statuesque distinctness; but these are neither grotesquely horrible like
Dante's, nor are they spirits with incalculable capacity for evil like
Milton's.

    Stampano alcuni il suol di ferine orme,
    E in fronte umana ban chiome d'angui attorte;
    E lor s'aggira dietro immensa coda,
    Che quasi sferza si ripiega e snoda.

Against this we have to place the dreadful scene of Satan with his
angels transformed to snakes (_Par. Lost_, x. 508-584), and the
Dantesque horror of the 'vermo reo che 'l mondo fora' (_Inf._ xxxiv.
108). Again when Dante cries--

                  O Sommo Giove,
    Che fosti in terra per noi crocifisso!

we feel that the Latin phrase is accidental. The spirit of the poet
remains profoundly Christian. Tasso's Jehovah-Jupiter is always 'il Re
del Ciel'; and the court of blessed spirits which surrounds his 'gran
seggio,' though described with solemn pomp of phrase, cannot be compared
with the Mystic Rose of Paradise (ix. 55-60). What Tasso lacks is
authenticity of vision; and his heightened style only renders this
imaginative poverty, this want of spiritual conviction, more apparent.

His frequent borrowings from Virgil are less unsuccessful when the
matter to be illustrated is not of this exalted order. Many similes
(vii. 55, vii. 76, viii. 74) have been transplanted with nice propriety.
Many descriptions, like that of the approach of night (ii-96), of the
nightingale mourning for her young (xii. 90), of the flying dream (xiv.
6), have been translated with exquisite taste. Dido's impassioned
apostrophe to Aeneas reappears appropriately upon Armida's lips (xvi.
56). We welcome such culled phrases as the following:

                   l'orticel dispensa
    Cibi non compri alia mia parca mensa (vii. 10).

    Premer gli alteri, e sollevar gl'imbelli (x. 76).

    E Tisaferno, il folgore di Marte (xvii. 31).

    Va, vedi, e vinci (xvii. 38).

    Ma mentre dolce parla e dolce ride (iv. 92).

    Chè vinta la materia è dal lavoro (xvi. 2).

    Non temo io te, nè tuoi gran vanti, o fero:
    Ma il Cielo e il mio nemico amor pavento (xix. 73).

It may, however, be observed that in the last of these passages Tasso
does not show a just discriminative faculty. Turnus said:

                     Non me tua fervida terrent
    Dicta, ferox: Di me terrent et Jupiter hostis.

From Jupiter to Amor is a descent from sublimity to pathos. In like
manner when Hector's ghost reappears in the ghost of Armida's mother,

    Quanto diversa, oimè, da quel che pria
    Visto altrove (iv. 49),

the reminiscence suggests ideas that are unfavorable to the modern
version.

In his description of battles, the mustering of armies, and military
operations, Tasso neither draws from mediaeval sources nor from
experience, but imitates the battle-pieces of Virgil and Lucan,
sometimes with fine rhetorical effect and sometimes with wearisome
frigidity. The death of Latino and his five sons is both touching in
itself, and a good example of this Virgilian mannerism (ix. 35). The
death of Dudone is justly celebrated as a sample of successful imitation
(iii. 45):

    Cade; e gli occhi, ch'appena aprir si ponno,
    Dura quiete preme e ferreo sonno.

The wound of Gerniero, on the contrary, illustrates the peril of
seeking after conceits in the inferior manner of the master (ix. 69):

    La destra di Gerniero, onde ferita
    Ella fu pria, manda recisa al piano;
    Tratto anco il ferro, e con tremanti dita
    Semiviva nel suol guizza la mano.

The same may be said about the wound of Algazèl (ix. 78) and the death
of Ardonio (xx. 39). In the description of the felling of the forest
(iii. 75, 76) and of the mustering of the Egyptian army (xvii. 1-36)
Tasso's Virgilian style attains real grandeur and poetic beauty.

Tasso was nothing if not a learned poet. It would be easy to illustrate
what he has borrowed from Lucretius, or to point out that the pathos of
Clorinda's apparition to Tancredi after death is a debt to Petrarch. It
may, however, suffice here to indicate six phrases taken straight from
Dante; since the _Divine Comedy_ was little studied in Tasso's age, and
his selection of these lines reflects credit on his taste. These are:

    Onorate l'altissimo campione! (iii. 73: _Inf._ iv.)

    Goffredo intorno gli occhi gravi e tardi (vii. 58: _Inf._. iv.).

                   a riveder le stelle (iv. 18: _Inf._ xxxiv.).

    Ond' è ch'or tanto ardire in voi s'alletti? (ix. 76: _Inf._ ix.)

    A guisa di leon quando si posa (x. 56: _Purg._ vi.)

                  e guardi e passi (xx. 43: _Inf._ in.)

As in the _Rinaldo_, so also in the _Gerusalemme_, Tasso's classical
proclivities betrayed him into violation of the clear Italian language.
Afraid of what is natural and common, he produced what is artificial and
conceited. Hence came involved octaves like the following (vi. 109):

      Siccome cerva, ch'assetata il passo
    Mova a cercar d'acque lucenti e vive,
    Ove un bel fonte distillar da un sasso
    O vide un fiume tra frondose rive,
    Se incontra i cani allor che il corpo lasso
    Ristorar crede all'onde, all'ombre estive,
    Volge indietro fuggendo, e la paura
    La stanchezza obbliar face e l'arsura.

The image is beautiful; but the diction is elaborately intricate,
rhetorically indistinct. We find the same stylistic involution in these
lines (xii. 6):

    Ma s'egli avverrà pur che mia ventura
    Nel mio ritorno mi rinchiuda il passo,
    D'uom che in amor m'è padre a te la cura
    E delle fide mie donzelle io lasso.

The limpid well of native utterance is troubled at its source by
scholastic artifices in these as in so many other passages of Tasso's
masterpiece. Nor was he yet emancipated from the weakness of _Rinaldo_.
Trying to soar upon the borrowed plumes of pseudo-classical sublimity,
he often fell back wearied by this uncongenial effort into prose. Lame
endings to stanzas, sudden descents from highly-wrought to pedestrian
diction, are not uncommon in the _Gerusalemme_. The poet, diffident of
his own inspiration, sought inspiration from books. In the magnificence
of single lines again, the _Gerusalemme_ reminds us of _Rinaldo_. Tasso
gained dignity of rhythm by choosing Latin adjectives and adverbs with
pompous cadences. No versifier before his date had consciously employed
the sonorous music of such lines as the following:--

    Foro, tentando inaccessibil via (ii. 29).

    Ond' Amor l'arco inevitabil tende (iii. 24).

    Questa muraglia impenetrabil fosse (iii. 51).

    Furon vedute fiammeggiare insieme (v. 28).

    Qual capitan ch'inespugnabil terra (v. 64).

    Sotto l'inevitabile tua spada (xvi. 33).

    Immense solitudini d'arena (xvii. I).

The last of these lines presents an impressive landscape in three
melodious words.

These verbal and stylistic criticisms are not meant to cast reproach on
Tasso as a poet. If they have any value, it is the light they throw upon
conditions under which the poet was constrained to work. Humanism and
the Catholic Revival reduced this greatest genius of his age to the
necessity of clothing religious sentiments in scholastic phraseology,
with the view of attaining to epic grandeur. But the Catholic Revival
was no regeneration of Christianity from living sources; and humanism
had run its course in Italy, and was ending in the sands of critical
self-consciousness. Thus piety in Tasso appears superficial and
conventional rather than profoundly felt or originally vigorous; while
the scholarship which supplied his epic style is scrupulous and timid.

The enduring qualities of Tasso as a modern poet have still to be
indicated; and to this more grateful portion of my argument I now
address myself. Much might be said in the first place about his
rhetorical dexterity--the flexibility of language in his hands, and the
copiousness of thought, whereby he was able to adorn varied situations
and depict diversity of passions with appropriate diction. Whether Alete
is subtly pleading a seductive cause, or Goffredo is answering his
sophistries with well-weighed arguments; whether Pluto addresses the
potentates of hell, or Erminia wavers between love and honor; whether
Tancredi pours forth the extremity of his despair, or Armida heaps
reproaches on Rinaldo in his flight; the musical and luminously polished
stanzas lend themselves without change of style to every gradation of
the speaker's mood. In this art of rhetoric, Tasso seems to have taken
Livy for his model; and many of his speeches which adorn the graver
portions of his poem are noticeable for compact sententious wisdom.

In fancy Tasso was not so naturally rich and inventive as the author of
_Orlando Furioso_. Yet a gallery of highly-finished pictures might be
collected from his similes and metaphors. What pride and swiftness mark
this vision of a thunderbolt:

    Grande ma breve fulmine il diresti,
    Che inaspettato sopraggiunga e passi;
    Ma del suo corso momentaneo resti
    Vestigio eterno in dirupati sassi (xx. 93).

How delicately touched is this uprising of the morning star from ocean:

    Qual mattutina Stella esce dell'onde
    Rugiadosa e stillante; o come fuore
    Spuntò nascendo già dalle feconde
    Spume dell'ocean la Dea d'amore (xv. 60).

Here is an image executed in the style of Ariosto. Clorinda has received
a wound on her uncovered head:

    Fu levissima piaga, e i biondi crini
    Rosseggiaron così d'alquante stille,
    Come rosseggia l'or che di rubini
    Per man d'illustre artefice sfaville (iii. 30).

Flowers furnish the poet with exquisite suggestions of color:

    D'un bel pallor ha il bianco volto asperso,
    Come a gigli sarian miste viole (xii. 69).

    Quale a pioggia d'argento e mattutina
    Si rabbellisce scolorita rosa (xx. 129).

Sometimes the painting is minutely finished like a miniature:

      Così piuma talor, che di gentile
    Amorosa colomba il collo cinge,
    Mai non sì scorge a sè stessa simile,
    Ma in diversi colori al sol si tinge:
    Or d'accesi rubin sembra un monile,
    Or di verdi smeraldi il lume finge,
    Or insieme li mesce, e varia e vaga
    In cento modi i riguardanti appaga (xv. 5).

Sometimes the style is broad, the touch vigorous:

      Qual feroce destrier, ch'al faticoso
    Onor dell'arme vincitor sia tolto,
    E lascivo marito in vil riposo
    Fra gli armenti e ne'paschi erri dìsciolto,

    Se il desta o suon di tromba, o luminoso
    Acciar, cola tosto annitrendo è volto;
    Già già brama l'arringo, el'uom sul dorso
    Portando, urtato riurtar nel corso (xvi. 28).

I will content myself with referring to the admirably conceived simile
of a bulky galleon at sea attacked by a swifter and more agile vessel
(xix. 13), which may perhaps have suggested to Fuller his famous
comparison of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson in their wit encounters.

But Tasso was really himself, incomparable and unapproachable, when he
wrote in what musicians would call the _largo e maestoso_ mood.

    Giace l'alta Cartago; appena i segni
    Dell'alte sue ruine il lido serba.
    Muoino le città, muoino i regni;
    Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba;
    E l'uomo d'esser mortal par che si sdegni!
    Oh nostra mente cupida e superba! (xv. 20).

This is perfect in its measured melancholy, the liquid flow of its
majestic simplicity. The same musical breadth, the same noble sweetness,
pervade a passage on the eternal beauty of the heavens compared with the
brief brightness of a woman's eyes:

                           oh quante belle
    Luci il tempio celeste in sè raguna!
    Ha il suo gran carro il di; le aurate stelle
    Spiega la notte e l'argentata luna;
    Ma non è chi vagheggi o questa o quelle;
    E miriam noi torbida luce e bruna,
    Che un girar d'occhi, un balenar di riso
    Scopre in breve confin di fragil viso (xviii. 15).

This verbal music culminates in the two songs of earthly joy, the
_chants d'amour_, or hymns to pleasure, sung by Armida's ministers
(xiv. 60-65, xvi. 12, 13). Boiardo and Ariosto had painted the
seductions of enchanted gardens, where valor was enthralled by beauty,
and virtue dulled by voluptuous delights. It remained for Tasso to give
that magic of the senses vocal utterance. From the myrtle groves of
Orontes, from the spell-bound summer amid snows upon the mountains of
the Fortunate Isle, these lyrics with their penetrative sweetness, their
lingering regret, pass into the silence of the soul. It is eminently
characteristic of Tasso's mood and age that the melody of both these
honeyed songs should thrill with sadness. Nature is at war with honor;
youth passes like a flower away; therefore let us love and yield our
hearts to pleasure while we can. _Sehnsucht_, the soul of modern
sentiment, the inner core of modern music, makes its entrance into the
sphere of art with these two hymns. The division of the mind, wavering
between natural impulse and acquired morality, gives the tone of
melancholy to the one chant. In the other, the invitation to
self-abandonment is mingled with a forecast of old age and death. Only
Catullus, in his song to Lesbia, among the ancients touched this note;
only Villon, perhaps, in his Ballade of Dead Ladies, touched it among
the moderns before Tasso. But it has gone on sounding ever since through
centuries which have enjoyed the luxury of grief in music.

If Tancredi be the real hero of the _Gerusalemme_, Armida is the
heroine. The action of the epic follows her movements. She combines the
parts of Angelica and Alcina in one that is original and novel. A
sorceress, deputed by the powers of hell to defeat the arms of the
crusaders, Armida falls herself in love with a Christian champion. Love
changes her from a beautiful white witch into a woman.[76] When she
meets Rinaldo in the battle, she discharges all her arrows vainly at the
man who has deserted her. One by one, they fly and fall; and as they
wing their flight, Love wounds her own heart with his shafts:

    Scocca I' arco più volte, e non fa piaga
    E, mentre ella saetta, amor lei piaga (xx. 65).

Then she turns to die in solitude. Rinaldo follows, and stays her in the
suicidal act. Despised and rejected as she is, she cannot hate him. The
man she had entangled in her wiles has conquered and subdued her nature.
To the now repentant minister of hell he proposes baptism; and Armida
consents:

    Sì parla, e prega; e i preghi bagna e scalda
    Or di lagrime rare, or di sospiri:
    Onde, siccome suol nevosa falda
    Dov'arde il sole, o tepid' aura spiri,
    Così l'ira che in lei parea sì salda,
    Solvesi, e restan sol gli altri desiri.
    _Ecco l'ancilla tua_; d'essa a tuo senno
    Dispon, gli disse, e le fia legge il cenno (xx. 136).

[Footnote 76: I may incidentally point out how often this motive has
supplied the plot to modern ballets.]

This metamorphosis of the enchantress into the woman in Armida, is the
climax of the _Gerusalemme_. It is also the climax and conclusion of
Italian romantic poetry, the resolution of its magic and marvels into
the truths of human affection. Notice, too, with what audacity Tasso has
placed the words of Mary on the lips of his converted sorceress!
Deliberately planning a religious and heroic poem, he assigns the spoils
of conquered hell to love triumphant in a woman's breast. Beauty, which
in itself is diabolical, the servant of the lords of Hades, attains to
apotheosis through affection. In Armida we already surmise _das ewig
Weibliche_ of Goethe's Faust, Gretchen saving her lover's soul before
Madonna's throne in glory.

What was it, then, that Tasso, this 'child of a later and a colder age,'
as Shelley called him, gave of permanent value to European literature?
We have seen that the _Gerusalemme_ did not fulfill the promise of
heroic poetry for that eminently unheroic period. We know that neither
the Virgilian hero nor the laboriously developed theme commands the
interest of posterity. We feel that religious emotion is feeble here,
and that the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance is on the point of
expiring in those Latinistic artifices. Yet the interwoven romance
contains a something difficult to analyze, intangible and
evanescent--_un non so che_, to use the poet's favorite phrase--which
riveted attention in the sixteenth century, and which harmonizes with
our own sensibility to beauty. Tasso, in one word, was the poet, not of
passion, not of humor, not of piety, not of elevated action, but of
that new and undefined emotion which we call Sentiment. Unknown to the
ancients, implicit in later mediaeval art, but not evolved with
clearness from romance, alien to the sympathies of the Renaissance as
determined by the Classical Revival, sentiment, that _non so che_ of
modern feeling, waited for its first apocalypse in Tasso's work. The
phrase which I have quoted, and which occurs so frequently in this
poet's verse, indicates the intrusion of a new element into the sphere
of European feeling. Vague, indistinct, avoiding outline, the phrase _un
non so che_ leaves definition to the instinct of those who feel, but
will not risk the limitation of their feeling by submitting it to words.
Nothing in antique psychology demanded a term of this kind. Classical
literature, in close affinity to sculpture, dealt with concrete images
and conscious thoughts. The mediaeval art of Dante, precisely,
mathematically measured, had not felt the need of it. Boccaccio's
clear-cut intaglios from life and nature, Petrarch's compassed melodies,
Poliziano's polished arabesques, Ariosto's bright and many colored
pencilings, were all of them, in all their varied phases of Renaissance
expression, distinguished by decision and firmness of drawing.
Vagueness, therefore, had hitherto found no place in European poetry or
plastic art. But music, the supreme symbol of spiritual infinity in art,
was now about to be developed; and the specific touch of Tasso, the
musician-poet, upon portraiture and feeling, called forth this quality
of vagueness, a vagueness that demanded melody to give what it refused
from language to accept. Mendelssohn when some one asked him what is
meant by music, replied that it had meanings for his mind more
unmistakable than those which words convey; but what these meanings
were, he did not or he could not make clear. This certainty of
sentiment, seeming vague only because it floats beyond the scope of
language in regions of tone and color and emotion, is what Tasso's _non
so che_ suggests to those who comprehend. And Tasso, by his frequent
appeal to it, by his migration from the plastic into the melodic realm
of the poetic art, proved himself the first genuinely sentimental artist
of the modern age. It is just this which gave him a wider and more
lasting empire over the heart through the next two centuries than that
claimed by Ariosto.

It may not be unprofitable to examine in detail Tasso's use of the
phrase to which so much importance has been assigned in the foregoing
paragraph. We meet it first in the episode of Olindo and Sofronia.
Sofronia, of all the heroines of the _Gerusalemme_, is the least
interesting, notwithstanding her magnanimous mendacity and Jesuitical
acceptance of martyrdom. Olindo touches the weaker fibers of our
sympathy by his feminine devotion to a woman placed above him in the
moral scale, whose love he wins by splendid falsehood equal to her own.
The episode, entirely idle in the action of the poem, has little to
recommend it, if we exclude the traditionally accepted reference to
Tasso's love for Leonora d'Este. But when Olindo and Sofronia are
standing, back to back, against the stake, Aladino, who has decreed
their death by burning, feels his rude bosom touched with sudden pity:

    Un non so che d'inusitato e molle
    Par che nel duro petto al re trapasse:
    Ei presentillo, e si sdegnò; nè voile
    Piegarsi, e gli occhi torse, e si ritrasse (ii. 37).

The intrusion of a lyrical emotion, unknown before in the tyrant's
breast, against which he contends with anger, and before the force of
which he bends, prepares us for the happy _dénouement_ brought about by
Clorinda. This vague stirring of the soul, this _non so che_, this
sentiment, is the real agent in Sofronia's release and Olindo's
beatification.

Clorinda is about to march upon her doom. She is inflamed with the
ambition to destroy the engines of the Christian host by fire at night;
and she calls Argante to her counsels:

    Buona pezza è, signor, che in sè raggira
    Un non so che d'insolito e d'audace
    La mia mente inquieta; o Dio l'inspira,
    O l'uom del suo voler suo Dio si face (xii. 5).

Thus at this solemn point of time, when death is certainly in front,
when she knows not whether God has inspired her or whether she has made
of her own wish a deity, Clorinda utters the mystic word of vague
compulsive feeling.

Erminia, taken captive by Tancredi after the siege of Antioch, is
brought into her master's tent. He treats her with chivalrous courtesy,
and offers her a knight's protection:

    Allora un non so che soave e piano
    Sentii, ch'al cor mi scese, e vi s'affisse,
    Che, serpendomi poi per l'alma vaga,
    Non so come, divenne incendio e piaga (xix. 94).

At that moment, by the distillation of that vague emotion into vein and
marrow, Erminia becomes Tancredi's slave, and her future is determined.

These examples are, perhaps, sufficient to show how Tasso, at the
turning-points of destiny for his most cherished personages, invoked
indefinite emotion to adumbrate the forces with which will contends in
vain. But the master phrase rings even yet more tyrannously in the
passage of Clorinda's death, which sums up all of sentiment included in
romance. Long had Tancredi loved Clorinda. Meeting her in battle, he
stood her blows defenseless; for Clorinda was an Amazon, reduced by
Tasso's gentle genius to womanhood from the proportions of Marfisa.
Finally, with heart surcharged with love for her, he has to cross his
sword in deadly duel with this lady. Malign stars rule the hour: he
knows not who she is: misadventure makes her, instead of him, the victim
of their encounter. With her last breath she demands baptism--the good
Tasso, so it seems, could not send so fair a creature of his fancy as
Clorinda to the shades without viaticum; and his poetry rises to the
sublime of pathos in this stanza:

      Amico, hai vinto: io ti perdon: perdona
    Tu ancora: al corpo no, che nulla pave;
    All'alma sì: deh! per lei prega; e dona
    Battesmo a me ch'ogni mia colpa lave.
    In queste voci languide risuona
    Un non so che di flebile e soave
    Ch'al cor gli serpe, ed ogni sdegno ammorza,
    E gli occhi a lagrimar gl'invoglia e sforza (xii. 66).

Here the vague emotion, the _non so che_, distils itself through
Clorinda's voice into Tancredi's being. Afterwards it thrills there like
moaning winds in an Aeolian lyre, reducing him to despair upon his bed
of sickness, and reasserting its lyrical charm in the vision which he
has of Clorinda among the trees of the enchanted forest. He stands
before the cypress where the soul of his dead lady seems to his
misguided fancy prisoned; and the branches murmur in his ears:

    Fremere intanto udia continuo il vento
    Tra le frondi del bosco e tra i virgulti,
    E trarne un suon che flebile concento
    Par d'umani sospiri e di singulti;
    E un non so che confuso instilla al core
    Di pietà, di spavento e di dolore (xiii. 40).

The master word, the magic word of Tasso's sentiment, is uttered at this
moment of illusion. The poet has no key to mysteries locked up within
the human breast more powerful than this indefinite _un non so che_.

Enough has been said to show how Tasso used the potent spell of
vagueness, when he found himself in front of supreme situations. This
is in truth the secret of his mastery over sentiment, the spell whereby
he brings nature and night, the immense solitudes of deserts, the
darkness of forests, the wailings of the winds and the plangent litanies
of sea-waves into accord with overstrained humanity. It was a great
discovery; by right of it Tasso proved himself the poet of the coming
age.

When the _Gerusalemme_ was completed, Tasso had done his best work as a
poet. The misfortunes which began to gather round him in his
thirty-first year, made him well-nigh indifferent to the fate of the
poem which had drained his life-force, and from which he had expected so
much glory. It was published without his permission or supervision. He,
meanwhile, in the prison of S. Anna, turned his attention to prose
composition. The long series of dialogues, with which he occupied the
irksome leisure of seven years, interesting as they are in matter and
genial in style, indicate that the poet was now in abeyance. It remained
to be seen whether inspiration would revive with freedom. No sooner were
the bolts withdrawn than his genius essayed a fresh flight. He had long
meditated the composition of a tragedy, and had already written some
scenes. At Mantua in 1586-7 this work took the form of _Torrismondo_. It
cannot be called a great drama, for it belongs to the rigid declamatory
species of Italian tragedy; and Tasso's genius was romantic, idyllic,
elegiac, anything but genuinely tragic. Yet the style is eminent for
nobility and purity. Just as the _Aminta_ showed how unaffected Tasso
could be when writing without preconceived theories of heightened
diction, so the _Torrismondo_ displays an unstrained dignity of simple
dialogue. It testifies to the plasticity of language in the hands of a
master, who deliberately chose and sustained different styles in
different species of poetry, and makes us regret that he should have
formed his epic manner upon so artificial a type. The last chorus of
_Torrismondo_ deserves to be mentioned as a perfect example of Tasso's
melancholy elegiac pathos.

Meanwhile he began to be dissatisfied with the _Gerusalemme_, and in
1588 he resolved upon remodeling his masterpiece. The real vitality of
that poem was, as we have seen, in its romance. But Tasso thought
otherwise. During the fourteen years which elapsed since its completion,
the poet's youthful fervor had been gradually fading out. Inspiration
yielded to criticism; piety succeeded to sentiment and enthusiasm for
art. Therefore, in this later phase of his maturity, with powers
impaired by prolonged sufferings and wretched health, tormented by
religious scruples and vague persistent fear, he determined to eliminate
the romance from the epic, to render its unity of theme more rigorous,
and to concentrate attention upon the serious aspects of the subject.
The result of this plan, pursued through five years of wandering, was
the _Gerusalemme Conquistata_, a poem which the world has willingly let
die, in which the style of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ is worsened, and
which now serves mainly to establish by comparison the fact that what
was immortal in Tasso's art was the romance he ruthlessly rooted out. A
further step in this transition from art to piety is marked by the poem
upon the Creation of the World, called _Le Sette Giornate_. Written in
blank verse, it religiously but tamely narrates the operation of the
Divine Artificer, following the first chapter of Genesis and expanding
the motive of each of the seven days with facile rhetoric. Of action and
of human interest the poem has none; of artistic beauty little. The
sustained descriptive style wearies; and were not this the last work of
Tasso, it would not be mentioned by posterity.

Tasso has already occupied us through two chapters. Before passing
onward I must, however, invite the reader to pause awhile and
reconsider, even at the risk of retrospect and repetition, some of the
salient features of his character. And now I remember that of his
personal appearance nothing has hitherto been said. 'Tasso was tall,
well-proportioned, and of very fair complexion. His thick hair and beard
were of a light-brown color. His head was large, forehead broad and
square, eyebrows dark, eyes large, lively and blue, nose large and
curved toward the mouth, lips thin and pale.' So writes Manso, the
poet's friend and biographer, adding: 'His voice was clear and sonorous;
but he read his poems badly, because of a slight impediment in his
speech, and because he was short-sighted.' I know not whether I am
justified in drawing from this description the conclusion that Tasso
was, physically, a man of mixed lymphatic and melancholic temperament,
of more than ordinary sensitiveness. Imperfection, at any rate, is
indicated by the thin pale lips, the incoherent utterance and the
uncertain vision to which his friend in faithfulness bears witness. Of
painted portraits representing Tasso in later life there are many; but
most of these seem to be based upon the mask taken from his face after
death, which still exists at S. Onofrio. Twenty-one years ago I gazed
upon this mask, before I knew then more than every schoolboy knows of
Tasso's life and writings. This is what I wrote about it in my Roman
diary: 'The face is mild and weak, especially in the thin short chin and
feeble mouth.[77] The forehead round, and ample in proportion to the
other features. The eyes are small, but this may be due to the
contraction of death. The mouth is almost vulgar, very flat in the upper
lip; but this also ought perhaps to be attributed to the relaxation of
tissue by death.

Tasso was constitutionally inclined to pensive moods. His outlook over
life was melancholy.[78]

[Footnote 77: Giov. Imperiale in the _Museum Historicum_ describes him
thus: 'Perpetuo moerentis et altius cogitantis gessit aspectum, _gracili
mento_, facie decolori, conniventibus cavisque oculis.']

[Footnote 78: 'La mia fiera malinconia' is a phrase which often recurs
in his letters.]

The tone of his literary work, whether in prose or poetry, is
elegiac--musically, often querulously plaintive. There rests a shadow of
dejection over all he wrote and thought and acted. Yet he was finely
sensitive to pleasure, thrillingly alive to sentimental beauty.[79]
Though the man lived purely, untainted by the license of the age, his
genius soared highest when he sang some soft luxurious strain of love.
He was wholly deficient in humor. Taking himself and the world of men
and things too much in earnest, he weighed heavily alike on art and
life. The smallest trifles, if they touched him, seemed to him
important.[80] Before imaginary terrors he shook like an aspen. The
slightest provocation roused his momentary resentment. The most
insignificant sign of neglect or coldness wounded his self-esteem.
Plaintive, sensitive to beauty, sentimental, tender, touchy,
self-engrossed, devoid of humor--what a sentient instrument was this for
uttering Aeolian melodies, and straining discords through storm-jangled
strings!

[Footnote 79: 'Questo segno mi ho proposto: piacere ed onore'
(_Lettere_, vol. v. p. 87).]

[Footnote 80: It should be said that as a man of letters he bore with
fools gladly, and showed a noble patience. Of this there is a fine
example in his controversy with Della Cruscans. He was not so patient
with the publishers and pirates of his works. No wonder, when they
robbed him so!]

From the Jesuits, in childhood, he received religious impressions which
might almost be described as mesmeric or hypnotic in their influence
upon his nerves. These abode with him through manhood; and in later
life morbid scruples and superstitious anxieties about his soul laid
hold on his imagination. Yet religion did not penetrate Tasso's nature.
As he conceived it, there was nothing solid and supporting in its
substance. Piety was neither deeply rooted nor indigenous, neither
impassioned nor logically reasoned, in the adult man.[81] What it might
have been, but for those gimcrack ecstasies before the Host in boyhood,
cannot now be fancied. If he contained the stuff of saint or simple
Christian, this was sterilized and stunted by the clever fathers in
their school at Naples.

During the years of his feverishly active adolescence Tasso played for a
while with philosophical doubts. But though he read widely and
speculated diffusely on the problems of the universe, he failed to
pierce below the surface of the questions which he handled. His own
beliefs had been tested in no red-hot crucible, before he recoiled with
terror from their analysis. The man, to put it plainly, was incapable of
honest revolt against the pietistic fashions of his age, incapable of
exploratory efforts, and yet too intelligent to rest satisfied with
gross dogmatism or smug hypocrisy. Neither as a thinker, nor as a
Christian, nor yet again as that epicene religious being, a Catholic of
the Counter-Reformation, did this noble and ingenuous, but weakly nature
attain to thoroughness.

[Footnote 81: Tasso's diffuse paraphrase of the _Stabat Mater_ might be
selected to illustrate the sentimental tenderness rather than strength
of his religious feeling.]

Tasso's mind was lively and sympathetic; not penetrative, not fitted for
forming original or comprehensive views. He lived for no great object,
whether political, moral, religious, or scientific. He committed himself
to no vice. He obeyed no absorbing passion of love or hatred. In his
misfortunes he displayed the helplessness which stirs mere pity for a
prostrate human being. The poet who complained so querulously, who wept
so copiously, who forgot offense so nonchalantly, cannot command
admiration.

There is nothing sublimely tragic in Tasso's suffering. The sentiment
inspired by it is that at best of pathos. An almost childish
self-engrossment restricted his thoughts, his aims and aspirations, to a
narrow sphere, within which he wandered incurably idealistic, pursuing
prosaic or utilitarian objects--the favor of princes, place at Courts,
the recovery of his inheritance--in a romantic and unpractical
spirit.[82] Vacillating, irresolute, peevish, he roamed through all the
towns of Italy, demanding more than sympathy could give, exhausting
friendship, changing from place to place, from lord to lord. Yet how
touching was the destiny of this laureled exile, this brilliant wayfarer
on the highroads of a world he never understood! Shelley's phrase, 'the
world's rejected guest' exactly seems to suit him.

[Footnote 82: The numerous plaintive requests for a silver cup, a ring,
a silk cloak and such trifles in his later letters indicate something
quite childish in his pre-occupations.]

And yet he allowed himself to become the spoiled child of his
misfortunes. Without them, largely self-created as they were, Tasso
could not now appeal to our hearts. Nor does he appeal to us as Dante,
eating the salt bread of patrons' tables, does; as Milton, blind and
fallen on evil days; as Chatterton, perishing in pride and silence; as
Johnson, turning from the stairs of Chesterfield; as Bruno, averting
stern eyes from the crucifix; as Leopardi, infusing the virus of his
suffering into the veins of humanity; as Heine, motionless upon his
mattress grave. These more potent personalities, bequeathing to the
world examples of endurance, have won the wreath of never-blasted bays
which shall not be set on Tasso's forehead. We crown him with frailer
leaves, bedewed with tears tender as his own sentiment, and aureoled
with the light that emanates from pure and delicate creations of his
fancy.

Though Tasso does not command admiration by heroism, he wins compassion
as a beautiful and finely-gifted nature inadequate to cope with the
conditions of his century. For a poet to be independent in that age of
intellectual servitude was well-nigh impossible. To be light-hearted and
ironically indifferent lay not in Tasso's temperament. It was no less
difficult for a man of his mental education to maintain the balance
between orthodoxy and speculation, faith and reason, classical culture
and Catholicism, the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. He
belonged in one sense too much, and in another sense too little, to his
epoch. One eminent critic calls him the only Christian of the Italian
Renaissance, another with equal justice treats him as the humanistic
poet of the Catholic Revival.[83]

Properly speaking, he was the genius of that transition from the
Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation, on which I dwelt in the second
chapter of this work. By natural inclination he belonged to the line of
artists which began with Boccaccio and culminated in Ariosto. But his
training and the bias of the times in which he lived, made him break
with Boccaccio's tradition. He tried to be the poet of the Council of
Trent, without having assimilated hypocrisy or acquired false taste,
without comprehending the essentially prosaic and worldly nature of that
religious revolution. He therefore lived and worked in a continual
discord. This may not suffice to account for the unhingement of his
reason. I prefer to explain that by the fatigue of intellectual labor
and worry acting on a brain predisposed for melancholia and overtasked
from infancy. But it does account for the moral martyrdom he suffered,
and the internal perplexity to which he was habitually subject.

[Footnote 83: Carducci, in his essay _Dello Svolgimento della
Letteratura Nazionale_, and Quinet, in his _Révolutions d'ltalie_.]

When Tasso first saw the light, the Italians had rejected the
Reformation and consented to stifle free thought. The culture of the
Renaissance had been condemned; the Spanish hegemony had been accepted.
Of this new attitude the concordat between Charles and Clement, the
Tridentine Council, the Inquisition and the Company of Jesus were
external signs. But these potent agencies had not accomplished their
work in Tasso's lifetime. He was rent in twain because he could not
react against them as Bruno did, and could not identify himself with
them as Loyola was doing. As an artist he belonged to the old order
which was passing, as a Christian to the new order which was emerging.
His position as a courtier, when the Augustan civility of the earlier
Medici was being superseded by dynastic absolutism, complicated his
difficulties. While accepting service in the modern spirit of
subjection, he dreamed of masters who should be Maecenases, and fondly
imagined that poets might still live, like Petrarch, on terms of
equality with princes.

We therefore see in Tasso one who obeyed influences to which his real
self never wholly or consciously submitted. He was not so much out of
harmony with his age as the incarnation of its still unharmonized
contradictions. The pietism instilled into his mind at Naples; the
theories of art imbibed at Padua and Venice; the classical lumber
absorbed during his precocious course of academical studies; the
hypocritical employment of allegory to render sensuous poetry decorous;
the deference to critical opinion and the dictates of literary
lawgivers; the reverence for priests and princes interposed between the
soul and God: these were principles which Tasso accepted without having
properly assimilated and incorporated their substance into his spiritual
being. What the poet in him really was, we perceive when he wrote, to
use Dante's words, as Love dictates; or as Plato said, when he submitted
to the mania of the Muse; or as Horace counseled, when he indulged his
genius. It is in the _Aminta_, in the episodes of the _Gerusalemme_, in
a small percentage of the _Rime_, that we find the true Tasso. For the
rest, he had not the advantages enjoyed by Boiardo and Ariosto in a less
self-conscious age, of yielding to natural impulse after a full and
sympathetic study of classical and mediaeval sources. The analytical
labors of the previous century hampered his creativeness. He brought to
his task preoccupations of divers and self-contradictory
pedantries--pedantries of Catholicism, pedantries of scholasticism,
pedantries of humanism in its exhausted phase, pedantries of criticism
refined and subtilized within a narrow range of problems. He had,
moreover, weighing on his native genius the fears which brooded like
feverish exhalations over the evil days in which he lived--fears of
Church-censure, fears of despotic princes, fears of the Inquisition,
fears of hell, fears of the judgment of academies, fears of social
custom and courtly conventionalities. Neither as poet nor as man had he
the courage of originality. What he lacked was character. He obeyed the
spirit of his age, in so far as he did not, like young David, decline
Saul's armor and enter into combat with Philistinism, wielding his
sling and stone of native force alone. Yet that native force was so
vigorous that, in spite of the panoply of prejudice he wore, in spite of
the cumbrous armor lent him by authority, he moved at times with superb
freedom. In those rare intervals of personal inspiration he dictated the
love-tales of Erminia and Armida, the death-scene of Clorinda, the
pastoral of Aminta and Silvia--episodes which created the music and the
painting of two centuries, and which still live upon the lips of the
people. But inasmuch as his genius labored beneath the superincumbent
weight of precedents and deferences, the poet's nature was strained to
the uttermost and his nervous elasticity was overtaxed. No sooner had he
poured forth freely what flowed freely from his soul, than he returned
on it with scrupulous analysis. The product of his spirit stood before
him as a thing to be submitted to opinion, as a substance subject to the
test of all those pedantries and fears. We cannot wonder that the
subsequent conflict perplexed his reason and sterilized his creative
faculty to such an extent that he spent the second half of his life in
attempting to undo the great work of his prime. The _Gerusalemme
Conquistata_ and the _Sette Giornate_ are thus the splendid triumph
achieved by the feebler over the stronger portions of his nature, the
golden tribute paid by his genius to the evil genius of the age
controlling him. He was a poet who, had he lived in the days of Ariosto,
would have created in all senses spontaneously, producing works of
Virgilian beauty and divine melancholy to match the Homeric beauty and
the divine irony of his great peer. But this was not to be. The spirit
of the times which governed his education, with which he was not
revolutionary enough to break, which he strove as a critic to assimilate
and as a social being to obey, destroyed his independence, perplexed his
judgment, and impaired his nervous energy. His best work was
consequently of unequal value; pure and base metal mingled in its
composition. His worst was a barren and lifeless failure.

CHAPTER IX.

GIORDANO BRUNO.

     Scientific Bias of the Italians checked by Catholic
     Revival--Boyhood of Bruno--Enters Order of S. Dominic at
     Naples--Early Accusations of Heresy--Escapes to Rome--Teaches the
     Sphere at Noli--Visits Venice--At Geneva--At Toulouse--At
     Paris--His Intercourse with Henri III.--Visits England--The French
     Ambassador in London--Oxford--Bruno's Literary Work in
     England--Returns to Paris--Journeys into Germany--Wittenberg,
     Helmstädt, Frankfort--Invitation to Venice from Giovanni
     Mocenigo--His Life in Venice--Mocenigo denounces him to the
     Inquisition--His Trial at Venice--Removal to Rome--Death by Burning
     in 1600--Bruno's Relation to the Thought of his Age and to the
     Thought of Modern Europe--Outlines of his Philosophy.

The humanistic and artistic impulses of the Renaissance were at the
point of exhaustion in Italy. Scholarship declined; the passion for
antiquity expired. All those forms of literature which Boccaccio
initiated--comedy, romance, the idyl, the lyric and the novel--had been
worked out by a succession of great writers. It became clear that the
nation was not destined to create tragic or heroic types of poetry.
Architecture, sculpture and painting had performed their task of
developing mediaeval motives by the light of classic models, and were
now entering on the stage of academical inanity. Yet the mental vigor of
the Italians was by no means exhausted. Early in the sixteenth century
Machiavelli had inaugurated a new method for political philosophy;
Pompanazzo at Padua and Telesio at Cosenza disclosed new horizons for
psychology and the science of nature. It seemed as though the
Renaissance in Italy were about to assume a fresh and more serious
character without losing its essential inspiration. That evolution of
intellectual energy which had begun with the assimilation of the
classics, with the first attempts at criticism, with the elaboration of
style and the perfection of artistic form, now promised to invade the
fields of metaphysical and scientific speculation. It is true, as we
have seen, that the theological problems of the German Reformation took
but slight hold on Italians. Their thinkers were already too far
advanced upon the paths of modern rationalism to feel the actuality of
questions which divided Luther from Zwingli, Calvin from Servetus, Knox
from Cranmer. But they promised to accomplish master-works of
incalculable magnitude in wider provinces of exploration and
investigation. And had this progress not been checked, Italy would have
crowned and completed the process commenced by humanism. In addition to
the intellectual culture already given to Europe, she might have
revealed right methods of mental analysis and physical research. For
this further step in the discovery of man and of the world, the nation
was prepared to bring an army of new pioneers into the field--the
philosophers of the south, and the physicists of the Lombard
universities.

Humanism effected the emancipation of intellect by culture. It called
attention to the beauty and delightfulness of nature, restored man to a
sense of his dignity, and freed him from theological authority. But in
Italy, at any rate, it left his conscience, his religion, his
sociological ideas, the deeper problems which concern his relation to
the universe, the subtler secrets of the world in which he lives,
untouched.

These _novi homines_ of the later Renaissance, as Bacon called them,
these _novatori_, as they were contemptuously styled in Italy, prepared
the further emancipation of the intellect by science. They asserted the
liberty of thought and speech, proclaimed the paramount authority of
that inner light or indwelling deity which man owns in his brain and
breast, and rehabilitated nature from the stigma cast on it by
Christianity. What the Bible was for Luther, that was the great Book of
Nature for Telesio, Bruno, Campanella. The German reformer appealed to
the reason of the individual as conscience; the school of southern Italy
made a similar appeal to intelligence. In different ways Luther and
these speculative thinkers maintained the direct illumination of the
human soul by God, man's immediate dependence on his Maker, repudiating
ecclesiastical intervention, and refusing to rely on any principle but
earnest love of truth.

Had this new phase of the Italian Renaissance been permitted to evolve
itself unhindered, there is no saying how much earlier Europe might have
entered into the possession of that kingdom of unprejudiced research
which is now secured for us. But it was just at the moment when Italy
became aware of the arduous task before her, that the Catholic reaction
set in with all its rigor. The still creative spirit of her children
succumbed to the Inquisition, the Congregation of the Index, the decrees
of Trent, the intellectual submission of the Jesuits, the physical force
of Spanish tyranny, and Roman absolutism. Carnesecchi was burned alive;
Paleario was burned alive; Bruno was burned alive: these three at Rome.
Vanini was burned at Toulouse. Valentino Gentile was executed by
Calvinists at Berne. Campanella was cruelly tortured and imprisoned for
twenty-seven years at Naples. Galileo was forced to humble himself
before ignorant and arrogant monks, and to hide his head in a country
villa. Sarpi felt the knife of an assassin, and would certainly have
perished at the instigation of his Roman enemies but for the protection
guaranteed him by the Signory of Venice. In this way did Italy--or
rather, let us say, the Church which dominated Italy--devour her sons of
light. It is my purpose in the present chapter to narrate the life of
Bruno and to give some account of his philosophy, taking him as the most
illustrious example of the school exterminated by reactionary Rome.

Giordano Bruno was born in 1548 at Nola, an ancient Greek city close to
Naples. He received the baptismal name of Filippo, which he exchanged
for Giordano on assuming the Dominican habit. His parents, though
people of some condition, were poor; and this circumstance may perhaps
be reckoned the chief reason why Bruno entered the convent of S. Dominic
at Naples before he had completed his fifteenth year. It will be
remembered that Sarpi joined the Servites at the age of thirteen, and
Campanella the Dominicans at that of fourteen. In each of these
memorable cases it is probable that poverty had something to do with
deciding a vocation so premature. But there were other inducements,
which rendered the monastic life not unattractive, to a young man
seeking knowledge at a period and in a district where instruction was
both costly and difficult to obtain. Campanella himself informs us that
he was drawn to the order of S. Dominic by its reputation for learning
and by the great names of S. Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. Bruno
possibly felt a similar attraction; for there is nothing in the temper
of his mind to make us believe that he inclined seriously to the
religious life of the cloister.

During his novitiate he came into conflict with the superiors of his
convent for the first time. It was proved against him that he had given
away certain images of saints, keeping only the crucifix; also that he
had told a comrade to lay aside a rhymed version of the Seven Joys of
Mary, and to read the lives of the Fathers of the Church instead. On
these two evidences of insufficient piety, an accusation was prepared
against him which might have led to serious results. But the master of
the novices preferred to destroy the document, retaining only a
memorandum of the fact for future use in case of need.[84] Bruno, after
this event, obeyed the cloistral discipline in quiet, and received
priest's orders in 1572.

At this epoch of his life, when he had attained his twenty-fourth year,
he visited several Dominican convents of the Neapolitan province, and
entered with the want of prudence which was habitual to him into
disputations on theology. Some remarks he let fall on transubstantiation
and the Divinity of Christ, exposed him to a suspicion of Arianism, a
heresy at that time rife in southern Italy. Bruno afterwards confessed
that from an early age he had entertained speculative doubts upon the
metaphysics of the Trinity, though he was always prepared to accept that
dogma in faith as a good Catholic. The Inquisition took the matter up in
earnest, and began to institute proceedings of so grave a nature that
the young priest felt himself in danger. He escaped in his monk's dress,
and traveled to Rome, where he obtained admittance for a short while to
the convent of the Minerva.

[Footnote 84: The final case drawn up against Bruno as heresiarch makes
it appear that his record included even these boyish errors. See the
letter of Gaspar Schopp in Berti.]

We know very little what had been his occupations up to this date. It is
only certain that he had already composed a comedy, _Il Candelajo_:
which furnishes sufficient proof of his familiarity with mundane
manners. It is, in fact, one of the freest and most frankly satirical
compositions for the stage produced at that epoch, and reveals a
previous study of Aretino. Nola, Bruno's birthplace, was famous for the
license of its country folk. Since the day of its foundation by
Chalkidian colonists, its inhabitants had preserved their Hellenic
traditions intact. The vintage, for example, was celebrated with an
extravagance of obscene banter, which scandalized Philip II.'s viceroy
in the sixteenth century.[85] During the period of Bruno's novitiate,
the ordinances of the Council of Trent for discipline in monasteries
were not yet in operation; and it is probable that throughout the
thirteen years of his conventual experience, he mixed freely with the
people and shared the pleasures of youth in that voluptuous climate. He
was never delicate in his choice of phrase, and made no secret of the
admiration which the beauty of women excited in his nature. The
accusations brought against him at Venice contained one article of
indictment implying that he professed distinctly profligate opinions;
and though there is nothing to prove that his private life was vicious,
the tenor of his philosophy favors more liberty of manners than the
Church allowed in theory to her ministers.[86]

[Footnote 85: See 'Vita di Don Pietro di Toledo'_ (Arch. Stov._ vol. ix.
p. 23)]

[Footnote 86: See the passage on polygamy in the _Spaccio della Bestia_.
I may here remark that Campanella, though more orthodox than Bruno,
published opinions upon the relations of the sexes analogous to those of
Plato's Republic in his _Citta del Sole_. He even recommended the
institution of brothels as annexes to schools for boys, in order to
avoid the worse evil of unnatural vice in youth.]

It is of some importance to dwell on this topic; for Bruno's character
and temper, so markedly different from that of Sarpi, for example,
affected in no small measure the form and quality of his philosophy. He
was a poet, gifted with keen and lively sensibilities, open at all pores
to the delightfulness of nature, recoiling from nothing that is human.
At no period of his life was he merely a solitary thinker or a student
of books. When he came to philosophize, when the spiritual mistress,
Sophia, absorbed all other passions in his breast, his method of
exposition retained a tincture of that earlier phase of his experience.

It must not be thought, however, that Bruno prosecuted no serious
studies during this period. On the contrary, he seems to have amassed
considerable erudition in various departments of learning: a fact which
should make us cautious against condemning conventual education as of
necessity narrow and pedantic. When he left Naples, he had acquired
sufficient knowledge of Aristotle and the Schoolmen, among whom he paid
particular attention to S. Thomas and to Raymond Lully. Plato, as
expounded by Plotinus, had taken firm hold on his imagination. He was
versed in the dialectics of the previous age, had mastered mediaeval
cosmography and mathematics, and was probably already acquainted with
Copernicus. The fragments of the Greek philosophers, especially of
Pythagoras and Parmenides, whose metaphysics powerfully influenced his
mind, had been assimilated. Perhaps the writings of Cardinal Cusa, the
theologian who applied mathematics to philosophy, were also in his hands
at the same period. Beside Italian, he possessed the Spanish language,
could write and speak Latin with fluency, and knew something of Greek.
It is clear that he had practiced poetry in the vernacular under the
immediate influence of Tansillo. Theological studies had not been wholly
neglected; for he left behind him at Naples editions of Jerome and
Chrysostom with commentaries of Erasmus. These were books which exposed
their possessors to the interdiction of the Index.

It seems strange that a Dominican, escaping from his convent to avoid a
trial for heresy, should have sought refuge at S. Maria Sopra Minerva,
then the headquarters of the Roman Inquisition. We must, however,
remember that much freedom of movement was allowed to monks, who found a
temporary home in any monastery of their order. Without money, Bruno had
no roof but that of a religious house to shelter him; and he probably
reckoned on evading pursuit till the fatigues of his journey from Naples
had been forgotten. At any rate, he made no lengthy stay in Rome. News
soon reached him that the prosecution begun at Naples was being
transferred to the metropolis. This implied so serious a danger that he
determined to quit Rome in secret. Having flung his frock to the
nettles, he journeyed--how, we do not know--to Genoa, and thence to Noli
on the Riviera. The next time Bruno entered the Dominican convent of S.
Maria sopra Minerva, it was as a culprit condemned to death by the
Inquisition.

At Noli Bruno gained a living for about five months by teaching grammar
to boys and lecturing in private to some gentlefolk upon the Sphere. The
doctrine of the Sphere formed a somewhat miscellaneous branch of
mediaeval science. It embraced the exposition of Ptolemaic astronomy,
together with speculations on the locality of heaven, the motive
principle of the world, and the operation of angelical intelligences.
Bruno, who professed this subject at various times throughout his
wanderings, began now to use it as a vehicle for disseminating
Copernican opinions. It is certain that cosmography formed the basis of
his philosophy, and this may be ascribed to his early occupation with
the sphere. But his restless spirit would not suffer him to linger in
those regions where olive and orange and palm flourish almost more
luxuriantly than in his native Nola. The gust of travel was upon him. A
new philosophy occupied his brain, vertiginously big with incoherent
births of modern thought. What Carlyle called 'the fire in the belly'
burned and irritated his young blood. Unsettled, cast adrift from
convent moorings, attainted for heresy, out of sympathy with resurgent
Catholicism, he became a Vagus Quidam--a wandering student, like the
Goliardi of the Middle Ages. From Noli he passed to Savona; from Savona
to Turin; from Turin to Venice. There his feet might perhaps have found
rest; for Venice was the harbor of all vagrant spirits in that age. But
the city was laid waste with plague. Bruno wrote a little book, now
lost, on 'The Signs of the Times,' and lived upon the sale of it for
some two months. Then he removed to Padua. Here friends persuaded him to
reassume the cowl. There were more than 40,000 monks abroad in Italy,
beyond the limits of their convent. Why should not he avail himself of
house-roof in his travels, a privilege which was always open to friars?
From Padua he journeyed rapidly again through Brescia, Bergamo and Milan
to Turin, crossed Mont Cenis, tarried at Chambéry, and finally betook
himself to Geneva.

Geneva was no fit resting-place for Bruno. He felt an even fiercer
antipathy for dissenting than for orthodox bigotry. The despotism of a
belligerent and persecuting sectarian seemed to him more intolerable,
because less excusable, than the Catholic despotism from which he was
escaping. Galeazzo Caracciolo, Marquis of Vico, who then presided over
the Italian refugees in Geneva, came to visit him. At the suggestion of
this man Bruno once more laid aside his Dominican attire, and began to
earn his bread by working as a reader for the press--a common resort of
needy men of learning in those times. But he soon perceived that the
Calvinistic stronghold offered no freedom, no security of life even, to
one whose mind was bent on new developments of thought. After two
months' residence on the shores of Lake Leman he departed for Toulouse,
which he entered early in 1577.

We cannot help wondering why Bruno chose that city for his refuge.
Toulouse, the only town in France where the Inquisition took firm root
and flourished, Toulouse so perilous to Muret, so mortal to Dolet and
Vanini, ought, one might have fancied, to have been avoided by an
innovator flying from a charge of heresy.[87] Still it must be
remembered that Toulouse was French. Italian influence did not reach so
far. Nor had Bruno committed himself even in thought to open rupture
with Catholicism. He held the opinion, so common at that epoch, so
inexplicable to us now, that the same man could countermine dogmatic
theology as a philosopher, while he maintained it as a Christian. This
was the paradox on which Pomponazzo based his apology, which kept
Campanella within the pale of the Church, and to which Bruno appealed
for his justification when afterwards arraigned before the Inquisitors
at Venice.

[Footnote 87: On the city, university and Inquisition of Toulouse in the
sixteenth century see Christie's _Etiennne Dolet_--a work of sterling
merit and sound scholarship.]

It appears from his own autobiographical confessions that Bruno spent
some six months at Toulouse, lecturing in private on the peripatetic
psychology; after which time he obtained the degree of Doctor in
Philosophy, and was admitted to a Readership in the university. This
post he occupied two years. It was a matter of some moment to him that
professors at Toulouse were not obliged to attend Mass. In his dubious
position, as an escaped friar and disguised priest, to partake of the
Sacrament would have been dangerous. Yet he now appears to have
contemplated the possibility of reconciling himself to the Church, and
resuming his vows in the Dominican order. He went so far as to open his
mind upon this subject to a Jesuit; and afterwards at Paris he again
resorted to Jesuit advice. But these conferences led to nothing. It may
be presumed that the trial begun at Naples and removed to Rome, combined
with the circumstances of his flight and recusant behavior, rendered the
case too grave for compromise. No one but the Pope in Rome could decide
it.

There is no apparent reason why Bruno left Toulouse, except the
restlessness which had become a marked feature in his character. We find
him at Paris in 1579, where he at once began to lecture at the Sorbonne.
It seems to have been his practice now in every town he visited, to
combine private instruction with public disputation. His manners were
agreeable; his conversation was eloquent and witty. He found no
difficulty in gaining access to good society, especially in a city like
Paris, which was then thronged with Italian exiles and courtiers.
Meanwhile his public lectures met with less success than his private
teaching. In conversation with men of birth and liberal culture he was
able to expound views fascinating by their novelty and boldness. Before
an academical audience it behoved him to be circumspect; nor could he
transgress the formal methods of scholastic argumentation.

Two principal subjects seem to have formed the groundwork of his
teaching at this period. The first was the doctrine of the Thirty Divine
Attributes, based on S. Thomas of Aquino. The second was Lully's Art of
Memory and Classification of the Sciences. This twofold material he
worked up into a single treatise, called _De Umbris Idearum_, which he
published in 1582 at Paris, and which contains the germ of all his
leading speculations. Bruno's metaphysics attracted less attention than
his professed Art of Memory. In an age credulous of occult science, when
men believed that power over nature was being won by alchemy and magic,
there was no difficulty in persuading people that knowledge might be
communicated in its essence, and that the faculties of the mind could be
indefinitely extended, without a toilsome course of study. Whether Bruno
lent himself wittingly to any imposture in his exposition of mnemonics,
cannot be asserted. But it is certain that the public were led to expect
from his method more than it could give.

The fame of his Art of Memory reached the king's ears; and Henri III.
sent for him. 'The king, says Bruno, 'had me called one day, being
desirous to know whether the memory I possessed and professed, was
natural or the result of magic art. I gave him satisfaction; by my
explanations and by demonstrations to his own experience, convincing
him that it was not an affair of magic but of science.' Henri, who might
have been disappointed by this result, was taken with his teacher, and
appointed him Reader Extraordinary--a post that did not oblige Bruno to
hear Mass. The Ordinary Readers at Paris had to conform to the usages of
the Catholic Church. On his side, Bruno appears to have conceived high
admiration for the king's ability. In the _Cena della Ceneri_ and the
_Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante,_ composed and published after he had
left France, he paid him compliments in terms of hyperbolical laudation.
It would be vain to comment on these facts. No one conversant with
French society at that epoch could have been ignorant of Henri's
character and vicious life. No one could have pretended that his
employment of the kingdom's wealth to enrich unworthy favorites was
anything but dishonorable, or have maintained that his flagrant
effeminacy was beneficial to society. The fantastic superstition which
the king indulged alternately with sensual extravagances, must have been
odious to one whose spiritual mistress was divine Sophia, and whose
religion was an adoration of the intellect for the One Cause. But Henri
had one quality which seemed of supreme excellence to Bruno. He
appreciated speculation and encouraged men of learning. A man so
enthusiastic as our philosopher may have thought that his own teaching
could expel that Beast Triumphant of the vices from a royal heart
tainted by bad education in a corrupt Court. Bruno, moreover, it must be
remembered, remained curiously inappreciative of the revolution effected
in humanity by Christian morals. Much that is repulsive to us in the
manners of the Valois, may have been indifferent to him.

Bruno had just passed his thirtieth year. He was a man of middling
height, spare figure, and olive complexion, wearing a short
chestnut-colored beard. He spoke with vivacity and copious rhetoric,
aiming rather at force than at purity of diction, indulging in trenchant
metaphors to adumbrate recondite thoughts, passing from grotesque images
to impassioned flights of declamation, blending acute arguments and
pungent satires with grave mystical discourses. The impression of
originality produced by his familiar conversation rendered him agreeable
to princes. There was nothing of the pedant in his nature, nothing about
him of the doctor but his title.

After a residence of rather less than four years in Paris, he resolved
upon a journey to England. Henri supplied him with letters of
introduction to the French ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau de
la Mauvissière. This excellent man, who was then attempting to negotiate
the marriage of Elizabeth with the Duke of Anjou, received Bruno into
his own family as one of the gentlemen of his suite. Under his roof the
wandering scholar enjoyed a quiet home during the two years which he
passed in England--years that were undoubtedly the happiest, as they
were the most industrious, of his checkered life. It is somewhat strange
that Bruno left no trace of his English visit in contemporary
literature. Seven of his most important works were printed in London,
though they bore the impress of Paris and Venice--for the very
characteristic reason that English people only cared for foreign
publications. Four of these, on purely metaphysical topics, were
dedicated to Michel de Castelnau; two, treating of moral and
psychological questions, the famous _Spaccio della Bestia_ and _Gli
eroici Furori_, were inscribed to Sidney. The _Cena delle Ceneri_
describes a supper party at the house of Fulke Greville; and it is clear
from numerous allusions scattered up and down these writings, that their
author was admitted on terms of familiarity to the best English society.
Yet no one mentions him. Fulke Greville in his Life of Sidney passes him
by in silence; nor am I aware that any one of Sidney's panegyrists, the
name of whom is legion, alludes to the homage paid him by the Italian
philosopher.

On his side, Bruno has bequeathed to us animated pictures of his life in
London, portraying the English of that period as they impressed a
sensitive Italian.[88] His descriptions are valuable, since they dwell
on slight particulars unnoticed by ambassadors in their dispatches. He
was much struck with the filth and unkempt desolation of the streets
adjacent to the Thames, the rudeness of the watermen who plied their
craft upon the river, and the stalwart beef-eating brutality of
prentices and porters. The population of London displayed its antipathy
to foreigners by loud remarks, hustled them in narrow lanes, and played
at rough-and-tumble with them after the manners of a bear-garden. But
there is no hint that these big fellows shouldering through the crowd
were treacherous or ready with their knives. The servants of great
houses seemed to Bruno discourteous and savage; yet he says nothing
about such subtlety and vice as rendered the retainers of Italian nobles
perilous to order. He paints the broad portrait of a muscular and
insolently insular people, untainted by the evils of corrupt
civilization. Mounting higher in the social scale, Bruno renders
deserved homage to the graceful and unaffected manners of young English
noblemen, from whom he singles Sidney out as the star of cultivated
chivalry.[89]

[Footnote 88: The 'Cena delle Ceneri,' _Op. It._ vol. i. pp. 137-151].

[Footnote 89: Signor Berti conjectures that Bruno may have met Sidney
first at Milan. But Bruno informs us that he did not become acquainted
with him till he came to London: 'Tra' quali è tanto conosciuto, per
fama prima quanbo eravamo in Milano et in Francia, e poi per experienza
or che siamo ne la sua patria' (_Op. It._ vol. i. p. 145).]

What he says about the well-born youth of England, shows that the flower
of our gentlefolk delighted Southern observers by their mixture of
simplicity and sweetness with good breeding and sound sense. For the
ladies of England he cannot find words fair enough to extol the beauties
of their persons and the purity of their affections. Elizabeth herself
he calls a goddess, _diva_, using phrases which were afterwards recited
in the terms of his indictment before the Inquisition. What pleased him
most in England, was the liberty of speech and thought he there
enjoyed.[90] Society was so urbane, government was so unsuspicious, that
a man could venture to call things by their proper names and speak his
heart out without reserve. That Bruno's panegyric was not prompted by
any wish to flatter national vanity, is proved by the hard truths he
spoke about the grossness of the people, and by his sarcasms on Oxford
pedants. He also ventured to condemn in no unmeasured terms some customs
which surprised him in domestic intercourse. He drew, for instance, a
really gruesome picture of the loving-cup, as it passed round the table,
tasted by a mixed assemblage.[91]

A visit paid by Bruno to Oxford forms a curious episode in his English
experiences. He found that university possessed by pedants and ignorant
professors of the old learning. 'Men of choice,' he calls them,
'trailing their long velvet gowns, this one arrayed with two bright
chains of gold around his neck, that one, good heavens! with such a
valuable hand--twelve rings upon two fingers, giving him the look of
some rich jeweler.'[92] These excellent dons, blest in the possession of
fat fellowships, felt no sympathy for an eccentric interloper of Bruno's
stamp. They allowed him to lecture on the Soul and the Sphere.

[Footnote 90: Preface to 'Lo Spaccio della Bestia' (_Op. It._ vol. ii.
p. 108).]

[Footnote 91: _Op. It._ vol. i. p. 150.]

[Footnote 92: _Op. It._ vol. i. p. 123.]

They even condescended to dispute with him. Yet they made Oxford so
unpleasant a place of residence that after three months he returned to
London. The treatment he experienced rankled in his memory. 'Look where
you like at the present moment, you will find but doctors in grammar
here; for in this happy realm there reigns a constellation of pedantic
stubborn ignorance and presumption mixed with a rustic incivility that
would disturb Job's patience. If you do not believe it, go to Oxford,
and ask to hear what happened to the Nolan, when he disputed publicly
with those doctors of theology in the presence of the Polish Prince
Alasco.[93] Make them tell you how they answered to his syllogisms; how
the pitiful professor, whom they put before them on that grave occasion
as the Corypheus of their university, bungled fifteen times with fifteen
syllogisms, like a chicken in the stubble. Make them tell you with what
rudeness and discourtesy that pig behaved; what patience and humanity he
met from his opponent, who, in truth, proclaimed himself a Neapolitan,
born and brought up beneath more genial heavens. Then learn after what
fashion they brought his public lectures to an end, those on the
Immortality of the Soul and those on the Quintuple Sphere.'[94] The Soul
and the Sphere were Bruno's favorite themes. He handled both at this
period of life with startling audacity.

[Footnote 93: See Wood, _Ath. Oxon._ p. 300.]

[Footnote 94: _Op. It._ vol. i. p. 179.]

They had become for him the means of ventilating speculations on
terrestrial movement, on the multiplicity of habitable worlds, on the
principle of the universe, and on the infinite modes of psychical
metamorphosis. Such topics were not calculated to endear him to people
of importance on the banks of Isis. That he did not humor their
prejudices, appears from a Latin epistle which he sent before him by way
of introduction to the Vice Chancellor.[95] It contains these pompous
phrases: 'Philotheus Jordanus Brunus Nolanus magis laboratae theologiae
doctor, purioris et innocuae sapientiae professor. In praecipuis Europae
academiis notus, probatus et honorifice exceptus philosophus. Nullibi
praeterquam apud barbaros et ignobiles peregrinus. Dormitantium animarum
excubitor. Praesuntuosae et recalcitrantis ignorantiae domitor. Qui in
actibus universis generalem philantropiam protestatur. Qui non magis
Italum quam Britannum, marem quam foeminam, mitratum quam coronatum,
togatum quam armatum, cucullatum hominem quam sine cucullo virum: sed
ilium cujus pacatior, civilior, fidelior et utilior est conversatio
diligit.' Which may thus be Englished: 'Giordano Bruno of Nola, the
God-loving, of the more highly-wrought theology doctor, of the purer and
harmless wisdom professor. In the chief universities of Europe known,
approved, and honorably received as philosopher. Nowhere save among
barbarians and the ignoble a stranger. The awakener of sleeping souls.
The trampler upon presuming and recalcitrant ignorance. Who in all his
acts proclaims a universal benevolence toward man. Who loveth not
Italian more than Briton, male than female, mitred than crowned head,
gowned than armed, frocked than frockless; but seeketh after him whose
conversation is the more peaceful, more civil, more loyal, and more
profitable.' This manifesto, in the style of a mountebank, must have
sounded like a trumpet-blast to set the humdrum English doctors with
sleepy brains and moldy science on their guard against a man whom they
naturally regarded as an Italian charlatan. What, indeed, was this more
highly-wrought theology, this purer wisdom? What call had this
self-panegyrist to stir souls from comfortable slumbers? What right had
he to style the knowledge of his brethren ignorance? Probably he was but
some pestilent fellow, preaching unsound doctrine on the Trinity, like
Peter Martyr Vermigli, who had been properly hissed out of Oxford a
quarter of a century earlier. When Bruno arrived and lectured, their
worst prognostications were fulfilled. Did he not maintain a theory of
the universe which even that perilous speculator and political schemer,
Francis Bacon, sneered at as nugatory?

[Footnote 95: Printed in the _Explicatio triginta Sigillarum_.]

In spite of academical opposition, Bruno enjoyed fair weather, halcyon
months, in England. His description of the Ash Wednesday Supper at Fulke
Greville's, shows that a niche had been carved out for him in London,
where he occupied a pedestal of some importance. Those gentlemen of
Elizabeth's Court did not certainly exaggerate the value of their
Italian guest. In Italy, most of them had met with spirits of Bruno's
stamp, whom they had not time or opportunity to prove. He was one among
a hundred interesting foreigners; and his martyrdom had not as yet set
the crown of glory or of shame upon his forehead. They probably accepted
him as London society of the present day accepts a theosophist from
Simla or Thibet. But his real home at this epoch, the only home, so far
as I can see, that Bruno ever had, after he left his mother at the age
of thirteen for a convent, was the house of Castelnau. The truest chords
in the Italian's voice vibrate when he speaks of that sound Frenchman.
To Mme. de Castelnau he alludes with respectful sincerity, paying her
the moderate and well-weighed homage which, for a noble woman, is the
finest praise. There is no rhetoric in the words he uses to express his
sense of obligation to her kindness. They are delicate, inspired with a
tact which makes us trust the writer's sense of fitness.[96] But Bruno
indulges in softer phrases, drawn from the heart, and eminently
characteristic of his predominant enthusiastic mood, when he comes to
talk of the little girl, Marie, who brightened the home of the
Castelnaus. 'What shall I say of their noble-natured daughter? She has
gazed upon the sun barely one luster and one year; but so far as
language goes, I know not how to judge whether she springs from Italy or
France or England! From her hand, touching the instruments of music, no
man could reckon if she be of corporate or incorporeal substance. Her
perfected goodness makes one marvel whether she be flown from heaven, or
be a creature of this common earth. It is at least evident to every man
that for the shaping of so fair a body the blood of both her parents has
contributed, while for the tissue of her rare spirit the virtues of
their heroic souls have been combined.'[97]

[Footnote 96: _Op. It._ vol. i. p. 267.]

[Footnote 97: _Loc. cit._ p. 267.]

It was time to leave these excellent and hospitable friends. 'Forth from
the tranquil to the trembling air' Bruno's unquiet impulse drove him. He
returned to Paris at the end of 1585, disputed before the Sorbonne with
some success of scandal, and then, disquieted by the disorders of the
realm, set out for Germany. We find him at Marburg in the following
year, ill-received by the University, but welcomed by the Prince. Thence
we follow him to Mainz, and afterwards to Wittenberg, where he spent two
years. Here he conceived a high opinion of the Germans. He foresaw that
when they turned their attention from theology to science and pure
speculation, great results might be expected from their solid
intellectual capacity. He seems in fact to have taken a pretty accurate
measure of the race as it has subsequently shown itself. Wittenberg he
called the German Athens. Luther, he recognized as a hero of humanity,
who, like himself, defied authority in the defense of truth. Yet he felt
no sympathy for the German reformers. When asked by the Inquisitors at
Venice what he thought about these men, he replied: 'I regard them as
more ignorant than I am. I despise them and their doctrines. They do not
deserve the name of theologians, but of pedants.' That this reply was
sincere, is abundantly proved by passages in the least orthodox of
Bruno's writings. It was the weakness of a philosopher's position at
that moment that he derived no support from either of the camps into
which Christendom was then divided. Catholics and Protestants of every
shade regarded him with mistrust.

A change in the religious policy of Saxony, introduced after the death
of the Elector Augustus, caused Bruno to leave Wittenberg for Prague in
1588. From Prague he passed to Helmstädt, where the Duke Heinrich Julius
of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel received him with distinction, and bestowed on
him a purse of eighty dollars.[98] Here he conceived two of his most
important works, the _De Monade_ and _De Triplici Minimo_, both written
in Latin hexameters.[99] Why he adopted this new form of exposition is
not manifest. Possibly he was tired of dialogues, through which he had
expressed his thought so freely in England. Possibly a German public
would have been indifferent to Italian. Possibly he was emulous of his
old masters, Parmenides and Lucretius.

[Footnote 98: It is a curious fact that the single copy of Campanella's
poems on which Orelli based his edition of 1834, came from
Wolfenbüttel.]

[Footnote 99: They were published at Frankfort, and dedicated to the
friendly Prince of Wolfenbüttel.]

At Helmstädt he came into collision with Boetius, the rector of the
Evangelical church, who issued a sentence of excommunication against
him. Like a new Odysseus, he set forth once again upon his voyage, and
in the spring of 1590 anchored in Frankfort on the Main. A convent (that
of the Carmelites) sheltered him in this city, where he lived on terms
of intimacy with the printers Wechel and Fischer, and other men of
learning. It would appear from evidence laid before the Venetian
Inquisitors that the prior of the monastery judged him to be a man of
genius and doctrine, devoid of definite religion, addicted to fantastic
studies, and bent on the elaboration of a philosophy that should
supersede existing creeds.[100] This was a not inaccurate portrait of
Bruno as he then appeared to conservatives of commonplace capacity. Yet
nothing occurred to irritate him in the shape of persecution or
disturbance. Bruno worked in quiet at Frankfort, pouring forth thousands
of metaphysical verses, some at least of which were committed to the
press in three volumes published by the Wechels.

[Footnote 100: Britanno's Deposition, Berti's _Vita di G.B._ p. 337.]

Between Frankfort and Italy literary communications were kept open
through the medium of the great fair, which took place every year at
Michaelmas.[101] Books formed one of the principal commodities, and the
Italian bibliopoles traveled across the Alps to transact business on
these important occasions. It happened by such means that a work of
Bruno's, perhaps the _De Monude_, found its way to Venice.[102] Exposed
on the counter of Giambattista Ciotto, then plying the trade of
bookseller in that city, this treatise met the eyes of a Venetian
gentleman called Giovanni Mocenigo. He belonged to one of the most
illustrious of the still surviving noble families in Venice. The long
line of their palaces upon the Grand Canal has impressed the mind of
every tourist. One of these houses, it may be remarked, was occupied by
Lord Byron, who, had he known of Bruno's connection with the Mocenighi,
would undoubtedly have given to the world a poem or a drama on the fate
of our philosopher. Giovanni Mocenigo was a man verging on middle life,
superstitious, acknowledging the dominion of his priest, but alive in a
furtive way to perilous ideas. Morally, he stands before us as a twofold
traitor: a traitor to his Church, so long as he hoped to gain illicit
power by magic arts; a traitor to his guest, so soon as he discovered
that his soul's risk brought himself no profit.[103] He seems to have
imagined that Bruno might teach him occult science or direct him on a
royal way to knowledge without strenuous study. Subsequent events proved
that, though he had no solid culture, he was fascinated by the
expectation of discovering some great secret. It was the vice of the age
to confound science with sorcery, and Bruno had lent himself to this
delusion by his whimsical style. Perhaps the booksellers, who then
played a part scarcely less prominent than that of the barbers in
diffusing gossip, inflamed Mocenigo's curiosity by painting the author
of the puzzling volume in seductive colors. Any how this man sent two
letters, one through Ciotto, and one direct to Bruno, praying him to
visit Venice, professing his desire for instruction, and offering him an
honorable place of residence.

[Footnote 101: Sarpi mentions the return of Ciotto from the fair
(_Lettere_, vol. i. p. 527).]

[Footnote 102: Ciotto, before the Inquisition, called the book _De
Minimo Magno et Mensura_. It may therefore have been the _De Triplici
Minimo et Mensura_, and not the _De Monade_ (_Vita di G.B._ p. 334).]

[Footnote 103: Mocenigo told Ciotto: I wish first to see what I can get
from him of those things which he promised me, so as not wholly to lose
what I have given him, and afterwards I mean to surrender him to the
censure of the Holy Office' (Berti, p. 335).]

In an evil hour Bruno accepted this invitation. No doubt he longed to
see Italy again after so many years of exile. Certainly he had the right
to believe that he would find hospitality and a safe refuge in Venice.
Had not a Venetian noble pledged his word for the former? Was not the
latter a privilege which S. Mark extended to all suppliants? The
Republic professed to shield even the outlaws of the Inquisition, if
they claimed her jurisdiction. There was therefore no palpable
imprudence in the step which Bruno now took. Yet he took it under
circumstances which would have made a cautious man mistrustful. Of
Mocenigo he knew merely nothing. But he did know that writs from the
Holy Office had been out against himself in Italy for many years, during
which he had spent his time in conversing with heretics and printing
works of more than questionable orthodoxy.[104] Nothing proves the force
of the vagrant's impulse which possessed Bruno, more than his light and
ready consent to Giovanni Mocenigo's proposal.

He set off at once from Frankfort, leaving the MS. of one of his
metaphysical poems in Wechel's hands to print, and found himself at the
end of 1591 a guest of his unknown patron. I have already described what
Mocenigo hoped to gain from Bruno--the arts of memory and invention,
together with glimpses into occult science.[105] We know how little
Bruno was able to satisfy an in satiable curiosity in such matters. One
of his main weaknesses was a habit of boasting and exaggerating his own
powers, which at first imposed upon a vulgar audience and then left them
under the impression that he was a charlatan. The bookseller Ciotto
learned from students who had conversed with him at Frankfort, that 'he
professed an art of memory and other secrets in the sciences, but that
all the persons who had dealt with him in such matters, had left him
discontinued.'[106]

[Footnote 104: Mere correspondence with heretics exposed an Italian to
the Inquisition. Residence in heretical lands, except with episcopal
license, was forbidden. The rules of the Index proscribed books in which
the name of a heretic was cited with approval.]

[Footnote 105: Bruno speaks himself of 'arte della memoria et inventiva'
(_op. cit._ p. 339). Ciotto mentions 'la memoria et altre scientie'
(_ib._ p. 334).]

[Footnote 106: _Op. cit._ p. 335.]

Another weakness in his character was extraordinary want of caution.
Having lived about the world so long, and changed from town to town,
supporting himself as he best could, he had acquired the custom of
attracting notice by startling paradoxes. Nor does he seem to have cared
to whom he made the dangerous confidence of his esoteric beliefs.
His public writings, presumably composed with a certain
circumspection--since everybody knows the proverb _litera scripta
manet_--contain such perilous stuff that--when we consider what their
author may have let fall in unguarded conversation--we are prepared to
credit the charges brought against him by Mocenigo. For it must now be
said that this man, 'induced by the obligation of his conscience and by
order of his confessor,' denounced Bruno to the Inquisition on May 23,
1592.

When the two men, so entirely opposite in their natures, first came
together, Bruno began to instruct his patron in the famous art of memory
and mathematics. At the same time he discoursed freely and copiously,
according to his wont, upon his own philosophy. Mocenigo took no
interest in metaphysics, and was terrified by the audacity of Bruno's
speculations. It enraged him to find how meager was Bruno's vaunted
method for acquiring and retaining knowledge without pains. In his
secret heart he believed that the teacher whom he had maintained at a
considerable cost, was withholding the occult knowledge he so much
coveted. Bruno, meanwhile, attended Andrea Morosini's receptions in the
palace at S. Luca, and frequented those of Bernardo Secchini at the sign
of the Golden Ship in the Merceria. He made friends with scholars and
men of fashion; absented himself for weeks together at Padua; showed
that he was tired of Mocenigo; and ended by rousing that man's
suspicious jealousy. Mocenigo felt that he had been deceived by an
impostor, who, instead of furnishing the wares for which he bargained,
put him off with declamations on the nature of the universe. What was
even more terrible, he became convinced that this charlatan was an
obstinate heretic.

Whether Bruno perceived the gathering of the storm above his head,
whether he was only wearied with the importunities of his host, or
whether, as he told the Inquisitors, he wished to superintend the
publication of some books at Frankfort, does not greatly signify. At any
rate, he begged Mocenigo to excuse him from further attendance, since he
meant to leave Venice. This happened on Thursday, May 21. Next day,
Mocenigo sent his bodyservant together with five or six gondoliers into
Bruno's apartment, seized him, and had him locked up in a ground-floor
room of the palace. At the same time he laid hands on all Bruno's
effects, including the MS. of one important treatise _On the Seven
Liberal Arts_, which was about to be dedicated to Pope Clement VIII.
This, together with other unpublished works, exists probably in the
Vatican Archives, having been sent with the papers referring to Bruno's
trial from Venice when he was transported to Rome. The following day,
which was a Saturday, Mocenigo caused Bruno to be carried to one of
those cellars (_magazzeni terreni_) which are used in Venice for storing
wood, merchandise or implements belonging to gondolas. In the evening, a
Captain of the Council of Ten removed him to the dungeons of the
Inquisition. On the same day, May 23, Mocenigo lodged his denunciation
with the Holy Office.

The heads of this accusation, extracted from the first report and from
two subsequent additions made by the delator, amount to these. Though
Bruno was adverse to religions altogether, he preferred the Catholic to
any other; but he believed it to stand in need of thorough reform. The
doctrines of the Trinity, the miraculous birth of Christ, and
transubstantiation, were insults to the Divine Being. Christ had seduced
the people by working apparent miracles. So also had the Apostles. To
develop a new philosophy which should supersede religions, and to prove
his superiority in knowledge over S. Thomas and all the theologians, was
Bruno's cherished scheme. He did not believe in the punishment of sins;
but held a doctrine of the transmigration of souls, and of the
generation of the human soul from refuse. The world he thought to be
eternal. He maintained that there were infinite worlds, all made by God,
who wills to do what he can do, and therefore produces infinity. The
religious orders of Catholicism defile the earth by evil life,
hypocrisy, and avarice. All friars are only asses. Indulgence in carnal
pleasures ought not to be reckoned sinful. The man confessed to having
freely satisfied his passions to the utmost of his opportunities.

On being questioned before the Inquisitors, Mocenigo supported these
charges. He added that when he had threatened Bruno with delation, Bruno
replied, first, that he did not believe he would betray his confidence
by making private conversation the groundwork of criminal charges;
secondly, that the utmost the Inquisition could do, would be to inflict
some penance and force him to resume the cowl. These, which are
important assertions, bearing the mark of truth, throw light on his want
of caution in dealing with Mocenigo, and explain the attitude he
afterwards assumed before the Holy Office.

Mocenigo's accusations in the main yield evidences of sincerity. They
are exactly what we should expect from the distortion of Bruno's
doctrines by a mind incapable of comprehending them. In short, they are
as veracious as the image of a face reflected on a spoon. Certain gross
details (the charges, for example, of having called Christ a _tristo_
who was deservedly hung, and of having sneered at the virginity of Mary)
may possibly have emanated from the delator's own imagination.[107]

[Footnote 107: They remind us of the blasphemies imputed to Christopher
Marlowe.]

Bruno emphatically repudiated these; though some passages in his
philosophical poems, published at Frankfort, contain the substance of
their blasphemies. A man of Mocenigo's stamp probably thought that he
was faithfully representing the heretic's views, while in reality he was
drawing his own gross conclusions from skeptical utterances about the
origin of Christianity which he obscurely understood. It does not seem
incredible, however, that Bruno, who was never nice in his choice of
language, and who certainly despised historical Christianity, let fall
crude witticisms upon such and other points in Mocenigo's presence.

Bruno appeared before the Venetian Inquisition on May 29. His
examination was continued at intervals from this date till July 30. His
depositions consist for the most part of an autobiographical statement
which he volunteered, and of a frank elucidation of his philosophical
doctrines in their relation to orthodox belief. While reading the
lengthy pages of his trial, we seem to overhear a man conversing
confidentially with judges from whom he expected liberal sympathy. Over
and over again, he relies for his defense upon the old distinction
between philosophy and faith, claiming to have advocated views as a
thinker which he does not hold as a Christian. 'In all my books I have
used philosophical methods of definition according to the principles and
light of nature, not taking chief regard of that which ought to be held
in faith; and I believe they do not contain anything which can support
the accusation that I have professedly impugned religion rather than
that I have sought to exalt philosophy; though I may have expounded many
impieties based upon my natural light.'[108] In another place he uses
the antithesis, 'speaking like a Christian and according to
theology'--'speaking after the manner of philosophy.'[109] The same
antithesis is employed to justify his doctrine of metempsychosis:
'Speaking as a Catholic, souls do not pass from one body into another,
but go to paradise or purgatory or hell; yet, following philosophical
reasonings, I have argued that, the soul being inexistent without the
body and inexistent in the body, it can be indifferently in one or in
another body, and can pass from one into another, which, if it be not
true, seems at any rate probable according to the opinion of
Pythagoras.'[110]

[Footnote 108: _Op. cit._ p. 352.]

[Footnote 109: _Ibid._ p. 355.]

[Footnote 110: _Ibid._ p. 362.]

That he expected no severe punishment appears from the terms of his
so-called recantation. 'I said that I wished to present myself before
the feet of his Holiness with certain books which I approve, though I
have published others which I do not now approve; whereby I meant to say
that some works composed and published by me do not meet with my
approbation, inasmuch as in these I have spoken and discussed too
philosophically, in unseemly wise, not altogether as a good Christian
ought; in particular I know that in some of these works I have taught
and philosophically held things which ought to be attributed to the
power, wisdom and goodness of God according to the Christian faith,
founding doctrine in such matters on sense and reason, not upon
faith.'[111] At the very end of his examination, he placed himself in
the hands of his judges, 'confessing his errors with a willing mind,'
acknowledging that he had 'erred and strayed from the Church,' begging
for such castigation as shall not 'bring public dishonor on the sacred
robe which he had worn,' and promising to 'show a noteworthy reform, and
to recompense the scandal he had caused by edification at least equal in
magnitude.'[112] These professions he made upon his knees, evincing
clearly, as it seems to me, that at this epoch he was ready to rejoin
the Dominican order, and that, as he affirmed to Mocenigo, he expected
no worse punishment than this.

In attempting to estimate Bruno's recantation, we must remember that he
felt no sympathy at all for heretics. When questioned about them, he was
able to quote passages from his own works in which he called the
Reformation a Deformation of religion.[113] Lutheran and Calvinist
theologians were alike pedants in his eyes.[114] There is no doubt that
Bruno meant what he said; and had he been compelled to choose one of the
existing religions, he would have preferred Catholicism. He was, in
fact, at a period of life when he wished to dedicate his time in quiet
to metaphysical studies. He had matured his philosophy and brought it
to a point at which he thought it could be presented as a peace-offering
to the Supreme Pontiff. Conformity to ecclesiastical observances seemed
no longer irksome to the world-experienced, wide-reaching mind of the
man. Nor does he appear to have anticipated that his formal submission
would not be readily accepted. He reckoned strangely, in this matter,
without the murderous host into whose clutches he had fallen.

[Footnote 111: _Op. cit._ p. 349]

[Footnote 112: _Ibid._ p. 384]

[Footnote 113: _Ibid._ p. 364]

[Footnote 114: _Ibid._ p. 363]

Searching interrogations touching other heads in the evidence against
him, as blasphemous remarks on sacred persons, intercourse with
heretics, abuse of the religious orders, dealings in magic arts,
licentious principles of conduct, were answered by Bruno with a frank
assurance, which proves his good conscience in essentials and his firm
expectation of a favorable issue to the affair. Mocenigo had described
him as _indemoniato_; and considering the manifest peril in which he now
stood, there is something scarcely sane in the confidence he showed. For
Mocenigo himself he reserved words of bitterest scorn and indignation.
When questioned in the usual terms whether he had enemies at Venice, he
replied: 'I know of none but Ser Giovanni Mocenigo and his train of
servants. By him I have been grievously injured, more so than by living
man, seeing he has murdered me in my life, my honor and my property,
having imprisoned me in his own house and stolen all my writings, books,
and other effects. And this he did because he not only wished that I
should teach him everything I know, but also wished to prevent my
teaching it to any one but him. He has continued to threaten me upon the
points of life and honor, unless I should teach him everything I
knew.'[115]

The scene closes over Bruno in the Venetian Inquisition on July 30,
1592. We do not behold him again till he enters the Minerva at Rome to
receive his death-sentence on February 9, 1600. What happened in the
interval is almost a blank. An exchange of letters took place between
Rome and Venice concerning his extradition, and the Republic made some
show of reluctance to part with a refugee within its jurisdiction. But
this diplomatic affair was settled to the satisfaction of both parties,
and Bruno disappeared into the dungeons of the Roman Inquisition in the
month of January 1593.

Seven years of imprisonment was a long period.[116]

[Footnote 115: _Op. cit._ p. 378.]

[Footnote 116: These years were not all spent at Rome. From the Records
of the Inquisition, it appears that he arrived in Rome on February 27,
1598, and that his trial in form began in February 1599. The Pope
ratified his sentence of death on January 20, 1600; this was publicly
promulgated on February 8, and carried into effect on the subsequent
17th. Where Bruno was imprisoned between January 1593, and February 1598
is not known.]

We find it hard to understand why Bruno's prosecution occupied the Holy
Office through this space of time. But conjectures on the subject are
now useless. Equally futile is it to speculate whether Bruno offered to
conform in life and doctrine to the Church at Rome as he had done at
Venice. The temptation to do so must have been great. Most probably he
begged for grace, but grace was not accorded on his own terms; and he
chose death rather than dishonor and a lie in the last resort, or rather
than life-long incarceration. It is also singular that but few
contemporaries mention the fact of his condemnation and execution. Rome
was crowded in the jubilee year of 1600. Bruno was burned in open
daylight on the Campo di Fiora. Yet the only eye-witness who records the
event, is Gaspar Schoppe, or Scioppius, who wrote a letter on the
subject to his friend Rittershausen. Kepler, eight years afterwards,
informed his correspondent Breugger that Bruno had been really burned:
'he bore his agonizing death with fortitude, abiding by the asseveration
that all religions are vain, and that God identifies himself with the
world, circumference and center.' Kepler, it may be observed, conceived
a high opinion of Bruno's speculations, and pointed him out to Galileo
as the man who had divined the infinity of solar systems in their
correlation to one infinite order of the universe.[117]

[Footnote 117: Doubts have recently been raised as to whether Bruno was
really burned. But these are finally disposed of by a succinct and
convincing exposition of the evidence by Mr. R.C. Christie, in
_Macmillan's Magazine_, October 1885. In addition to Schoppe and Kepler,
we have the reference to Bruno's burning published by Mersenne in 1624;
but what is far more important, the _Avviso di Roma_ for February
19,1600, records this event as having occurred upon the preceding
Thursday. To Signor Berti's two works, _Documenti intorno a G. Bruno_
(Roma, 1880), and _Copernico e le vicende_, etc. (Roma, 1876), we owe
most of the material which has been lucidly sifted by Mr. R.C.
Christie.]

Scioppius was a German humanist of the elder Italianated type, an
elegant Latin stylist, who commented indifferently on the _Priapeia_ and
the Stoic philosophy. He abjured Protestantism, and like Muretus, sold
his pen to Rome. The Jesuits, in his pompous panegyric, were first
saluted as 'the praetorian cohort of the camp of God.' Afterwards, when
he quarreled with their Order, he showered invectives on them in the
manner of a Poggio or Filelfo. The literary infamies of the fifteenth
century reappeared in his polemical attacks on Protestants, and in his
satires upon Scaliger. Yet he was a man of versatile talents and
considerable erudition. It must be mentioned in his honor that he
visited Campanella in his prison, and exerted himself for his
liberation. Campanella dedicated his _Atheismus Triumphatus_ to
Scioppius, calling him 'the dawn-star of our age.' Schoppe was also the
first credible authority to warn Sarpi of the imminent peril he ran from
Roman hired assassins, as I hope to relate in my chapter upon Sarpi's
life. This man's letter to his friend is the single trustworthy document
which we possess regarding the last hours of Bruno. Its inaccuracies on
minor points may be held to corroborate his testimony.

Scioppius refers to Bruno's early heresies on Transubstantiation and the
Virginity of Mary. He alludes to the _Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante_,
as though it had been a libel on the Pope.[118]

[Footnote 118: 'Londinam perfectus, libellum istic edit de Bestia
triumphante, h.e. de Papa. quem vestri honoris causa bestiam appellare
solent.']

He then enumerates Bruno's heterodox opinions, which had been recited
in the public condemnation pronounced on the heresiarch. 'Horrible and
most utterly absurd are the views he entertained, as, for example, that
there are innumerable worlds; that the soul migrates from body to body,
yea into another world, and that one soul can inform two bodies; that
magic is good and lawful; that the Holy Spirit is nothing but the Soul
of the World, which Moses meant when he wrote that it brooded on the
waters; that the world has existed from eternity; that Moses wrought his
miracles by magic, being more versed therein than the Egyptians, and
that he composed his own laws; that the Holy Scriptures are a dream, and
that the devils will be saved; that only the Jews descend from Adam and
Eve, the rest of men from that pair whom God created earlier; that
Christ is not God, but that he was an eminent magician who deluded
mankind, and was therefore rightly hanged, not crucified; that the
prophets and Apostles were men of naught, magicians, and for the most
part hanged: in short, without detailing all the monstrosities in which
his books abound, and which he maintained in conversation, it may be
summed up in one word that he defended every error that has been
advanced by pagan philosophers or by heretics of earlier and present
times.' Accepting this list as tolerably faithful to the terms of
Bruno's sentence, heard by Scioppius in the hall of Minerva, we can see
how Mocenigo's accusation had been verified by reference to his
published works. The _De Monade_ and _De Triplici_ contain enough
heterodoxy to substantiate each point.

On February 9, Bruno was brought before the Holy Office at S. Maria
sopra Minerva. In the presence of assembled Cardinals, theologians, and
civil magistrates, his heresies were first recited. Then he was
excommunicated, and degraded from his priestly and monastic offices.
Lastly, he was handed over to the secular arm, 'to be punished with all
clemency and without effusion of blood.' This meant in plain language to
be burned alive. Thereupon Bruno uttered the memorable and monumental
words: 'Peradventure ye pronounce this sentence on me with a greater
fear than I receive it.' They were the last words he spoke in public. He
was removed to the prisons of the State, where he remained eight days,
in order that he might have time to repent. But he continued obdurate.
Being an apostate priest and a relapsed heretic, he could hope for no
remission of his sentence. Therefore, on February 17, he marched to a
certain and horrible death. The stake was built up on the Campo di
Fiora. Just before the wood was set on fire, they offered him the
crucifix.[119] He turned his face away from it in stern disdain. It was
not Christ but his own soul, wherein he believed the Diety resided, that
sustained Bruno at the supreme moment.

[Footnote 119: We may remember that while a novice at Naples, he first
got into trouble by keeping the crucifix as the only religious symbol
which he respected, when he parted with images of saints.]

No cry, no groan, escaped his lips. Thus, as Scioppius affectedly
remarked, 'he perished miserably in flames, and went to report in those
other worlds of his imagination, how blasphemous and impious men are
handled by the Romans.'

Whatever we may think of the good taste of Bruno's sarcasms upon the
faith in which he had been bred--and it is certain that he never rightly
apprehended Christianity in its essence--there is no doubt he died a
valiant martyr to the truth as he conceived it. 'His death like that of
Paleario, Carnesecchi, and so many more, no less than countless exiles
suffered for religious causes, are a proof that in Italy men had begun
to recognize their obligation to a faith, the duty of obedience to a
thought: an immense progress, not sufficiently appreciated even by
modern historians.'[120] Bruno was a hero in the battle for the freedom
of the conscience, for the right of man to think and speak in
liberty.[121]

[Footnote 120: These pregnant words are in Berti's _Vita di G.B._ p.
299.]

[Footnote 121: He well deserves this name, in spite of his recantation
at Venice; for it seems incredible that he could not by concessions have
purchased his life. As Breugger wrote with brutal crudity to Kepler:
'What profit did he gain by enduring such torments? If there were no God
to punish crimes, as he believed, could he not have pretended any thing
to save his life?' We may add that the alternative to death for a
relapsed apostate was perpetual incarceration; and seven years of prison
may well have made Bruno prefer death with honor.]

Just five years before this memorable 17th of February, Tasso had passed
quietly away in S. Onofrio. 'How dissimilar in genius and fortune,'
exclaims Berti, 'were these men, though born under the same skies,
though in childhood they breathed the same air! Tasso a Christian and
poet of the cross; Bruno hostile to all religious symbols. The one,
tired and disillusioned of the world, ends his days in the repose of the
convent; the other sets out from the convent to expire upon the
scaffold, turning his eyes away from the crucifix.'[122] And yet how
much alike in some important circumstances of their lives were these two
men! Both wanderers, possessed by that spirit of vagrancy which is the
outward expression of an inner restlessness. The unfrocked friar, the
courtier out of service, had no home in Italy. Both were pursued by an
oestrum corresponding to the intellectual perturbations which closed the
sixteenth century, so different from the idyllic calm that rested upon
Ariosto and the artists of its opening years. Sufficient justice has not
yet been done in history to the Italian wanderers and exiles of this
period, men who carried the spirit of the Renaissance abroad, after the
Renaissance had ended in Italy, to the extremest verges of the civilized
world. An enumeration of their names, an examination of their services
to modern thought, would show how puissant was the intellectual
influence of Italy in that period of her political decadence.[123]

[Footnote 122: _op. cit._ p. 70.]

[Footnote 123: Both Berti and Quinet have made similar remarks, which,
indeed, force themselves upon a student of the sixteenth century.]

Bruno has to be treated from two distinct but interdependent points of
view--in his relation to contemporary thought and the Renaissance; and
in his relation to the evolution of modern philosophy--as the critic of
mediaeval speculation and the champion of sixteenth-century enthusiasm;
and also as the precursor of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Schelling,
Hegel, Darwin.

From the former of these two points of view Bruno appears before us as
the man who most vitally and comprehensively grasped the leading
tendencies of his age in their intellectual essence. He left behind him
the mediaeval conception of an extra-mundane God, creating a finite
world, of which this globe is the center, and the principal episode in
the history of which is the series of events from the Fall, through the
Incarnation and Crucifixion, to the Last Judgment.[124] He substituted
the conception of an ever-living, ever-acting, ever-self-effectuating
God, immanent in an infinite universe, to the contemplation of whose
attributes the mind of man ascends by study of Nature and interrogation
of his conscience. The rehabilitation of the physical world and of
humanity as part of its order, which the Renaissance had already
indirectly effected through the medium of arts and literature and modes
of life, found in Bruno an impassioned metaphysical supporter. He
divinized Nature, not by degrading the Deity to matter, but by lifting
matter to participation in the divine existence. The Renaissance had
proclaimed the dignity of man considered as a mundane creature, and not
in his relation to a hypothetical other-world. It abundantly manifested
the beauty and the joy afforded by existence on this planet, and
laughingly discarded past theological determinations to the contrary of
its new Gospel. Bruno undertook the systematization of Renaissance
intuitions; declared the divine reality of Nature and of man;
demonstrated that we cannot speculate God, cannot think ourselves,
cannot envisage the universe, except under the form of one living,
infinite, eternal, divinely-sustained and soul-penetrated complex. He
repudiated authority of every sort, refusing to acknowledge the decrees
of the Church, freely criticising past philosophers, availing himself of
all that seemed to him substantial in their speculations, but appealing
in the last resort to that inner witness, that light of reason, which
corresponds in the mental order to conscience in the moral. As he
deified Nature, so he emancipated man as forming with Nature an integral
part of the supreme Being. He was led upon this path to combat Aristotle
and to satirize Christian beliefs, with a subtlety of scholastic
argumentation and an acerbity of rhetoric that now pass for antiquated.
Much that is obsolete in his writings must be referred to the polemical
necessities of an age enthralled by peripatetic conceptions, and
saturated with the ecclesiastical divinity of the schoolmen.

[Footnote 124: This theological conception of history inspired the
sacred drama of the Middle Ages, known to us as Cyclical Miracle Plays.]

These forces of the philosophy he sought to supersede, had to be
attacked with their own weapons and by methods adapted to the spirit of
his age. Similar judgment may be passed upon his championship of the
Copernican system. That system was the pivot of his metaphysic, the
revelation to which he owed his own conception of the universe. His
strenuous and ingenious endeavors to prove its veracity, his elaborate
and often-repeated refutations of the Ptolemaic theory, appear to modern
minds superfluous. But we must remember what a deeply-penetrating,
widely-working revolution Copernicus effected in cosmology, how he
dislocated the whole fabric upon which Catholic theology rested, how new
and unintelligible his doctrine then seemed, and what vast horizons he
opened for speculation on the destinies of man. Bruno was the first
fully to grasp the importance of the Copernican hypothesis, to perceive
its issues and to adapt it to the formation of a new ontology.
Copernicus, though he proclaimed the central position of the sun in our
system, had not ventured to maintain the infinity of the universe. For
him, as for the elder physicists, there remained a sphere of fixed stars
inclosing the world perceived by our senses within walls of crystal.
Bruno broke those walls, and boldly asserted the now recognized
existence of numberless worlds in space illimitable. His originality
lies in the clear and comprehensive notion he formed of the Copernican
discovery, and in his application of its corollaries to the Renaissance
apocalypse of deified nature and emancipated man. The deductions he drew
were so manifold and so acute that they enabled him to forecast the
course which human thought has followed in all provinces of speculation.

This leads us to consider how Bruno is related to modern science and
philosophy. The main point seems to be that he obtained a vivid mental
picture (_Vorstellung_) of the physical universe, differing but little
in essentials from that which has now come to be generally accepted. In
reasoning from this concept as a starting-point, he formed opinions upon
problems of theology, ontology, biology and psychology, which placed him
out of harmony with medaeival thought, and in agreement with the thought
of our own time. Why this was so, can easily be explained. Bruno, first
of all philosophers, adapted science, in the modern sense of that term,
to metaphysic. He was the first to perceive that a revolution in our
conception of the material universe, so momentous as that effected by
Copernicus, necessitated a new theology and a new philosophical method.
Man had ceased to be the center of all things; this globe was no longer
'the hub of the universe,' but a small speck floating on infinity. The
Christian scheme of the Fall and the Redemption, if not absolutely
incompatible with the new cosmology was rendered by it less conceivable
in any literal sense. Some of the main points on which the early
Christians based their faith, and which had hardened into dogmas
through the course of centuries--such, for instance, as the Ascension
and the Second Advent--ceased to have their old significance. In a world
where there was neither up nor down, the translation of a corporeal
Deity to some place above the clouds, whence he would descend to judge
men at the last day, had only a grotesque or a symbolic meaning; whereas
to the first disciples, imbued with theories of a fixed celestial
sphere, it presented a solemn and apparently well-founded expectation.
The fundamental doctrine of the Incarnation, in like manner, lost
intelligibility and value, when God had to be thought no longer as the
Creator of a finite cosmos, but as a Being commensurate with infinity.
It was clear to a mind so acute as Bruno's that the dogmas of the Church
were correlated to a view of the world which had been superseded; and he
drew the logical inference that they were at bottom but poetical and
popular adumbrations of the Deity in terms concordant with erroneous
physical notions. Aristotle and Ptolemy, the masters of philosophy and
cosmography based upon a theory of the universe as finite and
circumscribed within fixed limits, lent admirable aid to the theological
constructions of the Middle Ages. The Church, adopting their science,
gave metaphysical and logical consistency to those earlier poetical and
popular conceptions of the religious sense. The _naïf_ hopes and
romantic mythologies of the first Christians stiffened into syllogisms
and ossified in the huge fabric of the _Summa_. But Aristotle and
Ptolemy were now dethroned. Bruno, in a far truer sense than Democritus
before him,

                            extra
    Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi.

Bolder even than Copernicus, and nearer in his intuition to the truth,
he denied that the universe had 'flaming walls' or any walls at all.
That 'immaginata circonferenza,' 'quella margine immaginata del cielo,'
on which antique science and Christian theology alike reposed, was the
object of his ceaseless satire, his oft-repeated polemic. What, then,
rendered Bruno the precursor of modern thought in its various
manifestations, was that he grasped the fundamental truth upon which
modern science rests, and foresaw the conclusions which must be drawn
from it. He speculated boldly, incoherently, vehemently; but he
speculated with a clear conception of the universe, as we still
apprehend it. Through the course of three centuries we have been engaged
in verifying the guesses, deepening, broadening and solidifying the
hypotheses, which Bruno's extension of the Copernican theory, and his
application of it to pure thought, suggested to his penetrating and
audacious intellect, Bruno was convinced that religion in its higher
essence would not suffer from the new philosophy. Larger horizons
extended before the human intellect. The soul expanded in more
exhilarating regions than the old theologies had offered. The sense of
the Divine in Nature, instead of dwindling down to atheism, received
fresh stimulus from the immeasurable prospect of an infinite and living
universe. Bruno, even more than Spinoza, was a God-intoxicated man. The
inebriation of the Renaissance, inspired by golden visions of truth and
knowledge close within man's grasp, inflamed with joy at escaping from
out-worn wearying formula into what appeared to be the simple intuition
of an everlasting verity, pulses through all his utterances. He has the
same cherubic confidence in the renascent age, that charms us in the
work of Rabelais. The slow, painful, often thwarted, ever more dubious
elaboration of modern metaphysic in _rapport_ with modern science--that
process which, after completing the cycle of all knowledge and sounding
the fathomless depth of all ignorance, has left us in grave
disillusionment and sturdy patience--swam before Bruno in a rapturous
vision. The Inquisition and the stake put an end abruptly to his dream.
But the dream was so golden, so divine, that it was worth the pangs of
martyrdom. Can we say the same for Hegel's system, or for Schopenhauers
or for the encyclopaedic ingenuity of Herbert Spencer?

Bruno imagined the universe as infinite space, filled with ether, in
which an infinite number of worlds, or solar systems resembling our own,
composed of similar materials and inhabited by countless living
creatures, move with freedom. The whole of this infinite and complex
cosmos he conceived to be animated by a single principle of thought and
life. This indwelling force, or God, he described in Platonic
phraseology sometimes as the Anima Mundi, sometimes as the Artificer,
who by working from within molds infinite substance into an infinity of
finite modes. Though we are compelled to think of the world under the
two categories of spirit and matter, these apparently contradictory
constituents are forever reconciled and harmonized in the divine
existence, whereof illimitable activity, illimitable volition, and
illimitable potentiality are correlated and reciprocally necessary
terms. In Aristotelian language, Bruno assumed infinite form and
infinite matter as movements of an eternal process, by which the
infinite unity manifests itself in concrete reality. This being the
case, it follows that nothing exists which has not life, and is not part
of God. The universe itself is one immeasurable animal, or animated
Being. The solar systems are huge animals; the globes are lesser
animals; and so forth down to the monad of molecular cohesion. As the
universe is infinite and eternal, motion, place and time do not qualify
it; these are terms applicable only to the finite parts of which it is
composed. For the same reason nothing in the universe can perish. What
we call birth and death, generation and dissolution, is only the passage
of the infinite, and homogeneous entity through successive phases of
finite and differentiated existence; this continuous process of exchange
and transformation being stimulated and sustained by attraction and
repulsion, properties of the indwelling divine soul aiming at
self-realization.

Having formed this conception, Bruno supported it by metaphysical
demonstration, and deduced conclusions bearing on psychology, religion,
ethics. Much of his polemic was directed against the deeply-rooted
notion of a finite world derived from Aristotle. Much was devoted to the
proof of the Copernican discovery. Orthodox theology was indirectly
combated or plausibly caressed. There are consequently many pages in his
dialogues which do not interest a modern reader, seeing that we have
outlived the conditions of thought that rendered them important. In the
process of his argument, he established the theory of a philosophical
belief, a religion of religions, or 'religione della mente,' as he
phrased it, prior to and comprehensive of all historical creeds. He
speculated, as probabilities, the transmigration of souls, and the
interchangeability of types in living creatures. He further postulated a
concordance between the order of thought and the order of existence in
the universe, and inclined to the doctrine of necessity in morals. Bruno
thus obtained _per saltum_ a prospect over the whole domain of knowledge
subsequently traversed by rationalism in metaphysics, theology and
ethics. In the course of these demonstrations and deductions he
anticipated Descartes' position of the identity of mind and being. He
supplied Spinoza with the substance of his reasoned pantheism; Leibnitz
with his theory of monadism and pre-established harmony. He laid down
Hegel's doctrine of contraries, and perceived that thought was a
dialectic process. The modern theory of evolution was enunciated by him
in pretty plain terms. He had grasped the physical law of the
conservation of energy. He solved the problem of evil by defining it to
be a relative condition of imperfect development. He denied that
Paradise or a Golden Age is possible for man, or that, if possible, it
can be considered higher in the moral scale than organic struggle toward
completion by reconciliation of opposites through pain and labor. He
sketched in outline the comparative study of religions, which is now
beginning to be recognized as the proper basis for theology. Finally, he
had a firm and vital hold upon that supreme speculation of the universe,
considered no longer as the battle-ground of dual principles, or as the
finite fabric of an almighty designer, but as the self-effectuation of
an infinite unity, appearing to our intelligence as spirit and
matter--that speculation which in one shape or another controls the
course of modern thought.[125]

[Footnote 125: It was my intention to support the statements in this
paragraph by translating the passages which seem to me to justify them;
and I had gone so far as to make English versions of some twenty pages
in length, when I found that this material would overweight my book. A
study of Bruno as the great precursor of modern thought in its more
poetical and widely synthetic speculation must be left for a separate
essay. Here I may remark that the most faithful and pithily condensed
abstract of Bruno's philosophy is contained in Goethe's poem _Proemium
zu Gott und Welt_. Yet this poem expresses Goethe's thought, and it is
doubtful whether Goethe had studied Bruno except in the work of his
disciple Spinoza.]

It must not be supposed that Bruno apprehended these points with
distinctness, or that he expressed them precisely in the forms with
which we are familiar. The hackneyed metaphor of a Pisgah view across
the promised land applies to him with singular propriety. Moreover, as
an acute critic has remarked, things old and new are so curiously
blended in his writings that what at first sight appears modern, is
often found upon reflection to be antique, and what is couched in
obsolete scholastic terminology, turns out upon analysis to contain the
germs of advanced theories.[126] The peculiar forms adapted for the
exposition of his thoughts contribute to the difficulty of obtaining a
methodical view of Bruno's philosophy. It has, therefore, been disputed
whether he was a pantheist or an atheist, a materialist or a
spiritualist, a mystic or an agnostic. No one would have contended more
earnestly than Bruno himself, that the sage can hold each and all of
these apparent contradictions together, with the exception of atheism;
which last is a simple impossibility. The fragmentary and impassioned
exposition which Bruno gave to his opinions in a series of Italian
dialogues and Latin poems will not discourage those of his admirers who
estimate the conspicuous failure made by all elaborate system-builders
from Aristotle to Hegel. To fathom the mystery of the world, and to
express that mystery in terms of logic, is clearly beyond the faculty of
man. Philosophies that aim at universe-embracing, God-explaining,
nature-elucidating, man-illuminating, comprehensiveness, have justly,
therefore, become objects of suspicion. The utmost that man can do,
placed as he is at obvious disadvantages for obtaining a complete survey
of the whole, is to whet his intelligence upon confessedly insoluble
problems, to extend the sphere of his practical experience, to improve
his dominion over matter, to study the elevation of his moral nature,
and to encourage himself for positive achievements by the indulgence in
those glorious dreams from which regenerative creeds and inspiring
philosophies have sprung--

    Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
    And ever moving as the restless spheres.

[Footnote 126: Spaventa in his _Saggi di Critica_.]

Faith and poetry are the highest regions in which his spirit can
profitably move. The study of government, law, and social ethics, the
analysis of physical conditions to which he is subject, and over which
he has an undefined, though limited, control, form the practical sphere