A Timon, not at all of the nobler sort, seems to have been that great light of recent German philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. As Schopenhauer died childless, it will, I hope, hurt the feelings of no one if we dissect his character candidly as that of the most prominent Pessimist of the age. It will be instructive, I think, to learn the “notes” of such a character,—to study, in short, of what kind of stuff (so to speak) a Pessimist is occasionally made. In justice, we must carry in mind that Schopenhauer accomplished a good deal in the philosophic way, besides preaching Pessimism. He worked out a metaphysical system of considerable depth and ingenuity,—one of the merits of which, at all events, may be accounted that it is readily applicable to quite other views than those of its author, respecting the nature and destiny of mankind. With this formidable system, elaborated in his great work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, we have, however (happily for me, and probably for my reader), for our present purpose, no concern whatever, but only with his actions and character, such as Miss Zimmern, condensing the original German memoirs, sketched in a life-like and transparently truthful manner in her Life of Schopenhauer.
The first “note” of Schopenhauer’s character, I should say, was his Heartlessness. He seems scarcely to have loved anybody—in any sense of the word worth considering—from his cradle to his grave. He made, indeed, after his father’s death, much parade of respect for his memory; but his filial piety, such as it was, stopped short at this point. He disliked his sprightly, good-natured mother, and treated her with singular insolence. As to friendship, he avowed his opinion that “men of much intellectual worth, more especially if they have genius, can have but few friends”; and he verified his own dictum as a first-rate genius by having, so far as we may judge, no real friends at all, though in later life, when he became celebrated, he had numerous flatterers and disciples. Love was even less in Schopenhauer’s way than friendship, unless we are to call by the title the passion in its coarsest form. His opinion was that “the poetry of love is mainly illusion, a glittering drapery meant to mantle the solemnity of the thing as it really is” (p. 222); and his actions were quite in accordance with this crass materialism. He led, his biographer states, “no saintly ascetic life, nor did he pretend to this eminence.... He despised women.... He was only different from ordinary men in that he spoke of what others suppressed; and his over-zealous disciples, who saw the god-like in all his acts, even dragged these to the light of day.” His “careless dallying with beauty” (a euphemism, I presume, for a loose life) but once brought him to wish for a permanent union. The only woman whom he is recorded to have desired to marry was an actress, who, at the time he was “enraptured with her,” was (fit position for the wife of a great moral philosopher!) the recognized mistress of Duke Carl August.
It has sometimes happened that men who have been lacking in those family and friendly affections which are the most beautiful things in human life have yet almost atoned for their deficiency by their fervent “Enthusiasm of Humanity.” It is needless to say that Schopenhauer’s character displayed an impartial negation of both orders of feeling. He neither loved men nor women in particular, nor man in general. He carefully defined himself to be not a misanthrope, only a despiser of men (p. 83). The higher a man stood mentally, he thought, the lower must his fellow-men appear. That it was the divine part of the greatest to serve the least was the very last suggestion which would have occurred to his mind. “I read,” he observed, “in the face of the Apollo Belvidere, the just and deep displeasure felt by the god of the Muses for the wretched obstinacy of the Philistines”; and, doubtless, Arthur Schopenhauer figuratively drew himself up, and felt as like the Apollo Belvidere as the corporeal circumstances of a German philosopher might permit.
He was “penetrated with the conviction that he had been placed in a world peopled with beings morally and intellectually contemptible, from whom he must keep apart.” In his note-book (of rather a different cast from that of Marcus Aurelius), he wrote this piece of self-counsel: “Study to acquire an accurate and connected view of the utter despicability of mankind in general, then of your contemporaries, and of German scholars in particular.”
The second “note” in Schopenhauer’s character was his exceeding Cowardice. The modern Socrates would have deserted Athens at the plague, and run away at Potidæa. With what poltroonery he would have behaved, when required to drink the hemlock, it is impossible to imagine. When his country was in the throes of war and political crises, Schopenhauer always carefully moved out of the way. When there was any kind of infectious disease prevalent, he fled to another city, so that half his journeys were mere panic flights. He left Berlin for fear of the cholera, Naples from alarm of the small-pox, and Verona because he took it into his head that his snuff was poisoned. He slept with loaded pistols close to his hand, and seized them at the slightest noise. When the postman brought him a letter, he started. He used a cup of his own to avoid the contagion which might lurk in a glass at a public table. He labelled his valuables with deceptive names, and wrote his business memoranda in Greek. As we have seen, he was not bellicose. Only once in his life is it recorded that he struck a blow, and that was at a woman. Finding an acquaintance of his landlady presumptuous enough to hold a coffee-party in his anteroom, Schopenhauer knocked her down with such violence that her right arm was permanently disabled. Any other man, who had committed an act of similar brutality in a moment of passion, would probably have hastened to offer some compensation to his victim; but our philosopher, on the contrary, hotly contested the poor woman’s suit for legal redress, and quitted the town in disgust when he found himself compelled to maintain her for life,—a period which (the non-sympathetic reader will rejoice to learn) was extremely prolonged. The writer of an exceedingly able and thoughtful review of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in the Contemporary Review, some years ago, observed that his unamiable traits are best excused by his own candid avowal that he liked his own mental physiognomy well enough, but his moral not at all. The unalterableness of the natural character was one of his favorite dogmas. Certainly, the self-training by which many a naturally nervous temperament has disciplined itself into courage, a selfish one into generosity, and a morose or peevish temper into gentleness, was as far as possible from Schopenhauer’s plan of life; and it opens to us a rather alarming idea of the society of the future, if his followers generally should resolve to adopt his facile principle, and assume that their “natural characters,” whatever they may chance to be,—selfish, false, dissolute, or cruel,—are “unalterable.” Such liberty, however, is probably reserved for those who may claim to be “men of genius” like their master, since he absolved himself from the ordinary duties incumbent on meaner mortals by the help of a theory which we may call the Philosopher’s Anti-nomianism. “He weighed his duties toward the world,” we are told, “in the balance with the weight and intensity of his natural gifts, and he came to the conclusion that a man gifted with genius, by merely being and working, sacrifices himself for all mankind: therefore, he is free from the obligation of sacrificing himself in particular individually. On this account, he may ignore claims which others are bound to fulfil.”[14]
But the third “note” was, I venture to think, the true key of Schopenhauer’s character. It was Arrogance. The philosophers whom the world has hitherto honored have been generally noted for the opposite quality. As saints learn humility by gazing up at infinite holiness above them, so sages acquire modesty by looking out on the boundless ocean of truth, beside which their greatest discoveries appear but as the pebbles which the child gathers by the shore. But the philosophers who are so good as to enlighten us in these days scarcely belong to the antiquated type of either a Socrates or a Newton. The pride and conceit of Arthur Schopenhauer, at all events, commenced in boyhood, and seems to have grown like a snowball till he died of old age. His mother (described as a woman of “modest, pleasing manners” and amiable character, who received habitually in her house such men as Goethe, the Schlegels, Grimm, and Wieland) depicts him thus, when a lad yet engaged in collegiate studies: “Your ill-humor, your complaints of things inevitable, your sullen looks, the extraordinary opinions you utter like oracles which none may presume to contradict,—all this depresses me. Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world and human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams.”[15] This little preliminary glance at the youth of twenty enables us to judge what value should be attached to the plea urged on his behalf, that his arrogance and bitterness were but the natural results of the neglect with which his great book was received by an unappreciative public and a jealous coterie of offended philosophers, the “necessary armor of scorn and self-defence” which enabled him to hold his ground. The boy at college, it seems, long before he had written a work to instruct the world, or had experienced anything but kindness and prosperity, the healthy, rich, gifted, and independent young lad, was already habitually “lamenting over the stupid world and human misery,” and uttering, with “sullen looks,” “oracles which none may presume to contradict.”
As he grew older, Schopenhauer learned to express his good opinion of himself and his works with serenest equanimity. No more naïf expressions of self-complacency have perhaps ever been penned than this gentleman’s eulogiums on his own productions; as, for example, when he writes to the publisher of his work that its “worth and importance are so great that I do not venture to express it even toward you, because you could not believe me,” and proceeds to quote a review “which speaks of me with the highest praise, and says that I am plainly the greatest philosopher of the age, which is really saying much less than the good man thinks.” “Sir,” he said to an unoffending stranger who watched him across a table d’hôte (where he habitually acted the part of local “lion”), “sir, you are astonished at my appetite. True, I eat three times as much as you, but, then, I have three times as much mind!” (p. 159.) The reader who thinks that this speech could never have been spoken except in jest and to produce a good-humored laugh has not yet studied Schopenhauer’s saturnine temperament, to which a joke at his own expense must have been quite inconceivable. To others, perhaps, such barbarous intellectual insolence may seem a pardonable reaction from the tone of self-depreciation (often exceedingly insincere) which modern manners have enforced. But the old classic pride was a very different thing from Schopenhauer’s aggressive arrogance, wherewith he managed to blend gross and egregious vanity in quite a novel combination. On a les défauts de ses qualités, but not usually together two apparently contradictory defects. In our simplicity, we should have anticipated that the man who considered himself the greatest philosopher of his age, and talked about the “loneliness of the heights” of intellectual grandeur, would have disdained to trouble himself about such miserable things as common newspaper reviews. We should have been, however, much mistaken in such a guess. “Schopenhauer (we are told) began to read German newspapers, now that they wrote about him. He caused the veriest trifle that contained his name to be sent to him. He looked through all philosophical works for a mention of himself. His intense contempt for women wavered, when he saw they could feel interest in his works.” What would Aristotle’s “Magnanimous Man” have said to this kind of littleness? “Honor, from any other person” (than the good), “or on the score of trifles, he will utterly despise, and likewise he will despise dishonor.”[16]
Let it be remembered, too, that this was in Schopenhauer’s old age. For a young author to be nervously excited about the reception of his works is nothing blameworthy or ridiculous. He is looking for the confirmation of the yet uncertain whispers of his own consciousness of ability, or to the extinction of his hopes. But this exculpation cannot apply to a man advanced in life and of established literary reputation, whose opinion of his own exalted gifts had been fully expanded while he was yet a lad at college.
Is it too much to say that in this inordinate opinion of his own powers and merits lies the secret of this man’s Pessimism, of his contempt of other men, of his discontent with life, of his revolt against Providence? It is not wonderful that a man who looks on his fellows like Apollo Belvidere, slaying them with the arrows of his scorn, should find them wretched and unlovable; for no man, however humble, is ever truly seen by him who looks down on him, and thus lacks all the insight of love and sympathy, and all the charity of one who forgives as he hopes to be forgiven. It is not wonderful that a man who estimates himself as supremely wise, and condones his own faults on the score of the unalterableness of natural character, should survey the world and find it a godless desert. Probably no human heart ever yet bloomed out into gratitude even under the brightest sunshine of prosperity, which had not once been ploughed up by self-reproach and softened by tears of repentance. In truth, any kind of religious sense is well-nigh incompatible with such pride as we are discussing. The doors whereby other men enter the Temple,—the tender guidance of human affection, the awful strife of the higher self against passion and sin, the sacred moral ambition after yet unattained purity and goodness,—all these are closed to him. Schopenhauer’s religious history is a confirmation of the truth that it is not the marble-palace mind of the philosopher which God will visit so often as the humble heart which lies sheltered from the storms of passion, and all trailed over by the sweet blossoms of human affections.
It is actually ludicrous to compare this man’s intensely selfish, vain, cowardly character with the magnificent compliments which he paid to virtue in the abstract, and to the ideal he draws of the perfect man, or “ascetic,” in whom the very sense of individuality, not to speak of self-regard, is annihilated: “He will no longer regard himself as a real existence, comprised within the rigid line of personality, and thus insulated and differentiated from the rest of the universe. He will regard his separate being as a mere transitory phenomenon, a temporary objectivation of the sole real existence; and this recognition of his true position must necessarily destroy selfishness.... When a man ceases to draw an egotistic distinction between himself and others, and takes as much part in their sorrows as in his own, it naturally follows that such a one, recognizing his own self in all beings, must regard the endless griefs of all beings as his own, and thus appropriate to himself the sorrows of the whole world.”[17] The modern “Man of Sorrows” (if we may venture on so irreverent a comparison for the sake of the contrast) had, for his own use, an easy method of “appropriating” the griefs of his kind. “We gather,” says his keen-sighted critic of the Contemporary Review, “from the accounts of his disciples, that he had arranged for himself an existence more than tolerable; for, while free from positive annoyance, he found a perfectly consistent and legitimate source of pleasure in the disinterested contemplation of the idea of the world’s sorrows.”[18] A more easy form of martyrdom it is hard to imagine.