SOURCE: An introduction to The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, edited by Irwin Edman, The Modern Library, 1928, pp. v-xiv.

Edman has edited works by Plato, Schopenhauer, and John Dewey. In the following excerpt, Edman comments on Schopenhauer's writing style and popular appeal.

The popularity of Schopenhauer with a large unacademic public is easily explained. Part of the explanation is to be found in the extraordinarily vivacious and luxurious discourse that was his medium. He is one of the great German prose writers, and even in translation there is the tang of sense, the pungency of realistic observation in his pages. But there is something more. He seems to the reflective layman to have hit upon the inner essence and divined the essential tragedy of human existence. His philosophy is not the closet dialectic of the schools, though even in the dialectical branches of thought he is nobody's fool; it is...