The science of sensibility is to most men a fountain sealed; they always fancy themselves to be too robust! They march straight on in parallel lines; military devotion is their virtue; women alone can serve as a bond of union, soften and beautify everything, cover with a varnish of glory and disinterestedness the things that need it. Hence, besides their mission at home, they may be said to have a social part of the first importance to play; the more sensible men become to their social influence, the higher is man’s civilisation. Now at the very period when France decided to move, the women of Italy had long since shown what could be expected of women in this direction. They often flaunted sentiments which are open to the charge of audacity or naïveté, primitive sentiments, à la Botticelli or Perugino, crude to a degree; there were manifestly many women of young and fresh affections who opposed to the simplicity of brute force that charming form of simplicity, that adorable confidence in the things of life, which the worship of the beautiful gives to unsoiled souls. They are to the women of the eighteenth century what Memling is to Watteau. Properly to understand their spiritual condition we should have to do as they did—solve the problem of feminism in the feminine way, be women, and more than women—arch-women. The fulfilment of their natural vocation, namely, to look after the amenities of life, was a pretty extensive office, in a country where art and taste had so prominent a place. But they went farther. They inculcated moral strength through beauty; they dreamt of raising men, of plunging into their life like rescuing angels. Some critics say that the intervention of women is always a proof of men’s decadence, and that when they save us, we are in parlous need of saving. Unhappily that is our normal state. Women assuredly represent the Red Cross of society; it is the duty of us men to be purblind and case-hardened to the brutalities of life, or even to find a certain happiness therein, and to remain cold like a sword-blade; women have no right to escape wounding by the despicable and shameful things among us. They would prefer, you say, to remain quietly gathering flowers behind their park walls; that is perfectly true; they only act from a sense of duty, because they no longer wish to serve as the stake of battles, because there is no misery, no injustice, no disgrace for which a woman of heart does not feel responsible. In fulfilling this mission they do not humble us; on the contrary, we can have no higher ambition than to desire peace, no action can less degrade us than to bend in respect before the noblest things in the world—weakness and sentiment. It was the conviction of all the sons of the Renaissance, and of its great-grandsons (even the last and most sceptical of them, like M. Mérimée), that sentiment has higher lights than reason, and that certain intuitions of the heart unfold to us, as