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 a