Book: Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance

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Considered from the point of view of a minute observation of nature,
the Infinite might figure as "the infinitely little"; no blade of
grass 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
space, 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
God is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worlds
innumerable. Yes! one might well have divined what reason now
demonstrated, indicating those endless [151] spaces 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 assurance 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 God 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 God 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 ingratitude;--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. God 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 God literally everywhere!--here was the
final counsel of perfection. The world was even larger than youthful
appetite, 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 space 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, 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 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 title of his discourse. There was "heroic gaiety" there:
only, as usual with gaiety, it made the passage 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, coarse odours, of that fiery, volcanic soil, fertile in
such irregularities as manifest power. Helping himself indifferently
to all religions for rhetoric illustration, his preference was still
for that of the soil, the old pagan religion, and for the primitive
Italian gods, 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 substituted
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 ass," shining even
there amid the university folk,--those intellectual bankrupts of the
Latin Quarter, who had so long passed 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 emancipated 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
constituted 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 God'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 God."

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, encompassed, 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 grünen
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, passion, etc."

THE END

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