SCHOPENHAUER.*
"IN possessing Schopenhauer the world possesses a per- sonality the richer," declares the writer of the introduction to these essays, and the remark is just. We do not so much care for the specific opinions held by Schopenhauer as for the fact that he arrived at opinions for himself, that his mind was original, his intellect clear, his sense of intellectual honesty profound, that he was never carried away by the jargon or fashions of the hour. "Best be yourself, imperial, plain, and true," says Browning, and the spirit of that idea permeates all that Schopenhauer ever wrote. The essay in this volume on "Thinking for Oneself" represents the mental attitude of the writer all through his life, and its central thought shows why Schopenhauer exercised so vigorous an influence on contemporary Europe. Honesty, courage, lucidity, — these were in his eyes the intellectual virtues, the absence of which, he thought, had inflicted such injury on German philosophy and literature. The philosophical creed of Schopenhauer, as set forth mainly in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, has been much discussed, and we do not :ntend to treat of it, since it is only indirectly concerned with the present volume, ex- cepting as regards the essay on "Religion." Suffice it to say that Schopenhauer was consumed with hatred for the Transcendental school as represented by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who had, he thought, led the world astray, and he conceived of himself as having taken up the true problem of philosophy as it was left by Kant, whose legitimate successor he was. His mind, fundamentally Greek, was also strongly imbued with Oriental thought, and he was led to see the phenomenal world as the outcome of will, which was the source of the contradictions and misery of existence. From those contradictions and misery man could never be released save by the renunciation of the will to exist. This doctrine has an affinity with Christianity ; but while the latter enjoins renunciation because we may escape front the dominance of the lusts of the flesh and of the mind into the sanctuary of the divine will which is identified with the good and the rational, with Schopenhauer we only escape into the cold embrace of an impersonal intellect which is divorced from the real world and in which our personality is lost. In short, we have in the philosophy of Schopenhauer a kind of Western Buddhism, founded on keen intellectual analysis, and inspired by the undoubtedly true idea that man's misery arises from his finite nature, and can never be cancelled from that side. Where he fails is in relating himself to life.
These essays are all characteristic of the man,—of his strength and his weakness, of his intellectual sincerity, and of his moral shortcomings. He loved clear thinking and decided utterance, as we see from his essays on "Authorship and Style" and on "Reading and Books." He had an absolute hatred for sentimentalism and for conventions, and he despised women, whom he regarded as the chief mainstays of these all-pervading elements in social life. He had an utter contempt for the trifles amid which the mass of people fritter away life, as we see from his essay on the "Emptiness of Existence." He detested priests and those philosophers whose conclusions maintain the institution of priesthood, as we discover in the dialogue on "Religion." He thinks the world a poor business, and the mass of its inhabitants, who live dazzled and deluded by the shows of things, beneath contempt, fit only to be hewers of wood and drawers of water for the superior few. Indeed, Schopenhauer's sym- pathies are as thoroughly aristocratic as his intellect is keen. When we say this, it must be understood that we mean aris- tocratic in the Greek, not in the ordinary modern, sense. For the upper classes, with their conventions, their absence of ideas, their externalism and materialism, Schopenhauer not only has no sympathy, he despises them. Indeed, his lip is perpetually curled in acorn for a world which he conceives as a profound blunder, filled with stupid people, and given over to the noisy performance of things that are not worth doing. His contenipt for the world, however, has not the true religious note of either Christianity or Buddhism. It is purely intel- lectual, without divine sympathy or pity : its renunciation is merely intellectual, without the passionate devotion to an ideal good which burns in the heart of St. Augustine or St. Francis. Beneath the almost ascetic garb we detect the cloven
4 B000lis of Sohopenhauer. Translated by Mrs. Rudolph Dinh, London: Walter Scott
foot of Mephistopheles, and we know that in his aetn A lito Sehopenhatter was unable to rise above a eliL. eyn, which accords ill with his almost Platonic worship at the shrine of the Idea.
The best essays in this work are those which have to do with reading, literature, and books, with nearly every wont of which we are in hearty agreement, and every word of which needs saying. Much readim.7, says Sehopenhauer, is destructive of original thought. The .;reat writers whose works will endure wrote out of their own heart, they learned direct from Nature, and had an original connection with the universe. The inferior writers, who have really nothing to say, but who write for money, or to gratify vanity, or for the purpose of mere light criticism, depend on the works of other men ; they merely think thoughts that have already been thought many times over. The first class of writers think about the subject itself, the second think about the books which have been already written on the subject, and so they can never be original. The former alone develop style, which is "the physiognomy of the mind." There is no true literature without this subtle element of style, the talk of substance without form being a delusion. "This preference for matter to form is the same as a man ignoring the shape and painting of a fine Etruscan vase in order to make a chemical examination of the clay and colours of which it is made." Style, however, is not the outcome so much of direct effort as of clear thinking, which will create its own style, so that we see in the Greeks, as in Shakespeare or Moliere. clear, original ideas issuing naturally in a style of distinction, while so many German writers (Schopenhaner is very severe on most of his own countrymen), with flaccid and vague notions, are unable to give us anything lucid or definite. On the whole, thinks Schopenhauer, writers should write generally as they speak, but "a certain trace of relationship with the monumental style" should be visible. In other words, literature should be embodied in a certain medium between the slipshod talk of the street and the stilted form of the pedant. To the reader Schopenhauer gives advice which the reviewer admits to be counsel of perfection, but to which he cannot, in the nature of things, attain. Why waste time over the last sen- sational novel or piece of mere bookmaking when the real treasures of the world of letters lie before you P Our philosopher is terribly severe on the literary small-talk of the drawing-room, which, it is to be feared, is worse now, and in England, than it was in the Germany of his day. " Nine- tenths of the whole of our present literature aims solely at taking a few shillings out of the public's pocket, and to accomplish this, author, publisher, and reviewer have joined forces." We do not read great books, says Schopenhauer, but books about books, and even books about these, and we spend our time chattering about these stale rehashes while we might be fortifying the intellect with the immortal works of literature. This charge is, no doubt, true ; but something is to be said for reading even the poorer books of our own time, because they do, in a measure, breathe the Zeitgeist, and we cannot afford to cut ourselves off from the influences of our own age.
The essay on "Noise" would be admirable were it not for the spirit of utter contempt for the labouring masses, who mostly make noise, which pervades it. But every man of letters will acquiesce in the protest against purely unneces- sary noises which ruin the nerves, sour the temper, and pre- vent much good intellectual work from being done. If Schopenhauer found so much exasperation from the noises of a comparatively small German city, what would be his feeling in the London of to-day, where quiet is a luxury tc be bought and paid for at a high price ? Still more/ characteristic of its author than the essay on " Noise " is that on "Women." Here, indeed, we arrive at Schopenhaner's inmost soul. It will be remembered that his mother, Joanna, was a singular woman, with whom he was perpetually at war. She was lively, he was grim. She was a sentimentalist, he detested sentiment. She was devoted to society, to gossip, to the convenances of life. He lived for ideas ; and with an almost savage moroseness poured scorn on the round of "at homes" and msthetic tea-parties. Both were selfish and quarrelsome. We may judge, therefore, that Schopenhaner took his notions of women partly from his mother. It goes without saying that these notions were violent in the extreme, yet not without aspects of truth. The "new woman" would rave at this satire on her pretensions ; and yet it would do her good to read what Schopenhauer has to say with as much calmness as she can command. Woman is here depicted as emphatically "a lesser man,"—indeed, so far below man as to be fit only for the role of the old-fashioned German Haus-frau, to look after the children and to cook the dinner, and to deport herself meekly before her superiors of the other sex. She has no genius, she has never produced a single great work, her influence in modern literature is deplorable as tending to lower its standard, she has no sense of justice, she has no large aims, she is frivolous and capricious, and she is naturally more dishonest and untruthful than man. Even her personal beauty is attacked; and it is declared absurd to talk about the fair sex unless we mean man. "It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual instinct that could give that stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short- legged race the name of the fair sex; for the entire beauty of the sex is based on this instinct. One would be more justified in calling them the unwsthetic sex than the beautiful." And Schopenhauer bids us observe how women behave at a concert when they "keep on chattering during the finest passages in the greatest masterpieces." The charge is often true, but we have heard men do it too. The objectionable character of the sex has reached its climax in the modern "fine lady," and it must be the duty of men to rid themselves of the "lady- grievance," which is to be accomplished through the revival of polygamy! We see once more the Eastern mind welling up in this Western man, and leading him to take up a position fatal to civilisation.
The utterance on religion is cast in the form of a dialogue, in which one of the characters takes sides with what may be called liberal Christianity, while the other obviously repre- sents Schopenhauer himself, whose argument is that the day for religion is over, and that we can no longer maintain fig- ments in which we do not believe for the sake of keeping the masses quiet. A return to Paganism for the many, to a kind of esoteric Buddhism for the few, seems to be the idea which the Frankfort philosopher had in his mind. The last essay defends suicide, and is evidence both of the Pagan conception of life, and the Eastern conception of impersonal absorption, which were blended in the thought of Schopenbauer.
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