The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Wagner’s music, said Lewes, ‘remains a language we do not understand’.11 Cosima Wagner was as baffled by the harmonious, quiet, civilized relationship between Lewes and the great novelist with whom he shared his life. ‘Ils nagent dans une mer de calme perpetuel,’ she told someone, ‘mais nous savons très bien qu’il y a tout autant de requins et de choses pernicieuses dans une mer calme que dans une mer orageuse.’ (They swim in a sea of perpetual calm, but we know very well that there are as many sharks and harmful things in a calm sea as in a stormy sea.)

  This is certainly a misreading of Lewes’s ‘marriage’ with his Polly – i.e. George Eliot. But how does it work as a survey of the contemporary scene? Going down the Thames by steamer, and passing the docklands where Father Wainwright toiled among the Wapping poor, the Wagners found that ‘the industrial landscape made a tremendous impression’. Wagner said, ‘This is Alberich’s dream come true – Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog.’ In the very same year, Henry James made the same journey and noted:

  like so many aspects of English civilisation that are untouched by elegance or grace, it has the merit of expressing something very serious. Viewed in this intellectual light, the polluted river, the sprawling barges, the dead-faced warehouses, the frowsy people, the atmospheric impurities become richly suggestive. It sounds rather absurd, but all this smudgy detail may remind you of nothing less than the wealth and power of the British Empire at large; so that a kind of metaphysical magnificence hovers over the scene.12

  One of the most disturbing novels of the 1870s was Trollope’s The Way We Live Now – disturbing because genial, comic Anthony Trollope, who had so consistently amused his public with tales of country-house gossip and cathedral-feuds, chose to depict an England entirely vulgarized, sold to Mammon, dominated by money-worship. His swindling financier Augustus Melmotte, whose high reputation is based completely on corruption and fraud, is a perennial figure in English life. There is always, at any one time, an Augustus Melmotte in London, idolized by politicians, fawned upon by society, until his exposure, when all those who have been happy to enjoy his largesse howl at his dishonesty. Melmotte (like Dickens’s Mr Merdle, a comparable figure) commits suicide. Professor Polhemus, an American scholar quoted by Trollope’s biographer James Pope-Hennessy, makes the point that Trollope saw the same truth as Marx and Engels – ‘a world where there is no other bond between man and man but crude self-interest and callous cash-payment’, a world that ‘has degraded personal dignity to the level of exchange-value’, creating ‘exploitation that is open, unashamed, direct and brutal’. Professor Polhemus points out that, while Karl Marx was an optimist, Trollope’s later years were suffused with pessimism and gloom.13

  The Way We Live Now was published the year before the opening of the Bayreuth Festival Playhouse and the first complete performance of Wagner’s Ring.14 As Bernard Shaw reminded ‘The Perfect Wagnerite’ in 1898, ‘the Ring, with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its water-maidens and Valkyries, its wishing-cap, magic ring, enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure is a drama of today, and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity. It could not have been written before the second half of the nineteenth century, because it deals with events which were only then consummating themselves.’15

  Shaw rightly saw Alberich the dwarf, amassing power through his possession of the ring, and forcing the Nibelungs to mine his gold, as the type of capitalism. ‘You can see the process for yourself in every civilized country today, where millions of people toil in want and disease to heap up more wealth for our Alberichs, laying up nothing for themselves, except sometimes agonizing disease and the certainty of premature death.’16

  Shaw saw The Ring as an allegory which ultimately failed. Wagner had first sketched ‘the Night Falls on the Gods’ when he was thirty-five. ‘When he finished the score for the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 he had turned 60. No wonder he had lost his old grip and left it behind him.’ Others have suggested, however – to my mind more plausibly – that what the conclusion of Götterdämmerung implies is a transcendence of politics. ‘The message of Götterdämmerung was that if heroes fall short … they fail and with them all their achievements; their whole world passes, while nature prepares another renewal of the life-force.’ It is indeed surprising that Shaw with his quite preternaturally acute musical ear was so deaf to the beautiful resolution of the Cycle – ‘Nature, the Rhine rises to take again the ring from the finger of the dead hero, whence no lesser power could wrest it. Peace comes through nature …’17

  It is strange that William Morris, who had published a verse adaptation of the Nordic myths, Sigurd the Volsung (1876), should have so mistaken the nature of Wagner’s purpose. He met the composer, holding out a hand to him which was bright blue – he was experimenting with dyes at this period. But he thought the Ring was a ‘pantomime’ version of the Nibelungenlied. ‘It is nothing short of desecration to bring such a tremendous and world-wide subject under the gaslights of an opera: the most rococo and degraded of all forms of art – the idea of a sandy-haired German tenor tweedledeeing over the unspeakable woes of Sigurd, which even the simplest words are not typical enough to express!’

  Fiona MacCarthy, Morris’s best biographer, says that ‘in his notorious belittlings of Wagner, Morris appears at his most pig-headed and parochial’,18 which is true; but she could have added ‘most ignorant’. It is obvious that a man who imagined that Wagner’s operas involved ‘tweedledeeing’ had not heard a single chord of the composer’s work. It would have been interesting to take Morris to Bayreuth and hear his reaction if he had actually sat through The Ring: he might have been converted.

  No allegory of any work is exhausted by drawing too punctilious a match between symbol and signified. The audience to Wagner’s musical drama is caught up in an experience which is profound in itself, and to say Alberich = the Big Capitalist or that the befriending of Alberich by Loki and Wotan = the Church and the Law embracing the power of capital is too narrow and too specific an account of what stands as a universal work of art. Shaw was right, however, to say that Wagner’s masterpiece was rooted in its time.19 What is suggested in the final opera in the cycle is a universal collapse – the Gods themselves hurtling towards self-destruction. As the ‘storm-clouds of the nineteenth century’ – John Ruskin’s phrase – gather, we sense impending disaster in many of the great artworks of the period.

  Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky died a couple of months before Disraeli. His vision of the human condition was as disturbed, as dark, as demonic as Wagner’s. Those who read Besy (The Devils), his novel of 1871–2, might, when it first appeared, have thought it was merely a farce about a group of liberals in a provincial town being taken over by a manipulative lunatic, a nihilist. To us, reading it 130 years after it was published, The Devils is still as funny as the day it was written, but it is also uncannily prophetic. This is, in very truth, what is about to happen to Russia. Just thirty-six years after the death of Dostoyevsky the mighty Russian Empire will fall into the hands of a psychopath and his group of destructive followers.

  Dostoyevsky was haunted, as are the musical dramas of Wagner, by the Death of God, the ultimate moral and imaginative calamity for the human race. He believed it was possible to undo the knowledge of this horrible fact by falling at the feet of Jesus and by accepting Russian Orthodoxy. The Russian People, the God-bearing people, might yet save the world by their loyalty to this mystic Christ.

  It is strange to think of this great genius pacing the streets of London on his one visit there, in 1862. Like many visitors to Victorian England – both contemporary visitors from abroad and time-travellers who write about the period – Dostoyevsky was forcibly impressed by the sheer numbers of prostitutes swarming in the Haymarket. ‘Here there are old women, here there are beauties at the sight of which you stop in amazement. In the whole world, there is no more beautiful female type than the Englishwoman …’20

  So one could b
elieve if looking at the canvases of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In a casino he sees a girl and ‘I stopped, simply thunderstruck; I have never seen anywhere anything like that ideal beauty. She also seemed very sad.’ What Dostoyevsky saw in the faces of Londoners were those ‘marks of woe’ which William Blake had seen as their hallmark. The ‘white negroes’ as he called the British working classes, the toilers in the East End of London who ‘seek salvation in gin and debauchery’, fill him with gloom.

  What you see here is no longer even a people, but a systematic, resigned loss of consciousness that is actually encouraged. And looking at all these pariahs of society, you feel that it will be a long time before the prophecy is fulfilled for them, before they are given palms and clothed with white robes, and that they will long continue their appeal to the throne of the Almighty: How long, O Lord?

  Dostoyevsky’s solutions, in so far as they were thought through, to the malaise of modern European life could hardly have been more different from that of the communists, but many have noted the similarity between his observations on the English poor in 1862 and those of Engels in 1844.

  By the time of Dostoyevsky’s death in 1881, nearly forty years had passed since Engels reported on the condition of the working class in England. And England, and the world, had changed quite enormously. America had torn itself apart in a great civil war, with huge loss of life, and the president most associated with the release of the slaves had been assassinated. An assassin, too, murdered the tsar of Russia who liberated the serfs.

  There had been several unsuccessful attempts to kill Alexander. On 1 March 1881 a bomb was thrown at his carriage on his return from a military parade, and this seemed like another failed assassination. The emperor got out of his carriage and was standing in the street making inquiries when a second bomb was thrown, which mortally wounded him. This liberal and gentle man was sixty-three years old.21

  The murder sent reverberations far beyond the Russian borders. The anarchy predicted by Dostoyevsky seemed all too likely to be about to be loosed upon the world. ‘Man cannot possibly exist without his former God’ – this is the view thrown out by the anarchist Kirillov in The Devils, during one of the most dramatic scenes in the whole of fiction.

  The malaise of the late nineteenth century was not primarily a political or an economic one, though subsequent historians might choose to interpret it thus. Men and women looked at the world which Western capitalism had brought to pass since Queen Victoria had been on the throne – over forty years now! – and they sensed that something had gone hideously awry. Dostoyevsky is – like so many geniuses – capable of holding contrarieties of view in his head, which is why his vision is so interesting. With a part of himself he was a completely modern, progressive thinker, who for example gave a favourable review to G.H. Lewes’s The Physiology of Common Life, who had read Darwin, or reviews of Darwin, and dipped into J.S. Mill, both the political thought and the system of logic.22 On the other hand, as he did so, he felt things falling apart, the centre not holding. Ruskin and Carlyle were writing about a similar phenomenon. So too was the wholly secular Trollope in The Way We Live Now who ‘says nothing about the gross disparity between rich and poor’,23 concentrating merely on the vanity, the sheer pointlessness of the lives of the rich.

  Gladstone bellowing on the windswept moorlands of Midlothian; Wagner in the new-built Bayreuth Festival Theatre watching the citadel of the Gods go down in flames; world-weary Trollope scribbling himself to death in the London clubs; Dostoyevsky coughing blood, and thrusting, as he did, his New Testament into the hands of his son24 – these could hardly be more different individuals. Yet they all at roughly the same moment in history were seized with comparable misgiving. It is like one of these disconcerting moments in a crowd of chattering strangers when a silence suddenly falls; or when a sudden chill, spiritual more than atmospheric, causes an individual to shiver and to exclaim ‘I feel as if a man has just walked over my grave.’

  His London concerts complete, Wagner had returned to Germany long before November 1877, when the curtain went up at the Opera Comique Theatre, just off the Strand, which had been leased by the theatrical impresario, Richard D’Oyly Carte. The German musical dramatist was therefore not in a position to see the Gilbert and Sullivan opera, The Sorcerer.25

  The first hit,fn1 Trial by Jury, had played at the Royalty Theatre from 25 March to 18 December 1875 with prodigious success. ‘It seems, as in the great Wagnerian operas, as though poem and music had proceeded simultaneously from one and the same brain’ – as The Times critic put it. The music was sublime. The play absurd. Yet in a bizarre way, it was a recognizable picture of the audience’s actual world. Those who saw the operas as they first appeared went out into the street with words and music in their heads which – love them or loathe them – are ineradicable. But more than that, for the fans, of whom there are millions to this day, the world itself is transformed by the Gilbert and Sullivan experience.

  There is a pathos, not to say tragi-comedy, about the fact that the operas did, and do, indeed seem as if they had proceeded simultaneously from one and the same brain. Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), the son of a sergeant bandmaster from the Royal Military College, Sandhurst (formerly a clarinettist and music teacher), rose through the route of choirboy at the Chapel Royal and star pupil at the Royal Academy of Music to being a serious aspirant musician and composer. He had studied at Leipzig, and if it had not been for his frivolous association with Richard D’Oyly Carte and William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911) he might have had an illustrious career as a minor nineteenth-century musician, known only to the devotees of kitsch as the composer of ‘The Lost Chord’ – one of the most popular of all English songs – and to churchgoers as the composer of the most rousing tune to ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ (‘St Gertrude’, 1871).27 As it was, this dignified biography was denied him. He was fated to be prodigiously rich and famous – and to be ‘and Sullivan’ for as long as the English language endures.

  Gilbert, a failed barrister with a grotesque penchant for rather cruel burlesque, was a most unlikely collaborator for Sullivan. For parallels you have to imagine what it might have been like had Mendelssohn gone into partnership with Dickens.

  The defendant in Trial by Jury is accused of that hoary old Victorian joke, Breach of Promise. It enables Gilbert to indulge in two of his great stand-bys, mockery of the outward forms of English law – judges in their wigs, juries vacillating in their opinions: these are naturally comic – and the ageing process in women. There is hardly an opera in which the joke does not resurface. In Trial by Jury the Judge himself recalls his days of impecunosity as a young barrister:

  But I soon got tired of third-class journeys,

  And dinners of bread and water;

  So I fell in love with a rich attorney’s

  Elderly ugly daughter.

  The attorney, delighted to get the daughter off his hands, is able to assure the judge:

  ‘You’ll soon get used to her looks,’ said he

  ‘And a very nice girl you will find her!

  ‘She may very well pass for forty-three

  ‘In the dusk with the light behind her!’28

  Versions of this joke, which to modern taste seems merely cruel, run through the entire Gilbertian oeuvre, from Ko-Ko’s

  I’ve got to take under my wing,

  Tra la,

  A most unattractive old thing,

  Tra la,

  With a caricature of a face29

  in The Mikado (1885) to Jane’s song in Patience (1881):

  Fading is the taper waist,

  Shapeless grows the shapely limb,

  And although severely laced,

  Spreading is the figure trim!

  Stouter than I used to be,

  Still more corpulent grow I –

  There will be too much of me

  In the coming by and by!

  Sullivan’s harmonious and beautiful settings of these words make them seem all the more outrage
ous.

  But however much a modern prude might abhor Gilbert, or a musical snob be foolish enough to despise Sullivan, they are essential objects of study if we want to catch the flavour of the late Victorian world. ‘Mere entertainment’ is all they are; but they share with great art the capacity to make us see their world in a particular way.

  Now, as the example of Gilbert’s ungallantry about women makes clear, this is not a way of viewing the world of which we would necessarily approve. I could imagine a Marxist critique of The Savoy Operas – as the works came to be known when D’Oyly Carte built the Savoy Theatre in 1881 on the south side of the Strand (the first theatre in Britain to be lit by electric light). Perhaps the Marxist might argue that the audiences who streamed into that brightly lit world, who were beguiled by Sullivan’s tunes and who laughed at Gilbert’s burlesques and puns, were being numbed with a real opiate, something much more potent than religion. The institutions of the Law, Parliament, the Armed Forces, the Class System are all held up to ridicule in The Savoy Operas: but it is an essentially undisturbing ridicule, on the whole inspiring affection not loathing for its objects. No one coming out of Trial by Jury – which represents the judiciary as ludicrous and corrupt – stands on the pavement wanting the destruction, or even the overhaul, of the legal system. In fact the opposite.

  JUDGE

  Though homeward as you trudge,

  You declare my law a fudge,

  Yet of beauty I'm a judge

  ALL

  And a good Judge too!30

  No one comes out of The Sorcerer wanting to overthrow the Church.

  Now for the tea of our host –

  Now for the rollicking bun –

  Now for the muffin and toast –

  And now for the gay Sally Lunn!31

  as Dr Daly – the only clergyman in the canon – sings in happy chorus. There is no danger here, no real satire – only suburban reassurances. Anyone – my fictitious Marxist would argue – who has been ‘brought up’ on Gilbert and Sullivan expects England to be absurd, corrupt and badly organized – but instead of this making us wish to reform the system, purge it from top to bottom, it induces affection for the most moribund and unjustifiable abuses.