By Laura Spencer Portor
I
IT is my increasing belief, to which the careful observation and study of years give strength, that all lives may be said to be haunted in greater or less degree by certain recurrent thoughts or influences or impressions or realizations, which, visiting and revisiting the chambers of the mind, probably from earliest years, come at last to dwell persistently with us, returning again and again like the French ghostly revenants, making free to haunt those long-closed rooms of the memory where once, it may be, they moved in the full daylight of consciousness and realization, as delights or dreads, joys or terrors of the soul.
'Two ideas,' says Pater, in writing of Leonardo, 'were especially fixed in him, as reflexes of things that touched his brain in childhood beyond the measure of other impressions—the smiling of women, and the motion of great waters.' And later on, 'He became above all a painter of portraits; faces of a modeling more skillful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality which almost amounts to illusion on dark air. To take a character as it was, and delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious in observation, curious in invention.'
So we seem to see Leonardo possessed always by the interest and beauty and meaning of faces, fascinated by the individuality, the infinite variety, the delicately interpretative meanings of them; reminiscent of the charm of them; visited by a hundred recurrent lovelinesses of them; preoccupied by their mystery; and above all, it seems, haunted and summoned by the lovely and enigmatic smiling of women.
To recognize this is to know much of Leonardo and his work; and even if we read no more of Pater's memorable essay, he has succeeded in these three sentences in bringing before us some impression of the essential man which is not readily forgotten, and has admitted us as it were to a partial knowledge of that great and diverse mind.
But all this is rare, very rare in biography. We write biography, for the most part, as we write history—with a leaning toward dates and successions of events.
M. Taine in the introduction to his History of English Literature makes a strong protest, it will be remembered, against this method of writing history. He cites Carlyle's Cromwell and Sainte-Beuve's Port Royal as examples of the opposite and more modern method. In these event and happening are given but secondary place; in these it is always rather the subtle underlying causes which are touched on with particular insistence. It is the tragedy of the soul of Cromwell which is so memorably recorded by Carlyle; and by Sainte-Beuve it is the intricate psychology of an entire institution which is laid bare.
It is according to this method, Taine argues, not only that history should be written, but also that we should study the literature of any nation. He then proceeds through his several volumes to his memorable consideration of English literature, dwelling repeatedly on the psychology of the English people as it manifests itself in their literature. He calls attention again and again to certain recurring ideas or ideals which manifest themselves persistently in this particular race, which haunt it almost as an individual is haunted by certain not always definite, yet strongly formative influences.
All this is not very new in substance, yet in application it belongs distinctly to modern times. It falls in with the spirit of research and inquiry so active in the past half century, and announces as with prophetic voice—for it was written as much as fifty years ago—the psychology of nations, of which we only lately begin to speak with real seriousness.