This very intellect, that raised man above the brute, and gave the fuller powers in the struggle for life—what happiness did it bring? It dangled hopes and ambitions and joys before the eyes, simply to deceive the passionate urging of life to fiercer struggle for life.
The intellect! man’s boast over the brute—it was the crown of thorns.
Intellect! which was given as the last plague—the brutes had been spared that. Thought warring with impulse; the love of beauty and of justice fighting the appetites and the body’s yearnings which impel our actions to the brutal struggle for life; contemplation upon the ignobleness of these appetites and base injustices and greeds impotent before the overwhelming lusts and impulses and emotions of the body.
Imagination!—to shrink from the seething dunghill of the world.
Was there any deliverance from this miserable tyranny of life? Only by boldly standing across the path of life and refusing to share in it.
He opened the third book of the wisdom of Schopenhauer, and he found the two means that Pessimism has found, by denial, to accept life in full—art for art’s sake, and the asceticism of religion.
By steeping self in the contemplation of the beauty of works of art, outside and aloof from self, in the contemplative pleasure of craftsmanship and artistry we may escape for awhile from the brutal urgings of our life, forget for awhile the brutal struggle for existence round about and at every hand, ignore the cruelty of the world. In the subtle pleasure that comes from a work of art can we alone be purely contemplative——
Yes—this Schopenhauer fellow had wisdom.
The Youth put his hand upon the book, and by the gods he swore it, he would follow art for art’s sake. He would seek salvation from the tyranny of living in the contemplation of the beautiful.