To combat the emasculating, rootless environment of the modern city, a patently ideological construction of “nature” was exalted to the status of a cult. Writing of the conflation of nationalism and nature-worship that arose during the fin-de-siècle, Mosse observes that becoming part “of nature . . . gave both sanction to the established order and meaning to individual lives . . . The healing power of nature lay readily at hand, not just for individuals but for the nation as well.” Mosse continues, “The quest for the genuine through the power of nature became a search for the true soul of the nation as well.”37 Elgar located this quest vaguely in “an out-of-door sort of spirit,” but other English contemporaries took this ideology a step further in the case of Sibelius: he became an avatar of the Finnish race through his presumed “pantheistic” identification with nature. Sibelius was Finland. In an obituary tribute, Ernest Newman declared forthrightly, “It is a case not of seeing Sibelius through Finnish eyes but of seeing Finland through the eyes of Sibelius.”38 For these critics, the influence of the Finnish composer’s masculine “rootedness” offered a way of purging from English music the lingering perfume of post-Wagnerian decadence.
Predictably, Gray seeks to have his cake and eat it when discussing questions of national identity, casting Sibelius both as an international modernist and as the conflation of two distinct racial types. In his 1931 biography of Sibelius, Gray, having now visited Finland, helpfully informs his readers that—despite the “otherness” of a landscape dotted with prehistoric boulders—it is a modern country that exemplifies technological, architectural, educational, and political progress.39 By so doing, Gray seems ready to place the composer in a decidedly contemporary context. He then makes a sharp and unexpected detour, for though Gray has honed his vocabulary since the publication of A Survey of Contemporary Music, he does not abandon altogether his “primitive” rhetoric of 1924. Instead, he articulates a similar point with greater subtlety through the use of racial stereotyping. Gray explains the dualities of Sibelius’s personality as well as his music—the contrast between the ephemeral salon music and the profound symphonies—in terms of a putative bifurcation between the composer’s supposed Swedish affability and essential Finnish nature. Gray, who despised Newman and constantly baited him, uses a geologic image similar to that employed by his nemesis:
This aspect of his personality probably represents the Swedish element in him, both of race and culture, for the Swedes are justly famed among peoples of the north for their possession of . . . amiable social attributes . . .With Sibelius, however, one very soon becomes aware of another side to his personality, deeper and more fundamental, a substratum of Finnish granite, as it were, underlying the polished and elegant Swedish surface. He unites in himself, in fact, the characteristic qualities of the two racial types; the traditional charm, affability, and bonhomie of the Swede and the fiercely independent spirit, the sturdy self-reliance, the love of isolation and solitude, the extreme reserve, of the Finn.40
Readers today cannot help but be disconcerted by the insouciance with which Gray bandies about racial profiling in such passages (and they are legion), but for Gray and his contemporaries, a dissection of a composer’s inherent racial characteristics was both “progressive” and “scientific.” After the popularization of Darwinian theory, such assertions were common in the writings of British music historians. Sir C. Hubert H. Parry (1848–1918), who was appointed Director of the Royal College of Music in 1895, is best remembered today as a composer, but during his lifetime he was revered as a distinguished scholar as well.41 Parry was considered a political and social liberal: his celebrated volume The Evolution of the Art of Music, first published in 1896, reflects its author’s admiration for the Victorian progressive Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).42 The book is filled with authoritative racial pronouncements presented serenely as scientific fact. (The firm of Kegan Paul published Parry’s book as one of “The International Scientific Series.”) In his Hegelian chapter on folk music, Parry, whose ethnography was shaky at best, asserts, “Racial differences, which imply different degrees of emotionalism and imaginativeness, and different degrees of self-control in relation to exciting influences, are shown very strongly in the folk music of different countries. . . . The folk-tunes of England present much the same features as German tunes. There is next to no superfluous ornamentation about them, but a simple, directness, such as characterises most northern folk-tunes.”43
Given such a background of racial discourse in English musical writing, it would be difficult to argue that the vocabulary of later British writers was the result of either unselfconsciousness or naïveté. Although Newman once wrote that he was not “a believer in rooted and inalterable race-characteristics,” his practice contradicts that assertion, as when, in the course of a laudatory review of Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service, he opines, “The work . . . is of course Jewish at heart . . . . What gives this music its particularly moving quality is the cry throughout it all of a sorely persecuted race.”44 That Newman’s colleague Gray was conversant with contemporary racial theory is clearly illustrated by a passage aimed at excusing Sibelius’s compositional promiscuity. Gray writes defensively:
This immense fecundity, combined with a certain unevenness in quality, has always militated strongly against Sibelius in the eyes of many superior persons who are disposed to regard these characteristics of his with the same stern disapproval as that with which eugenists [sic] regard the unsystematic, uncontrolled proliferation of the lower classes. According to them, the artist should so control his creative urge as to permit nothing unworthy to escape into existence.45
Just because Gray humorously uses eugenicists as a stick with which to beat those censorious critics—he cites only Germans—who disapproved of Sibelius’s “immense fecundity” does not mean he disagreed with eugenic premises. In the next paragraph he clarifies his position: “It is certainly better to produce one healthy and intelligent offspring than a large family of weaklings and mental defectives, and better to write one good composition than a vast horde of mediocre ones.”46 Indeed, his assertions represent the continuation of a strain of British thought that came into sharp, dogmatic focus in the mid-Victorian period after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. At this juncture, the racial prejudices indispensable to imperial conquest were given new luster by the burnished imprimatur of science. Previously, religion—the conversion of “savages” deprived of the tender mercies of Christianity—was often ardently invoked in the pulpit as an excuse for colonial expansion. As the doctrine of biblical inerrancy gave way to Victorian faith in technological progress, however, science was called on to provide a pretext for the subjection of “lesser” races. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, embroidered upon by such polymaths as Herbert Spencer and Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), led to a form of social Darwinism that posited “the survival of the fittest” in racial terms.47
With a gift for publicizing his ideas, Galton was profoundly influential in shaping racial theory. As Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “Independently wealthy, Galton had the rare freedom to devote his considerable energy and intelligence to his favorite subject of measurement. . . . He even proposed and began to carry out a statistical inquiry into the efficacy of prayer!” As Gould relates, “Galton coined the term ‘eugenics’ in 1883 and advocated the regulation of marriage and family size according to hereditary endowment of the parents.”48 But Galton did not stop at such relatively modest measures, for he argued that, just as the hardiness of domestic animals can be enhanced by “preventing more faulty members of the flock from breeding, so a race of gifted men might be obtained, under exactly similar conditions.” Galton even hinted that it might be a positive development if the modern state instituted the culling of its weaker members according to the “social arrangements” favored by the ancient Spartans. Galton asserted flatly, “Modern industrial civilization deteriorates the breed.”49
It was a short step from Galton’s hypotheses to a scienti
fic racism that viewed the white races—to which all of these eugenicists and scientists belonged—as superior to other races such as Jews, Africans, African-Americans, Indians, Native Americans, Arabs, and Mediterranean peoples. Commenting on the American Civil War, distinguished English biologist T. H. Huxley (1825–1895) wrote:
It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest. But whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitations may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforth lie between Nature and him.50
Huxley’s use of scientific terms (“prognathous”) to justify racial taxonomy became a common stratagem for racial discrimination throughout the English-speaking world.
These British hypotheses of scientific racism found a ready welcome among the privileged upper crust of American society, as well as in universities, where classes on eugenics were added to the curriculum.51 This development was due in large part to the tensions unleashed in America both by Reconstruction and the influx of immigrants; these fears reached a feverish pitch during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, who was an ardent eugenicist.52 In 1916, Madison Grant, who was a patrician conservationist, a friend of Roosevelt’s, and a fanatical believer in eugenics, published The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History, a classic of scientific racism that, despite relatively modest sales, had an enormous impact both in America and Europe.53 Following Deniker and others, Grant, who popularized the neologism Nordic, posits a hierarchy of races at the apogee of which he placed the hardy peoples of the Baltic region.54
A lifelong bachelor, Grant positively luxuriates in his fantasies about tall, virile Nordic men; he rarely describes, discusses, or mentions, women. For Grant, the Nordics are “a purely European type” that he apotheosizes as “Homo europæus, the white man par excellence.” Grant describes these paragons of racial purity as “everywhere characterized by certain specializations, namely wavy brown or blond hair and blue, gray, or brown eyes, fair skin” also possessing a “narrow and straight nose.”55 Hypothesizing that the Nordic race developed around the shores of the Baltic sea, he posits that “the vigor and power of the Nordic race as a whole is such that it could not have evolved in so restricted an area as Southern Sweden.” Admittedly, “the problem of the Finns is a difficult one,” as they seemed to Grant not to have many racial connections to the other peoples settled in the Baltic region, but he observes brightly that “the coast of Finland, of course, is purely Swedish” and concludes that the Finns are a “thoroughly Nordic type.”56
Grant hails Nordic men as a “race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers and aristocrats.” Furthermore, Grant proclaims, “The Nordic race is domineering, individualistic, self-reliant and jealous of their personal freedoms . . . The pure Nordic peoples are characterized by a greater stability and steadiness than are mixed peoples.”57 Influenced by Huxley and others, Grant lays this purity at the feet of geographical isolation abetted by nature in the form of an inclement climate: “The climatic conditions must have been such as to impose a rigid elimination of defectives through the agency of hard winters . . . such demands on energy if long continued would produce a strong, virile and self-contained race.”58
With notable exceptions, such as those penned by the distinguished anthropologist Franz Boas and his students, Grant’s tome—virtually unreadable today—received respectful reviews. The New York Herald lauded the volume as “ a profound study of world history from the ethnological standpoint.” (As Jonathan Peter Spiro points out, Emily Greene Balch, then a professor of economics and sociology at Wellesley, was the only reviewer “to object to Grant’s statement that negative measures should ultimately be applied to ‘worthless race types.’”)59 The Passing of the Great Race was published throughout Europe, in German, French, and Norwegian translation; all four of the book’s editions appeared in Great Britain as well.60 Among Grant’s influential British admirers were the socially progressive novelist John Galsworthy and the distinguished Oxford geologist W. J. Sollas, who sent a letter of praise to Grant, declaring, “I hope your work will be widely read and that it may have some influence on our Statesmen.”61
Though few, if any, British statesmen of the time seem to have been influenced by Grant’s book, the vocabulary of eugenics became part of the lingua franca of many English writers, such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, as well as those who wrote about Sibelius. However, it cannot therefore be assumed that any music critic was a passionate eugenicist, a doctrinaire scientific racist, or a political conservative. In his book Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain, Dan Stone aptly observes, “It is now fairly widely accepted that eugenics appealed to thinkers across the political spectrum. . . . Eugenics was not some kind of free-wheeling amorphous project, but was an aspect of generally held ideas about social reform. . . . For left-wing thinkers . . . it became an integral part of their conception of society, along with (indeed part of) schemes for public hygiene and education.”62 One of the reasons that eugenics became so popular during the First World War and after is that it provided a hygienic promise of a renewed world purged of defect; few had the foresight to discern the horrors into which this seemingly benign program would lead humanity. Discussions of eugenics were so pervasive in Britain during the interwar period that Gray, Newman, and others used both the vocabulary and assumptions of the eugenicists without a second thought. When A Survey of Contemporary Music was published in 1924, for example, Gray did not use the word Nordic to describe the Finnish composer; in the final chapter of his 1931 biography of Sibelius, he uses it several times and places the concept in relation to Sibelius’s stylistic development: “The decade 1900–10 presents . . . a conspicuous decrease in the number and importance of the more predominantly nationalistic and Nordic works, and a corresponding increase in the number and importance of those which I have loosely designated as cosmopolitan and eclectic.”63 Furthermore, Gray does not hesitate to use racial profiling on Sibelius, applying an unattributed quotation from unidentified “ethnologists” that essentially offers Grant’s Nordic type: “The typical Finn has been described by ethnologists as ‘of middle height, muscular, broad-shouldered, with round head, broad face, concave nose, fair complexion, and blue or grey eyes.’” Gray continues, “This might almost be the passport description of Sibelius, so closely does he conform in physique to the national type.”64
Notice that both Newmarch and Gray describe Sibelius’s physical body in virtually the same terms, and that both pointedly observe how his features conform to assumptions about Northern manhood.65 A more revealing aspect of this strain of criticism are the various ways that Gray and other writers use references to the male body to describe Sibelius’s music. Nowhere is this focus more apparent than in descriptions of the Fourth Symphony. Gray, for example, compares the Third and Fourth symphonies both as sexes and bodies: “If the Third represents the result of a slimming treatment, a reduction of the adipose tissues and somewhat opulent curves of the symphonic muse as she appears in the first two examples, the Fourth is the outcome of a process of sheer starvation, of a fakir-like asceticism and self-denial. The Fourth Symphony is gaunt, spectral, emaciated almost; the question here is no longer one of superfluous flesh, but of any flesh at all—the very bones protrude.”66 In an article publis
hed two years after the appearance of Gray’s biography, Newman echoed his colleague: “No other music that has ever been written is so spare of build as this: it is an athlete’s body, without an ounce of superfluous flesh upon it, with most of the weight in the bones and with the bones and the muscles all tension and power.”67 In his comparison, Gray executes an awkward rhetorical pirouette starting from the voluptuous female body of Sibelius’s first two lushly romantic symphonies, pivoting on the slimming classicism of the Third and landing akimbo in front of a male body stripped to its bare essentials—that of an Indian ascetic in loin cloth (if that) and stripped of “superfluous flesh.” Having arrived at the image of an emaciated but powerful body, it was a short step for Gray to envision the Fifth Symphony as energy only, a massive, pulsating “Red Giant” star glistening in the dark of outer space. Newman prefers to see healthy flesh, comparing the symphony to the body of an athlete, a trained body that—taut with muscle and tension—is, like Gray’s fakir, devoid of “superfluous flesh.”
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 20