THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

SCHOPENHAUER 231
He sent the MS. to the publisher magna cum laude; here, he said, was no
mere rehash of old ideas, but a highly coherent structure of original
thought, "clearly intelligible, vigorous, and not without 3 '
beauty a ; book
"which would hereafter be the source and occasion of a hundred other
books." 9 All of which was outrageously egotistic, and absolutely true.
Many years later Schopenhauer was so sure of having solved the chief
problems of philosophy that he thought of having his signet ring carved
with an image of the Sphinx throwing herself down the abyss, as she had
promised to do on having her riddles answered.
Nevertheless, the book attracted hardly any attention; the w r orld was
too poor and exhausted to read about its poverty and exhaustion. Sixteen
years after publication Schopenhauer was informed that the greater part
of the edition had been sold as waste paper. In his essay on Fame, in "The
Wisdom of Life," he quotes, with evident allusion to his masterpiece, two
remarks of Lichtenberger's :
" Works like this are as a mirror: if an ass
looks in you cannot expect an angel to look out"; and "when a head and
a book come into collision, and one sounds hollow, is it always the book?'*
Schopenhauer goes on, with the voice of wounded vanity: "The more
a man belongs to posterity in other words, to humanity in general so
much the more is he an alien to his contemporaries; for since his work is
not meant for them as such, but only in so far as they form part of mankind
at large, there is none of that familiar local color about his pro-
ductions which would appeal to them.*' And then he becomes as eloquent
as the fox in the fable: "Would a musician feel flattered by the loud ar*
plause of an audience if he knew that they were nearly all deaf, and that
to conceal their infirmity he saw one or two persons applauding? And
what would he say if he discovered that those one or two persons had
often taken bribes to secure the loudest applause for the poorest player?**
In some men egotism is a compensation for the absence of fame; in
others, egotism lends a generous cooperation to its presence.
So completely did Schopenhauer put himself into this book that his
later works are but commentaries on it; he became Talmudist to his own
Torah, exegete to his own Jeremiads. In 1836 he published an essay On
the Will in Nature, which was to some degree incorporated into the en-
larged edition of The World as Will and Idea which appeared in 1844.
In 1841 came The Two Ground-Problems of Ethics, and in 1851 two
substantial volumes of Parerga et Parliapomena literally, "By-products
and Leavings" which have been translated into English as the Essays.
For this, the most readable of his works, and replete with wisdom and wit,
Schopenhauer received, as his total remuneration, ten free copies. Optimisirn
is difficult under such circumstances.
Only one adventure disturbed the monotony of his studious seclusion
In Wallace, Life, p. 107.