.••:•--*•.•-.••>•-•."••'••'

THE ART OF LITERATURE

H Series of

BY

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Vitam impendere vero.— JUVENAL
SELECTED AND TRANSLATED

WITH A PREFACE BY

T. BAILEY SAUNDERS, M.A.

LONDON: SWAN SONNENSCIIEIN & CO., LIM.

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.

1897.

First Edition, March iSgi : Second Edition, January iSqz : Third Edition^
March iSff*

\

THE ART OF LITERATURE

at

Crown Bz'o} each 2s. 6d.

1. The Wisdom of Life ....

2. Counsels and Maxims ....

3. Religion, a Dialogue, elc.

4. The Art of Literature ....

5. Studies in Pessimism ....

6. Outlines of the Philosophy of Religion -

7. The Problem of Reality

8. First Steps in Philosophy - - •

9. The Influence of Buddhism on Primi

tive Christianity - - - -.

10. Religion

11. The Sexes Compared -

12. The Gospel of Buddha - - -

13. The Art of Controversy

14. On Human Nature ....

A. SCHOPENHAUER.
A. SCHOPENHAUER.
A. SCHOPENHAUER.
A. SCHOPENHAUER.
A. SCHOPENHAUER.
H. LOTZE,
E. B. BAX
W. M. SALTER.

A. LlLLIE.

G. DE MOLINARI.

E. VON HARTMANN.
PAUL CARUS.
A. SCHOPENHAUER.
A. SCHOPENHAUER.

LONDON:

SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & Co., LIMITED.

CONTENTS.

Page

PREFACE v

ON AUTHORSHIP . • - • - i

ON STYLE - J5

ON THE STUDY OF LATIN - - - - - - 39

ON MEN OF LEARNING 47

ON THINKING FOR ONESELF - - - - 57

ON SOME FORMS OF LITERATURE - - 73

ON CRITICISM .-------05

ON REPUTATION - " - - - 103

ON GENIUS - - - ~ - - - -127

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

THE contents of this, as of the other volumes in the
series, have been drawn from Schopenhauer's Parerga,
and amongst the various subjects dealt with in that
famous collection of essays, Literature holds an im
portant place. Nor can Schopenhauer's opinions fail
to be of special value when he treats of literary form
and method. For, quite apart from his philosophical
pretensions, he claims recognition as a great writer;
lie is, indeed, one of the best of the few really excellent
prose-writers of whom Germany can boast. While he
is thus particularly qualified to speak of Literature as
an Art, he has also something to say upon those in
fluences which, outside of his own merits, contribute
so much to an author's success, and are so often under
valued when he obtains immediate popularity. Scho
penhauer's own sore experiences in the matter of re
putation lend an interest to his remarks upon that
subject, although it is too much to ask of human
nature that he should approach it in any dispassionate
spirit.

In the following pages we have observations upon
style by one who was a stylist in the best sense of tie
word, not affected, nor yet a phrase-monger ; on think-

vi TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

ing for oneself by a philosopher who never did any
thing else ; on criticism by a writer who suffered much
from the inability of others to understand him ; on
reputation by a candidate who, during the greater
part of his life, deserved without obtaining it ; and on
genius by one who was incontestably of the privileged
order himself. And whatever may be thought of some
of his opinions on matters of detail — on anonymity,
for instance, or on the question whether good work is
never done for money — there can be no doubt that
his general view of literature, and the conditions
under W7hich it flourishes, is perfectly sound.

It might be thought, perhaps, that remarks which
were meant to apply to the German language would
have but little bearing upon one so different from it
as English. This would be a just objection if Scho
penhauer treated literature in a petty spirit, and con
fined himself to pedantic inquiries into matters of
grammar and etymology, or mere niceties of phrase.
But this is not so. He deals with his subject broadly,
and takes large and general views ; nor can anyone who
knows anything of the philosopher suppose this to mean
that he is vague and feeble. It is true that now and
again in the course of these essays he makes remarks
which are obviously meant to apply to the failings of
certain writers of his own age and country ; but in
such a case I have generally given his sentences a
turn, which, while keeping them faithful to the spirit
of the original, secures for them a less restricted range,
and makes Schopenhauer a critic of similar faults in
whatever age or country they may appear. This has
been done in spite of a sharp word on page 8 of this

TRANSLATORS PREFACE. Vll

volume, addressed to translators who dare to revise
their author ; but the change is one with which not
even Schopenhauer could quarrel.

It is thus a significant fact — a testimony to the
depth of his insight and, in the main, the justice of
his opinions — that views of Iit3rature which appealed
to his own immediate contemporaries, should be
found to hold good elsewhere and at a distance of
fifty years. It means that what he had to say was
worth saying ; and since it is adapted thus equally to
diverse times and audiences, it is probably of perma
nent interest.

The intelligent reader will observe that much of the
charm of Schopenhauer's writing comes from its
strongly personal character, and that here he has to
do, not with a mere maker of books, but with a man
who thinks for himself and has no false scruples in
putting his meaning plainly upon the page, or in un
masking sham wherever he finds it. This is nowhere
so true as when he deals with literature ; and just as
in his treatment of life, he is no flatterer to men in
general, so here he is free and outspoken on the pecu
liar failings of authors. At the same time he gives
them good advice. He is particularly happy in recom
mending restraint in regard to reading the works of
others, and the cultivation of independent thought;
and herein he recalls a saying attributed to Hobbes,
who was not less distinguished as a writer than as a
philosopher, to the effect that " if he had read as
much as other men, he should have' been as ignorant as
they."

Schopenhauer also utters a warning, which we shall

Vlll TRANSLATORS PREFACE.

do well to take to heart in these days, against mingling
the pursuit of literature with vulgar aims. If we
follow him here, we shall carefully distinguish between
literature as an object of life and literature as a means
of living, between the real love of truth and beauty,
and that detestable false love which looks to the price
it will fetch in the market. I am not referring to
those who, while they follow a useful and honour
able calling in bringing literature before the public,
are content to be known as men of business. If, by
the help of some second witch of Endor, we could
raise the ghost of Schopenhauer, it would be interest
ing to hear his opinion of a certain kind of literary
enterprise which has come into vogue since his day,
and now receives an amount of attention very much
beyond its due. We may hazard a guess at the
direction his opinion would take. He would doubt
less show us how this enterprise, which is carried on
by self-styled literary men, ends by making literature
into a form of merchandise, and treating it as though
it were so much goods to be bought and sold at a
profit, and most likely to produce quick returns if
the maker's name is well known. Nor would it be
the ghost of the real Schopenhauer unless we heard
a vigorous denunciation of men who claim a connection
with literature by a servile flattery of successful
living authors — the dead cannot be made to pay — in
the hope of appearing to advantage in their reflected
light and turning that advantage into money.

In order to present the contents of this book in a
convenient form, I have not scrupled to make an
arrangement with the chapters somewhat different

TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. IX

from that which exists in the original ; so that two or
more subjects which are there dealt with successively
in one and the same chapter, here stand by themselves.
In consequence of this, some of the titles of the
sections are not to be found in the original. I may
state, however, that the essays on Authorship and
Style and the latter part of that on Criticism are
taken direct from the chapter headed Ueber Schrift-
stellerei und Stil; and that the remainder of the essay
on Criticism, with that of Reputation, is supplied by
the remarks Ueber Urtheil, Kritik, Beifall und Ruhm.
The essays on The Study of Latin, on Men of Learn
ing, and on Some Forms of Literature, are taken
chiefly from the four sections Ueber GcleJirsamkeit
und Gelehrte, Ueber Sprache und Worte, Ueber Lesen
und Bucher : Anhang, and Zur Metaphysik des
Schoncn. The essay on TJ linking for Oneself is a
rendering of certain remarks under the heading
Selbstdenken. Genius was a favourite subject of
speculation with Schopenhauer, and he often touches
upon it in the course of his works ; always, however,
to put forth the same theory in regard to it as may be
found in the concluding section of this volume.
Though the essay has little or nothing to do with
literary method, the subject of which it treats is the
most needful element of success in literature ; and I
have introduced it on that ground. It forms part of
a chapter in the Parerga entitled Den Intellekt i'tber-
haupt und in jeder Beziehung betreffende Gedanken :
An hang veruuandter Stellen.

It has also been part of my duty to invent a title
f»r this volume ; and I am well aware that objection

x TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

may Le made to the one I have chosen, on the ground
that in common language it is unusual to speak of
literature as an art, and that to do so is unduly to
narrow its meaning and to leave out of sight its main
function as the record of thought. But there is no
reason why the word Literature should not be
employed in that double sense which is allowed to
attach to Painting, Music, Sculpture, as signifying
either the objective outcome of a certain mental
activity, seeking to express itself in outward form;
or else the particular kind of mental activity in
question, and the methods it follows. And we do, in
fact, use it in this latter sense, when we say of a writer
that he pursues literature as a calling. If, then, litera
ture can be taken to mean a process as well as a result
of mental activity, there can be no error in speaking
of it as Art. I use that term in its broad sense, as
meaning skill in the display of thought; or, more
fully, a right use of the rules applying to the practical
exhibition of thought, with whatever material it may
deal. In connection with literature, this is a sense
and an application of the term which have been suffi
ciently established by the example of the great writers
of antiquity.

It may be asked, of course, whether the true thinker,
who will always form the soul of the true author, will
not be so much occupied with what he has to say,
that it will appear to him a trivial thing to spend
great effort on embellishing the form in which he
delivers it. Literature, to be worthy of the name,
must, it is true, deal with noble matter — the riddle of
our existence, the great facts of life, the changing

TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. XI

passions of the human heart, the discernment of some
deep moral truth. It is easy to lay too much stress
upon the mere garment of thought ; to be too pre
cise ; to give to the arrangement of words an atten
tion that should rather be paid to the promotion of
fresh ideas. A writer who makes this mistake is
like a fop who spends his little mind in adorning
his person. In short, it may be charged against the
view of literature which is taken in calling it an Art,
that, instead of making truth and insight the author's
aim, it favours sciolism and a fantastic and affected
style. There is, no doubt, some justice in the objection ;
nor have we in our own day, and especially amongst
younger men, any lack of writers who endeavour to
win confidence, not by adding to the stock of ideas in
the world, but by despising the use of plain language.
Their faults are not new in the history of literature;
and it is a pleasing sign of Schopenhauer's insight that
a merciless exposure of them, as they existed half a
century ago, is still quite applicable to their modern
form.

And since these writers, who may, in the slang
of the hour, be called " impressionists " in literature,
follow their own bad taste in the manufacture of dainty
phrases, devoid of all nerve, and generally with some
quite commonplace meaning, it is all the more necessary
to discriminate carefully between artifice and art. But
although they may learn something from Schopen
hauer's advice, it is not chiefly to them that it is
offered. It is to that great mass of writers, whose
business is to fill the columns of the newspaper and
the pages of the review, and to produce the ton of

xii TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

novels that appear every year. Now that almost
everyone who can hold a pen aspires to be called an
author, it is well to emphasize the fact that literature
is an art in some respects more important than any
other. The problem of this art is the discovery of
those qualities of style and treatment which entitle
any work to be called good literature. It will be safe
to warn the reader at the very outset that, if he
wishes to avoid being led astray, he should in his
search for these qualities turn to books that have stood
the test of time. For such an amount of hasty writ
ing is done in these clays that it is really difficult for
anyone who reads much of it to avoid contracting its
faults, and thus gradually coming to terms of danger
ous familiarity with bad methods. This advice will
be especially needful if things that have little or no
claim to be called literature at all — the newspaper,
the monthly magazine, and the last new tale of
intrigue or adventure — fill a large measure, if not the
whole, of the time given to reading. Nor are those
who are sincerely anxious to have the best thought in
the best language quite free from danger if they give
too much attention to contemporary authors, even
though these seem to think and write excellently.
For one generation alone is incompetent to decide
upon the merits of any author whatever ; and as
literature, like all art, is a thing of human invention,
so it can be pronounced good only if it obtains lasting
admiration, by establishing a permanent appeal to
mankind's deepest feeling for truth and beauty. It is
in this sense that Schopenhauer is perfectly right in
holding that the neglect of the ancient classics, which

TRANSLATORS PREFACE. Xlll

are the best of all models in the art of writing, will
infallibly lead to a degeneration of literature. And
the method of discovering the best qualities of style,
and of forming a theory of writing, is not to follow
some trick or mannerism that happens to please for
the moment, but to study the way in which great
authors have done their best work.

It will be said that Schopenhauer tells us nothing
we did not know before. Perhaps so ; as he himself
says, the best things are seldom new. But he puts
the old truths in a fresh and forcible way ; and no
one who knows anything of good literature will deny
that these truths are just now of very tit application.
It was probably to meet a real want that, a year or
two ago, an ingenious person succeeded in drawing
a great number of English and American writers into
a confession of their literary creed and the art they
adopted in authorship ; and the interesting volume in
which he gave these confessions to the world con
tained some very good advice, although most of it had
been said before in different forms. More recently a
new departure, of very doubtful use, has taken place ;
and two books have been issued, which aim, the one
at being an author's manual, the other at giving
hints on essays and how to write them. A glance
at these books will probably show that their
authors have still something to learn. Both of
these ventures seem, unhappily, to be popular ; and,
although they may claim a position next-door to that
of the present volume, I beg to say that it has no con
nection with them whatever. Schopenhauer does not
attempt to teach the art of making bricks without stra^

xiv TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

I wish to take this opportunity of tendering my
thanks to a large number of reviewers for the very
gratifying reception given to the earlier volumes of
this series. And I have great pleasure in expressing
my obligations to my friend Mr. W. G. Collingwood,
who has looked over most of my proofs and often
given me excellent advice in my effort to turn Schopen
hauer into readable English.

T. B. S.
February, 1891.

ON AUTHORSHIP.

ON AUTHORSHIP.

THERE are, first of all, two kinds of authors : those
who write for the subject's sake, and those who write
for writing's sake. While the one have had thoughts or
experiences which seem to them worth communicating,
the others want money; and so they write, for
money. Their thinking is part of the business of
writing. They may be recognised by the way in
which they spin out their thoughts to the greatest
possible length ; then, too, by the very nature of their
thoughts, which are only half -true, perverse, forced,
vacillating; again, by the aversion they generally
show to saying anything straight out, so that they
may seem other than they are. Hence their writing
is deficient in clearness and definiteness, and it is not
long before they betray that their only object in
writing at all is to cover paper. This sometimes
happens with the best authors ; now and then, for
example, with Lessing in bis Dramaturgic, and even
in many of Jean Paul's romances. As soon as the
reader perceives this, let him throw the book away ;
for time is precious. The truth is that when an
author begins to write for the sake of covering paper
he is cheating the reader ; because he writes under the
pretext that he has something to say.

Writing for money and reservation of copyright
are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes

4 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

anything that is worth writing, unless he writes
entirely for the sake of his subject. What an in
estimable boon it would be, if in every branch of
literature there were only a few books, but those ex
cellent ! This can never happen, as long as money
is to be made by writing. It seems as though the
money lay under a curse ; for every author degenerates
as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way
for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest
men all come from the time when they had to write
for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that
Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honour
and money are not to be found in the same purse —
honra y provecho no caben en un saco. The reason
why Literature is in such a bad plight nowadays is
simply and solely that people write books to make
money. A man who is in want sits down and writes
a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it.
The secondary effect of this is the ruin of language.

A great many bad writers make their whole living
by that foolish mania of the public for reading no
thing but what has just been printed, — journalists, I
mean. Truly, a most appropriate name. In plain
language it is journeymen, day-labourers !

Again, it may be said that there are three kinds of
authors. First come those who write without think
ing. They write from a full memory, from remini
scences ; it may be, even straight out of other people's
books. This class is the most numerous. Then
come those who do their thinking whilst they are
writing. They think in order to write ; and there is
no lack of them. Last of all come those authors

ON AUTHORSHIP. 5

who think before they begin to write They are
rare.

Authors of the second class, who put off their think
ing until they come to write, are like a sportsman
who goes forth at random and is not likely to bring
very much home. On the other hand, when an
author of the third or rare class writes, it is like a
battue. Here the game has been previously captured
and shut up within a very small space ; from which
it is afterwards let out, so many at a time, into
another space, also confined. The game cannot pos
sibly escape the sportsman ; he has nothing to do but
aim and fire — in other words, write down his thoughts.
This is a kind of sport from which a man has some
thing to show.

But even though the number of those who really
think seriously before they begin to write is small,
extremely few of them think about the subject itself:
the remainder think only about the books that have
been written on the subject, and what has been said
by others. In order to think at all, such writers need
the more direct and powerful stimulus of having other
people's thoughts before them. These become their im
mediate theme; and the result is that they are always
under their influence, and so never, in any real sense
of the word, original. But the former are roused to
thought by the subject itself, to which their thinking is
thus immediately directed. This is the only class that
produces writers of abiding fame.

It must, of course, be understood that I am speak
ing here of writers who treat of great subjects ; not of
writers on the art of making brandy.

6 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

Unless an author takes the material on which he
writes out of his own head, that is to say, from his
own observation, he is not worth reading. Book-
manufacturers, compilers, the common run of history-
writers, and many others of the same class, take their
material immediately out of books ; and the material
goes straight to their finger-tips without even paying
freight or undergoing examination as it passes through
their heads, to say nothing of elaboration or revision.
How very learned many a man would be if he knew
everything that was in his own books ! The conse
quence of this is that these writers talk in such a
loose and vague manner, that the reader puzzles his
brains in vain to understand what it is of which they
are really thinking. They are thinking of nothing. It
may now and then be the case that the book from which
they copy has been composed exactly in the same way ;
so that writing of this sort is like a plaster cast of a
cast ; and in the end, the bare outline of the face, and
that, too, hardly recognisable, is all that is left of your
Antinous. Let compilations be read as seldom as
possible. It is difficult to avoid them altogether;
since compilations also include those text-books which
contain in a small space the accumulated knowledge
of centuries.

There is no greater mistake than to suppose that
the last work is always the more correct ; that what
is written later on is in every case an improvement
on what was written before ; and that change always
means progress. Real thinkers, men of right judg
ment, people who are in earnest with their subject, —
these are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule

ON AUTHORSHIP. 7

everywhere in the world: it is always on the alert,
taking the mature opinions of the thinkers, and in
dustriously seeking to improve upon them (save the
mark !) in its own peculiar way.

If the reader wishes to study any subject, let him
beware of rushing to the newest books upon it, and
confining his attention to them alone, under the
notion that science is always advancing, and that the
old books have been drawn upon in the writing of
the new. They have been drawn upon, it is true ;
but how ? The writer of the new book often does
not understand the old books thoroughly, and yet he
is unwilling to take their exact words ; so he bungles
them, and says in his own bad way that which has
been said very much better and more clearly by the
old writers, who wrote from their own lively know
ledge of the subject. The new writer frequently
omits the best things they say, their most striking
illustrations, their happiest remarks ; because he does
not see their value or feel how pregnant they are.
The only thing that appeals to him is what is shallow
and insipid.

It often happens that an old and excellent book is
ousted by new and bad ones, which, written for
money, appear with an air of great pretension and
much puffing on the part of friends. In science a man
tries to make his mark by bringing out something
fresh. This often means nothing more than that he
attacks some received theory which is quite correct, in
order to make room for his own false notions. Some
times the effort is successful for a time ; and then a
return is made to the old and true theory. These

8 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

innovators are serious about nothing but their own
precious self: it is this that they want to put forward,
and the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to
start a paradox. Their sterile heads take naturally
to the path of negation ; so they begin to deny truths
that have long been admitted — the vital power, for
example, the sympathetic nervous system, generatio
equivoca, Bichat's distinction between the working of
the passions and the working of intelligence ; or else
they want us to return to crass atomism, and the like.
Hence it frequently happens that the course of science
is retrogressive.

To this class of writers belong those translators
who not only translate their author but also correct
and revise him ; a proceeding which always seems to
me impertinent. To such writers I say : Write books
yourself which are worth translating, and leave other
people's works as they are !

The reader should study, if he can, the real authors,
the men who have founded and discovered things ; or,
at any rate, those who are recognised as the great
masters in every branch of knowledge. Let him buy
second-hand books rather than read their contents in
new ones. To be sure, it is eas}T to add to any new
discovery — inventis aliquid addere facile est; and,
therefore, the student, after well mastering the rudi
ments of his subject, will have to make himself
acquainted with the more recent additions to the
knowledge of it. And, in general, the following rule
may be laid down here as elsewhere : if a thing is
new, it is seldom good ; because if it is good, it is only
for a short time new.

ON AUTHORSHIP. 9

What the address is to a letter, the title should be
to a book ; in other words, its main object should be
to bring the book to those amongst the public who
will take an interest in its contents. It should, there
fore, be expressive ; and since by its very nature it
must be short, it should be concise, laconic, pregnant,
and if possible give the contents in one word. A
prolix title is bad ; and so is one that says nothing, or
is obscure and ambiguous, or even, it may be, false
and misleading; this last may possibly involve the
book in the same fate as overtakes a wrongly ad
dressed letter. The worst titles of all are those which
have been stolen, those, I mean, which have already
been borne by other books ; for they are in the first
place a plagiarism, and secondly the most convincing
proof of a total lack of originality in the author. A
man who has not enough originality to invent a new
title for his book, will be still less able to give it new
contents. Akin to these stolen titles are those which
have been imitated, that is to say, stolen to the ex
tent of one half; for instance, long after I had pro
duced my treatise On Will in Nature, Oersted wrote
a book entitled On Mind in Nature.

A book can never be anything more than the im
press of its author's thoughts ; and the value of these
will lie either in the matter about which he has
thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in
other words, what it is that he has thoug/tt about it.

The matter of books is most various ; and various
also are the several excellences attaching to books on
the score of their matter. By matter I mean every
thing that comes within the domain of actual experi-

10 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

ence ; that is to say, the facts of history and the facts
of nature, taken in and by themselves and in their
widest sense. Here it is the thing treated of which
gives its peculiar character to the book; so that a
book can be important, whoever it was that wrote it.

But in regard to the form, the peculiar character of
a book depends upon the person who wrote it. It
may treat of matters which are accessible to everyone
and well known ; but it is the way in which they are
treated, what it is that is thought about them, that
gives the book its value ; and this comes from its
author. If, then, from this point of view a book is
excellent and beyond comparison, so is its author. It
follows that if a writer is worth reading, his merit
rises just in proportion as he owes little to his matter ;
therefore, the better known and the more hackneyed
this is, the greater he will be. The three great
tragedians of Greece, for example, all worked at the
same subject-matter.

So when a book is celebrated, care should be taken
to note whether it is so on account of its matter or
its form ; and a distinction should be made ac
cordingly.

Books of great importance on account of their
matter may proceed from very ordinary and shallow
people, by the fact that they alone have had access to
this matter ; books, for instance, which describe
journeys in distant lands, rare natural phenomena, or
experiments; or historical occurrences of which the
writers were witnesses, or in connection with which
they have spent much time and trouble in the research
and special study of original documents.

ON AUTHORSHIP. 11

On the other hand, where the matter is accessible
to everyone or very well known, everything will
depend upon the form ; and what it is that is thought
about the matter will give the book all the value it
possesses. Here only a really distinguished man will
be able to produce anything worth reading ; for the
others will think nothing but what anyone else can
think. They will just produce an impress of their
own minds ; but this is a print of which everyone
possesses the original.

However, the public is very much more concerned
to have matter than form ; and for this very reason it
is deficient in any high degree of culture. The public
shows its preference in this respect in the most
laughable way when it comes to deal with poetry;
for there it devotes much trouble to the task of
tracking out the actual events or personal circum
stances in the life of the poet which served as the occa
sion of his various works; nay, these events and circum
stances come in the end to be of greater importance
than the works themselves ; and rather than read
Goethe himself, people prefer to read what has been
written about him, and to study the legend of Faust
more industriously than the drama of that name.
And when Burger declared that " people would write
learned disquisitions on the question, Who Leonora
really was," we find this literally fulfilled in Goethe's
case ; for we now possess a great many learned dis
quisitions on Faust and the legend attaching to him.
Study of this kind is, and remains, devoted to the
material of the drama alone. To give such preference
to the matter over the form, is as though a maa were

12 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

to take a fine Etruscan vase, not to admire its shape
or colouring, but to make a chemical analysis of the
clay and paint of which it is composed.

The attempt to produce an effect by means of the
material employed — an attempt which panders to this
evil tendency of the public — is most to be condemned
in branches of literature where any merit there may
be lies expressly in the form; I mean, in poetical
work. For all that, it is not rare to find bad
dramatists trying to fill the house by means of the
matter about which they write. For example, authors
of this kind do not shrink from putting on the stage
any man who is in any way celebrated, no matter
whether his life may have been entirely devoid of
dramatic incident ; and sometimes, even, they do not
wait until the persons immediately connected with
him are dead.

The distinction between matter and form to which
I am here alluding, also holds good of conversation.
The chief qualities which enable a man to converse
well are intelligence, discernment, wit and vivacity :
these supply the form of conversation. But it is not
long before attention has to be paid to the matter
of which he speaks; in other words, the subjects
about which it is possible to converse with him — his
knowledge. If this is very small, his conversation will
not be worth anything, unless he possesses the above-
named formal qualities in a very exceptional degree ;
for he will have nothing to talk about but those facts
of life and nature which everybody knows. It will
be just the opposite, however, if a man is deficient in
these formal qualities, but has an amount of know.

ON AUTHORSHIP. 13

ledge which lends value to what he says. This value
will then depend entirely upon the matter of his
conversation ; for, as the Spanish proverb has it^
mas sabe el necio en su casa, que el sabio en la agena
— a fool knows more of his own business than a wise
man of others'.

ON STYLE.

ON STYLE.

STYLE is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer
index to character than the face. To imitate another
man's style is like wearing a mask, which, be it
never so fine, is not long in arousing disgust and
abhorrence, because it is lifeless; so that even the
ugliest living face is better. Hence those who write
in Latin and copy the manner of ancient authors,
may be said to speak through a mask ; the reader,
it is true, hears what they say, but he cannot
observe their physiognomy too; he cannot see their
style. With the Latin works of writers who think
for themselves, the case is different, and their style is
visible; writers, I mean, who have not condescended to
any sort of imitation, such as Scotus Erigena, Petrarch,
Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and many others. And
affectation in style is like making grimaces. Further,
the language in which a man writes is the physiog
nomy of the nation to which he belongs ; and here
there are many hard and fast differences, beginning
from the language of the Greeks, down to that of the
Caribbean islanders.

To form a provisional estimate ot the value of a
writer's productions, it is not directly necessary to
know the subject on which he has thought, or what
it is that he has said about it ; that would imply a
perusal of all his works. It will be enough, in the

o
B

18 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

main, to know how he has thought. This, which
means the essential temper or general quality of his
mind, may be precisely determined by his style. A
man's style shows the formal nature of all his
thoughts — the formal nature which can never change,
be the subject or the character of his thoughts what
it may: it is, as it were, the dough out of which all the
contents of his mind are kneaded. When Eulenspiegel
was asked how long it would take to walk to
the next village, he gave the seemingly incongruous
answer : Walk. He wanted to find out by the man's
pace the distance he would cover in a given time.
In the same way, when I have read a few pages
of an author, I know fairly well how far he can
bring me.

Every mediocre writer tries to mask his own
natural style, because in his heart he knows the truth
of what I am saying. He is thus forced, at the out
set, to give up any attempt at being frank or naive —
a privilege which is thereby reserved for superior
minds, conscious of their own worth, and therefore
sure of themselves. What I mean is that these
everyday writers are absolutely unable to re
solve upon writing just as they think ; because
they have a notion that, were they to do so, their
work might possibly look very childish and simple.
For all that, it would not be without its value. If
they would only go honestly to work, and say, quite
simply, the things they have really thought, and
just as they have thought them, these writers would
be readable and, within their own proper sphere,
even instructive.

ON STYLE. 19

But instead of that, they try to make the reader
believe that their thoughts have gone much further
and deeper than is really the case. They say what
they have to say in long sentences that wind about in
a forced and unnatural way ; they coin new words
and write prolix periods which go round and round
the thought and wrap it up in a sort of disguise.
They tremble between the two separate aims of com
municating what they want to say and of concealing
it. Their object is to dress it up so that it may look
learned or deep, in order to give people the impression
that there is very much more in it than for the
moment meets the eye. They either jot down their
thoughts bit by bit, in short, ambiguous, and para
doxical sentences, which apparently mean much more
than they say, — of this kind of writing Schilling's
treatises on natural philosophy are a splendid in
stance ; or else they hold forth with a deluge of words
and the most intolerable diffusiveness, as though no
end of fuss were necessary to make the reader under
stand the deep meaning of their sentences, whereas it
is some quite simple it' not actually trivial idea, —
examples of which may be found in plenty in the
popular works of Fichte, and the philosophical manuals
of a hundred other miserable dunces not worth men
tioning; or, again, they try to write in some particular
style which they have been pleased to take up and
think very grand, a style, for example, par excellence
profound and scientific, where the reader is tormented
to death by the narcotic effect of long-spun periods
without a single idea in them, — such as are furnished
in a special measure by those most impudent of all

20 THE ART Ol LITERATURE.

mortals, the Hegelians ; l or it may be that it is an
intellectual style they have striven after, where it
seems as though their object were to go crazy alto
gether ; and so on in many other cases. All these
endeavours to put off the nascetur ridiculus mus —
to avoid showing the funny little creature that
is born after such mighty throes— often make it diffi
cult to know what it is that they really mean. And
then, too, they write down words, nay, even whole
sentences, without attaching any meaning to them
themselves, but in the hope that some one else will
get sense out of them.

And what is at the bottom of all this ? Nothing
but the untiring effort to sell words for thoughts ; a
mode of merchandise that is always trying to make
fresh openings for itself, and by means of odd expres
sions, turns of phrase, and combinations of every sort,
whether new or used in a new sense, to produce the
appearance of intellect in order to make up for the
very painfully felt lack of it.

It is amusing to see how writers with this object in
view will attempt first one mannerism and then
another, as though they were putting on the mask of
intellect! This mask may possibly deceive the in
experienced for a while, until it is seen to be a dead
thing, with no life in it at all : it is then laughed at and
exchanged for another. Such an author will at one
moment write in a dithyrambic vein, as though he
were tipsy; at another, nay, on the very next page, he
will be pompous, severe, profoundly learned and

1 In their Hegel-gazette, commonly known as Jahrbucher der
ivissenschaftlicJien Literatur.

ON STYLE. 21

prolix, stumbling on in the most cumbrous way and
chopping up everything very small; like the late
Christian Wolf, only in a modern dress. Longest of
all lasts the mask of unintelligibility; but this is only
in Germany, whither it was introduced by Fichte,
perfected by Schelling, and carried to its highest pitch
in Hegel — always with the best results.

And yet nothing is easier than to write so that no
one can understand; just as, contrarily, nothing is
more difficult than to express deep things in such a way
that every one must necessarily grasp them. All the
arts and tricks I have been mentioning are rendered
superfluous if the author really has any brains; for
that allows him to show himself as he is, and confirms
to all time Horace's maxim that good sense is the
source and origin of good style : —

Scribcndi recte sapere est et principium et fons.

But those authors I have named are like certain
workers in metal, who try a hundred different com
pounds to take the place of gold — the only metal
which can never have any substitute. Rather than
do that, there is nothing against which a writer should
be more upon his guard than the manifest endeavour
to exhibit more intellect than he really has ; because
this makes the reader suspect that he possesses very
little; since it is always the case that if a man affects
anything, whatever it may be, it is just there that he
is deficient.

That is why it is praise to an author to say that he
is naive; it means that he need not shrink from
showing himself as he is. Generally speaking, to be

22 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

naive is to be attractive; while lack of naturalness is
everywhere repulsive. As a matter of fact we find
that every really great writer tries to express his
thoughts as purely, clearly, definitely and shortly as
possible. Simplicity has always been held to be a
mark of truth; it is also a mark of genius. Style
receives its beauty from the thought it expresses; but
with sham-thinkers the thoughts are supposed to be
fine because of the style. Style is nothing but the
mere silhouette of thought; and an obscure or bad
style means a dull or confused brain.

The first rule, then, for a good style is that the
author should have something to say; nay, this is in
itself almost all that is necessary. Ah, how much it
means! The neglect of this rule is a fundamental trait
in the philosophical writing, and, in fact, in all the
reflective literature, of my country, more especially
since Fichte. These writers all let it be seen that
they want to appear as though they had something
to say; whereas they have nothing to say. Writing
of this kind was brought in by the pseudo-philosophers
at the Universities, and now it is current everywhere,
even among the first literary notabilities of the age.
It is the mother of that strained and vague style,
where there seem to be two or even more meanings

tD

in the sentence ; also of that prolix and cumbrous
manner of expression, called le stile empcse; again, of
that mere waste of words which consists in pouring
them out like a flood ; finally, of that trick of con
cealing the direst poverty of thought under a farrago
of never-ending chatter, which clacks away like a
windmill and quite stupefies one — stuff which a man

ON STYLE. 23

may read for hours together without getting hold of
a single clearly expressed and definite idea.1 How
ever, people are easy-going, and they have formed the
habit of reading page upon page of all sorts of such
verbiage, without having any particular idea of what
the author really means. They fancy it is all as it
should be, and fail to discover that he is writing
simply for writing's sake.

On the other hand, a good author, fertile in ideas,
soon wins his reader's confidence that, when he writes,
he has really and truly something to say ; and this
gives the intelligent reader patience to follow him
with attention. Such an author, just because he
really has something to say, \vill never fail to express
himself in the simplest and most straightforward
manner; because his object is to awake the very
same thought in the reader that he has in himself,
and no other. So he will be able to affirm with
Boileau that his thoughts are everywhere open to the
light of day, and that his verse always says something,
whether it says it well or ill : —

Ma pensde au grand jour partout £ off re et s'expose,
M mon vers, bien ou mal, dit toujours quelque chose :

while of the writers previously described it may be
asserted, in the words of the same poet, that they talk
much and never say anything at all — qui parlant
beaucoup ne disent jamais rien.

Another characteristic of such writers is that they

1 Select examples of the art of writing in this style are to be
found almost passim, in the Jahrbuclier published at Halle, after
wards called the Deutschen Johrbtiche*.

24 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

always avoid a positive assertion wherever they can
possibly do so, in order to leave a loophole for escape
in case of need. Hence they never fail to choose the
more abstract way of expressing themselves ; whereas
intelligent people nse the more concrete ; because the
latter brings things more within the range of actual
demonstration, which is the source of all evidence.

There are many examples proving this preference
for abstract expression ; and a particularly ridiculous
one is afforded by the use of the verb to condition in
the sense of to cause or to produce. People say to
condition something instead of to cause it, because
being abstract and indefinite it says less ; it affirms
that A cannot happen without B, instead of that J. is
caused by B. A back door is always left open ; and
this suits people whose secret knowledge of their own
incapacity inspires them with a perpetual terror of all
positive assertion; while with other people it is merely
the effect of that tendency by which everything
that is stupid in literature or bad in life is immediately
imitated — a fact proved in either case by the rapid
way in which it spreads. The Englishman uses his
own judgment in what he writes as well as in what
he does; but there is no nation of which this eulogy
is less true than of the Germans. The consequence of
this state of things is that the word cause has of late
almost disappeared from the language of literature,
and people talk only of condition. The fact is worth
mentioning because it is so characteristically ridiculous.

The very fact that these commonplace authors are
never more than half -conscious when they write, would
be enough to account for their dulness of mind and

ON STYLE. 25

the tedious things they produce. I say they are only
half-conscious, because they really do not themselves
understand the meaning of the words they use: they
take words ready-made and commit them to memory.
Hence when they write, it is not so much words as
whole phrases that they put together — phrases handles.
This is the explanation of that palpable lack of clearly-
expressed thought in what they say. The fact is that
they do not possess the die to give this stamp to their
writing; clear thought of their own is just what they
have not got. And what do we find in its place ? — a
vague, enigmatical intermixture of words, current
phrases, hackneyed terms, and fashionable expressions.
The result is that the foggy stuff they write is like a
page printed with very old type.

On the other hand, an intelligent author really
speaks to us when he writes, and that is why he is
able to rouse our interest and commune with us. It
is the intelligent author alone who puts individual
words together with a full consciousness of their
meaning, and chooses them with deliberate design.
Consequently, his discourse stands to that of the
writer described above, much as a picture that has been
really painted to one that has been produced by the
use of a stencil. In the one case, every word, every
touch of the brush, has a special purpose ; in the other,
all is done mechanically. The same distinction may
be observed in music. For just as Lichtenberg says
that Garrick's soul seemed to be in every muscle in his
body, so it is the omnipresence of intellect that always
and everywhere characterises the work of genius.

I have alluded to the tediousness which marks the

26 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

works of these writers ; and in this connection it is to
be observed, generally, that tediousness is of two
kinds: objective and subjective. A work is objectively
tedious when it contains the defect in question ; that
is to say, when its author has no perfectly clear
thought or knowledge to communicate. For if a man
has any clear thought or knowledge in him, his aim
will be to communicate it, and he will direct his
energies to this end ; so that the ideas he furnishes
are everywhere clearly expressed. The result is that
he is neither diffuse, nor unmeaning, nor confused, and
consequently not tedious. In such a case, even though
the author is at bottom in error, the error is at any
rate clearly worked out and well thought over, so that
it is at least formally correct; and thus some value
always attaches to the work. But for the same reason
a work that is objectively tedious is at all times
devoid of an}7 value whatever.

The other kind of tediousness is only relative : a
reader may find a work dull because he has no interest
in the question treated of in it, and this means that
his intellect is restricted. The best work may, there
fore, be tedious subjectively, tedious, I mean, to this
or that particular person; just as, contrarily, the
worst work may be subjectively engrossing to this
or that particular person who has an interest in the
question treated of, or in the writer of the book.

It would generally serve writers in good stead if
they would see that, whilst a man should, if possible,
think like a great genius, he should talk the same
language as everyone else. Authors should use com
mon words to say uncommon things. But they do just

ON STYLE. 27

the opposite. We find them trying to wrap up trivial
ideas in grand words, and to clothe their very ordinary
thoughts in the most extraordinary phrases, the most
far-fetched, unnatural, and out-of-the-way expressions.
Their sentences perpetually stalk about on stilts.
They take so much pleasure in bombast, and write in
such a high-flown, bloated, affected, hyperbolical and
acrobatic style that their prototype is Ancient Pistol,
whom his friend FalstafF once impatiently told to say
what he had to say like a man of this world.1

There is no expression in any other language exactly
answering to the French stile empese*; but the thing
itself exists all the more often. When associated with
affectation, it is in literature what assumption of
dignity, grand airs and primness are in society ; and
equally intolerable. Dulness of mind is fond of
donning this dress; just as in ordinary life it is stupid
people who like being demure and formal.

An author who writes in the prim style resembles
a man who dresses himself up in order to avoid being
confounded or put on the same level with the mob —
a risk never run by the gentleman, even in his worst
clothes. The plebeian may be known by a certain
showiness of attire and a wish to have everything
spick and span ; and, in the same way, the common
place person is betrayed by his style.

Nevertheless, an author follows a false aim if he
tries to write exactly as he speaks. There is no style
of writing but should have a certain trace of kinship
with the epiyraphic or monumental style, which is,

1 King Henry IV., Part IT. Act v. Sc. 3.

28 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

indeed, the ancestor of all styles. For an author to
write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the
opposite fault, to speak as he writes ; for this gives a
pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time
makes him hardly intelligible.

An obscure and vague manner of expression is
always and everywhere a very bad sign. In ninety-
nine cases out of a hundred it comes from vagueness

o

of thought ; and this again almost always means that
there is something radically wrong and incongruous
about the thought itself — in a word, that it is in
correct. When a right thought springs up in the
mind, it strives after expression and is not long in
reaching it; for clear thought easily finds words to
fit it. If a man is capable of thinking anything at all,
he is also always able to express it in clear, intelligible,
and unambiguous terms. Those writers who con
struct difficult, obscure, involved, and equivocal sent
ences, most certainly do not know aright what it is
that they want to say: they have only a dull con
sciousness of it. which is still in the stage of struggle
to shape itself as thought. Often, indeed, their desire
is to conceal from themselves and others that they
really have nothing at all to say. They wish to
appear to know what they do not know, to think
what they do not think, to say what they do not say.
If a man has some real communication to make, which
will he choose — an indistinct or a clear way of ex
pressing himself ? Even Quintilian remarks that
things which are said by a highly educated man are
often easier to understand and much clearer ; and that
the less educated a man is, the more obscurely he will

ON STYLE. 29

write — plerumque accidit ut faciliora sint ad intelli-
gendum et lucidiora multo qucs a doctissimo quoque
dicuntur .... Erit ergo etiam obscurior quo qiiisque
deterior.

An author should avoid enigmatical phrases ; he
should know whether he wants to say a thing or does
not want to say it. It is this indecision of style
that makes so many writers insipid. The only case
that offers an exception to this rule arises when it
is necessary to make a remark that is in some way
improper.

As exaggeration generally produces an effect the
opposite of that aimed at ; so words, it is true, serve
to make thought intelligible — but only up to a certain
point. If words are heaped up beyond it, the thought
becomes more and more obscure again. To find where
the point lies is the problem of style, and the business
of the critical faculty ; for a word too much always
defeats its purpose. This is what Voltaire means
when he says that the adjective is the enemy of the
substantive. But, as we have seen, many people try
to conceal their poverty of thought under a flood of
verbiage.

Accordingly, let all redundancy be avoided, all
stringing together of remarks which have no meaning
and are not worth perusal. A writer must make a
sparing use of the reader's time, patience and attention ;
so as to lead him to believe that his author writes
what is worth careful study, and will reward the time
spent upon it. It is always better to omit something
good than to add that which is not worth saying at
all. This is the right application of Hesiod's maxim,

30 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

-V TTUI/TOS l — the half is more than the
whole. Le secret pour etre ennuyeux, c'est de
tout dire. Therefore, if possible, the quintessence only!
mere leading thoughts ! nothing that the reader would
think for himself. To use many words to communi
cate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable
sign of mediocrity. To gather ri:uch thought into
few words stamps the man of genius.

Truth is most beautiful undraped ; and the im
pression it makes is deep in proportion as its expres
sion has been simple. This is so, partly because it then
takes unobstructed possession of the hearer's whole
soul, and leaves him no by-thought to distract him ;
partly, also, because he feels that here he is not being
corrupted or cheated by the arts of rhetoric, but that
all the effect of what is said comes from the thing it
self. For instance, what declamation on the vanity of
human existence could ever be more telling than the
words of Job ? — Man t .\at is born of a woman hath
but a short time to live and is full of misery. He
cometh up, and is cut down, like a /lower ; he fleetli
as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one
stay.

For the same reason Goethe's naive poetry is incom
parably greater than Schiller's rhetoric. It is this,
again, that makes many popular songs so affecting. As
in architecture an excess of decoration is to be avoided,
so in the art of literature a writer must guard against
all rhetorical finery, all useless amplification, and all
superfluity of expression in general; in a word, he must
strive after chastity of style. Every word that can
1 Works and Days, 40.

ON STYLE. 31

be spared is hurtful if it remains. The law of sim
plicity and naivety holds good of all fine art ; for it
is quite possible to be at once simple and sublime.

True brevity of expression consists in everywhere
saying only what is worth saying, and in avoiding
tedious detail about things which everyone can
supply for himself. This involves correct discrimina
tion between what is necessary and what is super
fluous. A writer should never be brief at the expense
of being clear, to say nothing of being grammatical.
It shows lamentable want of judgment to weaken
the expression of a thought, or to stunt the meaning
of a period for the sake of using a few words less.
But this is the precise endeavour of that false brevity
nowadays so much in vogue, which proceeds by
leaving out useful words and even by sacrificing
grammar and logic. It is not only that such writers
spare a word by making a single verb or adjective do
duty for several different periods, so that the reader,
as it were, has to grope his way through them in the
dark ; they also practise, in many other respects, an
unseemly economy of speech, in the effort to effect
what they foolishly take to be brevity of expression
and conciseness of style. By omitting something that
might have thrown a light over the whole sentence,
they turn it into a conundrum, which the reader tries
to solve by going over it again and again.1

1 Translator's Note. In the original, Schopenhauer here enters
upon a lengthy examination of certain common errors in the
writing and speaking of German. His remarks are addressed
to his own countrymen, and would lose all point, even if they
\vere intelligible, in an English translation. But for those who

32 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

It is wealth and weight of thought, and nothing
else, that gives brevity to style, and makes it concise
and pregnant. If a writer's ideas are important,
luminous, and generally worth communicating, they
will necessarily furnish matter and substance enough
to fill out the periods which give them expression, and
make these in all their parts both grammatically and
verbally complete ; and so much will this be the case
that no one will ever find them hollow, empty or feeble.
The diction will everywhere be brief and pregnant, and
allow the thought to find intelligible and easy expres
sion, and even unfold and move about with grace.

Therefore instead of contracting his words and forms
of speech, let a writer enlarge his thoughts. If a man
has been thinned by illness and finds his clothes too
big, it is not by cutting them down, but by recover
ing his usual bodily condition, that he ought
to make them fit him again.

Let me here mention an error of style very
prevalent nowadays, and, in the degraded state
of literature and the neglect of ancient languages,
always on the increase; I mean subjectivity. A
writer commits this error when he thinks it
enough if he himself knows what he means
and wants to say, and takes no thought for the
reader, who is left to get at the bottom of it as best
he can. This is as though the author were holding

practise their German by conversing or corresponding with
Germans, let me recommend what he there says as a useful
corrective to a slipshod style, such as can easily be contracted
if it is assumed that the natives of a country always know
their own language perfectly.

ON STYLE. 33

a mruologue ; whereas it ought to be a dialogue ; and
a dialogue, too, in which he must express himself all
the more clearly inasmuch as he cannot hear the
questions of his interlocutor.

Style should for this very reason never be sub
jective, but objective ; and it will not be objective unless
the words are so set down that they directly force the
reader to think precisely the same thing as the author
thought when he wrote them. Nor will this result be
obtained unless the author has always been careful
to remember that thought so far follows the law
of gravity that it travels from head to paper much
more easily than from paper to head ; so that he must
assist the latter passage by every means in his power.
If he does this, a writer's words will have a purely
objective effect, like that of a finished picture in oils ;
whilst the subjective style is not much more certain
in its working than spots on the wall, which
look like figures only to one whose phantasy has been
accidentally aroused by them ; other people see no
thing but spots and blurs. The difference in question
applies to literary method as a whole ; but it is often
established also in particular instances. For example,
in a recently published work I found the following
sentence : / have not written in order to increase the
number of existing books. This means just the
opposite of what the writer wanted to say, and is
nonsense as well.

He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the
very outset that he does not attach much importance
to his own thoughts. For it is only where a man is
convinced of the truth and importance of his thoughts,

o

34 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

that he feels the enthusiasm necessary for an untiring
and assiduous effort to find the clearest, finest, and
strongest expression for them, — -just as for sacred relics
or priceless works of art there are provided silvern or
golden receptacles. It was this feeling that led ancient
authors, whose thoughts, expressed in their own words,
have lived thousands of years, and therefore bear the
honoured title of classics, always to write with care.
Plato, indeed, is said to have written the introduction
to his Republic seven times over in different ways.1

As neglect of dress betrays want of respect for the
company a man meets, so a hasty, careless, bad style
shows an outrageous lack of regard for the reader,
who then rightly punishes it by refusing to read the
book. It is especially amusing to see reviewers
criticising the works of others in their own most care
less style — the style of a hireling. It is as though a
judge were to come into court in dressing-gown and
slippers ! If I see a man badly and dirtily dressed, I
feel some hesitation, at first, in entering into conversa
tion with him : and when, on taking up a book, I am
struck at once by the negligence of its style, I put
it away.

Good writing should be governed by the rule that
a man can think only one thing clearly at a time ;
and, therefore, that he should not be expected to
think two or even more things in one and the same
moment. But this is what is done when a writer
breaks up his principal sentence into little pieces, for

1 Translator's Note. It is a fact worth mentioning that the first
twelve words of the Republic are placed in the exact order which
would be natural in English.

ON STYLE. 35

the purpose of pushing into the gaps thus made two f
or three other thoughts by way of parenthesis ; there
by unnecessarily and wantonly confusing the reader. }
And here it is again my own countiymen who are
chiefly in fault. That German lends itself to this way
of writing, makes the thing possible, but does not
iustify it. No prose reads more easily or pleasantly
than French, because, as a rule, it is free from the
error in question. The Frenchman strings his
thoughts together, as far as he can, in the most
logical and natural order, and so lays them before his
reader one after the other for convenient delibera
tion, so that every one of them may receive undivided
attention. The German, on the other hand, weaves
them together into a sentence which he twists and
crosses, and crosses and twists again ; because he
wants to say six things all at once, instead of ad
vancing them one by one. His aim should be to
attract and hold the reader's attention ; but, above
and beyond neglect of this aim, he demands from the
reader that he shall set the above mentioned rule at
defiance, and think three or four different thoughts at
one and the same time ; or since that is impossible,
that his thoughts shall succeed each other as quickl}'
as the vibrations of a cord. In this way an author
lays the foundation of his stile empesd, which is then
carried to perfection by the use of high-flown, pompous
expressions to communicate the simplest things, and
other artifices of the same kind.

In those long sentences rich in involved parentheses,
like a box of boxes one within another, and padded
out like roast geese stuffed with apples, it is really

36 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

the memory that is chiefly taxed ; while it is the
understanding and the judgment which should be
called into play, instead of having their activity
thereby actually hindered and weakened.1 This kind
of sentence furnishes the reader with mere half-
phrases, which he is then called upon to collect care
fully and store up in his memory, as though they
were the pieces of a torn letter, afterwards to be
completed and made sense of by the other halves
to which they respectively belong. He is expected
to go on reading for a little without exercising any
thought, nay, exerting only his memory, in the hope
that, when he comes to the end of the sentence, he
may see its meaning and so receive something to
think about; and he is thus given a great deal to
learn by heart before obtaining anything to under
stand. This is manifestly wrong aud an abuse of the
reader's patience.

The ordinary writer has an unmistakable pre
ference for this style, because it causes the reader
to spend time and trouble in understanding that which
he would have understood in a moment without it ;
and this makes it look as though the writer had more
depth and intelligence than the reader. This is, in
deed, one of those artifices referred to above, by means
of which mediocre authors unconsciously, and as it
were by instinct, strive to conceal their poverty of

1 Translator's Note. This sentence in the original is obviously
meant to illustrate the fault of which ifc speaks. It does so by
the use of a construction very common in German, but happily
unknown in English; where, however, the fnult itself exists
none the less, though in a different form.

ON STYLE. 37

thought and give an appearance of the opposite.
Their ingenuity in this respect is really astounding.

It is manifestly against all sound reason to put one
thought obliquely on top of another, as though both
together formed a wooden cross. But this is what is
done where a writer interrupts what he has begun to
say, for the purpose of inserting some quite ah' en
matter ; thus depositing with the reader a meaningless
half-sentence, and bidding him keep it until the com
pletion comes. It is much as though a man were
to treat his guests by handing them an empty plate,
in the hope of something appearing upon it And
commas used for a similar purpose belong to the same
family as notes at the foot of the page and parentheses
in the middle of the text ; nay, all three differ only in
degree. If Demosthenes and Cicero occasionally
inserted words by way of parenthesis, they would
have done better to have refrained.

But this style of wiiting becomes the height of
absurdity when the parentheses are not even fitted
into the frame of the sentence, but wedged in so as
directly to shatter it. If, for instance, it is an im
pertinent thing to interrupt another person when he
is speaking, it is no less impertinent to interrupt
oneself. But all bad, careless, and hasty authors,
who scribble with the bread actually before their
eyes, use this style of writing six times on a
page, and rejoice in it. It consists in — it is
advisable to give rule and example together,
wherever it is possible — breaking up one phrase in
order to glue in another. Nor is it merely out of
laziness that they write thus. They do it out of

38 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

stupidity; they think there is a charming Ugerett
about it; that it gives life to what they say. No
doubt there are a few rare cases where such a form of
sentence may be pardonable.

Few write in the way in which an architect builds;
who, before he sets to work, sketches out his plan,
and thinks it over down to its smallest details. Nay,
most people write only as though they were playing
dominoes ; and as in this game the pieces are arranged
half by design, half by chance, so it is with the
sequence and connection of their sentences. They
only just have an idea of what the general shape of
their work will be, and of the aim they set before
themselves. Many are ignorant even of this, and
write as the coral-insects build : period joins to period,
and Lord knows what the author means.

Life now-a-days goes at a gallop ; and the way in
which this affects literature is to make it extremely
superficial and slovenly.

ON THE STUDY OF LATIN.

ON THE STUDY OF LATIN.

THE abolition of Latin as the universal language of
learned men, together with the rise of that provin
cialism which attaches to national literatures, has
been a real misfortune for the cause of knowledge in
Europe. For it was chiefly through the medium of
the Latin language that a learned public existed in
Europe at all — a public to which every book as it came
out directly appealed. The number of minds in the
whole of Europe that are capable of thinking and
judging is small, as it is ; but when the audience is
broken up and severed by differences of language,
the good these minds can do is very much weakened.
This is a great disadvantage ; but a second and worse
one will follow, namely, that the ancient languages
will cease to be taught at all. The neglect of them is
rapidly gaining ground both in France and Germany.
If it should really come to this, then farewell,
humanity ! farewell, noble taste and high thinking !
The age of barbarism will return, in spite of railways,
telegraphs and balloons. We shall thus in the end
lose one more advantage possessed by all our ancestors.
For Latin is not only a key to the knowledge of
Roman antiquity ; it also directly opens up to us the
Middle Age in every country in Europe, and modern
times as well, down to about the year 1750. Erigena,
for example, in the ninth century, John of Salisbury

42 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

in the twelfth, Raimond Lully in the thirteenth, with
a hundred others, speak straight to us in the very
language that they naturally adopted in thinking of
learned matters. They thus come quite close to us
even at this distance of time : we are in direct contact
with them, and really come to know them. How
would it have been if everyone of them spoke
in the language that was peculiar to his time and
country ? We should not understand even the half of
what they said. A real intellectual contact with them
would be impossible. We should see them like shadows
on the farthest horizon, or, may be, through the trans
lator's telescope.

It was with an eye to the advantage of writing in
Latin that Bacon, as he himself expressly states, pro
ceeded to translate his Essays into that language,
under the title Sermones fideles ; at which work
Hobbes assisted him.1

Here let me observe, by way of parenthesis, that
when patriotism tries to urge its claims in the domain
of knowledge, it commits an offence which should not
be tolerated. For in those purely human questions
which interest all men alike, where truth, insight,
beauty, should be of sole account, what can be more
impertinent than to let preference for the nation to
which a man's precious self happens to belong, affect
the balance of judgment, and thus supply a reason
for doing violence to truth and being unjust to the
great minds of a foreign country in order to make
much of the smaller minds of one's own ! Still, there

1 Cf. Thomae Hobbes vita : Carolopoli apud Eleuthcrium
Anglicum, 1681, p. 22.

OX THE STUDY OF LATIN. 43

are writers in every nation in Europe who afford ex
amples of this vulgar feeling. It is this which led
Yriarte to caricature them in the thirty-third of his
ch arming Literary Fables.1

In learning a language, the chief difficulty consists
in making acquaintance with every idea which it
expresses, even though it should use words for which
there is no exact equivalent in the mother tongue ;
and this often happens. In learning a new language
a man has, as it were, to mark out in his mind the
boundaries of quite new spheres of ideas, with the
result that spheres of ideas arise where none
were before. Thus he not only learns words, he
gains ideas too.

This is nowhere so much the case as in learning
ancient languages, for the differences they present in

* Translator's Note. Tomas de Yriarte (] 750-91), a Spanish
poet, and keeper of archives in the War Office at Madrid.
His two best known works are a didactic poem, entitled La
Musica, and the Fables here quoted, which satirise the peculiar
foibles of literary men. They have been translated into many
languages ; into English by Rockliffe (3rd edition 1866).
The fable in question describes how, at a picnic of the animals,
a discussion arose as to which of them carried off the palm for
superiority of talent. The praises of the ant, the dog, the bee,
and the parrot were sung in turn ; but at last the ostrich stood
up and declared for the dromedary. Whereupon the dromedary
stood up and declared for the ostrich. No one could discover
the reason for this mutual compliment. Was it because both
were such uncouth beasts, or had such long necks, or wero
neither of them particularly clever or beautiful ? or was it
because each had a hump ? No ! said the fox, you are all wrong.
Don't you see they are both foreigners ? Cannot the same bo
?aid of many men of learning ?

44 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

tbeir mode of expression as compared with modern
languages is greater than can be found amongst
modern languages as compared with one another.
This is shown by the fact that in translating into Latin,
recourse must be had to quite other turns of phrase
than are in use in the original. The thought that is
to be translated has to be melted down and recast ;
in other words, it must be analysed and then recom-
posed. It is just this process which makes the study
of the ancient languages contribute so much to the
education of the mind.

It follows from this that a man's thought varies
according to the language in which he speaks. His
ideas undergo a fresh modification, a different shading,
as it were, in the study of every new language.
Hence an acquaintance with many languages is not
only of much indirect advantage, but it is also a
direct means of mental culture, in that it cor
rects and matures ideas by giving prominence
to their many-sided nature and their different
varieties of meaning, as also that it increases dex
terity of thought ; for in the process of learning
many languages ideas become more and more in
dependent of words. The ancient languages effect
this to an incomparably greater degree than the
modern, in virtue of the difference to which I have
alluded.

From what I have said, it is obvious that to imitate
the style of the ancients in their own language, which
is so very much superior to ours in point of gram
matical perfection, is the best way of preparing for
a skilful and finished expression of thought in the

ON THE STUDY OF LATIN. 45

mother-tongue. Nay, if a man wants to be a great
writer, he must not omit to do this ; just as, in the
case of sculpture or painting, the student must educate
himself by copying the great masterpieces of the past,
before proceeding to original work. It is only by
learning to write Latin that a man comes to treat
diction as an art. The material in this art is language,
which must therefore be handled with the greatest
care and delicacy.

The result of such study is that a writer will pay
keen attention to the meaning and value of words, their
order and connection, their grammatical forms. He
will learn how to weigh them with precision, and so
become an expert in the use of that precious in
strument which is meant not only to express valuable
thought, but to preserve it as well. Further, he will
learn to feel respect for the language in which he writes,
and thus be saved from any attempt to remodel it by
arbitrary and capricious treatment. Without this
schooling, a man's writing may easily degenerate into
mere chatter.

To be entirely ignorant of the Latin language is
like being in a fine country on a misty day. The
horizon is extremely limited. Nothing can be seen
clearly except that which is quite close ; a few steps
beyond, everything is buried in obscurity. But the
Latinist has a wide view, embracing modern times,
the Middle Age and Antiquity ; and his mental
horizon is still further enlarged if he studies Greek or
even Sanscrit.

If a man knows no Latin, he belongs to the vulgar,
even though he be a great virtuoso on the electrical

THE ART OF LITERATURE.

machine and have the base of hydrofluoric acid in his
crucible.

There is no better recreation for the mind than the
study of the ancient classics. Take any one of them
into your hand, be it only for half an hour, and you
will feel yourself refreshed, relieved, purified, ennobled,
strengthened ; just as though you had quenched your
thirst at some pure spring. Is this the effect of the
old language and its perfect expression, or is it the
greatness of the minds whose works remain unharmed
and unweakened by the lapse of a thousand years ?
Perhaps both together. But this I know. If the
threatened calamity should ever come, and the ancient
languages cease to be taught, a new literature will
arise, of such barbarous, shallow and worthless stuff
as never was seen before.

ON MEN OF LEARNING

ON MEN OF LEARNING.

WHEN one sees the number and variety of institutions
which exist for the purposes of education, and the vast
throng of scholars and masters, one might fancy the
human race to be very much concerned about truth
and wisdom. But here, too, appearances are deceptive.
The masters teach in order to gain money, and strive,
not after wisdom, but the outward show and re
putation of it ; and the scholars learn, not for the sake
of knowledge and insight, but to be able to chatter
and give themselves airs. Every thirty years a new
race comes into the world — a youngster that knows
nothing about anything, and after summarily de
vouring in all haste the results of human knowledge
as they have been accumulated for thousands of years,
aspires to be thought cleverer than the whole of the
past. For this purpose he goes to the University,
and takes to reading books — new books, as being of
his own age and standing. Everything he reads
must be briefly put, must be new ! he is new himself.
Then he falls to and criticises. And here I am not
taking the slightest account of studies pursued for
the sole object of making a Hving.

Students, and learned persons of all sorts and every
age, aim as a rule at acquiring information rather
than insight. They piquo themselves upon knowing
about everything — stones, plants, battles, experiments,

50 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

and all the books in existence. It never occurs to
them that information is only a means of insight, and
in itself of little or no value ; that it is his way of
thinking that makes a man a philosopher. When
I hear of these portents of learning and their imposing
erudition, I sometimes say to myself: Ah, how-
little they must have had to think about, to have
been able to read so much ! And when I actually find
it reported of the elder Pliny that he was continually
reading or being read to, at table, on a journey, or in
his bath, the question forces itself upon my mind,
whether the man was so very lacking in thought of
his own that he had to have alien thought incessantly
instilled into him ; as though he were a consumptive
patient taking jellies to keep himself alive. And
neither his undiscerning credulity nor his inexpressibly
repulsive and barely intelligible style — which seems
like that of a man taking notes, and very economical
of paper — is of a kind to give me a high opinion of
his power of independent thought.

We have seen that much reading and learning is
prejudicial to thinking for oneself ; and, in the same
way, through much writing and teaching, a man loses
the habit of being quite clear, and therefore thorough, in
regard to the things he knows and understands ;
simply because he has left himself no time to acquire
clearness or thoroughness. And so, when clear know
ledge fails him in his utterances, he is forced to fill out
the gaps with words and phrases. It is this, and not
the dryness of the subject-matter, that makes most
books such tedious reading. There is a saying that a
good cook can make a palatable dish even out of an

ON MEN OF LEARNING. 51

old shoe ; and a good writer can make the dryest
things interesting.

With by far the largest number1 of learned men,
knowledge is a means, not an end. That is why they
will never achieve any great work ; because, to do
that, he who pursues knowledge must pursue it as an
end, and treat everything else, even existence itself, as
only a means. For everything which a man fails to
pursue for its own sake is but half-pursued ; and true
excellence, no matter in what sphere, can be attained
only where the work has been produced for its own
sake alone, and not as a means to further ends.

And so, too, no one will ever succeed in doing any
thing really great and original in the way of thought,
who does not seek to acquire knowledge for himself,
and, making this the immediate object of his studies,
decline to trouble himself about the knowledge of
others. But the average man of learning studies for
the purpose of being able to teach and write. His
head is like a stomach and intestines which let the
food pass through them undigested. That is just why
his teaching and writing is of so little use. For it is
not upon undigested refuse that people can be
nourished, but solely upon the milk which secretes
from the very blood itself.

The wig is the appropriate symbol of the man of
learning, pure and simple. It adorns the head with a
copious quantity of false hair, in lack of one's own :
just as erudition means endowing it with a great
mass of alien thought. This, to be sure, does not
clothe the head so well and naturally, nor is it so
generally useful, nor so suited for all purposes, nor so

52 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

firmly rooted ; nor when alien thought is used up, can
it be immediately replaced by more from the same
source, as is the case with that which springs from
soil of one's own. So we find Sterne, in his Tristram
Shandy, boldly asserting that an ounce of a man's
own wit is worth a ton of other people's.

And in fact the most profound erudition is no more
akin to genius than a collection of dried plants is like
Nature, with its constant flow of new life, ever fresh,
ever young, ever changing. There are no two things
more opposed than the childish naivety of an ancient
author and the learning of his commentator.

Dilettanti, dilettanti ! This is the slighting way
in which those who pursue any branch of art or
learning for the love and enjoyment of the thing,
— per il loro diletto, are spoken of by those who have
taken it up for the sake of gain, attracted solely by
the prospect of money. This contempt of theirs comes
from the base belief that no man will seriously devote
himself to a subject, unless he is spurred on to it by
want, hunger, or else some form of greed. The
public is of the same way of thinking ; and hence its
general respect for professionals and its distrust of
dilettanti. But the truth is that the dilettante treats
his subject as an end, whereas the professional, pure
and simple, treats it merely as a means. He alone
will be really in earnest about a matter, who has a
direct interest therein, takes to it because he likes it>
and pursues it con amore. It is these, and not
hirelings, that have always done the greatest work.

In the republic of letters it is as in other republics ;
favour is shown to the plain man — he who goes his

ON MEN OF LEARNING. 53

way in silence and does not set up to be cleverer than
others. But the abnormal man is looked upon as
threatening danger ; people band together against
him, and have, oh ! such a majority on their side.

The condition of this republic is much like that of
a small State in America, where every man is intent
only upon his own advantage, and seeks reputation
and power for himself, quite heedless of the general
weal, which then goes to ruin. So it is in the re
public of letters ; it is himself, and himself alone, that
a man puts forward, because he wants to gain fame.
The only thing in which all agree is in trying to keep
down a really eminent man, if he should chance to
show himself, as one who would be a common
peril. From this it is easy to see how it fares with
knowledge as a whole.

Between professors and independent men of learn
ing there has always been from of old a certain
antagonism, which may perhaps be likened to that
existing between dogs and wolves. In virtue of their
position, professors enjoy great facilities for becoming
known to their contemporaries. Contrarily, indepen
dent men of learning enjoy, by their position, great
facilities for becoming known to posterity; to which
it is necessary that, amongst other and much rarer
gifts, a man should have a certain leisure and
freedom. As mankind takes a long time in finding
out on whom to bestow its attention, they may both
work together side by side.

He who holds a professorship may be said to receive
his food in the stall; and this is the best way with
ruminant animals. But he who finds his food for

54 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

himself at the hands of Nature is better off in the
open field.

Of human knowledge as a whole and in every branch
of it, by far the largest part exists nowhere but on
paper — I mean, in books, that paper memory of man
kind. Only a small part of it is at any given period
really active in the minds of particular persons. This
is due, in the main, to the brevity and uncertainty of
life; but it also comes from the fact that men are lazy
and bent on pleasure. Every generation attains, on
its hasty passage through existence, just so much of
human knowledge as it needs, and then soon dis
appears. Most men of learning are very superficial.
Then follows a new generation, full of hope, but
ignorant, and with everything to learn from the
beginning. It seizes, in its turn, just so much as it
can grasp, or find useful on its brief journey, and then
too goes its way. How badly it would fare with
human knowledge if it were not for the art of writing
and printing ! This it is that makes libraries the only
sure and lasting memory of the human race, for its
individual members have all of them but a very
limited and imperfect one. Hence most men of
learning are as loth to have their knowledge ex
amined as merchants to lay bare their books.

Human knowledge extends on all sides farther
than the eye can reach; and of that which would be
generally worth knowing, no one man can possess
even the thousandth part.

All branches of learning have thus been so much
enlarged that he who would "do something" has to pur
sue no more than one subject and disregard all others.

ON MEN OF LEARNING. 55

In his own subject he will then, it is true, be superior
to the vulgar; but in all else he will belong to it. If
we add to this that neglect of the ancient languages,
which is now-a-days on the increase and is doing away
with all general education in the humanities — for a
mere smattering of Latin and Greek is of no use — we
shall come to have men of learning who outside their
own subject display an ignorance truly bovine.

An exclusive specialist of this kind stands on a par
with a workman in a factory, whose whole life is
spent in making one particular kind of screw, or catch,
or handle, for some particular instrument or machine,
in which, indeed, he attains incredible dexterity. The
specialist may also be likened to a man who lives in
his own house and never leaves it. There he is
perfectly familiar with everything, every little step,
corner, or board; much as Quasimodo in Victor Hugo's
Notre Dame knows the cathedral; but outside it, all
is strange and unknown.

For true culture in the humanities it is absolutely
necessary that a man should be many-sided and take
large views; and for a man of learning in the higher
sense of the word, an extensive acquaintance with history
is needful. He, however, who wishes to be a complete
philosopher, must gather into his head the remotest
ends of human knowledge : for where else could they
ever come together ?

It is precisely minds of the first order that will
never be specialists. For their very nature is to make
the whole of existence their problem ; and this is a
subject upon which they will every one of them in
some form provide mankind with a new revelation.

56 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

For be alono can deserve the name of genius who
takes the All, the Essential, the Universal, for the
theme of his achievements; not he who spends his
life in explaining some special relation of things one
to another.

ON THINKING FOR ONESELF.

ON THINKING FOR ONESELF.

A LIBRARY may be very large ; but if it is in disorder,
it is not so useful as one that is small but well
arranged. In the same way, a man may have a great
mass of knowledge, but if he has not worked it up by
thinking it over for himself, it has much less value
than a far smaller amount which he has thoroughly
pondered. For it is only when a man looks at his
knowledge from all sides, and combines the things he
knows by comparing truth with truth, that he obtains
a complete hold over it and gets it into his power. A
man cannot turn over anything in his mind unless he
knows it ; he should, therefore, learn something ; but
it is only when he has turned it over that he can be
said to know it.

Reading and learning are things that anyone can
do of his own free will ; but not so thinking. Think
ing must be kindled, like a fire by a draught ; it must
be sustained by some interest in the matter in hand.
This interest may be of purely objective kind, or
merely subjective. The latter comes into play only in
things that concern us personally. Objective interest
is confined to heads that think by nature ; to whom
thinking is as natural as breathing ; and they are
very rare. This is why most men of learning show so
little of it.

It is incredible what a different effect is produced
upon the mind by thinking for oneself, as compared

59

GO THE ART OF LITERATURE.

with reading. It carries on and intensifies that
original difference in the nature of two minds which
leads the one to think and the other to read. What
I mean is that reading forces alien thoughts upon the
rnind — thoughts which are as foreign to the drift and
temper in which it may be for the moment, as the
seal is to the wax on which it stamps its imprint.
The mind is thus entirely under compulsion from
without ; it is driven to think this or that, though for
the moment it may not have the slightest impulse or
inclination to do so.

But when a man thinks for himself, he follows the
impulse of his own mind, which is determined for
him at the time, either by his environment or some
particular recollection. The visible world of a man's
surroundings does not, as reading does, impress a
single definite thought upon his mind, but merely
gives the matter and occasion which lead him to
think what is appropriate to his nature and present
temper. So it is, that much reading deprives the
mind of all elasticity ; it is like keeping a spring con
tinually under pressure. The safest way of having
no thoughts of one's own is to take up a book every
moment one has nothing else to do. It is this practice
which explains why erudition makes most men more
stupid and silly than they are by nature, and prevents
their writings obtaining any measure of success. They
remain, in Pope's words :

For ever reading, never to be read I x

Men of learning are those who have done their
1 Dunciad, iii. 194.

ON THINKING FOR ONESELF. 61

reading in the pages of a book. Thinkers and men of
genius are those who have gone straight to the book
of Nature ; it is they who have enlightened the world
and carried humanity further on its way.

If a man's thoughts are to have truth and life in
them, they must, after all. be his own fundamental
thoughts ; for these are the only ones that he can fully
and wholly understand. To read another's thoughts
is like taking the leavings of a meal to which
we have not been invited, or putting on the
clothes which some unknown visitor has laid
aside.

The thought we read is related to the thought
which springs up in ourselves, as the fossil-impress of
some prehistoric plant to a plant as it buds forth in
springtime.

Reading is nothing more than a substitute for
thought of one's own. It means putting the mind into
leading-strings. The multitude of books serves only
to show how many false paths there are, and how
widely astray a man may wander if he follows any of
them. But he who is guided by his genius, he who
thinks for himself, who thinks spontaneously and
exactly, possesses the only compass by which he can
steer aright A man should read only when his own
thoughts stagnate at their source, which will happen
often enough even with the best of minds. On the other
hand, to take up a book for the purpose of scaring
away one's own original thoughts is sin against the
Holy Spirit. It is like running away from Nature to
look at a museum of dried plants or gaze at a land
scape in copp erplate*

62 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

A man may have discovered some portion of truth
or wisdom, after spending a great deal of time and
trouble in thinking it over for himself and adding
thought to thought ; and it may sometimes happen
that he could have found it all ready to hand in a
book and spared himself the trouble. But even so, it
is a hundred times more valuable if he has acquired
it by thinking it out for himself. For it is only when
we gain our knowledge in this way that it enters as
an integral part, a living member, into the whole
system of our thought ; that it stands in complete
and firm relation with what we know ; that it is
understood with all that underlies it and follows from
it ; that it wears the colour, the precise shade, the
distinguishing mark, of our own way of thinking;
that it comes exactly at the right time, just as we felt
the necessity for it ; that it stands fast and cannot be
forgotten. This is the perfect application, nay, the
interpretation, of Goethe's advice to earn our inheri
tance for ourselves so that we may really possess it : —

Was du ererbt von deinen Vatern hast,
Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. 1

The man who thinks for himself, forms his own
opinions and learns the authorities for them only
later on, when they serve but to strengthen his belief
in them and in himself. But the book-philosopher
starts from the authorities. He reads other people's
books, collects their opinions, and so forms a whole
for himself, which resembles an automaton made up
of anything but flesh and blood. Contrarily, he who
1 Faust, I. 329,

ON THINKING FOR ONESELF. 63

thinks for himself creates a work like a living man as
made by Nature. For the work comes into being as
a man does ; the thinking mind is impregnated from
without, and it then forms and bears its child.

Truth that has been merely learned is like an
artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose ; at best,
like a nose made out of another's flesh ; it adheres to
us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by
thinking of our own is like a natural lirnb ; it alone
really belongs to us. This is the fundamental differ
ence between the thinker and the mere man of learn
ing. The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks
for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light
and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour
perfectly harmonised ; it is true to life. On the other
hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of
learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of
colours, which at most are systematically arranged,
but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.

Reading is thinking with some one else's head
instead of one's own. To think with one's own head
is always to aim at developing a coherent whole — a
system, even though it be not a strictly complete one ;
and nothing hinders this so much as too strong a
current of others' thoughts, such as comes of continual
reading. These thoughts, springing every one of
them from different minds, belonging to different
systems, and tinged with different colours, never of
themselves flow together into an intellectual whole ;
they never form a unity of knowledge, or insight, or
conviction ; but, rather, fill the head with a Babylonian
confusion of tonimes. The mind that is over-loaded

G4 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

with alien thought is thus deprived of all clear in
sight, and so well-nigh disorganised. This is a state
of things observable in many men of learning ; and it
makes them inferior in sound sense, correct judgment
and practical tact, to many illiterate persons who,
after obtaining a little knowledge from without, by
means of experience, intercourse with others, and a
small amount of reading, have always subordinated it
to, and embodied it with, their own thought.

The really scientific thinker does the same
thing as these illiterate persons, but on a larger
scale. Although he has need of much knowledge,
and so must read a great deal, his mind is
nevertheless strong enough to master it all, to
assimilate and incorporate it with the system of his
thoughts, and so to make it fit in with the organic
unity of his insight, which, though vast, is always
growing. And in the process, his own thought, like
the bass in an organ, always dominates everything,
and is never drowned by other tones, as happens
with minds which are full of mere antiquarian lore ;
where shreds of music, as it were, in every key,
mingle confusedly, and no fundamental note is heard
at all.

Those who have spent their lives in reading, and
taken their wisdom from books, are like people who
have obtained precise information about a country
from the descriptions of many travellers. Such people
can tell a great deal about it; but, after all, they
have no connected, clear, and profound knowledge of
its real condition. But those who have spent their
lives in thinking resemble the travellers themselves ;

ON THINKING FOR ONESELF. 65

(hey alone really know what they are talking about ;
they are acquainted with the actual state of affairs,
and are quite at home in the subject.

The thinker stands in the same relation to the
ordinary book-philosopher as an eye-witness does to
the historian ; he speaks from direct knowledge of
his own. That is why all those who think for them
selves come, at bottom, to much the same conclusion.
The differences they present are due to their different
points of view ; and when these do not affect the
matter, they all speak alike. They merely express
the result of their own objective perception of things.
There are many passages in my works which I have
given to the public only after some hesitation,
because of their paradoxical nature ; and afterwards
I have experienced a pleasant surprise in finding the
same opinion recorded in the works of great men
who lived long ago.

The book-philosopher merely reports what one
person has said and another meant, or the objections
raised by a third, and so on. He compares different
opinions, ponders, criticises, and tries to get at the
truth of the matter ; herein on a par with the critical
historian. For instance, he will set out to inquire
whether Leibnitz was not for some time a follower of
Spinoza, and questions of a like nature. The curious
student of such matters may find conspicuous examples
of what I mean in Herbart's Analytical Elucidation of
Morality and Natural Right, and in the same author's
Letters on Freedom. Surprise may be felt that a man
of the kind should put himself to so much trouble ;
for, on the face of it, if he would only examine the

66 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

matter for himself, he would speedily attain his object
by the exercise of a little thought. But there is a
small difficulty in the way. It does not depend
upon his own will. A man can always sit down and
read, but not — think. It is with thoughts as with
men : they cannot always be summoned at pleasure ;
we must wait for them to come. Thought about a
subject must appear of itself, by a happy and har
monious combination of external stimulus with mental
temper and attention ; and it is just that which never
seems to come to these people.

This truth may be illustrated by what happens in
the case of matters affecting our own personal in
terest. When it is necessary to come to some resolu
tion in a matter of that kind, we cannot well sit
down at any given moment and think over the merits
of the case and make up our mind ; for, if we try to
do so, we often find ourselves unable, at that par
ticular moment, to keep our mind fixed upon the
subject ; it wanders off to other things. Aversion to
the matter in question is sometimes to blame for this.
In such a case we should not use force, but wait for
the proper frame of mind to come of itself. It often
comes unexpectedly and returns again and again ; and
the variety of temper in which we approach it at
different moments puts the matter always in a fresh
light. It is this long process which is understood by
the term a ripe resolution. For the work of coming
to a resolution must be distributed ; and in the
process much that is overlooked at one moment
occurs to us at another ; and the repugnance vanishes
when we find, as we usually do, on a closer in-

ON THINKING FOB ONESELF. 67

spection, that things are not so bad as they
seemed.

This rule applies to the life of the intellect as well
as to matters of practice. A man must wait for the
right moment. Not even the greatest mind is capable
of thinking for itself at all times. Hence a great
mind does well to spend its leisure in reading, which,
as I have said, is a substitute for thought : it brings
stuff to the mind by letting another person do the
thinking ; although that is always done in a manner
not our own. Therefore, a man should not read too
much, in order that his mind may not become
accustomed to the substitute and thereby forget the
reality ; that it may not form the habit of walking in
well-worn paths ; nor by following an alien course of
thought grow a stranger to its own. Least of all
should a man quite withdraw his gaze from the real
world for the mere sake of reading; as the impulse
and the temper which prompt to thought of one's own
come far oftener from the world of reality than from
the world of books. The real life that a man sees
before him is the natural subject of thought; and in
its strength as the primary element of existence, it
can more easily than anything else rouse and in
fluence the thinking mind.

After these considerations, it will not be matter for
surprise that a man who thinks for himself can easily
be distinguished from the book-philosopher by the
very way in which he talks, by his marked earnest
ness, and the originality, directness, and personal con
viction that stamp all his thoughts and expressions.
The book-philosopher, on the other hand, lets it be

68 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

seen that everything he has is second-hand ; that his
ideas are like the lumber and trash of an old furniture-
shop, collected together from all quarters. Mentally,
he is dull and pointless — a copy of a copy. His
literary style is made up of conventional, nay,
vulgar phrases, and terms that happen to be cur
rent ; in this respect much like a small State where
all the money that circulates is foreign, because it
has no coinage of its own.

Mere experience can as little as reading supply the
place of thought. It stands to thinking in the same
relation in which eating stands to digestion and
assimilation. When experience boasts that to its dis
coveries alone is due the advancement of the human
race, it is as though the mouth were to claim the
whole credit of maintaining the body in health.

The works of all truly capable minds are distin
guished by a character of decision and definiteness,
which means that they are clear and free from ob
scurity. A truly capable mind always knows definitely
and clearly what it is that it wants to express,
whether its medium is prose, verse, or music. Other
minds are not decisive and not definite ; and by this
they may be known for what they are.

The characteristic sign of a mind of the highest
order is that it always judges at first hand. Every
thing it advances is the result of thinking for itself ;
and this is everywhere evident by the way in which
it gives its thoughts utterance. Such a mind is like a
Prince. In the realm of intellect its authority
is imperial, whereas the authority of minds of a
lower order is delegated only; as may be seen in

ON THINKING FOR ONESELF. 69

their style, which has no independent stamp of
its own.

Every one who really thinks for himself is so far
like a monarch. His position is undelegated and
supreme. His judgments, like royal decrees, spring
from his own sovereign power and proceed directly
from himself. He acknowledges authority as little as
a monarch admits a command ; he subscribes to
nothing but what he has himself authorised. The
multitude of common minds, labouring under all sorts
of current opinions, authorities, prejudices, is like
the people, which silently obeys the law and accepts
orders from above.

Those who are so zealous and eager to settle de
bated questions by citing authorities, are really glad
when they are able to put the understanding and the
insight of others into the field in place of their own,
which are wanting. Their number is legion. For, as
Seneca says, there is no man but prefers belief to the
exercise of judgment — unusquisque mavult credere
quam judicare. In their controversies such people
make a promiscuous use of the weapon of authority,
and strike out at one another with it. If any one
chances to become involved in such a contest, he will
do well not to try reason and argument as a mode of
defence; for against a weapon of that kind these people
are like Siegfrieds, with a skin of horn, and dipped in
the flood of incapacity for thinking and judging.
They will meet his attack by bringing up their
authorities as a way of abashing him — argumentum
ad verecundiam, and then cry out that they have
won the battle.

70 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

In the real world, be it never so fair, favourable
and pleasant, we always live subject to the law of
gravity, which we have to be constantly overcoming.
But in the world of intellect we are disembodied
spirits, held in bondage to no such law, and free from
penury and distress. Thus it is that there exists no
happiness on earth like that which, at the auspicious
moment, a fine and fruitful mind finds in itself.

The presence of a thought is like the presence of a
woman we love. We fancy we shall never forget the
thought nor become indifferent to the dear one. But
out of sight, out of mind ! The finest thought runs
the risk of being irrevocably forgotten if we do not
write it down, and the darling of being deserted if we
do not marry her.

There are plenty of thoughts which are valuable to
the man who thinks them ; but only few of them
which have enough strength to produce repercussive
or reflex action — I mean, to win the reader's sympathy
after they have been put on paper.

But still it must not be forgotten that a true value
attaches only to what a man has thought in the first
instance for his own case. Thinkers may be classed
according as they think chiefly for their own case or
for that of others. The former are the genuine inde
pendent thinkers ; they really think and are really
independent; they are the true philosophers ; they
alone are in earnest. The pleasure and the happiness
of their existence consist in thinking. The others are the
sophists ; they want to seem that which they are not,
and seek their happiness in what they hope to get
from the world. They are in earnest about nothing

ON THINKING FOR ONESELF. 71

else. To which of these two classes a man belongs
may be seen by his whole style and manner. Lich ten-
berg is an example for the former class; Herder,
there can be no doubt, belongs to the second.

When one considers how vast and how close to us
is the problem of existence — this equivocal, tortured,
fleeting, dream-like existence of ours — so vast and so
close that a man no sooner discovers it than it over
shadows and obscures all other problems and aims ;
and when one sees how all men, with few and rare
exceptions, have no clear consciousness of the problem,
nay, seem to be quite unaware of its presence, but
busy themselves with everything rather than with
this, and live on, taking no thought but for the pass
ing day and the hardly longer span of their own
personal future, either expressly discarding the pro
blem or else over-ready to come to terms with it by
adopting some system of popular metaphysics and
letting it satisfy them ; when, I say, one takes all this
to heart, one may come to the opinion that man may
be said to be a thinking being only in a very remote
sense, and henceforth feel no special surprise at
any trait of human thoughtlessness or folly ; but
know, rather, that the normal man's intellectual range
of vision does indeed extend beyond that of the brute,
whose whole existence is, as it were, a continual
present, with no consciousness of the past or the
future; but not such an immeasurable distance as is
generally supposed.

This is, in fact, corroborated by the way in
which most men converse ; where their thoughts
are found to be chopped up fine, like chaff, so

72 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

that for them to spin out a discourse of any
length is impossible.

If this world were peopled by really thinking
beings, it could never be that noise of every kind
would be allowed such generous limits, as is the case
with the most horrible and at the same time aimless
form of it.1 If Nature had meant man to think, she
would not have given him ears ; or, at any rate,
she would have furnished them with air-tight flaps,
such as are the enviable possession of the bat. But,
in truth, man is a poor animal like the rest, and his
powers are meant only to maintain him in the struggle
for existence ; so he must needs keep his ears
always open, to announce of themselves, by night as
by day, the approach of the pursuer.

1 Translator's Note. Schopenhauer refers to the cracking cf
whips. See the essay On Noise in Studies in Pessimism.

ON
SOME FORMS OF LITERATURE.

ON SOME FORMS OF LITERATURE.

IN the DRAMA, which is the most perfect reflection of
human existence, there are three stages in tho pre
sentation of the subject, with a corresponding variety
in the design and scope of the piece.

At the first, which is also the most common, stage,
the drama is never anything more than merely in
teresting. The persons gain our attention by follow
ing their own aims, which resemble ours ; the action
advances by means of intrigue and the play of char
acter and incident ; while wit and raillery season the
whole.

At the second stage, the drama becomes sentimental.
Sympathy is roused with the hero and, indirectly,
with ourselves. The action takes a pathetic turn ;
but the end is peaceful and satisfactory.

The climax is reached with the third stage, which
is the most difficult. There the drama aims at being
tragic. We are brought face to face with great suffer
ing and the storm and stress of existence ; and the
outcome of it is to show the vanity of all human
effort. Deeply moved, we are either directly prompted
to disengage our will from the struggle of life, or else
a chord is struck in us which echoes a similar feeling.

The beginning, it is said, is always difficult. In the
drama it is just the contrary ; for there the difficulty
always lies in the end. This is proved by countless

75

6 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

plays which promise very well for the first act or two,
and then become muddled, stick or falter — notoriously
so in the fourth act — and finally conclude in a way that
is either forced or unsatisfactory or else long foreseen
by every one. Sometimes, too, the end is positively
revolting, as in Lessing's Emilia Galotti, which sends
the spectators home in a temper.

This difficulty in regard to the end of a play arises
partly because it is everywhere easier to get things
into a tangle than to get them out again ; partly also
because at the beginning we give the author carte
blanche to do as he likes, but, at the end, make certain
definite demands upon him. Thus we ask for a con
clusion that shall be either quite happy or else quite
tragic ; whereas human affairs do not easily take so
decided a turn ; and then we expect that it shall be
natural, fit and proper, unlaboured, and at the same
time foreseen by no one.

These remarks are also applicable to an epic and to
a novel ; but the more compact nature of the drama
makes the difficulty plainer by increasing it.

E nikilo nihil fit. That nothing can come from
nothing is a maxim true in fine art as elsewhere. In
composing an historical picture, a good artist will use
living men as a model, and take the ground-work of
the faces from life ; and then proceed to idealise them
in point of beauty or expression. A similar method, I
fancy, is adopted by good novelists. In drawing a
character they take the general outline of it from
some real person of their acquaintance, and then
idealise and complete it to suit their purpose.

ON SOME FORMS OF LITERATURE. 77

A NOVEL will be of a high and noble order, the
more it represents of inner, and the less it represents
of outer, life ; and the ratio between the two will
supply a means of judging any novel, of whatever
kind, from Tristram Shandy down to the crudest
and most sensational tale of knight or robber.
Tristram Shandy has, indeed, as good as no action at
all ; and there is not much in La Nouvelle Heloise
and Wilhelm Meister. Even Don Quixote lias re
latively little ; and what there is, is very unimportant,
and introduced merely for the sake of fun. And these
four are the best of all existing novels.

Consider, further, the wonderful romances of Jean
Paul, and how much inner life is shown on the
narrowest basis of actual event. Even in Walter
Scott's novels there is a great preponderance of inner
over outer life, and incident is never brought in except
for the purpose of giving play to thought and emotion ;
whereas, in bad novels, incident is there on its own
account. Skill consists in setting the inner life in
motion with the smallest possible array of circum
stance; for it is this inner life that really excites our
interest.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great
events, but to make small ones interesting.

HISTORY, which I like to think of as the contrary

of poetry (Icrropov^vov — TreTro^evoi/), is for time what

geography is for space ; and it is no more to be called
a science, in any strict sense of the word, than is
geography, because it does not deal with universal

F8 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

truths, but only with particular details.1 History has
always been the favourite study of those who wish to
learn something, without having to face the effort
demanded by any branch of real knowledge, which
taxes the intelligence. In our time history is a
favourite pursuit ; as witness the numerous books
upon the subject which appear every year.

If the reader cannot help thinking, with me, that
history is merely the constant recurrence of similar
things, just as in a kaleidoscope the same bits of glass
are presented, but in different combinations, he will
not be able to share all this lively interest ; nor, how
ever, will he censure it. But there is a ridiculous and
absurd claim, made by many people, to regard history
as a part of philosophy, nay, as philosophy itself ;
they imagine that history can take its place.

The preference shown for history by the greater
public in all ages may be illustrated by the kind of
conversation which is so much in vogue eve^where
in society. It generally consists in one person relating
something, and then another person relating something
else ; so that in this way everyone is sure of receiving
attention. Both here and in the case of history it is
plain that the mind is occupied with particular details.
But as in science, so also in every worthy conversa
tion, the mind rises to the consideration of some
general truth.

This objection does not, however, deprive history

1 Translator's Note. — This line of argument is not likely to be
popular now-a-days ; but if the reader is interested by it, he will
find it more fully stated in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellting,
Yol. II., c. 38.

ON SOME FORMS OF LITERATURE. 79

of its value. Human life is short and fleeting, and
many millions of individuals share in it, who are
swallowed by that monster of oblivion which is wait
ing for them with ever-open jaws. It is thus a very
thankworthy task to try to rescue something — the
memory of interesting and important events, or the
leading features and personages of some epoch — from
the general shipwreck of the world.

From another point of view, we might look upon
history as the sequel to zoology ; for while with all
other animals it is enough to observe the species, wTith
man individuals, and therefore individual events, have
to be studied ; because every man possesses a character
as an individual. And since individuals and events
are without number or end, an essential imperfection
attaches to history. In the study of it, all that a man
learns never contributes to lessen that which he has
still to learn. With any real science, a perfection of
knowledge is, at any rate, conceivable.

When we gain access to the histories of China and
of India, the endlessness of the subject-matter will
reveal to us the defects in the study, and force our
historians to see that the object of science is to recog
nise the many in the one, to perceive the rules in any
given example, and to apply to the life of nations a
knowledge of mankind; not to go on counting up
facts ad infinitum.

There are two kinds of history ; the history of
politics and the history of literature and art. The
one is the history of the will ; the other, that of the
intellect. The first is a tale of woe, even of terror : it
is a record of agony, struggle, fraud, and horrible

80 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

murder en masse. The second is everywhere pleasing
and serene, like the intellect when left to itself, even
though its path be one of error. Its chief branch is
the history of philosophy This is, in fact, its funda
mental bass, and the notes of it are heard even in the
other kind of history. These deep tones guide the
formation of opinion, and opinion rules the world.
Hence philosophy, rightly understood, is a material
force of the most powerful kind, though very slow in
its working. The philosophy of a period is thus the
fundamental bass of its history.

The NEWSPAPER is the second-hand in the clock of
history ; and it is not only made of baser metal than
those which point to the minute and the hour, but it
seldom goes right.

The so-called leading article is the chorus jbo the
drama of passing events.

Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to jour
nalism as it is to the dramatic art; for the object of
journalism is to make events go as far as possible.
Thus it is that all journalists are, in the very nature
of their calling, alarmists ; and this is their way of
giving interest to what they write. Herein they are
like little dogs ; if anything stirs, they immediately
set up a shrill bark.

Therefore, let us carefully regulate the attention to
be paid to this trumpet of danger, so that it may not
disturb our digestion. Let us recognise that a news
paper is at best but a magnify ing-glass, and very
often merely a shadow on the wall.

The pen is to thought what the stick is to walking;

ON SOME FORMS OF LITERATURE.

but you walk most easily when you have no stick,
and you think with the greatest perfection when you
have no pen in your hand. It is only when a man
begins to be old that he likes to use a stick and is
glad to take up his pen.

When an hypothesis has once come to birth in the
mind, or gained a footing there, it leads a life so far
comparable with the life of an organism, as that it
assimilates matter from the outer world only when it
is like in kind with it and beneficial ; and when,
contrarily, such matter is not like in kind but hurtful,
the hypothesis, equally with the organism, throws it
off, or, if forced to take it, gets rid of it again entire.

To gain immortality an author must possess so many
excellences that, while it will not be easy to find
anyone to understand and appreciate them all, there
will be men in every age who are able to recognise
and value some of them. In this wa}r the credit
of his book will be maintained throughout the long
course of centuries, in spite of the fact that human
interests are always changing.

An author like this, who has a claim to the
continuance of his life even with posterity, can only
be a man who, over the wide earth, will seek his like
in vain, and offer a palpable contrast with everyone
else in virtue of his unmistakable distinction. Kay
more: were he, like the wandering Jew, to live
through several generations, he would still remain in
the same superior position. If this were not so, it
would be difficult to see why his thoughts should not
perish like those of other men,

F

82 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

Metaphors and similes are of great value, in so far
as they explain an unknown relation by a known one.
Even the more detailed simile which grows into a
parable or an allegory, is nothing more than the
exhibition of some relation in its simplest, most
visible and palpable form. The growth of ideas rests,
at bottom, upon similes; because ideas arise by a
process of combining the similarities and neglecting
the differences between things. Further, intelligence,
in the strict sense of the word, ultimately consists in
a seizing of relations ; and a clear and pure grasp of
relations is all the more often attained when the
comparison is made between cases that lie wide apart
from one another, and between things of quite differ
ent nature. As long as a relation is known to me as
existing only in a single case, I have none but an
individual idea of it — in other words, only an intui
tive or perceptive knowledge of it ; but as soon as I
see the same relation in two different cases, I have a
general idea of its whole nature, and this is a deeper
and more perfect knowledge.

Since, then, similes and metaphors are such a
powerful engine of knowledge, it is a sign of great
intelligence in a writer if his similes are unusual and,
at the same time, to the point. Aristotle also observes
that by far the most important thing to a writer is
to have this power of metaphor; for it is a gift which
cannot be acquired, and it is a mark of genius.1

As regards reading, to require that a man shall
retain everything he has ever read, is like asking him

1 Poetics, o. 22.

ON SOME FORMS OF LITERATURE. 83

to carry about with him all he has ever eaten. The
one kind of food has given him bodily, and the other
mental, nourishment ; and it is through these two
means that he has grown to be what he is. The body
assimilates only that which is like it ; and so a man
retains in his mind only that which interests him, in
other words, that which suits his system of thought
or his purposes in life. Everyone has purposes, no
doubt ; but very few have anything like a system of
thought. Few people take an objective interest in
anything, and so their reading does them no good;
they retain nothing.

If a man wants to read good books, he must make
a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, and
time and energy limited.

Repetitio est mater studiorum. Any book that is
at all important ought to be at once read through
twice ; partly because, on a second reading, the con
nection of the different portions of the book will be
better understood, and the beginning comprehended
only when the end is known ; and partly because we
are not in the same temper and disposition on both
readings. On the second perusal we get a new view
of every passage and a different impression of the
whole book, which then appears in another light.

It would be a good thing to buy books if one could
also buy the time in which to read them ; but gener
ally the purchase of a book is mistaken for the
acquisition of its contents.

A man's works are the quintessence of his mind,
and even though he may possess very great capacity,
they will always be incomparably more valuable than

84 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

his conversation. Nay, in all essential matters his
works will not only make up for the lack of personal
intercourse with him, but they will far surpass it in
solid advantages. The writings even of a man of
moderate genius may be edifying, worth reading and
instructive, because they are his quintessence — the
result and fruit of all his thought and study ; whilst
conversation with him may be unsatisfactory.

So it is that we can read books by men in whose
company we find nothing to please, and that a high
degree of culture leads us to seek entertainment
almost wholly from books and not from men.

ON CRITICISM.

ON CRITICISM.

THE following brief remarks on the critical faculty
are chiefly intended to show that, for the most part,
there is no such thing. It is a rara avis ; almost as
rare, indeed, as the phoenix, which appears only once
in five hundred years.

When we speak of taste — an expression not chosen
with any regard for it — we mean the discovery, or, it
may be only the recognition, of what is right aestheti
cally, apart from the guidance of any rule ; and this,
either because no rule has as yet been extended to the
matter in question, or else because, if existing, it is
unknown to the artist, or the critic, as the case may
be. Instead of taste, we might use the expression
cesthetic sense, if this were not tautological.

The perceptive critical taste is, so to speak, the
female analogue to the male quality of productive
talent or genius. Not capable of begetting great work
itself, it consists in a capacity of reception, that is to
say, of recognising as such what is right, fit, beautiful,
or the reverse ; in other words, of discriminating the
good from the bad, of discovering and appreciating
the one and condemning the other.

In appreciating a genius, criticism should not deal
with the errors in his productions or with the poorer
of his works, and then proceed to rate him low ; it
should attend only to the qualities in which he most

87

88 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

excels. For in the sphere of intellect, as in other
spheres, weakness and perversity cleave so firmly to
human nature that even the most brilliant mind is
not wholly and at all times free from them. Hence
the great errors to be found even in the works of the
greatest men ; or as Horace puts it, quandoque bonus
dormitat Homerus.

That which distinguishes genius, and should be the
standard for judging it, is the height to which it is
able to soar when it is in the proper mood and finds a
fitting occasion — a height always out of the reach of
ordinary talent. And, in like manner, it is a very
dangerous thing to compare two great men of the
same class ; for instance, two great poets, or musicians,
or philosophers, or artists ; because injustice to the
one or the other, at least for the moment, can hardly
be avoided. For in making a comparison of the kind
the critic looks to some particular merit of the one
and at once discovers that it is absent in the other,
who is thereby disparaged. And then if the process
is reversed, and the critic begins with the latter and dis
covers his peculiar merit, which is quite of a different
order from that presented by the former, with whom
it may be looked for in vain, the result is that both
of them suffer undue depreciation.

There are critics who severally think that it rests
with each one of them what shall be accounted good,
and what bad. They all mistake their own toy-
trumpets for the trombones of fame.

A drug does not effect its purpose if the dose is too
large ; and it is the same with censure and adverse
criticism when it exceeds the measure of justice.

ON CRITICISM. 89

The disastrous thing for intellectual merit is that it
must wait for those to praise the good who have
themselves produced nothing but what is bad ; nay,
it is a primary misfortune that it has to receive its
crown at the hands of the critical power of mankind
— a quality of which most men possess only the weak
and impotent semblance, so that the reality may be
numbered amongst the rarest gifts of nature. Hence
La Bruyere's remark is, unhappily, as true as it is
neat. Apres Vesprit de discernement, he says, ce qu'il
y a au monde de plus rare, ce sont les diamans et les
perles. The spirit of discernment! the critical faculty !
it is these that are lacking. Men do not know how
to distinguish the genuine from the false, the corn
from the chaff, gold from copper ; or to perceive the
wide gulf that separates a genius from an ordinary
man. Thus we have that bad state of things described
in an old-fashioned verse, which gives it as the lot of
the great ones here on earth to be recognised only
when they are gone : —

Us 1st nun das Gescliick der Grossen hier auf Erden,

Erst wann sie nicht mehr sind, von uns erkannt zu werden.

When any genuine and excellent work makes its
appearance, the chief difficulty in its way is the
amount of bad work it finds already in possession of
the field, and accepted as though it were good. And
then if, after a long time, the new comer really suc
ceeds, by a hard struggle, in vindicating his place for
himself and winning reputation, he will soon encounter
fresh difficulty from some aiiected, dull, awkward

90 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

imitator, whom people drag in, with the object of
calmly setting him up on the altar beside the genius ;
not seeing the difference and really thinking that
here they have to do with another great man. This
is what Yriarte means by the first lines of his 28th
Fable, where he declares that the ignorant rabble
always sets equal value on the good and the bad : —

Siempre acostumbra hacer el vulgo necio
De lo bueno y lo malo igual aprecio.

So even Shakespeare's dramas had, immediately after
his death, to give place to those of Ben Jonson,
Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and to yield the
supremacy for a hundred years. So Kant's serious
philosophy was crowded out by the nonsense of Fichte,
Schelling, Jacobi, Hegel. And even in a sphere
accessible to all, we have seen unworthy imitators
quickly diverting public attention from the incompar
able Walter Scott. For, say what you will, the public
has no sense for excellence, and therefore no notion
how very rare it is to find men really capable of doing
anything great in poetry, philosophy, or art, or that
their works are alone worthy of exclusive attention.
The dabblers, whether in verse or in any other high
sphere, should be every day unsparingly reminded
that neither gods, nor men, nor booksellers have
pardoned their mediocrity : —

mediocribus esse poetis
Non homines, non D\, non concessere columnce.1

Are they not the weeds that prevent the corn coming
1 Horace, Ars Poetica, 372.

ON CRITICISM. 91

up, so that they may cover all the ground themselves ?
And then there happens that which has been well
and freshly described by the lamented Feuchtersleben,1
who died so young: how people cry out in their
haste that nothing is being done, while all the while
great work is quietly growing to maturity ; and then,
when it appears, it is not seen or heard in the clamour
but goes its way silently, in modest grief : —

" 1st dock," — rufen sie vermessen —
" Nichts im Werke, nichts gethan ! "
Und das Grosse, reift indessen
Still heron.

Es erscheint nun : niemand sieht es,
Niemand hort es im Geschrei.
Mit bescheid'ner Trauer zieht es
Still vorbei.

This lamentable dearth of the critical faculty is not
less obvious in the case of science, as is shown by the
tenacious life of false and disproved theories. If they
are once accepted, they may go on bidding defiance to
truth for fifty or even a hundred years and more, as
stable as an iron pier in the midst of the waves.
The Ptolemaic system was still held a century after
Copernicus had promulgated his theory. Bacon,
Descartes and Locke made their way extremely
slowly and only after a long time ; as the reader may

1 Translator's Note. — Ernst Freiherr von Feuchtersleben
(1800-49), an Austrian physician, philosopher, and poet, and a
specialist in medical psychology. The best known of his songs
is that beginning ' ' Es ist bestimmt in Gottes. Rath, " to which
Mendelssohn composed one of his finest melodies.

02 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

see by d'Alembert's celebrated Preface to the Encyclo
paedia. Newton was not more successful ; and this is
sufficiently proved by the bitterness and contempt
with which Leibnitz attacked his theory of gravi
tation in the controversy with Clarke.1 Although
Newton lived for almost forty years after the
appearance of the Principia, his teaching was,
when he died, only to some extent accepted in
his own country, whilst outside England he
counted scarcely twenty adherents ; if we may
believe the introductory note to Voltaire's exposition
of his theory. It was, indeed, chiefly owing to this
treatise of Voltaire's that the system became known
in France nearly twenty years after Newton's death.
Until then a firm, resolute, and patriotic stand was
made by the Cartesian Vortices; whilst only forty
years previously, this same Cartesian philosophy
had been forbidden in the French schools ; and
now in turn d'Agnesseau, the Chancellor, re-
rused Voltaire the Imprimatur for his treatise
on the Newtonian doctrine. On the other hand,
in our day Newton's absurd theory of colour
still completely holds the field, forty years after
the publication of Goethe's. Hume, too, was dis
regarded up to his fiftieth year, though he began very
early and wrote in a thoroughly popular style. And
Kant, in spite of having written and talked all his
life long, did not become a famous man until
he was sixty.

Artists and poets have, to be sure, more chance than
thinkers, because their public is at least a hundred
1 See especially §§ 35, 113, 118, 120, 122, 123.

ON CRITICISM. 93

times as large. Still, what was thought of Beethoven
and Mozart during their lives ? what of Dante ? what
even of Shakespeare ? If the latter 's contemporaries
had in any way recognised his worth, at least one
good and accredited portrait of him would have come
down to us from an age when the art of painting
flourished ; whereas we possess only some very doubt
ful pictures, a bad copperplate, and a still worse
bust on his tomb.1 And in like manner, if he had
been duly honoured, specimens of his handwriting
would have been preserved to us by the hundred, in
stead of being confined, as is the case, to the signatures
to a few legal documents. The Portuguese are still
proud of their only poet Camoens. He lived, however,
on aim s collected every evening in the street by a
black slave whom he had brought with him from the
Indies. In time, no doubt, justice will be done to
everyone ; tempo e galanf uomo ; but it is as late and
slow in arriving as in a court of law, and the secret
condition of it is that the recipient shall be no longer
alive. The precept of Jesus the son of Sirach is
faithfully followed: Judge none blessed before his
death.2 He, then, who has produced immortal work?,
must find comfort by applying to them the words of
the Indian myth, that the minutes of life amongst the
immortals seem like }rears of earthly existence ; and
so, too, that years upou. earth are only as the minutes
of the immortals.

1 A. Wivell : An Inquiry into the History, Authenticity, and
Characteristics of SJiakespeare's Portraits ; with 21 engravings.
London, 1836.

- Ecclesiasticus, xi. 28,

04 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

This lack of critical insight is also shown by the
fact that, while in every century the excellent work
of earlier time is held in honour, that of its own is
misunderstood, and the attention which is its due is
given to bad work, such as every decade carries with
it only to be the sport of the next. That men are
slow to recognise genuine merit when it appears in
their own age, also proves that they do not under
stand or enjoy or really value the long-acknowledged
works of genius, which they honour only on the score
of authority. The crucial test is the fact that bad
work — Fichte's philosophy, for example — if it wins
any reputation, also maintains it for one or two
generations ; and only when its public is very large
does its fall follow sooner.

Now, just as the sun cannot shed its light
but to the eye that sees it, nor music sound
but to the hearing ear, so the value of all
masterly work in art and science is conditioned
by the kinship and capacity of the mind to which
it speaks. It is only such a mind as this that
possesses the magic word to stir and call forth the
spirits that lie hidden in great work. To the ordi
nary mind a masterpiece is a sealed cabinet of mys
tery, — an unfamiliar musical instrument from which
the player, however much he may flatter himself, can
draw none but confused tones. How different a
painting looks when seen in a good light, instead of
in some dark corner ! Just in the same way, the
impression made by a masterpiece varies with the
capacity of the mind to understand it.

A fine work, then, requires a mind sensitive to its

ON CRITICISM. 95

beauty; a thoughtful work, a mind that can really
think, if it is to exist and live at all. But alas ! it
may happen only too often that he who gives a fine
work to the world afterwards feels like a maker of
fireworks, who displays with enthusiasm the wonders
that have taken him so much time and trouble to
prepare, and then learns that he has come to the
wrong place, and that the fancied spectators were one
and all inmates of an asylum for the blind. Still
even that is better than if his public had consisted
entirely of men who made fireworks themselves ; as
in this case, if his display had been extraordinarily
good, it might possibly have cost him his head.

The source of all pleasure and delight is the feeling
of kinship. Even with the sense of beauty it is un
questionably our own species in the animal world,
and then again our own race, that appears to us the
fairest. So too in intercourse with others, every man
shows a decided preference for those who resemble
him ; and a blockhead will find the society of another
blockhead incomparably more pleasant than that of
any number of great minds put together. Every man
must necessarily take his chief pleasure in his own
work, because it is the mirror of his own mind, the
echo of his own thought ; and next in order will come
the work of people like him ; that is to say, a dull,
shallow and perverse man, a dealer in mere words,
will give his sincere and hearty applause only to
that which is dull, shallow, perverse or merely verbose.
On the other hand, he will allow merit to the work of
great minds only on the score of authority, in other
words, because he is ashamed to speak his opinion ;

06 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

for in reality they give him no pleasure at all. They
do not appeal to him ; nay, they repel him ; and he
will not confess this even to himself. The works of
genius cannot be fully enjoyed except by those who
are themselves of the privileged order. The first re
cognition of them, however, when they exist without
authority to support them, demands considerable
superiority of mind.

When the reader takes all this into consideration,
he should be surprised, not that great work is so late
in winning reputation, but that it wins it at all. And
as a matter of fact, fame comes only by a slow and
complex process. The stupid person is by degrees
forced, and as it were tamed, into recognising the
superiority of one who stands immediately above him ;
this one in his turn bows before some one else ; and so
it goes on until the weight of the votes gradually pre
vail over their number ; and this is just the condition
of all genuine, in other words, deserved fame. But
until then, the greatest genius, even after he has passed
his time of trial, stands like a king amidst a crowd of
his own subjects, who do not know him by sight and
therefore will not do his behests ; unless, indeed, his
chief ministers of state are in his train. For no
subordinate official can be the direct recipient of the
royal commands, as he knows only the signature of
his immediate superior ; and this is repeated all the
way up into the highest ranks, where the under
secretary attests the minister's signature, and the
minister that of the king. There are analogous stages
to be passed before a genius can attain widespread
fame. This is why his reputation most easily comes

ON CRITICISM. 97

to a standstill at the very outset ; because the highest
authorities, of whom there can be but few, are most fre
quently not to be found ; but the further down he goes
in the scale the more numerous are those who take the
word from above, so that his fame is no more arrested.

We must console ourselves for this state of things
by reflecting that it is really fortunate that the
greater number of men do not form a judgment on
their own responsibility, but merely take it on author
ity. For what sort of criticism should we have on
Plato and Kant, Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe, if
every man were to form his opinion by what he really
has and enjoys of these writers, instead of being
forced by authority to speak of them in a fit and
proper way, however little he may really feel what he
says. Unless something of this kind took place, it
would be impossible for true merit, in any high sphere,
to attain fame at all. At the same time it is also
fortunate that every man has just so much critical
power of his own as is necessary for recognising the
superiority of those who are placed immediately over
him, and for following their lead. This means that
the many come in the end to submit to the authority
of the few ; and there results that hierarchy of critical
judgments on which is based the possibility of a
steady, and eventually wide-reaching, fame.

The lowest class in the community is quite im
pervious to the merits of a great genius; and for
these people there is nothing left but the monument
raised to him, which, by the impression it produces
on their senses, awakes in them a dim idea of the
man's greatness.

G

98 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

Literary journals should be a dam against the un
conscionable scribbling of the age, and the ever-
increasing deluge of bad and useless books. Their
judgments should be uncorrupted, just and rigorous ;
and every piece of bad work done by an incapable
person ; every device by which the empty head tries
to come to the assistance of the empty purse, that is
to say, about nine-tenths of all existing books, should
be mercilessly scourged. Literary journals would then
perform their duty, which is to keep down the craving
for writing and put a check upon the deception of the
public, instead of furthering these evils by a miserable
toleration, which plays into the hands of author and
publisher, and robs the reader of his time and his
money.

If there were such a paper as I mean, every
bad writer, every brainless compiler, every plagiarist
from others' books, every hollow and incapable place-
hunter, every sham-philosopher, every vain and
languishing poetaster, would shudder at the prospect
of the pillory in which his bad work would inevitably
have to stand soon after publication. This would
paralyse his twitching fingers, to the true welfare of
literature, in which what is bad is not only useless
but positively pernicious. Now, most books are bad
and ought to have remained unwritten. Conse
quently praise should be as rare as is now the case
with blame, which is withheld under the influence of
personal considerations, coupled with the maxim
accedas socius, laudes lauderis ut absens.

It is quite wrong to try to introduce into literature
the same toleration as must necessarily prevail in

ON C1UTICISM. 99

society towards those stupid, brainless people who.
everywhere swarm in it. In literature such people
are impudent intruders ; and to disparage the bad is
here duty towards the good ; for he who thinks
nothing bad will think nothing good either. Politeness,
which has its source in social relations, is in literature
an alien, and often injurious, element; because it
exacts that bad work shall be called good. In this
way the very aim of science and art is directly
frustrated.

This ideal journal could, to be sure, be written only
by people who joined incorruptible honesty with rare
knowledge and still rarer power of judgment ; so that
perhaps there could, at the very most, be one, and
even hardly one, in the whole country; but there it
would stand, like a just Areopagus, every member of
which would have to be elected by all the others.
Under the system that prevails at present, literary
journals are carried on by a clique, and secretly per
haps also by booksellers for the good of the trade ;
and they are often nothing but coalitions of bad
heads to prevent the good ones succeeding. As
Goethe once remarked to me, nowhere is there so
much dishonesty as in literature.

But, above all, anonymity, that shield of all literary
rascality, would have to disappear. It was introduced
under the pretext of protecting the honest critic, who
warned the public, against the resentment of the
author and his friends. But where there is one case
of this sort, there will be a hundred where it merely
serves to take all responsibility from the man who
cannot stand by what he has said, or possibly to

100 TEIE ART OF LITERATURE.

conceal the shame of one who has been cowardly and
base enough to recommend a book to the public for
the purpose of putting money into his own pocket.
Often enough it is only a cloak for covering the
obscurity, incompetence and insignificance of the
critic. It is incredible what impudence these fellows
will show, and what literary trickery they will
venture to commit, as soon as they know they are
safe under the shadow of anonymity. Let me recom
mend a general Anticriticism, a universal medicine
or panacea, to put a stop to all anonymous re
viewing, whether it praises the bad or blames the
good : Rascal ! your name ! For a man to wrap him
self up and draw his hat over his face, and then fall
upon people who are walking about without any
disguise — this is not the part of a gentleman, it is the
part of a scoundrel and a knave.

An anonymous review has no more authority than an
anonymous letter ; and one should be received with
the same mistrust as the other. Or shall we take
the name of the man who consents to preside over
what is, in the strict sense of the word, une societd
anonyme as a guarantee for the veracity of his
colleagues ?

Even Rousseau, in the preface to the Nouvelle
Helo'ise, declares tout honnete homme doit avouer les
livres qu'il publie ; which in plain language means
that every honourable man ought to sign his articles,
and that no one is honourable who does not do so.
How much truer this is of polemical writing, which is
the general character of reviews ! Rieiner was quite
right in the opinion he gives in his Reminiscences of

ON CRITICISM. 101

Goethe i1 An overt enemy, he says, an enemy who
meets you face to face, is an honourable man, who will
treat you fairly, and with whom you can come to terms
and be reconciled : but an enemy who conceals himself
is a base, cowardly scoundrel, who has not courage
enough to avow his own judgment; it is not his opinion
that he cares about, but only the secret pleasure of
wreaking his anger without being found out or
punished. This will also have been Goethe's opinion,
as he was generally the source from which Biemer
drew his observations. And, indeed, Rousseau's
maxim applies to every line that is printed. Would a
man in a mask ever be allowed to harangue a mob,
or speak in any assembly ; and that, too, when he was
going to attack others and overwhelm them with abuse ?
Anonymity is the refuge for all literary and
journalistic rascality. It is a practice which must be
completely stopped. Every article, even in a news
paper, should be accompanied by the name of its
author; and the editor should be made strictly re
sponsible for the accuracy of the signature. The
freedom of the press should be thus far restricted ; so
that what a man publicly proclaims through the far-
sounding trumpet of the newspaper, he should be
answerable for, at any rate with his honour, if he has
any ; and if he has none, let his name neutralise the
effect of his words. And since even the most in
significant person is known in his own circle, the
result of such a measure would be to put an end to
two-thirds of the newspaper lies, and to restrain the
audacity of many a poisonous tongue.
1 Preface, p. xxix.

ON REPUTATION.

ON REPUTATION.

WRITERS may be classified as meteors, planets and
fixed stars. A meteor makes a striking effect for a
moment. You look up and cry There ! and it is gone
for ever. Planets and wandering stars last a much
longer time. They often outshine the fixed stars and
are confounded with them by the inexperienced ; but
this is only because they are near. It is not long
before they too must yield their place ; nay, the light
they give is reflected only, and the sphere of their
influence is confined to their own orbit — their con
temporaries. Their path is one of change and move
ment, and with the circuit of a few years their tale is
told. Fixed stars are the only ones that are constant ;
their position in the firmament is secure ; they shine
with a light of their own ; their effect to-day is the
same as it was yesterday, because, having no parallax,
their appearance does not alter with a difference in
our standpoint. They belong not to one system, one
nation only, but to the universe. And just because
they are so very far away, it is usually many years
before their light is visible to the inhabitants
of this earth.

We have seen in the previous chapter that where a
man's merits are of a high order, it is difficult for him
to win reputation, because the public is uncritical and

105

106 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

lacks discernment. But another and no less serious
hindrance to fame comes from the envy it has to en
counter. For even in the lowest kinds of work, envy
balks even the beginnings of a reputation, and never
ceases to cleave to it up to the last. How great a
part is played by envy in the wicked ways of the
world ! Ariosto is right in saying that the dark side
of our mortal life predominates, so full it is of this
evil : —

questa assai piti oscura die sercna
Vita mortal, tutta clinvidia plena.

For envy is the moving spirit of that secret and in-
Formal, though flourishing, alliance everywhere made
by mediocrity against individual eminence, no matter
of what kind. In his own sphere of work no one
will allow another to be distinguished : he is an in
truder who cannot be tolerated. Si quelqu'un excelle
parmi nous, qu'il aille exceller ailleurs! this is the
universal password of the second-rate. In addition,
then, to the rarity of true merit and the difficulty it
has in being understood and recognised, there is the
envy of thousands to be reckoned with, all of them
bent on suppressing, nay, on smothering it altogether.
No one is taken for what he is, but for what others
make of him ;. and this is the handle used by medio
crity to keep down distinction, by not letting it come
up as long as that can possibly be prevented.

There are two ways of behaving in regard to
merit : either to have some of one's own, or to refuse
any to others. The latter method is more convenient,

OX REPUTATION, 107

and so it is generally adopted. As envy is a mere
sign of deficiency, so to envy merit argues the lack of
it. My excellent Balthazar Gracian has given a very
fine account of this relation between envy and merit
in a lengthy fable, which may be found in his Discrete
under the heading Hombre de ostentacion. He de
scribes all the birds as meeting together and conspiring
against the peacock, because of his magnificent feathers:
//, said the magpie, we could only manage to put a
stop to the cursed parading of his tail, there would
soon be an end of his beauty ; for what is not seen
is as good as what does not exist.

This explains how modesty came to be a virtue.
It was invented only as a protection against envy.
That there have always been rascals to urge this
virtue, and to rejoice heartily over the bashfulness of
a man of merit, has been shown at length in my
chief work.1 In Lichtenberg's Miscellaneous Writ
ings I find this sentence quoted : Modesty should be
the virtue of those who possess no other. Goethe has
a well-known saying, which offends many people : It
is only knaves who are modest ! — Nur die Lumpen
sind bescheiden! but it has its prototype in Cervantes,
who includes in his Journey up Parnassus certain
rules of conduct for poets, and amongst them the
following : Everyone whose verse shows him to be a
poet should have a high opinion of himself, relying on
the proverb that he is a knave who thinks himself one.
And Shakespeare, in many of his Sonnets, which
gave him the only opportunity he had of speaking of

1 Welt als Wille, Vol. II. c. 37.

108 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

himself, declares, with a confidence equal to his in
genuousness, that what be writes is immortal.1

A method of underrating good work often used by
envy — in reality, however, only the obverse side of it
— consists in the dishonourable and unscrupulous
laudation of the bad ; for no sooner does bad work
gain currency than it draws attention from the good.
But however effective this method may be for a while,
especially if it is applied on a large scale, the day of
reckoning comes at last, and the fleeting credit given
to bad work is paid off by the lasting discredit which
overtakes those who abjectly praised it. Hence these
critics prefer to remain anonymous.

A like fate threatens, though more remotely, those
who depreciate and censure good work; and conse
quently many are too prudent to attempt it. But
there is another way ; and when a man of eminent
merit appears, the first effect he produces is often only
to pique all his rivals, just as the peacock's tail
offended the birds. This reduces them to a deep
silence ; and their silence is so unanimous that it
savours of preconcertion. Their tongues are all

1 Collier, one of his critical editors, in his Introduction to the
Sonnets, remarks upon this point : " In many of them are to
be found most remarkable indications of self-confidence and of
assurance in the immortality of his verses, and in this respect
the author's opinion was constant and uniform. He never
scruples to express it, ... and perhaps there is no writer of
ancient or modern times who, for the quantity of such writings
left behind him, has so frequently or so strongly declared that
what he had produced in this department of poetry ' the world
would not willingly let die.' "

OX REPUTATION. 109

paralysed. It is the silentium livoris described by
Seneca. This malicious silence, which is technically
known as ignoring, may for a long time interfere with
the growth of reputation ; if, as happens in the higher
walks of learning, where a man's immediate audience is
wholly composed of rival workers and professed stud
ents, who then form the channel of his fame, the greater
public Is obliged to use its suffrage without being able
to examine the matter for itself. And if, in the end,
that malicious silence is broken in upon by the voice
of praise, it will be but seldom that this happens en
tirely apart from some ulterior aim, pursued by those
who thus manipulate justice. For, as Goethe says in
the West-ostlicher Divan, a man can get no recogni
tion, either from many persons or from only one, unless
it is to publish abroad the critic's own discernment : —

Denn es ist Icein Anerkennen,
Weder Vieler, noch des Einen,
Wenn es nicht am Tage fordert,
Wo man selbst was mochte scheinen.

The credit you allow to another man engaged in work
similar to your own or akin to it, must at bottom be
withdrawn from yourself; and you can praise him
only at the expense of your own claims.

Accordingly, mankind is in itself not at all inclined
to award praise and reputation ; it is more disposed to
blame and find fault, whereby it indirectly praises it
self. If, notwithstanding this, praise is won from
mankind, some extraneous motive must prevail. I
am not here referring to the disgraceful way in which
mutual friends will puff one another into a reputation;

110 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

outside of that, an effectual motive is supplied by
the feeling that next to the merit of doing something
oneself, comes that of correctly appreciating and re
cognising what others have done. This accords with
the threefold division of heads drawn up byHesiod,1 and
afterwards by Machiavelli.2 There are, says the latter,
in the capacities of mankind, three varieties : one man
will understand a thing by himself ; another so far
as it is explained to him; a third, neither of himself
nor when it is put clearly before him. He, then, who
abandons hope of making good his claims to the first
class, will be glad to seize the opportunity of taking a
place in the second. It is almost wholly owing to
this state of things that merit may always rest assured
of ultimately meeting with recognition.

To this also is due the fact that when the value of
a work has once been recognised and may no longer
be concealed or denied, all men vie in praising and
honouring it ; simply because they are conscious of
thereby doing themselves an honour. They act in the
spirit of Xenophon's remark : he must be a wise man
who knows what is wise. So when they see that the
prize of original merit is for ever out of their reach,
they hasten to possess themselves of that which comes
second best — the correct appreciation of it. Here it
happens as with an army which has been forced to
yield ; when, just as previously every man wanted to
be foremost in the fight, so now every man tries to be
foremost in running away. They all hurry forward
to offer their applause to one who is now recognised

1 Works and Days, 293.

2 The Prince, ch. 22.

OX REPUTATION. Ill

to be worthy of praise, in virtue of a recognition, as a
rule unconscious, of that law of homogeneity which I
mentioned in the last chapter ; so that it may seem as
though their way of thinking and looking at things
were homogeneous with that of the celebrated man,
and that they may at least save the honour of their
literary taste, since nothing else is left them.

From this it is plain that, whereas it is very difficult
to win fame, it is not hard to keep it when once at
tained ; and also that a reputation which comes
quickly does not last very long; for here ioo,quodcitO
fit, cito perit. It is obvious that if the ordinary,
average man can easily recognise, and the rival workers
willingly acknowledge, the value of any performance,
it will not stand very much above the capacity of
either of them to achieve it for themselves. Tantum
guisque laudat, quantum se posse sperat imitari — a
man will praise a thing only so far as he hopes to be
able to imitate it himself. Further, it is a suspicious
sign if a reputation comes quickly ; for an application
of the laws of homogeneity will show that such a re
putation is nothing but the direct applause of the
multitude. What this means may be seen by a remark
once made by Phocion, when he was interrupted in a
speech by the loud cheers of the mob. Turning to
his friends who were standing close by, he asked :
Have I made a mistake and said something stupid ? 1

Contrarily, a reputation that is to last a long timo

must be slow in maturing, and the centuries of its

duration have generally to be bought at the cost of

contemporary praise. For that which is to keep its

1 Plutarch : ApopWiajms.

112 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

position so long, must be of a perfection difficult to
attain ; and even to recognise this perfection requires
men who are not always to be found, and never in
numbers sufficiently great to make themselves heard ;
whereas envy is always on the watch and doing
its best to smother their voice. But with moderate
talent, which soon meets with recognition, there is the
danger that those who possess it will outlive both it
and themselves ; so that a youth of fame may be
followed by an old age of obscurity. In the case of
great merit, on the other hand, a man may remain un
known for many years, but make up for it later on by
attaining a brilliant reputation. And if it should be
that this comes only after he is no more, well ! he is to
be reckoned amongst those of whom Jean Paul says
that extreme unction is their baptism. He may con
sole himself by thinking of the Saints, who also are
canonised only after they are dead.

Thus what Mahlmann l has said so well in Herodes
holds good ; in this world truly great work never
pleases at once, and the god set up by the multitude
keeps his place on the altar but a short time : —

Ich denke} das wahre Grosse in der Welt
1st immer nur Das was nicht gleich gefdllt
Und wen der Pobel zum Gotte weiht
Der steht auf dem Altar nur kurze Zeit.

It is worth mention that this rule is most directly con
firmed in the case of pictures, where, as connoisseurs
well know, the greatest masterpieces are not the first

1 Translator's Note. — August Mahlmann (1771-1826), journa
list, poet and story-writer. His Herodes vor Bethlehem is a
parody of Kotzebue's Hussiten wr Naumbury.

ON REPUTATION. 113

to attract attention. If they make a deep impression,
it is not after one, but only after repeated, inspection ;
but then they excite more and more admiration every
time they are seen.

Moreover, the chances that any given work will be
quickly and rightly appreciated, depend upon two
conditions : firstly, the character of the work, whether
high or low, in other words, easy or difficult to under
stand ; and, secondly, the kind of public it attracts,
whether large or small. This latter condition is, no
doubt, in most instances a corollary of the former;
but it also partly depends upon whether the work in
question admits, like books and musical compositions,
of being reproduced in great numbers. By the com
pound action of these two conditions, achievements
which serve no materially useful end — and these alone
are under consideration here — will vary in regard to
the chances they have of meeting with timely recog
nition and due appreciation; and the order of pre
cedence, beginning with those who have the greatest
chance, will be somewhat as follows : acrobats, circus-
riders, ballet-dancers, jugglers, actors, singers, musi
cians, composers, poets (both the last on account of
the multiplication of their works), architects, painters,
sculptors, philosophers.

The last place of all is unquestionably taken by
philosophers, because their works are meant not for
entertainment, but for instruction, and because they
presume some knowledge on the part of the reader,
and require him to make an effort of his own to under
stand them. This makes their public extremely small,
and causes their fame to be more remarkable for its

H

114 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

length than for its breadth. And, in general, it may
be said that the possibility of a man's fame lasting a
long time, stands in almost inverse ratio with the
chance that it will be early in making its appearance ;
so that, as regards length of fame, the above order of
precedence may be reversed. But, then, the poet and
the composer will come in the end to stand on the
same level as the philosopher ; since, when once a work
is committed to writing, it is possible to preserve it to
all time. However, the first place still belongs by
right to the philosopher, because of the much greater
scarcity of good work in this sphere, and the high
importance of it ; and also because of the possibility
it offers of an almost perfect translation into any
language. Sometimes, indeed, it happens that a
philosopher's fame outlives even his works themselves;
as has happened with Thales, Empedocles, Heraclitus,
Democritus, Parmenides, Epicurus, and many others.

My remarks are, as I have said, confined to achieve
ments that are not of any material use. Work that
serves some practical end, or ministers directly to
some pleasure of the senses, will never have any diffi
culty in being duly appreciated. No first-rate pastry
cook could long remain obscure in any town, to say
nothing of having to appeal to posterity.

Under fame of rapid growth is also to be reckoned
fame of a false and artificial kind ; where, for instance,
a book is worked into a reputation by means of un
just praise, the help of friends, corrupt criticism,
prompting from above and collusion from below. All
this tells upon the multitude, which is rightly pre
sumed to have no power of judging for itself. This

ON DEPUTATION. 115

sort of fame is like a swimming-bladder ; by its aid a
heavy body may keep afloat. It bears up for a certain
time, long or short according as the bladder is well
sewed up and blown ; but still the air comes out
gradually, and the body sinks. This is the inevitable
fate of all works which are famous by reason of some
thing outside of themselves. False praise dies away ;
collusion comes to an end; critics declare the reputation
ungrounded ; it vanishes, and is replaced by so much
the greater contempt. Contrarily, a genuine work,
which, having the source of its fame in itself, can
kindle admiration afresh in every age, resembles a
body of low specific gravity, which always keeps up
of its own accord, and so goes floating down the stream
of time.1

Men of great genius, whether their work be in
poetry, philosophy or art, stand in all ages like
isolated heroes, keeping up single-handed a desperate
struggle against the onslaught of an army of op
ponents. Is not this characteristic of the miserable
nature of mankind ? The dulness, grossness, per
versity, silliness and brutality of by far the greater
part of the race, are always an obstacle to the efforts
of the genius, whatever be the method of his art ; they
so form that hostile army to which at last he has to

1 Translator's Note. — At this point Schopenhauer interrupts
the thread of his discourse to speak at length upon an example
of false fame. Those who are at all acquainted with the
philosopher's views will not be surprised to find that the writer
thus held up to scorn is Hegel ; and readers of the other volumes
in this series will, with the translator, have had by now quite
enough of the subject. The passage is therefore emitted.

116 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

succumb. Let the isolated champion achieve what he
may: it is slow to be acknowledged; it is late in
being appreciated, and then only on the score of
authority; it may easily fall into neglect again, at
any rate for a while. Ever afresh it finds itself
opposed by false, shallow, and insipid ideas, which are
better suited to that large majority, and so generally
hold the field. Though the critic may step forth and
say, like Hamlet when he held up the two portraits
to his wretched mother, Have you eyes ? Have you
eyes ? alas ! they have none. When I watch the
behaviour of a crowd of people in the presence of
some great master's work, and mark the manner of
their applause, they often remind me of trained
monkeys in a show. The monkeys' gestures are, no
doubt, much like those of men; but now and again
they betray that the real inward spirit of those
gestures is not in them. Their irrational nature
peeps out.

It is often said of a man that he is in advance of
his age ; and it follows from the above remarks that
this must be taken to mean that he is in advance of
humanity in general. Just because of this fact, a
genius makes no direct appeal except to those who are
themselves considerably above the average in capacity;
and these are too rare to allow of their ever forming a
numerous body at any one period. If he is in this
respect not particularly favoured by fortune, he will
be misunderstood by his own age ; in other words, he
will remain unaccepted until time gradually brings
together the voices of those few persons who are
capable of judging a work of such high character.

ON REPUTATION. 117

Then posterity will say : This man was in advance
of his age, instead of in advance of humanity;
because humanity will be glad to lay the burden of
its own faults upon a single epoch.

Hence if a man has been superior to his own age,
he would also have been superior to any other ; pro
vided that, in that age, by some rare and happy
chance, a few just men, capable of judging in the
sphere of his achievements, had been born at the
same time with him ; just as when, according to a
beautiful Indian myth, Vischnu becomes incarnate as
a hero, so, too, Brahma at the same time appears as
the singer of his deeds; and hence Valmiki, Vyasa
and Kalidasa are incarnations of Brahma.

In this sense, then, it may be said that every
immortal work puts its age to the proof, whether or
no it will be able to recognise the merit of it. As a
rule, the men of any age stand such a test no better
than the neighbours of Philemon and Baucis, who
expelled the deities they failed to recognise. Accord
ingly, the right standard for judging the intellectual
worth of any generation is supplied, not by the great
minds that make their appearance in it — for their
capacities are the work of Nature, and the possibility
of cultivating them a matter of chance circumstance —
but by the way in which contemporaries receive their
works ; whether, I mean, they give their applause
soon and with a will, or late and in niggardly fashion,
or leave it to be bestowed altogether by posterity.

This last fate will be specially reserved for works
of a high character. For the happy chance men
tioned above will be all the more certain not to come,

118 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

in proportion as there are few to appreeiate the kind
of work done by great minds. Herein lies the
immeasurable advantage possessed by poets in respect
of reputation ; because their work is accessible to
almost every one. If it had been possible for Sir
Walter Scott to be read and criticised by only some
hundred persons, perhaps in his life-time any common
scribbler would have been preferred to him; and
afterwards, when he had taken his proper place, it
would also have been said in his honour that he was
in advance of his age. But if envy, dishonesty and
the pursuit of personal aims are added to the in
capacity of those hundred persons who, in the name of
their generation, are called upon to pass judgment on
a work, then indeed it meets with the same sad fate
as attends a suitor who pleads before a tribunal of
judges one and all corrupt.

In corroboration of this, we find that the history of
literature generally shows all those who made know
ledge and insight their goal to have remained unre
cognised and neglected, whilst those who paraded
with the vain show of it received the admiration of
their contemporaries, together with the emoluments.

The effectiveness of an author turns chiefly upon
his getting the reputation that he should be read.
But by practising various arts, by the operation of
chance, and by certain natural affinities, this reputa
tion is quickly won by a hundred worthless people ;
while a worthy writer may come by it very slowly
and tardily. The former possess friends to help
them ; for the rabble is always a numerous body
which holds well together. The latter has nothing

OX REPUTATION. 119

but enemies; because intellectual superiority is every
where and under all circumstances the most hateful
thing in the world, and especially to bunglers in the
same line of work, who want to pass for something
themselves.1

This being so, it is a prime condition for doing any
great work — any work which is to outlive its own
age, that a man pay no heed to his contemporaries,
their views and opinions, and the praise or blame
which they bestow. This condition is, however, ful
filled of itself when a man really does anything great,
and it is fortunate that it is so. For if, in producing
such a work, he were to look to the general opinion
or the judgment of his colleagues, they would lead
him astray at every step. Hence, if a man wants to
go down to posterity, he must withdraw from the
influence of his own age. This will, of course, gener
ally mean that he must also renounce any influence
upon it, and be ready to buy centuries of fame by
foregoing the applause of his contemporaries.

For when any new and wide-reaching truth comes
into the world — and if it is new, it must be paradoxi
cal — an obstinate stand will be made against it as
long as possible ; nay, people will continue to deny it
even after they slacken their opposition and are
almost convinced of its truth. Meanwhile it goes on
quietly working its way, and, like an acid, under
mining everything around it. From time to time

1 If the professors of philosophy should chance to think that
I am here hinting at them and the tactics they have for more
than thirty years pursued toward my works, they have hit the
nail upon the head.

120 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

a crash is heard; the old error comes tottering to
the ground, and suddenly the new fabric of thought
stands revealed, as though it were a monument just
uncovered. Everyone recognises and admires it. To
be sure, this all comes to pass for the most part very
slowly. As a rule, people discover a man to be worth
listening to only after he is gone ; their hear, hectr !
resounds when the orator has left the platform.

Works of the ordinary type meet with a better
fate. Arising as they do in the course of, and in con
nection with, the general advance in contemporary
culture, they are in close alliance with the spirit of
their age — in other words, just those opinions which
happen to be prevalent at the time. They aim at
suiting the needs of the moment. If they have any
merit, it is soon recognised ; and they gain currency
as books which reflect the latest ideas. Justice, nay,
more than justice, is done to them. They afford little
scope for envy ; since, as was said above, a man will
praise a thing only so far as he hopes to be able to
imitate it himself.

But those rare works which are destined to become
the property of all mankind and to live for centuries,
are, at their origin, too far in advance of the point at
which culture happens to stand, and on that very
account foreign to it and the spirit of their own time.
They neither belong to it nor are they in any connection
with it, and hence they excite no interest in those
who are dominated by it. They belong to another, a
higher stage of culture, and a time that is still far
off. Their course is related to that of ordinary works
as the orbit of Uranus to the orbit of Mercury. For

ON REPUTATION. 121

the moment they get no justice done to them. People
are at a loss how to treat them ; so they leave them
alone, and go their own snail's pace for themselves.
Does the worm see the eagle as it soars aloft ?

Of the number of books written in any language
about one in 100,000 forms a part of its real and per
manent literature. What a fate this one book has to
endure before it outstrips those 100,000 and gains its
clue place of honour ! Such a book is the work of
an extraordinary and eminent mind, and therefore
it is specifically different from the others; a fact
which sooner or later becomes manifest.

Let no one fancy that things will ever improve in this
respect. No ! the miserable constitution of humanity
never changes, though it may, to be sure, take somewhat
varying forms with every generation. A distinguished
mind seldom has its full effect in the lifetime of its
possessor ; because, at bottom, it is completely and
properly understood only by minds already akin to it.

As it is a rare thing for even one man out of many
millions to tread the path that leads to immortality,
he must of necessity be very lonely. The journey to
posterity lies through a horribly dreary region, like
the Lybian desert, of which, as is well-known, no one
has any idea who has not seen it for himself. Mean
while let me before all things recommend the traveller
to take light baggage with him; otherwise he will
have to throw away too much on the road. Let him
never forget the words of Balthazar Gracian : lo bueno,
si breve, dos vezes bueno — good work is doubly good if
it is short. This advice is specially applicable to my
own countrymen.

122 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

Compared with the short span of time they live,
men of great intellect are like huge buildings, standing
on a small plot of ground. The size of the building
cannot be seen by anyone just in front of it ; nor, for
an analogous reason, can the greatness of a genius be
estimated while he lives. But when a century
has passed, the world recognises it and wishes him
back again.

If the perishable son of time has produced an im
perishable work, how short his own life seems com
pared with that of his child ! He is like Semele or
Maia — a mortal mother who gave birth to an im
mortal son ; or, contrarily, like Achilles in regard to
Thetis. What a contrast there is between what is
fleeting and what is permanent ! The short span of
a man's life, his necessitous, afflicted, unstable, exist
ence, will seldom allow of his seeing even the be
ginning of his immortal child's brilliant career; nor
will the father himself be taken for that which he
really is. It may be said, indeed, that a man whose
fame comes after him is the reverse of a nobleman,
who is preceded by it.

However, the only difference that it ultimately
makes to a man to receive his fame at the hands of
contemporaries rather than from posterity, is that in
the former case his admirers are separated from him
by space, and in the latter by time. For even in the
case of contemporary fame, a man does not, as a rule,
see his admirers actually before him. Reverence
cannot endure close proximity : it almost always
dwells at some distance from its object ; and in the
presence of the person revered it melts like butter in

ON REPUTATION. 123

the sun. Accordingly, if a man is celebrated with his
contemporaries, nine-tenths of those amongst whom
he lives will let their esteem be guided by his rank
and fortune ; and the remaining tenth may perhaps
have a dull consciousness of his high qualities, because
they have heard about him from remote quarters.
There is a fine Latin letter of Petrarch's on this
incompatibility between reverence and the presence
of the person, and between fame and life. It comes
second in his Epistolce familiares,1 and it is addressed
to Thomas Messanensis. He there observes, amongst
other things, that the learned men of his age all made
it a rule to think little of a man's writings if they had
even once seen him.

Since distance, then, is essential if a famous man is
to be recognised and revered, it does not matter
whether it is distance of space or of time. It is true
that he may sometimes hear of his fame in the one
case, but never in the other ; but still, genuine and
great merit may make up for this by confidently
anticipating its posthumous fame. Nay, he who pro
duces some really great thought is conscious of his
connection with coming generations at the very
moment he conceives it ; so that he feels the extension
of his existence through centuries and thus lives with
posterity as well as for it. And when, after enjoying
a great man's work, we are seized with admiration
for him, and wish him back, so that we might see and
speak with him, and have him in our possession, this
desire of ours is not unrequited ; for he, too, has had
his longing for that posterity which will grant the
1 In the Venetian edition of 1492.

124 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

recognition, honour, gratitude and love denied by
envious contemporaries.

If intellectual works of the highest order are not
allowed their due until they come before the tribunal
of posterity, a contrary fate is prepared for certain
brilliant errors which proceed from men of talent, and
appear with an air of being well grounded. These
errors are defended with so much acumen and learning
that they actually become famous with their own age,
and maintain their position at least during their
author's lifetime. Of this sort are many false theories
and wrong criticisms ; also poems and works of art,
which exhibit some false taste or mannerism favoured
by contemporary prejudice. They gain reputation
and currency simply because no one is yet forthcoming
who knows how to refute them or otherwise prove
their falsity; and when he appears, as he usually
does, in the next generation, the glory of these works
is brought to an end. Posthumous judges, be their
decision favourable to the appellant or not, form the
proper court for quashing the verdict of contem
poraries. That is why it is so difficult and so rare to
be victorious alike in both tribunals.

The unfailing tendency of time to correct know
ledge and judgment should always be kept in view
as a means of allaying anxiety, whenever any grievous
error appears, whether in art, or science, or practical
life, and gains ground ; or when some false and
thoroughly perverse policy or movement is undertaken
and receives applause at the hands of men. No one
should be angry, or, still less, despondent ; but simply
imagine that the world has already abandoned the

ON REPUTATION. 125

error in question, and now only requires time and
experience to recognise of its own accord that which
a clear vision detected at the first glance.

When the facts themselves are eloquent of a truth,
there is no need to rush to its aid with words : for
time will give it a thousand tongues. How long it
may be before they speak, will of course depend up
on the difficulty of the subject and the plausibility of
the error ; but come they will, and often it would be
of no avail to try to anticipate them. In the worst
cases it will happen with theories as it happens with
affairs in practical life ; where sham and deception,
emboldened by success, advance to greater and greater
lengths, until discovery is made almost inevitable.
It is just so with theories ; through the blind con
fidence of the blockheads who broach them, their
absurdity reaches such a pitch that at last it is
obvious even to the dullest eye. We may thus say to
such people : the wilder your statements, the better.

There is also some comfort to be found in reflecting
upon all the whims and crotchets which had their day
and have now utterly vanished. In style, in grammar,
in spelling, there are false notions of this sort which
last only three or four years. But when the errors
are on a large scale, while we lament the brevity of
human life, we shall, in any case, do well to lag be
hind our own age when we see it on a downward
path. For there are two ways of not keeping on a
level with the times. A man may be below it ; or he
may be above- it.

ON GENIUS.

ON GENIUS,

No difference 01 rank, position, or birth, is so great
as the gulf that separates the countless millions who
use their head only in the service of their belly, in
other words, look upon it as an instrument of the will,
and those very few and rare persons who have the
courage to say : No ! it is too good for that ; my head
shall be active only in its own service ; it shall try to
comprehend the wondrous and varied spectacle of this
world, and then reproduce it in some form, whether
as art or as literature, that may answer to my
character as an individual. The.sc are the truly noble,
the real noblesse of the world. The others are serfs
and go with the soiX~-~-glebce adscripti. Of course, I
am here referring to those who have not only the
courage, but also the call, and therefore the right, to
order the head to quit the service of the will ; with a
result that proves the sacrilice to have been worth the
making. In the case of those to whom all this can
only partially apply, the gulf is not so wide ; but
even though their talent be small, so long as it is real,
there will always be a sharp line of demarcation be
tween them iind the millions.1

1 The correct scale for adjusting the hierarchy of intelligences
is furnished by the degree in which the mind takes merely in
dividual or approaches universal views of things. The brute
recognises only the individual as such : its comprehension do-,1:-,

I

130 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

The works of fine art, poetry and philosophy pro
duced by a nation are the outcome of the superfluous
intellect existing in it.

For him who can understand aright — cum grano salis
— the relation between the genius and the normal man
may, perhaps, be best expressed as follows : A genius
has a double intellect, one for himself and the service
of his will ; the other for the world, of which he be
comes the mirror, in virtue of his purely objective
attitude towards it. The work of art or poetry or
philosophy produced by the genius is simply the
result, or quintessence, of this contemplative attitude,
elaborated according to certain technical ru'es.

The normal man, on the other hand, has only a
single intellect, which may be called subjective by
contrast with the objective intellect of genius. How
ever acute this subjective intellect may be — and it

not extend beyond the limits of the individual. But man re
duces the individual to the general ; herein lies the exercise of his
reason ; and the higher his intelligence reaches, the nearer do
his general ideas approach the point at which they become
universal. If his grasp of the universal is so deep as to be
intuitive, and to apply not only to general ideas, but to an
individual object by itself, then there arises a knowledge of the
Ideas in the sense used by Plato. This knowledge is of an
{esthetic character ; when it is self-active, it rises to genius, and
reaches the highest degree of intensity when it becomes
philosophic : for then the whole of life and existence as it
passes away, the world and all it contains, are grasped in their
true nature by an act of intuition, and appear in a form which
forces itself upon consciousness as an object of meditation.
Here reflection attains its highest point. Between it and the
merely animal perception there are countless stages, which differ
according to the approach made to a universal view of things.

ON GENIUS. 131

exists in very various degrees of perfection — it is
never on the same level with the double intellect of
genius; just as the open chest notes of the human
voice, however high, are essentially different from the
falsetto notes. These, like the two upper octaves of
the flute and the harmonics of the violin, are produced
by the column of air dividing itself into two vibrating
halves, with a node between them ; while the open
chest notes of the human voice and the lower octave
of the flute are produced by the undivided column of
air vibrating as a whole. This illustration may help
the reader to understand that specific peculiarity of
genius which is unmistakably stamped on the works,
and even on the physiognomy, of him who is gifted
with it. At the same time it is obvious that a double
intellect like this must, as a rule, obstruct the service
of the will ; and this explains the poor capacity often
shown by genius in the conduct of life. And what
specially characterises genius is that it has none of
that sobriety of temper which is always to be found
in the ordinary simple Intellect, be it acute or dull.

The brain may be likened to a parasite which is
nourished as a part of the human frame without con
tributing directly to its inner economy ; it is securely
housed in the topmost storey, and there leads a self-
sufficient and independent life. In the same way it
may be said that a man endowed with great mental
gifts leads, apart from the individual life common to
all, a second life, purely of the intellect. He devotes
himself to the constant increase, rectification and ex
tension, not of mere learning, but of real systematic
knowledge and insight; and remains untouched by ;].e

132 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

fate that overtakes him personally, so long as it does
not disturb him in his work. It is thus a life which
raises a man and sets him above fate and its changes.

o

Always thinking, learning, experimenting, practising
his knowledge, the man soon comes to look upon this
second life as the chief mode of existence, and his
merely personal life as something subordinate, serving
only to advance ends higher than itself.

An example of this independent, separate existence
is furnished by Goethe. During the war in the
Champagne, and amid all the bustle of the camp, he
made observations for his theory of colour ; and as
soon as the numberless calamities of that war allowed
of his retiring for a short time to the fortress of
Luxembourg, he took up the manuscript of his
Farbenlehre. This is an example which we, the salt of
the earth, should endeavour to follow, by never letting
anything disturb us in the pursuit of our intellectual
life, however much the storm of the world may in
vade and agitate our personal environment ; always
remembering that we are the sons, not of the bond
woman, but of the free. As our emblem and coat of
arms, I propose a tree mightily shaken by the wind,
but still bearing its ruddy fruit on every branch ; with
the motto JDum convellor mitescunt, or Conquassata
sed ferax.

That purely intellectual life of the individual has
its counterpart in humanity as a whole. For there,
too, the real life is the life of the will, both in the
empirical and in the transcendental meaning of the
word. The purely intellectual life of humanity lies in
its effort to increase knowledge by means of the

OX GENIUS. 133

sciences, and its desire to perfect the arts. Both
science and art thus advance slowly from one genera
tion to another, and grow with the centuries, every
race as it hurries by furnishing its contribution. This
intellectual life, like some gift from heaven, hovers
over the stir and movement of the world ; or it is, as it
were, a sweet-scented air developed out of the ferment
itself — the real life of mankind, dominated by will ;
and side by side with the history of nations, the his
tory of philosophy, science and art takes its innocent
and bloodless way.

The difference between the genius and the ordinary
man is, no doubt, a quantitative one, in so far as it is
a difference of degree ; but I am tempted to regard it
also as qualitative, in view of the fact that ordinary
minds, notwithstanding individual variation, have a
certain tendency to think alike. Thus on similar
occasions their thoughts at once all take a similar
direction, and run on the same lines ; and this explains
why their judgments constantly agree — not, however,
because they are based on truth. To such lengths
does this go that certain fundamental views obtain
amongst mankind at all times, and are always being
repeated and brought forward anew, whilst the great
minds of all ages are in open or secret opposition to
them.

A genius is a man in whose mind the world is pre
sented as an object is presented in a mirror, but with
a degree more of clearness and a greater distinction of
outline than is attained by ordinary people. It is
from him that humanity may look for most instruc
tion ; for the deepest insight into the most important

134 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

matters is to be acquired, not by an observant atten
tion to detail, but by a close study of things as a
whole. And if his mind reaches maturity, the instruc
tion he gives will be conveyed now in one form, now
in another. Thus genius may be defined as an emi
nently clear consciousness of things in general, and
therefore, also of that which is opposed to them, namely,
one's own self.

The world looks up to a man thus endowed, and
expects to learn something about life and its real
nature. But several highly favourable circumstances
must combine to produce genius, and this is a very
rare event. It happens only now and then, let us say
once in a century, that a man is born whose intellect
so perceptibly surpasses the normal measure as to
amount to that second faculty which seems to be
accidental, as it is out of all relation to the will. He
may remain a long time without being recognised or
appreciated, stupidity preventing the one and envy
the other. But should this once come to pass, man
kind will crowd round him and his works, in the hope
that he may be able to enlighten some of the darkness
of their existence or inform them about it. His
message is, to some extent, a revelation, and he him
self a higher being, even though he may be but little
above the ordinary standard.

Like the ordinary man, the genius is what he is
chiefly for himself. This is essential to his nature ; a
fact which can neither be avoided nor altered. What
he may be for others remains a matter of chance and
of secondary importance. In no case can people re
ceive from his mind more than a reflection, and then

ON GENIUS. 135

only when he joins with them in the attempt to get
his thought into their heads ; where, however, it
is never anything but an exotic plant, stunted and
frail.

In order to have original, uncommon, and perhaps
even immortal thoughts, it is enough to estrange one
self so fully from the world of things for a few
moments, that the most ordinary objects and events
appear quite new and unfamiliar. In this way their
true nature is disclosed. What is here demanded can
not, perhaps, be said to be difficult ; it is not in our
power at all, but is just the province of genius.

By itself, genius can produce original thoughts just
as little as a woman by herself can bear children.
Outward circumstances must come to fructify genius,
and be, as it were, "a father to its progeny.

The mind of genius is among other minds what the
carbuncle is among precious stones : it sends forth light
of its own, while the others reflect only that which
they have received. The relation of the genius to the
ordinary mind may also be described as that of an
idio-electrical body to one which merely is a conductor
of electricity.

The mere man of learning, who spends his life in
teaching what he has learned, is not strictly to be
called a man of genius ; just as idio-electrical bodies
are not conductors. Nay, genius stands to mere
learning as the words to the music in a song. A man
of learning is a man who has learned a great deal ; a
man of genius, one from whom we learn something
which the genius has learned from nobody. Great
minds, of which there is scarcely one in a hundred

136 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

millions, are thus the lighthouses of humanity ; and
without them mankind would lose itself in the bound
less sea of monstrous error and bewilderment.

And so the simple man of learning, in the strict
sense of the word — the ordinary professor, for in
stance — looks upon the genius much as we look upon
a hare, which is good to eat after it has been killed
and dressed up. So long as it is alive, it is only good
to shoot at.

He who wishes to experience gratitude from his
contemporaries, must adjust his pace to theirs. But
great things are never produced in this way. And
he who wants to do great things must direct his gaze
to posterity, and in firm confidence elaborate his work
for coming generations. No doubt, the result may be
that he will remain quite unknown to his contempor
aries, and comparable to a man who, compelled to
spend his life upon a lonely island, with great effort
sets up a monument there, to transmit to future sea
farers the knowledge of his existence. If he thinks
it a hard fate, let him console himself wTith the reflec
tion that the ordinary man who lives for practical
aims only, often suffers a like fate, without having
any compensation to hope for ; inasmuch as he may,
under favourable conditions, spend a life of material
production, earning, buying, building, fertilising, laying
out, founding, establishing, beautifying, with daily
effort and unflagging zeal, and all the time think that
he is working for himself ; and yet in the end it is
his descendants who reap the benefit of it all, and
sometimes not even his descendants. It is the same
with the man of genius; he, too, hopes for his reward

ON GENIUS. 137

and for honour at least ; and at last finds that he has
worked for posterity alone. Both, to be sure, have
inherited a great deal from their ancestors.

The compensation I have mentioned as the privilege
of genius lies, not in what it is to others, but in what
it is to itself. What man has in any real sense lived
more than he whose moments of thought make their
echoes heard through the tumult of centuries ? Per
haps, after all, it would be the best thing for a genius
to attain undisturbed possession of himself, by spend
ing his life in enjoying the pleasure of his own
thoughts, his own works, and by admitting the world
only as the heir of his ample existence. Then the
world would find the mark of his existence only afier
his death, like the marks in the Ichnolith.1

Nor is it only in the activity of his highest powers
that the genius surpasses ordinary people. A man
who is unusually well-knit, supple and agile, will per
form all his movements with exceptional ease, even
with comfort, because he takes a direct pleasure in an
activity for which he is particularly well-equipped,
and therefore often exercises it without any object.
Further, if he is an acrobat or a dancer, not only does
he take leaps which other people cannot execute, but
he also betrays rare elasticity and agility in those
easier steps which others can also perform, and even
in ordinary walking. In the same way a man of
superior mind will not only produce thoughts and
works which could never have come from another ; it

1 Translator's Note. — For an illustration of this feeling in
poetry, Schopenhauer refers the reader to Byron's Prophecy cj
Dante : introd. to C. 4.

138 THE ART OF LITEEATUHE.

will not be here alone that ho will show his greatness;
but as knowledge and thought form a mode of activity
natural and easy to him, he will also delight himself
in them at all times, and so apprehend small matters
which are within the range of other minds, more
easily, quickly and correctly than they. Thus he
will take a direct and lively pleasure in every increase
of knowledge, every problem solved, every witty
thought, whether of his own or another's ; and so his
mind will have no further aim than to be constantly
active. This will be an inexhaustible spring of de
light ; and boredom, that spectre which haunts the
ordinary man, can never come near him.

Then, too, the masterpieces of past and contempor
ary men of genius exist in their fulness for him alone.
If a great product of genius is recommended to the
ordinary, simple mind, it will take as much pleasure
in it as the victim of gout receives in being invited to
a ball. The one goes for the sake of formality, and
the other reads the book so as not to be in arrear.
For La Bruyere was quite right when he said : All
the wit in the world is lost upon him who has none.
The whole range of thought of a man of talent, or of a
genius, compared with the thoughts of the common
man, is, even when directed to objects essentially the
same, like a brilliant oil-painting, full of life, com
pared with a mere outline or a weak sketch in water-
colour.

All this is part of the reward of genius, and com
pensates him for a lonely existence in a world with
which he has nothing in common and no sympathies.
But since size is relative, it comes to the same thing

ON GENIUS. 139

whether I say, Caius was a great man, or Cains has
to live amongst wretchedly small people ; for Brob-
dignack and Lilliput vary only in the point from
which they start. However great, then, however ad
mirable or instructive, a long posterity may think the
author of immortal works, during his lifetime he will
appear to his contemporaries small, wretched, and
insipid in proportion. This is what I mean by say
ing that as there are three hundred degrees from the
base of a tower to the summit, so there are exactly
three hundred from the summit to the base. Great
minds thus owe little ones some indulgence ; for it is
only in virtue of these little minds that they them
selves are great.

Let us, then, not be surprised if we find men of
genius generally unsociable and repellent. It is not
their want of sociability that is to blame. Their path
through the world is like that of a man who goes for
a walk on a bright sunlmer morning. He gazes with
delight on the beauty and freshness of nature, but he
has to rely wholly on that for entertainment ; for he
can find no society but the peasants as they bend over
the earth and cultivate the soil. It is often the case
that a great mind prefers soliloquy to the dialogue he
may have in this world. If he condescends to it now
and then, the hollowness of it may possibly drive him
back to his soliloquy; for in forge tfulness of his inter
locutor, or caring little whether he understands or
not, he talks to him as a child talks to a doll.

Modesty in a great mind would, no doubt, be pleas
ing to the world ; but, unluckily, it is a contradictio
in adjecto. It would compel a genius to give the

140 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

thoughts and opinions, nay, even the method and
style, of the million preference over his own ; to set a
higher value upon them ; and, wide apart as they are,
to bring his views into harmony with theirs, or even
suppress them altogether, so as to let the others hold the
field. In that case, however, he would either produce
nothing at all, or else his achievements would be just
upon a level with theirs. Great, genuine and extra
ordinary work can be done only in so far as its author
disregards the method, the thoughts, the opinions of
his contemporaries, and quietly works on, in spite of
their criticism, on his side despising what they praise.
No one becomes great without arrogance of this sort.
Should his life and work fall upon a time which
cannot recognise and appreciate him, he is at any
rate true to himself ; like some noble traveller forced
to pass the night in a miserable inn ; when morning
comes, he contentedly goes his way.

A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find
with his age if it only permits him to do his work
undisturbed in his own corner ; nor with his fate if
the corner granted him allows of his following his
vocation without having to think about other people.

For the brain to b3 a mere labourer in the service
of the belly, is indeed the common lot of almost all
those who do not live on the work of their hands ;
and they are far from being discontented with their
lot. But it strikes despair into a man of great mind,
whose brain-power goes beyond the measure neces
sary for the service of the will ; and he prefers, if
need be, to live in the narrowest circumstances, so
long as they afford him the free use of his time for

ON GENIUS. 1-l

the development and application of his faculties ; in
other words, if they give him the leisure which is
invaluable to him. It is otherwise with ordinary
people : for them leisure has no value in itself, nor is
it, indeed, without its dangers, as these people seem
to know. The technical work of our time, which is
done to an unprecedented perfection, has, by in
creasing and multiplying objects of luxury, given the
favourites of fortune a choice between more leisure
and culture upon the one side, and additional luxury
and good living, but with increased activity, upon the
other; and, true to their character, they choose the
latter, and prefer champagne to freedom. And they
are consistent in their choice; for, to them, every
exertion of the mind which does not serve the aims
of the will is folly. Intellectual effort for its own
sake, they call eccentricity. Therefore, persistence in
the aims of the will and the belly will be concen
tricity; and, to be sure, the will is the centre, the
kernel of the world.

But in general it is very seldom that any such
alternative is presented. For as with money, most
men have no superfluity, but only just enough for
their needs, so with intelligence ; they possess just
\vhat will suffice for the service of the will, that is,
for the carrying on of their business. Having made
their fortune, they are content to gape or to indulge
in sensual pleasures or childish amusements, cards or
dice ; or they will talk in the dullest way, or dress
up and make obeisance to one another. And how
few are those who have even a little superfluity of
intellectual power ! Like the others they too make

THE ART OF LITERATURE.

themselves a pleasure ; but it is a pleasure of the
intellect. Either they will pursue some liberal study
which brings them in nothing, or they will practise
some art ; and, in general, they will be capable of
taking an objective interest in things, so that it will
be possible to converse with them. But with the
others it is better not to enter into any relations at
all ; for, except when they tell the results of their
own experience or give an account of their special
vocation, or at any rate impart what they have
learned from someone else, their conversation will not
be worth listening to ; and if anything is said to
them, they will rarely grasp or understand it aright,
and it will in most cases be opposed to their own
opinions. Balthazar Gracian describes them very
strikingly as men who are not men — hombres die non
lo son. And Giordano Bruno says the same thing :
What a difference there is in having to do with men
compared with those who are only made in their
image and likeness .fl And how wonderfully this
passage agrees with that remark in the Kurral : The
common people look like men but I have never seen
anything quite like them. If the reader will consider
the extent to which these ideas agree in thought and
even in expression, and the wide difference between
them in point of date and nationality, he cannot
doubt but that they are at one with the facts of life.
It was certainly not under the influence of those
passages that, abo;it twenty years ago, I tried to get
a snuff-box made, the lid of which should have two
fine ches'nuts represented upon it, if possible in
1 Opera : ed. Wagner, I. 224.

ON GENIUS. 143

mosaic ; together with a leaf which was to show that
they were horse-chestnuts. This symbol was meant
to keep the thought constantly before my mind. If
anyone wishes for entertainment, such as will prevent
him feeling solitary even when he is alone, let me
recommend the company of dogs, whose moral and
intellectual qualities may almost always afford de
light and gratification.

Still, we should always be careful to avoid being
unjust. I am often surprised by the cleverness, and
now and again by the stupidity, of my dog ; and I
have similar experiences with mankind. Countless
times, in indignation at their incapacity, their total
lack of discernment, their bestiality, I have been
forced to echo the old complaint that folly is the
mother and the nurse of the human race : —

Humani generis mater nutrixque profedo
Stultitia est.

But at other times I have been astounded that from
such a race there could have gone forth so many arts
and sciences, abounding in so much use and beauty,
even though it has always been the few that produce
them. Yet these arts and sciences have struck root,
established and perfected themselves ; and the race
has with persistent fidelity preserved Homer, Plato,
Horace and others for thousands of years, by copying
and treasuring their writings, thus saving them from
oblivion, in spite of all the evils and atrocities that
have happened in the world. Thus the race has
proved that it appreciates the value of these things,
•and at the same time it can form a correct view of

144 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

special achievements or estimate signs of judgment
and intelligence. When this takes place amongst
those who belong to the great multitude, it is by a
kind of inspiration. Sometimes a correct opinion
will be formed by the multitude itself ; but this is
only when the chorus of praise has grown full and
complete. It is then like the sound of untrained
voices ; where there are enough of them, it is always
harmonious.

Those who emerge from the multitude, those who
are called men of genius, are merely the lucida in-
tervalla of the whole human race. They achieve that
which others could not possibly achieve. Their
originality is so great that not only is their divergence
from others obvious, but their individuality is ex
pressed with such force, that all the men of genius who
have ever existed show, everyone of them, peculiarities
of character and mind ; so that the gift of his works
is one which he alone of all men could ever have pre
sented to the world. This is what makes that simile
of Ariosto's so true and so justly celebrated : Natura
lo fece e poi ruppe lo stamr:o. After Nature stamps
a man of genius, she breaks the die.

But there is always a limit to human capacity; and
no one can be a great genius without having some
decidedly weak side, it may even be, some intellectual
narrowness. In other words, there will be some
faculty in which he is now anl then inferior to men
of moderate endowments. It will be a faculty which,
if strong, might have been an obstacle to the exercise
of the qualities in which he excels. What this weak
point is, it will always be hard to define with any ac-

ON GENIUS. 145

curacy even in a given case. It may be better ex
pressed indirectly ; thus Plato's weak point is exactly
that in which Aristotle is strong, and vice versa ; and
so, too, Kant is deficient just where Goethe is great.

Now, mankind is fond of venerating something;
but its veneration is generally directed to the wrong
object, and it remains so directed until posterity comes
to set it right. But the educated public is no sooner
set right in this, than the honour which is due to
genius degenerates; just as the honour which the
faithful pay to their saints easily passes into a
frivolous worship of relics. Thousands of Christians
adore the relics of a saint whose life and doctrine are
unknown to them ; and the religion of thousands of
Buddhists lies more in veneration of the Holy Tooth
or some such object, or the vessel that contains it, or
the Holy Bowl, or the fossil footstep, or the Holy Tree
which Buddha planted, than in the thorough know
ledge and faithful practice of his high teaching.
Petrarch's house in Arqua ; Tasso's supposed prison in
Ferrara ; Shakespeare's house in Stratford, with his
chair ; Goethe's house in Weimar, with its furniture ;
Kant's old hat ; the autographs of great men ; these
things are gaped at with interest and awe by many
who have never read their works. They cannot do
anything more than just gape.

The intelligent amongst them are moved by the wisk
to see the objects which the great man habitually had
before his eyes ; and by a strange illusion, these pro
duce the mistaken notion that with the objects they
are bringing back the man himself, or that something
^f him must cling to them. Akin to such people ar?

HO THE ART OF i.ITFRATURE.

those who earnestly strive to acquaint themselves with
the subject-matter of a poet's works, or to unravel the
personal circumstances and events in his life which
have suggested particular passages. This is as though
the audience in a theatre were to admire a fine scene,
and then rush upon the stage to look at the scaffolding
that supports it. There are in our day enough instances
of these critical investigators, and they prove the
truth of the saying that mankind is interested, not in
the form of a work, that is, in its manner of treat
ment, but in its actual matter. All it cares for is the
theme. To read a philosopher's biography, instead of
studying his thoughts, is like neglecting a picture and
attending only to the style of its frame, debating
whether it is carved well or ill, and how much it cost
to gild it.

This is all very well. However, there is another
class of persons whose interest is also directed to
material and personal considerations, but they go much
further and carry it to a point where it becomes ab
solutely futile. Because a great man has opened up
to them the treasures of his inmost being, and, by a
supreme effort of his faculties, produced works which
not only redound to their elevation and enlighten
ment, but will also benefit their posterity to the tenth
and twentieth generation ; because he has presented
mankind with a matchless gift, these varlets think
themselves justified in sitting in judgment upon his
personal morality, and trying if they cannot discover
here or there some spot in him which will soothe the
pain they feel at the sight of so great a mind, compared
with the overwhelming feelingof their own nothingness,

ONT OENIUS.

Tids is the real source of all those prolix, discussions,
carried on in countless books and reviews, on the moral
aspect of Goethe's life, and whether he ought not to
have married one or other of the girls with whom he
fell in love in his young days ; whether, again, instead
of honestly devoting himself to the service of his
master, he should not have been a man of the people,
a German patriot, worthy of a seat in the Pdulskirche,
and so on. Such crying ingratitude and malicious de
traction prove that these self-constituted judges are
as great knaves morally as they are intellectually,
which is saying a great deal.

A man of talent will strive for money and reputation ;
but the spring that moves genius to the production of
its works is not so easy to name. Wealth is seldom
its reward. Nor is it reputation or glory ; only a
Frenchman could mean that. Glory is such an un
certain thing, and, if you look at it closely, of so little
value. Besides it never corresponds to the effort you
have made : —

Eesponsura tiio nunquam est par fama labori.

Nor, again, is it exactly the pleasure it gives you; for
this is almost outweighed by the greatness of the effort.
It is rather a peculiar kind of instinct, which drives
the man of genius to give permanent form to what he
sees and feels, without being conscious of any further
motive. It works, in the main, by a necessity similar
to that which makes a tree bear its fruit; and no
external condition is needed but the ground upon
which it is k> thrive.

148 THE ART OF LITERATURE.

On a closer examination, it seems as though, in the
case of a genius, the will to live, which is the spirit of
the human species, were conscious of having, by some
rare chance, and for a brief period, attained a greater
clearness of vision, and were now trying to secure it,
or at least the outcome of it, for the whole species, to
which the individual genius in his inmost being be
longs ; so that the light which he sheds about him
may pierce the darkness and dulness of ordinary
human consciousness and there produce some good
effect.

Arising in some such way, this instinct drives the
genius to carry his work to completion, without think
ing of reward or applause or sympathy; to leave
all care for his own personal welfare ; to make his
life one of industrious solitude, and to strain his faculties
to the utmost. He thus comes to think more about
posterity than about contemporaries; because, while
the latter can only lead him astray, posterity forms
the majority of the species, and time will gradually
bring the discerning few who can appreciate him.
Meanwhile it is with him as with the artist described
by Goethe ; he has no princely patron to prize his
talents, no friend to rejoice with him : —

Ein Fiirst der die Talente schatzt,
Ein Freund der sich mit mir ergotzty
Die haben leider mir gejehlt.

His work is, as it were, a, sacred object and the true
fruit of his life, and his aim in storing it away for a
more discerning posterity will be to make it the
property of mankind. An aim like this far surpasses

ON GENIUS. 1v9

all others, and for it he wears the crown of thorns
which is one day to bloom into a wreath of laurel.
All his powers are concentrated in the effort to com
plete and secure his work ; just as the insect, in the
last stage of its development, uses its whole strength
on behalf of a brood it will never live to see ; it puts
its eggs in some place of safety, where, as it well
knows, the young will one day find life and nourish
ment, and then dies in confidence.

THE END.

Cowan & Co., Limited Print* r, Perth

SCHOPENHAUER SERIES.

Uniformly Bound in Cloth. Price 2s.

1. THE WISDOM OF LIFE. Being the First Part
of ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER'S Aphorismen zur Leben-
sweisheit. Translated, with a Preface, by T. BAILEY
SAUNDERS, M.A. Fifth Edition.

PRESS NOTICES.

" Schopenhauer is not simply a moralist writing in his study and
applying abstract principles to the conduct of thought and action,
but is also in a large measure a man of the world, with a firm grasp of
the actual, and is therefore able to speak in a way which, to use
Bacon's phrase, comes home to men's business and bosoms. The
essentially practical character of his ' Wisdom of Life ' is evidence
by his frequent recourse to illustrations, and his singularly apt use
of them. . . . This allusive illustrative method of treatment gives to
his work a special charm in which similar treatises are, as a rule, de
ficient. Mr. Bailey Saunders' introductory essay adds much to the
value and interest of a singularly suggestive volume." — Manchester Ex
aminer.

" From the point of view of the English reader there is a good deal
to be said in favour of taking Schopenhauer in small doses, commencing
with the less technical of the philosopher's writings, such as treat of
subjects interesting to the human kind — a course made easy by Mr.
Bailey Saunders* fluent translations." — Saturday Review.

2. COUNSELS AND MAXIMS. Being the Second
Part of ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER'S Aphorismen zur
Lebenswehheit. Translated by T. BAILEY SAUNDERS,
M.A. Fourth Edition.

" In publishing these two little volumes Mr. Saunders has done
English readers a genuine service. . . . He has also introduced his
translation by a clear and thoroughly helpful preface, in which are de
fined with sufficient exactness Schopenhauer's philosophic standpoint
and the relation of his minor writings to his chief metaphysical treatise.

ADVERTISEMENTS. 1 5 1

. . . Schopenhauer is commonly ranked among the few philosophers, in
cluding our own Berkeley, who possess a literary style. The aphorisms
give an excellent sample of this style. By their very form they exhibit
at its best Schopenhauer's characteristic manner — his directness, his
momentum, his brevity. . . . Even in point of substance, it contains
many a keen observation, and enforces unpalatable, but eminently
wholesome truths. . . . Nor do we remember to have met with a
finer plea, on the whole, for that inner self-culture which is the great
and unfailing condition of human happiness." — Athenaum.

" It was a happy thought which inspired Mr. Saunders to translate
some of Schopenhauer's minor essays. He has succeeded in a remark
able degree in retaining the pungent flavour of the original, and at the
same time in dressing his dish for the English palate." — Academy.

3. RELIGION: a Dialogue, and other Essays.

By ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER. Selected and Translated
by T. BAILEY SAUNDERS, M. A. Fourth and Enlarged
Edition,

" In this modest volume we have a selection of very readable essays
from the writings of the famous pessimistic philosopher, clothed in good,
intelligible English." — Literary World.

"There is no doubt either as to the public interest taken in Schopen
hauer, or as to the services rendered to his memory by Mr. Saunders.
This is a very handy and useful little book." — Spectator.

4, THE ART OF LITERATURE. A Series of
Essays. By ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER. Selected
and Translated by T. BAILEY SAUNDERS. Third
Edition.

" Mr. Saunders has fitly brought his Schopenhauer series to a close
with a group of essays on literature. The essays on authorship, style,
criticism and genius are among the most attractive and suggestive of
his writing." — Athenceuin.

" This final instalment on the art of literature exhibits the sage at

152 ADVERTISEMENTS.

his best. Mr. Saunders has evidently regarded his translation as a
labour of love, and has done full justice to it." — Liverpool Post.

5. STUDIES IN PESSIMISM. A Series of

Essays. By ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER. Selected
and Translated by T. BAILEY SAUNDERS. Fourth
Edition.

" We have once more to thank Mr. Saunders for a series of extracts,
mostly from the * Parerga.' Like the former translations, this one is
extremely well done, and the volume should be popular." — Glasgow
Herald.

" If others have been the prophets of Schopenhauer to the mass of
English readers, Mr. Saunders may fairly claim to have been the
philosopher's interpreter. . . . The series of little books by which Mr.
Saunders has done this still goes on. The latest number is by no
means the least interesting of them all, and as Mr. Saunders' version
is again admirable. He unites readable idiomatic English, untainted
by an infection of Teutonism that might easily have weakened the
style." — Scotsman.

6. THE ART OP CONTROVERSY, and other

Posthumous Papers. By ARTHUR SCHOPEN
HAUER. Selected and Translated by T. BAILEY
SAUNDERS, M.A.

" By the selection and translation of these essays Mr. Saunders has
conferred a great boon, not only on those who cannot read them in the
original, but on that busy section of the public which has to be content
to form acquaintance with many authors chiefly by selections from their
works." — Educational Review.

"Certainly not less interesting than any of Mr. Saunders' versions
of Schopenhauer. The translation has the same clearness and fluency,
and is equally successful in making an original system of philosophy
attractive to a general reader. " — Scotsman.

SWAN SONNENSCHFJN & CO., LIM., LONDON.

r*

University of Toronto
Library

DO NOT

REMOVE

THE

CARD

FROM

THIS

POCKET

Acme Library Card Pocket
LOWE-MARTIN CO. LIMITED