If we are tempted to make this easy comment, we should remember the note that Schopenhauer is never tired of appending to his pages, the reminder that he stands not alone but is the expression of whole races and civilizations. He is heir to the deep pessimism of the East, of Brahminism, of Buddhism, that called life a “veil of illusion,” and figured one attached to its purposeless turning as “tied to the wheel of things.” He is the voice of that Christianity that fled to the desert, and hid itself in monasteries. He could repeat after the “Imitation of Christ,” “Truly it is misery even to live upon the earth. The more spiritual a man desires to be, the more bitter does this life become to him; because he sees more clearly and perceives more sensibly the defects of human corruption. For to eat and to drink, to sleep and to watch, to labor and to rest, to be subject to the necessities of nature is a great misery and affliction to a religious man, who would gladly be set loose.” No, Schopenhauer did not stand alone--the past was behind him, and as it proved the future ready for his message. Not merely among the technical philosophers is his influence to be traced, but in that sensitive expression of what is passing in the heart of his age--the artist. Never has art had the courage it now displays to conceive the tragedy of life as Schopenhauer thought it out--not indeed the drama of guilt and its punishment, the ideal of justice working itself out at the cost of individual pain. This is the older conception of tragedy--Schopenhauer would say it is not tragedy at all. To the modern conception tragedy lies in the perception that there _is_ no justice in the world--only indifference, only chance, only stupidity. One might cite works of Flaubert, tales of Maupassant, pages of Anatole France; but most notable of all, pretty much the whole literary output of Thomas Hardy, that tireless recorder of “Life’s Little Ironies,” that bold acknowledger of crass casualty as the only god of things. Schopenhauer does not stand alone against a background of forgotten gloom if one may still hear the voice of nature questioning as Hardy heard it: “When I look forth at dawning, pool, Field, flock, and lonely tree All seem to look at me Like chastened children sitting silent in a school. “Their faces dulled, constrained and worn, As though the master’s ways Through the long teaching days Their first terrestrial zest had chilled and overborne. “And on them stirs, in lippings mere (As if once in clear call, But now scarce breathed at all) ‘We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here. “‘Has some vast Imbecility Mighty to build and blend But impotent to tend Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardy?’ “Thus things around. No answer I ...” It is time we come to the question: What then? Life is a misery, and then what?