ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

(1788-1860)

CHOPENHAUER was born at Dantzic, Germany, February 22d, 1788. After a short novitiate in the office of a Hamburg merchant, where he had been placed by his father, he decided that he was unfit for business and determined to become great in literature. Studying at Göttingen and beginning his literary work with the deepest problems of philosophy, he published in 1813 his monograph "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason," and in 1819 followed it with his most celebrated work, "The World as Will and Idea." After spending several years as a tutor at the University of Berlin, he went to Frankfort-on-the-Main, where he lived from 1831 until his death, September 21st, 1860. His shorter essays, which were published in 1851, are artistically the best which have come from any professional philosopher of Germany. Schopenhauer knows how to condense his thought to the utmost possible extent without making it obscure, and to expand as much as he pleases without making it so abstract that it ceases to be intelligible. His admirers are not generally inclined to admit that he is a humorist, but there is a latent suspicion of an undertone of humor in his deepest philosophy. His "pessimism » reduces itself to the proposition that the world as men make it "must be some kind of a mis take." At another time, he compares it to "a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with infusoria, or a speck of cheese full of mites invisible to the naked eye." This is pessimism, but, after all, it is much less bitter than that of Swift. Indeed, Schopenhauer's view of the world as it manifests itself through selfishness, is in no essential respect different from that presented in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, which account for human life and for the physical and moral conditions under which it is passed as the result of degeneracy or a "Fall" into conditions which destroy the wholly unfit and force those who are fit for survival to improve. When a world controlled by the impulses of selfish struggle is said to be either "a hell or a hospital," the pessimism of the definition depends on the conclusion from it. Those who argue from it to negation must become hopeless and useless. But while St. Paul and St. John agree with the most extreme modern pessimists in conceding the weariness and uselessness

of the life natural to the world, they made this conclusion merely the premise for asserting the infinite possibility of increasing efficiency, to be achieved through Faith and Love, operating as governing motives of action. Schopenhauer's theory that the body is "the Will objectified" is related on one side to the Pythagorean idea that the Will or the soul it represents, must necessarily take such shapes in animal life as represent its moral qualities; and on the other side it seems to bear a not less distinct relation to the Darwinian hypothesis of the gradual modification of species as a result of Will determining the habits of typical individuals of the class.

W. V. B.

THE

BOOKS AND AUTHORSHIP

HERE 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 recognized 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 his "Dramaturgie," 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 anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! 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 au

begins to put pen to paper in The best works of the greatest

thor degenerates as soon as he any way for the sake of gain. 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 honor and money are not to be found in the same purse-"Honray provecho no caben en un saco." The reason 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 nothing but what has just been printed-journalists, I mean. Truly, a most appropriate In plain language it is journeymen, day-laborers!

name.

Again, it may be said that there are three kinds of authors. First come those who write without thinking. They write from a full memory, from reminiscences; 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 who think before they begin to write. They are rare.

Authors of the second class, who put off their thinking 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 afterward let out, so many at a time, into another space, also confined. The game cannot possibly 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 something 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 immediate 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 speaking here of writers who treat of great subjects; not of writers on the art of making brandy.

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!

A book can never be anything more than the impress 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 thought 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 everything that comes within the domain of actual experience; 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 every one 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 accordingly.

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 the other hand, where the matter is accessible to every one 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 any one else can think. They will just produce an impress of their own minds; but this is a print of which every one 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 circumstances in the life of the poet which served as the occasion of his various works; nay, these events and circumstances 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 Bürger 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 disquisitions 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 man were to take a fine Etruscan vase, not to admire its shape or coloring, 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