Chapter 4

There is that in us which we call the sense or Idea of beauty, and we recognise it in works of art. What causes it in us? It is a sentiment, but it is more than a sentiment. It is indissolubly connected with expression, but it is more than expression. It raises all kinds of associations, but it is more than associations. It thrills the nerves, it stimulates the intellect, but it is more than a thrill, and other than the intellect; it is treatment, but who can give laws for it? The answer which explained the sense of beauty that we feel in works of art would go straight to the revelation of the essence of beauty. All that æsthetic teachers tell us is, that certain lines and colours and arrangements are harmonious, and the philosopher fails in telling us why they are harmonious. Does Hegel? Even if we are told there is an Idea in us which is also an Idea in Nature, and, therefore, we can understand the Idea, because We are It, does that throw light on what the Idea really is? We are the human side of nature, and have the same human difficulty as before in interpreting the Idea. Yet there is one philosopher, as many readers must have felt, who has brought us nearer to the interpretation of the artistic attitude, than any other, and this is Schopenhauer on what we may call his mystical side in his book of "Will and Idea." Perhaps most philosophers have erred in too rigid an exclusion of feeling and imagination. It is impossible to help feeling that his philosophy is largely moulded and created by his feeling for art--and by his oriental mysticism. He can be curiously prosaic at the same time, and this is another proof of the infinite complexity of the mind:--he can be inartistic and unpoetic so that he almost staggers us, as in his unillumining remarks on Landscape Art. Vegetation, according to Schopenhauer's theory, is on a lower grade of Will Objectification or Manifestation, than men and animals are, and landscape painting is, therefore, altogether on a different plane. Through his theories he loses the power of seeing that art is concerned with treatment, with conception and expression, that beauty depends not on the object, but on the treatment of the object.

But if we turn to his mystical theory of the Unconscious, we do get a beautiful description of the absorption, that is, of the essence of the artistic nature. He shows how the artist loses his own personality in the object of contemplation, so completely that he identifies himself mentally with it. Schopenhauer describes the artistic mind when it is affected by the beautiful and the sublime. By losing all sense of individuality and personality the artist is so possessed by his object of thought and vision that he is absorbed in it and feels the Idea, which it represents. This theory put into ordinary language, is that the artist has in him the sense of a great Idea, such as Beauty, and in his power of vision into objects of beauty he lives in the sense of Beauty, which they represent. They represent to him the Idea of Beauty itself. He lives in the Idea, is isolated in it, absorbed in it, and by the privilege of genius can keep the sense of the inner world of beauty and can produce beautiful works of art.

With joy and innocence, his whole soul absorbed in the beautiful forms which he creates, he represents the ideas within him, and he loses the sense of life and consciousness and Will, which, according to Schopenhauer, is to be freed from constant demands, and strivings. He is no longer bound to the wheel of desire--he has no personal interests--no subjectivity.

He is a "pure will-less, time-less subject of knowledge" of "pure knowing," which means complete absorption. He excites and suggests in others the knowledge of the Ideas, which, beautiful objects represent. Thus, through the works of Genius, others may reach an exalted frame of mind, for, indeed, if we had not some artistic capacity for seeing and feeling the Ideas which works of art represent, we should be incapable of feeling or enjoying them. Perhaps, to make this abstract thought clearer, it would be well to endeavour to find some examples which will illustrate Schopenhauer's meaning. And Shakespeare offers us incomparable examples. In his great tragedies--such as Othello, for instance--we feel the knowledge or Idea of Life, in all its varied human manifestations. Life, manifold, diverse, and abundant--and all felt intuitively from within. Into his creations, Shakespeare pours wide and overflowing knowledge of life; there is nothing narrow or shut in, in his conceptions, but every character is alive in the great sense, illustrating no narrow precept or trite morality, no cut and dried scheme of a petty out-look on life, but the great morals of life itself, as varied, as intangible and as inexplicable. He represents this sense of varied life as manifested or objectified in his creations, _i.e._, his characters. In _Othello_, for instance, we have suggestions of love and jealousy that go down to the very depth of the heart, through imaginative insight. And what we are brought close to, is the vivid intense life of feeling that Shakespeare's creations hold, and that we, ourselves, are capable of holding in our own hearts. In this presentation, Shakespeare flashes the sense of life with all its complexities of heart and brain into us. He does not stand, as it were aside, as a commentator on the faults or weaknesses of his characters, but he wafts us out of our circumscribed lives, out of our limitation of thought, we know not how, into an atmosphere quivering with passion, and felt by us all the keener, because we recognise that the Poet never thought about _us_ at all. He excites our sympathies by his own intuitions into the clashing ideas, which he represents in the tragedy of a passionately loving and a jealous nature. We learn truths, not of fact, but of life, focussed and arranged as an artist arranges them, and permeated with that strange sense of wonder which only Life can give. We feel the suggestion of an inevitable dim something beyond, to explain the unexplainable, the tragedy of character, and the tragedy of circumstance.

These make the great crises which break up lives. But the play goes on with all the wild force of life itself. We feel the Idea of jealousv forming itself in the noble nature of Othello, and bringing with it anguish, the bitterer throes of life, those intense and hopeless moments when struggle only makes the coil close tighter round the victim. And after we have felt these, no nature remains quite the same as before. There has entered into us a power of imaginative sympathy which Art alone can inspire and only when it most inwardly reveals Life itself. Of all things, the "Too late" and the "Might have been" are the most sorrowful, and the divine possibility, cruelly realised too late, gives the sharpest edge to Othello's mental agony, when the whole truth of Desdemona's life--an "objectification" of loyalty, love, and purity--is only revealed to him as she lies there dead before him, killed by his own hand. All that it means rushes then like a torrent on his soul; when Othello falls on the bed, by Desdemona's body, the remorse and love that rend him with their talons are beyond even Shakespeare's power of expression.

With groans scarcely uttered, Othello gives the only outlet possible to the blinding, scathing storm of passions within him. There is one touch, and only the intuitive artist of humanity and of life could have known it, and given it--only one touch of consolation that could be left him, and it comes to Othello as he is dying! "I kiss'd thee, 'ere I kill'd thee."

He fastens on this as a starving man fastens on a crumb of bread.

Why is this so true as to be almost intolerable--and yet so beautiful? The characters have art necessities. Schiller said Art has its categorical Imperatives--its _must_, and Shakespeare's characters fulfil them. We feel how inevitable is their fate. They make their own tragedy. The Poet compresses a Life Tragedy into a few pages of manuscript. He, with the great sense and Idea of Human Life in him, has to choose what he will portray, and the greater an artist the more unerring is his selection. Then begins his own absorption in the characters. Conception and expression come to him and come nobly and spontaneously--and so spontaneous is his touch--so completely is he absorbed in, and one with his characters--that it makes our rush of sympathy as spontaneous as his own.

We feel the Identification of Shakespeare with Othello--with Iago--with Desdemona He _is_ them _all_. _He_, William Shakespeare, is "the will-less--time-less--subject of knowledge," living in "pure knowing" and absorbed in the creations that represent his varied and his intuitive knowledge of the great Idea of Life. And he excites and suggests in us the same absorption in his creations--that is, if we have the capacity to feel it.

It is a land of marvel and of mystery when all personal interests and all consciousness of individual temperaments are lost, fall off from us, and nothing remains, nothing exists to us but the love, the betrayal, the agony, and the struggles of the noble nature, that "dies upon a kiss." We are so much part of it, we become so possessed by it, that we do not even know or feel that we are knowing or feeling. Shakespeare _is_ Othello--and so are we, for the time being. Shakespeare had the insight and power of genius, and so could retain and reproduce his vision into the inner life. We alas! often cannot; when the play is over we become again, a link in the chain that binds us to the ordinary world of consciousness; the veil of illusion has fallen again between us and real vision, we are again among the shadows, with some general impressions more or less blurred, but the vivid vision of the Poet which made us feel in the manifestations he created, the very Idea of Life itself--has faded from us, we are no longer in the Ideal world which is the real world.

We will take one other example, not of a play, but of a picture. The Ascending Christ for instance at the Pitti Palace, Florence, by Fra Bartolomeo.

It is well enough known, with the rapt faces of the four evangelists, two on either side, gazing at their Master, with more of love for Him than of understanding even then, in their expression. And the two lovely little angels beneath, oblivious of everything but the medallion they are holding, as is the way with old Masters. It is the Christ alone that rivets our attention. The majestic, noble form, and the sad, grave, beautiful eyes, revealing the Victor over Life and Death, as He leaves the earth, triumphant indeed, but with the solitariness of triumph of the Divine Man, Who knows now the awful sorrow of humanity. It is Life human and divine in the Artist's Conception or Idea. How absorbed must he have been in his representation of this idea since he could suggest, and that spontaneously, such problems of unutterable thoughts in those divine eyes. The whole vision of humanity, as it might be in the mind of Christ, and as it was felt in the artist's vision, is flashed into our own minds--it is an artistic inspiration. Art suggests, it does not explain. A picture focusses into a few inches of space a whole drama of life and thought. We read it there, we feel it, and with no conscious effort, for this is the gift of Genius.

And our absorption in a work of genius is untouched even by consideration of technique. The methods of conveying the impression may be noted afterwards, and we may delight in form and colour, and light and shade. But it is the _result_ of all these that the art lover feels so spontaneously and unconsciously. Learned art critics and dealers will study the size of ears, the length of noses, the breadth of thumbs, the manner of curving the little finger in order to make sure of the authenticity of the artist. It is more important to them than the enjoyment of the work of art itself. The lover of art has a receptive nature, so that he does not concern himself much, with these considerations, he does not even compare pictures. All _that_ may come afterwards, if he is a student, as well as a lover. But, at all events, at first, he will find a response simply in his own soul to the picture, which represents to him an idea. His own personality and individuality leave him; unconsciously he is possessed. Instead of getting to understand it, and attacking a work of art as if it were a mathematical problem, he discovers that the picture is possessing him, and that is what Schopenhauer means. Art has dæmonic power, it takes hold of us wholly, and in proportion to our faculty of receptiveness we understand it more or less fully. Architecture can hold us in this way, sculpture can, a great city can with its architecture and associations combined. Rome _does_. The very essence of the artistic quality hangs round the old walls of Rome. Rome itself can teach us, enter into us, possess us in a way of its own. The great bond of similarity between all the arts is their having this _possessing_ power, this revelation of ideas, in whatever form they are expressed. Rafael in the exquisite outline of the peasant girl's face, saw without conscious effort the vision of maternity, as the perfect form of the Madonna della Seggiola rose before him. This is idealism--seeing the idea in the object of contemplation. And the spectator, gazing at the picture, also without consciousness of effort, is moved into "a passionate tenderness, which he knows not whether he has given to heavenly beauty or earthly charm"; he feels motherhood, and to quote again Mr. Henry James in "The Madonna of the Future," he is intoxicated with the fragrance of the "tenderest blossom of maternity that ever bloomed on earth." Critics may question its manner, method and style; but the art lover feels its "graceful humanity," he does not "praise, or qualify, or measure or explain, or account for"--he is one with its loveliness--one with the purity and the truth of the ideal which it represents.

This may explain something of the attitude towards art in Schopenhauer's philosophy, though to reproduce and exemplify thought is always difficult, and abstract philosophical thought is especially so. The real comprehension of a philosopher's mind depends mainly on how far we are able to get into the atmosphere of his thought; it depends upon affinity in fact, and this is why philosophy must be the study, mainly, of the lonely thinker. Explainers and lecturers necessarily intrude their own individualities into their explanations, which have to be discounted. Yet when discounted, certain individualities do help us in philosophy, and even in poetry. Some minds may be more akin with the philosopher's or poet's than are our own, and a thought will become more vivid and clear to us, and a poem more lovely, when we understand it or view it, through a mind to which it appeals _directly_, and to us through that other. And now, after endeavouring to grapple with Schopenhauer's theory of art, what does it come to at last? Is it more than this that the philosopher explains it as unconscious absorption in the manifestation of an Idea, and that it is a refuge from life and its woes _We_ may have _felt_ all that he has described, and, for a philosopher, Schopenhauer has a great gift of expression, indeed the love of art and literature glows on almost every page of his book. But his theory is surely scarcely more than a re-statement of what we _feel_, and if we ask whence comes the artistic quality--from the heart or the nerves--or the brain;--what is the philosophical definition of the _compulsion_ in art; how does philosophy account for its strange compelling, unique, possessing, power--we get no answer at all, it eludes all tests. We get no explanation of what the strange insight is which we find in the man of Genius, or of the faculty that gives the capacity for absorption and that excites it in us. The genesis of this wonderful faculty remains unknown to us, undefined. Unconsciousness is a necessary ingredient in it, according to Schopenhauer, and this helps us to realise the difficulty of expressing it. What thinker will reduce the quality to intellectual symbols? Until that is done, however, Philosophy of Art must remain a philosophy of the Undefined, and the Undefinable!

V.

IMPRESSIONS OF GEORGE SAND.

Perhaps the keynote to the charm of George Sand's art is given in her preface to her exquisite novel "La Derniere Aldini." Here is none of the accuracy and patience of the scientific enquirer into the "mysterious mixture" man, which we find in George Eliot's preface to "Middlemarch." Indeed these prefaces sum up the remarkably differing characteristics of the two writers. George Eliot is occupied with "the function of knowledge" in regard to the "ardently willing soul." She explains in her preface that the aim of her book is to trace the fate of the Saint. Theresas of a past age, in the ordinary environment and circumstances of our time. The problem was, how were detachment of mind and spiritual longing and love to find their developments in a modern prosaic setting. George Eliot brought to bear on this enquiry all her great powers of observation, discrimination and thought. Each page of the novel reveals the conscious endeavour of the born thinker to express in artistic form some conception that would help to clear the outlook on which the answer to the problem depended. George Sand, who had also her philosophising, and her analysing moods, was yet capable of feeling that novels may be romances. She could write under the sway of pure emotion and apart from theory. George Eliot never regarded her novels as mere romances. "Romances," said George Sand in _her_ preface, "are always 'fantasies,' and these fantasies of the imagination are like the clouds which pass. Whence come the clouds and whither do they go? In wandering about the Forest of Fontainebleau tête à tête with my son I have dreamed of everything else but this book. This book which I wrote that evening in the little inn, and which I forgot the next morning, that I might occupy myself only with the flowers and the butterflies. I could tell you exactly every expedition we made, each amusement we had, but I can not tell you why my spirit went that evening to Venice. I could easily find a good reason, but it will be more sincere to confess that I do not remember it."

The mind of George Sand, instead of being engaged with a problem, was like an Æolian harp breathed upon "by every azure breath,

"That under heaven is blown To harmonies and hues beneath, As tender as its own."

So responsive was she that she gave back in wealth of sentiment and idea, the beauty wafted to her by the forest winds. So instinct with emotion, so alive and receptive and creative that a passing impulse resulted in a work of art of the touching beauty of "La Derniere Aldini." So unanalytic of self, that she could not remember the driving impulse that caused her to write the novel. Impulses like clouds come and go, and the artist soul is the sure recipient of them. It sees and "follows the gleam"--it feels the mystic influences. This is the foundation of that inexplicable thing inspiration, genius. This receptive-creative faculty is the gift George Sand received, and this preface is the keynote to it.

It is this gift, which is power, and in George Sand it is a liberating power; it freed her own soul, and it freed the souls of others. She herself felt--and she made readers feel, as in "Lelia," that outward limitations and hindering circumstances were as nothing compared to the great fact of freedom within, freedom of heart and soul and mind from "the enthralment of the actual." We are _free_;--it is a great thing to be as sure and as proud of it as St. Paul was of having been "Free born." Some of us achieve freedom with sorrow and with bitter tears and with great effort--sometimes with spasmodic effort, and George Sand obtained inward freedom in that way.