THE NAME OF Girolamo Cardano, who was born at Pavia in 1501 and died at Rome in 1576, would be familiar to a student of the history of medicine or of mathematics. But the ordinary person, who alone confers immortality, will hesitate to accept him on such trivial grounds, rightly considering that his science has long been superseded, and that his contributions to algebra are now no more deserving of special celebrity than are the waters of a river when they are once mingled in the sea.
If Cardan escapes the oblivion he so much dreaded, it will be neither as doctor nor as mathematician, but because at the end of his life he wrote a little book about himself, and wrote it in the right way. He had always been interested in the subject, and fragments of autobiography occur in most of his works. Now, he gives it undivided attention, and endeavours through fifty-four chapters to describe his character, constitution, and fortunes. He might have been to us merely a person of some importance in his time, a funny old man who pottered about, four centuries ago, beside the springs of science. Hitherto his egotism has rescued him. He is so supremely interesting to himself that he cannot but interest others; and his little book ranks among the great autobiographies of the world.
The first statement in it is in some ways the most remarkable, and indicates the spirit in which he will review his life. ‘Before my birth, my mother endeavoured to procure abortion, and failed.’ Another writer, if he had the courage to make such a statement, would certainly turn it to some literary use. He would become sentimental over the poor infant, entering the world so unwillingly, so ungraciously received. He would try to arouse pity or indignation. He would probably say, that it was better for him if he had never been born. Cardan does nothing of the sort. Here is a fact, and a fact of some importance, to be related without lamentation, and without apology. If people are shocked at it, they are silly; if they pity him for it they are sillier still. He proceeds to calculate his horoscope.
It is this absence of sentimentality that gives Cardan his value — one might say his charm. Strictly speaking, there is nothing very attractive about him; there is certainly nothing poetic. But he has the ability, as well as the wish to be sincere, and his writing affects us with the power of a spoken work, making us blush sometimes for him, and more frequently for ourselves. Truthfulness is one of the few virtues to which he lays claim, and for this reason his biographers have accused him of untruthfulness. ‘A man,’ they argue, ‘who makes such a claim, must be a liar: we should never think of making it ourselves.’ It is a difficult point; however, it is worth while remembering that evidence against Cardan’s truthfulness is both scarce and doubtful. ‘It has never been my habit,’ he says, ‘to tell lies.’ His autobiography may be assumed to be a fairly trustworthy, as well as a readable book; and on it the following account of him is based.
Fazio Cardano, his father, was a Milanese lawyer, a man of good birth and some ability, who had hoped to go down to posterity as the commentator of a book called Peckham’s Perspectives. He was very ugly, like his son, having white eyes, no teeth, a stammer, and a round back, and he did not carry off his ugliness by any charm of disposition. He was never married to Cardan’s mother, which may partly account for the boy’s ill-regulated childhood, and for the persecution he encountered from respectable people in later years. ‘My Mother,’ says Cardan, ‘had a bad temper and a good memory. She was short, fat and pious. Indeed, both my parents had bad tempers, and they did not love their son for long at a time. However, they spoilt me; my father insisted on me laying in bed every morning till eight o’clock, and I think it did me a great deal of good. If I may say so my father was on the whole kinder and nicer than my mother.’ The household was completed by ‘my. Aunt Margaret, a woman from whose composition all venom seemed to have been omitted.’
The child, in spite of a tolerable horoscope, was unlucky from the first. At the age of one month he caught the plague, and his face was covered with carbuncles. Up to the age of seven years, his family whipped him, and he had to tug his father’s heavy bag through the streets of Milan. After seven, when whipping would have done him some good, he was left in peace. At eight, he ate a bunch of unripe grapes, and nearly died. He could remember being lifted up, in his convalescence, to see the French troops returning in triumph from the battles of 1509. Then he went to call on a friend, and a small smoothhaired dog bit him in the stomach. He climbed up a ladder, and the ladder fell. Sitting on a doorstep, safe for once, he thought, a tile slipped off a neighbouring roof, and stretched him senseless. Fazio thought it time to move; and ‘we changed our house, but not our fortune.’ There was no money, the country was harassed by perpetual wars, and the question of a profession had to be decided. Fazio wished the law; Cardan, in a notable passage, explains why he rejected it. From boyhood he had realized the dignity of life, and he desired to understand men in all ages and in all places. Law differed country by country, and altered year by year: he must have a profession which dealt with all humanity. Such an attitude might have made him a philosopher: Fazio hoped that it might. It made him a doctor instead. It made him a mathematician also. His father, with very elementary knowledge, had produced a tolerable commentary on Peckham’s Perspectives; he would do better. So he did; and at the present day, if anyone remembers that — 3 can be the root of 9, it is owing to him.
This squalid childhood, so full of disasters and disagreements, made a great impression on Cardan. ‘A family,’ he says, pathetically, ’is kept together neither by fear nor love, but by a certain reverence.’ Both fear and love were present in his; but the reverence was lacking.
It is not necessary to quote the detailed catalogue of his physical defects, which he relates with the interest of a physician rather than with the horrid zest of an invalid. Nowadays, a man so miserably constituted would be regarded as an oddity, and treated with consideration; in the sixteenth century he was allowed to take his chance of becoming great. He himself is conscious of nothing disgraceful; for at times the mender of flesh can attain to the serenity of the maker. Occasionally he wished for death, but the wish did not last long, nor was it violent while it lasted. ‘I think,’ he adds, ‘that others have wished for it also, though they have never had the courage to say so in a book.’
He is equally sincere over the defects of his character, though here the moralist may object that sincerity is not enough, and that a little shame would be very desirable. Cardan is so interested in self-analysis that he often forgets to deplore the results he has arrived at. He relates, in quick succession, his bad temper, his stupidity, his licentiousness, his inordinate love of revenge, without pausing to take breath and repent. Several times he had ruined himself by gambling: he sold all his wife’s jewels, and the furniture, to pay his debts. But he can look back with pleasure on the days when he had luck and adds: ‘Never play unless you play for money; nothing else can excuse the waste of time.’ When his vices are inconvenient to himself, we have a more decorous state of things. ‘I wish I had a stronger character; I ought to give the servants notice, and I can’t. And I have allowed people to give me presents of goats, lambs, storks, hares and conies, till the house smells like a farmyard.’ But sometimes, when we should most desire it, he is truly penitent: he cannot forgive himself for his habit of deliberately saying things that will vex his hearers: he has done it all his life: it is so strange, this sudden impulse to be rude and to inflict pain. Evidently Cardan had the desire to shock others which is so often found in unconventional people, and which is so often taken as a mark of unconventionality. But he had the head to know that it was wrong, and the heart to be sorry for it.
Such instances of tenderness are comparatively rare. To Cardan, the greatest things in life were work, self-examination, and the hope of immortality. Human intercourse was i unimportant beside these. The only time he is stirred to great emotion is at the death of his son, and even here it is the feeling that his name will not survive on earth that pains him most. He regarded friends as useful aids to existence: he took care that Cardinals should be among them, and Senators, and the Imperial Viceroys of Milan. ‘When you are choosing a friend, see first whether he gets on with others’ — admirable advice, but not the best. He is conscious of the risk of great affection: ‘only the gods know how to love and how to be wise.’ It may be conceded that, in this respect, Cardan is less interesting than his contemporaries, whether we take Michelangelo on the one hand, or Benvenuto Cellini on the other. Only once is he at all impressive — when he describes how he meets his future wife. And, even here, he grows strangely frigid towards the close. The passage opens with rather a beautiful account of a dream.
‘I was practising at Sacco, and things were going rather well with me, when one night I dreamt I was in a garden. It was delightful: there were flowers and fruit and gentle wind: no poet or painter could have imagined anything so charming. The garden gate was open, and outside it stood a girl dressed in white. I ran out to embrace her, and immediately the gardener shut the gate, and would not let me return. I burst into tears, and, clinging to the girl, was excluded from the garden for ever.’
A few days later, Altobello Bandarini, a retired officer of the Venetian militia, moved into the house next door, and his daughter, both in face and clothing, was exactly like the lady of my dream.
‘I said to myself: “What am I to do with this girl? I am poor and she is poor, and stifled by a crowd of brothers and sisters. How can I marry her? And if I attempt seduction her father lives close by, and is a military man besides. Whatever am I to do?” The end of it was, that I married her, and her parents were quite pressing about it, and offered every facility. She lived with me fifteen years, and was the cause of every misfortune that happened to me throughout my life.’
But he had the grace to add that Lucia Bandarini made a good wife. It is only as the mother of his sons that she can be said to be the cause of his misfortune.
It is characteristic of Cardan that the approach of his marriage should be thus indicated by a dream. Never was a man so anxious to establish a connection between the spiritual world and our own. He believed in dreams, omens, familiar spirits, ghosts, astrology, necromancy, cheiromancy, and metoposcopy. The supernatural powers were assiduous in their comments on his life, but they were singularly ill informed, and rarely told him the truth. They never prophesied what happened, and they prophesied what never happened. He is to die at the age of forty-one, and frames his life accordingly. He lives till seventy-six, thus finding himself with thirty-five unexpected years. He goes for a walk, and a crow seizes on to his clothes and tears a hole in them. Nothing happens. He dreams of a large red hen. He fears it will speak to him. It does speak to him. He cannot remember what it says and nothing happens. His little dog, generally so well behaved, jumps on to the shelf in his absence and chews up all his manuscripts, with the exception of a dialogue on Fate, though it was the easiest to chew. This time something does happen: before the year is out he gives up his practice in Milan.
Such were the connections that Cardan tried to establish with the other world. He thinks he is impartial, but, obviously, here is a matter of faith: he never would have tolerated such incapacity in a human adviser. Here he is characteristic of his age. He lived at a period when the Catholic religion seemed to be breaking down, and each man was trying to make a religion for himself. The result was not attractive. A little later, and the Jesuits put an end to private enterprise in superstition, and reorganized it in the interests of the Church.
It is instructive to follow the career of a man so curiously equipped. But, as we are concerned with Cardan’s character, rather than with his achievements, it is sufficient to note three events of his life — his visit to Scotland, his quarrel with Julius Cæsar Scaliger, and the tragedy of his sons.
The visit to Scotland, which took place in 1552, marks the highest point to which Cardan’s worldly fortunes attained. For forty years he had struggled against poverty, which his marriage had increased. The College of Physicians at Milan would not admit him, because he was of illegitimate birth. He was the victim of snobbishness, which, if it is not coeval with human nature, may be dated from the Counter-Reformation. But his extraordinary ability as a doctor compelled people to notice him. He records over 180 successful cures, and of patients whom he has definitely killed he can only remember three. Since he believed he could cure consumption, it was natural that he should be invited to attend on the Archbishop of St. Andrews, John Hamilton, who believed that he was suffering from it.
Fortunately for both parties, the Archbishop’s complaint turned out to be not consumption but asthma. Cardan owed his success mainly to his common sense. If he saw the patient was growing worse, he changed the treatment. He was less scientific than his contemporaries, but, as their science was wrong, this was to his advantage. In the present case, he profited by the failure of others, and in a month the Archbishop, if not restored to health, was at all events saved from death. He was to live regularly, with proper allowance for sleep, and he was not to sleep on a feather bed. Every morning he was to take a shower bath. He was to have plenty of turtle soup, and was not to overwork. Such advice, then, if not now, was more valuable than drugs, and Cardan is not to be considered a quack because his reputation rested on it. Before he left, he calculated Hamilton’s horoscope, but did not discover that his patient would be hanged in 1571.
On his way back through London, Cardan had an audience of Edward VI, who was recovering from an attack of measles. He was greatly struck by the ability of the king, who asked him some intelligent questions about the Milky Way. At the request of the courtiers, he calculated the king’s horoscope, and found that he would live till he was fifty-five at least. Next year the king died, and Cardan wrote a dissertation called What I thought afterwards about the subject. He frankly confesses his failure. He is to blame, but not the stars. The horoscope, indeed, was a perfunctory piece of work. Cardan wanted to get away from London. He was frightened at the overwhelming power and ambition of Northumberland, and he foresaw, by common sense, though not by astrology, that horrible tragedies were at hand.
His general impression of Great Britain was favourable.
‘It is worth consideration that the English care little for death. With kisses and salutations parents and children part: the dying say that they depart into immortal life, that they shall there await those left behind, and each exhorts the other to retain him in his memory. They dress like the Italians, for they are very fond of us. All the northern nations love us more than they love each other. Perhaps they don’t know how wicked we are. They are faithful, liberal, and brave. But bravest of all are the Highlanders, who take pipes with them when they are led to execution, and go dancing up to their death.’
It is interesting to contrast this with the lurid account of Italy given by the Englishman Roger Ascham. But whether the contrast is to the credit of the English, or of the Italians, is another question.
Three years later, in 1555, Cardan was attacked by the scholar and physician Julius Cæsar Scaliger. Scaliger was a great, healthy bully, who had begun life as a soldier. He was born in Italy, but so hated Italians, that he became a French subject and settled at Agen, where he reared his devoted family. ‘My father was a terrible man,’ says his son. ‘All the gentry respected him. He had a face like any king’s, yes, like an emperor’s. There is no king or emperor who has so grand a way as he had. Look at me; I am exactly like him. As for my sister, she is a poor creature, a beast.’ Scaliger, for the sake of notoriety, had already quarrelled with Erasmus. Now he attacked Cardan, whom he could not bear, thinking him a puny, affected, diseased Italian, who had no right to exist in a world which was meant for the strong. Cardan’s work, Concerning Subtlety — the greatest of his works — furnished an excuse. Scaliger wrote fifteen books of Esoteric Exercitations to confute it, loading his adversary with every kind of insult.
Cardan received a copy of this work, but, having other occupations, did not immediately reply to it. Scaliger and his family waited, month after month, in the greatest anxiety. At last the silence was explained. News arrived that Cardan was dead. The Esoteric Exercitations had killed him.
Then the strong man was seized with remorse. He immediately composed a funeral oration on his victim, which begins as follows:
‘Since fate has been so Unkind to me as to combine my private achievement with a public misfortune, and to connect my efforts, so noteworthy and so necessary, with a calamity so disproportionately dire, I think it only fair to inform posterity that I did not vex Cardan more by my trifling corrections than he has vexed me by his death.’
He continues in the same strain of complacent magnanimity and gentlemanly regret, and loudly calls to heaven to witness that he had meant no harm. He had done no harm either. Cardan survived the oration by twenty-one years, and the orator by seventeen. Unfortunately, the oration was never published, and the greatest joke of the sixteenth century could only have been enjoyed by a few.
The younger Scaliger notes it as an odd thing that, when Cardan did reply to his father, he never mentioned him by name. He only called him a ‘certain accuser.’ This restraint is typical of the man. Though he might be violent with his tongue, he tried to govern his pen. The printing press, then only a century old, had been mistaken for an engine of immortality, and men hastened to commit to it their deeds and passions for the benefit of future ages. Cardan, though he shared the illusion, had a higher conception of the responsibility. Though he was pitiless to himself, he desired that the follies and incompetencies of others should often remain anonymous. For this reason, Scaliger is only ‘a certain accuser’ in the reply.
The end of Cardan’s life was embittered by the tragedy of his sons. His own father and mother were long since dead, and his wife had died also. He was left to educate three children, Gianbattista, Aldo, and a daughter Chiara. Chiara was a good girl, and never cost her father more than a dowry. Aldo was wicked and worthless from the first. Cardan, after much unhappiness, was obliged to disinherit him. All the love of which he was capable went to his elder son, Gianbattista. It is all probably for Gianbattista that he composed the Precepts which are printed at the end of his autobiography, and which are a pleasant contrast to the dusty piety, and still more dusty cynicism, with which great men have so often regaled their offspring. Gianbattista, who had some ability, studied medicine in Milan. There was an earthquake in the night; and, next morning, Cardan heard that his son had married a disreputable woman who had neither character, connections, nor dowry. He refused to receive them; and the quarrel lasted nearly a year.
Then he forgave his son, and tried to make the best of the catastrophe.
But greater misfortunes were at hand. Gianbattista’s wife had not become respectable by marriage, and their life was one continual squabble, in which she was supported by her father, mother and three brothers. At last the young man could no longer bear the consequences of his folly. He bought some arsenic and put it into a cake, which he offered to the household. His father-in-law and mother-in-law were violently ill, but recovered. His wife, who had recently given birth to a child, died in great agony. The cause of her death was obvious. The next day Gianbattista was taken to prison.
As usual, Cardan was warned by portents and dreams. He noticed a fiery mark on his hand, which took the shape of a sword. He left Pavia, where he was living, and tried to save the life of his son. There was just a chance that death might be commuted for exile. To this end Cardan used all the curious scholastic arguments which still found favour in the courts. He proved that poison was a nobler weapon than a dagger. He proved that it was sometimes used as medicine, and might therefore be considered beneficial. But the Milanese had never liked him. His affection moved them as little as his arguments.,On the 7th of April, 1560, Gianbattista, then twenty-six years old, was executed in the prison.
Cardan was ruined. Not only had he spent large sums over the trial, but his reputation as a doctor was destroyed. The father of a murderer could not inspire patients with the necessary confidence. Then, as now, ability without respectability was useless. Fifty years earlier, in the prime of the Renaissance, when a man was judged by himself, not by his relatives, he might have recovered quickly from the blow. But the Counter-Reformation had begun. The Council of Trent was sitting, the Index had been started, the Inquisition was being developed. Cardan lived too late, a fate even more tragic than living too early. He was a martyr without being an apostle. He moved to Bologna; and, for a time, his fortunes improved. Then, without warning, he was accused of impiety, and imprisoned.
Hitherto, the Church had shown little opposition to science. In Italy, at all events, men were permitted to say, ‘I hold this as a philosopher; as a Christian I hold the reverse.’ And Cardan had always been strictly orthodox: he had even refused to go to Denmark as a royal physician because the Lutheran heresy had been established in that country. But now the Church was determined to combat inconsistency as well as dissent. This, in Cardan’s 237 volumes, was not difficult to find. The most serious charge was that he had calculated the horoscope of Christ. He was accused of atheism, and, since there were then grades in atheism, he was placed in the first division of the second class.
The life that had been so tragic ended like a farce. Cardan was released from prison by Cardinal Morone, and by Cardinal, afterwards Saint, Carlo Borromeo. He was taken to Rome, and he died there in the receipt of a pension from the Pope. It seems that his accusers had no desire to persecute him. He was an old man, and it was improbable that he would give them such trouble in future. All they required was a decent submission to the new order that they were establishing, and, having obtained that, they left him to die off in peace. His great learning, and his past achievements, conferred a certain distinction on anyone who would protect him. He was kept carefully, the product of a talented but misguided age, just as the marble gods and goddesses were kept carefully locked up in the galleries of the Vatican.
He entered Rome in 1571. There he had time in which to consider his eventful life, and, for all its misery, he finds that it has been good.
‘It has been my peculiar fortune to live in the century which discovered the whole world — America, Brazil, Patagonia, Peru, Quito, Florida, New France, New Spain, countries to the North and East and South. And what is more marvellous than the human thunderbolt, which in its power far exceeds the heavenly? Nor will I be silent about thee, magnificent Magnet, who dost guide us through vast oceans, and night and storms, into countries we have never known. Then there is our printing press, conceived by man’s genius, fashioned by his hands, yet a miracle equal to the divine.
‘It is true that, to compensate these things, great tribulations are probably at hand: heresy has grown, the arts of life will be despised, certainties will be relinquished for uncertainty. But that time has not yet come. We can still rejoice in the flowering meadow of spring.
‘I cannot say that I regret my lot. I am the happier for having known so many things which are important and certain and rare. And I know that I have the immortal element within me, and that I shall not wholly die.’
Besides hoping for immortality beyond the grave, for which there is some justification, Cardan hoped for immortality this side of it, for which there is no justification at all. The Italians of the Renaissance found their life so wonderful, that they believed that men would remember for ever that they had lived, and that the intensity of their emotions could not be dissipated by time. Cardan, who is the last of that Renaissance, is less ambitious in his demands. ‘I do not mind whether it is known what kind of a man I was, but I should like it to be known that I existed.’ Sir Thomas Browne, who lived still later, and who is prepared for total oblivion, sees the futility of such a compromise. ‘To be content that times to come should only know there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, was a frigid ambition in Cardan, disparaging his horoscopal inclination and judgment of himself.’
To raise up a skeleton, and make it dance, brings indeed little credit either to the skeleton or to us. But those ghosts who are still clothed with passion or thought are profitable companions. If we are to remember Cardan to-day let us not remember him as an oddity.
[1905]