rning poison into food, to live and
thrive thereon; an art, surely, no less opportune in the Paris of
that hour, intellectually or morally, than had it related to physical
poisons. If Bruno himself was cautious not to suggest the ethic or
practical equivalent to his theoretic positions, there was that in
his very manner of speech, in his rank, unweeded eloquence, which
seemed naturally to discourage any effort at selection, any sense of
fine difference, of nuances or proportion, in things. The loose
sympathies of his genius were allied to nature, nursing, with equable
maternity of soul, good, bad, and indifferent, rather than to art,
distinguishing, rejecting, refining. Commission and omission; sins
of the former surely had the preference. And how would Paolo and
Francesca have read the lesson? How would this Henry the Third, and
Margaret of the "Memoirs," and other susceptible persona then
present, read it, especially if the opposition between practical good
and evil traversed another distinction, to the "opposed points," the
"fenced opposites" of which many, certainly, then present, in that
Paris of the last of the Valois, could never by any possibility
become "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 the
unfinished 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 Scott
definition: "wanton violence, arising from the pride of strength,
passion, etc."

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