Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers Part 26

In that troublous year of Seventeen Hundred Ninety-three, the Free City of Danzig fell under the sway of Prussia.

Heinrich Schopenhauer, who loved freedom, jealous of his privileges, fearful of his rights, immediately packed up his effects, sold out his property--at great loss--and moved to the Free City of Hamburg.

That his fears for the future were quite groundless, as most fears are, is a fact relevant but not consequent.

Johanna was vivacious and eminently social. She spoke French, German, English and Italian. She played the harp, sang, wrote poetry and acted in dramas of her own composition. Around her there always cl.u.s.tered a goodly group of men with long hair, dreamy eyes and pointed beards, who soared high, dived deep, but seldom paid cash. This is the paradise to which most women wish to attain: to be followed by a concourse of artistic archangels--what n.o.bler ambition! And let the great biological and historical fact here be written down--that there are no female angels.

Heinrich did not settle down in Hamburg and go into business, as he expected. He and his wife and boy traveled much--through England, France, Germany and Switzerland.

This man and his wife were trying to get away from themselves. Long years after, their son wrote, "When people die and wake up in h.e.l.l they will probably be surprised to find that they are just such beings as they were when they were on earth."

For a year the lad was left at school with a clergyman at Wimbledon, in England. The strict religious discipline to which he was there subjected seemed to have had much to do with forming in him a fierce hatred of English orthodoxy; but he learned the language and became familiar with the great names in English literature. The King Arthur stories pleased him, and he always took a peculiar satisfaction in the fact that the name Arthur was the same in English, German and French. He was a prenatal cosmopolitan.

Boarding-schools are a great scheme for getting the children out of the way--it throws the responsibility upon some one else. When nine years of age, Arthur was placed in a French boarding-school, remaining for two years. There he learned to speak French so fluently that when he returned to Hamburg and tried to talk to his mother in German, his broken speech threw that excellent woman into fits of laughter.

When the mature man of affairs takes a young girl to wife, he expects to mold her to his nature, but he reckons without his host. Heinrich Schopenhauer's opposition to his wife's wishes was not strong enough to crush her--it simply developed in her a deal of wilful, dogged strength.

One winter day in Eighteen Hundred Four the body of Heinrich Schopenhauer was found in the ca.n.a.l at Hamburg.

Arthur was then sixteen years of age--old for his years, traveled, clever--strong in body and robust in health.

In wandering with his parents, he had met Goethe, Wieland, Madame De Stael, Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, and many other distinguished people, for his mother was a famous lion-hunter, and wherever they went, the great ones were tracked to their lairs. But however much Madame Schopenhauer indulged in hero-wors.h.i.+p, she had no expectations or ambitions for her son. She apprenticed him as a clerk and did her utmost to immerse him in commerce. What she desired was freedom for herself, and the popular plan to gain freedom is to enslave others. Madame Schopenhauer moved to Weimar and opened there a sort of literary salon.

She wrote verses, novels, essays, and her home became the center of a certain artistic group. The fortune her husband had left was equal to about forty thousand dollars, one-third of which was to go to Arthur when he was twenty-one. The mother had the handling of it all until that time, and as the funds were well invested, her income was equal to about two thousand dollars a year.

A handsome widow, under forty, with no enc.u.mbrances to speak of, and a fair income, is very fortunately situated. Indeed, a great writer has recently written an essay showing that widows, discreetly bereaved, are the happiest creatures on earth.

Young Schopenhauer, at his desk in Hamburg, grieved over the death of his father. That which is lost becomes valuable--bereavement softens the heart. The only tenderness that is revealed in the writings of Schopenhauer refers to his father. He affirms the sterling honesty of the man, and lauds the merchant who boldly states that he is in business to make money, and compares him with the philosophers who clutch for power and fame and yet pretend they are working for humanity. When Schopenhauer was past sixty, he dedicated his complete works to the memory of his father. As nothing purifies like fire, so does nothing sanctify like death--the love we lose is the only love we keep.

Mathematics, bills and balance-sheets were odious to young Schopenhauer.

He reverenced the memory of his father, but his mother had endowed him with a strong impulse for expression. He wrote little essays on the backs of envelopes, philosophized over his bills, sneaked out of the countingroom the back way to attend the afternoon lectures by the great Doctor Gall, and finally, boldly followed his mother to Weimar, that he might bask in the shadow of the mighty Goethe. It was shortly after this that he sat in a niche of Goethe's library, musing, sad and solitary, while a gay throng chattered by. Some young women, seeing him there, laughed, and one asked, "Is it alive?" And Goethe, overhearing the pleasantry, rebuked it by saying, "Do not smile at that youth--he will yet eclipse us all."

At Weimar there was no greeting for Schopenhauer from his mother--she welcomed all but her son. Unfortunately for her, she put herself on record by writing him letters. Scathing letters are all right, but they should be directed and stamped, then burned just before they are trusted to the mails. To record unkindness is tragedy, for the unkind word lives long after the event that caused it is forgotten. Here is one letter written by Madame Schopenhauer that this methodical son saved for posterity:

_My Dear Son:_

I have always told you it is difficult to live with you. The more I get to know you, the more I feel this difficulty increase. I will not hide it from you: as long as you are what you are, I would rather bring any sacrifice than consent to be near you. I do not undervalue your good points, and that which repels me does not lie in your heart; it is in your outer, not your inner being; in your ideas, your judgment, your habits; in a word, there is nothing concerning the outer world in which we agree. Your ill-humor, your complaints of things inevitable, your sullen looks, the extraordinary opinions you utter, like oracles, none may presume to contradict; all this depresses me and troubles me, without helping you. Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world and human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams....

Your Dear Mother, etc., _Johanna Schopenhauer_

The young man took lodgings at Weimar, at a goodly distance from his mother. Goethe held out a friendly hand, as he did to Mendelssohn, and all bright young men. They talked much, and Goethe read to Arthur his essay on the theory of colors (for Wolfgang Goethe was human and dearly loved the sound of his own voice). The reasoning so impressed the youth that he devised a chromatic theory of his own--almost as peculiar.

Theories are for the theorizer, so all theories are useful.

At the earnest importunity of his mother, who starved him to it, Arthur went back to his clerks.h.i.+p, but soon returned and made terms, agreeing not to call on his mother, in consideration of a pound a week. He took lessons in Greek and Latin of a retired professor, attended lectures, fell in love with an actress--vowed he would marry her, but, luckily for her, he didn't.

When he was twenty-one, his mother turned over to him his patrimony, amounting to about fourteen thousand dollars; and suggested that he leave Weimar and make his fortune elsewhere--the world was wide.

His money was invested so it brought him an income of seven hundred dollars a year. And here seems a good place to say that Schopenhauer's income was never over a thousand dollars a year until after he was fifty-six years of age. Although he could not make money, yet he had inherited from his father an ability to care for it. Throughout his life he kept exact books of account, never ran in debt, and never allowed his expenditures to outrun his income, thus complying with Charles d.i.c.kens' recipe for happiness.

In still another way he revealed that he could apply philosophy to daily life: he exercised regularly in the open air, took long walks, was absurdly exact about his cold baths, and like Kant, served the neighbors as a chronometer, so they set their clocks at three when they saw him going forth for a walk. And in the interests of truth, we will have to make the embarra.s.sing admission that the great Apostle of Pessimism was neither a dyspeptic nor an invalid--if he was ever aware that he had a stomach we do not hear of it.

The life of Schopenhauer is the life of a recluse--a visionary--a hermit who lost himself amid the maze of city streets, and moved solitary in the throng. Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Gottingen, Frankfort, engaged him, and from one to the other he turned, looking for the rest he never found, and which he knew he would never find, so in the vain search there was no disappointment. He was always happiest when most miserable, for then were his theories proved.

A single room in a lodging-house sufficed, and this room always had the appearance of being occupied by a transient. He had few books, acc.u.mulated no belongings in way of domestic ballast, persistently giving away things that were presented to him, satisfied if he had a chair, a bed, and a table upon which to write; getting his own breakfast, dining at the table d'hote of the nearest inn, with supper at a "Gast-Haus"--so pa.s.sed his days. He had no intimate friends, and his chief dissipation was playing the flute. His black poodle, named "h.o.m.o"

in a subtle mood of irony, accompanied him everywhere, and on this dog he lavished what he was pleased to call his love. He antic.i.p.ated Rip Van Winkle concerning dogs and women, and when h.o.m.o died, he bought another dog that looked exactly like the first, and was just as good.

In a few instances Schopenhauer read his essays in public as lectures, but his ideas were keyed to concert pitch and were too p.r.o.nounced for average audiences. He was offered a professors.h.i.+p at Gottingen and also at Heidelberg, if he would "tone things down," but he scornfully declined the proposition, and said, "The Universities must grow to my level before I can talk to them." By his caustic criticisms of contemporaries he became both feared and shunned, and no doubt he found a certain satisfaction in the fact that the so-called learned men of his time would neither listen to his lectures, read his books, nor abide his presence. He had made himself felt in any event. "Blessed are ye when men shall revile you," is the sweet consolation of all persecuted persons--and persecution is only the natural resentment towards those who have too much ego in their cosmos.

His opinions concerning love and marriage need not be taken too seriously. Ideas are the results of temperaments and moods. When a man amplifies on the woman question he describes the women he knows best, and more especially the particular She who is in his head. Literature is only autobiography, more or less discreetly veiled. Schopenhauer hated his mother to the day of her death, and although during the last twenty-four years of her life he never once saw her, her image could at any time be quickly and vividly thrown upon the screen. The women a strong man has known are never forgotten--here is where time does not tarnish, nor the days grow dim.

Between his twenty-eighth and fortieth years, Schopenhauer had wandered through Italy--spent months at Venice, and dawdled away the days at Rome and Florence. He had dipped deep into life--and the wrong kind of life.

And his experiences had confirmed his suspicions--it was all bitter--he was not disappointed.

Until Schopenhauer was past thirty he was known as the son of Johanna Schopenhauer. And when he once told her that posterity would never remember her except as the mother of her son, she reciprocated by congratulating him that his books could always be had cheap in the first editions.

He retorted, "Mamma Dear, my books will be read when butchers are using yours for wrapping up meat." In some ways this precious pair were very much alike.

It is very probable that Schopenhauer's mother was not so base as he thought; and when he declared, "Woman's morality is only a kind of prudence," he might have said the same of his own. He stood aloof from life and said things about it. He had no wife, no child, no business, no home--he dared not venture boldly into the tide of existence--he stood forever on the bank, and watched the current carrying its flotsam and jetsam to the hungry sea.

In his love for the memory of his father, and in his tender care for his dog, we get a glimpse of depths that were never sounded. One side of his nature was never developed. And the words of the undeveloped man are worth what they are worth.

Schopenhauer once said to Wieland, "Life is a ticklish business--I propose to spend my time looking at it." This he did, viewing existence from every angle, and writing out his thoughts in terse, epigrammatic language.

Among all the German writers on philosophy, the only one who had a distinct literary style is Schopenhauer. Form was quite as much to him as matter--and in this he showed rare wisdom; although I am told that the writers who have no literary style are the only ones who despise it.

Dishes to be palatable must be rightly served: appet.i.te--literary, gastronomic or s.e.xual--is largely a matter of imagination.

Schopenhauer need not be regarded as final. The chief virtue of the man lies in the fact that he makes us think, and thus are we his debtors.

In this summary of Schopenhauer's philosophy I have had the valuable a.s.sistance of my friend and fellow-worker in the Roycroft Shop, George Pannebakker, a kinsman and enthusiastic admirer of the great Prophet of Pessimism.

In talking to Mr. Pannebakker, I am inclined to exclaim, "Thou almost persuadest me to be a pessimist!" It is unfortunate that our English tongue contains no word that stands somewhere between pessimism and optimism--that symbols a judicial cast of mind which sees the Truth without blinking and accepts it without complaint. The word Pessimist was first flung in contempt at those who dared to express unpalatable truth. It is now accepted by a large number of intellectuals, and if to be a pessimist is to have insight, wit, calm courage, patience, persistency, and a disposition that accepts all Fate sends and makes the best of it, then pity 'tis we haven't more.

The root of existence, the inmost kernel of all being, the original vitalizing power, the fundamental reality of the universe, is, according to Schopenhauer, "WILL." What is Will? Will, in the usual sense, is the faculty of our mind by which we decide to do or not to do. Will is the power to choose. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, Will is something less as we know will, and something more than force. Will, connected with consciousness, as peculiar to man, is, in a less developed form, the real essence of all matter, of all things, organic or inorganic. Will is the blind, irresistible striving for existence; the unconscious organizing power, the omnipotent creative force of Nature, pervading the whole limitless universe; the endeavor to be, to evolve, to expand.

The whole world of phenomena is the objectivation or apparition of Will.

Will, the same force which slumbers in the stone as inert gravity, forms the crystals with such wonderful regularity.

Will impels a piece of iron to move with ardent desire toward the magnet. Will causes the magnet to point with unfailing constancy to the north. Will causes the embryo to cling as a parasite and feed on the body of the mother. Will causes the mother's breast to fill that her babe may be fed. Will fills the mother-heart with love that the young may be cared for.

The same force urges the tender germ of the plant to break through the hard crust of the earth and, stretching toward the light, to enfold itself in the proud crown of the palm-tree. Will sharpens the beak of the eagle and the tooth of the tiger and, finally, reaches its highest grade of objectivation in the human brain. Want, the struggle for existence, the necessity of procuring and selecting sufficient food for the preservation of the individual and the species, has at last developed a suitable tool, the brain, and its function, the intellect.

With the intellect appear consciousness and a realm of rational life full of yearning and desires, pleasures and pain, hatred and love.

Brothers slay their brothers, conquerors trample down the races of the earth, and tyrants are forging chains for the nations.