‘That is the penalty of my English environment.’ So Edward Elgar replied to Frederick Delius, who had just opined that he ‘thought it was a great pity that [Elgar] had wasted so much time and energy in writing those long-winded oratorios’. Elgar was visiting Delius at his home in Grez-sur-Loing on 30 May 1933, just before conducting the French premiere of his Violin Concerto. Delius, a fervent disciple of Nietzsche, despised any music Associated with organised religion; he once remarked to his amanuensis Eric Fenby that Elgar ‘might have been a great composer if he had thrown all that religious paraphernalia overboard. Gerontius is a nauseating work, and, of course, tremendously influenced by Parsifal.’

Assuming that Delius, who was as a rule brutally frank, did report Elgar's reply accurately, a question arises immediately: why did Elgar thus casually dismiss The Dream of Gerontius, The Apostles, and The Kingdom as penance imposed upon him by his environment? Even if offered in courtesy or in jest, Elgar's remark constitutes a shocking, almost Petrine, threefold denial. This appears to repudiate the oratorios, belittle the loyalty of the English listeners who supported his career, and leave Christian faith out of the question entirely. Even for such a tortured personality, riven by lacerating self-doubt and envy, Elgar's denial seems at first inexplicable. To understand the forces that motivated Elgar's renunciation of the three great oratorios and shaped their creation in the first place, one must first attend Elgar's deathbed. This chapter will place those oratorios within a cultural, historical and aesthetic perspective so as to illuminate not only their position within Elgar’s oeuvre, but also the ambivalent attitudes of their creator towards religious belief, society and aesthetics.

It might seem odd that, in the 1920s, some thought Elgar unrepresentative of British music; there is no doubt that he had been held as supremely British – or at least English – during the Edwardian era, and he was to become regarded thus again. But this exception does go some way to prove the rule that no music is essentially intrinsic to any nationality: certain traits may become associated with nationhood, as much by the composer as by the audience, but these associations are just as provisional as any other connotations music might hold. To Ponsonby's generation, Vaughan Williams and his generation had tapped the roots of Englishness by rediscovering the folk repertory and returning to the idioms of the Tudor and Elizabethan eras. Elgar's idiom lacked this purity, perhaps even representing the false imperial optimism that lay at the roots of the Great War; moreover, Elgar did not have the luxury of erasing his Germanic musical roots – as the royal family had managed to do with its dynastic title.

‘If we had nothing but Elgars, then there might be an end to conservatories, and our theory teachers might lose their entire earnings.’ Thus wrote not an irate member of Britain's musical establishment but an admiring German critic, Max Hehemann, one of several early twentieth-century German musicians to write articles about Elgar in musical periodicals. The period of German interest in Elgar in the years immediately following the successful Düsseldorf performances of The Dream of Gerontius in 1901 and 1902 was relatively brief: as Michael Kennedy has observed, Elgar came ‘at the end of an epoch in European music, at the dawn of a renaissance in England’, with the result that he soon ‘ceased to exercise the European musician's curiosity’. But soon is not immediately: in this short period Elgar's works received an acclaim outside Britain they have not known since. The criticism that exists therefore offers us valuable insights into Elgar at a time when the composer was at his creative peak, but from outside British musical society, and thus from outside the cultural-political battleground of the British musical renaissance within which the critical discourse on Elgar's music took place. Consequently, we can examine afresh the commonly held idea of Elgar as a musical embodiment of ‘Englishness’, not least the extent to which the composer's Englishness was perceived as compatible with his Catholicism. Before doing so, however, we must first become acquainted with the critics themselves.

‘Elgar Brothers’, the music shop at 10 High Street, Worcester, became a mounting embarrassment to Elgar as his composing confidence increased and he aspired to a higher social position. Retail trade might have been acceptable as background to his Helen Weaver engagement. But there were rumours also of a connection with Sarah-Anne Wilkinson Newholme made while staying with Dr Charles Buck in Yorkshire, then of an attempted engagement to Gertrude Walker, musical daughter of the rector and squire at Abbots Norton, with whom Elgar shared many a concert platform, and who went on to breed dogs and become local secretary of the British Shakespeare Society. Above all there was Alice Roberts, a major-general's daughter born in India, whose social concerns in her early writings became rather, after her marriage to Elgar on 8 May 1889, a determination to raise her composer husband out of the sphere he was born in. Occasionally Elgar's mother might visit the home of the couple; occasionally the father would be summoned to tend a piano; but there is no record of the parents being invited together. To anticipate the Gerontius premiere, F. G. Edwards of the Musical Times planned a major article on Elgar. Alice Elgar, in a letter to Edwards of 18 September 1900, put her foot down firmly on certain matters, and notably the ‘shop’; ‘Then as E. has nothing to do with the business in Worcester would you please leave out details which do not affect him&with which he has nothing to do – His interests being quite unconnected with business.’

As Edward Elgar's compositions for imperial ceremonies and the First World War have specific functions (royal celebrations, marching music, rallying cries, and charitable offerings), they can be considered together within an analysis. The compositions share a number of characteristics: none is abstract in nature, Elgar composed many of them to sound specifically ‘popular’, and none can claim ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’ meanings, like the ‘Enigma’ Variations or the Violin Concerto. In the period before the war, these compositions solidified Elgar's reputation as an important national figure. During the war, they aptly represented the complex difficulties individual Britons faced from the violence and carnage of battle. After the war, they placed Elgar in the forefront of society as an official ceremonial figure. They allowed him to represent a musical tradition rapidly declining throughout elite Great Britain, but prominent in middle-class quarters. These works were inspirational in their own time, and many are still rousing today. As important examples of period pieces, they show Elgar transcending the limits of concert music to successfully negotiate popular forms.

Throughout this chapter, ‘popular’ describes music that might be easily disseminated, might be performed in non-elite contexts and venues (bandstands, rallies, music-halls, the London Coliseum, etc.), or might have been written by Elgar to garner a broad audience. A close analogy to this type of composition would be Beethoven's Wellingtons Sieg (or ‘Battle Symphony’), a potboiler meant to capture timely sentiment. Elgar often designed his ‘functional’ music to be popular through concentrating on broad styles of composition, including singable melody as opposed to motivic transformation.

America's distinctive relation to the Great War originated in its remoteness from the event itself. Both because thousands of miles of ocean lay between the US and the battle in Europe, and because American troops did not participate in major action until the last year of hostilities, the First World War remained a virtual phenomenon to many US residents. The reports of German-Austrian aggression and Belgian-French imperilment did not lack for urgency (there were even German purposes to thwart closer to home, in Mexico and the Caribbean), but they did lack for immediacy. The American side of the Great War necessarily relied on institutions of representation - journalism, print propaganda, fiction, sermons - to make the war real in the place where it was not occurring. In important respects, American writing of the war was the war.

In the years before President Wilson abandoned the nation’s policy of neutrality and gained a declaration of war from Congress in April of 1917, the American public speculated about European statecraft, debated developments that might draw the US into the hostilities, and imagined the horrific new technologies of modern warfare like poison gas, massive artillery shelling, trench combat, and airplanes used as weapons.

This short extract from E. S. Caley's “The Foreman and the Manager,” a parody of Lewis Carroll's “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” raises many issues central to women's war writing and the feminist scholarship that has brought both women's experience of the war years and their considerable body of writings on the war to public attention since the 1980s. Published in a munitions factory newspaper, the poem is about male responses to the huge impact of the war on gender roles. The Foreman, according to Claire A. Culleton, who discusses this poem in her rich account of women and working-class culture, has recognized the need for women's labor and is lecturing the manager of a munitions factory on the need to begin instructing the new female workforce. Culleton tells us that munitions workers numbered 900,000 of the nearly 3,000,000 women employed in British factories by the end of the war. Another 2,000,000 “worked in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, the Women's Land Army, the Volunteer Aid Detachment, and other paramilitary organizations,” working both at home and in the war zone, albeit not as combatants. Women's mass entry into previously male jobs fundamentally challenged the period's dominant assumptions about women's capacities and proper role in the home. Even though women were forced out of these jobs at the end of the war, their experience of “Screws and Shells and Overalls” marked British twentieth-century society and contributed to women's economic, social, and sexual emancipation.

In 1915, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had enlisted in the cavalry in late 1914, wrote a poem called “Guerre” (”War ”), which begins:

To Anglophone readers, whose touchstone for the poetry of the GreatWar is the lyric of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, or Siegfried Sassoon, the apocalyptic sentiments expressed in Apollinaire’s “War” must seem all but incomprehensible. Did les jeunes de la classe 1915 really believe that the war would provide entrance to a Brave New World in which the heights of the heavens and depths of the earth would be sounded?

In his acceptance address for the 1980 Theodore Adorno Award, the widely influential essay “Modernity - An Incomplete Project,” Jöurgen Habermas marks the twentieth century as the historical moment during and after which widespread faith in the progressive improvement of human culture through the means of secular enlightenment becomes increasingly untenable. In his context, he is stating an obvious fact and thus provides no details. Yet it is useful occasionally to belabor the obvious: what specific events of the twentieth century have made the project of modernism, understood as a trajectory of historical improvement, so vexed? Certainly, the Holocaust is one inevitable meaning of this twentieth-century interruption. The specter of the tools of enlightened technology turning the factory from a site of production to a site of sheer destruction haunts any subsequent evocation of the inevitability, or even probability, of human progress. No other single event of the twentieth century may have the interruptive power of Auschwitz. Yet in many ways the unprecedented mass slaughter of the First World War inaugurates the twentieth century as a disruption of enlightenment. The products and techniques of industrial culture turn on their users: what had been tools for the efficient production of goods become weapons in the efficient production of death. Mass armies of draftees are marched to their mechanized destruction with all the organization that industrial capitalism has learned from the factory and the abattoir.

A consensus understanding continues to represent the Great War of 1914-18 as the signal event of artistic modernism. In this account, the war stands as a watershed episode: it draws a line through time, dividing the nineteenth from the twentieth centuries; thus it provides the shaping occasion for artists who take novelty, invention, and precedent-dismaying energy as their establishing aim and motive. The readiness of this connection does not discredit it. Global in scope, shattering in its impact on national traditions as well as class structures and gender identities, this first world war scored a profound disruption into prevailing standards of value and so opened the space in cultural time in which radical artistic experimentation would be fostered. Yet the self-evident element in this reckoning has allowed literary historians to be content with the generalized formulation, taken at somewhat distant retrospect. The relative dearth of work in a historically informed understanding of the “modernist war” has been furthered by the fact that much of this modernist writing came out of a civilian circumstance, whereas readers' attention has been drawn understandably to the dramas attending the production of combat narratives (novels and memoirs) and trench poetry. No less compelling, however, are the conditions impinging on the modernist literature of the war.

The fifty-month-long Great War affected France as no other country. With dozens of major battles on its territory, greater losses per capita than any other nation in men wounded and killed (some 1,385,000 dead out of 39 million in 1914), countless villages destroyed or disfigured and woods, fields, orchards ruined, France, the chief prize, was also the chief casualty of the war, both physically and emotionally. The effects persisted for decades and indeed last until this day. The scars left on the countryside and the national consciousness were deep, and few aspects of French life were left untouched. No town or village is without its memorial, prominently located. Some areas were permanently depopulated: twelve villages destroyed around Verdun, the site of the bloodiest battle, which France fought alone for over 300 days, have never been rebuilt, although a chapel has been erected on each site, and thousands of acres there remain off-limits because of live shells. The number of deaths and mutilations contributed to a serious decrease in the birthrate, already much lower than Germany's before 1914, and to national obsession with natality. Maurice Barrès, a militant nationalist from Lorraine, whose wartime journalism fills fourteen volumes, wondered whether France could recover from the bleeding. The French recoiled from the idea of further fighting on their territory; the rapid collapse of 1940 is not unrelated to awful memories of the previous war. Early in World War II, for instance, peasants removed army mines strategically placed to help protect against invasion.

Arms and the muse

In the BBC TV series Blackadder Goes Forth the flying-ace Lord Flasheart says: “I'm sick of this damn war - the blood, the noise, the endless poetry.” This echoes satire during the Great War itself, as when the Wipers Times ”regrett[ed] to announce that an insidious disease is affecting the Division, and the result is a hurricane of poetry.” Since a “strange scabies scribendi” also afflicted “civilian verse-makers,” and newspapers printed poems, poetry virtually became a mass medium in Britain - a phenomenon unmatched in other combatant countries. Catherine Reilly's bibliography lists 2,225 published poets and (1914-22) about 50 anthologies with titles like Soldier Songs, The Muse in Arms, From the Front: Trench Poetry. While most of this outpouring has been remaindered by history, it set the scene for poetry conditioned by the war, poetry that internalized the war, poetry that remains a model for public poetry. Great War poetry is read, imitated, and quoted in shifting contexts. Before the Iraq War, the anthology 101 Poems Against War appeared. Its cover quotes Wilfred Owen ( “All a poet can do today is warn ”), as does an afterword by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion: “Towards the end of the First World War, amidst the squalor and tragedy of the Western Front, something fundamental changed . . . The patriotic imperative 'Dulce et Decorum Est' became 'that [sic] old lie,' and . . . our sense of 'a war poet' was transformed.”

In James Hanley's The German Prisoner (1930), two defiantly proletarian British soldiers, O'Garra and Elston, lose contact with their unit during an assault on the German lines. The “fog of war” has had the effect, it seems, of putting them once and for all beyond authority's reach. They capture a young German soldier called Otto Reiburg whose fair hair and fine clear eyes represent to them a provocatively bourgeois “grace of body.” The buried “rottenness” in O'Garra shoots up like filth from a sewer in a deathly premature ejaculation. O'Garra and Elston begin to beat Reiburg unconscious. Elston urinates on him. O'Garra drives a bayonet into his anus. “Elston laughed and said: 'I'd like to back-scuttle the bugger.'” And that appears to be that. The worst obscenity, in a performance obscene from beginning to end, is that Reiburg remains unraped. The Sadean utopia O'Garra and Elston have built for themselves inside war's thickening excremental fog is dedicated to the pursuit of death alone. A shell duly puts an end to them both.

Gunn, the veteran protagonist of Liam O’Flaherty’s Return of the Brute (1929), is another man subject to deathly ejaculations. The object of Gunn’s desire is a raw recruit feminized by cowardice, whose timidity becomes to him a “seductive temptation.” He at once gives in to and overcomes temptation by murdering a sadistic corporal, as it were on his friend’s behalf, while they are out on a raid. “Now he was really an animal, brutish, with dilated eyes, with his face bloody.” Gunn has joined O’Garra and Elston inside the fog of war.

In an important sense all German literature after 1914 is literature written in the aftermath of the Great War, since it can be held to reflect the horror, despair, and doubtful glory of this event or else to have repressed it. This chapter has much to choose from among “war writings” and has selected those that are explicit in referring to the frontline experience of soldiers, along with other types of writing that arise in an acknowledged, immediate relation to the Great War, including the works of ideological writers, like Thomas Mann, who consider themselves, in Mann's phrase, “soldiers of ideas.”

The general reaction to the outbreak of war with Serbia, Russia, France, and England in the great cities of Germany and Austria was a display of enthusiasm in public places by massed crowds so huge as to have the power to draw all observers into their camp. Franz Kafka, for one, was swept along into the street crowds in Prague, in 1914 the capital of the Bohemian Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; but what he afterwards marveled at was the crowd factor, the degree of cohesion, and less the substance of its giant yawp. All throughout Central Europe the weather that summer had been brilliant – unmatchably brilliant in recent memory; and so it is thinkable that if the weather had been foul, and the opportunity for crowds to exert pressure on their rulers less available, the foulness of the war might have been averted: historians like Reiner Stach and Modris Eksteins hold this view.

The genre, “memoir,” is an odd one, encompassing simple chronicles and more elaborate, analytic or poetically structured accounts. Those First World War memoirs that have become canonical in literary studies have, not surprisingly, been the more structured work of poets. These are the main focus of the present chapter, but other, less-known work will be touched on. As with the poetry of these memoirists, one of the chief literary interests of their work is the way traditional generic or formal literary features (corresponding broadly with a set of received values about masculinity, heroism, the countryside, and so on) are twisted into something different by the necessity of representing experience that compels a revaluation of all such values. These memoirs are the work, mainly, of writers who do not otherwise conspicuously engage with modernity, perhaps because they were too young to have reached any sort of maturity as writers before their war experience. And after the war that experience remained as their most intense reality – despite the efforts of Robert Graves, for example, to say “good-bye to all that.” The stress that traditional forms undergo in these memoirs (as in the war poetry of the same and other poets) is sufficient to turn the writers into something very close to modernists, almost against their will, and in relation to the war only. Still, they form a kind of “alternative current” of modernism in England by virtue of which the movement is sometimes seen as largely a response to the upheaval of the war. The prototype of such understanding is the public response to the official exhibitions of war paintings held in London in 1919. “Cubism” could now be “understood,” even if it was not liked.