III
LEONARDO DA VINCI
"Philosophieren ist vivificieren."
I
Historians affirm with a surprising unanimity that in the Year of Grace 1452 there was born in the town of Vinci a child who received the fair name of Leonardo, and became famous throughout Italy and beyond the Alps. And they go on to tell how he was taken to Florence and apprenticed to Andrea del Verrocchio, how he began to paint with marvelous skill, how he went to the court of Milan—and many other things which the reader surely knows much better than I. If he doesn't, he may find them duly set forth by the said historians—from the beloved unknown writer of the Gaddi manuscript, or the popular Vasari (equally famous for his horrible frescoes and his extraordinary misinformation), down to the latest biographers of Leonardo, whom I will not even name, lest I seem too erudite.
But my Leonardo is not the Leonardo of the historians. Their Leonardo, Ser Pietro's son, who lived his mortal life from 1452 to 1519, I gladly leave to all those honest men who turn to history for facts, and worship documentary evidence. For myself I have fashioned another and a different Leonardo. And since he is my creation, I love him the more, like a dutiful father, and am very fond of his company.
I don't mean to say that the Leonardo of the historians is to be forgotten. If I had had the luck to live in his generation, it would not have been hard for me to regard him as the dearest of my friends. And since he loved the spirits of those who seek, perhaps he would have taken me with him on some of his thoughtful walks among those Tuscan hills that gladden his canvases with their pale azure. And he would have talked to me, in his clear, rich voice, of his anatomical researches and his architectural plans. Some day, perhaps, he would have taken me to the bare summit of Monte Ceceri, whence he hoped to fly to Florence in a mysterious machine of his own invention. And as his glance and his gesture followed the flight of birds through my Florentine sky, I would have repeated to him Alexandrian subtleties learned from some disciple of Ficino.
But the times have changed too much. Amid the relentless progress of our day it would be mad to regret the bloody and barbaric age of the Renaissance. In the streets of Florence, cluttered with cabs and bicycles, one can no longer spin a quiet syllogism, one can no longer enjoy in silence the red glow of sunset on the noble dark-browed palaces. The Leonardo of the fifteenth century, with his fine raiment and his great dreams, would not now be at home in that Milan to which he gave so many gentle images. And Milan would be too busy with municipal elections and the exportation of rubber to take any interest in him.
If Leonardo is to live on as something more than a subject for theses and for lantern slides, he must be transformed, must be given a spiritual existence. This transformation is what I have sought to achieve.
II
In the real Leonardo, as revealed by his writings and by other records, there are some elements that I do not find sympathetic. He had too much of a mania for science. His disheveled books are too full of observations and of tiny facts. It seems as though this man, whose father and grandfather had been notaries, were possessed by an atavistic desire to undertake an inventory of the universe. That passion for detail which has dulled the spirits of so many of his successors had seized him all too firmly. In a certain sense (and I am sincerely sorry to speak so ill of him) he was a positivist long before the time of positivism. For that reason, perhaps, he is held in high esteem by our own scientists. Every now and then one of these gentlemen discovers that Leonardo was the founder of some science or other, and salutes him as father and master of the experimental method.
There is doubtless a certain amount of exaggeration in this point of view. I am even inclined to believe that Leonardo was much less of a positivist than the moderns would have us think—some of his cosmological conceptions, for instance, are hopelessly marked by animism and anthropocentrism. Nevertheless, one can but recognize that he deserves the title of scientist, that he is even more of a scientist than an artist—and for that I cannot forgive him. Even his painting, though he poured into it the treasure of his dreams, was to him primarily a form of science, destined to reproduce the aspects of nature with the most scrupulous fidelity. All his studies, even those which were directly related to his work as painter, led in reality toward a complete knowledge of the universe. And this constant preoccupation, which wins the plaudits of the scientists, tends on the contrary to repel those who love æsthetic and metaphysical unreality, as I do.
Had he been rather a philosopher than an artist I could willingly have pardoned him: I could indeed have praised him without reserve. But his philosophy, it must be confessed, does not amount to much. In its essence it consists of the old Greek idea of the world as a living organism; and his acceptance of this idea is inconsistent with his criticism of those thinkers whose theories are not supported by experiment. Now a man who has not reached that aristocratic intellectuality which treats ideas as of supreme interest in themselves, without the least thought of their relation to facts, has not attained the greatest heights.
Perhaps, too, those delicate lovers of strange souls who, like Walter Pater, have admitted the wondrous Leonardo into their intimate circle of great spirits, have not fully realized that this man was too much inclined to practical and mathematical interests. Much of his research was devoted to the invention of machinery and apparatus for canals or sluices, or to the construction of engines which could kill or defend, or to the designing of wonderful vehicles. He is forever saying that one must think of practical utility; and much as he loved knowledge in itself, I suspect that many of his experiments were tried for purely practical ends. And it sometimes saddens me to think that the man who left us the "Adoration of the Magi" is famous also for the canals of Lombardy.
Such criticism may lead the reader to think that I am incapable of appreciating versatility. Had I the time, I might answer that the problem is really one of quantity and quality. It is not the number of things that a man has done that matters, but their excellence. I could wish that Leonardo had painted one more canvas and left a hundred less precepts; and I could indeed willingly dispense with that praise of his universality which is so showered upon him by men who do not realize the meaning of their words. Botanists and engineers of our own day can draw plants and plans of fortresses; but for the painting of certain mountainous backgrounds and for the writing of certain pensées there has been none save Leonardo—and it is sad to think that so much of his time was spent on things unworthy of his powers.
So too I regret the excessive time he spent in companionship with other men, and the hours that he wasted in the courts of Milan and of France at repartee with ladies and with princes. He was delightful in conversation—so the historians say—and those ambiguous prophecies of his, which at times seem weighty with hidden meaning, were but riddles devised to sharpen courtly wit. I cannot imagine my Leonardo, author of the most profound of all eulogies of solitude, as the entertainer of a fashionable company. In the spiritual biography of my Leonardo I have canceled the hours which the historic Leonardo spent in society; and have sent him instead over mountain slopes and summits, searching for wild flowers and watching the flight of royal eagles.
III
But it is high time that I should turn to my own Leonardo and his secret.
Unlike the Leonardo of history, mine did not die on the second of May, 1519, in the melancholy castle of Cloux. He is still living, and very much alive; he is within me; he is a part of myself, a precious fragment of my spirit.
He dwells as of old in his fair Italy, and stirs me to pulsing meditation in the keen Tuscan springtime. He repeats to me some of his profoundest sayings; he helps me to realize the full wonder of certain sunsets. In the Pantheon of my soul he is one of the most inspiring geniuses, one of the most adored divinities. His image, beside that of his younger brother, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and opposite that of the Olympian Goethe, illumines the current of my thoughts and charms the tapestry of my unwearying dreams.
Literal folk who consider great men as external and independent beings will reproach me for sacrilege, and express surprise at this adaptation of a genius to the spiritual needs of one obscure soul. They may protest as loudly as they will: they have failed to understand that the great men of the past are in reality instruments of the present, themes on which we may build personality, fragments of olden time through which we may learn to analyze ourselves, dead bodies to which we may give new life. If we content ourselves with knowing the external vicissitudes of the great, the scenes in which they moved, the lists of their works, their characteristic traits of style, we are simply gathering erudition, we are approaching the temple without prayer, we are entering the orchard without tasting its fruit. But if we seek to know the heroes of the past truly and profoundly, we shall make them members of ourselves, our own instruments of joy—we shall save their treasure by enabling them to live again in us. A great man may be known either through dead words and documents or through present and individual consciousness. Only the poor and the timid choose the former way.
Thus with historic materials I have created a living Leonardo, who satisfies my need and my desire far better than his prototype.
This second Leonardo is neither a pure scientist nor a pure artist—much less is he an engineer or a courtier. He is the complete type of the inner man—unwilling to reveal himself too rich in spiritual fruit, lest greedy folk should ruin him. He loves solitary toil, and feels himself diminished by the presence of others; he knows the power of silence; he gathers for his own sake, and does not cast the treasure of his thoughts amid the crowd. In that first life that was his youth he meditated more than all his fellows, yet he did not publish a single book; his broad-winged fancy conceived the fairest of all visions, the sweetest and most alluring of all faces, yet he left to men but a few unfinished sketches; he was a profound and subtle poet, yet in the heart of the Italian Renaissance he had the heroism not to write a single line. In a word, he is one of those rare men who are sufficient unto themselves, who are not concerned with others; into whose souls, as close and strong as a breastplate, only a few companion spirits win admission.
He is a pagan ascetic, a purified mystic, who chose to ascend the heights of intellectual ecstasy by the two great paths of art and knowledge. His paintings are but memories of visions he sought to fix in color that he might rise still higher. His observations and his speculations are but doors through which he passed to behold the secrets of nature, to discover throughout the world the pulsing of that life which he perceived, and thus to satisfy the perpetual desire of souls that are incomplete. All his creations, in beauty and in thought, are mystic: steps in the course of his ascent (for he did not choose to follow the way of the Pseudo-Dionysius and Hugh of St. Victor) to that divine state in which all shadow is illumined, from which all littleness is banished—that supreme state which only a few saints, a few artists, and a few philosophers have been able, through utter resolution, to attain.
Like all great men, my Leonardo tends to make his life his masterpiece. His works are but the foot-prints of his path, stones that the master cast by the wayside to mark his progress, though posterity has mistaken them for the objects of his toil. But his purpose lay beyond. And if in his first life his mystic conquest was imperfect, if he did not reach that summit that o'ertops all other heights, he is nearer his goal in this his second life.
In this epoch, when a great revolution in thought is imminent, he represents for me the achievement of personality, the possession of self, the conquest of the world by means of thought and image. Ibsen's exhortation—"Be yourself"—is absurd. Every one of us is himself, whether he will or no; and when one imitates another it simply means that the instinct of imitation is part of himself. Leonardo da Vinci gives us something better than an exhortation: the glorious example of a life fair, rich, and intimate, a life which seeks ever to surpass itself, to become deeper, more individual, more spiritual.
In the name of this lover of fair forms, who hid that which he loved and that which he discovered, we may proclaim a new age of the spirit, an age for which a little band of his younger brothers is seeking to prepare the way.
Above our common life, outside the throng of those who have not ears to hear, beyond the little steaming ring wherein men seek the means of sustenance, let us speed our hearts toward the master of shadows and of smiles.