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!