The Art of Literature - Arthur Schopenhauer
Now, mankind is fond of venerating something; but its veneration is
generally directed to the wrong object, and it remains so directed
until posterity comes to set it right. But the educated public is
no sooner set right in this, than the honor which is due to genius
degenerates; just as the honor which the faithful pay to their saints
easily passes into a frivolous worship of relics. Thousands of
Christians adore the relics of a saint whose life and doctrine are
unknown to them; and the religion of thousands of Buddhists lies more
in veneration of the Holy Tooth or some such object, or the vessel
that contains it, or the Holy Bowl, or the fossil footstep, or the
Holy Tree which Buddha planted, than in the thorough knowledge and
faithful practice of his high teaching. Petrarch's house in Arqua;
Tasso's supposed prison in Ferrara; Shakespeare's house in Stratford,
with his chair; Goethe's house in Weimar, with its furniture; Kant's
old hat; the autographs of great men; these things are gaped at with
interest and awe by many who have never read their works. They cannot
do anything more than just gape.
The intelligent amongst them are moved by the wish to see the objects
which the great man habitually had before his eyes; and by a strange
illusion, these produce the mistaken notion that with the objects they
are bringing back the man himself, or that something of him must
cling to them. Akin to such people are those who earnestly strive to
acquaint themselves with the subject-matter of a poet's works, or to
unravel the personal circumstances and events in his life which have
suggested particular passages. This is as though the audience in a
theatre were to admire a fine scene and then rush upon the stage to
look at the scaffolding that supports it. There are in our day enough
instances of these critical investigators, and they prove the truth of
the saying that mankind is interested, not in the _form_ of a work,
that is, in its manner of treatment, but in its actual matter. All it
cares for is the theme. To read a philosopher's biography, instead of
studying his thoughts, is like neglecting a picture and attending only
to the style of its frame, debating whether it is carved well or ill,
and how much it cost to gild it.
This is all very well. However, there is another class of
persons whose interest is also directed to material and personal
considerations, but they go much further and carry it to a point where
it becomes absolutely futile. Because a great man has opened up to
them the treasures of his inmost being, and, by a supreme effort
of his faculties, produced works which not only redound to their
elevation and enlightenment, but will also benefit their posterity to
the tenth and twentieth generation; because he has presented mankind
with a matchless gift, these varlets think themselves justified in
sitting in judgment upon his personal morality, and trying if they
cannot discover here or there some spot in him which will soothe the
pain they feel at the sight of so great a mind, compared with the
overwhelming feeling of their own nothingness.
This is the real source of all those prolix discussions, carried on in
countless books and reviews, on the moral aspect of Goethe's life, and
whether he ought not to have married one or other of the girls with
whom he fell in love in his young days; whether, again, instead of
honestly devoting himself to the service of his master, he should not
have been a man of the people, a German patriot, worthy of a seat in
the _Paulskirche_, and so on. Such crying ingratitude and malicious
detraction prove that these self-constituted judges are as great
knaves morally as they are intellectually, which is saying a great
deal.
A man of talent will strive for money and reputation; but the spring
that moves genius to the production of its works is not as easy to
name. Wealth is seldom its reward. Nor is it reputation or glory; only
a Frenchman could mean that. Glory is such an uncertain thing, and,
if you look at it closely, of so little value. Besides it never
corresponds to the effort you have made:
_Responsura tuo nunquam est par fama labori._
Nor, again, is it exactly the pleasure it gives you; for this is
almost outweighed by the greatness of the effort. It is rather a
peculiar kind of instinct, which drives the man of genius to give
permanent form to what he sees and feels, without being conscious of
any further motive. It works, in the main, by a necessity similar to
that which makes a tree bear its fruit; and no external condition is
needed but the ground upon which it is to thrive.
On a closer examination, it seems as though, in the case of a genius,
the will to live, which is the spirit of the human species, were
conscious of having, by some rare chance, and for a brief period,
attained a greater clearness of vision, and were now trying to secure
it, or at least the outcome of it, for the whole species, to which the
individual genius in his inmost being belongs; so that the light which
he sheds about him may pierce the darkness and dullness of ordinary
human consciousness and there produce some good effect.
Arising in some such way, this instinct drives the genius to carry
his work to completion, without thinking of reward or applause or
sympathy; to leave all care for his own personal welfare; to make his
life one of industrious solitude, and to strain his faculties to
the utmost. He thus comes to think more about posterity than about
contemporaries; because, while the latter can only lead him astray,
posterity forms the majority of the species, and time will gradually
bring the discerning few who can appreciate him. Meanwhile it is with
him as with the artist described by Goethe; he has no princely patron
to prize his talents, no friend to rejoice with him:
_Ein Fuerst der die Talente schaetzt,
Ein Freund, der sich mit mir ergoetzt,
Die haben leider mir gefehlt_.
His work is, as it were, a sacred object and the true fruit of his
life, and his aim in storing it away for a more discerning posterity
will be to make it the property of mankind. An aim like this far
surpasses all others, and for it he wears the crown of thorns which
is one day to bloom into a wreath of laurel. All his powers are
concentrated in the effort to complete and secure his work; just as
the insect, in the last stage of its development, uses its whole
strength on behalf of a brood it will never live to see; it puts its
eggs in some place of safety, where, as it well knows, the young will
one day find life and nourishment, and then dies in confidence.