IV
As soon as we begin to think about the world around us in what we vainly call a disinterested way—for disinterest is, as Leibnitz said, a chimera, and there remains a superior interest—we become youths and lovers and artists, and there is at the same time a significant strain of sexual imagery in our thought.[[44]] Among ourselves this is not always clear; we have been dulled by the routine of civilisation and the artificial formalities of what is called education. It is clear in the mythopœic creation of comparative primitive thought, but in civilisation it is in the work of men of genius—poets, philosophers, painters, and, as we have to recognise, men of science—that this trait is most conspicuously manifested. To realise this it is sufficient to contemplate the personality and activity of one of the earliest great modern men of science, of Leonardo da Vinci. Until recent times it would have seemed rather strange so to describe Leonardo da Vinci. He still seemed, as he was in his own time, primarily a painter, an artist in the conventionally narrow sense, and as such one of the greatest, fit to paint, as Browning put it, one of the four walls of the New Jerusalem. Yet even his contemporaries who so acclaimed him were a little worried about Leonardo in this capacity. He accomplished so little, he worked so slowly, he left so much unfinished, he seemed to them so volatile and unstable. He was an enigma to which they never secured the key. They failed to see, though it is clearly to be read even in his face, that no man ever possessed a more piercing concentration of vision, a more fixed power of attention, a more unshakable force of will. All that Leonardo achieved in painting and in sculpture and in architecture, however novel or grandiose, was, as Solmi, the highly competent Vincian scholar has remarked, merely a concession to his age, in reality a violence done to his own nature, and from youth to old age he had directed his whole strength to one end: the knowledge and the mastery of Nature. In our own time, a sensitive, alert, widely informed critic of art, Bernhard Berenson, setting out with the conventional veneration for Leonardo as a painter, slowly, as the years went by and his judgment grew more mature, adopted a more critical attitude, bringing down his achievements in art to moderate dimensions, yet without taking any interest in Leonardo as a stupendous artist in science. We may well understand that vein of contempt for the crowd, even as it almost seems the hatred for human society, the spirit of Timon, which runs across Leonardo’s writings, blended, no doubt inevitably blended, with his vein of human sweetness. This stern devotee of knowledge declared, like the author of “The Imitation of Christ,” that “Love conquers all things.” There is here no discrepancy. The man who poured a contemptuous flood of irony and denunciation over the most sacred social institutions and their most respectable representatives was the same man—the Gospels tell us—who brooded with the wings of a maternal tenderness over the pathos of human things.
When, indeed, our imagination plays with the idea of a future Overman, it is Leonardo who comes before us as his forerunner. Vasari, who had never seen Leonardo, but has written so admirable an account of him, can only describe him as “supernatural” and “divine.” In more recent times Nietzsche remarked of Leonardo that “there is something super-European and silent in him, the characteristic of one who has seen too wide a circle of things good and evil.” There Nietzsche touches, even though vaguely, more nearly than Vasari could, the distinguishing mark of this endlessly baffling and enchanting figure. Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy. But it is usually a measurable angle. We cannot measure the angle at which Leonardo stands; he strikes athwart the line of our conventional human thought in ways that are sometimes a revelation and sometimes an impenetrable mystery. We are reminded of the saying of Heraclitus: “Men hold some things wrong and some right; God holds all things fair.” The dispute as to whether he was above all an artist or a man of science is a foolish and even unmeaning dispute. In the vast orbit in which Leonardo moved the distinction had little or no existence. That was inexplicable to his contemporaries whose opinions Vasari echoes. They could not understand that he was not of the crowd of makers of pretty things who filled the workshops of Florence. They saw a man of beautiful aspect and fine proportions, with a long curled beard and wearing a rose-coloured tunic, and they called him a craftsman, an artist, and thought him rather fantastic. But the medium in which this artist worked was Nature, the medium in which the scientist works; every problem in painting was to Leonardo a problem in science, every problem in physics he approached in the spirit of the artist. “Human ingenuity,” he said, “can never devise anything more simple and more beautiful, or more to the purpose, than Nature does.” For him, as later for Spinoza, reality and perfection were the same thing. Both aspects of life he treats as part of his task—the extension of the field of human knowledge, the intension of the power of human skill; for art, or, as he called it, practice, without science, he said, is a boat without a rudder. Certainly he occupied himself much with painting, the common medium of self-expression in his day, though he produced so few pictures; he even wrote a treatise on painting; he possessed, indeed, a wider perception of its possibilities than any artist who ever lived. “Here is the creator of modern landscape!” exclaimed Corot before Leonardo’s pictures, and a remarkable description he has left of the precise effects of colour and light produced when a woman in white stands on green grass in bright sunshine shows that Leonardo clearly apprehended the plein-airiste’s problem. Doubtless it will prove possible to show that he foresaw still later methods. He rejected these methods because it seemed to him that the artist could work most freely by moving midway between light and darkness, and, indeed, he, first of painters, succeeded in combining them—just as he said also that Pleasure and Pain should be imaged as twins since they are ever together, yet back to back because ever contrary—and devised the method of chiaroscuro, by which light reveals the richness of shade and shade heightens the brightness of light. No invention could be more characteristic of this man whose grasp of the world ever involved the union of opposites, and the opposites both apprehended more intensely than falls to the lot of other men.
Yet it is noteworthy that Leonardo constantly speaks of the artist’s function as searching into and imitating Nature, a view which the orthodox artist anathematises. But Leonardo was not the orthodox artist, not even, perhaps, as he is traditionally regarded, one of the world’s supreme painters. For one may sympathise with Mr. Berenson’s engaging attempt—unconvincing as it has seemed—to “expose” Leonardo. The drawings Mr. Berenson, like every one else, admires whole-heartedly, but, save for the unfinished “Adoration,” which he regards as a summit of art, he finds the paintings mostly meaningless and repellent. He cannot rank Leonardo as an artist higher than Botticelli, and concludes that he was not so much a great painter as a great inventor in painting. With that conclusion it is possible that Leonardo himself would have agreed. Painting was to him, he said, a subtle invention whereby philosophical speculation can be applied to all the qualities of forms. He seemed to himself to be, here and always, a man standing at the mouth of the gloomy cavern of Nature with arched back, one hand resting on his knee and the other shading his eyes, as he peers intently into the darkness, possessed by fear and desire, fear of the threatening gloom of that cavern, desire to discover what miracle it might hold. We are far here from the traditional attitude of the painter; we are nearer to the attitude of that great seeker into the mysteries of Nature, one of the very few born of women to whom we can ever even passingly compare Leonardo, who felt in old age that he had only been a child gathering shells and pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of truth.
It is almost as plausible to regard Leonardo as primarily an engineer as primarily a painter. He offered his services as a military engineer and architect to the Duke of Milan and set forth at length his manifold claims which include, one may note, the ability to construct what we should now, without hesitation, describe as “tanks.” At a later period he actually was appointed architect and engineer-general to Cæsar Borgia, and in this capacity was engaged on a variety of works. He has, indeed, been described as the founder of professional engineering. He was the seer of coming steam engines and of steam navigation and transportation. He was, again, the inventor of innumerable varieties of ballistic machines and ordnance, of steam guns and breech-loading arms with screw breech-lock. His science always tended to become applied science. Experience shows the road to practice, he said, science is the guide to art. Thus he saw every problem in the world as in the wide sense a problem in engineering. All nature was a dynamic process of forces beautifully effecting work, and it is this as it were distinctive vision of the world as a whole which seems to give Leonardo that marvellous flair for detecting vital mechanism in every field. It is impossible even to indicate summarily the vast extent of the region in which he was creating a new world, from the statement, which he set down in large letters, “The sun does not move,” the earth being, he said, a star, “much like the moon,” down to such ingenious original devices as the construction of a diving-bell, a swimming-belt, and a parachute of adequate dimensions, while, as is now well known, Leonardo not only meditated with concentrated attention on the problem of flight, but realised scientifically the difficulties to be encountered, and made ingenious attempts to overcome them in the designing of flying-machines. It is enough—following expert scientific guidance—to enumerate a few points: he studied botany in the biological spirit; he was a founder of geology, discovering the significance of fossils and realising the importance of river erosion; by his studies in the theories of mechanics and their utilization in peace and war he made himself the prototype of the modern man of science. He was in turn biologist in every field of vital mechanism, and the inaugurator before Vesalius (who, however, knew nothing of his predecessor’s work) of the minute study of anatomy by direct investigation (after he had found that Galen could not be relied on) and post-mortem dissections; he nearly anticipated Harvey’s conception of the circulation of the blood by studying the nature of the heart as a pump. He was hydraulician, hydrographer, geometrician, algebraist, mechanician, optician.[[45]] These are but a few of the fields in which Leonardo’s marvellous insight into the nature of the forces that make the world and his divining art of the methods of employing them to human use have of late years been revealed. For centuries they were concealed in notebooks scattered through Europe and with difficulty decipherable. Yet they are not embodied in vague utterances or casual intuitions, but display a laborious concentration on the precise details of the difficulties to be overcome; nor was patient industry in him, as often happens, the substitute for natural facility, for he was a person of marvellous natural facility, and, like such persons, most eloquent and persuasive in speech. At the same time his more general and reflective conclusions are expressed in a style combining the maximum of clarity with the maximum of concision,—far, indeed, removed from the characteristic florid redundancy of Italian prose,—which makes Leonardo, in addition to all else, a supreme master of language.[[46]]
Yet the man to whom we must credit these vast intellectual achievements was no abstracted philosopher shut up in a laboratory. He was, even to look upon, one of the most attractive and vivid figures that ever walked the earth. As has sometimes happened with divine and mysterious persons, he was the natural child of his mother, Caterina, of whom we are only told that she was “of good blood,” belonging to Vinci like Ser Piero the father, and that a few years after Leonardo’s birth she became the reputable wife of a citizen of his native town. Ser Piero da Vinci was a notary, of a race of notaries, but the busiest notary in Florence and evidently a man of robust vigour; he married four times and his youngest child was fifty years the junior of Leonardo. We hear of the extraordinary physical strength of Leonardo himself, of his grace and charm, of his accomplishments in youth, especially in singing and playing on the flute, though he had but an elementary school education. Except for what he learnt in the workshop of the many-sided but then still youthful Verrocchio, he was his own schoolmaster, and was thus enabled to attain that absolute emancipation from authority and tradition which made him indifferent even to the Greeks, to whom he was most akin. He was left-handed; his peculiar method of writing long raised the suspicion that it was deliberately adopted for concealment, but it is to-day recognised as simply the ordinary mirror-writing of a left-handed child without training. This was not the only anomaly in Leonardo’s strange nature. We now know that he was repeatedly charged as a youth on suspicion of homosexual offences; the result remains obscure, but there is some reason to think he knew the inside of a prison. Throughout life he loved to surround himself with beautiful youths, though no tradition of license or vice clings to his name. The precise nature of his sexual temperament remains obscure. It mocks us, but haunts us from out of his most famous pictures. There is, for instance, the “John the Baptist” of the Louvre, which we may dismiss with the distinguished art critic of to-day as an impudent blasphemy or brood over long, without being clearly able to determine into what obscure region of the Freudian Unconscious Leonardo had here adventured. Freud himself has devoted one of his most fascinating essays to a psychoanalytic interpretation of Leonardo’s enigmatic personality. He admits it is a speculation; we may take it or leave it. But Freud has rightly apprehended that in Leonardo sexual passion was largely sublimated into intellectual passion, in accordance with his own saying, “Nothing can be loved or hated unless first we have knowledge of it,” or, as he elsewhere said, “True and great love springs out of great knowledge, and where you know little you can love but little or not at all.” So it was that Leonardo became a master of life. Vasari could report of him—almost in the words it was reported of another supreme but widely different figure, the Jesuit saint, Francis Xavier—that “with the splendour of his most beautiful countenance he made serene every broken spirit.” To possess by self-mastery the sources of love and hate is to transcend good and evil and so to possess the Overman’s power of binding up the hearts that are broken by good and evil.
Every person of genius is in some degree at once man, woman, and child. Leonardo was all three in the extreme degree and yet without any apparent conflict. The infantile strain is unquestioned, and, apart from the problem of his sexual temperament, Leonardo was a child even in his extraordinary delight in devising fantastic toys and contriving disconcerting tricks. His more than feminine tenderness is equally clear, alike in his pictures and in his life. Isabella d’Este, in asking him to paint the boy Jesus in the Temple, justly referred to “the gentleness and sweetness which mark your art.” His tenderness was shown not only towards human beings, but to all living things, animals and even plants, and it would appear that he was a vegetarian. Yet at the same time he was emphatically masculine, altogether free from weakness or softness. He delighted in ugliness as well as in beauty; he liked visiting the hospitals to study the sick in his thirst for knowledge; he pondered over battles and fighting; he showed no compunction in planning devilish engines of military destruction. His mind was of a definitely realistic and positive cast; though there seems no field of thought he failed to enter, he never touched metaphysics, and though his worship of Nature has the emotional tone of religion, even of ecstasy, he was clearly disdainful of the established religions, and perpetually shocked “the timid friends of God.” By precept and by practice he proclaimed the lofty solitude of the individual soul, and he felt only contempt for the herd. We see how this temper became impressed on his face in his own drawing of himself in old age, with that intent and ruthless gaze wrapped in intellectual contemplation of the outspread world.
Leonardo comes before us, indeed, in the end, as a figure for awe rather than for love. Yet, as the noblest type of the Overman we faintly try to conceive, Leonardo is the foe, not of man, but of the enemies of man. The great secrets that with clear vision his stern grip tore from Nature, the new instruments of power that his energy wrought, they were all for the use and delight of mankind. So Leonardo is the everlasting embodiment of that brooding human spirit whose task never dies. Still to-day it stands at the mouth of the gloomy cavern of Nature, even of Human Nature, with bent back and shaded eyes, seeking intently to penetrate the gloom beyond, with the fear of that threatening darkness, with the desire of what redeeming miracle it yet perchance may hold.