"But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality."
It is as if, says Schopenhauer, when genius appears in an individual, a far greater measure of the power of knowledge falls to his lot than is necessary for ordinary men. This excess of knowledge, being free, now becomes subject purified from will, a clear mirror of the inner nature of the world.
Imagination is an essential element in genius, and it is a necessary condition that it should be possessed in an extraordinary degree. Imagination extends the horizon far beyond the limits of actual personal experience, and so enables the artist to construct the whole dream, the complete vision, out of the little that comes into his own actual apperception.
The actual objects are almost always but imperfect copies of the ideas expressed in them. Therefore the artist requires imagination in order to see in things, not that which nature has actually made, but that which { 56} she endeavoured to make, but could not, because of the never-ceasing conflict between the various forms of will. Through the penetrating vision of this imagination, the artist recognises the Idea. He understands the half-uttered speech of nature, and is able to articulate clearly what she only stammered forth.
The common mortal, he says, that manufacture of nature, which she produces by the thousand every day, is not capable of observation that is wholly disinterested in every sense. He can turn his attention to things only so far as they have some relation to his will, however indirect it may be. This is why he is so soon done with everything, with works of art, objects of natural beauty, and everywhere with all that is truly significant in the various scenes of life. He does not linger in the pursuit of beauty, but seeks only to gain his own way in life. On the consideration of the significance of life as a whole, he wastes no time. The artist, on the other hand, strives to understand the inner nature of everything. His faculty of vision is to him the sum which reveals the world.
In spite of his contempt for the majority of men, Schopenhauer has to admit that the faculty of perceiving the Idea, the inner reality, must exist in nearly all men, in a smaller and different degree, otherwise they would be just as incapable of enjoying works of art as of producing them. They would have no susceptibility to beauty, nor to sublimity. All men, therefore, who are capable of æsthetic pleasure at all, must be capable to some extent of knowing the Idea in things, and in responding to the call of beauty, of transcending their personality for the moment.