The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the Olympians nearest to Jove; and you must not rest until your body and soul have trembled with the rhythmic majesty of the Mass in B Minor, and the Passion according to St. Matthew.With the old organist of Arnstadt and everywhere, who had time between masterpieces to have twenty children, music reaches one of its twin dominating peaks; not till the mad Beethoven will it scale such a height again. The eighteenth century is full of noble melody: Handel dispenses oratorios, and Haydn develops the sonata and the symphony; Gluck makes a noble accompaniment for Iphigenia’s sacrifice, and Mozart, out of his sadness and his happiness, weaves such a concourse of sweet sound as makes all later compositions seem chaotic and discordant. If you wish to know “absolute music”—music relying not on stories, or pictures, or ideas, but on its own “meaningless” beauty—turn off your radio for a moment, and play the Andante from Mozart’s Quartet in D Major.

But here we are at the eighteenth century, which Clive Bell, in his precious volumette on Civilization, rates with the age of Pericles and the Renaissance as one of the three supreme epochs in the history of culture. An age of barbaric wars, advancing science, and liberated philosophy; of baronial exploitation, fine manners, and such handsome dress as makes our forked pantaloons and incarcerating shirts seem funereal and penal. “Those who have not lived before 1789,” said that brilliant piece of “mud in a silk stocking,” as Napoleon called Talleyrand, “have never known the full happiness of life.” Read in Sainte-Beuve’s Portraits the lives of these gilded men; see their pictures in Watteau and Fragonard, in Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney; and then take with Taine and Carlyle a front seat at the fiery drama of their fall. Think of an age that could produce such historians as Gibbon and Voltaire, such philosophers as Hume and Kant, such an undertaking as the French Encyclopedie, such a biographer as Boswell, such a circle as Johnson, Goldsmith, Gibbon, Burke, Garrick, and Reynolds, such novelists as Fielding and Sterne, still unsurpassed in England, such an economist as Adam Smith, such a cynic as Jonathan Swift, such a woman as Mary Wollstonecraft!

And so the Revolution comes, aristocracy is guillotined, art and manners droop, truth replaces beauty, and science remakes the world nearer to its head’s desire. Let Robinson tell of that Industrial Revolution which has so quickly and profoundly transformed our lives, our governments, our morals, our religions, and our philosophies; it is one of the great pivots on which history revolves. As the eighteenth century had been the age of theoretical mechanics and physics, and the next was the era of their victory in action, so the nineteenth century was the age of theoretical biology, and the twentieth will see it in triumphant operation. New conceptions of the nature of development and man dominated the scientific scene, and precipitated a war of faiths that has unsettled and saddened the Western mind. It was a century poor in sculpture, despite the unfinished Rodin, and a century full of dubious experiments in painting, from Turner’s sunsets to Whistler’s rain, but in music, strange to say (for who could have expected it in an age of machines?), it outsang every other epoch in history.