Evening star., 1929-12-14
THIS AND THAT
BY CHARLES E. TRACEWELL.

1.-The artist listened in silence. feign-
ing agreement. He waited for Soderini's
speech to end, with respondent sub
missiveness, even as a traveller on a
highway who, being overtaken by a
yhirlwind of dust. waits with head
bowed and eyes shut.
"In these ordinary thoughts Of ordi-
nary men Leonardo felt blind, deaf
inplacable force, resembling the forces
of Nature, with which one cannot con-
tend: and, although at first sight such
thoughts appeared to him merely fiat
when he came to ponder upon them
more deeply he experienced the same
sensation as If he were glancing into a
fearful void, into vertiginous abyss.
This excerpt from Dmitri Merejkow-
skis Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci
brings up pleasantly an idea which
most people have had at some time or
other, but perhaps never seen so well
expressed before.
THE ordinary thoughts of ordinary
men''-who has not fallen foul of them
and suffered immensely, although he
himself might be only far enough in ad-
vance to see that their thoughts were
ordinary?
Modern factors of startling ingenuity
such as motion pictures. have accented
the dullness of mankind by giving sc
many millions exactly the same thoughts
about the same things.
There are other forces today operat-
ing in the same way, with the result
that at no time III worlds history have
men and women. and even the children
been so inclined to think on q level.
On the other hand, We have no SYM
pathy with would-be "intellectualS'
who profess to find decency, goodness
and morality bromide" as they say
There is vast difference between such
conversation, sententious though it may
be, and that fiat staleness about moth
ing of which Merejkowski speaks.
X q II x
THE voice of the people is the voice
of God"
This saying is one of the Oldest
attempts to justify the wisdom of the
mob. The latest is the jocular Fifty
million Frenchmen can't be wrong"
The truth seems to be that the voice
of the people" sometimes is anything
but the voice of God, and that fifty
million Frenchmen, or Americans, OF
English, can be wrong upon occasion.
There are only supposed to be 5000
men in the world who really contribute
anything to thinking as an art. but the
average reader may well hesitate before
accepting such figures.
Nobody has any way Of proving that
there are 5000 such persons, or 10000
or 100000. What all these generaliza-
tions attempt to do is to distinguish
between firSt-class thought and medi-
ocre thought. Perhaps these statements
do as we'll as any.
They take us back, however. to the
scene in The Romance of Leonardo Da
Vinci," in which the above quoted words
appear. The Russian writer has sue
ceeded in this novel in writing a much
better psychological biography than
many of the hastily thrown together
biographies" now clamoring for the
eyes of the American reading public.
What distinguishes this book-novel
biography, for it is both-is the COM
plete life of the man, unrelieved by any
fictional craft which ordinarily plays
up the high lights" of a subjects ca
reer. In this book Leonardo the Flor
cntine lives and works and fades out
of the picture. Death comes to him,
as 1t must to all men, but here unre-
lieved The guile of artistry is not used
to give falSeness to the inevitable end,
so that the achievement is Startlingly
real.
In the scene under discussion the good
man Soderini, head of the council, is
lecturing the great artist on art. He