The vision of Clarice, appearing like Virgil's Camilla, stirs him from

this lethargy. He falls in love at first sight, as Tasso's heroes always

do, and vows to prove himself her worthy knight by deeds of unexampled

daring. Thus the plot is put in motion; and we read in well-appointed

order how the hero acquired his horse, Baiardo, Tristram's magic lance,

his sword Fusberta from Atlante, his armor from Orlando, the trappings

of his charger from the House of Courtesy, the ensign of the lion

rampant on his shield from Chiarello, and the hand of his lady after

some delays from Malagigi.

[Footnote 64: Canto i. 17.]

No new principle is introduced into the romance. As in earlier poems of

this species, the religious motive of Christendom at war with Islam

becomes a mere machine; the chivalrous environment affords a vehicle for

fanciful adventures. Humor, indeed, is conspicuous by its absence.

Charles the Great assumes the sobriety of empire; and his camp, in its

well-ordered gravity, prefigures that of Goffredo in the

_Gerusalemme_.[65] Thus Tasso's originality must not be sought in the

material of his work, which is precisely that of the Italian romantic

school in general, nor yet in its form, which departs from the romantic

tradition in details so insignificant as to be inessential. We find it

rather in his touch upon the old material, in his handling of the

familiar form. The qualities of style, sympathy, sentiment, selection in

the use of phrase and image, which determined his individuality as a

poet, rendered the _Rinaldo_ a novelty in literature. It will be

therefore well to concentrate attention for a while upon those

subjective peculiarities by right of which the _Rinaldo_ ranks as a

precursor of the _Gerusalemme_.

The first and the most salient of these is a pronounced effort to

heighten style by imitation of Latin poets. The presiding genius of the

work is Virgil. Pulci's racy Florentine idiom; Boiardo's frank and

natural Lombard manner; Ariosto's transparent and unfettered modern

phrase, have been supplanted by a pompous intricacy of construction.

[Footnote 65: Canto vi. 64-9.]

The effort to impose Latin rules of syntax on Italian is obvious in

such lines as the following:[66]

Torre ei l'immagin volle, che sospesa

Era presso l'altar gemmato e sacro,

Ove in chiaro cristal lampade accesa

Fea lume di Ciprigna al simulacro:

or in these:

Umida i gigli e le vermiglie rose

Del volto, e gli occhi bei conversa al piano,

Gli occhi, onde in perle accolto il pianto uscia,

La giovinetta il cavalier seguia.

Virgil is directly imitated, where he is least worthy of imitation, in

the details of his battle-pieces. Thus:[67]

Si riversa Isolier tremando al piano,

Privo di senso e di vigore ignudo,

Ed a lui gli occhi oscura notte involve,

Ed ogni membro ancor se gli dissolve.

* * * * *

Quel col braccio sospeso in aria stando,

Ne lo movendo a questa o a quella parte,

Che dalla spada cio gli era conteso,

Voto sembrava in sacro tempio appeso.

* * * * *

Mentre ignaro di cio che 'l ciel destine,

Cosi diceva ancor, la lancia ultrice

Rinaldo per la bocca entro gli mise,

E la lingua e 'l parlar per mezzo incise.

This Virgilian imitation yields some glowing flowers of poetry in longer

passages of description. Among these may be cited the conquest of

Baiardo in the second canto, the shipwreck in the tenth, the chariot of

Pluto in the fourth, and the supper with queen Floriana in the ninth.

[Footnote 66: Canto iii. 40, 45.]

[Footnote 67: Canto ii. 22, iv. 28, 33.]

The episode of Floriana, while closely studied upon the Aeneid, is also

a first sketch for that of Armida. Indeed, it should be said in passing

that Tasso anticipates the _Gerusalemme_ throughout the _Rinaldo_. The

murder of Anselmo by Rinaldo (Canto XI.) forecasts the murder of

Gernando by his namesake, and leads to the same result of the hero's

banishment. The shipwreck, the garden of courtesy, the enchanted boat,

and the charmed forest, are motives which reappear improved and

elaborated in Tasso's masterpiece.[68]

While Tasso thus sought to heighten diction by Latinisms, he revealed

another specific quality of his manner in _Rinaldo_. This is the

inability to sustain heroic style at its ambitious level. He frequently

drops at the close of the octave stanza into a prosaic couplet, which

has all the effect of bathos. Instances are not far to seek:[69]

Gia tal insegna acquisto l'avo, e poi

La portar molti de'nipoti suoi.

* * * * *

E a questi segni ed al crin raro e bianco

Monstrava esser dagli anni oppresses e stanco.

* * * * *

Fu qui vicin dal saggio Alchiso il Mago,

Di far qualch'opra memorabil vago.

* * * * *

Io son Rinaldo,

Solo di servir voi bramoso e caldo.

[Footnote 68: _Rinaldo_, cantos x. vii.]

[Footnote 69: Canto i. 25, 31, 41, 64.]

The reduplication of epithets, and the occasional use of long sonorous

Latin words, which characterize Tasso's later manner, are also

noticeable in these couplets. Side by side with such weak endings should

be placed some specimens, no less characteristic, of vigorous and noble

lines:[70]

Nel cor consiston l'armi,

Onde il forte non e chi mai disarmi.

* * * * *

Si sta placido e cheto,

Ma serba dell'altiero nel mansueto.

If the _Rinaldo_ prefigures Tasso's maturer qualities of style, it is no

less conspicuous for the light it throws upon his eminent poetic

faculty. Nothing distinguished him more decidedly from the earlier

romantic poets than power over pathetic sentiment conveyed in melodious

cadences of oratory. This emerges in Clarice's monologue on love and

honor, that combat of the soul which forms a main feature of the lyrics

in _Aminta_ and of Erminia's episode in the _Gerusalemme_.[71] This

steeps the whole story of Clizia in a delicious melancholy,

foreshadowing the death-scene of Clorinda.[72] This rises in the

father's lamentation over his slain Ugone, into the music of a threnody

that now recalls Euripides and now reminds us of mediaeval litanies.[73]

Censure might be passed upon rhetorical conceits and frigid affectations

in these characteristic outpourings of pathetic feeling. Yet no one can

ignore their liquid melody, their transference of emotion through sound

into modulated verse.

[Footnote 70: _Rinaldo_, Canto ii. 28, 44.]

[Footnote 71: Canto ii. 3-11.]

[Footnote 72: Canto vii. 16-51.]

[Footnote 73: Canto vii. 3-11.]

That lyrical outcry, finding rhythmic utterance for tender sentiment,

which may be recognized as Tasso's chief addition to romantic poetry,

pierces like a song through many passages of mere narration. Rinaldo,

while carrying Clarice away upon Baiardo, with no chaste intention in

his heart, bids her thus dry her tears:[74]

Egli dice: Signora, onde vi viene

Si spietato martir, si grave affanno?

Perche le luci angeliche e serene

Ricopre della doglia oscuro panno?

Forse fia l'util vostro e 'l vostro bene

Quel ch'or vi sembra insupportabil danno,

Deh! per Dio, rasciugate il caldo pianto.

E l'atroce dolor temprate alquanto.

It is not that we do not find similar lyrical interbreathings in the

narrative of Ariosto. But Tasso developed the lyrism of the octave

stanza into something special, lulling the soul upon gentle waves of

rising and falling rhythm, foreshadowing the coming age of music in

cadences that are untranslateable except by vocal melody. In like

manner, the idyl, which had played a prominent part in Boiardo's and in

Ariosto's romance, detaches itself with a peculiar sweetness from the

course of Tasso's narrative. This appears in the story of Florindo,

which contains within itself the germ of the _Aminta_, the _Pastor Fido_

and the _Adone_.[75] Together with the bad taste of the artificial

pastoral, its preposterous costume (stanza 13), its luxury of tears

(stanza 23), we find the tyranny of kisses (stanzas 28, 52), the

yearning after the Golden Age (stanza 29), and all the other apparatus

of that operatic species. Tasso was the first poet to bathe Arcady in a

golden afternoon light of sensuously sentimental pathos. In his idyllic

as in his lyrical interbreathings, melody seems absolutely demanded to

interpret and complete the plangent rhythm of his dulcet numbers.

Emotion so far predominates over intelligence, so yearns to exhale

itself in sound and shun the laws of language, that we find already in

_Rinaldo_ Tasso's familiar _Non so che_ continually used to adumbrate

sentiments for which plain words are not indefinite enough.

[Footnote 74: Canto iv. 47.]

[Footnote 75: Canto v. 12-57.]

The _Rinaldo_ was a very remarkable production for a young man of

eighteen. It showed the poet in possession of his style and displayed

the specific faculties of his imagination. Nothing remained for Tasso

now but to perfect and develop the type of art which he had there

created. Soon after his first settlement in Ferrara, he began to

meditate a more ambitious undertaking. His object was to produce the

heroic poem for which Italy had long been waiting, and in this way to

rival or surpass the fame of Ariosto. Trissino had chosen a national

subject for his epic; but the _Italia Liberata_ was an acknowledged

failure, and neither the past nor the present conditions of the Italian

people offered good material for a serious poem. The heroic enthusiasms

of the age were religious. Revived Catholicism had assumed an attitude

of defiance. The Company of Jesus was declaring its crusade against

heresy and infidelity throughout the world. Not a quarter of a century

had elapsed since Charles V. attacked the Mussulman in Tunis; and before

a few more years had passed, the victory of Lepanto was to be won by

Italian and Spanish navies. Tasso, therefore, obeyed a wise instinct

when he made choice of the first crusade for his theme, and of Godfrey

of Boulogne for his hero. Having to deal with historical facts, he

studied the best authorities in chronicles, ransacked such books of

geography and travel as were then accessible, paid attention to

topography, and sought to acquire what we now call local coloring for

the details of his poem. Without the sacrifice of truth in any important

point, he contrived to give unity to the conduct of his narrative, while

interweaving a number of fictitious characters and marvelous

circumstances with the historical personages and actual events of the

crusade. The vital interest of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ flows from

this interpolated material, from the loves of Rinaldo and Tancredi, from

the adventures of the Pagan damsels Erminia, Armida and Clorinda. The

_Gerusalemme_ is in truth a Virgilian epic, upon which a romantic poem

has been engrafted. Goffredo, idealized into statuesque frigidity,

repeats the virtues of Aeneas; but the episode of Dido, which enlivens

Virgil's hero, is transferred to Rinaldo's part in Tasso's story. The

battles of Crusaders and Saracens are tedious copies of the battle in

the tenth Aeneid; but the duels of Tancredi with Clorinda and Argante

breathe the spirit and the fire of chivalry. The celestial and infernal

councils, adopted as machinery, recall the rival factions in Olympus;

but the force by which the plot moves is love. Pluto and the angel

Gabriel are inactive by comparison with Armida, Erminia and Clorinda.

Tasso in truth thought that he was writing a religious and heroic poem.

What he did write, was a poem of sentiment and passion--a romance. Like

Anacreon he might have cried:

thelo legein Atreidas

thelo de Kadmon adein,

ha barbitos de chordais

Erota mounon echei.

He displayed, indeed, marvelous ingenuity and art in so connecting the

two strains of his subject, the stately Virgilian history and the

glowing modern romance, that they should contribute to the working of a

single plot. Yet he could not succeed in vitalizing the former, whereas

the latter will live as long as human interest in poetry endures. No one

who has studied the _Gerusalemme_ returns with pleasure to Goffredo, or

feels that the piety of the Christian heroes is inspired. He skips canto

after canto dealing with the crusade, to dwell upon those lyrical

outpourings of love, grief, anguish, vain remorse and injured affection

which the supreme poet of sentiment has invented for his heroines; he

recognizes the genuine inspiration of Erminia's pastoral idyl, of

Armida's sensuous charms, of Clorinda's dying words, of the Siren's

song and the music of the magic bird: of all, in fact, which is not

pious in the poem.

Tancredi, between Erminia and Clorinda, the one woman adoring him, the

other beloved by him--the melancholy graceful modern Tancredi, Tasso's

own soul's image--is the veritable hero of the _Gerusalemme_; and by a

curious unintended propriety he disappears from the action before the

close, without a word. The force of the poem is spiritualized and

concentrated in Clorinda's death, which may be cited as an instance of

sublimity in pathos. It is idyllized in the episode of Erminia among the

shepherds, and sensualized in the supreme beauty of Armida's garden.

Rinaldo is second in importance to Tancredi; and Goffredo, on whom Tasso

bestows the blare of his Virgilian trumpet from the first line to the

last, is poetically of no importance whatsoever. Argante, Solimano,

Tisaferno, excite our interest, and win the sympathy we cannot spare the

saintly hero; and in the death of Solimano Tasso's style, for once,

verges upon tragic sublimity.

What Tasso aimed at in the _Gerusalemme_ was nobility. This quality had

not been prominent in Ariosto's art. If he could attain it, his ambition

to rival the _Orlando Furioso_ would be satisfied. One main condition of

success Tasso brought to the achievement. His mind itself was eminently

noble, incapable of baseness, fixed on fair and worthy objects of

contemplation. Yet the personal nobility which distinguished him as a

thinker and a man, was not of the heroic type. He had nothing Homeric

in his inspiration, nothing of the warrior or the patriot in his nature.

His genius, when it pursued its bias, found instinctive utterance in

elegy and idyl, in meditative rhetoric and pastoral melody. In order to

assume the heroic strain, Tasso had recourse to scholarship, and gave

himself up blindly to the guidance of Latin poets. This was consistent

with the tendency of the Classical Revival; but since the subject to be

dignified by epic style was Christian and mediaeval, a discord between

matter and manner amounting almost to insincerity resulted. Some

examples will make the meaning of this criticism more apparent. When

Goffredo rejects the embassy of Atlete and Argante, he declares his firm

intention of delivering Jerusalem in spite of overwhelming perils. The

crusaders can but perish:

Noi morirem, ma non morremo inulti. (i. 86.)

This of course is a reminiscence of Dido's last words, and the

difference between the two situations creates a disagreeable

incongruity. The nod of Jove upon Olympus is translated to express the

fiat of the Almighty (xiii. 74); Gabriel is tricked out in the plumes

and colors of Mercury (i. 13-15); the very angels sinning round the

throne become 'dive sirene' (xiv. 9); the armory of heaven is described

in terms which reduce Michael's spear and the arrows of pestilence to

ordinary weapons (vii. 81); Hell is filled with harpies, centaurs,

hydras, pythons, the common lumber of classical Tartarus (iv. 5); the

angel sent to cure Goffredo's wound culls dittany on Ida (xi. 72); the

heralds, interposing between Tancredi and Argante, hold pacific scepters

and have naught of chivalry (vi. 51). It may be said that both Dante

before Tasso, and Milton after him, employed similar classical language

in dealing with Christian and mediaeval motives. But this will hardly

serve as an excuse; for Dante and Milton communicate so intense a

conviction of religious earnestness that their Latinisms, even though

incongruous, are recognized as the mere clothing of profoundly felt

ideas. The sublimity, the seriousness, the spiritual dignity is in their

thought, not in its expression; whereas Tasso too frequently leaves us

with the certainty that he has sought by ceremonious language to realize

more than he could grasp with the imagination. In his council of the

powers of hell, for instance, he creates monsters of huge dimensions and

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).

Che vinta la materia e dal lavoro (xvi. 2).

Non temo io te, ne 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, oime, 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 Algazel (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' e 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 avverra pur che mia ventura

Nel mio ritorno mi rinchiuda il passo,

D'uom che in amor m'e 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

Spunto nascendo gia 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 cosi 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:

Cosi piuma talor, che di gentile

Amorosa colomba il collo cinge,

Mai non si scorge a se 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 disciolto,

Se il desta o suon di tromba, o luminoso

Acciar, cola tosto annitrendo e volto;

Gia gia 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 citta, 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 se raguna!

Ha il suo gran carro il di; le aurate stelle

Spiega la notte e l'argentata luna;

Ma non e 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 piu 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:

Si 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,

Cosi l'ira che in lei parea si 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 sdegno; ne 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 _denouement_ 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 e, signor, che in se 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 si: 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 pieta, 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 _Revolutions 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,

Helmstaedt, 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 Chambery, 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 Mauvissiere. 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 e 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 Helmstaedt, where the Duke Heinrich Julius

of Brunswick-Wolfenbuettel 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

Wolfenbuettel.]

[Footnote 99: They were published at Frankfort, and dedicated to the

friendly Prince of Wolfenbuettel.]

At Helmstaedt 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.]