by Adams, Byron
Mr. Polly
H. G. Wells, born nine years after Elgar, was another shopkeeper’s son. His father’s business failed, and he worked his way to national recognition through self-help and hard work. During the first decade of the twentieth century—when Elgar enjoyed his greatest public esteem—Wells wrote three semiautobiographical novels that featured young, lower-middle-class men: Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), and The History of Mr. Polly (1909). In each case the main character is innocent and aspiring but ill educated and trapped in unpromising employment: all the ingredients for escapist behavior are in place.
The character most akin to Elgar is Mr. Polly, whose father owns a music and bicycle shop. Mr. Polly is imprisoned first in the routine of a dull job in a drapery emporium and then in marriage and a High Street shop in Fishbourne in which he foolishly invests some unexpectedly inherited capital. Mr. Polly receives an inferior education and constantly struggles against straightened financial circumstances and meager opportunities for self-improvement. Before his fortunate windfall, he alternates between the shop floor and the employment office. However, he never fully loses his sparks of imagination and wonder. Deep inside him there lurks the conviction that “there was beauty, there was delight; that somewhere—magically inaccessible perhaps, but still somewhere—were pure and easy and joyous states of body and mind.”4 Mr. Polly therefore lives out a dual existence. He avidly collects books, and he prefers to lose himself in them than look after his shop properly. He is a keen cyclist, and at weekends goes on long rides to explore the countryside. His reading is totally unsystematic (and in this respect probably more like Elgar’s than the latter would have admitted), mixing classics (Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Rabelais) with modern adventure stories and thrillers.5 He falls in love in courtly fashion, after the manner of a character in a chivalric romance. As an autodidact, Mr. Polly is uncertain of the pronunciation of words he has seen only in print, but is enthusiastic in devising ringing phrases and sometimes ridiculous neologisms. He has a tendency to verbal pretence, but is also vulnerable to the conversational faux pas.
Mr. Polly suffers from chronic indigestion—of mind as well as body—and thus frequent bouts of bad temper. These afflictions are the result of the impossible conditions that English society imposes on him. The novel begins with Mr. Polly sitting on a stile in a field, with an aching stomach. After fifteen years of unrewarding shopkeeping, he finds his business on the verge of bankruptcy. He is in his mid- or late thirties (the age at which Elgar was still a frustrated provincial violin teacher, seemingly destined for permanent obscurity). Mr. Polly decides to burn the shop and kill himself, allowing his wife to live off the insurance payment. He goes through with the arson, but somehow forgets to execute the suicide. So he pockets a share of the money and abandons his former existence to become a cheerful vagabond, wandering the woods and lanes of southern England. By the end of the novel he is fortunate enough to settle into a job at a country inn, where he enjoys an idyllic existence as a ferryman on a river and works for the comfortable fat woman who owns the establishment. Here he feels “mellowish and warmish.” His existence is “as safe and enclosed and fearless as a child that has still to be born.”6 So Mr. Polly, who was all along an “artless child of nature,” escapes to a womblike refuge.
Elgar, living in the real world, never achieved such a decisive and successful escape. His indigestion of the mind—and tendency to dyspeptic outbursts and theatrical displays of self-pity—remained to the end of his life. Many of the illnesses he suffered during his thirties and forties may well have been at least partly psychosomatic. The early scars left by the Victorian class system made him ashamed of his origins and profession, resentful of establishment “insiders,” but also, conversely, left him afflicted by an unattractive snobbery, overvaluing material possessions, and affecting the behavior of a leisured amateur. His father’s music shop was not especially profitable, nor were Elgar’s teaching rounds, which in any case he loathed. Even in later years, when he had secured a national reputation, he constantly feared having to fall back on teaching or worse. He frequently contemplated suicide—or claimed to—but never attempted the deed. Like Mr. Polly, Elgar had a small slice of financial luck—in his case it was his wife’s (relatively modest) income—but his attempt to develop a career in London between 1889 and 1891 failed, and he was forced to return to his provincial origins and renew his old connections. During the 1890s, his prospects often seemed bleak. One day early in that decade, when he was in his mid-thirties, Elgar, in “a pitifully overwrought state,” explained his troubles to his friend Rosa Burley, the headmistress of the school where he taught the violin. She described his account as “an outpouring of misery that was positively heartrending.”7 The theme was Elgar’s high artistic ambitions, which, he maintained, were constantly thwarted by poverty and the drudgery of his daily job.
Clearly Mr. Polly lags some way behind Elgar both in creative imagination and in artistic, social, and sartorial pretension. But in other respects the two appear rather disconcertingly alike. Elgar was largely self-taught and always carried with him the anxieties of the autodidact. As a young man he immersed himself in books and acquired a taste for chivalry and romance. Later he became a book collector and dabbled on the fringes of literary scholarship.8 His letters display an enduring delight in wordplay. He claimed to have preserved into adulthood a childlike sense of wonder and imagination within himself. Above all he was devoted to the countryside and to cycling, and took every opportunity to lose himself far from civilization.
Nevertheless, despite these parallels in their characters, the differences between the respective destinies of Elgar and Mr. Polly are stark. Mr. Polly discovers that “if the world does not please you you can change it.”9 Wells’s novel thus describes the successful transformation of Mr. Polly’s life. Like Wells, whose portrait of Mr. Polly drew upon his own life experience, Elgar transgressed the hidebound class divisions of the time to become a famous and honored artist. Thus for Elgar the rural idyll remains a temporary refuge; he must always return to society to find a home, make a living, and, of course, make music. Elgar never conducted an incendiary experiment to match Mr. Polly’s burning of his shop, for Elgar harbored ambitions for self-advancement more like those of Wells himself than the quietist solution embraced by Mr. Polly.10 Aside from Elgar’s obvious responsibilities as a father and husband, there was probably too much conservativism in his character, both politically and personally, for him to make a sharp break and abandon his aspirations to respectability and public approval. Guided by his wife, in the 1890s Elgar attempted to escape his difficulties through the alternative methods of hard work, social climbing, and eventually the cultivation of royal patronage, but this deepened his entanglement in English society and, in the end, did not cure his mental indigestion. In this light Elgar’s escapism is a paradoxical impulse. Like Mr. Polly’s, it is deeply embittered, but it coexists with an outward tendency not only to accept but even to strengthen the original entrapment. The next section suggests a model for this uncomfortable condition, finding it—literally—just down Elgar’s street.
Worcester Forgotten and Remembered
How often in years gone by, while pacing the lonely cloisters of our venerable cathedral, have I endeavored in imagination to refill the void with its former occupants—to note their appearance, dress, and employment—to enquire of these shadowy unrealities their history, thoughts, hopes, and aspirations, and to restore for a few moments the gorgeous pomp and circumstance of a wondrous institution now gone for ever.
—John Noake, The Monastery and Cathedral of Worcester (1866)
Toward the end of his life, Hubert Leicester, Elgar’s childhood companion, fellow Catholic, Worcester stalwart, and five times mayor of the city, penned a series of contributions to its history: Notes on Catholic Worcester (1928), Forgotten Worcester (1930), How the Faith Was Preserved in Worcestershire (1932), and Worcester Remembered (1935).11 Although Elgar’s foreword to Forgot
ten Worcester implies that the pair were chalk and cheese in terms of personality, their social origins were similar (class, religion, upbringing on High Street), both enjoyed upward career trajectories (Leicester became a successful accountant), and both held their hometown in high esteem and relished its traditions of civic ceremony. Leicester’s books echo some of Elgar’s basic beliefs and attitudes and flesh them out in a way that Elgar himself never did. Leicester emerges from them as an ambivalent figure, filled with civic pride but deeply dissatisfied with the present and yearning for the return of a distant past that was swept away long ago in what he regards as a violent catastrophe.
Leicester’s introduction to Forgotten Worcester strikes a note of solemn local patriotism. He has written the book solely to satisfy a request from the mayor. He hopes that the work will confirm the importance of the city and inspire the native.12 He then lays out a personal interpretation of “History” in the large—not just the history of Worcester, but that of England as a whole over two millennia. The first era (1–669 C.E.) was pagan, and he passes over it swiftly. For Worcester, the second (669–1155) started at the time of the conversion of the kingdom of Mercia to Christianity. Society was now shaped by the teachings of the Church, which upheld a duty to administer to the needs of the less fortunate. To this end abbeys, friaries, priories, convents, churches, and cathedrals were established, which provided relief to the poor, sick, and orphaned, and education to those who needed it. This regime maintained direct links between the community, the spiritual values of its people, and the dispensation of local charity. “Rates [local taxes], as we know them to-day, were things unheard of.”13 The third era (1155–1540) witnessed the development of trade and commerce and the awakening of “the general desire to acquire money”; it thus contained the first seeds of modern decline. The activities of the Church were now ably supplemented by guilds and corporations, which regulated the behavior of tradesmen, arranged public entertainments, and provided insurance for the citizens against misfortune, criminal damage, or loss. The era ended with society’s definitive fall from grace: “This dual management, for satisfying the new wants of the community, continued till the sixteenth century, when the religious houses were dissolved, the guilds banned, and the lands and possessions of both bodies (which were really the property of the people) seized by the Crown.”14 Leicester’s characterization of the fourth era (1540–1930) is terse and devastating: “After the religious houses were abolished, the financial, or mercenary age commenced, and brought with it the extension of the rent system, the introduction of rates, taxes, and ground rents, and the reduction of most of our institutions to a mercantile basis. And in this state we are today.”15
Leicester’s books periodically return to aspects of this narrative and expand upon the details. Mention of the English Reformation is usually scornful, with the word placed within quotation marks: “the fateful ‘Reformation’”; “what is known as the ‘Reformation.’”16 Leicester regards its immediate outcomes as sacrilege and rapine, and its long-term impact as far-reaching social alienation. Worcester Remembered tenderly records a catalogue of “outrages” committed against the religion of the city: the prohibition of the Mass, the abolition of altars and crucifixes, the despoiling of “sacred images,” the reuse of consecrated altar stones as paving, and the plunder of the shrines of Saint Oswald and Saint Wulstan. Heavy fines imposed by the Crown on recusants enriched the exchequer and coerced the English people into accepting Protestantism against their true wishes.17 Leicester takes similar pains in documenting the damage inflicted on Worcester Cathedral by Cromwell’s troops during the English Civil War: the destruction of “sacred statues,” the smashing of stained glass, the use of the building as a stable, and “other atrocities too vile to be mentioned.”18 The long-term consequences of the Reformation were no less dire. The chapter in Forgotten Worcester on “Ancient Guilds as They Affected Worcester” praises the pre-Reformation guild system for its reliance on local beneficence, pride, and solidarity, and aims several barbs at the modern system of state welfare provision. “All these services were performed by the Guilds in days when men were prepared to pay for what they received, and did not expect, as so many do to-day, to receive these benefits as their right… . In the trade Societies of to-day, the main objects are to force up wages and obtain for the worker constant increase of pay, while those of the masters have it as their object to so manage matters that the price of commodities may be put up to the advantage of the producer.” Similarly, in modern times insurance is provided by “commercial companies run for the sake of profit.” These developments owe their existence ultimately to the expansion of the state in the sixteenth century, when poor laws and workhouses had to be established to substitute for the work of the monasteries and guilds, and taxes levied to pay for them.19
Leicester’s views appear to rest on a combination of staunch local patriotism and middle-class resentment of taxation and state bureaucracy. Welfare is best administered between and among fellow citizens; when the state steps between those who fund and receive welfare, both suffer. His tone of disillusion in this regard may owe something to the industrial strife of the 1920s and the economic depression of the 1930s. What is distinctive about his writings, however, is the combination of these politically Conservative themes with a strong emotional attachment to a lost culture of Catholicism, which casts an air of mystery and romance over the whole account. He rejects the prevailing view of the English Reformation as a heroic phase of national self-definition. His condemnation of central government’s “crimes” against the English people is reminiscent of early-nineteenth-Century radical texts such as William Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Reformation (1824–27) and Rural Rides (1830). His devotion to medieval Catholicism and its social mission echoes the opinions of the Victorian architect and medievalist A. W. N. Pugin, whose writings compared the society of the Middle Ages favorably with that of the present. (Pugin regarded the modern city as filthy, cramped, violently policed, and brutal in its effect on the poor.)20 These themes became commonplaces of Victorian medievalism, articulated by Thomas Carlyle and the “Young England” circle, and then by John Ruskin and the Christian Socialists. Later they were taken up by William Morris and the Guild Socialist movement.21 Leicester thus writes within a tradition that challenges the basic narrative about English identity and history made by British governments and the Church of England for several centuries.
The connections between Leicester and Elgar are oblique yet intriguing, given the men’s common origins. In 1905, during Leicester’s first stint as mayor of Worcester, he arranged for Elgar to be awarded the freedom of the city. At the ceremony Elgar (wearing his Yale University robes) processed solemnly through the streets alongside the civic dignitaries.22 In 1930, possibly influenced directly by Leicester’s writings, Elgar composed his Severn Suite, whose movements evoke Worcester’s medieval past (“Worcester Castle,” “Tournament,” “Cathedral,” “Commandery”).
Elgar’s letters contain an abundance of references to the distant past of his own life, many of them associated with his childhood and early adulthood in Worcester, and, especially in later years, infused with passionate regret and longing for a lost idyll.23 Leicester’s books, too, have their warm domestic aspects: they blend personal and family memories, legend and hearsay, and genuine historical findings, merging personal and collective memory. To be sure, aside from the decision to set Cardinal Newman’s “The Dream of Gerontius”—at the time a controversial move—Elgar seldom advertised his attachment to the mystery and majesty of Catholic worship, and he certainly did not utter public polemics on the subject: he was a cultural Catholic rather than a militant believer.24 Still, in 1931 he could write about the College Hall in Worcester: “The College Hall is a favorite subject for meditation with me, carrying, as it does, the happiest memories of great music, with a halo of the middle ages combined with an odour of sanctity which even the sacrilege of the reformers has not wholly destroyed.”25 (This
sensual description resonates with Elgar’s more general attachment to display and ceremonial, his liking for “colorful” music, and his impatience with the English taste for the plain.)
But Leicester’s most significant parallels with Elgar are found at the levels of tone and rhetoric. Leicester’s books are marked by an undercurrent of loss and anger and a sense of belatedness. The distant past is characterized by perfect unity; this was the time of “what had always been the ‘one faith’ of Christendom.”26 Past and present worlds are separated by a definitive break at 1540, a break violently imposed by external forces against which the inhabitants of England, and Worcester in particular, are helpless. Although Leicester looks forward to the future unification of the Anglican and Catholic churches, his remarks in that regard sound as much like pious formulae as real hopes. When he lets down the guard of the respectable citizen and diligent antiquarian, Leicester emerges, like Elgar, as a man of contradictions: an accountant who hates commercialism and a Catholic with a sense of disinheritance within the city to which he professes devotion. As with Elgar, there is in practice no easy way out of this predicament. For the present, a better world can be glimpsed only through memory and imagination.
Some Musical Escape Routes