by Adams, Byron
The cares we hugged drop out of vision.
Our hearts with deeper thoughts dilate.
We step from days of sour division
Into the grandeur of our fate.
For us the glorious dead have striven,
They battled that we might be free.
We to their living cause are given;
We arm for men that are to be.
Among the nations nobliest chartered,
England recalls her heritage.
In her is that which is not bartered,
Which force can neither quell nor cage.
For her immortal stars are burning
With her the hope that’s never done,
The seed that’s in the Spring’s returning,
The very flower that seeks the sun.
She fights the fraud that feeds desire on
Lies, in a lust to enslave or kill,
The barren creed of blood and iron,
Vampire of Europe’s wasted will …
Endure, O Earth! and thou, awaken,
Purged by this dreadful winnowing-fan,
O wronged, untameable, unshaken
Soul of divinely suffering man.
Movement II (Moderato)
X. To Women
Your hearts are lifted up, your hearts
That have foreknown the utter price.
Your hearts burn upward like a flame
Of splendour and of sacrifice.
For you, you too, to battle go,
Not with the marching drums and cheers
But in the watch of solitude
And through the boundless night of fears.
Swift, swifter than those hawks of war,
Those threatening wings that pulse the air,47
Far as the vanward ranks are set,
You are gone before them, you are there!
And not a shot comes blind with death
And not a stab of steel is pressed
Home, but invisibly it tore
And entered first a woman’s breast.
Amid the thunder of the guns,
The lightnings of the lance and sword Your hope,
your dread, your throbbing pride,
Your infinite passion is outpoured
From hearts that are as one high heart
Withholding naught from doom and bale
Burningly offered up,—to bleed,
To bear, to break, but not to fail!
Movement III (Solenne)
XI. For the Fallen 48
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.
Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.49
[Stanza written by Binyon especially for Elgar:]
They fought, they were terrible, nought could tame them,
Hunger, nor legions, nor shattering cannonade.
They laughed, they sang their melodies of England,
They fell open-eyed and unafraid.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:50
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.
But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.
Elgar took his title for The Spirit of England from the opening stanza of “The Fourth of August,” the first of the three poems he selected from Binyon’s book. In this he was probably influenced by the publication of The Spirit of Man, a popular anthology of poetry and philosophy compiled by Robert Bridges (1844–1930), who had been made poet laureate in 1913 following Kipling’s refusal of the post. In his preface, Bridges stated the intention of his volume—to uphold and nourish spirituality among the Allies in the face of “the miseries, the insensate and interminable slaughter, the hate and filth” brought on by the “evil” of Prussian materialism, militarism, and conscious criminality.51 In “The Fourth of August” Binyon associates the “Spirit of England” with qualities such as mettle, courage, ardor, and steadfastness, which, he implies, define the English as individuals, as an army, and as a nation with a noble destiny. Other meanings are also brought into play, however, which remove the poem from its immediate time and place to the realms of the metaphysical and the eschatological: among those who make up the “Spirit of England” are the “glorious dead” who in the battle for freedom have already “gone before” (in both senses of the phrase). Here, as in the Ruskin extract Colvin cited for Elgar, war is presented not only as a fight for good against evil, but as a purgation of the spirit of the English, from whom self-sacrifice is required to secure the cleansing, revivification, and salvation of Europe. Binyon encapsulates this in his image of the winnowing-fan, a tool from which crops are thrown up into the air as the fertile grain is sorted from the lightweight chaff. That this was an attractive metaphor for Elgar is evident in his decision to reprise the opening stanza at the end of the first movement, thereby bringing purged (seventh stanza) and purified (first stanza) into a direct relationship with each other through juxtaposition and reinforcing the interpretation of spirit as soul, that is, along eschatological lines. At its first appearance the word purified falls on a weak beat but is accented, and in its final iteration is given musical expression with a movement sharpwards in the harmonies.
Example 1a. “Novissima hora est” motif, The Dream of Gerontius, Part I, rehearsal no. 66.
Example 1b. “Endure, O Earth!” The Spirit of England, first movement, “The Fourth of August,” rehearsal no. 13.
More significant are the motivic links Elgar establishes between this movement and The Dream of Gerontius, connections that confirm a bond between these two works in his imagination. For the phrase “Endure, O Earth!” (seventh stanza), Elgar quotes his setting of the phrase “Novissima hora est” (“This is the final hour”) from Gerontius (compare Examples 1a and 1b), probably prompted by the phrase “hour of peril” in the fourth line of the first stanza, but again focusing attention on the afterlife: this poignant phrase is sung by Gerontius in the final agonies of corporeal death (Part I, rehearsal no. 66), on encountering God (Part II, at “Take me away,” two measures after rehearsal no. 120), and by the Angel of the Agony pleading with Christ for deliverance of the Souls in Purgatory (Part II, at “that glorious home,” five measures before rehearsal no. 113—“Hasten, Lord, their hour, and bid them come to Thee, / To that glorious Home, where they shall ever gaze on Thee”).52 Elgar’s reuse of this distinctive motif here also gives musical utterance to Binyon’s implied parallel between the “Spirit of England” and the figure of Christ in the lines that follow (“O wronged, untameable, unshaken / Soul of divinely suffering man”), for in Gerontius, as Moore points out, the “novissima hora est” motif takes its shape from those associated both with Christ’s peace (“Thou art calling me”)
and with the agony of the crucifixion (“in Thine own agony”) (compare Example 1a with 2a and 2b).53 For the closing lines of the seventh stanza, as he did in the opening of Part II of The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar seems to suspend time, delivering the direct address in a hushed, unaccompanied chorale, markedpiú lento and espressivo:
Example 2a. “Christ’s Peace” motif, The Dream of Gerontius, Part I, five measures after rehearsal no. 22.
Example 2b. “Christ’s Agony” motif, The Dream of Gerontius, five measures after rehearsal no. 62.
Example 3. The Spirit of England, first movement, “The Fourth of August,” rehearsal no. 14.
The “Novissima hora est” motif also resurfaces in the second movement, “To Women,” where it is heard (over the “Spirit of England” theme from the first movement) in the solo part and taken up by the chorus at “but not to fail!” (Example 4).54 For added emphasis, the melody used for “this dreadful winnowing-fan” in the previous movement is alluded to in the violins in the measure before rehearsal no. 11, where the chorus reenters with “to bleed, to bear, to break.” Once again the connections with Christ are significant, emphasizing both divine sacrifice and endurance, for the text of this movement can be interpreted as a latter-day Stabat Mater Dolorosa. As mothers, but also wives and lovers, women of England witness in spirit the corporeal suffering and death of their men on the battlefield, just as Mary stood weeping for her Son at the foot of the Cross on Golgotha. Binyon’s choice of language seems to echo the opening verses of the thirteenth-Century Latin hymn, particularly in his fifth and sixth stanzas that refer to the “infinite passion,” seemingly anachronistically to “lance and sword,” and to the scourging of Christ with the phrase “to bleed, to bear, to break.” (Here Elgar links the motif of endurance with immortality by anticipating in the orchestra the climax of the third movement, the ghostly legion “moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,” as well as “Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit” and “There is music in the midst of desolation.”)55 The connection is lost for us, however, in his association of “passion” with “throbbing pride.” Elgar’s biographer Basil Maine heard further echoes of The Dream of Gerontius in this movement:
At more than one point in this deeply moving music but especially in the brief orchestral passage at the end, the spirit that pervaded the “Angel of the Agony” episode in “Gerontius” is perceptibly at work.56
Example 4. The Spirit of England, second movement, “To Women,” rehearsal no. 10.
The chromaticism and the repeated rhythm (short-long) forge this link, which again transports us to Calvary and an invocation to the crucified Christ; for as Gerontius is told just before the appearance of this heavenly being, the Angel of the Agony is “the same who strengthened Him, what time He knelt / Lone in the garden shade, bedewed with blood. / That Angel best can plead with Him for all / Tormented souls, the dying and the dead.”
A further motivic link with Gerontius is established in the first movement for the sixth stanza (rehearsal nos. 9–13), which culminates in the line “Vampire of Europe’s wasted will.” At this point Elgar quotes the Demons’ Chorus from the second part of the oratorio, thus connecting implicitly the architects of the Prussian war machine with the depraved beings who howl and snatch at the soul of Gerontius as it passes on its way to Judgment. On June 17, 1917, after completing The Spirit of England, Elgar sent an explanation of this decision to Ernest Newman, who was to write an account of this movement for the Musical Times:
Do not dwell upon the Demons part:—two years ago I held over that section hoping that some trace of manly spirit would shew itself in the direction of German affairs: that hope is gone forever & the Hun is branded as less than a beast for very many generations: so I wd. not invent anything low & bestial enough to illustrate the one stanza; the Cardinal invented (invented as far as I know) the particular hell in Gerontius where the great intellects gibber & snarl knowing they have fallen:
This is exactly the case with the Germans now;—the music was to hand & I have sparingly used it. A lunatic asylum is, after the first shock, not entirely sad; so few of the patients are aware of the strangeness of their situation; most of them are placid and foolishly calm; but the horror of the fallen intellect—knowing what it once was & knowing what it has become—is beyond words frightful.57
The words “held over” in this letter have often been interpreted to mean that Elgar had difficulty composing this passage—that with his style so firmly rooted in the Austro-German tradition, he struggled to position the Hun musically as the “Other,” in a way he had not in his depiction of the “otherness” of the Mogul emperors for the Crown of India three years earlier—and that it had taken him well over a year to arrive at this solution.58 If this was indeed a troublesome passage that held up the completion of the work for so long, however, it seems odd that among the sketches so few are devoted to this particular section.59 A more plausible explanation is that Elgar arrived at his solution early on, and held this particular movement back—the first performances (from May 3, 1916, until the premiere of the completed trilogy on October 4, 1917) were of the second and third movements. His reasons for this decision were probably twofold. First, he would have wanted to avoid offending certain friends, most notably Edgar Speyer, the wealthy patron of London’s transport system, hospitals, and concert life. Despite having English nationality, the Speyer family had rapidly become the target of anti-German harassment in the early months of the war: Edgar Speyer was ostracized by former associates, accused of collusion with the enemy, and pressured to relinquish his baronetcy and membership in the Privy Council. Ultimately, on May 26, 1915, Speyer and his family left England for the United States. Elgar had been supportive under these difficult circumstances and might well have remained reluctant to place “The Fourth of August” before the public until the Speyers had settled abroad.60 Elgar’s great German musical ally, the conductor Hans Richter, was dead by the end of December 1916.
From Alice Elgar’s diaries we know that German forces were frequently described as demonic and brutal in the Elgar household during the early stages of the Binyon project. On December 31, 1914, she wrote, “Year ends in great anxieties but with invaluable consciousness that England has a great, holy Cause—May God keep her,” and from Severn House the following month she recorded outright condemnation of the latest Zeppelin activity:
[19 January 1915:] Seemingly tranquil but at night a German air raid on Yarmouth & that part of East Coast. They damaged houses & caused some loss of life, engulfing themselves more deeply in crime than ever. Brutes—
[20 January 1915:] Long accounts of air raid. Hope it has shown the U.S.A. what lengths uncivilised fiends will go
[27 January 1915:] Splendid accounts of naval action. Must have immense moral effect—No truth in the elaborate German lies. Almost impossible to conceive that their airships dropped bombs on the sailors while they were trying to save German drowning men—Demons might have acted better.61
This intemperate language resurfaced twelve months into the war, when Alice, who had ambitions as a versifier, tried her hand at a war sonnet after Binyon for publication in The Bookman. The Handel scholar R. A. Streatfeild, acting as go-between for the editor, advised her that he would “(probably) suggest another adjective in the place of ‘devilish,’” but the original word was retained when the poem went into print.
England. August 4, 1914. A retrospect.
Holding her reign in kindly state and might,
Still deeming honour trod in knightly ways,
Half armed, lay England, through the summer days;
Her rule, outspeeding dawn, outchecking night,
Welded the sphere in wide, majestic flight.
When lo! a foe appears who neither stays
Nor warns, but sweeps the Belgian plains and sways
Grim hosts and arrogates a devilish right. ‘
England still sleeps,’ he said ‘and dreams of gain,
She will n
ot stir, who once was battle’s lord,
Or risk the clash of squadrons on the main;
Her treaties may be torn, while ‘gainst the horde
These lesser folk may plea[d]e for help in vain …’
Then, throned amidst the seas, She bared her sword.62
Such rhetoric is a reflection of the propaganda that was disseminated widely in the early months of 1915, particularly concerning alleged German atrocities in Belgium, which were detailed in the Bryce report, published in May 1915.63 Characterization of the German army as a demonic horde was encouraged in response to the use of poison gas and flame throwers against Allied combatants, air raids that resulted in civilian casualties, and incidents such as the torpedoing of the British passenger liner Lusitania and the “martyrdom” of nurse Edith Cavell, all of which were dwelt on at length by the British press in horror and outrage (see figure 2).64
For Elgar, however, setting the sixth stanza of “The Fourth of August” to the music he had hitherto used for Newman’s demons was not an exercise in cheap propaganda, but part of his conception of the war as a metaphysical struggle between hell and heaven, of darkness and light, for the soul of humanity. Concern that he should not be seen to be peddling anti-German propaganda, fueling popular hatred, and endorsing simplistic views of the war as a conflict between English knights and German devils, might well have been a second factor in his decision to suppress the first movement for so long. And on this point Elgar’s dialogue with the critics is revealing.
Figure 2. “The Murder of Nurse Cavell,” The War Illustrated: A Picture-Record of Events by Land, Sea and Air (30 October 1915). Reproduced by permission of the British Library.
In April 1916, Ernest Newman wrote an article on The Spirit of England for The Musical Times in anticipation of the premiere of the second and third movements, which was scheduled for the following month (described in greater detail below). In his essay, Newman extemporized on material Elgar had supplied for that purpose in a personal letter, but the critic also indulged in explicit anti-German sentiments couched in “holy war” rhetoric:65
