He was executed on the Campo dei Fiori. Those who know Italian may therein find inspiration for a pretty little allegory.
CHAPTER XXI
SPINOZA
There are certain things in history which I have never been able to understand and one of these is the amount of work done by some of the artists and literary men of bygone ages.
The modern members of our writing guild, with typewriters and dictaphones and secretaries and fountain pens, can turn out between three and four thousand words a day. How did Shakespeare, with half a dozen other jobs to distract his mind, with a scolding wife and a clumsy goose-quill, manage to write thirty-seven plays?
Where did Lope de Vega, veteran of the Invincible Armada and a busy man all his life, find the necessary ink and paper for eighteen hundred comedies and five hundred essays?
What manner of man was this strange Hofkonzertmeister, Johann Sebastian Bach, who in a little house filled with the noise of twenty children found time to compose five oratorios, one hundred and ninety church cantatas, three wedding cantatas, and a dozen motets, six solemn masses, three fiddle concertos, a concerto for two violins which alone would have made his name immortal, seven concertos for piano and orchestra, three concertos for two pianos, two concertos for three pianos, thirty orchestral scores and enough pieces for the flute, the harpsichord, the organ, the bull-fiddle and the French horn to keep the average student of music busy for the rest of his days.
Or again, by what process of industry and application could painters like Rembrandt and Rubens produce a picture or an etching at the rate of almost four a month during more than thirty years? How could an humble citizen like Antonio Stradivarius turn out five hundred and forty fiddles, fifty violoncellos and twelve violas in a single lifetime?
I am not now discussing the brains capable of devising all these plots, hearing all these melodies, seeing all those diversified combinations of color and line, choosing all this wood. I am just wondering at the physical part of it. How did they do it? Didn’t they ever go to bed? Didn’t they sometimes take a few hours off for a game of billiards? Were they never tired? Had they ever heard of nerves?