Leonardo da Vinci
“E se tu sarai solo, tu sarai tutto tuo.”
Ibid
After the inevitable tumult of early youth had been controlled, the vehemence of conflicting desires defeated, and a barrier raised against the confused and multifold overflow of sensations, I had sought during the momentary silence that ensued on my consciousness to find out whether life might not become something different from the usual exercise of the faculties of adaptation to changing circumstances; that is to say, whether my will might not be able, by means of selection and exclusion, to build up some new and artistic work out of the elements which life had already stored up within me.
I felt assured, after some self-examination, that my consciousness had reached that arduous point when it becomes possible to appreciate this too simple axiom: The world represents the sensibility and the thought of a few superior men who created it, and in course of time have enlarged and adorned it, and who in the future will continue to enlarge and adorn it more and more. The world, as it appears to us to-day, is a magnificent gift from the few to the many, from free men to slaves, from those who think and feel to those who work. And then I recognised my own highest ambition in the desire to bring some ornament, to add some new value to this human world which is being eternally embellished with beauty and sorrow.
Face to face with my own soul, I thought again of that dream which came to Socrates several times over, each time taking a different form, but always urging him to fulfil the same mission: “O Socrates, compose and cultivate music.” Then I learned that the real duty of a man of worth is to discover in the course of his existence a series of harmonies, varied indeed, but controlled by one dominant motive, and bearing the impress of one style. And so it appeared to me that the ancient sage, who excelled in the art of raising the human soul to its utmost degree of vigour, might teach a great and efficacious lesson to our own age.
By the study of himself and his neighbours, this man discovered what inestimable benefits assiduous discipline bent always to a fixed purpose can confer upon life. His supreme wisdom seems to me most resplendent in this, that he did not place his Ideal out of the reach of daily practice, beyond the sphere of necessary realities, but that he made it the living centre of his being, and deduced his own laws from it; and, in accordance with these laws, he developed rhythmically throughout the course of years, exercising with calm pride such rights as they permitted him, and separating—he a citizen of Athens under the tyranny of the Thirty, and under the tyranny of the plebeians—deliberately separating his moral existence from that of the city. He desired, and he was able to preserve himself for himself until death. “I will be obedient to God only,” meant, “I will be obedient only to the laws of that genius to which, in order to fulfil my conception of order and beauty, I have subjected my free nature.”
Far more subtle as an artist than Apelles or Protogenes, he was able to trace with a firm hand the complete image of himself in one continuous line. And the sublime joy of the last evening came to him, not from the hope of that other life which he had spoken of in his discourses, but rather from the vision of his own image, made one with death.
Ah, why cannot he live again on Latin soil, this Master who understood with such profound and hidden art how to awaken and stimulate all the energies of intellect and soul in those who approached to listen to him?