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.
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