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_.”
[Illustration: =“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]
[Illustration: =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.