ious
of her own fully developed womanhood and all its needs, radiantly
beautiful and finely shaped in every limb. She lacked the spirituality
of her predecessors, but she had gained in intellect. She appears first
in the pages of Boccaccio. After a long interval Titian immortalized her
rich and mature beauty; she is Flora, she is Ariadne, she is alike the
Earthly Love and the Heavenly Love. Every curve of her body was
adoringly and minutely described by Niphus and Firenzuola.[80] She was,
moreover, the courtesan whose imperial charm and adroitness enabled her
to trample under foot the medieval conception of lust as sin, even in
the courts of popes. At the great academic centre of Bologna, finally,
she chastely taught learning and science.[81] The people of the Italian
Renaissance placed women on the same level as men, and to call a woman a
_virago_ implied unalloyed praise.[82]

The very mixed conditions of what we have been accustomed to consider
the modern world then began for women. They were no longer
cloistered--whether in convents or the home--but neither were they any
longer worshipped. They began to be treated as human beings, and when
men idealized them in figures of romantic charm or pathos--figures like
Shakespeare's Rosalind or Marivaux's Sylvia or Richardson's
Clarissa--this humanity was henceforth the common ground out of which
the vision arose. But, one notes, in nearly all the great poets and
novelists up to the middle of the last century, it was usually in the
weakness of humanity that the artist sought the charm and pathos of his
feminine figures. From Shakespeare's Ophelia to Thackeray's Amelia this
is the rule, more emphatically expressed in the literature of England
than of any other country. There had been no actual emancipation of
women; though now they had entered the world of men, they were not yet,
socially and legally, of that world. Even the medieval traditions still
lived on in subtly conventionalized forms. The "chivalrous" attitude
towards women was, as the word itself suggests, a medieval survival. It
belonged to a period of barbarism when brutal force ruled and when the
man who magnanimously placed his force at the disposition of a woman was
really doing her a service and granting her a privilege. But
civilization means the building up of an orderly society in which
individual rights are respected, and force no longer dominates. So that
as civilization advances the occasions on which wom