David Cormack, Faithful, All Too Faithful
Introduction
In accordance with his wishes, Richard Wagner’s earthly remains were laid in the tomb he had prepared in the garden of his Villa Wahnfried, on 18 February 1883. [1] An eyewitness report in the London Times of the funeral of ‘The Late Richard Wagner’ noted that: ‘Among the English mourners there was a Mr. Cyriax and a Mr. Hatton, from London, the latter, a son of the well-known composer of the same name, and but for the shortness of notice and the long way to come, British art would have been much more numerously represented. As it was, several handsome wreathes were sent from London and, among others, one to the “immortal poet and musician”, from Messrs. Ashton Ellis and Godfrey H. Thornton.’ [2]
William Ashton Ellis’s ‘handsome wreathe’ is the only tangible bridge between the genius and his admirer. It might never even have made it to the hallowed burial ground: ‘The bulk of the wreathes had been left behind at the station to be sent direct to the theatre, where they were still on view many years afterwards.’ [3] It can safely be said that Wilhelm Richard Wagner had never heard of William Ashton Ellis.
Aged 30 at the time of Wagner’s death, Ellis was acutely aware that he had arrived too late to impinge physically on the great man’s consciousness. But by then he had also become convinced that the end of one individual’s earthly journey could bear upon another. ‘For my own part’, as he put it,
when, a few weeks after Wagner’s death, the whole of the Grand Canal, as far as the eye could reach, was thronged by a concourse of gondolas, each freight in rapt attention to the strains of a band of German musicians, who had moored their barge in front of the palace in Venice where the Meister had sojourned during his last halt in his earthly journey. [4]
Like Parsifal, Ellis witnessed a funereal ceremony from the wings, and would draw heavy inferences about how that ‘earthly journey’ should be interpreted.
A Pepper-Box of Commas
to pretend that the translation has not been an arduous task; but I can honestly say that it was not by reason of the unwonted difficulties often alleged to exist in the original. Any one who has a moderate knowledge of German, and is accustomed to thinking a little deeper than the ordinary light literature of the day, can read Wagner’s prose in the original, and profit by it.
Wagner’s prose and light literature? It’s a statement that could only be made by someone with a confident, rather than moderate, knowledge of German, and with an intrinsic habit of deep thinking. Perhaps it’s well intentioned, urging readers to approach Wagner’s prose in the original. But it knows all along that those it flatters, those sensible people with their moderate knowledge of German, are in fact waiting for ‘the original’ to be served up to them in digestible form. The implication is that this task should fall to someone ready and able to do what Thomas Carlyle did for Goethe (and who would happily accept the charge of epigonism).
‘No’, he insists:
the same difficulty exists in every attempt to render faithfully and readably into English any of the more serious products of German literature. However rich our own language may be, we have to depend, for philosophic and aesthetic terms, too much upon words of Greek or Latin derivation; whereas the German classic has at his disposal words that have sprung from the spirit of the language, words that, however philosophically used, have still a direct relation with what may be called concrete – as opposed to abstract – modes of thought. The difficulty, therefore, is to translate these expressions into terms that shall not be so conventional as to rob them of their vital play of meaning.
In other words, English speakers must fall back upon an impoverished Greek and Latin linguistic heritage, still suitable, if not for shopkeepers, then for lawyers or doctors – but no longer capable of rendering other than conventional ideas. The German speaker, however, is fortunate enough to possess a still-vital language, even for abstractions. And in translation from German into English, punctuation itself becomes as much an impediment as an interpretative tool:
we English are impatient of delay in getting to the end of a sentence; we object to waiting for the qualifications of a thought before we reach the thought itself. […] Thus, in translation from German into English, one always has to be on the look out for the saving efficacy of a comma. I may say that that comma is the most difficult of all to translate; it is used in another fashion to ours, and often represents our semicolon. So one has to stand over one’s rough transcript with a pepper-box of commas, semicolons, colons and full stops, ready to spice it up for the English table. [5]
That unexpectedly quaint turn of phrase (‘a pepper-box of commas’) marks him out as a late-Victorian eccentric. He’s apologetic for the limitations of his own language, but he has chosen to apply it to the elaboration of a deeper ‘German’, a ‘philosophic’ message. Few nowadays appreciate the ironic rhapsodies of Thomas Carlyle’s pseudo-biographic Professor Teufelsdröckh in Sartor Resartus, who inhabits a vaguely similar intellectual world. Even fewer are likely to be drawn to William Ashton Ellis’s stylistic idiosyncrasies.
In the real world, the language difficulties were well known early on. The German-born Francis (Franz) Hueffer (1843–89) had arrived in England in 1869. Linguistically gifted, he quickly mastered the Queen’s English (though he became a British national only in 1882), and was able to succeed the fearsomely conservative and quirky James Davison as music critic for The Times in 1878. In 1888 he translated the correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, and warned:
That the task of reproducing these minutiae [i.e., mannerisms] without doing too much violence to the English idiom was an extremely difficult one, the experienced reader need not be told. Liszt, it is true, writes generally in a simple and straightforward manner, and his letters, especially those written in French, present no very great obstacles; but with Wagner the case is different. He also is plain and lucid enough where the ordinary affairs of life are concerned, but as soon as he comes upon a topic that really interests him, be it music or Buddhism, metaphysics or the iniquities of the Jews, his brain gets on fire, and his pen courses over the paper with the swiftness and recklessness of a race-horse, regardless of the obstacles of style and construction, and sometimes of grammar. His meaning is always deep, but to arrive at that meaning in such terrible letters […] sometimes seems to set human ingenuity at defiance. [6]
Until recently modern English translators and critics have preferred to tackle Wagner’s letters before the prose works. As Hueffer observed, it’s simply that the letters, being generally shorter, written with immediacy, and usually with some material purpose in view, are more translatable. Line for line the letters can yield more biographical information about Wagner than page after page of didactic or ‘philosophical’ prose, however well translated. But William Ashton Ellis’s translations of the composer’s letters, let alone the prose works, have generally been declared unacceptable for modern scholarly purposes. In 1987 Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington put together the most important single volume of Wagner’s selected letters, with Wagner’s German freshly translated. Yet their declared aims resembled Ellis’s: ‘the translation aims to reproduce a nineteenth-century literary style in keeping with Wagner’s own ornate and often highly poetical language’. They were rather less worried about Ellis’s ‘saving efficacy’ of commas: ‘Wagner’s own idiosyncratic punctuation has been retained, except in those cases where to have done so would have impaired understanding.’ And they paid tribute to those ingenious forerunners whose ‘occasional felicities of style […] it would have been short-sighted (and ungracious) not to have borrowed’. [7]
Exceptionally, John Deathridge’s 1991 edition of the Family Letters chose explicitly to rework Ellis’s first (and only) edition. Macmillan, Ellis’s publisher in 1911, co-operated eighty years later in an experiment that hasn’t really been given full credit for its critical approach. Deathridge’s edition carefully sets Ellis’s in context with his own introduction, notes, expansions and additions, but it deliberately retains much of the typography, layout and ‘feel’ of the 1911 edition. ‘Ellis thought long and hard about the problems of rendering Wagner into English’, Deathridge explained, but
hard as Ellis tried to feel his way into Wagner’s writings – with touching devotion and often true understanding it should be said – he arrived at an ‘equivalent’ of the Master’s style that was unmistakeably [sic] his own, including the quasi-biblical inflections, inelegant archaisms and other dotty traits of Ellis-speak that have irritated generations of English Wagnerites ever since. Ellis’s translations of Wagner’s letters […] are less annoying probably because the original German is clearer and more spontaneous, though the reader still has to endure the bouts of mad-translator disease to which Ellis was always prone. […] Yet to dismiss Ellis out of hand is a mistake. For one thing, his ‘invention’ of Wagner in English has become too much part and parcel of the literature for it to be simply ignored. For another, the translations are closer in time to the original and capture a part of the historical ‘aura’ of the texts that a modern translation never could. [8]
An aura appears, of course, at the edge of an object. In fact it’s usually detectable only after direct contact with the object has been lost. The present study makes no claims for any centrality to Wagner scholarship. In more than one sense it focuses not on the original but on the translation. It takes in peripheral, curious and downright unfashionable aspects of Wagner’s reception in Britain. I’m afraid it indulges in Ellis’s own predilection for pregnant footnotes, especially in poignant details unearthed from death certificates, census returns and other secondary sources (dug out diligently at the time of my first researches, but many now accessible and verifiable online). In this scaled-down lens I hope that William Ashton Ellis’s much-disparaged attempt at an English ‘equivalence’ of Wagner’s writings can in fact be seen to disclose some valuable conceptual and receptive issues.
Untruths and Half-Truths
The use of mundane or secondary material might be decried as historicism. But secondary or peripheral issues do seem to recur, strangely enough when commentators are looking for a new ‘angle’. Sometimes they’re mischievously invoked and exaggerated in order to ‘spice up’ for a new generation an interpretation of the stale past. Wagner’s own attempts in his lifetime to condition his posterity through autobiography and re-editing has engendered a whole cottage industry devoted to discovering the untruths and half-truths about him. [9] Immediately after the composer’s death it was felt loyal and natural to establish a tradition of appropriation, selection, editing, and emendation of at least the recorded documents and facts. And this was not necessarily pernicious. John Deathridge quoted Ernest Newman’s ‘charitable view’ that
It stands to reason that the nearer the publication stood to the date of Wagner’s death, and the more people who were still alive at the time, the more scruples Wahnfried would have about publication in full. Perhaps what Cosima and the others did was no more than any other widow and any friends would do in similar circumstances. [10]
The urge of successive generations to condition Wagner needs to be examined in its own right. After he ceased to speak for himself, ‘Wagner’ came to us through the mediation of his successors, hagiographic or hostile, scholarly or dilettante, over the last two hundred years. We have lost direct contact with Wagner and are left with ‘interpretation’, of which translation is a pretty violent form. Patrice Chéreau’s 1976 centenary production of the Ring at Bayreuth is universally accepted as a dramaturgical watershed. More or less self-consciously (usually more), productions since then have had to seek new modes of interpretation and expression. Engagement with, or antagonism towards, the audience has become increasingly commonplace, not least at Bayreuth. Over the decades we have had continually to ‘invent’ our relationship with Wagner, to seek an ‘equivalence’ for our times. Patrick Carnegy has documented the always unsatisfying but endlessly absorbing dichotomy between Werktreue and Regietheater. [11] Wagner’s work now calls for invention (or intervention) beyond the stage. Over the decades Fritz Lang, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and Bill Viola, in film or video, have offered entertainment with or without offence along the way. Video backdrop or front-screen projections are now almost de rigueur; more multimedia experiment can (and should) be expected onstage and off.
And Wagner himself has become opera, as in the late Jonathan Harvey’s buddhistic Wagner Dream of 2007. Wagner biography has sought to make its mark as a literary genre with degrees of psychologising or politicising, from Nietzsche and Ferdinand Praeger, to Martin Gregor-Dellin and Joachim Köhler. [12] For most of the twentieth century ‘Wagner literature’ – the serious prose by, after and about Wagner – resided off the stage, off the screen, and on the higher shelves of the critic’s library, or in condensed or selective texts in programme notes. But in the 21st century there has been a growing number of attempts to grapple with Wagner’s prose writings. The premise now is that whatever Wagner wished us to read about his ambition can’t be ignored in any appraisal of his achievement. [13] Most artists would probably wish this. Ernest Newman made it clear as early as 1914 that the man can’t be separated from the artist. But the sheer shelf-space of the prose Wagner produced, and the primary and secondary biographical and exegetical material left in its train, has made this an extraordinary challenge. And this is before taking into account the tragic subsequent, or rather retrospective, historical context that Wagner couldn’t possibly have imagined, however much his genes (or Cosima’s, or Winifred’s) contributed to it.
The Prose Opera
Given the shelf-space, almost all concert-goers and probably most opera-goers seem to be content with the performances, if not the dramaturgy. Those who go to boo at Bayreuth are also highly privileged. But for stay-at-home English language readers, with enough shelf-space, William Ashton Ellis remains unique – or possibly heroically alone – in his determination to deliver unto us the exhaustive translation and propagation of Wagner’s prose opera as something no less essential than the mises-en-scène or Mein Leben. Ellis’s eight-volume translation of Wagner’s prose works, as Stewart Spencer said, ‘for all its waywardness, remains the standard English version of Wagner’s writings in prose. No new translation of the complete writings is planned at the time of going to press.’ [14] This is as true now as it was in 1992. John Deathridge’s ‘Checklist of Writings’ in the Wagner Handbook dutifully cross-referenced the Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen with ‘the standard English translation of Wagner’s prose works (Ellis)’. [15] Ellis’s volumes were reprinted in their entirety in the USA in 1967 and 1972. In 1964, Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn brought out a selection of extracts under the title Wagner on Music and Drama, the publishers on both sides of the Atlantic attributing the translation through several reprints to one H. Ashton Ellis. [16] The 1991 English edition of Dieter Borchmeyer’s authoritatively exegetical Richard Wagner, Theory and Theatre, however, was resolutely anti-Ellis. Its translator (Stewart Spencer again) informed the reader that: ‘All the passages from Wagner’s prose writings have been newly translated, although earlier versions have occasionally been consulted and plundered where appropriate. Little would have been served, however, by including references to Ashton Ellis’s eight-volume translation of the Prose Works (London, 1892–9), a translation as unedifying as it is unobtainable.’ [17] This verdict somehow failed to deter the University of Nebraska Press from launching in 1994–96 a paperback reprint of Ellis’s eight volumes, re-titled but otherwise unchanged, with a cover blurb describing him as ‘one of the most important translators of nineteenth-century musicology’ [sic]. Despite better-informed opinion there seems to persist in the English-speaking world a need for a ‘standard’ complete English translation of Wagner’s prose works. And for the time being William Ashton Ellis’s still seems to serve, even if we know little about the man who provided it.
There have always been caveats about him personally. ‘No one who has had occasion to work in detail at Wagner’s life and letters’, Ernest Newman wrote, ‘can have anything but respect for Ellis’s untiring industry and his patience in disentangling complicated threads.’ But the results of Ellis’s industry were – and always had been – questionable, since
unfortunately the peculiar kind of English he employs in his versions of the prose works and some of the letters gives a touch of the ridiculous to them that is not in the original. As long ago as 1893 Houston Stewart Chamberlain had to express to Cosima his regret that the task of Englishing Wagner had fallen into the hands of Ellis, for whom, as a man, he had considerable respect – ‘the good Ellis’, as he calls him in a letter of the 4th October of that year. ‘But ah!’ he continues, ‘that is a sad business! Only now have I been able to examine his work as translator [of the prose works], and I have to look upon it as a pure calamity.’ Later he wrote to Cosima, ‘I must talk to you some other time about Ellis’s translations. I did not mean, as you appear to think, that they are not faithful; but they are not English. No Englishman who does not understand German can understand this Ellis-style. Ellis is faithful enough to the word – too faithful; but not to the sense.’ [18]
Newman clearly meant that to be the last word on Ellis, by then dead for seventeen years. Ellis had been aged 30 when Wagner died. He was in his early twenties when he was first struck by the phenomenon of the composer, but it was only after Wagner’s death that Ellis’s lifelong mission began. What John Deathridge called the ‘aura’, Ellis found to be in everything that had come from the composer’s hand and mind. Few could now share his blasé view of Wagner as not merely ‘the greatest composer of dramatic music ever born’ but ‘a philosopher and aesthetician’ whose – not theories, not conclusions, but – ‘opinions, whether they be eventually accepted or not, are pregnant with deep meaning’. [19] All that Wagner did, said or wrote was taken by Ellis to be conducive to that whole ‘deep meaning’, and deserving therefore of wider communication through translation. The structure Ellis chose for his English version of the composer’s prose works was logical enough; the determination and consistency with which he realised the project was impressive, though it was the only large-scale endeavour which Ellis was to see through from conception to completion. It was interwoven with commentaries in The Meister (out of which it grew), and with independent studies and articles; ultimately it underpinned the edifice of Ellis’s later (uncompleted) Life of Richard Wagner.
‘Der gute Ashton Ellis’
The extent of Ellis’s known literary undertaking – the articles, revisions, editing, the translation of letters and of the prose works, the biography – can be summarised:
1886 ‘Theosophy in the Works of Richard Wagner’ (article in the Transactions of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society)
1886–7 ‘Wagner’s Parsifal’ (two-part article extracted from ‘Theosophy in the Works of Richard Wagner’) in H. P. Blavatsky’s monthly The Theosophist
1887 ‘Richard Wagner, as Poet, Musician and Mystic’ (lecture published by the Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts)
1887–8 at least six contributions (one anonymous) to H.P. Blavatsky’s monthly Lucifer
1888–9 translates (most of) E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Elixir of the Devil in Lucifer
1888–95 edits (and writes most of) The Meister (quarterly journal of the London Wagner Society)
1889 translates Hans von Wolzogen’s
1891 translates Arthur Smolian’s
1892 two lectures at Trinity College, London, on ‘Richard Wagner’s “Art-Work of the Future”’ (reviewed in the Musical Times but not apparently published)
1892 ‘Aus dem Briefe eines Engländers an einen Deutschen’, in the Bayreuther Blätter
1892
1892 ‘Richard Wagner’s Prose’ (lecture published in the Proceedings of the Musical Association)
1892 Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 1
1893 ‘Richard Wagner’s (prosaische) Schriften’ (German version of the ‘Translator’s Preface’ to the Prose Works, vol. 1), in the Bayreuther Blätter
1893 translates Ferdinand Graf Sporck’s libretto for Cyrill Kistler’s Kunihild and the Bride-Ride on Kynast
1893 ‘Kunihild at Würzburg’ (review of Kistler’s opera in the Musical Times)
1893
1894
1894–98 edits twenty-three programmes and ‘books of words’ for the Schulz–Curtius Wagner Concerts at the Queen’s Hall
1895
1896
1896 ‘Erlösendes Weltentat’, in the Bayreuther Blätter
1897
1897 edits and indexes Francis Hueffer’s translation of the Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt
1898
1898 provides the ‘authorised’ English translation of the libretto for Siegfried Wagner’s Der Bärenhäuter
1899 ‘Wagner and Schopenhauer’ (article in the Fortnightly Review)
1899 translates Letters to Wesendonck et al.
1899 translates Letters of Richard Wagner to Emil Heckel
1899
1900 Life of Richard Wagner, vol. 1
1902 Life of Richard Wagner, vol. 2
1903 Life of Richard Wagner, vol. 3
1904 ‘Die verschiedenen Fassungen von Siegfrieds Tod’ (two-part article in Die Musik)
1904 Life of Richard Wagner, vol. 4
1905 translates letters of Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck
1905 ‘Richard and Minna Wagner’ (article in the Fortnightly Review)
1906 Life of Richard Wagner, vol. 5
1908 Life of Richard Wagner, vol. 6
1909 translates letters from Richard to Minna Wagner
1910 ‘The Pessimist: Added Testimony in Wagner’s Case’ (as chapter XI in George M. Gould’s Biographic Clinics, vol. 6)
1911 translates ‘Letters of Wagner to His Schoolfellow, [Theodor] Apel’ in the English Review (in four parts)
1911 translates Family Letters of Richard Wagner
1911 The New ‘Wagner–Liszt’ (three-part review of Erich Kloss’s 1910 edition of the Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt) in the Musical Times
1915 ‘Richard Wagner contra Militarism’, ‘Wagner and Latter-Day France’, and ‘Nietzsche Unveiled’ (in the Musical Times)
This literary output [20] began after the formative ages of 19 to 26 during which Ellis trained as a surgeon and physician and the next nine years in which he practised that profession. There is clear evidence of his commitment to and ability in his profession. Yet he resigned his medical post in 1887, and from that year forward until 1915, his career as a physician gave way to Wagner translation, biography and propagandising.
As for his own biographical details, the man was an enigma. Ellis was coy even about his age. Until the appearance of the first version of the present study in 1993, no commentator knew the true date of William Ashton Ellis’s birth. [21] Ellis was an infant when Wagner conducted for the Old Philharmonic Society in London from March to June 1855. He was trained for and accomplished in the medical profession, but seems to have become self-made in the arts. He does not reveal when and how he acquired his German, and he was to describe his musical knowledge – probably with false modesty – as amateur. He was a medical student during Wagner’s Albert Hall concert ‘festival’ in May 1877, and only on the fringe of an older generation of Wagner acolytes in London who actually glad-handed the great man. He never did meet Wagner, but he felt himself to be his first genuinely English (as opposed to expatriate German) exponent. He never married, never had children. He was a member of the Theosophical Society, but no member of that or any other society seems to have claimed to be his friend. Outside the London Wagner Society, he never mixed in ‘society’. Until now no photograph of him has been discovered, though he himself was an amateur photographer. [22] The autographs of his writings appear to have vanished. His Wagnerian endeavours met with only qualified appreciation by his most sympathetic contemporaries, George Bernard Shaw, David Irvine and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and the next generation, in particular Ernest Newman, William Wallace and W.H. Hadow, took critical, if not scornful, issue with them. Ellis felt betrayed by unacknowledged borrowings made by others from his work, and by younger writers who went on from where he had left off. He rejoiced in the growth of Wagner’s popularity in London in the 1890s and in the artistic and financial consolidation of the Bayreuth Festival under Cosima and Siegfried Wagner, then saw it all collapse with the onset of war between Britain and Germany. He was realistic enough not to expect his writings on Wagner to be remunerative, and George Bernard Shaw was compassionate enough to argue for a Civil List pension for him. After war broke out Ellis returned to his former medical post, perhaps as much out of financial need as for humanitarian reasons. He died in his rooms at the Western Dispensary, having suffered the removal of his piano and books in order to make way for an air raid shelter, and at odds with his staff. So who was he?
Welsh, Irish and Cornish
William Ashton Ellis’s paternal origins were in North Wales. His father, Robert Ellis (one of a number of first-born scions bearing that name), was born in Ruthin, Denbighshire, in 1823. He was the ‘Son’ of Robert Ellis & Son, ‘manufacturing chymist’ and mineral water manufacturer at Mwrog Street in Ruthin, a company established in 1825. It became well known and obtained royal warrants: the firm survived until 1924 and is apparently still appreciated by glass bottle collectors today. [23] The son did not follow the father into the mineral water business (though two grandsons would). A medical career beckoned, and in the first English census of 1841 ‘Robt. Ellis, 20 [he would in fact have been 18], Med. Student’ is found lodging at 7 Leicester-street in the Parish of St. Anne’s, Westminster (just off Leicester Square). Little else is discoverable about Robert’s life until 1844 when, after studying at the newly founded London University, he qualified as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. [24]
On 5 August 1845, Robert Ellis married Mary Ann Eliza Uther, two years his senior, and living next door to his lodgings. Her father Charles Bagley Uther had risen in 1819 from foreman to owner of the famous London gunmakers’ firm of Alexander Forsyth & Co. With his daughter and son, Charles William Anthony Uther, he now occupied the firm’s premises at 8 Leicester Street, Leicester Square, Soho, after its founder retreated to enjoy his renown in his native Aberdeenshire. [25] Despite the bridegroom’s Welsh origin, the marriage of Robert Ellis and Mary Ann Eliza Uther was performed according to the rites and ceremonies of the established church of England and Ireland. And despite his scientific career Robert Ellis was to display a typically mid-Victorian deference towards the God of that church.
Both ‘Robert Ellis of Ruthin in the County of Denbigh Gentleman’ and ‘my son in law the said Robert Ellis the younger’ were beneficiaries of Uther’s will made on 5 August 1858, ‘proved at London 20th day of July 1860 by the oaths of Robert Ellis Esquire and Robert Ellis the younger’. Uther’s own wife, Mary Ann (née Colman) was not mentioned in the will. This wasn’t surprising – in 1826 she had been divorced by her husband on the grounds of adultery. ‘The parties married in October, 1819’, according to the judgment, and cohabited till April 1823, when, 'owing to some differences, they separated, and Mr. Uther procured lodgings for his wife, and allowed her 1/- per week. She left these lodgings and hired others, where she resided till September, 1824. She was proved before this period to have been frequently in the habit of being out late at night, and was visited by Joseph Henry Hedley, sometimes called Anderson, who occasionally was represented as Mr. Uther. With this person there was abundant evidence to show that an adulterous intercourse was carried on by Mrs. Uther, who was delivered of a daughter, the expenses attending whose birth and subsequent funeral were defrayed by Hedley. Other facts respecting Mrs Uther’s misconduct were also pleaded; Mr. Uther was not distinctly aware of it until July 1825.
Sir C. Robinson, in pronouncing sentence, observed that there could be no doubt of the fact of adultery:
Charles Bagley Uther was left in custody of two young children, the 6-year-old Mary Ann Eliza and his 4-year-old son, Charles William Anthony Uther, born on 11 December 1822. By the time of Uther’s will in 1858 he and his daughter were both living with his son-in-law Robert Ellis. Charles William Anthony was ‘now presumed to be living in Australia’. [27]
William Ashton Ellis would leave a fragmentary reminiscence of Charles Bagley Uther: ‘For years’, he would write, ‘[Schopenhauer] passed an hour each day in playing through the operas of Rossini seriatim on his flute – and very aptly do they suit that instrument, as I know to my cost through early experience of the musical achievements of an old gentleman of somewhere about his [Schopenhauer’s] generation.’ [28] Uther was born in 1782, Schopenhauer in 1788: both died in 1860. It’s doubtful whether Ellis ever discovered the truth about his maternal grandmother, whose names his mother carried. He was later to confide to Bernard Shaw, ‘I fancy my Welsh blood is of larger proportion in me than my Irish & Cornish (or at least I suppose Uther, my mother’s family (now extinct), must be Cornish, cf. – Pendragon).
At the time of his marriage, Robert Ellis was living at 59 Brompton Crescent, practising as surgeon and ‘accoucheur’ to the Chelsea, Brompton and Belgrave Dispensary at 41 Sloane Square. [30] His first child, Robert Uther, was born on 26 April 1847, but by the time a daughter, Ada Matilda, arrived in 1849 the family had moved nearer the dispensary, to 63 Sloane Street. Robert Ellis had evidently begun to enjoy success. He became a regular attender at St Saviour’s on Walton Street, where all his children would be christened. Henry Holland’s neoclassical Sloane Street was a favoured location for the professional middle class. No fewer than ten medical practitioners had addresses there during the 1850s. Most notably at number 62, next to the Ellis family across Hans Street which intervened, there was born and lived Francis Seymour Haden. Haden, whose no less famous surgeon father had introduced the stethoscope to England, ran a large private practice at 62 Sloane Street from 1847 to 1878, almost exactly the same period as Robert Ellis’s occupation of number 63. An early champion of ovariotomy, Haden became renowned not only as a surgeon. In 1875, in a series of letters to The Times, he advocated ‘Earth to Earth’ burial using papier mâche coffins, and attacked the proponents of cremation on grounds of cost and hygiene. He eventually gave up surgery in 1887 to pursue an even better-known career as an artist, becoming knighted and president of the Society of Painter Etchers. [31] The occupation of surgeon was by now thoroughly respectable, and, if successful enough, permitted some interesting sidelines.
In 1848 Robert Ellis had approached the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge with a proposal to contribute a ‘Chemical History of Vegetation’. The society recorded that it: ‘Read a letter from Mr. Robt. Ellis offering to write a book or a series of books upon subjects connected with Natural History and Philosophy. Mr. Ellis forwarded a prospectus of a work “The Life of a Tree,” together with Specimens of Articles written by him and published in Chambers’ Edinburgh Magazine. / Mr. Ellis’s prospectus was approved and it was Agreed That he be encouraged to proceed with the proposed work.’ [32] The work eventually published by the SPCK was The Chemistry of Creation: being an outline of the chemistries of the earth, the air, the ocean, etc. Ellis had contacted the photographic pioneer W. H. Fox Talbot (1800–77) about the possibility of including ‘Talbotype’ (or Calotype) illustrations ‘as an aid to the faithful representation of Geological structure’ in his book.
63 Sloane Street
London –
May 22 1850.
Dear Sir,
I feel much obliged by your polite answer to my note.
The volume I sent you is a fair illustration of the work I propose to write, and it is to be published by the same Society –
I can at once state that highly though the Talbotype process would be valued by me as an aid to the faithful representation of Geological structure, the proposal to employ it for this purpose is wholly my own, being simply anxious to make the views scientifically accurate. I feel therefore that it would be impossible – especially as the art is to be only indirectly employed, & artists to reduce, & correct the sketches have to be paid just as much as if the sketches had been taken by the pencil by my own hand – to offer any pecuniary equivalent for permission to use the Talbotype process. This society does not feel at all anxious for the use of photographic originals: and it would be consequently in vain to [illegible deletion] expect that a licence for using the Talbotype would be sanctioned by their committee. The whole proposition came from me, & the responsibility of its success rests entirely upon me. I hope I distinctly expressed myself that the views themselves are not to be introduced.
Messrs Henneman & Malone having stated in their prospectus that amateurs could pursue this beautiful art for their own amusement; I felt that for the purposes of science it would be equally freely available.
The volume is only intended to be a small contribution to popular science, and would contain many sketches taken by pencil as well as by the sunbeam.
I trust this explanation will be deemed satisfactory, & hope that your consent will not be withheld. From the fact just mentioned I had not indeed thought that it would have been necessary to obtain permission – only I felt that it was not polite to employ your discovery, even for a scientific object, without communicating with you on the subject –
As I am shortly about to leave England, I should consider a favor if you would kindly reply to this communication by an early post.
With much [illegible] for your labours in science, & congratulations for the success which has at length crowned your efforts,
I am, Dr Sir, Yours very faithfully
Robert Ellis
H Fox Talbot Esqr. [33]
As Ellis foresaw, the SPCK proved unwilling to pay Fox Talbot for a patent licence, and Fox Talbot was evidently unwilling to grant Ellis an individual concession. The Chemistry of Creation appeared in 1850 with simple line drawings and engravings.
In June 1852, with William Ashton Ellis a babe in arms, Robert Ellis published Disease in Childhood, its common causes and directions for its practical management. It was dedicated ‘To the Rev. Sir H.R. Dukinfield, Bart., Chairman of the Committee of the Hospital for Sick Children in admiration of his long-continued and successful labours in the cause of neglected and suffering humanity […] by his obliged friend, The Author’. ‘Upwards of twenty-five thousand seven hundred children’, observed The Author, ‘die in London every year, the oldest not having seen sixteen summers’. Infant death was commonplace:
The loss of a single little child to the community of which it formed one, is an event regarded as but of minor importance in comparison with that of an adult; and this is a natural result of that disposition of the mind which leads us to regard the present rather than the future, and also of the comparatively narrow social circle in which the presence of this little being was felt to be precious. [34]
Ellis could draw on mortality statistics from ‘the records of a Dispensary [the Chelsea, Brompton, and Belgrave Dispensary, Sloane Square] in the vicinity of the spot where I reside
Was ever an
A child can never be too early, nor too diligently, instructed in that fear of the Lord which has been so beautifully described as
[…] It is difficult to understand the precise motives which have prescribed woollen trousers for boys of ten, and cotton drawers for the more delicate child of five years old. […] So much has been said against stays for girls, that I feel almost in despair at finding any allusion to such destructive contrivances being still as much needed as ever. When it is known that stays shorten life, interfere with and injure the most important functions of the body, and are wholly unnecessary and artificial things, it might be thought that no parent would permit their use to her children; such, however, is not the case. [35]
These strictures on parenting weren’t to be borne alone by Mary Ann Eliza Ellis, however. The following advertisement appeared in The Times on Saturday 17 October 1857:
WANTED, a NURSE and a HOUSEMAID, in a Christian family. The nurse must be able to take a baby from the month and have tact in managing children. The housemaid must be cleanly and active in her duties, and be able to wait at table. Both must be good needlewomen. The nurse to apply this day, and the housemaid on Monday at 63 Sloane-street, S.W., from 2 to 5 p.m.
In 1862 The Lancet printed Robert Ellis’s letter to the editor on ‘The effects of railway travelling upon uterine diseases’: ‘So decided is my opinion of the injury likely to be inflicted by railway motion upon women who are suffering from uterine disorder, that I have refused permission to persons coming up to town for consultation to return again the same day.’ [36] Ellis was elected a Fellow of the Obstetrical Society of London in 1861, and through the 1860s both The Lancet and the Transactions of the Obstetrical Society would report on and illustrate his innovative devices and procedures. [37] In 1866 there appeared an eighty-page treatise On the Safe Abolition of Pain in Labour and Surgical Operations by Anæsthesia with Mixed Vapours with woodcut illustrations of ‘Mr. Robt. Ellis’s Compound Inhaler’. [38] His mixture – alcohol, chloroform and ether – remained in use as ‘A.C.E.’ until the 1920s. Robert Ellis, described on his title-pages as sometime Fellow of the Linnean Society, and Surgeon to the National Society’s Training Institution for Schoolmistresses and to the Hans Town Industrial School, [39] was obviously more than a mere sawbones.
A decade earlier, on the strength of the polymathic Chemistry of Creation, the Royal Commissioners had appointed the young Robert Ellis as ‘scientific editor’ of the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition 1851. Ellis provided a general preface to the catalogue, offering ‘a simple statement of the part fulfilled by the writer in connection with this work’. The material had been compiled from official forms returned by exhibitors (coloured according to their classification into Sculpture and Fine Art, Raw Materials, Machinery and Manufactures). Ellis’s role had been ‘the general literary and scientific superintendence and management of the work […] and for these he may be held responsible’. He regarded the work as a contribution in the great tradition of English scientific and mercantile coadjutation. ‘In the seventeenth century’, he wrote in a section describing the ‘Scientific Revision and Preparation of the Catalogue’, ‘ROBERT BOYLE perceived the important results likely to arise from the “naturalist’s insight into trades”. It may be hoped that such results will not now fail of their accomplishment.’ Charles Dickens’s Household Words made the catalogue speak for itself:
I am a Catalogue of the Great Exhibition. You are the public. […] Now, you have made a Chimborazo of the Exhibition, and it towers in Hyde Park, and you are astounded, and you do not look at the surrounding elevations. Call the peak Paxton, if you please; but I tell you that this peak is the centre of a mountain system which presents grand and bold heights to your view. Call me a mountain, and my peaks, if you will, you may call Ellis, Playfair, Yapp (my compilers), Clowes (my printer), and so forth. [40]
Ruefully, however, one of those ‘peaks’ had to condescend to more humble levels:
At the period when this work makes its appearance in a complete state, the Exhibition is about to close. The first function of a Descriptive Catalogue can therefore scarcely be fulfilled ere the great spectacle it illustrates will pass away. To these wonders of Art and Industry which Man, taught by God, has been by Him enabled to accomplish, it will prove a guide but for a brief period. But its more permanently valuable offices then commence; and it may be reasonably hoped that, as a record of the most varied and wonderful collection of objects ever beheld, and as book of reference to the philosopher, merchant and manufacturer, it will constantly prove both interesting and instructive to the reader. [41]
In his work on the catalogue, Ellis was assisted by a team of twenty-five ‘annotators’, headed by the eminent Professor Richard Owen, F.R.S., and Baron Justus Liebig, F.R.S., and no fewer than eleven other Fellows of the Royal Society. Ellis himself was a mere F.L.S. – a Fellow of the Linnean Society. As ‘Robert Ellis Esq. Member of the Royal College of Surgeons, 63 Sloane Street, a Gentleman much attached to the Study of Natural History’, he had been elected to the Society on 5 November 1850. The physician, public health reformer and botanist Edwin Lankester (1814–74) was one of his sponsors. In 1852 the title-page of Disease in Childhood described its author as Robert Ellis, F.L.S., but curiously his name ceased to appear in the List of Fellows of the Linnean Society published in 1855. For reasons which are unknown he had withdrawn from Fellowship in 1854 – coincidentally the year in which Charles Darwin was elected. [42]
In late 1866 Robert Ellis’s name made the newspapers for reasons more sensational than scholarly. Under the dramatic headline ‘APPALLING DEATH OF A FEMALE THROUGH CRINOLINE AND FIRE’ the Surrey Advertiser reported the Westminster coroner’s enquiry into the death of Silvia Bennett, aged 15, in service with Charlotte Bell, a widow, at her lodging-house at number 61 Sloane Street. ‘On Thursday last, about twelve o’clock’, ran the report, ‘she was cleaning up a bed-room on the third-floor, when she suddenly ran downstairs screaming into the kitchen enveloped in flames’. Failing to find water in the kitchen she made it to the street door ‘all in a blaze’, where ‘a French gentleman and Mr. Ellis, a surgeon, attended her, and removed her in a blanket to St. George’s Hospital.’ Sadly she could not be saved, and at the coroner’s enquiry,
Mr. Ellis, surgeon, of 63, Sloane-street, gave an account of the affair. Evidence was then given that deceased, while in the hospital, said she was dusting the mantel-piece, and as she turned round towards the dust-pan her clothes must have caught fire. Some remarks were made relative to the conduct of the cabman who had refused to take the girl to the hospital, when Mr. Inspector Rolls, B division, in reply to the coroner, said he believed that a cabman was not compelled to take a fare whereby his cab might be injured. If Mr. Ellis, or any gentleman who met with the driver’s refusal, were to complain to the commissioners, the man could be found and the matter would be investigated. The Coroner said it wat [sic] the first case of the kind he had met with, for cabmen were humane as well as other people – so he had found it. A verdict of accidental death was recorded. [43]
No doubt the 9-year-old William Ashton Ellis heard his father describe this immolation and its mundanely tragic circumstances. Perhaps he heard the word ‘humane’ for the first time. Later, he may have heard another side of his father’s compassionate temperament if this advertisement is anything to go by:
A MEDICAL POCKETBOOK LOST, by a London surgeon, travelling from Victoria to Brighton, by express stopping at East Croydon at 6.21 pm in the afternoon of Tuesday April 22nd. The owner will feel deeply obliged to any one who may have found this book returning it at once to the Station Master at East Croydon; or to Mr. Robert Ellis, 63 Sloane-street, London S.W. The pocketbook is valueless to any other person, but contains engagements of great importance to a large number of sick persons. A reward will, if required, be willingly given and all expenses paid. [44]
In 1871 Robert Ellis published letters in The Times drawing attention to the need to vaccinate all classes of persons in a household, not only the superior classes, against smallpox. [45] And in 1887 he graphically described a case of typhoid where the patient was found to be an otherwise robust Scottish footman brought by a family to ‘the lofty realm of fashion and the sang bleu’ for ‘the season’:
In front the house seemed tolerably fresh and inodorous, and I could not trace the true source of the empoisoned state in which I found the poor Highlander. It is next to hopeless to ask questions: every house in Belgravia is to be deemed immaculate, and bold is the doctor to denounces – still worse if he convicts – these grand fever receptacles of laying, wounding and maiming the persons who dwell therein, in the fierce heats of the
A characteristic example of his wider scientific and social concern is this article which appeared in The Times the following month:
ARCTIC LIME JUICE. Mr. Robert Ellis, of Sloane-street, writes to us with reference to the rumours from Germany and from New York touching fresh Arctic Expeditions. On the subject of lime-juice, which has been recognized as an indispensable concomitant of such expeditions, he says: –
But Robert Ellis’s professional specialisation was obstetrics. Practical results of this can be seen in the measured spacing of the births of all nine of his surviving children: Robert Uther (1847–1921), Ada Matilda (1849–1936), William Ashton (1852–1919), Ernest Charles (1854–1921), Reginald Henry Uther (1857–1926), Douglas Uther (1859–1898), Florence Mabel (1861–1916), Evelyn Campbell (1865–1920) and Claude Bertram (1867–1919). There had been one loss. The Times of 10 April 1860 reported the death, ‘On Good Friday afternoon, [of] Florence Mary, the beloved child of Robert Ellis, Esq., of 63 Sloane-street, aged 4 years.’ Florence Mary Ellis succumbed on 6 April 1860 to meningitis, which her father had diagnosed fourteen days earlier.
Charles Bagley Uther was present in the Ellis household at 63 Sloane Street during the census of 1851, and since Forsyth & Co. ceased trading at Leicester Street the following year he must have relocated there from the old premises above the shop. Uther died there from phthisis (tuberculosis) aged 78, in the presence of his surgeon son-in-law, on 20 May 1860. For the young William Ashton Ellis the loss of his 4-year-old sister Florence Mary a month earlier was the first of a series of encounters with mortality. Florence’s death had been registered not by her surgeon father, but by ‘Robert Ellis Sen.r in attendance’. The paternal grandfather gave his address as 1 Walton Place, Chelsea. Born in Ruthin in 1797, he may have come to London to support his son Robert junior in this first family crisis, but the 1861 census recorded him as resident nearby at 1 Walton Place as a widower and ‘retired gen. merchant’. Another son, Charles G. Ellis, 34, a solicitor, also born in Ruthin, was with him, and there was a boarder, Charles Uther, 29, described as a ‘fund holder’. Though there is a date discrepancy if this age is true, he was most likely Charles Bagley Uther’s son Charles William Anthony Uther.
The death of yet another brother to Robert Ellis the younger was announced in The Times on 9 January 1861: ‘On the 5th inst., aged 22, of acute bronchitis, Francis Edgar, youngest son of Robert Ellis, Esq., of No. 1, Walton-place, Chelsea, and Glan-ŷ-don, Rhyl.’ (The death was registered in Aston, Warwickshire.) Robert Ellis senior would be the subject of two other notices in The Times. On 4 December 1862, the marriage was reported, ‘On the 26th Nov., at St. Luke’s Church, Chelsea, by the Rev. Francis Synge, [of] Robert Ellis, Esq., of 1, Walton-place, and Glan-y-don, Rhyl, to Susan Campbell, of Glebelands, Mitcham, Surrey.’ Then on 8 November 1867, the death, ‘On the 5th inst., at 1, Walton-place, Hans-place, Chelsea, [of] ROBERT ELLIS, Esq., late of Ruthin, North Wales, aged 70. Friends will be so kind as to accept this intimation.’ The cause of death was certified as ‘bronchitis 10 days, laryngitis 5 days, exhaustion’. By the age of 15, William Ashton Ellis had lost a sister, a couple of uncles, and both grandfathers.
The next child of Robert Ellis the younger and Mary Ann Eliza was also christened Florence: she survived. Commenting in his later years on Richard Wagner’s place also as one of ten (eight surviving) children, William Ashton Ellis would draw on his own ‘personal experience of a similar quiverful’ as confirmation that ‘attitudinising’ in such company was out of the question: ‘elder brothers and sisters knock all that sort of thing out of their juniors mighty soon’. [48] William seems to have had an affectionate relationship with his elder sister Ada Matilda (who survived him by seventeen years, remaining a spinster [49]), but it would be going too far to conclude that he must therefore have received a ‘knocking’ at the hands of his elder brother Robert. Robert Uther Ellis, in any case, had left the family by William’s 19th year, probably in order to train as a dentist, but certainly in order to get married. [50]
Mary Ann Eliza Ellis does not disclose her side of things. She does not emerge from history, not even as dedicatee of any of Robert Ellis’s writings; she may in fact have been treated shamefully, as we shall see. But the Uther line left its impression. Three of Robert Ellis’s sons bore their mother’s maiden name among their Christian names, though not the third child born to Mary Ann Eliza Ellis on 20 August 1852 in the family home. In the Parish church of St Saviour, Upper Chelsea, he was baptised William Ashton Ellis on 8 December. Since there was no rush to perform the ceremony, it can be taken he was a healthy infant. Twelve years later, master William Ashton Ellis was entered at Westminster School. Robert Ellis found that after all he had an ‘extraordinarily clever child’ on his hands. William successfully examined to become one of the forty Queen’s Scholars at St Peter’s College (as the school is otherwise known) in 1867. His brothers Ernest Charles, Reginald Uther and Douglas Uther would also be taught at Westminster, but none showed the same scholastic promise as William. His father’s example beckoned. After leaving Westminster School in December 1870, William entered the medical school at St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner on 1 May 1871, where in August the next year he won the Governors’ Prize of ten guineas for general proficiency among first year medical students. [51] He would have been a day scholar: in the 1871 census Robert and Mary Ann Eliza Ellis would still be recorded at 63 Sloane Street, Chelsea, together with all their children save the eldest (Robert Uther Ellis, now aged 24 and about to be married); not to mention a cook, head nurse, under-nurse, upper housemaid, under-housemaid, footman, and boarder.
The Early Wagner Societies
In 1872, the year of Ellis’s student success, Edward Dannreuther (1844–1905) published a series of essays in the Monthly Musical Record entitled ‘Wagner and the reform of the opera’: they would form the basis of his book Richard Wagner: His Tendencies and Theories (1873), the first serious study of Wagner to appear in English. [52] The opening of Dannreuther’s book noted that in Europe ‘competent and incompetent critics, fighting under every manner of flag, have assaulted the “musician of the future” or broken a lance in his honour. The Almanach des Deutschen Musikvereins for 1869 gives a surprisingly extensive list of books, pamphlets and articles put forth by Germans on the defensive side alone.’ It seemed absurd to Dannreuther that Germans should waste ‘so much ink and paper’ when ‘the master’s own expositions of his views’ could be consulted directly. In England, however, ‘where a genuine curiosity has only of late arisen’ (Dannreuther dated this to the 1870 production of L’Olandese Dannato at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane), ink and paper could justifiably be pressed into Wagner’s service. Dannreuther looked forward to the culmination of Wagner’s career then scheduled for 1874, the Ring at Bayreuth. Funds for the construction of the festival theatre ‘are being furnished by different “Wagner Societies” which have sprung up spontaneously, absolutely without agitation on the master’s part, and in most instances without his knowledge, in all parts of Germany, in London, Pesth, Milan, New York, &c'. [53]
Dannreuther himself founded the first London Wagner Society in 1872. It grew out of a ‘Working Men’s Society’ formed in the 1860s to promote the ‘music of the future’ chiefly represented at the time by Liszt and Berlioz. [54] The first of a series of concerts of Wagner’s music took place on 19 February 1873. The organisers were ‘working men’ in the sense that they refused to be complacent consumers of conservative art, but were musical practitioners, teachers, theorists and critics who wished to associate themselves with the most advanced European music. They would transfer their allegiance to successive societies promoting progressive music, including successive Wagner societies. Many were serious musical establishment figures who were prepared to risk controversy and put their academic and professional reputation on the line.
Edward Dannreuther’s energetic relationship with Wagner – undiminished by the distance between London and Bayreuth – was remarkable. It was he who, with Alfred Forman, found a London theatrical property master to provide the stage dragon – or at least most of it – and other fauna for the Bayreuth Ring premiere in 1876. [55] He was the celebrity’s host during Wagner’s 1877 Albert Hall conducting season, and was instrumental in its arrangements, and in making subsequent financial amends for it. It was in Dannreuther’s Bayswater home that Wagner read the completed Parsifal poem publicly for the first time. At Wagner’s request Dannreuther found a London manufacturer or importer of Chinese tam-tams to provide the (unsuccessfully) tuned resonances for Bayreuth’s Parsifal bells in 1882. [56] He was a practical ‘working man’ who could turn his hand to teaching (pupils including Hubert Parry), performing (not least the British premiere of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto), and making scholarly contributions to Grove’s Dictionary [57] and the Oxford History of Music.
Dannreuther prevailed upon the ageing (60-year-old) historian and bibliophile Lord Lindsay, Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, [58] to become the Wagner Society’s august president, and placed the following announcement in the press:
WAGNER SOCIETY
A number of PATRONATSCHEINE, at 300 thalers each, for the Three Complete Representations of DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN (Rheingold, Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung), which are to take place at Bayreuth in the summer of 1873 [sic], have been secured. They will be divided amongst the members so that each may have a first-rate seat for one entire performance of the work, i.e. four consecutive evenings, at the cost of £15.
Members will have special privileges at the series of orchestral concerts, under the direction of Mr. Edward Dannreuther, to be given by the Society next January, for the introduction of important compositions by Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz, Schubert, and Joachim.
PRESIDENT – Lord LINDSAY.
FOREIGN SECRETARY – Dr. Franz Hüffer.
TREASURER – J. S. Bergheim, Esq.
All communications to be addressed to Mr. DANNREUTHER, Granville Chambers, Granville Place, London, W. [59]
Franz (later Francis) Hüffer (later Hueffer), its ‘foreign secretary’, had settled in London in 1869 (he would be naturalised in January 1882), but evidently kept up his German connections. Dannreuther himself took the role of music director, and the next year the society was advertising a season of six concerts at the St. James’s Hall including music by Beethoven, Berlioz and Wagner with an ‘Orchestra of 80 performers’ conducted by Dannreuther, and with Hans von Bülow as guest soloist in works by Raff and Liszt. [60]
In his twenties William Ashton Ellis must have attended some of those concerts. According to his own testimony, it was around 1875 that he became ‘a devotee of Wagner’s works […] and devoured most of the literature then available on the subject’. [61] However, he did not join Dannreuther’s Wagner Society; his medical studies had first claim upon his time. On 27 January 1876 Ellis attended the Court of Examiners of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, paid his fee of fifteen guineas, and followed his father into membership of that body, entering the Medical Register on 4 February. ‘I missed the great Nibelungen festival of 1876’, Ellis tells us, but he avidly listened to first-hand reports of it. [62] Ellis seems also to have missed Wagner’s Albert Hall concerts in London in May 1877: at any rate he offers no first-hand account of them. But if he ‘devoured’ The Times he may soon after have seen Dannreuther’s appeal for contributions to a ‘Richard Wagner Testimonial’, a fund ‘with the object of making up to him the sum of £1,200’ in view of ‘Herr Wagner having declined to accept the greater part of the honorarium agreed upon for his services at the recent Festival Concerts in favour of his artist’s [sic] salaries’. [63] The Times carried the following notice on 25 June 1877:
We learn that Lord Lindsay, the President of the Wagner Society, and other members of the Committee, along with Mr. Dannreuther, the conductor of the concerts of 1873 and 1874, have resolved to raise a fund to present the composer with an adequate testimonial. They have taken this step in order to carry out that principle on which the association was based – namely, to assist Herr Wagner to establish the National Opera-House at Bayreuth. It is no secret, and it is to be regretted even by those professors and amateurs who do not concur with him in his views of the lyric drama, that Herr Wagner has been suffering severely under the load of the deficit at Bayreuth, and that the recent concerts at the Royal Albert Hall have been of little service to him. He is in ignorance of the present movement of his friends and admirers, who believe that the proposed testimonial is the only way of securing for him the leisure and rest necessary for the development of his creative powers. – Athenæum.
Ellis doesn’t say whether he dug into his pocket. In all likelihood he was still concentrating, with his father’s encouragement, on his professional future. The next year, 1878, he qualified as a physician (Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians, LRCP). He quickly put his qualifications to use. On 6 August 1878 the London Gazette announced the appointment of
The Resident Medical Officer
The dispensaries were wound up on the creation of the National Health Service after the Second World War. Funded through philanthropy, they provided home medical care (especially midwifery) to the local poor, some of whom subscribed for the service on a means-test basis. The Western Dispensary was connected with the United Westminster Almshouses, and among the great and the good providing for it were Baroness Burdett-Coutts [65] and Sir Rutherford Alcock (1809–97), celebrated surgeon, a governor of Westminster Hospital, and organiser of the first exhibition of Japanese art in London. Soon after Ellis was appointed Resident Medical Officer, the Western Dispensary moved into new premises at 38 and 40 Rochester Row, next to the almshouses. The building (like the almshouses, still extant, though remodelled in 1962–3) comprised a ground-floor dispensary, a first-floor boardroom, and residential accommodation on the second floor. In addition to the resident doctor, the dispensary could draw on four honorary consultants, a dentist, six ‘attending doctors’, a dispenser and two midwives. In 1899, more than 21,000 attendances (the sick poor nursed in their own homes) would be recorded. The building ceased to be a dispensary in December 1949, and its funds were handed over to the almshouses in 1954. [66] The institution originated in 1789 through the
William Ashton Ellis is named in this account of 1892 as a member of a standing medical committee, part of the committee of management of the dispensary, and Ellis would later claim to be a ‘life governor’. ‘An anniversary dinner’, the account continues, ‘recommended by the first report, is held on the 25th of May, the Centennial Festival which occurred in 1889 having been presided over by Mr. W. Burdett-Coutts, M.P.’ An interestingly named ‘Marie Celeste Convalescent Branch’ (she was actually a benefactress) was formed in 1888–9. The King of the Belgians was succeeded by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales as Patron of the
Mr. Ellis drew the attention of the Committee to the fact that the balconies of the Almshouse had been built close up to the lead flat outside his bedroom window, so that persons could easily pass from one premises to the other, and the Committee after viewing the spot, instructed the secretary to confer with Mr. Chapple, the Builder, and to obtain his opinion and also an estimate of the cost of most effectually and at the least expense protecting that portion of the premises. [69]
The London Branch of the Wagner Society
On 19 July 1882 the minutes record that the Resident Medical Officer had been granted five weeks’ leave of absence. Did Ellis go to Bayreuth for the first performances of Parsifal between 26 July and 29 August? It’s tempting to think so, but Ellis nowhere explicitly refers to the experience. In his Wagner biography Ernest Newman mentions only Edward Dannreuther, Ferdinand Praeger and Julius Cyriax by name among ‘a number of London friends’ present
Many of these names will crop up again later in Ellis’s career, but one that doesn’t is Carrie Pringle (1859–1930). It’s ironic that the Chelsea-born Ellis had no idea that the so-called English Flowermaiden of the 1882 Parsifal premiere had close family connections in Earl’s Court and Chelsea between 1886 and 1906, and later in Brighton, while Ellis was also in Sussex. Through these Ellis could have made her acquaintance and scored something of a coup by scotching (or not) with her reminiscences the subsequent rumours about the part she had played in Wagner’s life – and death. [73]
According to the minutes for 28 March 1883, Ellis and a Mrs Wilson organised a concert for the benefit of the
when, a few weeks after Wagner’s death, the whole of the Grand Canal, as far as the eye could reach, was thronged by a concourse of gondolas, each freight in rapt attention to the strains of a band of German musicians, who had moored their barge in front of the palace in Venice where the Meister had sojourned during his last halt in his earthly journey. [74]
The ‘band of German musicians’ were from Angelo Neumann’s Touring Wagner Theatre, coincidentally in Venice, who played their tribute on 19 April 1883. As Neumann recalled it,
[That] afternoon on the Grand Canal, before the house where Richard Wagner lived and died, the members of the Master’s Opera Company arranged a stately tribute to his memory that was worthy of the name they bore. The municipality of Venice had placed at our disposal their great gondolas of state – and in these Anton Seidl and all his orchestra took their places. The artists followed in six smaller gondolas, and all about us darted the slender boats conducting us in state to the Palazzo Vendramin. Here they hovered about, – flower-decked and beauty-laden! All the nobility of Venice was on the Grand Canal, and as many strangers as could find a boat. All deeply impressed, they floated a silent throng, celebrating with us the apotheosis of our hero. [75]
And one of those strangers at the apotheosis was William Ashton Ellis.
B.L. Mosely
Dannreuther’s original London Wagner Society was reconstituted in 1884 as the London branch (‘Zweigverein’) of the Universal or United Wagner Society (Allgemeiner Richard Wagner-Verein), whose central committee was then based in Munich. It’s not clear whether the old London Society retained any real function between Dannreuther’s last concert in May 1874 and Lord Lindsay’s death in December 1880. It was to (moneyed) society at large that Dannreuther had appealed after the Albert Hall embarrassment of 1877, and Hueffer was surely right when he said that the first Society had ‘existed essentially, like Schumann’s Davidsbund, in the head of its founder and musical director, Mr. Edward Dannreuther, to whom the present writer served as humble literary adviser and amanuensis’. [76] In 1884 the founding secretary of the new London branch of the United Wagner Society was the lawyer and amateur musician B. L. Mosely. [77] How Mosely had come by this appointment is uncertain. It’s probable that like Julius Cyriax he met Wagner in London during his Albert Hall ‘Festival’ in May 1877. Cosima’s diary records that Wagner wrote to both Cyriax and a Herr Mosely on 3 June 1879. The editors of both the German and English editions of her diary refer at this point to a letter in the Wahnfried archive from a ‘Dr. L. Mosely’. [78] In fact the letter to which Wagner replied, though in cursive German script, is clearly signed by B.L. Mosely, sent from his barristers’ chambers at 2 Brick Court, Temple, London, on 18 May 1879. [79] The Wagner-Briefe-Verzeichnis lists three letters from Wagner to Mosely between 1877 and 1881: one is accessible in the Richard-Wagner-Museum. Their correspondence appears to have been of little significance, Mosely mainly sending obsequious greetings (and at least one gift) on the occasion of Wagner’s birthday.
Even Cyriax seemed unsure why, but in March 1884, as he reported to Carl Friedrich Glasenapp, ‘The branch to be erected here [in London] is in the most capable hands. My friend Mosely has been appointed its representative (which I didn’t know) and seems to tackle the great cause with all energy.’ [80] His correspondence with Wagner, and his translation in 1884 of Wolzogen’s Guide to the Legend, Poem and Music of Richard Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’ were probably Mosely’s main credentials for the job. In any event, with Bayreuth’s express authority Mosely placed advertisements in The Times in the spring of 1884:
UNITED RICHARD WAGNER SOCIETY of GERMANY. – LONDON BRANCH. – A branch of the above Society, under the presidency of the Right Honourable the Earl of Dysart, is in the course of formation, with the object of providing funds to defray the expenses of future representations of Wagner’s Music Dramas at Bayreuth; likewise to furnish poor musicians with the means of attending such representations free of cost, and generally to develop a taste for the works of that composer by combining his adherents in one organisation.
The Annual subscription for Members is 10s. They will be entitled to attend and vote at the general meetings of the United Wagner Society as well as those of the Branch Society. The ’Bayreuther Blätter’, the organ of the Society, will be issued to them at the modest rate charge of 6s. per annum, and tickets of admission for prospective performances at Bayreuth will be offered to them at reduced rates should the Society’s funds permit.
Applications for membership to be addressed to B.L. Mosely, Esq., No. 55, Tavistock-square, who will also thankfully receive donations towards the funds of the Society. [81]
Though, as Glasenapp heard, there was ‘very low general interest’, Mosely ‘had received immediately a letter and visit from the Earl of Dysart, a 25-year-old Wagner enthusiast whose eagerness beats everything here. At present he [Mosely] is forming a most aristocratic committee (very important here).’ [82]
Mosely’s name appeared, in varying form, in the sumptuous French precursor of The Meister, La revue wagnérienne (1885–88). In the Revue’s number for May 1886 its London correspondent Louis N. Parker mentioned ‘J.B. Moseley qui a fondé la branche anglaise de la Societé Wagnérienne’. [83] Mosely’s name suffered various misrepresentations throughout his life, though Parker must personally have known him. The next month Parker reported that ‘Lors du passage de Liszt à Londres, le 17 avril, une adresse lui a été présentée, de la part du Cercle Wagnérien, par M. J.B. Mosely’. [84] The Revue got the name right, though, when Parker reported the London Society’s prospectus for 1886 which included the lecture ‘Un simple description des principes d’art de Wagner’ to be given on 16 March ‘par M. B.L. Mosely’, and earlier when it listed the international central committee of ‘l’Association Wagnérienne’ in Munich. ‘Le president honoraire est Liszt; et les membres du Comité sont: le baron d’Ostini et le comte de Sporck, presidents; MM. Sachs et Porges, secrétaires; Schmid, trésorier; et H. Lévi, chef d’orchestre de Munich, Merz, le baron de Wolzogen, Fischer, de Schmœdel, et Seitz. Le représentant à Paris est M. H.S. Chamberlain, à Bruxelles M. H. La Fontaine, à Londres M. B.L. Mosely.’ [85]
In England though, Mosely had given up the position of secretary of the London branch by 1887 in favour of Julius Cyriax, though he remained one of the ‘Hon. Auditors’ of its balance sheet published for that year. [86] In May 1889 he is mentioned in The Meister as a contributor to the discussion following Louis N. Parker’s lecture ‘Confessions of a Wagnerian’ read at Trinity College on the first of that month. William Ashton Ellis is almost certainly the contributor of this ‘Note’:
Those among the audience expecting to hear a recantation after the manner of Mr. Friedrich Nietzsche were doomed to disappointment. Mr. Parker touched in a very light and gossipy style upon such widely dissimilar topics as provincial audiences, Bayreuth audiences, cuts, musical literature, old librettos, prima donnas, and musical education; and concluded with an account of what we must, for want of a better word, describe as his conversion. These points were illustrated with anecdotes and instances, and the paper seemed to find great favour with the audience. But by no means its least merit was that it provoked some excellent speeches from Messrs. Armbruster, Jacques, Mosely, and Praeger. […] Mr. Mosely referred eloquently to the loss sustained by the Society, owing to the death of Mr. Carl Rosa, and spoke in graceful terms of the lecture they had just heard. Mr. Parker closed the proceedings by thanking his audience for their reception of him, and congratulated them on being rewarded by their patience in listening to him by the privilege of hearing the other speakers. [87]
Ellis breaks in here to assure his readers that ‘Such evenings as the above are of great benefit to the Society; for, though in print they may have rather the appearance of the bugbear, “mutual admiration”, they are in reality the means of bringing about many an animated discussion, in which the views of different speakers must necessarily become widened and more catholic.’ [88] But it’s possible to read between the lines of Ellis’s report of Parker’s lecture his irritation at the ‘mutual admiration’ indulged in by old stagers of the London branch of the Wagner Society such as Praeger and Mosely. Parker’s reminiscences of this period, forty years later, were somewhat ingenuous, given his documented involvement in the Revue wagnérienne, the London Wagner Society and The Meister:
I had been an original member of the London Branch of the Wagner Society; and now, partly with a view to getting better known in London, I took an active share in its work. This brought me into contact with Alfred [sic] Dowdeswell, Avigdor Birnstingl, Ashton Ellis and Alfred Forman […]. At one of my lectures I also made the acquaintance of Ferdinand Praeger and his wife. I grew very fond of them, and spent many pleasant hours at their house. Later Praeger published a book, Wagner as I Knew Him, which roused the extremists in the Wagner Society, and, I believe, Wahnfried, to fury. I was not, and am not, sufficiently versed in the minutiae of Wagnerian history to give any opinion on the rights of the case, but I think Praeger’s opponents were a little bloodthirsty. [89]
Parker fails to mention Mosely, and except for Ellis’s Note in May 1889, Mosely’s name never appeared in The Meister. He probably realised he was being sidelined. His last contribution to English Wagnerism was earlier in 1889, when he wrote to The Times to ‘correct’ its obituary of Francis Hueffer:
While wishing to bear my humble tribute to the services rendered to the Wagner movement in this country by the late Dr. Hueffer, in the name of historical accuracy I would ask to be allowed to point out an error which has crept into the obituary notice of that able critic. It is not correct to say that ‘Dr. Hueffer was perhaps the first in this country to recognize the merits of Richard Wagner and to advocate his claims.’ So far from this being the fact, it was already in 1856 [sic] that the Philharmonic Society, at Ferdinand Praeger’s suggestion, invited Wagner over to London to conduct their concerts, with a result which is now matter of common knowledge to all who interest themselves in the art of music. For many years after that untoward incident the name of Wagner was rarely heard here save as synonymous with charlatanism; and it was not until the late Walter Bache started his well-remembered concerts that the Wagner propaganda can be considered to have begun in real earnest. Mr. Bache’s efforts were seconded and supplemented by those of Mr. Edward Dannreuther, whose essays and whose concerts were largely instrumental in forcing the claims of the great German upon the notice of the English public. But all this happened before Dr. Francis Hueffer’s writings on Wagner had seen the light. [90]
Mosely withheld his own name: the letter was signed simply ‘Founder of the Wagner Society (London Branch)’.
For a time, though, Mosely maintained his connection with the London branch. On 17 June 1889 he wrote to Cyriax with forebodings about its future if Cyriax’s intention to retire as secretary were carried out: ‘we may have to watch the melancholy spectacle of its decadence or, worse still, its employment for the purpose of advancing the commercial interests of some unscrupulous individual’. Mosely must have meant Ellis. [91] Since his role in English Wagnerism has been eclipsed by William Ashton Ellis for over a century, this may be the time and place to acknowledge his contribution.
Benjamin Lewis Mosely was born at 48 Leadenhall Street in the City of London on 24 November 1851, the son of Ephraim Mosely (1810–67), an ‘oilsman’ (a supplier of lighting and heating oil, but also recorded as a snuff and tobacco dealer), and his wife Rosetta (Rezka), née David. He was the youngest of seven children. The premature death of his mother when he was only seven months old, and the subsequent dispersal of most of his siblings, explains why by the age of nine he is found in the 1861 census at the far more affluent address of 55 Tavistock Square, St. Pancras. He is recorded as a scholar in the household of Jonas Levy, 46, an unmarried barrister. After the death of Mosely’s father in 1867, Jonas Levy adopted the 15-year-old and set him up in pupillage in his chambers. By the time of the census held on 2 April 1871 Benjamin is an undergraduate of London University (studying for his LL.B.), at the same address. [92] A fortnight later, on 18 April 1871, at the age of 19, ‘Benjamin Lewis Mosely of 55 Tavistock Square, 5th son of Ephraim Mosely late of Dalston, was admitted to Gray’s Inn on 18 April 1871’ to study law, following in the footsteps of his adoptive ‘stepfather’ twenty years earlier. By the same time, however, he had become enthusiastic about English poetry and drama. He was elected a Member of the Society of Arts in 1873, before being called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn on 26 January 1874 and admitted to the society of the Middle Temple on 4 May 1874. He was then aged 22. [93]
Ten years later he had become established in both German and English Wagnerian circles. In 1884 his translation of Hans von Wolzogen’s Guide to the Legend, Poem and Music of Richard Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’ was published by Breitkopf & Härtel, and was dedicated ‘To the Right Honourable the Earl of Dysart, President of the London Branch of the United Richard Wagner Society’. In a translator’s footnote Mosely remarked: ‘It is not generally known that the subject of Tristan and Isolde was suggested to Wagner as appropriate for musico-dramatic treatment by his lifelong friend and staunch supporter, Ferdinand Praeger, himself a composer of striking originality.’ [94] Mosely (an amateur pupil of Praeger’s) may have been overly credulous on this, or he may have misremembered something Praeger had said about the ‘embryo of the idea’ of Tristan, at a meeting of the Musical Association two years earlier: ‘I may tell you at the same time that [Wagner] never looked out for a libretto, because, being so intimate with him, I asked him to write one, when he said, “I cannot; my librettos come only by chance. They all at once strike me.”’ [95] After Praeger later re-worked this reminiscence more ambiguously into his controversial reminiscences of Wagner, William Ashton Ellis queried its veracity (at least on account of the date) and Chamberlain derided Mosely for representing what he called a ‘conte à dormir debout’ (child’s bedtime story) as historically established fact. [96]
Like George Bernard Shaw, Mosely was a member of the Browning and Shelley Societies and an ardent admirer of Alma Murray’s dramatic talents. The actress Alma Murray (1854–1945) was the wife of Wagner translator Alfred Forman (1840–1925): both were on the committee of the London branch of the Wagner Society. On 7 May 1886 she was particularly admired in progressive literary circles for her strenuous performance as Beatrice in a single private representation at the Grand Theatre, Islington, of Shelley’s sensational incest-and-murder drama The Cenci. Mosely even composed some incidental music. ‘Appropriate music for the plaintive farewell song of Beatrice in the last act had been composed by B.L. Mosely, Esq.’, reported Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper on 9 May 1886, ‘and notwithstanding the great strain upon Miss Murray’s voice through nearly four hours, her rendering of it was very touching and expressive’. [97] Mosely later published privately a passionate record of ‘Miss Alma Murray as Beatrice Cenci (Read and discussed before the Shelley Society on the 9th of March, 1887)’. He had already eulogised her in 1885 in a paper read before the Browning Society, for her performance on 28 November 1884 as ‘Constance in Robert Browning’s “In a Balcony”’. [98]
Mosely seems to have known something about passion, illicit or otherwise. In 1878 he gallantly wrote several letters to the Law Journal to oppose the abolition of the legal action of breach of promise. [99] His own propinquity seems to have been adventurous. In August 1890 he was cited as co-respondent in the divorce of the theatrical designer and furniture historian Percy Macquoid (1852–1925). Macquoid’s biography makes no mention of his first wife Charlotte Thorn (born in 1851), whom he married in November 1877; they had a child, Cecil Cuthbert, who died in infancy in September 1878. In his divorce petition Macquoid swore ‘That during the month of August 1889 at divers places at Nuremberg in the Empire of Germany [and] on the 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th days of August instant at the Hotel Tronchet Rue Tronchet Paris in the Republic of France the said Charlotte Macquoid committed adultery with the said Benjamin Lewis Mosely.’ The petition was uncontested. Mosely paid costs of £65 2s. 2d. into court, and the decree absolute took effect on 6 May 1891. Macquoid’s petition had added: ‘I say that there is no collusion or connivance between me and my wife Charlotte Macquoid or any other person in any way whatever.’ [100] But later in 1891 Macquoid married Theresa Isa Dent (1858-1939), whose portrait he had painted in 1883, while earlier the same year – as soon as the divorce permitted – Mosely had married Charlotte, under her maiden name.
Mosely’s cultural preoccupations took a new turn. He had affirmed his Anglo-Judaism in the dedications of songs published in 1875 (‘By the Rivers of Babylon’) and 1881 (‘Slumber Song’). Together with Francis Lewis Cohen (1862–1934) Mosely became co-editor of the Handbook of Synagogue Music for Congregational Singing (London, 1889). In 1894 Jonas Levy died, bequeathing a large fortune to Mosely. Four years later the former synagogue musicologist left England for, of all places, British-occupied Muslim Egypt, where he had been appointed a judge of the Native Courts of First Instance. In Cairo in 1908 he befriended the touring novelist Hall Caine (1853–1931), finding a doctor to treat Caine’s ‘gyppy tummy’ and offering to relieve Caine’s wife by reading Syed Ameer Ali’s The Spirit of Islam (1891) to the invalid. [101] In July 1911 he was to be one of the organising honorary secretaries of the first Universal Races Congress held at the University of London, whose object was ‘to discuss, in the light of science and the modern conscience, the general relations subsisting between the peoples of the West and those of the East, between so-called white and so-called coloured peoples, with a view to encouraging between them a fuller understanding, the most friendly feelings, and a heartier co-operation.’ Mosely represented Egypt at the Congress [102] though he remained listed until 1915 in the London Post Office Directories at his chambers at 2 Brick Court, Temple, E.C. The circumstances of his death on 13 July 1916, at 4 Avenue des Fleurs, Monte Carlo in neutral Monaco, are not known. Surely it was not to stake his fortune at the gaming tables which, though reduced in clientèle, had remained open despite the war. [103] Mosely’s fortune seems to have remained intact. He left assets of £60 at the National Bank of Cairo, and £1,200-worth of Egyptian 4% Unified Bonds [104] and in the United Kingdom estate of £42,274 net. After bequests to former servants and clerks, ‘The residue of his estate Mr. Mosely left to his wife, but in the event of her predecease to the Khedive of Egypt for charitable purposes in Egypt and elsewhere as he may determine.’ [105] The Khedive didn’t inherit. He was deposed by the British in 1914 for siding with the Ottoman Empire. Charlotte Mosely lived on in the Monte Carlo Palace Hotel until her death in 1931 aged 81.
Benjamin Lewis Mosely’s later internationalism may not have been exactly typical, but it’s clear that when it was founded by him the new London branch of the United Wagner Society could contain an eclectic mixture of background and potential, men and women, English- and German-speaking, confessing and atheist, aristocrat and professional, academic and dilettante, musical and literary. It also included William Ashton Ellis.
The Board Room
The Royal Albert Hall, on Monday 10 and Saturday 15 November 1884, saw two remarkable concert performances of Parsifal under the direction of Joseph Barnby. Therese Malten (Kundry), Heinrich Gudehus (Parsifal) and Emil Scaria (Gurnemanz) reprised their Bayreuth roles, with English supporting soloists and the Royal Albert Hall Choral Society. Authorised by Wagner’s publisher Schott’s if not by the composer’s heirs, these were the earliest nearly complete renderings to be given outside Bayreuth. Hueffer provided a 22-page programme book published by Schott’s, [106] but despite considerable public excitement most of the London Wagner Society’s luminaries, loyal to the Bayreuth ideal, avoided it. William Ashton Ellis would say he had boycotted it as ‘an oratorio-version (which had better have stayed away)’. [107] Ellis may have joined the London branch of the United Wagner Society by then, but the following year he was still preoccupied with professional matters. On 17 March 1885 the Western Dispensary’s minutes recorded that he ‘made application for the occasional use of the Board Room for Committee meetings’ – not of the Wagner Society, but – ‘of the Association of Members of the Royal College of Surgeons, of which he is one of the Honorary Secretaries’. The association was formed during 1884, and held its first annual general meeting at Westminster Town Hall on 5 May 1885, at which Dr Robert Collum was confirmed as president, and Dr Warwick C. Steele, Mr J. Nield Cook [108] and Mr W. Ashton Ellis as honorary secretaries and treasurers. Its main objective was the constitutional reform of the Royal College. There were then some 16,500 members as compared with 1,200 fellows, and feeling among the members was growing for some form of representation on the college’s council. The campaign lasted several years, and included a members’ petition to the queen in Council. [109]
The campaign called repeatedly for rallies of the members. In October 1886 the British Medical Journal carried a letter from Warwick C. Steele and Wm. Ashton Ellis, ‘Honorary Secretaries, Association of M.R.C.S.’:
SIR, – On Thursday, November 4th, at 3 P.M., the Members of the Royal College of Surgeons of England will again, it is hoped, fill their theatre in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields with a body of men determined to attain fitting representation on the Council of that Corporation. L’union fait la force, and no consideration of the personal inconvenience of individual members should stand in the way of their assembling in their hundreds, and ensuring for that meeting a success equally decisive with that of the meetings of last year. [110]
These meetings can’t have been as ‘decisive’ as the honorary secretaries hoped. Two years later we find the British Medical Journal publishing a very similar letter from Steele and Ellis calling for a demonstration of members at the imminent annual meeting of fellows and members: ‘Let Members, therefore, assemble on Thursday in numbers as large as on former occasions, and assist us in passing resolutions emphasising the determination of the great body of the Corporation to make its voice heard in the management of the affairs of its own College.’ [111] Then in February 1889 frustration broke out. Ellis and Steele organised a members’ meeting at the college without the permission of the College Council. An extraordinary meeting of the council was called to order the closure of the college on the appointed day. The members met, found the doors of the college barred against them, and repaired to the Holborn Restaurant to consider their next step. They resolved to instruct Steele and Ellis, on behalf of the Members’ Association, to seek an injunction against the council and its president, Sir William Savory (1826–95) to prevent further enforcement of the ban.
It took until 26 January 1892 for the case of Steele v Savory to come to trial in the Chancery Division of the High Court. Warwick Charles Steele, William Ashton Ellis, Jabez Hogg and William Gilbert Dickinson ‘on behalf of themselves and all other [sic] the Members of the Royal College of Surgeons of England’ claimed a declaration that ‘all the freemen or Members’ had the right of free access to the college hall and to hold meetings, and that the president’s prohibition was based on a by-law that was ‘bad for unreasonableness’. Without even calling upon counsel for the defendants, Mr. Justice Romer summed up by saying that ‘to the lay mind there might appear to be something in the case, but to the legal mind, on the facts of the case, there was nothing’. [112] Judgment was given emphatically against Steele and Ellis, and the case dismissed with costs. Steele and Ellis begged the college to forbear to press the costs. The college refused, but agreed to accept payment over a period. After three years of legal preparation for the trial, the costs amounted to £2,162, and half was paid immediately in cash – a severe drain on the plaintiffs’ resources. A subscription list for the remainder was launched in the British Medical Journal, [113] but Steele may have been bankrupted by the case: ‘Warwick Charles Steele, Ealing, Surgeon and Medical Practitioner’ was listed in The Times on 9 November 1892 among those placed under ‘receiving orders’.
‘Sunset’
Ellis’s troubles increased in the summer of 1885. The dispensary minutes for 21 July noted that ‘In consequence of the serious illness of the Resident Medical Officer’s father, immediate leave of absence was granted to Mr Ellis’. Robert Ellis, however, died the next day. The Post Office Directories show that he had left Chelsea around 1877, [114] probably retiring as a practising surgeon at the age of 53. He had moved his family south, out of the metropolis, to what was then rural Mitcham in Surrey. The handsome (and still extant, and listed) Elm Lodge in Lower Green, Mitcham, was built in around 1807, and is today a doctor’s surgery: local history says it has often been occupied by doctors. [115] The 1881 census lists the Lodge’s occupants as Robert Ellis, Mary A.E. Ellis, Ada M. Ellis, Reginald H.U. Ellis, Douglas U. Ellis, Evelyn C. Ellis, Claude B. Ellis, Florence M. Ellis, plus two domestic servants and a footman. That is to say, the entire family is still together, save for Robert Uther Ellis (a married dentist in Marylebone); William Ashton Ellis (resident medical officer at the Western Dispensary, Rochester Row); and Ernest Charles Ellis (solicitor in Rickmansworth High Street). [116] Robert Ellis remains listed at Elm Lodge in the Post Office Directories of Surrey from 1878 until 1882. However, he was to end his life a few years later in North Devon, in quite other company.
The following advertisement appeared on the front page of the North Devon Journal for 7 February 1884:
GOOD HORSE (Aged), FOR SALE. Belongs to a Private Gentleman, having no further need of him. Will only be sold to a gentleman where he would have light work and kind treatment. Price most moderate. Believed to be sound and quiet in harness. – Apply, Dr. Ellis, ‘Sunset’, Westward Ho.
Westward Ho!, in the north-western corner of Northam parish named after Charles Kingsley’s 1855 novel set there, is the only place-name in the British Isles officially to include an exclamation mark. It was a most suitable place for the retirement of the respected author of The Chemistry of Creation, who might have read it described as ‘222½ miles from London, by the London and South Western Railway’. And interestingly,
There is much building ground still available – and among the plans likely to be carried out is one of a Sanatorium, to be called the ‘Kingsley’, with a resident physician, for the reception and benefit of invalids, who would here derive the solid advantages to be gained from the salubrious breezes of the Atlantic. This locality supplies several objects of interest to geologists and antiquarians. In the low cliffs may be seen the remains of an ancient raised beach of pebbles, analogous to the present pebble ridge in its formation and materials, marking a period when the water flowed to a far higher level than at present. While in exact contrast to this may be seen near low-water mark the remains of a peat bed, in which are found numerous specimens of an extinct shell (a pholas), the remains of large trees, hazel nuts, the bones of red deer, &c., and, stranger still, the tokens of ancient man, who lived amid these trees and woods, as seen in the flint flakes that mark the places where he hewed weapons out of flint nodules – and in the bones of the ox, sheep, &c., which were broken up by him to extract the marrow. [117]
The geologist and antiquarian Dr. Ellis was among those who had taken out an interest in building ground. Under the ‘Local Board’ report for Northam on its inside pages, the North Devon Journal recorded that ‘Letters were received from Dr. Ellis, of Westward Ho, respecting the nuisance arising from the sewerage gas from his dwelling, in consequence of there not being any common sewer. – The Board was unanimous in ordering a pipe sewer to be made, in order that Dr. Ellis’s drain might be connected.’ And again, ‘A letter was also read from Dr. Ellis, of Sunset, Westward Ho! in reference to the delay in arranging for the gas to be brought to his house, and he also wrote that Mr. Molesworth, the gas proprietor, was quite willing to do his part if the Board did theirs.’ [118]
A short obituary notice in The Lancet for 1 Aug. 1885 read: ‘ELLIS – On the 22nd ult., at Sunset, Westward Ho, North Devon, after a long illness, Robert Ellis, M.R.C.S., L.S.A., late of 63, Sloane-street, aged 62.’ (Almost identical notices appeared in the British Medical Journal, The Times and the North Devon Journal.) The ‘long illness’ may have been euphemistic: the cause of death was attributed by the local physician to ‘Cirrhossis [sic] of the Liver 2 Years Certified by Ezekiel Rouse’. ‘Sunset’ was pointed out to me by a local historian in June 1995 as then a nursing home (thankfully not called ‘Sunset’) on Atlantic Way, not far from what was the United Services College (made famous by Kipling in Stalky & Co., but long since converted into flats). In its issue for Thursday 23 July 1885 (the day after Robert Ellis’s death) the North Devon Herald reported a cricket match (played three days before his death) between the United Services College and Mr L.E. Day’s Eleven: ‘This match was played on the College Ground at Westward Ho! on Saturday last, and resulted in a draw […]. E.C. Ellis, in the College innings, bowled very well his six wickets, costing only two runs each.’ I have no corroborating evidence, but this might just have been the younger and more sportif of Robert Ellis’s two sons with the initials E.C., the 20-year-old Evelyn Campbell Ellis. [119]
Ezekiel Rouse, the medical officer of health for the area and surgeon to the United Services College, was a witness when Robert Ellis made his will three days before his death. It revoked ‘all Wills and testamentary dispositions heretofore made by me’. To ‘my friend Miss Wilkins of Westward Ho’, Robert Ellis left ‘the chiming clock presented by her to me’ and the sum of £50. The will omitted the names of his wife and his eldest son Robert Uther Ellis, both alive and well 222½ miles away, but at least there were bequests to his daughters Ada Mathilde Ellis (including ‘my gold ring with stones set to form the name “Robert”’), Florence Mabel Ellis, his youngest son Claude Bertram Ellis, and his sister Elizabeth Swan. The option to purchase (!) ‘my one horse power gas engine at the price of twenty pounds’ was given to his sons Reginald Henry Uther Ellis and Douglas Uther Ellis, ‘should they be carrying on the business of Soda Water Manufacturers at the time of my decease’. (They were, in Lower Mitcham, Surrey.) Other gifts went to ‘the widow of my old Coachman Henry Aldridge’ and to two old servants, Charles Meredith (the footman of the 1871 census) and William Belford. But these bequests were second in priority to some characteristic legacies: five guineas each to the Church Missionary Society, the London City Mission, the Scripture Readers Association, ‘the Boys Home of Dr. Barnardo and The Orphan Home of Mr. Müller near Bristol’. Upon probate, Robert Ellis’s estate was valued at an enormous £33,141 7s. 4d. (re-sworn in April 1888 at £32,700 18s. 2d.). William Ashton Ellis, Reginald Henry Uther Ellis and Evelyn Campbell Ellis, though executors, were otherwise bequeathed nothing in their father’s will beyond a sibling’s equal share in his residual estate. [120]
The reason may never be uncovered, but the worthy though hard-headed Robert Ellis had taken up with a new home and a new ‘friend’ Miss Wilkins in Westward Ho! towards the end of his life. Sophia Ann Wilkins was born in Stamford Hill, North London, in 1816, some six or seven years before Robert Ellis was born in North Wales. By 1881, however, according to the census for that year, she was a 64-year-old spinster, lodging at the home of a widowed dressmaker named Mrs Anderson, at 151 Sloane Street, Chelsea. The next census (1891, six years after Robert Ellis’s death) lists Miss Sophia A. Wilkins, aged 74, ‘Living on her own means’, with two servants, not at ‘Sunset’ but at Hill Side, Westward Ho Road, Northam (given in the 1893 Kelly’s Directory as Hillside Cottage, Westward Ho!). Sophia Ann Wilkins was to die nearby, at ‘Rockingham’, close to ‘Sunset’, on 21 December 1899 aged 83. The cause of death was influenza and acute bronchopneumonia. She is described as ‘of independent means’. She is the only traceable ‘Miss Wilkins of Westward Ho’. [121] It is not beyond conjecture that in the 1870s a Sloane Street liaison developed between the middle-aged doctor and the older spinster lodger, causing Ellis to leave Chelsea for Mitcham some time after 1877. When Robert Ellis’s family were all ‘of age’ (the youngest, Claude Bertram, would have been about 15), [122] he may then have joined Sophia in Westward Ho! some time around 1882 or 1883. At any rate, in the mid-1880s Robert Ellis appears to have turned his back on his wife of more than thirty-five years, and most of his own large family left behind in London. Beside the £50 in his will, had he settled some of his wealth on Miss Wilkins, raising her from impoverished spinsterhood to ‘independent means’? If he had new-found happiness it was short-lived; the chiming clock he bequeathed back to Miss Wilkins would have counted down the two years of liver disease which caught up with him in July 1885.
Back in London, a first indication of some unhappiness at the Western Dispensary is found on 27 July 1886, when the Western Dispensary’s minutes record that William Ashton Ellis applied for the post of secretary there. Curiously, in view of his financial circumstances, the post of secretary offered a salary of only £18 2s. 6d. per quarter, compared with his Resident Medical Officer’s salary of £26 5s. Less onerous duties rather than remuneration may have been the attraction. In any event Ellis failed to obtain the post. It was given to Francis Charles Morgan, a bank clerk by profession, who held it until his death on 22 December 1912, when his 35-year-old daughter Edith succeeded him. [123] In the closing years of his life Ellis was to have certain difficulties with that lady.
Spiritual Women
Ellis’s first public contribution to Wagner studies was a paper read to the Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts on 3 February 1887, and repeated before the London Branch of the ‘United Richard Wagner Society’ on 10 March. It marked a decisive change in Ellis’s career, which deprived the Westminster poor of his ministry in order to enrich us less tangibly. Between those readings (on 1 March to be exact), a special meeting of the Western Dispensary’s Committee of Management was convened to receive a letter from the Resident Medical Officer, resigning his appointment with effect from Lady Day next (25 March – the dispensary worked punctiliously to the quarters). Another special meeting on 22 March appointed a successor, but the minutes also show that it was
carried most unanimously that –
The Committee desire to express to Mr Ellis, the late Resident Medical Officer, their best thanks for the very efficient manner in which he has discharged his various duties during the last 8 years and to acknowledge the kindness and courtesy he has always shown to the patients under his care.
In accordance with the united wish of the committee, Mr Ellis was called in and personally informed by the Chairman of the motion referred to as well as of the tenor of the accompanying and subsequent remarks. Mr Ellis thanked the meeting for this Evidence of their Esteem and appreciation.
It was resolved that a copy of the motion be forwarded to Mr Ellis, in a communication to be signed by the Chairman.
If to the Dispensary’s Committee Ellis’s resignation was as inexplicable as it was unexpected, the reason for it is to be found in a letter of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91), the founder of Theosophy, written from Ostend to her sister Vera Jelihovsky (1835–1896):
What am I to Ellis who never saw me before, that he should think nothing of the risk, when leaving the hospital without permission, for a whole week for my sake; now he has lost his place, his handsome pay, and his rooms at the Westminster [sic] dispensary. He went home and returned here laughing: he does not care a bit, he says! ‘He will have more time to spend on Theosophy.’ [124]
It’s unlikely that Ellis exaggerated his own self-sacrifice. Madame Blavatsky was reciting only one of a number of examples of her ostensible power over others: ‘Why should it be my fate to influence the destinies of other people?’ she asks rhetorically in the same letter. No doubt it suited her purpose to imagine that Ellis left his post ‘without permission’. A more objective account was given by Blavatsky’s companion, Countess Constance Wachtmeister (1838–1910):
In October, 1886, I joined H.P.B. in Ostende […] Towards the end of the winter [evidently in March] H.P.B. became very ill […]. I telegraphed to Madame Gebhard […] and also to Mr. Ashton Ellis, a member of the T.S. [Theosophical Society] and a clever doctor, both responded to my call and helped me through those trying and anxious days, and in the end Mr. Ellis’ wise treatment pulled her through the dangerous crisis. [125]
Ellis had diagnosed Blavatsky’s dangerous crisis as Bright’s Disease of the kidneys. According to Countess Wachtmeister, he ‘massé’d her until he was quite exhausted; but she got no better, and to my horror I began to detect that peculiar faint odour of death which sometimes precedes dissolution’. But against all expectations the efforts of Ellis and a Belgian doctor prevailed. [126] Blavatsky’s own full account to her sister provides a unique glimpse of Ellis’s bedside manner. She describes a profound intimation of mortality in Ostend on 17 March 1887.
Two days after we nearly forgot all about it, when I received a letter from a certain London member [of the Theosophical Society], whom I never saw before in my life – Ashton Ellis, a doctor of the Westminster Dispensary, a mystic, a Wagnerian, great lover of music, still quite a young man, he also insisted on my coming [to London] for the simple reason, don’t you know, of having seen me before him and having recognized me because of my portraits. I stood, he says, on the other side of the table on which he was writing, and gazed at him. I and Constance (the Countess Wachtmeister) were very much amused by his enthusiastic statement: ‘My life seems strangely linked with yours’, he writes, ‘with you and the Theosophical Society. I know I am bound to see you soon.’ We were amused, but soon forgot all about it. Then I caught a cold in the throat, I really do not understand how, and then it grew still worse. When on the fifth day – after I had to go to bed, the Ostende doctors said there was no hope, as the poisoning of the blood had begun owing to the inaction of the kidneys, I dozing all the time and doomed to enter eternal sleep while thus dozing – the Countess remembered that this Ashton Ellis is a well-known doctor. She telegraphed to him, asking him to send her a good specialist. And lo! – this perfect stranger wires back: ‘coming myself, shall arrive in the night’. Through my sleep I dimly remember someone coming into the room in the night, taking my hand and kissing it and giving me something to swallow; then he sat at the edge of my bed and started massaging my back. Just fancy, this man never went to bed during three days and three nights, rubbing and massaging me every hour.
After this Blavatsky narrates that she heard someone saying her body would not be allowed to be burned, were she to die not having signed her will. Cremation only would secure her reincarnation. ‘Here’, she continues,
consciousness awoke in me, struck with horror at the thought of being buried, of lying here with Catholics, and not in Adyar […] I called out to them and said: ‘Quick, quick, a lawyer’, and, would you believe it, I got up! Arthur Beghard [sic – probably Gebhard], who had just returned from America and had come here with his mother, having heard about my illness, rushed out and brought a lawyer and the American Consul, and I really don’t know how I could gather so much strength: – I dictated and signed the will […]. Having done with it, I felt I could not keep up any longer. I went back to bed saying to myself: ‘Well, good bye, now I shall die.’ But Ashton Ellis was positively beside himself; the whole night he massaged me and continually gave me something nasty to drink. But I had no hope, for I saw my body was grey and covered with dark yellowish-blue spots, and loosing [sic] consciousness I was bidding good bye to you all in my thoughts.
Twenty-four hours later she had recovered. To her aunt Nadejda Fadeef she wrote shortly afterwards:
The Ostende doctors tortured me, with no result at all, robbing me of my money and nearly killing me, but I was saved by a Theosophist of ours, Dr. Ashton Ellis, who as a reward has lost a situation with good pay, having left the Westminster Dispensary without permission and having been the last nine days by my side (massaging my back) […]. When all the local doctors gave me up, Countess remembered about Ashton Ellis, whom she knew by reputation, and asked him to give some advice or to send some doctor, and he answered, he was coming personally in the night. He dropped everything and came here. And mind you, he had not so much as seen me before, knowing of me only through my work and articles. I am simply tortured with remorse, he having lost so much for my sake. At least it is well he is a bachelor […]. He has saved me with massage, rubbing me day and night, positively taking no rest whatever. Lately he has been to London and returned yesterday, informing me that he will not leave me until I am quite recovered and intends to take me to London personally, the first warm day. […] And what do you say about the attachment this Ashton Ellis has shown to me! Where could a man be found, who would give up a good position and work, all in order to be free to save from death an old woman, an unknown stranger to him? […] And everything at his own expense, – he refuses to take a penny from me, treating me, into the bargain, to some very old Bordeaux, he has unearthed from somewhere. And all this from a stranger and an Englishman, moreover. People say: the ‘English are cold, the English are soulless’. Evidently not all. [127]
The meeting of the Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts which heard Ellis’s lecture on 3 February 1887 was chaired by A.P. Sinnett, Esq. As well as being on that society’s Council, Alfred Percy Sinnett (1840–1921) was a member of the Theosophical Society, then and later a far less reticent one than Ellis. Acquainted with Madame Blavatsky since 1879, he had been on her behalf the recipient of the controversial ‘Mahatma Letters’ supposedly communicated for the benefit of theosophy by Himalayan ‘Masters’. After Blavatsky’s death he professed his conviction as to her previous incarnations (including ‘an aunt who died prematurely’) and her ‘transfer to another nationality’ so as to ‘be better able from the fulcrum of a European birth to further the interest of the Hindoo race’. [128]
It was evidently not necessary later to revere Blavatsky to be a true Theosophist. Sinnett was to become the author of The Early Days of Theosophy in Europe (published posthumously in 1922), a work denounced by yet more Wagnerian theosophists, Alice Leighton Cleather (1854–1938) and Basil Woodward Crump (1866–1945). [129] Between 1897 and 1899 Basil Crump had written on ‘Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas’, and reviewed Ellis’s translation of the prose works in the American theosophical journal Universal Brotherhood (see http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/ub/ub-hp.htm). However, while grateful to William Ashton Ellis for translating all the relevant ‘Eastern’ references in Wagner, in their own Wagnerian writings Cleather and Crump made little reference to their forerunner’s personal theosophical involvement. Nor apparently does Ellis refer in print to Cleather and Crump’s Wagnerian contributions. Ellis may have preferred to refrain when they condemned Sinnett for holding Blavatsky ‘up to the scorn and reprobation of posterity as nothing more than an ordinary medium, and a fraudulent one at that’. [130] Sinnett had sided with Blavatsky’s successor as leader of the Theosophical Society, the former associate of Charles Bradlaugh and Bernard Shaw, Annie Besant. ‘In spite of her conversion to the tenets of Theosophy’, wrote Cleather, ‘the ineffaceable stain of Socialism and Atheism remained. Subsequent events have amply proved the danger to the Theosophical Movement of these and other elements in Mrs. Besant, who was destined to become its evil genius.’ [131]
Following Blavatsky’s arrival in London in 1887 after Ellis’s treatment of her in Ostend – Sinnett preferred to regard it as ‘the exercise of occult power’ [132] – a Blavatsky Lodge was set up in opposition to the London Lodge, dating from 1876. By the mid-1890s the Theosophical movement was in disruption, with accusations and counter-accusations of charlatanism. Sinnett was charged with dubious experiments with mesmerism verging on black magic. He was classed with the most notorious of Annie Besant’s associates, the alleged paedophile Charles Webster Leadbeater. Cleather and Crump were to call as witness against this perversion of the movement no less an expert than Richard Wagner himself:
Richard Wagner, who had considerable knowledge of magic, gives an exact and terrible illustration of this process in his symbolical music-drama Parsifal […]. At the beginning of Act II [Klingsor] is seen calling up [Kundry’s] ‘red-violet Astral Body’ while her physical body lies in a hypnotic sleep under a bush in the Grail’s domain […]. The whole may be taken as a drama of the Theosophical Society, which may now be said to be under the domain of Klingsor, and still awaiting the coming of its Parsifal who can shatter the vast fabric of psychic illusion. [133]
Ellis wouldn’t have found this too far-fetched. In The Meister for July 1888 he noted:
The red turban which [Klingsor] wears (which, by the way, has been discarded, for some unaccountable reason, since Wagner’s death in favour of a white turban) is the distinctive mark in the East of the sorcerers who use their knowledge of the secret forces of nature for the furtherance of black magic, in pursuance of inordinate selfish ambition, and who are called from their wearing of this colour the Dugpas (red caps). [134]
In 1887 Ellis was more than hovering on the fringes of theosophical controversy with that lecture delivered under Sinnet’s chairmanship, ‘Richard Wagner, as Poet, Musician and Mystic’. The ‘as poet’ section eschewed literary analysis: ‘there is room here for none but intense feelings of passion, or ecstatic yearnings for sensation lifted on to a plane above this world’. [135] The ‘as musician’ section disavowed musicianship disingenuously: ‘I am not schooled in rules of harmony, and have not cared to indulge in the sad diversion of picking a passage of music to pieces to see what it is made of. Such scientific dissection I must leave to the professional musicians, though not without recognising that it is an all-important duty for them to exercise themselves in the anatomy of their art.’ [136] The same section anticipated the ‘as mystic’:
But if we cannot enter upon the Indian mysteries of nature and, like [Wagner], surprise her at her work, forcing from her her archetypes and bringing them from what the Easterns call the Akāsa, and the Western occulists [sic], the ‘astral light’ – that sphere in which the moulds of things past, present and to come, lie as an open secret, unlocked to inspiration – down to the plane of matter: if we cannot do this, we can at least judge from the effect whether he was right or wrong. […] My advice to those about to witness a Wagner performance would therefore be: leave your motiv-books behind you, and give yourself up heart and soul to the music, action, poetry and scene set before you. If you lose your identity for the time, what matter? It will come back to you, sure enough, with the matter-of-fact din and hubbub of the streets, when you return to them. [137]
The ‘as mystic’ section of the essay turned out to be a closely argued protest against materialism. Ellis defined ‘mysticism’ in sentences from ‘our own great Philosopher Thomas Carlisle’ [sic] which culminated in:
The Invisible world is near us, or rather, it is here, in us and about us; were the fleshly coil removed from our soul, the glories of the Unseen were even now around us, as the ancients fabled of the spheral music.
‘These words of Carlyle’ Ellis continued,
sound almost as a prophecy, when we consider that they were written half a century ago, when there seemed to most men but little prospect of a revival from the crushing scientific materialism that was gradually tightening its iron grasp upon the hearts of Englishmen; for now-a-days people of open mind are glad to search into these things, and the ridicule is rather being turned against the self-sufficient obscurantists than against those who are earnestly endeavouring to penetrate behind the veil of Isis. At no time has there been such a widespread desire to search all things, and to wring forth some of the hidden secrets of that which is above and beyond Matter. Bodies of men are grouping themselves together, some attempting to deal with the question from the side of ghostly manifestations, as the Spiritualists; some from that of thought-transference and allied phenomena, as the Society for Psychical Research; and some from the side of the ancient, and till lately almost inaccessible stores of occult wisdom, as the Theosophical Society. The object in all, however, is the same; to shake off this great pall of gross matter that shuts men off into separate prison cells of personal egoism, and to reach forth, however feebly at first, into a realm, the nearness to us of which Carlyle thus set forth.
‘That this was also Wagner’s great, though at first unconscious aim’, Ellis went on, ‘no one can deny, who will take the trouble to read his prose-writings, or who will analyse the systematic expansion of the spiritual side of his dramatic works’. However, ‘Such an analysis’ – i.e. that systematic expansion of the spiritual side of Wagner’s works – ‘is quite out of the question to-night’, Ellis told his no doubt relieved audience,
for in preparing a paper which I read elsewhere I found that the mere hints that might be offered on this subject filled up a space of time longer than I could dare to demand from you for the whole of this lecture, and even then the topic could only be grazed upon, to say nothing of exhausted. [138]
The lecture quoted extensively from Wagner’s prose works, which Ellis evidently knew comprehensively by that date. Ellis neatly rounded off his argument by appearing to draw together his themes of Wagner, the English, and the ineffable:
One little passage alone would vindicate my contention, where [Wagner] says, ‘I fear that to go to the bottom of this subject would lead us to Mystic depths, and those who would follow us would be branded by the self-styled cultured world of music as blockheads, a word with which according to Carlyle, the English label all Mystics.’ [139]
Wagner seems to have been referring to Carlyle’s article on Novalis which remarks that in English (or rather Scots) ‘common speech’ a Mystic ‘means only a man whom we do not understand, and, in self-defence, reckon or would fain reckon a Dunce’. [140] William Ashton Ellis could not have been unaware that the streets of his youth were famously walked by the Sage of Chelsea. Did he recognise in the Scottish-born Carlyle a non-conformist, even dislocated, intellectual force that reminded him of his own Welsh-born father?
The ‘paper read elsewhere’ had been published before the ‘As Poet’ lecture, as ‘Theosophy in the Works of Richard Wagner’, in the August 1886 issue (number 11) of the Transactions of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society. [141] The opening of that essay averred, with a mixture of geological metaphors, that ‘while our Tyndalls and Huxleys, our Darwins and our Spencers are reducing all to the cold plane of gross matter, a school has arisen, unmarked or derided in its inception, but destined, in the lapse of time, to win back the world from these frigid formularies to the sense of higher realms, standing open with rich fields of gold ready for the spade of the explorer’. [142] Replete with quotations from Edwin Arnold’s Buddhistic poem ‘The Light of Asia’ and terms such as the ‘septenary chain’ of ‘the body Rupa’, ‘the Kama Rupa’, ‘Prana’, ‘Linga Sharira’, ‘the Manas’, ‘Buddhi’, and ‘the Atma’, the essay’s aim was to introduce English theosophists to their German precursor Richard Wagner. As such, it’s more easily digested than A.P. Sinnett’s arcane musings which comprised the majority of the Transactions. For our purposes, though, the essay is interesting for its reference at its close to correspondence Ellis reveals he had already had with ‘a lady who had most intimately known the composer for the last thirty years of his life’. He quotes a passage from this lady’s reply on the subject of vegetarianism and Buddhism: Wagner was ‘in principle’ a vegetarian, she says, but ‘in practice, however, neither his health nor the orders of his physician allowed him to be a vegetarian’. [143] (At this point it’s with some relief that we can observe that if Wagner was only as spiritual as his physical life allowed him to be, Ellis would turn out to be only as theosophical as his English sense of propriety allowed him to be.) [144]
Twenty years later, in his 1905 edition of the letters of Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, Ellis was to reveal publicly that he had had the ‘personal experience’ of being ‘admitted to the honour of Frau Wesendonck’s society during the last twenty years of her life’, beginning with a first encounter ‘in that sad year at Bayreuth when the master was no more’. If Ellis meant that he met Mathilde Wesendonck at a Bayreuth Festival, then he was referring to the 1884 rather than the 1883 festival. [145] The meticulous minutes of the Western Dispensary show that on 21 March 1883 Ellis applied for and was granted three weeks’ leave from 3 April (to pay homage, as we have seen, at the Palazzo Vendramin) but no leave was granted for the festival month of August 1883. The minutes for 16 July the following year, however, show that Ellis applied for and was granted three weeks’ leave, which would have taken in the 1884 festival.
Ellis conjures her up: ‘This placid, sweet Madonna, the perfect emblem of a pearl, not opal, her eyes still dreaming of Nirvana, – no! emphatically no! she could not once have been swayed by carnal passion’. [146] Whereas A.P. Sinnett could idolise first Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s spiritual connections, and then Annie Besant’s, Ellis’s devotion was steadily directed towards Mathilde Wesendonck, a living ‘spiritual’ link (at any rate until her death on 29 August 1902) with his own acknowledged Master. Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck includes a letter to Ellis from Mathilde in unintentionally hilarious English, which Ellis po-facedly reproduces in facsimile. [147] Dated 26 March 1892, it is a reply to a warning apparently sent by to her by Ellis about the ‘slander’ contained in Praeger’s Wagner As I Knew Him (about which more later):
Milan. März 26. 1892.
Dear Sir!
Your kind lettre of The20th reached me at Milan, where I stay a couple of day’s, on the way home to Berlin, Zelten 21., after an absence of almost a year, past in Austria and in Italy.-
You will believe me that the content of your writing, deeply afflicts’ me. It is a base and hateful beginning, that of Mr Ferdinand Prager’s, in writing and publishing a book, merely to darken the Meister’s Memory to Mankind, by making ‘Gossip’ on the Intimacy of his Private Life, a Life, full of Conflikt, affliction and suffering!-
What hath the Publick to do with it? Deed he not bequeath to him, his unequaled, unrivaled everlasting Work’s? And is this holy Testament not above all doubt and Calumny? Is it not sufficient to secure him for ever, the grateful and tender Respect, the awe and the Consideration, due to his Great-ness and his Genius? –
The [Jessie Laussot] ‘Episode’ of Bordeaux has been related by the ‘Meister’ himself, and is to be found in the Edition of: ‘hinterlassene Schriften’. May we not be content with what he tell’s us about it? Need we know more? –
The truth is: That R. Wagner’s affection and Gratefulness to the ‘Wesendonck’s’ remained the same throughout his life, and that the ‘Wesendonck’s’ on theire Side, never ceased to belong to his most true and sincerest friend’s until to Death!-
What shall I say more! Is it worth while, to speak in so serious a matter, from my owne personal Self?-
The tie that bound him to Mathilde Wesendonck, whome he then called his ‘Muse’, was of a so high, pure, nobel and ideal Nature that, alas, it will only be valued of those, that in their own Noble chest find the same elevation and selfishlessnes of Mind!-
Many, many thank’s for your kind interference and communication. Yours truly
Mathilde Wesendonck
[In margin] I write in english, though no more accustomed to it, on purpose to prevent missun-derstanding!
Curiously, the original of Mathilde’s letter ended up folio’d in 1965 among George Bernard Shaw’s papers in the British Library Manuscripts Department and it remains wrongly indexed there as a letter to Shaw. [148]
The young W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) was convinced that in April 1888 Ellis was the author of the unsigned review in Madame Blavatsky’s theosophical monthly Lucifer of A Dream of the Gironde and other poems by Evelyn Pyne. ‘We understand that there remain only a few copies of this volume’, said the review, ‘and that they are for the most part in the possession of the author, Mr. Evelyn Pyne, The Pines, Bagshot, Surrey, to whom we refer our readers’. [149] The same issue of Lucifer included three poems by Evelyn Pyne – and the second number of The Meister the following month included that author’s ‘Anniversary Ode (R. Wagner, born May 22, 1813)’. [150] ‘They think no end of “Mr Pyne”’, wrote Yeats, ‘as they call her. One man on the staff is quite enthusiastic [,] has bought both her books and compares her metre to Swinburne. Has quite considerable corrispondence [sic] with her, never dreaming she was not “Evelyn Pyne Esq”. He is the editor of the new Wagner journal the “Meister”.’ Yeats relished this exhibition of mistaken theosophical enthusiasm for Evelyn Pyne’s allegedly Swinburnian (the review actually said Shelleyan) rhapsodies: ‘the very simple minded musician who reviews and is so enthusiastic about her blushed when he was told “Mr Pyne” was a lady. Her poems in Lucifer are quite long. I have not read them.’ [151]
‘Evelyn Pyne’ was the pseudonym of Evelyn May Noble, born in June 1853, daughter of the Sunningdale nurseryman Charles Noble. She is said to have taken her nom de plume from her address, The Pines, Bagshot, Surrey. Paradoxically, she seems to have had a very unSchopenhauerian will to life. The 1891 census recorded her at Noble’s Nurseries with an employment status given as ‘Litterary Various’ [sic]. In 1893 she married John Armitage, a Quaker minister twenty-seven years her senior. The following year The Times of 25 May announced the forthcoming publication by Hodder Brothers of a volume of ‘social and political essays’ establishing a new liberal political party to be called ‘The New Party’; contributors would include Robert Blatchford, Keir Hardie, Alfred Russel Wallace, Walter Crane, and ‘Miss Evelyn Pyne’. On 22 June the same year The Times reported that ‘Messrs. William Andrews & Co., of Hull, propose to issue shortly the “Quaker Poets of England”, by Evelyn Pyne (Mrs. Evelyn Noble Armitage), author of “The Message of Quakerism to the Present Day” &c.’ It was published in 1896. In 1901 the census found Evelyn and John Armitage at 1 Mount Pleasant Crescent in Hastings, aged 47 and 74 respectively. John Armitage died in 1903. In 1909 Evelyn married again; her second husband, Millin Russell Selby (born 1849) died in 1933. On 28 December 1937 The Times announced the death in Brighton on 24 December of ‘EVELYN MAY (EVELYN PYNE), widow of MILLIN R. SELBY, aged 86’. (She would in fact have been 84.)
The publisher’s advertisement in the endpapers of Evelyn Pyne’s collection The Poet in May (1885) for the earlier Dream of the Gironde (1877) had cited appreciations of ‘Mr. Pyne’s poetry’ from the Westminster Review, the Liverpool Daily Post and the Spectator. Those reviewers, like Ellis, had doubtless been misled by the dedication of the earlier volume ‘To the dear memory of her who dead to the world blooms a star in my heart forever.’ (Ellis had a younger brother, it will be recalled, called Evelyn.) But whether Ellis blushed or not in 1888, his admiration for Miss Evelyn Pyne remained undimmed. He was to publish another of her poems, ‘A May Song’, in The Meister in May 1890. Fifteen years later, in his volume of translations of letters from Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, he unblushingly rendered thanks ‘above all to an English friend, “Evelyn Pyne”’ for her assistance in giving the due feminine flavour to our joint translation of Frau Wesendonck’s tales and letters, also for her sole and beautiful translation of that lady’s poems’. And in covering the Wesendonck episode in the sixth volume (1908) of the Life of Richard Wagner Ellis gave the credit again to his ‘English friend’ for translations ‘for these pages by “Evelyn Pyne”’ of the texts of three of the Five Songs. [152]
Yeats may not have known it, but Ellis’s first signed contribution to Lucifer had been published in its fourth issue, dated 15 December 1887. The article ‘An infant genius’ presented the keyboard prodigy Josef Hofmann, ‘a child whose life, in this incarnation at least, is barely ten years old’, as proof of the doctrine of reincarnation. The young Hofmann (1876–1957) was taking concert-going London by storm, but aroused deeper reflections in Ellis: ‘it must be that the child has lived upon this earth before’. Allowing that the child was likely subsequently to ‘squander’ his gifts in this existence, Ellis wrote:
We have only adduced this boy’s genius as one of the indications that life is in its succession a far more complex problem than the materialists or the orthodox religionists would have us believe. There are countless other suggestive little facts of early talent that must have come within the circle of the daily life of each of us; but without the thread of Karma whereon to string them, we pass them by; and it is only when some remarkable phenomenon, such as that of Josef Hofmann, bursts upon the world, that men fall to wondering. Yet it is by the accumulation of small details that a philosopher like Darwin worked out his scheme of natural evolution; and it is by the testing of such a theory as that of re-incarnation by many a little hitherto unexplained incident that we shall find its worth. [153]
Ellis’s second contribution to Lucifer, in its sixth issue, a review of the astrologer Captain William C. Eldon Serjeant’s Spirit Revealed, envisaged something more socially concrete than the accumulation of small details strung on the thread of Karma: ‘an awakening of the peoples to their real position as members of one great Spiritual community’. ‘If Theosophy is to be a living thing, and not a mere intellectual amusement’, Ellis concluded, it is by such men as Captain Serjeant that ‘the world would soon be freed from its misery, by the force of their united volition. Verily their reward is at hand.’ [154]
Ellis’s other contributions to Lucifer were ‘Occult Phenomena’ (15 March 1888) and ‘A Glance at “Parsifal”’ (15 October 1888). The former is, to the best of my knowledge, Ellis’s only published verse-form contribution. It derides those who seek a facile ‘sign’ that the material world is not all there is. The answer to them is Jonah’s cry to the city of Nineveh ‘to cleanse its heart – and see’. The latter, somewhat contradictorily, views Parsifal as a rich source of profound ‘mystic’ or ‘philosophical’ signs, to be found in formulations such as ‘Time is swallowed up in Space’ and in ‘the various hints of the doctrine of re-incarnation’ as in the words ‘all that breathes and lives, and lives again’. Between December 1888 and June 1889 Lucifer also printed instalments of Ellis’s (apparently uncompleted) translation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Elixir of the Devil.
If Josef Hofmann was a temporary musical detail on the thread of Karma, the figure of Richard Wagner must have seemed to Ellis to embody Karma itself. [155] In that sixth issue of Lucifer, an advertisement appeared for ‘The new Wagner journal’ The Meister, whose prospectus had just been received by the editor, Blavatsky. It noted that since The Meister’s editor ‘is a member of the Committee of the Wagner Society, and a member of the Council of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society, we hope that prominence will be given to the esoteric side of Richard Wagner’s works’. And justification for that hope was looked for in words quoted from The Meister’s prospectus:
Religion, Art, and Social Questions are in these works presented to his readers under novel aspects, and such as are of the greatest interest to a generation which is eagerly scanning the horizon for some cloud which may be the harbinger of refreshing rain long looked for to quench the thirst of the arid sands of Materialist Science. [156]
At the end of 1888, in Lucifer’s ‘Literary Jottings’, Blavatsky marked the completion of The Meister’s first volume:
We congratulate our brother theosophist, the editor of THE MEISTER, on the completion of the first year of that journal. No. IV (the issue is quarterly) is well up to the standard of its predecessors, and contains the conclusion of a careful analysis of the deeper meaning of “Parsifal”, in which though unsigned, we detect the hand of the Editor, Mr. W. Ashton Ellis. In some respects the lines of Mr. Ellis’ contribution to the Transactions of the London Lodge of the T.S. have been followed, but the author has evidently pondered the subject more deeply in his mind with the lapse of time, and has matured his treatment of the mystic philosophy of this greatest of modern dramas. [157]
The notice went on to comment on The Meister’s translation of ‘Art and Revolution’, ‘a work most daring in its conception of the relation of art to social life’. In fact, though, Ellis’s ponderings may have caused him to begin to doubt whether Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society were after all capable of delivering the spiritual revolution he himself envisioned.
East and West
The London branch of the Universal Wagner Society had been planning a Wagner journal some time before March 1887. [158] As its front-page advertisement in the Musical Times for 1 March 1887 put it, ‘It seems strange that though Germany and France have each a periodical exclusively devoted to the furtherance of the Wagner movement, England possesses nothing whatever of the kind. In order to supply this want, it is proposed to start a QUARTERLY PUBLICATION […]. Messrs. W. Ashton Ellis and E.F. Jacques have kindly consented to act as Honorary Editor and Sub-Editor.’ The journal would appear as soon as an extra annual subscription of 4s. (over and above the 10s. ordinary subscription) from at least one hundred members of the society was pledged. Julius Cyriax pressed Ellis to take up the post of Honorary Editor. Ellis replied:
Dear Cyriax,
I have been thinking a good deal over what I said to you on Sat. night, & though I must give up the idea of being Hon. Ed. of the Wagner Journal, owing to complete change & upset in all my plans caused by my leaving my old post, I will get out the first number of the journal if you wish it, & then hand over the Ed.ship to whoever you may think best. I don’t know Wagnerians well enough to choose one myself. [159]
On 2 July 1887 Cyriax reported to Carl Friedrich Glasenapp in Bayreuth that because of the ‘insufferable formalities’ of his position at the Western Dispensary, Ellis had handed back the task. [160] As we have seen, in July 1886 Ellis had tried unsuccessfully to obtain the less onerous post of secretary at the dispensary; and on 1 March 1887 the dispensary’s committee received and accepted his resignation. The conflict Ellis experienced over taking up editorship of the Wagner journal was more to do with his higher devotion to Madame Blavatsky rather than his day job. However, Ellis’s resignation from his ‘old post’ at the dispensary resolved the crisis. His predestined mission to Madame Blavatsky was fulfilled, the subscriptions and contributors for the Wagner periodical were found, and by 14 January 1888 Cyriax was able to inform Glasenapp that ‘Ellis is almost red-hot in his enthusiasm for the journal; he is responsible for everything; I have the fullest trust in him. He wants to christen the child “The Meister”.’ [161] As Ellis grew ‘red-hot’ for Wagnerism, his theosophical passion would cool.
Despite the speed and diligence with which he had attended Madame Blavatsky in Ostend in 1887, and being numbered for a time among her closest associates after her subsequent arrival in London, after 1889 Ellis withdrew from her circle, and seems to have shunned both the London Lodge and the Blavatsky Lodge of the Theosophical Society. [162] Another physician, Dr Z. Mennell, would attend Blavatsky’s deathbed in St John’s Wood on 8 May 1891. [163] Ellis may have been unaware of the event. Seemingly wholly engrossed in Wagnerian matters, the previous day he signed off his ‘Translator’s Preface’ to Arthur Smolian’s The Themes of ‘Tannhäuser’ (London, 1891). [164] The only explicit reference to Madame Blavatsky in Ellis’s published Wagnerian writings is in an inconsequential footnote of 1902, where Ellis offers the information that the Countess Hahn-Hahn, a guest along with Wagner at Ferdinand Hiller’s soirees in 1846, was ‘Countess Ida, the novelist, an older cousin of the late Helena Petrovna Blavatzky [sic]. – W.A.E.’ [165] After Blavatsky’s death W.A.E. was unlikely (given his revulsion from both materialism and orthodoxy in matters of the spirit) to have allied himself with her successor Annie Besant and her well-known kaleidoscopic career through exoteric free-thought, atheism, socialism and republicanism to theosophy. Nor, for the same reason, with Annie Besant’s esoteric theosophical opponents such as Cleather and Crump. Ellis clearly wished to have no more to do with (capital T) Theosophy in its descent into unseemly squabbles. As his work of translating and interpreting Wagner took hold of him, he would on his own account lay before an English audience Wagner’s own allusions to Buddhism, Hindu myths and reincarnation.
The last number of The Meister to appear contained the second part of Ellis’s article on ‘The “Ring” Drama’. In it he translated a lengthy passage from Wagner’s letter to August Röckel of April 1855, in which the composer had turned his back on ‘affirmative’ (Feuerbachian) thought, now seen as merely ‘coquetting with the Will’ and which when ‘pursued at all costs’ turned out to be ‘Judaism itself, so omnipotent again today and trumpeting the narrowest, most parochial world-view ever preached’. True, Christianity’s origins were not to be found in the ‘soulless, heartless Optimism’ of Judaism, according to Wagner (as translated, and wholeheartedly endorsed, it seems, by Ellis), but in ‘the pure original teachings of the Buddha, and particularly the doctrine of the Transmigration of the Soul as incentive to a purely humane, a life full of sympathy with special reference to the knowledge-lacking world of beasts and plants, – assuredly the most beautiful fancy of a lofty spirit longing to impart itself’. ‘It may appear an abuse of editorial privilege’, Ellis interjected, ‘to have led my readers seemingly so far from the immediate subject, the ‘Ring Drama’; but when one places oneself in Richard Wagner’s hands for a journey to the transcendental, it is uncommonly difficult to turn back and descend from the general to the particular.’ [166] It was significant for Ellis that Wagner was expressing these buddhistic yearnings at the very time he was packing his bags for no less worldly a spot than London. The transcendental journey eastwards was an ‘astral’ counterpart of the actual westward railway and steamship journey from Zurich, via Paris to Dover. From there it was a train journey into London Bridge, where in Ellis’s imagination – now phrased more like William Booth than Edwin Arnold – Wagner ‘[had] to do his own haggling with the London porters, and deposit his weary bones in that abomination of desolation, a station “growler”’, before ‘trundling through the four odd miles of streets made trebly dismal by the sepulchral gloom of an English Sunday night, splashed here and there with the forbidding glare of public-houses’. [167] Among the multifarious criticisms Ellis would make of Ferdinand Praeger, Wagner’s London host in 1855, Ellis chided him for failing to meet his famous guest at the station. In fact Wagner himself didn’t complain: after a ‘stupid’ two-and-a-half hour wait for a train at Dover, ‘[the] journey to London’, he wrote, ‘finally passed off quite well’ with an hour’s cab drive to Praeger’s house in unexpectedly fine evening weather. [168]
In musing on how destiny can unite the sublime and the base, Ellis may have recalled that his father’s Chemistry of Creation had opened with a steel engraving of The Alchemist and with mention of Hermes Trismegistus and Geber – ‘curiosities in the history of chemistry’. Robert Ellis had respected ‘the chemistry of experience’ in ancient Egypt and China, which had yielded glass, porcelain, dyes, and, through astrology, the science of astronomy. For him, though, the perceptible driving-force had been ‘the deep-rooted covetousness of the human heart, that, from the very first, men regarded chemistry as a means of making gold’. The search for the philosopher’s stone had persisted ‘down even to the end of the last century, one of its latest victims being a Dr. Price, of Guildford, who destroyed himself in disappointment at discovering the delusion under which he had been labouring’. [169] The elixir of personal immortality, the distillation of fluid gold from base matter, was ‘a foolish and illogical train of reasoning’ not to be regarded in Faustian tragic–heroic terms, but as an irresponsibility to be condemned in Victorian moral terms:
How lightly after all did they really estimate the misery of immortal life to an individual in the present world! An immortality of the beholding of suffering, sorrow, and sin, of withering hopes, dying friends, unsatisfying occupations – this was the object of their search? Surely it was the voice of mercy, not of wrath, which pronounced in solemn accents, death to be the wages of sin, that it might add the glorious intelligence that the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. [170]
Robert Ellis went on to describe the hand of God behind the rational, experimental advance of chemistry from Francis Bacon onward, up to his own day and his own materialist heroes of natural science, Dalton, Davey, Priestley, Liebig and Darwin. But by the late nineteenth century – by the time William Ashton Ellis was beginning to write – Frederick Engels had noted how Bacon, Newton, Crookes and Darwin’s colleague Alfred Russel Wallace, whatever their scientific discoveries, had reverted to metaphysical speculations about elixirs, spirit rapping, a fourth dimension and the like. ‘If we trust the spectrum-analysis observations of Crookes, which led to the discovery of the metal thallium, or the rich zoological discoveries of Wallace in the Malay Archipelago’, Engels wrote, ‘we are asked to place the same trust in the spiritualistic experiences and discoveries of these two scientists’. And when Engels expressed the sarcastic opinion ‘that, after all, there is a little difference between the two, namely, that we can verify the one but not the other’, he found he was met with sophistic assurances by ‘empiricists’ that ‘the existence of falsifications proves the genuineness of the genuine ones’. [171]
The Woman of the Future
Robert Ellis’s concern for ‘individuals in the present world’ had been empirically obvious in his later writings on the medical care of children and women. In giving up his Linnean Society Fellowship after 1854 and in declining to take sides in the grand ontological battles of Owen, Darwin and Huxley, he had returned to the purview of his speculum. To that extent his aims were shared by his son’s early commitment to hands-on medical work at the Western Dispensary. It’s hard, therefore, to imagine a thirtysomething William Ashton Ellis putting that seriousness of purpose aside in order to take holidays by bicycle (perhaps with one of Evelyn Pyne’s slim volumes in his pannier) through the countryside of this present world, even if his destination was usually Bayreuth. But this is apparently what happened. A flamboyant young woman, Annie Horniman (1860–1937) had made Ellis’s acquaintance in the reading room of the British Museum. Annie too had rejected a rich, serious-minded Linnean Society father (tea magnate, entomologist and founder of the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, south-east London), in order to indulge her passion for art and the theatre. After assisting him with his Wagnerian researches in the British Museum, ‘Miss Horniman’, apparently, ‘visited the Continent with Ellis, a bachelor of somewhat fussy habits, and though he had some uneasiness as to the propriety of the companionship, her only objections arose when she was mistaken for being his wife’. [172] As late as 1905 Yeats would write to Arthur Symons: ‘Your essay [on Wagner] is a substitute for more volumes than anything of the kind I have seen, and has I believe greatly pleased Ashton Ellis. At any rate I know it has Miss Horniman, who I think speaks as his voice.’ [173] But whatever their liaison and however long it lasted, their paths were diverging. By 1890 Annie had forsaken Ellis for Yeats and a post-theosophy variety of mysticism, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, until factionalism inevitably forced her resignation from it too in 1903. Ellis was to retreat to Sussex and a vicarious intellectual and spiritual life based on events half a century previous. Evidently Ellis became convinced that the Karmic ‘veil of Maya’ could be better lifted to universal moral and spiritual effect through the example of an historic German figure in living memory, whose genius was now publicly acknowledged even in the theatres, concert halls and newspapers of England.
In his ‘Introductory’ chapter to the letters from Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck (1905), Ellis was to quote Malwida von Meysenbug’s allusion to of Wagner’s ‘belief in the future of Woman’: ‘In face of practical life he had that awkwardness of genius which is so touching, since it coincides with a profound naivety of ideas about the relations of ordinary life which can be misunderstood alone by mediocrity and malice.’ [174] Meysenbug, along with Hans Richter, had been chosen by Richard and Cosima to be a witness at their wedding in Lucerne in 1859. Associated as she is with masculine radicals including Robert Blum, Alexander Herzen, Lajos Kossuth, Mazzini and Garibaldi, and later Nietzsche and Romain Rolland, it seems difficult nowadays to square Meysenbug’s feminist and socialist independence with her loyalty to the Wagner family through all its vicissitudes, before and after Wagner’s death. [175] Ellis sheds some light on this aspect of the Woman Question when he goes on to cite (from the prose works) as an example of Wagner’s ‘naivety’ a passage from the first edition of ‘A Communication to My Friends’ describing his (Wagner’s) early licentious self-expression as ‘the only way in which Nature can utter herself under the pressure of the moral bigotry of our Society, namely as – what folk call, unfortunately to-be-tolerated – vice’. (One recalls Ellis’s quotation in The Meister of Shaw’s words: ‘When Blake told men that through excess they would learn moderation, he knew that the way for the present lay through the Venusberg.’) In the faithful Prose Works, Ellis had observed the suppression of that passage in translating the later (1872) edition of the ‘Communication’, but only by relegating the sentences to an appendix – ‘whence – oddly enough – ’, he remarked, ‘they have not yet been unearthed by “mediocrity and malice”’. Ellis refused to censor the passage completely. On the contrary he pointed out that its suppression in the German edition proved that ‘[Wagner’s] traducers were a force to be reckoned with, people who even in 1872 would fail to comprehend his protest against that “shy reserve towards the female sex” which still prevailed in Germany and turned that sex into domestic animals or puppets’. And it was Ellis himself, without any known liaison beyond his cycling tours with Annie Horniman and his intellectual encounter with Malwida von Meysenbug, who concluded that in Wagner’s day ‘The Woman of the Future was only just beginning to be born, and rational liberty of comradeship was not yet tolerated.’ [176] Ellis may possibly be recalling John Stuart Mill:
Thus far, the benefits which it has appeared that the world would gain by ceasing to make sex a disqualification for privileges and a badge of subjection, are social rather than individual; consisting in an increase of the general fund of thinking and acting power, and an improvement in the general conditions of the association of men with women. But it would be a grievous understatement of the case to omit the most direct benefit of all, the unspeakable gain in private happiness to the liberated half of the species; the difference to them between a life of subjection to the will of others, and a life of rational freedom. [177]
Considering that when he wrote about the ‘rational liberty of comradeship’ in 1905 the English ‘Woman of the Future’ had only just begun to demand the national vote, Ellis’s attitude toward intellectual women seems decidedly liberal, though incontestably bachelor. Was he aware, one wonders, of the item that appeared in March the previous year in the militant ‘Outside the Gates’ column in the British Journal of Nursing?
Surprise and dissatisfaction have been caused by the refusal of the Governors of the Western Dispensary, Westminster, to confirm the appointment of Dr. Ethel Vernon, who was temporarily appointed, and has since acted, as medical officer to the institution, in last November. The reason is to be found in the announcement at the Annual Meeting of the Governors that Dr. W. H. Allchin, hon. consulting physician to the dispensary, would resign if Miss Vernon were permitted to continue her work as an attendant medical officer. Apparently, Dr. Allchin was abroad when the appointment was first made, or his narrow, intolerant attitude towards women would no doubt have caused a protest from him in the first instance. It is from men of this type that nurses must expect opposition to their just demands, and it is not surprising to find that Dr. Allchin is an active member of the Central Hospital Council for London which is organising opposition to the Nurses’ Registration Bill. [178]
Ellis himself had remained a governor of the Western Dispensary, but whether he had supported Dr Vernon’s appointment is not known. He seems to have concocted his own notion of that ‘rational liberty of comradeship’ which transcended the hypocritical ‘shy reserve’ overtly shown by most men towards women. It’s quite possible to infer in Ellis himself the same ‘touching awkwardness’ and ‘naivety’ that he recited in Malwida’s description of Wagner. Ellis was to remain unmarried and childless, and without any recorded close human relationship. He always remained close (geographically as well as emotionally) to his mother. He gives away nothing about his father, whose intellect he must have admired but whose late infidelity to his wife and family must have been devastating to him. On the other hand, or perhaps as a result, there was a tenacious, obsessive side to William Ashton Ellis’s personality.
In 1908 an acutely personal insight into his animosity toward moral bigotry is revealed in the Life of Richard Wagner. Ellis recalled ‘a little manual which has enjoyed unrivalled circulation for the last three generations under the insinuating title “The Peep of Day: A Series of the Earliest Religious Instruction [sic] the Infant Mind is Capable of Receiving”’ (the square-bracketed [sic] is Ellis’s insertion). After quoting ‘choice extracts’ of the most excruciating condescension on the subject of men and animals, bodies and souls, Ellis confessed in a footnote that he too had been one of ‘the millions of British Infant Minds’ brought up over the previous seventy years on this twaddle: [179]
The little book was first published in 1836, and I have a vivid recollection of it as one of the earliest Instructors of my own childhood an odd score of years later. The edition I quote from is dated 1901, and may have been a little modernised, though the main drift of the casuistry quite chimes with my juvenile memories. In many respects, no doubt, it is a good little book for ‘the Infant Mind’, but let me give one further illustration of its standpoint as regards the lower animals: ‘God makes the corn. Of what does he make it? – Of nothing [!]. God makes things of nothing […] If he did not make corn grow in the field, we should die. But he will not forget us. He even [subtle poison in that ‘even’] remembers the little birds. They are too silly [!] to plough or to sow corn, or to reap, or to put corn into barns [or over-eat themselves]; yet God does not let them starve [never?]. He hears their cry, and gives them food. Now God loves us much better than he loves the little birds, because we have souls, so he will certainly hear us when we pray to him.’ We are not informed why no ‘souls’ were given to the birds – had the supply of ‘nothing’ run short? – but to tranquillise the Infant Mind, the booklet ends up with a picture of the seamy side of the world to come and a grim warning that ‘Many people in Hell will say, “How I wish I had listened to the words of my teachers!”’ It does not add that some of those teachers may there have an opportunity of revising their doctrine as to the ‘throwing away’ of dead puppies like orange-peel.
Those bitter, square-bracketed interpolations are typical of Ellis’s engagement with his material when he leaves mere translation behind. Here Wagner is left behind as Ellis comes down on the side of ‘the worthies of the Roman church in olden times’, such as St Francis of Assisi, and on the side of those modern philosophers who had thrown off the burden of St Paul, Protestantism and Jesuitism, such as Schopenhauer, and concludes that ‘if this be Christian teaching, “heathen” India should shame us’. [180] Ellis’s own clasp bible has survived, and when I saw it in June 1995 it was in the possession of the widow (Maimie, deceased 7 August 1996) of his godson, Walter Hans Lear. Below the dedication, ‘A baptismal gift from his Godfather Robt. J. Ashton’, is inscribed, in the same hand, the uncompromising text from Mark 16: 16: ‘He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.’ The words would have haunted Ellis’s ‘Infant Mind’ as it anticipated ‘the seamy side of the world to come’. [181]
Paternalism
Little William Ashton Ellis grew up with that monumental three-volume Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, full of engravings, pull-out charts, appendices and schedules. Here may be the origin of his own obsessive indexing and cross-referencing. His father’s preface to the Catalogue had referred the reader deferentially to Tenniel’s title-page design with its inscription ‘The Earth is the Lord’s, and all that therein is, The compass of the world and they that dwell therein’, praying that if the Catalogue should survive the Crystal Palace exhibition, it should be remembered that ‘while descriptive of the successful labours of men, may it not be forgotten that the glory and praise are due to God alone’. [182] Robert Ellis had catalogued the detail of the material world’s success (including a patent safety gun and an ‘original percussion gun’ from Forsyth & Co.). But William Ashton Ellis would fail to find spiritual reassurance in the present world’s celebration of industry, science and technology.
Robert Ellis probably had little musical inclination. For him harmony was to be found in nature and in science. Yet as he reflected in the Chemistry of Creation on the physical attributes of a wave’s crest, front, height, amplitude, and the tidal effect, Robert Ellis detected an ‘abstruse’ philosophy behind the science:
It may appear that little interesting to the student or to the philosopher is to be found in the phenomena of waves, beyond their beauty, or their sublimity, or their force. To look upon this widely agitated surface, it would seem a vain attempt to discover anything like harmony or order in phenomena so apparently confused and irregular as those of waves. Yet there is much philosophy, and that of a very abstruse order, concerned in the explanation of their movements; and, incredible though it would seem, there is a real harmony and order of a very beautiful kind, observable in these seemingly disordered and commingled masses of water. […] How striking the thought, not one of these apparently free and fetterless billows, which have supplied poets with the most beautiful similes of liberty and unrestrained action, can move but in obedience to certain laws which control and direct them. To us nothing in nature appears so unshackled; in reality not a wave heaves but is under the influence of laws which prescribe its movement, velocity, and form. Is it not so in life? The movements of an hour, the fresh-rising events which appear to us as the most fortuitous things in the world – these all have their time, their form, and presence, and place appointed, in the hands of Him in whom we live, and move, and have our being. [183]
At the same time, as a scientist Ellis made frequent reference to Darwin’s 1831 Journal of Researches made during the voyages of the Beagle. It was in a scientific rather than ‘philosophical’ mode that The Chemistry of Creation gave this description of the observable natural cycle of life and death:
The interchange of ingredients never ceases. Millions of animals feed upon the vegetation nourished by the decay of former myriads. Their time is then completed; their period of utility is ended: they die. The air again receives their elements, and again with continually succeeding generations do these enter into activity in the economy of the world. [184]
Pragmatically, in Disease in Childhood Robert Ellis proposed practical, common-sense measures to reduce infant mortality – cleanliness, light, breastmilk, exercise, diet. That ethos, as well as a sense of an ‘abstruse’ philosophy behind it, would be handed down to his son, but not the sanctimonious Victorian insistence that chemistry, natural science, medicine were God’s gifts, practised by Men for the Glory of God. Theosophy was to suggest to William Ashton Ellis a new vocabulary, reaching behind the material world and the cycle of life and death. Richard Wagner, who had abandoned Feuerbach’s anti-religion for Schopenhauerian metaphysics, unveiled a beckoning ‘astral light’ to Ellis, who saw himself as Wagner’s English medium. And this was how the first canon of English Wagnerism came into being, during a period when materialists such as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and even Bernard Shaw himself, would have walked the same London pavements, sat in the same concert-halls, and rubbed elbows in the reading room of the British Museum, with William Ashton Ellis.
The Meister and Bernard Shaw
In the March 1887 number of La revue wagnérienne, its London correspondent Louis N. Parker reported:
La Société Wagnérienne de Londres a commencé le nouvel an avec courage et bon espoir. Nous avons à présent cent soixante-dix associés dont la plupart sont très connus dans la monde musical. Nous espérons augmenter ce nombre jusqu’à mille pendant l’année afin de pouvoir enfin donner les représentations, ou bien même UNE représentation d’un drame wagnérien: ce n’est pas la bonne volonté qui nous manque, mais l’argent. La Société s’occupe aussi de fonder un journal wagnérien qui doit paraître tous les trois mois seulement, car, quoique la revue wagnérienne soit bien connue en Angleterre il nous manque un journal anglais qui soit à nous. [185]
The renowned French journal ran for a mere three years; its English counterpart would run for seven. With the solemn anniversary date 13 February 1888, the first issue of The Meister made its appearance. ‘THE WAGNER SOCIETY of London makes to-day its bow to the public, and begs to introduce its friend the “MEISTER”. That gentleman must now say a few words for himself, or themselves; for the editorial “we” will betoken the impersonal character of the undertaking, and therein be more consistent with the true facts of the case than when employed by journals carried on for the purposes of private gain.’ [186] Its editor would defend its macaronic title – bestowed on it by himself – by pointing out that no-one had scruples about ‘the Czar’ or ‘the Lama’. [187] The first two annual volumes of The Meister were published by George Redway, who had been selected as the publisher of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine in 1888 (A.P. Sinnet had investments in the publishing firm). However, Redway’s proposals for the latter turned out not to be ‘financially satisfactory’ and his occult list, and The Meister itself, were soon afterwards acquired by Kegan Paul, Trench & Trübner. Throughout its eight years of publication, the first and second quarterly numbers of The Meister each year bore the date of Wagner’s death and birth respectively. (A minor fetish for coincidences of dates is to be found elsewhere in Ellis’s writings.) Where The Meister aimed to be symbolic, it did so clumsily. The first issue bore a truly awful frontispiece attributed to ‘Mr Percy Anderson, a well-known artist and steadfast admirer of Richard Wagner’s dramas’. Bernard Shaw described it kindly as ‘slapdash’, and recommended the journal to look to Selwyn Image or Walter Crane for models of title-page designs. But to the end of its days The Meister continued unabashed to carry Anderson’s design – ‘executed’ (or so it thought) ‘in the style of the German art of the 15th and 16th centuries’, as if the English nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement had never existed. [188] There was another defect Shaw wished to see improved – for all its claim to impersonality ‘the editorial “we”’ had ‘an evident indisposition to provoke hostility’.
When reading The Meister it’s as instructive as it is entertaining to have to hand Shaw’s books London Music in 1888–89: As Heard by Corno di Bassetto, and Music in London 1890–94. They form a commentary on almost the exact period of The Meister’s existence. The ‘Notes’ generally appearing at the back of each quarterly number of The Meister have the greatest interest for anyone curious about Wagner’s reception in London. It can safely be said that Ellis contributed them all with the exception of those few signed with other initials. On the one occasion when he rose to Shaw’s taunt of failing to be provocative – when he first poured scorn on Ferdinand Praeger’s Wagner As I Knew Him, in May 1892 – no-one took up his invitation to submit an alternative point of view in the next or indeed any subsequent number. [189]
The Meister sought early on to establish that its credentials were other than parochial. Its inaugural number included ‘an original article contributed by C.F. GLASENAPP, of Riga, author of “Richard Wagner’s Leben und Wirken”’. The translator of this article, ‘Richard Wagner and the “Bayreuther Blaetter”’, was anonymous, but it was of course Ellis. The article recognised that Wagner’s reception earlier in the century had been difficult, particularly in England, but there now existed a journal, the Bayreuther Blätter, whose purpose was to bridge the gulf between ‘the spirit’ of Wagner’s writings – ‘as whose fulfilment it must to a certain extent be regarded’ – and ‘the spirit of our modern reading-world’. Indeed, it went on, it ‘is a matter of no less moment than a complete revolution of our whole modern culture; and the most resolute upholder of this culture should not stand aside from this work, even should he take up the position of an attentive onlooker’. Even less should he be ‘inclined to stray away at every moment from the grand simplicity of the Bayreuth ideal, – when, for instance’, [had he Bernard Shaw in mind?] ‘this or that literary free-lance is clamouring in hot haste for the superseding of the Bayreuth Festpielhaus by a “Wagner-Theatre” of similar construction in Berlin or elsewhere’. [190] Glasenapp firmly asserted that the ‘Scientific-Historical School’ is inimical to this ‘revolution’, being ‘in such a hurry to prove every prominent individual to be merely the product of his surroundings in Time and Space’ that it fails to explain ‘the real harmonious relation in which the sudden appearances of intellectual giants stand to one another and to the inner spirit of their people. Conversely it sees in the Jew of to-day, not the booty-loving Son of the Desert, who has preserved his character unchanged through thousands of years, but the modern citizen of the Mosaic confession. The racial ideal is for it an abstraction, no living and realisable perception.’ The Bayreuther Blätter, Glasenapp pronounced, is ‘the only journal in Germany, or even in Europe, which, in loyal following of the Meister’s lead, sets up, in opposition to that critically-destructive form of culture, the method of artistic comprehension, and in this sense keeps its eye steadfast upon the unworthiness of modern art no less than on the seeds and blossoms of the worthier things to come’. [191]
Glasenapp continued: ‘We consider the moment at which the London Branch of the “Wagner-Verein” (Wagner Society) has founded a special organ in the English tongue as peculiarly appropriate wherein to indicate the wide-reaching significance of the “Bayreuther Blaetter” as set out above.’ The appearance of ‘the journal of the English Wagner Society’ signified the common cause between ‘our brothers across the Channel’ and those ‘on the ancestral German soil’, to gain ‘victory over the intellectual forces that have made so hard the task of clearing away the hindrances to the life-work of Richard Wagner, and the education of a new and better generation. So willed the Meister.’ [192] This early identification of The Meister with the reactionary nationalism of the Bayreuther-Kreis is undeniable. Yet it’s questionable how far Ellis personally endorsed these views. Clearly he was flattered to have won recognition in Bayreuth for his English efforts, but the political undertones in Glasenapp’s article must have jarred with his theosophical principles. As exemplified by B.L. Mosely, many of the Wagner Society’s members, whatever their ‘confession’, held office without any discernible adverse discrimination. In 1893 The Meister would rebuff as ‘foolish’ the attempt by the Daily Telegraph ‘to prove our London Wagner Society was “German”, by discovering on our list of members the gigantic proportion of about one-sixth whose names it could remotely trace to German derivation!’ [193] The ‘clearing away of hindrances’ was not on the English agenda.
From the start The Meister enlisted established and respected writers and critics such as its ‘sub-editor’ for a time, Edgar F. Jacques (1850–1906); he was also editor successively of the Musical World (1888–91) and the Musical Times (1892–97); and Charles A. Barry (1830–1915), former editor (1874–76) of the Monthly Musical Record. Aiming to join this tradition, The Meister’s ‘Notes’ are where reviews of performances in London and Bayreuth were to be found. These are of musical rather than of political or theoretical interest, and they demonstrate that Ellis himself had a fair critical talent (at least in matters Wagnerian). He could be surprisingly generous too. In a review of ‘Recent Wagner-Literature: French’ (Ellis seems to have been pretty fluent in that language as well), he wrote of Georges Noufflard’s Wagner d’après lui-même (1885, reprinted 1891): ‘Here we have, among others, an exposition of Opera and Drama which I cannot do better than advise any reader who may have lost patience with my own translation of that work, to study with the greatest care; it is lucid, logical, impartial, and full of original ideas, as a modern criticism should be.’ [194] Amen to that.
The Meister’s ‘Notes’ provide useful observations on first performances in London of Wagner’s Symphony in C, the Siegfried Idyll, the Kaisermarsch with chorus, the complete Fünf Gedichte (Wesendonck Lieder), and on singing style and staging at home and abroad. At the 1889 Bayreuth Festival, Ellis was received personally by Cosima Wagner:
We cannot, however, close this review of the Bayreuth season without a cordial word of thanks to Madame Wagner for her courtesy to us personally, and for the kind way in which she expressed her complete satisfaction with our London efforts to spread the knowledge of her late husband’s many-sided genius, and for the hospitable manner in which she threw open her salons every Tuesday evening to all whose visits were prompted by any feeling but that of idle curiosity. [195]
An impression of the individual Cosima Wagner received can be seen in the recently discovered signed photo of the balding, mustachio’d, 37-year-old William Ashton Ellis, reproduced in this article.
Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was also in Bayreuth in 1889, attending his first festival. He mentions meeting several individuals closely connected with the London Wagner Society (Charles Dowdeswell, Carl Armbruster, Pauline Cramer) – but not Ellis. [196] But then Shaw did not meet Cosima either, who would never have invited to her salons a man who wrote as Shaw did, after describing a mix-up with the spear business in the second act of Parsifal:
Now if you, my Wagnerian friends, wonder how I can scoff thus at so impressive a celebration, I reply that Wagner is dead, and that the evil of deliberately making the Bayreuth Festival Playhouse a temple of dead traditions, instead of an arena for live impulses, has begun already. It is because I, too, am an enthusiastic Wagnerite that the Bayreuth management cannot deceive me by dressing itself in the skin of the dead lion. [197]
Shaw was definitely of the opposing party with regard to Bayreuth. He was even prepared to promote a British Wagner Society at its expense:
I have in my hands the report of the London branch of the Wagner Society, which I peruse with mingled feelings. It is satisfactory enough that the 52 members of 1884 are now [i.e. 1890] 309; but the balance-sheet is enough to drive any sensible Englishman mad. In German-speaking cities at present Wagner’s operas are paying enormously. In Dresden, for instance, the announcement of an opera by any other composer empties the house. Even the Bayreuth performances were a financial success last year. In this miserable country a man who has seen Die Walküre on the stage is a much greater curiosity than one who has explored the Congo. Clearly, then, the business of an International Wagner Society is to transfer money from the prosperous Wagnerism of Germany to the languishing Wagnerism of Britain. Yet the London Wagner Society actually sent £46:12:6 to Berlin (of which city, London, it appears, is a suburb) out of its income of £271:19s. In return they got sixty-four free tickets for the Bayreuth performances, which were balloted for by gentlemen in a position to spend £20 on a fortnight’s holiday, to the unspeakable edification and Wagnerian enlightenment of the English nation at large. [198]
The same article is valuable for Shaw’s report on how the London Wagner Society actually functioned:
There was no chairman, no discussion, no orderly procedure, no opportunity whatever of raising any question connected with the subject of the evening or with the society. Mr Ellis, the secretary, simply came out; fed us with lecture as if we were a row of animals in the Zoo; and walked off and left us there. [199]
On the other hand, Shaw expressed genuine appreciation of Ellis’s efforts. He dutifully purchased each copy of The Meister, despite being sent review copies, [200] pronouncing it ‘good value for the money’ and ‘good Wagner and good English’: Shaw was even able to use the unexpected epithet ‘really readable’, at least à propos Ellis’s translation of ‘A Pilgrimage to Beethoven’. [201] Shaw wasn’t entirely uncritical, however. ‘I am a member of the Wagner Society’, he wrote, ‘and am therefore ready to roll its log at all times, but I do not think I shall contribute to its journal, the Meister. I can stand a reasonable degree of editing, but not even from the all but omniscient editor of The Star [202] would I bear a series of footnotes contradicting every one of my opinions.’ And ‘Corno di Bassetto’ goes on to give a swingeing parody of ‘the Meisterful method’ – Ellis’s compulsion to insert editorial parentheses even when ostensibly in agreement (‘on the whole’) with the writer:
One Tuesday last a numerous and crowded audience were attracted to St James’s Hall by the announcement that Miss Pauline Cramer would sing Isolde’s death song, that most moving piece of music ever written. (Note by ED. – Surely our most gifted contributor has forgotten Let Erin remember the days of the old, in making this sweeping statement.) It is unquestionably the greatest of Wagner’s works, and is far superior to the compositions of his earlier period. (We agree, on the whole; but would point out that both in his Tannhäuser March and in his well-known William Tell overture, Wagner has attained a more engaging rhythmic emphasis, and, at least, equal sweetness of melody. – ED.) Those who heard Miss Cramer’s performance must have forgotten for the moment all previous experiences of the kind. (Has our critic ever heard Miss Bellwood’s rendering of What cheer, Ria? If so, we can hardly let this statement pass without a protest. – ED.) And so on. [203]
Translation or Travesty?
In its first number for 1891, The Meister announced ‘the commencement of a series of translations of the lengthier of Richard Wagner’s prose-works. The London Branch of the Society has long felt that its duty to the Cause was only half fulfilled until such an undertaking as this was set about; and indeed the primary object of founding “THE MEISTER” was a first attempt at bringing this to pass.’ [204] Members of the branch would receive, free, the 32-page ‘Demy-octavo’ parts, six per year, which, when they had accumulated to book-size, would be bound as such. The zoo-keeper to dole out these chunks of meat singlehandedly would be, of course, William Ashton Ellis.
Ellis explained his intentions in a lecture given to the Musical Association (since 1944 the Royal Musical Association) on 13 December 1892. Earlier translations of Wagner’s prose, in particular the 1856 version of ‘Opera and Drama’, had been more or less deliberate travesties; English versions of Wagner’s libretti had been ‘worthy alone of the immortal Fitzball’ (a further reference comes shortly); and a philosophical appreciation of Wagner had been altogether absent. Ellis gave his audience a physician’s diagnosis of the influences on Wagner of other thinkers (and possibly of other stimulants):
Indeed, it was not the substance of thought that he ever borrowed, but merely its formula, and therefore I think that the simile of a dose of medicine would be far more to the point. When he went to Dr. Heine, he was ordered Iron and Acid; but he found the tonic too bitter, and it set his teeth on edge. He then consulted Dr. Feuerbach, who prescribed him Arsenic; the immediate result was a brilliance of complexion and a glistening of the eye; but he soon discovered that the brilliance was but skin-deep, the eye began to smart, and warning internal pains compelled him to throw aside the medicine. He had not, however, given up the thought of finding a physician who should understand his constitution, and at last he found one in Arthur Schopenhauer, who simply advised him to continue the form of mental exercise he had already discovered for himself, with the addition of an occasional grain of Indian hemp whenever he found the trials of the world too insupportable. [205]
Ellis was aware of what he called Wagner’s ‘fugitive essays’:
[As] usual with the nimble foe, these fractions have been singled out as thorough representatives of the whole. I allude, of course, to ‘Judaism in Music’, to portions of the essay ‘On Conducting’, and to the attacks on Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Hiller, &c. Of these it is better not to enter into any discussion here. […] The only one that I should honestly like to see suppressed – the “Capitulation”. [206]
It was generally thought (not least by Ellis himself) that the first English translation of the notorious ‘Judaism in Music’ was the one that would be included in volume 3 of Richard Wagner's Prose Works in 1894. In fact, an unattributed nine-part translation, probably by the American John Vipon Bridgeman (1819–1889), had begun to appear in the Musical World only six weeks after Wagner’s expanded revision was published in March 1869. Though Ellis had denigrated the Musical World’s (mis)translation of ‘Opera and Drama’, he seems to have missed this example. [207] In any event, Ellis now turned to the mainstream essays, and went on to compare ‘The Artwork of the Future’ – that is, his own translation of ‘Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft’ – with Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture, quoting without compunction several lengthy purple passages, more suggestive of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, from his own Prose Works translation. There are many examples to be mocked of Ellis-speak in print, but this would have been Ellis-speak in viva voce, without the saving grace of ironic mediation by Teufelsdröckh’s ‘editor’:
There sate she then, the lonely sullen sister [Poetry], behind her reeking lamp in the gloom of her silent chamber, – a female Faust, who, across the dust and mildew of her books, from the everlasting rack of fancies and of theories, yearned to step forth into actual life; with flesh and bone, and spick and span, to stand and go mid real men, a genuine human being. […] [Music] must willy-nilly twist and turn the empty cobweb, which none but the nimble play-seamstress herself can plait into a tissue: and there she chirps and twitters, as in the French confectionery-operas, until at last her peevish breath gives out.
Perhaps it was out of a degree of embarrassment, mingled with respect for the sheer audacity of Ellis’s style, that the contributors to the Musical Association’s discussion afterwards (C.A. Barry in the chair) dwelt on Wagner’s views on his contemporaries’ music (Brahms in particular), rather – to Ellis’s evident annoyance – than on the substance of his prose. [208] The discussion included Bernard Shaw and a Mr Newman, who was probably not Ernest but the Queen’s Hall impresario Robert Newman (1858–1926), and who would suggest the idea of prom concerts to Henry Wood the following year. (At this time Ernest Newman (1868–1959) was still in the banking profession and had barely begun his music critic’s career.) [209]
Ellis knew that translation itself was something that could never be brought to perfection. In the second volume of The Meister in 1889 he had serialised a translation of ‘Religion and Art’. Eight years later, in re-translating the essay for the Prose Works, he professed astonishment that he had earlier had ‘the temerity to storm a work whose peculiarities of style demand at least a long and close acquaintance with the master’s mode of thought, to say nothing of a systematic pursuit of his ideal through all the essays which that treatise crowns’. [210] But The Meister’s version of ‘Religion and Art’ is far fresher and less ponderous than the ‘official’ Prose Works translation. The paradox is that the harder Ellis worked at faithfulness through a ‘systematic pursuit’ of the ideal, the less he was able to render it idiomatically in English. It may be another paradox that the more we sense we might actually share Ellis’s apprehension of an unattainable ‘ideal’ in Wagner, the more we might forgive him his idiosyncrasies and occasional incoherence.
The flimsy brown-paper-covered parts of the first volume of Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, annual subscription for the six annual parts 5s. to the public but ‘Issued Gratis to Members of the Wagner Society’, were received by members during 1891 and 1892. On each back cover an advertisement for Steinway Pianofortes carried an endorsement – ‘A Beethoven Sonata, a Bach Chromatic Fantasie, can only be fully appreciated when rendered upon one of your pianofortes’ – purporting to be from the Master himself. The Times noticed the pamphlets on 27 March 1891:
WAGNER’S PROSE WORKS. – The first instalment of a complete edition of the prose works of Richard Wagner, translated by W. Ashton Ellis, is issued for the Wagner Society by Messrs. Kegan Paul and Co. Six parts are promised in the year, and the first contains an admirable version of the short autobiographic sketch, and the introduction and a portion of the pamphlet ‘Die Kunst und die Revolution’. The serial publication of the composer’s works should be welcomed by all who care for artistic progress, and even those who are familiar with ordinary German need not despise the help of an English version, since Wagner’s style abounds in difficulties of no usual kind.
The first bound volume of Richard Wagner’s Prose Works appeared in the bookshops in January 1893. Months later the Bayreuther Blätter paid Ellis the compliment of publishing his ‘Vorwort’, that is, his ‘Translator’s Preface’ dated December 1892, in faithful German and introduced by Hans von Wolzogen, under the heading ‘Richard Wagner’s (prosaische) Schriften, in das Englische übertragen durch Mr. William Ashton Ellis’. [211]
During this time Ellis continued to edit The Meister, with no apparent loss of energy. In the ‘Notes’ to the May 1891 number, he commented on the recent production of Tannhäuser at Covent Garden with Emma Albani (1843–1930) in the role of Elisabeth, with a foreshadowing of future dramaturgical debates: ‘Who, for instance, can patiently tolerate a “Venus” attired in the ball-room costume of the nineteenth century, and thereby impressing on the opening scene a character of “modern”-ness which robs it of all sublimity, even if it do no worse? High heels do not a goddess make!’ [212] The Meister regularly focused its attention on a work (Tannhäuser in this case) that was making its Bayreuth debut that year, though Ellis was later to deplore mugging-up on Wagner in advance:
In 1901, wandering up and down a corridor-train on the way from Cologne to Frankfort, I came across a large ‘personally-conducted’ party of Anglo-Saxons of uncertain age; each pair of eyes, male or female (mostly female), was bent on the study of a popular guide-book to the RING, neglecting what of natural charm the factory-chimneys have spared to the banks of the Rhine; and I saw the young ‘personal conductor’ (who doubtless knew everything, from the pyramid of Cheops to the geysers of the Yellowstone) implored at least once to throw light on some mythical problem. […] My own advice is: let no one rack his head with interpretations, whether of Wagner’s music or his poem, until after he has seen the actual drama on the stage […]; then the ‘motive-book’ and the ‘interpretation’ may stand him in good stead – provided always that he declines pointblank to be bound by the explanations or opinions of the learned or unlearned author (including myself), but determines to ‘prove all things’ on his own account. [213]
The next number of The Meister reported in glowing terms the ‘delightful concert’ given by the London Wagner Society’s president, Lord Dysart, on Wagner’s birthday. According to Ellis, Dysart’s home, Ham House on the Thames opposite Twickenham, ‘and the pastoral surroundings gave the performance somewhat of the “echt” Franconian flavour, which was helped out by the wein-kraut and leberwurst which figured among the other dainties of the refreshment tent’. [214] Shaw’s version of the event is more droll: ‘Lord Dysart did what a man could: he annihilated the very memory of the Theatre Restaurant by a marquee in which I took my very sober Wagnerian meal of brown bread and lemonade next to disciples who were trying reckless experiments with sauerkraut and rum custard.’ And Shaw returned to his hobbyhorse theme: ‘I strongly urge Lord Dysart to secede from the useless London branch of the German Wagner Society, and form a really important English society with the object of building a Wagner Theatre within ten minutes’ walk of his own door.’ [215] Lord Dysart was shortly to resign as president of the London Wagner Society, but for less than patriotic reasons.
Whether Ellis knew as much of Shaw’s activities as Shaw did of his seems doubtful. However, in the last number of The Meister for 1891 Ellis squeezed into his ‘Notes’ a recommendation to his readers of the recently published Quintessence of Ibsenism, congratulating Shaw:
on the lucidity and boldness of his exposition, though it goes without saying that the analysis is not intended for Mr. Gilbert’s ‘young lady of fifteen’ […] but it would be beside our present purpose, and beyond our limits, to do more than thank Mr. Shaw for the following, among other references to Wagner: ‘Tannhäuser’s passion for Venus is a development of the humdrum fondness of the bourgeois Jack for his Jill’; ‘When Blake told men that through excess they would learn moderation, he knew that the way for the present lay through the Venusberg’. [216]
This hardly repaid the compliment Shaw frequently paid to Ellis, but perhaps Shaw was happy with at least a little puff of wind in a stale quarter. To a different end, Ernest Newman was later to cite another of Shaw’s half-dozen references to Wagner in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, to the effect that only when man follows ‘that inner natural necessity which is the only true necessity’:
‘Then will he first become a living man, who now is a mere wheel in the mechanism of this or that Religion, Nationality, or State.’ Wagner did not know, and Mr. Shaw knows but will not tell, that any amount of following ‘natural inner necessity’ will not alter the constitution of things. [217]
Newman’s quotation came from the end of Shaw’s closing appendix to the 1891 first edition. That passage did not survive into later expanded editions, but Newman would hardly have dissented from one of Shaw’s more lasting remarks in the book, which he might have applied to Ellis:
Those who give up Materialism whilst clinging to rationalism generally either relapse into abject submission to the most paternal of the Churches, or are caught by the attempts, constantly renewed, of mystics to found a new faith by rationalizing on the hollowness of materialism. The hollowness has nothing in it; and if you have come to grief as a materialist by reasoning about something, you are not likely, as a mystic, to improve matters by reasoning about nothing. [218]
The conflict between the metaphysical and the rationalist view of Wagner in England was first explored by Anne Dzamba Sessa. More on Ellis and Newman will be said shortly.
Looking Forward and Back
By 1892 Ellis’s supremacy in English Wagnerism was unchallenged. As the Musical Times noted, he became a lecturing authority on the subject. On 23 February and 30 March 1892 he gave lectures on ‘Richard Wagner’s “Art-work of the Future”’ at Trinity College, London. The text of the lecture has not survived, but from the report on it in the Musical Times it seems Ellis managed to work in at least one contemporary reference:
If Wagner had been an Englishman or an American he would probably have set forth his scheme [for the ‘art-work of the future’] as Mr. Bellamy had done in ‘Looking Back’; but, being a German, and the German mind inclining to the philosophical form, Wagner naturally chose the latter method. It was, however, interesting to notice the great similarity which existed between the theories advanced in ‘Looking Back’ and the art-work of the future; both works were based on the idea of an association of men in which individualism should have free play. [219]
In the discussion following this lecture, reported the Musical Times, ‘Mr. Ashton [sic] said that Wagner had directed that his autobiography should not be published until thirty years after his death, and that therefore his son, Mr. Siegfried Wagner, who was the possessor of the MS., would not publish it for another twenty years.’ Ellis must have had information to this effect from Wahnfried. The autobiography would be released, as he predicted, in 1911. However, its ‘look back’ on the Wagnerian nineteenth century came too late for Ellis, who by then had already made his contribution to Wagner’s twentieth-century posterity.
A highly partisan review from Würzburg of Cyrill Kistler’s Kunihild in the Musical Times for 1 April 1893, though by-lined ‘from our ‘Special Correspondent’, was signed at the end ‘W. A.-E.’. [220] The convention of unsigned reviews was now generally on the wane, and William Ashton Ellis had begun to put his name to articles in The Meister. The first attributed article was ‘From Fitzball to Wagner’, a lively and entertaining account of his research into the Fitzball melodrama about the Flying Dutchman which Heine may or may not have seen at the Adelphi Theatre in 1827. [221] Another article written with some feeling is his tribute ‘In Honour of Julius Cyriax’, which records visits to Bayreuth (and Wahnfried) with one of the founders of the London Wagner Society. It was Cyriax who had introduced Ellis to the neo-Wagnerian composer Cyrill Kistler (1848–1907). Kistler is the only post-Wagnerian composer for whom Ellis displayed any enthusiasm. Hubert Parry’s fourth symphony (presented by Hans Richter in its original form) gets a paragraph in The Meister in July 1889 (‘it does not fall far short of those by Brahms’), but probably mainly because Parry was Dannreuther’s pupil and a member of the London Wagner Society. The February 1891 issue hopes that the run of Ivanhoe (about to open) ‘may be both long and successful’, even though the editor ‘cannot speak from knowledge of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music’. In July 1891 the journal finds Bruckner’s third symphony to be ‘a work which certainly cannot be fathomed in one hearing’, and the Brahms Deutsches Requiem one which ‘we hope never to be called upon to hear […] again.’ The August 1893 issue is dismissive of Mahler (as a conductor) who ‘by no means great, was yet capable and vigorous’. Grieg is taken to task in the February 1894 issue for daring to defend Schumann against criticism in the Bayreuther Blätter. ‘The young Scotch composer, Hamish M’Cunn’ is mentioned approvingly in the November number, inasmuch as he was the accompanist at the Wagner Society’s dinner-recital to welcome Siegfried Wagner to London. Brahms is cited approvingly in volume 4 of the Life of Richard Wagner, but only when he praises Wagner as ‘one of the clearest heads that ever came into the world’. [222] For Richard Strauss one needs to ferret out a small-print square-bracketed parenthesis in volume 5 of the Life where Ellis invokes Ein Heldenleben as a taunt to J.W. Davison’s conservatism. [223] In contrast to all these, in The Meister of July 1892 Ellis went on record to risk being ‘very much mistaken if Herr Kistler’s genius is not soon recognised as at least equal to that of any living composer’.
‘Though in no sense a “pupil” of Wagner’s’, Ellis informs us, ‘Kistler had spent some time at Bayreuth on various occasions, and had been there employed, in 1882, upon the correcting of the solo parts of Parsifal.’ The scoring of Kunihild ‘was completed in February 1883, on the very day of Wagner’s death’. Between the first and second Würzburg performances of Kunihild, Ellis had been invited to Kistler’s home in Kissingen, and in The Meister for May 1893, he depicts ‘the composer in the bosom of his family’. Noting that Kistler ‘is to a great extent his own publisher now, whereby there hangs a tale of rebellion against the middle-man’, Ellis completes the cosy picture ‘by the return from school of an animated but best-behaved boy of nine years old, who kisses your hand in that pretty fashion which might well be imported into England, to replace our modern schoolboy’s hands-in-pockets and “How d’ do, old chap!” This youngster is christened “Kunibert” after the hero of his father’s “opera”.’ Ellis makes no gulp here, but goes on serenely to inform us ‘from my own observation and as a contribution to a subject lately broached in London literary circles, that Kistler generally takes an hour or so’s siesta after the midday meal’. In recommending him to ‘Wagnerians, and others too – for I am sure that this music will appeal to an unsectarian spirit’, Ellis concludes: ‘As his catalogue is not yet printed, I hardly know the name or value of more than one or two of [Kistler’s works]; but I personally have a great liking for the “Vorspiel” to Act III of Kunihild, for his “Trauermusik” (Richard Wagner), his “Trauerklänge” (Franz Witt), – price 1s. 6d. each – as pianoforte solos, and his “Chromatische Walzer” from Eulenspiegel, as pianoforte duet (3s.)’ [224] With such persuasive arguments, and as editor of the programme books for Alfred Schulz-Curtius’ ‘Grand Wagner Concerts’ at the Queen’s Hall between 22 May 1894 and 16 June 1898, it was perhaps Ellis who induced Henry Wood to include Kistler’s ‘Chromatic Concert Valses from the Opera Eulenspiegel’, the Kunihild Act III prelude, and the ‘Festklänge’ march in the programme of the first Promenade concerts in August and September 1895. [225]
Otherwise Ellis was indeed ‘very much mistaken’ about Kistler. His advocacy failed to secure Kistler’s ‘genius’ a lasting place in post-Wagnerian posterity. Reviewing the Promenade concert, The Times remarked that ‘of the numerous imitators of Wagner [Kistler] is considered by some critics as the most competent to wield the bow of Ulysses. The piece performed on Saturday scarcely confirms that opinion. It is cast in the form of a set of waltzes, cleverly scored but containing very little actual originality.’ [226] J.A. Fuller Maitland (1856–1936), trying hard to be fair to Kistler (and to Ellis) at around the same time, had this to say:
Little more than a year after the death of Wagner there was brought out at Sondershausen, on March 20, 1883 [recte 1884], a three-act opera, Kunihild und der Brautritt auf Kynast, in which a certain section of the Wagnerian party discerned a worthy successor to the compositions of the master himself. […] So far as Kistler is to be judged by works already brought out, including many pieces of dance-music, no doubt written for the fashionable world of the watering-place, and several musicianly marches (notably one on the death of Wagner, in which the themes of Beethoven’s march in A flat minor, and of Siegfried’s death-march, are combined with good effect), the position claimed for him by a small band of admirers seems hardly justified. […] The composer lives a quiet life, in surroundings excellently adapted to the production of worthy works of art. In person he is described, in a recent number of The Meister (to which the reader may be referred for further information), as about 5ft. 10in. in height, ‘large-boned, slightly stooping with strongly-marked and regular features, keen dark eyes, rhetorical lips, and a forehead and shock of hair like Beethoven’s’. A portrait prefixed to [Kistler’s third opera] Baldur’s Tod bears this out, though it does not throw much light on the epithet ‘rhetorical’. [227]
Possibly at Ellis’s urging, Kistler was to publish some of the amateur compositions of Julius Cyriax. Ellis says he first met Cyriax ‘if I remember aright, in 1882, the Parsifal year […]. Every Festspiel since then has brought us more or less together, especially in latter years, affording food for thought in London.’ [228] Ellis’s applications for leave from the Western Dispensary (which were almost invariably granted by the Committee of Management), followed by notices in The Meister, give good indication of his actual pilgrimages to Bayreuth. He himself informs us he wasn’t at the Ring festival in 1876. On 19 July 1882 he was granted five weeks leave (the Western Dispensary had to find six guineas to engage a locum), so he could have witnessed the premiere performances of Parsifal – only, if he had been there with Cyriax, he would surely have said so unequivocally (and he had made the same application for leave at exactly the same time the year before). In 1883, as we have seen, he took three weeks leave in April to genuflect at the Palazzo Vendramin, and no further leave was requested or taken for the summer of that year. On 16 July 1884 Ellis was granted three weeks leave and, as said, it was almost certainly at that year’s festival that he first encountered Mathilde Wesendonck. Ellis took three weeks leave from Friday 22 May 1885 (surely only coincidentally Wagner’s birthday) but his father’s illness and death in July used up a further month’s leave ‘on the usual terms’: in any case there was no festival in 1885. The next year Ellis was granted a month’s leave from the dispensary on 20 July, and though there is no corroboration most likely he was in Bayreuth for Parsifal and the new Tristan. Bayreuth had another ‘rest year’ in 1887, but Ellis had already resigned from the Western Dispensary in March to follow theosophical imperatives. In 1888 Ellis may have been one of nearly a thousand Londoners who bought tickets at Chappell’s for Parsifal and Meistersinger at that year’s festival, but the lengthy review in the November issue of The Meister (though it bears some stylistic hallmarks, and was more enthusiastic about Meistersinger than Parsifal) was anonymous. In 1889, as he tells us outright, he was received by Cosima Wagner during the festival (Parsifal, Tristan, Meistersinger). There was no festival in 1890; but both The Meister and the Bayreuther Blätter record Ellis’s enthusiasm for Cosima’s 1891 production of Tannhäuser which he saw on 30 July and 2 August. And in the November 1892 issue of The Meister he poignantly described how Cyriax, already ill at what was to be his last festival, recovered one evening from what was obviously a coronary attack following a reception at Wahnfried. [229]
Julius Cyriax, though, had been at Bayreuth in the historic years 1876 and 1882, and had become personally acquainted with Wagner himself during his conducting visit to London in 1877, when Edward Dannreuther was the celebrity’s host. Wagner’s medical condition had been much on his mind during that time. Dannreuther took him to Critchetts, the opticians, where astigmatism was diagnosed, and noted that Wagner was also troubled with dyspepsia. [230] It’s quite conceivable that Dannreuther would then have referred Wagner to a German-speaking and musically minded pharmacist for medication, since the composer’s own English was poor. Since 1876 Julius Theodor Friedrich Cyriax (1840–1892) had been a partner in the firm of Burgoyne, Burbidges, Cyriax & Farries, ‘wholesale & export druggists & manufacturing chemists’ of 16 Coleman Street, London E.C. [231] He was naturalised, as Julius Frederick Theodore Cyriax, on 24 November 1884. [232]
The following year Cyriax, with his wife Anna, was welcomed by the Wagners in Bayreuth. Cosima Wagner’s diary entry for 20 June 1878 records that ‘Friend C[yriax] says R. is looking very well, and during our walk [in the woods near Bayreuth] he does indeed behave as if he were the youngest among us.’ Julius is mentioned frequently in Cosima’s diaries as ‘friend Cyriax’, and the rejuvenating effects of his letters and presents were always appreciated in Wahnfried: ‘Herr Cyriax sends all kinds of things; R.: “I like people who make presents to my wife, but who are in fact just going along with my secret intentions!”’ (5 July 1878).
Later in 1878 Cyriax began to make a photographic collection of places, particularly in London, associated with Wagner. On 10 October Cosima notes that ‘friend Cyriax writes to say he has discovered the Horseshoe Tavern! A 70-year-old house, the only one still standing, in the City [of London]!’ Ellis tells us that in fact Cyriax had been collecting a whole series of photographs for a special purpose:
I now learn through Herr Glasenapp that the ‘London friend’ – the late Julius Cyriax, a beloved friend of so many of us till death cut him down in September 1892 – caused the original photographs [of Wagner’s London residences during his visits in 1839, 1855 and 1877] to be taken in the spring of 1879 for a collection destined by Frau Wagner as a birthday-gift to her husband. [233]
A typical entry in Cosima’s diary is that for 17 July 1879, when she records ‘a cheerful meal with our friends Levi and Cyriax, who has just arrived from London. The latter tells us of Richter’s “triumphs” as a conductor in London, and both speak with enthusiasm of the Comédie Fr[ancaise]. Herr Cyriax has brought me a picture of the house in which R. stayed in Boulogne!’ Glasenapp, in an endnote to the first volume of his biography, told the story of how Cyriax’s researches into historical Wagner locations later gained him (Cyriax) a curious memento of Wagner’s birthplace in Leipzig, after its demolition in 1885:
Nur ein einzelner Theil des altehrwürdigen Hauses im Brühl ist noch heute erhalten, aber nicht mehr in Leipzig, sondern in London. Es ist die alte, historisch echte Thür, welche aus (Friedrich) Wagners Wohnzimmer in den Alkoven (resp. die Schlafkammer und das Geburtszimmer Richard Wagner’s) führte, und durch die der kleine Richard täglich vielmals gelaufen.’ Sie wurde bei der Abtragung des Hauses durch einen Leipziger angekauft und, mit beigefügtem Authentizitäts-Zeugnis, als ein Geschenk eigenthümlicher Art, einem der hochherzigsten, in Wagners Sache thätigsten Londoner Freunde, dem verewigten Julius Cyriax, zugesandt, der sie einem eigens dazu konstruirten Schrank zur Aufbewahrung seiner Wagnerianischen Heiligthümer in gleicher Funktion (als Thür nämlich!) einverleibte, und bei dessen Nachkommen diese seltsamste Reliquie für alle Zeiten einer pietätvollen Hochhaltung gewiß ist. [234]
Ellis must already have had the tale from Cyriax, for he translates (or, rather, paraphrases) Glasenapp quite prosaically:
The door leading from [Richard Wagner’s father] Friedrich Wagner’s living-room into the bedroom where Richard was born is now in London, having been presented by the Leipzig purchaser to the late Julius Cyriax, the well-beloved Secretary, and thereafter Treasurer, of the London Wagner Society; this precious relic, through which the little Richard must so often have passed, Mr Cyriax had fitted to a cabinet for the preservation of his other Wagner treasures. [235]
Wagner rewarded Cyriax for his friendship, not least by agreeing to become godfather (a relationship to have some significance for Ellis in his own childless life) to Cyriax’s second daughter named after the composer: ‘In the morning’, Cosima recorded on 3 June 1879, ‘he writes to friend Cyriax with a little verse for his small godchild: “that Richardis Cyriax may bloom and wax” was all he told me of it.’ Eva Richardis Cyriax had been born on 21 November 1878. [236]
Though there is no trace of rancour, Ellis must have envied Cyriax’s popularity at Wahnfried during Wagner’s lifetime, something he himself had never enjoyed (nor, be it said, sought). Certainly Wagner had found Cyriax a source of lively humour, a commodity which Cosima and Chamberlain – not themselves renowned for levity – were later unable to detect in Ellis. In part this was because Cyriax was disarmingly modest about great art, preferring to dwell on quite mundane and personal topics. Wagner obviously relished this light relief. Cosima records that he teased Cyriax about his pharmaceutical enterprise during Julius’s visit to Bayreuth on 13 August 1881: ‘In the evening our friend Cyriax; in his cheerful, frank way R. asks him about his income from his business, and thinks it rather small.’ In fact the firm, despite Wagner’s mockery, was quite enterprising, and not only in London. On 5 January 1882, for example, William Copeland, founder of the Spring Valley (now Kirin) Brewery in Yokohama, ordered from it a quantity of salicylic acid as a beer preservative ‘sufficient for 100 Hogsheads’, adding in a postscript, ‘If you have room please also put in ½ Doz. bottles of the best Hair Restorer you know’. [237] It’s possible that Wagner’s jocular friendship with Cyriax was his way of appreciating something quite personal: I understand from Cyriax’s descendants that the firm supplied preparations for the composer’s haemorrhoids.
Ellis, by contrast with Cyriax, knew he had few capitalist credentials to boast of or to be derided for, even gently. He was not that sort of materialist, and one suspects that Wagner would have found Ellis’s theosophical earnestness rather irksome. It’s impossible to imagine that Ellis could have entertained Wahnfried as when on 16 December 1881 Cosima recorded: ‘A moment of amusement is occasioned by a postcard from Cyriax, from whom I had ordered a new kind of umbrella which had been recommended by the [Illustrierte Zeitung] and which R. thought good; Cyriax tells us it was a joke in a humorous journal, which the Ill.Z. took seriously!’ Only two days before he died, Wagner referred indirectly but jokingly to Julius, as Cosima noted in her diary for 11 February 1883: ‘Around noon [Wagner] came into my room. “I have a letter from Cyriax.” “Is there anything in it?” “You’ll soon see.” When I have dried my hands, I look: it is a scherzo theme, written down on an envelope from Cyriax – he then plays it on his piano.’ The Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis refers to a musical sketch on an envelope from Cyriax postmarked London, 14 March 1879. [238] Cosima’s diary entry for 25 March that year records that during one of those occasions when Wagner was wont to lark about there came to him [‘es fallt ihm aber, wie er sagt, allerhand Allotria ein’] among other things ‘a scherzo theme for a symphony’. It would appear that just before his death Wagner rediscovered (rather than had just received) the envelope from Julius Cyriax on which he had sketched the scherzo theme nearly four years before. Ellis could only have envied Cyriax this easy ‘back-of-an-envelope’ personal relationship with Wagner. But Cyriax was doubtless instrumental in depicting vividly for Ellis the human side of the genius. His obituary tribute in The Meister reveals the genuine grief the 40-year-old Ellis felt when Cyriax died suddenly aged only 52.
Though their own relationship was much stiffer than Cyriax’s and Richard Wagner’s, in his own way Ellis might have contributed towards Siegfried Wagner’s reflection in later years on the affinity of medicine and music. Of all the professions represented in the audience at Bayreuth, Siegfried was to note, medicine was foremost. In the course of his profession the physician was necessarily confronted with so much human suffering that ‘without some mediation the psyche of such a person would succumb to pessimism; that mediation is the most redemptive of all arts – music!’ Siegfried’s mind was much expanded in February to June 1892 by travel to the Far East aboard the British ship Wakefield in the company of the young English composer Clement Harris (1871–97). In his published memoirs he wrote that he regarded the English (long before he knew he would marry one) as ‘congenial and full of humour and tact’ on the personal, if not the political, level. He also regarded ‘Hyperwagnerianer’ – ‘people who, from dawn till dusk, deliver quotations from my father’s works’ – as friends more dangerous than enemies. He seems not to have extended this caution, however, to the London Wagner Society whose main energy, he thought, was ‘directed towards the propagation of the Collected Writings of my father’. [239] A few months before he set sail, Siegfried had been introduced to Ellis by Cyriax. [240] They met again in London, when Ellis chaired a London Wagner Society reception for Siegfried on 2 November 1894. [241] In 1896 Ellis wrote to The Times among other things to defend Siegfried against the accusation that he had been selected as one of the conductors of the Ring at Bayreuth that year simply for ‘the gratification of Mme. Wagner’s maternal feelings’:
THE BAYREUTH FESTIVAL. – Mr. W. Ashton Ellis writes to us from Bayreuth, under date August 16, in reply to the letter from Mr. F. Jameson, which appeared in our issue of the 11th inst. Mr. Ellis denies that he ‘rebuked’ our musical critic for his criticism of the stage-business in connexion with Wotan’s sword, and says he merely pointed out that this ‘innovation’, as it was called, ‘was made by Richard Wagner himself in 1876’, and has been retained at Bayreuth ever since. Mr. Ellis further complains that Mr. Jameson misrepresented him in saying that he quoted Herr Siegfried Wagner as being among the authorities on the Bayreuth performances of 1876; and points out that Herr Siegfried Wagner’s name was not mentioned by him in the course of his first letter, published on August 1. With reference to Mr. Jameson’s remarks upon Herr Siegfried Wagner as conductor, Mr. Ellis says: – ‘The general consensus of opinion among the Bayreuth visitors has not only endorsed the action of the management in affording Herr Siegfried an opportunity of convincing the world of his ability, but has greeted the accomplished fact as a warrant of the permanence of the Bayreuth Theatre’s artistic prosperity. Not only were the calls for “Siegfried Wagner” at the close of Götterdämmerung both many and prolonged, but a deputation from the orchestra itself waited upon Frau Wagner the next day, begging her to allow him to conduct the next – i.e., the fifth and last, the present cycle – a request with which she, of course, could not comply, as Dr. Richter was returning for the purpose. I have only further to point out that there never was a “Patronat Verein” in authority over the Bayreuth Theatre; that the body of voluntary collectors of funds once styled the “Patronat Verein” has long since ceased to exist; and, finally, that the business affairs of the theatre are conducted by a “Verwaltungs[r]ath” presided over by Herr Adolf von Gross, the Bayreuth banker. To Herr Gross should Mr. Jameson address his animadversions on the “honesty” of a management that offers its performances to the public at something like 25 per cent below cost price; but it may be as well for me to inform your general readers that the Bayreuth authorities have never adopted the policy of announcing a list of performers, whether chefs d’orchestre or singers, before offering their seats to the public – the announcement that certain works would be performed there has sufficed for the vast majority of applicants.’ [242]
After this little more is known of their acquaintance, but in 1898 the authorised English translation for the libretto of Siegfried Wagner’s first and most successful opera Der Bärenhäuter was provided by William Ashton Ellis.
The Praeger Affair
Shaw reported that when he heard Ellis ‘confront’ the Musical Association on 13 December 1892 with that lecture on Wagner’s prose, he (Shaw) had ‘looked round for the old gang (if I may use that convenient political term without offence), and looked in vain. […] The enemy was chapfallen and speechless – that is, if the enemy was present; but I think he had stayed away. At any rate, Mr Ellis’s party had the discussion all to themselves.’ [243] Mr Ellis, moreover, was engaged in refining his party’s ideology.
The last quarterly number of The Meister for 1891 carried an unattributed notice: ‘By the death of Ferdinand Praeger we have lost a faithful member of the Society, Wagner’s earliest friend in London, and a composer whose modesty debarred his fame.’ [244] Fifteen years later, Ellis owned that he had been the author of that not inelegant epitaph. It had been, however, merely a glib use of the editorial voice: ‘In those days I could only speak of [Praeger] from hearsay, but all my friends in the Society had nothing save kind words to say about the aged man.’ [245] Since at least 1874 Praeger had been retailing his acquaintance with Wagner, as the London Correspondent of the Manchester Guardian reported:
To-night […] I heard a defence of the composer from one who is not only nominally but really his friend, Herr Ferdinand Praeger, a gentlemen who stated it to be his boast that every time he spends his holidays with Wagner, he always leaves him more and more amazed at the wonderful combination of excellences he displays. Herr Praeger’s lecture was delivered in the rooms of the Society of Arts, before a crowded audience; but, unfortunately, he was only audible to those near to him, and thus, like Herr [Ernst] Pauer, whose lectures are always marred by their delivery, he would have done well to secure the aid of an English reader. He exalts Wagner to the highest place as a musician, poet, and philosopher; and he even goes further, and predicts the complete triumph of his works in England when they become known. […] But this, I fancy, is an opinion which few musical readers will share. As, however, I have no wish to break a lance with the lecturer, I will simply state his view and give him the credit he highly deserves of being a friend indeed if not a friend in need to the much-discussed composer. As a whole his paper was well received, but one of his countrymen afterwards rose and strongly protested against the undue adulation of Wagner. On Friday night, by the way, Wagner will be as much in the ascendant in the concert-room as he was to-night in the lecture-room, the programme of the Wagner Society’s concert at St. James’s Hall being nearly filled with his music. [246]
Like his friends, Ellis had eagerly awaited Praeger’s published reminiscences of Wagner, even though the old man, strangely, had never availed himself of the opportunity to contribute anything to The Meister. When those reminiscences were unveiled to, as Ellis put it, ‘a questioning world’, they amounted to ‘one of the bitterest disappointments I ever experienced, since the most random dip into the book revealed its worthlessness as history’. [247] At the time he wrote to Cyriax, not altogether unsympathetically:
Poor Praeger! I wish he had never written that terrible ‘Wagner as I knew him’. The ‘candid (& rather short-viewed) friend’, is the worst of foes! Also the book wants thorough revising for mistakes of all kinds (proper names are all to pieces! – but that is the least offence. The Wagners, & especially good Madame Wesendonck, whom I know and respect, will be furious! [248]
Praeger had died the previous September, ‘after a long and painful illness’ according to his obituary in The Times of 3 September 1891. The posthumous publication of his Richard Wagner as I Knew Him came in February 1892. Reference is sometimes made (including in the current entry on Praeger in Grove) to its being first published in 1885. This is unlikely. Though Praeger had dated the dedication of his book to Lord Dysart 15 June 1885, in the spring of 1892 C.A. Barry expressed regret that the author ‘did not live to “see his book through the press”’, and Ellis ‘that Mr Praeger’s work was not published before his own decease’. [249] Praeger’s book cheated Ellis on three counts: it could lay claim to personal acquaintance with Richard Wagner; it became the first English-language biography of Wagner; and it reached publication a full year before Ellis’s most substantial public contribution so far, the book edition of the Prose Works vol. 1. In fact, during the festival of 1892 Praeger’s book appeared on the Bayreuth bookstalls in two editions, English and German, whose discrepancy proved to be the key to the flaws of both:
In a conversation on this matter with the editor of the Bayreuther Blätter, Freiherr Hans von Wolzogen (who, of course, had at once noticed it himself), asked me to write a fairly long review of the German version, for publication in that paper later on. At the same time I made the acquaintance of Mr Houston S. Chamberlain, an English resident in Vienna, who has given the German world some of the best essays yet written on the subject of Richard Wagner. He promised to render into German my forthcoming contribution. To cut a long story short, this culminated in a triple alliance, and from his own, from mine, and from Wolzogen’s notes and criticisms Mr Chamberlain constructed an essay of forty pages, small type, occupying the whole of the July number of the Bayreuther Blätter for 1893. [250]
Few have since disputed that Ellis and Chamberlain put Praeger’s factual errors to right, but the vehemence and obsessiveness of Ellis’s vendetta, though frequently remarked on, has hardly been explained. Ellis himself probably revealed the reason when he recorded how in a ‘superior’ way the Musical News of 29 July 1892 had, in its words, taken ‘leave to express an opinion that Praeger’s account of the doings of Wagner, with whom he had an intimate acquaintance, are much more likely to receive general acceptance, than the opinions of a writer whose knowledge of Wagner is second-hand and posthumous’. [251]
The sneer ‘second-hand and posthumous’ would have wounded Ellis. Ellis had always been conscious of being a British-born Wagnerite, standing ‘second-hand and posthumous’ to those fortunate others such as Edward Dannreuther and Julius Cyriax, and of course Ferdinard Praeger, whose age and German origins did allow them to have that first-hand ‘intimate acquaintance’ with the composer. Ellis knew that Dannreuther and Cyriax had given Wagnerian Christian names to some of their children; but when he refers to Praeger’s bestowing the full name of Richard Wagner Charles Henry Praeger on Wagner’s godson in July 1855, he comments that ‘it was almost tempting Providence’. (Ellis may not have known that in 1871 the Praegers had a daughter christened Brunhilde [sic].) [252] Childless himself, and unrelated personally to Wagner through language, nationhood or family, but bolstered by the theosophical convictions of his youth, Ellis pursued an affinity which for him transcended earth-bound biological connections.
Within four months of Praeger’s (English) book being published, Ellis fired off a public riposte in the form of a 72-page booklet entitled 1849: A Vindication. This curiosity (still to be found on Foyle’s shelves in the early 1970s, re-priced decimally at ‘£0.18’) was the first – and only – of a projected series of ‘Wagner Sketches’ intended to appear when ‘in following up some one particular track in the career of this extraordinary genius, one suddenly comes upon a scene so complex in its features, or so vivid in its colouring, that one cannot resist the impulse to out with brush and pencil and draft a hasty Sketch before the picture fades’. [253] In the ‘Notes’ for July 1892 the editor of The Meister coyly mentioned that
We have received from Messrs Kegan Paul a small volume entitled ‘1849: A VINDICATION’, by Wm. Ashton Ellis. We seem to know the author’s name; but he must accept our sincere apologies if we decline to review his work, for personal reasons. We may state, however, that its price is 2s. (bound in cloth 2s.6d.) and that the writer informs us that he may, in time, follow up this triolet of ‘WAGNER-SKETCHES’ by similar doses. He will have to get some one else to criticise them, for we absolutely refuse. [254]
Bernard Shaw accepted the obvious hint. Having reviewed Praeger’s book favourably when it appeared (‘a more vivid and convincing portrait than Praeger’s was never painted in words’), he typically proposed a common-sense solution when he found he was just as positive about Ellis’s rebuttal of its account of Wagner’s involvement in the Dresden insurrection: The Vindication should, he said, ‘be bound up with every library copy of the late Ferdinand Praeger’s very entertaining ”Wagner as I knew him”’. [255]
Nonetheless Shaw could not avoid crowning Ellis with the undisputed laurel: English Wagnerians ‘already owe more to [Ellis] than to any other man, except perhaps Mr Dannreuther. And when Mr Ellis’s translation of Wagner’s prose works, which has now reached the 1851 ‘Mittheilung an meine Freunde’, is complete, even Mr Dannreuther’s claims must give way to those of the editor of The Meister.’ [256] Recognition did not placate Ellis. The vendetta against the late Ferdinand Praeger continued in The Meister, where Ellis decided ‘to discard for the nonce the editorial “we” and criticise in propria persona’. [257]
In March 1895 Breitkopf & Härtel, the publishers of the German version of Praeger’s book, confirmed their withdrawal of it after Chamberlain produced clear evidence of Praeger’s tamperings. Chamberlain had been on a rare visit to his estranged homeland in October 1893. From his letters to Cosima we know that his visit began at 2 Wellington Road, Eltham, Kent, possibly a suitably anonymous ‘digs’ [258] from which it was a 20-minute rail journey into London, where in one day he says he saw ‘three uncles, two aunts, and various cousins of both sexes’. From London he then travelled north, to the remote and crumbling Castle Duart on the Isle of Mull, where his affluent widowed aunt Anne Arbuthnot Guthrie (née Chamberlain) resided. [259] Returning south, his destination was Buckminster Park, near Grantham, one of Lord Dysart’s two seats. Chamberlain said he had an invitation to Buckminster, where Dysart held his archive, but other accounts have it that he arrived in the earl’s absence. Whether by consent or by stealth, in any event he managed to copy the originals of the Wagner letters in Lord Dysart’s possession which Praeger had ‘reproduced’ in his books.
That Chamberlain had planned this as a near-clandestine mission, parachuting, as it were, into his now alien homeland on Wahnfried’s behalf, is apparent from his words to Cosima from his Eltham address on 4 October 1893: ‘Today I have begun to lay my snare for Lord Dysart, the owner of the Praeger letters; my aunt, Lady Chamberlain, knows his wife.’ [260] By 21 October Chamberlain could report to Cosima from the Isle of Mull that, ‘next week I will spend 2 or 3 days as his [Lord Dysart’s] guest at his Buckminster castle (in the vicinity of Grantham). Up till now he has refused to show the letters to anyone; but through my aunt Lady Chamberlain I was able to assail the feminine side, to said successful outcome.’ On 26 October from Buckminster itself he reports mission accomplished: ‘Of the 34 letters to Praeger Lord D. owns only 20; these I have copied faithfully from the originals.’ The others, he suggests, might have been stolen, but he would get on their track. Despite all the social niceties at Buckminster, no-one challenged his surreptitious copying activities during the evenings of his stay. ‘Luckily no-one knew what my objective was here, and I said to everyone, [in English] “Oh yes! Oh no! Oh, you don’t say so!” etc, – Whoever doesn’t regard me as an idiot here must be one himself.’ [261] Chamberlain admitted later that he made his copies ‘of necessity in short time and in a state of martyrdom to my nerves’. [262] With his transcripts Chamberlain headed home for Vienna and prepared to disclose Praeger’s misrepresentations and falsifications in the Bayreuther Blätter for January 1894. In the summer of that year his exposé reached a wider readership as Richard Wagner: Echte Briefe an Ferdinard Praeger, and a few weeks later Breitkopf & Härtel withdrew their German edition of Praeger’s book from the shops.
But despite a sustained campaign in the Musical Standard between 24 February and 7 April 1894 Ellis failed to get the English version of Praeger’s book withdrawn. ‘I wrote to Messrs Longmans, Green & Co. the middle of April 1895, informing them of Messrs Breitkopf & Haertel’s withdrawal, and asking them if they did not intend to follow suit. From that day to this I have had no answer from them […]. But surely there ought to be some means at our public reading-rooms – such as the inscription “unreliable: letters disputed” – of preventing the unwary student or budding journalist from being misled by such proved perversions of biography.’ That was how he put it in a lengthy ‘supplemental note’ to the fifth volume of the Life of Richard Wagner, recounting the story a whole decade later (published 1906, some footnotes dated 1905). ‘Until such means be found’, Ellis concluded grimly, ‘I shall have to continue to expose Praeger’s misstatements in detail whenever they are of sufficient moment to call for notice on my path, however little it may be to the “taste” of a few recidivists.’ [263]
In May 1895, in the antepenultimate number of The Meister Ellis offered, as he then hoped, ‘a final word’ on the Praeger affair, the news of the withdrawal of Praeger’s German edition. However he added the information that the name of the dedicatee of the book had been discreetly asterisked in the Musical Standard’s account, to save that gentleman’s embarrassment. None too subtly, Ellis reminded his readers of The Meister that this hapless individual was ‘the President of the London Wagner Society’, the near-blind and politically inactive Lord Dysart. Immediately following this, but without further comment, was another ‘Note’: ‘The Earl of Dysart on the 17th ult. [April 1895] resigned his Presidency and Membership of the Wagner Society, London; at the ensuing meeting of the Committee, Lord Dysart’s resignation was accepted.’ [264] ‘I regretted that resignation’, Ellis admitted later, ‘as the gentleman’s own sight was so impaired that he could in no just way be held responsible for this ghastly pair of books’. The New York Musical Courier had ‘without my privity’, as Ellis put it, been following the whole affair. In its number for 17 July 1895 it printed Ellis’s statement that ‘the Wagner Society had nothing whatever to do with the publication, and that our President had “in a private capacity owned the manuscripts etc. of Praeger’s book, and it is purely in a private capacity that he has dealt with them and it from first to last”’. [265] Nonetheless this, it appears, was the way in which Ellis dealt with ‘recidivists’.
Two more issues of The Meister were to appear. [266] Nearly every item was initialled W.A.E., and the weight of significance attached to Chamberlain and Glasenapp in the last number suggests that Ellis had now decided to continue on his own, seeing himself as Wahnfried’s intellectual ambassador in London. Having shot the prime exhibit, the zookeeper seems to have stalked off. For a time Edward Dannreuther resumed office from Lord Dysart as president of the London branch of the Wagner Society (‘The Right Hon. The Earl of Dysart’ appears as President of the Wagner Society in an advertisement in the British Library’s bound copy of volume 7 of The Meister; the otherwise nearly identical advertisement in volume 8 substitutes Dannreuther’s name). It’s not clear whether Ellis then gave up the editorship, or was removed. With its thirty-second issue, dated 25 November 1895, The Meister ceased publication without any warning or valediction. While continuing to send in the Prose Works translations, Ellis may even have gone back to medical practice between 1895 and 1898 in Herne Hill. [267]
The End of the Wagner Society
After Dysart’s resignation the London Wagner Society fell into disarray. By the time he completed the Prose Works translations in 1899 Ellis had ceased being its secretary. According to the Court Circular of The Times on 18 May of that year, ‘Dr. Hans Richter will be the guest of the Wagner Society at a banquet at the Café Royal on May 30; Lord Windsor is to take the chair. The hon. secretary is Mr. Charles Dowdeswell, 33, Argyll-mansions, Addison-bridge, W.’ In 1901, a Philip A. Wilkins, styling himself ‘Honorary Secretary, Allgemeiner Richard Wagner-Verein, London Branch’, wrote to the press to appeal for donations to the Bayreuth Stipendiary Fund, ‘the present year being the jubilee of the “Bayreuth Idea” and the half-jubilee of its earliest realization’. [268] The Stipendiary Fund was still being promoted in the 1904 prospectus of ‘the London Branch of the Wagner Society’, with donations to be sent ‘to the Treasurer of the Wagner Society (A.L. Birnstingl), 5 Pembroke Gardens, Kensington, London, W.’ [269]
Like Benjamin Lewis Mosely, Avigdor Lewis Birnstingl (1853–1924) is one of the unsung pioneers of English Wagnerism. Birnstingl had been on the committee of the Wagner Society since at least 1887, and he became its treasurer in 1889 following Julius Cyriax’s resignation as secretary for reasons of health and business. (Charles Dowdeswell took his place as secretary.) [270] Birnstingl’s wife Cordelia, whom he married in 1888, apparently suffered poor health too: on 6 March 1892 she lost a 10-week-old daughter and on 24 February 1894 another daughter, from scarlet fever, aged nearly 5. [271] (A son, Charles Avigdor Birnstingl, was born in 1895 and survived until 26 January 1971.) Cordelia died aged 51 on 30 January 1917 ‘after many years’ illness bravely borne’. [272] In 1891 Birnstingl was listed in the press as a donor to the Anglo-Jewish Society for Relieving the Aged Needy, and in 1907–8 as an annual subscriber to the King Edward’s Hospital Fund for London. He was respected in musical circles, and was one of the guests at the banquet commemorating the Novello centenary at De Keyser’s Hotel on 6 December 1911. The Times of 25 November 1924 recorded that: ‘The festival of St. Cecelia fell on Saturday, and yesterday the Worshipful Company of Musicians celebrated their patroness at evensong in St. Paul’s Cathedral. As befitted its purpose, it was a service in which the praise was music, and the music praise. Nor, while it remembered tradition, did it forget more personal memories; for at the conclusion Dr. [Charles] Macpherson played very beautifully on the organ a dirge composed by Sir Edward Elgar for members of the Company who had died within the last year. These were Sir Frederick Bridge (Senior Past Master), Alfred Moul and Avigdor Lewis Birnstingl (livery-men), and Sir Walter Parratt and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (honorary freemen).’ [273]
By the time of Edward Dannreuther’s death in February 1905, the London branch of the United Wagner Society seems to have folded altogether. Another ‘Wagner Association’ was founded in mid-1910 by Louis N. Parker, twenty-three years earlier a correspondent for La revue wagnérienne and one of the original members of the London branch, now a celebrated playwright and pageant-deviser. The association’s objectives included ‘the special celebration of the centenary of Wagner’s birth’ anticipated for 1913. As The Times reported:
This association, formed during the summer for ‘the encouragement of friendly criticism and support of the right performance of Wagner’s works in England’ and more especially to secure the celebration of the centenary of Wagner’s birth in 1913, held its first annual general meeting on October 3. There are now 223 members, and the president, Mr. Louis N. Parker, announced the election of Dr. Hans Richter and Mr. Ashton Ellis as honorary members. He also drew attention to the fact that the committee have decided to offer a prize to members of the association for the best essay on ‘Lohengrin’. The prize will be a complete set of tickets for the performances of the ‘Ring’, ‘Meistersinger’, and ‘Parsifal’ at Bayreuth (August 14 to 20, 1911). Particulars of membership and other conditions for the essay may be obtained from Mr. F.A. Richards (hon. assistant secretary), 2c, Bickenhall-mansions, Gloucester-place, W., or from Mr. Sydney Loeb (hon. treasurer), 4, Lancaster-gate, W. [274]
Shaw would have applauded the association’s ambition to present the first authorised performance outside Bayreuth of Parsifal (even before expiry of the copyright at the end of 1913), in a temporary ‘wooden theatre in Wembley Park, of which the interior – the auditorium and stage – should be an exact replica to scale, in every detail, of the Bayreuth theatre […]. At the close of the 1912 performances at Bayreuth, the whole company – soloists, chorus, orchestra, conductors and scenery – were to be transferred in a body to Wembley, where they would continue the performances unconscious that their venue had been changed.’ The profits (‘if any’) were to go to the Bayreuth Endowment Fund, and several wealthy German members of the new Wagner society promised support for the project (though not including Hans Richter, who seems to have been rather bemused by it). However, ‘Siegfried Wagner negatived it. His father had specifically ordained that “Parsifal” should never be played outside Bayreuth; and there, as far as he was concerned, was an end of the matter. So the following year “Parsifal” was set free and was at once done everywhere by everybody, according to everyone’s idea except Wagner’s.’ This Wagner Association lasted at least until 1912 (1914 according to Parker), and seems to have achieved some reconciliation between older and rising Wagnerians: at any rate its membership managed to include Alice Cleather and Basil Crump, the Earl of Dysart, William Ashton Ellis (honoris causâ), Alfred Forman, David Irvine, Hans Richter (honoris causâ), Robert Mayer, Donald Francis Tovey, and apparently a very young Victor Gollancz. Parker seems to have been unable to recruit Bernard Shaw and Ernest Newman. [275]
Lives of Wagner
Having disposed of the old recidivists, Ellis was to turn his sights on the rising generation. In the cantankerous fifth volume of the Life of Richard Wagner he took sarcastic issue with ‘a writer whose name I spare posterity in mercy to himself; as I trust he still is less than half-way through life’s journey, I will merely style him “Mr Youngman”’. [276] In coining ‘Mr. Youngman’ Ellis would have been unaware that ‘Ernest Newman’ was already a Bunyanesque cognomen adopted by William Roberts (1868–1959). [277] The substance of the quarrel boiled down to an 1904 article on Berlioz in which Newman had commented in a footnote that in Ellis’s Life of Richard Wagner (‘now in the course of publication’) his editorial practices were such that: ‘The British public is apparently to be treated like a child, and told only so much of the truth about Wagner as is thought to be good for it – or at any rate good for Wagner.’ ‘Taken by itself’, Ellis fumed, ‘that was offensive enough, and the more offensive as coming from an author who in a previous work of more elaborate pretensions had drawn so largely on my own translations of the master’s prose, after my besought and accorded permission.’ [278] The offending essay by Newman had been published in The Speaker for October 1904, though Ellis’s rejoinder went to the length of suppressing that journal’s name to deprive Newman of the publicity. Later that year Ellis also took exception to Newman’s new short study of Wagner in Wakeling Dry’s series ‘The Music of the Masters’. ‘A few enthusiasts’, Newman had written there,
still go on proclaiming that Wagner was a great thinker, but their number diminishes every day; and without any disrespect to them, one may say that their tributes of the excellence of Wagner’s thought would be more convincing were their own reputation as scientific thinkers a little more surely established. [279]
Worse than that, on page 204, as Ellis complained to Bernard Shaw, more than a little ‘disrespect’ was to be found:
Glasenapp’s big biography is being brought out by Mr. Ashton Ellis, who has also done excellent service by translating the ten volumes of Wagner’s prose works. Unfortunately Mr. Ellis, by long association with German prose, has acquired habits of expression that are decidedly Teutonic, and that makes the reading of his translations of Wagner somewhat of a trial to anyone with a literary palate. Some one might now do the student a real service by translating Mr. Ellis into English. [280]
Shaw persuaded Ellis not to retaliate, as it wouldn’t have enhanced his chances of being awarded a Civil List pension. Ellis’s letter to Shaw mentioned in passing that ‘beyond a couple of letters exchanged in 1899’ regarding errors in Newman’s study of Wagner, ‘no other correspondence has passed between us, nor have I ever met him’. Shaw was keen to keep it that way, and his handwritten note on Ellis’s letter instructed his secretary to ‘burn the letters to & re Newman 13/12/04’. Ellis had enclosed drafts of a private and a public ‘chastisement’ of Newman, saying that ‘a box on the ears of some sort is called for’. [281] Newman was later to respond to Ellis’s attacks with patrician disdain and a neat pun: ‘Over Mr. Ellis’s mixture of clumsy rudeness and heavy Teutonic facetiousness we need not linger; these things have no novelty for Wagner students who have sojourned long in the Ellisian fields of controversy.’ He closed with the observation that ‘If Wagner is to be whitewashed at all, it must be by a less brittle brush than this’. [282]
In 1893 Ellis had reviewed the American H.T. Finck’s Wagner and his Works in The Meister. Though he almost admired the impertinence of the transatlantic viewpoint, he was uncomfortable with its brusque treatment of the ‘classic’ Old World sources such as Glasenapp and Georges Noufflard. Finck wrote that ‘Glasenapp having been first in the field, had to do some hard pioneer work, for which he deserves credit. But his treatise exists only in German, and it will probably never be translated’ – here Ellis interpolated one of those combative square-bracketed parentheses, ‘[don’t be too sure!]’ – ‘as it is too verbose, and contains too many dry details of merely local interest.’ [283] Years later Sir William Henry Hadow (1859–1937) would deplore the stylistic and typographic techniques – what Shaw had called ‘the Meisterful method’ – employed by Ellis first against Praeger and then habitually: ‘the language is carefully chosen to suggest disparagement, the pages are clouded with little spiteful parentheses like mosquitoes, the tone is that of a prosecution which would find the prisoner guilty at all costs’. [284] This particular parenthesis, though perhaps less spiteful, was portentous.
Checking again with Bernard Shaw we find that volume 1 of the Prose Works was ‘well worth the money’ (always one of Shaw’s highest accolades), and volume 2 had ‘a sentence or two in which it is clearer than the original’ – though Shaw confessed his ‘stupendous’ ignorance of German. [285] Despite that ignorance, of course, Shaw was prepared to bandy Wagnerian exegesis with ‘my friend Mr. Ashton Ellis’ in the public prints, as in the Daily Chronicle in June 1898, over Brünnhilde’s oath in Götterdämmerung. [286] This was in order to flex a few Shavian muscles for The Perfect Wagnerite, to be published in December of that year. Shaw, though, knew his place as Wagnerite, and in the preface to his book he hailed Ellis’s prose works translation as ‘a masterpiece of interpretation and an eminent addition to our literature; but that is not because its author, Mr. Ashton Ellis, knows the German dictionary better than his predecessors. He is simply in possession of Wagner’s ideas, which were to them inconceivable.’ [287]
In the same year Ernest Newman wrote: ‘Only those who have had occasion to study Wagner’s writings closely can estimate the debt of all English Wagnerians to Mr. Ellis for his extremely careful and faithful translations, the valuable prefaces and editorial information he supplies, and the magnificent indexes of the volumes.’ [288] By 1914 and the time of Wagner as Man and Artist, however, ‘Mr Youngman’ had been so excoriated by Ellis that in his new book Newman would retaliate by making all the translations himself from the originals. However it is true that Ellis was always proud of his indexing, though his habit of condensing page numbers by omitting repeated tens and hundred values – ostensibly to save space! – can be irritating. (If indexing was conceived by Ellis as an exact science, he knew that translation itself was only an approximation.) Not only indexing: besides summarised contents and chapter-headings, in the Life of Richard Wagner he allowed himself free rein with textual interpolation (usually those square brackets), footnotes, and ‘Supplemental Notes’. His protestations about space and the cost of typesetting were surely ironic. Ellis’s footnoting frequently went off the subject to make his own idiosyncratic comment. One example is in 1908, in volume 6, when he referred to ‘a six-bar autograph’ prefiguring the Ride of the Valkyries, sent by Wagner to Liszt on 20 November 1856. Wagner had inscribed it ‘So reitet man in der Luft!’, which Ellis translated in a footnote with comment: ‘“That’s how one rides in the air”; not at all a bad motto for the coming aero prize-winner.’ [289] Ellis evidently expected his readers to be abreast of the news of the forthcoming Coupe de Michelin challenge: in December 1908 Wilbur Wright (having toured Europe for three months) would demonstrate the future international (and military) potential for aeronautical machines by flying from Le Mans to the Michelin headquarters at Clermont-Ferrand in two hours eighteen minutes to claim a prize of 20,000 francs. And Ellis opined not only on current affairs; he was happy to expend space on comments on historical events. When in 1855 Wagner writes to Praeger about Charles Lüders’s alleged leading part in ‘the émeute in Hyde Park the other day’ Ellis dismisses Praeger’s footnote about this being simply a jocular reference to Lüders’s unprepossessing stature and demureness. [290] He feels he has to tell us ‘what the Hyde Park riot was about’, and quotes from The Times of 2 July 1855 to inform the reader about the people who ‘hooted and groaned at every carriage which passed along the drive near the Serpentine, and exhorted the occupant to “go to church”’. They were protesting about a Bill to enforce Sunday closing of public houses ‘for the better observance of the Sabbath’. [291] Neither the 1908 aero prize nor the 1855 Hyde Park riot are matters of great Wagnerian moment, and yet Ellis would elsewhere bemoan ‘lack of space’. Younger writers such as Ernest Newman came to regard Ellis’s footnotes as irritating, irrelevant or self-indulgent asides in a work that was itself becoming outmoded in approach and style. But, in historicist terms, we can now see them as indications of Ellis’s impulse to present his Wagner in what he felt to be our time.
A Few Supporters
In 1894 Shaw had observed that
No doubt some time must elapse before the sale of so fine a piece of work [as the prose works] will have produced enough to pay Mr Ellis as much as the wages of a dock labourer for the time he has devoted to it; but as all such enterprises must at present be disinterested – more shame for us, bye the bye – he will probably esteem himself happy if he escapes being actually out of pocket by his printer’s bills. [292]
Shaw would later confirm that Ellis’s earnings from his translations were minimal, and he was almost wholly dependent on his share of his parental inheritance. Ellis’s salary during his years at the Western Dispensary had been relatively high (with rooms thrown in), but he took considerable time off in the summers at his own expense, for both personal and Wagnerian purposes. It’s reasonable to assume that his ability to give up a promising medical career meant a fairly secure background at first, and Ellis’s London addresses are indicative of this. His birthplace in Sloane Street was prestigiously located on the corner with Hans Street, but the site was rebuilt imposingly in the last years of the century. After resigning his residential post at the Western Dispensary, Ellis took lodgings at 14 Grosvenor Road, Westminster, S.W., now redeveloped and untraceable. From 1891 to 1895 his address was 33 Southampton Street, Covent Garden, W.C., today an Italian restaurant. The last volume of The Meister (1895) gave his address as 14 Buckingham Street, Adelphi, W.C., a building which today bears a plaque declaring it to be the former site of Samuel Pepys’ home, and the present building to have housed (before Ellis) the painters William Etty (1787–1849) and Clarkson Stanfield (1793–1867). It was still an artistic and intellectual locus when Ellis was a tenant: according to the Post Office Directory for 1895 he shared the address with, among others, the Church Association (publishers of militant protestant Anglican Tracts from 1860 to 1918), Thomas Graham Jackson, A.R.A. (1835–1924), architect of the Bridge of Sighs at Hertford College, Oxford, and Joseph Pennell (1847–1926), Philadelphia-born illustrator and writer who had settled in London in 1884 and joined Whistler’s circle. In 1899 Bernard Shaw would have an address nearby when he moved into his affluent wife’s flat at 10 Adelphi Terrace. Ellis was evidently keen to be associated socially with artists and arguments of the time. He probably over-extended himself, financially at least. When The Meister ceased publication, Ellis was at ‘Woodberry’ (not extant), on newly suburban Half Moon Lane, Herne Hill, S.E., at least until 1898. There is a short documentary gap until 1900, when Ellis is found at 87 Hailsham Avenue, Streatham, probably to be nearer the home of his elderly mother in Streatham. None of Ellis’s addresses suggests a particular lack of means. But he was probably spending beyond those means.
In any event Ellis’s private circumstances were about to be transformed. On 10 January 1900, Mary Ann Eliza Ellis died aged 79 of bronchopneumonia brought on by influenza, in her home at ‘Lauriston’, 1 Conyers Road in Streatham. Her will disposed of the ‘moiety’ of the estate she had received from ‘my late father Charles Bagley Uther deceased’, but made no mention of any widow’s inheritance from the late Robert Ellis. Probate in her small estate of £381 15s 11d was granted to her sons William Ashton Ellis, surgeon, and Ernest Charles Ellis, solicitor. Ellis was later to confess that: ‘Had it not been for the death of my dear mother at the beginning of 1900 I shd. have been in the workhouse long ago; but my little share of her property is dwindling to its last, & I cannot hold on for more than a twelvemonth, as my works bring me in not a penny (in 12 to 14 years!).’ [293]
In May there came some belated consolation. ‘On Richard Wagner’s birthday (Tuesday), Sir Hubert Parry presided at a dinner given by the Wagner society to Mr. W. Ashton Ellis, the translator of the master’s prose works.’
Sir Hubert said that at one time Wagner’s cause was so unpopular that to declare oneself a Wagnerite was to be branded as mad or worse. He should never forget the letter he received from a most eminent musician when, in 1876, he heard he was going to the opening festival at Bayreuth. One sentence ran: ‘The best thing that could happen would be that an earthquake should swallow up the whole place.’ The task of rendering Wagner’s difficult German into readable English was one on which both Mr. Ellis and the Society might well congratulate themselves. Sir Hubert then handed Mr. Ellis an illuminated address, a pair of opera glasses, and a cheque for £100. [294]
The year 1900 saw the eight volumes of the Prose Works stacked on the shelf, together with the 1899 companion translations of Wagner’s letters to Otto Wesendonck, Malwida von Meysenbug and Eliza Wille, and to Emil Heckel. In the course of these Ellis could not suppress his physician’s instincts in footnoting his own diagnosis (thirty-five years after the event) of ‘pyæmia’ (septicaemia), rather than the more usually attributed rheumatic fever, as the cause of Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s death shortly after he created the role of Tristan. [295] However The Times had already detected a more worrying trait in the Wesendonck and Heckel translations:
Mr. Ashton Ellis deserves so well for his labour of love in translating Wagner’s prose-writings that it seems captious to cavil at a few points in the present volumes. Probably a wish to be strictly accurate has led him to translate the colloquial ‘Gott’ and ‘Mein Gott’ as ‘God’ and ‘My God’, though the effect is very different in English. But ‘All is so earnest’ cannot be accepted as an accurate rendering of the ‘Alles ist so ernst’ of the letter of condolence to Wesendonck on the death of a child; and such words and expressions as ‘tendence’, ‘unforegoably’, ‘indicible’, ‘a housely future’, ‘the gotten property’, and ‘at like time’ are hardly English at all. [296]
The Pall Mall Gazette, which had earlier been as critical, had mellowed, however, as the Prose Works translations progressed. After the sixth volume appeared, it wrote:
[Ellis’s] industry and patience have been little short of amazing; but, but is even more to the point, he has from volume to volume made extraordinary progress in the sheer art of translation. In the case of some of the earlier volumes we have not hesitated to point out the curious German influence which seemed to brook over Mr. Ellis’s English style, and under which phrases were admitted to his pages sometimes of reckless clumsiness and complexity. This fault has been gradually disappearing as volume has succeeded volumes, until in the present collection of essays there are pages and pages which might be selected as very models of translation. The English is often supple and easy, with touches here and there of unforced and natural humour; it is nearly always lucid, and even in those occasional passages where the German has been too strong for it, the complexity never becomes outrageous or tiresome. Mr. Ellis deserves the heartiest congratulations upon a really fine achievement. [297]
And on the eventual completion of the ‘formidable task which he set himself to accomplish in less than nine years ago’, the Pall Mall could say that the eighth and final volume
crowns as industrious and as noble an example of perseverance in the face of difficulties that could well have been given by any man of letters. […] One can only, in the face of such constancy, such loyalty to a single cause, give to a tenacity of purpose so fine the homage of silent admiration. At all events, we know that if the old question had been propounded to Mr. Ashton Ellis in 1891 – ‘What book would you like to have with you, if you were stranded on a desert island?’ – his answer would not be the Bible or Shakespeare. […] In dealing with the first two volumes we ourselves complained that far too many pages were written in a tongue that, for want of a better word, might be called Anglo-German. But as Mr. Ellis continued his work his hand grew in cunning. He found a more liberal, more fluent manner with the publication of each successive volume, until it comes to this: that the last three volumes are as near as possible models of what a translation should be. [298]
Feeling he had subdued the carping press, Ellis was now prepared to carry out his promise made six years before in The Meister to tackle Glasenapp’s biography, by then expanded into its third edition. Translation of the prose works had been, he wrote,
an unalloyed enjoyment, whatever obstacles may occasionally have stood in the way of my seizing [Wagner’s] precise intention. […] Meantime I have the honour to invite my readers to accompany me for the next two or three years to the most trustworthy Life of Richard Wagner ever penned by another, the fruit of the untiring zeal of C. F. Glasenapp. So that my Farewell may really prove, I hope, ‘Auf Wiedersehen!’ [299]
Though a few spinster and bachelor siblings clung together, his brothers and sisters were by now dispersed. Ellis decided to take his library and manuscripts (and his piano) out of the ‘din and hubbub’ of the metropolis. In the Sussex village of Horsted Keynes he rented Leighton Cote (Leightoncote in his printed letterheads, and nowadays Leighton Cottage). For the next nine years (rather than ‘two or three’) he spent in the Sussex countryside he seems genuinely to have ‘esteemed himself happy’ as a reclusive but respectable Edwardian gentleman. Except insofar as the 1901 census return shows George Laurance, a 38-year-old from Middleton in Lancashire, also resident at Leighton Cote as Ellis’s ‘companion’, to which occupation the census enumerator has added ‘Dom’ (domestic).
In the rear-facing bow-windowed study of Leighton Cote, with its still fine view over rolling fields and woodland Ellis dated the preface to the first of the six volumes ‘Horsted Keynes, August 1900’. He proceeded ‘at once to make a clean breast of it, and confess that this is not a literal translation of Herr Glasenapp’s work.’ With Glasenapp’s explicit approval he was undertaking ‘an English revision’, though much of the early text was straightforward translation. The Times gave it a positive review:
The first volume of Herr C. F. Glasenapp’s authoritative biography of WAGNER – a work that has taken many years in preparation and is even now not complete – has been translated into English by Mr. W. Ashton Ellis, and is published by Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co. Mr. Ashton Ellis’s version of the master’s complete prose works is well known, and his industry is beyond all praise; it is now clear that the awkwardness of style which made the former translation rather hard reading is due mainly to the writer’s reverence for his original, a possibly mistaken reverence, but one that must command respect. In the biography we meet with far fewer Teutonisms or sentences only half-Anglicized […]. The translator has wisely given himself liberty to make sundry changes from the exact phrases or sequence of ideas in his original, and with the happiest results. He expects to complete the work, provided that the original book is finished, in about three years from the present time. [300]
The departure from ‘his original’, however, grew apace. In the preface to volume 2 Ellis tells us that, ‘as from about the seventh of the present set of chapters I had allowed myself considerably greater freedom, alike of exposition and construction, the work ran away with me at last’; in that to volume 3 he says that his five hundred pages represented only a hundred of Glasenapp’s, and leaves it to the reader to decide whether ‘English version’ is still an accurate description. From volume 4 he felt he had to omit Glasenapp’s name from the title-page since ‘I cannot honestly conceal the truth that very few of the ensuing pages are based, even for facts, on my esteemed precursor’s work, accurate though that is.’ [301] Volume 5 bears no preface as such, and it is there that, as we have seen, Ellis became bogged down in the minutiae of Wagner’s 1855 visit to London, Ferdinand Praeger’s share in it, and Praeger’s later calumny in general.
Though Ellis is best known for his Englishing of Wagner and Glasenapp, he was in fact also published in German, and in the Bayreuther Blätter no less. As ‘Herausgeber des “Meister”’ he had been one of a number of contributors in 1892 to the ‘Tannhäuser-Nachklänge’ following Cosima’s Bayreuth production of that work the previous year, which had demonstrated her determination to draw the entire canon of mature music dramas into the festival’s repertory. Ellis says he had attended performances on 30 July and 2 August 1891. His slender review ‘Aus dem Briefe eines Engländers an einen Deutschen’ followed similarly titled contributions from Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the French Marxist Charles Bonnier (writing from Oxford, where he had become a tutor). [302] In 1896, Ellis’s short article ‘Erlösendes Weltentat’, drawing thematic connections (though emphatically not political ones) between Siegfrieds Tod and the Vaterlandsverein address, was also published in the Blätter; but from the parenthetical line at the end, ‘Deutsch von A. Brunnemann’, [303] it would appear that Ellis was not entirely responsible for the language in which it appeared. In the spring of 1904 the Berlin bimonthly Die Musik, then in its third year of publication, published in its tenth and eleventh numbers a ‘contribution to Wagner scholarship’. ‘Die verschiedenen Fassungen von “Siegfrieds Tod”’ was Ellis’s only significant public effort in the German language. Here too he had the text seen through stylistically, this time by Prof. Rudolf Schlösser, [304] whose footnote recorded that he eagerly took on that task ‘because I recognised throughout Mr Ellis’s work the most significant contribution we have been given to date on the evolution of the Ring’. However, apart from a few formal editorial modifications, readers were assured that the essay was genuinely Ellis’s own intellectual property. Ellis was evidently keen to be reckoned with directly in the continental German Wagnerian salons, and so to fill the void left by the discredited Praeger. Though both Ellis and Chamberlain contributed to the Bayreuther Blätter for the first time in 1892, Ellis was in no position (and had no ambition) to displace Chamberlain as England’s ambassador to Wahnfried. [305] Apart from his personal reception by Cosima Wagner in 1889 – Chamberlain had first met her only a year before – it seems Ellis’s communication with Wahnfried, with Wolzogen, and even Glasenapp during work on the Life, may have been mainly postal. [306]
While the rootless Englishman Chamberlain was – so to speak – bedding down in Bayreuth, Ellis was happy to further his Wagnerian efforts in bucolic Sussex. In another of his few surviving letters to Bernard Shaw, Ellis gives a glimpse – small details which he calls ‘secrets’ – of his life in Horsted Keynes.
Forgive me if this letter is all about myself, but I have only this afternoon discovered that I was dining last Thursday with Arthur Balfour’s sister. I knew I was to meet at Mrs Benson’s (the archbishop’s widow, who lives a mile from here) a Mrs Henry Sidgwick; but my knowledge of the bigger world is so limited, that I did not know that relationship until my after-dinner (i.e. ‘digestion’) call to-day, when Miss Tait (daughter of another late archbishop) informed me. The latter is an awfully nice woman, whom I met a few months back on an errand of mercy (a child dying of convulsions in the village). Then came a local wedding, five weeks since, & at the reception I was led up by Miss Tait for introduction to Mrs B., who was in a kindly penitant mood for having ignored my existence these close on five years. […] It’s rather amusing, about Mrs B., for I have doggedly remained away from Church the whole time I’ve been here, except one Sunday (& this wedding), though I did get up two consecutive concerts in the Village reading-room last June on behalf of a new organ, lending and playing on my own piano. (Another amusing affair, is that I got the wife of the Radical candidate to sing at one, & the Conserv. Cand & his wife to come to the other.)
[…] In fact I’m rather liked down here, though I never entertain: but I’ve had a few broken legs &c. to doctor gratis, & that gets one well spoken of. – Now I’m telling you all my secrets, so I’d better bring this egoistic letter to a close. [307]
But Ellis’s contentment in his ‘rural nest’ was not to last. The preface to volume 6 of the Life of Richard Wagner exists in two forms. The earlier, dated ‘Horsted Keynes, January, 1908’, contains the longest personal complaint Ellis ever put into print. By comparing this with his apologetically ‘egoistic’ letter to Shaw, and with the square-bracketed personal parentheses in his published works, it’s possible to discern something of the private persona. Additionally, for its value as a local period curiosity it’s worth reproducing in its entirety:
Dear Reader,
I fear I owe you some apology for the length of the interval separating the appearance of the present volume from that of its predecessor. When you have gained an inkling of its cause, however, I just as strongly feel, you not only will forgive, but pity me; and should that pity merge into benignant sympathy, you will have pledged me to sincerest thanks. So bear with me a moment, while I unfold a private tale.
As the address below the preface to each volume of this Life will shew, the whole work hitherto has passed into the printer’s hands from the same secluded little nook of hill-bound Sussex; and in this rural nest I hoped some day to finish it. That hope has now been shattered by one of the most ruthlessly desecrating deeds that can ever have entered the mind of man, or woman. Once more, please listen:-
Overleaf you will find the reproduction of a photograph taken* [Ellis’s footnote reads: ‘* By Mr F. Douglas Miller, Boltro Road, Hayward’s Heath.’] from my study window during our belated summer of last September, just as the final sheets of this volume’s proofs, apart from its Index, were reaching my hands. I offer no apology for admitting unknown readers to a share in what has been the delight of my friends, but to them I must explain that the whole foreground, including that salient group of three acacias, had been slowly built up by my personal toil to throw into due relief the native beauty of the middle distance – my tiny pleasaunce having been nothing save a wilderness when first I rented it. It had just attained, in fact, that fatal point of perfection which presages impending ill. Swift and relentless as Fate, came that ill.
Not a week had I received proofs of this exquisite picture and allowed one of them to be displayed in our village shop, before workmen in the grounds adjoining me (to the left of the picture) began erecting, under the very boughs of my acacias, an atrocity the name whereof I dare not even mention here. To the philistines who recently had thrust on our unwelcoming souls a garish tabernacle for advancement of their own peculiar brand of politics-cum-piety nearly an acre of land lay still available; yet nothing could content them save defacement of the whole hillside through the site selected for this utterly unneeded thing. Behind the backs both of myself and those who own my residence, these professors of Brotherly Love had obtained from the District authorities a sanction too heedlessly given, and our expostulations, albeit lodged the moment we got wind of it, proved all too late. Such is the helpless condition to which the Individual is already reduced by our beautiful progress toward Socialism!
So there in full sight of my windows, and dominating every corner of my garden – owing to the equally remorseless previous mutilation of our common hedge – this horror with its added infamy, a thatch atop, has stood for full three months; and now the leaves have fallen, it mocks one all the more. How could a man sit tamely down and index, with such a canker grinning at him from the very heart of what had been a daily feast for his eyes? If others could, I could not, and a wickedly large part of my time since mid-autumn has been spent on unavailing efforts to shame the chief culprit into removal of what even our scavengers view with disgust. No, that culprit is ‘advanced’ alike in views and years, and nothing can convince her that no amount of rustic thatching will redeem a pest; just as there are those who tie up sewage-pipes with bows of satin and expect you to admire them in their boudoirs.
With heavy heart, accordingly, I shall have to bid farewell to my retreat next midsummer. Where I shall find another so entirely propitious to my work as this had erewhile been, Heaven knows, since ways and means must be consulted and nothing but the kindness of a few supporters has enabled me to pull along at all of late, – said work being unremunerative of its very nature, whatever my reviewers may suppose.
But, that being scarcely what I set about to say, I return to my apology, dear Reader, and, should the tale have interested you, will gladly forward a reprint of my open letter to a Sussex weekly thereanent, also a view since taken by myself at close quarters of that centennial oak whose strengthening presence I soon must leave, – provided only you enclose an addressed stamped envelope of about the length of this page.
And now, my future plans being so uncertain, I will simply add Auf Wiedersehen!
Yours very truly,
WM. ASHTON ELLIS
Horsted Keynes,
January, 1908.
No ‘open letter’ can be traced in any Sussex weekly of the time. It’s hard to judge what is irony and what is genuine in the story, but Ellis’s ultramundane theosophy probably gives the key. In 1903 the women’s suffragist and noncomformist preacher Louisa Martindale (1839–1914) had retired from Lewes, Sussex, [308] to ‘Cheelys’, a cottage in Horsted Keynes just down the hill to the right of Leighton Cote. Four years later she endowed a Congregational Hall, now called the Martindale Centre (its foundation stone bears the date 27 October 1906), on the other side of Ellis’s dwelling. She was manifestly that ‘culprit […] advanced alike in views and years’ (she would have been nearly 70) whom Ellis held responsible for the unutterable thatched ‘atrocity’ built in its grounds. But what to make of Ellis’s allusion to sewage-pipes? Could Mrs Martindale’s progressive brand of ‘politics-cum-piety’ have extended to the erection of – a public convenience? Was this the ‘utterly unneeded thing’ that stood ‘grinning down’ on Ellis’s ‘pleasaunce’, a forerunner perhaps of the one that stands today on the road obliquely facing Leighton Cottage? [309]
As for the photograph ‘overleaf’, it was not bound into the edition containing that preface. It was bound into a subsequent printing, which bears a much shorter, but equally personal, preface addressed ‘To the reader’ as follows:
Dear Reader,
Think yourself lucky you are rather late in the field, and have thus escaped the original preface I am doing my best to forget, though – barring the Corrigenda list on page vii – the edition otherwise remains the same. Merely one sentence and a scrap will I preserve from that whilom lament, in transparent excuse for retaining an illustration I am as fond of as ever, viz. the view from my late workroom window:- ‘As the address beneath the preface to each volume of this Life will shew, the whole work hitherto has passed into the printer’s hands from the same secluded little nook of hill-bound Sussex; and in this rural nest I hoped some day to finish it. That hope has now been shattered.’
Well, there is scarcely any misfortune that has not some redeeming feature, and although I now am robbed of the beloved oak I used to gaze on, I’m still in Sussex, and not only have the choice of downs or sea to feast my eyes with at five minutes’ notice, but the frequent opportunity of hearing our great master’s music capitally performed. So, instead of pity, I’ll this time ask you for your envy. Perhaps it even may lead to your following my example, and our meeting face to face.
Yours heartily,
WM ASHTON ELLIS
Preston Park,
February, 1909.
The view from the study window of Leighton Cottage in Horsted Keynes is still recognisable today from the photograph. A hand-pump still draws water to the cottage from the pond in the middle distance. A battered old oak at the bottom of the grounds of the Congregational Hall may be the remnant of Ellis’s ‘beloved oak’. Ellis sent photographs of this oak (which he said had been ‘printed for sale at our village shop’) to Bernard Shaw. [310] Whatever the cause, Ellis left the village, and by February 1909 was residing at 3 Surrenden Road, Preston Park, just outside Brighton. Though he greeted his readers ‘heartily’ from there in the second preface, the Life of Richard Wagner was never resumed. Whereas Glasenapp’s biography ground on into further editions and made it to the end of Wagner’s life with its sixth volume (1911), [311] Ellis’s version broke off with Wagner completing the score of Tristan und Isolde on 6 August 1859.
Eyestrain
Fifty years later, Tristan was to be the primary evidence adduced by those who sought to convict Wagner of moral depravity. If he preferred to ignore the current scandals connected with his erstwhile theosophical acquaintances, William Ashton Ellis could hardly have been unaware of the popular studies of sexuality by his contemporary and namesake, Havelock Ellis, [312] nor of Max Nordau, whose Degeneration was first published in 1892 and in English translation in 1895. Most likely it was Ernest Newman’s footnote referring to ‘excessive erethism among musicians’ in A Study of Wagner [313] that prompted Ellis’s repeated insistence in his Life of Wagner on a straightforward physiological basis for Wagner’s character. Ellis was able to draw upon his medical background and contacts in Wagner’s moral defence. In his third volume, he had diagnosed migraine behind Wagner’s persistent skin complaint and ‘neurasthenia’. [314] In the sixth volume, Ellis submitted at length evidence from the ophthalmologist Dr George M. Gould of Philadelphia, and from his own enquiries to the opticians Critchetts, whom Wagner had consulted (at Dannreuther’s suggestion) in London in 1877. In December 1904 Ellis had written triumphantly to Shaw: ‘It will interest you to know that I now know from Sir A. Critchett himself that Wagner had astigmatism.’ [315] Ellis may have been a fellow-sufferer. ‘I have also found’, he went on, ‘the right oculist, & he has done my sight a lot of good. Remember him! L.V. Cargill, F.R.C.S., 31 Harley Street (of King’s Hosp., quite a youngish man).’ [316] Ellis’s aim was to show that ‘presbyopia’ or eyestrain, rather than any more questionable condition, governed Wagner’s nature. ‘Astigmatism’, he argued, had not at the time been identified clinically, ‘but it is better for us to track that scientific cause than to catch up the parrot-cry of the pseudo-scientists and prate of ‘sexual erethism’ (!!) or Degeneration.’ Nordau’s name had already been briefly invoked in one of Ellis’s typical sarcastic parentheses. [317]
As a scientific theosophist Ellis had rejoiced in the Curies’ isolation of radium in 1902. It coincided with his argument in the Life of Richard Wagner that ‘Wotan’s Gedanke’ is that the Volsung twins can break ‘the “primordial law” of Natural Selection’ to create a new, unheard-of life-force. In a footnote inserted ‘Since the above was written (early 1903)’, he quoted a lecture by the eminent physicist (and president of the Society for Psychical Research) Sir Oliver Lodge. For Ellis the text would have echoed strikingly his Darwinian father’s Chemistry of Creation and its evocation more than fifty years earlier of the ongoing natural ‘economy of the world’ in ‘the interchange of ingredients’ through the ‘decay of former myriads’. In Lodge’s words the newly discovered transmutation of elements demonstrated that
Birth, culmination and decay, is the rule, whether for a plant or an animal, a nation or a planet or a sun. Twenty years ago it was thought that the atoms of matter were exempt from this liability to change […] Not so; the process of change has now been found to reach to these also. Nothing material is permanent […] The atoms are crumbling and decaying: must they not also be forming and coming to birth? This last we do not know as yet. It is the next thing to be looked for. Decay only, without birth and culmination, cannot be the last word. [318]
In 1899, Ellis had denied that Wagner was ever an ‘optimist in the only logical sense of the term, i.e., a believer in this world’s being the best of all worlds possible’. Nor, however, could he be described as a pessimist:
The idea of folding his hands in peace, and letting things take their downward course, or even proceed on their level way – the legitimate outcome of a hearty belief in the non-reality of all phenomena – must always have been repugnant to so ardent, so revolutionary, so strongly mercurial a spirit as Richard Wagner’s.
and Ellis found ‘glorious inconsistency’ to be the prerogative of genius. ‘I must guard myself, however’, he continued (and it is surely his self-defensive own voice we now hear),
against the possible interpretation of this ‘inconsistency’ as a fluctuation in point of time, a man’s denial to-day of that in which he trusted yesterday: rather is it a case of two co-existent planes of thought, the one facing towards an ideal world, the other fronting actual, practical life or art. And if a man has heart as well as brains, it is surely nothing to his discredit that, believing the world presented to our senses a mere hallucination, the baseless fabric of a vision, he yet endeavoured to bring some comfort to his fellows in that dream, to help them play their part in it as men ‘quand même’. [319]
By 1908, in the sixth volume of the Life of Wagner, Ellis had developed this ethical not-quite-quietism to make plain his own scientifically-based inability to accept Schopenhauer’s unalloyed ‘pessimism’. He endeavoured to show how both Schopenhauer and Wagner ‘may have been physiologically disposed towards the pessimistic view’. In fact he produced scant ‘physiological’ evidence with regard to Schopenhauer: but it’s significant that Ellis found ‘a ray of hope’ in the pessimist’s axiom that the death of an individual might imply the life of others. [320] Simply removing the notion of time, he said, results in the notion of ‘Metempsychosis’. As he put it: ‘Having come to curse the Will-to-life, the prophet has remained to bless it – in disguise.’ There followed what was surely one of Ellis’s most authentic utterances:
And should one now and then feel faint and heartsick, even in the thick of the fight there is always in that temporary refuge, the central peace a man may find at bottom of his deepest heart (as Sachs did), all consciousness forgotten for a spell. Let him not abide there too long – that is all – for work will still be waiting for his hand and brain, and ever thus must his Will be wrought to finer faculty of use and service. What of the opposition of contending energies! If the thumb did not oppose the fingers, and its own flexor and extensor muscles oppose each other, you never could pick up so much as a pin.
The physician and erstwhile theosophist had left Glasenapp and a Life of Wagner far behind, and if Ellis ever delivered himself of a personal credo it was here:
let us not be too afraid of Egoism, if only it be held in check by Altruism. […] If end of all things there ever is to be, we can conceive it still less possibly than a beginning; we ought to vex our souls no more with problematic happenings so infinitely remote. Sufficient for us to feel something within us, that might power the Will, which tells us plainer than all words, This cannot be our first ‘objectification’ and will not be our last – even if we chose so. [321]
Ellis, however, could hardly claim disinterest in that unique objectification of the Will that had been Richard Wagner. The facts of the composer’s personal life, particularly his conjugal life, seemed to require Ellis’s continual curating. In 1899, when Cosima Wagner had first given him ‘gracious permission’ to translate Wagner’s published letters, it had been expedient for Ellis to denigrate the composer’s misfortunate first marriage in almost vulturine terms:
Harsh as it may sound to say it, the merest justice to Richard Wagner’s memory demands that it should be placed on record that during the latter half of their wedded life Minna hung like a thunder-cloud above her husband’s head, continually discharging shocks that shattered his most cherished plans (half against her will), and filling him with dread of what might happen next. Even when finally separated, this luckless invalid’s power for evil was undiminished; and it is surely more than a coincidence, that the most peaceful years of Wagner’s life commence precisely with the date of unhappy Minna’s death. [322]
For Ernest Newman (and later Elbert Lenrow), Ellis’s short article in the Fortnightly Review of July 1905 on ‘Richard and Minna Wagner’ still seemed spitefully biased against Minna (though in fact Ellis was retailing an anecdote from Wendelin Weissheimer’s Erlebnisse mit Richard Wagner of 1898). That same year Ellis had broken off from the Life of Richard Wagner to publish his translation of Wagner’s letters to Mathilde Wesendonck, with commentaries and nuances of rendering which, as critics such as William Wallace, Julius Kapp and Ernest Newman were soon to point out, painted an all-too-innocent picture of that affair. [323] By 1909, however, Ellis had re-thought Minna’s role. Wondering how Minna had caused so many of Wagner’s letters to her to survive and find their way intact ‘into the Wahnfried strong-box’, he wrote that ‘it is as though she dimly foresaw the day when herself she might be instrumental in triumphantly clearing her husband’s name from calumnies reposing on a false assumption of her “martyrdom”’. [324] With the letters from Richard to Minna Wagner Ellis could now present two volumes of documentary proof that Wagner had in fact been a long-suffering but always caring and dutiful husband to her. These volumes would lead to the 1911 translation of the Family Letters, ‘i.e. letters from Richard Wagner to his mother, sisters, nieces, and so on’, where, as John Deathridge pointed out in his edition, Ellis would ponder on the significance of Wagner’s women without (perhaps) knowing anything of Freud. [325] The sanctimonious way in which the bachelor Ellis handled these intimate letters, released conditionally from the ‘Wahnfried strong-box’ for publication and translation, suggests an understandable professional respect for Cosima’s matriarchal authority, but as he worked his way through them they seem gradually to have also acquired an increasingly deep personal significance for the translator himself.
By 1905 Ellis’s relations with ‘Mr. Youngman’ were, as we have seen, at a low ebb. As Ellis became preoccupied between 1905 and 1911 with the complexity of Wagner’s relationships with Mathilde, Minna and his own family, it is interesting to see him accused by other critics of puerility in this context. [326] It may be tempting to try to discern a fraught oedipal relationship between Newman and Ellis, but with his scientific background Ellis could not have been unaware of the sexual basis of recent developments in psychology. In the same year in which Ellis’s translation of the Family Letters appeared, Havelock Ellis’s The World of Dreams (London, 1911) could hardly avoid mentioning Freud’s Die Traumdeutung. ‘Touches felt on awakening, in correspondence with a dream’, he wrote, ‘are not so very uncommon. Thus Wagner, when in love with Mathilde Wesendonk, wrote, in the private diary he kept for her, how, after a dream, “as I awoke I distinctly felt a kiss on my brow”.’ [327] The spelling Wesendonk suggests that Ellis (Havelock) wasn’t drawing here on Ellis (William Ashton) and his 1905 translation of the letters from Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck. [328] But at least since 1899, when their names had appeared alphabetically one after the other on the contents page of the Fortnightly Review, Ellis (William Ashton) would have been uncomfortably aware of his namesake’s popular studies on sex. Die Traumdeutung was not translated into English until 1913. Ellis of course would hardly have needed to wait for anyone else’s translation from the German of any works drawn on by Havelock Ellis, including Freud’s. He had already confronted psychological enemies – Nietzsche, Nordau, Praeger – in their own language. Ellis energetically deplored any prurient fascination for Wagner. But in a way that implies something about his own personality, he so overstated Wagner’s moral character as to make it implausibly chaste. Ernest Newman mocked him as a sanctifying ‘thurifer’. [329]
In 1899, as he concluded the Prose Works and began to contemplate the Glasenapp Life, Ellis (perhaps encouraged by Cosima and Chamberlain) had allowed himself the anticipation that: ‘Some future day there may yet be opened up the prospect of following Richard Wagner’s footsteps through his own life-history, but that cannot be for several years to come.’ [330] In fact as long ago as 1892, in his Trinity College lectures on ‘The Artwork of the Future’, Ellis had been given assurances from Siegfried Wagner himself that Richard Wagner’s autobiography would one day be published. In 1911 that time now came, for financial, family and ideological purposes. Having first considered Henry Thode for the trusted task, Cosima asked Chamberlain to edit the manuscript and first privately printed edition of Mein Leben for open publication. It was Chamberlain, she thought, who could properly ‘place the Meister in the philosophical company of Hegel, Feuerbach and Schopenhauer’. [331] But when Constable & Co. in London, and Dodd, Mead and Company in New York, simultaneously published an anonymous ‘authorized’ English translation in May the same year, Ellis expressed the hope ‘that we yet may be given a reliable [emphasis added] translation of Mein Leben’. [332] It’s clear, however, that he had not expected to be entrusted with the job himself. His friend David Irvine would take up cudgels over the translation’s reliability, claiming to find eight hundred errors in the German edition. [333] But by 1911 Ellis must have believed that so far as England was concerned he had already done what was necessary to wash the character of Wagner lastingly clean from all blemish – having vigorously opposed those, from the old traducer Ferdinand Praeger to the arrogant ‘Mr Youngman’, who would throw dirt at Wagner in order to see if it would stick. For us, an ‘authorized’ translation of Mein Leben by William Ashton Ellis would have been a fascinating balancing act between faithfulness and antisepsis; for him it would probably have been a welcome lucrative task.
‘Somewhere’, wrote Ellis in his ‘Translator’s Preface’, ‘I have recently seen this collection of “Family Letters” referred to by a well-wishing journalist in advance of its integral English publication […] as “a supplement to Wagner’s Autobiography”’. [334] Ellis was not averse to this comparison, but the socialist Ernest Belfort Bax took the opposite view to David Irvine and found Ellis’s translation of the Family Letters, published the same year, a distinctly lesser ‘supplement’ to the autobiography:
A word as to the translation of ‘My Life’. We have not had an opportunity of comparing it with the original, but can say that the style of the English is admirable, and seldom betrays its character as a translation. It is, indeed, quite exceptionally good in this respect. Mr. Ashton Ellis’s translation of the ‘Letters’ gives the impression of being extremely faithful in its adhesion to the original if, perhaps, a trifle less idiomatic than the English of the anonymous translator of the autobiography. [335]
This must have dispirited Ellis. His efforts to save Wagner from the ‘anti-Wagnerians’ had personally cost him a lot, ‘said work being unremunerative of its very nature’ as he had put it. Shortly before Ellis wrote those words in 1908 Bernard Shaw had urged R.B. Haldane (then Secretary of State for War) to make a bid for the Liberal premiership: ‘You must seize the crown; and when you have got it let the first acts of your reign be to give me that [Civil List] pension for Ashton Ellis (who is pawning his spare scarf-pins) and to abolish the Censorship of plays.’ [336]
That Civil List Pension
Ellis had tentatively reopened correspondence with Shaw in December 1904 with a view to ‘a Treasury Pension, or whatever they call it’. Their personal acquaintance had almost certainly begun twelve years before at the Musical Association with that reading by Ellis of his essay on ‘Richard Wagner’s Prose’. What Ellis now told Shaw, about the terms put to him by Grevel & Co. for the translation of the Mathilde Wesendonck letters, reveals the level of commercial esteem in which his Wagnerian endeavours were held, both by his publishers and himself: ‘Their offer to me was delicious. “We had been thinking of £30.” “It will take me 6 months to translate properly”, I replied, “do you imagine I can live on £60 a year?” – “Perhaps £50 then.” – “No, not on £100 a year can I live.”’ Ellis eventually agreed a royalty of 6d per copy sold for the first edition of a thousand, and 1s per copy thereafter, banking on the success of Wolfgang Golther’s German edition, then into its eleventh thousand. [337] Ellis’s focus on what the translation would bring him materially contrasts strikingly with the highflown moralism he would translate from the Wesendonck letters themselves. Elsewhere in his letters to Shaw around this time Ellis affects a coy artlessness about professors, archbishops and statesmen, designed to win Shaw’s good offices in trying to recruit them to Ellis’s personal, material, cause.
In January 1905, Shaw obligingly drafted a letter to the prime minister, Arthur Balfour, to accompany a complete set of the eight volumes of the Prose Works, sent ‘to enable you to judge the magnitude of the enterprise’. The real purpose of the letter, however, was to argue that case for a Civil List pension for Ellis. The ‘cost to the translator’, Shaw pleaded, ‘has included not only years of the most arduous labor in the face of every discouragement and difficulty, but the expenditure of his slender private fortune and the sacrifice of his profession as a physician. At the age of 52 he finds himself practically without resources.’ [338] Shaw envisaged the letter taking the form of a petition to be signed by Ellis’s supporters. Ellis had sent through various suggestions for signatories, including, as we have seen, Arthur Balfour via his sister Eleanor Sidgwick. The previous October he had been encouraged by correspondence as friendly as it was unsolicited from the music critic of the Birmingham Gazette. [339] At the time Ellis was aggrieved at what he saw as the ‘anti-Wagnerism’ of younger music critics such as Edward Algernon Baughan (1865–1938) and Ernest Newman. Robert Buckley (1847–1938), however, had favourably reviewed the fourth volume of Ellis’s Life of Richard Wagner, and Ellis sought his opinion on whether he should ask Grevel’s to request that his Mathilde Wesendonck translations should be reviewed by literary rather than musical critics, so as to ‘extricate’ the work ‘from the hands of that pestilent tribe’. Buckley was already the first biographer, and a personal friend, of Edward Elgar. On 27 December 1904 Ellis assured Shaw that ‘Buckley cd. get Elgar too’ to subscribe to the Civil List appeal. [340] But it is doubtful whether this letter was ever sent, or if it was, whose signatures it bore.
The Tory government faced growing unpopularity during 1905, and on 4 November Balfour resigned without seeking the dissolution of parliament. The Liberals formed a minority administration on 5 December, but in the general election called the following January they swept into power with a crushing and historic majority. Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) became prime minister (the first PM to use the title formally). Shaw kept up the pressure on Lord Haldane (1856–1928), co-translator in 1883 of Schopenhauer’s The World and Will and Idea and now (incongruous as it seems) Secretary of State for War:
I threatened that if something was not done we should have to sue in forma pauperis to the Kaiser; that is the only stone I could pick up to shy at our national amour propre. I don’t think this Government [Campbell-Bannerman’s] is at all less likely to give the pension than the late one [Balfour’s]. C.-B. is probably less squeezable with gentle little jobs on hand than A.B., and therefore likely to keep more in hand for real cases. [341]
Shaw eventually found a chink in the bureaucracy surrounding Campbell-Bannerman, whose health began to deteriorate after the death of his wife in August 1906, in the person of his private secretary, the economist historian Henry Higgs (1864–1940). Higgs put up stiff resistance at first, pointing out: ‘Linguists and Wagner-enthusiasts say that the translator has been (as the Italian pun has it) a traitor, misunderstanding and botching his work. The Civil List Acts say that C.L. pensions are to be given only to such persons as have […] by their eminent attainments in Literature or the Arts or their useful discoveries in Science deserved the gracious consideration of their Sovereign and the gratitude of their country. These are, I think, the exact words. Can we shew that Mr Ellis is a man of “eminent attainments in Literature”? Or is he a mere translator?’ [342]
In the event Haldane was not required to mount the coup urged by Shaw. In March 1908, a month before Campbell-Bannerman’s death at 10 Downing Street, Shaw’s blandishments worked. He had evidently sent through another petition on behalf of Ellis, since Higgs replied: ‘I have consulted two of your co-signatories. They say they “don’t know much about Ellis”. Such is the way of them when they sign memorials.’ But he conceded he was now ‘satisfied that the works were worth translating, and that we ought to do something for Ellis if we can.’ On 19 March 1908 he wrote to Shaw that:
The King has approved of a Civil List pension of £80 a year to Mr. W. Ashton Ellis, to date from the 1st of April 1907. It is desirable not to publish the fact until it is reported to Parliament in July. I hope you will not be disappointed that the pension is not larger. If it does not comfort you to think of it as 2,000 franks or 1,600 marks, it may be more satisfying to reflect that, as Ellis is only 55 years of age, the present value of his Annuity is considerably over £1,000 – which is a substantial subvention for the work he has done. [343]
Ellis was actually aged 56 by this time. As announced in The Times on 26 June (rather than July) 1905 the pension was awarded ‘in consideration of his contributions to literature in biography and music’. Sir Edwin Ray Lankester (the son of Robert Ellis’s Linnean Society sponsor) was granted £250 annually on the same occasion, ‘in consideration of his eminent services to science’.
On receiving notification the next day, Ellis thanked Shaw profusely ‘as prime mover & most influential pursuant in my “Civil List” cause’. As a result ‘at least I need not come upon “the rates” this side of the grave’. Ellis acknowledged the ‘energetic’ support he had had from Ashton Jonson, but confided that ‘privately, D.H. Irvine has been helping me above the rest’. [344] Shaw remained dissatisfied with the outcome. As he put it much later, in an unsigned article to the New Statesman in 1913, ‘Mr Ashton Ellis devoted his life to the translation of Wagner’s prose works; and it was with the greatest difficulty that, after years of effort, a wretchedly inadequate Civil List pension was procured for him in the face of the sedulously inculcated conviction that Wagner was an abominably bad musician, and that, being only a composer, he could not possibly have written books, or if he did they could not be proper ones.’ [345]
Ellis was taken seriously by at least one major musical contemporary. On 30 May 1905 Edward Elgar wrote to his patron and friend Edward Speyer, ‘I am sorry I forgot to send you back Ashton Ellis’s letter. Here it is. I am sending him Gerontius.’ [346] The Elgars had visited the Speyers at Ridgehurst, their home in Shenley, Hertfordshire, on 13–15 May, and it appears that Speyer handed the composer a letter from Ellis at that time. Whatever it contained, it has not survived. Speyer may have given it to Elgar to let him have Ellis’s address, since a copy of The Dream of Gerontius, its title-page handsomely inscribed by Elgar to Ellis, has survived. The dedication reads, ‘To W. Ashton Ellis / with admiration & gratitude for / his devotion to the master / from Edward Elgar / June 1905.’ [347] The Elgars set sail on the Deutschland for a tour of America on 9 June, so the inscription can be dated to the first week of June. Whether it was Robert Buckley who had indeed ‘got’ Elgar for Ellis is not known.
Outbreak of Hostilities
The unexplained circumstances of Ellis’s reluctant departure from Horsted Keynes and Leightoncote are compounded by an aside in that letter he wrote to Shaw from there on 20 March 1908, thanking him for securing the Civil List pension:
I had been away from home since yesterday morning, spending the night at my sisters’ [in Streatham] & returned in the most fearful fit of depression owing to a wave of misfortune wh. has almost swamped the whole of my family (I mean, of course, my brothers and sisters); little did I expect that a piece of good news for my personal self was awaiting me at home (or rather, here, wh. will soon no longer be my home). [348]
Ellis’s departure and his ensuing years in Preston Park, Brighton, are not well documented, and offer no further clue as to this ‘wave of misfortune’. He was later to refer – equally mysteriously – to ‘a strange concatenation of circumstances’ which led him to abandon the Life of Wagner. The ‘Translator’s Preface’ to the letters from Richard to Minna Wagner, dated ‘Preston Park, January 1909’, suggests some apprehension for the future. It places it ‘in the reader’s own hands, whether the present volumes shall soon be supplemented by an English rendering of the delightful Familienbriefe.’ [349] If the misfortune of 1908 was financial, the preface (‘Brighton, July 1911’) to the Family Letters of Richard Wagner at any rate testified to William Ashton Ellis’s professed lack of interest in making money from his work:
I have persuaded my present publishers to issue this [volume] at a price within the means of all who crowd the cheaper sections of the house at performances [of Wagner]. With them and their numberless friends it must rest, alike to justify our present, and to shape our future policy. For at least one more volume of letters is ready for printing in the event of a cordial reception of this. [350]
One more intended volume of letters may have been the translation of those to Theodor Apel, the German edition of which was published in Leipzig in 1910. Ellis opined that the Family Letters ‘presents us with the earliest of Richard Wagner’s private missives as yet discoverable; though in that respect it is run pretty close by the “Letters to Apel” quite lately contributed by me to The English Review’. [351] Ellis’s translation of the ‘Letters of Wagner to His Schoolfellow Apel’ appeared in the English Review in June–July and August–September 1911, but the text doesn’t appear to have been published elsewhere as a substantive ‘volume’. [352]
Ernest Newman, certainly, gave a less than cordial reception to Ellis’s volumes in 1912: ‘These Wagner–Ellis things don’t command a high price. The other day I only gave 5/6 for the two volumes of his Letters to Minna (pubd. 24/-).’ [353] Ellis was now aged 60, his literary reputation was waning, and he suffered a personal blow when his ‘companion attendant (domestic)’ [354] of the last twelve years, George Laurance, died at the age of 50 at their home in Preston Park on 1 September 1912. Ellis himself, ‘present at the death’, certified the cause as ‘Bright’s disease (15 years), Paroxysmal Tachycardia, Syncope’. In his will dated 27 November 1901 Laurance had bequeathed everything to Ellis, including ‘my jewellery and trinkets and the money standing in my name at the Post Office Savings Bank’. No-one else is mentioned. [355] Laurance had succumbed to the same condition from which Ellis had saved Madame Blavatsky twenty-five years earlier.
In the Wagner centenary year of 1913, it was Ernest Newman, not William Ashton Ellis, who fronted the Musical Times’s commemorative issue of 1 May with an article on ‘Wagner’s Prose Works’. ‘As a writer’, Newman asserted, Wagner ‘is still singularly little known in this country’:
For this the peculiar quality of most of the translations is largely responsible. They convert his German, which is often clumsy and tortuous enough to begin with, into a curious sort of pseudo-Teutonic English that no one ever talked or wrote before or since; and it is hardly surprising that people who have broken a tooth or two on one of these very tough nuts should shy at tackling the remainder. [356]
There was no rejoinder from Ellis, and I have traced nothing from his pen in the Wagner centenary year. There was to be no further volume of translations to afflict the teeth of English readers after the Family Letters; no more literary efforts in fact until the summer of 1915, when Ellis contributed three linked articles to the Musical Times concerning Wagner and the Great War. Though Ellis’s star was setting, it flickered one last time. One can only guess at the personal effect on Ellis of the advent of war between Britain and Germany, the loss of his correspondence with Wahnfried, the closure of the Bayreuth Festivals after 1914. Glasenapp died on 14 April 1915. Twenty years earlier, in the last issue of The Meister to appear, Ellis had issued an appeal to princes echoing Wagner’s in the Ring-poem preface of 1863. In part vicariously on his own behalf, he had called for support of the Riga schoolmaster ‘owing to the troubles put upon Herr Glasenapp by the Russian Government’:
If ever a German Prince, or even an Englishman of wealth, had the opportunity of doing the world a service, it is presented now. Herr Glasenapp ought to be rescued from all necessity of earning his living by teaching youth; his proper function is the teaching of men. There must be many a comfortable post, of Librarian and so forth, only waiting for a man of his standing and ability. Can no one influence, for instance, a member of our own Royal Family who is at like time a German Ruler, and thus ensure for Glasenapp a position where he could devote the major part of his time to the completion of his Life of Wagner? [357]
But now Ellis’s articles were unstinting in their condemnation of Germany and ‘the fiendish criminality of our hate-belching enemy’. The first was written three months after the sinking of the Lusitania, described by Ellis as ‘that appalling butchery on the high seas’. Wagner, Ellis maintained, was not that sort of German. Ellis publicly and uncompromisingly severed himself from Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose notorious Kriegsaufsätze (translated by Charles H. Clarke as The Ravings of a Renegade) had appeared that same year:
Could the Bayreuth Master arise from the tomb in which he was laid to rest over two-and-thirty years ago, I can imagine nobody who would be more indignant at the articles recently penned by that renegade ex-Englishman who now lives in his house, or at the prior insolent action of that old pupil we all once so honoured. But one thing is certain: his spirit would flee to the uttermost ends of the universe to escape contamination from the air polluted by the Hohenzollern decadent who but lately conferred a badge of shame, the Iron Cross ‘with white ribbon (for non-combatants),’ on his posthumous son-in-law. […] To speak for myself, if I may be permitted to, even in the almost inconceivable event of the Festival-theatre at Bayreuth opening its doors again during my lifetime, never more could I enter a town or country where a traitor to his native land apparently is held in high esteem, neither could I ever shake hands again with anyone of German birth who had not expressed a stern and honest detestation of the crimes this outcrop of barbarians misnames ‘necessities of war’; but of all his countrymen our Wagner was most innocent of any influence in that direction, and to condemn him for the wickedness of those who now are reversing all his cherished principles would be grotesquely absurd were it not so grimly tragic. [358]
At around the same time an anonymous ‘Neutral Correspondent’ for The Times surveyed the ‘war literature’ in Germany. ‘I know of no more interesting psychological study at this moment’, he wrote, ‘than a dispassionate analysis of the “literary” auxiliary corps of the German Army’. He elaborates:
The well-known Professor of Political Economy, Werner Sombart […] develops [his] thesis in order to show that the centre point of the world-struggle is that between ‘the shopkeeper and the hero, between the mercenary and the heroic spirit’. The two peoples which most definitely represent these conflicting spirits are the British and the Germans. Only as an Anglo-German war does the world-war of 1914 attain its deep historic significance.
Another book, published while I was in Germany, is a heavy volume bearing in big red letters the title ‘The Annihilation of English World-Power’, with the smaller sub-title ‘And of Russian Tsarism through the Triple Alliance and Islam’. The author must now regret his allusion to the Triple Alliance. A special note informed the reader that it was the first work issued by the ‘War Political Culture Committee of the German Northern European Wagner Society’. Among the contributors to its pages were ‘A Turkish Diplomatist’, Professors Haeckel and Eucken, and other well-known men. The back cover bore prominently the words, ‘Ceterum censeo Britanniam esse delendam’. […] This Wagner Culture Committee has many adherents. Among its leading spirits is the renegade Englishman, Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the author of the German Emperor’s favourite book, ‘The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century’. He recently received from the Kaiser the Iron Cross, ‘to be worn on a white ribbon’, in recognition of his services as an anti-English essayist. [359]
If ‘our’ Wagner was defended by Ellis – even the ‘Kapitulation’ which Ellis had once been prepared to see suppressed could be excused [360] – Nietzsche was offered up as a sacrifice. In the ‘Translator’s Preface’ to the fifth volume of the Prose Works dated January 1897, Ellis had described Nietzsche’s later writings as ‘nothing but aphorisms, glittering, acid, eccentric, sometimes startling and suggestive, but as unnutritious to the reader as a diet of chopped straw or a dinner composed of hors d’oeuvres’. In his preface to the succeeding volume, dated Christmas 1897, Ellis reported that during that year he had studied Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s biography of her brother, ‘also a very large portion of Nietzsche’s own voluminous writings’. These had confirmed his earlier impression of them: they were ‘so bewildering in their almost utter chaos, their stringing-together of jewels and glass beads, without so much as an index to guide one […] Though I cannot pretend to have read all his works as yet, I have closely studied a very large section of them, and dipped into the remainder.’ Ellis reminded his readers of Nietzsche’s insanity, not without a hint of sympathy, and follows Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in regretting a loss to the cause: ‘Nietzsche’, he had concluded, ‘was the only opponent within measurable distance of the master’. [361]
But as Ellis now recalled it in 1915:
Between ten and twenty years ago I waded through his eight big volumes (plus four of supplemental ‘remains’), and to this day I haven’t forgotten the mingled sense of irritation and disgust with which all but the earliest then filled me. To save myself from any future necessity of the sort, however, on the inner cover of each of them I providently jotted down a rough subject-index to the more distinctive passages as they struck me during my self-imposed task, expecting to need to enter somewhat fully into the said antagonism whenever I arrived at the ‘seventies in that ‘Life of Wagner’ which a strange concatenation of adverse circumstances arrested in mid-career even before the Great War came to shatter all hopes of resumption. [362]
Several of those passages were now patched together in his Musical Times article, whose thesis was: Wagner didn’t like Bismarck; Nietzsche didn’t like Wagner; therefore Nietzsche liked Bismarck. Ellis knew better than this: his Musical Times articles were not terribly scholarly, but they were a product of their time. In the event, Ellis’s loyalty to his country rose above his loyalty to an ideal to which he had dedicated his productive life.
The minutes of the monthly meeting of the Committee of Management of the Western Dispensary for February 1915 read as follows:
Mr. Jones stated that he had visited the Dispensary several times during the past months and in the course of his visits he had ascertained that the Resident Medical Officer was in a very bad state of health and appeared to be quite unable to carry out his duties properly, and he (Mr. Jones) was of the opinion that, in the interests of the Dispensary the engagement should be terminated forthwith. The secretary read some letters which she had received from Mr. W. Ashton Ellis, a former Resident Medical Officer, expressing his willingness to again act in that capacity if it required. [363]
The next month Ellis was confirmed in his old post as Resident Medical Officer at the Rochester Row Dispensary, and at his old salary (albeit nearly forty years later) of 100 guineas per annum. ‘Permission was granted to Mr. Ellis to have his grand piano in the Board Room, as there was not room for it in his apartments’. [364] But another month later, ‘Attention was called by members of the Committee to the quantity of furniture belonging to the Resident Medical Officer which had been placed in the Board Room and in other parts of the premises. After a discussion it was arranged that Mr. Sim should see the doctor upon the matter.’ [365]
Ellis’s return to the Dispensary was by no means welcomed by all. The 38-year-old Edith Morgan was the secretary, and she seems to have taken exception to this figure from the past. The feeling was mutual, according to the Dispensary’s minutes:
The Resident Medical Officer made a complaint with regard to a call by two gentlemen asking if there was a vacancy at the Dispensary for Resident Medical Officers, giving as their introduction the name of Messrs. Arnold & Sons, from whom the Resident Medical Officer had ascertained that the Secretary had been in correspondence with them. [366]
Ellis put his complaint in writing, and it was read out at a special meeting of the committee on 6 January 1916:
Dear Sir,
Having been informed by you that it is the wish of the Committee that I should reduce to the form of a written complaint entrusted to myself the enquiry I addressed to them in person at their last meeting, viz. 20th inst., I proceed to complain.
That without the faintest warning to me or the remotest hint from myself of any desire to terminate the engagement I hold here subject to three months’ notice on either side, I have been submitted to the grave indignity of discovering that, owing to communications which appear to have passed between our Secretary and a firm of medical agents in course of the week ended 18th inst. two applicants – one of them being an identifiable man – called here on the 19th inst. with a view to an alleged immediate vacancy in the post of ‘House Doctor’.
This is a matter so closely affecting not only my personal repute, but also the honour of the whole medical profession, that I respectfully pray yourself and colleagues to institute a searching enquiry into its true motives and authorship and further to redress any stigma I so easily may have incurred in the eyes both of Messrs. Arnold, the said agents, and our serving staff.
I have the honour to remain, dear Sir,
Your obedient servant
(Sgd). Wm. Ashton Ellis –
Res. Med. Officer
Also a Life Governor of Thirty Years standing.
Ellis actually issued a writ for slander against Miss Morgan. In the upshot the Committee of Management diplomatically defused the crisis by deciding that since Miss Morgan had not formally complained about the Resident Medical Officer, and the committee had not sacked him, they could assure Ellis that no professional stigma attached to him. [367]
Ellis continued to be troublesome. Only eleven days later, the minutes note that because of his ‘interference’ the Gas Light & Coke Company had been unable to install a new gas stove in the dispensary in place of the coal-fire range. Perhaps Ellis’s mistrust of gas was the natural response of a physician during the First World War (poison gas had first been used on 22 April 1915). There were further disputes over ‘the quantity of furniture’ Ellis had brought to the dispensary – presumably including his library and piano. The minutes for 16 July 1917 record that the chairman of the Committee of Management ‘arranged to see the R.M.O. with regard to his furniture &c and to explain that the purpose of the committee in having the clearance [of the dispensary’s basement] was to afford cover in case of air raids’.
Despite these disputes, Ellis’s altruism seems to have developed. On 5 February 1918 he was awarded honorary life membership of the British Red Cross Society, receiving badge number 127, ‘having given five complete courses of British Red Cross lectures gratuitously’. [368] During his lectures, Ellis may have recalled his words in the Musical Times ‘Wagner contra Militarism’ article, when he castigated attempts to ban the music of dead German composers from British concert-halls: by the same token, he had demanded, ‘are we promptly to discard all our triangular bandages lest our brave wounded should have their pride hurt by hearing them inadvertently called by the name derived from their inventor, the late well-known Prussian army-surgeon Esmarch?’ [369] Four days later, the Western Dispensary’s register records William Ashton Ellis becoming himself a financial subscriber towards the free care of the poor.
‘Body, Soul, Mind, and Intellect’
In 1878, when he had been first appointed to the Resident Medical Officer’s post, his name was recorded as William Ashdown Ellis. Along with Frederick and Margaret Brown (his servants, presumably), the 1918 Register of Electors resident at the dispensary on Rochester Row now listed him as ‘Ellis, William Ashlar’. Getting William Ashton Ellis wrong always seems to have been unavoidable in one way or another. It will never be known whether Ellis diagnosed his own condition correctly. William Ashton Ellis died in his rooms at the Western Dispensary on Thursday 2 January 1919. He was 67 years of age. His brother Sir Evelyn Campbell Ellis was in attendance. [370] The certified cause of death was given as ‘aortic regurgitation, cardiac dilatation, pulmonary congestion’. I stand to be corrected by qualified medical opinion, but Ellis may have been a victim of the devastating post-war ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic.
Left nothing specific in the will of Robert Ellis, according to his will of 23 May 1918 William Ashton Ellis had somehow come to possess ‘our late father’s large Ross microscope with stand and glass shade complete’. This potent symbol of his scientific paternity was bequeathed to Sir Evelyn Campbell Ellis together with ‘all such of my pictures engravings and photographs as he may care to select’. It was balanced by a sentimental keepsake offering a faint glimpse of the unknown Mary Ann Eliza Ellis: ‘I give to my beloved sister Ada Matilda Ellis my small white gilt & painted Worcester vase which we both remember as standing in our childhood on our darling mothers bedroom mantelpiece[:] with her never failing generosity and kindness I know that in the event of her surviving me my dear sister would not wish for more.’
Like his father, William Ashton Ellis made characteristic bequests. £50 to the King George’s Fund for Sailors; and should his brothers Reginald and Claude not survive him, £50 to the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund; and should his residual legatees not survive him, their share to ‘whatever fund or funds intended for the relief of sufferers through the present war’ his executors selected. His effects, valued in probate at £2,443 17s 11d, suggest that slightly fussy English Biedermeier taste: ‘ornamental china glass and other decorative articles of vertu’; a sterling silver collection, the prize of which was a ‘silver coffee pot with silver stand and spirit lamp complete bequeathed to me by my late godmother’; a ‘small chippendale glass doored dwarf cabinet that has stood upon the mantelpiece of my successive sitting rooms for well nigh forty years’; that is, since he first furnished his rooms at the Western Dispensary.
The ‘whole stock of my published literary works as standing in my name and to my credit at my printers and publishers at the time of my death together with my copyright and other legal rights therein’ were bequeathed to Ellis’s ‘valued friend Thomas Francis Howell[,] Barrister at law’. Howell (1864–1953) had studied music at the Guildhall School, but turned to the law when he was called to the Bar at Inner Temple in 1889. Together with Sir Evelyn Campbell Ellis, he was now executor of Ellis’s will. He asserted the copyright he inherited in Ellis’s works at least once, as indicated by a slip bound into copies of L. Archier Leroy’s Wagner’s Music Drama of the ‘Ring’, published by Noel Douglas, 38 Great Ormond Street, London WC1. There is no publication date, but the author’s preface and H.R. Barbor’s introduction are both dated 1925, which suggest that Ellis’s copyright expired in 1995. [371]
William Ashton Ellis’s ‘dear friend Thomas Lear of 7 Holmwood Grove West Jesmond Newcastle on Tyne’ was to receive the choicest and most personal items: his private collection of books; his papers; his unpublished manuscripts and all rights in them; ‘my silver plated goods my personal trinkets jewellery and writing implements my wearing apparel kit bags & portmanteaux my grand pianoforte my stained glass medallion of Richard Wagner and my framed engraving of a scene in Nuremberg’. The silver coffee pot was bequeathed to ‘my godson Walter Hans Lear with custody thereof during his minority [he was then aged 6] to his father the aforesaid Thomas Lear’.
Thomas Lear was born in Leeds in 1882, the son of a Rochdale ‘willyer’ – a wool worker. By the age of 18 he was already a musician by profession according to the 1901 census; he became an accomplished musical all-rounder, and when he died in Newcastle in 1954 aged 71 the death certificate described him as a ‘Theatre Musical Director (Retired)’. His pupil, the flautist Gerald Jackson, recalled that in about 1905, ‘besides playing the trombone, [Lear] was also a master of the violin, the piano and the cornet, and on a Sunday he would turn to the flute and piccolo in the Baptist chapel. […] The standard achieved by Thomas Lear was such that he was on regular call by the committee which arranged the concerts of the Leeds Symphony Orchestra.’ [372] How this precocious northerner, thirty years his junior, struck up a friendship with the reclusive William Ashton Ellis remains a mystery. Lear married Cissy (Elizabeth) Blakey in 1904, and Ellis became godfather to their son, Walter Hans Lear, after his birth in Newcastle on 4 March 1913 (he died in 1983). Ellis would still have been in Brighton, and it must have been Lear who took his talents southwards. Perhaps it was when he availed himself there of the ‘frequent opportunity of hearing our great master’s music capitally performed’ that he encountered Lear. Thomas Lear is said by some of his descendants to have been a close friend of Siegfried Wagner: this can’t be verified. A story lingers in the Lear family that ‘Dr. Ellis’ (he is sometimes referred to with even greater deference as Sir William Ashton Ellis) was ‘sweet upon’ Lear’s wife Elizabeth (1883–1968). [373]
Thomas Lear evidently had much more catholic musical interests than Ellis. The British Library possesses a virtuoso piece by Thos. Lear with polka rhythms for solo (or with piano accompaniment) B flat cornet entitled Shylock, published by Boosey & Co. in 1927. [374] A branch of the Lear family kindly passed on to me an undated Carl Simon Musikverlag score (for harmonium or organ with string quartet accompaniment) of Kistler’s Gebet op. 59 No. 3, inscribed (almost certainly by the composer) ‘Seinem lieben Herrn Ellis aus London’, and his ‘Trauerklänge (Erinnerung an Hans von Bülow)’ for harmonium or organ, op. 64 (Berlin, 1894). The family also gave me piano sheet music bearing Thomas Lear’s name or monogram stamp. These include a Novello album of Marches by Various Composers; Trois Morceaux by Sigismond Noskowski; a Breitkopf & Härtel Klavier-Bibliothek transcription of the Freischütz Overture; the ‘Danse Bohemiènne’ from Bizet’s Fair Maid of Perth; Adolf Jensen’s Hochzeitsmusik; a Capriccio by Domenico Scarlatti arranged by Tausig; Dvořák’s Silhouetten; the second part of Moritz Moszkowski’s Sechs Klavierstücke; Bülow’s arrangement of two Bach Gavottes; an Entr’acte from Gounod’s Colombe; Liszt’s Consolation No. 3, and his transcriptions of Mendelssohn’s Wasserfahrt and Der Jäger Abschied; and Johann Strauss’s Morgenblätter Waltz No. 7. A copy of Etienne Charavay’s catalogue of the Lettres Autographes composant la Collection de M. Alfred Bovet (Paris, 1887) is certainly Ellis’s. [375] The surviving Lear family have not been able to preserve much of Ellis’s estate, but they were generous in assisting me with my research. The silver coffee pot was sold years ago, but the stained glass portrait of Wagner survives. [376] All of William Ashton Ellis’s estate that the descendants of Thomas Lear now have in their possession – besides some kindly memories passed down – is his baptismal bible and the stained glass medallion of Richard Wagner.
The briefest of insertions appeared in The Times’ deaths column on page 1 on Saturday 4 January: ‘ELLIS. – On the 2nd Jan., In London, WILLIAM ASHTON ELLIS, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., son of the late Robert Ellis, M.R.C.S.’ On page 3, in its ‘News In Brief’ column, above items titled ‘Six Miles Up’ (a world altitude record of 30,500ft achieved by a De Havilland Airco DH9 biplane) and ‘Burglars’ Silent Window Breaking’ (an ingenious but felonious use of ‘paper and a sticky substance’), this was expanded into a brief obituary:
A BIOGRAPHER OF WAGNER
Dr. W. A. Ellis, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., who died in London on January 2, was a son of the late Robert Ellis, M.R.C.S. He qualified as a physician in 1878, and served as assistant [sic] medical officer at the Western Dispensary. He was a hon. life member-lecturer of the British Red Cross Society; late hon. secretary of the Association of Members of the Royal College of Surgeons, England; and assistant demonstrator in anatomy at St. George’s General Hospital. Dr. Ellis was the author [sic] of ‘Richard Wagner’s Prose Works’ (eight vols.) and a ‘Life of Wagner’ (six vols.), and he wrote also on the reform of the Royal College of Surgeons in the late eighties of the last century. [377]
A similar notice was published in The Lancet on 18 January. Ellis’s will had made no reference to funeral arrangements, but knowing what we now do about Ellis, it might have been reasonable to assume that he would have expressed a preference to follow Madame Blavatsky’s example and be cremated. However enquiries to Woking, and to Golders Green, the next likely cremation site for the time, produced no record. Nor was Ellis buried (as Evelyn Campbell Ellis would be) at Brompton Cemetery, which might be thought to be local to the Western Dispensary. That there was a ceremony was clear from the minutes of the Dispensary’s Committee of Management, which recorded that ‘The Chairman regretted having to report the death of Dr. Ellis, that he attended the funeral service, and had instructed the Secretary to send a floral tribute. A letter of thanks from Sir Evelyn Ellis was read.’ [378] In fact William Ashton Ellis was buried humbly on 7 January 1919 in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Tooting Graveney, in the borough of Wandsworth, not far from his mother’s last home in Streatham. The exact grave site is not identified. [379]
In the dispensary’s minutes it was also noted: ‘That as the R.M.O.’s rooms had been furnished by Dr. Ellis himself, the Institution would have to refurnish them.’ [380] ‘Dr.’ was a title never claimed by Ellis himself, but at his death, in The Times obituary and in the Western Dispensary’s minutes, it was now deemed appropriate to confer it on him. In the dispensary’s report for the year just ended 1918, a late note was inserted:
It is with very great regret that the Committee have to report the death of Dr. Wm. Ashton Ellis, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.(Lond), who took up the post of Resident Medical Officer of this Institution in March, 1915, in order to assist the Committee at a time when it was difficult to obtain Medical Officers, owing to the claims made on the profession by the War. Dr. Ellis served the office of Resident Medical Officer as long ago as from 1878 to 1886 [sic].
From 1887 (in fact) to 1915 William Ashton Ellis served another cause. In his 1928 memoirs the now almost forgotten Louis Napoleon Parker, who had known him since the days of The Meister, came close to an epitaph for Ellis:
Here was the archetype of the out-and-out Wagnerian; here was one who had merged his soul and mind in Wagner. He had given up a good medical practice and all the interests and joys of life in order to devote his whole energies, and all his considerable attainments, to the work of elucidating Wagner for English-speaking people. [381]
This was a moderated version of the embarrassingly fulsome speech Parker had made on 2 October 1910 when the new Wagner Association elected Hans Richter and William Ashton Ellis its first members honoris causâ:
Mr Ashton Ellis, as you know, has devoted his whole life, every working – every waking – moment of his life, to Wagner. In the pursuit of his aim he has deliberately given up a lucrative profession; he has lived the life of a recluse; he has absorbed himself utterly in his work and in his study; he has surrounded himself, body, soul, mind, and intellect, to Wagner, with a passion far transcending that of a lover for his mistress. He is the present-day representative of those astonishing figures who loom so largely in Wagner’s history, who were willing to sacrifice, and did sacrifice, health, wealth, position, friendship, everything which men value, including self, in his service. He is one of the very few men in England who have really done something for Wagner; something so great, so self-less that we find difficulty in understanding it; that we can only admire and pass on. The doing has been his only reward.
And Parker would draw us, in our twenty-first century, into his encomium:
By-and-by, years hence, long after our time, when the figure of Wagner has become mythical, and people go about trying to find out what manner of man he was, they will suddenly re-discover that long series of volumes to which Mr Ashton Ellis’s name is attached, and they will find in them an inexhaustible mine out of which they will be able to re-constitute the real Wagner, physically and mentally, down to the minutest detail, and to recover his life moment by moment. Then the reward will come. But posthumous honours are of little service to their recipient, and it is we, who wonderingly look at Ashton Ellis’s superb enthusiasm and untiring labour, who must consider it a great privilege to say to him, ‘Well done.’ [382]
If Parker’s extravagant hyperbole (‘far transcending that of a lover for his mistress’) and that final bathetic ‘Well done’ were intentional, one can only hope that Ellis’s myopia allowed him to overlook them in his moment of glory. Posterity would deal with him rather more cruelly. ‘I had some acquaintance with Mr. Ellis’, wrote William Henry Hadow a quarter of a century later, ‘indeed I reviewed one or two of his volumes when they appeared, and the impression that he left upon me was one of immense industry, and of integrity on indifferent topics entirely spoiled by a fanaticism which coloured almost every judgment and overcame every scruple’. [383]
Appendix: Ferdinand Praeger
Four previously unpublished letters by Léonie and Ferdinand Praeger in the archive of the Royal Philharmonic Society, reproduced by kind permission of the British Library (RPS MS 359, ff.175, 177, 179, 181). [384]
_______________________________________________________________
[To William Watts (1778–1859), emeritus past secretary, 1816–47, of the Philharmonic Society][385]
31 Milton Street
Dorset Square
[undated: Friday 2 March 1855]
Dear Sir
Mr Praeger is at Brighton since yesterday evening and does not return before Saturday evening, so I think it is better for me to answer your note. We do not know when Herr R. Wagner is coming; we expect him every day as in his last letter [386] he said he would be in London the first, or in the first days of March; you will find him here as he will stay with us at first and as soon as he is in London Mr Praeger will let you know.
Believe me dear Sir
Yours very respectfully
Léonie Praeger
Friday morning
[in another hand] Mr Praeger, 2 March 1855
_______________________________________________________________
[To George Hogarth (1783–1870), secretary of the Philharmonic Society, 1850–1864]
Saturday morning [3 March 1855]
My dear Sir
I have just arrived from Brighton to find, in a letter from R. Wagner, that he will be here tomorrow late night, & consequently ready for action on Monday next, thereby coming up to his promise of being a week before the first performance. [387]
By the way I must mention a fact of which perhaps you may not have become aware, viz. Spohr, the most orthodox judge found Wagner’s score of the Flying Dutchman without knowing anything of the composer – he was so delighted that he had the opera performed at Cassel forthwith, since then he has had the Tannhäuser done and lately wrote to Wagner for the score of Lohengrin. I can answer for that fact, Wagner does not care a straw about this nor his detractors and I mention it only ‘en passant’ not being a Wagnerite, having never heard his operas yet.
In London he will stay at my humble little house until he has had time to find suitable apartments.
Believe me dear Sir Yours very truly
Ferdinand Praeger
G. Hogarth, Esq.
_______________________________________________________________
[To William George Cusins (1833–93), conductor of the Philharmonic, 1867–83]
26/2/1879
4 Bradmore Park Terrace
New Road, Shepherd’s Bush, W.
My dear Sir!
I have been repeatedly asked by eminent musicians (I dislike citing ‘big’ names) who saw my scores – why I, of such long standing in London – never had anything performed at the Phil.c [‘c’ superior].
I of course told them that I never was asked & never myself asked – I was accused of pride & to show that it’s not that I had to tell what everyone knows – that viz: my pioneer enthusiasm for R. Wagner 23 years ago – closed all doors to me by the virulent attacks of the press against me – now they sing ‘another tune’ & to cut this long story short & come to a point I beg to offer some of my scores (not of great pretension or of length) for performance at the Philharmonic Socy. – mentioning that a ‘Manfred Overture’ of mine has been done at Berlin lately at the Symphony-Kapelle (the least there) & retained for a second performance, they are going to [word indecipherable] me too to the Crystal Pal/ce [‘ce’ superior]. [388] I leave it in your hands!
Believe me
Dear Sir
Yours sincerely
Ferdinand Praeger
G. Cusins, Esq.
_______________________________________________________________
[To the Directors of the Philharmonic Society]
‘Lansdowne’
23 Brackenburg Road W.
12 January 1881
Gentlemen
As the Philharmonic Season is nigh at hand I venture to bring to your notice with some degree of confidence the several orchestral compositions composed by me some of which have been performed in Germany, Birmingham and at the Crystal Palace, & now Mr. Theodore Thomas [389] writes from New York stating that he purposes producing one or two during his approaching season. As in my judgement that they are eminently fitted to be heard by the cultured audiences of the Philharmonic I trust that my request to be heard will be favourably entertained & that I might be permitted to forward you either one of those already performed or a new work.
Believe me, Gentlemen
Yours sincerely
Ferdinand Praeger
The Directors
of the Philharmonic Society
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© David Cormack (all rights reserved) 2014