For it is good that it be thus, and for five or six hundred years this it is that has made the greatness not only of European literature, but of Western civilization itself; I mean that which all the great nations, after slowly elaborating it, as it were, in their national isolation, have afterwards deposited in the common treasury of the human race.  Thus, to this one we owe the sense of mystery, and we might say the revelation of what is beautiful, in that which remains obscure and cannot be grasped.  To another we owe the sense of art, and what may be called the appreciation of the power of form.  A third one has handed to us what was most heroic in the conception of chivalrous honor.  And to another, finally, we owe it that we know what is both most ferocious and noblest, most wholesome and most to be feared, in human pride.  The share that belongs to us Frenchmen was, in the meanwhile, to bind, to fuse together, and as it were to unify under the idea of the general society of mankind, the contradictory and even hostile elements that may have existed in all that.  No matter whether our inventions and ideas were, by their origin, Latin or Romance, Celtic or Gallic, Germanic even, if you please, the whole of Europe had borrowed them from us in order to adapt them to the genius of its different races.  Before re-admitting them in our turn, before adopting them after they had been thus transformed, we asked only that they should be able to serve the progress of reason and of humanity.  What was troublous in them we clarified; what was corrupting we corrected; what was local we generalized; what was excessive we brought down to the proportions of mankind.  Have we not sometimes also lessened their grandeur and altered their purity?  If Corneille has undoubtedly brought nearer to us the still somewhat barbaric heroes of Guillem de Castro, La Fontaine, when imitating the author of the Decameron, has made him more indecent than he is in his own language; and if the Italians have no right to assail Moliere for borrowing somewhat from them, the English may well complain that Voltaire failed to understand Shakespeare.  But it is true none the less that in disengaging from the particular man of the North or the South this idea of a universal man, for which we have been so often reviled,—­if any one of the modern literatures has breathed in its entirety the spirit of the public weal and of civilization, it is the literature of France.  And this ideal cannot possibly be as empty as has too often been asserted; since, as I endeavored to show, from Lisbon to Stockholm and from Archangel to Naples, it is its manifestations that foreigners have loved to come across in the masterpieces, or better, in the whole sequence of the history of our literature.

GIORDANO BRUNO

(1548-1600)