JACQUES BARZUN
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schools and innovations, both in composition and performance. They
were teaching music history at the same time as appreciation. And
in doing so, they never hesitated to express shocking opinions or to
satirize the mind and the behavior of contemporary audiences. Sten–
dhal, as his friend Merimee noted, was courageous in the salon no
less than in anonymous print; and Shaw earned his reputation as a
rude iconoclast first of all as a reviewer of music . What enabled them
to survive protests and resentment was the compelling attraction of
prose styles such as had never been seen before.
Stendhal and Shaw obviously shared the dramatic tempera–
ment; the latter wrote plays, the former long tried to- he even took
courses in dramatic elocution from a professional. In each of them
the temperament went deeper than love of the stage and its smell of
grease paint. They conceived of life itself as drama. Stendhalloved
Italy and castigated France, because the Italians alone lived dramat–
ically. The violence of their passions had not shrunk into the petty
hostilities of a polished society . Shaw's revolutionary ardor sprang
from an Early-Christian belief that the individual must save his soul
by fighting for righteousness . He thought the greatest passage in
English literature was the scene of bloodshedding in
Pilgrim's Progress.
True, the librettos of opera usually trivialize moral conflict, but the
music does not , if the opera is great. And in religious music, the
same life-and-death issues inform the oratorios and other works
based on sacred history and prophecy.
The mark of the dramatic temperament is that it abhors sen–
timentality and is at ease with strong effects in art, sentimentality
being the refusal to act out one's emotions in life, and strong effects
in art being but the expression of strong passions in life. Accord–
ingly , Stendhal and Shaw had nothing but scorn for people boasting
of artistic sensibility who thought that art should always be delicate
and gentle, music particularly. When respectable Londoners ob–
jected to the "shocking noise" made by the Salvation Army bands,
Shaw went to hear their music and pronounced it excellent. "Imag–
ine a band with forty-three trombones!" Like Berlioz, our two wanted
music to "make their nerves vibrate ." Stendhal, indeed, has been
misunderstood precisely because he laid stress on the physicial force
of music. He did not know that one day Shaw would write about the
Rakoczy March in the
Damnation of Faust
that if it had gone on one
minute longer, he would have rushed out and taken Trafalgar Square
by storm.
In a word , music was an expression of life passionately felt.
Music does not depict scenes or describe objects or tell stories, but it
mysteriously embodies the continuous motion and emotion that we
