l6 INTRODUCTORYEinstein deserves to be given the same compliment he gave Newton: he, too,
was an artist in exposition. His talent for the German language was second only
to his gift for science. I refer not so much to his proclivity for composing charming
little rhymes as to the quality of his prose. He was a master of nuances, which are
hard to maintain in translation. The student of Einstein should read him in Ger-
man. It is fitting that several of his important papers, such as his scientific credo
in the Journal of the Franklin Institute of 1936, and his autobiographical sketch
in the Schilpp book [E6], should appear side by side in the original German and
in English translation. He wrote all his scientific papers in German, whether or
not they eventually appeared in that language. Not only his mastery of language
but also his perceptiveness of people is evident in his writings in memory of col-
leagues and friends: of Schwarzschild and Smoluchowski, of Marie Curie and
Emmy Noether, of Michelson and Thomas Edison, of Lorentz, Nernst, Langevin,
and Planck, of Walther Rathenau, and, most movingly, of Paul Ehrenfest. These
portraits serve as the best foil for the opinion that Einstein was a naive man.
In languages other than German, he was less at ease.* On his first visit to Paris,
in 1922, he lectured in French[Kl]. He spoke in German, however, when address-
ing audiences on his first visits to England and the United States, but became
fluent in English in later years.
Music was his love. He cared neither for twentieth century composers nor for
many of the nineteenth century ones. He loved Schubert but was not attracted to
the heavily dramatic parts of Beethoven. He was not particularly fond of Brahms
and disliked Wagner. His favorite composers were earlier ones—Mozart, Bach,
Vivaldi, Corelli, Scarlatti. I never heard him play the violin, but most of those
who did attest to his musicality and the ease with which he sight-read scores.
About his predilections in the visual arts, I quote from a letter by Margot Einstein
to Meyer Schapiro:
In visual art, he preferred, of course, the old masters. They seemed to him more
'convincing' (he used this word!) than the masters of our time. But sometimes
he surprised me by looking at the early period of Picasso (1905, 1906)....
Words like cubism, abstract painting... did not mean anything to him....
Giotto moved him deeply ... also Fra Angelico ... Piero della Francesca.. ..
He loved the small Italian towns.... He loved cities like Florence, Siena
(Sienese paintings), Pisa, Bologna, Padua and admired the architecture. ... If
it comes to Rembrandt, yes, he admired him and felt him deeply. [El3]***During the 1920s, Einstein once said to a young friend, 'I like neither new clothes nor new kinds
of food. I would rather not learn new languages' [SI].
**I have no clear picture of Einstein's habits and preferences in regard to literature. I do not know
how complete or representative is the following randomly ordered list of authors he liked: Heine,
Anatole France, Balzac, Dostoyevski (The Brothers Karamazov), Musil, Dickens, Lagerlof, Tolstoi
(folk stories), Kazantzakis, Brecht (Galilei), Broch (The Death of Virgil), Gandhi (autobiography),
Gorki, Hersey (A Bell for Adano), van Loon (Life and Times of Rembrandt), Reik (Listening with
the Third Ear).