widely circulated, contrary to Wittgenstein’s wishes. Again, it is not too much to say that he inaugurated a new ‘school’, or perhaps rather a new method in philosophy - namely, that of which John Wisdom and Gilbert Ryle are the best known exponents, and which is often referred to as ‘the philosophy of ordinary language’. The point of view put forward in these notes diverges widely from that of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, though it is not difficult to see how the second grew out of the first. The way had been prepared for this new philosophical departure by the emphasis placed by G. E. Moore, who was at Cambridge, on ‘the language of common sense’.
In 1936 Wittgenstein left Cambridge and went to Norway, where it is said that he lived in a mountain hut, and from which he returned in 1938, after the fall of Vienna. In 1939 he succeeded G. E. Moore in the Cambridge Chair of Philosophy, and was also naturalized as a British citizen. He continued lecturing for a time, but in 1943 he went to work, first as a porter in a London hospital and afterwards as a research assistant. In 1945 he returned, but found that his teaching duties prevented him from doing creative writing, and in 1947 he resigned from his chair. The second book, however, which he had sacrificed so much to complete and publish (in order, as he said, to show how very wrong the Tractatus was), was not destined to appear. In 1949 he became seriously ill, of a disease from which he knew there could be no great hope of recovery, and retired from active life. He formed round him a small group of philosophers who were also his friends, with whom he worked and discussed to the last.
We are still too close to Wittgenstein to form a just estimate of his work. His Tractatus is a logical poem, consisting as it does of the development of a gigantic metaphor, constructed round two senses of ‘language’. It is thus an exceptionally difficult book to interpret with any reliability. His sets of notes, and his incomplete manuscript, also show, in the opinion of all who have read them, signs of indubitable genius; but Wittgenstein himself took all the steps in his power to prevent their being circulated on the ground that, if they were, they would be bound to be misunderstood. What is beyond doubt is that, like Descartes in one way, like Locke in another, he started a worldwide philosophical trend. In so far as this can be described in one sentence, it consists in following up the idea that thinking consists in using a language. Thus thought, which it had been easy to conceive of as a private, indefinable, amorphous entity, becomes the manipulation of some symbolism; something public, something which can be ‘nailed down’ and to which the techniques of formal logic can be applied.
Arnold Schoenberg
Beyond chromaticism
13 July 1951
Professor Arnold Schoenberg, who died on Friday at his home at Los Angeles at the age of 76, was probably the most discussed musician of the twentieth century.
His system of atonality, or, as he preferred to call it, twelve-tone music, though reached by process of evolution from chromaticism, was the most revolutionary movement in musical history since Monteverde in the seventeenth century. It is so subversive of established ways of thought that its general adoption is improbable in the extreme, but it has provided a ferment of far-reaching influence on modern music. In this respect, as in some others, Schoenberg is like Stravinsky; between 1910 and 1930 these two men were the outstanding figures in the history of modern music. Curiously enough, both suffered the same fate. At the height of his fame each was forced to leave his country and to adjust himself to new conditions.
Schoenberg was born in Vienna on September 13, 1874. At the age of eight he learnt to play the violin and composed short violin duets for his lessons. Later on he taught himself the cello and composed a string quartet. For several years he worked without any outside help or supervision. Alexander von Zemlinsky (whose daughter he married in 1901), a composer of whom Brahms had a very high opinion, recognized his outstanding talent, gave him his first instruction in composition and brought him into the musical circles of Vienna. Schoenberg’s earliest works were written in the style of Brahms, whose technique he admired, and later set as a model to his pupils when he was teaching composition himself.
The first work which Schoenberg made known to the musical world was a string sextet, Verklärte Nacht. It was an attempt to apply the symphonic form of a tone poem to chamber music. To the same period belong the Gurrelieder, a cantata for solo voices, chorus and orchestra written in 1900, a tone poem, Pelleas and Melisande, and a string quartet in D minor. A new development began with the Chamber-Symphony in E, opus 9, in 1906. Schoenberg’s style became concise, his harmonies more daring. It was these works which first roused the opposition of conservative musicians and the admiration of a younger generation who were trying to find new ways of expression. This aim was achieved in the three piano pieces, opus 11, 1909, written in the so-called ‘atonal style’ which aroused much discussion among musicians all over the world. At this time Schoenberg left Vienna and settled in Berlin. Here he wrote Pierrot Lunaire, a cycle of poems recited in a kind of song-speech accompanied by instruments. This work established Schoenberg’s fame as one of the leading modern composers. In 1913 he returned to Vienna to teach composition, and, after the end of the 1914–18 war, he founded a society for the performance of modern music. He embodied his technical principles in the Treatise on Harmony, begun in the early years of the century and since revised, but it is only recently in a volume of essays, Style and Idea, that he has discussed their aesthetic basis.
The years between 1920 and 1925 were the most prosperous in Schoenberg’s life. His works were performed regularly at the festivals of the International Music Society; his principal choral work, the Gurrelieder, aroused general admiration at a performance in his honour at the Vienna State Opera, and most conductors included his works in their programmes. He had now gained an international reputation. When Busoni died in 1924 in Berlin, Schoenberg succeeded him as a member of the Academy of the Arts, a position which should have given him financial independence for the rest of his life. After Hitler came to power, however, in 1933, he lost his position and accepted an offer from the Malkin Conservatory, Boston. He felt the change as a great shock. His health suffered from the eastern winter and he soon moved to Los Angeles, where he was appointed professor of music in the University of Southern California. Here he wrote a suite for string orchestra (1934), the fourth string quartet (1938), a violin concerto, a piano concerto, and the Ode to Napoleon. Schoenberg retired from his university post in 1944 at the age of 70, to spend the rest of his life in composing and teaching. He completed the opera Moses and Aaron, on which he had been working for many years, not long before he died. He had the satisfaction of seeing a revival of his works after the defeat of the Nazi regime and the re-establishment of his fame as one of the most inspiring innovators of contemporary music. His wife died in 1923 and he is survived by a son and a daughter.
Joseph Stalin
Dictator of Russia for 29 years
5 March 1953
The death of Stalin, like the death of Lenin 29 years ago, marks an epoch in Russian history. Rarely have two successive rulers of a great country responded so absolutely to its changing needs and piloted it so successfully through periods of crisis. Lenin was at the helm through five years of revolution, civil war, and precarious recovery. Stalin, coming to power in the aftermath of revolution, took up the task of organizing and disciplining the revolutionary state, and putting into execution the revolutionary programmes of planned industry and collectivized agriculture. He thus equipped the country to meet the gravest external peril which had threatened it since Napoleon, and brought it triumphantly through a four years’ ordeal of invasion and devastation. The characters of the two men present a contrast which corresponds to the different tasks confronting them. Lenin was an original thinker, an idealist, a superb revolutionary agitator. Stalin neither possessed, nor required, these qualities. He was essentially an administrator, an organizer and a politician. Both were ruthless in the pursuit of policies which they regarded as vital to the cause they had at heart. But Stalin appeared to lack a certain element of humanity which Lenin generally maintained in personal relations, though allied statesmen who dealt with him during the war were unanimous in finding him approachable, sympathetic, and readily disposed to moderate the intransigence of his subordinates. As the war drew to its close Stalin, whether for reasons of health