"Jetzo, da ich ausgewachsen,
Viel gelesen, viel gereist,
Schwillt mein Herz, und ganz von Herzen,
Glaub' ich an den Heilgen Geist."—Heine+
[234] IT was on the afternoon of the Feast of Pentecost that news ofthe death of Charles the Ninth went abroad promptly. To hissuccessor the day became a sweet one, to be noted unmistakably byvarious pious and other observances; and it was on a Whit-Sundayafternoon that curious Parisians had the opportunity of listening toone who, as if with some intentional new version of the sacred eventthen commemorated, had a great deal to say concerning the Spirit;above all, of the freedom, the independence of its operation. Thespeaker, though understood to be a brother of the Order of St.Dominic, had not been present at the mass—the usual university mass,De Spiritu Sancto, said to-day according to the natural course of theseason in the chapel of the Sorbonne, by the Italian Bishop of Paris.It was the reign of the Italians just then, a doubly refined,somewhat morbid, somewhat ash-coloured, Italy in France, more Italianstill. Men of Italian birth, "to the great suspicion of simplepeople," swarmed in Paris, already "flightier, less constant, thanthe girouettes on its steeples," and it was love for Italian fashionsthat had brought king and courtiers here to-day, with great eclat, asthey said, frizzed and starched, in the beautiful, minutelyconsidered dress of the moment, pressing the university into aperhaps not unmerited background; for the promised speaker, aboutwhom tongues had been busy, not only in the Latin quarter, had comefrom Italy. In an age in which all things about which Parisians muchcared must be Italian there might be a hearing for Italianphilosophy. Courtiers at least would understand Italian, and thisspeaker was rumoured to possess in perfection all the curious arts ofhis native language. And of all the kingly qualities of Henry'syouth, the single one that had held by him was that gift ofeloquence, which he was able also to value in others—inheritedperhaps; for in all the contemporary and subsequent historic gossipabout his mother, the two things certain are, that the hands creditedwith so much mysterious ill-doing were fine ones, and that she was anadmirable speaker.
Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it,that the monastic life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its[235] silence and self-concentration. The prospect of such freedomsufficiently explains why a young man who, however well found inworldly and personal advantages, was conscious above all of greatintellectual possessions, and of fastidious spirit also, with aremarkable distaste for the vulgar, should have espoused poverty,chastity, obedience, in a Dominican cloister. What liberty of mindmay really come to in such places, what daring new departures it maysuggest to the strictly monastic temper, is exemplified by thedubious and dangerous mysticism of men like John of Parma and Joachimof Flora, reputed author of the new "Everlasting Gospel," strangedreamers, in a world of sanctified rhetoric, of that laterdispensation of the spirit, in which all law must have passed away;or again by a recognised tendency in the great rival Order of St.Francis, in the so-called "spiritual" Franciscans, to understand thedogmatic words of faith with a difference.
The three convents in which Bruno lived successively, at Naples, atCitta di Campagna, and finally the Minerva at Rome, developed freely,we may suppose, all the mystic qualities of a genius in which, f