We have indicated 1564 as the year in which the North of Europe begins to gain steadily at the expense of the South. The date especially fatal to Italy may perhaps be carried five years back, to 1559, when the long contest between France and Spain for supremacy in the Peninsula was decided in favour of the latter by the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. Up to this time the Italians had been in some measure able to play their oppressors off against each other; and such from Alexander the Sixth’s time had been the policy of the Popes, who all wished the expulsion of the barbarians, in so far as compatible with their own family interests. The accommodation between the foreign Herod and the foreign Pilate put an end to this system. The hope of the independence of Italy was definitively resigned, the minor princes submitted to be Spanish vassals, and the Popes indemnified themselves by enlisting the monarchs in support of their spiritual authority. Jesuits, seminary priests, and inquisitors darkened the land, and the ever-augmenting pressure culminated at last in the rules for censorship promulgated by Clement VIII. in 1595, which effectually stifled freedom of thought, and stopped the dissemination of knowledge, except by leave of those whose interest it was to prevent it. Not merely were heretical or licentious writings interdicted, but criticism on rulers and ecclesiastics, and praises of the freedom and virtue of antiquity.
Such satires as those in which, in the days of the Renaissance, Alamanni and other orthodox Catholics had scourged the sins of Church and State, could now be printed only in Protestant countries. Anything might be prohibited that shocked the prejudice or surpassed the comprehension of an ignorant and bigoted priest. Authors were discouraged from writing, booksellers from publishing, and readers from reading, while the frivolous pedantry and execrable taste of the Jesuits infected almost all the schools. Renaissance had become reaction; the new birth had passed into the second death. This iron despotism could not be perpetually maintained. It was impossible to shut Italians out from all knowledge of the intellectual progress of Protestant countries, nor in the universal flux of things could the stern inquisitorial type of ecclesiastical ruler be stereotyped for ever. In course of time the zelanti Popes gave way to affable and humane personages, but the nation had meanwhile sunk into a mental torpor, in which, with a few glorious exceptions, it remained plunged until the crash of the old order of things in the French Revolution. The exclusion of the vivifying spirit of the Reformation, the impossibility of so much as alluding, except in disparagement, to the chief transaction of contemporary history, indicate an emasculation, as well as a paralysis, beyond the power of language to express.
The extinction of the free spirit of the Renaissance was the more unfortunate for Italy, as it arrested the development of speculative and scientific research which seemed opening upon her. It has been frequently observed that the close of a brilliant literary epoch has coincided with the birth of an era of positive science. The early Greek philosophers follow Homer and the rhapsodists; Aristotle and Theophrastus, Epicurus and Zeno, succeed the dramatists and the orators; the decline of Latin literature is the age of the illustrious jurists. Even so, as the great authors and the great artists departed from Italy, she produced her greatest man of science, and a bold school of philosophers arose to challenge the authority to which Dante and Aquinas had bowed. “Philosophy,” says Symonds, “took a new point of departure among the Italians, and all the fundamental ideas which have since formed the staple of modern European systems were anticipated by a few obscure thinkers.”
The chief representative of physical science, however, was by no means obscure. GALILEO GALILEI was born in 1564, the year of the death of Michael Angelo. The scientific achievements of this mighty genius do not concern us as such. It must not be forgotten, however, that he was also an accomplished author in the vernacular. His immortal Dialogue (1632), the glory and the shame of his age, is written in Italian, and is enumerated by Italians among exemplars of diction, testi di lingua. What he might have accomplished if he had enjoyed the applause and sympathy which greeted a Newton is difficult to say; but the contrast between the lot of the Master of the Mint and the President of the Royal Society on the one hand, and that of the lonely captive on the other, is not greater than that between the condition of England and that of Italy. It is needless to relate the oft-told story of Galileo, which indeed rather regards the history of science than that of literature. We are only concerned with him as a typical figure, the most eminent victim of the spirit of persecution which deprived Italy of her supremacy among intellectual nations, and which, even before Galileo had excited its hatred, had claimed another victim, less illustrious, but not less interesting.
It is probably owing to the considerable infusion of Greek blood into Naples and Sicily that the inhabitants of these regions, so backward in many respects in comparison with the rest of Italy, have displayed a peculiar genius for philosophical research. Aquinas was a Neapolitan, and in our own day the subtleties of German metaphysics have found a more sympathetic reception and a more ready comprehension in the South than elsewhere in Italy. The four chief Italian thinkers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries belonged to the kingdom of Naples. BERNARDO TELESIO (1509-85) has missed the posthumous celebrity of the others by escaping their tragic fate; but his reputation in his own day was greater than theirs. Campanella wept at his tomb, and Bacon calls him the first experimental observer of nature. He led the way in the revolt against the authority of Aristotle which became general in the seventeenth century, and his sensationalism helped to mould the thought of Hobbes and Gassendi.
A fiery martyrdom, a sublimely poetical mind, and an intuition of modern views and discoveries have made GIORDANO BRUNO a more celebrated and interesting figure than Telesio, although too far in advance of his contemporaries and too late recognised by posterity to be influential with either. “The most faithful and pithily condensed abstract of Bruno’s philosophy,” says Symonds, “is contained in Goethe’s poem, Prôömium zu Gott und Welt. Yet this poem expresses Goethe’s thought, and it is doubtful whether Goethe had studied Bruno except in the work of his disciple, Spinoza.” “Disciple,” it may be added, is much too strong a word to express the Hebrew thinker’s relation to the Neapolitan. It would be difficult to conceive two men more dissimilar, except in intellectual intrepidity and in love of truth. Spinoza is the closest of reasoners, without a particle of poetry in his composition. Bruno has magnificent divinations, with little reasoning power. If Spinoza did read him, he must have been greatly annoyed by him. On the other hand, the celebrated definition, “A God-intoxicated man,” which seems so inappropriate to the intellectual geometer of Amsterdam, absolutely fits the rapt Neapolitan prophet of the essential unity of all things. The same vehemence which we have remarked in Neapolitan men of letters—Pontano, Tansillo, Basile—combines in Bruno with the metaphysical instinct of the race to form a poet-philosopher, as incoherent as if he had just emerged from the Sibyl’s cave, but full of the most surprising intuitions, instinct with the germs of modern thought and discovery. His very incoherence seems a claim to reverence; it does not convey the impression of intellectual inadequacy, but rather of an inspired message transcending mortal powers of speech. A chastened taste cannot but be offended by the drollery and burlesque which, like a true Neapolitan, Bruno blends with daring speculation and serious reflection, as well as by his gaudy rhetoric and exaggerated euphuism; yet Symonds is right in observing that “when the real divine œstrum descends upon him the thought is simple, the diction direct; the attitude of mind and the turn of expression are singularly living, surprisingly modern.”
Like Galileo, Bruno chose the dialogue as the most convenient form of propagating his opinions, and unlike most contemporary philosophers, claims a place among vernacular writers. In his Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante and his comedy Il Candelaio he is satirical; metaphysically speculative in the Cena delle Ceneri, Della Causa, and Dell’ Infinito Universo; but perhaps the most interesting of his works is Gli Eroici Furori, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, a dithyramb in prose and verse on the progress of the soul to union with the Divinity. It may be too much to say with the English translator that in this remarkable book the author “lays down the basis for the religion of thought and science”; but it is true that the ordinary ecclesiastical ideals are thrust aside, and progress in truth, knowledge, and justice declared to be the end of man. If many had thought so, none had said it so openly. Bruno, however, never learned to observe, and remained all his life the metaphysician and the poet. Chief among his intuitions, after his perception of the unity of all existence, must be placed his instinctive recognition of the immense revolution which the acceptance of the Copernican theory must effect in religious belief. It is probable that he thus alarmed the priesthood ere he could arouse the laity, and that to him must be ascribed the persecution of Galileo, nearly a century after Copernicus had been permitted to dedicate his treatise to the Pope.
Bruno’s own martyrdom had preceded Galileo’s; he suffered death in February 1600, after a life of constant flight and exile, which at one time brought him to England, where he lectured at Oxford and became Sidney’s friend, and latterly of imprisonment. His fate is a striking illustration of the dismal though inevitable change that had come over the spirit of the ecclesiastical rulers: a Renaissance Pope would probably have protected him. His name long seemed forgotten, and his writings obliterated. Early in the eighteenth century interest in him revived, as is shown by the collection of his works in Lord Sunderland’s library. Brucker gave an intelligible digest of his opinions; Schelling avowedly sought inspiration from him; Coleridge names him with Dante and Ariosto as one of the three most representative Italians; and at present, even though he be chiefly efficient through his influence on more disciplined geniuses and more systematic thinkers, the world has hardly a more striking example of the truth, “The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner.”
As Bruno is the personification of martyrdom in the cause of philosophical speculation, another Neapolitan philosopher of the age, the Dominican TOMMASO CAMPANELLA (1568-1639) represents martyrdom for the sake of country. Campanella is not only a less important figure than Bruno, but less sane and practical. With all his extravagance, Bruno is no visionary; if he sometimes appears obscure and confused, the defect is not in the brain, but in the tongue. Campanella, though endowed with profound ideas, was a visionary who based his hopes of delivering his country from the Spanish yoke on predictions of the millennium, to be fulfilled by the advent of the Turks, and was sufficiently paradoxical to dream of a perfect republic in the kingdom of Naples. But this alliance of mental unsoundness with extraordinary intelligence renders him deeply interesting; unlike the frank and candid Bruno, he is one of the problematische Naturen who, as Goethe justly says, perpetually attract mankind. The flower of his life (1599-1625) was spent in prison, and some of it in torture, on account of a conspiracy which, after all the investigations of Signor Amabile, remains in many respects obscure, but which was undoubtedly designed to free Naples from the yoke, not only of Spain, but of Rome.
Released at length, Campanella successively found an asylum at Rome and at Paris, where he died in 1639. As his captivity became milder, he had been permitted to write, and to receive visits from friends, through whom his works found their way to the public. They are mostly of a political character. The chief, De Sensu et Magia Naturali, is a curious blending of philosophy and occultism; another, a defence of Galileo, does him honour, even though he afterwards changed his view; but another, De Monarchia Universali, seeks to revive the mediæval idea of the universal Church and the universal Empire, substituting Spain for Germany. Until the rediscovery of his poems, his literary reputation principally rested upon one of his slightest productions, his City of the Sun, an Utopian picture of a perfect community. It contains a remarkable anticipation of the steamboat: “They possess rafts and triremes which go over the waters without rowers or the force of the wind, but by a marvellous contrivance. And other vessels they have which are moved by the winds.”