Schopenhauer’s schooling was sporadic but in 1797, aged nine, he was taken off to Paris and then Le Havre, where he stayed for two years with a French family. In 1799 he came back, not to Danzig but to Hamburg, and for three years attended a private school for ‘the sons of the wealthier classes.’ During these years the maternal component of his make-up began to become active and he developed a strong inclination towards literature which at length dominated him and led him to declare his intention of following a literary career when he grew up. It is clear that neither he nor his father had any precise notion of what this meant, but his father did know that at any rate it did not sound compatible with the running of the house of Schopenhauer as it ought to be run. He therefore offered the boy an alternative: he could either persist in wanting a ‘literary career’, in which case he would have to begin regular studies in Hamburg of literature, Latin and other dull subjects; or he could agree to settle down to a mercantile career, in which case he could leave immediately on a long tour of France and England so as to see something of the world first.
Arthur was 15 and he chose the latter alternative. Presumably his
father knew he would. They all left for a trip that was to last two years
(1803-5), and when they returned to Hamburg in January 18054, Arthur was put
into the office of a merchant named Jenisch, as a clerk.
This is now the crucial epoch of his life. In April his father dies; the death
leaves him feeling more rather than less bound to fulfill his promise to become
merchant. But the house of Schopenhauer is sold up, his mother and sister leave
for Weimar, and he is left in the office of Jensch. And now despair begins to
enter his soul. He hates the work of clerk, and has now come to hate the whole
mercantile world; at the same time his very modest education has fitted him for
little else. When he is 21 he will get his share of the paternal fortune,
assuming his mother has not spent it by then – but as yet he is only 17, and at
17 four years are an unimaginable eternity. In short, Jenisch’s office becomes
Schopenhauer’s blacking factory – with this difference, that Dicken’s experience
was that of a little boy unable to analyze his situation and was now
fortunately rare, while Schopenhauer’s is so ordinary as to be called as
perhaps the common lot of middle-class youth. The capitalist world, and in
particular the heart of it, the world of buying and selling, offers almost
nothing a young man wants: the instincts of youth are at variance with the demands
of business. And especially with those of clerking. What young man is by nature
diligent, sober and regular in his habits? Respectful to ‘superiors’ and humble before
wealth? Sincerely able to devote himself to what he finds boring? One in ten
thousand, perhaps. But for the great majority a ‘job’ is, depending on temperament,
a torment or a tedious irrelevance which has to be endured day after day in
order that, during one’s so-called ‘free time, one will be allowed to get on
with living. This situation is the most commonplace in the world. I believe it
is the cause of that settled cynicism with which nine out of ten regard as the
‘social order’: they know that short of a total revolution in the conduct of
human affairs, any conceivable social order will for the great
majority mean the boredom of routine, the damming up of their natural energies
and the frustration of their natural desires. This familiar feeling was what
now overcame Schopenhauer: the feeling which appears when life, hitherto
apparently capable of granting anything is suddenly revealed as a deception,
when the color is drained from it and the whole future seems a single grey. The
essence is in the question: Is this all? Is this life? The intensity
with which the question is asked must of course vary; but when we consider that
Schopenhauer was in fact a man of genius, we shall not be surprised to discover
that in him its intensity was very great. He himself tells us that, when in the
spring of 1807 his mother wrote to him from Weimar that now two years had elapsed
he could if he wished regard his promise to his late father as fulfilled and
change his mode of life, he ‘burst into tars of joy and left Jenisch’s office
at once. And my contention is that the attitude towards life produced by these
two years and more of office misery became, as did everything he felt, a permanent
and irremovable part of his make-up; became, in fact, his permanent attitude
towards life. What he as yet is a mode of expressing it, but as soon as he is
introduced to a suitable mode he seizes it instantly and employs it to the
limit of its capacity.
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