The pleasure we receive from all beauty, the consolation which art
affords, the enthusiasm of the artist, which enables him to forget the
cares of life,—the latter an advantage of the man of genius over other
men, which alone repays him for the suffering that increases in proportion
to the clearness of consciousness, and for the desert loneliness among men
of a different race,—all this rests on the fact that the in-itself of
life, the will, existence itself, is, as we shall see farther on, a
constant sorrow, partly miserable, partly terrible; while, on the
contrary, as idea alone, purely contemplated, or copied by art, free from
pain, it presents to us a drama full of significance. This purely knowable
side of the world, and the copy of it in any art, is the element of the
artist. He is chained to the contemplation of the play, the
objectification of will; he remains beside it, does not get tired of
contemplating it and representing it in copies; and meanwhile he bears
himself the cost of the production of that play, _i.e._, he himself is the
will which objectifies itself, and remains in constant suffering. That
pure, true, and deep knowledge of the inner nature of the world becomes
now for him an end in itself: he stops there. Therefore it does not become
to him a quieter of the will, as, we shall see in the next book, it does
in the case of the saint who has attained to resignation; it does not
deliver him for ever from life, but only at moments, and is therefore not
for him a path out of life, but only an occasional consolation in it, till
his power, increased by this contemplation and at last tired of the play,
lays hold on the real. The St. Cecilia of Raphael may be regarded as a
representation of this transition. To the real, then, we now turn in the
following book.
FOURTH BOOK. THE WORLD AS WILL.
Second Aspect. The Assertion And Denial Of The Will To Live, When
Self-Consciousness Has Been Attained.
Tempore quo cognitio simul advenit, amor e medio
supersurrexit.—_Oupnek’hat,_
_Studio Anquetil Duperron_, vol. ii. p. 216.