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dictate his ideas Newman had allowed his ideas to pervert some of
the documentary material-to misrepresent the contents of some of
the Liszt-D'Agoult letters to make them support his contentions about
the relations of the two people. After this demonstration-which New–
man, as far as I know, didn't answer, and whose correctness I discovered
when I looked up the volume of correspondence-one couldn't be
confident about the rigor and scrupulousness of Newman's dealing
with documentary material elsewhere, and specifically in
The Life oj
Richard Wagn er.
And as it happened, the publication in 1951 of a
volume of Hanslick's music criticism enabled me to discover how
Newman had misrepresented the review of Wagner's concert in Vienna
in 1872 and other writings of Hanslick. Moreover, though Newman
didn't answer Engel's demonstration of his scholarly malpractice in
The Man Liszt
in 1935, he did deal in an extraordinary manner with
certain highly vulnerable statements in Engel's review of the third
volume of the Wagner biography in 1941-among them Engel's
monstrous contention that because of the connection between Wagner–
ism and Nazism "we should ban and bum every scrap of Wagner's
music and writings, and every book written about the amazing wizard,
beginning with the books of the Anglo-Wagnerian Ernest Newman."
What was extraordinary in Newman's dealing with this was that he
answered it not in 1941 in a letter or article, but in 1946, long after
Engel's death, in an appendix of the final volume of the Wagner
biography; and he asked the world to believe that "if I have not
made a practice of replying to Dr. Engel's ill-tempered comments ...
it is because I would as soon have thought of going round with an
antiseptic cloth wiping up the slaver of a rabid dog. But I feel that I
ought not to bring the present biography to a close without some
exposure of the manners and the methods of this gentleman"; but it
seemed clear that actually he had adopted the strategy of remaining
silent when Engel had made a criticism that was valid and effective
and replying when Engel had said something monstrously stupid, and of
claiming then that such monstrous stupidity was what he had ignored
before. These methods and manners didn't restore confidence in the
rigor and scrupulousness of Newman's operation as a scholar; and
what he had revealed here one began to recognize in the critical
writing: much of it was the writing of a bullying tooth-and-nail de–
bater who used incorrect facts in fallacious reasoning against mis–
statements of what he was arguing against.
This-about which I will say more in a moment-is only one
of the things one discovers in reading the three collections. Another
