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Musical and Literary Networks in the Weekly Critical Review, Paris, 1903–1904*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2017

Paul Watt
Paul Watt*
Affiliation:
Monash University Email: paul.watt@monash.edu
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Abstract

Published in 1903 and 1904 the Weekly Critical Review was a typical ‘little magazine’: it was produced on a shoestring with a small readership, with big editorial ambition. Its uniqueness lay in its claim to be a literary tribute to the entente cordiale (and it enjoyed the imprimatur of King Edward VII), but more importantly, it was a bilingual journal, which was rare at the time even for a little magazine. The Weekly Critical Review aimed to produce high-quality criticism and employed at least a dozen high-profile English and French writers and literary critics including Rémy de Gourmont (1858–1915), Arthur Symons (1865–1945) and H.G. Wells (1866–1946). It also published articles and musical news by four leading music critics: English critics Alfred Kalisch (1863–1933), Ernest Newman (1868–1959) and John F. Runciman (1866–1916) and the American James Huneker (1857–1921).

Why did these critics write for the Weekly Critical Review? What did the articles in the WCR reveal about Anglo-French relations, about the aspirations of the English and French music critics who wrote for it, and about the scholarly style of journalism it published – a style that was also characteristic of many other little magazines? And in what ways were those who wrote for it connected? As a case study, I examine the ways in which Ernest Newman’s literary and musical networks brought him into contact with the journal and examine the style of criticism he sought to promote.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , April 2017 , pp. 33 - 50
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

I gratefully acknowledge that research for this article was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), 2012–2015 (ARC DE120100050).

References

1 For a potted history and definition of the little magazine see Hoffman, Frederick J., Allen, Charles and Ulrich, Carolyn F., The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946)Google Scholar. Other sources include Barbour, Thomas, ‘Little magazines in Paris’, Hudson Review 4/2 (1951): 278–283 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weiner, Seymour S., ‘Reflections on the French Little Magazine’, French Review 30/2 (1956): 126–130 Google Scholar; Whittemore, Reed, Little Magazines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Hamilton, Ian, The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976)Google Scholar; Pollak, Felix, ‘Elitism and the Littleness of Little Magazines’, Southwest Review 61/3 (1976): 297–303 Google Scholar; Golding, Alan, ‘Little Magazines and Alternative Canons: The Example of Origin ’, American Literary History 2/4 (1990): 691–725 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Görtschacher, Wolfgang, Little Magazines Profiles: The Little Magazines in Great Britain, 1939–1993 (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1993): 691–725 Google Scholar; Marek, Jayne E., Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995)Google Scholar; Bartholomew Brinkman, ‘A “Tea-Pot Tempest”: The Chap-Book, “Ephemeral Bibelots” and the Making of the Modern Little Magazine’, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 1/2 (2010): 193–215; and Rachel Schreiber, Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine: The Modern Figures of the Masses (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Most of the literature of little magazines define them as a twentieth-century phenomenon, though this is clearly inaccurate for there are many such magazines in the nineteenth century.

2 Extensive searches on RIPM, Gallica and Trove reveal the degree to which writings by critics, including those in the WCR including Huneker and Newman, were syndicated or recycled all over the world thus adding a further layer of complexity about networks that is beyond the scope of this article.

3 Savoy (published from January to December 1896) has been labelled an Anglo-French enterprise but this is disputed, ‘for the amount of prose and poetry by or about French writers is relatively small, though their presence is a significant contribution to the periodical’s avant-garde emanations’ (quoted in Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987): 127). For background on the Savoy see Beckson, Karl, London in the Eighteen Nineties (New York: Norton, 1992)Google Scholar and Koenraad Claes, ‘Savoy’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (London: British Library, 2009): 559. Another periodical from around the same time (1896–1898) that published articles in English and French – as well as German – was Cosmopolis. For a history of Cosmopolis and its significance to British cultural life at the turn of the twentieth century see Agathacleous, Tanya, Realism, Urban and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 27–68 Google Scholar.

4 Edward Dowden, ‘Literary Criticism in France’, Fortnightly Review, 1 December 1889, 737–53. Two years later an article of similar sentiment was published: George Saintsbury, ‘The Contrasts of English and French Literature’, Macmillan’s Magazine 63 (1890–1891): 330–41. A more recent appraisal of Sainte-Beuve’s influence is in Charles W. Meister, Dramatic Criticism: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1985): 86–9.

5 Dowden, ‘Literary Criticism in France’, 737.

6 Dowden, ‘Literary Criticism in France’, 738.

7 Dowden, ‘Literary Criticism in France’, 738.

8 Babbitt, Irving, Masters of Modern French Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Noonday Press, 1912): viGoogle Scholar. See also Bradford, Gamaliel, ‘The Mission of the Literary Critic’, Atlantic Monthly 94 (July–December 1904: 537–544 Google Scholar, who noted that ‘Sainte-Beuve … is gradually coming to be regarded elsewhere [outside France] as the greatest critic that ever lived’ (537). Another near-contemporary appreciation of Sainte-Beuve, although not as laudatory, is Francis Gribble, ‘Sainte-Beuve’, Fornightly Review, January–June 1905, 129–39.

9 ‘Le petite Sainte-Beuve’, unsigned article, the Speaker, 8 June 1895, 754–55.

10 Charles Augustine Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, 15 vols. 3rd edn (Paris: Garnier Frerès, 1851–72). For an extensive (if dated) critique of Sainte-Beuve’s style see Wellek, René, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950: The Age of Transition (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966): 34–72 Google Scholar. For an English biography of Sainte-Beuve – and a critique of his work as critic and historian – see Harold Nicolson, Sainte-Beuve (London: Constable, 1957). For a discussion of the role of the scholar-critic in little magazines see Hoffman, Allen and Ulrich, The Little Magazine, 189–91.

11 Arnold’s debt to Sainte-Beuve is noted in Whitridge, Arnold, ‘Matthew Arnold and Sainte-Beuve’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 53/1 (1938): 303–313 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donovan, Robert A., ‘The Method of Arnold’s Essays in Criticism’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 71/5 (1956): 922–931 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Super, R.H., ‘Documents in the Matthew Arnold–Sainte-Beuve Relationship’, Modern Philology 60/3 (1963): 206–210 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Phillips, E. Margaret, ‘On Sainte-Beuve’s Visit to England in 1828’, Modern Languages Review 20/3 (1925): 327–329 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More recent and fuller appraisals of Sainte-Beuve are Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 34–72, Maurois, André, Memoirs, 1885–1967, trans. Denver Lindley (London: Bodley Head, 1970): 367–369 Google Scholar and Marcel Proust ‘Against Sainte-Beuve’ in Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, ed. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1988).

12 Chorley, Henry F., Music and Manners in France and Germany, vol. 2 (New York: Da Capo, 1984 [1841]): 254 Google Scholar.

13 Chorley, Music and Manners in France and Germany, 254. On Chorley’s long career see Bledsoe, Robert, Henry Fothergill Chorley: Victorian Journalist (Farnham: Ashgate, 1998)Google Scholar.

14 Thomas De Quincey, ‘French and English Manners’, Hogg’s Instructor 5 n.s. (1850): 33–5 republished in David Mason, ed., The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, Volume 14: Miscellanea and Index (Edinburgh: A&C Black, 1890): 327–34.

15 Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions (Illusions Perdues), trans. Ellen Marriage (London: George Newnes, 1901 [1843]).

16 See especially Monod, G., ‘Hippolyte Taine’, Contemporary Review 63 (1893): 518–536 Google Scholar.

17 Brandes, Georg, Creative Spirits of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Rasmus B. Anderson (London; T. Fisher Unwin, 1924): vGoogle Scholar.

18 Stephen, Leslie, ‘Taine’s History of English Literature’, Fortnightly Review, 1873, reprinted in S.O.A. Ullmann, ed., Men, Books, and Mountains: Essays by Leslie Stephen (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), 81–111 Google Scholar.

19 Saintsbury, George, The Later Nineteenth Century, Periods of European Literature (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons 1923): 144 Google Scholar.

20 George Sainstbury, History of Criticism, vol. 3, 442. For later scholarship on Taine see Charlton, D.G., Positivist Thought in France During the Second Empire, 1852–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959): 127–157 Google Scholar and Jones, Stuart, ‘Taine and the Nation-State’ in Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800, ed. Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan and Kevin Passmore (London: Routledge, 1998): 85–96 Google Scholar. Between 1859 and 1862 Taine visited England numerous times. For Taine’s account of his travels, and for biographical and critical commentary on it, see Edward Hyams, ed., Taine’s Notes on England (London: Thames and Hudson, 1957).

21 Ernest Newman, ‘A note on Amiel’, National Reformer, 26 February 1893, 136; 5 March, 147–8; 12 March, 163–4; 19 March, 180–81; 26 March, 200 and ‘Amiel’, Free Review, October 1895, 44–57; November, 197–205.

22 James Huneker (1857–1921) described Bles as ‘a young Englishman of Dutch descent (his grandfather was a Dutch genre painter, David Bles, but whether of the Henri Met de Bles stock, the old-time painter with the white lock sported Whistler fashion, I do not know) and far-ranging in his ambition’. See Huneker, James, Steeplejack, vol. 2 (London: C. Scribner’s, 1920): 117 Google Scholar. M.D. Calvocoressi described him as ‘an enterprising man’. See Calvocoressi, , Musicians Gallery: Music and Ballet in Paris and London (London: Faber & Faber, 1933): 74 Google Scholar. Bles was made an Officier de l’Académie c. 1912. See correspondence from James Huneker to E.E. Ziegler in June 1912 in The Letters of James Gibbons Huneker, ed. Josephine Huneker (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1922): 131–3.

23 Huneker, Steeplejack, vol. 2, 120.

24 Huneker, Steeplejack, vol. 2, 121.

25 Huneker, Steeplejack, vol. 2, 121. For more detail on Huneker’s connection to Maeterlinck, and other interviews he undertook in Paris, see Schwab, Arnold T., James Gibbons Huneker: Critic of the Seven Arts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), 141–143 Google Scholar.

26 Details of the pair’s friendship is discussed in Calder-Marshall, Arthur, Havelock Ellis (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959)Google Scholar, Broome, Vincent, Havelock Ellis, Philosopher of Sex: A Biography (London: Routledge, 1979)Google Scholar, Grosskurth, Phyllis, Havelock Ellis: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1980)Google Scholar and Beckson, Arthur Symons: A Life.

27 Ellis and Symonds travelled together for six weeks every year between 1891 and 1901. See Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis, 165.

28 Broome, Havelock Ellis, 75; Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis, 132.

29 Beckson, Arthur Symons, 1.

30 See Huneker, Steeplejack, vol. 2, 122.

31 See correspondence from James Huneker to E.E. Ziegler in June 1912 in The Letters of James Gibbons Huneker, 133.

32 The series on Chopin began on 5 March 1903, 8.

33 See www.henle.de/blog/en/2012/03/19 (accessed 2 November 2015).

34 I am grateful to one of the reviews of this article who provided Davey’s full name and profession.

35 H. Murray McDonald Davey, ‘He Came Like a Dream’ [song], WCR, 16 April 1903.

36 Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery, 74.

37 Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery, 74. James Huneker also mentioned, in passing, the generous remuneration. See correspondence from James Huneker to E.E. Ziegler in June 1912 in The Letters of James Gibbons Huneker, 133. Bles received ‘a pile of notes threatening the magazine with bankruptcy’ according to Victor I. Seroff in Maurice Ravel (New York, 1970 [1953]): 87.

38 The entente cordiale comprised a number of documents signed between Britain and France in 1904 in part to shore up Britain’s presence in Europe but also to form a bilateral relationship with France against Germany. For background to the entente cordiale see Lee, Sidney, King Edward VII: A Biography, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1927): 216–238 Google Scholar and Heffer, Simon, Power and Place: The Political Consequences of King Edward VII (London: Phoenix Giant, 1999): 155–164 Google Scholar.

39 ‘The “Entente Cordiale”’, WCR, 19 February 1904, 127.

40 Arthur Bles, [editorial note], WCR, 12 March 1903, 9.

41 Brake, Laurel, ‘“Time’s Turbulence”: Mapping Journalism Networks’, Victorian Periodicals Review 44/2 (2011): 116–127 Google Scholar. See also Ellis, Katharine, ‘Paris, 1866: In Search of French Music’, Music & Letters 91 (2010): 684–688 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Brake, ‘“Time’s Turbulence”’, 117.

43 Brake, ‘“Time’s Turbulence”. An article that covers journalistic networks in France, though less explicitly, is Martha Ward, ‘From Art Criticism to Art News: Journalistic Reviewing in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris’, in Art Criticism and its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Michael R. Orwicz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994): 162–81. For more recent studies on intellectual exchange and networks see Christophe Charle, Jürgen Schriewer and Peter Wagner, eds, Transnational Intellectual Networks: Forms of Academic Knowledge and the Search for Cultural Identities (Frankfurt: Campus, c. 2004).

44 Newman, Ernest, Richard Strauss, with a Personal Note by Alfred Kalisch (London and New York: John Lane, 1908)Google Scholar.

45 J.F.R., ‘Gluck’, Saturday Review, 11 January 1896, 36–8.

46 See, for example, ‘English Music and Music Criticism’, Saturday Review, 26 October 1895, 542–3; and ‘Concerning Musical Criticism’, Saturday Review, 28 January 1899, 108–9.

47 J.F.R., ‘Gluck’, 37.

48 J.F.R., ‘Gluck’, 37, referring to Adolph Bernhard Marx, Gluck und die Oper, 2 vols (Berlin: O. Janke, 1863). There is no evidence or suggestion that Newman drew on Marx’s writings, including the Idee; perhaps its metaphysical slant was too objectionable for Newman’s rationalism. On Marx’s Idee see Burnham, Scott, ‘Criticism, Faith and the “Idee”: A.B. Marx’s Early Reception of Beethoven’, 19th-century Music 13/3 (1990): 183–192 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 J.F.R., ‘Gluck’, 37.

50 J.F.R., ‘Gluck’, 37.

51 MS Dobell, 14 January 1896.

52 MS Dobell, 14 January 1896.

53 Ernest Newman, ‘The Culture of the Emotions’, New Quarterly Musical Review, August 1893, 57–62. For a fuller discussion of impressionist criticism see Schick, Robert D., Classcial Music Criticism (New York: Garland, 1996): 80–84 Google Scholar.

54 See, for example, Titchener, E.B., ‘The Method of Impression and Some Recent Criticism’, American Journal of Psychology 19/1 (1908): 138–141 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Small, I.C., ‘Vernon Lee, Association and “Impressionist Criticism”’, British Journal of Aesthetics 17/2 (1977): 178–184 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Child, Ruth C., The Aesthetic of Walter Pater (New York: Macmillan, 1940): 4 Google Scholar.

56 Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1910 [1873])Google Scholar.

57 Pater, The Renaissance, viii–ix.

58 Ernest Newman, ‘Concerning Musical Criticism: An Open Letter to Mr. J.F. Runciman’, WCR, 22 January 1904, 19–20.

59 Newman, ‘Concerning Musical Criticism’.

60 See Charles Kensington Salaman, ‘On Musical Criticism’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, second Session (1875–76): 1–15 and John Stainer, ‘The Principles of Musical Criticism’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, seventh Session (1880–1881): 35–52 and ‘Essays in Musical Criticism’, Musical Times vol. 37 (1896): 16–17, 87–8, 232.

61 The most recent history of freethought culture is Cooke, Bill, A Gathering of Infidels: A Hundred Years of the Rationalist Press Association (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003)Google Scholar. See also Royle, Edward, Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

62 Ernest Newman, ‘A Note on George Meredith’, WCR, 5 February 1903, 8–9 and ‘Zola Idealist’, WCR, 12 March 1903, 1–2.

63 Ernest Newman, ‘Mr John M. Robertson’s Essays’, WCR, 19 March 1903, 13–14.

64 Newman, ‘Mr John M. Robertson’s essays’, 14.

65 Ernest Newman, ‘Thomas Traherne’, WCR, 16 April 1903, 7–8.

66 A further connection to Dobell is a four-part article Newman wrote in September 1903, ‘The Rationale of English Verse-Rhythm’, WCR, 3 September 1903, 152–4; 10 September, 186–8; 17 September, 206–7; 24 September, 234–5. Newman had proposed a book on the subject to Dobell but he declined it on the grounds that the topic was commercially unviable. See Dobell–Newman correspondence 26 November 1898 and 13 December 1989. Dobell Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford shelfmark 38484–5 (c. 32–8).

67 Brake, ‘“Time’s turbulence”’, 115.

68 Brake, ‘“Time’s turbulence”’, 115.

69 Bentley, Eric, ‘Editors in Person: Little Magazines’, Kenyon Review 9/2 (spring 1947): 279–286 Google Scholar, here 285.

70 Rosenfeld, Isaac, ‘On the Role of the Writer and the Little Magazine’, Chicago Review 11/2 (summer, 1957): 3–16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Weiner, ‘Reflections on the French Little Magazine’, 127.

72 Pollak, ‘Elitism and the Littleness of Little magazines’, 297.

73 Robertson, John M., ‘Concerning Mares’ Nests’: An Open Letter, University Magazine and Free Review, March 1898, 611–616 Google Scholar, here 615.