Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/293

Rh Again, in Jean Paul's "Titan," when Schoppe, melancholy and now brooding over himself, frequently looking at his hands, says to himself, "There sits a lord in bodily reality, and I in him; but who is such?" Heinrich Heine appears as a true humourist in his Romancero." Behind all his jokes and drollery we discern a profound seriousness, which is ashamed to appear unveiled. Accordingly humour depends upon a special kind of mood or temper (German, Laune, probably from Luna) through which conception in all its modifications, a decided predominance of the subjective over the objective in the apprehension of the external world, is thought. Moreover, every poetical or artistic presentation of a comical, or indeed even a farcical scene, through which a serious thought yet glimmers as its concealed background, is a production of humour, thus is humorous. Such, for example, is a coloured drawing of Tischbein's, which represents an empty room, lighted only by the blazing fire in the grate. Before the fire stands a man with his coat off, in such a position that his shadow, going out from his feet, stretches across the whole room. Tischbein comments thus on the drawing: "This is a man who has succeeded in nothing in the world, and who has made nothing of it; now he rejoices that he can throw such a large shadow." Now, if I had to express the seriousness that lies concealed behind this jest, I could best do so by means of the following verse taken from the Persian poem of Anwari Soheili: –

"If them hast lost possession of a world, Be not distressed, for it is nought; Or hast thou gained possession of a world, Be not o'erjoyed, for it is nought. Our pains, our gains, all pass away; Get thee beyond the world, for it is nought."

That at the present day the word humorous is generally used in German literature in the sense of comical arises from the miserable desire to give things a more