Edward Elgar and His World (75 page)

Elgar selected the passage from Ruskin's book
Sesame and Lilies
, which consisted of three lectures in the edition published in 1871.
⁸⁶
As Ruskin made clear in the preface, the impetus for his lectures, directed at the young, was that they were “written in the hope of awakening the youth of England, so as far as my poor words might have any power with them, to take some thought of the purposes of life into which they are entering, and the nature of the world they have to conquer.”
⁸⁷
The influence of reading Ruskin on Elgar can be surmised as having two dimensions. The first is stylistic, by which the character of Ruskin's prose, not unlike the influence of Henry Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson on Charles Ives, can be considered. Ruskin's form of eloquence is self-consciously aesthetic and the structure of his arguments in
Sesame and Lilies
intentionally tangential and elaborate, as elegantly designed as a complex garden. Ruskin's style transcended the conventions of prose as mere utilitarian instrument of logic and information, without conceding a veritable boundary between the language of argument and that of fiction. This prose style—elaborate, theatrical, and disarmingly engaging with overlong stretches of extended argument—has more than an incidental connection with the musical rhetoric in
Gerontius
. Elgar's encounter with Ruskin's use of language may well have encouraged the composer's adaptation of Wagnerian mannerisms into his own deeply personal and theological framework in which divine grace, truth, and salvation were at stake far more plausibly than in
Parsifal
(despite its Christian surface).

This hypothesis has its own, albeit unsympathetic, advocate in one of Elgar's contemporaries, the writer E. M. Forster. Although Forster had a deep interest in music, he seems to have had no contact with Elgar. But in his novel
Howards End
, published in 1910, the insurance clerk Leonard Bast, in a manner curiously reminiscent of Elgar's well-known biography, is an autodidact seeking to acquire culture in order to improve himself, much in the spirit of Arnold's transformation of the Philistine. Bast reads and goes to concerts. This is what Forster made of Bast's reading of Ruskin: “Leonard was trying to form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be the greatest master of English prose… . He felt that he was being done good to, and that if he kept on with Ruskin, and the Queen's Hall Concerts, and some pictures by Watts, he would one day push his head out of the grey waters and see the universe.”
⁸⁸

Forster appears not to have been a particular admirer of Elgar's. In the fifth chapter
of Howards End
a music concert is described in detail. Beethoven is held up as the unsurpassable model (a view that Elgar may have shared), but Brahms's “Four Serious Songs” come in for derision and Mendelssohn is dismissed. A discussion of English music ensues with a particularly sharp rejection of Elgar, which is then followed by the characters in the chapter beating a fast exit from
Pomp and Circumstance
. Forster expresses extreme skepticism regarding the self-consciously national element of English music as involving too great a sacrifice of the apparent universality of the instrumental repertoire of Viennese classicism and early Romanticism, particularly Beethoven.
⁸⁹

Indeed, as his two essays on music from 1939 and 1941 indicate, Forster was a strong devotee of the idea that the best music is “untrammelled and untainted by reference.”
⁹⁰
His is a Ruskin-like position that music as a transcendent art cannot be captured by language. The difference is that Ruskin does not deny music meaning in the sense Forster wishes to. Elgar may have tried to balance programmatic with so-called absolute music, and may have expressed a preference for the latter, but his fame rested on music that he himself freely admitted had extramusical significance, whether personal, dramatic, or political. Therefore Forster's implicit disdain for Elgar is not surprising.

In his preface to the 1882 edition of
Sesame and Lilies
, Ruskin identified his readership as “chiefly … young people belonging to the upper, or undistressed middle, classes; who may be supposed to have choice of the objects and command of the industries of their life. It assumes that many of them will be called to occupy responsible positions in the world, and they have leisure, in preparation for these, to play tennis or to read Plato.”
⁹¹
Ruskin's readers were Arnold's Philistines (with a smattering of Barbarians) and Longfellow's admirers. But the text, as the generous allusions and citations suggest (along with Ruskin's own apology that the third lecture, “The Mystery of Life and the Arts,” might read like a sermon), is driven by an underlying religious and theological premise. In this regard it differs markedly from the surface secular character of Arnold's
Culture and Anarchy.

Ruskin wished that his readers would not waste time with “books of the hour” but those of all time.
⁹²
As with literature, art, too, needed to be of the highest character and quality. The exemplars were Milton and Dante. But the underlying criterion was the artist's motive with respect to the meaning of life and fact of death. “Nothing I have ever said,” wrote Ruskin, “is more true or necessary … than my strong assertion that the arts can never be right in themselves, unless their motive is right.”
⁹³
For Ruskin, aesthetic criteria were tied inextricably to ethical criteria and social imperatives. This included, besides the necessities of life, providing the populace with proper books in aesthetically pleasing form. Such a synthesis of aesthetic judgment and moral claims derived from Ruskin's attachment to a view of life rooted in faith regarding the “ends of life.”
⁹⁴
The highest achievements of life, those that transcended speech and language and lay closest to its mystery, were in the realm of art. Ruskin's Christianity was a religion of charity and compassion in which the greatest and highest of gifts was the possibility of realizing the “strength of England” by turning a new generation's “intellect from dispute of words to discernment of things.”
⁹⁵
That power of discernment lay in the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility.

Ruskin called not for aestheticism, but for using the moral character and formal properties of art on behalf of humanity. More specifically, the arts could prosper only “when they had true purpose, and were devoted to the proclamation of divine truth or law.”
⁹⁶
The enemies of moral progress were practical men, men of the present, practiced in business but tone deaf to the deeper essence of life and the imagination. Art, and notably music—forms of expression that transcended language—were for Ruskin the instruments of moral edification, and therefore a force for the creation of a more just social order, superior to politics and organized religion. The arts were needed to transform the everyday, from the use of time to the housing and clothing of the populace.

Perhaps the most compelling dimension of Ruskin's influence on Elgar is how the writer's transformation of Christian ideals into a program of aesthetic and moral transformation affected the composer's conception of how one confronts death, the very subject of
Gerontius
. How may one's virtue be judged and one's place in the hereafter determined? Ruskin challenged the individual, particularly the artist, to find hope not in the migration of the soul to heaven but in a Christian spirit here on earth. “Let us, for our lives,” wrote Ruskin, “do the work of Men while we bear the form of them, if indeed those lives are
Not
as a vapour and do
Not
vanish away.”

The poets and prophets, the wise men, and the scribes, though they have told us nothing about a life to come, have told us much about the life that is now… . They have dreamed of mercy, and of justice; they have dreamed of peace and good-will; they have dreamed of labour undisappointed, and of rest undisturbed; they have dreamed of fullness in harvest, and overflowing in store; they have dreamed of wisdom in council, and of providence in law; of gladness of parents and strength of children, and glory of grey hairs.
⁹⁷

At first glance, this distinctly non-Catholic theology seems at odds with Elgar's devotion to Catholicism. But it provided precisely the framework by which the ambition of an artist could be reconciled with modern Catholicism, replete with more traditional notions of a divine obligation to act in the world with noble purpose, particularly in the service of one's community. Ruskin's text helps illuminate the attraction of Newman's poem to Catholic and Anglican readers alike, for the story of Gerontius is not one of a saint, and the reward in his dream is not heaven. Here, the quotation from Ruskin that Elgar used is telling:

This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, like another; my life was as the vapour, and is not; but
this
I saw and knew: this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.
⁹⁸

Gerontius is an Everyman figure who, when faced with death, transcends his fear. The listeners to Elgar's version (in which, as one scholar has put it, “Elgar's relentless focus on Gerontius' humanity is clearly seen”) develop sympathy for Gerontius's character and spirit as emblematic of an admirable but flawed mortal.
⁹⁹
General Gordon's own devotion to the poem helped spread its fame. Newman admired Gordon and was moved by the importance the poem held for the general, who seemed to have lived his life for his nation, without fear, “always on his deathbed,” acting as if each day would be his last.
¹⁰⁰
In the dream, the fate of Gerontius's soul is not tragic. Purgatory is not timeless damnation, and hell is robbed of much of its terror.

Indeed, Elgar's setting of the poem is curiously subversive, for it leaves readers and listeners with a profound sense of admiration for the manner in which Gerontius understood and approached the prospect of death. The implicit theology is that the spirit of God is present in the living individual. That spirit lends the conduct of one's life, including courage in the face of death in full knowledge of one's imperfections, an aspect of the divine. The grace of God becomes linked to the manner in which God's presence has resided in one's spirit during life, a notion that for the artist implied the presence of a Ruskin-like moral motive behind the achievement of worldly ends on behalf of humankind. Elgar's version places the greatest weight on Gerontius's dream experience
prior
to death. As Elgar told his friend A. J. Jaeger, “I imagined Gerontius to be a man like us, not a Priest or a Saint, but a
sinner
, a repentant one of course but still no end of a
worldly man
in his life, & now brought to book.”
¹⁰¹
The music, in the best sense of Ruskin's admonitions, was in Elgar's terms “a good, healthy full-blooded romantic, remembered worldliness, so to speak. It is, I imagine, much more difficult to tear one's self away from a well-to-do world than from a cloister.”
¹⁰²

Although Elgar spent considerable time researching the sources for his oratorios
The Apostles
and
The Kingdom
and relied on both Anglican and Catholic experts and collaborators, his views were hardly idiosyncratic; rather, they mirrored the views and influence of Cardinal Newman. The allure of Catholicism for Newman rested in its fundamental objectivity. He had left the Anglican Church because he rejected the basic claim of the evangelicals. There was not, indeed, a justification by faith alone: an individual could not simply receive Christ through personal experience directly through Scripture and thus achieve a state of grace. There was, for Newman and other converts, an objectivity to the fundamental tenets of Christianity, an objectivity that had been tested by time and by the continuity of a community. The Catholic Church represented that historic, communal, and doctrinal legitimacy and authority.

Furthermore, the historic, organic development of Christ's presence on earth in the form of a universal body of the faithful placed the community, not the individual, in the center. The laws governing the expression of faith were shared. In that regard, the centrality of the Eucharist was contingent on the equally potent assumption that the community of the faithful, given its size and power, demanded and possessed legitimate leadership. The Protestant belief in a personal reading of Scripture was no adequate surrogate for the centrality of the clergy as the sole representatives of doctrine. To Newman, there was an objectivity inherent in the primacy of the clergy, an objectivity earned and proven by the traditions of ascetic discipline and monasticism.

The basic notions of authority, community, and the individual's place in it mirrored Elgar's own aesthetic. The nature of art was not merely about individual achievement but also about the successful dissemination of normative criteria. The implicit individualism associated with the evangelical cause did not appeal to a composer who believed that through his hard work and discipline he had become a legitimate heir to a great tradition whose aesthetic authority could not be challenged. Despite a virtual absence of formal training (with the exception of piano lessons early in his life and violin studies with Adolphe Pollitzer), Elgar owed his authority and station to ascetic discipline, loyalty to universalism, and the organic continuity of compositional practice. His legitimacy derived from the acceptance of a great tradition in the art of music that paralleled the objective doctrinal and communitarian continuity of the Catholic Church.

Although much has been written about the liability Elgar's Catholicism posed for his career, the fact is that despite his occasional protestations to the contrary it did not place an insurmountable barrier in his path. Although his oratorios stuck to the notion of a single Catholic Church, his texts consistently maintained a position that would not offend the Anglican majority. Furthermore, he never veered toward a glorification of Rome, instead placing the center of his credo in a patriotism not dissimilar to Newman's. His synthesis of modernity and loyalty to Catholicism agreed with the temper of his times.
¹⁰³
In the wake of the debate over papal infallibility, a strain of Catholic thought developed in England that resisted the extreme authoritarian and mystical sides of the Catholic experience. It was this modernized, liberal Catholicism of the late nineteenth century with which Elgar felt most comfortable.