ich is the chief factor in abiding delight.[61]

The theory, casuistic and subtle, appealed momentarily to a society that
had no theories at all. It particularly appealed to women. Matrimony had
not always been propitious to them. Barring death or annulment the brand
of the ceremony was ineffaceable. In England Henry VIII maintained the
brand but, by means of divorce which he prescribed for himself, he
rendered it cumulative, a process which Parliament, subsequently
petitioned by Milton, regularized. In Italy meanwhile the pseudo-platonism
which Ficino and Bembo were expounding, omitted any interference with it.
In the corpus juris amoris matrimony was held to be incompatible with love
and pseudo-platonism, going a step further, eliminated even the
possibility of it. Pseudo-platonism maintained that if happiness consists
in love and love consists in yielding, yielding itself has its degrees.
There is the yielding of the body and of the soul, the yielding of the one
without the other, the yielding of the second without the first.
Platonism, as interpreted by pseudo-platonists, was the yielding of the
second, matrimony the yielding of the first. But into that yielding it had
already shown that not delight but its contrary enters.

On fanciful tenets such as these the moral bigamy of Provence returned,
with the difference that it enabled a lady to be as intangible to her
husband as she had supposedly been to her knight. A historian has related
that a woman of position, married to a man morally inferior and otherwise
objectionable, encountered these tenets and coincidentally, in a person of
greater distinction, encountered also her ideal. Together, in the most
perfect propriety, they departed and, with analogous couples of their
acquaintance, assembled in a villa where, reversing the _Decamerone_,
they philosophized agreeably on the charm of the new distinction between
love and love, one of which, the love matrimonial, was worldly and mortal
while the other, vivifying to the soul, was divine.[62]

Thereafter spiritual elopements became frequent. But not general. It was
not every woman that was capable of putting but her soul in the arms of a
lover nor was it every lover whom the ethereality of the proceeding
pleased. Dilettantes of crystal flirtations became, like poets,
omnipresent and yet rare. The majority that entered the mazes of the
immaterial did so with no other object than that of getting out. When one
of the part