Cobwebs of Thought

by Arachne

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.