“The door is open,” said Marcus Aurelius. “The door is open, if the house is smoky, leave it.” It is the solution of antiquity, and Schopenhauer himself finds it much more reasonable than most of the reasons that have been urged against it. Yet it is not through this easily opened door that he sees a way of escape from the ironic will to live. If that will had a date and a local habitation, then indeed to kill the body in which it dwelt would put an end to the monster. But such is not the case. Among the accidents of time and space you happen to be one; but had you not been one, or were you no longer one, the game would play itself out by the same rules, only another pawn would be on the spot that was yours. Now the evil of the game is not that _you_ happen to be one of the pieces, but rather that it should be played at all. Not the pawn, but the player must be killed, and the player is always that brutal Will to Live, pitted against itself, winning as it loses and losing as it wins. Step out of it if you will, what does he care? But stay in it, and by doing your part not with but against him you may not only emancipate yourself but have your share in putting an end to the game itself. What is this part to be played by each against the Will to Live? We shall come to Schopenhauer’s account of it in due time, meanwhile it is certainly _not_ the impatient gesture of self-destruction. From the past again comes another answer to the question: What then? It takes the form of a wine song, and we catch its refrain from the lips of singer after singer. “Another and another cup,” cries Omar, “to drown the memory of this insolence.” Well, for this solution too Schopenhauer has his sympathy. Not for the wine that is red, to be sure,--its intoxication is too brief, the awakening too bitter--but for the wine of beauty wherever it is to be found in nature or in art. It is most natural that Schopenhauer--for whom the woe of life springs from the possession of an aggressive, fighting selfhood--should have looked for solace to that beauty in which, we say, we forget ourselves, before which we stand rapt. The effect every one knows--the cause? That was Schopenhauer’s peculiar contribution to the theory of the beautiful. In a word his explanation is this. We forget our own individuality with all its torment, because we are seduced by the beauty of the thing we look at to forget _its_ individuality.