Poring over his
crucibles, making experiments with colour, trying, by a strange
variation of the alchemist's dream, to discover the secret, not of an
elixir to make man's natural life immortal, but rather of giving
immortality to the subtlest and most delicate effects 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
byways 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 deepest here.
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