British Literature and Classical Music: Cultural Contexts 1870–1945 9781474235815, 9781474235846, 9781474235839

Table of contents :
FC
Half title
Historicizing Modernism
Title
Copyright
Contents
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Approaches to classical music in British literature, 1870–1945: Theory and practice
1 The liberalization of music in aesthetic literature: Pater and Oxford
2 Modernism’s distinctive musical rhetoric: Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf
3 The musical refinement of society’s margins: Bennett, Burke, Lawrence, and their contemporaries
4 Distinguishing a musical homoeroticism: Pater, Forster, and their aesthetic descendants
5 Classical music, cosmopolitanism, and war: From authors to audiences
Conclusion: A literary coda: Classical music in British literature
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

British Literature and Classical Music

Historicizing Modernism Series Editors Matthew Feldman, Professor of Contemporary History, Teesside University, UK; and Erik Tonning, Professor of English Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway. Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chester, UK Editorial Board Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK. Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/American avant-garde 1900–45 parameters, this series reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods. Series Titles Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, edited by Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead and Erik Tonning Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer, Alex Latter The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker Samuel Beckett and Science, Chris Ackerley Samuel Beckett and The Bible, Iain Bailey Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’, John Pilling Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism, Henry Mead Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood

British Literature and Classical Music Cultural Contexts 1870–1945 David Deutsch

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © David Deutsch, 2015 David Deutsch has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-3581-5 ePDF: 978-1-4742-3583-9 ePub: 978-1-4742-3582-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Historicizing Modernism Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents Series Editors’ Preface Acknowledgments

1 2 3 4 5



Introduction: Approaches to classical music in British literature, 1870–1945: Theory and practice

vii ix

1

The liberalization of music in aesthetic literature: Pater and Oxford Modernism’s distinctive musical rhetoric: Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf The musical refinement of society’s margins: Bennett, Burke, Lawrence, and their contemporaries Distinguishing a musical homoeroticism: Pater, Forster, and their aesthetic descendants Classical music, cosmopolitanism, and war: From authors to audiences

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Conclusion: A literary coda: Classical music in British literature

229

Works Cited Index

17 55 95 139

231 253

Series Editors’ Preface This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth to twentieth-century literary Modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival deposits) in developing monographs, scholarly editions and edited collections on Modernist authors and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and annotated volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism; as well as mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature. Correspondingly, two burgeoning sub-disciplines of Modernism, Beckett studies and Pound studies, feature heavily as exemplars of the opportunities presented by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of “canonical” authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of supposedly “minor” or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of Modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will be weighted towards the English-speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone Modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally-based exploration shall also be included. A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic “autonomy” employed by many Modernists and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-definitions of Modernist writers, thinkers and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept “Modernism” itself. Similarly, the very notion of “historicizing” Modernism remains debatable, and this series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches. On the contrary, the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way. Matthew Feldman Erik Tonning

Acknowledgments This book is warmly dedicated to my mother and to my husband Kirk, the two of whom bore the brunt of it for many years and who are undoubtedly as glad as I am that it is finished. My sister and brother, Marthe and Steven, offered me the right mixture of support and indifference. The entire Walter family frequently asked me about the book and then listened to what I had to say, which meant a great deal. Woven throughout the book are thoughts of my grandparents, who in many ways brought me to this topic. Bella was always there making everything easier. I’d like to say here how fortunate I feel to have been invited into a department immensely warm in its collegiality and in its friendship. I’d like to thank in particular James McNaughton, Albert Pionke, and Emily Wittman for critiquing much of this manuscript, which they did with insight, with attention to detail, and with grace. I’d also like to thank Philip Beidler, Jen Drouin, Trudier Harris, and Cassie Smith for reading chapters and proposals along the way and for offering useful advice. Heather White answered questions with a smile. Tricia McElroy, Fred Whiting, Deborah Weiss, and Andy Crank have offered frequent food and laughter of equal excellence as they suffered my stopping by their homes and offices and even invited me back. Outside of my home department, Sebastian Knowles continued to read my work and offer feedback and support long past the dissertation stage. Adam Parkes and Robin Darwall-Smith have read chapters and offered advice, which made this a stronger book. Chris Ackerley offered useful advice at a pivotal stage. I have been fortunate to find mentoring and long-lasting friendship from Kalpen Trivedi. If any of my sentences have clarity, this has something to do with Andrew Cole who took the time to insist on precision when we were in Athens, Georgia. James Dixon offered consistent inspiration. Brock Tyra and the University of Alabama Libraries’ staff have been wonderfully resourceful in helping me with obtaining source material for this study. David Avital, Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning, and the staff at Bloomsbury Academic have been instrumental in bringing this study into the world as a book, for which I am exceptionally grateful. In the course of four years, Tuscaloosa and Northport have become home. This is in no small part to my and Kirk’s friends and neighbors, in particular

x Acknowledgments

Paul Morgan and Jason Payne, Harriet Cabell Walker, Merinda Simmons, Nathan Loewen, Arlo Simmons-Loewen, Christina and Ella Frantom, and Alabama’s brilliant brewers. At times I enjoyed writing this and I hope you enjoy reading it. Any errors you may find within I affably attribute to those who talk loudly in libraries. Sections of Chapters 1 and 5 appeared initially in The Pater Newsletter and Virginia Woolf: Writing the World (Clemson University Press, 2015) and I’d like to thank the editors of these publications who gave kind permission to reprint them.

Introduction

Approaches to classical music in British literature, 1870–1945: Theory and practice

E. M. Forster opens his second and his favorite novel, The Longest Journey (1907), with Cambridge undergraduates sitting in a darkened college room, lounging almost on top of each other before a fire, while discussing “philosophy” and half-listening as a friend plays the “Prelude to Rheingold” on a nearby piano (2001: 3, 5). This heady mixture causes Forster’s protagonist Rickie Elliot to become “sleepy” as the events of his day “float one by one before his acquiescent eyes,” events which include reading Theocritus, talking and walking with friends, and eating German biscuits (5). This lyrical opening uses music not as a focal point but as a permeating connective. Music in this scene weaves together class privilege, philosophy, leisure, sensual pleasures, homoeroticism, as well as dreamy yet hyper-imaginative interactions between opera and a relatively hermetic cosmopolitanism. Forster wraps these musical associations in a shadowy study, protected by porters and the castle-like walls of the college, all of which might send us searching for formal or thematic connections between Forster’s novel and Richard Wagner’s mythic Ring cycle, drawing us further and further into a complex realm of esoteric aesthetic resonances, should we have the time and the inclination to pursue them. Forster presents this musical scene, then, as warm, as inviting, as intellectually inspiring without being pedantic, and yet as the province of only a favored few. It is jarring and yet constructive to pair this musical scene with an almost contemporary one offered by Ford Madox Ford in his autobiographical Memories and Impressions (1911): “today I never go to a place of entertainment where miscellaneous music is performed for the benefit of the poorest classes without hearing at least the overture to Tannhäuser” (1985: 11). Whereas Forster’s style is lyrical and his setting plush, Ford’s reportage takes us into almost another world, a wider and more open one. His scene, for instance, is easily transferrable

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as this “place of entertainment” might be in an urban or provincial street or in a music hall, somewhere easily accessible. The participants in this scene are also much more heterogeneous: musicians, very likely philanthropists who pay the bills, observers, such as Ford himself, and poor working-class individuals who variously seek out entertainment and a self-improving “benefit” from serious music, at the very minimum inclusive of Wagner. Ford recalls the grittier, more sober struggles and successes of the Victorian rational recreation movements that sought to enrich the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic lives of disadvantaged classes, many of whom by the 1910s were increasingly taking control over their own extra-curricular education and who willingly chose to listen to and even to perform German, Italian, and French opera, symphonies, and chamber music instead of or in addition to less complex English popular songs. The ostensibly clashing interaction of Forster’s poetic novel and Ford’s impressionistic yet reportage-style memoir should startle us into re-examining the ways in which classical music functioned, participated, and indeed was represented in early-twentieth-century British literature and culture and for what purposes. At play in a consideration of Forster and Ford together are competing conceptions of how, where, when, and for whom classical music, such as Wagner’s, can function as an art and how this has evolved over a period of time for diverse yet interconnected factions of British society. How can Britain’s classical music culture as reflected in literature written during the period of 1870 to 1945 offer us information not only about education, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and politics but the lived experience of distinct yet interrelated communities depicted for us by a diverse array of authors? Of course the phrase “classical music” is itself worth defining in cultural contexts. I use “classical music,” here and throughout this book, in its popular sense, which designates certain strands of music inclusive of forms such as cantatas, oratorios, symphonies, and opera, from J. S. Bach to Gioachino Rossini to Richard Wagner, whether performed by concert orchestras or amateur brass bands. It is, to be sure, possible to argue with this broad definition, which seemingly conflates AustrianGerman with Italian, French, and even British traditions spanning over at least three centuries, and some scholars will undoubtedly baulk at this inclusivity. Yet, the phrase has the benefit of embracing shifts in musical tastes and traditions that unite in carrying intellectual and generally genteel values through the time period under consideration here, 1870 to 1945. Jennifer Hall-Witt, Dave Russell, and Charles McGuire have variously indicated how during this period disparate elements of British society altered their perceptions of what constituted “serious,” “art,” or more “popular” music based upon such variables as current fashions and



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tastes, locations of performance, and class of performers and audiences.1 I use the phrase “classical music” to designate more consistent conceptions of the intellectual or moral overtones of opera, oratorios, symphonies, and chamber works despite their occasional rises and falls in popularity within certain social factions. This popular use of the phrase also has the benefit of a valid currency among eminent present-day musicologists and literary critics. Lawrence Kramer, for instance, uses “classical music” to signal a musical “conception regardless of its nominal style or genre” or even time period of composition (2011: 211). “From Mozart to modernism and beyond,” Kramer asserts, “classical music expresses the values of a cultural world now irrevocably lost,” a world that this study intends to excavate, if not completely to recover, for that would be an impossible task (205). Similarly, if in more specifically literary contexts, in Virginia Woolf and Classical Music, Sutton uses “the term colloquially, as a synonym for ‘art music’ rather than for a historical period or style” (2013: 5). More importantly still, the phrase “classical music” accurately connotes a widespread understanding of this type of music during the literary and cultural period that I consider, i.e. the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This will become clear throughout the following chapters, but I will cite two of my favorite examples here: in George Gissing’s Our Friend the Charlatan (1901: 138), May Tomalin wants to promote “classical music” that consists of the works of composers such as “Bach and Beethoven and so on.” Beethoven could fit comfortably into the contexts of eighteenth-century “classical” music, but Bach and “so on” stretch the category a bit further on either end, from the Baroque period up, say, to Wagner, at least.2 In 1940, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge even included “Gounod’s ‘Faust’ ” and “Verdi’s ‘Aïda,’ ” along with works by Chopin and Schubert in the category of popular “Classical music” that tended to be played in cinemas (1950: 237). Kramer, Sutton, Gissing’s Tomalin, Graves, Hodge, and I, although all coming from different conceptual angles, conceive of classical music, with its popular or colloquial connotations, as a form of music that expresses intellectual, social, emotional, spiritual, and culturally valued traditions in a sustained yet variable fashion. Consequently, in this study, classical music will designate European music that the general populace associated—without necessarily confusing unique strands of French or German or Italian style or genres—with distinctive intellectual, philosophical, social, and cultural traditions that were not associated with more popular, ephemeral, and often simpler pub songs, music hall patter songs, and drawing-room tunes. To be sure, these traditions varied both diachronically and synchronically. Listening to Wagner in the late-nineteenth century, as Sutton has demonstrated

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in Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (2002), had specific resonances with decadence, even as Wagner could be associated, as Ford indicates in Memories, with the rational recreation movement in the Edwardian period. These connotations, as I explore them in Chapter 5, differed from those involved while listening to Wagner during World War I and II. While I am sensitive to these variations in my analysis throughout, I find that this loose, inclusive, yet historically accurate definition has the further benefit of allegorizing the blurring, although by no means the abandoning, of cultural connotations, nationalist ideologies, and British social classes that occurred through diverse subcultures’ engagements with classical music. How this relatively open-ended fusion of musical and cultural history both influenced and was influenced by British literature, including but extending well beyond literary modernism, from the years (roughly) of 1870 to 1945 is the subject of this book. The year 1870 offers a useful starting date for this study from both literary and more broadly cultural perspectives. This year transitioned into the decade when Walter Pater’s literary career, with its varied musical resonances, really gained ground, energizing British aestheticism and its literary successors. 1870 also provides a useful starting point as the last thirty years of the nineteenth century witnessed a series of watershed events that publicized Britain’s increasingly musical society and that proved influential for British culture as a whole. As Gordon Cox has shown in A History of Music Education in England, 1872–1928 (1993), the 1870s were an eventful time for the musical education of British children. Of key importance were the Elementary Education Act of 1870, which provided a major stepping stone towards universal education in England and Wales, and the revisions of the education code in 1872 and 1874 to include a one shilling financial incentive for teaching singing to lower-middle- and working-class students.3 Parliamentary efforts in the early 1870s advanced and publically institutionalized, if primarily symbolically, what Bernarr Rainbow in “The Rise of Popular Music Education in Nineteenth-Century England” (1986) and more recently Charles McGuire in his Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-Fa Movement (2009) have shown were extensive efforts from the mid-nineteenth century onwards to expand in conjunction musical and moral education in Britain. These educational advances, if not always as effective as reformers would have wished, nonetheless facilitated what Percy Scholes called the British “mania (and mania is not too strong a word)” for sight-singing, a nineteenth-century movement that taught thousands of amateurs to engage the oratorios and cantatas, for instance, of Handel and Mendelssohn (1947: 3).



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Board and Council schools further worked with groups such as the Maidstone Movement and the National Union of School Orchestras to promote students’ study of string instruments, mostly the violin. In the realm of advanced and adult education, in the late-nineteenth century patrons and teachers founded the Guildhall School of Music (est. 1880) and the Royal College of Music (opened 1883), which evolved out of the National Training School for Music (est. 1876). These London institutions supplemented the Royal Academy of Music (est. 1822). They were joined by Toynbee Hall, a settlement in London’s East End opened in 1884 by former Oxford students to provide opportunities for adult education for lower-middle and working-class individuals, which quickly grew to offer musical instruction and affordable concerts. At the University of Oxford itself, financially and socially privileged students likewise found an increasingly vibrant musical culture. Susan Wollenberg has detailed in Music at Oxford in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2001) the vast musical opportunities available to both the university and the town. The present book indicates how these opportunities were bolstered in the late-nineteenth century by Platonic theories of the benefits of a musical education and by aesthetes such as Walter Pater who consistently turned to music in his aesthetic criticism and fiction. Through the efforts of Benjamin Jowett and Pater, who re-imagined the importance of music in literary contexts, Oxford, rather than Cambridge or Britain’s musical academies, became a dominant influence on writers interested in musical tropes. Indeed, tracing the effect of Pater’s musical influence on the intellectual, social, and cultural interest of early-twentieth-century literature will be a thematic undercurrent throughout this book. Outside of educational institutions, opportunities to enjoy classical music likewise flourished. In London, as in Oxford, musical amateurs from increasingly diverse socio-economic backgrounds enjoyed affordable music in a variety of public contexts. There were popular and long-lasting concert series, for instance, such as the Queen’s Hall Promenade concerts, which began in 1895 and which continue today at the Royal Albert Hall. Varieties of classical music also thrived outside of London in both cities and more rural areas through performances offered by working-class brass bands and music festivals with diverse audiences and performers. With broader geographical influences, the formation of the British Broadcasting Company, founded in 1922, which became the British Broadcasting Corporation, chartered in 1927, greatly extended opportunities for musical education and enjoyment to countless more individuals. The BBC’s influence is unquantifiable, but Asa Briggs notes that from 1939 to 1945

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there were anywhere from 8,577,354 to 9,940,210 radio licenses in Britain and there were undoubtedly more listeners than license holders (1995: Appendix B). The BBC, especially, provided an invaluable outlet for European music from the late 1920s onwards, most notably during World War II. As classical music became more of a public commodity across all classes in the twentieth century, issues of music, sexuality, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism became common, often interrelated topics of concern. Frequently, the same-sex-desiring cultures that emerged in Britain were vilified via their associations with allegedly foreign and immoral cultural practices. Yet, at the same time, the increasing cultural status of European classical music in Britain offered a vital trope for same-sex-desiring individuals to present themselves as valuable both to diverse British factions and to a larger cosmopolitan culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Considering music and sexuality, then, offers a unique way to reconceive of a threatened and sometimes threatening cosmopolitanism in Britain as Germany became an increasingly powerful presence following its political unification in 1871. German music and musicians, like sexual dissidents, had a profound influence on British society during this period. Nicholas Temperley in “Xenophilia in British Musical History” (1999) and Meiron Hughes and Robert Stradling in The English Musical Renaissance 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music (2001), among others, have underscored the importance of German and British relations both for the production of an international musical culture and for the rise of England’s own highly publicized musical resurgence from the late-nineteenth century onwards, often called the “English Musical Renaissance.” Recently, Michael Allis in British Music and Literary Context (2012) has convincingly demonstrated the fertile relationship between nineteenth-century British music and literature. Yet, while certain twentiethcentury writers such as Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Lord Berners, and Virginia Woolf had personal connections to English composers—Berners was a composer himself and friends with Constant Lambert and William Walton, and Woolf was close to the composer Ethel Smyth and acquaintances with Hubert Parry’s family—most literary representations of music in this period focus on Italian, French, and particularly German musical traditions, rather than on English or even British ones. This is true even in literary work by Berners and Woolf. This predominance of German musical traditions in British cultural and literary contexts will guide the themes and the authors studied throughout the following chapters as I argue that the shifting relationships among music, education, sexuality, and nationalism, previewed in Forster’s The



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Longest Journey and Ford’s Memories and Impressions at the beginning of this introduction, greatly extended the intellectual contexts and the respectability of (largely German) classical music in British culture. These relationships, as I will show, were re-imagined, both sympathetically and critically, in a wide variety of British literature up through World War II. As we will see, receptions of classical music provide a fairly consistent, if ever widening, aesthetic bridge from the 1870s to the mid-1940s, one which allowed cosmopolitan, liberal, and humanist traditions to span the cultural divide instantiated by early modernism and World War I. The year 1945, then, provides a reasonable stopping point, as post-World War II British culture, politics, and economics substantially shifted. Kenneth Morgan has demonstrated the drastically changed political and economic situation of Britain in Britain Since 1945: The People’s Peace (2001) and Steven Connor in The English Novel in History: 1950–1995 (1996) has convincingly demonstrated the effect of Britain’s post-World War II history, culture, and politics on English literature produced after 1945. It would take another book to analyze the social, literary, and musical changes and continuities in the post-war period and I will not attempt that here. Nonetheless, in scholarship, as in romance, not all dates please all people. If readers disagree with the reasons I have offered for the dates I have chosen, I hope it will gratify them to see that these dates serve more as signposts than as barriers and that I slip past them in limited, yet necessary circumstances. Britain’s musical culture from about 1870 to 1945, then, I will argue, symbolized and facilitated the expansion of education and revaluations of socio-economic, sexual, and political identities in Britain. A key feature of my argument throughout this book will be that this culture also opened aesthetic possibilities for debating this liberalization in diverse forms of literature. Cultural critics, for instance, began to use an appreciation for European classical music as a trope for asserting or critiquing the intellectual, the moral, and the cultural value of diverse social groups. In literature published after the nineteenthcentury Education Acts (1870–1902), which expanded educational opportunities for all classes, David Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget” of 1910, which increased taxes for the super-rich, and the Parliament Act of 1911, which curtailed the power of the House of Lords in favor of the House of Commons, authors used classical musical culture as an often non-inflammatory means to discuss the potential for Britain to benefit from such increasingly liberal social developments. If individuals could appreciate the complexities of classical music, many writers reasoned, they probably had the erudition and the moral virtues

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necessary to benefit from increased social support and consequently to become more fully enfranchised and useful members of society. Finally, during the years 1914–18 and 1939–45, the relationship between musical appreciation and social virtues took on a noticeably cosmopolitan resonance as writers and audiences recalled that much of the music that had bolstered British cultural identities for well over a century had German origins. During and between the years of World War I and World War II, authors recalled the enormous impact of German music on myriad facets of British society to emphasize both the estrangements and, predominantly, the connections between the more liberal, peaceful elements of British and European cultures. Despite the changing cultural contexts of World War I and II, a cosmopolitan musical humanism remained remarkably consistent. I have tried to emphasize, and perhaps for some readers I have even overemphasized, Britain’s historical musical culture between 1870 and 1945. Still, for scholars who specialize in early-twentieth-century literary contexts and criticism, my arguments pertaining to the liberally reformist associations of classical music, cultural history, and British literature of this period might seem forced. Some of the more famous passages pertaining to music from the relevant late-Victorian and modernist literary canon might even seem to support this perspective due to their apparent disinterest in specific social reforms and preference for an ahistorical transcendent sublime, one which manifested an aesthetic elitism that was relatively new to the twentieth century. Authors such as Walter Pater, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, to name three particularly canonical examples, appear to acknowledge that music has something to do with humanity, but only in the vaguest transcendental or metaphysical sense, somewhat akin to Rickie Elliot’s musical mental meanderings. In The Renaissance (1888), for instance, Pater writes that “[a]ll art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” because “the mere matter” of an art object, “the actual circumstances of an event,” really “should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling” (1980: 106). Citing this passage, critics have long taken Pater’s interest in music as evidence of his preference for abstract transcendental forms through which to transmit a vague humanist ideal, a critical trend that I address in more depth in Chapter 1.4 Similarly, in “Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets (1943), Eliot writes of a music perceived so intensely that “it is not heard at all” and suggests that “you are the music” (1971: 5.27–8). One hears music so intensely that one does not hear it: this is a metaphysical musical paradox. Although music has here an intimate relation to life—“you are the music”—Eliot appears reluctant to articulate the specifics of it.



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Woolf, too, at times, could appear substantially vague in her musical intentions. In her autobiographical “Sketch of the Past,” she suggests that Shakespeare and Beethoven present an ordered truth in a chaotic world: “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet 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 ” (1985: 72). A Shakespeare play or a Beethoven quartet is a wonderful image for ordering the world into some transcendental or essential truth. Still better is the suggestion, resonant with Eliot’s, that “we are the music,” as this evokes a fundamental human harmony. Yet, Woolf ’s language remains ambiguous: what, we might well ask, is “the thing itself ”? The musical tropes of these writers all seem to evoke transcendental or even hieratic values that remain distanced from historical, socio-economic, and political contexts. The obscurity, the hieratic mystery, and even the intellectual pleasure of such passages stem from two key influences, which currently guide most critical engagements with music and British literature from the early-twentieth century. Nineteenth-century theories promoting an aesthetic sublime essentialism are one such influence. As Carl Dahlhaus explains in The Idea of Absolute Music, “[i]n the esthetics of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, i.e., the reigning theory of art in the second half of the [nineteenth] century, music was considered to be an expression of the ‘essence’ of things, as opposed to the language of concepts that cleaved to mere ‘appearances’ ” (1991: 10). One notable formulation of this concept was Wagner’s description of the “inexhaustibly expressive power of Symphonic Melody,” which he supplemented with theatrics in his Gesamtkunstwerke (1907: 337). Pater’s praise of music as a “consummate art” and Woolf ’s early observation that certain “exalted emotions, which belong to the essence of our being, … are those that are best translated by music” in her discussion of Wagnerian opera in “Impressions at Bayreuth” (1909) reveal the influence of popular theories that music could signify some consummate sublimity or transcendental essence (Pater 1980: 106; Woolf 1986: 1.290). Eliot’s aesthetic transcendence in Four Quartets, meanwhile, connects his religious mysticism to a musical sublime that was powerfully affected by nineteenth-century fascinations with the metaphysical connotations of Beethoven and Wagner, connotations of which F. O. Matthiessen and David Fuller have demonstrated that Eliot was aware.5 The hieratic obscurity associated with music and literature of this period congruently stems from attempted structural connections between these two arts. These potential connections influenced many modernists who hoped to

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achieve a transcendental formalism by imitating musical structures in writing. These inter-art experiments have subsequently fascinated critics of modernist British literature, particularly those in the field of word and music studies, who frequently focus on the aesthetic effects of such compositions. Calvin Brown in Music and Literature (1948), Werner Wolf in The Musicalization of Fiction (1999), Brad Bucknell in Literary Modernism and Musical Aestheticism (2001), and Alan Shockley in Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel (2009) have helpfully sought to explain the innovative relationships between sound and sense, counterpoint and prose, and opera and avant-garde narrative arcs in the British tradition. Many of these critics do consider some historical cultural references alongside formal elements of twentieth-century literature and music. Several previous volumes, such as Daniel Melnick’s Fullness of Dissonance (1994) and Emma Sutton’s Virginia Woolf and Classical Music (2013), have likewise begun to extend the study of music and early-twentieth-century literature by attending more closely to wider political, social, and economic influences. Yet, even when these critics refer to pertinent cultural, political, and social histories, there has been an inclination to emphasize modernist authors who overtly incorporate musical structures into their writing and these writers’ concern with aesthetic forms. This tendency has directed, and fruitfully so, the critical discussion of music and twentieth-century literature towards modernist or avant-garde authors and their preoccupation with aesthetic techniques that seek to create a sublime, philosophic, and erudite aesthetic for elite or relatively rarefied audiences. Consequently, for early-twentieth-century British literature, critical focus has centered overwhelmingly on T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf. In this study, I explore most of these authors and their uses of classical music, but I tell a different story, which has a few more characters. I am less concerned with a musical sublime, inter-art experimentation, and a modernist aesthetic formalism. Rather, I argue that from the late-Victorian period through the early-twentieth century, a surprisingly wide array of British authors from varied socio-economic backgrounds appropriated Britain’s classical musical culture as an aesthetic trope. Rather than simply mirror this culture, they used this trope to encourage and to critique how diverse elements of British society pursued generally liberal advances in education, sexual diversity, and a popular cosmopolitanism. While excellent work has been done in this vein for nineteenth-century British literature, there is much to discover by exploring early-twentieth-century canonical, popular, and even more cultish



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writers in their musical contexts, contexts which included the social upheavals of two world wars. This literature, I demonstrate, which includes but is not limited to that produced by modernist writers, depicts how classical music signaled intellectual, moral, and social vitality for five particularly musical subcultures: nationally influential, relatively liberal cultural critics centered in late-nineteenth-century Oxford; educated middle-class literati; ambitious lowermiddle and working-class individuals; same-sex-desiring men and women; and European cosmopolitans. By emphasizing these diverse yet interrelated subcultures and the myriad writers who depict them, we can uncover mutual influences among literature, classical music, and social reforms. Consequently, my focus on these five musical subcultures guides the structure of, and the source material used for, this book. I use each chapter to concentrate on the historical and musical contexts of one subculture rather than on several brilliant but fairly idiosyncratic authors. To achieve these ends, I engage a broad new historicist perspective merged with recent advances in social and cultural historicism. For each chapter I consider a range of what Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt might call “[m]ajor works of art,” “literary works regarded as too minor to deserve sustained interest,” but which are nonetheless interesting, and “texts that have been regarded as altogether nonliterary,” but which can fruitfully enrich our understanding of relevant cultural contexts (2000: 9). In so doing, I keep in mind Ruth Solie’s warning against a scholarly approach that looks “too exclusively to professionals (composers, scholars, music critics) for its evidence, thereby unwittingly missing the unspoken information about music and musical experience that is most central to a culture” (2004: 2). Throughout I have followed the culturally sensitive lead of advocates of a “new musicology” and scholars of literary representations of music both of whom have recently taken what Phyllis Weliver and Katharine Ellis call a “historical and archival turn” (2013: 11). A mixture of cultural studies, literary criticism, literary historicism, and musicology, my work draws on Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff ’s argument that “[f]iction is a natural (though not unproblematic) interpreter of cultural meaning” and that “in our attempts to understand the cultural contexts of music as fully as possible, we may turn to it as a ‘folk’ documenter of music historiography—not in a technical or even accurate sense, but to elicit information about what music meant to its performers and listeners (often also members of the novelists’ own audience)” (2004: xiv). As such, I examine the literary technique of my fictional sources, but still more so how literature engages with history and culture through music. This methodology enables me to consider the unifying trends as well as the idiosyncrasies of educators, musicians, critics, modernists, popular

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fiction writers, autobiographers, all-but-anonymous writers of letters to public newspapers and journals, and writers, often quite good ones, with limited readerships, all of whom represent the intellectual and moral force of music in their writing. In branching out in diverse directions, I realize that I may be faulted for being either overly inclusive or overly exclusive. I have emphasized twentieth-century British writers interested in classical music, but important figures are left out, such as Edith Sitwell, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. I leave these authors out with the knowledge that readers interested in music and their work will find extensive studies of them in almost any university library. In their place, however, I offer Katharine Burdekin, A. T. Fitzroy, Beverley Nichols, and Reginald Underwood, to name just four literary figures unjustly overlooked in the twenty-first century. Overall, I have tried to choose representative British authors whose works fit into my investigation of these five particularly musical subcultures but also authors whose writing I enjoy and find it profitable to linger over. This expansive approach could also, perhaps, be faulted for not attending exhaustively enough to the full literary craft of each work it considers or the biographical life-long aesthetic projects of each author, as scholars frequently do who focus on one or even several remarkable authors. But as Emily Petermann has suggested, there is a benefit to focusing on the “salient musical elements” of a “large group” of novels rather than attempting “a complete analysis of any individual novel” in order to construct a coherent argument that applies to a significant body of texts (2014: 6). Regula Hohl Trillini has likewise evidenced the value of pursuing what she calls “a theme and its variations” across a wide expanse of literature to establish “a continuity of attitudes and of representational patterns” while identifying how similar “tropes and conventions” can “interact with social and genre history” (2008: 10–11). Trillini admirably covers a breathtaking expanse of texts dealing with domestic music making and gender extending over three centuries. I narrow my time period to an expanse of less than a century in order to explore in more depth a smaller range of texts. Following in the footsteps of these scholars, I submit that there is also room in literary criticism for a vein of scholarship that analyzes an extensive body of literature to trace a history of cultural ideas and thereby evidence their widespread influence across the work of not just several but of myriad authors who advance interrelated cultural themes. An extensive diversity of sources, what I call a thickly layered breadth, does then, I think, have several intellectual benefits. I consider novels, poetry, plays, and more eclectic forms of writing that resonate, conflict, and otherwise engage,



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obliquely or directly, the lived experience of Oxonian critics, modernists, working-class autodidacts, same-sex-desiring individuals, and British cosmopolitans trying to sustain their European loyalties in the midst of war. This diversity allows me to provide evidence for the importance of classical music not just for several authors, but for larger subcultures. This diversity also allows me to consider a nexus of perspectives that evolve over time. The authors I discuss fall along a continuum from economically and politically conservative to socialist. Yet, with varying degrees of skepticism, sophistication, and naïveté, almost all of these writers promote evolving classical musical traditions as an apparatus for social and personal enrichment. These writers indicate how an appreciation for classical music symbolized a certain intellectualism. It symbolized an understanding of complex sign systems, formal arrangements of sounds, and how to concentrate; the moral virtues of thoughtful practice, hard work, and social harmony; and, finally, a stake in the achievements of European culture. These writers, then, represent an appreciation of classical music not so much as a hieratic or abstract aesthetic response, but as a litmus test for distinguishing what Pierre Bourdieu calls “educational” or “cultural capital,” a type of knowledge that places one within and allows one to more easily navigate through society (1984: 13–14). This is to say, writers in this period fashioned the engagement of individuals or communities with classical music into a sign of their cultural legitimacy, of their intellectual and social right to share and to help to direct British culture. The majority of these writers agreed that an appreciation of classical music signaled such a legitimacy, even if they disagreed over how, exactly, this legitimacy should function and over who, precisely, might benefit from it. Studying these writers, then, helps to determine how myriad socio-economic classes and sexual dissidents used European classical music for the common goal of establishing their cultural distinction. To be sure, not every member of the subcultures I explore found the same intellectual and social pleasures in classical music. Nonetheless, with this qualification in mind, I hope to demonstrate the pervasive and even the popularly reformist associations of classical music within British literature and society during this period. Indeed, one of my overriding goals, as I note above, is to demonstrate how varied were the communities who used classical music and literature to engage in debates over education, social mobility, sexuality, and European cosmopolitanism. As such, I have arranged this book so that each chapter, if read alone, offers an analysis of how authors used classical music to characterize the intellectual and social advancement of a specific subculture. Read together, these chapters present

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the multifaceted connections between classical music and cautious, sometimes limited, liberal advances in Britain from 1870 to 1945. I begin this study by examining late-nineteenth-century intellectuals, educators, and authors who increasingly succeeded in refuting charges that music was a socially suspect art by promoting classical music as culturally beneficial and genteel. In Chapter 1, “The liberalization of music in aesthetic literature: Pater and Oxford,” I argue that such authors, particularly those working in Oxford, a nerve-center for Britain’s scholastic and literary production, employed music as an elevated trope for forming an educated, tolerant, and morally harmonious society. In Chapter 2, “Modernism’s distinctive musical rhetoric: Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf,” I demonstrate how early-twentieth-century middle-class literati intensify the intellectual connotations of classical music, but appropriate tropes of attaining gentility and social advancement through music for their own benefit. I present a counter-perspective to this exclusivist rhetoric in Chapter 3, “The musical refinement of society’s margins: Bennett, Burke, Lawrence, and their contemporaries,” by exploring how Britain’s expanding musical culture offered popular, at times consciously anti-modernist authors aesthetic opportunities to assert the intelligence and the refinement of more marginalized musical amateurs. In Chapter 4, “Distinguishing a musical homoeroticism: Pater, Forster, and their aesthetic descendants,” I examine how myriad British writers capitalized upon Britain’s increasingly musical society and worked to legitimize and to validate same-sex-desiring individuals by portraying them as particularly musical. These first four chapters indicate how, from the latenineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, British society and British writers frequently used German music to characterize British cultural identities. In Chapter 5, “Classical music, cosmopolitanism, and war: From authors to audiences,” I consider how, in the midst of increasing commercial rivalries, political tensions, and military hostilities, Britain’s cosmopolitan musical culture offered authors a non-incendiary trope for discussing the complex relationship between Britain and Germany. This chapter evidences how myriad facets of early-twentieth-century British society continued to embrace German classical music as part of British and European culture, which allowed for a significant continuation of late-Victorian cosmopolitan and humanist traditions in Britain through the interwar period and World War II. Finally, I offer a brief literary coda, a conclusion that recapitulates the liberal humanistic legacy embodied in Britain’s musical culture that extends from Pater’s neo-Platonic ideals presented in the 1870s to W. H. Auden’s cautiously optimistic revitalizations of these ideals in his “New Year Letter,” written in 1941.



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Notes 1 See Hall-Witt (2007: 52–3), Russell (1997: 9–10), and McGuire (2009: 51–3). 2 See, for instance, Charles Salaman’s comparable definition of classical music, which includes composers from Purcell (1659–95) to Wagner (1813–83) to William Sterndale Bennett (1816–75), in “Classical Music” (Musical Times (April 1879): 200–3); see also the general definition of “classical” in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which notes that this term is “used of works which have held their place in general estimation for a considerable time, and of new works which are generally considered to be of the same type and style,” although Grove’s does note that the term can have more specialized connotations (Grove 1907: 1.547). 3 See Cox (1993: 20–1). 4 See, for instance, Herzog (1996: 129–30). 5 While Eliot’s early poems, such as “Opera” (c. 1909), undermine a Wagnerian Romanticism, he seems to have reconsidered his position in his composition of The Waste Land (1922), which relies on Wagnerian references for some of its metaphysical force. For Eliot’s interest in Beethoven and Wagner, see Matthiessen (1935: 90) and Fuller (2011: 136–40).

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The liberalization of music in aesthetic literature: Pater and Oxford

By the late-nineteenth century, as the introduction indicates, Britain’s musical culture was thriving. To justify and to encourage this success, authors, composers, and cultural critics pushed against traditional stereotypes that music was, as Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield insisted in the eighteenth century, an “illiberal” pleasure (Chesterfield 1946: 97). From the early 1870s, H. R. Haweis, Arthur Sullivan, and John Ruskin began to argue strenuously that classical or art music, designations encompassing myriad forms of instrumental and vocal music, could function not only as an unruly influence, but as an intellectual, respectable, and relatively liberalizing social cohesive. These public figures joined countless educators, such as John Hullah and John Curwen, who had suggested since the mid-nineteenth century that music could unite divisive social factions through common moral pleasures and, on occasion, could obtain a limited cultural legitimacy for marginalized individuals. These writers, artists, and educators indicate how musical amateurs, even those with diverse professional interests, used music to promote social unity, education, and more liberal forms of morality in late-nineteenth-century Britain. In late-nineteenth-century Oxford, Britain’s musical culture merged with its literary culture in a particularly productive fashion. At the university, literaryminded intellectuals, such as Benjamin Jowett and Walter Pater, drew on and stimulated Britain’s musical interests by connecting them to philosophic and to non-musical aesthetic contexts. Jowett’s and Pater’s interest in Platonism, for instance, an important facet of Oxford’s influential Literae Humaniores or “Greats” curriculum, highlighted connections among music, philosophy, and civic reforms. As Plato interspersed his dialogues with theories of music, Oxford’s neo-Platonism advanced an intellectual musical Hellenism. Oxford’s music faculty, as Susan Wollenberg has shown, bolstered these intellectual

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contexts by concurrently increasing the academic requirements for degrees in music.1 New local concert series correspondingly arose that linked educational and social pleasures.2 Reflecting these trends, Jowett, in his translations and critiques of Plato, and Pater, in his fiction and aesthetic criticism, promoted music as means to inspire intellectual and harmonious societies. Pater, in particular, refashioned music as a modern literary trope for the best that British aestheticism had to offer: intellectual and artistic inquiries and a morality that tolerated, at least theoretically, social and sexual diversity.

To “ennoble and fortify”: Defining a musical idealism Early in his career, Pater placed music at the center of his liberal humanist aesthetic. In 1877, he published “The School of Giorgione” in The Fortnightly Review and later added the essay to the 1888 edition of The Renaissance, a foundational text for late-Victorian aestheticism. While his nominal subject is the painter Giorgione, Pater outlines here his own aesthetic ideal by declaring that “[a]ll art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” This is because, he explains, “in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.” Music is Pater’s “consummate art” because it comes closest to obliterating “matter” and “form” through their “interpenetration,” the one into the other (1980: 106, 117). The motivations for this musical ideal warrant investigation as they offer fresh insight into the “interpenetration” of Britain’s aesthetic culture and late-Victorian social and educational reforms. By setting this aesthetic dictum alongside Pater’s and his contemporaries’ recurrent references to Platonic theories of harmony and to late-Victorian musical culture and education, we can see how music came to symbolize a more intellectual, tolerant society and how Pater shaped the precedent for musical references in much early-twentieth-century literature. Despite his detailed musical interests, most critics generally overlook Pater’s precise use of music to promote an intellectual social harmony. In 1877, W. H. Mallock used his The New Republic, a roman-à-clef satire, to mock Pater’s musical tropes. Mallock’s Paterian Mr. Rose advises that “the aim of culture” is “to make the soul a musical instrument, which may yield music either to itself or to others … and the more elaborate a man’s culture is, the richer and more composite can this music be.” Rose offers, actually, a nicely developed musical metaphor for the educational potential of culture. But Mallock reports that



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Rose’s “dreamy manner always tended to confuse” certain of his auditors (1878: 192). As so often with Pater, his musical aestheticism gets labeled as vaguely and confusingly idealistic. Subsequent commentators interested in Pater and music echo Mallock’s critique. These critics focus primarily on “Giorgione” and allege Pater’s predilection for vagueness and obscurity. In 1887, J. A. Symonds criticized Pater’s “questionable notion that the fine arts in their most consummate moments all aspire toward vagueness of intellectual intention” (1890: 186). In 1901, Ernest Newman, a prominent music critic, suggested that “if Pater argues that the highest art is that which resembles music in its vagueness,” this was because “Pater’s brain was more susceptible to vague than to specialised artistic emotion” (1901: 301). Both men impugn Pater’s sense of music and his intellectual aestheticism. With more philosophical sophistication and sympathy, twenty-first-century critics often praise Pater’s vagueness, typically in the context of its resonance with late-nineteenth-century theories of the sublime and an aesthetic plenitude or transcendence. Brad Bucknell has written of “a certain vagueness” in Pater’s musical ideal of plenitude and Angela Leighton observes an “abstraction or distraction from sense” in Pater’s admirably timeexpanding musical prose (Bucknell 2001: 47; Leighton 2005: 72). These assessments of Pater and music, however, frequently emphasize “Giorgione” or The Renaissance. More recent work by Andrew Eastham and Elicia Clements has begun to recoup Pater’s more sensual and subtle political contexts by investigating “Giorgione” in light of Pater’s larger musically interested oeuvre. Eastham investigates Plato and Platonism (1893) in terms of soundscape theory to identify Pater’s interest in music as a means to fulfill “the Utopian aspirations of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement,” but also to note Pater’s “anxiety about the public and political implications of aesthetic organicism,” which could be highly coercive to the individual (Eastham 2011: 32, 34). Examining Marius the Epicurean in terms of spatial sonorities, Clements has argued that Pater uses “spatio-aural circumstances” to delineate particular types of communities; this makes music, as she argues elsewhere, “an active art form,” if indirectly and subtly (2010: 158; 2011: 6). These critics make clear that Pater’s use of music was more culturally aware and active than his critics frequently take him to be. Indeed, Pater emphasizes the importance of retaining identifiable aesthetic subjects, particularly in literature. As he observes in “Giorgione,” an “ideal” musical poetry blends its form and matter “without a deduction of something from that matter” and only “appears to depend, in part, on a certain suppression

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or vagueness of mere subject” (1980: 108). He clarifies the relationship between appropriate subject matter and aesthetic greatness in his 1888 essay “Style,” a companion to the 1888 re-publication of “Giorgione.” In “Style,” he argues that literature fulfills the requirement of “[g]ood art” by imitating musical principles. But to be “great art,” he argues, the “matter” of “literature at all events” must also work for “great ends,” it must “be devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other” so that it “may ennoble and fortify us” (1901: 38). Pater connects these traits of “great art” to musical contexts in both his Plato and Platonism and his Imaginary Portraits, wherein he depicts music with literary tropes that push quite clearly for social reforms, for intellectual freedoms and honesty, for humanistic moral codes, and, correspondingly, for toleration of sexual diversity. He depicts, further, this musicality within specific contexts analogous to those found in late-nineteenth-century Britain, namely those pertaining to community building and to education. He refines thereby what his critics have considered his “aristocratic” tendencies by connecting them to relatively egalitarian attempts to enlarge the social sympathies of the general public.3 Reimagining, then, contemporary social, intellectual, and moral applications of music, Pater uses music as an ennobling subject in his own “great art” to encourage an enlightened, liberal, and more tolerant society.

“good music”: Music, education, and gentility in nineteenthcentury Britain To understand Pater’s and his contemporaries’ use of music to call for a new liberal, at times subversive, social humanism, we should note the revitalized status of music in late-nineteenth-century Britain. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, music held a reputation as a bohemian extravagance or an arcane hobby, barely fit for the educated upper classes. In 1774, Lord Chesterfield cautioned that performing music “puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light” and “brings him into a great deal of bad company”; if an English gentleman must have music, he should “pay” musicians, as servants, to play for him (1946: 97). The gentleman must not, however, engage too closely with music or he will make himself vulnerable to charges of ungentlemanly, perhaps even unmanly, behavior. Analogously, affluent parents of eighteenthcentury musical amateurs, Cyril Ehrlich has suggested, were “unlikely to



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encourage their offspring to confuse a minor social accomplishment with a potential career,” although for poorer individuals music could offer a means to “social elevation” (1985: 6, 32). Even for many mid-nineteenth-century amateurs, a “[c]onventional wisdom” dominated, which, as David Golby points out, “had long promoted the harmful dichotomy between the gentleman amateur scholar/theorist and the lowly musician devoid of a liberal education” (2004: 25). These genteel “scholar/theorist[s]” enjoyed music as an element of the medieval quadrivium, along with arithmetic, astronomy, and geometry, but, like Chesterfield, considered professional musicians to be socially suspect.4 In nineteenth-century Oxford, the reputation of music fared little better. Arthur Burns and Robin Wilson report that 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 violin was broken by an orange aimed at one of the performers, and around 1850 a chest of priceless viols in the Bodleian was burned since it was assumed to be dusty rubbish. (1985: 1–2)

Dogs disrupting musical events must have been a common problem, as the Oxford University Musical Union decreed as their 16th rule (out of 25) that “Dogs may not be brought into the Club Room” (Kemp 1904: 136). The Heather Professor of Music, moreover, endowed in 1627 by William Heather, retained a rather anemic existence. By the 1900s, Susan Wollenberg notes, the Professorship was “at the lower end of the scale of pay” and, consequently, music Professors were reluctant to spend their time teaching (2001: 134). The result was that the Professorship was held, as Grove’s Dictionary put it, as an impoverished “sinecure,” which scarcely helped the social, moral, or the intellectual standing of music (Grove 1907: 3.815).5 Yet, as instruments and scores became increasingly affordable in the nineteenth century, allowing for a greater interest in music, reformers legitimated this interest by arguing that music offered social, moral, and intellectual benefits. As Ehrlich observes, there evolved a “widespread adherence to two interconnected beliefs: that, given an appropriately genteel setting, music was a ‘highly respectabilising activity,’ and that it could and should be morally uplifting” (1985: 67). In his oft-reprinted Music and Morals, for instance, Haweis (1871: 50, 61) warns against “evil” uses of music but praised the “pleasurable, stimulating, or enervating ideas and fancies” inspired by dance music, martial

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music, religious music, and an “essentially moral” German classical music.6 Sullivan similarly exemplifies this trend by emphasizing the newfound respectability of music in British culture in an 1888 address (published in 1899) to the Birmingham and Midland Institute, an adult education settlement. He observes that, “since the days of that priggish nobleman, Lord Chesterfield, things have greatly changed.” As proof he cites how “Eton, Harrow, Rugby—all the great schools—have now their masters for music on the same footing as the other instructors” (Sullivan 1973: 274). Sullivan further asserts that one could “[g]o into the officers’ quarters in barracks” and “find pianofortes, violins, and violoncellos; and lying about there will be good music,” presumably played by the officers themselves. The “Duke of Edinburgh,” he divulges, “told me that he had a complete string quartette amongst the officers on board his ship—all these things point to a great reaction in the feelings of the professional classes towards music.” Music was extending beyond the limits of bohemianism and the arcane vestiges of the quadrivium and was considered worthy of serious, studied practice. Its growing respectability and popularity, moreover, Sullivan argued, led to more harmonious social interactions. As evidence, he reports that “[a]mateur societies flourish, which bring rich and poor together” (274). Music, Sullivan contends, had become an intellectual, liberalizing influence on diverse socio-economic classes. Sullivan identifies Britain’s growing musical culture but he employs a goodnatured hyperbole, which he nods to by admitting that key sections of British society had yet to accept the respectability of music. “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 snug satisfaction, like a man disowning poor relations.” He also acknowledges that some people still consider music “a mere family pastime, fit only for women and children” (275). For many of the upper and middle classes, music was still considered an appropriate interest for those who need not or could not concern themselves with more serious issues, such as governance or making money. Despite these limitations, Sullivan is right that music had made substantial progress from Lord Chesterfield’s day to 1888 (the year that Pater published “Style” and added “Giorgione” to The Renaissance), particularly in the field of education, which led to more musical performers and listeners and to a more musical society. Masters in Britain’s public schools, for instance, had promoted music to their students as early as the 1860s. William Johnson, an assistant master of classics at Eton, reported to an education commission in 1862 that although there were few “volunteers” to study music, some boys did take lessons



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“from the organist at Windsor, a few from some of the singing men, and some practice the piano themselves” (Parliamentary Commission 1969: 153). Raising conventional concerns regarding music and class, H. Halford Vaughan asked Johnson whether, “bearing in mind the class of boys who receive their education at Eton, and their position in society,” he considered it “very desirable that more boys should learn one or the other of the arts of music, and drawing, in a [more] solid manner than they do now?” Johnson responded that “it would be very desirable” and recommended “a handsome salary” of about “500l a year” for a music master (154, 140). Johnson’s answer advocates a serious investment in advancing music in Britain’s most prestigious public school, an investment which was echoed in similar institutions.7 Johnson’s salary suggestion indicates, moreover, how the increasing respectability of music could blur certain class distinctions. Good musicians, with both a practical and theoretical knowledge of their subject, might command higher salaries, as well as more respect. J. T. Coleridge, an Old Etonian and an Oxfordeducated jurist, argued before the commission that “whenever a teacher has had a gentleman’s education he should be put on precisely the same footing as the regular assistants.” One commissioner, suspecting some semantic slipperiness in Coleridge’s phrasing, asked “[d]o you mean a university education?” Coleridge clarified 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” (Parliamentary Commission 1969: 191). Coleridge’s response reveals a broadening of Britain’s educational system and of the qualifications for being considered a gentleman. Music and art in general offered a means to raise one’s social and economic standing. If music was increasingly a path to attaining some degree of gentility, it is significant that elite schools were not alone in integrating it into their curricula. I consider lower-middle- and working-class engagements with music more fully in Chapter 3, but it is worth signaling briefly how musical training could benefit Britain’s more marginalized students. As Charles McGuire has demonstrated, since the mid-nineteenth century many proponents of Curwen’s Tonic Sol-Fa, a wildly popular method of teaching sight-singing aimed “predominantly at the working and middle classes,” attempted to use singing “to improve people’s lives,” “to make such individuals morally upright,” particularly in Dissenting terms, and to bring “the fruits of culture and civilization to a wider swath of society” (2009: xv). S. T. Hawtrey, an assistant master in mathematics at Eton, outlined the analogous merits of similar such singing lessons that he offered at a parochial school in nearby Windsor, which drew students primarily from the “working”

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and the “lower classes” (Parliamentary Commission 1969: 229). Hawtrey argued that a musical education provided these under-privileged students with a mind training as well as an acquisition of music. … Then, when they have acquired the power of reading music, and sit down to one of Handel’s or Mendelssohn’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. I speak with very great confidence upon this point, because I speak now after 18 years’ experience. (228)

Notably, Hawtrey describes “lower”-class students engaging with Handel and Mendelssohn, composers widely respected for their genius and their morality, to characterize these students as models of intellectual and moral acuity. He provided this account to support his efforts of teaching music at Eton, hoping that the Etonians might imitate his parochial students.8 Echoing the rhetoric of the Sol-Fa movement, then, Hawtrey promotes music as a means to advance the morality, discipline, and intelligence of all classes. Outside of educational institutions, Ruskin too supported music as a means to teach genteel intellectual and moral virtues. In a letter to the cork cutter Thomas Dixon, for instance, published in Time and Tide (1867), Ruskin drew on Hellenic traditions to promote such virtues: You do not perhaps know, though I say this diffidently (for I often find working men know many things 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 … 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 … And the action of the deceiving or devilish power is in nothing shown quite so distinctly among us at this day … 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. (1905: 17.368–9)

Discussing Ruskin’s extensive musical writing, Delia da Sousa Correa notes that Ruskin’s ideas on the moral and educational properties of music “connect



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significantly” with those of contemporary advocates, although his “emphasis on myth and Platonic theory” is “distinctively his own” (1999: 123). In his letter, Ruskin does implicitly acknowledge the degree to which music was becoming an “instrument of education” by admitting that even a cork cutter might have discovered the ancient, and perhaps even the modern, educational properties of the art. As we will see, moreover, in less than a decade Ruskin’s emphasis on Hellenism, myth, and music would find still greater resonance in Pater.9 Along then with Johnson, Hawtrey, Hullah, Curwen, and Sullivan, Ruskin worked to overturn stereotypes of music as a pursuit for arcane specialists, servants, or disreputable bohemians by emphasizing the social benefits of its calming, harmonizing, moral, and intellectual influences. Music, these men argued, was a means to bring education, morality, and gentility to all social classes.

An unmanly music?: The immoral imputations of music Although influential individuals, such as Sullivan, Haweis, Hawtrey, and Ruskin, praised the educational and moral benefits of music, some people continued to associate music with immorality and effeminacy. While this fear could be general, it was particularly connected to certain musical genres. Oratorios and cantatas seem rarely to have incited vicious passions, while the Italian opera, pub songs, and popular music hall songs maintained a reputation for dissipation and decadence.10 Certain ostentatious, early-nineteenth-century aristocratic men, for instance, perpetuated the stereotype of the opera house as a refined red-light district. These men attended performances primarily to “ogle,” as Jennifer Hall-Witt puts it, both ballet dancers and singers, and were infamous for paying “attention to the sexual allure of the female performers, not the music itself ” (2007: 188). Hall-Witt reports a mid-nineteenth-century tapering of this decadent atmosphere as Queen Victoria attended the opera exuding “good taste and propriety,” but traces of an operatic dissolution remained (203). In Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima (1886), for instance, when Hyacinth’s guardian chides him for spending time with Millicent, he responds, “[w]here should you like me to spend my evenings? At some beastly public-house—or at the Italian opera?” (116). Hyacinth evokes the popular disrepute of both venues to remind his guardian that he could do worse than to spend his time with Millicent. Correspondingly, Victorian authors frequently depicted women using music to ensnare men and to increase their social standing. Mary Burgan has shown how several authors portray the piano, particularly, as a tool for avaricious

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musical women. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), Burgan notes, Rosamond Vincy uses her musical abilities to “entice Lydgate [a doctor] into her web,” while in Jane Eyre (1847) Charlotte Brontë portrays Blanche Ingram performing with a “feverish virtuosity” as she courts the rich Mr. Rochester; demure Jane, conversely, “plays the piano only as well as a governess must” (Burgen 1989: 42, 53). The skilled pianist becomes an overly polished predator, while Brontë’s heroine has simply the limited artistic ambitions and lack of sensuous ostentation desirable in a governess, a wife, and a stepmother. Phyllis Weliver, moreover, points to shifting nineteenth-century perceptions of music and argues that authors and cultural critics generally divided female musicians into a familiar taxonomy of angels and demons, wherein “angels” ’ activities were governed by families, while “demons” pursued their own, extra-familial interests (2000: 58). The musicality of these strong or quasi-demonic women makes them disturbingly, for the time, talented and self-sufficient. Another insidious implication existed in the question of whether music was a gentlemanly, with an emphasis on “manly,” occupation for young men. Thus, to refer once more to the 1862 education commission, Lord Clarendon questioned Hawtrey as to whether the Eton boys “think it manly to learn music” and he asked if there was “no laughing” at music students “by the rest of the boys” (Parliamentary Commission 1969: 228). In this line of inquiry, as Derek Scott argues, Clarendon raises “fears about the effeminacy,” if not the outright erotic unorthodoxy, of music (2003: 38). Unsurprisingly, given his own interests, Hawtrey reported that there would be “[n]ot the least” amount of laughter, as if to indicate that the manliness of music was assured (Parliamentary Commission 1969: 228). If this was Hawtrey’s intention, he was overstating his case. Associations linking music to effeminacy, sensuality, and even homoeroticism circulated relatively widely in late-nineteenth-century literature among writers such as Oscar Wilde, Marc-André Raffalovich, and Robert Hichens, as I discuss in Chapter 4. Ruskin, too, while praising the intellectual and moral potentials of music, warned that music could, if misused, promote sensuous depravity. In his Queen of the Air (1869), he notes that music, “which of all the arts is most directly ethical in origin,” is 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 the voice of the obedience of angels, and the companion of the course of the spheres of heaven;



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and in her depravity she is also the teacher of perfect disorder and disobedience, and the Gloria in Excelsis becomes the Marseillaise. (1905: 19.344)

Music, Ruskin argues, can inspire heavenly harmonies or intemperate immoderate passions, such as the destructiveness of the French Revolution or even, as he suggests in The Cestus of Aglaia (1865–6), violence and immoderate sexuality, as in the “wanton purpose” of “modern opera” (1905: 19.80). The moral value of music, as Ruskin indicates, remained multivalent and in flux. The ambivalent morality of music, however, provided an opportunity for individuals interested in legitimating a suspect social liberalism. If music was becoming respectable, several of the allegedly dissolute traits still associated with music might assume symbiotically its new social, moral, and intellectual connotations. Jowett, for instance, indirectly yet pervasively through his translations of Plato and more directly as master of Balliol, and Pater in his Plato and Platonism and Imaginary Portraits, developed music as a trope for tolerating diversity within one social body by linking music to Oxford’s Platonic renaissance and to the liberalizing, sociable musical culture of the university and the town. Going further, Pater reimagined these musical contexts to valorize marginalized voices, a more honest intellectual tradition, sensuality, and homoeroticism. Music, therefore, which Pater considered a great stylistic and thematic unifier, came to offer a powerful trope for sanctioning cautious yet influential social liberties.

“divine harmony in mortal motions”: Music in the Platonic State From the 1850s onwards, Platonism became an increasingly important element of Oxford’s “Greats” curriculum, largely under the auspices of Jowett, master of Balliol College (1870–93), Regius Professor of Greek (1855–93), vice-chancellor of the university (1882–6), and Plato’s chief Victorian translator. As Plato’s cultural authority expanded, Platonic and, more broadly, Hellenic philosophies of music intersected with the intellectual, moral, and social aspects of Oxford’s musical culture.11 This may seem surprising given Plato’s well-known wariness of the arts and his declaration in The Republic that overly complex or sorrowful arts must be “banished” from his ideal city (1892: 3.3:399). Yet, while decrying the subversive potentials of music, Plato argues that some forms of music are integral to education and to political and moral stability. These arguments were re-emphasized by Plato’s late-Victorian translators and critics.

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As several late-nineteenth-century scholars noted, Plato endows the concept of μουσική (music) with a much wider range of connotations than those maintained by its English equivalent. For writers of Plato’s era, as Richard Nettleship observed, “music” connoted subjects such as “literature” of various genres, “dancing,” “rhythm,” as well as “singing,” measured intervals, and sequences of sound (1910: 79, 118–19).12 Plato, moreover, imbues music with such intense “sacred” powers that Jowett, in his “Introduction” to The Republic, suggested that the philosopher indulges in a “degree of exaggeration” regarding its prominence even for ancient Greeks (1892: liv). Plato certainly privileges music in The Republic as he bases the education system of his ideal city on its study. The training of youth, Plato argues, should consist of “two divisions, gymnastic for the body, and music for the soul” (1892: 3.2:376; I use Jowett’s translations). Plato subsequently promotes restrained musical modes associated with the god Apollo, which reinforce “the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character” and create “temperance in the soul,” while he censures “complexity” and “panharmonic” music associated with the satyr Marsyas, which encourage anarchic “license,” i.e. disorder and civic disruption (3.3:399–400, 3.3:404). Plato thereby endorses teaching divine Apollonian music to help citizens to be wise, spiritual, brave, and disciplined, notably anticipating many late-Victorian pedagogical reformers who used music to promote wisdom, morality, and discipline. Plato, however, places a more forceful emphasis on the capacity of music to affect citizens’ virtues in a practical, even physical fashion. As Pater remarks in Plato: 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. (1925: 71)

For Plato, music, with its broad and narrow connotations, promotes harmony among the spiritual, intellectual, and “gymnastic” or physical elements of life. Plato stresses both the intangible and tangible benefits of music because he considered that the musical movements of the heavens could influence musical education on earth, which in turn influences citizens’ behavior. In The Republic, Plato imagines the cosmos as divine planetary voices “hymning” in “harmony” to create a perfectly balanced accord that guides earthly movements



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down below (1892: 3.10:617). Plato repeats this idea in the Timaeus, where he describes how “harmonious” cosmic sounds can impart “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” (1892: 3.80). This “divine harmony in mortal motions” can help to temper physical, spiritual, and emotional excesses and to create a balanced harmonious existence. In The Republic, too, Plato’s ideal guardian for the 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” (3.3:412). A heavenly music, the music of the spheres, Plato argues, can balance the minds and the bodies of individuals by tuning them to a divinely natural state of being. These healthy earthly echoes of the harmony of the heavens create balanced and temperate citizens, whose intangible thoughts and tangible actions, sustain a stable and harmonious political state. A musical education, therefore, Plato argues, provides an aesthetic guide to recognizing and to correcting human deviations from a divine and natural harmony. The “rightly educated” citizen, he argues, can “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” (1892: 3.3:401–2). Plato intertwines, moreover, a good musical education with a moral critique by declaring that “neither we nor our guardians, whom we have to educate, can ever become musical until we know the essential forms of temperance, courage, [and] liberality” (3.3:402). As citizens work towards a musical state of existence, he insists, they must alter their faults to create an ethical aesthetic atmosphere by critiquing art and their world. This aestheticized existence can, likewise, help good citizens to educate others. Properly educated musical citizens consequently align the discordant society in which they live as closely as possible to the ideal harmony of the heavens.

The meeting of mind and matter: Musical culture in late-Victorian Oxford Plato’s insistence that music provides an intellectual and moral force for social harmony was not lost on Oxonian intellectuals. Jowett, for instance, drew inspiration from Plato and turned to music to unify the social and intellectual culture of Balliol. In his annotations to The Republic Jowett admits that “[t]he power

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of a simple and characteristic melody on the impressible mind of the Greek is more than we can easily appreciate,” but he suggests a modern equivalence, namely that “[t]he effect of national airs may bear some comparison with it” (1892: 1.3.liv). National airs, of course, were associated with the patriotic pride and moral fortitude that, as Linda Dowling argues, Jowett hoped to instill in his students as he prepared them to be Britain’s future “national and imperial leaders” through the study of Plato (Dowling 1994: 71). In 1885, moreover, Jowett put Plato’s musical theory into practice by persuading John Farmer, a Harrow music master who produced several song-books, to work at Balliol.13 According to Evelyn Abbott, who worked under Jowett, the master hired Farmer to make “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 cliques, each keeping apart from the others in shy or rude isolation” and Jowett hoped that music might bring together undergraduates from “different schools, different grades in society, and different homes” (Abbott 1897: 246–7). Abbott reports that although “as a student of Plato” Jowett had “been somewhat suspicious” of music, he hoped that “under the spell of Farmer’s enthusiasm” music might be “an elevating influence in education” (247). Jowett took from Plato what he found suitable, musically, and he personally purchased two new organs for the college hall and chapel to support Farmer’s efforts to unify and to harmonize such diversity of undergraduates as could be found at Balliol.14 Jowett also introduced the Sunday Balliol Concerts in 1885, despite some protests over a largely, although not entirely, secular public event on Sundays.15 The first concert included various chorales and instrumental works, such as the “Andante” from Haydn’s 16th Symphony and “Part of the Slow Movement” from Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” (Burns and Wilson 1985: 2). These concerts quickly became a popular social event among undergraduates generally and opened up Balliol Hall, temporarily, to a wider community.16 Jowett’s concerts were a liberal, humanistic innovation, as they helped to legitimize secular entertainment on Sundays; but they were also part of Oxford’s larger musical culture. While perhaps not as inspired by Plato as Jowett’s concerts, the university had experienced a growing musical culture since the 1850s. Wollenberg notes, for instance, that university “Commemoration celebrations had acquired the distinctive character of a musical festival from the early eighteenth century” and nineteenth-century celebrations benefited from “the increasingly important role” of several new “[c]ollege, as well as university, musical societies” (2003: 226, 242). Jackson’s Oxford Journal often reported on colleges’ extensive Commemoration week events, such as those held in 1875,



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which are generally representative of those held during the last quarter of the century.17 The Journal reports that Pembroke College “inaugurat[ed] the festivities by giving … a concert in the Hall, which was, as usual, beautifully decorated with flowers, and crowded to the very doors with a brilliant company.” As was common at this point, the college provided a miscellaneous program that ranged from part songs, such as “Come, boys! drink!,” to a piano duet from Schubert’s Rosamunde and Chopin’s “Polonaise in A major” (“Commemoration.” JOJ June 5, 1875: 5). The Clarendon Press Musical Society, the University Musical Club, and the Oxford Philharmonic Society all provided subsequent concerts, with the Philharmonic Society offering music by composers such as Sterndale Bennett, Liszt, and Mozart. These concerts, held in individual colleges and in university buildings, such as the Sheldonian, undoubtedly helped to rehabilitate music as respectably intellectual and socially worthwhile by bringing together students, academics, parents, and townspeople of all genders.18 Outside of Commemoration Week plenty of societies continued to promote the intellectual and social value of music, particularly classical music. The University Musical Club, the Oxford Choral and Philharmonic Societies, and the Oxford University Musical Union all offered a variety of music.19 Individual colleges boasted musical societies, run by undergraduates and often featuring professional musicians, which performed frequently in Trinity term in college quads for the public.20 Wollenberg explains that many “[n]ew universitybased 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,” which were increasing the respectability of classical music (2001: 143).21 At the university, for instance, Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley, Heather Professor 1855–89, expanded the Bachelor of Music examination so that it “tested not only advanced harmony and counterpoint (in up to five parts) but also music history, form, and set works” (102). Wollenberg argues that these “changes must have affected the way that the degree was perceived both within and beyond the University” (103).22 Overall, she reports, from “1856 to 1889” these changes took place amidst a “definite though irregular rise in the numbers of candidates” for music degrees (100). This “rise” increased the number of musicians in the city, which could then support more educational and pleasurable musical events. College concerts, in particular, alongside their educational benefits, provided opportunities for socializing in relatively informal, aesthetically appealing settings. “Barbara Bocardo,” the Aristotelian pseudonym of a Journal editorialist, emphasized the pleasurable circumstances of the college concert scene:

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Bocardo is glib, but her insouciant description emphasizes the social, at times almost decadent atmosphere surrounding college concerts. Music-loving students decorated quads for concerts with exotic trappings, including “Chinese lanterns,” “coloured lights,” and, on occasion, “fireworks” at the concert’s conclusion (“University Intelligence.” JOJ May 26, 1883: 5). Elements of aestheticism were alive and well at these concerts, at which certain undergraduates, such as those favoring colored lights and fireworks, seem to have followed quite closely Pater’s advice to “burn always” with a “hard, gem-like flame” (1980: 189). The rhetorically liberal aesthetic humanism and social mixing associated with Oxonian musical endeavors could extend to religious music, too. Although in the Victorian period many popular musical genres, such as cantatas and oratorios, were tied to religiously themed texts, many audience members could appreciate music and its textual accompaniments from a tolerant aesthetic perspective.23 An Oxford Choral Society concert in 1877, for instance, offered its audience both a protestant hymn by Mendelssohn and Rossini’s Stabat Mater. Noting this religious mélange, a reviewer observed that, while from one perspective these works have “nothing in common,” Mendelssohn being “a German and a Lutheran” and Rossini being “an Italian and a Roman Catholic,” nonetheless “[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 December 1, 1877: 8). This promotion of an aesthetic appreciation irrespective of creed could have been written by Pater himself. Indeed, Pater seems to have appreciated religious music with a similarly liberal aesthetic perspective. Violet Paget once recounted a visit to Pater and his sisters in Oxford in 1882 where they “all took a walk in the town” and then “heard the



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music at the Cathedral” as part of their leisurely excursion (in Seiler 1987: 100). Considering Pater’s spiritual aestheticism, his fondness for seeking musical sensations in ecclesiastical settings seems hardly surprising.24 Edmund Gosse attributed Pater’s interest in ecclesiastical art to his “haunting sense of the value of the sensuous emblem, the pomp of colour and melody, in the offices of religion” (in Seiler 1987: 185). The music in Oxford’s chapels and Cathedral would have provided Pater with ample opportunity to enjoy the sensuousness of religious melodies. Pater long maintained an interest in religious music and encouraged this interest in others. F. W. Bussell, Pater’s friend, Brasenose colleague, and an Oxford Bachelor of Music, told students that Pater had taken a “great delight” in the college chapel services, although he found himself “sometimes regretting that the ardour of singing which you showed in the Psalms, seemed to abate when you came to the Magnificat, to him above others, the Song of Songs.” Bussell further reported Pater’s desire to have introduced “music into [Brasenose’s] monthly mid-day celebration, from which he was never absent when resident in College” (in Seiler 1987: 179). This music would undoubtedly have provided one more “sensuous emblem,” to use Gosse’s terms, of the chapel service for all to have enjoyed. As in his life, in his writing Pater connects a broad spiritualism to his sensual appreciation of music. Similarly to Jowett, he enriches Hellenism, Christianity, and Europe’s musical culture by emphasizing their mutual, even interconnected, humanism. In Pater’s unfinished novel Gaston de Latour, for instance, Giordano Bruno, a monk turned pantheist, connects the music of the spheres to Christian hymns: “ ‘[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.” This musical blending causes Giordano to consider the “ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe” with “the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship and sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its sympathetic inhabitants” (Pater 1900: 311–12). Giordano expands the original import of both the “music of the spheres” and the best Christian hymns by associating them in a refining merger that recalls a liberal Oxonian merging of Hellenic and modern European cultures. As Giordano uses music to imagine sympathies between worlds and religions to discover a richer “intention” than could be discovered by the advocates of one culture alone, so Pater, as we will see, uses music to merge the sympathetic, yet often subversive, moral, intellectual, and social intentions that he found in Hellenism with those of his contemporary world to advance a tolerant modern humanism.

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Pater’s Platonism: Music’s moral steadfastness within flux As Pater’s “Giorgione” essay urges a sympathetic “interpenetration” between aesthetic “subject” and “form,” and Gaston interconnects Hellenism and Christianity, so in lectures given at Oxford (1891–2) and published as Plato and Platonism (1893) Pater advances interconnections of late-Victorian and Hellenic theories on music, intellectual honesty, and an ethical aestheticism.25 In Plato, for instance, Pater appropriates the philosopher as a prophet of his own humanistic ethical aestheticism. According to Pater, Plato “anticipates the modern notion that art as such has no end but its own perfection,—‘art for art’s sake.’ ” While this might seem to make art so self-involved as to be socially irrelevant, Pater insists that for Plato the “perfection” of art encompasses a practical significance. Pater’s Plato considers “the reality of beauty” to have “importance” within a “practical sphere” in life: “[t]he loveliness of virtue” can illuminate the ideal forms of “Temperance, Bravery,” and “Justice” and go beyond a “mere utility,” such as commercial marketability, to inspire admiration for and emulation of these virtues in an audience (1925: 268). Pater uses Plato to argue that art can temper extreme judgments, to help audiences to consider new ideas, and to encourage a form of justice moderated by new perspectives. Plato’s philosophy, as interpreted by Pater, anticipates the ideal aesthetic effects that Pater himself advocates in The Renaissance and in “Style,” namely a “multiplied consciousness” and a devotion “to the increase of men’s happiness” and “to the redemption of the oppressed” (1980: 190; 1901: 38). Throughout Plato, Pater stresses the role of music, in particular, in Plato’s harmonious, yet diverse, ideal society. Pater observes that in The Republic: The proper art of the Perfect City is in fact the art of discipline. Music (μουσική) all the various forms of fine art, will [sic] be but the instruments of its one overmastering social or political purpose, irresistibly conforming its so imitative subject units to type: they will be neither more nor less than so many variations, so to speak, of the trumpet-call. (1925: 275–6)

Music, in its broad Platonic sense, serves as a model for individuals to imitate so as to improve society on a “political” level, “conforming” individuals into one “type” or community, while simultaneously allowing for “variations” within that community. An aesthetic “discipline” enables balanced yet varied perspectives working towards one harmonious civic goal. This musical conception of unity amidst diversity echoes substantively Jowett’s reasons for starting the Balliol Concerts and for teaching Plato and, more indirectly, the reasons given



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by Sullivan, Hawtrey, and other nineteenth-century pedagogues for teaching music. Pater, however, focuses much more heavily on the material elements of Platonism to emphasize Plato’s insistence of the influence of music on a physical plane. Pater consistently turns to Plato’s insistence on the “reality of beauty,” in the “practical sphere,” manifested in “the virtues (‘Temperance, Bravery, Justice’) as a visible representation by human persons and their acts” on earth. The “visible” virtues of beautiful “persons” and “acts” embody, Pater argues, “the eternal qualities of ‘the eternal,’ ” as in the eternally divine music of the spheres, “[a]nd accordingly, in education, all will begin and end in ‘music,’ ” the earthly representation of this divine music (1925: 268). A Platonic musical education, moreover, Pater insists, will help one “to find, or be put into, and keep, every one his natural place”; but, not “like little pieces in a machine! … No, like performers” who help society to run with the moral harmony of a “perfect musical exercise” (273). Plato, as we observed, believed that the movements of the spheres had physical repercussion on earth. In Plato, Pater glosses this philosophy to present, perhaps somewhat idealistically, music as a model for imagining the “natural” variations in human wills, desires, and even behaviors acting in a harmonious concert together for social peace. Yet, Pater differs from Plato by using a seductive aesthetic concreteness to undermine the ancient philosopher’s censoriousness and preference for abstractions. Recalling Plato’s banishment of licentious artists, Pater wonders “what price would not the musical connoisseur pay to handle the instruments” that Plato “banished” for their “seductive” effects, to discover what “pleasure” they might offer (1925: 275). Pater works against aesthetic suppressions or coerciveness by imagining the physical benefits of what Plato derides as immoral forms of musical expression.26 He attempts thereby to “enlarg[e]” the “sympathies” (to borrow his terms from “Style”) of Plato’s objective ideal by fleshing out and liberalizing what constitutes a “perfect musical exercise.” Pater here, as throughout Plato, uses Platonism to further his own sensuously liberalizing humanistic ends. Perhaps, Pater implies, what Plato or society in general considers licentious had and still has certain social values. Pater also promotes this revised philosophy of Platonic music because, within a constantly changing existence, it offered him a tolerant, stable ideal. In his notorious “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, Pater observed that “[t]o regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought” (1980: 186).27 In Plato, he traces the lineage of this thought by elaborating on Heraclitus’ theory of a “Perpetual

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Flux,” Heraclitus’ belief in “currents of universal change, stealthily withdrawing the apparently solid earth itself from beneath one’s feet” (1925: 12, 15). These currents, Pater reports, cause the “disintegration” and “incoherency” that “are inherent in the primary elements alike of matter and of the soul” (15). Pater warns, nonetheless, that this definition of the Flux, although the most widely accepted, explains only part of Heraclitus’ 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)

Platonism, Pater asserts, including his own empirical neo-Platonism of “a later age,” reasserts Heraclitus’ conception of a “logical” musical “cosmos” to conceptualize a stable structure of the universe (18). A Platonic “music of the spheres” offers Pater a dialectic stability-in-inconstancy and unity-in-diversity by hypothesizing a natural, logically traceable and anticipatable, rhythmic order that exists within a nonetheless mutable universe. Following his Hellenic predecessors, Pater draws on conceptions of a musical “cosmos” to construct a stable objective foundation for his own liberal moral aestheticism. He uses Greek philosophy to argue that recognition of a consistent, logical, and natural diversity should inform any and 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 (ἀρχή) in the dominion of number everywhere, the proportion, the harmony, the music, into which number as such expands. (1925: 52)

Part of what Pater admires most in Platonism, as he conceives it, is its insistence on a musical morality—a just acceptance of diversity, of “unity in variety”— based upon the Pythagorean principle of a constant and objective numerical harmony: “for Pythagoras, for Plato and Platonism … is certainly a formal development of purely numerical laws: that too surely is something, independently of ourselves, in the real world without us” (53). Pater argues that music, through its dependence upon numbers, offers us an objective understanding of the world, one independent of human subjectivity. He uses this objective



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mathematical music, moreover, to underpin what he calls elsewhere in Plato “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 musical morality exists, Pater claims, regardless of cultural or even religious contexts and any philosophy must account for its constancy, including his own. From another perspective, however, Pater fashions his Platonism to align with a musical morality that he had previously outlined in “The Child in the House” (1878), his first Imaginary Portrait. In “Child,” as in Plato, Pater uses music to imagine a moral system based upon stable, objective criteria. The incipient aesthete Florian Deleal captures a starling and separates her from her offspring. As the birds 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” (Pater 2014: 90). This experience teaches Florian to perceive how his influence on another creature’s emotions can affect its nervous system thereby causing a physical reaction. He has upset the “sense of harmony” that can exist between a “soul and its physical environment” and consequently this relationship, which should work “like perfectly played music,” has become discordant and painful (87). Such a discordant pain, Pater suggests, can serve as an objective moral guide for individuals’ treatment of others. The pain or pleasure people cause works as a rational, stable indicator of their own accord or discord with the natural harmony of their fellow beings and their environment. Unwanted physical pain suggests immoral social disruptions, while pleasure, within reasonable, temperate bounds, is moral and hence a force for social justice and good. Taken to its logical conclusion, this moral system based upon harmonious pleasure and discordant pain works, much as did Pater’s longing for Plato’s banished instruments, to undermine any potential censoriousness or oppressive implications of Plato’s physically compelling moral music. Yet, while reacting against Plato’s censoriousness, Pater himself never advocated an excessive sensual license and in Plato he frames his physical musical morality with a rhetoric of temperance. Pater even advocates an inherently sensual music by representing Hellenic musical virtues, such as temperance, as tangentially aligned with Christian virtues: “Order, harmony, the temperance, which, as Plato will explain to us, will convince us by the visible presentment of it in the faultless person of the youthful Charmides, is like a musical harmony,—that was the chief thing Pythagoras exacted from his

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followers … temperance in a religious intention, with many singular scruples concerning bodily purification, diet, and the like” (Pater 1925: 57). A “visible presentment” of a musical “temperance” or “purification” meshes as well with Platonic and Pythagorean as with Christian tenets promoting bodily restraint and self-control. Pater further aligned a Hellenic musical moralism with Christianity by suggesting that both wanted the embodied soul to correspond to a divine harmonious heaven. Discussing influences on Plato, Pater writes that “if, according to his [Pythagoras’] philosophy, the soul had come from heaven, … so the arguments of Pythagoras were always more or less explicitly involving one in consideration of the means by which one might get back thither, of which means, surely, abstinence, the repression of one’s carnal elements, must be one” (57). A divinely inspired “repression” of desires for excessive physical pleasures, Pater argues, are Platonic and Pythagorean as well as Christian in character. While Pater himself maintained a strong faith in the value of Christian traditions, skeptically or liberally conceived, he perhaps also hoped that the echoes he emphasized between Platonism and Christianity would make his refined aestheticism more reputable in intellectual circles, such as those represented by Jowett, which tried to effect similar reconciliations between contemporary religion and ancient philosophy.28 Pater’s notions of “temperance” and “abstinence,” however, are much more welcoming of sensuality than those expressed by Plato, Jowett, or many more prudish Victorians. Thus, while at times in Plato Pater seems to promote creeds similar to those of the moral majority of his day, he often qualifies these creeds until he has endowed them with a new significance. While appearing to uphold temperance or abstinence, for instance, Pater observes that “curious questions” exist regarding “the relationship of those carnal elements in us to the pilgrim soul” (1925: 57). Pater ties these “curious questions” regarding “carnal elements” first to a hermetic or even an unnameable love and subsequently to a connection of spirituality and physicality. He does so by linking Pythagoras to a love associated, at first, with secrecy, “that characteristic silence of which the philosopher of music was, perhaps not inconsistently, a lover”; subsequently, the philosopher’s beloved is not a covert “silence,” but a fixed object, as 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 our modern selves too often, in the ‘infinite,’ … but in the finite” (58, 59). A PythagoreanPlatonic love, in Pater’s formulation, merges with something “finite,” even material. “Plato’s ‘theory of ideas,’ ” Pater contends, is “an effort to enforce the Pythagorean πέρας [limit], with all the unity-in-variety of concerted music,—eternal definition



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of the finite, upon τὸ ἄπειρον, the infinite, the indefinite, formless, brute matter, of our experience of the world” (60). Platonic ideas, including the idea of love, Pater argues, define and harmonize “brute” worldly “matter.” Pater distinguishes this process through a forceful, physical music, which is itself matter presented in and sensuously refined by our worldly experience and a divine idealism. Pater, finally, refines his notion of a material musical “temperance” into a civically admirable homoeroticism by lauding the attractive divinely natural “rhythm” embodied by Greek statues of men. He suggests “that the perfect visible equivalent of such rhythm is in those portrait-statues of the actual youth of Greece—legacy of Greek sculpture more precious by far than its fancied forms of deity—the quoit-player, the diadumenus, the apoxyomenus,” all statues of male athletes in their late teens or early twenties. These statues are “brute matter” made marble (Pater 1925: 72). But they are not Keats’ “sculptur’d dead” (1982: “Eve of St. Agnes” 2.5). They are inspirational monuments of human bodies imbued with a cosmic rhythm and as capable of their own fugues of pleasure and pain as Florian’s starling. They are, moreover, Pater intimates, representative of “that highest civic embodiment of the Dorian temper, like some perfect musical instrument, perfectly responsive to the intention, to the lightest touch, of the finger of the law” (1925: 72). Pater moves here from a repressive definition of temperance to a celebration of the inherent, natural, and moral “harmony” of human and, more specifically, same-sex physical attraction.29 The personified “finger of the law” touching the statues is a metaphor for human erotic longings motivated by a natural law and a harmonious divine “music,” with all of that word’s Hellenic implications. As such, Pater’s longing for the rhythm of these statues evokes a longing for divine yet natural human desires, which can motivate civic harmony. In Plato, then, Pater uses music to promote a humanistic moral aestheticism that legitimates tolerance for social variations, particularly homo­eroticism, because they evoke a harmony that benefits the state.

“responsive to the intention”: Music and erotic scandal in Oxford Pater’s use of music to promote social harmony by legitimizing homoeroticism was, for his time, fairly idealistic. Indeed, the “touch” of his imagined cosmic laws was much more sympathetic than that of nineteenth-century British statutes.30 Several misfortunes experienced in Oxford by both J. A. Symonds and

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by Pater himself highlight the opposition between Pater’s tolerant natural laws, which he legitimates through Hellenic musical theories, and Victorian strictures against same-sex intimacies, which were often associated with musical contexts. In 1862 Symonds won a fellowship at Magdalen College, which he came close to losing when his associate C. G. H. Shorting created a sexual scandal by pursuing a chorister. In his memoirs, Symonds relates that he refused to tutor Shorting as a private pupil at Magdalen 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” (1984: 130). Shorting retaliated by sending six Magdalen fellows excerpts from Symonds’ letters and poetry to suggest that Symonds 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 fellows held an inquiry and subsequently permitted Symonds to keep his post. Symonds, however, considered his name to be “soiled with an unbearable suspicion,” and consequently his health suffered and he eventually left Oxford (132). The conventions of Victorian Oxford stood in clear contradiction to the tolerant musical laws imagined by Pater. The situation involving Symonds, Shorting, and Goolden, moreover, signals the seedier side of Britain’s humanistic musical culture. Goolden was a younger student and so held a somewhat disadvantaged position to the older Shorting and Symonds. Moreover, while Goolden came from a professional family, his role as a chorister placed him in a traditionally humble position at the college.31 In the previous century and a half, the position of “chorister” had been charitably bestowed upon boys without Goolden’s family’s advantages, but who showed intellectual promise and had a modicum of musical talent.32 Thus, the role of chorister provided a relatively unpretentious path to academic advancement. In addition, serving as a chorister was occasionally associated with an illicit homoeroticism. Historians have shown that authorities considered young choristers in Magdalen as presenting “a daily temptation” for undergraduates and there was a “worry that undergraduate homoeroticism, however Platonic, could easily become problematic” (Brockliss et al. 2008: 401). College authorities put restrictions in place to guard against any interaction between choristers and undergraduates and, by 1874, choristers and undergraduates were not to talk to each other and not to meet in private rooms.33 Despite these restrictions, contact between the two groups remained a concern well into the 1880s.34 The problems here most directly involved the age and sex of the participants, but these troubling potential relationships represent a public manifestation of the musical contexts of socially illicit sexualities.



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Symonds’ problems in 1862, moreover, anticipated those that Pater had with the musical William Money Hardinge in 1874. Hardinge was an undergraduate at Balliol from 1873 to September of 1874, when Jowett sent him down temporarily for possessing “ ‘indecent sonnets’ and for having been implicated in a ‘homosexual romance’ ” with Pater (Inman 1991: 9, 13).35 Walter Sichel, a contemporary of Hardinge’s at Balliol, remembered the latter as “the strange, hectic, talented Hardinge—musical, poetical, intensely flippant and flippantly ‘intense’ ” (1924: 119). While Hardinge played the piano and the harmonium, Sichel likely uses “musical” not only in its literal sense, but as a characterization for same-sex-desiring individuals, as did several other late-nineteenth-century authors whom I explore in Chapter 4.36 As such, Hardinge’s musicality and his expulsion give some context to Burns and Wilson’s claim that “[i]t was commonly believed at the time [the mid-nineteenth century] that an undergraduate who had a piano in his room was likely to come to a bad end” (1985: 2). Hardinge did not exactly come to a bad end—he wrote several novels in the 1880s—but his relationship with Pater had unhappy consequences for both: Hardinge was temporarily sent down from Oxford and Pater was put at odds with Jowett, who likely had a role in blocking his bid for the roles of the University Proctor in 1874 and of Professor of Poetry in 1877.37 Symonds’ and Pater’s experiences both indicate the hyper-idealism of much musical rhetoric in late-Victorian writing. In Plato, Pater nonetheless worked to revise Britain’s sexual mores by presenting music optimistically as a trope for advancing a more tolerant, intelligent, humanistic, and overall harmonized society. In doing so, he echoed larger reformist tropes in Oxford and in Britain that presented music as a force for social progress. In Plato, he explains the educational, social, and moral complexities of Platonic musical principles, connects these to Britain’s neo-Platonic and musical renaissances, and exclaims, somewhat over-optimistically, “We are now with Plato, you see!” (Pater 1925: 70). Still, Pater’s use of a Platonic musical cosmos to characterize homoeroticism as natural and even moral went far beyond accepted conventions. He undoubtedly understood that his musical moral principles, which encourage pleasure tempered by intelligence and condemn any action that creates unwanted pain, would in fact unnerve many people who were contentedly calibrated to more repressive British conventions. Pater understood, moreover, the real dangers of his philosophy, as he had encountered them in two failed bids for promotion at Oxford. While Pater emphasizes the benefits of his musical moral aestheticism in Plato, he drew on his personal experience to examine both the advantageous and the more dangerous aspects of this aestheticism in two of his Imaginary Portraits, to which I now turn.

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Music made meaningful: Music in “Denys L’Auxerrois” and “Apollo in Picardy” In Plato, Pater promotes the moral, intellectual, and even sexually subversive benefits of a Platonic musical education. This education, Pater argues, teaches one not to cause others excessive pain, to respect social variations, and to harmonize diversity into a unified state. In two Imaginary Portraits, “Denys L’Auxerrois” (1886) and “Apollo in Picardy” (1893), Pater envisions in fiction both the benefits and the difficulties of advancing these musical virtues. In “Denys,” Pater explores the benefits of increased socio-political freedoms for marginalized voices, but also the struggles that it often takes to secure these freedoms in a society redolent of late-nineteenth-century Britain. Pater expands these themes in “Apollo” to depict conservative reactions against intellectual honesty and natural, even divinely inspired, homoerotic pleasures in a context reminiscent of late-nineteenth-century Oxford. In “Denys,” Pater reimagines the Renaissance, Platonism, and contemporary progressive uses of music to characterize the difficulty of enacting humanistic socio-political reforms. Pater sets “Denys” in Auxerre, France, in the mid-thirteenth-century, a time and place that he associates with Europe’s incipient Renaissance, when “the desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life” manifested itself through “new forms of art” (1980: 1, 2). Indeed, in Pater’s Auxerre, the reemergence of an aesthetic humanism accompanies struggles for a political liberalism.38 Recalling his Platonic philosophy and advances in Britain’s musical culture, Pater has Denys enter Auxerre to promote freedom of speech and a hard-earned leisure through his musical influence. The town, ruled by an “old count … not long for this world,” finds itself 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” (2014: 172, 180). Denys encourages these socio-economic shifts as, surrounded by “musical instruments,” he leads the townspeople of Auxerre in public celebrations and becomes “[c]losely connected” with movements towards “individual freedom” (171, 172–3). Denys incites individual liberties and popular challenges to established authorities as he leads “long processions, through which … ‘the little people,’ the discontented, the despairing, would utter their minds,” while a “serf ” lays “at his ease at last” (177). Thwarting feudal powers, Denys embodies Dionysus who, Pater reported in 1876, was suspected “of a secret democratic interest,” although “he was a liberator only of men’s hearts” (Pater 1920: 22 n. 1). In “Denys” Pater goes further



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and Denys/Dionysus becomes a temporary carnivalesque king (l’Auxerrois) who works through music to encourage more permanent freedoms of speech and well-earned relaxation. Denys’ musicality stimulates not only a more egalitarian society, but also the liberation of a natural diversity. He inspires the staging of a pagan “morality” play that re-enacts the return of “the God of Wine” in “the cathedral square” and he takes the “chief part,” amidst “an intolerable noise of every kind of pipemusic,” which celebrates the god’s role as a “patron especially of the music of the pipe, in all its varieties” (Pater 2014: 178, 183). Pater echoes here his 1876 description of Dionysius’ divine inspiration of, and rule over, a diverse organic life, over “all the music of the reed, the water-plant, in which the ideas of water and of vegetable life are brought close together,” a concurrence of nature and the “spirit of life” (1920: 18). Pater uses the play’s inclusive “pipe-music,” then, to symbolize the “morality” of cultivating nature’s diversity and of celebrating its variety of voices, so often framed as “intolerable” by Christian churches. By celebrating these voices, Pater critiques these churches’ frequent intolerance of opposing perspectives based upon their preference for spirit over matter. Pater justifies the re-born god’s disruption of feudal and ecclesiastical repressions through presenting the tolerance of a multiplicity of perspectives as a more divine and natural way of life. Pater acknowledges, however, that cultural change is not easy and Denys’ push for social liberties results, initially, not in careful reforms but in aggressive disruptions of unjust conventions. His musical liberation erupts into “noisy” “hot nights” and, on occasion, it incites “horror” in “timid watchers” (2014: 177). This noise signals a coerced public recognition of estranged or disenfranchised voices. Although reminiscent of the aural “unity-in-variety” advocated in Plato, this revelry moves from a progressively rich harmony to an excruciating “coarseness of satiety,” as musical discord broadens into civil disobedience, anarchy, and a diminishment of human civility (66). Yet, this “nois[iness]” also foreshadows Denys’ violent sparagmos, the ritualistic sacrifice of the god necessary for revitalization, what Gerald Monsman calls his “rejuvenating death,” which makes him a “generative figure in the rebirth of higher culture” (1980: 76). As such, Denys’ noisy immoderation represents an orgiastic climax necessary, Pater suggests, both to insist on new freedoms and to stress the benefits of social cooperation over chaos. To illustrate this, Denys refashions the “wild, savage din” of his revolutionary music into an organ that can “express the whole compass of souls now grown to manhood,” with “the various modes of the power of the pipe” grown “tamed, ruled, united” (Pater 2014: 183, 184). Denys’ organ relies

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on the natural sounds of reeds or pipes, but refines these diverse elemental voices through a complex human art. This instrument represents an inclusive yet orderly and mature cultivation of natural diversity, a harmonious varietyin-unity, and Pater uses this to characterize more tolerant political proceedings in Auxerre.39 Following their anarchic uprisings, the people of Auxerre must entertain the young count of the rival town of Chastellux. Considering the age of Auxerre’s leader and France’s youthful political movements, the young count’s arrival threatens political discord. Echoing, however, Platonic musical theories and emerging associations of concerts with social unity and intellectual pleasure in late-Victorian Britain, Denys’ music unites disparate groups. The count arrives with a “proposal for the hand” of the count of Auxerre’s daughter, after which the people hear “the music of the organ … for the first time, with various feelings of delight.” The organ’s harmony helps to soothe political tensions and to encourage the people to welcome “their future lord,” which they do with a “civic festival,” a symbol of communal reconciliation (186). As Lionel Johnson noted after discussing “Denys” in 1894, for Pater, as for “Plato, change in a nation’s music meant change in a nation’s laws” (1912: 33). Johnson was right and we might add that Denys’ music represents Auxerre’s rejection of both restrictive autocracy and chaotic anarchy for an orderly, mature civic diversity wherein various voices interact harmoniously. The refined music of Denys’ organ represents, then, a practical replication of the divine music of the spheres, the influence of which induces civic disobedience and subsequently civic peace after socio-political adjustments. Yet, lest the politically progressive power of music appear lost with the arrival of another potential autocrat, Pater re-introduces the subversive power of Dionysus into the Portrait. Following the civic festival, Denys heads a new “rude popular pageant” only to have the populace rebel against him, killing him in a sacrifice representative of a coarse popular will (Pater 2014: 186). Denys’ sacrifice violently recalls how human nature can break free from even the firmest of calming tendencies. Pater nonetheless leaves us with a balance of the dual Dionysian nature of chaos and harmony. In the Portrait’s frame narrative, a modern traveler discovers Denys’ musical progressions in stained glass and tapestries kept near an organ, Pater’s emblem of progressive political reforms. The organ stands silent in the corner of a house as if waiting to re-establish a rational harmonious multiplicity in the contemporary world, perhaps even in Britain, which, with its aging Queen and powerful liberal movements, recalls the political situation of the ancient Auxerre. While in “Denys” Pater fictionalizes the liberating influence of music on society, in “Apollo” he reflects more individual struggles to live according to



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Hellenic musical principles in an intellectually and physically repressive scholarly community. In “Apollo,” Prior Saint-Jean exhausts himself by constricting himself to sterile abstractions while he tries 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” (Pater 2014: 272). Saint-Jean’s connection of his intellectual work to only desiccated, lifeless engagements with the physical cosmos causes him to grow enervated and ill. Pater only allows Saint-Jean to recuperate when the Prior learns to combine, as Pater claimed Hellenic philosophers did, pleasurable corporeal and mental sensations. Sent to convalesce at his monastery’s country grange, Saint-Jean’s health improves when he and the young novice Hyacinth befriend Apollo in the form of the handsome musical young Apollyon, who introduces them to a fusion of body, mind, and spirit. Saint-Jean first encounters Apollyon when, under the influence of the “veritable music” of a country night, he climbs to an attic and sees the “warm, white limbs” and “gentle sweetness” of the “godlike” young man (276). Apollyon, who joins music, beauty, and divinity, instantly attracts Saint-Jean and rejuvenates the monk’s engagement with mathematics and a “veritable” celestial music from a detached scholarly exercise to a sensual spiritual experience. Like Denys, Apollyon initially uses his music to improve the work and the lives of those around him, particularly Saint-Jean. His harping and singing help Saint-Jean in his “holiday task” of building a barn for the grange both by keeping the “workmen literally in tune, working for once with a ready will” and by attracting the physical “beams and stones into their fit places” (Pater 2014: 279, 280). Apollyon’s music aligns, temporarily, earthly movements with the will of the heavens and thereby echoes Pater’s description in Plato of a virtuous celestial music as a means for everyone and even everything to “find, or be put into,” their natural place (1925: 273). Pater uses this musical diversion of the barn-building as a metaphor for the holistic convalescence of Saint-Jean, for, as Pater notes, the “human body” is also “a building” (2014: 281). Initially, Saint-Jean visits the countryside “for the benefit of his body’s health,” but Pater signals that Apollyon also revitalizes Saint-Jean’s mind and spirit (274). This occurs through Saint-Jean’s new experience-oriented methods of work and his new companions. Helping to construct the monastic barn allows Saint-Jean to merge his intellectual and spiritual interest in mathematics with their physical manifestations in architecture, “a sort of music made visible” (280). This work also enables him to encounter physically robust individuals, as opposed to cloistered monks. This new community provides him, in a Platonic fashion, with a salutary and uplifting balance between his mind and body, between

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music and gymnastics, with both educational elements working in tandem. Just as Apollyon’s musical presence helps the workers to compose the barn, it re-composes Saint-Jean’s body, the house of his intellect and soul. Pater, furthermore, connects this accord of body, mind, and spirit to more successful academic work. Under Apollyon’s influence, Saint-Jean produces more meaningful work on his treatise. The monk breaks free from what Pater saw as the rigid “limits” of a medieval epistemology and moves beyond astronomical and musical theories derived from cold abstractions (1980: xxiii). The monk allows himself to be seduced by Apollyon’s experience-oriented, aesthetic approach to the universe, which allows him to “see … the deflexions of the stars from their proper orbits with fatal results here below” and to “hear” the “singing of the planets” (2014: 287). This practical aesthetic approach enables Saint-Jean to write now “truly and with authority” on the natural influence of the heavens, i.e. the music of the spheres, on earth (287). Saint-Jean’s new sensual experiences, Pater contends, lend greater accuracy and authenticity to his scholarship. Pater also depicts, however, how, because Saint-Jean’s society perceives this research as subversive, it vilifies him and truncates his work. More repressive perspectives perceive his new work as comparable to that of “madmen” and his writing appears to offer a “wicked, unscriptural truth” (2014: 273, 287). These perspectives reassert repressions of intellectual and physical verities, as SaintJean’s evolving scholarship, directed by Apollyon, actually reveals “a hundred truths unguessed at before,” an “illumination,” set into “ ‘arrangements’ that were like music made visible” (272, 273). The Prior’s work thus becomes “an interpolated page of life” and of his enlightened sensual growth (273). His work becomes a textual analogue to those virtuous people or to the homoerotic Greek statues, which Pater describes in Plato as embodying the enlightened and enlightening music of the spheres. In “Apollo,” Pater demonstrates the risk Saint-Jean undertakes in acknowledging such expansive pagan virtues, for when authorities find Hyacinth dead, they blame Saint-Jean and his allegedly “dissolute living” and they quarantine both him and his discoveries back in the monastery (291). These unwanted interruptions force Saint-Jean to stop his treatise short “with an unfinished word” signaling that he never finished his “notation” of the spheres (273, 287). His attempts to “arrest” on paper and to provide a “final transference to others” of his knowledge remain deficient (287). Pater uses Saint-Jean, then, to demonstrate the backlash and concomitant suppression of knowledge risked by individuals who advance beyond conventional intellectual and social mores. Pater depicts this monastic censorship of Hellenic musical culture to critique repressions within nineteenth-century Oxford that obstructed both intellectual



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honesty and naturally, perhaps even divinely, moral physical pleasures. SaintJean’s proscribed sensual scholarship recalls especially, as several critics have suggested, the disingenuous suppression of homoerotic knowledge within Oxford’s treatment of Hellenic culture and how this affected the work and the lives of Pater and Symonds, whose official academic careers were curtailed, among others.40 Even Jowett, who among his many achievements deserves credit for preserving male pronouns in Plato’s homoerotic situations, suggested in his annotations to the Symposium that same-sex desire was the “greatest evil of Greek life,” that it be regarded as “the beast in man,” and as a mere “figure of speech which no one interpreted literally” (1892: 1.534). In private correspondence to Jowett, Symonds replied that this latter claim, in particular, was misleading: “Greek love” for both Plato and “for modern students of Plato” was “no ‘figure of speech’ … but a present poignant reality” (1984: 102).41 Jowett’s annotations nonetheless indicate that, although young men such as Digby Dolben could declare with a naïve hopefulness in “A Resolve after reading Aeschylus,” “in passiveness I will lie still/ And let the multitudinous music of the Greek/ Pass into me, till I am musical,” established pedagogues worked to make sure that a repressive Christian moral tradition mediated any such passage (1981: lns. 5–7).42 In response, Pater uses music and Hellenism in “Apollo” both to critique Oxonian pedagogues’ deviousness and to recall more tolerant intellectual and spiritual perspectives. Correspondingly, Pater also depicts the pain caused by the unhealthy repression of natural instincts. Representing both Apollo, the god of order, and Apollyon, the destroyer, Pater’s Apollyon exudes an “untutored natural impulse” that leads Saint-Jean to enlightenment and to imprisonment and that encourages Hyacinth to engage in a physical abandonment that triggers his death. Pater thus suggests the increased dangers of more physical, as opposed to intellectual, erotic interchanges in Victorian society. To emphasize Apollyon’s increasingly physical relationship with Hyacinth, Pater describes how the novice, encouraged by Apollyon, abandons an astringent monastic asceticism and becomes “really a boy at last,” “eyes, hands and feet awake,” as they “raced” and “wrestled” (2014: 282). Hyacinth and Apollyon, moreover, “played as young animals do” and, advancing beyond animalistic instincts, they imitate Greek athletes by playing “quoits,” which, as Richard Dellamora notes, is likely a play on “coitus” (1990: 288, 289).43 Inflamed by the exercise, Apollyon casts aside his heavy “workman’s attire, and challenged the boy to do the same” (Pater 2014: 288). Pater’s references to Greek games and nudity suggest both the triumph of homoerotic sensuality over caution and a vulnerability initiated by sudden self-revelations. Human

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nature, too long repressed and uncultivated, overwhelms restraint and the young men play perilously in the dusk “by guess and touch chiefly” (289). Relying on their senses, they continue until a discus thrown by Apollyon returns to earth and, in an echo of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, decapitates Hyacinth. Pater accentuates suffering here as the scream of the musical god echoes like “the sound of some natural catastrophe,” signaling the discord between a divine will and this earthly tragedy (290). Like the Platonic musical truths in Saint-Jean’s treatise, the intimacy between Hyacinth and Apollyon is cut short with a macabre literality. The perfect natural unity embodied in the harmonious “Dorian temper” gets disrupted, as the “perfect musical instrument” of the male-desiring male body gets dismembered. Saint-Jean and Hyacinth both get sacrificed to the deviant, repressive law of the day, an earthly law out of temper with a heavenly inspired, humanistic natural order. Pater uses “Apollo,” then, and the musical god’s unmusical scream to indicate the anguish created by his society’s decision to repress rather than to tutor and to refine homoerotic instincts.

Pater’s musical patrimony In late-nineteenth-century Britain, a wide array of cultural critics used music as an increasingly respectable means to encourage educational advances, a more liberal morality, and social harmony. Composers, educators, and intellectuals such as Sullivan, Hawtrey, Ruskin, and Jowett theorized that music could unite disparate social and economic factions and, at times, they and their associates even tried to put these theories into practice. Correspondingly, in diverse classrooms, in concert halls, and even in Oxford colleges serious and more lighthearted music provided a means for individuals to mix with other musicians and amateurs and to demonstrate their intelligence, skill, and respectability. Sullivan, Lord Clarendon, and others acknowledged that music continued to maintain some connotations of effeminacy, childishness, and ungentlemanly moral licentiousness. Nonetheless, music, particularly European classical music, was becoming an increasingly important part of British culture. By the 1870s, moreover, Britain’s musical developments were influencing intellectual and creative literary production in Oxford, especially. More than serving as an empty encomium for a literary style or as a conceit used to invoke ambiguous ideals, literary uses of music maintained several clearly articulated social functions. Dons, journalists, and essayists used music to encourage intellectual honesty, social inclusion, and cultural harmony, and to promote new



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forms of morality, from legitimizing rational entertainment on Sundays to an aesthetic ecumenicalism to homoeroticism. Pater, in particular, used music to promote an aesthetic new republic, an ideal state or state-of-being founded upon the principles of a neo-Platonic “musical” education. This musical education, as outlined by Pater, required intellectual honesty, increased social liberties, and a sensual appreciation of the world and of the moral pains and pleasures of the body. As such, Pater frequently used music in both his criticism and his fiction to argue that art could refine nature and society into a more egalitarian and more tolerant state. Pater, it could be reasonably argued, reached narrower, more academic or literary audiences than reformers such as Haweis, Curwen, or even Ruskin. But Pater helped to introduce their liberal and morally charged musical tropes, with a Platonic twist, to an immensely influential strain of modern literature, one evolved by T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf, among many others.44 How Pater’s literary successors drew on, revised, and expanded these musical tropes provides the subject for the next four chapters.

Notes   1 Wollenberg (2001: 99–103).   2 Wollenberg (2001: 143).   3 DeLaura and Freedman both point to Pater’s elitist “aristocratic” tendencies, which were developed through taste and insight rather than by birth (DeLaura 1969: xi; Freedman 1990: 49–50).   4 For music and the “quadrivium,” see James (1993: 71–5).   5 Grove’s Dictionary observed that, despite improvements, the “endowment of the chair” of the Professor was still “little more than nominal” (Grove 1907: 3.815).   6 See also Haweis (1871: 48–52, 115–22).   7 For music at Westminster, see Evidence (Parliamentary Commission 1969: 437); for John Farmer’s attempts to instill fortitude through music at Harrow, see “Mr. John Farmer” (Musical Herald March 1, 1897: 72–3).   8 For the popularity of Handel’s and Mendelssohn’s religious oratorios and their moral reputation, see Haweis (1871: 210–12, 345–6) and Mackerness (1964: 102, 187).   9 Although overlooking their musical connections, Connor has shown the influence of Ruskin’s Queen of the Air on Pater’s use of Greek myths (Connor 1983: 29, 41). 10 A bizarre exception is what William Gatens calls Ruskin’s “special vituperation” against Mendelssohn’s St. Paul and Elijah (Gatens 1989: 82); see also Da Sousa Correa (1999: 128).

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11 For Plato at Oxford, see Brock and Curthoys (2000: 16–21), Campbell (1897: 132, 215), Clarke (1959: 101–2, 113), and Dowling (1994: 68–72). 12 As Carl Dahlhaus has shown, a narrower conception of “music” as primarily “a sounding phenomenon and nothing more” is relatively recent (1991: 8). 13 Farmer wrote the music for several songs, including some for “The Balliol Song Book,” which were later included in Gaudeamus: A Selection of Songs for Colleges and Schools, first published in 1890 and re-issued frequently. 14 Recounting Jowett’s purchase of the organ built by Henry Willis for Balliol’s hall, Burns and 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” (1985: 3). 15 Burns and Wilson note that the “Vicar of St. Mary Magdalene preached against those practices,” namely Sunday concerts, “which ‘might be all very well in atheist Germany,’ ” but which “in Christian England” were to be condemned, though he later changed his mind (1985: 4); see also “Memorial Concert” (JOJ March 10, 1894: 8). 16 The Sunday concerts were open to “members of all colleges,” to “towns-folk, provided they are introduced by a member,” and Jowett invited “distinguished guests,” such as Tennyson, Browning, T. H. Huxley, and Arthur Balfour; see “Memorial Concert” (JOJ March 10, 1894: 8.); “Mr. John Farmer” (Musical Herald March 1, 1897: 71); and Burns and Wilson (1985: 6). 17 The concerts offered part songs, more serious choral works, and instrumental music. While Commemoration musical events no doubt bolstered the repute of both Commemorations and of music in Oxford, they were not all formal or immune from undergraduate pranks and disruptions; see the JOJ’s review of the 1893 Encaenia ceremony (June 24, 1893: 7). 18 Commemoration week concerts were generally, but not always, represented as inclusive. Thomas Hardy’s Jude Fawley, unable to study at Christminster (Hardy’s fictional Oxford) in his youth, dies listening to the strains of Remembrance (i.e. Commemoration) Day concerts. The joy of the concerts underscores Fawley’s sorrow at his exclusion from the university. 19 The late-nineteenth-century Oxford University Musical Union (OUMO) in particular seems to have had an accomplished group of undergraduate amateurs. A relatively standard concert for the OUMU was that played on June 5, 1895, which included a Haydn String Quartet in C Major; Nicolai’s song “A little flower”; Schumann’s “Romance for Pianoforte and Oboe in A major,” Op. 94, No. 2; and Brahms’ “Sonata for Pianoforte and Violin in A major” Op. 100; among other pieces (Kemp and Mee, 1904, 13).



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20 Some college music societies hired outside performers while others, such as Exeter and Pembroke, primarily relied on current and former students of the college; see “The Commemoration” (JOJ June 13, 1885: 5) and Wollenberg (2001: 184–6, 194–202). 21 Oxford was not the only institution of higher education teaching music in Britain at this time. In London alone, there were the Guildhall School of Music (est. 1880), the Royal College of Music (opened 1883), which evolved out of the National Training School for Music (est. 1876), and the Royal Academy of Music (est. 1822). 22 See also Wollenberg (1999: 202–5). 23 There was, however, some controversy, for instance, surrounding music and nineteenth-century British ritualism, see Temperley (1979: 276–80). 24 For Pater’s spiritual or “Christian” aestheticism in non-musical contexts, see Shuter (1997: 47–52). 25 For late-Victorian Hellenism functioning as a social critique, see Evangelista (2009: 11–12); for an ethical “missionary” aestheticism, see Maltz (2006: 2–3). 26 Eastham convincingly argues for the influence of “Hegel’s conservative organicism” in the more coercive sections of Plato and suggests that Pater solves this problem by turning to the more liberal “English Wordsworth” (2011: 34). I would only add that Pater’s expressed desire for banned instruments, a metaphor for voices, offers another solution against a coercive cosmic organicism. 27 For nineteenth-century moral objections to Pater’s “Conclusion,” see Evans (1970: 13) and Donald Hill (1980: 444–9). 28 For Pater’s skeptical Christian faith, see Shuter (1997: 42–4). For the correspondence of Christianity and Hellenism in Oxford, see Dowling (1994: 70–1, 78). According to Arthur Benson, Jowett indeed “expressed admiration” for Plato and Platonism, which “reflect[ed] the opinion of the world” regarding Pater’s “eminence” (1911: 57–8). 29 Pater’s qualifications of temperance may be linked to the tradition of homosexual apologists who redefined perversion as engaging in relationships with those to whom one was not naturally attracted; see, for instance, Carpenter (1921: 52) and Raffalovich (1896: 15 n.1). 30 While historians generally agree that, as Hyde observes, “[n]o executions for buggery or sodomy were carried out after 1836” in England, sodomy officially remained a capital crime 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” (1970: 92). For court sentences for physical same-sex encounters after 1861, see Cocks (2010: 30–1, 35, 145). 31 Goolden’s father was a physician who had a house in Sussex Gardens, Hyde Park (Bloxam 1863: 307). For more on Shorting’s association with Symonds and Goolden, see Rousseau (2007: 177–85).

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32 Darwall-Smith reports that the president of Magdalen College from 1791 to 1854 “understood that choristers and clerks should be able to sing,” but that mid-nineteenth-century musical “standards cannot have been very high” at the college as choristers were still occasionally offered their position as a form of charitable patronage irrespective of their musical ability (2008: 328–9). From about 1860, Magdalen began to place more emphasis on the musical ability of its choir, see Brockliss et al. (2008: 400, 502–5; although see also “The Chapel Services,” Magdalen College School Journal 1.3 (July 1870): 13). 33 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 (2001: 201). 34 Illicit affairs between choristers and members of the college consistently troubled late-nineteenth-century Magdalen authorities; see Brockliss et al. (2008: 410, 499–500). Homoerotic choristers would become a motif in much twentiethcentury literature; see Chapter 4. 35 Hardinge’s friends preserved letters indicating that he and Pater did have a relationship, of a sort; see Inman (1991: 5–9). 36 For Hardinge’s musical talents, see Inman (2004); see also The Balliol College Register, which lists Hardinge’s “Recreations” as “[m]usic, cycling, study of French and Greek” and reports that he was a member of the “Oxford and Cambridge Musical” club (in Hilliard 1914: 141). 37 See Dellamora (1990: 163), Inman (1991: 7–8, 14), and Seiler (1987: 255, 258). 38 Dellamora discusses Pater’s emphasis on “democratic politics” and “economic equality” in “Denys,” but connects this to the “spirit of the Pre-Raphaelite avantgarde,” which was closely allied to painting and poetry (1990: 181). Platonic theory and British musical culture seem more likely or at least equal influences on “Denys.” Although Plato imagines dictatorial guardians governing his ideal Republic, he ties the extreme poverty and wealth associated with unjust dictators to the decay of art (1892: 1.4:421). Plato’s idealized dictators would create a society with less excessive wealth and poverty, which would consequently facilitate better art, such as the “music” that was to influence his ideal educational agenda. Pater probably also connected musical innovations to social reform, education, and civic unity through nineteenth-century sources, such as Oxford’s musical culture, discussed above, or even the contemporary educational and aesthetic advances referred to in the “Preface” to George Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, volumes of which Pater checked out from Brasenose’s library in 1883 and in 1886 (Inman 1990: 459, 468). 39 For the inclusive homoerotic contexts of the organ, see Dellamora (1990: 183–5). Denys’ organ is also an inclusive rejection of Plato’s censorship, as it boasts its Marsyasian pipes despite the “jealousy” of a dubious Apollo (Pater 2014: 184).



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40 Shuter suggests that “Apollo” has resonances of the dangerous homoerotic relationships of Pater and Hardinge and Wilde and Douglas (2001: 192–3); see also Dowling (1994: 138–40) and Dellamora (1990: 186). 41 E. M. Forster later mocked this academic dishonesty in Maurice via a Cambridge dean who has students skip passages pertaining to the “unspeakable vice of the Greeks” in Plato and a medical doctor named Jowitt who considers homosexuality as a problem for an “asylum” (1971: 51, 156). 42 The young Oxford-bound Dolben does not indicate what of Aeschylus he was reading, but Aeschylus was famous for his Oresteia, which featured the intimate friendship of Orestes and Pylades, who were at times associated with homoerotically charged couples such as “Achilles and Patroclus, Nisus and Euryalus, [and] Damon and Pythias” (Byron 1898: 175). 43 Dellamora notes that “quoits” was traditionally pronounced as “coits,” and thus is likely “a pun for coitus” (1990: 187). This would obviously emphasize the physical relationship between Apollyon and Hyacinth. 44 Pater’s influence on these writers and others has been well-documented; see, for instance, Evangelista (2009: 143–4), Meisel (1980: 16–17 n. 24), Heath (2008: 742–4), Parkes (2011: 54–6, 157–60), and Stape (1990: 142–3).

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Modernism’s distinctive musical rhetoric: Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf

By 1910, British intellectuals had associated classical music with gentility, morality, and intelligence with such frequency that Max Beerbohm decided to caricature popular conceptions of nobility and of music in conjunction. In Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford Love Story (1911), Beerbohm’s Duke of Dorset, an Oxford undergraduate and an amateur pianist, chivalrously pledges to die for his love of Zuleika, a music-hall illusionist. The Duke characterizes, hyperbolically, Britain’s upper classes as clinging self-destructively to outmoded ideals, such as chivalric love, and as consequently abandoning their cultural authority to emerging pretenders. The Duke, moreover, glorifies this perverse idealism by performing Chopin’s “Marche Funebre” at a college concert, thereby enticing those beneath him on the social scale to imitate his fatalistic chivalry. As the Duke “caressed the keyboard vaguely,” his fellow undergraduates admire how “the soul of their friend was singing to them” with “a voice etherealised by a triumph of joy that was not yet for them to share” (154). Inflamed by the Duke’s musical incitement to self-immolation, the undergraduates decide that they, too, should kill themselves for Zuleika. Beerbohm parodies here efforts, such as those analyzed in Chapter 1, to advance nobility, morality, and social order through music. Concurrently, he highlights how upper- and middle-class individuals, such as the undergraduates, began to signal their own allegedly “noble” virtues by advertising their sensitivity to classical music. While many of the educated upper and middle classes promoted their own musical refinement, they simultaneously accused their social inferiors of failing to engage music properly. As Dave Russell observes, “[f]or many observers higher up in the social order, the social base of popular music,” including popular opera and instrumental works, “gave sufficient grounds for confident dismissal of its artistic value, cultural discourse providing sections of the middle

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and upper classes with an opportunity to claim superior status over subordinate classes” (1997: 7–8). Beerbohm fictionalizes this process as the Duke spurns the musicality of his landlady’s daughter, Katie Batch. Following mid-nineteenthcentury precedents, Katie tries to attract him via her piano-playing only to remember that “her music was always interrupted by the ringing of the Duke’s bell and a polite request that it should cease.” Her hope that “love and the Board school,” state-funded schools geared towards the lower-middle and working classes, will “leve[l] all” falls flat (1911: 264). The Duke’s “ringing” asserts that her Board-school-provided aesthetic education is worth neither bragging about nor hearing. The Duke fails to realize, however, as he busily upholds outdated chivalric absurdities and only performs rather “vaguely” himself, that his pride will cut short not only his life, but also his cultural dominance. He will die, but Katie will continue to practice and the music of the class she represents will continue to exist and even thrive, as I explore in the next chapter. This satire suggests that, in mocking the Duke’s demise, Beerbohm also intuits Katie’s future musical successes. He just does not depict them, and in this he reflects larger representational trends. Many twentieth-century middleclass intellectuals declined to depict the lower-middle or the working classes as culturally proficient. This was because these groups were competing for the same cultural and intellectual authority—what Pierre Bourdieu has called “cultural” or “educational capital”—that was slipping away from Britain’s upper classes (1984: 13–14). As Jonathan Rose explains, [i]n the first half of the twentieth century … two rival intelligentsias squared off against each other, competing for audiences and prestige. One was middle-class, university-educated and modernist, supported largely by patronage and private incomes; the 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 journalism and the literary marketplace. (2001: 431)

Literature and music, Rose shows, provided contested battlegrounds for these “rival intelligentsias” throughout this period.1 John Carey similarly emphasizes such rivalries and suggests that erudite, generally middle-class authors used “modernist writing” to help to “preserve the intellectual’s seclusion from the ‘mass’ ” (1992: vii). Indeed, critics such as Jonathan Freedman, Sean Latham, and Lawrence Rainey have variously shown how intellectual and particularly modernist British writers embraced an aesthetic elitism, underwent and resisted commodification, and attempted to separate their art from commonplace socioeconomic contexts altogether.2



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Classical music and its reception became a frequent trope in this exclusivist, intellectual, largely middle-class British literature. Cormac Newark has argued that as “modes of reception” of music “originate from a range of different but overlapping perspectives—professional aesthetic, social, political; themselves all changing as the nineteenth century progressed—they also implicitly address more fundamental questions to do with the very practice of writing about music, as performance, subjective experience, cultural knowledge or social activity” (2013: 38).3 Newark focuses on the nineteenth century, but his point is equally true for writing by modernists such as T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf, who wrote about music to establish themselves as an intellectual “aristocracy” that could assume the cultural responsibilities of Britain’s older, more traditional upper class, which was decaying surprisingly quickly in the literature of its contemporaries.4 Beerbohm’s suicidal Duke, after all, foreshadowed a series of failing twentieth-century fictional aristocrats, such as Huxley’s Lord Gattenden in Point Counter Point (1928), D. H. Lawrence’s Sir Clifford Chatterley in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), and Evelyn Waugh’s Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited (1945), to name just a few. These characters symbolize changes occurring more slowly in Britain’s power structures, indicated, in part, by David Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget” in 1910, which imposed a super-tax on the wealthiest members of society, and the Parliament Act in 1911, which curtailed the power of the House of Lords.5 In this chapter, then, I contend that middle-class intellectual literati, and particularly modernists, employed a musical rhetoric to position themselves as Britain’s cultural and intellectual elite in opposition both to the seemingly declining landed aristocracy and to the allegedly uncultured lower-middle and working classes. One way middle-class literati, I will argue, aided their cultural ascent with classical music was, paradoxically, by emphasizing its noble contexts, thereby enhancing its value and exclusivity. Drawing on the late-nineteenth-century rhetoric examined in Chapter 1, these writers associate classical music with such “noble” virtues as aesthetic refinement, intellectual sophistication, and morality, although not with a Paterian liberalism. Consequently, their association of classical music with the upper classes is staunchly elitist. To bolster this elitism, these writers set the majority of their concert scenes in refined rooms filled with genteel and affluent characters. Such scenes enable Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf, among others, to promote the musical alienation of the lower classes who are, they allege, neither socially, intellectually, nor economically prepared to appreciate great art.

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The above writers simultaneously indicate, however, that the upper classes are not the best custodians for the cultural heritage that is superficially associated with them. Many authors who promote the “noble” associations of music also imply that the connection between a titled or an economic elite and classical music is a shallow façade. As Beerbohm’s undergraduates are not enthralled by the aesthetic or intellectual nobility of Chopin’s music, but by the Duke playing Chopin’s music, so most of the upper classes, these authors insinuate, appreciate classical music predominantly for its elitist associations. These upper classes use their ostensible appreciation of music to justify a social hierarchy and to slight their social inferiors. Ironically, as we will see, many middle-class intellectual authors follow suit. These writers impugn the ability of the upper classes to appreciate classical music in a sophisticated fashion in order to evoke the cultural, intellectual, and moral decay of Britain’s dominant elite. In actuality, a fair-sized portion of Britain’s upper classes had long supported myriad musical efforts in a serious and sincere fashion, although this support did fade somewhat in the twentieth century as the middle classes gained ground and aristocratic authority waned. Christina Bashford, for instance, has noted lateVictorian correlations between the “death” of John Ella’s Musical Union (1844–81) and “the diminishing of aristocratic authority … and the arrival of a mass culture for classical music,” although she argues that a “demand among high society for serious music in intimate, socially exclusive surroundings” nonetheless existed into the twentieth century resulting in “the vitality of chamber music in private salons” (2007: 342–3, 344). Pippa Drummond has likewise noted the financial and moral importance of aristocratic patronage for sustaining music festivals in the nineteenth century, although in the twentieth century “civic” rather than “aristocratic” dignitaries gained influence (2011: 257–8). Hughes and Stradling, meanwhile, have noted the genteel participants and patrons of the schools and concert venues that formed the “expensive apparatus” of the English Musical Renaissance in South Kensington, which boasted in its orbit affluent composers such as H. H. Parry and Ralph Vaughn Williams (2001: 255, 217, 181). As I discuss in Chapter 3, affluent musical philanthropists were somewhat cruelly mocked in several late-nineteenth-century novels dealing with the East End, although such philanthropists were rarely dealt with in modernist literature. In more direct contact with twentieth-century modernist circles were Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Lord Berners, Ethel Smyth, and Edward Sackville-West, later Lord Edward, composers and a critic who came from privileged families. Yet, pointedly disregarding the efforts of their upper-class musical acquaintances and friends, Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf obsessively depict the traditional



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upper classes as almost as ignorant, in their well-dressed way, as their stereotyped perceptions of the working classes. These writers depict the upper classes as patronizing music, but as scarcely interested in it other than for its elite social significance. With the richest and the poorest levels of society revealed as artistically and intellectually inept, authors such as Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf remain free to assume a forfeited cultural authority for themselves.

An aristocratic art? The ennoblement of classical music and the aural impoverishment of the lower-middle and working classes In contrast to Pater’s divine Denys or Apollyon, whose music emphasizes the value of social outcasts, Huxley and Woolf endow their upper-class characters with an uncritical musical snobbishness reminiscent of Beerbohm’s Duke. These characters echo broader cultural expectations that classical music was the domain of a privileged yet shallow elite, a domain to which the lower-middle and the working classes had little access and in which they had still less interest, unless, that is, it merged classical music with more popular attractions, such as the cinema. Such expectations were so influential that even Thomas Burke, who generally promoted working-class Londoners’ attainments, lamented that in 1901 classical music in the south of England seemed “a luxury trade” and that “there was little true music interest” (in Hill and Rees 1944: 17). Burke’s comments represent many public voices suggesting that classical music was the province of unmusical yet moneyed spectacle seekers from which less privileged audiences were excluded.6 Discussions of West End opera audiences, in particular, often provoked this rhetoric. Opera reviewers frequently highlighted the stars of the audience as much as the stars of the stage.7 This practice hindered recognition of the less glittering, but sometimes more serious amateurs, who were relegated to the “gods,” the highest areas of a venue. Breaking ranks, one reviewer described 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.

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This Wagnerian may have been H. C. Colles, an Oxford-educated music critic for The Times (1911–43), slumming in the gallery. Nevertheless, his report indicates how the affluent but “[i]nferior” or unmusical social elite sit near the stage, while the poorer “children of the light” must climb “endless flights of dirty stone stairs” to a “lofty abode” (“Wagner From the Gallery.” Times May 3, 1913: 6). As it was in the seating arrangements, so it was in the minds of many gatekeepers of culture: a privileged but unmusical elite patronized opera and concert halls, while the lower-middle and the working classes were out of sight, out of mind, and, allegedly, out of earshot. If music was indeed a “trade”—to borrow Burke’s term—then the variables in the exchange were not just aesthetic tastes and money. Literary representations of musical culture, in fact, frequently involved calculations of class, cultural status, intelligence, even morality. These calculations, with classical music standing in for “art” in general, perplexed writers from Beerbohm to Woolf. Accordingly, music helped to formulate several of the burning questions of modernist British literature: can art remain aloof from its socio-economic contexts? Does the aesthetic enjoyment of the upper classes or an intellectual aristocracy vindicate the deprivations of the uneducated lower classes? Can the less fortunate learn to appreciate great art? If classical music is a “luxury trade,” is it a fair one? There are no easy answers. Clive Bell, for instance, one of Bloomsbury’s prominent aesthetic theorists, argued in Civilization (1928) that “[c]ivilization requires the existence of a leisured class, and a leisured class requires the existence of slaves—of people, I mean, who give some part of their surplus time and energy to the support of others,” i.e. those who appreciate the intellectual and aesthetic benefits of civilization (1973: 146). Yet even Bell acknowledged that “the existence of slaves may be damaging to that very élite from which civilization springs,” because slaves cannot receive the “tincture of what the élite has to give” and because slavery might give society’s elite “a sense of discomfort, or callousness” (161). Civilization, for Bell, was worth these difficulties. Hyacinth Robinson, from Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima (1886), was more drastically ambivalent: torn between the justice of a social revolution and the value of a Western culture fueled by socio-economic oppression, he kills himself. Subsequent authors use classical music to pursue less fatal but equally tortured investigations into the value of aristocratic and intellectual aesthetic domains. Many of these authors contemplate apologies for abuses of labor that help to sustain canonical aesthetic treasures. “Tantamount House,” for instance, in Huxley’s Point Counter Point, provides the ideal setting for Lady Edward



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Tantamount’s elaborate “musical parties” (1928: 22). The grandiose mansion, Huxley reports, was built upon the backs of the “ploughmen, the shepherds,” and “the cowherds” who “laboured from before dawn till sunset, year after year, until they died,” for the glory of the Tantamounts (21). Tantamount House is therefore tantamount to the fruit of an exploitative socio-economic system. Still, Huxley suggests that the house may be “justifying its existence” by providing a support system for beautiful music, such as “Bach’s suite in B minor, for flute and strings,” a piece which reminds us that “[t]here are grand things in the world, noble things” (22, 27). Huxley understands this aesthetic value and so, for him, the existence of the house, which sustains Bach’s “noble” music, is relatively justified. Accordingly, although Tantamount House represents a metaphorical mausoleum for those who suffered to build it, it is also a valuable institution staffed by the musicians who perform alongside its “triumphal” marble staircase (Huxley 1928: 40). Huxley thus sets Bach’s music in an appropriately triumphant splendor, complete with an upper-class audience, including at least one general, one colonel, a peer, and myriad well-off socialites who all show their respect with “pious grimaces and religious silence” for great art (29). Huxley uses this scene to offer two arguments: first, Bach’s music inherently warrants such a shrine; second, if this audience can, like Huxley, appreciate Bach’s art then the suffering of the Tantamounts’ laborers is to some degree still further justified. Huxley, however, overloads this scene with irony, for most of this audience merely pretends to appreciate the music to validate its presence in the Tantamounts’ society. As Michael Allis has argued, Huxley himself “was clear as to music’s educational value” in his own musical criticism (in Huxley 2013: 4). Yet in Point Counter Point, most of Lady Tantamount’s guests exhibit what her friend John Bidlake identifies as an “intellectual hypocrisy” (1928: 29). They attempt to appear to appreciate Bach but have no actual interest in his complex music. As such, when Lord Tantamount sneaks into the room, he easily distracts them. After the performance, a “pent-up chatter” breaks loose with some guests discussing the peer and others horse racing, yet with both groups taking interest in the music only when Lady Tantamount comes to greet them (42). This tepid aesthetic and intellectual response hardly seems to “justif[y]” an oppressive socio-economic structure, particularly as most of the guests selfishly seek only to justify their place within an elite social circle ignoring what Huxley conceives of as the diverse pleasures of Bach. Lord Tantamount, alternatively, does appreciate the music, but only to a limited intellectual extent. Bach’s suite inspires Tantamount to become akin to a Wordsworthian “cloud-solitary philosopher” and to intuit the Platonically

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interconnected nature of the universe. Should he use this intuition to critique his predatory patrimony, his contact with the music could be extraordinarily worthwhile. The peer, however, has shed his clouds of glory and the potential for this intellectual awakening remains unfulfilled. Instead, as Bach’s suite progresses Tantamount takes an “indecent” visceral interest in it, like “[a] dog with the smell of rabbits in his nostrils” (Huxley 1928: 38). Focused, like his ancestors, on his own animalistic desires, he invents “excuses to justify the violence of his musical appetite,” regardless of the distress this causes others, such as his assistant whom he forces to accompany him towards the music (39). The music provokes Tantamount to indulge his aggressive aesthetic greed. Like Beerbohm’s Duke then, the Tantamounts and their guests all perceive some value in classical music, but a value that allows them to benefit from or to justify their place in a rapacious aristocratic society. From a diametrically opposed perspective, Frank Illidge, who has transcended his working-class background to become Lord Tantamount’s assistant, finds no benefit in the upper-class musical evening. Surveying the scene and its participants, he scoffs that it “stinks of art” (1928: 61). Huxley, however, allows Illidge little chance to consider the music in peace. Much like Leonard Bast, Illidge’s more famous counterpart in Forster’s Howards End (1910), Illidge is too busy worrying about his own social and economic disadvantages. As Bast worries about the price of concert tickets and his lost umbrella, Illidge laments his “cheap” suit, which causes him to look like an “oddity” among those guests in evening dress (Huxley 1928: 38, 39). Worried and embarrassed, Bast and Illidge cannot appreciate the music surrounding them. Nor does the music offer them a means of inclusion, as it does for the wealthier classes. Bast is wary of the refined Schlegel family sitting at the Queen’s Hall next to him and Illidge, feeling resentful, “hated Lady [Tantamount’s] guests one and all” (41). These guests use their feigned attention to the music to justify their presence at the party, but Illidge feels too alienated even to try. For both Illidge and Bast, music represents a social class from which they are excluded.8 Due to limitations in intellect, manners, and money, Huxley and Forster imply, both uncritical yet affluent social circles and the less well-heeled remain variously alienated from a musical culture that, regardless, retains a certain nobility. Despite their socio-economic disparities, then, Huxley presents the Tantamounts’ society and Illidge as existing in close conjunction at the musically unrefined lower end of what he once called the “spiritual hierarchy” of mankind. In a concert review entitled “Bad Music” (1922), Huxley laments the spiritual



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deficiencies of those unable to evaluate music properly. Considering the value of diverse musical exchanges, he observed, 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.

While Huxley lamented musicians’ and his own waste of resources on “coarse” music, he also worried that society’s “Sudras,” the lowest spiritual order, might actually “like” the “horrors” of music such as Léon Boëllmann’s Symphonic Variations, which Huxley had just heard (2013: 172). Huxley condemns Boëllmann’s work as “cinema music,” the simplistic “vulgarity” of which is only “tolerable” if heard “with the distracted ears of those who gaze absorbed” at some cinematic “Little Sweetheart,” that is, with the “ears” of someone whose spirituality and intelligence are preoccupied by sentimental or erotic images (173).9 The refined Huxley is “dejected,” however, not only because the “Sudras” enjoy such vulgarities, but also because their “great” number enables them to inflict their shallow cinematic pleasures on the upper-end of his “spiritual hierarchy,” such as himself (172). Cinematic music, as Huxley indicates, was a scapegoat for several middleclass intellectuals who perceived the cinema as epitomizing a mass-market culture that catered to spiritually depraved, under-educated audiences. Huxley, Eliot, and Lawrence, for instance, suggested that the cinema overly simplified noble, intellectual arts, such as music, for mass consumption.10 For Huxley, Boëllmann’s Symphonic Variations was as bad as “cinema music” because of “the almost total lack of invention exhibited in the variations,” which made the music vulgarly simplistic, despite its allegedly symphonic style (2013: 14). This simplicity turned an intellectual style of music into a thoughtless distraction. Despite being one modernist occasionally willing to recognize publically a beneficial working-class culture, such as that exemplified by Marie Lloyd’s music hall songs, Eliot similarly feared that the cinema’s “continuous senseless music” 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” 1922: 662). D. H. Lawrence reflects these concerns in The Lost Girl (1920), wherein the genteel Alvina Houghton perceives her father’s request

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that she play the piano for his provincial “cinematograph” 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” or “leading a chorus of collier louts” when the cinematograph malfunctions (Lawrence 1995: 99, 100). Alvina considers that performing in such a setting, for a working-class audience, with its demands for simple repetitive tunes, would demean her talent. Woolf similarly turned to a musical rhetoric to criticize early films and popular audiences, which she perceived as taking facile aesthetic shortcuts. In “The Cinema” (1926), she suggests that early film audiences had the potential of the first musicians, those “naked men who knocked two bars of iron together and heard in that clangour a foretaste of the music of Mozart” (1986: 4.348).11 Yet instead of fulfilling this potential, modern audiences enjoy the simplistic efforts of filmmakers who turned the cinema into a “parasite” that indolently appropriates and vitiates older arts rather than integrate them into a new form (4.350). The cinema, she theorizes, should accept only “the very slightest help from words or from music to make itself intelligible” and should progress by developing its own aesthetic (4.351). Woolf argues that by 1926 this had yet to happen and thus early moviegoers were like a “savage tribe” that “had found scattering the sea shore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, grand pianos 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” (4.352–3). These primitives create an awful cacophony and ruin older, refined art forms, such as novels and music. Huxley, then, is not alone in his critique of “cinematic” music. Eliot, Lawrence, and Woolf likewise tout music as a noble art that the lower classes, defined as such according to socio-economic or spiritual-intellectual criteria, adulterate as they enjoy it in vulgar or cinematic settings. In non-cinematic contexts too, Woolf habitually uses music to evaluate complex social and spiritual distinctions. She does so, in part, by distinguishing the classical musical interests of her leisured middle-class protagonists from the less spiritual, more materialistic interests of characters engaged with non-artistic commodities. This is true even when she acknowledges the dependence of classical music on the purportedly vulgar aspects of commerce. When the classical pianist Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out (1915) protests against the “[p]oor little goats” that make up her father’s freight, Willoughby Vinrace, a shipping magnate, reminds her “sharply” that “[i]f it weren’t for the goats there’d be no music … music depends upon goats” (1992: 18–19). This exchange emphasizes the unfortunate dependence of music, and of art generally, on crude economic practices, as



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Willoughby’s maritime trade keeps Rachel and her scores of “Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Purcell” afloat, both literally and figuratively (58). It also highlights, however, how the sensitive, aesthetic Rachel has difficulty relating to her financially successful but callous father, who prefers to discuss the “bursting” insides of sea “monsters” to music (19). Woolf acknowledges Willoughby’s contributions, however unpalatable, to art, but she clearly favors imagining Rachel’s spiritual and intellectual awakening, as Willoughby soon disappears from the novel. In Jacob’s Room (1922), Woolf returns to music to explore the aesthetic alienation of morally and economically disenfranchised individuals. To emphasize this alienation Woolf contrasts an “old blind woman,” one of London’s “prostitutes,” who sits outside a bank singing a “wild song,” to Lady Charles, who leaves Covent Garden Opera House in a carriage (1976: 64, 65).12 Lady Charles observes that “[o]f all the carriages that leave the arch of the Opera House, not one turns eastward”; arriving home, she wonders “Why? Why? Why?” Her repeated questioning suggests her frustration and even disapproval at the philistinism of working-class East End inhabitants. Woolf seems to echo this frustration as she offers no balancing character to indicate any poorer, non-carriage-riding peripatetic opera lovers headed east, thereby likewise implying that the inhabitants of the working-class East End do not go to the West End opera. Woolf, however, is not as thoughtlessly unaware of the potential reasons for this as Lady Charles, whose wealth and status provide her easy entry into a variety of financial and artistic milieus. Woolf discerningly counterpoints the “old blind woman,” who has had to work in degrading circumstances to survive and who remains locked out of the benefits of Britain’s financial institutions, to the privileged Lady Charles in order to provide a sympathetic reminder that many East Enders may have little money, time, or energy left over for such luxuries as Covent Garden opera or to cultivate a refined taste in music beyond “wild” and somewhat facilely put together sounds.13 Generally, then, the vast majority of the lower-middle and working classes in Jacob’s Room remain geographically, psychologically, and intellectually outside the realms of an established classical art. Woolf reports a “little thief ” in the “empty market-place” outside the Opera House whom “no one in black-andwhite or rose-coloured evening dress” stops “to help or condemn” (1976: 65). Inside Woolf ’s Opera House, the only patrons in (scarcely) comparable straitened circumstances are Bonamy, a Cambridge-educated middle-class classics scholar in a “seven-and-sixpenny seat,” and Whittaker, who sits “many feet above” the boxes. These two, though, exist at the top of a cultural hierarchy, as they enjoy the opera with a greater spiritual and intellectual sensitivity than anyone else.

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Bonamy is “set a little apart from his fellows by the influence of the music” and Whittaker carries a “miniature score” with him. These characters, moreover, can afford to join the upper classes who, like the Tantamounts’ guests, say “nothing … of profound importance,” as together they form the “two thousand hearts” listening to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (66, 65). Society’s economic and moral outcasts thus remain firmly outside the refined and culturally unifying aesthetic spheres of the relatively well-off opera patrons. Woolf reinforces this aesthetic alienation in The Years (1937) by juxtaposing the glamorous Covent Garden Opera House with the crude Covent Garden Market. During an intermission at a matinée, Lady Lasswade admires how the “whole Opera House leapt into life again with its faces and its diamonds” (1987: 142). Previously, she had thought how “ridiculous” it was “to come out in full evening dress” in the afternoon (139). But in the Opera House, “she no longer felt absurd. On the contrary, she felt appropriate” (140). It is those who cannot afford evening dress, such as the “porters, dingy little clerks in their ordinary working clothes, [and] coarse-looking women in aprons” whom she has seen in the market outside, who inside the Opera House would be absurd (139). Within the Opera House, Lady Lasswade, like Rachel Vinrace, distances herself from the crassness of overt commercialism, symbolized by the working-class porters, clerks, and aproned women, that helps to support, however indirectly, art in England. By juxtaposing these two adjacent geographical spaces, the opera house and the market, Woolf points to how definitions of the “appropriate” and the “absurd” are contingent to context, circumstance, and expectation. Nonetheless, it is the Opera House that inspires Woolf ’s own most elaborate aesthetic responses as she primarily incorporates the beauty of both the opera audience and the music and only very briefly the “coarse[ness]” of the market into her own prose thereby validating herself the value of an art form and culture from which the lower-middle and working classes are largely excluded. Woolf implies, however, that if the working classes remain outside the Opera House, this is not so bad, as they cannot appreciate their loss. For if the West End opera exudes a melodious opulence, as one nears the working-class East End there is an increased cacophony. When in The Years North Pargiter visits his aunt Sara in Milton Street, formerly Grub Street, just adjacent to the East End, he hears “a woman singing scales” and thinks “[w]hat a dirty … sordid … low-down street to live in” (Woolf 1987: 237). Later, North and Sara hear this vocalist clashing with a trombonist: “they sounded like two people trying to express different views of the world in general at one and the same time. The voice ascended; the trombone wailed” (241). This dissonance represents



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a sadly humorous characteristic of the “slums” in which Sara tends to live and is a metaphor for North’s difficulty communicating with his now shabby aunt (240). Similarly, in Mrs. Dalloway the educated, but “degradingly poor” and lonely pedagogue Miss Kilman finds “comfort in a violin; but,” the narrator reports, “the sound was excruciating; she had no ear” (Woolf 2000: 104, 105). While Woolf may be satirizing the seemingly impermeable musical boundaries between classes, the consistent absence of competent lower-middle- or workingclass musical amateurs in her fiction undermines her critique.14 Modern satires of working-class musical amateurs, nonetheless, form a tradition extending back at least to Major Barbara (1905) wherein G. B. Shaw lampoons the upper classes’ use of music to dominate London’s naïve working classes. In the play’s “Preface,” Shaw reports that he wrote Major Barbara to highlight the dangers of religious organizations that degrade the poor by encouraging their “submission to the State as at present capitalistically organized” (1963: 1.329). This report seems credible as Shaw depicts the Salvation Army tricking down-and-out inhabitants of East London’s West Ham by “convert[ing]” a “wedding chorus from one of Donizetti’s operas,” several of which were popular with the working classes, into the “West Ham Salvation March” (401).15 The “March” serves to distract indigent music-lovers from their wariness of the Army and to lure them to religious meetings. The Army’s musical disingenuousness, however, leaves London’s poor open to exploitation by the capitalistic upper classes. Andrew Undershaft, an amateur trombonist and wealthy industrialist, donates money to the Army, which allows him to take charge of its band. Led by Undershaft, whose “brazen roarings” on the trombone “were like the laughter of the damned,” “117 conversions took place” as the band marches through West Ham to an Army meeting (408). Music meant to liberate spiritually or simply to entertain becomes diabolically coercive as Undershaft, with the help of Army musicians, gains influence over the distracted converts.16 For Undershaft’s new acolytes, as for Miss Kilman, music offers a misleading comfort, which encourages their passivity despite their unfavorable socioeconomic circumstances. As both Woolf and Shaw indicate, when the lower classes engage with classical music in most canonical intellectual literature, the experience is predominantly a debasing one.17 Yet the value of music is often relative, as is the difference between music and noise. In his sketch “An Art Night,” from Nights in London (1916), Thomas Burke accentuates these relativities to warn against defining musical values too narrowly. Burke’s story takes place in a less-than-elegant “Models’ Club,” suspiciously suggestive of a brothel, in Chelsea, which by the 1910s was in a

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slump.18 Burke’s Club indeed exudes a “manufactured Bohemianism,” a crossclass atmosphere in which the narrator hears “young men” with the “self-proud accent of Oxford” flirt vapidly with female “models” as he listens to music (1918: 221, 220). Having “ascended the shabby stairs,” he hears a “cheap piano” and a cello from which “trickled the tones” of two performers playing (ironically) Elgar’s “Salut d’Amour” (219–20). An acerbic woman interrupts the music to shout “[s]hut that row” and to demand a drink, a “Cremdermont!” (220). Silence and alcohol, the woman hopes, will allow her to flirt more successfully with the narrator. Burke fashions this woman’s version of “amour” and her slurred pronunciation of “Crème de Menthe” as a sharp contrast to Elgar’s carefully crafted sentimental harmonies. Her vulgarity, moreover, ironically distances her from what Hughes and Stradling (2001: 60) have shown was Elgar’s own consistent attempts, with the substantial aid of his “upper-class wife Caroline Alice Roberts,” to draw “inexorably away from his background” as a shopkeeper’s son and to present a “gentlemanly image” to the public. By the Edwardian era, as Hughes has pointed out, the Elgars had carefully advanced this image through the press in order to facilitate “national and international recognition” of Elgar as England’s most successful composer (Hughes 2002: 174). To reinforce this ironic contrast between Burke’s somewhat less successful musicians and Elgar’s gentlemanly rise, another girl returns to the piano and provides one more incitement for the bored narrator to leave. Outside the narrator hears someone begin “Delilah’s song” (surely an aria from Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah) and, still dismissive, he judges the voice floating from a window to be “typical of the fifth-rate concert platform” (Burke 1918: 221, 222). Quick to disparage the arrogant accent of the young men, the narrator reveals his own snobbery by using his aesthetic refinement to deride the models’ musicality. Burke checks his narrator’s condescension, however, by forcing him to confront the diverse values of music. Outside, the narrator encounters a young girl eavesdropping on the music he has left. The girl listens as if “she was, for the first time, touching finger-tips with beauty.” “Wonder what it feels like to sing like that, eh? Makes me …,” she stammers, “sort of … ’fyou [sic] understand … funny like. Makes me want to …” (1918: 222, Burke’s ellipses). Despite her humble education, indicated by her decidedly un-Oxonian stumbling, the girl hears something subtly pleasurable in the singing that the narrator had missed. She cannot articulate it, as indicated by Burke’s ellipses, but she hears it. Burke insists thereby not that the singer is first-rate, but that even the under-educated can engage art music with some benefit. This girl is on the verge of an aesthetic epiphany, of making an intelligent connection between the beauty of art and the



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beauty of life that would be unattainable by Lord Tantamount, who succumbs too easily to his “dog”-like lust for music. What precise desire the music awakens in the girl, however, we never discover. One of the posh “Oxford voices” interrupts the singing by screeching “[n]o EARTHLY, dear old girl. You’ll never sing. Your values, you know, and all that are …” and the story ends (1918: 222). Burke depicts how music, even if not of a professional quality, can come from cheap instruments and amateur performers, while demonstrating how easily ignorance and arrogance can ruin this art. As Delilah cries in Saint-Saëns’ opera, “En vain je suis belle!” The story reproves both disadvantaged philistines who decry the “stin[k] of art” and cultured aesthetes who slip into a callous preciosity, reminiscent of both Beerbohm’s Duke and certain Times’ reviewers, by equating musicality and virtue with affluence and a box at the Opera. Burke leaves us, finally, with his ellipses to wonder what exactly it was that this unanticipated musical amateur desired and the exact value of the models’ music remains forever ambiguous.

Musical mediocrities: Sliding down the cultural scale Despite the interpretive pitfalls of equating classical music to noble values, twentieth-century writers as diverse as Arnold Bennett and George Orwell depicted this equation as benefiting upper- and middle-class individuals who were short of money. While the relatively poor yet cultured Bonamy and Whittaker exhibit traces of this trend in Jacob’s Room, this theme is more complex than these characters alone can indicate. For, as society increasingly perceived classical music to be a refined or noble art, the music profession offered a useful fall-back plan for formerly wealthy characters, particularly women, who needed to work but who refused to declass themselves entirely by becoming shopkeepers or clerks. Regula Trillini, Phyllis Weliver, and Paula Gillett have all explored the Victorian antecedents of this trend and Trillini, in particular, traces its complexities into the early-twentieth century.19 By working with music, often as teachers, these characters attempt to endow themselves with music’s escalating cultural cachet and thus to maintain some connection to their former refinement. Yet, as Bennett, George Gissing, and others suggest, using music as a last resort to make money indicates a failure to appreciate music properly. These characters appreciate music as a trade, not an art, and this implies that behind their refined pretentions lurk the same aesthetic apathy, intellectual decay, and general indolence found in the audience at the Tantamounts’ musical party. To

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emphasize these cultural weaknesses Bennett, Gissing, and other writers depict these characters garnering only mediocre musical successes. Bennett and Gissing both depict formerly affluent characters deluding themselves with dreams of regaining their lost wealth and prestige through a brilliant musical career. In Bennett’s “Clarice of the Autumn Concerts” (1905), Clarice Toft’s “flamboyant” father sends her to the “Royal College of Music” in London and “to the Conservatoire at Li[è]ge” (296). Upon returning to London, she discovers that she has to compete with “dozens of pianists whom she deemed more brilliant” than herself and she obtains “neither engagements” to perform “nor pupils” (296–7). When her father dies and she learns of “his true financial condition,” and her dearth of an inheritance, she abandons her dream of a London career to become “a teacher of the pianoforte” in the Five Towns, where she does “nicely” (297). Still, dreams die hard and Clarice again deceives herself into believing that she can become a star. A concert promoter offers her a chance to perform in London and, after playing a Tchaikovsky sonata, she envisions a “rosy future as the spoiled darling of continental capitals” (301). Unfortunately, she only moderately impresses the audience and after receiving no further engagements she returns home to teach. Eventually she marries and as her husband, a “pianoforte dealer,” is a “money-maker,” she gives up teaching altogether (303, 304). Clarice’s story suggests the varied practicalities of a musical career. A concert career is a road to achieving fame and fortune, but a difficult one now crowded with competitors.20 Her experience also suggests that teaching music, for some, is only a second-choice profession, a trade less favorable than marrying someone who sells pianos. Finally, it suggests that music offers a means to gentility, but one that the less dedicated abandon when easier means materialize. Gissing presents a more drastic failure in The Whirlpool (1897), wherein the former socialite Alma Frothingham sacrifices her musical career to her excessive indolence. Before her family’s financial downfall Alma declares, “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” (1948: 36). Alma is overly confident. When her family loses its fortune she takes what money her stepmother can spare her and goes to Leipzig to study the violin, hoping one day to support herself by performing. She “put[s] off,” however, “with one excuse after another the beginning of her serious studies” and instead attends “concerts and the theatre” and reads “multitudes of French and German novels” (67). Her career stagnates and eventually she marries for money. Once more comfortable, although not ostentatiously wealthy, Alma re-attempts a musical career to



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regain her social distinction; yet, as before, she distracts herself from practicing. As Gissing explains, Alma has “no profound love of the art” and so she has little interest in refining her technique. She hopes merely to use music to “maintain a place of distinction above ordinary handsome girls and heiresses” (245). As such, she relies on her unrefined talent and at her final concert she garners little musical prestige and only temporary flattery from her friends. Refusing to work at her art, the indolent Alma fails to achieve greater affluence or social influence, her life increasingly disintegrates, and eventually she kills herself. Anticipating a key modernist theme, Gissing uses music to highlight an upper-middle-class intellectual slothfulness. Gissing, however, compares this slothfulness directly to the aesthetic efforts of the working classes. Harvey Rolfe, Alma’s pragmatic husband, remarks that soon, “[w]hen all the bricklayers’ daughters are giving piano lessons,” “women of leisure” will “develop a surprising interest in the boiling of potatoes,” that is, the leisure class will need to learn to perform stereotypically servile tasks (1948: 341). Gissing signals the willingness of some underprivileged working-class individuals, the literary ancestors of Katie Batch, to strive for a socially respectable living, while the unemployed Alma is unwilling to practice her violin. Gissing uses Alma’s aesthetic apathy to condemn the self-cultivated laziness of her class. While Alma and Clarice find husbands to support them in lieu of musical careers, others are less fortunate. Unlucky characters return to or maintain teaching positions to cling to the waning social refinement of their families. These characters, several authors suggest, simultaneously recall the social prestige of music and degrade it by turning music into a second-choice trade. In George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), for instance, the Comstocks represent “the most dismal of all classes, the middle-middle class, the landless gentry,” who as they fall from their peak “on the wave of Victorian prosperity” struggle to maintain their gentility (1987: 39). When Mr. Comstock dies, his daughter must take a job in a teashop, while his wife starts giving piano lessons for “two shillings an hour” in Acton, an industrialized suburb of London, and then in a bleak part of Paddington.21 Mrs. Comstock had given lessons while her husband was alive, but only “sporadically,” when her family was “in lower water than usual.” Teaching the piano allows her to “manage” as respectably as possible until her son gets a decent job and can support the family (49). Her piano lessons indicate neither an enthusiasm for music nor the transmission of an assiduously practiced skill. They indicate, rather, her family’s precarious social position and their need for money. As Clarice and Alma indicate, music offered individuals, particularly women, a difficult, if potentially respectable, career path. Yet, Mrs. Comstock’s Paddington

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flat and Rolfe’s description of the piano-playing “bricklayers’ daughters” reveal how the middle echelons of the music profession could suggest some teachers’ proximity to the lower classes. Reluctant piano teachers in fiction thus shift ever closer to the representative teacher described by Sidney Harrison, a prominent Royal Academy of Music piano professor: [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. … 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. (1940: 114)

While Harrison ends his account on a cheerful note, the idea of being likened to a grocer’s cashier would not have appealed to Clarice or to Mrs. Comstock, much less to Alma. Nonetheless, “poor,” unglamorous, unskilled Miss Smith remains in the background and, though she does “no worse” than many, her achievements evoke her fictional colleagues’ slide down the social scale. Shifting focus from performers and teachers to the art of music itself, some authors imagined the aesthetic stagnation that could result from using music as a makeshift yet genteel profession or for superficial social objectives. Waugh offers perhaps the funniest example of this in Decline and Fall (1928). Sent down from Oxford and denied his inheritance, Paul Pennyfeather accepts a job at a boarding school to teach classics and literature, and to teach Peter BesteChetwynde the organ. Luckily for everyone, Beste-Chetwynde takes the lessons primarily “to get off gym” as one of Pennyfeather’s chief pedagogical strategies is to ask his student to stop playing (Waugh 1999: 26). During one lesson BesteChetwynde plays along not “terribly well,” until he asks, “[s]hall I stop for a bit?” to which Pennyfeather replies, “I wish you would” (123). Pennyfeather’s tutelage offers Beste-Chetwynde little opportunity or inspiration for improving his art, should he wish to do so. Woolf evokes more complex musical stagnations in Night and Day (1919) through the irresolute Henry Otway’s stalled ambitions. Unable to depend on his financially strapped father, Sir Francis, for money and unwilling to work “in a shipping office,” like the roughish Willoughby Vinrace, “or in a tea-merchant’s warehouse,” Henry indecisively studies music. He spends his time “practising both violin and piano, with the result that he could not perform professionally upon either.” His attempts to compose are likewise unsuccessful and “for thirtytwo years of life he had nothing more substantial to show than a manuscript



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book containing the score of half an opera” (Woolf 1988: 188). Unable to perform or to compose, he maintains “the uncongenial occupation of teaching the young ladies of Bungay to play upon the violin” (93). He dislikes this job, but it allows him to avoid the ignominy of having a commercial trade; ironically, however, this career links him to the pathetic Signor Morelli, “a sad little man” Woolf excised from The Years, who likewise performs the “hated” job of “teaching young ladies the violin.” Morelli’s “glorious operas” at least were presumably completed, even if they “were never played” (1977: 29). Henry, meanwhile, cannot concertize, has not even one opera ready to be played, and has an “uncongenial occupation” in which, Woolf insinuates, he produces very little of merit. The hard-working Woolf uses Henry as a critique of the indolent artist. He represents, perhaps, a failed version of Woolf herself, who by 32 years of age had published, among other things, “Street Music,” “The Opera,” and “Impressions at Bayreuth,” and was completing The Voyage Out. Henry’s proximity to a title also recalls Woolf ’s similar portrayals of the upper classes as intellectually and artistically deficient. In her essay “Am I a Snob?,” for instance, she recounts a party of Lady Colefax’s at which the soprano “Olga Lynn threw down her music in a rage because people talked” during her performance (1985: 219). For Woolf, the pleasure of snobbery was in admiring the upper classes for their beautiful surroundings and their rejection of certain conventions, while simultaneously enjoying her own intellectual and aesthetic superiority in the face of their aesthetic crassness. Like Alma Frothingham and Lady Colefax’s guests, Henry, with his musical failures, evokes a decaying upper-class will, one disinclined or unable to persevere in intellectual endeavors, and so destined to descend the cultural scale, which Woolf was ascending. Henry’s turn to composition and to pedagogy, moreover, like Alma’s, Mrs. Comstock’s, and Pennyfeather’s, evokes a questionable future for English music. These reluctant fictional music teachers reflect wider concerns regarding musical education during this period. Cyril Ehrlich reports that in the 1920s and 30s England experienced a boom in music teachers, particularly in piano teachers, many of whom held spurious or unreliable certifications.22 Very likely many of these teachers were akin to Harrison’s incompetent Miss Smith. Yet, as we have seen, when middle-class intellectuals fictionalize this trend, they focus less on inadequate lower-middle- and working-class teachers and more on teachers from the flailing upper or middle classes. They do so to indicate that, for characters such as Alma Frothingham, Mrs. Comstock, and Henry

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Otway, music holds little of the artistic, moral, or intellectual refinement that it holds for Huxley’s musical narrators, for Woolf ’s cultured Bonamy, or, indeed, for modernists such as Huxley and Woolf themselves. The musical knowledge of Henry and his ilk is half-hearted and desultory. These characters stress their association with a noble art in order to cling to the shreds of their social reputations. In doing so, these authors suggest, such characters risk cheapening the prestige of music itself.

“the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking”: The indifferent musicality of the thriving upper classes Bennett, Gissing, Orwell, and Woolf use the stalled musical careers of financially struggling upper- or middle-class characters to condemn them as lazy and irresolute. They further disparage these characters for demeaning music by using it superficially for its cultural or social capital. These characters also show, however, that the more artists must worry about making money, the less they can focus on their art. From this perspective, these characters evoke modernist concerns that the more artistic endeavors become tied to commercialism, the less they invoke worthwhile aesthetic values, such as refinement, skill, and a path towards Pater’s moral and intellectual “multiplied consciousness” (1980: 190). It is thus worth examining how certain modernists, such as Huxley and Eliot, portray music lovers whose need to work was limited or non-existent, who were nominally Britain’s cultural elite. These characters could afford the best education and the best concert tickets. As such, they should be the best suited to shoulder the interpretive onus of music and the cultural responsibilities of the upper classes. These are the characters, however, who fail the most dramatically. To exemplify a general upper-class decay, writers such as Huxley and Eliot depict even the most prosperous classes as cursed with, as Sir John Falstaff once put it, “the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking”: these characters far surpass Lord Tantamount in their aesthetic shallowness, as they emphasize the simplistic elements of mechanical musical spectacles (Shakespeare 1997: Henry IV Part II, 1.2.120–1). Unable or unwilling to understand the complexities of classical music, these characters reveal the paltriness of their cultural competencies. Their intellectual failures simultaneously accent the cleverness of their creators and signal an abandoned cultural and intellectual expertise, which modernists, such as Huxley and Eliot, brilliantly and humorously seize for themselves.



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In Crome Yellow (1921) Huxley satirically traces the aesthetic and intellectual decline of the wealthy Lapith-Wimbush family from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The family reaches its cultural apex in the eighteenth century with Sir Hercules, who, when fully grown, stood “three feet and four inches” tall. Although his father considered him a “lusus naturae,” Hercules lived up to his name when it came to the arts (2004: 62). When three years old, he showed a “remarkable aptitude for music” and at 21 he “was no indifferent performer on the violin, which he used to play like a bass viol” (61, 63). After his father’s death Sir Hercules marries Filomena, a musical Italian aristocrat. Filomena boasts a stature equivalent to her husband’s, both mentally and physically, and the two lead a pleasant life filled with artistic pursuits, “especially that of music”: “[a]ccompanied by her husband on his fine Cremona fiddle,” Filomena “would sing all the liveliest and tenderest airs from the operas and cantatas of her native country” and, when “[s]eated together at the harpsichord, 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). With hard work, intelligence, and grace, this couple transcends their physical, human limitations to achieve an artistic goal that is larger than either of them alone. While short, Hercules and Filomena represent the height of the LapithWimbush family’s artistic and intellectual achievements. Unfortunately, the family’s aesthetic and intellectual fortunes degenerate with the couple’s son, Ferdinando. Ferdinando grows as large as his parents are small and as boorish as they are refined. His parents mourn, particularly when he brings to Crome two friends from the “common race of men” each being of a “common” size and of vulgarly “common” tastes. Hercules hosts the young men graciously at dinner, but they ignore him as he discusses the pleasures of “the opera at Venice” and “the singing of the orphans” in Venetian churches (Huxley 2004: 70). Later in the evening, Hercules spies the young men 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 jig” (71). Ferdinando promises his friends that the next day they would “have a concerted ballet of the whole household.” Hercules explains the situation to Filomena, after which they recall their musical life and she sings “softly in her ghost of a cracked voice a few bars from Stradella’s Amor, amor, non dormir piu” (72). Their tender musical memories contrast sharply with the drunken men banging out the rhythm of a jig downstairs. To avoid the shame of the next evening’s “ballet,” the two commit suicide, leaving the family’s fate in Ferdinando’s crudely rhythmic hands.

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Following Ferdinando, the family’s musicality descends continually from the heights of seventeenth-century Italian opera to a perfunctory frenzy of noise. Huxley has the twentieth-century descendant of the Lapith line, Henry Wimbush, “trod out” on a pianola “the shattering dance music” of a song entitled “Wild, Wild Women” followed by a waltz during a house party (2004: 46). As Henry, a “slave at the mill” of the mechanical instrument, cranks out a mind-numbingly repetitive rhythm, “Rum; Tum; Rum-ti-ti; Tum-ti-ti,” two guests glide like a “beast” around him, indicating the fall of the family from the refined traditions of the Lapiths to the centaur-like impulsive wills of the Wimbushes, evoking a comic echo of the classical Centauromachy (47). Later, during the annual fair held at Crome, Denis, a guest of the Wimbushes, climbs to the top of the manor and hears a “steam-organ” blaring out a “prodigious music” to the crowd below. Denis listens as the “clashing of automatic cymbals beat out with inexorable precision the rhythm of piercingly sounded melodies,” until 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). Ferdinando’s jig-like table “thumping” might outdo Henry for brutishness, but Henry outdoes Ferdinando as a patron of noisy inanities. Perhaps, however, Henry outdoes Ferdinando on both counts, for Henry promotes a mechanical aesthetic that forsakes thought and skill and thereby facilitates the psychological manipulations of diverse audiences. Henry’s pianola and the steam-organ are well suited to control the unthinking “lower species” of Mr. Scogan’s theoretical “Rational State,” a forerunner to the dystopian “World State” of Brave New World (Huxley 2004: 126). Mr. Scogan outlines how in a “Rational State” the “lower species” or “Herd” would “[s]ystematically” be made content by having their “almost boundless suggestibility … scientifically exploited” so 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 the pianola and the steam-organ, the latter of which, Denis notes, gives out a blast reminiscent of the “Last Trump,” both provide an over-inflated sense of happiness and importance to the characters who dance throughout the novel (144). Huxley uses these instruments to insinuate, then, that despite their wealth and their assumed superiority, the Wimbushes and their friends all risk falling into an uncritical “lower species” fit for exploitation. Eliot similarly argues that an approval of noise and spectacle rather than artistry signals the philistine naïveté of the general London concert-goer. In his October 1921 London Letter, Eliot records how Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps,



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a pointed evolution of classical ballet music, was “received with wild applause,” although the “music was certainly too new and strange to please very many people” (452). Sacre du Printemps had first been performed in London in 1913, where it initially sparked minor demonstrations and Lawrence Rainey notes that it played again at the Prince’s Theatre for three nights in the summer of 1921.23 Eliot uses his review of one of these performances to present his perception of London’s would-be aesthetically advanced public as a factual reportage, one that fashions this public into a nearly hysterical and hypocritical mass that gives “wild” acclamation to what it does not understand. Eliot simultaneously presents himself as a part of an actual aesthetic elite, which calmly and objectively analyzes the modern merits of Stravinsky. Most of the audience, Eliot contends, missed what he himself identified as Stravinsky’s attempt to engage 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 the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music” (October 1921: 453). Much of the audience, Eliot implies, was unaware of the aesthetic significance of the music and applauded the sheer extravagance of the show. In comparison, Eliot’s carefully fashioned clauses evidence not only his own more thorough understanding of Stravinsky’s aesthetic revolutions but his ability to perform his own. Eliot’s carefully constructed alliterative language analogously links the ancient “rhythm of the steppes” to the “scream” of a modern “motor horn,” and the “rattle of machinery,” just as he refines the staid form of a journalistic report or review into modern prose poetry. Eliot emphasizes the audience’s superficial “applause” for Stravinsky to advance his cultured argument that the public and England’s traditionally elite society in particular seek value simply in the spectacle of intellectual music and its connotations of privilege. In the same Letter, he notes the celebrity of “Mr. Rubenstein [sic],” Arthur Rubinstein, the “brilliant pianist” and observes that in the previous summer “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” (October 1921: 452). Rubinstein was everywhere, apparently, but at a piano. The Londoners who patronize boxes and society events, Eliot implies, devalue Rubinstein’s brilliance by concentrating on the idea of his phenomenal presence, not his art, as they stress his role as a status symbol.24 This claim is itself an extension of Eliot’s August 1921 letter in which he referred 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” (August 1921: 213). For

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most of society, particularly high society, Eliot suggests, music has become merely a hollow symbol of culture. An underlying and unspoken assumption throughout these Letters, however, is that Eliot’s own audience has a much more refined, if less ostentatious intellectual aesthetic, for they appreciate not the luxurious flamboyance of Rubinstein and his over-imaginative admirers but the productive cultural critiques of Eliot himself. These London Letters evoke the cyclical evacuation and saturation of musical culture that Eliot alludes to in several early poems. In these works, Eliot’s would-be intellectuals evacuate romantic music of its complexity and saturate its social significance with the frivolity of their stunted affairs, as if confusing aesthetic romantic movements with erotic romantic relationships. In “Conversation Galante” (1917), for instance, Eliot satirizes the ebb of an aesthetic romantic sublimity. A dandy flirts glibly with his companion by referring to an “exquisite nocturne, with which we explain/ The night and moonshine; music which we seize/ To body forth our own vacuity” (1980: lns. 8–10). Eliot’s modern “galant,” a flippant courtly lover, degrades a nocturne, the most famous of which were composed by the arch-romantic Frédéric Chopin, into a metaphor for his own intellectual and amorous inanity.25 To indicate this process, Eliot satirically invokes the musical “style galant,” with its “emphasis on melody with light accompaniment,” which became prominent in the late-eighteenth century, as opposed to the denser complexity of baroque counterpoint, the so-called “learned” style, or even the complexities of romantic chromaticism (Arnold 1983: 740, 501). Eliot indicates the galant’s superficiality through his simplification of romantic music into a vacuous cliché without coming close to achieving the genius of a Mozartian “style galant.” In “Portrait of a Lady” (1917), Eliot likewise points to the amorous platitudes that some of the upper classes imposed upon romantic music due to their refusal to approach it critically. He heightens his characters’ insipidness by comparing them implicitly to characters in Henry James’ 1881 novel of the same name. James’ protagonists engage in intense analyses of details. Music becomes one such detail in Portrait of a Lady as James uses musical references to distinguish, to prod, and occasionally to mislead his characters. He introduces, for instance, the calculating Madame Merle by having her play a Schubert piece on the piano with a “discretion” that “showed skill” and “feeling” (1966: 171). Merle’s artistry initially leads the heroine Isabel Archer to feel “a strong desire to thank” Merle and to find her “attractive” (171, 172). The beautiful music encourages Isabel to cultivate a misguided admiration for Merle, who eventually betrays her. Conversely, James uses Isabel’s skill on the same instrument, which



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she plays to “gratif[y]” the “wish” of her future step-daughter, to suggest Isabel’s carefully considered, if initially naïve, dedication to the girl and her father (316). Eliot recalls James’ characters and parodies their complex musical contemplations by attenuating them. The “Lady” in Eliot’s “Portrait” tritely suggests of “Chopin” that “his soul/ Should be resurrected only among friends … who will not touch the bloom/ That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room,” as she tries to manipulate a young man into admiring her (Eliot 1980: 1.10–13). The woman degrades Chopin’s music into an un-“questioned,” cloying romantic overture that ironically opposes the complicated web of emotional control, trust, and betrayal symbolized by the music from which James’ characters carefully, if sometimes erroneously, draw conclusions. For Eliot’s characters, though not for the poet himself, Chopin’s music simply flattens out. The lady’s young man subsequently notes how in his “brain a dull tom-tom begins/ Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,” a “[c]apricious monotone” (1.32–4). He composes a dulled imitation of Chopin’s preludes to drown out the lady’s insipid amorous advances. His mental music hardly differs from the “street piano, mechanical and tired” that he encounters later as it “reiterates some worn-out common song … Recalling things that other people have desired” (2.39–42). For Eliot’s characters, once complex musical themes become enervated and “mechanical” romantic stimuli. The young man especially, Eliot suggests, uncritically allows these worn-out musical formulas to influence him. Although the young man wonders briefly whether the “desire[s]” and “ideas” conveyed through the mechanical music he hears are “right or wrong,” Eliot signals his lack of serious critical engagement with the music through an echo of Orsino’s affectations from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: the young man fears that a pseudo-amorous “music” might be convincingly “successful with a ‘dying fall’ ” (1980: 3.39). Yet even Orsino, with his punch-drunk amorousness, recognizes that the “dying fall” of music, if overly repeated, is “not so sweet … as it was before” and that what is filtered through an ideal “falls into abatement and low price” (Shakespeare 1997: 1.1.4, 8, 13). Orsino exhibits an aesthetic sensitivity that Eliot himself maintains but denies to the young man. The latter, wallowing in an attenuated aesthetic and erotic romanticism, fears that his lingering musical memories, embodying the reiterated traditions of what “other people have desired,” might gradually draw him into the lady’s clutches, after all. In the end, it is only his capricious egotism that allows him to escape, guiltily, her amorous musical advances. Eliot, then, analogously to Huxley, depicts many of the upper and uppermiddle classes using trite, often mechanical approaches to music to invoke

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superficial pleasures or to dominate others. The wide-ranging prevalence of these approaches, these writers argue, risked turning classical music into a metaphor for a cultural capital so inflated as to be almost worthless. As such, they suggest, only a revitalized intellectual appreciation of noble musical conventions, such as Bach’s, or of revolutions in musical techniques, such as Stravinsky’s, could reinforce the complexity and the wit of musical culture and save it from vulgarization.

The function of form: Structuring modernist literature to appropriate musical prestige Modernist writers such as Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf rose brilliantly and diversely to this challenge. Despite portraying classical music as socially significant, yet superficially so, for much of the British public, they repeatedly assert their own appreciation of its intellectual and spiritual nobility. They do so, in part, by making erudite references to classical composers, such as Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner. More complexly, they model their own literary experiments on forms borrowed from classical music, such as fugues, quartets, or theme and variations. Critics have long debated the successes of this modeling and its consequent effect on literary interpretations; I primarily concur with Emily Petermann’s argument that the imitation in literary texts of musical forms remains “partial, analogical, or suggestive” (2014: 3).26 Yet, in addition to critiquing the success of these inter-art experiments, we might well ask what shared reasons these writers had for rhetorically appropriating musical forms in the first place. There were four primary reasons. First, by imitating musical forms, experimental writers indicated their own ability to appreciate a culturally influential European art in a sophisticated and intellectual fashion, even if most others could not. Second, these writers sought to ennoble their own literary experiments by associating them with the complexity and the increasing social value of classical music in twentieth-century British society. Third, by emphasizing a commitment to aesthetic form these writers associated themselves with a British intellectual formalism exemplified by Walter Pater, as I discussed in Chapter 1, and his theoretical successors, such as Roger Fry and Clive Bell.27 These writers, finally, all enjoyed music and enjoyed associating it with their work. To draw attention to these four objectives, they created autobiographical characters who highlight the intellectual and philosophical meanings of musical forms in their work.



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In his lecture “The Music of Poetry” (1942), Eliot offers insight into how musical forms could positively influence literature. Despite warning that “it might be possible for a poet to work too closely to musical analogies,” he argues that one “may gain much from the study of music,” particularly if one studies “the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure” in music. A certain “rhythm,” he notes, can help a writer “bring to birth the idea and the image” of a poem. He also suggests that “there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet,” symphonies and quartets in their structural form consisting of several often related movements, and “of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter” (Eliot 1957: 38). A poet might learn, then, from studying musical rhythms, quartets, and counterpoint. Contrapuntal music or counterpoint, as noted earlier, was considered an especially “learned” or “scholastic” technique of composition (Arnold 1983: 501; Grove 1907: 1.614). While in itself counterpoint is really a technique, not a form, it is intimately related to the complex musical form “fugue” and this offers a clue to Eliot’s rhetorical goals. Associating poetry with such intellectual musical forms as quartets and fugues helped Eliot in his long-standing project of linking his poetry to a rich tradition of intellectual and cultural associations.28 Connections between classical musical forms and literature akin to those outlined by Eliot reappear consistently throughout British modernist writing. In each case, these connections allow modernist authors to appropriate for themselves and for their art the cultural prestige of classical musical forms. An excellent example of this, finished in the same year that he lectured on “The Music of Poetry,” is Eliot’s own Four Quartets (1935–42). Of this title Eliot observed that he wanted “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).” Although reluctant to be “too musical,” Eliot wanted to emphasize the quasi-musical “form” of his poems and to point to his “weaving in together three or four superficially unrelated themes” to make “a new whole” (in Gardner 1978: 26). These comments suggest that Eliot may have considered each section of the four poems to parallel one movement within a “quartet” or considered his themes to be woven together with a contrapuntal technique as if to form a fugue. His allusion to “three or four superficially unrelated themes” sounds much like Grove’s description of counterpoint, in the “ideal sense,” as a “melodic independence of parts, such as may be found, for example, in all fugal movements” (Grove 1907: 1.614). Yet, if Eliot dismisses any precise musical influence, the point remains that there is a patent intellectualism attached to

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his association of his poems with a classical musical form, such as a quartet or fugue, as opposed to, say, a popular ballad or a song.29 In Four Quartets, moreover, Eliot drew not only on the intellectual overtones of musical quartets, he also drew on Pater’s well-known conflation of form and content into a metaphysical music, one concerned with intellectual inquiry and moral action.30 Pater sought a musical interpenetration of form and content in art, which incited his claim that “[a]ll art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (1980: 106). But he simultaneously sought a musical correspondence of contemplation and conduct. “To treat life in the spirit of art,” which for Pater is the condition of music, “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” (1901: 62). To live aesthetically, and morally, one must recognize “the supreme importance of contemplation in the conduct of life”: contemplation and conduct must be of the same moment (59). When this aesthetic combination is achieved, and is also of humanistic “sympathies,” then it is akin to what Pater, in a similar context, calls a “musical law” (1901: 38; 1980: 109). This law allows one to achieve an “impassioned contemplation,” or, in compatible terms, the ability to “burn” with “a hard gem-like flame”—these merging moments are not only “success in life,” they are, for Pater, music (1901: 62; 1980: 189). In Four Quartets Eliot, too, emphasizes musical forms to encourage an “impassioned contemplation”; specifically, he uses a fugal form to highlight his merger of his three primary themes: time passing, a transcendence of time passing, and Christianity. Consider Eliot’s formal arrangements of the words “end” and “beginning”: “the end and the beginning were always there,” “In my end is my beginning,” “What we call the beginning is often the end” (1971: “BN” 5.11; “EC” 5.38; “LG” 5.1). The formulaic reiterations of “beginning” and “end” throughout the Quartets evoke both the passage of time and the transcendence of time’s passage, as “beginning” and “end” become syntactically and conceptually equivalent. Eliot further counterpoints this equivalency with the transcendence of time altogether in the Christian “Incarnation.” The “Incarnation” is, for Eliot, the moment when previous and forthcoming events are “reconciled,” as Christ embodies human mortality and divine immortality (“DS” 5.32, 5.36). Eliot’s “Incarnation” is the Paterian gem-like “lifetime burning” always yet not the “lifetime” of “one man only,” but of mankind and God (“EC” 5.23–4).31 Throughout the Quartets, Eliot uses such interpenetrating, contrapuntally constructed references to time and Christianity to encourage an “impassioned contemplation” of the temporal multiplicities of Christianity’s ultimate moment of merger, the “Incarnation.” Eliot reinforces his critical musical framework by



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explaining that the moment when one grasps the “Incarnation” is akin to sensing music perceived so intensely that “it is not heard at all,” when “you are the music” (“DS” 5.24, 28). While Eliot draws, then, on musical forms such as classical quartets and fugues, he also relies on Pater’s formal and metaphysical musical aesthetic to heighten the intellectual and moral paradigm of Four Quartets. Huxley similarly conflates music and moral contemplation in his writing, largely through fugal structures and contrapuntal techniques. In Point Counter Point, Philip Quarles theorizes the construction of an erudite novel (like his creator’s) containing “parallel, contrapuntal plots.”32 Quarles imagines these “contrapuntal plots” as working “[i]n sets of variations” akin to Beethoven’s “incredible Diabelli variations” (variations 24 and 32 are fugues) by presenting and developing “dissimilars [i.e. dissimilar people] solving the same problems” or “similar people confronted with dissimilar problems” (Huxley 1928: 350). Quarles combines the nominally distinct form of a fugue with a musical theme and variations for analytical purposes. This makes sense as a fugue contains variations of its themes in different voices (soprano, alto, tenor, bass), either inverting or reversing them or placing them in different harmonic situations, often simultaneously. This hybrid form then, as Huxley argues through Quarles, can display the complexities of one theme playing out in different voices, be they musical or characters’ voices, almost simultaneously. In Point Counter Point, Huxley himself uses this fugue-like structure to critique points of view on a variety of subjects. For example, he critiques infidelity from the perspective or the “voices” of five dissimilar women: Janet Bidlake, Rachel Quarles, Elinor Quarles (Rachel’s daughter-in-law), Gladys Helmsley, and Marjory Carling. The husbands of the first three women have affairs, the last two women have affairs themselves, and Huxley analyzes how these different women respond to these similar situations. Janet escapes into “regions of artistic and literary fancy,” which is where she feels “most at home” (1928: 384). Rachel varies this escapist motif by turning to a passive religiosity and the “old dull virtues” of “patience” and “resignation” (413). Gladys, Rachel’s husband’s mistress, threatens this escape when she becomes pregnant and refuses to be resigned or to forgo her “rights,” presumably to money (429). In a further inversion of the escapist motif, the younger women are more pro-active. Elinor encourages her husband to have affairs and considers having one herself. Marjory provides a similar variation to Gladys by committing adultery with Janet’s son, Walter. Huxley counterpoints these variations to analyze, as dispassionately as possible, the complexities of infidelity, as they occur simultaneously in the world of the novel.

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Of course, as inter-art critics such as Calvin Brown have long noted, themes and variations and techniques such as counterpoint are as much the traditional province of literature as of music.33 What then, do Eliot and Huxley gain by emphasizing how they shape their writing into musical forms? They gain, for one, a connection among themselves, their work, and the intellectual prestige associated with an interest in aesthetic forms and techniques, as advocated by Pater, Fry, and Bell. More influentially, because more popularly recognizable, they also gain a connection among themselves, their work, and the increasing cultural prestige of classical music. What makes their musical literary experiments so intriguing, however, is that they additionally gain the ability of musical forms, particularly the fugue, quartets, and themes and variations, and musical techniques, such as counterpoint, to accentuate the complex inter-relatedness of seemingly commonplace events and perspectives.34 As Quarles notes, through the “Diabelli variations” Beethoven organizes “the whole range of thought and feeling” by manipulating one “ridiculous little waltz tune,” with its commonplace notes. Imitating Beethoven, Huxley uses the commonplace literary theme of infidelity—what Elinor Quarles calls a “ridiculous,” if “thrillingly” lustful idea—and explores it from a range of “emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical, etc.” perspectives, which he wants his reader to consider both individually and concurrently (1928: 350, 330).35 Huxley does not create an actual musical fugue or musical theme and variations. But like Eliot, he does use a fugal literary structure to encourage an analytical method of reading. This analytical method of writing and reading is, however, for Huxley, an implicitly elitist project. This musical–literary structure, as Quarles suggests, formulates a “novel of ideas” and “[t]he chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to express—which excludes all but about .01 per cent. of the human race” (Huxley 1928: 351). This “defect” would, Quarles implies, limit not just an author’s array of characters, but also an author’s audience, which must take a similar interest in ideas. Huxley embraces, then, the complexities of musical forms to reinforce the intellectual attraction of a contrapuntal “novel of ideas,” even while believing that this will limit the appeal of his writing to those interested in such analytical entertainments.36 Nonetheless, according to Donald Watt, Huxley’s “fast-selling Point Counter Point,” which was composed along Quarles’ principles, actually did quite well (1975: 17). Many of the reviews of the novel that Watt reprints emphasize, moreover, the relationship of the novel’s musical structure to its presentation of contrapuntal ideas.37 Huxley’s attempt to provoke an analytical reading of his work through appropriating a musical structure seems to have worked,



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although, as he predicted, his books never sold in the quantities of middle-brow powerhouses such as Arnold Bennett or Somerset Maugham. Refusing to appeal to mass audiences, however, Huxley gives the most space in his novels to intellectual, intensely philosophical characters who can appreciate analytical ideas transmitted through musical forms and he fashions these characters as contemplative, middle-class characters, who run in aesthetic circles, like himself. In Antic Hay (1923), Theodore Gumbril, Huxley’s protagonist, is “wonderfully at home” with music and both courts women and critiques the ennui of the post-World War I period via his familiarity with Beethoven and Mozart, as did Huxley (2006: 122). In Those Barren Leaves (1925), the poet Francis Chelifer reads Wittgenstein and plays “a little Bach” to avoid the thoughtless “distractions offered by the cinema and the Palais de Danse” (Huxley 1998: 72). In Two or Three Graces (1926), Huxley’s autobiographical narrator conflates his role as a “musical critic” and his appreciation of the form of “Beethoven’s Op. 111” with his attempts to understand and to idealize what he calls “the music of our destinies” (1926: 217–18). Huxley placed similarly autobiographical middle-class, intellectual, musical characters into much of his pre-World War II fiction and these characters represent those individuals primed to appreciate a contrapuntal novel. Huxley and Eliot were not the only authors working in this musical vein. Elicia Clements and Emma Sutton have both offered extensive analyses of Woolf ’s relationship to music and have demonstrated how her novels reimagine musical forms, such as fugue, through prose.38 To add to their work, I would suggest that Woolf also merges music and literature by fashioning a Paterian literary-musical form. In “The String Quartet,” for instance, from Monday or Tuesday (1921), she re-forms a Mozart quartet into a stream-of-consciousness narration by an audience. The audience observes a string quartet as “the first violin counts one, two, three—” and then “Flourish, spring, burgeon, burst!” (Woolf 2003: 42). These last four words mimic the four players beginning the quartet as Woolf begins to translate music into prose, her words mimicking the music. Concurrently, she echoes Plato and Pater’s nineteenth-century musical reappraisals of Platonic social harmonies by having the Mozart quartet recall an ideal “city” that “has neither stone nor marble” yet “hangs enduring; stands unshakable” (45). I will analyze the political connotations of this image for Woolf in Chapter 5, but for now I want to emphasize how by recalling the sublimity of a stable, calm, social harmony, Woolf ties closely her own musical prose to Plato’s musical Republic, his ideal city with music as the chief educational and stabilizing heuristic, as well as to Pater’s own neo-Platonic musical intellectualism and his musical visions of harmonious social tolerance.

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In The Waves (1931), Woolf again translates music into a stream-ofconsciousness narration, this time to evoke a fusing metaphysical philosophical sublimity. As the contemplatively Woolf-like Rhoda attends a concert, Woolf formulates a verbal reflection of her aural experience: “men come with their violins; wait; count; nod; down come their bows. And there is ripple and laughter” among reflections of “ ‘[l]ike’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’….” This inspires Rhoda to think “[t]here is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong.” Rhoda re-imagines the ancient mathematical attempt to square the circle as the complexities of the music rouse her, much as they roused Woolf, to equate the essential qualities of the world around her. Woolf ’s merger of music and prose indeed exhibits an attempt to formulate such transcendental equivalencies, to evoke the sound and sense, for instance, that “like[n]” music to writing. This aesthetic merger reaches for what Rhoda identifies as the metaphysical “thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing” of everyday life, some universal commonality. Rhoda learns to find in the music, then, the “triumph” and the “consolation” of a musical evocation of a transcendental essence (2000: 123). Through Rhoda, Woolf brings to her own novel and to a female heroine the brief philosophical consolation through music that Forster offers his young male undergraduates in The Longest Journey as they sit around in Cambridge discussing “philosophy,” trying to “draw within the square a circle, and within the circle a square,” as they listen to a Wagnerian prelude, as I discuss in my introduction (Forster 2001: 3, 17). When she was younger Woolf desired the philosophical consolations of rich men’s sons, such as Forster’s undergraduates and her own brothers, but as an older, acclaimed novelist, with a gramophone and a full library, Woolf could access these consolations for herself and, going further, turn them into art. Indeed, Woolf goes further as by weaving music into this stream-ofconsciousness narration she associates her own art with what, following a distinguished tradition of European intellectual inquiries by Nietzsche, Pater, Wagner, and others, she conceived as the fusing sublimity of music. As Dahlhaus explains, “[i]n the esthetics of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, i.e. the reigning theory of art in the second half of the [nineteenth] century, music was considered to be an expression of the ‘essence’ of things, as opposed to the language of concepts that cleaved to mere ‘appearances’ ” (1991: 10). One popular formulation of this concept was Wagner’s notion of the “inexhaustibly expressive power of Symphonic Melody,” which could be realized by a Gesamtkunstwerk, a totalizing visual and aural experience (1907: 337). Woolf ’s rhetoric in “Impressions at Bayreuth”—wherein she observes that



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certain “exalted emotions,” such as those evoked by Parsifal, “which belong to the essence of our being, and are rarely expressed, are those that are best translated by music”—suggests her familiarity with this continental philosophy (1986: 1.290). Mark Hussey suggests that Clive Bell’s Art may also have been an “important factor in the development” of Woolf ’s aesthetics (Hussey 1986: 64). In Art (1914), Bell theorizes a “pure musical form” that can exist as a “pure art,” which may make us aware of an “essential reality, of the God in everything, of the universal in the particular, of the all-pervading rhythm” (31, 69). Woolf ’s conception of music, however, was far more sophisticated than Bell’s simplistic references to “pure musical form,” a phrase that he never really defines. Woolf took a more Paterian line by linking this form to an explicit thematic content, namely a sense of intellectual reflection and consolation, for Rhoda and for herself. Modernist writers such as Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf, then, interweave musical forms into their writing to illustrate their intellectual appreciation of a socially valued art form and to link their own writing to the cultural and philosophical cachet of classical music. This study, however, would be remiss without recalling that for all these authors, writing about music was hardly an “intellectual hypocrisy,” to borrow Huxley’s phrase. Eliot admitted to having no specific “technical knowledge” of music, but he was a critical attendee of musical events, as his London Letters indicate (1957: 38). Huxley had a brief career as a music critic in the 1920s, which was prepared for by years of learning to play the piano and by attending concerts, such as the Balliol concerts established by Jowett and examined in Chapter 1 (Murray 2002: 33, 43). Woolf attended concerts throughout her adult life and listened to records and broadcasts of opera at home, occasionally, like Whittaker, with “the book of the score” in front of her (1977–83: 4.107). She also published two articles indicating her interest in opera: “The Opera” (1909) and “Impressions at Bayreuth” (1909). These authors were not professional musicians, but their eager engagements with music made them well-suited to attempt their musical–literary experiments. Therefore, although these experiments indicate modernists’ reinforcement of their social positions at the expense of others, these experiments also indicate their love for and intellectual interest in both literature and music and their aesthetic philosophical potential. Moreover, lest this chapter seem to engage in an unfair class-whipping, it seems worth acknowledging that their musical associations and experiments are appealingly and brilliantly done.

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A recapitulation: Rethinking the role of music in Modernist writing Modernists’ fascination with musical–literary experiments advanced their aesthetic techniques through a variety of formalist innovations, as evidenced by Eliot’s contrapuntal poetry and by Woolf ’s musically impressionistic prose. These experiments go further, though, in that they point to a mutual, almost symbiotic influence of aesthetic and socio-economic concerns. Modernists appropriated musical forms for their writing to capitalize on the growing value of classical music in Britain and, in doing so, they promoted the cultural value of classical music itself. This was a sophisticated strategy. For while they linked classical music to glamorous and affluent settings to reinforce its social importance, they simultaneously implied that the upper classes who dominated these venues could scarcely concentrate on a basic melody, much less appreciate crucial musical forms. This rhetoric presented the British ruling classes as culturally, if not financially, bankrupt. Middle-class intellectual writers, such as Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf, then, used this theme of cultural impoverishment to equate the bulk of the British upper and upper-middle classes to the allegedly ignorant lower-middle and working classes. Simultaneously, modernist writers used their familiarity with musical forms and aesthetic theories pertaining to music to claim the established cultural and intellectual value of classical music for themselves and for their art. As Beerbohm himself comes off as the clever hero of his novel, rather than the over-idealized Duke or the underdeveloped Katie, much less the unmusical music-hall artiste Zuleika, so modernist writers like Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf become the heroes of their own works, particularly in the minds of contemporary and modern-day readers.39 Pretentious fictional aristocrats like the Duke or Woolf ’s Lady Lasswade, however, are ironically similar to many modernist authors in at least one respect. The latter too exhibit an aesthetic elitism by claiming classical music for themselves. Like Lady Lasswade, they eschew the socially progressive musical liberalism promoted in the late-nineteenth century by authors such as Pater and musicians such as Sullivan. These modernists unfortunately refused to advance the social virtues of music for anyone save a small, highly educated, aesthetic elite. Most modernists, that is, aspired to the cultural condition of music, but were willing to leave others behind. Two tradeoffs of British modernism, then, were critical experiments in a brilliant and alluring musical literary formalism and an increased prestige for classical



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music itself, both of which came at the expense of a restricted musical liberalism in fiction. An understanding of the motivations inherent in the thematic and structural uses of music in modernist fiction is, as such, useful to our understanding of the rhetorical rise of modernist authors to cultural prominence in the twentieth century.

Notes   1 See, for example, Rose on Leonard Woolf ’s and E. M. Forster’s condemnation of lower-middle- and working-class musical tastes (2001: 401–3, 409–10).   2 See Freedman (1990: 47–56); Latham (2003: 2, 6–7); and Rainey (1998: 170–1); for the opposition between modernism and mass culture more generally, see Huyssen (1986: vii, 16–17).   3 For musical receptions, aesthetic attitudes, politics, and nationalisms in the nineteenth century, see also Hall-Witt (2007: 9–10).   4 For Britain’s middle-class “intellectual aristocracy,” see Annan (1969: 243–4, 284–6), Carey (1992: 71–2), and Zwerdling, who argues that authors associated with “Bloomsbury” critique their inherited intellectual traditions but refuse to relinquish them entirely (1986: 58).   5 Fiction often accelerated the decline of the aristocracy, which in actuality retained significant, if waning, influence and privileges; see McKibbin (2000: 19–22) and Perkin (1989: 77–8, 253–5).   6 A musical expertise was, nonetheless, still socially suspect at the turn of the century. Arthur Somervell observed in 1905 that “[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 musician” (2003: 79 n. 3). The upper and middle classes might safely be musical amateurs, but to pursue music as more than a hobby was still frequently frowned upon, perhaps due to the sexual connotations of music analyzed in Chapter 4.   7 See, for instance, the review “Melba and Caruso: Their Majesties’ Visit to Covent Garden” (Times June 8, 1914: 56) in which the opera stars share the spotlight with royalty. This review provoked the response “London and Two Operas: Music and Fashion” (Times June 10, 1914: 10), critiquing reviewers’ focus on aristocratic audience members.

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  8 In “Young Archimedes” and in Where Angels Fear to Tread, Huxley and Forster, respectively, do depict poor Italians engaging with classical music. These Italians, however, are at a safe remove from the British class system.   9 Huxley shows some tolerance for cinema music in his 1926 essay “Where are the Movies Moving?” wherein he suggests that the cinema’s “monotonous music” can “enhance in the minds of the spectators the dream-like quality of what they see on the screen” (1968: 225). In this essay, however, Huxley refers to music intended to be heard at the cinema, not the concert hall, like Boëllmann’s Variations. 10 Some contemporary music critics agreed that uses of music in the cinema were too simplistic; see Scholes (1947: 800; for notable exceptions, see 801–5). Conversely, Rose notes that “ ‘I learnt to whistle the classics’ at the cinema was a common refrain in plebeian memoirs” (2001: 202). Despite many modernists’ wariness of the cinema, critics have argued for the influence of cinematic techniques on their work; for cinematic influences on Eliot and Lawrence, see Trotter (2007: 126–32, 22–7); on Woolf, see Marcus (2007: 128–39, 143–9); for the cinematic narratives of modernists generally, see Seed (2005: 56–70). 11 Associating the early cinema with a cultural primitivism was a contemporary trope; see Marcus (2007: 120–1). 12 Woolf offers a slightly more sympathetic representation of this figure in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) via the “battered woman” whose voice Peter Walsh hears “running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human meaning,” but who Woolf tells us is “singing of love” and into whose song she weaves lyrics from Strauss’ “Allerseelen” (2000: 69, 68); for the Strauss reference, see Miller (1985: 63–4). This woman recalls Woolf ’s considerate, if patronizing claim in “Street Music” (1905) that “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” (1986: 1.28). In a Paterian move, Woolf even suggests that these street musicians might signal the return of “the gods who went into exile when the first Christian altars arose” (1.29). But while the music of Pater’s liberal gods is influential, Woolf ’s lower-class figures fail to attain a musical competence and she concludes her essay hoping one day to hear “at each street corner the melodies of Beethoven and Brahms and Mozart” (1.32). For more sanguine readings of Woolf ’s portrayals of street music, see Wicke (1994: 18) and Squier (1985: 41–2). 13 For the East End’s predominantly working-class associations in this period, see Palmer (1989: 68–71, 128–31), but also White (2008: 17–18). 14 As Zwerdling argues, the social satires coming from authors associated with “Bloomsbury” were often undermined due to a “deep reluctance to reject a social



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system that—for all its gross inequities and moral blindness—had nurtured” them (1986: 58). For Donizetti and popular audiences, see Russell (1997: 9–10). Palmer includes West Ham in his mapping of the East End (1989: xi). Interestingly, soon after Major Barbara’s premier, the Salvation Army had Shaw critique a festival of Army bands. While generally favorable, he advised the Army against performing too much “empty but exciting circus music,” which had the effect on “a laborer” of “switching off the current of religious enthusiasm and switching on the current of circus excitement” (1981: 3.592). Shaw was likely thinking here as much of Undershaft’s circus-like, manipulative performance in Major Barbara as of the bands at the festival. For musicians in Shaw’s non-canonical novels, see Chapter 3. According to Jerry White, Chelsea in the 1910s was a “faded flower of bohemia” and “less prosperous than it had been” in the late-Victorian era or would be again in the 1920s (2008: 23, 16). See Trillini (2008: 69, 201), Weliver (2000: 45–6), and Gillett (2000: 9–11). For the overabundance of turn-of-the-century music teachers, see Gillett (2000: 207–12). Acton was known for its laundries and, after 1931, an increasing number of factories (White 2008: 181, 189). Ehrlich reports problems with a lack of “thorough training” in musical education and “fake diploma mills” in post-1918 England, though he notes that “[a]t the highest levels the training of musicians had also improved” (1985: 191–2). See also Harrison, who refers to “concerns which are all too ready to grant a [music] diploma to anyone who can scrape together the necessary fee” (1940: 114). See “The Fusion of Music and Dancing” (Times July 26, 1913: 8) and Rainey (2005: 244 n. 4). In his autobiography, Rubinstein 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” (1980: 80). He did perform, though, in these drawing rooms and noted that he “received large fees for playing in private houses” in England (Chotzinoff 1964: 132; see also Rubinstein 1980: 79). The dates in Rubinstein’s biography and in the interview are broad, but it is hard to imagine that he did not perform in private during this summer. The Times advertises one public performance for this summer: a concert at the Queen’s Hall on June 11, 1921 (“Arrangements for To-day.” Times June 11, 1921: 13). For the long-standing various connotations of a “gallant” as a courtly lover, see Voltaire (1901: 140–2). The amount of criticism on this subject is itself a modern triumph. Emily Petermann’s The Musical Novel, Brad Bucknell’s Literary Modernism and Musical

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British Literature and Classical Music Aestheticism, and Alan Shockley’s Music in the Words must represent here the critics working on this period and subject. Fry linked the importance of form and music in his promotion of Post-Impressionism, which provided a way “[t]o discover … 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” (1911: 857). Bell similarly stressed his theory of “Significant Form,” which encompasses aesthetic “forms arranged and combined according to certain unknown and mysterious laws” (1914: 11). For a general critique of the intellectual and cultural exclusivity involved in the “absolute primacy of form over function,” see Bourdieu (1984: 30, also 18–19). See Eliot’s earlier claim in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that a “poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past” (1967: 17). Two useful investigations of specific musical influences on Eliot’s Quartets can be found in Holloway (1992: 150–7) and Barndollar (2000: 186–91). Yet, to detail too exclusively the intended presence of any one musical form would be to disregard Eliot’s disinclination towards what he called a “confusion des genres” (in Gardner 1978: 26). The musical forms of Eliot’s work are, moreover, as the above critics indicate, primarily a stimulus to an intellectual or metaphysical engagement with his themes. As Eliot himself reflected in 1933, he wanted “to write 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 poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music” (in Matthiessen 1935: 90). Both musical and poetic forms, for Eliot, should instigate an aesthetic transcendence. Despite Eliot’s accusation that Pater was “incapable of sustained reasoning,” Pater remained a consistent influence on Eliot (1967: 390); see also Freedman (1990: 126–8). Eliot’s “burning” draws not only on Pater, but also on imagery from Dante’s Divine Comedy; see Knowles (1990: 116–17). Huxley, however, like Eliot, was perhaps cautious about associating his writing too closely with music. He asked C. H. Prentice to change the title to Diverse Laws; but, according to Grover Smith, Point Counter Point “was preferred by the American publisher” (in Huxley 1969: 296 n. 272). Perhaps Huxley thought that Quarles’ analysis of “contrapuntal plots” was a sufficient inter-art correlation (1928: 350). Regardless, Huxley did see his novel’s musical structure as linked to mental exertion. In a 1945 letter, he referred to the “structure of Point Counter Point” and his other novels as “experiments in the technique of narrative and of the exploration of the mind” (1969: 538).



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33 On the subject of musical and literary repetitions and developments, see, for instance, Brown (1948: 109) and Wolf (1999: 17–20). 34 To accentuate the complexity of common place events was, of course, a consistent modernist project; see, for instance, Woolf ’s call for modern authors to acknowledge the “myriad impressions” of everyday life on the mind (1986: 4.160). 35 Huxley reiterates this multivalent method of analyzing his novel in a letter to his father (1969: 274–5). 36 André Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925) is generally acknowledged as a source for Huxley’s fugal novel and Huxley’s/Quarles’ emphasis on exclusivity offers another correspondence between Huxley’s work and Gide’s. In Gide’s book, the fictional author Édouard seeks a literary style “qui serait comme l’Art de la fugue.” Édouard’s friends protest that Bach had created a near hermetic masterpiece, “une sorte de temple astronomique, où ne pouvaient pénétrer que de rares initiés” (243). If Édouard wrote a novel along Bach’s principles, they suggest, few would understand or be interested in his work. 37 See Watt (1975: 148, 149–50, 152, 154). 38 See Sutton’s demonstration of Woolf ’s use of “fugal form” and “contrapuntal structure” in Mrs. Dalloway (2013: 98–9) and Clements’ analysis of the influence of Beethoven on the narrative structure of The Waves (2005: 164–75). 39 Sydney Roberts suggests that “the reader of Zuleika Dobson is obsessed not by Miss Dobson, but by Max” (1974: 109).

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The musical refinement of society’s margins: Bennett, Burke, Lawrence, and their contemporaries Contrary to the dominant strain of modernist rhetoric analyzed in the previous chapter, audiences for classical music in twentieth-century Britain did not consist principally of an upper- and middle-class elite. Charles McGuire has emphasized how from the mid-nineteenth century through the early-twentieth century, the Tonic Sol-Fa movement made available oratorios and cantatas by composers such as Handel and Mendelssohn to eager lower-middle- and working-class performers and audiences.1 Music festivals, as Pippa Drummond has evidenced, extending generally from 1784 and achieving their “height” from “around 1880 to 1914,” further provided a plethora of opportunities for provincial performers and audiences from a range of social classes to enjoy continental and British compositions, particularly choral music (2011: 1). Christina Bashford and Catherine Dale have revealed how turn-of-the-century attempts to provide more clearly descriptive, analytical, yet non-pedantic concert programs, guidebooks, and journals facilitated greater aesthetic appreciation for the diverse audiences of concerts across Britain, which in turn enabled better programming and more enjoyment for all involved.2 Gordon Cox, Trevor Herbert, Jonathan Rose, and Dave Russell, meanwhile, have shown how twentieth-century state-run schools, brass bands, and London institutions such as Henry Wood’s Promenades frequently introduced works by composers such as Beethoven, Handel, Mendelssohn, and Wagner to audiences that almost never appear, as we have seen, in fiction by modernist authors.3 In response to these nineteenth-century advances, however, many earlytwentieth-century critics patronizingly struck back by insisting that the taste of this growing musical public was decisively mid-grade and that its constituents preferred a “light” or “middlebrow” classical canon. We have already considered in Chapter 2 how Huxley condemns “light” orchestral music as “Bad Music”

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fit only for degraded cinema audiences (2013: 127). Eric Mackerness and Ross McKibbin have similarly reported that many early-twentieth-century critics lamented that this new musical public consisted of predominantly “middlebrow” audiences who applauded a trite canon of popular masterpieces, never mind that these masterpieces were by Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner, hardly “middlebrow” composers, and that they were popular for a very good reason: their excellence.4 Bach’s cantatas, Beethoven’s sonatas and symphonies, and more familiar selections from Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn, or Wagner are all fine compositions and labeling them part of a middlebrow canon says more about the deeply subjective and at times unfairly arbitrary perspectives of critics who employ variable classifications based upon arenas of performance, unfamiliar audiences, and a sense of their own social anxiety than about the music or its simultaneously diverse receptions by diverse individuals. As Russell and McGuire have shown, the very same music could fall into the classification of serious and classical or popular, trite, and middlebrow based upon variations in cultural contexts.5 Despite this seeming arbitrariness, it is this implied middlebrow aesthetic that so many middle-class intellectual authors attribute to characters, such as Beerbohm’s Katie Batch or Huxley’s Frank Illidge, who fail to engage with music in as sophisticated a fashion as their more refined middle and upper-middle-class counterparts. How, then, do writers sympathetic to the lower-middle and the working classes portray their engagement with classical music, “light” or otherwise, if they portray it at all? Rose, Russell, and Paul Thompson point to autobiographies wherein lower-middle- and working-class amateurs report having satisfying, often sophisticated musical lives. Most studies of the period between 1890 and 1945, however, whether historical or literary in emphasis, overlook fictional depictions of these classes enjoying music that they considered to be serious or “classical.” For instance, after quoting Neville Cardus’ account of clerking and living in early 1900s Manchester, where Cardus heard and discussed music by Elgar, Strauss, and Wagner, Rose queries, “[w]hy isn’t there a scene like that in Howards End?” (2001: 410). In Howards End (1910) E. M. Forster’s ambitious clerk Leonard Bast talks uncertainly of art with the leisure-class Margaret Schlegel after hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Yet, novelists besides Forster do offer scenes similarly sympathetic to those found in such contemporary autobiographies. This chapter will trace musical scenes, particularly by authors with lower-middle-class backgrounds, that often echo these autobiographies by representing socially and economically marginalized amateurs of classical music as intellectual and genteel, if not necessarily as members of a cultural upper class.



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Authors sympathetic to lower-middle- and working-class musical amateurs, as I will show, represent their enjoyment of classical music with rhetoric strikingly similar to that of the authors analyzed in the previous chapter.6 Although the latter frequently associated classical music with relatively affluent settings, both groups valued classical music as a means to attain a sense of refinement, an intellectual sophistication, and a community composed of aesthetically discerning individuals. These virtues, therefore, were not always the rhetorical property of the middle classes, although middle-class intellectuals and philanthropists often promoted them as such.7 The authors studied here, in fact, draw on precedents from both Britain’s lower-middle and working classes to indicate how a perhaps limited but not insignificant number of ambitious, yet socially and economically disenfranchised individuals used an appreciation of classical music to evoke their own sense of gentility, of cultural value, and, occasionally, of their financial success, both in fiction and in their autobiographies. I will begin by arguing that Thomas Burke, Somerset Maugham, and Compton Mackenzie take pains to show the value of socio-economically disadvantaged amateurs enjoying classical music in London homes and in more public arenas, often drawing on critically neglected elements of music hall culture. These characters, I suggest, represent the fruit of the broad musical education offered in early-twentieth-century Britain. Max Beerbohm, Virginia Woolf, and Rebecca West mock this education, but autobiographies reveal the significance of these musical endeavors as part of the valued lived experience of lower-middle- and working-class communities. I turn next to how G. B. Shaw, early in his career, similarly satirizes musical philanthropists but does so to emphasize the valuable musicality of socially disenfranchised musicians. D. H. Lawrence, meanwhile, indicates more ambivalently the social advantages of the musical opportunities available for similarly situated individuals in the provinces. Here too I attend to several autobiographies to compare Lawrence’s fictional representations to the more positive self-perceptions of amateurs who actively engaged a rural classical musical culture. Finally, I examine novels by Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells to indicate how many fictional amateurs considered their enjoyable and intellectual musical engagements as a means to or as a sign of their social and financial successes.

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“The hidden soul of harmony”: Classical music and the urban lower-middle and working classes, or the music of Milton Street In Chapter 2, I examined how Thomas Burke evokes the curtailed musical awakening of a cockney girl in Nights in London. Fortunately for such children, opportunities to hear relatively decent music in even the shabbier areas of London were, if not plentiful, not scarce. Classical music—including opera, chamber music, and choral music—coexisted with more popular songs in lowermiddle- and working-class homes, in music halls, in schools, and in educational settlements. While Burke once admitted that the “Typical Englishman,” who “gets what is called an education at a Council School, and perhaps Evening Classes,” who “is turned out at fourteen to set about earning his living—usually in an office or store or factory,” is someone who “dislikes symphony concerts and chamber music,” in his sketches Burke consistently evokes how lower-middleand working-class Londoners could, and certain individuals did, seek a sense of refinement through the complex music produced in their homes and neighborhoods (1947: 50–1). Burke and other sympathetic writers describe these venues in ways that challenge the discordant musical and social atmosphere that Huxley depicts the lower-middle classes wallowing in and that Woolf depicts outside a Milton Street flat in The Years. In “A Russian Night,” for instance, Burke offers an inverse image of Lady Tantamount’s “musical parties,” from Huxley’s Point Counter Point, by describing an enlightening evening spent in a working-class apartment 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 Sibelius, played by a factory girl,” a cockney of Russian descent (1918: 232). The girl’s “technique,” Burke admits, “might not have won the Gold Medal of our white-shirted academies, but she had enough temperament to make half a dozen Steinway Hall virtuosi” (233). If the performer does not have a first-class technique, her musicality is surprisingly admirable. Burke presents it as more direct, perhaps even more honest, adventurous, and emotional than performances in stuffier venues, held back by overly stiff sartorial and pedantic traditions. She offers an “intellectual emotion” and a sort of cockney cosmopolitanism, an international aura more expected of Bloomsbury than of Spitalfields (232). Homes offering such unexpected performances appear, as we will see, throughout Burke’s quasi-journalistic, quasi-fictional sketches. Burke, Maugham, and others also depicted amateurs with limited incomes enjoying classical music at Victorian and Edwardian music halls. Primarily remembered today for their comic songs and variety acts, scholars,



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particularly of Victorian England, have observed that music halls also offered some light classical works, generally selections from well-known opera.8 While certainly not of the quality offered by Manchester’s Hallé or London’s Queen’s Hall Orchestras, certain halls offered arias, overtures, marches, and occasionally more complicated works and often gave their small orchestras and choruses prominent billing space. A mid-nineteenth-century program for London’s Oxford Music Hall, for instance, on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, boasted two accompanists, eight first sopranos, four second sopranos, six first tenors, five second tenors, five basses, and two “instrumental soloists,” a flutist, and a pianist, as well as a “FULL BAND AND CHORUS” (“The Oxford Music Hall” c. 1866). These musicians provided selections from Gounod’s Faust, Offenbach’s Orphée aux Enfers, Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Verdi’s Il Trovatore, and an abridged version of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasia, performed in English. In 1921 at the London Coliseum, in St. Martin’s Lane, one could hear overtures by Elgar, Chopin’s “Ballade” in A flat “Orchestrated by Arnold Bax,” and Maud Allan playing the “Dance Poems” of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite (“The London Coliseum” July 11, 1921). The next year, one could hear a Mendelssohn “March” followed by Austin Layton’s curiosity, “The Singing Puzzle” (“The London Coliseum” October 30, 1922). Also during this period, the “Old Vic,” in Lambeth, as Paula Gillett has shown, “developed into a musical institution that brought opera into thousands of lives that would never otherwise have experienced it” (2000: 56). While music hall productions could be abridged and informal, the Old Vic put on fairly substantial shows. Ballet music, too, had a prominent, long-standing place in the halls and at times engaged serious and highly capable musicians. In London, the West End Alhambra and Empire were particularly famous for their frequent high-quality productions.9 While for many patrons the dancers were the chief attraction, orchestras provided a wide array of musical accompaniments, occasionally offering re-arrangements of works by Bizet, Rameau, Delibes, Tchaikovsky, and other more modern composers (Guest 1992: 68, 125, 142).10 Georges Jacobi, after performing with several European orchestras, including the Paris Opéra, became musical director at the Alhambra in 1872, where he arranged or composed an estimated “103 ballets and divertissements” (Walker 1947: 82). Landon Ronald, the future principal of London’s Guildhall School of Music, wrote music for the Alhambra ballets Britannia’s Realm (1902) and The Entente Cordiale (1904) and Mario Costa helped produce music for a 1907 ballet about gambling, called the Queen of Spades (“The Alhambra” September 16, 1907).11

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The Alhambra was proud of its ballets, as was 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 musicians (“Empire Advertisement” undated). Although by the late-nineteenth century the West End halls famous for ballet were catering to upper-middle- or even to upper-class patrons, they pragmatically served a diverse public. When Woolf has Katharine Hilbery and her friends visit a music hall in Night and Day (1919) she describes the audience as “bare-shouldered, tufted and garlanded in the stalls, decorous but festal in the balconies, and frankly fit for daylight and street life in the galleries” (1988: 414). This cross-section of Londoners reflects what Woolf likely saw when she visited the Leicester Square Hippodrome in 1918.12 The Alhambra and the Empire likewise had, as Alexandra Carter notes, “huge audiences for their ballets” and these audiences were composed of a mixed public (2005: 20). Roland Belfort reported in 1902 that “[a]ristocrats, artists, bourgeois, students, provincials, foreigners, and the ‘man in the street’ ” were all “component parts of the Empire public” (236). This “street” public included members of the lower-middle classes, if not the working classes. Seats in the galleries and the pits, even at high-end halls, were priced for those with more moderate incomes. In the earlytwentieth century the Alhambra and the Empire charged 6d for the gallery and 1s for pit or amphitheatre seats.13 Lower-middle-class patrons could easily have enjoyed the ballets and music from these seats and some did.14 More indirect audiences consisted of those who ran the halls: the various “stage-carpenter[s]”; the corps de ballet, some of whom earned £12–25 a month and who usually came from “lower-class families”; and, finally, the musicians, who “sweated in music halls for four hours a night, plus one rehearsal a week,” and “rarely earned more than 30s” weekly (Symons 1896: 80; Guest 1992: 131; Ehrlich 1985: 143). Like the patrons, these people, too, would have engaged with the music with varying degrees of interest and they certainly appeared in fiction of the period. Picking up on London’s increasingly socially diverse and diversely musical music halls, several turn-of-the-century authors de-emphasized the squalor of low wages and highlighted the glamour of music-hall ballet. They depict the culture of musical-hall ballet giving social poise and self-confidence to fictional cockney performers. In Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth (1897), Liza adds a certain courtliness to her life by waltzing “as stately as an empress” to the “Intermezzo” from Pietro Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry), played by an organ grinder. Dancing next to a faster tune, she compares her skill favorably to “the ballet at the Canterbury and the South London” music halls: “You just



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wite till you see the ballet at Vere Street, Lambeth,” she boasts (1920: 15–16). Maugham recreates his own rustic chivalry as he juxtaposes Liza’s cockney dialect to her desire to represent herself to herself and to others as royalty through her engagements with the opera music and the ballet. Mascagni’s music played by an organ grinder might not have the cultural cachet for elite audiences as when played by an orchestra at Covent Garden, but Liza considers her mediated access to this music as both her gateway to a refined culture and as evidence that a “stately” classical culture can exist within Lambeth. Maugham notes of her dancing, “they could not have done it better in a trained ballet” and his sympathy with her perspective reinforces her aesthetic glamour (17). With the absence of the actual sound of the organ grinder, Maugham’s sympathetic literary rhetoric might even evoke in audiences familiar with Mascagni’s music a unique sort of cultural connection to Liza. In Of Human Bondage (1915), Maugham performs a similar narrative tactic, although with a bit more irony. As opposed to the young Liza, he depicts here an aging “member of the ballet at a famous music-hall,” perhaps the Empire or the Alhambra, who visits St. Luke’s Hospital. She is “outrageously painted,” with “grossly alluring” smiles, and she speaks with “a cockney accent, but with an affectation of refinement which made every word a feast of fun.” The dancer is clearly absurd as Maugham uses paradox with an almost brutal satire when describing her repulsive charms as “grossly alluring.” Yet, his ultimate sympathy for her comes to the fore as he describes her “abundant self-confidence” gained from what she sees as the potential or affected sophistication of her profession (2007: 445). Maugham allows her self-conscious yet confident mixture of cockney and high-class culture to save her from being ridiculous. In Carnival (1912) Compton Mackenzie depicts Jenny Pearl, daughter of a joiner, honing her musical acumen a bit more critically by dancing in ballets. In her leisure time Pearl prefers “skating rinks” to “Symphony Concerts,” but while dancing at the Covent Garden Opera House and the Orient Palace of Varieties, which Carter suggests is modeled on the Alhambra, Pearl develops decided preferences for Italian over German music (Mackenzie 1970: 196; Carter 2005: 101). Pearl dislikes Wagner, for instance, and Mackenzie remarks that “it was better she should preserve an instinct for a sanity that was sometimes pathos rather than … she should lose what was, after all, a classical feeling in her sensuous love of obvious beauty.” Pearl’s career is not an extensive aesthetic education, but Mackenzie describes it offering her exposure to music by Verdi, Tchaikovsky, and other classical composers and a “feeling for meticulous form” (1970: 116). Her critical preference for “sanity” and “a classical feeling” sounds,

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in fact, rather Huxleyan, even if Huxley was fonder of Bach and Beethoven than nineteenth-century Italian opera, which he found too sensuously “palpitating” (Huxley 1924: 277). Mackenzie nonetheless depicts Pearl refining her aesthetic tastes through music in a fashion that corresponds recognizably to those of middle-class intellectuals. Pit musicians, too, in fiction, could acquire distinction. Recalling a minor music-hall “chef d’orchestre,” Burke reflects, “if I met him now I am sure I should bow, though I know that he was nothing but a pillow stuffed with pose.” Despite his inadequacies, the conductor had appeared “a demi-god” to the young Burke and had provided a fascinating introduction to the music world that Burke continued to value (1918: 28). Similarly, in Henry James’ Princess Casamassima (1886) Anastasius Vetch plays the violin at a “second-rate theatre,” a companion to the music hall, “for a few shillings a week.” Although Vetch was a “disappointed, embittered, cynical little man, whose musical organisation had been sterile,” for the seamstress Amanda Pynsent “he represented art” and she sets him in “a higher social sphere, though his earnings were hardly greater than her own” (18).15 Vetch remains, moreover, one of the novel’s noblest characters, someone capable of distinguishing between what is “common” and what is “rare” (70). Both Burke and James reflect how mediocre musicians can offer a valuable representation of refinement to those around them, as well as access to art for those not privileged to experience only the best that the world has to offer. Such musicians, moreover, Burke suggests, can provide a useful guidepost in the aesthetic education of the young if only by way of an introduction to certain forms of music. For all these reasons, Burke and James insist, even some mediocre musicians ought to be treated with respect. Not all fictional music-hall performers, however, are mediocre. In “Gina of the Chinatown,” Burke frames Gina’s talents and life in operatic dimensions. Gina, from Poplar in London’s East End, dances, sings, and plays the piano, which causes her proud father to invite people home to hear her perform a “Rachmaninoff prelude,” Sibelius’ “Valse Triste,” and “Mozart sonatas” (1917: 191). To accompany her talent, Gina has a larger-than-life charm, echoing Mimi from La Bohème and Nedda from Pagliacci, two of the Italian operas that she has “taken to her heart,” probably after hearing selections from them in the halls (218). Gina’s love of music represents her love of life, which her music-hall career and her intellect allow her to share: “what music was to her, so was life, and so she interpreted it to others” (218). Her performances, moreover, improve the lives of others, for “[t]hrough her, all little lapses and waywardnesses became touched with delicacy,” and for this audiences love her (219). Unfortunately, like



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her operatic predecessors, Gina dies young, cutting short her life-improving musical interpretations. As Gina’s story illustrates, Burke suggests that music provides pleasure and refinement, but not that it relieves entirely the problems of London’s poorer districts. In “A Lonely Night,” for instance, Burke more ambivalently evokes music to recall the chaos of crowded city streets and then to depict art reducing urban despair. Portraying London’s Kingsland Road, he describes “an Easy Payments piano” as “tortured by wicked fingers that sought after the wild grace of Weber’s ‘Invitation to the Valse.’ ” Burke invites his readers to imagine people with poorly trained technique, “wicked fingers,” fighting for beauty on cheap instruments amidst the “clatter” of cars, the “blustering” of bar fights, and a general discontent. Hungry and alone, Burke’s narrator hears how “[h]armoniums, pianos, concertinas, mouth organs, gramophones, tin trumpets, and voices uncertainly controlled, poured forth their strains, mingling and clashing” (1918: 88, 90). Musical attempts to transcend destitution can create more discord and dissatisfaction than happiness. Still, refusing to represent only the worst, he also uses musical references to initiate a friendly urban community. Riffing on Weber’s title, Burke concludes with an “invitation to the feast,” when a neighbor offers the narrator dinner (91). Burke then moves on to the next sketch, which relates in verse 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.” With a revitalized perspective, the narrator hears this music “light up the enchanted gloom” of London, even for those whom Ladies Charles or Lasswade might least expect it to do so (94).

The “pure joy of singing”: Music and education in England Yet how, we might ask, did characters or individuals akin to Beerbohm’s Katie Batch and Burke’s myriad musicians learn to read music and to play instruments and in what contexts? From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the lower-middle and the working classes had numerous opportunities to obtain affordable scores, instruments, and instruction, with the affordability of musical paraphernalia and a musical and moral education going hand in hand.16 One influential example of this progressive musicality was the sightsinging movement that both drew on and inspired a need for cheap scores in religious and educational contexts. From the 1820s onwards, Sarah Glover, John Hullah, Rev. John Curwen, and their associates used variations of the solfege

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system to teach singing to underprivileged pupils. Advocates of Tonic Sol-Fa, as McGuire has emphasized, offered an enormous amount of music and music education, mixing “philanthropy” with “a great deal of paternalistic guidance” (2009: 8).17 This was achieved in part through producing “moralizing pabulum” and in part Tonic Sol-Fa versions of “most large-scale choral dramatic works,” including those by English and continental composers, which had the effect of improving musical “taste” among the lower and middle classes through the early 1920s (xviii, 13, 51). Despite sight-singing’s Dissenting moralistic culture, this education, as Eric Mackerness has emphasized, came with aesthetic benefits, making music such as oratorios and cantatas “accessible to hundreds of people who could not follow the intricacies of a full score” (1964: 163). The most visible signs of the spread of sight-singing were “monster” music festivals at which thousands performed oratorios by Handel and Mendelssohn.18 Eventually, these advocates of musical moralism and “rational recreation,” what Diana Maltz has usefully called in other contexts a “missionary” aestheticism, began to influence the curricula of state-funded schools (2006: 2–3). The mid-nineteenth-century successes of Hullah and Curwen were particularly influential in encouraging music within Britain’s new Board Schools, established by Parliament in 1870 primarily for the lower-middle and working classes. From 1870 onwards, the national government followed the lead of “rational recreation” reformers, festival participants, local teachers, and France, Germany, and Switzerland by supporting musical education via state-funded primary schools, with Hullah serving as a national inspector of music for teacher training colleges from 1872 to 1882 and Curwen serving as an unofficial inspiration and advocate to music educators. As Gordon Cox and Catherine Dale have shown, myriad state-run schools advanced music education under Hullah and his successors despite overcrowded schedules, insufficiently trained teachers, and some opposition to expanding Board and later Council school programs.19 As Cox and Dale have argued, under John Somervell especially, inspector of music (1901–28), officials began to promote a “transition from ‘singing’ to ‘music’ ” thereby advancing from singing lessons to more complex forms of musical appreciation and “intelligent listening” (Cox 1993: 166; Dale 2003: 25–6). Efforts by Somervell, his staff, and innumerable teachers provided a key means of offering the lower-middle and working classes at least a partial aesthetic education in the early-twentieth century. Several of these advances were promoted by a series of Handbooks for teachers issued by government officials. By 1927 the advisory Handbook of Suggestions, issued by the national Board of Education, recommended for



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a school’s “highest classes” the use of “traditional song literature” as well as “selected songs from great composers, such as Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Handel, Byrd, and Purcell” (Board of Education 1927: 254).20 The Handbook also advocated using gramophones to illustrate a “fine performance” of symphonies, string quartets, and songs (262). The 1937 Handbook, reprinted in 1941, recommended using the “wireless lessons” in music now broadcast by the BBC and encouraged teachers to offer instruction in “extended forms, such as the Rondo and the Minuet and Trio” and “[t]he clear cut form of a Fugue” (1941: 213). These recommendations indicate a clear desire to initiate students into the communal canon of Western music, not simply limited to English composers, such as Byrd and Purcell, but inclusive of composers working in Germany as well. These suggestions also indicate that teachers should take advantage of technologies that earlier reformers never had at their disposal to help to teach the intricacies of classical musical forms, the critical reception of which, as we saw in Chapter 2, certain members of the intellectual aristocracy, such as Clive Bell, T. S. Eliot, or Aldous Huxley tried to appropriate for themselves. To justify the inclusion of music in school curricula, these handbooks emphasized late-nineteenth-century associations between music and a genteel, moral, intelligent, and harmonious community, such as those that I explored in Chapter 1. The 1927 Handbook called music “an ennobling recreation,” which “brings people together to work for a common end under conditions which refine, discipline, and delight” (240). The 1937 version remarked that music involves both “intellectual” and “bodily activity,” through a “controlled and harmonious effort,” and “the sharing in a common emotional and intellectual experience” (1941: 174–5). These endorsements of a musical education invoke not only the rhetoric of the “rational recreation” movement, but also the Platonism emanating from late-nineteenth-century Oxford. Somervell explicitly linked his own musical views to Plato, which likely accounts for the Republic-like rhetoric of these early handbooks.21 Most striking, however, and this sentiment echoes throughout both handbooks, was the 1927 Handbook’s advice that music be taught simply for the “pure joy of singing” (or listening) itself (256). The handbooks, then, offer a mix of paternalism and liberalism, a desire to “discipline” the lower classes and to help them to achieve “emotional and intellectual” enlightenment and gentility. They offer, in other words, the primrose path to culture half-trodden by Katie Batch and Leonard Bast. Despite some notable successes, there were nonetheless concerns that many students, like Bast or Frank Illidge, were getting left behind.22 George Dyson, for instance, whose father was a blacksmith and who himself became director of the

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Royal College of Music (1937–52), observed in the mid 1950s that “[m]usic in the average primary school is confined to class-singing … Few children carry any desire to join a choir into their adult lives. Nor is it possible under primary school conditions to make children sufficiently familiar with the notation of music for this knowledge to become a permanent accomplishment” (1954: 60–1). This negative perception of music in “average” schools was long-standing and echoes earlier critiques, such as Sidney Harrison’s remarks on private piano instruction discussed in Chapter 2. Several twentieth-century novelists offered more dramatic critiques of a state-run musical education, which they feared would cause the lower classes to inflict awful noises on to refined middle-class ears. Thus, Beerbohm’s Duke asks that Katie Batch’s piano-playing “should cease” rather than suffer her Board-school culture (1911: 264). In Woolf ’s The Years, Martin Pargiter asks the children of an apartment caretaker to “sing a song” and Martin’s niece prods them by asking, “[w]eren’t you taught something at school?” (1987: 326). The children oblige, but their song, “Etho passo tanno hai,” is “unintelligible” and the Pargiters find their music “so shrill, so discordant, and so meaningless” (327). Patrick blames the children’s “Cockney accent,” this being “[w]hat they teach ’em at school,” undoubtedly meaning the Council schools. Patrick’s indolent articulation undercuts his insult, yet this scarcely distracts from the children’s “hideous noise.” Eleanor and Maggie Pargiter wonder whether the music was “[b]eautiful,” but Eleanor is “not sure” that they mean “the same thing,” suggesting that this beauty is more a confusedly inarticulate sublime, magnificent in its ugliness (328).23 Similarly, in The Fountain Overflows, Rebecca West mocks unsuitable music instructors through Ms. Beevor who teaches violin at an early-twentiethcentury London school. Beevor’s chief qualifications are having had lessons from an Italian violinist who “had never been any good” and an interest in Wagner, signaled by her “handbag stamped with the word ‘Bayreuth’ ” (1956: 302, 56). Mrs. Aubrey, an impoverished former concert pianist, detests Beevor’s influence over her oldest daughter. Beerbohm, Woolf, and West each deride the musical education of the lower classes, whom they depict as threatening the quality of classical culture for those who can truly appreciate it. While there were undoubtedly musical disappointments, several workingclass memoirists enthusiastically record taking advantage of opportunities at school to further their long-term engagement with music. Elizabeth Ring, for instance, grew up in EC1, London, and so was, as she puts it, “a proper Cockney” (1975: 1). She appreciatively recollects the musical education offered at her local school, Hugh Myddelton, in the interwar period. Although her mother earned



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only slightly over “thirty shillings a week,” she allowed Ring to buy a violin through her school and, “[a]fter a year’s scraping,” Ring “joined the school orchestra” and rose through its ranks (96, 60). Ring also recalls that her “fourthyear teacher was a man who lived for music” and he “not only played symphonies to us on the gramophone,” but “explained them too, so that we knew what to look for when listening” (60–1). Ring maintained a life-long love of music and after graduation she joined an amateur “operatic society” and listened to music on the wireless and at Sadler’s Wells and Queen’s Hall (123, 87, 63–4, 127). Ring was an exceptional student and went, she reports, to a good school; still, her experience was not unique. Marjory Todd recalls that her youngest brother learned at his Council school, along with “ballads of equal un-merit,” “two or three soprano solos from the Messiah,” which he taught to the rest of his family who would sing in their kitchen (1960: 106). As an adult Todd happily attended classical concerts in London and, as Rose plausibly suggests, “[j]ust possibly, singing in the kitchen prepared her for that experience” (2001: 197). Other schools, too, had dedicated teachers, such as Ring’s. Alexander Hartog, who was not overly fond of his school, the voluntary aided Jews’ Free School, London, nonetheless records that “many of the teachers volunteered to do two or three hours, a couple of evenings a week, to teach the violin, purse making, boot repairing, woodwork, metalwork, pottery, musical appreciation, [and] printing” (1978: 28). Hartog, who sought a musical education from many sources, maintained his own interest in music long after he finished his elementary education. Mark Benney was exceptional in a different fashion, as he was a youthful thief who had multiple encounters with the law before turning 18, all while undergoing an aesthetic awakening. Benney describes how he gradually gave “more attention to the poetry and music learnt at school” and to the artistic objects around him (1937: 115). Unfortunately, his burgeoning aestheticism inspired him to steal a miniature painting, after which a court sent him to a penal Industrial School. He recounts that, upon his arrival, he “had been enchanted to learn that the school had its own band,” which sparked “visions of a brilliant career as violinist, flautist or saxophonist” (147). He was disillusioned when the bandmaster refused him the instruments he wanted and made him play a “battered brass cornet,” as the band performed “the same two or three marches, until the very sound of the things became unbearable” (148–9). All the while, he notes, “at the top of the band-hut were rows upon rows of the opera of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Brahms: one was conscious of them there, one was intensely curious about them, one stared wistfully in their direction—but always

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there was the rapping of the bandmaster’s baton calling one back to Unter den Linden or The Great Little Army” (149). While the Industrial School was a setback, Benney had learned enough about music to be at least curious about the classics and to long for them even if they were just out of his immediate legal, physical, or social reach. With Benney’s imagination, moreover, life at the school was not always aesthetically dreary. In a fine Paterian passage he describes how on “the first Sunday in each month” the school would march, with the band at its head, to a fine old church in a neighbouring town. There, in the dim religious light of stained-glass windows, with organ-strains weaving slow celestial harmonies and High church vestments carrying in their folds a rich solemnity of symbol, one did indeed catch momentary glimpses of ineffable vistas, of the City of God … (1937: 150)

Benney’s education, if hardly ideal, offered tantalizing exposures to music that made him feel connected to a more luxurious material life and a more intense spirituality. He extended these exposures later in life through his engagement with composers such as Beethoven and Gershwin, with the latter’s jazz-influenced “symphonic methods,” and “Stravinsky, Block, Sibelius, [and] Schönberg,” whose music Benney reports discussing with friends (196, 313). Music helped to provide Benney with an intellectual language with which to interpret and access the modern, cosmopolitan world around him. While many students were poorly served by state-funded music programs, some students obviously benefited from them. These students received support from groups like the Maidstone Movement and the National Union of School Orchestras, which, through the hire-purchase system, as Russell explains, helped to “foster the growth of school orchestras” in England (1997: 54).24 The violin was particularly popular with school children, but some schools also offered instruction for other string, brass, and wind instruments. C. H. Rolph, born in 1901, recalls how his father had gone to the Royal Military Asylum as an orphan scholar, where he took up the flute. He subsequently earned “a place at the Royal Military School of Music … and was trained there to a high standard of proficiency” (1974: 18). After school, his father joined the City of London Police and played with the Police Band and other amateur orchestras. Rolph proudly remembers a childhood filled with what his “father always impressively called ‘The Standard Overtures,’ delectable and unforgettable pieces” by “Rossini, Donizetti, Auber, Suppé, Wallace, Balfe, Herold, Adam, Offenbach, Verdi, Nicolai, Bizet, [and] Gounod” (24). Rolph’s memoir emphasizes his



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lifelong pride in his father’s technical skills and his own extensive musical knowledge gained from his father. Formally, the above memoirs offer strategic references and even lists of famous composers and concert venues both to challenge representations of the lower-middle and working classes as musically unsophisticated and to recall the pleasurable musical culture of their homes and neighborhoods. Benney even employs a consciously aesthetic prose to highlight the emotional intensity of mediocre organ music for an adolescent interested in art. Thematically, they indicate that the education offered by state-run schools could lead to an individual’s and even a family’s long-term involvement with music. These writers suggest, then, not only an individual but also a communal intellectual and social value gained through music. This is part of a Victorian musical legacy. As McGuire notes, Victorian philanthropy typically “concentrated on the reform of the individual; with faith in the power of self-improvement and education, the reformed individual would transform society” (2009: 39). Sometimes this process worked, if to a limited degree. To suggest that these twentieth-century musical amateurs used their self-improvement to reform “society” might be going too far. But while these writers do not imagine themselves as musical or social revolutionaries, they do represent themselves as competent life-long musical amateurs who took part in or even advanced their local musical communities.

“It isn’t our object to amuse”: Perspectives on philanthropy and adult education Along with state-run schools, philanthropists also offered musical instruction and they, too, appear in the fiction of this period, generally as objects of satire. Sometimes these satires even position naïve philanthropists against more talented lower-middle- or working-class musicians. In two early novels Shaw simultaneously mocks upper-class musical missionaries while admiring lowermiddle and working-class musical achievements. In The Irrational Knot (1880: rev. 1905), Shaw offers what Paula Gillett calls a “scathing commentary on the social snobbery of many musical philanthropists” (Gillett 2000: 47). Shaw’s philanthropic leisure-class characters show less musical sensitivity and skill than Edward Conolly, who, despite his lower-middle-class background, performs dexterously at their “Music for the People” concert, enjoys playing “Bach fugues,” and dislikes his upper-middle-class wife’s singing because, he explains, “[w]hen

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I was a child I heard every day better performances” (Shaw 1913: 9, 255, 293). Shaw reprises this theme in Love Among the Artists (1900), wherein, as Phyllis Weliver suggests, “[t]he bourgeoisie and aristocracy” represent “misplaced cultural guardians” (Weliver 2006: 137). Indeed, Owen Jack, a composer with questionable origins who starts the novel in “bad circumstances,” and a “halfdrunken soldier,” a clarinetist, are both better artists than the upper-middle-class characters who patronize them (Shaw 1916: 19, 48). In these novels, as opposed to his play Major Barbara, Shaw presents socially and economically disadvantaged musicians as more dignified than those who would demean them. These works counter East End slum novels that depict upper-class philanthropic musicians attempting to cultivate the alleged cultural waste land of the working classes. In Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), for instance, two philanthropists combat an alleged working-class aesthetic ignorance as Besant’s narrator declares that the “English workman is the least musical of men” (1900: 53). In A Child of the Jago (1896), Arthur Morrison mocks the affluent musical missionaries and the lower-middle classes and artisans who “patronised the clubs, the musical evenings, the brass band, and the bagatelle board” of the “East End Elevation Mission and Pansophical Institute” as enjoying only an “illusion of intellectual advance” (2014: 77, 75). Maltz has convincingly argued that due to this Institute’s “geographical location in the story, Morrison seems to be satirizing the university settlement Toynbee Hall,” of which more soon (in Morrison 2014: 75 n. 1). Similarly, in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Lord Henry ridicules both upperclass musical missionaries and East End audiences. After flipping through Schumann’s Forest Scenes, Dorian recalls a forgotten engagement to play duets at a “club in Whitechapel” with Lady Agatha, causing Henry to quip, “I don’t think it really matters 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” (Wilde 2005: 18–19). As Dorian notes, this insult is both “horrid” to Agatha and “not very nice” to himself, as it implies that his presence was unnecessary (19). The witticism also derides, however, the Whitechapel audience, which Henry suggests could mistake half a work for the whole. These satirical tendencies lingered into the twentieth century, although with a greater focus on mocking musical philanthropists who are now of a more insipid middle-class variety. In Our Friend the Charlatan (1901), George Gissing makes the middle-class May Tomalin seem absurdly supercilious as she describes her charitable society’s plans “to give a few concerts”:



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[i]t 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. (138)

May’s dreary approach to music, Gissing suggests, is what is “wrong,” as are her oversimplified assumptions about working-class tastes. May, like Alma from The Whirlpool, overlooks all the ambitious piano-playing “bricklayers’ daughters” who are, perhaps, genuinely interested in the respectability or even the nobility of music (1948: 341). Gissing’s misguided May is akin to the aspiring philanthropists in Wells’ Kipps (1905). Arthur Kipps, who was raised among the lower shop-keeping classes in New Romney, Kent, takes a job as a draper’s assistant in nearby Folkestone and begins to attend evening courses in the hopes of improving his aesthetic and intellectual abilities. In doing so, he meets several middle-class mentors who primarily take an interest in him so that they might show off and thereby reaffirm their own only recently and tenuously acquired achievements. Several of these mentors, for instance, invite him to one of their homes so that he might “assist” them, Wells writes, “in trying over some Beethoven duets, if they remembered them, that is, sufficiently well” (1984: 193). This dubiously improving recital causes Kipps to abandon his more loyal tradesmen friends, for whom he enjoys playing the banjo. Wells lampoons here the hypocrisy of those who would use an art that they themselves do not fully understand to affect a higher social class and set themselves above those whom they see as beneath them. He also implicitly questions aesthetic pretentions that might set up poorly played classical music over competently and eagerly played banjo music. Wells dignifies Kipps in that he is willing to take interest in all varieties of music, whereas the would-be philanthropists fail to interest themselves in popular music altogether, without taking the time to find out whether they might in fact enjoy it. Finally, Wells laments that pretentious perspectives regarding aesthetic pursuits might cause social divisions, as the philanthropists’ pianistic pursuits temporarily cause Kipps to break with his old friends, whom he regains when he returns to his broader interest in the world around him. Writing in a darker Wellsian vein, George Orwell obliquely derides such educational endeavors in Coming Up for Air (1939) when George Bowling, the

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careworn middle-class son of an impoverished shopkeeper, attends a lecture at a shabby nonconformist hall wherein sits “a huge square thing draped in dustcloths which might have been an enormous coffin,” although “[a]ctually it was a piano” (1986: 152). The lecture is on politics, not music, but Bowling facetiously and indirectly equates the lecturer to a “well-known pianist” (151). Orwell uses these musical references to satirize the moribund aesthetic and ideological pretensions of adult education, which recalls here primarily the death of art, community, and happiness. Such satires by Wilde, Gissing, and Wells are funny and engaging but they are also somewhat inaccurate as philanthropic endeavors geared towards adult education often attracted eager amateurs along the lines of Shaw’s Conolly rather than simply affected individuals who took undue pleasure in halfplayed pieces of music. In London alone, the Passmore Edwards (later the Mary Ward) Settlement, the Working Men’s College, and Toynbee Hall, among others, offered concerts and music courses for amateurs with limited incomes.25 Historians have pointed to the “neo-feudal outlook” of these institutes, which were run primarily by the upper classes (Simon 1965: 78).26 Yet, the settlements would occasionally join forces with more independent clubs and individuals. Together these groups challenged the perception that the lower-middle and the working classes were incapable of appreciating the musical preserves of society’s elite. A Burkean or early Shavian desire to overturn stereotypes of the philistine lower orders led several educators to emphasize both the technicalities and the pleasures of music in their courses. Toynbee Hall, for instance, with its close connections to the University of Oxford, was founded by Samuel and Henrietta Barnett in 1884 with the goal of providing an “education and the means of recreation and enjoyment for the people in the poorer districts of London” (“Universities’ Settlement” 1915: 3). In accordance with these goals, Toynbee offered series of concerts by both professionals, occasionally featuring such celebrated performers as Fanny Davies and Benno Moiseiwitsch, and Toynbee students.27 Toynbee also offered courses on choral music, orchestral music, and music theory, among others. While enrollments were not always large, and occasionally the Music Club’s orchestra had to be bolstered by “players from the West of London,” several courses from 1913–30 contained about 15–20 students, each (“The Musical Club.” Toynbee Record 13.5 (1901): 55).28 By the 1930s, there was enough musical interest on the part of students and instructors for Toynbee to form a “School of Music.” According to its “Statement of Purpose,” the School provided “access to music study or performance both



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for the beginner or the experienced, in whatever fashion is most likely to attract and hold the interest” (“Toynbee Hall Educational Syllabus: 1936–1937” 1936: 14). During the 1936–7 term (thus overlapping with Woolf ’s publication of The Years), the School offered over ten different music courses, including “Appreciation of Music,” covering ancient and contemporary music, and “Voice Training and Solo Singing,” taught by Robert Parker “of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden.” There were courses on brass-band conducting and opera, and an orchestra that rehearsed on Sunday afternoons. The latter advertised 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” (15). The orchestra, directed by “Alec Sherman of the BBC,” required an audition, but individuals could advance their skills through lessons at the School for 6d per hour, plus an initial 5s registration fee for new students (Briggs and Macartney 1984: 121; “Toynbee Hall Educational Syllabus” 1936: 15, 16). The School also offered written materials to help students with musical activities in their “club, office, factory, or, indeed, [their] own home” (14). Consequently, although Toynbee may have been somewhat paternalistically run largely by middle-class Oxonians, its School of Music did attempt to empower adult students to continue learning on their own terms and in their own spaces. Outside London, Mechanics’ Institutes, Working Men’s and Women’s Clubs, and small institutions such as Wincham Hall likewise provided some opportunities for musical amateurs.29 Wincham Hall was a rural counterpart to the larger, urban Toynbee Hall. Founded in 1933, Wincham was a residential center “for unemployed [male] workers in Lancashire and Cheshire.” Men generally stayed at Wincham for six weeks, their “board and residence” costing “13s. per week” (“Prospectus”).30 Students supplemented “main courses” on wood or metal working with “optional courses” on dancing, music appreciation, or pipe-making and playing (“Wincham Hall: Report” c. 1935: 5–6). By 1939, Wincham reported that “424 men ha[d] passed through” the hall, not including those who “stayed for special short courses” (“Questionnaire” 1939). One such “short” course was a “music school” offered in 1937, which, while not offering Toynbee’s opportunities for opera and orchestral music, provided instruction on musical fundamentals. This eight-day school cost 10s and offered instruction on “Principles of sound,” covering “[b]alance and distribution of separate melodic lines”; “Elementary Harmony and Part-Writing”; and “Listening: What to look for,” with “Illustrations from gramophone records.” For practical study, participants divided according to proficiency, with advanced groups playing “concerted” music (“SELNEC” 1937: 1). Wincham hoped that these courses

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would help men be of “practical use” in their clubs and organizations and keep them from feeling “discouraged” and as if music was “to[o] incomprehensible for them to master” (2). Wincham instructors clearly intended, like the best music instructors at Council schools and at Toynbee Hall, that its students would become musically self-motivated. Significantly, several documents outside the official publications of settlements, such as the memoirs of musical amateurs, occasionally reflect, although not sycophantically so, this buoyant rhetoric. J. M. Dent, the founder of the Everyman book series, was the son of a financially strapped father who taught music and sold both “instruments and fishing tackle” in a north England shop (1938: 9). Around 1887 Dent became associated with Toynbee Hall where, “[a]s part of the educational work of the association,” he “urged music” and helped “to establish a Sunday afternoon musical concert” (49–50). “The first concerts,” he remembers, “were by slenderly trained amateurs,” but with assistance, he arranged for increasingly better performances. The audiences’ “appreciation was marvelous, for these people of Whitechapel knew good music,” an observation to which he adds, “I presume the explanation is that many of them were Russians and Jews, and had more experience of real music than we English people” (50). Foreign and Jewish East Enders seemed to provide significant elements of Toynbee concerts, as The Toynbee Record likewise noted the “many members of the Jewish faith, a race always keen in the enjoyment of the best music,” attending one such concert in 1900 (“Music at Toynbee Hall.” Toynbee Record 13.3 (1900): 31). These enthusiastic amateurs were undoubtedly the forerunners of Burke’s “factory girl” in Spitalfields and represent Britain’s popular musical cosmopolitanism, which I explore further in Chapter 5. Alexander Hartog, too, enthusiastically recalls how he worked hard at Toynbee from 1938 to 1941 for his musical accomplishments. Having previously sung at his synagogue, at age 16 Hartog wanted “proper singing lessons.” He recollects, “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,” working for a tailor, “so I could afford it” (1978: 44). Hartog greatly admired his vocal coach, Robert Parker, but stresses his own efforts. Toynbee classes were, he states, “for business … for work” and, after describing a successful end-of-term concert, he remarks “I had practiced my art” (45, 46). Hartog’s particular care for his musical education illustrates the individualistic perspective articulated more forcefully by Neville Cardus, who grew up in the “mean streets” of Manchester to become a music critic for the Manchester Guardian (1947: 280). “I don’t believe,” Cardus



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wrote, “in the contemporary idea of taking the arts to the people; let them seek and work for them” (281). Hartog utilized the help of aesthetic philanthropists, but he too worked hard for his aesthetic achievements. Like Cardus, fictional lower-middle- or working-class musicians, such as Shaw’s Conolly or Burke’s Gina, generally work outside philanthropic institutions for their aesthetic education. Yet, individuals who took advantage of such institutions worked too, and they belie the naïve audiences imagined by Besant’s philanthropists, Lord Henry, and May Tomalin. The stories and histories of Conolly, Gina, Dent, and Hartog all suggest, moreover, that musical appreciation and the qualities associated with it—the intellectual acquisition of difficult skills and a genteel desire to polish one’s art—were not entirely the rhetorical property of the middle classes, but belonged to lower-middle- and workingclass rhetoric, too. Interestingly, while most fiction presents this situation satirically, most memoirs refrain from a too biting criticism of naïve musical philanthropists. These memoirs, therefore, while opposing privileged fantasies, imagine a more genial musical democracy.

The “inner refinement” of music: The cultural gentility of the provincial poor This genial musical democracy, to the degree that it did exist, was not limited to cities such as London and Manchester. Drummond, Herbert, Rose, and Russell, among others, have revealed the extensive opportunities for making and for hearing music in the British provinces: music festivals offered sacred and secular music from English and German composers; factory workers formed brass bands and performed selections from German and Italian operas; opera troupes, such as the D’Oyly Carte, Carl Rosa, and Moody-Manners companies, toured extensively, particularly in the late-nineteenth century; and colliers performed oratorios by Handel, Mendelssohn, and others.31 Noting the frequency of musical miners, Rose muses that “[p]erhaps it was in the nature of mining communities to develop great musical traditions,” as many miners considered music to be a “high road to a better world” (2001: 198, 200). In this way, the intellectual “aristocracy” of the elite middle classes becomes culturally analogous to the “labor aristocracy” of the working classes.32 Indeed, despite some contemporary criticism of the quality of provincial music-making, many provincial amateurs and their fictional representatives considered their musical culture to be both pleasurable and ennobling, for individuals and

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for the community.33 This process, however, was not always idealized and D. H. Lawrence often uses music to signal characters’ distance from their initial community. While the working classes could not match the Duke of Dorset’s and Lord Tantamount’s wealth or Beerbohm’s and Huxley’s education, they could invoke their own genteel intellectual accomplishments by appropriating a conventionally “noble” classical musical culture. When 14-year-old Harold Brown, for instance, went to work in the mines of Staffordshire in 1917, he took solace in his discovery that his mentor on the coal face, Abe Deakin, was a “real gentlem[a]n,” with both aesthetic and intellectual refinements (1981: 92): Deakin “played the ’cello” to express his “finer feelings” and had “knowledge of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Handel” (91, 85). When praising the refinement of his district, Brown again turns to music, citing an acquaintance’s observation that “[y]ou will not pass many houses before you hear a piano being played, someone practising singing exercises, others working hard at some brass instrument 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’s own recollections of town “choirs rehearsing ‘The Messiah,’ ‘Elijah,’ ‘Israel in Egypt’ and other of the well-known oratorios” support his acquaintance’s conclusion that “there is a standard of culture in this district that is second to none” (110). In the eyes of these miners, Staffordshire takes on a certain gentility through its first-rate musical efforts. D. R. Davies, who worked as a young miner in Wales in the early 1900s, likewise recalls how music offered his family a sense of belonging to an intellectually refined community. Davies’ 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 so taught his children “tonic sol-fa” and paid for singing and violin lessons. Davies remembers “constantly listening to Bach, Handel, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Schubert—oratorios, cantatas and masses” (1961: 27). This musicality provided a sense of self-worth, as “[i]t fed the spirit as an instrument of perception, as an organ of knowledge,” and “made for inner refinement.” His family, he reports, 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 have agreed on the benefits of music, though they might have doubted a miner’s ability to comprehend the importance of aesthetic “form.” Nonetheless, summing up his musical education, Davies writes, “I very much doubt whether,



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fundamentally, Eton or Harrow would have given me a better start, educationally, than the ‘tin Bethel,’ the elementary council school, and my home” (29). Regarding his education in the “Humanities—Music, Literature, History,” among other subjects, Davies further remarks, “[h]ad I been an earl’s son … I could not have acquired greater or deeper interests” (34). Like Brown, Davies reveals how classical music helped working-class individuals and communities in rural areas to fashion ennobling intellectual, moral, and aesthetic identities characterized by hard-work and diverse interests. While urban middle-class modernists such as Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf overlook the provincial lower-middle- and working-class musicality outlined above, D. H. Lawrence, raised in the mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, frequently acknowledges a rural musicality. Yet, unlike Brown and Davies, who emphasize a communal musical gentility, Lawrence’s characters generally use music to signal their fiercely individualistic sense of superiority. Lawrence thus provides a bridge between most provincial musical amateurs and modernists: he acknowledges the skilled musicality of diverse social classes, but he emphasizes an aesthetic and intellectual elitism. In The White Peacock (1911), this elitism comes across as Lettie, the daughter of a lower-middle-class mother and an absentee father, uses her musical knowledge simultaneously to flirt with and to mock the farmer George Saxton, whom she considers her social inferior. After playing a “romance of Schubert’s” at the Saxton farmhouse, Lettie asks George, “how did the music make you feel?” When George, who was admiring her body, replies, “I don’t know— whether—it made me feel anything,” she responds that he must have been “either asleep or stupid” and wonders that he could “see nothing in the music” (Lawrence 1983: 16). Lettie’s ability to play Schubert allows her to distinguish herself and to chastise George’s indifference to refined art. Lawrence highlights Lettie’s aesthetic skill, but concurrently portrays her eschewing a communal musicality. He thereby recalls the alienating urban musical scenes in novels by Huxley and Woolf and the ironically “romantic” music of Eliot’s early poetry. Lawrence echoes these socially alienating uses of music in several plays, which likewise have provincial settings. In The Merry-go-Round (1912), Nurse Broadbanks pities Mr. Wilcox who, “after fumbling” at a piano, courts her with a popular song (1965: 440). In Touch and Go (1920), which repeats elements of Women in Love, Job Arthur Freeman comes from a “musical family” and “plays the violin well, although he was a collier, and it spoilt his hands.” Freeman’s “spoilt” musicality represents his longing for and exclusion from a life of “luxuriation” (1965: 362). Rather than a noble musical character, Freeman is

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a resentful “modern Judas” and “what he admires, and what he aspires to, he must betray” (362–3). Freeman consequently creates more strife than unity in his mining community when he urges his colliers’ union to ineffective violence against Gerald, a rich mine-owner whom he envies. Finally, in A Collier’s Friday Night (1934), Mr. Barker, a collier, tries to impress Nellie, a collier’s daughter, by “banging through The Maiden’s Prayer.” Nellie initially reciprocates by playing, “with real sympathy,” bits of Grieg (1965: 490–1). When Barker leaves, however, Nellie cries, “[t]he poor piano! Mother, it’ll want tuning now,” due to Barker’s banging (492). Nellie’s mocking undermines the fragile musical community she briefly shared with Barker. In each of these plays, music creates distinctions and divisiveness rather than a communal unity. Lawrence also uses music as a means for lower-middle or working-class men to escape from their families. Unlike D. R. Davies’ father, a choirmaster who taught his children music, the carpenter Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow (1915) uses his position as choirmaster and organist at a chapel in Cossethay to escape from the complexities of his family and his work. He enjoys sitting at his organ “alone” and he hears in the music he makes a “protestation” against his troubles (1989: 192). When his daughter interrupts him to tell him of her new teaching position, he turns to “more music” and sounds “a long, emphatic trumpet-note of the organ” (338). Feeling emasculated, Tom uses the instrument to drown out his daughter’s bid for financial independence. In Aaron’s Rod (1922), Aaron Sisson similarly escapes his family and, further, his socio-economic class by playing his flute and piccolo. Early in the novel Aaron, a checkweighman at a coal mine, avoids his daughter by “playing Mozart.” Realizing his intentions, her face goes “pale with anger at the sound” and she leaves him alone (Lawrence 1988: 14). Subsequently, Aaron abandons his family and his life at the mines altogether when he absconds to London and starts playing with an orchestra. Through this position, Aaron extends his acquaintanceship with several of the wealthier inhabitants of his hometown when he meets them at a London opera, appearing “as much a gentleman as anybody” (53). Later his musicality connects him to cosmopolitan aesthetes in Europe, with whom he discusses Bach, Beethoven, and Schumann. While Aaron’s career thus suggests the ability of the working classes to appreciate a noble art—through Aaron’s own musicality and through his being “in request at concerts and dances” back home—Lawrence emphasizes how Aaron uses music not to nurture his family or community but to abandon them for a more desirable luxurious life (14). In his early personal life, Lawrence seems to have had a more ambivalent response to the communal effects of music. Jessie Chambers Wood, Lawrence’s



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first love interest, recalls that “[t]he subject he enjoyed most of all in college was music, which of course was singing,” particularly “Folk songs” (1965: 80). She also provides a tender example of his 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” (80–1). In a 1908 letter Lawrence describes singing in the fields, while doing farm-work with three others: “we sang the songs we learned at school, and then my beloved Schumann, and Giordani” (1979: 1.67).34 A hint of Lawrence’s elitism shows through here. He shares the common property of “school” songs with these men, but ascribes a love of Schumann and Giordani, an opera composer, to himself. In his fiction, too, Lawrence occasionally imagines with sympathy the increasing collective musicality of the lower-middle and working classes. In revising his short story “Two Marriages” into “Daughters of the Vicar” (1914) Louisa Lindley, a daughter of the impoverished but pompous vicar of Aldecross, goes from “giving lessons on the piano to all but miners’ daughters” to “giving lessons on the piano to the colliers’ daughters” specifically (1983: 213–14, 42). Alfred Durant, meanwhile, a young miner, plays the flute “very well” in the first version and in the second he plays the “piccolo, and was considered an expert,” and “[h]e sang in the choir because he liked singing” (226, 68, 66). Lawrence hints here at the musical expertise growing joyfully in some mining towns. In The Lost Girl (1920), Lawrence likewise evokes musical miners who enable Miss Frost, a genteel but struggling piano teacher, to maintain her lifestyle. Similarly to Louisa, Miss Frost “trudged the country” around her small town “giving music lessons to the daughters of tradesmen and of colliers who boasted pianofortes” and to “heavy-handed but dauntless colliers, who were seized with a passion to ‘play’ ” (1995: 10). There is more than a little satire in the quotation marks around “play,” suggesting that Miss Frost, if not Lawrence himself, finds the technical ability of these strong and unwieldy collier students, in particular, to be wanting. Yet, there is also admiration in that they dauntlessly approach their studies, willingly paying Miss Frost “fifteen shillings for thirteen weeks’ lessons, two lessons a week,” prices that are considered “rather dear.” Enough tradesmen and colliers pay for lessons, moreover, so that Miss Frost can help “to support” the failing merchant family with whom she lives (11). Her lowermiddle- and working-class clients evidently consider the cultural knowledge gained through piano lessons to be worth the expense for themselves and for their daughters, whom they likely hope will achieve an aesthetically richer life and a better social standing via music, something truly to “boas[t]” about.

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In these two stories, the increasingly refined colliers have money to spare, while the genteel musicians struggling to maintain their class do not. Louisa’s family has the “look of the genteel, isolated poor” and to support this decaying gentility she must work (Lawrence 1983: 41). Similarly, the colliers who employ Miss Frost consider her “a lady if ever there was one”; but, she confesses, “[w]hen I don’t work I shan’t live” (1995: 11, 45). After her death, a friend observes that, Miss Frost “saved nothing for herself. You can see why she never wanted to grow old, so that she couldn’t work” (52). Louisa charges “thirteen shillings for twenty-six lessons” and so earns half a shilling per lesson and Miss Frost only slightly more (1983: 42). Harold Brown recalls his family saving “two shillings a week” for piano lessons and, allowing for discrepancies between a city and a town, we might note a 1920 survey indicating that most music lessons in Liverpool “ranged from 1s to £1.5s” (Brown 1981: 80; in Ehrlich 1985: 193). The prices Lawrence’s teachers charge might have seemed “dear” to the colliers, but they were not exorbitant and, in the end, the music is dearer to the upwardly mobile colliers than the money. Louisa and Miss Frost, however, depend upon the “heavy-handed” miners to whom they must sell their culture to salvage what they can of their middle-class lifestyle. The miners, however, on the rise, increasingly enjoy musical luxuries. Lawrence, then, frequently presents music as a refining art, while simultaneously separating it from an association with great wealth. This is analogous to what we saw in novels by Huxley and Woolf in the previous chapter. Lawrence, however, depicts the cultural success of ambitious rural working-class amateurs, not urban middle-class intellectuals. The miners gain a sense of respectability and gentility through their improving, if variously “expert” and “fumbling” musical refinements, while the gentility of middle-class piano teachers diminishes as they must now depend, however reluctantly, upon the miners’ musicality.

“in a real rapture”: Musical appreciation as a sign of economic, social, and intellectual success Burke and Lawrence indicate in fiction how cockneys and colliers could use sufficient but still limited funds to gain a qualified gentility through music. Other authors associate classical music with the rapidly increasing influence and affluence of once underprivileged characters. Unlike the indolent uppermiddle-class musicians examined in Chapter 2, such as Alma Frothingham or Henry Otway, H. G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett depict lower-middle-class



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musical amateurs working simultaneously and successfully at their hard-earned professional careers and their aesthetic perceptions. These characters’ appreciation of classical music is not the result of social or financial achievements alone but symbolizes their perseverance and cultural and intellectual ambitions. These traits become, therefore, not intrinsically middle-class values—although they may come more easily to middle-class individuals who have more time, money, and education—but represent a desire for a better life. Several twentieth-century authors similarly portray their characters’ socioeconomic success as increasing correspondingly with their musical interests, thereby symbolizing their hard work in diverse arenas and their immense success. As George Ponderevo recalls his “social trajectory” from the servants’ quarters of a country manor to the heights of a pharmaceutical empire in Wells’ Tono-Bungay (1909), his appreciation of classical music marks his intellectual, financial, and social advance (Wells 1916: 6). Having left his provincial grammar school to continue his education in London, Ponderevo explores the music available in the capital. Looking back, he recalls 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). Ponderevo’s retrospective perspective signals his increased understanding of music as he has grown richer and more knowledgeable. This might reflect Wells’ own experience as he once observed that “at the age of thirteen,” before he moved to London, he “had heard no music at all except an occasional brass band, the not very good music of hymn singing and organ voluntaries in Bromley Church,” and was therefore delighted to hear his cousins’ “piano songs” (1934: 93). For both Ponderevo and Wells, their later financial success simply advances their already bourgeoning aesthetic interests. Wells contrasts Ponderevo’s expanding musical and intellectual interests to the stunted superficiality of his wife, Marion. Before their marriage, Ponderevo tries to engage Marion with his “fermenting ideas about theology, about Socialism, about æsthetics,” which fail to interest her. Marion prefers, instead, “the effect of going about” and has Ponderevo take her “to Earl’s Court, to Kew, to theatres and concerts, but not often to concerts, because, though Marion ‘liked’ music, she didn’t like ‘too much of it’ ” (Wells 1916: 191). After they marry, they buy a piano, “though Marion’s playing was at an elementary level” and she remains uninterested in improving (213). Marion’s musical education falls short of the ideals promoted by school reformers such as Hullah or Somervell. But she hardly helps herself, a failure symbolized by her using her piano primarily

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to display an “India-rubber plant” (215). Marion stagnates, having “no faculty of growth or change,” which she reveals, in part, through her treatment of music as a superficial ornament, rather than using it, as does Ponderevo, to evolve his intellectual interests (213). More intricately, Bennett uses an appreciation of classical music to signal the socio-economic and cultural evolution of three generations of one family in his Clayhanger series. In Clayhanger (1910), Bennett introduces Darius who, after being rescued from the workhouse, builds a successful printing business in the English midlands. Darius increases his family’s financial security, rising from the working to the middle class, but fearful of overspending, he keeps his children culturally impoverished. As the local schools likewise disregard aesthetic pursuits, Darius’ son Edwin, after finishing his formal education, “had never seen a great picture or statue, nor heard great orchestral or solo music,” nor received any substantial aesthetic training (14). Edwin thus begins life in the middle class, but with an aesthetic ignorance that, according to widespread cultural stereotypes, would align him with the working class. As the Clayhangers’ business grows, Edwin concurrently experiences an aesthetic and intellectual awakening, which Bennett signals by widening Edwin’s interests to include both popular and classical music. Edwin’s first significant encounter with music is when his father’s foreman performs with a vocal quartet in a local tavern. Edwin is “thrilled, as by an exquisite and vast revelation,” with the quartet’s “dizzying harmonies” and “fugal calls and responses” (Bennett 1910: 92). His aesthetic experience broadens when his family moves to a finer neighborhood and he becomes friends with the musical and highly educated Orgreaves—Osmond, the father, is an architect and Tom, the eldest son, becomes a solicitor. Edwin particularly enjoys hearing Tom play Bach. As opposed to the vocal quartet, Bach offers a pleasure for which Edwin must strive. He repeatedly asks to hear Bach’s preludes and fugues, so that he might “examine once more and yet again the sensations which the music produced”; as Edwin concentrates on the fugues, especially, they provide him with “a pleasant and yet a trying anxiety” and a “deep joy” (334). Bennett follows contemporary stereotypes by associating tavern songs with the working-class foreman and Bach with the upper-middle-class Orgreaves. Edwin’s engagement with Bach nonetheless emphasizes his efforts to refine his aesthetic and intellectual tastes. To become truly genteel, Bennett suggests, one must not just earn money, as Darius did, but explore complicated new ideas, as Edwin does through music. Bennett presents Edwin, moreover, as mingling the best of Darius and the Orgreaves. Unlike Darius, Osmond lives beyond his means and dies leaving his



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wife and unmarried daughter relatively impoverished. Bennett indicates, then, the benefits of emulating not the Orgreaves’ extravagance, but their culture. To emphasize this, in Hilda Lessways (1911) Bennett has Hilda, Edwin’s future wife, who herself comes from a formerly affluent family, admire the Orgreaves as “obviously of a class superior to her own” (224). The Orgreaves evidence and even share their “superior[ity]” through music. Hilda, who “[b]eyond a little part-singing at school … had no practical acquaintance with music,” listens “with pleasure” as the Orgreave siblings play Beethoven and, as she does, “her thoughts and her aspirations were ennobled” (223). When in These Twain (1915) Hilda and Edwin wish to secure their own comfortable middle-class status, they try to establish “Musical Evenings” and their first attempt is filled with “artistic thrills and emotional quality” (75, 170). Combining Darius’ business sense with the Orgreaves’ culture, Edwin moves beyond his father’s philistinism towards a richer life, both economically and culturally. Bennett does not, however, present the Clayhangers’ ascent uncritically. In The Roll-Call (1918) he uses it to analyze how an easily inherited culture can hinder one’s aesthetic discrimination. When Edwin marries Hilda he adopts her son George Edwin Cannon and gives him a privileged life complete with “piano lessons” and exposure to other arts (1915: 373). Unfortunately, this upbringing incites in George an intellectual laziness. When he moves to London to train as an architect, he takes advantage of the city’s musical options; but, unlike Edwin or Ponderevo, George becomes overly reliant on others for his opinions. George “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” (1918: 57). Bennett attributes George’s laziness to “age,” but in a metaphorical sense. For, whereas young Edwin once strove to understand Bach for himself, “[u]nfamiliar items on a program displeased [George]. He had heard compositions by Richard Strauss, but he could make nothing of them, and his timid, untravelled taste feared to like them.” George uncritically dismisses Strauss, a composer to whom “Mr. Enwright himself was mainly inimical,” but has “come to admire” Glazounov, a composer admired by Enwright (251, 58). George’s access to culture came early and easily and, in his case, this brings an immature critical indolence. Bennett also uses George’s musical tastes to indicate how an aesthetic cultivated by parents for self-improvement can become a means for their children to set themselves pretentiously apart from others. Despite borrowing his musical preferences, George uses them to assert his cultural sophistication against that of Alfred Prince, who is “small” and “very shabby” (1918: 49). When Prince

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announces a desire to go to the Proms, George asks him if he wants to hear the scheduled work by Glazounov; Prince replies that he wants to hear an Elgar piece. George had “derived from Mr. Enwright positive opinions about the relative importance of Elgar and Glazounov” and considers Prince’s fondness for the provincial Elgar and lack of interest in Glazounov to be an ineffectual “snub,” a challenge to what he considers his more sensitive taste (51, 52). Unwilling to contemplate the aesthetic reasoning of the “shabby” other man and somewhat uncertain of his own ideas, George falls back on considering Prince unrefined and parochial. Yet, akin to Burke’s strategy in “An Art Night,” Bennett sets up George’s elitist musical pretensions to show him reassess them. George’s love interest, Marguerite, agrees to go to the Proms with him and, after arriving at the Queen’s Hall, the two grow “inspired by the feeling that life was a grand thing” (1918: 56). The orchestra pauses, then begins a new piece and George gets “ready to put himself into the mood of admiration if it was the Glazounov” (56–7). George, though, is unsure: “[w]as it Glazounov? … It sounded fine. Surely it sounded Russian.” Spying a program, George learns that he is listening to Elgar’s “Sea Pictures.” This realization prompts George to say to Marguerite, with a “careless condescension,” that the piece is “only the Elgar” and to find “that the music was not fine” (57). George indeed must make “careless,” uncritical aesthetic judgments as Elgar’s Sea Pictures is a song cycle and in the first song the English lyrics come in almost immediately, in the third measure. Bennett lampoons the superficiality of George’s criticism, which depends upon a composer’s name and reputation, not a careful consideration of his art. Still, Bennett likes George and challenges his musical pretensions primarily to suggest that his education is incomplete. When the Elgar ends, Marguerite lets out “a sigh of appreciation” and “George too, reflecting,” yet again, “upon the sensations produced within him by Elgar,” grows “ready to admit that, though Elgar could of course not be classed with the foreigner [Glazounov], there might be something to be said for him after all” (58). George’s borrowed aesthetic pretensions hold him back, but his continued exposure to music and a tolerant attitude might allow him to find pleasure and satisfaction in unfamiliar sensations and ideas. George’s brief enjoyment of Elgar, moreover, temporarily creates a unified musical community similar to that imagined in the educational handbooks, examined above. As George enjoys the Elgar despite himself, he joins the ranks not only of Marguerite and Prince, but also of the audience members he has seen “perched on other ledges” or on “cold steam-pipes,” including a “girl with a big face and heavy red lips” who “sat alone” as Elgar sent her “into an ecstasy”



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(Bennett 1918: 57). We might place this in conjunction with the concert scene in Howards End, wherein Forster unites a divided Queen’s Hall audience who all enjoy, if variously so, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In Roll-Call, Bennett similarly shows music uniting a divided audience, if only momentarily. Simultaneously, he suggests that a truly noble or “Prince[ly]” approach to music is to cultivate a catholicity of taste, as does Edwin Clayhanger. It is fitting that Bennett sets this moment of cultural harmony at the Queen’s Hall during a Promenade or “Prom” concert, as the Proms were known for their informal, welcoming atmosphere. Revitalizing older Promenade-style concerts, the Queen’s Hall Proms began in 1895 under the auspices of Robert Newman, the Queen’s Hall manager, and Henry Wood, the conductor of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra.35 From the beginning, Newman and Wood endeavored to distance the Proms and the Queen’s Hall from the exclusive formality of most contemporary concerts and venues. W. W. Thompson, who worked under Newman, remembered how “in the early days the promenade floor was edged with stalls for the sale of ices, cigars, and flowers,” while “the centre-piece on the floor was—as nearly all the world knows—a fountain” (in Hill and Rees 1944: 4). In Roll-Call, Bennett describes appreciatively the Proms’ “flags,” “flowers,” and “fountain,” along with a general “enthusiasm” that spread so that “every person present had the illusion of a share in the triumph” (1918: 55–6). This is an exciting “illusion” that, as George Cannon illustrates, can lead to an actual musical interest. The Queen’s Hall ambiance, then, not only drew on older promenading traditions, but also, with its delicacies and aesthetic pleasures, recalled, if unintentionally so, the Oxford college concerts discussed in Chapter 1. This welcoming informality combined with good music drew a broad audience, inclusive of at least the lower-middle classes. Bennett recalls in his Journal “an eager tumultuous mass (excited by expectation), struggling to get at the ticket offices” for a concert in 1897 (1933: 34). Arthur Symons similarly reported the Proms attracting a “heterogeneous audience” consisting 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-castes,” 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 September 7, 1907: 298). Newman, Leanne Langley confirms, gained a “broad” audience of “real connoisseurs and total novices, practicing musicians and ordinary event-seekers, the well behaved, the inattentive, students, the elderly, officer workers and bus drivers, soldiers (‘khaki’), single women and couples, bankers, solicitors, clerks

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and clerics,” and “civil servants” (2007: 44–5). Visibly indicative of this crossclass audience was Newman’s removal of the traditionally more expensive stall seating to create room for the general public at the price of a shilling, a set-up borrowed with great success from Covent Garden promenades. With such arrangements, as Paul Kildea observes, non-traditional audiences “were physically taking over their betters’ territory” (2007: 12). When the BBC took charge of the Promenades in 1927, these audiences expanded still further over the airwaves. Significantly, the inclusivity of the Queen’s Hall did not lead towards an indifferent approach to music. Newman, Wood reports, wanted to “train the public by easy stages … gradually raising the standard until [he had] created a public for classical and modern music” (1946: 68). As the nineteenth progressed to the twentieth century, Newman and Wood worked to achieve this goal by trying to hire quality performers to play an array of works, albeit with limited rehearsal times, and by employing Rosa Newmarch in 1907 to write accessible concert programs. Newmarch combined what Philip Bullock defines as “moderately technical language” with an “aesthetic” appreciation to educate the public on the music being performed, thereby encouraging a “Paterian listening” that put the onus of an informed interpretation of the music on the audience itself (2010: 297–8, 301). In doing so, Newmarch helped to carry into the twentieth century what Christina Bashford has identified as the late-Victorian penchant for “educational” concert programs, closely connected to Victorian “self-improvement” efforts, that eschewed pedantry and that were intended, as Catherine Dale has shown, “to educate and to make music accessible to the masses” (Bashford 2003: 127; Dale 2003: 36). For many members of the “shilling” public the Proms were consequently an entertaining education. The early-twentieth-century critic C. B. Rees, for instance, cheerfully claimed “that without Henry Wood and the Proms I might today be utterly allergic to good music.” Offering an undoubtedly personal anecdote, 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. (In Hill and Rees 1944: 20)

Figures as diverse as Thomas Burke, himself from a lower-middle-class family; Elizabeth Ring, Marjory Todd, and William Bowyer, all from working-class



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backgrounds; and the Balliol-educated philosopher C. E. M. Joad similarly recall their educational and pleasurable encounters with classical music at the Proms and the Queen’s Hall.36 The popular atmosphere of the Queen’s Hall, itself intimately associated with the Proms, was not, however, universally praised. In Howards End Forster refers to it as the “dreariest music-room in London” and Margaret Schlegel and Leonard Bast, representatives of the leisured and newly advanced lower-middle classes respectively, both “find the atmosphere of Queen’s Hall oppressive” (Forster 1973: 44, 49). In 1915, Virginia Woolf took a more balanced perspective and referred to the Hall as a “box of pure beauty set down in the middle of London streets” filled with “people—all looking so ordinary, crowding to hear, as if they weren’t ordinary after all, or had an ambition for something better.” Mixed in with these “ordinary” people, Woolf saw Oliver Strachey, G. B. Shaw, and Walter Lamb. Still, Woolf tempers her praise of this quasi-democratic atmosphere by remarking that at the “divine concert” she heard the “playing wasn[’]t very good” and the music was somewhat spoiled by the noise of those who ate chocolates and “crumbled the silver paper into balls” (1977–83: 1.33–4). The Hall gathered diverse classes with diverse aesthetic conventions, but the combination was not always an easy or an entirely satisfying one. Most discussions of the Queen’s Hall Proms nonetheless emphasized an increasingly sophisticated musical public. Some contemporaries even intimated the superior ability of amateurs in lower socio-economic tiers to appreciate the Proms. Discussing the “Queen’s Hall during the Promenade Season,” Burke writes, [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 heat and sound, for two hours and a half, listening, not to the inanities of Sullivan or Offenbach or Arditi, but to Weber, Palestrina, Debussy, Tchaikowsky, Wieniawski, Chopin, Mozart, Handel, and even the starch-stiff Bach. (1918: 96)

It could be that the affluent classes preferred to attend the more serious Queen’s Hall symphony concerts rather than the Proms. Regardless, what is remarkable is how Burke inverts the exclusivist modernist rhetoric analyzed in Chapter 2 by presenting the lower-middle classes as musically refined and the ostensibly sophisticated, snobbish classes as absentee philistines.

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A. H. Sidgwick, son of the Oxbridge classicist Arthur Sidgwick, suggests the influence of this populist rhetoric by satirizing reports of the refined musical masses and the uncultured middle classes. In his The Promenade Ticket (1914) a middle-class aesthete observes that “children get such an elevated musical education nowadays, that a very short course of L. C. C. bands (which are becoming confoundedly classical) initiates them into the inner mysteries of the Promenades, and they take their Debussy like ham-and-eggs for breakfast.” So “how,” he laments, “can any of us feel really select and exclusive in our music any longer?” He suggests that the snob’s “only refuge is to revert to vulgarity, and there, unfortunately, we find most of our friends” (189). As Burke and Sidgwick indicate, some commentators considered a substantial portion of the Proms audiences to consist of the culturally and intellectually ambitious lower orders, those amateurs who listened to the London County Council bands and who threatened to overtake their socio-economic superiors. Of course, Sidgwick’s aesthete can facetiously suggest abandoning refined music to the masses because music is not money or political power; moreover, he undoubtedly believes in the ultimate aesthetic superiority of the middle-class elite, anyway. Yet, Sidgwick’s satire, like most modernist fiction, exhibits a trace of anxiety for the status of the culturally elite middle classes in Britain when faced with the rising lower-middle and working classes. Notably, rhetoric promoting the popularity of classical music was not limited to discussions of Proms audiences, but was applied, intermittently, to audiences across London. Surveying the Covent Garden Opera House, one reviewer suggested that, “[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 May 3, 1913: 6). This critic likely refers to educated, but not affluent, middle-class amateurs, like Woolf ’s Belamy or Whittaker in Jacob’s Room. But intermixed with the latter were at least some lower-middle-class amateurs, some with workingclass backgrounds. William Bowyer, for instance, was born in 1889 into a “respectable” working-class neighborhood in Battersea and worked his way up through the lower and middle ranks of the Civil Service (1941: 61). In Brought out in Evidence, his art-treatise-cum-autobiography, Bowyer describes going to pre-World War I performances of the “Ballets Russes” at the Covent Garden Opera House, where he and his friends “always went in the gallery … and the audience there (we thought) was more intelligent than in any other part of the house” (161). At this time Bowyer was earning £70 a year as a clerk and his



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advancing career and musical tastes recall those of George Ponderevo, Edwin Clayhanger, and even Leonard Bast who also “attend[s] the gallery for the Royal Opera” (Forster 1973: 49). Sophisticated lower-middle and working-class amateurs also gathered at smaller concerts, such as those the Sunday Evening Concert Society offered at the Working Men’s College, on Crowndale Road in London. 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. Music was nominally provided for free, although patrons were occasionally asked to donate “AT LEAST sixpence” to keep the concerts running (see, for instance, the program for March 15, 1925). These concerts offered mixed programs, including more difficult chamber music and lighter songs. One program, for instance, consisted of Bach’s “Coffee Cantata,” with the “argument” explained on the program, available for three pence, and a selection of traditional songs and poetry set to music, such as “A Shropshire Lad” by A. E. Housman with music by Ivor Gurney (March 22, 1925). Another representative program was that for the 22nd concert of the 15th season, the 339th concert of the series, which occurred in 1935. On this evening, performers presented Beethoven’s quartet in F major, Op. 59, No. 1; Brahms’ intermezzo in E flat major, Op. 117, No. 1 and his rhapsody in G minor Op. 79, No. 2; a Stravinsky piano sonata; and a Sibelius quartet in D minor, which had been featured four times previously (March 31, 1935).37 The continued quality and the variety of compositions performed at this long-lasting concert series reveal its audiences’ willingness and desire to hear such music. The nonconformist South Place Ethical Society offered similarly structured concerts at Finsbury Square, London. In 1887 the Ethical Society took over a Sunday series sponsored by the People’s Concert Society begun in 1878. By February 1927, the Ethical Society series had provided over a thousand concerts for predominantly lower-middle- and working-class audiences.38 This series, also supported by donations, provided a wide array of chamber music, from works by familiar composers, such as Robert Schumann and Antonin Dvořák, to more obscure ones, such as Edith Swepstone and Richard Walthew. On occasion, informative lectures accompanied specialty concerts.39 For their audiences, these concerts provided both aesthetic and intellectual entertainment. As Bennett, Bowyer, and Burke touted the sophisticated shilling and gallery audiences at the Queen’s Hall and Covent Garden, contemporary critics praised the rising intellectual and cultural respectability of South Place audiences, occasionally at the expense of their West End counterparts. In 1925, W. S.

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Meadmore, an advocate of the series, observed that the South Place “audience is hardly the audience one meets in West End concert rooms,” for the South Place audience attends not for a “social function” but “to hear music and the music must be of the highest quality” (1925: 79). In The Story of a Thousand Concerts, Meadmore reprints similar encomia, such as in the following review published in the Daily Graphic in 1898: Glancing at one corner of the hall you would say that the visitors came from round about Finsbury—the small trades people about Bishopgate Street, the better class of Houndsditch and Shoreditch and Spitalfields beyond—and another corner would present to you a group of the young men and women who ordinarily are to be seen “walking out” in a rather aimless fashion through the Sunday evening streets. But the bulk of the audience strikes you as suburban, the rather pale-faced people who attend evening lectures, and very seldom miss going to chapel on Sunday mornings. One thing is characteristic of all in the audience, and that is the intelligence with which they listen to the music. … It is more than possible that this audience, which is a very regular one … has been educated to a real appreciation of “classical” music, instead of to the necessity of pretending to like it. (In Meadmore 1927: 12)

The Daily Graphic indicates a mixture of predominantly lower-middle-class shopkeepers and perhaps upper-working-class amateurs who have learned to seek “the best and highest” music. The Musical Standard also observed an upward trend in 1911, when it remarked that although the first South Place concerts “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” (in Meadmore 1927: 20–1). Even The Times chimed in when, in celebration of the 1,300th concert, it admired “the fine quality and high aims” of the series (“South Place Concert.” Times March 1, 1938: 14). Journalistic descriptions of South Place audiences enjoying the “best” quality music and “high aims,” education unaffectedly mixing with pleasure, indicate a certain increase of their intellectual and perhaps even social and moral respectability. The above articles supplement the autobiographies cited earlier to redress satires of philanthropic organizations offering musical opportunities. They also show how segments of the lower-middle and the working classes gained positive public recognition by attending classical concerts. We need not, moreover, perceive these expanding audiences for classical music, in conjunction with the audiences of more popular venues such as the Queen’s Hall, as relying solely on



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the paternalistic charity of the upper classes. These audiences actively engaged with institutions to further their own education and enjoyment of music. This was almost certainly the motivation of many who attended the Sunday Evening Concert Society and the South Place Ethical Society concerts and the Proms. This attitude was certainly transferred into fiction. Wells evokes a sense of self-motivated cultural advance in George Ponderevo, Bennett in Edwin Clayhanger, and Shaw in Conolly. The musical initiative of these characters and of the historical audiences they represent indicate how certain segments of the population, those supposedly disenfranchised from society’s “highbrow” art, used classical music to claim an intellectual gentility and a cultural competency frequently denied them on account of their alleged ignorance and limited incomes.

An unexpected accord This literary and historical outline brings us back to the modernist question examined in Chapter 2 regarding the social value of classical music, only now with a much wider context. This context includes not only the perspectives of middle-class literati, but also of lower-middle- and working-class musical amateurs and of the writers who sympathized with them. These perspectives suggest that these groups associated similar social values with classical music. Classical music could, then, be viewed as a seemingly arbitrary indicator of class divides. But as I have been arguing, the term also became imbued with the potential to redefine class identities, if only in a limited fashion. An appreciation of classical music, even, as Sidgwick suggests, as performed by brass bands, could signal intelligence and gentility while a lack of appreciation signaled intellectual laziness and vulgarity regardless of one’s inherited background or economic status. As we have seen, middle-class literati used representations of classical music to assert their intellectual and cultural dominance and to create complex works of art. They depicted autobiographical characters as musically proficient, and hence as intelligent and genteel, while the majority of their upper- and middleclass musical characters resort to a half-hearted musicality in an attempt to retain a failing gentility. These latter characters re-enforce associations of classical music with a refined lifestyle and, through their lack of aesthetic acuity, reveal their cultural IQs to be scarcely higher than those of the allegedly unrefined lower-middle or working classes, represented by Frank Illidge in

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Huxley’s Point Counter Point or the caretaker’s children in Woolf ’s The Years. Modernist authors, moreover, such as Eliot, Huxley, and Woolf emphasize the shallow musical appreciation of these characters in complexly structured “musical” novels to suggest the cultural bankruptcy of the majority of Britain’s upper and lower classes and to establish themselves as the primary executors of Britain’s cultural legacy. The self-representations of a substantial number of lower-middle and working-class musical amateurs stand in distinct opposition to the representations of the unrefined lower classes imagined by most early-twentieth-century middle-class intellectuals and by most modernists, in particular. Benney, Bowyer, and Ring, among others, who themselves represent the countless audience members of Queen’s Hall concerts and East End concert societies, all describe their appreciation of music by Bach, Mozart, and Wagner, and lighter works by Donizetti or Verdi. They indicate, moreover, the joy, refinement, and sense of gentility this music brought to their lives. I have tried to illustrate how these amateurs fit into an oft-overlooked literary tradition. If largely ignored by canonical middle-class authors, underprivileged musical amateurs found representation in the intellectual, aesthetic, and sheer willful perseverance embodied within the brilliant “temperament” of Burke’s East End “factory girl,” Lawrence’s Aaron Sisson, Bennett’s Edwin Clayhanger, and more tangentially in Maugham’s and Mackenzie’s cockney ballet dancers and Lawrence’s nameless accumulation of collier piano-players, whom their authors refer to with respect, if at times begrudgingly so. Ironically then, amidst all the glittering representations of musical events at Tantamount House and the Covent Garden Opera House, the modernist musical–literary project has surprising correlations to sympathetic representations of lower-middle- and working-class musical amateurs and to the goals of state-run schools, institutions such as Toynbee Hall, the Proms, Sunday concert societies, and even, if more indirectly, certain music halls. Both modernists and certain segments of the lower-middle and the working classes of this period each pursued the social and intellectual value of classical music in order to enjoy it. Yet, they also claimed a sophisticated musicality to establish their own cultural authority, a learned gentility, and what D. R. Davies called a spiritual “inner refinement,” a concept remarkably akin to Huxley’s “spiritual hierarchy,” as discerned through musical tastes. One crucial difference between the writers considered in Chapter 2 and those considered here is that the former achieved a greater formal complexity in their works, often by translating musical forms into literature. A second crucial



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difference is that, thematically, the former frequently attempted to exclude almost everyone but their own circles from an appreciation of classical music. Conversely, writers sympathetic to the lower-middle and the working classes acknowledged that the number of amateurs interested in classical music was, in reality, expanding. The attempt of the modernists to co-opt classical music for themselves was thus inevitably a futile one. If there was an equation, to return to a metaphor from Chapter 2, between an ability to appreciate classical music and socio-economic class, it was an open-ended one. The forces at work in early-twentieth-century British society—from adult education settlements to provincial musical amateurs to Promenades audiences—helped classical music to become not an elitist art, but a democratic one: colliers seeking a better life played instruments and went to concerts, and writers depicted them doing so. Expectations were fraught with inversions and, as the twentieth century progressed, classical music gained wider and more varied audiences. For many socially disenfranchised audiences and authors, an increasing appreciation of classical music helped to formulate a strong sense of their culturally and intellectually legitimated place in society.

Notes   1 McGuire (2009: 51–4).   2 See Bashford (2003: 127); Dale (2003: 4–6, 36).   3 Cox (1993: 20–1), Herbert (2000: 54–9, 331–41), Rose (2001: 196–204), and Russell (1997: 78–81, 205–11).   4 See Mackerness (1964: 269–72) and McKibbin (2000: 386–9). Bourdieu discusses similar distinctions entailed by “educational capital” and “light music” in post-1950s France (1984: 14).   5 Russell (1997: 7–8); McGuire (2009: 51–3).   6 For the similarities and distinctions between the lower-middle classes and the “respectable,” self-educated, and consistently employed upper-working classes, see Crossick (1977: 34–7) and Gray (1981: 41–2). These two groups often interacted with classical music in a similar fashion. I will therefore consider them together, noting differences where appropriate.   7 Critics have often examined how Victorian and Edwardian philanthropists attempted to impose ostensibly middle-class values onto the working classes, frequently by promoting certain perspectives on art and recreation. Bailey suggests that “[r]ational recreation” was “an important instrument for educating the working classes in the social values of middle-class orthodoxy,” although by the

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mid-nineteenth century “the history of several schemes launched in its name had revealed the considerable problems of putting its rationale of social control into practice” (1978: 35, see also 46–7). Art music, as Russell has argued, often served as a means of influencing the working classes and as a voluntarily “central part of their musical culture” (1997: 235, see also 23–7). Herbert suggests that brass bands, which often played transcriptions of art music, offered a “common territory between classes” from the 1860s onwards (2000: 11). Conversely, Jones has emphasized a London working-class culture that was “clearly distinguished from the culture of the middle class and had remained largely impervious to middle-class attempts to dictate its character or direction” (1983: 207). Generally speaking, Jones’ argument may hold true; but, a desire for classical music in both middle-class society and in lower-middle- and working-class urban bands, music halls, and elsewhere offers an important qualification to any clear-cut distinctions between class cultures. See Kift (1996: 18, 20–1, 28, 54, 96) and Russell (1997: 105–7). For a broad, early-twentieth-century history of music-hall ballet, see Haddon (1935: 125). These patrons may be represented by Arthur Symons; for his obsession with ballet dancers, see Faulk (2004: 63–74); for music-hall dancing, see Guest (1992: 6–8) and Koritz (1990: 420–31). For Landon and the ballets, see Guest (1992: 66, 69). See Woolf (1977–83: 1.144). (Program for the Alhambra, September 16, 1907); for the Empire, see Guest (1992: 106–7, 126–7, 134–5). Russell suggests that Victorian audiences of “West End halls” traditionally included “some superior clerks and shopmen” (1997: 93). An Edwardian critic records watching the “ ‘real genuine unsophisticated gents’ ” in attendance at an Alhambra drama (“Alhambra Theatre.” Times October 25, 1910: 10). This phrase repeats James Spedding’s description of a pit audience: “We are … 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” (in “Philip Van Artevelde.” Edinburgh Review 434 (October 1910): 300); see also Norman’s recollections (in Porter and Weeks 1991: 24, 26). For the general “denigration” of late-nineteenth-century theater musicians, see Lawrence (2007: 40). For affordable nineteenth-century musical publications and instruments in England, see Russell (1997: 172–80), Ehrlich (1976: 10, 104; 1985: 101), and Herbert (2000: 308–11). McGuire traces the Tonic Sol-Fa movement through many of its complex philanthropic engagements with education and musical culture in Music and Victorian Philanthropy (2009).



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18 For early working-class involvement with and the religious associations of the sight-singing movement, see also Rainbow (1986: 25–32, 38–40). For the “monster” music festivals, see Mackerness (1964: 65) and Scholes (1947: 165). 19 For music in state-funded schools from 1867 onwards, see Cox (1993: 19–40) and Dale (2003: 16–26). For opposition to the expansion of state-funded education, see Simon (1965: 264–73) and Gordon, Aldrich, and Dean (1991: 47–52). For music in English education prior to 1870, see Rainbow (1986: 25–7). 20 The use of classical choral music in schools was not completely new; see Cox (1993: 44). 21 For the influence of Pythagorean and Platonic theories on Somervell and his contributions to the Suggestions for the Consideration of Teachers, the forerunner of the Handbook, see Cox (2003: 81–3, 20). 22 For a brief discussion of musical failures and successes in the 1920s, see Cox (1993: 133–6). 23 For a more sanguine perspective on this scene, see Squier (1985: 178–9). 24 For a history of these movements, see Deverich (1987: 40–8). 25 Gustav Holst taught, for a time, at the Passmore Edwards Settlement (Briggs and Macartney 1984: 121); for music courses at London’s Working Men’s College, see Harrison (1954: 63–4, 162, 173). 26 The precise make-up of the audiences and students for settlement musical events is unclear. According to Simon, “[i]t is doubtful whether the Settlement movement ever affected the mass of the working class … Many of the activities evidently appealed more to the lower middle class than the workers” (1965: 84–5). The Toynbee Record, however, observed of a concert in 1900 that for those “who have watched the rapid advance in the appreciation of good music in working-class districts during the past few years, it was not at all astonishing to find an audience of workers listening with unquestionable interest to a couple of movements from Reinecke’s Trio in A Minor … and enthusiastically demanding an encore for Miss Clara Blumenthal’s performance of one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies” (TR 13.3 (1900): 30). The Record described a “mixed” audience, including “gentlemen” who “were innocent of shirt collars,” a contingent of “working girls,” and some who “looked rather rough customers, probably from Petticoat-lane round the corner” (31). 27 For Davies, see Toynbee Record 13.6 (1901): 66. In 1933, Toynbee Hall instituted a series of “celebrity concerts by artists of international reputation,” to be held at the White Chapel Art Gallery, costing 1s–2s for those not members of Toynbee’s Musical Society, and a series to be held at the Hall for 6d for the general public (“Toynbee Musical Society: Second Season—1933–1934” 1933). From the 1930s, Musical Society members could also get discounted tickets for concerts in the West End (Briggs and Macartney 1984: 117).

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28 The Education Committee minutes of March 27, 1923, for example, suggest that this term’s choral class enrolled 15 active students; the minutes of December 4, 1924, suggest that this term’s choral class had 16 students at the last class and the “Appreciation of Music” class had 20 students (“Education Committee Minute Book 1913–30”). 29 For music and Mechanics’ Institutes, see Russell (1997: 31, 172). For music and the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union, see Rose (2001: 78–9). For London and provincial “girls’ ” clubs, see Gillett (2000: 63–4). 30 Men could pay their fees with their unemployment insurance and arrangements could be made for those with dependants to “cover the needs of the household” (“Prospectus”). 31 For overviews of musical repertoires and activities outside of London, see Drummond (2011: 132, 163), Herbert (2000: 54–9, 331–41), Rose (2001: 196–204), and Russell (1997: 78–81, 205–11). 32 For theories on an “intellectual aristocracy,” see Annan (1969: 243–4) and Carey (1992: 71–2); the term “labor aristocracy” generally relates to economics and social status, but may have some relationship to culture more generally (Gray 1981: 35–6). 33 Two reviews of the Moody-Manners opera company published in the Saturday Review in 1906 suggest the divergent thoughts on touring opera companies. John Runciman observes that Manners had done “magnificent work in the provinces and in the provinces he has found support and backing” to produce operas such as Carmen, Figaro, and Lohengrin (“The Everlasting Opera Question.” SR March 17, 1906: 328). Harold Gorst, while acknowledging that the company’s members “deserve … the gratitude of all music-lovers,” emphasizes the “drawbacks and difficulties” of “popularising a commendable standard of operatic performance throughout the provinces” (“Sham Tragic Opera.” SR May 12, 1906: 582). See also Thompson (1992: 32–3). 34 For the probable identities of these men, see Boulton’s hypothesis (in Lawrence 1979: 1.65 n. 3). 35 For previous London “Promenades,” see Mackerness (1964: 180–3) and Langley (2007: 40–2). 36 For Burke and Joad, see Hill and Rees (1944: 17, 51–2); for Burke’s background, see Witchard (2005: 63–6); see also Ring (1975: 127), Todd (1960: 106–7), and Bowyer (1941: 116). 37 To give an expanded sense of the society’s programming: one 1925 concert included a Beethoven piano trio in E flat major, songs by Beethoven, Brahms, and Handel, an organ concerto by W. Fr. Bach transcribed for the piano, and instrumental pieces by Ernest Bloch and Brahms (November 29, 1925). For a 1927 concert, the program included “Variations of a Theme of Beethoven for Two



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Pianofortes” by Saint-Saëns and a Beethoven Quartet in B flat major (March 6, 1927). 38 See Meadmore (1927: 10). 39 In the eighth season (1893–4), 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” (Meadmore 1927: 9).

4

Distinguishing a musical homoeroticism: Pater, Forster, and their aesthetic descendants

As the cultural cachet of classical music increased in late-Victorian Britain, authors represented minority subcultures as intelligent auditors, as skilled performers, and as talented composers in order to justify or to elevate their place in society. As I demonstrate in the previous chapters, both modernist authors and members of the lower-middle and the working classes used an affiliation with classical music to claim a cultural and an intellectual foothold in British society. This chapter focuses on a new facet of this paradigm by examining the creation (in the late-nineteenth century) and the reevaluation and consolidation (in the early-twentieth century) of a generally affirmative association between classical music and homoeroticism in British literature and culture. Following Pater, writers took advantage of Britain’s increasingly musical society by representing same-sex-desiring characters as particularly or even innately musical and therefore uniquely valuable within this new cultural context. Profiting from the aesthetic and social opportunities made available by these new social conditions, these writers associated these socially alienated individuals with music to promote their cultural value both to themselves and to society at large. This affirmative association, I argue, bolstered the queer subcultures centered on same-sex desire that existed despite legal and social persecutions in these periods. Recent critics have meticulously explored what Jeffrey Weeks has called the “creative response” to oppression found in “a variegated subculture, where homosexuals met, developed a mode of social intercourse, and explored a network of ritualized sexual contacts” (1990: 6). H. G. Cocks, for instance, has shown how “the unspeakable status of homosexuality in nineteenth-century society” in fact “produced paradoxical opportunities not only for representation, but also for self-making,” across diverse social classes and geographies, through coded discourses (2010: 199). Particularly useful for Britain’s same-sex-desiring

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subcultures were discourses shaped by late-nineteenth-century aestheticism, which, as Matt Cook has argued, “provided a model for a complex identity based on beauty and the senses, rather than on social and cultural conformity or biological determinism” (2003: 96). These aesthetic discourses offered a limited “self-determination and mastery over the environment, at least for an elite” (97). Complementing Cocks and Cook by emphasizing the importance of “class, race, gender, age, and place,” Matt Houlbrook has detailed the “[d]iverse desires, ways of being, and cultural practices” that shaped “queer London” in the early-twentieth century (2005: 7, 8). Conflations of homosexuality with music, particularly classical music, frequently influenced the sexually queer “self-making” and “cultural practices” portrayed in literature and in discourses drawing on literary tropes. While several critics have observed a relationship between homoeroticism and musicality, many emphasize this relationship’s inauspicious connotations. Philip Brett has observed how writers from Plato onward have often considered music “an agent of moral ambiguity always in danger of bestowing deviant status upon its practitioners” (1994: 11). In his discussions of homosexuality and opera, Wayne Koestenbaum eulogizes opera, but stresses the queer opera lover’s “helplessness” and “solitude” (1993: 45, 197). From a less abstract perspective, Emma Sutton traces the complex relationship between homoeroticism and music in late-Victorian England, but highlights their connection to “[t]he pathological vocabulary and imagery in which decadents and Wagnerians were so often described” (2002: 56).1 In his essay “The ‘perniciously homosexual art,’ ” Joe Law similarly evokes the unhappy deviancy associated with a musical homoeroticism in fin-de-siècle fiction. Law draws his title from Imre (1906), a novel by Xavier Mayne, the pseudonym of Edward Prime-Stevenson, wherein Imre declares his temporary “aversion to music,” a “perniciously homosexual art” (2003: 100). While Law primarily presents the role of music, “an inarticulate medium with the power to stir and trouble,” as an “emblem” for homosexuality, his analysis emphasizes associations of music with “dubious influence,” “hidden sorrows or secret sins,” and unhappiness (2004: 196, 178, 189). I argue in this chapter that these lines of argument, while convincing, elide multiple associations of classical music with sympathetic representations of homoeroticism in diverse British literary forms and styles. As I will show, Oscar Wilde and Amy Levy draw on the Paterian sexual liberalism that I examine in Chapter 1 to support homoerotic subjectivities in their prose and poetry with a fanciful lyricism. They fashion impromptus, symphonies, and operas into introductions to self-knowledge and to sympathetic small communities.



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Subsequently, sexologists Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis evolved this support by linking a heightened musicality to the physiological and psychological characteristics of sexual “intermediates,” whose “psychical affections and affinities” blend masculine and feminine traits and who exhibit “sexual inversion—that is the leaning of desire to one of the same sex” (Carpenter 1921: 10, 51). Use of these terms and definitions vary across the writing of both men but consistently refer to types of individuals who experience same-sex attractions that suggest less late-twentieth-century gay or lesbian identities than a fluid mix of sex and gender characteristics, psychological and spiritual sensibilities, and erotic urges. Carpenter, in particular, as we will see, characterized the innate musicality of many male inverts as evidence of the social value of their feminine characteristics and hyper-sensitive nervous systems, a line of thought that Ellis likewise affirmed, if more cautiously, through his collection of case studies. Carpenter and Ellis, then, shifted a fin-de-siècle fancifulness towards an ostensibly scientific prose and more straightforward autobiographical narratives, which worked to legitimate affirmative, empirical representations of intermediate inverts via music. Whereas Wilde and Levy, like Walter Pater, emphasized aesthetic discourses that played with the liberating erotic potentials of distinctively sensitive individuals who grouped together, Carpenter and Ellis sought to define relatively larger groups with the explicit purpose of defending their place in a diverse society. To a much greater degree than Wilde’s, Carpenter’s and Ellis’ reformist sexology was, as Ruth Livesey has shown, guided by turn-of-the-century socialist ideologies that sought to normalize diverse sexual relationships and to better socio-economic relations in general.2 In their approbation of physical sexual relationships, they differed from their more spiritually and socially conservative contemporary, Marc-André Raffalovich. Carpenter, Ellis, and Raffalovich, however, all integrated musical ideas akin to Pater’s, Wilde’s, and Levy’s into sexological discourses that insisted on the value of innately musical “intermediate” bodies and minds for a wider British public. After examining these late-nineteenth-century writers, I will argue that early-twentieth-century novelists advanced these idealistic and variously socialist themes and stylistic antecedents both to extol and to critique same-sex desiring characters that use music to establish beneficial social relationships. Using prose styles that balance Pater’s and Carpenter’s, A. T. Fitzroy (the penname of Rose Allatini) and Beverley Nichols depict men characterized as variously inverted, homosexual, or queer (a popular early-twentieth-century, polymorphous term less associated with theoretical sexology) using music to

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find male lovers and to gain admiration from heterogeneous communities.3 These musical tropes revolve primarily around educated, middle-class men, although some novelists explore beyond this socio-economic elite. Drawing on the increasing prestige of classical music in Britain across all classes, Ronald Firbank, Radclyffe Hall, Nichols, and Reginald Underwood assert the cultural value of same-sex-desiring lower-middle-class men, and occasionally women, by depicting their musical skills. Correspondingly, Robert Hichens and Firbank parody a decadent fancifulness to satirize characters who use music as a social entrée or as a cover for cruising. E. M. Forster and Hall, meanwhile, indicate how social oppression can destroy the inspirational relationships of inverted musicians. They often signal frustration by inserting descriptions of sickness into lyrical passages to symbolize the destruction of musical lives. All these authors, however, at some point, use music to portray contemporary, same-sexdesiring individuals as talented, as sophisticatedly sensitive, and as culturally valuable. This remains a common theme regardless of the terminology that authors use to define sexual practices or identities, all of which, if connotatively diverse, as I note, have the shared quality of indicating same-sex desire. Finally, I will demonstrate how Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden reacted against this valorization of a sexually queer musicality by linking music to violent political contexts.

The late-nineteenth-century fashioning of a musical homoeroticism In late-nineteenth-century writing, music frequently featured as a positive intellectual component of queer self-fashioning. Pater and Wilde, taking an avant-la-lettre constructionist stance, characterized same-sex-desiring subjectivities and subcultures as particularly musical and as prone to using this musicality to create knowledge.4 Whether such individuals were actually more musical than anyone else was, perhaps, irrelevant. For, as Wilde observed, “[t]o give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture” (2007: 135). What was important was to construct a valuable, even fantastic, tradition of a queer eroticism, an affirmative historiography connected to erudite aesthetic traditions admired in Britain. As part of this project, late-nineteenth-century authors frequently conflate same-sex desire with music, often in private settings that facilitate educational



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yet lyrical conversations regarding intellectual and spiritual aesthetic pleasures. Pater, as demonstrated in Chapter 1, argues for the value of desire between males by connecting it to Platonic theories of a “music of the spheres,” as evidenced in Apollyon’s private tutorials with Prior Saint-Jean. Considering academics’ reluctance to discuss pederasty in Greek literature, Pater’s sensual musical depictions also issue a call for intellectual honesty, one that would acknowledge erotic educational relationships between sophisticated men and naïve male adolescents, as distinct from pedophilic relationships between men and children. In “Denys” and “Apollo,” Pater even advanced beyond the Greeks to imagine a pederastic relationship between a sophisticated adolescent god and a more naïve or inexperienced older man. Wilde similarly connects music to inquisitive romantic passions in conversations between sophisticated and less culturally refined adults. In “The Critic as Artist,” Gilbert happily details to Ernest how, “[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” (Wilde 2007: 127). Music, he informs Ernest, “creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant,” such that “a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life” can hear “some curious piece of music” and “discove[r] that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves” (127–8). Through Gilbert’s lyrical tutorial, refined safely in a private residence, Wilde argues that music, thanks to its vague meaningfulness, can help one to imagine transcendental perspectives. It can inspire “romantic” knowledge and pleasures, implicitly inclusive of, if not limited to, knowledge of passion between men. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde further uses music to arouse and to legitimatize overtly physical same-sex mentorships. Upon meeting Dorian, Lord Henry calls with his “musical voice” for a “return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal” (2005: 183). This “ideal” refers, predominantly, to the Hellenic legitimacy of pederasty, which Wilde refines in a modern, physical fashion. Lord Henry’s sensual voice touches “some secret chord” in Dorian, which sets him “vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses” (184). Later, Lord Henry finds that “talking to [Dorian] was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow” (199). Influenced by Lord Henry, Dorian becomes a contemporary, gentlemanly embodiment of the Greek sculptures Pater compared in Plato to “some perfect musical instrument” (1925: 72). Like Pater, Wilde valorizes a physical male eroticism by connecting it to the material sensuality of music, an increasingly respectable and educational art. Wilde associates this eroticism with erudition

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by restoring and reimagining the censored queer tropes of Greek musical philosophies. Wilde concurrently uses this valorized music to outline the expansion of a modern homoerotic community. Following Lord Henry’s precedent, Dorian connects with Alan Campbell through music: “it was music that had first brought [Alan] and Dorian Gray together—music and that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished ….” After meeting at a musical party, the two “used to be always seen together at the Opera, and wherever good music was going on” (2005: 306). While Wilde never clarifies their relationship, he implies that Dorian uses “curious music” to awake in Alan the “wild romantic loves” imagined in “The Critic as Artist.” As such, the line from (Gilbert to) Lord Henry to Dorian to Alan presents a community that mingles musical and pederastic pleasures in refined, genteel settings. Wilde defines the limits of this community, however, by shaping Dorian into a negative exemplum. Wilde subverts his protagonist’s musical heritage—Plato endorsed the “Dorian” musical mode as inspiring “stern resolve” to endure hardship (Plato 1892: 1.3:399)—to depict how a constructive aesthetic intensity can become destructive. After using his aesthetic resolve to engage sympathetic communities, Dorian excessively pursues selfish aesthetic pleasures, which leads to his self-disgust and death. His excessive pursuit of sensations, moreover, revolts Alan, destroying their musical “intimacy” and tainting Alan’s engagement with music: once “an excellent musician,” after his break with Dorian, Alan “appeared almost to dislike hearing music” and stops practicing it (Wilde 2005: 306). These results illustrate Wilde’s early declaration that his novel “is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment” (2000: 43). One “punishment” for unrestrained pursuits of self-knowledge and sensation is the destruction of musical communities, which disintegrate into narcissistic individualities, and of musical production, which gets abandoned. Wilde cautions against brutal hunts for sensations, aesthetic or otherwise, which blunt the benefits of self-knowledge and the sympathetic communities symbolized by harmonious music. Wilde generally uses music, nonetheless, to characterize homoeroticism as intellectually, spiritually, and often physically refining. In “The Critic as Artist,” for instance, Gilbert uses a fantastic lyricism to conflate Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture with late-Victorian queer tropes, such as beautiful knights, impossiblebecause-illegal loves, Plato, and sickness and healing.5 Gilbert observes that this overture variously evokes for him a “comely knight,” “the lives of others whom one has loved,” and “that Amour de l’Impossible, which falls like a madness on



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many who think they live securely,” until “like the music of which Aristotle and Plato tell us, 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 harmony” (Wilde 2007: 158). Gilbert’s fantasy soothes the “madness” of legally, medically, and religiously taboo desires, principally erotic relationships between men, not by repressing them, but by associating them with an admirable harmonious music and with a community imaginatively composed of knights, philosophers, and contemporary lovers. Similarly, beautiful piano playing symbolizes Dorian’s attempt to re-order his life within an intellectual and moral pederastic community. When Dorian plays Chopin to Lord Henry before destroying himself, Lord Henry comments, “[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” (2005: 352). As Dorian tries to improve himself, Wilde connects his healthy self-awareness to music. Thus, although Wilde has Gilbert declare that “music is the perfect type of art” because it “can never reveal its ultimate secret,” Wilde consistently overlays this “secret” with strategic references (2007: 160). Taking advantage of long, complex conversations in private homes, Wilde’s characters lyrically associate a connotatively vague classical music with same-sex desire, a sense of self-worth and of self-knowledge, and a positive, if relatively confidential, communal identification.

“Because our world has music”: Critiquing constructions of musical identification Pater and Wilde were not the only late-nineteenth-century writers to refine homoeroticism by associating it with musical tropes. While de-emphasizing Hellenic contexts in private settings, Amy Levy, Marc-André Raffalovich, and Robert Hichens depict heightened musical perceptions facilitating contemporary same-sex attractions in public. They describe individuals using these perceptions to construct public sanctuaries amidst potentially hostile, but less perceptive crowds. Raffalovich and Hichens, moreover, expand their interest in diverse communities to critique how men from various socio-economic classes could vulgarize this passionate musicality. Even these writers, however, refuse to abandon music entirely as a context for facilitating refined queer romances. While the experiences and representations of nineteenth-century same-sexdesiring women differed from those of men, music occasionally served as an

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erotic trope for both. Terry Castle and Sophie Fuller have pointed to vibrant circles of same-sex-desiring female musicians, composers, and amateurs in England, while Emma Sutton has traced Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s use of musical allusions common to late-Victorian queer love poetry.6 Amy Levy, meanwhile, used musical metaphors to evoke exclusive, hence safe, passions in public. In “Sinfonia Eroica (to Sylvia),” from A Minor Poet (1884), Levy depicts an erotic meeting between two women at a crowded performance of a Beethoven Symphony: “Clear and strong/ Rush’d forth the sound,” as “[a]cross the clust’ring heads mine eyes did seem/ By subtle forces drawn, your [Sylvia’s] eyes to meet” (1891: lns. 14–17). The speaker melts into “rapture” as her aesthetic and emotional excitement become physical, and Beethoven’s “Eroica” becomes erotic (ln. 22). As Phyllis Weliver observes, in Levy’s poetry musical sensations often give “physical life to imaginative processes that remain private” and through which “a parallel world occurs for same-sex lovers” (2005: 4). Yet here, Levy’s musical sensations create not only “a parallel world” but also an intensified existence within one shared space: at one “wondrous” moment “each man held his breath,” but for the speaker already “you [Sylvia], the melody, the summer heat,” has “[m]ingled in all [her] blood,” so that she “forgot the world’s great woe and mine” (Levy 1891: lns. 29, 18–20). The speaker’s heightened aesthetic sensitivity simultaneously intensifies and safeguards her desire for Sylvia, to which the late-Victorian public would be “woe[fully]” hostile, but from which, in the poem, it is also excluded. The anonymous authors of Teleny (1893) show a similarly heightened musical sensitivity attracting two men in a crowd.7 The pianist René Teleny seduces Camille Des Grieux by performing a “wild Hungarian rhapsody” at a concert (Anonymous 1986: 29). While the audience responds with “thundering applause,” Camille, having envisioned musically inspired images of “the gorgeous towns of Sodom and Gomorrah,” responds orgasmically (31, 30). Afterward, Briancourt tells René, “you have outdone yourself. … I never heard you play like that before.” René replies, I felt that somebody was listening to me. … Amongst a French public … 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 … (34)

Cormac Newark has explored “the vicissitudes of attention,” ranging from “lapses in hearing” to a focus on “visual effects,” during nineteenth-century



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French opera performances and we can see a number of similar “vicissitudes” in this scene (2013: 49). Sensitive same-sex-desiring individuals, namely Briancourt and Camille, offset the conventional audience members who both acknowledge René’s prodigious spectacle of a performance, the pianist’s physical prowess being akin to an opera’s visual effects, and the social cachet in his music by attending his concert and clapping. These audience members, however, pay little attention to the actual music or to René’s interpretation of it. Making further distinctions among homophile individuals themselves, René indicates that Camille’s particular aesthetic sensitivity, rather than Briancourt’s, spurs him to artistic pinnacles, simultaneously strengthening the bond between them. This privileged sensitivity allows the men to connect without risking public disclosure, a threat that looms throughout the novel, as it did in reality. Raffalovich likewise connects music to what he later called inversion, but he critiques such aesthetic connections as only superficially beneficial. One sonnet from In Fancy Dress (1886), for instance, begins with a confessional epigraph: “The cheat deceives the cheat, the vain the vain ….” Raffalovich subsequently analyzes the disingenuous benefits of overt artistic representations: “Because our world has music, and we dance;/ Because our world has colour, and They gaze … They think that we know friendship, passion, love!” (lns. 1–2, 9). But really, he claims, “[o]ur lives are wired like our gardenias” (ln. 14). Given Raffalovich’s association with and later critique of Wildean circles, “our world” likely alludes to the queer aesthetic subculture in which he circulated and “They” to envious and perhaps semi-repressed admirers. Raffalovich suggests that this effete aesthetic “world” duplicitously reinforces its seeming virtues with artifices, such as music and painting, to trick its adherents and others into admiring its decaying sensuality and to delay an inevitable wilting. This deceptive, theatrical wiring, he argues, is vain in both its overinflated self-admiration and its inevitable ineffectiveness. In his study Uranisme et Unisexualité (1896), Raffalovich nonetheless proposes that some inverts can ease their relationship to society through music. In a section entitled “Music and Inversion,” Raffalovich pragmatically reshapes Karl Ulrich’s conception of Uranism, an ideal of same-sex sexuality etymologically related to Uranos, the Greek god of the sky, to emphasize a positive association between the spirituality of music and inversion. In this section, Raffalovich explains that certain children 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 an opportunity to make themselves useful.”8 Those who have “delicate health, unruly tastes” or are “sedentary”

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might find in music “an excuse to separate themselves from children who are brusque, mocking,” and “indifferent.” Like children, Raffalovich contends, many inverts have “dreamy, anxious,” and “precocious” personalities and the influence of music will act, inexplicably, “at least a little more” powerfully on them (186). Inverts, too, he implies, will turn to music for consolation and to make themselves socially useful. He reports, moreover, that “in certain coteries the word musical, like the word artistic, seems to have become a synonym for pederasts,” men who desire younger men or adolescents (188). This synonym is ostensibly a sympathetic one and in circumstances, Raffalovich suggests, this sympathy is warranted, as the aesthetic pursuits of temperate, if not necessarily virginal, inverts can be “useful to the progression of civilization” (207). Despite Raffalovich’s demeaning comparison of inverts to children, his argument that such men frequently use music to assert their value to themselves and to society is relatively affirmative. Yet, Raffalovich cautions, a musical devotion also opens noble men to exploitation by baser dilettantes. “Many people,” he notes, “have not learned to distinguish between the musician and his music, between the man and the sensations or the emotions that he wakes.” Consequently, “effeminate,” “weak,” and “vain” musicians can mislead respectable men into admiring them (1896: 186). “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,” accumulating “money,” “good camaraderie,” the “rage of a homosexual passion,” and even “voluptuous, libertine, and self-interested liaisons” (187). While early writers generally associate a musical homoeroticism with upper-class men, such as Wilde’s aesthetes, Raffalovich’s critique reveals distinct socioeconomic anxieties regarding the musical lower classes. Greedy social-climbers, Raffalovich suggests, counterparts to lower-class blackmailers, can swindle music lovers by seeming to share their interests. This danger is particularly prevalent in England, he implies, because the “musical mania (I do not say aptitude) of the English is very strong, and rouses many masculine vanities” to flaunt themselves, unrestrained by a sophisticated continental education. “I am sure,” he declares, “that many English sing who would not dare to utter a sound if they were German” (188). These unrefined musicians may tempt men with otherwise admirable musical sensitivities and thereby degrade a noble musical inversion into a mere tool for sexual procurement. Raffalovich’s critique of licentious musical men echoes, perhaps consciously, The Green Carnation (1894), Hichens’ scarcely veiled satire of Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas, and their musically coded sexual proclivities. Alan Sinfield has



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noted that the novel’s reference to “musical” costermongers in Covent Garden “may have signalled same-sex passion to some readers” (1994: 120). But there is more here to music than this. Hichens mocks contemporary attempts to valorize same-sex desires through art in general, but he does so most intently through Esmé and Lord Reggie’s debauched musicality.9 Esmé tritely intellectualizes his and Reggie’s adoration of “sin,” a term which, as becomes clear, encompasses deviant sexualities, by associating it with the elementary fundamentals of composition: “[s]in has its harmonies and its dissonances, as music has its harmonies and its dissonances. The amateur sinner … is perpetually introducing consecutive fifths and octaves into his music” (Hichens 1970: 32). The pair’s affected musical intellectualism impresses at least one philistine socialite, who admires how Esmé and Reggie “both play” music and how they “hate Wagner and the moderns” and “prefer the ancient church music, Mozart and Haydn and Paganini, or is it Palestrina?” (42). For the philistine, the pair’s understanding of basic musical conventions and their affinity for pre-nineteenth-century music turns their peculiarities into refinements. Yet whether the friends prefer Paganini or Palestrina is irrelevant, as Hichens implies that they cannot appreciate the music of either. These aesthetes enjoy music primarily as a respectable cover for their illicit pedophilia. Absurdly, they keep “busy at the piano, inventing and composing the elevation of ‘Three blind mice’ ” into an anthem with the words “Rose—white—youth,” which results in a “primitive sort of tune” designed to entice choristers (1970: 117). Improbably, they half succeed. The boys 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). Esmé and Reggie engage simplistic music to attract children, falling short of Paganini’s virtuosity, Palestrina’s polyphony, Plato’s pederasty, and draining a Wildean music of its philosophical and psychological complexities. Hichens, then, portrays Esmé and Reggie as aesthetically incompetent, pseudo-intellectuals who use music to cover their pedophilic depravity. Ironically, despite this satirical “hit,” Hichens borrowed Wildean themes of music and same-sex romance for his 1897 novel Flames. Flames offers a watered-down version of the Platonic “music of the stars and the spheres, of the mightiest passion of deepest imaginings” through Valentine, who plays the piano and sings (1897: 180). Valentine’s music offers a conduit for intimacy with Julian, the two having “in mind,” if not in sleeping arrangements, “taken up their residence together” (4). Valentine’s coldly brilliant singing, however, “lacked power,” symbolizing his excessive preference for “the pleasures of the intellect” and his “mistake of opposing them, as enemies, to the pleasure of the

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body” (46, 1). Valentine’s excessive asceticism provides a negative exemplum comparable to Dorian Gray’s excessive sensuality, as the chaste friends perish through Valentine’s inability to achieve an intellectual and physical “passion.” Concurrently, Hichens’ association of the tenderer aspects of the adults’ love with a Platonic music reasserts the positive convention associating musical with same-sex attraction, which he had earlier satirized.

“Do you like music?”: The musical hermeneutics of meeting men Roughly two decades after Flames, Ronald Firbank labeled Hichens one of the “representatives of English Culture” who embodied “the very apotheosis of worn-out cliché” (1988: 592). As early as the 1890s, however, British writers interested in same-sex eroticism and romance reveal the decreasing influence of Hellenism or a metaphysical aesthetic sensitivity and the increasing legitimacy of science by fashioning musical metaphors with progressively more references to nervous systems and with empirical case histories. The latter were often autobiographical narratives, many of which report how a privately valued and socially valuable relationship between music and inversion or same-sex attraction benefited the lives of their authors. As Sean Brady and others have shown, scientific and autobiographical writing on queer desires often encountered a “culture of resistance” in late-nineteenth-century Britain (2005: 119).10 Nonetheless, these modern reportage-style texts, when combined with an established musical aestheticism, became part of a pragmatic, often affirmative homoerotic subculture encompassing both a literary elite and well-read segments of the British middle classes. Edward Carpenter was an influential proponent of this modern musical discourse. In The Intermediate Sex (1908), he argued for the social value of inverts by pointing, in part, to their physiologically distinctive aesthetic sensitivities. Although rejecting Ulrich’s theory of Urnings, female souls in male bodies—“we are not obliged to accept his theory about the crosswise connexion between ‘soul’ and ‘body’ ” (1921: 20)—Carpenter frequently insisted on the nobler side of inverts by redefining Ulrich’s spiritualized terms for sexual intermediacy in more modern contexts of sensibility and nerves. According to Carpenter, certain Urnings exhibit an “artist-nature, with the artist’s sensibility and perception. Such an one is … often a musician, or a man of culture, courted in society, which nevertheless does not understand him,” although he remains



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socially desirable. For support, Carpenter cites the sexologist Otto de Joux, who reported that male inverts, in particular, “are enthusiastic for poetry and music” and that “[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” (Carpenter 1921: 32).11 Carpenter uses de Joux’s scientifically framed musical metaphors to validate how the physiology of these men provides them with a socially attractive heightened aesthetic capacity. In Sexual Inversion, Ellis more cautiously emphasizes affirmative empirical connections between music and inversion, a term he uses to describe an innate homosexuality. In the third edition (1915), he observes: “As regards music, my cases reveal 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.” Conveying the larger critical discussion, Ellis cites work by three continental scientists, including Magnus Hirschfeld’s calculation that “98 per cent of male inverts are greatly attracted to music, the women being decidedly less attracted.” Drawing on these studies, Ellis links inverts’ “musical aptitude” to their particular “nervousness.” Although both Ellis and Carpenter perceive drawbacks to this nervous sensitivity—Ellis associates it with “neuropathic and psychopathic diathesis” and Carpenter with excessive male effeminacy—both believe it heightens aesthetic aptitudes (Ellis 1921: 295). These reputedly objective scientific observations, which helped readers “to view sex coldly and clearly,” as Terence Greenidge remarked in 1930, provided a relatively respectable representation of modern same-sex attraction (90). Sexual Inversion further promoted this respectable representation by including several autobiographical case histories emphasizing how those with homosexual tendencies enjoyed their musicality. E. S., for instance, a physician aged 50, reports being “very susceptible” to the “fine arts,” but especially to music: “I am devoted heart and soul to music, which is more and more to me every year I live. Trivial or light music 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 Hugo Wolf ” (in Ellis 1921: 107). T. S., an artist aged 32, cheerfully links music to erotic physical experiences, reporting that “[w]orking at art, painting, and above all music and beauty … set my erotic longing in violent motion. I have never found this [to] do me any harm. Abstinence,” conversely, “has a very harmful effect on me, upsetting the whole nervous and physical

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system” (132). This reportage style blends with respectable aesthetic discourses, a blend appropriated by Carpenter and others, to offer compassionate depictions of realistic, rather than fancifully Hellenic, contemporary middle-class men.12 In a more distinctly literary, Bildungsroman form, Reginald Underwood’s autobiographical Hidden Lights (1937) likewise offers an affirmative blend of reportage and a musical aestheticism. Underwood’s narrator reports that “out of the few compensations drawn from the troubled striving we call life, music has been for me the chief ” (36). As he grew up “an increasingly lonely figure,” conscious that “temperamentally” he “was in many ways different from the average schoolboy” in his village, he relied on literature and on music for solace (39). Later in life, music also gave him a sense of “self-importance” when he became an organist (78). Being musical brought Underwood a sense of his own value and social respect in provincial England. This could not offset entirely his loneliness or alienation, but it did provide him with solace and knowledge that he contributed usefully to his community. Despite their restrained prose, these autobiographical narratives indicate that same-sex-desiring individuals, besides poets and novelists, occasionally drew, even if indirectly, on the numerous homoerotic musical references in novels, poetry, and coterie rhetoric to represent themselves in socially respectable terms.13 Personal advertisements support this supposition. In 1896, Raffalovich observed that one reads constantly in the best journals that a young man, well born, of good appearance, friendly, sympathetic, and musical would like 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 as a companion in the town or countryside, a young man who is well-born, sympathetic, and musical. (188)

These men either reuse or reinforce aesthetic musical idioms as an attractive code for same-sex desire, faintly echoing Pater and Wilde. Cocks reports a more directly literary musical code, one cracked by the police, in “companionship” advertisements in the twentieth-century journal Link. In 1921, four men were “charged with aiding and abetting the commission of gross indecency and of conspiring to enable the commission of such acts with others unknown” (2002: 459). During their 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 example from 1920 from “Iolaus … 24,” who “was ‘intensely musical,’ ” who “had been ‘looking for many years



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for [a] tall, manly Hercules’ ” (459 n. 4). This semi-public musical rhetoric has obvious literary roots, as in the implied reference to Carpenter’s Ioläus (1902). Cocks reports, moreover, that advertisers’ private correspondence, collected by the police, “seemed to place them in a homosexual tradition that stretched back at least as far as Oscar Wilde,” with correspondents referring directly to Dorian Gray, to Whitman, and to Carpenter (2002: 459). Elsewhere Cocks briefly observes that “words connoting acute perception which derived in part from [a] Whitman/Carpenter tradition such as ‘artistic’ and ‘musical’ were … key terms of homosexual self-description until well into the twentieth century” (2010: 195). Writers of literature, autobiographical narratives, and even private letters continued to use music in a mutually influential fashion as an affirmative, if no longer entirely protective contextualization for same-sex desire. Affirmative literary representations of music also seem to have influenced non-textual romantic relationships between men. Trevor Thomas recalls that in the 1930s “[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 your 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” (in Porter and Weeks 1991: 62). Along with initiating romance, music could also create a sense of community. Frank Oliver recalls how shortly after World War I his father, an engineer, sent him to a school in North Devon, where “[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” (in Hall Carpenter 1989: 9). This need not suggest any impropriety and Oliver reports that his own relationships were with other boys. The light opera productions did, however, create for him a sense of belonging. For both Thomas and Oliver, music functioned not just as a metaphor for self-knowledge but as a means to experience a community based on shared socially respectable interests. Musical venues also provided a fairly cultured arena for meeting likeminded individuals. Norman, a shop assistant and then journalist, and Stephen, a civil servant, report meeting men at ballets at the Empire music hall and at Sadler’s Wells, respectively (in Porter and Weeks 1991: 26, 114). Stephen reports that “the Coventry Street Corner House,” which served as a place for bringing dates around World War II, “used to have very good pianists there, classical pianists who played Chopin rather well” (111). Oliver, meanwhile, recounts meeting a “young American” at a Toscanini concert (in Hall Carpenter 1989: 10). These experiences did not necessarily lead to psychological or intellectual

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epiphanies, but they intimate the refined overtones of being “musical” for early-twentieth-century men from the middle classes. While, moreover, any literary influence here may be indirect, we might note that several of these men recall reading Carpenter, Ellis, and Pater (in Porter and Weeks 1991: 24, 110). Taken together, these case histories, personal advertisements, and recollections offer an indication of turn-of-the-century musical literary tropes influencing everyday life and lived experiences. Conventional degradations of same-sex attraction indicate why many individuals relied on respectable musical contexts for self-representations. Ed Cohen has argued that newspapers reporting Wilde’s trials signaled his sexual transgressions by evoking the “absence” of “dominant norms” in his public persona (1993: 143). As Cook has shown, in many newspapers, “[s]tereotypes” of same-sex-desiring men “were evoked, clarified and endorsed, rendering the pariah recognisable in a number of forms in the city streets: as fleshy and decadent; weak and effeminate; or more generally as ‘unwholesome’ and ‘beastly’ ” (2003: 61). Reynolds’s Newspaper, as Morris Kaplan has demonstrated, published letters-to-the-editor representing diverse responses to the sexual transgressions surrounding the Wilde trials, but the editors maintained that “the subject of the debate is ‘one of the greatest evils of our time’ ” (Kaplan 2005: 258). In the twentieth century, The Times referred to “abominable” and “unnatural” crimes linked to suicide, bribery, and libel, the combined details relatively clearly alluding to sexual encounters between men gone horribly awry.14 Homoerotic associations with the arts often countered these negative depictions. Literature, for instance, as Houlbrook has argued, “allowed [queer] men to forge an affirmative sense of self and established their connections to men like them” (2005: 208). Characterizations of music often functioned similarly by allowing these men to invoke an intellectual literary trope, a superlatively sensitive nervous system, and a sympathetic, like-minded subculture, all while associating themselves with a widely celebrated art.

“he wondered whether he couldn’t become a hero”: Gaining public acceptance through music While same-sex-desiring individuals, particularly men, used their musicality to connect to likeminded companions, several twentieth-century writers emphasized how this respectable trait might also connect them to more heterogeneous



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communities. These authors mingle the emotional directness, although never the sexual details, of case histories with literary realism and with limited flights of aesthetic fancy to imagine societies with tolerant factions. Drawing on theories of intermediacy and inversion, often without directly referencing the terms, they portray effeminate musical men as a natural and advantageous facet of human culture. A particularly popular genre for this trope was the public school novel. Updating the antiquated Hellenic and pederastic musical contexts of Pater and Wilde, twentieth-century authors such as Nichols, Berners, and Fitzroy focus on the positive social interactions between diversely sophisticated adolescents and young men of roughly equivalent ages. This theme in public school novels is perhaps somewhat surprising considering how several well-known novelists mocked public schools’ treatment of music. In A Passage to India (1924) Forster satirizes the “Public School attitude” that leads Ronny Heaslop to believe that “a viola was almost a demerit” (1952: 40). Similarly, in Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth (1917), Gordon Caruthers becomes a minor school hero after having “cut the string of the chapel organ,” so that the “next morning in chapel the choir began but the organ was mute” (1984: 121). Admiring the stunt, a rugby captain calls Caruthers a “sportsman” (122). Forster and Waugh both depict public school boys as respecting more antiintellectual, conventionally “manly” sports than more “effeminate” intellectual or aesthetic endeavors. Nonetheless, as Chapters 1 and 3 indicate, turn-of-thecentury educational institutions increasingly embraced music and public school novels offered excellent opportunities to depict aesthetic and psychological explorations amidst enforced social interactions. Beverley Nichols profits from this in Prelude (1920), wherein he uses Paul Trevelyan’s musical skill to valorize his aesthetically coded homosexuality and subsequently to explain his popularity. Before going to school, Paul recalls his uncle sneering that he was “far too effeminate,” “dressing himself up, acting and dancing and playing the piano,” and that he would therefore “grow into a monstrosity” (4). Nichols, however, presents Paul’s piano playing as a wondrously natural maturation: “[w]hen he was about thirteen he started to discover Chopin, with miraculous effect” (14). Combining Paul’s effeminate musicality with his burgeoning (homo)sexuality, Nichols describes the conflation as wonderful because of its naturalness: 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,

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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 fairly brave here. After 1895, as Sinfield argues, the “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,” one which extended, with qualifications, into the twentieth century (1994: 118).15 The accumulation of Paul’s effeminacy, dislike of sports, dedicated musicality, and Nichols’ acknowledgment of the “degrees” of sex, a nod towards studies like Carpenter’s and Ellis’, swirls right to the edge of a Wildean inversion. Nichols presents these characteristics, however, as pleasingly natural and insists on the value of “people like Paul.” Nichols, moreover, depicts Paul’s musicality as making him socially attractive rather than monstrous. Initially lonely, Paul listened “to the college orchestra playing Schubert’s unfinished symphony” and “wondered whether he couldn’t become a hero by some other method than that of athleticism. Why shouldn’t he become so great a pianist that the whole school would fall down and worship him?” (1920: 43–4). His daydream gradually comes true as the next term he wins admiration by singing “[t]he Prologue to Pagliacci,” which causes his roommates to clap appreciatively as “other dormitories joined in” with “shouts of ‘Encore!’ ” (59, 60). Later, Jack, one of Paul’s two love interests, compliments him by saying, “you’re not seventeen yet, and you play [the piano] like nothing on earth” (246). Paul’s prodigious musicality, combined with his intelligence and cleverness in easing social situations, make him popular and respected at school. Nichols extends his association of same-sex attractions, social inclusiveness, and music as Paul finishes school in 1916 and seeks a broader relevance for his art. Paul remarks that one “can play a certain amount of Bach and Chopin and modern stuff, and can generally pose—but it’s all most awfully empty” (1920: 247). He seeks fulfillment by going to war to revenge the death of his idealized love interest, Rufus, but admits “I don’t think I should have come out if it had only been that” (288). He expresses his broader reasons in musical terms: “I used to play the piano jolly well … I’d rather play a bit worse and yet perhaps play with more understanding ….” This “understanding,” he clarifies, cannot come from someone who forgoes “the risk of mixing with other people” (289). Desiring more vital aesthetic and social sympathies, Paul joins the patriotic war



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effort. Nichols indicates, however, the futility of seeking an “Art for Life’s sake” through “mixing with other people” in war, as Paul dies, destroying his aesthetic vitality (290). Nichols makes clear that a modern humanism, a Paterian “Art for Life’s sake,” is most nobly obtained through a broadly inclusive, non-violent social tolerance. Nichols’ use of music to indicate a character’s same-sex desires and to endear that character, despite initial resistance, to a broader public was not unique. It echoes Nichols’ own experience and inadvertently parallels that of Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Lord Berners.16 Recollecting his school days, 1893–1900, Berners describes how authority figures discouraged his interest in classical music. In First Childhood (1934), he recounts that his preparatory school music master “hated Bach, Beethoven and Mozart—in fact all the classics,” and labeled Chopin, whom Berners loved, “morbid,” preferring to teach “ridiculous, mid-Victorian drawing-room pieces” (1983: 97). In A Distant Prospect (1945), Berners further relates that his headmaster considered “that music was not the sort of thing that ought to appeal to nice manly Englishmen,” equating music with effeminacy and an untoward foreignness (44). Berners notes that his mother, meanwhile, “liked to hear people praise [his] amateurish pianoplaying,” but the idea of him “becoming a professional artist filled her with horror” (18). She considered, nonetheless, “that literature and painting were less dangerous to [him] than music” (19).17 Berners’ mother enjoys the social acclaim his music garners in private settings; but, she probably associates a too-practiced musicality with effeminacy and homoeroticism, as did Paul’s uncle and Berners’ headmaster. Piano playing nonetheless offered Berners solace and a certain popularity at school. Practicing Chopin “surreptitiously,” he remembers, provided one of the “artificial paradises into which I could retreat and take refuge” (1983: 97). When assigned a piece called “The Lover and the Bird” for the end-of-term concert, Berners put his practice to use and “learnt to execute the piece with a certain amount of brio.” This was well received, he explains, as “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” (98–9). The performance also sparked a minor affair after Longworth, the “Captain of the Second Eleven,” “a tall, athletic, fair-haired youth,” congratulated the pianist, saying, “ ‘[w]ell played!’ just as though I had hit a boundary or scored a goal” (67, 99).18 Berner’s social recognition and romance culminated one evening with Longworth taking him to the school roof to smoke. Berners’ musically inspired desirability was paying off, he recalls, as Longworth

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“threw his arm round my neck and drew me closer to him.” Unused to tobacco however, Berners suddenly became “violently sick” and even the “glamour” he had gleaned from “the concert platform” could not quite cover this mishap (109, 104). Berners’ recollections satirize what Trillini and Burgan have identified as the almost predominantly feminine and often sentimentalized or eroticized connotations of piano playing in Victorian and Edwardian courtship narratives.19 Berners revises these narrative conventions by associating his musical romance with his “diminutive[ly]” effeminate younger self and the hyperbolically masculine Longworth. He further parodies the faulty idealism of his own youthful courtship by having young Berners’ torrent of sentimental piano music end in a torrent of bilious unpleasantness, thereby perversely ending rather than consummating this once passionate friendship. Still, when Berners moved to Eton, music again gained him a wider array of admirers, although this popularity brought uncomfortable sexual imputations. By playing selections from The Geisha and “some of the more tuneful Chopin waltzes,” Berners became friendly with the elite older boys of his house (1946: 44). Unfortunately, these associations caused his classmates to greet him with “cynical grins and mysterious hints,” implying illicit sexual relations between them (45). Eventually, Berners overlooked conventional morality and bonded over Wagner with the musical Deniston, who was himself “the object of a good deal of scandalous gossip” and whom Berners describes as “a sophisticated edition of Walt Whitman’s ‘tan-faced prairie boy,’ ” a poetic embodiment of Whitman’s erotic desires (69). These relationships foreshadow Berners’ later years, when his own compositions would bring him the applause of audiences and into the circles of Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, and Gertrude Stein.20 In her novel Despised and Rejected (1918), Fitzroy similarly argues for a special connection between music and same-sex desire that evidences the social value of inverts for a heterogeneous public. Dennis is “musical” in a similar fashion to Berners, Nichols, Nichols’ Paul, and Carpenter’s ideal invert. Yet, Fitzroy complicates this character-type by having Dennis fight temporarily his innate proclivities in order to assimilate safely into his conventional school community. “When I was at school,” he declares, “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” (Fitzroy 1988: 78). He clarifies subsequently that he was “different, not only by reason of his music” but also because he had “the soul of a woman in the body of a man” (107). Conflating his “musical gift” with his inversion—the former serving as a euphemism for the latter—Dennis fears the alienating effects of both. He even avoids a sympathetic



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musical schoolmate, Eric Rubenstein, who “played the violin … like an artist” but was “ragged,” which caused Dennis to consider him too “dangerous” to befriend (80, 79). Dennis distances himself from music and musicians so as not to run afoul of the other students for showing interest in transgressive desires. He purposefully avoids the gentle, refined Eric to make himself less of a target and, implicitly, less differentiated from the school’s resident bullies. Fighting his own instincts, Dennis tacitly condones and facilitates violence out of fear for his own safety. Fitzroy makes Dennis’ fears understandable, if lamentable, as she uses Eric to depict the social humiliation that could accompany a “musical” inversion. One afternoon, the boys were with a “loutish Sixth Form chap” who was “banging away on the piano” with friends. Someone suggested that Eric “should play his violin” and he refused. Violence against inverts mingles with an anti-aesthetic boorishness and anti-Semitism as, following 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” (1988: 80). Dennis felt that “it was indecent that [Eric] should play before those boys who didn’t really want to hear his music, and only wanted to make a mock of him” (81). This violent musical “indecen[cy]” echoes claims that homosexual acts were only “morbid” if engaged in by predominantly heterosexual men (Carpenter 1921: 52).21 This sadistic sexual violence, the pokers evoking phalluses, inspires Dennis to perceive musicality and, metaphorically, love between men as vulnerable both to social shame and actual injury. Yet his unexpected sympathy with Eric also allows him to realize that music and same-sex attraction can be valuable proclivities best shared with those who can or are willing to learn to appreciate them. Like Nichols and Berners, then, Fitzroy traces the maturation of a young man to theorize how sexual tolerance can lead to greater artistic appreciation and social sympathies. Fitzroy, however, goes still further than both men in using the traditional association of musicality and inversion as she links them together explicitly, clarifying the by now prominent connection that facilitated so much Paterian and Wildean innuendo in the 1880s and 1890s. From one perspective, this explicit connection shuts down the potential for a wider range of musical associations kept open by earlier writers. Yet from another perspective, Fitzroy might be said to merge the genres of the ostensibly fictional “queer school boy novel” and the more autobiographical “case study” to promote the freeing honesty of self-revelations and public proclamations. Her fictional characters can admit their desires with a freedom that actual men could not, at

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least not without the semi-fictional pseudonyms or initials inevitably used by the case studies’ subjects and authors. She simultaneously fashions this merger to acknowledge the increasing exposure of a coterie rhetoric, the increasingly open secret of the euphemistic conflation of music and homoeroticism, which she herself facilitates and presents as a double-edged sword. Defining this euphemism for the public aims to legitimate inverts but it also brings danger by spotlighting the contextual signs of taboo relationships, as those who wrote personal ads for the Link found out to their detriment in 1921. Thus, Fitzroy depicts Dennis fearing his musical gift as much as his unconventional sexual urges because his peers might know what the former implies. This acknowledgment of violence against inverts allows Fitzroy to provide a much more nuanced because less romanticized depiction of sexual and musical awakening in a young man than Nichols’ or Berners’ by depicting Dennis’ initial desire to abandon his musicality in order to emulate normative social behaviors out of fear of psychological and physical reprisals. Nonetheless, Fitzroy consistently stresses that a special relationship between music and inversion can help to validate the latter to a sophisticated public. Dennis comes to realize that the “something inside [his] brain that turned everything [he] felt and experienced,” including his attraction to men, “into music” can bring pleasure to the world (1988: 79). He imagines one of his opera being performed “at Covent Garden,” so that “the work that is nearest and dearest to [his] heart” might “be played before hundreds and hundreds of people,” who would “acclaim it” (78). What Dennis offers for social “acclaim” stems, in part, from his homoerotically charged “heart.” Yet simultaneously, as a composer, he can conceal himself from a potentially hostile public by mediating his music through musicians, avoiding what happened to Eric. Dennis thereby risks placing his ambiguous music in “collusion,” as Philip Brett might say, with the closet (1994: 21). Fitzroy, however, overtly reminds her readers that experiences that their laws condemn may inspire the art that they acclaim. Like Nichols and Berners, then, she conflates music and same-sex passion to symbolize the benefits of embracing inverts for Britain’s larger, conventional society.



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“Don’t let down your nineteenth-century composers”: Gay guardians of conservative culture Nichols, Berners, and Fitzroy emphasize same-sex-desiring characters using traditional and more recent forms of classical music to reform their society. Several remarkable variations on such “musical” characters are those who reject conventional heterosexuality while vigorously promoting a stringently conservative aesthetic culture. In Noël Coward’s Semi-Monde (written in 1926), for instance, Inez represents a modification of those “English lesbians” who, according to Laura Doan, “in terms of self-presentation, self-promotion or cultural production … were often situated in the forefront of the ‘modern,’ ” although “their maneuvers within modernity were sometimes deeply, and disturbingly, conservative in nature” (Doan 2001: xix). Inez’s precise politics are unclear, but while she is sexually liberal, she is aesthetically conservative: she picks up women at concerts, but “resents anything progressive in opera” (Coward 1999: I:iii).22 Her self-presentation and relationships are unconventional, but her engagements with cultural production are starkly traditional. In the Piano Quintet (1925) Edward Sackville-West evokes an aggressive aesthetic conservatism through the English pianist Melchior, who is effeminate, like a “pretty maid,” not “respectable” like conventional men, and almost certainly homosexual (152, 142). Preparing a lecture on music for students in Germany, Melchior initially evokes a Paterian-like aestheticism— “To be happy, go through life in innocencies of sensation … a bright continuous ecstasy”—only to turn venomously xenophobic, warning: “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!” (238–40). Melchior’s virulent intolerance of French and “negro music” seems suspiciously hypocritical and a deviation from the liberal humanist aestheticism with which he begins. Inez and Melchior represent certain factions of queer subcultures that, despite their sexual liberalism, sought to sustain a strained connection to dominant conservative ideologies. More lightheartedly, in Extraordinary Women: Theme and Variations (1928) Compton Mackenzie mocks modern, educated homosexuals’ outmoded fascination with classicism via the lesbian composer Olimpia Leigh who revives antiquated aesthetic traditions. “There were plenty of people,” Mackenzie writes, “to maintain that [she] was the greatest female creative mind since Sappho, and there was none to deny her right to be called the greatest female composer

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the world had yet known” (1986: 229). Particularly of note is her “astonishing concerto for piano and antique instruments such as the tuba, the lituus, and the salpinx, the tibia both single and double, the syrinx, cithara, pectis, lyra, sambuca, and the tympanum.” Unfortunately, “[t]his work had never been performed because there were neither instruments nor players available,” although those who had “read the score” had “declared it sublime” (233). Olimpia is so aesthetically conservative that she writes music for instruments no longer obtainable. Mackenzie critiques here any disproportionate admiration of classical Greece, an unperformable, unrealizable, and ultimately unknowable ideal. Nonetheless, Mackenzie presents Olimpia sympathetically as throughout the novel she alone remains intellectually and artistically dignified on her own terms. Musical amateurs and lovers admire her, if primarily for her compositions with contemporary instrumentation. Her modern music and desires thrive by reinventing the “classical,” whereas her compositions idealizing antiquity fall short. Mackenzie thereby implicitly encourages Britain’s queer community to take advantage of its present age rather than long for a world no longer available.

“For musical purposes”: Satirizing social legitimation While many authors depict same-sex-desiring characters benefiting romantically or socially from classical music, others satirize these ennobling endeavors by highlighting more utilitarian uses of musical culture. Like Hichens, although with more sympathy, these twentieth-century authors show complex music working as a shallow erotic facilitator or stimulation or as a tool for tepid social successes. They also evoke the difficulties of using musical skills to ingratiate subversive desires with a stereotypically unmusical social elite, as explored in Chapter 2. An early example of this subgenre is Horatio Brown’s poem, sardonically entitled, “Bored: At a London Music,” included in Drift (1900). At a Tantamount-esque setting, Brown’s speaker observes a “sense of falseness everywhere” as a bored audience pretends to appreciate a concert (ln. 4). Only Brown’s speaker is not bored, as he feigns musical concentration to pursue his interest in his hosts’ footman: “Remote I sat with shaded eyes, / Supreme attention in my guise, / And heard the whole laborious din, / Piano, ’cello, violin; / And so, perhaps, they hardly guessed / I liked their footman, John, the best” (lns. 13–18). Brown eschews Wilde and Levy’s musically inspired grandiose romances, as his speaker uses music pragmatically to indulge his voyeurism. The audience’s limited musical interest, moreover, questions the extent of the social



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value of any subculture’s claim to musicality. This deflation, yet not rejection, of a romantic or culturally ennobling musicality is a hallmark of twentieth-century satires of musical legitimations of same-sex romance. In Maurice (written 1913–14), for instance, Forster punctures the hopes of young lovers who use musical associations to swell their romance. Clive Durham and Maurice Hall connect while listening to Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, a symphony renowned in certain circles for its queer connotations, Tchaikovsky having dedicated it to his love interest, a nephew.23 Clive alludes to this sad romance when he calls the symphony “the Pathetic,” simultaneously foreshadowing the temporary romantic pathos that he will cultivate with Maurice (Forster 1971: 35). Ironically, the nickname also alludes to Clive’s pathetic inability to progress beyond Socrates’ ideal of non-physical love in Plato’s Symposium towards an intellectual, emotional, and physical relationship with Maurice. Forster stresses Clive’s limitations by having him introduce the symphony to Maurice on a pianola, a method of “courtship” that, as Michelle Fillion observes, is “superbly ironic” as it is mechanically and inhumanly mediated (2010: 99). Forster also, perhaps, alludes to the “pathetic fallacy,” which John Ruskin defines as the tendency for “violent” emotions to create “a falseness in all our impressions of external things” (1905: 3.205). Maurice’s desire creates a false impression of the pitiful Clive as a potential physical lover. These diverse connotations of “pathetic” indicate Forster’s contention that art might stimulate, but not sustain lasting relationships. Forster further uses the Pathétique to mock audiences’ ignorance of the homoerotic implications of music, while subtly chiding homosexuals who take a pyrrhic joy in their own erudition. After a London performance of the symphony, Maurice encounters Risley, who gleefully refers to Tchaikovsky’s symphony as “Incestueuse et Pathique,” a play on pathic. Risley explains that he attended the concert “to see all respectable London flock” to admire the music that Tchaikovsky dedicated to the nephew with whom he “had fallen in love” and “in whom,” Maurice later reads, was “his spiritual and musical resurrection” (Forster 1971: 162).24 Risley enjoys the irony of “respectable London” obliviously admiring Tchaikovsky’s music, complete with its hieratic queer associations. Yet, Forster characterizes Risley’s joy as futile, for the audience is ignorant of what, precisely, they are admiring. Risley’s knowledge is amusing but hardly advances the social legitimation of same-sex romance. More humorously, in Vainglory (1915) Firbank mocks the lower-middleclass Winsome Brookes (a talented, Firbankian Leonard Bast) who seeks social approbation through his art. Unfortunately, as a pianist, Brookes scarcely

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catches his upper-middle-class audience’s attention. When asked to play at a party, he opens with the “exciting Capriccio Espagnol of Rimsky-Korsakoff,” only to have someone murmur “that a person who begins by playing the Prelude of Rachmaninoff seldom plays anything else,” while others engage in unrelated conversations (1988: 94). As a composer, he gets more attention, but is less musically impressive. Following the difficult Capriccio, he plays a “few of the leading themes” from his opera “Justinian,” including “the motive for Theodora,” which he performs by “folding his arms and drooping back” from the piano.25 The music for this, he explains, is “only the movement of [Theodora’s] dress” (95). Later, Brookes considers getting “re-baptised” as “Rose de Tivoli. For musical purposes it sounded so much more promising … Two persons would come to hear Rose, whereas only one, and perhaps not even one” would come for Winsome (107).26 Firbank laughs at audiences impressed mostly by artifice and exoticism. He also laughs, however, at the machinations of talented “musical” young men who demean themselves by seeking, unsuccessfully, the acclaim of an alluring, yet philistine society. Correspondingly, in Valmouth: A Romantic Novel (1919) Firbank caricatures society’s tolerance of erotic deviancy so long as it is enjoyed ambiguously through art. Richard Thoroughfare, a young sailor, returns home during a town fête with a new bride and Jack Whorwood, who is to Thoroughfare, “upon a cruise,” what “Patroclus was to Achilles, and even more,” a phrase that suggests a particularly exuberant lover (1988: 398).27 Thoroughfare, along with his two partners, receives a musical welcome, as “with quick insight the maître d’orchestre” begins “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.”28 Berners and Tchaikovsky were, of course, coded names for those aware of their romantic involvement with men, while Scriabin signals Thoroughfare’s catholic interests. This music replaces an “old osseous” man’s drunken singing of “Lilli burlero,” a popular ballad sung satirically by seventeenth-century English Protestants from the perspective of a drunken Irish Catholic (452).29 Firbank ironically exchanges “Lilli burlero” for the more modern, sexually subversive waltz, signaling society’s continuing attraction to and even acceptance of proscribed behaviors, whether drunkenness or homo­eroticism, so long as one conceals them with acceptable aesthetic pretenses. In The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923), Firbank evolves Hichens’ and Raffalovich’s late-Victorian work by depicting music as an uneasily legitimate erotic lure or stimulation, one beneficial for all parties. As “the Authorities” of an Italian town make “enquiries for sundry missing articles, from the Trésor of the



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Cathedral,” Peter Passer, a “former chorister” and current thief, flees with Count Cabinet to a nearby island (1988: 565). This situation benefits both. Peter gains safety as Cabinet’s secretary, while Cabinet, sitting on a swan-filled beach, can watch Peter swim and listen to him “warbling” various “Kyries and Anthems” that “would often stir the old man to the point of tears.” Firbank compares this potentially scandalous scene to a legitimate concert: “the swans themselves would paddle up to listen” to Peter, and would recall to Cabinet “the ecstasies of certain musical or ‘artistic’ dames at Concert-halls, or the Opera House, long ago” (566). Firbank suggests, humorously yet seriously, that Cabinet is not so different from audiences who pay to enjoy the musical and physical charms of young performers. Peter’s enticement of Cabinet, moreover, is not dissimilar to secular or to Church musicians who charm the public for acclaim and money.30 Artistic pleasure, Firbank indicates, often entwines sublime emotions with more utilitarian erotic, religious, and commercial enticements. Berners, too, laughs at how successful aesthetic endeavors can persuade individuals to overlook sexual taboos and facilitate a fragile social liberalism. In The Camel (1936), Herbert Scrimgeour, an overambitious young organist for a provincial church, is “very musical” but “a very indifferent executant” (1999: 69). He is also a “decadent” who dislikes “making up” to women and prefers “[h]is favourite chum,” the choirboy Antony (88, 102, 103). The vicar observes that Scrimgeour takes “a great deal of trouble with the choir-boys,” but refuses to suspect Scrimgeour “of any form of immorality.” Therefore, despite Scrimgeour not being “the type of man that the Vicar admired, the type of the ‘nice clean young Englishman,’ ” the vicar “might possibly have forgiven him” his flaws, “if it had not been for his lamentable performances on the organ” (88). The vicar’s almost willful obliviousness to Scrimgeour’s erotic interests makes Berners’ point clear: should artists fulfill the basic requirements of their jobs, and keep their public images conventional enough, even a small-town society will frequently refuse to examine their private lives too closely. Same-sex-desiring, mediocre musicians, then, like Scrimgeour, find only an unstable social legitimacy. As a final example of this satirical trend, in Paying Guests (1929) E. F. Benson portrays Florence Kemp excessively admiring Alice Howard’s musicality in order to court her.31 Florence considers Alice an “incarnation of brilliant existence,” who “could improvise” on the piano and “sell those beautiful little sketches she dashed off so easily” (1984: 195). Florence appreciates Alice’s art, however, and particularly her music, primarily as an opportunity to praise her. For, Alice does not have the artistic brilliance that Florence attributes to her. Alice refines her improvisations through “industrious little practices with the

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soft pedal down, while everyone was resting upstairs” (23). These “practices” are an open secret at their Wentworth boarding house. Still, when another guest complains that Alice rehearses “the same old tune that she’s been hammering at ever since [he] came to Wentworth,” Florence uncritically praises her “lovely tunes” (71). Florence’s determination to admire Alice’s musicality, moreover, foreshadows her determination of Alice’s sexuality. Florence convinces herself, “with the infallible certainty of instinct,” that Alice “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 ” (195). Florence’s resolve optimistically assesses both Alice’s musicality and lesbianism. As Florence’s upbeat aesthetic ignorance suggests, Benson both exposes his characters’ idiosyncrasies and allows them to make his characters happy. Florence’s willful assessments, aesthetic and erotic, pay off after she confesses her admiration to Alice: “Florence 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,” an “effervescence” consisting largely of praise for Alice’s “painting” and “music” (1984: 196–7). Alice responds favorably to this flattery and her “cork showed signs of popping too” (197). Soon the women have “kissed” and Florence suggests that Alice “[s]it down at the piano and make something beautiful. Improvise.” The music provides “relief ” and indicates that Florence’s willingness to perceive Alice’s musical and emotional improvisations as fresh will allow the two to fall and to stay in love (198). Alice’s questionable talent provides an erotic satisfaction and the two prepare for a “honeymoon” before happily moving in together in London (218). Like all the authors analyzed in this section, Benson lampoons, but does not entirely reject, music as a romantic and valuable, if often fragile, legitimation of same-sex relationships.

“Always breaking off ”: Social oppression and silence While reinforcing sympathetic musical tropes, several authors indicate how persecution can destroy aesthetic vitality, both for same-sex-desiring individuals and for society. In The Well of Loneliness (1928), for instance, Radclyffe Hall reworks sexologists’ associations of art with inversion, such as Carpenter’s and Ellis’, to emphasize how social oppression can stimulate creative success or lead to failure. Incensed by society’s homophobia, Stephen Gordon, a “masculinelooking” lesbian, declares “I have faith in my writing, great faith; some day I shall climb to the top and that will compel the world to accept me for what I



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am” (1956: 165, 425). Rejection, however, causes the composer Jamie to fail. Exiled from their Scottish village, Jamie and her lover Barbara move to Paris. Unfortunately, Jamie took inspiration from the landscape where she and Barbara had fallen in love. As they had listened to a local “piper,” his “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). At home, Jamie would “improvise for hours,” provided that “Barbara would sit in their parlour and listen” (354–5). In exile, Jamie’s inspiration withers and her music becomes “stiff and scholarly” (350). When Barbara develops consumption “they could not afford the smart English doctor” and Jamie feels guilty for failing to provide Barbara with “anything proper” (359, 360). These deteriorating circumstances destroy Jamie’s artistic career and lead to Barbara’s death, followed by Jamie’s suicide. Social ostracism destroys Jamie’s art, her earning power, and, consequently, her life.32 Hall’s theory of inversion, then, stresses, in part, the diverse influences of desire and society on creative productivity. For the psychologically strongest inverts, repression can manifest in a legitimating creative output, but for those who cannot handle as much strain, social alienation leads to artistic failure. For Hall, social repression can therefore lead diversely to both the enrichment and impoverishment of culture. In Crazy Pavements (1927), Nichols offers a less theoretically influenced but similarly dualistic perspective by counterpointing the musical, romantic happiness of two lower-middle-class men with a wealthier man’s monotonous misery. Brian, a journalist, adores Walter and Walter, “an ex-naval officer,” has “two passions in the world—the first a passion for freedom. The second an almost absurd hero-worship of Brian.” The two have “one of those rare friendships,” such as “make one feel that life is not an uncommonly feeble joke by a vulgar and untidy spirit” (2013: 13).33 In the evening they sit together, with “Brian trying to play Debussy on a piano designed only for the simpler marches of Sousa” (14). Later, after a separation, a gramophone obliquely praises their reunion. Brian, a mess without Walter, enters a bar, stumbles, and “found himself sitting on somebody’s knee …. It was Walter” (218). Brian cries, “Don’t go …. I want you—awfully,” as a “gramophone bawled: ‘You’d better not / You’re getting hot / Getting away with a terrible lot’ ” (218–19). While seemingly critical, the lyrics are a version of the song “So’s Your Old Lady” (1926) which warns against infidelity and so indirectly celebrates Brian and Walter’s reconciliation. Nichols confirms this reconciliation by having Brian wake and see Walter “on the other side of the room” they share (219). Music marks their happy modern domesticity and their welcomed reunion. This private, relatively poor, but happy couple contrasts with Maurice Cheyne,

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an effeminate socialite whose suspicious self-hatred Nichols emphasizes through a constrained musical monotony. Believing false rumors, Maurice accuses Brian of saying “monstrous things” about him, as “[i]n feminine irritation he tapped E flat quickly, six times, with his right forefinger.” Brian realizes that someone had “decided to queer his pitch.” Nichols uses this phrase to signal Brian’s realization that someone wants to ruin his reputation and to activate contemporary homoerotic overtones of the word “queer,” which signal the reason for Maurice’s distress.34 Maurice’s repeated “six taps on E flat” emphasize the constraining nature of his fear that his desires could hurt him both socially and legally (2013: 174). Maurice further restricts himself by confusedly considering his desires as both legitimate and intolerable. Maurice declares to Brian, “I’m as natural as you are,” but then he admits to having “never fallen in love, or wanted to marry, or longed for children” though he has “tried till” he was “almost insane” (175). Maurice’s attempt to reject his natural desires in order to pursue a heterosexual, patriarchal life fuels his confusion, self-torment, and his loneliness: I’m frightened … 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. … 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. (175–6)

In contrast to Brian’s adventurously domestic Debussy and his gramophonic cues, Maurice’s gramophone provides an ineffective distraction from his lonely self-hatred. Maurice’s monotonous E flats, meanwhile, reveal his stunted life and his despair due to his fear of his innate desire for other men. As such, Nichols’ novel and its musical references illustrate the potential for queer happiness but in admittedly qualified, because secluded, settings. More public men like Maurice, Nichols admits, can have greater difficulties integrating happily into society. In “Dr. Woolacott” (written in 1927), Forster correspondingly links the repression of musical and homoerotic pleasures to a death-in-life existence.35 Society considers young Clesant to be sick, although he suffers from “[n]othing organic,” but rather, he notes, “my heart makes my nerves go wrong, my nerves my digestion, then my head aches, so I can’t sleep, which affects my heart, and round we go again.” Forster’s circuitous prose evokes the accumulating symbiosis of social, emotional, and physical tribulations that adversely affect Clesant. Social disapprobation causes him to sense that something is wrong with his “heart,” meaning his



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romantic urges towards men, which consequently affects his “nerves”—same-sex desires, as we have seen, were often associated with a heightened nervous system— which then affects his head, that is his mental health, which causes society to see him as still more sick (1972: 84). As “treatment,” Dr. Woolacott, a one-time army doctor who represents social strictures, has forbidden “all excitement,” including violin music and, particularly, “being kind to handsome strangers and wanting to touch them” (83, 84, 92). This last phrase is striking as “handsome” is an adjective that predominantly signals masculinity, while “stranger” suggests an individual who is “estranged” somehow from everyday life. The doctor thereby signals his knowledge of Clesant’s romantic interests but refuses to recognize them officially and in this way to give them further life. Rather than advise Clesant simply to enjoy his organic or natural desires, the doctor insists that he abstain from any form of sensuality and live isolated in the countryside. The doctor’s “treatment” thus refers less towards his efforts to care for Clesant than to his efforts to manage Clesant’s seemingly deviant desires. Forster sets this situation up to indicate how an individual coerced into abstaining from the sensual pleasures of art and human touch loses interest in life. For Clesant, the very “sun” grows “tepid” and the “country people” are “colourless” and “shapeless” (1972: 83). Yet, when he encounters an “attractive” “agricultural labourer,” the very embodiment of someone who cultivates nature, Clesant’s starved senses revolt (87). The laborer returns to the nearby fields and Clesant moves inside, but begins to feel “a languorous yearning” and wonders, “might not the violin satisfy” it (85–6)? Forster reinforces connections between music and a vital romance between men as the stranger returns, as if summoned by Clesant’s desire for music, and kisses him with “lips that parted as they touched him to murmur—‘And to hell with Woolacott’ ” (89). The farm-hand challenges Clesant’s abstentions from sense and sensuality by observing that Woolacott “never makes anyone well, which seems a defect in a doctor.” Confused, Clesant “longed to feel” the stranger’s arms “around him,” but pushes back from him and protests that Woolacott “keeps people alive” (90). Clesant’s swerving narrative arc, variously longing for the stranger and then rejecting his advances, imitates in its plot the increasingly unstable state of his mental health. Clesant, Forster thereby indicates, indeed settles for being respectably “alive” yet not “well” by repressing his musical and romantic desires and by rejecting unconventional yet vital sensations due to misguided social and medical proscriptions. Significantly, Clesant’s socially inspired repressions harm not only himself but begin to negatively affect those around him, reiterating Forster’s emphasis on the circuitous and accumulative tendencies of social repressions. Although

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longing for the stranger, Clesant refuses to reject Woolacott and the laborer slips into a closet-like “cupboard” when they hear “[t]he normal life of the house … servants, inmates”—Clesant may actually be at a medical asylum— approaching (1972: 91–2).36 This is a retreat and Forster indicates the negative effects of homosexuals’ withdrawal from “normal life,” whether self-induced or unfairly enforced by the legal or medical system, through interrupted music: 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, Forster’s ellipses)

The sought-after music had played while Clesant re-connected with the farm-hand or, perhaps, with himself as projected into a fantasy of the laborer, for when the cupboard is opened, no one is there. Either way, this violin music recalls Paterian connections of music with homoerotic self-knowledge and symbolizes Clesant’s attempts to accept his desires. Ultimately, however, Clesant cannot accept his attraction to men when confronted by the social expectations of home or authoritative institutions. Caught between society and his nature, he dies, unable to exist. The diverse musical pleasures induced by his near-self-acceptance therefore remain beautiful, but broken, leaving both himself and his society aesthetically and emotionally “unsatisf[ied].”37 Forster, then, echoes Carpenter and Ellis in challenging the medical establishment’s denigration of same-sex attractions. Forster, however, imagines beneficial queer musical nervous systems in more emotional life-and-death contexts. He does so to suggest that the romantic vigor of erotic physical encounters between men should be celebrated for the benefit of society. Finally, Reginald Underwood’s Bachelor’s Hall (1934) correspondingly depicts how one man’s rejection of his lover’s physical needs causes a musical self-destruction. Adrian, a lower-middle-class provincial organist, falls in love with Ronald, a middle-class violinist, and the two make Schubert’s “Ave Maria” a symbol of their relationship. Adrian, however, is not very sensual and, having been exposed only to his village’s sexually conservative mores, he sublimates what physical desires he has. Ronald, however, can afford to travel to London where he learns to value more physical queer romances. When Ronald returns and confesses his physical longings, Adrian grows confused and considers ending their intimacy. Distraught, Ronald goes home and plays his violin,



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making music that “seemed almost like a child crying” then begins Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” Soon there is “a crash, a sound of splintering wood,” and the violin is “in fragments upon the floor … a sort of murder!” (Underwood 1975: 303). Estranged from Adrian, Ronald rejects the music that made them happy, their aesthetic “child,” then kills himself. Underwood’s connection of repressed love and death with ruined music intensifies the misfortunes discussed above. These tragedies correlate the suffering of similarly inclined men and women with the decay of a culturally valuable art. Indirectly revisiting and updating Pater’s late-nineteenth-century portrayals in “Denys” and “Apollyon” of how social intolerance can interrupt both music and writing about music, the above authors suggest that mainstream society rejects homoeroticism and consequently impoverishes itself by hindering a fruitful inspiration for intellectual aesthetic production. They thereby call for a broader inclusion, even celebration of same-sex relationships as a means to enrich society across several socioeconomic classes and geographical settings.

“a music from our time”: Music, homoeroticism, and violence The fiction considered above suggests that while socially and legally alienated from the British mainstream, early-twentieth-century same-sex-desiring individuals often formed small communities, inevitably influenced by socioeconomic class.38 Of particular interest to several contemporary writers were such communities engaged in an elite transnational aestheticism. Evelyn Waugh refers to these communities in Brideshead Revisited (1945) when he describes Anthony Blanche as “a nomad of no nationality” who mingles with international male artists known for their romances with men (1973: 46). As homoeroticism became associated with classical music, in particular, authors increasingly highlighted the cosmopolitan connotations of both. These cosmopolitan connotations have been implicit in my discussion above, but three common variations are worth highlighting to help us to understand queer life in Britain. First, this eroticized musical cosmopolitanism incited hyper-nationalistic British circles to consider both same-sex sexuality and European music, one implicating the other, to be exotic and immoral. Second, it helped to establish international ties between transgressive sexualities in Britain and peace-seeking European politics. Finally, it inspired several left-wing writers interested in homoeroticism and European politics in the 1930s to use musical metaphors to emphasize erotic and social conflict rather than harmony.

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As the previous chapters have shown, many twentieth-century British authors disassociated European classical music from an exotic immorality by representing it as a genteel, intellectual part of British culture. Nonetheless, suspicions of an un-British musical immorality lingered. Berners’ headmaster considered that music should not “appeal to nice manly Englishmen” (1983: 44). In Rose Macaulay’s Lee Shore (1912), Peter “Margery” Margerison is an aesthete whose “love of pleasant things is what he lives by. Including among them Denis Urquhart,” a handsome aristocrat (46).39 Denis, who once rescues Peter from being stranded, his radio playing the sexually suggestive “Tchaikowsky,” nonetheless marries, destroying their tacit romance (70). This breaks Peter’s heart, which illustrates Peter’s repeated observation that “he was easy to break and hard to mend—made in Germany” (11, also 68). Macaulay equates Peter with a shoddy German industrialism and leaves him in Italy, selling needlework, evoking the allegedly weak productivity of, and the social ostracism risked by, same-sex-desiring British aesthetes. Peter, Macaulay suggests, fits in more appropriately with a decadent continental Europe than with Britain. Likewise, in Mordaunt Shairp’s The Green Bay Tree (1933), Mr. Dulcimer, a cosmopolitan, leisure-class homosexual, uses Wagner and Chopin to lure David Owens towards decadence and away from his fiancée and hardworking father, who prefers Welsh hymns. Shairp portrays Dulcimer’s indolent and sexually decadent aestheticism weakening the bonds of British families and industriousness. These conflations of allegedly un-British sexual depravities with classical music, encompassing composers suspected of excessive sensuality, such as Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner, drew on late-nineteenth-century portrayals of homoeroticism as decadent, foreign, and dangerous to Britain. Cook has shown how after Wilde’s trials, sexual and cultural decadence often got characterized as “French, urban, excessive, contagious and parasitic, vampirically draining the nation’s life blood” (2003: 118). Cohen demonstrates how newspapers linked Wilde’s “artistic and sexual practices to the fall of empires” and to threats to “national security” (1993: 170, 172). Brady argues that for many people romance between men seemed to threaten Britain’s “cultural selfperception of pre-eminence in the wider world” (2005: 24). For some, European classical music, aestheticism, and homoeroticism, alone or together, appeared to undermine a manly British imperialism. A particularly paranoid convergence occurred in 1918 when Noel Pemberton Billing linked music and same-sex pedophilia to German espionage in his newspaper The Imperialist. Billing evolved the late-Victorian journalist tropes analyzed by Cohen, Cook, and Kaplan, and published descriptions of a black



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book that allegedly contained “the names of forty-seven thousand English men and women,” including “Privy Councillors, youths of the chorus,” and “dancing girls,” among others, who were vulnerable to German blackmail for their association with “unnatural” acts. This list of occupations reputedly followed “no order of precedence,” but the second-place position of “youths of the chorus” suggests the influence of stereotypes regarding choristers. The book also purportedly detailed “the unnatural defloration of children who were drawn to the parks by the summer evening concerts” (“The Forty-Seven Thousand.” The Imperialist January 26, 1918: 3). Billing uses here the subversive associations of music to highlight fears of foreign sexual perversions that could weaken British strength during the war. Ironically, music appeared to neutralize such rhetoric when Billing’s paper accused the pianist-turned-dancer Maud Allan of fostering lesbianism and, consequently, German espionage by performing in Wilde’s Salomé. Allan sued Billing for libel and during the trial the prosecution referred four times to Richard Strauss’ Salome to mitigate any alleged “unnatural” erotic influence.40 In one instance, a doctor testifying for Billing 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 Clitoris,’ ” an assertion which, as Michael Kettle observes, made the doctor appear “a crank” (1977: 163).41 Philip Hoare concurs, arguing that “[t]he obvious absurdity of this claim—which would have labelled thousands of respectable opera-goers as perverts—opened both the court’s and the judge’s eyes to the extent of the doctor’s,” if not Billing’s, “delusion” (Hoare 1998: 149). Amidst paranoid prejudices, Billing was acquitted. But due to Britain’s increasing musical interests, a German opera worked to alleviate British fears regarding foreign music during war, if not, unfortunately, fears regarding same-sex sexuality. More liberal writers challenged such reactionary fears by revising homoerotic musical traditions to imagine an international peace during WWI. Mingling a Paterian Hellenism with a Carpenterian socialism in his Dream Comrades (1916), Leonard Green describes music manifesting a “rhythm that must have accompanied the planets on their primæval dance,” which evolves to become a “love-march of all mankind” (27, 29). In Despised and Rejected Fitzroy similarly expands an acceptance of inverts into a peace-seeking musical cosmopolitanism. After connecting music to inversion, Dennis re-conceptualizes both in terms of an international “kinship.” He dreams of composing a “symphony” that “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

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the whole world as his ‘country,’ and claims kinship with all people who walk upon the face of it” (Fitzroy 1988: 200). This echoes Carpenter’s suggestion that the “artistic nature” of intermediate inverts could make them “reconcilers” (1921: 36). A friend of Dennis’ evokes Carpenter’s precedent by theorizing that “perhaps these men who stand mid-way between the extremes of the two sexes are the advance-guard of a more enlightened civilisation” (Fitzroy 1988: 348). Dennis hopes to fulfill this role by promoting a pacifist cosmopolitan unity through his symphony. He foreshadows, then, the 1963 recording of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, which features the British Peter Pears, the German Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and the Russian Galina Vishnevskaya singing Wilfred Owen’s war poetry. Green and Fitzroy evoke an idealized social harmony advanced through Pater to Carpenter by associating inversion, cosmopolitanism, and music. In the 1920s, however, as we have seen, Nichols, Hall, and Forster began to suggest how this equation could be severely or even permanently interrupted by homophobic, nationalistic, or even more wide-ranging intolerant interventions. In the 1930s, Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden shifted this equation altogether. Reacting against what they perceived as idealized legitimating associations of Platonic or Paterian harmonies and inversion, these younger writers stressed intensely uneasy connections among homoeroticism, music, and contemporary political strife. In his autobiographical Christopher and His Kind (1976), Isherwood signals this generational shift by classifying differences in identifying terminologies. He reports that his uncle used “the slang expressions of his generation,” referring “to himself as being ‘musical’ or ‘so’ ” (36). Isherwood describes his uncle as representing his sexual non-conformity with almost meaningless old-fashioned labels, wherein “musical” does not necessarily activate connotations of value but simply equates to the still more abstract, circuitous “so.” Isherwood separates himself and his generation from these older circumlocutions, signifying what he saw as more repressed sexual identities, by using language that is much more blunt: “To Christopher, Berlin meant boys” (2). He also recalls how, as his time in Berlin began to overlap with Hitler’s rise, Berlin meant sex amidst increasing violence against any overt forms of sexual deviancy and Isherwood recalls the consequent “terror in the Berlin air” (128). Isherwood abandons musical codes in order to describe clearly and explicitly his romantic relationships and his urgent efforts to save his German lover Heinz from being sent back home to Hitler’s army as they flee from nation to nation. This fast-paced modern queer life, Isherwood implies, no longer allowed for the subtlety of metaphoric or



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fanciful philosophic portraits or self-searching dialogues in the style of Pater and Wilde. To reflect his sense of urgency at this period in history, he required a new degree of clarity in queer identifying and he obtained this, he implies, by abandoning older metaphors, tropes, and allegories. Christopher was written decades after the events it describes, but even in the early memoir Lions and Shadows (1938) we can see Isherwood’s reluctance to associate queer desire with a musical aestheticism. His sense of an inverted musicality as antiquated suggests why he abandoned an incipient novel, described in Lions, about Roger, a “quartette’s secretary” who “becomes increasingly fascinated by the personality of Tommy” (209, 211). Isherwood later claimed that the plot got “so complex and self-contradictory” that he discarded it. Yet, Isherwood’s trouble was likely also his obsessive suspicion of the past and that, during his own time working for André Mangeot’s quartet, he had become “violently prejudiced against culture worship” (1976: 65). This prejudice would have increased Isherwood’s dislike of a traditional musical or idealized aesthetic male erotic that helped to create elite and insular coteries and neglected the left-leaning political movements with which he increasingly sympathized. Indeed, Isherwood left behind Tommy and Roger to finish two novels, the Berlin stories (1935–9), as well as a series of plays, which I discuss in Chapter 5 and which focus primarily on interwar generational struggles and the increasing rise of fascism in Europe. In the rare instances when Isherwood does mingle fin-de-siècle aestheticism and homoeroticism, the mingling is ironic and an overt castigation of old tropes. In Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the semi-autobiographical narrator visits a “very expensive” and “depressing” “queer” cabaret called the “Salomé” wherein a “few stage lesbians” and several effeminate “young men with plucked eyebrows lounged at the bar, uttering occasional raucous guffaws or treble hoots— supposed, apparently, to represent the laughter of the damned” (1954: 192). Isherwood alludes here to Wilde’s Salomé and Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings of languorous, lounging, unhealthy looking, and generally frightening images for the play. Isherwood, however, depicts these once rich images of scandal and pathology as an overrated shadow of their former selves. There are no critics or artists in this Salomé, only bored actors that serve an enervated entertainment to those who can afford it. Isherwood associates this sardonically toothless decadence with a society in which a Paterian or Wildean aesthetic idealism has failed and in which fear, confusion, and rage remain. Leaving the cabaret, the narrator encounters several “American youths, very drunk,” led by a young man who asks what is occurring

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inside and subsequently asks whether the narrator himself is “queer” (1954: 192). When the narrator responds in the affirmative, the American becomes agitated, “panting, thrusting out his jaw, uncertain it seemed, whether he ought not to hit” the narrator “in the face,” then utters a “wild battle-cry” and rushes into the building (193). The American’s response implies a confusion of disgust, anger, curiosity, and angsty sexual excitement. Consequently, this queer setting echoes not with harmonious music leading to self-knowledge and romance, but with the cries of uncertainty and fury. The Americans, unfortunately, and somewhat unfairly, foreshadow the much greater threat of what is to come, as the German “[p]olice have begun to take a great interest in these places.” The Americans are aggressive, but the interest of the German police evidences Hitler’s desire to initiate “a general Berlin clean-up” and the deadly destruction of Berlin’s queer night-life (192). The narrator’s gradual awareness of this looming loss, in fact, has motivated him to visit the cabaret for the first time since coming to Berlin in 1931. Significantly, Isherwood places this scene towards the end of the novel where it confirms the once naïve narrator’s realization that the ostensibly carefree Berlin is falling prey to Hitler’s authoritarianism. Isherwood’s novel takes place in Germany, yet his use of the name Salomé subtly activates associations with the narrator’s home in England. Salomé was closely tied to queer British fin-de-siècle aesthetics and censorship, such as the banning of Wilde’s play in London in 1892 and, as Philip Hoare and Michael Kettle have documented, the scandal surrounding the play’s revival by Jack Grein and Maud Allan in 1918.42 The narrator had escaped to Germany, after all, to avoid the sexual restrictions of British society in the late 1920s. Thus, Isherwood encourages an implicit comparison between British and German social freedoms in the early 1930s. He likewise relies on this reference to condemn the aesthetic idealism of his literary forebears, such as Pater and Wilde, as having failed to prevent the homophobic virulence of both fascism and British conservatism. Auden similarly distanced modern homoeroticism from an older musical idealism, yet he does so by denigrating the specifically Oxonian traditions explored in Chapter 1. Arriving at Oxford in 1925, Auden sought “to join the Musical Union” and found a piano on which to play “hymn tunes” and “Bach’s forty-eight Preludes and Fugues” (Carpenter 1992: 42–3). Auden’s musicality, however, scarcely ingrained an idealized aestheticism. As Samuel Hynes argues, by the mid-1930s “Auden was urging a kind of writing that would be affective, immediate, and concerned with ideas, moral not aesthetic in its central intention” (1976: 13). Older aesthetic themes were replete with



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“ideas,” but Auden presented them as fantastical and less immediately applicable to the moral politics of modern life. In his autobiographical “Letter to Lord Byron” (1936), Auden presents his time at Oxford as a “theme” on the musical “score” of his life and describes his collegiate aesthetic encounters in terms of stylized symphonic orchestrations complete with string and wind instruments presenting “shrill poses” and gossiping like “pre-war” Russians, as brass instruments bellow about “Art” and percussive performers insist on “Life” (1986: 4.40.2, 4–7). Auden portrays this musical interweaving of “Art” and “Life” as pompously passé, as “poses” of a pre-World War I exuberance that overlooked the social discord and revolution in Britain and Russia, respectively. He ties this decayed and distracting musical sensuality to a corrupt eroticism by linking it to the excesses of his immediate predecessors at Oxford. His generation is the successor to the “debauched” prior one that came to age after the First World War and developed “new glosses” on “Amour” (4.43.4–7). Auden’s class follows the post-World War I generation of “[Evelyn] Waugh and Brian Howard,” as John Fuller observes (1998: 207). This crowd, Auden proposes, debauched aestheticism with its amorous “glosses,” in the sense of providing new interpretive spins or new varnishes on the old trope of Wildean homoerotic aristocratic extravagances, the equivalent of painting up a half-dead peacock. In reaction, Auden learned to detest those individuals who claim to champion “Art” over “Life and Love” (1986: 4.45.3–5). Modern queer life, Auden argues, must set aside aristocratic pretentions and engage contemporary disenfranchised classes and political tensions in less fanciful and perhaps, as Auden’s own working-class affairs suggest, only differently exploitative terms.43 In “Oxford” (1938), Auden again connects modern homoeroticism to class conflict, this time to critique hieratic intellectual aesthetes’ disdain for lowerclass passions and materialism. He condemns privileged Oxford academics as “rooks,” using “rooks” to evoke both black academic gowns and a quarrelsome fraudulence, an older connotation of the term (1986: ln. 1). These academics promote divisive delusions of life by pursuing infantile emotions and disdaining lower-class physical satisfactions. They are like nimble “babies,” who discuss but cannot understand complex emotions because they lock themselves up in college “quadrangles,” avoiding the world of commerce, factories, and the “green county” outside the ancient city and university (lns. 2, 11, 31). In their turn-of-the-twentieth-century slang dictionary, Farmer and Henley note the sexual connotation of the term “greens” a connotation of which Fuller suggests that Auden was aware.44 Consequently, Auden indicates here how his academics eschew not only productive economic arenas, such as markets and factories,

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but also natural, physical erotic engagements, which might be emotionally, intellectually, and psychologically productive. Problematically, for Auden, these academics speak of what they have not experienced, reflecting abstractly on feelings, such as love and desire, while abhorring their concrete manifestations: a “virginal” “Eros Paidagogos,” an allegorical Love-through-Teaching, cries alone as he simultaneously desires and yet hates or cringes at the attractive “thousands” outside Oxford who wiggle and “poke,” satisfying their physical desires, both material and sexual (lns. 34–5, 38, 33). Auden disparages academics as naïvely valorizing their desire for common men through abstract Hellenic ideals, yet deriding messy physical satisfactions as crude pokings. Essentially, this is a critique of hypocritical Oxonian neo-Platonists and Classicists who, preferring Eros to actual intercourse, fraudulently represent themselves as wise and mature but who are actually infantile because they cannot deal with the quotidian world around them. Auden suggests that this ambivalent perspective creates frustrations and mutual resentments and he consequently describes these intellectuals in destructive terms. Drawing on aesthetic tropes popularized by Pater and Carpenter, Auden reports that these cloistered academics are like “lovers” dangerously entwined in a “fabulous embrace” or ill-fated “comrades” who consciously adventure towards danger holding phallic pennants as if a “third sex” while “music” plays in an ironically noble fashion (1986: lns. 42–5). For Auden, champions of an intellectual musical inversion, an aggrandized third sex, that could reform society by promoting chaste “comrades” fall prey to deceptively noble ideals. The homoerotic “embrace” is fabulous because it is experienced only through a mythical fable and because it is overly idealized and so disassociated from its socially, physically, morally, and politically material messiness. This ignorance is emotionally and intellectually toxic and this embrace will eventually turn deadly. The irony for certain academics or intellectuals is that they know this but refuse to change their rhetoric or social behavior. After 1938, Auden excised lines 41–5, further deemphasizing a musical idealism by considering it not even worthy of attack, and thereby reinforcing his themes of (homo)-erotic class conflicts, which remained in the poem.45 While Auden considers a musical idealism outdated, he often emphasizes the potential destructiveness of homoeroticism, or really any eroticism, by associating it with modern aggressive, even militaristic musical contexts. In “Easily, my dear,” (1934), Auden links a beloved’s excitement with the musical stimulations of martial parade grounds, complete with a “sidedrum” and a “trombone” (1986: ln. 23). This erotic musicality may be in a martial Dorian mode, but



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it is not an antiquated Hellenism. The lovers in the poem are attracted by “a music from our time” to interact with contemporary events, such as the poor and anxious parading past “Hitler and Mussolini” who offer “wooing poses,” just as “Churchill” and “Roosevelt” similarly court their respective electorates, scenes evoked in conjunction with the lovers’ own “first meeting” (lns. 25, 31–6). Mendelson suggests that here, for Auden, “[p]rivate meeting and mass rally are equally erotic events, and it is we alone who choose which we prefer” (1981: 223). Yet, Auden also restricts choice by conflating these moments. As Bozorth argues, Auden shows how “private love is the local incarnation of the politics of dominance and submission” (2001: 189). Political appeals mingle with Auden’s speaker courting his beloved, whose “flesh and bone” the lover’s desires try to refashion into an ideal, “to make their own” (Auden 1986: lns. 55–6). To resist his own fascistic desires and for the beloved to retain his moral individuality, the speaker advises “be deaf ” should “hatred” promise some “immediate pleasure,” as desire encourages the beloved to “Be Lubbe, Be Hitler” so long as the beloved indulges the lover’s private pleasures (lns. 57–8, 64–5). Auden conflates political and erotic aggressions that pursue selfish benefits despite larger social costs, while disguising any broader violent “hatred” with instantaneous pleasurable “trick[s],” either aesthetic or erotic (ln. 32). One must be “deaf ” to, or ignore, personal desire to avoid larger tyrannies. Uniquely among the writers discussed in this chapter, Auden suggests silence as an opportunity for critical thought and self-knowledge.

Strange meetings: Making music make history By the late 1920s, efforts to legitimate or to valorize homoeroticism through music were waning. Certainly, Berners, Nichols, and Underwood continued to connect same-sex romance to the communal values of classical music. But they were an older guard who sustained generally sanguine late-nineteenth-century musical tropes even when exploring repression and alienation. Forster is a bridge-figure, as Woolacott was a World War I army doctor and therefore anticipates the militaristic aggression in Auden and Isherwood. Still, Forster’s use of Clesant’s violin music is highly romanticized. When younger twentieth-century writers associated music with queerness, rather than evoking self-knowledge or usefully sensitive, inverted nervous systems, they generally emphasized political and socio-economic conflicts. Consequently, these writers transformed music from an affirmative to a more ambivalent metaphor for their generation’s sexual, social, and political anxieties.

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While explorations of such anxieties are useful for contextualizing marginalized sexualities, we might nonetheless consider what got lost. In Auden’s early poetry, many lovers are like the one in his 1933 sonnet “At the far end” who hears “drumtaps” tapping anxiously and a “fiddle soaring” dreamily as he recalls a lover for whom he considers himself an “enemy” (1986: lns. 3–4, 9).46 Of course, while young, Auden was uncomfortable with his sexuality and to validate homoeroticism unconditionally was hardly his goal.47 Still, it seems that a valuable musical metaphor for same-sex attraction gets lost in the works of Auden and Isherwood. In this chapter I have argued that literary associations of music, especially classical music, with homoeroticism provided a means to represent sympathetically to diverse publics the self-knowledge and the cultural and social value of same-sex-desiring men and women, of various socio-economic classes and geographical regions. Nonetheless, it seems right to recall Brett’s admonition regarding the “collusion of musicality and the closet”; to re-acknowledge the shortcomings of using music, with all its ambiguities, to legitimize homosexuality “by making it obscurely present in public discourse” (1994: 21–2). Sinfield similarly cautions against obscurity, against the tendency for same-sex-desiring individuals to be “accepted as purveyors of artistic culture on condition that we be discreet, thereby acknowledging our own unspeakableness.” In this case, he argues, “[d]ecoding the work of closeted homosexual artists discovers not a ground for congratulation but a record of oppression and humiliation” (1994: 198). Still, as even Sinfield cautiously admits, there is some value in keeping “faith with the struggles of earlier generations, and one way of doing that is to reassert stigmatized gay traditions,” if only to reappraise their significance, as his book so brilliantly does (197). There are, indeed, benefits to exploring how sexually marginalized artists interacted with mainstream culture. In her study of gay composers in the U. S., Nadine Hubbs argues that one “point of queer histories generally is to show” how “queer subjects … operated either more or less productively within and against those definitions, identities, and practices that structured the historical and cultural moment in which they lived” (2004: 135). Queer histories can show the inextricable relationship of homoerotic subjects and communities to culture and society. This need not, necessarily, be a degrading or an assimilationist historiography. In Britain, such subcultures joined alienated socio-economic groups in using their musicality to assert their intelligence, skill, communities, self-respect, and social value. This created a tradition that was often explicitly affirmative. For each of these subcultures, to engage in a socially valued



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mainstream art pushed the traditions of art and aesthetics into a contested meeting ground, one to which all had a claim and a vested interest in critiquing. Remembering this idea of a contested yet shared meeting ground—one enabling what Wilfred Owen might call strange meetings—I turn now to examine how a popular interest in European classical music helped to shape Britain’s cosmopolitan sympathies during two twentieth-century world wars (1965: 35).

Notes   1 For music and negative British perceptions of homoeroticism, see also Hyde (1970: 17) and David (1997: 27).   2 See Livesey (2007: 86).   3 For early-twentieth-century uses of “queer,” see Houlbrook (2005: 136–7).   4 According to Robert Sherard, Wilde actually “knew little about music,” which “bored him” (1911: 121–2). Wilde certainly knew, however, about literary allusions to music from Plato to Pater.   5 For the queer overtones of knighthood in Wilde’s circle, see Charles Kains Jackson’s “The New Chivalry” (in Reade 1970: 315) and Pater’s Amis and Amile (1980: 6–8); for queer desires, Hellenism, and music, see Chapter 1; for homosexuality and sickness, see Symonds (1896: 29–30).   6 See Castle (1993: 208–9), Sophie Fuller (2002: 83–90), and Sutton (2005: 224–9).   7 For the production history of Teleny, and its association with Wilde, see McRae’s introduction (1986). Significantly, Teleny’s publisher, Leonard Smithers, issued a Prospectus linking the novel to “an article in a largely-circulated London daily paper, which demonstrated the subtle influence of music and the musician in connection with perverted sexuality” (in McRae 1986: 10).   8 Translations of Raffalovich’s Uranisme et Unisexualité are mine.   9 Hichens himself was diversely “musical” and succeeded Shaw as the music critic for the London World; see Hichens (1947: 73). 10 British authorities suppressed Ellis’ Sexual Inversion, for instance, in 1898, but it was re-published in the U. S. in 1901 and was available by mail-order in Britain; see Brady (2005: 141–50). Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex was more fortunate, although it was criticized in the press and the British Museum isolated the book from its general collection; see Brady (2005: 205–7) and Weeks (1990: 117–18). 11 Carpenter’s quotation of De Joux unintentionally echoes Pater’s description of “pain-fugues on the delicate nerve-work of living creatures” (2014: 90). 12 The 1901 edition of Ellis’ Sexual Inversion likewise included several case histories wherein individuals report being “fond of ” or “passionately devoted to music” (80, 83); see case histories XI, XII, XV, XVI, XVIII, XXV, XXVIII, XXX, XXXIII,

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XXXVI, and XXXVII. Carpenter includes several case histories referencing music in The Intermediate Sex, borrowed from Ellis and Krafft-Ebing, and presents his own case history in My Days and Dreams, wherein he recounts his relationship to music (1916: 24). Mayne’s The Intersexes (1908), known to Ellis and Carpenter, likewise includes several case histories of queer musicians, male and female, and ambivalently connects music to a nervous homosexuality (1975: 89, 129–33, 395–9). Similarly, in Mayne’s fictional Imre: A Memorandum, two men initially bond over music and the novel ends with them walking home together to the music of “a cigány orchestra” that is “despairing,” yet “triumphant!” (2003: 37, 127–8). Of course this was not true of everyone; Quentin Crisp claimed, “I never understood music. It all seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information” (2000: 195). See “The Austrian Espionage Affair” (Times June 6, 1913: 8); “Alleged Abominable Crime” (Times December 3, 1919: 16); and “Naval Officer’s Libel Action” (Times July 24, 1920: 7). Sinfield qualifies that the evolution of an aesthetic “queer stereotype” was “uneven,” and some aesthetes were perceived as simply sophisticated (1994: 130). Sinfield references, for example, the teenaged Nichols’ romantic friendship with the effeminate aesthete Egerton Edwards, which, Bryan Connon reports, Nichols’ parents seem to have encouraged (Connon 2000: 38). Connon notes that Prelude “follows Beverley’s own experiences closely” and offers a conscious opposition to Waugh’s Loom of Youth (2000: 84). For Nichols’ early musical successes at social engagements, see Connon (2000: 29–30). Berners’ depiction of his mother’s fears may draw more on stereotypes regarding music and effeminacy than on reality, as she likely paid for his music lessons and he felt comfortable writing to her about Wagner; see Amory (1999: 24–5). Berners later recalls, “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” (1983: 103). See Trillini (2008: 215) and Burgan (1989: 42). For Berners’ diverse friendships, see Amory (1999: 52–3, 161–5). See also Raffalovich (1896: 15n.1) and Mayne (1975: 122). For more on opera and female homoeroticism, see Castle (1993: 207–18). For associations of homosexuality and Tchaikovsky, see Carpenter (1921: 104) and Mayne (1975: 397). Keeling argues that “there is no reason to doubt that [Forster] was, at the time he wrote Maurice, very much aware of Tchaikovsky’s English reception and reputation,” which was growing (2003: 89).



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25 The Justinian theme makes for a libretto indicative of limited legitimations of sexual dissidence. Gibbon observes that when Justinian became the Byzantine emperor, he shared power “with the woman whom he loved, the famous Theodora,” a former actress and prostitute, whose “presence was avoided by all who wished to escape either the scandal or the temptation” of her charms (1899: 58–9). Justinian, however, was also reputed to have enacted harsh laws against homoerotic behavior (Symonds 1896: 8–10). Brookes has also composed “The Suite in Green,” which functions similarly, as the relationship between the color green and homoeroticism was popularized by Wilde and Hichens’ Green Carnation; see McKenna (2005: 169–71) and Ellis (1921: 120, 182, 186, 291, 299). 26 Foreign musicians often had an easier time gaining prominent employment in Britain, although during World War I there were bursts of musical xenophobia (Ehrlich 1985: 187–8; Mackerness 1964: 207–8). Brookes borrows the Italian pseudonym from the painter Philipp Peter Roos (c. 1655–1706). 27 For traditional homoerotic accounts of Patroclus and Achilles, see Carpenter (1906: 68–74). 28 Berners likely first met Firbank in 1918; see Amory (1999: 89). By 1917, Berners had composed his Valses Bourgeoises and his “Valse sentimentale,” see Jones (2003: 15). Perhaps Firbank was aware of these? The second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, in 5/4 time, could easily be described as a waltz with a “troubled beat.” Firbank need not, however, have had specific works in mind: it is the composers’ homoerotic reputations that are significant. 29 For “Lilli burlero,” see Hamilton (1887: 189–90). 30 Firbank again associates music, eroticism, money, and the church in Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926), wherein dancing choirboys serve as erotic images for the priests and to charm money out of parishioners (1988: 654). 31 As Brian Masters observes, Benson’s comical treatment of these women is somewhat “ironic” given his own sexual reticence (1991: 249). 32 Ironically, as Sophie Fuller has pointed out, Hall herself knew several same-sexdesiring women who did find some success in the musical world (2002: 84). Similarly tragic lesbian musicians appear in Underwood’s Hidden Lights and Flame of Freedom. 33 Connon suggests that Nichols “went to some lengths to stress the idealistic and sexless nature of the relationship” between Brian and Walter (2000: 126). Yet, given their interactions, it is harder to imagine the two as friends than as lovers. Connon records, moreover, Nichols’ 1982 acknowledgment that “[o]f course Brian and Walter were lovers” (127). 34 For contemporary homoerotic overtones of “queer,” see Houlbrook (2005: 1–3, 136–7). 35 For this dating, see Furbank (1981: 2.148).

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36 In Forster’s Maurice, Dr. Jowitt refers to the treatment of “unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort” as “asylum work” (1971: 156). 37 Clesant’s music may also represent Forster’s fiction. According to Furbank, Forster suggested that he abandoned “novel-writing” because “being a homosexual, he grew bored with writing about marriage and the relations of men and women.” Furbank further suggests that Forster became frustrated because, after writing Maurice, he knew “that it might have been a better novel if it had been written for publication” (1981: 2.132). Social repressions hindered Forster’s art as they do Clesant’s. 38 For historical male and female homoerotic communities during this period, see also Houlbrook (2005: 68–75), Doan (2001: 97–9), and Vicinus (2004: 177–80), respectively. 39 Nineteenth-century effeminate sodomites were occasionally labeled “Margeries”; see Cocks (2010: 90). 40 For the prosecution’s references to Strauss, see the transcription in Kettle (1977: 65, 163, 201, 240). 41 The phrase “Cult of the Clitoris” first appeared in conjunction with Allan in The Vigilante, the new name for The Imperialist (“Cult.” The Vigilante February 16, 1918: 1). 42 See Hoare’s Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand (1998) and Kettle’s Salome’s Last Veil (1977). 43 For Auden’s interest in working-class lovers, see Carpenter (1992: 90). 44 See Farmer and Henley (1893: 206) and Fuller (1998: 207). 45 For the excised lines, see Auden (1986: 425). 46 Auden’s “drumtaps” are echoes of Whitman’s equally violent “Drum-Taps,” in which “[t]o the drum-taps” come “young men falling in and arming” during the U. S. Civil War (Whitman 1965: lns. 21–2). 47 For Auden’s possible attempt to make himself bisexual in the late 1920s, see Carpenter (1992: 82–4).

5

Classical music, cosmopolitanism, and war: From authors to audiences

The previous four chapters have shown how, from the 1870s through the late 1930s, myriad writers depicted diverse British subcultures asserting their intellectual and social virtues by engaging with classical music. These writers variously characterize British middle-class literati, ambitious lower-middle and working-class intellectuals, and same-sex-desiring individuals enjoying the music of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Wagner. While embracing the intellectual and social benefits of French and Italian music, these writers particularly reflected their society’s admiration for and support of German musical traditions. These German traditions encompassed music associated with the pre-1871 German states and, after the 1871 unification of the German Empire, with modern Germany and Austria.1 British society’s admiration for German music, broadly conceived, formed a strong connective in the cultural kinship that existed between turn-of-the-century British and German societies, even alongside British anxieties regarding the industrial and military successes of the growing German Empire.2 These anxieties understandably influenced some contemporary suspicions regarding what Jeffrey Richards has referred to as “the stranglehold of German music on British cultural life” and the preeminence in British concert life of what Sven Müller has called the “the musical superpower Germany” (Richards 2001: 12; Müller 2008: 319). Yet, as we have seen, even amidst these anxieties, by the early-twentieth century German music had become an intellectual, pleasurable, and even inextricable part of Britain’s cosmopolitan culture. This chapter will explore how in the years prior to and during both world wars, writers frequently emphasized the political connotations of this cosmopolitan musical culture in Britain. By “cosmopolitan” I mean the “cosmopolitan European civilisation” that E. M. Forster associated in 1943 with “reason,” “tolerance,” “the

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production of beauty,” and a “humanism” that may sometimes evoke indecision and “coward[ice]” but that remained nonetheless valuable to many members of a diverse British public (2008: 220).3 The very European element of cosmopolitanism in Britain, however, could prove contentious by accentuating international rivalries. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, and G. B. Shaw, for instance, depict pre-World War I British characters admiring a German culture that seemed to produce more intellectual audiences, more powerful music, and more skilled musicians than those found in Britain. In doing so, these authors use music as a relatively non-threatening means to evoke pre-World War I British fears that German “efficiency” and “professional[ism]” would surpass British “amateurishness” in educational, commercial, and military arenas.4 After 1918, despite Britain’s victory over Germany, these politically fraught musical representations reemerged, often with ironic mythological overtones that worked to assuage lingering fears regarding Britain’s intellectual and technical inadequacies. These representations recurred particularly in literature recounting WWI and prefiguring WWII, the latter of which critics have labeled a “Literature of Preparation” or “of Anticipation” (Hynes 1976: 341; Knowles 1990: 2). Ford Madox Ford, for instance, retrospectively imagines a mythically heroic, Wagnerian German army as overrated, while Katharine Burdekin and Evelyn Waugh use a coercive musical intensity to characterize Germany’s unsustainably violent resurgence in the 1930s. Yet, alongside these violent musical tropes, authors also presented Britain’s musical cosmopolitanism as a connection between generally non-violent factions of Britain and Germany. Even during World War I, as Peter Firchow has noted, British society gave some credence to traditional differentiations between “the ‘good’ German,” who was amiable, artistic, and intellectual, and “the ‘bad’ German (or Prussian),” who was militaristic, oppressively regimented, and aggressive (1986: 163). After the war, to counter the nationalistic sentiments that had prolonged it, Siegfried Sassoon recalled popular conceptions of “good” Germans by evoking their contributions to Europe’s shared musical culture. This rhetoric of a shared European culture was particularly prevalent prior to and during World War II and, as I will show, British writers such as Burdekin and Virginia Woolf revised allusions to “good” and “bad” Germans to separate a European German musicality from the violently nationalistic Nazis. W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood critiqued this musical cosmopolitanism by depicting it as fruitlessly harmonious during preparations for war, as the violent nationalism of the 1930s perverted an ostensibly peaceful European aesthetic heritage. Nonetheless, a significant portion of the British public, as the foregoing chapters indicate, were intensely invested in classical music, much of it associated with Germany, and this



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public joined Burdekin and Woolf in finding in Europe’s cosmopolitan musicality a hope for humanistic sympathies despite fascist atrocities. From the late-Victorian period up to the 1940s, then, writers developed representations of music to evoke intellectual, political, and even military rivalries between Britain and Germany but also to reinforce a shared European culture. Critics such as Modris Eksteins, Samuel Hynes, and Paul Fussell emphasize, with reason, the First World War’s facilitation of “rejection[s],” “discontinuities,” and, less radically, “ironic” re-imaginings of aesthetic, cultural, and social traditions (Eksteins 2000: 216; Hynes 1991: 33; Fussell 2000: 35). Yet, British literary tropes alluding to music and war frequently reinforce the continuities of a liberal aesthetic cosmopolitanism that had its roots in the late-Victorian period. It is illustrative, therefore, to consider the musical tropes of both world wars together, despite their historical differences. The invasive Wagnerian Germans in Ford’s retrospective Parade’s End (1924–8), for instance, anticipate the invasive Wagnerian Nazis in Burdekin’s forwardlooking Swastika Night (1937). Conversely, the troubled yet persistent musical cosmopolitanism in Forster’s Howards End (1910) anticipates the calming, Paterian musical cosmopolitanism of Sassoon’s Memoirs of George Sherston (1928–36), of Burdekin’s characterization of Bach, of Woolf ’s post-1918 fiction, and of many wartime British audiences. To understand these evolving continuities, this chapter will examine the musical literary themes pertaining to both wars in close conjunction. The reward will be an understanding of how the prominence of German classical music in Britain helped a wide array of British authors to imagine both violent international conflicts and, more predominantly, to promote existing international sympathies between British and German societies. Literary portrayals of classical music, then, as we will see through Forster, Burdekin, Sassoon, and Woolf, predominantly provided a relatively stable, if occasionally renovated, aesthetic bridge from the 1870s to the mid 1940s, one which allowed liberal cosmopolitan, humanist traditions to span the cultural divide represented by early modernist aesthetic experiments and the First World War.

“you mustn’t run down our English composers”: Britain’s aesthetic anxieties By the Edwardian era, as we have seen, British society had long admired German music. As early as the 1870s, however, this admiration evoked

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German challenges to Britain’s intellectual, aesthetic, economic, and, more obliquely, military pre-eminence. Desires to meet such intellectual and aesthetic challenges inspired, in part, celebrations of Britain’s musical achievements in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1879–89), the opening of London’s Royal College of Music (1883), and the promotion of the late-Victorian and Edwardian English Musical Renaissance.5 In Made in Germany (1896), Ernest Williams railed against the pervasiveness of Germany’s commercial and industrial invasions of British markets by citing the popularity of German “opera,” “instruments,” and even “sheets of music” (11–12). Henry Billinghurst, of the British piano-manufacturer Brinsmead & Sons, similarly framed attempts by London’s Guildhall School of Music to purchase German pianos in 1911 as an attack on British workmanship and finance. Such purchases of German pianos, Billinghurst argued, would be a “serious blow … to the prestige of the British trade” (“Pianos.” Musical Trades Review January 1911).6 The economics of art were an imperial concern and British piano manufacturers were already suffering from Germany’s development of what Cyril Ehrlich has called “the best system of technical and commercial education in the world” (1976: 71). Contemporary British critics manifested analogous concerns regarding Germany’s efficient military industries, military training, and frequent anti-British sentiments, which resulted, for instance, in the pre-1914 naval race between Germany and Britain and in well-publicized claims that British opposition to conscription and to training civilians for military service were compromising the British Empire’s competitive edge.7 Within these contexts, Germany’s powerful musical culture came to symbolize wide-ranging German challenges to Britain’s seemingly amateurish and inefficient approaches to education, industry, and military preparedness. Forster, Richardson, and Shaw all reflect such anxieties over Germany’s increasing efficiency by representing British audiences engaging music much more haphazardly than their German counterparts. In Howards End (1910), Forster depicts the British members of a Queen’s Hall audience as casual and variously distracted listeners. In the Anglo-German Schlegel family, Helen’s British side dominates as “her attention wandered” during the Andante of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, leaving her free to “smil[e] at her cousin Frieda” and to observe her “Aunt Juley,” who is herself “so British, and wanting to tap” to the tunes she can recognize (1973: 44–5). Margaret, Helen’s sister, likewise gets distracted as she worries about her new associate, Leonard Bast, and even “whisper[s]” to Bast during Brahms’ Four Serious Songs (47). Bast himself, meanwhile, can scarcely concentrate on music due to his poor education and his



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poverty. Finally, Tibby Schlegel pedantically mediates the music through his “full score,” effectively distracting himself from the live performance (44). His concentration and enjoyment are more passive than vigorous and he represents, as Michelle Fillion suggests, a fairly “lifeless aesthete” (2010: 82). None of Forster’s British characters, then, approach music with much concentration or vigor. Conversely, Forster’s two unequivocally German characters remain fervently attentive to the concert. “Fräulein” Frieda Mosebach “remembers all the time that Beethoven is ‘echt Deutsch’ ” [properly German] and, “listening to Classical Music,” she refuses to “respond” to Helen’s smile. “Herr Liesecke,” meanwhile, who mingles his ardor for Frieda with Beethoven, looks “as if wild horses could not make him inattentive” to the music. Beethoven’s music, the narrator remarks, augments the “passion” of all the audience, but Forster’s German characters filter their passion through a disciplined attention to the live performance (1973: 44). Forster’s distinctions between British and German audiences echo his distinctions between British and German composers, which he uses to question Britain’s ability to compete with Germany in more martial arenas. While everyone enjoys, in some fashion, Beethoven’s symphony, Margaret dismisses Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” by exclaiming “ugh!” upon seeing the name on the program, thereby causing Herr Liesecke to ask, “The ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ will not be fine?”8 Aunt Juley, who is “so anxious” for Liesecke to hear some English music, protests, “you mustn’t run down our English composers, Margaret” (1973: 47). When Frieda halfheartedly praises the Elgar as “dramatic, a little,” Juley rejects this damnation with faint praise by accusing Frieda of “despis[ing] English music” (48). This dispute over Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” infuses Juley’s sense of musical rivalry between Britain and Germany with militaristic implications, as Elgar’s title for this series of marches, Pomp and Circumstance, frequently published with the subtitle Military Marches, alludes to Shakespeare’s reference in Othello to the “[p]ride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war” and the series provides the music for Britain’s patriotic song “Land of Hope and Glory” (Shakespeare 1997: 3.3.370). Forster intensifies these militaristic implications in Howards End by subsequently reporting predictions that “England and Germany are bound to fight” (1973: 69). Forster’s musical-military implications are troubling because Elgar’s marches are not only less “dramatic” than Beethoven’s symphony, but less complex and less powerful. In 1910, then, Forster uses musical rivalries to question, in oblique, non-inflammatory terms, how the undisciplined British might fare in a war against the dramatically regimented, passionate Germans.

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While Forster refers overtly to Edwardian Anglo-German military rivalries, Richardson uses music more covertly to allude to Germany’s intellectual and technical challenges to Britain from the 1890s onwards. As Carol Watts points out, Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (written 1913, published 1915) depicts turn-of-the-century Germany developing a “rival culture” to Britain’s (1995: 8–9). Richardson, as Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg argues, recalls pre-1914 concerns regarding “German professionalism and efficiency” by evoking an “idealization of Germany” that “leads to a total dismantling of English self-confidence,” in part through conceptions of German musicality (Björkén-Nyberg 2002: 108). Specifically, I would add, Richardson uses music to praise disciplined German training and to criticize British amateurishness. Having traveled to Hanover “to finish her education,” Miriam Henderson, Richardson’s protagonist, overhears “the careful unstumbling repetition of a difficult passage” as Emma Bergmann practices the piano (Richardson 1938: 28, 35). Miriam also admires how “easily” Clara Bergmann’s hands move when she plays a difficult piece “without music,” a feat suggestive of Clara’s painstaking rehearsals (43). This disciplined practice results in the “difference” Miriam observes “between the performance of these German girls and nearly all the piano-playing she had heard” back home. Emma’s playing, for instance, has “a quality” that Miriam “had only heard occasionally at concerts, and in the playing of one of the music teachers at school,” one “who had, as the school prospectus declared, been ‘educated in Leipzig’ ” (35, 45). A disciplined German education, Richardson implies, produces better, more professional results than a lax British one. Richardson also uses music to suggest that Germans are more adventurous than much of British society. When Clara performs her complex modern solo, she lifts her face “boldly” as “[t]he 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” (1938: 43). Miriam admires this fragmented aesthetic technique, akin to the technique Richardson employs in her own fragmented prose suggesting Richardson’s own approval of it. Miriam’s father, conversely, enjoys “playing the role” of a more conventional “English gentleman” (28). While this “role” entails some intellectual curiosity, inspiring him to attend “Philharmonic Concerts” and to associate with “scientific men,” he disdains modernist experimentations (33). The German students’ enjoyment of and aptitude for diverse musical styles evokes a sophistication, technique, and “brilliant” innovation that Richardson implies even privileged British men lacked. In the late 1890s world of the novel, these oblique



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musical references to Germany’s turn-of-the-nineteenth-century intellectual, technical, and innovative strengths are more vaguely troubling than aggressively menacing. In 1913 and certainly in 1915, when Richardson wrote and published her novel, this German adventurousness could hardly have helped activating contemporary fears regarding Germany’s military challenge to Britain. From 1903 to 1918, Shaw, too, used musical tropes to represent the intellectual, political, and even militaristic anxieties behind observations of English frivolousness and German discipline. In the “Don Juan in Hell” episode of Man and Superman (1903), a reworking of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Shaw argues that English audiences reject the contemplative pleasures of classical music for cruder stimulations and thereby indicate their intellectual indolence. In England, Shaw’s Devil observes, there are “concert rooms” that offer “Mozart” and “the classical concert is admitted to be a higher, more cultivated, poetic, intellectual, ennobling place than the racecourse.” Nonetheless, “lovers of racing” refuse to “desert their sport” for the noble pensiveness of classical concerts (1963: 3.614). Not that English concert-goers, someone else suggests, are much more cultivated, for at “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). These inane English amateurs seek the appearance of social and intellectual distinction and little more. They correspond, actually, to the Devil himself, who declares music to be the “sublimest of the arts” but who is really “like a hysterical woman fawning on a fiddler” (612). Like the English race-lovers and concert-goers, Shaw’s Devil favors frenetic stimuli, analogous to those of racing, and a shallow aestheticism over complex musical contemplations. The English, Shaw implies, prefer hellish crude stimuli and devilish delusions of grandeur to the heavenly cerebral pleasures of classical music. They consequently reveal their mental laziness, effeminate superficiality, and moral shortcomings. Conversely, Shaw’s exemplars of a disciplined intellectualism are Mozart, an embodiment of the German musical tradition, and Don Juan, based on Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Shaw sends both these men to a musical heaven, as they realize that the actual reward of heaven, and by Shaw’s analogy the “classical concert,” is that there “you live and work instead of playing and pretending” (1963: 3.617). They both accept that “joy” is “contemplation,” which in heaven accompanies “the work of helping Life in its struggle upward.” Music, for them, is an ennobling metaphor for critically organizing “Life” amidst the chaos of “toil and poverty” (618). To use music otherwise, in a delusional, “amateur[ish]” English fashion, is to make it “the brandy of the damned,” i.e. a superficial distraction

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from life (612). Shaw implicitly compares here an undisciplined English to a disciplined Germanic culture, a comparison Max Beerbohm intensified in 1907 by observing that as England had not yet performed Man and Superman in its entirety, England did “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” (“G. B. S. Again.” SR June 8, 1907: 713). The indolent, uncritical English, Beerbohm implies, have failed to keep up with the industrious, intellectual Germans. In The Music-Cure (debuted January 28, 1914), Shaw returns to music, this time to critique the unprofessionalism and the uncritical naïveté of Britain’s ruling class. Lord Reginald, whose primary “capacity” is for “vamping” trendy songs on the piano, has acquired work as an “under-secretary in the War Office” solely because his “father is a Duke” (1963: 5.158, 156). Unprepared for this job, Reginald improvises his duties as he improvises accompaniments and gets caught using insider information to buy stock shares for himself.9 Disgraced and unable to understand the immorality of his actions, he hides from the public and takes opium, hardly fulfilling the intellectual or moral ideal of a civil servant. He disgraces himself still further by bragging to the professional pianist Strega Thundridge, whom his mother has sent to revitalize him, that he “can play a bit” himself but that “it wouldn[’]t do for a man in [his] position to lower himself by becoming a professional.” Shaw uses Reginald’s willful attempts to remain an “amateur,” both at music and at governance, to satirize members of England’s ruling class who are reluctant to work or to think complexly and who consequently valorize a careless approach both to art and to statecraft (163). Shaw also satirizes, by association, the public and the politicians who allow such individuals to maintain power. For if, he implies, this amateurishness may be amusing in aesthetic contexts, it is entirely inappropriate when it comes to running a nation. Shaw portrays the danger of this ruling-class amateurishness by having Thundridge dominate Reginald, both physically and intellectually, with her professionally disciplined musicality. When Reginald admires Thundridge’s hands, she hurls him away, causing him to exclaim, “[y]ou are strong.” She responds, “[m]y strength has been developed by playing left hand octave passages—like this,” and she plays “Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s Erl König.”10 Reginald “puts his fingers in his ears, but continues to stare at her” (1963: 5.162). He is unable to bear the loud, difficult music, but Thundridge’s forcefulness nonetheless entrances him. She informs him, “I am now going to educate you musically. I am going to play Chopin, and Brahms, and Bach, and Schumann,



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and—” Reginald interrupts, “[y]ou don[’]t mean classical music?” Confronted with complex art, he is “horrified” (164). Insisting to him “I’m going to make a man of you,” Thundridge plays Chopin’s “Polonaise in A Flat,” the “Heroic,” and commands: “Imagine yourself going into battle” (164–5). Frightened of battle, Reginald “runs away” but he soon returns and, after she advises him to imagine that he has already “saved [his] country,” he enjoys himself. Flattered by this fancy, Reginald allows Thundridge to teach him to play part of the Polonaise, which he eagerly plays until she “pushes him off the bench on to the floor” and continues alone (165). Thundridge slowly revitalizes the under-secretary, but simultaneously dominates him with her strength and intellect as she keeps him subservient to herself. Shaw, then, uses this willfully unprepared under-secretary for war to critique Britain’s ruling class as masochistically privileging dilettantes and as consequently dangerous for Britain’s international preeminence. Overcome by Thundridge’s dominating musicality, Reginald proposes marriage to her by admitting that his “one secret longing” is “to be mercilessly beaten by a splendid, strong, beautiful woman.” Thundridge accepts and admits her own “dream of a timid little heart fluttering against [hers]” and “a silky moustache to kiss [her] weary fingers when [she] return[s] from a Titanic struggle with Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in G major” (1963: 5.167). Shaw presents Reginald’s abjection and Thundridge’s force with humorous over-exaggerations, but his hyperbole signals concerns more pressing than aesthetic struggles, such as Britain’s economic and military rivalry with Germany. For, while Thundridge’s surname recalls Thundridge, Hertfordshire, and she compares herself to the Polish pianist Paderewski, her expertise is in the German musical tradition and her first name connects her with Prussian militarism, Strega being both the Italian word for witch and a variation of Striegau, a Silesian town once famous on account of Frederick the Great’s victory over the Austro-Saxon allies during the “battle of Striegau” (Chisholm 1911: 570–2). As such, Reginald’s masochistic subservience to Thundridge implies that Britain’s ruling class weakens the nation intellectually, morally, and even militarily by giving amateurs positions that in continental nations, such as Germany, are held by trained professionals. After WWI began, Shaw’s frustration with British society’s amateurish selfdestructiveness inspired Heartbreak House (1918), wherein he satirizes Britain’s middle classes as embracing the excitement of fruitless destruction and as therefore unable to live productively, particularly in wartime. Shaw signals British society’s masochistic wartime excitement by having his characters eagerly await an air raid outside a house resembling a “high-pooped ship” (1963: 1.489). The

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ship evokes both Plato’s Ship of State and, as Sally Vogt suggests, the renaissance “Ship of Fools,” symbolizing Britain at its most absurd (Vogt 1978: 280–1). For Shaw’s foolish characters, the potential destruction of the house, metaphorically Britain, assumes the excitement of a concert. Hesione Hushabye asks, “[d]id you hear the explosions? And the sound in the sky: it’s splendid: it’s like an orchestra: it’s like Beethoven.” Ellie Dunn goes further: “it is Beethoven” (Shaw 1963: 1.595). When Hector Hushabye turns on lights in the house to attract the allegedly Beethovian bombers, Ellie, “tense with excitement,” irresponsibly commands him to make the house a still more discernible target: “[s]et fire to the house, Marcus” (596). Tellingly, she calls Hector “Marcus,” the alias he assumes when he “tells lies” to seduce women other than his wife (512). By longing for the planes, Shaw suggests, Ellie and her friends adopt a domestically destructive delusion akin to “Marcus’ ” lies. Ellie, in particular, “behave[s] like an amateur” soldier, unaware of the consequences of battle, and romanticizes violence (597). Disregarding the consequences of losing the house and the risk to themselves and to Britain, these characters foolishly consider the air raid an exhilarating aesthetic event. While in Man and Superman Shaw mocked uncritical glorifications of aesthetic excitements, in Heartbreak House he emphasizes how such foolishness can facilitate pain and suffering. Eagerly anticipating the raid, these characters act analogously to “hysterical” people “fawning on a fiddler,” but with more serious consequences as they confuse the sound of bombers with Beethoven, that is, with an art to seek out. By refusing to contemplate the devastation of bombs, they also correspond to the “war maniacs” whom Shaw decries in his “Preface” to Heartbreak House as “glorying grotesquely in the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and most abject terrors” (1963: 1.461, 462). These “maniacs” gloried in the excitement of destruction without considering its human cost. Ellie and her associates indicate how easily this mania can afflict even intelligent people, as it once afflicted Shaw himself. After watching a zeppelin catch fire near his home, Shaw reported that the sound of the Zepp’s engines was so fine … that I positively caught myself hoping next night that there would be another raid. I grieve to add that after seeing the Zepp fall like a burning newspaper, with its human contents roasting for some minutes … I went to bed and was comfortably asleep in ten minutes. One is so pleased at having seen the show that the destruction of a dozen people or so in hideous terror and torment does not count.

“Pretty lot of animals we are,” he reflected (1965: 426).11 Shaw enjoys the aesthetic appeal of destruction; but, he recognizes its inhumanity, as Ellie and



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her friends do not. As such, these characters evoke a troubling heartlessness that extols and thereby supports the “terror and torment” of war. Indeed, they hope that the planes will “come again tomorrow,” as they listen to Randall, a re-imagined Reginald, play “Keep the Home Fires Burning” on his pastoral flute (1963: 1.598). Randall’s music signifies the group’s foolish expectation of its own safety amidst burning, death, and destruction in an Arcadian England. This delusional naïveté enables their uncritical eagerness for and refusal to protest the spectacle of violence. The best that can be said of this group, then, is that they avoid glorifying the specific deaths of shot-down pilots, as do characters in Rudyard Kipling’s “Mary Postgate” (1915) and H. G. Wells’ Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916). Alone among Shaw’s party, Captain Shotover recognizes the bombers as a call for critical contemplation. Shotover, Shaw’s mouthpiece, identifies the planes as a “judgment” against British society that should jolt the group into realizing that their “souls are still alive” and capable of moral critique (1963: 1.596). This echoes Shotover’s earlier assertion that whoever directs the Ship of State or has a “will to live” must “[l]earn [their] business as an Englishman”: “Navigation” (594). For, as Shaw remarks in the play’s “Preface,” “[t]he ship had to be saved” (464). To save Britain, its ruling class must navigate past delusions that facilitate excessive violence. If they cannot avoid violence altogether, they must at least avoid glorifying it, as in confusing bombers with Beethoven. To provide a positive model, Shaw has Shotover, a weapons inventor, take interest in “life-saving inventions” and admit that “[his] mind does not dwell on slaughter as it did when [he] was a boy” (528). Shotover represents an evolving attempt to navigate Britain safely through non-combative waters. Such cautious movements towards peace, although not total disarmament, Shaw felt, could prevent the “bogey of the British Empire” from imitating the hated German Empire (1965: 425). Shaw’s allusion to Beethoven in Heartbreak House, then, reminds the British that they might learn from the Germans’ intellectual and aesthetic strengths while avoiding their more violent militaristic excesses. Classical music provides Forster, Richardson, and Shaw with serious, but not inherently threatening tropes for discussing rivalries between British and German cultures. In the writing of these authors, British audiences, composers, and performers repeatedly compare unfavorably to their German counterparts, who exhibit greater concentration, discipline, and skill. While these musical rivalries may initially seem trivial, these authors conflate a prowess in classical music with intellectual and physical strength. By comparing a pre-World War I British amateurishness to a German musical seriousness or professionalism,

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these authors suggest that Britain was unprepared for competition with Germany in other arenas, such as education and war. Shaw, in particular, condemned what he perceived as England’s uncritical musicality and suggested, sardonically, that some English must enjoy being dominated by Germany’s superior professionalism. All three authors, however, argue that a culture’s willingness to engage with classical music indicates its willingness to think critically and to work hard. Consequently, in their writing, British society’s casual approach to music leaves Britain vulnerable to more aesthetically, intellectually, and technically sophisticated nations, such as Germany.

“bringing in all the brass”: Music in the interwar period After 1918 and the end of World War I, several authors, such as Ford, Sitwell, Isherwood, and Burdekin, revisited the aggressive connotations of German music raised by Shaw both to recount past and to anticipate future German threats to Britain. These authors often frame by now familiar musical tropes in mythic terms to represent the alleged magnitude of German power and the fortitude of British resolve. In doing so, they connect certain composers to nationalistic mythologies more than others. Many Germans, as Nietzsche observed, frequently perceived in “Wagner’s appropriation of old sagas and songs … something German par excellence” (1911: 64); many British writers followed suit regarding Wagner and, correspondingly, heightened Elgar’s British Imperialism by referring to his Pomp and Circumstance marches rather than, say, to his Violin Concerto (1910), which the Austrian Fritz Kreisler premiered, or to his other pre-1914 orchestral works. These authors imply, nonetheless, that these nationalistic musical myths are not necessarily intrinsic to the music but are characterizations that highlight concerns regarding military and cultural rivalries. In Parade’s End (1924–8), for instance, Ford uses Wagnerian opera to recall and to deflate the fabled force of German militarism during World War I. During an attack on his trench, Christopher Tietjens imagines the German army as an almost overwhelming orchestra “bringing in all the brass, all the strings, all the wood-wind, all [sic] the percussion […] It was comic to the extent that an operatic orchestra’s crescendo is comic. Crescendo! … Crescendo! CRRRRRESC ….” (2012: 604). Ford attempts not so much to mimic music in words as to convey the absurdly chaotic sensations inspired by Wagnerian opera, which itself provides a means for Tietjens to conceptualize a German attack in familiar terms. Ford evokes



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the unsustainable pomposity of Wagnerian sound through a bombastic mixture of typographical techniques, such as italics and repetition for emphasis, ellipses to offer tense anticipation, capital letters to signal loudness, which then slips suddenly into an easily discernible narrative and typographical conventionalism: “The Hero arrived. Naturally, he was a Hun” (605). In this scene, a German soldier’s attack reminds Tietjens of a Wagnerian mythic Hero, probably Siegfried, grandson of the god Wotan—Tietjens soon thinks of German miners as “Nibelungen-like,” so Wagner’s Ring cycle is on his mind—who likewise goes knowingly, if somewhat more grandly to his death (608).12 The German soldier, however, is only human and when shot he “threw his arm abroad, his—considerably mashed!—face to the sky,” a response that Tietjens considers “[t]oo dramatic, really” (605). Ford’s macabre mythology turns the German offensive into a horrific mocking joke, a Gesamtkunstwerk overloaded with sham grandeur, which collapses before it can destroy British culture embodied by Tietjens, who imagines himself as a “statue of the Bard of Avon,” i.e. Shakespeare (604).13 Ford’s operatic allusions acknowledge the strength of the German army and culture, but portray their alleged superiority to Britain’s as exaggerated, strong only in brief chaotic spurts, and ultimately unstable as it falls back into a more parsable and contestable existence. Ford, however, to his credit, likewise refuses to aggrandize British culture, which he equivalently deflates through Tietjens’ ironic references to Elgar. Before the war, Tietjens criticizes British social conventions by mockingly describing Elgar’s music to “Land of Hope and Glory” as “absolutely correct!” (2012: 113). Walking through a pastoral countryside, Tietjens reflects that this “Land” has unfortunately become institutionalized through its “Church! State! Army!” and through “All the governing class! All rotten!” (114). Ford’s style in this passage, with its repetitions and exclamation points, foreshadows and, upon a rereading, recalls the wartime scene analyzed above in the context of Wagnerian opera. As such, Ford positions Elgar as the British equivalent to Wagner in the sense that Elgar offers a mythological vision of Britain that must be deflated. Ford links Elgar to overly powerful British institutions that due to their old-fashioned mores and conventions are “rotten” and absolutely incorrect. At this pre-war point, Tietjens is concerned less with international relations than with his personal battle against his own society, as he fears that supporters of Britain’s inflexible establishments will consider his relationship with the un-ironically “virtuous” Valentine Wannop a “scandal” due to his youthful misalliance with his unfaithful first wife (114, 115). For Tietjens then, Elgar’s music symbolizes the pompous, often hypocritical social expectations that compromise the hopes and glories of noble individualists, such as himself and Valentine.

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After the advent of the war, Tietjens expands his critique of British hypocrisy and inflexibility via Elgar to condemn the British army’s arrogantly premature focus on commemorations rather than on changing tactics to win battles that were going astoundingly awry. Tietjens recalls how “[a]t the beginning of the war” he went to “the War Office” and found a man “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.” All this is ironically “symbolical,” Tietjens insists, because after World War I there will be “[n]o more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades” (Ford 2012: 330). The incompetence and horror of World War I has undermined the hubristic martial pageantry associated with Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches, including “Land of Hope and Glory,” which, as Richards has argued, were “inspired by that nineteenth-century phenomenon, the romance of war” (2001: 58). The War Office’s failure to prepare for modern warfare and the consequential massive destruction, Tietjens indicates, should puncture the inflated mythic glory of British military pomp. This sustained treatment of Elgar, we might note, as an entrenched representative of a corrupt yet intractable British institution is somewhat unfair. As Hughes and Stradling have argued, Elgar himself struggled to fit in to both social and musical British establishments, in part because of his lower-middleclass shop-keeping background and in part because of his sustained interest in cosmopolitan musical styles that the genteel leaders of the English Musical Renaissance, headed by H. H. Parry and Charles Stanford, “distrusted and wished to reform” (2001: 61). Elgar, Stradling and Hughes explain, “saw the progressive Wagner-Strauss school as the signpost to the future, and passionately believed that he could give a lead towards a native version. Connected to this was his feeling that the English Renaissance was creatively moribund and dominated by the London conservatoires and their satellite institutions, to an extent that excluded and asphyxiated other potentialities” (74). Parry and Stanford actually wrote some quite good music, but Elgar’s struggles with the Renaissance figureheads, his Roman Catholicism, and sneers at his vulgar shop-keeping background, despite his being knighted in 1904, should preclude linking Elgar to an unquestioning adherence to British traditions. To this we might add that while Elgar did write patriotic music during the war, such as that for Carillon (1914) and the multi-movement Spirit of England (1917), the latter, as Andrew Neill observes, reveals Elgar’s lasting response to the war, which was “both angry and sad for the waste, horror and carnage that would destroy the life he knew. Although for ‘England,’ these pieces are for any country and its dead”



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(2001: 35). For Ford to harken back consistently to “Pomp and Circumstance” as a symbol of corrupt British institutions makes for a good literary device but it is a misrepresentation of Elgar’s patriotism. Nonetheless, Ford uses these critiques of Elgar to underscore, ironically, Tietjens’ longing to idealize an English peacefulness as a counter to Germany’s Wagnerian army. Hearing music near the front, Tietjens willfully imagines it to be by “Herrick and Purcell” although it is “perhaps a modern imitation. Good enough” (2012: 610). As Tietjens suspects and Ford implies, this music is not Henry Purcell’s (1659–95) but is Edward Purcell Cockram’s (1853–1932) “Passing By,” which uses lyrics reputed to be by Herrick.14 Disregarding his suspicions, Tietjens willfully thinks of this music as Purcell’s or Purcellian “enough” to evoke the seventeenth century, “[t]he only satisfactory age in England,” with its “quiet fields” (612). He uses this musical romance to combat his fear of “Nibelungen-like” German miners by considering the peaceful English music to be “[a]s efficient working beneath the soul as the picks of miners” (608, 610). Tietjens’ conflation of Purcell with Cockram, however, signals his self-delusion. Tietjens romanticizes Britain’s “quiet fields,” which England’s seventeenth-century civil wars, while scarcely as destructive as World War I, certainly disrupted. Analogously, he briefly idealizes a musical English sanctity as offsetting Germany’s operatic army near the front. Such virtuous musical self-indulgences, Ford suggests, are hard to escape. Yet, throughout Parade’s End, Ford criticizes both Germany and Britain for reinforcing unsustainable nationalistic mythologies of power and social righteousness through music. Looking back to look forward in Those Were the Days (1938), Osbert Sitwell uses Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier (1911) to highlight British delusions of social stability as Austria and Germany prepared for WWI and WWII. In “the summer of 1914,” Sitwell writes, “London” seemed “a ballroom” and the dance that “reigned supreme” was a “waltz from the Rosenkavalier, that mocking parody of the old order” (1938: 194, 196). Sitwell compares here pre-war gilded London to the aristocratic society of Der Rosenkavalier, which Strauss mocks as so focused on sensuality that it overlooks challenges to its social and political influence. In Der Rosenkavalier, however, these challenges are inchoate or occur offstage, which leaves Strauss’ aristocrats relatively secure in their collective supremacy, allowing them to ignore his subtly dissonant musical warnings. Intensifying Strauss’ themes, Sitwell has his “gilded youth” misinterpret the waltz accompanying their dancing as signifying that their world is rational, rhythmic, and predictable, but overtly reminds his readers that “[a]lready in Vienna, the home of the waltz, the plot was being prepared” by Austrian and German politicians for a European war

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(195–6). “Fragments of this music,” Sitwell reflects, “must have returned, in a few weeks time,” to former dancers “as they lay dying in dust or mud” (196). These dancers’ prior belief in the harmonious, waltz-like romance of life heightens the irrational horror of World War I. Sitwell, then, turns Strauss’ waltz into a tragic trope, which, much more explicitly than in Der Rosenkavalier, stresses the peril of blithely trusting ambiguous signs of stability. Sitwell, moreover, capitalizes on German music having been occasionally “under suspicion as a German agent” during World War I to impugn Austria, in collusion with Germany, as the home of both dangerous delusions of old-world grandeur and the modern political violence that so recently battered Europe (1977: 76). Sitwell also encapsulates here a shift in the 1930s to using German music to anticipate World War II. As his novel concludes, his middle-aged heroine imagines hearing “the opening phrases of the Rosenkavalier Waltz” while she watches a younger generation dancing to modern music. She can “almost see” acquaintances from her youth “dancing again, though nearly all the men had been dead for two decades” (1938: 544). Sitwell revisits at the end of his novel the musical excitement before the storm of World War I to draw together the events of 1914 and those of his present day, 1938, which witnessed a sharp escalation of political violence in Germany and Italy. These repeated references to Strauss’s mocking waltz anticipate Britain hurtling again towards war as its distracted gilded youth dance on, uncritically repeating the past as they overlook the increasing aggression of Hitler and European fascism. The recursive structure of the novel, with its cyclical references to Strauss’ waltz and the returning dance scenes, draws attention to what Sitwell considered the unfortunately recurring thematic circumstances that would bring about a repetition of World War I. Isherwood, Burdekin, and Waugh likewise revisit representations of Germany’s powerful musical traditions to characterize its re-emergence as a threat to Europe in the 1930s. They offer multivalent perspectives of musical culture to indicate how German society’s vaunted discipline could support both a valuable cosmopolitan art and submission to a violent nationalism that debilitates such art. These authors use music to explore how a nation with cosmopolitan traditions, refined by discipline and regimented practice, could fall prey to the anti-cosmopolitan, authoritarian Nazis. Music becomes a means to differentiate between European German and Nazi German cultures while presenting them as closely connected. Consequently, these writers join Forster, Woolf, and myriad others, as we will see, to resist theories of an almost inherently violent German culture, such as those advocated by Robert Vansittart and



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others.15 Isherwood, Burdekin, and Waugh, indeed, emphasize how Nazism perverts a German valorization of meticulousness and self-control by distorting these virtues into aesthetic oppression, aggressive nationalism, and a toleration of violence. In Goodbye to Berlin (1939), for instance, Isherwood portrays an intensely disciplined German musicality to suggest how regimented social conventions could lead even cultured Germans to tolerate Nazism. Attending a Berlin “concert of Mozart concertos” with Natalia Landauer, Isherwood’s narrator emphasizes how the audience’s “taut, devotional enthusiasm” and their “blind, half-frowning, listening heads” “oppressed” him “like a headache” (1954: 147). Intensifying the musical concentration Forster attributed to Mosebach and Liesecke, Isherwood highlights the cruel potential of German discipline by reporting that this audience’s focus “oppresse[s]” his easy-going British narrator. He broadens the significance of this oppressive discipline by placing it within the “Landauers” section of Goodbye, which examines how a cultured Jewish family lives within an increasingly Nazi-controlled Germany. This section begins by recounting “[o]ne night in October 1930, about a month after the Elections,” which constituted a momentous Nazi victory, when “Nazi roughs” “manhandled” Jewish-looking individuals and vandalized “Jewish shops. The incident was not, in itself, very remarkable,” the narrator observes (139). Isherwood, however, implies a marked connection between the general German public’s orderly disregard of Nazi viciousness and the concert audience, which “blind[ly]” prepares both for the music and for the ascendant Nazis who will persecute some of its members, such as Natalia. Isherwood uses this concert, then, to indicate how a general acquiescence to regimentation could allow a disciplined German culture, to which Natalia belongs, to decay into an authoritarian Nazism, which threatens Natalia and European cosmopolitanism.16 Isherwood’s novel, while published in 1939, recounts changes in Germany occurring in the early 1930s, before Hitler had completely consolidated his rule. In 1937, Burdekin published her dystopian Swastika Night, which takes into account and critiques the increasing prevalence of German propaganda that promoted the almost supernatural and omnipotent power of Nazism after Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Ian Kershaw has shown how from around 1933 and well into the early 1940s, Hitler’s supporters promoted the “Führer myth,” which extolled the Chancellor as the tireless, practically god-like savior of the German people (1987: 72). This myth, Kershaw writes, was “devised as an integrating force by a regime acutely aware of the need to manufacture consensus” among both ardent Nazi supporters and the German people more

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generally (3). Benefiting from the futuristic and theoretical perspective of the dystopian genre, in Swastika Night Burdekin conjectures the long-term consequences should this propaganda be successfully promulgated and should Germany actually conquer all of Europe and integrate both the German people and their colonized nations under an ideology of Nazi superiority. To investigate how this integrative ideology might work, Burdekin frequently turns to Nazi engagements with musical culture. She portrays the Nazis as having appropriated Germany’s musical discipline to mythologize their superiority and to justify to themselves and to others the Nazi Party’s domination of Europe for some “seven hundred years” (1985: 78). By denying foreign or non-Nazi influences on German music, Burdekin’s Nazis demoralize other nations and aggrandize the omnipotence of Nazism. Alfred, for instance, a member of the enslaved British proletariat, considers himself “not a musical man,” but he is “very fond of music” and finds it hard sometimes not to have a genuine inferiority feeling when he heard a Bach chorale or cantata perfectly rendered by the Nazi choir in the great barracks church in Salisbury. The Germans had such astonishing musical ability. … 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)

Alfred’s conflation of these composers with contemporary Germans in the barracks church reflects the Nazis’ arrogation of pre-Nazi cosmopolitan music for their nationalistic mythology, which promotes a deified Hitler and the holy bloodlines of the German military caste. Alfred’s sense of “inferiority,” furthermore, inspired by the Nazis singing “perfectly” in Salisbury, once home to a magnificent English cathedral, demonstrates the Nazis’ musical, psychological, religious, and physical domination of Britain and British culture. The Nazis’ seeming omnipotence deteriorates for Alfred, however, when he discovers that they have actually undermined German musicality. Burdekin, whether intentionally or not, publicizes in English what Erik Levi and Michael Kater have identified as German audiences’, administrators’, and even several pro-Nazi critics’ apparent disinterest in a significant amount of the lackluster serious music associated with Nazism.17 Burdekin intensifies the banality of Nazi “art” music by having Friedrich von Hess, a hereditary high-ranking Nazi official, confess to Alfred that Germans can no longer compose good music: “No one has written anything for hundreds of years, except the most flagrant hash-ups and plagiarisms” (1985: 120). Contemporary Germans have “technical



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skill and knowledge,” but under the Nazis’ rigid authoritarianism and extreme nationalism German creativity has become “stagnant” (121). Contemporary performances, moreover, falter due to the Nazis’ ban on foreign instruments, such as Christian whistles. Most “Germans despise the Christians,” whom they consider international outcasts, and refuse to use Christian instruments (195). Yet, the “bird-music” from Wagner’s Siegfried, von Hess insists, “should always be played on Christian whistles,” because it does “not fit with the more sophisticated instruments” produced by the Nazis (145). Von Hess asserts the cosmopolitanism of Siegfried by arguing that even Germans cannot perform it properly without the international outcasts’ whistles. To over-exaggerate a Wagnerian German nationalism, as the actual Nazis did, debilitates Wagner’s music.18 Through von Hess, then, Burdekin argues that the cosmopolitan elements of Wagner’s music contest Nazi claims to Germany’s pre-Nazi art and the alleged benefits of oppressive, anti-cosmopolitan Nazi regulations. Music, accordingly, provides a catalyst for defying Nazism within the novel. Nazi laws forbid trading with Christians, but when von Hess orders his servants to collect Christian whistles for him, they “forgive” him this infraction because of his rank and because they are “musical men themselves” (Burdekin 1985: 145). This appreciation for good music inspires commercial and ideological exchanges that challenge the mythology of Nazi superiority and, consequently, other aspects of the Nazis’ seeming omnipotence. Alfred had believed that “some, both individuals and races, have special abilities. The Germans have musical ability, for instance. And martial ability” (106). If the Nazi Germans’ musicality can weaken, Alfred realizes, their militarism may weaken, too. Correspondingly, if the Christians have untapped musical abilities, they may have new ways of combating the Nazis. Alfred, then, inspired by von Hess’ confessions, encourages the British to cooperate with the Christians to overthrow the Nazi tyranny and Burdekin concludes by implying that this cosmopolitan effort will eventually defeat Nazism. Consequently, Burdekin fashions Alfred into a new Alfred the Great who worked to unify Britain against foreign invaders and to popularize Christianity and who was eulogized for posterity by his first biographer in 893, as Richard Abels has argued, as an idealized “Christian warrior-king” (1998: 2). Unlike his namesake, however, Burdekin’s Alfred eschews military tactics even as he finds in Christianity, art, and non-violence a means to challenge Britain’s newest invader, the Nazis. Burdekin anticipates, therefore, through Alfred, not just another European war, but its conclusion, which is advanced, in part, by a musical cosmopolitanism. In Put Out More Flags (1942), Waugh similarly anticipates the Nazis’ fall by using a Wagnerian mythology to portray Nazi perversions of German culture as

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unsustainable. When Ambrose Silk describes his interwar, provincial German lover Hans “joining the Brown Shirts,” he recalls that Hans was “bemused in a twilight where the demagogues and party hacks loomed and glittered like Wagnerian heroes” (2002: 240). Ambrose equates the Nazi leaders and Stormtroopers, who bewitch Hans and drive himself, “a cosmopolitan, Jewish pansy,” from Germany, to Wagner’s greedy, violent protagonists of The Twilight of the Gods (87). As Isherwood uses the Enlightenment-era Mozart to imply that disciplined middleclass Germans will endure, “half-frowning[ly],” the Nazi regime, Waugh uses Wagner’s more populist musical folklore to characterize how “provincial petitbourgeois youth,” who are “uncritical of direct authority,” succumb to the Nazis’ façade of mythic power (239). Ambrose implies, however, that even Hans can only remain “full of his illusions” regarding Nazism for so long (246). Waugh predicts, then, the Nazis’ demise by comparing them to Wagner’s heroes and gods who self-destruct, unable to sustain their selfish regimes, at the end of Twilight.19 While the more realistic styles of Isherwood and Sitwell prevented such (at the time) seemingly escapist fantasies regarding the Nazis’ demise, Burdekin and Waugh’s mythological inflations predict the Nazis’ downfall by portraying them, like Ford’s German “Hero,” as too histrionic and too rigidly nationalistic to last.

“suddenly there was no more music”: Interruptions of classical musical cultures Burdekin, Isherwood, and, to a degree, Waugh depict Nazis appropriating German musical traditions, which then degenerate under their authoritarian xenophobia. Lawrence, Huxley, and Storm Jameson, meanwhile, portray political violence more directly interrupting or even silencing altogether a European classical musical culture. Referencing first Italian then German fascism, they suggest that these threats to cosmopolitan musicality signal threats to European liberalism and to intellectual and physical liberties. In Aaron’s Rod (1922), for instance, Lawrence depicts a bomb—likely planted by an “anarchist” angry at Italy’s intensifying fascism—destroying Aaron’s flute, symbolizing both the end of Aaron’s musical career and the deterioration of European liberalism (1988: 284). “With the breaking of the flute,” Aaron recognizes, “that which was slowly breaking had finally shattered. … The bomb had settled it and everything” (288). What has “shattered,” Lawrence implies a bit prematurely, are the social structures that enabled Aaron to escape his working-class job, to travel, and to interact with people outside his socio-economic class through music.



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Aaron recognizes, if somewhat ambivalently, Europe’s growing preference for political violence over art and cultural stability. Lawrence suggests, further, that what happens on a widespread political level happens on a personal level, too. The destruction of his flute encourages Aaron to abandon his individual liberty to submit to the stronger personality of Rawdon Lilly. As a musician Aaron was relatively independent; but, rather than purchase another flute and maintain his independence, Aaron turns to Lilly, who declares that the “destiny” of most people “is slavery.” This “slavery,” Lilly argues, should initially be “voluntary” then subsequently enforced by a “[p]ermanent and very efficacious power,” even a “military power” (1988: 281–2). Aaron feels “a thread of destiny attaching him to Lilly” and considers that if he must “yield his wilful independence, and give himself, then he would rather give himself to the little, individual man,” to Lilly (288, 290). In this “shattered” Europe, Lawrence suggests, relatively approvingly, intellectual art will not save weak men who long to submit to strong leaders. Huxley concurrently and less sympathetically argued that politics were disrupting Italy’s valuable musical traditions. In 1922 he reported that “everywhere in Italy the music of the streets” had become “political music,” most of which supported the “Fascisti,” and he lamented that this “deplorable stuff ” had replaced “that rich and varied popular music” that had “gladdened Dr. Burney,” the famous English musicologist, in his eighteenth-century Italian travels (2013: 132).20 To explain this musical decline, Huxley observed that “energies” previously “devoted to painting pictures and composing and executing music are now devoted to politics and business and engineering” (132–3). These new devotions, particularly politics, superseded aesthetic pursuits, which facilitated an increase in violence. To illustrate this, Huxley recalled an altercation in Venice among a “Socialist,” “Fascisti,” and “carabiniere” that caused a crowd “to make patriotic demonstrations … rendering almost completely inaudible the ‘Tancredi’ of Rossini” being performed by a band nearby.21 Huxley commented that the Venetians’ preference for “making a demonstration in favour of the House of Savoy to listening to a masterpiece” by Rossini was “a melancholy and deplorable thing. But like the Fascist tune, it is symptomatic” (133). Huxley outlines an intensifying cycle of cultural decay: political songs, primarily the “Fascist tune,” certainly “Giovinezza,” displace Italy’s relatively peaceful aesthetic heritage, which encourages further political violence and aesthetic decay.22 In his story “Young Archimedes” (1924), Huxley links still more explicitly the violent stimulations of popular music and fascism, which he perceived as

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supplanting Italy’s intellectual musicality. He observes again that “[t]he times when Dr. Burney could tour through Italy, listening to an unending succession of new operas, symphonies, quartets, cantatas, are gone” (274). Italy’s refined musical traditions have been replaced by decadent late-nineteenth-century operas, such as Pagliacci (1892), which portrays the passionate violence of lower-class characters, and the bombastic “Fascists’ song,” which celebrates youth, labor, and fascism (1924: 275). Consequently, when Huxley’s British narrator plays Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) for an Italian farmer, the farmer regrets that “[i]t’s not like Pagliacci,” that it is “[n]ot palpitating,” like more modern music, which he prefers.23 Arguing for the mutual ascendency of violently exciting music and politics, Huxley’s narrator notes that “palpitating” is a word found recently “in every Italian political speech and patriotic leading article.” He remarks further that “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” (1924: 277). Unfortunately, Huxley contends, society’s increasing preference for the “inferior” passions “palpitating” reciprocally between popular music and authoritarian politics has disrupted the superior intellectualism and spiritual peace of older Italian music, a disruption which leads, in turn, to a more violent society. Huxley uses “Young Archimedes” to pinpoint a violent, unintellectual shift in British culture, too. As the narrator listens to the non-palpitating “slow movement of Bach’s Concerto in D Minor for two violins,” the “coolest and clearest of all draughts,” his “bored” son interrupts to ask for “soldiers. Like in London,” as “[h]e remembered the rag-time and the jolly marches” he had heard in Britain (1924: 278–9). To Bach’s “exacting intellectual logic,” his son prefers “tunes” to which he can go “stamping round … pretending that he was a whole regiment of soldiers” (278). Huxley indicates that in British as in Italian culture an immature militarism threatens to trample the calm pleasures of a more mature musical contemplation, as the force of a regiment overwhelms the individual intellectual. Huxley intensifies his portrayal of threats to Britain’s intellectualism in Point Counter Point (1928) by portraying British fascists violently interrupting contemplative chamber music. While Maurice Spandrell plays for Mark and Mary Rampion a recording of the third movement of Beethoven’s Op. 132, in which the “miraculous paradox of external life and eternal repose was musically realized,” men from the fascist Brotherhood of British Freemen arrive and shoot him (511). Spandrell had recently assassinated their leader and sent the group his address in repentance, knowing that they would retaliate. With Spandrell



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dying and the Rampions in shock, no one attends the record until “suddenly there was no more music; only the scratching of the needle on the revolving disc” (512). Under the violent influence of British fascism and Spandrell’s reaction against it, Huxley’s contemplative musical ideal disintegrates into meaningless discord. In her In the Second Year (1936), Storm Jameson amplifies Huxley’s trope by imagining a British fascist party consolidating its power through dismantling England’s cosmopolitan culture. In a post-1918 England, Frank Hillier, an echo of Hitler, takes power with his “National State Party” and to “seal” his “national uprising” he orders an “entirely English season” at the Covent Garden Opera House (55, 75). To music lovers this symbolizes a distressingly narrow-minded aesthetic. Even an English soprano, who will benefit professionally from this season, complains that “it is a riot of Wallace and Balfe” whose music cannot compare to that of more canonical composers (75). Implicitly, this season signals the intellectual dishonesty that is almost unavoidable when promoting an “entirely” nationalistic music, as William Wallace and Michael Balfe were both born in Ireland. Explicitly, to Jameson’s narrator, the Imperialistic and Elgarian “pomp and circumstance” of “enshrining” musical “trivialit[ies]” because of their alleged nationality is “a pinch of bitter dust,” as this restricted aesthetic represents political tyranny (113). Art in England, as a music critic laments, is “squeezed between the police and the Government” (122). Consequently, this “season” publically celebrates cultural constraints akin to those motivating the mysterious “Training Camps” through which Hillier’s National State Party forcibly indoctrinates liberal political dissidents (26). Like Lawrence and Huxley, then, Jameson argues that sudden attempts to silence cosmopolitan art often stem from political violence. These authors, moreover, join Isherwood, Burdekin, and Waugh in suggesting that the rejection of a cosmopolitan aesthetic often occurs in conjunction with the decline of intellectual and physical liberties.

The “International Language”: Britain’s cosmopolitan musical culture Lawrence, Huxley, and Jameson depict political violence, restraints on intellectual liberalism, and fascism, in particular, as preventing British characters from pursuing a musical cosmopolitanism. Several interwar authors, however, showed British characters successfully pursuing just such musical goals and

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thereby subverting political violence, promoting intellectual liberties, and maintaining some sympathy between Britain and Germany. This is a latenineteenth-century trend that maintained its trajectory throughout an influential strand of writing in the 1920s and 1930s, thereby challenging any overly rigid sense of a cultural break symbolized by the First World War.24 Shaw in his critical writing and Sassoon and Woolf in their fiction, for instance, spanning the 1920s and 1930s, consistently refer to German music to remind British society of its shared aesthetic heritage with Germany. They reference Beethoven and Mozart to undermine narrow-minded British animosities towards Germans and to emphasize a common international culture that benefits from congenial interactions. Even Ford and Burdekin, who use Elgarian marches and Wagnerian opera to outline national rivalries, imagine an international community fruitfully sharing Handel and Bach. These authors remind their readers that German composers have helped to form the aesthetic and intellectual identity of British and even of European culture. As the Nazis gained power, moreover, Burdekin and Woolf re-asserted a shared European musicality to remind their readers of a European Germany, distinguishable from Nazism, with which peace would be possible. Several British representations of music, then, written between 1919 and 1945, but drawing on Victorian ideals, emphasize a European musical heritage to promote socio-cultural, if not political, sympathies between Britain and Germany and to work for a peace that would benefit Europe. Shaw provides an early interwar example of this cosmopolitanism in his 1919 “Preface” for Heartbreak House, wherein he recalls Britain’s debt to German composers to undermine myopic nationalistic sentiments. “To the truly civilized man,” he argues, “to the good European, the slaughter of the German youth was as disastrous as the slaughter of the English.” “German losses,” he insists, “were our losses as well. Imagine exulting in the death of Beethoven because Bill Sikes dealt him his death blow!” (1963: 465). Beethoven’s loss, Shaw argues, would have harmed Britain’s culture as much as Germany’s, while the triumph of the British Sikes, Charles Dickens’ embodiment of evil, would benefit no one. The destruction of German and British soldiers, moreover, Shaw implies, certainly caused the death of numerous present-day artists and, consequently, Europe’s aesthetic impoverishment. A “truly civilized” post-war society, Shaw suggests, should promote the peaceful maintenance of a shared European culture rather than pursue a narrow-minded, destructive nationalism. Ford and Sassoon intensify Shaw’s argument by asserting the value of cosmopolitan musical sympathies in retrospective novels set during World War I. They depict these musical sympathies promoting peace despite ongoing hostilities.



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Ford, as we saw, uses Elgar and Wagner to critique the nationalistic ideals often linked to these composers. He uses Handel, however, who was born in Saxony and became a naturalized Englishman in 1727, to provide an eminent example of Britain benefiting from German culture.25 Walking near the front, Tietjens “good-humouredly” compares Anglicanism to an English country estate, “the atmosphere” of which is like “the interior of Winchester Cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been finished, a perpetual Sunday” (2012: 394). Unlike the passages of the novel pertaining to Wagner or Elgar, Ford’s language here is calm, un-ironic, and almost pastoral as Tietjens imagines a saner world wherein English and German cultures harmonize in perpetual peace. Sassoon analogously uses German music in The Memoirs of George Sherston (1928–36) to evoke wartime longings for a peacefully cosmopolitan England. In his wartime poem “Dead Musicians,” Sassoon raises the painfully failed promises of a harmonious cosmopolitanism evoked by “Beethoven, Bach, [and] Mozart,” writing “[f]or God’s sake stop that gramophone” (1918: 1.1, 3.11). Yet in retrospection, distanced somewhat from the horror of the violence, Sassoon revives the wartime solace and vitality of German music. Sherston’s engagements with a variety of German composers provide a consistent trope that creates structural and thematic links across the three volumes of the Memoirs, between England and the warzone in France, and between British and German culture. In 1915, while in his “company mess at Montagne,” Sherston wishes he could “hear a Handel violin sonata,” particularly one “Kreisler had played” when Sherston had heard him in London (Sassoon 1937: 1.343, 344). Sherston’s nostalgia for the Austrian violinist’s pre-war performance counters the nationalistic animosities of their respective nations by reaffirming the benefits of international cooperation. His nostalgia is particularly pointed because, as British papers reported, Kreisler had fought for Austria in 1914.26 Later, on leave in Liverpool in 1916, Sherston again finds respite from the war in German music by enjoying a performance of “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony” (2.146). These musical experiences repeatedly recall British sympathies with German culture to challenge a narrow-minded xenophobic hatred between the combatant nations. Rather than death or impotence, Handel, Kreisler, Beethoven, and even the gramophone, here a modern disseminator of art, bring comfort and recall the humanity of European civilization. Sassoon, however, acknowledges the limitations of Sherston’s musical respites. After getting wounded in 1917, Sherston recuperates at an English country house, where he hears an officer playing “Gluck and Handel on the piano. Nothing,” Sherston reflects, “could have been more tranquil and harmonious

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than my first evening at Nutwood Manor” (1937: 2.250). This tranquility is nonetheless fragile, for that night “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 France must be waiting to go over the top” of their trench into battle (250–1). Juxtaposing these reflections in quick succession, Sassoon depicts how German music in England could induce a “harmonious” atmosphere, even for wounded combatants, but underscores that this harmony fails to counteract unreservedly contemporaneous international atrocities. Even so, Sassoon suggests that British civilians would be less likely to urge hostilities between Britain and Germany if only they would recall their admiration for German culture. Sherston, like Sassoon, comes to believe that the “callous complacency” with which non-combatants regarded soldiers’ “agonies” caused, in part, the unnecessary continuation of the war (1937: 2.298, Sassoon’s italics). Sassoon illustrates this by having Sherston overhear a “well-dressed” woman in an Edinburgh hotel condemn pacifists, who “were worse than the Germans,” and political critics of Britain’s wartime government, whom she hopes might “be strung up to the nearest lamppost by the soldiers they are now trying to betray.” Sassoon stresses the callousness of this well-off, anti-German civilian criticizing efforts to stop the war, which would allow soldiers from both sides to enjoy the peace she does. He heightens, furthermore, the irony of her hypocrisy by having her sing along with an “insouciant tra-la-la” as “[t]he hotel musicians” play “Mendelssohn’s (German) ‘Spring Song’ ” (3.27). As soldiers are dying, this woman carelessly enjoys “German” music by the composer who next to Handel best symbolizes the mingling of German and British cultures.27 The pleasures gained from such valuable cultural exchanges, Sassoon implies, should encourage this woman and those who agree with her to renounce their hypocritical jingoism, which betrays both English and German societies’ alike by facilitating the continuation of hostilities. Sassoon, finally, buttresses a peaceful musical cosmopolitanism by linking it to Pater’s broadminded musical humanism, which I examine in Chapter 1. Visiting the “Paterish” Father Rosary in Scotland, Sherston overtly recalls Pater’s Neo-Platonic argument from The Renaissance that “the essence of humanism” is the “belief ” that whatever has “interested living men and women” maintains its “vitality” across cultures and time (1937: 3.50–1). Rosary engages this intellectually expansive humanism by leading Sherston “from uncomfortable controversies by playing some classical and nobly serious [piano] pieces” by “Italian masters” (53). This music recontextualizes, if it cannot erase, political “controversies” by evoking enduring cross-cultural interests. Recalling these



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shared vital traditions, Europe’s international quarrels scarcely warrant so much death and war. Sassoon reiterates this argument when Sherston returns to France and laments how “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, Sassoon’s ellipses). A musical cosmopolitanism offers no panacea for peace. But Sassoon suggests, if the combatants could remember their shared cultural heritage then they might rethink their differences and prefer to safeguard their lives, their intellects, and a “Heaven[ly]” international harmony rather than pursue their callously ill-defined war goals. While Ford and Sassoon emphasize music promoting peace during war, Woolf envisions a musical rejuvenation of post-WWI Britain in “String Quartet,” from Monday or Tuesday (1921). In the midst of individuals gathering for a chamber recital, someone announces that “Regent Street is up, and the Treaty signed” (2003: 41). The reference to Regent Street evokes what Harold Clunn reported to be the beginning in 1920 of renovations to one of London’s commercial districts, a sign of Britain’s post-World War I economic revitalization, while reference to the “Treaty” finally being signed indicates Woolf ’s sense that at least official moves were being made towards stabilizing European politics through the Treaty of Versailles.28 “Still,” Woolf has someone insist, “the war made a break” and people are “seeking something” (41, 42). These people seek to heal Europe’s still broken culture. A “Mozart” string quartet, Woolf proposes, can help with these reconciliations (43). At Woolf ’s concert, Mozart’s German music recalls “the waters of the Rhone,” a French and Swiss river, in a British room, inspiring “sorrow” and “joy” to grow “inextricably commingled” (42, 43). This cosmopolitan musical mingling promises that Europe’s culture will heal as joy returns to temper an enduring pain. Like Sassoon then, Woolf rejects naïve optimism but draws on a Paterian Neo-Platonism to portray music offering a balanced opposition to excessively nationalist ideologies. During World War I, as Emma Sutton has argued, Woolf seemed repelled by overtly “nationalist music and appropriations of music,” even as after the war, in Mrs. Dalloway, she would explore “the difficulties of sustaining that cherished nineteenth-century belief in a shared Northern European musical, aesthetic and ethnic identity in the aftermath of war” (Sutton 2013: 72, 76). Despite these difficulties, in “String Quartet,” Woolf reasserts this nineteenthcentury shared musical identity with an ascetic nod toward its abstract idealism. Warning that “the worst of music” is the “silly dreams” it inspires, she cautiously

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imagines a Mozart quartet conjuring a Platonically idealized city (2003: 44). This immaterial city consists of “neither stone nor marble,” but “hangs enduring”; remaining free from political divisions, it has no “flag,” is “auspicious to none,” yet is “resplendent” and “severe” (45). Resplendently undamaged by war, Woolf ’s musical city, her musical Platonic Republic, symbolizes a severely neutral meeting ground. This musical city cannot stop war, and therefore offers no false joy, but it can counteract excessive nationalism by representing an indestructible, if because primarily conceptual, international community. Despite the social, political, and aesthetic vicissitudes of the 1920s and 1930s, in Between the Acts (written 1938–41) Woolf reemphasizes how music can function as a symbol of national and international unity. “Music,” an audience decides, “makes us see the hidden, join the broken” (1969: 120). Highlighting the cosmopolitanism of this “join[ing],” this audience listens together to music that might be by “Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart” or be “merely a traditional tune” such as “Home Sweet Home” or “Rule Britannia,” the latter of which Beethoven, Handel, and Wagner each borrowed (188).29 The “hidden” subtleties of these diverse musical influences “join” into a recognizably cosmopolitan musicality. This music, then, makes the “distracted united,” uniting audience members and, more symbolically, nations distracted from their common humanity and shared interests. It conjures “warriors straining asunder” getting “recalled from the edge of appalling crevasses; they crashed; solved; united” (189). This cadenced ending symbolizes both a musical resolution, in the “unit[ing]” of a final chord, and an anticipated resolution to the discord of World War II, as Britain and Germany’s shared musical culture implies the potential for peace. In Swastika Night, Burdekin suggests that Bach, in particular, could provide a peaceful humanist rallying point for ending war. Still more than Wagner, whom von Hess considers cosmopolitan but whom Alfred considers especially German, Bach represents a non-violent universal culture. Burdekin’s Nazis claim Bach as their compatriot, but Alfred believes him to be “great in a way no man of action was great … a kind of peak civilisation in general,” as much British as German (1985: 99). Bach affirms Alfred’s belief that a “rebellion” against the Nazis “must be spiritual, out of the soul. The same place where Bach got his music from” (100). Alfred increasingly rejects the Nazis, who betray Bach’s cosmopolitanism, as he seeks to establish a spiritual Europe opposed to violence and terror. Burdekin, like Ford, then, recognizes that nationalistic connotations may attach to certain composers, such as Wagner or Elgar, through extra-musical conventions; yet, as Ford with Handel, she emphasizes the cosmopolitanism associated with Bach to promote peace in Europe. Burdekin thereby



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joins Ford, Sassoon, and Woolf to advance Forster’s hope, presented more cautiously almost three decades earlier in Howards End, that a shared European musical culture, even one stemming from Germany, might unite various nationalities into a harmonious, although not homogenous, community. A common musical culture, these authors suggest, will not end war, but it can remind us how Europe benefits from peaceful international exchanges.

The “cellist is crucified over his instrument”: Doubting the musical stopgap Not everyone agreed, however, that music inspires effectively peaceful cultural exchanges. W. H. Auden, as we saw in Chapter 4, often associates music with seductive coerciveness in his early poetry. In his plays, written circa 1928–38, often in collaboration with Isherwood, he similarly presents music as a seductive but ultimately ineffective means to encourage harmony between opposing factions. In his critique of these plays, David Izzo notes the influence of Auden’s quest for a “mystical meaning” that could lead to a “vision of transcendent brotherly love,” Auden’s vision of “agape.” In the Paterian tradition evolved through Woolf and Burdekin, music aids in the formation of this transcendent vision. As Izzo notes, however, in the 1930s for Auden, it is a politically inflected metaphysical self-understanding that leads towards a loving “inner peace,” not longstanding aesthetic traditions (2001: 120). In these plays, indeed, violence inevitably perverts the harmonious promises of music. These aesthetic promises, Auden and Isherwood suggest, are persistently proven to be empty. In Paid on Both Sides (1928), for instance, Auden presents a parable of a violent world, wherein the Nower and the Shaw clans perpetuate a cycle of aggression momentarily abated by the musical engagement of John Nower to Anne Shaw. In their courtship the two perform “duets” that are full of “quavers” (Auden and Isherwood 1988: 8). These “duets” represent their union and the joining of feuding houses, but the pun on “quavers,” alluding to eighth notes and to vibrations, suggests the short, tremulous future of the families’ concord. Echoing the sacrificial spring imagery in Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913), Auden imagines the social harmony between the families’ younger generations succumbing to a violently “insolent new spring” (9). Indeed, the Shaw matriarch sacrifices the families’ peace to their feud by coercing a Shaw to kill a Nower at the wedding, causing the

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Nowers to retaliate. The “duet” briefly unites the families, but its harmony cannot withstand their history of violence. Auden and Isherwood extend this theme in The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935) by depicting international elites provisionally mollifying their tyranny with music. Visiting Ostnia, a foil for Britain, Alan Norman witnesses its King executing several socialists. To palliate his violence the King conducts the executions as his choir performs a Requiem Mass, excluding the Day of Wrath sequence, for he had heard “complaints” during a previous execution that it was excessively “gruesome,” and he is especially concerned “not to hurt anybody’s feelings” (1988: 213). The King relies on a pseudo-religious musical quietism to soothe the conscience of his ruling class and the sorrows of mourners by evoking peace after death and by covering over gunshots. The playwrights imply, moreover, that the King adapts here British strategies by having him fondly recall, directly following the executions, music “in King’s Chapel,” probably at Cambridge, and other British musical events (216). Ostnia’s King, the playwrights suggest, simply amplifies British governing techniques, which they soon show in their native setting. Sir William Spurgeon and his staff operate on a poor but adventurous villager while singing with the “Flavour of Bach” in an orderly “4-part harmony” (249). This medical contingent represents Britain’s ruling class, which, to avoid tyrannous executions, tries to control the body politic in a relatively harmonious, allegedly helpful fashion. Jarring notes nonetheless disrupt both the King’s and Spurgeon’s mellifluous social dominance. One Ostnian mourner yells “Murderers!!” after the musical execution, before being swiftly “removed,” and Spurgeon loses control of his operating room when the “lights go out,” causing an intruder to mistake certain chemicals, which leads his patient to die (215, 250). The harmonious order enforced by international ruling classes, Auden and Isherwood insist, cannot entirely resist discord. Anticipating later critiques of Nazism, Auden and Isherwood suggest that these international elite sacrifice the humanistic cosmopolitanism of music by using it to obscure and thereby to assist political and economic injustices in their own nations. Across Europe, the playwrights report, concert halls are rife with “music,” as the “pianist” pounds his piano and the “cellist is crucified over his instrument” with the consequence that “the ejaculations of the sentinels” and the laments of “the most poor” go unheard (1988: 241). These ruling elite prolong a temporary peace by using pleasurable music to drown out ill-fated warnings by social commentators and the unhappiness of political and socio-economic outcasts. Violence, Auden and Isherwood suggest, nonetheless remains imminent and, unlike Burdekin or Woolf, the playwrights offer no potential for a useful aesthetic aid to peace.



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Auden and Isherwood intensify this pessimism in On the Frontier (1937–8) by satirizing hopes that music might inspire political harmonies between antagonistic European nations. When the Westland “Leader,” modeled on Hitler’s role as German führer, succumbs to his neurotic “suffering” for alleged injustices to his homeland, Valerian calms his outbursts by playing recordings of music such as Mendelssohn’s “War March of the Priests,” Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetic Symphony,” and Rameau’s “Tambourin” (1988: 371).30 The playwrights mock the Leader, and indirectly Hitler, as these pieces, save the Tchaikovsky, are short and would not overtax his limited intelligence. The Tchaikovsky and the Mendelssohn, moreover, carry associations that the Leader and Hitler would have despised. The Pathetic recalls same-sex desire, as well as the Leader’s own “pathetic,” in the sense of contemptible, nature, while the March from Mendelssohn’s opera Athalia accompanies Jewish priests marching to overthrow a tyrant analogous to Hitler himself.31 The Leader’s ignorance regarding these connotations allows the music itself to calm him. Auden and Isherwood thus mock the Leader’s aesthetic obliviousness while raising the implication that dictators’ increased appreciation for art might calm their violent tendencies. Ultimately, however, the playwrights insist, the calming influence of art is fragile and unsustainable. When anonymous agents bomb a bridge between Westland and Ostnia, the Leader makes a furious, Hitler-like speech then arrives at Valerian’s house in turmoil. Valerian puts on Rameau’s Tambourin and the Leader’s “sobbing” diminishes. “Ah,” he says, “that music! How clearly I see the way” and he announces that the next day he will present Ostnia with “a pact of non-aggression” to protect the inviolability of their mutual “frontier for a thousand years!” an echo of Nazi predictions regarding the thousand-year timespan of the Third Reich (1988: 396). Yet, when the Ostnians pre-emptively attack Westland, the Leader abandons his musically inspired overtures of peace and declares that he will remove Ostnia from “the map of Europe” (397). As throughout all their plays, Auden and Isherwood portray music inspiring a temporary social harmony, but no lasting peace. At best, music offers transitory social or cultural connections, which hatred and violence all too easily override.

“Many thanks”: A popular cosmopolitanism Auden and Isherwood’s cynicism, however, was not the dominant mood of Britain’s classical musical culture. Rather, in imagining World War II, Burdekin and Woolf, among others, reflected how, for innumerable British music lovers,

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an attachment to German classical music could reinforce the peaceful cultural heritage shared between Britain and Germany, even while they were at war. Representing this shared musical heritage consequently helped many audiences to imagine peaceful elements of Germany that could survive Nazism and that were worth saving. As precedents, of course, these authors had works by Ford, Forster, Sassoon, and Shaw. More importantly, perhaps, they had Britain’s longstanding cosmopolitan musical culture. Even Oscar Schmitz, who in his The Land Without Music (1904) claimed that English composers had not produced much of significance, observed that “perhaps more foreign music is performed in England than in any other country” (1925: 26). Schmitz intends to slight British creativity here; but, in doing so, he acknowledges Britain’s embrace of a musical diversity. Indeed, musical amateurs from a variety of British subcultures, as previous chapters illustrate, had eagerly engaged German music, especially, since the late-nineteenth century. They continued to do so during World War I, the interwar period, and World War II, evidencing what might be called a popular cosmopolitanism.32 Significant sections of the British public, that is, continued to manifest widespread admiration for composers associated with Germany and, simultaneously, with a broader European culture. Many British amateurs perceived music by Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and even Wagner as a fundamental component of a culture shared and supported, harmoniously, by Britain, Germany, and Europe generally. WWI audiences indicate how this popular cosmopolitanism could transcend nationalistic animosities. While certain British factions, as Hynes has noted, waged a home-front “war against German music” and “German Kultur” generally, this combat resulted in “a diminishment of English culture,” which much of the British concert-going public refused to endorse in its entirety (1991: 74, 78). German instruments, musicians, and modern composers were frequently suppressed, often for economic reasons, but Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven remained popular despite their German associations.33 Even the notoriously anti-German Noel Pemberton-Billing argued that there was no point in “refusing to listen to the masterpieces of German composers who died years, and even centuries, before their nation even contemplated running amok” (“German Music.” Imperialist October 7, 1916: 5). British concert-goers’ continued attraction to canonical German composers suggests that while World War I undoubtedly represented and even facilitated cultural revolts and ruptures, Britain’s classical musical culture predominantly helped to bridge rather than to widen these. Concerts performed under the auspices of the



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Queen’s Hall, the London Philharmonic, and the South Place Society, among others, emphatically continued their pre-war traditions and the concert-going public supported them.34 During WWII, many British audiences supported a similar musical cosmopolitanism, finding in it some reprieve, however inadequate, from Nazi threats to Britain and some reminder of non-violent European sympathies. Letters written from 1940 to 1945 to the Radio Times provide a unique and an as-yet-unnoticed insight into how the British public found a peaceful, soothing, and even spiritual comfort in wartime broadcasts of German music.35 In 1940, for instance, M. F. Woollard wrote to offer “[m]any thanks” for a broadcast of Schumann’s piano concerto. Woollard remarked that amidst “the wailing” of air raid warnings “the remembrance of its calm beauty was a distinct comfort” (“What the Other Listener Thinks [W.O.L.T.]” July 12, 1940: 9). Soon after, Kathleen Hassard wrote to praise a broadcast of “Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata,” as Beethoven’s sonatas offer intimations of a “permanence” that would “live on after the dangerous toys of mankind have done their worst” (“W.O.L.T.” August 16, 1940: 8). At the present time, Joan Booth wrote, “many people want and need the healing power found in the music of such old masters as Handel and Haydn” (“W.O.L.T.” June 14, 1940: 9). In 1941, during the Blitz, Hedley Matthews wrote to praise a performance of Handel’s Messiah and noted how “soothing” and yet “thrilling” it was to hear “something both sane and human in these mad days (and nights) of bombs and guns” (“W.O.L.T.” January 3, 1941: 8). British listeners also enjoyed music by Finnish, French, Polish, and Russian composers, often performed in support of allied efforts. Yet, as the above suggests, it was German music that most consistently symbolized a shared, peaceful international spirit. Many of these listeners echoed the sentiment of Freda Tyler, who remarked that “[t]he spirit of music, new and old, is international” (“W.O.L.T.” December 18, 1942: 8). Most directly, then, German music broadcast into people’s homes could counter and was conceived as an offset to the discordant noises of war. More symbolically, hearing familiar and even occasionally more modern German composers recalled a calm, healing, rational, international humanism that would survive despite the irrational violence of war. The above letters were likely from civilians, yet service members also wrote to the Radio Times in support of broadcasting music by German composers. In 1940, for instance, Lt. Rice, M. E. C., R. E., B. E. F., wrote to ask the BBC to give troops “one decent concert a week—composers like Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart?” Noting the “trying and ‘nervy’ life” of being in the Armed Forces, even when not in imminent danger, Rice reported that “to a large number

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of people a concert would give real mental—almost spiritual—relaxation” (“W.O.L.T.” March 29, 1940: 9). Echoing many British listeners and servicemen, Rice found a traditional intellectual peace in Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart that transcended the degradation and anxiety of his present material, wartime existence and that reminded him of the decency of a more civilized and peaceful European life. Of course not everyone agreed that service members wanted classical music, German or otherwise, and many auditors characterized this aesthetic dispute in overtly socio-political terms. Complaining of Proms broadcasts, G. W. W., Petty Officer, H. M. Ships, argued that heavier classical compositions should be kept for civilian programming, “as the Services need entertainment … Forcing things that they don’t want on men is not democracy” (“W.O.L.T.” August 1, 1941: 8). V. N., a sailor writing from Portsmouth, nonetheless challenged this politically inflected claim by wondering if the previous writer ever contemplated “the tolerance of the, admitted, minority on the Lower Deck, forced to listen with patient resignation” to the “dance music” and light non-musical programming that comprised the majority of broadcasting aimed at the Armed Forces. V. N. lamented that this minority’s requests for “ ‘once a month’ opera, and ‘once a year’ Proms” should go disregarded, his imputations of aesthetic intolerance carrying subtle overtones of social intolerance due to an undemocratic tyranny of the majority (“W.O.L.T.” August 22, 1941: 8). J. A. F., a coder, sparked a similar exchange by arguing that “[e]minent music critics of the lower deck must have jive, jazz, and boogie-woogie. Classical composers are German, Sullivan, and Eric Coates” and are “tolerated,” “not enjoyed.” “Bach, Beethoven, Mozart,” he wrote, “must on no account be listened to. That is my experience in the Royal Navy” (“Letters.” February 9, 1945: 4). “Lofty” Dell, Petty Officer, Royal Navy, however, retorted that J. A. F. was a coder, “a very recent branch of the R. N.,” and that he himself had “spent well over ten years on the lower deck” and could claim “longer experience” with naval tastes. He called on this experience to defend the popularity of classical composers among some naval ratings. He records that he “learned to love the music of Tchaikovsky, Handel, Mozart, Gounod, etc., … through the eminent music critics of the lower deck, not of one of H. M. ships but of four.” He further reported that he was part of a “music circle” composed of “forty to fifty ratings,” which lasted “some three hours” during which they listened to music by “Bach, Beethoven, Grieg, etc.” (“Letters.” March 16, 1945: 4). These exchanges, which took place throughout the war, suggests that despite being a self-confessed minority, there were a substantial number of service members who wished to hear classical music,



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including music by German composers. This minority, it is worth noting, included even members of the “lower deck,” who were generally not of the more classically educated and affluent officer class. Moreover, the language that this significant minority used to defend and to promote their aesthetic tastes helps to reinforce a popular strand of classical musicality conceived, however indirectly, not only in terms of an enjoyable entertainment but also in terms of liberal cosmopolitan intellectual traditions evolved from the late-nineteenth century.36 The sentiments that these soldiers and sailors express in these letters do not quite equal Woolf ’s optimistic vision in Between the Acts of “warriors” getting “recalled from the edge of appalling crevasses,” until “they crashed; solved; united” or Burdekin’s hope for a musically inspired pacifism (1985: 189). Yet, as the above letters evidence through their references to music and “democracy” and “tolerance,” these real-life warriors were undoubtedly cognizant of the socio-political implications of listening to the wireless and to the music that was broadcast. It seems more than likely that many of these men, as V. N. implies with his liberal musical rhetoric, found a certain enjoyment in listening to German composers that filled them with a sense of their own intellectual and aesthetic sophistication and that also inspired in them a renewed interest in the political and social “tolerance” for which they were fighting. The BBC fostered this cosmopolitan musicality during the war in several ways. One “For the Schools” broadcast, for instance, promoted Beethoven and classical music “as a branch of world history, for such an art is not bounded by the language of any one country” (RT April 12, 1940: 21). While the BBC geared such musical school broadcasts toward children, they inevitably reached older audiences.37 In 1941, the BBC also promoted, briefly, the “V for Victory” campaign, which broadcast the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth (V) Symphony to signal democratic solidarity with nations under Nazi occupation and a hope for an Allied victory over the Nazis.38 Occasionally, the BBC even presented Wagner’s music, so often associated with German nationalism, as part of a liberal international culture. The Radio Times, for instance, remarked of an upcoming broadcast of Wagner’s “Rule Britannia Overture” that the composer had used the tune “as a symbol of liberty battling against tyranny,” which was “a slap for the Nazis who claim Wagner as a prophet of their ideology!” (“Both Sides of the Microphone.” March 26, 1943: 3). Here the BBC agreed with Philip Bailey, an enthusiastic listener who had suggested that Wagner’s music, too, was part of “an international language” and was valuable “to people of all nations” (“What the Wartime Listener Thinks.” February 16, 1940: 9). The BBC, then, facilitated a widespread public embrace of German music as a comforting,

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culturally unifying European tradition that countered Nazism and xenophobia. In this endeavor, the BBC found support in a significant, if incalculable, proportion of its listeners.39 The BBC, however, was far from being the only popular purveyor of “highbrow” music that couched its output in the context of maintaining liberal European traditions during the war. In London, Myra Hess, too, promoted a popular cosmopolitanism by arranging the lunchtime National Gallery Concerts, 1939–46, which provided classical music for diverse audiences at the price of a shilling. For the first program on October 10, Hess herself performed works by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Scarlatti, and Schubert to an unexpectedly large crowd. A member of the series’ Executive Committee recalled in 1944 how the “amazing” initial 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” (National Gallery Concerts 1944: 9). “Audiences,” he reported, generally varied “between 250 and 1,250 daily, the average (not counting the lean days of the Blitz) being about 500 or 600” (12).40 While historians have debated the actual composition of these audiences and their role in narratives promoting Britain’s war-time social unity, there does seem to have been a notable variety of the middle and upper middle classes, if not of the working classes, in the concerts’ socio-economic make-up.41 By their fourth year, the concerts had offered these relatively diverse lunchtime audiences several complete sequences of Beethoven’s “String Quartets,” both Beethoven’s and Mozart’s “Sonatas for Violin and Piano,” performances of Bach’s “Brandenburg Concertos and 48 Preludes and Fugues,” “the complete Chamber Music of Brahms,” and one performance each of Schöenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” and of music from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, among myriad other works (11, 67, 74). In addition to German music, European musicians who had fled to Britain occasionally performed and international admirers donated funds to keep the concerts running during and after the Blitz.42 The series was a prominent example of an international musical community. Praising this series in a 1943 BBC broadcast, Forster juxtaposed its progressive liberal cosmopolitanism with the Nazis’ xenophobic cultural censorship. After a brief paean to British “democracy” and “freedom,” he transitioned to praising the concerts for providing “first-class music for 1/-s” for “people who come in their hundreds,” a diverse “public” encompassing individuals such as Forster himself and less affluent, more conventionally employed Londoners who went during their lunch breaks and benefited from the “coffee and sandwiches” sold



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“cheaply” at the Gallery. These affordable concerts, Forster argues, reinforced progressive social and cultural sympathies by safeguarding a relatively popular access to fine European art, even to German music: 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 realise 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 ban German culture. We don’t. (2008: 218)

The “cultural conditions” in Britain, as Forster admitted elsewhere, were “not perfect,” but they were “paradise compared with the conditions in Germany,” even after Britain’s enactment of new government powers in 1939 (1951: 38). In his BBC broadcast, Forster used the National Gallery Concerts, then, to praise the general, if not ideal, continuation of Britain’s social and cultural liberalism. Simultaneously, he used the concerts to contrast the aesthetic richness of shared European traditions with the Nazis’ violent and culturally impoverished nationalism. He differentiated thereby between a German culture that a liberal cosmopolitan Europe could claim as its own and a Nazi Germany that the Allies worked to defeat. Revisiting these sentiments in his commemorative essay “From the Audience,” Forster more lyrically emphasized how the National Gallery concert series promoted an international metaphysical humanism, one reminiscent of that imagined by Pater, Sassoon, and Woolf. Forster imagines how “Schumann” or “Brahms … promotes that enlargement of the spirit which is our birthright” and how even after a concert is over “[i]t discovers treasures which would have remained hidden, and they are the chief part of the human heritage.” German music, Forster suggests, can inspire British audiences to enlarge their cultural identifications beyond nationalistic boundaries to discover an inheritance that belongs to no one nation alone. These international identifications, moreover, should hold strong even during the war, for music like the “masterpieces of Bach and Mozart” offers “continuity” and an “aspect of the eternal” (National Gallery Concerts 1944: 7). Reinforcing a musical cosmopolitan sublime, Forster argued that a musical heritage creates continuous and unbreakable international connections. The National Gallery concerts, then, according to Forster, provided British audiences with a lasting means to relate to the humanist, universal elements of German culture, which the Nazis’ violent nationalism could not destroy.

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Importantly, the National Gallery concerts did not exist in a vacuum, but worked in conjunction with popular wartime concerts throughout England. Trevor Thomas, for instance, helped “regional organisers” for “the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts” (CEMA) to put on “lunchtime concerts at the [Leicester] museum,” which, he reported, “caught on like wildfire” (Porter 65). The Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), like CEMA, also organized classical concerts, which included works by German, as well as by French, Italian, and modern British composers, for both the Armed Forces and civilians. Describing these events in a metaphysical humanistic vein, reminiscent of Forster, Stephen Spender recalled how wartime “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 realities as themselves—and to the pressing need to affirm faith and joy within them.” These aesthetic affirmations “answered that side of humanity which had produced the war with the indestructibility of this other side—human love” (2001: 313). These concerts, Spender argued, provided a connection across time and space to a cosmopolitan community for an array of socially and geographically varied audiences. Elizabeth Lister described this view a bit more succinctly in her poem “Goering and Beethoven” wherein she compares an air raid to the National Gallery concerts, the latter of which caused its audiences to look past “War’s horrifying measure,” enhanced horrifically by Goering’s Luftwaffe, by offering the concerts’ participants the solace of Beethoven’s cosmopolitan chamber music (Listener September 18, 1941: 403). While, again, it would likely be misleading to overemphasize the socio-economic diversity of audiences at public classical concerts, it would likewise be misleading to discount the range of middle and even working-class amateurs who enjoyed attending them.43 As writers of novels, of essays, and of letters to the Radio Times recounted, such musical communities challenged the violent nationalistic ideology that had sparked the war and evoked a hope for a more liberal, more culturally inclusive peace.

“That real republic”: Cosmopolitan conclusions Prior to and during both world wars, British authors and audiences continued to enjoy and to critique German classical music. This effective integration of German music into British culture, as we have seen, frequently troubled



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even those who admired it. Forster and Shaw, for instance, anxiously use sophisticated German music, musicians, and audience members as metaphors for German expertise dominating British amateurism. For these authors, music provides an initially non-threatening means to question whether Britain was prepared to compete with Germany’s expertise or efficiency in other intellectual, technical, and psychological arenas, all of which converged, horrifically, in modern war. Britain, of course, outlasted Germany in World War I, passing what Harold Perkin has called the “supreme test of national efficiency” (1989: 186). Continuing fears of Germany nonetheless pervaded British society during the interwar period. Contemporary authors, drawing on turn-of-thetwentieth-century literary tropes, filtered these fears through representations of classical music to expose the political, intellectual, and technical significances of seemingly benign cultural advances. A musical cosmopolitanism, inclusive of German composers, nonetheless endured in Britain. Paul Kennedy has observed that such “shared cultural traditions” had “little or no weight in the changing relationship” between Britain and Germany in the years leading up to World War I (1980: 386). This seems all too true for political and military relationships prior to and during both world wars. Yet, German music nonetheless became an influential trope, for the British public at least, for imagining a liberal humanist harmony that could temper and resist, if it could not overcome, divisive nationalisms. Its influence was such that many authors who use German music to evoke Germany’s challenges to Britain also present this music as part of a valuable European heritage, which benefits from peaceful international associations. Even Auden, whose musical tropes are generally so cynical, describes a wedding in his “New Year Letter” (1941) where guests hear Schubert, Mozart, and Gluck, all Germanic composers, in a friendly social setting in the midst of the war. This, Auden suggests, was a communal, real-life instantiation of a “real” Platonic “republic,” the ideal society that “all politicians,” including those who are “the worst,” contend it is “their aim” to achieve on a larger scale (1975: 3.21–6). Echoing Plato, Pater, Sassoon, and Woolf, Auden uses music here to characterize an ideal society sought out by writers and politicians, even the awful ones. Even if society can only imperfectly mimic this cosmopolitan musical republic outside of a small community, in the midst of war Auden felt that it was worth striving for this harmonious, musical ideal. Importantly, these authors were not alone in their optimism. They recall how throughout the first half of the twentieth-century, music by Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Wagner, and other German composers had become a welcome and vital

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part of British culture. The previous chapters of this study indicate the prevalence of this musical heritage in Britain. As we have seen, by 1914 and still more so by 1939, authors, performers, and audiences from four influential subcultures—late-nineteenth-century Oxonian literary circles, educated middle-class modernists, ambitious individuals from the working and lower-middle classes, and writers sympathetic to same-sex desire—had widely integrated classical music, very often German classical music, into their own cultural identities to demonstrate their social, intellectual, and moral virtues. In doing so, these subcultures effectively integrated German music into British culture. While, therefore, German music inevitably symbolized German culture, it also came to symbolize a cultural heritage shared between Britain and Germany and with Europe itself. Burdekin, Ford, Forster, Sassoon, Woolf, and many others reinforced and promoted this tradition using music not to prevent war—this is probably beyond the power of music—but to soften violent nationalisms and to imagine a sympathetic cosmopolitan peace and post-war reconciliations.

Notes   1 Conceptions of “German” music, even in intellectual contexts, often included the work of Austrian composers; see, for instance, Grove’s reference to Mozart’s efforts towards “the advancement of German art” (Grove 1907: 3.454).   2 For the increasingly tenuous cultural kinship between Britain and Germany after the unification of modern Germany in 1871, see Mander (1974: 196–200) and Firchow (1986: 32–4). More recently, however, Geppert and Gerwarth have stressed the “Anglo-German cultural affinities” that remained in existence prior to WWI (2008: 2).   3 Studies of cosmopolitanisms and literature abound. The type of cosmopolitanism studied here, as represented in modernist and more popular literature, emphasizes a multifaceted international “community” and “commonality” akin to that which Jessica Berman has examined in specifically modernist works (2001: 3). It places more faith in European liberalism, rationalism, and aesthetic traditions than does the modernist cosmopolitanism that Rebecca Walkowitz associates with “democratic individualism” and “antifascism” but also with a “distrust of civilizing processes, and of the role of art in these processes” (2007: 4).   4 For British anxieties over German efficiency and British amateurishness, see Kennedy (1980: 391–2), Rau (2009: 71–2), Rose (1986: 117–22), and Searle (1990: 54–7, 76–7, 83).   5 See Dibble (2001: 33–5, 38), Richards (2001: 10–12), and Hughes and Stradling (2001: 24–8).



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  6 London Metropolitan Archives contains a collection of published reports on this scandal (LMA: CLA/056/AD/04/9).   7 See Kennedy (1980: 415–23, 374–6), Hynes (1968: 26–9, 38–40), and Rose (1986: 134–5).   8 Margaret also pans works by Brahms and Mendelssohn, but only Elgar draws the coarse reaction, “ugh!”   9 Shaw alludes here to the Marconi scandal of 1912–13; see Gilbert (1989: 307–8). 10 Shaw remarked that the play was “written for two pianists, but can be adapted to any instruments on which the performers happen to be proficient.” William Armstrong and Madge McIntosh originated the roles of Reginald and Thundridge. 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 would be worth hearing, but the missing power of Thundridge’s piano likely undermined Shaw’s critique of England (1963: 5.154). 11 See also Shaw’s critique of “amateurish” civilians who rush towards an air-raid (in Weintraub 1971: 251). 12 In his polemic When Blood is Their Argument (1915), Ford similarly characterizes Wagner’s hyperbolic self-promotion as “symbolical” of “modern Germany. Wagner wrote some very beautiful music and he succeeded in brow-beating the world of his day into believing him not only a musician but a philosopher, a prophet, a saviour, and a hero” (143). Wagner symbolizes modern Germany, for Ford, because he produced musical treasures then used them to mythologize his own cultural importance. Ford re-emphasizes the link between Wagnerian and German aggression by describing William II as “an imperial Richard Wagner” (226). 13 Ironically, prior to and even during World War I many Germans remained fervent Shakespeareans just as many British remained fervent Wagnerians. For Shakespeare in Germany, see Firchow (1986: 64–8); for Wagner in Britain, see Shaw (1965: 289). 14 For general confusion regarding Purcell, Purcell Cockram, and “Passing By,” see Scholes (1935: 236). 15 For Vansittart’s views, see his Black Record (1941: 16–17); for Vansittartism, see Goldman (1979: 160–6). 16 In a later discussion of this scene, Isherwood reinforced distinctions between a cosmopolitan and a Nazi German culture. “The Nazis,” he recalls, “hated culture itself, because it is essentially international …. What they called Nazi culture was a local, perverted, nationalistic cult, by which a few major artists and many minor ones were honored for their Germanness, not their talent” (1976: 65). 17 See Levi (1994: 185–8) and Kater (1997: 25–9). 18 Burdekin aims her critique at the Nazis’ real-life association with Wagnerian traditions for which see Levi (1994: 6, 35) and Kater (1997: 34–9).

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19 Congruently, the Berlin Philharmonic performed Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods at their final concert prior to the Russian invasion of Berlin in 1945; see Ryan (1966: 386–7). 20 In 1923, Huxley expressed briefly a quasi-admiration for Mussolini; see Huxley (1969: 222–3). But in his 1920s music criticism and fiction Huxley consistently deplored the decline of Italian aesthetics under fascism. 21 Two months earlier Huxley had reviewed Aaron’s Rod; see Huxley (2013: 97). Possibly Lawrence’s destructive bomb scene recalled this Venetian anecdote. 22 “Giovinezza” was known even in Britain as the “Fascista song” (“March of Fascisti in London.” Times November 6, 1922: 11). For Italian music and politics, see also Huxley’s “Music and Politics” (2013: 152–4). 23 One might argue, of course, that Mozart’s Italianate Don Giovanni itself palpitates with erotic, if aristocratic, violence. 24 For critics emphasizing the cultural and aesthetic breaks, breaches, and ironic re-imaginings facilitated by the war, see Eksteins (2000: xv–xvi, 209, 215–18); Hynes (1991: 33, 78); and Fussell (2000: 35). 25 Two hundred years after Handel’s naturalization his German ancestry had not been forgotten, as indicated by a BBC official who felt it necessary to note that “Handel was as good as British” to justify the composer’s inclusion in a 1927 Armistice Day program (in Gregory 1994: 138). 26 See, for instance, “Through German Eyes” (Times September 30, 1914: 6) and “Occasional Notes” (Musical Times August 1, 1916: 366). 27 For Mendelssohn’s reputation in England, see Hughes and Stradling (2001: 12–16). 28 For a discussion of London renovations, see Clunn (1927: 126–7). 29 For “Rule Britannia” and classical composers, see Richards (2001: 99). 30 Mendelson notes that for the play’s first production the Lord Chamberlain asked for revisions “designed to blur Westland’s identification with Germany” (in Auden and Isherwood 1988: 661). Auden and Isherwood also use Valerian’s name to mock the Leader as the valerian root was known “as a powerful carminative” and “antispasmodic” (Greenish 1899: 275). 31 For same-sex desire and Tchaikovsky, see Chapter 4. 32 Literary critics, such as Jessica Berman and Rebecca Walkowitz, have generally examined early-twentieth-century British cosmopolitanism within a specifically modernist framework. My examination of a popular cosmopolitanism joins scholars, such as Judith Walkowitz, in an attempt to extend these investigations into “broader,” more populist cultural contexts (2012: 5). 33 For wartime prejudice against German instruments, musicians, and modern composers, see Ehrlich (1985: 187–8; 1976: 160–7), Foreman (2001: 90–4), and Hynes (1991: 74–5, 77).



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34 For the continued popularity of German music during World War I, see also Meadmore (1927: 24, 39) and Shaw (1965: 289). 35 The Listener, a counterpart to the Radio Times, rarely published letters in this vein. In an early editorial, however, it warned against any desire to ban German music, remarking that this was contrary to “those very values” that Britain was “fighting to preserve,” “values” inclusive of a cosmopolitan aesthetic that made up the “civilised life” of all of Europe (“Wireless in War.” The Listener September 7, 1939: 464). 36 See also letters to the Radio Times from E. Brian Joll, R. N. R. (“W.O.L.T.” October 11, 1940: 10); H. T. Tovey, chaplain, B. E. F., (“W.O.L.T.” March 29, 1940: 9); Lt. B. G. Kempston, R. A., India (“Letters.” May 7, 1943: 5); T. Mann, R. A. F., C. M. F. (“Letters from Listeners.” June 30, 1944: 5); and in The Listener, F. Gallifend, Pte. (“Points from Letters.” Listener September 16, 1943: 327). 37 G. E. Sutton, for instance, was an adult who enjoyed radio programming intended for the schools and she singled out classical music as a particularly intriguing subject, observing that she previously had not appreciated “this so-called ‘highbrow’ music” but after listening to educational broadcasts she began “searching for orchestral recitals and really enjoying them” (“Letters.” RT October 23, 1942: 5). Sutton’s letter helps to evidence how older British audiences, even during the war, learned to consider European classical music as an attainable intellectual pleasure. 38 For the “V for Victory” campaign, see Rolo (1942: 174–9) and Briggs (1995: 338–40). 39 Briggs notes that from 1939 to 1945 there were anywhere from 8,577,354 to 9,940,210 radio licenses in Britain. He puts contemporary sales of the Radio Times at anywhere from 2,282,422 to 4,058,650 (1995: Appendix B). Not everyone, of course, was focusing on classical composers; but, Briggs notes that “ ‘serious music’ gained a wider and more knowledgeable audience during the course of the war” (526; see also 517 n. 87, 527–9). 40 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 (National 1944: 12). 41 Sheridan emphasizes variously middle and upper-middle-class audiences (2007: 62–9). Ziegler, conversely, describes the National Gallery concerts as “small and elitist gatherings” and compares these to Henry Wood’s more popular Proms (1995: 191). 42 Ferguson reports that “donors included Toscanini, Koussevitsky, Block, Heifetz, Rachmaninoff, and many other world-famous musicians” (National 1944: 14). 43 For recollections of diverse audiences of ENSA and CEMA audiences, including factory workers, see Dean (1956: 218, 221–2) and Calder (1969: 372–4). Hayes offers evidence for factory audiences’ varied receptions of CEMA concerts, but emphasizes disinterest in classical productions (1999: 223–35).

Conclusion

A literary coda: Classical music in British literature

By exploring a significant portion of Britain’s literary and cultural history, using a methodology that I call in my introduction a “thickly layered breadth,” I have argued that from around 1870 to 1945 British writers consistently engaged classical music to redefine and to reimagine British society. To offer historical and ideological explanations for this engagement, I have shown how writers during this period consistently used classical music to represent diverse, if at times overlapping, subcultures as intellectually, morally, and socially valuable to British culture. Cultural critics in late-nineteenth-century Oxford used music as a philosophical metaphor for social harmony among intellectuals across diverse social strata. This metaphor was particularly resonant as it reflected and reinforced recent increases in musical education across almost all British social classes. In the early-twentieth century, educated middle-class literati appropriated these Oxonian musical–literary traditions to establish themselves as Britain’s intellectual and cultural elite. Conversely, writers from or sympathetic to Britain’s more marginalized classes portrayed ambitious lower-middle and working-class individuals claiming the pleasures and the intellectual associations of classical music for themselves by taking advantage of new educational opportunities, affordable instruments, and popular concert venues. Drawing on increasingly popular associations of classical music with intellectual and social virtues, many writers similarly represented same-sex-desiring individuals as especially musical to assert their cultural value both to themselves and to mainstream society. Finally, as we have seen, writers drew on British society’s widespread engagement with German classical music to symbolize rivalries between Britain and Germany and, predominantly, to symbolize the benefits of peaceful cultural exchanges between these nations. A study of British literature and culture of this period, then, reveals how classical music, particularly as

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represented in literature, helped to characterize and to promote, in a hopeful if sometimes naïve fashion, more liberal and peaceful cultural sympathies. The associations of classical music with an inclusive and progressive education, with a sense of communal self-worth, with toleration of diverse pleasures, with an open-minded morality, and with an expansive cosmopolitanism consistently remained a vital element of British literature throughout this period. Such literary portrayals of music remain relevant, I think, because on its own classical music cannot educate or expand one’s intellectualism or sense of social virtue with any great complexity. Music is primarily a collection of organized sounds until we filter it through our minds and attach it to associative thinking. Consequently, the contexts in which we hear, think, and write about music matter in clearly definable and multifaceted ways. This study provides a social context for thinking about music and writing both in the past and, I hope, an inspiration to rethink the meaning of music in our own time.

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Witchard, Anne. “Thomas Burke, the ‘Laureate of Limehouse’: a New Biographical Outline.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 48.1 (January, 2005): 164–87. Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999. Wollenberg, Susan. “Music in Nineteenth-Century Oxford.” Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, Vol. 1, ed. Bennett Zon. Aldershot: Ashgate, 201–8, 1999. Wollenberg, Susan. Music at Oxford in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Wollenberg, Susan. “The Oxford Commemorations and Nineteenth-Century British Festival Culture.” Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, Vol. 3, eds. Peter Horton and Bennett Zon. Aldershot: Ashgate, 225–49, 2003. Ziegler, Philip. London at War, 1939–1945. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Index Aaron’s Rod (Lawrence) 118, 204–5 Abbott, Evelyn 30 Alhambra Theatre (London) 99–100 Allan, Maud 173 amateurs 108–9, 216 religion 67 settings 98–9 see also class issues “Apollo in Picardy” (Pater) 42, 44–6, 47 games 47–8 religion 46 sexual issues 46–7, 143 aristocracy see class issues Art (Bell) 87 “Art Night, An” (Burke) 67–9 Athalia (Mendelssohn) 215 Auden, W. H. 176, 213 brotherly love 213 Dog Beneath the Skin, The 214 “Easily, My Dear” 178–9 “Letter to Lord Byron” 177 “New Year Letter” 223 On the Frontier 215 “Oxford” 177–8 Paid on Both Sides 213–14 sexual issues 176–7, 180 “Ave Maria” (Schubert) 170–1 Bach, Johann Sebastian 96, 122 Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins 206 peace and 212 Suite in B Minor 61–2 Bachelor’s Hall (Underwood) 170–1 “Bad Music” (Huxley) 62–3 ballet 99–101 Balliol College 30, 32, 41, 50 n.14 BBC 5–6, 219–20, 227 n.37, 227 n.39 Beerbohm, Max 55, 56 Beethoven, Ludwig van 96, 136–7 n.37, 194, 195, 209, 218, 219 Fifth Symphony 189

form 84 humanism and 9 String Quartet in A Minor 206–7 Third Symphony 146 Bell, Clive 60, 87, 92 n.27 Bennett, Arnold “Clarice of the Autumn Concerts” 70 class issues 69–70, 74, 120–1 Clayhanger 122–3 Hilda Lessways 123 Roll-Call, The 123–5 These Twain 123 Benney, Mark 107–8 Benson, E. F. 165–6 Berlin 174, 175–6 Berners, Lord Gerald 6, 157–8, 165, 182 nn.17–18 Between the Acts (Woolf) 212 Billing, Noel Pemberton 172–3 Boëllmann, Léon 63 “Bored: At a London Music” (Horatio Brown) 162–3 Bowyer, William 128–9 Brasenose College 33 Briggs, Asa 227 n.39 Brown, Harold 116 Brown, Horatio 162–3 Burdekin, Katharine 186–7, 196, 200–1, 208 Swastika Night 201–3, 212–13 Burgan, Mary 25–6 Burke, Thomas 102 class issues 59 “Gina of the Chinatown” 102–3 Nights in London 67–9, 98, 103, 127 Burns, Arthur 21 Bussell, F. W. 33 Cambridge 1 Camel, The (Berners) 165 Carnival (Mackenzie) 101–2 Carpenter, Edward 141, 150–1, 174, 178

254 Index Cavalleria Rusticana (Mascagni) 101 CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) 222 “Child in the House, The” (Pater) 37 Child of the Jago, A (Morrison) 110 Chopin, Frédéric 55, 78, 79, 193 choristers 40, 52 nn.32–4 Christopher and His Kind (Isherwood) 174–5 “Cinema, The” (Woolf) 64 cinematic music 63–4, 90 nn.9–10 circus music 91 n.16 Civilization (Bell) 60 “Clarice of the Autumn Concerts” (Bennett) 70 class issues 2, 30, 61–2, 96, 106–7, 115, 129, 131 contemplation 84–5 cross-class 100, 124–7, 220, 229 decline 57, 58 denial 68 dystopia 76 enjoyment and 5, 111, 112, 114, 129, 130–1, 132, 135 n.26 epiphany and 68–9 hypocrisy 61, 111 laziness 73, 123 marginalization 90 n.12 mediocrity and 102–3 morality 23–5, 104, 193–5 philistinism 76–7, 88, 122, 127, 131–2 prices 103–4 proscription and 133–4 n.7 provincial settings 115, 116–17, 119 “refinement” and 122, 132 resolve 113–14, 120–1, 131, 132 respectability and 20–1, 22–3, 129–30 ridicule and 75, 76, 106, 109–12 seating 100, 128–9 servitude and 60–1 settings 98, 100–1 sexual issues 25, 40, 69, 71–2, 148, 163–4, 167 stagnation and 72–4 threat and 89 n.6, 106 violence and 62 voluntary aid 107 widening learning 104–5 see also elitism; “vulgarity”; wealth

Clayhanger (Bennett) 122–3 Clements, Elicia 19 Cockram, Edward Purcell 199 Cocks, H. G. 152–3 Collier’s Friday, A (Lawrence) 118 Coming Up for Air (Orwell) 111–12 commerce 119, 134 n.14, 164–5 servitude and 67 “vulgarity” and 64–5, 66 Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins (Bach) 206 “Conversation Galante” (Eliot) 78 cosmopolitanism 185–6, 212–13, 216, 223, 224 n.3 comfort and 217 community 220, 222 sexual issues 171–2 see also individual names Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) 222 counterpoint 81, 82–3, 84, 92 n.32 Covent Garden Opera House 128–9 Coward, Noël 161 Cox, Gordon 104 Crazy Pavements (Nichols) 167–8 “Critic as Artist, The” (Wilde) 143, 144–5 Crome Yellow (Huxley) 75–6 cultural issues 4, 7, 9–10, 229–30 classical music defined 2–3 cultural capital 13 “light” and “middlebrow” music 95–6 see also individual names; cultural concepts Curwen, Rev. John 103–4 Dahlhaus, Carl 9 Dale, Catherine 104 “Daughters of the Vicar” (Lawrence) 119, 120 Davies, D. R. 116–17 Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh) 72 Dent, J. M. 114 “Denys L’Auxerrois” (Pater) 42–4, 52 n.38 Despised and Rejected (Fitzroy) 158–60, 173–4 Distant Prospect, A (Berners) 157–8 Dog Beneath the Skin, The (Auden and Isherwood) 214 dogs 21

Index Donizetti, Gaetano 67 Douglas, Lord Alfred 148–9 Drift (Horatio Brown) 162–3 “Dr. Woolacott” (Forster) 168–70 “Dry Salvages” (Eliot) 8 “Easily, My Dear” (Auden) 178–9 Eastham, Andrew 19 education 4–5, 48, 108–9 adults and children 219, 227 n.37 crime and 107–8 narrow learning 105–6 religion 103–4, 108 sexual issues 26, 153, 155 sight-singing 23–4, 103–4 see also individual names; class issues Elgar, Edward class issues 68, 123–4, 198 destruction and 198–9 hypocrisy and 197–8 marginalization 198 Pomp and Circumstance 189 pomposity and 197–8 “Salut d’Amour” 68 Sea Pictures 124–5 Eliot, T. S. 87 cinematic music 63 class issues 57–9, 74, 79–80 “Conversation Galante” 78 form 80–1, 84, 92 n.29 Four Quartets 8, 81–3 London Letters 76–8 “Portrait of a Lady” 78, 79 elitism 55–8, 59, 73, 93 n.36, 128 infantilism 177 laziness 123–4 liberalization and 88–9, 132–3 marginalization 62 morality 192 novel of ideas 84 philistinism and 77 provincial settings 117–18 ridicule and 55, 56, 58–9, 192–3 seating and 59–60 servitude and 60 sexual issues 162–3, 171, 177–8 stagnation and 74, 198 status symbols 77–8, 91 n.24 threat and 128, 193, 199

255

violence 214 Ellis, Havelock 141, 151–2 Empire Theatre (London) 99–100 English Musical Renaissance 6, 198 Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) 222 Eroica Symphony (Beethoven) 146 essentialism 9, 86–7 ethics see morality Eton College 22–3, 158 Extraordinary Women (Mackenzie) 161–2 family 108–9 class issues 22, 116 provincial settings 118 sexual issues 26 violence and 213–14 Farmer, John 30 fascism 204–7, see also Nazism Faux-Monnayeurs, Les (Gide) 93 n.36 female same-sex issues 142, 145–6 conservatism and 161–2 hypocrisy 165–6 ridicule and 161–2, 166 scandal 173 see also inversion Fifth Symphony (Beethoven) 189 Firbank, Ronald 142, 163–5, 183 n.28 First World War, see World War I Fitzroy, A. T. 158–60, 173–4 Flames (Hichens) 149–50 Flower Beneath the Foot, The (Firbank) 164–5 Ford, Ford Madox 2, 196, 208–9 Memories and Impressions 1–2 Parade’s End 196–8, 199, 209 When Blood is Their Argument 225 n.12 form 9–10, 80–1, 82–3, 84–5, 88, 92 n.27, 92 n.29 counterpoint 81, 82–3, 84, 92 n.32 fugues 81–2, 83, 93 n.36 quartets 81–2, 85 Forster, E. M. 2, 185–6, 195–6, 220–1, 223 “Dr. Woolacott” 168–70 “From the Audience” 221 Howards End 62, 188–9 Longest Journey, The 1 Maurice 163

256 Index Passage to India, A 155 sexual issues 184 n.37 Fountain Overflows, The (West) 106 Four Quartets (Eliot) 8, 81–3 “From the Audience” (Forster) 221 Fry, Roger 92 n.27 fugues 81–2, 83, 93 n.36 games 47–8 Gaston de Latour (Pater) 33 gay issues see same-sex issues Germany 6–7, 185, 186–7, 207–8, 216, 223–4 discipline and 191–2, 195–6, 200 humanism 223 militarism and 188, 189 nationalism 196 sexual issues 172–3 threat and 186, 187–8, 190–1, 222–3 see also individual names; Nazism; World War I; World War II Gide, André 93 n.36 “Gina of the Chinatown” (Burke) 102–3 Gissing, George class issues 69–70, 74 Our Friend the Charlatan 3, 110–11 Whirlpool, The 70–1 Glazounov, Alexander 123–4 gods 59–60 Goodbye to Berlin (Isherwood) 175–6, 201 Goolden, W. T. 40 Graves, Robert 3 Greece/Hellenism 44–6, 47 class issues 24–5 games 47–8 religion 33, 46 sexual issues 46–7, 53 nn.41–3, 143–4, 161–2 see also individual names Green Bay Tree, The (Shairp) 172 Green Carnation, The (Hichens) 148–9 Hall, Radclyffe 142, 166–7 Hall-Witt, Jennifer 25 Handel, George Frideric 209–10 Hardinge, William Money 41 Harrison, Sidney 72 Hartog, Alexander 107, 114–15

Hawtrey, S. T. 23–4 Heartbreak House (Shaw) 193–5, 208 Heather Professor of Music 21 Hellenism see Greece/Hellenism Heraclitus 35–6 Hess, Myra 220 Hichens, Robert 145, 148–50 Hidden Lights (Underwood) 152 Hilda Lessways (Bennett) 123 Hitler, Adolf 201–2, 215 Hodge, Alan 3 homoeroticism see same-sex issues Howards End (Forster) 62, 188–9 Hughes, Meirion 198 Hullah, John 103–4 humanism 8–9, 18–19, 35, 43, 221, 222 cosmic rhythm 39 liberalization and 18, 20, 35, 42–4, 52 n.38, 223 morality 39, 43 peace and 210–11 violence and 44 Huxley, Aldous 87, 205 “Bad Music” 62–3 cinematic music 63 class issues 57–9, 74, 79–80 Crome Yellow 75–6 form 80, 84–5 Point Counter Point 60–2, 83, 92 n.32, 206–7 “Young Archimedes” 205–6 Imaginary Portraits (Pater) 42, 44–6, 47 games 47–8 humanism and 42–4, 52 n.38 morality 37 religion 43, 46 sexual issues 46–7, 143 industry 115, 116–18, 119–20 escape 118 prices and 120 In Fancy Dress (Raffalovich) 147 Intermediate Sex, The (Carpenter) 150–1 In the Second Year (Jameson) 207 inversion 141, 147–8, 151 denial and 158–9 esteem and 160 exploitation and 148 failure and 167

Index kinship 173–4 liberalization and 159–60 marginalization 167 naturalness and 155–6 nervous sensibility 150–2 proscription and 166–7 ridicule and 158, 175 secrecy and 160 threat and 157 violence and 159, 160 Irrational Knot, The (Shaw) 109–10 Isherwood, Christopher 196, 200–1 Christopher and His Kind 174–5 Dog Beneath the Skin, The 214 Goodbye to Berlin 175–6, 201 Lions and Shadows 175 On the Frontier 215 Paid on Both Sides 213–14 Jacob’s Room (Woolf) 65–6 James, Henry 25, 78–9, 102 Jameson, Storm 207 Jews 114, 201 Johnson, William 22–3 Jowett, Benjamin 17, 27 class issues 30 morality 29–30 prices 50 n.14 sexual issues 41, 47 Sunday concerts 30 Justinian I 183 n.25 Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Orwell) 71–2 Kipps (Wells) 111 Kramer, Lawrence 3 Kreisler, Fritz 209 Law, Joe 140 Lawrence, D. H. 118–19, 120 Aaron’s Rod 118, 204–5 class issues 117 Collier’s Friday, A 118 “Daughters of the Vicar” 119, 120 Lost Girl, the 63–4, 119–20 provincial settings 119 Rainbow, The 118 Touch and Go 117–18 White Peacock, The 117 laziness 70–1, 73, 191

257

borrowed tastes 123–4 Lee Shore (Macaulay) 172 Leoncavallo, Ruggero 206 lesbian issues see same-sex issues “Letter to Lord Byron” (Auden) 177 Levy, Amy 145, 146 Lions and Shadows (Isherwood) 175 Liza of Lambeth (Maugham) 100–1 London Coliseum 99 London Letters (Eliot) 76–8 “Lonely Night, A” (Burke) 103 Longest Journey, The (Forster) 1 Loom of Youth, The (Alec Waugh) 155 Lost Girl, The (Lawrence) 63–4, 119–20 Love Among the Artists (Shaw) 110 lower classes, see class issues Macaulay, Rose 172 Mackenzie, Compton 101–2, 161–2 Magdalen College 40, 52 nn.32–4 Major Barbara (Shaw) 67 male same-sex issues 45, 53 nn.41–3, 141–2, 145–6, 154, 174, 182 nn.17–18, 183 n.28 community and 153, 154–5, 171 companionship and 152–3 conservatism and 161, 175 crime and 51 n.30, 152 denial and 165, 169–70 destruction 170–1 enjoyment and 163 esteem and 156, 157–8 failure 163 frankness 174–5 happiness and 167–8 humanism 39 hypocrisy 178 marginalization and 152, 168, 169, 170, 177–8, 184 n.37 militarism 178–9 morality and 144, 172, 176–7 naturalness and 168 nervous sensibility 168–9 pederasty and 143, 144, 148–9, 164–5 philistinism 162–4 proscription and 46–7, 157, 168–9, 170, 171, 176 “refinement” and 144–5 repercussions 41

258 Index ridicule and 155, 163, 164, 178 scandal and 39–40, 41, 158, 168, 173 secrecy and 40, 142–5, 147, 153, 164 settings 153–4 sterility 149–50 threat and 40, 47–8, 52 nn.33–4, 172 vilification 154 violence and 174, 175–6 war 156–7 see also inversion Mallock, W. H. 18–19 Man and Superman (Shaw) 191–2 “Marche Funèbre” (Chopin) 55 Mascagni, Pietro 101 Maugham, Somerset 100–1 Maurice (Forster) 163 Mayne, Xavier 182 n.12 Meadmore, W. S. 130 Memoirs of George Sherston, The (Sassoon) 209–11 Memories and Impressions (Ford) 1–2 Mendelssohn, Felix 32, 215 middle classes see class issues militarism 178–9, 188, 189, 206 servitude and 205 miners 116–18, 119–20 Minor Poet, A (Levy) 146 Monday or Tuesday (Woolf) 85, 211–12 Moody-Manners company 136 n.33 morality 23–5, 28–30, 104, 144, 176–7 contemplation and 82–3 death and 195 destruction and 144, 193–5 deviance and 25, 26–7, 140, 149, 172, 177 liberalization and 27, 41, 43, 48–9 numbers and 36–7 pain and pleasure 37, 194–5 respectability and 21–2 scandal 192 secrecy and 38 temperance 37–8, 39 threat and 25 worldly experience and 38–9 Morrison, Arthur 110 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 191–2, 211–12, 218 Music-Cure, The (Shaw) 192–3, 225 n.10

music halls 98–9 ballet 99–101 class issues 100, 102–3, 134 n.14 National Gallery concerts 220–2, 227 nn.40–2 Nazism 200–1, 202, 203, 212 acquiescence and 201, 204 defiance and 219–20 destruction 203–4 liberalization and 221 oppression and 201, 203 philistinism 215 propaganda 201–2 ridicule 215 sexual issues and 174–5, 176, 178–9 stagnation and 202–3 threat and 204 violence 186 Newark, Cormac 57 Newman, Robert 125–6 Newmarch, Rosa 126 New Republic, The (Mallock) 18–19 “New Year Letter” (Auden) 223 Nichols, Beverley Crazy Pavements 167–8 Prelude 155–7 sexual issues 141–2 Night and Day (Woolf) 72–4 Nights in London (Burke) 103 class issues 67–9, 98, 127 “Salut d’Amour” 68 Of Human Bondage (Maugham) 101 Old Vic 99 Oliver, Frank 153 On the Frontier (Auden and Isherwood) 215 Orwell, George 71–2, 74, 111–12 OUMU (Oxford University Musical Union) 50 n.19 Our Friend the Charlatan (Gissing) 3, 110–11 Oxford 17–18, 21, 31, 52 n.32 class issues 5, 177–8, 229 Commemoration events 30–1, 50 nn.17–18 concert settings 31–2 dogs 21

Index morality 48–9 religion 32 respectability and 21 sexual issues 40, 52 nn.33–4, 177–8 Sunday concerts 50 nn.15–16 see also individual names “Oxford” (Auden) 177–8 Oxford Music Hall (London) 99 Oxford University Musical Union (OUMU) 50 n.19 Pagliacci (Leoncavallo) 206 Paid on Both Sides (Auden and Isherwood) 213–14 Parade’s End (Ford) 196–8, 199, 209 Passage to India, A (Forster) 155 “Passing By” (Cockram) 199 Pater, Walter 5, 17, 18, 19 class issues 178 form and 82, 85 Gaston de Latour 33 humanism and 18–19, 20, 210–11 Imaginary Portraits 37, 42–8, 52 n.38, 143 morality 27, 49 Plato and Platonism 28, 34, 35–9, 41 religion 32–3 Renaissance, The 8 “School of Giorgione, The” 18, 19–20 sexual issues 39–40, 41 “Style” 20 Pathétique Symphony (Tchaikovsky) 163, 215 Paying Guests (Benson) 165–6 pederasty 143, 144, 164–5 commerce and 164–5 inversion and 148 morality and 149 philistinism and 149 ridicule and 148–9 threat and 172–3 Pembroke College 31 philistinism 76–7, 88, 122, 127, 131–2 boredom 162–3 esteem and 163–4 peace and 215 ridicule and 149 stagnation and 121–2 Piano Quintet (Sackville-West) 161

259

Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde) 110, 143–4, 145 pipe-music 43–4 Plato and Platonism (Pater) 34 cosmos 36 humanism 35 morality 28, 36–7 Perpetual Flux 35–6 religion 37–8 sexual issues 38–9, 41 Plato/Platonism 28, 34–5 community 211–12, 223 cosmos 36 form and 85 humanism and 35, 42, 52 n.38 morality 27, 28, 29–30, 36–7 religion 37–8 Republic, The 28–9, 34 sexual issues 38–9, 41, 144–5, 149–50 Point Counter Point (Huxley) class issues 60–1, 62 form 83, 92 n.32 Suite in B Minor 61–2 violence 206–7 Pointed Roofs (Richardson) 190–1 Pomp and Circumstance (Elgar) 189 “Portrait of a Lady” (Eliot) 78, 79 Portrait of a Lady (James) 78–9 poverty, see wealth Prelude (Nichols) 155–7 Princess Casamassima (James) 102 Promenade Ticket, The (Sidgwick) 128 Proms concerts 125, 126 class issues 123–7, 128 enjoyment and 218 prices 126 programs 126 provincial settings 115–16, 117, 119, 136 n.33 commerce 119 escape 118 industry 115, 116–18, 119, 120 Purcell, Henry 199 Put Out More Flags (Evelyn Waugh) 203–4 Pythagoras 36, 37–9 Quarles, Philip 83, 84 quartets 81–2, 85

260 Index Queen of the Air (Ruskin) 26–7 Queen’s Hall (London) 124–5, 126–7 queer issues see same-sex issues Raffalovich, Marc-André 145, 147–8, 152 Rainbow, The (Lawrence) 118 Rameau, Jean-Philippe 215 Rees, C. B. 126 religion 32–3, 46, 91 n.16, 108, 114 class issues 67 contemplation 82–3 defiance and 203 humanism and 43 oppression and 201, 203 sexual issues 37–8 sight-singing 103–4 Renaissance, The (Pater) 8 Republic, The (Plato) 28–9, 34 Rheingold (Wagner) 1 Richardson, Dorothy 190–1, 195–6 Ring, Elizabeth 106–7 Rite of Spring, The (Stravinsky) 76–7 Roll-Call, The (Bennett) 123–5 Rolph, C. H. 108–9 Rose, Jonathan 56 Rosenkavalier, Der (Strauss) 199–200 Rossini, Gioachino 32, 205 Rubinstein, Arthur 77, 91 n.24 rural settings, see provincial settings Ruskin, John 24–5, 26–7 “Russian Night, A” (Burke) 98 Sackville-West, Edward 161 Sacre du Printemps, Le (Stravinsky) 76–7 Salome (Strauss) 173 Salomé (Wilde) 173, 175 “Salut d’Amour” (Elgar) 68 Salvation Army 67, 91 n.16 same-sex issues 139–40, 150, 171, 179–81, 181–2 n.12 marginalization 180 morality 41, 140 peace and 173 pederasty 172–3 proscription 174 secrecy and 180 threat and 6 see also female same-sex issues; inversion; male same-sex issues

Sassoon, Siegfried 208, 209–11 Schmitz, Oscar 216 “School of Giorgione, The” (Pater) 18, 19–20 Schubert, Franz 117, 170–1 Sea Pictures (Elgar) 124–5 seating 59–60, 100, 128–9 Second World War, see World War II Semi-Monde (Coward) 161 servitude 60–1, 67, 205 Settlement movement 135 n.26 Sexual Inversion (Ellis) 151–2 sexual issues 6, 71–2, 78–9, 141, 146–7 deviance and 183 n.25 infidelity 83 morality and 25, 37–9 ridicule and 26, 78, 79 threat and 26 wealth and 25–6, 69, 72 see also same-sex issues Shairp, Mordaunt 172 Shakespeare, William 9, 79 Shaw, George Bernard 195–6, 208, 223 circus music 91 n.16 Heartbreak House 193–5, 208 Irrational Knot, The 109–10 Love Among the Artists 110 Major Barbara 67 Man and Superman 191–2 Music-Cure, The 192–3, 225 n.10 Shorting, C. G. H. 40 Sichel, Walter 41 Sidgwick, A. H. 128 Siegfried (Wagner) 203 sight-singing 23–4, 103–4 Sinfield, Alan 180 “Sinfonia Eroica (to Silvia)” (Levy) 146 Sitwell, Osbert 196, 199–200 Sixth Symphony (Tchaikovsky) 163, 215 “Sketch of the Past, A” (Woolf) 9 social issues 7–8, 10–11, 229 liberalization 17 see also individual names; social concepts Sol-Fa 23–4, 104 Somervell, Arthur 89 n.6 South Place Ethical Society 129–30 Spender, Stephen 222 Stabat Mater (Rossini) 32

Index Story of a Thousand Concerts, The (Meadmore) 130 Stradling, Robert 198 Strauss, Richard 173, 199–200 Stravinsky, Igor 76–7 stream of consciousness 85–6 street music 90 n.12 “Street Music” (Woolf) 90 n.12 “String Quartet, The” (Woolf) 85, 211–12 String Quartet in A Minor (Beethoven) 206–7 “Style” (Pater) 20 Suite in B Minor (Bach) 61–2 Sullivan, Sir Arthur 22 Sunday Evening Concert Society 129, 136–7 n.37 Sutton, Emma 3–4 Swastika Night (Burdekin) 201–3, 212–13 Symonds, J. A. 39–40 Symphonic Variations (Boëllmann) 63 “Tambourin” (Rameau) 215 Tancredi (Rossini) 205 Tannhäuser (Wagner) 144–5 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr 163, 215 Teleny 146–7 These Twain (Bennett) 123 Third Symphony (Beethoven) 146 Thomas, Trevor 153 Those Were the Days (Sitwell) 199–200 Tono-Bungay (Wells) 121–2 Touch and Go (Lawrence) 117–18 Toynbee Hall 112–13, 114, 135 n.27 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 79 Twilight of the Gods, The (Wagner) 204 Underwood, Reginald 152, 170–1 upper classes, see class issues Uranisme et Unisexualité (Raffalovich) 147–8 Vainglory (Firbank) 163–4 Valmouth (Firbank) 164 Voyage Out, The (Woolf) 64–5 “vulgarity” 66–7, 79–80 hypocrisy 191 laziness 191 “refinement” and 62–5, 67–8, 75–6, 101, 128

261

Wagner, Richard 3–4, 96, 203–4, 219, 225 n.12 attack and 196–7 class issues 59–60 essentialism and 9 Rheingold 1 Siegfried 203 Tannhäuser 144–5 Twilight of the Gods, The 204 “War March of the Priests” (Mendelssohn) 215 Waugh, Alec 155 Waugh, Evelyn 72, 200–1, 203–4 Waves, The (Woolf) 86 wealth 20–1, 25–6, 58, 69–70, 74, 122–3 commerce and 64–5, 66, 67, 134 n.14 enjoyment and 121 fame and 70 laziness 70–1 marginalization 65–6, 97 prices and 100 provincial settings 120 seating 128–9 subsistence and 71, 72 “vulgarity” and 66–7 Well of Loneliness, The (Hall) 166–7 Wells, H. G. 111, 120–2 West, Rebecca 106 When Blood is Their Argument (Ford) 225 n.12 Whirlpool, The (Gissing) 70–1 White Peacock, The (Lawrence) 117 Wilde, Oscar “Critic as Artist, The” 143, 144–5 Picture of Dorian Gray, The 110, 143–4, 145 Salomé 173, 175 sexual issues 142, 148–9, 154, 172 Wilson, Robin 21 Wincham Hall 113–14 Wollenberg, Susan 31 Wood, Henry 126 Wood, Jessie Chambers 118–19 Woolf, Virginia 6, 87, 186–7, 208 Between the Acts 212 “Cinema, The” 64 class issues 57–9, 73, 74, 127 essentialism 86–7 form 80

262 Index Jacob’s Room 65–6 Monday or Tuesday 85, 211–12 Night and Day 72–4 settings 100 “Sketch of the Past, A” 9 “Street Music” 90 n.12 Voyage Out, The 64–5 Waves, The 86 Years, The 66–7, 106 working classes see class issues World War I 8, 186, 187, 208–10 attack 196–7 class issues 192, 193–5, 199 community and 211–12 death and 156–7, 208 destruction 198–9 enjoyment and 216–17 failure 197 hypocrisy 210 incompetence 198 peace and 199, 210–11

pomposity 198 sexual issues 173–4 threat and 199–200 World War II 8, 215–16, 227 n.35 censorship and 221 class issues 220 comfort and 217, 219–20 community and 223 defiance and 219–20 enjoyment and 218–19, 220, 222, 227 n.37 humanism and 221, 222 liberalization and 221 peace and 217–18 prices 220–1 threat and 200 Years, The (Woolf) 66–7, 106 “Young Archimedes” (Huxley) 205–6 Zuleika Dobson (Beerbohm) 55, 56