in Florence and evidently a man of robust vigor; 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 lute, though he had but an elementary school education.

Except for what he learned in the workshop of the many-sided but then still youthful Verrocchio, he was his own schoolmaster, and was thus aided 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 recognized 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 offenses; 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

VOL. 15-NO. 747

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. So it was that 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 splendor 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 Over-man'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, and drawing mysterious symbolic designs that have foolishly suggested to some that he was an occultist. 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 toward human beings, but 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

The Nation

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 Over-man 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.

He had n't been a week in Kyle when it came to him suddenly, all in a flash, the theme he had been waiting for. He knew it was somewhere, of course, all the time, just round the corner; or rather they were there, for surely their name was legion; but how to overtake, surprise, spring upon, seize, and carry off even one of the band was the problem that had bothered him for the last fifteen years. He was thirty-five years old now, and it was when he was in the very early twenties that others- friends and editors of magazines- began to uphold his own conviction as to his power of writing, his power even of winning by his pen fame and success beyond the ordinary; the editors gave positive proof of their belief in him by printing his stories and paying for them; the friends talked largely and loudly about him; and by the time he was twenty-five he belonged to the select band of young writers who 'counted' and who could be depended on to count for very much more in the future; he had 'arrived,' very lightly equipped, on the strength of a few brilliant trifles; but heavy and interesting luggage was following him you felt sure; when he started to unpack this, you might be assured of a display of riches dazzling to his generation.

What he had displayed to the public so far had been nothing of larger bulk than a number a considerable number of short tales. His genius (it was the word his friends used) had expressed itself in short stories of an unviolent kind. He could, capture and

put on paper in extremely lucid language most delicate and intricate psychic relationships, adventures of the mind, spiritual crises of the most subtle fragile kind, making them so right, so true, that the most fastidious critics could not but praise them, and making them at the same time so simple and so exciting that ordinary people found pleasure in their perusal. He was never crude, and he was never precious.

But, of course, the short story was not going forever to content him. They were mere trials of his wings, exhibitions of what he could do, wonderful feats, spectacular tricks undertaken to prove to himself how perfectly he was master of his machine, how, even at his most daring moments, his hands never hesitated or fumbled on the levers; never for an instant did he lose control. He was as capable, he knew, of long flights as of these brillant brief dartings, of sustained soaring as of vivid flashings but whither should he fly? His flight would be so just and true, so brilliant and tremendous, that it called for a worthy objective. He needed a great theme.

Many of the themes of his short tales were great, but in a tiny way. They did n't ask for sustained elaboration, they could adequately be dealt with and dismissed without going outside the limits which editors set to the 'short story'; he had n't to compress them, they asked for no more space, demanded no large expanse of canvas. But he knew that there were themes that did demand space; his

fellow writers seemed to find them without great difficulty; why in Heaven's name could n't he?

And now, after fifteen years of conscious searching, he had found one. Found it in a flash of a second in Kyle Church; found it while he imagined he was following with attention the reading of the Second Lesson. It was the parson who had supplied it; little redfaced sleepy man, he was the theme; his sleepiness, his slovenly middle age, his crumpled surplice, his stumbles over the prayers, his lack of attention. He had presented himself and all his appendages in a flash to Luke; had said to him in that clear unmistakable voice in which ideas always spoke, 'Here I am; use me'; and in the next second had made it clear that he could n't be treated in a short story, that he possessed richnesses, amplitudes that asked for space unlimited to spread themselves upon; he presented himself as the theme for a novel. The more Luke thought it over, the more rich, the more ample it became. It was vast. He saw that it was n't going to concern itself only with the parson's personal history; it would imply the history of his whole class (which also was Luke's class); it would imply a certain amount of the history of Ireland. It started by presenting itself as the adventure of a clergyman who is young and energetic, who has led an active life in busy town curacies, and who is rewarded at an early age by being made rector of a country parish. His congregation would consist of twenty-five souls (Luke had counted twelve people in the country church); he would not have more than a day's work to do in the week; and gradually, slowly (how fascinating to watch in detail the slow advance!) he must lose all his fine freshness, all his enthusiasm, the spring of his activity must weaken,

weaken, till he ended by becoming like sloppy Mr. (whatever his name was), droning out the prayers. Should it be a study in negations, a tragedy in which the villain of the piece is just that nothing ever happens? That idea dismissed itself; to make his tragedy worth the writing his hero must be rather exceptionally gifted for the act of living; and if so gifted, he would be strong enough to break away from mere negation. No; his hero, who loved life and people and activity, who belonged to the church militant rather than to the church contemplative, must need for his undoing a train of events not necessarily far fetched or violent, but a little out of the ordinary. Luke saw him not always patient, saw him unhappy. He decided that he must love and be unhappy in his love; he must love hopelessly; love, perhaps a Catholic-yes, by Jove, that was it and

The theme suddenly unfolded itself in quite unexpected amplitude. His hero became almost unimportant personally, because so portentously important as an actor in a vast drama. The theme revealed itself in its true colors, was n't ashamed of being labeled, boldly announced itself as being a study of the deathless antagonism between the two faiths.

But it was n't going to be a violent drama. It must be for the most part unconscious, just the inevitable wearing down and away of the weaker of the two antagonists. It must never degenerate into being a 'problem' novel, it must teach nothing, prove nothing, point out no reform that should be made. The big issue must be vast and impersonal, but all the detail of it immensely personal-the mere anecdote of it, material that in other hands would go to make a 'best seller.'

At this point his theme seemed to

He

him to lose its balance, its rightness and sanity became obscured. turned his mind back to the starting point, to the little slack, sleepy parson. But why sleepy and slack? He did n't look like a man who had suffered actively; one could n't suspect him of a tragic love affair; in his case it must be a question of mere negation, but negation plus something, plus some force, some hidden power- that is to say apparent negation; something very active that ambuscaded itself behind a barricade of quiescence; something very powerful that pretended to be the personification of ineffectiveness but what was it?

His eyes searched the landscape, and the fields and woods, the damp sunshine, and the soft wind smiled back at him in answer. He met them with a surprised, incredulous 'You?' and they sighed a faint assent. His theme immediately righted itself; no wonder it had seemed out of balance, for, of course, the church was only half the theme, the other half was the country- this sunny friendly southern country which must smile in gentle welcome on his hero and gradually lap him round and fold him in and put him to sleep. He must be strong enough to fight the powers of darkness, but not the powers that came veiled in soft sunshine; he must n't be strong enough to fight the long mild wet winters, the enervating persistent southwest wind, the 'stuffiness' of the valleys, the airless woods. These must weave around him thin webs, filmy threads so fragile as to be imperceptible in the spinning, they must gently blind his eyes to all distant views, softly seal his ears to all outside voices. In the end he must be offered a road of escape and must be too sapped of energy to take it; he must throw up the sponge with hardly a murmur, hardly a conscious gesture.

That was his theme in four words -throwing up the sponge. Had n't Luke's class been doing it these three generations past, sometimes with groans and curses and struggles, sometimes with mute acceptance of the inevitable? Was n't his religion doing it, retiring without disorder, fighting a gallant losing battle? It was part of the battle of class and creed not to admit that you were beaten; but the moment was quickly arriving when that attitude would become ridiculous, when the most dignified prayer was a Nunc dimittis. Now Luke should speak for his class finally and forever, should throw up their sponge with a superb gesture, throw it up as he exuberantly expressed it with unerring aim, right into the blue, for all the world to wonder at. By Jove, what a theme, what a theme!

The small property he had unexpectedly inherited at Kyle included a pleasant little house, and by letting the land for grazing, he found himself in possession of a sufficient income to live on. Eventually he would sell the property, but he determined to sacrifice three years to his theme. It existed at present only in broad outline; all the delicate intimate details needed careful filling in, and a town-bred cosmopolitan like himself had no stock of knowledge to draw upon, he would have to collect it on the spot. But it was worth the trouble; it was worth three years of his life; it was worth, if necessary, five years.

During those years the details presented themselves quickly and in abundance. A chance acquaintance, a statement by a neighbor about someone else, enabled him to create his Catholic family with ease. They were to be rich, would be the 'big people' of his hero's parish, would be cultured, and must offer to the young man all the beauties of art, music, and literature