After a residence of rather less than four years in Paris, he resolved upon a journey to England. Henri supplied him with letters of introduction to the French ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau de la Mauvissière. This excellent man, who was then attempting to negotiate the marriage of Elizabeth with the Duke of Anjou, received Bruno into his own family as one of the gentlemen of his suite. Under his roof the wandering scholar enjoyed a quiet home during the two years which he passed in England—years that were undoubtedly the happiest, as they were the most industrious, of his checkered life. It is somewhat strange that Bruno left no trace of his English visit in contemporary literature. Seven of his most important works were printed in London, though they bore the impress of Paris and Venice—for the very characteristic reason that English people only cared for foreign publications. Four of these, on purely metaphysical topics, were dedicated to Michel de Castelnau; two, treating of moral and psychological questions, the famous Spaccio della Bestia and Gli eroici Furori, were inscribed to Sidney. The Cena delle Ceneri describes a supper party at the house of Fulke Greville; and it is clear from numerous allusions scattered up and down these writings, that their author was admitted on terms of familiarity to the best English society. Yet no one mentions him. Fulke Greville in his Life of Sidney passes him by in silence; nor am I aware that any one of Sidney's panegyrists, the name of whom is legion, alludes to the homage paid him by the Italian philosopher.
On his side, Bruno has bequeathed to us animated pictures of his life in London, portraying the English of that period as they impressed a sensitive Italian.[88] His descriptions are valuable, since they dwell on slight particulars unnoticed by ambassadors in their dispatches. He was much struck with the filth and unkempt desolation of the streets adjacent to the Thames, the rudeness of the watermen who plied their craft upon the river, and the stalwart beef-eating brutality of prentices and porters. The population of London displayed its antipathy to foreigners by loud remarks, hustled them in narrow lanes, and played at rough-and-tumble with them after the manners of a bear-garden. But there is no hint that these big fellows shouldering through the crowd were treacherous or ready with their knives. The servants of great houses seemed to Bruno discourteous and savage; yet he says nothing about such subtlety and vice as rendered the retainers of Italian nobles perilous to order. He paints the broad portrait of a muscular and insolently insular people, untainted by the evils of corrupt civilization. Mounting higher in the social scale, Bruno renders deserved homage to the graceful and unaffected manners of young English noblemen, from whom he singles Sidney out as the star of cultivated chivalry.[89]
What he says about the well-born youth of England, shows that the flower of our gentlefolk delighted Southern observers by their mixture of simplicity and sweetness with good breeding and sound sense. For the ladies of England he cannot find words fair enough to extol the beauties of their persons and the purity of their affections. Elizabeth herself he calls a goddess, diva, using phrases which were after wards recited in the terms of his indictment before the Inquisition. What pleased him most in England, was the liberty of speech and thought he there enjoyed.[90] Society was so urbane, government was so unsuspicious, that a man could venture to call things by their proper names and speak his heart out without reserve. That Bruno's panegyric was not prompted by any wish to flatter national vanity, is proved by the hard truths he spoke about the grossness of the people, and by his sarcasms on Oxford pedants. He also ventured to condemn in no unmeasured terms some customs which surprised him in domestic intercourse. He drew, for instance, a really gruesome picture of the loving-cup, as it passed round the table, tasted by a mixed assemblage.[91]
A visit paid by Bruno to Oxford forms a curious episode in his English experiences. He found that university possessed by pedants and ignorant professors of the old learning. 'Men of choice,' he calls them, 'trailing their long velvet gowns, this one arrayed with two bright chains of gold around his neck, that one, good heavens! with such a valuable hand—twelve rings upon two fingers, giving him the look of some rich jeweler.'[92] These excellent dons, blest in the possession of fat fellowships, felt no sympathy for an eccentric interloper of Bruno's stamp. They allowed him to lecture on the Soul and the Sphere.
They even condescended to dispute with him. Yet they made Oxford so unpleasant a place of residence that after three months he returned to London. The treatment he experienced rankled in his memory. 'Look where you like at the present moment, you will find but doctors in grammar here; for in this happy realm there reigns a constellation of pedantic stubborn ignorance and presumption mixed with a rustic incivility that would disturb Job's patience. If you do not believe it, go to Oxford, and ask to hear what happened to the Nolan, when he disputed publicly with those doctors of theology in the presence of the Polish Prince Alasco.[93] Make them tell you how they answered to his syllogisms; how the pitiful professor, whom they put before them on that grave occasion as the Corypheus of their university, bungled fifteen times with fifteen syllogisms, like a chicken in the stubble. Make them tell you with what rudeness and discourtesy that pig behaved; what patience and humanity he met from his opponent, who, in truth, proclaimed himself a Neapolitan, born and brought up beneath more genial heavens. Then learn after what fashion they brought his public lectures to an end, those on the Immortality of the Soul and those on the Quintuple Sphere.'[94] The Soul and the Sphere were Bruno's favorite themes. He handled both at this period of life with startling audacity.
They had become for him the means of ventilating speculations on terrestrial movement, on the multiplicity of habitable worlds, on the principle of the universe, and on the infinite modes of psychical metamorphosis. Such topics were not calculated to endear him to people of importance on the banks of Isis. That he did not humor their prejudices, appears from a Latin epistle which he sent before him by way of introduction to the Vice Chancellor.[95] It contains these pompous phrases: 'Philotheus Jordanus Brunus Nolanus magis laboratae theologiae doctor, purioris et innocuae sapientiae professor. In praecipuis Europae academiis notus, probatus et honorifice exceptus philosophus. Nullibi praeterquam apud barbaros et ignobiles peregrinus. Dormitantium animarum excubitor. Praesuntuosae et recalcitrantis ignorantiae domitor. Qui in actibus universis generalem philantropiam protestatur. Qui non magis Italum quam Britannum, marem quam foeminam, mitratum quam coronatum, togatum quam armatum, cucullatum hominem quam sine cucullo virum: sed ilium cujus pacatior, civilior, fidelior et utilior est conversatio diligit.' Which may thus be Englished: 'Giordano Bruno of Nola, the God-loving, of the more highly-wrought theology doctor, of the purer and harmless wisdom professor. In the chief universities of Europe known, approved, and honorably received as philosopher. Nowhere save among barbarians and the ignoble a stranger. The awakener of sleeping souls. The trampler upon presuming and recalcitrant ignorance. Who in all his acts proclaims a universal benevolence toward man. Who loveth not Italian more than Briton, male than female, mitred than crowned head, gowned than armed, frocked than frockless; but seeketh after him whose conversation is the more peaceful, more civil, more loyal, and more profitable.' This manifesto, in the style of a mountebank, must have sounded like a trumpet-blast to set the humdrum English doctors with sleepy brains and moldy science on their guard against a man whom they naturally regarded as an Italian charlatan. What, indeed, was this more highly-wrought theology, this purer wisdom? What call had this self-panegyrist to stir souls from comfortable slumbers? What right had he to style the knowledge of his brethren ignorance? Probably he was but some pestilent fellow, preaching unsound doctrine on the Trinity, like Peter Martyr Vermigli, who had been properly hissed out of Oxford a quarter of a century earlier. When Bruno arrived and lectured, their worst prognostications were fulfilled. Did he not maintain a theory of the universe which even that perilous speculator and political schemer, Francis Bacon, sneered at as nugatory?
In spite of academical opposition, Bruno enjoyed fair weather, halcyon months, in England. His description of the Ash Wednesday Supper at Fulke Greville's, shows that a niche had been carved out for him in London, where he occupied a pedestal of some importance. Those gentlemen of Elizabeth's Court did not certainly exaggerate the value of their Italian guest. In Italy, most of them had met with spirits of Bruno's stamp, whom they had not time or opportunity to prove. He was one among a hundred interesting foreigners; and his martyrdom had not as yet set the crown of glory or of shame upon his forehead. They probably accepted him as London society of the present day accepts a theosophist from Simla or Thibet. But his real home at this epoch, the only home, so far as I can see, that Bruno ever had, after he left his mother at the age of thirteen for a convent, was the house of Castelnau. The truest chords in the Italian's voice vibrate when he speaks of that sound Frenchman. To Mme. de Castelnau he alludes with respectful sincerity, paying her the moderate and well-weighed homage which, for a noble woman, is the finest praise. There is no rhetoric in the words he uses to express his sense of obligation to her kindness. They are delicate, inspired with a tact which makes us trust the writer's sense of fitness.[96] But Bruno indulges in softer phrases, drawn from the heart, and eminently characteristic of his predominant enthusiastic mood, when he comes to talk of the little girl, Marie, who brightened the home of the Castelnaus. 'What shall I say of their noble-natured daughter? She has gazed upon the sun barely one luster and one year; but so far as language goes, I know not how to judge whether she springs from Italy or France or England! From her hand, touching the instruments of music, no man could reckon if she be of corporate or incorporeal substance. Her perfected goodness makes one marvel whether she be flown from heaven, or be a creature of this common earth. It is at least evident to every man that for the shaping of so fair a body the blood of both her parents has contributed, while for the tissue of her rare spirit the virtues of their heroic souls have been combined.'[97]
It was time to leave these excellent and hospitable friends. 'Forth from the tranquil to the trembling air' Bruno's unquiet impulse drove him. He returned to Paris at the end of 1585, disputed before the Sorbonne with some success of scandal, and then, disquieted by the disorders of the realm, set out for Germany. We find him at Marburg in the following year, ill-received by the University, but welcomed by the Prince. Thence we follow him to Mainz, and afterwards to Wittenberg, where he spent two years. Here he conceived a high opinion of the Germans. He foresaw that when they turned their attention from theology to science and pure speculation, great results might be expected from their solid intellectual capacity. He seems in fact to have taken a pretty accurate measure of the race as it has subsequently shown itself. Wittenberg he called the German Athens. Luther, he recog nized as a hero of humanity, who, like himself, defied authority in the defense of truth. Yet he felt no sympathy for the German reformers. When asked by the Inquisitors at Venice what he thought about these men, he replied: 'I regard them as more ignorant than I am. I despise them and their doctrines. They do not deserve the name of theologians, but of pedants.' That this reply was sincere, is abundantly proved by passages in the least orthodox of Bruno's writings. It was the weakness of a philosopher's position at that moment that he derived no support from either of the camps into which Christendom was then divided. Catholics and Protestants of every shade regarded him with mistrust.
A change in the religious policy of Saxony, introduced after the death of the Elector Augustus, caused Bruno to leave Wittenberg for Prague in 1588. From Prague he passed to Helmstädt, where the Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel received him with distinction, and bestowed on him a purse of eighty dollars.[98] Here he conceived two of his most important works, the De Monade and De Triplici Minimo, both written in Latin hexameters.[99] Why he adopted this new form of exposition is not manifest. Possibly he was tired of dialogues, through which he had expressed his thought so freely in England. Possibly a German public would have been indifferent to Italian. Possibly he was emulous of his old masters, Parmenides and Lucretius.
At Helmstädt he came into collision with Boetius, the rector of the Evangelical church, who issued a sentence of excommunication against him. Like a new Odysseus, he set forth once again upon his voyage, and in the spring of 1590 anchored in Frankfort on the Main. A convent (that of the Carmelites) sheltered him in this city, where he lived on terms of intimacy with the printers Wechel and Fischer, and other men of learning. It would appear from evidence laid before the Venetian Inquisitors that the prior of the monastery judged him to be a man of genius and doctrine, devoid of definite religion, addicted to fantastic studies, and bent on the elaboration of a philosophy that should supersede existing creeds.[100] This was a not inaccurate portrait of Bruno as he then appeared to conservatives of commonplace capacity. Yet nothing occurred to irritate him in the shape of persecution or disturbance. Bruno worked in quiet at Frankfort, pouring forth thousands of metaphysical verses, some at least of which were committed to the press in three volumes published by the Wechels.