play of words, rabbinic
allegories, verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he
professed to despise, with a shameless image here or there, product
not of formal method, but of Neapolitan improvisation, was akin to
[243] the heady wine, the sweet, coarse odours, of that fiery,
volcanic soil, fertile in the irregularities which manifest power.
Helping himself indifferently to all religions for rhetoric
illustration, his preference was still for that of the soil, the old
pagan one, the primitive Italian gods, whose names and legends haunt
his speech, as they do the carved and pictorial work of the age,
according to the fashion of that ornamental paganism which the
Renaissance indulged. To excite, to surprise, to move men's minds,
as the volcanic earth is moved, as if in travail, and, according to
the Socratic fancy, bring them to the birth, was the true function of
the teacher, however unusual it might seem in an ancient 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 bookman, yet with so vivid a hold on
people and things, the traits and tricks of the audience seemed to
revive in him, 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; himself to enjoy 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 Parisians then heard was, in truth, the first fervid
expression of all those contending apprehensions, out of which his
written works would afterwards be compacted, with much loss of heat
in the process. Satiric or hybrid growths, things due to hybris,+
insolence, insult, all that those fabled satyrs embodied--the
volcanic South is kindly prolific of this, and Bruno abounded in
mockeries: 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 very courtly
exterior, with mordent words, in unabashed criticism of all real or
suspected evil, provoked his utmost powers of scorn for the
"triumphant beast," the "constellation of the Ass," shini