On Authorship
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the
subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. While the one have
had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, the
others want money; and so they write, for money. Their thinking is part of
the business of writing. They may be recognized by the way in which they
spin out their thoughts to the greatest possible length; then, too, by the very
nature of their thoughts, which are only half-true, perverse, forced,
vacillating; again, by the aversion they generally show to saying anything
straight out, so that they may seem other than they are. Hence their writing
is deficient in clearness and definiteness, and it is not long before they
betray that their only object in writing at all is to cover paper. This
sometimes happens with the best authors; now and then, for example, with
Lessing in his Dramaturgie, and even in many of Jean Paul's romances. As
soon as the reader perceives this, let him throw the book away; for time is
precious. The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of
covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the
pretext that he has something to say.
Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin
of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes
entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if
in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those
excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by
writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author
degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake
of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when
they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish
proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not to be
found in the same purse—honora y provecho no caben en un saco. The
reason why Literature is in such a bad plight nowadays is simply and solely
that people write books to make money. A man who is in want sits down
and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it. The secondary
effect of this is the ruin of language.
A great many bad writers make their whole living by that foolish mania
of the public for reading nothing but what has just been printed,—
journalists, I mean. Truly, a most appropriate name. In plain language it is
journeymen, day-laborers!
Again, it may be said that there are three kinds of authors. First come
those who write without thinking. They write from a full memory, from
reminiscences; it may be, even straight out of other people's books. This
class is the most numerous. Then come those who do their thinking whilst
they are writing. They think in order to write; and there is no lack of them.
Last of all come those authors who think before they begin to write. They
are rare.
Authors of the second class, who put off their thinking until they come
to write, are like a sportsman who goes forth at random and is not likely to
bring very much home. On the other hand, when an author of the third or
rare class writes, it is like a battue. Here the game has been previously
captured and shut up within a very small space; from which it is afterwards
let out, so many at a time, into another space, also confined. The game
cannot possibly escape the sportsman; he has nothing to do but aim and fire
—in other words, write down his thoughts. This is a kind of sport from
which a man has something to show.
But even though the number of those who really think seriously before
they begin to write is small, extremely few of them think about the subject
itself: the remainder think only about the books that have been written on
the subject, and what has been said by others. In order to think at all, such
writers need the more direct and powerful stimulus of having other people's
thoughts before them. These become their immediate theme; and the result
is that they are always under their influence, and so never, in any real sense
of the word, are original. But the former are roused to thought by the
subject itself, to which their thinking is thus immediately directed. This is
the only class that produces writers of abiding fame.
It must, of course, be understood that I am speaking here of writers who
treat of great subjects; not of writers on the art of making brandy.
Unless an author takes the material on which he writes out of his own
head, that is to say, from his own observation, he is not worth reading.
Book-manufacturers, compilers, the common run of history-writers, and
many others of the same class, take their material immediately out of books;
and the material goes straight to their finger-tips without even paying
freight or undergoing examination as it passes through their heads, to say
nothing of elaboration or revision. How very learned many a man would be
if he knew everything that was in his own books! The consequence of this
is that these writers talk in such a loose and vague manner, that the reader
puzzles his brain in vain to understand what it is of which they are really
thinking. They are thinking of nothing. It may now and then be the case that
the book from which they copy has been composed exactly in the same
way: so that writing of this sort is like a plaster cast of a cast; and in the
end, the bare outline of the face, and that, too, hardly recognizable, is all
that is left to your Antinous. Let compilations be read as seldom as possible.
It is difficult to avoid them altogether; since compilations also include those
text-books which contain in a small space the accumulated knowledge of
centuries.
There is no greater mistake than to suppose that the last work is always
the more correct; that what is written later on is in every case an
improvement on what was written before; and that change always means
progress. Real thinkers, men of right judgment, people who are in earnest
with their subject,—these are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule
everywhere in the world: it is always on the alert, taking the mature
opinions of the thinkers, and industriously seeking to improve upon them
(save the mark!) in its own peculiar way.
If the reader wishes to study any subject, let him beware of rushing to
the newest books upon it, and confining his attention to them alone, under
the notion that science is always advancing, and that the old books have
been drawn upon in the writing of the new. They have been drawn upon, it
is true; but how? The writer of the new book often does not understand the
old books thoroughly, and yet he is unwilling to take their exact words; so
he bungles them, and says in his own bad way that which has been said
very much better and more clearly by the old writers, who wrote from their
own lively knowledge of the subject. The new writer frequently omits the
best things they say, their most striking illustrations, their happiest remarks;
because he does not see their value or feel how pregnant they are. The only
thing that appeals to him is what is shallow and insipid.
It often happens that an old and excellent book is ousted by new and
bad ones, which, written for money, appear with an air of great pretension
and much puffing on the part of friends. In science a man tries to make his
mark by bringing out something fresh. This often means nothing more than
that he attacks some received theory which is quite correct, in order to make
room for his own false notions. Sometimes the effort is successful for a
time; and then a return is made to the old and true theory. These innovators
are serious about nothing but their own precious self: it is this that they
want to put forward, and the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to start
a paradox. Their sterile heads take naturally to the path of negation; so they
begin to deny truths that have long been admitted—the vital power, for
example, the sympathetic nervous system, generatio equivoca, Bichat's
distinction between the working of the passions and the working of
intelligence; or else they want us to return to crass atomism, and the like.
Hence it frequently happens that the course of science is retrogressive.
To this class of writers belong those translators who not only translate
their author but also correct and revise him; a proceeding which always
seems to me impertinent. To such writers I say: Write books yourself which
are worth translating, and leave other people's works as they are!
The reader should study, if he can, the real authors, the men who have
founded and discovered things; or, at any rate, those who are recognized as
the great masters in every branch of knowledge. Let him buy second-hand
books rather than read their contents in new ones. To be sure, it is easy to
add to any new discovery—inventis aliquid addere facile est; and,
therefore, the student, after well mastering the rudiments of his subject, will
have to make himself acquainted with the more recent additions to the
knowledge of it. And, in general, the following rule may be laid down here
as elsewhere: if a thing is new, it is seldom good; because if it is good, it is
only for a short time new.
What the address is to a letter, the title should be to a book; in other
words, its main object should be to bring the book to those amongst the
public who will take an interest in its contents. It should, therefore, be
expressive; and since by its very nature it must be short, it should be
concise, laconic, pregnant, and if possible give the contents in one word. A
prolix title is bad; and so is one that says nothing, or is obscure and
ambiguous, or even, it may be, false and misleading; this last may possibly
involve the book in the same fate as overtakes a wrongly addressed letter.
The worst titles of all are those which have been stolen, those, I mean,
which have already been borne by other books; for they are in the first place
a plagiarism, and secondly the most convincing proof of a total lack of
originality in the author. A man who has not enough originality to invent a
new title for his book, will be still less able to give it new contents. Akin to
these stolen titles are those which have been imitated, that is to say, stolen
to the extent of one half; for instance, long after I had produced my treatise
On Will in Nature, Oersted wrote a book entitled On Mind in Nature.
A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's
thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he
has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it
is that he has thought about it.
The matter of books is most various; and various also are the several
excellences attaching to books on the score of their matter. By matter I
mean everything that comes within the domain of actual experience; that is
to say, the facts of history and the facts of nature, taken in and by
themselves and in their widest sense. Here it is the thing treated of, which
gives its peculiar character to the book; so that a book can be important,
whoever it was that wrote it.
But in regard to the form, the peculiar character of a book depends upon
the person who wrote it. It may treat of matters which are accessible to
everyone and well known; but it is the way in which they are treated, what
it is that is thought about them, that gives the book its value; and this comes
from its author. If, then, from this point of view a book is excellent and
beyond comparison, so is its author. It follows that if a writer is worth
reading, his merit rises just in proportion as he owes little to his matter;
therefore, the better known and the more hackneyed this is, the greater he
will be. The three great tragedians of Greece, for example, all worked at the
same subject-matter.
So when a book is celebrated, care should be taken to note whether it is
so on account of its matter or its form; and a distinction should be made
accordingly.
Books of great importance on account of their matter may proceed from
very ordinary and shallow people, by the fact that they alone have had
access to this matter; books, for instance, which describe journeys in distant
lands, rare natural phenomena, or experiments; or historical occurrences of
which the writers were witnesses, or in connection with which they have
spent much time and trouble in the research and special study of original
documents.
On the other hand, where the matter is accessible to everyone or very
well known, everything will depend upon the form; and what it is that is
thought about the matter will give the book all the value it possesses. Here
only a really distinguished man will be able to produce anything worth
reading; for the others will think nothing but what anyone else can think.
They will just produce an impress of their own minds; but this is a print of
which everyone possesses the original.
However, the public is very much more concerned to have matter than
form; and for this very reason it is deficient in any high degree of culture.
The public shows its preference in this respect in the most laughable way
when it comes to deal with poetry; for there it devotes much trouble to the
task of tracking out the actual events or personal circumstances in the life of
the poet which served as the occasion of his various works; nay, these
events and circumstances come in the end to be of greater importance than
the works themselves; and rather than read Goethe himself, people prefer to
read what has been written about him, and to study the legend of Faust
more industriously than the drama of that name. And when Bürger declared
that "people would write learned disquisitions on the question, Who
Leonora really was," we find this literally fulfilled in Goethe's case; for we
now possess a great many learned disquisitions on Faust and the legend
attaching to him. Study of this kind is, and remains, devoted to the material
of the drama alone. To give such preference to the matter over the form, is
as though a man were to take a fine Etruscan vase, not to admire its shape
or coloring, but to make a chemical analysis of the clay and paint of which
it is composed.
The attempt to produce an effect by means of the material employed—
an attempt which panders to this evil tendency of the public—is most to be
condemned in branches of literature where any merit there may be lies
expressly in the form; I mean, in poetical work. For all that, it is not rare to
find bad dramatists trying to fill the house by means of the matter about
which they write. For example, authors of this kind do not shrink from
putting on the stage any man who is in any way celebrated, no matter
whether his life may have been entirely devoid of dramatic incident; and
sometimes, even, they do not wait until the persons immediately connected
with him are dead.
The distinction between matter and form to which I am here alluding
also holds good of conversation. The chief qualities which enable a man to
converse well are intelligence, discernment, wit and vivacity: these supply
the form of conversation. But it is not long before attention has to be paid to
the matter of which he speaks; in other words, the subjects about which it is
possible to converse with him—his knowledge. If this is very small, his
conversation will not be worth anything, unless he possesses the above
named formal qualities in a very exceptional degree; for he will have
nothing to talk about but those facts of life and nature which everybody
knows. It will be just the opposite, however, if a man is deficient in these
formal qualities, but has an amount of knowledge which lends value to what
he says. This value will then depend entirely upon the matter of his
conversation; for, as the Spanish proverb has it, mas sabe el necio en su
casa, que el sabio en la agena—a fool knows more of his own business
than a wise man does of others.