The Heroic Enthusiasts | Page 3

discovered to those astonished
minds the myriads of worlds which fill the immensity of space.
Columbus was derided and banished by his fellow-citizens, and the fate
of our philosopher was similar to his. In the humble schoolmaster who
taught grammar to the children, the bishop, the clergy, and the nobles,
who listened eagerly to his lectures on the Sphere, began to suspect the
heretic and the innovator. After five months it behoved him to leave
Noli; he took the road to Savona, crossed the Apennines, and arrived at
Turin. In Turin at that time reigned the great Duke Emanuele Filiberto,
a man of strong character--one of those men who know how to found a
dynasty and to fix the destiny of a people; at that time, when Central
and Southern Italy were languishing under home and foreign tyranny,
he laid the foundations of the future Italy.
He was warrior, artist, mechanic, and scholar. Intrepid on the field of
battle, he would retire from deeds of arms to the silence of his study,
and cause the works of Aristotle to be read to him; he spoke all the
European languages; he worked at artillery, at models of fortresses, and
at the smith's craft; he brought together around him, from all sides of
Italy, artisans and scientists to promote industry, commerce, and
science; he gathered together in Piedmont the most excellent
compositors of Italy, and sanctioned a printer's company.
Bruno, attracted to Turin by the favour that was shown to letters and
philosophy, hoped to get occupation as press reader; but it was
precisely at that time that the Duke, instigated by France, was
combating, with every kind of weapon, the Waldensian and Huguenot
heresies, and had invited the Jesuits to Turin, offering them a
substantial subsidy; so that on Bruno's arrival he found the place he had
hoped for, as teacher in the university, occupied by his enemies, and he
therefore moved on with little delay, and embarked for Venice.
Berti, in his Life of Bruno, remarks that when the latter sought refuge
in Turin, Torquato Tasso, also driven by adverse fortune, arrived in the
same place, and he notes the affinity between them--both so great, both
subject to every species of misfortune and persecution in life, and
destined to immortal honours after their death: the light of genius

burned in them both, the fire of enthusiasm flamed in each alike, and
on the forehead of each one was set the sign of sorrow and of pain.
Both Bruno and Tasso entered the cloister as boys: the one joined the
Dominicans, the other the Jesuits; and in the souls of both might be
discerned the impress of the Order to which they belonged. Both went
forth from their native place longing to find a broader field of action
and greater scope for their intellectual powers. The one left Naples
carrying in his heart the Pagan and Christian traditions of the noble
enterprises and the saintly heroism of Olympus and of Calvary, of
Homer and the Fathers, of Plato and St. Ignatius; the other was filled
with the philosophical thought of the primitive Italian and Pythagorean
epochs, fecundated by his own conceptions and by the new age;
philosopher and apostle of an idea, Bruno consecrated his life to the
development of it in his writings and to the propagation of his
principles in Europe by the fire of enthusiasm. The one surprised the
world with the melody of his songs; being, as Dante says, the "dolce
sirena che i marinari in mezzo al mare smaga," he lulled the anguish
that lacerated Italy, and gilded the chains which bound her; the other
tried to shake her; to recall her to life with the vigour of thought, with
the force of reason, with the sacrifice of himself. The songs of Tasso
were heard and sung from one end of Italy to the other, and the poet
dwelt in palaces and received the caress and smile of princes; while
Bruno, discoursing in the name of reason and of science, was rejected,
persecuted, and scourged, and only after three centuries of ingratitude,
of calumny, and of forgetfulness, does his country show signs of
appreciating him and of doing justice to his memory. In Tasso the poet
predominates over the philosopher, in Bruno the philosopher
predominates over and eclipses the poet. The first sacrifices thought to
form; the second is careful only of the idea. Again, both are full of a
conception of the Divine, but the God that the dying Tasso confessed is
a god that is expected and comes not; while the god that Bruno
proclaims he already finds within himself. Tasso dies in his bed in the
cloister, uneasy as on a bed of thorns; Bruno, amidst the flames, stands
out as on a pedestal,