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Home , 1900s (decade), 1932 in British music, 1963 in British music, 1978 in British music, 2004 in British music, 2006 in British music

Music Made Meaningful: Social Reforms and Classical in British Literature and from 1870 to 1945

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree in the Graduate of The

By

David Henry Deutsch, M. A.

Graduate Program in English

The

2011

Dissertation Committee:

Sebastian Knowles, Advisor

David Adams

Mark Conroy

Copyright by

David H. Deutsch

2011

Abstract

This dissertation examines the importance of portrayed in British literature as a means to indicate social worth, ability, and political identity.

Most scholars of music and literature emphasize the abstract, avant-garde influence of quartets and on novels and , overlooking the broader cultural implications of music in Britain. This project demonstrates how, from the 1870s, authors such as

Benjamin Jowett, and used diverse appreciations of and music to make socio-economic and moral distinctions, as well as to portray political cohesion through communal pleasures. Turning to literature written after 1900, I show how modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf revised these late-Victorian themes and used an ability to understand classical music as a litmus test for determining a character‟s placement within intellectual hierarchies. To locate these literary concerns within their cultural context, I uncover how journalists depicted in domestic and institutional settings to indicate the value of communities that could create and sustain an art increasingly recognized as nationally important.

Having established the social significance of classical music, I detail how writers relied on musical proclivities to justify the value of alienated to the larger

British populace. and depict the allegedly uncultured lower-middle and working classes as engaged with and as a means to assert their respectability. Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and twentieth-century authors such ii as Beverley Nichols and A. T. Fitzroy did the same for homosexual characters. I argue that these depictions are historically accurate by investigating working-class memoirs, contemporary cultural critiques, as well as unpublished documents pertaining to music in lower-income and halls. Moving beyond class and sexuality, E. M.

Forster and G. B. Shaw depicted British citizens as enjoying continental European classical music as a means to explore the relationships between Britain and .

They represent a series of authors who used German classical music as a means to create connections between the liberal and peaceful factions of British and German societies during two world wars. By examining concert programs and letters printed in popular newspapers, I argue that these literary themes were prevalent throughout British culture.

This study proves that, rather than acting as an abstruse art, classical music was fundamental to definitions of social and national identities in literature.

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Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my mother and to Kirk.

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Acknowledgments

Without my , my mother, Kirk, my sister and brother, and Bella, writing this dissertation would have been a lonely and a dismal process. My grandparents taught me to music and for that words cannot thank them. Regarding words, I would like to thank my dissertation director, Sebastian Knowles, and my committee, Mark Conroy and

David Adams, for reading very long drafts that were full of them and for providing helpful comments and suggestions for further reading. I would also like to thank David

Riede and Marlene Longenecker for reading and commenting on chapter drafts. Without the help of Andrew Cole, I would never have known how to write a graduate paper, much less a dissertation. In the graduate office, Kathleen Griffin knew the answers to all my questions and made the graduate experience much easier than it might have been. The

Institute of Historical Research in and the of Arts and Sciences at Ohio

State both provided research fellowships and travel grants and for this I am grateful.

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Vita

June 1999 ...... Chattahoochee High School

2003...... B.A. English, University of Georgia

2006...... M.A. English, University of Georgia

2006 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of English, The Ohio State University

Publications

“Reconnecting Music to Howards End: Forster‟s Aesthetics of Inclusion.” LIT: Literature

Interpretation Theory 21.3 (2010): 1-24.

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments...... v

Vita ...... vi

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 2: Re-Imagining Music: Walter Pater and the of a Modern Musical

Aesthetic ...... 13

Chapter 3: Economies of Appreciation: Class, Culture, and Classical Music in Modernist

Literature (Part One: A Modernist Fantasia) ...... 92

Chapter 4: Economies of Appreciation: Class, Culture, and Classical Music in Modernist

Literature (Part Two: The Music of the Working and Lower-Middle Classes) ...... 160

Chapter 5: A “curious music”: Music and the Positive Imagining of Homosexual Selves

...... 236

Chapter 6: “The International Spirit”: Classical Music and Wartime Reconciliations .. 327

Chapter 7: Epilogue: “Our privileged community”: The Commonwealth of Classical

Music...... 420

References ...... 430 vii

Chapter 1: Introduction

When it comes to discussing classical music and its relation to life, early- twentieth-century British writers often appear to run into difficulties. One of these difficulties is not having nothing to say. If we scan the pantheon of canonical writers from this period (say 1900 to 1945) we will find in fact that they are downright voluble on the subject. T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf, to cite just three prominent examples, have quite a lot to say about music, and they say it often. Nor is their an interpretation of notes. They are not interested in the significance of a “D” or what happens aurally when it sounds with an “A,” at least not in their writing. Their chief problem appears, rather, to be a descent (or an ascent, depending upon your perspective) into an abstract metaphysics.

When exploring the tripartite interchanges of music, literature, and life, writers often get bogged down in abstractions. In his “The Music of Poetry,” T. S. Eliot argued for a connection between music and the poetry of everyday language: “[t]he music of poetry … must be a music latent in the common speech of its time” (On Poetry 31). In discussing this temporally-grounded combination, however, he emphasizes the loss of a clearly defined semantic meaning. A musical poetry has something to do, he suggests, with “an allusiveness which is in the of words” and their diverse “secondary

1 meanings” (33). The diverse associations that words in common usage accumulate over time create a musically poetic diffusion of sense.

In Four Quartets Eliot takes this principle of a musical-literary “allusiveness” to an extreme. In “Dry Salvages” he writes of a “music heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at all” (V 27-28). Here music has a profound significance. It is a significance linked to the accumulated meanings of human existence, for he goes on to suggest that “you are the music/ While the music lasts” (V 28-29). Music has an intimate relation to life, but Eliot is reluctant to say what precisely this relation is or to agree that it could ultimately be discerned at all. The more intensely one hears the diverse resonances of important music, the less one hears the comprehensive meaning of the music itself: this is a metaphysical musical paradox.

Forster shows a similar eagerness to affirm, but a reluctance to specify the link between music and history. In Howards End (1910), Helen Schlegel tries to make sense of the relationship between music and her world by turning ‟s Fifth into a story of “heroes and goblins,” the former of which she connects to people like

“President Roosevelt” (30, 31). Whatever Beethoven intended, Helen imagines a relatively specific, current political context for his music. Forster, however, quickly has her sister Margaret undercut her chain of associations. Margaret, the most pragmatic

Schlegel, suggests that the meaning of music cannot be translated into words or into or into anything that helps to define it in an -musical language. “Helen‟s one aim,” Margaret declares, “is to translate tunes into the language of painting, and pictures into the language of music. It‟s very ingenious, and she says several in the

2 process, but what‟s gained, I‟d like to know? Oh, it‟s all rubbish, radically false” (36).

Forster himself took the middle road. In his essay “The Raison d‟Être of Criticism in the

Arts,” he observed that using a non-musical language (verbal or pictorial) to define music can get one “muddled,” but it can also help one to get closer to the vital “insistence” that music has to offer (Two Cheers 129).

When discussing how the arts, both verbal and musical, can uncover some ordered truth in our chaotic world, Woolf turned to and to Beethoven. In her autobiographical “Sketch of the Past,” she wrote that “ or a Beethoven is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself” (Moments of Being 72). This is a beautifully lyric idea. A

Shakespeare play or a Beethoven quartet is a wonderful image for ordering the world into its essential elements. Still better is the suggestion that “we are the music,” as this evokes a fundamental human . The problem is that Woolf‟s language is obstinately ambiguous: the “truth,” “this vast mass,” “the world,” “the thing itself.”

Woolf‟s far-reaching words recall Eliot‟s theory of the musicality of a semantic allusiveness. What indirect associations, we might ask, resonate with the words “truth” and “world”? What are their overtones? Eliot, Forster, and Woolf were not, I think, trying to be sneaky or to avoid all definitions of the world around them. But, their artistic elusiveness, which came in varying degrees, forbade them a critical precision. Those of us looking for more clarity are thus left to ask: What sort of truths? What sort of world?

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What is the aesthetic or indeed the human “thing itself”? What is more, how does a quartet help us to answer these questions?

One way in which modern critics have approached these questions (and particularly the last one) has been to explore the structural connections between music and the literary language that authors use to define their . Critics of music and literature tend to focus on how the forms of classical music (classical music is here taken to be a broad category inclusive of , , and opera from to

Britten) have helped to shape the forms of modern poetry and prose. becomes a theme of literary criticism. Each critic inevitably brings something new to the intellectual welcome table as each works to uncover innovative relationships between sound and sense, and prose, symphonies and syntax, or opera and an opaque narrative arc.1 In these explorations, then, there has been a logical inclination to emphasize avant-garde authors who experiment with musical structures. In the English- language literary , these authors are T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce,

Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and, of course, Walter Pater.

While this study explores many of the authors on the above list and their uses of classical music, it tells a different story and it has a few more characters. I am less concerned with structural relationships and more concerned with how music and

1 The amount of scholarship investigating the structural influences of music on late-nineteenth and twentieth-century literature is itself a modern triumph. The following is a list of some of the best examples: Calvin Brown‟s Music and Literature (1948), Werner Wolf‟s The Musicalization of Fiction (1999), Robert Morgan‟s “The Language of ” (1984), Daniel Albright‟s Untwisting the (2000), and Brad Bucknell‟s Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics (2001). John DiGaetani‟s Richard and the Modern British Novel (1978),Vincent Sherry‟s Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993), and Timothy Martin‟s Joyce and Wagner (1991) provide some substantial social or historical context for the uses of music in literature; while very useful, these latter works focus primarily on one or two authors or on one musical , namely opera. 4 literature meet within specific historical situations in writing that is both avant-garde and conventional. Taking my cue from historically-informed musicologists, such as

Russell, and cultural historians, such as Jonathan Rose, to whom my fourth chapter owes an enormous intellectual debt, I explore the associations echoing amongst music, cultural history, and literature.2 Who was listening or playing what, where, when, and why?

Equally as important, how did literary representations of audiences or subcultures

(composed of middle-class modernists, the working classes, homosexuals, and cosmopolitan musical amateurs) play off of and reinforce economic, intellectual, political, and social movements?

One of the immediate benefits of this historical approach to music and literature is that it grounds formalistic concerns within a clearly discernible framework. In doing so, this approach brings into focus very specific material themes localized within time and space: namely within the latter half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century in Britain. This will help to hear the deeper (circumstantial) meanings of music; it will help to detect what British audiences conceived music as insisting that they do; and it will help to contextualize the aesthetic thing itself.

A brief example of how this process works will at this point be of use. In discussions of music and turn-of-the-century British literature, critics often point to the

Oxford don Walter Pater. Pater is frequently credited with promoting a combination of music and literature that evades a quotidian search for clarity and favors an aesthetic

2 Russell‟s in , 1840-1914 (1997) and Rose‟s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) merge superlative historical research with cultural studies, and contain brief forays into literary criticism. 5 obscurity.3 Drawing on German philosophers such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and

Wagner (the quintessential -philosopher), Pater declared in 1877 that due to the inseparable nature of the form and content of music, music is the “consummate art.”

Hence, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (106). Pater duly noted that this aspiration can lead to “a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning” of a musical work of art at times “reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding” (108). This discussion of aesthetic form had an immense influence on subsequent writers who came to see music as the epitome of the arts. Both T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster, to name only two, took the above formulations and reshaped them for their own attempts to reinforce and to clarify the metaphysics of art in general and of music and literature in particular.4 Modern critics have followed suit and focus on Pater‟s notion of a formal obscurity as his sole claim to musical criticism.

What happens, however, when we widen the historical lens? Why might Pater have made this statement when and where he did? As I discuss in chapter two, in the

1860s and 70s the powerful Regius of Greek, , was placing

Plato‟s at the heart of the Literae Humaniores curriculum at the University of

Oxford. In the Republic, links the of certain types of music to education, to morality, and to a political stability. Jowett followed Plato‟s lead by developing the

3 See chapter two (16-17).

4 T. S. Eliot once wrote “[f]rom one point of view, the poet aspires to the condition of the music-hall ” (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 32). In this essay, as I argue in chapter three, Eliot presents a critique of an overly obscure metaphysics and argues for a (slightly) more specific Christian . E. M. Forster inverted Pater‟s high-flown language when in “The Raison d‟Être of Criticism in the Arts” he described music as “the deepest of the arts and deep beneath the arts” (Two Cheers 107). Instead of the arts aspiring to climb to the heights of music, the arts are here founded upon music, as if music was some sort of aesthetic substratum. 6

Balliol Concert series, which offered chamber music to Oxford students. Jowett‟s practical Platonism came at a time when the university‟s music faculty and amateurs in the town itself were expanding their own musical programs for education and for . Concurrently, Britain‟s public schools, the newly-founded state-run board schools, and working-class sight- movements were expanding their capacities to teach music to diverse student bodies. In Oxford and in Britain in the 1870s, music, and particularly classical music, was intertwining itself with an intellectual advance, with a push for greater in education, and with a political and cultural desire for social reform.

These trends might not be explicitly apparent in Pater‟s The , his most widely read work. But, as we will see, they are unavoidable in his Imaginary

Portraits, Miscellaneous Studies, Plato and Platonism, and in his critical writings. These are filled with sound-tracked socio-political revolutions and musical metaphors for a harmonious egalitarianism. The musical rise of the in the portrait of “Denys l‟Auxerrois,” for instance, calls to mind the increasing role of music in working and lower-middle-class in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Similarly, Prior Saint-

Jean‟s interest in music, math, and humanistic physical desires in “ in Picardy” correlates to the increasing influence of a homoerotic Platonism in Pater‟s Oxford. Read within these contexts, Pater‟s musical aesthetic is no empty formalism, but a call-to-arms for an intellectually and socially liberal aestheticism.

As this brief discussion of Pater indicates, this study draws music out from a rarefied abstract formalism and places it into discernible historical and cultural

7 movements. To provide coherence to the following chapters, I have taken 1870 and 1945 as my nominal dates of departure and arrival, though I will give myself breathing room in either direction. I take the 1870s as a starting point because this period finds the convergence of Jowett‟s musical Platonism and Pater‟s writing, which helped to expand influential musical themes (pertaining to economics, , and sexuality) in literature, with the rise of a populist interest in learning about and performing classical music. 1945 provides a logical terminus, as the conclusion of the Second ended a period that saw the widespread use of German classical music in Britain as a means to evoke a liberal solidarity against fascism. From Oxford, we will move to the rest of Britain and then to how British denizens saw themselves in relation to .

During this time frame, depictions of audience responses to classical music become a key trope for defining social, intellectual, and political identities in literature and in British culture. Authors use an appreciation of symphonies, chamber music, and opera as an indicator of an individual‟s ability to understand and to influence the world around them. Memoirists, novelists, playwrights, and poets represent individuals who can enjoy classical music as filled with an innate gentility, as erudite, and as culturally authoritative. Those characters who fail to value such music are portrayed as intellectually and as politically impotent.

These literary themes simultaneously provide insight into the rhetoric of late- nineteenth and early-twentieth-century British social reforms. Literary representations of music reflected and at times helped to shape the terms through which the popular press and (parliament or education settlements) expanded public education and

8 challenged the rigid morality and socio-economic hierarchies of Victorian society. In turn, the promotion of a common musical culture helped to induce a common denominator for respectability.

As classical music became an increasingly vital element of British culture, authors and guardians of social discourse began to use continental European and particularly

German music as a socially acceptable means to evoke unpopular subjects. Music provided a non-threatening way to explore economic, sexual, and military challenges to the . Authors both criticized and vaunted foreign music and the musical talents of the working-classes, homosexuals, and continental ex-patriots. They occasionally depicted these subcultures as vulgar and as socially destabilizing but much more frequently as valuable members of British society. An understanding of these literary trends reveals the paradox of how an allegedly elitist, abstract art became a central force in shaping a widespread cosmopolitan in Britain through periods of social reformation and two world wars.

This introduction serves as chapter one. A brief overview of what follows will signal, I hope, how each subsequent chapter builds upon and contextualizes those that come before and after it. Chapter two traces the rise of classical music from a trivial art to an elevated for social cohesion in literature produced at the University of

Oxford and across Britain. In this chapter I read Pater‟s influential body of work alongside recurrent late-Victorian references to Platonic theories of harmony and education. Benjamin Jowett, in his translations and critiques of Plato, and Pater, in his fiction and aesthetic criticism, both depict music as tempering social and intellectual

9 tyrannies. The cultural life of Oxford reflected and shaped the educational of

Britain. Cultural critics, such as John Ruskin, educators, and parliamentarians, many influenced by an Oxonian Platonism, all argued that a musical education could reduce social differences and broaden human sympathies.

Chapter three analyzes how British modernists advanced the intellectual associations of classical music, as they qualified late-Victorian attempts to use it to promote social equality. In his early fiction and music reviews, Aldous Huxley evokes intellectual and spiritual hierarchies based upon diverse appreciations of Bach,

Beethoven, and . In his poetry and “London letters,” T. S. Eliot draws on public perceptions of gramophones, of at Covent Garden, and of music in cinemas to suggest that the upper classes only enjoy music for its fashionable surroundings. Like

Huxley, Eliot meanwhile depicts the poor as intellectually excluded from the majority of the joys of an advanced musical culture. Eliot joins Huxley, James Joyce, and Virginia

Woolf however, to promote the intelligence of the educated middle classes. They each position individuals trained in musical , such as themselves, as the ideal arbiters of a cultural heritage in an attempt to seize control of culture in Britain from a decaying .

Chapter four highlights the uses of music in literature concerned with the working and the lower-middle classes in order to qualify the elitist rhetoric of modernism.

Thomas Burke and W. Somerset Maugham examine how Italian operas and ballets create a sense of community in lower-income music halls. Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells similarly use an enthusiasm for Beethoven to illustrate the social and the economic

10 enrichment of lower-middle-class families. Unique among modernists, D. H. Lawrence depicts miners playing music by , though his characters often use their talents as a means to escape from their families. To complement these novels, I show how classical music maintained a presence in . Through research into working-class memoirs, into education institutes, and into music-hall programs, I demonstrate how allegedly uncultured sections of society represented their ability to listen to and to perform classical music as a sign of inner and of civic pride.

Chapter five demonstrates how authors represent cosmopolitan homosexuals, from a variety of economic backgrounds, as having musical talents that evidence their worth to the British public. Drawing on the aestheticism of Walter Pater and Oscar

Wilde, A. T. Fitzroy (Rose Allatini) and E. M. Forster claim an innate musical sensitivity for bodies, which sets them above the common amateur. Ronald Firbank and

Beverley Nichols, meanwhile, depict effeminate male as charming public audiences and as gaining ardent male admirers. By analyzing biographical case studies collected by and others, I show that these tropes benefited the self- perceptions of queer readers. These exotic depictions of queer literary characters expanded debates regarding the social value of homosexuals to Britain. By associating classical music with , authors made use of the increasing importance of classical music in British culture to insist on the virtues of a frequently maligned .

Chapter six unites the communities discussed in chapters two through five to reveal how authors used foreign music in literature both to critique British culture and to

11 construct a broader European identity. Prior to the War, authors such as Saki

(H. H. Munro) and G. B. Shaw used literary depictions of foreign music to argue that

British citizens were neither intellectually nor technically as prepared for war as

Germany. After the war, Shaw joined forces with Katharine Burdekin, Ford Madox

Ford, Sassoon, and others to promote German classical music as a symbol for a shared aesthetic heritage between British and German cultures. German classical music became then a prominent means to promote a cultural cosmopolitanism. W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood questioned this idealized international musical community by relating sensual harmonies to fascistic propaganda across Europe. Significant portions of the general populace, however, considered the music of German-speaking to be part of a European heritage. This created what I call a popular cosmopolitanism, which I explore through letters to the BBC‟s Radio Times and through a discussion of popular wartime concert series.

Each of these chapters provides evidence for the overall argument that from around 1870 to 1945 British literature depicted classical music as a predominantly democratizing force. In each chapter I argue that despite classical music being a largely non-representational art, British writers and cultural authorities repeatedly turned to it to define and to influence the identities of individuals and their communities. I briefly explore in my conclusion how these democratizing musical trends have been treated in post-1945 British fiction.

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Chapter 2: Re-Imagining Music: Walter Pater and the Reformation of a Modern Musical

Aesthetic

By the latter half of the nineteenth century, music in England was thriving. In very few places, with the exceptions of London and Manchester, might this have been more self-evident than in Oxford.1 Here “classical” or “”—designations which encompass both various forms of sacred and secular instrumental music, such as chamber music and symphonies, as well as instrumental and —could be found emanating across the carefully manicured grounds of individual ; from university buildings, such as Christopher Wren‟s classical Sheldonian Theatre; from various ecclesiastical institutions; and from town performance spaces not directly associated with education at all. If it would be an overstatement to suggest that music was rampant in

Oxford, it would not be so to say that it was quickly becoming entrenched within both the formal and the leisurely aspects of life. This melodious infiltration, and the wide array of social contexts that it brought along with it, largely influenced by the Platonic renaissance in late-nineteenth-century Oxford, could not but help to define other aesthetic aspects of life, and particularly of literary life, in Oxford, and from Oxford on to the rest of England.

1 William Weber argues that it was in the period of 1848-1870 that the concert life in London, as well as in and Vienna, had consolidated into its “modern form,” after a “rapid explosion” in the “number and significance” of concerts during the first half of the century (3). 13

By the end of the nineteenth century, largely through the influence of Oxonian academics such as Benjamin Jowett and Walter Pater, music would come to be refashioned as a paradigm for the best that aestheticism had to offer: an intellectual morality, community, and a push for social equality.

Setting the Stage: The Rise of Music in Aestheticism

In the late-nineteenth century, the aesthetic movement was quickly becoming attached to the shy and somewhat retiring Brasenose fellow Walter Pater. In 1873, Pater had published the seminal aesthetic text Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which would be re-titled in subsequent editions as simply The Renaissance: Studies in Art and

Poetry. In the third edition of the book, published in 1888, Pater added an essay entitled

“The School of Giorgione.”2 Although the nominal subject of the essay is the painter

Giorgione, Pater uses a substantial amount of the piece to reflect on music and, , it is to this essay that Pater scholars inevitably turn when they want to talk about his thoughts on this art. Indeed, it is here that he sets out his oft-quoted dictum that “[a]ll art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (106). It is music, he says, “that essential music,” which can provide its audience with “no words, no matter of sentiment or thought, separable from the special form in which it is conveyed to us,” which makes it the sole art able to do away with the distinction between “mere matter” and “form,” a distinction which “it is the constant effort of art to obliterate” (103 and 106). It is for this

2 The “Giorgione” essay was first published in October of 1877 in the Fortnightly Review. 14 incorporative quality of music that he calls it the “the typical, or ideally consummate art,” a sort of model for all of the other arts to imitate (106).

This idealized incorporation or obliteration of contingent differences has, of course, a semantically destabilizing effect. Should poetry imitate music, for instance, the

“mere matter” of poetic words would have to become “nothing without the form” into which they are marshaled (106). In less abstract terms, the “subject” of a poem becomes sublimated within the form of the poetic language and poetic structure itself. The result of this, as Pater observes, is that “the very perfection of such poetry often appears to depend, in part, on a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding” (108).

“[O]f mere subject”—modern readers have found a significant amount of pleasure in untangling the metaphysical mess in which phrases such as this have left the signifying power of both music and writing. There is a strong tendency, for example, to consider

Pater‟s views on music as having inspired a certain “vagueness” or an ephemeral quality within his own art, that of prose writing.3

This is a critical paradigm which Pater encourages himself within his own 1888 essay “Style.” Once more taking up the fusion of form and content, he observes that “[i]f music be the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the expression, then, literature, by finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the term to

3 Angela Leighton writes that Pater‟s “sentences make a shape in the ear long after they have meant anything. That shape, a kind of abstraction or distraction from sense, is the reason why his prose, otherwise so hard to place, is a literary rather than a philosophical or critical form” (72). 15 its import, will be fulfilling the condition of all artistic quality in things everywhere, of all good art” (Appreciations 37-38). If we take Pater‟s own literature as musical, then his comments might lead us to expect a certain amount of “vagueness” in both his art criticism and his fiction.

Most modern readers who discuss Pater and music go further, offering reflections on how his valorization of an “ideal” fusion of “absolute correspondence of term to import” suspends the ability to articulate any specific signifying power of art altogether.

Along such lines, Patricia Herzog has suggested that Pater‟s references to music might have been influenced by the nineteenth-century fascination with “absolute music.” As

Herzog explains, “[a]bsolute music would be ideally suited to exemplify Pater‟s thesis since it contains nothing extraneous to the medium of music itself, a medium consisting solely of tonally moving forms arranged melodically, harmonically and rhythmically.” In absolute music meaning was completely dissolved into its sensual elements, which created a sense of completion or even perfection. As Herzog notes, using language reminiscent of Pater‟s own, “the aesthetic of the absolute” was an artistic vision “which elevated music without text, title, programme, or other extramusical component to a station far above not only all other music but all other art” (125). The result of this is, of course, that any sort of clear-cut semantic explanation of the subject of the artwork was seen as a compromise of its purity or perfection.

Linking this ambiguity of music more closely to literature, Brad Bucknell puts

Pater alongside modernist writers such as Joyce and Mallarmé, who were fascinated by the ludic possibilities inherent in the ambiguities of a musical language, a language able

16 to affirm, yet never able to encapsulate, some sort of transcendental ideal. As Bucknell observes, “a certain vagueness seems essential to Pater‟s sense of music as the paradigm of the arts,” as some sort of unattainable artistic archetype (47). Bucknell links this idealized musical vagueness to modernity at large by noting that Pater, as well as Joyce and others, was working “at a time when „music‟ for many writers refer[red] obliquely to an art which transcend[ed] referential or lexical meaning, and which ha[d] the power of some kind of excessive, yet essential, element to which the literary may point, but which it can never fully encompass” (1). Similarly to Herzog, Bucknell sees Pater and others using music as a means to strive for a significance that goes beyond a semantically connotative definition.

While this general assessment of the aspiration of art, and particularly the aspiration of literature, for an essential, transcendental, yet nevertheless imprecise musical idealism has a great deal of truth to it, Pater did not perceive his uses of music to be as vague or even as metaphysical as his readers often take them to be. To begin with, he does not rely only upon music as a formal or stylistic inspiration for writing or for art in general. In his own work, for instance, he often depicts music or musically influenced events as taking place within larger social contexts congruent with the contemporary setting of late-nineteenth-century England. This is particularly true within his critical study Plato and Platonism as well as his fictional Imaginary Portraits, in which he often uses descriptions of musical performances to color and enhance the meaning of frequently quite specific proceedings, such as social upheavals, political reconciliations, educational opportunities, moral codes, and religious ceremonies.

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Pater‟s uses of music, then, seem to have been influenced not only by conceptions of abstract “absolute” music, but also by the ways in which classical music, of both instrumental and vocal varieties, was being mobilized in very specific ways throughout the second half of the nineteenth century in England. During this period, both individuals and social institutions were using music to aid in the attainment of a variety of goals similar to those referred to above: namely, the advancement of education, the discernment and disruption of gender differences, morality (of both secular and religious varieties), institutional pomp and circumstance, and for the assertion of England‟s national honor on a world-wide stage. All of these issues, as I will show, were frequently evidenced in a complicated, yet nonetheless clearly articulated fashion in the social life of

Oxford, in the literature of the time period, and in England‟s larger socio-political conscious.

It is Pater‟s emphasis on the connection between these specific socio-political issues and music that makes this art such a vital subject in his writing. For, as he notes in

“Style,”

by imitating musical principles, prose writing may fulfill the requirements “of all good art … but not necessarily great art” (38). Music and literature are, after all, distinct, and part of this distinction means that “literature, at all events”—though certainly all art as well—must maintain some concern for the quality of its matter, as well as its form (“Style” 38).

This is because for Pater, as for many of us, it is “on the quality of the matter it informs or controls” that “the greatness of literary art depends” (“Style 38). For literary art to be great, Pater argues, and argues quite specifically, it must be concerned with “great ends,” it must “be devoted further to the increase of men‟s happiness, to the redemption of the

18 oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other,” so that it “may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here”; it must have “something of the of humanity in it” (“Style” 38). Drawing then on the social, political, and moral applications of music in the late-nineteenth century, Pater uses the depiction of music within his own consummate art, a musical prose, as an aesthetic call-to-arms to attain his goals for “great art.” He uses the social and cultural of his ideal art of music in order to encourage an enlightened, liberal, and democratic mode of social and artistic perfection, which will set the stage for similar uses of music throughout a significant amount of British literature in the first half of the twentieth century.

Tuning Up: The Shifting Public Perceptions of Music in the Nineteenth-Century in England

In order to understand Pater‟s use of music to flesh out moral philosophies and social upheavals, it is necessary to grasp the role that music was taking on in England at large and in English educational institutions, such as Oxford University, during the nineteenth century. Throughout this period a variety of teachers, politicians, and artists were attempting to overturn previously held conceptions of music as an arcane academic topic, one barely fit for the educated or aristocratic classes, into one full of moral, intellectual, and national importance. Within fortified Oxford, that flower of the English elite, an institutional interest in music had been embodied, at least nominally, since

William Heather created and endowed the Heather Professorship of Music in 1627. On the surface, then, the subject of music would seem to have held rank with such similarly

19 endowed subjects as Geometry and Astronomy, , and even Moral

Philosophy, each embodied in the Savile Professorship (for Geometry and Astronomy),

Camden Professorship, and White Professorship, respectively. Yet, as Susan Wollenberg points out, the Heather Professor was “at the lower end of the scale of pay” in Oxford and was actually “far below the Savile, Camden, and White Professorships,” each of which had been similarly founded in the seventeenth century. As such, she notes, music tended to be more reluctant to spend their time lecturing to or teaching students than their fellow academics. The result was that the professorship was held as a sort of impoverished “sinecure” during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a fact which did little to help the social or intellectual standing of music in Oxford or anywhere else. 4

The financial castrating of the Heather Professorship was on par with the generally derogatory fashion in which the performance of music, and particularly of secular instrumental music, was perceived in England throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A prime example of this, one cited well into the nineteenth century, can be found in Philip Dormer Standhope, Chesterfield‟s Letters to his Son, published in 1774. Chesterfield describes music as an “illiberal” pleasure to be

4 Wollenberg notes that the Heather Professor was originally paid £13.6s. 8d. per year (6). The entry under “Professor” for the second edition of the third volume of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and , published in 1907, tells a similar story. The Dictionary suggests that for a “long period the office was a sinecure,” but notes that “in the middle of the , it was attempted to restore reality to the School of Music at Oxford by requiring the Professor to lecture at least once in each term”; so great was the attempt, it appears, that there actually ended up being “about three” lectures “a term,” two more than were originally expected. Of course it should be noted that, as the entry states, the “endowment of the chair” was still “little more than nominal.” On the other hand, by the end of the nineteenth century many of the Heather Professors were known as quite active composers in their own right outside of the university walls, such as and C. H. H. Parry, who composed some very good music, such as a “Jerusalem” (using Blake‟s ) and the “Cambridge” Symphony. 20 encountered only from a distance.5 Advising his son, whom he believes to be traveling in

“a musical country,” namely Venice, wherein “singing, fiddling, and piping are not only the common topics of conversation, but almost the principal objects of attention,” he tells that boy that if he has to have music, he might permit himself to go hear it, but he should never attempt to play it. He admonishes his son, “go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself.” The reason for this is that though Chesterfield condescendingly acknowledges the potential intellectual quality of music—“(though music is commonly reckoned one of the liberal arts),” he admits—he all the same advises his son that it “puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light; brings him into a great deal of ; and takes up a great deal of time, which might be much better employed” (97). If a gentleman finds he simply must have music, he can pay musicians, as servants, to play for him, so long as he himself remembers to stay at a safe social distance from them. Above all, however, he must remember not to perform music, or he will open himself up, as Chesterfield implies, to all sorts of uncouth, ungentlemanly, and perhaps even, unmanly individuals.

Chesterfield‟s advice to his son, although obviously a bit rigid, reveals the general tendency in Georgian England to view music as a gentlemanly pursuit only in so far as it remained in the realm of a theoretical appreciation and manifested itself only as a dispassionately intellectual, and not visceral, enjoyment. As David Golby has pointed out, a “„scholarly‟ interest in music,” focused “on the long-standing mathematical

5 Chesterfield‟s perspective was not the only one. There was some system of patronage prevalent in England during the eighteenth century. Cyril Ehrlich, for instance, discusses the first duke of Chandos, John Brydges‟s patronage of a “musical establishment at Cannons, near ,” which maintained about twenty-four musicians in 1719 (Music Profession 4). 21 principles of Pythagorean musical theory, was considered far more respectable” than an emotional or performative interest, and was “very much the of the gentleman amateur rather than the professional ” (46).6 If music had to be a “liberal art” or a gentlemanly diversion, it was most safely enjoyed within the respectable confines of the medieval , alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The gentleman therefore had a means to set himself off from “the lowly musician devoid of a liberal education,” who was seen as being, “even if successful, proficient merely in a

„mechanical‟ and „commercial‟ art without inspiration or genius” (Golby 25). Inspiration and genius were reserved for more philosopher figures, such as those who studied musical theory. This division between the theory and the performance of music is one that weakened with the passage of time, but which nevertheless remained in the conscious memory of university-educated late nineteenth-century politicians, educators, and authors.

Ironically, however, the acknowledgement of the role of music in the intellectual context of the , and from there well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, prepared the way for the increasing importance of the subject, with regards to both its theoretical and performance aspects, in English educational institutions in the nineteenth century. The increasing importance of music in education was perhaps best summed up by Sir in his 1888 address to the and Midland

Institute, of which he was president (a past president having been none other than Charles

6 For a more in-depth discussion examining the links between the “quadrivium” and music, see Jamie James (71-74). 22

Dickens), entitled: “About Music.”7 Noting the improvements of the perception of music in the past two hundred years in England, Sullivan observes that, “since the days of that priggish nobleman, Lord Chesterfield, things have greatly changed.” As an example he cites how “Eton, Harrow,” and “Rugby—all the great schools—have now their masters for music on the same footing as the other instructors” (274). The performance of music, he asserts, has at last become a proper part of an aristocratic education.

The rise of music was not taking place in the public schools alone, but was infiltrating even into unexpected echelons of society. Aside from taking place in drawing-room parties, upper-class concert halls, or public schools, one could, according to Sullivan, “[g]o into the officers‟ quarters in barracks,” for instance, and find evidence of the respectable spread of music in the form of “pianofortes, , and violoncellos; and lying about there will be good music,” which the officers, those educated upholders of the British Empire, presumably play. In fact “H. R. H., the Duke of Edinburgh”

Sullivan lets drop, told him “that he had a complete string quartette amongst the officers on board his ship.”8 Aside from the Duke‟s quartette, music also provided a sort of social glue, and Sullivan described to his audience how “[a]mateur societies flourish, which bring rich and poor together,” all for the love of hearing, of possibly even performing good music (274). Sullivan seems to be almost prodding his audience, as if to ask of them: well, what other art does all of that?

7 Sullivan‟s address was given in 1888 and reprinted in Sir Arthur Sullivan: Life Story, Letters and Reminiscences in 1899.

8 Albert was known as a remarkable patron of the arts and particularly music (34 n29, below). 23

There seems to be something good-naturedly hyperbolic about Sullivan‟s lecture, an impression which he himself nods to by reining in, a bit, his polemic. He admits that music has not quite attained the level of respectability that one might wish for it. “At any great meeting on the subject of music,” he allows, “archbishops, judges, politicians, financiers—each one who rises to speak will deprecate any knowledge of music with a smug satisfaction, like a man disowning poor relations.” He also acknowledges that there are still those who perceive music “as a mere family pastime, fit only for women and children” (275). In the minds of many of the , Sullivan suggests, music is considered a fit interest not only for servants, but for the poor in general, as well as for women and children, all of whom need not or perhaps even cannot concern themselves with the more serious or money-making elements of life.

Despite his qualifications, there is a good deal of truth to what Sullivan said regarding the progress that music had made by 1888, the same year that Pater published

“Style” and added his “Giorgione” essay to The Renaissance. Sullivan was particularly right with regards to the advances that had been made in the field of education. The public schools, for instance, had been extending their curricula to include music as early as the 1860s. Evidence given in 1862 to the “Commissioners on the Revenues and

Management of Certain Colleges and Schools” reveals, for instance, various teachers testifying to the role of music at Eton. William Johnson, a classical assistant, testified that a few boys take lessons “from the at Windsor, a few from some of the singing men, and some practice the themselves.” Johnson noted that this education was “chiefly of a practical,” as opposed to a theoretical, “character” (Evidence 153).

24

Raising familiar concerns about music, H. Halford Vaughan, an examiner on the commission, asked Johnson whether, “bearing in mind the class of boys who receive their education at Eton, and their position in society, that it would be very desirable that more boys should learn one or the other of the arts of music, and drawing, in a solid manner than they do now?” A good champion of music, and the arts in general, Johnson responded that “it would be very desirable” and that the boys would be willing to learn the arts “if there was a society, and public displays,” in other words musical performances, “in the school” (154).

Johnson‟s remarks and suggestions are corroborated by further testimony. S. T.

Hawtrey reveals that two masters at Eton, Mr. Snow and Mr. Cornish, did in fact teach music outside of the standard curriculum and had “about 12 to 14 [students] in each class” (228). There also does seem to have been a society, which boys could pay an extra five shillings a term to join, for musical instruction, and to which various masters at the college “subscribed” (229). In his comments, Johnson was perhaps envisaging a society included in the general cost of the school. Far from being a blind idealist, however, the assistant noted that such an endeavor would cost money. He thus observed, in an echo of the problem with the Heather Professorship at Oxford, that should a specific music master for Eton be hired, the position would well warrant “a handsome salary,” possibly of about “500l a year” (140). Keeping in mind, perhaps, as Vaughan had, the responsibilities that the elite little matriculants of Eton would, at least in theory, have to take up later on in life, he argued that they were deserving of a music master who would

25 not be allowed simply to subsist, but who should be paid a salary befitting the position of both the students and the school.

If Sullivan was overly optimistic about the potential for music to bring the rich and the poor together, the changing perception of music in the public schools nevertheless did serve to muddy the a bit with regards to education and class distinctions. Music masters of the practical variety were beginning to command a higher salary, as well as more respect. In his testimony before the education commissioners, for instance, J. T. , an Eton and Oxford educated jurist, argued that “whenever a teacher has had a gentleman‟s education he should be put on precisely the same footing as the regular assistants,” such as the traditional assistant masters who taught Greek and

Latin. One of the commissioners, Mr. Thompson, perhaps suspecting some semantic slipperiness in this statement, asked Coleridge “[d]o you mean a university education?”

A question to which Coleridge responded rather assertively by informing the commissioners that he had “purposely said a gentleman‟s education; for instance, a drawing-master or a music-master may not have had a university education, and yet may have been liberally educated” (191). In this exchange Chesterfield‟s parentheses, which signaled the suspect place of music in the category of the liberal arts, have been dropped.

We can begin to see a specific phase in the broadening of England‟s educational system and in the definition of what it takes to be considered an educated man of culture.

Coleridge makes it clear that a specific artistic skill, such as music, can serve as a means to overthrow or bypass the traditional forms of knowledge or competencies, or even finance in the form of an expensive degree, that helped to define what it takes to be a

26

“gentleman.” Music and art thus begin to be a means to disrupt previously held class distinctions.

It is significant, then, that the public schools, England‟s “great schools,” to use

Sullivan‟s term, were not the only ones to integrate music into their syllabi. I will deal with England‟s national “board schools” (what in the U.S. would be called public schools) more fully in chapter four, but for now it is important to understand how music and more specifically the performance-oriented aspect of music narrowed, at least in part, the differences between the education of the children of England‟s upper and those of

England‟s working classes. A prime example of an educator who helped to this divide between public school students, many of whom were bound for Oxford or

Cambridge, and the more impecunious scholars of parochial schools, was the Rev. S. T.

Hawtrey M. A., Eton‟s mathematical assistant master. Hawtrey, the commission records, had “made a continuous,” if to date “unsuccessful effort” to increase the musical education of Etonians, based largely upon the sight-singing methods (methods that taught students to read musical notations, pitch values, and at sight) promoted by John

Hullah, who was himself instrumental in bringing to the masses and into the board schools during the 1860s, ‟70s, and ‟80s—more on Hullah later (228).9

Hawtrey argued before the commission for the use of Hullah‟s system at Eton based upon his own success with it at the nearby Windsor . Describing his achievements at Windsor, with a student body made up primarily of children from the

9 It should be noted that Hullah himself was another such bridge-figure between the and Eton. Hullah briefly applied his sight-singing system to Etonians himself, but his lessons at the school were interrupted first by an outbreak of scarlet fever and then a second time by the “annual cricket match”; in the latter instance there was “but a single boy in the class” (Evidence 228). 27

“working” and “laboring” classes, Hawtrey noted that these student were “very well taught in music,” and that he had “seen the eyes of little boys eight or nine years old fixed on a tablet with a degree of earnestness which cannot be created by any other kind of lesson.” In an impassioned speech outlining the moral and intellectual benefits of a musical education, Hawtrey pointed out that this education provided the Windsor students with

a mind training as well as an acquisition of music. I have no doubt of it. Then, when they have acquired the power of reading music, and sit down to one of ‟s or ‟s choruses, the concentrated attention, precision, and self-reliance with which they go through their parts shows clearly that the process of acquiring the power of singing at sight has been an admirable mental discipline. I have looked into their countenances, full of animation and intelligence, as they sung, and have felt convinced that the power they had gained was not only a moral benefit to them, but a highly intellectual acquisition also.

He finished by declaring, “I speak with very great confidence upon this point, because I speak now after 18 years‟ experience” (228). What is particularly of interest here is how

Hawtrey portrays the working classes as engaging studiously with serious classical works, such as those of Handel or Mendelssohn, as a positive moral and intellectual example of the success of a musical education.10 What may be even more notable, if not downright surprising, is that, though the Windsor students are not exactly chumming it up here with H. R. H. the Duke of Edinburgh, or, for that matter, with their Etonian counterparts, Hawtrey does put them forth as a model of a success from which the upper- classes could learn. This is a trend that will repeat itself throughout the writings of music

10 Handel and Mendelssohn were probably chosen for their moral and religious associations. Mackerness notes that “[b]y setting sacred texts to music which occasionally exhibited a true sublimity, Handel produced something that was virtually a supplement to formal worship” (102). He also notes that Mendelssohn‟s “career gave no evidence of anything remotely resembling impropriety” and he “never applied his talents to unworthy objects” (187). 28 journalists and autodidactic working-class authors throughout the first half of the twentieth century, if not necessarily in the works of canonical authors.11 For now though, it is enough to note how Hawtrey‟s promotion of music as a means to advance morality and even an intellectual acuity seems to work against the traditional negative stereotypes of music as a pursuit for servants and the “ungentle.”12

11 I discuss the presentation of the working classes as a model for intelligent listening in more depth in chapter four. A good brief example of the trend, however, would be a review of the South Place Concerts in the Daily Graphic of December 12th, 1898, which observed of the largely working-class audience: “It is more than possible that this audience, which is a very regular one, and has attended concerts the programmes of which have never deviated from the ideal of presenting the best and highest examples of Chamber music for twenty years, has been educated to a real appreciation of „classical‟ music, instead of to the necessity of pretending to like it” (Quoted in Meadmore 12-13).

12 Hawtrey may stand in as an example of many reformers during this time period who extolled the ethical, intellectual, and patriotic potentials of music, such as the aforementioned John Hullah, John Curwen, and later on into the twentieth century Sir Arthur Somervell; see chapter four (175-81). John Ruskin might also be named here as well. Although typically associated with the visual arts, Ruskin would occasionally refer to the intellectual and moral potential of music and encourage its use within an educational system. In his Queen of the Air, Ruskin notes: “[e]xactly in proportion to the degree in which we become narrow in the cause and conception of our passions, incontinent in the utterance of them, feeble of perseverance in them, sullied or shameful in the indulgence of them, their expression by musical sound becomes broken, mean, fatuitous, and at last impossible; the measured waves of the air of heaven will not lend themselves to expression of ultimate vice, it must be for ever sunk into discordance or silence. And since, as before stated, every work of right art has a tendency to reproduce the ethical state which first developed it, this, which of all the arts is most directly ethical in origin, is also the most direct in power of discipline; the first and simplest, the most effective of all instruments of moral instruction; while in the failure and betrayal of its functions, it becomes the subtlest aid of moral degradation. Music is thus, in her health, the teacher of perfect order, and is of the obedience of angels, and the companion of the course of the of heaven; and in her depravity she is also the teacher of perfect disorder and disobedience, and the Gloria in Excelsis becomes the Marseillaise” (355). The “Marseillaise,” for Ruskin, obviously represents the potential of music to instigate a national disaster along the lines of the more destructive elements of the French Revolution, as opposed to the appropriate patriotic respect for traditional forms of order and hierarchy. For music, education, and morality, see also Ruskin‟s eleventh letter to the cork cutter Thomas Dixon in Time and Tide (368-69). 29

An Unmanly Music?: The Immoral Imputations of

At the same time as public figures such as Sullivan, Hawtrey, and Hullah, were praising the moral and educational benefits of music, the fear remained that the art was immoral. As such, musical performance continued to be typecast as the purview of women, the openly sensuous, or, even worse, the outright “unmanly.” This view of music seems to have been particularly prevalent amongst the upper and middle classes, and to have been caused, in some instances, by their own behavior. As if playing to Lord

Chesterfield‟s musical nightmares, certain sets of highly visible, aristocratic men in the early half of the nineteenth century openly perpetrated the stereotype of the , in particular, as a somewhat cultured red-light district. They attended performances primarily in order to “ogle,” as Jennifer Hall-Witt puts it, the artists, with the result that young, dandyish men could be observed paying “attention to the sexual allure of the performers, not the music itself.”13

On an only slightly less theatrical level, women in the early-nineteenth century were often perceived as relying upon their musical education as an instrument with which to capture an unsuspecting husband or to increase their family‟s social standing. As

Mary Burgan has shown, the theory that music provided a means for women to ensnare a

13 Jennifer Hall-Witt notes that this operatic brothel-like atmosphere began to change, however, as began to attend the opera in the middle of the nineteenth century. The queen, Hall-Witt argues, “fostered feeling of nationalist pride,” and “[w]hereas the attention given to” a young “George IV” had “focused on his drunkenness and rude behavior, what observers saw in Victoria‟s box was a model of good taste and propriety” (203). Nevertheless, traces of the reputation of the opera house as a place to find dissolute sexual attractions remained, and showed up in novels such as Henry James‟s 1885-86 Princess Casamassima. When Hyacinth‟s foster-mother Pinnie accuses him of spending too much time with the working-class and physically attractive Millicent Henning, he responds sassily, “[w]here should you like me to spend my evenings? At some beastly public-house,—or,” even worse, “at the ?” (116). 30 man, particularly by playing the piano, was one which was widely promulgated in novels throughout the nineteenth century. “Without the piano,” Burgan notes, “to provide a field for her exertions in ascending the scale of class, Rosamond Vincy in George Eliot‟s

Middlemarch (1871-72) could hardly entice” the doctor “Lydgate into her web” (42).

While in Jane Eyre, as Burgan points out, Brontë portrays Blanche Ingram, the overly sensuous socialite who is out to attract the attention of Mr. Rochester, as an accomplished, almost flashy . It is a depiction which works in counterpoint to the musical restraint of the milder, more domesticated Jane. As such, “Jane plays the piano only as well as a governess must, while Blanche exhibits her social superiority through a feverish virtuosity as she „seated herself with proud grace at the piano, spreading out her snowy robes in queenly amplitude, [and] commenced a brilliant prelude; talking meantime‟” (53). The tortured Mr. Rochester is, of course, uninterested. But what is remarkable here is how Brontë uses Jane‟s limited ability at the piano to emphasize her responsibilities as the caretaker of Mr. Rochester‟s child. As such, the heroine has only the limited requisite artistic skills of a governess, while the “brilliant” pianist, Blanche, becomes an overly polished predator.

The misogynistic contextualizations of women and music occasionally even denied female characters any sense of a sustained artistic virtuosity. An association between an often mediocre music and a dangerous, pointedly feminine sensuality or even sexuality persisted, in varying degrees, through several novels of the early twentieth century. In E. M. Forster‟s 1908 A Room with View, for instance, the amateur pianist

Lucy Honeychurch breaks off an engagement and elopes with George Emerson. As are

31 most of Forster‟s protagonists, Lucy is passionate, in an attenuated sort of way, and

Forster foreshadows her somewhat tempestuous relationship with the young George through her piano playing in the Italian hotel in which she meets him. Forster describes

Lucy at the piano as “no dazzling exécutante” and explains that she us not “the passionate young lady, who performs so tragically on a summer‟s evening with the window open”; yet, he nevertheless observes in her performance a certain “[p]assion,” which, though “it could not be easily labeled,” all the same slips through “love and hatred and jealousy, and all the furniture of the pictorial style” (28). As her playing predicts, although Lucy seriously annoys her more or less bourgeois family by running off with George, her passionate affair with him culminates in a rather respectable marriage, safely within the

“pictorial style.”

Gide on the other hand, unsurprisingly no doubt, takes the association of music and sensuality to an extreme in his La Porte Étroite (1909). Here, he foreshadows the adultery of Lucile Bucolin by separating her off from her family to play a so languorously that she is unable even to get through it. Of course the portraits that these writers create are only one side of the story and there were, in all actuality, many extraordinarily talented and well-respected, even celebrated female musicians through the nineteenth century, such as the pianists Fanny Davies and , as well as the celebrated performer/pedagogue, . The general perception of women and music, though, seems to have been more misogynistic than not and

32 challenges the moralizing and educational function of music touted by proponents of classical music such as Sullivan, Hullah, Hawtrey, and others.14

There still remains, however, a slightly more insidious implication in the question of whether music was a gentlemanly, with an emphasis on “manly,” past-time for young men to be engaged in, particularly in the all male atmosphere of the public schools as well as Oxford and Cambridge. Thus, to refer once more to the 1862 education commission, Lord Clarendon questioned the Rev. Hawtrey as to whether the Eton boys

“think it manly to learn music” and asked if there was “no laughing” at those who do “by the rest of the boys” (228), a line of inquiry in which Derek Scott sees latent “fears of effeminacy,” if not worse (38).15 Unsurprisingly, given his polemical position, Hawtrey reports that there would be “[n]ot the least” amount of laughter, as though to indicate that the manliness of a musical education was assured (228). If this is his indication, he is almost certainly overstating his case.

Regardless, however, of whether or not the desire of young men to make music is a cause for laughter, it was a part of the curriculum that was increasingly prevalent at

Eton, as well as at and Harrow.16 The prominent English composer C. H. H.

14 It should be noted that women were not the only musical predators. They are sometimes the victims, for instance in Aldous Huxley‟s Antic Hay, the violinist Sclopis hopes to ensnare the young Emily, while in D. H. Lawrence‟s The Trespasser, the young violinist Beatrice falls in love with her teacher, the married Siegmund McNair. Leopold Bloom in James Joyce‟s Ulysses will think to himself that “[t]enors get women by the score” (11. 686)

15 In support of his argument regarding “fears of effeminacy” Scott cites an article from an 1898 issue of the Musical Times wherein the author observes that a boy at Harrow school who “went in for the study of music” in the late “would have been looked upon as a veritable milksop” (“Mr. Walter McFarren.” Musical Times and Singing Class Circular. 39.659 (Jan. 1, 1898): 12.)

16 For a brief discussion of the state of musical education at Westminster, which seems to have been roughly akin to that of Eton, see Evidence (437). 33

Parry, for instance, would receive early training at Eton and John Farmer was a prominent and by several accounts quite successful music master at Harrow from 1862 until Jowett convinced him in 1885 to move to Oxford so as to direct musical matters at

Balliol. All the same, it is important to keep in mind the shifting associations of music with regards to the potential manly or unmanliness of young men during this period, as it will be picked up by Pater and set up against the quasi-homosexual background of the

“Greats” curriculum, the classical course of study more formally known as the Literae

Humaniores at Oxford.

“Divine Harmony in Mortal Motions”: Music as a Stabilizing Moral Force for the State in Platonic Theory

If music in secondary schools was helping to combat traditional English notions of music as the most degenerate, subversive, and vulgar of the arts by presenting it as a force for an intellectual and moral good, reformers such as Hullah, Hawtrey, and later

Sullivan had on their side—perhaps somewhat surprisingly—no less of an authority than

Plato. One of the most striking scenes in the Republic is when Plato bans artists as liars from his ideal state in Book Three. Aligning the classical philosopher with the above educational and musical reformers might therefore seem counter-intuitive. Yet with

Plato, such a subtle concept of the political uses and abuses of art can hardly be placed into one amorphous category. While acknowledging all of the potentially subversive potentials of music referred to by Chesterfield père and others, Plato at the same time sees in the stricter forms of music a force for political and moral stability. Plato thus

34 provides an important intellectual link between the shifting associations of music in

English secondary schools at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries and the literary culture of nineteenth-century Oxford, particularly as the latter manifested itself in the works of Walter Pater.

Before considering Pater‟s reliance on Plato and music to investigate the shifting nature of class, morality, and issues of sex and gender, it might be useful to narrow our focus from the changing perceptions of music in England in general in order to filter them through the lens of the historical music scene within Oxford. Music played a vital role in the life of both the university and the town. With regards to the former, the importance of music had much to do with its overwhelming importance to Plato and the increasingly prominent role of his dialogues in the university‟s “Greats” curriculum. The advancement of the “Greats” by Benjamin Jowett, don and later master of Balliol

College, Regius Professor of Greek, and vice-chancellor of the university itself, significantly reoriented the knowledge base of the university's classical teaching towards

Platonic and neo-platonic writings. Jowett particularly emphasized the importance of

Plato‟s The Republic and other dialogues such as the Timaeus and the Phaedrus, which deal with an ideal structuring of society and of the universe in general, and which he himself translated and annotated anew. As Linda Dowling has shown, Jowett‟s focus on such idealistic, ethically-oriented works was designed to foster a moral, civic, and

35 intellectual ethos that would turn the “Oxford into a school for national and imperial leaders” of the then still expanding British Empire (71).17

Just as embedded within the foundational Platonic texts of the Greats curriculum as the expected political virtues of morality and stability is the somewhat unexpected argument for the necessity of music for the formation of a robust, educated, and well- functioning society. The prominence which Plato gave music in his utopian social order must have seemed rather surprising to many nineteenth-century readers, particularly considering the ambiguous role that music still played in British society at the time. No doubt part of the confusion stemmed from the different connotations of the word for

“music” in the and English languages. To the ancient Greeks the word

“music,” or “μουσική,” had a much broader reference and signified more than merely abstract sounds arranged harmoniously, or otherwise, to be played alone or with words.

Although this aural aspect was a large part of its meaning, the other connotations of the term included most of the liberal and fine arts watched over by the nine muses, from whom the word “music” is obviously etymologically related.18

17 Dowling notes that “[o]nce Plato‟s Republic had been established at the center of the Greats curriculum as the guarantee that the Oxford liberals”—as opposed to the polemical Oxford Tractarians, who by 1860 were strongly disliked—“had not turned aside from the pursuit of transcendental truth, Jowett could in turn appeal to this „greatest uninspired writing,‟” as he called the pagan Republic, to transform “Oxford into a school for national and imperial leaders” both at home and abroad (71). Thus, as Dowling points out, Jowett often arranged “for Indian and Home Civil Service candidates, as well as foreign students, to be educated at Balliol,” so as to turn “ambitious and energetic peers alike into that civic elite of laity and statesmen whom he trusted” to fulfill the spiritual and governing needs of a progressive British society (71-72).

18 The effects of the “Greats” curriculum in linking mathematics and music to the were relatively wide-spread and had a fair amount of influence even outside of Oxford. In the education commission reports cited, above for instance, the commissioner, and former Regius Professor of History at Oxford (from 1848 to 1858), H. Halford Vaughan made a connection between music and mathematics in support of to teach music at Eton. At one point he wonders “whether the cultivation of music, especially through stringed instruments, might be combined in such a way, with the teaching of 36

Plato elaborates on this expansive theoretical meaning of music in society in Book

II of the Republic during a discussion in which he places music at the center of the educational system he designs to sustain his perfect city. In this discussion, he notes that the training of youth should consist of primarily “two divisions, gymnastic for the body, and music for the soul” (2:376).19 Gymnastic is, unsurprisingly, physical training, while the division of “music” encompasses both instructions in sounds and various forms of

“literature” of both the “true or false” varieties: in other words, history, , philosophy, and poetry (2:377). In Book III, Plato elaborates on the social benefits of a

“musical” education by discussing the relationship between poetry and harmonious sounds, which in his time were often paired together.20 Plato observes that music, and particularly, he notes, music with restrained meters and rhythms, could provide a means

mathematics as that the two studies might proceed together and illustrate each other,” and goes on to note “that was well versed in the theory of music in addition to being a great mathematician,” and finally observes that in antiquity “music and mathematics” were “studied very much together” (Evidence 229). Ruskin similarly makes this connection in Time and Tide, observing in the above cited letter to the cork cutter Thomas Dixon, “[y]ou do not perhaps know, though I say this diffidently (for I often find working men know many thing which one would have thought were out of their way), that music was, among the Greeks, quite the first means of education; and that it was so connected with their system of ethics and of intellectual training, that the God of Music is with them also the God of Righteousness;—the God who purges and avenges iniquity, and contends with their Satan as represented under the form of Python, „the corrupter.‟ And the Greeks were incontrovertibly right in this. Music is the nearest at hand, the most orderly, the most delicate, and the most perfect, of all bodily pleasures; it is also the only one which is equally helpful to all the ages of man,—helpful from the nurse‟s to her infant, to the music, unheard of others, which so often haunts the deathbed of pure and innocent spirits. And the action of the deceiving or devilish power is in nothing shown quite so distinctly among us at this day,—not even in our commercial dishonesties, nor in our social cruelties,—as in its having been able to take away music, as an instrument of education, altogether; and to enlist it almost wholly in the service of superstition on the one hand, and of sensuality on the other” (368-69).

19 I use Benjamin Jowett‟s translations for all quotations from Plato.

20 As Carl Dahlhaus, in fact, has shown, our more modern narrow conception of “music” as primarily pertaining to non-communicative sound is a relatively recent conception: “What may seem obvious today, as though indicated in the nature of the thing—that music is a sounding phenomenon and nothing more, that a text is therefore considered an „extramusical‟ impetus—proves to be a historically molded theorem no more than two centuries old” (8). Dahlhaus discusses analyzes how so-called “absolute music” was a reaction against the dominant moral-oriented aesthetics of the eighteenth century (6-7). 37 to add “expressions of a courageous and harmonious life” to poetry, which would in turn lead to a courageous and harmonious state (3:399-400).

Courage and harmony, for Plato, are the key purposes of any education and whatever leads to these ends should be taught, while whatever does not must be banned.

Thus, although he claims ignorance regarding musical harmonies in general, Plato is nevertheless keen to emphasize his appreciation of how various types of music tend to produce divergent effects on an audience. A complex, “pan-harmonic” sort of music, he notes, can lead to an unrestrained excess of emotions and an anarchic “license,” while a more restrained “simplicity in music,” such as the playing of only one mode at a time, can affect the qualities of strength, moderation, and “ in the soul” (3:404). In his ideal state, then, complex music will be censored, along with all other types of art that induce disorder. But, two rather simplistic forms of music may remain, along with any other order inducing arts, to promote the goals of courage and social harmony. There will be one mode of music, Plato decrees, for sounding “the note or accent which a brave man utters in the hour of danger and stern resolve,” which represents his “firm step and a determination to endure”; and yet another that represents “his willingness to yield to persuasion or entreaty or admonition, and which represents him when by prudent conduct he has attained his end, not carried away by his success, but acting moderately and wisely under the circumstances, and acquiescing in the event” (3:399). By permitting these two varieties, and outlawing any others, Plato believes that music can help his state remain brave, but not arrogant, and strong, but not intemperate.

38

Plato‟s views on music, and particularly on the proper forms of music, corresponded quite closely to those of the Reverend Hawtrey, Arthur Sullivan, and indeed many of the others who supported the addition of music to England‟s educational system, all of whom believed that the art could promote discipline, morality, and wisdom.

What is so remarkable about Plato though is how truly difficult it would be to overestimate the actual, material influence that he gives to music in dialogues such as The

Republic and the Timaeus. As Pater himself explains in his Plato and Platonism:

The student of The Republic hardly needs to be reminded how all- pervasive in it that [musical] imagery is; how emphatic, in all its speculative theory, in all its practical provisions, is the desire for harmony; how the whole business of education (of gymnastic even, the seeming rival of music) is brought under it; how large a part of the claims of duty, of right conduct, for the perfectly initiated, comes with him to be this, that it sounds so well (71).

For Plato, music, in both its broader Greek sense as well as in its more modern aural one, was vital for the promotion of harmony in not just an abstract spiritual or intellectual world, but also a physical, “gymnastic” one.

Music held such a high position in The Republic because for Plato, as well as for other Greek philosophers, such as Pythagoras, the best of earthly music was merely an imitation or the faded repetition of the sounds of the heavens. Plato outlines his notion of how this heavenly music works most clearly in Book X of the Republic through his recounting of the “Myth of Er.” Here he describes the heavens as a series of planetary objects that are attached to a large spindle. These objects, Plato says, spin in , at various speeds corresponding to their divergent sizes, while the spindle

39 moves in the opposite direction. The result of such divine planetary movements is a harmonious sort of hymning. As Plato describes it,

[t]he spindle turns on the knees of Necessity; and on the upper surface of each circle is a siren, who goes round with them, hymning a single tone or note. The eight together form one harmony; and , at equal intervals, there is another , three in number, each sitting upon her throne: these are the Fates, daughters of Necessity, who are clothed in white robes and have chaplets upon their heads, Lachesis and Clotho and Atropos, who accompany with their voices the harmony of the sirens— all of which, when combined together, create a perfectly balanced heavenly accord (10:

617). It is this stable, divine accord that Plato wants to imitate or to reenact in his ideal citizens through the instruction of music.

In this theory of the hymning of the spheres, music becomes, for Plato, a key to a divine order and to the natural harmony of . The ultimate purpose of musical education in the Republic is therefore to teach citizens how to align their own disordered and unruly human natures to the harmonious nature of the heavens. To this end, Plato imagines a “musical training” which would enable his ideal citizens to achieve a “ and harmony” that could imitate the divine harmony. This would help the citizens to

“find their way into the inward places of the soul” to which they might “fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful,” a process which would then spread outwards. As a result of this education, the citizen should, as such, be able to “shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good” (3:401). Should this “musical training” of the citizens work, then they should be able not only to alter their own potentially faulty human natures, but also to create an 40 aesthetic atmosphere, through a critique of art, which could in turn alter the of others, helping to align the earthly state in which they live as closely as possible to the ideal harmony of the heavens.

Yet to achieve this music of the spheres in humanity, it was necessary to find the right equations not only between humanity and the heavens, but also between the human mind and the body. As Plato observes in the Timaeus, there is one defense against

“disproportion:—that we should not move the body without the soul or the soul without the body, and thus they will be on their guard against each other, and be healthy and well balanced.” Consequently, Plato notes that anyone whose “thoughts are much absorbed in some intellectual pursuit, must allow his body also to have due exercise, and practice gymnastic; and he who is careful to fashion the body, should in turn impart to the soul its proper motions, and should cultivate music and all philosophy, if he would deserve to be called truly fair and truly good” (Jowett trans. 88). This crucial balance between mind and body, which when achieved leads to a divine form of goodness, is a difficult one to obtain. Yet, Plato argues, the physical force of earthly music, if properly composed to produce an imitation of the divine harmonies, can help one to reach it. An appropriate mixture of harmonious sounds, he argues, could bring about “a pleasure which even the unwise feel, and which to the wise becomes a higher sort of delight, being an imitation of divine harmony in mortal motions” (80). This “divine harmony in mortal motion,” then, could help to temper physical as well as spiritual or emotional excess and lead to comprehensively “graceful” human existence.

41

On the other hand, if mortal motions, in particular physical elements of the human body (fire, , , and air), are not in some synch with divine harmony, disease can ravage both body and mind. In the Timaeus Plato follows the above discussion of music and pleasure with a long discussion of the various hardships that can occur when our bodies are inharmoniously ordered, many of which lead to “madness” and/or “ignorance” (86). In the Republic, he similarly notes, in language a bit toned down, how an “exclusive devotion to gymnastic,” representative of a fixation on the body, can produce “a temper of hardness and ferocity,” one in excess of a useful courageousness, while “the opposite effect of an exclusive devotion to music” can result in “softness and effeminacy” (3:410). Therefore the perfect guardian of the ideal state is

“he who mingles music with gymnastic in the fairest proportions, and best attempers them to the soul,” for he “may be rightly called the true musician and harmonist in a far higher sense than the tuner of the strings” (3:412). Here the physicality of an individual can be influenced by music and art, refined and shaped into a natural harmony, that can lead to the “good.” According to Plato, then, if it has the proper restraint, earthly music can reproduce the harmonious accord of the heavens, which, in turn, can balance out the mind and the body of individuals, attuning them to their divinely natural states of being; this will result in citizens that are good and fair and true, which will lead, ultimately, to an ideally stable and harmonious political state.

42

The Meeting of Mind and Matter: The Performance of Music in Oxford

In late-Victorian England, of course, music was perceived to have nowhere near the amount of metaphysical or even the apparent physical force that it had for Plato and the Greeks. All the same, Plato‟s insistence that music could be used as a strengthening, moderating, and overall intellectual influence for both the moral and physical good of the state was not lost on Jowett. Thus, although he admits in his annotations to the Republic that “[t]he power of a simple and characteristic melody on the impressible mind of the

Greek is more than we can easily appreciate,” he nevertheless attempts to land upon a suitable comparison by adding that “[t]he effect of national airs may bear some comparison with it” (liv).21 Jowett‟s choice of “national airs” as a point of comparison is interesting for several reasons. First because such airs are a genre of music that might be associated with the civic pride and responsibility that, as Dowling points out, Jowett hoped to instill in his students, primarily by infusing them with a love for morality, strength, and integrity, all of which he saw as inherent in Platonic philosophies.

Second, because this is exactly how such patriotic airs were being used in the second half of the nineteenth century in England, on a variety of different musical styles.

As Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling have shown, what is commonly known as the

English Pastoral School of Music, a school of English classical music which blossomed more or less loosely under the influence of the patriotic folk-music movement, had its antecedents in the latter half of the Victorian period. Hughes and Stradling point, in

21 Jowett also claims, regarding music, that Plato might have been engaging in a “degree of exaggeration” regarding its importance (“Introduction and Analysis,” liv). This is coincidentally similar to his statement regarding homosexuality in the Symposium, namely that it was a “figure of speech,” which it would be an exaggeration to take too literally (“Analysis and Notes” 534). 43 particular, to the publication of George Grove‟s Dictionary of Music and Musicians in

1879-89 as a turning point, and note that the effect of this monumental effort “was to revolutionise perceptions about English Music and its history” (76). One of the results of this promotional revolution was the composition of several pieces specifically identified with or unified under the banner of English culture. We might think, for instance, of

Arthur Sullivan‟s to the Tempest, composed in 1861-62, of George

Alexander MacFarren‟s Opera Robin Hood, published in 1860, or of the future Heather

Professor of Music (1900-08) Parry‟s “Cambridge” symphony of 1882, all of which were contemporaneous with Jowett‟s tenure as master of Balliol. I want to avoid overstating the case, which is perhaps minimal, for Jowett having had these specific forerunners of the in mind when he wrote the phrase “national airs”; but, it is highly likely that he was aware of the national Folk-music movement in general through his connection with Farmer, who produced several song-books containing choral national airs.22

22 Farmer, for instance, wrote the music for several , including some for “The Balliol Song Book,” which were later published in the songbook he edited, Gaudeamus: A Selection of Songs for Colleges and Schools, first published in 1890. The songbook includes a selection of international songs and songs about idealized romantic love, but significantly quite a few nationalistic ones praising strength and valor in English battles. See for instance, the songs “Heroes,” taken from “The Balliol Song Book,” which contains the verse “Led, we struck our stroke nor cared for doings left and right:/ Each as on his sole head, failer or succeeder,/ Lay the blame or lit the praise; no care for cowards: fight!,” all to be song “in unison” with the marking “” (64-65). Other nationalistic songs include “Hearts of Oak,” a song praising sea battles (96-97), and the song “Epilogue,” also from “The Balliol Song Book,” which deals more with a moral struggle (110-11). Jowett would undoubtedly have appreciated the tendency of these songs to praise steady, strong, English victories. The majority of the songs in this book would also seem to support Farmer‟s claim, published in The Musical Herald that he “dare not give students or boys, at their formative period, anything weak.” He also claimed to avoid giving boys anything too “„pretty,‟” a category into which he placed many Anglican songs (“Mr. John Farmer.” MH 1 Mar. 1897: 73). 44

Regardless of how he landed on the phrase “national airs,” by 1885 Jowett had actively begun to promote the performance of both choral and instrumental music as an integral and institutionally unifying part of life in Oxford. While in the midst of working on his translation of the Republic, with which he hoped to bolster the moral and intellectual acuity of England‟s ruling class, Jowett was also pursuing the organist, composer, and Harrow School music master Farmer, whom he finally persuaded to come to Oxford in 1885. Jowett was also to provide the money for two new organs for Balliol

College, first for the college hall and then for the college chapel, out of his own pocket.

The hall organ alone cost about two thousand pounds; but for Jowett the price seems to have been worth it, as the instrument was seen as an invaluable aid to Farmer in his quest to promote the unity of the college through music.23 According to , a

Balliol don under Jowett, the master had hired Farmer “with a commission to do what he could in making music an element of education and of social union in the College. For as the College grew in extent there seemed a danger of its falling into , each keeping apart from the others in shy or rude isolation” (246). Although “as a student of Plato,”

Abbott reports, Jowett had “been somewhat suspicious” of music, the master now hoped that “under the spell of Farmer‟s enthusiasm, which had done so much for the schools

23 Jowett might have even been willing to pay more. Recounting the story of Jowett‟s purchase of the organ built by Henry Willis, the famed organ-maker, for Balliol‟s hall, Arthur and Robin Wilson note that “[w]hen the final estimate arrived, Jowett asked Farmer whether an extra few hundred pounds would make it any better. But Willis had done his best, and Jowett paid the entire cost of £2000 out of his own pocket. Two years later, when the Harrison organ in the College chapel was completely rebuilt at enormous expense, the cost was once again provided by Jowett personally” (3). 45 boys at Harrow,” music in the chapel and the hall “would be made an elevating influence in education” at Balliol (247).24

With these goals of unity and a moral elevation in mind, and despite some public dismay at the intrusions of the largely secular concerts on Sunday, Jowett also introduced what came to be called the “Balliol Concerts.” These concerts commenced on October

18th, 1885. The first program included various Chorales, such as Corelli‟s “Wake Awake

[sic],” and instrumental music, such as Bach‟s “Prelude and Gigue in A,” Farmer‟s own

“Gavotte and Saraband,” ‟s “Andante” from the 16th Symphony and “Part of the

Slow Movement” from Beethoven‟s “Pastoral Symphony,” among others (Burns and

Wilson 2). As time went on, the Balliol Concerts were perceived to be a popular event not only among the students, but also among the university community and the town in general.25 In this way, the concerts took part in bridging the potential divide between the university and the city of Oxford itself.

24 Perhaps with this “elevating influence” in mind, Jowett would bring to the concerts “distinguished guests, who at various times included Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Lord Coleridge, T. H. Huxley, Arthur Balfour and ” (Burns and Wilson, 6). The concerts thus provided the students with a chance to mingle, at least to some extent, with the literary and political movers and shakers of their day, while such guests could in turn lend a sort of cultural cachet to the music.

25 On Jowett‟s death Jackson’s Oxford Journal (JOJ) provided the following description of a special Memorial Concert held in the late master‟s memory: “The hall of Balliol College was crowded to overflowing on Sunday night on the occasion of the 185th Sunday night concert, which was in memory of the late master, Professor Jowett … The Balliol Sunday night concerts were started in 1885, by permission of the Master, by Dr. Farmer, and although the innovation excited considerable ridicule at the time, they have from the outset been most popular. The music performed is not necessarily of a sacred character, and the performances are attended by members of all colleges. The late Master was present on nearly every occasion up to the time of his death, and frequently expressed his pleasure that he had sanctioned their introduction. Professor Jowett‟s approval of them was shown in a very practical manner, for he paid out of his own pocket for two organs, one erected in the College chapel and the other in the hall. It is believe that this is the only College dining hall in England possessing an organ. The two cost upwards of 3000l” (“Memorial Concert to the Late Master of Balliol.” JOJ 10 Mar. 1894: 8.) Burns and Wilson note that the “Vicar of St. Mary Magdalene” in particular “preached against those practices,” namely Sunday concerts, 46

Although Jowett‟s Balliol Concerts were innovative in so far as they helped to introduce and secular entertainment more generally on Sundays, they were very much in tune, so to speak, with their time.26 For the use of classical music as a means to provide some sort of unifying institutional accord had, by the mid-nineteenth century, somewhat of a precedent in university affairs. Though not as directly influenced as Jowett‟s concerts were by Platonic theory, the university had been gradually increasing the use of music throughout the early half of the nineteenth century at official celebrations. Most apparent was the use of classical music to help celebrate the annual

Commemoration week ceremonies, traditionally held during the ninth week of Trinity

Term, in honor of the benefactors and founders of the university.

Jackson’s Oxford Journal (henceforth, the “Journal”) was one of the few prominent local newspapers during the nineteenth century in Oxford and is therefore a good source of information regarding university and town events, including those of a musical nature. The Journal often reported on the extensive musical productions that occurred during the weeklong celebration in both individual colleges and in the

“which „might be all very well in atheist Germany,” but which “in Christian England” were to be condemned (4).

26 In pointing out the increasingly musical atmosphere in Oxford, I do not want to underemphasize the point that both Jowett‟s concerts and music in general in Oxford were helping to change, for the better, the generally dismal perception of music in England. Burns and Wilson note that “even by the end of the eighteenth century, music was not generally regarded as a respectable activity. It was a regular occurrence for concerts to be interrupted by undergraduate „tumults‟, and it was often necessary to remind concert- goers that „dogs shall not be brought to the concerts‟. In the Holywell Music Room a Cremona was broken by an orange aimed at one of the performers, and around 1850 a chest of priceless in the Bodleian was burned since it was assumed to be dusty rubbish” (1-2). Bringing dogs to concerts, though surprising, may actually have been a wide-spread problem. It was at least enough of one for the Oxford University Musical Union to include as their 16th club rule (1 out of 25 rules total, pertaining mostly to club membership requirements and music borrowing privileges) that “Dogs may not be brought into the Club Room” (Kemp and Mee 136). 47 traditional location for formal university ceremonies, the Sheldonian Theatre. The

Journal‟s report on of the 1875 Commemoration week events may be taken as a relatively standard example of such celebrations during the latter quarter of the nineteenth century.27 The Journal reported that this year Pembroke College had “had the honour” of

“inaugurating the festivities by giving, on the evening of Thursday, June 3rd, a concert in the Hall, which was, as usual, beautifully decorated with flowers, and crowded to the very doors with a brilliant company.” The Journal goes on to give a list of pieces performed at the Pembroke concert, which ranged from Part Songs, such as “Come, boys! drink!” to an Overture by Schubert and Chopin‟s “ in A major, No. 4,” and notes that “the concert was most thoroughly enjoyed” by the audience.

The Journal provides similar reviews of subsequent concerts throughout the

Commemoration Week. On Friday June 4th there was a concert given by the Oxford

Musical Society at Queen‟s College. There were several performances given on Saturday

27 The concerts seem to have been a way for everyone to enjoy the week by providing a wide-array of music, including part songs, more serious choral works, and instrumental music; (for other examples of Commemoration week programs, see JOJ 17 June 1882: 4; JOJ 13 June 1885: 5; JOJ 18 June 1887: 5, which notes that this year‟s events included a “Richter concert,” a concert directed by the famous London conductor Hans Richter; and JOJ 23 June 1888: 4, which notes a particularly well attended concert in Balliol hall: “A large audience gathered in the Hall of Balliol College this evening, when Mendelssohn‟s „Antigone‟ was performed by the College Musical Society, some 400 ladies and gentlemen being present”). While the musical events were no doubt held to give prestige to the annual occasion, they were not all formal or entirely inviolate affairs. One of the main draw at some ceremonies with musical interludes seems have been the ribaldry that was expected from the undergraduate sections of the audience. In 1895, for instance, during the Encaenia ceremony—held for the awarding of honorary degrees in the Sheldonian Theatre and one of the chief events of the Commemoration week—a concert was performed by Dr. J. Varley Robert on the organ. It included an “Andante and Allegro in D” by Bach, the “War ” from Athalie by Mendelssohn, a toccata in G by Dubois, and the “the larghetto and andante” movements of Handel‟s “Organ in G minor, No. 1.” Aside from listing the program, the reviewer takes the time to comment on the “almost total absence of witty cries and jokes on the part of the undergraduates in the upper gallery”; he does note that their “interruptions, however, were as numerous and noisy as ever.” As an example of the noise, the reviewer reports that “[t]he organist, while playing the „Toccata in G‟ was requested to „stop that, and play a comic song” (JOJ 24 June 1893: 7). The majority of the concerts, however, seems to have been uninterrupted and, as the critics of the day might have said, “thoroughly enjoyed” by all. 48

June 6th, one in the afternoon by the Clarendon Press Musical Society and one in the evening by the University Musical Club, the latter of which was well known for the high quality of their concerts. For Monday the 7th, the Journal advertised “[a] grand morning concert,” which was to be given “in the Sheldonian Theatre by the Oxford Philharmonic

Society, commencing at two o‟clock in the afternoon. The principal pieces selected” included “Sterndale Bennett‟s „May Queen,‟ Mozart‟s Symphony in G minor, and ‟s

„Reapers‟ Chorus.”‟ Such Commemoration Week concerts, performed both in individual colleges and in university buildings at university ceremonies, no doubt helped to rehabilitate music as a respectable, intellectually worthwhile endeavor by providing access to good music by good performers while uniting disparate members of the community, students, dons, and townspeople of both genders, in one shared activity.

Access to good music was not limited either to one week in Trinity Term or to the

Balliol Concerts during the rest of the year. Music in Oxford flourished and there were myriad musical societies in the city during the late nineteenth century, such as the

University Musical Club, the Oxford Choral and Philharmonic Societies, as well as the

Oxford University Musical Union, which had members from a variety of colleges.28

Societies also formed in individual colleges, organized and run by undergraduates, all of which played a wide array of “classical” music, both for themselves and for a wider public in college quads.

28 The Oxford University Musical Union in particular seems to have been quite an accomplished group of undergraduate amateurs at this time. A relatively standard concert for this time was that played on Wednesday, June 5th, 1895: A in C Major, No. 72 by Haydn, a Song entitled “A little flower” by Nicolai, a “Romance for Pianoforte and in A major,” Op. 94, No. 2, by Schumann, a “ for Pianoforte and Violin in A major” Op. 100 by , a “Song” entitled “My heart‟s beloved” by Nicolai, and “Moderato for Organ Solo in F major, Op. 22 No. 1 by Gade (Kemp and Mee 13). 49

The reasons for this proliferation of music and musical societies were varied. One of the most prominent, however, was the increasing intellectual cachet that music was accumulating within the ranks of the university itself. Working alongside the larger cultural shifts in the general perception of music—the transition, for instance, of music being perceived as a moral, intellectual pursuit rather than as a dissolute one—was the figure of Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley, Heather Professor of Music from 1855-89. As

Wollenberg shows, Ouseley worked to institute a number of rigorous changes in the university statutes governing examinations for the degree . In 1856

Ouseley agitated for a “written examination” as a requirement to pass from a Bachelor‟s degree to a Doctorate in music (99). Then, in 1871, Wollenberg writes, “the B.Mus. examination was expanded to encompass two parts, the first (in harmony and counterpoint, in not more than four parts) held in Michaelmas Term” as well as a follow up examination “in Easter or Act Term, which tested not only more advanced harmony and counterpoint (in up to five parts) but also , form, and set works” (102-

03).

Wollenberg observes that the “University‟s new requirements were quite demanding,” and, as such, these “changes must have affected the way that the degree was perceived both within and beyond the University” (103). A further change enhancing the perception of the study of music would have been the university‟s decision in 1876 to pass a statute requiring undergraduates seeking the B.Mus. to have evidence proving some amount of exposure to the wider liberal arts curriculum, including such subjects as

English, mathematics, or classical or modern languages (108). All of these changes

50 brought about what Wollenberg describes as a “definite though irregular rise in the numbers of candidates” for music degrees, which in turn filled the city of Oxford with students ready to perform (100).29

Along with this rise in academic standing and increased enrollment came a series of public concerts provided by serious musicians, both undergraduates and graduates.

These were provided for the combined town and university community at relatively rates. For the centenary of Mozart‟s death in 1891, for instance, the joint Oxford

Choral and Philharmonic Society performed the composer‟s and the

29 Though the increasing number of statutes encouraging more rigorous examinations for music degrees may have increased the intellectual standing of the degree in the university community at large, they had an odd, if understandable, effect on those applying for the degrees. Wollenberg notes that after the passage of the 1876 statute “requiring more rigorous entrance conditions for music degrees,” which was scheduled to come into effect in Hilary Term of 1878, there was “a rush to enter before the new requirement came into force.” She notes that a similar process seems to have repeated itself in the , “when it became known that the University was considering the imposition of residence requirements” for music students, who, as such, would have to pay more (102). Ironically, the increased enrollment was due to students wanting to earn the degree before it actually became more difficult to do so, not, notably, the increasing prestige of the degree itself. Wollenberg observes, nonetheless, that many “[n]ew university-based societies were formed partly in association with the trend to increase the academic value placed on music … and partly under the influence of the developments in concert life generally in Britain” (143). This last statement alludes to the fact that Oxford was not the only teaching music at the university level. The increasing standards in Oxford‟s musical curriculum were taking place at a time when there was a flurry of activity along similar educational lines, during what Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, drawing on Pater, have termed the “English Musical Renaissance” (a phrase also bandied about at the end of the late nineteenth century). This period showed a re-invigorated interest in English music on the levels of both composition and performance. The authors link their discussion of Pater and the “Musical Renaissance” to several of the professional musical schools that formed in London, such as the National Training School (NTS). The NTS was designed “to recruit students from all social classes by competitive selection—the essential qualification” being “the promise of excellence. The land for the NTS—adjacent to the —was donated by the Exhibition commissioners. The building itself was paid for by a London builder, Charles Freake,” and various “[s]cholarships were funded in 1876” in order to mitigate student fees; and to secure the prestige of the school, the founders had hired “(the soon- to-be-Sir) Arthur Sullivan as principal” (23). Music became, in fact, somewhat of a nationalistic endeavor, in part due to the support of the . When the NTS became the (RCM) in 1883, George Grove was made director and “the Queen agreed to become its first patron and the Prince of Wales its first president.” Coinciding with “the day of the opening ceremonies Grove‟s knighthood was announced” (31). In 1880, meanwhile, the Corporation opened the Guildhall School of Music (47). All of these schools were, it should be noted, in addition to the older Royal of Music, which was founded in 1822 and given a charter by King George IV in 1830. According to Mackerness, however, it “had never really carried much weight in the national musical life” (196). 51

Philharmonic performed one of his E Flat major symphonies. Ticket prices were as follows: “Stalls, Numbered and Reserved, 6s.; Second Seats 3s. 6d., Back of Room 2s”

(JOJ 28 Nov. 1891: 5).30 On a more regular basis were the “Public Classical Concert[s]” given by the Oxford University Musical Club, which also began in 1891 and which were extensively reported on and praised in the Journal. The first “Public” concert was held in the Sheldonian Theatre and included Beethoven‟s Overture, Schumann‟s in A Minor, Haydn‟s “Oxford Symphony,” and Mozart‟s Overture from

Figaro. The Ladies gallery was priced at 3s and seats in the Upper Gallery were 2s (JOJ

24 Oct. 1891: 4). Here, good music was being provided to the town public at large at relatively affordable prices.31

A final reason for the plethora of Oxford concerts, one having only indirectly to do with intellectual endeavors, was the influx of students into the university who, having been trained by people such as Hullah, Hawtrey, and Farmer in their prep schools, wanted to continue to enjoy music in their undergraduate careers. It was most likely undergraduates such as these who would organize concert parties in the quads of colleges, either performing in the concerts themselves or inviting others to perform, not only for educational or commemorative purposes, but simply for the pleasure of a

30 There must have been a conscious effort to keep these public concerts relatively affordable, as the Journal records the OUMC‟s continuing struggles over a series of years to keep the concerts afloat, with some concerts selling out but still others with insufficient attendance to guarantee the continuation of the concerts (JOJ 26 Oct. 26. 1895: 8, and JOJ 29 Oct. 1892: 5).

31 I am basing this statement off of two articles in the journal, The Nineteenth Century, one by Miranda Hill, the noted social worker and sister of Octavia Hill, entitled “Life on Thirty Shillings a Week” and “Life on a Guinea a Week” by W. Roberts. These articles outline living on a limited salary and if Hill and Roberts have their numbers right, two shillings per seat at a concert would clearly have constituted a luxury, but would not have been an entirely unaffordable one. Other, still cheaper concerts, some at 6d to 3 d a seat, were also being directly held for the working classes in other parts of England (Russell 42-43). 52 musical atmosphere. One of the most entertaining “music critics” from the Journal went by the Aristotelian pseudonym of Barbara Bocardo and, in her column entitled “Notes by an Oxford Lady,” reports on this aspect of college concert life, about which she has this to say:

Its most important feature, as everybody knows, is the interval. Of course you must have music of some kind on either side to create an interval, but the music is merely a make-believe, the entertainment is in truth the promenade in the illuminated quads and gardens, with ices and light refreshment thrown in for the benefit of the more prosaic. Balliol, as usual, led off the concert season [a different season from that consisting of Jowett‟s Sunday concerts] on Saturday night, but Balliol is a painfully sober-minded foundation and its concert is all music and no interval. At this early period of the proceedings it does not matter so much, and the hall was crowded with decorous youths and maidens, [and] with a due percentage of chaperons, who sat out and apparently enjoyed the lengthy programme (JOJ 27 May 1899: 9).

This rather flippant description emphasizes the more pleasurable atmosphere surrounding music making in Oxford.

Indeed, an almost sensual atmosphere surrounding the music at college concerts seems to have been rather important. Illuminations and decorations at musical events were a tradition with the undergraduates, a trend suggesting that certain aspects of the aesthetic movement in England were alive and well on the college concert circuit. A review of an Exeter College Musical Society concert from 1883, for instance, recounts how the extensive decorations set up for one performance trumped even those of a sporting event a few days earlier. After detailing the pieces performed—a selection of vocal music, a Schubert piano , a “Romanza” by F. Ries, and Chopin‟s B minor —an anonymous reviewer goes on to report that “[t]he illuminations in the Front

Quadrangle on this occasion were even more elaborate than on the previous Wednesday, 53 which was then in honour of the Eight being „head of the river.‟” “Chinese lanterns” had been “hung from nearly every window, and also suspended from four lines across the

Quadrangle, which altogether had a very pleasing effect. carried out by a few

Undergraduates of the College, to give éclat to the concert.” As if all this were not enough, at “the conclusion of the concert, and as the company were leaving, a pretty display of fireworks and coloured lights took place in the Old Quad, near the Chapel.”

Reviewing a Queen‟s College concert a few paragraphs later, the same critic praises the of the front quad “where refreshments of choice kinds were provided, while the buildings were brightly illuminated by coloured fires” (JOJ 26 May 1883: 5). At these concerts, undergraduates seem to have been taking almost literally Pater‟s controversial advice from the “Conclusion” of The Renaissance to “burn always with” a

“hard, gem-like flame” (189).

Yet, this sensual pleasure was not, as some reviewers imply, all in the decorations and refreshments. The program of the Balliol concert in the review by Bocardo quoted above included, according to the Lady‟s own account, songs in German and in English, as well as a Schubert , a Chaconne in D minor by Tommaso Vitali and solos by Bach and Dunkler. Despite her penchant for intervals, Bocardo was clearly paying attention to the music during her down time. This program, with its mixture of songs and instrumental music, is representative of the programs of many other college concerts. It is also interesting, yet not unique, in that the singers, the violinist, and the cellist were all women. Despite the all male constituency of the colleges, women often were engaged to perform in music society concerts and were undoubtedly an added source of interest for

54 the undergraduates. Women, however, were not the only performers. During a visit to an Exeter College concert, the Lady reported on “orchestral music and part songs,” including the school song “ Exoniense,” “by the College Musical Society,” a group that was professionally conducted, but had student instrumentalists and vocalists.32

This would imply that this concert consisted entirely of male performers. Unfortunately, however, for the “Oxford Lady,” although the Exeter “Fellows‟ garden was duly illuminated” for the concert, “the audience could not venture into it for rain, so the refreshments were served to them in their seats”; as she sensibly notes, “such an interval is not worthy of the name” (“Notes by an Oxford Lady.” JOJ 27 May 1899: 9).

Last but not least, a word should probably be said about . In

Oxford there are more chapels than there are colleges and in many of these some sort of music was taking place, often of a loosely “classical” variety.33 During this time it was in fact difficult to extricate religion from music, primarily because so many of the most popular musical were bound up with religious texts in the forms of , , and oratorios. Nonetheless, for many audience members, music and its textual could be appreciated in an aesthetic light, regardless of religious or

32 Some College Music Societies would often hire outside performers for their concerts while others, such as Exeter, Pembroke, and others were made up of either current or former students of the college. The Journal, in 1885, notes that Pembroke, for instance, usually “relies upon its own musical talents entirely,” and only occasionally hires outside talent (JOJ 13 June 1885: 5). See also Wollenberg‟s chapter on “The Colleges, II” for a more in-depth discussion of college music societies (184-86, 194-202).

33 See, for instance, the entry for an “Organ Recital at Queen‟s College,” given by Mr. T. W. Dodds, “Mus. Bac., Organist to the College, who played the following selection in a most masterly manner”: the concert took place in the college chapel and the selections included pieces by Mendelssohn, Batiste, J. S. Bach, Guilmant, and Handel (“Tuesday, June 12th.” JOJ 16 June 1877: 5). Music by “classical” composers such as Bach and Handel, among others, was also often played as the to anthems and other sung in chapels and churches. See for instance the advertised services at St. Mary‟s Cathedral for the mornings of Sunday and Monday Nov. 9th and 10th, during which songs were song to music by Mendelssohn (JOJ 8 Nov. 1884: 5). 55 doctrinal context. An example of just such a musical liberality can be found in a review of an Oxford Choral Society concert in 1877, which included both a by

Rossini and a protestant by Mendelssohn. Noting this religious mélange, the reviewer observed that, although these works have “nothing in common,” Mendelssohn being “a German and a Lutheran” and Rossini being “an Italian and a Roman Catholic,” all the same “[t]hose who can understand the beautiful, no matter under what phase exhibited, are in a position to appreciate the works of both masters, and, acknowledging them to be in earnest, to give both credit for that earnestness” (“Oxford Choral Society.”

JOJ 1 Dec. 1877: 8). Such a philosophy regarding an aesthetic appreciation irrespective of pedantic doctrines, and of the interpenetration of a beautiful form and a beautiful earnestness, could almost have been written (had it a few more clauses) by Pater himself, and it seems rather likely this is the way that he would have appreciated , when he ducked into a chapel to hear it.

For duck in he did. Violet Paget, the actual name of the author Vernon Lee, was an acquaintance of Pater‟s and his two sisters, Hester and Clara, who stayed with them several times in the . Writing to her mother after one such visit, she recounts a day spent in Oxford with the three of them: “After lunch they wanted to go on the river, but as it looked rainy, we all took a walk in the town and heard the music at the Cathedral. I cannot say how friendly these people are” (Seiler 100). To some degree, a fondness on

Pater‟s part for hearing music in an ecclesiastical setting should come as no surprise considering his spiritual aestheticism. Noting Pater‟s interest in ecclesiastical art, his friend Edmund Gosse specifically attributed it to what he described as the author‟s

56

“haunting sense of the value of the sensuous emblem, the pomp of colour and melody, in the offices of religion,” which Gosse claims came from the Catholic heritage of Pater‟s family (Seiler 185). One of the more pleasant aspects of Catholicism is, of course, the within its long polyphonic masses, as well as pieces such as the above mentioned Stabat Mater.

Regardless, of its origin, Pater seems to have maintained his interest in ecclesiastical music, and to have enjoyed seeing others interested in it as well, to the end of his life. In a memorial sermon for Pater in 1894, his close friend, Brasenose colleague, and Oxford B.Mus. degree holder, F. W. Bussell recounted to Brasenose students how the deceased had taken a “great delight” in the college chapel services, although “some times regretting that the ardour of singing which you showed in the , seemed to abate when you came to the Magnificat, to him above others, the Song of Songs.”34 Several settings of the Magnificat have, of course, been composed by such noted musicians as J.

S. Bach, C. , , Charles Villiers Stanford, and Frederick Ouseley

(Heather Professor from 1855-89). Bussell went on to note of Pater that yet “[a]nother alteration he would have liked was the introduction of music into our monthly mid-day celebration, from which he was never absent when resident in College” (Seiler 179). The church music would undoubtedly, to use Gosse‟s terms, have provided still one more

“sensuous emblem” of the Brasenose chapel service for Pater to have enjoyed.

Pater, similarly to Jowett, most likely considered the performance of religious music, in Brasenose and elsewhere, as a practical, modern extension of the moral and

34 It is also interesting to note that Bussell was one of the original members of the Oxford University Musical Union, discussed above (Buck 14). 57 educational advantages of Greek music. Consider, for instance, the following lines from

Pater‟s unfinished novel Gaston de Latour, wherein the lapsed monk Bruno Giordano listens to a Christian Hymn, while thinking, “„[t]he music of the spheres!‟—he could listen to it in a perfection such as had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoras even

… Yes! The grand old Christian hymns, perhaps the grandest of them all, seemed to blend themselves in the chorus, to be deepened immeasurably under this new intention”

(311-12). Here the Christian hymns, apprehended by a former monk, become mingled into the music of the spheres only to become “deepened” by their newly imputed Greek

“intention.” An antinomian appreciation, for Giordano, seems to lead to a deeper understanding and enjoyment of music. For Pater too, perhaps, such an appreciation of the “earnestness” of religious hymns, added to the simple aesthetic pleasures of wandering into a chapel or church, provided a means to pursue through the actual performance of music the moral, and even subversive, values which he saw inherent in

Greek music.

It is my hope that this discussion of the venues and the theoretical and institutional uses of music in Oxford has done something to flesh out the musical culture in which Pater was living and working. More than serving as a mere empty encomium for prose form, or as a metaphysical conceit used to invoke a more ambiguous, if exulted ideal than literature could wrap its words around, music maintained several clearly articulated functions. Plato, whose prestige at Oxford was increasing throughout the late-

Victorian period, theorized a musical education as a means to stabilize the body, mind, and state according to a divine will. During the same period, Jowett founded his Balliol

58 concerts to encourage a sense of community. The university itself, as Wollenberg has shown, was around this time increasing the rigor of its music curriculum. The

Commemorative Week concerts, meanwhile, many of which took place at the Sheldonian

Theatre, almost a stone‟s throw around the corner of Brasenose College, as well as various other musical societies, generated a practical musical atmosphere throughout both the university and the town. All of these events can easily be seen as increasing the social and institutional prestige of music.

At the same time, various circumstances and traditions conspired to keep the subversive potential of music prominent. The rise of Plato reinforced the association of music with femininity and a questionable masculinity. Unrestrained music, the philosopher preached, could lead to an immoral “license,” as well as to “softness and effeminacy.” A subtle emphasis on physical or aesthetic pleasures could, indeed, be seen to temper the more rigid educational or elevating aspects of some of the college concerts.

More seriously, an appreciation of music also provided a means to submerge Christian texts into ambiguity, to merge them with pagan values, or merely to provide audiences with a rational entertainment that distracted from religious on Sundays.

Hence, Jowett‟s Sunday evening concerts were, in some quarters, condemned and ridiculed.35 If we want to examine the role of music as it appeared to late nineteenth- century Oxford writers, these were its social and political contexts. If, moreover, these issues were at the forefront in Oxford, they were also, as Sullivan indicates, linked to larger cultural trends across England, of which Pater was undoubtedly aware.

35 Religious protests against Sunday concerts, and indeed all Sunday amusements, were fervent since at least the 1850s and not limited to Oxford (Bailey 82; see also 53 n29, above). 59

Pater‟s Platonism: Music‟s Moral Steadfastness within Flux

As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, Pater‟s most comprehensive theoretical discussions of music appear not in his “Giorgione” essay, nor even in his most famous book, which contains that essay, The Renaissance (106). They appear, rather, in a series of lectures that he gave at Oxford from 1891-92 and then published as Plato and

Platonism in 1893. In this volume, Pater reveals the width and depth of his knowledge of

Platonic philosophy by discussing such varied topics as “Plato‟s Æsthetics” or “Plato and the Doctrine of Number,” both of which analyze Platonic and Pythagorean theories concerning the nature of the world, and “Lacedæmon,” which details the fierceness of the

Spartan temperament that produced both fighters and artistic spirits. His volume also reveals the influence of the various uses of music in nineteenth-century Oxford, from its association with a more rigorous education to a sense of community. Throughout the book, however, hardly a chapter goes by without Pater in some way reinforcing the relationship between Platonic theories of music and such topics as aesthetics; social order; education; the natural, divine sensuality inherent within the human body; and social reform.

One of Pater‟s driving arguments throughout Plato and Platonism is that Plato himself anticipated a complex philosophy intimately analogous to the late-nineteenth- century aesthetic movement. This movement was often crystallized in the dictum of “art for art‟s sake,” a call-to-arms vulgarly mistaken as hedonistic, but which Pater meant to stimulate individuals towards a “quickened sense of life” and a “multiplied 60 consciousness” (190).36 An admiration of art, Pater suggested, could lead to a socially progressive and humanistic moral standard. As he put it in “Style,” “great art,” the type of art humanity should most admire, should be not merely a meaningless beauty. It should rather be “devoted … to the increase of men‟s happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other” (38). In Plato and

Platonism, Pater declares that Plato was a forerunner of this moral aesthetic philosophy:

“He anticipates the modern notion that art as such has no end but its own perfection,—

„art for art‟s sake.‟” For Plato too, though, the “perfection” of art is wrapped up with a social significance. Plato sees, Pater writes, that “the reality of beauty” has an

“importance” within a “practical sphere” in life. “The loveliness of virtue” can illuminate the ideals of “Temperance, Bravery” and “Justice,” moving beyond a “mere utility,” but inspiring an aesthetic and philosophic admiration and emulation (268). Plato‟s philosophy, as advanced by Pater, becomes an obvious forerunner to the enlightening

“great art” defined in “Style” and the “Conclusion” to the Renaissance.

Elsewhere, Pater acknowledges the important social role of music in Plato‟s socio-aesthetic philosophy. He suggests that, for Plato, art

has no purpose but itself, its own perfection. The proper art of the Perfect City is in fact the art of discipline. Music (μοσσική) all the various forms of , will be but the instruments of its one over-mastering social or political purpose, irresistibly conforming its so imitative subject units to type (275-76). “Art for art‟s sake,” Pater notes, applies to “proper art,” which instead of existing to serve some imperfect utilitarian purpose or as a simplistic means for pleasure, can be used for

36 Maltz explains how these socially constructive, as opposed to simply hedonistic, aesthetic ideas played out amongst the working classes in her British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class, 1870- 1900: Beauty for the People. As Maltz shows, aestheticism was not all of a hedonistic or Wildean sort. 61 both. Art and particularly music, that ideal embodiment of all the fine arts, can serve a higher purpose as a model to imitate in order to improve society on both a moral and a political level, unifying a populace. This is a clear echo of Jowett‟s reasons for starting the Balliol Concerts.

What is perhaps most striking, is Pater‟s depiction of the ability of music to implement its socio-political goals in a physical, real-world fashion. Pater picks up and hones in on the most material elements within Plato‟s philosophy in order to detail how art and music can take on an active, objective sense. Pater‟s Plato insists on the moral

“reality of beauty,” in the “practical sphere,” wherein the “loveliness of virtue as a harmony” can be perceived in the “visible representations of” virtuous “human persons and their acts” (268). Since the “virtues” of these individuals manifest “the eternal qualities of „the eternal,‟” which is to say, of the “famous „music of the spheres,‟” Plato posits, Pater writes, that, “in education, all will begin and end in „music‟” in an ideal state

(268, 70). This will create virtuous citizens. Once educated with regards to the formal or corporeal qualities of music, and divine music in particular, through its “symmetry,

æsthetic fitness,” and “tone,” the ideal society will become attuned to a natural and celestial form of virtuous behavior. Through a musical education, then, “[w]e are to find, or be put into, and keep, every one his natural place,” so that society can run with the natural moral harmony of a “perfect musical exercise” (273).

This Platonic focus on a musical materiality and order clearly has and imperialistic overtones, which even Pater, himself hardly a strapping , appears to have admired. He devotes an entire chapter entitled “Lacedæmon” to the patriotic

62 military superiority of Sparta, the English term for Lacedæmon. Noting that Plato may have had the Lacedæmonians in mind when constructing his “Perfect City” in The

Republic, Pater observes that “music,” in the sense of a liberal arts education, was a large part of Spartan culture. Admitting that the Spartans themselves most likely had “no conscious theories about it,” he nonetheless argues that “music (μουσική)[,] in the larger sense of the word, was everywhere,” and was used for a concrete purpose: namely, to encourage moral and physical strength. The purpose of music for the Spartans, Pater argues, was not just to soften, “not to alleviate only but actually to promote and inform, to be the very substance of their so strenuous and taxing habit of life.” This “„music‟” offered a way of life for “which those vigorous souls were ready to sacrifice so many opportunities, privilege, enjoyments of a different sort, so much of their ease, of themselves,” and “of one another” (200). Undoubtedly Pater‟s emphasis on a “strenuous and taxing” way of life and on “sacrifice” might be seen to maintain the inherent, real- world focused imperialistic tendencies of Jowett‟s “Greats” curriculum. Along such lines, Platonic uses of music, with all of the word‟s Hellenic connotations, in Oxford were intended to unify and to strengthen young undergraduates, the future philosopher- guardians of the British Empire. Platonic music was to imbue them with the institutionally sanctioned Greek and Victorian ideals of “Temperance, Bravery” and

“Justice.”

Yet a system of order need not necessarily be martial. It can also bring a sense of stability to a world constantly in transition. In the famously controversial “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, Pater had observed that “[t]o regard all things and principles of

63 things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought” (186).37 In Plato and Platonism, he finds a dialectic stability in inconstancy through an association of Platonic notions of music with the immutable nature of a rhythmically ordered universe. In order to make this association, he offers a basic definition of ‟s “Perpetual Flux,” which he describes as “currents of universal change, stealthily withdrawing the apparently solid earth itself from beneath one‟s feet” (12, 15). This flux brings about a “disintegration” and “incoherency” which

“are inherent in the primary elements alike of matter and of the soul” (15). Pater warns, however, that although this definition is the most commonly known, it is only a partial, and therefore incomplete, understanding of the way in which Plato, in particular, grasped the Heraclitean philosophy. There is

another side to the doctrine of Heraclitus; an attempt on his part, after all, to reduce that world of chaotic mutation to cosmos, to the unity of a reasonable order, by the search for and the notation, if there be such, of an antiphonal rhythm, or logic, which, proceeding uniformly from movement to movement, as in some intricate musical theme, might link together in one of those contending, infinitely diverse impulses (17).

Plato, Pater notes, was aware of this tendency towards a “cosmos,” just as he was aware of and borrowed from Pythagoras‟s theory of the mathematical “music of the spheres” to conceptualize an essentially stable structure to the workings of the universe.

Pater, in turn, draws on Platonic conceptions of a musical “cosmos” in order to construct a stable, independent and objective foundation for his own moral aesthetic

37 John Wordsworth, a Brasenose Fellow, a theologian, and a grandnephew of the poet, particularly took issue with Pater‟s claim “that no fixed principles either of religion or morality can be regarded as certain” (Evans 13). 64 philosophy. Theorizing generally, he argues that a mathematically informed, rhythmic stability within movement should inform all philosophy:

To realise unity in variety, to discover cosmos—an order that shall satisfy one‟s reasonable soul—below and within apparent chaos: is from first to last the continuous purpose of what we call philosophy. Well! Pythagoras seems to have found that unity of principle (ἀρτή) in the dominion of number everywhere, the proportion, the harmony, the music, into which number as such expands (52).

What enthralls Pater in Plato is the philosopher‟s insistence on a musical morality based upon the Pythagorean principle of a stable omnipresent numerical harmony.38 Plato,

Pater argues, uses this mathematically stable music to set up a foundation for “the perfect

Justice, for instance, which if even the gods mistake it for perfect Injustice is not moved out of its place; the Beauty which is the same, yesterday, to-day and for ever” (27). A

Platonic musical morality exists, in other words, regardless of cultural contexts. This stability, according to Pater, must be accounted for by any philosophical system, aesthetic or otherwise.

Although in Plato and Platonism Pater explores a stable musical morality through ancient philosophy, he had done so previously in his first Imaginary Portrait, “Child in

38 See also Pater‟s observation that music is “a formal development of purely numerical laws: that too surely is something, independently of ourselves, in the real world without us, like a personal intelligible soul durably resident there for those who bring intelligence of it, of music, with them; to be known on the favorite Platonic principle of like by like … though the incapable or uninstructed ear, in various degrees of dullness may fail to apprehend it” (PP 53). This statement is notable for several reasons. First, it complicates the primary question of the aesthetic critic as laid out in “The Preface” to The Renaissance, which asks, what is the work of art, “to me?” Pater acknowledges that some ears may be, by nature, incapable of comprehending musical notes to a sufficient degree. Second, he highlights the ability of music to affect us, because it is an integral part of us, through his reference to the “Platonic principle of like by like.” This suggests that music is not merely a metaphor for humanity‟s relationship to nature and a divine presence, but that music is an integral part of our beings. At the same time, however, through the dependence of music upon numerical laws, it provides us with a means of understanding the nature of the world in a manner that is independent of human subjectivity. Third, Pater argues that even if everyone cannot aesthetically understand the ways in which music works, it nevertheless remains present “in the real world without us,” and therefore has the potential to affect us, even if we are unconscious of its working. 65 the House.” In this portrait, the incipient aesthete Florian Deleal captures a mother starling and separates her from her offspring. As call to each other across the bars of a cage, Florian realizes “that he too was become an accomplice in moving, to the limit of his power, the springs and handles of that great machine in things, constructed so ingeniously to play pain-fugues on the delicate nerve-work of living creatures”

(Miscellaneous Studies 184). This experience teaches Florian how the most delicate shifts in the pained emotions of the bird can cause a physical pain for which he is directly responsible. He has upset the “sense of harmony” at work between a “soul and its physical environment,” and on account of this an interaction which should work much

“like perfectly played music,” like a “,” has become a veritable discord that he can trace (180).

Here the pain of discord, as opposed to the health and “pleasure,” which Plato noted could be found in human realizations of harmonious music, serves as an objective moral guide for Florian and his treatment of the physical beings around him. What

Florian learns is that the physical pain or pleasure that we cause another living being can be used as a rational, stable, and, importantly, universal indicator of our accord or discord with the natural, divine harmony of the world. Physical pain suggests a certain immorality, while pleasure, within reasonable, temperate bounds, is moral, and hence a force for justice and good. Taken to its logical conclusion this system of morality based around harmony and pain, as explored in both “Child in the House” and in Pater‟s discussion of the Pythagorean cosmos, works to undermine the potentially violent

66 imperialistic overtones of music that can be found throughout Plato‟s Republic or within any use of Platonic theories for empire-building.

To more austere Victorian eyes, such as Jowett‟s, Pater‟s descriptions of music as a sensual means by which to understand the world rationally or even to physically influence the qualities of temperance and justice, could hardly have been objectionable.39

This is particularly true so far as his notions of these qualities maintained the ultimate goal of upholding the harmonious order of a unified political state. Pater in fact gets away with conflating music with justice, goodness, and sensuality by representing

Platonic notions of a musical morality as implicitly Christian in nature. He suggests, for instance, how Plato links the concept of “temperance” to the beautifully “visible presentment of it in the faultless person of the youthful Charmides,” as well as to the divine discipline inherent in “musical harmony.” This interest in a beautiful aesthetic

“temperance” meshes well with Platonic tenets as well as with Christian ones. We might think here of any one of the temperately chaste Christian saints known for their physical charms or of temperate Anglican art: the example of St. Sebastian comes to mind, or the restrained music of Anglican church services. Platonism, as Pater observes, like

Christianity, was concerned with how the soul on earth might rejoin the divine harmony of heaven. Heightening the comparison between all three cultural epistemologies

(, Platonism, and Aestheticism) at once, Pater notes that “surely” Pythagorean notions of “abstinence, the repression of one‟s carnal elements,” such as the desire for

39 Arthur Benson states that Jowett “expressed admiration” for Plato and Platonism (58; see also Seiler 186). 67 excessive physical or aural pleasure, despite the very presence of a material beauty, is one of the ways to reconnect humanity to the harmony of heaven (PP 57).

Yet, Pater‟s notions of “temperance” and “abstinence” were not the same as the publically prudish Jowett‟s, nor were they the same as many of the equally prudish

Victorians. Thus while in Plato and Platonism Pater at times seems to be promoting similar notions of such characteristics to those expressed by the moral majority of his time, he often refines or qualifies them until he has endowed them with an entirely new significance.40 As such, while Pater appears to be holding up chastity, he observes, as if he simply cannot help himself, that “abstinence” or the relationship of the “carnal elements in us to the pilgrim soul” is actually wrapped up not in certainties, but in what he terms “curious questions” (57). He begins to stress, with an ever decreasing subtlety, that abstinence does not necessarily preclude the possibility of an unfamiliar or perhaps even an unnameable type of love. Indeed he associates both Plato and Pythagoras with a love wrapped up in a certain sort of secrecy, “that characteristic silence of which the philosopher of music was, perhaps not inconsistently, a lover” (58). Soon, however, it is not secrecy that is the beloved of the philosopher, but a specific, finite object. Pater goes on to warn that one must “remember always in reading Plato—Plato, as a sincere learner in the school of Pythagoras—that the essence, the active principle of the Pythagorean doctrine, resides, not as with the ancient Eleatics, nor as with our modern selves too

40 For an in-depth examination of how Pater uses this same re-signifying technique in his 1888 essay “Style,” see John Coates‟s essay “Controversial Aspects of Pater‟s „Style.‟” Coates here provides an examination of Pater‟s subtle appropriation and re-signification of arguments made by his contemporaries such as Mathew Arnold and George Saintsbury in regards to the unity and disunity, respectively, of art and society. 68 often, in the „infinite,‟ those eternities, infinitudes, abysses,” but rather “in the finite”

(59).

Pater goes on to refine the notion of an abstemious Platonic love almost out of existence by attaching a love of the “finite” to what, following Plato and Pythagoras, he himself sees as the physical, corporeal force of music and its inherent link to the human body. Thus he observes that “Plato‟s „theory of ideas,‟” which of course includes the theory of Love, “is but an effort to enforce the Pythagorean πέρας,” or “limit,” as he translates, “with all the unity-in-variety of concerted music,—eternal definition of the finite, upon τὸ ἄπειρον, the infinite, the indefinite, formless, brute matter, of our experience of the world” (60). Platonic ideas, Pater suggests, make sense or order out of worldly matter, they harmonize the world of our experience. Pater explains this process once again through a forceful, almost corporeal music, which is itself “brute matter” presented in and refined by “our experience of the world” and a divine idealism.

Having brought his reader from an abstract, silent abstinence to the “eternal definition” of a worldly “brute matter,” Pater re-shapes his notion of “temperance” into a subversively noble, musical homoeroticism. As if the idea of the “brute matter” of creation was still too vague, Pater refers to the perfect, moral, equalizing rhythm of Greek male statues in specific. The statues are abstract brute matter made marble. But these are not ‟s “sculptured dead.” They are the physically impressive and physically impressed monuments of a lifelike human body, a body as capable of its own natural musical “fugues” or rhythms, of both pleasure and pain, as was Florian Deleal‟s starling.

“Call to mind,” Pater asks his reader, “that the perfect visible equivalent of such rhythm

69 is in those portrait-statues of the actual youth of —legacy of Greek sculpture more precious by far than its fancied forms of deity—the quoit-player, the diadumenus, the apoxyomenus,” all statutes of male athletes in their late-teens or early-twenties. Such statues, Pater observes, are representative of “that highest civic embodiment of the

Dorian temper, like some perfect , perfectly responsive to the intention, to the lightest touch, of the finger of the law” (72-73).41 Here Pater moves from a repressive, if not oppressive, definition of abstinence to a probing celebration of the inherent, natural, and moral “harmony” of human and, even more specifically, same- sex physical . It seems hardly necessary to point out that the metaphysical

“finger of the law” is but a transparent metaphor suggestive of the divine, harmonious, and inherent in a variety of human desires, of the desire of one human to touch another.

In reality, however, the “finger” of the positive, man-made laws of Victorian

England, or even of the contemporary college regulations in Oxford, was not so

Platonically tempered.42 The case of J. A. Symonds illustrates the division between

Pater‟s version of a sympathetic natural law, validated by an objective Platonic music, and Victorian sexual strictures against same-sex relations. In 1862 Symonds, a scholar, won a fellowship at Magdalen College. Shortly after, he became mired in a

41 Robert Peters briefly makes a similar claim regarding music, aestheticism, and sexual passion, although in the context of The Renaissance. Peters notes that, “[t]o enrich his concept of transformed sexual passion, Pater found allusions to music helpful. The enlightened Paterian soul, quivering in response to Beauty, yearns after the „condition of music‟” (55). For a possible eroticized double-entendre involving the word “quoit[s],” see Dellamora (quoted 96 n59, below).

42 Same-sex relations were of course illegal in Britain during this period. For a discussion of a brief discussion of the various laws in play see chapter five (242 n4). 70 scandal initiated by his erstwhile friend and student C. G. H. Shorting. In his memoirs,

Symonds relates how he had to tutor Shorting, a private pupil, in his Magdalen rooms because the latter “was regarded by the dons and the men with aversion and suspicion, having already intrigued tactlessly and pertinaciously with one of the choristers,” a young man named Goolden (130). Feeling that Symonds had “„cut him,‟”

Shorting got his revenge by sending six Magdalen fellows excerpts from Symonds‟s letters and poetry, edited and re-arranged, according to Symonds, to suggest that he himself had “supported” Shorting “in his pursuit of the chorister W. T. Goolden” and that

Symonds “shared” Shorting‟s “habits and was bent on the same path” (131). The

Magdalen fellows held an inquiry to decide whether Symonds should be let go.

Although acquitted from any charge of wrong-doing, this in no way alleviated what Symonds viewed as a horribly public indignity. “My name is soiled,” he wrote in his diary, “with an unbearable suspicion; my usefulness in the college is destroyed, and

Oxford is made an impossibility” (132). Later in life, he looked back on this incident and noted, “[t]he pain and distress of Shorting‟s attack on me during my first months at

Magdalen broke me down. I received a blow then from which I have never recovered”

(230). Here, the positive regulations and social taboos of Victorian society stand in contradiction to the more liberal, progressive ones that Pater emphasized in Plato.

Aside from any personal troubles, the situation involving Symonds, Shorting, and

Goolden works to raise the impossibility of seeing the subversive potential of music as entirely positive from either a social or an economic perspective. Though Goolden himself came from an educated, professional family, and happened to be musically

71 talented, this was not necessarily true of all choristers for Magdalen.43 In the eighteenth and even up to the mid-nineteenth century, the position of “chorister” could be obtained by boys who showed intellectual promise, frequently independent of musical talents, whose families could not afford to send them to quality schools. Choristers for Magdalen

College were historically drawn from Magdalen College School, for instance, where scholarship boys were put in a position to receive a good education (some indeed went on to matriculate at Magdalen College) in return for their “singing” for the undergraduates in the of the college chapel.44 In this role, music, at least nominally, provided a relatively servile, though an all the same effective path to academic advancement.

In addition to issues of class or social difference, sexuality and differences in age between choristers and undergraduates also presented difficulties. As historians have shown, the presence of young choristers in Magdalen College‟s chapel were seen by authorities as presenting “a daily temptation” for the more self-assured undergraduates.

There was a “worry that undergraduate homoeroticism, however Platonic, could easily become problematic” (D‟ 401). For this reason, following the Symonds affair restrictions were put in place to guard against any interactions between choristers and

43 W. T. Goolden‟s father was R. H. Goolden, a medical had a house in Sussex Gardens, Hyde Park (Bloxam 307). It also appears that Goolden could, in fact, sing (Magdalen College School Journal 365).

44 Robin Darwall-Smith observes that the president of Magdalen College during the first half of the nineteenth century, Martin Routh, “understood that choristers and clerks should be able to sing,” and “[a]s a result being a chorister during Routh‟s presidency was far less likely to be merely a stepping stone on the road to academic study,” as it had been previously (328). Nonetheless, he notes that even by 1854 musical “standards cannot have been very high” and the positions as chorister were still being used as “„compliments or rewards‟” for those whom Routh wanted to bestow them upon, regardless of musical ability (Darwall-Smith 328-39). In the later half of the nineteenth century, however, Magdalen‟s choir followed general trends and began to place more emphasis on the importance of musical ability in the directorship and the choristers of its choir (D‟Ancona et. al., 400, 502-05). 72 undergraduates. By 1874, choristers and undergraduates were not to talk to each other and certainly not to meet in private rooms.45 Interactions between the two groups nevertheless remained a recurrent concern well into the eighteen-eighties. As such, these troubling potential relationships represent a semi-public example of the role of music in, as Plato might have put it, licentious relationships.46 They also signal the unfortunate tendency for well-off or simply older males to take advantage of those who are socially or in any way “beneath” them.

Coincidentally, Symonds‟ problems in 1862 correlate circumstantially to those

Pater himself had with William Money Hardinge in 1874. Hardinge was a student at

Balliol from 1873 to of 1874, when he was sent down by Jowett for having

“„indecent sonnets‟” and for having been implicated in a “homosexual romance” with

Pater (Inman, 1991, 9, 13). In private letters written and preserved by Hardinge‟s circle of friends, it seems clear that the two did have a romantic relationship, of sorts.47 Aside from his association with Pater, Hardinge was also known for being “musical,” a term that as the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth would take on adjectival connotations close to our modern day “homosexual” (see chapter five). Walter Sichel, whose time at Balliol overlapped with that of Hardinge, described the latter as “the strange, hectic, talented Hardinge—musical, poetical, intensely flippant and flippantly

45 Magdalen Archives: MS 881 ii/16: “Notice on the door of Magd-Coll.Hall. Any undergraduate detected speaking to a chorister will be sent down [and] the chorister expelled. Or if found asking a chorister to his room will be expelled.” The notice is dated June 1874, see also Wollenberg (201).

46 The threat of inappropriate relationships between choristers and members of the college was a recurrent one for Magdalen (D‟Ancona et al., 410, 499-500).

47 Several of these letters have been reprinted at length in Billie Inman‟s “Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William M. Hardinge” (6-8). 73

„intense‟” (119). Billie Inman notes that when Hardinge went up to Balliol in 1873 he played the harmonium in the college chapel and “was an accomplished pianist,” a dangerous, slightly effeminate expertise to have in those days (Inman, 2004).48

Hardinge‟s expulsion unfortunately gives some context to Arthur Burns and Robin

Wilson‟s claim that, in the nineteenth century “[i]t was commonly believed … that an undergraduate who had a piano in his room was likely to come to a bad end” (2).

Hardinge did not exactly come to a bad end—he returned to Oxford and went on to write several novels in the 1880s—but his relationship with Pater did have unhappy consequences for both men. Hardinge was briefly sent down and Pater was put at odds with the powerful master of Balliol, who had some hand in blocking his bid for the

University Proctorship in 1874.49

Throughout Plato and Platonism Pater challenges such embarrassments by presenting music as a means to reorient society to a more just, moral, intelligent, open, understanding, and overall harmonized state of being. In doing so, he was following larger trends in Oxford society and in England at large. At the same time, it remains important to see how he went beyond the accepted ways in which his society was willing to see music and the performance of music as a means for the advancement of social equality and unity. This progressivism was part of the heritage he passed on to generations of younger writers, critics, and citizens, such as Wilde and Forster, to name

48 The Balliol College Register lists Hardinge‟s “Recreations” as “Music, cycling, study of French and Greek” and reports that he was a member of the “Oxford and Cambridge Musical” club (141).

49 The best account of this event is Inman‟s in “Estrangement and Connection” (7-8, 14). Other relevant information on Jowett‟s refusal to support Pater in his bid for the university proctorship or any other office can be found in Benson‟s diary entries detailing his writing of Pater‟s biography (Seiler 255, 258). 74 just two. Intrinsic to this progressivism were Pater‟s musical moral principles, which encouraged a moderate physical pleasure, always tempered by intelligence, while decrying any action that ends up creating physical pain. Aside, then, from his Platonism being a critique of regressive sexual taboos, it was also an inherent critique of the militaristic or imperial purposes for which Plato was then being mobilized. These

Paterian anti-militaristic musical tendencies would reappear in the twentieth-century in the works of Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley, which I will discuss in chapter six.

Even towards the end of the nineteenth century, Pater had felt sure enough of

England‟s progress that, after explaining the educational complexities of Greek music, he could exclaim exuberantly, “We are now with Plato, you see!” (PP 70). It is hard to interpret this statement as anything other than his overly optimistic hope that the benefits that he found in a Platonic morality and in the complex associations of an ancient musical education were coming alive once more in Oxford and beyond. Pater‟s notions of a musical morality, however, unnerved quite a number of people who saw themselves as contentedly calibrated to the repressive, conservative, and imperialistic ways of English life. Despite his optimism, Pater undoubtedly knew this and understood the real life fall- out of his philosophy. He indeed had experienced such a fall-out himself, with Jowett and loss of the proctorship. Following his affair with Hardinge, he would examine both the advantageous and injurious aspects of his musical moral aestheticism in two of his

Imaginary Portraits, to which I now turn.

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Music Made Meaningful: Pater‟s use of Music in “Denys L‟Auxerrois” and “Apollo in Picardy”

Plato and Platonism represents a theoretical discussion of the moral, intellectual, and even subversive benefits of a Platonic musical education. Pater fictionally envisions the applications of these benefits, and their pitfalls, in two Imaginary Portraits: “Denys

L‟Auxerrois” and “Apollo in Picardy,” published first in 1886 and 1893, respectively.

“Denys L‟Auxerrois” is a framed narrative, the inner story of which takes place primarily around “the middle of the thirteenth century” in Auxerre, a small town in France (IP 54).

To Pater, this time and place signaled a revitalizing period of transition in the cultural climate of Europe. In The Renaissance he assigns the embryonic re-emergence of

Hellenism and humanism to the incipient Renaissance he perceived in the “beginning of the thirteenth century” in France, which challenged the “limits which the religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the imagination (1, xxiii).50 This transitional period was, in fact, not so different from that of the transitioning perceptions of music and its relationship to education and nationalism in the late-nineteenth century. In

“Denys” Pater will rely upon the progressive uses of music in his own time, as well as in

50 In “Two Early French Stories,” the opening essay of The Renaissance, Pater defines the Renaissance as not only a “revival of ,” but a “united movement, in which the love of the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake,” as well as “the desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life” began to make themselves felt through “new forms of art” (1, 2). Pater may have also connected music to education and nationalism directly through nineteenth century sources, such as George Grove‟s massive new Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which he checked out from Oct. 29th to Nov. 19th of 1883 and again from Oct. 8th through Jan. 2nd of 1884 (Inman, 1990, 468, 459). One of Grove‟s goals was to represent England as a musical nation in its own right, correlating a musical success with a more wide-spread national success in an international cultural arena. This message is diffused throughout the dictionary through myriad entries on English composers and music history. Grove‟s emphasis on England‟s own national musical heritage, however, comes across quite overtly in his “Preface,” wherein he writes, “[i]n an English dictionary it has been thought right to treat English music and musicians with special care, and to give their biographies and achievements with some minuteness of detail” (vi). 76

Platonic theory to depict a humanistic and artistic social liberation in the French town of

Auxerre.

Not long into “Denys” Pater sets the stage for an emergent social revolution associated with humanist art. He notes that at the same time as the art of Auxerre was coming nearer “to the expression of life; with a feeling for reality in no ignoble form,” the town, ruled by an old count “not long for this world,” was surrounded by a new

“political movement which broke out sympathetically, first in one, then in another of the towns of France, turning their narrow, feudal institutions into a free, communistic life”

(IP 55, 66).51 In “Denys,” Pater constructs an updated but recognizable Platonic line of thought, by connecting innovations in art in general to a political situation emerging from a medieval system of rigid class hierarchies into a social structure emphasizing an egalitarian form of social unity.

Denys, a Dionysus-in-exile figure, wonders into Auxerre at this period and embodies the artistic and egalitarian virtues of the Renaissance most explicitly through his musical influence over the populace. Pater first introduces Denys in the narrative frame through a modern traveler‟s encounter with a series of stained glass fragments and tapestries wherein the exiled god appears surrounded by “musical instruments” including

“pipes, ,” and “long reed-like ” (53). In a tapestry, he is pictured using

51 Dellamora also points to an egalitarianism, or a “transgression” of “class barriers” in “Denys,” which he links to the culture of sexual transgressions that occurred through what were actually the mutually predatory relations between upper-middle-class or upper-class men and working-class prostitutes in London‟s West End (178). He reaches closer to Pater‟s utopian bent, I think, when he argues that, “[i]n the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelite avant-garde, Pater emphasizes the parallel between individual self-affirmation and democratic politics. Moreover, democracy here is not simply liberal and antipatriarchal it is heterogeneous in character and implies both economic equality and a creative conflation of popular with ” (181). My argument approaches Pater‟s utopian individualistic and democratic aesthetic with an eye to his interest in Plato, rather than the Pre-Raphaelites. 77 these instruments to lead the townspeople of Auxerre in some sort of rapturous celebration. In the midst of this charged atmosphere, Pater tells us, merging us into the inner story, the townspeople come to Denys with not only the “political stir” of

“individual freedom” inherent within their processional revelry, of which the god was either the “cause or effect,” but also more generally with a “new, free, generous manner in art” (55-56). Art, and most specifically a musical art, becomes associated with a more egalitarian or even an anarchic sense of liberty.

Denys‟s popularity in the town increases and Pater continues to connect him to individual liberty and to music, and often to both at once, through his challenges to established authorities. Pater describes how “a shrill music” pervades the town as Denys leads “long processions, through which by and by „the little people,‟ the discontented, the despairing, would utter their minds,” while a “serf” lies “at his ease at last,” finally able to enjoy the land he has cultivated (61). At one point, “[i]n the cathedral square,” the town puts on old pagan “„morality‟” play re-enacting the return of “the God of Wine” from the East. Denys plays the “chief part,” amidst “an intolerable noise of every kind of pipe-music” (63). Here, the figure of Dionysus—whom in his 1876 essay “A Study of

Dionysus,” published in Greek Studies, Pater described as being suspected “of a secret democratic interest,” although “he was a liberator only of men‟s hearts”—represents a challenge to the ancient established order in a traditional seat of feudal and religious power (22n1). Ironically Denys/Dionysus has become some sort of a socialistic, carnivalesque king (l‟Auxerrois) destined to liberate the people and then wither away.

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Denys‟s musical influence also represents a return to a more natural order of society. The all-inclusive “every kind of pipe-music” of the Dionysian “„morality‟” play recalls the wine god‟s role as “a lover and patron especially of the music of the pipe, in all its varieties” (71). In his “Study of Dionysus” Pater described this divine attribute in terms of Dionysus‟s inspiration of and rule over a natural order, over “all the music of the reed, the water-plant, in which the ideas of water and of vegetable life are brought close together, natural property, therefore, for the spirit of life in the green sap” (GS 18). In

Denys‟s portrait, Pater justifies the reborn god‟s disruption of repressive medieval hierarchies of feudal and ecclesiastical power through his connection to the music of a freer, more naturalistic world order.

Such a push for a freer, natural egalitarianism, however, often results in the violent destruction of existing positive laws and man-made regulations. As Denys‟s own musical liberation progresses, it turns into a violent defiance of social mores, as it manifests itself in “noisy” “hot nights” filled with chaos (53). Pater depicts how Denys‟s musicalized revolution incites “horror” on the faces of “timid watchers,” who stare fearfully as Bacchante-like “disheveled women and youths with red-stained limbs” run wild. He describes the “intolerable noise” of the myriad instruments surrounding Denys at the pageant, an enforced recognition of a variety of strange, often unheard voices (61).

Denys‟s pipe playing is not always the ordered “music of the reed.” It is also an inharmonious cacophony representative of the sparagmos, the Dionysian ritualistic sacrifice that goes beyond the bounds of the established social order. His revelry has moved from a progressively rich harmony, to an excruciating “coarseness of satiety and

79

[a] shapeless, battered-out appetite,” as musical disorder turns into revolution, then and a diminishment of human civility (66).

Denys‟s noisy immoderation represents an orgiastic climax necessary, perhaps, not only to destroy the old and usher in the new, but to bring our attention to the benefits of harmony and social cooperation in some form. As such, Denys‟s out of control license soon blows itself out leaving behind only the admonitory memory of a Dionysian excess.

Worn out with his own surfeit, Denys restrains the “wild, din” of his carnivalesque music by tempering it into an organ. He builds an instrument that relies on the natural music of reeds or pipes, but which restrains and refines this music by human art (71). Here a natural multiplicity leads not to excess, but to the careful construction of an instrument capable of disciplining unruly noises, while at the same time cultivating diversity. Thus the music of Denys‟s organ can “express the whole of souls now grown to manhood,” to a sort of maturity, and in doing so it can represent variety in an orderly fashion, thus “the various modes of the power of the pipe” are “tamed, ruled, united” (71, 72).52

52 To a degree, Pater also conflates this musical progression with his general theory of the three stages of mythical development as outlined in his essay “Demeter and Persephone,” first published in 1876. The development of myths, Pater writes in his essay on Demeter, moves from an explanation of “certain primitive impressions . . . of the natural world,” to a literary phase, in which the poets filter the “vague instinctive product of the popular imagination,” a description which suggests that in this stage the myths suffer from inexpert alteration, but that they are also potentially simplified and developed by the poets, until they pass finally into “an ethical phase,” wherein they provide didactic examples “of moral or spiritual conditions” (GS 91). Steven Connor has pointed to a correlation between Pater‟s three stages of myth in his “Demeter and Persephone” essay, “Denys L‟Auxerrois,” and the mythical development that Ruskin outlines in the above mentioned Queen of the Air, in which the latter emphasizes the connection between music and a moral nationalism (29, 41). Connor does not point to the musical connection, but the possibility remains that Pater may have had Ruskin‟s comments in the back of his mind while writing “Denys.” 80

After the construction of the organ, Pater conflates the “unity-in-variety” of

Denys‟s musical progression with the continued political progress of the town of

Auxerre. Drawing on his innate knowledge of reeds, from his earliest experiences with

“the simple and pastoral, the homely”—and observe the double-entendre here, “homely” connoting both plain and familiar, as well as patriotic—“note of the pipe,” to a more developed knowledge of “all the instruments then in use,” Denys hopes to use his musical understanding in the future for “sweeter purposes” (71, 72). One of these purposes is a reformed sense of political stability in Auxerre. The town has moved from the instability of an archaic form of feudalism, embodied in the dying old count, to an increased egalitarianism and political liberty, which unrestrained had led dangerously towards anarchy and discord. Yet, one more destabilizing factor has yet to be added. For not long after Denys‟s own communistic uprisings, the townspeople of Auxerre must entertain, due to some ancient “ecclesiastical privilege” owed to him, the new count of the town of Chastellux, with whom their ruling house had long had a feud. Considering the age of the present ruler of Auxerre, the threat of invasion here is rather manifestly implied. Following, however, the general outline of Platonic theory, as well as the emerging notions of the importance of music to civic life in the nineteenth century in

Oxford, Pater outlines how an appropriate use of “the music of the organ, rolling over” the townspeople “for the first time, with various feelings of delight,” serves to smooth over this potentially tense visit (75). The harmony of the music brings a sense of harmony to the people involved in the official proceedings.

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The organ music creates, in fact, a sense of civic unity on a day which otherwise might have proved enormously disruptive. Instead of a further eruption of the feud between the count of Chastellux and the old count of Auxerre, “on this happy occasion,” prepared for by the calming influence of the organ, the former comes to claim his privilege along with “an offer of peace” through “a proposal for the hand of the Lady

Ariane,” the daughter of the aged ruler (75). The organ music not only helps to create a pleasant atmosphere during the bestowal of the young count‟s honors within the church, but it also helps to put the people in the mood to welcome “their future lord,” which they do afterwards with a “civic festival” (75).

The refined music of Denys‟s organ, then, appears to represent a practical imitation of the divine music of the spheres, the influence of which induces peace and political reconciliations. It also reflects the official and aesthetic uses of music in Oxford, which were relied on to instill a sense of institutional and religious unity, of celebration, as well as of an educational pleasure. Yet lest the politically progressive power of music appear entirely lost to us in the reemergence of another potential autocrat, the count of

Chastellux, Pater re-introduces the anarchic power of Dionysus. At the end of the festival, Denys resumes his former place at the head of a new “rude popular pageant” among the general populace, which now rebels against him, killing him in a final sacrifice representative of a coarse popular will (75). It is a violent reminder of how a turbulent and changing human nature can break free from even the firmest of calming tendencies. Pater all the same leaves us with a perfect balance of the dual Dionysian nature of order and chaos. All that is left of Denys today is the ecclesiastical

82 ornamentation, stained glass and tapestries, recounting his story, seen by the modern traveler. Standing amongst these, however, the traveler also sees an organ, Pater‟s emblem of a harmonious political accord. It stands silent in the corner as if waiting to be influential once more, to re-establish a rational harmonious multiplicity in a contemporary world.

If “Denys L‟Auxerrois” fictionalizes the liberating potential of music on a civic level, as a way of reorienting society, then “Apollo in Picardy” is a reflection on the struggles inherent in a more personal attempt to live one‟s life according to the music of the Greeks. In “Apollo” Pater emphasizes the potential psychomachia that lies inherent in the intellectual and personal enlightenment of a scholar in the sexually repressive nineteenth century. The story centers on the erudite Prior Saint-Jean who, while attempting to complete the “[t]welfth volume of a dry enough treatise on mathematics, applied, still with no relaxation of strict method, to astronomy and music,” comes into contact with and becomes attracted to the of the beautiful god Apollo

(Miscellaneous Studies 143). Having exhausted himself in his intellectual labor of writing the first eleven volumes, Saint-Jean has been sent to his monastery‟s country grange by his superior in the company of a young novice named Hyacinth. Once there, the two befriend Apollo in the form of an attractive young shepherd named Apollyon, whose “rich, warm, white limbs” and “gentle sweetness” they encounter amidst the

“veritable music” of the country wind (148, 149).

Apollyon, like Denys, at first eases the life of those whom he meets. Having wandered into the countryside, he uses his music to aid in the building of a barn for the

83 grange, a “holiday task” for the recuperating prior (152). Apollyon helps Saint-Jean and his workmen by playing his and singing in a manner that not only alleviates, but guides their work. His music keeps “the hard taxed workmen literally in tune, working for once with a ready will,” as though they were doing exactly what they were meant to do in that time and place. The young man‟s music also seems to attract the physical

“beams and stones” of the new barn “into their fit places” (153). Here earthly movements are, for once, in accord with the divine movements of heaven. Apollyon‟s music thus indirectly echoes Pater‟s previous description of celestial music in Plato and

Platonism, whereby everyone or perhaps even everything is able to “find, or be put into” their natural place (273).

Pater distinctly sets up the musical diversion of the barn-building, however, not so much to illustrate the happy workmen, as to offer a metaphor for the convalescence of

Saint-Jean. Originally, Saint-Jean is sent to the countryside “for the benefit of his body‟s health,” but, upon meeting Apollyon, Pater makes it clear how he finds his soul unexpectedly restored as well (146). This occurs through his change in scenery, work, and companions. Taking part in the construction of the barn allows Saint-Jean to combine his spiritual interest in the divine forms of mathematics with an interest in their earthly, materialistic manifestations. He refines his theories on the latter by putting them into practice through architectural construction. His work here also affords him a chance to encounter physically healthy individuals, as opposed to only cloistered monks. As such, this work provides him, in a rather Platonic fashion, with a salutary and uplifting balance between his mind and his body, between an expansive Greek definition of music

84 and gymnastics, with both educational elements working together in harmony. For the

“human body,” Pater suggests in “Apollo,” is also “a building,” and just as Apollyon‟s musical presence helps to compose the barn, it also re-composes Saint-Jean‟s body, the house of his soul (155).

This harmonious accord between spirit and body puts Saint-Jean in a position to do more meaningful intellectual work on his academic treatise. Under the influence of the boy he deviates from his previously rigid methodology to create a complicated nexus of images modeled upon the music of the spheres. Moving beyond theories of astronomical and musical formulas reasoned out by means of a cold abstraction, Saint-

Jean allows himself to be seduced by Apollyon‟s more experience-oriented or aesthetic approach to astronomical explorations. This allows the prior to “see … the deflexions of the stars from their proper with fatal results here below,” as well as to “hear” the

“singing of ” (164, Pater‟s emphasis). This aesthetic, almost practical approach enables Saint-Jean to break free from what Pater saw as the rigid “limits”

(Renaissance xxiii) of a medieval epistemology and thus to speak “truly and with authority” on the natural influence of the heavens, of the music of the spheres, here on the earth (MS 164). Saint-Jean‟s new and sensual experiences thereby lend to his scholarship a new accuracy and authenticity, which his old methods never could have obtained.

Within the portrait, however, this sensual scholarship is problematic, to say the least, and as a result it ends up truncated. Saint-Jean never manages to fill his writings with the “notation” of the spheres as completely as he had hoped, a failure indicated by the narrator‟s observation that the scholar‟s treatise stops short “with an unfinished word”

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(145). Saint-Jean‟s attempt therefore to “arrest” his newly gained knowledge for himself and to provide a “final transference to others” of his learning remains deficient (164). He finishes enough, though, to cause his work to be compared to the work of “madmen,” and to see in it himself a “wicked, unscriptural truth!” (145, 164). This despite the fact that the last volume in particular, composed as it was under the enlightened influence of

Apollo/Apollyon, reveals “a hundred truths unguessed at before,” an “illumination,” written in a way that appeared to be “music made visible” (143, 144, 145). The Prior‟s work has, in fact, become “an interpolated page” of his sensual, enlightened life under the influence of Apollyon (144). It is analogous therefore to a written depiction of those virtuous “human persons” or the homoerotic Greek statues which Pater describes in Plato and Platonism, which embodied, much more openly than Saint-Jean or indeed many nineteenth-century scholars were able to, the enlightened and enlightening music of the spheres.

Such madly sensual, scholastic truths, combined as they are with music, inescapably recall the disingenuously prohibited subject of homosexuality within Oxford and within the teaching of the “Greats” curriculum in particular. Even an intimation of

Greek homoeroticism put into practice could impair, as the cases of Symonds and Pater himself illustrate, the career of even a celebrated young scholar. Consequently, readers of Pater often see the brilliant but strained influence of Apollyon on Prior Saint-Jean as representative of the homophobic atmosphere that pervaded Oxford despite the university‟s fascination with Greek and Roman literature. William Shuter, for instance, hesitantly but convincingly links Saint-Jean‟s downfall to Pater‟s own troubled

86 relationship with Hardinge as well as with Wilde‟s dangerous flirtations with Alfred

Douglas, an affair which Wilde himself painted against the background of “Greek love.”53 The musical correlations between Hardinge and Goolden and the young god

Apollyon would seem to lend credence to this connection.

A similar case could be made for the connection amongst a taboo homosexuality, partial or incomplete scholastic truths, and Jowett himself. For while the young poet

Digby Dolben could declare with a naïve hopefulness, “in passiveness I will lie still/ And let the multitudinous music of the Greek/ Pass into me, till I am musical,” Jowett, among others, was working rather actively to make sure that any such passage was not made unmediated (“A Resolve after reading Aeschylus” 5-7). Jowett, who certainly deserves credit for, among his many other academic achievements, preserving male pronouns in

Plato, nevertheless suggested in his annotations of the Symposium that the “greatest evil of Greek life,” namely same-sex desire, be regarded as “the beast in man” (“Analysis and

Notes” 534). Same-sex desire, Jowett claimed, was no more than a “spurious form of an enthusiasm for the ideal of beauty—a worship as of some godlike image of an Apollo or an Antinous” (535). Even more notoriously he would suggest that homosexual desire in

Plato was merely a “figure of speech which no one interpreted literally” (534). The latter

53 In his discussion of “Apollo in Picardy,” Shuter observes that Hardinge “injured Pater … by advertising their relationship to persons he knew would be scandalized by it and who might therefore feel an obligation to report it to someone in authority,” which, in fact, is what happened. Although “Apollo in Picardy,” as Shuter points out, “was written in 1893, nearly twenty years after Pater‟s relationship with Hardinge,” the old man might have “recalled his experience” on account of Wilde‟s more contemporary relations with Douglas (Shuter 192; see also Dowling 138-39 and Dellamora 186). 87 claim, as Symonds in private correspondence pointed out to Jowett himself, was far from the truth.54

In “Apollo in Picardy,” Pater attempts to explore publically the retribution of such nineteenth-century intellectual hypocrisies. In the process, same-sex desires are hardly represented as an invulnerable “perfect musical instrument,” in an intellectual, moral, or even in a physical context. As Linda Dowling and Shuter point out, an air of devastation pervades Pater‟s retelling of the god‟s return (Dowling 138-39; Shuter 191-93). Pater‟s

Apollyon comes to represent not only Apollo, the god of light and order, but Apollyon the destroyer. Apollyon‟s increasing excesses throughout the portrait share a similar dark side to those of Denys, as the former‟s “untutored natural impulse” runs away with him

(156). In his extremes, he leads those around him to engage in revelatory but perilous liberalities. Under his influence, for instance, Saint-Jean acknowledges a natural,

“unscriptural truth,” which causes him to be supposed mad. A strikingly sympathetic senex amans, he finds himself “detained” in a monastic “apartment, in a region of the atmosphere likely to restore lost wits,” after Hyacinth is suddenly and mysteriously found dead (170). Saint-Jean‟s supposed culpability to the murder is linked to the presumed

54 Symonds argued in a private letter to Jowett, reprinted in his Memoirs, that “Greek love was for Plato no „figure of speech‟, but a present poignant reality. Greek love is for modern students of Plato no „figure of speech‟ and no anachronism, but a present poignant reality” (102). E. M. Forster would later follow Symonds in the twentieth century by lambasting these academically unsupportable comments twice in his novel Maurice. He recreates the Balliol master as the Oxford dean Cornwallis who hypocritically has students in his Greek translation class skip over passages pertaining to the “unspeakable vice of the Greeks” in Plato. Forster also imagines a medical doctor, who sees homosexuality as a problem not to be admitted, but to be hidden away in mental institutions, whom he gives the name of “Jowitt.” These somewhat reduced refigurations of Jowett are, unfortunately, ironic in the light of Forster‟s own refusal to publish Maurice during his lifetime. Pater, on the other hand, goes much further than Jowett in Plato and Platonism and does so in a more public manner than Forster was willing to, by presenting homosexuality as real and physical and by linking it to Greek theories of morality and intellectualism, as well as to a physically sensual “music.” 88 madness of the sensually derived natural epiphanies set out in his treatise. The death was caused, in fact, accidently, by Apollyon, as in the Ovidian myth from which Pater drew, wherein Apollo unintentionally kills a beautiful young man of the same name, as the two play together in the countryside. In Pater‟s version, the intellectually honest Saint-Jean opens himself up to be made a sacrifice for Apollyon‟s natural desire to engage with the young Hyacinth, not just in an academic, but in a physical manner.

Rejecting monastic pretenses regarding human nature, the younger Hyacinth engages with Apollyon on a less intellectual, more physical level, and encounters a more violent end. Playing with Apollyon, the young novice becomes “really a boy at last,” as, set free from the astringent of monastic influences, his “eyes, hands and feet awake” to his physical nature, and the two play “as young animals do” (156, 166).

Hyacinth merely awakening to his physical nature might have been fine, but Pater subtly delineates the increasing physicality of his play with Apollyon. One afternoon, Hyacinth finds a Greek discus, then several more, and the two begin playing with the “quoits.”55

Soon Apollyon has cast aside his heavy “workman‟s attire, and challenged the boy to do the same.” References to a state of undress, an awakening sensuality, and animalistic behaviors undoubtedly suggest not just the triumph of carnality over reason, but the vulnerability caused by self-revelations and the danger of a physical self-awareness.

Having been repressed for so long, human nature overwhelms a cautious monastic restraint. Playing in the dark foolishly with a discus, “by guess and touch chiefly,” the

55 Dellamora notes that “quoits” was traditionally pronounced as “coits,” and hence may be an allusion to “coitus.” This would emphasize the physical relationship between Apollyon and Hyacinth (187). Given Pater‟s interest in etymology and word play, this interpretation of “quoits” seems a likely possibility. 89 two ignore the admonition of the sounds coming now not from the wild uncovered god‟s harp, but from a church, as its “death- cries out harshly” for a recently deceased villager, in whose grave, previously prepared, one of the discuses had been found (167).

Focused completely on their animal instincts, the minds of the young men become clouded. Unable to read the signs of an impending disaster, they continue to play until a discus, thrown up by Apollo, returns to earth to sever Hyacinth‟s head from his body.

The scream of the musical god resounds throughout the “Picard wolds” like “the sound of some natural catastrophe” as Hyacinth dies (168).

Not only does Hyacinth lose his head under the influence of Apollo, but any implied relationship between the two is interrupted. It is cut short like the musical truths in Saint-Jean‟s treatise, only this time with a macabre literality. Here the perfect natural unity embodied in the harmonious “Dorian temper” is disrupted. The “perfect musical instrument” of the male-desiring male body, as Pater calls it in Plato and Platonism, becomes disarrayed and disordered. Hyacinth too becomes sacrificed to the deviant, repressive law of the day, as his head is dissevered under the sounds of the church by the harshest “touch” of an earthly law out of temper with a heavenly-inspired, humanistic natural order.

Pater‟s Musical Patrimony

Music for Pater was much more than an ideal amalgamation of aesthetic form and content. As he warns against a partial reading of the Heraclitean flux, which would lead only to an incomplete understanding of Heraclitus‟ philosophy, it would be 90 correspondingly unwise to see in his own musical formulations a philosophy concerned only or even principally with abstractions. Pater did not believe, as Wilde facetiously put it, that “[a]ll art is quite useless” (“Preface” to The Picture of Dorian Gray 168).56 His consistent uses of music in his writing, which continued throughout his literary career, and many of which reflect the historical uses of music in his time, emphasize his desire to use the art to reshape and to refine society into a more natural, more ideal, more politically tolerant state.

In his writings, Pater advocated for a “new republic,” an ideal state to be founded not upon insipidly veiled insults or academic mis-directions, but upon the clearly defined principles of his version of a Platonic “musical” education. Such an education would require honest scholarship, political and social equality, and an aesthetic appreciation of the pain and the pleasure of the body. This last principle would entail a moral system based upon an objective standard so elemental that it should be (although it never has been) axiomatic. It would insist upon the immorality of actions that cause excessive pain and the morality of actions that lead to pleasure guided by reason, a morally physical pleasure intellectually refined, yet natural. It is this liberal and morally charged musical atmosphere that Pater bequeathed to his successors.

56 Wilde himself did not completely believe this; see chapter five (247-48). 91

Chapter 3: Economies of Appreciation: Class, Culture, and Classical Music in Modernist

Literature (Part One: A Modernist Fantasia)

Parody is a sure sign of prominence. By the first of the twentieth century, the virtues of classical music in England, as in Oxford, had become so closely associated with a culture of enlightenment, a refined sense of morality, and a certain richness of life that they could be caricatured with ease in ‟s 1911 novel

Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford Love Story. Here, the archly aristocratic Duke of Dorset, pledged to die for the enchanting , expresses the satiric chivalry of his upcoming demise through a performance of (what else?) Chopin‟s “ Funebre.” Born to provide a paradigm, the Duke pours out his noble sentiments to an audience of undergraduates at a college concert. Sitting at the piano he is not so much a figure for ridicule, as he is an idealized exemplar. At least, he is for the undergraduates who revere him. As his fingers “caressed the keyboard vaguely,” they concentrate eagerly on how

“the soul of their friend was singing to them: they heard his voice, but clearer and more blithe than they had ever known it—a voice etherealised by a triumph of joy that was not yet for them to share” (154). His fellow Oxonains are all properly sensible to the aesthetic force of the music. As such, at the end of his performance, they decide, under

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“the glow of the Japanese lanterns that hung around in honour of the concert,” that they too will kill themselves for Zuleika (157).

While this scenario might retroactively prove the theory that an undergraduate with a piano was “likely to come to a bad end,” the Duke‟s instigation of a mass undertaking of self-immolation is hardly the end-goal of what either Pater or Jowett or, for that matter, any other nineteenth-century musically-minded philosopher had in mind when offering up music as a communal force for virtue (Burns and Wilson 2). It does suggest, however, that by the twentieth century the nobility of classical music had become almost a stereotype. By embodying it in that paragon of nobility, the Duke,

Beerbohm satirizes how an ability to appreciate classical music had become a sign of the virtuous superiority of the upper classes.1

As classical music became more and more prominent in British society, a tendency arose to appropriate it for the upper classes and to deny it to the lower. Katie

Batch, the daughter of the Duke‟s land-lady, in a naive attempt to convince their aristocratic tenant that she is worthy of his attention, cites her skills on the piano as an example of her cultural education. Upon mentioning her playing, however, she quickly cuts herself off, recalling “that her music was always interrupted by the ringing of the

1 Aside from being a of the Garter, the Duke had for a while been the sole member of an Oxford eating club so exclusive that for months no-one else was “quite eligible” to join, until he eventually condescended to induct one undergraduate each from Balliol and Brasenose (124). Citing works by the Reverend Haweis and John Spencer Curwen, son of Rev. John Curwen, Dave Russell observes that, “[f]or many observers higher up in the social order, the social base of popular music”—by which Russell means all music, including some famous classical pieces, performed by the working classes—“gave sufficient grounds for confident dismissal of its artistic value, cultural discourse providing sections of the middle and upper classes with an opportunity to claim superior status over subordinate classes” (1997, 7-9). Ironically, this elitist dismissal of music was taking place at the same time that others, such as Arthur Sullivan were attempting to use music to create an egalitarian space for England‟s various classes, and when still others were attempting to bring classical music to the working classes; see chapter two (23; see also Russell, Popular Music 25-26). 93

Duke‟s bell and a polite request that it should cease.” Her hope that “love and the Board school”—the latter an increasing source of musical education for the lower-middle classes—will level all falls flat (264). The Duke‟s “ringing” all too clearly implies that her Board school musicality is hardly worth hearing, much less bragging about. What the

Duke fails to realize, though, and ironically so, considering his impending self-slaughter, is that his arrogant pride is leading to the end of not only his life, but of his cultural dominance as well. Busy fulfilling outdated chivalric absurdities the Duke overlooks that it is the Katie Batches of the world who would continue to practice and to play and that, as a result, it was their music that would ultimately come to the fore.

Filing In: Setting Up Audience Expectations

Of course as Beerbohm‟s satirical stance suggests, in the midst of praising the aesthetic sensitivity of the Duke, he intuits Katie Batch‟s future musical successes. He just does not depict them. This is in no way surprising. For, as historians and literary critics have shown, most twentieth-century were hardly eager to depict the working and lower-middle classes as culturally proficient. This was because these groups were the emerging contenders for the social and cultural authority that was slipping away, however slowly, from the fading aristocracy. As Jonathan Rose explains in his magisterial The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, “[i]n the first half of the twentieth century … two rival intelligentsias squared off against each other,” both

“competing for audiences and prestige.” One of these “was the middle-class, university- educated and modernist, supported largely by patronage and private incomes,” while “the 94 other was based in the working and clerking classes, mainly Board school graduates and the self-educated, more classical in their tastes, but fearlessly engaged in popular and the literary marketplace” (431). Classical music quickly developed into one of the most fiercely contested battlegrounds for social and cultural ascendancy, particularly in the minds of early-twentieth-century modernists. The next chapter will provide a discussion of the historical role of music in the lives and the literature of the working and lower-middle classes, a role which was predominantly democratic. The present chapter will examine the musical rhetoric of literary modernism, which was largely avaricious and discriminatory.

As the cultural power of the aristocracy declined—prematurely symbolized in fiction by the deaths of so many aristocrats, à la the Duke‟s—the modernists were quick to take over any abandoned aesthetic authority for themselves. At the same time, they did not want (generally speaking) to share their freshly claimed role as cultural arbiters with their competitors, the working and lower-middle classes. They needed, therefore, to find some way of setting up clear, definitive boundaries between themselves and those

“beneath” them in the traditional social hierarchy. As John Carey has argued, “modernist literature” provided just what was needed, and so became a made-to-order means through which “to exclude” the “newly educated (or „semi-educated‟)” from the ascendency of the cultured elite (vii). As the twentieth century progressed, classical music would become one of the primary themes deployed by the literati to invoke their intellectual and cultural superiority to the working and lower-middle classes.

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Beerbohm‟s novel then helps to indicate how classical music played such a definitive role in the cultural positioning of the canonical modernists. For, paradoxically, one of the ways in which the modernists framed their ascent was to emphasize the superficially “aristocratic” nature of art music. This had several benefits. The first was that it enhanced the value of music. Drawing on the trends of the late-nineteenth century, the modernists insisted upon the association of classical music with idealized

“aristocratic” virtues, such as those manifested by the Duke: namely an aesthetic refinement, an intellectual sophistication, though perhaps “sophistry” would be a better word, and an inner-morality, although not, notably, a Paterian egalitarianism.

Consequently, a second benefit was that such an association with the upper classes was generally exclusive. Therefore the majority of the concert scenes that take place in early twentieth-century fiction do so in the presence of elegant, witty figures in the comfort of opulent rooms designed to discomfort or to exclude those who could not dress up and who were, as most modernists would have us believe, not trained either culturally or intellectually to appreciate classical music on any level. Not only Beerbohm, but writers such as T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf, all depict concerts in such settings from which the working and lower-middle classes were excluded or ostracized.2

At the same time, most modernists openly questioned whether aristocrats and the wealthier upper-middle classes were the best custodians for the cultural heritage which was, on the surface, being assigned to them. As such, many of the same authors who

2 D. H. Lawrence is a notable exception to this list of modernist authors; see chapter four (206-10). 96 promoted an elitist appropriation of music, such as Huxley and Eliot, concurrently suggested that the connection between a titled or an economic elite and classical music was, for the most part, a widespread façade. It was a satire along the line of Beerbohm‟s.

The majority of the upper classes, the modernists insinuated, appreciated classical music, but only on the most superficial of levels. Such classes used music as no more than a shallow with which to validate or to rationalize their oppression of their social inferiors and to justify a social hierarchy. The general failure of the upper- and upper- middle classes to appreciate classical music in a sophisticated, intellectual fashion became then a way for the modernist authors to expose the cultural, moral, and intellectual decay of Britain‟s ruling . By carefully refusing to acknowledge any worthwhile working-class culture, the modernists were able to imply that the upper classes were as ignorant, in their own well-dressed way, as the working classes upon whom they trampled. With the richest and the poorest levels of society revealed to be artistically and intellectually inept, this left the modernists free to assume a forfeited cultural legitimacy for themselves.

An Aristocratic Art?: The Ennoblement of Classical Music and the Aural Impoverishment of the Working Classes

In contrast to Pater‟s Denys, who leads a musical revolution to regain the rights of the working classes, by the early twentieth century the cultural elite of Britain would be following the example set by the Duke of Dorset‟s autocratic dismissal of Katie Batch‟s practicing. Both an appreciation and an ability to perform classical music, modernists

97 would allege, was almost the exclusive domain of the upper and upper-middle classes, as well as the classically educated. This was a suggestion that they drew from larger social trends circulating during the period. The insinuation that socio-economic delineations were one of the indirect, and occasionally not so indirect, functions of classical music was not only prevalent in fiction, but was as popular in the early decades of the twentieth century as it is now, a hundred years later. Even Thomas Burke, an author generally sympathetic to the working classes, once admitted that by the end of the nineteenth century, classical music had become, predominantly, a “luxury trade,” an exchange through which the and choral societies, particularly of southern England, provided “a music of Stars and Lions,” offering concerts for aristocrats and the very rich

(Hill, “Sir Henry” 17). Burke‟s comment is representative of how several very public voices of English society saw a sophisticated enjoyment of music as belonging, rightly or wrongly, to the well-born and the well-off, highly-cultured, highly-educated, social elite of England.3

This was a social structure mimicked, as it largely is today, by the very visible commercial aspects of the leading concert halls. The most expensive seats were, in general, the most prominent and the most visible. This was particularly true of opera performances, a trend attested to by reviewers who frequently discussed the prominently

3 Even as a “luxury trade,” however, music was still not a pursuit for the well-off to be engaged with on a substantial level, either as a provider or as a consumer. As Arthur Somervell, Inspector of Music for the national Board of Education from 1901 to 1937, lamented in 1905, “[t]he ordinary Englishman, I think, looks upon a love of music very much as all but fanatics regard a real knowledge of wine; it is a refined and gentlemanly taste, if not indulged in to excess. It is no longer considered disreputable to be a musician or artist if a man happen to belong to the upper strata of society; but every man over fifty must remember the time when it was so regarded; and, I think, ninety-nine out of one hundred parents would rather see their son a good average soldier or a partner in a successful business than even a really great painter or musicians” (“Music as a Factor in National Life” 79 n3). 98 placed “stars” of the audience as much as they did the “stars” of the stage. As one angry reader complained to in a letter headed “London and Two Operas: Music and

Fashion,” “[y]our musical critic‟s account of La Bohème at Covent Garden is preceded by a list of Kings, , and attendant peers—and this is only what we all expect;” a claim supported, the self-acknowledged musician says, by the same paper‟s review of

Prince Igor at Drury Lane, which was “followed by a scarcely less splendid row of names” (Times. 10 June 1914: 10).4

While the rich sat in the highly visible boxes or stalls, the poorer and less shining members of society were relegated to the sections of the “gods,” the highest areas of a venue. Therein, if the visibility of the occupants was occasionally impaired, at least the sightline of those below was spared the image of maladroit menials. One Wagnerite expressed the situation in the following terms:

A devout Wagnerian, perched distressfully upon the remote and excruciating planks which constitute the Covent Garden gallery, reflects with sorrow that the seating in that ancient theatre corresponds almost by opposites with the cosmography of the Ring … Inferior beings sit in god- like ease down below, while we, the children of the light, are cramped and twisted and flattened in our dizzy altitudes as mercilessly as any little Nibelung in Alberich‟s domains.

Granted, this Wagnerian was most likely H. C. Colles, the Oxford-educated music editor for The Times from 1911-1943. Nevertheless, his report from the cramped, elevated

4 The letter from a self-declared musician is signed by someone in “The Upper Gallery” and is almost certainly referring to a review entitled “Melba and : Their Majesties‟ Visit to Covent Garden” (Times 8 June 1914: 56). The first two out of five paragraphs in this review list the names of various royals and peers and other prominent figures. Listing prominent royalty was, as the Gallery amateur suggests, a trend. Consider, for instance, The Times review of the last night of the opera season at Covent Garden in the same year, wherein of two paragraphs, a subordinate clause of one sentence alone reveals that the opera performed was . The remaining substance of the two printed paragraphs consists of the names of royalty, peers, and lesser nobility (“Last Night of Covent Garden Opera.” Times 29 : 10). 99 gallery reveals a general situation in which the “[i]nferior” false-deities of the social elite sit at ease in full view of the stage, while the enlightened, god-like “children of the light” sit in the cramped cheap seats, having had to tramp, heavenwards, up “endless flights of dirty stone stairs” to a “lofty abode” at the top of the theater (“Wagner From the Gallery.”

Times. 3 May 1913: 6). As it was in the seating , so it was in the minds of many of the gatekeepers of culture. When it came to classical music, the working and the lower-middle classes were, for all intents and purposes, out of sight, out of mind, and out of earshot.

It was perhaps inevitable that the efforts of Jowett, Pater, and Arthur Sullivan, among others, to promote music as a cultural force for a harmonious life, moral virtue, and social equality, would go astray. As music came to the forefront of Britain‟s cultural conscious in the late-nineteenth century, the process was accompanied not only by an increased presence of nobility at concerts and operas, but by the conferral of knighthood upon of a series of prominent men of music. Sir John Stainer and Sir (both

Oxford Heather Professors of Music), Sir Charles Hallé, Sir George Grove, as well as still more popular celebrities, such as Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir , and Sir

Henry Wood were all honored for their musical activities between 1883 and 1914.5

Several of these knighthoods were awarded, in part, for efforts which broadened the appeal of classical music across the classes, such as those of Sir Charles Hallé and of Sir

Henry Wood, famously popular conductors in Manchester and London, respectively.

5 provides a good summary on each of these figures as well as the exact dates of the conferrals of their knighthoods (736). 100

Yet, in the quickly evolving connection between the upper classes and classical music, this was an egalitarian subtlety that could be easily overlooked, or simply ignored.

In modernist fiction, to be sure, authors highlighted the more elegant and elitist associations of the noble art of music, rather than public service. This allowed modernist authors to attack the privileged and rich upper classes for their failure to appreciate their musical opportunities and to attack the lower classes as ignorant and inelegant social climbers. Concurrently, middle-class intellectual authors claimed the prestige of the classical music for themselves. If music was a “trade” the variables in the exchange were not just music and money, but cultural status, quality of life, intelligence, and last but not least, .

Perhaps it is unfair to bring the works of classical music into a discussion regarding such seemingly unmusical subjects as money and class conflict. But all questions of fairness aside, the music of classical composers, particularly that of

Beethoven and Bach, served as a frequent placeholder for the quintessential variable of

“art” in a class equation that perplexed writers from Beerbohm and Henry James to modernists such as Huxley, Waugh, and Woolf. In doing so, classical music helped to formulate several of the burning questions of modernism itself: does the intrinsic value of

“high art” balance out the sufferings of those who enable the upper classes to enjoy it? If the great works of art enjoyed by the elite of society are dependent upon the sufferings of the laboring classes—many of whom, most modernists assumed, would never be able to enjoy the art themselves—was the “trade” of art for their misery worthwhile? If classical music is a “luxury trade,” is it a fair one? There were, and are, no easy answers. Thus in

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Henry James‟s The Princess Casamassima, Hyacinth Robinson, torn between the benefits of a revolutionary anarchy and the value of the created by class oppression, kills himself.

Authors besides James often use classical music in particular to provoke less abrupt but equally tortured investigations into the ambivalent value of what they depict as the aristocratic realm of art. These investigations frequently offer an excuse of an aristocratic abuse of labor on account of the artistic value that such an abuse helps to create and maintain. The luxurious and aptly named Tantamount House, for instance, in

Aldous Huxley‟s Point Counter Point, provides the ideal setting for Lady Tantamount‟s elaborate “musical parties” (22). In supporting the maintenance and proliferation of music, Huxley wonders whether the opulent Tantamount House and Lady Tantamount herself might be seen as either excusing or even defending the unfair social systems that allow for the upper classes to lay claim to beautiful art and an aesthetic indulgence. The house itself, Huxley tells us, was “a model of the Papal Chancellery in Pall Mall” built upon the backs of the “ploughmen, the shepherd[s],” and “the cowherds” who “labored from before dawn till sunset, year after year, until they died,” generation after generation, solely for the glory of the Tantamount family (21). Tantamount House is therefore

“tantamount” to one of the most abusive socio-economic systems of Western society. All the same, on the evening of one of Lady Tantamount‟s parties, Huxley suggests that the house might in fact be “justifying its existence” by providing a practical support system for : namely, Bach‟s suite in B minor for and strings (22).

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As a result, though the house might represent, on the one hand, a metaphorical mausoleum for those who have died so that it might be built; on the other, it is a useful institution, a gorgeous museum or a house of worship, staffed by the musicians who are ensconced “at the foot” of its “triumphal” marble staircase (44). Surrounded by such grandiose ostentation, those in the audience—among whom are at least one general, one colonel, numerous aristocrats, and hordes of other well-off, artistically inclined individuals; a microcosm, in other words, of the “Stars and Lions” of London, to borrow

Burke‟s phrase—take great care to prostrate themselves, complete with “pious grimaces and [a] religious silence,” to the shrine temporarily assigned to Bach (29). The implication is that if the sufferings of a portion of humanity can enable and sustain the upper classes‟ appreciation of a great piece of music such as Bach‟s, then all the misery might indeed be justifiable after all.

Such a literal reading, however, while provocatively illustrative of a dominant cultural attitude of the time, only scratches the surface of the issues at hand. Huxley overloads this scene with irony, and though the majority of the upper-class audience makes a great effort to appear to appreciate the music, grimacing and so forth, a number of its individuals are only engaging in what the artist John Bidlake identifies as an

“intellectual hypocrisy” (29). They fail, in other words, to appreciate the music. As such, when Lord Tantamount sneaks down the “triumphal” marble staircase behind the , he provides an easy distraction from the music and, despite his care to be quiet, unwittingly becomes the center of attention. When the performers have finished and

Lady Tantamount‟s guests are free to talk, their “pent-up chatter” breaks loose and they

103 prefer to focus on her husband, several of them discussing what they consider to be his social faux-pas, as opposed to the actual music (42). This tepid aesthetic response hardly amounts to a justification of the oppressive laboring of the ploughmen, shepherds, and cowherds. Their actions do suggest, however, a desire to be seen appreciating the music so as to exude a cultural sophistication appropriate to a place within the Tantamounts‟ society.

Lord Tantamount, on the other hand, although he appears socially uncouth, does have the redeeming quality of actually appreciating the music played in his house. Music causes the old aristocrat, with all of his faults, to become a “cloud-solitary philosopher” and to intuit the Platonically interconnected nature of the universe (38). Should he transfer this intuition to his self-interested financial or social interactions, to see how his actions affect others, his appreciation of the music could be extraordinarily worthwhile.

The potential for this transfer, however, remains unfulfilled and Tantamount remains isolated from everything save his own interests. All the same, he uses the leisure time provided by his financial security to take an abstract philosophic pleasure in the music.

In doing so, he manifests an ironically idealized aristocratic sense of aesthetics rather reminiscent of the Duke of Dorset‟s. He too, then, sees value in the structure of a world that allows for such art to exist, even if that value exists primarily for his own pleasure.

Huxley allows the Tantamounts and their guests, therefore, to all see some value in classical music, as it provides them with a means to validate their position in or to take pleasure from the benefits of an upper-class society.

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From a diametrically opposed perspective, Frank Illidge, a child of working-class parents, such as those who labored to support the Tantamounts, remains unable to find any positive value in the music on any level. Surveying the cultured scene of the performance, he remarks disdainfully that it “fairly stinks of art” (61). Illidge, however, has had little chance to enjoy the music in peace. Much like his more famous counterpart from E. M. Forster‟s Howards End, Leonard Bast, he is too busy worrying about his own disadvantaged situation. Illidge laments his “cheap” suit, which causes him to look like an “oddity” amongst those in evening dress, just as Bast worries about the prices of concert seats and programs (38, 39). The result is that neither of them can appreciate the music playing in front of them: Illidge cannot appreciate Bach, nor Bast Beethoven.

Neither does the music foster a sense of community, as it does for the upper classes. Just as Bast is suspicious of the wealthier Schlegel family sitting at the Queen‟s Hall concert next to him, Illidge is filled with rage at all of Lady Tantamount‟s guests, “without exception,” as he surveys them enjoying the music (41). The guests all use their appreciation of the music to justify their presence at Lady Tantamount‟s parties, while

Illidge alone feels isolated. In artistic settings, both Huxley and Forster imply, the working and lower-middle classes are outcasts.

The question thus arises of why Bach and Beethoven cannot be appreciated by those such as Illidge and Bast, who seem to get nothing out of art but a foul smell and anxiety. Are their critical powers distracted by an overpowering apprehension due to the setting and audience? Or, is their lack of appreciation a stinging indictment, on the part of their creators, against the attempt to excuse the abuse of labor by citing the artistic

105 pursuits it enables? Or, more insidiously, is the olfactory implication here that those with working-class roots are simply incapable of enjoying the higher forms of culture, such as classical music, and should therefore be barred from entering into the debate over the value of art altogether?

This last interpretation, that a cultural elite can discern good music, and by correlation, good art, in ways that the lower classes cannot, seems to have lingered in

Huxley‟s mind in particular. Writing a concert review for The Weekly Westminster

Gazette about six years before the publication of Point Counter Point, he lamented the fate of fine performers condemned to play lackluster music. This thought led him to a consideration of both the value of certain types of musical exchanges, as well as how such exchanges might be assessed by various classes of listeners. He observes,

what gloomy reflections are evoked by the contrast between the artistry and refinement of player, and the coarse vulgarity of the work that is played! One thinks of the waste of the performer‟s talent and time (not to mention the waste of our time and the price of our tickets); one thinks of the minds of the people who like this sort of thing; one thinks of all the lovely works one might be hearing and isn‟t; one thinks of the spiritual hierarchy of man and makes the melancholy constatation that there are a great many Sudras in the world. And one comes away at the end of the concert—that is, if one hasn‟t had the wisdom to come out a good deal earlier—thoroughly cast down, damped and dejected.

As opposed to the scene described in Point Counter Point, the emphasis here is not on the potential theft of the resources of the British working classes, but on the “waste” of

Huxley‟s own resources: the time and the money that he has lost. Ironically, Huxley and

Bast seem to have some similar concerns here. The difference, however, is that Huxley‟s distraction comes from the fact that he has paid to hear what he considers to be “coarse” and vulgar music, not Beethoven‟s Fifth. The refined, Balliol-educated Huxley is no 106 doubt on the higher end of his “spiritual hierarchy” and is therefore quite able to appreciate “lovely works,” such as Beethoven‟s symphonies, when he has the opportunity to hear them. That he had not heard them that particular afternoon is unfortunate.

What is worse, though, for Huxley, is the notion that some people, the “Sudras,” or the lowest orders of society, might actually have enjoyed the “horrors” of the bad music that he has heard. They might have actually liked listening to Léon Boellmann‟s

Symphonic Variations, a piece which Huxley himself condemns in his review as “cinema music,” the simplistic “vulgarity” of which it is only “tolerable” to listen to if the audience can hear it “with the distracted ears of those who gaze absorbed” at cinema beauty queens.6 To be fair, Boellmann‟s Symphonic Variations might not be brilliant, but

Huxley‟s reference to the music as a “vulgarity” fit only for the spiritually impoverished is a bit on the harsh side. All the same, we have here a blueprint for Huxley‟s musical deliberations in Point Counter Point in which he will go on to add the constraints of socio-economic hierarchies to his spiritual one. Even in 1922, however, the overall message is clear. Only those towards the higher levels of the hierarchy, spiritual or economical, can appreciate “lovely” music, such as Haydn and Bach, while those at the lower end remain distractedly satisfied with the “coarse vulgarity” of simple “cinema music” (“Bad Music.” WWG 23 Dec. 1922: 14).7 Huxley thus comes away depressed not

6 Huxley treats this “distract[ing]” music of the cinema with slightly more tolerance in his later essay “Where are the Movies Moving?” wherein he partially admires the “monotonous music” of the theaters that “enhance in the minds of the spectators the dream-like quality of what they see on the screen” ( New and Old 225). Here, however, Huxley is referring only to music intended to be heard inside the cinema, not music intended to be heard in a concert hall.

7 The concert Huxley heard had in the first half music by Boccherini, Haydn, and Bach. But “in the second half of the programme, in the section devoted to modern work, that the horrors of the afternoon,” such as 107 only because all the “many Sudras” do not know what they are missing, but because due to their large numbers they can inflict their “cinema” music on the more select members of society, such as himself.

Cinema music, as Huxley indicates, represented an easy target for many modernists, as by the nineteen-twenties it had become a symbol of the easily-digestible mass-market culture that made the intelligentsia so uneasy.8 Although several readers have discerned the influence of cinematic techniques on modernist narratives, writers such as Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Eliot, and Woolf each examined in critical writings how the cinema could degrade the complex art of music into a cheap commodity by borrowing selections from symphonies, operas, , and even popular songs, for mere perfunctory pastimes (Seed 48, 55-58, 64-70). Several critics of the time agreed, acknowledging that much movie music, in particular, did not have any sophisticated artistic function, but rather served to make the silent films more palatable by providing some sort of crude emotional cue for the audience before the advent of the talkies in

1927.9

the Boellmann, “began.” This should not be taken to suggest that Huxley did not like all modern music. He admits to being partial to Delius, whom he praises, for instance, in his review “Delius and the Nature- Emotion” (WWG. 16 Dec. 16 1922:14). A complete listing of Huxley‟s for the Gazette can be found in Bradshaw‟s “A New Bibliography of Aldous Huxley‟s Work and its Reception, 1912-1937.”

8 James Joyce would be a notable exception. As Keith Williams has argued, “Joyce was just as interested in the medium for its lowbrow appeal as for its avant-garde potentials,” as exampled by the “varied and non-discriminatory” films he showed at his Dublin theatre, the Volta (1).

9 As Percy Scholes notes, “[t]he human animal finds it trying to squat for an hour or more in silence,” and so music played a vital, if mostly background, part in keeping an audience interested in what was going on on-screen (800). Scholes‟s terms are more humorous than snobbish, I think, as he recognizes the later quality of music composed by Vaughan Williams and for films (801-05). They nevertheless reveal, as do Huxley‟s and Woolf‟s, the low-brow associations of cinematic aesthetics, as opposed to the high-brow ones of painting, literature, and, of course, classical music. 108

Huxley, Lawrence, and Eliot, in particular, all associate a simplistic use of music as playing into the aesthetic crudity of the lower classes and with the cinema. For Huxley it was “the almost total lack of invention exhibited in the variations” of Boellmann‟s piece that made the music so much like the vulgar music played during movies (“Bad

Music,” 14). Correspondingly, in D. H. Lawrence‟s novel The Lost Girl, the genteel

Alvina Houghton views her father‟s request that she play the piano for the cinema at his new as an affront: “Here was a blow for her! She hurried off to her bedroom to laugh and cry at once. She just saw herself at that piano, banging off the Merry Widow

Waltz, and, in tender moments, The Rosary. Time after time, The Rosary,” all for the cinemas‟ loud obnoxious audiences (99). Alvina makes it clear that playing in such a context demeans her talent through its rudimentary demand for mere noise and repetition.

Eliot, meanwhile, being one modernist occasionally willing to tout a paternalistic idealization of working-class culture over that of the upper classes, saw little benefit in the exposure of the working classes to music in the theater. He feared that the lulling of the “continuous senseless music” of the movie houses would fill the “lower classes” with the “same listless apathy with which the middle and upper classes regard any entertainment of the nature of art” (“London Letter,” Dec. 1922, 662). As Sebastian

Knowles has noted, what Eliot disliked in the early movie theaters was what he saw as an increased lack of a critical interaction, or of any interaction, between the “artist and

109 viewer”; this caused Eliot to loathe the cinema, as well any other passive modern art

(“Then You Wink the Other Eye” 27-28).10

Although Woolf alludes only indirectly to music accompanying films, she does so in order to lament what she saw as the facile technical tricks of the early cinema. In her

1926 essay “The Cinema,” she uses musical metaphors to suggest how the early cinema was a “parasite,” an art which simplified, absorbed, and degraded more traditional and advanced arts, rather than productively sublimating and synthesizing them into a new form (Collected Essays 270). To her, cinema enthusiasts had the potential of the original musicians, those “naked men who knocked two bars of iron together and heard in that clangour a foretaste of the music of Mozart” (268). Unfortunately, instead of being patient and learning to use the technical aesthetic potential inherent in film, movie makers were relying on already advanced art forms, such as music or novels, to jumpstart their own aesthetic. It is as if, she writes, “instead of finding two bars of iron to play with,” the original musicians had “found scattering the sea shore , , , grand by Erard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy but without knowing a note of music to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time” (272).

Here, the comparisons to Mozart and the wonderfully refined Bechsteins allude, circuitously, to the tendencies of cinematic productions to rely on the performance of music, as well as on other literature and narrative, to add a sense of emotion or of sophistication to what was visually. This cheapened, she implies, the

10 Eliot‟s fear was, at least in part, unjustified. Rose notes, “„I learnt to whistle the classics‟ at the cinema was a common refrain in plebeian memoirs” (202). While no doubt good cinema music washed over some listeners, others were introduced to the works of Beethoven, Bizet, Elgar, Verdi, and Wagner through the films and carried the music out of the darkened theater with them (202-03). 110 experience of both arts: of music, which was “hammer[ed]” out to fit whatever was on the screen, and to film, which was distracted from learning to express feelings and events in a more unique cinematic fashion.

Woolf does, however, imagine that someday a more intelligent cinema might learn to use music and other arts in a more sophisticated fashion. The cinema should progress, she theorizes, by relying on a complex integration of foreign aesthetic elements into its “own devices” (270). Woolf argues that the cinema should accept only “the very slightest help from words or music,” using these arts judiciously and critically in order

“to make itself intelligible” in its own aesthetic language (270). In order to bring the

“foretaste” of a genius, such as the iconic Mozart‟s, in the movies to fruition, the cinema must deal with music and other arts critically, not thoughtlessly in a way that will simply ease the commercial value of the film industry. According to Woolf, this had yet to happen, and as such, twentieth-century movie goers were not experiencing either Mozart or art in general, but were mere “savages … watching the pictures” (268).

To be sure then, Huxley was not alone in his musical snobbery, and, as Woolf‟s references to “savages” suggests, many modernists similarly refused to permit their fictional lower classes, defined as such according to either an economic or “spiritual hierarchy,” to engage successfully with classical music. They attempted, rather, to separate the musical tastes of their cultured characters from those of anyone involved with the more popular businesses of non-artistic commodities. This is true even when they acknowledge the dependence of classical music on the purportedly vulgar aspects of trade. When the young pianist Rachel Vinrace in Woolf‟s début novel The Voyage Out

111 protests against the “[p]oor little goats” that make up her father‟s freight, the shipping magnate Willoughby Vinrace “sharply” reminds his daughter that “[i]f it weren‟t for the goats there‟d be no music … music depends upon goats,” before going on to discuss the crudely bursting insides of sea animals (18-19). This brief exchange emphasizes the unfortunate dependence of art, and particularly of music, on crude economic practices at the same time as it highlights the inability of the pampered, cultured Rachel to relate to the self-made, unaesthetic businessman who is her father, however much she may respect him.

Woolf went on to explore this aesthetic alienation in both Jacob’s Room (1922) and in The Years (1937). In each of these novels she emphasizes the exclusion of the economically, as opposed to the simply spiritually, disadvantaged from classical music.

After leaving the opera at Covent Garden in Jacob’s Room, Lady Charles observes that

“[o]f all the carriages that leave the of the Opera House, not one turns eastward”; upon arriving home she wonders “Why? Why? Why?” (65). The implication here is either that those who live in the working-class neighborhoods of the East End do not go to the opera or that Lady Charles has not noticed those who have headed home on foot.

As Woolf herself fails to allude to any peripatetic opera lovers, the evidence seems to point to the first interpretation. Both Woolf and Lady Charles do take the time, however, to reflect on “the little thief” left in the “empty market-place” whom “no one in - and-white or rose-coloured evening dress” stops “to help or condemn” (65). Wrapped up in their world of art, the gentility remains aloof from the distasteful concerns of those outside.

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The opera is, in Woolf‟s version of London, ostensibly the safe-haven of the wealthy indifferent, an aristocratic preserve against the social outcasts surrounding it.

Thus Lady Lasswade in The Years can freely admire how during an intermission of a matinée performance of Siegfried the lights come on at Covent Garden causing the

“whole Opera House” to leap “into life again with its faces and its diamonds,” shining in the splendor of its patrons (142). Earlier, outside the grandeur of the hall, she had thought how “ridiculous” it was “to come out in full evening dress” in the light of the afternoon (139). Once inside, however, where “the air glowed yellow and crimson,” she can relax, for “she no longer felt absurd. On the contrary, she felt appropriate” (140). It is rather those who cannot afford the proper evening dress, such as Illidge or Bast or the

“porters, dingy little clerks in their ordinary working clothes, coarse-looking women in aprons” working in Covent Garden market outside, whom Lady Lasswade had seen, who would, within the confines of the opera house, be the absurd ones (139). As such, it seems that the latter cannot enter in and the upper classes, such as Lady Lasswade, remain safe.

Woolf implies, though, that if the working classes cannot enter Covent Garden, this might not be so bad, as they do not know what they are missing. If the glamorous

West End opera is the preserve of a harmonious opulence, as one nears Woolf‟s East

End, the home territory of the working classes, there is only an increase in dirt and cacophony. Standing in opposition to the scenes in Covent Garden in The Years, for instance, is North Pargiter‟s visit to his aunt Sara in Street, formerly Grub Street, just adjacent to the East End. Sitting outside his aunt‟s apartment, North hears “the voice

113 of a singing scales” and thinks to himself, not how lucky his aunt must be to hear free music, but “[w]hat a dirty … sordid … low-down street to live in” (237). The same evening, North and Sara hear the vocalist from before clashing with “a player” who “had struck up in the street below” (241). As opposed to the fantasy of the homogenously rich opera house, Woolf imagines music in Milton Street as dissonance.11

She uses this dissonance as a metaphor for the difficulty of communication between the young, fortunate North, who back home from feels “an outsider,” and his aging, shabby aunt (242). It is also a humorous attribute of the “slums” in which the elder

Pargiter tends to live (240).12 They two hear the dissonance and “[t]hey laughed,” at both themselves and at the awkward musical situation (241). North and his aunt are at least amused by the would-be musical racket. When poor Miss Kilman from Mrs. Dalloway listens to the violin, she finds it “excruciating”; for her, however, the music is somewhat worth the pain, as she takes a sickeningly masochistic religious “comfort” in it (105).

11 For a more optimistic, theoretical take on the dissonance of language in modernist literature, see Melnick (8, 126); for dissonance in modernist continental literature and art as a means to create a paradoxical “unity” out of “a struggle between union and division, nationalism and internationalism, aristocracy and ” and other opposition of pre-1914 Europe, see Harrison (20).

12 Woolf offered a more overtly optimistic, if patronizing version of street music in 1905 where she argued that “we must always treat with tenderness the efforts of those who strive honestly to express the music that is in them; for the gift of conception is certainly superior to the gift of expression, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the men and women who scrape for the harmonies that never come while the traffic goes thundering by have as great a possession, though fated never to impart it, as the masters whose facile eloquence enchants thousands to listen” (The Essays of Virginia Woolf 28). While refusing to acknowledge a musical competency in the performances of common “street musician[s],” Woolf in this early essay does acknowledge an aesthetic force to their music. The street musician becomes “the minister of the wildest of all gods” and so maintains a Dionysian art of divinity (29). Should their divine idealism be channeled to the poor through “the melodies of Beethoven and Brahms and Mozart,” Woolf imagines, “it is probable that all crime and quarrelling would soon be unknown, and the work of the hand and the thoughts of the mind would flow melodiously in obedience to the laws of music” (32). Unfortunately, in the above scene with North and Sara Partiger in The Years, what Woolf emphasizes is a dissonant street music, which instead of having a calming effect, offers at most a temporary relief of the impasse between North and Sara. 114

Woolf‟s humbler characters, particularly Miss Kilman, present a fleshed out version of those presumably working-class “sinner[s]” whom G. B. Shaw describes in

Major Barbara (1905) getting hoodwinked into passivity by clamorous music in the East

London district of . Major Barbara is meant to point out, as Shaw observes in his “Preface,” the dangers of religious organizations, such as the Army, which work against the poor by encouraging their “submission to the State as at present capitalistically organized” (Complete Plays I 329). The chief way in which Shaw depicts the Army in the play as managing to “convert” working-class Londoners “to good,” that is to an obedient state beneficial only for the capitalistic elite, is through the energy and dynamism of the music played by the Salvation Army bands.

This musical duplicity is symbolized by the adaption of a popular opera tune into an enticement to submit to the Salvation Army. The Army band has turned a “wedding chorus from one of Donizetti‟s operas,” several of which were popular with the working classes, into the “West Ham Salvation March,” which the band performs on the way to a conversion meeting (401). Conspicuously, Shaw has the band led by characters representative of the capitalistic upper classes, particularly the munitions manufacturers

Andrew Undershaft and his future protégé Cusins. The latter subsequently claims that, under the influence of Undershaft, whose “brazen roarings” on the trombone “were like the laughter of the damned,” “117 conversions took place” (408).

The music meant to liberate spiritually becomes more of a death march as

Undershaft, with the help of the Army band, tunefully leads grateful converts into his

115 clutches.13 Though the salvation derived from the music by both Miss Kilman and by

Undershaft‟s new acolytes is registered differently, one painfully and the other pleasurably, the result is nevertheless the same: a veritable false-consciousness, an illusion of being uplifted. When modernists represented the lower classes as engaging with classical music of any variety, the experience is a subservient and debasing encounter.

For all of their subtleties, Huxley, Woolf, and the Shaw of Major Barbara cannot bring themselves to show the working or lower-middle classes as capable of taking an unalloyed pleasure in classical music, much less in performing it. The music these classes do perform, they equate with discord and a valueless noise. Value, however, is always a relative term; just as the difference is between noise and music. In his “An Art Night,” Thomas Burke accentuates these relativities and warns against defining musical values too narrowly. Burke‟s story takes place in a distinctly non- aristocratic venue, a dilapidated “Models Club,” suspiciously suggestive of a brothel.

Within the club reigns a “painfully manufactured Bohemianism,” an atmosphere in which the narrator listens to young men with the “self-proud accent of Oxford” tell vapid stories and flirt with the “models” (Nights 220, 221). This pseudo-bohemian mixture of Oxford and the inhabitants of a “shabby” Chelsea apartment is compounded by the sounds of a

13 Interestingly, shortly after the play‟s premier in November, 1905, Shaw was invited to visit and critique a December festival of Salvation Army bands. Though generally favorable, his report advised against the Army performing too much secular music, which has the effect, on laborers, of “switching off the current of religious enthusiasm and switching on the current of circus excitement.” Shaw continued to observe that “it is a pity that the Salvation Army, which has produced a distinctive type of religious service and religious life, should not also produce a distinctive type of marching music” (592). Shaw may have been thinking as much here of Undershaft‟s circus like performance in Major Barbara, performing Donizetti‟s opera music, as those bands that he had heard at the festival. Either way, in both his report and in his play, Shaw decries the use of music to mislead by excitement. 116

“cheap piano” and a cello, upon which two of the club‟s musical amateurs “trickled” out

(with an awful irony) Elgar‟s “Salut d‟Amour” (219 and 220). The music is stopped short when, prior to demanding a drink, an acerbic woman snaps out at the performers

“[s]hut that row,” her own version of “amour” and Elgar‟s no doubt differing (220). The irrepressible spirit of the musician/models soon starts up again, though, with a rendition of “Delilah‟s song,” most likely one of the from Saint-Saëns‟s opera Samson and

Delilah. This time it is the narrator who is dismissive of their effort. While leaving, he thinks of the musicians‟ performance as “typical of the fifth-rate concert platform” (222).

Quick to disparage what he sees as the arrogant accent of the young men, the narrator reveals his own snobbery by using his musical taste to place himself above the inexpert musical culture of the “Club.”

The narrator‟s condescension is soon checked, however, as upon leaving the building he is forced to confront his own restrictive pretentiousness. Outside, he comes across a young girl on the street staring up at an open window, eavesdropping on the music he has just left. The girl is listening with a rapt amazement, as if “she was, for the first time, touching finger-tips with beauty” (222). Laughing with joy she stammers,

“[c]uh! … Wonder what it feels like to sing like that, eh? Makes me … sort of …‟fyou understand … funny like. Makes me want to ….” The girl, despite her apparent lack of education, signaled by her decidedly unOxford stumbling, clearly hears something subtle and pleasurable that the narrator had missed. The heart of the girl on the street opens up to the voice from the window and she is very likely on the verge of making a connection between the beauty of art and the beauty of life such as would be unattainable by the likes

117 of Lord Tantamount. But what exactly the music inspires in her we never find out, for a posh accent crashes over the singing, screeching “„[n]o EARTHLY, dear old girl. You‟ll never sing. Your values, you know, and all that are …” and the story is over (222). “En vain je suis belle!” Overwhelmingly sympathetic to so many working-class musical amateurs in his stories, Burke here depicts how musical flowers can spring up even amongst the rockiest soils of poor quality instruments and amateur performers, while demonstrating how easily their stems can be cut short by both ignorance and arrogance.

The story stands, then, as a reproof both to the philistines who decry the “stink of art” and to those cultured aesthetes who slip so easily into a callous musical preciosity, equating talent and virtue with tiaras and a box at the Opera House. At the same time Burke leaves us to wonder what exactly it was that his unanticipated musical amateur had been made to desire. As such, the exact value of the music remains here forever ambiguous.

Musical Mediocrities: Sliding Down the Cultural Scale

Despite the repressive drawbacks of equating classical music with certain refined

“values,” twentieth-century intellectuals did acknowledge the equation as having some benefits for the cultured classes who found themselves temporarily, or perennially, out of money. Relying on the increasingly prominent formulations of classical music as a

“luxury” or upper-class art, a variety of authors began to use the profession of music as a social crutch for characters in an economic decline. Teaching music in particular became a sort of “fall-back” plan for formerly wealthy or independent characters who, for whatever reason, found themselves having to make a living, but who refused to declass 118 themselves entirely by becoming shopkeepers or clerks. An association with music, such characters hope, would endow them with its escalating cultural cachet and so help them to keep their heads above society‟s waters.

The hopes of these down and out characters serve as an indicator of the increasing respect for music in society. The decision, however, of twentieth-century intellectuals to depict such characters as turning to music as a last resort to make money suggests the failure of the upper and upper-middle classes to appreciate music at the highest levels: to appreciate music as an art, not a trade. As if to call attention to this cultural weakness, authors emphasize how these characters inevitably fail to make a name for themselves.

The majority of such characters trade rather unspectacularly on a second- or even third- rate half-hearted musicality to keep up an appearance of gentility which is nevertheless fading. This trend implies that behind the crust of refinement or even upper-class gentility lurks an aesthetic apathy and an intellectual decay.

Quite often faltering upper- or upper-middle-class characters lift themselves up with too facile dreams of regaining or even of surpassing their lost wealth through a brilliant musical career, only to end up falling somewhat short of their goals. In Arnold

Bennett‟s “Clarice of the Autumn Concerts,” for instance, Clarice Toft is fortunate enough to have been sent by her father, “an earthenware manufacturer, and the flamboyant Alderman of Turnhill, in Towns,” to the Royal College of Music in

London, and from there “to the Conservatoire at Liège” (Tales of the Five Towns, 296).

After her studies, she goes to London to earn her living. Once there, however, she finds out that she has to compete with the “dozens of pianists whom she deemed more

119 brilliant” than herself, and she obtains “neither engagements nor pupils” (296). Still, when her father dies, and she learns of “his true financial condition” and her own dearth of an inheritance, she can fall back on the respectable position of being “a teacher of the pianoforte” in the Five Towns; while she does not succeed wonderfully there either, she does do “nicely” (297).

The dream, though, of becoming a star and rising to the top is hard to kill. When vacationing in Llandudno, Wales, Toft is heard by a concert and wins a chance to perform, without getting paid, before a live audience in London. It is a chance which starts her dreaming of stardom. After what she supposes to be a rather successful performance of Tchaikovsky‟s “Slavonic Sonata,” Toft fantasizes of regaining or even of exceeding her family‟s lost financial glory and imagines a “rosy future as the spoiled darling of continental capitals” (301). The critics, however, are only moderately impressed, those, that is, who take notice of her at all, and future engagements are not forthcoming. Her experience nevertheless allows her to advertise as a “solo pianist” when she returns to teaching. Eventually she marries, and as her husband, a “pianoforte dealer,” is a “money-maker,” she gives up teaching altogether (303, 304). Toft‟s experience reveals the wide-array of uses for a career in music. A concert career is a possible road to achieving fame and fortune, but a difficult one, now crowded with competitors. It also suggests how when a profitable celebrity status is not forthcoming, classical music is, for some, no more than a temporary, last-minute profession. It is one which allows for its practitioner to maintain his or her gentility, but which can be abandoned, without regret, when something better comes along.

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Sometimes authors depict an upper-class character abandoning music simply because a career in that profession entails tiresome amounts of hard work. Gissing explores the pipe-dream of an easy musical career in his 1897 novel The Whirlpool.

Early in the novel, the young, wealthy socialite Alma Frothingham performs with a string quartet which she herself has founded, thus guaranteeing herself a place in it. Following the performance, she flippantly declares, “[o]h, music is my religion … I‟ve a good mind to ask Father to turn me out of house and home, with just half-a-crown. Then I might really do something. It would be splendid!” (36). When her family loses its ill-gotten fortune due to the financial speculations of her father, the result is somewhat less than

“splendid.” Relying on what little money her step-mother can spare her, Alma goes to

Leipzig to study the violin, hoping that one day she will be able to make her own living through performing. Once in , however, she loses her resolve, giving “very little attention” to music and “putting off with one excuse after another the beginning of her serious studies” (67). Faced with the difficult task of practicing, Alma ignores her violin in order to read novels; a familiar habit, no doubt, for many amateur musicians, but a dangerous tendency for a future professional.

Rather than work hard, Alma prefers to take the chance that her untrained aptitude for music will pull her through and earn her the admiration of the musically indifferent beau monde. She gambles musically, in other words, just as her father had gambled financially. The truth about Alma though, as Gissing explains it, is that while musically talented, she “had no profound love of the art” (245). She has no interest in refining her technique or interpretations or putting in years of hard work. Her music provides her

121 merely with a way to “maintain a place of distinction above ordinary handsome girls and heiresses,” and her lust for an easy and meteoric rise in the music world is no more than a desire for social success (245). As a result, when Alma marries a fairly well-off suitor, and feels secure enough not to have to depend upon music for her living, she once again tries to jumpstart her career to regain her lost social distinction. Still indolent, however, she practices the barest minimum possible and does not even fail spectacularly, merely moderately. She receives tepid reviews and loses a bit of money on a large advertising campaign for her recital, which is later repaid by her husband. She makes no effort to follow up her professional début with subsequent performances.

In contrast to Beerbohm and the majority of modernists, Gissing heightens

Alma‟s slothfulness by distinctly comparing it, albeit briefly, to the future moderate successes of the Katie Batches of the world. For Alma‟s artistic anemia is a clear counterpoint to her own observation that soon, “[w]hen all the bricklayers‟ daughters are giving piano lessons,” “women of leisure” will have to acquire an interest in stereotypically servile tasks (341). Gissing clearly alludes here to the willingness of the less privileged working classes to work hard for what they see as a practical, yet still respectable, living, while the unemployed Alma can barely bring herself to practice now and then to fulfill her desire to become a professional violinist. Her failure in music ultimately represents the self-cultivated laziness and the intellectual weakness of her socio-economic class.

Although Alma, like Clarice Toft, ends up finding a husband willing to support her, other characters are not so lucky. The unlucky ones find themselves reluctantly

122 returning to or unenthusiastically maintaining teaching positions. These upper-class, or formerly upwardly mobile, characters underline a musical mediocrity, as they cling to the waning social refinements of their families. In George Orwell‟s Keep the Aspidistra

Flying, for instance, the Comstocks represent “the most dismal of all classes, the middle- , the landless ,” who as they fall from their peak “on the wave of

Victorian prosperity” attempt to maintain their gentility by whatever means possible (39).

When Mr. Comstock dies, leaving his family all but bankrupt, his daughter has to take a job in a -shop, while his wife earns “two shillings an hour” by giving piano lessons in and around her home in the suburb of Acton. This was a profession she had followed while her husband was alive, but only “sporadically” and when her family was “in lower water than usual” (49). Her return to teaching signals her family‟s desperate need for money and the precariousness of their social and financial position. Mrs. Comstock‟s piano lessons are therefore portrayed neither as the manifestation of a lifelong enthusiasm for music, nor as the representation of an assiduously practiced skill-set, but rather as a way for her to “„manage‟” respectably for a year or two until her son agrees to get a job and is more or less on its feet again (49).

As the dreams of Clarice and Alma indicate, music offered individuals, and particularly women, the potential for a relative independence and a respectable, if not necessarily desirable career. At the same time, however, the economically-oriented, last resort interest in the piano of Clarice and Mrs. Comstock, along with Alma‟s visions of the up-and-coming hoards of piano-playing “bricklayers‟ daughters,” reveal how the less star-studded and the more middling echelons of the music profession could suggest to its

123 practitioners their own proximity to the lower classes. Though such figures are rarely evoked in literature, the fictional unmarried Clarices and widowed Mrs. Comstocks sink ever closer to the likes of the piano teacher imagined by Sidney Harrison, a Royal

Academy of Music piano professor. In his essay “Music as a Profession,” Harrison attempts to describe the various sorts of musicians in the , including unmarried, almost unskilled women piano teachers:

[i]n a back street of an outer suburb lives Miss Smith. She teaches on an old upright piano in her parlour. She visits in the neighbourhood. Her fees are shockingly low—a shilling a lesson or even less. … She has no idea of modern methods of technique. Her pupils strum and thump. If one of them has natural gift that survives bad teaching, Miss Smith may venture to enter the child for one of the lower of the graded exams. Miss Smith is poor, but she is no worse off than the girl in the cash desk at the grocer‟s, and she is the welcome friend of many young people (Musical Box 114).

Harrison ends his account on an optimistic note. But, the idea of being comparable to a grocer‟s shop-girl would hardly have appealed to the genteel

Clarice or to Mrs. Comstock, much less to Alma. Nevertheless, “poor” Miss

Smith remains in the background, and as she was doing “no worse” than others, her very mediocrity accents how her colleagues were coming down.

Harrison‟s imaginary “Miss Smith” helps to explain some of the financial and social anxieties that weave their way into the Misses Morkan‟s Christmas party in James

Joyce‟s “The Dead.” Kate and Julia Morkan and their niece, Mary Jane, are all musicians. They lead a “modest” daily life, are respected in town and are able to eat “the best of everything” (Dubliners 138). They are also able to provide for large, hospitable

Christmas parties each . At various points throughout the story, however, Joyce

124 uncovers how each of their careers is vulnerable to an upset which could destabilize the entire household.14 Kate has grown “too feeble to go about much” and must limit herself to giving “music lessons to beginners” at home (138). The implication is of a shrinking career and hence a shrinking income. Her sister Julia meanwhile, though she can still sing beautifully, appears to her nephew Gabriel to be dying. We soon find out that due to

Pope Pius X‟s 1903 decree forbidding women to sing as part of church , she has recently been displaced as “the leading in Adam and Eve‟s,” Dublin‟s Church of the Immaculate Conception (138). As John Jackson and Bernard McGinley have noted, the pope‟s decree was a rather “topical controversy” in 1903, in part because singing in church choirs often provided women with a much needed means of earning an income

(164). This allusion to an economic loss, along with the overall insult to her sister‟s dignity, is undoubtedly what provides some of the bite in Kate‟s declaration that “it‟s not at all honourable for the pope to turn out the women out of the choirs that have slaved there all their lives and put little whipper-snappers of boys,” who are most likely not as in need of an income from music as the older Julia, “over their heads” (Dubliners 153).

The musically-related anxieties of Kate and Julia‟s are due, largely, to extra musical influences. Kate is growing old and Julia has the pope set against her. The

14 The downward-moving Misses Morkan and their niece are a variation of Mrs. Kearney from the earlier Dubliners story “A Mother.” Mrs. Kearney “had been educated in a high-class convent where she had learned French and music” in the hopes of marrying well and living a high society-life. Her “playing and ivory manners” are “much admired,” but she herself is quite choosy and ends up dismissing most of her suitors until, growing older, she marries a boot-maker (106-07). Her own social ambitions thwarted, she educates her daughter in the same tradition, and even sends her on to the Royal Irish Music Academy. The façade of the Kearney ladies‟ “high-class” status, however, is overthrown when during an intermission of a concert in the Antient Concert Rooms put on by the nationalist Eire Abu Society, Mrs. Kearney haggles over the four guineas remaining unpaid from the eight owed to her daughter for playing. When the full fee is not received before the second half of the concert, Mrs. Kearney refuses to let her daughter perform. The concert promoter remarks to Mrs. Kearney acidly, “I thought you were a lady” (116). He further challengers her aristocratic, cultured airs by replacing her daughter with another performer on the spot. 125 unease surrounding Mary Jane, however, is more closely tied up with the still transitional social state of the music profession itself. Mary Jane is the “main prop of the household,” bringing in money as an organist and a piano teacher to several of “the better-class families” in and around Kingstown (138). She is probably able to command this better- class clientele, and probably a better income, because she has been to the Royal Irish

Academy, which would lend a certain prestige to her musical qualifications. Despite her accomplishments, however, the social standing of her pupils causes all three women to take extra care to cater to them throughout the Christmas party, to which they have been invited. Her aunts worry that her students especially, as opposed to all of the other young people, might see Freddy Malins “under the influence” of too much drink (139). During the dinner, Mary Jane herself waits on them in order to make sure “that they got the best slices” of goose (155). Later, when a tense point arises during a discussion of a black singer, Mary Jane soothes the situation by paying tribute to one of her students who had gotten her a ticket to the opera Mignon, which she praises as “very fine” (156). One of

Joyce‟s themes throughout the story is, of course, the brilliance of Irish hospitality; but, the efforts made by the three women throughout the evening seem to emphasize their desire to please those who provide the lion‟s share of their family‟s income. This is a reminder that though the music profession was more respectable than ever, its professors were still somewhat servile.

The concern the women take to flatter the students is undoubtedly tied to the fact that the interest of the latter in music, as an art, seems to be somewhat lukewarm and limited. When Miss Daly plays a waltz for dancing, for instance—a piece which Mary

126

Jane criticizes obliquely as a “beautiful waltz,” which “made lovely time”—it draws an enthusiastic audience, sparking in particular the interest of “Miss Furlong, who was one of Mary Jane‟s pupils” (143).15 When Mary Jane plays her Academy piece, however,

Gabriel notes that the only two people “who seemed to follow the music were Mary Jane herself, her hands racing along the keyboard or lifted from it at the pauses like those of a priestess in momentary imprecation, and Aunt Kate,” who was “standing at her elbow to turn the page” (146). The analogy for Mary Jane‟s hands, which are raised as if in a

“momentary imprecation,” is most likely her recognition, however unconscious, of the curse working against herself and her household, as she has been trained to follow in the insecure musical footsteps of her aunts. Now she is respected, but her own students‟ disinterest in her performance alludes to how looms.

Other authors picked up on the negative artistic effects on music itself when it was used as a social place holder for the economically derailed. These authors set an emphasis on the artistic staleness which results from using music not merely as a makeshift profession, but as a way to get out of any substantial form of work at all. The most humorous example of such a ludicrously indifferent “professional” might be Evelyn

Waugh‟s musically-ignorant Paul Pennyfeather. Upon being sent down from Oxford and denied his rightful inheritance by his guardian, Pennyfeather is hired by a to teach Classics and English generally, and to teach Peter Beste-Chetwynde the organ. Luckily for both, the latter takes the lessons only “to get off gym” as

15 Of course many a “beautiful waltz” has been written by wonderful composers, such as Chopin or Weber, and performed by brilliant pianists, such as . None of these waltzes, however, could be best praised by the meiotically mordant compliment that they “made lovely time.” 127

Pennyfeather‟s chief teaching technique is to “wish” out loud that his student would stop playing: Beste-Chetwynde simply plays along, not too “terribly well,” for a while until he asks, “[s]hall I stop for a bit?” to which Pennyfeather responds, “I wish you would” (26,

123). The real-life Victorian music pedagogues, such as Hullah and Hawtrey, would have rolled in their graves.

To a lesser extreme, Woolf too explores an apathetic musical incompetency in

Night and Day (1919) through Henry Otway, the son of the financially floundering Sir

Francis Otway.16 Rather than taking a more lucrative position “either in a shipping office,” pace the roughish Willoughby Vinrace, “or in a tea-merchant‟s warehouse,”

Henry persists in indifferently “practising both violin and piano, with the result that he could not perform professionally upon either,” but can subsist in “the uncongenial occupation of teaching the young ladies of Bungay to play upon the violin” (188, 93).

Though he makes little money teaching, he at least spares himself the stereotypical

Edwardian ignominy of engaging in an inartistic, more patently middle-class trade. His aristocratically affected bohemianism on the other hand earns him the somewhat suspect

16 Woolf‟s treatment of Henry Otway falls into Woolf‟s typical attitude towards the titled upper classes. While Woolf was generally enamored of the aristocracy, she also seems to have exulted in portraying its members as intellectually incompetent or as dependent on the highly-educated middle classes, of which she herself was a member. In her essay “Am I a ?” for instance, Woolf pointedly exclaims that her “snobbery is not of the intellectual kind,” as she prefers her peers to be intellectually insipid. She then refers with great relish to her memory of a written lunch invitation from Margot Asquith, Lady Oxford, wherein the political socialite had referred to Woolf as “far the greatest female writer living” and asked her to “write a short notice in The Times” to say that she admired Lady Oxford‟s writing (Moments of Being 186-87). Woolf pointedly claims that it is the coronet-topped invitation to lunch that flatters her—not, notably, the fact that Margot Asquith, of all people, saw her as a great writer. She then goes on to slight the intellectual and cultural pretentiousness of Lady Colefax as well, citing an instance at Argyll House where the celebrated vocal pedagogue “Olga Lynn threw down her music in a rage because people talked” during a performance, an incident Woolf mentions twice in her essay (197). For Woolf, the pleasures of being a snob is being able to admire the upper-classes for their beautiful surroundings and for their ability to reject social conventions, such as being silent during a performance, gracefully, while at the same time Woolf herself can enjoy her own sense of an intellectual and cultural superiority. 128 laurels of the “support” of the novel‟s heroine, the tepidly aesthetic Katharine Hilberry.

It also earns him Woolf‟s caustic comment that “for thirty-two years of life he had nothing more substantial to show than a book containing the score of half an opera” (188).17 Henry will never, Woolf implies, attain his half-hearted goal of becoming a composer. His half-completed opera score suggests the failing will of an upper-class indolent, one either unwilling or unable to persevere in any sustained intellectual endeavor. At the same time it suggests a threat to the future of art, both through his half- hearted teaching and his disinterest in creative efforts.

According to the economic and music historian Cyril Ehrlich, in the and

30s the music profession experienced a boom in the number of music teachers, and of piano teachers especially, many of whom claimed spurious or all but worthless certifications that created a multitude of questionable and potentially incompetent professionals.18 What is interesting from a literary perspective is that early twentieth- century authors tended to focus not so much on the musical inadequacies of the working classes—though as most portrayed the working classes as unable to appreciate classical music at all, this should not be surprising—but rather on the musical mediocrity of the descending upper and upper-middle classes. For characters such as Alma Frothingham,

Mrs. Comstock, and Henry Otway, all of whom are teetering on and in some cases are

17 To some degree, Katherine and Henry represent failed versions of Woolf, who by the age of 32 had already published several articles on music: “Street Music,” in 1905, “The Opera” in 1906, and “Impressions at Bayreuth” in 1909, as well as being on her way to having completed The Voyage Out, her first novel.

18 Despite problems with fraudulent certificates, Ehrlich notes that “[a]t the highest levels the training of musicians had also improved” (The Music Profession 191-92). See also Harrison, who refers to the “concerns which are all too ready to grant a [music] diploma to anyone who can scrape together the necessary fee” (114). 129 over the edge of a downward social slide, music has none of the intellectual or artistic refinement that it signaled for the scathingly idealized duke. Nor does it have any aesthetic or moral force. Rather, the musical knowledge of these characters is half- hearted and desultory. They leech off the noble overtones of this allegedly upper-class art in order to ward off the ignominy of their financial decline and to cling to the shreds of their social reputations. In doing so, they threaten to cheapen the art of music itself.

“The disease of not listening, the malady of not marking”: The Rhetoric of Upper-Class Ignorance

The more characters such as Alma and Henry Otway have to worry about making money, the less they are able to focus on their art as art. Writers such as Gissing and

Woolf thereby raise the implication that the more artistic endeavors become associated with financial concerns or the more an artwork becomes overtly associated with commercialism, in whatever shape or form, the less worthwhile or refined is its aesthetic value. The more an artwork is overtly associated with making money, the less it becomes associated with refinement, intellectual activity, and morality. If these characteristics are not immediately available, moreover, they are not much sought after.

It would thus be worthwhile to take a closer look at how the modernists portrayed those who did not have to work or whose need to work was limited; how they portrayed those, in other words, who were nominally Britain‟s established elite and who might have made up or have been the social cohorts of the audience at Lady Tantamount‟s musical evenings. These were the paragons of society, with the best seats in the house and the

130 best access to education. As such, they are the characters who should, theoretically, be the best suited to take on the interpretive onus of an audience and, in doing so, carry on the cultural legacy of the upper classes. These are the characters, though, that the modernists depict failing most grandly, who come off seeming most like fools.

By and large, the fictional representatives of the upper classes in the first half of the twentieth century give credence to John Bidlake‟s allegation of their “intellectual hypocrisy” when it comes to culture (Point Counter Point 29). Lineage and money begin to give way in this period to cultural and musical appreciation as yardsticks for gentility and intelligence.19 The upper classes of twentieth-century fiction, those who have continued to hover at the heights of society, almost invariably fail to live up to the mark.

Though they might appear to be listening, like the audience at Tantamount house, the attention of the upper classes to classical music is quite often a façade. This is because to exemplify the general aristocratic decay of the period, modernist authors very prominently depict members of the well-off leisured classes as cursed with “[t]he disease,” as Shakespeare‟s put it, “of not listening, the malady of not marking”: they cannot hear or are unable to understand the complexities of music and thereby reveal the stark hollowness of their stunted or superficial cultural competency. This theoretical hole in the intellectual and cultural fabric of society opened up a space that the modernists would attempt to seize for themselves.

In addition to Woolf‟s static characterization of Henry Otway in Night and Day, some modernists tended to depict the onset of upper-class cultural ignorance over time.

19 See, for instance, the conversation between Thompson and Coleridge in chapter two (34-35). 131

This emphasized the present day situation of wealth without culture by representing it as the end result of a . Huxley emphasizes such a measured diachronic erosion of cultural authority, a general basis for upper-class delusions of superiority, through his outline of the Lapith-Wimbush family in Crome Yellow (1921). The family, despite its loss of a title due to a lack of sons in the nineteenth century, has maintained its estate and, in general, its wealth from the sixteenth to the early-twentieth century. The cultural apex of the family is reached in the eighteenth century with the birth of Sir

Hercules Lapith, who, when fully grown, stands, ironically, “three feet and four inches” tall. Although his father considers him a “lusus naturae,” Hercules lives up to his name when it comes to the arts (62). When three years old, he showed a “remarkable aptitude for music” (61). By the age of twenty-one he could play the flute “and was no indifferent performer on the violin, which he used to play like a ” (63). After his father‟s death Sir Hercules transforms the family estate of Crome into a paradise for dwarfs. He hires a dwarf staff to join him and he marries an Italian wife, the musical Filemona.

Filemona boasts a stature similar to her husband‟s, both mentally and physically, and the two lead a life rich with their common artistic pursuits, “especially that of music”:

“[a]ccompanied by her husband on his fine Cremona ,” Filomena “would sing all the liveliest and tenderest airs from the operas and cantatas of her native country,” and when “seated together at the , they found that they could with their four hands play all the music written for two hands of ordinary size, a circumstance which gave Sir

Hercules unfailing pleasure” (67).

132

Unfortunately, the family‟s aesthetic and intellectual fortune goes downhill with the happy, musical couple‟s son, Ferdinand. Ferdinand grows up to be as large as his parents are small, his overall boorishness increasing with every inch. His parents mourn, but the final straw is when he comes back to Crome after having gone on the Grand Tour and brings with him two of his friends from the “common race of men,” all three men being of standard size and of vulgar, “common” tastes. Hercules attempts to be a good host, but the young men mock him as he discusses the pleasures of , including “the opera at Venice” and “the singing of the orphans in the churches of the same city” (70).

Depressed Hercules goes up to his wife, only to hear a noise coming from down below.

When he cautiously goes downstairs to investigate, he is horrified to see his son and his friends in the dining room “thumping the table with their hands,” as the family‟s old butler, “so primed with drink that he could scarcely keep his balance, was dancing a ”

(71). Ferdinand throws nuts at the butler‟s head, knocking him over. Laughing at his own cruelty he promises his friends that the next day they would “have a concerted of the whole household” (72). Hercules creeps back upstairs and explains the situation to his wife. They reminisce of how they used to make music together and Filomena sings

“softly in her ghost of a cracked voice a few bars from Stradella‟s „Amor, amor, non dormer piu‟” (72). Their tender musical memories contrast sharply with their drunken son and his friends banging out the rhythms of a jig downstairs. In order to miss the shame of the next evening‟s “concerted ballet,” the two commit suicide.

Having descended from the metaphorical heights of Italian opera in the eighteenth century, the musical lineage at Crome arrives in the twentieth at a Futuristic frenzy of

133 indolence. At the country house party at the present time of the novel, Huxley has the most recent descendent of the Lapith line, Henry Wimbush, standing at a pianola as he

“trod out the shattering dance music” of a song entitled “Wild, Wild Women” (46).

Henry, a mere “slave at the mill” of the mechanistic pianola, cranks out the “Rum; Tum;

Rum-ti-ti; Tum-ti-ti” of mind-numbingly repetitive music as his guests glide like

“beast[s]” around him (47). Later, during a scene detailing the events at the annual Fair, paid for by the still quite wealthy Henry Wimbush for the benefit of the town surrounding

Crome, Denis, one of the Wimbushes‟ guests, climbs to the top of the manor house and hears a steam-organ blaring out so much “prodigious music” to the crowd, plebian and aristocratic alike, below. Denis listens as the “clashing of automatic cymbals beat out with inexorable precision the rhythm of piercingly sounded melodies,” as an “alternate tonic and dominant detached themselves from the rest of the music and made a tune of their own, a loud, monotonous see-saw” (144). The dissonance evoked by the vocalist and the trombone player in Woolf‟s The Years might sound almost soothing compared to the mechanical inanity of the steam organ hired by the Wimbushes.

Still more disquieting than the noise is how the present day head of the Lapith-

Wimbush family promulgates an artistic taste that has abandoned human skill and complex harmonies for an involuntary homogeny. Although G. B. Shaw had, in his 1901 novel, The Unsocial Socialist theorized that a mechanical piano would allow

“[t]houghtful men” to highlight their “musical capacity” (229), Huxley‟s vision of the pianola and the steam-organ seem to manifest themselves as instruments fitted more to control the unthinking “lower species” of his own Mr. Scogan‟s “Rational State,” a

134

Futuristic foreshadowing of “The World State” of Brave New World (126).20 In Crome

Yellow Scogan outlines how in a “Rational State” the “lower species” or “Herd” would

“[s]ystematically” be made happy by having their “almost boundless suggestibility … scientifically exploited” in order that they may “believe that they are happy, that they are tremendously important beings, and that everything they do is noble and significant”

(126). The mechanical music of Wimbush‟s pianola and steam-organ, the latter of which,

Denis notes, gives out a pompous blast reminiscent of the “Last Trump,” each provide an insistently over-inflated sense of happiness and importance to the rather flippant characters who pepper the novel (144). Huxley thereby insinuates that despite their assumed superiority, the Wimbushes and their friends are all at risk for falling into the

“lower species.” One might even, without stretching the case too far, interpret the pompous, mechanically repeated sounds of simple tonics and dominants as reminiscent of the and airs used “[s]ystematically,” to borrow Scogan‟s term, to aggrandize certain military marches or recruitment efforts during World War One. Both the military

20 Though the majority of modernists who came after Shaw were dubious as to the benefits of mechanical instruments, such as the pianola, working- and lower-middle-class amateurs found the instruments useful in helping them to prepare for going to concerts. They would use the mechanical pianos to learn the general outline of the music beforehand. Elizabeth Ring, for instance, remembers how the aunt of a childhood friend had “a pianola and she would often let us hear things that were going to be played at forthcoming concerts. The tone was ghastly, and we much preferred the sound of the orchestra, but at least it gave us an idea of the melodies we were to hear, and probably helped us to become discriminating listeners” (42). William Bowyer similarly notes how, with a friend, he “acquired a piano-player, which is by no means a mechanical an instrument as many suppose”; with its help the two “ascended what seemed to us the craggy heights of the late of Beethoven and the two great works for piano of César Franck, as well as much that was „modern‟ and difficult” (133-34).

135 bands and Huxley‟s steam organ suggest how forceful music might be used to cover over a chaotic, horrifying absurdity with a systematized, thoughtless, sense of happiness. 21

Further allusions to mechanical music in the works of authors such as Osbert

Sitwell and T. S. Eliot suggest that while providing an emblem of the self-satisfied superficiality of England‟s elite, such music simultaneously revealed a hollowed out emptiness, a static façade of noble leadership. Huxley‟s mechanical instruments are analogous to the electric organ used by Lady Septuagesima Goodley‟s husband “Tootsie” to ward off her guests in Sitwell‟s novella “Triple Fugue” (1924). Although normally staid and “monumental, like one of the togaed statues outside the old House of

Commons,” Tootsie usually remained “immersed in his own nobility of mien and character,” though he was once “nearly driven off his head” by one of his wife‟s guests

(263, 264). He eventually escaped by playing “the electric organ for seven hours without stopping,” which left him “[s]o exhausted” that he had to seek medical attention (264).

The implication here is that the music of the electric organ becomes aesthetically

21 This claim is in no way meant to belittle the efforts or the skill levels of the various bands that provided military music during WWI. Nevertheless, music was seen as useful for ennobling or aggrandizing unpleasant military activities such as marching and recruiting. See, for instance, the report of a self- declared “middle-aged” gentleman which describes a training march from the center of London to the countryside accompanied by “gallant pipers” who provided “something „distinctly resembling an air‟” that made “the road go by with a swing that has pride as well as pleasure in it” (“Joy March of the Volunteers: Middle-Aged in Training.” Times 10 Mar. 1915: 15). See also the following letters to the editor of the Times, which touted the benefits of military music to ease both marching and recruiting practices, respectively: one by George Millar (Major, R. M. L. I.) (“Military Music.” Times 5 Apr. 1915: 7) and another by H. C. De Lafontaine, (Chairman of the Recruiting Bands Committee) (“Military Music.” Times 15 Nov. 1918: 9). The use of music to whitewash a horrifying absurdity was taken to an extreme in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 40s. The upbeat and proud marches of and inspired by Horst Wessel, for instance, were used by National Socialists and by music critics to help “verify Nazi truths” and “to weed out and decadent components” in Germany and in German art (Meyer 653). 136 irrelevant and a detrimental escape from thinking and human interaction.22 The dangers of using music in such a uniform, mechanical, automatic manner will become apparent in chapter six, which looks at the uses of music to depict fascism and a resistance to a rigid nationalism. For now, such mechanized music patronized by England‟s upper classes, such as the squire-esque Wimbush and the “togaed” Tootsie, suggests an astonishing dearth of cultural intelligence and ties them to a carelessly slavish monotony, which in turn challenges their political legitimacy in the quickly changing world of the twentieth century.

22 Consider also the pianola in the “Circe” chapter of James Joyce‟s Ulysses. Here the pianola does not belong to the upper classes, but to a brothel in Dublin‟s red-light district. It nevertheless maintains associations with an escape from critical thought and unrestrained socio-economic tyranny. Alluding to the of the Flying Dutchman, a ship cursed to fly without stopping around the world until Judgment Day, Bloom refers “impassionedly” to capitalistic “flying Dutchmen or lying Dutchmen”—i.e. colonial Dutchmen—of whom he says “[m]achines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous hobglobins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour” (15.1390-94). Just such an exploitative “[l]aboursaving apparatu[s]” enters the episode a little later in the form of the pianola at the brothel Stephen and Bloom visit, which cranks out “My Girl‟s a Yorkshire Girl.” The “[b]ang fresh barang bang … Baraabum!” of the mechanical music to which Stephen “whirls giddily” evokes in his mind his dead mother whom he perceives as wishing him to resubmit to the reign of the , the spiritual and economical tyranny of which he had rejected in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (15.4140, 4150, 4151). The vision evoked by the mechanical piano alludes also to his fear of returning to the ease of the uncritical simplicity of his early childhood in Portrait, when his mother “played on the piano the sailor‟s for him,” and he would dance “Tralala lala,/ Tralala tralaladdy” for his family (1-2). (Could the song his mother played have been the hornpipe “The Flying Dutchman” by Richard Ryan and John Parry (Thornoton 374))? To the vision of his mother in Ulysses, however, the adult Stephen eventually rejects any notion of a blind, mechanical servitude to Catholicism with the rallying cry of “intellectual imagination!,” screaming “Non serviam!” (15.4227, 4228). It is significant that the generally hard-working socially upward moving Bloom decries such machines, while the economically impoverished and generally passive and indolent Stephen falls, at least initially, prey to the slavish charms of the instrument. Stephen, in other words, despite his intense intellectualism proves to be almost as much prey to the mechanical machinations of society as the visitors to Huxley‟s Crome. Joyce himself casts aspersions on the notion of mechanical music by reconstructing the opera La Giaconda out of the “barang bang” of the pianola‟s rendition of “My Girl‟s a Yorkshire Girl,” most likely played with “batonroll of music” provided by a vision of Almidano Artifoni [phony art]—a purveyor of the phony art of pianola music—in Stephen‟s mind (15.2501). For a discussion of the mental mechanics of La Giaconda in “Circe” see Gordon (285-87). Almidano Artifoni was, first and foremost, the name of the director of the Berlitz school in Trieste, where James and Stanislaus Joyce worked (Ellmann 185). It seems impossible, however, that Joyce would not have consciously conceived and then utilized the homophonous potentials inherent in Artifoni‟s name in conjunction with the mechanical pianola. 137

Eliot takes these notions of an unquestioning cultural incompetence, as well as its concordant intimation of an intellectual ignorance, to an extreme in his London Letters regarding opera, ballet, and music in general. In these Letters, Eliot suggests that, for

London‟s elite, the important social value of classical music has come to reside largely in the mere mention or the fleeting idea of it. In his August 1921 letter, for instance, Eliot refers to the London opera as “one of the last reminders of a former excellence of life, a sustaining symbol even for those who seldom went” (213). In his October Letter, noting the celebrity of “Mr. Rubenstein [sic],” the “brilliant pianist” (certainly Arthur

Rubinstein), Eliot observes that in the summer of 1921 “he was everywhere; at every dinner, every party, every week-end; in the evening crisp and curled in a box; sometimes apparently in several boxes at once” (452). He was everywhere, apparently, but at a piano. To the Londoners who patronize theater boxes and society events, Eliot implies,

Rubinstein‟s brilliance lies not in his art, but in his conversation and phenomenal aura.23

According to Eliot, even when those who want to appear to appreciate fine music do end up dragging themselves to a performance, they are intellectually able to catch only the most superficial aspects of it. In the same October 1921 letter cited above, Eliot fears

23 In his autobiography My Many Years, Rubinstein himself lamented that, during the twenties, “my popularity in the finest drawing rooms of London and my being the „friend‟ of duchesses in the Sketch or the Tatler did me the greatest harm in my career” (80). He did perform, however: he notes that “society people” were particularly fond of his “Spanish pieces” (79) and in an interview he gave to Samuel Chotzinoff he mentions that he “received large fees for playing in private houses” (Chotzinoff 132, both Rubinstein‟s autobiography and the Chotzinoff interview are also cited in Sachs 199). The dates in Rubinstein‟s biography and in Chotzinoff are broad and do not reference specifically the summer of 1921. It is hard to imagine, however, that Rubinstein did not perform in private at all during this summer; his social appearances most likely simply dominated people‟s perceptions, as Eliot implies that they did. The Times advertises one public appearance during this time: a concert at the Queen’s Hall on June 11th, 1921 (“Arrangements for Today.” Times 11 : 13). He was given a brilliant review two days later (“Mr. Rubinstein‟s Recital.” Times 13 June 1921: 8); this seems to be the only public performance he gave in London in during the summer of 1921. 138 that though new music by was “received with wild ,” the “music was certainly too new and strange to please very many people” (452). Even with the glamorous reception of Stravinsky, the “applause” of the London audience comes across as no more than a pretense. Their appreciation is no more than a performance itself, and an unconvincing one. The audience, Eliot implies, misses what he himself can identify as

Stravinsky‟s new attempt to endow music with the sounds of modernity. Stravinsky,

Eliot argues, takes part in the necessary “interpenetration and metamorphosis” of art, by seeking “to transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery,” and so on, “into music” (453). The Covent Garden audience, as

Eliot depicts it, misses out on the modern musical meanings, but applauds the extravagant, noisy spectacle.

Eliot‟s concerns regarding the physical or intellectual absence of an audience from classical music were not new. His London Letters are an advanced stage in the cyclical saturation and evacuation of the meaning of musical content that he alluded to within his earlier poetry. In his early works, his leisure-class characters tend to sense only the latter half of this artistic evolution. In “Conversation Galante,” for instance,

Eliot acerbically mocks the death of Romantic idealism. A would-be evokes

Chopin in his reference to an “„exquisite , with which we explain/ The night and moonshine; music which we seize/ To body forth our own vacuity‟” (Complete Poems and Plays lns. 8-10). Art music, Eliot suggests, and particularly the music of the arch-

Romantic Chopin, has become a metaphorical embodiment of the emptiness, of the intellectual and emotional inanity of the British “galant,” with all of this word‟s romantic

139 and chivalric connotations. The title also invokes the musical “style galant,” the term for the emphasis on melody that became so prominent in the “classical” music of the eighteenth century, as in Mozart‟s piano sonatas, for instance, as opposed to the dense counterpoint, the so-called “learned” style, of Bach‟s baroque fugues (Arnold 740,

501).24 The galant‟s simplicity here is an ironic symbol of emptiness as opposed to a highly evolved musical or .

In his “Portrait of a Lady,” Eliot carefully proceeds not only to point to the worn- out idealistic meanings that the upper classes imposed upon Romantic and Classical music in general, that they paradoxically saturated it with, but to suggest that this imposition can occur only because of a conceited failure to approach such music critically. Simultaneously, through his echo of Henry James‟s 1881 novel of the same name he insinuates that this is a relatively modern problem. James‟s characters are, of course, known for over analyzing almost every side of every detail, a trait which he invites his readers to imitate. Music becomes one such detail in Portrait of a Lady as

James uses it to suggest, to prod, and occasionally to mislead his characters. He introduces, for instance, the calculating, malevolent brilliance of Madame Merle by having her play the piano with a “discretion” that “showed skill” and a vague “feeling”

(171). Merle‟s cultured artistry initially leads the heroine Isabel Archer to feel grateful to her for the “pleasure” of the music and helps her to find the pianist “attractive” (172). All of this causes Isabel to cultivate a strong admiration and respect for the player of the beautiful music, who by the end of the novel will have betrayed her. Conversely, James

24 “The style galant … was typical of Rococo rather than Baroque attitudes; in music, resulting in an emphasis on melody with light accompaniment, rather than on equal-voiced part-writing” (Arnold 740). 140 uses Isabel‟s skill on the same instrument, which she plays to “gratif[y]” the “wish” of the neglected young Pansy, to suggest his heroine‟s carefully considered, if somewhat naïve, dedication to the education and to the pleasure of the all-too-innocent girl and her father (316).

Evoking James‟s characters, Eliot overtly fails to engage in any of their sophisticated, psychological contemplations of music. Eliot‟s anonymous lady, for instance, suggests that the music of “Chopin,” “[s]o intimate,” “[s]hould be resurrected only among friends … who will not touch the bloom/ That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room” (Complete Poems and Plays 1.10-13). The unquestioned musical

“bloom” in Eliot‟s poem stands in an ironic opposition to the complexly arranged web of emotional control, trust, betrayal, and dedication set in motion by the piano-playing of both Madame Merle and Isabel, much of which James carefully “question[s].” For

Eliot‟s characters, Chopin‟s music (one of the preludes?) simply flattens out, as the lady‟s gentleman friend notes how in his “brain a dull tom-tom begins/ Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,” a “[c]apricious monotone” (1.32-34). In the mind of the young gentleman, a reflection of Chopin‟s music is dulled and dampened. It is hardly different from the “street piano, mechanical and tired,” which he hears later on, as it “reiterates some worn-out common song … Recalling things that other people have desired” (2.39-

40, 42).

The exhausted romanticism of music becomes so flimsy and vacuous for the speaker that he is left at last to wonder, almost reluctantly, whether the clichéd truths conveyed through lyrical music “are right or wrong” (2.43). When he eventually decides

141 that such pseudo-emotional music can be “successful with a „dying fall,‟” Eliot signals the absence of any serious intellectual engagement with music at all through his echo of the bombastic foolishness of Orsino from Shakespeare‟s Twelfth Night (3.39). Orsino himself, despite his punch-drunk enthusiasm for love, recognizes that the “dying fall” of music overly repeated is “not so sweet … as it was before,” while that which you filter through an irrational ideal “falls into abatement and low price/ Even in a minute” (1.1.4,

8, 13-14). Orsino exhibits an aesthetic sensitivity which Eliot maintains himself, but which the man in his poem seems to miss as he wallows in a washed out Romanticism.

Eliot then leaves us with another echo of James, that of the older man‟s abrasive

American journalist Henrietta, who admonishes Isabel against engaging in her more idealistic, less critical side. She tells Isabel, “you think you can lead a romantic life, that you can live by pleasing yourself and pleasing others. You‟ll find you‟re mistaken.

Whatever life you lead you must put your soul in it—to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance … it becomes grim reality!”

(215). As opposed to the late Victorian period of Pater and James, by 1915, Eliot suggests, the trite appreciation of classical music among the upper- and upper-middle classes who used it unthinkingly to invoke a sickly-sweet fantasy of pleasure, or to signal their superiority over those who had to work for a living, had enabled art music to become a metaphor for a cultural capital so inflated as to be all but worthless. Only a new take on art, such as Stravinsky‟s or his own, would now be capable of revealing the heart and soul, the “grim reality” of modern life.

142

The Function of Form: The Aesthetic Structure of the Modernists‟ Ascension

While portraying classical music as evacuated of meaning for the majority of the ostensibly refined classes who affected to appreciate it, many avant-garde intellectuals simultaneously relied on the forms of the art to structure their own writings. Following the high modernist theory that form was content, the modernists attempted to resuscitate classical music in their formalist literary experimentations, and thereby redeem it from the hypocritical content imposed onto it by the likes of Lady Tantamount and her guests.25 Eliot, for instance, in his essay “The Music of Poetry” offers the basic premise that, though “it might be possible for a poet to work too closely to musical analogies,” he or she “may gain much from the study of music,” learning from instrumental groupings, counterpoint, and the transitions between movements in works such as symphonies or quartets. According to Eliot, the structure of these musical forms, as well as of musical rhythms in general, could aid in the “arrangement of subject-matter,” and, on a deeper level, help a writer to “bring to birth the idea and the image” of a poem (On Poetry 38).

Traces of such loosely structured formal, even metaphysically gestational correlations are evoked by the title of Eliot‟s own Four Quartets. Sitwell worked in a similar fashion by trying to bring musical counterpoint to bear on the intertwining lives of

25 In many modernist aesthetic theories, the form of artistic “arrangements” was fundamental to the meaningful content in musical paintings, novels, and poetry. Perhaps most famous were Pater‟s arguments regarding the importance of form in “The School of Giorgione,” from The Renaissance—though as I argue in chapter two and below, form was in no way Pater‟s only aesthetic concern. Coming slightly later, Roger Fry, the influential art critic, also emphasized the importance of “form.” Fry famously touted Post- as a way “[t]o discover the visual language of the imagination. To discover, that is, what arrangements of form and colour are calculated to stir the imagination most deeply through the stimulus given to the sense of sight. This is exactly analogous to the problem of music, which is to find what arrangements of sound will have the greatest evocative power” (857). 143 three men in his “Triple Fugue.” Huxley too alludes to contrapuntal music in the title of

Point Counter Point, an allusion strengthened by his reliance on a fugal theory of the novel, with “contrapuntal plots,” so similar to that of André Gide‟s in Les Faux- monnayeurs (350). There is also, of course, Joyce‟s “Sirens” chapter from Ulysses, ostensibly composed as if a fugue (Letters Vol.1 129). Joyce also relied on the Platonic and Pythagorean mathematics of music, which so fascinated Pater, throughout his career

(Rice 16-23). From a more impressionistic angle, Woolf sought from music the

“slightest help” for her own literary ventures, much as she hoped that an advanced abstract cinematography one day might synthesize music into its own new art form

(Collected Essays 270). While writing Mrs. Dalloway she turned to music for the power

“to stimulate & suggest” and found narrative inspiration while writing The Waves in

Beethoven quartets and sonatas (“, 1924,” Diary Vol. 2, 320).26 Forster made his own literary-musical project quite clear through his discussion of “Beethoven‟s

Fifth Symphony,” musical “rhythm,” and literary effects in his Aspects of the Novel (164,

168).

It is worth noting, too, that for each of these writers, thinking about music was hardly an empty hobby or an “intellectual hypocrisy,” as each maintained a substantial interest in music in their daily lives. Eliot claimed in “The Music of Poetry” to have had

26 Woolf also found inspiration in music while writing The Waves. On June 18, 1927, Woolf noted, “But it [The Waves] needs ripening. I do a little work on it in the evening when the gramophone is playing late Beethoven sonatas” (Diary Vol. 2. 139). In her diary for Dec. 22nd, 1930, Woolf wrote, “[i]t occurred to me last night while listening to a Beethoven quartet that I would merge all the interjected passages into Bernard‟s final speech and end with the words O solitude: thus making him absorb all those scenes and having no further break” (Diary Vol 3. 339). For an in-depth discussion of the influence of Beethoven‟s quartets on the narrative of The Waves, see Elicia Clements‟s “Transforming Musical Sounds into Words: Narrative Method in Virginia Woolf‟s The Waves.” 144 no specific “technical knowledge” of music, but he was nevertheless an avid attendee of musical events, as his London Letters indicate (On Poetry 38). Huxley‟s career as a music critic in the 1920s was prepared for by years of learning to play the piano, starting in 1911, and attending musical events, such as the Balliol concerts established by Jowett in Oxford (Murray 33, 43). Joyce was a keen student of opera and contemplated becoming a professional (McCourt 41-42). Virginia Woolf was an active concert goer throughout her adult life and was proud of being able to distinguish and remember the “tunes” of pieces (“, 1921,” Diary Vol. 2, 114).27 She also wrote two critical essays drawn from her experience in the audience of operas, “The Opera” (1905) and

“Impressions at Bayreuth” (1909). Forster played the piano, rather well by all accounts, and was quite familiar with Beethoven‟s sonatas (Furbank 43). He also collaborated with

Benjamin Britten as the librettist for the latter‟s opera Billy Budd (283-87).

All the same, the degree to which the modernists made actual substantive use of their musical knowledge in their writing is a subject open to debate.28 In general, it is

27 While keen on the formal elements of music, Woolf does admit to being distracted by the “human element” of performers. After one concert she notes, “Bach was very beautiful, though the human element in the choir always distracts me. They aren‟t beautiful; all in greens, greys, pinks, , fresh from the suburbs & high tea. The hall seemed to suit them better than the music” (“, 1920.” Diary Vol. 2. 31, emphasis in the original). Unfortunately, the appearance of these suburban women is not as suited to Bach as Woolf would have wanted; it is curious, though, that she criticizes their clothes rather than their voices.

28 Various discussions on the successes and failures of musical structures in English modernist literature can be traced representatively through Huxley and Joyce. Calvin Brown dismisses Huxley‟s work as “brilliant” but “ineffective,” and notes of Joyce‟s “Sirens,” “[i]f this chapter really be a fugue, it is certainly an academic one” (209-11, 159-60). Werner Wolf declares that “although finding exact parallels between verbal text and musical techniques, especially counterpoint,” Point Counter Point nevertheless “betrays a sustained effort to create a structural analogy” to contrapuntal forms and hence is an “outstanding” example of “modernist experiments with musico-literary intermediality (173). Wolf declares Joyce‟s experiment in “Sirens” to be more “ambivalent” (145). Most critics agree, not only with regards to “Sirens,” but to musico-literary experiments generally. Knowles, for instance, suggests that “Sirens” should be seen as “canonic” but “certainly not fugal” (Dublin Helix 86). Bucknell, meanwhile, offers theoretical grapplings 145 useful to follow Eliot‟s lead in examining what literature can gain from music without juxtaposing the two “too closely,” note for note and word for word. Eliot‟s Four

Quartets, for instance, can be seen as utilizing a musical framework that in some ways imitates formal musical techniques, but that relies primarily upon the theoretical structures of music as an impetus to “bring to birth the idea” and to evoke an

“arrangement of [the] subject-matter” of the poems: namely, religious strivings that evoke and transcend our secular reality.29 Eliot‟s theoretical-musical framework in Four

Quartets is, in fact, particularly and indeed forcefully reminiscent, and to a far greater degree than is generally recognized, of the connections made by Pater between the ideal amalgamation of the form and the content of musical writing in “The School of

Giorgione” and in “Style.” Throughout Four Quartets, Eliot actively reworks Pater‟s musical aesthetic, with both writers agreeing that the more the meaning of a poem can become embodied in its form, the more musical and the more transcendental the writing becomes.

with Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein, and argues generally that these writers use music in order to help them work through “a desire for congruence between work and expression that is both longed for, and yet unattainable” (5). As this claim suggests, Bucknell explores both successes and failures enjoyed by each writer in appropriating music for modernist literature.

29 Indeed, Eliot wanted to avoid evoking too much of a musical connection. In 1942 he wrote a letter to John Hayward in which he observed of the title of the combined four poems, “I should like to indicate that these poems are all in a particular set form which I have elaborated, and the word „quartet‟ does seem to me to start people on the right track for understanding them („sonata‟ in any case is too musical).” The general goal, Eliot explained, was to connect his “particular set form” of the poem “by weaving in together three or four superficially unrelated themes,” thus evoking a Paterian music of form created out of content (quoted in Gardner 26). This is not to say, however, that concrete correlations between a classical musical culture and Eliot‟s Quartets cannot be discerned. To cite one example, Eliot was quite familiar with Beethoven‟s quartets, particularly the late ones, and it seems to me that Eliot‟s imitations of Middle English orthography is reminiscent of Beethoven‟s use of the archaic in the third movement of his quartet in A minor, Opus 132. For Eliot‟s familiarity with Beethoven‟s quartets, see David Barndollar‟s “Movements in Time: Four Quartets and the Late String Quartets of Beethoven.” 146

Eliot relies on the older writer‟s musical-linguistic formulations primarily to get beyond the messy communicative potentials of language. Eliot uses theories of music analogous to Pater‟s in an attempt to stabilize and limit the connotative potential of language. This is an extrapolation of the musical ideal set forth so famously in Pater‟s

“The School of Giorgione,” in The Renaissance, and later restated and refined in his essay “Style,” published in 1889. In this later essay, which investigates the musical attributes of language, Pater observed that, “if music be the ideal of all art whatever,” it is

“precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the expression,” an amalgamation which “literature, by finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the term to its import” can imitate (37). Writing becomes “good art” by aspiring to the ideal formal-content of music. It becomes “great art,” when the literary matter refined by its artistic forms

“import[s]” or devotes itself to “men‟s happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed,” to

“the enlargement of our sympathies with each other,” to the “new or old truth” about our life on earth, or—importantly in connection Eliot‟s Four Quartets—with an eye “to the glory of God” (38). The more writing finds a “correspondence” between a word and its meaning, and the more this meaning relates to the above listed values, the greater the writing is overall.

Such an idealized musical “correspondence” of form and matter, however, is not easy for writers to achieve. Words, after all, resonate with their own, frequently strange, associations, which threaten to break free from what a writer wishes them to mean. Pater therefore observes in “Style” that a good writer, “to whom nothing about [words] is

147 unimportant,” must be constantly “on the alert not only for obviously mixed metaphors of course, but for the metaphor that is mixed in all our speech” (20). Similarly, the writer should attempt to maintain a historical, indeed a “scholarly,” awareness of the

“accumulating effect of second shades of meaning” (24). Finally, the writer must avoid leaving in any distracting or misleading “surplusage” of words or meaning; this is because an intact “structure is all-important,” a literary structure that purifies the work by limiting connotations and creating simplicity and unity out of complexity. Such a structure, like architecture or like music, should foresee “the end in the beginning” and

“every part” of the work should be “conscious of all the rest”: for Pater this is the

“condition of literary art,” as the ideal “condition” for all art is the correspondence of matter and form in music (21).

This musical-literary stance anticipates Eliot‟s own argument regarding words and meaning in a review entitled “The Three Provincialities.” Eliot postulates here that

“[w]hatever words a writer employs, he benefits by knowing as much as possible of the history of these words, of the uses to which they have already been applied,” so as to be able to get “as much as possible of the whole weight of the history of the language behind his word” and create “a new idiom” (13, Eliot‟s emphasis). For Eliot too, however, language must avoid excessive associations or a “surplusage” that disrupts from a musical, poetical meaning. As he claimed once in 1933, he desired “to write poetry which should be essentially poetry, with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its bare bones, or poetry so transparent that in reading it we are intent on what the poem points at, and not on the poetry, this seems to me the thing to try for. To get beyond

148 poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music” (quoted in

Matthiessen 89-90).30 Though Eliot admits that the poet may never succeed in attaining the alchemy that turns poetic complexity into a transcendental simplicity, this was nevertheless what should be attempted and it was a process inspired or brought “to birth” by that which he found in music.

Yet even with the best of intentions, the historical baggage of language threatens to subvert the intentions of those who assemble its constituent elements. Eliot acknowledges this in his first quartet, “Burnt Norton.” Here he evokes how “[w]ords strain,/ Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,/ Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,/ Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/ Will not stay still” (149-53). In an echo of Pater‟s eternal emphasis on structure, Eliot declares that “[o]nly by the form, the ,/ Can words,” with all of their semantic slippage, “or music reach/ The stillness, as a Chinese jar still/ Moves perpetually in its stillness” (140-44). It is only through form, through the rhythm and arrangement of words, Eliot suggests, that one can attempt to prevent a verbal “imprecision,” or what Pater referred to in “Style” as the

“constant degradation of language by those who use it carelessly,” without an appreciation for form or history (20). For both writers, a historically-inflected musical form alone can provide some hope, if not ever a completely achieved one, for exactness and semantic stability. Not that either poet sought stability in a dead or in any inactive sense, but they did seek a precision that would smolder and build upon the necessary

30 Matthiessen offers this quote from an unpublished lecture of Eliot‟s and reads it in association with what Eliot called his “auditory imagination.” Matthiessen describes this as the poet‟s “understanding of the fact that poetic rhythm by means of its power of incantation is able to renew one of the most primitive elements of man‟s experience at the same time that it gives expression to the last subtle nuances of civilized feeling” (89-90). 149 associations of a word, reaching up to a higher reverence, to a “new or old truth,” rather than down to a burnt out and degraded inexactness (38).

All verbal associations then need to be marshaled, so far as possible, into the unifying form of a work and effectively managed in order to facilitate, if not to ensure, both an idealized musical perfection, as well as the proper, thoughtful reaction on the part of a reader. For, to obtain a complete immersion in the experience of a poem the onus is not only on the author, but on the reader as well. Thus in yet another, rather ironic echo of Pater, Eliot observes that, “[f]rom one point of view, the poet aspires to the condition of the music-hall comedian” (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 32). Here, in the introduction to his 1932-33 lectures on The Use of Poetry as well as in Four Quartets,

Eliot is practicing what he preaches. Evoking the idealism prevalent throughout Pater‟s formalist musical aesthetics, Eliot attempts to harness it for his own purposes. The reason that the poet aspires to the music-hall comedian, Eliot writes, is because “[b]eing incapable of altering his wares to suit a prevailing taste, if there be any, he naturally desires a state of society in which they may become popular, and in which his own talents will be put to the best use” (22). If Eliot is taking into consideration his own “applied” uses of the music halls in his London Letters of the 1920s, then it seems safe to assume that the desire of the poet is to garner the same interactive engagement that Eliot himself saw as existing between the music-hall artists and their audiences. At the same time, however, there is a touch of personal egotism here: the poet will not change his “wares,” which for the Eliot of both the lectures and Four Quartets were explicitly Christian ones,

150 which he hoped to instigate his audience into interacting with, to whatever degree they were able.

Of course in poetry, Eliot did not want to instigate a simple interaction, but an active spirit of reflective contemplation on the part of both the poet and the reader/auditor. This was a lesson he learned not only from Christian spiritual manuals, but from Pater‟s aesthetics. Pater sought the musical combination of form and content not only in art, but in the simultaneous correspondence of an end-within-a-means and of conduct-within-contemplation. “To treat life in the spirit of art,” he once wrote, “is to make life a thing in which means and ends are identified: to encourage such treatment, the true moral significance of art and poetry” (Appreciations 62). To live a moral life,

Pater argued, one must recognize “the supreme importance of contemplation in the conduct of life” (59). Form and function, ends and means, contemplation and conduct, all must be of the same moment, and when they are synthesized, one is able to achieve an

“impassioned contemplation,” or, in compatible terms, the ability to “burn” with “a hard gem-like flame”; such moments are not only “success in life,” they are, for Pater, music

(Appreciations 62; Renaissance 189).

In Four Quartets Eliot likewise sought a musically “impassioned contemplation.”

He too was afraid, as was Pater, that one might go through life having “had the experience but” having “missed the meaning,” having acted but not considered (“Dry

Salvages” 93). Yet while Pater‟s burning musical , as I suggested in chapter two, were a rallying call for a humanistic, sensuous, often homoerotic, intellectual honesty, based largely upon a theory of the music of the spheres, the chief celestial flame,

151 for Eliot, was a purgatorial one. What, after all, are Eliot‟s repetitious variations of words and phrases, structurally indicative of paradoxical sameness, but an attempt to encourage a distilling act of contemplation, a mediation on a concept equivalent, if not directly derived from the Thomistic/Boethian “Nunc Stans” (Aquinas 1a. 10, 2)? For instance, “the end and the beginning were always there,” “In my beginning is my end,”

“What we call the beginning is often the end/ And to make an end is to make a beginning” are all phrases in which the movement of “end” and “beginning” form a cyclically moving idiomatic still-point, their form musically mirroring their content

(“BN” 147, “EC” 1, “LG” 214-15).

Eliot uses this musically repetitious language to approximate Aquinas‟s theory of an ever-present time, of the supreme linking of past and future, which in “Dry Salvages” comes to be represented in the multi-layered metaphor of the “Incarnation” (“DS” 215).

The “Incarnation” embodies the ultimate musical moment as “the impossible union/ Of spheres of existence,” where “the past and future/ Are conquered, and reconciled,/ Where action were otherwise movement,” as the immortal substance of God and the mortal substance of man fuse and stabilize into the form of the Christian Christ (215-220). A

“lifetime burning in every moment,” according to Eliot, comes from the actively impassioned contemplation of the Incarnation, which he attempts to evoke through the

“still and still moving” musically-patterned repetitions of his phrases (“DS” 194, 201).31

31 Eliot‟s primary literary source for fiery imagery came from Dante‟s Purgatorio and Inferno, which exerted an influence on so many prominent British writers during the Second World War (Knowles, A Purgatorial Flame 18-19, 116-17). Such imagery came only secondarily from the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, whose theories Eliot at times claimed to disdain. He affected to believe that if anyone had “missed the meaning” of art and of life, and of everything in between, it was Pater. He derided Pater‟s call “[t]o treat life in the spirit of art,” and “to make life a thing in which means and ends are identified,” as well 152

He uses such phrases in an attempt to “reach” upwards, subsuming and transcending the historical associations of language to attain a “perpetually” moving “stillness,” a complex simplicity which can move beyond art and point to where the “here and now cease to matter” (“BN” 141, “143,” “DS” 204).

Eliot, in essence, attempts in Four Quartets, through form, pattern, and subject, to lead his reader into a state of divine contemplation through the complexity of his poem‟s repetitious form and structure. He attempts “[t]o get beyond poetry, as

Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music,” to attain the spiritual

“intensity” of “a further union, a deeper ” with God, as if willing his poetry itself to incite the reader to the purgatorial power of an “unprayable/ (“EC” 205-

06, “DS” 53-54).32 The rare moments when one can achieve such a “communion,” Eliot suggests, are when we can become aware of the “music heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at all” (“DS” 210-11); these are the transcendental moments, Eliot writes, when half-aware of the “Incarnation,”“you are the music” (215, 206). Thus while Eliot can certainly be seen to draw on musical forms inspired by the quartets, most noticeably in the different “movements” of each of the four poems, what he primarily relies upon is the metaphysical musical aesthetic of Pater. Pater‟s formalist musical theories provided Eliot

as his suggestion that art exists to bring “the highest quality” to life. For Eliot, such claims were a narrow perversion of Christianity and were the result of Pater‟s “[be]ing incapable of sustained reasoning” in either “philosophy or theology,” on account of his inclination “to emphasize whatever is morbid or associated with physical malady” (Selected Essays 389-90). These are, to be sure, strong words from a man who declared that the “essential advantage for a poet … is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory” (Eliot, The Use of Poetry 99). The theoretical and imagistic correspondences between Pater and Eliot, if only secondary echoes, are nevertheless remarkably frequent.

32 Gardner notes that Eliot specifically had in mind portions of the prayer „Anima Christi sanctifica me‟ while writing “Little Gidding,” going so far as to include several adapted lines from this prayer in a draft version of the poem, though he ended up excising them (207). 153 with a paradigm for tightening up and ordering meanings, for recreating the “nunc stans” of the Incarnation through repetitious language meant to be used for an active meditation.

A musical structure in the poem then becomes one more piece of what Eliot calls humanity‟s “shabby equipment” with which to make a new “raid on the inarticulate”

(“EC” 179-80).

Similarly to Eliot, although without the poet‟s metaphysical or spiritual agenda,

Huxley uses a fugal structure in Point Counter Point in order to encourage a primarily analytical way of reading. He offers a useful meta-critical outline of his attempt in chapter twenty-two, which he presents as an excerpt from the diary of the fictional novelist, Philip Quarles. Quarles considers the “musicalization of fiction” (349). He imagines manipulating the form of a novel so that its structure would work something along the line of “[t]hose incredible Diabelli variations,” in opposition to, one would assume, any bland variations by someone such as Boellmann (350). Quarles asserts that all an author would need “is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots,” with an ample variety of individuals caught up in similar situations, “dissimilar

[characters] solving the same problems,” or “similar people confronted with dissimilar problems” (350, emphasis added). Huxley combines the nominally distinct forms of a musical theme and variations and a fugue, which in fact makes good sense as a fugue often contains variations of its separate themes in different voices (soprano, , tenor, bass; violin, , cello, etc.), either inverting or reversing them, or by placing similar themes in different harmonic situations, all of which helps to see how the colors, sounds, and complexities, of the original theme work.

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To examine one example of how this fugal structure works in Point Counter

Point, we might pick the theme of adultery, which Huxley manipulates by placing it in the different “voices” of women such as Janet Bidlake, Rachel Quarles, Elinor Quarles,

Rachel‟s daughter-in-law, and Marjory Carling. The husbands of the first three women have affairs, and Huxley explores how each of them responds in a different way to this similar situation. Janet escapes into “regions of artistic and literary fancy,” which is where she feels “most at home” (384). Rachel picks up on this escapist motif and varies it in that she escapes into the passivity of Christianity and the false assurance of the “old dull virtues” of “patience, resignation, and the rest,” all of which are threatened, however, when her own husband‟s mistress, who has recently realized she is pregnant, refuses to be resigned to her situation and forgo her “rights,” presumably to money (413 and 429). In an inversion of the escapist motif, the younger women are more pro-active. Elinor actually encourages her husband to commit adultery by helping to set him up with other women, while Marjory provides yet another inversion by committing adultery herself with Janet‟s son Walter.

Of course, as literary critics have noted, such techniques as “variations” and

“developments” of themes are just as much literary as musical.33 So what does Huxley gain here by stressing a deliberately musical, a deliberately fugal frame? For starters, it is useful for amplifying the importance and complexity of seemingly commonplace events—one of the most consistent projects of modernism—by way of analyzing one

33 Brown writes “[t]he general principles of repetition are much the same in music and in literature,” though he observes “there is a conspicuous difference in degree. In general, music demands far more repetition than poetry” or literature on the whole “can tolerate” (109) ; Wolf, too, notes the similarity but emphasizes a difference between “the principle of variation and repetition” versus the literary “idea of development” (222; see also 90). 155 abstract occurrence or idea from a multitude of enacted perspectives.34 Through his

“Diabelli variations,” as Huxley notes, Beethoven organizes “the whole range of thought and feeling” by manipulating and rearranging one “ridiculous little waltz tune” (350); consequently Huxley himself uses the familiar theme of adultery (one among many others) to explore a range of human “thought and feeling” through the purposefully counterpointed interactions of his characters and the distinctive joys, reliefs, and disappointments that are the consequence of their individualized experiences of one

“ridiculous,” if “thrillingly” lustful desire to cheat on a loved one (330).

These carefully organized interactions bring us to another benefit that Huxley saw in the frame of music: it highlighted the artificial structure of literature and thus emphasized the personality of its creator. In other words, instead of attempting to erase the presence of an author from a novel so as to encourage an illusion of reality by implying a seemingly untailored narrative of events (A leading to B then to C then to D—an artistic technique as soporific for Huxley as cinema music), the frame of a contrapuntal musical structure encourages an analytical objectivity by calling attention not to the storyline but to the machinations of the author. It highlights the philosophical comparisons that the author wants to make by placing one point of view, one treatment of a theme, next to another next to another (A compared to A1 and to A2 etc. all compared with B and B1 etc. with any extra unique variations). Thus instead of stressing the sequence of events of adultery in different lives, Huxley‟s fugal or contrapuntal

34 Of course some of Cézanne‟s still-life paintings, such as his Bathers, with Mont-Sainte-Victoire in the Background or his Still Life with a Basket of Apples, could have provided a model for this sort of modernist technique as well; but, as music happens in time and Huxley was more acquainted with music, a musical framework is more appropriate for his novels than a pictorial one. 156 organization calls attention to the various ways in which he wants to examine the basic theme of adultery, from “emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical, etc.” perspectives (350). Huxley is not in any way creating a musical fugue, but he is using a musical framework, untroubled by realism, to encourage an objective, relational, analytical mode of reading.

From poetry to the novel, from a structure emphasizing to a structure emphasizing a rational systemization of reading, the reliance of modernist writings on the forms of classical music was a sardonically sophisticated strategy. For while Eliot,

Huxley, Sitwell, Woolf, and others were carefully positioning classical music within upper-class settings, such as the fictional Tantamount House, or real-life social institutions, such as Covent Garden, in order to acknowledge the art‟s possession of or to imbue it with a cultural legitimacy, they were also implying that the majority of the upper classes who ruled these settings could not concentrate on the basic melodies of, much less appreciate the crucial formal content of the music. This presented the British ruling classes as culturally, if not financially, bankrupt. This cultural bankruptcy provided a means, then, for twentieth-century intellectuals to equate the majority of the upper classes to the supposedly uncultured and aesthetically ignorant working- and lower-middle classes.

The modernists‟ use of formalist musical theories and of classical musical forms to structure their own writings, meanwhile, implies an attempt to re-claim both the culturally established social value and the deeper intellectual prestige of classical music for themselves. Their use of key formal elements, such as form-content correspondences

157 or the fugue, also allowed the modernists to transfer the prestige of classical music to their own work, as if according to Eliot‟s theory of aesthetic “interpenetration and metamorphosis.” It is, therefore, almost certainly no coincidence that the most prominent structural techniques that the modernists used were the Oxford-born aesthetic theories of

Pater and the contrapuntal or “learned style” of music, as opposed to the less academic, less hermetic “style galant.” What becomes important then is not so much whether we can actually map or match-up formal musical structures to literature, but the musical hermeneutics of literary theory: music provides a way of interpreting literature similar to other exclusive modernist critical frameworks, such as Imagism, Vorticism,

Psychological Realism, and extreme experiments with streams of consciousness.

A Recapitulation: Rethinking the Role of Music in Modernist Writing

All this theoretical positioning, then, suggests that the “luxury trade” of classical music, the routes of which had supposedly circulated amongst the diamonds and exclusive charms of a massive inherited wealth, was actually quickly placed under siege in the early decades of the twentieth century by intellectual circles of aesthetic formalists and avant-garde inter-art experimentalists. As such, part of the satirical pleasure inherent within the Duke of Dorset‟s aesthetic refinement is that he came from a class of characters whose aesthetic awakening was being cut off before it had really begun. To twentieth-century intellectuals such as Beerbohm, Eliot, Forster, Gissing, Huxley, and

Woolf, such a figure could be admired, because he was hardly a threat. Lord

Tantamount, meanwhile, his closest kin, despite being one of the most musically cultured 158 aristocratic figures in modernist fiction, and significantly more advanced than Lord

Chesterfield, hardly holds a candle to the socially active musical virtues expressed in the late-nineteenth century through characters such as Pater‟s Denys, Apollyon, or Bruno

Giordano. While these latter characters sought an increase in liberties through music,

Lord Tantamount is content to live on the wealth that the working classes of England have created for him, enjoying the fruits of their work, which they themselves are denied.

Lord Tantamount, though, is in fact rather similar to the majority of the modernists themselves. They exhibited a corresponding aesthetic elitism, one which they justified by denying almost any indication that the upper classes could appreciate the music in front of them or that the working classes could understand the music that they were missing. As such, thematically speaking, modernist writers, such as Eliot, Huxley,

Sitwell, and Woolf, in their attempt to create a rhetorical vacuum of musical appreciation, unfortunately failed to advance the social contexts of music for anyone save a small, highly-educated, aesthetic elite. Most modernists, that is to say, aspired to the cultural condition of music, but were by and large willing to leave everyone else behind. On the other hand, to substantiate their own new position, they spent an enormous amount of time incorporating the structures of music into English literature and analyzing the intended effects. The trade-off of the modernist period, then, was an advancement of a musical literary formalism and an increased sense of prestige for classical music itself.

But, these advances came at the expense of a severely restricted musical democracy.

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Chapter 4: Economies of Appreciation: Class, Culture, and Classical Music in Modernist

Literature (Part Two: The Music of the Working and Lower-Middle Classes)

Despite quite elaborate claims to the contrary, the enjoyment, the appreciation, and even the performance of classical music was in no way confined to the realm of the upper- or upper-middle classes of twentieth-century British society. While the duke silences Katie Batch‟s piano playing in Beerbohm‟s Zuleika Dobson and Woolf‟s East

End is filled with discord and Huxley‟s Illidge can only sense the stink of art, the musical self-stylings of many similarly positioned working- and lower-middle-class individuals were sounding loud and clear both in London and in the British countryside by ways of bands, choral societies, and the efforts of individual musicians. That the modernists could have missed them would have been impossible, for these musical endeavors were often prominently documented and even promoted by a variety of institutional sources, such as newspapers, various branches of the increasingly democratic educational establishment, places of entertainment, and authors as unexpectedly divergent as the populist Thomas Burke and the rather more elitist D. H. Lawrence. Music, whether the modernists acknowledged it or not, was a powerful presence in the lives of many working and lower-middle-class individuals and, correspondingly, in the lives of non-canonical fictional characters, as well.

160

Despite what most modernists would have us think, working- and lower-middle- class individuals and literary characters enjoyed classical music in many of the same ways in which the modernists did themselves, only less exclusively. Classical music, for instance, had long held for the working and lower-middle classes the same “aristocratic” values promoted by the modernists. Since the sight-singing advances of the 1840s and the brass band movement of the 1860s, classical music had provided for the poorer and non-university educated a sense of an aesthetic refinement, an intellectual sophistication, and an inner-morality, as well as a strong sense of community.1 These musical associations only intensified as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth and the opportunities to obtain a musical education and to hear and perform in concerts increased among all classes.

The proliferation of musical activities among the working classes and lower-level clerks also aided, however unintentionally, the modernist project of distinguishing the nobility of classical music from the nobility of its aristocratic patrons. For the masses, as much as for the modernists, an appreciation of music, and particularly of classical music, became a standard by which to measure the cultural intellectualism or virtue of anyone, regardless of class or income. As such, the increasingly acknowledged value of classical music provided an ever more prominent way for the working and lower-middle classes to assert their own sense of social and cultural self-worth. As the music profession itself became more and more intertwined with the rise of industrialism and the spread of education, the increasing appreciation of music by the working and lower-middle classes

1 Scholes discusses the implications of the sight-singing movements (3, 48) and Herbert offers an introduction to the social value of British brass bands (“Nineteenth-Century Bands” 11). 161 began to signal the shift of cultural authority away from those who had inherited it and toward those who were willing to work for it.

“Untwisting all the chains that tie/ The hidden soul of harmony”: Classical Music in the lives of the Working Classes, or Milton Street‟s Revenge

In the previous chapter I discussed how Thomas Burke evokes and then cuts short the aesthetic awakening of a young girl on the street as a swell with the “self-proud accent of Oxford” interrupts an sung by an artist‟s “model” in his short story “An Art

Night” (221). Fortunately for the young girl, however, as anyone familiar with Burke‟s urban sketches or short stories will realize, an aria pouring out from the window of a barely disguised brothel in a faded Chelsea apartment hardly constituted the sole instance of classical music in the poorer or working-class areas of London. In London‟s East End alone there was a rich musical culture. If, therefore, carriages did not turn eastwards from Covent Garden, as Lady Charles observes in Virginia Woolf‟s Jacob’s Room, this may have been due to the plethora of opera, ballet, or chamber music intermixed with the more popular songs playing within any number of the private apartments, Music Halls,

Variety Theaters, or the myriad other public outlets for classical music that one could visit closer to home. These places hardly support the discordant atmosphere Woolf describes outside of Sara Partiger‟s Milton Street flat in The Years. Burke, for instance, in “A Russian Night,” describes an evening spent in an apartment inhabited by cockneys of Russian descent in Spitalfields. “It is more than curious,” Burke writes, “to sit in these rooms, in the filthiest spot in London, and listen to Mozskowsky, Tchaikowsky, and

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Sibelius, played by a factory girl” (Nights 232). The girl‟s “technique,” Burke admits,

“might not have won the Gold Medal of our white-shirted , but she had enough temperament to make half a dozen Steinway Hall virtuosi,” as “her little hands lit up the enchanted gloom of the place with bright thrills” (233). Like the “Models Club,” this apartment becomes its own private concert hall. If it is not one filled with mechanically award-winning talent, it is all the same a very good one.

Classical music was not only to be heard in dusky cockney apartments, but in a wide variety of informal public venues, both in out and of the East End. The cinemas, for instance, despite the derision of them by writers such as Huxley and Eliot, often provided excerpts from great symphonies by Bizet and Wagner, and sometimes even music by

Bach, in the form of transcriptions for piano pieces or a smaller orchestra.2 Aside from playing music for the audience, they also provided a number of working-class musicians with steady jobs, at least until the 1930s and the advent of the “talkies.”3 Another often overlooked venue for live classical music was in that fantastically diverse, democratizing, if not completely democratic, miscellany of the Victorian and early Modernist music hall.

Scholars of the music halls have occasionally noted, usually in passing, that some classical music, such Gounod‟s “” or productions from Diaghilev or “ballet” music in general, was performed within the halls alongside the much more critically discussed variety acts of juggling, comic songs, living pictures, and early examples of

2 For a discussion of the importance of the cinemas in introducing the working and lower-middle classes to classical music, see Rose (202-03).

3 For cinemas, musicians, music, and the disastrous effect of “talkies” on the music profession, see Ehrlich (Music Profession 194-200). 163 cinematography.4 The variety of classical music performed in some halls, however, was actually quite extensive and orchestras and choirs often took prominent billing space on the programs. A program for the London Oxford Music Hall in 1866, for instance, proudly lists the names of their two accompanists, eight first , four second sopranos, six first , five second tenors, five basses, and two “instrumental soloists,” a flutist and a pianist, as well as a “FULL BAND AND CHORUS.” This group of musicians was scheduled to provide a wide range of selections from ‟s

Orphée aux Enfers (an updated version of the Orpheus legend in which to “satisfy modern taste” Orpheus has become a violinist), from Anna Bolena by Donizetti, and from

Il Trovatore by Verdi. The twenty-second item on the program was Beethoven‟s Choral

Fantasia, complete with “Pianoforte Solo with Orchestral and choral Accompaniments,” performed in English with a slightly abridged text, as well as a longish selection from

Gounod‟s Faust. In 1921 at the London Coliseum one could hear overtures by Elgar, and then later on in the evening catch on the piano playing the “Dance Poems” of

Edvard ‟s Suite and Chopin‟s “” in A flat “Orchestrated by

Arnold Bax” (“11 July 1921”).5 At the same venue almost a year later, one could hear popular singing events such as Austin Layton‟s “The Singing Puzzle” following a march by Mendelssohn (“30 Oct. 1922”).

4 Faulk discusses ballets in terms of Arthur Symons‟s writings on music halls, but does not focus on the music itself (66-74). See also Russell, who though providing a wonderful history of popular music in all other aspects, only discusses music hall ballet very briefly (93) and Kift who points to opera and classical music in music halls in general (54, and in more local contexts on 18, 21, 28, 96).

5 Maud Allan is largely remembered today for her persecution in 1918 by Noel Pemberton-Billing for allegedly antics during a 1918 private performance of Wilde‟s Salome, see chapter five (313-15). She initially, however, trained as a pianist, taking lessons at one point from (Hoare 65, 69). 164

Aside from opera, orchestral, and solo instrumental selections, ballet music, often accompanied by attendant dancing and occasionally even singing, took a prominent billing in music hall programs. The early twentieth-century music hall historian and enthusiast Archibald Haddon went so far as to claim that “[t]he art of Ballet owes its encouragement in England far more to the music hall than to the Opera”; a claim he substantiated by pointing out that “[v]astly more performances of ballet have been given at the Alhambra, Empire, Palace, and Coliseum than in any other places” (125).

According to Haddon‟s calculations, “British ballets at the Empire and Alhambra were periodically given for forty years—from 1872 t[o] 1912 (Alhambra), and from 1884 to

1914 (Empire),” and he cites the following “„first appearances in England‟”: “Pavlova,

Palace Theatre of Varieties, 1910. Karsavina, London Coliseum, 1909. The Russian

Ballet, London Coliseum, 1909. Mordkin, Palace Theatre of Varieties, 1910. Genée,

Empire Theatre of Varieties, 1897. Kyasht, Empire Theatre of Varieties, 1908. The

Monte Carlo Russian Dancers, Alhambra, 1933.” Nijinsky also put in an appearance

(though not his first in England) “at the Palace of Varieties in March, 1914” (125). All of this dancing would have been done to instrumental or orchestral music.

The giant halls of the Alhambra and the Empire were in particular known for their high-class and frequent ballets. The most impressive record for the composition of ballet music for the halls must be the Alhambra‟s resident composer Georges Jacobi. After having performed with several European orchestras, including the Paris Opéra as first violinist and as a conductor under the oversight of Offenbach at the Théâtre des Bouffes,

Jacobi became the musical director of the London Alhambra Music Hall in 1871. The

165 previous year the hall had lost its dancing license due to a risqué performance of the can- can. A year later, however, it was able to hire Jacobi, who was, according to Katherine

Walker, able to successfully compose about “103 ballets and ” for the hall

“at the rate of approximately three a year from 1871 to 1897” (82).6 Jacobi eventually left the Alhambra to work for the Crystal Palace Orchestra, with occasional engagements at the London Hippodrome, and a teaching position at the Royal College of

Music. After Jacobi left the Hall, ballet at the Alhambra continued on into the twentieth century with music by such composers as , the future principal of

London‟s Guildhall School of Music, who wrote the music for ballets entitled Britannia’s

Realm (1902) and The (1904).7 Ballet was also a headlining feature of the Empire, which advertised itself as “The Home of Ballet” and “The Highest-Class and most Luxurious Place of Entertainment in London,” with a corps de ballet and auxiliaries of 250 and a house orchestra of 50 (undated “Empire Advertisement”).8 While ballet

6 Haddon also discusses Jacobi and the “100 Alhambra ballets during his many years as that music hall‟s chef d’orchestre” (126).

7 While politics were often conservatively discussed in music hall songs, Guest describes The Entente as wonderfully and progressively cosmopolitan, as it resulted in an “apotheosis showing the nations of the world uniting in a single grand alliance, a chimera that ten years later was to be shattered on the battlefield of Flanders” (69). Ronald‟s connection with a ballet consisting of such utopian international propaganda as The Entente will take on a heavy irony in the late 1930s, see chapter six (336 n12). Britannia’s Realm, a ballet for which Ronald also composed the music, was more unabashedly nationalistic (66). Some evenings at the halls would have quite a bit of music that would fall under the general heading of orchestral. In 1907, the Alhambra provided a program with an overture called “Amazonen” by Von Blow, an “orchestral selection,” “Zampa” by Herold, and then a “Grand Ballet” entitled with “Queen of Spades” with music by Mario Costa (“Program” for the week of 16th Sept. 1907).

8 With a large corps de ballet, the training of all but the premières danseuses, who often came from some of the finest troupes in France and Russia, could be shaky, a tendency which held true at both the Alhambra and the Empire. As Guest notes, however, “[w]hatever may have been their artistic shortcoming, it would be a mistake to dismiss the ballets produced in London‟s music halls between 1860 and 1914 as entirely lacking in artistic content. Many of them were carefully thought-out productions of not inconsiderable merit, and artistic standards certainly rose as the audiences acquired a taste for ballet” (8). 166 turns at the halls were woven into other forms of dancing and accompanied songs as well as what we today would consider “classical” ballet music, this does not mean that ballet movements or music would necessarily be construed as informal or as free-form.9 As

Amy Kovitz explains, there existed “differences in the structure and casting of performances, and in the activities assigned to dancers, that justify distinguishing among types of dancers and dance performances” (420). This is not to say, though, that there was no eroticized overlap between high-art forms of dance, such as the ballet and burlesque (426-27).

Of course it is true that, to some degree, the West End halls so famous for ballet, such as the Alhambra and the Empire, were by the late-nineteenth century catering to middle and quite often upper-class audiences. When Laura Ormiston , for instance, tried in 1894 to shut down the Promenade of the Empire to protect female prostitutes and public morality, there was, as Barry Faulk has pointed out, a large number of “men of taste from the professional middle class and segments of the aristocracy” who very publicly spoke up in defense of their playground (106). Dave Russell, meanwhile, has observed how “[u]ngracious critics of these halls claimed that the entertainment they offered, especially ballet, a common feature at the Alhambra and not unknown in other

„aristocratic‟ halls, was merely a ploy to please lascivious young swells” (Popular Music

93). It is true that there was a plethora of private boxes, some with separate entrances to augment class segregation, such as those at the Oxford Music Hall going for 10s 6d in the

9 To be sure, not all of the music that accompanied Music Hall ballets would fall into what we would broadly classify today as “classical.” Composers of ballet music at both the Alhambra and Empire would both compose new works and, at other times, weave into new forms selections from composers such as Bizet, , Tchaikovsky, as well as more “popular” dance music (Guest 68, 125, 142, 141). 167 mid-nineteenth century or those at the Alhambra going for £4 4s in 1907. These seats, prohibitively expensive for most of the population, indicate that the West End halls were courting an exclusive, upper-class audience.

In reality, however, even these upper-class halls catered to a somewhat varied audience. As Alexandra Carter has observed, the Alhambra and the Empire had “huge audiences for their ballets,” which “comprised many others besides old men” or gilded youths (20). Carter points to Roland Belfort, who, writing of the Empire in 1902, took pains to represent the Empire as cosmopolitan and chic, but who nevertheless observed that “[a]ristocrats, artists, bourgeois, students, provincials, foreigners, and the „man in the street‟” were all “component parts of the Empire public” (Belfort 236). Aside from the boxes and stalls, there were many more affordable seats for sale at both locations in the galleries and pits for any economically elite members of the audience. The Oxford offered an admission price in the mid-nineteenth century for 6d and the Alhambra and the

Empire in the first of the twentieth century each offered “gallery” seats for 6d and slightly more expensive “pit” or “amphitheatre” seats for 1s (Programs for the “Oxford

Music Hall,” 1866; “Alhambra” 1907).10 Artists, students, and the more advanced sort of provincial or lower-middle-class individuals could have easily enjoyed the ballets from the 6d or perhaps even 1s areas and some in fact did.11

10 See also Guest for published Empire programs from 1891, 1905, and 1908 (106-07, 126-27, 134-5).

11 Occasionally glimpses of such people can be found in the news. For instance in a review of the play Fall in, Rookies by Henry Arthur Jones, designed to spur recruits to the army, The Times critic notes watching the “„real genuine unsophisticated gents‟” in the stalls and circle and gallery at the Alhambra (“Alhambra Theatre.” Times. 25 Oct. 1910:10). The critic uses a phrase from a theater review by James Spedding which had recently been published in the Edinburgh Review to contrast the supposed view of a critic in a box versus the average theater attendee in the pit. Spedding‟s use of the phrase reads: “We are not the 168

Listening to the music, although with differing degrees of interest, just as those in the audience, would have also been all those who worked in the halls. Even Arthur

Symons, primarily concerned with the audience in the first-rows and the dancers, would occasionally stoop to acknowledge the “stage-carpenter or scene-shifter or limelight- man,” who “passes in the background” as ballet were conducted (“At the

Alhambra” 80). There were also all of the hundreds of girls in the corps de ballet themselves, such as those at the Empire, who, due to a lingering “” against dancing on the stage, primarily came from “lower-class families” with a “sprinkling being from the middle class” (Guest 131). Some of these women made good money, earning between roughly £12-25 a month.12 Others in the halls, of course, made less.

Cyril Ehrlich has estimated that pit musicians “sweated in music halls for four hours a night, plus one a week,” though they “rarely earned more than 30s” for their efforts (The Music Profession 143). All these individuals would have been frequently surrounded, however, with works by Jacobi, Elgar, and a variety of Italian opera overtures.

literary gent, but the real genuine unsophisticated gent; we are tradesmen and their wives, apprentices, lawyers‟ clerks, poor artists, servants and the like; who cannot pay two shillings without being aware of it” (“Philip Van Artevelde: A Dramatic Romance.” Edinburgh Review 434 (Oct. 1910): 300). See also Between the Acts: Lives of Homosexual Men 1885-1967, wherein Norman, a shop assistant born in 1895, describes going to the Empire at Leicester Square (24, 26). The working classes also had the opportunity to enjoy the ballet in similarly priced venues outside of the capital. In Manchester, for instance, the People‟s Music Hall and the Manchester Palace put on ballets in the 1870s and 1890s. The latter venue, in particular, seems to have courted and been supported by certain portions of the working classes (Kift 59, 171-72).

12 Guest notes that “[d]ancers in the house ballet could expect between £12 and £18 a month if they merely had a pretty face and a good figure, from £20 to £25 if they possessed some talent in addition, and more if they undertook rôles.” Child dancers in training, meanwhile, when they were needed, “were paid one or two shillings a performance, while a few senior pupils could expect to be more generously treated, receiving from £4 to £8 a month” (131). Headlining dancers would of course rake in much more. Lydia Kyaksht (or Kyasht), for instance, made £75 a week in 1908 (137). 169

Whatever their wages, the glamour of the ballet and the classical music of the music halls often lent the performers, in particular, a shade of their high-art allure. In Of

Human Bondage, for instance, W. Somerset Maugham depicts with sympathetic humor an aging woman, “a member of the ballet at a famous music-hall,” most likely the Empire or the Alhambra, who visits Philip and Dr. Tyrell at St. Luke‟s hospital for bronchitis.

While being treated she flirts with the medical students and invites the doctor to come see her dance. Maugham describes her as “outrageously painted,” with “grossly alluring smiles,” an “abundant self-confidence,” and a voice with “a cockney accent, but with an affectation of refinement which made every word a feast of fun” (445). In Maugham‟s

Liza of , as well, the factory girl Liza Kemp borrows some of this allure by comparing extemporaneous dancing in the streets to “the ballet at the Canterbury and of

South London” (16). “You just wite till you see the ballet at Vere street, Lambeth,” she boasts, and Maugham‟s narrator notes that the dancers, including Liza, “could not have done it better in a trained ballet” (16, 17).

Pit musicians too, despite their potential poverty, could come across as somewhat splendid. In “An Entertainment Night,” Thomas Burke describes one “chef d’orchestre” in particular, whom, he claims, he used to watch as a child. Though he admits that the man was most likely “nothing but a pillow stuffed with pose,” in the eyes of a child he was “a demi-god,” who “never came into the orchestra,” but “„entered,‟” replete with

“white gloves” and “evening dress,” an “Olympian” (28, 29). In the same fashion,

Anastasius Vetch in Henry James‟s Princess Casamassima is a “lonely, disappointed, embittered, cynical little man, whose musical organisation had been sterile” and “whose

170 fate had condemned him, for the last ten years, to play a fiddle at a second-rate theatre for a few shillings a week.” All the same for the seamstress Amanda Pynsent “he represented art, literature (the literature of the play-bill), an philosophy, and she always felt about him as if he belonged to a higher social sphere, though his earnings were hardly greater than her own” (18). Though James seems to make fun of Vetch by presenting him as a musical underling, whom Pynsent mistakes for an artist, the violinist remains one of the noblest characters of the novel. He is the one who, using his artistic sense, loving attempts to help James‟s protagonist Hyacinth navigate the difference between what is “common” and “rare” in both life and art (70). For both Burke and James, then, the figure of the ostensibly second-rate musician provides a sophisticated, if slightly ambivalently so, appeal to those around them.

In literature, in particular, the sophistication brought about by classical music and the ballet was not limited to the West End halls. Although Symons is most frequently touted as the chief music hall litterateur, it was Burke, more than anyone, who made a sustained attempt to bring the consciously working-class lives of the East End music hall performers up to a level of quite often operatic proportions. He did so not only by describing the relative elegance of the halls, but also by using musical themes to create scenarios brushed with a decidedly modernist irony. In his short story “The Cue,” for instance, from his collection Nights, Burke uses a music hall conductor‟s substitution of “Stars and Stripes” for Wagner‟s “The ” from to get revenge on a performer who had refused his amorous advances (108). The unexpected substitution causes the girl‟s lover to lose his rhythm during an acrobatic

171 routine and fall to the distant floor of the stage, head first. There is a “muffled blow as of something cracking” (109). In this story there will be no wedding for anyone.

Similarly operatic is the rise and fall of the eponymous young music hall artiste from “Gina of the Chinatown.” Upon her “first week” of teaching Gina, her dance instructor thinks that “she had found a Taglioni, and that hers would be the honour—and the commission” (193). Here, the instructor compares Gina, if with a knowing exaggeration, to the famous nineteenth-century ballerina Marie Taglioni.13 If Gina does not quite live up to the renowned Taglioni in her dancing, she more than makes up for it in that she can sing and, much like the young Maud Allan, play the piano, performing works along the lines of a “ prelude,” Sibelius‟s “Valse Triste,” and

“Mozart sonatas” (191). Gina also has a larger than life operatic allure about her, evoking echoes of from La Bohème and the young and vulnerable Nedda from

Pagliacci, operas which, along with Cavalleria Rusticana, she has “taken to her heart,” not by chance, but by “instinctive choice,” having heard them around town, most likely in the halls (218). Her enjoyment of music represents her love of life, and her performance of it allows her to translate this love to her audience: “what music was to her, so was life, and so she interpreted it to others” (218). Her music hall act improves the lives of all who experience it, for “[t]hrough her, all little lapses and waywardnesses became touched with delicacy,” and for this her audiences loved and occasionally worshipped her (219).

Unfortunately, however, like Mimi and Nedda, and with as much heartbreaking misfortune, Gina dies tragically at an unfortunately young age.

13 To be compared to Taglioni seems to have been a bit of a fashion in the dance world of the second half of the nineteenth century (Guest 20, 94). 172

Burke, as the story of Gina illustrates, was no blithe idealist and music in his books never promises to liven up the gloom of poverty unconditionally. In “A Lonely

Night,” for instance, another sketch from Nights in London, he describes the horrors of

Kingsland Road, where, similarly to Woolf‟s description of the slums where Sara Pargiter lives, a confusion of music evokes the maddening chaos of over-crowded city streets. In this story, Burke depicts “an Easy Payments piano” as “being tortured by wicked fingers that sought after the wild grace of Weber‟s „Invitation to the Valse‟” (88). Here the title of ‟s piece provides an invitation for Burke‟s own audience to imagine the tense claustrophobic rush of Kingsland as its inhabitants fight, and occasionally fail, to attain some sort of beauty amongst the clatter of cars, bar fights, and a general discontent. Through the calls of his own hunger Burke hears how

“[h]armoniums, pianos, concertinas, mouth organs, gramophones, tin trumpets, and voices uncertainly controlled, poured forth their strains, mingling and clashing,” and observes with annoyance that “[t]he whole thing seemed got up expressly for my disturbance” (90). Yet after a while, the whirl of the dance of Kingsland concludes with an “invitation to the feast,” when a charitable neighbor offers him dinner (91). With a bit of food in his stomach Burke is eventually able to move on with pleasure to the next chapter, wherein he describes in verses (about as accomplished as Symons‟) how

“happily high from the loud street’s fermentation … Valse, mazurka, and nocturne, prelude and polonaise/ Clamour and wander and wail on the opiate air” (94). Even with the noise of the streets ever in the background, Burke now describes how a complex

173 appreciation of music can “light up the enchanted gloom” of London areas, even where those such as Lady Charles or Lady Lasswade might least expect it (94).

The “pure joy of singing”: the Rise of Music in the National School Systems

Although twentieth-century writers such as Beerbohm, Forster, Huxley, Woolf and others often portray working-class audiences as inept or unwillingly listeners of classical music, the immense presence of music in Burke‟s sketches of London, although obviously indicating a personal interest of his own, at the same time reveal the variety of ways in which classical music could and very much did have a positive place in the lives of the city‟s working and lower-middle-class inhabitants. Burke‟s music lovers, the owners of all those “harmoniums, pianos, concertinas,” and “gramophones,” are representative of the large following that classical music had outside of the homes of

Britain‟s Oxbridge educated, wealthy, and overall “cultured” elite. This more popular musical following was able to develop in the nineteenth century and then explode in the twentieth for several complex and interconnected reasons. Two of the most notable were an increased emphasis on a musical education in the national school system and an increased affordability of musical equipment. Both of these advances created an easier access to music in schools and homes, as well as in places of entertainment.

As we saw in chapter two, by the second half of the nineteenth century music had made several substantial moves towards claiming a place in England‟s educational system. To a large degree, live music became a part of the intellectual and aesthetic life of institutions, such as Oxford and England‟s public schools, thanks to its ties to the 174 musical theories of classical heavyweights along the lines of Plato and Pythagoras.

Classical music, however, can be seen as working its way into the public life from two ends: from the classically educated governing classes and from the musical enthusiasm of the working and lower-middle classes. Surprisingly, considering the elitist associations that classical music has today, while educators were fighting for a place for such music in the reluctant strongholds of the upper classes, the art succeeded much more quickly and much earlier on, largely from around the eighteen-forties, in gaining a hold over the general populace.

One of the most successful ways of bringing music to the masses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was through the unbelievable rage for sight-singing.14 Two of the chief leaders of this musical movement were the Rev. John Curwen and John Hullah, both of whom promoted the teaching of a process for singing music at first sight, generally using the solfege system of “doh, re, mi,” etc. Although the two educators backed different methods—Curwen encouraged a movable or tonic “doh,” an idea he borrowed from the pedagogical pioneer Sarah Glover, while Hullah promoted a fixed

“doh” always equaling C—both were widely advocated from the 1840s throughout the

14 Scholes, in his survey of the Musical Times from 1844-1944, notes that by the 1840s, Britain experienced “a mania (and mania is not too strong a word) for, of all things in the world SIGHT-SINGING!” (3). He argues, however, that this “mania” reached a peak in the twentieth century in “what may be called a British Choral Renascence,” in part defined by “a general determination to attain a new level of technical and expressional excellency, prompted largely by what the frequent meeting of choirs in competition had revealed as to the possibility of attainment of such a new level” (48).

175 second half of the nineteenth century, with each educator introducing large classes of primarily working- and lower-middle-class students to choral music.15

While to some, particularly U. S. readers, solfege might conjure up images of

Julie Andrews twirling around the hills of Austria (or, for those such as myself, the horrors of singing in public during a first round of college music classes), the process nevertheless provided a firm backbone for the musical and moral education in Britain for a wide-range of both children and adults. In and out of schools and under the auspices of churches and the state, sight-singing took a significant and institutionalized part in the so- called “rational recreation” movement of the Victorian period.16 Curwen, for instance, as

E. D. Mackerness has noted, took great pains to advertise his system “to clergymen, teachers, temperance and mission workers—in fact, to all in charge of groups capable of singing,” and in so doing furthered the association of music and morality. At the same time, through solfege he made “works like The and Elijah,” as well as hundreds of other oratorios, cantatas, and part songs, “accessible to hundreds of people who could

15 Scholes observed that “[h]istorically considered, the sight-singing movement was really but a part of a larger movement for the general betterment (intellectual, moral and religious) of the working classes. It connected itself naturally with the Mechanics‟ Institute movement,” as well as “with the Temperance movement” (8). Unfortunately, this meant that sometimes musical education and performances were tied up with conservative dogmatic injunctions designed to prevent against working class against landowners and the Church; see, for instance, Scholes‟s discussion of the Y. M. C. A.‟s eviction of the “Sacred Harmonic Society” from Exeter Hall on account of “the fear that the lives of some of the singers might not always reflect the sentiments they uttered, so making their singing sincere” (25; see also 39, 42). By and large, though, the goals of the movement were to provide people with the means to lead a happily musical life. For Curwen‟s borrowing of Sara Glover‟s sight-singing system see Scholes (13).

16 Peter Bailey suggests that the “improved recreations were an important instrument for educating the working classes in the social values of middle-class orthodoxy” (35; see also 46-47). In some ways, then, musical education in this period can be seen as an indoctrination into middle-class values. Another perspective would simply see the of music, and even of more “difficult” classical music specifically, on the part of the working- and lower-middle-classes as due simply to their enjoyment of both the music and its communal aspects. For the community aspects of music, see Bailey (11). Herbert points out that the brass band movement, along with its focus on “art” music, can be seen as a “common territory between classes” from the 1860s onwards (11). 176 not follow the intricacies of a full score” (163). Between Hullah, Curwen, Glover, and others, hundreds of sight-singing amateurs quickly turned into thousands, as the momentum built by the sight-singing movement erupted in “monster” choral concerts, consisting from anywhere from about three hundred to a couple thousand performers putting on Handel and Mendelssohn oratorios (165).17

Hullah, meanwhile, was particularly influential with regards to promoting music within Board Schools, where sight-singing and eventually instrumental instruction made their way into the twentieth century. Due in large part to his influence (although also to that of the untiring Curwen, Glover, and the success of the solfege movement in whatever shape it took form), when Parliament passed the Elementary Education Act of 1870 provisions were made so that extra funds might be given to a school if they taught singing. By 1872, schools could be financially penalized if music was not taught satisfactorily. Although there were a few hitches in these early years of introducing the subject into the schools, primarily due both to instructors and to school inspectors being unprepared to teach and evaluate it, the Board Schools by and large showed an increasing commitment to the musical education of British schoolchildren. A highlight of this was the appointment of John Hullah as the Inspector of Music for the National School Board in 1872. In 1882, the position was taken over by Sir John Stainer, who was also the organist at St. Paul‟s and who in 1889 would become the Oxford Heather Professor of

Music, two long-established positions which no doubt added a certain titled prestige to

17 Such “monster” concerts took place during music festivals and Tonic Sol Fa competitions, in and outside of London. Mackerness estimates that 3,625 people took part in a Crystal Palace festival of 1862 (165). When the Crystal Palace was moved to Sydenham and enlarged, such concerts became easier (184). Scholes offers an estimate of 4,000 performers (choral and instrumental) at the Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace in 1923 (179). 177 the role of inspector. By the twentieth century, music in the schools would become so definitively established as to allow Sir Arthur Somervell, the third man to hold the position of Inspector of Music, to feel secure enough to encourage, with great aplomb, an expansion from sight-singing to more advanced forms of in the classroom.18

Under Somervell‟s long and fruitful tenure (from 1901-37), the national Board of

Education continued to expand the place of music in the classroom and to institute a progressive breadth of instruction. The various handbooks provided by the Board to aid teachers in the classroom provide a clue to changes in the official expectations for a musical education. The gradual development of music from sight-singing can be seen in the change of focus from the 1905 handbook, which offered a chapter on “The Teaching of Singing,” to that produced in 1927, which contained a much broader one on “Music,” under Somervell‟s watch (Suggestions 106; Handbook, 1927, 237).19 Although each edition of the book acknowledged the importance of a foundation in singing traditional , the 1927 Handbook—in a move reminiscent of S. T. Hawtrey‟s gradual introduction of classical music at the Windsor parochial school discussed in chapter

18 This overview is, of course, a necessarily simplified version of events. Although Hullah was extremely influential, as signified by his being made the first Inspector of Music in 1872, his system of using a fixed “doh” was widely challenged by more teachers than just Curwen. It was eventually abandoned to be replaced by the tonic “doh,” which makes much more sense for those without absolute pitch. Gordon Cox provides an invaluable overview of the significant dates and thought processes behind music education in Britain‟s schools during the first decades of the national school system in his A Education in England 1872-1928 (19-21, 36).

19 Suggestions was reprinted, with additions, in 1905, 1912, 1914, 1918, 1921, and 1923. The 1921 and 1923 editions cost 9d. The 1927 handbook went through at least four impressions and cost 2s. The implications of these reprints and prices suggests that such volumes were both relatively popular and affordable. For Somervell‟s contributions to the handbook, see Gordon (43) and Cox (Sir Arthur Somervell 20). 178 two—suggests the eventual introduction of songs from the classical repertoire: “In the highest classes, while a sound knowledge of traditional song literature is kept up, it is obvious that full use should be made of selected songs from great composers, such as

Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Handel, Byrd, and , and some of the fine unison songs which have lately been written for schools by modern British composers” (254-55). A foundation in songs, not only in singing them, but in carefully listening to them, the 1937

Handbook suggests, provides “an excellent preparation for the understanding of more extended forms, such as the Rondo and the and .” This Handbook also observes that, in addition to songs, “[t]he clear cut form of a Fugue, simply considered,” makes “an excellent listening study for a class of children” (213).

As technology became both more affordable and more widely available, more complex music, beyond even fugues, could be brought into the classroom through gramophones. “There are not many teachers,” the 1927 handbook admits, “who can give an adequate performance on the piano of, say, a symphonic movement, while such pieces as string quartets, string and wind solos, and even some songs, would be out of the question. The gramophone,” however, “although unsatisfactory from certain points of view, gives a representation of what was, in the first instance, a very fine performance of the piece chosen” (Handbook, 1927, 262).20 When the British Broadcasting Corporation

20 The handbooks are an interesting example of industry spurring on musical education and vice versa. The insides cover of the fourth impression of the 1927 Handbook comes complete with several advertisements aimed at teachers of music. There is a “His Master‟s Voice” gramophone ad, declaring that “[t]he greater volume and breadth of tone of the New „His Master‟s Voice‟ Gramophone make it the ideal instrument for use in the School.” Or, perhaps better still might be, “[t]he ONLY Scientific Gramophone,” otherwise known as “[t]he Viva-tonal Columbia” gramophone, “[t]he Ideal Gramophone for Teachers.” Chappell Piano Company Ltd. also has an ad picturing an upright and the text “As supplied to the LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL and other Education Committees. Prices quoted on application.” 179 came into existence, it too provided a series of broadcasts, along with published materials, to help teachers incorporate music into their classrooms (Scholes 264-65).

The “Music” sections of the teacher handbooks indicate the intensive efforts of the musical lobby not only to ease the teaching of a progressive musical program, but also to justify the existence of such a program in the first place. Strong, Platonically worded arguments continued to play an important, if less overt, role in encouraging the benefits of music in the formation of a moral, intelligent, and culturally unified community within the schools.21 Thus the 1927 Handbook offered a variety of reasons for providing a musical education, such as the ability for music taught in the schools to protect students from “the attractions of vulgar and sentimental music,” as well as to establish “a tie between the members of a school, a college, or even a nation” through traditional songs (253). Music was offered as “not only an ennobling recreation,” but also as “an ideal means of promoting human fellowship,” one which “brings people together to work for a common end under conditions which refine, discipline, and delight” (240). The 1937 Handbook, uses similar language and suggests that music has an “intellectual side,” as well as a physical in that “it involves bodily activity, controlled and harmonious effort in accordance with appropriate patterns and designs,” all of which leads to the “sharing in a common emotional and intellectual experience with a common purpose in view” (174-75).22 All of these goals are summed up in the Platonic argument,

21 For the influence of Pythagorean and Platonic theories on Somervell, see his references to Plato‟s Politics and Republic in “Music as a Factor in National Life,” (Sir Arthur Somervell 80-82; for Somervell‟s influence on the Handbooks see 186, 186 n19, above).

180 so reminiscent of those statements emanating from late-nineteenth-century Oxford discussed in chapter two, that “education must take into account the whole man and aim at enriching his personality,” for “when the wise use of leisure is acknowledged as one of its chief objects, then the arts, and especially music, are seen to deserve generous recognition” (Handbook, 1927 239). Thus, “[i]n so far as pupils are unable to read music at sight by the time they leave school, their elementary education is incomplete” (247).

All the same, perhaps the most obvious goal for teaching music in the schools, and it is a sentiment which echoes in spirit throughout all of the handbooks, is that music should be taught for the “pure joy of singing” itself (256).

The optimism and idealism represented by the handbooks were, of course, just that: optimism and idealism. In his A History of Music Education in England 1872-1928,

Gordon Cox details various problems under Somervell‟s tenure ranging from teachers struggling to fit music into an already overcrowded school schedule, one filled with math and history, to dealing with students‟ voices breaking during adolescence, although the introduction of music appreciation and of instrumental instruction helped to circumvent this latter obstacle (116-20). All the same, difficulties were rife. Speaking primarily of school singing lessons, for instance, George Dyson, director of the Royal College of

Music from 1937-52, drily observed that by 1954 the music taught “in the average ” had caused few children to “carry any desire to join a choir into their

22 Many of the justifications offered for the study of music in the later handbooks are refinements or elaborations on those offered in the introduction to the “Singing” chapter in the 1905 handbook (Suggestions 104). 181 adult lives” or to become “sufficiently familiar with the notation of music” for that

“knowledge to become a permanent accomplishment” (60-61).

Many modernists were similarly unconvinced of the success of teaching working- class children music through the board schools. We have already seen the example of how the Duke of Dorset cuts off Katie Batch‟s practicing in Max Beerbohm‟s Zuleika

Dobson, with the implication that a board school education does not provide one with the requisite aesthetic expertise to be a pianist. E. M. Forster‟s Leonard Bast in Howards

End has an analogous desire to Batch‟s to learn music. Bast too has had some education in the subject. He can, for instance, “jingl[e] out a little Grieg” on his rented piano (63).

This suggests that he has maintained some familiarity with . He has, however, very little time, only “an hour at lunch and a few shattered hours in the evening,” for further practice or study in his adult life. He therefore attends concerts filled with anxiety not only over their expense, but his own inability “to pronounce foreign names correctly” (50). This is a clear implication that not only have music lessons failed him, but so has the push for musical appreciation. Forster, unlike many other modernists, I think, was not intending to be snobby here, but to examine how socio- economic limitations, the need to work a full day and to feed dependents, can stunt one‟s artistic growth.23 Nevertheless, the significance of Bast‟s jingling is clear: a school education is not a guarantee for continued artistic growth.

23 Critics occasionally take Forster to task for his refusal to allow Leonard Bast to enjoy classical masterpieces by Beethoven and Grieg. Pointing to the musical experience of Neville Cardus, a Manchester clerk who attended performances of Elgar‟s , Wagner‟s Tristan, and Strauss‟s Salome, and discussed them with his friends, Rose asks: “Why isn‟t there a scene like that in Howards End?” (410). The answer, I think, is that Forster was trying to show how society fails to allow for a critical reception of 182

Woolf herself, on the other hand, seems to have feared that a board school-led effort to teach music might backfire, inflicting awful music onto the cultured classes.24

When in The Years, for instance, the children of the caretaker of Delia Pargiter‟s apartment are asked by her Irish husband Patrick to “sing a song for sixpence,” Delia‟s niece Peggy encourages them by asking, “[w]eren‟t you taught something at school?”

(326). Under the gaze of the patronizing adults, the shy children oblige, but their song comes out unintelligibly: “Etho passo tanno hai,/ Fai donk to tu do ….” The Pargiters listen astounded, thinking the music “so shrill, so discordant, and so meaningless” (327).

When the children have been paid and escaped, a party-goer asks, “what the devil were they singing?” Patrick suggests that the fault lay in the children‟s “Cockney accent,” such accents being “[w]hat they teach ‟em at school” (328). His insult is undercut by his own half-pronounced words, but it hardly distracts from the disturbing effect of the horrible sham music, the distinction between the children having “looked so dignified,” yet having made such a “hideous noise” (328). Eleanor and Maggie Pargiter do find the singing bizarrely “[b]eautiful,” but the beauty they evoke is more of a Nietzschean dithyrambic terror than anything else (328).

As in most large scale endeavors, while there were problems, such as might have led to “hideous” singing, there were also successes. Many of these latter were due to enthusiastic teachers who, despite already long days, were willing to put in overtime

art by either giving us not enough time to appreciate it or conversely too much time and a glut of artistic experiences, see my “Reconnecting Music to Howards End.”

24 This fear is an echo of Huxley‟s concert review quoted in chapter three, wherein he laments “the great many Sudras in the world” and the thought of “the minds of the people” who like the “coarse vulgarity” of the popular “cinema music” (“Bad Music.” WWG 23 Dec. 1922: 14). 183 conducting school orchestras or bands or by giving instrumental lessons.25 In several cases, these teachers instilled an enduring interest in music that outlasted the time their students spent in the classroom. The multi-talented Elizabeth Ring grew up in EC1,

London, in the first two decades of the , and as such was, as she proudly puts it, “a proper Cockney” (1). She fondly recollects the musical foundation offered to her by her school, Hugh Myddelton. Ring recalls how, although her mother earned only a little over thirty shillings a week, she was able to take violin lessons, with the result that “after a year‟s scraping,” she “joined the school orchestra” and rose quickly through its ranks (60,

96). During school vacations she would pawn her violin and pick it up again when classes would resume, an unhappy solution to a lack of funds that nevertheless could not prevent her from obtaining a musical education such as would have thrilled Hullah,

Curwen, and Somervell. Particularly pleasing to such educators might have been how she credits a fair degree of her success to her teachers. She recalls in particular how her

“fourth-year teacher was a man who lived for music,” who “not only played symphonies to us on the gramophone,” but “explained them too, so that we knew what to look for when listening” (60-61). This was the beginning of a life-long love of music, and although Ring sold her violin when she graduated, she continued to perform singing roles in amateur opera productions and listened to music on the wireless, as well as go in person to the Queen‟s Hall and Sadler‟s Wells (123, 87, 127, 63-64).

To be fair, Ring was an exceptional student and went, by her own admission, to a particularly good school (46); her experience, however, was not in all ways unique.

25 Even Dyson acknowledged that there were some good teachers in the school system, though he did largely argue for musical education outside of day schools (60, 61). 184

Mark Benney, a youthful troublemaker and a thief who had multiple encounters with the law before the age of eighteen, recalls his musical evolution in his autobiography Low

Company: Describing the Evolution of a Burglar. Though his title may not evoke it,

Benney‟s life was quite musical. As a child, he longed to impress his mother and her con artist friends and he relates one attempt to do so through song. One evening, after having been put to bed, he recollects re-appearing in the living room of his family‟s small apartment, walking into a “roomful of people” who “checked the on the way to their lips to look round at me, a forlorn little figure in pyjamas, framed in the doorway.”

Overcome with a sudden embarrassment, he remembers, “I sought desperately for a song, and words I had learnt at school came into my mind” (31). The attempt to impress fails, however, and he is sent back to bed.

Despite this early disappointment in the affective power of song, this incident captures Benney‟s burgeoning realization that the music taught in school could, if with some anxiety, enhance his life. As Benney‟s musical adventures continue, he describes what can only be called an aesthetic awakening, as he “began to give more attention to the poetry and music learnt at school” and to take notice of artistic objects in the world around him (115). Unfortunately, his aesthetic interest incites him to steal an antique cameo from a shop on Wardour Street, and he is sent by the courts to an Industrial School for wayward boys. Upon his arrival, he recounts how he “had been enchanted to learn that the school had its own band,” and how “visions of a brilliant career as violinist, flautist or saxophonist had immediately possessed” him. He is soon disenchanted when the bandmaster refuses to give him either the violin or the cello he initially wants (147).

185

Forced to play on an unwanted “battered brass ” and to perform “the same two or three marches,” he all the while longs to explore the more complex world “of the opera of

Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, [and] Brahms”; he recounts how “one was conscious of them there, one was intensely curious about them, one stared wistfully in their direction—but always there was the rapping of the bandmaster‟s baton calling one back to Unter den

Linden or The Great Little Army” (148, 149).

Life at the school was, nevertheless, not entirely an aesthetic backwater. In a rather Pateresque passage Benney describes how on “the first Sunday of each month” the school would march, “with the band at its head, to a fine old church in a neighbouring town.” Here,

in the dim religious light of stained-glass windows, with organ-strains weaving slow celestial harmonies and vestments carrying in their folds a rich solemnity of symbol, one did indeed catch momentary glimpses of ineffable vistas, of the City of God far and fair in a radiant dawn, of distant, desirable terraces fanned by faint breezes from the wings of peace (150).

Benney‟s musical education, at both the board school and the “Industrial School,” although hardly ideal, does encourage an interest and a longing for music. This continued interest continued on into later in his life through his interest in composers as diverse as Beethoven, Block, Gershwin, Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Schönberg, whom he would discuss and argue about with friends (196, 313).

Not all school music experiences, however, were quite so ambivalent as

Benney‟s. Thousands of students were, like Ring, able to study the violin, many of them with the support of groups such as the immensely popular Maidstone Movement and the

National Union of School Orchestras, which, through the hire-purchase system, helped, 186 as Dave Russell puts it, to “foster the growth of school orchestras” throughout England

(Russell, Popular Music 54).26 Though the violin was the most popular instrument for school children, some schools offered instruction for brass and wind instruments as well.

An example of this, and a useful contrast to the confirmed thief Benney, can be found in

C. H. Rolph‟s autobiography Living Twice. Rolph recalls how his father had gone to the

Royal Military Asylum (from 1892 onwards the Duke of York‟s Royal Military School) as an orphan scholar, where he took up the flute. At the age of fourteen he was “given a place at the Royal Military School of Music (Kneller Hall) at , and was trained there to a high standard of proficiency in „flute and ‟” (18).27 In later life his father joined the City of London Police and played with the Police Band as well as with other amateur orchestras. Rolph describes at length the importance of this music in his own life, remembering how “[t]he whole of my childhood had a background of flute and piccolo practice,” with his father playing the music of “Rossini, Donizetti, Auber,

Suppé, Wallace, Balfe, Herold, Adam, Offenbach, Verdi, Nicolai, Bizet, Gounod,” and,

26 The Maidstone Movement and the National Union of School Orchestras often got quite a lot of press due to their Crystal Palace concerts, as evidenced by this review published under the heading “Crystal Palace”: “Under the auspices of the National Union of School Orchestras two highly instructive concerts were given by 6,00 children attending elementary schools in the London district. Supported by the Prize Band and the organ (Mr. T. Mee Pattison), some 3,500 juniors carried out the afternoon programme, and at the evening concert a slightly smaller number of more advanced children played more difficult music, under the skilful guidance of Mr. Allen Gill. In each case the standard reached spoke eloquently of the work which has been done since the Union was founded, some thirteen years ago. Starting in a single school at Maidstone, the scheme of teaching violinists in classes has spread until it has been adopted in 5,00 schools, and that great results have come from humble beginning is further proved a comparison between the total of performers this year with the modest 700 who took part in the Union‟s first concert in 1905” (The Globe 6 Oct. 1912; ). Such events were widely reported in the London newspapers each year through the early decades of the twentieth century.

27 Rolph would enter modernist literary history himself when he wrote The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd. in 1961. Kneller Hall was able to flourish under grant money from 1872 and supplied an excellent education to many military bandsmen by maintaining a high quality staff, including the father of Arthur Sullivan (Farmer, The Rise and Development of Military Music, 134- 35). 187 of course, “Wagner” (24, 25). Rolph‟s tribute here to his father is an important reminder how music taught in the schools, whether board schools, Industrial Schools, military schools, or even public schools, could lead to a student‟s and to a student‟s family‟s lifelong involvement with music by enabling the art to take place in the home.

“But they must be made to understand that their weariness and discontent is wrong”: Adult Education and the Satire of Clubs and Societies

As important as state sponsored schools were to the introduction of music into general society, they were hardly the only places at which the working and lower-middle classes could obtain instruction in the subject. Several adult education settlements, such as the London-based Toynbee Hall or the Northampton Institute, or further out, smaller places such as Wincham Hall, offered music courses with classes frequently run by university-educated instructors and professional musicians. These places provided an opportunity for adult students who either wanted to continue their musical education or for those who had never received much instruction at their elementary schools. To supplement their private and class lessons, many such settlements, institutions, and educational clubs also offered concerts by both their students and professional musicians, sometimes with quite famous performers, such as the pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch.28

These settlements, though ostensibly run by charitable members of the upper and upper-

28 In 1933, for instance, Toynbee Hall instituted a series of six “celebrity concerts by artists of international reputation,” to be held at the White Chapel Art Gallery. The series opened with Moiseiwitsch. The celebrity concerts cost 2s for seats towards the front and there was a back row of seats for 1s, if one was not a member of the Toynbee Hall Musical Society, for whom there was presumably a discount. The Toynbee music organization also organized in the same year a second, cheaper series to be held at held at the Hall itself for 6d (“Toynbee Musical Society: Second Season—1933-1934”). 188 middle classes, occasionally joined up with working-class clubs, a corresponding faction of the rational recreation movement. Together they challenged the perception that working- and lower-middle-class individuals were incapable of enjoying or appreciating the music that was supposedly the preserve of society‟s elite.29

These education settlements are particularly notable because of the amount of half-satirical disdain that so many late-Victorian and early-modernist writers heaped upon them when depicting the efforts of the upper classes to educate those less privileged than themselves, particularly with regards to their efforts with music.30 In The Picture of

Dorian Gray, for instance, Oscar Wilde playfully mocks charity concerts in his effort to show Dorian as utterly egocentric. At the beginning of the novel, the self- absorbed Dorian, introduced as he is turning over the pages of Schumann‟s Forest

Scenes, recalls how he had “promised to go to a club in Whitechapel” with Lord Henry‟s aunt, the philanthropist Lady Agatha, in order that they might have “played a duet together—three , I believe.” Fortunately for him, he “forgot all about” the commitment, presumably having found something much more amusing to do. In response to his neglected engagement, Lord Henry quips “I don‟t think it really matters

29 This argument presents a qualification to Gareth Stedman Jones‟s general claim in his influential essay on working-class culture that the “distinctiveness of a working-class way of life was enormously accentuated” to reflect its “separateness and impermeability” in a way that “emphasize[d] the distance of the working class from the classes above it and to articulate its position within an apparently permanent social hierarchy” (498). When Jones refers in his argument to musical culture he by and large refers to the culture of music halls. Another perspective is revealed by turning the spotlight on classical music. While the influx of classical music into all social classes generally did not close the economical distance between the lives of very many working-class amateurs and the upper classes, it did help to level the intellectual playing field between the two. Though ticket prices for the prime seats of the Covent Garden opera house and other music venues undoubtedly maintained a distancing effect, an appreciation of the music itself can be perceived as having provided a form of cultural equality.

30 This particular dislike of adult education institutes is part of the overall disapproval by the modernists of the general spread of education, discussed by Carey (15 et passim). 189 about your not being there. The audience probably thought it was a duet. When Aunt

Agatha sits down to the piano she makes quite enough noise for two people.” As Dorian notes, the insult here is a double-edged one; and so it is, although not only in the way that he thinks. Dorian observes that Lord Henry‟s comment is “horrid” to Agatha as well as

“not very nice” to himself, as Henry has implied that his presence was not necessary at the performance (181). At the same time, however, the witticism derides not only the musical missionaries, but the allegedly ignorant East End audience, which, Lord Henry claims, could mistake half of a work for a whole.

In Our Friend the Charlatan, Gissing engages in a similar satire of such endeavors, although instead of mocking cultural knowledge he the potential for enjoyment among both the missionaries and their audiences. In Our Friend, the juvenile philanthropist May Tomalin boasts how she belongs to “a little society for extending civilization among the ignorant and the neglected.” Her society, she explains, has plans

“to give a few concerts in a school-room.” “Of course it must be really good music,” she declares pretentiously, adding

we shan‟t have anything of a popular kind, at least we shan‟t if my view prevails. It isn‟t our object to amuse people; it would be really humiliating to play and sing the kind of things the ignorant poor like. We want to train their intelligence. Some of our friends say it will be absurd to give them classical music, which will weary and discontent them. But they must be made to understand that their weariness and discontent is wrong. We have to show them how bad and poor their taste is, that they may strive to develop a higher and nobler. I, for one, shall utterly decline to have anything to do with the concerts if the programme doesn‟t consist exclusively of the really great—Bach and Beethoven and so on (155).

Of course May is the type of missionary that has “always thought more of principles than of persons” (194). As such, it is most likely she herself who would be wearied and 190 discontented, although able to feel sufficiently aristocratic, at her concerts. It is this dreary approach to classical music, Gissing suggests, that is in fact what is “wrong.”

Notably, the type of working-class audiences implied by Lord Henry and May— although not necessarily, I think, by Wilde and Gissing—are ignorant and mute and the implied assumption is that the concerts that they attend are events of indescribable boredom. Opposed to such imagined audiences are Burke‟s characters, who are more than capable of not only appreciating and enjoying classical music but of performing it for themselves, if at times imperfectly. This latter depiction of working- and lower- middle-class amateurs is, of course, much more realistic. An understanding of upper- class , however, such as those embodied by Lord Henry and May Tomalin, and a desire to challenge them led many educators to emphasize both an appreciation and an enjoyment of music along with a technical training. This dual approach was employed successfully at Toynbee Hall, opened by Samuel and Henrietta Barnett in 1884 and named after the Balliol historian Arnold Toynbee. In contrast to the fictional May‟s abhorrence of the idea that intellectual music might actually “amuse people,” Toynbee

Hall was founded with the intention of providing an “education and the means of recreation and enjoyment for the people in the poorer district of London,” with the goal that education and enjoyment were to be intertwined (“‟ Settlement in East

London” 3).

During the first half of the twentieth century, Toynbee Hall put a substantial amount of effort into helping the working classes of London to learn more about and to enjoy more of classical music. The Hall started off with only a few choral and music

191 appreciation classes, but by the 1920s its music program had extended its work and some music classes faired just as well as, and occasionally better than, popular courses in

French, Public Speaking, Greek Dancing, and . In the 1920s student numbers were not necessarily huge, with some classes averaging only about 15 to 20 active students. 31 But, by the 1930s Toynbee had reached out to enough students interested in courses to start a full-fledged “School of Music.” The School‟s published “Statement of

Purpose” was “to provide access to music study or performance both for the beginner or the experienced, in whatever fashion is most likely to attract and hold the interest.” Not content to interest students for one or two terms, the School acknowledged that there was a wide variety of potential students with an array of skill levels. As such, the school hoped to provide enough classes so that those who came would be “encouraged to develop” their “musicianship and to express themselves in performance.”

To aid in this, the school hoped to encourage, to support, and even to provide written materials for the musical activities of students outside of Toynbee Hall. Toynbee offered to help in a student‟s “club, office, factory, or, indeed, your own home”

(“Toynbee Hall Educational Syllabus: 1936-1937” 14). During the 1936-37 terms (thus

31 The Minutes for March 27th, 1923, which was a year of particularly low attendance, the spring choral class had 15 students, with French, Public Speaking, and Greek Dancing coming in each with 13, and Drama with 12. The Minutes for December 4th, 1924, noted that the “Appreciation of Music” course had thirty students on the register, with twenty recorded as showing up on the last day of class; the Choral class had 21 students registered, but only 16 consistently showed up for class. This was roughly the average number of students for most classes this quarter, suggesting that music courses were able to hold their own alongside others in drama, foreign languages, and history. These are numbers for individual classes and each year the total number of students varied. The entry for May 23rd, 1921, lists classes in choral music, orchestral music, the theory of music, and one dealing with the “Appreciation of Music,” as well as folk dancing and drama. In 1921 there were 473 students total, spread out not just over music classes, but over Toynbee Hall‟s other liberal-arts classes as well. One of the highest years for enrollment was 1914-15, with 783 students registered; one of the lowest was 1916-17, with 288 students registered, no doubt these low numbers were due to the extended duration of the First World War (“Education Committee minute book 1913-1930”). 192 overlapping the publication of Woolf‟s The Years), the “School of Music” itself offered over ten different music courses, ranging from an “Appreciation of Music,” covering ancient and contemporary music, to “Voice Training and Solo Singing,” with Robert

Parker “of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden.” There was also a class on brass band conducting and an orchestra, which rehearsed on Sunday afternoons, with the hopes of providing an “excellent opportunity for skilled players of all instruments to gain experience in ensemble playing” and to “study the works of great composers, both classical and modern” (“Toynbee Hall Educational Syllabus: 1936-1937” 15). The orchestral class required an audition, but to help people work up to a satisfactory skill level the School offered group and private lessons in piano and violin, with a 5s registration fee for new students (in general to cover the price of books and, for piano students, a silent keyboard) and an extra 6d per hour lesson (“Toynbee Hall Educational

Syllabus: 1936-1937” 15, 16).

Of course, the school was successful largely because of a desire on the part of its students to learn and play better. The school itself encouraged this desire, and if the students were dissatisfied, they would leave.32 Thus the school attempted, at various

32 Perhaps no example works better to illustrate this point than the experience of Hartog, who was born in 1922 and lived for most of his youth in the East End, with his mother who ran a stall in Petticoat Lane. An amateur singer of opera, Hartog relates that “[a]t the age of sixteen and a half, in the September of 1938, I decided it was time I had proper singing lessons. I went to Toynbee Hall and joined a singing class there which cost 17/6d for a year. By then I was earning about 27/6d a week,” while working for a tailor, “so I could afford it.” At first he enjoyed the classes: “I fitted in there like a very happy bug in a well-known and well-loved rug. It was a realization of all my dreams. From the outside, the buildings weren‟t particularly impressive. But inside there was an air of drama, beauty, activity, camaraderie. Brilliantly gifted people of the many shades of Art were there—ballet dancers, actors, musicians, singers, painters, sculptors. ... The atmosphere was truly magical. It hit me then and, even now as I look back, I still think, „That was the first time in my life I felt I was really where I belonged.‟” It was a place for enjoyment, but also, he says, time spent there “was for work” (44 and 45). When Robert Parker started at 193 points, to make taking classes easier. If students wished to enroll in two weekly classes, the syllabus reminded them, they could do so with no second registration fee; meanwhile for those who wished to take violin lessons, but could not immediately purchase an instrument for use at home, the school suggested “a savings bank scheme,” and loaned the investors “a practising instrument” (“Toynbee Hall Educational Syllabus: 1936-1937”

16).

Instrument affordability, of course, was a major concern to many amateur musicians, as throughout the nineteenth century the initial investment in the proper musical accessories could be a major stumbling block for working- and lower-middle- class students. Even by the turn of the century, good musical instruments, such as reasonable sounding violins or reliable pianos were, to be sure, signs of luxury. Wilde, for instance, often has his characters languishing over pianos and when in H. G.

Wells‟s Tono-Bungay (1909) George Ponderevo describes the extravagances of the country manor house, Bladesover, he cites “a big harp beside a -shaped music-stand, and a grand piano” in company with several “great Sèvres vases on pedestals,” and huge chandeliers, “bearing some hundreds of dangling glass lustres,” as evidence (Wells 25-

26).33

Nevertheless, by the turn of the century, fairly decent instruments, pianos among them, had become much cheaper and much more easily accessible. This was largely due

Toynbee, however, Hartog found that he did not get along with him. Hartog found that Parker did not offer him personally enough instruction, and so he left.

33 Besides Dorian Gray there is, for instance, Gilbert in “The Critic as Artist,” and Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, who, though he does not “play accurately,” as “anyone can play accurately,” he does play “with wonderful expression” (1.3-5). 194 to increased competition among manufacturers and advances in instrument manufacturing technology, as well as the increasing incomes of the working and lower- middle classes.34 Ehrlich has noted that by end of the nineteenth century, pianos “of real musical quality” had become “available at modest prices, rendered even more attractive by a widespread system of hire purchase” (The Piano 10). By 1910, pianos could be gotten under the hire purchase system for “payments of less than 10s. a month, without deposit,” with payments spread over various lengths of years (104). As such, the price of a decent piano, from £25 and under, “was now roughly equivalent to three months‟ income of a clerk or school teacher, and ownership was by no means limited to such white-collar workers” (10). The piano, then, became an increasingly effective means not only to advance a family‟s but also to promote domestic music making.35

Correspondingly, brass and wind instruments became increasingly available as well. Ehrlich points out that “[b]y 1883 an esteemed French manufacturer offered flutes at retail prices ranging from 32 s. to 6 gns., at £6, £2. 14 s. 0 d., at £15, trumpets at £5,” while “[l]ow grade and second-hand instruments were much

34 For a discussion of the wages of the working classes and lower-middle-class clerks, see Rose (434).

35 It would be virtually impossible to underestimate the importance of the piano or the pianoforte in the early decades of the twentieth century considering that it was commonly touted both as a necessary household item for any respectable family of whatever class and as the key means of music making in the home. John Hullah, for instance, once observed that “[m]usic in the house, purely as well as partially instrumental, has long been and is long likely to remain largely dependent on the pianoforte, deservedly called „the family orchestra‟” (Music in the House 24). This is not to say, however, that the piano did not have its detractors. One of them, making the somewhat questionable, one hopes ironic, claim that “[t]here is nothing, however grotesque, which cannot be said or done in the name of morality,” argued that the piano was “unmoral.” “A piano is like a poison,” Harold Gorst explained, for “in competent hands it may be harmless and even utilitarian,” but “[i]n its capability for tone production it is monotonous; in its range of opportunity for the manufacture of hideous sounds, or for musical misinterpretation, it is unrivalled” (“Household Music.” SR 13 Oct. 1906: 456.) As silly as Gorst‟s statements may be, they are all the same evidence of the overall uncertain quality of many pianos in circulation in the early decades of the twentieth century. 195 cheaper,” even if “technical improvements had rendered many of the latter obsolete” (The

Music Profession 101). Around 1913, the English firm of Besson and Co., was offering new “School” model for £3 10s and new, high quality “Class A” tenor for £7 7s (Herbert, “Appendix 1” 310). Granted these prices seem high, but according to

Trevor Herbert, “[v]irtually every purchaser seems to have benefited from a Byzantine system of discounting,” with “[c]ash, cheques, deferred payments, and any other means of pay” receiving some sort of discount (Herbert 43).

Advertisements from all varieties of continental and British manufacturers, including piano manufacturers, proliferated in trade journals, concert programs, and the daily newspapers. Granted the affordable pianos may not have been Bösendorfers nor the violins by Stradivarius, but there were many relatively decent flutes, cornets, and instruments in circulation. Novello and Chappell‟s also advertised a wide range of classical at relatively affordable prices.36 Thus it is unsurprising that Burke‟s

“factory girl” was able to get a piano sufficiently decent to play the music of

“Tchaikowsky, and Sibelius” enchantingly, while in real life Elizabeth Ring was able to get her violin and join her school orchestra, along with countless other children. The relationship between music and education by the early twentieth century was no doubt a two-way street: an increase in instruments allowed for an increased demand in instrumental tuition and increased educational opportunities sustained the market for affordable instruments.

36 In an 1881 program for the Saturday Popular Concerts, for instance, Chappell and Co., London advertise a wide price range of pieces from 2s. 0d. for Schubert‟s Nachtstuck, Op. 23 to 31s. 6d. for a copy of one volume of Bach‟s 48 Preludes and Fugues, though anyone interested could buy individual selections for 2s. a piece (Saturday Popular Concerts 28, 34). 196

Rural Overtures: Classical Music outside of London

The market for a musical education and musical instruments was not, of course, only limited to the urban opportunities of a rich, sophisticated city such as London.

Work by Herbert, Rose, and Russell has revealed the extensive opportunities that those living in the British countryside had for hearing art music. There were touring opera troupes, for instance, such as the D‟Oyly Carte, Carl Rosa, and -Manners companies, as well as the local productions of those who were colliers by day and musicians by night. Noting the popularity of such events, Rose muses that “[p]erhaps it was in the nature of mining communities to develop great musical traditions,” as the miners saw music as a “high road to a better world” (198, 200). It was this sort of uplifting attitude that helped to support both the touring opera companies and the brass band movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Herbert has argued that brass bands in particular were a powerful force for communal bonding through good music, both for the bands and the towns that supported them.37 These bands provided countless opportunities for working and lower-middle-class audiences to become familiar with Italian opera music, from which a significant portion of band music was drawn.38

Indeed, the touring opera companies and the performance of opera music by working-

37 One of the common channels of bonding in the brass band movement came about through the brass band contests, which inspired both a desire for musical excellence and a local pride (Herbert 53, 64).

38 Much of the brass band repertoire up through the included transcriptions of Italian opera overtures and contest “test” pieces were written by British composers of serious “art” music as Edward Elgar, Gustav , and Granville Bantock, among others (Russell, “What is Wrong with Brass Bands?” 94, 95). test pieces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ranged from selections from Wagner‟s Die Meistersinger to Mozart‟s Così fan tutte to an arrangement entitled Gems of Chopin (Herbert, Appendix 5 333, 334). 197 class bands was most likely mutually supportive. Though some contemporary reviewers criticized the quality of both the touring opera companies and the performance styles of largely working-class bands, there is little doubt that these groups often provided quality performances and an informal musical education for their working- and lower-middle- class audiences.39

Aside from touring opera companies and brass bands, some local clubs in mining communities and other industrial towns organized by working men, even men who were out of work, in the twenties and thirties, included music education among their

39 Two sets of articles published in 1906 in the Saturday Review suggest the competing and most likely highly relative perception of the quality of opera companies touring the countryside. Both these reviews deal with the Moody-Manners opera company. Writing in March, John Runciman wrote that Manners, had done “magnificent work in the provinces and in the provinces he has found support and backing.” The Moody-Manners company put on operas such as Siegfried, Carmen, Eugen Onegin, Greysteel, Philemon and Baucis, Figaro, and Lohengrin, occasionally sharing profits with charities. In 1904, for instance, the company raised “£457 for the University fund.” Moreover, Runciman suggests that non-London audiences have a higher appreciation of the operatic performances than their urban counterparts, since “[i]n people won‟t go to hear opera; they go to admire royalty and be-diamonded ladies,” and when the latter are not present, the public take “the trouble to stay away” (“The Everlasting Opera Question.” SR 17 Mar. 1906: 327-28). Harold Gorst, on the other hand, while acknowledging that the Moody-Manners Opera Company “certainly deserve in the highest degree the gratitude of all music-lovers,” chooses to emphasize the “many drawbacks and difficulties” of “popularising a commendable standard of operatic performance throughout the provinces.” Noting that touring opera companies can only successfully popularize opera “at necessarily popular prices,” Gorst observes that this “imposes a natural limit upon their undertaking.” The result is that “[i]t is impossible for them to compete with Covent Garden.” In support of his argument he cites a then recent performance at which “two boxes had to be taken to provide room for some of the players who could not find it elsewhere” (“Sham Tragic Opera.” SR 12 May 1906: 582). It is interesting to note that Runciman focuses on the intellectual and cultural sophistication of the non-urban, presumably working- class audiences for the opera, while Gorst tends to downplay this sophistication by focusing on the physical limitations of countryside structures not purpose-built for opera. The argument seems to be one of perspective, with Runciman wanting to hone in on the benefits of the touring opera (it brings pleasure, provides money for the community, suggests cultural erudition among the working classes, etc), while Gorst tends to focus on the negatives of the situation caused by economic obstacles. The tradition of brass band contests and an expanding repertoire, combined with the challenges of trying to get a brass band to attempt to recreate parts originally written for an orchestra, led to what musical historians have observed are relatively complex and sophisticated scores (Herbert 57; Herbert and Wallace 284).

198 activities.40 Large organizations such as the Mechanics‟ Institutes, occasionally supported by smaller institutions such as Wincham Hall, provided music courses to aid such performers.41 Wincham Hall, in particular, is an interesting case as it demonstrates the importance of a musical education in smaller communities outside of London.

Roughly equivalent to the older and larger Toynbee Hall, Wincham Hall was a residential center founded in 1933 “for unemployed workers in and Cheshire” with the goal of providing “an environment and conditions of living such as will enable unemployed men to maintain their physical and mental fitness so that they may be ready and able to take up employment when the opportunity occurs.” Unemployed men could go and stay at the Hall for, in general, about three weeks, though occasionally up to three months (“Prospectus”).42 While there men would take “main courses” in wood working, metal working, and weaving, as well as “optional courses” in subjects such as music, pipe-making and playing, and dancing. In the evening, these classes would be supplemented by “a musical, dramatic or cinema entertainment” provided by either residents or nearby societies (“Wincham Hall: Report” 5). Such a mixture of practical and more cultural activities fit in with the claims of the settlement to exist not “to train men for jobs nor to produce instructors and supervisors for clubs,” but “to serve

40 Rose offers an excellent overview of musical activities outside of London (196-202).

41 For sight-singing and Mechanics‟ Institutes, see Scholes (8).

42 “The total charge for board and residence” was “13s. per week, payable weekly.” Those men living on unemployment insurance could use it to pay for courses and living expenses. Arrangements could be made for students with dependents so that they would have enough money left over to “cover the needs of the household in the same way as if the student were living at home, less a sum of five shillings which is the estimated saving in household expenses due to the student‟s absence” (“Prospectus”). The ultimate goal in pricing was that almost anyone, even those with a family at home could afford to go stay and take courses. 199 individuals,” with its “success or failure” depending upon “the enhancement or not of personal values which cannot be easily measured” (“Wincham Hall: Report” 6).

Though not originally intending to provide instructors for clubs, Wincham eventually did come to offer a “” that was specifically designed to help reinforce the musical efforts made by men in such organizations back home.43 One

“school,” more accurately an eight day intensive course held in 1937, cost 10 shillings, and included boarding, lodging, and tuition. Classes consisted of “Principles of sound: ,” which was scheduled to go over the “Balance and distribution of separate melodic lines”; “Elementary Harmony and Part-Writing,” complete with “Illustrations provided by the students, culled from music in actual use for study purposes”; and

“Listening: What to look for. Shape and Design,” with “Illustrations from gramophone records.” The participants of the school were divided up for practical study according to previous skill levels, with the more advanced groups playing “concerted” music

(“SELNEC Advisory” 1).

Many of these courses, like those at Toynbee and elsewhere, were designed, in part, to make up for where elementary schools had failed, for whatever reason, to give their students a firm foundation in music while young or to enhance what the students already knew. It was also intended to help prevent those individuals interested in music from feeling “discouraged” or as if music was “far to[o] incomprehensible for them to master.” While the tone here is no doubt a bit patronizing, the organizers of the school

43 Citing from the “Working Men‟s Club and Institute Union, Annual Report” for 1874-75, Rose estimates that in 1874 of 312 local Working Men‟s Clubs “64 percent [a little under two hundred] held „musical and elocutionary ,‟” with the number of clubs increasing as the years progressed (79). 200 did attempt to rid themselves of any direct form of control. They hoped that those who came as students would themselves become “of practical use in their own centres” when they left by helping to teach others whatever new knowledge they had learned

(“SELNEC Advisory” 2). Much as in the best of the board schools then, the musical opportunities, including both those run by the working classes themselves and by the upper and upper-middle classes, in both urban and rural environments, hoped to provide and in many cases actually succeeded in providing a variety of opportunities for the working and lower-middle classes to hear and to perform a range of music while promoting community activism.

A “great enthusiasm for music in various forms”: the Cultural Aristocracy of the Working Classes

If being ignorant of music could lead to discouragement and ignorance, an association with or fluency in music could lead to gentility, regardless of financial wealth. If the working classes could not match the Duke of Dorset‟s or Lord

Tantamount‟s enormous estates, they could take comfort in their ability to appropriate, and to make their own, their cultural inheritance. When young Harold Brown, for instance, lost a chance at a because his father wanted him to work in the mines of Silverdale, Staffordshire, he took solace in the discovery that his mentor on the coal face, Abe Deakin, was a “real gentleman,” one of the indicators being the older man‟s knowledge of classical music. Deakin, Brown says, had a “quiet manner, clean speech,” and a “conscientious workmanship”; he also played the “‟cello” and had a

201

“knowledge of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Handel” (91). When praising the general nobility of his home district, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Brown again resorts to music, recounting how an acquaintance drew his attention to the fact that, when in the area,

“[y]ou will not pass many houses before you hear a piano being played, someone practising singing exercises, others working hard at some preparing for contest day,” all of which suggests “[n]ot only great enthusiasm for music in various forms, but that there is a great reaching out for „culture‟.” Brown himself observes having heard town choirs “rehearsing „The Messiah‟, „Elijah‟, „Israel in Egypt‟ and other of the well-known oratorios.” The man concludes that despite being in a mining district,

“there is a standard of culture” around Silverdale “that is second to none” (110).

Similarly to Brown, D. R. Davies too worked in the mines of a small town as a child, though in Wales, not England. For him as well, music provided a sense of family unity and a valuable sense of a moral and artistic refinement. Much as did Brown‟s family, Davies‟ parents saved money, despite their poverty, in order to share their love of music with their children. In terms equivalent to Somervell‟s, Davies recalls how his father, the choirmaster of a local chapel, “had the idea that no one could be really educated without a knowledge and appreciation of music” and how “he did his best to inculcate in his children a deep love of it” (27). As such, he taught his children the basics of sight-singing and provided for more advanced forms of musical instruction. This included vocal training for Davies‟s sisters and brother, the latter of whom eventually became a tenor for the Moody-Manners Opera Company, and violin lessons for Davies himself (113). While disclaiming any exceptional talent of his own, Davies notes that he

202 did play in several orchestras at various times, “and even played first violin,” in at least one of them (27).

This musical experience provided him with a valued sense of self-worth that could compete with anyone‟s. Explaining the importance of this musical education, he recounts how “[i]t fed the spirit as an instrument of perception, as an organ of knowledge,” and “made for inner refinement.” His family, he says, had “few of the graces and polish of manners, characteristic of an affluent and secure society, but music gave us something better. It created in us a fastidiousness of moral as well as literary taste. It gave us a sense of the necessary relation between content and form.” Huxley and Woolf would no doubt have agreed on the benefits of music, though they might have doubted Davies‟s ability to actually understand aesthetic theories regarding the importance of form and content. Nevertheless, summing up his musical education,

Davies writes, “I very much doubt whether, fundamentally, Eton or Harrow would have given me a better start, educationally, than the „tin bethel‟, the elementary council school, and my home” (29). Eventually, Davies‟ musical knowledge secured him a job doing free-lance lecturing and reviewing for His Master‟s Voice.44

In these two representative accounts by both Brown and Davies it is possible to see how music, passed on through education in both elementary schools and in individual homes, provided a form of both familial and community bonding for working- and lower-

44 As Ehrlich has noted, music has been a gateway to greater cultural opportunities since the eighteenth century: “Few occupations offered so many opportunities to cross frontiers of wealth and class which were closed to most people: entering rich households to play and teach, sometimes mingling with the company or even achieving a degree of intimacy with one‟s betters” (Music Profession 31). Ehrlich provides three interesting “success stories” from the years of 1757-1867 of men who whose music allowed them to raise their in the years, one of whom was the famous conductor and composer Sir George Smart (32-42). 203 middle-class families. Individuals and towns enjoyed making music together, often overtly aware of both the aesthetic and moral implications of what they were doing. At the same time, music in these mining towns takes part in the general trend apparent in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries of associating music with certain forms of nobility. It is important to note, however, that this is not the financially exclusive or the entailed nobility that fascinated so many modernists, but a clear form of an egalitarian gentility, one increasingly open to, if not taken up by, all. It is a form of nobility not so different from the best forms of virtuous morality advocated by writers and thinkers such as Plato and Pater.

Although the rural working-classes‟ successful engagement with classical music had little influence on the majority of modernists authors, this is not to say that it had none had at all. It did. While urban dwelling authors, such as Beerbohm, Huxley, and

Woolf, tended to overlook the musical communities of the working- and lower-middle- class countryside, D. H. Lawrence, a child of the mining town of Eastwood,

Nottinghamshire, appropriated such communities for his own purposes. As opposed to viewing music as Brown and Davies did, however, which is to say as a communal form of art capable of ennobling a town or a family, in Lawrence‟s writing music tends to come across as a means to emphasize a character‟s self-presumed and often viciously individualistic superiority. In this way, though he draws on the historical involvement of mining towns with music to a greater degree than any other canonical modernist author, one might argue that Lawrence‟s perception of music and the working-classes was not so very different from his literary colleagues.

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In Lawrence‟s first novel, The White Peacock (1911) this elitist modernist trend comes across quite clearly. Although the novel takes place primarily in the considerably unmodernist setting of Eberwich, a double for Lawrence‟s own Eastwood, Lawrence asserts the modernist trend of associating art, and classical music in particular, with aristocratic airs. Lettie, the daughter of a middle-class woman and an absentee father, uses her musical knowledge to patronizingly flirt with and at the same time to show up the farmer George Saxton, whom she sees as socially beneath her. At the Saxton farmhouse, which proudly boasts a piano, she sits down at the instrument. After dismissing one of the Saxton family‟s songbooks, she picks up “a romance of

Schubert‟s,” telling George “I‟ll nod when you must turn—bring a chair.” Though the presence of the Schubert suggests that someone in the Saxton household is interested in it, George is caught up in admiring Lettie. As such, he is “oblivious” to her signal and earns her wrath. When he comes in too late to turn the page, she sharply tells him

“[d]on‟t bother” and continues to play on, ignoring him. When she has finished the piece without his help, she condescendingly commands him, “now tell me how you felt while I was playing.” George replies, “Oh—a fool!” Responding to this coquettishly, she announces, “I‟m glad to hear it” and during the ensuing conversation she tells him that he must have been “either asleep or stupid” for seeing “nothing in the music” (16).

Schubert‟s “romance” thus becomes a way for Lettie to attract George and then to chastise his artistic ignorance with her ostensibly more sophisticated understanding of

205 words and music and culture.45 Here Lawrence exhibits the typical modernist uses of music. There is no social unity, no town orchestras, clubs, or choirs practicing Messiah or Israel in Egypt, no rural gentility through oratorios, only the socially pretentious Lettie caustically using music to establish her cultural superiority over the supposedly lower- class George.

In later works, music provides a means for Lawrence‟s lower-middle- or working- class male characters to establish themselves in a world of culture, often distancing themselves not only from their environment, but more specifically from their families.

Unlike D. R. Davies‟ father, for instance, who was concerned to teach his children music, the carpenter Tom Brangwen in The (1915) uses his position as choirmaster and organist at the Chapel in Cossethay to escape from the complexities of living with his family. He likes to sit at the chapel organ “alone” and he hears in the music he makes a

“protestation” against his family life (192). When Tom‟s daughter Ursula tells him that she has found a teaching position that will allow her to live on her own, he feels emasculated. He turns to the keyboard in front of him and sounds out “a long, emphatic -note,” at which Ursula turns to leave, understanding the music to be her father‟s

45 Lawrence himself uses music in a slightly similar fashion in a letter to Blanche Jennings dated , 1908 wherein he describes his time singing in the fields, while doing farm-work: “In the evening, as we moved, we four men, turning the silvered swaths, we sang the songs we learned at school, and then my beloved Schumann, and Giordani” (Letters Vol. 1 67). James Boulton notes that the three other men to whom Lawrence refers were most likely Alan Chambers (one of the real life inspirations for George Saxton), George Neville and Richard Pogmore (Letters. Vol. 1 65n3). In his letter Lawrence ascribes a love of the classical composers Schumann and Giordani—probably Giuseppe Giordani, the Italian opera composer—to himself, leaving the more common school songs for common property. As Jessie Chambers noted, however, Lawrence was fond of schools songs as well. In her memoir of Lawrence, she recalls how “[t]he subject he enjoyed most of all in college was music, which of course was singing” (T. E. 80). She also provides a tender example of Lawrence‟s teacher-training at work: “I have seen Lawrence standing in the open doorway of the cowshed while my brother was milking, humming a tune from the sol-fa notes by the light of the hurricane lamp for the latter to learn” (T. E. 80-81). 206 attempt to drown her out (338). A similar scene appears in Aaron’s Rod (1922) when

Aaron Sisson, who works as a “checkweighman” on the surface of a coal-mine, escapes his responsibilities to his family by playing his piccolo (36). Early in the novel he avoids the importuning questions of his daughter Millicent by focusing on his music. Millicent senses this and as she hears him “playing Mozart,” with his piccolo breaking out “wild, shrill, brilliant,” her face goes “pale with anger at the sound” (14). Instead of bringing joy or happiness, the music here only brings separation and estrangement, as Lawrence‟s father characters use their instruments as a means to flee interactions with their families.

Aaron‟s music eventually provides him with the means to abandon his family and his life in the mining town altogether. One evening he simply packs up his flute and piccolo and goes off to London. Once there, he gets a job in an orchestra at the Opera, a likely venue considering the popularity of opera music in the British countryside.

Aaron‟s new job allows him to extend his acquaintance with some of the wealthier, more cultured members of his native mining-town on a relatively fresh footing, when he meets them again at a London opera performance. Thus although Aaron‟s music seems to acknowledge the potential for those who work manually to appreciate a form of high- class culture—both through Aaron‟s own musicality as well as through his being in demand for “concerts” and “dances” back home—Lawrence instead chooses to emphasize how music provides his character with an opportunity to break away from the mines and to live as an independent musician, far away from his working-class family, but “as much a gentleman as anybody” (14, 53).

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Occasionally, however, Lawrence did make an effort to counter the snobbery in his representations of the musical abilities of working- or lower-middle-class figures, if only ever to a limited extent. In revising his short story “Two Marriages” (written in

1911) into “Daughters of the Vicar” (published in 1914) Miss Louisa Lindley, the daughter of the impoverished and unappreciated, but nevertheless self-important vicar of

Aldecross, goes from “giving lessons on the piano to all but miners‟ daughters” to traveling around “giving lessons on the piano to the colliers‟ daughters” specifically, “at thirteen shillings for twenty-six lessons” (Prussian Officer 42, 214).46 Alfred Durant, meanwhile, the son of a fairly well-off, but socially lower-middle-class tailor, plays the flute well in the first version of the story and the piccolo well in the second. Many consider Alfred an “expert” at his instrument, though this sign of his musical respectability is dampened in that Louisa sees his cultural sophistication as “unmanly”

(68, 66).

Lawrence again takes up the figure of a genteel and impoverished piano teacher and heightens her dependence upon working-class miners in The Lost Girl (1920). The governess and piano-teacher Miss Frost, similarly to Louisa in the earlier story, “trudged the country” around the collier town of Woodhouse “giving music lessons to the daughters of tradesmen and of colliers who boasted pianofortes,” and even to some

“heavy-handed but dauntless colliers” themselves, “who were seized with a passion to

„play‟” (10). Miss Frost charges “fifteen shillings for thirteen weeks‟ lessons,” with “two lessons a week,” prices which are considered “rather dear” (11). All the same, enough

46 For the textual history, see John Worthen‟s introduction to The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (xl, xxxii). 208 colliers are willing to pay her so that she can support herself and help out the “domestic hearth and board” of the slowly failing merchant family, the Houghtons, who are ostensibly her primary employers (10). Lawrence presents here another, slightly unexpected, modernist portrayal of music in country towns: one where music is “seized with a passion” despite its cost, and not merely as a means by which to escape from human responsibilities and interactions.

In both “Daughters of the Vicar” and Lost Girl then, Lawrence evokes a limited refinement through music, while at the same time he separates music from its direct association with great wealth. This is a literary theme analogous to what we saw in

Huxley and Woolf in the last chapter, only here working-class amateurs, not middle-class intellectual authors, come out on top. Alfred and the colliers all manage to enhance their only moderate incomes with a noteworthy sense of respectability through their musical aspirations, even in the face of the misogynistic denigration of Louisa or Miss Frost‟s perception of a “heavy-handed” piano technique.

More significantly, perhaps, as opposed to the majority of the works discussed in the previous chapter, in these stories it is the increasingly refined workers who have money to spare, while the culturally sophisticated women do not. Both women grow increasingly impoverished and come to depend upon their musicality to insure their social superiority and indeed their ability to live. Louisa‟s relations, thanks to their intellectual and cultural sophistication, have the “semi-transparent look of the genteel, isolated poor,” and she needs to work (41). Similarly, though the colliers who employ Miss Frost think of her as “a lady if ever there was one,” she herself admits, “[w]hen I don‟t work I shan‟t

209 live” (45). After her death, her friend Mrs. Lawson confirms that Miss Frost‟s declarations were hardly a ringing endorsement of her love of teaching music: she needed to give piano lessons because she needed the money. Yet at thirteen or fifteen shillings for twenty-six lessons, Louisa is bringing in only half a shilling per lesson. Miss Frost brings in only slightly more. While we would have to allow for discrepancies between the prices of a larger city and the prices of a small town, it is useful to note the results of a survey conducted by a union of music teachers in Liverpool in 1920, which found that most lessons in the city “ranged from 1s to £1.5s” (cited in Ehrlich, Music Profession

193).47 Thus while the prices charged by the two women might have seemed high to the colliers, they were not really all that exorbitant.

For both the women, the luxury expense of the miners proves crucial to their survival.48 Both the women are dependent upon the musicality of the colliers, even as the latter think of their impoverished music teachers as being touched with a certain gentility.

Music, Lawrence suggests, even for the impoverished, such as Louisa and Miss Frost, can provide a desperate whiff of luxury, courtesy, and an upper-class refinement, but only if the colliers tend to be in an economically stronger position and interested in art.

47 The prices suggested by the Liverpool survey correspond roughly with the “shockingly low” fee of “a shilling a lesson or even less” that Sidney Harrison estimated that the average working-class piano teacher earned in London in the 1930s (114).

48 This is an interesting inversion of the situation in Joyce‟s “The Dead,” as the Misses Morkan emphasize their dependence upon “the better-class families” who make up Mary Jane‟s pupils; see chapter three (125- 26). 210

A “thousand francs of Chopin”: The Financial Elevation of the Lower-Middle and Working Classes through Music

While Lawrence focused primarily on working-class music in the countryside, other authors in this period used the increasing tendency of a modern urban society to associate the performance of music, and specifically classical music, with gentility as a means to signal their characters‟ climb up to or even entrenchment within the heights of the upper or upper-middle classes. Unlike characters such as Clarice Toft, Alma

Frothingham, and Mrs. Comstock, these up-and-coming figures put effort and soul into their music and their exertions are often rewarded. Perhaps no novel represents the ability of classical music to enable both a social and a financial ascension combined quite as flamboyantly as ‟s Trilby, published to enormous popular acclaim in 1894.49 The novel‟s ostensible villain, the poor Jewish musician Svengali, is a collage of variously xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and anti-musical stereotypes, and so starts off in an unfortunate position, to say the least. Du Maurier gratuitously describes the impoverished genius as full of “egotism and conceit,” as “both tawdry and dirty,” and as

“more greasily” and “mattedly unkempt than even a really successful pianist has any right to be, even in the best society” (57). Svengali utterly disgusts du Maurier‟s presumptive heroes, two well-cared for Englishmen and a Scottish laird, who have come over to Paris to learn how to paint. The men will occasionally socialize with Sevengali, but always reluctantly, as they find him “only to be endured for the sake of his music”

49 For the immense popularity of the novel and the production history of the so-called “Trilby Boom,” see Jenkins (229). 211

(114). The artistry of Svengali‟s music, therefore, stands out against all of his ignoble characteristics and makes him irresistible, at least at times, even to the well-born friends.

Hardly a fool, Svengali realizes that someday the seed of gentility in his music will blossom into his success, bringing him both social and financial tributes. He knows that, despite his personal ugliness, his rendition of Chopin‟s impromptu in A flat is so beautiful that it brings even the proud heart of Little Billee, the chief of the three friends,

“nigh to bursting with suppressed emotion and delight” (12-14). The down-and-out musician keeps his spirits up by imagining how such emotional reactions as Little

Billee‟s will eventually bring him, as he puts it, “a thousand francs of Chopin” (110). He dreams of days when the English aristocracy will hear him play in London only to “lose their Serenity and their Highness when they hear Svengali,” whom they will invite “to their palaces” to “bring him tea and gin” and, in a reversal of class position, generally serve him (110). Eventually, after years of effort, Svengali does reach these social and financial heights. With the help of his student Gecko, Svengali teaches “for three years— morning, noon, and night—six—eight hours a day” the beautiful, but tone-deaf Trilby to sing, with a music hall bravura, Chopin‟s impromptu (454). The world flocks to hear both Svengali and Trilby, the three heroes fall even more in love with Trilby, and

Svengali and Trilby both become ridiculously rich.

Trilby could perhaps be dismissed as a literary exploitation of the superficial adulation that often follows a mindless, if hard-earned cult of virtuosity, if du Maurier did not prevent such a reading by blatantly mocking such occurrences. Shortly before

Trilby‟s début in Paris, du Maurier has his three heroes attend a crowded musical evening

212 at the home of Lord Cornelys, an acquaintance of Little Billee‟s, who lives in the appropriately of “a palace on Camden Hill” (246). The scene provides du

Maurier with an opportunity to reflect on the different ways in which various social climbers, audiences and performers alike, tend to appreciate music. He outlines three distinct types of appreciation found in three different types of amateurs: first, there are those who treat music as a “pastime, a mere emotional delight, in which the intellect has no part”; second are those who are captivated by the virtuosic style, by performers “who play so charmingly that they make their listeners forget the master who invented the music in the lesser master who interprets it!” (249, emphasis added). These virtuosic performers use art as a little more than springboard for their own superficial success, an obvious analogy to any variety of specious social climbing, such as, for example,

Svengali‟s. Finally, there are those who affect an appreciation of or perhaps really do appreciate high-art, such as (yet again) “Sebastian Bach,” but who use their appreciation in a calculating fashion to “scor[e]” against those whom they hope to show up as philistines (250). The first category is intellectually vapid and du Maurier dismisses it.

The next two categories of listening are more sophisticated, but each involves a musical one-upmanship that depends upon an individual‟s ability to seize art not as something worthwhile in itself or for noble goals, but as a cheap cultural capital.

In outlining these three versions of musical appreciation du Maurier relies upon negative stereotypes of musical amateurs from previous centuries, including the notion that all good musicians have the taint of being immoral and bohemian (lingering stereotypes from those discussed in chapter two) in order to offer a “send-up” of those

213 who would use music as an exotic “luxury” item to enhance their social position. Du

Maurier depicts, in other words, Trilby and Svengali as Katie Batches who have temporarily conquered the world, but only through a vaguely dirty and plagiarized, if well-practiced trick. They have capitalized on a “master,” on Chopin‟s genius. At the same time, du Maurier‟s sympathetic portrayal of Trilby, “the apotheosis of voice and virtuosity,” and also of those to whom her bizarre, music-hall version of Chopin‟s

“impromptu,” carefully taught her by Svengali, brings a life-enhancing joy, might indicate a fourth, more proper type of music appreciation: namely, that the best approach to music is simply to practice and to enjoy it as best one can without using one‟s pleasures to hammer down those of others (323).

Within more moderate extremes than those outlined by du Maurier—a dirty foreigner, such as Svengali, rising to the heights of English society—and with therefore more safely positive connotations, other twentieth-century authors use their characters‟ increasing appreciation of classical music as a sign of their upwardly mobile middle-class credentials. These are the characters who on their way up the social scale would presumably cross paths with those upper-class characters on their way down discussed in chapter three. In Tono-Bungay, for instance, as George Ponderevo traces his “social trajectory” from the servants‟ quarters at Bladesover to the heights of his uncle‟s pharmaceutical empire his appreciation of classical music functions as a clear marker of his social, financial, and intellectual rise (6). When George leaves his provincial to continue his education at the Consolidated Technical Schools in

London he starts to explore the opportunities for art and music available to the general

214 populace within the capital. He describes how one night, “in a real rapture,” he “walked round the upper gallery of the Albert Hall and listened for the first time to great music; I believe now that it was a rendering of Beethoven‟s Ninth Symphony” (120). His “I believe now” signals an increased understanding and enjoyment of music as years pass, a time during which he gets richer and generally more sophisticated.

George‟s increased interest in classical music can be contrasted to the stolid intellectual state of his lower-middle-class wife Marion. When courting, Marion “liked the effect of going about,” and so George would take her to the movies, as well as “to

Earl‟s Court, to , to theatres and concerts, but not often to concerts, because, although Marion „liked‟ music, she didn‟t like „too much of it‟” (191). Although Marion can play the piano “at an elementary level,” she is not interested in the deeper enjoyments of music (213). Her stunted musical education hardly fulfills the ideals set up by teachers such as Hullah or Somervell, a failure which Wells symbolizes by having her use her piano as a mere pedestal, not of Bach or of Beethoven, but as the resting place of an

“India-rubber plant in a Doulton-ware pot” (215). For Marion, music is more of a superficial social ornament than an for enjoyment, pleasure, or even for an intellectual advancement. As George hunts for a deeper understanding of life, Marion

“pursued some limited, clearly seen and experienced ideal—that excluded all other possibilities” (213). George‟s interest in the intellectual, pleasurable, and cultural possibilities of music signal his increasingly active engagement with life, while Marion‟s disinterest indicates her ultimately stagnant mindset.

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One of the most sophisticated connections of an appreciation of classical music with both intellectual and socio-economic advancement can be found in Arnold Bennett‟s

Clayhanger series, which signals how music as a social marker can shift over the span of three generations. In the introductory novel Clayhanger (1910), Bennett presents us with the gentle, precocious Edwin, the son of the tough, ascetic Darius Clayhanger. Having been threatened with the work-house as a child, Darius has sweated his way up to the proprietorship of a successful printing business in the midland pottery-town of Bursley.

Always careful with his money, he increases the financial security of his family, but keeps his son in a relative state of cultural impoverishment. Despite Edwin‟s aesthetic interests, Darius is either unaware of or simply unwilling to make up for the artistic deficiencies of his son‟s schooling. As a child, Edwin “had never seen a great picture or statue, nor heard great orchestral or solo music” nor received any substantial education in the arts (14). Edwin begins life then, as a middle-, if not upper-middle-class young man economically, but with a level of aesthetic ignorance that in the general modernist schema, its erroneousness aside, would align his cultural outlook with that of the working classes.

There is, nonetheless, to borrow a phrase, “a touch of the artist” about young

Edwin and Bennett traces the youth‟s aesthetic and intellectual awakening as he begins to socialize with the variously cultured classes of Bursley. Though his father squashes his dreams by coercing him into the family printing-business, a trade which, however respectable, represents a career path less artistically inclined than that of his first choice of architecture, Edwin‟s aesthetic bent continues to manifest itself through his

216 appreciation of both culture in general and music in particular. As he grows and matures,

Edwin moves from an enjoyment of popular to classical music. His first encounter with music is through his father‟s foreman, Big James, at a performance of the latter‟s vocal quartet in a local “free and easy” (an informal precursor to the Victorian music halls).

Listening to the music, Edwin becomes “thrilled, as by an exquisite and vast revelation”

(92). The singing enlivens him and he wants to hear more.

This musical experience broadens as the Clayhanger family moves into the finer areas of Bursley and Edwin becomes friends with the more prominently established, comfortably cultured Orgeaves. Edwin particularly enjoys hearing the eldest Orgreave brother, Tom, play (whom else?) Bach on the piano. As opposed to his unproblematic enjoyment of the quartet singing, Bach represents an arduous pleasure for which Edwin has to strive. He repeatedly asks Tom to play Bach‟s preludes and fugues, so that he might “examine once more and yet again the sensations which the music produced”

(334). The fugues especially offer him a potential for increased pleasure, something to work for, all the while providing him with “a pleasant and yet a trying anxiety,” and a

“deep joy” (334). Though Bennett falls into typical twentieth-century stereotypes by associating “free and easy” songs with the working-class Big James and Bach with the relatively well-off, professionally employed Orgeaves—the father is an architect and

Tom is “junior partner in a firm of solicitors”—Edwin‟s rise suggests the importance of making a sustained intellectual effort in one‟s attempt to become cultured (236). To become truly genteel, and not just wealthy, Bennett suggests, one has to work for it, not just by earning money, as Darius did, but by exploring new ideas. This is the primary

217 type of effort that leads to an inner-nobility, and music provides an ideal channel for such an exertion.

Bennett therefore sets the Orgreave family up as a model of musical and intellectual, if not necessarily fiscal, success. Unlike the tight-fisted Darius, the architect

Osmond Orgreave lives beyond his means and eventually leaves his wife and unmarried daughter relatively impoverished. As such, it is not so much on account of the family‟s ostensible wealth, as it is through its culture, that the Orgreaves are an ideal to be imitated. Not only does the star-struck Edwin admire the piano-playing Orgreaves, but even Edwin‟s future wife Hilda, who comes from a hereditarily well-off family, looks up to them. In Hilda Lessways (1911), Hilda sees the Orgreaves as manifesting a “facile and yet aristocratic unceremoniousness,” suggestive of the fact that they are “obviously of a class superior to her own” (224). One of the primary ways in which the Orgeave family‟s superiority represents itself is through their musical evenings. Hilda listens “with pleasure” as Tom plays Beethoven. For “[b]eyond a little part-singing at school,” she

“had no practical acquaintance with music,” for “there had never been a piano at home.”

Despite this initial lack, when she hears Tom and his sisters play transcriptions of

Beethoven symphonies “her thoughts and her aspirations” become “ennobled” (223).

When Hilda and Edwin attempt to secure their future social standing in These Twain

(1915) their own plans for “Musical Evenings” mimic those of the Orgeaves and the first is “exciting as a social manifestation” (75, 170). Edwin has come a far way from any taint of the workhouse feared by his father.

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Bennett, however, does not represent the social and cultural rise of the

Clayhangers uncritically. As Edwin‟s branch of the family consolidates its cultural and economic influence in Bursley, combining Darius‟s business sense with the Orgeaves‟ artistic interests, Bennett offers an analysis of how a cultural life received with too much

“facility” can become constraining. George Edwin Cannon, raised by his mother Hilda and his step-father Edwin, represents an apparent culmination of the latter‟s own aesthetic endeavors. George is adopted by Edwin after his unfortunate, destitute father, -time clerk who had married for money and then bigamously married Hilda, has had to flee from the law (Hilda 435). When Edwin marries Hilda, young George takes on a privileged life, complete with “piano lessons” and musical evenings (These Twain 373), which he remembers in the last novel of the series, The Roll-Call (1918), which focuses on his life. Supported financially and emotionally by his step-father, George eventually moves to London to train as an architect. Once there, he is well positioned to put his fingers on the cultural pulse of the capital, much like George Ponderevo had before him and as Edwin dreamed of doing.

Unlike Ponderevo, however, or his stepfather, George‟s sophisticated upbringing has upheld in him both a distinct sort of laziness and a taste for a pre-digested

“exoticism” (Roll-Call 59). George, Bennett tells us, “really loved music, but he happened to be at that age, from which some people never emerge, at which the judgment depends almost completely on extraneous suggestion” (57). Refusing to explore music for himself, George relies on the preconceived opinions of his mentor, Mr. Enwright.

Whereas Edwin once strove eagerly to understand the initially unfamiliar sounds of Bach,

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George “had no traffic with the unfamiliar. Unfamiliar items on a program displeased him. He had heard compositions by , but he could make nothing of them, and his timid, untravelled taste feared to like them” (251). Strauss, unfortunately, has the dubious attribute of being a composer to whom “Mr. Enwright himself was mainly inimical,” and so George simply dismisses him (251). On the other hand, George will extend his approval unthinkingly to music he perceives to be sufficiently comprehensible, so long as it is pre-approved by Enwright and touched with a hint of the glamour of a foreign origin, such as the compositions of Glazounov, whom George, through Enwright, has “come to admire” (58).

Part of what is so interesting about George‟s musical evolution is how Bennett employs it to show how the art form used by culturally insecure parents for self- improvement can become a means for their trendy children to separate themselves off from others. Despite the detail that George‟s tastes are, for all intents and purposes, a bit borrowed, he feels secure enough in them to use his musical preferences to assert his cultural sophistication in front of his love interest, Marguerite. Joining Marguerite in the garret of the artist Alfred Prince, George disdainfully observes the “small, pale man, with a small brown beard, very shabby,” who was “full of small nervous gestures” (49). When

Prince announces a desire to go to , George becomes all of a sudden interested and asks if he wishes to hear the scheduled ballet music by Glazounov. Prince replies that he wants to hear a new Elgar piece. Unfortunately, George sees this reaction as “a snub,” as a challenge to what he considers to be his own more sensitive taste (52). He had “derived from Mr. Enwright positive opinions about the relative importance of Elgar

220 and Glazounov,” and the threadbare man‟s preference for the all-too-English composer seems to George almost offensive and smacking of a provincialism. Prince‟s apparent lack of sophistication adds to George‟s indignation when Prince invites Marguerite to go to the Proms with him (51).

In a move similar to Burke‟s in “An Art Night,” Bennett does not allow such musical snobbery to go unchecked. Instead, he offers a gently mocking picture of

George‟s shallow use of music as a means to set himself in a class apart. Having refused to go to the Proms with Prince, Marguerite agrees to go with George. Once at Queen‟s

Hall, the home of the Proms from 1893 until it was destroyed in 1941, the two are swept up in the atmosphere and grow “inspired by the feeling that life was a grand thing” (56).

The orchestra pauses and then begins again. As the music picks up, George listens,

“ready to put himself into the mood of admiration if it was the Glazounov item” (56-57).

Yet the conflict in the garret combined with his own uncertain musical taste causes him to question himself. He wonders whether the music he is ready to admire is, in fact, what he thinks it is, “[w]as it Glazounov? It sounded fine. Surely it sounded Russian.” Yet it is not Russian, for peering at a nearby program he sees that he is listening to Elgar‟s “Sea

Pictures.”50 This realization prompts George to say to Marguerite, with a “careless condescension,” that the piece is “only the Elgar,” as well as to reconsider the situation and to find “that the music was not fine” (57).

50 Indeed how George could even have thought the “Sea Pictures” were Russian is a bit confusing, as its movements are all choral works set to lyrics in English, and it is a bit hard to imagine the songs being performed without the vocal lines. 221

Bennett here pokes holes in George‟s musical pretentions, largely to suggest that his education is merely unfinished. All the same, when the “Sea-Pictures” (these really are quite fine) are over, Marguerite lets out “a sigh of appreciation” for the music. By the completion of the set, “George, too,” has reflected “upon the sensations produced within him by Elgar” and is “ready to admit that, though Elgar could of course not be classed with the foreigner, there might be something to be said for him after all” (58). George‟s borrowed methods of social advancement hold him back, but self-reliance and an enlightened attitude could allow him to find pleasure and satisfaction where he had not previously expected them.

George‟s unexpected enjoyment, then, signals the means for his own self- improvement, as well as a potential way for him to break out of his self-fashioned and isolating class consciousness. His appreciation, no matter how tepid, of Elgar‟s “Sea-

Pictures” creates a listening community quite similar to that which the Handbooks hoped that national songs and classical music in general might in the schools. As George enjoys the music despite himself, he joins not only the ranks of Marguerite and Alfred Prince, but also of all the others he has seen “perched on other ledges” or on “cold steam-pipes” in the Queen‟s Hall, including a “girl with a big face and heavy red lips” who “sat alone” as Elgar sent her “into an ecstasy” (57). In a way we might see this as Bennett‟s response to Forster‟s Howards End. If in chapter five of Howards End Forster conspicuously divides a Queen‟s Hall audience up into Foreigners (Fräulein Mosebach) and English

(Mrs. Munt), intellectual aesthetes (Tibby) and sentimental amateurs (Helen), and the rich

(the Schlegels) and the poor (Bast), here Bennett attempts to bring all these figures

222 together again, if only for a moment. At the same time he suggests that a truly noble, a truly princely approach to music is to avoid superficial artistic attributes, and to strive for a certain, half-thought-out and half-instinctive catholicity of taste, as does Edwin

Clayhanger.

It is fitting that Bennett sets one of the finest moments of cultural unity in the

Clayhanger series in the Queen‟s Hall. The venue provided an environment where everyone could gain easy access to good performances at cheap prices and it, perhaps more than any other site in early-twentieth-century England, save the Crystal Palace, represented a symbol of the rising engagement of the working and the lower-middle classes with classical music. Here even the “girl with a big face,” a “simple creature” roughly equivalent to Leonard Bast‟s wife Jackie, could sit and enjoy Glazounov and

Elgar, Haydn and Mozart, and even Bach (57). Although Forster (ironically, one wants to hope) refers to the Hall as the “dreariest music-room in London” and Margaret

Schlegel and Leonard Bast, despite their divergent capacities for aesthetic appreciation, can both agree that “the atmosphere of Queen‟s Hall” was “oppressive,” many others found it a wonderful center for cultural enlightenment (44, 49). Virginia Woolf, in a diary entry in 1915 noted that the Hall was a “little box of pure beauty set down in the middle of London streets” filled with “people—all looking so ordinary, crowding to hear

[the music], as if they weren‟t ordinary after all, or had an ambition for something better.” Amongst all these “ordinary” people, Woolf spotted Oliver Strachey, Lytton‟s brother, “Bernard Shaw, grown a whitehaired benevolent old man,” while “down in the orchestra was Walter Lamb.”

223

This is not to suggest that Woolf herself idealized the hall. In the same entry she records that though she heard a “divine concert,” the “playing wasn[‟]t very good,” and that what was played was somewhat spoiled by the noise of those around her who ate chocolates and “crumbled the silver into balls,” thereby impinging upon the increasingly wide-spread middle-class desire for a silent adoration of music (“, 1915,”

Diary, Vol. 1, 33, 34).51 If the fusion, in reality, was not always an easy or a complete one, the Queen‟s Hall nevertheless enabled a surprising mingling of various classes and aesthetic conventions.

Audiences, in fact, with wide-ranging socio-economic backgrounds were the most notable feature of the Queen‟s Hall, particularly due to its being the home of the Proms.

The Proms began in 1895 under the auspices of the Queen‟s Hall manager Robert

Newman and the conductor Sir Henry J. Wood (knighted in 1911), the latter of whom music historian Leanne Langley has fittingly noted became a “cultural icon” (34).52

Taking over the Hall almost from its first day, Newman endeavored to make it different from the formal atmospheres of already established venues. The ambiance was to be almost, if not quite, like a music hall, not to mention unintentionally reminiscent of the

Oxford college concerts discussed in chapter two. W. W. Thompson, who worked under

Newman, remembered how “in the early days the promenade floor was edged with stalls

51 It is interesting to contrast this memory of Woolf‟s annoyance of the music-hall like atmosphere of Queen‟s Hall to a memory of Arnold Bennett‟s enthusiasm of “an eager tumultuous mass (excited by expectation), struggling to get at the ticket offices” (“February 13, 1897,” Journal of Arnold Bennett 34).

52 This designation may be taken somewhat literally as a bust of Henry Wood was established in Queen‟s Hall in 1938 (“Sir Henry Wood‟s Jubilee.” MT 79.1148 (Oct., 1938): 778). The bust still presides over the Proms today at the Royal Albert Hall, where the series moved after the destruction of the Queen‟s Hall in . 224 for the sale of ices, cigars, and flowers,” while “the centre-piece on the floor was—as nearly all the world knows—a fountain” (Hill, Sir Henry 4).

In part, this informal atmosphere was intended to attract a new audience. As

Leanne Langley recounts, Newman “targeted not the conglomerate audience of established orchestral concerts, but a far larger, metropolitan audience living mostly in the new suburbs—generally of modest means and few preconceived expectations, but with genuine intellectual and social aspirations” (44). As such, the audience was noticeably, almost flamboyantly, diverse and generally consisted, as Arthur Symons observed, of “some specimen of every age and class; aged ladies, sitting bowed over patiently in the few uncomfortable seats of the arena with their backs to the orchestra, profiles of young girls, heads of musicians, half-,” in fact “all the London of motor- cars and penny omnibuses clustered in one heap and for one purpose: to hear good music cheap” (“Promenade Concerts.” SR. 7 Sept. 1907: 298). Most suggestive of this increased audience for classical music was the removal of the traditionally fixed, exclusive “stall” seats to create more room for the general promenading public at the price of a shilling. As Paul Kildea puts it, the more varied audiences “were physically taking over their betters‟ territory” in an informal invasion (12).

The relaxed atmosphere of the Queen‟s Hall, however, did not lend itself towards a relaxed quality of music. Henry Wood‟s insistence on conducting first rate works at the

Proms makes Woolf‟s description of the venue as a place for people who “had an

225 ambition” or at least a longing “for something better” one that is especially apt.53 For many members of this “shilling” public the Proms were more than a carnivalesque good time with atmospheric music. They were a means to gain enjoyment along with a cultural education. Despite Woolf‟s irritation at the seeming irreverence of chocolate eaters and silver-ball crumplers (and it is hard, particularly from a twenty-first-century perspective, not to sympathize with her on this point) the Proms were, for many, both an enjoyably educational event and an event that was educationally enjoyable. The early twentieth-century music historian C. B. Rees, for instance, cheerfully claimed “that without Henry Wood and the Proms I might today be utterly allergic to good music.”

With what is no doubt a personal touch, Rees mused that

if a young and lonely individual, thrown on slender resources in London, chooses on a wet night to wander into Queen‟s Hall, largely because it is the only place he can afford to enter, and finds, in a mood of mingled curiosity and obtuse ignorance, that something goes on there which has on him the effect of a kind of „conversion‟, he cannot be expected to forget it. This experience is not unique. Indeed, Henry Wood has made it general (Hill, Sir Henry 20).

In confirmation of Rees‟s assertions, similarly personal, eye-opening encounters with classical music at Queen‟s Hall can be found in reminiscences from figures as diverse as the East End Thomas Burke and the populist, Balliol-educated philosopher C. E.

M. Joad.54

53 Meanwhile, Woolf‟s denigration of the playing at the Proms should be read in context with her comments on the distracting nature of the “human element” of music; chapter three (152 n86).

54 Burke, who grew up as a lower-middle-class youth and worked as an office boy before becoming a journalist and fiction writer, recounts the “faithful audiences that waited at the doors of Queen‟s Hall each summer” and how they “showed Sir Henry that he had a nucleus to work upon for the forming of a body of sound musical taste and interest. We were young, and the majority was, I imagine, in my own condition; that is, keenly responsive to music but knowing little about it. He did not rush us into it and take us out of 226

The emphasis here on discovery and “conversion,” on an increasingly sophisticated taste with regards to classical music among the working and lower-middle classes is a revealing twist on the modernist perspective. Indeed, for those familiar with modernist literature in particular, one of the more surprising rhetorical associations tied up with the Proms, and indeed with other concerts as well, might be a contemporary emphasis on the superior appreciation of music by those in the lower socio-economic tiers of society. Discussing “Queen‟s Hall during the Promenade Season” in Nights in

London, Burke rhetorically asks,

[w]here are the empty seats? In the five-shilling tier. Where is the hall packed to suffocation? In the shilling promenade. In the promenade there are seats for about one hundred, and room for about seven hundred. That means that six hundred Londoners stand, close-packed, with hardly room for a change of posture and in an atmosphere overcharged with and sound for two hours and a half, listening, not to the inanities of Sullivan or Offenbach or Arditi, but to Weber, Palestrina, , Tchaikowsky, Wieniawski, Chopin, Mozart, Handel, and even the starch-stiff Bach (96).

our depth. He cleverly led us on by degrees so that, speaking for myself, as a result of his education I would not today turn out to hear the programme I heard with such delight at that first of my Promenades in 1901. Trusting to my memory, the programme included the Tannhäuser March; the Overture to Merry Wives of Windsor; Three Hungarian Dances (Brahms); Gounod‟s Funeral March of a Marionette; the „1812‟ Overture; and the Mazurka from Coppélia” (Hill, Sir Henry 17). It is hard not to hear in Burke‟s description a hint of snobbery, which he sees as a refinement of taste. Though this could be merely a quibble, for it depends upon what one thinks of works such as the „1812‟ Overture. For Burke‟s background, see Witchard (63-66). Joad came down from Balliol where he seems to have missed the majority of musically enriched opportunities offered by Oxford in the first decades of the twentieth century. He remembers of the Queen‟s Hall, however: “I was still in the Beethoven stage when I first came to London and went to the Proms. Friday night was Beethoven night and week after week I was there to hear the symphonies from one to nine and the piano , usually played in reverse order, from five to one. At this period there was no Bach night, but it was Sir Henry‟s habit to insert a piece of Bach either in the first part of the programme or, more frequently as the flood of ballads let loose by Messrs. Boosey and Chappell began to recede, after the interval. Thus it was under Sir Henry‟s beneficent auspices that I heard my first Brandenburgs. Bach came, was heard and conquered and for a dozen or more years after the establishment of the Bach night, Wednesday evening became for me the high light of the week. And for thousands of others…. Young, not very well off, often rather lonely, men and women would flock in their hundreds to stand at Queen‟s Hall through Brandenburgs and suites” (Hill, Sir Henry 164-66). See also Ring (127) and Bowyer (166), who remembers a limited number of free seats at the hall, often hard to get because of the demand for them, available on Sundays in 1907. 227

While this is indeed a tribute to Henry Wood‟s successful educational enterprise, it is also a sign that the increased opportunities both for a musical education and to hear music were creating a larger, more culturally sophisticated audience, one filled with individuals in the cheap seats who were willing to flex their auditory and intellectual muscles and to represent themselves as superior to those of the flippant upper classes in their boxes.

Importantly, this trend did not stop at the floor of Queen‟s Hall, but was evident in other theaters across London, including Covent Garden. A “devout Wagnerian”— most likely H. C. Colles, the Oxford-educated music editor of the Times from 1911-

1943—described his position “perched distressfully” high in the gallery of the opera hall, largely invisible to those in the boxes and stalls below him, and proclaimed, “[i]t is an accepted tradition among the critics that the most musical portion of the audience sits in the cheaper seats…. Taken generally, the gallery is more serious, more instructed, and more devout than the stalls or the boxes or the balcony” (“Wagner from the Gallery.”

Times. 3 May 1913: 6). Of course as mentioned in the previous chapter, The Times usually took to touting the brilliant nobility in the boxes and stalls, not the “devout” in the gallery. All the same, those high-up in the section of the “gods” were listening and paying attention, and not all of them had the educational background of someone such as

Colles. William Bowyer, for instance, was raised in at the turn of the century and was board-school educated. He lovingly describes in his art-treatise cum autobiography, Brought out in Evidence, how during the pre-war seasons of the “Ballets

Russes” at the Covent Garden Opera House, he and his friends “always went in the gallery,” which, aside from providing a “not at all a bad viewpoint,” had an audience that 228 he and his friends thought “was more intelligent than in any other part of the house”

(161). At this time Bowyer was earning £70 a year as a Second Division clerk with the

Civil Service in Whitehall, a position he had not gotten by preferment, but by working his way up the Civil Service ladder (125).

Bowyer‟s claim to a musical acumen and a desire to hear the best music was hardly unique. An example of similarly musically astute individuals would be those that attended the South Place Ethical Society‟s Sunday Concert series at Finsbury Square,

London. The series started in 1887 and forty years later had provided over a thousand concerts for predominantly working- and lower middle-class audiences in the East End.55

Seats were free, although a collection basket was passed around for donations. The series, under the auspices of A. J. Clements, offered a wide array of chamber music, from works by relatively familiar composers, such as and Antonin Dvořák, to more obscure ones, such as Edith Swepstone and Richard Walthew. On occasion, specialty concerts were accompanied by informative lectures and by biographical program notes.56

55 An excellent source for information of the South Place Concerns is W. S. Meadmore‟s The Story of a Thousand Concerts: (February 20th 1887—February 20th 1927). The book was written to commemorate the thousandth concert of the South Place concerts. The South Place Concerts run by the South Place Ethical Society (S.P.E.S.) were a continuation of the concert series provided by an organization called the People‟s Concert Society, which begun in 1878 and ran for ten years before the S.P.E.S took over. The first season given by the S.P.E.S. in 1887 consisted of seven concerts and offered programs that “contained descriptive notes,” which “were sold at a penny.” The second season was in 1888 and consisted of 13 concerts. By 1889 Meadmore notes that “[t]he season consisted of 26 concerts; audiences were very good, and on many occasions people were unable to find even standing room. Press notices were again very encouraging, the Daily Telegraph, Daily News, Pall Mall Gazette and the Star all saying many kindly things” (The Story 6).

56 In the Eighth Season of 1893-94, for instance, “[o]n the afternoon of the Schumann concert, Mr. E. F. Jacques, the Editor of the Musical Times, gave a lecture on the composer with vocal and instrumental illustrations by students of the R. A. M. At these concerts the programmes contained biographical sketches 229

Similarly structured were the “Sunday Evening Concert Society” concerts held at the Working Men‟s College, on Crowndale Road.57 The society was led by W. W.

Cobbett and had a substantial list of vice-presidents, among whom were the musicologist

Edward J. Dent, the composer Walford Davies, and Arnold Bennett.58 These concerts, like some of the South Place concerts, and even the college concerts at Oxford, had mixed programs, including more difficult chamber music and lighter songs. One example might be the program which in the first half consisted of Bach‟s “Coffee”

Cantata, with the “argument” explained on the program, while the second half consisted of a selection of traditional songs and poetry set to music, such as “A Shropshire Lad” by

A. E. Housman with music by Ivor Gurney (“22 Mar. 1925.” CPH). Another might be the program for the 22nd concert of the fifteenth season and the 339th concert of the series, which occurred in 1935. On this evening, performers presented Beethoven‟s quartet F major, Op. 59, No. 1, Brahms‟s intermezzo in E flat major, Op. 117, No. 1 and his rhapsody in G minor Op. 79, No.2, as well as Stravinsky‟s Sonata for Pianoforte in three movements, followed by a Sibelius quartet in D minor, which had been featured four times previously (“31 Mar. 1935.” CPH). Both programs, held ten years apart, are

of the composers, admirably written by W. T. Restall, a member of the Committee” (Meadmore, The Story 9).

57 The Working Men‟s College concerts, like the South Place Society concerts were free, ostensibly. Organizing these endeavors must have taken quite an effort, but it also took money. The programs advertised “All Seats Free,” but the programs themselves cost three pence. As at the South Place Concerts, there was a “Silver Collection to Defray Expenses.” Occasionally, the programs also carried the warning that “WE CANNOT KEEP UP THE STANDARD OF THESE CONCERTS unless EVERY member of the audience gives AT LEAST Sixpence” (“15 Mar. 1925.” CPH). Somehow or another the organizers got the requisite funds, as the concerts continued for years with excellent programming.

58 The names of Dent, Davies, and Bennett, as well as other vice-presidents of the society are listed on the programs printed for the performances. 230 representative of the Sunday Evening Concert Society concerts, which went on for decades.59 The continued quality and occasional daring of music performed at the South

Place Society‟s and the Working Men‟s College‟s long-lasting concert series reveal not only a willingness, but also a desire to hear such music on the part of their audiences.

One interesting facet of the South Place audiences, in particular, is how their aesthetic and intellectual attributes were positively portrayed in the press. In 1925, W. S.

Meadmore, a fervent advocate of the South Place concerts, observed that “[a]t South

Place the audience are not there to hear some famous virtuoso display his or her personality; they go to hear music and the music must be of the highest quality” (“The

South Place Chamber Music Concerts” 79).60 In yet another echo of S. T. Hawtrey,

Thomas Burke, and others, Meadmore touts the musical amateurs in the cheap seats as

59 In concert of November of 1925, for instance, the first half of the program included Beethoven‟s in E flat major and songs by Handel, Brahms, and Beethoven, and an organ concerto by W. Fr. Bach transcribed for the piano. The second half included pieces by Ernest Bloch and Brahms (“29 Nov. 1925.” CPH). At another concert in March, 1927, the series offered “Variations of a Theme of Beethoven for Two Pianofortes” by Saint-Saens and Beethoven‟s Quartet for Strings in B flat major. The names of the movements were printed in Italian on the program “i. Allegro con brio ii. Adagio ma non troppo, iii. Scherzo. Allegro. iv. La Malinconia. Questo pezzo si deve trattare colla più gran delicatezza, leading to v. Allegretto quasi Allegro” (“6 Mar. 1917.” CPH).

60 In Story of a Thousand Concerts Meadmore bolsters his claims with those of other critics, such as D. Donaldson‟s comment in the Musical Standard on , 1911, which notes that although the first concerts provided by South Place “seem to have been frankly educational and not altogether unconnected with the „uplifting of the masses‟ … nowadays, while happily they have lost none of their democratic character, they are free from the definitely didactic, and whole-souled enjoyment is the prevailing mood with the audience…. Of the programmes it is impossible to speak too highly: it is not too much to say that they are invariably interesting. A sane catholicity has always directed the Committee; and, while due prominence is given to the classics, all phases of modern work are accorded a ready hearing.” Donaldson goes on to write, “The music of friends! It is in very great measure to the frank co-operative feeling between the artists, the Concert Committee, and the audience that the continued success of the work at South Place is due. It is an undertaking conceived in the best spirit and carried out in a highly efficient and enlightened manner, worth the support of all genuine music-lovers” (quoted in Meadmore, The Story 20- 21). In 1938, celebrating the 1,300th concert of the series, The Times ran a short review of a concert consisting, among other works, of a Mozart Quartet performed by the Griller Quartet and a Schumann , featuring Myra Hess, and noted that the “programme was an admirable example of the fine quality and high aims” of the series (“South Place Concert.” Times. 1 Mar. 1938: 14). 231 the ideal audience for first-rate performances of classical composers, as they are open- minded, objective, intelligent, thoughtful, and desire a musical excellence. At the same time, an ability to appreciate such music provided working- and lower-middle-class audiences, and their fictional counterparts, with a way of reaching a luxury of the

“highest quality” without the benefit of trust-funds, securities, sinecures, or incoming rents from landed-estates. As result of these new artistic experiences, largely provided through increasing opportunities for a musical education and to both play and hear music at affordable prices, those classes that had traditionally been intellectually and aesthetically disenfranchised from society‟s “high-brow” art could claim a gentility and culturally competency which had largely been denied to them on account of their supposed intellectual ignorance.

An Unexpected Accord

This historical outlay brings us around full circle to the modernist question regarding the value of classical music as delineated according to socio-economic status, only with a much wider context: one broadened to include not only the perspective of middle-class literati, but those of the working- and lower-middle-class musical amateurs themselves. As we saw in the last chapter, upper-class characters such as Alma

Frothingham from Gissing‟s The Whirlpool, Henry Otway from Woolf‟s Night and Day, and Eliot‟s characters from within poems such as “Portrait of a Lady” and “Conversation

Galante” see only a superficial value in art music. They cling to it parasitically in a half- hearted attempt to retain some of their fragile gentility. In doing so, they ambivalently 232 re-enforce the cultural association of music with a refined lifestyle. Conversely, through their lack of an aesthetic acuity and their unwillingness to engage with music any more than intermittently they also reveal their cultural IQs to be roughly equivalent to how the modernists portrayed those of the working classes, through characters such as Huxley‟s

Frank Illidge or Woolf‟s children singing incomprehensibly in The Years. Modernist authors such as Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf emphasize the shallow musical appreciation of such characters to suggest the cultural bankruptcy of the majority of both the upper and lower classes in order to establish a role for themselves as the primary executors of

Britain‟s cultural legacy.

All of these unsophisticated characters, however, stand in distinct counterpoint to the musical capacities of a sizable number of the rising working and lower-middle classes. Individuals such as Mark Benney, William Bowyer, Harold Brown, D. R.

Davies, and Elizabeth Ring, not to mention the countless audience members of the

Queen‟s Hall concerts, and the concerts of the South Place Ethical Society and the

Sunday Evening Concert Society at the Working Men‟s College, on Crowndale Road, all sought out and appreciated the joys of Bach, Beethoven, Elgar, Mozart, and countless other sophisticated musical works. Although largely ignored by modernist authors, such real life characters found some form of fictional representation in the intellectual, aesthetic, and sheer willful perseverance embodied within the brilliant “temperament” of

Burke‟s “factory girl” in Spitalfields, in Lawrence‟s Aaron Sisson, in the Clayhanger-

Cannon family, and in Lawrence‟s and Gissing‟s nameless accumulation of collier piano- players, whom their authors refer to with a grudging respect. While such figures, both in

233 real life and in fiction, may have disapproved of and in some cases loathed outright the inhumane conditions that, no matter how indirectly, frequently provided for the patronage that allowed for much classical music to be written and maintained in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century British society, all of them found an abundance of value either in performing or in listening to, and quite often in both, this allegedly elitist art.

Ironically then, amidst all the gold and glitter of early-twentieth-century depictions of classical music, the supposedly high-art modernist musical-literary project had surprising correlations to the goals of the promoters of the South Place Ethical

Society concerts, of the board schools, of institutions such as the Toynbee Hall music school, and even, though perhaps less overtly so, of the managements of the music halls.

Both the modernists and the working and lower-middle classes of the early-twentieth century each claimed the social and intellectual value of classical music in order to enjoy it. Yet, they also claimed a musicality to establish their own cultural authority. They used music to claim a gentility or an intellectual capability that the upper classes would deny to them on the basis of their lack of an obscenely enormous income or their supposed cultural ignorance.

One crucial difference was that modernist intellectuals set out to exclude everyone but themselves from an appreciation of classical music, only begrudgingly alluding to the occasional interloper. Working- and lower-middle-class individuals, on the other hand, acknowledged that the number of musical amateurs was, in reality, expanding. The attempt of the modernists to co-opt classical music for themselves would thus inevitably be a futile one. If there was an equation between socio-economic class

234 and an ability to appreciate classical music, it was an open-ended one. The general forces at work in the British society of the early-twentieth century—from the social charities of the educated elite to the desire to learn and play on the part of the disenfranchised classes themselves—were causing music to become not an elitist art, but a democratic one.

Colliers were playing pianos and opera was everywhere. Expectations were thus fraught with inversions and as the twentieth century progressed, instead of being an art available only to the very select, classical music gained wider and more varied audiences than ever before. For many of these audiences, an increasing appreciation of and desire for classical music helped to formulate a strong sense of a culturally and an intellectually legitimated place in society.

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Chapter 5: A “curious music”: Music and the Positive Imagining of Homosexual Selves

One of the most notable inversions that came about through the increasing cultural value of classical music was how alienated minority groups relied upon an association with the art as performers, as composers, and as sophisticated, knowing audience members in order to elevate or to justify their place in society. As I argued in the previous two chapters, both modernist authors and members of the middle and working classes used an affiliation with classical music to claim a cultural and an intellectual foothold in British society at the expense of the fading artistic intelligence of the upper and aristocratic classes. This chapter will focus on a more pointed facet of this paradigm by examining the creation (in the late-nineteenth century) and the consolidation

(in the early-twentieth) of the association between music and homosexuality through literature.

For years literary critics and historians have usefully pointed to the tendency of authors, both sympathetic and hostile to social reform, to make a connection between music and homosexual subcultures. Most scholars, however, mark the connection between the two and move on to other points. Perhaps this is because any relationship between the traditional unspeakability of homosexuality—that love which was not to be discussed—and the Romantic fascination with the transcendental ineffability of music—

236 that art which could not be articulated—is understandable, and from this perspective it seems as if no more need be said.1

Yet, one of the most abiding, fascinating, and self-promoting minority engagements with classical music since the late-nineteenth century has been by homosexual writers or by writers sympathetic to oppressed homosexuals who actively created a positive, often laudatory tie between homosexual sensibilities and music. This tradition takes part, then, in what H. G. Cocks, in his indispensible study Nameless

Offences, has identified as the tendency for “the unspeakable status of homosexuality in nineteenth-century society” to produce “paradoxical opportunities not only for representation, but also for self-making” (199). Music provided one such opportunity to create a generally affirmative homosexual self-image, both for private and public purposes. Moving beyond a simple ambiguity, fin-de-siècle writers such as Oscar Wilde,

Amy Levy, and Marc-André Raffalovich capitalized on the increasingly respectable, yet still subversively bohemian connotations of classical music to depict and often to exalt homoerotic desire.

Authors such as Wilde and his associates explored how music could provide an encouraging way to contextualize same-sex relationships by encoding the indefiniteness of music with the historically-inflected overtones explored in chapter two. For these writers, music stood for a liberal morality and a comprehensive form of self-knowledge, one not precisely articulated, but not so indefinite as to exclude carefully constructed intellectual and physical homoerotic implications. At the same time, they realized that

1 For the unspeakability of homosexuality, see below; Dahlhaus discusses the origins of the Romantic fascination with the inarticulable ineffability or ambiguity of music (6-10). 237 any form of self-knowledge can be perverted when combined with a willful ignorance or shallow self-centeredness. Raffalovich and Robert Hichens in particular reveal and satirize how the moral and intellectual implications inherent in the Oxonian music of

Pater and Wilde could become diluted to serve as a superficial code for cruising.

As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, authors would rely on both strands of this literary construction, serious and satiric, to re-inscribe and to expand in avowedly modern terms the by now traditional association of music with homosexuality.

Moving away from an overt Hellenism, music became the means for some, such as

Edward Carpenter and, to a lesser degree, Havelock Ellis, to provide self-validation to homosexuals by emphasizing the cultural benefits of deviancies from the norm, from the simplest formulations of “art for art‟s sake” to the expression of a complex physiological and psychological aesthetic. Carpenter, in particular, advanced an affirmative tradition by postulating an exclusive and privileged artistic homosexual nature, one which in many ways reflected homosexual self-perceptions in circulation outside of overtly literary contexts. Other authors, meanwhile, such as Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, , and

Beverley Nichols, revealed how individuals used music to build bridges to larger heterogeneous communities, from which, particularly after the bad press of aestheticism following the Wilde trials, many homosexual aesthetes feared alienation.

As might be expected, overly sanguine representations of music and homosexuality lent themselves to biting satire and, at times, to an equivalent despair.

Authors such as Ronald Firbank and E. F. Benson highlight the wishful thinking of those who attempt to use music as a facile social entrée, while others, such as E. M. Forster,

238

Radclyffe Hall, and explore the darker side of oppression by suggesting that the world remains a grayer place when social and legal intolerance cut short both the inspiration and the lives of musicians. Of course the above is only an outline and, as will become apparent, the variety of the definable social and rhetorical implications of music and homosexuality was a field so rich that many authors relied upon several of these tropes at various points during their careers, and occasionally in the very same book. They all have in common, however, how their association of music, and largely classical music, with homosexuality works to advance the benefits of having homosexuals within society by citing their valuable contributions to a socially sanctioned art.

“To be „musical‟ was almost a capital offence”: The Perilous Imputations of Musicality

As previously indicated, the connection between subversive desires and the moral ambivalence of music stretches from as early as Plato up through the nineteenth century.

Plato perceived some simplistic forms of music as leading to a “temperance in the soul” and to a civic stability, but he also perceived a complex “pan-harmonic” music as inducing emotional, intellectual, and physical immoderations, a “license” (Republic

3:404). Although it is frequently only half-understood, Plato‟s influence, as Philip Brett has observed, has left “a legacy of moral doubt that infected much of the writing about music in the West” for centuries. Though it has never been “proscribed in the same way as homosexuality,” Brett points out that “music has often been considered a dangerous substance, an agent of moral ambiguity always in danger of bestowing deviant status 239 upon its practitioners” (11). One of the chief dangers that music bestowed in nineteenth- century literature, particularly in writings influenced by an Oxonian Platonism, was its evocation of same-sex desire. Joe Law draws on this tendency in perhaps the most complete survey on the subject, “The „perniciously homosexual art‟: Music and homoerotic desire in The Picture of Dorian Gray and other fin-de-siècle fiction.”

Stressing the dangerously ambiguous associations of music, Law argues that “as an inarticulate medium with the power to stir and trouble while it seems to communicate some indefinite message, music is an emblem for that which could not be named but would be recognized by those who shared in it” (196).2

As the important work done by Brett and Law indicates, most scholarship on music, homosexual desire, and/or literature focuses largely on the negative aspects of the vagueness of music and its limited ability to maintain a definite meaning. Brett, for instance, has observed that the very obscurity of “coded messages” regarding homosexuality in music has led to what he calls the “collusion of musicality and the closet,” in so far as a model of “„discretion‟” can work to reinforce a “dominant culture by confining homosexuality to the private sphere while making it obscurely present in the public discourse as an unthinkable” or unspeakable “alternative” (21-22). By advocating, then, a connection between the ambiguous, coded nature of music and homosexuality, one risks limiting the potential sphere in which the latter can have a positive meaning.

This effectively re-inscribes the insignificance of same-sex desire.

2 Law‟s primary concern in this essay is to point to the frequent connections between music and homosexuality of this time period. His choice of examples and his interpretations, however, tend to overemphasize, I think, the morally “dubious” or “perniciously” influence of music (178, 195). He does not address the Platonic influence emanating from Oxford on discussions of music or homosexuality. 240

Other historians have noted how the limitation of homosexuals themselves to an ambiguous periphery could cut off their ability to become visible to society as anything but marginal “others.” H. Montgomery Hyde, for instance, realizing the negative political effects of rigorously restricting the circulation of minority groups, noted in 1970 that a “widely held but erroneous belief is that homosexuality is peculiar to members of particular professions and trades such as actors, boxers, interior decorators, sailors, waiters, Turkish bath attendants and musicians” (17). In this list, same-sex desires are limited to fringe or bohemian figures, making “unthinkable” homosexual doctors, lawyers, or teachers.

Hyde highlights the connection between homosexuality and “musicians” in particular, as well as the potential for the fringe to sneak its way into the center, by pointing to a conversation between T. M. Healy and Joe Biggar, both Irish MPs, regarding the sexual escapades of English officials in that instigated the Dublin

Castle scandals of 1884.3 Healy recalls in his memoirs Biggar asking if he had noticed

“that all those blackguards [the English officials in the scandals, eventually ousted from office] were musical?” Healy comments that “[t]o be „musical‟ was almost a capital offence with Joe” (195). For Biggar, being “musical” equates with the thinkable, yet not nameable and certainly not desirable, subject of sodomy. Hyde points out that Biggar‟s

“own private life was anything but reputable,” but his philandering was hardly perceived as a “capital” crime (17). Sodomy, however, though not officially a capital offense since

1861, still carried a punishment of imprisonment for anywhere from ten years to life if

3 For an overview of the Dublin Castle affair, see Hyde (127-33). 241 one was convicted, and hence was at the time far too close to being a “capital offense” for comfort.4

Of course not all presentations of the connection between music and same-sex desire were as violent as Biggar‟s. Some were more callously neutral. Hugh David has observed how, even after the inflammatory Wilde trials in 1895, some men, such as

“[u]nmarried vicars and bachelor uncles were granted the token immunity they had always enjoyed: they were just „so‟ or „musical‟ or „that way‟. But the truth was out, and others were not so lucky. Erstwhile „pure young men‟ were now „bum-boys‟ and „shirt- lifters‟” (27). While not so disparaging as to be considered worthy, “almost,” of a death sentence, being granted a “token immunity” for being ambiguously “musical” seems indifferent at best. At worst, the characterization evokes a closeted, even misleading veiling of the “truth,” for which one could be derided and prosecuted.

The “inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture”: The Literary Formation of the Musical Homosexual

Despite these negative connotations, late-nineteenth-century authors began to use music as a decidedly positive metaphor for same-sex desire. Writers such as Pater and

Wilde, for instance, constructed the homosexual body as an instrument to be played upon,

4 Historians generally agree that, as Hyde observes, “[n]o executions for buggery or sodomy were carried out after 1836,” though sodomy as a capital crime was not officially abolished until 1861, when “the penalty” was “reduced to penal servitude for life or for any term not less than ten years at the discretion of the court. Attempts were punishable by a maximum of ten years” (92). The actual application of sodomy laws in various cases is a complex issue. A good recent analysis of the evolution of the application of such laws from 1861 through 1885, when Henry Labouchère‟s notorious contribution to the Criminal Law Amendment Act (it was this that was used to convict Wilde) was instituted, as well as in subsequent years, can be found in Brady (85-118). 242 one which could bring forth something valuable, such as self-knowledge or a conventionally forbidden eroticism. Musical proclivities, meanwhile, were used to realize communities or subcultures based upon emotional, intellectual, and physical exchanges of information, and pleasure. Whether the homosexual body or subculture was any more “musical” than any other was, perhaps, irrelevant. What was important, however, was to advance a musical conception of same-sex desire, an affirmative historiography, which had its foundations in the Platonic and Pythagorean works so admired in late-nineteenth-century Oxford. As Wilde once observed, “[t]o give an accurate description of what has never occurred” and perhaps has never been “is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture” (“The Critic as Artist” [“TCA”] 135). While keeping in mind Brett‟s cautions, I want to explore how, as opposed simply to hiding a truth or to offering a predominantly negative influence, authors used associations with classical music to uncover or even to create “innate” character traits and, in particular, a “historically” validated form of self-knowledge for homosexuals.

One of the primary ways in which late-nineteenth-century authors conflated music with same-sex desire was through their reliance upon Platonic theories of music. Pater argues in his Plato and Platonism (1893) for the legitimacy of homosexuality by connecting it to Platonic and Pythagorean theories of a natural morality reflected in the divine music of the spheres. This celestial music, according to the Greeks, acted on human bodies below. If we put this into the familiar terms of musical “matter” and

“form,” which Pater establishes in The Renaissance (the 1888 edition) and which Wilde

243 would eroticize, the musical “matter” of the heavens mingles with the human “form” on earth, and the closer these two align, the closer a person comes to embodying that most

“consummate art,” music (106). What is also “consummate” is Pater‟s attempt to bring the form of British morality into closer contact with the actual matter of Hellenic theories of human nature by celebrating the physicality of “Greek” love which was widely suppressed, even in academic settings.5 The nexus of homosexual desires and music, then, also included a call for intellectual honesty.

Almost concurrently, Wilde too was formulating a link amongst music, an intellectual open-mindedness, and sexual exploration in two early essays from Intentions

(1891).6 In “The Decay of Lying” (“DL”), Wilde has Vivien, his spokesman with a seductive “musical voice,” observe that what “makes music the type of all the arts” is not so much “that vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells,” as it is that music exemplifies the precept that “Art never expresses anything but itself”

(75, 96).7 Or, as Ernest in “The Critic as Artist” puts it, what makes music troubling, often pleasantly so, is that it is “far too indefinite” (127). To Wilde, however, a musical inexpressibility or indefiniteness is neither vacuous nor a mere obfuscation. Music is the

“type” of “all the arts,” including the “highest,” which consistently gains from “a new

5 Plato‟s most famous nineteenth-century translator, for instance, Benjamin Jowett, refused to discuss Greek homosexuality in its complexity and referred to it merely as a “figure of speech”; see chapter two (87-88, 88 n54).

6 According to Robert Sherard, Wilde actually “knew little about music,” which “bored him,” for “he had no knowledge of any instrument” and it is merely “probable that he could with difficulty distinguish one tune from another” (121-22). Wilde certainly, however, knew much about literary uses of music from Plato to Pater.

7 Wilde is here drawing on Pater‟s claims in “The School of Giorgione” (106). Other statements throughout The Renaissance anticipate Gilbert‟s observations of music in “The Critic as Artist”; see chapter five (245 n8). 244 medium or a fresh material” (“DL” 96-97). It is thus akin to the “critical spirit,” which helps “to realize, not merely our own lives, but the collective life of the [human] race” through a search for varied material (“TCA” 176). The critical aesthetic spirit achieves the collective potential of humanity, because through it there is “no mood with which one cannot sympathize, no dead mode of life that one cannot make alive,” including that

“dead mode” of Hellenism, with its sympathy for same-sex desire (176-77). For Wilde then, music, like any interesting ambiguity, promotes the critical spirit or critical thought through the formulation of wide-ranging emotions and desires.

The very elasticity of music in particular, Wilde implies, can evoke in its audiences a more complete sense of humanity by providing a psychological and emotional gateway to hidden sympathies and to the nature of repressed desires. Thus

Gilbert declares that, “[a]fter playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own” (127).

More generally, he proclaims that music “creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant,” and he describes how a “curious piece of music” can create the effect of “a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life … suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations” (127-28).8 The power of music, then, though Wilde (in his essays) arrives at it from a different, less overtly

Platonic path than Pater‟s, is that it can lead to a supressed emotional self-knowledge,

8 Wilde‟s language is echoing and expanding Pater‟s in “Winckelmann,” in The Renaissance, wherein the latter declares that “[p]ainting, by the flushing of colour in the face and dilatation of light in the eye— music, by its subtle range of tones—can refine most delicately upon a single moment of passion, unraveling its subtlest threads” (169). 245 including knowledge of a romantic variety, as well as an understanding of the unconscious, desiring soul.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde puts theory into fictional practice and uses music as a catalyst for arousing half-conscious same-sex desires in men, described here in incontestably physical terms. Early in the novel, Lord Henry Wotton, with his own “musical voice,” evokes a “fresh impulse of joy,” which would “return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal,” this “ideal” being, at least in part, a reference to the legitimacy of same-sex love idealized in Plato‟s

Symposium and represented by such idolized lovers as Harmodius and Aristogeiton,

Hadrian and Antinous, or those of the Theban Band (183). In alluding to such historical contexts Lord Henry touches “some secret chord” within Dorian, which sets him

“vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses.” Captivated, Dorian remembers how

“[m]usic had stirred him” much as Lord Henry has. “Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate” (184). Dorian, at first, cannot speak of his thrills, though he nonetheless spends a fair amount of time enjoying his inarticulate sensations.

When we first meet him in Basil Hallward‟s house, he is “seated at the piano … turning over the pages of a volume of Schumann‟s „Forest Scenes,‟” which he wants to take home with him (181). Dorian‟s body is also somewhat akin to the “perfect musical instrument” Pater compared to the bodies of Greek sculptures (Plato and Platonism 273).

The erudite Lord Henry finds that conversation with Dorian “was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow …” (199, ellipses are

Wilde‟s). Moving beyond the emotional and intellectual forays into forbidden musical

246 eroticism in his earlier essays, Wilde uses these scenes to emphasize the physicality of a critical musical resonance.

Wilde also uses music to outline the physical extension of a homoerotic community. Having learned to manipulate the sensations of his “secret chord,” Dorian turns around and uses music to involve himself with Alan Campbell: “it was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray together—music and that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished … often without being conscious of it.” As Dorian meets Henry while playing the piano at Basil‟s house, Alan meets Dorian at a music party and from there after they “used to be always seen together at the Opera, and wherever good music was going on” (306). Although it is never precisely clear what happens between the two, Wilde implies that Dorian lures Campbell into his life, using “curious music” to kindle “curious pulses” that lead Alan to the

“terrible experiences,” the “fearful joys,” and even the “wild romantic loves” outlined in

“The Critic as Artist.” As such, the line from (Gilbert to) Lord Henry to Dorian to Alan evokes a self-referential aesthetic musical community of self-aware same-sex desiring men.

Dorian Gray, however, so far as he is anything, is a negative exemplum. The militaristic Dorian mode was one of the two temperate and socially useful forms of music

Plato approved of in The Republic, and Wilde‟s eponymous protagonist is clearly an ironic reflection of how, without a contemplative restraint, a narrow pursuit of self- knowledge can go horribly wrong. Although Wilde claimed in the 1891 Preface to

Dorian Gray that “[a]ll art is quite useless” (168), he had previously pointed out in a

247 series of letters pertaining to the earlier serialized version, that the novel “is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment” (Complete Letters 431). As Wilde noted, this moral was an “extremely obvious” one (435). Only slightly less obvious is its corollary: the pursuit of self- knowledge and sensations at the unnecessarily painful expense of others brings as its

“punishment” the destruction not only of an individual‟s happiness, but of art and community.

Dorian‟s excessive exploration of his every desire at the expense of Alan‟s, for instance, brings about the end of their metaphorically “musical” relationship, as well as the end of Alan‟s interest in music qua music. Over the “eighteen months” that Alan maintains an “intimacy” with Dorian, Wilde describes the two as enjoying concerts and the opera, until something goes wrong and they break (306). Alan, Wilde implies, refused to keep up with Dorian‟s increasingly gratuitous pursuit of sensuality, just as he later refuses to help Dorian to cover up his murder of the painter Basil. When Dorian sneers at Alan‟s final refusal, his use of the past tense encompasses their past and present relations, “[y]ou were stern, harsh, offensive. You treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me—no living man, at any rate” (310). This can only be a reference to the no longer living Basil, whom Dorian killed after the painter had warned Dorian that he

“worshipped” himself “too much” (299). Alan too, it appears, had refused to go along with Dorian‟s self-worship. As Wilde alluded to Alan‟s early pleasures with Dorian in

248 musical contexts, he symmetrically describes their break through a musical cessation.9

After rupturing with the debauched Dorian, Alan, previously “an excellent musician, who

“played both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs,” “appeared almost to dislike hearing music” and gave up the “practice” of it himself (306). Wilde has earlier associated the “Hellenic ideal” with self-knowledge evoked through music, and he now uses Dorian‟s having led Alan beyond the benefits of self-knowledge and into a realm of detrimental overindulgence to provoke a broken friendship, a broken communal unity, and the beginning of a silence, both social and artistic.

Although the relationship between Dorian and Alan turns sour, both musically and emotionally, Wilde‟s work predominantly represents a complex attempt to engage positively with currently circulating stereotypes of same-sex desire and music. Drawing on Pater, Wilde sees in the beauty of music emancipating and hence salutary possibilities.

In “The Critic as Artist,” Gilbert notes of Wagner‟s overture to Tannhäuser that at times it evokes for him “that comely knight treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass ….”

“[A]t other times” it calls to mind his “own life, or of whom one has loved….” Still at other times it fills him with “that Amour de l’Impossible,” that legally intolerable, to some unthinkable love, “which falls like a madness on many who think they live securely and out of reach of harm,” until finally, “[t]omorrow, like … the noble

Dorian music of the Greek, it may perform the office of a physician, and give us an anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit that is wounded,” bringing “„the soul into

9 Wilde parallels his moral of excess leading to the destruction of art not only through the cessation of Alan‟s music and Dorian‟s murder of Basil, but also, of course, by having Dorian stab the picture of himself that Basil had painted, which has become the “evidence” of his debauched lifestyle (356). 249 harmony‟” (158).10 Wilde‟s language here is a harmonious Platonic ideal filtered through a homoerotic Paterian prose.

In Dorian Gray, Dorian‟s beautiful playing leads to his own attempt to right his life. When Dorian plays Chopin before destroying himself in a final rage, Lord Henry tells him “[y]ou have never played so well as to-night.” Dorian responds, “[i]t is because

I am going to be good.… I am a little changed already” (352). As he attempts, albeit briefly, to alter his depraved life—to try to avoid causing the death of anyone else—

Dorian moves towards a calmer “Hellenic ideal.” This causes his playing to sparkle and creates a clear link between a healthy self-awareness and beautiful music. Thus, though

Wilde could have Gilbert declare that “music is the perfect type of art” because it “can never reveal its ultimate secret,” the “heal[ing]” that Wilde ultimately suggests that music could bring to homosexuals, in particular, aside from the beauty of sounds themselves, was a natural sense of self-worth and a communal identification (160).

“Because our world has music”: Critiquing Constructions of Musical Identification

Along with Pater and Wilde, late-nineteenth-century writers such as Amy Levy,

Marc-André Raffalovich, and Robert Hichens evidence how widespread the predominantly affirmative association between music and homoeroticism is in the fin-de-

10 This is essentially a list of homoerotic allusions: references to the Dorian mode and Plato have been explained in chapter two and at the beginning of this chapter; the “Amour de l'Impossible” is explicated above; and chivalry was also taking on homoerotic overtones in certain circles. One might think of Pater‟s “Two Early French Stories” from The Renaissance, with its descriptions of Amis and Amile or of Charles Kains-Jackson‟s “The New Chivalry,” which advocated a new type of “youthful masculine ideal,” in place of the previous “youthful feminine ideal” (Reade 315). 250 siècle literary tradition.11 They each offer, moreover, reasons for the conscious association of music with homoeroticism that go beyond an Oxonian emphasis on a

Platonic or Pythagorean music of the spheres. While Greek tropes remain influential in their work, these writers evoke the innate musical proclivities of homosexually inclined characters by stressing physical, emotional, and psychological motivations, including social repressions that force their characters to be more sensitive to subtle stimuli and to put up defensive façades. Musical interpretation, in other words, becomes pragmatically linked to the heightened perceptions and interpretative skills necessary for oppressed individuals to survive within traditionally hostile, public situations. Consequently, music becomes not only a means to promote a homoerotic sense of self-worth but a consciously constructed, aural and theoretical sanctuary against the potential threat of a crowd.

Though Raffalovich and Hichens expose flaws in this system, all three writers promote a cultured use of music as a way for alienated individuals to discover and to enjoy each other‟s company in public.

Amy Levy, a writer working in London in the 1880s, whose work was admired by

Wilde, draws on a musical connection through a heightened sense of hearing between two women amongst a large contemporary audience in her “Sinfonia Eroica (to

Sylvia).”12 The opening lines call up a summer concert setting: “it was a day in June,/ A mellow, drowsy, golden afternoon;/ And all the eager people thronging came” (1-3). Yet,

11 In her essay “„The Music Spoke for Us,‟” Emma Sutton explores music and sensuality in general in the poetry of Wilde and Arthur Symons, and she analyzes lesbian implications in the poetry of Michael Fields (the nom de plume of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), but does not touch on the works I discuss below.

12 In his obituary for her in The Woman’s World, Wilde described Levy “as a poet of no mean excellence” (169). Referring to a short story, he observed she had “a touch of genius in her work” (CL 325). 251 even amongst the appreciative crowd, the speaker (Levy?) establishes a direct connection to Sylvia. “Far off, across the hush‟d expectant throng,” the speaker notes Sylvia‟s “face that fac‟d mine” (ln. 12-13). At this moment Beethoven‟s 3rd Symphony begins and melds with the mentally or emotionally eroticized charge flowing between the two women in the audience. “Clear and strong/ Rush‟d forth the sound,” the speaker recounts, as “[a]cross the clust‟ring heads mine eyes did seem/ By subtle forces drawn, your eyes to meet./ Then you, the melody, the summer heat,/ Mingled in all my blood and made it wine./ Straight I forgot the world‟s great woe and mine” (14-20). The speaker soon melts into “rapture,” as her emotional and aesthetic excitement becomes physical (22).

Levy includes several other poems in her 1884 volume A Minor Poet and Other

Verse which recall lost loves in similarly intense musical terms.13 As Phyllis Weliver usefully observes, several of these are notable because they evoke an experience of music that works in opposition to the “en masse response to musical sensation” suggested in so many Victorian descriptions of concert crowds (3). In Levy‟s poetry, Weliver argues, music produces sensations “for the purpose of giving physical life to imaginative processes that remain private” and through which “a parallel world occurs for same-sex lovers” (4). Yet the private world Levy creates seems not merely “parallel” to the public heterosexual one, as it embodies a greater, intensified appreciation of the concert scene and the musical experience through the speaker‟s eroticization of the event. Every man in the audience in “Sinfonia Eroica” may have “held his breath,” but the music has

“[m]ingled” in the speaker‟s “blood,” in her body, and has drawn by “subtle forces” her

13 These include “To Sylvia,” “In a minor Key (An Echo from a Larger Lyre),” and “A June-Tide Echo (After a Richter Concert).” 252

“eyes” (29). An erotic appreciation blends into a heightened aesthetic sensibility that simultaneously guards and valorizes homosexual desires, to which the late-Victorian public was overwhelmingly hostile, but from which, in the poem, they are also excluded.

A similar reliance upon a heightened sensibility for music to provoke a connection between two lonely homosexual individuals in a crowd, this time men, can be found in the variously erudite, unswervingly vulgar, pornographic novel Teleny, published anonymously in 1893.14 Amidst a large audience, the pianist René Teleny attracts his future lover, the young man Camille Des Grieux, by playing a “wild

Hungarian rhapsody,” which evokes in the latter‟s mind “the gorgeous towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, weird, beautiful and grand” (29, 30). Though the audience admires

Teleny‟s virtuosity and the concert ends with “the thundering applause of the whole theatre,” the music has touched Des Grieux especially so ecstatically, not just mentally but physically, that his jouissance has stunned him into silence (31). Afterwards in the green room, a friend remarks to Teleny, “you have outdone yourself.… I never heard you play like that before.” In Des Grieux‟s presence, Teleny responds invitingly,

I felt that somebody was listening to me.… Amongst a French public, especially that of a charity concert, do you really think that there are many persons who listen? I mean who listen intently with all their heart and soul. The young men are obliging the ladies, these are scrutinizing each other‟s toilette; the fathers, who are bored, are either thinking of the rise and fall of the stocks, or else counting the number of gas-lights, and reckoning how much the illumination will cost (34).

14 Teleny was written by several men, one of whom is often identified, based upon circumstantial evidence, as Wilde; this seems hard to believe, however, based upon the poor quality of almost the entire novel. For an overview of what is known about the production of the work, see McRae‟s short introduction. Notably, the publisher Leonard Smithers issued a Prospectus observing that the “subject” of the novel “was treated in a veiled manner in an article in a largely-circulated London daily paper, which demonstrated the subtle influence of music and the musician in connection with perverted sexuality” (quoted in McRae 10). 253

Here Teleny describes how by using a heightened, carefully applied aesthetic sense, homosexuals can perceive each other without risking an overt disclosure in a public place—a threat looming throughout the novel, as it did in real life. At the same time, the mere intimation of a nearby kindred spirit spurs the great pianist on to even greater artistic pinnacles. Both men, then, provide an intelligent counterpoint to the artistically indifferent heterosexual public.

Like Levy and others, Raffalovich too exploited the benefits of a connection between music and homosexuality for self-knowledge and erotic identifications.15 His most insightful poetry, however, highlights the defensive nature of this consciously constructed association. One of his best poems, “Because our world has music,” from his

1886 volume In Fancy Dress, begins with a confessional epigraph: “The cheat deceives the cheat, the vain the vain, the blind the blind, the weak the weak.” Following this caveat is a self-reflective evocation of the ambivalent benefits of a queer aesthetic:

“Because our world has music, and we dance;/ Because our world has colour, and They gaze;/ Because our speech is tuned, and schooled our glance … They think that we know friendship, passion, love!” (1-3, 9). Really, however, Raffalovich claims in the volta,

“[o]ur lives are wired like our gardenias” (14). These signs of joy and happiness, he suggests, are manipulated props.

The volta is a clever twist and reveals Raffalovich‟s wariness of the aesthetic lifestyle. But, the complexity of the sonnet turns on the question of who is misled into

15 Raffalovich had indeed written his own sanguine musical verse in a similar vein to Levy‟s and to the musical prose found in Teleny. See, for instance, his “Angel of Desire” and “Nihil Mea Carmina,” the latter a sonnet which takes its title from a line in Virgil‟s celebrated second eclogue, the “horrid one,” as called it, “[b]eginning with „Formosum Pastor Corydon‟” (Don Juan 1.42), in his 1885 volume Tuberose and Meadow-Sweet. 254 believing that the aesthetic life is a happy one. To whom do “our” and “They” refer?

Given his membership in and later critique of a Wildean aesthetic culture, it is far from improbable to read Raffalovich‟s “our” as an allusion to the London homosexual aesthetic community in which he circulated. “They” could also be an allusion to latent homosexually-inclined aesthetes or to heterosexual outsiders listening in on the community‟s self-fashioned aesthetic splendors. Either way, any superior musicality or beauty, Raffalovich suggests, is an artificial construction. It is a defensive façade braced to stand up against a natural wilting in an attempt to appear happy and inspire envy.

Despite this gloomy admission, Raffalovich would continue to “wire” his volume with music in poems such as “As You Like It,” “Ganymede of Ida,” and “Beyond Refuge.”

Raffalovich‟s early poetry is particularly interesting because in the mid-1890s, he would reflect explicitly on the popularity and the construction of the connection between music and homosexuality in his Uranisme et Unisexualité (1896), a work referred to by twentieth-century reformers such as Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis.16 In a section of his study entitled “Musique et Inversion,” Raffalovich observes that “in certain coteries the word musical, like the word artistic, seems to have become synonymous with homosexuality” (188).17

16 Uranisme et Unisexualité was published in both Lyon and Masson in France and it is in France where Raffalovich published most of his scientific-oriented studies, though these are largely influenced by his experience in England. For an overview of Raffalovich‟s work for the French Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, see Patrick Cardon‟s “A Homosexual Militant at the Beginning of the Century: Marc André Raffalovich.”

17 All translations of Raffalovich are my own: “Je dois dire … que dans certaines coteries le mot musical comme le mot artistique semble être devenu synonyme de pédéraste” (188). The word “pédéraste” in French, of course, stands for “homosexual” and need not signify the English word “pederast.” 255

Curiously eliding over his own contributions to this trend in English aesthetic circles, he attempts to analyze how this could have come about by focusing on psychological and non-literary influences. Children, he observes, who are “a little dreamy, a little anxious, a little precocious, or very vain, loving already flattery and success, will quickly obtain from music a pleasure, a consolation, or even the occasion to make themselves useful.”18 Consequently, those who have “a delicate health” or “unruly tastes” might find in music “an excuse to separate themselves from children who are brusque, mocking,” and “indifferent.”19 Many homosexual individuals, Raffalovich argues, have correspondingly “dreamy, worried,” and “precocious” personalities, and, according to him, the influence of music will act (for some unstated reason) “at least a little more” powerfully on them, causing homosexuals, like children, to turn to music for the merit which it will bring them (186).20 For those inverts who are temperate, although not necessarily chaste, such a devotion to art can be “useful to the progression of civilization” (207).21 As such, according to Raffalovich‟s theories, homosexuals often

18 Raffalovich begins with a discussion of the children in the musical countries of Germany and Austria, then moves on to homosexuals in general: “Dans ces pays les enfants un peu rêveurs, un peu ennuyés, un peu précoces, ou bien très vaniteux, aimant déjà la flatterie et le succès obtiendraient très vite de la musique un plaisir, un consolation ou l‟occasion de se faire valoir” (186).

19 “Et pour les enfants d‟une santé délicate, de goûts peu turbulents, pour les enfants sédentaires, la musique serait une excuse pour s‟éloigner des enfants brusques, moqueurs, indifférents” (186).

20 “Beaucoup d‟invertis, d‟uranistes, sont rêveurs, ennuyés, précoces … Toutes ces causes qui agissent sur beaucoup d‟enfants agiraient au moins un peu plus sur les uranistes ou les efféminés, et l‟effect que produit la musique sur les étrangers contribuerait à les y attacher” (186).

21 “L‟invert qui n‟est pas chaste, sans être coupable d‟actes délictueux … peut se considérer comme utile à la marche de la civilisation … et l‟uraniste supérieur a le droit de se féliciter d‟être providentiellement éloigné des soucis du mariage pour pouvoir se livrer à un art, une science, une vocation, un idéal quelconque qui comporte le célibat et le courage de bien faire” (207). 256 turn to music for reasons of self-protection, as their proclivity for it illustrates their value both to themselves and to others.

While this musical devotion is useful, Raffalovich points out that it leaves noble inverts open to the temptation of those with debauched inclinations. Despite their musicality, “[m]any people,” Raffalovich notes, “have not learned how to distinguish between the musician and his music, between the man and the sensations or the emotions that he wakes.”22 The result is that “effeminate,” “weak,” and “vain” men can easily take advantage of more stalwart ones who have otherwise admirable musical sensibilities

(186).23 “A man,” he notes, “with a musical aptitude, with a not bad physique or figure, from 15 to 40 years old, can make his way in the world of inverts,” winning “money” and

“good camaraderie,” the “fervor of a homosexual passion” or even “voluptuous, , and calculating liaisons: he will have only to choose what he wants” (187).24

What is true generally is then also true in England. Particularly striking in light of the rising musical population in Britain outlined in the previous chapters, Raffalovich also observes that in England there exists a strong “musical mania,” though he insists “I do not say [an] aptitude,” which, without the restraining influence of a sophisticated musical education, “rouses many masculine vanities” to flaunt themselves. “I am sure,”

22 “Tant de gens n‟ont pas appris à distinguer entre le musicien et sa musique, entre l‟homme et les sensations ou le émotions qu‟il éveille” (186).

23 “Les uranistes mâles aimeraient probablement plus la musique pour elle-même, et pour eux-mêmes, pour le plaisir qu‟elle leur à eux et peut-être à un ami, mais les efféminés si nombreux, les faibles, les vaniteux, l‟aimeraient pour les succès faciles” (186).

24 “Un homme avec une aptitude musicale, pas mal de corps ou de figure, de 15 à 40 ans, pourrait faire son chemin dans le monde des invertis; il aurait tous les succès depuis les succès de vanité jusqu‟aux succès d‟argent, depuis un empressement purement mondain, depuis des relations de bonne camaraderies, jusqu‟à l‟emportement de la passion unisexuelle, jusqu‟aux liaisons voluptueuses, , intéressées: il n‟aurait qu‟à choisir” (187). 257 he declares, “that many English sing who would not dare to utter a sound if they were

German” (188).25 This is an unfortunate occurrence, he implies, as it leads more men to abuse the sensitivity of refined homosexuals to music.

Raffalovich was not alone in seeing in music a means to achieve willfully sordid objectives under the protective guise of a venerable art. Although his poetic reflections were published in the 1880s, his later critiques of music were most likely influenced, or at least reinforced, by Robert Hichens. Hichens was a popular author in the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries who wrote several successful novels and who succeeded G. B. Shaw as the music critic for the London World.26 Initially, however, he burst onto the literary scene in 1894 with The , a rather opportunistic and vicious send-up of Wilde and .27

In his roman à clef, Esmé Amarinth and Lord Reggie, barely veiled caricatures of

Wilde and Douglas, wrap themselves up in the propriety of vapid musical sins. Esmé tells Reggie that “[s]in has its harmonies and its dissonances, as music has its harmonies

25 “… la manie musicale (je ne dis pas l‟aptitude) des Anglais est très forte, et ameute bien des vanities masculines. Je suis sûr que bien des Anglais chantent qui n‟oseraient pas proférer un son s‟ils étaient Allemands” (188).

26 For Hichens‟s assumption of Shaw‟s post at the London World, see Hichens‟s autobiographical Yesterday (73).

27 The book was initially published anonymously. Hichens later described Wilde‟s and Douglas‟s realization that he was the author as “amusing,” and claims to have received threatening telegrams from them that were really “burlesque and merely good jokes” (72). He almost certainly realized, however, the potential seriousness of his allusions to the homosexual tendencies of the two, as his publisher, William Heinemann, had the book reviewed by the solicitor George Lewis prior to publication to make sure that he would not be sued for libel. This, Hichens, admits, made him “very uncomfortable” (70). Neil McKenna convincingly argues that the “damage” the book in fact caused to “Oscar and Bosie‟s reputations was real and significant” and that the two knew this (305). Sinfield, on the other hand, suggests that the book was not meant to be “unfriendly,” but notes that it reveals a “potential queer identity getting constituted around Wilde and Douglas” (118, 121). He briefly notes that Hichens‟s use of the word “[m]usical … may have signaled same-sex passion to some readers,” and so would have become part of the queer identity, but he does not focus on the larger connotations of the word (120). 258 and its dissonances. The amateur sinner, the mere bungler whom we meet with, alas! so frequently, is perpetually introducing and octaves into his music” (32).

Detesting bunglers, both men assert a sinful expertise: Reggie prefers “to preface his failings with an overture on the orchestra,” and Esmé claims to have “sinned for years”

(5, 32). While other arts, such as painting, occasionally provide metaphors for vice,

Hichens cements the sinful pretensions of the two through frequent references to their supposed fondness for classical music. The society hostess Mrs. Windsor, for instance, observes admiringly that “Reggie andé Mr. Amarinth both play” (the piano) and that, while they “hate Wagner and the moderns,” “[t]hey prefer ancient church music, Mozart and Haydn and Paganini, or is it Palestrina?” (42). An affinity for the past evokes, particularly for the ignorant philistine, the aesthetes‟ thrillingly aberrant affectations.

Whether the two prefer Paganini or Palestrina is irrelevant, however, as the narrator suggests that an actual appreciation, much less a performance of the work of either would be well beyond the musical or intellectual capabilities of both Esmé and

Reggie. The friends appreciate music neither for its beauty nor for the self-knowledge it evokes, so much as for how it can function as a respectable lure. They spend, for instance, a significant portion of the novel at a country-house party perfecting an

“anthem” to be sung by choir boys. Their inspiration, though, is hardly what one could call classical. Rather, they keep “busy at the piano, inventing and composing the elevation of „Three blind mice‟” to accompany the words “Rose—white—youth, Rose— white—youth” repeated to the melody. Instead of creating anything beautiful or

259 worthwhile, Esmé and Reggie‟s talents, their aesthetic instincts result in a “primitive sort of tune” with which they hope to entice choristers (117).

Improbably, they partially succeed in their desire to attract the boys, but in a way that reflects no credit on themselves. Their shoddy opus ends up causing the boys to fall

“hopelessly in love with Lord Reggie,” at least, “to whom they had learnt, over the anthem, to draw near with a certain confidence” (132). The carefully composed musical

Hellenism of Pater and Wilde has here been emptied of its emotional or intellectual complexity, just as the anthem has been deprived of the of Palestrina. What remains is Hichens‟s emphasis on the crude predatory enticements of simple sounds and his portrayal of Wilde, in particular, not as an artist or an intellectual, but as an aesthetically ignorant, pedophilic “bungler” using music to conceal his depravity.

Despite his satirical “hit,” Hichens went on to borrow Wildean themes of music and homoeroticism in his 1897 novel Flames. Flames depicts a watered down version of the Oxonian “music of the stars and the spheres, of the mightiest passion of deepest imaginings” (180). Music functions in the novel as a conduit for the relationship between the pianist Valentine and his ideal audience, his friend Julian, the two having “in mind,” if not in sleeping arrangements, “taken up their residence together” (4). Valentine‟s cold, but brilliant music, though, “lack[s] power,” symbolizing his unnaturally favoring “the pleasures of the intellect so much” as to make “the mistake of opposing them, as enemies, to the pleasure of the body” (46, 1). In this, Valentine provides a diametrically opposed negative exemplum to Dorian Gray‟s sensual excess, as the friends come to grief through

Valentine‟s unnaturally immoderate restraint. Hichens reasserts, however, the value of

260 the metaphor for homoerotic desire he had earlier satirized by associating the more tender aspects of the love of the two adults with music.

“Do you like music?”: The Musical Hermeneutics of Meeting Men in the Twentieth Century

Roughly two decades after the publication of The Green Carnation, Ronald

Firbank would cattily refer to Hichens as one of the “„representatives of English

Culture‟” who embodied “the very apotheosis of worn-out cliché” (592). To a degree, this was true as early as 1897. For, as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth,

English intellectuals interested in homosexuality began working more than ever outside of decadent circles, which had reached their height with Wilde in 1895. Leaving behind

Hellenic theories of the stars, while simultaneously downplaying the problematic of antique cultures, early sexologists writing in English, such as Edward

Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, explored the social value of a homosexually coded aesthetic sense in more current sociological and psychological terms.

Concurrently, they moved beyond Hichens‟s emasculated chastity and

Raffalovich‟s qualified assertion that music may affect homosexuals “at least a little more” than others. Instead Carpenter and Ellis relied on a combination of medicine and pseudo-scientific categorizations mixed with references to differentiated nerve-systems.

In addition to technical analyses, they also relied upon “case histories,” often personally written testimonials, which illustrate how a privately valued and socially valuable

261 relationship between music and homosexuality had become increasingly useful in the practical lives of men and women.

Edward Carpenter was perhaps the most influential proponent of this new wave of literature in England. In his The Intermediate Sex, published in 1908 (though containing some material written as early as 1894), Carpenter helped to popularize the notion of same-sex desiring individuals who fell somewhere between heterosexual males and .28 One of his chief ideological goals was to argue for the value of this

“intermediate sex,” which he did, in part, by pointing to their distinctive aesthetic sensitivity. According to Carpenter, one of the benefits of such intermediate types is their

“artist-nature, with the artist‟s sensibility and perception. Such an one is often a dreamer, of brooding, reserved habits, often a musician, or a man of culture, courted in society, which nevertheless does not understand him,” though, importantly, he remains valuable all the same.

To support his case, Carpenter turned to discussions of nerves. He cites, in particular, the sexologist Otto de Joux. De Joux noted that intermediate men, in particular, “are enthusiastic for poetry and music” and “are often eminently skilful in the fine arts,” due largely to their intensely physical sensitivities. Using language that

28 In 1894 Carpenter had printed a private pamphlet entitled “Homogenic Love, and its Place in a Free Society,” parts of which were reproduced in the later Intermediate Sex in the essay “The Homogenic Attachment” (Brady 202-203). Carpenter‟s writing actually had a fairly wide circulation and influenced writers such as E. M. Forster and most likely D. H. Lawrence. For his influence on Forster, see the latter‟s own “Terminal Note” to Maurice, and for Lawrence, see Delavenay (21-22, 24-25, 37). By 1916, The Intermediate Sex had been reprinted three times in England and once in the U.S, see Carpenter‟s My Days and Dreams (325). Carpenter also would have brought the existence of Raffalovich‟s analytical work on homosexuality to the attention of a wider English audience, as he briefly referenced Uranisme et Unisexualité twice in The Intermediate Sex. He provided a similar service for other European authors, such as Kraft-Ebbing, whom Carpenter cites as having observed that “a great number” of intermediates are “„highly gifted in the fine arts, especially music and poetry,‟” as well as Ellis‟s Sexual Inversion (54). 262 echoes, though from a more scientific perspective, Pater‟s aesthete, Florian Deleal‟s awareness of “pain-fugues on the delicate nerve-work of living creatures,” Carpenter again quotes from de Joux: “[t]he nerve-system of many an Urning is the finest and the most complicated musical instrument in the service of the interior personality that can be imagined‟” (32). Here Carpenter argues that the extreme sensitivity of the physiology of intermediates provides them with an innate, intrinsic means to tap into an artistic vein.29

Carpenter‟s work was analytical, if avowedly polemical; still, even in the evolution of Havelock Ellis‟s more objective Sexual Inversion we can trace the spread of the affirmative connection between homosexuality and music into cultural and scientific critiques.30 In the second edition of Sexual Inversion, first published in 1898, Ellis gave little emphasis to his discussion of music, observing generally that “[a]rt … in its various forms, and music, exercise much attraction,” but that to his knowledge “literature is the avocation to which inverts seem to feel chiefly called, and that, moreover, in which they may find the highest degree of success and reputation” (173).31

By the enlarged 1915 edition, Ellis had expanded his section on music to include research and medical expertise. “As regards music,” Ellis now reports, “my cases reveal

29 While here Carpenter relies on physiological references, in his Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk, he was more willing to discuss the conflation of music and homosexuality in the spiritual practices of early societies.

30 Sexual Inversion was suppressed in Britain in 1898, but published in the U. S. from 1901 onward and available by mail-order in Britain. For a concise overview of the complex publication history, see Brady (141-151).

31 All the same, in eleven cases in the 1901 version, individuals refer to themselves as being “fond of music” or “very fond of music,” or use similar language, indicating that they either play or sing, or are in some way “passionately devoted to music” (80, 56, 83); see case histories XI, XII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVIII, XXV, XXVIII, XXX, XXXIII, and XXXVI. I reference the second edition here as most of the first was destroyed; see Brady (141). 263 the aptitude which has been remarked by others as peculiarly common among inverts. It has been extravagantly said that all musicians are inverts; it is certain that various famous musicians, among the dead and the living, have been homosexual.” Ellis here makes qualifications, sensibly looking for facts in an overly broad claim: some “famous musicians” have for “certain” been homosexual, but not all. He then cites four continental scientists on the subjects of music and/or homosexuality, including Magnus

Hirschfeld‟s calculation, from his recently published Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (1914), that “98 per cent, of male inverts are greatly attracted to music, the women being decidedly less attracted” (295).

Similarly to Carpenter, Ellis too drew a connection between an increased musicality in homosexuals and nerves. He connects the “musical aptitude” of homosexuals to their greater predisposition to “nervousness” and, drawing on the work of others, suggests that it is “closely related to [a] neuropathic and psychopathic diathesis [a predisposition to diseases]” (295). Both Ellis and Carpenter point to positive and negative benefits to this nervous musicality. They both conceived it to bring about an increased aesthetic sensitivity. But, Ellis also noted that it could suggest an increased chance of disease, while Carpenter saw it leading to an unfortunate excess of effeminacy in men. Ellis also differs from Carpenter in highlighting the more pathological aspects of nervousness in a complicated, yet consciously authoritative medical language.

Another important difference between the editions of Ellis‟s work is the increased number of case histories he includes in the 1915 edition of Sexual Inversion. These histories were largely written by the subjects themselves and frequently reflect warmly on

264 musical interests.32 E. S., for instance, a physician aged 50, speaks with enthusiasm of his artistic and particularly his musical proclivities. He notes that he is “very susceptible” to the “fine arts” in general, though music is his primary interest: “I am devoted heart and soul to music, which is more and more to me every year I live. Trivial or

I cannot endure, but of Beethoven, Bach, Händel, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms,

Tschaikowsky, and Wagner I should never hear enough. Here, too, my sympathies are very catholic, and I delight in McDowell, Debussy, Richard Strauss, and Wolf”

(107). T. S., meanwhile, an artist aged 32, cheerfully links music to erotic experiences.

“Working at art, painting, and above all music and beauty have a strong influence over me,” he records, “and set my erotic longing in violent emotion. I have never found this

32 Ellis was not the only homosexual apologist writing in English to use case histories reporting positive perspectives on same-sex desire and the arts. Carpenter included several in The Intermediate Sex, lifted from both Ellis and Krafft-Ebing. He also presented his own long “case history,” though in more covert terms, for his readers in his My Days and Dreams, wherein he describes his personal musical growth, recalling that by “the age of ten” he “desired mightily to learn the piano” and how making music became “one of the chief events” of his childhood (24). Later, he remembers offering University Extension lectures on music (105). He similarly remarks on his partner George Merrill‟s “remarkably good ear for music” and his “sympathetic voice” (161). Also writing in English, though in Italy, was the American Xavier Mayne—a pseudonym for Edward Prime-Stevenson—who wrote The (1908), which makes extensive connections between music and a nervous homosexuality, and includes several case histories of homosexual musicians. Mayne also provided a fictional “case history” in his novel Imre: A Memorandum (1906), which was cited by both Carpenter and Ellis, the latter of whom also referenced The Intersexes. Though in The Intersexes Mayne is ambivalent regarding the benefits of music and homosexuality, in Imre he presents a strongly positive association of both. Law quotes one of the novel‟s few negative passages in his essay, from which he draws his title “The „perniciously homosexual art.‟” In the novel, the Englishman Oswald and the Hungarian Imre meet at a café concert. Oswald quickly becomes attracted to Imre through the “vibrant thrill” of his voice and the two begin discussing “music (that open road to all sorts of mutualities on short acquaintanceships)”; Imre‟s familiarity with the subject leads Oswald to believes that his new friend “knew much and felt even more than he expressed,” and “from music,” he notes, “we passed to one or another aesthetic question; to literature, to social life, to human relationships, to human emotions,” until they arrive at their “own two lives and beings” (37). Here the benefit of an innate homosexual sensitivity to sound works at its best to bring together two intelligent, sympathetic men. After a series of misunderstands and withholdings of secrets, the novel ends with the two having told their coming-stories in case history fashion. They declare their abiding love for each other and the final paragraphs depict them walking back to Oswald‟s room amidst the “pulsating” sounds of a “nerve-thrilling” gypsy orchestra (126-27). Ellis himself noted of Imre: “it embodies a notable narrative of homosexual development which is probably more or less real” (340). 265

[to] do me any harm. Abstinence, on the other hand, has a very harmful effect on me, upsetting the whole nervous and physical system” (132). He also relates that he has had at least two positive relationships, one physical, with “musical” men, whom he remembers fondly (131).

By the late 1890s, the homoerotic musical tradition was so prevalent in novels and poetry that the references to music in these histories would seem to imply some interchange between the literary tradition and the ways in which homosexual men and women conceived of themselves in positive artistic contexts. By the twentieth century, certainly, the musical metaphor had become so popular that it would be fruitless to conjecture whether literature was imitating real-life perceptions or vice-versa: there was a mutual exchange.33 What is interesting, however, is how the specific trope of music as a means to reach out to likeminded individuals in books was conflated with its concurrent use in people‟s practical self-representations. This was true not only of homosexual self- descriptions in case histories, but in personal advertisements, as well. As early as 1896, for instance, Raffalovich had observed that

[o]ne reads constantly in the best journals that a young man, well born, of good appearance, friendly, sympathetic and musical wanted to be adopted by a mature gentleman, or to travel with a rich young man, or to keep company with a man of the world. One reads also that a man of the world, or a rich man would like to have as a secretary, or traveling companion, or

33 Of course this was not true of everyone. Quentin Crisp, one of the most famous “out” homosexuals of the twentieth century, declared “I never understood music. It all seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information” (195). Crisp was intent on conveying his own message regarding the existence of homosexuality as clearly as he could. His proclaimed ignorance of music, however, is belied by his admission that he found the music examinations he took through his prep school “quite easy” (11). 266

as a companion in the town or countryside, a young man who was well born, sympathetic, and musical (188, emphases added).34

Here the idioms of aestheticism, such as Wildean inferences of “wild romantic loves” induced by music, are covertly (re-)imagined—albeit in terms toned down and with far more utilitarian contexts—and similarly manifested in a positive, self-knowing way, by adults seeking adults, who supplied at least one prototype for the musical case histories of

Carpenter and Ellis.

Roughly twenty years later, the association of music and same-sex desire as a positive means for homosexuals to recognize each other had earned enough of a cultural cachet to stay current in certain circles. In his study of “companionship” advertisements from 1913-1928, Cocks notes that in 1921, four men, including the editor of the magazine Link, were placed on trial for “aiding and abetting the commission of gross indecency and of conspiring to enable the commission of such acts with others unknown”

(459). During the trial, “the prosecution informed the court that the Link „contained hundreds of advertisements from men who described themselves as „artistic and musical‟‟” (460). Cocks cites one ad, like those in question, put out by “„Iolaus … 24,‟” who “was „intensely musical‟” and “of a „peculiar temperament,‟ and‟” who “had been

34 “… on lit constamment dans les meilleurs journaux qu‟un jeune homme bien né, de bonne apparence, aimable, sympathique et musical voudrait être adopté par un monsieur mûr, ou voyager avec un jeune riche, ou tenir compagnie à un homme du monde. On lit aussi qu‟un homme du monde, ou qu‟un homme riche voudrait avoir comme secrétaire, ou compagnon de voyage, ou comme compagnon de ville ou de campagne, un jeune homme bien né, sympathique, musical” (188). 267

„looking for many years for [a] tall manly Hercules‟” (459).35 Music had become a traditional codeword for same-sex desire.

Notably, this tradition had obvious literary roots. In addition to the ads themselves, the private correspondence engaged in by advertisers, and subsequently collected by the police, seemed to take part, as Cocks observes, “in a homosexual tradition that stretched back at least as far as Oscar Wilde” (459-60). The correspondents referred directly to Dorian Gray as well as to the more contemporary Carpenter, who in his Ioläus had explored the “very warm friendship” of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and

Wagner (153).36 Though problems clearly arose as codes became recognizable to the police and legal authorities, the Link trial indicates how literary representations of music continued to function well into the twentieth century in a strikingly convenient fashion.

Such literarily disseminated associations also worked in non-overtly textual situations, outside of literature, case histories, and personal ads. In Between the Acts

(BTA), a series of the recollections of men from 1885-1967, Kevin Porter and Jeffrey

Weeks have recorded several stories of men who remember using music as a codeword to meet other men. Trevor Thomas, a long-time museum director born in 1907, recalls that

35 (Link [September 1920]: 14). It is interesting to remember that Walter Sichel referred to William Money Hardinge, who had an affair, of sorts, with Pater in the early 1870s, as “musical, poetical, intensely flippant and flippantly „intense‟”; see chapter two (73-74).

36 Cocks notes that, along with Carpenter and Wilde, was another influence of enormous significance mentioned in the personal correspondence of the defendants (460). Whitman‟s own brand of physicality and transcendent comradeship was of particular importance to homosexuals in England as, along with Carpenter, he helped to bring a affirmative focus to physical sensations, and through them to formulate what in Nameless Offences Cocks describes as “a fascination with transcendence of body, desire, self and even speech” that “came to define a homosexual sensibility” in the late nineteenth century (158). Though Cocks only mentions music in passing with regards to this tradition, he does observe that “words connoting acute perception which derived in part from this Whitman/Carpenter tradition such as „artistic‟ and „musical‟ were … key terms of homosexual self-description until well into the twentieth century” (195). 268 in the 1920s and 30s “[o]ne of the opening gambits would be, are you fond of music? Do you like music? Oh yes, I like music very much. Oh, what are you favourite composers?

And there would be double meanings as to whether, you know, if you were of the romantic slushy kind or the austere Bach type of thing” (62). This shows a highly complex and diversified manifestation of this tradition.

Not all references to music and homosexuality were this complex, but most suggest music as a means to create a comfortable community. These musical communities of course need not have been exclusively male. But, in the memories of many men they were related in some way to homosexuality. Frank Oliver, also born in

1907, the son of an engineer, recalls how in 1918 his father sent him to a boarding school in North Devon. Talking to Porter and Weeks for their study, Oliver notes of this school,

“[w]e had a marvellous headmaster. He had his favourites with the boys and, being musical, I was one of them because he was very musical himself. He loved Gilbert and

Sullivan and I used to play all the leading parts in the operas” (Walking After Midnight

[WAM] 9). This need not, of course, suggest any impropriety between student and headmaster—Oliver openly and unashamedly admits to romantic affairs with other students—but it does suggest a certain homo-social connection, a sense, for Oliver, of belonging created through musical productions. In both Thomas‟s and Oliver‟s experiences music functioned not just as a metaphor for self-knowledge but as a useful means to experience a homosexual community filled with positive connotations of culturally valued similar interests.

269

Equally as important, music did not just function as a shared interest, but musical settings provided a physical arena outside of parks, and less savory areas, for meeting other like-minded individuals. Norman, for instance, a shop assistant born in 1895, recalls going to London after the First World War, at which point he went “a great deal to the ballet” and “to the Empire at that time in Leicester Square.” He describes how one time he “was standing in the circle and there were some young men there. I saw someone, and I went up and picked him up. It was rather funny, because I used to share him with Siegfried Sassoon” (BTA 26). This relationship, Norman relates, was an emotional, not a physical one. Stephen, meanwhile, born in 1910, was a civil servant and friends with Forster and Joe Ackerley. He reports that a “great meeting place was the gallery in Sadlers Wells. There was the ballet, of course, but one used to go up there and one got in for a shilling and stand at the back. That was really quite some pick-up point”

(114). Sam, a dance instructor who was also born in 1910, similarly remembered going to “ballets and things like that” and wondering why he “was more attracted to the male form than the woman form” (97). As Sam‟s story implies, there is probably a reason why the ballet, in particular, held an interest for these men.

Men, though, would meet each other at concerts as well. Frank Oliver, for instance, recounts that he had his first love affair after meeting “a very handsome young

American” at a Toscanini concert, where he had been working for the impresario Lionel

Powell (WAM 10-11). Stephen similarly recounts that “the Coventry Street Corner

House,” before and during WWII, “used to have very good pianists … who played

Chopin rather well,” and served as a place for bringing dates (BTA 111). These

270 experiences seem not to have lead to aesthetic or intellectual epiphanies, but each helps to understand the positive homoerotic undertones of being “musical” in the early half of the twentieth century. In advertisements and to a less direct extent in the stories told by the above men, we have a compelling example of a turn-of-the-century literary trope influencing everyday life in a fairly conscious fashion.37

Considering long-standing public depictions of homosexuality, however, it is not hard to understand why some individuals would rely upon the word “musical” to describe themselves. Discussing newspaper reports of the Wilde trials in 1895, Matt Cook has observed how certain “[s]tereotypes” of homosexually inclined men “were evoked, clarified and endorsed, rendering the pariah [same-sex desire] recognisable in a number of forms in the city streets: as fleshy and decadent; weak and effeminate; or more generally as „unwholesome‟ and „beastly‟” (61). Morris Kaplan, meanwhile, recounts a more reasoned dialogue that took place in Reynolds’s Newspaper after Wilde‟s trial, mainly through letters to the editor. Many of these letters, Kaplan explains, “not only sympathize with Wilde but also offer a sustained critique of the laws under which he was condemned” (260). Despite the sympathy of some, though hardly all, of the correspondents, Kaplan observes that Reynolds’s editors described “the subject of the debate” as “„one of the greatest evils of our time‟” (258). In the twentieth century, The

Times would continue to carry coded references to “abominable” or “unnatural” crimes

37 Though a literary influence is more tenuous with regards to the formation of the musical self-perceptions of these men than in the personal ads, it is worth noting that Thomas recalls having read Carpenter and J. A. Symonds early in his career (BTA 61); Norman had a penchant for Carpenter and D. H. Lawrence (24); Stephen remembers it “becoming fairly clear” that he “was homosexual by dint of reading Havelock Ellis, reading Edward Carpenter, reading Plato in particular,” as well as “Pater and Winckelmann and people like that,” who all “sort of pointed in that direction. They were things that were congenial to read” (110). 271 linked to suicide, bribery, or libel involving two men, the combined details of the case evoking a relatively decipherable allusion to homosexuality.38

Characterizations of being “musical,” then, were one of the most positive self- representations in circulation that homosexuals had to use.39 As such, it is no surprise that to be “musical” became a valued cultural commodity for the underground homosexual subculture, whether to refer to the superlatively, if occasionally deprecated, sensitive nervous systems espoused by Carpenter or Ellis, or simply to invoke established cultural connotations men relied upon to meet other men with similar romantic interests.

“he wondered whether he couldn‟t become a hero”: Using Music to Win Public Acceptance

If real-life homosexuals, particularly men, were using their musicality to find an innate self-worth or as a way to reach out and find likeminded companions, some twentieth-century writers were imagining the ways in which musical performances could unite them to or could even cause them to be celebrated by a larger, more public community. One of the predominant genres for relying on music to bring social acceptance was in works recalling the boarding school days of the author. This is surprising considering the degree to which some novelists mocked music within the public schools. Forster, for instance, in A Passage to India observes that in Chandrapore,

38 For suicide, see “The Austrian Espionage Affair: Official Story of Colonel Redl‟s Suicide” (Times 6 Jun. 1913: 8); for bribery and libel, see “Alleged Abominable Crime” (Times 3 Dec. 1919: 16) and “Naval Officer‟s Libel Action: Alleged Conspiracy in a Mess: A Midshipman‟s Confession” (Times 24 July 1920: 7).

39 Brett makes a similar point in a more general context (“Musicality” 11). 272 the English community‟s “ignorance of the Arts was notable, and they lost no opportunity of proclaiming it to one another; it was the Public School attitude”; therefore Ronny

Heaslop, an English official in town, “repressed his mother when” on a visit “she enquired after his viola; a viola was almost a demerit,” Forster ironically expatiates, “and certainly not the sort of instrument one mentioned in public” (40).

Other instruments do not fare much better. In Alec Waugh‟s notorious The Loom of Youth, Gordon Caruthers becomes a minor school hero after having “cut the string of the chapel organ” used to indicate air pressure, so that the “next morning in chapel the choir began but the organ was mute.” Admiring the stunt, the captain of one of the rugby teams praises Caruthers, referring to him as a “sportsman” (136). Forster and Waugh both play into the stereotype of public schools as institutions that focused more on unintellectual “manly” activities, such as sports, than on education or the arts.

Yet, as chapters three and four point out, music was on the rise in the English education system throughout the late-Victorian period, from public schools, such as

Harrow and Eton, to board schools, to Oxford University. Benjamin Jowett, for instance, started the popular Balliol Concerts in 1885 both to experiment with Platonic theories of education and to unify disparate cliques within his college.40 It makes a certain sense, then, that one of the best fictional examples of music leading to social inclusion would be from Beverley Nichols, a Balliol graduate. Nichols divides his first novel, Prelude

(1920), into four “books”—“The Prelude,” Modulations,” “Resolutions,” and “The Last

Movement”—which, when taken together, follow his hero Paul Trevelyan from his rather

40 See chapter two (45-46). 273 solitary childhood up through the popularity of his teenage years. The story, which takes place largely from 1912-18, is absurdly sentimental, funny, and, at times, quite touching, with music providing a consistent means for Paul to evolve into a socially conscious young man.

Throughout the novel, Paul‟s musical talent provides a way for him to assert his own self-worth and to prepare him to take part in a larger community. Nichols begins this process by using music to motivate an all but overt defense of Paul‟s latent, aesthetically-coded homosexuality. As Paul is on the brink of being sent off to school, he recalls his childhood and his uncle‟s caveat that he was “far too effeminate” and that it was “ridiculous that he should be at home all the time, dressing himself up, acting and dancing and playing the piano.” This uncle warns Paul‟s widowed mother that “[t]he boy will grow into a monstrosity if you don‟t look out” (4). But as Paul matures, he is not a monstrosity and his music enables something akin to an epiphany: “[w]hen he was about thirteen he started to discover Chopin, with miraculous effect. He would play for hours, shutting himself up in one room all the morning, practising an étude or a nocturne, dashing upstairs at intervals to bring down his mother to listen to a he had just made perfect, or a melody which he thought particularly beautiful. It was then that he started to improvise, a thing which indeed he did far too much” (14-15). Music here is a wonderful gift to be proud of and shared, albeit a bit dangerous if indulged in too freely.

Equally as important, Nichols aggressively presents Paul‟s pubescent musical awakening as a clever and natural occurrence. Following his descriptions of Paul‟s

274 youthful musical exuberance, which Paul shares with those around him, Nichols challenges:

Perhaps all this may be looked upon as effeminate. What of it? When the complicated and mysterious question of sex and its degrees has been settled, some light will have been thrown on people like Paul. To those people who say that Paul was behaving unnaturally for a boy, there is only one answer. That is, that the only word in the English language that is necessarily meaningless is “unnatural.” For Paul to do what he did was absolutely natural, he was far more spontaneous, far more natural than the youths who were engaged in calling each other “swots” or “sneaks,” and learning how to field and how to play various games which a large number of them heartily disliked (15-16)

Nichols is, to an extent, being brave here. Waugh‟s book, with its terse allusions to romantic friendships, in its few non-sports related passages, had caused an uproar for far less.41 Moreover, as Alan Sinfield has suggested, after the Wilde trials of 1895, “the entire, vaguely disconcerting nexus of effeminacy, leisured idleness, immorality, luxury, insouciance, decadence and aestheticism, which Wilde was perceived as instantiating, was transformed into a brilliantly precise image,” which lasted well into the twentieth century (118).42 The accumulation here of Paul‟s effeminacy, the decadence of his

41 See Waugh‟s The Early Years (117-20).

42 Sinfield qualifies, however, that the emergence of an aesthetic “queer stereotype” was “uneven,” and thus some aesthetes could still be seen as simply sophisticated (130). Although Sinfield does not reference Nichols‟s fiction, he does cite the example of the young author‟s romantic friendship with the aesthetic Egerton Edwards. According to Nichols‟s biographer, Bryan Connon, Edwards was “in his late twenties,” but Nichols‟s parents let their teenage son associate with him freely, knowing that the two “shared a love of music” and literature (38, 39). Nichols‟s father may have also hoped that the well-heeled Edwards would introduce his son to “the world of the gentry” (39). Trouble did briefly arise when Edwards gave Nichols a copy of Dorian Gray for his birthday, no doubt fancying himself a version of Lord Henry striking Hellenic chords. Upon finding the book, Nichols‟s father tore it up and wrote a note informing his son that Wilde was guilty of “„ILLUM CRIMEN HORRIBILE QUOD NON NOMINANDUM EST‟” (40). As Nichols did not tell his father who gave him the book, he and Edwards were allowed to maintain their relationship. His father‟s reaction to the novel, though, is relatively clear. For those who could decipher the appropriate allusions—for the more obtuse, Wilde‟s name; for the more astute, such as Paul‟s uncle, a more subtle musical aestheticism, combined with effeminacy—the signs of homosexuality were, by this point, relatively patent. Ironically, Nichols, who according to Connon was at this point in his life “no stranger to 275 dressing up, and his dislike of sports, and, most telling of all, his “unnatural” yet miraculous musical nature swirls right into the Wildean aesthetic/homosexual nexus, yet with an almost entirely positive framework, through which Nichols asks his reader to admire the value of both Paul and “people like Paul.”

According to his own nature then, Nichols‟s hero maintains his faith in his musicality. When he arrives at school, he initially has difficulty making friends, due largely to his disinclination to play sports. One day towards the end of his first term, however, he sits “listening to the college orchestra playing Schubert‟s unfinished symphony,” and “he wondered whether he couldn‟t become a hero by some other method than that of athleticism” (43-44). “Why,” he wondered, as perhaps almost all boys do,

“shouldn‟t he become so great a pianist that the whole school would fall down and worship him?” (44). Music, he hopes, must surely lead to his popularity.

His dream soon comes true, in a fashion, as his music brings him not the shame that his uncle had implied that it would, but social acceptance. During the next term he wins admiration from his house dormitory through his rendition of “[t]he Prologue to

Pagliacci” in Italian, although only after having reassured his audience that there was not

“anything bad” in the lyrics (59). Upon his conclusion, his dormitory claps appreciatively and his roommates listen as “other dormitories joined in and shouts of

„Encore!‟ were echoed all over the building” (60). Similarly, Jack, one of Paul‟s two love interests, will later assure him, “you‟re not seventeen yet, and you play like nothing on earth” (246). Rather than isolating him, Paul‟s popularity at school stems from his

homosexual behavior,” claimed that the incident left him “no wiser about Wilde than he had been before” (40). 276 prodigious musical ability combined with his intelligent way of handling difficult situations in a fresh manner.

All the same, as his school career winds up in 1916, Paul starts to seek a larger social relevance for his art. “It‟s awfully easy,” he tells his friends, “to impress people— one can talk airily about all sorts of things, and can play a certain amount of Bach and

Chopin and modern stuff, and can generally pose—but it‟s all most awfully empty”

(247). Paul attempts to fill this emptiness by going to war to fight for England after his idealized love interest, Rufus, has been killed. He writes to Jack to explain his motivation, noting that he wants vengeance for “poor old Rufus‟ death,” while also admitting “I don‟t think I should have come out if it had only been that” (288). Paul‟s more thoughtful reason for enlisting gets expressed in musical terms: “I used to play the piano jolly well … well, I‟d rather play a bit worse and yet perhaps play with more understanding, since I‟ve realized that there are other things in life.” Such an

“understanding,” he clarifies, cannot come from an artist who will not “run the risk of mixing with other people,” and so hides. “Great art,” Paul observes, “has its roots deep in the clay and the worms, and the deeper , the more lovely the flowers” (289).

Rather than express a shallow musicality, Paul desires a deeper artistic connection with England and the world. He imagines an “Art for Life‟s sake,” as he calls it, which leads him to Ypres (290). Concurrently, however, Nichols insinuates that going to war is not the most fruitful way to reap the harvest of a useful public art, as Paul is killed, cutting off at the any flower of genius he might have had. Nichols thus offers a sophisticated combination of Jowett‟s desire to use music to create a communal loyalty

277 with a Paterian aesthetic, which emphasized the discordance of pain as a morality check.43

The importance of music in Paul‟s fictional social life was, in fact, far from unique. It reflects Nichols‟s own youthful experiences and inadvertently parallels those of the painter, author, and composer Lord Berners.44 In his memoirs, Berners recounts scenes from his youth at the boarding school “Elmley” (really Cheam), then Eton, stretching from 1893 to 1900. Initially, as Berners recalls, his teachers and mother discouraged his interest in classical music. In First Childhood (1934), Berners describes how the Elmley music master, Sammy, had a penchant for “ridiculous, mid-Victorian drawing-room pieces,” though he “hated Bach, Beethoven and Mozart—in fact all the classics,” and went so far as to label Chopin “„morbid‟” (184, 185).

The presence of such a questionable music master was perhaps due to Mr.

Gambril, the headmaster. As Berners relates in A Distant Prospect (1945), Mr. Gambril shared the opinion of Paul‟s uncle, in so far as he considered “that music was not the sort of thing that ought to appeal to nice manly Englishmen” (44). Gambril added a slight xenophobia to his misogyny and then declared the sentiment to Berners‟s mother. She found it matched her own. Berners‟s notes that, though “[s]he liked to hear people praise my amateurish piano-playing,” the idea of her son “becoming a professional artist filled

43 This foreshadows Nichols‟s own intense interest in pacificism (Connon 171-76). Paul will later get reborn, in a way, in Nichols‟s follow-up novel Patchwork (1921). The musically talented Ray Sheldon, who after surviving WWI goes to Oxford, uses his piano playing in a similar fashion to Paul‟s and can be read as Paul‟s reincarnation.

44 Connon notes that Prelude “follows Beverley‟s own experiences closely,” offering a consciously aesthetic opposition to Waugh‟s sports obsessed The Loom of Youth (84). For Nichols‟s early successes at social engagements through music, see Connon (29-30). 278 her with horror” (18). All the same Berners was artistic and his mother felt that she had to give way somewhere. It is telling that she pushed her effeminate son towards

“literature and painting,” which “were less dangerous,” in her opinion, “than music”

(19).45

Despite such setbacks, Berners describes in First Childhood how musical successes brought him an escape from the unhappiness of school, as well as popularity.

Thwarting Sammy, he studied Chopin “surreptitiously” and found in the music one of the few “artificial paradises into which,” he remembers, “I could retreat and take refuge”

(185). Eventually he put the virtuosic style of playing he learned from Chopin to use during an end-of-term concert. Sammy had given him a piece called “The Lover and the

Bird,” which reminded him “of a dialogue between a sentimental old maid and her canary.” Although he detested it, he “learnt to execute the piece with a certain amount of brio,” and the result was well received. As the music “sounded very difficult,” he explains, “my apparent virtuosity together with my diminutive stature created a favourable impression on the audience and the item was one of the biggest successes of the programme” (187).

The performance also sparked a minor affair, as well. In addition to the applause of the audience, Longworth, the “Captain of the Second Eleven” and “a tall, athletic, fair- haired youth,” came up to congratulate the young pianist, saying, “„[w]ell played!‟ just as though I had hit a boundary or scored a goal” (128, 188). This set off a mild romance between the two culminating in Longworth taking Berners up to the school roof one

45 Berners‟s mother nevertheless seems to have allowed him to take music lessons at school and he felt free enough to write to her about his fascination with Wagner (Amory 24-25). 279 evening to smoke. Berners‟s musically inspired desirability seemed to have paid off, as

Longworth, he recalls, “suddenly threw his arm round my neck and drew me closer to him.” Being unused to tobacco, however, Berners had smoked too much and at that moment got “violently sick” (207). Even the “certain glamour” he had gleaned from “the concert platform” could not make up for this mishap and the relationship ended (196).46

Music brought Berners a still wider array of friends when he moved to Eton, though with this popularity came more uncomfortably overt sexual imputations. In A

Distant Prospect, Berners describes how he became friendly with the elite “Upper members” of his public school house by playing pieces from the music hall comedy The

Geisha, as well as “some of the more tuneful Chopin waltzes” (44). Unfortunately, these new social ties sparked a decrease in his standing amongst his own classmates, who began to greet him with “cynical grins and mysterious hints,” implying some sort of illicit relationship between Berners and the older boys, though Berners insisted on the falseness of such insinuations (45).

Eventually, however, he managed to overlook conventional morality by befriending the dashing, musical Deniston. Deniston was “a sophisticated edition of Walt

Whitman‟s „tan-faced prairie boy,‟” who was also “the object of a good deal of scandalous gossip” (69). When not creating scandal, he and Berners bonded over a shared interest in Wagner. These varied musical relationships foreshadow, of course,

46 Describing this experience years later in First Childhood, Berners notes that “if my feelings towards Longworth were of a sexual nature I was certainly not aware of it at the time.… I cannot, however, deny that my infatuation for this boy-hero of my school-days was accompanied by all the usual symptoms connected with sexual attraction. His image haunted my waking thoughts and my dreams” (195). Berners describes this youthful affair as emotional rather than physical; but, looking back on it, he attributes to it a tinge of the overtly sexual longings he was to experience as an adult. For Berners‟s later relationships and amorous interests, see Amory (126-27, 222). 280

Berners‟s later years, when his own compositions would bring him into the circles of such striking, if outré characters as Sergei Diaghilev, , and Gertrude Stein, as well as the applause of anonymous audiences (Amory 52-53, 161-65).

Similarly to Nichols and Berners, A. T. Fitzroy draws on the community creating potential of music, but only after having evoked the pressure to betray a homoerotic musical talent in order to assimilate into the commonplace.47 In her 1918 novel Despised and Rejected, Dennis Blackwood is a “musical” young man much like the fictional Paul and the real life Berners. Unlike them, however, he fights openly against his innate proclivities. “When I was at school,” he tells a friend, “I was terrified of my musical gift;

I hated it, and did my utmost to suppress it, because I thought it was that which made me different from the other boys. I loathed being „different‟” (78). Dennis conflates the difficulties in enjoying a rare “musical gift” with those encountered in enjoying one‟s opportunities as a homosexual. He makes this connection clear when he later recognizes that he was “different, not only by reason of his music,” but because he had “the soul of a woman in the body of a man” (107). At one point, he even went so far, he admits, as to distance himself from a sympathetic schoolmate, the musical newcomer Eric Rubenstein, so as not to run afoul of the other students. Eric “played the violin … like an artist,” but was “ragged,” which caused Dennis to consider him too “dangerous” to befriend (80, 79).

Dennis‟s actions are understandable, if not admirable, as soon after arriving at school Eric underwent what can most accurately be described as a musical rape. One

47 A. T. Fitzroy was the synonym for Rose Allatini, who, for a moment, hovered on the fringe of Bloomsbury, having tea with Ottoline Morrell. She was married to the composer Cyril Scott for twenty years before they separated and she eventually moved to Rye with Melanie Mills, the home also of E. F. Benson and Radclyffe Hall. See Jonathan Cutbill‟s short “Introduction” to Despised and Rejected. 281 afternoon Dennis and Eric were in the room of a “loutish Sixth Form chap” who, with his friends, was “banging away on the piano.” Someone suggested that Eric “should play his violin”; he refused. Here violence against musicians/homosexuals gets caught up with anti-Semitism—similar to Mr. Gambril‟s xenophobic suggestion that serious music is not for “manly Englishmen”—as with taunts of “dirty Jew” and the threat of “red-hot pokers down his back,” the piano-bangers forced Eric to play “by threat of sheer physical violence” (80). Dennis remembers feeling that “it was indecent that he should play before those boys who didn‟t really want to hear his music, and only wanted to make a mock of him,” and he was glad when he realized “that Eric wasn‟t really giving himself in his music,” that “he seemed to be withholding himself from expression” (81). Fitzroy thus characterizes music, and by association homosexual inclinations, as valuable, but as proclivities only to be shared with those who are able or who can be taught to appreciate them.48

Despite past events, Dennis slowly accepts his musical and homosexual nature and uses the talents it enables to connect to a heterogeneous public. He comes to see in music—that still somewhat subversive, but increasingly respectable art—the potential to reconcile the transgressive nature of homosexuals to a sexually intolerant, but musically receptive world. He realizes that the certain homoerotic “something inside [his] brain that turned everything [he] felt and experienced into music” provides a way for him to bring pleasure into the world as a productive artist (79). While preparing an opera with a

48 Some homosexual apologists considered homosexual tendencies to be “perverted” (Raffalovich, 1896, 15 n.1) or “against Nature” (Mayne 122) if engaged in merely due to lack of women or lust, not an actual romantic interest in or appreciation of one‟s partner. 282 friend, he imagines it being performed “next opera-season at Covent Garden,” so that

“the work that is nearest and dearest to [his] heart” might “actually be played before hundreds and hundreds of people.”49 He hopes that society would “acclaim it, go mad over it,” though he declares that, should this happen, “there won‟t be an ounce of conceit in me, because after all it‟s just my child they‟ll be making the fuss about—not me” (78).

Fitzroy suggests, though, that music can never be a complete deflection of one‟s inner self. When Dennis meets Alan, his future lover, and gets frightened, he gives him

“a roll of manuscript-music,” which, he explains, will reveal why he must leave: “It will tell you all that I mustn‟t tell you in words” (107). What Dennis offers for the “acclaim” of society is a variation on what he gave Alan, a composition born, at least in part, out of his experiences, his joys and sorrows, of being homosexual. Yet at the same time, as a composer, he gets to conceal himself from a public which might not understand, protecting himself from what had happened to Eric, by mediating his music through the performance of others. To a degree, then, Dennis places his music in “collusion,” as

Brett might say, with the closet. Fitzroy, on the other hand, works to burst the closet door right open by reminding people that the art that they “go mad” for may flower out of the very experiences that their laws condemn.

49 Artworks and compositions as a form of children—“[t]hose children nursed, deliver‟d from thy brain” (77.11, cf. sonnet 78)—that benefit the individual and society have, of course, been a part of the queer literary tradition since Shakespeare‟s sonnets. 283

“Don‟t let down your nineteenth-century composers”: The Homosexual Guardians of Conservative Culture

A slight, but remarkable variation on homosexuals characters who make themselves socially valuable through music are those whom their authors represent as guardians of a conservative musical culture. In Noël Coward‟s play Semi-Monde, for instance (written in 1926, though not performed until 1977), the lesbian vocalist Inez

“resents anything progressive in opera” (I:iii). Inez does, however, progressively use music to pick up women at concerts. Cyril Hardacre, meanwhile, her fellow musician, is an ungrateful playboy who uses the older man Beverley Fletcher to get to Paris to study singing with an opera pedagogue, as well as to provide him with an entrée into the fast life. Both Inez and Cyril represent those types, so scorned by Raffalovich in Uranisme, who seem intent on using a consciously conservative art in, respectively, libidinous and depraved ways.

A slightly more troubling can be found in Edward Sackville-West‟s dreamlike novel Piano Quintet (1925). Sackville-West presents Melchior, the titular quintet‟s pianist, as morbid, effeminate, and, more than likely, homosexual.50 Despite such eccentric characteristics, he remains virulently reactionary in his musical tastes.

Initially, this is unexpected. When touring Germany, Melchior is asked to give a lecture

50 Sackville-West is even more discreet regarding Melchior‟s sexuality than he was with his own; nevertheless, several references throughout the novel make a case for the pianist‟s homosexual inclinations. Those made by the quintet‟s second violinist, Imogen, are most direct. When she begins an affair with the first violinist Aurelian, she briefly discusses it with the cellist Lionel, asking him, with a playful candidness, whether he thinks of her as an “immoral woman, most unsuitable to be connected with two respectable men,” namely Lionel himself and the violist, Barnaby. Lionel asks, “[w]hy d‟you leave out poor Melchior? Isn‟t he respectable?” “Not in the same breath with you and Barnaby!” Imogen responds (142). The two laugh, indicating Melchior‟s own “immoral,” unmanly reputation. Later, Imogen refers to Melchior as a “pretty maid” evoking, offhandedly, his prudish effeminacy, and perhaps his emotional squabbles with Lionel and Aurelian, as well (152). 284 to music students at a local university. As he prepares his remarks, he constructs an outline beginning “Juvenis Coram Juvenibus Precor [Oh young man, I long to be among young men]” (237). This, he thinks, is “the inception of what was most important in his speech” (238). He quickly follows it up with a rather Paterian sentiment of sensuality mixed with innocence: “To be happy, go through life in innocencies of sensation; live from hand to mouth—a bright continuous ecstasy” (238). So far so good, as he invokes an insipid version of a late-nineteenth-century Oxonian aestheticism, relying on the long- standing connection between classical (though typically Greek, not ) homoerotic sensuality, no matter how innocently imagined, and music.

Melchior quickly turns, however, venomously xenophobic and pretentious. He plans to warn the students: “Don’t let down your nineteenth-century composers! Trust in the peculiar genius of German music, and don’t ape the French, who have the thinnest of musical individualities.… Above all, don’t be seduced into thinking that there’s anything worth learning from negro music!” Melchior‟s advice not to “submit to the reaction against Brahms” is commendable, but his narrow-mindedness with regards to the French avant-garde and “negro music” seems suspiciously hypocritical and a deviation from the better humanistic elements of the aesthetic traditions in which he is working (240).51

As a light-hearted comparison, we might turn to Compton Mackenzie‟s satiric novel Extraordinary Women: Theme and Variations (1928), wherein he presents the

51 In his younger years, at least, Sackville-West seems to have maintained an interest in what he called the “[s]incerity” of music. De-la-Noy notes that in October 1919, during one of his frequent bouts of sickness, “Eddy took his diary to bed with him and found the strength to reflect upon his music. „Sincerity above all things. I loathe poseurs like Lord Berners!‟” (62-63). This did not mean, though, that he disliked modern music. He was a strong ally of contemporary British composers, such as and (De-la-Noy 195, 223). 285 brilliant lesbian composer Olimpia Leigh who represents the pinnacle of past aesthetic traditions. “There were plenty of people,” Mackenzie writes, “to maintain that she

[Olimpia] was the greatest female creative mind since Sappho, and there was none to deny her right to be called the greatest female composer the world had yet known” (229).

Mackenzie presents Olimpia as a proud essentialist feminist avant la lettre, one who believes in the potential of a uniquely “feminine evolution” (230). She herself is a shining example of the process, having “inherited” both “her Greek scholarship” and her

“music from her mother” (231, 232).

She noticeably reinforces this maternal legacy, however, by tying it to an old- fashioned aesthetic theory inherited from Pater, Wilde, and, further back, Sappho. For,

Olimpia believes that the “supreme” position of Sappho in the lyric tradition was due to her having “moved nearer than any poet toward a perfect fusion of poetry with music”

(232). Olimpia ties the Sapphic lyrical tradition to a Paterian Aestheticism (à la “The

School of Giorgione”) and then attempts to go them both one better by composing pure music. She has composed, for instance, her “astonishing concerto for piano and antique instruments such as the , the lituus, and the salpinx, the tibia both single and double, the , cithara, pectis, lyra, sambuca, and the tympanum.” Unfortunately, “[t]his work had never been performed because there were neither instruments nor players available”; though, “those who had been privileged to read the score” had “declared it sublime” (233). Olimpia is so aesthetically conservative that she writes music for instruments that no longer exist!

286

Mackenzie is obviously sending up the obsession of homosexual subcultures with classical Greece and “classical” music. There is little doubt, though, that he looks fondly upon Olimpia‟s attempts to create an ideal modern art by turning to the past.

Throughout the novel, she is the sole character to remain intellectually and artistically dignified on her own terms and she consistently inspires the admiration of those around her, if largely for the music she composes with a contemporary instrumentation.

“For musical purposes it sounded so much more promising”: Satirizing the Expectation of Homosexual Emancipation through Music

While some authors—poets, novelists, and sexologists—were touting the benefits of a musical homosexuality to the larger community, others picked up on this trend and emphasized the ironic humor in using an ostensibly ambiguous, yet cultivated art as a means to ingratiate subversive desires with society. The work that might be said to have launched this subgenre into the twentieth century is a short poem by Horatio Brown, entitled, rather bluntly, “Bored: At a London Music.”52 The poem begins:

The rows of foolish faces blent In two blurred lines; the compliment, The formal smile, the cultured air, The sense of falseness everywhere Her ladyship superbly dressed— I liked their footman, John, the best (1-6).

52 “Bored” was included in Brown‟s 1900 volume Drift. According to a review of the volume in The Academy, 454, which included as a sample the first two stanzas of this poem, “Bored” was first published in The Pall Mall Gazette. This is a fair amount of publicity for such a forthright poem; though, its democratic connotations—the footman is the most interesting character in the poem—could function as an easy blind to more subversive interpretations. Brown himself is best known today for his complicated role in suppressing J. A. Symonds‟s contributions to Ellis Sexual Inversion (Brady 141). 287

What is surprising here is less the “sense of” an aesthetic “falseness” at some

Tantamount-esque, aristocratic household, than that the narrator has remembered the name of a footman for a purpose other than ordering a drink, and that he likes him better than his own “cultured” class.

The joke, of course, is that Brown‟s speaker is not bored at all, but is busy admiring the footman under the cover of the concert. He maintains such a “[s]upreme attention in his guise,” appearing to appreciate “the whole laborious din,/ Piano, ‟cello, violin,” that no-one, he reiterates, “hardly guessed” that he liked the “footman, John, the best” (14, 15-16, 17, 18). Indeed it is everyone around him who seems as though they would prefer to be elsewhere, from the performers with their exhausted appearance,

“[t]he tired musicians‟ ruffled mien,” to the cramped members of the audience, with their

“frigid plaudits, quite confined,/ By fear of being unrefined” (7, 9-10). The only one enjoying himself is the speaker.

Yet even he is not caught up in a musically-inspired grandiose romance. He avoids the high-flown rhetoric of his aesthetic predecessors, both the absurd predators of

Hichens‟s The Green Carnation or Levy‟s more serious and sympathetic amateur. His observation regarding the footman is instead a quiet, simple admission that he is objectively using the music as a cover to suit his own needs. The music is nothing more.

This detached, sardonic narrative style is the hallmark of twentieth-century satires of those who would use the increasing, but still ambivalent social respectability of music to legitimize homosexuality.

288

Another early satire on the connection between music and homosexuality can be found in E. M. Forster‟s Maurice, written largely from 1913-14, though not published until 1971.53 Early in the novel, the intellectual aesthete Clive Durham and the hearty

Maurice Hall bond while listening to Tchaikovsky‟s Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique.

The Pathétique was renowned in some circles for its homosexual connotations, as the composer had dedicated it to his reputed love interest, his nephew Vladimir Davydov.54

Clive alludes to this emotional history when he calls the symphony “the Pathetic,” cryptically foreshadowing the connection that he himself will cultivate with Maurice

(35). Years later, however, the two will part due to Clive‟s inability to progress beyond the abstract ideal of love he admires in Plato‟s Symposium towards a comprehensively intellectual, emotional, and physical relationship with Maurice. The nickname, then, is also an ironic allusion to the feebleness of Clive‟s own affections. Forster is perhaps also playing off the “pathetic fallacy,” the tendency, described by Ruskin in Modern Painters, for “violent” emotions to “produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things” (205). Either way, for Forster, a strong infatuation encouraged by a cherished book or by music is not enough to ground our love of someone else or to represent it

53 For the compositional dates of Maurice, see Furbank (1.258-59).

54 By 1908 several homosexual apologists had proudly proclaimed Tchaikovsky as a homosexual artist, due largely to his dedication of the Pathétique to Vladimir “Bob” Davydov, a connection which Forster himself underlines in chapter thirty-two of the novel. Carpenter, for instance, to whose partner, George Merrill Forster famously attributed the inspiration for Maurice, had referred to Tchaikovsky in The Intermediate Sex as the “” who “has attained to the highest eminence” in music (104), while in The Intersexes Mayne observed that “[s]ome homosexuals hearers of Tschaikowsky‟s [sic] last (and most elegiac) symphony, known as the „Pathetic‟ claim to find in it such revelations of a sentimental-sexual kind that they have nicknamed the work the „Pathic‟ Symphony” (397). For Forster‟s discussion of Merrill, see the “Terminal Note” in Maurice (249). 289 accurately. Love must instead be sustained by human interactions, which survive beyond the initial exciting impulses of art.

The symphony also serves to trigger a satire of modern audiences, which will laud an individual‟s art, while condemning the very inspiration for it. Although similar to

Fitzroy‟s critique of audiences in Despised and Rejected, Forster‟s take is much more contemptuously humorous. The second time Maurice encounters the Pathétique is during a concert in London, after which he meets Risley, a former acquaintance from Oxford.

Risley gleefully refers to Tchaikovsky‟s symphony as “Incestueuse et Pathique,” a play on the English “pathic,” and tells Maurice of its homoerotic history. Then, with an acute sense of schadenfreude, Risley informs Maurice that he has gone to the concert “to see all respectable London flock” to admire the music that Tchaikovsky had dedicated to the nephew with whom he “had fallen in love” and “in whom,” as Maurice later reads, was

“his spiritual and musical resurrection.”55 The admiration of “respectable London” for

Tchaikovsky‟s work is, for Risley, spiced by the horror that Londoners might have suffered had they known of the symphony‟s dedication or perhaps of its inspiration. This hypocritical ignorance causes Risley to find the experience darkly “supreme!” (162).56

55 As Bret Keeling points out, Tchaikovsky was gaining popularity in England at the turn of the century, and “[g]iven Forster‟s appreciation of music and love of the concert hall, there is no reason to doubt that he was, at the time he wrote Maurice, very much aware of Tchaikovsky‟s English reception and reputation” (89); for Tchaikovsky‟s popularity, see also Scholes (439).

56 Ironically, Risley‟s knowing, voyeuristic position of power is undone in the Merchant Ivory film version of the novel by an unfortunate re-triangulation. Instead of Risley watching Londoners enjoy the symphony he knows more about than they do, Maurice and Clive are shown listening to the music in a state of tension, having found out from the newspapers that Risley has been arrested. Directly following the concert is a scene revealing Risley in the dock of a courtroom, the eyes of a packed gallery on him, as a judge sends him to prison for importuning a guardsman. Here a man with a “promising career in politics,” as the judge puts it, instantly becomes a pariah, as his homosexuality becomes public knowledge (Merchant/Ivory Maurice). 290

While Brown and Forster offer send ups of ignorant society audiences, Ronald

Firbank offers a critique of those homosexual musicians who would attempt to ingratiate themselves to such indifferent amateurs. In Vainglory (1915), the young, “musical,” but not very well-off Winsome Brookes (a Firbankian Leonard Bast, of sorts) hopes to use his art as an entrée into society. Yet, as a pianist, he is barely able to catch his upper- middle-class audience‟s attention. When his patron, Mrs. Henedge, presses him to play at a party, he opens with “the exciting Capriccio Espagnol of Rimsky-Korsakoff,” a dazzling piece originally scored for an orchestra, and which, so far as I can find, exists only for piano in the four-hand transcription arranged by the composer himself.57 So,

Brookes is either an extremely good pianist or he only plays half of a piece; or, perhaps he has come up with his own arrangement, which is not entirely improbable.

As it turns out, most of his musically uninformed audience barely listens anyway. One woman murmurs “maliciously” to her neighbor that “a person who begins by playing the

Prelude of Rachmaninoff seldom plays anything else,” while others engage in conversations having nothing to do with the music whatsoever (94). On the whole,

Brookes‟s Capriccio flops.

As a composer, Brookes is still less impressive, although in this role he does garner the dubious accolade of more attention from his patron‟s guests. After the

Capriccio, Mrs. Asp begs him to play “something of [his] own,” and he complies by offering a “few of the leading themes” from his opera “Justinian” (95).58 He plays “the

57 See Olga Browning‟s translation of the “Foreword” to Capriccio Espagnole.

58 The story of Justinian is rather an odd choice for a . Gibbon observes in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that, when he became emperor of the Byzantines, “[i]n the exercise of supreme 291 pas of the Barefooted Nuns,” which Lady Listless compares to “the Sugar-Plum Fairies‟

Dance” from Tchaikovsky‟s Nutcracker, and the ending of which Mrs. Asp describes, with “approbation,” as “[j]ust like the falling of a silver tray!” He follows this clattering success with “the motive for Theodora,” which he performs by “folding his arms and drooping back shyly” from the piano, as the music for this, he explains, is “only the movement of her [Theodora‟s] dress” (95). Firbank presents Brookes with a slight air of the ridiculous. He is a minor, if talented, aesthete primarily concerned with ploys and appearances.

Firbank reinforces this characterization by describing the gaudy contents of

Brookes‟s flat, as well as its inhabitant‟s calculated ambitions. Brookes‟s home décor includes “a caricature” of the urbane actor Owen Nares and “an early photograph” of his intensely close friend Andrew “in a surplice” on the mantle, while on the piano sits a

“mask of Beethoven in imitation bronze” placed so that, “during the more strenuous efforts of the player,” it would “invariably slip, giving, often, the signal for applause”

(106). Amongst these possessions Brookes waits with Andrew for his breakfast while considering whether he should be “re-baptised” as “Rose de Tivoli. For musical purposes,” he reflects, “it sounded so much more promising…. Two persons would come to hear Rose, whereas only one, and perhaps not even one” would come to hear Winsome

power, the first act of Justinian was to divide it with the woman whom he loved, the famous Theodora, whose strange elevation cannot be applauded as the triumph of female virtue” (58). Before becoming the mistress and then the wife of Justinian, Theodora had been an actress and a prostitute, whose “presence was avoided by all who wished to escape either the scandal or the temptation” of her charms (59). Aside from his opera on Justinian Brookes has also composed “The Suite in Green” (94). The relationship of the color green and homosexuality was popularized by Oscar Wilde‟s famous green carnation and Hichens‟s book (McKenna 169-71; also Ellis, 1915, 120, 182, 186, 291, 299). 292

(107).59 Firbank offers a biting evaluation of music lovers—a small enough crowd, he implies, as it is—who are impressed less by talent and hard work than by artifice and exotic pedigrees. He also critiques the “artistic” machinations that “musical” young men were supposed to engage in, with the hopes of earning the acclaim of a philistine, if alluring society.

In Valmouth: A Romantic Novel (1919) Firbank switches tracks and scathingly pokes fun at the public‟s capacity for flaunting its own cultural taboos, so long as they remain mediated through art. Late in the novel, Captain Richard Thoroughfare, a young sailor long awaited by both his landlocked-lover and his mother, returns home to the resort town of Valmouth in the midst of a fête for vacationing centenarians.60 He brings with him his unexpected Jamaican bride, as well as Lieutenant Jack Whorwood, a young man whom he had earlier described to Thetis, “with a peculiar smile,” as being to him what “ was to , and even more” (398).61 Amidst the carousing and drinking of the supposedly respectable old folks, the Lieutenant brings his wife and his lover.

Despite Firbank‟s portrayal of Thoroughfare as a bit of a cad—he has led on the bathetically romantic Thetis and, potentially, his new wife and mother—the sailor

59 Foreign musicians had traditionally had an easier time gaining prominent musical employment in Britain (Ehrlich, Music Profession 186, 22; Mackerness 208).

60 As with most of his names, Firbank is being humorous here. In classical mythology Thetis was a Nereid, a sea nymph. As such, that Thoroughfare can run off from her by going to sea is comical, with a hint of the unnatural. The Nereid Thetis was also Achilles‟ mother; see ‟s Theogony (lns. 240-45, 1003-07 n. 59). Firbank‟s use of these names in his novel creates an oddly entangled series of close-knit love affairs.

61 The relationship between Patroclus and Achilles was famous throughout the classical world and the relationship provided an ideal model for early, classically-trained twentieth-century homosexual apologists. See, for instance, Carpenter‟s Iolaus, which traces the relationship from Æschylus‟s Myrmidons, through Plato, Dante, and up through contemporary scholars, such as J. A. Symonds (68-74). 293 receives a rather triumphant musical welcome. As the three adventurers enter the fête, a

“little old, osseous man” is cut off from his inebriated singing of “Lilli burlero”—a politically charged song popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sung satirically by English protestants from the perspective of a drunken, violent Irish

Catholic—when “with quick insight the maître d‟orchestre” strikes up “a capricious concert waltz, an enigmatic au delà laden air: Lord Berners? Scriabin? Tschaikovski?

On the wings of whose troubled beat were borne [the] recent arrivals” (452).62 Berners and Tchaikovsky were of course coded names for those aware of their homosexual inclinations, while Scriabin seems to signal Thoroughfare‟s own catholic interests.

Firbank ironically exchanges the older, politically satirical “Lilli burlero” for the more modern and sexually subversive (if the music is by Berners or Tchaikovsky) waltz, signaling a continuing attraction to socially proscribed behaviors, whether a drunken Irish

Catholic nationalism or homosexuality, so long as they remain covered by an acceptably artistic pretence.

Music, however, for Firbank, is not always a gimmick or a simple cover.

Although he mocks Hichens in The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923), in the same novel he returns to the theme of music as a sexualized lure, as popularized in The Green

Carnation, reworking it with more democratically exploitative effects. In Flower, at the

62 For a further explanation of “Lulli burlero” or “Lulliburlero” and a copy of its lyrics, see Walter Hamilton (189-90). Berners seems to have first met Firbank for an extended period of time in 1918 in Oxford (Amory 89). By 1917, Berners had composed his Valses Bourgeoises and his Trois Morceaux, the second of which is the “Valse sentimentale”; the orchestral arrangement of the Trois Morceaux was performed in public on March 8th 1919 in Manchester, see Jones (15, 120). Firbank need not necessarily have heard any one particular Berners‟s waltz, however, for as both were well-known figures on the art scene he may have heard about them ( Horder 26, 35-36, 66, 82). The second movement of Tchaikovsky‟s Sixth Symphony, in 5/4 time, could easily be described as a waltz with a “troubled beat.” 294

“moment when the Authorities” of an Italian town “were making minute enquiries for sundry missing articles, from the Trésor of the Cathedral,” Peter Passer, a “former chorister,” flees with Count Cabinet, a former politician, into exile on a nearby island

(565). The situation works out well for both, as Peter escapes from the authorities, while the count, sitting on a beach filled with swans, gets to watch Peter swim and to hear him

“warbling in the water with his clear alto voice” the “ and Anthems” of which “he knew no end”; these “would often stir the old man,” a music lover, “to the point of tears.”

In a sardonic twist, Firbank compares this scandalous scene to a night at the opera, when he observes that “[f]requently the swans themselves would paddle up to listen, expressing by the charmed or rapturous motions of their necks (recalling to the exile the ecstasies of certain musical or „artistic‟ dames at Concert-halls, or the Opera House, long ago) their mute appreciation, their touched delight” (566).

The count‟s infatuation with Peter is given an intelligible (if morally problematic) legitimizing contextualization. The count and Peter are not so different, Firbank insinuates, from all the old women, or even “„artistic‟” old men, who flock to public concerts to enjoy the musical charms of young performers. Nor is the “former chorister”‟s enticement of the count so dissimilar to young homosexual or even Church musicians who would charm acclaim and money from the general public.63 Aesthetic

63 Firbank again takes up music, money, and the church in Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926). Here dancing-choir-boys serve as much as erotic temptations for the priests as a means to charm money out of uncharitable parishioners. One choir boys asks ingenuously, “[w]hy should the Church charge higher for a short Magnificat than for a long Miserere?” Another answers, “[b]ecause happiness makes people generous, stupid, and often as not they‟ll squander, boom, but unhappiness makes them calculate” (654). It is an interesting answer. A pleasant time all around encourages charity, although Firbank also implies that people are willing to cough up more cash so as to get out of a service a little faster. 295 pleasure as sacred, as art, as commodity, or even as erotic enticement is purely, Firbank implies, a matter of perspective.

While Firbank laughs at the use of the cultural value of music as a relativistic excuse to flaunt or to insist on the social legitimacy of homosexuals, Lord Berners uses his 1936 novel The Camel to lampoon a grudging willingness to overlook suspicious behaviors, so long as those who engage in them fulfill the minimum requirements of being an artist. Here Berners introduces Herbert Scrimgeour, the young church organist for the small country town of Slumbermere. “Mr. Scrimgeour,” the narrator tells us,

“was very musical, and knew quite a lot about counter point and harmony,” although

“unfortunately he was a very indifferent executant” (38). Once, for instance, he learned a

“cheerful little fugue by Bach” and “decided to play it as a voluntary.” He botches it, however, due to “stage fright”: “short as the fugue was, he forgot several bars in the middle of it and was obliged to improvise,” somehow dislodging two hymn books “on to the top keys” of the organ in the process “so that an unexpected shrill tremolo was added to the general confusion” (39).

What the church vicar truly dislikes, however, is not the organist‟s professional failings, so much as his fin-de-siècle aesthetic associations. Scrimgeour “was an æsthete, a decadent,” and not “the type of man that the Vicar admired, the type of the „nice clean young Englishman‟” (86, 85). Still, the vicar “might possibly have forgiven him all this, if it had not been for his lamentable performances on the organ,” particularly as he feels himself “obliged to concede in Mr. Scrimgeour‟s favour” that “[h]e took a great deal of trouble with the choir-boys,” though without, the vicar assumes, “any form of

296 immorality” (86, 87, 85). The vicar is obviously a bit thick, but Berners‟s point is clear.64

Should artists perform at least the basic requirements of their jobs and keep their public images reasonably clean (one of Wilde‟s inabilities, despite his genius), society tends not to look too closely into intentions.

Men, finally, were not the only ones who were taken to task for using music for extra-artistic purposes.65 In Paying Guests, for instance, E. F. Benson depicts how music could provide a facile excuse for an inartistic woman to get close to a talented beloved.

Benson‟s Kemp, with “[h]er cropped like a man‟s” and her “sort of Eton jacket” works herself up over the musical Alice Howard, while both are staying at a boarding house in Wentworth (59). To Florence, Alice seemed “the incarnation of brilliant existence: she could improvise” on the piano, “she could paint and sell those beautiful little sketches she dashed off so easily, she was gay and independent, and self- reliant” (222). Florence uses her constant admiration of Alice‟s art as an excuse for being around her.

Alice is all of these things, though not quite to the degree that Florence allows herself to believe. The pianist‟s , for instance, are rather well-rehearsed affairs, refined through “industrious little practices, with the soft pedal down while everyone was resting upstairs,” “practices” which are rather an open secret (18). When a

64 Later in the novel, the vicar in fact thinks that Scrimgeour is flirting with his wife. The narrator, however, remarks that the vicar would have been relieved to know that “there was not the least likelihood of Mr. Scrimgeour making up to his wife, nor indeed to any other woman,” as he much preferred “his favourite chum,” the choir boy Antony (The camel 121, 123). Like Firbank‟s Peter Passer and Count Cabinet, this relationship is mutually exploitative, as Scrimgeour gets to spend time with Antony, who was himself “intelligent enough to realise the benefits that might accrue to him through the retention of Mr. Scrimgeour‟s friendship,” such as “the gift of a football” (123).

65 Nor of course were homosexuals the only ones using music for “extra-artistic” purposes, see chapter two (30-32, 30 n13). 297 fellow guest, the John Bullish Colonel Chase complains that Alice, who has been invited to “improvise” at an upcoming charity concert, is inanely rehearsing “the same old tune that she‟s been hammering at ever since [he] came to Wentworth,” or, as the narrator puts it more kindly, “memorizing her ,” Florence simply smiles and says “[s]uch lovely tunes” (75). Despite such increasingly overt pretenses, Florence‟s determination to admire Alice‟s skill gets wrapped up with her desire for Alice herself. In effect,

Florence convinces herself, “with the infallible certainty of instinct,” that Alice is not only a wonderful musician, but “was not one who cared much or indeed at all for the companionship or affection of men, and in this she recognized a secret kinship of nature with herself” (223).

As Florence‟s determined, yet upbeat aesthetic ignorance suggests, Benson manages the feat of both exposing his characters‟ idiosyncrasies and allowing them to end up happy on their account. Florence‟s willfully subtle instincts pay off: she admits to

Alice that she has “watched and admired” her and Alice responds favorably, an interaction which results in a most unexpectedly expressed display of enthusiasm.

“Florence,” Benson writes, “was naturally reserved, but like most reserved women, when once the cork came out it made an explosive exit, and a stream of bottled-up effervescence followed” her admission, her “effervescence” largely consisting of praise for Alice‟s “painting” and “music” (224).

Alice finds herself rather pleased by the flattery of the musically unrefined

Florence. As a result, her “cork showed signs of popping too; it did not fly forth with the vigour of Florence‟s explosion, but there was a little fizzing at its edges” (225). “Her

298 cork” begins “to fizz a little more,” when she remembers that Florence owns “a flat in

Kensington Square,” and has been further reassured that Florence‟s feelings are sincere.

Soon the women have “kissed” and Florence, slightly overcome, suggests that Alice “[s]it down at the piano and make something beautiful. Improvise.” The music provides them with a much needed “relief” and indicates how Florence‟s willingness to see Alice‟s recurring improvisations, both musical and emotional, as freshly effective will allow the two to fall and stay in love (226). The comic novel ends, appropriately, with the two going off on a “honeymoon” before happily moving in together in London (318).66

“Always breaking off”: Social Oppression and Silence

While novelists such as Benson, Berners, Firbank, Forster, and Nichols explore and satirize the ways in which characters use music to justify the role of homosexuals in society, others (and sometimes the very same authors) suggest how social oppression and an often rabid persecution could destroy the self-respect and loving support necessary for the creation of new art. One of the most touching examples of this theme comes from

Radclyffe Hall‟s (1928), which examines how social oppression can both spur one to artistic success or cause an artist to be cut off from her inspiration.

The writer Stephen Gordon, Hall‟s voice in the novel, represents a will to achieve inspired by the trauma of living in a society that condemns her way of life. Stephen, a

66 As Brian Masters observes, there is something “ironic” in Benson‟s comical treatment of these women, who seem to show their unconventional desire in a much more overt way than their creator ever showed his (249). Benson set up more serious traces of homosexual inclinations linked to music in The Challoners and in Michael, for the latter see chapter six (358-62), though these novels do not end happily. For Benson‟s association with homosexual English society in Capri and his own closeted homosexual tendencies, see Masters (185-86, 244-252). 299

“masculine-looking girl” grows up detested by her mother and the majority of those around her (165). After meeting and successfully courting the more feminine Mary

Llewellyn, Stephen begins to live a life with which she is relatively happy. She nevertheless ends up surrendering Mary to a man several years later with the hope of making her lover‟s life easier. When initially faced with the impending loss, Stephen declares a “faith in my writing,” a “great faith,” that it could someday “compel the world to accept me for what I am” (425). After having given up Mary, she begins to feel this faith grow rife with emotional power, and the novel ends with “[h]er barren womb” become “fruitful” as her (for the moment) “sterile burden” cries out for “the right to our existence” (437).

The composer Jamie, Stephen‟s fellow artist, does not fare as well. Stephen meets Jamie and her lover Barbara in Paris, where the two have fled from the Scottish

Highlands due to the hostility of their neighbors. Jamie‟s inspiration comes directly from the landscape where she and Barbara had fallen in love as girls. As the young lovers had

“strolled down the village street” and listened to a local “piper at evening,” “something in that sorrowful, outlandish music would arouse the musical soul in Jamie, so that great chords would surge up through her brain, very different indeed from the wails of the piper, yet born of the same mystic Highland nature” (353). In their village, Jamie would sit at her family‟s piano and “improvise for hours,” provided that “Barbara would sit in their parlour and listen” (354-55).

Exiled from their homeland, however, Jamie‟s inspiration dries up. Her music becomes “stiff and scholarly” (350). With Jamie still in school and with each deprived of

300 the traditional support from a family, the two live in poverty, cold, and hunger. When

Barbara develops consumption they are unable to afford the “smart English doctor” and

Jamie feels guilty and cannot compose. In frustration, she cries to Barbara “how can I work if you will go on coughing,” then blames herself for being unable to provide her lover with “anything proper” (359, 360). These deteriorating circumstances lead to a break in Jamie‟s artistic evolution and eventually to Barbara‟s death, followed by Jamie‟s suicide. Instead of inciting her to greater artistic heights, social ostracism destroys her art and, eventually, her life.

Forster expands this interplay between death and the breakdown of music in “Dr.

Woolacott,” published posthumously but written in 1927. Here he evokes how the emotional and physical repressions of homosexuality offer a protracted, neutered stasis, a death-in-life, by inhibiting both the creation of music and the various pleasures that come through the risks of enjoying oneself.67 The story begins with Clesant, a young, semi- invalid country squire, looking across his park and thinking to himself calmly, “[t]here is no reason I should not live for years now that I have given up the violin” (83). Clesant is sick, Forster quickly reveals, with “[n]othing organic,” but with an illness that stems from his “heart” to his “nerves” to the rest of his body (84). Due to this partially nervous illness—homosexuality, as we have seen, was widely attributed to hypersensitive nerves—Dr. Woolacott has warned him that he “must avoid all excitement,” such as playing the violin (84). He also “mustn‟t be intimate with people,” a prohibition which includes “being kind to handsome strangers and wanting to touch them” (84, 92).

67 For the dating, see Furbank (2.148). 301

“Aware of all his weaknesses,” Woolacott has particularly “warned him against this one”

(92). Forster carefully combines here the repression of with a repression of physical stimulants, particularly homoerotic ones—Clesant must avoid masculine “handsome” strangers, as opposed to feminine beautiful ones—in order to evoke a consequent blandness. In return for avoiding excitement, Clesant remains free to sit in the “tepid sun” and watch “the colourless shapeless country people” who surround him (83).

Clesant, however, is young and struggles with his repression of both his artistic and his physical desires. When a vital looking “farm-worker” unexpectedly jumps the fence onto his lawn and boldly talks to him before leaving to re-find his friends, Clesant begins to reconsider what he is missing (84). Having come face to face with a representative of freedom and health, someone willing to venture into restricted areas,

Clesant begins to see the activities of life, forbidden him by Woolacott, as “pleasanter and more significant” (85). Soon “a languorous yearning” fills him and Clesant wonders rebelliously, “might not the violin satisfy” it (85-86)? Almost with this thought the stranger returns. As the two begin to talk, the stranger moves closer to Clesant, then kisses him, with “lips that parted as they touched him to murmur—„And to hell with

Woolacott‟” (89). The bold “attractive” farm-hand, “strong as a horse” challenges both

Clesant‟s inhibitions and Woolacott whom, he observes, “never makes anyone well, which seems a defect in a doctor” (87, 90). Though Clesant “longed to feel” the stranger‟s arms “around him,” he nevertheless hesitates to leap into the world of the vigorous, and so protests that Woolacott “keeps people alive” (90).

302

Clesant mistakes being “alive” for living, which causes the two to quarrel and

Clesant to risk losing his new friend and a chance at a healthier life. Unable to convince

Clesant of the doctor‟s evil, the stranger to move to leave. As he does so, however, they hear the “[t]he normal life of the house … servants, inmates”—one begins to suspect, in fact, that Clesant is in a rest home or that the “normal” world is merely an overgrown, irrationally run prison—approaching them (91-92). They grow frightened of being found together and Clesant helps the stranger to in a “cupboard,” an early embodiment of the closet (92). This excitement causes Clesant‟s “illness” to flare. As people enter the room, Clesant fights against both desire and fear. He thus moves feverishly from intending to “betray his late friend” to demanding of everyone, “[d]on‟t go to the cupboard,” as he “writhed in convulsions” (92, 93).

Clesant remains torn, then, between a life of quiet submissiveness and the dangerous, yet vital love and excitement offered by -worker. Forster symbolizes this ambivalence through violin music interrupted. As Clesant writhes, he hears voices speaking of a violin:

A violin had apparently been heard playing in the great house for the last half-hour, and no one could find out where it was. Playing all sorts of music, gay, grave and passionate. But never completing a theme. Always breaking off. A beautiful instrument. Yet so unsatisfying … leaving the hearers much sadder than if it had never performed (93, ellipses in the original).

The music, it seems, had been playing for the duration of Clesant‟s discussion with the farm-hand, a representative, we soon discover, of Clesant‟s own repressed nature, for when the cupboard is opened, no-one is there. As such, the violin stands for the traditional Paterian or Wildean connection of music with self-knowledge and represents 303

Clesant‟s attempt to come to terms with himself.68 Unable, however, to accept the psychical or physical implications of his homosexuality, the music induced by Clesant‟s near acknowledgement of his desires, his own physical and mental “pain fugues,” remains beautiful, but broken, both for himself and for the larger household.

Under this stress, Clesant‟s music soon ends entirely. Following his breakdown, the stranger reappears and the two clasp each other passionately, “their limbs intertwined” growing “mad with delight,” together at last, but unable to face the world or the returning Dr. Woolacott, who this time arrives “too late” and finds Clesant “dead on the floor” (95, 96). Forster thereby evokes the aesthetic, emotional, as well as physical deaths that result when individuals are cut off, not only from their homelands and loved ones, but from their very selves.69

Social repression does not always lead, of course, to the stoppage of music.

Sometimes it provokes the continuation of a stifled . Nichols makes this point in his brilliantly manic 1927 novel Crazy Pavements. The novel opens with a happy portrait of the covertly homosexual “roommates” Brian Elme and Walter Moore living in

68 Focusing on issues of class and narcissism, Wilfred Stone refers to Clesant‟s “psychomachia” (400).

69 According to Furbank, Forster gave up writing novels due to his perception of a similar aesthetic self- alienation: “namely, that, being a homosexual, he grew bored with writing about marriage and the relations of men and women.” Furbank also suggests that Forster became frustrated with the novel form because, after writing Maurice, he knew “at the back of his mind that it might have been a better novel if it had been written for publication”; furthermore, that “having written it, he was, after all, no nearer to writing a publishable novel” about relationships other than those overtly heterosexual (2.132). In light of this inability to refine a novel, it is interesting to consider that Arctic Summer, begun in 1911 and never finished (xi), also contains a sexually repressed “Clesant,” who curses his older brother because the latter has taken “to filth” and gone “with women” (191). By 1927, the new Clesant has moved quite a bit towards overcoming his prudishness and Forster was able to tell T. E. Lawrence, with whom he had shared “Doctor Woolacott,” that it was “the best thing I‟ve done and also unlike any one else‟s work” (quoted in Furbank 2.149). While it is a wonderful story, and has several interesting psychological elements, it is not totally “unlike any one else‟s work,” as this chapter shows. 304 domestic musical bliss in a mediocre boarding house near London‟s Marble Arch. Brian is a gossip , a naïve predecessor to Evelyn Waugh‟s Mr. Chatterbox in Vile

Bodies, who adores Walter. Walter is “an ex-naval officer, with two passions in the world—the first a passion for freedom. The second an almost absurd hero-worship of

Brian” (20). Their relationship is “about two years” old and began when they “had struck up an acquaintance which had ripened into one of those rare friendships,” such as “make one feel that life is not an uncommonly feeble joke by a vulgar and untidy spirit.”70 A feeling of warmth envelops them. In the evening they sit together, as Brian tries “to play

Debussy on a piano designed only for the simpler marches of Sousa” (21).

When their relationship is troubled, a gramophone record brings them back together. Soon into the book, Brian becomes entranced by an aristocratic woman he meets through work. The friends more or less separate, with Brian spending most of his time away from their shared room. They reconcile, however, when Brian staggers into a bar, a mess without Walter, and finds “himself sitting on somebody‟s knee…. It was

Walter.” Brian cries, “Don‟t go…. I want you—awfully,” as nearby a “gramophone bawled: „You better not/ You‟re getting hot/ Getting away with a terrible lot‟” (286).

And they are, for when Brian next wakes up he sees Walter “on the other side of the room,” Nichols leaving us to assume that their happy domesticity has resumed (287).

70 Connon observes that Brian appears to live a “blameless life with Walter,” and that Nichols “went to some lengths to stress the idealistic and sexless nature of the relationship” (126). True, but Nichols stresses it almost to the breaking point. The navy was particularly associated with homosexuality (Porter and Weeks 15, 64, 86-7, 134; also consider Firbank‟s Thoroughfare and Whorwood from The Flower Beneath the Foot). Moreover, with the lyrics coming from the record player while Brian is sitting on Walter‟s knee (see above in text) it would take more of an act of will to imagine that the two were simply friends than to assume that they are lovers. It is therefore hardly a surprise when Connon records Nichols‟s acknowledgement that “„[o]f course Brian and Walter were lovers‟” (127). 305

The happy Brian and Walter stand in stark counterpoint to the overtly effeminate

Maurice Cheyne, whose lonely misery Nichols evokes through an emaciated musical serialism. When Brian drops his new, debauched aristocratic , one member, the cocaine addict Lord William, dishonestly tells another, Maurice, that Brian has been saying Maurice “ought to be shot.” Maurice invites Brian to his flat to confront him.

When Brian arrives, Maurice quickly sits down at his piano and accuses his guest of

“[s]aying—monstrous things,” as “[i]n feminine irritation he tapped E flat quickly, six times, with his right forefinger” on the piano, for emphasis. Brian immediately realizes that Lord William had “decided to queer his pitch”; to ruin, that is, his reputation, which is the traditional meaning of the phrase. By 1927, however, “queer” had taken on the overtones that it has today, and so Nichols also implies that homosexual imputations are involved.71

The pitch that is truly “queer[ed],” then, with all of the word‟s connotations, is

Maurice‟s. Nichols symbolizes his hysterical state of mind by the repeated “maddening six taps on E flat,” that one chillingly constrained note hit over and over again (230).

Brian denies Maurice‟s accusations, but the latter continues his monothematic onslaught, insisting to Brian, “[y]ou think I‟m a freak, effeminate, something that ought to have been strangled at birth. Don‟t you? Don‟t you? (231). The “tap, tap, tap” of the E flat underlines Maurice‟s repeated self-loathing accusations and signifies the metaphorically

71 See Kaplan for a discussion of the homosexual contexts in which the Marquis of Queensbury used “” in 1894 (299); Ullman provides an attestation of “queers” used in a homosexual and contexts in the “in the area” in 1914 (593); Nichols had spent time in the states in 1918, where he might have picked up the slang (Connon 66-69); and Isherwood uses “queer” in similar ways in Goodbye to (192-93) published in 1939, but depicting events in 1932-33. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary Thomas pick up on this tradition in their 1994 book Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian . 306

“strangled” nature of his life (230, 231). It also hammers home how Brian‟s alleged insinuations threaten to out Maurice emotionally, and, if too widely publicized, to confine him to jail. His constricted, serial taps, then, present a petrifying contrast to the relaxed, domestic Debussy that Brian jingles out at home with Walter.

Directly following the taps on the piano, Maurice also foreshadows the gramophone that will provide the brazen for the reconciliation of the masculine, but more covertly amorous Brian and Walter with a description of how he uses his. Abruptly following his repeated accusations, Maurice makes a series of startling revelations filled with a yearning, self-loathing, paranoia that generates one of the most chilling confessions in all of early-twentieth-century literature. After declaring, pointedly, to Brian, “I‟m as natural as you are”—indeed, he naturally wants what Brian has with Walter—Maurice recounts how he has “never fallen in love, or wanted to marry, or longed for children,” though he has “tried and tired till” he is “almost insane” (231,

232). Touching Brian‟s arm, he goes further, outlining his inner agony:

I‟m frightened. Hideously frightened of life…. Sometimes I come back from a party and I turn on all the lights and I play the gramophone, and I stand in the middle of the room, just waiting, till I could scream. The room is bright and noisy, but I feel it‟s full of people, looking at me, condemning me. They crowd round me, out of every door, they climb in at the window, they grin down from the ceiling, and oh, God! … they all accuse me. Accuse me…. There are other people who are made like I am, and they make friends, wonderful friends, that stick to them all their life. I haven‟t got a single friend (232).

The gramophone that in five chapters will remind Walter and Brian of the fulfilling life they share together, has its mirror image in the one Maurice uses to drown out his self- hatred. When he is older, he predicts, this gramophone will be all he has left. He

307 imagines, he tells Brian, how his friends will “leave me alone in this room, with the lights on and the gramophone playing,” his only solace being the noise and the company he can buy (234). While the art of Jamie and Clesant is cut brutally short, Maurice‟s music is almost worse. His gramophone strains on providing sounds used simply to hide his misery, as the repeated E flat reveals his stunted life.

As one final twist on this theme, it is worth noting Mackenzie‟s depiction of how audience expectations based upon gendered stereotypes, many of which are as constrained and as tedious as Maurice‟s “maddening six taps,” can cause a sense of artistic inadequacy. In Extraordinary Women, Mackenzie contrasts the successful, self- possessed Olimpia Leigh with the pianist Cléo Gazay, whom critics consider a “failure” because they think “she did not practice enough.” Although “[i]t was true she was lazy,”

Mackenzie suggests that the principal reason for dissatisfaction with Cléo is that she does not fit comfortably into the stereotypical category of genius: she is not sufficiently masculine. Cléo has “merely reached as far as despising her feminine clothes,” but “had not enough awareness of herself in relation to the rest of the world to affect deliberately a masculine style of attire.” Due to her ambiguously gendered appearance, and her unwillingness to assume a deliberate façade, audiences consider Cléo “masculine enough to play well, yet not masculine enough to be one of the world‟s genuinely great pianists.”

Thus “[a]lthough unceasing practice might have kept those fingers not so careless of wrong notes, listeners would have continued to judge her as a man and still found something lacking” (112).

308

Even if Cléo did wear more masculine clothes, and thereby affect a more complete masculinity, and hit all the right notes, conventional audiences would still perceive her as having “something lacking.” She could never be so masculine as to be a

“man,” and so, for some, she could never be a “genuinely great” pianist. As Cléo desires to reach “the top,” not in her own eyes, which “were half the time clouded with the preoccupation of why she had been made as she was,” but in those of the public, which discounts her, this public perception interrupts her self-actualization with regards to her talent and her self-worth (112, 113).

What Cléo needs to succeed, Mackenzie implies, is to become so comfortable with herself as to not need the praise of prejudiced critics. An unfeigned confidence, such as Olimpia‟s, (and more practice) might give her what she needs to consider herself a success, and perhaps convince part of the public, at least, that she is one as well.

Unfortunately, Cléo lacks self-sufficiency and the consequent disappointments—similar to those suffered by the other musicians discussed in this section, and the disappointing destruction of art in Dorian Gray and of musical knowledge in “Apollo in Picardy”— imply the negative results of homophobic social conventions on both artists and audiences. This, in turn, leads to the impoverishment of culture in general. Such characters as Cléo, Clesant, and others in this way make an implicit call for the social inclusion of queer individualities. Obviously, this would not solve everyone‟s problems—no one solution ever will—but it might make, the above authors propose, for a generally richer, happier world.

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“Summoned by such a music from our time”: Music, Homosexuality, and Politics

Although real life homosexuals risked being socially and legally alienated from

British society and were thus left to form smaller, secretive, and loosely linked communities, there was often the sense that they belonged to a larger, international circle, one usually constructed from artistic relationships. When in Brideshead Revisited Evelyn

Waugh describes Anthony Blanche as “a of no nationality,” he alludes to the cosmopolitanism of this aesthetic homosexual subculture. Blanche had, for instance,

“dined with and Gide and was on closer terms with Cocteau and Diaghilev;

Firbank sent him his novels with fervent inscriptions,” and “he had aroused three irreconcilable feuds in Capri,” the sometime home of W. Somerset Maugham, E. F.

Benson, and the heterosexual Compton Mackenzie (46). As homosexuality became more closely associated with the musical arts in particular, the connection tended to consolidate, in the minds of some reactionaries, the international and specifically anti-

English connotations of both homosexuals and classical music. This pushed both still further away from the sympathy of hyper-nationalistic English circles. At the same time, the association created an anti-jingoistic and often pacifistic tie between English homosexuals in the arts and left-wing European politics.

As we have seen in previous chapters, by the 1870s classical music in England was progressively shedding the taint of an exotic, even foreign immorality that it had maintained from the eighteenth century. While I will go into the complexities of music and nationalism in-depth in chapter six, we have seen enough evidence to make the case for a suspicion of classical music still lingering in some conservative English outlooks 310 well into the modern . In Forster‟s A Passage to India, the pompous Ronny

“repressed his mother when she enquired after his viola,” so as not to lose face amongst the Imperial Anglo-Indian community in Chandrapore. Lord Berners‟ recalls his headmaster telling his mother that “music was not the sort of thing that ought to appeal to nice manly Englishmen,” while in Despised and Rejected sixth form louts taunt the violinist Eric Rubenstein by calling him a “dirty Jew,” as they treat him as less than a musical prostitute. In Nichols‟s Prelude, meanwhile, Paul has to promise the head-boy in his dormitory that the “Prologue” to Pagliacci is not obscene before singing it.

Progressive authors mock such old-fashioned, xenophobic reactions to music, but also attest to their continued existence.

As these examples indicate, an archaic association of music and especially foreign music with something shameful or a non-English depravity dovetails neatly into contemporary connotations of homosexuality, which was similarly seen as foreign and dangerous. By the twentieth century, England had a well-established tradition of attributing its native homoeroticism to other nations, often for political reasons. Cook, for instance, links the anti-aesthetic of 1895, when Wilde‟s “decadent art and gross indecency were conflated in court and in condemnatory newspaper editorials,” to “tension between France and England following the French alliance with Russia in

1894” (117, 118). During this period, English editorialists, as Cook shows, “tended towards the promotion of a cleansing and tacitly pastoral Englishness.”

This sanitized nationalistic ideal worked in opposition to a Wildean, homoerotic decadence. The papers portrayed this decadence as “French, urban, excessive,

311 contagious and parasitic, vampirically draining the nation‟s life blood” (118). Brady concurs, arguing that homosexuality around the turn of the century was often represented as non-British to protect the empire, as “any social of sex between men not only undermined masculinity as a social status in the metropolitan space of mainland

Britain, but also threatened the cultural self-perception of pre-eminence in the wider world” (24). If British courts, legislation, newspapers, or the medical community did have to acknowledge same-sex acts in England, they discussed them as vaguely as possible. As Brady points out, this allowed the “British to foster ideals of masculinity and manliness, in which the phenomenon of sex between men was perceived as exceedingly rare, compared with other societies,” such as France, Germany, or even the

United States (115).72

These nationalistic stereotypes of the foreignness of homosexuality and of art in general lingered on well into the twentieth century, at times feeding into a nationalistic paranoia. Perhaps the most bizarre combination of music, homosexuality, pedophilia, and xenophobia came in 1918 when the right-wing parliamentarian Noel Pemberton-

Billing linked them all to German espionage and, eventually, Wilde.73 On page three of

72 Music was not the only negative influence. Much of the fear surrounding foreign homosexuality centered on the impact of books, scientific and otherwise, coming from France, Germany, and the U.S, see Kaplan (88-89), Brady (82), and Ellis (212), respectively. Ellis book itself was banned in England, though available in the U.S..

73 Another striking example of the conflation of art, Germany, and homosexuality can be found in Alfred Douglas‟s “The Rossiad (1916). A still earlier example can be found in Rose Macaulay‟s 1912 novel Lee Shore. The aesthete Peter “Margery” Margerison is described as someone whose “love of pleasant things is what he lives by. Including among them Denis Urquhart,” a beautiful aristocrat who was at school with Peter (46). At one point, when Denis comes to Peter‟s aid, Tchaikovsky is notably playing in the background (70). Peter, however, does not end up with Denis, as nothing ever goes right for him. This is a character trait linked without overt explanation to Germany. Peter twice notes that “he was easy to break and hard to mend—made in Germany” (11, see also 68). Here Brady‟s argument that turn-of-the-century 312 the January 26th, 1918 edition of his newspaper The Imperialist, Billing published an article outlining the contents of a German book, which he could not produce, but which he insisted contained “a precis [sic] of general instruction regarding the propagation of evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia,” as well as a list of “the names of forty-seven thousand English men and women,” including “[t]he names of Privy Councillors, youths of the chorus, wives of Cabinet Ministers, dancing girls, even Cabinet Ministers themselves,” a wide array of citizens. Many of these individuals,

Billing suggested, were open to blackmail by who had induced or who intended to induce them to commit “unnatural” acts.

Music takes a notable part in Billing‟s rabid accusations. Though the names, the article states, followed “each other with no order of precedence,” it is interesting to note that “youths of the chorus” comes in second in the list on offer, suggesting the influence of established stereotypes regarding chorus boys. Music appears once more, when the article claims that in the “black book of sin details were given of the unnatural defloration of children who were drawn to the parks by the summer evening concerts.” While I want to avoid overstressing the Imperialist‟s use of music—the paper was chiefly concerned with threats to British strength—it is notable how music circulated here among fears of foreign homosexuality and particularly of pedophilia.

Music would reappear in conjunction with Billing, this time with ironically neutralizing connotations. In 1918, Billing published a notice accusing the pianist turned

British society saw homosexuality as tainting the masculine strength that propped up the Empire is reversed against Germany, as Peter‟s homosexuality get equated with a weak, easily breakable German industrialism. Peter‟s own English origins, however, could easily be interpreted as a warning to the nation not to assume foreign sexual practices, and indeed Peter ends the novel safely in Italy selling his needlework. 313 dancer Maud Allan of encouraging lesbianism through her portrayal of the title-role in a private production of Wilde‟s Salome.74 The notice suggested that Allan catered to

“several thousand” of the original forty-seven—a subsection termed “The Cult of the

Clitoris”—through her performances, the implication being that she furthered the German agenda by inciting sexual perversion (The Vigilante. 16 Feb. 1918: 1).75 Billing was quickly sued for libel.

Surprisingly, particularly considering the wartime backdrop, the prosecution would refer four times to the music that the German composer Richard Strauss had set to the play to mitigate the alleged homosexual influence of Wilde‟s words. The most notable instance of this occurred during the cross-examination of a doctor whom Billing had arranged to testify to the lesbian and sadistic symbolism of Wilde‟s work. Prompted by the prosecution, the doctor agreed that if Wilde‟s words were set to “the music of

Strauss,” then it would be “legitimate to head the programme „The Cult of the ‟”

(Kettle 163).76 As Philip Hoare argues, “[t]he obvious absurdity of this claim—which would have labeled thousands of respectable opera-goers as perverts—opened both the

74 Jodie Medd links wartime paranoia, the publically unspeakable nature of homosexuality in 1918, Wilde‟s Salome, and the difficulties of decadent language. She convincingly argues that “[t]he very suggestibility of lesbianism, with its wide range of connotations and possible manifestations,” offered “a particularly powerful vehicle for figuring the wartime problematic of uncertainty, illegibility, and (mis)representation,” particularly when it was placed in conjunction with the “incantatory musicality” of the symbolist language of Salome (26, 28).

75 With this edition The Imperialist became The Vigilante. The Times would reprint passages of the Imperialist‟s initial report on the “black book” in coverage of Billing‟s trials, reproducing the section from The Imperialist relating to “youths of the chorus,” etc. (“Mr. Billing‟s Defence. The German Black Book. Attack on the Judge.” Times. 31 May 1918. 4).

76 For an edited and annotated transcript of the parts of the trial referring to the neutralizing potential of Strauss‟s opera, see Kettle (65, 163-64, 201, 240). More recently, and with a more positive perspective, Carolyn Abbate has discussed the opera in terms similar to those that frightened the doctor. Abbate argues that Strauss‟s operatic translation of Wilde‟s play “draws on motifs of acoustic delusion” that evoke a “liberating confusion” closely related to “transvestism” and “a dispersal of authority” (229). 314 court‟s and the judge‟s eyes to the extent of the doctor‟s,” and no doubt of Billing‟s,

“delusions” (149). Amidst paranoia and , the prosecution‟s strategy failed.

Billing was eventually acquitted, but for a moment (a foreshadowing of the count‟s thoughts about opera‟s legitimizing power in The Flower Beneath the Foot) a “foreign” art form often cited as dangerous during WWI seems to have alleviated the perceived unnatural influences of England‟s arch-decadent.77

While Billing represents a wartime evolution of the nineteenth-century journalists discussed by Brady, Cook, and Kaplan, more liberal novelists rebelled against archaic fears of exotic art and sexual nonconformity. Drawing on earlier aesthetic and homosexual champions, such writers emphasized the positive connotations of an international, musical homosexual culture. In Despised and Rejected, for instance,

Dennis, who had initially tied his music to his homosexuality, reconceptualizes both in terms of a pacifist, international “kinship” amidst WWI:

Already, as was usual with him, thought was translating itself into sound, into music that was no longer morbid as a nightmare, but strong, triumphant, a pæan of peace—the peace of all nations…. This symphony of his should be as international as art itself; as international as the heart of the man who, seeing beyond hedges and frontiers and class-distinctions, claims the whole world as his „country,‟ and claims kinship with all people who walk upon the face of it (200).

Dennis moves from using music as a negative, then a positive analogy for homosexuality; to a means to communicate with Alan; to a means to stimulate an international unity through art.

77 For the powerfully heightened debate on the benefits and negatives of German music during WWI, see chapter six. 315

Fitzroy overtly draws here on the positive associations of music, homosexual desire, and homosexual sensitivities promoted by Edward Carpenter. Dennis, for instance, recalls Carpenter‟s suggestion in The Intermediate Sex that the “artistic nature” of male homosexuals could help them to be “reconcilers and interpreters” (36). Barnaby, a friend of Dennis‟s, also draws on Carpenter when he theorizes that “perhaps these men who stand mid-way between the extreme of the two sexes are the advance-guard of a more enlightened civilisation” (348). Dennis hopes to fulfill this role by using a secular music, one almost as inclusive as the music of the spheres, to break through the boundaries of sexuality and of nationality and to create an international community. In doing so, his imagined symphony effectively foreshadows the 1963 recording of

Benjamin Britten‟s , which would feature the Russian soprano Galina

Vishnevskaya, the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and the English tenor Peter

Pears, with words from Wilfred Owen‟s war poetry.

Despised and Rejected was a product of its time: the fruit of a Paterian morality and an idealized aestheticism advanced through Wilde to Carpenter, which equated homosexuality, cosmopolitanism, and art (particularly music).78 In the 1930s, however, newer, equally rebellious writers emerged and this equation shifted, de-emphasizing debts to a fin-de-siècle musical romanticism, while emphasizing to a greater degree the relationship of homosexuality to international politics. In his autobiographical

78 Despised and Rejected was not alone. The decadence of Wilde and others was by its very nature international, drawing on French, Italian, and Greek traditions. In the twentieth century, the American Xavier Mayne‟s novel Imre features a relationship between an Englishman and a Hungarian, as did Teleny, and there was an immense international interchange of ideas in Ellis‟s Sexual Inversion and Carpenter‟s The Intermediate Sex. A jingoistic twist on this motif can be found in Benson‟s 1917 Michael, for which see chapter six (358-62). 316

Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood alludes to this in his discussion of his self-outing to his homosexual uncle sometime in 1930. He recalls how the older man used “the slang expressions of his generation” and how he would refer “to himself as being „musical‟ or „so‟” (36). Between the rough dates of 1918 and 1930, then, using artistic terms, such as “musical,” to indicate homosexuality had started to become passé.

This might provide one reason for Isherwood‟s abandonment of an early musical novel described in Lions and Shadows. The plot is based around Roger Garland, a young

“quartette‟s secretary,” who had “funked the high dive in his prep. school swimming- bath,” and hence failed to live up to the masculine school-boy athletic ethos. Roger can nevertheless impress his artistic friends, as he can “imitate Cortot and Casals and hold forth about Hindemith and Stravinsky and Delius” (209). Roger soon meets and

“becomes increasingly fascinated by the personality of Tommy,” an undergraduate rugby player (211).

A love triangle develops between Roger, Tommy, and a female ‟cellist, setting homosexual desires within an traditional musical milieu. Isherwood claims in Lions and

Shadows that the plot got “so complex and self-contradictory” that he gave it up (208).

Yet, from his description, the plot sounds no more “complex” than that of The Memorial

(1932) or Goodbye to Berlin (1939). Isherwood‟s trouble may have been, then, his suspicion of the past. In Christopher, he recalls that in his own years as a secretary with

André Mangeot‟s quartet he became “violently prejudiced against” what he calls “culture worship” (65). This prejudice against entrenched cultural traditions along with his initial wariness of openly homosexual allusions (overcome by his second, more political novel

317

The Memorial) could have made a homoerotic aesthetic musicality simply too outdated for his tastes. Indeed, the closest he comes to aestheticism in any of his pre-WWII novels is through , in his depiction of the “queer” cabaret, the Salomé, in Goodbye to

Berlin, which his characters visit as the Nazis begin closing gay bars in 1932-33 (193).

Auden‟s 1930s poetry likewise works carefully to distance homosexuality from a naïve fin-de-siècle aestheticism.79 Describing his Oxford years (“the theme marked

„Oxford‟ on my score”) in “Letter to ” (1936), Auden recalls how “[a]esthetic trills I‟d never heard before/ Rose from the strings, shrill poses from the cor;/ The woodwind chattered like a pre-war Russian,/ „Art‟ boomed the brass, and „Life‟ thumped the percussion” (4.40.2, 4-7). By the time Auden went to Oxford, however, this musicalized aesthetic revelation was an anachronism. As he puts it, his circle was “the tail, a sort of poor relation/ To that debauched, eccentric generation/ That grew up with their fathers at the War/ And made new glosses on the noun Amor” (4.43.4-7).80 Auden advanced beyond this past when he learns, as he says, “to express my deep abhorrence/ If

I caught anyone preferring Art/ To Life and Love” (4.45.3-5). For Auden too, then, an

79 As my discussion on music illustrates a more general shift in emphasis from aesthetics to politics in queer writings—both are inevitably always present—it draws heavily on previous arguments stretching from Samuel Hynes to Richard Bozorth in maintaining the overriding (international and national) political emphasis of Auden‟s and others‟ 1930s works. Hynes argues, for instance, that by the mid-thirties “Auden was urging a kind of writing that would be affective, immediate, and concerned with ideas, moral not aesthetic in its central intention,” in a literary circle where most writing dealt “with problems of politics and action” (13, see also 509 n31 for a brief discussion of homosexuality and politics). Bozorth, meanwhile, narrows the focus, and argues that “[m]uch of his [Auden‟s] early writing is obsessed with whether homosexuality can engender a progressive political identity based on difference, conferring an empowering distance on England and its ills, or whether this is a childish and dangerous, even fascistic illusion” (10). All references to Auden‟s poetry will come from The English Auden.

80 suggests that this is a reference to Evelyn Waugh and Brian Howard (207). One could include Nichols too. 318 aesthetic musicality, particularly as an overly idealistic, if lately “debauched” means to express modern homosexual love (a new gloss on “Amour”) was by 1936 out of date.

More current than a rarefied aestheticism was a focus on international politics, and war. Hence in “Oxford” (1938), Auden decries how the cloistered “college garden” intellectuals archaically seclude themselves from the more modern wide-ranging “shops” and “works” and “the whole green county,” and finally the “natural world” (1, 36).

Within the university, the hieratic “Eros Paidagogos/ Weeps on his virginal bed” unable to relate to the “thousands” in the nearby towns and countryside, for “he is Eros and must hate what most he loves” (34-35, 33, 38).81 Auden suggests here that earlier intellectuals who relied on progressive aesthetic ideals to proclaim the naturalness of homoerotic love and liberality have never quite gotten over their disdain of the wider empirical world they desired.

As such, all an ornate fin-de-siècle aestheticism has created is personal devastation. Auden therefore describes aesthetic Oxonian lovers in self-destructive terms. They are “lovers poisoned in a fabulous embrace,/ The doomed comrades riding to their known destruction,/ The flags like a third sex,/ and the music” ironically

“nobilmente” (42-45).82 For Auden the “fabulous,” fairy-tale musical hopes of Pater,

Wilde, and particularly of Carpenter that an intellectualized, hermetic, homoerotic art or

81 In “The Good Life,” Auden suggests that “[w]hat can be loved can be cured” and “fear” can be “overcome” by the “exercise” or even an extension of “caritas or eros paidogogos”; in other words, for positive change to occur erotic teachings must overcome an instinct for isolation. In the same essay, Auden also argues that “[w]hat we call evil is something that was once good but has been outgrown,” a philosophy that applies to his view of an elitist aestheticism expressed in “Letter to Lord Byron” and “Oxford” (114). 82 Auden later shortened this poem. Here I take into account the eventually excised ninth stanza (lines 41- 45) originally published in the Listener in February 1938, which references the “third sex”; see Mendelson‟s notes in English Auden (425). Sean Grass reads the revisions of “Oxford” alongside revisions of the overtly politically charged “Spain, 1937,” also focusing on Auden‟s disenchantment with a self- enclosed Oxonian idyll (98-99). 319 an artistic “intermediate sex” could positively affect the world is “doomed” to

“destruction,” willingly seduced by its own fatally ideal attractiveness. and barbarism, meanwhile, triumph by insisting simplistically that true “Knowledge is conceived in the hot womb of violence” (22).

Auden‟s own demotically-minded conflation of homoeroticism and music, though, often comes across in an aggressive, modern military mood, and hence seems hardly less doomed than the older Oxonian aesthetic. In “Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head” (1934), Auden describes a lover who “[t]hrough bankrupt countries” goes “[i]ntent as a collector to pursue/ His greens and lilies,” that is, private sexual adventures and aesthetic preoccupations (15, 17-18).83 The lover, however, is “[s]imple to excite” and can be shaken from his selfish pursuits by “horses, the fountains, the sidedrum, the trombone,” the musical excitement of a military parade ground (22, 23).

While these stimulations may be in a martial Dorian mode, they are far from some

Hellenic past, as Auden notes that the lover is “[s]ummoned by such a music from our time” to an awareness of contemporary public events, namely the pomp of “[t]en thousand of the desperate marching by … Hitler and Mussolini in their wooing poses”

(25, 31-33). Here a selfishly homoerotic or even self-love can be roused out of itself to take into account public events.

83 Lilies have been popularly associated with aestheticism ever since W. S. Gilbert placed one into the “mediæval hand” of Bunthorne, a parody of Wilde and other aesthetes, in Patience, first performed in 1881 in London (169). It is worth noting that the Bunthornian/Wildean aesthete also evokes a spectacular fatal attraction, as Gilbert describes him as a “pallid and thin … a greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery,/ Foot-in- the-grave young man!” (194-94). Auden recalls this fatalism in “Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head.” For “greens” having sexual connotations, see the eponymous entry in Farmer and Henley (206) and Fuller who points to the eroticized use of “greens” in “Letter to Lord Byron” (207). 320

Auden implies, though, that this arousal can lead to a dangerous homoerotic hero- worship, as the lover becomes prey to a fascistic “wooing.” He echoes this sentiment in a later satiric call to arms, “It‟s farewell to the drawing-room‟s civilised cry” (1937). Here the totalitarian, “Fortunate One,” a new “Happy-Go-Lucky” leader, declares that “works for two pianos” are part of the decadent tradition that must be “stored upstairs” as one cleans the house of Western culture (33, 34, 5, 8). Such music is part of the “sedentary

Sodom and slick Gomorrah,” which will be replaced by “order and trumpet and anger and drum,” new uncritically active, seducing sounds (38, 57). An imperative, fascistic war music takes over, and it, not an elevating, reflective art, exploits homoerotic love and hero-worship, so as to destroy them.84

Stephen Spender—the third of the Isherwood/Auden homosexually inclined

1930s triumvirate—focuses less on a military representation of music than he does on portraying cosmopolitan homoerotic musical metaphors as ineffective or rotting. In

World within World, he recounts how in 1929, while staying in Germany with “Dr.

Jessell,” an acquaintance met in Oxford, the young academic capitalizes on Spender‟s whistling a bit of “the Eighth Symphony” (probably Beethoven‟s), by noting “So. Then you like music. We have many tastes in common.‟” They have some, but Spender is repulsed by the overly awkward, “rather intent” Jessell and classical music fails to function as a connective mutual interest (117).

Hardly more effective is the music that Spender links to social decay in “Vienna”

(1934). Spender describes “songs buried beneath the ground like rotted leaves/ To spring

84 Auden‟s own relationship to homosexuality was of course notoriously fraught and wrapped up with ambiguously fascistic fantasies of control, paranoia, and hero-worship, see Bozorth (113-120). 321 as cucumbers,” which he links to the city‟s “[o]bscene electric gestures, its glance like rape/ Hanging at doorways” (1.45-48). As opposed to Vienna‟s rotting musical prostitutes—most likely the future of the “[p]athic” “Greek” bodies “[a]vailable for uses, but only sold,” discussed later on (2.52-53)—Spender notes “I choose the wholly dead”

(2. 1.48). The more attractive “wholly [holy] dead” are no doubt the men killed in “the suppression of the Viennese Socialists by Dollfuss, Fey and Starhemberg,” whom

Spender laments in his brief explication of “Vienna” in World (210). In “Vienna” too then it is the political metaphor that contextualizes homoerotic desire, music having become a mere trace of a once valuable framework.

Even if we look closer to Spender‟s Oxford days, to his second collection, Poems

(1933), there is only the merest hint of the aesthetic tradition, as music and desire vacillate between a Romantic soulfulness and a vague .85 In “I think continually of those who were truly great,” Spender describes those heroic individuals “[w]ho, from the womb, remembered the soul‟s history…. Whose lovely ambition/ Was that their lips, still touched with fire,/ Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song” (lns. 2-

6). These “great” have more in common with Wordsworth‟s souls “trailing clouds of glory,” from “Intimations of Immortality,” or with those “singing” workers from “The

Funeral” who dream of the “red flags” of a “world state” than with the Hellenism of Pater and Wilde (14, 9, 11).

85 Poems is actually a slight return to traditional uses of music, as sound was more overtly destructive in Spender‟s first volume, Nine Experiments (1928). Experiments begins with an “Invocation” proclaiming “BRAY TRUMPETS … let the violins, tempest-sworn/ Lash out their hurricane:/ And let the Heavens splinter, and tear, and rage” (lns. 1-5). Platonic heavens are ripped apart by the “harshly-perfect music” the poet longs for in “Epistle,” the only music that will not make him “nauseous sick” (28, 27). Spender aligns this “harsh-perfect music” to a desire to “pluck” a “rose” and to “lips spotted and condemned”; it is thus a forebear to the sickly erotic music in “Vienna” (20-21). 322

At the end of this chapter, and with “Vienna” in mind, it is tempting to interpret these lines in terms of the aesthetic fascination with Mediterranean musical bodies. To do so, however, would only be to revivify what in “The Funeral” Spender refers to as

“[t]he decline of culture/ Mourned by scholars who dream of the ghosts of Greek boys”

(19-20). Gone is the overt homoerotic music of Spender‟s Oxonian forebears. It has been replaced by either a universal “song” or the “Internationale.”

“Strange Meetings”: Making Music Make History

By the late 1920s, the creative, polemical, and enduring effort to write homosexual self-valorizations and social justifications through an association of desire with music was waning. True, writers such as Berners, Nichols, and Forster continued to connect homosexuality to the positive communal values of the art; but, they were of an older guard. It is unsurprising then that when they do explore issues such as paranoia and repression—issues with which their generation was certainly all too familiar—their work is quite often steeped in a generally sanguine or idealistic musical aestheticism: one might think of Scrimgeour‟s and Brian‟s pianos or of Clesant‟s violin. Younger writers, on the other hand, began to evoke their desires with more vividly up-to-date allusions to combat and the struggle of opposing, if vaguely defined political powers. Auden,

Isherwood, and Spender, for instance, each set a hopeful aestheticism aside, replacing it with international, domestic, and/or psychological frontiers, spies, and prostitutes.86

86 This is not to say that the positive relationships between music and homosexuality examined in this chapter were at an end; they were simply less prevalent. There was still to come, for instance, Forster‟s 323

When these writers do use music as a metaphor for homosexuality, they do so largely within violently antagonistic or even martial contexts. Rather than evoking “curious pulses” of self-knowledge, their music drums to the forefront connotations either of decay or of physical danger for radicals of all stripes. As such, they helped to transform music from a positive to a much more ambivalent cosmopolitan metaphor for their generation‟s political and sexual anxieties.

While explorations of isolation and barriers are valuable, we might do well to ask what has been lost. Spies and tortured frontiers are entrancing and bracing, but perhaps not quite conducive to recouping an unfairly repressed minority. For the rare allusion in

Auden‟s poetry to “new men making another love,” as in “Doom is dark and deeper,” there are many more lovers like those in “At the far end of the enormous room.” In the latter, the speaker/lover is entranced by the contradictory seductions of “drumtaps nagging like a nervous twitch” and a “fiddle like a flying dream” (3-4). The music evokes both a daydream of a beloved and the “nagging” suspicion that the lover is his beloved‟s “enemy” (9).87 Of course, to validate homosexual desire unconditionally was hardly Auden‟s goal, and I am not suggesting that it should have been. Still, it does seem that something valuable, something which courageously crossed frontiers, something un-ironically “nobilmente” has gotten lost the work of these three writers. collaboration with Benjamin Britten on Billy Budd (first performed in 1951). Auden too collaborated with Britten. As their early partnership does not overtly explore music, homosexuality, and politics in literature, I will not discuss their work here, but instead refer interested readers to Donald Mitchell‟s Britten and Auden in the Thirties and Brett‟s essay “Auden‟s Britten,” the latter of which discusses the role of sexuality in their relationship in more depth. As Auden‟s work as a librettist took place after 1940, it unfortunately remains outside the already expansive time limits of this chapter.

87 The “drumtaps” in the sonnet come from an “orchestra … playing to the rich” (2), but are also echoes of Whitman‟s “Drum-Taps,” in which “to the drum-traps prompt” come “young men falling in and arming” during the U. S. Civil War (3.1-2). 324

The argument of this chapter has been that music, especially classical music, as portrayed in literature, provided a valuable means of leading homosexual men and women to self-knowledge, self-respect, and a sense of their beneficial role in society.

Returning once more, however, to Brett‟s admonition regarding the “collusion of musicality and the closet,” it seems right to re-acknowledge the obvious shortcomings of using not just music, but art in general for a wide-ranging social legitimization of homosexuality. In the closing pages of The Wilde Century, Sinfield convincingly warns against the tendency to “assume that gay-oriented work is all very well, but getting into the mainstream is what counts,” an assumption which has motivated artists from Wilde‟s time up to our own. As Sinfield points out, an obsession with the “mainstream” “is self- oppressed,” as homosexuals are quite often tepidly “accepted as purveyors of artistic culture on condition that we be discreet, thereby acknowledging our own unspeakableness.” As a result, Sinfield suggests that “[d]ecoding the work of closeted homosexual artists discovers not a ground for congratulation but a record of oppression and humiliation” (198).

Sinfield is surely right that gay artists, especially today, should not shirk from cultivating not only “„universal‟” (which, as he points out, usually implies

“heterosexual”), but also gay audiences. Still there is undeniably a benefit that should be re-emphasized in exploring how historical homosexual artists emerged into mainstream culture alongside their heterosexual colleagues. For young (and really for all) gay audience members, to recognize oneself, however partially, in a widely accessible mainstream media—whether that be on the stage, on film, in books, poetry, or

325 elsewhere—should force the traditions of art and aesthetics away from questions of “our culture” or “their culture” and into a contested meeting ground belonging to everyone; one to which we all have a claim, and a vested interest in critiquing (198). As Sinfield himself affirms, there is a need “to keep faith with the struggles of earlier generations, and one way of doing that is to reassert stigmatized gay traditions,” if only to reappraise their social role, as his book so brilliantly does (197).

In the academy today, however, as teachers and readers, we are so careful to avoid eliding differences—particularly of time period, race, nationality, and class, not to mention sexuality—and rightly so, that we often forget the bridge-building benefits of partial recognitions, of “strange meetings,” as Wilfred Owen might say. Classical music often provided such a valuably contested meeting ground in late-nineteenth and early- twentieth-century literature, much as it still does today—and not just with regards to a cosmopolitan homosexuality. With the idea of such “strange meetings” in mind, I now turn to how a progressive musical cosmopolitanism combined with a musical helped to shape Britain‟s national and international identities during the two world wars.

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Chapter 6: “The International Spirit”: Classical Music and Wartime Reconciliations

The previous four chapters have shown how around 1870 classical music became an increasingly esteemed facet of British institutions, of British literature, and of British lives. Thanks to the musical cultures of Walter Pater‟s Oxford, of public schools, of the national board schools, of popular concert halls, of amateur musicians, and of musical literary metaphors, classical music became a valued element of middle-class, of working- class, and of homosexual identities. With classical music working as an important cultural identifier in British society, the art would take on international political connotations as Britain moved closer to war with Germany and Austria not once, but twice in the first half of the twentieth century.

Classical music would become a lightning rod for political sentiments because so much of the music being taught and enjoyed in Britain came from a decidedly Germanic musical tradition.1 Many of the instruments, moreover, on which musicians in Britain were performing “German” music came from “German” workshops and were built by

1 Germany, of course, was not a unified state until 1870. The tradition stemming from Bach to Beethoven to Brahms, however, was often described as “German.” Grove’s entry on Brahms, for instance, discusses the influence on his work of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart and places him within an “illustrious line of German composers of the first rank” (I 391).

327

“German” artisans.2 British novelists, poets, and journalists increasingly advertised and debated this situation. As they did so, classical music became an allegory for who was going to maintain not only a cultural, but an intellectual, an economic, and even a political dominance within Europe. After World War One, authors would expand on these themes, while also using a cosmopolitan musical aesthetic to promote international reconciliations in literature and in Europe in general.

An excellent example of British cultural anxieties represented through music can be found in E. M. Forster‟s quintessential “condition of England” novel Howards End

(1910). In chapter five Forster details the musical tastes of the Schlegel family‟s British

Aunt Juley and their German cousin Fräulein Frieda Mosebach, both of whom sit enjoying Beethoven‟s Fifth Symphony at an afternoon Queen‟s Hall concert. Frieda listens to the music intensely, remembering “all the time that Beethoven is „echt Deutsch

[properly German]‟”; Aunt Juley, despite being “so British,” sees no problem in enjoying

Beethoven herself and even “tap[s] surreptitiously when the tunes come—of course, not so as to disturb the others” (29, 30). Aunt Juley is not, however, as she later admits, very

2 Many of the arguments that I make in this chapter regarding German music—for example that it evoked both a threat to British culture and a means to stimulate European reconciliations—could also be made, albeit with less complexity, through a discussion of authors‟ representations of Italian musicians and music. Huxley‟s portrayal of “the great Pongileoni,” a flutist, in Point Counter Point, for instance, represents a successful musician with an Italian background hired to perform as a soloist for Bach‟s Suite in B minor at Tantamount House. Yet, Huxley feels the need to undercut his flutist‟s triumph. Pongileoni plays beautifully, but he does so as he “glueily kissed his flute,” and Bach‟s music comes across “with the help of Pongileoni‟s snout” (27). Pongileoni is both a “great” artist and, it would seem, a bit slobbery and animalistic—hardly a threat to the urbane British Huxley himself. As for uses of Italian music to evoke an international reconciliation, at the end of his Sword of Honour triology Evelyn Waugh depicts an army bureaucrat who is trying to “get the opera going” in the “various opera houses of occupied Italy,” as this is “the most certain way to the Italian heart” (706). A professional British soldier observes that this sounds like a “cover for something else,” but this is voiced as the fear of a “regimental” warrior who is distrustful of the role of art in healing war wounds. While these two examples from Huxley and Waugh primarily focus on Italian music, the majority of references to classical music and international politics in British literature of this period pertain to German music and therefore, in the interests of time and space, this music will be my focus. 328

“musical” (36). This admission from Forster‟s advocate of all things British signals how, despite the increases in musical education in Britain after 1870, British audiences maintained the stigma of being less musically refined than their German counterparts.

Many guardians of British culture feared that not only were British audiences musically inferior to German audiences, but that the works of British composers were perceived to be inferior to those of their German colleagues. Forster evokes this anxiety through Aunt Juley‟s protestations at her niece Margaret‟s dismissal of Edward Elgar‟s

“Pomp and Circumstance” in front of Frieda and her companion Herr Liesecke. Aunt

Juley admonishes Margaret, “you mustn‟t run down our English composers” (33). When

Frieda attempts half-heartedly to praise the Elgar as being “dramatic, a little,” Aunt Juley snips at her, saying “Frieda, you despise English music. You know you do” (34). In

1910 Aunt Juley‟s cultural insecurities can be funny; but, they also draw on larger concerns of how England might stack up against Germany in other areas, such as in education, production, and even in an overall preparedness for war. The cultured disagreement over Beethoven and Elgar in chapter five of Howards End, for instance, foreshadows the rumor that “England and Germany are bound to fight” in chapter seven and a clergyman‟s assertion in an “Old English” restaurant that if the “Emperor

[presumably the German emperor] wants war,” the English should “let him have it” in chapter seventeen (60, 148, 150). In Howards End a competition between the merits of

British and German music intimates larger, more militaristic disagreements. But in 1910,

Forster merely insinuates larger problems looming and remains content to have his characters agree upon a shared love of Beethoven, if not Elgar.

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“The selling and buying of pianos ... has nothing to do with art”: the Intellectual, Economic, and Political Contexts of Music

i. Intellect

The dominance of foreign classical music in Britain caused concern not only to

Forster, but to the society for which Forster wrote Howards End. For decades, factions of the British parliament and the educational establishment had considered a European and particularly a German eminence in music to be an indicator of Britain‟s educational short-comings. As early as 1840 some officials were taking minor steps to equalize the musical playing field between Britain and the continent. They looked to the latter for examples of how to teach music in British primary schools.3 In the 1870s and 80s, as we

3 In 1840, a parliamentary “Committee of Council on Education” had “directed their Secretary to collect or procure, from various parts of Europe where vocal music has been cultivated in elementary schools, the books in most general use in Normal schools, and in the schools of the and of the towns. The manuals of vocal music were accordingly collected in Switzerland, Holland, the German States, Prussia, Austria, and France” (“Committee of Council” 47). The committee decided to recommend to teachers a manual from France, but its minutes twice single out the particular successes of teaching music in Germany. In 1840 Germany was not yet a state, but the committee acknowledged how music served as a means for public unification in the “churches of Germany”: “One of the chief characteristics of public worship ought to be the extent to which the congregation unite in those solemn psalms of prayer and praise which, particularly in the Lutheran churches of Germany and Holland, appear the utterance of one harmonious voice. One of the chief means of diffusing through the people national sentiments is afforded by songs, which embody and express the hopes of industry and the comforts and contentment of household life; and, preserving for the the traditions of his country‟s triumphs, inspire him with the confidence in her greatness and strength” (46). The committee also noted the moral effects of music in the German States: “The importance and useful influence of vocal music on the manners and habits of individuals, and on the character of communities, few will be prepared to dispute. It is, however, satisfactory to know that the degrading habits of intoxication, which at one time characterized the poorer classes of Germany, are most remarkably diminished since the art of singing has become almost as common in that country as the power of speech,—a humanizing result attributable to the excellent elementary schools of many of the States of Germany” (51-52). In this passage we can see the beginnings of the key characteristics of modern Germany that would worry Britain: “national sentiments,” “industry,” “strength,” and the “excellent” schools. 330 have seen, official action was bolder and music was incorporated into the curriculum of the newly sanctioned state-run board schools.4

On a more academic level, Sir George Grove, the secretary of music for London‟s

Crystal Palace from 1855 to 1873 and the director of London‟s Royal College of Music from 1883 to 1894, founded the pre-eminent English-language music encyclopaedia,

Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, in 1879. Music historians tend to view

Grove‟s as the creation of “a national monument.” It was moreover a

“national monument, which,” as Jeremy Dibble argues, “as evidence of British musical earnestness and scholarly credentials, could be observed from the outside, not least by the

Austro-German [musical] axis, with admiration and respect” (38). The Dictionary also, as Hughes and Stradling point out, served to give “English musical culture an extraordinary coverage and ” and to do so at a time when “German musicians fully shared in the upsurge in nationalist feelings” for their newly unified state (24, 25). The

Dictionary helped then both to advertise British musical scholarship and a British musical tradition itself, thereby promoting a national British pride.

While Grove no doubt succeeded in creating a British monument, he did so within the shadow of and, particularly, of Germany. In the “Preface” to his dictionary, he boasts that “[m]usic is now performed, studied, and listened to by a much larger number of persons, and in a more serious spirit, than was the case at any previous period of our [British] history.” Still, one of the surest signs of the increases in British musical education that Grove offers is that the “newest works of continental musicians

4 In 1880, John Hullah was invited to inform parliament on the conditions of musical education in Europe in order to provide guidance to the teaching of singing in British board schools (Précis 235-37). 331 are eagerly welcomed here [in Britain] very soon after their appearance abroad” (v, emphasis added). But, who, we might ask, was introducing these works to British audiences? Frequently it was musicians such as Sir August Manns, who as conductor of the Crystal Palace orchestra from 1855 to 1901 introduced works by Brahms and

Schubert to British audiences, or Sir Charles Hallé, who in 1857 helped to found the influential Manchester orchestra (Scholes 382, 198, 736). Both of these men were

Germans knighted in England for their services to British music. The very heads of two of Britain‟s most prominent nineteenth-century concert scenes embodied a German musical eminence.

ii. Economics

British concerns over the musical intelligence of Germany did not only pertain to who could best appreciate the finer qualities of a Beethoven symphony or conduct an orchestra. An increasing interest in music education also raised anxieties regarding the economics of art. Prominent cultural critics and economists at the turn of the century frequently used the materiality of the music trade to discuss the economic structures of

British society. As early as 1888, Sir Arthur Sullivan addressed the Birmingham and

Midland Institute on the subject of the advance of music in Britain. While doing so, he emphasized the influence of music appreciation on British industry. Sullivan asked his audience, “what would commerce be without the music trades”? To bring his point home, he observed, “I will take one item, comparatively a small one, but one which for

Birmingham has a peculiar interest. Have you ever thought,” Sullivan asked, “of the 332 amount of steel wire used in the manufacture of pianofortes?” (278). This is a pointed question as Birmingham had a prominent steel industry.5 Sullivan went on to estimate that the “principal manufacturing countries, England, France, Germany, America, and smaller states,” used about “18,892 miles of steel wire” per year to produce pianos (279).

Sullivan does not cite his sources, but his rhetorical point is clear: the more Britain invests in a musical education, the more people will want to buy pianos and the better life will be for the steel trade of Birmingham and for British industries overall.

What Sullivan did not observe to his Birmingham audience was that Germany was increasingly dominating the commerce of music. In his 1896 book Made in

Germany, Ernest Williams vehemently pointed this out. Williams asked his readers to look around them so as to realize the prevalence of German-made products in Britain

(10):

Roam the house over, and the fateful mark [i.e. “made in Germany”] will greet you at every turn, from the piano in your drawing-room to the mug on your kitchen ... At midnight your wife comes home from an opera which was made in Germany, has been here enacted by singers and conductor and players made in Germany, with the aid of instruments and sheets of music made in Germany (11).

Williams‟s rhetoric generally privileges industrial examples of German dominance in world markets, such as the production of chemicals or metal. Music offers him the means to extend his argument into the realm of a seemingly abstract culture and in doing so to make culture material. This reinforces his claim regarding the subtle extent of

5 For a list of Birmingham steel works see Swank (420) and Sauer (46-47). 333

German profits at Britain‟s expense.6 The payment of German royalties and the salaries of German opera stars blends, he points out, into payments for German instruments and paper.7 Williams uses the seemingly small or inconsequential to highlight

Germany‟s increasing gains on Britain in industrial areas such as the production and sale of metals and wood.

iii. Politics

Nationalistic tensions would directly affect Britain‟s uneasiness over the economics of art in the years leading up to World War I, emphasizing the political nature of music. One of the most public examples of the politics of music emerged through the desire of London‟s Guildhall School of Music to acquire more German pianos. In

January of 1911 the Musical Trades Review printed the following letter addressed to the

Lord Mayor of London and signed by H. Billinghurst, the “Managing Director” of

“Brinsmead & Sons,” a British piano manufacturer:

6 Williams estimates that “[f]or musical instruments we [Britain] paid her [Germany] as much as £563,018” in 1895. Of the 11 statistics from this year that Williams cites in this context only “woollen manufactures” at £1,106,694 and paper at £586,835 were of more import value. As Williams points out, the import of these materials into Britain from Germany is significant because “[t]hey are not products which we must either import or lack:—they all belong to the category of English manufactures, the most important of them, indeed, being articles in the preparation of which Great Britain is held pre-eminent” (12). Williams would repeat these arguments regarding music and instruments and his financial estimates elsewhere in his book (e.g. 17, 123-25). Cyril Ehrlich estimates that “[d]uring the 1880s” Germany was producing “probably between sixty and seventy thousand” pianos. “By 1913 it exceeded 100,000, probably greater than English production, four times that of France, but only one third the size of America‟s vast industry” (Piano 68). He notes that at this time “the general trend of German dominance” in the piano trade was indeed “unmistakable” and that this dominance came about because of Germany‟s “willingness and ability to adopt the latest technology, backed by the best system of technical and commercial education in the world and a widespread respect for applied science” (70, 71).

7 It is interesting to note here that Williams couches opera as an art for one‟s wife to enjoy. Opera is effeminized, though it does affect more masculine industrial concerns. 334

Dear Sir,—We have heard with the greatest surprise and regret that it is the intention of the newly appointed head of the Guildhall School of Music [Landon Ronald] to replace all the Brinsmead pianos (or the greater part of them) with those of a German make. ... You will readily understand what a serious blow would result to the prestige of the British trade, and that of this old-established house, by the contemplated change; moreover, we cannot but feel that the wholesale introduction of German instruments (which are in no way better than many made in this country) would not be in accordance with the traditions of the first City of the Empire.8

For the next three years a very public struggle between the Guildhall School of Music and British piano manufacturers, led by Brinsmead, took place and was reported in trade papers, as well as in The Times, The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, The Globe, and John

Bull.

This debate highlighted the often antagonistic political constraints on the production of art. In a report on a committee meeting of Guildhall School of Music officials in May of 1911, the City Press observed “an insistent demand on the part of the pupils and professors for foreign pianos, and the committee could not ignore that feeling.”9 The governing committee of the school appears to have been wary of caving into the nationalistic, at times imperialistic economic agenda of the British piano manufacturers. Emphasizing the foolishness of nationalizing art, the Press editorialized on the debate with the following reductio ad absurdum argument: “To be consistent, those who argued for British pianos only should stipulate that only British music should

8 (“Pianos at the Guildhall School of Music” Musical Trades Review Jan 1911). All of the newspaper reports of the Guildhall School of Music piano scandal have been gleaned from a Guildhall School of Music scrapbook held by the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA: CLA/056/AD/04/9). The scrapbooker unfortunately cut off many of the articles‟ page numbers, but more than made up for this, I think, by collecting the relevant materials in one location.

9 The City Press reported that the Guildhall School wanted to move from having 59 British pianos and 12 foreign ones (71 total) to 41 British pianos and 30 foreign pianos (71 total) (“Court of Common Council: British Versus Foreign Pianos: Vigorous Debate.” CP 13 May 1911). 335 be used, only British professors employed, only British children taught, and only British instruments used.” The reporter noted that this would, “of course, be absurd.”10

Ronald tried to counter Billinghurst and his ilk by emphasizing the international status of German pianos. In 1912, he announced that one particular German firm (not named, but certainly Bechstein) whose pianos the Guildhall wished to acquire was “none other than the one that almost every great living pianist plays on to-day, including

Pachmann, Busoni, Godowsky, Harold Bauer, Carreno, Sauer, Eugen d‟Albert, and others too numerous to mention.”11 This is a list that includes German, Italian, British,

Scottish, and Venezuelan pianists. Landon went on to protest against the nationalistic terms of the debate, insisting that “Art is cosmopolitan” and that “a great school of music exists for the purpose of giving a proper education to young musicians.” Like art, he argued, such a school was “not to be confounded with a city warehouse or a business, nor should it be used as a means of advertisement by any firm under the somewhat laboured excuse of „.‟” To this Billinghurst retorted, “art is cosmopolitan. The selling and buying of pianos, however, has nothing to do with art—it is business.”12

10 (“Court of Common Council.” CP 13 May 1911).

11 For a while in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Bechstein ran advertisements quoting praises by Busoni, Carreno, d‟Albert, and Pachmann, among others, for their brand (e.g. MT 1 Jan. 1908). As Ehrlich points out, Brinsmead had a history of puffing its products at the expense of German firms, particularly of Bechstein (Piano 148-49, 162, 164).

12 The Daily Express published the arguments of both men simultaneously (“German Piano Scandal.” DE 16 Oct. 1912). Landon had previously exhibited a cosmopolitan by composing music for such internationally themed ballets as The Entente Cordiale (1902; not to be confused with ‟s opera of that name), though he had also composed for the more nationalistic Britannia’s Realm (1902) (Guest 69, 66). Ronald‟s cosmopolitan stance at the Guildhall would take on a heavy irony in the 1930s when he launched public attacks on the BBC for performing works by foreign composers at the expense of their British counterparts (Doctor 234-36). 336

In 1914, Billinghurst‟s emphasis on business and patriotism temporarily triumphed and the once absurdist notion of classical music stripped of German influence somehow seemed sane. On September 15th, 1914, eleven days after Britain‟s entry into

World War I, newspapers reported that “The Music Committee of the Corporation of

London have decided to dispense with the services of all professors of German, Austrian, or Hungarian nationalities at the Guildhall School of Music. The committee have further decided that as from this date only pianos of British make shall be used in the school.”13

German music would be played in Britain throughout the war. But for a time, business and a desire to keep up patriotic appearances publicly prevailed over the cosmopolitanism of art.14

13 (“Enemy Music Professors.” Daily Telegraph 15 Sept. 1914; practically the same article, using almost the same language, was printed in the Times, the Globe, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Express on the same date, and in John Bull on 23 Sept. 1914).

14 Despite this initially strong anti-German stance, music by German composers was performed throughout the war, occasionally even at charity concerts to raise money for soldiers. The Guildhall School of Music collection, for instance, contains a program for a fundraiser for the British Red Cross sponsored by the Fellowship. On February 3rd, 1915, Henry F. Dickens (the author‟s son) gave a reading of “A Christmas Carol” and Elaine Dickens (Henry‟s daughter) performed in the violin and “Moto Perpetua,” by Carl Bohm (a composer not to be confused with the later conductor Karl Böhm) (LMA: CLA/05/AD/03/23). This concert was not unique. On March 3rd, 1916, for instance, a concert was advertised “In Support of the Soldiers and Sailors Dental Aid Fund.” Among various recitations and character sketches, Miss Eileen Cheatle played “Waldesrauschen” by Liszt and the London Diocesan Orchestra played an arrangement from Idomeneo by Mozart and “Russian Suite, for Strings” by Richard Wuerst, a somewhat obscure German composer (LMA: Dorothea Crompton Collection: CLA/058/01); see also footnotes 51 and 77 below. 337

“Did you hear the explosions? And the sound in the sky: ... it‟s like Beethoven”: Literary Formulations of the Intellectual, Economic, and Political Contexts of Music

i. Intellect

This historical background tends to get left out of discussions of classical music and British literature, many of which center around whether brilliantly avant-garde pieces of writing, such as T. S. Eliot‟s Four Quartets or Aldous Huxley‟s Point Counter Point, recreate a musical structure.15 By intervening into these structural debates with a historical perspective, we can see how British authors used music as an allegory for

Britain‟s anxiety over Germany‟s growing industrial and military strength in the years leading up to World War I and then again to World War II. Petra Rau has shown how in the early-twentieth century popular British authors began to call for a military

“professionalism,” akin to Germany‟s, that was “at odds with the national rhetoric of casual amateurism” depicting British Imperialism as a “„game,‟ [a] hobby or [a] sport”

(71, 70).16 These same issues of a continental professionalism versus a lax British amateurism also came across in the works of more avant-garde authors in their discussions of music. Authors such as Dorothy Richardson, Lord Berners, and George

Bernard Shaw drew on the concerns of the government, of economists, and of cultural critics that Britain was falling behind Germany in intellectual, economic, and political and military strength.

15 See chapter three (145-157).

16 Rau discusses authors such as William Le Queux and Erskine Childers, both of whom wrote popular spy and invasion novels. Paul Fussell has detailed the importance of the “classic equation between war and sport” in British culture as a key indicator of “the initial British innocence” in the years leading up and into World War One in his The Great War and Modern Memory (25). 338

Richardson, Berners, and Shaw each portrayed continental and particularly

German performers and audiences as more musically intelligent and as more self- controlled than the British, who were mere musical amateurs. In Pointed Roofs (1915),

Richardson compares the intense musical training that one received in pre-War Germany to the slack education that one supposedly received in Britain. Upon arriving in

“to finish her education,” Richardson‟s heroine Miriam Henderson hears Emma

Bergmann practicing the piano and notes “the careful unstumbling repetition of a difficult passage” (24, 35). This painstaking practice, even when done on a “bad old piano,” prepares “Miriam for the difference between the performance of these German girls and nearly all the piano-playing she had heard” back home (36). Emma‟s playing has a professional, practised quality that Miriam “had only heard occasionally at concerts, and in the playing of one of the music teachers at school,” a teacher “who had, as the school prospectus declared, been „educated in Leipzig‟” (36, 53).17

Not only is the playing of the German girls more disciplined, Richardson depicts their musical taste as decidedly more advanced than that of the English. One day Miriam hears Clara, Emma‟s sister, perform a complex piece of new and bold music from memory on one of the boarding house‟s better pianos. Clara “played, without music, her face lifted boldly. The notes rang out in a prelude of unfinished phrases—the kind,

Miriam noted, that had so annoyed her father in what he called new-fangled music—she felt it was going to be a brilliant piece—fireworks—execution—style—and sat up self-

17 Leipzig was a popular destination for British musicians to go to study (Dibble 35). In fiction, for instance, George Gissing sends Alma Frothingham to Leipzig to study the violin, though she is an irresponsible student and spends most of her time reading novels (The Whirlpool 67). 339 consciously and fixed her eyes on Clara‟s hands. ... How easily they moved” (50).

Miriam is modern and cosmopolitan. Her father, however, a former tradesman, enjoys

“playing the rôle of the English gentleman” and “the idea of being a „person of leisure and cultivation‟” (24). This is not a particularly adventurous rôle and, although “[n]o one else” from his circle “had been to Madame Schumann‟s Farewell” concert and he enjoys

“the Philharmonic Concerts” in England, he does not feel compelled to appreciate the

“fireworks” of modern music (33). Richardson uses the German students‟ appreciation of and aptitude for both established and more contemporary compositions to evoke a

German musical sophistication that was widely perceived to be lacking in England.

Richardson‟s description of Mr. Henderson recalls Forster‟s of Aunt Juley and illustrates how not only German performers, but German audiences had a reputation for having a higher level of musical understanding and of discipline than the British. In his memoir of travelling in Germany in 1901, Lord Berners would also recall the concentration of German audiences on serious music. To set up this recollection, Berners veers into a story of the rather feeble performances of the British Lord Anglesey, who travelled to “continental music halls” where he went “to show himself on the stage attired in the family jewels” (Dresden 42-43). “Imagine,” Berners writes, “the reception of such a display by an English music hall audience” (44). Berners notes that the German audience “seemed a little disconcerted” by Anglesey but did not react rudely. “German audiences even in the music halls were extraordinarily disciplined and well-behaved,” as opposed, he implies, to British audiences. Berners then recounts how “[o]nce at the

Dresden opera a new tenor, appearing for the first time in the role of Lohengrin, missed

340 his footing on stepping out of the swan-boat and fell headlong on the stage. His shield and helmet were restored to him by members of the chorus, and the performance was resumed in perfect silence. There was not the sound of the faintest chuckle” (43-44).18

German audiences of classical music, Berners suggests, maintain the intellectual and aesthetic discipline of their generally un-frivolous society.

ii. Economics

From an economic angle, several examples exist of authors praising German- made instruments for their high quality and value. In Despised and Rejected (1918) by

A. T. Fitzroy (Rose Allatini), the pianist Crispin Burgess takes a break from his “private and personal war against the people who are trying to bar Wagner and Bach” in Britain and goes home to find that his aunt and his uncle have gotten rid of their German piano

(168). Overcoming, mostly, his stammer, he tells his friends that it was a “F-full-sized g- grand. P-perfect tone.” His aunt and uncle “[s]-said they wouldn‟t have it in the house any more. … Their B-blüthner piano. Because it was a Hun m-make. So I said they n- needn‟t have me in their b-beastly house any more either” (207). In order not to appear to support the Germans, two adults throw out a wonderful, expensive German piano that

18 Berners memories were set down sometime “[i]n the later ” (Dresden 29n8), but he is most likely drawing on the influence of what in the nineteenth century came to be known as the “Bayreuth hush.” This term is self-explanatory as it refers to the noticeable hush that would occur during the performance of Wagner‟s music- in Bayreuth (cf. “At the .” All the Year Round 22 Sept. 1894: 281). In 1894, Shaw ironically observed that the “„the Bayreuth hush‟ has acquired its eminence solely through its being quite the noisiest thing of the kind, owing to the way in which the older English ladies, confused by the darkness, and not realizing the solemnity of the moment, will ask questions of their daughters and provoke angry „Sh-sh-es‟ from incontinent foreigners and fanatic Wagner worshipers” (Shaw’s Music III 205). 341 they had presumably bought because, as Crispin suggests, Blüthners had an excellent reputation.19 Twenty years later, in his musical Operette, premiered in 1938 but set in

1906, Noël Coward had four aristocrats sing of how they will “pawn the Bechstein

Grand” so that they could “stand by the Stately Homes of England” and keep up appearances of wealth and prestige (54). Cyril Ehrlich notes that Coward chose his brand

“accurately,” as “it was a Bechstein grand that could be pawned” for a suitable amount of money (Piano 75).

In contrast, in his comic novel Before the Bombardment (1926), Osbert Sitwell offers a fairly disparaging depiction of the products of Broadwood, a British piano manufacturer. Sitwell has the nasty old Miss Fansharpe leave Miss Bramley, her paid companion, not the annuity she had hinted she would, but “a seventy-year-old

Broadwood Upright Piano,” a “hand-mirror on the back of which were represented ... the faces, sprouting wings instead of whiskers, like so many bloated white-bats, of five angels,” “and ten pounds to buy a mourning dress.” Faced with this disappointing legacy, Miss Bramley sells the piano for “twenty pounds, in order to escape payment of carriage” and to bring in some much needed cash (41). Twenty pounds in pre-war days was a fair amount of money.20 Still, by lumping the Broadwood in with the ridiculous hand-mirror and estimating that it would bring in only twice the price of a dress, Sitwell provides a rather unoptimistic evaluation of the value of the brand.

19 Ehrlich notes that in the nineteenth century “Bechstein‟s most serious competitor was Julius Blüthner” (Piano 75). By the twentieth century, Blüthner‟s firm had built up a reputation bolstered by “endorsements and performances by leading virtuosi” and “royal patronage” (76).

20 At one point poor Miss Bramley rents a cold room “for fourteen pounds a year” (12). 342

Unwilling to leave well enough alone, Sitwell returns to the subject of Broadwood to evoke the moribund state of Britain‟s aesthetic economy prior to World War One. In her travels, Miss Bramley comes across a Broadwood in a hotel in the provincial town of

Newborough, which happily reminds her of her sold legacy. She thinks, “[y]ou could always tell a Broadwood piano anywhere … the „timbre,‟ she supposed.” She goes on to consider that it was “[u]nusual, too, to find one in a hotel, at any rate one in as good condition. But there it was, the hotel was superior to most other hotels.” Sitwell‟s narrator immediately undercuts Miss Bramley‟s musical intelligence and this advertisement for Broadwood by remarking that “[t]he hotel was, certainly, unlike other hotels,” primarily because of the degree to which it was infused with a decaying

Victorian aesthetic. Move the furniture, the narrator notes, “and from under will crawl sideways some crustacean and armoured spinster, or a purple-faced monster of an old oceanic Colonel.” When not simply sitting there like furniture or being played by Miss

Bramley, the piano itself had been performed on by Mrs. de Flouncey, who “used to play it for her husband‟s dancing classes every Thursday” in the hotel drawing-room (106).

Like the spinster and the colonel, these “prophets of Terpsichore” are both “grey and well stricken in years” and “it was most difficult to learn dancing” from them (84, 87). The

Broadwood is hardly indicative then of a booming home-grown aesthetic trade.

The Broadwood in fact represents the antithesis of the modern cosmopolitan luxuries being imported into Britain in the Edwardian era. The British piano is simply a sign that it would be “useless to pretend that eastern wave of luxury, which was now spending itself in London, had as yet broken over the interior of this, one of the first built

343 hotels in England” (106). The provincial hotel and its Broadwood evoke a provincial

British decay. Opposed to this are the “rodent-like” excitements of London where the increasing influence of “ringent Eastern gentlemen from Brighton and Bombay, Bagdad and Berlin” call to mind “Finance” and “‟s music, with its inevitable suggestion of constant hot water and every modern convenience” (102). Sitwell uses the advance into

Britain of the conglomerated people and products of India, the ,

Germany, and Italy, as well as, most likely, Jewish merchants, to evoke the decadence and the decline of the British Empire.21 According to Sitwell, the British “Empire” and its home-grown products grow “larger and softer” as antiquated Victorian tastes weigh- down its center and the goods of foreign markets invade it (103).

iii. Politics

The political anxieties behind these observations of Germanic intellectual seriousness and the economics of an aesthetic cosmopolitanism manifest themselves with an increasing clarity in the plays of . Shaw frequently translates the stereotypical musical and technical sophistication of continental Europeans—as opposed to the lax amateurism of the English—into a sign of the continent‟s better preparation for the difficulties of modern life. In the “Don Juan in Hell” episode of Man and Superman

(1903), for instance, Shaw suggests that the majority of the English snub the

21 As Victoria Glendinning points out, Sitwell‟s descriptions of these commercial “Eastern gentleman” may very well refer to “the rich Jews who with Edward VII‟s patronage were making their way in society”; the comment would thereby represent a muted, but still “unattractive” anti-Semitism. It should be kept in mind, though, as Glendinning also observes, that Sitwell frequently “expresses his contempt and loathing for most of the values and attitudes of his class,” as well (3). Sitwell‟s satire is shared all around. 344 contemplative pleasures of classical music in favour of trivial pursuits, thereby weakening themselves as a nation.22

In “Don Juan in Hell,” Shaw‟s Devil sets up a symbolic opposition between

“concert rooms where they play the classical compositions” of “Mozart” and

“racecourses.” According to the Devil, in England “the classical concert is admitted to be a higher, more cultivated, poetic, intellectual, ennobling place than the racecourse”; but, he implies, a good many English prefer the excitement of the racecourse (CP III 614).

Shaw‟s animate Statue, a character borrowed from Mozart‟s Don Giovanni, concurs, adding that “[a]t every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it” (615).23 Don Juan goes them one better by observing that the

“concert rooms” equate to “heaven,” “the home of the masters of reality,” while

“racecourses” equate to “hell,” “the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness”

(CP III, 616). Don Juan even catches the Devil falling into his own insult when the latter

22 Man and Superman was published in 1903 and was performed in 1905 in Britain without the “Don Juan in Hell” scenes. In 1907, “Don Juan in Hell” was performed on its own at the Court Theatre in London (Gibbs 174). This led Max Beerbohm to declare to his readers, “[w]e do not deserve Mr. Shaw. Why was he not born a German? In Germany they have been industriously playing „Man and Superman‟ from start to finish … a six hours‟ traffic.” Beerbohm attributes the abridged performances to the notion that “in England it is an old and honoured custom to be sulky and grudging in acknowledgment of contemporary genius” (“G. B. S. Again.” SR 8 June 1907: 713). It was not until 1915 that the play was performed in its entirety in Britain, at the in Edinburgh (Gibbs 212).

23 Although based on the statue in Mozart‟s opera, Shaw‟s version is much more flippant. Both characters nonetheless serve to call others to account. The original statue warns Don Giovanni during a night of revelling that his “ will turn to woe ere it is morning” and Shaw‟s statue warns the English that they do not take their cultural pursuits seriously enough (Mozart and da Ponte 240).

345 shallowly echoes Walter Pater, declaring music to be the “sublimest of the arts!”24 Don

Juan accuses the Devil, and indirectly English Aestheticism, of acting “like a hysterical woman fawning on a fiddler,” of enjoying music as a cheap sensual stimulus (612).

Shaw‟s implication is that most English, like the devil, prefer cheap thrills and that those who attempt to better themselves simply become bored when they fail to find a facile excitement. Those who buy into an English mode of listening are consequently unable to master reality.

Conversely, Shaw‟s ideal audience for classical music is Mozart‟s Don Juan and the Austrian composer himself, who both end up in heaven. These two end up in a state of grace because they realize that the true reward of heaven, and by Shaw‟s analogy the

“classical concert,” is an austere one, whereby “you live and work instead of playing and pretending” (617). They both accept that “joy” comes from “the work of helping Life in its struggle upward” (618). For them, music is not so much sensually exciting as it is a medium for a complicated and arduous contemplation of existence and of the world around them. To view music otherwise, in an amateurish English fashion, is to turn the art into either “the brandy of the damned” or into a wearying illusion of sophistication— in other words, into hell (612).

In his 1913 curtain-raiser The Music-Cure, Shaw made these nationalistic musical stakes explicitly militaristic.25 Although this play is a farce, Shaw depicts an insipid

24 This seems to be a cheap shot at Pater. If it is, perhaps Shaw had not read Plato and Platonism or even the Imaginary Portraits, both of which present music as a stimulus to contemplation and an intellectual social harmony; see chapter two (60-70, 74-75, 76-90).

25 The Music-Cure was first performed in January, 1914, in London as a curtain-raiser for G. K. Chesterton‟s Magic. 346 musical amateurism as a serious sign of England‟s intellectual, moral, and physical unpreparedness for war against a European power. Here Shaw presents Reginald, a son of the Duke of Dunmow, as a morally weak civil servant and as a physically weak pianist. Directly prior to the action of the play, Reginald had worked as an “under- secretary in the [British] War Office.” While there he learned that “the army was going to be put on a vegetarian diet, and that the British Maccaroni Trust shares would go up with a rush when this became public.”26 Without seeing a conflict of interests, he purchased “a great many” shares of the Trust (CP V, 156). When officials discover his insider trading, he is disgraced, though he claims not to understand why, and turns to opiates. To rejuvenate his spirits, his mother sends Strega Thundridge, a “female

Paderewski,” to his hotel (161). Fascinated by Thundridge, Reginald tells her that he can

“play” the piano “a bit,” too. He gushes over songs such as “Rum Tum Tiddle” and “Oh, you beautiful doll” and plays a little until Thundridge, who thinks he is inanely flirting with her, “knocks him sprawling over the keyboard” (164). Shaw makes it clear that

Reginald‟s moral and physical weaknesses correlate to his rather frivolous tastes in music. Altogether, he provides a fairly poor representative of Britain‟s intellectual, moral, and physical readiness for an attack.

Thundridge‟s sophisticated musical tastes and technique, however, signal the power of a refined continental culture both to intimidate and to bolster Britain. When

26 Shaw is playing off the Marconi Scandal of 1912-13, when several high-ranking Liberal ministers, including and Rufus Isaacs, purchased shares of the American Marconi telegraph company around the same time as its English counterpart had been offered a lucrative government contract. The Music-Cure was first performed in January 1913 (Gibbs 201). The scandal had already resulted in difficult questions for Asquith‟s government, but the full implications of Lloyd George‟s and Isaac‟s involvement were not made public until February and March of 1913 (B. Gilbert 307-08). 347

Reginald flirts with Thundridge, she knocks him around, causing him to exclaim in surprise, “[y]ou are strong.” The virtuoso responds, “[m]y strength has been developed by playing left hand octave passages—like this,” and “[s]he begins playing Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s Erl König.”27 At the sound, Reginald “puts his fingers in his ears, but continues to stare at her.” He is unable to bear the music, but he is in awe of

Thundridge‟s strength (162). Thundridge sternly tells him, “I am now going to educate you musically. I am going to play Chopin, and Brahms, and Bach, and Schumann, and—

” Reginald interrupts her, crying “[y]ou don‟t mean classical music?” He is “horrified” at the thought of a complex European art. Telling Reginald that she is “going to make a man” of him, Thundridge plays “Chopin‟s Polonaise in A Flat” and commands: “Imagine yourself going into battle.” Poor Reginald, Shaw indicates, “runs away” (154-55). Soon, though, she has coaxed him back and gets him to play part of the Polonaise with her, just

“riddle tiddle, riddle tiddle,” as he describes it.28 Reginald starts enjoying himself, imagining, at Thundridge‟s command, that he has “saved [his] country by deeds of splendid bravery” (165). At a repeat he cries, “[a]gain! again!” growing increasingly excited until Thundridge “pushes him off the bench to the floor” and plays on alone

(165). Thundridge pushes Reginald around, but she has also rekindled his self- confidence and his interest in life.

27 In a note, Shaw observes that the play was “written for two pianists, but can be adapted to any instruments on which the performers happen to be proficient.” The roles of Reginald and Thundridge were originally played by William Armstrong and Madge McIntosh, respectively. Shaw recalls that, “though Mr Armstrong was an accomplished pianist, Miss McIntosh‟s virtuosity was confined to the English concertina,” which “did just as well.” Liszt on the concertina must have been something to hear, but I wonder if the lack of the power of a piano undermined the critique of England inherent within Shaw‟s play (CP V 154).

28 It is virtually impossible to imagine what part of this polonaise Reginald could be describing by the phrase “riddle tiddle.” 348

Thundridge‟s musical shock therapy works then, but in a way that depicts the

British establishment as intellectually and physically subservient to a continental culture.

Overcome by Thundridge‟s knowledge of Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, and Schubert (a list of primarily Germanic composers championed by a presumably Polish pianist), Reginald propositions her.29 He admits, “I have had only one secret longing, and that was to be mercilessly beaten by a splendid, strong, beautiful woman” (167). The powerful

Thundridge responds that she herself has “a dream of a timid little heart fluttering against mine, of a gentle voice to welcome me home, of a silky moustache to kiss my weary fingers when I return from a Titanic struggle with Tchaikovsky‟s Concerto in G major”

(169). Through Thundridge‟s descriptions of musical struggles, Shaw implies that a continental European culture grows strong in the submissive bosom of a British musical amateurism. All the while, this musical amateurism is a symptom of larger problems, such as intellectual and moral failures, within Britain‟s ruling .

The Music-Cure was first performed in January, 1914. The following summer, the world‟s focus shifted from the stage to the battlefield and Shaw became increasingly frustrated with what he saw as an English muddle-headedness in the First World War. In

Heartbreak House, written between 1913 and 1919, Shaw imagines decadent representatives of English leisure and business classes eagerly awaiting the destruction of their home and country. These representatives stand watching for an air raid outside of an English country house designed “to resemble… an old-fashioned high-pooped ship,” materializing the Ship-of-State allegory in book six of Plato‟s Republic (CP I, 489). For

29 Liszt was Hungarian, but was frequently associated with “what came to be known as the „‟” (Newman, Ernest. “.” MT 1 Oct. 1911: 634). 349 the group, the upcoming raid assumes the excitement of an impromptu concert. The upper-class Hesione Hushabye emerges from the darkness where she has been adulterously flirting with a businessman and cries out to her friends, “[d]id you hear the explosions? And the sound in the sky: it‟s splendid: it‟s like an orchestra: it‟s like

Beethoven.” The young Ellie Dunn agrees: “By thunder, Hesione: it is Beethoven”

(595). Refusing to act, as her father tells her to, like a professional “soldie[r]” under orders “to take cover,” Ellie declares “I shall behave like an amateur” and she stays to enjoy the spectacle with Hesione. , Hesione‟s husband, soon joins them, having turned on the lights in the house to attract the bombers. Ellie, “tense with excitement,” tells Hector to “[s]et fire to the house” to make it still more discernible to the musical planes (597). Each of these characters perceives the threat of destruction within England to be an exhilarating aesthetic event to be sought out, like the performance of a

Beethoven symphony.

This take on Beethoven, Shaw suggests, is worse than any ordinary amateur‟s: it is an extreme perversion of “hysterical” people “fawning on a fiddler.” Ellie, Hesione, and Hector are a development of the Devil from “Don Juan in Hell,” for they prefer a superficial excitement to the critical contemplation necessary for dealing with modern reality. These representatives of England also then correspond to the “war maniacs” whom Shaw describes in his “Preface” to the play. They have lost “the masks of education, art, science and religion” and are therefore left “glorying grotesquely in the licence suddenly accorded to [their] vilest passions and most abject terrors” (461, 462).

Unrestrained by the traditional curricula of critical thought or by a critical approach to

350 art, they symbolize a threat to the sanity of the English governing classes. They are an embodiment of Plato‟s Ship of Fools.

Among this English “audience,” it is only the elderly Captain Shotover, Shaw‟s , who recognizes the critical contemplation called for by the Beethovian bombers. He alone identifies the bombers as not simply an aesthetic sensation, but as a

“judgment.” “The judgment has come,” he tells the group, and “[c]ourage will not save you; but it will shew that your souls are still alive” (596). The planes are a critique of hysteria and a reminder that, as Shotover has previously explained, the best for whoever would run the Ship of State is to “lay his course and stand on his bridge and steer it” (593). The planes signal how anyone who has the “will to live” must “[l]earn his business as an Englishman,” namely “[n]avigation,” how to steer the state by courageously looking at reality. This will encourage reason and forethought and the avoidance of a facile thoughtlessness and an unrestrained desire for shallow and destructive stimulants (594).

Despite Shotover‟s warnings, this musical condemnation of English war mania fails to check the ill-considered longing of the younger generation for a dangerous excitement cushioned by an ultimate security. The planes pass overhead having bombed only a businessman and a nearby rectory, allowing Ellie to note “disappointedly” that everyone else is “safe” and Hector to lament “disgustedly” “how damnably dull the world has become again” (597). Hesione meanwhile observes “what a glorious experience” the threat has been and hopes that the planes will “come again tomorrow night,” a sentiment with which Ellie concurs. Randall, a minor Reginald-like character, closes this final

351 scene by playing “Keep the Home Fires Burning” on his flute (598). Randall‟s music represents less a courageous response to the planes than an ironic opiate akin to

Reginald‟s musical distractions. His performance ironically reflects what Shaw saw as an upper-class expectation of security that enabled an unhealthy desire for excitement— an English desire to “Keep the Homes Fires Burning,” to maintain a shallowly “cheery” mindset that could burn down the house. Shaw‟s cautionary “judgment” against this tension through German planes and a German composer provides a warning to the

English that they, as a nation, were unprepared for the difficulties of shaping modern

European history in an effectively contemplative and peaceful fashion.

The “tastes of modern London”: Aesthetic Invasions of England

Richardson, Sitwell, and Shaw evoked a continental superiority in music to reveal an intellectual and economic weakness and a consequent lack of preparation for war in

Britain. Other authors went still further and warned of how an ostensibly blasé infiltration of German Kultur into Britain could pave the way for a German invasion.

These authors saw a British embrace of German art, and of German music in particular, as a sign of Britain disregarding the inherent security of a nationalistic chauvinism. In

Saki‟s (H. H. Munro‟s) When William Came: A Story of London Under the

Hohenzollerns (1913), the upper-class Murrey Yeovil arrives home from a hunting expedition in the East to find that Germany has successfully invaded Britain. He is unhappily surprised to find little local resistance to the invaders. His friend Holham

352 accounts for this seemingly “heartless indifference” of the British to the occupying power by pointing out that

[i]n the world of music and art and the drama ... the foreign names are legion ... and some of our British devotees of such arts are more acclimatized to the ways of or than they are familiar with the life, say, of Stirling or York. For years they have lived and thought and spoken in an atmosphere and jargon of denationalized culture—even those of them who have never left our shores (Complete Works 710).

The music of Munich and Moscow has usurped a British desire for a healthier music, such as the imperialistic, patriotic Yeovil seeks in nature. “I know,” Holham tells Yeovil,

“[t]here is more music to you in the quick thud, thud of hoofs on desert mud … than in all the droning and flourishes that a highly-paid orchestra can out to an expensively fed audience. But the tastes of modern London, as we see them crystallized around us, lie in a very different direction” (711). As such, Yeovil should not expect the high society of

London, especially, “to be permanently concerned or downcast because the Crown of

Charlemagne takes it[s] place now on the top of the Royal box in the theatres, or at the head of programmes at State concerts” (710). German or a generically foreign art, according to Holham (who seems here to speak for Saki), effectively prepares the way for an invasion by acclimating the British capital to a foreign presence.

Much of Saki‟s reasoning as to how these musically-led invasions work anticipates the more paranoid and homophobic rantings of Noel Pemberton-Billing, which would come five years later.30 Germanic music, Saki implies, weakens the English

30 Pemberton-Billing accused the performer Maud Allan and the producer J. T. Grein of attempting to seduce British audiences into homosexual activity with Oscar Wilde‟s Salome so as to weaken British resolve and thereby help Germany win the First World War. One of Billing‟s witnesses in the subsequent libel trial suggested that Richard Strauss‟s opera Salome would have the same seductive effect as the play; see chapter five (314-15). 353 populace by creating musical amateurs in the most derogatory sense. It creates inept individuals who are physically and intellectually soft, as well as effete. Saki epitomizes this trend in Percival Plarsey. Leading Yeovil through his recently redecorated home,

Plarsey shows him his “new music-room.” Therein, Plarsey boasts, “[a]ll the hangings” are “violette de Parme” and “all the furniture” is “rosewood. The only ornament in the room is a replica of the Mozart statue in Vienna. Nothing but Mozart is to be played in the room. Absolutely, nothing but Mozart” (763, Saki‟s emphases). Listening to Plarsey

“pattering” on, Yeovil laments how he himself “belonged to a race forbidden to bear arms.” He thinks how “[a]t the moment he would gladly have contented himself with the weapons with which nature had endowed him, if he might have kicked and pommelled the abhorrent specimen of male humanity whom he saw before him” (764). But everything around Plarsey becomes limited and enervated. Rejecting a physical response, Yeovil contents himself with peevishly criticizing the replication of an Austrian statue in Britain.

Yeovil does not, noticeably, point to a vibrant British musical heritage, which theoretically could have been another option. Disregarding H. H. Parry and Henry

Purcell and even the imperialistic offerings of Elgar, all that Saki depicts an emasculated

London as offering for a native music is the “more or less meaningless” music-hall song

“They quaff the gay bubbly in Eccleston Square,” sung by Tony Luton (696-97). Luton‟s song, known as the “National Anthem of the fait accompli,” offers rather less in the way of fermenting British pride than even a replicated statue of Mozart (712).

354

While decrying a feeble and unchallenged imitation of German Kultur in Britain,

Saki also bewails what he portrays as a British pandering to the decadent tastes of

Germans themselves. In the novel, Yeovil‟s wife Cecily hopes to maintain her upper- class lifestyle by ingratiating herself to the well-connected society hostess the Gräfin von

Tolb. Cecily hopes to use her lackadaisical lover, Ronnie Storre, to attract the Gräfin.

Storre, Cecily tells her husband, is “[a] rather good-looking young animal with something midway between talent and genius in the piano-playing line” (714). As the Gräfin is

“passionately fond of music” and “very fond of good-looking boys,” Storre is a good lure

(749). Towards the end of the novel, Cecily has Storre give a recital in her townhouse to which she succeeds in drawing the Gräfin and several other high-ranking German and

British assimilationists. Saki gives Cecily her come-uppance by having the Gräfin attach herself to Ronnie and pay little attention to her hostess. Cecily debases herself by hosting the recital and ends up with nothing to show for it.

Perhaps still more insidious than an aesthetic acclimation or a pandering to

German Kultur is the sheer abstract complacency that Saki depicts classical music as imparting. When Storre sits down at the piano for his recital, “[a] sudden hush descended on the company gathered in the great drawing-room at Berkshire Street,” and for the next

“nine or ten minutes” he “held possession of the crowded room” amidst a general contented forgetting. A German “Landgraf forgot for the moment the regrettable trend of his subjects towards Parliamentary Socialism,” while “the excellent Gräfin von Tolb forgot all that the Canon,” an insipid English assimilationist, “had been saying to her for the last ten minutes” (780). Worst of all, the American-born, but English-titled Duchess

355 of Dreyshire forgets that her husband‟s home and her adopted land has been invaded.

She declares Storre‟s efforts to impress the distinguished assembly, including its German components, to be a “perfectly glorious triumph” (781). The vague excitement of music,

Saki implies, can cause one to forget one‟s subservient position and thus to be foolishly satisfied.31

Only an articulated rejection of a musical stupor undoes this disquieting sense of contentment. The Duchess‟s repeated references to Storre‟s “glorious triumph” strike a nerve in Yeovil. He retorts loudly, “I don‟t know ... you see, glory hasn‟t come very much my way lately.” He then calls out, in a “taunting” manner, the sixth stanza of

William Cowper‟s eighteenth-century “Boadicea: An Ode,” which anachronistically predicts the fall of the Roman invaders of ancient Britain: “„Other Romans shall arise,/

Heedless of a soldier‟s name,/ Sounds, not deeds, shall win the prize,/ Harmony the path to fame‟” (Saki 781, Cowper 6.1-4).32 These lines envision successive Roman generations trading military for aesthetic glories. This exchange leaves them open to the events of the stanza, which Yeovil does not quote, but which tells how “the progeny that springs/ From the forests of our [British] land,/ Arm‟d with thunder, clad with wings,/ Shall a wider world command” (7.1-4). The native “progeny,” the poem predicts, will arise to defeat the now effete Romans and to create a larger empire. Yeovil

31 Herr Settembrini in Thomas Mann‟s Magic Mountain (1924) would make a similar claim. As he explains, “[m]usic, it would appear, is movement for its own sake—although I suspect it of quietism. Let me overstate my case: my distaste for music is political” (111). Settembrini‟s problem with music is that it can “numb us, put us asleep, counteract all activity and progress,” that it “knows all too well the effect that opiates have” (112).

32 Saki‟s “Sounds, not deeds, shall win the prize” is actually a slight misquotation. Cowper‟s original reads, “Sounds, not arms, shall win the prize” (6.3). The change is an unfortunate one because in Cowper‟s version 6.3 anticipates the arming of the British in 7.3, “Arm‟d with thunder, clad with wings.” 356 obviously hopes that militaristic British progeny will someday arise to supplant the

Germans.

Yeovil need not quote Cowper‟s seventh stanza, as Tony Luton enacts it. Having himself been a “young man who had sprung from the people” of the countryside before he had run to London, Luton goes beyond mere poetry. At Yeovil‟s recitation, he arises and arms himself with thunder. “Hell!” he exclaims, “it‟s true, that‟s the worst of it. It‟s damned true!” (782). Luton realizes that he too has become aesthetically enfeebled. As such, he rejects his assimilationist stance, as well as his “meaningless” song, and joins the ousted British imperial army. Several days after Storre‟s concert, Yeovil reads “an announcement in the papers that, in spite of handsome offers of increased salary, Mr.

Tony Luton, the original singer of the popular ditty Eccleston Square, had terminated his engagement” at the “Caravansery Theatre, and signed on as a deck hand in the Canadian

Marine” (785). Only by rejecting the stultifying effect of German music and the shallow

British music-hall culture can Luton help to retake Britain for the British.

While Saki‟s novel presented a pre-war warning, Rebecca West‟s The Return of the Soldier (1915) offers an indication of the conflicting associations that German music held for those in Britain during the war. For some German music was a consolation, for others it was an indicator of the influence of the enemy. The night her shell-shocked cousin Chris returns from France, Jenny plays Beethoven for solace. She reflects how

“[t]hrough this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.” Chris‟s understandably embittered wife Kitty responds adversely, saying “[s]o

357 you like Jenny … to play Beethoven when it‟s the war that‟s caused all this. I could have told that you would have chosen to play German music this night of all nights.” To Kitty, the performance of Beethoven brings a reminder of the enemy into her carefully secured, country home. The more pensive, idealistic Jenny switches to a safer “saraband by

Purcell” (56).

E. F. Benson would promote a more fervent wartime rejection of German classical music, along with its subversively liberal associations, in Mike (1916).33 Prior to the war, the aristocratic Michael Comber is a repressed young homosexual who breaks away from his father, Lord Ashbridge, by resigning his commission in the Guards to study classical music. The bumptious, militaristic Ashbridge considers Michael‟s new career to be a disgrace. Ashbridge thinks of music as being “vaguely connected with white waistcoats and opera glasses and large pink carnations” and he is “congenitally incapable of viewing it in any other light than a diversion” (101). In his mind, music represents the degenerating glitter that it does for Yeovil and for Holham and for so many of the aristocrats discussed in chapter three. As such, he would prefer that Michael stay in his regiment and, at some point, get married. “You,” he tells Michael, “have to learn the meaning of such words as patriotism, and caste, and duty” (63). Michael must continue the Ashbridge traditions and serve his country, as had his forefather and as must his children.

33 When the novel was published in the U. S. in 1916, it was called Michael. In Britain it was reprinted, as originally published, as Mike twice in 1916 and then again in 1918, 1919, and 1927, dates which suggest some degree of popularity, though it is no longer as popular. 358

Michael, however, sees music as a means to escape from his father, from aristocratic traditions, and from the demands of a conventional British society. Initially, music provides him with a motivation to resign from the “nightmare” of the Guards, against his father‟s wishes (99). Subsequently, it provides a means for him to connect with the vivacious Anglo-German pianist Hermann Falbe, whom he meets while travelling to Bayreuth, the center of Wagnerian opera. Although his parents desperately want him to marry, Michael himself “thought he disliked girls” and his “inability” to talk to them “filled him with an uncomfortable sense of his want of normality” (100). It is only while in Bayreuth that he establishes the first warm and comfortable relationship of his life, with Hermann. During their conversations he feels, at first, “as if he was undressing in public,” and then as if “he was undressing in front of a fire,” as if he was

“welcome.” Safely away from his family and home, Michael and Herman have “the common land of music to build upon, whereas to Lord Ashbridge that same soil had been, so to speak, the territory of the enemy” (91). The Anglo-German musician and

Germany blend so that Michael can enjoy “his first taste of liberty,” having “stripped himself naked to music” and having “found a friend” (98). In the foreign land of

Bayreuth, German Kultur, classical music, and homosexuality invade the ramparts of

Michael‟s British reserve.

Problems arise for Michael when German music becomes openly conflated with military aggression. Soon into their relationship, Hermann signals to Michael how he identifies largely as German by setting up the following distinction between German and

British cultures: “We [Germans] waste nothing, not even time, whereas the English have

359 an absolute genius for wasting time. Look at all your games,” he tells Michael, “they are merely devices for getting rid of the hours, and so not having to think. You hate thought as a nation, and we live for it. Music is thought; all art is thought; commercial prosperity is thought; soldiering is thought” (87). While visiting Bayreuth musical “thought” infuses Michael‟s emotions and invasively colonizes him, “even as music was in

Michael‟s heart, so Germany was there also” (103). This form of a musical occupation might now seem innocuous. But, deep-seated cultural associations with Germany were particularly suspect during the First World War, as evidenced by the reaction against

Lord Haldane, who had reportedly called Germany his “spiritual home.”34 Michael‟s musicality comes therefore to risk an association with German military aggression.

Michael reasserts a vague cosmopolitanism when he transcends this invasion through his dreaminess during a performance of in Munich. Listening to the first act, Michael passes an hour “in one unbroken mood of absorption,” as “Falbe, he himself, the thronged and silent theatre, the Emperor, Munich, Germany, were all blotted out of his consciousness” (113, 114). When this blithe disinterest in gets disrupted, Michael rebels against the Germanic culture as outlined by

Hermann above. At the first intermission, the Kaiser invites Michael into his box and forces on him sinisterly analytical appraisals. The Kaiser questions him about “the state of things in Ireland,” “the Territorial Force,” and the “Navy,” in an attempt to feel out

Britain‟s strength. As the music starts, the Kaiser‟s line of inquiry shifts and he indulges

34 Lord Haldane was repeatedly taken to task for both his failures as Britain‟s Secretary of State for War and for his overt admiration of Germany, which, as was frequently reported, he had labelled his “spiritual home.” See, for example, the sample of letters to the editor of the Saturday Review following the heading “Lord Haldane and His Record,” particularly Arthur Lovell‟s (SR 2 Dec 1916: 529-30). 360 in “a stream of whispered appreciation and criticism” of the performance, disrupting

Michael‟s enjoyment (117, 118). At the second intermission, Michael rejoins Hermann

“in a state of republican irritation” ostensibly because he had to listen to the Kaiser‟s invasive analysis of the opera (119). He soon acknowledges a “bitter taste” though when he thinks of the Kaiser‟s “curiosity to be informed on English topics.” More sinister than the Kaiser‟s imposed is his conflation of German music, thought, and military aggression. Michael rejects this conflation with an apolitical attitude, claiming to “know nothing” of politics and reasserting his love of both Germany and England

(121).

Despite this early idealism, the novel ends with Michael decisively declaring his ultimate loyalty to Britain by rejecting a cosmopolitan musical community, along with his rational thinking. When World War One breaks out, Hermann and Michael both abandon their music. Hermann joins the German army and Michael rejoins the British

Guards, ending up at the front. Surrounded by war, Michael falls into a dangerously nationalistic solipsism. Having previously considered that “[t]he music of the world is

German,” Michael now finds his heart warmed by “four privates” whistling

“„Tipperary,‟” the British music-hall-turned-marching-song (22, 351).35 The whistling

“was not precisely in tune nor were the performers in unison, but it produced a vaguely pleasant effect” that “was in tune with the air of security of Sunday morning” (351). This

35 Michael‟s anti-German Aunt Barbara had referenced “It‟s a long way to Tipperary” earlier in the novel and this is likely the song the privates are whistling (280). Ironically, the song describes a longing for Ireland, not England. 361 half-harmonious British security, highly desirable in and of itself, quickly coalesces into

Michael‟s myopic contemplation of how

[t]he minor problems which had worried him, the fact of millions of treasure that might have fed the poor and needy over all Britain for a score of years, being outpoured in fire and steel, the fact of thousands of useful and happy lives being sacrificed, of widows and orphans and childless mothers growing ever a greater company—all these things, terrible to look at, if you looked at them alone, sank quietly into their sad appointed places when you looked at the thing entire.

Despite Benson‟s frequently flippant style, it is difficult to read this passage as ironic.

Michael‟s rejection of a liberal, international music and his corresponding “joy” in imagining war and “the honour of England” without contemplating “minor” details seem sincere (360). Similarly sincere seems to be Benson‟s endorsement of Michael‟s wartime disregard of all that had liberated him from a repressive, patriarchal society.36 This is particularly so as the novel ends soon after Michael has shot Hermann as the latter leaps over a trench . Hermann‟s last words are the objectively sympathetic greeting

“[g]ood morning, old boy!” (364). Benson‟s portrayal of the friends‟ fanatic yet un- resentful rejection of a cosmopolitan music for patriotism presents a stark counterpoint to the pacifist aesthetics of Fitzroy‟s Dennis and Alan explored in chapter five.

In literature, then, from about 1904 onwards, British authors conflated a prowess in classical music with intellectual, economic, and even military strength. In these musical-literary conflations, Europe in general and Germany in particular frequently bested Britain, though not always, as the ending of Mike shows. Approaching such a

36 It is worthwhile to consider the manifestly patriotic veins of Mike as part and parcel of Benson‟s work for C. F. G. Masterman and the Ministry of Information, for the latter see Masters (202-04). It is also significant that as the war approaches in the novel, Benson has Michael marry Hermann‟s sister Sylvia, which signals his fall back into a conservative . This new relationship never has the warmth of that between Michael and Hermann. 362 nationalistic hierarchy through literary representations of classical music served three functions. First, it presented Britain‟s supposed cultural inadequacies in a non- threatening fashion, as in works by Richardson and Berners. Second, it highlighted how even seemingly erudite cultural accomplishments could indicate more immediately pressing achievements, such as a superior education leading to technical and industrial strength, as in Shaw‟s plays. Finally, and as Britain moved closer to and beyond 1914, these literary representations (with the exception of Richardson‟s 1915 novel) highlighted how a supposedly abstract German art could stand for a temporarily successful military invasion of Britain or British society, as in works by Saki and Benson, and in Shaw‟s

Heartbreak House.

“The Hero arrived. Naturally, he was a Hun”: Restrospective Mythologies of Music and German Threats to Britain in the Interwar Period

In interwar novels retrospectively considering the First World War, some authors used German music as a by now familiar, even mythic symbol of threats to British virtues. In No More Parades (1925), for instance, characterizes Sylvia

Tietjens as the nefarious Venus from Wagner‟s Tannhäuser as she tempts the asceticism of her estranged husband Christopher. Christopher is Ford‟s idealized reincarnation of an eighteenth-century English gentleman, the last “Tory of the Tories,” and Sylvia has abandoned him (Parade’s End 106). Having found out that he is now in love with the acutely virtuous Valentine Wannop, Sylvia follows him to France during the war so as to

“[t]o torment him and to allure him” (429).

363

Sylvia torments Christopher by distracting him from both his self-control and from his loyalty to Wannop. In so doing, she challenges his idealized gentlemanly nature. At a hotel near the front, she sits with him and they listen to a record over which the sounds of war dominate. Outside the hotel the “tumult increased to an incredible volume,” so that “even the thrillings of the near-by gramophone … became mere shimmerings of gold thread in a fabric of sound” (439-40). Someone puts on “a languorous and interrupted variation of a waltz.” A General condemns the people

“[d]ancing in the dark!” as the noise outside signals that “the Germans may be here at any moment” (440). Ignoring the General, Christopher succumbs to the eroticism of the music and asks Sylvia to dance. As they do, she begins “humming Venusberg music”

(442). A little later, she asks her husband, “[i]sn‟t it queer that Venus should be your own?” Her question positions Christopher as Tannhäuser, the Wagnerian knight who longs to be redeemed from lust to be pure for Elisabeth, who in Sylvia‟s mind becomes

“poor Valentine-Elisabeth.” As “the Venusberg music was dinning in her ears,” Sylvia leads Christopher upstairs to her hotel room (443). Recalling the fall of Tannhäuser in the opera, Sylvia‟s Venusberg music mingles with the noise of the German guns to create a combined threat to Christopher‟s moral, physical, and psychological safety.

As Parade’s End continues, Ford returns to the mythic force of Wagner‟s music to pit its posturing against the strength of English culture.37 In A Man Could Stand Up—

37 Ford Madox Ford was of course originally Ford Madox Hueffer. His father, the music critic Francis Hueffer, had been born in Prussia and moved to London to work. Ford‟s anti-Prussian polemic When Blood is Their Argument (1915) signals his unease with his North German heritage. In the polemic, he singles Wagner out among German musicians, seeing the composer and Bayreuth as “symbolical in a quite extraordinary manner” of modern, Prussia-led Germany. “Wagner wrote some very beautiful music,” Ford writes, but he also “succeeded in brow-beating the world of his day into believing him not only a musician 364

(1926), the third volume of Ford‟s tetralogy, Tietjens prepares for a bombardment of his trench while imagining himself as “a solitary statu[e] of the Bard of Avon,” as

Shakespeare, experiencing an opera. As he does so, he observes how around him the

“[n]oise” of war “increased. The orchestra was bringing in all the brass, all the strings, all the wood-wind, all [sic] the percussion instruments. ... It was comic to the extent that an operatic orchestra‟s crescendo is comic. Crescendo! … C r e s c e n d o! C R R R R R

E S C…. The Hero must be coming!” Then “[t]he Hero arrived” and, Tietjens thinks,

“[n]aturally, he was a Hun” (559). Tietjens is almost certainly thinking here of Siegfried from The Ring cycle, for later that evening he hears miners under his trench and, imagining that they are German, he thinks of them as “Nibelungen-like” (562). Whatever mythic “Hero” the “Hun” represents, he is also a German soldier and Tietjens‟s men shoot him. He falls “crumbling” and Tietjens thinks of him as “[t]oo dramatic, really”

(559). The Wagnerian war-opera becomes a that self-destructs,

but a philosopher, , a saviour, and a hero” (143). Wagner is like a Prussian Germany because he produced something of some value, then overestimated its importance and demanded that the rest of the world do so too. Ford later bolsters this conception of Wagner as a bully by describing William II as “an imperial ” (226). Ford is rather an expert on the subject, he explains, because his father, Francis Hueffer, was “chiefly instrumental in forcing the music of Wagner” onto England (145). For Ford, Wagner‟s personality and his music are chiefly invasive. Ford draws here on a conflicted literary tradition of seeing Wagner‟s music as brash and bullying, yet also soothing. In Wilde‟s The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon‟s Aunt Augusta rings his bell, causing him to exclaim, “[a]h! that must be Aunt Augusta. Only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian manner” (303). But, this Wagnerian force can sometimes be welcome, as when Gilbert remarks in “The Critic as Artist” that Wagner‟s overture to Tannhäuser can “heal the spirit that is wounded” (CW IV 158). Proust would also use Wagner to suggest a healing atmosphere of peace in Le Temps Retrouvé (1927). Recounting a letter written to him from near the front during the First World War, Marcel tells how his friend Saint-Loup “ne prenait aucune circonlocution pour me dire que, quand à l‟aube il avait entendu un premier gazouillis à lisière de cette forêt, il avait été enivré comme si lui avait parlé l‟oiseau de ce <> qu‟il espérait bien entendre après la guerre” (62). Saint-Loup uses an overt reference to Siegfried in a very different fashion from Ford‟s in Parade’s End. Rather than associating its music with the noise of an invading army, Proust references the bird music from the forest scenes of Act II to evoke a moment of peace from the fighting. Saint-Loup‟s longing to get home to hear the opera “après la guerre” also offers the hope for an at least aesthetically cosmopolitan peace. 365 dragged down by its own dramatic weight, before it can destroy English culture in the contemplative Shakespearean form of Tietjens.

Along with Shakespeare, Ford also uses Elgar to signal the strengths and the limitations of an early-twentieth-century British idealism. While less of an icon than

Shakespeare, Elgar was frequently associated with the virtues of England and of British

Imperialism. As Jeffrey Richards has pointed out, Elgar‟s Pomp and Circumstance marches, of which “Land of Hope and Glory” is the most famous, were “inspired by that nineteenth-century phenomenon, the romance of war,” in other words, by perceptions of war “as an arena for pageantry” and “as a vehicle for the noblest of instincts—courage, service, self-sacrifice, comradeship” (58). These traits, which Tietjens realizes are largely symbolic, akin to “imbecile epithets,” all the same explain how he can idealize

England through an Elgarian lens in the pre-war scenes of Some Do Not (1924) (105).

Walking through “Kentish grass fields” with Valentine Wannop, whom he considers a

“maid virtuous, clean, [and] vigorous,” Tietjens can, “in high good humour,” rejoice in

“God‟s England!” (105-06). Reflecting on this picturesque vision, he thinks of “„Land of

Hope and Glory!‟” For him, the music is “[a]ll absolutely correct! Double basses,

‟, all violins, all woodwind, all brass” (106). He goes on to conceptualize this pre- war Elgarian countryside as standing in opposition to the modern “Church! State!

Army! H. M. Ministry: H. M. Opposition: H. M. City Man,” all of which he considers corrupt embodiments of Britain‟s degraded “governing class! All rotten!” It is a good thing “Britannia needs no bulwarks” (106). Tietjens senses the falseness of this

366 romanticized conception of Empire; but, in the pre-war summer Elgar‟s march can still represent for him, half ironically and half seriously, all that is finest in England.

Later Elgar‟s “Land of Hope and Glory” takes on a more insidious tone undermining the romance of war, and indicating the flaws in Britain‟s war plans and in

British idealism. In No More Parades Tietjens remembers, how “[a]t the beginning of the war,”

I had to look in on the War Office, and in a room I found a fellow … what the hell do you think he was doing? He was devising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion ... the band would play Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant would say: There will be no more parades …. Don‟t you see how symbolical it was—the band playing Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant saying There will be no more parades? … For there won‟t. … No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country … nor for the world, I dare say … None (306-07).

As the war progresses, any romantic vision of battle collapses like the Wagnerian hero.

Tietjens‟s experience at the front proves the pomp and circumstance of military pageantry to be hollow and suspect. Focusing on or planning primarily for the grandiosity of

“Hope” and “Glory,” he implies, dangerously neglects the gritty details of the blood, sweat, and horror of battle. As Benson does in Mike, though with different ideological goals, Ford also reflects on how music with overt patriotic connotations can disastrously cover the horrors of war.

In A Man Could Stand Up— Tietjens then re-mythologizes England by replacing the martial symbolism of Elgar with a pseudo-seventeenth-century air, which he willfully imagines to be by Purcell. Tietjens hopes that as Britain‟s quintessential home- grown composer, Purcell (or his imitator) can, like Shakespeare, stand up to Wagner and

367 to the dangerous idealism of an Elgarian Imperialism. The morning after Tietjens imagines hearing “Nibelungen-like” miners beneath him, he hears a British soldier playing an old-fashioned tune on a cornet. He experiences a “sudden waft of pleasure at the seventeenth-century air that the tones gave to the landscape” around him. “Herrick and Purcell!” Tietjens thinks, “[o]r it was perhaps a modern imitation. Good enough.”

Modern or not, the melody calls to his mind an old poem (“I know a lady fair and kind”), which Tietjens thinks of as “exact and quiet”—much as Elgar had once been “absolutely correct”—and which is “[a]s efficient working beneath the soul as the picks of miners in the dark” (564).38 The tune‟s “seventeenth-century air”—“air” functions here as a synonym for “musical tune” and for “atmosphere”—further recalls to him “[t]he only satisfactory age in England,” an age of “Anglican sainthood, accuracy of thought,” and

“timbered hedge-rows” (566).

The music represents for Tietjens an English culture worth saving. He therefore decides to try to get the cornet player “a pass back to Division” that will enable him to practice for a concert for the troops and to avoid a suspected German “strafe.” The musician has shown that even in the midst of war the best of English culture has survived in a musical form and Tietjens considers that, “for his good taste,” this man should be saved (565).

38 The misquoted poem is probably not by Herrick and the air, as Tietjens suspects, is not by Purcell, at least not the seventeenth-century Purcell. The original poem begins: “There is a Lady sweet and kind/ Was never face so pleased my mind;/ I did but see her passing by,/ And yet I love her till I die” (Anon., Oxford Book of English Verse lns. 1-4). The tune Tietjens hears is most likely “Passing By,” by Edward Purcell, not the older, more famous . According to Scholes, “The popular song, „Passing By‟, is not correctly described as by Purcell. It is by Edward Purcell Cockram (died 1932), who, unfortunately, adopted the pen name of „Edward Purcell.‟ It has frequently appeared under false colors in programs in Britain and America and has also been taken into at least one anthology of classical songs (with resulting legal trouble, by the way, since it is still copyright). The simplicity of the melody gives the song an old- world flavor and seems to encourage the error” (Music Appreciation 236). 368

In Those Were the Days (1938), Osbert Sitwell takes a different track and uses a

German parody of eighteenth-century musical order to emphasize the fabled naiveté undone by World War One. He describes how during “the summer of 1914, it seemed as if the whole of London were a ballroom” (194). “All that summer,” he recalls, “the windows were wide open to the air” and “music flowed out onto a hundred balconies,” as across London “the gilded youth of the day waltzed and fox-trotted” (195). The one dance that “reigned supreme in every ballroom” was “the waltz from the Rosenkavalier, that mocking parody of the old order, that triumph of Ritz-Eighteenth-Century.”39

Sitwell uses a waltz (he does not specify which one) from Strauss‟s opera as an ironic sign that the safe excitement of the “old order” of European culture was stable. It was not, for “[a]lready in Vienna, the home of the waltz, the plot” for a European war “was being prepared by gloved, suave-faced gentlemen in top-hats” and “„immaculately-cut suits.‟” Sitwell considers how “[f]ragments of this music must have returned, in a few weeks‟ time,” to the former dancers “as they lay dying in dust or mud, unable to speak or move, or to see clearly” (196). But during the summer, the fortunate youth “waltzed on” in an almost “complete inexpectation of massacre,” unaware that though “[t]he River of

History” had been “frozen fast for a hundred years,” a “Great Thaw was setting in” that would lead to their deaths (197). The war shows that Strauss‟s music had been no more than the masquerade of a well-ordered world.

39 “Ritz-Eighteenth-Century”: Sitwell might be thinking of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, which, though located in a building from 1685, had an “interior design” that “was based on successive French historical styles from late Louis XIV to the First Empire” and “[f]urniture” that was “accurately copied from Louis XV and Louis XVI pieces” (Denby 274, 275). The Ritz Hotel in London was opened in May of 1906 and Denby reports that it originally contained “Louis XVI furniture designs” (238). Either way, the Ritz represents here a gilded rebirth of classical sophistication. 369

Sitwell‟s novel moves from the pleasures and the catastrophes of 1914 up through the 1930s and thus, though retrospective, it also provides a prophetic warning. To highlight this latter function, Sitwell recalls the magical memory of the pre-World War

One waltz in the penultimate paragraph of the book. Amidst the modern music of a

1930s “-band,” Sitwell‟s middle-aged heroine hears in her mind “the opening phrases of the Rosenkavalier Waltz.” She can “almost see” those she had known in her youth

“dancing again, though nearly all the men had been dead for two decades.” She considers that this ghostly dancing occurs “with the very movement of a river thawing, of the water springing up irresistibly under the glaucous ice,” as history—and Sitwell‟s watery metaphor for war—reproduces itself (544). Sitwell‟s late-1930‟s decision to revisit the musical excitement before of the First World War works to draw together the events of 1914 and those of his present day. At the end of the novel, itself published during the increasing political violence in Germany and Italy, Strauss‟s mocking waltz works to predict the onset of the Second World War.

“bemused in a twilight where the demagogues and party hacks … glittered like Wagnerian heroes”: Musical Mythologies of a European Germany versus a Nazi Germany

The time-span of Sitwell‟s book is useful because it signals how in the nineteen- twenties and thirties many authors transitioned from re-imagining World War I to warning against Germany‟s re-emergence as a dominant and an intimidating nation.40 As

40 This type of writing from the 1930s falls into the genre of what Sebastian Knowles has called the “Literature of Anticipation,” “a body of prophetic texts,” and what Hynes has called a “Literature of 370 these writers made this transition, they returned to allegations of the superiority of

German music and of German audiences in order to critique what they portrayed as the post-1918 inadequacies of British culture. In Edward Sackville-West‟s Piano Quintet

(1925), the quintet of the title has been together for “nearly five years” and at last feels ready to be a “success with the Continental audiences” (9). Discussing their upcoming tour, Imogen, the second violinist, remarks that she will “be glad to get on to Berlin” as

“[t]hey‟ll listen there all right, though they‟ll be more critical” (1-2). As Imogen remarks that there is “[n]o one so unmusical as the French,” she suggests that the quintet‟s prior performances in Britain and their first engagements in France serve as a preparation for the more sophisticated audiences of the German capital (1).

As the novel continues, the expected critical acuity of the Berliners merges with the industrial strength of their city. As the quintet nears Berlin, Imogen observes how

“factory after hideous factory, spread along the line, each with its tall chimney.” The factories are distasteful but functional and indicative of the “huge growth” of the city

(114). Overall, Berlin represents a “concrete example of the abstract Idea of a town,” one which “is admirable—monumentally dull, and perfectly commodious” (118). The growth and the order of the German capital, moreover, are highlighted by Sackville-

West‟s previous descriptions of the decayed British countryside, where the quintet has practiced. In his only descriptions of England, Sackville-West describes the outdated and dilapidated Martello towers on the British coast as “forlorn” and filled with “mere dust and refuse,” each existing as a “pathetic symbol of former habitation” (30). They

Preparation,” literature “concerned more with assessment and understanding” of the anticipated new war “than with action” (Knowles Purgatorial 2; Hynes Auden 341). 371 are also an outdated coastal defence. Sackville-West‟s novel is reminiscent of much pre-

1914 fiction as the musical, intellectual, and industrial strength of 1920s Germany looms over the aesthetic backwaters and the general corrosion of Britain.

One key difference between pre-1914 literature and pre-1939 literature is the differentiations made between a European German culture and a Nazi culture.41 In

Goodbye to Berlin (1939), Christopher Isherwood illustrates this tendency by setting a classical concert against the background of the Nazis‟ rise to power in the early 1930s.

The strict concentration of a German audience in the German capital indicates how elements of the nation were moulding themselves to a regimented way of life.

Isherwood‟s eponymous narrator attends “a concert of Mozart concertos” with Natalia

Landauer, a German Jew. The concert takes place in a “severe Corinthian hall” set up to encourage a fierce attentiveness. Isherwood details how his “eyes were uncomfortably dazzled by the classic brilliance of the electric lights” and how the “shiny wooden chairs were austerely hard.” Unable to profit from the surroundings himself, he notes that the rest of “[t]he audience plainly regarded the concert as a religious ceremony.” The “taut, devotional enthusiasm” of those around him, he observes, “oppressed” him “like a headache,” as he “couldn‟t, for a moment, lose consciousness of all those blind, half- frowning, listening heads.” In this rigid atmosphere, he fails to enjoy himself, “despite the Mozart” (Berlin Stories 147). The freewheeling Isherwood cannot bring himself to

41 In Thomas Mann‟s Doctor Faustus, Serenus Zeitblom makes a similar distinction in the midst of the Second World War, between “the intellectual dream of a European Germany” and the “rather terrifying, rather flawed, and sees it, so it would seem, quite intolerable reality of a German Europe” (183). The music made by Serenus‟ friend, Adrian Leverkühn, the Faustus character, takes part in the European German tradition, albeit a strongly modernistic extension of it. As such, Serenus wants “to resist the victory of German arms, because [his] friend‟s work would be buried beneath it, covered with the curse of proscription and forgetfulness for perhaps a hundred years” (34). 372 take pleasure from the music in the devout and oppressive ambience created by the

German audience.

Natalia‟s immersion in this German audience would evoke familiar pre-1914 themes opposing Germans to the British, save that recent political events stress a difference between Germans and German Jews. The section that contains the oppressive concert scene also emphasizes the violence of the Nazi party‟s growing influence and the rise of anti-Semitism. The section opens on a “night in October 1930, about a month after the ,” which had constituted a momentous victory for the National

Socialists. On this October night, “Nazi roughs turned out to demonstrate against the

Jews.”42 The Nazis “manhandled” some Jews and “smashed the windows of all the

Jewish shops,” though, by this time, “[t]he incident was not, in itself, very remarkable”

(139). This opening account signals how this section attempts to show how the cruel intensity of the Nazis‟ rise to power manifested itself in ways not always “very remarkable” to those not directly affected.

Read in this context, what Isherwood sees as the oppressive “enthusiasm” of the post- concert scene creates a subtle but apposite resonance to the sadistic demonstrations of the Nazi gangs against Germans Jews, such as Natalia. The “blind, half-frowning” audience steeling itself to face the music suggests how German society will turn a blind eye to the violence of anti-Semitism in its attempt to deal with the new

Nazi regime. The audience also exhibits an eerie resemblance to Fraulein Shroeder,

42 The election Isherwood refers to took place on September 14th, 1930. On September 16th, the Times reported that the National Socialists had gained 107 seats, which made it the “second biggest” party in the German Reichstag (“The German Elections.” Times 16 Sept. 1930: 13). The election was a significant coup for the Nazi party. 373

Isherwood‟s German landlady, who at the end of the novel is “acclimatizing herself” to the Nazis‟ domination of Germany (207). The setting of the concert against the elections points to the separation of a European German society in which Natalia had a place from a Nazi society from which she will be excluded.

In case these resonances seem stretched, it is worth noting that Isherwood later reinforced an opposition between an international and an exclusive Nazi culture in connection with this scene. In Christopher and his Kind (1976), Isherwood reports that

Stephen Spender “reproached” him for “his sneers at Natalia‟s culture worship” by suggesting that “the Nazi attitude towards concerts and culture and Jews is in some respects like yours [Isherwood‟s].”43 Isherwood responds that he “didn‟t see eye to eye” with the Nazis. “The Nazis,” he explains, “hated culture itself, because it is essentially international and therefore subversive of nationalism. What they called Nazi culture was a local, perverted, nationalistic cult”—language that recalls Goodbye to Berlin‟s description of the German audience‟s “blind, half-frowning,” “taut, devotional enthusiasm” for Mozart—“by which a few major artists and many minor ones were honored for their Germanness, not their talent” (65). In the concert scene, Isherwood was critiquing the German audience, not Natalia. He was connecting a too rigid worship of

German music to the increasingly fascist organization of the German state.

43 Spender‟s remark is somewhat unfair. In Christopher Isherwood notes that it was “while he was living in the world of the London studios, salons, and concert halls as secretary to the violinist André Mangeot” that he “had grown to hate the gushings of concert audiences and the holy atmosphere of concerts” (65). As such, he claims to “hate … the holy atmosphere of concerts” in Britain as much as in Germany. As I explain above though, in Goodbye to Berlin Isherwood implicitly links the devotional mindset of German concert audiences to the devotional mindset of by describing a German audience‟s oppressive interest in a German composer in a scene set in an episode focusing on the Nazis‟ abuse of German Jews. 374

As Isherwood indicates, the Nazis‟ rise to power was often contextualized by an almost religious adoration of “German” classical music. In Put Out More Flags (1942),

Evelyn Waugh drew on the party‟s appropriation of Wagner to equate the Nazis‟ rise and fall to that of a nationalized operatic mythology.44 Like his literary descendent Anthony

Blanche in Brideshead Revisited, the “cosmopolitan, Jewish pansy” Silk had long considered “Art” to be an international pleasure (79). It was a pleasure though that had had its “primrose path,” its prime, “in the days of Diaghilev,” the pre-1914 and interwar impresario of the quintessentially cosmopolitan Ballets Russes.45 As the Second

World War approaches, Ambrose discerns a nationalistic split in the artistic community.

In England he sits in a studio filled with “coarse and tedious youngsters,” contemplating a “preposterous yellow face” painted in a mediocre imitation of (48). This flaccid

English surrealism, reminiscent of Charles Ryder‟s “creamy English charm, playing tigers,” accents the diametric aesthetic strength of Germany‟s glittering authoritarian state

(BR 273). Recalling his German lover Hans “joining the Brown Shirts,” Ambrose remembers him as “lapped in a kind of benighted chivalry, bemused in a twilight where

44 Waugh‟s association had long been prepared for by Nazi propaganda. Early on in his rise to power, Hitler had associated himself with and supported the Wagnerian operatic tradition. According to Erik Levi, “[d]uring the Autumn of 1923, Adolf Hitler had made a to Bayreuth and gained whole-hearted approval from the Wagner family and the racial theorist, Stewart Chamberlain.” A result was that the Wagnerian tradition also became associated with Hitler: “The degree to which Hitler was already taken seriously by the Wagner circle was already manifested in the Spring 1924 edition of the Bayreuther Blätter, which opened with a quotation from one of his speeches” (6). As Hitler‟s power increased, he also “guaranteed the future financial stability of Bayreuth, and in 1938 financed the promotion of Wagner research in the town” (35). For Wagnerian myths and Nazi culture in Germany, see Meyer (661-62).

45 Diaghilev represented for Waugh one of the heights of a decadent aestheticism prior to World War Two. In Brideshead Revisited one of Anthony Blanche‟s credentials as an aesthete is that “he dined with Proust and Gide and was on closer terms with Cocteau and Diaghilev” (46). In “The Balance,” Adam Doure takes a decadent tour of Oxford and hears a student playing “„L‟Après midi d‟un Faun [sic]‟ on the gramophone to an American aunt,” presumably to shock her, in his rooms in (Complete Short Stories 22). Diaghilev, of course, had helped to produce Nijinsky‟s scandalous portrayal of the Faun for the Ballets Russes. 375 the demagogues and party hacks loomed and glittered like Wagnerian heroes …. The

Wagnerians shone … in Hans‟s eyes” (198). Ambrose describes the Nazi stormtroopers as if they were the as-yet-undefeated, divine heroes of Wagner‟s Twilight of the Gods.

Hans leaves the cosmopolitan Ambrose for the gleaming Nazis, yet Waugh uses the

Wagnerian references as a hopeful if nonetheless threatening evocation of the operatic fate of Nazi Germany, as the destructive heroes of Twilight eventually perish.

Katharine Burdekin also describes a threateningly mythic, Nazi musicality in

Swastika Night (1937), but goes several steps further than either Isherwood or Waugh.

She imagines a Europe that has suffered under the religious and martial stranglehold of a cultish Nazi regime for some “seven hundred years” (78). Relying on stereotypes of a

German devotion to classical music, she uses music to evoke a British self-doubt and the

Nazis‟ emphasis on German superiority. Her hero, Alfred, is a mechanic who knows that he “was not a musical man,” “[b]ut he was very fond of music and at times deeply affected by it.” He considers, moreover, it

hard sometimes not to have a genuine inferiority feeling when he heard a Bach chorale or perfectly rendered by the Nazi choir in the great barracks church in Salisbury. The Germans had such astonishing musical ability. Why, any four bumpkins among them could sing you into happiness or despair … with a simple little part song. And the composers themselves. Bach, Brahms, Beethoven—when one heard them, yes, it did seem for a little while as if the Germans had some natural born superiority (99).

As he matures, Alfred realizes “that all men are equal in a way, though some, both individuals and races, have special abilities.” Alfred considers the “abilities” of the

Germans to be their musicality and their military might: “Germans have musical ability, for instance. And martial ability” (106). He implicitly links the physical and the 376 intellectual self-control that are necessary for music to a capacity for a martial regimentation that is specifically German and not British.

A hope for a British nevertheless rises when a scion of the ruling class admits that under the Nazis the Germans are losing their musicality. The Knight von

Hess tells Alfred that, in the present day of the novel, the Germans can play but they can no longer “make music.” They can no longer create it: “No one has written anything for hundreds of years, except the most flagrant hash-ups and plagiarisms” (120). Von Hess observes that the contemporary Germans have “technical skill and knowledge,” but he confesses that they have grown creatively “stagnant” (121). The implication of the musical sterility of the Germans under the established Nazi regime is that the powerful

Nazi party has squandered German talent and is on the decline.46

Von Hess further provides Alfred with hope by linking the Nazis‟ cultural decline to their continued fanatical nationalism. Von Hess tells Alfred that German music has suffered from a refusal to use anti-Nazi folk instruments, specifically Christian whistles.

In Burdekin‟s world, the Christians are international outcasts and are considered to be primitive untouchables. While the British live apart from them, most “Germans despise the Christians so much that they won‟t sully their noble hands with turning over their bits of belongings” (195). The Christians nonetheless provide one of the few artistic challenges to the Nazi regime by making excellent whistles. Von Hess notes that the

Christian whistle “is a fascinating little primitive musical instrument” and that “[t]here is

46 Indeed it is a common consensus that composers writing for the Nazi regime failed to write music of lasting value. This was observed even during the 1930s in Germany amongst pro-Nazi music critics; see Meyer (652) and Levi (185-87). 377 a kind of music you really cannot play satisfactorily on anything else” (144). He provides an example of how German culture has weakened under the nationalistic restrictions of the Nazi regime by arguing that Wagnerian operas, deprived of Christian influences, have become overly refined.47 The “bird-music” from Wagner‟s Siegfried, the knight insists, “should always be played on Christian whistles,” because it does “not fit with the more sophisticated instruments” produced by the Nazis (145).

Music, then, provides one motivation for breaching the Nazi orders stifling cultural exchanges. It creates a more European Germany within Nazi Germany. The

Nazis forbid German trade with Christians, but von Hess admires their whistles so much that he instructs his German servants to collect them for him. His servants “forgive” him, he says, for ordering this indiscretion because he is part of the ruling class and because they “are mainly musical men themselves” (145). The Christian whistles represent an archaic but recognizably valuable popular art that, unlike the fluting of Shaw‟s Randall or the violent nationalism Benson associates with “Tipperary,” provokes artistic interactions. Von Hess‟s acknowledgment of the quality of this cosmopolitan aestheticism challenges the Nazis‟ nationalistic claims to superiority, particularly in

Alfred‟s eyes. At the end of the novel, Alfred realizes that the British pacifists must cooperate with the musical Christians to overthrow the Nazi tyranny.

47 The operas also suffer because women are excluded from singing in them (120). 378

“suddenly there was no more music”: Violence and the Destruction of Classical Music and Culture

Burdekin‟s novel depicts a once insurmountable Nazi regime in the infancy of its decline. The majority of the Nazis in her world consider their culture to be “perfect,” when it is in fact “dead” or resting on its laurels (121). Several interwar authors also explored this fatalistic theme to suggest that within a violent society and, more particularly, under the threat of totalitarianism, sophisticated music deteriorates or fails altogether. As a corollary, they depict how the cessation of classical music can signal the end of peace and of individual liberty. D. H. Lawrence, for instance, suggests the difficulty of making music in the midst of violent social upheavals in Aaron’s Rod

(1922). After a bombing in Florence, possibly caused by an anti-fascist anarchist, the flutist Aaron finds a section of his instrument “split right down” and ruined. His mentor

Lilly (Lawrence‟s mouthpiece) advises him to “[t]hrow” the remains of the flute “in the river,” as “[i]t‟s an end” (284). The violence of the bomb has effectively ended Aaron‟s musical career.

The destruction of his flute has also ended Aaron‟s ability to gain independence through his music within the class-tainted order of European society. Aaron has previously used his flute to take a job in a London opera orchestra, freeing himself from his job as a collier and his responsibilities to his family. He had then travelled around

Italy playing chamber music. But this, as Lilly indicates, was just the beginning of

Aaron‟s rejection of his old life. “With the breaking of the flute,” as Aaron comes to realize, “that which was slowly breaking had finally shattered at last. ... The bomb had

379 settled it and everything” (288). In so doing it had taken away his musical independence founded upon the aesthetic tastes of the old socio-political order.

This violent severing with his old musical life pushes Aaron to submit to the dictatorial Lilly. As Marla Kalnins has observed, “some of the Italian scenes in Aaron’s

Rod,” such as the bombing scene in Florence, signal Lawrence‟s “shrewd understanding of that era of political unrest which saw the rise of fascism and communism” (xxii).48

Lilly signals Lawrence‟s uneasy interest in these political movements by advocating a voluntary submission to a totalitarian leader in personal relationships, instead of to an authoritarian state regime. Directly before the destruction of Aaron‟s flute, Lilly had been informing his friends that “[p]eople are not men: they are insects and instruments, and their is ” (281). This slavery, he says, should be “voluntary.” But, after individuals assume their servitude, their submission should be enforced by a

“[p]ermanent and very efficacious power,” a “military power” (281-82). This sophistic theory of an enforced voluntary submission allows Lilly to claim simultaneously that

“every man is a sacred and holy individual, never to be violated” (282). With his flute and his ties to the past having been destroyed, Aaron feels drawn towards submitting himself voluntarily to the dogmatic Lilly: “[t]he only thing he felt was a thread of destiny attaching him to Lilly” (288). If he must “yield his wilful independence, and give himself, then he would rather give himself to the little, individual man,” namely Lilly

(290). With his musical career forcefully ended, Aaron is one step closer to abandoning

48 Lawrence wrote the majority of the novel in 1920 and 21, during the early years of Mussolini‟s rise to power (AR xxii-xxiv). Evidence of the fascist Black Shirts might be seen in the “black eager crowd of men” who are “pressing to where the bomb had burst” in chapter twenty (283). For a discussion on the use of black shirts and Italian Fascism, see Falasca-Zamponi (101, 241 n53). Vladimir Lenin‟s communist regime had of course been established in Russia through the October Revolution of 1917. 380 his self-determination and to following what Lilly tells him is “the heroic soul in a greater man,” in other words to following Lilly‟s own totalitarian lead (299).

As Lawrence was publishing Aaron’s Rod, Aldous Huxley was arguing that the violent energy of fascism was detrimental to the calm inherent in the best forms of music. In a 1922 article entitled “,” Huxley notes that on hearing of “Mussolini‟s coup d’état and the march of the Black Shirts on ,” he had hoped that a “spiritual contemplation of Italian music” would “throw light on the whole situation.” What Huxley claims to discover is how “Caruso and the operas and the

Neapolitan tunes help one to perceive what Fascismo is made of.” Through this music, he finds that the “substance, which has crystallised into Fascismo, is a certain abstract ideal of passion and energy.” While “[p]assion and energy,” Huxley explains, “were the ideals of the baroque art of the seventeenth century” and “inspired to heights sometimes of sublimity,” they could also lead to an ardent “vulgarity,” which has translated into the violence of 1920s Italian fascism. Huxley provides an example of this process by describing the effect of singing César Franck‟s “Dieu s‟avance à la

Lande.”49 “In no work by Franck,” Huxley writes, is his “flawless purity of sentiment, his clear and limpid religious feeling, more simply and beautifully displayed.” Yet, when

Caruso performs this song, Huxley argues, one “no longer” hears “God advancing across the landes [sic],” but rather “Benvenuto Cellini advancing across some warm, dark piazza in search of amorous adventures, a slung over his shoulder, and at his side a long and penetrating dagger” (“Music and Politics.” WWG 4 Nov. 1922: 14). Huxley sees an

49 Huxley must be thinking here of Franck‟s “Dieu s‟avance à travers les champs.” 381

Italian preference for a violent passion in music as an indicator of why Mussolini has become popular in Italy. He simultaneously suggests that this passion mars a calm musical clarity.

In “Music and Politics” Huxley elaborates on an earlier argument that popular

Italian songs promoting sentimentalism and fascism were killing a valuable classical art.

In “Popular Music in Italy,” Huxley writes that “[w]alking through the streets of an

Italian town to-day you hear no itinerant musicians playing with that native taste which delighted Burney; you hear no charming voices singing charming songs.” After having visited “many parts of Italy” during “the last eighteen months [1921-22],” Huxley recalls,

“I do not remember more than two or three occasions when I have heard anything sung or whistled ... that was not either the sentimental tune which is, I believe, called „Salome‟ or the marching song of the Fascisti; and of these two the Fascist air is enormously the more popular.” Huxley suggests that with the dominance of this popular fascist song in 1920s

Italy, the famous eighteenth-century music historian Charles Burney would not have had much to praise in his books on Italian music.50

To confirm his argument that songs popularizing political sentiments destroy a charming worthwhile music, Huxley relates an anecdote of an evening he had recently spent in Venice. He was “sitting at a café table” listening to a Marine band, which began its performance with the Italian national anthem. He describes how everyone stood

50 Burney wrote, for instance, The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771), in which he several times describes “itinerant” musicians. One example can be found in his chapter on Venice, where he describes how “immediately” upon his arrival in the city, he heard “an itinerant band of two fiddles, a violoncello, and a voice, who, though as unnoticed here as small-coal-men or oyster-women in England, performed so well, that in any other country of Europe they would not only have excited attention, but have acquired applause, which they justly merited” (144). 382

“except one man. A Socialist, evidently, a „subversive,‟ a Communist. He was immediately assaulted; Fascisti knocked him down, officers trampled on him, the crowd yelled,” and there was a general uproar. The result was that “[t]he crowd continued to make patriotic demonstrations for at least half an hour—thereby rendering almost completely inaudible the „Tancredi‟ of Rossini which was being patiently played by the

Marines in the centre of the piazza, as though nothing had happened.” Huxley observes that for the Venetians to “prefer making a demonstration in favour of the House of Savoy to listening to a masterpiece by the son of a hornblower of , seemed to me a melancholy and deplorable thing. But like the Fascist tune, it is symptomatic” (“Popular

Music in Italy” WWG 16 Sept. 1922: 14). The sentiments of political songs, bolstered by the fascists, degenerate into a chaotic yelling that overpowers what is left, as Huxley sees it, of valuable Italian music.

In October 1922, Mussolini became the prime minister of Italy. Huxley turned to fiction and to German music to stress the musically and the intellectually destructive elements of fascism. Using phrases culled from his earlier article, Huxley has his British narrator of “Young Archimedes” (1924) observe that “[t]he times when Dr. Burney could tour through Italy, listening to an unending succession of new operas, symphonies, quartets, cantatas, are gone” (Young Archimedes 274). What is there now is “„Salome‟ and the Fascists‟ song” and decadent Italian opera (275). Anticipating Auden‟s work in the 1930s, Huxley links this modern music to violent politics and to a mindless eroticism.51 When the narrator plays a bit of Mozart‟s Don Giovanni for an Italian

51 See chapter five (319-21). 383 farmer, the farmer dislikes it because “[i]t‟s not like Pagliacci” or modern Italian songs.

The narrator helps the man to describe his dislike by suggesting that Mozart‟s music is

“[n]ot palpitating,” using a phrase he knew “would be familiar” to the farmer, as it was turning up “in every Italian political speech and patriotic leading article” (277). The farmer agrees and the narrator reflects “that it is precisely by the difference between

Pagliacci and Don Giovanni, between the palpitating and the non-palpitating, that modern musical taste is separated from the old.” After Mozart, the narrator claims,

“Beethoven taught music to palpitate with his intellectual and spiritual passion. It has gone on palpitating ever since, but with the passion of inferior men.” According to

Huxley, a modern emphasis on un-intellectual “erotic ecstasies” has led to the over- stimulating noise of popular operas like Pagliacci and of the fascist songs. This modern music stirs the people, but causes the dying out of more “brilliant” and thought-provoking music, such as Mozart‟s (278).

Huxley saw anti-intellectual militaristic tendencies as disrupting the civilizing affects of music not only in Italy, but in Britain as well. He offers an early sign of this in

“Young Archimedes.” While listening to the non-palpitating “ of Bach‟s

Concerto in D Minor for two violins,” which the narrator describes as the “most musical piece of music ... the coolest and clearest of all draughts,” the narrator‟s son “became bored” (278-79). He cries out for “soldiers. Like in London.” The narrator realizes that his son had “remembered the rag-time and the jolly marches round and round the room” he had heard in London, most likely played by military bands, which he now prefers to the “exacting intellectual logic” of Bach (279).

384

At the end of Point Counter Point (1928), Huxley intensifies this theme, equating the disruption of peaceful music by with murder. Maurice Spandrell hopes to convince his friend Mark Rampion of the existence of God through a gramophone recording of Beethoven‟s “heilige Dankgesang,” the third movement of Op.

132 (505). Huxley describes how the music evokes an “ineffable peace,” one which

“quivered” and “was alive” and “became an active calm, an almost passionate serenity,” as “[t]he miraculous paradox of external life and eternal repose was musically realized”

(511). In the midst of this musical sublimity, men in the “green uniform” of the British fascist group the Brotherhood of British Freemen knock on Spandrell‟s door. Spandrell had previously assassinated their leader and sent the group a note telling them where he lived, as repentance for the murder. Spandrell opens the door and the Freemen shoot him. With Spandrell dying and Rampion and his wife shocked, there is no one to care for the record. The piece finishes and “suddenly there was no more music; only the of the needle on the revolving disc” (512). Under the influence of , Huxley‟s paradoxical ideal of “external life and eternal repose” comes to a grating end.

Several years later, Storm Jameson evolved Huxley‟s theme by emphasizing how a nationalistic British totalitarianism could destroy the best of British culture, which is at heart cosmopolitan. Jameson‟s In the Second Year (1936) imagines that a home-grown fascist party has taken over of Britain. The ideologue Frank Hillier and Richard Sacker, his acolyte, rise to power in a post-1918 England and set up “Training Camps,” which are similar, though less realistically vicious, to Nazi concentration camps. These camps

385 attempt to indoctrinate the liberal and the cosmopolitan intellectuals who challenge the fascist ideology of the new “National State Party” (26).52 A less gruesome, but related way in which Hillier, the new Prime Minister, decides to “seal the national uprising” is by instituting an “entirely English season” at the Covent Garden Opera House. Harriet

English, a clever if not too talented British opera star, informs Sacker that “[e]ven Handel is banned from it, and apart from Purcell it is a riot of Wallace and Balfe. The Prime

Minister‟s taste.” When Sacker replies that he sees “nothing unfortunate in it,” Harriet impugns the new Party‟s leaders by retorting, “I suppose it is good enough for you.

Anyone who prefers music can go to Austria” (75). The opera season opens with

William Wallace‟s Maritana, Anglicized to avoid its Spanish setting. The narrator—

Sacker‟s brother-in-law, an Englishman who lives in —describes the performance as “a pinch of bitter dust” (113). For him, as for Harriet, the all-English season is a symbol of England‟s overall aesthetic decline as a totalitarian state.

A music critic stresses the larger implications of this decline by linking the aesthetic restrictions of the opera season to the loss of civilization itself. After the first performance, the critic mourns “what is happening, what is going to happen, to art in this country,” as it is “squeezed between the police and the Government.” The narrator carefully responds that he too found the opera to be “trivial,” then asks if this matters.

The more brazen critic retorts, “[o]nly if you believe that civilisation is important” (122).

Here the critic speaks for Jameson and for Jameson, as for Huxley, a xenophobic

52 The narrator finds out later that the training camps are prisons where people are tortured and “a man called Stephen Spender, a writer,” was supposed to have been “done to death,” though no evidence of this was found (29). 386 totalitarianism leads to the degradation of music, which symbolizes the degradation of intellectual freedom and human progress.

The “International Language”: Insisting on Britain‟s Cosmopolitan Musical Culture

As Jameson‟s novel suggests, the presence of German (in particular) and of continental European (in general) classical music in Britain did not only function as a means to create comparisons between a musically refined Europe and an amateurish

Britain. The prevalence of European music in Britain also served to emphasize the intermingling, even the interdependence of British and continental cultures. Despite literary portrayals of xenophobic British musical amateurs, such as Shaw‟s Reginald,

Saki‟s Tony Luton, or Jameson‟s Hillier, British institutions and inhabitants had a long history of enthusiastically embracing classical music from continental Europe. As chapters two through four show, with the government‟s sanction British board schools and public schools sought to teach students music by Bach and Mozart; British churches, college chapels, and choral societies played airs and anthems by Handel and

Mendelssohn, and Rossini; and British subcultures widely employed their knowledge of

German and Italian composers to evoke their cultural expertise.53

These widespread incorporations of European music into British society had two effects: first, they assured that Britain could never completely extricate itself culturally

53 Richards has pointed out that even imperial events relied upon German music to increase their and their prestige. At Edward VII‟s coronation, for instance, Wagner‟s was performed alongside “Elgar‟s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, and the coronation marches by Tchaikovsky, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Mackenzie and Godrey” (105). The Coronation March by Saint-Saëns was composed for the occasion (106). 387 from either Germany or Italy; and second, they created a common European culture that could be used to stimulate a rapprochement between the liberal forces inside politically opposed nations. For many amateur and professional musicians, writers, and cultural guardians, the key canonical composers, such as Beethoven, Handel, and Mendelssohn had inescapably embedded Germanic culture, especially, in Britain. As Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling have observed, Handel had been “„anglicised‟ in his lifetime” and after his death he had been “thoroughly assimilated into the national [i.e. British] culture”

(5). Mendelssohn had received a similar treatment in the British musical press after his death in 1847 (15). Even after WWI, throughout which German music was, as Obsert

Sitwell recalled, “under suspicion” (“Ronald Firbank” 67), BBC officials considered

Handel to be “as good as British” for all intents and purposes and had played Beethoven on Armistice Day in 1927 (Gregory 138, Richards 162). The greatest composers, however, amongst whom these three are certainly included, were more than simply

British or German. They were cosmopolitan artists who had created an international heritage, which was enjoyed in Britain through both world wars, despite protests by those such as Saki or Benson.54

54 Hynes notes that during the early months of the First World War, Britain waged a home-front “war against German music,” which resulted in a “diminishment of English culture” (A War Imagined 74, 78). This particular “war” was lost almost as soon as it had begun. Institutions such as the Proms tried doing away with German music in 1914, but, as Shaw noted, this “resulted in empty concert rooms,” until there was “an unparalleled outburst of Beethoven and Wagner,” which “crowded them again” (SM III 719). Even such a virulent nationalist as Pemberton-Billing acknowledged that “[t]he question of German music is a delicate one,” despite the war with Germany. Billing‟s comment came in response to a 1916 “campaign” (as Billing militaristically described it) “adopted by the London Symphony Orchestra,” which seemed to be “going in for, virtually, all-German programmes.” Billing goes on, and surprisingly so considering his intensely anti-German rhetoric in other contexts, to argue not for the abandonment of German music altogether, but for moderation: “Much as I dislike hedging in my opinions, I think in this question a middle course is the more sensible. That is to say, there is no reason why we should cut off our noses, etc., by refusing to listen to the masterpieces of German composers who died years, and even 388

While factions of the public had long accepted canonical German composers as integral to British traditions, after 1918 many authors began to rely on the presence of

German music in Britain as a means to promote a cosmopolitan heritage happily shared between the two nations despite their political differences.55 This is true even for those interwar authors who used music to set up national comparisons. As if to reinforce these competing themes, these authors would at times slip out of a fragmented avant-garde or a socially committed narrative to exalt an international musical culture using an old- fashioned Victorian lyricism reminiscent of Pater or of Wilde. This established some sense of a literary and a cultural continuity between pre-war and post-war writing, not only for Shaw, but for more overtly modernist writers as well, such as Ford and Woolf.56

With the First World War safely won by the Allies, Shaw was one of the first prominent writers to start reminding British citizens of their close cultural ties to

centuries, before their nation even contemplated running amok” (“German Music.” Imperialist 7 Oct. 1916: 5).

55 Recent studies of cosmopolitanism, aesthetics, and literature have focused on how art can help to obtain a vague or an aloof liberal stance. In her Cosmopolitan Style, Rebecca Walkowitz argues, for instance, that modernist authors strategically use “naturalness, triviality, evasion, mix-ups, treason, and vertigo to generate specific projects of democratic , on the one hand, and of antifascism or anti- imperialism, on the other” (4). What is interesting about discussions of classical music in literature after 1918 is how un-evasively so many of them promoted a cultural interdependence between anti-nationalist and anti-fascist liberal elements in Britain and Germany for specifically anti-war purposes. To be sure, writers such as Oscar Wilde and others in his circle had evoked the cosmopolitanism of Hellenism through classical music in the late-nineteenth century (see chapter five 244-47), but this theme manifested itself with a greater frequency, a greater breadth, and a greater urgency in the post-1918 era.

56 Critics of First World War literature frequently point to the “breaks” and the “discontinuities” created by the war. Hynes, for instance, convincingly argues that “one of the discontinuities that the war would create would be the break with the literary past that would become a principle of post-war Modernism” (AWI 33). Fussell has argued for “the modernist adversary relation with the past, a past conceived as destructively pious, genteel, and fatally mistaken” (“The Great War and Cultural Modernism” 252). While modernist authors such as Joyce and Woolf certainly used classical music as an inspiration for new, disruptive literary forms (Joyce‟s “Sirens” in Ulysses, for instance, or Woolf‟s “String Quartet”) their thematic uses of a musical sublime represented a continuity with a literary past stretching back to at least Pater and Wilde in England and to Wagner and Schopenhauer in Germany. 389

Germany.57 In his 1919 “Preface” to Heartbreak House he argued that Britain was not the only nation responsible for the failures in critical thinking that led to the war. He decried a broader “Heartbreak House” composed of a “cultured, leisured Europe” (449).

This Europe used art not “to realize Utopia for the common people,” but to create

“favorite fictions” in which the wealthy “lived without scruple on incomes which they did nothing to earn” (450). This Europe, inclusive of Britain, he stressed, was likewise responsible for the prolongation of the war. It was the cultured individuals of all

European nations that should have averted the “war delirium” by realizing that “[t]o the truly civilized man, to the good European, the slaughter of the German youth was as disastrous as the slaughter of the English” (459, 465), Thus in Britain, he insisted, only

“[f]ools exulted in „German losses.‟ They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting in the death of Beethoven because Bill Sikes,” that embodiment of the violent elements of the British character, “dealt him his death blow!” (465). The loss of Beethoven would not have been a German loss; it would have been a European one. This alone should have shortened, if not stopped, the war.

In the press, Shaw argued that British artists must engage in the international musical community in order to bring British art onto a collaborative world stage. In an article entitled “The Future of British Music” (1919) Shaw advocated “for providing in

England the condition in which it will be possible for Englishmen, after a lapse of two centuries, once more to express themselves in genuinely British music with a weight and

57 Shaw had discussed political and economic similarities between Britain and Germany in his essay “Common Sense About the War” (1914), wherein he compared German Junkers and Militarists to British Junkers and Militarists. It was in his 1919 “Preface” to Heartbreak House, however, that he emphasized the more aesthetic similarities between the two nations. 390 depth possible only in the higher forms of music.”58 Shaw believed that there could be a specifically “British music,” but he warned his readers not to fall prey to the burgeoning interest in the “„national music‟ that is produced by forcing music into local dance forms” or by “omitting those intervals of our scale which could not be played on primitive forms of the bagpipe or the harp.”59 Rather, Shaw insists, British music must come from the

“higher forms” of an internationally recognized and evolving : “The language and instrumentation of music are now international; and what is meant by

British music is music in which British musicians express their British character in that international language” (SM III 717). If Britain truly wants to become a “cultured nation” or even simply to take its place in the world community, he claims that it must engage in the “international language” of music (719).

Shaw‟s post-1918 cosmopolitan perspective appealed to many writers of the interwar period, who had, of course, grown up with a musical culture that was inextricable from Germany‟s. Looking back to World War I, authors such as Ford and

Siegfried Sassoon relied on German choral music, sonatas, and symphonies as an ideal means to transcend an irrational “war delirium” and to evoke an international goodwill.60

58 This article was printed twice: first in the British Music Society Bulletin in June 1919, where it was called “Starved Arts Mean Low Pleasure,” and then again in The Outlook in July of the same year (SM III 714).

59 Towards the end of the nineteenth century in England some members of the musical community developed an interest in collecting “folk” songs from the British countryside. As Stradling and Hughes point out, “the English Folk-Music Revival derived to a significant degree from German musical scholarship of the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, Carl Engel, a German exile,” who lived for a while in London, “wrote the key text An Introduction to the Study of National Music, first published in English and in London (1866). Engel was a Darwin of the folksong—although few of its later advocates cared to acknowledge him as such” (77).

60 Sassoon in particular was following a general trend in thinking about the First World War. As Adrian Gregory has shown, in the 1920s “[t]he war,” and particularly thinking about the war, “required a new 391

Ford, for instance, though he uses Elgar and Wagner to characterize British and German military tendencies, respectively, also describes a rural English peace through the music of Handel. Walking close to the front line, Tietjens thinks “good-humouredly about his official religion,” considering “the Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English

Landowner, benevolently awful,” with Christ as “an almost too benevolent Land-

Steward, son of the Owner,” and the Holy Ghost as “the spirit of the estate” (365-66).

These are amusing and peaceful thoughts for Tietjens reminiscent of an idealized English countryside. German music noticeably permeates this quasi-lyrical passage, as, in his mind, he compares the “atmosphere of the estate” to “the interior of Winchester

Cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been finished” (366). In the midst of this idealized English landscape, it is with his own good-humour that Ford relies on the

German-English Handel—rather than, say, on Purcell, as he does later in the novel—to evoke the peaceful atmosphere of a “perpetual Sunday” (366).

Sassoon similarly uses references to German music to symbolize a longing for a cosmopolitan peacetime London in his semi-autobiographical trilogy The Memoirs of

George Sherston (1928-36). In the first book, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Sherston sits in his “company mess at Montagne” early in 1915 listening to a gramophone that his acquaintance Ormand had received from England. Ormand plays a “mawkish popular song,” while Sherston wants “to hear a Handel ,” particularly the one

“Kreisler had played the first time I heard him” (344). had by this point

purpose, one that could withstand attacks on the horror and incompetence that it had entailed.” One strain of popular thought sought to turn “the meaning of the First World War” into “an object lesson in peace” (122). 392 fought for and been wounded in the Austrian army and had moved to the , where he gave interviews reaffirming his identity as “an Austrian,” while also arguing that “the hatred of one foe for another was only an impersonal thing.”61 Kreisler‟s military service, if not his Bensonian political views, was known in British music circles during the war.62 Sherston‟s fond memories of Kreisler playing Handel in London show how the music of an Anglo-German composer and an Austrian performer could transcend nationalistic animosities to evoke nostalgia for a peacetime London in the midst of war.

Sassoon also uses canonical German music to highlight the uneasy differences between the detached wartime tranquillity of England and his memories of the trenches in

France. In Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Sherston takes a friend to hear “Beethoven‟s

Fifth Symphony” while on leave in Liverpool in 1916 (146). His friend dislikes the music, but Sherston admires it and the concert is no doubt a welcome break from his tumultuous life at the front. Again in 1917, while resting at Nutwood Manor, a country- home for convalescents, Sherston listens to an officer play “ and Handel on the piano.” He observes that “[n]othing could have been more tranquil and harmonious than my first evening at Nutwood Manor” (250). Later that night, however, he finds that his relief was only temporary, for “the War insisted on being remembered, and by 3 a. m. it had become so peremptory that I could almost believe that some of my friends out in

61 (“Kreisler, Wounded, Tells of War as He Saw It.” New York Times 29 Nov. 1914: 4).

62 As early as 1914, the Musical Times informed its readers that “[t]he report that Kreisler has been wounded while serving with the Austrian Army seems well substantiated. It is understood that his violin playing will not be affected” (MT 1 Nov. 1914: 670). In 1921 The Musical Times observed that another trade paper, The Pianomaker, would not publish an advertisement by The for a Kreisler record, as it would “„not give publicity to any late alien enemy, however high may be his standing in the artistic world‟” (“Miscellaneous.” MT 1 Sept. 1921: 661). There were clearly still some hard- feelings against German and Austrian musicians after 1918. 393

France must be waiting to go over the top” (250-51). Sassoon juxtaposes these thoughts in such quick succession, all in one paragraph, that the calming nature of the music in

England works in direct opposition to the thoughts of war that keep Sherston from sleeping.

Despite its failure to ease the pains of war entirely, Sassoon continues to push his readers to create connections between Britain and Germany through music. In Sherston’s

Progress, the final volume of the trilogy, Sherston sits in a hotel lobby in England and overhears a “well-dressed” and comfortable woman condemning pacifists and Germans.

“Pacifists,” she exclaims, “were worse than the Germans.” As for pacifist leftist politicians, such as Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowdon, the woman hopes that “if they do start their beloved revolution” against the coalition government running the war,

“they‟ll both be strung up to the nearest lamppost by the soldiers they are now trying to betray.” Following this speech, “[t]he hotel musicians” begin to play “Mendelssohn‟s

(German) „,‟” to which the woman supplies “a self-possessed and insouciant tra-la-la” (27). The irony here is both tragic and comic, for if the woman could appreciate that her most current carefree pleasure came from Germany, she might realize the hypocrisy inherent in her conservative jingoism.

Sassoon‟s larger musical point, though, transcends nationality altogether. Having returned to France one final time, he laments that normally “[s]ensitive and gifted people of all nations are enduring” a “mental starvation in order to safeguard—whatever it is they are told that they are safeguarding. … And O,” he exclaims, “how I long for a good

Symphony Concert! The mere thought of it is to get a glimpse of Heaven” (194,

394

Sassoon‟s ellipses). While Sherston did not consider a musical cosmopolitanism to be an opiate that could erase the war or provide a false sense of security, he did consider it to be a rather Paterian humanist link between nations, which, if its existence were realized, could bring a sliver of a heavenly peace to Earth.63

In literature describing the period after the war, some writers returned to an abstract Platonic ideal of a harmonious musical society to imagine the mending of international fissures.64 In Virginia Woolf‟s “String Quartet” (1921), a nameless character announces that “Regent Street is up” and that “the Treaty [is] signed,” evoking a world of commerce and politics returning to some state of normalcy after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles (71). “Still,” another character insists, “the war made a break—”

(72). One way to transcend this break, Woolf proposes, is through an “early Mozart” string quartet (75). As the quartet begins, she describes how “the waters of the Rhone flow swift and deep” throughout a London room filled with people reconnecting with friends and acquaintances who are “furtively seeking something” beyond the of the economic and domestic troubles of post-war life (74, 73). This something can be

63 Sassoon explicitly links Pater, humanist thought, and music in an earlier passage in Sherston’s Progress when Sherston visits Father Rosary. Rosary has “an untranslatably Paterish quality” about him on account of the “„aroma of humanism‟” he carries. Sassoon thinks of Rosary that “[h]e was, so to speak, a connoisseur in the wisdom of the ages, and I can imagine his rich voice rolling out that fine passage of Pater‟s which cannot be quoted too often: „For the essence of humanism is that belief of which he [Pico della Mirandola] seems never to have doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality—no language they have spoken, no oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended time and ‟” (SP 50-51; Pater, Renaissance 38). Sassoon links this cosmopolitanism-through-space-and-time directly to music as Rosary sits down to play the piano and leads Sherston and his psychiatrist, Dr. Rivers, “further from uncomfortable controversies by playing some classical and nobly serious piece, for he loved the old Italian masters” (53). The music here is Italian but the Paterian musical cosmopolitanism is universal.

64 For a discussion of these Platonic conceptions in a Paterian Oxford and beyond, see chapter two (38-42). 395 found in music, as the English Woolf depicts the Austrian Mozart capturing the power of the French and Swiss Rhone in an emotional way that causes “sorrow” and “joy” to be

“inextricably commingled” (75, 76).

While she admits that “the worst of music” may be the “silly dreams” it inspires,

Woolf maintains that these dreams can be useful for creating a balanced, healing perspective (76). Of particular use in this post-war world is the musical dream of an idealized “city” of “neither stone nor marble,” which “hangs enduring; stands unshakable.” This stabilized Mozartian city remains neutral. It is free from the cracks of nationality, as it has no “flag” or even a “face” to “greet or welcome” one. It is

“auspicious to none,” yet it is “resplendent” and “severe,” a sublime ideal of a continuous

Platonic cosmopolitanism (79).

While the quartet‟s audience separates into the night after the concert, the unifying symbolism of music remained with Woolf. In her posthumously published

Between the Acts (1941), written in the early years of World War Two, she declares that

“[m]usic makes us see the hidden, join the broken” (120). She brings this point home in a cosmopolitan context when at the end of the novel‟s rural pageant Ms. La Trobe‟s assistant throws on a record to join the “scraps, orts and fragments” of the isolated and disintegrated individuals in their audience. The latter are meant to “listen to the gramophone affirming” a desire for connection to oneself and to others. At first there is a

“hitch,” as “[t]he records had been mixed,” but the assistant quickly finds the right one.

Still, whether the music is a classical composition by “Bach, Handel, Beethoven, [or]

Mozart” or a “traditional tune” along the lines of “Sweet Lavender, Home Sweet Home”

396 or even “Rule Britannia” is unclear (188). What is clear is that the music, for a moment, makes “the distracted united.” In the impressionistic minds of the audience, the music evokes how “warring battle-plumed straining asunder” are “recalled from the edge of appalling crevasses,” their differences “solved” so that they are “united” (189).

In 1941, Woolf was eager to evoke the similarities between refined German music and

British popular tunes so as to indicate how music in general can stimulate a peaceful unification of fragmented entities.65

We have already seen how in the late 1930s and early 1940s several British authors used music to establish a difference between a Nazi German and a European

German culture. Some of these same authors who discussed a Nazi elitism through musical metaphors, also focused on classical music to emphasize an inclusive and peaceful European culture, as did Woolf. In Swastika Night, for example, the Nazis adore Wagner, who is as “German as the Sacred Aeroplane,” a symbol of the military might of Burdekin‟s fictionalized Nazi regime. Bach, however, transcends his Germanic roots to provide a transcendent humanist rallying point. “He must be,” Alfred thinks, “he probably is, a kind of peak civilisation in general” (99). Alfred employs the Baroque

Germanic composer as a sign of a universal civilization to frame his rebellion: “A rebellion against Germany ... must be spiritual, out of the soul. The same place where

Bach got his music from” (100). Bach provides an inspiration for universal freedom and so works against the Nazis who claim him for their own.

65 There is a particularly strong connection between German music and “Rule Britannia,” which composers such as Beethoven, Handel, and Wagner have quoted in their own works as a nod to the British Empire (Richards 99). 397

In her 1942 novel, Then We Shall Hear Singing: A Fantasy in C Major, Storm

Jameson suggests that the Nazis had in fact betrayed the long-established internationalism associated with Germany‟s aesthetic contributions to European traditions. Here Jameson imagines Germany‟s occupation of and a subsequent plan to operate on the conquered people, “to take away their minds” and

“their precious memories” so that they can only perform menial tasks (18).66 The diabolical Dr. Hesse, who performs the operations, explains to his subjects the supposed benefits of the “beautiful and severe simplicity of the new order.” According to the plans of the doctor and of his Leader, “[n]o one is to be unemployed, everyone is to do the work he is fitted for.” It just so happens, he asserts, that his “own people … have a scientific, scholastic, and artistic genius. So naturally we provide the doctors, professors, musicians.” The conquered people, then, “have the necessary job of working and producing children. Once you realise that,” Hesse explains, “every difficulty which still exists between us will vanish. We shall all live and work in harmony. A predestined harmony. The great symphony of historical necessity” (74). This “harmony,” though, destroys any aesthetic and intellectual traditions, both European and national, outside of the xenophobic minds of the German conquerors.

The fascist doctor‟s plan goes against what Jameson presents as the humanist values of a European heritage bolstered by German art. “By an extreme perversion,” she notes, “Europe, with its memories of Goethe and Mozart, its humble and childish ghosts,

66 Jameson never explicitly names the conquered nation, but she dedicates the book to “Lìba Ambrosová and her country.” Ambrosová was from Czechoslovakia (“Looking On.” Friends’ Intelligencer 101 (1944): 6). 398 has become the continent of a hideous inhumanity” (103). The German militants claim these memories for their own, but they betray their humanist significance. The history of

Europe changes, however, when an old woman in an occupied village sings “a verse of one of those songs every defeated people swallows with its hard bread.” Those who hear her remember “their attachment to [the] hard soil” of their land (227). Her song represents a call-to-arms or a new rite of spring and the rebirth of the conquered nation and of Europe, as in the final chapters of the novel the downtrodden people rise up against the oppressors of Europe to restore peace and equality.67 Frequently, authors suggested that supporting this inclusive musical tradition would strengthen British society, in particular. In Jameson‟s In the Second Year, an exclusively English opera season signals Britain‟s cultural decline. On a more directly positive, quotidian level,

Rebecca West alludes to the bracing presence of foreign Jewish musicians on London‟s concert life. In her pseudo-autobiographical This Real Night (published in 1984, but drawn from West‟s memories of pre-World War One London), Rose Aubrey‟s childhood piano teacher is “Mr Kisch, who had belonged to that elect tribe, the Jews of Budapest,” but had come to England to give lessons (124). When Rose‟s next teacher, Mr. Harper, feels that he has overwhelmed her, he tells her, “I‟ve been trying you too hard. You are a girl, after all, and you‟re not Jewish, being Jewish is a great help, these Jewish scholarship kids can go on for ever” (131). The British “Jewish scholarship kids”—who

67 Jameson‟s attempt to tie this folk song into her literary “Fantasy in C Major” is reminiscent of more substantial efforts by composers, such as Béla Bartók or Igor Stravinsky, to rejuvenate classical Western music with folksong-like rhythms or thematic programs; it is also reminiscent of the musicalized fiction of Huxley and Joyce. 399 might fairly be assumed to have an Eastern European heritage—will go on to bolster

British orchestras.

An acceptance of foreign musicians could also bolster the British military. In

Men at Arms (published in 1952, but set during World War Two), Waugh describes how

General Ritchie-Hook orders members of the fictional Royal Corps of Halberdiers “to be the stiffening” agent of a unit from the Pioneer Corps, “a force otherwise composed of anti-fascist ‟cellists and dealers in abstract painting from the Danubian Basin” (SH 177).

Although this “force” seems a motley, unmilitary crew, Waugh describes how when

Ritchie-Hook wants his men to finish a difficult training camp in Scotland, “[t]he musicians responded with temperamental fire” and “the art dealers less zealously, but seriously and well” (178). Waugh may be thinking here of German , many of them musicians, artists, and scholars, who joined the Pioneer Corps towards the beginning of the war.68 If so, these characters, albeit minor ones, are a far cry from du

Maurier‟s Svengali. West‟s Mr. Kisch, certainly, and Waugh‟s anti-fascist cellists, if

68 One potential source for Waugh‟s “anti-fascist ‟cellists” were the musicians of the “A” (for “Alien”) companies in the Pioneer Corps, the German and the Austrian refugees in Britain who formed “the Pioneer Corps‟ own orchestra,” which later helped to form “the Southern Command Continental Orchestra” (Leighton-Langer 31; see also Fry, H., 9, 17-18). Some musicians preferred fighting to playing in the Southern Command Orchestra, such as Fritz Lustig. In 1940, Lustig was part of an orchestra in the Entertainment Section of No. 3 Training Centre in Ilfracombe for the Pioneer Corps, which in 1939 and 1940 was one of the few ways in which enemy aliens could support the war effort (Fry 1). He joined the orchestra as a cellist and remembers playing “a mixture of classical and popular pieces,” as well as putting on “variety shows and pantomimes. Once he even played with the Southern Command orchestra at a National Gallery Concert in London. Yet, he notes, “I had never been very happy in the Orchestra, as I did not consider that playing the cello was the best way of helping to win the war. So I was very glad when at my request I was transferred to the Intelligence Corps in May 1943, and my new Commanding Officer assured me in a welcoming interview that what I was going to do now would be far more valuable for the successful prosecution of the war than firing a rifle or driving a tank” (Lustig, Fritz. “Memories of the Pioneer Corps Orchestra.” http://london.iwm.org.uk/upload/pdf/Fritz_Lustig_speech_20080911150239.pdf, accessed 11/09/2010). 400 they are meant to be German refugees, suggest how continental musicians became a valuable element of both British cultural life and the military.

The “cellist is crucified over his instrument”: Doubting the Musical Stopgap

Not everyone, however, was convinced of the overall effectiveness of music as a political panacea or as a means of imparting strength. W. H. Auden, for instance, frequently uses music as a means to reconcile two antagonists, but as a means which inevitably falls short of this goal. In his poetry, as we saw in chapter five, Auden uses music to evoke a connection between two people, though he frequently aligns this connection with a destructive, fascist, homoerotic hero-worship. In his plays, written from 1928-38, often in collaboration with Isherwood, Auden similarly uses pianos, singing, and gramophones to stimulate an optimism that is rarely justified. Repeatedly in his drama, music starts to soothe the world‟s economic and political problems, only to fail ultimately to do so. As Auden‟s playwriting career progressed, the harmony of music increasingly promised explicit hopes of peace, which he refused to allow it to deliver.

In Paid on Both Sides (1928) Auden presents a parabolic world dominated by the mutual hate of the Nowers and the Shaws, a hate he briefly assuages through a musical metaphor. The action opens with William Nower having shot a member of the Shaw family as revenge for having “sniped” a Nower “last Easter” (Plays 7). The world of the

Shaws and the Nowers thereby evokes a seemingly interminable cycle of violence. To disrupt this, an Announcer steps forward to herald the “engagement ... of John Nower, eldest son of the late Mr and Mrs George Nower,” to “Anne Shaw, only daughter of the 401 late Mr and Mrs Joseph Shaw.” To symbolize this peace-making union, a Chorus briefly describes the couple‟s courtship in musical terms: “We played duets, she turned the page,/ More quavers on the other side” (8). The “duets” offer an apt metaphor for the relationship, as the pun on “quavers”—a word which alludes both to the British term for an eighth note and to the verb “to quaver” or “to vibrate”—suggests the tremulous nature of the union between the two families. Indeed, the chorus goes on to suggest, with echoes of Eliot‟s The Waste Land and Stravinsky‟s , that the rebirth coming from the marriage will lead only to “an insolent new spring” (9).69 As the Chorus predicts, the hoped-for rebirth of peace between the two families falls victim to the history of their feud. The Shaw matriarch coerces her son Seth into killing William

Nower at the wedding causing the Nower family to retaliate. The “duet,” then, the brief uniting of the two families, was merely indicative of a temporary harmony unable to withstand an inherited history of violence.

Auden returned to the ambivalent effects of music on social strife in The Chase

(1934), this time to depict how a canonical aesthetic can buttress a conservative . The Chase begins with a Chorus explaining how the manager of a mine near the English village of Pressan Ambo has bought machinery to replace miners, as “[o]ne man can tend five machines” allowing the mine to pay for “less labour.” As a result, the manager “has turned off hands” and “the men are angry” (112). The owner of the mine, who is also the local squire, Sir Francis, has meanwhile gone missing. Under the terms of Francis‟s father‟s will, “[e]ach year his villages in turn/ Should choose by lottery a

69 For a superlative account of the revolt and violence inherent in spring imagery in art, culture, and politics in the years leading up to the First World War, see Modris Eksteins‟s Rites of Spring (39, 40, 50-54). 402 man/ To find Sir Francis if he can” and the man who succeeds will win “[h]alf his land”

(114). The poor orphan Alan Norman has his name picked out of a hat and he leaves the tumult of Pressan behind to find the missing heir. Essentially the system forces him to become complicit in the capitalistic transference of the rents of the villages and the profits of the mine from father to son. Alan soon learns that Francis is at a local hospital, as he has been shot by a “police bullet” in the midst of revolting miners in a street fight at

Pressan‟s “Power House” (155).70 Alan comes upon Sir Francis as a Surgeon and a group of Medical Students are trying to keep the young squire alive. The Surgeon, “Sir

William Spurgeon,” and the Students operate while singing in a “heavy 4-part harmony,” performed with the “Flavour of Bach in his dramatic mood” (174). The knighted

Surgeon leads the singing in his attempt to save the squire and the status quo of power in the village. The scene suggests how the upper-class establishment appropriates a time- honored musical style to bolster a patriarchal capitalism.

The power of music in the play, however, is not solely reactionary. Auden relies upon a reformulated and politicized Wagnerian liebestod to evoke a transfer of power from Sir Francis to Alan. As Francis lies dying he shares a “duet” with Alan “in the style of Wagnerian opera.” During this, Francis gives Alan his blessing and tells him to “be true/ To Pressan” (177).71 Alan responds, “I hear and obey” (178). Regardless of what

70 Francis was shot presumably while siding with the revolting miners. If he was fighting for the miners, then he fits the profile of other Auden characters in his willingness to sympathize with working-class causes and in his simultaneous disinclination to relinquish his income, which depends upon working-class oppression: see for instance, the slightly ironic “I have a Handsome Profile” or “Out on the lawn I lie.”

71 The Wagnerian singing was important to Auden and he provided directions for the inclusion of music in case the actors could not sing: “If the actors cannot sing, the singing might either be done by the singers 403

Francis intends, Alan takes this song as a charge to be loyal to the Pressan workers‟ rebellion and goes off to fight. Auden draws here on the revolutionary associations with

Wagner that had circulated in the late-nineteenth century.72 Unfortunately, Francis‟s

Wagnerian send-off has overly agitated Alan and he foolishly runs right into the military forces assembling to put down the workers. These forces gun him down as he cries out,

“Too late./ Once more I‟m cheated by my Fate/ I cannot fight with the miners to-night”

(186). The operatic music has stimulated a revolutionary fervor, though it is not of much use.73

When Auden revised The Chase with Isherwood into The Dog Beneath the Skin

(1935), the playwrights emphasized the tendency for society‟s elite to ease an abuse of power through music on an international level. Two notable additions to the play are scenes 3 and 4 of Act 1, which have Norman crossing the British Channel to look for Sir

Francis in Ostnia, a repressive kingdom based loosely upon Britain. In scene 3, Alan arrives at the Ostnian palace, where he learns that it is “Execution Day.” The significance of this holiday quickly becomes apparent as scene 4 reveals the King executing socialist revolutionaries. Auden and Isherwood write this scene as a farce, having the King “sympathise with the aims” of the revolutionaries and going so far as to

concealed in the chorus, or by using a panatrope [a variety of ] concealed under the operating table” (176).

72 In his (1898), for instance, Shaw insisted on using “the ideas of the revolutionary Wagner of 1848” to interpret The Ring Cycle as a socialist allegory, see in particular the section “Wagner as Revolutionist” (SM III 441-47).

73 The effect of music here and in all these plays points to Auden‟s later remark that “poetry makes nothing happen” (“In Memory of W. B. ,” EA 2.5). 404 ask, “[a]re we not all socialists nowadays?”74 All the same, he insists that “order has to be maintained” and he follows the off stage, where “[s]hots are heard” (214-

15). To accompany the executions, a Master of Ceremonies has arranged for a choir to sing a Requiem Mass. The music and chanting work to provide a comforting and an authoritative atmosphere.

The playwrights stress here the ironically soothing effects of the music. The King has requested, for instance, that the MC cut the “” (Day of Wrath) section of the

Requiem because he had “heard several complaints last time, that it was too gruesome.

As you know,” the King insists, “I am particularly anxious not to hurt anybody‟s feelings” (213). While the effect of this cut is ironic, the King does seem honestly at pains to ease the suffering of the economic dissidents and their families. The Queen too seems naively sincere when she embellishes on the intoned words of the Requiem in her valedictory speech to the newly-made widows. She advises them to “abide patiently, strong in the hope that you will meet your loved ones again in another and better world ... where we shall all walk hand in hand” (215).75 At this, one woman, who had been quiet throughout the ceremony, cries out “Murderers!!” causing all the widows to be “politely removed” (215). Combined with the absurd speeches of the king and queen, this woman‟s belated response suggests how the ruling classes can use music to palliate their

74 Auden borrows here a declaration popularly attributed to Sir William Harcourt, a Liberal M. P.; see, for instance, “The Part System of the Future.” Macmillan’s Magazine (Masson 113).

75 The queen improvises and adds on to the phrases intoned by the Choir on stage: “Requiem aeternam dona et lux perpetua luceat eis” and “Proficiscere Anima Ostniana, de hoc mundo” [Grant eternal rest and allow a perpetual light to shine on them] and [Depart Ostnian Soul from this world] (214, 215). The queen obviously takes her cheery consolatory tone from these words. 405 own guilt over state-perpetrated crimes, but that it is ultimately ineffective for their victims.

Fearing, perhaps, that an English audience might consider the pomp and circumstance or simply the brutality of the Ostnian court to be too dissimilar to its

English counterpart, Auden and Isherwood establish a direct musical connection between the two nations. Moving swiftly from the execution, the Ostnian King greets Alan and immediately tells him how “[d]elighted” he is “to see anyone from England.” The King tells him of his “very happy memories” of England and particularly of “[t]he singing in

King‟s Chapel,” which was “marvellous.” He further suggests England‟s influence on

Ostnia by remarking, “[t]alking of which, I hope you liked our singing today? I‟m always most grateful for any criticisms” (216). The King clearly sees the English aristocracy as his model and he wants his court to be familiar to his English guest. Alan offers no critique and indeed he need not for this new scene is already a successful critical reflection of the later hospital scene, which Auden and Isherwood keep ideologically similar. The Ostnian King uses music to assuage his assertion of his power quite like the well-meaning Sir Spurgeon and his Medical Students use their Bach- flavoured harmonies to try to keep an envoy of aristocratic power alive in England. The tendency to use music as a prop for the social and political establishment, the playwrights imply, is an international one.

Music then, according to Auden and Isherwood, is an international language, but not in the utopian way that Shaw had hoped it would be. For many of the upper-classes, they argue, Europe is still the Heartbreak House that it always was. As the Chorus of The

406

Dog argues in lines added before the hospital scene, music often serves simply to drown out suffering: across Europe “[t]he galleries are full of music, the pianist is storming the keys, the great cellist is crucified over his instrument,” with the result “[t]hat none may hear the ejaculations of the / Nor the sigh of the most numerous and the most poor” (241). The well-meaning art of music covers up the underlying problems in the economic foundations of Europe.

As tensions increased between Britain and Germany at the end of the 1930s,

Auden and Isherwood shifted their emphasis from class relations to international politics.

In On the Frontier (1937-38) they allude to the potential of a cosmopolitan musical heritage to soothe antagonistic nationalist tempers. The plot of Frontier centers on the mutual animosities of the parabolic nations of Ostnia and Westland, the latter a fascist state so blatantly based on Nazi Germany that the British censor made the playwrights mute some of the similarities.76 One prominent plotline details the efforts of the aptly named Valerian to prevent the Westland Leader from attacking Ostnia.77 Luckily,

Valerian argues, the Westland Leader is like a “gramophone.” He takes in the

“suffering” of the Westlanders and repeats it back to them, cathartically. But, Valerian boasts, a “gramophone can be made to play better and more harmonious records” (371).

He describes how when the Leader “seems tired and dispirited” and thus more likely to

“hit first,” to pre-emptively start a war with Ostnia, he plays the Leader music (371,

76 In his textual notes on the play, Mendelson reports that in the performed version “[t]he Leader became Guidanto (Esperanto for „leader‟), a Storm Trooper became a Corporal,” etc, to satisfy the demands of the Lord Chamberlain‟s office (CP 661).

77 The valerian was used as a drug and was known “as a powerful carminative, stimulant, and antispasmodic” and it was offered to people with “hysteria, palpitation of the heart, &c.” to ease their discomfort (Greenish 275). 407

393).78 With Valerian “educating” him, the Leader learns to take in the harmonies of

“Narcissus and the Melody in F,” Mendelssohn‟s “The War March of the Priests,”

Tchaikovsky‟s “The Pathetic Symphony,” and Rameau‟s “Tambourin” (371).

Essentially, Valerian calms the Leader, providing him with a more “harmonious” outlook, with a mixture of music by Jewish, Russian, and French composers and music in some circles associated with homoeroticism.79

Valerian‟s efforts offer a temporary sedative for the Leader‟s rage. Towards the end of the play, an anonymous agent blows up a bridge between Ostnia and Westland, injuring citizens from both nations. Both nations deny responsibility for the attack and both mobilize for war. After making furious, Hitler-esque speeches all day, the Leader arrives at Valerian‟s house. Recounting how he has “suffered” for Westland, he works himself into a frenzy. Valerian puts on Rameau‟s Tambourin and, listening to the French music, the Leader‟s “sobbing quietens and stops” and his “expression” grows “calm and radiant.” “Ah,” he says, “that music! How clearly I see the way, now!” He announces that the next morning “the whole world” will hear “that I have proposed to Ostnia a pact of non-aggression, guaranteeing the sanctity of the frontier for a thousand years!” a

78 Stahl remarks at one point: “Cold is an exceedingly dangerous state of mind. A coward often hits first” (393). “Cold funk” here means a state of depression, but also a state of cowardliness.

79 “Narcissus” probably refers to a song by or perhaps by Ethelbert Nevin; or, a short piece for violin and piano by Karol Szymanowski—none of which would have fit into the Nazi aesthetic. “Melody in F” almost certainly refers to ‟s piece by this title. There is also more than a hint of irony to the Leader enjoying ‟s “The War March of the Priests,” as the priests are marching to overthrow the tyrant in the opera Athalie. After 1935 Mendelssohn‟s work seems to have vanished from public performances in Nazi Germany due to the composer‟s Jewish heritage (Levi 70-72, 248 n67). Auden and Isherwood furthermore seem to be mocking the leader in that all of these selections, save the Tchaikovsky, are rather short. For the association of Tchaikovsky‟s “Pathetic Symphony” with homoeroticism, see chapter five (289-90, 289 n54). 408 musically-inspired inversion of the Nazi claim that the Third Reich would last for a thousand years (396).

Unfortunately, in the end fear and aggression override a musical good will. In the midst of his plans for a “thousand years” of peace, the Leader receives a message that the

Ostnian army has made a pre-emptive strike. Shaking off the musical atmosphere, the

Leader resumes his former rage and the curtain descends with him “still shouting” his insistence that “Ostnia shall be blotted from the map of Europe” (397). Music, Auden and Isherwood suggest, provides no ultimate relief, merely a fleeting sense of sympathy and connection in the face of hatred and war.80

“Many Thanks …”: A popular cosmopolitanism

Auden and Isherwood, however, did not have the final word. The interwar promotion of an international musical culture by writers such as Burdekin, Ford, Sassoon, and Shaw was succeeded during the Second World War by the public‟s strong attachment to the European classical music tradition. Much of the public had, of course, grown up with works by Handel, Bach, and Beethoven. The public‟s highly publicized and widespread enjoyment of a Europeanized German classical music during the war exhibits what might be called a popular cosmopolitanism. While this enjoyment was present

80 Benjamin Britten composed some of the music for On the Frontier (Plays 654). In contradiction of the play‟s unspoken motto that “music makes nothing happen,” Britten later composed a requiem for the Second World War. His War Requiem (1962) emphasizes and international sympathies by borrowing from Wilfred Owen‟s poetry for its text and by including solo parts Britten intended to have sung by the British tenor (and his partner) ; the German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau; and the Russian soprano, Galina Vishnevskaya, though the latter was not able to perform the work until 1963 due to the Soviet Union‟s refusal to allow her to stay in England for the inaugural performance (Cooke 26, 80). 409 during the First World War, it was particularly noticeable during the Second—no doubt because the Second World War was fought more against Nazism and totalitarianism than against German imperialism—and it can be detected, in part, in the letters written from

1940-1945 to the Radio Times, the chief publication organ of the BBC, as well as in the enormous popular response to music series, such as the National Gallery Concerts in

London.81

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of the BBC for the British public during the Second World War.82 By 1939 the BBC had become firmly entrenched as a British institution and some worried, and perhaps with good reason, that it would become a propaganda machine akin to German radio.83 Louis MacNeice, for instance,

81 The decision of the BBC and the National Gallery Concerts to continue playing German and Austrian music throughout the Second World War followed precedents set by the London Symphony Orchestra, the Proms, and several concert series discussed in previous chapters. During the First World War the South Place Concerts in London (see chapter four 229-32) continued its tradition of performing chamber music for lower-middle and working-class audiences. W. S. Meadmore, the chief contemporary historian of the concerts, notes that “it is a proud reflection that the concerts „carried on‟ all through the long four years of war. Indeed the concerts in those dark days assumed magical qualities, and many of the audience then came for the music which alone could give them consolation” (4). The 1914-15 season notably had “[s]pecial evenings” that were “devoted to Schubert” and “Bach,” as well as to music from Britain‟s allies (24). Meadmore emphasizes the significance of the concerts to their pre-war audience by recounting several letters from soldiers asking specifically about the continued existence of the concerts during the war. Arthur Burns and Robin Wilson similarly note that the Balliol Concerts in Oxford continued throughout the war with “the music being provided by undergraduates and cadets stationed at Balliol.” Burns and Wilson make a point of observing that the Balliol tradition of “promoting German and Central European music” was “continued during the First World War when in many places German music was not performed” (16). A desire for German and Austrian music, it seems, existed across socio-economic classes in Britain during the First World War.

82 Music broadcast by the BBC is especially significant because it reached so many people. Asa Briggs notes that from 1939 to 1945 there were anywhere from 8,852,363 to 9,940,210 radio licenses in Britain. He puts concurrent sales of the Radio Times at anywhere from 2,282,422 to 4,058,650 (Appendix B). Granted not all of these people were listening to Bach and Beethoven; but, a significant amount of them were. There is evidence that “„serious music‟ gained a wider and more knowledgeable audience during the course of the war,” a trend that was acknowledged at the time (Briggs 526; see also 517 n87).

83 Auden and Isherwood depict varying forms of government-sponsored radio propaganda in The Ascent of F6, such as a broadcast account of the death of a man racing to the top of a mountain to beat foreign rivals that attempts to persuade the British public that such a demise is “right and splendid” (Plays 336), and in 410 wondered whether, “in order to beat/ The enemy,” the British would “model ourselves upon the enemy,” maintaining “[a] howling radio for our paraclete” (Autumn Journal vii.70-72). He feared that people would end up “taking orders/ Out of a square box from a mad voice,” with music fading away. He observed, “earlier days had their music,/ We have some still to-day,/ But the orchestra is due for the bonfire/ If things go on this way”

(xviii. 107-08, 117-20). Fortunately, the BBC did not become the “howling paraclete” that MacNeice and others feared it might and, though music was occasionally used as propaganda, it was also a widely welcomed feature of radio programming.

In the early years of the Second World War especially, the Radio Times published many letters from people who wrote to express their appreciation for the BBC‟s broadcasts of German classical music. Some of the letters patently juxtaposed the comforting harmony of the music to the howling noises of the war. In July of 1940, for instance, M. F. Woolard wrote to the BBC via the Radio Times to say “[m]any thanks for letting us hear Solomon‟s fine rendering of the Schumann Piano Concerto on Monday evening. … Even in the wailing of the sirens the remembrance of its calm beauty was a distinct comfort.”84 The following month, the paper printed Kathleen Hassard‟s letter thanking the BBC for a “rendering of Beethoven‟s Appassionata Sonata.” Hassard

On the Frontier, where the Westland Leader and the Ostnian king prepare their nations for war (382, 386). The alternating and competing voices of the two leaders in Frontier would create a sort of “howling” effect. As it turned out, the relationship between the government and the BBC was complex and hardly clear-cut. Certain factions of the BBC fought successfully to keep a relative independence from the government during wartime (Briggs 301-15).

84 (Woollard, M. F.. Radio Times 12 July 1940: 9). Solomon Cutner, professionally known simply as “Solomon,” was a well-known concert pianist who, according to John and Anna Gillespie, “took great pride in his richly mixed heritage: German-Jewish on the maternal side; Polish-Jewish on the paternal side; and himself a true Cockney, born in Spitalfields in London‟s East End” (823). His Eastern European Cockney heritage is reminiscent of the Spitalfields “factory girl” from Thomas Burke‟s Nights in London (232, see chapter three 162-63) as well as Rebecca West‟s Mr. Kisch in This Real Night (124). 411 observed, “Beethoven‟s sonatas provide a sense of permanence which will still live on after the dangerous toys of mankind have done their worst.”85 In June, Joan Booth wrote to say that “[i]n these days many people want and need the healing power found in the music of such old masters as Handel, Haydn, and the others.”86 In January of 1941,

Hedley Matthews wrote to thank the BBC for a performance of Handel‟s Messiah, observing that “[i]t was indeed soothing and at the same time thrilling, to be in touch with something both sane and human in these mad days (and nights) of bombs and guns.”87

The BBC did receive some complaints, but many listeners wrote in to support its policy of playing familiar and comforting classics in war time.88 These individuals echoed Freda Tyler‟s sentiment in her 1942 letter that “[t]he spirit of music, new and old, is international.”89 The BBC itself fostered this perspective through its broadcast series for the board schools, which promoted Beethoven and classical music as a fundamental

85 (Hassard, Kathleen M. RT 16 Aug. 1940: 8).

86 (Booth, Joan. RT 14 June 1940: 9).

87 (Matthews, Hedley. RT 3 Jan. 1941: 8). An odd event connected with the merger of guns and music involves the story of Beatrice Harrison, her cello, and nightingales. In 1924 the BBC and His Master‟s Voice broadcast and recorded Beatrice Harrison playing her cello in a duet with the nightingales in her garden. The program and recording proved to be very popular, as did subsequent broadcasts in the following months. In 1942, sound engineers returned to the garden to record the nightingales, this time without the cello. Unbeknownst to the engineers, this was the same night that a British bombing raid was being carried out on Mannheim, ironically the home of the eponymous Mannheim Crescendo. Brian Rust observes of the result, “[t]he contrast between the ethereal sound of the birds‟ voices and the ominous thunder of the bombers is something unique in the history of commercial recording” (156).

88 After a broadcast, for instance, entitled “The Spirit of Austria,” which recounted the fond memories of British travellers to Austria prior to the war, “[a] certain number of correspondents … objected violently to the playing of what they described as the German National Anthem at the end of the programme.” The producer of the program responded rather tartly that he would have “thought that even the dullest musical ear could have detected the difference between Haydn‟s „Emperor‟ Quartet (slow movement), and the quick brass-band tune which is the present German National Anthem, even though the melody be the same” (McLaren, Moray. RT 17 May 1940: 9).

89 (Tyler, Freda. RT 18 Dec. 1942: 8). 412 element of “World History.” It also promoted the “V for Victory” campaign for

European solidarity with limited broadcasts to occupied Europe of the opening motif of

Beethoven‟s Fifth (V) Symphony.90

All of the above letters appear to have been from civilians, yet members of the services wrote to the BBC too. Many of them expressed their desire for broadcasts of classical works by German composers. In March of 1940, for instance, Lt. Rice, a member of the Middle East Command, wrote to ask “[c]ouldn‟t you give us one decent concert a week—composers like Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart?” He continued, “[w]ithout wishing to become heroic and pretend we‟re facing imminent death, it is a rather trying and „nervy‟ life, and to a large number of people a concert would give real mental— almost spiritual—relaxation, instead of the rather superficial „lightening‟ effect of dance music.”91

90 On April 15, 1940, the BBC advertised a “For the Schools” program entitled “World History (Ages 9- 12).” The “opening broadcast” focused on “Servants of the World; Modern Times” by Power and dealt with Beethoven. The advertisement read as follows: “World History this term will deal historically with various branches of human achievement. This opening broadcast introduces music as a branch of world history, for such an art is not bounded by the language of any one country. In this episode listeners will meet Beethoven and his friends, and will, of course, hear some of the composer‟s music” (RT 12 Apr. 1940: 21). While such programs as these were geared towards children, they reached a larger audience. G. E. Sutton, for instance, declared herself to be “one of the housewives who welcomed the new [radio school] term most heartily” and she particularly singled out music as one of her favourite subjects. “The plays and talks are always full of new delight,” she wrote, “but my understanding of music has most benefited. I could never understand this so-called „highbrow‟ music, and consequently turned off the wireless whenever it was announced. However, after listening to the broadcasts to schools I found myself searching for orchestral recitals and really enjoying them” (Sutton, G. E. RT 23 Oct. 1942: 5). The BBC made an effort to continue to educate its listeners with regards to classical music throughout the war and, as signalled by the “Servants of the World,” presented German classical music as part of a world heritage. Writing during the war, Charles Rolo reported that the V for Victory campaign began on January 14th, 1941 when the BBC broadcaster M. de Laveleye proposed to his fellow countrymen in Belgium “the letter V” as a “rallying emblem,” as it signified “„Victoire‟ in French, and „Vrijeheid‟ in Flemish, as well as the English word „Victory‟” (174). Soon “the V symbol was transcribed into sound,” when someone “struck upon the idea of incorporating the Morse signal for V into British broadcasts.” According to Rolo, “[i]t immediately occurred to all concerned that this Morse signal (…—) was the rhythmic theme of numerous pieces of music, in particular of Beethoven‟s Fifth Symphony, one movement of which, based on this theme, is called „Fate knocking at the door.‟ On his June 27th broadcast, Colonel Britton introduced the 413

Of course not everyone agreed with Rice. At times there were heated exchanges in the “letters to the editor” pages of the Radio Times disputing whether or not members of the services wanted classical music generally (German or otherwise) on “For the

Forces” broadcasts. Under the heading, “The Soldiers‟ Poison” the paper printed the following politically-shaded letter from G. W. W., Petty Officer, H. M. Ships: “Why inflict punishment on the Forces by introducing Proms on their wavelength? Such heavy ditchwater stuff should be kept on the Home Service wavelength, as the Services need entertainment, not boredom. Forcing things that they don‟t want on men is not democracy.”92 The following week, the paper printed this retort: “I feel bound to answer the egotistical and self-opinionated letter of my contemporary „Petty Officer‟ apropos

Proms on the Forces wavelength.” This sailor asked,

I wonder if my friend ever considers the tolerance of the, admitted, minority on the Lower Deck, forced to listen with patient resignation to the dreary reiteration of dance music, second-rate Variety, and organ music that constitutes, in the main, the Forces programme. Our pleas, nevertheless, for our „once a month‟ opera, and „once a year‟ Proms are crushed. So, be fair, Petty Officer, it‟s only a very minute percentage of listening time for which we ask.93

V sound to his audience. The next day, the BBC‟s program for French listeners carried a special feature entirely built around the V sound. Not only were the theme of the Fifth Symphony and the Morse signal abundantly used, but the feature demonstrated in a striking manner how every sound in the daily life of a French village or town could be made into a V” (178). Apparently, this use of Beethoven upset the Nazi propaganda industry, as Rolo writes that “Goebbels therefore decided to take over the V and thereby neutralize it, if not in the eye of the occupied populations at least in those of the Wehrmacht. Hilversum, and then other German controlled stations, began to broadcast the Fifth Symphony and either to ridicule English attempts at using this noble German music for propaganda aims or to pretend that the V sign and sound were German inventions” (179; see also Briggs 338-40).

91 (Rice, Lt. M. E. C., R. E., B. E. F. RT 29 Mar. 1940: 9).

92 (W., G. W. RT 1 Aug. 1941: 8).

93 (N., C. RT 22 Aug. 1941: 8). A similar exchange took place again in 1945. J. A. F. wrote that “[e]minent music critics of the lower deck must have jive, jazz, and boogie-woogie. Classical composers are German, Sullivan, and , who are tolerated but not enjoyed. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, those 414

The service members who wished to hear opera or the Proms were a self-confessed minority, but there were still a fair number who asserted their rights to hear what they wanted.94

All in all, the BBC tried to satisfy both sides, according to their proportions. Most of the music broadcast with the troops in mind was “light music,” consisting of arranged dance pieces or songs, but there were some classical programs for those who wanted them. On July 5th, 1940, for instance, there was a typical section of classical music entitled “Favourite Piano Pieces,” “recorded by Rachmaninoff,” consisting of Handel‟s

“The harmonious blacksmith,” Schubert‟s Impromptu in A flat, Chopin‟s Waltz in E minor, Mendelssohn‟s “The bees‟ wedding” and a scherzo from his Midsummer Night’s

Dream arranged by Rachmaninoff.”95 Instrumental programs like these did appear more than once a month, if one was free to listen to them. When the troops reached Italy in

1945, the Radio Times asserted that “the planners of the General Forces Programme were quick to spot that requests for opera programmes which reached the BBC along with the overseas forces mail were out of all proportion to the previous demand. The reason? bungling amateurs, must on no account be listened to. That is my experience in the ” (F., J. A., coder, R. N. RT 9 Feb. 1945: 4). This called forth the following response: “Reading a letter from J. A. F. in the February 9 issue gave me rather a shock, and I do hope readers will not judge the listening matelot from this coder‟s article. He is a coder, a very recent branch of the R. N. I have spent well over ten years on the lower deck, and I claim much longer experience. I‟m a great lover of boogie-woogie, of swing, and to be frank I know my Basie, but my experience has been that I learned to love the music of Tchaikovsky, Handel, Mozart, Gounod, etc., as much as my boogie, through the eminent music critics of the lower deck, not of one of H. M. ships but of four. A music circle is held on this small station, every Tuesday, at which forty to fifty rating attend; it lasts some three hours. The composers? Not Basie, Shaw, Wilson, etc., but Bach, Beethoven, Grieg, etc. And the soloists? Not Goodman, Hodges or James, but Rubinstein, Menuhin, and Cyril Smith” (Dell, „Lofty.‟ P. O., R. N., RT 16 Mar. 1945: 4).

94 (e.g. Joll, E. Brian. R. N. R. RT 11 Oct. 1940: 10; Kempston, Lt. B. G., R. A., India. RT 7 May 1943: 5; and Mann, T. R. A. F., C. M. F. RT 30 June 1944: 5).

95 (“Favourite Piano Pieces.” RT 5 July 1940: 11). 415

Men serving in Italy had, for the first time in their lives, heard opera sung as sing it. And in their case familiarity bred enchantment.” The paper reported that “[t]he result of their letters is that the G. F. P. will be carrying a special fortnightly series, Nights at the Opera, presented by Barbara McFadyean, formerly one of its announcers.”96

Back in London, the concert pianist Myra Hess was running the lunchtime

National Gallery Concerts. These provided cheap classical music for the public from

1939 through to 1946.97 With the majority of the pictures removed from the Gallery due to the threat of air raids, Hess convinced the Gallery‟s management to allow her to use the all but empty space for the performance of music. Hess herself performed the first program, playing works by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, , and Schubert to an unexpectedly large crowd.98 Howard Ferguson, a member of the Committee of the Concerts, recalled how the “amazing first audience” was “made up of people from every walk of life: members of the forces, civilians carrying gas-masks, A. R. P. [Air

Raid Precaution] workers, office-boys, [and] workers from Government offices”

96 (RT 13 Apr. 1945: 5). The Radio Times occasionally pointed to perceived changes in the listening tastes of the public. When, for instance, the BBC wanted to move away from songs by “crooners” to more serious music, the Radio Times insisted that this change in programming was instigated by a change in the tastes of British audiences: “It is a change of attitude on the part of the public that has brought this about. It is not for the BBC to discriminate between one kind of music or another. The aim has always been to offer the best in every kind, Beethoven for those who like Beethoven, crooners for those who preferred crooners. But from its infinite number of contacts in homes, camps, barracks, and factories all over the country it has learned beyond all doubt that the 1942 public as a whole finds the sempiternal sob of the crooner almost as distasteful and distressing as, say, flippant blasphemy or an indecent innuendo. In the third year of an increasingly strenuous war the public is demanding something more virile, more robust. The BBC, as the servant of the public, must act in the public interest” (RT 24 July 1942: 3). Most likely the Radio Times is overstating its case a bit, comparing “crooners” to “blasphemy,” to make its point.

97 The concerts began on October 10th, 1939 and cost one shilling (National Gallery Concerts 8).

98 Hess played two Scarlatti Sonatas, two Bach Preludes and Fugues, Beethoven‟s Appassionata Sonata, several Schubert dances, three Brahms‟ Intermezzos and, as an encore, Bach‟s “Gigue” from the French Suite in G Major and “Jesu, Joy of man‟s desiring” (NGC 9-10). 416

(National Gallery Concerts 9).99 Generally, he reports, “[a]udiences var[ied] between

250 and 1,250 daily, the average (not counting the lean days of the Blitz) being about 500 or 600” (12).100 German music—including limited performances of pieces by Wagner and Schöenberg—was frequently a highlight of the concerts.101

In an essay written to commemorate the series in 1944, Forster pointed to the ideological implications of the concerts by imagining the subtle after-effects of German music on their audiences. As if extending Woolf‟s cosmopolitan sublime from the

“String Quartet” or Between the Acts, Forster imagines how, even after a concert,

“Schumann—or was it Brahms?” or whichever German composer it was—“obliterates the squalor” of daily life and war and “promotes that enlargement of the spirit which is our birthright. The concert is not over when the sweet voices die. It vibrates elsewhere.

It discovers treasures which would have remained hidden, and they are the chief part of the human heritage.” German music leads to a humanistic, spiritual legacy. As such, for

Forster, “the masterpieces of Bach and Mozart” heard during the war offer “continuity”

99 Hess was very pleased with the diverse nature of the audiences of the concerts. In her commemorative essay for the series she wrote, “[d]uring many years of playing in many countries I have felt again and again that music was available almost exclusively for a privileged section of the community; and I have wondered how it would be possible to reach the many thousands of potential music-lovers, who were surely to be found outside this limited world of concert-goers. Though it seemed so impossible, I longed to throw open the doors to the very best music, at a price which all would be able to afford.” One ironically positive result of the war was that it provided “the extraordinary circumstances which gave us the National Gallery for daily concerts of chamber music.” This enabled her to offer cheap concerts for the “large and varied audience” that were “daily at hand” in London (NGC 5).

100 Total attendance for the first four years was estimated to be 143,619 for the first year; 78,466 for the second year; 124,905 for the third year; and 142,467 for the fourth year (NGC 12).

101 By the fourth year of the concerts, the promoters could boast that “[v]arious „series‟ have been given from time to time; such as the Beethoven String Quartets (three complete cycles, apart from many separate performances), the Beethoven Sonatas for Violin and Piano (two cycles), the Mozart Sonatas for Violin and Piano (two cycles), Bach‟s Brandenburg Concertos and 48 Preludes and Fugues, and the complete Chamber Music of Brahms” (NGC 11). There had also been one performance of Schöenberg‟s “Verklärte Nacht” and one performance of Wagner‟s “Song: Gazing Around” from Tannhäuser (67, 74). 417 and “another aspect of the eternal” (NGC 7). Therefore, as he would state baldly during a

BBC broadcast, to ban this music simply because it was German would be “foolish” and narrow minded, just as were the Nazis (BBC Talks 218).102 By listening to this music,

Forster suggests, the National Gallery audience takes part in a humanistic tradition that the Nazis appallingly reject.

Forster‟s essay suggests that the National Gallery Concerts provided an idealized means of reaching across time and space to a sympathetic community, which was the antithesis of war. Stephen Spender concurred and after the war he remembered how

“[t]he audiences at the midday concerts of the National Gallery, or at the recitals of music and ballet in provincial towns and at factories, sat with a rapt attention as though they were listening for some message from the artist, who, though perhaps he had lived in other times, was close to the same as themselves—and to the pressing need to affirm faith and joy within them.” Spender saw the musical arts as having “answered that side of humanity which had produced the war with the indestructibility of this other side—human love” (World Within World 313). That so much of the music played at the

National Gallery Concerts was German, and that the production of these concerts became, in fact, an international effort, and that so many people in London came to enjoy

102 Forster stressed the implications of the German music at the National Gallery Concerts in a January 6th, 1943 broadcast for the BBC. He began by reminding his audience of the existence of the concerts and of their cheap price of one shilling. He then observed: “Note by the way that much of the music is German: Beethoven, Brahms, Bach. And note here a difference between this war and the last; in the last war there was a tendency to bar German music; in this war we all realize that this would be foolish, especially since the Nazis themselves are not and don‟t want to be the inheritors of their own national culture. They ban some German music. They won‟t listen to Mendelssohn or Bloch because those composers are Jewish, they won‟t read the poet Heinrich for the same reason, nor Goethe because he is cosmopolitan. They ban German culture. We don‟t” (BBC Talks 218). As in Burdekin‟s Swastika Night and in Jameson‟s Then We Shall Hear Singing, Forster uses German music to differentiate between a Europeanized German culture, which in the essay quoted above he associates with a “human heritage,” and a specifically Nazi culture. 418 the concerts, all indicates the significant turn towards the cosmopolitan nature of music in

Britain during the Second World War.103 This turn correspondingly indicates how the cosmopolitan nature of German music evoked a common European or, more broadly, a common human heritage—made up of the value of a variety of human lives: e. g. British,

German, working-class, and homosexual—in the midst of war, destruction, and occasional despair in both British literature and culture.

103 Ferguson writes that during the Blitz, when performances took place in “a Shelter in the Gallery‟s basement,” there arose a “severe strain on the financial resources of the Concerts.” In response, “a fund was opened in America by Mr. Arthur Mendel in Myra Hess‟s name. The gifts received from the United States and Canada reached the astonishing total of over £4,000. Mrs. Frederick Steinway was the benevolent chairman, and donors included Toscanini, Koussevitsky, Block, Heifetz, Rachmaninoff, and many other world-famous musicians” (NGC 12, 14). Refugees from Germany and Austria also played at the concerts (see 408 n65, above). 419

Chapter 7: Epilogue: “Our privileged community”: The Commonwealth of Classical

Music

From about the 1870s to the mid-1940s classical music came to offer both elitist and alienated subcultures a means of attaining respect and influence within British society. Literary representations of music helped to give birth to this cultural trend.

Changes in late-nineteenth-century listening habits and in the pedagogy of educational institutions influenced the literary output of authors. This literary output, in turn, caused the aesthetic interests of the public and the cultural significance of classical music to expand. The influence of this expansion on British culture was wide-reaching. The aristocracy and the working-classes, as well as a wide array of influential educators, journalists, politicians, novelists, playwrights, and poets came to consider a familiarity with symphonies, operas, and chamber music to be a means to indicate the cultural authority of an individual or of a class. Knowledge of classical music became a means to assert the social value of oneself and one‟s friends.

The effects of this were manifold. Many middle-class modernist intellectuals divisively attempted to claim the cultural capital of classical music for themselves. In doing so, they hoped to seize control of culture from the aristocratic classes and to set themselves off from the increasingly educated lower-middle and working-classes by

420 tapping into an erudite formalistic musical sublime. More democratically, lower-middle and working-class writers depicted themselves as musically astute and hence as intellectual and as culturally genteel. They used their musicality to claim a cultural equality or even superiority to those with bigger bank accounts or inherited titles, but with little knowledge of music. Cutting across class-boundaries, queer authors from

Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde onward toward Beverley Nichols and A. T. Fitzroy depicted same-sex desiring individuals as particularly sensitive to or proficient in classical music and thus as valuable to society. These uses of music were at times elitist and at times a means to unite an individual or a class to a larger, more mainstream society.

As Britain entered two World Wars in the first half of the twentieth century, an increasing interest in classical music served largely—though not always—as a means to connect British inhabitants to a wider European community. While in the years surrounding the First World War, in particular, polemics by writers such as Ernest

Williams and Saki warned against Germany‟s dominance in musical trades, there were post-1918 works by writers, such as Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf, who emphasized how German music was an integral part of Britain‟s European heritage. A culminating effect of musical movements from 1870 onward, then, was that during the

Second World War, music by German-born composers, such as Bach, Beethoven, and

Handel, was widely touted by writers and by the British public as an art that transcended nationality. In the minds of many, the cosmopolitanism of classical music became a means to reconcile the more peaceful elements of British and German cultures and to link

421 them together against the common threat of Nazism. British citizens in particular were well prepared for this musical union thanks to the important place that German composers held in their education, entertainment, and literature.

The common notion that classical music was a foundation or a stimulation for an international society was so powerful that even those who were cynical found themselves repeatedly returning to it. As such, it seems fitting to recall these lines from Auden‟s

“New Year Letter,” written in 1940 and published in 1941, describing a concert in the U.

S. where “SCHUBERT sang and MOZART played/ and GLUCK and food and friendship made/ Our privileged community/ That real republic which must be/ The State all politicians claim,/ Even the worst, to be their aim” (Collected Longer Poems 3.15-26).

Here Auden echoes Plato in presenting classical music as a foundation of not only a “real republic,” but an ideal one sought out by politicians. Even if such a society can only be imperfectly mimicked in contexts outside of a small concert audience, Auden felt that this harmonious, this musical ideal was one for which it was worth striving. As Auden‟s lines suggest then, a study of British literature and culture from the 1870s to the mid 1940s reveals how classical music did not exist as a hermetic or an essentially vague or abstract art. Symphonies, operas, and chamber music worked largely to provide a democratic, communal sympathy.

Post-1945 Considerations

What then, it is fair to ask, has happened to the triad of classical music, literature, and culture since 1945? The simple response is that this question lies outside the bounds 422 of this study, which has to end somewhere. Still, it seems fitting to provide a general sketch of post-1945 conditions, particularly as so many of the themes dealt with in the preceding chapters have kept their place in British literature and culture. In providing such a sketch, I will stick to literary highlights. In ‟s

(1956), Jimmy Porter, an educated young man with working-class roots, tries to enjoy a

Vaughan Williams symphony on the radio on his day off from running a sweet stall. He fails because his girlfriend and his roommate make too much noise. When Jimmy complains, his roommate sardonically replies, “[s]orry, your lordship” (23). Jimmy is, in many ways, a reincarnation of Leonard Bast or Frank Illidge and music fails to free him from his small, confined flat, much as it had failed the more mild-mannered Leonard and the angry Frank over twenty-five years earlier. All three men want to live up to their education, but high society does not make room for them. For some, Tantamount House, as discussed in chapter three, still holds sway. It is also worth noting that, despite the continuance of music education in British schools, an easy access to music on the radio, and the continuation of the London Proms, classical music has maintained an aristocratic overtone in popular culture.

Still, the legacy of working-class music lovers has found its way into more recent

British literature. In Brian Friel‟s , Here I Come! (1965), for instance,

Gareth O‟Donnell works in his father‟s shop in the fictional “small village of Ballybeg,”

Ireland (27). Underpaid by his father and having abandoned his affluent girlfriend because he cannot afford to marry her, Gareth decides to move to Philadelphia to work in a hotel and make his fortune. As he readies himself to leave his old life, he fantasizes

423 about a dual career as a successful musician and as a sports star. Standing by his waiting suitcase, he imagines a radio announcer informing an audience that he will perform his favourite piece, Mendelssohn‟s Violin Concerto: “[t]he main item in tonight‟s concert is the First Movement of the Violin Concerto in E minor, Opus 64, by Jacob Ludwig Felix

Mendelssohn. The orchestra is conducted by Gareth O‟Donnell and the soloist is the

Ballybeg half-back, Gareth O‟Donnell. Music critics,” the announcer continues,

“throughout the world,” praise “O‟Donnell‟s simultaneous wielding of baton and bow”

(36). Gareth‟s fantasies of becoming a world-famous musician, and a sports star, help to give him the confidence to travel abroad, as they simultaneously evoke his ambition for grander things than he can find in his village. Gareth is the heir to many of the characters discussed in chapter four.

In his 2004 novel The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst draws on several themes dealt with in chapters two through five. Nick Guest, an Oxford-educated aesthete who was raised in a middle-class household, uses his musical knowledge to show himself to be just as cultured (if not more so) as the wealthy, conservative Fedden family who allow him to live in their fashionable London home. One evening he brings Leo, his first boyfriend and the son of a working-class Jamaican mother, back to the empty Fedden house. He watches Leo look around the house admiringly and then sit down at the piano to play Mozart:

“Ah, that‟s all right,” Leo murmured courteously; and he started to play, with a distracted frown at the page. It was the great second movement of K533, spare, probing, Bach-like, that Nick had discovered, and tried to play, on the night when he‟d lost his [first] chance of meeting Leo—till Catherine [Fedden] had complained, and he‟d apologized and doodled off into Waldorf music. To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to 424

concede that it was obnoxious, boring, “vulgar and unsafe”—that was the worst thing. And the music seemed to know this, to know the irresistible curve of hope, and its hollow inversion (152).

Nick adores Bach and Mozart and he enriches his desire for Leo by associating it with the elegance, the liberality, and the hopefulness of their music. In doing so, he follows the lead of so many homosexually-inclined authors before him, as discussed in chapters two and five. Catherine‟s patronizing conservatism, on the other hand, Nick associates with the lighter brand of “Waldorf music,” presumably a snide reference to the light produced in the 1950s and 60s by the Waldorf Music Hall label. Catherine may be a privileged little rich girl, but Nick sees himself as an intellectual and cultural aristocrat.

Leo‟s musical skill, moreover, pushes Nick to overcome his own unwarranted prejudices. When Leo, a bit tipsy, gives up on his sight-reading, the rather impressed

Nick blurts out, “„[y]ou‟re good. I can‟t play that. I didn‟t know you could play.‟ He felt very touched, and chastened, as if by a glimpse of his own unquestioned assumptions.

It opened a new perspective, the sight of Leo in his jeans and sweatshirt and baseball boots raising Mozart out of the sonorous old Bösendorfer” (153). Mozart is not reconciling nations at war, as in chapter six, and Nick is not overtly xenophobic, but

Hollinghurst does use Leo‟s musicality to surprise Nick, secure in his unsuspected belief that classical music in the tradition of Bach and Mozart is solely a European purview.

Hollinghurst picks up here on the expansion of the European classical music tradition and its cosmopolitan associations. This scene between Leo and Nick is reminiscent of an earlier scene from Samuel Selvon‟s The Lonely Londoners (1956).

Selvon describes a cheap London hostel inhabited by immigrants from the West Indies

425 and , some of whom are “studying” and others who are “only marking time” (47).

One notable hostel patron is “a African fellar” who plays the piano: “he would give you a classic by Chopin, then a calypso, then one of them funny African tune [sic]” (48). As in the earlier music halls or the Victorian tradition of the miscellany concert, and as anticipated by Selvon‟s own mixture of dialect and standard British English, “classic” music blends with popular music. Chopin, calypso, and an African tune converge, unique but integrated, not as a false consolation, but as a representation of a point of happiness or interest in the day of the lives of immigrants far from home.

Zadie Smith‟s On Beauty (2005) with its amalgamation of Forster, Mozart,

Mozart‟s friend Süssmayr, and a Spoken Word artist from Roxbury, , provides an excellent place for this study to end. Smith rewrites Howards End offering the confident, talented Carl Thomas, an American hip-hop aficionado, as a revitalization of Leonard

Bast. Like Leonard, Carl is not “educated,” but has to get his culture informally, outside of a college setting. “Anything happening that‟s free in this city and might teach me something,” Carl says, “I‟m there” (76). Unlike Leonard, however, Carl has successfully learned to incorporate classical art into his own life. After hearing a Beethoven symphony at the relatively cheap Queen‟s Hall in London, Leonard tries to perform Grieg on his piano at home. He plays it “badly and vulgarly” (HE 52). Carl, on the other hand, reports how after having heard Süssmayr‟s completed version of Mozart‟s unfinished

Requiem in Boston, he had gone home and “sampled it for [a] tune” he made, putting his own “words over the top and a beat below” (OB 136). Carl, already an accomplished wordsmith in his own right, mingles his work with Mozart‟s.

426

Through Carl, Smith‟s novel revisits the continuing debate over who can appreciate, who can create, and even what constitutes a worthwhile international art.

Carl‟s eclectic composition suggests that those who can fruitfully integrate aesthetic innovations with classical achievements, merging present and past (as Smith does herself), can best appreciate and achieve new works of unexpected value. It is Carl who, in an inversion of Forster‟s novel, exhibits an aesthetic competency unattained by the highly-educated, Schlegelian Howard Belsey and Zora, his daughter. The Anglo-

American Belseys can discuss Mozart academically, but they rarely engage with his music. Howard, an art history professor at Wellington College, mocks Mozart‟s “genius” and his legacy (70). Later, when Carl tries to talk about the Requiem to Zora, a student at

Wellington, she cannot remember the music, despite having listened to a recorded lecture about it. She responds confusedly, “I‟m not really a classical music type of—” (136).

Carl expects the Belseys to have the intellectual tools to relate to Mozart. They do not; he does.

With his unexpectedly wide-ranging capacity for aesthetic appreciation and creation, Carl is a bit like his own description of Süssmayr, a musical underdog when compared to Mozart. According to Carl, Süssmayr‟s work on the “” is “the best thing in the Requiem”:

it‟s like Süssmayr, this guy, stepped up to the bat ... and all these people be trying to prove that it‟s Mozart ‟cos that fits in with their idea of who can and who can‟t make music like this, but the deal is that this amazing sound was just by this guy Süssmayr, this average Joe Schmo guy (137).

Carl is much like a modern day Süssmayr in that he creates what no-one expects him to and he does it in an aesthetically complex fashion. His ability to combine 427 his interests in classical music and rap to fashion new art helps to make him the most successful and the most interesting artist in a novel preoccupied with aesthetics.

What is more, Carl‟s own artistic confidence gives him the strength to abandon the Wellington circles in which he finds himself. Forster‟s Leonard dies when the Schlegels‟ bookcase falls on him, symbolizing the crushing weight of

Western culture on the uneducated mind. Conversely, Smith‟s Carl consciously rejects the aid of the well-connected Zora and her pseudo-intellectual, privileged society when he realizes that though its inhabitants “act so superior,” they are unable to “tell the truth” (417). “I‟m just trying to get a stage higher with my life,” Carl tells Zora, “[b]ut that‟s just a joke around here” (418). The petty superficiality, the deception, and the self-aggrandizement of the academic Belsey world hold Carl back. So, he decides to go off on his own. He wants to go, he says, “[b]ack to my people” (419). He wishes a return to the African-American community in which he grew up. But he also wishes to return, as his speech to

Zora indicates, to the eclectic, autodidactic, but more intellectually honest cultural life he led prior to meeting the Belseys. He has realized the moral dishonesty of the academy and gone awry. He nonetheless maintains the liberal dream of using culture—a modern culture inclusive of rap and Mozart—to obtain a better life.

Both Hollinghurst and Smith indicate how literary and cultural endeavors rooted in the late-nineteenth century in England have expanded into

428 internationally acclaimed literature of the twenty-first century. The associations of classical music with an inclusive and , with a sense of self-worth, with the probative value of an open-minded morality (one founded on pleasing one‟s self in ways that do not hurt others), and with an expansive cosmopolitanism remain as vital today as they ever were, at least in literature. Of course on its own, classical music cannot educate or expand one‟s morality to any great degree. Music is only a collection of sublime sounds until it is filtered through the human mind and attached to associative thinking. The contexts in which we hear, think, and write about music then matter in clearly definable, if complex ways. As such, the music hall can be as meaningful, and as socially useful, as the music. This study urges an awareness of these contextual meanings.

For, to rephrase Hollinghurst, “raising Mozart” in unexpected situations can open new and unforeseen perspectives. We should not miss out on these.

429

References

Frequently Cited Newspapers

Jackson’s Oxford Journal (JOJ)

Musical Herald and Tonic Sol-fa Reporter (MH)

Musical Times and Singing Class Circular (MT)

Radio Times (RT)

The Saturday Review (SR).

The Weekly Westminster Gazette (WWG)

Archives

London County Council—now held at the London Metropolitan Archives (LCC)

London Metropolitan Archives (LMA)

Royal College of Music (RCM)

Centre for Performance History (CPH)

University of London: Senate House Library (SHL)

430

Concert Programs

“15 Mar. 1925.” CPH: London: Educational Establishments: Working Men's College, Crowndale Road (1925-1957).

“22 Mar. 1925.” CPH: London: Educational Establishments: Working Men's College, Crowndale Road (1925-1957).

“29 Nov. 1925.” CPH: London: Educational Establishments: Working Men's College, Crowndale Road (1925-1957).

“29 Mar. 1927.” CPH: London: Educational Establishments: Working Men's College, Crowndale Road (1925-1957).

“31 March, 1935.” CPH: London: Educational Establishments: Working Men's College, Crowndale Road (1925-1957).

Music-Hall Programs

“The Alhambra.” 16 Sept. 1907. LCC: MIN/10/770.

“Empire Advertisement.” Undated. LMA 4237/A/001/63.

“The London Coliseum.” 11 July 1921. RCM LC:1905-1959.

“The London Coliseum.” 30 Oct. 1922. RCM LC:1905-1959.

“The Oxford Music Hall.” [c. 1866]. LMA ACC/3527/458.

Sources for Toynbee Hall and Wincham Hall

i. Toynbee Hall

“Education Committee minute book 1913-1930.” LMA A/TOY/3.

431

“Toynbee Hall Educational Syllabus: 1936-1937.” London: Loxley Brothers Ltd., 1936. LMA A/TOY/10/2. “Toynbee Musical Society: Second Season—1933-1934.” London: Loxley Brothers Ltd., 1933. LMA: A/TOY/11/3.

“The Universities‟ Settlement in East London.” Memorandum and Articles of Association, Registered 21st July, 1884. London: Penny and Hull, 1915. LMA: A/TOY/9/1.

ii. Wincham Hall

“Prospectus.” SHL: MS.867/2/6/2/7.

“SELNEC ADVISORY COUNCIL: Report on Music School held at Wincham Hall, Northwich 2nd-9th April, 1937.” SHL: MS.867/2/6/3/75.

“Wincham Hall: Report: 1934-35.” SHL: MS.867/2/6/8.

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