The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

Here is Beethoven, passing with the turn of the century from the Mozartian simplicity of his early works through the power of the Eroica, the perfection of the Fifth Symphony, and the subtle delicacy of the Emperor Concerto and the Kreutzer Sonata, to the mad exuberance of the later sonatas and the Choral Symphony; here is Schubert, infinite store of melody, leaving unsung masterpieces by the hundred in his attic; here is the misty-melancholy Schumann, center of one of the finest love stories in truth or fiction; here is Johannes Brahms, looking like a butcher and composing like an angel, weaving harmonies profounder than any of Schumann, and yet so loyal to his memory that, though loving with full devotion the mad musician’s widow (the greatest woman pianist of her time), and protecting her for forty years, he never dared to ask her hand in marriage. What a dynasty of suffering—from the dying Beethoven shaking his fist at fate, through Schubert drunk and Schumann insane, through Chopin hunted by tubercle bacilli and deserted by George Sand, to Richard Wagner, genius and charlatan, who bore indignities for half a century, and then made German kings and princes pay the piper at Bayreuth! Happier was Mendelssohn, who was too kind and simple to suffer much; and Liszt who drank fame to the last drop, till all his life was intoxication with glory; and Rossini, who preferred cooking spaghetti to composing The Barber of Seville; and genial Verdi, living on his Fortunatus’ purse of melody, and putting a barrel-organ into every opera house in Europe. But when we pass to Russia it is melancholy that strums the strings again: the broken Moussorgsky sings of death, and the pathetic Tschaikowsky, breaking his heart over a Venus of the opera, ends his life with a cup of poison (we may be sure of this, since all respectable historians deny it).

Apparently beauty is born in suffering, and wisdom is the child of grief. The philosophers of our parent-century were almost as unhappy as the composers: they began with Schopenhauer, who wrote an encyclopedia of misery, and ended with Nietzsche, who loved life because it was a tragedy, but went insane with the thought that he might have to live again. What a pitiful sight, once more, is the invalid Buckle, who never had a healthy moment in his life, and died at forty-one before be could complete even the Introduction to his History of Civilization in England! The only sound man in all the list of nineteenth-century genius was old Goethe, who differed from Shelley by growing up. Read Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, and treat yourself to a week’s company with a mature mind. Read Part One of Faust,but let no historian of literature—not even the great Brandes—lure you into Part Two: it is a senile hotch-potch of nonsense worthy of Edward Lear. The only other mind comparable to Goethe’s in that age was that of Napoleon, powerful instrument of imagination, energy, and will; let Ludwig tell you his story, and then read the ninety sparkling pages with which Taine analyzes the Corsican’s genius in The Modern Regime.

Absorb every word of Taine’s chapter on Byron, and then read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cain, and two or three cantos of Don Juan. Do not miss the odes of Keats: they are the finest poems in the language.Verlaine and De Musset fall out of our list, because no translation can capture their wistful melody, and Heine is included despite the failure of all who have tried to transpose from one tongue to another the wit and music of his verse. Tennyson enters with In Memoriam and the Idylls of the King, but if courage failed not, his place would be given to Sir Thomas Malory, whose Morte d’Arthur is a stately monument of English prose. Of Balzac, when this century of books is done, you must read a great deal, for he is almost as illuminating as life itself. Skip through Les Miserables, but miss not a word of Flaubert’s two masterpieces (Mme. Bovary and Salambo), which the list here dishonestly groups as one with the connivance of a publisher who issues most of Flaubert in one volume. Then you may nibble at the delicacies offered you by Anatole France, who is the distilled essence of French culture and art; only Penguin Isle is named, but if you are a gourmand for beauty and subtlety of speech you will read twenty volumes of Anatole. Take Pickwick Papers and Vanity Fair (or take David Copperfield and Henry Esmond) leisurely, and forget our egotistic depreciation of the Victorian Age; let our time equal that in literature and then we may throw stones.