The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

All suffering, since it is a mortification and a call to resignation, has potentially arsaiictlfying power. This' !slK^r^anatipji.oi,.jdieJaclilmlLfiY£i:^ oF deep pain inspires a certain awe. But the sufferer only feany’TTecdmes an object of reverence when, surveying the course of his life as a chain of sorrows, or mourning some great and incurable misfortune, he does not really look at the special combination of circumstances which has plunged his own life into suffering, nor stops at the single great misfortune that has befallen him ; for in so doing his knowledge still follows the principle of sufficient reason, and clings to the particular phenomenon ; he still wills life only not under the conditions which have happened to him ; but only then, I say, he is truly worthy of reverence when he raises "bis gfance from the particular to the uhTyerihri'^wheh'he re^r^ Els” suffering as merely an example of the whole.

* Henry VI., Part ii, act 3, sa 3.

THE WORLD AS WILL.

BK. IV.

5ia and for him, since in a moral regard partakes of genius, 6ne~~case stands Ibf a thousand, so that the whole of life conceived~a^ essiETtlaH^lnffering brings him to resignation. Therefore it inspires reverence when in Goethe’s,.** Torfluato Tasso” the princess speaks of how her own life and that of her relations has always been sad and joyless, and yet regards the matter from an entirely universal point of view.

A very noble character we always imagine with a certain trace of quiet sadness, which is anything but a constant fretful ness at daily annoyances (this would be an ignoble trait, and lead us to fear a bad disposition), but is a consciousness derived from knowledge of the vanity of all possessions, of the suffering of all life, not merely of his own. But such knowledge may primarily be awakened by the personal experience of suffering, especially some one great sorrow, as a single unfulfilled’wish bTought "Fetrarch to that state of resigned sadness concerning the whole of life which appeals to .u.s. .S.O- patheticadly in his works ; ^ the Daphne he pursued had to flee from his hands in order to leave him, instead of herself, the immortal laurel. When through some such great and irrevocable denial of fate the will is to some extent broken, almost nothing else is desired, and the character shows itself mild, just, noble, and resigned. When, finally, grief has no definite object, but extends itself over the whole of life, then it is to a certain extent a going into itself, a withdrawal, a gradual disappearance of the will, whose visible manifestation, the body, it imperceptibly but surely undermines, so that a man feels a certain loosening of his bcmds^u niild foretaste of that death which promises to be the abolition at once of the body and of the will. Therefore a secre^.pleasu.ra-acco.mpaniea-.thl9 grief, and it is this^ as I belike, \yhich the most melancholy of all nations has calleJ ** the joy 9f„grief.” But here also lies the danger of sentimentality, both in life itself and in the representation of it in poetry ; when a man is always mourning and

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lamenting without courageously rising^to resignation. In tills way weT^ose holTi earth and heaven, and retai^mere^ a watery sentimentality. Only_^ assumes the form of purekiiowIe^(jgg, jtnd^Uns^iSfcing^^a^ a 0^ the willy brin^ about resignation, worthy^ Qf je ye^ejice.

In this regard, however, we feel a certain respect at the sight of every great sufferer which is akin to the feeling excited by virtue and nobility of character, and also seems like a reproach of our own happy condition. We cannot help regarding every sorrow^ both our own and those of ^lers, as at least a potfiixtial_a.dyance.lQ\yards^\drtue a^^ holiness, and, on the contrary, pleasures and worldly s^isTsetfons as a retrogression from thein. This goes so far, fTTal every man who endures a great bodily or mental suffering, indeed every one who merely performs some physical labour which demands the greatest exertion, in the sweat of his brow and with evident exhaustion, yet with patience and without murmuring, every such man, I say, if we consider him with close attention, appears to us like a sick man who tries a painful cure, and who willin^y, and even wdtli s^isfaction^ endures tlie su^ffering it causes him, because he knows that the more he suffers tlie more the cause of his (hsease is^ affected, therefore the present suffering is the measure of his cure.