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PARTISAN REVIEW
music largely through self-education, by listening and reading widely,
though each had a start in early music lessons. Shaw emerged as the
better trained of the two, because his mother and quasi father were
both professionals; but Stendhal also had some training- enough to
make him resent his family's failure to provide him with better teachers
-and the notion that he was a musical illiterate is now entirely dis–
carded.
The body of music criticism that each of our men has left us is
abundant. Though some of Stendhal's is scattered in diaries and
travel books, it may be estimated as not far from equal in bulk to
Shaw's six volumes of collected reviews, speeches, and letters to the
press- all about music . What is amazing after we take in that fact is
that neither writer went on to make a musician a principal figure in
any of his fiction.
It could be argued that this generality is partly blurred by the
character of Owen Jack in the third of Shaw's five and a half novels,
Love Among the Artists
(1881). But the chief trait of Owen Jack is his
rude arrogance, arising from the consciousness that he is a
genius among philistines- so much of a genius that he decides against
marriage as an impediment to art. His role in the novel is to upset
the fuddy-duddies who run the Antient Orpheus Society and are
petrified by his new music; the novel makes no attempt to describe
the inner workings of a composer's mind. Its purpose, Shaw later ex–
plained, was to show the difference between people who enjoy the
fine arts as dabblers and those in whom it is a passion . Whatever one
concludes about this figure in Shaw's prentice work, it remains note–
worthy that in none of his fifty-three plays is there a leading char–
acter who is a musician. Indeed, there are only two artists: March–
banks, the fledgling poet in
Candida,
and Dubedat, the immoral
painter in
The Doctor's Dilemma.
In Stendhal the absence of musicians is likewise complete. Nor
is much use made of music as part of life in the imaginative work of
either writer. In Stendhal the one conspicuous incident involving
music is the effect of hearing Cimarosa's
Matrimonio segreto
on
Mathilde in
The Red and the Black:
she detests music, but the opera
releases her pent-up passion of love, and she bursts into a torrent of
tears . In the rest of his fictions, Stendhal is content simply to name
concerts or operas as a means of suggesting contemporary reality. In
a few places he refers to music for comic effect, and so does Shaw–
for instance in the fourth act of
Caesar and Cleopatra,
where the
queen's professor of music, after teaching her the harp for two
