Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/195

180 for him. Of abstract justice she has no ideal; neither of other abstract qualities—honour, decency, morality—virtues that have been invented, for the greater safety of the race. For all her mysticism, she has little sympathy with unembodied ideas.

It is not that she is less virtuous than her neighbours; but her virtue takes a different turn. She and the Spaniards, whose influence is spreading far and wide, take their stand on different moralities. They stab their unfaithful wives and burn their heretics in gangs. To Margaret infidelity is tolerable, but not fanaticism; murder, and not loose morals, excites her horror. Her respect for life is stronger than her respect for any moral code.

And, with all its limitations, this gift of actuality was the one most needed by the age in which she lived. Born prematurely in the Dauphin's Court, the seventeenth century was drawing on apace; the seventeenth century, with its moonstruck romance, its genius for mathematics, its conflict of science and superstition, its perversities of torture and fanaticism. Loyola is already the General of the new Society of Jesus. The Guises are already grown. Already, at the Court of the King, sits, white and black as a moon in the clouds, the relentless beauty of Diana; Diana, panoplied in her incestuous respectability; Diana the would-be disinheritor of her Huguenot children; Diana to whom form is all and nature nothing. Already, under her fair, white bosom, throbs the unnatural pulse of the age to come.