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.]