Two men of genius, in our own generation, have revealed for all time the
always inexplicable magic of Leonardo da Vinci: Walter Pater in his
prose and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his sonnet. It is impossible not to
quote this lyrical prose.
The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive
of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Here is
the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the
eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon
the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and
fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. All the thoughts and
experience of the world have been etched and moulded there in that which
they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the
animalism of peace, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Ages
with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the
Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among
which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and
learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and
keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with
Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and,
as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as
the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which
it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the
hands.
Rossetti, whose criticisms on poets are as direct and inevitable as his
finest verse, was always his own best critic. He who said finally: "The
life-blood of rhymed translation is this--that a good poem shall not be
turned into a bad one," was as finally right on himself, as he was on
others, in his unsurpassable revision of one of the most imaginative
sonnets ever written: "A Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione." Certainly no
poem of his shows more plainly the strength and wealth of the workman's
lavish yet studious hand. And, in this sonnet as in the one on Leonardo,
there is the absolute transfusion of a spirit that seemed incommunicable
from one master's hand to another's. Only in the Leonardo, which I shall
quote, there is none of the sovereign oppression of absolute beauty and
the nakedness of burning life that I find in the _Fête Champêtre._ For
in this divine picture the romantic spirit is born, and with it modern
art. Here we see Whistler and the Japanese: a picture content to be no
more than a picture: "an instant made eternity," a moment of color, of
atmosphere, of the noon's intense heat, of faultless circumstance. It is
a pause in music, and life itself waits, while men and women are for a
moment happy and content and without desire; these, content to be
beautiful and to be no more than a strain of music; to those others, who
are content to know only that the hour is music.
Here, then, is Rossetti's version of the beauty of mysterious peace
which broods over the _Virgin of the Rocks._
Mother, is this the darkness of the end,
The Shadow of Death? and is that outer sea
Infinite imminent Eternity?
And does the death-pang by man's seed sustained
In Time's each instant cause thy face to bend
Its silent prayer upon the Son, while he
Blesses the dead with his hand silently
To his long day which hours no more offend?
Mother of grace, the pass is difficult,
Keen as these rocks, and the bewildered souls
Throng it like echoes, blindly shuddering through.
Thy name, O Lord, each spirit's voice extols,
Whose peace abides in the dark avenue
Amid the bitterness of things occult.
So Leonardo, who said "that figure is not good which does not express
through its gestures the passions of its soul," becomes, more than any
painter, the painter of the soul. He has created, not only in the
_Gioconda_, a clairvoyant smile, which is the smile of mysterious wisdom
hidden in things; he has created the motion of great waters; he has
created types of beauty so exotic that they are fascinating only to
those who are drawn into the unmirrored depths of this dreamless mirror.
He invents a new form of landscape, subtle and sorcerous, and a whole
new movement for an equestrian statue; besides inventing--what did not
this miraculous man invent!--the first quite simple and natural
treatment of the Virgin and Child. So, as he was content to do nothing
as it had been done before, he creates in the _Gioconda_ a new art of
portrait painting; and, in her, so disquieting, that her eyes, as they
follow you persistently, seem to ask one knows not what impenetrable and
seductive question, on which all one's happiness might depend.
Mysterious and enigmatical as she is, there is in her face none of the
melancholy--which is part of the melancholy of Venice--that allures
one's senses in a famous picture in the Accademia; where, the feast
being over, and the wine drunk, something seems to possess the woman,
setting those pensive lines about her lips, which will smile again when
she has lifted her eyelids.