JACQUES BARZUN
619
Inside the play is the scene in hell, and there Don juan, who is
temporarily the shade of the play's hero as well as the spokesman for
Shaw, launches into a tirade against art. He acknowledges that,
thanks to art, he has cultivated his senses and derived "great delight
for many years." But the artist "with his love songs and his paintings
and his poems ... led me at last into the worship of Woman .. .. "
And this "beauty worshipping and happiness hunting and woman
idealizing was not worth a dump as a philosophy of life."
In case this indictment should not be strong enough, Shaw
gives his hero three splendid aphorisms. First, a true philosophy of
life "reduced art to the mere schooling of my faculties." Second,
"Music is the brandy of the damned." And third (one of the maxims
for revolutionists), "The nineteenth century was the Age of Faith in
the Fine Arts: The results are before us."
That maxim is the clue to the previous onslaught and to Shaw's
difference from Stendhal. Stendhal's philosophy had succeeded in
the nineteenth century
as a belief-
the romanticist belief in regenera–
tion through art as the expression of true individual selves. But at
the dawn of the next century, his alter ego Bernard Shaw, an artist
brought up in the same creed, sees that man and society are still
unregenerate, and he looks for another remedy. The remedy is two–
fold: the economic remaking of society through socialism and life
enhanced by the further evolution of man's intelligence.
This one ultimate difference between the two music critics, or
rather, the artistic and historical perspective that it affords, was the
point of my taking the risk of a comparison.
I should logically stop with this
quod erat demonstrandum.
But as
in
Don Giovanni
and
Saint Joan,
there is need for a brief epilogue.
Shaw continued after
Man and Superman
to be a passionate devotee of
music and the other arts. He kept writing criticism and thinking like
a nineteenth-century man. That forgivable inconsistency reduces his
divergence from Stendhal in one material way, for, of course, Sten–
dhal never repudiated art. And the attentive reader will surely have
noticed another reconciliation: these two artists acknowledged alike
that there was something above and greater than art, which is life
itself. Hence the absence of musician- or artist-heroes from both the
novels and the plays.
Jacques Barzunformerly was provost and is Emeritus Professor
of
His–
tory
at Columbia University. His latest book is
Critical Questions: On
Music and Letters, Culture and Biography
1940-80,
recently published
by the University of Chicago Press.
