{"product_id":"2940013405417","title":"Love Among the Artists - a novel","description":"Scanned, proofed and corrected from the original magazine edition for enjoyable reading. (Worth every penny spent!)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e***\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEpisodes of brilliancy, force, audacity, there are; but episodes only. The psychology of a musician is admirably set forth in \"Love Among the Artists,\" and the story, in addition, contains one of the most lifelike portraits of a Polish pianiste that has ever been painted. John Sargent could have done no better in laying bare a soul. Ugliness is rampant — ugliness and brutality. It is all as invigorating as a bath of salt water when the skin is peeled off — it burns; you howl; Shaw grins. He hates with all the vigour of his big brain and his big heart to hear of the infliction of physical pain. He does not always spare his readers. Three hundred years ago he would have roasted heretics, for there is much of the grand inquisitor, the John Calvin, the John Knox, in Shaw. He will rob himself of his last copper to give you food, and he will belabour you with words that assault the tympanum if you disagree with him on the subject of Ibsen, Wagner, or — anything he likes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBeefsteak, old Scotch ale, a pipe, and Montaigne — are what he needs for one year. Then his inhumane criticism of poor, stumbling mankind's foibles might be tempered. Shaw despises weakness. He follows to the letter Nietzsche's injunction, Be hard! And there is something in him of Ibsen's pitiless attitude toward the majority, which is always in the wrong; yet is, all said and done, the majority. Facts, reality, truth — no Gradgrind ever demanded them more imperiously than Heervater Shaw, whose red beard and locks remind one of Conrad in Die Meistersinger. Earth folk do everything to dodge the facts of life, to them cold, harsh, and at the same time fantastic. Every form of anodyne, ethical, intellectual, aesthetical, is resorted to to deaden the pain of reality. We work to forget to live; our religions, art, philosophy, patriotism, are so many buffers between the soul of man and bitter truth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn appearance some twenty years after its first publication, with a whimsical introduction by the author. The sneer of the Bohemian for the Philistine is the Leit motiv of this amusing tale without much plot, but it is fairly matched by impatience of the dilettante, whom we have always with us, jabbering of inspiration and aims, chattering the jargon without realizing its expression in work, and turning out impossible daubs. Then there are a Polish pianiste, an actress, and a Welsh composer, a kind of Hans von Biilow in unpardonable rudeness, and lack of manners; also a good-natured bounder, connected with a motor company, who, in making a proposal of marriage, states his income, computed with a \"percentage off the minimum,\" and who knows that the untamed composer's heroic symphony is good music because it reminds him of the Pacific railroad.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith gradual, yet unhalting steps, Shaw works his way to those startling and topsy-turvy theories which are so delightfully credible to the intellectuels and so bewilderingly exasperating to the Philistines. In \"Love Among the Artists,\" Madge Brailsford's open avowal to Owen Jack of her love for him gives a hint that the theory of woman as the huntress and man as the quarry is upon us. The exhibitions of physical prowess are the most\"howlingly funny\" incidents in the book, it is nevertheless true that Shaw has done nothing to surround the \" noble art of sluggerei\" with any halo of fictitious romance. \"Its novelty,\" as Shaw himself maintains, \"consists in the fact that an attempt is made to treat the art of punching seriously, and to detach it from the general elevation of moral character with which the ordinary novelist persists in associating it.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe real novelty, and, indeed, the chief charm, of the book consists rather in the fact that no attempt is made to treat anything seriously. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is easy to praise Mozart to-day; not so easy to demonstrate the genius of Richard Strauss. Wagner in 1888 was still a bogie-man, a horrid hobgoblin threatening the peace of academic British music. Shaw took up the fight, just as he fought for Degas and Manet when he was an art critic. I still preserve with reverence his sweeping answer to Max Nordau. It wiped Nordau off the field of discussion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Love Among the Artists\" proves something, and proves it hard!","brand":"OGB","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47073691140336,"sku":"2940013405417","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940013405417_p0.jpg?v=1763580797","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940013405417","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}