The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp
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The translator’s English as printed (R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
p. 317
life, as it develops itself in time in the manifold tangled chains of causes and effects. It is, however, impossible that he can have all the data for this ; he cannot have seen all and discovered all * He is forsaken at every moment by the original ot his picture, or a false one substitutes itself for it, and this so constantly that I think I may assume that in all history the false outweighs the true. The poet, on the contrary, has comprehended the Idea of man from some definite side which is to be represented ; thus it is the nature of his own self that objectifies itself in it for him. His knowledge, as we explained above when speaking of sculpture, is half a priori; his ideal stands before his mind firm, distinct, brightly illuminated, and cannot forsake him ; therefore he shows us, in the mirror of his mind, the Idea pure and distinct, and his delineation of it down to the minutest particular is true as life itself.^ The great ancient historians are, therefore, in those particulars in which their data fail them, for example, in the speeches of their heroes — poets; indeed their whole manner of handling their material approaches
^ It is scarcely necessary to say that wherever I speak of poets I refer exclusively to that rare phenomenon the great true poet. I mean no one else ; least of all that dull insipid tribe, the mediocre poets, rhymsters, and inventors of fables, that flourishes so luxuriantly at the present day in Germany. They ought rather to have the words shouted in their ears uncf^asingly from all sides —
Mediocribus €»$e poecis Non homines^ non Dty non conccssere cdLv.miut,
It is worthy of serious consideration what an amount of time — both their own and other people’s — and paper is lost by this swarm of mediocre poets, and how injurious is their influence. For the public always seizes on what is new, and has naturally a greater proneness to what is perverse and dull as akin to itself. Therefore these works of the mediocre poets draw it away and hold it back from the true masterpieces and the education they afford, and thus working in direct antagonism to the benign influence of genius, they ruin taste more and more, and retard the progress of the age. Such poets should therefore be scourged with criticism and satire without indulgence or sympathy till they are induced, for their own good, to apply their muse rather to reading what is good than to writing what is bad. For if the__b^^»K^^f; qI ine^mpetent so raised the wrath of the ^ntle Ap6ndnEgaFTie..c^5S"jj^ Marsyas, I do not 9^^ whAt fcha mediocre p^ts baseJkeiiLglauP to tolerance!
3i8 the world as IDEA. bk. hi, to the epic. But this gives their representations unity, and enables them to retain inner truth, even when outward truth was not accessible, or indeed was falsified.
And as we compared history to portrait-painting, in contradistinction to poetry, which corresponds to historical painting, we find that Winckelmann’s maxim, that the portrait ought to be the ideal of the individual, was followed by the ancient historians, for they represent the individual in such a way as to bring out that side of the Idea of man which is expressed in it Modern historians, on the contrary, with few exceptions, give us in general only “ a dust-bin and a lumbef-fbbm, and at the nm^a chronicle of the 'princij>ar poTIHcal eventsT* Therefore, whoever desires to know man in his mner”hature, identical in all its phenomena and developments[^ knovr. hw tCfiprding to the Idea, will find that tfie works of the great, immortal poet present a far truer, more distinct picture, than the historians can ever" give.
Ihr even the best of the historians are, as poets, far from the first ; and moreover their hands are tied. In this aspect the relation between the historian and the poet may be illustrated by the following comparison.
The mere, pure historian, who works only according to data, is like a man, who without any knowledge of mathematics, has investigated the relations of certain figures, which he has accidentally found, by measuring them ; and the problem thus empirically solved is afifected of course by all the errors of the drawn figura The poet, on the other hand, is like the mathematician, who constructs these relations a priori in pure perception, and expresses them not as they actually are in the drawn figure, but as they are in the Idea, which the drawing is intended to render for the senses. Therefore Schiller says : —
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