And yet the dignitaries of the church invariably denounced it, and had the courage to break with the women on this point. They countenanced neither the old masters nor the new—the eloquent Cataneo, the gay Boiardo. Nothing disarmed their opposition—neither the success of romances like _La Célestine_,[235] nor blandishments. When Ariosto offered to Cardinal d’Este his masterpiece packed with dithyrambs in honour of all the Estes past, present, and to be, the amiable prelate said to him: “Where on earth did you get all this nonsense?”[236] In short, women who read, read what spoke of love: that was what they set store by. Philosophy spoke of love—they were philosophers; romances, facéties, novels, poetry spoke of love—they sipped also of that philosophy. But in some cases it was philosophy that bred the spirit of love, in other cases it was the spirit of love that led them to philosophy; and from this wide differences resulted. The first class were coldly sentimental,—but no real sway is exerted through coldness; they lived in the absolute,—but the absolute lends no governing force. They lost touch with things, they had nothing of the communicable warmth which makes apostles. They were princesses, sacred beings, to be admired but not touched. Plato had not evolved a practical rule for happiness, and his best friends agreed that his social ideas presented many chimerical sides. But the ladies who learnt their philosophy from love were the ardent, active women who knew that the world is swayed by passions, good or bad, and that the secret of feminine power lies far more in that than in any amount of reasoning. Reason may produce an artless blissfulness, but passion has lynx eyes. Love is not reasoned out or manufactured, it is a give and take; life also is only a perpetual exchange, and happiness comes from life, while Plato seeks it in self-contemplation and egoism. To act on another, one must be acted on; to make others happy we must gain happiness through others. An illogical process? What if it is? Nothing is more illogical and more relative than happiness, since it has to do with us. That is for many women the science of life, and they love romances as a pictorial philosophy—not cold precept, but a living force—a philosophy in which the heart cries out instead of patiently suffering dissection. Books appealed to the feelings. Poggio tells the story of a worthy man, a merchant and a Milanese, and therefore doubly unemotional, who almost died of grief after reading about the death of Roland: yet Roland had been dead seven hundred years! Much more were women justified in showing their sensibility!