t
authority and in favour of discovery. "Whoever in discussion adduces
authority," he says, "uses not intellect but rather memory"; and,
anticipating Milton, he observes that all our knowledge originates in
opinions. Perhaps some one had rebuked him for having too many opinions.
We can be sure that he chafed against dull, cautious, safe men who
wished for results. He himself cared nothing for them; it was enough for
him to know what might be done, without doing it. He was so sure of his
insight that he did not care to put it to the test of action; that was
for slower men, whether artists or men of science. His notebooks were
enough for him.

In spite of the notebooks and the sketches, we know less about the man
Leonardo than about the man Shakespeare. Here and there he makes a
remark with some personal conviction or experience in it. "Intellectual
passion," he says, "drives out sensuality." In him it had driven out or
sublimated all the sensual part of character. We cannot touch or see or
hear him in anything he says or draws. The passion is there, but it is
too much concerned with universals to be of like nature with our own
passions. He seems to be speaking to himself as if he had forgotten the
whole audience of mankind, but in what he says he ignores the personal
part of himself; he is most passionate when most impersonal. "To the
ambitious, whom neither the boon of life nor the beauty of the world
suffices to content, it comes as a penance that life with them is
squandered and that they possess neither the benefits nor the beauty of
the world." That might be a platitude said by some one else; but we know
that in it Leonardo expresses his faith. The boon of life, the beauty of
the world, were enough for him without ambition, without even further
affections. He left father and mother and wealth, and even achievement,
to follow them; and he left all those not out of coldness, or fear, or
idleness, but because his own passion drew him away. No cold man could
have said, "Where there is most power of feeling, there of martyrs is
the greatest martyr." It is difficult for us northerners to understand
the intellectual passion of the South, to see even that it is passion;
most difficult of all for us to see that in men like Leonardo the
passion for beauty itself is intellectual. We, with our romanticism, our
sense of exile, can never find that identity which he found between
beauty and reality. "This benign nature so provides