And Another Thing | 16 February 2008

What is a genius? We use the word frequently but surely, to guard its meaning, we should bestow it seldom. To me, a genius is a person whose gift contains an element of the inex- plicable, not to be accounted for by heredity, upbringing, background, exertions and talents, however noble. Thus, we can’t account for the extraordinary imagination of Chaucer, the vintner’s son, brought up at a military-minded court. Equally, where Shakespeare got or acquired his magic is a mystery. By contrast, Jane Austen, though one of the greatest of novelists — and my personal favourite — is a straightforward case of a clever girl, brought up in the congenial environment of a reading family, with its jokes, theatricals, verse-writing and wide acquaintance, who used her natural wit and sharp gift of observation, helped by her appreciative but critical siblings, to create a new kind of realistic fiction. No mystery there, whereas Dickens, coming from nowhere and nothing, to explode his Sketches by Boz and Pickwick Papers as a superbly self-confident young master, is an enigma. We can’t explain it, any more than we can explain why Kipling, at 18, wrote so truthfully and enchantingly about the secrets of human hearts, of both sexes and many races.

When I was 12 or 13, and first making incursions into the musical repertoire, my idea of a genius was Arturo Toscanini. He was then conducting New York’s NBC Symphony Orchestra, an orchestra he virtually created and which was disbanded after his retirement. I contrived to hear him conducting all Beethoven’s symphonies, either on records or on the wireless, and they are still my ideal of how they should be played; rightly so, for his fidelity both to the score and the spirit and intention of the composer was his lifelong object, achieved so comprehensibly that he changed the art of conducting for good.