GIORDANO BRUNO, PARIS: 1586. +

WALTER HORATIO PATER

 "Jetzo, da ich ausgewachsen, Viel gelesen, viel gereist, Schwillt mein Herz, und ganz von Herzen, Glaub' ich an den Heilgen Geist. "--Heine+

[234] IT was on the afternoon of the Feast of Pentecost that news ofthe death of Charles the Ninth went abroad promptly. To hissuccessor the day became a sweet one, to be noted unmistakably byvarious pious and other observances; and it was on a Whit-Sundayafternoon that curious Parisians had the opportunity of listening toone who, as if with some intentional new version of the sacred eventthen commemorated, had a great deal to say concerning the Spirit;above all, of the freedom, the independence of its operation. Thespeaker, though understood to be a brother of the Order of St. Dominic, had not been present at the mass--the usual university mass, De Spiritu Sancto, said to-day according to the natural course of theseason in the chapel of the Sorbonne, by the Italian Bishop of Paris. It was the reign of the Italians just then, a doubly refined, somewhat morbid, somewhat ash-coloured, Italy in France, more Italianstill. Men of Italian birth, "to the great suspicion of simplepeople, " swarmed in Paris, already "flightier, less constant, thanthe girouettes on its steeples, " and it was love for Italian fashionsthat had brought king and courtiers here to-day, with great eclat, asthey said, frizzed and starched, in the beautiful, minutelyconsidered dress of the moment, pressing the university into aperhaps not unmerited background; for the promised speaker, aboutwhom tongues had been busy, not only in the Latin quarter, had comefrom Italy. In an age in which all things about which Parisians muchcared must be Italian there might be a hearing for Italianphilosophy. Courtiers at least would understand Italian, and thisspeaker was rumoured to possess in perfection all the curious arts ofhis native language. And of all the kingly qualities of Henry'syouth, the single one that had held by him was that gift ofeloquence, which he was able also to value in others--inheritedperhaps; for in all the contemporary and subsequent historic gossipabout his mother, the two things certain are, that the hands creditedwith so much mysterious ill-doing were fine ones, and that she was anadmirable speaker. 

Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it, that the monastic life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its[235] silence and self-concentration. The prospect of such freedomsufficiently explains why a young man who, however well found inworldly and personal advantages, was conscious above all of greatintellectual possessions, and of fastidious spirit also, with aremarkable distaste for the vulgar, should have espoused poverty, chastity, obedience, in a Dominican cloister. What liberty of mindmay really come to in such places, what daring new departures it maysuggest to the strictly monastic temper, is exemplified by thedubious and dangerous mysticism of men like John of Parma and Joachimof Flora, reputed author of the new "Everlasting Gospel, " strangedreamers, in a world of sanctified rhetoric, of that laterdispensation of the spirit, in which all law must have passed away;or again by a recognised tendency in the great rival Order of St. Francis, in the so-called "spiritual" Franciscans, to understand thedogmatic words of faith with a difference. 

The three convents in which Bruno lived successively, at Naples, atCitta di Campagna, and finally the Minerva at Rome, developed freely, we may suppose, all the mystic qualities of a genius in which, fromthe first, a heady southern imagination took the lead. But it wasfrom beyond conventional bounds he would look for the sustenance, thefuel, of an ardour born or bred within them. Amid such artificialreligious stillness the air itself becomes generous in undertones. The vain young monk (vain of course!) would feed his vanity bypuzzling the good, sleepy heads of the average sons of Dominic withhis neology, putting new wine into old bottles, teaching them theirown business--the new, higher, truer sense of the most familiarterms, the chapters they read, the hymns they sang, above all, as ithappened, every word that referred to the Spirit, the reign of theSpirit, its excellent freedom. He would soon pass beyond the utmostlimits of his brethren's sympathy, beyond the largest and freestinterpretation those words would bear, to thoughts and words on analtogether different plane, of which the full scope was only to befelt in certain old pagan writers, though approached, perhaps, atfirst, as having a kind of natural, preparatory kinship withScripture itself. The Dominicans would seem to have hadwell-stocked, liberally-selected, libraries; and this curious youth, inthat age of restored letters, read eagerly, easily, and very sooncame to the kernel of a difficult old author--Plotinus or Plato; tothe purpose of thinkers older still, surviving by glimpses only inthe books of others--Empedocles, Pythagoras, who had enjoyed theoriginal divine sense of things, above all, Parmenides, that mostancient assertor of God's identity with the world. The affinities, the unity, of the visible and the invisible, of earth and heaven, ofall things whatever, with each other, through the consciousness, theperson, of God the Spirit, who was at every moment of infinite time, in every atom of matter, at every [236] point of infinite space, ay!was everything in turn: that doctrine--l'antica filosofia Italiana--wasin all its vigour there, a hardy growth out of the very heart ofnature, interpreting itself to congenial minds with all the fulnessof primitive utterance. A big thought! yet suggesting, perhaps, fromthe first, in still, small, immediately practical, voice, somepossible modification of, a freer way of taking, certain moralprecepts: say! a primitive morality, congruous with those largerprimitive ideas, the larger survey, the earlier, more liberal air. 

Returning to this ancient "pantheism, " after so long a reign of aseemingly opposite faith, Bruno unfalteringly asserts "the vision ofall things in God" to be the aim of all metaphysical speculation, asof all inquiry into nature: the Spirit of God, in countless varietyof forms, neither above, nor, in any way, without, but intimatelywithin, all things--really present, with equal integrity, in thesunbeam ninety millions of miles long, and the wandering drop ofwater as it evaporates therein. The divine consciousness would havethe same relation to the production of things, as the humanintelligence to the production of true thoughts concerning them. Nay! those thoughts are themselves God in man: a loan, there, too, ofhis assisting Spirit, who, in truth, creates all things in and by hisown contemplation of them. For Him, as for man in proportion as manthinks truly, thought and, being are identical, and things existentonly in so far as they are known. Delighting in itself, in the senseof its own energy, this sleepless, capacious, fiery intelligence, evokes all the orders of nature, all the revolutions of history, cycle upon cycle, in ever new types. And God the Spirit, the soul ofthe world, being really identical with his own soul, Bruno, as theuniverse shapes itself to his reason, his imagination, ever more andmore articulately, shares also the divine joy in that process of theformation of true ideas, which is really parallel to the process ofcreation, to the evolution of things. In a certain mystic sense, which some in every age of the world have understood, he, too, iscreator, himself actually a participator in the creative function. And by such a philosophy, he assures us, it was his experience thatthe soul is greatly expanded: con questa filosofia l'anima, mis'aggrandisce: mi se magnifica l'intelletto!

For, with characteristic largeness of mind, Bruno accepted thistheory in the whole range of its consequences. Its more immediatecorollary was the famous axiom of "indifference, " of "the coincidenceof contraries. " To the eye of God, to the philosophic vision throughwhich God sees in man, nothing is really alien from Him. Thedifferences of things, and above all, those distinctions whichschoolmen and priests, old or new, Roman or Reformed, had inventedfor themselves, would be lost in the length and breadth of thephilosophic survey; nothing, in itself, either great or small; andmatter, [237] certainly, in all its various forms, not evil butdivine. Could one choose or reject this or that? If God the Spirithad made, nay! was, all things indifferently, then, matter andspirit, the spirit and the flesh, heaven and earth, freedom andnecessity, the first and the last, good and evil, would besuperficial rather than substantial differences. Only, were joy andsorrow also to be added to the list of phenomena really coincident orindifferent, as some intellectual kinsmen of Bruno have claimed theyshould?

The Dominican brother was at no distant day to break far enough awayfrom the election, the seeming "vocation" of his youth, yet wouldremain always, and under all circumstances, unmistakably a monk insome predominant qualities of temper. At first it only by way ofthought that he asserted his liberty--delightful, late-foundprivilege!--traversing, in mental journeys, that spacious circuit, asit broke away before him at every moment into ever-new horizons. Kindling thought and imagination at once, the prospect draws from himcries of joy, a kind of religious joy, as in some new "canticle ofthe creatures, " a new monkish hymnal or antiphonary. "Nature"becomes for him a sacred term. "Conform thyself to Nature"--withwhat sincerity, what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he enouncesthe precept to others, to himself! Recovering, as he fancies, acertain primeval sense of Deity broadcast on things, in whichPythagoras and other inspired theorists of early Greece had abounded, in his hands philosophy becomes a poem, a sacred poem, as it had beenwith them. That Bruno himself, in "the enthusiasm of the idea, " drewfrom his axiom of the "indifference of contraries" the practicalconsequence which is in very deed latent there, that he was ready tosacrifice to the antinomianism, which is certainly a part of itsrigid logic, the purities of his youth for instance, there is noproof. The service, the sacrifice, he is ready to bring to the greatlight that has dawned for him, which occupies his entire consciencewith the sense of his responsibilities to it, is that of days andnights spent in eager study, of a plenary, disinterested utterance ofthe thoughts that arise in him, at any hazard, at the price, say! ofmartyrdom. The work of the divine Spirit, as he conceives it, exalts, inebriates him, till the scientific apprehension seems totake the place of prayer, sacrifice, communion. It would be amistake, he holds, to attribute to the human soul capacities merelypassive or receptive. She, too, possesses, not less than the soul ofthe world, initiatory power, responding with the free gift of a lightand heat that seem her own. 

Yet a nature so opulently endowed can hardly have been lacking inpurely physical ardours. His pantheistic belief that the Spirit ofGod was in all things, was not inconsistent with, might encourage, akeen and restless eye for the dramatic details of life and characterfor humanity in all its visible attractiveness, since there, too, in[238] truth, divinity lurks. From those first fair days of earlyGreek speculation, love had occupied a large place in the conceptionof philosophy; and in after days Bruno was fond of developing, likePlato, like the Christian platonist, combining something of thepeculiar temper of each, the analogy between intellectual enthusiasmand the flights of physical love, with an animation which showsclearly enough the reality of his experience in the latter. TheEroici Furori, his book of books, dedicated to Philip Sidney, whowould be no stranger to such thoughts, presents a singular blendingof verse and prose, after the manner of Dante's Vita Nuova. Thesupervening philosophic comment re-considers those earlier physicalimpulses which had prompted the sonnet in voluble Italian, entirelyto the advantage of their abstract, incorporeal equivalents. Yet ifit is after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack of thenatural stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be made. That there is no single name of preference, no Beatrice or Laura, byno means proves the young man's earlier desires merely "Platonic;"and if the colours of love inevitably lose a little of their forceand propriety by such deflection, the intellectual purpose ascertainly finds its opportunity thereby, in the matter of borrowedfire and wings. A kind of old, scholastic pedantry creeping backover the ardent youth who had thrown it off so defiantly (as if Lovehimself went in for a degree at the University) Bruno developes, under the mask of amorous verse, all the various stages ofabstraction, by which, as the last step of a long ladder, the mindattains actual "union. " For, as with the purely religious mystics, union, the mystic union of souls with each other and their Lord, nothing less than union between the contemplator and thecontemplated--the reality, or the sense, or at least the name ofit--was always at hand. Whence that instinctive tendency, if not fromthe Creator of things himself, who has doubtless prompted it in thephysical universe, as in man? How familiar the thought that thewhole creation longs for God, the soul as the hart for thewater-brooks! To unite oneself to the infinite by breadth and lucidity ofintellect, to enter, by that admirable faculty, into eternallife--this was the true vocation of the spouse, of the rightly amoroussoul--"a filosofia e necessario amore. " There would be degrees ofprogress therein, as of course also of relapse: joys and sorrows, therefore. And, in interpreting these, the philosopher, whoseintellectual ardours have superseded religion and love, is still alover and a monk. All the influences of the convent, the heady, sweet incense, the pleading sounds, the sophisticated light and air, the exaggerated humour of gothic carvers, the thick stratum of pagansentiment beneath ("Santa Maria sopra Minerva!") are indelible inhim. Tears, sympathies, tender inspirations, attraction, repulsion, dryness, zeal, desire, recollection: he finds a place for them all:knows them all [239] well in their unaffected simplicity, while heseeks the secret and secondary, or, as he fancies, the primary, formand purport of each. 

A light on actual life, or mere barren scholastic subtlety, neverbefore had the pantheistic doctrine been developed with suchcompleteness, never before connected with so large a sense of nature, so large a promise of the knowledge of it as it really is. The eyesthat had not been wanting to visible humanity turned with equalliveliness on the natural world in that region of his birth, whereall its force and colour is twofold. Nature is not only a thought inthe divine mind; it is also the perpetual energy of that mind, which, ever identical with itself, puts forth and absorbs in turn all thesuccessive forms of life, of thought, of language even. But whatseemed like striking transformations of matter were in truth only achapter, a clause, in the great volume of the transformations of theSpirit. To that mystic recognition that all is divine had succeededa realisation of the largeness of the field of concrete knowledge, the infinite extent of all there was actually to know. Winged, fortified, by this central philosophic faith, the student proceeds tothe reading of nature, led on from point to point by manifold lights, which will surely strike on him, by the way, from the intelligence init, speaking directly, sympathetically, to the intelligence in him. The earth's wonderful animation, as divined by one who anticipates bya whole generation the "philosophy of experience:" in that, the bold, flighty, pantheistic speculation became tangible matter of fact. Here was the needful book for man to read, the full revelation, the detailed story of that one universal mind, struggling, emerging, through shadow, substance, manifest spirit, in various orders ofbeing--the veritable history of God. And nature, together with thetrue pedigree and evolution of man also, his gradual issue from it, was still all to learn. The delightful tangle of things! it would bethe delightful task of man's thoughts to disentangle that. AlreadyBruno had measured the space which Bacon would fill, with roomperhaps for Darwin also. That Deity is everywhere, like all suchabstract propositions, is a two-edged force, depending for itspractical effect on the mind which admits it, on the peculiarperspective of that mind. To Dutch Spinosa, in the next century, faint, consumptive, with a hold on external things naturally faint, the theorem that God was in all things whatever, annihilating, theirdifferences suggested a somewhat chilly withdrawal from the contactof all alike. In Bruno, eager and impassioned, an Italian of theItalians, it awoke a constant, inextinguishable appetite for everyform of experience--a fear, as of the one sin possible, of limiting, for oneself or another, that great stream flowing for thirsty souls, that wide pasture set ready for the hungry heart. Considered fromthe point of view of a minute observation of nature, the Infinitemight figure as "the infinitely little;" no blade [240] of grassbeing like another, as there was no limit to the complexities of anatom of earth, cell, sphere, within sphere. But the earth itself, hitherto seemingly the privileged centre of a very limited universe, was, after all, itself but an atom in an infinite world of starryspace, then lately displayed to the ingenuous intelligence, whichthe telescope was one day to verify to bodily eyes. For if Brunomust needs look forward to the future, to Bacon, for adequateknowledge of the earth--the infinitely little; he looked back, gratefully, to another daring mind, which had already put the earthinto its modest place, and opened the full view of the heavens. If God is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worldsinnumerable. Yes! one might well have supposed what reason nowdemonstrated, indicating those endless spaces which sidereal sciencewould gradually occupy, an echo of the creative word of God himself, "Qui innumero numero innumerorum nomina dicit. "

That the stars are suns: that the earth is in motion: that the earthis of like stuff with the stars: now the familiar knowledge ofchildren, dawning on Bruno as calm assurance of reason on appeal fromthe prejudice of the eye, brought to him an inexpressiblyexhilarating sense of enlargement of the intellectual, nay! thephysical atmosphere. And his consciousness of unfailing unity andorder did not desert him in that larger survey, making the utmost onecould ever know of the earth seem but a very little chapter in thatendless history of God the Spirit, rejoicing so greatly in theadmirable spectacle that it never ceases to evolve from matter newconditions. The immovable earth beneath one's feet! one almost feltthe movement, the respiration of God in it. And yet how greatly eventhe physical eye, the sensible imagination (so to term it) wasflattered by the theorem. What joy in that motion, the prospect, themusic, the music of the spheres!--he could listen to it in aperfection such as had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoraseven. 

 "Veni, Creator Spiritus, Mentes tuorum visita, Imple superna gratia, Quae tu creasti pectora!"

Yes! the grand old Christian hymns, perhaps the grandest of them, seemed to blend themselves in the chorus, to deepen immeasurablyunder this new intention. It is not always, or often, that men'sabstract ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal spirits, affect conduct. It was what they did with Bruno. The ghastlyspectacle of the endless material universe, infinite dust, in truth, starry as it may look to our terrestrial eyes--that prospect fromwhich Pascal's faithful soul recoiled so painfully--induced in Brunoonly the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship [241]and sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have itssympathetic inhabitants. Scruples of conscience, if he felt such, might well be pushed aside for the "excellency" of such knowledge asthis. To shut the eyes, whether of the body or the mind, would be akind of dark ingratitude; the one sin, to believe directly orindirectly in any absolutely dead matter anywhere, because involvingdenial of the indwelling spirit. A free spirit, certainly, as ofold! Through all his pantheistic flights, from horizon to horizon, it was still the thought of liberty that presented itself to theinfinite relish of this "prodigal son" of Dominic. God the Spirithad made all things indifferently, with a largeness, a beneficence, impiously belied by any theory of restrictions, distinctions, absolute limitations. Touch, see, listen, eat freely of all thetrees of the garden of Paradise with the voice of the Lord Godliterally everywhere: here was the final counsel of perfection. Theworld was even larger than youthful appetite, youthful capacity. Lettheologian and every other theorist beware how he narrowed either. The plurality of worlds! how petty in comparison seemed the sins, topurge which was the chief motive for coming to places like thisconvent, whence Bruno, with vows broken, or obsolete for him, presently departed. A sonnet, expressive of the joy with which hereturned to so much more than the liberty of ordinary men, does notsuggest that he was driven from it. Though he must have seemed tothose who surely had loved so lovable a creature there to bedeparting, like the prodigal of the Gospel, into the furthest ofpossible far countries, there is no proof of harsh treatment, or evenof an effort to detain him. 

It happens, of course most naturally, that those who undergo theshock of spiritual or intellectual change sometimes fail to recognisetheir debt to the deserted cause: how much of the heroism, or otherhigh quality, of their rejection has really been the growth of whatthey reject? Bruno, the escaped monk, is still a monk: hisphilosophy, impious as it might seem to some, a new religion. Hecame forth well fitted by conventual influences to play upon men ashe was played upon. A challenge, a war-cry, an alarum; everywhere heseemed to be the creature of some subtly materialized spiritualforce, like that of the old Greek prophets, like the primitive"enthusiasm" he was inclined to set so high, or impulsive Pentecostalfire. His hunger to know, fed at first dreamily enough within theconvent walls as he wandered over space and time an indefatigablereader of books, would be fed physically now by ear and eye, by largematter-of-fact experience, as he journeys from university touniversity; yet still, less as a teacher than a courtier, a citizenof the world, a knight-errant of intellectual light. The philosophicneed to try all things had given reasonable justification to thestirring desire for travel common to youth, in which, if in nothingelse, that whole age of the [242] later Renaissance was invinciblyyoung. The theoretic recognition of that mobile spirit of the world, ever renewing its youth, became, sympathetically, the motive of alife as mobile, as ardent, as itself; of a continual journey, theventure and stimulus of which would be the occasion of ever newdiscoveries, of renewed conviction. 

The unity, the spiritual unity, of the world:--that must involve thealliance, the congruity, of all things with each other, greatreinforcement of sympathy, of the teacher's personality with thedoctrine he had to deliver, the spirit of that doctrine with thefashion of his utterance. In his own case, certainly, as Brunoconfronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, his language, were the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which soon had hold ofhis audience also; alien, strangely alien, as it might seem from thespeaker. It was intimate discourse, in magnetic touch with every onepresent, with his special point of impressibility; the sort of speechwhich, consolidated into literary form as a book, would be a dialogueaccording to the true Attic genius, full of those diversions, passingirritations, unlooked-for appeals, in which a solicitous missionaryfinds his largest range of opportunity, and takes even dull witsunaware. In Bruno, that abstract theory of the perpetual motion ofthe world was a visible person talking with you. 

And as the runaway Dominican was still in temper a monk, so hepresented himself in the comely Dominican habit. The eyes which intheir last sad protest against stupidity would mistake, or missaltogether, the image of the Crucified, were to-day, for the mostpart, kindly observant eyes, registering every detail of thatsingular company, all the physiognomic lights which come by the wayon people, and, through them, on things, the "shadows of ideas" inmen's faces (De Umbris Idearum was the title of his discourse), himself pleasantly animated by them, in turn. There was "heroicgaiety" there; only, as usual with gaiety, the passage of a peevishcloud seemed all the chillier. Lit up, in the agitation of speaking, by many a harsh or scornful beam, yet always sinking, in moments ofrepose, to an expression of high-bred melancholy, it was a face thatlooked, after all, made for suffering--already half pleading, halfdefiant--as of a creature you could hurt, but to the last never shakea hair's breadth from its estimate of yourself. 

Like nature, like nature in that country of his birth, the Nolan, ashe delighted to proclaim himself, loved so well that, born wandereras he was, he must perforce return thither sooner or later, at therisk of life, he gave plenis manibus, but without selection, and, with all his contempt for the "asinine" vulgar, was not fastidious. His rank, unweeded eloquence, abounding in a play of words, rabbinicallegories, verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition heprofessed to despise, with a shameless image here or there, productnot 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 rhetoricillustration, his preference was still for that of the soil, the oldpagan one, the primitive Italian gods, whose names and legends haunthis speech, as they do the carved and pictorial work of the age, according to the fashion of that ornamental paganism which theRenaissance indulged. To excite, to surprise, to move men's minds, as the volcanic earth is moved, as if in travail, and, according tothe Socratic fancy, bring them to the birth, was the true function ofthe teacher, however unusual it might seem in an ancient university. Fantastic, from first to last that was the descriptive epithet; andthe very word, carrying us to Shakespeare, reminds one howcharacteristic of the age such habit was, and that it waspre-eminently due to Italy. A bookman, yet with so vivid a hold onpeople and things, the traits and tricks of the audience seemed torevive in him, to strike from his memory all the graphic resources ofhis old readings. He seemed to promise some greater matter than wasthen actually exposed; himself to enjoy the fulness of a greatoutlook, the vague suggestion of which did but sustain the curiosityof the listeners. And still, in hearing him speak you seemed to seethat subtle spiritual fire to which he testified kindling from wordto word. What Parisians then heard was, in truth, the first fervidexpression of all those contending apprehensions, out of which hiswritten works would afterwards be compacted, with much loss of heatin the process. Satiric or hybrid growths, things due to hybris, +insolence, insult, all that those fabled satyrs embodied--thevolcanic South is kindly prolific of this, and Bruno abounded inmockeries: it was by way of protest. So much of a Platonist, forPlato's genial humour he had nevertheless substituted the harshlaughter of Aristophanes. Paris, teeming, beneath a very courtlyexterior, with mordent words, in unabashed criticism of all real orsuspected evil, provoked his utmost powers of scorn for the"triumphant beast, " the "constellation of the Ass, " shining eventhere, amid the university folk, those intellectual bankrupts of theLatin Quarter, who had so long passed between them gravely aworthless "parchment and paper" currency. In truth, Aristotle, asthe supplanter of Plato, was still in possession, pretending todetermine heaven and earth by precedent, hiding the proper nature ofthings from the eyes of men. Habit--the last word of his practicalphilosophy--indolent habit! what would this mean in the intellectuallife, but just that sort of dead judgments which are most opposed tothe essential freedom and quickness of the Spirit, because the mind, the eye, were no longer really at work in them?

To Bruno, a true son of the Renaissance, in the light of those large, antique, pagan ideas, the difference between Rome and the Reformwould figure, of course, as but an insignificant variation upon [244]some deeper, more radical antagonism between two tendencies of men'sminds. But what about an antagonism deeper still? between Christ andthe world, say! Christ and the flesh?--that so very ancientantagonism between good and evil? Was there any place forimperfection in a world wherein the minutest atom, the lightestthought, could not escape from God's presence? Who should note thecrime, the sin, the mistake, in the operation of that eternal spirit, which could have made no misshapen births? In proportion as manraised himself to the ampler survey of the divine work around him, just in that proportion did the very notion of evil disappear. Therewere no weeds, no "tares, " in the endless field. The trulyilluminated mind, discerning spiritually, might do what it would. Even under the shadow of monastic walls, that had ever been theprecept, which the larger theory of "inspiration" had bequeathed topractice. "Of all the trees of the garden thou mayst freely eat! Ifyou take up any deadly thing, it shall not hurt you! And I thinkthat I, too, have the spirit of God. "

Bruno, the citizen of the world, Bruno at Paris, was careful to warnoff the vulgar from applying the decisions of philosophy beyond itsproper speculative limits. But a kind of secresy, an ambiguousatmosphere, encompassed, from the first, alike the speaker and thedoctrine; and in that world of fluctuating and ambiguous characters, the alerter mind certainly, pondering on this novel reign of thespirit--what it might actually be--would hardly fail to find inBruno's theories a method of turning poison into food, to live andthrive thereon; an art, surely, no less opportune in the Paris ofthat hour, intellectually or morally, than had it related to physicalpoisons. If Bruno himself was cautious not to suggest the ethic orpractical equivalent to his theoretic positions, there was that inhis very manner of speech, in his rank, unweeded eloquence, whichseemed naturally to discourage any effort at selection, any sense offine difference, of nuances or proportion, in things. The loosesympathies of his genius were allied to nature, nursing, with equablematernity of soul, good, bad, and indifferent, rather than to art, distinguishing, rejecting, refining. Commission and omission; sinsof the former surely had the preference. And how would Paolo andFrancesca have read the lesson? How would this Henry the Third, andMargaret of the "Memoirs, " and other susceptible persona thenpresent, read it, especially if the opposition between practical goodand evil traversed another distinction, to the "opposed points, " the"fenced opposites" of which many, certainly, then present, in thatParis of the last of the Valois, could never by any possibilitybecome "indifferent, " between the precious and the base, aesthetically--between what was right and wrong, as matter of art?

NOTES

234. +Pater's article appeared in The Fortnightly Review, 1889. Later it was much revised and included as Chapter VII of theunfinished novel, Gaston de Latour. 

234. +From Heine's Aus der Harzreise, "Bergidylle 2": "Tannenbaum, mit grunen Fingern, " Stanza 10. 

243. +E-text editor's transliteration: hybris. Liddell and Scottdefinition: "wanton violence, arising from the pride of strength, passion, etc. "