This touching tribute to a friend of the composer, Mr. A. J. Jaeger (the English equivalent of whose name, hunter, suggested the title), has all the serious thoughtfulness, the tenderness coupled with aspiration, the noble plainness, that belong to Elgar at his best. And it is a striking fact that the originality of the passage (for no one but Elgar could have written it) is due to subtle, almost unanalyzable qualities in the mode of composition rather than to any unusual features of style. The harmonic style, indeed, is quite the same simple diatonic one as that of "The Black Knight" chorus, showing that, in music as in literature, noble poetry can be made from the same materials as doggerel. There is the same predominance of simple triads and seventh chords, especially the more rugged sevenths, for which Elgar has a noticeable fondness; the same frequent use of suspensions, though here it is dictated by emotion rather than by custom; the same restless motion of the bass, one of the hall-marks of Elgar's style. The melody, however, shows a tendency to large leaps, often of a seventh, in alternating directions, giving its line a sharply serrated profile. This, it may be noted, is also one of the outstanding features of his more personal thought. But above all should be observed the rhythmic flexibility that here takes the place of sing-song—the free sweep of the line, scorning to rest on the accents, soaring through its long continuous flight like a bird in a favoring gale.
We have here, then, the vein of expression at once plain, serious, and noble, which makes Elgar at his best both English and universal. It recurs frequently throughout the whole body of his work: in the "Go forth" chorus in "Gerontius," so finely used in the prelude; in the theme of the Variations; in the fundamental theme of the first Symphony, which dominates the entire work and in which Elgar reaches perhaps his most exalted utterance; in the themes of the slow movement of the same symphony; and in another way in the Prince Hal theme of "Falstaff." Some may feel that this is the essential Elgar. Yet there is also in this quiet Englishman a passionate mysticism, a sense of subtle spiritual experience, which has urged him to develop progressively quite another mode of musical speech. On this side he is related to Wagner and to César Franck. Like them he has realized that there is a whole range of feeling, inaccessible to the diatonic system of harmony, that can be suggested by harmony based on the chromatic scale, and even more vividly and subtly by a harmonic system that opens up a path between all the keys, that makes them all available together—by what we may call, in short, "polytonal" harmony. This polytonal harmonic system is common to "Tristan und Isolde," to Franck's "Les Béatitudes," to much of Chopin, and to many parts of "The Dream of Gerontius," however much they may differ in other respects.
Elgar began early to experiment in this direction. Even in "The Black Knight," for example, at the word "rock" in the lines
When he rode into the lists
The castle 'gan to rock,
we have the following progression, equally striking from the musical and the dramatic point of view:
Figure XII.
From "The Black Knight."
This is what Mr. Carl W. Grimm has well named a "modulating sequence"; that is, each unit group of harmony (in this case a measure in length) is the sequential repetition of the preceding, yet the chromatic texture is so managed that each begins in a new key; the total effect is thus much more novel and exciting than is that of the traditional monotonal sequence. Yet, as Mr. Stillman-Kelley has pointed out in a closely reasoned essay,[20] however ingenious may be the arrangement of the modulating sequence on the harmonic side, it is liable to the same fault that besets the monotonal sequence—that is, rhythmic monotony. Once we have the pattern, we know what to expect; and if the composer gives us exactly what we expect the effect is too obvious, and we are bored. It is precisely by his avoidance of this literal repetition, says Mr. Kelley, that Wagner, in such a modulating sequence as that of the Pilgrims' Chorus, maintains both the rhythmic and the harmonic vitality of the music.