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 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. 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 splendour 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 Overman’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. 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 towards human beings, but to 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 age, with that intent and ruthless gaze wrapped in intellectual contemplation of the outspread world.