Scholars are wont to say that after that brilliant coming-of-age in Spain, England, and France, Europe suffered a setback, and fell from the high level of the Renaissance. In a sense it is true: the seventeenth century is an epoch of religious conflict, the period of that Thirty Years’War which ruined Germany, and that Puritan Revolution which put an end for a century to the poetic and artistic exuberance of England. But even so consider the roster of that century. It is the time of the Three Musketeers: Richelieu and Mazarin strengthen the central government of France against the feudal barons, and bequeath a united and powerful state to Louis XIV as an organized medium of security and order for the fine flower of French culture under Voltaire. La Rochefoucauld gives finished form to the cynicism of theaters and courts; Molière fights with ridicule the hypocrisies and conceits of his people, and Pascal mingles, in passionate rhetoric, mathematics and piety. Bacon and Milton raise English prose to its highest reach, and Milton writes, in addition, some tolerable verse. It is an era of mighty systems in philosophy: Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke in England; Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz on the Continent. In science it is the age of Galileo in astronomy, of Sir William Harvey in physiology, of Robert Boyle in chemistry, of Isaac Newton in everything. In painting it is a shower of stars: in Holland, Rembrandt and Franz Hals; in Flanders, Rubens and Van Dyke; in France, Poussin and Claude Lorrain; in Spain, El Greco and Velázquez. And in music, Bach is born.
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.
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.