Edward Elgar and His World (16 page)

Certain of the composer's biographers have seen Elgar's interest in earlier literature as a mark of extraordinary intellectual curiosity, but a fascination with such authors was common among working-class autodidacts in the mid-nineteenth century.
⁵²
In the interview with
The Strand Magazine
in 1904 Elgar explains how he began to “read everything”:

I had the good fortune to be thrown among an unsorted collection of old books. There were books of all kinds, and all distinguished by the characteristic that they were for the most part incomplete. I busied myself for days and weeks arranging them. I picked out the theological books, of which there were a great many, and put them on one side. Then I made a place for the Elizabethan dramatists, the chronicles including Barker's and Hollinshed's, besides a tolerable collection of old poets and translations of Voltaire and all sorts of things up to the eighteenth century. Then I began to read. I used to get up at four or five o'clock in the summer and read—every available opportunity found me reading. I read till dark. I finished reading every one of those books—including the theology. The result of that reading has been that people tell me that I know more of life up to the eighteenth century than I do of my own time, and it is probably true.
⁵³

In an earlier interview with F. G. Edwards, Elgar relayed this story in a less vivid fashion but named titles: “In this way, he made the acquaintance of Sir Philip Sydney's
Arcadia
, Baker's
Chronicles
, Drayton's
Polyolbion
, etc.”
⁵⁴
In “Elgar's Use of Literature,” Brian Trowell wrote, “Edwards originally mentioned only Sir Philip Sydney” but Elgar added the rest of the list to the proof. Trowell opines that “these are indeed extraordinarily unlikely books for a fifteen-year-old to read, more a test of endurance than a literary experience.”
⁵⁵
Trowell misses a vital point, however, for an impecunious but voracious reader starved for material virtually any book will suffice, especially if nothing else is available. As Rose relates in his history, the self-educated Marxist author T. A. Jackson (1879–1955) testified that as an adolescent he read “Pope, old volumes from the
Spectator, Robinson Crusoe
, Pope's translations of Homer, and a copy of
Paradise Lost
” for “the simple reason that there was nothing else to read.” Jackson later commented, in terms surprisingly close to those of Elgar, that “mentally speaking” he dated “from the early 18th century.”
⁵⁶
Rose further cites the memories of C. H. Rolph, who recalled that his father, a London policeman, read such books as “Aristotle's
Ethics, The Koran
, Xenophon's
Memorabilia
, the
Nibelungenlied
” as well as “Schiller's
William Tell
.” After considering the effect of Xenophon on a London policeman of the Edwardian era, it is perhaps less difficult to imagine a young Edward Elgar devouring Sydney, Voltaire, and other authors more abstruse.

Ann Elgar's reading may have included easily acquired classics, such as Alexander Pope's translation of the
Iliad
, a volume that remained popular with working-class readers throughout the nineteenth century.
⁵⁷
Such an interest in these classic authors may account for Frank Schuster's curious belief, told to Sassoon, that Elgar's mother “used to sit up half the night reading Greek and Latin with him when a boy.”
⁵⁸
Whereas it is certainly true that some working-class readers did teach themselves Greek and Latin, it seems unlikely that a woman with a wayward husband and five children to feed, clothe, and educate had time to acquire the linguistic skills required to read Homer or Virgil in the original. In December 1874, Ann expounded upon the challenges of her situation: “It is no joke to have men and women to rule, and keep peace between, and to keep
home
in something [of] order and comfort.”
⁵⁹
Michael De-la-Noy is tartly dismissive of Schuster's remark, implying that it was the result of a typically Elgarian exaggeration, but it is quite possible that Schuster was laboring under a misapprehension, since it seems unlikely that Elgar, even in his most self-mythologizing moods, would have concocted such an improbable tale. But it is entirely plausible that Elgar related to Schuster how his mother used to read
translations
of the Greek and Latin classics to him.
⁶⁰
Reading aloud was a major form of entertainment and edification in all kinds of households throughout the nineteenth century and, indeed, until the advent of radio broadcasting.
⁶¹

However he may have found the literature of earlier eras, including the Greek and Latin classics, Elgar's youthful interest in writers of earlier centuries—especially that of the previous one—resonated throughout his work. Has any other English composer since the death of Arne written so many minuets? These minuets, along with a light sprinkling of gavottes, appear throughout his career. Aside from the dedicated Minuet for Piano (1897; later orchestrated as op. 21), they appear in such disparate works as the Harmony Music no. 5 (1878), containing a minuet that Elgar reworked fifty-two years later for the
Severn Suite
, op. 87 (1930); the first
Wand of Youth
Suite, op. 1A (despite the fanciful opus number, this score dates from 1907);
The Crown of India
Suite, op. 66 (1912); and the incidental music to
Beau Brummell
(1928). Evocations of the eighteenth century occur in the Variations on an Original Theme, op. 36 (
Enigma
Variations, 1898–99)—Elgar once implied that the eighth variation, “W.N.,” was in part “suggested by an eighteenth-century house”—and consistently throughout his ballet,
The Sanguine Fan
, op. 81 (1917), the action of which unfolds in a rococo setting. Jerrold Northrop Moore writes: “
The Sanguine Fan
score opened with an ‘18th century theme' (as the diary described it)—a courtly minuet elaborately descending.”
⁶²
(This four-measure minuet theme, usually presented as an antecedent phrase in search of a balancing consequent, permeates the entire work; it is treated almost like a ritornello throughout a substantial part of the score and is the source from which most of the thematic material is derived.) None of these minuets give off even the merest whiff of either irony or pastiche: Elgar's musical antiquarianism was spontaneous, sincere, and informed by childhood memories.

Example 1. “Minuet” Theme,
The Sanguine Fan
, op.8, starting three measures after the opening.

One result of his unsupervised early reading may have been Elgar's compulsion toward mystification.
⁶³
As part of this inner game, and to throw pursuers off his track, Elgar often sprinkled his manuscripts with epigraph “hints” from seemingly obscure sources such as Virgil, Tasso, Lesage, and others. It is not always apparent, however, that the composer was familiar with the entire book from which he quotes—or indeed where he may have found the epigraph in the first place. For example, the notoriously ambiguous line that Elgar affixed to the score of his Violin Concerto was drawn from Alain-René Lesage's eighteenth-century picaresque novel,
L'Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane
(1715–35; translated into English by Tobias Smollett in 1748 as
The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane
). Given its eighteenth-century provenance, and its translation by a noted English novelist of that period,
Gil Blas
would seem to fall firmly within the ken of Elgar's literary enthusiasms; Brian Trowell has observed that this novel “was much better known in Elgar's time than it is today,” an assertion that may well be true, but for which the author declines to offer even anecdotal evidence. Moore has pointed out, however, that this epigraph may have come to Elgar through the mediation of a contemporary poet, W. E. Henley, who quoted the same phrase—”
Aquí estí encerrada el alma de
…”—at the beginning of a volume titled
Echoes
.
⁶⁴
Did Elgar seek to appear more learned than he was, or was the temptation to expropriate a good mystifying quotation just too strong for him to resist?

The epigraph drawn from Ruskin's
Sesame and Lilies
(1865) that Elgar inscribed on the full score manuscript of
The Dream of Gerontius
is another matter altogether, and points up the composer's contradictory allegiances regarding his working-class origins. This epigraph is drawn from the first of the lectures that constitute
Sesame and Lilies,
Of Kings' Treasuries,” section 9: “This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, hated, like another: my life was as the vapor, and is not: but this I saw and knew: this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.”
⁶⁵
Unlike the ambiguity surrounding
Gil Blas
, Elgar had clearly read
Sesame and Lilies:
he had received this volume, along with Ruskin's
The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Crown of Wild Olive
, and others, as a gift from E. W. Whinfield in 1889.
⁶⁶
Induced by Charles F. Kenyon, a journalist who wrote under the pseudonym Gerald Cumberland, into recommending models of pure literary style, Elgar innocently cited Shakespeare, Ruskin, and Cardinal Newman.
⁶⁷
Elgar's response to Cumberland thus places Ruskin in a triumvirate at the top of his pantheon.

Brian Trowell remarks that today it seems “not only odd, but disappointing” that Elgar declined to evoke Ruskin's name during the course of the Peyton Lectures he gave at the University of Birmingham in 1905–6.
⁶⁸
But Elgar may have had cogent reasons for not quoting Ruskin directly, for as Trowell astutely observes, “Few people read Ruskin today, and it is curious how superficial our notions of ‘Ruskinian aestheticism' have become… . In his own time, Ruskin was considered by many to be an unsettling and dangerous writer, or at best an impractical visionary.”
⁶⁹
Although Ruskin was admired by nearly all for his art criticism, his radical theories on political economy, including his comments on the need for a fixed wage for workingmen, were pilloried in the British press.
The Saturday Review
, for example, excoriated Ruskin's political writings as “eruptions of windy hysterics … utter imbecility.”
⁷⁰
Ruskin's plea in
Sesame and Lilies
for educational reforms designed to benefit workingmen and women, including for the establishment of “great libraries that will be accessible to all clean and orderly persons at all times of the day and evening” are far less startling than his suggestion that “maximum limits should be assigned to incomes, according to classes.”
⁷¹
For voicing such progressive and compassionate sentiments, Ruskin, who put his educational beliefs into practice by teaching at the Working Men's College, was revered by working-class readers.
⁷²

As Percy M. Young has noted, the public lecture itself was a tradition rooted in an ethic of Victorian adult education that had its roots in the working-class Mechanic's Institutes—and Ruskin was widely considered the preeminent master of the public lecture. Even though Ruskin is not cited, Elgar's Peyton Lectures are in essence a Ruskinian project. Young writes: “Elgar, the beneficiary of Victorian education and non-education, did not attempt to disguise a moral purpose, as is shown particularly by his loaded adjectives and his inspirational quotations from other writers… . Nor did he fail to draw attention to the responsibility that should be borne by those who controlled the nation's wealth.”
⁷³
Elgar's retentive memory allowed him to echo certain passages from
Sesame and Lilies
in both style and substance. Even the controversy engendered by Elgar's lectures is reminiscent of how certain Ruskinian ideas were received by the popular press.

Although Elgar did not go so far as to suggest fixed incomes for the British populace—the very idea would have been abhorrent to him—some of the recommendations he made in the Peyton Lectures are like Ruskin's in
Sesame and Lilies
. In the second lecture, “English Composers,” Elgar makes a number of sensible and enlightened suggestions, including his declaration, “I
would like to see in every town
—a large hall capable of accommodating a large
sixpenny audience
.” Reporting on this lecture, the
Birmingham Post
amplified Elgar's remarks: “Sir Edward wished to see in every town a large hall capable of accommodating a large sixpenny audience, for the working classes, with their education, should be provided for as they were in Germany.”
⁷⁴
In a later lecture, Elgar declared forthrightly, “
English working-men are intelligent: they do not want treating sentimentally, we
must give them the real
thing, we
must give them of the best because we want them to have it, not from mere curiosity to see HOW they will accept it.
What we do
in literature and art, we might do in music.”
⁷⁵
Not only does this passage reflect the covert resentment of a man who had tasted the bitter cup of condescension based on class inequity, but it also represents Elgar's internalization of the progressive educational reforms posited by Ruskin and other Victorian social reformers. Elgar's call for inexpensive but dignified concert venues for working-class listeners is strikingly reminiscent of Ruskin's utopian desire, articulated in
Sesame and Lilies
(“Of King's Treasuries,” section 49) that “royal or national libraries will be founded in every considerable city, with a royal series of books in them … their text printed all on leaves of equal size, broad of margin, and divided into pleasant volumes, light in the hand, beautiful and strong.”
⁷⁶