II or Leo X, or in much that they believed in; but he could paint
the Superman three hundred years before Nietzsche wrote Also Sprach
Zarathustra and Strauss set it to music. Michael Angelo won the primacy
among all modern painters and sculptors solely by his power of shewing
us superhuman persons. On the strength of his decoration and color alone
he would hardly have survived his own death twenty years; and even his
design would have had only an academic interest; but as a painter of
prophets and sibyls he is greatest among the very greatest in his craft,
because we aspire to a world of prophets and sibyls. Beethoven never
heard of radioactivity nor of electrons dancing in vortices of
inconceivable energy; but pray can anyone explain the last movement of
his Hammerklavier Sonata, Opus 106, otherwise than as a musical picture
of these whirling electrons? His contemporaries said he was mad, partly
perhaps because the movement was so hard to play; but we, who can make a
pianola play it to us over and over until it is as familiar as Pop
Goes the Weasel, know that it is sane and methodical. As such, it
must represent something; and as all Beethoven's serious compositions
represent some process within himself, some nerve storm or soul storm,
and the storm here is clearly one of physical movement, I should much
like to know what other storm than the atomic storm could have driven
him to this oddest of all those many expressions of cyclonic energy
which have given him the same distinction among musicians that Michael
Angelo has among draughtsmen.

In Beethoven's day the business of art was held to be 'the sublime and
beautiful.' In our day it has fallen to be the imitative and voluptuous.
In both periods the word passionate has been freely employed; but in the
eighteenth century passion meant irresistible impulse of the loftiest
kind: for example, a passion for astronomy or for truth. For us it has
come to mean concupiscence and nothing else. One might say to the art of