After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Elgar, who left school at fifteen in Worcester, worked for a while as a clerk in a lawyer’s office, and eventually went to London ‘living on two bags of nuts a day’, and was taught the violin by Adolf Pollitzer. There followed a brief, inspirational visit to Leipzig (1882). Then in the late 1880s he was bowled over by Dvorak’s visit to England, and in the 1890s he discovered Wagner, and sat through two performances of Parsifal at Bayreuth.

  Yet for all the Continental influences which enabled Elgar to become a composer of very near greatness, all these models led him to a point of inspirational psychological release in which he seemed to be tapping a collective mood, annotating the very landscape of England, and its soul. His feeling for the landscape of the Malvern Hills and the valleys of Avon is reflected in his programme music the Enigma Variations, which became immediately popular at its first performance – conductor Hans Richter – in 1899. The following year Richter conducted, in Birmingham, Elgar’s oratorio, based on Cardinal Newman’s poem about a man dying and going to purgatory, The Dream of Gerontius. As with Enigma, you can hear all the echoes of greater composers whom Elgar is imitating. The anguished chromatics of Part I are all but a quotation from the first act of Parsifal. Yet mysteriously something new has been created. In Gerontius and in his other oratorio The Apostles Elgar’s passionate emotional commitment to his Roman Catholic faith is surely one of the ingredients which explain why these works immediately hold and move. They have the compulsiveness of pure sincerity.

  This strange, melancholic dog-lover belonged to no ‘in’ set. He had not been to a public school or a university: he did not belong to the national Church. But it was he who set the Edwardian Age to an unforgettable music.

  Parking Mr Phoebus outside the New Inn, a ‘little roadside pub’ near Stretton Grandison, on 24 June 1902, he was about to hear some dramatic news. The new King had appendicitis. The Coronation, at which Elgar’s Coronation Ode was to be performed, was delayed. ‘Don’t for heaven’s sake sympathise with me – I don’t care a tinker’s damn. It gives me three blessed sunny days in my own country,’ he wrote to the ‘Nimrod’ of Enigma. Hearing the news for the first time in the New Inn he had said: ‘Give me another pint of cider. I’m deadly sorry for the King, but that’s all.’ The heads of state were all assembled in London for the ceremony, and at first the king was adamant that it should proceed despite his illness. Only when he developed peritonitis did the doctors persuade him to postpone. To everyone’s amazement the king was fit enough for the Coronation to take place on 9 August. By any standards, the Coronation – with Elgar’s Ode and Parry’s anthem, ‘I was glad when they said unto me’ – was a musical feast. But it was at a concert performance of the Coronation Ode by Clara Butt that the extraordinary qualities of the Ode were made clear to its composer.

  The words had been written by a melancholic schoolmaster turned don, fellow of Magdalene, Cambridge, compulsive diarist and prolific belletrist, Arthur Benson. Although an Eton master and the son of an archbishop of Canterbury, Benson’s copious diaries are a chronicle of feeling outside as well as in, crushed by insecurity, mental illness and suppressed – to the point of being barely recognized – homosexuality. He was not an especially political being, certainly not a jingo. Yet he and Elgar, these two mustachioed introverts, managed to do in one evening for the British Empire what Leni Riefenstahl did for the Third Reich. Elgar made the tonic key E flat rising at the end to C minor. He asked Benson to rewrite several times to fit his rhythms, receiving disarming replies such as: ‘I will try &; [sic] write a finale on the lines you indicate – though the metre is a hard one – if you could string a few nonsense words just to show me how you would like them to run I would construct it, following the air closely.’

  So, when Clara Butt stood up in the Royal Opera House, Elgar had arranged Benson’s hastily composed doggerel into a high imperial theme accompanied by military brass, an organ and full orchestra. It had an amazing effect. Arthur Benson wrote in his diary: ‘The Ode did both please and impress me very much; it is wizard-like music – I like the softer portions best’.6 For the large audience, the wizardry did its magic.

  From the instantaneous frenzy of the audience, Elgar knew that he had touched an extraordinary nerve. ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ became immediately a second national anthem. In spite of the fact, perhaps in part because of it, that its imperialistic sentiments are so shocking to the bien pensants, it remains a hugely popular song, bellowed enthusiastically by any British crowd if the opportunity arises. (It was not meant to be bellowed. Elgar introduced the tune dolce and pianissimo into the Coronation Ode, played by the orchestra alone.) Next to Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’, it must be the most compulsive of all open-air crowd-songs ever composed. For every one who is offended by the imperialist expansionism of its last lines, there must be a thousand who still believe the first two. Nor have the years since Benson wrote them, the years of refugees from every kind of tyranny, and the years of political emancipation and economic libertarianism, made the opening words of the Ode totally absurd. Of course, when Benson wrote the lyric, women (and nearly half of all men) were still not politically emancipated. Homosexual activity was illegal. Plays all had to meet with the approval of the Lord Chamberlain and press censorship was strong. The lives of the greater part of the population were circumscribed by the grinding demands of work. Ireland was held in an uneasy union with Westminster. The peoples of the Empire, especially in India, were beginning to wish for independence, or if not total independence the desire to have political rights equivalent to those enjoyed in the mother country. And yet, count the numbers of British people in the years covered by the ensuing pages of this present volume who voluntarily chose to go and live in the Ottoman Empire; Tsarist or Communist Russia; Wilhelmine or Nazi Germany; socialist or Fascist Spain, Fascist Italy, the Irish Free State or Republic, and compare it with the number from those places who clamoured to get on a boat to Britain. Certain freedoms, of the right to trial by jury, for example, had been inviolate in England for ages, and some – a far greater freedom of thought and expression than existed in the rest of the world – had been fought for by Victorian radicals.

  One of the things which redeems both the lyric and the music of the Coronation Ode is the elegiac note – which is also to be found in Kipling’s hymn ‘Recessional’, which was also sung at Edward VII’s Coronation.

  Far call’d, our navies melt away;

  On dune and headland sinks the fire:

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

  Lest we forget, lest we forget.

  The Edwardian lyricists love a land which feels threatened less by enemies without than by a sense that it contains the seeds of its own dissolution.

  Behind the music of Elgar is a lost music: not that of concert halls but of fields, pubs and kitchens. Contemporaneous with Elgar’s most creative period, the Folk Song Society, guided by its formidable Hon. Secretary Mrs Kate Lee, began to collect up the living oral traditions of song before they were lost. At the inaugural meeting of the Society, Sir Hubert Parry saw the enemy of authentic folk music as the growth of industrial towns, ‘our terribly overgrown towns’ with their ‘pawnshops and flaming gin palaces’ where ‘miserable piles of Covent Garden refuse which pass for vegetables are offered for food’. With the illness (and in 1904 the death) of Kate Lee, Cecil Sharp became the leading exponent of folk song, claiming to have collected over 500 tunes, of which 125 were modal tunes. ‘I’m Seventeen Come Sunday’, ‘Blow Away the Morning Dew’, ‘Hares on the Mountains’, ‘The Trees They Do Grow High’, they are all rural, and those who sang them belonged to the diminishing band of men and women who earned their living from the land, or from the sea.7 If he had not collected them, their memory would have faded. Yet the very act of gathering them up was, it could be said, a way of changing or destroying them, and when they had been arranged by Cec
il Sharp for piano, or for use in songs, and printed with sheet music, they had ceased to be folk songs. (In 1907, Sharp persuaded the music publisher Novello to sell cheap folk song collections for 2d. each.) Just as cyclists and ramblers helped to destroy the thing they went out for to see – unvisited and unspoilt country – so Cecil Sharp’s musical version of Merrie England suburbanized an organic tradition.

  For generations after they had become urbanized, however, the British continued not only to hanker after the country but to carry along and within them a sense of its rhythms and sounds. The commonest determinant factor in the shape of most English towns is the shape of the old fields on which they were built. Modern Liverpool owes its layout to the fields and farms which were there before the streets. Almost every block of nineteenth-century terraced houses in Leeds, especially in its suburbs of Hunslet and Armley, is rigidly controlled by pre-existing fields and their ownership. In some industrial towns, such as Nottingham, the common fields still existed in the early nineteenth century, so that expansion and building speculation on land which was available was all the more crowded and squalid.8 The great Victorian slums, whose jerry-building made them, by the twentieth century, intolerable for their ever-expanding populations, sing their own bleak requiem for rural England, and of no city could this be truer than London, whose population had swollen to millions more than the limits which Thomas Malthus or Cobbett or Dickens would have deemed unendurable.

  No wonder that in such circumstances the country, especially the country within easy reach of the great cities, seemed ever more poignantly attractive. Country Life Illustrated was a magazine which had been started in 1897 not by a countryman but by Edward Hudson, a tall fish-faced man, ‘a kind of bourgeois gentilhomme’ a friend called him, a bachelor who lived in north London with an invalid brother and two stiff spinster sisters who looked like old-fashioned dolls waiting to be wound up.9 He had started work as a solicitor’s clerk, and inherited a printing works from his father. The idea of Country Life struck him while playing golf with a solicitor friend on the golf course at Walton Heath: an illustrated magazine which would feed the townsman’s appetite for country houses, and pay for itself with the advertising revenue from estate agents.

  The best gardening articles were written by Gertrude Jekyll, pronounced to rhyme with Treacle. Born in 1843, she belonged to the first generation of women to receive a formal artistic training. She attended the School of Art in South Kensington with Helen Paterson (later Allingham) and Barbara Leigh-Smith. She knew most of the late Victorian painters and artists – G. F. Watts, Frederick Leighton, William Holman Hunt, William de Morgan – and her witty conversation compensated for staggering plainness of feature. Her passions were Surrey and gardens. ‘To Munstead for good’, she wrote in her diary on 26 September 1878 when she and her mother had moved into a large, somewhat Scottish-seeming house built for them by J. J. Stevenson in the splendid Surrey heathland south of Godalming.10 She did stay in Munstead for good, dying in 1932, but she did not always reside with her mother at Munstead House.

  Partly driven by poor eyesight and the fear of blindness, partly obsessed by the fact that rural Surrey was already beginning to be spoilt, Jekyll spent the 1880s chronicling the country she loved and building up a huge photographic archive, of flowers, trees, landscapes, old Surrey landscapes, cottages and their weather-beaten peasant inhabitants in their smocks and bonnets. It was on 17 May 1889 that she met a budding young architect, Ned Lutyens, born in 1869, who shared her love of old Surrey. Lutyens, the impoverished son of a painter, was taken up by Jekyll and introduced to the work of the great Arts and Crafts architect, Philip Webb.

  Lutyens is to English architecture what Elgar is to English music, an amalgam of styles and influences fused into something entirely idiosyncratic, individual. His head was filled with vernacular details from Surrey cottage eaves, barns, swooping roofs and latticed windows. Shapes and motifs from his endless cycling and walking trips through these villages were to stay in his mind, often reappearing even after he developed into an imperial classicist. In his early Arts and Crafts phase, after meeting Gertrude Jekyll, he was much influenced by Webb and his school – but Jekyll herself gave him his first major commission and her specifications were to influence him in designing dozens of other country houses. Her mother died in 1895, her brother inherited Munstead House, and she commissioned Lutyens to build on adjoining land at Munstead Wood.11

  It was all to be built in a vernacular manner out of dressed Bargate stone, with exposed oak beams (treated with hot lime to look greyish and powdery), oak mullions, oak window boards. No two door or window fittings were the same. Lutyens was to follow many of her directions into other commissions – for example, the very low treads on the oak staircase. Some hallmark details – the raked tile roof swooping down to the tops of the ground-floor windows – were very much his own. Munstead Wood, as far as its owner was concerned, was not simply a house, it was the setting for a garden. Lutyens knew nothing of gardens until he met Jekyll; she had been fully engaged with the cultivation of the gardens at Munstead House before designing her own at Munstead Wood. Her garden plans show her a meticulous colourist with an encyclopedic knowledge of plants. The paths and nooks and garden seats in any Jekyll garden give you the chance to see the abundance of plants at close hand. She wanted gardens to be abundant and colourful at all seasons, so for example to counteract the ‘temporary look’ of spring, bulbs would be planted in a setting in which clumps of Myrrhis odorata, Veratrum nigrum and Euphorbia wulfonii could flourish even when daffodils wilted. She liked enclosed gardens, with thick unclipped hedges of yew, holly and Quercus ilex. She liked rough sandy paths, and stone steps, and beds banked up so that the tall plants at the back of a bed were as visible as the tumbling drifts of colour in the middle and the trailing smaller flowers and leaves at the edge.

  The combination of Gertrude Jekyll’s gardening skills and Edwin Lutyens’s architecture became extremely popular among the classes rich enough to patronize them. After Munstead Wood he built Orchards, for the Chance family, who had made their money in Smethwick in the West Midlands making lenses for lighthouses. The success of Orchards inspired Frederick and Margaret Mirrielees to spend money made exporting department stores to Moscow creating Goddards, near Abinger – the courtyard with its well, the low walls drowned in aubrietia, the swooping roofs – and indoors, the old fire irons and bedwarmers made by the local blacksmith created an atmosphere of a lost past, a new home for which one felt instantly nostalgic. There followed dozens of commissions, of increasing grandeur. Chinthurst Hill was built for Maggie Guthrie, a feminist medic who hated it and sold it at once to Lord Rendel. Fulbrook, another magnificent Surrey house, at Elsted, was for another client who was ‘modern’, Gerard Streithfield, a gentleman of leisure, and his wife who was a keen motorist.12 John Galsworthy rightly noted in The Forsyte Saga that the status of the upper middle classes was confirmed by new building. The bohemian wife of Soames Forsyte, Irene, has an affair with Bosinney, the slightly Lutyensesque architect of their new-built house at Robin Hill. Soames was the solicitor for the impoverished estate, which is how he acquired the land. Going to view it, ‘Soames, the pioneer leader of a great Forsyte army advancing to the civilisation of this wilderness, felt his spirit daunted by the loneliness, by the invisible singing, and the hot sweet air’.13 Nevertheless, he is enraptured both by the beauty of the scene and, Man of Property as he is, by the notion of owning, mastering, making his mark by new building.

  A long, soft ripple of wind flowed over the corn, and brought a puff of warm air into their faces.

  ‘I could build you a teaser here,’ said Bosinney, breaking the silence at last.

  ‘I dare say,’ replied Soames drily. ‘You haven’t got to pay for it.’

  ‘For about eight thousand I could build you a palace.’14

  The popularity of Country Life, as Country Life Illustrated became in 1901, cannot be blamed for the growth of the suburbs, but to some extent it
determined their shape. As you turned its pages, if you were a stockbroker or a lawyer’s wife, you would know that you could not afford to have a house on the same scale of grandeur as Deanery Garden, Sonning, built for Edward Hudson the proprietor by Sir Edwin Lutyens, with a garden planting by Miss Gertrude Jekyll.15 But you could perhaps afford a new Tudorbethan mansion, with an oak staircase and mullioned windows and half-timbered gables, in Godalming or Esher, or Amersham or Penn. Such places were within easy reach of London now that suburban railways had been built. Comparable dormitory villages sprang up near Manchester (Altrincham, Cheshire, is the Esher of the North), Birmingham, Leeds. By the end of Edward VII’s reign the country in between was being bought up by speculative builders. For, if you could not afford stockbroker Tudor in Godalming or Esher, you could at least get out of town and have a semi-detached in Surbiton. Thus the English, in pursuit of a bit of peace and quiet, destroyed it, and in preferring country to town merely ended up by creating an endless ribbon between the two, a ribbon of suburbs which were not perhaps either town or country. The process had begun decades before King Edward came to the throne, and would continue long after he died.

  In flight from the ugliness and disease of the big industrial cities, and from the diseased values which had built them, was a wide variety of high-minded seekers. As early as 1891 ‘General’ William Booth, leader of the Salvation Army which sought to bring spiritual and physical relief to the sufferings of the urban poor, had established a Farm Colony at Hadleigh, Essex, far from the temptations of East End pubs and music halls, where the working classes made bricks, kept a chicken farm and tended fruit. There were about 300 colonists in this 100 acres of farm which by the time of 1905 had grown to 500. John Ruskin would have approved. Adjoining was a settlement for recovering alcoholics. At Sternthwaite Mill, Cumbria, the Colonization Society had a colony for unemployed city workers. And perhaps the strangest of all, Whiteway Colony in Gloucestershire attempted to put into practice a home-concocted blend of the simple-lifer ideals of Count Tolstoy with the consolations of Free Love. It was hard to know what was the more shocking to the indigenous rural community: the knickerbockers and sandals with no socks16 sported by the men, or the stories of their amorous goings-on.