violin, for the tones, chords, and harmonies he can get out of it."




CHAPTER II. His Ideas, Passions and Intelligence.

I. Intense Passions.

Personality and character during the Italian Renaissance and during
the present time. - Intensity of the passions in Bonaparte. - His
excessive touchiness. - His immediate violence. - His impatience,
rapidity, and need of talking. - His temperament, tension, and faults.

On taking a near view of the contemporaries of Dante and Michael
Angelo, we find that they differ from us more in character than in
intellect.[1] With us, three hundred years of police and of courts of
justice, of social discipline and peaceful habits, of hereditary
civilization, have diminished the force and violence of the passions
natural to Man. In Italy, in the Renaissance epoch, they were still
intact; human emotions at that time were keener and more profound than
at the present day; the appetites were ardent and more unbridled;
man's will was more impetuous and more tenacious; whatever motive
inspired, whether pride, ambition, jealousy, hatred, love, envy, or
sensuality, the inward spring strained with an energy and relaxed with
a violence that has now disappeared. All these energies reappear in
this great survivor of the fifteenth century; in him the play of the
nervous machine is the same as with his Italian ancestors; never was
there, even with the Malatestas and the Borgias, a more sensitive and
more impulsive intellect, one capable of such electric shocks and