Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/475

Rh SCHOPENHAUER 453 sions, the final issue was in 1826 to award the complainant compensation (with five-sixths of costs and a small sum for medical expenses) to the amount of a quarterly aliment of fifteen thalers, which sum she received till her death, fifteen years afterwards. The six years (1825-31) at Berlin were a dismal period in the life of Schopenhauer. In vain did he watch for any sign of recognition of his philosophic genius. Hegelianism reigned in the schools and in literature and basked in the sunshine of authority. It was a bad time for an inde- pendent thinker who ignored the state and the yearlong alliance between philosophy and theology. Thus driven back upon himself, Schopenhauer fell into morbid medita- tions, and the world which he saw, if it was stripped naked of its disguises, lost its proportions in the distorting light. The sexual passion had a strong attraction for him at all times, and, according to his biographers, the notes he set down in English, when he was turned thirty, on marriage and kindred topics are unfit for publication. He had in opening manhood been so fascinated by a Weimar actress that he declared he would take her to his home though he found her breaking stones on the roadside. Later years had nipped the freshness of his enthusiasm, and casual experiences generated an overweening misogyny, which, while allowing woman her place in the natural economy, regarded the lady as the invention of a false civilization. Yet in the loneliness of life at Berlin the idea of a wife as the comfort of gathering age sometimes rose before his mind, only to be driven away by cautious hesitations as to the capacity of his means, and by the shrinking from the loss of familiar liberties. He continued his bachelor- dom, and found consolation in less onerous associations. At home he tuned his flute ; he dined, and it might be conversed, with his fellow-guests at the Hotel de Russie ; he read for hours at the royal library, and gave his even- ings to the theatres. But he wrote nothing material. In 1828 he made inquiries about a chair at Heidelberg; and in 1830 he got a shortened Latin version of his physio- logical theory of colours inserted in the third volume of the Scriptores Ophthalmologici Minores (edited by Radius). Another pathway to reputation was suggested by some remarks he saw in the seventh number of the Foreign Review, in an article on Damiron's French Philosophy in the 19th Century. With reference to some statements in the article on the importance of Kant, he sent in very fair English a letter to the writer, offering to translate Kant's principal works into English. He named his wages and enclosed a specimen of his work. His corre- spondent, Francis Hay wood, made a counter -proposal which so disgusted Schopenhauer that he addressed his next letter to the publishers of the review. When they again referred him to Haywood, he applied to Thomas Campbell, then chairman of a company formed for buy- ing up the copyright of meritorious but rejected works. Nothing came of this application. 1 A translation of selec- tions from the works of Balthazar Gracian, which was published by Frauenstadt in 1862, seems to have been made about this time. 2 In the summer of 1831 cholera raged at Berlin, and Schopenhauer fled to Frankfort. About a year later he adjourned to Mannheim. But after eleven months' ex- perience of the latter he decided, from a carefully weighed list of comparative advantages, in favour of Frankfort. And there, accordingly, for the rest of his life he remained. He resumed correspondence with his sister, who was liv- ing with her mother in straitened circumstances at Bonn. 1 It was not till 1841 that a translation of Kant's Kritik in English appeared. 2 He also projected a translation of Hume's Essays and wrote a preface for it At first the good people of Frankfort knew him, not as the celebrated philosopher, but as the son of the famous Johanna Schopenhauer, 3 and as the companion of a familiar poodle. The day had not yet risen when, as he had pro- phesied to his mother (who joked at his book on "four- fold root " as smelling of the apothecary), his works would be read of all, and hers only be used by the grocer to wrap his goods in. The sense of unappreciated work, aggravated by ill health and by pecuniary worry about his Dantzic property, sank deep into a heart that was yearn- ing for outward recognition. He seemed to see around him none but enemies, a world mainly filled with knaves and fools, where a true man was rarer than an honest woman, and where the very touch of society was so perilous that irony and reserve were imposed on every one who re- tained his self-respect. In solitude he devoured his own soul. At the hotel table a stranger might occasionally be drawn into listening to his vigorous monologue ; but it was seldom he was thus encouraged to discourse. Ground- less fears of hidden dangers made him see himself and every other independent genius the aim of a conspiracy of vulgar charlatans. He would never entrust his neck to the barber's hand; and he succeeded in secreting his valuables so thoroughly that some of them were after his death recovered only after much search. Ever since the publication of The World as Will and Idea he had silently waited for some response to his message. He had uttered the word he felt himself charged to utter. As the years passed he noted down every confirmation he found of his own opinions in the writings of others, and every instance in which his views appeared to be illustrated by new researches. Full of the conviction of his idea, he saw everything in the light of it, and gave each apercu a place in his alphabetically arranged note -book. Everything he published in later life may be called a commentary, an excursus, or a scholium to his main book; and many of them are decidedly of the nature of commonplace books or collec- tanea of notes. But along with the accumulation of his illustrative and corroborative materials grew the bitter- ness of heart which found its utterances neglected and other names the oracles of the reading world. The gathered ill-humour of many years, aggravated by the confident assurance of the Hegelians, found vent at length in the introduction to his next book, where Hegel's works are described as three-quarters utter absurdity and one- quarter mere paradox, a specimen of the language in which during his subsequent career he used to advert to his three predecessors Fichte, Schelling, but above all Hegel. This work, with its wild outcry against the philo- sophy of the professoriate, was entitled Ueber den Willen in der Natur, and was published in 1836. The eight essays which go under the title of The Will in Nature Will in seek to show that his theory has the unique distinction of finding Nature. in physical science testimony to its metaphysical doctrines that will is the primary basis of all nature and intellect a derivative phenomenon. Often a trivial similarity of phrases serves to establish in his judgment an agreement of radical view. In the second essay he argues for the origin of animal organization from will, pointing out how in growing creatures the tendency to use an organ appears before the organ itself is formed, and maintaining that, instead of seeking the protoplasm of the animal kingdom in a mere lump of vitalized matter, to be moulded by external conditions, we should 8 Johanna Schopenhauer (1766-1838) was in her day an authoress of some reputation. Besides editing the memoirs of Fernow, she published Notes on Travels in England, Scotland, and Southern France (1813-17); Johann van Eyck and his Successors (ISM); three romances, Gdbriele (1819-20), Die Tante (1823), and Sidonia (1828), besides some shorter tales. These novels teach the moral of renunciation (Entsagung). Her daughter Adele (1796-1849) seems to have had a brave, tender, and unsatisfied heart, and lavished on her brother an affection he sorely tried. She also was an authoress, publishing in 1844 a volume of Hans-, Wald-, und Feld-Miihrchen, full of quaint poetical conceits, and in 1845 Anna, a novel, in two vols.