Cobwebs of Thought Part 2

"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 circ.u.mstances 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 apt.i.tudes, 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-l.u.s.tre 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 a.s.sumptions. 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 att.i.tude, 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_ a.s.sent. 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 a.s.sociations, but it is more than a.s.sociations. 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 att.i.tude, 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 ill.u.s.trate Schopenhauer's meaning. And Shakespeare offers us incomparable examples. In his great tragedies--such as Oth.e.l.lo, 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, ill.u.s.trating 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 _Oth.e.l.lo_, 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 circ.u.mscribed lives, out of our limitation of thought, we know not how, into an atmosphere quivering with pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sionately 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 circ.u.mstance.

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 n.o.ble nature of Oth.e.l.lo, 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 Oth.e.l.lo'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 Oth.e.l.lo 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, Oth.e.l.lo gives the only outlet possible to the blinding, scathing storm of pa.s.sions 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 Oth.e.l.lo 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 ma.n.u.script. 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 n.o.bly 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 Oth.e.l.lo--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 n.o.ble 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_ Oth.e.l.lo--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, n.o.ble 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sociations 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 pa.s.sionate 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 att.i.tude 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.n.a.lysing 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 pa.s.s. 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 b.u.t.terflies. I could tell you exactly every expedition we made, each amus.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sing impulse resulted in a work of art of the touching beauty of "La Derniere Aldini." So una.n.a.lytic 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 circ.u.mstances 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 ma.s.se"--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 h.e.l.l, 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 Pet.i.te 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 Pet.i.te 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 pa.s.sionate 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 a.s.suming 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 ingrat.i.tude 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sions 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 princ.i.p.al 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 pa.s.ses 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.