Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Silly, rotten, derivative, but sane - George Bernard Shaw's The Sanity of Art

George Bernard Shaw’s little books or pamphlets on Henrik Ibsen and Richard Wagner – The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) and The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) – were so much fun that I rounded out the trilogy with The Sanity of Art (1895).  The three essays have been collected under the boooring title Major Critical Essays, but I read online scans of old versions.

The Sanity of Art is a demolition job against Max Nordau’s screed Degeneration (1892) which was having a vogue in England.  Nordau’s book is a classic in the “everything is going to hell” genre, especially interesting because 1) the sad, terrible irony of what the Nazis would do with this idea (Nordau was a founder of Zionism), and 2) he goes after all of the wrong targets.  It is amazing.  Ibsen, Wagner, Tolstoy, Wilde, the pre-Raphaelites, Impressionist painting, and this art is not merely bad or harmful but insane, which is hardly their fault as they are only symptoms of the overall degeneration of the human brain.

Alternatively, Nordau hits all of the right targets, since everything only gets worse, across the board.  I mean, if you think Whistler, Monet, and D. G. Rossetti are evidence of the end of civilization, wait’ll you see what Picasso, Kandinsky, and Duchamp are going to do.

Shaw argues that the relevant works are “wholly beneficial and progressive, and in no sense insane or decadent” (29), which is perhaps too easy of an argument, too much of a bug-squashing.  He calls it “riveting his book to the counter” with “a nail long enough to go through a few pages by other people as well” (113).

More interesting is watching Shaw work through the central problem of contemporary arts criticism, telling the rotten imitators from the real artists.

Thus you have here again a movement which is thoroughly beneficial and progressive presenting a hideous appearance of moral corruption and decay, not only to our old-fashioned religious folk, but to our comparatively modern scientific Rationalists as well.  And here again, because the press and the gossips have found out that this apparent corruption and decay is considered the right thing in some influential quarters, and must be spoken of with respect, and patronized and published and sold and read, we have a certain number of pitiful imitators taking advantage of their tolerance to bring out really silly and rotten stuff, which the reviewers are afraid to expose, lest it, too, should turn out to be the correct thing.  (69)

I’m not sure if Shaw is being too hard on the reviewers or too easy.  But he is correct that the art of our time almost always looks decadent.  No critic is wrong when he complains that there is too much derivative trivia out there, and too much garbage.

Even at such stupidly conservative concerts as those of the London Philharmonic Society I have seen ultra-modern composers, supposed to be representatives of the Wagnerian movement, conducting pretentious rubbish…  And then, of course, there are the young imitators, who are corrupted by the desire to make their harmonies sound like those of the masters whose purposes and principles of work they are too young to understand, and who fall between the old forms and the new into simple incoherence.  (42-3)

In the identical riff in the section on Impressionists, Shaw says that Whistler’s imitators paint “figures placed apparently in coal cellars,” making them look, if I do not understand what they are doing, insane.  If I do understand, they merely look mediocre and derivative.

The Sanity of Art is bracing for a critic, and is only incidentally itself a rant.  Do your jobs, critics!  Yessir, Mr. Shaw.

Page numbers from the 1907 edition I found at Hathi Trust.

20 comments:

  1. I've been reading Shaw too, and he'll be my next post (if I ever get around to it; maybe today). Of course, I'm not adverse to the idea that Ibsen does signify the end of art.

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  2. Ibsen is a good candidate! Ibsen plus Wagner even better.

    I should read Shaw's plays sometime.

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  3. As I think I noted previously, Shaw impressed me more as a critic than a playwright; if he had an infusion of Oscar Wilde's wit, he might have been a better dramatist. But at least Shaw made sure Ibsen got noticed in England. Hooray for Shaw!

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  4. These long critical essays have plenty of wit. Are the plays generally not funny? I read Mrs. Warren's Profession long ago and did not find it funny at all - how good can that memory be, how good could that reading have been - but Candida, the one Shaw play I have read in the last 25 years, was quite funny.

    I am just an ignoramus about the plays.

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    1. Mrs Warren's Profession is the most recent one I read. Is it funny? Is it meant to be funny? - I think it's termed a comedy at least; but really it's a very bitter satire - as are all these plays. Shaw looks at society and doesn't like what he sees. I don't remember there being jokes, or even inherently comedic scenes.

      I'd assumed you'd read all the plays.

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    2. A bitter satire, yes, that is how I remember it. It was only years later, reading about Shaw, that I kept coming across his witty side, and eventually it sank in that he might write more than one kind of thing. The film critic Stanley Kauffmann was a big help here. He was a great Shaw fan who was attuned to his comedy, like in the play You Never Can Tell, a comedy of errors with mistaken identities and such nonsense.

      Until recently, though, I have not bothered to see for myself.

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  5. I think the plays are generally not very funny, but I prefer Wilde; let each audience member make up his or her own mind about Shaw (a playwright who remains popular in university theater departments).

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    1. Shaw ...remains popular in university theater departments.
      Perhaps that's why the plays don't seem very funny.

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  6. i think it's hard to beat "the new ashmolean marching society and students conservatory band"!

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  7. We'll be seeing "Mrs. Warren’s Profession" in March. We saw Wilde's "Ernest" last season; I'd never seen it nor read it and found it hi-larious. A couple of years ago we saw "Pygmalion" and it was pretty darned good, too.

    The thing about Shaw, maybe, is that his humor can be mean-spirited, like Shakespeare's. What was that Shaw play you wrote about a few years ago, the one about Shakespeare and Walter Scott? "Whar's yer Willie Shaxper tha noo?" That was great fun, and really perceptive on Shaw's part, as I recall. Theater criticism in the form of a play.

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    1. Maybe you didn't write about the Shaw play; maybe I'm making that up.

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  8. I wish I had written that. It sounds good.

    The Importance of Being Earnest is imperishable and unique, even for Wilde. I would never bother to compare another play to it, except possibly another of Wilde's, and that would just be to demonstrate its uniqueness.

    Mudpuddle, what does that song have to do with Shaw? You have stumped me, but good.

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    1. i remembered that from one of wilde's plays, i forget which one; but it was a hilarious song which seemed suitable for interjecting there... well, maybe not; sorry...

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    2. I think someone may have been...improving, shall we say?...the Wilde play.
      Mind you, "the new ashmolean marching society and students conservatory band" would be an improvement on some of the plays.

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    3. I hope the Wilde play was Salomé.

      Frank Loesser should get credit for his song, though.

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    4. Frank Loesser should get credit for his song, though. ...in a musical based on Charley's Aunt by Brandon Thomas. It's great fun, but it's not exactly Wildean (or Shavian). In Robert Altman's film Cookie's Fortune the villainous Camille Dixon says the play she is producing is Wilde's Salomé with a few "improvements" she provided. I thought Al Pacino could have done with her help in his film of Salomé.

      Back to Shaw!
      Shaw can be funny, but he's also intently didactic. The funny lines are always from the characters Shaw approves of at the expence of the ones he doesn't. It's like watching the Olympic Shooting Fish in a Barrell Final.

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    5. absolutely correct! i got some wires crossed. seems to be happening more lately... i guess it's true, what they say about getting old: whatever it was; i forget...

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  9. I had not had the slightest idea that there was a musical version of Charley's Aunt. I am crushed to see that Altman beat me to that joke.

    All right, some Shaw plays will be part of next year's reading.

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    1. I thought "the new ashmolean marching society and students conservatory band" was Mudpuddle's invention until I looked it up. Bless you, Google. I wish I'd known about Loesser's version when I lived in Oxford. I'd have started the original.

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