Pentalogia, containing five of the very finest among
his shorter studies in dramatic poetry. In 1847 he
published his most important Latin work, Poemata
et Inscriptiones, comprising, with large additions,
the main contents of two former volumes of idyllic,
satiric, elegiac, and lyric verse; and in the same
golden year of his poetic life appeared the very
153
A. C. SWINBURNE
crown and flower of its manifold labours. The
Hellenics of Walter Savage Landor, enlarged and
completed. Twelve years later this book was
reissued, with additions of more or less value, with
alterations generally to be regretted, and with
omissions invariably to be deplored. In 1853 he
put forth The Last Fruit off an Old Tree, con-
taining fresh conversations, critical and controversial
essays, miscellaneous epigrams, lyrics, and occasional
poems of various kind and merit, closing with Five
Scenes on the martyrdom of Beatrice Cenci, un-
surpassed even by their author himself for noble
and heroic pathos, for subtle and genial, tragic
and profound, ardent and compassionate insight
into character, with consummate mastery of
dramatic and spiritual truth. In 1856 he published
Antony and Octavius ā Scenes for the Study, twelve
consecutive poems in dialogue which alone would
suffice to place him high among the few great
masters of historic drama. In 1858 appeared a
metrical miscellany bearing the title of Dry Sticks
Fagoted by W. S. Landor, and containing among
other things graver and lighter certain epigrammatic
and satirical attacks which reinvolved him in the
troubles of an action for libel; and in July of the
same year he returned for the last six years of his
life to Italy, which he had left for England in 1835.
Embittered and distracted by domestic dissensions,
if brightened and relieved by the affection and
veneration of friends and strangers, this final period
of his troubled and splendid career came at last
154
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
to a quiet end on the 17th (as aforesaid) of Septem-
ber, 1864. In the preceding year he had pubHshed
a last volume of Heroic Idyls, with additional poems,
English and Latin; the better part of them well
worthy to be indeed the " last fruit " of a genius
which after a life of eighty-eight years had lost
nothing of its majestic and pathetic power, its
exquisite and exalted loveliness,
A complete list of Landor's writings, published
or privately printed, in English, Latin, and Italian,
including pamphlets, fly-sheets, and occasional
newspaper correspondence on political or literary
questions, it would be difficult to give anywhere
and impossible to give here. From nineteen almost
to ninety his intellectual and literary activity was
indefatigably incessant; but, herein at least like
Charles Lamb, whose cordial admiration he so
cordially returned, he could not write a note of
three lines which did not bear the mark of his
" Roman hand " in its matchless and inimitable
command of a style at once the most powerful and
the purest of his age. The one charge which can
ever seriously be brought and maintained against
it is that of such occasional obscurity or difficulty
as may arise from excessive strictness in conden-
sation of phrase and expurgation of matter not
always superfluous, and sometimes almost indis-
pensable. His English prose and his Latin verse
are perhaps more frequently and more gravely
liable to this charge than either his English verse
or his Latin prose. At times it is well-nigh
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A. C. SWINBURNE
impossible for an eye less keen and swift, a scholar-
ship less exquisite and ready than his own, to catch
the precise direction and follow the perfect course
of his rapid thought and radiant utterance. This
apparently studious pursuit and preference of the
most terse and elliptic expression which could be
found for anything he might have to say could not
but occasionally make even so sovereign a master
of two great languages appear " dark with excess
of light"; but from no former master of either
tongue in prose or verse was ever the quality of
real obscurity, of loose and nebulous incertitude,
more utterly alien or more naturally remote. There
is nothing of cloud or fog about the path on which
he leads us; but we feel now and then the want
of a bridge or a handrail; we have to leap from
point to point of narrative or argument without
the usual help of a connecting plank. Even in his
dramatic works, where least of all it should have
been found, this lack of visible connection or
sequence in details of thought or action is too often
a source of sensible perplexity. In his noble trilogy
on the history of Giovanna Queen of Naples it is
sometimes actually difficult to realise on a first
reading what has happened or is happening, or how,
or why, or by what agency ā a defect alone sufficient,
but unhappily sufficient in itself, to explain the too
general ignorance of a work so rich in subtle and
noble treatment of character, so sure and strong
in its grasp and rendering of " high actions and
high passions," so rich in humour and in pathos,
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WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
so royally serene in its commanding power upon
the tragic mainsprings of terror and of pity. As a
poet, he may be said on the whole to stand midway
between Byron and Shelley, ā ^about as far above
the former as below the latter. If we except Catullus
and Simonides, it might be hard to match and it
would be impossible to overmatch the flawless and
blameless yet living and breathing beauty of his
most perfect elegies, epigrams, or epitaphs. As truly
as prettily was he likened by Leigh Hunt " to a
stormy mountain pine which should produce lilies."
His passionate compassion, his bitter and burning
pity for all wrongs endured in all the world, found
only their natural and inevitable outlet in his life-
long defence or advocacy of tyrannicide as the last
resource of baffled justice, the last discharge of
heroic duty. His tender and ardent love of children,
of animals, and of flowers, makes fragrant alike
the pages of his writing and the records of his life.
He was as surely the most gentle and generous
as the most headstrong and hot-headed of heroes
or of men. Nor ever was any man's best work more
thoroughly imbued and informed with evidence
of his noblest qualities. His loyalty and liberality
of heart were as inexhaustible as his bounty and
beneficence of hand. Praise and encouragement,
deserved or undeserved, came yet more readily
to his lips than challenge or defiance. Reviled and
ridiculed by Lord Byron, he retorted on the offender
living less readily and less warmly than he lamented
and extolled him dead. On the noble dramatic
157
A. C. SWINBURNE
works of his brother Robert he lavished a magni-
ficence of sympathetic praise which his utmost
self-estimate would never have exacted for his
own. Age and the lapse of time could neither
heighten nor lessen the fullness of this rich and
ready generosity. To the poets of his own and of
the next generation he was not readier to do honour
than to those of a later growth, and not seldom of
deserts far lower and far lesser claims than theirs.
That he was not unconscious of his own, and
avowed it with the frank simplicity of nobler
times, is not more evident or more certain than
that in comparison with his friends and fellows he
was liable rather to undervalue than to overrate
himself. He was a classic, and no formalist; the
wide range of his just and loyal admiration had
room for a genius so far from classical as Blake's.
Nor in his own highest mood or method of creative
as of critical work was he a classic only, in any
narrow or exclusive sense of the term. On either
side, immediately or hardly below his mighty
masterpiece of Pericles and j4spasia, stand the two
scarcely less beautiful and vivid studies of mediaeval
Italy and Shakespearean England. The very finest
flower of his immortal dialogues is probably to be
found in the single volume comprising only " Im-
aginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans";
his utmost command of passion and pathos may be
tested by its transcendent success in the distilled
and concentrated tragedy of Tiberius and Fipsania,
where for once he shows a quality more proper to
158
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
romantic than classical imagination ā the subtle
and sublime and terrible power to enter the dark
vestibule of distraction, to throw the whole force
of his fancy, the whole fire of his spirit, into the
" shadowing passion " (as Shakespeare calls it) of
gradually imminent insanity. Yet, if this and all
other studies from ancient history or legend could
be subtracted from the volume of his work, enough
would be left whereon to rest the foundation of a
fame which time could not sensibly impair.
159
NOTES ON LEONARDO DA VINCI
By Walter Pater
In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now-
read it there are some variations from the first
edition. There, the painter who has fixed the
outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries
was a bold speculator, holding lightly by other
men's beliefs, setting philosophy above Christianity.
Words of his, trenchant enough to justify this
impression, are not recorded, and would have
been out of keeping with a genius of which one
characteristic is a tendency to lose itself in a refined
and graceful mvstery. The suspicion was but the
time-honoured form in which the world stamps
its appreciation of one who has thoughts for himself
alone, his high indifferentism, his intolerance of
the common forms of things; and in the second
edition the image was changed into something
fainter and more conventional. But it is still by
a certain mystery in his work, and something
enigmatical beyond the usual measure of great
men, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels.
His life is one of sudden revolts, with intervals
in which he works not at all, or apart from the
main scope of his work. By a strange fortune the
1 60
LEONARDO DA VINCI
works on which his more popular fame rested
disappeared early from the world, as the Battle
of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely with the
work of meaner hands, as the Last Supper. His
type of beauty is so exotic that it fascinates a larger
number than it delights, and seems more than that
of any other artist to reflect ideas and views and
some scheme of the world within, so that he seemed
to his contemporaries to be the possessor of some
unsanctified and secret wisdom, as to Michelet
and others to have anticipated modern ideas. He
trifles with his genius, and crowds all his chief
work into a few tormented years of later life; yet
he is so possessed by his genius that he passes un-
moved through the most tragic events, overwhelming
his country and friends, like one who comes across
them by chance on some secret errand.
His legend, as the French say, with the anecdotes
which every one knows, is one of the most brilliant
in Vasari. Later writers merely copied it, until,
in 1804, Carlo Amoretti applied to it a criticism
which left hardly a date fixed, and not one of those
anecdotes intact. And now a French writer, M.
Arsene Houssaye, gathering all that is known
about Leonardo in an easily accessible form, has
done for the third of the three great masters what
Grimm has done for Michael Angelo, and Passa-
vant, long since, for Raffaelle. Antiquarianism
has no more to do. For others remain the editing
of the thirteen books of his manuscripts, and the
separation by technical criticism of what in his
I 161 M
WALTER PATER
reputed works is really his, from what is only half
his or the work of his pupils. But a lover of strange
souls may still analyse for himself the impression
made on him by those works, and try to reach
through it a definition of the chief elements of
Leonardo's genius. The Legend, corrected and
enlarged by its critics, may now and then intervene
to support the results of this analysis.
His life has three divisions, ā thirty years at
Florence, nearly twenty years at Milan, then
nineteen years of wandering, till he sinks to rest
under the protection of Francis L at the Chateau
de Clou. The dishonour of illegitimacy hangs
over his birth. Piero Antonio, his father, was of
a noble Florentine house, of Vinci in the Val
d'Arno, and Leonardo, brought up delicately
among the true children of that house, was the
love-child of his youth, with the keen puissant
nature such children often have. We see him in
his youth fascinating all men by his beauty,
improvising music and songs, buying the caged
birds and setting them free as he walked the
streets of Florence, fond of odd bright dresses
and spirited horses.
From his earliest years he designed many objects,
and constructed models in relief, of which Vasari
mentions some of women smiling. Signor Piero,
thinking over this promise in the child, took him
to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, then
the most famous artist in Florence. Beautiful
objects lay about there, ā r*eliquaries, pyxes, silver
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LEONARDO DA VINCI
images for the Pope's chapel at Rome, strange
fancy work of the Middle Age keeping odd com-
pany with fragments of antiquity, then but lately
discovered. Another student Leonardo may have
seen there ā a boy into whose soul the level light
and aerial illusions of Italian sunsets had passed,
in after days famous as Perugino. Verrocchio was
an artist of the earlier Florentine type, carver,
painter, and worker in metals in one; designer,
not of pictures only, but of all things for sacred or
household use, drinking-vessels, ambries, instru-
ments of music, making them all fair to look upon,
filling the common ways of life with the reflection
of some far-off brightness; and years of patience
had refined his hand till his work was now sought
after from distant places.
It happened that Verrocchio was employed by
the brethren of Vallombrosa to paint the Baptism
of Christ, and Leonardo was allowed to finish an
angel in the left-hand corner. It was one of those
moments in which the progress of a great thing ā
here that of the art of Italy ā presses hard and
sharp on the happiness of an individual, through
whose discouragement and decrease humanity, in
more fortunate persons, comes a step nearer to
its final success.
For beneath the cheerful exterior of the mere
well-paid craftsman, chasing brooches for the copes
of Santa Maria Novella, or twisting metal screens
for the tombs of the Medici, lay the ambitious
desire of expanding the destiny of Italian art by
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WALTER PATER
a larger knowledge and insight into things ā a
purpose in art not unlike Leonardo's still uncon-
scious purpose; and often, in the modelling of
drapery, or of a lifted arm, or of hair cast back
trom the face, there came to him something of the
freer manner and richer humanity of a later age.
But in this Baptism the pupil had surpassed the
master; and Verrocchio turned away as one
stunned, and as if his sweet earlier work must
thereafter be distasteful to him, from the bright
animated angel of Leonardo's hand.
The angel may still be seen in Florence, a space
of sunlight in the cold, laboured old picture; but
the legend is true only in sentiment, for painting
had always been the art by which Verrocchio set
least store. And as in a sense he anticipates Leo-
nardo, so to the last Leonardo recalls the studio of
Verrocchio, in the love of beautiful toys, such as
the vessel of water for a mirror and lovely needle-
work about the implicated hands in the Modesty
and Vanity, and of reliefs, like those cameos which
in The Virgin of the Balances hang all round
the girdle of St. Michael, and of bright variegated
stones, such as the agates in the Saint Anne,
and in a hieratic preciseness and grace, as of a
sanctuary swept and garnished. Amid all the
cunning and intricacy of his Lombard manner
this never left him. Much of it there must have
been in that lost picture of Paradise, which he
prepared as a cartoon for tapestry to be woven in
the looms of Flanders, It was the apex of the older
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LEONARDO DA VINCI
Florentine style of miniature painting, with patient
putting of each leaf upon the trees and each flower
in the grass, where the first man and woman
were standing.
And because it was the perfection of that style,
it awoke in Leonardo some seed of discontent
which lay in the secret places of his nature. For
the way to perfection is through a series of dis-
gusts; and this picture ā all that he had done so
. far in his life at Florence ā was after all in the old
slight manner. His art, if it was to be something
in the world, must be weighted with more of the
meaning of nature and purpose of humanity.
Nature was " the true mistress of higher intelli-
gences." So he plunged into the study of nature.
And in doing this he followed the manner of the
older students; he brooded over the hidden virtues
of plants and crystals, the lines traced by the stars
as they moved in the sky, over the correspondences
which exist between the different orders of living
things, through which, to eyes opened, they inter-
pret each other; and for years he seemed to those
about him as one listening to a voice silent for
other men.
He learned here the art of going deep, of tracking
the sources of expression to their subtlest retreats,
the power of an intimate presence in the things
he handled. He did not at once or entirely break
with art; only he was no longer the cheerful
objective painter, through whose soul, as through
clear glass, the bright figures of Florentine life,
165
WALTER PATER
only made a little mellower and more pensive by
the transit, passed on to the white wall. He wasted
many days in curious tricks of design, seeming to
lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices of
lines and colours. He was smitten with a love of
the impossible ā the perforation of mountains,
changing the course of rivers, raising great buildings,
such as Giovanni Church, in the air; all those
feats for the performance of which natural magic
professes to have the key. Later writers, indeed,
see in these efforts an anticipation of modern
mechanics; in him they were rather dreams,
thrown off by the overwrought and labouring
brain. Two ideas were especially fixed in him, as
reflexes of things that had touched his brain in
childhood beyond the measure of other impres-
sions ā the smiling of women and the motion
of great waters.
And in such studies some interfusion of the
extremes of beauty and terror shaped itself, as an
image that might be seen and touched, in the mind
of this gracious youth, so fixed, that for the rest
of his life it never left him; and as catching glimpses
of it in the strange eyes or hair of chance people,
he would follow such about the streets of Florence
till the sun went down, of whom many sketches
of his remain. Some of these are full of a curious
beauty, that remote beauty apprehended only by
those who have sought it carefully; who, starting
with acknowledged types of beauty, have refined
as far upon these as these refine upon the world
i66
LEONARDO DA VINCI
of common forms. But mingled inextricably with
this there is an element of mockery also; so that,
whether in sorrow or scorn, he caricatures Dante
even. Legions of grotesques sweep under his
hand; for has not nature, too, her grotesques ā
the rent rock, the distorting light of evening on
lonely roads, the unveiled structure of man in the
embryo or the skeleton ?
All these swarming fancies unite in the Medusa
of the Uffizi Vasari's story of an earlier Medusa,
painted on a wooden shield, is perhaps an invention;
and yet, properly told, has more of the air of truth
about it than anything else in the whole legend.
For its real subject is not the serious work of a
man, but the experiment of a child. The lizards
and glow-worms and other strange small creatures
which haunt an Italian vineyard bring before one
the whole picture of a child's life in a Tuscan
dwelling, half castle, half farm; and are as true to
nature as the pretended astonishment of the father
for whom the boy has prepared a surprise. It was
not in play that he painted that other Medusa, the
one great picture which he felt behind him in
Florence. The subject has been treated in various
ways; Leonardo alone cuts to its centre; he alone
realises it as the head of a corpse, exercising its
power through all the circumstances of death.
What we may call the fascination of corruption
penetrates in every touch its exquisitely-finished
beauty. About the dainty lines of the cheek a
rabbit creeps unheeded. The delicate snakes seem
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WALTER PATER
literally strangling each other in terrified struggle
to escape from the Medusa brain. The hue which
violent death always brings with it is in the features
ā features singularly massive and grand, as we
catch them inverted, in a dexterous foreshortening,
sloping upwards, almost sliding down upon us,
crown foremost, like a great calm stone against
which the wave of serpents breaks. But it is
a subject that may well be left to the beautiful
verses of Shelley.
The science of that age was all divination,
clairvoyance, unsubjected to our exact modern
formulas, seeking in an instant of vision to con-
centrate a thousand experiences. Later writers,
thinking only of the well-ordered treatise on
painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle du Fresne,
a hundred years after, compiled from Leonardo's
bewildered manuscripts, written strangely, as his
manner was, from right to left, have imagined a
rigid order in his inquiries. But such rigid order
was little in accordance with the restlessness of
his character; and if we think of him as the mere
reasoner who subjects design to anatomy, and com-
position to mathematical rules, we shall hardly
have of him that impression which those about him
received from him. Poring over his crucibles,
making experiments with colour, trying by a
strange variation of the alchemist's dream to dis-
cover the secret, not of an elixir to make man's
natural life immortal, but rather of giving im-
mortality to the subtlest and most delicate effects
i68
LEONARDO DA VINCI
of painting, he seemed to them rather the sorcerer
or the magician, possessed of curious secrets and a
hidden knowledge, living in a world of which
he alone possessed the key. What his philosophy
seems to have been most like is that of Paracelsus
or Cardan; and much of the spirit of the older
alchemy still hangs about it, with its confidence
in short cuts and odd by-ways to knowledge. To
him philosophy was to be something giving strange
swiftness and double sight, divining the sources of
springs beneath the earth or of expression beneath
the human countenance, clairvoyant of occult
gifts in common or uncommon things, in the reed
at the brook-side or the star which draws near to
us but once in a century. How in this way the
clear purpose was overclouded, the fine chaser's
hand perplexed, we but dimly see; the mystery
which at no point quite lifts from Leonardo's
life is thickest here. But it is certain that at
one period of his life he had almost ceased to
be an artist.
The year 1483 ā year of the birth of Raffaelle
and the thirty-first of Leonardo's life ā is fixed
as the date of his visit to Milan by the letter in which
he recommends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and
offers to tell him for a price strange secrets in the
art of war. It was that Sforza who murdered his
young nephew by slow poison, yet was so sus-
ceptible to religious impressions that he turned
his worst passions into a kind of religious cultus,
and who took for his device the mulberry tree ā
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WALTER PATER
symbol, in its long delay and sudden yielding of
flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which
economises all forces for an opportunity of sudden
and sure effect. The fame of Leonardo had gone
before him, and he was to model a colossal statue
of Francesco, the first duke. As for Leonardo
himself, he came not as an artist at all, or careful
of the fame of one; but as a player on the harp ā
strange harp of silver of his own construction,
shaped in some curious likeness to a horse's skull.
The capricious spirit of Ludovico was susceptible
to the charm of music, and Leonardo's nature had
a kind of spell in it. Fascination is always the word
descriptive of him. No portrait of his youth remains;
but all tends to make us believe that up to this
time some charm of voice and aspect, strong enough
to balance the disadvantage of his birth, had played
about him. His physical strength was great; it
was said that he could bend a horse-shoe like a