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The Impressionists, as they were now called, continued to hold exhibitions, being supported by Durand-Ruel and other dealers with the courage of their convictions, and little by little, with the aid of intelligent criticism, hostility was overcome and the aims of Monet and his associates began to be understood. It was not, however, until 1889, when he shared an exhibition with Rodin at the Georges Petit Gallery, that Monet had a substantial success, his first one-man show in 1880 having been a failure.
With his studies of the Gare Saint Lazare in the third group exhibition of 1877, Monet had already begun the series of the same or similar subjects – railway stations, cathedrals, hay-ricks, river banks, poplars, water-lilies – under different conditions of light which were to establish his fame, and from 1889 onward his artistic reputation steadily increased. In 1883 he had settled at Giverny, in the department of the Eure, Normandy, and he remained there for the rest of his life, with occasional visits abroad, quietly and happily producing his pictures. Monet never received any honour from the State, though a tardy offer was made to him of a seat on the Académie des Beaux Arts, which he declined, and such pictures of his as are to be found in French national collections, at the Luxembourg Museum and elsewhere, are gifts or bequests. He himself presented to the French nation a series of 19 ‘Water-Lily’ paintings, and in 1923, at the age of 83, in the company of his old friend, M. Clemenceau, who was a supporter of the Impressionists in the stormy days of the ’seventies, Monet visited the Tuileries Gardens to inspect the building which was being specially constituted to contain them.
London Views
His work has been frequently shown in London, at the Goupil Gallery, the Leicester Galleries, the Lefèvre Galleries, the French Gallery, the Independent Gallery, and elsewhere, and some years ago an association of English and foreign artists was formed in London called the ‘Monarro Group’, combining the names of Monet and Pissarro as heads of the movement with which they found themselves in sympathy. In connection with Monet’s visits to England his views of the Thames, including ‘Waterloo Bridge’ and ‘The Houses of Parliament’, must not be forgotten. He is represented in the Modern Foreign Section of the Tate Gallery by two pictures only: ‘Plage de Trouville’, painted in 1870, purchased in 1924 by the Trustees of the Courtauld Fund; and ‘Vetheuil: Sunshine and Snow’, painted in 1881, included in the Lane Bequest of 1917.
Monet’s artistic progress may be described as the more and more purely æsthetic organization of his technical conquest of light and atmosphere. He did not follow the so-called neo-Impressionists into the formal dotting which was the logical outcome, or scientific application, of his own system of laying strokes or touches of pure colour side by side, eliminating all browns from the palette, but contented himself with a method which produced the effects he desired; and it was the æsthetic value, the poetry, rather than the mere realization of light that inspired him. Nor, though he was a pioneer in the discovery of ‘colour in shadow’, was he a decorative colourist by intention; he painted colour for the sake of light rather than light for the sake of colour. His work has been called lacking in design, but the charge cannot be supported. It stands to reason that if an artist is designing in atmospheric values, in veils of light, the design will not be so emphatic, so easily grasped, as if he were designing in solid forms, but nobody can look with attention at a picture by Monet and regard it as a mere representation of the facts and conditions. In this respect his work might well be compared to the music of his countryman Claude Debussy, in which, under an atmospheric shimmer, the melodies are not so immediately recognizable as they are in the works of Bach or Beethoven, but are nevertheless present to the attentive ear.
At the same time it must be allowed that the aim and methods of Monet were better adapted to some subjects than others, and with due appreciation of his cathedrals, railway stations, and Venetian scenes, we find his happiest expression in those river subjects in which a leafy garland of poplars reflects the influence of sky and water, such as the beautiful ‘Poplars on the Epte’, in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, or in the arabesques of water lilies. A fair description of the emotional effect of a typical work of Monet at his best would be that of a ‘sunny smile’. It was inevitable that after so much trafficking in airy regions painting should come to earth again, and the concern for plastic volumes and a more emphatic design instituted by Cézanne and other leaders of the movement conveniently known as Post-Impressionism was as natural a sequence to the Impressionism of Monet, as is the desire for physical exercise after loitering in a garden. But, so far as it is humanly possible to judge, Monet left a gleam upon the surface of painting which will never entirely disappear. Monet has been the subject of many writings, including an exhaustive study by M. Camille Mauclair.
Emmeline Pankhurst
A pioneer of woman suffrage
14 June 1928
Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, whose death is announced on another page, was born in Manchester on July 14, 1858. In her early childhood she was brought into close touch with those who had inherited the spirit of the Manchester reformers. Her father, Mr Robert Goulden, a calico-printer, was keenly interested in the reform question and the dawn of the movement for woman’s suffrage; her grandfather nearly lost his life in the Peterloo franchise riots in 1819. At the age of 13, soon after she had been taken to her first woman suffrage meeting by her mother, she went to school in Paris, where she found a girl-friend of her own way of thinking in the daughter of Henri Rochefort. In 1879 she married Dr R. M. Pankhurst, a man many years older than herself. An intimate friend of John Stuart Mill and an able lawyer, he shared and helped to mould his wife’s political views. She served with him on the committee which promoted the Married Women’s Property Act, and was at the same time a member of the Manchester Women’s Suffrage Committee. In 1889 she helped in forming the Women’s Franchise League, which, however, was discontinued after a few years. She remained a Liberal until 1892, when she joined the Independent Labour Party. After being defeated for the Manchester School Board, she was elected at the head of the poll for the board of guardians and served for five years. When her husband died, in 1898, she was left not well off, and with three girls and a boy to bring up. Accordingly she found work as registrar of births and deaths at Chorlton-on-Medlock, but her propaganda activities were considered inconsistent with her official position and she resigned.
In 1903 her interest in the cause of woman suffrage was reawakened by the enthusiasm of her daughter Christabel and she formed the Women’s Social and Political Union, the first meeting of which was held in her house in Manchester in October of that year. Two years later the militant movement was started as the immediate result of the treatment received by Miss Christabel Pankhurst and Miss Annie Kenney, two members of the union who endeavoured to question Sir Edward Grey on the prospects of woman suffrage, at a political meeting held in Manchester. In 1906 Mrs Pankhurst and her union began a series of pilgrimages to the House of Commons, which resulted in conflicts with the police and the imprisonment of large numbers of the members. In October, 1906, she was present at the first of these demonstrations, when 11 women were arrested. In January, 1908, she was pelted with eggs and rolled in the mud during the Mid-Devon election at Newton Abbot, and a month later she was arrested when carrying a petition to the Prime Minister at the House of Commons, but was released after undergoing five of the six weeks’ imprisonment to which she was sentenced. Some months later, in October, a warrant was issued for her arrest, together with Miss Pankhurst and Mrs Drummond, for inciting the public to ‘rush’ the House of Commons. During her three months’ imprisonment in Holloway Gaol she led a revolt of her followers against the rules of prison discipline, demanding that they should be treated as political prisoners. In 1909, the year in which the ‘hunger strike’ and ‘forcible feeding’ were first practised in connection with these cases, she was once more arrested at the door of the House of Commons, and after her trial, and pending an appeal founded on the Bill of Rights and a statute of Charles, dealing with petitions to the Crown, she went to America and Canada on a lecturing tour; two days before her return her fine was paid by some unknown person, so that she did not go to prison.
As soon, however, as she was back in England, she again devoted her energies to the encouragement of the campaign of pin-pricks and violence to which she was committed and by which she hoped to further the cause which she had at heart. In 1912, for her own share in those lawless acts, she was twice imprisoned, but in each case served only five weeks of the periods of two months and nine months – for conspiracy to break windows – to which she was sentenced. A year later she was arrested on the more serious charge of inciting to commit a felony, in connection with the blowing-up of Mr Lloyd George’s country house at Walton. In spite of the ability with which she conducted her own defence the jury found her guilty – though with a strong recommendation to mercy – and she was sentenced by Mr Justice Lush to three years’ penal servitude. On the tenth day of the hunger strike which she at once began (to be followed later on by a thirst strike) she was temporarily released, under the terms of the measure introduced by Mr McKenna commonly known as the Cat and Mouse Act, because of the condition of extreme weakness to which she was reduced. At the end of five months, during which she was several times released and rearrested, she went to Paris, and then to America (after a detention of 2½ days on Ellis Island), having served not quite three weeks of her three years’ sentence. On her return to England the same cat-and-mouse policy was resumed by the authorities – and accompanied by more and more violent outbreaks on the part of Mrs Pankhurst’s militant followers – until at last, in the summer of 1914, after she had been arrested and released nine or ten times on the one charge, it was finally abandoned, and the remainder of her term of three years’ penal servitude allowed to lapse.
Whether, but for the outbreak of the Great War, the militant movement would have resulted in the establishment of woman suffrage is a point on which opinions will probably always differ. But there is no question that the coming of the vote, which Mrs Pankhurst claimed as the right of her sex, was sensibly hastened by the general feeling that after the extraordinary courage and devotion shown by women of all classes in the nation’s emergency there must be no risk of a renewal of the feminist strife of the days of militancy. When the War was over it was remembered that on its outbreak Mrs Pankhurst, with her daughter Christabel and the rest of the militant leaders, declared an immediate suffrage truce and gave herself up to the claims of national service and devoted her talents as a speaker to the encouragement of recruiting, first in this country and then in the United States. A visit to Russia in 1917, where she formed strong opinions on the evils of Bolshevism, was followed by a residence of some years in Canada and afterwards in Bermuda for the benefit of her health. Since she came home, at the end of 1925, she had taken a deep interest in public life and politics, and had some thoughts of standing for Parliament, though she declined Lady Astor’s offer to give up to her her seat in Plymouth.
Whatever views may be held as to the righteousness of the cause to which she gave her life and the methods by which she tried to bring about its achievement, there can be no doubt about the singleness of her aim and the remarkable strength and nobility of her character. She was inclined to be autocratic and liked to go her own way. But that was because she was honestly convinced that her own way was the only way. The end that she had in view was the emancipation of women from what she believed, with passionate sincerity, to be a condition of harmful subjection. She was convinced that she was working for the salvation of the world, as well as of her sex. She was a public speaker of very remarkable force and ability, with a power of stimulating and swaying her audience possessed by no other woman of her generation, and was regarded with devoted admiration by many people outside the members of her union. With all her autocracy and her grievous mistakes, she was a humble-minded, large-hearted, unselfish woman, of the stuff of which martyrs are made. Quite deliberately, and having counted the cost, she undertook a warfare against the forces of law and order the strain of which her slight and fragile body was unable to bear. It will be remembered of her that whatever peril and suffering she called on followers to endure, up to the extreme indignity of forcible feeding, she herself was ready to face, and did face, with unfailing courage and endurance of body and mind.
D. H. Lawrence
A writer of genius
2 March 1930
David Herbert Lawrence, whose death is announced on another page, was born at Eastwood, near Nottingham, on September 11, 1885. His novel Sons and Lovers and his play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd are at least so far biographical as to tell the world that his father was a coalminer and his mother a woman of finer grain. At the age of 12 the boy won a county council scholarship; but the sum was scarcely enough to pay the fees at the Nottingham High School and the fares to and fro. At 16 he began to earn his living as a clerk. When his ill-health put an end to that, he taught in a school for miners’ boys.
At 19 he won another scholarship, of which he could not avail himself, as he had no money, to pay the necessary entrance fee; but at 21 he went to Nottingham University College, and after two years there he came to London and took up teaching again. It was in these years that he wrote, under the name of Lawrence H. Davidson, some books on history. He had begun also the writing of fiction, and his first novel, The White Peacock, was published about a month after his mother’s death had robbed him of his best and dearest friend.
Sons and Lovers, published when he was 28, brought him fame. Many years of poverty were to pass before his work began to make him financially comfortable; and even then the collapse of a publishing firm in America deprived him of some of the fruits of his labours. But this revolt against society which fills his books had its counterpart in his life, in his travels, and especially in his attempt to found, in 1923, an intellectual and community settlement in New Mexico.
Undoubtedly he had genius. He could create characters which are even obtrusively real. His ruthless interpretation of certain sides of the nature of women was recognized by some women to be just. Every one of his novels, as well as his books of travel, contains passages of description so fine that they command the admiration of people whom much of his work disgusts. His powers range from a rich simplicity, a delicacy almost like that of Mr W. H. Davies, to turbulent clangour, and from tenderness to savage irony and gross brutality. There was that in his intellect which might have made him one of England’s greatest writers, and did indeed make him the writer of some things worthy of the best of English literature. But as time went on and his disease took firmer hold, his rage and his fear grew upon him. He confused decency with hypocrisy, and honesty with the free and public use of vulgar words. At once fascinated and horrified by physical passion, he paraded his disgust and fear in the trappings of a showy masculinity. And, not content with words, he turned to painting in order to exhibit more clearly still his contempt for all reticence.
It was inevitable (though it was regrettable) that such a man should come into conflict with the law over his novel The Rainbow, over some manuscripts sent through the post to his agent in London and over an exhibition of his paintings. But a graver cause for regret is that the author of Sons and Lovers, of Amores, and the other books of poems, of Aaron’s Rod, the short stories published as The Prussian Officer, Ladybird, and Kangaroo should have missed the place among the very best which his genius might have won.
In 1914 Lawrence married Frieda von Richthofen, who survives him. He left no children.
Dame Nellie Melba
A great prima donna
23 February 1931
Melba, to use the name by which she was universally known until the prefix of Dame Nellie was attached to it, whose death we regret to announce this morning, was born near Melbourne in 1859, and began her career as Helen Porter Mitchell. Her Scottish parents, who had settled in Australia, had themselves some musical proclivities. But it was not until after her early marriage to Mr Charles Armstrong that it became clear that her gifts must be taken seriously.
It was largely by her own efforts that she came to England in 1885 with the intention of cultivating her voice. When she arrived the experts to whom she appealed in London did not realize her possibilities. It is amusing to record that she was refused work in the Savoy Opera Company by Sullivan, though probably he did her and the world at large the greatest service by his refusal. She went to Paris, and to Mme Mathilde Marchesi belongs the credit of having instantly recognized that, to quote her own phrase, she ‘had found a star’.
A year of study and of close companionship with this great teacher was all that was needed to give Nellie Armstrong a brilliant début at ‘La Monnaie’ in Brussels as Mme Melba. She made her first appearance there on October 13, 1887, in the part of Gilda in Rigoletto. Her second part was Violetta in La Traviata, so that from the first she was identified with the earlier phases of Verdi, in which she has been pre-eminent ever since. Although, contrary to the traditions of the Brussels theatre, she sang in Italian, she aroused such enthusiasm that when a little later she was to sing Lakmé, and the question arose as to whether her French accent was sufficiently secure, the composer Délibes, is said to have exclaimed, ‘Qu’elle chante Lakmé en français, en italien, en allemand, en anglais, ou en chinois, cela m’est égal, mais qu’elle la chante.’
Her first appearance at Covent Garden on May 24, 1888, in Lucia di Lammermoor, was a more qualified success. Curiously enough, she was more commended at first for some supposed dramatic power than for the only two things which have ever really mattered in her case – the exquisite voice and the perfect use of it. From London she returned to the more congenial atmosphere of Brussels, and in the following year, 1889, proceeded to the conquest of Paris, where she triumphed as Ophélie in Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet. In Paris Mme Melba had the advantage of studying the parts of Marguerite in Faust and of Juliette with Gounod, and she took part in the first performance of Roméo et Juliette in French at Covent Garden in 1889.
From this time onward Mme Melba had only to visit one country after another to be acclaimed. From St Petersburg, where she sang before the Tsar in 1891, to Chicago, where in 1893 her singing with the de Reszkes was one of the features of the ‘World’s Fair’, the tale of her triumphs was virtually the same. But from the musical point of view a more important episode was her prolonged visit to Italy between these two events. Here she met the veteran Verdi and the young Puccini. Verdi helped her in the study of Aïda and of Desdemona (Otello). She made the acquaintance of Puccini’s Manon, but La Bohème, the only one of his operas with which she was to be identified, was not yet written. Another young composer who begged leave to be presented was Leoncavallo. She sang Nedda in the first London performance of I Pagliacci a little later.
Mme Melba’s early American appearances recall her few experiments with Wagner. She sang Elisabeth in Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, during her first season there, and it was later in America that she made her single appearance as Brünnhilde. She had previously sung Elsa (Lohengrin) at Covent Garden, but she quite rightly realized that Wagner’s music was not for her. The only pity, when one recalls her repertory, is that either lack of opportunity or of inclination prevented her from turning to Mozart instead.
Her actual repertory amounted to 25 operas, of which, however, only some 10 parts are those which will be remembered as her own. La Bohème was the last of these to be added, and she first sang in it at Philadelphia in 1898, having studied it with the composer in Italy earlier in the year. She was so much in love with the music that she would not rest until she had brought it to London, and it was largely by her personal influence that it was accepted at Covent Garden. Indeed, she persuaded the management to stage La Bohème with the promise to sing some favourite scena from her repertory in addition on each night that she appeared in it until the success of the opera was assured. She kept the promise, though the rapid success of the opera soon justified her faith. To most of the present generation of opera-goers ‘Melba nights’ meant La Bohéme nights, and, for several seasons before the War and when Covent Garden reopened after it, there could not be too many of them for the public. She bade farewell to Covent Garden on June 8, 1926, when, in the presence of the King and Queen, she sang in acts from Roméo et Juliette, Otello, and La Bohème. Actually her last appearance in London was at a charity concert in 1929.
It is difficult now to realize that 30 years or so ago La Bohème seemed to offer few opportunities for the special characteristics of Mme Melba’s art, intimately associated as it then was with Donizetti, the earlier Verdi, and Gounod. But those characteristics in reality had full play in all music based on the expression of a pure vocal cantilena, and could appear in the simply held note at the end of the first act of La Bohème as completely as in the fioritura of ‘Caro nome’ or ‘The Jewel Song’. The essence of her power was due to such an ease in the production of pure tone in all parts of the voice and in all circumstances that there was no barrier between the music and the listener.
It is unnecessary to enlarge on the personal popularity of Melba here, or the almost passionate devotion which she inspired among her own countrymen on the various occasions when she revisited Australia. Her book of reminiscences, Melodies and Memories (1925), was disappointing, for it contained too little about her methods and experiences. She was generous in giving her services for good causes, and her work for War charities is remembered in the title conferred in 1918. She was then created dbe, and gbe in 1927.
Sir Edward Elgar
The laureate of English music
23 February 1934
The number of musicians of whom it can safely be said that the general public needs no explanation of their importance and asks for no justification of the place which their fellows accord them is small. Among composers this country has possessed two in the last century – Sullivan and Elgar. Of these the case of Elgar, who died yesterday at his home at Worcester at the age of 76, is the more remarkable because his genius was devoted to the larger forms of the musical art with which the ordinary man is supposed to sympathize least readily – the symphony, the concerto, and the oratorio. He never associated himself with the theatre in any close way; he never held any dominating official position in the musical life of the country, he rather stood aloof from institutions of any sort. Through nearly half his working life he was entirely unknown; during the remainder he was unhesitatingly accepted as our musical laureate.
In these days when the term ‘British composer’ is on everyone’s lips it is worth while remarking that Elgar by descent, upbringing, and education was entirely English. His father, a native of Dover, had settled in Worcester, where he kept a music shop and was organist to the Roman Catholic church of St George. His mother, Ann Greening, came from Herefordshire.
Edward William Elgar (he entirely dropped the second name in later years) was born at Broadheath, a village about four miles from Worcester, on June 2, 1857, and spent his youth in the typically English environment of the cathedral town and its surrounding country. Much has been said of Elgar’s upbringing as a member of the Roman Catholic Church and of the inspiration which it brought to his greatest choral work, The Dream of Gerontius, all of which is natural and true. But Elgar used to resent the idea that these influences in any way cut him off from others. As a boy he was constantly in and out of the cathedral listening to the music of its daily services and drawing many of his earliest and most treasured experiences from them. The Three Choirs Festivals at Worcester were sources of the most vivid delight to him. Indeed, it was characteristic of him at all times, that he loved to show himself knowledgeable on whatever others were inclined to think might lie a little outside his sphere of interest.
Early Compositions
Young Elgar had no systematic musical education, but he entered into all the musical activities of his father, which were many. He played the organ at St George’s, and, indeed, succeeded his father as regular organist there; he played the bassoon in a wind quintet (which perhaps accounts for the bassoon solo in the ‘Enigma’ Variations No. 111), but more particularly the violin, his thorough knowledge of which certainly had something to do with the brilliant passage-work of the famous concerto. He took an active part in all local music, particularly the concerts of the Worcester Glee Club, whose members gave him a bow for his violin in recognition of his services. Above all, he composed constantly, and some of the music now known in the orchestral suites, The Wand of Youth, dates from his boyhood. Pieces for violin and piano, part-songs, a motet, slight essays for the orchestra, are chief among such early works as survive. The interesting thing about them is that among much that is obvious and some that is trite one comes across turns of melody and harmony which are unmistakably the voice of Elgar. Even the first phrase of ‘Salut d’Amour’ must be allowed to be one of them.
Elgar was 32 years of age when he married, in 1889, Caroline Alice, only daughter of General Sir Henry Gee Roberts. This is hardly the place to write particularly of his wife’s influence on his career, but beyond question her unfaltering faith in him both as man and as artist sustained him through all the disappointments of his isolated position and enabled him to hold the difficult course towards success to which his helm was set.
In one respect his marriage rather emphasized the difficulties, for it caused him to live in London for the first time, and to discover how unready were musicians, publishers, and concert givers to take any interest in his music. The neglect of genius is always a fruitful theme for commentators who are wise after the event. Elgar was a genius, he lived two years in London unrecognized; these commentators cry ‘shame!’ but it is difficult to see what there was to recognize between 1889 and 1891. He had written none of the great works which have made him famous since. It may be remarked that Mr Bernard Shaw’s recently published Music in London, 1890–1894 does not contain the name of Elgar. True his overture ‘Froissart’ was produced at the Worcester Festival in 1890, and some people realized that here was something fresh and original.
Festival Works
In 1891 Elgar returned to the West Country and settled at Malvern, where he began his serious work in the composition of a number of pieces for choir and orchestra which were produced at various festivals in the succeeding years. The Black Knight, characteristically described as ‘a symphony for chorus and orchestra’, came out in 1893. Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf, Scenes from the Bavarian Highlands and an oratorio, The Light of Life, all appeared in 1896, the first at the North Staffordshire Musical Festival, the other two at Worcester. Here indeed was proof positive of the new voice in music, more than a hint of that mystical imagination, that sensitiveness to tone-colour, and that elusive yet individual gift of melody which were to seize his hearers so powerfully a little later. A patriotic cantata, The Banner of St George, for the Diamond Jubilee year, and Caractacus, written for the Leeds Festival of 1898, emphasized another side of Elgar’s musical character, an alert and nervous energy, the love of pageantry, the discovery of the poetry underlying external splendour. One finds here the Elgar of the ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ marches, the Coronation march, and the Scherzo of the Second Symphony.
The invitation to write for the Leeds Festival (this was the last festival conducted by Sullivan) was in Elgar’s case, as in that of several other English composers, the sign that he had ‘arrived’. A still more decisive landmark in his career was the production by Richter of the ‘Enigma’ Variations for orchestra in London in the following year, and it is indeed difficult to understand how, amid these signal proofs of his qualities, The Dream of Gerontius could have missed fire as it did at Birmingham in 1900. No doubt its very originality stood in its way. Choral singers accustomed to solid oratorio choruses could not understand these paeans of angels and frenzied outcries of demons. It was held to be extremely difficult. Common opinion declared that while it had beautiful moments it was a failure as a whole. That opinion has now been reversed. Every one realizes that The Dream of Gerontius has some perilously weak moments, but that as a whole it is one of the great imaginative creations of musical art.
The failure at Birmingham, however, was a step towards Elgar’s recognition outside his own country. A. J. Jaeger, an early enthusiast for Elgar’s music, and at that time reader to Messrs. Novello and Co., was instrumental in getting Gerontius accepted for performance at the Lower Rhine Festival at Düsseldorf, where it was most enthusiastically acclaimed. The approval of a keenly critical German public led to its revival at Worcester in 1902, with the result that everyone knows. Birmingham made amends by producing the two companion oratorios, The Apostles and The Kingdom, at its two subsequent festivals (1903 and 1906); the London Choral Society was formed to give the first public performance of The Dream of Gerontius in London (1903), and a special festival consisting entirely of Elgar’s music was arranged at Covent Garden in 1904. In the following year he paid his first visit to the United States, where his works were received with enthusiasm.
The Symphonies: Public Acclaim
With these triumphs the first period of Elgar’s success as a composer of choral and orchestral works on the largest scale was completed. A second and equally brilliant instrumental period was to begin with the production of the first symphony in 1908. The Variations and several concert overtures, notably the popular ‘Cockaigne’ and ‘In the South’, together with the beautiful ‘Introduction and Allegro’ for strings, had contributed to the assurance that Elgar would reach his most individual expression in some work of the symphonic type; but he was even slower than Brahms in committing himself to a symphony. When the first symphony in A flat was announced for a concert of the Hallé Orchestra under Richter at Manchester excitement ran high. The broad melody with which it opens, the restless surge of its first allegro, the delicate merging of the scherzo into the slow movement and the triumphant progress of the finale to an apotheosis of the opening theme, would have carried away an audience less thrilled with expectancy than was that which crowded the Free Trade Hall on December 3, 1908.
Never has a symphony become so instantly ‘the rage’ with the ordinary British public as did this. For some time the regular orchestras of London could not play it often enough, special concerts were arranged for it, enterprising commercialists even engaged orchestras to play it in their lounges and palm courts as an attraction to their winter sales of underwear. The ‘boom’ was as absurd as such things usually are, and as short-lived, but it was based on something real. Here at last the public had found a composer whom experts acknowledged to be a master and whom they could understand. Elgar had caught the ear of the public for big music, apart from words or voice or drama.
That the violin concerto produced by Kreisler in 1910 should have been received in the same spirit is less remarkable, for the solo work has all the advantage of personal virtuosity which the symphony lacks. Both it and the second symphony in E flat, dedicated to the memory of King Edward vii, were felt by musicians to be of a finer fibre than the first, but the quiet, reflective ending of the second symphony was in itself sufficient to prevent the work being sought for as the first had been. The majestic funeral march of this symphony and the lofty but restrained dignity of the finale make it rank very high, however, in the estimation of musicians.
The War and After
It is not surprising that a period of comparative unproductiveness should have followed on these years. The Music Makers, a short choral work of a sentimental cast, in which themes from all Elgar’s chief works were freely quoted, rather emphasized his decline in energy. One further orchestral work, the symphonic poem ‘Falstaff’, however, showed that his invention was by no means exhausted. The War came, and various pièces d’occasion, sincerely felt and fervently expressed, occupied him. Such were the music to Cammaerts’s poem ‘Carillon’ and three commemorative odes (Laurence Binyon), of which ‘For the Fallen’ was the most impressive. He turned also to the composition of chamber music, and brought out together several works of that class, a violin sonata of rather unequal texture, a delicate string quartet, and a fine quintet for piano and strings. With these came in 1919 the concerto for violoncello, which though scored for a normally full orchestra has more in common with the intimate mood of the chamber works than with that of his big orchestral period.
In the spring of 1920 the death of Lady Elgar broke the composer’s life. For some time he lived very much in retirement; but among the few occasions on which he was willing to make a public appearance were always the Three Choirs Festivals of his native West Country. But for him those festivals might not have been restored after the War, and certainly could never have enjoyed the prosperity of the last decade without the attraction of Elgar’s music given under his own direction. In 1924 the King appointed him to the traditional office, without specific duties, of Master of the King’s Musick.
There was presently some talk of his finishing the trilogy of oratorios begun with The Apostles, possibly for a Gloucester festival, but that scheme did not mature. A few minor compositions, however, were thrown off, and in the summer of 1932 Elgar mentioned casually in conversation the existence in his desk of a Third Symphony. He was persuaded to promise it to the bbc Orchestra, and it was announced for production this year. The Third Symphony, however, was not in his desk, but in his head, when he spoke of it, and, like many a great composer before him, he spoke of it as ‘practically written’ when he had made only a few sketches. Though Elgar made considerable progress with it after the offer of the bbc was accepted, ill-health last year prevented him from bringing it into a condition from which it could be finished by anyone else. During his last illness he spoke of his anxiety lest an attempt should be made by another hand to finish his work. His wishes in regard to the fragments must be respected. There is not a single movement which is near completion, though some passages have been fully scored.
Elgar was a man of many interests outside music, and as years increased they tended to absorb more of his time and attention. He loved travel, experimental chemistry, heraldry, literature, and the racecourse. Sometimes he seemed to take a whimsical pleasure in persuading himself (though he could never persuade others) that these were the serious preoccupations of his life and that the writing of symphonies was only a frivolous hobby. He was fond of saying that he knew very little about music, was not particularly interested in the performances of his works, and never read what the papers said of them. This sometimes seemed an affectation, but was really an armour of defence. He suffered much from the adulation of indiscriminate admirers and often yearned to get out of the limelight at the very moment when he deliberately walked into it. He was like his music, essentially simple and spontaneous, though the simplicity might be occasionally clouded, by decorative details. Indeed it was his power of expressing himself in his music which made so extraordinarily direct an appeal. Through all the diversity of the subjects he treated the same mind speaks. A tune of two bars or a progression of two chords is enough to reveal him. It is impossible to imagine him writing like anyone else or even purposely maintaining a disguise through a page of score.
Many Honours
Elgar received many honours both at home and abroad. He was knighted in 1904 by King Edward, and on the occasion of King George’s coronation the Order of Merit was conferred on him, a distinction never previously bestowed on a musician. In 1928 he was made kcvo, in 1931 he was created a baronet, and he was promoted to gcvo last year. The University of Cambridge led the way in the many offers of academic distinctions, honoris causa. It was at the instance of Stanford that Elgar became a Doctor of Music of Cambridge on November 22, 1900. Academic institutions of France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, and the United States of America have paid him their several tributes. But the greatest tribute is the extent to which his music has travelled to foreign countries and has been performed by artists of the first rank. While there have been plenty of critics able to discover that his music is not a thousand things which the ideal symphony or the ideal oratorio ought to be, Elgar has been everywhere appreciated as one of the most individual composers of modern times, and distinguished from many of his contemporaries in the fact that music for him was always first and foremost beautiful sound.
Sir Edward Elgar leaves an only daughter, Carice Irene, who was married to Mr S. H. Blake in 1922.
Marie Curie
The discoverer of radium
4 July 1934
Mme Curie, whose death we announce with regret on another page, had a worldwide reputation as the most distinguished woman investigator of our times. Her claim to fame rests primarily on her researches in connection with the radioactive bodies and particularly for her discovery and separation of the new element rad-ium, which showed radiating properties to a marked degree. This was a discovery of the first importance, for it provided scientific men with a powerful source of radiation which has been instrumental in extending widely our knowledge not only of radioactivity but of the structure of atoms in general. Radium has also found an extensive application in hospitals for therapeutic purposes, and particularly for the treatment of cancerous growths by the action of the penetrating radiation emitted spontaneously from this element.
Marie Sklodowska, as she was before her marriage, was born on November 7, 1867, at Warsaw, and received her education there. She early showed a deep interest in science, and went to Paris to attend lectures in the Sorbonne. She had small financial resources, and had to teach in schools to earn sufficient money to pay her expenses. In 1895 she married Pierre Curie, a young scientist of great promise, who had already made several notable discoveries in magnetism and in the physics of crystals. Mme Curie continued her scientific work in collaboration with her husband, but the direction of their work was changed as the result of the famous discovery of Henri Becquerel in 1896, who found that the element uranium showed the surprising property of emitting penetrating types of radiation, which blackened a photographic plate and discharged an electrified body.
Examination of Pitchblende
Mme Curie made further investigations of this remarkable property using the electric method as a method of analysis. She showed that the radioactivity of uranium was an atomic property, as it depended only on the amount of uranium present and was unaffected by the combination of uranium with other elements. She also observed the striking fact that the uranium minerals from which uranium was separated showed an activity four to five times the amount to be expected from the uranium present. She correctly concluded that there must be present in uranium minerals another substance or substances far more active than uranium. With great boldness she undertook the laborious work of the chemical examination of the radioactive mineral pitchblende, and discovered a new strongly active substance which she named polonium, after the country of her birth. Later she discovered another new element, allied in chemical properties to barium, which she happily named radium. This element is present in minerals only in about one part in 3,000,000 compared with uranium, and shows radioactive properties more than a million times that of an equal weight of uranium. The Austrian Government presented Mme Curie with the radioactive residues necessary for the separation of radium in quantity, and she was in this way able to obtain sufficient material to determine the atomic weight and physical and chemical properties of the new element.
The importance of this discovery was at once recognized by the scientific world. In 1903 the Davy Medal of the Royal Society was awarded jointly to Professor and Mme Curie, while in 1904 they shared a Nobel Prize with Henri Becquerel. After the death of Pierre Curie in a street accident in Paris in 1906 Mme Curie was awarded in 1911 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and isolation of the element radium. In 1906 she was appointed to a special Chair in the Sorbonne and was the first woman to obtain this distinction. Later a special Radium Institute, called the Pierre Curie Institute, was founded for investigations in radioactivity, and Mme Curie became the first director. She held this post at the time of her death.
Classes at the Sorbonne
In the course of the last 20 years this institute has been an important centre of research, where students of many nationalities have carried out investigations under her supervision. Mme Curie was a clear and inspiring lecturer, and her classes at the Sorbonne were widely attended. Her scientific work was all of a high order. She was a careful and accurate experimenter, and showed marked power of critical judgment in interpreting scientific facts. She retained an enthusiastic interest in her science throughout her life, and was a regular attendant at international conferences, taking an active and valuable part in scientific discussions.
She had a deep interest in the application of radium for therapeutic work both in France and abroad, and during the War actively helped in this work. She was twice invited to visit the United States and was received with acclamation, while the women of that country presented her with a gram of radium, to allow her to extend her researches. In 1922 she was appointed a member of the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations and took an active part in their deliberations.
Mme Curie left two children. The elder, Irene, early showed marked scientific ability and married a co-worker in the Radium Institute, M. Joliot. It was a source of great satisfaction and pride to Mme Curie in her later years to follow the splendid researches made by her daughter and her husband, for they have made notable contributions to our knowledge of neutrons and transformations. During the present year, they observed that a number of elements became radioactive by bombardment with the particles from radium, and have thus opened up a new method for study of the transformation of the atoms of matter.
The many friends of Mme Curie of all nations, and the scientific world as a whole, will greatly lament the removal of one who was held in such great honour for her splendid discoveries in science, and one who by strength of character and personality left a deep impression on all those who met her.
Sigmund Freud
Psycho-analysis
23 September 1939
Professor Sigmund Freud, md, originator of the science of psycho-analysis, died at his son’s London home at Hampstead on Saturday night at the age of 83. From 1902 until recently he was Professor of Neurology in the University of Vienna. When the Germans violated Austria last year he was compelled to fly to England, where he had lived ever since.
Freud was one of the most challenging figures in modern medicine. Indeed, though his work was primarily medical, there is something incongruous in speaking of him as a doctor. Rather he was a philosopher, using the methods of science to achieve therapeutic ends. Philosophy, science, and medicine all paid him the tributes of excessive admiration and excessive hostility.
The truth would seem to be that even at this late date the time has not yet arrived when a just estimate of psycho-analysis and its founder is possible. The atmosphere is too highly charged with controversy. Supporters and opponents are still in too bitter a mood. One can neither affirm that Freud’s teaching will stand the test of time, nor deny that it may change permanently the whole conception of the operations of the human mind. Psycho-analysis, whatever it may have become in alien hands, possesses at least the merit of having been given to the world as a treatment of disease and not as a moral law. Freud, indeed, though he took great liberties with philosophy, though he was himself a philosopher malgré lui, always wrote and spoke as a man of science. He did not pretend to have invented his remarkable view of mental processes: he asserted that he had discovered it.
But Freud, the man, was clearly bigger than his detractors are usually ready to admit. His influence has pervaded the world within the space of but a few years. It can be discerned today in almost every branch of human thought, and notably in education, and some of his terms have become part of everyday language, ‘the inferiority complex’ for example.
Misunderstanding dogged Freud’s steps from the beginning. He spoke of sex in that large sense which includes the love of parents for their children, the love of children for their parents, the labours of a man to provide for his family, the tenderness of a grown man towards his mother, and so on: and immediately his intention was narrowed by his critics to their own partial view. They accused him of attempting to undermine the moral law. Again, he indicated his belief that natural impulses which have been suppressed have not, by that act, been annihilated. They remain in what he called the ‘unconscious mind’ to vex and trouble their possessors. At once the cry was raised that this man preached a doctrine of unbridled libertinism. Those raising it overlooked the fact that Freud had placed side by side with his doctrine of repression his doctrine of ‘sublimation’. We must not, he taught, regard a natural impulse as, of itself, wrong or unworthy. To do so is to abhor the law of Nature and so the order of the universe. Rather we must take that impulse and apply it to the noblest purposes of which we are capable.
This, it may be admitted, was a little like saying that a negative produces a positive, and that man owes his spiritual development to racial and social taboos. It was a doctrine which appealed strongly to Puritanical minds, with the result that Freud’s supporters, like his opponents, included persons of the most diverse views. Psycho-analysis thus became not one but a dozen battle-grounds on which the combatants fought with the fierceness of zealots. There is indeed, in all Freud’s writing, a haunting echo of theological controversy. His conception included, under other names, many ancient doctrines and dogmas. Thus there is but little real distinction between ‘original sin’ and the ‘natural impulse’ of the Viennese professor. Freud, too, adjured his patients to recognize their human nature as the necessary first step to cure; not merely the knowledge but the conviction of sin was essential to a change of heart. Again, he bade his followers know themselves by every means and devised astonishing new methods of self-knowledge or ‘self-analysis’. Thus was the evil spirit of a suppressed emotion or desire unmasked and released to be transmuted into the good spirit serving as a mainspring of action.
The famous theory of dreams and the various ‘complexes’ resolve themselves, when viewed as Freud meant them to be viewed, into observations of the activities of the ‘natural man’ imprisoned and ignored yet always alive within us. This original sin, if denied, possesses, he believed, the power to ‘attach’ itself to or ‘associate’ itself with other, apparently good and innocent thoughts, lending them, thereby, its own passionate energy. Hence the innumerable ‘anxieties’ and fears (‘phobias’) of the mentally sick: hence their strange apings of physical disease, their perverted ideas, their unreasoning prejudices. To resurrect this natural man and yoke his powers to fresh and useful enterprises was the life-aim of the physician.
There are those, today, who deny the very existence of the ‘unconscious mind’ – though their numbers are diminishing. There are others who see in nervous ailments only the failure of will power, whereby they think we hold our instincts in wholesome restraint. Finally, there are many who believe that an actual physical lesion, a disease of the body, underlies every abnormality of the mind. Freud’s doctrine is anathema to all such. His doctrine, moreover, has been modified and changed, notably by Jung, who laid far less stress than Freud on the sexual character of emotional impulse. The controversy is apt to become a barren one.
Freud was born at Freiberg, in Moravia, on May 6, 1856, and studied in Vienna and at the Salpêtrière in Paris, graduating md in 1881. Most of his numerous works have been translated into English and other languages, and he was editor of Internationale zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and of Imago, and director of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Last year he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and many years ago he received the honorary degree of ll.d from Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. Professor Freud married in 1886, and had three sons and three daughters.
Amy Johnson
A great airwoman
6 January 1941
Miss Amy Johnson, cbe, whose death is now confirmed, will always be remembered as the first woman to fly alone from England to Australia. That flight took place in 1930 and her name at once became world-famous.
In the early days of the war she was employed in ‘ferrying’ material to France for the raf. Her cool courage, flying unarmed through the danger zone, was much admired by the raf pilots. Since that time she had flown a variety of aircraft many thousands of miles and she met her death while serving her country.
Amy Johnson was of Danish origin. Her grandfather, Anders Jörgensen, shipped to Hull when he was 16, settled there, changed his name to Johnson, and married a Yorkshire woman named Mary Holmes. One of their sons, the father of Amy, became a successful owner of Hull trawlers. Amy graduated ba at Sheffield University, and then went to London to learn to fly at the London Flying Club at Stag Lane, Edgware. After taking her ‘A’ licence she passed the Air Ministry examination to qualify as a ground engineer. Before starting on her flight to Australia her only considerable experience of cross-country flying was one flight from London to Hull.
Having acquired a secondhand Moth with Gipsy engine, she started from Croydon on May 5, 1930, on an attempt to beat the light aeroplane record of 15½ days from England to Australia. Considering her lack of experience at that time as a navigator, it was a marvel that she found her way so well. She arrived safely at Darwin on May 24. Thence she flew to Brisbane, where, probably through her exhausted condition, she overshot the aerodrome and crashed her Moth rather badly. Australian National Airways Limited arranged for her to fly as a passenger in one of their machines to Sydney, and in the pilot of that machine she met her future husband, Mr J. A. Mollison. She was accorded a great reception in Australia, and was received at Government House. King George V conferred on her the cbe and the Daily Mail made her a present of £10,000. On her return to England she was met at Croydon by the Secretary of State for Air, the late Lord Thomson, in person.
In 1931 she made a fine flight to Tokyo across Siberia, and then back to England, and in 1932 she started off in another Puss Moth, Desert Cloud, to beat her husband’s record to the Cape, which she did by nearly 10½ hours. The skill with which she crossed Africa proved that she had become a first-class pilot. In 1933 she and her husband acquired a D. H. Dragon aeroplane and set out to fly to New York. They successfully crossed the Atlantic, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Maine, and Massachusetts, but when they were approaching New York their petrol ran short and they therefore landed at Bridgeport, 60 miles short of New York, in the dark. The Dragon ran into a swamp, and overturned. It was extensively damaged, and both of them were bruised and scratched. Her flight to the Cape and back in May, 1936, will rank as one of her greatest achievements. She beat the outward and the homeward records, the record for the double journey, and the capital to capital record. The Royal Aero Club conferred its gold medal upon her in October, 1936, in recognition of her Empire flights. Her book Sky Roads of the World was published in September, 1939.
Her marriage took place in 1932, but in 1936 she resumed her maiden name for the purposes of her career, and in 1938 the marriage was dissolved.
Virginia Woolf
Novelist, essayist, and critic
28 March 1941
The death of Mrs Virginia Woolf, which must now be presumed, and is announced on another page, is a serious loss to English letters. As a novelist she showed a highly original form of sensitivity to mental impressions, the flux of which, in an intelligent mind, she managed to convey with remarkable force and beauty. Adeline Virginia Stephen was born at Hyde Park Gate, London, in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen (then editor of the Cornhill and later of the DNB) by his second wife, Julia Prinsep Duckworth (a widow, born Jackson). She was related to the Darwins, the Maitlands, the Symondses, and the Stracheys; her godfather was James Russell Lowell; and the whole force of heredity and environment was deeply literary. Virginia was a delicate child, never able to stand the rough-and-tumble of a normal schooling. She was reared partly in London and partly in Cornwall, where she imbibed that love of the sea which so often appears in her titles and her novels. Her chief companion was her sister Vanessa (later to become Mrs Clive Bell, and a distinguished painter). Her home studies included the unrestricted use of Sir Leslie’s splendid library, and as she grew up she was able to enjoy the conversation of distinguished visitors like Hardy, Ruskin, Morley, and Gosse. She devoured Hakluyt’s Voyages at a very juvenile age, and early acquired a love of the whole Elizabethan period that never left her. Her mother died when she was 13 and her father in 1904, when she was 22. After Sir Leslie Stephen’s death Virginia, Vanessa, and two brothers set up house together at Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, and as time went on the sisters, with Mr Clive Bell, the late Lytton Strachey, Mr T. S. Eliot, and some others, formed a group with which the name of that London district was associated, sometimes with ill-natured implications. But, so far as Virginia Woolf was concerned, she would have done honour to any district. She very soon displayed a keen and catholic critical sense which found expression in those brilliant and human articles written for The Times Literary Supplement, many of which are contained in her book, The Common Reader. In 1912 she married Mr Leonard Woolf, the critic and political writer, and went to live at Richmond, Surrey.
The marriage led to much joint work, literary and in publishing; but Mrs Woolf’s private interests remained primarily artistic rather than political. Despite friendships with Mrs Fawcett, the Pankhursts, and Lady Constance Lytton, she took no active part in the movement for woman suffrage, though as she showed in A Room of One’s Own, she passionately sympathized with the movement to secure for women a proper place in the community’s life. It was not until she was 33 (in 1915) that she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, which was a recension of a manuscript dating back some nine years. It was an immature work, but very interesting prophetically, as can be seen by comparing it with To the Lighthouse. By this time Mr and Mrs Woolf had set up as publishers at Hogarth House, Richmond, calling their firm the Hogarth Press. The high level of the works published by this press is universally recognized. Among them are some of the best early works of Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, besides the works of Mrs Woolf herself. Later transferred to Bloomsbury, the Press acquired an additional reputation for the issue of books having a political trend to the Left.
