127 at once allowed, to lecture at the university; and he chose, as the subject of thirty discourses, thirty Divine Attributes taken from St. Thomas. Authoritative approval was signified, after their conclusion, by the offer of a professorship, which was, however, declined. The occupation of an ordinary chair carried with it the obligation of assisting at Mass, and this, Bruno, having incurred excommunication by the breach of his vows, was debarred from doing. His repugnance has often been considered symptomatic of aversion to Catholic worship; it was, in fact, a mark of reverence towards it. He continued, accordingly, to teach and lecture independently, and on a theme the more attractive the farther it lay from the curriculum of regular academic study. From an early age Bruno had pursued the phantom of a universal art of knowledge. Its possibility followed as a corollary from his theory of the universe. His sanguine nature, the vividness of his intuitions, the brilliant reflection which, with a kind of intoxicated rapture, he perceived in his own mind of the solemn and spacious realities of the world without, confirmed his belief that he had found a logical key to the secrets of existence. Thought and being were, he held, inseparable. By the very same stairs,' he wrote, by which nature descends to the production of 'things, the intellect ascends to the cognition of them, both 'one and the other passing from unity through multiplicity 'back to unity.' * The only difficulty was to seize and hold the clue to the intervening labyrinth, and Raymond Lully's 'methodic art' placed it in his hands. As the Majorcan Bruno Naturally it lacked completeness. monk had fashioned it, it served no such lofty purpose. It was a cumbrous thinking-machine, offering a crutch, not unlikely to prove insecure, to the memory, and a guidingline, neither straight nor strong, to the reason. expected from it, when renovated by himself, widely different effects. The new Lullian art included a system of mnemonics; it trained the mind to pass swiftly and inevitably from one associated idea to another; it provided at once for the unification and for the increase of knowledge. From the purely idealistic point of view, a formula of discovery should be possible. If things are but the material projections of ideas, their order and connexion can best be investigated by studying the mutual dependence of concepts. An * De la Causa, Principio, et Uno, p. 285 (Wagner's edition). 'art of thinking' would thus be the supreme desideratum of science. Written on our minds, we should then clearly retrace the shadows of the divine ideas obscurely imprinted upon them, and, pursuing the fleeting sequence of phenomena, mount above them to the archetypal forms from which they emanate. Hence Bruno's efforts for the invention of an art which should reduce to perfect scientific unity and an exact equation real and ideal existence, and represent in an adjusted combination of concepts the true concreated com'bination of all things.'* It is needless to say that he failed-that the 'high priori road' led him, as it has led so many others, into a jungle of perplexities. He traversed it, none the less, with enthusiasm, and his enthusiasm was infectious. His lectures on the Lullian art took the learned world of Paris by storm. They must indeed have been rarely well worth hearing, if not for the matter they contained, at least for the manner in which they were delivered. Bruno possessed the gifts of an improvisatore superadded to those of a philosopher. Words streamed from him with a facility and an impetus which carried his auditors fairly off their feet, and very likely out of their depth as well. But the flowing waters of speculation in which they found themselves were not alarming under such confident guidance. New regions of thought opened out before them, new lights of knowledge played above the horizon of the future. For while their teacher appeared to revive the Grand Art' denounced later by Bacon as a methodus imposture, he was in reality inculcating a novel and seductive philosophy. In Signor Berti's words,† he 'cunningly intercalated his own with Lully's opinions, made new and ingenious applications, proceeded rapidly from particulars to generals, often rising from labyrinthine mnemonic intricacies to the luminous fields of physics, metaphysics, and astronomy. . . . Witty and pungent phrases gave point to his discourse; comparisons, metaphors, curious citations abounded. He promised wonders, couching his promises in vague and mysterious words, by which the curiosity and attention of his hearers were vividly excited. He taught with passion, and loved to dissert on the spur of the moment on any problem or question whatsoever.' * Mamiani, Preface to Schelling's Bruno,' p. 12. + Vita di Giordano Bruno, p. 124. Mr. Frith has misunderstood and presumptuously ridiculed this passage. upon. Docters and professors, laymen and ecclesiastics, thronged to hear him. The poor runaway monk had suddenly become a person of note in the greatest capital in Europe. His society, too, was in request. His melancholy eyes with lightnings lurking in them, his gentle and refined bearing in the absence of academic provocation, the accommodating frankness of his disposition, the charm of his conversation, which flowed equally in Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian, won him general favour. Among his patrons were the Duc d'Angoulême, Regnault his secretary, Giovanni Moro the Venetian ambassador; above all, the king himself. Out of a combined regard (as Mr. Frith says) for his 'mother and Macchiavelli,' Henry III. petted and patronised Italians; hence Bruno's nationality was in itself a recommendation to him. The fame of his marvellous promises reaching the royal ears, he summoned me,' Bruno relates," one day before him, and desired to know whether the 'memory I possessed and professed were natural or by arts of magic; to whom I gave satisfaction, proving both by what I said, and by what I caused him to experience, that my art was scientific, not magical.' To Henry III., accordingly, the first of a series of treatises on the Lullian art, entitled 'De Umbris Idearum,' was dedicated in 1582, in a style probably, under the circumstances, unmatched for intrepid self-laudation. It procured him the place of Professor Extraordinary in the university, which, however, he did not long remain to enjoy. Driven from Paris by the tumults' (it is to be noted that halcyon weather rarely prevailed in his vicinity), he crossed, at Easter, 1583, to London, armed with letters of recommendation from Henry III. to his ambassador, Michel Castelnau de Mauvissière. This excellent and accomplished man proved a true friend to him. A strict Catholic himself, he showed, if anything, an extreme of tolerance for the vagaries of his guest, and even accepted the dedication of some of his books. Bruno's first preoccupation, however, was, as usual with him, of the professorial kind. He had no sooner reached London than he got Vautrollier to print for him a little work on the art of memory, entitled Explicatio triginta Sigillorum,' prefaced with an address to the Vice-Chancellor and Fellows of Oxford. This undoubtedly expressed the writer's most intimate convictions. He truly believed himself to be a 'mer * Berti, Documenti intcrno a Giordano Bruno,' p. 20. VOL. CLXVI. NO. CCCXXXIX. K 'curial,' or heaven-sent man, through whose coming a reign of light and reason was to dawn upon the earth. His trumpetblast to the slumbering intellect of England sounded as follows: * 'Philotheus Jordanus Brunus of Nola, a doctor in perfected theology; a professor of pure and blameless wisdom; a philosopher known, approved, and honorifically acknowledged by the foremost academies of Europe; to none a stranger, save barbarians and the vulgar; a waker of slumbering souls; a breaker of presumptuous and stubborn ignorance; who, in all his dealings, professes love to all men, love to the Italian and to the Briton, to man and woman, to the mitre and to the crown, to him wearing a toga and to the warrior, to the frocked and to the unfrocked, but who is inclined chiefly to him whose way is peaceable, enlightened, true, and fruitful; who looks not to the anointed head nor to the consecrated brow; not to the pure in hand nor to the circumcised, but thither where man's true countenance is to be found, towards his soul, and the perfection of his spirit; whom dispensers of foolishness and hypocrites abhor; whom upright and sincere men love; whom noble souls receive with acclamation,-To the honoured and noble Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and to his fellows, greeting.' The desired effect ensued. Bruno was made free of the university, and received permission to deliver there two courses of lectures on the Immortality of the Soul,' and on the Quintuple Sphere.' They respectively unfolded, it is conjectured, his doctrines of metempsychosis and of the infinity of worlds. They proved, at any rate, unpalateable to the authorities, and were brought, it would seem, to a premature close. Oxford did not in those days show much tolerance of strange opinions; each divergence from the peripatetic faith was punished in her graduates by a fine of five shillings; and Bruno outraged peripatetic (and other) convictions at every point. Success had emboldened him to speak out. He no longer kept within the bounds of the exoteric doctrine which had served to make him known at Toulouse and Paris, but gave a fuller taste of his quality in teachings often startling and subversive. His career at Oxford lasted just three months. It concluded, in June 1583, with the visit of the Polish Prince Albert de Alasco, the Palatine of Siradia, who came to the 'English Court to see the fashions, and admire the wisdom ' of the Queen,' † and was received by Leicester at the university with festivities of three days' duration. He was * In Mr. Frith's translation, op. cit., p. 118. + Wood, 'Antiquities of Oxford' (Gutch's edition), vol. ii. p. 215. said to be insatiable of learned pleasures,' and enough of them were provided to cloy the most robust appetite. Sermons, dissertations, disputations, theatrical performances, succeeded each other, the professors making show without stint of their learning and their Latinity, the Palatine of his powers of endurance. 6 6 Among the spectacles not the least significant was that of a spare-bodied, bright-eyed Italian engaged in acrimonious encounter with certain dons, described by him as clad in 'long robes of velvet, adorned with gold chains or costly rings, smelling of Greek and beer, and owning the manners ' of ploughmen.'* Fifteen several times, according to the same authority, was the 'Coryphæus of the academy on that ' grave occasion' reduced, by the conclusive force of fifteen syllogisms, to the embarrassed condition of a 'chicken in a 'stubble-field,' while the rudeness and brutality of that 'pig' brought out in strong contrast the graceful forbearance of his opponent, who in truth showed himself a Neapolitan, born and bred under more benignant skies.'† There were doubtless high words on the occasion. Bruno's mode of controversy was of an eminently exasperating kind. His sarcasms were, in the phrase of M. Conti, stiletto'thrusts;' his ironical attempts at conciliation scarcely more soothing. The upshot of the display was his disappearance from Oxford. The banks of the Isis knew him no more; nor was his brief stay commemorated by any local record. The Bodleian has been searched in vain § for any scrap of evidence bearing on the Nolan episode. Contemporary English writers were similarly silent. Not one of them mentions the name of Giordano Bruno. Yet he figured conspicuously in London society during upwards of two years. He knew Burghley and Walsingham; he was on terms of intimate friendship with Sidney and Fulke Greville; he had frequent access to Elizabeth. Italian refinement captivated the taste of the virgin queen:' she spoke the language per ambizione, as the Venetian ambassador reported-and aired the acquirement whenever feasible; Castiglione's code of gentility was her vade mecum; she affected the Italian mode and air, and stimulated her courtiers to imitate the Italian exiles whom misfortune or misconduct Cena de le Ceneri, pp. 123, 137 (Wagner's edition). + Ibid., p. 179. Storia della Filosofia, p. 266. By Professor Nettleship, at the request of M. Brunnhofer. |