ARTICLE II-SCHOPENHAUER AND OMAR KHAYYAM.

NOTHING strikes one more forcibly in reading Schopenhauer's philosophy than the splendid consistency of his pessimism. It is rare, indeed, that one finds a writer who has the courage and the candor seriously to elaborate a whole system of thought, logically leading up to the conclusion that the world is absolutely the worst possible. Jonathan Swift was a consistent pessimist, both in his writings and in his life; he regularly kept his birthday as a day of fasting and mourning; but Swift has left no philosophical system. Carlyle often spoke like a pessimist, but his pessimism was not inseparably connected with the order of the world; it sprang simply from a belief that the tendency of the age was bad. A great many writers are pessimists—or think they are-in times of special misfortune, or when absorbed in unusual trains of thought. Lyrical poetry is often pessimistic, because it is so often the outcome of a melancholy mood, or the expression of unsatisfied yearning. In a general acquaintance with Shakspere's plays, we should never class him as a pessimist; but some of his sonnets are steeped in pessimism. Perhaps there is no one, who has not at some time, for a long or short interval, been a pessimist; who has not keenly felt what the Germans call Weltschmerz; but the peculiar characteristic of Schopenhauer is that he is a pessimist in cold blood. His system is just the reverse of that of Carlyle, who cried out against the age and the men of the age, but who believed in a beneficent order of the universe and in the divine potentiality of human nature; it is altogether different from the pessimism of the Book of Ecclesiastes, which recognizes the vanity and suffering of life, but finds the key to the mystery in fearing God and keeping his commandments. Schopenhauer's pessimism is coldly philosophical, one might almost say mathematical. Except in places where he flings mud at the professors of philosophy, his book nowhere sounds like the tone of a disappointed, soured old man; the writer is evidently in calm equipoise, in perfect possession of his wits. We can easily

imagine him seated before a warm fire, with his dressing gown and slippers on, placidly writing off his theory that the world is a mirror of hell; that life and suffering mean the same thing; that consciousness is the grand mistake of nature; that human existence is a tragedy, with the dignity of tragedy taken away. His temperament may be well described in the words of a biographer of John Randolph: "His was a nature that would have made a hell for itself even if fate had put a heaven around it." The relative goodness and badness of men does not affect Schopenhauer's pessimism. He would say that human character has little enough good in it, but even if it had ten times the amount it possesses, it could attain to no more happiness. The world is so constituted as to make existence in it constant pain; it is but the manifestation of a blind will, which multiplies itself in millions of forms, each one appearing but a short time, and then expiating the crime of its existence by death. It is far better not to be; before our sad eyes stands only the nothingness from which we came into the light; and this nothingness must be the goal of our highest endeavor. Schopenhauer's ethical solution is therefore a complete denial of the will to live; the only way of salvation is to escape from one's self; in asceticism one finds, not indeed happiness, but a calm contemplation of existence and a worthy preparation for the heaven of Nirvana.

It is interesting to compare Schopenhauer's system and its ethical solution with the philosophy and teaching of Omar Khayyam, the astronomer-poet of Persia. Both men are greater in literature than they are in philosophy. Schopenhauer's poetic style, with its musical sadness, with its flexibility of movement and brilliancy of illustration, with its sparkling wit and its solemn earnestness, makes him one of the greatest of the prose writers of Germany; and Omar has contrived to clothe his shallow creed in such a garment of poetic beauty, as to make the body within seem infinitely more stately and imposing than it would appear, if stripped of all adornment. Both writers are complete pessimists in their views of the world; both are fatalists, believing in the absolute despotism of destiny; both believe that the soul of man departs into the voiceless night from which it came. A comparison of their

writings will show how closely akin they are in their views of the order of the world. Now, with ideas so similar, it is strange enough to notice that their ethical solutions of the problem are diametrically and totally opposed. Schopenhauer says: "You must escape from yourself by asceticism, by denying the will to live." Omar says, "You must escape from yourself by plunging recklessly into the pleasures of life.”

Both Schopenhauer and Omar Khayyam were able to lead independent intellectual lives; each had a sufficient income, which left him free to devote his time to thought. This was probably a misfortune in the case of both men. As many a man is an atheist with a brilliant book in his hand, and a theist as soon as he mingles with others in the active work of life-so men are pessimists in solitary hours when they contemplate the stage of life, and witness what appears to be a great tragedy enacted; it is only when one lives his individual life in contact with others that his pessimism forsakes him, and his life assumes some significance and importance.

Omar Khayyam was born in the latter half of the eleventh century, and the story of his life reads like a romance. When a youth, he agreed with his two most intimate friends, that whichever of them became rich should divide his property equally with the others. One of them became Vizier, and Omar asked simply for a competence, that he might spend his life in intellectual pursuits. His friend did not turn from him in scorn, as we might expect from the romantic consistency of the narrative thus far, but cheerfully granted his modest request; and Omar became a devotee of science and philosophy, giving special attention to astronomy, in which he became the foremost scholar of his time. He must have been a man who took the keenest delight in the intellectual life; yet we find his philosophy simply a poetic version of "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." This is what he says of his early life:

"Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument

About it and about: but evermore

Came out by the same door wherein I went.

With them the seed of wisdom did I sow,

And with my own hand wrought to make it grow :
And this was all the harvest that I reaped-

'I came like water, and like wind I go." "

He seems to have been utterly baffled by the ultimate mysteries of life; to have lost heart before the great enigmas he could not solve, and so to have fled away from himself and from his torturing doubts into a life of gross and sensual pleasure. Perhaps, however, he did this only on paper; as Schopenhauer was a saint only in print. Schopenhauer condemns sensual pleasure.

"He shows the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede."

So Omar, while telling us that the summum bonum is wine and women, may have lived a severely intellectual life.

The three questions which every thoughtful man asks, What am I? Why am I? Where am I going? were ones to which Omar could find no answer.

"Into this universe, and why not knowing,
Nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as wind along the waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.

"Yesterday this day's madness did prepare ;
To-morrow's silence, triumph, or despair:

Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why;
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.”

His philosophy amounts to this: We find ourselves in a world full of physical delights, but which is a complete enigma. By the highest part of our nature we are driven to questionings, which lead us into the darkness and leave us there. When we begin to ask about our origin and destiny, we find we can know absolutely nothing; the past and the future are both blanks; all we know is that the life we enjoy now is short; that we have opportunities for positive pleasure of the senses; these must be seized to-day, or lost perhaps forever. The wise man will grasp them while he has the power, instead of laying up treasures in an impossible heaven beyond the grave.

To a mind whose religious faith has never been shaken, such a doctrine as Omar's seems utterly contemptible and inexplicable, coming from so profound a scholar; one must have tasted for himself the bitterness of skepticism, before he can

have any charity for the Persian poet. Let us glance for a moment at Schopenhauer's picture of life, to compare it with Omar's:

"It is really incredible how meaningless and void of significance when looked at from without, how dull and unenlightened by intellect when felt from within, is the course of the life of the great majority of men. Every individual, every human being and his course of life, is but another short dream of the endless spirit of nature, of the persistent will to live; is only another fleeting form, which it carelessly sketches on its infinite page, space and time. And yet, and here lies the serious side of life, every one of these fleeting forms, these empty fancies, must be paid for by the whole will to live, in all its activity, with many and deep sufferings, and finally with a bitter death, long feared and coming at last. This is why the sight of a corpse makes us suddenly so serious."

"The worldly hope men set their hearts upon
Turns ashes-or it prospers; and anon,
Like snow upon the desert's dusty face,
Lighting a little hour or two, is gone.

For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his vintage rolling time has prest,

Have drunk their cup a round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the dust descend;

Dust into dust, and under dust, to lie,
Sans wine, sans song, sans singer and sans end!

Yet ah, that spring should vanish with the rose !
That youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close!
The nightingale that in the branches sang
Ah whence, and whither flown again, who knows!

Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire

Remould it nearer to the heart's desire !"

This view of life, looking upon it as a vain, empty dream, is something like the position taken by the melancholy Jacques in Shakspere's "As you like it."

Schopenhauer regards the individual as of little or no consequence, being merely a perishable form of the manifestation of