Gaston de Latour Part 4

She, too, possesses initiatory power as truly as the divine soul of the world, to which she responds with the free gift of a light and heat that seem her own.

Yet a nature so opulently endowed can hardly have been lacking in purely physical or sensuous ardours. His pantheistic belief that the Spirit of G.o.d is in all things, was not inconsistent with, nay! might encourage, a keen and restless eye for the dramatic details of life and character [146] however minute, for humanity in all its visible attractiveness, since there too, in truth, divinity lurks. From those first fair days of early Greek speculation, love had occupied a large place in the conception of philosophy; and in after days Bruno was fond of developing, like Plato, like the Christian Platonists, combining something of the peculiar temper of each, the a.n.a.logy between the flights of intellectual enthusiasm and those of physical love, with an animation which shows clearly enough the reality of his experience in the latter. The Eroici Furori, his book of books, dedicated to Philip Sidney, who would be no stranger to such thoughts, presents a singular blending of verse and prose, after the manner of Dante's Vita Nuova. The supervening philosophic comment reconsiders those earlier, physically erotic, impulses which had prompted the sonnet in voluble Italian, entirely to the advantage of their abstract, incorporeal, theoretic, equivalents. Yet if it is after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack of the natural stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be made. That there is no single name of preference, no Beatrice, or Laura, by no means proves the young man's earlier desires to have been merely Platonic; and if the colours of love inevitably lose a little of their force and propriety by such deflexion from their earlier purpose, their later intellectual purpose as certainly finds its opportunity thereby, in the [147] matter of borrowed fire and wings.

A kind of old scholastic pedantry creeping back over the ardent youth who had thrown it off so defiantly (as if love himself went in now for a University degree), Bruno developes, under the mask of amorous verse, all the various stages of abstraction, by which, as the last step of a long ladder, the mind attains actual "union." For, as with the purely religious mystics, "union," the mystic union of souls with one another and their Lord, nothing less than union between the contemplator and the contemplated--the reality, or the sense, or at least the name of such union--was always at hand. Whence that instinctive tendency towards union if not from the Creator of things Himself, who has doubtless prompted it in the physical universe, as in man? How familiar the thought that the whole creation, not less than the soul of man, longs for G.o.d, "as the hart for the water- brooks"! To unite oneself to the infinite by largeness and lucidity of intellect, to enter, by that admirable faculty, into eternal life- -this was the true vocation of the spouse, of the rightly amorous soul. A filosofia e necessario amore. There would be degrees of progress therein, as of course also of relapse: joys and sorrows, therefore. And, in interpreting these, the philosopher, whose intellectual ardours have superseded religion and physical love, is still a lover and a monk. All the influences of the convent, the sweet, heady [148] incense, the pleading sounds, the sophisticated light and air, the grotesque humours of old gothic carvers, the thick stratum of pagan sentiment beneath all this,--Santa Maria sopra Minervam!--are indelible in him. Tears, sympathies, tender inspirations, attraction, repulsion, zeal, dryness, recollection, desire:--he finds a place for them all: knows them all well in their unaffected simplicity, while he seeks the secret and secondary, or, as he fancies, the primary, form and purport of each.

Whether as a light on actual life, or as a mere barren scholastic subtlety, never before had the pantheistic doctrine been developed with such completeness, never before connected with so large a sense of nature, so large a promise of the knowledge of it as it really is.

The eyes that had not been wanting to visible humanity turned now with equal liveliness on the natural world, in that region of his birth, where all the colour and force of nature are at least two- fold. Nature is not only a thought or meditation in the divine mind; it is also the perpetual energy of that mind, which, ever identical with itself, puts forth and absorbs in turn all the successive forms of life, of thought, of language even. What seemed like striking transformations of matter were in truth only a chapter, a clause, in the great volume of the transformations of the divine Spirit. The mystic recognition that all is indeed divine had accompanied a realisation [149] of the largeness of the field of concrete knowledge, the infinite extent of all there was actually to know.

Winged, fortified, by that central philosophic faith, the student proceeds to the detailed reading of nature, led on from point to point by manifold lights, which will surely strike on him by the way, from the divine intelligence in it, speaking directly, sympathetically, to a like intelligence in him. The earth's wonderful animation, as divined by one who antic.i.p.ates by a whole generation the Baconian "philosophy of experience": in that, those bold, flighty, pantheistic speculations become tangible matter of fact. Here was the needful book for man to read; the full revelation, the story in detail, of that one universal mind, struggling, emerging, through shadow, substance, manifest spirit, in various orders of being,--the veritable history of G.o.d. And nature, together with the true pedigree and evolution of man also, his gradual issue from it, was still all to learn. The delightful tangle of things!--it would be the delightful task of man's thoughts to disentangle that. Already Bruno had measured the s.p.a.ce which Bacon would fill, with room, perhaps, for Darwin also. That Deity is everywhere, like all such abstract propositions, is a two-edged force, depending for its practical effect on the mind which admits it on the peculiar perspective of that mind. To Dutch Spinosa, in the next century, faint, consumptive, with a naturally [150] faint hold on external things, the theorem that G.o.d was in all things whatever, annihilating their differences, suggested a somewhat chilly withdrawal from the contact of all alike. But in Bruno, eager and impa.s.sioned, an Italian of the Italians, it awoke a constant, inextinguishable appet.i.te for every form of experience,--a fear, as of the one sin possible, of limiting, for one's self or another, the great stream flowing for thirsty souls, that wide pasture set ready for the hungry heart.

Considered from the point of view of a minute observation of nature, the Infinite might figure as "the infinitely little"; no blade of gra.s.s being like another, as there was no limit to the complexities of an atom of earth,--cell, sphere, within sphere. And the earth itself, hitherto seemingly the privileged centre of a very limited universe, was, after all, but an atom in an infinite world of starry s.p.a.ce, then lately divined by candid intelligence, which the telescope was one day to present to bodily eyes. For if Bruno must needs look forward to the future, to Bacon, for adequate knowledge of the earth, the infinitely little, he could look backwards also gratefully to another daring mind which had already put that earth into its modest place, and opened the full view of the heavens. If G.o.d is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worlds innumerable. Yes! one might well have divined what reason now demonstrated, indicating those endless [151] s.p.a.ces which a real sidereal science would gradually occupy.

That the stars are suns: that the earth is in motion: that the earth is of like stuff with the stars:--now the familiar knowledge of children--dawning on Bruno as calm a.s.surance of reason on appeal from the prejudice of the eye, brought to him an inexpressibly exhilarating sense of enlargement in the intellectual, nay! the physical atmosphere. And his consciousness of unfailing unity and order did not desert him in that broader survey, which made the utmost one could ever know of the earth seem but a very little chapter in the endless history of G.o.d the Spirit, rejoicing so greatly in the admirable spectacle that it never ceases to evolve from matter new conditions. The immoveable earth, as we term it, beneath one's feet!--Why, one almost felt the movement, the respiration, of G.o.d in it. And yet how greatly even the physical eye, the sensible imagination (so to term it) was flattered by the theorem. What joy in that motion, in the prospect, the music! "The music of the spheres!"--he could listen to it in a perfection such as had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoras even.--

Veni, Creator Spiritus, Mentes tuorum visita, Imple superna gratia, Quae tu creasti pectora.+

Yes! The grand old Christian hymns, perhaps [152] the grandest of them all, seemed to lend themselves in the chorus, to be deepened immeasurably under this new intention. It is not always, or often, that men's abstract ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal spirits, affect conduct. It was what they did with Bruno. The ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe--infinite dust, in truth, starry as it may look to our terrestrial eyes--that prospect from which the mind of Pascal recoiled so painfully, induced in Bruno only the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship and sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its sympathetic inhabitants. Scruples of conscience, if he felt such, might well be pushed aside for the "excellency" of such knowledge as this. To shut the eyes, whether of the body or the mind, would be a kind of sullen ingrat.i.tude;--the one sin to believe, directly or indirectly, in any absolutely dead matter anywhere, as being implicitly a denial of the indwelling spirit.--A free spirit, certainly, as of old! Through all his pantheistic flights, from horizon to horizon, it was still the thought of liberty that presented itself, to the infinite relish of this "prodigal son" of Dominic. G.o.d the Spirit had made all things indifferently, with a largeness, a beneficence, impiously belied by any theory of restrictions, distinctions, of absolute limitation. Touch! see!

listen! eat freely of all the trees of the garden of Paradise, with the voice of the [153] Lord G.o.d literally everywhere!--here was the final counsel of perfection. The world was even larger than youthful appet.i.te, youthful capacity. Let theologian and every other theorist beware how he narrowed either. "The plurality of worlds!"--How petty in comparison seemed those sins, the purging of which was men's chief motive in coming to places like this convent, whence Bruno, with vows broken, or for him obsolete, presently departed. A sonnet, expressive of the joy with which he returned to so much more than the liberty of ordinary men, does not suggest that he was driven from it.

Though he must have seemed to those who surely had loved so loveable a creature there to be departing, like the "prodigal" of the Gospel, into the farthest of possible far countries, there is no proof of harsh treatment on their part, or even of an effort to detain him.

It happens most naturally of course that those who undergo the shock of spiritual or intellectual change sometimes fail to recognise their debt to the deserted cause:--How much of the heroism, or other high quality, of their rejection has really been the product of what they reject? Bruno, the escaped monk, is still a monk; and his philosophy, impious as it might seem to some, a religion; very new indeed, yet a religion. He came forth well-fitted by conventual influences to play upon men as he had been played upon. A challenge, a war-cry, an [154] alarum, everywhere he seemed to be but the instrument of some subtly materialised spiritual force, like that of the old Greek prophets, that "enthusiasm" he was inclined to set so high, or like impulsive Pentecostal fire. His hunger to know, fed dreamily enough at first within the convent walls, as he wandered over s.p.a.ce and time, an indefatigable reader of books, would be fed physically now by ear and eye, by large matter-of-fact experience, as he journeys from university to university; less as a teacher than a courtier, a citizen of the world, a knight-errant of intellectual light. The philosophic need to try all things had given reasonable justification to the stirring desire for travel common to youth, in which, if in nothing else, that whole age of the later Renaissance was invincibly young. The theoretic recognition of that mobile spirit of the world, ever renewing its youth, became the motive of a life as mobile, as ardent, as itself, of a continual journey, the venture and stimulus of which would be the occasion of ever-new discoveries, of renewed conviction.

The unity, the spiritual unity, of the world:--that must involve the alliance, the congruity, of all things with one another, of the teacher's personality with the doctrine he had to deliver, of the spirit of that doctrine with the fashion of his utterance, great reinforcements of sympathy. In his own case, certainly, when Bruno confronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, [155] his language, were alike the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which soon had hold of his audience also; alien, strangely alien, as that audience might seem from the speaker. It was intimate discourse, in magnetic touch with every one present, with his special point of impressibility; the sort of speech which, consolidated into literary form as a book, would be a dialogue according to the true Attic genius, full of those diversions, pa.s.sing irritations, unlooked-for appeals, in which a solicitous missionary finds his largest range of opportunity, and takes even dull wits unaware. In Bruno, that abstract theory of the perpetual motion of the world was become a visible person talking with you.

And as the runaway Dominican was still in temper a monk, so he presented himself to his audience in the comely Dominican habit. The reproachful eyes were to-day for the most part kindly observant, registering every detail of that singular company, all the physiognomic effects which come, by the way, on people, and, through them, on things,--the "shadows of ideas" in men's faces--his own pleasantly expressive with them, in turn. De Umbris Idearum: it was the very t.i.tle of his discourse. There was "heroic gaiety" there: only, as usual with gaiety, it made the pa.s.sage of a peevish cloud seem all the chillier. Lit up, in the agitation of speaking, by many a harsh or scornful beam, yet always sinking, in moments of repose, to an [156] expression of high-bred melancholy, the face was one that looked, after all, made for suffering,--already half pleading, half defiant, as of a creature you could hurt, but to the last never shake a hair's-breadth from its estimate of yourself.

Like nature, like nature in that opulent country of his birth which the "Nolan," as he delighted to call himself, loved so well that, born wanderer as he was, he must perforce return thither sooner or later at the risk of life, he gave plenis manibus, but without selection, and was hardly more fastidious in speech than the "asinine" vulgar he so deeply contemned. His rank, un-weeded eloquence, abounding in play of words, rabbinic allegories, verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he professed to despise, with here and there a shameless image,--the product not of formal method, but of Neapolitan improvisation--was akin to the heady wine, the sweet, coa.r.s.e odours, of that fiery, volcanic soil, fertile in such irregularities as manifest power. Helping himself indifferently to all religions for rhetoric ill.u.s.tration, his preference was still for that of the soil, the old pagan religion, and for the primitive Italian G.o.ds, whose names and legends haunt his speech, as they do the carved and pictorial work of that age of the Renaissance. To excite, to surprise, to move men's minds, like the volcanic earth as if in travail, and, according to the Socratic fancy, [157] to bring them to the birth, was after all the proper function of the teacher, however unusual it might seem in so ancient a university.

"Fantastic!"--from first to last, that was the descriptive epithet; and the very word, carrying us to Shakespeare, reminds one how characteristic of the age such habit was, and that it was pre- eminently due to Italy. A man of books, he had yet so vivid a hold on people and things, that the traits and tricks of the audience seemed to strike from his memory all the graphic resources of his old readings. He seemed to promise some greater matter than was then actually exposed by him; to be himself enjoying the fulness of a great outlook, the vague suggestion of which did but sustain the curiosity of the listeners. And still, in hearing him speak you seemed to see that subtle spiritual fire to which he testified kindling from word to word. What Gaston then heard was, in truth, the first fervid expression of all those contending views out of which his written works would afterwards be compacted, of course with much loss of heat in the process. Satyric or hybrid growths, things due to hybris,+ insult, insolence, to what the old satyrs of fable embodied,--the volcanic South is kindly prolific of these, and Bruno abounded in mockery; though it was by way of protest. So much of a Platonist, for Plato's genial humour he had nevertheless subst.i.tuted the harsh laughter of Aristophanes. Paris, teeming, beneath a [158]

very courtly exterior, with mordant words, in unabashed criticism of all real or suspected evil, provoked his utmost powers of scorn for the "Triumphant Beast," the "installation of the a.s.s," shining even there amid the university folk,--those intellectual bankrupts of the Latin Quarter, who had so long pa.s.sed between them, however gravely, a worthless "parchment and paper" currency. In truth, Aristotle, the supplanter of Plato, was still in possession, pretending, as Bruno conceived, to determine heaven and earth by precedent, hiding the proper nature of things from the eyes of men. "Habit"--the last word of his practical philosophy--indolent habit! what would this mean, in the intellectual life, but just that sort of dead judgments which, because the mind, the eye, were no longer really at work in them, are most opposed to the essential quickness and freedom of the spirit?

The Shadows of Ideas: De Umbris Idearum: such, in set terms, have been the subject of Bruno's discourse, appropriately to the still only half emanc.i.p.ated intellect of his audience:--on approximations to truth: the divine imaginations, as seen, darkly, more bearably by weaker faculties, in words, in visible facts, in their shadows merely. According to the doctrine of "Indifference," indeed, there would be no real distinction between substance and shadow. In regard to man's feeble wit, however, varying degrees of knowledge const.i.tuted such a distinction. [159] "Ideas, and Shadows of Ideas": the phrase recurred often; and, as such mystic phrases will, fixed itself in Gaston's fancy, though not quite according to the mind of the speaker; accommodated rather to the thoughts which just then preoccupied his own. As already in his life there had been the Shadows of Events,--the indirect yet fatal influence there of deeds in which he had no part, so now, for a time, he seemed to fall under the spell, the power, of the Shadows of Ideas, of Bruno's Ideas; in other words, of those indirect suggestions, which, though no necessary part of, yet inevitably followed upon, his doctrines.

What, for instance, might be the proper practical limitations of that telling theory of "the coincidence, the indifference, of opposites"?

To that true son of the Renaissance, in the light of his large, antique, pagan ideas, the difference between Rome and the Reform would figure, of course, as but an insignificant variation upon some deeper and more radical antagonism, between two tendencies of men's minds. But what about an antagonism deeper still? Between Christ and the world, say!--Christ and the flesh!--or about that so very ancient antagonism between good and evil. Was there any place really left for imperfection, moral or otherwise, in a world, wherein the minutest atom, the lightest thought, could not escape from G.o.d's presence? Who should note the crime, the sin, [160] the mistake, in the operation of that eternal spirit, which was incapable of mis- shapen births? In proportion as man raised himself to the ampler survey of the divine work around him, just in that proportion did the very notion of evil disappear. There were no weeds, no "tares," in the endless field. The truly illuminated mind, discerning spiritually, might do what it would. Even under the shadow of monastic walls, that had sometimes been the precept, which larger theories of "inspiration" had bequeathed to practice. "Of all the trees of the garden thou mayest freely eat!--If ye take up any deadly thing, it shall not hurt you!--And I think that I, too, have the spirit of G.o.d."

Bruno, a citizen of the world, Bruno at Paris, was careful to warn off the vulgar from applying the decisions of philosophy beyond its proper speculative limits. But a kind of secrecy, an ambiguous atmosphere, encompa.s.sed, from the first, alike the speaker and the doctrine; and in that world of fluctuating and ambiguous characters, the alerter mind certainly, pondering on this novel "reign of the spirit"--what it might actually be--would hardly fail to find in Bruno's doctrines a method of turning poison into food, to live and thrive thereon; an art, to Paris, in the intellectual and moral condition of that day, hardly less opportune than had it related to physical poisons. If Bruno himself was cautious not to suggest the ethic or practical [161] equivalent to his theoretic positions, there was that in his very manner of speech, in that rank, un-weeded eloquence of his, which seemed naturally to discourage any effort at selection, any sense of fine difference, of nuances or proportion, in things. The loose sympathies of his genius were allied to nature, nursing, with equable maternity of soul, good, bad, and indifferent alike, rather than to art, distinguishing, rejecting, refining.

Commission and omission! sins of the former surely had the natural preference. And how would Paolo and Francesca have read this lesson?

How would Henry, and Margaret of the "Memoirs," and other susceptible persons then present, read it, especially if the opposition between practical good and evil traversed diametrically another distinction, the "opposed points" of which, to Gaston for instance, could never by any possibility become "indifferent,"--the distinction, namely, between the precious and the base, aesthetically; between what was right and wrong in the matter of art?

NOTES:

132. +From Aus der Harzreise, "Bergidylle 2": "Tannenbaum, mit grunen Fingern," Stanza 10. E-text editor's translation: "Now that I have grown to maturity, / Have read and traveled much, / My whole heart expands / With my belief in the Holy Spirit."

151. +The beginning of a hymn used by the Catholic Church to commemorate solemn occasions. Dryden's translation: "Creator Spirit, by whose aid / The world's foundations first were laid, / Come visit every pious mind, Come pour Thy joys on human kind."

157. +Transliteration: hybris. Liddell and Scott definition: "wanton violence, arising from the pride of strength, pa.s.sion, etc."

THE END