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