Jerome Cardan - William George Waters (best novels to read for beginners txt) 📗

deny that other men may not now and then encounter like experiences, but the experiences of other men were not fraught with such momentous crises, nor did they foreshadow so many or grave dangers.

The chronicling of this episode and the fanciful coincidence of the deaths of Dominicus and Troilus may be taken as evidence that his idiosyncrasies were becoming aggravated by the decay of his faculties. Writing on October 1, 1576, he makes mention of the various testaments he had already made, and goes on to say that he had resolved to make a new and final disposition of his goods. He would fain have let his property descend to his immediate offspring, but with a son like Aldo this was impossible, so he left all to Gian Battista's son, who would now be a youth about eighteen years of age, Aldo getting nothing. He desired, for reasons best known to himself, that all his descendants should remain _in curatela_ as long as possible, and that all his property should be held on trust; if the issue of his body should fail, then the succession should pass in perpetuity to his kinsfolk on the father's side. He desired that his works should be corrected and printed, and that, if heirs failed entirely, his house at Bologna should pass to the University, and be styled, after his family, _Collegium Cardanorum_.

There is no authentic record of the exact date of Cardan's death. De Thou, in writing the record of 1576, says that if Cardan's life had been prolonged by three days he would have completed his seventy-fifth year. As Cardan's birthday was September 24, 1501, this would fix his death on September 21, 1576. The exact figures given by De Thou are: "eodem, quo praedixerat, anno et die, videlicet XI. Kalend. VIII.," and he adds by way of information that a belief was current at the time that Cardan, who had foretold how he would die on this day and in this year, had abstained from food for some days previous to his death in order to make the fatal day square with the prophecy.

But the details which Cardan himself has set down concerning the last few weeks of his life are inconsistent with the facts chronicled by De Thou. In the _De Vita Propria_, chapter xxxvi., Cardan records how on October 1, 1576, he set to work to make his last will and testament, wherefore if credit is to be given to his version rather than to that of De Thou, he was alive and active some days after the date of his death as fixed by the chronicler. In cases where the record of an event of his early life given in the _De Vita Propria_ differs from an account of the same in some contemporary writing, the testimony of the _De Vita Propria_ may justly be put aside; but in this instance he was writing of something which could only have happened a few days past, and the balance of probability is that he was right and De Thou wrong. Bayle notices this discrepancy, and in the same paragraph taxes De Thou with a mistake of which he is innocent. He states that De Thou placed the date of Cardan's death in 1575, whereas the excerpt cited above runs: "Thuanus ad annum MDLXXVI., p. 136, lib. lxii. tom. 4. Romae magni nominis sive Mathematicus, sive Medicus Hieronymus Cardanus Mediol. natus hoc anno itidem obiit."

No mention is made of the disease to which Cardan finally succumbed. Had his frame not been of the strongest and most wiry, it must have gone to pieces long before through the havoc wrought by the severe and continuous series of ailments with which it was afflicted; so it seems permissible to assume that he died of natural decay. His body was interred in the church of Sant Andrea at Rome, and was subsequently transferred to Milan to be deposited finally under the stone which covered the bones of his father in the church of San Marco. This tomb, which Jerome had erected after Fazio's death, bore the following inscription:

FACIO CARDANO

1.C.

Mors fuit id quod vixi: vitam mors dedit ipsa,
Mens aeterna manet, gloria tuta quies.

Obiit anno MDXXIV. IV. Kalend. Sept. anno AEtatis LXXX.
Hieronymus Cardanus Medicus Parenti posterisque V.P.[247]

FOOTNOTES:

[239] "Qua causa permotus sim ad scribendum, superius intellexisse te existimo, quippe somnio monitus, inde bis, terque, ac quater, ac pluries, ut alias testatus sum; sed et desiderio perpetuandi nominis. Bis autem magnam copiam ac numerum eorum perdidi; primum circa XXXVII annum, cum circiter IX. libros exussi, quod vanos ac nullius utilitatis futuros esse intelligerem; anno autem MDLXXIII alios CXX libros, cum jam calamitas illa cessasset cremavi."--_De Vita Propria_, ch. xlv. pp. 174, 175.

[240] _Opera_, tom. i. p. 122.

[241] _De Vita Propria_, p. 232.

[242] _Opera_, tom. i. p. 639. In the _De Varietate_ he says that natural causes may in most cases be found for seeming marvels. "Ecce auditur strepitus in domo, potest esse mus, felis, ericius, aut quod tigna subsidant blatta."--p. 624.

[243] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xli. p. 152.

[244] _De Vita Propria_, chapter xlii., _passim_.

[245] _Ibid.,_ p. 66.

[246] _Opera_, tom. i. p. 339.

[247] Tomasinus, _Gymnasium Patavinum_.


CHAPTER XIV

THE estimates hitherto made concerning Cardan's character appear to have been influenced too completely, one way or the other, by the judgment pronounced upon him by Gabriel Naude, and prefixed to all editions of the _De Vita Propria_. Some writers have been disposed to treat Naude as a hide-bound pedant, insensible to the charm of genius, and the last man who ought to be trusted as the valuator of a nature so richly gifted, original, and erratic as was Cardan's. Such critics are content to regard as black anything which Naude calls white and _vice versa_. Others accept him as a witness entirely trustworthy, and adopt as a true description of Cardan the paragraphs made up of uncomplimentary adjectives--applied by Cardan to himself--which Naude has transferred from the _De Vita Propria_ and the _Geniturarum Exempla_ to his _Judicium de Cardano_.

It may be conceded at once that the impression received from a perusal of this criticism is in the main an unfavourable one of Cardan as a man, although Naude shows himself no niggard of praise when he deals with Cardan's achievements in Medicine and Mathematics. But in appraising the qualifications of Naude to act as a judge in this case, it will be necessary to bear in mind the fact that he was in his day a leading exponent of liberal opinions, the author of a treatise exposing the mummeries and sham mysteries of the Rosicrucians, and of an "Apologie pour les Grands Hommes soupconnez de Magie," and a disbeliever in supernatural manifestations of every kind. With a mind thus attuned it is no matter of surprise that Naude should have been led to speak somewhat severely when called upon to give judgment on a man saturated as Cardan was with the belief in sorcery, witches, and attendant demons.

If Naude indeed set to work with the intention of drawing a figure of Cardan which should stand out a sinister apparition in the eyes of posterity, his task was an easy one. All he had to do was to place Jerome Cardan himself in the witness-box. Reference to the passages already quoted will show that, in the whole _corpus_ of autobiographic literature, there does not exist a volume in which the work of self-dissection has been so ruthlessly and completely undertaken and executed as in Cardan's memoirs. It has all the vices of an old man's book; it is garrulous, vain-glorious, and full of needless repetition; but, whatever portion of his life may be under consideration, the author never shrinks from holding up to the world's gaze the result of his searches in the deepest abysses of his conscience. Autobiographers, as a rule, do not feel themselves subject to a responsibility so deep as this. Memory turns back to the contemplation of certain springs of action, certain achievements in the past, making a judicious selection from these, and excerpting only such as promise to furnish the possible reader with a pleasing impression of the personality of the subject. With material of this sort at hand, the autobiographer sets to work to construct a fair and gracious monument, being easily persuaded that it would be a barbarous act to mar its symmetry by the introduction of loathly and misshapen blocks like those which Cardan, had he been the artist, would have chosen first of all.

Naude, after he has recorded the fact that, from his first essay in letters, he had been a zealous and appreciative student of Cardan's works, sets down Cardan's picture of himself, taken from his own Horoscope in the _Geniturarum Exempla_, "nugacem, religionis contemptorem, injuriae illatae memorem, invidum, tristem, insidiatorem, proditorem, magum, incantatorem, frequentibus calamitatibus obnoxium, suorum osor[e=], turpi libidini deditum, solitarium, inamoenum, austerum, sponte etiam divinantem, zelotypum, lascivum, obscoenum, maledicum, obsequiosum, senum conversatione se delectantem, varium, ancipitem, impur[u=], et dolis mulierum obnoxium, calumniatorem, et omnino incognitum propter naturae et morum repugnantiam, etiam his cum quibus assidue versor." The critic at once goes on to state that in his opinion this description, drawn by the person who ought to know best, is, in the main, a correct one. What better account could you expect, he asks, of a man who put faith in dreams and portents and auguries; who believed fully in the utterances of crazy beldames, who saw ghosts, and who believed he was attended by a familiar demon? Then follows a catalogue of moral offences and defects of character, all taken from Cardan's own confessions, and a pronunciation by Naude that the man who says he never lies, must be of all liars the greatest; the charge of mendacity being driven home by references to Cardan's alleged miraculous comprehension of the classic tongues in a single night, and his pretended knowledge of a cure for phthisis. There is no need to follow Naude farther in his diatribe against the faults and imperfections, real and apparent, of Cardan's character; these must be visible enough to the most cursory student. Passages like these arouse the suspicion that Naude knew books better than men, that at any rate he did not realize that men are to be found, and not seldom, who take pleasure in magnifying their foibles into gigantic follies, and their peccadilloes into atrocious crimes; while the rarity is to come across one who will set down these details with the circumstantiality used by Cardan. There is one defect in the _De Vita Propria_--an artistic one--which Naude does not notice, namely, that in his narrative of his early days Cardan often over-reaches himself. His show of extreme accuracy destroys the perspective of the story, and, in his anxiety to be minute over the sequence of his childish ailments, the most trivial details of his uneasy dreams, and the cuffs he got from his father and his Aunt Margaret, he confuses the reader with multitudinous particulars and ceases to be dramatic. But the hallucinations which he nourished about himself were not all the outcome of senility. In the _De Varietate_, the work upon which he spent the greatest care, and the product moreover of his golden prime, he gives an account of four marvellous properties with which he was gifted.[248] The first of these was