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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13766 ***
+
+COBWEBS OF THOUGHT
+
+by
+
+"ARACHNE"
+
+London
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+  I. OUR IGNORANCE OF OURSELVES
+
+ II. CONTRASTS
+
+III. MAETERLINCK ON HAMLET
+
+ IV. AN IMPOSSIBLE PHILOSOPHY
+
+  V. IMPRESSIONS OF GEORGE SAND
+
+
+
+
+MOTTO.
+
+
+"The first philosophers, whether Chaldeans or Egyptians, said there
+must be something within us which produces our thought. That something
+must be very subtle: it is breath; it is fire, it is ether; it is a
+quintessence; it is a slender likeness; it is an intelechia; it is a
+number; it is harmony; lastly, according to the divine Plato, it is a
+compound of the _same_ and the _other_! It is atoms which think in us,
+said Epicurus after Democritus. But, my friend, how does an atom
+think? Acknowledge that thou knowest nothing of the matter."
+                                                           --VOLTAIRE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+
+OUR IGNORANCE OF OURSELVES.
+
+
+Self-Analysis, apart from its scientific uses, has seldom rewarded
+those who have practised it. To probe into the inner world of motive
+and desire has proved of small benefit to any one, whether hermit,
+monk or nun, indeed it has been altogether mischievous in result,
+unless the mind that probed, was especially healthy. Bitter has been
+the dissatisfaction, both with the process, and with what came of it,
+for being miserably superficial it could lead to no real knowledge of
+self, but simply centred self on self, producing instead of
+self-knowledge, self-consciousness, and often the beginnings of mental
+disease.
+
+For fruitful self analysis it is apparently necessary then to have a
+clear, definite aim outside self--such as achieving the gain of some
+special piece of knowledge, and we find such definite aims in
+psychology, and certain systems of philosophy--Greek, English, and
+German, in Plato Locke, Kant, and in the meditations of Descartes, and
+many others. Self-analysis is the basis of psychological knowledge,
+but the science has been chiefly used to explain the methods by which
+we obtain knowledge of the outer world in relation to ourselves. When
+a philosopher centres self on self, in order to know self as a result
+of introspection, the results have been disastrous, and have
+contributed nothing to knowledge, properly so-called. If religious
+self-examination has its dangers, so also has philosophical
+self-analysis for its own sake. It is a fascinating study for those
+who care for thought for thought's sake--the so-called Hamlets of the
+world, who are for ever revolving round the axes of their own ideas
+and dreams, and who never progress towards any clear issue. Amiel's
+"Vie Intime" is a study of this kind. It adds nothing to any clear
+knowledge of self, absorbing and interesting as the record is. It is
+suggestive to a great degree, and in that lies its value, but it is as
+vague, as it is sad. It appeals deeply to those who live apart in a
+world of their own, in thoughtful imaginative reverie, but its effects
+on the mind were deplored even by Amiel himself in words which are
+acutely pathetic. The pain which consumed him arose from the
+concentration of self on self. Self was monopolised by self,
+self-consciousness was produced, though without a touch of selfish
+egoism.
+
+Out of this self-conscious introspection, grew that sterility of soul
+and mind, that dwindling of capacity, and individuality, which Amiel
+felt was taking place within him. A constant, aimless, inevitable
+habit of self-introspection was killing his mental life, before the
+end came physically.
+
+Another philosophical victim to the same habit was John Stuart Mill,
+at one time of his life. His father analysed almost everything, except
+himself, and John Stuart Mill had grown up in this logical atmosphere
+of analysis, and to much profit as his works show. But when he turned
+the microscope on his own states of feeling, and on the aims of his
+life, the result was melancholia--almost disease of mind. His grandly
+developed faculty of analysis when devoted to definite knowledge
+outside himself, produced splendid results, as in his Logic, and his
+Essays, but when he analysed himself, he gained no additional
+knowledge, but a strange morbid horror that all possible musical
+changes might be exhausted, and that there might be no means of
+creating fresh ones. He also feared that should all the reforms he,
+and others, worked for, be accomplished, the lives of the reformers
+would become meaningless and blank, since they were working for means,
+not ends in themselves. Out of this hopeless mental condition there
+was only one outlet possible, and that was to leave self-analysis of
+this sort alone for ever, and to throw himself into its direct
+contrary, the unconscious life of the emotions. John Stuart Mill did
+this, and it saved him. In Wordsworth's poetry he found sanity and
+healing. Happily for him that was not the age of Browning's "Fifine at
+the Fair." Had he fallen in with dialectical analysis in the garb of
+poetry, it must have killed him!
+
+And yet "Know thyself" has always been considered supremely excellent
+advice, as true for our time, as for the age of Socrates. It certainly
+is disregarded by most of us, as fully as it was by many of the
+Greeks, whom Socrates interrogated so ruthlessly. Is there then a sort
+of self-analysis, which can be carried out for its own sake, and which
+can be, at the same time, of vital use? Is all self-analysis when
+practised for its own sake necessarily harmful, and unprofitable? It
+is time to ask these questions if we are ever to know how to analyse
+ourselves with profit, if we are ever to know ourselves. And we none
+of us do. As students, we are content with every other knowledge but
+this. After all the self probing of the religious and philosophical,
+during long centuries, what have we learned? Truly to ourselves, we
+are enigmas. To know everything else except the self that knows, what
+a strange position! But it is our condition. The one thing that we do
+not know--that we feel as if we never could know is the Self in us.
+Our characters, our powers, our natures, our being--what are they? Our
+faculties--what can we do? And what can we not do? What is the reason
+of this faculty, or that want of faculty? We have never reached an
+understanding of ourselves, which makes us not only know, but perceive
+what we are capable of knowing; which makes us aware, not only that we
+can do something, but why we can do it. We are an unknown quantity to
+ourselves. We can calculate on a given action in a machine, but we
+cannot calculate on our own, much less on our moods. If we would but
+take half the trouble to understand ourselves that we take to study a
+science or art--if we could learn to depend on the sequence of our own
+thoughts as an engineer can on the sequence of movements in his steam
+engine--if we could dig, and penetrate into the depths of our own
+being, as a miner penetrates into a seam of coal--we might then
+cultivate with some profit our own special lines of thought, our own
+gifts, that portion of individuality, which we each possess. But it is
+so difficult to get to know it--we are always on the surface of
+ourselves. What power will unearth our self and make us really know
+what we are and what we can do? It is because we do not know
+ourselves, that we fail so hopelessly to give the things which are of
+incalculably real worth to the world, such as fresh individuality, and
+reality of character. Among millions of beings how few exist who
+possess strong original minds! We are _not_ individual for the most
+part, and we are _not_ real. Our lives _are_ buried lives; we are
+unconscious absorbers, and reproducers, under other words of that
+which we have imbibed elsewhere. We need not only fresh expressions of
+old statements, but actually new ideas, and new conceptions. (The
+fresh _subjects_ people talk about, are really fresh _conceptions_ of
+subjects.) We shall never get this bloom of freshness, and this sense
+of reality and individuality of view unless we cultivate their
+soil--to have fresh ideas, we must encourage the right atmosphere in
+which alone they can live. We must not let our own personality,
+however slight, be suppressed, or be discouraged, or interfered with
+by a more powerful, or a more excellent personality.
+
+Individuality is so weak and pliable a thing in most of us that it is
+very easily checked--it requires watchfulness and care, and not to be
+overborne, for the smallest individual thought of a mind of any
+originality, is more worth to the world than any re-expression of the
+thought of some other mind, however great.
+
+Even the "best hundred books" may have a disastrous effect upon us.
+They may kill some aspirations, if they kindle others. Persons of
+mature age may surely at some time have made the discovery that much
+has been lost through the dominating influence of a superior mind.
+Many persons, for instance, have felt the great influence of Carlyle,
+and Ruskin, in their youth. Carlyle could do incalculable good to some
+minds by his ethics of work, but irremediable harm to others; minds
+have actually become stunted and sterile through that part of his
+teaching, which was unsuited to them. Carlyle's temperament checked
+their proper development. Youth has a beautiful capacity for trust and
+belief, and it accepts everything as equal in goodness and truth from
+an author it reverences. The young do not know enough of themselves,
+and they do not trust enough to their own instincts to discriminate.
+They are dominated and unconsciously suppressed. Ruskin, in his
+ethical views of art, and strange doctrines about some old masters,
+has done nearly as much harm to susceptible minds as Carlyle. Ruskin
+restricted and perverted their art ideals on certain lines as Carlyle
+crushed ethical discrimination. Mind have been kept imprisoned for
+years, and their development on the lines nature intended them to
+take, has been arrested, by the want of belief in their own
+initiative. What was inevitable for Ruskin's unique mind was yet wrong
+for readers, who agreed to all his theories under the influence of his
+fascinating personality, and through the power of his individuality.
+In life, we sometimes find we have made a series of mistakes of this
+sort, before at last we get glimmerings of what we were intended to
+be, and we learn at last the need of having known ourselves, and the
+vital necessity of cultivating the atmosphere and colour of that mind
+of ours, which has been used merely as a tool to know everything else.
+
+Spiritualists and Theosophists talk of a Dominant Self, and an Astral
+body, and of gleams of heavensent insight. Gleams of insight and
+dreams do come to us, and teach us truths, which "never can be
+proved," and without some such intuitions the soul of man would indeed
+be poor,
+
+  The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
+  Hath had elsewhere its setting,
+  And cometh from afar.
+
+But the value of the intuitions is relative to the soul which has
+them; they cannot be conveyed to any one else, or demonstrated; they
+can never become Truths valid to all minds. And these last are the
+truths we want if we would make some orderly progress towards a given
+issue. And so we resort after all, to science, to see if it can solve
+the intellectual riddle of our being. What can it do for us? If we
+would really know ourselves, we want a depth of self-analysis; not a
+pitiful search for motives, not the superficial probings of a
+moralist, not the boundless, limitless, self-absorbed speculations on
+the nature of self of the philosopher, not the sympathetic noting of
+each emotion that crosses the horizon of the soul--the introspection
+of the Poet; these will never teach us the reason why we think and
+feel on certain lines, and not on others--these will never explain to
+us what the mind is, that is in us--what that strange thing is, which
+we have tried so vainly to understand. And without this knowledge how
+worthless is the work of the moralist; of what practical use is it for
+him to endeavour to alter a man's character, when he does not even
+know the ingredients that constitute character, still less the cause
+why character is good or bad. Mr. Robert Buchanan said in one of his
+essays: "I can advance no scientific knowledge for seeing a great
+genius in Robert Browning, or a fine painstaking talent in George
+Eliot, for thinking George Meredith almost alone in his power of
+expressing personal passion, and Walt Whitman supreme in his power of
+conveying moral stimulation. I can take a skeleton to pieces
+scientifically, but not a living soul. I am helpless before Mr.
+Swinburne, or any authentic poet, but quite at my ease before Macaulay
+or Professor Aytoun." Mr. Buchanan could presumably take the last two
+to pieces and analyse them as if they were skeletons; but before
+Swinburne, "the living soul," he is helpless. Now we want a scientific
+reason for all this; we want to analyse, not the skeleton, that has
+been done often enough, but "the living soul." We want to know the
+ingredients of character that constituted Mr. Buchanan's preferences.
+What composition gave him his special temper and character? Why did
+his mind tend towards Robert Browning, and away from George Eliot? Why
+in short did his mind work in the way it did? The more original the
+mind, the more its investigation would repay us. But it must be
+self-investigation; what we want are facts of mind, mental data and in
+order to get them, we must investigate the living mind All the usual
+explanations of Temperament, Nature, Heredity, Education are the same
+difficulties, expressed in different words. Heredity is a
+circumstance, which has to be reckoned with, but we have to
+investigate, not circumstances, but results. Here is a living complex
+mind, no matter how I inherit it, here it is; now then, how does it
+work, what can I do with it? And then comes the further inevitable
+question--What is it? What is this thing, this me, which tends to feel
+and act in a certain direction--to admire spontaneously, this, and to
+despise with as perfect ease, that. What we need for scientific
+investigation into the ME is "to utilise minds so as to form a living
+laboratory" _Mind_ vivisection without torture, cruelty or the knife.
+What we want to know definitely from science is: How does this thing
+which I call my mind work? Science regards mind as the sum of
+sensations, which are the necessary results of antecedent causes. It
+endeavours to know how and in what way these sensations can be trained
+and perfected. Nearly twenty years ago, a writer in the Psychological
+Journal "Mind"[1] Mr. J. Jacobs, attempted to form a Society for the
+purpose of experimental psychology. Thinkers and scientific men have
+carried out this work, but the general public has not been greatly
+interested or interested for any length of time. No such society
+exists among the English public. The greater number of enthusiastic
+students is to be found in Italy and America. But Germany has
+furnished great individual workers, such as Fechner, Helmholtz, and
+Wundt. Collective investigation was necessary to separate individual
+peculiarities from general laws. Science of course aims at changing
+the study of individual minds/into "a valid science of mind." Mr. J.
+Jacobs wished a Society to be organised for the purpose of measuring
+mind, measuring our senses, and for testing our mental powers as
+accurately as weight and height are tested now, and also for
+experimenting on will practice. He believed it possible to train the
+will on one thing until we got it perfectly under control, and in so
+doing we should modify character immensely. If this proved possible,
+we ought to persevere until conduct becomes an art, education a
+principle, and mind is known as a science is known. Mr. Jacobs wanted
+systematic enquiries to be made into powers of attention, such as "Can
+we listen and read at the same time, and reproduce what we have read
+and heard." And into the faculties of observation and memory, with
+after images, and the capacity for following trains of reasoning,
+&c., &c., "When we read a novel, do we actually have pictures of the
+scenes before our minds?" Mr. Jacobs wished for enquiries into every
+kind of intelligence ordinary and extraordinary; out of all
+ingredients of character, out of early impressions, out of classified
+emotions to build up an answer to the question: "Is there a science
+of mind?" Since he wrote, much has been done in experiment by the
+scientific. Children's minds are constantly being investigated, and
+the results given to the public. Mr. Galton has to some extent
+popularised this sort of investigation. But it is still generally
+unpopular. Novelists, and artists, leisured people, women, everyone
+could be of use, if they would investigate themselves, or offer their
+minds for investigation. But after all that the scientific French,
+German, American, Italian, and English workers have done, we are as
+yet only on the threshold of mind knowledge--of what we might know--if
+we had ardour enough to push self-analysis in to the remotest corner
+of the brain, noting down, comparing, tabulating the most involuntary
+and ethereal sublimities that appear to flit through the mind, the
+most subtle emotion that hardly finds expression in language. We must
+push on and on till we arrive at the knowledge of a mind science. Our
+scientific enquirers want, as we all do, more ardour, they are dulled
+by a cold, uninterested public. Psychologists now seem to despair of
+obtaining any large results from the science. Mr. E.W. Scripture in
+"The New Psychology" says, in 1897, "It cannot dissect the mind with a
+scalpel, it cannot hope to find a startling principle of mental life."
+If psychological experiment could be presented somewhat apart from its
+technicalities, and if minds could play freely round its discoveries,
+how much more interesting it would be felt to be by the general
+public! The great experimental worker, Mr. J. Mck Cattell has given[2]
+some clear idea of the results he obtained by analysing and measuring
+sensations. The physical processes, which accompany sensations of
+sound and light for instance, unlike as they must be to sensations,
+being facts of matter in motion, yet share with them this
+characteristic, that sensations also have each an _order in time_, the
+mental processes can be measured, equally with the physical. Of course
+measuring sensations is only measuring "the outside of the mind"--but
+it produces among others one very suggestive result: "that as time is
+relative, if all things moved much more slowly or quickly than at
+present, we should not feel any change at all. But if our objective
+measures of time moved twice as fast, whilst physiological movements
+and mental processes went on at the same rate as now, the days of our
+years would be seven score, instead of three score years and ten, yet
+we should not be any the older, or live any the longer. If on the
+other hand the rate of our physiological and mental motions was
+doubled and we lived exactly as many years as before, we should feel
+as if we lived twice as long and were twice as old as now." This is a
+suggestion for Mr. Well's "Anticipations" Is evolution leading us in
+this direction or the other? Is it retarding or "quickening the
+molecular arrangements of the nervous system?" Are we becoming "more
+delicately balanced so that physical changes proceed more quickly as
+thoughts become more comprehensive, feelings more intense, and will,
+stronger." Does the time it needs to think, feel, and will become
+less? And we may add are the physical and mental processes of the
+intelligent brain, quicker, or slower than the unintelligent? For if
+it is the sensitive quick witted organisation, which is destined to
+live twice as long as it does now, how will it bear the burden of such
+added years? Leaving aside inquiries into Time, and Space Sense--(and
+what enormous faculty our minds must have that can supply these)--let
+us go on to Mr. J. McKeen Cattell's analysis of memory--which is
+perhaps the most interesting of all to the student of mind--the
+analysis of memory, attention and association of ideas. Just as the
+eye can only see (attend to) a certain number of vibrations, for if
+the requisite amount is added to, the result is blankness, darkness,
+so the mind can only attend to a certain amount of complexity--add to
+the complexity and attention ceases, but, a certain degree of
+complexity is necessary to produce any conscious attention at all. In
+experiments with a Metronome and the ticking of a watch, it is found
+the attention at certain intervals gets weaker--from 2 to 3 seconds.
+The impression produced by the ticking of the watch is less distinct,
+it seems to disappear and then is heard again. "This is not from
+fatigue in the sense organ," but apparently represents "a natural
+rhythm in consciousness or attention," which interferes with the
+accuracy of attention. What a suggestive fact this is! Have we not all
+at times, felt an inexplicable difficulty in listening and attending
+to certain speakers, which may perhaps be explained by a difference
+between the rhythm of our own consciousness, and that of the voice of
+the speaker. In Association of Ideas the time that it takes for one
+idea to suggest another has been determined, but of course, it must be
+the average time, for people differ enormously in the speed in which
+ideas occur to them. It is impossible to allude here to more points,
+but in the same interesting article Mr. Mck Cattell considers it
+proved that "experimental methods can be applied to the study of mind,
+and that the positive results are significant," and he hopes, "one
+day, we shall have as accurate and complete a knowledge of mind as we
+have of the physical world." Beyond this knowledge of mind as a
+machine, the Psychologist goeth not. He ends, and what do we know more
+as to what mind is? Philosophy properly so-called, begins here or
+ought to begin. In science we experiment widely and constantly with
+mind and arrive at some knowledge of its workings and capacities; we
+learn occupation with the mind itself as a subject for observation,
+and we practise a self-analysis, which adds to the sum of general
+knowledge. Through this study we know more about our senses and their
+faculties, more of our own tendencies and idiosyncrasies, and in what
+direction they tend. We are on the way to solve some such problems as:
+"the influences of early impressions, the ingredients of character,
+the varying susceptibility to mental anguish, the conquest of the
+will," and many another. These are beginnings--there is much more to
+attain to, if we would know mind even scientifically, for we have only
+attacked its breast works, but we are on the right road, as we
+believe, towards this most interesting of all sciences--Mind Science.
+From Philosophy we do not as yet know definitely that mind _is_, or
+what it is, or why it is. The psychologist accepts the word mind, but
+it is not accepted as a _philosophical_ term; it is called
+Consciousness, Being, Ego, and anything else but mind. Notwithstanding,
+we all feel what we mean by the word. Though the senses divide the
+non-ego, the world outside us, into five separate parcels, things
+seen, things heard, things smelt, things touched, things tasted,
+there is a faculty of unifying, a sensation of unity in us, which
+makes us conscious of all these separate sensations as forming a
+whole in any object which comes into our consciousness. Kant has
+given this unifying faculty, or sensation, a long name, which does
+not make it any clearer. What is this inner power, which unifies
+sensations and how does it come? In some way the mind supplies it to
+its mental states or consciousness. And _within_ us this unifying
+faculty, which we call Mind, is felt through the infinite number of
+modifications of sensations or mental states, for we are aware that
+what we call a mind exists in us. It is this consciousness of unity in
+complexity, which makes memory and identity possible. The exploded
+idea of mental substance and its attributes, held by the School men,
+was probably suggested to them by the consciousness of this mental
+unity. In our mentality there is something which makes each one say
+"My mind," not "My minds." Now it is this unity of sensations, which
+is lost, and the mind with it, if the ego is divided as Professor W.
+James divides it into many egos such as--the inner self--the complex
+self--the social self--the intellectual self--and so on. For how does
+that help us? It is the same unknown quantity in different
+circumstances. The self that ponders in thought, knows itself as the
+same that talks in society. The strange power of being able to analyse
+ourselves at all is one of the strangest things about us. What a world
+of difference lies between the unconscious self of the animal and this
+conscious self of man! Professor James' brilliantly written chapter of
+investigation into the self leaves us amused rather than enlightened.
+Against all arguments to the contrary, we should refuse to give up the
+word mind, whether it is considered vague or defective in any or every
+way. Mind in all its complexity, is what we have to investigate
+scientifically. Mind in all its complexity is what the philosopher has
+to explain, not mind, analysed into simple acts of consciousness. The
+hypnotist talks of double, treble and quadruple personalities with
+totally different characteristics "under suggestion," but it helps us
+little for we have not yet defined mind on its sane and normal sides.
+Considering the acuteness and the sanity of the French mind, it is
+somewhat strange that the French psychologists should devote
+themselves chiefly to the study of the insane and hysterical.
+Philosophy, though it gives us soaring thoughts, grand speculations,
+and metaphysical schemes, from Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer,
+to Herbert Spencer, and Mr. Mallock, cannot give us any knowledge in
+which they mutually agree. Mr. Mallock sums up philosophy as a
+necessity to the mind. We _must_ believe in some theory of mind, some
+religion, some philosophy, else life is dreary and unlivable. This
+appears to be the result of his book "The Veil of the Temple," and
+this is simply the doctrine of utility. But no philosopher, can tell
+us why mind works on certain lines and not on others, because they
+cannot tell us definitely that they _know_ what mind is. Mind is a
+function of _Matter: Matter_ is a function of thought: Mind is
+Noumenon the unseen and unknown, as contrasted with Phenomena the seen
+and known; the universe, the creation of the mind; the mind, the
+product of the universe. All these ideas and many others so widely
+differing can none of them receive a demonstrable proof;--these
+contrary statements show how far we are from possessing any real
+knowledge of what mind is. After all that has been written, elaborated
+and imagined, do we actually _know_ more than Omar Khayam knew?
+
+  "There was the door to which I found no key;
+  There was the veil through which I could not see;
+  Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
+  There was--and then no more of Thee and Me."
+
+Philosophy is still powerless to tell us what mind is; the self, the
+ego always vanishes as we seem to be nearing it, it always eludes our
+deepest probings--we only demonstrate our failure in regard to our
+knowledge of it. All this is true, but should we therefore despair? If
+we are born with the record on the brain of the inexorable desire to
+_know_, the very failure should stimulate us to further, and greater,
+and more fruitful questionings.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+
+CONTRASTS.
+
+
+CARLYLE, GEORGE ELIOT, MAZZINI, BROWNING,
+
+All contrasts drawn between writers, and thinkers should have for aim
+the setting forth of some striking and fundamental difference in
+thought, and it would be hard to find anywhere a greater and a more
+vivid contrast than that between Carlyle and George Eliot. For George
+Eliot's philosophy was centred in the well-being of the Race.
+
+Carlyle's was summed up in the worth of the Individual.
+
+George Eliot teaches in prose and still more in poetry that
+Personality, with its hopes, loves, faiths, aspirations, must all be
+relinquished, and its agonies and pains endured, should Humanity gain
+by the sacrifice and the endurance.
+
+She considers the Individual as part of collective humanity, and that
+he does not live for himself, he has no continuance of personal life,
+he has no permanence, except as a living influence on the Race. This
+is the Positivist creed, the Racial Creed.
+
+Beyond the influence that it exerts, spiritual personality is doomed.
+It is not humanity in God but humanity in itself which is to exist
+from age to age, solely in the memory of succeeding generations.
+
+  "Oh may I join the Choir Invisible
+  Of those immortal dead, who live again
+  In minds made better by their presence."
+
+Permanence and continuance and immortality are in the race alone.
+George Eliot's strong accentuation of the race is the Gospel of
+annihilation to the individual. Yet the most personal and imaginative
+of poets has treated this lofty altruism in his strange, sad,
+beautiful poem of "The Pilgrims," with a fervour greater even than
+that of George Eliot.
+
+Here are two stanzas:
+
+  "And ye shall die before your thrones be won.
+  Yea, and the changed world and the liberal sun
+  Shall move and shine without us and we lie
+  Dead; but if she too move on earth and live,
+  But if the old world with the old irons rent,
+  Laugh and give thanks, shall we not be content?
+  Nay we shall rather live, we shall not die,
+  Life being so little and Death so good to give."
+
+  "Pass on then and pass by us, and let us be.
+  For what life think ye after life to see?
+  And if the world fare better will ye know?
+  And if men triumph, who shall seek you and say?"
+
+  "Enough of light is this for one life's span.
+  That all men born are mortal, but not Man:
+  And we men bring death lives by night to sow,
+  That man may reap and eat and live by day."
+                                              --SWINBURNE.
+
+Turning from the moral grandeur of self-abnegation that fills the
+philosophy of humanity, we feel the contrast of strong human
+personality, which animates us with an inspiring sensation as we
+listen to the prophet of individualism.
+
+Few can have read Carlyle's writings in their youth, without having
+experienced an indescribable and irresistible stimulation, to
+accomplish some real work, to make some strenuous endeavour "before
+the night cometh." Carlyle's contempt for sloth, stings; his bitter
+words are a tonic, they scourge, encourage, and at times plead with
+poetic fervour. "Think of living. Thy life wert thou the pitifullest
+of all the sons of earth is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. _It
+is thy own; it is all thou hast to front Eternity with._ Work then
+like a star unhasting and unresting."
+
+The man's soul, naked through sloth, or clothed through works, has to
+meet its doom, and to bear it as it best can. For Carlyle ignored the
+collective view of mankind, the single soul had to prostrate itself
+before the Supreme Power. This Supreme Power was almost as vague (to
+him) as George Eliot's Permanent Influence is to us. For Carlyle did
+not believe "that the Soul could enter into any relations with God,
+and in the sight of God it was nothing." There is nothing singular in
+this. The religious, but independent-minded Joubert thought "it was
+not hard to know God, provided one did not force oneself to define
+Him," and deprecated "bringing into the domain of reason, that which
+belongs to our innermost feeling."
+
+This very well represented Carlyle's view, but it occupies but a small
+place in his writings. All his books, his letters, pamphlets,
+histories, essays show his profound living belief in the worth of
+individual men, as the salt of the earth, and the young are always
+greatly influenced by strong personalities. But the mature mind that
+struggles after catholicity of taste, and wide admiration, receives
+some rude shocks from Carlyle's treatment of humanity, as Dr. Garnett
+has well shown in his excellent biography of Carlyle; indeed it has
+led with some to the parting of the ways. For the hopes and
+inspirations of poet, reformer, teacher, became in great part to him
+as "the idle chatter of apes" and "the talk of Fools."
+
+Mazzini's world-wide sympathies, his life of many deaths for his
+country, were unintelligible to Carlyle, who also described, as "a
+sawdust kind of talk," John Stuart Mill's expression of belief and
+interest in reforming and raising the whole social mass of toiling
+millions.
+
+Bracing and stimulating, as is Carlyle's strong, stern doctrine of
+independence, of work, and of adherence to Truth for its own sake, we
+feel the loss his character sustained, through the contempt that grew
+upon him for the greater part of humanity. The Nemesis of contempt was
+shown in his inability at last to see even in individuals, the
+greatest things. Physical force came to be admired by him for itself.
+From hero-worship, he passed "to strong rulers, and saviours of
+society."
+
+The worth of the individual, withered and changed, and Carlyle's hopes
+rested finally on strength alone, just as George Eliot's thoughts
+centred on the influence human beings exercised on each other, and
+there is extraordinary beauty in this idea. How striking is her
+conception of the good we all receive from even the simplest lives, if
+they have been true lives. "The growing good of the world is partly
+dependent upon unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with
+you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who
+lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs." But some
+who read her books feel an underlying tone of sadness--a melancholy
+whisper as of a finality, an inevitable end to all future development,
+even of the greatest personalities. Many other writers have believed
+that men live in the world's memory only by what they have done in the
+world, but George Eliot is definite that this memory is all, that
+personality has no other chance of surviving. Her hopes rested on
+being:
+
+  "The sweet presence of a good diffused,
+  And in diffusion ever more intense,
+  So shall I join the Choir Invisible
+  Whose music is the gladness of the world."
+
+Both George Eliot and Carlyle over accentuated one the race, the other
+the individual.
+
+Mazzini's place in thought was exactly between the two.
+
+He believed in God _and_ Collective Humanity. Humanity in God. He
+said: "We cannot relate ourselves to the Divine, but through
+collective humanity. Mr. Carlyle comprehends only the individual; the
+true sense of the unity of the race escapes him. He sympathises with
+men, but it is with the separate life of each man, and not their
+collective life."[3]
+
+Collective labour, according to an educational plan, designed by
+Providence, was, Mazzini believed, the only possible development of
+Humanity.
+
+He could never have trusted in any good and effective development from
+Humanity alone.
+
+Nationality, he reverenced, and widened the idea, until it embraced
+the whole world. He said it was the mission, the special vocation of
+all who felt the mutual responsibility of men. But nationality of
+Italy meant to Carlyle, only "the glory of having produced Dante and
+Columbus," and he cared for them not for the national thought they
+interpreted, but as gigantic men. Mazzini cared for "the progressive
+history of mankind," Carlyle for "the Biography of great men."
+
+Carlyle's sadness "unending sadness," came, Mazzini thought from
+looking at human life only from the individual point of view. And a
+poem by Browning, "Cleon" would have afforded him another example of
+"the disenchantment and discouragement of life," from individualism.
+
+Browning was as great an individualist as Carlyle; he stood as far
+apart from belief in Collective Humanity, and Democracy as Carlyle
+did, though in Italy, he felt the thrill of its nationality, as
+Carlyle did not. But Mazzini might have said also truly of Browning,
+that, with the exception of Italy, "he sympathised with the separate
+life of each man and not with their collective life." The sadness
+Mazzini attributed to Carlyle's strong individualistic point of view,
+ought logically then to have been the heritage of Browning also. _If_
+Mazzini's explanation was the true one, it is another proof of the
+difficulty of tabulating humanity, or of making a science of human
+nature. For the Individualist Browning, far from being remarkable for
+sadness, was the greatest of optimists amongst English poets. He had a
+far wider range of sympathies, than Carlyle, for failure attracted
+him, as much as victory, the Conquered equally with the Conqueror,
+indeed every shade of character interested him. Perhaps he expresses
+through "Cleon" some of his own strongest feelings, his insistence on
+the worth of individuality, his craving for deeper joy, fuller life
+than this world gives, and his horror of the destruction of
+personality. Cleon, the Greek Artist, is indeed "the other side" to
+the poetic altruism of "The Pilgrims" and "The Choir Invisible." Never
+was the yearning for Personal Continuance more vividly and more
+humanly presented. The Greek Artist, without any knowledge of, or
+belief in Immortality, hungers after it. Browning represents him as
+writing to and arguing with the King, who has said:
+
+  "My life......
+  Dies altogether with my brain, and arm,......
+  ....triumph Thou, who dost _not_ go."
+
+And Cleon says if Sappho and Æschylus survive because we sing her
+songs, and read his plays, let them come, "drink from thy cup, speak
+in my place."
+
+Instead of rejoicing in his works surviving he feels the horror of the
+contrast, the life within his works, the decay within his heart. He
+compares his sense of joy growing more acute and his soul's power and
+insight more enlarged and keen, while his bodily powers decay. His
+hairs fall more and more, his hand shakes, and the heavy years
+increase.
+
+He realises:--
+
+  "The horror quickening....
+  The consummation coming past escape,
+  When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy--
+  When all my works wherein I prove my worth,
+  Being present still to mock me in men's mouths,
+  Alive still, in the phrase of such as thou,
+  I, I, the feeling, thinking, acting man,
+  The man who loved his life so over much,
+  Shall sleep in my Urn. . . It is so horrible."
+
+He imagines in his need some future state may be revealed by Zeus.
+
+  "Unlimited in capability
+  For joy, as this is in desire for joy,
+  To seek which the joy hunger forces us:"
+
+He speculates that this life may have been made straight, "to make
+sweet the life at large."
+
+And that we are: "freed by the throbbing impulse we call Death." But
+he ends by fearing that were it possible Zeus must have revealed it.
+
+This passionate pathetic longing for joy, and life beyond death finds
+an echo in many hearts, which yet can admire the grand altruism of
+"The Pilgrims" and the selfless spirit of the Impersonal Martyr. After
+considering all this clash of thought, it seems as if it all resolved
+itself into the individual temperament which settles and modifies and
+adapts to itself the forms of our philosophies and religions, our
+Hopes and Faiths, and Despairs.
+
+For from whence comes the real power thinkers possess over us? It is
+not in their forms of thought, as Matthew Arnold said most truly, but
+in the tendencies, in the spirit which led them to adopt those
+formulas. Every thinker has some secret, an exact object at which he
+aims, which is "the cause of all his work, and the reason of his
+attraction" to some readers, and his repulsion to others.
+
+What was the secret aim then in George Eliot which made her believe so
+firmly in the permanent influence of Humanity, and in the annihilation
+of personal existence? Was the tendency of temperament developed by
+her life and circumstances?
+
+What was it that developed so strong an Individualism in Carlyle and
+Browning and awoke in Browning such unlimited hope, and in Carlyle
+such "unending sadness?"
+
+Why did the darkness and the storm of his life give Mazzini so
+passionate a belief in Humanity, and such an intimate faith in God?
+These and such-like are the problems we should have in our minds as we
+study the works of Great Writers, if we would penetrate into the
+innermost core of their nature, in short, if we would really
+understand them.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+
+MAETERLINCK ON HAMLET.
+
+
+Maeterlinck, in his first essay, "The Treasure of the Humble," is,
+undoubtedly, mystical. He does not argue, or define, or explain, he
+asserts, but even in that book and far more so in his second, "Wisdom
+and Destiny," it is real life which absorbs him as Alfred de Sutro his
+translator points out. In this book "he endeavours in all simplicity
+to tell what he sees." He is a Seer.
+
+Maeterlinck's aim is to show that contrary to the usual idea, what we
+call Fate, Destiny, is not something apart from ourselves, which
+exercises power over us, but is the product of our own souls.
+
+He takes many examples to prove this, of which Hamlet is one. Man,
+said Maeterlinck, is his own Fate in an inner sense; he is superior to
+all circumstances, when he refuses to be conquered by them. When his
+soul is wise and has initiative power, it cannot be conquered by
+external events, and happiness is inevitable to such a soul.
+Maeterlinck asks: Where do we find the fatality in Hamlet? Would the
+evil of Claudius and Queen Gertrude have spread its influence if a
+wise man had been in the Palace? If a dominant, all powerful soul--a
+Jesus--had been in Hamlet's palace at Elsinore, would the tragedy of
+four deaths have happened? Can you conceive any wise man living in the
+unnatural gloom that overhung Elsinore? Is not every action of Hamlet
+induced by a fanatical impulse, which tells him that duty consists in
+revenge alone? And revenge never can be a duty. Hamlet thinks much,
+continues Maeterlinck, but is by no means wise. Destiny can withstand
+lofty thoughts but not simple, good, tender and loyal thoughts. We
+only triumph over destiny by doing the reverse of the evil she would
+have us commit. _No tragedy is inevitable_. But at Elsinore no one had
+vision--no one saw--hence the catastrophe. The soul that saw would
+have made others see. Because of Hamlet's pitiful blindness, Laertes,
+Ophelia, the King, Queen, and Hamlet die. Was his blindness
+inevitable? A single thought had sufficed to arrest all the forces of
+murder. Hamlet's ignorance puts the seal on his unhappiness, and his
+shadow lay on Horatio, who lacked the courage to shake himself free.
+Had there been one brave soul to cry out the truth, the history of
+Elsinore had not been shrouded in horror. All depended not on destiny,
+but on the wisdom of the wisest, and this Hamlet was; therefore he was
+the centre of the drama of Elsinore, for he had no one wiser than
+himself on whom to depend.
+
+Maeterlinck's doctrine of the soul and its power over Destiny is very
+captivating, but it is doubtful if he was fortunate in his choice of
+Hamlet as an example of ignorance and blindness, and of failure to
+conquer fate, through lack of soul-power.
+
+How Hamlet should have acted is not told us, but that it was his duty
+to have given up revenge is clearly suggested. We might, perhaps, sum
+up Hamlet's right course, from the hints Maeterlinck has given us, in
+a sentence. Had he relinquished all idea of revenge and forgiven his
+uncle and mother, he would have ennobled his soul, gained inward
+happiness, spread a gracious calm around and have so deeply influenced
+his wicked relations, that they would have become repentant and
+reformed. Thus his evil Destiny would have been averted and we should
+have had no tragedy of Hamlet. This explanation sounds rather
+conventional and tract-like put into ordinary language, but, indeed,
+Maeterlinck's doctrine might be compressed into a syllogism:--
+
+  All the wise are serene,
+    Hamlet was not serene,
+    Hamlet was not wise.
+
+That is the simple syllogism by which Maeterlinck tests human nature.
+But Hamlet's nature cannot be packed into a syllogism. A Theorist, who
+tries to fit into his theory a peculiar nature cannot always afford to
+understand that nature. The external event that froze Hamlet's soul
+with horror, and deprived it of "transforming power" was a
+supernatural event, not "disease, accident, or sudden death!" The
+mandate laid on his soul was a supernatural mandate, and as Judge Webb
+said in a suggestive and interesting paper: "The Genuine text of
+Shakespeare," October number of the "National Review, 1903," "it was
+utterly impossible for that soul to perform it," or it might be added,
+to cast it aside. He was betrayed by the apparition "into consequences
+as deep as those into which Macbeth was betrayed by the instruments of
+darkness--the witches." We cannot reason about Maeterlinck's thought
+that if expressed "would have arrested all the forces of murder"
+because we do not know what the thought was, nor can any one gauge or
+estimate rightly the power of Hamlet's soul to conquer external
+events, without taking into careful account that the Vision from
+another world came to Hamlet, when he was outraged at the re-marriage
+of his mother and full of emotion that the sudden death of his father
+called forth in his meditative mind.[4] But Maeterlinck never refers
+to anything of this sort. He does not seem to realise what the effects
+of the vision must have been on a complicated character--on "a great
+gentleman in whom the courtier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, were
+all united." Hamlet was _not_ an example of the normal type of the
+irresolute man--but the mandate laid upon his nature, it could not
+perform. The vision was his destiny--for Destiny lay in the nature of
+the mandate, as well as the nature of the man, and unhappiness was
+inevitable; yet Maeterlinck says, "No tragedy is inevitable, the wise
+man can be superior to all circumstances by the initiative of the
+soul. To be able to curb the blind force of instinct is to be able to
+curb external destiny." Did not Hamlet curb his instincts of love for
+Ophelia, and love for books and philosophy, under pressure of the
+great commandment laid upon him? He could not curb the power of his
+intellect--it was too subtle and supreme, but he concealed all else.
+Yet Hamlet could not escape his Destiny, by curbing his instincts. The
+initiative of his soul worked against the duty he had to perform. And
+it was through his "simple, tender, good," thoughts of, and love for
+his father that he kept to his task, and could not "withstand his
+complicated destiny." Maeterlinck is surely wrong, too, in saying
+Hamlet was moved by a fanatical impulse to revenge for he spent his
+life in weighing _pros_, and _cons_, and in combating the idea that he
+must fulfil the duty laid upon him. So unfanatical was he that he even
+doubted at times whether the apparition was his father's spirit. But
+supposing there had been "one brave soul to cry out the truth"
+(Maeterlinck does not say what the truth was); we will suppose that
+Hamlet had resolved to forgive fully and generously, would he, then,
+have gained the fortitude and serenity, which Maeterlinck evidently
+means by inner happiness? Not if he kept a shred of his inner nature.
+Hamlet "saw no course clear enough to satisfy his understanding."
+Could such a nature be serene? But was it unwise? Judicious, wise, and
+witty when at ease; he could not escape the dark moods that made him
+indifferent to the visible world.
+
+"If OEdipus had had the inner refuge of a Marcus Aurelius, what could
+Destiny have done to him?" asks Maeterlinck. Fate we suppose would
+have had no power over him, if he had calmly reasoned over the
+terrible circumstances in which he found himself involved, and if he
+preserved his equanimity to the end, as M. Aurelius would have done.
+Does this prove more than that the two men may have had very different
+temperaments? But, individuality cannot be made to agree with theory,
+and can be tabulated in no _science_ book of humanity. When
+Maeterlinck says, "Hamlet's ignorance puts the seal on his
+unhappiness," we may well ask ignorance of what? Was it ignorance of
+the power of will? Certainly his intellect was greater than his will.
+"He would have been greater had he been less great." The
+"concentration of all the interests that belong to humanity" was in
+Hamlet. Except the gifts of serenity and calmness, what did he lack?
+And because he was not inwardly serene, Maeterlinck considers him
+blind and ignorant. It is strange to connect blindness and ignorance
+with a wit of intellectual keenness, an imagination of a poet, and the
+unflinching questioning of the philosopher. Maeterlinck says: "Hamlet
+thinks much but is by no means wise." How does Hamlet show he had not
+the wisdom of life? Maeterlinck, no doubt, would dwell on his varying
+moods, his subtle melancholy, his nature baffled by a supernatural
+command. If he was not wise how strange he should have said so many
+words of truest wisdom both of Life and Death, "If it be now, 'tis not
+to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet
+it will come; the readiness is all." We feel that Hamlet was "a being
+with springs of thought and feeling and action deeper than we can
+search." But the elements in his nature could not resolve themselves
+into an inner life of calm. Therefore, according to Maeterlinck, he
+was not wise, for he could not conquer his inner fatality--destiny in
+himself. Maeterlinck's ideas are very beautiful, and he writes
+delightfully, but his test of wisdom is questionable, for Hamlet's
+thoughts have captured and invaded and influenced the best minds and
+experiences of thinkers for centuries, How many a Shakespearean reader
+has _felt_ that Hamlet is one of the very wisest of men as well as one
+of the most lovable and attractive! Not his ignorance, but his wisdom
+has borne the test of study and time. He did not bear the tragedy of
+life when the supernatural entered it, with an unshaken soul, but
+ourselves and the realities of life become clearer to us, the more we
+read his thoughts. If "it is _we_ who are Hamlet," as Hazlitt said, it
+is a great tribute to his universality--but a greater one to
+ourselves. Indeed, we learn wisdom, not only from the lucubrations of
+the serene and calm, or from Hamlet, magnificent in thought, acute and
+playful, but also from Hamlet in his mortal struggles, in his deep
+questionings, and his melancholy.
+
+  For wisdom "dwells not in the light alone
+    But in the darkness and the cloud."
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+
+AN IMPOSSIBLE PHILOSOPHY.
+
+
+Philosophers talk of a philosophy of art, ancient and modern. But this
+is unnecessary. Art is always art, or never art, as the case may be;
+whether it is art in the days of Pheidias and Praxitiles, of Rafael,
+or of Turner, or whether it is not art as in the days of its
+degeneration in Greece and Italy. The outward expression of course,
+changes, but it changes through individual and national aptitudes, not
+from Chronology. That indispensable and indescribable thing which is
+of the essence of art, is the same in all times and countries; for art
+is ever young, there is no old, no new, and here is its essential
+difference from science. In its essence, art is neither ancient or
+modern, because it is incapable of progress, it is the expression of
+an illimitable idea. We find before the Christian Era more beautiful
+sculpture than after it. "Ah!" Victor Hugo says in his "William
+Shakespeare," "You call yourself Dante, well! But that one calls
+himself Homer. The beauty of art consists in not being susceptible of
+improvement. A _chef d'oeuvre_ exists once and for ever. The first
+Poet who arrives, arrives at the summit. From Pheidias to Rembrandt
+there is no onward movement. A Savant may out-lustre a Savant, a Poet
+never throws a Poet into the shade. Hippocrates is outrun, Archimides,
+Paracelsus, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, La Place, Pindar not;
+Pheidias not. Pascal, the Savant, is out-run, Pascal, the Writer, not.
+There is movement in art, but not progress. The Frescoes of the
+Sistine Chapel are absolutely nothing to the Metopes of the Parthenon.
+Retrace your steps as much as you like from the Palace of Versailles
+to the Castle of Heidelberg. From the Castle of Heidelberg to the
+Notre Dame of Paris. From the Notre Dame to the Alhambra. From the
+Alhambra to St. Sophia. From St. Sophia to the Coliseum. From the
+Coliseum to the Propyleans. You may recede with ages, you do not
+recede in art. The Pyramids and the Iliad stand on a fore plan.
+Masterpieces have the same level--the Absolute. Once the Absolute is
+reached, all is reached." And Schopenhauer says, "Only true works of
+art have eternal youth and enduring power like nature and life
+themselves. For they belong to no age, but to humanity--they cannot
+grow old, but appear to us ever fresh and new, down to the latest
+ages." Let us disclaim then any such word as Modern in relation to
+art, particularly in relation to a philosophy which has to do with the
+principle and essence of art. Is a Philosophy of Art possible? There
+must be some who will think it is impossible. Have we a philosophy
+that explains such an apparently simple thing as how one knows
+anything--or of simple consciousness? Every philosopher that has
+attempted to explain consciousness or how we know, takes refuge in
+assumptions. At any Philosophical Society, if you ask for the
+explanation of simple Consciousness, the avalanche of answers, each
+differing from the other, will bewilder you. We know the outward
+appearance of an object, of which we say that we know it, but what is
+it _in itself_? Of that we are as much in the dark as we are of the
+mind that knows. We say, each of us--I know, but in philosophy we are
+not clear whether there is a thing that knows. We know we are
+conscious, but we know nothing but that bare fact. We do not know how
+an object swims into our consciousness. We do not know in the
+scientific meaning of knowledge, how we come to know any object. Our
+abysmal ignorance is this, that, of the thing known, and of that which
+knows, and of the process of knowing, we know nothing. Who can tell us
+how the movement of matter in the brain causes what we call thought.
+Is it a cause, or merely a concurrence? When we can know this much,
+then art may have a philosophy in which we can all agree. But, what
+signs are there of even the beginnings of agreement? Certainly art is
+not known as we know a science--perhaps we do not wish it ever to be
+so. And the process of art is as indescribable as the process of
+knowing. The advance we have made in philosophy seems to be this, that
+whereas one philosopher after another according to his temperament has
+thought he knew and has supplied us with hypotheses, and with
+successive clues to the mystery of Being, and with many systems of
+thought, we know now that none of them were adequate to supply even
+initial steps, and so, for the most part, we fall back on the
+knowledge that comes to us from living, from being, from knowing
+appearances, from action, and from feeling; on that position in short
+which Schopenhauer thought so despicable in a human being, _i.e._,
+Refuge in the common sense attitude, and practically the giving up of
+philosophy. The outcome of all the brain work on philosophy, since the
+time of the Greeks, is that despair has entered into our minds of ever
+achieving any knowledge of the _Real_, beneath and beyond Phenomena,
+of a knowledge which _commands_ assent. Can even a Hegel write a
+convincing Philosophy of Art--which implies a philosophy of complex
+knowing and feeling; the feeling or emotion, or sensation, which
+vibrates in music and colour and poetry. Could Hegel himself answer
+this objection: that poetry eludes all tests--that that which you can
+thoroughly explain in any way is not poetry, as Swinburne has said? It
+is the inexplicable, then, which lies at the essence of art and it is
+this, which if there is to be a Philosophy of Art must be its object.
+The Inexplicable must be the object for the thinker with his orderly
+sequences, his logical search for causes and results. It is not that
+artistic feeling is too subtle as a subject; it is that we cannot get
+hold of it at all. It is where? Here, in our emotion, our feeling, our
+imagination; it flies from us and it comes again.
+
+We do not ask for a philosophy of artistic _creations_ (whatever they
+may be, in music, painting, or poetry), for a Philosophy of Art must
+be a philosophy of the artistic _faculty_ that creates, and that
+admires and understands and is absorbed in the creations. Philosophy
+of Art is the philosophy of the creative--receptive qualities. We feel
+these qualities, but we are not able to explain them, we cannot even
+help another to feel them. The capacity comes from within. In
+ourselves is a nameless response to Beauty. All art is an expression
+of the artist thrown out towards a reproduction of some intuitive Idea
+within, and what artist has ever satisfied his inward aspiration? Why
+tell us that harmonies of art may be traced down to the simplest
+lines, and, that at the root, lies an aim of edification? Simplify the
+lines, as we will, let the basis of edification lie at the root of all
+beauty, still the initial question remains unanswered. Why do certain
+lines in a poem, curves of beauty in a statue, colour in a picture,
+produce in us the feelings of beauty and delight? Why does
+edification, if it is such, produce in me, the sense of a nameless
+beauty?
+
+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.
+
+But however obtained, the first time a mind feels conscious of it, it
+is a revelation, and it may come as an influence from an artist soul.
+George Sand had "l'esprit _libre_ et varié." George Eliot "l'esprit
+fort et pesant." George Sand was widely, wisely, and eminently human.
+She felt deep down in her heart all the social troubles and problems
+of her day--and created some herself! But she was true to the artist
+soul in her--to the belief in an ideal. Art was dormant when she wrote
+disquisitions, and sometimes her social disquisitions are very long
+treatises. But her art was not dormant when from her inmost soul she
+sketched the fate of the Berri peasant whom she loved so well. In the
+introduction to that simple delightful Idyll "La Mare au Diable,"
+which should be read by all social reformers and by all who really
+care for the poor and the causes of poverty, she conveys her
+conceptions of the mission of art towards the oppressed unhappy
+labourer; oppressed and unhappy, because with form robust and
+muscular, with eyes to see, and thoughts that might be cultivated to
+understand the beauty and harmony of colour and sounds, delicacy of
+tone and grace of outline, in a word, the mysterious beauty of the
+world, he, the peasant of Berri, has never under stood the mystery of
+the beautiful and his child will never understand it; the result of
+excessive toil, and extreme poverty. Imperfect and condemned to
+eternal childhood, George Sand recounts his life, touching gently his
+errors, and with deep sympathy entering into his trials and griefs.
+And a deeper ignorance, she adds, is one that is born of knowledge
+which has stifled the sense of beauty. The Berri peasant has no
+monopoly in ignorance of beauty, and intimate knowledge of toil and
+extreme poverty, but not many of us feel with the peasant's fate, as
+George Sand felt it. She never ceased to care for the cause of social
+progress, just as she was always heart and soul an artist. George
+Eliot has written words "to the reader" about the ruined villages on
+the Rhone. In "The Mill on the Floss," she writes, and again the
+remarkable difference between the two writers appears as forcibly as
+in the two prefaces. "These dead tinted, hollow-eyed skeletons of
+villages on the Rhone, oppress me with the feeling that human
+life--very much of it--is a narrow ugly grovelling existence, which
+even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its
+bare vulgarity of conception, and I have a cruel conviction that the
+lives, of which these ruins are the traces were part of a gross sum of
+obscure vitality that will be swept into the same oblivion with the
+generations of ants and beavers." George Eliot saw in imagination
+these unhappy and oppressed peasants with clear, unsparing eyes. She
+was right in calling her conviction "Cruel," for she saw merely the
+outside of the sordid lives of oppressive narrowness, which seemed to
+irritate her, these lives of dull men and women out of keeping with
+the earth on which they lived. She never alluded to any possible
+explanatory causes, such as excessive toil and extreme poverty, which
+if she had realised, as George Sand realised them, would have brought
+the tender touch of sympathy with individual lives and griefs that we
+find so often in George Eliot's novels. But George Sand could _never_
+have written of any peasants as "part of a gross sum of obscure
+vitality," because she could never have felt towards them in that way.
+She was too imaginative and tender. She did not look at the peasantry
+"en masse"--but individually, and loved the Berri peasants
+individually, as they loved and adored her. Her artistic sense and her
+humanity illumined her view of them, and she saw their latent
+possibilities, and knew why they were only latent. She knew indeed,
+many--if not all kinds of humanity. Once it is recorded she said to
+Pere Lacordaire, "You have lived with Saints and Angels. I have lived
+with men and women, and I could tell you (and we may well think she
+could) some things you do not know." She had indeed run through the
+gamut of feeling, and it was in one of those moments when her
+experiences of life were overwhelming her--that she exclaimed "J'ai
+trop bu la vie." But her gift of genius kept her always vivifying. She
+never depresses. From her first years at Nohant to the end of her long
+life, she was always _alive_. In the political troubles of 1848, when
+she wrote of herself as "navré jusqu 'au fond de l'ame par les orages
+exterieurs," and as trying to find in solitude if not calm and
+philosophy, at least a faith in ideas, her soul shrank from blood shed
+on both sides. "It needed a Dante," she thought, "with his nerves, and
+temper, and tears to write a drama full of groans and tortures. It
+needed a soul tempered with iron, and with fire, to linger in the
+imagination over horrors of a symbolic Hell, when before one's very
+eyes is the purgatory of desolation on the earth." But "as a weaker
+and gentler artist," George Sand saw what her mission was in those
+evil times;--it was to distract the imagination from them, towards
+"tenderer sentiments of confidence, of friendship, and of kindness."
+Her political and social hopes and aims were always dear to her, but
+to interpret nature, to live the quiet life of the affections were the
+phases of her middle life. And so she wrote a "sweet song" in prose,
+one of the most delightful of her Bergeries, "La Petite Fadette." It
+was her contribution to the hatreds and agitations of the time--she
+gave a refuge to the souls that could accept it--an "Ideal of calmness
+and innocence and reverie." "La Petite Fadette" and "Le Meunier
+d'Angibault" reveal her fascinating intelligence and her idyllic
+imagination. "Le Meunier d'Angibault," she tells us, was the result of
+a walk, a meeting, a day of leisure, an hour of _far niente_, followed
+by Reverie, that play of the imagination which, clothes with beauty
+and perfects, and interprets, the isolated and small events and facts
+of life. There are books of hers in early life that are simply
+self-revelations--outpourings of her indignations. She is not at her
+best in these. "Indiana," written in her age of revolt, is too
+obviously a pamphlet to reveal her passionate hatred of marriage. In
+it she looked on marriage as "un malheur insupportable." But
+"Consuelo," "La Comtesse de Rudolstadt," "Lettres d'un voyageur,"
+Lelia, Spiridion, Valvédre, Valentine, "History of her Life and
+letters," and many other books reveal her agonies and agitations, her
+hope and power, her love of beauty both outward and inward as
+represented in Consuelo herself, who is contrasted with the mere
+beautiful "animal" Anzoleto, the artist in his lowest form. He cared
+only for physical loveliness, he was a great child, who needed nothing
+but amusement, emotion and beauty. But George Sand herself felt the
+delight of existence. She says of Joy "It is the great uplifter of
+men, the great upholder. For life to be fruitful, life must be felt as
+a blessing." In all she wrote we feel the rare charm of perfect ease
+and naturalness, combined with the cadences of beauty. We never feel
+that she is "posing." And yet the author of the bitter attack "Lui et
+elle," accused her of continual "posing." Edonard de Musset wrote with
+an envenomed pen, (but we must remember he was defending a brother),
+in that strange literary duel between him and George Sand. Alfred de
+Musset had accused her of assuming the maternal "pose" towards poets
+and musicians who adored her, whilst she absorbed their loves and
+lives and then deserted them. It is certainly very striking how her
+strong vitality seemed to sway and overpower some of those with whom
+she came in contact. She was the oak, and the others were the ivy.
+When they were torn apart, the oak was scarred but not irreparably
+injured, it was the ivy that was destroyed. In, "Elle et Lui," George
+Sand claims that hers was a protecting love for the wayward, gifted
+child of art, the poet whose ingratitude she bore with, whose nerves
+she soothed, and whom she cared for and nursed in illness. Kindly time
+throws a softening veil over the acutest differences, and the clash of
+temperaments, even where they remain inexplicable. But the answer to
+Alfred de Musset's reproaches must be looked for not in one book, but
+in the whole tenor of her life. Does this show that her maternal
+attitude was a "pose." It is often said that women are born wives or
+born mothers. George Sand was undeniably a born _mother_. Mrs.
+Oliphant resembled her in this respect. They both show the deep
+passion of maternity in books and autobiographies and letters. Both
+were devoted to their children, there was no company they cared for in
+comparison, and they spared neither trouble or time in their
+interests. But George Sand cared much, not only for her children but
+for the peasants--for the poor and oppressed. Yes, and for the poets,
+the painters--the singers and the musicians, with their temperaments
+of genius, their loves, jealousies, and their shattered nerves. For
+upwards of six years she treated Chopin with a mother's care; she had
+the passion of maternity in her towards them all, with whatever
+feelings it may have been complicated in her life of manifold
+experiences and with her artist temperament. She may have leant
+heavily on it at times, it may have served as a weapon of defence when
+she was attacked, and used thus it may well have suggested a "pose."
+But however used, whatever the purpose--that the maternal instinct was
+strong in her there is no denying. To explain definitely her social
+and personal moral standards requires a biography that has not yet
+been written. Socially she had a hatred of feudalism, of religious and
+military despotism. She sympathised with and helped the aspirations
+towards a wider, a more humane view of a social system, and fraternal
+equality and social liberty were to her holy doctrines. Perhaps fully
+to understand George Sand from within may require the genius of a
+French mind and one of her own generation; for the French of the
+present day neither study her, or appear to care much for her books.
+Her letters should aid in giving a discriminating record of her
+intense and intricate life as viewed from within, and the ideas on
+which that life was lived. What then were the leading principles, and
+what was the force in George Sand, which while conquering life and
+harmonising it enabled her to realise herself? If heredity influences
+moral standards the mystery certainly is whence George Eliot derived
+not her morality, but her "fire of insurgency." It is not difficult to
+account for it in George Sand when we remember her mother's life and
+temperament, and her own early years. Her father was a good soldier,
+but had also many literary gifts. George Sand herself said: "Character
+is hereditary, if my readers wish to know me, they must know my
+father." George Eliot's creed and pervading view of life was the
+supreme responsibility of it, and the inevitableness of the struggles
+of the spirit warring against the senses. Her ideal is attainment
+through great trial. George Sand, the born hater of conventions,
+developed life into a harmony. We feel ultimately in her, a sense of
+peculiar serenity and peace, of self realisation, more akin perhaps to
+Plato's ideal of a character in harmony with itself, whose various
+impulses are so attuned that they form practically a single desire and
+this desire satisfies all the forces of the nature. What was this
+desire that was involved in the whole aim or system of George Sand's
+life? The ethical poet who affirmed emphatically that "conduct was
+three-fourths of life," expressed the highest admiration of George
+Sand's aims and ethics, and according to Matthew Arnold, her ruling
+idea was, that this ordinary human life of love and suffering was
+destined to be raised, into an ideal life, and _that_ ideal life is
+our real life. Matthew Arnold has written one of his most beautiful
+and eloquent and touching essays in this record of his impressions and
+estimate of George Sand. Well does he say that "her passions and her
+errors have been abundantly talked of." She left them behind her, and
+men's memory of them will leave them behind also.
+
+There will remain the sense of benefit and stimulus from that large
+and frank nature, that large and pure utterance. Matthew Arnold gives
+three principal elements in her strain. Instead of the hopeless echo
+of unrealised ideas we hear from her the evolution of character: "1,
+Through agony, and revolt; 2, Through consolation from nature and
+beauty; 3, Through sense of the Divine ('Je fus toujours tourmenté des
+choses divines') and social renewal, she passes into the great life
+motif of her existence;" that the sentiment of the ideal life is none
+other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it. Matthew
+Arnold saw George Sand in his enthusiastic youth when she was in the
+serenity and dignity of middle age at Nohant.
+
+Browning came across her in her journalistic career in Paris, and he
+was not touched with the same admiration.
+
+Mr. Chesterton suggests in his biography of the poet that Browning was
+conventional by nature--and through the greatness of his brain he
+developed. He certainly developed on many sides, but his development
+did not include admiration for George Sand and her circle. It was
+social tone, his biographer believes, more than _opinions_, which
+created this strong aversion in the author of "The Statue and the
+Bust."
+
+But Mrs. Browning, though her life had been mainly one long seclusion
+on her sofa, was unhampered by these conventional barriers. What she
+felt was the attraction of the massive and fascinating brain and heart
+of the great French woman, what she heard was "that eloquent voice,"
+what she saw was "that noble, that speaking head." She had warm, quick
+sympathies and intuitional appreciations of genius. In regard to so
+wide and so complicated a character as George Sand's, we cannot be
+astonished at finding very different judgments and impressions; indeed
+we are prepared to feel in all of them some note of inadequacy and of
+incompleteness. But in our relation to her as a Great Writer, of this,
+as readers, we are assured, we _know_ that it is no common matter to
+have come into contact with so gifted and great a nature, with a
+genius that possessed "a current of true and living ideas," and which
+produced "amid the inspiration of them."
+
+
+
+
+NOTES:
+
+
+
+[1: 1886. "Mind" Vol. 11. "The need of a Society for experimental
+Psychology."]
+
+[2: 1888. "Mind" Vol. 13. "The Psychological Laboratory at Leipsic."]
+
+[3: Essays. On the genius and tendency of the writings of Thomas
+Carlyle. "The Camelot Series."]
+
+[4: See supplementary notice of "Hamlet" in Charles Knight's Pictorial
+Edition of Shakespeare.]
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13766 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Cobwebs of Thought, by Arachne
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Cobwebs of Thought
+
+Author: Arachne
+
+Release Date: October 16, 2004  [eBook #13766]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COBWEBS OF THOUGHT***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Clare Boothby, Keith M. Eckrich, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+COBWEBS OF THOUGHT
+
+by
+
+"ARACHNE"
+
+London
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+  I. OUR IGNORANCE OF OURSELVES
+
+ II. CONTRASTS
+
+III. MAETERLINCK ON HAMLET
+
+ IV. AN IMPOSSIBLE PHILOSOPHY
+
+  V. IMPRESSIONS OF GEORGE SAND
+
+
+
+
+MOTTO.
+
+
+"The first philosophers, whether Chaldeans or Egyptians, said there
+must be something within us which produces our thought. That something
+must be very subtle: it is breath; it is fire, it is ether; it is a
+quintessence; it is a slender likeness; it is an intelechia; it is a
+number; it is harmony; lastly, according to the divine Plato, it is a
+compound of the _same_ and the _other_! It is atoms which think in us,
+said Epicurus after Democritus. But, my friend, how does an atom
+think? Acknowledge that thou knowest nothing of the matter."
+                                                           --VOLTAIRE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+
+OUR IGNORANCE OF OURSELVES.
+
+
+Self-Analysis, apart from its scientific uses, has seldom rewarded
+those who have practised it. To probe into the inner world of motive
+and desire has proved of small benefit to any one, whether hermit,
+monk or nun, indeed it has been altogether mischievous in result,
+unless the mind that probed, was especially healthy. Bitter has been
+the dissatisfaction, both with the process, and with what came of it,
+for being miserably superficial it could lead to no real knowledge of
+self, but simply centred self on self, producing instead of
+self-knowledge, self-consciousness, and often the beginnings of mental
+disease.
+
+For fruitful self analysis it is apparently necessary then to have a
+clear, definite aim outside self--such as achieving the gain of some
+special piece of knowledge, and we find such definite aims in
+psychology, and certain systems of philosophy--Greek, English, and
+German, in Plato Locke, Kant, and in the meditations of Descartes, and
+many others. Self-analysis is the basis of psychological knowledge,
+but the science has been chiefly used to explain the methods by which
+we obtain knowledge of the outer world in relation to ourselves. When
+a philosopher centres self on self, in order to know self as a result
+of introspection, the results have been disastrous, and have
+contributed nothing to knowledge, properly so-called. If religious
+self-examination has its dangers, so also has philosophical
+self-analysis for its own sake. It is a fascinating study for those
+who care for thought for thought's sake--the so-called Hamlets of the
+world, who are for ever revolving round the axes of their own ideas
+and dreams, and who never progress towards any clear issue. Amiel's
+"Vie Intime" is a study of this kind. It adds nothing to any clear
+knowledge of self, absorbing and interesting as the record is. It is
+suggestive to a great degree, and in that lies its value, but it is as
+vague, as it is sad. It appeals deeply to those who live apart in a
+world of their own, in thoughtful imaginative reverie, but its effects
+on the mind were deplored even by Amiel himself in words which are
+acutely pathetic. The pain which consumed him arose from the
+concentration of self on self. Self was monopolised by self,
+self-consciousness was produced, though without a touch of selfish
+egoism.
+
+Out of this self-conscious introspection, grew that sterility of soul
+and mind, that dwindling of capacity, and individuality, which Amiel
+felt was taking place within him. A constant, aimless, inevitable
+habit of self-introspection was killing his mental life, before the
+end came physically.
+
+Another philosophical victim to the same habit was John Stuart Mill,
+at one time of his life. His father analysed almost everything, except
+himself, and John Stuart Mill had grown up in this logical atmosphere
+of analysis, and to much profit as his works show. But when he turned
+the microscope on his own states of feeling, and on the aims of his
+life, the result was melancholia--almost disease of mind. His grandly
+developed faculty of analysis when devoted to definite knowledge
+outside himself, produced splendid results, as in his Logic, and his
+Essays, but when he analysed himself, he gained no additional
+knowledge, but a strange morbid horror that all possible musical
+changes might be exhausted, and that there might be no means of
+creating fresh ones. He also feared that should all the reforms he,
+and others, worked for, be accomplished, the lives of the reformers
+would become meaningless and blank, since they were working for means,
+not ends in themselves. Out of this hopeless mental condition there
+was only one outlet possible, and that was to leave self-analysis of
+this sort alone for ever, and to throw himself into its direct
+contrary, the unconscious life of the emotions. John Stuart Mill did
+this, and it saved him. In Wordsworth's poetry he found sanity and
+healing. Happily for him that was not the age of Browning's "Fifine at
+the Fair." Had he fallen in with dialectical analysis in the garb of
+poetry, it must have killed him!
+
+And yet "Know thyself" has always been considered supremely excellent
+advice, as true for our time, as for the age of Socrates. It certainly
+is disregarded by most of us, as fully as it was by many of the
+Greeks, whom Socrates interrogated so ruthlessly. Is there then a sort
+of self-analysis, which can be carried out for its own sake, and which
+can be, at the same time, of vital use? Is all self-analysis when
+practised for its own sake necessarily harmful, and unprofitable? It
+is time to ask these questions if we are ever to know how to analyse
+ourselves with profit, if we are ever to know ourselves. And we none
+of us do. As students, we are content with every other knowledge but
+this. After all the self probing of the religious and philosophical,
+during long centuries, what have we learned? Truly to ourselves, we
+are enigmas. To know everything else except the self that knows, what
+a strange position! But it is our condition. The one thing that we do
+not know--that we feel as if we never could know is the Self in us.
+Our characters, our powers, our natures, our being--what are they? Our
+faculties--what can we do? And what can we not do? What is the reason
+of this faculty, or that want of faculty? We have never reached an
+understanding of ourselves, which makes us not only know, but perceive
+what we are capable of knowing; which makes us aware, not only that we
+can do something, but why we can do it. We are an unknown quantity to
+ourselves. We can calculate on a given action in a machine, but we
+cannot calculate on our own, much less on our moods. If we would but
+take half the trouble to understand ourselves that we take to study a
+science or art--if we could learn to depend on the sequence of our own
+thoughts as an engineer can on the sequence of movements in his steam
+engine--if we could dig, and penetrate into the depths of our own
+being, as a miner penetrates into a seam of coal--we might then
+cultivate with some profit our own special lines of thought, our own
+gifts, that portion of individuality, which we each possess. But it is
+so difficult to get to know it--we are always on the surface of
+ourselves. What power will unearth our self and make us really know
+what we are and what we can do? It is because we do not know
+ourselves, that we fail so hopelessly to give the things which are of
+incalculably real worth to the world, such as fresh individuality, and
+reality of character. Among millions of beings how few exist who
+possess strong original minds! We are _not_ individual for the most
+part, and we are _not_ real. Our lives _are_ buried lives; we are
+unconscious absorbers, and reproducers, under other words of that
+which we have imbibed elsewhere. We need not only fresh expressions of
+old statements, but actually new ideas, and new conceptions. (The
+fresh _subjects_ people talk about, are really fresh _conceptions_ of
+subjects.) We shall never get this bloom of freshness, and this sense
+of reality and individuality of view unless we cultivate their
+soil--to have fresh ideas, we must encourage the right atmosphere in
+which alone they can live. We must not let our own personality,
+however slight, be suppressed, or be discouraged, or interfered with
+by a more powerful, or a more excellent personality.
+
+Individuality is so weak and pliable a thing in most of us that it is
+very easily checked--it requires watchfulness and care, and not to be
+overborne, for the smallest individual thought of a mind of any
+originality, is more worth to the world than any re-expression of the
+thought of some other mind, however great.
+
+Even the "best hundred books" may have a disastrous effect upon us.
+They may kill some aspirations, if they kindle others. Persons of
+mature age may surely at some time have made the discovery that much
+has been lost through the dominating influence of a superior mind.
+Many persons, for instance, have felt the great influence of Carlyle,
+and Ruskin, in their youth. Carlyle could do incalculable good to some
+minds by his ethics of work, but irremediable harm to others; minds
+have actually become stunted and sterile through that part of his
+teaching, which was unsuited to them. Carlyle's temperament checked
+their proper development. Youth has a beautiful capacity for trust and
+belief, and it accepts everything as equal in goodness and truth from
+an author it reverences. The young do not know enough of themselves,
+and they do not trust enough to their own instincts to discriminate.
+They are dominated and unconsciously suppressed. Ruskin, in his
+ethical views of art, and strange doctrines about some old masters,
+has done nearly as much harm to susceptible minds as Carlyle. Ruskin
+restricted and perverted their art ideals on certain lines as Carlyle
+crushed ethical discrimination. Mind have been kept imprisoned for
+years, and their development on the lines nature intended them to
+take, has been arrested, by the want of belief in their own
+initiative. What was inevitable for Ruskin's unique mind was yet wrong
+for readers, who agreed to all his theories under the influence of his
+fascinating personality, and through the power of his individuality.
+In life, we sometimes find we have made a series of mistakes of this
+sort, before at last we get glimmerings of what we were intended to
+be, and we learn at last the need of having known ourselves, and the
+vital necessity of cultivating the atmosphere and colour of that mind
+of ours, which has been used merely as a tool to know everything else.
+
+Spiritualists and Theosophists talk of a Dominant Self, and an Astral
+body, and of gleams of heavensent insight. Gleams of insight and
+dreams do come to us, and teach us truths, which "never can be
+proved," and without some such intuitions the soul of man would indeed
+be poor,
+
+  The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
+  Hath had elsewhere its setting,
+  And cometh from afar.
+
+But the value of the intuitions is relative to the soul which has
+them; they cannot be conveyed to any one else, or demonstrated; they
+can never become Truths valid to all minds. And these last are the
+truths we want if we would make some orderly progress towards a given
+issue. And so we resort after all, to science, to see if it can solve
+the intellectual riddle of our being. What can it do for us? If we
+would really know ourselves, we want a depth of self-analysis; not a
+pitiful search for motives, not the superficial probings of a
+moralist, not the boundless, limitless, self-absorbed speculations on
+the nature of self of the philosopher, not the sympathetic noting of
+each emotion that crosses the horizon of the soul--the introspection
+of the Poet; these will never teach us the reason why we think and
+feel on certain lines, and not on others--these will never explain to
+us what the mind is, that is in us--what that strange thing is, which
+we have tried so vainly to understand. And without this knowledge how
+worthless is the work of the moralist; of what practical use is it for
+him to endeavour to alter a man's character, when he does not even
+know the ingredients that constitute character, still less the cause
+why character is good or bad. Mr. Robert Buchanan said in one of his
+essays: "I can advance no scientific knowledge for seeing a great
+genius in Robert Browning, or a fine painstaking talent in George
+Eliot, for thinking George Meredith almost alone in his power of
+expressing personal passion, and Walt Whitman supreme in his power of
+conveying moral stimulation. I can take a skeleton to pieces
+scientifically, but not a living soul. I am helpless before Mr.
+Swinburne, or any authentic poet, but quite at my ease before Macaulay
+or Professor Aytoun." Mr. Buchanan could presumably take the last two
+to pieces and analyse them as if they were skeletons; but before
+Swinburne, "the living soul," he is helpless. Now we want a scientific
+reason for all this; we want to analyse, not the skeleton, that has
+been done often enough, but "the living soul." We want to know the
+ingredients of character that constituted Mr. Buchanan's preferences.
+What composition gave him his special temper and character? Why did
+his mind tend towards Robert Browning, and away from George Eliot? Why
+in short did his mind work in the way it did? The more original the
+mind, the more its investigation would repay us. But it must be
+self-investigation; what we want are facts of mind, mental data and in
+order to get them, we must investigate the living mind All the usual
+explanations of Temperament, Nature, Heredity, Education are the same
+difficulties, expressed in different words. Heredity is a
+circumstance, which has to be reckoned with, but we have to
+investigate, not circumstances, but results. Here is a living complex
+mind, no matter how I inherit it, here it is; now then, how does it
+work, what can I do with it? And then comes the further inevitable
+question--What is it? What is this thing, this me, which tends to feel
+and act in a certain direction--to admire spontaneously, this, and to
+despise with as perfect ease, that. What we need for scientific
+investigation into the ME is "to utilise minds so as to form a living
+laboratory" _Mind_ vivisection without torture, cruelty or the knife.
+What we want to know definitely from science is: How does this thing
+which I call my mind work? Science regards mind as the sum of
+sensations, which are the necessary results of antecedent causes. It
+endeavours to know how and in what way these sensations can be trained
+and perfected. Nearly twenty years ago, a writer in the Psychological
+Journal "Mind"[1] Mr. J. Jacobs, attempted to form a Society for the
+purpose of experimental psychology. Thinkers and scientific men have
+carried out this work, but the general public has not been greatly
+interested or interested for any length of time. No such society
+exists among the English public. The greater number of enthusiastic
+students is to be found in Italy and America. But Germany has
+furnished great individual workers, such as Fechner, Helmholtz, and
+Wundt. Collective investigation was necessary to separate individual
+peculiarities from general laws. Science of course aims at changing
+the study of individual minds/into "a valid science of mind." Mr. J.
+Jacobs wished a Society to be organised for the purpose of measuring
+mind, measuring our senses, and for testing our mental powers as
+accurately as weight and height are tested now, and also for
+experimenting on will practice. He believed it possible to train the
+will on one thing until we got it perfectly under control, and in so
+doing we should modify character immensely. If this proved possible,
+we ought to persevere until conduct becomes an art, education a
+principle, and mind is known as a science is known. Mr. Jacobs wanted
+systematic enquiries to be made into powers of attention, such as "Can
+we listen and read at the same time, and reproduce what we have read
+and heard." And into the faculties of observation and memory, with
+after images, and the capacity for following trains of reasoning,
+&c., &c., "When we read a novel, do we actually have pictures of the
+scenes before our minds?" Mr. Jacobs wished for enquiries into every
+kind of intelligence ordinary and extraordinary; out of all
+ingredients of character, out of early impressions, out of classified
+emotions to build up an answer to the question: "Is there a science
+of mind?" Since he wrote, much has been done in experiment by the
+scientific. Children's minds are constantly being investigated, and
+the results given to the public. Mr. Galton has to some extent
+popularised this sort of investigation. But it is still generally
+unpopular. Novelists, and artists, leisured people, women, everyone
+could be of use, if they would investigate themselves, or offer their
+minds for investigation. But after all that the scientific French,
+German, American, Italian, and English workers have done, we are as
+yet only on the threshold of mind knowledge--of what we might know--if
+we had ardour enough to push self-analysis in to the remotest corner
+of the brain, noting down, comparing, tabulating the most involuntary
+and ethereal sublimities that appear to flit through the mind, the
+most subtle emotion that hardly finds expression in language. We must
+push on and on till we arrive at the knowledge of a mind science. Our
+scientific enquirers want, as we all do, more ardour, they are dulled
+by a cold, uninterested public. Psychologists now seem to despair of
+obtaining any large results from the science. Mr. E.W. Scripture in
+"The New Psychology" says, in 1897, "It cannot dissect the mind with a
+scalpel, it cannot hope to find a startling principle of mental life."
+If psychological experiment could be presented somewhat apart from its
+technicalities, and if minds could play freely round its discoveries,
+how much more interesting it would be felt to be by the general
+public! The great experimental worker, Mr. J. Mck Cattell has given[2]
+some clear idea of the results he obtained by analysing and measuring
+sensations. The physical processes, which accompany sensations of
+sound and light for instance, unlike as they must be to sensations,
+being facts of matter in motion, yet share with them this
+characteristic, that sensations also have each an _order in time_, the
+mental processes can be measured, equally with the physical. Of course
+measuring sensations is only measuring "the outside of the mind"--but
+it produces among others one very suggestive result: "that as time is
+relative, if all things moved much more slowly or quickly than at
+present, we should not feel any change at all. But if our objective
+measures of time moved twice as fast, whilst physiological movements
+and mental processes went on at the same rate as now, the days of our
+years would be seven score, instead of three score years and ten, yet
+we should not be any the older, or live any the longer. If on the
+other hand the rate of our physiological and mental motions was
+doubled and we lived exactly as many years as before, we should feel
+as if we lived twice as long and were twice as old as now." This is a
+suggestion for Mr. Well's "Anticipations" Is evolution leading us in
+this direction or the other? Is it retarding or "quickening the
+molecular arrangements of the nervous system?" Are we becoming "more
+delicately balanced so that physical changes proceed more quickly as
+thoughts become more comprehensive, feelings more intense, and will,
+stronger." Does the time it needs to think, feel, and will become
+less? And we may add are the physical and mental processes of the
+intelligent brain, quicker, or slower than the unintelligent? For if
+it is the sensitive quick witted organisation, which is destined to
+live twice as long as it does now, how will it bear the burden of such
+added years? Leaving aside inquiries into Time, and Space Sense--(and
+what enormous faculty our minds must have that can supply these)--let
+us go on to Mr. J. McKeen Cattell's analysis of memory--which is
+perhaps the most interesting of all to the student of mind--the
+analysis of memory, attention and association of ideas. Just as the
+eye can only see (attend to) a certain number of vibrations, for if
+the requisite amount is added to, the result is blankness, darkness,
+so the mind can only attend to a certain amount of complexity--add to
+the complexity and attention ceases, but, a certain degree of
+complexity is necessary to produce any conscious attention at all. In
+experiments with a Metronome and the ticking of a watch, it is found
+the attention at certain intervals gets weaker--from 2 to 3 seconds.
+The impression produced by the ticking of the watch is less distinct,
+it seems to disappear and then is heard again. "This is not from
+fatigue in the sense organ," but apparently represents "a natural
+rhythm in consciousness or attention," which interferes with the
+accuracy of attention. What a suggestive fact this is! Have we not all
+at times, felt an inexplicable difficulty in listening and attending
+to certain speakers, which may perhaps be explained by a difference
+between the rhythm of our own consciousness, and that of the voice of
+the speaker. In Association of Ideas the time that it takes for one
+idea to suggest another has been determined, but of course, it must be
+the average time, for people differ enormously in the speed in which
+ideas occur to them. It is impossible to allude here to more points,
+but in the same interesting article Mr. Mck Cattell considers it
+proved that "experimental methods can be applied to the study of mind,
+and that the positive results are significant," and he hopes, "one
+day, we shall have as accurate and complete a knowledge of mind as we
+have of the physical world." Beyond this knowledge of mind as a
+machine, the Psychologist goeth not. He ends, and what do we know more
+as to what mind is? Philosophy properly so-called, begins here or
+ought to begin. In science we experiment widely and constantly with
+mind and arrive at some knowledge of its workings and capacities; we
+learn occupation with the mind itself as a subject for observation,
+and we practise a self-analysis, which adds to the sum of general
+knowledge. Through this study we know more about our senses and their
+faculties, more of our own tendencies and idiosyncrasies, and in what
+direction they tend. We are on the way to solve some such problems as:
+"the influences of early impressions, the ingredients of character,
+the varying susceptibility to mental anguish, the conquest of the
+will," and many another. These are beginnings--there is much more to
+attain to, if we would know mind even scientifically, for we have only
+attacked its breast works, but we are on the right road, as we
+believe, towards this most interesting of all sciences--Mind Science.
+From Philosophy we do not as yet know definitely that mind _is_, or
+what it is, or why it is. The psychologist accepts the word mind, but
+it is not accepted as a _philosophical_ term; it is called
+Consciousness, Being, Ego, and anything else but mind. Notwithstanding,
+we all feel what we mean by the word. Though the senses divide the
+non-ego, the world outside us, into five separate parcels, things
+seen, things heard, things smelt, things touched, things tasted,
+there is a faculty of unifying, a sensation of unity in us, which
+makes us conscious of all these separate sensations as forming a
+whole in any object which comes into our consciousness. Kant has
+given this unifying faculty, or sensation, a long name, which does
+not make it any clearer. What is this inner power, which unifies
+sensations and how does it come? In some way the mind supplies it to
+its mental states or consciousness. And _within_ us this unifying
+faculty, which we call Mind, is felt through the infinite number of
+modifications of sensations or mental states, for we are aware that
+what we call a mind exists in us. It is this consciousness of unity in
+complexity, which makes memory and identity possible. The exploded
+idea of mental substance and its attributes, held by the School men,
+was probably suggested to them by the consciousness of this mental
+unity. In our mentality there is something which makes each one say
+"My mind," not "My minds." Now it is this unity of sensations, which
+is lost, and the mind with it, if the ego is divided as Professor W.
+James divides it into many egos such as--the inner self--the complex
+self--the social self--the intellectual self--and so on. For how does
+that help us? It is the same unknown quantity in different
+circumstances. The self that ponders in thought, knows itself as the
+same that talks in society. The strange power of being able to analyse
+ourselves at all is one of the strangest things about us. What a world
+of difference lies between the unconscious self of the animal and this
+conscious self of man! Professor James' brilliantly written chapter of
+investigation into the self leaves us amused rather than enlightened.
+Against all arguments to the contrary, we should refuse to give up the
+word mind, whether it is considered vague or defective in any or every
+way. Mind in all its complexity, is what we have to investigate
+scientifically. Mind in all its complexity is what the philosopher has
+to explain, not mind, analysed into simple acts of consciousness. The
+hypnotist talks of double, treble and quadruple personalities with
+totally different characteristics "under suggestion," but it helps us
+little for we have not yet defined mind on its sane and normal sides.
+Considering the acuteness and the sanity of the French mind, it is
+somewhat strange that the French psychologists should devote
+themselves chiefly to the study of the insane and hysterical.
+Philosophy, though it gives us soaring thoughts, grand speculations,
+and metaphysical schemes, from Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer,
+to Herbert Spencer, and Mr. Mallock, cannot give us any knowledge in
+which they mutually agree. Mr. Mallock sums up philosophy as a
+necessity to the mind. We _must_ believe in some theory of mind, some
+religion, some philosophy, else life is dreary and unlivable. This
+appears to be the result of his book "The Veil of the Temple," and
+this is simply the doctrine of utility. But no philosopher, can tell
+us why mind works on certain lines and not on others, because they
+cannot tell us definitely that they _know_ what mind is. Mind is a
+function of _Matter: Matter_ is a function of thought: Mind is
+Noumenon the unseen and unknown, as contrasted with Phenomena the seen
+and known; the universe, the creation of the mind; the mind, the
+product of the universe. All these ideas and many others so widely
+differing can none of them receive a demonstrable proof;--these
+contrary statements show how far we are from possessing any real
+knowledge of what mind is. After all that has been written, elaborated
+and imagined, do we actually _know_ more than Omar Khayam knew?
+
+  "There was the door to which I found no key;
+  There was the veil through which I could not see;
+  Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
+  There was--and then no more of Thee and Me."
+
+Philosophy is still powerless to tell us what mind is; the self, the
+ego always vanishes as we seem to be nearing it, it always eludes our
+deepest probings--we only demonstrate our failure in regard to our
+knowledge of it. All this is true, but should we therefore despair? If
+we are born with the record on the brain of the inexorable desire to
+_know_, the very failure should stimulate us to further, and greater,
+and more fruitful questionings.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+
+CONTRASTS.
+
+
+CARLYLE, GEORGE ELIOT, MAZZINI, BROWNING,
+
+All contrasts drawn between writers, and thinkers should have for aim
+the setting forth of some striking and fundamental difference in
+thought, and it would be hard to find anywhere a greater and a more
+vivid contrast than that between Carlyle and George Eliot. For George
+Eliot's philosophy was centred in the well-being of the Race.
+
+Carlyle's was summed up in the worth of the Individual.
+
+George Eliot teaches in prose and still more in poetry that
+Personality, with its hopes, loves, faiths, aspirations, must all be
+relinquished, and its agonies and pains endured, should Humanity gain
+by the sacrifice and the endurance.
+
+She considers the Individual as part of collective humanity, and that
+he does not live for himself, he has no continuance of personal life,
+he has no permanence, except as a living influence on the Race. This
+is the Positivist creed, the Racial Creed.
+
+Beyond the influence that it exerts, spiritual personality is doomed.
+It is not humanity in God but humanity in itself which is to exist
+from age to age, solely in the memory of succeeding generations.
+
+  "Oh may I join the Choir Invisible
+  Of those immortal dead, who live again
+  In minds made better by their presence."
+
+Permanence and continuance and immortality are in the race alone.
+George Eliot's strong accentuation of the race is the Gospel of
+annihilation to the individual. Yet the most personal and imaginative
+of poets has treated this lofty altruism in his strange, sad,
+beautiful poem of "The Pilgrims," with a fervour greater even than
+that of George Eliot.
+
+Here are two stanzas:
+
+  "And ye shall die before your thrones be won.
+  Yea, and the changed world and the liberal sun
+  Shall move and shine without us and we lie
+  Dead; but if she too move on earth and live,
+  But if the old world with the old irons rent,
+  Laugh and give thanks, shall we not be content?
+  Nay we shall rather live, we shall not die,
+  Life being so little and Death so good to give."
+
+  "Pass on then and pass by us, and let us be.
+  For what life think ye after life to see?
+  And if the world fare better will ye know?
+  And if men triumph, who shall seek you and say?"
+
+  "Enough of light is this for one life's span.
+  That all men born are mortal, but not Man:
+  And we men bring death lives by night to sow,
+  That man may reap and eat and live by day."
+                                              --SWINBURNE.
+
+Turning from the moral grandeur of self-abnegation that fills the
+philosophy of humanity, we feel the contrast of strong human
+personality, which animates us with an inspiring sensation as we
+listen to the prophet of individualism.
+
+Few can have read Carlyle's writings in their youth, without having
+experienced an indescribable and irresistible stimulation, to
+accomplish some real work, to make some strenuous endeavour "before
+the night cometh." Carlyle's contempt for sloth, stings; his bitter
+words are a tonic, they scourge, encourage, and at times plead with
+poetic fervour. "Think of living. Thy life wert thou the pitifullest
+of all the sons of earth is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. _It
+is thy own; it is all thou hast to front Eternity with._ Work then
+like a star unhasting and unresting."
+
+The man's soul, naked through sloth, or clothed through works, has to
+meet its doom, and to bear it as it best can. For Carlyle ignored the
+collective view of mankind, the single soul had to prostrate itself
+before the Supreme Power. This Supreme Power was almost as vague (to
+him) as George Eliot's Permanent Influence is to us. For Carlyle did
+not believe "that the Soul could enter into any relations with God,
+and in the sight of God it was nothing." There is nothing singular in
+this. The religious, but independent-minded Joubert thought "it was
+not hard to know God, provided one did not force oneself to define
+Him," and deprecated "bringing into the domain of reason, that which
+belongs to our innermost feeling."
+
+This very well represented Carlyle's view, but it occupies but a small
+place in his writings. All his books, his letters, pamphlets,
+histories, essays show his profound living belief in the worth of
+individual men, as the salt of the earth, and the young are always
+greatly influenced by strong personalities. But the mature mind that
+struggles after catholicity of taste, and wide admiration, receives
+some rude shocks from Carlyle's treatment of humanity, as Dr. Garnett
+has well shown in his excellent biography of Carlyle; indeed it has
+led with some to the parting of the ways. For the hopes and
+inspirations of poet, reformer, teacher, became in great part to him
+as "the idle chatter of apes" and "the talk of Fools."
+
+Mazzini's world-wide sympathies, his life of many deaths for his
+country, were unintelligible to Carlyle, who also described, as "a
+sawdust kind of talk," John Stuart Mill's expression of belief and
+interest in reforming and raising the whole social mass of toiling
+millions.
+
+Bracing and stimulating, as is Carlyle's strong, stern doctrine of
+independence, of work, and of adherence to Truth for its own sake, we
+feel the loss his character sustained, through the contempt that grew
+upon him for the greater part of humanity. The Nemesis of contempt was
+shown in his inability at last to see even in individuals, the
+greatest things. Physical force came to be admired by him for itself.
+From hero-worship, he passed "to strong rulers, and saviours of
+society."
+
+The worth of the individual, withered and changed, and Carlyle's hopes
+rested finally on strength alone, just as George Eliot's thoughts
+centred on the influence human beings exercised on each other, and
+there is extraordinary beauty in this idea. How striking is her
+conception of the good we all receive from even the simplest lives, if
+they have been true lives. "The growing good of the world is partly
+dependent upon unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with
+you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who
+lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs." But some
+who read her books feel an underlying tone of sadness--a melancholy
+whisper as of a finality, an inevitable end to all future development,
+even of the greatest personalities. Many other writers have believed
+that men live in the world's memory only by what they have done in the
+world, but George Eliot is definite that this memory is all, that
+personality has no other chance of surviving. Her hopes rested on
+being:
+
+  "The sweet presence of a good diffused,
+  And in diffusion ever more intense,
+  So shall I join the Choir Invisible
+  Whose music is the gladness of the world."
+
+Both George Eliot and Carlyle over accentuated one the race, the other
+the individual.
+
+Mazzini's place in thought was exactly between the two.
+
+He believed in God _and_ Collective Humanity. Humanity in God. He
+said: "We cannot relate ourselves to the Divine, but through
+collective humanity. Mr. Carlyle comprehends only the individual; the
+true sense of the unity of the race escapes him. He sympathises with
+men, but it is with the separate life of each man, and not their
+collective life."[3]
+
+Collective labour, according to an educational plan, designed by
+Providence, was, Mazzini believed, the only possible development of
+Humanity.
+
+He could never have trusted in any good and effective development from
+Humanity alone.
+
+Nationality, he reverenced, and widened the idea, until it embraced
+the whole world. He said it was the mission, the special vocation of
+all who felt the mutual responsibility of men. But nationality of
+Italy meant to Carlyle, only "the glory of having produced Dante and
+Columbus," and he cared for them not for the national thought they
+interpreted, but as gigantic men. Mazzini cared for "the progressive
+history of mankind," Carlyle for "the Biography of great men."
+
+Carlyle's sadness "unending sadness," came, Mazzini thought from
+looking at human life only from the individual point of view. And a
+poem by Browning, "Cleon" would have afforded him another example of
+"the disenchantment and discouragement of life," from individualism.
+
+Browning was as great an individualist as Carlyle; he stood as far
+apart from belief in Collective Humanity, and Democracy as Carlyle
+did, though in Italy, he felt the thrill of its nationality, as
+Carlyle did not. But Mazzini might have said also truly of Browning,
+that, with the exception of Italy, "he sympathised with the separate
+life of each man and not with their collective life." The sadness
+Mazzini attributed to Carlyle's strong individualistic point of view,
+ought logically then to have been the heritage of Browning also. _If_
+Mazzini's explanation was the true one, it is another proof of the
+difficulty of tabulating humanity, or of making a science of human
+nature. For the Individualist Browning, far from being remarkable for
+sadness, was the greatest of optimists amongst English poets. He had a
+far wider range of sympathies, than Carlyle, for failure attracted
+him, as much as victory, the Conquered equally with the Conqueror,
+indeed every shade of character interested him. Perhaps he expresses
+through "Cleon" some of his own strongest feelings, his insistence on
+the worth of individuality, his craving for deeper joy, fuller life
+than this world gives, and his horror of the destruction of
+personality. Cleon, the Greek Artist, is indeed "the other side" to
+the poetic altruism of "The Pilgrims" and "The Choir Invisible." Never
+was the yearning for Personal Continuance more vividly and more
+humanly presented. The Greek Artist, without any knowledge of, or
+belief in Immortality, hungers after it. Browning represents him as
+writing to and arguing with the King, who has said:
+
+  "My life......
+  Dies altogether with my brain, and arm,......
+  ....triumph Thou, who dost _not_ go."
+
+And Cleon says if Sappho and Æschylus survive because we sing her
+songs, and read his plays, let them come, "drink from thy cup, speak
+in my place."
+
+Instead of rejoicing in his works surviving he feels the horror of the
+contrast, the life within his works, the decay within his heart. He
+compares his sense of joy growing more acute and his soul's power and
+insight more enlarged and keen, while his bodily powers decay. His
+hairs fall more and more, his hand shakes, and the heavy years
+increase.
+
+He realises:--
+
+  "The horror quickening....
+  The consummation coming past escape,
+  When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy--
+  When all my works wherein I prove my worth,
+  Being present still to mock me in men's mouths,
+  Alive still, in the phrase of such as thou,
+  I, I, the feeling, thinking, acting man,
+  The man who loved his life so over much,
+  Shall sleep in my Urn. . . It is so horrible."
+
+He imagines in his need some future state may be revealed by Zeus.
+
+  "Unlimited in capability
+  For joy, as this is in desire for joy,
+  To seek which the joy hunger forces us:"
+
+He speculates that this life may have been made straight, "to make
+sweet the life at large."
+
+And that we are: "freed by the throbbing impulse we call Death." But
+he ends by fearing that were it possible Zeus must have revealed it.
+
+This passionate pathetic longing for joy, and life beyond death finds
+an echo in many hearts, which yet can admire the grand altruism of
+"The Pilgrims" and the selfless spirit of the Impersonal Martyr. After
+considering all this clash of thought, it seems as if it all resolved
+itself into the individual temperament which settles and modifies and
+adapts to itself the forms of our philosophies and religions, our
+Hopes and Faiths, and Despairs.
+
+For from whence comes the real power thinkers possess over us? It is
+not in their forms of thought, as Matthew Arnold said most truly, but
+in the tendencies, in the spirit which led them to adopt those
+formulas. Every thinker has some secret, an exact object at which he
+aims, which is "the cause of all his work, and the reason of his
+attraction" to some readers, and his repulsion to others.
+
+What was the secret aim then in George Eliot which made her believe so
+firmly in the permanent influence of Humanity, and in the annihilation
+of personal existence? Was the tendency of temperament developed by
+her life and circumstances?
+
+What was it that developed so strong an Individualism in Carlyle and
+Browning and awoke in Browning such unlimited hope, and in Carlyle
+such "unending sadness?"
+
+Why did the darkness and the storm of his life give Mazzini so
+passionate a belief in Humanity, and such an intimate faith in God?
+These and such-like are the problems we should have in our minds as we
+study the works of Great Writers, if we would penetrate into the
+innermost core of their nature, in short, if we would really
+understand them.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+
+MAETERLINCK ON HAMLET.
+
+
+Maeterlinck, in his first essay, "The Treasure of the Humble," is,
+undoubtedly, mystical. He does not argue, or define, or explain, he
+asserts, but even in that book and far more so in his second, "Wisdom
+and Destiny," it is real life which absorbs him as Alfred de Sutro his
+translator points out. In this book "he endeavours in all simplicity
+to tell what he sees." He is a Seer.
+
+Maeterlinck's aim is to show that contrary to the usual idea, what we
+call Fate, Destiny, is not something apart from ourselves, which
+exercises power over us, but is the product of our own souls.
+
+He takes many examples to prove this, of which Hamlet is one. Man,
+said Maeterlinck, is his own Fate in an inner sense; he is superior to
+all circumstances, when he refuses to be conquered by them. When his
+soul is wise and has initiative power, it cannot be conquered by
+external events, and happiness is inevitable to such a soul.
+Maeterlinck asks: Where do we find the fatality in Hamlet? Would the
+evil of Claudius and Queen Gertrude have spread its influence if a
+wise man had been in the Palace? If a dominant, all powerful soul--a
+Jesus--had been in Hamlet's palace at Elsinore, would the tragedy of
+four deaths have happened? Can you conceive any wise man living in the
+unnatural gloom that overhung Elsinore? Is not every action of Hamlet
+induced by a fanatical impulse, which tells him that duty consists in
+revenge alone? And revenge never can be a duty. Hamlet thinks much,
+continues Maeterlinck, but is by no means wise. Destiny can withstand
+lofty thoughts but not simple, good, tender and loyal thoughts. We
+only triumph over destiny by doing the reverse of the evil she would
+have us commit. _No tragedy is inevitable_. But at Elsinore no one had
+vision--no one saw--hence the catastrophe. The soul that saw would
+have made others see. Because of Hamlet's pitiful blindness, Laertes,
+Ophelia, the King, Queen, and Hamlet die. Was his blindness
+inevitable? A single thought had sufficed to arrest all the forces of
+murder. Hamlet's ignorance puts the seal on his unhappiness, and his
+shadow lay on Horatio, who lacked the courage to shake himself free.
+Had there been one brave soul to cry out the truth, the history of
+Elsinore had not been shrouded in horror. All depended not on destiny,
+but on the wisdom of the wisest, and this Hamlet was; therefore he was
+the centre of the drama of Elsinore, for he had no one wiser than
+himself on whom to depend.
+
+Maeterlinck's doctrine of the soul and its power over Destiny is very
+captivating, but it is doubtful if he was fortunate in his choice of
+Hamlet as an example of ignorance and blindness, and of failure to
+conquer fate, through lack of soul-power.
+
+How Hamlet should have acted is not told us, but that it was his duty
+to have given up revenge is clearly suggested. We might, perhaps, sum
+up Hamlet's right course, from the hints Maeterlinck has given us, in
+a sentence. Had he relinquished all idea of revenge and forgiven his
+uncle and mother, he would have ennobled his soul, gained inward
+happiness, spread a gracious calm around and have so deeply influenced
+his wicked relations, that they would have become repentant and
+reformed. Thus his evil Destiny would have been averted and we should
+have had no tragedy of Hamlet. This explanation sounds rather
+conventional and tract-like put into ordinary language, but, indeed,
+Maeterlinck's doctrine might be compressed into a syllogism:--
+
+  All the wise are serene,
+    Hamlet was not serene,
+    Hamlet was not wise.
+
+That is the simple syllogism by which Maeterlinck tests human nature.
+But Hamlet's nature cannot be packed into a syllogism. A Theorist, who
+tries to fit into his theory a peculiar nature cannot always afford to
+understand that nature. The external event that froze Hamlet's soul
+with horror, and deprived it of "transforming power" was a
+supernatural event, not "disease, accident, or sudden death!" The
+mandate laid on his soul was a supernatural mandate, and as Judge Webb
+said in a suggestive and interesting paper: "The Genuine text of
+Shakespeare," October number of the "National Review, 1903," "it was
+utterly impossible for that soul to perform it," or it might be added,
+to cast it aside. He was betrayed by the apparition "into consequences
+as deep as those into which Macbeth was betrayed by the instruments of
+darkness--the witches." We cannot reason about Maeterlinck's thought
+that if expressed "would have arrested all the forces of murder"
+because we do not know what the thought was, nor can any one gauge or
+estimate rightly the power of Hamlet's soul to conquer external
+events, without taking into careful account that the Vision from
+another world came to Hamlet, when he was outraged at the re-marriage
+of his mother and full of emotion that the sudden death of his father
+called forth in his meditative mind.[4] But Maeterlinck never refers
+to anything of this sort. He does not seem to realise what the effects
+of the vision must have been on a complicated character--on "a great
+gentleman in whom the courtier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, were
+all united." Hamlet was _not_ an example of the normal type of the
+irresolute man--but the mandate laid upon his nature, it could not
+perform. The vision was his destiny--for Destiny lay in the nature of
+the mandate, as well as the nature of the man, and unhappiness was
+inevitable; yet Maeterlinck says, "No tragedy is inevitable, the wise
+man can be superior to all circumstances by the initiative of the
+soul. To be able to curb the blind force of instinct is to be able to
+curb external destiny." Did not Hamlet curb his instincts of love for
+Ophelia, and love for books and philosophy, under pressure of the
+great commandment laid upon him? He could not curb the power of his
+intellect--it was too subtle and supreme, but he concealed all else.
+Yet Hamlet could not escape his Destiny, by curbing his instincts. The
+initiative of his soul worked against the duty he had to perform. And
+it was through his "simple, tender, good," thoughts of, and love for
+his father that he kept to his task, and could not "withstand his
+complicated destiny." Maeterlinck is surely wrong, too, in saying
+Hamlet was moved by a fanatical impulse to revenge for he spent his
+life in weighing _pros_, and _cons_, and in combating the idea that he
+must fulfil the duty laid upon him. So unfanatical was he that he even
+doubted at times whether the apparition was his father's spirit. But
+supposing there had been "one brave soul to cry out the truth"
+(Maeterlinck does not say what the truth was); we will suppose that
+Hamlet had resolved to forgive fully and generously, would he, then,
+have gained the fortitude and serenity, which Maeterlinck evidently
+means by inner happiness? Not if he kept a shred of his inner nature.
+Hamlet "saw no course clear enough to satisfy his understanding."
+Could such a nature be serene? But was it unwise? Judicious, wise, and
+witty when at ease; he could not escape the dark moods that made him
+indifferent to the visible world.
+
+"If OEdipus had had the inner refuge of a Marcus Aurelius, what could
+Destiny have done to him?" asks Maeterlinck. Fate we suppose would
+have had no power over him, if he had calmly reasoned over the
+terrible circumstances in which he found himself involved, and if he
+preserved his equanimity to the end, as M. Aurelius would have done.
+Does this prove more than that the two men may have had very different
+temperaments? But, individuality cannot be made to agree with theory,
+and can be tabulated in no _science_ book of humanity. When
+Maeterlinck says, "Hamlet's ignorance puts the seal on his
+unhappiness," we may well ask ignorance of what? Was it ignorance of
+the power of will? Certainly his intellect was greater than his will.
+"He would have been greater had he been less great." The
+"concentration of all the interests that belong to humanity" was in
+Hamlet. Except the gifts of serenity and calmness, what did he lack?
+And because he was not inwardly serene, Maeterlinck considers him
+blind and ignorant. It is strange to connect blindness and ignorance
+with a wit of intellectual keenness, an imagination of a poet, and the
+unflinching questioning of the philosopher. Maeterlinck says: "Hamlet
+thinks much but is by no means wise." How does Hamlet show he had not
+the wisdom of life? Maeterlinck, no doubt, would dwell on his varying
+moods, his subtle melancholy, his nature baffled by a supernatural
+command. If he was not wise how strange he should have said so many
+words of truest wisdom both of Life and Death, "If it be now, 'tis not
+to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet
+it will come; the readiness is all." We feel that Hamlet was "a being
+with springs of thought and feeling and action deeper than we can
+search." But the elements in his nature could not resolve themselves
+into an inner life of calm. Therefore, according to Maeterlinck, he
+was not wise, for he could not conquer his inner fatality--destiny in
+himself. Maeterlinck's ideas are very beautiful, and he writes
+delightfully, but his test of wisdom is questionable, for Hamlet's
+thoughts have captured and invaded and influenced the best minds and
+experiences of thinkers for centuries, How many a Shakespearean reader
+has _felt_ that Hamlet is one of the very wisest of men as well as one
+of the most lovable and attractive! Not his ignorance, but his wisdom
+has borne the test of study and time. He did not bear the tragedy of
+life when the supernatural entered it, with an unshaken soul, but
+ourselves and the realities of life become clearer to us, the more we
+read his thoughts. If "it is _we_ who are Hamlet," as Hazlitt said, it
+is a great tribute to his universality--but a greater one to
+ourselves. Indeed, we learn wisdom, not only from the lucubrations of
+the serene and calm, or from Hamlet, magnificent in thought, acute and
+playful, but also from Hamlet in his mortal struggles, in his deep
+questionings, and his melancholy.
+
+  For wisdom "dwells not in the light alone
+    But in the darkness and the cloud."
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+
+AN IMPOSSIBLE PHILOSOPHY.
+
+
+Philosophers talk of a philosophy of art, ancient and modern. But this
+is unnecessary. Art is always art, or never art, as the case may be;
+whether it is art in the days of Pheidias and Praxitiles, of Rafael,
+or of Turner, or whether it is not art as in the days of its
+degeneration in Greece and Italy. The outward expression of course,
+changes, but it changes through individual and national aptitudes, not
+from Chronology. That indispensable and indescribable thing which is
+of the essence of art, is the same in all times and countries; for art
+is ever young, there is no old, no new, and here is its essential
+difference from science. In its essence, art is neither ancient or
+modern, because it is incapable of progress, it is the expression of
+an illimitable idea. We find before the Christian Era more beautiful
+sculpture than after it. "Ah!" Victor Hugo says in his "William
+Shakespeare," "You call yourself Dante, well! But that one calls
+himself Homer. The beauty of art consists in not being susceptible of
+improvement. A _chef d'oeuvre_ exists once and for ever. The first
+Poet who arrives, arrives at the summit. From Pheidias to Rembrandt
+there is no onward movement. A Savant may out-lustre a Savant, a Poet
+never throws a Poet into the shade. Hippocrates is outrun, Archimides,
+Paracelsus, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, La Place, Pindar not;
+Pheidias not. Pascal, the Savant, is out-run, Pascal, the Writer, not.
+There is movement in art, but not progress. The Frescoes of the
+Sistine Chapel are absolutely nothing to the Metopes of the Parthenon.
+Retrace your steps as much as you like from the Palace of Versailles
+to the Castle of Heidelberg. From the Castle of Heidelberg to the
+Notre Dame of Paris. From the Notre Dame to the Alhambra. From the
+Alhambra to St. Sophia. From St. Sophia to the Coliseum. From the
+Coliseum to the Propyleans. You may recede with ages, you do not
+recede in art. The Pyramids and the Iliad stand on a fore plan.
+Masterpieces have the same level--the Absolute. Once the Absolute is
+reached, all is reached." And Schopenhauer says, "Only true works of
+art have eternal youth and enduring power like nature and life
+themselves. For they belong to no age, but to humanity--they cannot
+grow old, but appear to us ever fresh and new, down to the latest
+ages." Let us disclaim then any such word as Modern in relation to
+art, particularly in relation to a philosophy which has to do with the
+principle and essence of art. Is a Philosophy of Art possible? There
+must be some who will think it is impossible. Have we a philosophy
+that explains such an apparently simple thing as how one knows
+anything--or of simple consciousness? Every philosopher that has
+attempted to explain consciousness or how we know, takes refuge in
+assumptions. At any Philosophical Society, if you ask for the
+explanation of simple Consciousness, the avalanche of answers, each
+differing from the other, will bewilder you. We know the outward
+appearance of an object, of which we say that we know it, but what is
+it _in itself_? Of that we are as much in the dark as we are of the
+mind that knows. We say, each of us--I know, but in philosophy we are
+not clear whether there is a thing that knows. We know we are
+conscious, but we know nothing but that bare fact. We do not know how
+an object swims into our consciousness. We do not know in the
+scientific meaning of knowledge, how we come to know any object. Our
+abysmal ignorance is this, that, of the thing known, and of that which
+knows, and of the process of knowing, we know nothing. Who can tell us
+how the movement of matter in the brain causes what we call thought.
+Is it a cause, or merely a concurrence? When we can know this much,
+then art may have a philosophy in which we can all agree. But, what
+signs are there of even the beginnings of agreement? Certainly art is
+not known as we know a science--perhaps we do not wish it ever to be
+so. And the process of art is as indescribable as the process of
+knowing. The advance we have made in philosophy seems to be this, that
+whereas one philosopher after another according to his temperament has
+thought he knew and has supplied us with hypotheses, and with
+successive clues to the mystery of Being, and with many systems of
+thought, we know now that none of them were adequate to supply even
+initial steps, and so, for the most part, we fall back on the
+knowledge that comes to us from living, from being, from knowing
+appearances, from action, and from feeling; on that position in short
+which Schopenhauer thought so despicable in a human being, _i.e._,
+Refuge in the common sense attitude, and practically the giving up of
+philosophy. The outcome of all the brain work on philosophy, since the
+time of the Greeks, is that despair has entered into our minds of ever
+achieving any knowledge of the _Real_, beneath and beyond Phenomena,
+of a knowledge which _commands_ assent. Can even a Hegel write a
+convincing Philosophy of Art--which implies a philosophy of complex
+knowing and feeling; the feeling or emotion, or sensation, which
+vibrates in music and colour and poetry. Could Hegel himself answer
+this objection: that poetry eludes all tests--that that which you can
+thoroughly explain in any way is not poetry, as Swinburne has said? It
+is the inexplicable, then, which lies at the essence of art and it is
+this, which if there is to be a Philosophy of Art must be its object.
+The Inexplicable must be the object for the thinker with his orderly
+sequences, his logical search for causes and results. It is not that
+artistic feeling is too subtle as a subject; it is that we cannot get
+hold of it at all. It is where? Here, in our emotion, our feeling, our
+imagination; it flies from us and it comes again.
+
+We do not ask for a philosophy of artistic _creations_ (whatever they
+may be, in music, painting, or poetry), for a Philosophy of Art must
+be a philosophy of the artistic _faculty_ that creates, and that
+admires and understands and is absorbed in the creations. Philosophy
+of Art is the philosophy of the creative--receptive qualities. We feel
+these qualities, but we are not able to explain them, we cannot even
+help another to feel them. The capacity comes from within. In
+ourselves is a nameless response to Beauty. All art is an expression
+of the artist thrown out towards a reproduction of some intuitive Idea
+within, and what artist has ever satisfied his inward aspiration? Why
+tell us that harmonies of art may be traced down to the simplest
+lines, and, that at the root, lies an aim of edification? Simplify the
+lines, as we will, let the basis of edification lie at the root of all
+beauty, still the initial question remains unanswered. Why do certain
+lines in a poem, curves of beauty in a statue, colour in a picture,
+produce in us the feelings of beauty and delight? Why does
+edification, if it is such, produce in me, the sense of a nameless
+beauty?
+
+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.
+
+But however obtained, the first time a mind feels conscious of it, it
+is a revelation, and it may come as an influence from an artist soul.
+George Sand had "l'esprit _libre_ et varié." George Eliot "l'esprit
+fort et pesant." George Sand was widely, wisely, and eminently human.
+She felt deep down in her heart all the social troubles and problems
+of her day--and created some herself! But she was true to the artist
+soul in her--to the belief in an ideal. Art was dormant when she wrote
+disquisitions, and sometimes her social disquisitions are very long
+treatises. But her art was not dormant when from her inmost soul she
+sketched the fate of the Berri peasant whom she loved so well. In the
+introduction to that simple delightful Idyll "La Mare au Diable,"
+which should be read by all social reformers and by all who really
+care for the poor and the causes of poverty, she conveys her
+conceptions of the mission of art towards the oppressed unhappy
+labourer; oppressed and unhappy, because with form robust and
+muscular, with eyes to see, and thoughts that might be cultivated to
+understand the beauty and harmony of colour and sounds, delicacy of
+tone and grace of outline, in a word, the mysterious beauty of the
+world, he, the peasant of Berri, has never under stood the mystery of
+the beautiful and his child will never understand it; the result of
+excessive toil, and extreme poverty. Imperfect and condemned to
+eternal childhood, George Sand recounts his life, touching gently his
+errors, and with deep sympathy entering into his trials and griefs.
+And a deeper ignorance, she adds, is one that is born of knowledge
+which has stifled the sense of beauty. The Berri peasant has no
+monopoly in ignorance of beauty, and intimate knowledge of toil and
+extreme poverty, but not many of us feel with the peasant's fate, as
+George Sand felt it. She never ceased to care for the cause of social
+progress, just as she was always heart and soul an artist. George
+Eliot has written words "to the reader" about the ruined villages on
+the Rhone. In "The Mill on the Floss," she writes, and again the
+remarkable difference between the two writers appears as forcibly as
+in the two prefaces. "These dead tinted, hollow-eyed skeletons of
+villages on the Rhone, oppress me with the feeling that human
+life--very much of it--is a narrow ugly grovelling existence, which
+even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its
+bare vulgarity of conception, and I have a cruel conviction that the
+lives, of which these ruins are the traces were part of a gross sum of
+obscure vitality that will be swept into the same oblivion with the
+generations of ants and beavers." George Eliot saw in imagination
+these unhappy and oppressed peasants with clear, unsparing eyes. She
+was right in calling her conviction "Cruel," for she saw merely the
+outside of the sordid lives of oppressive narrowness, which seemed to
+irritate her, these lives of dull men and women out of keeping with
+the earth on which they lived. She never alluded to any possible
+explanatory causes, such as excessive toil and extreme poverty, which
+if she had realised, as George Sand realised them, would have brought
+the tender touch of sympathy with individual lives and griefs that we
+find so often in George Eliot's novels. But George Sand could _never_
+have written of any peasants as "part of a gross sum of obscure
+vitality," because she could never have felt towards them in that way.
+She was too imaginative and tender. She did not look at the peasantry
+"en masse"--but individually, and loved the Berri peasants
+individually, as they loved and adored her. Her artistic sense and her
+humanity illumined her view of them, and she saw their latent
+possibilities, and knew why they were only latent. She knew indeed,
+many--if not all kinds of humanity. Once it is recorded she said to
+Pere Lacordaire, "You have lived with Saints and Angels. I have lived
+with men and women, and I could tell you (and we may well think she
+could) some things you do not know." She had indeed run through the
+gamut of feeling, and it was in one of those moments when her
+experiences of life were overwhelming her--that she exclaimed "J'ai
+trop bu la vie." But her gift of genius kept her always vivifying. She
+never depresses. From her first years at Nohant to the end of her long
+life, she was always _alive_. In the political troubles of 1848, when
+she wrote of herself as "navré jusqu 'au fond de l'ame par les orages
+exterieurs," and as trying to find in solitude if not calm and
+philosophy, at least a faith in ideas, her soul shrank from blood shed
+on both sides. "It needed a Dante," she thought, "with his nerves, and
+temper, and tears to write a drama full of groans and tortures. It
+needed a soul tempered with iron, and with fire, to linger in the
+imagination over horrors of a symbolic Hell, when before one's very
+eyes is the purgatory of desolation on the earth." But "as a weaker
+and gentler artist," George Sand saw what her mission was in those
+evil times;--it was to distract the imagination from them, towards
+"tenderer sentiments of confidence, of friendship, and of kindness."
+Her political and social hopes and aims were always dear to her, but
+to interpret nature, to live the quiet life of the affections were the
+phases of her middle life. And so she wrote a "sweet song" in prose,
+one of the most delightful of her Bergeries, "La Petite Fadette." It
+was her contribution to the hatreds and agitations of the time--she
+gave a refuge to the souls that could accept it--an "Ideal of calmness
+and innocence and reverie." "La Petite Fadette" and "Le Meunier
+d'Angibault" reveal her fascinating intelligence and her idyllic
+imagination. "Le Meunier d'Angibault," she tells us, was the result of
+a walk, a meeting, a day of leisure, an hour of _far niente_, followed
+by Reverie, that play of the imagination which, clothes with beauty
+and perfects, and interprets, the isolated and small events and facts
+of life. There are books of hers in early life that are simply
+self-revelations--outpourings of her indignations. She is not at her
+best in these. "Indiana," written in her age of revolt, is too
+obviously a pamphlet to reveal her passionate hatred of marriage. In
+it she looked on marriage as "un malheur insupportable." But
+"Consuelo," "La Comtesse de Rudolstadt," "Lettres d'un voyageur,"
+Lelia, Spiridion, Valvédre, Valentine, "History of her Life and
+letters," and many other books reveal her agonies and agitations, her
+hope and power, her love of beauty both outward and inward as
+represented in Consuelo herself, who is contrasted with the mere
+beautiful "animal" Anzoleto, the artist in his lowest form. He cared
+only for physical loveliness, he was a great child, who needed nothing
+but amusement, emotion and beauty. But George Sand herself felt the
+delight of existence. She says of Joy "It is the great uplifter of
+men, the great upholder. For life to be fruitful, life must be felt as
+a blessing." In all she wrote we feel the rare charm of perfect ease
+and naturalness, combined with the cadences of beauty. We never feel
+that she is "posing." And yet the author of the bitter attack "Lui et
+elle," accused her of continual "posing." Edonard de Musset wrote with
+an envenomed pen, (but we must remember he was defending a brother),
+in that strange literary duel between him and George Sand. Alfred de
+Musset had accused her of assuming the maternal "pose" towards poets
+and musicians who adored her, whilst she absorbed their loves and
+lives and then deserted them. It is certainly very striking how her
+strong vitality seemed to sway and overpower some of those with whom
+she came in contact. She was the oak, and the others were the ivy.
+When they were torn apart, the oak was scarred but not irreparably
+injured, it was the ivy that was destroyed. In, "Elle et Lui," George
+Sand claims that hers was a protecting love for the wayward, gifted
+child of art, the poet whose ingratitude she bore with, whose nerves
+she soothed, and whom she cared for and nursed in illness. Kindly time
+throws a softening veil over the acutest differences, and the clash of
+temperaments, even where they remain inexplicable. But the answer to
+Alfred de Musset's reproaches must be looked for not in one book, but
+in the whole tenor of her life. Does this show that her maternal
+attitude was a "pose." It is often said that women are born wives or
+born mothers. George Sand was undeniably a born _mother_. Mrs.
+Oliphant resembled her in this respect. They both show the deep
+passion of maternity in books and autobiographies and letters. Both
+were devoted to their children, there was no company they cared for in
+comparison, and they spared neither trouble or time in their
+interests. But George Sand cared much, not only for her children but
+for the peasants--for the poor and oppressed. Yes, and for the poets,
+the painters--the singers and the musicians, with their temperaments
+of genius, their loves, jealousies, and their shattered nerves. For
+upwards of six years she treated Chopin with a mother's care; she had
+the passion of maternity in her towards them all, with whatever
+feelings it may have been complicated in her life of manifold
+experiences and with her artist temperament. She may have leant
+heavily on it at times, it may have served as a weapon of defence when
+she was attacked, and used thus it may well have suggested a "pose."
+But however used, whatever the purpose--that the maternal instinct was
+strong in her there is no denying. To explain definitely her social
+and personal moral standards requires a biography that has not yet
+been written. Socially she had a hatred of feudalism, of religious and
+military despotism. She sympathised with and helped the aspirations
+towards a wider, a more humane view of a social system, and fraternal
+equality and social liberty were to her holy doctrines. Perhaps fully
+to understand George Sand from within may require the genius of a
+French mind and one of her own generation; for the French of the
+present day neither study her, or appear to care much for her books.
+Her letters should aid in giving a discriminating record of her
+intense and intricate life as viewed from within, and the ideas on
+which that life was lived. What then were the leading principles, and
+what was the force in George Sand, which while conquering life and
+harmonising it enabled her to realise herself? If heredity influences
+moral standards the mystery certainly is whence George Eliot derived
+not her morality, but her "fire of insurgency." It is not difficult to
+account for it in George Sand when we remember her mother's life and
+temperament, and her own early years. Her father was a good soldier,
+but had also many literary gifts. George Sand herself said: "Character
+is hereditary, if my readers wish to know me, they must know my
+father." George Eliot's creed and pervading view of life was the
+supreme responsibility of it, and the inevitableness of the struggles
+of the spirit warring against the senses. Her ideal is attainment
+through great trial. George Sand, the born hater of conventions,
+developed life into a harmony. We feel ultimately in her, a sense of
+peculiar serenity and peace, of self realisation, more akin perhaps to
+Plato's ideal of a character in harmony with itself, whose various
+impulses are so attuned that they form practically a single desire and
+this desire satisfies all the forces of the nature. What was this
+desire that was involved in the whole aim or system of George Sand's
+life? The ethical poet who affirmed emphatically that "conduct was
+three-fourths of life," expressed the highest admiration of George
+Sand's aims and ethics, and according to Matthew Arnold, her ruling
+idea was, that this ordinary human life of love and suffering was
+destined to be raised, into an ideal life, and _that_ ideal life is
+our real life. Matthew Arnold has written one of his most beautiful
+and eloquent and touching essays in this record of his impressions and
+estimate of George Sand. Well does he say that "her passions and her
+errors have been abundantly talked of." She left them behind her, and
+men's memory of them will leave them behind also.
+
+There will remain the sense of benefit and stimulus from that large
+and frank nature, that large and pure utterance. Matthew Arnold gives
+three principal elements in her strain. Instead of the hopeless echo
+of unrealised ideas we hear from her the evolution of character: "1,
+Through agony, and revolt; 2, Through consolation from nature and
+beauty; 3, Through sense of the Divine ('Je fus toujours tourmenté des
+choses divines') and social renewal, she passes into the great life
+motif of her existence;" that the sentiment of the ideal life is none
+other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it. Matthew
+Arnold saw George Sand in his enthusiastic youth when she was in the
+serenity and dignity of middle age at Nohant.
+
+Browning came across her in her journalistic career in Paris, and he
+was not touched with the same admiration.
+
+Mr. Chesterton suggests in his biography of the poet that Browning was
+conventional by nature--and through the greatness of his brain he
+developed. He certainly developed on many sides, but his development
+did not include admiration for George Sand and her circle. It was
+social tone, his biographer believes, more than _opinions_, which
+created this strong aversion in the author of "The Statue and the
+Bust."
+
+But Mrs. Browning, though her life had been mainly one long seclusion
+on her sofa, was unhampered by these conventional barriers. What she
+felt was the attraction of the massive and fascinating brain and heart
+of the great French woman, what she heard was "that eloquent voice,"
+what she saw was "that noble, that speaking head." She had warm, quick
+sympathies and intuitional appreciations of genius. In regard to so
+wide and so complicated a character as George Sand's, we cannot be
+astonished at finding very different judgments and impressions; indeed
+we are prepared to feel in all of them some note of inadequacy and of
+incompleteness. But in our relation to her as a Great Writer, of this,
+as readers, we are assured, we _know_ that it is no common matter to
+have come into contact with so gifted and great a nature, with a
+genius that possessed "a current of true and living ideas," and which
+produced "amid the inspiration of them."
+
+
+
+
+NOTES:
+
+
+
+[1: 1886. "Mind" Vol. 11. "The need of a Society for experimental
+Psychology."]
+
+[2: 1888. "Mind" Vol. 13. "The Psychological Laboratory at Leipsic."]
+
+[3: Essays. On the genius and tendency of the writings of Thomas
+Carlyle. "The Camelot Series."]
+
+[4: See supplementary notice of "Hamlet" in Charles Knight's Pictorial
+Edition of Shakespeare.]
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Cobwebs of Thought, by Arachne
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Cobwebs of Thought
+
+Author: Arachne
+
+Release Date: October 16, 2004  [eBook #13766]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COBWEBS OF THOUGHT***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Clare Boothby, Keith M. Eckrich, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+COBWEBS OF THOUGHT
+
+by
+
+"ARACHNE"
+
+London
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+  I. OUR IGNORANCE OF OURSELVES
+
+ II. CONTRASTS
+
+III. MAETERLINCK ON HAMLET
+
+ IV. AN IMPOSSIBLE PHILOSOPHY
+
+  V. IMPRESSIONS OF GEORGE SAND
+
+
+
+
+MOTTO.
+
+
+"The first philosophers, whether Chaldeans or Egyptians, said there
+must be something within us which produces our thought. That something
+must be very subtle: it is breath; it is fire, it is ether; it is a
+quintessence; it is a slender likeness; it is an intelechia; it is a
+number; it is harmony; lastly, according to the divine Plato, it is a
+compound of the _same_ and the _other_! It is atoms which think in us,
+said Epicurus after Democritus. But, my friend, how does an atom
+think? Acknowledge that thou knowest nothing of the matter."
+                                                           --VOLTAIRE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+
+OUR IGNORANCE OF OURSELVES.
+
+
+Self-Analysis, apart from its scientific uses, has seldom rewarded
+those who have practised it. To probe into the inner world of motive
+and desire has proved of small benefit to any one, whether hermit,
+monk or nun, indeed it has been altogether mischievous in result,
+unless the mind that probed, was especially healthy. Bitter has been
+the dissatisfaction, both with the process, and with what came of it,
+for being miserably superficial it could lead to no real knowledge of
+self, but simply centred self on self, producing instead of
+self-knowledge, self-consciousness, and often the beginnings of mental
+disease.
+
+For fruitful self analysis it is apparently necessary then to have a
+clear, definite aim outside self--such as achieving the gain of some
+special piece of knowledge, and we find such definite aims in
+psychology, and certain systems of philosophy--Greek, English, and
+German, in Plato Locke, Kant, and in the meditations of Descartes, and
+many others. Self-analysis is the basis of psychological knowledge,
+but the science has been chiefly used to explain the methods by which
+we obtain knowledge of the outer world in relation to ourselves. When
+a philosopher centres self on self, in order to know self as a result
+of introspection, the results have been disastrous, and have
+contributed nothing to knowledge, properly so-called. If religious
+self-examination has its dangers, so also has philosophical
+self-analysis for its own sake. It is a fascinating study for those
+who care for thought for thought's sake--the so-called Hamlets of the
+world, who are for ever revolving round the axes of their own ideas
+and dreams, and who never progress towards any clear issue. Amiel's
+"Vie Intime" is a study of this kind. It adds nothing to any clear
+knowledge of self, absorbing and interesting as the record is. It is
+suggestive to a great degree, and in that lies its value, but it is as
+vague, as it is sad. It appeals deeply to those who live apart in a
+world of their own, in thoughtful imaginative reverie, but its effects
+on the mind were deplored even by Amiel himself in words which are
+acutely pathetic. The pain which consumed him arose from the
+concentration of self on self. Self was monopolised by self,
+self-consciousness was produced, though without a touch of selfish
+egoism.
+
+Out of this self-conscious introspection, grew that sterility of soul
+and mind, that dwindling of capacity, and individuality, which Amiel
+felt was taking place within him. A constant, aimless, inevitable
+habit of self-introspection was killing his mental life, before the
+end came physically.
+
+Another philosophical victim to the same habit was John Stuart Mill,
+at one time of his life. His father analysed almost everything, except
+himself, and John Stuart Mill had grown up in this logical atmosphere
+of analysis, and to much profit as his works show. But when he turned
+the microscope on his own states of feeling, and on the aims of his
+life, the result was melancholia--almost disease of mind. His grandly
+developed faculty of analysis when devoted to definite knowledge
+outside himself, produced splendid results, as in his Logic, and his
+Essays, but when he analysed himself, he gained no additional
+knowledge, but a strange morbid horror that all possible musical
+changes might be exhausted, and that there might be no means of
+creating fresh ones. He also feared that should all the reforms he,
+and others, worked for, be accomplished, the lives of the reformers
+would become meaningless and blank, since they were working for means,
+not ends in themselves. Out of this hopeless mental condition there
+was only one outlet possible, and that was to leave self-analysis of
+this sort alone for ever, and to throw himself into its direct
+contrary, the unconscious life of the emotions. John Stuart Mill did
+this, and it saved him. In Wordsworth's poetry he found sanity and
+healing. Happily for him that was not the age of Browning's "Fifine at
+the Fair." Had he fallen in with dialectical analysis in the garb of
+poetry, it must have killed him!
+
+And yet "Know thyself" has always been considered supremely excellent
+advice, as true for our time, as for the age of Socrates. It certainly
+is disregarded by most of us, as fully as it was by many of the
+Greeks, whom Socrates interrogated so ruthlessly. Is there then a sort
+of self-analysis, which can be carried out for its own sake, and which
+can be, at the same time, of vital use? Is all self-analysis when
+practised for its own sake necessarily harmful, and unprofitable? It
+is time to ask these questions if we are ever to know how to analyse
+ourselves with profit, if we are ever to know ourselves. And we none
+of us do. As students, we are content with every other knowledge but
+this. After all the self probing of the religious and philosophical,
+during long centuries, what have we learned? Truly to ourselves, we
+are enigmas. To know everything else except the self that knows, what
+a strange position! But it is our condition. The one thing that we do
+not know--that we feel as if we never could know is the Self in us.
+Our characters, our powers, our natures, our being--what are they? Our
+faculties--what can we do? And what can we not do? What is the reason
+of this faculty, or that want of faculty? We have never reached an
+understanding of ourselves, which makes us not only know, but perceive
+what we are capable of knowing; which makes us aware, not only that we
+can do something, but why we can do it. We are an unknown quantity to
+ourselves. We can calculate on a given action in a machine, but we
+cannot calculate on our own, much less on our moods. If we would but
+take half the trouble to understand ourselves that we take to study a
+science or art--if we could learn to depend on the sequence of our own
+thoughts as an engineer can on the sequence of movements in his steam
+engine--if we could dig, and penetrate into the depths of our own
+being, as a miner penetrates into a seam of coal--we might then
+cultivate with some profit our own special lines of thought, our own
+gifts, that portion of individuality, which we each possess. But it is
+so difficult to get to know it--we are always on the surface of
+ourselves. What power will unearth our self and make us really know
+what we are and what we can do? It is because we do not know
+ourselves, that we fail so hopelessly to give the things which are of
+incalculably real worth to the world, such as fresh individuality, and
+reality of character. Among millions of beings how few exist who
+possess strong original minds! We are _not_ individual for the most
+part, and we are _not_ real. Our lives _are_ buried lives; we are
+unconscious absorbers, and reproducers, under other words of that
+which we have imbibed elsewhere. We need not only fresh expressions of
+old statements, but actually new ideas, and new conceptions. (The
+fresh _subjects_ people talk about, are really fresh _conceptions_ of
+subjects.) We shall never get this bloom of freshness, and this sense
+of reality and individuality of view unless we cultivate their
+soil--to have fresh ideas, we must encourage the right atmosphere in
+which alone they can live. We must not let our own personality,
+however slight, be suppressed, or be discouraged, or interfered with
+by a more powerful, or a more excellent personality.
+
+Individuality is so weak and pliable a thing in most of us that it is
+very easily checked--it requires watchfulness and care, and not to be
+overborne, for the smallest individual thought of a mind of any
+originality, is more worth to the world than any re-expression of the
+thought of some other mind, however great.
+
+Even the "best hundred books" may have a disastrous effect upon us.
+They may kill some aspirations, if they kindle others. Persons of
+mature age may surely at some time have made the discovery that much
+has been lost through the dominating influence of a superior mind.
+Many persons, for instance, have felt the great influence of Carlyle,
+and Ruskin, in their youth. Carlyle could do incalculable good to some
+minds by his ethics of work, but irremediable harm to others; minds
+have actually become stunted and sterile through that part of his
+teaching, which was unsuited to them. Carlyle's temperament checked
+their proper development. Youth has a beautiful capacity for trust and
+belief, and it accepts everything as equal in goodness and truth from
+an author it reverences. The young do not know enough of themselves,
+and they do not trust enough to their own instincts to discriminate.
+They are dominated and unconsciously suppressed. Ruskin, in his
+ethical views of art, and strange doctrines about some old masters,
+has done nearly as much harm to susceptible minds as Carlyle. Ruskin
+restricted and perverted their art ideals on certain lines as Carlyle
+crushed ethical discrimination. Mind have been kept imprisoned for
+years, and their development on the lines nature intended them to
+take, has been arrested, by the want of belief in their own
+initiative. What was inevitable for Ruskin's unique mind was yet wrong
+for readers, who agreed to all his theories under the influence of his
+fascinating personality, and through the power of his individuality.
+In life, we sometimes find we have made a series of mistakes of this
+sort, before at last we get glimmerings of what we were intended to
+be, and we learn at last the need of having known ourselves, and the
+vital necessity of cultivating the atmosphere and colour of that mind
+of ours, which has been used merely as a tool to know everything else.
+
+Spiritualists and Theosophists talk of a Dominant Self, and an Astral
+body, and of gleams of heavensent insight. Gleams of insight and
+dreams do come to us, and teach us truths, which "never can be
+proved," and without some such intuitions the soul of man would indeed
+be poor,
+
+  The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
+  Hath had elsewhere its setting,
+  And cometh from afar.
+
+But the value of the intuitions is relative to the soul which has
+them; they cannot be conveyed to any one else, or demonstrated; they
+can never become Truths valid to all minds. And these last are the
+truths we want if we would make some orderly progress towards a given
+issue. And so we resort after all, to science, to see if it can solve
+the intellectual riddle of our being. What can it do for us? If we
+would really know ourselves, we want a depth of self-analysis; not a
+pitiful search for motives, not the superficial probings of a
+moralist, not the boundless, limitless, self-absorbed speculations on
+the nature of self of the philosopher, not the sympathetic noting of
+each emotion that crosses the horizon of the soul--the introspection
+of the Poet; these will never teach us the reason why we think and
+feel on certain lines, and not on others--these will never explain to
+us what the mind is, that is in us--what that strange thing is, which
+we have tried so vainly to understand. And without this knowledge how
+worthless is the work of the moralist; of what practical use is it for
+him to endeavour to alter a man's character, when he does not even
+know the ingredients that constitute character, still less the cause
+why character is good or bad. Mr. Robert Buchanan said in one of his
+essays: "I can advance no scientific knowledge for seeing a great
+genius in Robert Browning, or a fine painstaking talent in George
+Eliot, for thinking George Meredith almost alone in his power of
+expressing personal passion, and Walt Whitman supreme in his power of
+conveying moral stimulation. I can take a skeleton to pieces
+scientifically, but not a living soul. I am helpless before Mr.
+Swinburne, or any authentic poet, but quite at my ease before Macaulay
+or Professor Aytoun." Mr. Buchanan could presumably take the last two
+to pieces and analyse them as if they were skeletons; but before
+Swinburne, "the living soul," he is helpless. Now we want a scientific
+reason for all this; we want to analyse, not the skeleton, that has
+been done often enough, but "the living soul." We want to know the
+ingredients of character that constituted Mr. Buchanan's preferences.
+What composition gave him his special temper and character? Why did
+his mind tend towards Robert Browning, and away from George Eliot? Why
+in short did his mind work in the way it did? The more original the
+mind, the more its investigation would repay us. But it must be
+self-investigation; what we want are facts of mind, mental data and in
+order to get them, we must investigate the living mind All the usual
+explanations of Temperament, Nature, Heredity, Education are the same
+difficulties, expressed in different words. Heredity is a
+circumstance, which has to be reckoned with, but we have to
+investigate, not circumstances, but results. Here is a living complex
+mind, no matter how I inherit it, here it is; now then, how does it
+work, what can I do with it? And then comes the further inevitable
+question--What is it? What is this thing, this me, which tends to feel
+and act in a certain direction--to admire spontaneously, this, and to
+despise with as perfect ease, that. What we need for scientific
+investigation into the ME is "to utilise minds so as to form a living
+laboratory" _Mind_ vivisection without torture, cruelty or the knife.
+What we want to know definitely from science is: How does this thing
+which I call my mind work? Science regards mind as the sum of
+sensations, which are the necessary results of antecedent causes. It
+endeavours to know how and in what way these sensations can be trained
+and perfected. Nearly twenty years ago, a writer in the Psychological
+Journal "Mind"[1] Mr. J. Jacobs, attempted to form a Society for the
+purpose of experimental psychology. Thinkers and scientific men have
+carried out this work, but the general public has not been greatly
+interested or interested for any length of time. No such society
+exists among the English public. The greater number of enthusiastic
+students is to be found in Italy and America. But Germany has
+furnished great individual workers, such as Fechner, Helmholtz, and
+Wundt. Collective investigation was necessary to separate individual
+peculiarities from general laws. Science of course aims at changing
+the study of individual minds/into "a valid science of mind." Mr. J.
+Jacobs wished a Society to be organised for the purpose of measuring
+mind, measuring our senses, and for testing our mental powers as
+accurately as weight and height are tested now, and also for
+experimenting on will practice. He believed it possible to train the
+will on one thing until we got it perfectly under control, and in so
+doing we should modify character immensely. If this proved possible,
+we ought to persevere until conduct becomes an art, education a
+principle, and mind is known as a science is known. Mr. Jacobs wanted
+systematic enquiries to be made into powers of attention, such as "Can
+we listen and read at the same time, and reproduce what we have read
+and heard." And into the faculties of observation and memory, with
+after images, and the capacity for following trains of reasoning,
+&c., &c., "When we read a novel, do we actually have pictures of the
+scenes before our minds?" Mr. Jacobs wished for enquiries into every
+kind of intelligence ordinary and extraordinary; out of all
+ingredients of character, out of early impressions, out of classified
+emotions to build up an answer to the question: "Is there a science
+of mind?" Since he wrote, much has been done in experiment by the
+scientific. Children's minds are constantly being investigated, and
+the results given to the public. Mr. Galton has to some extent
+popularised this sort of investigation. But it is still generally
+unpopular. Novelists, and artists, leisured people, women, everyone
+could be of use, if they would investigate themselves, or offer their
+minds for investigation. But after all that the scientific French,
+German, American, Italian, and English workers have done, we are as
+yet only on the threshold of mind knowledge--of what we might know--if
+we had ardour enough to push self-analysis in to the remotest corner
+of the brain, noting down, comparing, tabulating the most involuntary
+and ethereal sublimities that appear to flit through the mind, the
+most subtle emotion that hardly finds expression in language. We must
+push on and on till we arrive at the knowledge of a mind science. Our
+scientific enquirers want, as we all do, more ardour, they are dulled
+by a cold, uninterested public. Psychologists now seem to despair of
+obtaining any large results from the science. Mr. E.W. Scripture in
+"The New Psychology" says, in 1897, "It cannot dissect the mind with a
+scalpel, it cannot hope to find a startling principle of mental life."
+If psychological experiment could be presented somewhat apart from its
+technicalities, and if minds could play freely round its discoveries,
+how much more interesting it would be felt to be by the general
+public! The great experimental worker, Mr. J. Mck Cattell has given[2]
+some clear idea of the results he obtained by analysing and measuring
+sensations. The physical processes, which accompany sensations of
+sound and light for instance, unlike as they must be to sensations,
+being facts of matter in motion, yet share with them this
+characteristic, that sensations also have each an _order in time_, the
+mental processes can be measured, equally with the physical. Of course
+measuring sensations is only measuring "the outside of the mind"--but
+it produces among others one very suggestive result: "that as time is
+relative, if all things moved much more slowly or quickly than at
+present, we should not feel any change at all. But if our objective
+measures of time moved twice as fast, whilst physiological movements
+and mental processes went on at the same rate as now, the days of our
+years would be seven score, instead of three score years and ten, yet
+we should not be any the older, or live any the longer. If on the
+other hand the rate of our physiological and mental motions was
+doubled and we lived exactly as many years as before, we should feel
+as if we lived twice as long and were twice as old as now." This is a
+suggestion for Mr. Well's "Anticipations" Is evolution leading us in
+this direction or the other? Is it retarding or "quickening the
+molecular arrangements of the nervous system?" Are we becoming "more
+delicately balanced so that physical changes proceed more quickly as
+thoughts become more comprehensive, feelings more intense, and will,
+stronger." Does the time it needs to think, feel, and will become
+less? And we may add are the physical and mental processes of the
+intelligent brain, quicker, or slower than the unintelligent? For if
+it is the sensitive quick witted organisation, which is destined to
+live twice as long as it does now, how will it bear the burden of such
+added years? Leaving aside inquiries into Time, and Space Sense--(and
+what enormous faculty our minds must have that can supply these)--let
+us go on to Mr. J. McKeen Cattell's analysis of memory--which is
+perhaps the most interesting of all to the student of mind--the
+analysis of memory, attention and association of ideas. Just as the
+eye can only see (attend to) a certain number of vibrations, for if
+the requisite amount is added to, the result is blankness, darkness,
+so the mind can only attend to a certain amount of complexity--add to
+the complexity and attention ceases, but, a certain degree of
+complexity is necessary to produce any conscious attention at all. In
+experiments with a Metronome and the ticking of a watch, it is found
+the attention at certain intervals gets weaker--from 2 to 3 seconds.
+The impression produced by the ticking of the watch is less distinct,
+it seems to disappear and then is heard again. "This is not from
+fatigue in the sense organ," but apparently represents "a natural
+rhythm in consciousness or attention," which interferes with the
+accuracy of attention. What a suggestive fact this is! Have we not all
+at times, felt an inexplicable difficulty in listening and attending
+to certain speakers, which may perhaps be explained by a difference
+between the rhythm of our own consciousness, and that of the voice of
+the speaker. In Association of Ideas the time that it takes for one
+idea to suggest another has been determined, but of course, it must be
+the average time, for people differ enormously in the speed in which
+ideas occur to them. It is impossible to allude here to more points,
+but in the same interesting article Mr. Mck Cattell considers it
+proved that "experimental methods can be applied to the study of mind,
+and that the positive results are significant," and he hopes, "one
+day, we shall have as accurate and complete a knowledge of mind as we
+have of the physical world." Beyond this knowledge of mind as a
+machine, the Psychologist goeth not. He ends, and what do we know more
+as to what mind is? Philosophy properly so-called, begins here or
+ought to begin. In science we experiment widely and constantly with
+mind and arrive at some knowledge of its workings and capacities; we
+learn occupation with the mind itself as a subject for observation,
+and we practise a self-analysis, which adds to the sum of general
+knowledge. Through this study we know more about our senses and their
+faculties, more of our own tendencies and idiosyncrasies, and in what
+direction they tend. We are on the way to solve some such problems as:
+"the influences of early impressions, the ingredients of character,
+the varying susceptibility to mental anguish, the conquest of the
+will," and many another. These are beginnings--there is much more to
+attain to, if we would know mind even scientifically, for we have only
+attacked its breast works, but we are on the right road, as we
+believe, towards this most interesting of all sciences--Mind Science.
+From Philosophy we do not as yet know definitely that mind _is_, or
+what it is, or why it is. The psychologist accepts the word mind, but
+it is not accepted as a _philosophical_ term; it is called
+Consciousness, Being, Ego, and anything else but mind. Notwithstanding,
+we all feel what we mean by the word. Though the senses divide the
+non-ego, the world outside us, into five separate parcels, things
+seen, things heard, things smelt, things touched, things tasted,
+there is a faculty of unifying, a sensation of unity in us, which
+makes us conscious of all these separate sensations as forming a
+whole in any object which comes into our consciousness. Kant has
+given this unifying faculty, or sensation, a long name, which does
+not make it any clearer. What is this inner power, which unifies
+sensations and how does it come? In some way the mind supplies it to
+its mental states or consciousness. And _within_ us this unifying
+faculty, which we call Mind, is felt through the infinite number of
+modifications of sensations or mental states, for we are aware that
+what we call a mind exists in us. It is this consciousness of unity in
+complexity, which makes memory and identity possible. The exploded
+idea of mental substance and its attributes, held by the School men,
+was probably suggested to them by the consciousness of this mental
+unity. In our mentality there is something which makes each one say
+"My mind," not "My minds." Now it is this unity of sensations, which
+is lost, and the mind with it, if the ego is divided as Professor W.
+James divides it into many egos such as--the inner self--the complex
+self--the social self--the intellectual self--and so on. For how does
+that help us? It is the same unknown quantity in different
+circumstances. The self that ponders in thought, knows itself as the
+same that talks in society. The strange power of being able to analyse
+ourselves at all is one of the strangest things about us. What a world
+of difference lies between the unconscious self of the animal and this
+conscious self of man! Professor James' brilliantly written chapter of
+investigation into the self leaves us amused rather than enlightened.
+Against all arguments to the contrary, we should refuse to give up the
+word mind, whether it is considered vague or defective in any or every
+way. Mind in all its complexity, is what we have to investigate
+scientifically. Mind in all its complexity is what the philosopher has
+to explain, not mind, analysed into simple acts of consciousness. The
+hypnotist talks of double, treble and quadruple personalities with
+totally different characteristics "under suggestion," but it helps us
+little for we have not yet defined mind on its sane and normal sides.
+Considering the acuteness and the sanity of the French mind, it is
+somewhat strange that the French psychologists should devote
+themselves chiefly to the study of the insane and hysterical.
+Philosophy, though it gives us soaring thoughts, grand speculations,
+and metaphysical schemes, from Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer,
+to Herbert Spencer, and Mr. Mallock, cannot give us any knowledge in
+which they mutually agree. Mr. Mallock sums up philosophy as a
+necessity to the mind. We _must_ believe in some theory of mind, some
+religion, some philosophy, else life is dreary and unlivable. This
+appears to be the result of his book "The Veil of the Temple," and
+this is simply the doctrine of utility. But no philosopher, can tell
+us why mind works on certain lines and not on others, because they
+cannot tell us definitely that they _know_ what mind is. Mind is a
+function of _Matter: Matter_ is a function of thought: Mind is
+Noumenon the unseen and unknown, as contrasted with Phenomena the seen
+and known; the universe, the creation of the mind; the mind, the
+product of the universe. All these ideas and many others so widely
+differing can none of them receive a demonstrable proof;--these
+contrary statements show how far we are from possessing any real
+knowledge of what mind is. After all that has been written, elaborated
+and imagined, do we actually _know_ more than Omar Khayam knew?
+
+  "There was the door to which I found no key;
+  There was the veil through which I could not see;
+  Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
+  There was--and then no more of Thee and Me."
+
+Philosophy is still powerless to tell us what mind is; the self, the
+ego always vanishes as we seem to be nearing it, it always eludes our
+deepest probings--we only demonstrate our failure in regard to our
+knowledge of it. All this is true, but should we therefore despair? If
+we are born with the record on the brain of the inexorable desire to
+_know_, the very failure should stimulate us to further, and greater,
+and more fruitful questionings.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+
+CONTRASTS.
+
+
+CARLYLE, GEORGE ELIOT, MAZZINI, BROWNING,
+
+All contrasts drawn between writers, and thinkers should have for aim
+the setting forth of some striking and fundamental difference in
+thought, and it would be hard to find anywhere a greater and a more
+vivid contrast than that between Carlyle and George Eliot. For George
+Eliot's philosophy was centred in the well-being of the Race.
+
+Carlyle's was summed up in the worth of the Individual.
+
+George Eliot teaches in prose and still more in poetry that
+Personality, with its hopes, loves, faiths, aspirations, must all be
+relinquished, and its agonies and pains endured, should Humanity gain
+by the sacrifice and the endurance.
+
+She considers the Individual as part of collective humanity, and that
+he does not live for himself, he has no continuance of personal life,
+he has no permanence, except as a living influence on the Race. This
+is the Positivist creed, the Racial Creed.
+
+Beyond the influence that it exerts, spiritual personality is doomed.
+It is not humanity in God but humanity in itself which is to exist
+from age to age, solely in the memory of succeeding generations.
+
+  "Oh may I join the Choir Invisible
+  Of those immortal dead, who live again
+  In minds made better by their presence."
+
+Permanence and continuance and immortality are in the race alone.
+George Eliot's strong accentuation of the race is the Gospel of
+annihilation to the individual. Yet the most personal and imaginative
+of poets has treated this lofty altruism in his strange, sad,
+beautiful poem of "The Pilgrims," with a fervour greater even than
+that of George Eliot.
+
+Here are two stanzas:
+
+  "And ye shall die before your thrones be won.
+  Yea, and the changed world and the liberal sun
+  Shall move and shine without us and we lie
+  Dead; but if she too move on earth and live,
+  But if the old world with the old irons rent,
+  Laugh and give thanks, shall we not be content?
+  Nay we shall rather live, we shall not die,
+  Life being so little and Death so good to give."
+
+  "Pass on then and pass by us, and let us be.
+  For what life think ye after life to see?
+  And if the world fare better will ye know?
+  And if men triumph, who shall seek you and say?"
+
+  "Enough of light is this for one life's span.
+  That all men born are mortal, but not Man:
+  And we men bring death lives by night to sow,
+  That man may reap and eat and live by day."
+                                              --SWINBURNE.
+
+Turning from the moral grandeur of self-abnegation that fills the
+philosophy of humanity, we feel the contrast of strong human
+personality, which animates us with an inspiring sensation as we
+listen to the prophet of individualism.
+
+Few can have read Carlyle's writings in their youth, without having
+experienced an indescribable and irresistible stimulation, to
+accomplish some real work, to make some strenuous endeavour "before
+the night cometh." Carlyle's contempt for sloth, stings; his bitter
+words are a tonic, they scourge, encourage, and at times plead with
+poetic fervour. "Think of living. Thy life wert thou the pitifullest
+of all the sons of earth is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. _It
+is thy own; it is all thou hast to front Eternity with._ Work then
+like a star unhasting and unresting."
+
+The man's soul, naked through sloth, or clothed through works, has to
+meet its doom, and to bear it as it best can. For Carlyle ignored the
+collective view of mankind, the single soul had to prostrate itself
+before the Supreme Power. This Supreme Power was almost as vague (to
+him) as George Eliot's Permanent Influence is to us. For Carlyle did
+not believe "that the Soul could enter into any relations with God,
+and in the sight of God it was nothing." There is nothing singular in
+this. The religious, but independent-minded Joubert thought "it was
+not hard to know God, provided one did not force oneself to define
+Him," and deprecated "bringing into the domain of reason, that which
+belongs to our innermost feeling."
+
+This very well represented Carlyle's view, but it occupies but a small
+place in his writings. All his books, his letters, pamphlets,
+histories, essays show his profound living belief in the worth of
+individual men, as the salt of the earth, and the young are always
+greatly influenced by strong personalities. But the mature mind that
+struggles after catholicity of taste, and wide admiration, receives
+some rude shocks from Carlyle's treatment of humanity, as Dr. Garnett
+has well shown in his excellent biography of Carlyle; indeed it has
+led with some to the parting of the ways. For the hopes and
+inspirations of poet, reformer, teacher, became in great part to him
+as "the idle chatter of apes" and "the talk of Fools."
+
+Mazzini's world-wide sympathies, his life of many deaths for his
+country, were unintelligible to Carlyle, who also described, as "a
+sawdust kind of talk," John Stuart Mill's expression of belief and
+interest in reforming and raising the whole social mass of toiling
+millions.
+
+Bracing and stimulating, as is Carlyle's strong, stern doctrine of
+independence, of work, and of adherence to Truth for its own sake, we
+feel the loss his character sustained, through the contempt that grew
+upon him for the greater part of humanity. The Nemesis of contempt was
+shown in his inability at last to see even in individuals, the
+greatest things. Physical force came to be admired by him for itself.
+From hero-worship, he passed "to strong rulers, and saviours of
+society."
+
+The worth of the individual, withered and changed, and Carlyle's hopes
+rested finally on strength alone, just as George Eliot's thoughts
+centred on the influence human beings exercised on each other, and
+there is extraordinary beauty in this idea. How striking is her
+conception of the good we all receive from even the simplest lives, if
+they have been true lives. "The growing good of the world is partly
+dependent upon unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with
+you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who
+lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs." But some
+who read her books feel an underlying tone of sadness--a melancholy
+whisper as of a finality, an inevitable end to all future development,
+even of the greatest personalities. Many other writers have believed
+that men live in the world's memory only by what they have done in the
+world, but George Eliot is definite that this memory is all, that
+personality has no other chance of surviving. Her hopes rested on
+being:
+
+  "The sweet presence of a good diffused,
+  And in diffusion ever more intense,
+  So shall I join the Choir Invisible
+  Whose music is the gladness of the world."
+
+Both George Eliot and Carlyle over accentuated one the race, the other
+the individual.
+
+Mazzini's place in thought was exactly between the two.
+
+He believed in God _and_ Collective Humanity. Humanity in God. He
+said: "We cannot relate ourselves to the Divine, but through
+collective humanity. Mr. Carlyle comprehends only the individual; the
+true sense of the unity of the race escapes him. He sympathises with
+men, but it is with the separate life of each man, and not their
+collective life."[3]
+
+Collective labour, according to an educational plan, designed by
+Providence, was, Mazzini believed, the only possible development of
+Humanity.
+
+He could never have trusted in any good and effective development from
+Humanity alone.
+
+Nationality, he reverenced, and widened the idea, until it embraced
+the whole world. He said it was the mission, the special vocation of
+all who felt the mutual responsibility of men. But nationality of
+Italy meant to Carlyle, only "the glory of having produced Dante and
+Columbus," and he cared for them not for the national thought they
+interpreted, but as gigantic men. Mazzini cared for "the progressive
+history of mankind," Carlyle for "the Biography of great men."
+
+Carlyle's sadness "unending sadness," came, Mazzini thought from
+looking at human life only from the individual point of view. And a
+poem by Browning, "Cleon" would have afforded him another example of
+"the disenchantment and discouragement of life," from individualism.
+
+Browning was as great an individualist as Carlyle; he stood as far
+apart from belief in Collective Humanity, and Democracy as Carlyle
+did, though in Italy, he felt the thrill of its nationality, as
+Carlyle did not. But Mazzini might have said also truly of Browning,
+that, with the exception of Italy, "he sympathised with the separate
+life of each man and not with their collective life." The sadness
+Mazzini attributed to Carlyle's strong individualistic point of view,
+ought logically then to have been the heritage of Browning also. _If_
+Mazzini's explanation was the true one, it is another proof of the
+difficulty of tabulating humanity, or of making a science of human
+nature. For the Individualist Browning, far from being remarkable for
+sadness, was the greatest of optimists amongst English poets. He had a
+far wider range of sympathies, than Carlyle, for failure attracted
+him, as much as victory, the Conquered equally with the Conqueror,
+indeed every shade of character interested him. Perhaps he expresses
+through "Cleon" some of his own strongest feelings, his insistence on
+the worth of individuality, his craving for deeper joy, fuller life
+than this world gives, and his horror of the destruction of
+personality. Cleon, the Greek Artist, is indeed "the other side" to
+the poetic altruism of "The Pilgrims" and "The Choir Invisible." Never
+was the yearning for Personal Continuance more vividly and more
+humanly presented. The Greek Artist, without any knowledge of, or
+belief in Immortality, hungers after it. Browning represents him as
+writing to and arguing with the King, who has said:
+
+  "My life......
+  Dies altogether with my brain, and arm,......
+  ....triumph Thou, who dost _not_ go."
+
+And Cleon says if Sappho and AEschylus survive because we sing her
+songs, and read his plays, let them come, "drink from thy cup, speak
+in my place."
+
+Instead of rejoicing in his works surviving he feels the horror of the
+contrast, the life within his works, the decay within his heart. He
+compares his sense of joy growing more acute and his soul's power and
+insight more enlarged and keen, while his bodily powers decay. His
+hairs fall more and more, his hand shakes, and the heavy years
+increase.
+
+He realises:--
+
+  "The horror quickening....
+  The consummation coming past escape,
+  When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy--
+  When all my works wherein I prove my worth,
+  Being present still to mock me in men's mouths,
+  Alive still, in the phrase of such as thou,
+  I, I, the feeling, thinking, acting man,
+  The man who loved his life so over much,
+  Shall sleep in my Urn. . . It is so horrible."
+
+He imagines in his need some future state may be revealed by Zeus.
+
+  "Unlimited in capability
+  For joy, as this is in desire for joy,
+  To seek which the joy hunger forces us:"
+
+He speculates that this life may have been made straight, "to make
+sweet the life at large."
+
+And that we are: "freed by the throbbing impulse we call Death." But
+he ends by fearing that were it possible Zeus must have revealed it.
+
+This passionate pathetic longing for joy, and life beyond death finds
+an echo in many hearts, which yet can admire the grand altruism of
+"The Pilgrims" and the selfless spirit of the Impersonal Martyr. After
+considering all this clash of thought, it seems as if it all resolved
+itself into the individual temperament which settles and modifies and
+adapts to itself the forms of our philosophies and religions, our
+Hopes and Faiths, and Despairs.
+
+For from whence comes the real power thinkers possess over us? It is
+not in their forms of thought, as Matthew Arnold said most truly, but
+in the tendencies, in the spirit which led them to adopt those
+formulas. Every thinker has some secret, an exact object at which he
+aims, which is "the cause of all his work, and the reason of his
+attraction" to some readers, and his repulsion to others.
+
+What was the secret aim then in George Eliot which made her believe so
+firmly in the permanent influence of Humanity, and in the annihilation
+of personal existence? Was the tendency of temperament developed by
+her life and circumstances?
+
+What was it that developed so strong an Individualism in Carlyle and
+Browning and awoke in Browning such unlimited hope, and in Carlyle
+such "unending sadness?"
+
+Why did the darkness and the storm of his life give Mazzini so
+passionate a belief in Humanity, and such an intimate faith in God?
+These and such-like are the problems we should have in our minds as we
+study the works of Great Writers, if we would penetrate into the
+innermost core of their nature, in short, if we would really
+understand them.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+
+MAETERLINCK ON HAMLET.
+
+
+Maeterlinck, in his first essay, "The Treasure of the Humble," is,
+undoubtedly, mystical. He does not argue, or define, or explain, he
+asserts, but even in that book and far more so in his second, "Wisdom
+and Destiny," it is real life which absorbs him as Alfred de Sutro his
+translator points out. In this book "he endeavours in all simplicity
+to tell what he sees." He is a Seer.
+
+Maeterlinck's aim is to show that contrary to the usual idea, what we
+call Fate, Destiny, is not something apart from ourselves, which
+exercises power over us, but is the product of our own souls.
+
+He takes many examples to prove this, of which Hamlet is one. Man,
+said Maeterlinck, is his own Fate in an inner sense; he is superior to
+all circumstances, when he refuses to be conquered by them. When his
+soul is wise and has initiative power, it cannot be conquered by
+external events, and happiness is inevitable to such a soul.
+Maeterlinck asks: Where do we find the fatality in Hamlet? Would the
+evil of Claudius and Queen Gertrude have spread its influence if a
+wise man had been in the Palace? If a dominant, all powerful soul--a
+Jesus--had been in Hamlet's palace at Elsinore, would the tragedy of
+four deaths have happened? Can you conceive any wise man living in the
+unnatural gloom that overhung Elsinore? Is not every action of Hamlet
+induced by a fanatical impulse, which tells him that duty consists in
+revenge alone? And revenge never can be a duty. Hamlet thinks much,
+continues Maeterlinck, but is by no means wise. Destiny can withstand
+lofty thoughts but not simple, good, tender and loyal thoughts. We
+only triumph over destiny by doing the reverse of the evil she would
+have us commit. _No tragedy is inevitable_. But at Elsinore no one had
+vision--no one saw--hence the catastrophe. The soul that saw would
+have made others see. Because of Hamlet's pitiful blindness, Laertes,
+Ophelia, the King, Queen, and Hamlet die. Was his blindness
+inevitable? A single thought had sufficed to arrest all the forces of
+murder. Hamlet's ignorance puts the seal on his unhappiness, and his
+shadow lay on Horatio, who lacked the courage to shake himself free.
+Had there been one brave soul to cry out the truth, the history of
+Elsinore had not been shrouded in horror. All depended not on destiny,
+but on the wisdom of the wisest, and this Hamlet was; therefore he was
+the centre of the drama of Elsinore, for he had no one wiser than
+himself on whom to depend.
+
+Maeterlinck's doctrine of the soul and its power over Destiny is very
+captivating, but it is doubtful if he was fortunate in his choice of
+Hamlet as an example of ignorance and blindness, and of failure to
+conquer fate, through lack of soul-power.
+
+How Hamlet should have acted is not told us, but that it was his duty
+to have given up revenge is clearly suggested. We might, perhaps, sum
+up Hamlet's right course, from the hints Maeterlinck has given us, in
+a sentence. Had he relinquished all idea of revenge and forgiven his
+uncle and mother, he would have ennobled his soul, gained inward
+happiness, spread a gracious calm around and have so deeply influenced
+his wicked relations, that they would have become repentant and
+reformed. Thus his evil Destiny would have been averted and we should
+have had no tragedy of Hamlet. This explanation sounds rather
+conventional and tract-like put into ordinary language, but, indeed,
+Maeterlinck's doctrine might be compressed into a syllogism:--
+
+  All the wise are serene,
+    Hamlet was not serene,
+    Hamlet was not wise.
+
+That is the simple syllogism by which Maeterlinck tests human nature.
+But Hamlet's nature cannot be packed into a syllogism. A Theorist, who
+tries to fit into his theory a peculiar nature cannot always afford to
+understand that nature. The external event that froze Hamlet's soul
+with horror, and deprived it of "transforming power" was a
+supernatural event, not "disease, accident, or sudden death!" The
+mandate laid on his soul was a supernatural mandate, and as Judge Webb
+said in a suggestive and interesting paper: "The Genuine text of
+Shakespeare," October number of the "National Review, 1903," "it was
+utterly impossible for that soul to perform it," or it might be added,
+to cast it aside. He was betrayed by the apparition "into consequences
+as deep as those into which Macbeth was betrayed by the instruments of
+darkness--the witches." We cannot reason about Maeterlinck's thought
+that if expressed "would have arrested all the forces of murder"
+because we do not know what the thought was, nor can any one gauge or
+estimate rightly the power of Hamlet's soul to conquer external
+events, without taking into careful account that the Vision from
+another world came to Hamlet, when he was outraged at the re-marriage
+of his mother and full of emotion that the sudden death of his father
+called forth in his meditative mind.[4] But Maeterlinck never refers
+to anything of this sort. He does not seem to realise what the effects
+of the vision must have been on a complicated character--on "a great
+gentleman in whom the courtier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, were
+all united." Hamlet was _not_ an example of the normal type of the
+irresolute man--but the mandate laid upon his nature, it could not
+perform. The vision was his destiny--for Destiny lay in the nature of
+the mandate, as well as the nature of the man, and unhappiness was
+inevitable; yet Maeterlinck says, "No tragedy is inevitable, the wise
+man can be superior to all circumstances by the initiative of the
+soul. To be able to curb the blind force of instinct is to be able to
+curb external destiny." Did not Hamlet curb his instincts of love for
+Ophelia, and love for books and philosophy, under pressure of the
+great commandment laid upon him? He could not curb the power of his
+intellect--it was too subtle and supreme, but he concealed all else.
+Yet Hamlet could not escape his Destiny, by curbing his instincts. The
+initiative of his soul worked against the duty he had to perform. And
+it was through his "simple, tender, good," thoughts of, and love for
+his father that he kept to his task, and could not "withstand his
+complicated destiny." Maeterlinck is surely wrong, too, in saying
+Hamlet was moved by a fanatical impulse to revenge for he spent his
+life in weighing _pros_, and _cons_, and in combating the idea that he
+must fulfil the duty laid upon him. So unfanatical was he that he even
+doubted at times whether the apparition was his father's spirit. But
+supposing there had been "one brave soul to cry out the truth"
+(Maeterlinck does not say what the truth was); we will suppose that
+Hamlet had resolved to forgive fully and generously, would he, then,
+have gained the fortitude and serenity, which Maeterlinck evidently
+means by inner happiness? Not if he kept a shred of his inner nature.
+Hamlet "saw no course clear enough to satisfy his understanding."
+Could such a nature be serene? But was it unwise? Judicious, wise, and
+witty when at ease; he could not escape the dark moods that made him
+indifferent to the visible world.
+
+"If OEdipus had had the inner refuge of a Marcus Aurelius, what could
+Destiny have done to him?" asks Maeterlinck. Fate we suppose would
+have had no power over him, if he had calmly reasoned over the
+terrible circumstances in which he found himself involved, and if he
+preserved his equanimity to the end, as M. Aurelius would have done.
+Does this prove more than that the two men may have had very different
+temperaments? But, individuality cannot be made to agree with theory,
+and can be tabulated in no _science_ book of humanity. When
+Maeterlinck says, "Hamlet's ignorance puts the seal on his
+unhappiness," we may well ask ignorance of what? Was it ignorance of
+the power of will? Certainly his intellect was greater than his will.
+"He would have been greater had he been less great." The
+"concentration of all the interests that belong to humanity" was in
+Hamlet. Except the gifts of serenity and calmness, what did he lack?
+And because he was not inwardly serene, Maeterlinck considers him
+blind and ignorant. It is strange to connect blindness and ignorance
+with a wit of intellectual keenness, an imagination of a poet, and the
+unflinching questioning of the philosopher. Maeterlinck says: "Hamlet
+thinks much but is by no means wise." How does Hamlet show he had not
+the wisdom of life? Maeterlinck, no doubt, would dwell on his varying
+moods, his subtle melancholy, his nature baffled by a supernatural
+command. If he was not wise how strange he should have said so many
+words of truest wisdom both of Life and Death, "If it be now, 'tis not
+to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet
+it will come; the readiness is all." We feel that Hamlet was "a being
+with springs of thought and feeling and action deeper than we can
+search." But the elements in his nature could not resolve themselves
+into an inner life of calm. Therefore, according to Maeterlinck, he
+was not wise, for he could not conquer his inner fatality--destiny in
+himself. Maeterlinck's ideas are very beautiful, and he writes
+delightfully, but his test of wisdom is questionable, for Hamlet's
+thoughts have captured and invaded and influenced the best minds and
+experiences of thinkers for centuries, How many a Shakespearean reader
+has _felt_ that Hamlet is one of the very wisest of men as well as one
+of the most lovable and attractive! Not his ignorance, but his wisdom
+has borne the test of study and time. He did not bear the tragedy of
+life when the supernatural entered it, with an unshaken soul, but
+ourselves and the realities of life become clearer to us, the more we
+read his thoughts. If "it is _we_ who are Hamlet," as Hazlitt said, it
+is a great tribute to his universality--but a greater one to
+ourselves. Indeed, we learn wisdom, not only from the lucubrations of
+the serene and calm, or from Hamlet, magnificent in thought, acute and
+playful, but also from Hamlet in his mortal struggles, in his deep
+questionings, and his melancholy.
+
+  For wisdom "dwells not in the light alone
+    But in the darkness and the cloud."
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+
+AN IMPOSSIBLE PHILOSOPHY.
+
+
+Philosophers talk of a philosophy of art, ancient and modern. But this
+is unnecessary. Art is always art, or never art, as the case may be;
+whether it is art in the days of Pheidias and Praxitiles, of Rafael,
+or of Turner, or whether it is not art as in the days of its
+degeneration in Greece and Italy. The outward expression of course,
+changes, but it changes through individual and national aptitudes, not
+from Chronology. That indispensable and indescribable thing which is
+of the essence of art, is the same in all times and countries; for art
+is ever young, there is no old, no new, and here is its essential
+difference from science. In its essence, art is neither ancient or
+modern, because it is incapable of progress, it is the expression of
+an illimitable idea. We find before the Christian Era more beautiful
+sculpture than after it. "Ah!" Victor Hugo says in his "William
+Shakespeare," "You call yourself Dante, well! But that one calls
+himself Homer. The beauty of art consists in not being susceptible of
+improvement. A _chef d'oeuvre_ exists once and for ever. The first
+Poet who arrives, arrives at the summit. From Pheidias to Rembrandt
+there is no onward movement. A Savant may out-lustre a Savant, a Poet
+never throws a Poet into the shade. Hippocrates is outrun, Archimides,
+Paracelsus, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, La Place, Pindar not;
+Pheidias not. Pascal, the Savant, is out-run, Pascal, the Writer, not.
+There is movement in art, but not progress. The Frescoes of the
+Sistine Chapel are absolutely nothing to the Metopes of the Parthenon.
+Retrace your steps as much as you like from the Palace of Versailles
+to the Castle of Heidelberg. From the Castle of Heidelberg to the
+Notre Dame of Paris. From the Notre Dame to the Alhambra. From the
+Alhambra to St. Sophia. From St. Sophia to the Coliseum. From the
+Coliseum to the Propyleans. You may recede with ages, you do not
+recede in art. The Pyramids and the Iliad stand on a fore plan.
+Masterpieces have the same level--the Absolute. Once the Absolute is
+reached, all is reached." And Schopenhauer says, "Only true works of
+art have eternal youth and enduring power like nature and life
+themselves. For they belong to no age, but to humanity--they cannot
+grow old, but appear to us ever fresh and new, down to the latest
+ages." Let us disclaim then any such word as Modern in relation to
+art, particularly in relation to a philosophy which has to do with the
+principle and essence of art. Is a Philosophy of Art possible? There
+must be some who will think it is impossible. Have we a philosophy
+that explains such an apparently simple thing as how one knows
+anything--or of simple consciousness? Every philosopher that has
+attempted to explain consciousness or how we know, takes refuge in
+assumptions. At any Philosophical Society, if you ask for the
+explanation of simple Consciousness, the avalanche of answers, each
+differing from the other, will bewilder you. We know the outward
+appearance of an object, of which we say that we know it, but what is
+it _in itself_? Of that we are as much in the dark as we are of the
+mind that knows. We say, each of us--I know, but in philosophy we are
+not clear whether there is a thing that knows. We know we are
+conscious, but we know nothing but that bare fact. We do not know how
+an object swims into our consciousness. We do not know in the
+scientific meaning of knowledge, how we come to know any object. Our
+abysmal ignorance is this, that, of the thing known, and of that which
+knows, and of the process of knowing, we know nothing. Who can tell us
+how the movement of matter in the brain causes what we call thought.
+Is it a cause, or merely a concurrence? When we can know this much,
+then art may have a philosophy in which we can all agree. But, what
+signs are there of even the beginnings of agreement? Certainly art is
+not known as we know a science--perhaps we do not wish it ever to be
+so. And the process of art is as indescribable as the process of
+knowing. The advance we have made in philosophy seems to be this, that
+whereas one philosopher after another according to his temperament has
+thought he knew and has supplied us with hypotheses, and with
+successive clues to the mystery of Being, and with many systems of
+thought, we know now that none of them were adequate to supply even
+initial steps, and so, for the most part, we fall back on the
+knowledge that comes to us from living, from being, from knowing
+appearances, from action, and from feeling; on that position in short
+which Schopenhauer thought so despicable in a human being, _i.e._,
+Refuge in the common sense attitude, and practically the giving up of
+philosophy. The outcome of all the brain work on philosophy, since the
+time of the Greeks, is that despair has entered into our minds of ever
+achieving any knowledge of the _Real_, beneath and beyond Phenomena,
+of a knowledge which _commands_ assent. Can even a Hegel write a
+convincing Philosophy of Art--which implies a philosophy of complex
+knowing and feeling; the feeling or emotion, or sensation, which
+vibrates in music and colour and poetry. Could Hegel himself answer
+this objection: that poetry eludes all tests--that that which you can
+thoroughly explain in any way is not poetry, as Swinburne has said? It
+is the inexplicable, then, which lies at the essence of art and it is
+this, which if there is to be a Philosophy of Art must be its object.
+The Inexplicable must be the object for the thinker with his orderly
+sequences, his logical search for causes and results. It is not that
+artistic feeling is too subtle as a subject; it is that we cannot get
+hold of it at all. It is where? Here, in our emotion, our feeling, our
+imagination; it flies from us and it comes again.
+
+We do not ask for a philosophy of artistic _creations_ (whatever they
+may be, in music, painting, or poetry), for a Philosophy of Art must
+be a philosophy of the artistic _faculty_ that creates, and that
+admires and understands and is absorbed in the creations. Philosophy
+of Art is the philosophy of the creative--receptive qualities. We feel
+these qualities, but we are not able to explain them, we cannot even
+help another to feel them. The capacity comes from within. In
+ourselves is a nameless response to Beauty. All art is an expression
+of the artist thrown out towards a reproduction of some intuitive Idea
+within, and what artist has ever satisfied his inward aspiration? Why
+tell us that harmonies of art may be traced down to the simplest
+lines, and, that at the root, lies an aim of edification? Simplify the
+lines, as we will, let the basis of edification lie at the root of all
+beauty, still the initial question remains unanswered. Why do certain
+lines in a poem, curves of beauty in a statue, colour in a picture,
+produce in us the feelings of beauty and delight? Why does
+edification, if it is such, produce in me, the sense of a nameless
+beauty?
+
+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 aesthetic 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 daemonic 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
+tete a tete 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 AEolian 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.
+
+But however obtained, the first time a mind feels conscious of it, it
+is a revelation, and it may come as an influence from an artist soul.
+George Sand had "l'esprit _libre_ et varie." George Eliot "l'esprit
+fort et pesant." George Sand was widely, wisely, and eminently human.
+She felt deep down in her heart all the social troubles and problems
+of her day--and created some herself! But she was true to the artist
+soul in her--to the belief in an ideal. Art was dormant when she wrote
+disquisitions, and sometimes her social disquisitions are very long
+treatises. But her art was not dormant when from her inmost soul she
+sketched the fate of the Berri peasant whom she loved so well. In the
+introduction to that simple delightful Idyll "La Mare au Diable,"
+which should be read by all social reformers and by all who really
+care for the poor and the causes of poverty, she conveys her
+conceptions of the mission of art towards the oppressed unhappy
+labourer; oppressed and unhappy, because with form robust and
+muscular, with eyes to see, and thoughts that might be cultivated to
+understand the beauty and harmony of colour and sounds, delicacy of
+tone and grace of outline, in a word, the mysterious beauty of the
+world, he, the peasant of Berri, has never under stood the mystery of
+the beautiful and his child will never understand it; the result of
+excessive toil, and extreme poverty. Imperfect and condemned to
+eternal childhood, George Sand recounts his life, touching gently his
+errors, and with deep sympathy entering into his trials and griefs.
+And a deeper ignorance, she adds, is one that is born of knowledge
+which has stifled the sense of beauty. The Berri peasant has no
+monopoly in ignorance of beauty, and intimate knowledge of toil and
+extreme poverty, but not many of us feel with the peasant's fate, as
+George Sand felt it. She never ceased to care for the cause of social
+progress, just as she was always heart and soul an artist. George
+Eliot has written words "to the reader" about the ruined villages on
+the Rhone. In "The Mill on the Floss," she writes, and again the
+remarkable difference between the two writers appears as forcibly as
+in the two prefaces. "These dead tinted, hollow-eyed skeletons of
+villages on the Rhone, oppress me with the feeling that human
+life--very much of it--is a narrow ugly grovelling existence, which
+even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its
+bare vulgarity of conception, and I have a cruel conviction that the
+lives, of which these ruins are the traces were part of a gross sum of
+obscure vitality that will be swept into the same oblivion with the
+generations of ants and beavers." George Eliot saw in imagination
+these unhappy and oppressed peasants with clear, unsparing eyes. She
+was right in calling her conviction "Cruel," for she saw merely the
+outside of the sordid lives of oppressive narrowness, which seemed to
+irritate her, these lives of dull men and women out of keeping with
+the earth on which they lived. She never alluded to any possible
+explanatory causes, such as excessive toil and extreme poverty, which
+if she had realised, as George Sand realised them, would have brought
+the tender touch of sympathy with individual lives and griefs that we
+find so often in George Eliot's novels. But George Sand could _never_
+have written of any peasants as "part of a gross sum of obscure
+vitality," because she could never have felt towards them in that way.
+She was too imaginative and tender. She did not look at the peasantry
+"en masse"--but individually, and loved the Berri peasants
+individually, as they loved and adored her. Her artistic sense and her
+humanity illumined her view of them, and she saw their latent
+possibilities, and knew why they were only latent. She knew indeed,
+many--if not all kinds of humanity. Once it is recorded she said to
+Pere Lacordaire, "You have lived with Saints and Angels. I have lived
+with men and women, and I could tell you (and we may well think she
+could) some things you do not know." She had indeed run through the
+gamut of feeling, and it was in one of those moments when her
+experiences of life were overwhelming her--that she exclaimed "J'ai
+trop bu la vie." But her gift of genius kept her always vivifying. She
+never depresses. From her first years at Nohant to the end of her long
+life, she was always _alive_. In the political troubles of 1848, when
+she wrote of herself as "navre jusqu 'au fond de l'ame par les orages
+exterieurs," and as trying to find in solitude if not calm and
+philosophy, at least a faith in ideas, her soul shrank from blood shed
+on both sides. "It needed a Dante," she thought, "with his nerves, and
+temper, and tears to write a drama full of groans and tortures. It
+needed a soul tempered with iron, and with fire, to linger in the
+imagination over horrors of a symbolic Hell, when before one's very
+eyes is the purgatory of desolation on the earth." But "as a weaker
+and gentler artist," George Sand saw what her mission was in those
+evil times;--it was to distract the imagination from them, towards
+"tenderer sentiments of confidence, of friendship, and of kindness."
+Her political and social hopes and aims were always dear to her, but
+to interpret nature, to live the quiet life of the affections were the
+phases of her middle life. And so she wrote a "sweet song" in prose,
+one of the most delightful of her Bergeries, "La Petite Fadette." It
+was her contribution to the hatreds and agitations of the time--she
+gave a refuge to the souls that could accept it--an "Ideal of calmness
+and innocence and reverie." "La Petite Fadette" and "Le Meunier
+d'Angibault" reveal her fascinating intelligence and her idyllic
+imagination. "Le Meunier d'Angibault," she tells us, was the result of
+a walk, a meeting, a day of leisure, an hour of _far niente_, followed
+by Reverie, that play of the imagination which, clothes with beauty
+and perfects, and interprets, the isolated and small events and facts
+of life. There are books of hers in early life that are simply
+self-revelations--outpourings of her indignations. She is not at her
+best in these. "Indiana," written in her age of revolt, is too
+obviously a pamphlet to reveal her passionate hatred of marriage. In
+it she looked on marriage as "un malheur insupportable." But
+"Consuelo," "La Comtesse de Rudolstadt," "Lettres d'un voyageur,"
+Lelia, Spiridion, Valvedre, Valentine, "History of her Life and
+letters," and many other books reveal her agonies and agitations, her
+hope and power, her love of beauty both outward and inward as
+represented in Consuelo herself, who is contrasted with the mere
+beautiful "animal" Anzoleto, the artist in his lowest form. He cared
+only for physical loveliness, he was a great child, who needed nothing
+but amusement, emotion and beauty. But George Sand herself felt the
+delight of existence. She says of Joy "It is the great uplifter of
+men, the great upholder. For life to be fruitful, life must be felt as
+a blessing." In all she wrote we feel the rare charm of perfect ease
+and naturalness, combined with the cadences of beauty. We never feel
+that she is "posing." And yet the author of the bitter attack "Lui et
+elle," accused her of continual "posing." Edonard de Musset wrote with
+an envenomed pen, (but we must remember he was defending a brother),
+in that strange literary duel between him and George Sand. Alfred de
+Musset had accused her of assuming the maternal "pose" towards poets
+and musicians who adored her, whilst she absorbed their loves and
+lives and then deserted them. It is certainly very striking how her
+strong vitality seemed to sway and overpower some of those with whom
+she came in contact. She was the oak, and the others were the ivy.
+When they were torn apart, the oak was scarred but not irreparably
+injured, it was the ivy that was destroyed. In, "Elle et Lui," George
+Sand claims that hers was a protecting love for the wayward, gifted
+child of art, the poet whose ingratitude she bore with, whose nerves
+she soothed, and whom she cared for and nursed in illness. Kindly time
+throws a softening veil over the acutest differences, and the clash of
+temperaments, even where they remain inexplicable. But the answer to
+Alfred de Musset's reproaches must be looked for not in one book, but
+in the whole tenor of her life. Does this show that her maternal
+attitude was a "pose." It is often said that women are born wives or
+born mothers. George Sand was undeniably a born _mother_. Mrs.
+Oliphant resembled her in this respect. They both show the deep
+passion of maternity in books and autobiographies and letters. Both
+were devoted to their children, there was no company they cared for in
+comparison, and they spared neither trouble or time in their
+interests. But George Sand cared much, not only for her children but
+for the peasants--for the poor and oppressed. Yes, and for the poets,
+the painters--the singers and the musicians, with their temperaments
+of genius, their loves, jealousies, and their shattered nerves. For
+upwards of six years she treated Chopin with a mother's care; she had
+the passion of maternity in her towards them all, with whatever
+feelings it may have been complicated in her life of manifold
+experiences and with her artist temperament. She may have leant
+heavily on it at times, it may have served as a weapon of defence when
+she was attacked, and used thus it may well have suggested a "pose."
+But however used, whatever the purpose--that the maternal instinct was
+strong in her there is no denying. To explain definitely her social
+and personal moral standards requires a biography that has not yet
+been written. Socially she had a hatred of feudalism, of religious and
+military despotism. She sympathised with and helped the aspirations
+towards a wider, a more humane view of a social system, and fraternal
+equality and social liberty were to her holy doctrines. Perhaps fully
+to understand George Sand from within may require the genius of a
+French mind and one of her own generation; for the French of the
+present day neither study her, or appear to care much for her books.
+Her letters should aid in giving a discriminating record of her
+intense and intricate life as viewed from within, and the ideas on
+which that life was lived. What then were the leading principles, and
+what was the force in George Sand, which while conquering life and
+harmonising it enabled her to realise herself? If heredity influences
+moral standards the mystery certainly is whence George Eliot derived
+not her morality, but her "fire of insurgency." It is not difficult to
+account for it in George Sand when we remember her mother's life and
+temperament, and her own early years. Her father was a good soldier,
+but had also many literary gifts. George Sand herself said: "Character
+is hereditary, if my readers wish to know me, they must know my
+father." George Eliot's creed and pervading view of life was the
+supreme responsibility of it, and the inevitableness of the struggles
+of the spirit warring against the senses. Her ideal is attainment
+through great trial. George Sand, the born hater of conventions,
+developed life into a harmony. We feel ultimately in her, a sense of
+peculiar serenity and peace, of self realisation, more akin perhaps to
+Plato's ideal of a character in harmony with itself, whose various
+impulses are so attuned that they form practically a single desire and
+this desire satisfies all the forces of the nature. What was this
+desire that was involved in the whole aim or system of George Sand's
+life? The ethical poet who affirmed emphatically that "conduct was
+three-fourths of life," expressed the highest admiration of George
+Sand's aims and ethics, and according to Matthew Arnold, her ruling
+idea was, that this ordinary human life of love and suffering was
+destined to be raised, into an ideal life, and _that_ ideal life is
+our real life. Matthew Arnold has written one of his most beautiful
+and eloquent and touching essays in this record of his impressions and
+estimate of George Sand. Well does he say that "her passions and her
+errors have been abundantly talked of." She left them behind her, and
+men's memory of them will leave them behind also.
+
+There will remain the sense of benefit and stimulus from that large
+and frank nature, that large and pure utterance. Matthew Arnold gives
+three principal elements in her strain. Instead of the hopeless echo
+of unrealised ideas we hear from her the evolution of character: "1,
+Through agony, and revolt; 2, Through consolation from nature and
+beauty; 3, Through sense of the Divine ('Je fus toujours tourmente des
+choses divines') and social renewal, she passes into the great life
+motif of her existence;" that the sentiment of the ideal life is none
+other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it. Matthew
+Arnold saw George Sand in his enthusiastic youth when she was in the
+serenity and dignity of middle age at Nohant.
+
+Browning came across her in her journalistic career in Paris, and he
+was not touched with the same admiration.
+
+Mr. Chesterton suggests in his biography of the poet that Browning was
+conventional by nature--and through the greatness of his brain he
+developed. He certainly developed on many sides, but his development
+did not include admiration for George Sand and her circle. It was
+social tone, his biographer believes, more than _opinions_, which
+created this strong aversion in the author of "The Statue and the
+Bust."
+
+But Mrs. Browning, though her life had been mainly one long seclusion
+on her sofa, was unhampered by these conventional barriers. What she
+felt was the attraction of the massive and fascinating brain and heart
+of the great French woman, what she heard was "that eloquent voice,"
+what she saw was "that noble, that speaking head." She had warm, quick
+sympathies and intuitional appreciations of genius. In regard to so
+wide and so complicated a character as George Sand's, we cannot be
+astonished at finding very different judgments and impressions; indeed
+we are prepared to feel in all of them some note of inadequacy and of
+incompleteness. But in our relation to her as a Great Writer, of this,
+as readers, we are assured, we _know_ that it is no common matter to
+have come into contact with so gifted and great a nature, with a
+genius that possessed "a current of true and living ideas," and which
+produced "amid the inspiration of them."
+
+
+
+
+NOTES:
+
+
+
+[1: 1886. "Mind" Vol. 11. "The need of a Society for experimental
+Psychology."]
+
+[2: 1888. "Mind" Vol. 13. "The Psychological Laboratory at Leipsic."]
+
+[3: Essays. On the genius and tendency of the writings of Thomas
+Carlyle. "The Camelot Series."]
+
+[4: See supplementary notice of "Hamlet" in Charles Knight's Pictorial
+Edition of Shakespeare.]
+
+
+
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