He was always like a
strange, wonderful creature from another planet, taking notes with
unstaled delight but never losing his heart to any particular. Sex
itself seems hardly to exist for him, or at least for his mind. Often
the people in his drawings are of no sex. Rembrandt draws every one,
Leonardo no one, as if he were his own relation. Women and youths were
as much a subject of his impassioned curiosity as flowers, and no more.
He is always the spectator, but a spectator who can exercise every
faculty of the human mind and every passion in contemplation; he is the
nearest that any man has ever come to Aristotle's Supreme Being.
But we must not suppose that he went solemnly through life living up to
his own story, that he was mysterious in manner or in any respect like a
charlatan. Rather, he lived always in the moment and overcame mankind by
his spontaneity. He had the charm of the real man of genius, not the
reserve of the false one. The famous statement of what he could do,
which he made to Ludovico Sforza, is not a mere boast but an expression
of his eagerness to do it. These engines of war were splendid toys to
him, and all his life he enjoyed making toys and seeing men wonder at
them. His delight was to do things for the first time like a child, and
then not to do them again. Again and again he cries out against
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.
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