Giordano Bruno | Page 9

as a book, would be a dialogue according to the true Attic
genius, full of those diversions, passing 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 a visible person talking
with you.
And as the runaway Dominican was still in temper a monk, so he
presented himself in the comely Dominican habit. The eyes which in
their last sad protest against stupidity would mistake, or miss altogether,
the image of the Crucified, were to-day, for the most part, kindly
observant eyes, registering every detail of that singular company, all
the physiognomic lights which come by the way on people, and,
through them, on things, the "shadows of ideas" in men's faces (De
Umbris Idearum was the title of his discourse), himself pleasantly
animated by them, in turn. There was "heroic gaiety" there; only, as
usual with gaiety, the passage of a peevish cloud seemed 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 expression of
high-bred melancholy, it was a face 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 country of his birth, the Nolan, as he
delighted to proclaim 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, with all his
contempt for the "asinine" vulgar, was not fastidious. His rank,
unweeded eloquence, abounding in a play of words, rabbinic allegories,
verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he professed to
despise, with a shameless image here or there, product not of formal
method, but of Neapolitan improvisation, was akin to [243] the heady

wine, the sweet, coarse odours, of that fiery, volcanic soil, fertile in the
irregularities which manifest power. Helping himself indifferently to all
religions for rhetoric illustration, his preference was still for that of the
soil, the old pagan one, the primitive Italian gods, whose names and
legends haunt his speech, as they do the carved and pictorial work of
the age, according to the fashion of that ornamental paganism which
the Renaissance indulged. To excite, to surprise, to move men's minds,
as the volcanic earth is moved, as if in travail, and, according to the
Socratic fancy, bring them to the birth, was the true function of the
teacher, however unusual it might seem in an ancient 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
bookman, yet with so vivid a hold on people and things, the traits and
tricks of the audience seemed to revive in him, 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; himself to
enjoy 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 Parisians then heard was, in truth,
the first fervid expression of all those contending apprehensions, out of
which his written works would afterwards be compacted, with much
loss of heat in the process. Satiric or hybrid growths, things due to
hybris,+ insolence, insult, all that those fabled satyrs embodied--the
volcanic South is kindly prolific of this, and Bruno abounded in
mockeries: it was by way of protest. So much of a Platonist, for Plato's
genial humour he had nevertheless substituted the harsh laughter of
Aristophanes. Paris, teeming, beneath a very courtly exterior, with
mordent words, in unabashed criticism of all real or suspected evil,
provoked his utmost powers of scorn for the "triumphant beast," the
"constellation of the Ass," shining even there, amid the university folk,
those intellectual bankrupts of the Latin Quarter, who had so long
passed between them gravely a worthless "parchment and paper"
currency. In truth, Aristotle, as the supplanter of Plato, was still in
possession, pretending 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 are
most opposed to the essential freedom and quickness of