by Adams, Byron
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.
Amid all this lay the central theme of Gerontius: divine presence resides in the living human being and is expressed in the conduct of one’s life. Though death offers liberation, the hope for grace rests in the extent to which the divine presence is revealed in one’s life and character. This
was not a Lutheran doctrine of good works but was distinct in requiring adherence to objective norms and doctrines validated by a community, not attained through the subjective experience of a personalized encounter with Christ. The making of art was one means for an individual to realize the ideal. Aesthetic norms suggested the possibility of divine sanction and required a resonant response from a universal community. In this regard, Elgar’s musical achievement qualified. The implicit religious foundation of his compositional practice, rooted in history, authority, tradition, and measurable by the assent of the community, also explains Elgar’s affinity for the Pre-Raphaelite painters.
Painting: The Realization of the Imagined Ideal
The movement known as Pre-Raphaelite burst on the English scene in 1849. The painters of the group, much like the members of the Oxford Movement and the Cambridge Apostles, constituted themselves as a brotherhood. As was the case with similar associations of intellectuals and artists of that generation, the group was held together by a spiritual and intellectual idealism critical of inherited eighteenth-Century pieties. A cold rationalism, a disregard of the organic character of history, a resistance to acknowledging the limitations of human action, an arrogance toward tradition, and an all-too-radical individualism all came under scrutiny. Pre-Raphaelite ideology and the aesthetic consequences and reception of their art in Edward Elgar’s lifetime make their work a key to understanding the composer.
It was not so much the brotherhood, the idealization of friendship, the use of religious imagery and symbolism from the pre-Reformation past, or the homoerotic underpinnings of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood that formed the basis of affinity for the adult Elgar. Rather, it was a close personal link. Alice Stuart-Wortley, Elgar’s “Windflower,” was John Everett Millais’s daughter. In 1903, she gave Elgar an engraving of her father’s portrait of Cardinal Newman (see figure 1).104
Like the Pre-Raphaelites, and consistent with Longfellow’s didactic ambitions, Elgar was drawn to premodern subject matter ranging from Caractacus and King Olaf to Jean Froissart. In these contexts, the underpinnings of the music were idealized versions of history. Elgar’s intent was not so much to regenerate myth (in the Wagnerian sense) as to create a symbiosis of realism and normative aesthetics. The compositional strategy, as Jaeger’s pamphlets on The Apostles and The Kingdom suggest, was to use the Wagnerian leitmotif.105 In this way Elgar could establish musical signifiers whose repetition and audible transformation within a complex fabric helped the listener achieve a sense of representation and narration. Clearly the musician, unlike the novelist or the painter, possessed no easy instrument of correspondence with reality. But Elgar’s ambivalence about the effort to create parallels notwithstanding, he did adapt the model set by Wagner, who successfully reached a wide public—precisely Arnold’s Philistines—with a musical drama that combined so-called normative aesthetic values with narrative accessibility.106
Figure 1. John Everett Millais, Portrait of Cardinal Newman, 1881.
Painting more than music has a readily available capacity to manipulate the illusion of realism. But in the hands of the Pre-Raphaelites, as Ruskin argued on their behalf, aesthetic norms (of the sort argued in Germany by Johann Joachim Winckelmann) were applied to a reconstructed past and tradition, whether of antiquity or the Middle Ages. The choice of symbolic, mythic, and religious subject matter cast in a distinctly premodern manner stood in stark contrast to the genre painting and portraiture typical of eighteenth-Century painting. Furthermore, the Pre-Raphaelites construed realism in a way that was strikingly historical, cultivating techniques that suggested the refined craftsmanship of the medieval masters, eschewing even the use of perspective and depth.
Elgar’s pride in his command of form and his attention to detail, particularly in orchestration, mirrors the extreme attention to illustrative detail in the painting of the Pre-Raphaelites. A poignant example of this was Elgar’s admiring comments and advice he sent to Parry concerning the latter’s The Vision of Life. Parry responded that the struggle to achieve aesthetic perfection in the realization of a work of art reminded him of Millais’s own struggles.107
At the core of the Pre-Raphaelite project was the idealization of reality. In Elgar’s favorite, Millais’s Isabella, from 1849 (figure 2), a representation of Keats’s poem (later set to music in a brilliant tone poem by Frank Bridge in which musical gestures suggest and narrate the emotional intensity of the poem’s story), the quite modern, almost hyperrealistic gestures, faces, and attitudes are striking.108 So, too, is the idealized meticulousness with which the wallpaper and fabrics are realized. The idealization is communicated in a manner sharply divergent from eighteenth-Century genre and landscape painting by the use of vivid color and the refinement of the delineation. Realism is not only transcended, but idealized: something in Isabella even approaches later painterly movements such as Magical Realism and Surrealism. This effort to transfigure realism through idealization and meticulous exaggeration is paralleled by Elgar’s musical strategy, which employs complex norms of absolute musical form and technique to elevate both program and choral music, thereby edifying the broad public he wished to reach.
Figure 2. John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1849.
Millais and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites chose subject matter that was imaginary, symbolic, or religious rather than quotidian or patently historical. But the core of believability was required, as were the illusion of a direct contact between picture and viewer and the effacement of the painter’s individuality. These goals are analogous to the immediate identification with and comprehensibility of musical communication, evident in the transparency and formal clarity of the leitmotifs so dear to Elgar. As William Michael Rossetti observed in 1903:
A leading doctrine with the Pre-Raphaelites … was that it is highly inexpedient for a painter, occupied with an ideal or poetical subject, to portray his personages from the ordinary hired models; and that on the contrary he ought to look out for living people who, by refinement of character and aspect, may be supposed to have some affinity with those personages—and, when he has found such people to paint from, he ought, with substantial though not slavish fidelity, to represent them as they are.109
This helps explain Elgar’s use of programs that implied an ideal or poetical subject for music—from Caractacus to Falstaff—and his transformation of them into music, by adapting, following Strauss’s example, musically strategic evocations of realism, without slavish imitation but with contemporary, almost modern, authenticity. This connection between normative idealism and realism reconciles Elgar’s avowed allegiance to absolute music and his consistent reliance on idealized nonmusical subject matter (whether that subject matter was religious or intimately personal) as a framework.
Religion was a key subject matter for the Pre-Raphaelites, as it was for Elgar. With his characterizations of Judas and Mary Magdalene in The Apostles, the mix of realism with aesthetic idealism shows his debt not only to Longfellow but also to the Pre-Raphaelites. The painterly equivalent of Elgar’s Apostles is Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (figure 3). In this painting, all the elements—realism, idealization, and normative aesthetic craftsmanship of a traditional manner taken to the most minute detail—can be seen. The connection to Elgar is also theological. Christ in the House of His Parents was linked to Anglo-Catholicism. Millais spent time at Oxford and was associated with the Tractarians, among them Newman. The narrative of Christ in the House of His Parents reveals the influence of Edward Bouverie Pusey as well as the Tractarian and Roman Catholic emphasis on the sacrament as reflective of the sacred memory of Christ’s physical suffering, his bleeding. The necessity of infant baptism and the receipt of the sacrament from a priesthood separated from everyday life, in a monastic discipline descended from the apostles, is signaled by the wound in the hand of the young Jesus near the center of the canvas, suggestive of the wounds he would later receive on the cross, which is being washed away in the presence of his mother. This emphasis on sa
crament and priestly authority, framed with a decisive role for Mary, transmitted through tradition by the historical continuity of Christ’s followers, was central not only to the Tractarians but, as Newman observed, also led logically to Catholicism and stood in contrast to the doctrines of justification by faith alone and the subjective response to Scripture characteristic of Protestantism.110
Figure 3. John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents, 1849–50.
Millais was not the only Pre-Raphaelite painter to interest Elgar and his wife. Alice Elgar, in a classic Longfellow-like response, was inspired by Edward Burne-Jones’s The Golden Stairs (figure 4) to write a poem of her own.111 Once again, the painting represents the real in the ideal: one of the women it depicts is the mother of Alice Stuart-Wortley.112 Burne-Jones’s Ascension, a stained-glass window at St. Philip’s Cathedral in Birmingham (figure 5), was admired by Elgar, who conducted a performance of The Apostles there. Though Burne-Jones also came from Oxford and was influenced by the spirit of the Oxford Movement, what distinguishes him from Millais but suggests an affinity with Elgar’s musical strategies is his emphasis on formal design. The focus in Millais is on a searing wealth of minute detail, with a stark realism in the psychological character of the figures, their posture, and faces, while in Burne-Jones the stress is on the compositional structure. His faces are strangely distant and formal, their gaze hypnotic and depersonalized within a commanding architectural design. Elgar’s resistance to excessive subjectivity, his inclination to hide the personal beneath a compelling aesthetic framework, and his capacity to generate melody that permitted the listener to interject his or her own subjective meaning parallel Burne-Jones’s removed and neutral representation of the human figure and face.
