Abstract
When George Eliot included one of the first favourable critiques of Wagner in English in her 1855 article ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’, she discussed his art in terms of organic evolutionary development. Her account of Wagner’s work opens with a historical survey of the advance of opera in which Eliot speculates about the music of the future with a joke that calls on her readers’ familiarity with current debates about organic development:
As to melody — who knows? It is just possible that melody, as we conceive it, is only a transitory phase of music, and that the musicians of the future may read the airs of Mozart and Beethoven and Rossini as scholars read the Stabreim and assonance of early poetry. We are but in ‘the morning of the times’, and must learn to think of ourselves as tadpoles unprescient of the future frog.1
The two contexts evident in this passage, Eliot’s engagement with contemporary science and with German culture, work together in her writing about music.
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Notes
George Eliot, Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge, 1963), p. 102.
Eliot, The Journals of George Eliot, eds Margaret Harris and Judith Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 26, 24, 3 October and 20 September 1854. Cited hereafter as Journals.
Sally Shuttleworth describes Spencer as ‘the theorist most clearly responsible for popularising ideas of the social organism in England’: George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 9.
Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, Vol. I (London: Longman, 1858), pp. 359–84.
See Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 1–30. Robert M. Young points out that this is also a ‘view of life borrowed from Coleridge’: Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (Oxford and London: Clarendon, 1970), p. 156. Spencer quotes Coleridge in Social Statics: Or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (London: Chapman, 1851), p. 436.
Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (London: John W. Parker, 1855), pp. 202–9, 310–11, 347–8, 431. Eliot knew Bain in the 1850s and from 1865 he was a regular visitor at The Priory: see Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 389.
Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, p. 151. For a recent account of how psychology was transmuted by Spencer’s emphasis on evolutionary biology and the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and for comparisons between Spencer and Bain, see Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially pp. 220–1.
Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 361–2. (Spencer directs the reader to Alexander Bain’s Animal Instinct and Intelligence for more information on the principle of reflex action.) The direct connections between nervous action and sensation were also stressed by G.H. Lewes in the second volume of his The Physiology o f Common Life (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1860), pp. 55–64, 165–225.
Spencer makes only a general reference to Charles Burney’s work: Essays, I, p. 24. Vol. I of A General History o f Music: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 4 vols (London: Burney, 1776–89), deals with ancient and particu-larly with Greek music. Vol. IV, pp. 13 ff., begins with a chapter about the invention of recitative and opera, in which Burney cites the intention of early operatic composers to ‘revive the melody of the ancient declama-tion’ (p. 19).
Eliot, Daniel Deronda [1876], ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), p. 43.
See William Gardiner, The Music of Nature: Or, an Attempt to Prove that What is Passionate and Pleasing in the Art of Singing, Speaking and Performing upon Musical Instruments, is Derived from the Sounds of the Animated World: with Curious and Interesting Illustrations (London: Longman, 1832), p. 245.
Thomas Busby, A Grammar of Music: To Which are Prefixed Observations Explanatory o f the Properties and Powers o f Music as a Science and of the General Scope and Object o f the Work, 2nd edn (London: Printed for Geo. B. Whittaker, 1826), pp. iii—iv.
Rev. H.R. Haweis, Music and Morals [1871] 3rd edn (London: Strahan & Co., 1875), p. 9.
Aristotle, Politics and The Athenian Constitution, ed. and trans. John Warrington (London: Dent, 1959), pp. 223–33, especially pp. 227 ff. See also Warren Anderson, ‘Plato’, Grove, XIV, pp. 853–7.
See Stephen Banfield, ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’, The Romantic Age: 1800–1914, ed. Nicholas Temperley (London: Athlone Press, 1981), p. 456.
William Crotch, Substance of Several Courses of Lectures on Music, Read in the University o fOx ford, and in the Metropolis (London: Longman, 1831), pp. 45–6.
Joseph Mainzer, A Treatise on Musical Grammar, and the Principles of Harmony (London: Mainzer, 1843), p. 7.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 152.
Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 152, and see Eliot, Middlemarch [1871–2], ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), p. 189.
H.F. Chorley, ‘Foreign Correspondence’, Athenaeum, 527 (1837), p. 881. For accounts of Mainzer’s activities in Britain see Bernarr Rainbow, ‘Mainzer, Joseph’, Grove, XI, pp. 539–40 and introduction to Mainzer’s Singing for the Million: A Practical Course of Musical Instruction, Adapted from its Pleasing Simplicity and Rapid Effect to Render Musical Reading and Singing Familiar to all Ages, Capacities and Conditions [1841], repr. in Classic Texts in Music Education, 9 (Kilkenny: Boethius Press, 1984), pp. 2–5.
John Hullah (1812–84), whose History of Modern Music (London: Longman, 1875) Eliot read when writing Daniel Deronda, established the first sol-fa singing classes in London just four months before Mainzer’s own. He had visited Paris with Chorley intending to observe Mainzer’s classes but these had been closed down by the Paris police. Hullah instead visited similar classes run by G.L. Bocquillon Wilhem, whose rival sol-fa method thus became the basis of his singing classes in England. John Curwen developed an independent sol-fa method and founded the highly successful Tonic Sol-fa Society; see Herbert A. Simon, Songs and Words:AHistory of the Curwen Press (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973); Rainbow, John Curwen: A Short Critical Biography (Sevenoaks: Novello, 1980).
Mainzer, Music and Education (London: Longman, 1848), pp. 9–13.
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans [1854] (New York: Harper, 1975), pp. 3–4.
Eliot, Adam Bede [1859], ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 399.
Cf. Bernard Paris quoting Josiah Royce on Eliot’s religious humanism in which ‘the infinite is conceived and known only in this world of fellow beings’. Paris himself emphasises the significance for Eliot of Feuerbach’s identification of religious and human feeling: Bernard J. Paris, Experiments in Li fe: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965), pp. 98, 100.
Letters, III, pp. 70–1. To Sara Hennell, 21 May [1859]. Letters, IV, p. 134. To Mrs Peter Alfred Taylor, 3 March 1864. Eliot retained her particular enthu-siasm for Handel’s choral writing, commenting in a later letter to Mrs Peter Alfred Taylor on 2 August 1871, ‘I remember … the sublime effect of the Handel choruses, and the total futility of the solos’: Letters, V, p. 173.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale o f Manchester Life [1848], ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 142.
Letters, II, p. 452. To Sara Hennell, 17 April 1858. See Daniel Deronda, p. 339; Letters, IV, p. 196. To Mrs Peter Alfred Taylor, 10 July 1865.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: And Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871), II, pp. 336–7.
Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, p. 311, and see p. 429, where Bain describes ‘the features, respiratory and vocal organs’ as ‘the parts first acted on by feeling’ and thus ‘by pre-eminence the organs of expression’.
Eliot, The Mill on the Floss [1860], ed. Haight (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), p. 352.
See Tyndall’s introduction to Helmholtz’s Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, ed. E. Atkinson (London: Longman, 1873), pp. xv–xvi, where he records translating Helmholtz’s famous 1847 lecture, ‘Die Erhaltung der Kraft’ (p. xv) published as ‘On the Conservation of Force’ in Scientific Memoirs, ed. William Francis and John Tyndall (London: Taylor & Francis, 1853), pp. 114–62.
James Sully, Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Aesthetics (London: Henry S. King, 1874), p. 58.
Alexander J. Ellis, introduction to Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz, On the Sensations o f Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory o f Music [1862], trans. Ellis (London: Longman, 1875), p. v., n. 1.
Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone, pp. 358, 563, 564, 568; see also Popular Lectures, p. 105.
See for example, Sully, Illusions: A Psychological Study (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), p. 236.
Sully, My Life and Friends: A Psychologist’s Memories (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1918), p. 145.
Sully, Sensation and Intuition, pp. 225–6, 229–39; and see Banfield, ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’, p. 461.
Sully, ‘On the Nature and Limits of Musical Expression’, Contemporary Review, 23 (1874), p. 587. See also Sensation and Intuition, pp. 241–3
Sully, ‘Nature and Limits of Musical Expression’, p. 573; Sensation and Intuition, p. 222.
See, for example, his praise of Spencer’s ‘evolutional explanation’ of our capacity to admire landscape: Edmund Gurney, ‘On Music and Musical Criticism’, II, Nineteenth Century, 5 (1879), p. 1077.
Gurney, ‘On Some Disputed Points in Music’, Fortnightly Review, 34 (1876), pp. 107–8.
Gurney, ‘On Music and Musical Criticism’, I, Nineteenth Century, 4 (1878), p. 55.
Gurney, ‘Disputed Points’, p. 107. ‘The Speech Theory’, pp. 476–97 of The Power of Sound (London: Smith, Elder, 1880), is a rebuttal of Spencer’s ‘Origin and Function’ thesis.
Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone, pp. 385–7. Helmholtz cites Aristotle’s con-clusion that music resembles feelings because rhythm and melody are motions, comparable to actions.
Vernon Lee [Violet Paget], ‘Hoffmann’s Kreisler: The First of Musical Romanticists’, Fraser’s Magazine (1878), pp. 842–80, repr. as ‘Chapelmeister Kreisler: A Study of Musical Romanticists’, in Belcarro (London: W. Satchell, 1881), pp. 106–7.
F.W.H. Myers, ‘Edmund Gurney’s Work in Experimental Psychology’, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 5 vols (1882–89), V, pp. 361–2.
Gurney, ‘On Song’, Fraser’s Magazine, 19 (1879), p. 224.
Letters, VI, pp. 333–4. To James Sully, 19 January 1877. Letters, VII, p. 12, n. 1. Lewes to Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon [31 January 1878]. See also Lewes, Diary, 30 March 1877, 31 May–4 June 1877, 14 April 1878, in Letters, VI, p. 360, VI, p. 380, VII, p. 21. Letters, VI, p. 396. Lewes to the Misses Cross, 31 July [1877]. Letters, VI, p. 398. To Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 2 [August] 1877. Lewes, Diary, 8 March 1874, in Letters, IX, p. 118, n. 2.
‘I have always fancied — though without any evidence — that some touches in Deronda were drawn from one of her friends, Edmund Gurney, a man of remarkable charm of character, and as good-looking as Deronda’: Leslie Stephen, George Eliot, English Men of Letters (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1902), p. 191. Gurney also had a fine voice and sang with a choir convened by Jenny Lind which Eliot heard perform: Letters, VI, p. 321. To Cara Bray, 21 December 1876.
Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, Library Edition, 3 vols (London: Williams & Norgate, 1891), II, pp. 426–51.
Deryck Cooke, The Language of Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1959). See also Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1956).
Quoted in Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism o f Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), p. 226 and see p. 227 n. 46.
Malcolm Budd, Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 53.
John A. Sloboda, The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 265.
Sloboda, The Musical Mind, p. 268. Meanwhile, Anthony Storr suggests that music offers us a unique opportunity to achieve mental order: our auditory system, ‘originally designed to inform us of spatial relationships’ has become ‘incorporated and transformed into a means of structuring our inner world’: Music and the Mind (London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 41. Both theories pro-pose that music is the result of the structural capacity of the human brain, rather than the reflection of an external natural order. Sloboda has explored parallels between the linguistic theories of Chomsky and works of musicol-ogy: The Musical Mind, pp. 11–17; see also Storr, Music and the Mind, pp. 51, 64. Our ability to remember sequences of sound suggests the apprehension of underlying structures equivalent to those fundamental to all languages: Sloboda, The Musical Mind, p. 246.
[M.S. Moseleyl’s ‘Lyric Feuds’, Westminster Review, 32 (1867), pp. 119–60, was in favour of Wagner’s music and theory, but Wagner did not become generally popular until two decades after Eliot’s article.
Binstock, ‘A Study of Music in Victorian Prose’, pp. 161–86, gives a survey of ‘Victorian Reactions to Wagner’.
Eliot, Essays, p. 100. Wagner apparently missed opportunities to make liter-ary contacts during his London visit: C.F. Glasenapp, Life o f Richard Wagner, trans. Ellis, 6 vols (London: Kegan Paul, 1900–8), V, pp. 127–9.
There is no evidence of her having read any of Wagner’s own publications. Eliot records meeting Joachim Raff, and mentions that he is the author of a recent book ‘called Wagnerfrage’, but not whether she has read it: Journals, p. 21, 10 August 1854. See also Anthony McCobb, George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters (Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1982), p. 29. Raff’s book, published during the same year in which Eliot met him, was on Lohengrin: Die Wagnerfrage: Kritisch beleuchtet von Joseph Ra ff (Brunswick: Friedrich Vieweg, 1854)).
A pirated piano arrangement of the Tannhauser march was the first piece of Wagner’s to be performed in England, at a concert of the Amateur Musical Society in March 1854; the overture was performed later during the year at a concert of the New Philharmonic and at two or three of Jullien’s concerts: Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, 4 vols (London: Cassell, 1933–47), II, p. 438.
Such favourable reviews as there were concentrated exclusively on Wagner as a conductor: see Glasenapp, Life o f Richard Wagner, V, pp. 167–9.
At the beginning of his article Davison calls for a translator for Wagner’s books. He concludes with a mock desperate plea to Wagner’s champion Liszt for enlightenment: Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, p. 118. Davison also refers to Eduard Sobolewski’s Reactionary Letters [Reaktionare Briefe (Konigsberg, 1854)1, which may have been his main source of infor-mation about Wagner: Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, p. 116. Later during Wagner’s visit, Davison ran a translation of Opera and Drama in the Musical World: see Newman, Life, II, p. 442.
‘Das Judenthum in der Musik’ had been published pseudonymously in Die Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik in 1850, and was not known as Wagner’s in England. Davison’s were apparently the first references to Wagner’s anti-Semitism in the English press: see Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, pp. 177–9.
Adolf Stahr, Weimar und Jena, 2 vols (Oldenburg, 1852); see McCobb, George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters, p. 246. Franz Liszt, ‘Scribe’s und Meyerbeer’s Robert der Teufel’, Neue Zeitschrift fiir Musik, 40:25 (1854), pp. 261–9.
[George Eliot], ‘The Romantic School of Music’, Leader, 5 (1854), pp. 1027–8. There is some disagreement about in exactly which directions the original borrowings went. Pinney, Essays, p. 101, n. 18, describes Eliot’s article as a ‘paraphrase’ of Liszt’s article, and Eliot herself records condens-ing an article by Liszt in her Journal for 1st and 2nd October 1854: Journals, p. 26. However, McCobb maintains that Stahr (whose book Eliot read in Berlin, immediately following her stay in Weimar) was probably Eliot’s source as she was also indebted to him for much of the material in her ‘Three Months in Weimar’ article: ‘Either Stahr simply included Liszt’s original article or George Eliot’s adapted article in later editions of [Weimar und Jena] or they both copied from Stahr’: McCobb, George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters, p. 30, n. 62.
See Richard Wagner, Wagner Writes from Paris: Stories, Essays and Articles by the Young Composer, eds and trans. Robert L. Jacobs and Geoffrey Skelton (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), p. 151.
Eliot, Essays, pp. 101–2. See Liszt, ‘Scribe’s und Meyerbeer’s Robert der Teufel’, p. 263.
Eliot, Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, eds A.S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 368–9.
Eliot, Selected Essays, pp. 349, 350. Friedrich Flotow (1812–83) was a fash-ionable German composer.
See Eliot, Essays, p. 216, where Pinney cites claims that Eliot’s essay did more than any other single work in introducing Heine to England.
Eliot, Essays, pp. 234–5; see also pp. 249–50 where Eliot quotes a stanza from ‘Deutschland’ which evokes the ‘singing flames’ of Dante’s ‘terza rima’.
See William Joseph Sullivan, ‘George Eliot and the Fine Arts’, PhD disserta-tion (Wisconsin, 1970), pp. 9–16.
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© 2003 Delia da Sousa Correa
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da Correa, D.S. (2003). 1Music, Science, Literature: The ‘Large Music of Reasonable Speech’. In: George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598010_2
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