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Practices of Aesthetic Self-Cultivation: British Composer-Critics of the ‘Doomed Generation’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Sarah Collins
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Abstract

The spectre of music as a transcendent artistic ideal figures prominently in the literary criticism of Victorian aestheticism, though the extent to which aestheticism of the movement actually influenced the thinking of British composers has received only marginal scholarly attention. By the first decades of the twentieth century, aestheticism had become decidedly unfashionable even in literary circles, so it is unsurprising that composers of the time would choose to distance themselves from its rhetoric. The prevalence of a certain type of metaphysical conception of the creative act of the artist and intuitive act of the critic, however, may suggest an important remnant of aesthetic influence. Drawing from new critical trends which themselves mirror those of aestheticism, this article posits a revised conception of aesthetic discourse as an activity of self-cultivation, and examines its role in shaping the lives of selected British composer-critics from the early part of the twentieth century. By casting the aesthetic ethos not as a doctrine but as a set of internal practices that inform the creation and subversion of doctrine, the article demonstrates how a ‘relational musicology’ can act as a tool for historical inquiry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 138 , Issue 1 , 2013 , pp. 85 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Musical Association

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References

1 Arnold Whittall, ‘The Isolationists’, Music Review, 27 (1966), 122–9. Whittall outlined a similar (though truncated) characterization two years earlier in ‘Van Dieren’, Musical Times, 105 (1964), 438. He also offered the isolationist narrative in a more general form to describe the ‘prevalent aesthetic of British critics and composers in the 1930s’ in his two retrospectives for the Musical Times (‘British Music Thirty Years Ago’, Musical Times, 105 (1964), 186–7, and ‘Thirty (More) Years On’, Musical Times, 135 (1994), 143–7).

2 Whittall, ‘The Isolationists’, 129, 128.

3 Whittall, ‘The Isolationists’, 122.

4 Whittall, ‘The Isolationists’, 125.

5 The ‘typical romantic dilemma’ (Whittall, ‘The Isolationists’, 122).

6 Whittall, ‘The Isolationists’, 123.

7 Whittall, ‘The Isolationists’, 125.

8 According to Stephen Banfield, Warlock's songs (about 120 in all) represented ‘polished gems of English art song forming a pinnacle of that genre's brilliant brief revival in the early 20th century’. ‘Moeran, Warlock and Song’, Tempo, 215, British Issue (2001), 7–9 (p. 7). Heseltine's well-known works include the vocal chamber piece The Curlew (1920–2), dedicated to Cecil Gray; Bethlehem Down (1927; text by Bruce Blunt); Serenade for string orchestra (1921–2); and Capriol Suite (1926; arranged for full orchestra, 1928).

9 According to Gray, Warlock was for Heseltine a ‘protection, a façade, a mask, a carapace, a defence erected against a hostile world’. Cecil Gray, Peter Warlock: A Memoir of Philip Heseltine (London, 1934), 228.

10 The recent doctoral research of Sean Vaughn Owen has cast doubt upon the Spanish-Sicilian heritage of Sorabji's mother. In his genealogical study, Owen suggests that she may instead have been of English descent, and that Sorabji's fabrication reveals the highly contrived nature of his ‘otherness’. Sean Vaughn Owen, ‘Kaikhosru Sharpurji Sorabji: An Oral Biography’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southampton, 2007). Sorabji fiercely insisted upon his mixed ethnicity, writing that he had ‘not one drop of English blood in my veins’, and the critical conception of the composer, then as now, often proceeded from this characterization. Sorabji, letter to Garrard Macleod, manager of radio station WMUK, Kalamazoo, Michigan, n.d. (location not given), quoted in Alistair Hinton, ‘Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji: An Introduction’, Sorabji: A Critical Celebration, ed. Paul Rapoport (Aldershot, 1994), 17–57 (p. 24). While the revelation about Sorabji's mother is significant, it does not render redundant studies into Sorabji's interaction with orientalism (from the fact of his father's heritage), such as Nalini Ghuman's ‘“Persian Composer-Pianist Baffles”: Kaikhosru Sorabji’, Western Music and Race, ed. Julie Brown (Cambridge, 2007), 125–44.

11 In 1900, Scott's First Symphony in G major (later withdrawn) was premièred by Willem De Haan in Darmstadt, and his Heroic Suite by Hans Richter in Liverpool; in 1903, the first performance of his Second Symphony was conducted by Henry Wood at a Promenade Concert, and that of his Piano Quartet op. 16 in E minor, led by Kreisler, took place at a Broadwood concert, all before the composer's twenty-fifth birthday. Most frequently performed among his solo piano works are his Piano Sonata no. 1, op. 66 (1909, revised 1935), and Lotus Land (1905), and one of his best-known songs is Blackbird's Song, op. 52 no. 3 (1906; text by Rosamund Marriott Watson). Over the last two decades there has been a revival of interest in Scott's more significant compositions, driven largely by the release of new recordings of his orchestral works and string quartets on the Chandos label. Scott also wrote choral music and three operas.

12 The idea of a burgeoning ‘renaissance’ in modern English music first appeared in 1882 in a review of Hubert Parry's Symphony no. 1 by the music critic Joseph Bennett (Daily Telegraph, 4 September 1882), and was further supported by critics at The Times (Francis Heuffer and J. A. Fuller Maitland) and the Athenaeum (Ebenezer Prout and Henry F. Frost). In addition to that of Parry, the work of Charles Villiers Stanford and Alexander Mackenzie was championed as a part of this active Victorian exercise in canon formation. The English musical renaissance was still a widely accepted phenomenon right up until Frank Howes's The English Musical Renaissance (London, 1966), and continued to prompt examination in Peter Pirie, The English Musical Renaissance (London, 1979), and Michael Trend, The Music Makers: Heirs and Rebels of the English Musical Renaissance (London, 1985). Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling forwarded a revisionist approach to the formation of this narrative in The English Musical Renaissance, 1840–1940: Construction and Destruction (London, 1993), now in its second edition as The English Musical Renaissance, 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music (Manchester, 2001); and Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance and the Press, 1850–1914: Watchmen of Music (Aldershot, 2002). In recent years, however, there has been an attempt to reconceptualize the narrative as referring not so much to the exclusive promotion of a selection of academy-trained composers as to a broader sociocultural shift that allowed for a vast expansion of musical activity in Britain and a renewed importance of music in the public psyche. For a good outline of this reconceptualization, see Colin Eatock, ‘The Crystal Palace Concerts: Canon Formation and the English Musical Renaissance’, 19th-Century Music, 34 (2010–11), 87–105. See also Nicholas Temperley, ‘Xenophilia in British Musical History’, Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies Vol. 1, ed. Bennett Zon (Aldershot, 1999), 3–22, and Alain Frogley, ‘Rewriting the Renaissance: History, Imperialism, and British Music since 1840’, Music and Letters, 84 (2003), 241–57.

13 Cecil Gray, ‘The Task of Criticism’, The Sackbut, 1 (1920), 9–13 (p. 11).

14 Cecil Gray, Musical Chairs, or Between Two Stools, Being the Life and Memoirs of Cecil Gray (London, 1948), 91.

15 Cecil Gray, Predicaments, or Music and the Future: An Essay in Constructive Criticism (London, 1936), 291–2.

16 Anne-Marie Forbes, ‘Grainger in Edwardian London’, Australian Music Research, 5 (2000), 1–16 (p. 5).

17 For Sorabji's views on this matter, see Kaikhosru Sorabji, Around Music (London, 1932). For an interesting account of the role of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ in the English musical renaissance, see Matthew Riley, ‘Liberal Critics and Modern Music in the Post-Victorian Age’, British Music and Modernism, ed. Riley (Farnham, 2010), 13–30.

18 For Sorabji's views on this matter, see Kaikhosru Sorabji, Around Music (London, 1932). For an interesting account of the role of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ in the English musical renaissance, see Matthew Riley, ‘Liberal Critics and Modern Music in the Post-Victorian Age’, British Music and Modernism, ed. Riley (Farnham, 2010), 15.

19 Byron Adams, Foreword, Musical Quarterly, 91 (2008), 1–7 (p. 4).

20 [Cyril Scott], The Initiate in the Dark Cycle (London, 1932), 160, and Cyril Scott, Bone of Contention: Life Story and Confessions (London, 1969), 104.

21 Kaikhosru Sorabji, Mi contra fa: The Immoralisings of a Machiavellian Musician (London, 1947), 72.

22 Kaikhosru Sorabji, Mi contra fa: The Immoralisings of a Machiavellian Musician (London, 1947), 72.

23 The perceived association between decadence and effeminacy driven by Oscar Wilde's aestheticism and the corollary masculine characterization of self-restraint and sincerity will be further developed under the subheading ‘Reticence and Self-Discipline’ below (from p. 115). These associations are manifest in the critics’ aesthetic preferences. By way of example, see Gray's description of the ‘primitivism’ of the English Pre-Raphaelites, Claude Debussy, Henri Matisse and Igor Stravinsky as ‘hyper-civilised, super-cultured, over-refined’. Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music, 2nd edn (London, 1928), 187. Also see Heseltine's comments about Delius's work as ‘simplicity, directness, avoidance of anything remotely suggestive of the bombastic, the pretentious or the over-intellectualized’. Philip Heseltine, ‘Delius: Composer and Interpreter of Nature’, Radio Times, 25/314 (1929), 7–18.

24 Victorian aestheticism itself suffered from a similar disparity in the ways its adherents chose to address a common cause. This disparity makes it difficult to characterize aestheticism as a cohesive ‘movement’ at all, a point noticed early on by Walter Hamilton in his famous study The Aesthetic Movement in England (London, 1882).

25 Ian Hunter, ‘Aesthetics and Cultural Studies’, Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler (New York, 1992), 347–67 (p. 368).

26 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 5.

27 Susan Blood, Baudelaire and the Aesthetics of Bad Faith (Stanford, CA, 1997), 3.

28 See, for example, Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville, VA, 1996).

29 Georgina Born, ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135 (2010), 205–43.

30 Tia DeNora, After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (Cambridge, 2003), 151–2.

31 Hunter, ‘Aesthetics and Cultural Studies’, 348.

32 Georgina Born, ‘The Social and the Aesthetic: For a Post-Bourdieuian Theory of Cultural Production’, Cultural Sociology, 4 (2010), 171–208.

33 The New Aestheticism, ed. John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas (Manchester, 2003); Eduardo de la Fuente, ‘The “New Sociology of Art”: Putting Art Back into Social Science Approaches to the Arts’, Cultural Sociology, 1 (2007), 409–25; Ian Hunter, ‘Scenes from the History of Poststructuralism: Davos, Freiburg, Baltimore, Leipzig’, New Literary History, 41 (2010), 491–516, respectively.

34 Born, ‘The Social and the Aesthetic’, 175.

35 Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley, CA, 1995), and Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (London, 2004), respectively.

36 Garry Banham, ‘Kant and the Ends of Criticism’, The New Aestheticism, ed. Joughin and Malpas, 193–207 (p. 193).

37 A similar impulse has also appeared in the area of art history, with scholars such as Charlotte de Mille advocating a ‘virtual’, ‘immanent’ or ‘experiential’ approach to art history in contrast to the contextual or interpretative approach which views the art object from an external standpoint. Charlotte de Mille, ‘“Sudden Gleams of (F)light”: “Intuition as Method”?’, Art History, 34 (2011), 370–86. De Mille takes the work of Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry as both her subject for study and the inspiration for her critical style. The theory of artistic and critical intuition that she attributes to post-Impressionism is tantalizingly similar to the ideas of the ‘isolationist’ interwar composer-critics.

38 Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford, 1985); idem, First Philharmonic: A History of the Performing Rights Society (Oxford, 1995); Hughes and Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance (2nd edn); Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance and the Press.

39 See Temperley, ‘Xenophilia in British Musical History’, especially the ‘Chronologies of the “Dark Age” and “Renaissance”’ provided on p. 7.

40 See, for example, the collection of essays in Music and British Culture, 1785–1914, ed. Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford, 2000), as well as titles published in Ashgate's ‘Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ series (edited by Bennett Zon) and Boydell & Brewer's ‘Music in Britain 1600–1900’ series (edited by Rachel Cowgill and Peter Holman), such as Christina Bashford, The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London (Woodbridge, 2007). The significant new growth of research in this area is also evidenced in the biennial Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain conference.

41 Charles Edward McGuire, ‘Edward Elgar: “Modern” or “Modernist?”: Construction of an Aesthetic Identity in the British Music Press, 1895–1934’, Musical Quarterly, 91 (2008), 8–38.

42 Jenny Doctor, ‘The Parataxis of “British Musical Modernism”’, Musical Quarterly, 91 (2008), 89–115, and The BBC and Ultra Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation's Tastes (Cambridge, 1999). Again, this study proceeded from an interest in charting the reception of Continental modernism in England via the works of composers of the Second Viennese School.

43 Deborah Heckert, ‘Schoenberg, Roger Fry and the Emergence of a Critical Language for the Reception of Musical Modernism in Britain, 1912–14’, British Music and Modernism, ed. Riley, 49–66.

44 Walter Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, from The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1893 Text), printed in Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1974), 17–63 (p. 57).

45 Walter Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, from The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1893 Text), printed in Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1974), 54–5.

46 Harold Bloom, Introduction, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, vii–xxxi (p. ix).

47 William Butler Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York, 1916), 175.

48 The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA, 1983), xv, quoted in John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, ‘The New Aestheticism: An Introduction’, The New Aestheticism, ed. Joughin and Malpas, 1–22 (p. 5).

49 Hunter, ‘Aesthetics and Cultural Studies’, 354.

50 Hunter, ‘Aesthetics and Cultural Studies’, 355.

51 J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge, 1992), 5, quoted in Joughin and Malpas, ‘The New Aestheticism’, 11.

52 Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying (Whitefish, MT, 2004), 18.

53 Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, 167.

54 Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, 56.

55 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Berkeley, CA, 1980), 188–9.

56 Similarly, in Keats's ‘Ode on Indolence’: ‘O, for an age so shelter'd from annoy / That I may never know how change the moons / Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!’

57 Sorabji, Mi contra fa, 193.

58 Gray, ‘The Task of Criticism’, 13.

59 Judith R. Walkowitz, ‘The “Vision of Salome”: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908–18’, American Historical Review, 108 (2003), 337–76 (p. 344). My thanks to Rachel Cowgill for highlighting the relevance of Allan's case.

60 Bloom has noted, however, that Pater was indeed ‘the most widely diffused (though more and more hidden) literary influence of the later nineteenth upon the twentieth century’. Bloom, Introduction, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, x.

61 Joughin and Malpas, ‘The New Aestheticism’, 5, and Hunter, ‘Scenes from the History of Poststructuralism’, 491, respectively.

62 Joughin and Malpas, ‘The New Aestheticism’, 1.

63 Pierre Hadot, ‘Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy’, trans. Arnold I. Davidson and Paula Wissing, Critical Inquiry, 16 (1990), 483–505; idem, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford, 1995); Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York, 2006); Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988); idem, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, WI, 1992); idem, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge, 1995); Hunter, ‘Scenes from the History of Poststructuralism’; idem, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 2001).

64 Christopher Pinney, ‘Things Happen: Or, From Which Moment Does That Object Come?’, Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham, 2005), 256–72.

65 Philip Bohlman, ‘Musicology as a Political Act’, Journal of Musicology, 11 (1993), 411–36.

66 Michel Foucault, ‘An Ethics of Pleasure’, Foucault Live (Interviews 1966–84), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. John Johnston (New York, 1989), 371–81 (p. 379), quoted in Kevin Lamb, ‘Foucault's Aestheticism’, Diacritics, 35 (2005), 43–64 (p. 45).

67 Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst, MA, 1988), 16–49 (p. 25).

68 Hunter, ‘Aesthetics and Cultural Studies’, 352.

69 Hunter, ‘Aesthetics and Cultural Studies’, 352.

70 DeNora, After Adorno, 152.

71 Banham, ‘Kant and the Ends of Criticism’, 193.

72 Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), 32–50.

73 Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), 36.

74 Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), 39.

75 James Eli Adams, ‘Gentleman, Dandy, Priest: Manliness and Social Authority in Pater's Aestheticism’, English Literary History, 59 (1992), 441–66 (p. 442).

76 Bloom, Introduction, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, xvii–xviii.

77 ‘The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible […]. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.’ From Wilde's ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’, Chameleon (1894).

78 Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 7, and The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford, 1981), xxiv.

79 Victor Brombert, ‘Review: Wilde, Apostle of Aestheticism’, Hudson Review, 32 (1979), 135–8 (p. 136). Brombert wrote that ‘Aestheticism flourished in reaction to philistinism; it continued to thrive as a form of protest’ (p. 136).

80 Victor Brombert, ‘Review: Wilde, Apostle of Aestheticism’, Hudson Review, 32 (1979), 137.

81 Adams, ‘Gentleman, Dandy, Priest’, 443.

82 Elaine Hadley, ‘On a Darkling Plain: Victorian Liberalism and the Fantasy of Agency’, Victorian Studies, 48 (2005), 92–102 (pp. 96, 94). Hadley described these functions as ‘formalized cognitive practices’.

83 Gray, Predicaments, 291–2.

84 Quoted in Sorabji, Mi contra fa, 11 (further details of the original source not given).

85 Quoted in the front matter of Kaikhosru Sorabji, Around Music (London, 1932).

86 Hadley, ‘On a Darkling Plain’, 95.

87 Hadley, ‘On a Darkling Plain’, 96 (emphasis added).

88 Barry Smith, Peter Warlock: The Life of Philip Heseltine (Oxford, 1994), 79, 87.

89 Cyril Scott, My Years of Indiscretion (London, 1924), 25.

90 Esther Fisher, ‘Esther Fisher on Cyril Scott’, British Institute of Recorded Sound, Live Recording Programme, Lecture Series (unpublished), 19 June 1974, GB-Lbl T1080BW.

91 Edmund Rubbra, ‘Master and Pupil’, BBC Radio 3, 27 September 1979, GB-Lbl T2517BW.

92 D. H. Lawrence to Ottoline Morrell, 13 January 1916, quoted in Smith, Peter Warlock, 87. Smith does not provide details of the location of the letters he quotes.

93 D. H. Lawrence to Ottoline Morrell, 25 February 1916, quoted in Smith, Peter Warlock, 90.

94 Frank Howes, ‘Gray, Cecil’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (accessed 5 June 2011).

95 [Cyril Scott], The Initiate: Some Impressions of a Great Soul (London, 1920), 331–3.

96 Adams, ‘Gentleman, Dandy, Priest’, 456.

97 See Kaikhosru Sorabji, ‘The Validity of the Aristocratic Principle’, Art and Thought, ed. K. Bharatha Iyer (London, 1947), 214–18.

98 Scott, Bone of Contention, 75–6 (original emphasis).

99 Michael Winkler, ‘Master and Disciples: The George Circle’, A Companion to the Works of Stefan George, ed. Jens Rieckmann (Rochester, NY, 2005), 145–59 (p. 156).

100 In Grainger's ‘blue-eyed’ or Nordic English, the term ‘over-soul’ referred to ‘genius’. See, for example, Grainger's frequent use of this term in his autobiographical writing. Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, ed. Malcolm Gillies, David Pear and Mark Carroll (Oxford, 2006).

101 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, xxiii.

102 Arthur Symons, ‘Petronius’, Sackbut, 1 (1920), 209–13 (p. 209).

103 Cyril Scott, ‘Music and Material Expression (a Plea for Aristotle)’, Musical Quarterly, 1 (1915), 181–2, and ‘Fragments of a Lecture Delivered to the Fabian Society, Summer 1913, II: The Faculty of Unlearning’, Monthly Musical Record, 44 (1914), 121–3 (p. 122).

104 Cyril Scott, The Philosophy of Modernism (in its Connection with Music) (London, 1917), 99–100.

105 ‘Imagination […] is that divine ladder built by god, whereby the aspirant may climb to the blissful heights of Realisation.’ [Cyril Scott], The Initiate in the New World (London, 1932), 176.

106 Scott, The Philosophy of Modernism, 100.

107 Cyril Scott, ‘Romantic: An Over-Used Word’, Musical Times, 100 (1959), 136–7 (p. 136). The term ‘Futurist’ came to be used rather loosely in the London music and art press during the early decades of the twentieth century. Rather than specifically indicating the work of the Italian or Russian Futurists, the term was regularly used as a general slight against overtly modernist works. Heckert notes that the arbitrary pejorative use of the term highlighted ‘the difficulties British musicians and critics had in distinguishing alliances and affinities between these new, radical forms of music’. Heckert, ‘Schoenberg, Roger Fry and the Emergence of a Critical Language’, 53.

108 Gray, ‘The Task of Criticism’, 13.

109 Gray, ‘The Task of Criticism’, 13.

110 Bloom, Introduction, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, x. Bloom also noted the dangers of such an approach: ‘How often, in Modern poetry, we have heard these strains mingled, until by now our latest poets alternately intoxicate and eradicate themselves in the inhuman effort that might sustain a vision so exalted.’ Ibid.

111 Israel Knox, The Aesthetic Theories of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer (New York, 1958), 132.

112 [Scott], The Initiate: Some Impressions of a Great Soul, 251.

113 From T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic (New York, 1965), 39, and ‘Views and Reviews’, New English Weekly, 7 (1935), 190, quoted in Mowbray Allan, T. S. Eliot's Impersonal Theory of Poetry (Lewisburg, PA, 1974), 97.

114 See Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, trans. Martin Turnell, 3rd edn (New York, 1967), 81–2.

115 D. H. Lawrence to Ottoline Morrell, 9 January 1916, quoted in Smith, Peter Warlock, 86.

116 Heseltine to Delius, 17 February 1913, quoted in Smith, Peter Warlock, 41 (emphasis added).

117 Hadley, ‘On a Darkling Plain’, 94.

118 Cyril Scott, Music: Its Secret Influence throughout the Ages, 1933 (London, 1934), 25.

119 Scott, My Years of Indiscretion, 12.

120 [Cyril Scott], The Autobiography of a Child: Written from the Psycho-Sexual-Analytical Standpoint: For Doctors, Parents, Teachers, and Psychologists (London, 1921). The book proposed to initiate public discussion on the sexual proclivities of children for the purpose of aiding parents and medical practitioners better to manage cases of childhood neurosis. It was withdrawn by the publishers after a complaint was made by none other than Lord Alfred Douglas, who contended that the book contravened the Obscene Publications Act 1857. See the reportage of the case in The Times: ‘The Autobiography of a Child: Summons against Publishers’, The Times, 18 March 1921, 7; ‘The Autobiography of a Child: Alleged Obscene Work’, The Times, 26 March 1921, 5; ‘Autobiography of a Child: Held to be Obscene’, The Times, 12 April 1921, 5; and ‘The Autobiography of a Child: Publishers Not to Appeal’, The Times, 20 April 1921, 7.

121 [Scott], The Initiate: Some Impressions of a Great Soul (see note 95); The Initiate in the New World, a Sequel to ‘The Initiate’ by his Pupil (New York, 1927; London, 1932); The Initiate in the Dark Cycle (see note 20).

122 Spoken by the character of the guru to the pupil in [Scott], The Initiate: Some Impressions of a Great Soul, 201.

123 Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’, 46–7.

124 Smith, Peter Warlock, 124–5.

125 Smith, Peter Warlock, 100–1.

126 Smith, Peter Warlock, 44, quoted in Thomas Beecham, Frederick Delius (London, 1959), 175.

127 Smith, Peter Warlock, 41.

128 Adams, ‘Gentleman, Dandy, Priest’, 442.

129 Heseltine to Delius, 17 February 1914, quoted in Smith, Peter Warlock, 42.

130 Percy Grainger to Cyril Scott, 20 December 1939, AUS-PVgm 02.0078.

131 Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, 176, 183.

132 Myrrha Bantock, Granville Bantock: A Personal Portrait (London, 1972), 134.

133 Scott, Bone of Contention, 81.

134 Scott, My Years of Indiscretion, 53. For a more detailed account of Scott's Symbolist influences and aesthetic outlook, see Sarah Collins, The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott (Woodbridge, 2013).

135 Winkler, ‘Master and Disciples’, 146.

136 Adams, ‘Gentleman, Dandy, Priest’, 442.

137 Adams, ‘Gentleman, Dandy, Priest’, 446.

138 Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, 1885 (London, 1939), 160–1 (emphasis added).

139 Bloom, Introduction, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, x.

140 For example, Robin Legge, a critic for the Daily Telegraph, wrote to Delius in 1907 that Scott ‘is now devoted to “occultism” – & is seen everywhere with a black Yogi who is supposed to hold in his head all the secrets of the Universe. Scott is a whole-hogger in the matter.’ Quoted in Laurie Sampsel, Cyril Scott: A Bio-Bibliography (London, 2000), 12.

141 Sorabji, Around Music, 227.

142 Sorabji, Mi contra fa, 195.

143 Sorabji, Mi contra fa, 74.

144 Sorabji, Around Music, 21.

145 Gray, Predicaments, 47

146 These are Barry Smith's words about Heseltine in his biography of the composer, Peter Warlock, 132.

147 Philip Heseltine, letter to Colin Taylor, 31 October 1917, quoted in Smith, Peter Warlock, 132 (emphasis original).

148 Philip Heseltine, letter to Colin Taylor, 27 September 1917, quoted in Smith, Peter Warlock, 132 (emphasis original).

149 Cf. Pater's notion of ‘renaissance’ described above (p. 104).

150 Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885), quoted in Adams, ‘Gentleman, Dandy, Priest’, 454.

151 Jeffrey Barnouw, ‘The Morality of the Sublime: Kant and Schiller’, Studies in Romanticism, 19 (1980), 497–514 (p. 498).

152 Robert E. Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 213.

153 Brombert, ‘Review: Wilde, Apostle of Aestheticism’, 136.

154 Whittall, ‘The Isolationists’, 122.

155 Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20th Century, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1985), i, 89.

156 Banfield, Sensibility and English Song, i, 12.

157 The hermeneutical complexities of examining representations of the East and other manifestations of imperialism and Empire in the music of the time are now ever-present themes in British music studies.

158 Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, 188. Yeats attributes the last part of this quotation to Matthew Arnold.

159 From Yeats's ‘The Rhymers’ Club’, Boston Pilot, 23 April 1892, reproduced as Appendix I in Norman Alford, The Rhymers’ Club: Poets of the Tragic Generation (New York, 1994), 141.

160 Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, 181.

161 Alford, The Rhymers’ Club, 141.

162 Alford, The Rhymers’ Club, v.

163 Yeats, ‘The Rhymers’ Club’, quoted in Alford, The Rhymers’ Club, 143. The reference to music is to the ‘music’ of poetic expression.

164 Scott, Bone of Contention, 149.

165 Smith, Peter Warlock, 108.

166 Smith, Peter Warlock, 33.

167 Huxley had also attended Eton during the same period as Heseltine, and chose to depict Heseltine in his later novel Antic Hay (1923).

168 Gray, Peter Warlock, 72, quoted in Smith, Peter Warlock, 57.

169 Smith, Peter Warlock, 57.

170 Banfield, Sensibility and English Song, i, 13.

171 Banfield, Sensibility and English Song, 104–5.

172 Whittall, ‘The Isolationists’, 122, 129.

173 Gray, Predicaments, 18–19.

174 Gray, Predicaments, 18–19. The quotation comes from Yeats's poem The Second Coming, although Gray himself does not acknowledge this.

175 Matthew Arnold's Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, quoted in Gray, Predicaments, 15 (original source not provided by Gray). The poem itself is thought to have been written at some time between 1851 and 1855.

176 Bloom, Introduction, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, xxv.

177 Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, 182.