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