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is how poor the writing is-how verbose, and as a result how inexact
in statement and conducive to fallacy in reasoning; and how badly
it performs the critic's primary and essential task of describing and
evaluating the work of art that is presented
to
him. This too I will
say more about presently; but an interesting preliminary at this point
is Newman's comment on the music criticism of Bernard Shaw collected
in
Music in London 1890-94.
As a young provincial who confined his
reading of criticism to men like Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Brunetiere and
Lessing, Newman hadn't known of the mere musical journalism Shaw
was doing in London; and reading it for the first time in 1932 he
noted that Shaw "concerned himself with music only as it came his way
week by week in . .. performances, and . . . went no further into any
subject than his couple of columns ... demanded of him," and that–
using in this his knowledge of what he was writing about, his "lively
intellect" and a literary style with "direc tness . . . point .. . wit and
humor"-he produced articles "not only as readable but as valuable
in 1932 as they were in 1890." What is interesting about this is that
the operation which produced Shaw's writing-the concert-reviewing
in a newspaper which he was content
to
dcr-Newman from the
be–
ginning of his own career disdained and denounced as a worthless
activity and a waste of the critic's powers that should be devoted to
"lengthy and connected essays in book form" and the other loftier
activities Newman carried on in addition to the concert-reviewing he
was compelled to do. And worthless too, in Newman's opinion, was
what Shaw accepted as his critical task in his reviewing- the task, as
E. M. Forster has described it, of considering the work of art "as an
object in itself ... and [telling] us what [he can] about its life," or, as
Henry D. Aiken once put it, of attending
to,
and reporting, "what
one directly hea rs and feel s" in the work. This Newman described
contemptuously as "performing a fantasia on [one's] own 'reactions'
to a work," which, he contended, told a reader nothing about the
work, but only things about the critic that were of no interest or
value to anyone else. Not, again, that Newman, in his own concert–
reviewing. didn't do what he was con temptuous of; but in addition he
professed to do what he contended was the critic's
real
task, which
is
to
inform the reader about the operation of the composer's mind.
And it is ironic that whereas Shaw, content with his modest objective,
produced wonderfully perceptive writing that is fascinating today,
Newman, contemptuous of that objective and pursuing his more pre·
tentious ones, failed not only in these but in the modest one he dis–
dained, producing not only pretentious think-pieces that were erroneous
