Elgar's whole life has thus been a gradual and progressive self-emancipation from the limitations of inherited style, an escape from habit to initiative, from formality to eloquence, from insularity to cosmopolitanism. Nor has this progress been the less inspiring in that it has been spasmodic, subject to interruptions, and never complete. In that respect it shares the lovable imperfection of all things human. It has been instinctive rather than reasoned, has proceeded largely by trial and error, and has counted among its experiments almost as many failures as successes. There are commonplace pages in almost everything Elgar has written, unless it be the "Enigma" Variations. But the important point is that however much, in moments of technical inattention or emotional indifference, he may fall back into the formulæ of his school, he has at his best left them far behind, and made himself the peer of his greatest continental contemporaries in wealth and variety of expression—of such men as Strauss in Germany and d'Indy in France.
What are these never-quite-ejected formulæ, lurking in Elgar's brain, ever ready to guide his pen when for a moment he forgets to think and feel? If we look at the opening chorus of "The Black Knight," written in 1893, and numbered opus 25, we shall get a working notion of them (Figure X, page 102).
Figure X.
Opening chorus from "The Black Knight."
How this passage calls up the atmosphere of the typical English choral festival: the unwieldy masses of singers, the scarcely less unwieldy orchestra or organ, the ponderous movement of the music, half majestic, half tottering, as of a drunken elephant, the well-meaning ineptitude of the expression, highly charged with good nature but innocent of nuance! There is the solid diatonic harmony, conscientiously divided between the four equally industrious parts. There is the thin disguising of the tendency of this hymn-tune type of harmony to sit down, so to speak, on the accent of each measure, by a few conventional suspensions. There is the attempt to give the essentially stagnant melody a specious air of busyness by putting in a triplet here and a dot or short rest there. And there is the sing-song phraseology by which a phrase of four measures follows a phrase of four measures as the night the day. In short, there is the perfectly respectable production of music by the yard, on the most approved pattern, undistorted by a breath of personal feeling or imagination.
How far Elgar, whenever his imagination is stirred, can get away from this conventional vacuity, even without departing materially from its general idiom, may as well be shown at once, for the sake of the illuminating contrast, by the quotation of a bit of genuine Elgar—the "Nimrod" in the "Enigma" Variations, opus 36 (1899).
Figure XI.
"Nimrod," from the "Enigma Variations."