom, absence from the beloved object
brings much suffering with it, because the influence of her beauty gives
the lover wonderful delight when she is present, and by warming his
heart wakens and melts certain dormant and frozen forces in his soul,
which (being nourished by the warmth of love) spread and blossom about
his heart, and send forth through the eyes those spirits that are very
subtle vapours made of the purest and brightest part of the blood, which
receive the image of her beauty and fashion it with a thousand various
ornaments. Hence the soul delights, and trembles with awe and yet
rejoices, and as in a stupour feels not only pleasure, but that fear and
reverence which we are wont to have for sacred things, and speaks of
being in paradise.
66.—“Therefore the lover who considers beauty in the body only, loses
this blessing and felicity as soon as his beloved lady by her absence
leaves his eyes without their splendour, and his soul consequently
widowed of its blessing. Because, her beauty being far away, that
amourous influence does not warm his heart as it did in her presence;
wherefore his pores become arid and dry, and still the memory of her
beauty stirs a little those forces of his soul, so that they seek to
scatter abroad the spirits; and these, finding the ways shut, have no
exit, and yet seek to issue forth; and thus hemmed in by those goads,
they sting the soul and give it keenest suffering, as in the case of
children when the teeth begin to come through the tender gums. And from
this proceed the tears, the sighs, the anguish and the torments of
lovers, because the soul is ever in affliction and travail, and becomes
almost raging until her dear beauty appears to it again; and then it
suddenly is calmed and breathes, and all intent upon that beauty it
feeds on sweetest food, nor would ever part from so delightful a
spectacle.
“Hence, to escape the torment of this absence and to enjoy beauty
without suffering, there is need that the Courtier should, with the aid
of reason, wholly turn his desire from the body to the beauty alone, and
contemplate it in itself simple and pure, as far as he can, and fashion
it in his imagination apart from all matter; and thus make it lovely and
dear to his soul, and enjoy it there, and have it with him day and
night, in every time and place, without fear of ever losing it; bearing
always in mind that the body is something very different from beauty,
and not only does not enhance it, but diminishes its perfection.
“In this wise will our unyouthful Courtier be beyond all the bitterness
and calamities that the young nearly always feel: such as jealousies,
suspicions, disdainings, angers, despairings, and certain furies full of
madness whereby they are often led into such errour that some of them
not only beat the women whom they love, but deprive themselves of life.
He will do no injury to the husband, father, brothers or kinsfolk of his
beloved lady; he will put no infamy upon her; he will never be forced to
bridle his eyes and tongue with such difficulty in order not to disclose
his desires to others, or to endure suffering at partings or
absences;—because he will always carry his precious treasure with him
shut up in his heart, and also by force of his imagination he will
inwardly fashion her beauty much more beautiful than in fact it is.
67.—“But besides these blessings the lover will find another much
greater still, if he will employ this love as a step to mount to one
much higher; which he will succeed in doing if he continually considers
within himself how narrow a restraint it is to be always occupied in
contemplating the beauty of one body only; and therefore, in order to
escape such close bounds as these, in his thought he will little by
little add so many ornaments, that by heaping all beauties together he
will form an universal concept, and will reduce the multitude of these
beauties to the unity of that single beauty which is spread over human
nature at large. In this way he will no longer contemplate the
particular beauty of one woman, but that universal beauty which adorns
all bodies; and thus, bewildered by this greater light, he will not heed
the lesser, and glowing with a purer flame, he will esteem lightly that
which at first he so greatly prized.
“This stage of love, although it be very noble and such as few attain,
still cannot be called perfect; for since the imagination is merely a
corporeal faculty and has no perception except through those means that
are furnished it by the senses, it is not wholly purged of material
darkness; and hence, although it considers this universal beauty in the
abstract and intrinsically, yet it does not discern that beauty very
clearly or without some ambiguity, because of the likeness which
phantoms bear to substance. Thus those who attain this love are like
tender birds beginning to put on feathers, which, although with their
frail wings they lift themselves a little in flight, yet dare not go far
from their nest or trust themselves to the winds and open sky.
68.—“Therefore when our Courtier shall have reached this goal, although
he may be called a very happy lover by comparison with those who are
plunged in the misery of sensual love, still I would have him not rest
content, but press boldly on following along the lofty path after the
guide who leads him to the goal of true felicity. And thus, instead of
going outside himself in thought (as all must needs do who choose to
contemplate bodily beauty only), let him have recourse to himself, in
order to contemplate that beauty which is seen by the eyes of the mind,
which begin to be sharp and clear when those of the body lose the flower