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.