The success which followed the publication of this {37} book was reflected on the earlier works, and it was now possible to bring out further editions. Schopenhauer's delight at this tardy recognition was unbounded. Every scrap of applause was gathered and absorbed with eagerness. In his letters during this period, everyone who differs from him is denounced as a charlatan and a windbag. Everyone who says anything at all similar is attacked as a plagiarist. Every adversary is moved by the meanest motives. So virulent is his abuse, and so coarse his language, that words in his letters have sometimes to be changed for an initial. Nothing short of adulation, could satisfy his hungry vanity. Even when the universities at last acknowledged him, and offered a prize for the best exposition and criticism of his system, he was enraged at the award of the prize to a student who treated him as of more importance in a literary than in a philosophical capacity. Praise of any other philosophy than his own filled him with bitterness. His correspondence with Frauenstadt, Lindner, and Asher is full of such weakness. It may be doubted whether any great man ever left behind him letters of so trifling a nature, so steeped in vanity and so resentful of any breath of criticism. He was active to the end of his life, though the first fine rapture of his passionate love for all that is best in art was dimmed inevitably with the passing years. There is a pathetic reference in a letter to this dulling of his power of vision. "In the time," he writes, "when my spirit was at its zenith, whatever object my eye rested upon made revelations to me. Now that I am old, it may happen that I stand in front of Raphael's Madonna, and she says nothing to me." He died suddenly, in 1860, at the age of seventy-two. The stone which marks his grave bears as inscription the sole words "Arthur Schopenhauer." {38} CHAPTER II PESSIMISM Schopenhauer's system is set forth in all its fulness in his great work, _The World as Will and Idea_. All that he wrote after the appearance of this book was confirmation and expansion of the theories already laid down. It differs from his earlier books in method. He no longer follows academic lines. He looks upon the work as a revelation of the meaning of life, based on a clear and direct intuition into life, and the style shapes itself accordingly. Metaphor frequently takes the place of argument, and his theories are developed in a flow of passionate eloquence, contrasting remarkably with the severer methods of the ordinary metaphysician.