George Bernard Shaw, his life and works

by Archibald Henderson

CHAPTER VIII

In 1888 a gentleman described in the World at that time as “a Chinese statesman named Tay Pay,”[105] founded the Star, claiming for it the distinction of the first and only half-penny paper, and ignoring the Echo, which early succumbed to the treatment. On the recommendation of Mr. H. W. Massingham, Shaw was placed on the editorial staff as leader writer, on the second day of the paper's existence. At that time the Fabian Society had just invented the municipal modification of Socialism called Progressivism; and the sole object of Shaw, then a “moderate and constitutional, but strenuous Socialist,” in joining the Star was to foist this new invention upon it as the latest thing in Liberalism. Here Shaw's “impossibilism” broke out worse than ever; and Mr. O'Connor, an Irishman too, and a skilled journalist in the bargain, was not to be taken in. He refused to print the articles. “Then the Fabian Society ordered all its members to write to the Star,” records Shaw, “expressing indignant surprise at the lukewarmness of its Liberalism and the reactionary and obsolete character of its views. This was more successful; the paper became Progressive, and London rose so promptly to the new programme, that the first County Council election was fought and won on it. The Liberal leaders remonstrated almost daily with T. P., being utterly bewildered by what was to them a most dangerous heresy. But the Star articles became more and more Progressive, then ultra-Progressive, then positively Jacobin; and the further they went the better London liked them. They were not, I beg to say, written by me, but by Mr. H. W. Massingham.”[106]

While the Fabians were thus engaged in “collaring the Star by this stage army stratagem,” Shaw, to the utter consternation of the Chinese statesman, was writing political leaders for which the country was not ripe by about five hundred years, according to the political computation of the eighties. Too good-natured to do his duty and put Shaw out summarily, Tay Pay, in desperation, proposed that Shaw should have a column to himself, to be headed “Music,” and to be “coloured by occasional allusions to that art.” It was with a gasp of relief that he heard Shaw's acceptance of the proposition; and so a new career opened for Shaw as “ Corno di Bassetto,”[107] a “person now forgotten, but I flatter myself, very popular for a couple of years in the Star.”

“Magnetic, he has the power to infect almost everyone with the delight that he takes in himself.” (Mr. George Bernard Shaw.)

A Cartoon. By Max Beerbohm.
By permission of the Artist and “Vanity Fair.”

Among Shaw's colleagues on the Star at this time were Clement K. Shorter and Richard Le Gallienne. A. B. Walkley, the distinguished dramatic critic of the London Times, was then the “Star man” in the theatres, and although he was more fastidious and dignified than the incorrigible “Bassetto,” he was quite as amusing. “I am far from denying that a man of genius may make even a newspaper notice of the Royal Academy or of a 'Monday Pop.' permanently valuable and delightful,” Mr. Archer once said; “all I maintain is that it assuredly takes a man of genius to do so. Mr. Bernard Shaw ... has to my thinking a peculiar genius for bringing day-by-day musical criticism into vital relation with æsthetics at large, and even with ethics and politics—in a word, with life....” According to his subsequent confession, “The Star's own captious critic,” as Shaw was denominated at the time, used the word music in a platonically comprehensive sense; for he wrote about anything and everything that came into his head. He once spoke of his column in the Star, signed “Corno di Bassetto,” as “a mixture of triviality, vulgarity, farce and tomfoolery with genuine criticism.” George Henry Lewes' style, as Mr. Archer has shrewdly observed,[108] reminds one of that of “Corno di Bassetto”; but the dramatic essays of Lewes, Shaw freely confesses, are miles beyond the crudities of Di Bassetto, although the combination of a laborious criticism with a recklessly flippant manner is the same in both. Indeed, Shaw's column in the Star was perhaps the most startling evidence of the insurgency and iconoclasm of the New Journalism as represented by the Star, its foremost exponent. Imagine a column a week in the sprightly vein of the following:

“I warn others that Offenbach's music is wicked. It is abandoned stuff: every accent in it is a snap of the fingers in the face of moral responsibility, every ripple and sparkle on its surface twits me for my teetotalism, and mocks at the early rising which I fully intend to make a habit of some day.... In Mr. Cellier's scores, music is still the chastest of the muses. In Offenbach's she is—what shall I say?—I am ashamed of her. I no longer wonder that the Germans came to Paris and suppressed her with fire and thunder. Here in England how respectable she is! Virtuous and rustically innocent her six-eight measures are, even when Dorothy sings, 'Come, fill up your glass to the brim'! She learned her morals from Handel, her ladylike manners from Mendelssohn, her sentiment from the 'Bailiff's Daughter of Islington.' But listen to her in Paris, with Offenbach. Talk of six-eight time: why, she stumbles at the second quaver, only to race off again in a wild Bacchanalian, Saturnalian, petticoat spurning, irreclaimable, shocking quadrille.”

No more accurate characterization of the work of Di Bassetto can be conceived than is to be found in Shaw's own confession. He secured the privileges he usurped, he says, in two ways: first, by taking care that “Corno di Bassetto” should always be amusing; and, secondly, by using a considerable knowledge of music, which nobody suspected him of possessing, to provide a solid substratum of genuine criticism for the mass of outrageous levities and ridiculous irrelevancies which were the dramatic characteristics of “Bassetto.” “I daresay these articles would seem shabby, vulgar, cheap, silly, vapid enough if they were dug up and exposed to the twentieth century light; but in those days, and in the context of the topics of that time, they were sufficiently amusing to serve their turn.”[109]

It will be recalled that Shaw, from his early childhood, had been in close contact with the best that had been thought, felt, and written in music. It was his practice as a boy to whistle to himself the operatic themes he heard continually practised at his home, precisely as a street gamin whistles the latest piece of “rag-time.” He was introduced to Wagner's music for the first time by hearing a second-rate military band play an arrangement of the Tannhäuser march. He thought it a rather commonplace plagiarism from the famous theme in Der Freischütz. This boyish impression was exactly the same as that recorded of the mature Berlioz, who was to Shaw at that time the merest shadow of a name which he had read once or twice. Shaw learned his notes at the age of sixteen; and although for a long time thereafter he inflicted untold suffering on his neighbours, he became in time quite a good accompanist. In the early days in London, when he was not laboriously writing five pages a day on one of his novels, Shaw occasionally tried his hand at musical composition, at writing and setting words to music. I have before me now a folded sheet of pink paper, dated “23d of June, 1883,” in Shaw's fine handwriting, on which he had written music for one of Shelley's poems, Rossetti edition, Vol. III., p. 107. On the inside of the folded sheet, in Shaw's hand, is copied the poem, headed Lines, beginning:

“When the lamp is shattered,
The light in the dust lies dead;
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed;
“When the lute is broken,
Sweet notes are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.”

Shaw was deeply interested in a study of Wagner's music, and took great pains in studying Wagner's methods of composition. I have seen Shaw's musical notes made during this period—sheets of stiff paper on which he had written out the musical scores of the various distinct leit motifs in the Wagnerian operas—the Ring motive, the Rheingold motive, etc., etc.—with fine marginal stenographic notes in the Pitman system. He once made quite a study of counterpoint; and, as we learned in an earlier chapter, acquired a grounding in “Temperament” through his acquaintance with his friend, James Lecky. When Mr. O'Connor transferred Shaw from the editorial staff to the post of musical critic for the Star, believing that he could do no great harm there, his wisdom was justified by the result. All his experience in writing and criticism on the Star, combined with his early knowledge of music, filled Shaw's hands with weapons. And when Louis Engel, the “best hated musical critic in Europe,” as Shaw calls him, found it necessary to give up his position as musical critic of the World, his post fell to “Corno di Bassetto.”

At the time when Shaw first entered the lists as a musical critic, he was possessed of the strongest convictions on the subject of music, musicians, and true musical genius. In Love Among the Artists Shaw has given expression to his decided views concerning the pedantry of the academic schools, the absurd jargon of conventional musical criticism, and the vacuity and inconsequence of all music, based on method alone, which does not come into being through unaffected enthusiasm for art, and the sincere effort towards the complete realization of personality. The musical criticism which takes the analysis of “Bach in B minor” as its point of departure is there held up to unmeasured scorn. It seems something more than a coincidence that the avoidance of this very subject, with all its implications, should have been the condition on which Shaw began his career as a critic of music. In connection with his appointment as musical critic of the Star, Shaw relates this story of Mr. O'Connor: “He placed himself in my hands with one reservation only. 'Say what you like,' he said; 'but for—(here I omit a pathetic Oriental adjuration)—don't tell us anything about Bach in B minor.' It was a bold speech, considering the superstitious terror in which the man who has the abracadabra of musical technology at his fingers' end holds the uninitiated editor; but it conveyed a golden rule.” Shaw was in perfect accord with the editor in the belief that “Bach in B minor” is not good criticism, not good sense, not interesting to the general readers, not useful to the student. He fulfilled his part of the contract far more completely than the “Chinese statesman” had any right to expect. Not only did Shaw not tell us anything about “Bach in B minor”: he spent six years of his life in holding the practice up to ridicule and contempt!

Bernard Shaw brought his critical faculty to bear upon music in England during the period when the academic faction held full sway. There was a large reserve of native musical talent in England at this time, but it found nothing like full scope for its development, largely because of the commercial pandering to popular taste. The so-called masters of contemporary music in England were all reared on the methodology of the schools. Dr. Mackenzie, the Principal of the Royal Academy of Music, was probably the leader of the academic faction. Sir George Grove, author of that standard work, the Dictionary of Musicians, was an honoured figure in the world of music. Dr. Hubert Parry, at the height of his creative activity, was writing and occasionally conducting his oratorios, such as Job and Judith. These and other earlier works of his—notably, L'Allegro ed il Pensieroso and Prometheus—Shaw took the utmost pleasure in declaring to be “without any merit whatsoever,” or “the most conspicuous failures,” despite their fine feeling, their scrupulous moderation, and other pleasant and perfectly true irrelevancies. At the Albert Hall, Sir Joseph Barnby, Principal of the Royal Choral Society, in his measured and complacent style, was leading those huge, lumbering choirs which are still the pride of Great Britain. Villiers Stanford, that Irish professor ever trifling in a world of ideas, was writing his Eden, and other works, which entitled him to a high place in the councils of academicism. Goring Thomas, for his Golden Web, and other operas, had already attained a position as a dramatic composer, which, according to Shaw, at least, “placed the production of an opera of his beyond all suspicion as a legitimate artistic enterprise.” Arnold Dolmetsch, that rarely fine interpreter of ancient music, was giving those unique viol concerts in the hall of Barnard's Inn and elsewhere which charmed Arthur Symons yesterday as they charmed Bernard Shaw long ago. Gilbert and Sullivan had once more joined forces in Utopia, scoring another operatic triumph, somewhat less decisive and conspicuous, it must be confessed, than Pinafore, The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance. Cowen was winning encomiums as a conductor, and Sterndale Bennett was still a name to conjure with. To the many, Wagner, like Ibsen, was still an offensive impostor. But Ashton Ellis's exhaustive task of translating Wagner's works was slowly proceeding; and Armbruster, that Bayreuth extension lecturer, so to speak, aided by Shaw in the Star and in the World, was paving the way for a more general comprehension and appreciation of Wagner in England. Paderewski was slowly mounting to the position of the foremost living pianist, and Patti had begun to give her “Farewell Concerts.”

In musical criticism, as in all other phases of his strangely diversified career, Shaw is essentially a revolutionary. His attack upon Parry's Job, so he always maintained, threatened to call forth a great national protest! He fought for Wagner with the same revolutionary enthusiasm which enlisted him in the cause of Ibsen—and Shaw. He had no tolerance for anything traditional, not even for traditional versions of old airs, for the simple reason that they were always inaccurate. So jealous was he of his critical sense, for fear of its prostitution by irrelevant beauty or factitious romance, that he steadfastly steeled himself against that subtlest of all forces in undermining critical integrity—personal magnetism.

Perhaps the simplest way to arrive at a comprehension of Shaw, the critic of music, is by taking account of his tastes and aversions. For example, Shaw usually viewed Paderewski's performances, at the time when the Polish pianist was first creating such sensations in England, as brutal contests between the piano and the pianist to settle the question of the survival of the fittest. The following description of his sensations on hearing Paderewski is not without its reminder of that once popular pièce de récitation, How Ruby Played.[110] “The concerto was over, the audience in wild enthusiasm, and the piano a wreck. Regarded as an immensely spirited young harmonious blacksmith, who puts a concerto on the piano as upon an anvil, and hammers it out with an exuberant enjoyment of the swing and strength of the proceeding, Paderewski is at least exhilarating; and his hammer play is not without variety, some of it being feathery, if not delicate. But his touch, light or heavy, is the touch that hurts; and the glory of his playing is the glory that attends murder on a large scale when impetuously done.” Three years later, in 1893, Shaw has reached the conclusion that Paderewski is a weak, a second-hand composer, but an artist whose genuine creative achievements have assured him the title of the greatest of living pianists. “I had rather see Paderewski in his next composition for orchestra drop the piano altogether,” Shaw said. “It is the one instrument he does not understand as a composer, exactly because he understands it so well as an executant.”

For David Bispham Shaw had the sincerest admiration, and the De Reszkes won his praise because, as he explained it, they sang like dignified men, instead of like male viragoes in the dramatic Italian style. He made a point of insisting, however, that Édouard de Reszke occasionally abused his power by “wilful bawling for the mere fun of making a thundering noise. On hearing Gerster in 1890, he was sufficiently charmed to say: “The old artistic feeling remained so unspoiled and vivid that, if here and there a doubt crossed me whether the notes were all reaching the furthest half-crown seat as tellingly as they came to my front stall, I ignored it for the sake of the charm which neither singer nor opera (The Huguenots) has lost for me.” Of a concert given in 1893 by “our still adored Patti,” whom he calls “now the most accomplished of mezzo-sopranos,” he gives the following description:

“It always amuses me to see that vast audience (at Albert Hall) from the squares and villas listening with moist eyes whilst the opulent lady from the celebrated Welsh castle fervently sings: 'Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage again.' The concert was a huge success: there were bouquets, raptures, effusions, kissings of children, graceful sharings of the applause with obbligato players—in short, the usual exhibition of the British bourgeoisie in the part of Bottom and the prima donna in the part of Titania. Patti hazarded none of her old exploits as a florid soprano with an exceptional range: her most arduous achievement was 'Ah, fors e lui,' so liberally transposed that the highest notes in the rapid traits were almost all sharp, the artist having been accustomed for so many years to sing them at a higher pitch. Time has transposed Patti a minor third down, but the middle of her voice is still even and beautiful; and this with her unsurpassed phrasing and that delicate touch and expressive nuance which make her cantabile singing so captivating, enables her to maintain what was, to my mind, always the best part of her old supremacy.”[111]

Of that brilliant executant Essipoff, the wife of Leschetizky, Shaw said that if it were possible to believe that she cared two straws about what she played, she would be one of the greatest executive musicians of Europe. Hollman was, on the whole and without any exception, in Shaw's opinion, the greatest violoncellist he had ever heard. Joachim's fineness of tone, perfect dignity of style, and fitness of phrasing impressed Shaw as truly magnificent; and when he heard him play Bach's “Chaconne in D minor,” he confessed that he came as near as he ever came to calling anything done by mortal artist perfect. Ysaye, that other master-violinist, moved Shaw as much as he moved Symons by the perfectly harmonious blending of his every faculty. Shaw smilingly reminded all readers of the screed of G. B. S. that “Decidedly, if Ysaye only perseveres in playing splendidly to us for twenty-five years more or so, it will dawn on us at last that he is one of the greatest of living artists; and then he may play how he pleases until he turns ninety without the least risk of ever hearing a word of disparagement or faint praise.”

In Shaw's view, Mozart is the ideal, the supreme composer. Again and again, throughout his works, Shaw has lavished upon Mozart the finely-tempered praise of the clear-eyed devotee. The critical rating of a composer is overwhelmingly impressive when it is supported by the avowal of personal indebtedness; and Shaw has frequently asserted that Mozart has influenced his dramatic works more than any English dramatist since Shakespeare. I remember discussing Mozart with Mr. Shaw one day; and I took occasion to express my scepticism as to the possibility of any profound influence exerted by Mozart the composer upon Shaw the dramatist. “In a certain sense, Mozart must always have been a model for me,” replied Mr. Shaw. “Throughout the entire period of my career as a critic of music, I always thought and wrote of Mozart as a master of masters. The dream of a musician is to have the technique of Mozart. It was not his 'divine melodies' but his perfect technique that profoundly influenced me. What a great thing to be a dramatist for dramatists, just as Mozart was a composer for composers! First, and above all things else, Mozart was a master to masters.”

The second part of Faust impressed Shaw as the summit of Schumann's achievement in dramatic music; and he was very ready to admit that Schumann had at least one gift which has now come to rank very high among the qualifications of a composer for the stage: a strong feeling for harmony as a means of emotional expression. He always found Brahms to be insufferably tedious when he tried to be profound, but delightful when he merely tried to be pleasant and naïvely sentimental. “Euphuism, which is the beginning and end of Brahms' big works,” Shaw remarks in connection with the “Symphony in E minor,” “is more to my taste in music than in literature. Brahms takes an essentially commonplace theme; gives it a strange air by dressing it in the most elaborate and far-fetched harmonies; keeps his countenance severely (which at once convinces an English audience that he must have a great deal in him); and finds that a good many wiseacres are ready to guarantee him as deep as Wagner, and the true heir of Beethoven.” Dvorak, Bohemia's most eminent creative musician, famed alike for an inexhaustible wealth of melodic invention and a rich variety of colouring, is stamped by Shaw as a romantic composer, and only that. His “Requiem” Shaw found utterly tedious and mechanical, while his “Symphony in G” is “very nearly up to the level of a Rossini overture, and would make excellent promenade music at the summer fêtes.” The announcement of a Mass by Dvorak affected Shaw very much as would the announcement of a “Divine Comedy” in ever so many cantos by Robert Louis Stevenson! He regarded Verdi as the greatest of living dramatic composers; and years before Shaw began writing musical criticism, when Von Bülow and others were contemptuously repudiating Verdi, Shaw was able to discern in him a man possessing more power than he knew how to use, or, indeed, was permitted to use by the old operatic forms imposed on him by circumstances.[112]

For the solemnly manufactured operas of Saint Saëns, Shaw felt not mere distaste, but genuine contempt. As soon, in fact, as he discovered the sort of thing that a French composer dreams of as the summit of operatic achievement, his artistic sympathy with Paris was cut off at the main. Early in his career, he solemnly announces, he gave up Paris as impossible from the artistic point of view! His characterization of French music is nothing short of Heinesque.

“London I do not so much mind. Your average Londoner is, no doubt, as void of feeling for the fine arts as a man can be without collapsing bodily; but, then, he is not at all ashamed of his condition. On the contrary, he is rather proud of it, and never feels obliged to pretend that he is an artist to the tips of his fingers. His pretences are confined to piety and politics, in both of which he is an unspeakable impostor. It is your Parisian who concentrates his ignorance and hypocrisy, not on politics and religion, but on art. In this unwholesome state of self-consciousness he demands statues and pictures and operas in all directions, long before any appetite for beauty has set his eyes or ears aching; so that he at once becomes the prey of pedants who undertake to supply him with classical works, and swaggerers who set up in the romantic department. Hence, as the Parisian, like other people, likes to enjoy himself, and as pure pedantry is tedious and pure swaggering tiresome, what Paris chiefly loves is a genius who can make the classic voluptuous and the romantic amusing. And so, though you cannot walk through Paris without coming at every corner upon some fountain or trophy or monument for which the only possible remedy is dynamite, you can always count upon the design including a female figure free from the defect known to photographers as under-exposure; and if you go to the opera—which is, happily, an easily avoidable fate—you may wonder at the expensive trifling that passes as musical poetry and drama, but you will be compelled to admit that the composer has moments, carried as far as academic propriety admits, in which he rises from sham history and tragedy to genuine polka and barcarolle; whilst there is, to boot, always one happy half-hour when the opera-singers vanish, and capable, thoroughly trained, hard-working, technically skilled executants entertain you with a ballet. Of course the ballet, like everything else in Paris, is a provincial survival, fifty years behind English time; but still it is generally complete and well done by people who understand ballet, whereas the opera is generally mutilated and ill done by people who don't understand opera.”

Is it any wonder, then, that the “tinpot stage history” of Saint Saëns was the bane of Shaw's existence and the abomination of his critical sense? Or that Offenbach's music struck him as wicked, abandoned stuff? And of Meyerbeer, then still regarded in Paris as a sort of Michelangelo, he says: “If you try to form a critical scheme of the development of English poetry from Pope to Walt Whitman, you cannot by any stretch of ingenuity make a place in it for Thomas Moore, who is accordingly either ignored in such schemes or else contemptuously dismissed as a flowery trifler. In the same way, you cannot get Meyerbeer into the Wagnerian scheme except as the Autolycus of the piece.”

The most significant feature of Shaw's career as a musical critic was his championship of Wagner. Although he had an exalted admiration for Wagner, he was no hero-worshipper, nor in the least degree blind to the defects of Wagner as a composer who failed to preserve philosophic continuity and coherence in his greatest dramatic achievement. The similarity of tastes in music between Wagner and Shaw is a very noticeable feature of the “C. di B.” and “G. B. S.” criticisms. It was to be expected that Shaw the dramatist would admire Wagner for composing music designed to heighten the expression of human emotion; he realized fully that such music was intensely affecting in the presence of that emotion, and utter nonsense apart from it. Like Wagner, Shaw had a deep love for Beethoven, an intense admiration for Mozart, and a sincere appreciation of the Mendelssohn of the Scotch symphony. And he likewise shared Wagner's sovereign contempt for the efforts of Schumann and Brahms to be “profound.”

A German would laugh at the notion that Wagner required any “championing” during the years from 1888 to 1894 inclusive, since the Bayreuth performances began in 1876. The chief novelty in Shaw's Wagner criticisms was his attack on Bayreuth for the various old-fashioned absurdities perpetrated there—the inadequacy of mise en scène, the ridiculous unnaturalness and inappropriateness of scenery and dress, and the retention in leading parts of “beer-barrels of singers” who did not know how to sing. The result of Shaw's first visit, in 1889, was an article on Bayreuth for the English Illustrated Magazine; a later visit produced an illustrated article in the Pall Mall Budget. Besides this, both visits were reported day by day by Shaw in the Star, over his signature, “Corno di Bassetto,” or “C. di B.” Up to that time, in Shaw's opinion, Bayreuth criticism had been either worship or blasphemy. “I threw off all this, and criticized performances of Wagner's works at Bayreuth precisely as I should have criticized performances of Wagner's works at Covent Garden. The effect on pious Wagnerians was as though I had brawled in church.”

In his relation of musical critic in England, Shaw took the greatest pains to ascertain the exact bearings of the controversy which had raged round Wagner's music-dramas since the middle of the century. The six years of Shaw's activity as a musical critic fell within the decade of Sir Augustus Harris's greatest operatic enterprises. Shaw spent a large part of his time in making onslaught after onslaught on the “spurious artistic prestige” of Covent Garden. For some seasons he was forced to pay for his own stall; and there were times, Shaw says, when “I was warned that my criticisms were being collated by legal experts for the purpose of proving 'prejudice' against me, and crushing me by mulcting my editor in fabulous sums.... The World proved equal to the occasion in the conflict with Covent Garden, and, finally, my invitations to the opera were renewed; the impresario made my personal acquaintance, and maintained the pleasantest relations with me from that time onward....” It is true that Jean de Reszke made his first appearance on any stage on July 13th, 1889, as the hero of Die Meistersinger; but it infuriated Sir Augustus Harris to be publicly reminded by Shaw that Tristan and Isolde, having been composed in 1859, was perhaps a little overdue. Indeed, it was not until 1896 that Tristan and Isolde at last made its way into the repertory of Royal Italian Opera in England. Shaw exhausted himself, in the columns of the World, in “apparently hopeless attempts to shame the De Reszkes out of their perpetual Faust and Mephistopheles, Romeo and Laurent, and in pooh-poohed declarations that there were such works in existence as Die Walküre and Tristan. It was not Sir Augustus Harris who roused Jean de Reszke from his long lethargy, but his own artistic conscience and the shock of Vandyk's brilliant success in Massenet's Manon.” And when Shaw's successor on the World, on the occasion of the death of Sir Augustus Harris in 1896, declared that the great impresario laboured to cast aside the fatuous conventions of the Italian school, and to adopt all that was best in the German stage, Shaw was provoked into a crushing reply. “Sancta simplicitas!” he exclaimed. “The truth is that he fought obstinately for the Italian fatuities against the German reforms. He was saturated with the obsolete operatic traditions of the days of Tietjens, whose Semiramide and Lucrezia he admired as great tragic impersonations. He described Das Rheingold as 'a damned pantomime'; he persisted for years in putting Tannhäuser on the stage with Venusberg effects that would have disgraced a Whitechapel Road gaff, with the twelve horns on the stage replaced by a military band behind the scenes, and with Rotten Row trappings on the horses.... It was only in the last few years that he began to learn something from Calvé and the young Italian school, from Wagner, from Massenet and Bruneau, and from Verdi's latest works. In opera, unfortunately, he was soaked in tradition, and kept London a quarter of a century behind New York and Berlin—down almost to the level of Paris—in dramatic music.”[113]

It happens that Shaw's squarest and solidest contributions to Wagnerian criticism were written after his career as musical critic ceased. At the request of Mr. Benjamin Tucker, editor of Liberty, a journal of Philosophic Anarchy, published in New York, Shaw wrote a reply to Max Nordau's Degeneration, which was then (1895) making a great impression on the American mind. This reply, entitled A Degenerate's View of Nordau, was published in a double copy of Liberty, especially printed to make room for it; Mr. Tucker sent a copy to every paper in America; and, as Shaw avers, Nordau's book has never been heard of in an American paper since. It was undoubtedly a great piece of journalism in those days for Mr. Tucker to pick out the right man—as Shaw unquestionably was—for that stupendous task; and Shaw still takes an unholy joy in showing how Tucker the crank was able to beat all the big fashionable editors at their own game. Besides being largely imported in England, the article did Shaw a great private service. For when William Morris read it, he at once threw off all reserve in talking to Shaw about modern art, and treated him thenceforth as a man who knew enough to understand what might be said to him on that subject. The article contained, among many other equally able things, an eminently sane and intelligible treatment of the development of modern music, and its relation to Wagner. Mr. Huneker, who regards this as Shaw's finest piece of controversial work, rightly declared that it completely swept Nordau from the field of discussion.[114]

Ahenobarbus at Rehearsal.

Reproduced from the original water-color, drawn from memory, in 1894.

Bernard Partridge.
Courtesy of the Artist.

The other piece of Wagnerian criticism by which Shaw is best known was the subject of a letter Shaw once wrote to the editor of the Academy (October 15th, 1895): “I see you have been announcing a book by me entitled, 'The Complete Wagnerite,'” writes Shaw. “This is an error; you are thinking of an author named Izaak Walton. The book, which is a work of great merit, even for me, is called, 'The Perfect Wagnerite,' and is an exposition of the philosophy of Der Ring des Nibelungen. It is a G. B. eSsence of modern Anarchism, or Neo-Protestantism. This lucid description speaks for itself. As it has been written on what the whole medical faculty and all the bystanders declare to be my death-bed, it is naturally rather a book of devotion than one of those vain brilliancies which I was wont to give off in the days of my health and strength.—P. S. I have just sprained my ankle in trying to master the art of bicycling on one foot. This, with two operations and a fall downstairs, involving a broken arm, is my season's record so far, leaving me in excellent general condition. And yet they tell me a vegetarian can't recuperate!” In this commentary to what had already been written by “musicians who are no revolutionists, and revolutionists who are no musicians,” Shaw reads into Wagner far more Socialism than he had ever read into Ibsen. He took pains to base his interpretation upon the facts of Wagner's life—his connection with the revolution of 1848, his association with August Roeckel and Michael Bakounin, his later pamphlets on social evolution, religion, life, art, and the influence of riches—rather than upon his recorded utterances in regard to the specific meanings of the “Ring” music-dramas. It is not difficult to recognize, with Shaw, the portraiture of our capitalistic industrial system from the Socialist point of view in the slavery of the Niblungs and the tyranny of Alberich: but little significance attaches to such cheap symbolism. It is more difficult to identify the young Siegfried with the anarchist Bakounin on the strength of the latter's notorious pamphlet demanding the demolition of existing institutions. To the Ring of the Niblungs, Shaw has, so to speak, applied the Ibsenic-Nietzschean-Shavian philosophy as a unit of measure, and found it to apply at many points. Siegfried is a “totally unmoral person, a born Anarchist, the ideal of Bakounin, an anticipation of the 'overman' of Nietzsche”—a Germanized Dick Dudgeon or a Teutonic Prometheus. Whenever the philosophy of the “Ring” diverges from the Shavian philosophy, Wagner was “wandering in his mind.” Whenever his own explanations do not agree with the idée fixe of Shaw, they only prove, as was once claimed by Shaw in the case of Ibsen, that Wagner was far less intellectually conscious of his purpose than Shaw. As an exposition of the Shavian philosophy, the book is worthy of note; as an exposition of the Wagnerian philosophy, it is unconvincing. The book is exceedingly ingenious and in places, brilliant; but it is the work of an ideologue and an a-priorist.

One final word in regard to Shaw's position as a champion of Wagner. While it is of little importance now, still Wagner and anti-Wagner was the great controversy of that time in music until anti-Wagnerism finally became ridiculous in the face of Wagner's overwhelming popularity. In the same way, Ibsen and anti-Ibsen was the great controversy in drama in London after 1889. In both instances, the whirligig of time has brought round its revenges. For some years, even before his death, Ibsen stood unchallenged as the premier dramatist of the age. And now that Wagner's battle is won and over-won, Shaw has the profound gratification of seeing “the professors, to avert the ridicule of their pupils, compelled to explain (quite truly) that Wagner's technical procedure in music is almost pedantically logical and grammatical; that the Lohengrin prelude is a masterpiece of the 'form' proper to its aim; and that his disregard of 'false relations,' and his free use of the most extreme discords without 'preparation,' were straight and sensible instances of that natural development of harmony which has proceeded continually from the time when common six-four chords were considered 'wrong,' and such free use of unprepared dominant sevenths and minor ninths as had become common in Mozart's time would have seemed the maddest cacophony.” And in a letter to me, Mr. Shaw said (July 15th, 1905): “I was on the right side in both instances: that is all. According to the Daily Chronicle, Wagner and Ibsen were offensive impostors. As a matter of fact, they were the greatest living masters in their respective arts; and I knew that quite well. The critics of the nineteenth century had two first-rate chances—Ibsen and Wagner. For the most part they missed both. Second best they could recognize; but best was beyond them.”[115]

Mr. Shaw's most recent incursion into the field of music criticism was occasioned by a criticism of Richard Strauss' Elektra, at the time of its first production in England in March, 1910, from the pen of the well-known critic of music, Mr. Ernest Newman. The vigorous controversy between Mr. Shaw and Mr. Newman that ensued was, of course, quite inconclusive, so far as erecting any absolute standards by which Strauss' greatness as a dramatic composer might be judged. But it evoked from Mr. Shaw an outburst of enthusiasm unparalleled in his career as a critic of music:

“What Hofmannsthal and Strauss have done is to take Clytemnestra and Aegistheus, and by identifying them with everything that is evil and cruel, with all that needs must hate the highest when it sees it, with hideous domination and coercion of the higher by the baser, with the murderous rage in which the lust for a lifetime of orgiastic pleasure turns on its slaves in the torture of its disappointment and the sleepless horror and misery of its neurasthenia, to so rouse in us an overwhelming flood of wrath against it and ruthless resolution to destroy it, that Elektra's vengeance becomes holy to us; and we come to understand how even the gentlest of us could wield the axe of Orestes or twist our firm fingers in the black hair of Clytemnestra to drag back her head and leave her throat open to the stroke.

“That was a task hardly possible to an ancient Greek. ...And that is the task which Hofmannsthal has achieved. Not even in the third scene of Das Rheingold, or in the Klingsor scenes in Parsifal, is there such an atmosphere of malignant and cancerous evil as we get here. And that the power with which it is done is not the power of the evil itself, but of the passion that detests and must and finally can destroy that evil, is what makes the work great, and makes us rejoice in its horror....

“That the power of conceiving it should occur in the same individual as the technical skill and natural faculty needed to achieve its complete and overwhelming expression in music, is a stroke of the rarest good fortune that can befall a generation of men. I have often said, when asked to state the case against the fools and moneychangers who are trying to drive us into a war with Germany, that the case consists of the single word, Beethoven. To-day, I should say with equal confidence, Strauss. That we should make war on Strauss and the heroic warfare and aspiration that he represents is treason to humanity. In this music-drama Strauss has done for us just what he has done for his own countrymen: he has said for us, with an utterly satisfying force, what all the noblest powers of life within us are clamouring to have said, in protest against and defiance of the omnipresent villainies of our civilization; and this is the highest achievement of the highest art.”[116]

So often was Shaw mocked by scepticism concerning his talent and by imperviousness to his mood, that he sometimes actually went to the length of tagging one of his Irish bulls with the explanatory parenthesis (“I speak as an Irishman”). If the larger public ever gains a just understanding of Shaw, it will be because they have found this central and directing clue: he speaks as an Irishman. The right to say in jest what is meant in earnest is a right the average Englishman denies; he agrees with Victor Hugo that “every man has a right to be a fool, but he should not abuse that right.” M. Faguet has recently said of Sainte Beuve that he was guided by one of the finest professional consciences the world of literature has ever known. Early in his career, Shaw succeeded in imparting to his readers the conviction that his glaring deficiency was the total lack of a professional conscience. Shaw was preoccupied with the exposition of the eternal comedy. He is that hitherto unknown phenomenon in the history of musical criticism—a musical critic who charged his critical weapon with genuine comic force. The conviction has probably come to every musical critic in some moment of self-distrust that his effort to catch and imprison in written words the elusive spirit of music is, after all, only a more or less humorous subterfuge. In this respect Shaw differs from every other musical critic who ever lived: instead of feeling his criticism to be merely a humorous subterfuge, he actually believed it to be a comically veracious impression of reality.

No view of Shaw's unique attitude as a critic has yet been obtained that is not one-sided, false, or—what is far worse—misleading. The absurdly simple truth is that Shaw always aimed at saying, in the most forcible and witty way possible, exactly what he thought and felt, however absurd, unnatural, or comic these criticisms might sound to the “poor, silly, simple public.” To the feelings of other musical critics, to the prejudices of the dry academic schools, or even to the consensus of opinion, crystallized through the lapse of years, he paid no heed whatsoever. He did not feel himself bound by the traditions of any journal, by any obligations, fancied or real, to operatic managers, or by the predilections of his audience. In fact, to put it in a homely way, he was “his own man,” feeling free to express his opinions exactly as he chose. And it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that, since 1885, the whole spirit of English criticism, personified in Walkley, Archer and Shaw—an Englishman of French descent, a Scotchman, and an Irishman—has been a spirit of forthrightness, outspoken frankness and unblushing sincerity.

In the matter of individual style, Shaw occupies an absolutely unique position in English literature. He occupied a more unusual terrain than had ever been occupied before. Concerning the subjects in which he claimed to be thoroughly versed, he gaily announced himself as an authority. With an air of grandiose condescension, he once confessed that he might be mistaken: “Even I am not infallible—that is, not always.” He really meant that he was. “Let it be remembered, that I am a superior person,” he characteristically says, “and that what seemed incoherent and wearisome fooling to me may have seemed an exhilarating pastime to others. My heart knows only its own bitterness; and I do not desire to intermeddle with the joys of those among whom I am a stranger. I assert my intellectual superiority—that is all.” He was ever sublimely conscious of his own supreme dialectical and critical skill. “Some day I must write a supplement to Schumann's 'Advice to Young Musicians.' The title will be 'Advice to Old Musicians'; and the first precept will run, 'Don't be in a hurry to contradict G. B. S., as he never commits himself on a musical subject until he knows at least six times as much about it as you do.'” If he had been matched in argument with the greatest living critic of the arts—and he was frequently matched against the greatest English critics—he would doubtless have said to him, in the language of the apocryphal anecdote: “All the world's mad save thee and me, John. And sometimes I think thee's a little mad too.”

Behind all this “infernal blague” lurks the real critic, whose chief conviction is that “Bach in B minor” is not fit subject for enjoyment or criticism. “I would not be misunderstood,” Mr. Shaw remarked to me one day, “in regard to my position about analysis and 'analytic criticism.' The analytic criticism I mercilessly condemn is the sort of criticism of Hamlet's soliloquy that reads: 'It is highly significant, in the first place, that Hamlet begins his soliloquy with the infinitive of the verb “To be,” etc., etc' Far from minimizing the function of analysis sanely and appropriately employed in criticism, I attribute my superiority as a critic to my superiority in the faculty of analysis.” The inevitable reaction from “absolute music” was the dramatic expression of individuality, e.g., Wagner. The inevitable reaction from “analytic criticism” is the critical expression of individuality, e.g., Shaw. He never hunted out false relations, consecutive fifths and sevenths, the first subject, the second subject, the working out, and all the rest of “the childishness that could be taught to a poodle.” His supreme effort was to get away from a discussion of the technology of music to the nuances of the music itself, the source of its inspiration, the spirit of its genius. If Shaw should find Wagner an offensive charlatan and his themes cacophonous strings of notes, he would frankly say so, without making any effort to prove him so by laying down the first principles of character and composition, and showing that his conduct and his works are incompatible with these principles. The expert, in Shaw's view, should merely give you his personal opinion for what it is worth. Shaw protested against the whole academic system in England, and declared himself its open enemy. “This unhappy country would be as prolific of musical as of literary composers were it not for our schools of music, where they seize the young musician, turn his attention forcibly away from the artistic element in his art, and make him morbidly conscious of its mechanical conditions, especially the obsolete ones, until he at last becomes, not a composer, but an adept in a horribly dull sort of chess played with lines and dots, each player having different notions of what the right rules are, and playing his game so as to flourish his view under the noses of those who differ from him. Then he offers his insufferable gambits to the public as music, and is outraged because I criticize it as music and not as chess.”

Shaw made the most persistent effort to encourage the employment of the vernacular in music, as well as in criticism of music. An arrant commonplace, made out of the most hackneyed commonplace in modern music, pleased him more than all the Tenterden Street specialties. “I cry 'Professor' whenever I find a forced avoidance of the vernacular in music under the impression that it is vulgar.... Your men who really can write, your Dickenses, Ruskins and Carlyles, and their like, are vernacular above all things: they cling to the locutions which everyday use has made a part of our common life. The professors may ask me whether I seriously invite them to make their music out of the commonplaces of the comic song writer? I reply, unabashed, that I do.”

With the deepest fervour, he continued to preach the doctrine of spontaneity and naturalness. “Why hesitate to perpetrate the final outrage of letting loose your individuality, and saying just what you think in your own way as agreeably and frankly as you can?” His own aim was to reach that truly terrible fellow, the average man—“the plain man who wants a plain answer.” If he can only awake the attention of the man in the street and, by expressing himself frankly in everyday language, the quotidian commerce of thought, occasionally even in the vernacular of the street, make clear to that man the appeal that music makes to a critic acutely sensitive to the subtler implications of its highest forms, Shaw is perfectly satisfied with himself and his performance. Accordingly, he aimed, primarily, to make an exact record of the sensations induced by a certain piece of music, or a certain performer, Don Juan or De Reszke, Letty Lind or The Pirates of Penzance. He made no effort whatsoever to control the current of his humour. He allowed it to play as lightly about Patti, as uproariously about Paderewski, as derisively about Vieuxtemps as his inclination directed. The most solemn symphony excited his risibility to the explosion point, and the latest Mass suggested seaside promenades instead of the life of the world to come.

Shaw's efforts to free musical criticism from the blighting effects of academicism, his advocacy of the free expression of individuality, and his insistence upon the return to nature, both in music and in criticism, brought upon him the scorn and contempt that is always the meed of the would-be reformer. The French public looked up to Francisque Sarcey with a sort of filial veneration, and affectionately dubbed him “uncle.” The English public sneered at Shaw's brilliant attacks upon their favourites and their idols, and looked down upon him, not as a reasonable human being, but, as Shaw expressed it, as a mere Aunt Sally. Not only did the critics and the public laugh at his revolutionary zeal, but they regarded him as an amusing incompetent, availing himself of his abundant gift of humour to supply the deficiency of any knowledge of music or of the possession of the faintest critical sense. Analytic criticism was revered, while the individual and impressionistic style of Shaw was immoderately enjoyed as the tricky device of a colossal humbug. Shaw fought against misrepresentation and prejudice with unabated vigour, continually confounding his critics with some unanswerable argument that logically reduced their attacks to nothingness. By apt examples, he often revealed the absurdities of analytic criticism in literature, once confronting his critics with the startling query: “I want to know whether it is just that a literary critic should be forbidden to make his living in this way on pain of being interviewed by two doctors and a magistrate, and hauled off to Bedlam forthwith; whilst the more a musical critic does it, the deeper the veneration he inspires. By systematically neglecting it I have lost caste as a critic even in the eyes of those who hail my abstinence with the greatest relief; and I should be tempted to eke out these columns in the Mesopotamian manner if I were not the slave of a commercial necessity and a vulgar ambition to have my articles read, this being the main reason why I write them, and the secret of the constant 'straining after effect' observable in my style.”

Perhaps the most enlightening evidence as to Shaw's position as a critic of music is contained in his recital of an amusing incident. One day, it seems, a certain young man, whose curiosity overswayed his natural modesty, approached Shaw on the subject of the G. B. S. column in the World. “At last he came to his point with a rush by desperately risking the question: 'Excuse me, Mr. G. B. S., but do you know anything about music? The fact is, I am not capable of forming an opinion myself; but Dr. Blank says you don't, and—er—Dr. Blank is such a great authority that one hardly knows what to think.' Now this question put me into a difficulty, because I had already learnt by experience that the reason my writings on music and musicians are so highly appreciated is that they are supposed by many of my greatest admirers to be a huge joke, the point of which lies in the fact that I am totally ignorant of music, and that my character of critic is an exquisitely ingenious piece of acting, undertaken to gratify my love of mystification and paradox. From this point of view every one of my articles appears as a fine stroke of comedy, occasionally broadening into a harlequinade, in which I am the clown, and Dr. Blank the policeman. At first I did not realize this, and could not understand the air of utter disillusion and loss of interest in me that would come over people in whose houses I incautiously betrayed some scrap of amateurish enlightenment. But the naïve exclamation, 'Oh! you do know something about it, then!' at last became familiar to me; and I now take particular care not to expose my knowledge. When people hand me a sheet of instrumental music, and ask my opinion of it, I carefully hold it upside down, and pretend to study it in that position with the eye of an expert. They invite me to try their new grand piano, I attempt to open it at the wrong end; and when the young lady of the house informs me that she is practising the 'cello, I innocently ask her whether the mouthpiece did not cut her lips dreadfully at first. This line of conduct gives enormous satisfaction, in which I share to a rather greater extent than is generally supposed. But, after all, the people whom I take in thus are only amateurs. To place my impostorship beyond question, I require to be certified as such by authorities like our Bachelors and Doctors of Music—gentlemen who can write a 'Nunc Dimittis' in five real parts, and know the difference between a tonal fugue and a real one, and can tell you how old Monteverde was on his thirtieth birthday, and have views as to the true root of the discord of the seventh on the supertonic, and devoutly believe that si contra fa diabolus est. But I have only to present myself to them in the character of a man who has been through these dreary games without ever discovering the remotest vital connection between them and the art of music—a state of mind so inconceivable by them—to make them exclaim:

“'Preposterous ass! that never read so far
To know the cause why music was ordained,'

and give me the desired testimonials at once. And so I manage to scrape along without falling under suspicion of being an honest man.

“However, since mystification is not likely to advance us in the long run, may I suggest that there must be something wrong in the professional tests which have been successfully applied to Handel, to Mozart, to Beethoven, to Wagner, and last, though not least, to me, with the result in every case of our condemnation as ignoramuses and charlatans. Why is it that when Dr. Blank writes about music, nobody but a professional musician can understand him; whereas the man-in-the-street, if fond of art and capable of music, can understand the writings of Mendelssohn, Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz, or any of the composers? Why, again, is it that my colleague, W. A., for instance, in criticizing Mr. Henry Arthur Jones' play the other day, did not parse all the leading sentences in it? I will not be so merciless as to answer these questions now, though I know the solution, and am capable of giving it if provoked beyond endurance. Let it suffice for the moment that writing is a very difficult art, criticism a very difficult process, and music not easily to be distinguished, without special critical training, from the scientific, technical and professional conditions of its performance, composition and teaching. And if the critic is to please the congregation, who wants to read only about the music, it is plain that he must appear quite beside the point to the organ-blower, who wants to read about his bellows, which he can prove to be the true source of all the harmony.”[117]

FOOTNOTES:

[105] Mr. T. P. O'Connor.

[106] In speaking of his first appearance as a journalistic writer—in a “London Letter,” written, at the age of fifteen, for a well-known journal in Scarborough—Max Beerbohm once wrote (the Saturday Review, January 26th, 1901): “I well remember that the first paragraph I wrote was in
reference to the first number of the Star, which had just been published. Mr. T. P. O'Connor, in his editorial pronunciamento, had been hotly philanthropic. 'If,' he had written, 'we enable the charwoman to put two lumps of sugar in her tea instead of one, then we shall not have worked in vain.' My comment on this was that if Mr. O'Connor were to find that charwomen did not take sugar in their tea, his paper would, presumably, cease to be issued.... I quote it merely to show that I, who am still regarded as a young writer, am exactly connate with Mr. Shaw. For it was in this very number of the Star that Mr. Shaw, as 'Corno di Bassetto,' made his first bow to the public.” This latter statement, although inaccurate, is essentially correct.

[107] The name of a musical instrument which went out of use in Mozart's time.

[108] In his introduction to the Dramatic Essays of John Forster and George Henry Lewes.

[109] In the Days of Our Youth. In the Star, February 19th, 1906.

[110] The reference is to Rubinstein.

[111] Music, signed G. B. S., in the World, June 7th, 1893.

[112] In this connection compare Shaw's article: A Word More about Verdi, in the Anglo-Saxon Review, Vol. VIII., March, 1901.

[113] De Mortuis, signed G. B. S., in the Saturday Review, July 4th, 1896.

[114] In the letter Mr. Tucker wrote to Mr. Shaw at Easter, 1895, Shaw once told me, he said that he knew Shaw was the only man in the world capable of tackling Nordau on his various fields of music, literature, painting, etc.: “He said that if I would find out the highest figure ever paid by, say, the Nineteenth Century for a single article to any writer, not excluding Gladstone or any other eminent man, he would pay me that sum for a review of 'Degeneration' for his little paper. This, mind you, from a man who was publishing a paper at his own expense, without a chance of making anything out of it, and with a considerable chance of finding himself in prison some day for telling the truth about American institutions. Mr. Tucker probably worked double shifts and ate half meals for the next two or three years to pay off what the adventure cost him.” This essay, somewhat amplified, was recently (February, 1908) published in America by Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y.—in England by the New Age Press, London—under the title, The Sanity of Art: an Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate.

[115] Is Shaw, the anti-romantic, consistent in championing Wagner, the head and front of European romanticism? Shaw, the individualist, recognized that Wagner was a great creative force in art; that was sufficient cause for his championship. It may be interesting in this connection to consult Julius Bab's acute analysis of Shaw's Wagnerism: Bernard Shaw (S. Fischer, Berlin), pp. 210-214.

[116] The 'Elektra' of Strauss and Hofmannsthal. A letter to the editor of the Nation (London), March 19th, 1910.

[117] Music, in the World, February 18th, 1893.

THE DRAMATIC CRITIC

Mac Beth.
Oth Ello.
Comedy of Er Rors.
Merchant of Ve Nice.
Coriol Anus.
Midsummer Night's D Ream.
Merry Wives of Win Dsor.
Measure for Mea Sure.
Much Ado about Not Hing.
Antony and Cleop Atra.
All's Well that Ends Well.[118]

FOOTNOTES:

[118] The conclusive cryptographic proof that Bernard Shaw wrote the plays usually attributed to Shakespeare—discovered by Mr. S. T. James, of Leeds.