sympathy, and has become embittered because he has found other men
less good and true than himself. There is a certain average sincerity,
average unselfishness, average generosity and gratitude common among
men. He who has a little above the average of such fine qualities
meets on all sides disappointment. He finds people who display
selfishness, where, as a matter of course, he would have sacrificed
his own convenience or interest to theirs; people who are mean where
he would have been liberal, and suspicious where he was as open as the
day; and, finally, people who return his kindness with an ingratitude
inexplicable to his generous mind, rich in its own benevolence. What,
then, can happen to our Timon but to begin to mistrust those whom he
finds so unlike himself, to shut himself from them (and so, perhaps,
provoke their mistrust in turn), and very commonly to bestow much of
his disappointed affections on animals, on whose fidelity he finds
he can more surely depend, and whose wrongs at the hands of cruel
men still further deepen his disgust of his own kind? All this time,
another man, whose generosity and sincerity were, at starting, a little
below rather than above the average, has been passing through life
pleasantly astonished to find that his neighbors will show him more
kindness than (he is conscious) he would in their places display,
and rather more than less honest than he has reckoned to find them.
Thus, by a curious contradiction, the nobler-natured man is much
more liable than the baser to develop into the misanthrope; and it
is the lofty kind of scorn and bitterness properly belonging to him
which every Pessimist assumes, whether he truly feel it or not. It is
always _sous entendu_, in all tirades against human nature, that the
speaker is quite incapable of the weakness, folly, and wickedness he
condemns; and that, if he refers to the “dark side of Providence,”
_he_ would have managed the universe on better principles. But it is
extremely questionable whether we ought to give unlimited credit to
the genuineness of the indignation of those gentlemen who denounce the
evils of the world, but never stir a finger to remove them; and whose
personal enjoyment of the good things of life--fine houses, clothes,
dinners, pictures, bric-à-brac, pleasant conversation, and favorable
reviews of their books--has, manifestly, never been clouded by their
sombre sense of the dreadful destiny of mankind at large, nor their
appetite for applause been impaired by their profound conviction of the
folly and contemptibility of the people by whom it is offered.
A Timon, not at all of the nobler sort, seems to have been that great
light of recent German philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. As Schopenhauer
died childless, it will, I hope, hurt the feelings of no one if we
dissect his character candidly as that of the most prominent Pessimist
of the age. It will be instructive, I think, to learn the “notes” of
such a character,--to study, in short, of what kind of stuff (so to
speak) a Pessimist is occasionally made. In justice, we must carry in
mind that Schopenhauer accomplished a good deal in the philosophic
way, besides preaching Pessimism. He worked out a metaphysical system
of considerable depth and ingenuity,--one of the merits of which, at
all events, may be accounted that it is readily applicable to quite
other views than those of its author, respecting the nature and
destiny of mankind. With this formidable system, elaborated in his
great work, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, we have, however
(happily for me, and probably for my reader), for our present purpose,
no concern whatever, but only with his actions and character, such as
Miss Zimmern, condensing the original German memoirs, sketched in a
life-like and transparently truthful manner in her Life of Schopenhauer.
The first “note” of Schopenhauer’s character, I should say, was his
HEARTLESSNESS. He seems scarcely to have loved anybody--in any sense
of the word worth considering--from his cradle to his grave. He made,
indeed, after his father’s death, much parade of respect for his
memory; but his filial piety, such as it was, stopped short at this
point. He disliked his sprightly, good-natured mother, and treated
her with singular insolence. As to friendship, he avowed his opinion
that “men of much intellectual worth, more especially if they have
genius, can have but few friends”; and he verified his own dictum
as a first-rate genius by having, so far as we may judge, no real
friends at all, though in later life, when he became celebrated, he had
numerous flatterers and disciples. Love was even less in Schopenhauer’s
way than friendship, unless we are to call by the title the passion
in its coarsest form. His opinion was that “the poetry of love is
mainly illusion, a glittering drapery meant to mantle the solemnity
of the thing as it really is” (p. 222); and his actions were quite in
accordance with this crass materialism. He led, his biographer states,
“no saintly ascetic life, nor did he pretend to this eminence.... He
despised women.... He was only different from ordinary men in that he
spoke of what others suppressed; and his over-zealous disciples, who
saw the god-like in all his acts, even dragged these to the light of
day.” His “careless dallying with beauty” (a euphemism, I presume, for
a loose life) but once brought him to wish for a permanent union. The
only woman whom he is recorded to have desired to marry was an actress,
who, at the time he was “enraptured with her,” was (fit position for
the wife of a great moral philosopher!) the recognized mistress of Duke
Carl August.
It has sometimes happened that men who have been lacking in those
family and friendly affections which are the most beautiful things in
human life have yet almost atoned for their deficiency by their fervent
“Enthusiasm of Humanity.” It is needless to say that Schopenhauer’s
character displayed an impartial negation of both orders of feeling.
He neither loved men nor women in particular, nor man in general. He
carefully defined himself to be not a misanthrope, only a despiser of
men (p. 83). The higher a man stood mentally, he thought, the lower
must his fellow-men appear. That it was the divine part of the greatest
to serve the least was the very last suggestion which would have
occurred to his mind. “I read,” he observed, “in the face of the Apollo
Belvidere, the just and deep displeasure felt by the god of the Muses
for the wretched obstinacy of the Philistines”; and, doubtless, Arthur
Schopenhauer figuratively drew himself up, and felt as like the Apollo
Belvidere as the corporeal circumstances of a German philosopher might
permit.
He was “penetrated with the conviction that he had been placed in a
world peopled with beings morally and intellectually contemptible, from
whom he must keep apart.” In his note-book (of rather a different cast
from that of Marcus Aurelius), he wrote this piece of self-counsel:
“Study to acquire an accurate and connected view of the utter
despicability of mankind in general, then of your contemporaries, and
of German scholars in particular.”
The second “note” in Schopenhauer’s character was his exceeding
COWARDICE. The modern Socrates would have deserted Athens at the
plague, and run away at Potidæa. With what poltroonery he would
have behaved, when required to drink the hemlock, it is impossible
to imagine. When his country was in the throes of war and political
crises, Schopenhauer always carefully moved out of the way. When there
was any kind of infectious disease prevalent, he fled to another city,
so that half his journeys were mere panic flights. He left Berlin for
fear of the cholera, Naples from alarm of the small-pox, and Verona
because he took it into his head that his snuff was poisoned. He
slept with loaded pistols close to his hand, and seized them at the
slightest noise. When the postman brought him a letter, he started.
He used a cup of his own to avoid the contagion which might lurk in
a glass at a public table. He labelled his valuables with deceptive
names, and wrote his business memoranda in Greek. As we have seen,
he was not bellicose. Only once in his life is it recorded that he
struck a blow, and that was at a woman. Finding an acquaintance of his
landlady presumptuous enough to hold a coffee-party in his anteroom,
Schopenhauer knocked her down with such violence that her right arm
was permanently disabled. Any other man, who had committed an act of
similar brutality in a moment of passion, would probably have hastened
to offer some compensation to his victim; but our philosopher, on the
contrary, hotly contested the poor woman’s suit for legal redress,
and quitted the town in disgust when he found himself compelled to
maintain her for life,--a period which (the non-sympathetic reader
will rejoice to learn) was extremely prolonged. The writer of an
exceedingly able and thoughtful review of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in
the _Contemporary Review_, some years ago, observed that his unamiable
traits are best excused by his own candid avowal that he liked his
own mental physiognomy well enough, but his moral not at all. The
_unalterableness of the natural character_ was one of his favorite
dogmas. Certainly, the self-training by which many a naturally nervous
temperament has disciplined itself into courage, a selfish one into
generosity, and a morose or peevish temper into gentleness, was as
far as possible from Schopenhauer’s plan of life; and it opens to us
a rather alarming idea of the society of the future, if his followers
generally should resolve to adopt his facile principle, and assume that
their “natural characters,” whatever they may chance to be,--selfish,
false, dissolute, or cruel,--are “unalterable.” Such liberty, however,
is probably reserved for those who may claim to be “men of genius”
like their master, since he absolved himself from the ordinary duties
incumbent on meaner mortals by the help of a theory which we may call
the Philosopher’s Anti-nomianism. “He weighed his duties toward the
world,” we are told, “in the balance with the weight and intensity of
his natural gifts, and he came to the conclusion that a man gifted
with genius, by merely being and working, sacrifices himself for all
mankind: therefore, he is free from the obligation of sacrificing
himself in particular individually. On this account, he may ignore
claims which others are bound to fulfil.”[14]
But the third “note” was, I venture to think, the true key of
Schopenhauer’s character. It was ARROGANCE. The philosophers whom the
world has hitherto honored have been generally noted for the opposite
quality. As saints learn humility by gazing up at infinite holiness
above them, so sages acquire modesty by looking out on the boundless
ocean of truth, beside which their greatest discoveries appear but as
the pebbles which the child gathers by the shore. But the philosophers
who are so good as to enlighten us in these days scarcely belong to
the antiquated type of either a Socrates or a Newton. The pride and
conceit of Arthur Schopenhauer, at all events, commenced in boyhood,
and seems to have grown like a snowball till he died of old age. His
mother (described as a woman of “modest, pleasing manners” and amiable
character, who received habitually in her house such men as Goethe,
the Schlegels, Grimm, and Wieland) depicts him thus, when a lad yet
engaged in collegiate studies: “Your ill-humor, your complaints of
things inevitable, your sullen looks, the extraordinary opinions you
utter _like oracles which none may presume to contradict_,--all this
depresses me. Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world
and human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams.”[15] This
little preliminary glance at the youth of twenty enables us to judge
what value should be attached to the plea urged on his behalf, that his
arrogance and bitterness were but the natural results of the neglect
with which his great book was received by an unappreciative public and
a jealous coterie of offended philosophers, the “necessary armor of
scorn and self-defence” which enabled him to hold his ground. The boy
at college, it seems, long before he had written a work to instruct
the world, or had experienced anything but kindness and prosperity,
the healthy, rich, gifted, and independent young lad, was already
habitually “lamenting over the stupid world and human misery,” and
uttering, with “sullen looks,” “oracles which none may presume to
contradict.”
As he grew older, Schopenhauer learned to express his good opinion
of himself and his works with serenest equanimity. No more _naïf_
expressions of self-complacency have perhaps ever been penned than this
gentleman’s eulogiums on his own productions; as, for example, when he
writes to the publisher of his work that its “worth and importance are
so great that _I do not venture to express it_ even toward you, because
you could not believe me,” and proceeds to quote a review “which speaks
of me with the highest praise, and says that I am plainly the greatest
philosopher of the age, which is really _saying much less than the good
man thinks_.” “Sir,” he said to an unoffending stranger who watched him
across a _table d’hôte_ (where he habitually acted the part of local
“lion”), “sir, you are astonished at my appetite. True, I eat three
times as much as you, but, then, _I have three times as much mind_!”
(p. 159.) The reader who thinks that this speech could never have been
spoken except in jest and to produce a good-humored laugh has not yet
studied Schopenhauer’s saturnine temperament, to which a joke at his
own expense must have been quite inconceivable. To others, perhaps,
such barbarous intellectual insolence may seem a pardonable reaction
from the tone of self-depreciation (often exceedingly insincere)
which modern manners have enforced. But the old classic pride was
a very different thing from Schopenhauer’s aggressive arrogance,
wherewith he managed to blend gross and egregious vanity in quite a
novel combination. _On a les défauts de ses qualités_, but not usually
together two apparently contradictory defects. In our simplicity,
we should have anticipated that the man who considered himself the
greatest philosopher of his age, and talked about the “loneliness of
the heights” of intellectual grandeur, would have disdained to trouble
himself about such miserable things as common newspaper reviews. We
should have been, however, much mistaken in such a guess. “Schopenhauer
(we are told) began to read German newspapers, now that they wrote
about him. He caused the veriest trifle that contained his name to be
sent to him. He looked through all philosophical works for a mention of
himself. His intense contempt for women wavered, when he saw they could
feel interest in his works.” What would Aristotle’s “Magnanimous Man”
have said to this kind of littleness? “Honor, from any other person”
(than the good), “or on the score of trifles, he will utterly despise,
and likewise he will despise dishonor.”[16]
Let it be remembered, too, that this was in Schopenhauer’s old age.
For a _young_ author to be nervously excited about the reception of
his works is nothing blameworthy or ridiculous. He is looking for the
confirmation of the yet uncertain whispers of his own consciousness of
ability, or to the extinction of his hopes. But this exculpation cannot
apply to a man advanced in life and of established literary reputation,
whose opinion of his own exalted gifts had been fully expanded while he
was yet a lad at college.
Is it too much to say that in this inordinate opinion of his own
powers and merits lies the secret of this man’s Pessimism, of his
contempt of other men, of his discontent with life, of his revolt
against Providence? It is not wonderful that a man who looks on his
fellows like Apollo Belvidere, slaying them with the arrows of his
scorn, should find them wretched and unlovable; for no man, however
humble, is ever truly seen by him who looks _down_ on him, and thus
lacks all the insight of love and sympathy, and all the charity of
one who forgives as he hopes to be forgiven. It is not wonderful that
a man who estimates himself as supremely wise, and condones his own
faults on the score of the unalterableness of natural character, should
survey the world and find it a godless desert. Probably no human heart
ever yet bloomed out into gratitude even under the brightest sunshine
of prosperity, which had not once been ploughed up by self-reproach
and softened by tears of repentance. In truth, any kind of religious
sense is well-nigh incompatible with such pride as we are discussing.
The doors whereby other men enter the Temple,--the tender guidance of
human affection, the awful strife of the higher self against passion
and sin, the sacred moral ambition after yet unattained purity and
goodness,--all these are closed to him. Schopenhauer’s religious
history is a confirmation of the truth that it is not the marble-palace
mind of the philosopher which God will visit so often as the humble
heart which lies sheltered from the storms of passion, and all trailed
over by the sweet blossoms of human affections.
It is actually ludicrous to compare this man’s intensely selfish,
vain, cowardly character with the magnificent compliments which he
paid to virtue in the abstract, and to the ideal he draws of the
perfect man, or “ascetic,” in whom the very sense of individuality,
not to speak of self-regard, is annihilated: “He will no longer regard
himself as a real existence, comprised within the rigid line of
personality, and thus insulated and differentiated from the rest of
the universe. He will regard his separate being as a mere transitory
phenomenon, a temporary objectivation of the sole real existence;
and this recognition of his true position must necessarily destroy
selfishness.... When a man ceases to draw an egotistic distinction
between himself and others, and takes as much part in their sorrows
as in his own, it naturally follows that such a one, recognizing his
own self in all beings, must regard the endless griefs of all beings
as his own, and thus appropriate to himself the sorrows of the whole
world.”[17] The modern “Man of Sorrows” (if we may venture on so
irreverent a comparison for the sake of the contrast) had, for his own
use, an easy method of “appropriating” the griefs of his kind. “We
gather,” says his keen-sighted critic of the _Contemporary Review_,
“from the accounts of his disciples, that he had arranged for himself
an existence more than tolerable; for, while free from positive
annoyance, he found a perfectly consistent and legitimate source of
pleasure in the disinterested contemplation of the idea of the world’s
sorrows.”[18] A more easy form of martyrdom it is hard to imagine.
Is it not somewhat surprising that a man like this, who, to do him
justice, made no pretence of practising what he taught, but said
openly, with cynical effrontery, “I preach sanctity, but I am no
saint,”[19] should have exercised any influence over his generation?
We read, however, that “his little band of disciples grew, and their
fanaticism reached a ludicrous point. One entreated him to found a
trust for the purpose of keeping watch that no syllable of his works
should ever be altered; another had his portrait painted and placed in
a room like a chapel,”[20] etc.
This particular hero-worship is, to my thinking, so portentous that I
have been tempted thus to study it at some length. For thousands of
years, the human race has gone on adding one noble type to another in
its Pantheon,--the old heathen patriotism and heroism of a Theseus, a
Codrus, a Curtius, a Regulus, the modest wisdom of a Socrates, and the
stoic grandeur of a Marcus Aurelius. Christianity added yet saintlier
virtues to the ideal,--the charity, the purity, the religious fervor,
and martyr devotion of a whole army of saints. Yet all these “stars of
our mortal night” can, it seems, be obscured and forgotten; and men
who might have known and honored and followed them, like the Magi of
old, prefer to dance after such a flaring link-light as Schopenhauer
lifted over his own head! Observing this, and how his desolate
doctrine is gaining ground, and recognizing not a few of his personal
characteristics (more especially his arrogance) among other thinkers
nearer home, we are tempted to turn back fondly and regretfully to the
humblest old-fashioned goodness. Many of us had confidently trusted
that, when knowledge increased, wisdom and love would grow along with
it; that, without losing the sacred lessons of the past, mankind
would obtain still deeper insight into moral truth, and that phases
of character would appear more beautiful, more joyous, more perfectly
rounded in all the gifts and graces of humanity than the world yet has
seen,--the long-severed virtues of the hero and the saint combined at
last.
Alas! if Schopenhauers are to increase and multiply among us, these
hopes have been visionary, indeed! As his character emerges from
his biography, and stands clearly revealed to sight, memories of
many a man and woman of small account in the world rise up and range
themselves in our thoughts for comparison opposite to this great
philosopher. We remember those who, instead of flying from the terrors
of pestilence or war, have freely gone to meet them at the call of
benevolence or patriotism. We remember those who, instead of finding
their fellow-men “despicable,” have been lifelong loving friends,
faithful and tender husbands, devoted parents and children, ardent
philanthropists, sacrificing wealth and health and every enjoyment
that they might relieve and bless the most miserable of mankind,--the
criminal, the diseased, the vicious, and abandoned. We remember those
who, instead of resting self-satisfied with the “unalterableness” of
their own moral defects, have striven day and night, like the Pilgrim
fighting on his knees against Apollyon, to purify their hearts of every
stain, and, instead of arraigning Providence because their merits
were insufficiently rewarded, have blessed God most of all for their
afflictions. We remember all these, and also we remember the glory of
peace and patience on their pain-worn faces; and from the depths of our
souls comes the verdict that the dullest “Philistine” of them all was,
in the scale of true nobleness, worth a thousand pessimist philosophers.
Schopenhauer was, in truth, the best illustration which could be found
of the fallacy of the modern intellect-worship, the idolatry of mere
mental force, which is scarcely less stupid and ignoble than the
idolatry of the physical force of winds or waters. As baseness is more
contemptible in a king, and miserliness in a millionnaire, so are all
moral faults and littlenesses only more despicable when set on the
pedestal of genius. There are minds--and Schopenhauer’s was one of
them--whose brilliancy is that of a light-house. Its best use is to
disclose the cold and troubled sea, and the dreary rocks whereon the
unwary might make shipwreck.
* * * * *