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:

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:

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:

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.

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]