British Literature and Classical Music

Cultural Contexts 1870-1945

David Deutsch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781474235822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

British Literature and Classical Music explores literary representations of classical music in early 20th century British writing. Covering authors ranging from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and D.H. Lawrence, the book examines literature produced during a period of widely proliferating philosophical, educational, and performance-oriented musical activities in both public and private settings. David Deutsch demonstrates how this proliferation caused classical music to become an increasingly vital element of British culture and a vehicle for exploring contentious issues such as social mobility, sexual freedoms, and international political rivalries. Through the use of archives of concert programs, cult novels, and letters written during the First and Second World Wars, the book examines how authors both celebrated and satirized the musicality of the lower-middle and working classes, same-sex desiring individuals, and cosmopolitan promoters of a shared European culture to depict these groups as valuable members of and - less frequently as threats to – British life.

1

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, literary-minded 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 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 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 time-expanding 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 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 nineteenth-century 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 eighteenth-century musical amateurs, Cyril Ehrlich has suggested, were “unlikely to 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 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, li...

Table of contents

• Historicizing Modernism
• Title
• Contents 
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Approaches to classical music in British literature, 1870–1945: Theory and practic
• 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
• Copyright