II.

In order to describe properly what an event my first look into

Schopenhauer's writings was for me, I must dwell for a minute on an

idea, that recurred more constantly in my youth, and touched me more

nearly, than any other. I wandered then as I pleased in a world of

wishes, and thought that destiny would relieve me of the dreadful and

wearisome duty of educating myself: some philosopher would come at

the right moment to do it for me,--some true philosopher, who could

be obeyed without further question, as he would be trusted more than

one's self. Then I said within me: "What would be the principles, on

which he might teach thee?" And I pondered in my mind what he would

say to the two maxims of education that hold the field in our time.

The first demands that the teacher should find out at once the strong

point in his pupil, and then direct all his skill and will, all the

moisture and all the sunshine, to bring the fruit of that single

virtue to maturity. The second requires him to raise to a higher

power all the qualities that already exist, cherish them and bring

them into a harmonious relation. But, we may ask, should one who has

a decided talent for working in gold be made for that reason to learn

music? And can we admit that Benvenuto Cellini's father was right in

continually forcing him back to the "dear little horn"--the "cursed

piping," as his son called it? We cannot think so in the case of such

a strong and clearly marked talent as his, and it may well be that

this maxim of harmonious development applies only to weaker natures,

in which there is a whole swarm of desires and inclinations, though

they may not amount to very much, singly or together. On the other

hand, where do we find such a blending of harmonious voices--nay, the

soul of harmony itself--as we see in natures like Cellini's, where

everything--knowledge, desire, love and hate--tends towards a single

point, the root of all, and a harmonious system, the resultant of the

various forces, is built up through the irresistible domination of

this vital centre? And so perhaps the two maxims are not contrary at

all; the one merely saying that man must have a centre, the other, a

circumference as well. The philosophic teacher of my dream would not

only discover the central force, but would know how to prevent its

being destructive of the other powers: his task, I thought, would be

the welding of the whole man into a solar system with life and

movement, and the discovery of its paraphysical laws.

In the meantime I could not find my philosopher, however I tried; I

saw how badly we moderns compare with the Greeks and Romans, even in

the serious study of educational problems. You can go through all

Germany, and especially all the universities, with this need in your

heart, and will not find what you seek; many humbler wishes than that

are still unfulfilled there. For example, if a German seriously wish

to make himself an orator, or to enter a "school for authors," he

will find neither master nor school: no one yet seems to have thought

that speaking and writing are arts which cannot be learnt without the

most careful method and untiring application. But, to their shame,

nothing shows more clearly the insolent self-satisfaction of our

people than the lack of demand for educators; it comes partly from

meanness, partly from want of thought. Anything will do as a

so-called "family tutor," even among our most eminent and cultured

people; and what a menagerie of crazy heads and mouldy devices mostly

go to make up the belauded Gymnasium! And consider what we are

satisfied with in our finishing schools,--our universities. Look at

our professors and their institutions! And compare the difficulty of

the task of educating a man to be a man! Above all, the wonderful way

in which the German savants fall to their dish of knowledge, shows

that they are thinking more of Science than mankind; and they are

trained to lead a forlorn hope in her service, in order to encourage

ever new generations to the same sacrifice. If their traffic with

knowledge be not limited and controlled by any more general

principles of education, but allowed to run on indefinitely,--"the

more the better,"--it is as harmful to learning as the economic

theory of _laisser faire_ to common morality. No one recognises now

that the education of the professors is an exceedingly difficult

problem, if their humanity is not to be sacrificed or shrivelled

up:--this difficulty can be actually seen in countless examples of

natures warped and twisted by their reckless and premature devotion

to science. There is a still more important testimony to the complete

absence of higher education, pointing to a greater and more universal

danger. It is clear at once why an orator or writer cannot now be

educated,--because there are no teachers; and why a savant must be a

distorted and perverted thing,--because he will have been trained by

the inhuman abstraction, science. This being so, let a man ask

himself: "Where are now the types of moral excellence and fame for

all our generation--learned and unlearned, high and low--the visible

abstract of constructive ethics for this age? Where has vanished all

the reflection on moral questions that has occupied every great

developed society at all epochs?" There is no fame for that now, and

there are none to reflect: we are really drawing on the inherited

moral capital which our predecessors accumulated for us, and which we

do not know how to increase, but only to squander. Such things are

either not mentioned in our society, or, if at all, with a naïve want

of personal experience that makes one disgusted. It comes to this,

that our schools and professors simply turn aside from any moral

instruction or content themselves with formulæ; virtue is a word and

nothing more, on both sides, an old-fashioned word that they laugh

at--and it is worse when they do not laugh, for then they are

hypocrites.

An explanation of this faint-heartedness and ebbing of all moral

strength would be difficult and complex: but whoever is considering

the influence of Christianity in its hour of victory on the morality

of the mediæval world, must not forget that it reacts also in its

defeat, which is apparently its position to-day. By its lofty ideal,

Christianity has outbidden the ancient Systems of Ethics and their

invariable naturalism, with which men came to feel a dull disgust:

and afterwards when they did reach the knowledge of what was better

and higher, they found they had no longer the power, for all their

desire, to return to its embodiment in the antique virtues. And so

the life of the modern man is passed in see-sawing between

Christianity and Paganism, between a furtive or hypocritical approach

to Christian morality, and an equally shy and spiritless dallying

with the antique: and he does not thrive under it. His inherited fear

of naturalism, and its more recent attraction for him, his desire to

come to rest somewhere, while in the impotence of his intellect he

swings backwards and forwards between the "good" and the "better"

course--all this argues an instability in the modern mind that

condemns it to be without joy or fruit. Never were moral teachers

more necessary and never were they more unlikely to be found:

physicians are most in danger themselves in times when they are most

needed and many men are sick. For where are our modern physicians who

are strong and sure-footed enough to hold up another or lead him by

the hand? There lies a certain heavy gloom on the best men of our

time, an eternal loathing for the battle that is fought in their

hearts between honesty and lies, a wavering of trust in themselves,

which makes them quite incapable of showing to others the way they

must go.

So I was right in speaking of my "wandering in a world of wishes"

when I dreamt of finding a true philosopher who could lift me from

the slough of insufficiency, and teach me again simply and honestly

to be in my thoughts and life, in the deepest sense of the word, "out

of season"; simply and honestly--for men have now become such

complicated machines that they must be dishonest, if they speak at

all, or wish to act on their words.

With such needs and desires within me did I come to know

Schopenhauer.

I belong to those readers of Schopenhauer who know perfectly well,

after they have turned the first page, that they will read all the

others, and listen to every word that he has spoken. My trust in him

sprang to life at once, and has been the same for nine years. I

understood him as though he had written for me (this is the most

intelligible, though a rather foolish and conceited way of expressing

it). Hence I never found a paradox in him, though occasionally some

small errors: for paradoxes are only assertions that carry no

conviction, because the author has made them himself without any

conviction, wishing to appear brilliant, or to mislead, or, above

all, to pose. Schopenhauer never poses: he writes for himself, and no

one likes to be deceived--least of all a philosopher who has set this

up as his law: "deceive nobody, not even thyself," neither with the

"white lies" of all social intercourse, which writers almost

unconsciously imitate, still less with the more conscious deceits of

the platform, and the artificial methods of rhetoric. Schopenhauer's

speeches are to himself alone; or if you like to imagine an auditor,

let it be a son whom the father is instructing. It is a rough,

honest, good-humoured talk to one who "hears and loves." Such writers

are rare. His strength and sanity surround us at the first sound of

his voice: it is like entering the heights of the forest, where we

breathe deep and are well again. We feel a bracing air everywhere, a

certain candour and naturalness of his own, that belongs to men who

are at home with themselves, and masters of a very rich home indeed:

he is quite different from the writers who are surprised at

themselves if they have said something intelligent, and whose

pronouncements for that reason have something nervous and unnatural

about them. We are just as little reminded in Schopenhauer of the

professor with his stiff joints worse for want of exercise, his

narrow chest and scraggy figure, his slinking or strutting gait. And

again his rough and rather grim soul leads us not so much to miss as

to despise the suppleness and courtly grace of the excellent

Frenchmen; and no one will find in him the gilded imitations of

pseudo-gallicism that our German writers prize so highly. His style

in places reminds me a little of Goethe, but is not otherwise on any

German model. For he knows how to be profound with simplicity,

striking without rhetoric, and severely logical without pedantry: and

of what German could he have learnt that? He also keeps free from the

hair-splitting, jerky and (with all respect) rather un-German manner

of Lessing: no small merit in him, for Lessing is the most tempting

of all models for prose style. The highest praise I can give his

manner of presentation is to apply his own phrase to himself:--"A

philosopher must be very honest to avail himself of no aid from

poetry or rhetoric." That honesty is something, and even a virtue, is

one of those private opinions which are forbidden in this age of

public opinion; and so I shall not be praising Schopenhauer, but only

giving him a distinguishing mark, when I repeat that he is honest,

even as a writer; so few of them are, that we are apt to mistrust

every one who writes at all. I only know a single author that I can

rank with Schopenhauer, or even above him, in the matter of honesty;

and that is Montaigne. The joy of living on this earth is increased

by the existence of such a man. The effect on myself, at any rate,

since my first acquaintance with that strong and masterful spirit,

has been, that I can say of him as he of Plutarch--"As soon as I open

him, I seem to grow a pair of wings." If I had the task of making

myself at home on the earth, I would choose him as my companion.

Schopenhauer has a second characteristic in common with Montaigne,

besides honesty; a joy that really makes others joyful. "Aliis lætus,

sibi sapiens." There are two very different kinds of joyfulness. The

true thinker always communicates joy and life, whether he is showing

his serious or comic side, his human insight or his godlike

forbearance: without surly looks or trembling hands or watery eyes,

but simply and truly, with fearlessness and strength, a little

cavalierly perhaps, and sternly, but always as a conqueror: and it is

this that brings the deepest and intensest joy, to see the conquering

god with all the monsters that he has fought. But the joyfulness one

finds here and there in the mediocre writers and limited thinkers

makes some of us miserable; I felt this, for example, with the

"joyfulness" of David Strauss. We are generally ashamed of such a

quality in our contemporaries, because they show the nakedness of our

time, and of the men in it, to posterity. Such _fils de joie_ do not

see the sufferings and the monsters, that they pretend, as

philosophers, to see and fight; and so their joy deceives us, and we

hate it; it tempts to the false belief that they have gained some

victory. At bottom there is only joy where there is victory: and this

applies to true philosophy as much as to any work of art. The

contents may be forbidding and serious, as the problem of existence

always is; the work will only prove tiresome and oppressive, if the

slip-shod thinker and the dilettante have spread the mist of their

insufficiency over it: while nothing happier or better can come to

man's lot than to be near one of those conquering spirits whose

profound thought has made them love what is most vital, and whose

wisdom has found its goal in beauty. They really speak: they are no

stammerers or babblers; they live and move, and have no part in the

_danse macabre_ of the rest of humanity. And so in their company one

feels a natural man again, and could cry out with Goethe--"What a

wondrous and priceless thing is a living creature! How fitted to his

surroundings, how true, and real!"

I have been describing nothing but the first, almost physiological,

impression made upon me by Schopenhauer, the magical emanation of

inner force from one plant of Nature to another, that follows the

slightest contact. Analysing it, I find that this influence of

Schopenhauer has three elements, his honesty, his joy, and his

consistency. He is honest, as speaking and writing for himself alone;

joyful, because his thought has conquered the greatest difficulties;

consistent, because he cannot help being so. His strength rises like

a flame in the calm air, straight up, without a tremor or deviation.

He finds his way, without our noticing that he has been seeking it:

so surely and cleverly and inevitably does he run his course, as if

by some law of gravitation. If any one have felt what it means to

find, in our present world of Centaurs and Chimæras, a single-hearted

and unaffected child of nature who moves unconstrained on his own

road, he will understand my joy and surprise in discovering

Schopenhauer: I knew in him the educator and philosopher I had so

long desired. Only, however, in his writings: which was a great loss.

All the more did I exert myself to see behind the book the living man

whose testament it was, and who promised his inheritance to such as

could, and would, be more than his readers--his pupils and his sons.