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 that all over the
world you find something to imitate." To us imitation means prose, to
him it meant poetry; science itself meant poetry, and illusion was the
only ugliness. "Nature never breaks her own law." It is we who try to
find freedom in lawlessness, which is ignorance, ugliness, illusion.
"Falsehood is so utterly vile that, though it should praise the great
works of God, it offends against His divinity." There is Leonardo's
religion; and if still it is too cold for us, it is because we have not
his pure spiritual fire in ourselves.




The Pompadour in Art


It is an important fact in the history of the arts for the last century
or more that in England and America, if not elsewhere, the chief
interest in all the arts, including literature, has been taken by women