The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer | Page 8

knows. It will be just the
opposite, however, if a man is deficient in these formal qualities, but
has an amount of knowledge which lends value to what he says. This
value will then depend entirely upon the matter of his conversation; for,
as the Spanish proverb has it, _mas sabe el necio en su casa, que el
sabio en la agena_--a fool knows more of his own business than a wise
man does of others.

ON STYLE.
Style is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character
than the face. To imitate another man's style is like wearing a mask,
which, be it never so fine, is not long in arousing disgust and
abhorrence, because it is lifeless; so that even the ugliest living face is
better. Hence those who write in Latin and copy the manner of ancient
authors, may be said to speak through a mask; the reader, it is true,
hears what they say, but he cannot observe their physiognomy too; he
cannot see their style. With the Latin works of writers who think for
themselves, the case is different, and their style is visible; writers, I
mean, who have not condescended to any sort of imitation, such as
Scotus Erigena, Petrarch, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and many others.
An affectation in style is like making grimaces. Further, the language in
which a man writes is the physiognomy of the nation to which he
belongs; and here there are many hard and fast differences, beginning
from the language of the Greeks, down to that of the Caribbean

islanders.
To form a provincial estimate of the value of a writer's productions, it is
not directly necessary to know the subject on which he has thought, or
what it is that he has said about it; that would imply a perusal of all his
works. It will be enough, in the main, to know how he has thought. This,
which means the essential temper or general quality of his mind, may
be precisely determined by his style. A man's style shows the formal
nature of all his thoughts--the formal nature which can never change,
be the subject or the character of his thoughts what it may: it is, as it
were, the dough out of which all the contents of his mind are kneaded.
When Eulenspiegel was asked how long it would take to walk to the
next village, he gave the seemingly incongruous answer: Walk. He
wanted to find out by the man's pace the distance he would cover in a
given time. In the same way, when I have read a few pages of an author,
I know fairly well how far he can bring me.
Every mediocre writer tries to mask his own natural style, because in
his heart he knows the truth of what I am saying. He is thus forced, at
the outset, to give up any attempt at being frank or naïve--a privilege
which is thereby reserved for superior minds, conscious of their own
worth, and therefore sure of themselves. What I mean is that these
everyday writers are absolutely unable to resolve upon writing just as
they think; because they have a notion that, were they to do so, their
work might possibly look very childish and simple. For all that, it
would not be without its value. If they would only go honestly to work,
and say, quite simply, the things they have really thought, and just as
they have thought them, these writers would be readable and, within
their own proper sphere, even instructive.
But instead of that, they try to make the reader believe that their
thoughts have gone much further and deeper than is really the case.
They say what they have to say in long sentences that wind about in a
forced and unnatural way; they coin new words and write prolix
periods which go round and round the thought and wrap it up in a sort
of disguise. They tremble between the two separate aims of
communicating what they want to say and of concealing it. Their object
is to dress it up so that it may look learned or deep, in order to give
people the impression that there is very much more in it than for the
moment meets the eye. They either jot down their thoughts bit by bit, in

short, ambiguous, and paradoxical sentences, which apparently mean
much more than they say,--of this kind of writing Schelling's treatises
on natural philosophy are a splendid instance; or else they hold forth
with a deluge of words and the most intolerable diffusiveness, as
though no end of fuss were necessary to make the reader understand the
deep meaning of their sentences, whereas it is some quite simple if not
actually trivial idea,--examples