THE HIGH PRIEST OF PESSIMISM.
Arthur Schopenhauer, the founder of the present school, was born toward
the close of the last century, in the now mildewed city of Dantzic. His
people came of good Dutch stock, and were both well-to-do and peculiar.
His grandmother lost her reason at the death of her husband, a
circumstance as unusual then as in more recent years; his two uncles
passed their melancholy lives on the frontiers of insanity, and his
father enjoyed a reputation for eccentricity which his end fully
justified.
This latter gentleman was a rich and energetic merchant, of educated
tastes and excitable disposition, who, when well advanced in middle
life, married the young and gifted daughter of one of the chief
magnates of the town. Their union was not more unhappy than is usually
the case under similar circumstances, his time being generally passed
with his ledger, and hers with the poets.
With increasing years, however, his untamable petulance grew to such an
extent that he was not at all times considered perfectly sane, and it
is related that on being visited one day by a lifelong acquaintance,
who announced himself as an old friend, he exclaimed, with abrupt
indignation, "Friend, indeed! there is no such thing; besides, people
come here every day and say they are this, that, and the other. I don't
know them, and I don't want to." A day or two later, he met the same
individual, greeted him with cheerful cordiality, and led him amiably
home to dinner. Shortly after, he threw himself from his warehouse to
the canal below.
He had always intended that his son, who was then in his sixteenth
year, should continue the business; and to prepare him properly for his
duties he had christened him Arthur, because he found that name was
pretty much the same in all European languages, and furthermore had
sent the lad at an early age first to France, and then to England, that
he might gain some acquaintance and familiarity with other tongues.
The boy liked his name, and took naturally to languages, but he felt no
desire to utilize these possessions in the depressing atmosphere of
commercial life, and after his father's death loitered first at the
benches of Gotha and then at those of Göttingen.
Meanwhile his mother established herself at Weimar, where she soon
attracted to her all that was brilliant in that brilliant city. Goethe,
Wieland, Fernow, Falk, Grimm, and the two Schlegels were her constant
guests. At court she was received as a welcome addition, and such an
effect had these surroundings upon her imagination, that in not very
many years she managed to produce twenty-four compact volumes of
criticism and romance.
During this time her son was not idle. Thoroughly familiar with ancient
as with modern literature, he devoted his first year at Göttingen to
medicine, mathematics and history; while in his second, which he passed
in company with Bunsen and William B. Astor, he studied physics,
physiology, psychology, ethnology and logic; as these diversions did
not quite fill the hour, he aided the flight of idle moments with a
guitar.
He was at this time a singularly good-looking young man, possessing a
grave and expressive type of beauty, which in after years developed
into that suggestion of majestic calm for which the head of Beethoven
is celebrated, while to his lips there then came a smile as
relentlessly implacable as that of Voltaire.
From boyhood he had been of a thoughtful disposition, finding wisdom in
the falling leaf, problems in vibrating light, and movement in
immobility. Already he had wrung his hands at the stars, and watched
the distant future rise with its flouting jeer at the ills of man. In
this, however, there was little of the cheap sentimentalism of Byron,
and less of the weariness of Lamartine. His griefs were purely
objective; life to him was a perplexing riddle, whose true meaning was
well worth a search; and as the only possible solution of the gigantic
enigma seemed to lie in some unexplored depth of metaphysics, he soon
after betook himself to Berlin, where Fichte then reigned as Kant's
legitimate successor. But the long-winded demonstrations that Fichte
affected, his tiresome verbiage, lit, if at all, only by some trivial
truism or trumpery paradox, bored Schopenhauer at first well-nigh to
death, and then worked on his nerves to such an extent that he longed,
pistol in hand, to catch at his throat, and cry, "Die like a dog you
shall; but for your pitiful soul's sake, tell me if in all this rubbish
you really mean anything, or take me simply for an imbecile like
yourself." For Schopenhauer, it should be understood, had passed his
nights first with Plato and then with Kant; they were to him like two
giants calling to one another across the centuries, and that this
huckster of phrases should pretend to cloak his nakedness with their
mantle seemed to him at once indecent and absurd.
Schelling pleased him no better; he dismissed him with a
word,--mountebank; but for Hegel, Caliban-Hegel as he was wont in after
years to call him, his contempt was so violent that, with a prudence
which is both amusing and characteristic, he took counsel from an
attorney as to the exact limit he might touch in abusing him without
becoming amenable to a suit for defamation. "Hegel's philosophy," he
said, "is a crystalized syllogism; it is an abracadabra, a puff of
bombast, and a wish-wash of phrases, which in its monstrous
construction compels the mind to form impossible contradictions, and
in itself is enough to cause an entire atrophy of the intellect." "It
is made up of three fourths nonsense and one fourth error; it contains
words, not thoughts;" and then, rising in his indignation to the
heights of quotation, he added, "'Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain
not.'" Time, it may be noted, has to a great extent indorsed
Schopenhauer's verdict. The tortures of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel
linger now in the history of philosophy very much as might the memory
of a nightmare, and except in a few cobwebbed halls the teachings of
the three sophists may safely be considered as a part of the
inexplicable past.
It should not, however, be supposed that because he found the
philosophy of the moment so little to his taste he necessarily
squandered his time; on the contrary, he turned to Aristotle and
Spinoza for consolation, and therewith followed sundry lectures in
magnetism, electricity, ichthyology, amphiology, ornithology, zoölogy,
and astronomy, all of which he enlivened with rapid incursions to the
rich granaries of Rabelais and Montaigne, and moreover gave no little
time to the study of the religion and philosophy of India.
It was at this time characteristic of the man, that while his
appearance, wealth, and connections would have formed an open letter to
the best society in Berlin, which was then heterogeneously agreeable,
or even to the worst, which is said to have been charming, he preferred
to pass his leisure hours in scrutinizing the animals in the
Zoölogical Gardens, and in studying the inmates of the State Lunatic
Asylum.
In this _cità dolente_ his attention was particularly claimed by two
unfortunates who, while perfectly conscious of their infirmity, were
yet unable to master it; in proof of which, one wrote him a series of
sonnets, and the other sent him annotated passages from the Bible.
In the second year of his student life at Berlin the war of 1813 was
declared, and Schopenhauer was in consequence obliged to leave the city
before he had obtained his degree. He prepared, however, and forwarded
to the faculty at Jena an elaborate thesis, which he entitled the
Quadruple Root of Conclusive Reason,--a name which somewhat astounded
his mother, who asked him if it were something for the apothecary,--and
meanwhile prowled about Weimar meditating on the philosophy which he
had long intended to produce. He visited no one but Goethe, took
umbrage at his mother's probably harmless relations with Fernow,
treated her to discourse not dissimilar to that which Hamlet had
addressed to his own parent, received his degree from Jena, and then
went off to Dresden, where he began to study women with that
microscopic eye which he turned on all subjects that engaged his
attention.
The result of these studies was an essay on the metaphysics of love,
which he thereupon attached to his budding system of philosophy; an
axiom to the effect that women are rich in hair and poor in thought;
and the same misadventure that befell Descartes.
His life at Dresden was necessarily much less secluded than that to
which he had been hitherto accustomed; he became an _habitué_ at the
opera and comedy, a frequent guest in literary and social circles, and,
as student of men and things, he went about disturbing draperies and
disarranging screens, very much as any other philosopher might do who
was bent on seeing the world.
Meanwhile, he was not otherwise idle: the morning he gave to work, and
in the afternoon he surrendered himself to Nature, whom he loved with a
passionate devotion, which increased with his years. The companionship
of men was always more or less irksome to him; and while it was less so
perhaps at this time than at any other, it was nevertheless with a
sense of relief that he struck out across the inviting pasture-lands of
Saxony, or down the banks of the Elbe, and left humanity behind, in
search of that open-air solitude which is Nature's nearest friend.
In the companionship of others he was constantly seeking a trait or a
suggestion, some hint capable of development; when in the world,
therefore, he flashed a lantern, so to speak, at people, and then
passed them by; but in the open country he communed with himself, and
strolled along, note-book in hand, jotting down the thoughts worth
jotting very much after the manner that Emerson is said to have
recommended.
With regard to the majority of men, it will not seem reckless to say
that their end and aim is happiness and self-satisfaction; but however
trite the remark may be, it may still perhaps serve to bring into
relief something of Schopenhauer's distinctive purpose. It would, of
course, be foolish to assert that he did not care for his own
happiness, and disregarded his own satisfaction, for of these things
few men, it is imagined, have thought more highly. If his ideas of
happiness diverged widely from those generally received as standards,
it has but little to do with the matter in hand, for the point which is
intended to be conveyed is simply that above all other things, beyond
the culture of self, that which Schopenhauer cared for most was truth,
and that he pursued it, moreover, as pertinaciously as any other
thinker whom the world now honors. Whether he ran it to earth or not,
the reader must himself decide; indeed, it was very many years before
any one even heard that he had been chasing it at all. Of late,
however, some of the best pickets who guard the literary outposts from
Boston to Bombay have brought a very positive assurance that he did
catch it, and, moreover, held it fast long enough to wring out some
singularly valuable intimations.
In hurrying along after his quarry, Schopenhauer became convinced that
life was a lesson which most men learned trippingly enough, but whose
moral they failed to detect; and this moral, which he felt he had
caught on the wing, as it were, he set about dissecting with a great
and sumptuous variety of reflection.
Wandering, then, on the banks of the Elbe, massing his thoughts and
arranging their progression, his system slowly yet gradually expanded
before him. He wrote only in moments of inspiration, yet his hours were
full of such moments; little by little he drifted away from the opera
and his friends into a solitude which he made populous with thought,
and in this manner gave himself up so entirely to his philosophy that
one day, it is reported, he astonished an innocent-minded gate-keeper,
who asked him who he was, with the weird and pensive answer, "Ah! if I
but knew, myself!"
Meanwhile his work grew rapidly beneath his hands, and when after four
years of labor and research "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung" was so
far completed as to permit its publication, he read it over with
something of the same unfamiliarity which he would have experienced in
reading the work of another author, though, doubtless, with greater
satisfaction.
Fascinated with its merits, he offered the manuscript to Brockhaus, the
Leipsic publisher. "My book," he wrote, "is a new system of philosophy,
but when I say new I mean new in every sense of the word; it is not a
restatement of what has been already expressed, but it is in the
highest degree a continuous flow of thought such as has never before
entered the mind of mortal man. It is a book which, in my opinion, is
destined to rank with those which form the source and incentive to
hundreds of others."
Brockhaus, familiar with the proverbial modesty of young authors, lent
but an inattentive ear to these alluring statements, and accepted the
book solely on account of the reputation which Schopenhauer's mother
then enjoyed; a mark of confidence, by the way, which he soon deeply
regretted. "It is so much waste paper," he said, dismally, in after
years; "I wish I had never heard of it." He lived long enough, however,
to change his mind, and in 1880 his successors published a stout little
pamphlet containing the titles of over five hundred books and articles,
of which the "World as Will and Idea" formed the source and incentive.
"Le monde," Montaigne has quaintly noted, "regorge de commentaires,
mais d'auteurs il en est grand chierté."
Schopenhauer's philosophy first appeared in 1818; but while it was
still in press, its author, like one who has sprung a mine and fears
the report, fled away to Italy, where he wandered about from Venice to
Naples bathing his senses in color and music. He associated at this
time very willingly with Englishmen, and especially with English
artists and men of letters. Germans and Americans he avoided, and as
for Jews, he not only detested them, but expressed an admiring approval
of Nebuchadnezzar, and only regretted that he had been so lenient with
them. "The Jews are God's chosen people, are they?" he would say,
"very good; tastes differ, they certainly are not mine." In this
dislike he made no exception, and scenting in after years some of the
_foetor judaicus_ on Heine and Meyerbeer, he refused them the
attention which others were only too glad to accord. Schopenhauer's
distaste, however, for everything that savored of the Israelite will be
perhaps more readily understood when it is remembered that the Jews, as
a race, are optimists, and their creed, therefore, to him, in his
consistency, was like the aggressive flag to the typical bull.
With the Germans he had another grievance. "The Germans," he said, "are
heavy by nature; it is a national characteristic, and one which is
noticeable not only in the way they carry themselves, but in their
language, their fiction, their conversation, their writings, their way
of thinking, and especially in their style and in their mania for
constructing long and involved sentences. In reading German," he
continued, "memory is obliged to retain mechanically, as in a lesson,
the words that are forced upon it, until after patient labor a period
is reached, the keynote is found, and the meaning disentangled. When
the Germans," he added, "get hold of a vague and unsuitable expression
which will completely obscure their meaning, they pat themselves on the
back; for their great aim is to leave an opening in every phrase,
through which they may seem to come back and say more than they
thought. In this trick they excel, and if they can manage to be
emphatic and affected at the same time, they are simply afloat in a sea
of joy. Foreigners hate all this, and revenge themselves in reading
German as little as possible.... Wherefore, in provision of my death, I
acknowledge that on account of its infinite stupidity I loathe the
German nation, and that I blush to belong thereto."
At various _tables-d'hôte_ Schopenhauer had encountered traveling
Yankees, and objected to them accordingly. "They are," he said, "the
_plebs_ of the world, partly, I suppose, on account of their republican
government, and partly because they descend from those who left Europe
for Europe's good. The climate, too," he added, reflectively, "may have
something to do with it." Nor did Frenchmen escape his satire. "Other
parts of the world have monkeys; Europe has Frenchmen, _ça balance_."
But with Englishmen he got on very well, and during his after life
always talked to himself in their tongue, wrote his memoranda in
English, and read the "Times" daily, advertisements and all.
Meanwhile Schopenhauer held his hand to his ear unavailingly. From
across the Alps there came to him no echo of any report, only a silence
which was ominous enough to have assured any other that the fusee had
not been properly applied. But to him it was different; he had, it is
true, expected a reverberation which would shake the sophistry of all
civilization, and when no tremor came he was mystified, but only for
the moment. He had been too much accustomed to seek his own dead in the
great morgue of literature not to know that any man, who is to belong
to posterity, is necessarily a stranger to his epoch. And that he was
to belong to posterity he had no possible doubt; indeed he had that
prescience of genius which foresees its own future, and he felt that
however tightly the bushel might be closed over the light, there were
still crevices through which it yet would shine, and from which at last
some conflagration must necessarily burst.
It was part of the man to analyze all things, and while it cannot be
said that the lack of attention with which his philosophy had been
received left him entirely unmoved, it would be incorrect to suppose
that he was then sitting on the pins and needles of impatience.
Deeply reflective, he was naturally aware that as everything which is
exquisite ripens slowly, so is the growth of fame proportioned to its
durability. And Schopenhauer meant to be famous, and this not so much
for fame's sake, as for the good which his fame would spread with it.
He could therefore well afford to wait. His work was not written
especially to his own epoch, save only in so far as his epoch was part
of humanity collectively considered. It did not, therefore, take him
long to understand that as his work was not tinted with any of the
local color and fugitive caprices of the moment, it was in consequence
unadapted to an immediate and fictitious vogue. Indeed, it may be added
that the history of art and literature is eloquent with the examples of
the masterpieces which, unrewarded by contemporary appreciation, have
passed into the welcome of another age; and of these examples few are
more striking than that of the absolute indifference with which
Schopenhauer's philosophy was first received.
It was presumably with reflections of this nature that Schopenhauer
shrugged his shoulders at the inattention under which he labored, and
wandered serenely among the treasuries and ghosts of departed Rome.
About this time an incident happened which, while not possessing any
very vivid interest, so affected his after life as to be at least
deserving of passing notice. Schopenhauer was then in his thirty-first
year. On coming of age, he had received his share of his father's
property, some of which he securely invested, but the greater part he
deposited at high interest with a well-known business house in Dantzic.
When leaving for Italy, he took from this firm notes payable on demand
for the amount which they held to his credit, and after he had cashed
one of their bills, learned that the firm was in difficulties. Shortly
after, they suspended payment, offering thirty per cent. to those of
their creditors who were willing to accept such an arrangement, and
nothing to those who refused.
All the creditors accepted save Schopenhauer, who, with the wile of a
diplomat, wrote that he was in no hurry for his money, but that perhaps
if he were made preferred creditor he might accept a better offer. His
debtors fell into the trap, and offered him first fifty, and then
seventy per cent. These offers he also refused. "If," he wrote, "you
offer me thirty per cent. when you are able to pay fifty, and fifty per
cent. when you are able to pay seventy, I have good reason to suspect
that you can pay the whole amount. In any event, my right is perennial.
I need not present my notes until I care to. Settle with your other
creditors, and then you will be in a better position to attend to me. A
wise man watches the burning phoenix with a certain pleasure, for he
well knows what that crafty bird does with its ashes. Keep my money,
and I will keep your drafts. When your affairs are straightened either
we will exchange, or you will be arrested for debt. I am, of course,
very sorry not to be able to oblige you, and I dare say you think me
very disagreeable, but that is only an illusion of yours, which is at
once dispelled when you remember that the money is my own, and that its
possession concerns my lifelong freedom and well-being. You will say,
perhaps, that if all your creditors thought as I do, it would be deuced
hard for me. But if all men thought as I do, not only would more be
thought, but there would probably be neither bankrupts nor swindlers.
Machiavelli says, Giacchè il volgo pensa altrimente,--although the
common herd think otherwise,--ma nel mondo non é se non volgo,--and
the world is made up of the common herd,--e gli pocchi ivi luogo
trovano,--yet the exceptions take their position,--dove gli molti stare
non possono,--where the crowd can find no foot-hold."
By the exercise of a little patience, and after a few more dagger
thrusts of this description, Schopenhauer recovered the entire amount
which was due him, together with the interest in full. But the danger
which he had so cleverly avoided gave him, so to speak, a retrospective
shock; the possibility of want had brushed too near for comfort's sake.
He was thoroughly frightened; and in shuddering at the cause of his
fright he experienced such a feeling of insecurity with regard to what
the future might yet hold that he determined to lose no time in seeking
a remunerative shelter. With this object he returned to Berlin, and as
_privat-docent_ began to lecture on the history of philosophy.
Hegel was then in the high tide of his glory. Scholars from far and
near came to listen to the man who had compared himself to Christ, and
said, "I am Truth, and teach truth." In the "Reisebilder," Heine says
that in the learned caravansary of Berlin the camels collected about
the fountain of Hegelian wisdom, kneeled down, received their burden of
precious waters, and then set out across the desert wastes of
Brandenburg.
At that time not to bend before Hegel was the blackest and most wanton
of sins. To disagree with him was heretical, and as few understood his
meaning clearly enough to attempt to controvert it, it will be readily
understood that in those days there was very little heresy in Berlin.
Among the few, however, Schopenhauer headed the list. "I write to be
understood," he said; and indeed no one who came in contact with him or
with his works had ever the least difficulty in seizing his meaning and
understanding his immense disgust for the "pachyderm hydrocephali,
pedantic eunuchs, apocaliptic retinue della bestia triumphante," as in
after years, with gorgeous emphasis, he was wont to designate Hegel and
his clique. The war that he waged against them was truly Homeric. He
denounced Hegel in a manner that would have made Swinburne blush; then
he attacked the professors of philosophy in general and the Hegelians
in particular, and finally the demagogues who believed in them, and who
had baptized themselves "Young Germany."
For the preparation of such writings as theirs he had a receipt, which
was homeopathic in its simplicity. "Dilute a minimum of thought in five
hundred pages of nauseous phraseology, and for the rest trust to the
German patience of the reader." He also suggested that for the wonder
and astonishment of posterity every public library should carefully
preserve in half calf the complete works of the great philosophaster
and his adorers; and, considering very correctly that philosophers
cannot be hatched like bachelors of arts, he further recommended that
the course in philosophy should be cut from the University programmes,
and the teaching in that branch be limited to logic. "You can't write
an Iliad," he said, "when your mother is a dolt, and your father is a
cotton nightcap."
There are few debts which are so faithfully acquitted as those of
contempt; and as Schopenhauer kicked down every screen, tore off every
mask, and jeered at every sham, it would be a great stretch of fancy to
imagine that he was a popular teacher. But this at least may be said:
he was courageous, and he was strong of purpose. In the end, he dragged
Germany from her lethargy, and rather than take any other part in
Hegelism than that of spectre at the feast, he condemned himself to an
almost lifelong obscurity. If, therefore, he seems at times too bitter
and too relentless, it should be remembered that this man, whom Germany
now honors as one of her greatest philosophers, fought single-handed
for thirty years, and routed the enemy at last by the mere force and
lash of his words.
But in the mean time, while Hegel was holding forth to crowded halls,
his rival, who, out of sheer bravado, had chosen the same hours,
lectured to an audience of about half a dozen persons, among whom a
dentist, a horse-jockey, and a captain on half pay were the more
noteworthy. Such listeners were hardly calculated to make him
frantically attached to the calling he had chosen, and accordingly at
the end of the first semester he left the empty benches to take care of
themselves.
Early in life Schopenhauer wrote in English, in his note-book,
"Matrimony--war and want!" and when the _privat-docent_ had been
decently buried, and the crape grown rusty, he began to consider this
little sentence with much attention. As will be seen later on, he
objected to women as a class on purely logical grounds,--they
interfered with his plan of delivering the world from suffering; but
against the individual he had no marked dislike, only a few pleasing
epigrams. During his Dresden sojourn, as in his journey to Italy, he
had knelt, in his quality of philosopher who was seeing the world, at
many and diverse shrines, and had in no sense wandered from them
sorrow-laureled; but all that had been very different from assuming
legal responsibilities, and whenever he thought with favor of the
_petits soins_ of which, as married man, he would be the object, the
phantom of a milliner's bill loomed in double columns before him.
Should he or should he not, he queried, fall into the trap which nature
has set for all men? The question of love did not enter into the matter
at all. He believed in love as most well-read people believe in William
Tell; that is, as something very inspiring, especially when treated by
Rossini, but otherwise as a myth. Nor did he need Montaigne's hint to
be assured that men marry for others and not for themselves. The
subject, therefore, was somewhat complex: on the one side stood the
attention and admiration which he craved, and on the other an eternal
farewell to that untrammeled freedom which is the thinker's natural
heath.
The die, however, had to be cast then or never. He was getting on in
life, and an opportunity had at that time presented itself, a
repetition of which seemed unlikely. After much reflection, and much
weighing of the pros and cons, he concluded that it is the married man
who supports the full burden of life, while the bachelor bears but
half, and it is to the latter class, he argued, that the courtesan of
the muses should belong. Thereupon, with a luxury of reminiscence and
quotation which was usual to him at all times, he strengthened his
resolution with mental foot-notes, to the effect that Descartes,
Leibnitz, Malebranche, and Kant were bachelors, the great poets
uniformly married and uniformly unhappy; and supported it all with
Bacon's statement that "he that hath wife and children has given
hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises,
either of virtue or of mischief."
In 1831 the cholera appeared in Berlin, and Schopenhauer, who called
himself a choleraphobe by profession, fled before it in search of a
milder and healthier climate. Frankfort he chose for his hermitage, and
from that time up to the day of his death, which occurred in September,
1860, he continued to live there in great peace and tranquillity.
Schopenhauer should in no wise be represented as having passed his life
in building dungeons in Spain. Like every true scholar he was, in the
absence of his peers, able to live with great comfort with the dead. He
was something of a Mezzofanti; he spoke and read half a dozen languages
with perfect ease, and he could in consequence enter any library with
the certainty of finding friends and relations therein. For the
companionship of others he did not care a rap. He was never so lonely
as when associating with other people, and of all things that he
disliked the most, and a catalogue of his dislikes would fill a
chapter, the so-called entertainment headed the obnoxious list.
He had taken off, one by one, the different layers of the social nut,
and in nibbling at the kernel he found its insipidity so great that he
had small approval for those who made it part of their ordinary diet.
It should not, however, be supposed that this dislike for society and
the companionship of others sprang from any of that necessity for
solitude which is noticeable in certain cases of hypochondria; it was
simply due to the fact that he could not, in the general run of men,
find any one with whom he could associate on a footing of equality. If
Voltaire, Helvetius, Kant, or Cabanais, or, for that matter, any one
possessed of original thoughts, had dwelled in the neighborhood,
Schopenhauer, once in a while, would have delighted in supping with
them; but as agreeable symposiasts were infrequent, he was of necessity
thrown entirely on his own resources. His history, in brief, is that of
the malediction under which king and genius labor equally. Both are
condemned to solitude; and for solitude such as theirs there is neither
chart nor compass. Of course there are many other men who in modern
times have also led lives of great seclusion, but in this respect it
may confidently be stated that no thinker of recent years, Thoreau not
excepted, has ever lived in isolation more thorough and complete than
that which was enjoyed by this blithe misanthrope.
It is not as though he had betaken himself to an unfrequented waste, or
to the top of an inaccessible crag; such behavior would have savored of
an affectation of which he was incapable, and, moreover, would have
told its story of an inability to otherwise resist the charms of
society. Besides, Schopenhauer was no anchorite; he lived very
comfortably in the heart of a populous and pleasant city, and dined
daily at the best _table d'hôte_, but he lived and dined utterly alone.
He considered that, as a rule, a man is never in perfect harmony save
with himself, for, he argued, however tenderly a friend or mistress may
be beloved, there is at times some clash and discord. Perfect
tranquillity, he said, is found only in solitude, and to be permanent
only in absolute seclusion; and he insisted that the hermit, if
intellectually rich, enjoys the happiest condition which this life can
offer. The love of solitude, however, can hardly be said to exist in
any one as a natural instinct; on the contrary, it may be regarded as
an acquired taste, and one which must be developed in indirect
progression. Schopenhauer, who cultivated it to its most supreme
expression, admitted that at first he had many fierce struggles with
the natural instinct of sociability, and at times had strenuously
combated some such Mephistophelian suggestion as,--
"Hör' auf, mit deinem Gram zu spielen,
Der, wie ein Geier, dir am Leben frisst:
Die schlechteste Gesellschaft lässt dich fühlen
Dass du ein Mensch, mit Menschen bist."
But solitude, more or less rigid, is undoubtedly the lot of all
superior minds. They may grieve over it, as Schopenhauer says, but of
two evils they will choose it as the least. After that, it is
presumably but a question of getting acclimated. In old age the
inclination comes, he notes, almost of itself. At sixty it is well-nigh
instinctive; at that age everything is in its favor. The incentives
which are the most energetic in behalf of sociability then no longer
act. With advancing years there arises a capacity of sufficing to one's
self, which little by little absorbs the social instinct. Illusions
then have faded, and, ordinarily speaking, active life has ceased.
There is nothing more to be expected, there are no plans nor projects
to form, the generation to which old age really belongs has passed
away, and, surrounded by a new race, one is then objectively and
essentially alone.
Then, too, many things are clearly seen, which before were as veiled by
a mist. As the result of long experience very little is expected from
the majority of people, and the conclusion is generally reached that
not only men do not improve on acquaintance, but that mankind is made
up of very defective copies, with which it is best to have as little to
do as possible.
But beyond converting his life into a monodrama with reflections of
this description, Schopenhauer considered himself to be a missionary of
truth, and in consequence as little fitted for every-day companionship
as missionaries in China feel themselves called upon to fraternize with
the Chinese. It was the rule of his life to expect nothing, desire as
little as possible, and learn all he could, and as little was to be
expected and nothing was to be learned from the majority of the dull
ruffians who go to the making of the census, it is not to be wondered
that he trod the thoroughfares of thought alone and dismissed the
majority of men with a shrug.
"They are," he said, "just what they seem to be, and that is the worst
that can be said of them." Epigrams of this description were naturally
not apt to increase his popularity. But for that he cared very little.
He considered that no man can judge another save by the measure of his
own understanding. Of course, if this understanding is of a low degree,
the greatest intellectual gifts which another may possess convey to him
no meaning; they are as colors to the blind; and consequently, in a
great nature there will be noticed only those defects and weaknesses
which are inseparable from every character.
But to such a man as Schopenhauer,--one who considered five sixths of
the population to be knaves or blockheads, and who had thought out a
system for the remaining fraction,--to such a man as he, the question
of esteem, or the lack thereof, was of small consequence. He cared
nothing for the existence which he led in the minds of other people. To
his own self he was true, to the calling of his destiny constant, and
he felt that he could sit and snap his fingers at the world, knowing
that Time, who is at least a gentleman, would bring him his due
unasked.
Schopenhauer's character was made up of that combination of seeming
contradictions which is the peculiarity of all great men. He had the
audacity of childhood and the timidity of genius. He was suspicious of
every one, and ineffably kind-hearted. With stupidity in any form he
was blunt, even to violence, and yet his manner and courtesy were such
as is attributed to the gentlemen of the old school. If he was an
egotist, he was also charitable to excess; and who shall say that
charity is not the egotism of great natures? He was honesty itself, and
yet thought every one wished to cheat him. To mislead a possible thief
he labeled his valuables Arcana Medica, put his banknotes in
dictionaries, and his gold pieces in ink bottles. He slept on the
ground floor, that he might escape easily in case of fire. If he heard
a noise at night he snatched at a pistol, which he kept loaded at his
bedside. Indeed, he might have chosen for his motto, "Je ne crains rien
fors le dangier," and yet who is ever so foolish as a wise man? Kant's
biography is full of similar vagaries, and one has but to turn to the
history of any of the thinkers whose names are landmarks in literature,
to find that eccentricities no less striking have also been recorded of
them.
Voltaire said, "On aime la vie, mais le néant ne laisse pas d'avoir du
bon;" and Schopenhauer, not to be outdone, added more massively, that
if one could tap on the tombs and ask the dead if they cared to return,
they would shake their heads. His views of life, however, and of the
world in general, will be considered later on, and for the moment it is
but necessary to note that he regarded happiness as consisting solely
in the absence of pain, and laid down as one of the supreme rules for
the proper conduct of life that discontent should be banished as far as
possible into the outer darkness.
When, therefore, to this Emerson in black there came those moments of
restlessness and dissatisfaction which visit even the most philosophic,
he would argue with himself in a way which was almost pathetic, and
certainly naïve; it was not he that was moody and out of sorts, it was
some _privat-docent_ lecturing to empty halls, some one who was abused
by the Philistines, some defendant in a suit for damages, some one
whose fortune was engulfed perhaps beyond recovery, some lover
pleading to inattentive ears, some one attacked by one of the thousand
ills that flesh is heir to; yet this was not he; these things truly he
might have endured and suffered as one bears for a moment an ill-made
shoe, but now the foot no longer ached; indeed, he was none of all
this, he was the author of the "Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," and
what had the days to do with him!
But through all the intervening years the book had lain unnoticed on
the back shelves of the Leipsic publisher; and Schopenhauer, who had at
first been puzzled, but never disheartened, at the silence which had
settled about it, became convinced that through the influence of the
three sophists at Berlin, all mention of its merit had been suppressed
from the start.
"I am," he said, "the Iron Mask, the Caspar Hauser of philosophy," and
thereupon he pictured the Hegelians as looking admiringly at his
system, very much as the man in the fairy tale looked at the genie in
the bottle which, had he allowed it to come out, would carry him off.
Truth, however, which is long-lived, can always afford to wait; and
Schopenhauer, with something of the complacency of genius that is in
advance of its era, held his fingers on the public pulse and noted the
quickening which precedes a return to consciousness. Germany was waking
from her torpor. Already the influence of Hegel had begun to wane; his
school was split into factions, and his philosophy, which in solving
every problem had left the world nothing to do but to bore itself to
death, was slowly falling into disrepute. Moreover, the great class of
unattached scholars and independent thinkers, who cared as little for
University dogmas as they did for the threats of the Vatican, were
earnestly watching for some new teacher.
Schopenhauer was watching too; he knew that a change was coming, and
that he would come in with the change. He had but to wait. "My extreme
unction," he said, "will be my baptism; my death, a canonization."
Meanwhile old age had come upon him unawares, but with it the rich
fruition of lifelong study and reflection. The perfect tranquility in
which he passed his days had been utilized in strengthening and
expanding his work, and in 1843, in his fifty-sixth year, the second
and complementary volume of his philosophy was completed.
Twelve months later he wrote to Brockhaus, his publisher:--
"I may tell you in confidence that I am so well pleased with this
second volume, now that I see it in print, that I really think it will
be a great success.... If, now, in return for this great work, you are
willing to do me a very little favor, and one that is easily performed,
I will beg you each Easter to let me know how many copies have been
sold."
For two years he heard nothing, then in answer to a letter from him,
Brockhaus wrote:--
"In reply to your inquiry concerning the sale of your book, I can only
tell you that, to my sorrow, I have made a very poor business out of
it. Further particulars I cannot enter into."
"Many a rose," Schopenhauer murmured, as he refolded the note and
turned to other things.
In 1850, when, after six years' daily labor, he had completed his last
work, "Parerga und Paralipomena," his literary reputation was still so
insignificant that Brockhaus refused to publish it. Schopenhauer then
offered it, unavailingly, to half a dozen other publishers. No one
would have anything to do with it; the name which it bore would have
frightened a pirate, and the boldest in the guild was afraid to examine
its contents. "One thing is certain," said Schopenhauer, reflectively,
"I am unworthy of my contemporaries, or they of me." The "Parerga,"
however, in spite of the lack of allurement in its title, was not
destined to wither in manuscript. After much reconnoitring a publisher
was discovered in Berlin who, unwillingly, consented to produce it, and
thereupon two volumes of the most original and entertaining essays were
given to the public. For this work Schopenhauer received ten copies in
full payment.
Meanwhile a few adherents had rallied about him. Brockhaus, in an
attempt to make the best of a bad bargain, had marked the "Welt" down
to the lowest possible price, and a few copies had in consequence
fallen into intelligent hands. Among its readers there were some who
came to Frankfort to make the author's acquaintance; a proceeding
which pleased, yet alarmed Schopenhauer not a little.
One of them wrote to people with whom he was unacquainted, advising
them to read the work at once. "He is a fanatic," said Schopenhauer, in
complacent allusion to him, "a fanatic, that's what he is."
Dr. Gwinner, his subsequent biographer, whom he met about this time,
was his apostle, while Dr. Frauenstadt, another Boswell, whose
acquaintance he made at _table d'hôte_, he called his arch-evangelist,
and, not without pathos, repeated to him Byron's seductive lines,--
"In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the white waste there still is a tree,
And a bird in the solitude singing,
That speaks to my spirit of thee."
These gentlemen, together with a few others, made up a little band of
sturdy disciples, who went about wherever they could, speaking and
writing of the merits of Schopenhauer's philosophy. But the first note
of acclamation which, historically speaking, was destined to arouse the
thinking world, came, curiously enough, from England.
In 1853 the "Westminster Review" published a long and laudatory article
on Schopenhauer's philosophy; and this article Lindner, the editor of
the "Vossiche Zeitung," to whom Schopenhauer had given the title of
_doctor indefatigabilis_, reproduced in his own journal. In the
following year Dr. Frauenstadt published, in a well-written
pamphlet[3] which only needed a little more order and symmetry to be a
valuable handbook, a complete exposition of the doctrine; and the
applause thus stimulated reëchoed all over Germany. The "Welt als Wille
und Vorstellung," the "World as Will and Idea," which for so many years
had lain neglected, was dragged from its musty shelf like a Raphael
from a lumber-room; and the fame to which Schopenhauer had not made a
single step came to him as fame should, unsought and almost unbidden.
"My old age," he said, "is brighter now than most men's youth, for time
has brought its roses at last; but see," he added, touching his
silvered hair, "they are white."
From all sides now came evidences of the most cordial recognition. The
reviews and weeklies published anecdotes about him and extracts from
his works. Indeed, it was evident that the Iron Mask had escaped, and
that to Caspar Hauser light and air had at last been accorded.
Thinkers, scholars, and philosophers, of all creeds and colors, became
his attentive readers. Decorations were offered to him, which he
unostentatiously refused. The Berlin Academy, within whose walls Hegel
had reigned supreme, invited him to become one of its faculty. This
honor he also declined. "They have turned their back on me all my
life," he said, "and after my death they want my name to adorn their
catalogues." His philosophy was lectured upon at Breslau, and the
University of Leipsic offered it as a subject for a prize essay. All
this was very pleasant. Much to his indignation, however, for he was by
nature greatly disinclined to serve as pastime to an idle public, the
"Illustrirte Zeitung" published his likeness, and added insult to
injury by printing his name with two p's. Ah! how truly has it been
said that fame consists in seeing one's name spelt wrong in the
newspapers!
One of the most flattering manifestations of this sudden vogue was the
curiosity of the public, the number of enthusiasts that visited him,
and the eagerness with which artists sought to preserve his features
for posterity. To all this concert of praise it is difficult to say
that Schopenhauer lent a rebellious ear. The success of his philosophy
of disenchantment enchanted him. He accepted with the seriousness of
childhood the bouquets and sonnets which rained in upon him on his
subsequent birthdays, and in his letters to Frauenstadt alluded to his
ascending glory with innocent and amusing satisfaction:--
FRANKFORT, _September 23, 1854._
... A fortnight ago, a Dr. K., a teacher, came to see me; he
entered the room and looked so fixedly at me that I began to
be frightened, and then he cried out, "I must look at you, I
will look at you, I came to look at you." He was most
enthusiastic. My philosophy, he told me, restored him to
life. What next?...
_June 29, 1855._
... B. called to-day; he had been here for twenty-four hours
under an assumed name, and after many hesitations came in a
closed carriage to pay his respects.... On taking leave, he
kissed my hand. I screamed with fright....
_August 17, 1855._
... My portrait, painted by Lunteschütz, is finished and
sold. Wiesike saw it in time, and bought it while it was
still on the easel. But the unheard-of part of the whole
matter is that he told me, and Lunteschütz too, that he was
going to build a temple on purpose for it. That will be the
first chapel erected in my honor. Recitativo, "Ja, ja,
Sarastro herrschet hier."[4] What will be said of me, I
wonder, in the year 2100?...
_September, 1855._
... Received a number of visits. Baehr, the Dresden painter
and professor, came; he is a charming fellow, and pleased me
very much. He knows all my works, and is full of them. He
says, at Dresden every one is interested in them, especially
the women, who, it appears, read me with passionate delight.
Hornstein, a young composer, came also; he is a pupil of
Richard Wagner, who, it seems, is also one of my students.
Hornstein is still here, and pays me an exaggerated respect;
for instance, when I want my waiter, he rises from table to
summon him.... My portrait has been for a fortnight at the
exposition. There has been a great crowd to see it. Von
Launitz, the Frankfort Phidias, wants to take my bust....
_December 23, 1855._
... A gentleman has written to me from Zurich to say that in
the club to which he belongs my works are read with such
admiration that the members are crazy to get a picture of me
of any kind, nature, or description, and that the artist who
takes it has but to forward it C. O. D.... You see that my
fame is spreading like a conflagration, and not in
arithmetical ratio either, but in geometric, and even
cubic....
_March 28, 1856._
... R., too, kissed my hand,--a ceremony to which I cannot
accustom myself; yet it is one, I suppose, that forms part
of my imperial dignity....
_June 6, 1856._
... Becher sent his son and nephew here, and Baehr sent his
son also, and that only that these young people may in their
old age be able to boast that they had seen and spoken to
me....
_June 11, 1856._
... Professor Baehr, of Dresden, was here yesterday, and,
penetrated with the most praiseworthy enthusiasm, wished to
exchange his beautiful silver snuff-box for my forlorn old
leather one. I refused, however. He told me of a certain
Herr von Wilde, who was a perfect fanatic on the subject of
my philosophy, and who, at the age of eighty-five, died with
my name on his lips.
My Buddha, re-gilded, glittering on his pedestal, gives you
his benediction.
_August 14, 1856._
... Four pages and a half of Tallendier about me.[5] You
have seen it, I suppose. French chatter, personal details,
etc., but where the devil did he hear that I am "tout etonné
du bruit que font mes écrits dans le monde?" I am so little
astonished, that Emden told Nordwall, to the latter's
intense surprise, that I had predicted to him my future
celebrity fully twenty years ago....
Now, mediocrity may, of course, be praised, but, as Balzac has put it,
it is never discussed. And Schopenhauer, in the matter of discussion,
came in for his full share. He was praised and abused by turn. Like
every prominent figure, he made a good mark to fire at. Certain critics
said that he had stolen from Fichte and Schelling everything in his
philosophy that was worth reading, others abused him personally; and
one writer, a woman with whom he had refused to converse, and who had
probably expected to pay her hotel bill with the protocol of his
conversation, wrote a quantity of scurrilous articles about him. But
_censura perit, scriptum manet._ The criticisms are forgotten, while
his work still endures and, moreover, grows each year into surer and
stronger significance.
Among his visitors at the time was M. Foucher de Carsil, and the
portrait which that gentleman subsequently drew of him is so graphic
that it is impossible to resist the temptation of making the following
extract:[6]--
"When I first saw him, in 1859, at the Hôtel d'Angleterre, at
Frankfort, he was then an old man, with bright blue and
limpid eyes. His lips were thin and sarcastic, and about them
wandered a smile of shrewd intelligence. His high forehead
was tufted on either side with puffs of white hair that gave
to his physiognomy, luminous as it was with wit and malice, a
stamp of nobility and distinction. His garments, his lace
_jabot_, his white cravat, reminded me of that school of
gentlemen who lived toward the close of the reign of Louis
XV. His manners were those of a man accustomed to the best
society; habitually reserved and timid even to suspicion, he
rarely entered into conversation with any save his intimates
and an occasional sympathetic traveler. His gestures were
abrupt, and in conversation they became at once petulant and
suggestive. He avoided discussions and combats in words, but
he did so that he might the better enjoy the charm of
familiar conversation. When he did speak, his imagination
embroidered on the heavy canvas of the German tongue the
most subtle and delicate arabesques that the Latin, Greek,
French, English, or Italian languages were capable of
suggesting. Indeed, when he cared to talk, his conversation
possessed swing and precision, and joined thereto was a
wealth of citation, an exactitude of detail, and such
tireless flow of wit, as held the little circle of his
friends charmed and attentive until far into the night. His
words, clear-cut and cadenced, captivated his listener
wholly: they both pictured and analyzed, a tremulous
sensitiveness heightened their fervor, they were precise and
exact on every topic. A German, who had traveled extensively
in Abyssinia, was so astonished at the minute details which
he gave on the different species of crocodiles, and their
customs, that he thought that in him he recognized a former
companion.
"Happy are they who heard this last survivor of the
conversationalists of the eighteenth century! He was a
contemporary of Voltaire and of Diderot, of Helvetius and of
Chamfort; his brilliant thoughts on women, on the part that
mothers hold in the intellectual qualities of their children;
his theories, profoundly original, on the connection between
will and mind; his views on art and nature, on the life and
death of the species; his remarks on the dull and wearisome
style of those who write to say nothing, or who put on a mask
and think with the thoughts of others; his pungent
reflections on the subject of pseudonyms, and on the
establishment of a literary censure for those journals which
permitted neologisms, solecisms, and barbarisms; his
ingenious hypotheses on magnetic phenomena, dreams, and
somnambulism; his hatred of excess of every kind; his love of
order; and his horror of obscurantism, 'qui, s'il n'est pas
un péché contre le Saint Esprit en est un contre l'esprit
humain,' make for him a physiognomy entirely different from
any other of this century."
A few tags and tatters of these conversations have been preserved by
Dr. Frauenstadt,[7] and in them Schopenhauer is discovered sprawled at
ease, and expressing himself on a variety of topics with a
_disinvoltura_ and freedom of epithet which recalls the earlier
essayists. With them, as with him, periphrasis was avoided. Spades were
spades, not horticultural implements; and in one dialogue Frauenstadt
compliments his master in having, in breadth and reach of his polemic,
nothing in common with contemporary regard for ears polite. Citations
of this class, however, may well be omitted. A thinker in slippers, and
especially _in puris naturalibus_, is generally unattractive even to
those the least given to prudishness. But beyond certain instances of
this description, the scholar and man of the world is usually very
discernible. At times he is profound, at others vivacious; for
instance, he is asked what man would be if Nature, in making the last
step which leads to him, had started from the dog or the elephant; to
which he answers, in that case man would be an intelligent dog or an
intelligent elephant, instead of being an intelligent monkey. As may be
imagined, there was about Schopenhauer very little of the Sunday-school
theologian, and religion was in consequence seldom viewed by him from
an orthodox standpoint; when, therefore, Schleiermacher was quoted
before him to the effect that no man can be a philosopher who is not
religious, he observed very quietly, "No man who is religious can
become a philosopher,--metaphysics are useless to him, and no true
philosopher is religious; he is sometimes in danger, but he is not
fettered, he is free." Elsewhere he said, "Religion and philosophy are
like the two scales of a balance; the more one rises, the more does the
other descend."
In Schopenhauer's opinion, the greatest novels were "Tristram Shandy,"
"Wilhelm Meister," "Don Quixote," and the "Nouvelle Héloïse." To "Don
Quixote" he ascribed an allegorical meaning, but as an intellectual
romance he preferred "Wilhelm Meister" to all others. He believed in
clairvoyance, but not that man is a free agent; and it may be here
noted that, according to the most recent scientific opinion, man is a
free agent, _at most_, about once in twenty-four hours. "Everything
that happens, happens necessarily," he would say; and it was with this
maxim, of whose truth he had a variety of every-day examples, and with
the aid of the theory of the ideality of time, that he explained second
sight. "Everything is now that is to be," he said; "but with our
ordinary eyes we do not see it; the clairvoyant merely puts on the
spectacles of Time."
In the "Paränesen und Maximen," in which Schopenhauer chats quietly
with the reader and not with the disciple, many quaint and forcible
suggestions are to be found. For instance, among other things, he says,
"I accord my entire respect to any man who, when unoccupied, and
waiting for something, does not immediately begin to beat a tattoo with
his fingers, or toy with the object nearest his hand. It is probable
that such a man has thoughts of his own." His advice, too, on the
manner in which we should think and work is quite Emersonian in its
directness. It was, it may be added, the manner in which he thought and
worked, himself: "Have compartments for your thoughts and open but one
of them at a time; in this way each little pleasure you may have will
not be spoiled by some lumbering care; neither will one thought drive
out another, and an important matter will not swamp a lot of smaller
ones."
Such, vaguely outlined, was this great and interesting figure. With the
appearance of the "Parerga" his work was done. He lived ten years
longer in great seclusion, receiving only infrequent visits. "There,
where two or three are gathered together," he would say, and suggested
that his friends and believers should meet and consult without him.
Such literary labor as he then performed consisted mainly in
strengthening that which he had already written, and in making notes
and suggestions for future editions. At the age of seventy-two he died,
very peacefully though suddenly, leaving all his fortune to charitable
purposes.
In these pages no attempt has been made to enter into the details of
biography, for that pleasant task has been already well performed by
other and better equipped pens. The present writer has therefore only
sought to present such a view of Schopenhauer as might aid the general
reader to a clearer understanding of the doctrine which he was the
first to present, and which will be briefly considered in the next
chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: _Briefe über die Schopenhauer'sche Philosophie._]
[Footnote 4: "Yes, yes, Sarastro reigns herein."--Air from the _Magic
Flute_.]
[Footnote 5: An article in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_.]
[Footnote 6: _Hegel et Schopenhauer._ Paris: Hachette et Cie.]
[Footnote 7: _Arthur Schopenhauer. Von ihm, Ueber ihn._ Berlin.]