The Weekly Critical Review, published in Paris in 1903–1904, has survived as little more than a footnote in musical and literary history. As a ‘little magazine’ the Weekly Critical Review was a boutique publication; it owed its short life to a small circulation and was ultimately commercially unviable.Footnote 1 Yet, despite its short life, this periodical published the work of some of the finest writers of the day, including Rémy de Gourmont (1858–1915), Arthur Symons (1865–1945) and H.G. Wells (1866–1946). It also published articles and musical news by four leading music critics: the English critics Alfred Kalisch (1863–1933), Ernest Newman (1868–1959) and John F. Runciman (1866–1916), and James Huneker (1857–1921) from the United States. This stellar line-up of contributors suggests the Weekly Critical Review (WCR) was a significant periodical, especially since it also enjoyed the imprimatur of King Edward VII. In this article I take a close look at the circumstances that gave rise to the journal and the mission it sought to serve, and I account for the unusually wide range of writers in the journal’s employ. I argue that the networks the WCR fostered or represented reveal not only the uniqueness of the WCR’s editorial reach and purpose but also the connections brokered between English and French intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of these connections are not immediately obvious, but may be found in a range of literature including histories of journals, biographies and works on Anglo-French politics and culture.Footnote 2 At the same time, I propose that a strong English interest in and for admiration for French criticism of all types was likely the impetus behind the journal’s establishment, and that it found expression in the journal in the work of two English writers in particular, Ernest Newman and John F. Runciman.
It is commonplace to assume that a newspaper or journal published in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century attracted a reasonably homogenous group of writers, but the Weekly Critical Review did not. Symbolists and rationalists, Catholics and atheists were amongst its eclectic mix of contributors, who agitated for a range of contentious causes including Wagnerism and homosexuality. Though there was an editorial office, few, if any, of the writers would ever have visited it. Copy was posted or telegraphed across the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. Articles were printed in either English or French (which made it unique for its time) and the journal was sold by subscription locally and throughout the northern hemisphere.Footnote 3
The circumstances that gave rise to the establishment of the WCR appear to have been dependent upon the formation of a particular network of English and French intellectuals that gained momentum in the 1880s. This network did not merely arise out of nothing; rather, it was an English initiative born of a longer-standing interest in, and association with, French literary criticism and history.
Despite the existence of shared literary, critical and musical concerns in the WCR, a number of questions about its mission and scope present themselves. For example: Why, in 1903, was a bilingual literary periodical (that also ran articles on music) published in Paris with an English title? What conditions – intellectual, social and practical – paved the way for the establishment of this journal? Who wrote for it, and why? What did the articles in the WCR reveal about Anglo-French relations, about the aspiration of the English and French music critics who wrote for it, and about the scholarly style of journalism it published – a style that was also characteristic of many other little magazines? And in what ways were those who wrote for it connected? To answer some of these questions I examine the intellectual and social environment that brought this journal into existence, and explore what the WCR represents in terms of the role that periodicals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century played in international relations. I also discuss the journal’s economic and cultural benefit. Taking Ernest Newman as a case study, I examine the ways in which his literary and musical networks brought him into contact with the journal. I argue that Newman’s articles on musical criticism in this publication fulfilled a long-term quest – not only of Newman’s but also many of his literary and musical colleagues – to improve musical criticism. Although ostensibly concerned with literature, the WCR’s music contributors formed a substantial part of its many and varied networks.
English–French Critical Dialogue in the Nineteenth Century
For much of the nineteenth century, English critics (musical, literary and dramatic) gazed across the English Channel green with envy. The works of French literary critics were seen as the pinnacle of the art (and sometimes the science) of criticism, and many hoped that one day Britain would cultivate a similarly sophisticated critical tradition. Some writers reported on the superiority of French letters after having travelled to France, while others reported after simply reading a wide range of French literature including novels, criticism (especially musical and literary criticism) and histories.
This high regard for French letters in England is represented in the critical reception of French writers including C.A. Sainte-Beuve (1804–69), Hippolyte Taine (1828–93), and Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–91) by a variety of English writers including Edward Dowden (1843–1913), Matthew Arnold (1822–88), Henry Chorley (1808–72), Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) and George Saintsbury (1845–1933). Dowden articulated a particularly good example of his esteem for French literary criticism in an article entitled ‘Literary criticism in France’ in the December 1889 issue of the Fortnightly Review.Footnote 4 In this article (a transcript of an invited lecture to the Taylorian Institution), Dowden recounted how ‘I glanced back over my recent reading, and I found that a large part, perhaps an undue proportion of it, had consisted of French literary history and French literary criticism’.Footnote 5 Critics and writers he held in especially high regard were Jules Lemaïtre, Paul Bourget, Emile Hennequin, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Hippolyte Taine. Central to Dowden’s praise of French critics was their intellectual range and writing style. The quality of Sainte-Beuve’s prose – as well as the depth of his intellectual insights in journalism and historical writing – captivated English writers and Taine’s historiography, especially in his multi-volume History of English literature (1860) translated into English published in English in 1872, aroused the curiosity and interest of many English readers (see further below). Dowden believed the French critics had attained the ‘truer and more enlightened criticism’ that Matthew Arnold had longed and campaigned for in England. As Dowden remarked,
As regards the criticism of literature, Mr. Arnold did good service in directing our eyes to France, and when we spoke of French literary criticism any time in the fifties and the sixties of this century, we meant first of all Sainte-Beuve.Footnote 6
The ways of French criticism, according to Dowden, would be a panacea to ‘British inaccessibility to ideas, our wilfulness of temper, our caprices of intellect, our insular narrowness, the provinciality of our thoughts, the brutality of our journals, the banality of our popular teachers’.Footnote 7 Importantly, Dowden was not alone in his praise of Sainte-Beuve and other critics. In 1914, Irving Babbitt concurred that ‘To study Sainte-Beuve and other leading French critics of the nineteenth century is therefore to get very close to the intellectual centre of the century’.Footnote 8
Matthew Arnold’s association with and admiration for Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, led him to be known in some quarters as ‘Le petit Sainte-Beuve’.Footnote 9 Sainte-Beuve was a poet, novelist, biographer and critic whose most celebrated work, Port Royal, was a biography of a monastic community and was celebrated for its use of primary sources and psychological insight into a complex corner of French history. But Sainte-Beuve’s reputation in England rested largely on his elegant, engaging and detached prose style in his ‘Causeries du Lundi’, weekly essays from the Revue contemporaine later published in 15 volumes between in 1851 and 1872.Footnote 10 Sainte-Beuve was a keen Anglophile, and he travelled to England in the late 1820s, thereafter establishing a strong friendship with Matthew Arnold, who went to stay with Sainte-Beuve in Paris during a visit in the late 1850s. They remained life-long friends and it has been argued that a significant part of Arnold’s work bears the hallmark of Sainte-Beuve’s critical style in detachment and ability to engage the readers which, in part, spurred Arnold to write his famed essay on British criticism and his tirade against the philistine in 1878.Footnote 11
English music critics, just like their literary counterparts, were also charmed by French criticism. Henry Chorley is one example. After undertaking a two-year sojourn to France and Germany in the 1840s, he recalled that
There is hardly a circle, be it ever so grave, where the art [of criticism] is not discussed with a fluency and a decision startling to an Englishman, who has become used, owing to the bad habits of a century, to hearing music mentioned in intellectual society with apology and hesitation.Footnote 12
In the account of his travels, Chorley often returned to the virtues of French music criticism. He claimed that ‘Journalism in Paris … is like Wisdom, and “crieth in the streets.” You may touch it, taste it, handle it. You may meet it in a minister’s salon or at a duchess’s private concert’ and he was envious of the richness that French language brought to critical vocabulary and style.Footnote 13 Chorley would have agreed with Thomas de Quincey who observed some nine years later that ‘the manners of our French neighbours are more polished than our own’.Footnote 14 But the French themselves would not have been so sure. For example, Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions (Illusions Perdues) (1843) paints a picture of French letters beset by cronyism and corruption.Footnote 15
Hippolyte Taine’s History of English Literature, published in 1872, was another book that was greeted with much excitement in England. It was published to a positive critical reception, the public positioning it, as some critics did, as a landmark in English history.Footnote 16 The book was, in the author’s words, a ‘psychology’ of the British people and his interpretation of history and literature through the lens of ‘race, milieu, moment’ was novel for its time and considered a landmark approach to the subject at a time when the idea of method, or science (or ‘applied science’, as Georg Brandes termed it) in all manner of history writing was highly prized.Footnote 17 An especially detailed review of Taine’s book, and a consideration of its meaningfulness for English readers, was written by the literary critic and historian Leslie Stephen and published in the Fortnightly Review in 1873. Despite a lack of sympathy with some of Taine’s critical judgments, his philosophizing and an excess of ‘epigrammatic illustration’, Stephen found the book an engaging read, stating that it was methodologically persuasive and that the author ‘ha[s] done for us what no native author had done, or, it may be, was able to do’.Footnote 18 Another literary critic and historian George Saintsbury also found the book a high watermark of contemporary scholarship, but problematic. Admitting Taine’s history to be ‘the most popular book everywhere’ in England, he found the book deeply troublesome.Footnote 19 Although praising it as ‘one of the most brilliantly written of its class, one of the most interesting’ he found it ‘utterly worthless’ for it failed to ‘supply the native with the useful independent checks and views of a theory not a man. It supplies the foreigner with a false and dangerous travesty’.Footnote 20
Henri Frédéric Amiel’s Journal Intime was another work in French that excited the British. Journal Intime was first published in Geneva in 1882 and was translated into English by Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Macmillan published the first edition in 1885; in 1889 a second edition was published and then reprinted. It was reprinted twice in 1890, twice in 1891 and reprinted 13 times between 1892 and 1933. It was widely regarded in England as a reflective lifework par excellence, though some critics, such as Ernest Newman, were perturbed by its moody introspection.Footnote 21
This long-standing British interest in French criticism (both journalism as well as history, as seen in the work of Sainte-Beuve particular) throughout the nineteenth century provided the backdrop and, to a degree, the critical mass necessary for the WCR to be established, though this background was not the key driver of its editorial focus not least because there is no definitive statement anywhere about whom the journal was intended. Arguably, such a publication might have been inevitable, not only due to the mobility of books and journals across the English Channel, but as a consequence of the travels and networking of the critics themselves. This long-standing interest by the English in the virtues of French criticism was set to continue in the WCR.
Establishment of the WCR
In the 1880s and 1890s, the connections English critics cultivated with their French counterparts became increasingly personal as well as professional, and led to the founding of the WCR by its editor, Arthur Bles, of whom little is known.Footnote 22 Support for the journal was probably garnered with connections that Bles, and some of the journals’ contributors, had established with leading French intellectuals over many years. For example, Bles seems to have been well connected in Paris, and he and North American music critic James Huneker had met Maurice Maeterlinck at his ‘admirably designed cabinet’ in the Rue Reynouard some time in 1903.Footnote 23 This meeting is particularly telling about the Frenchman’s interest in English literature; according to Huneker, even though Maeterlinck declined to speak in English, ‘he ha[s] all English literature stored in his skull’ and the conversation included forays into the literature of Shakespeare, Poe and Emerson.Footnote 24 It also revealed Maeterlink’s interest in the playwright Browning, Maeterlink saying ‘Naturally, I read Browning; who does not?’Footnote 25
Years before, other writers who would be contributors to the WCR, including the aesthete, poet and music critic Arthur Symons and the sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), had established connections with leading French writers and intellectuals in some of Paris’s salons. Ellis had met Symons around 1888 and they became firm friends; for a time in the 1880s and 1890s, they shared rooms together. There is talk in the biographical literature that the men were lovers.Footnote 26 In 1889 the pair went to Paris. It was Symonds’s first trip there, and the purpose of their excursion, apart from dropping in on the Paris Exhibition, was to network with French writers.Footnote 27 The pair was introduced to many luminaries, including Mallarmé, Verlaine, Huysmans, Gourmont and Hippolyte Taine.Footnote 28 It was probably during this visit that Symonds and Ellis cemented for themselves a place in French literary society; over the course of the next decade this coterie of English and French writers – and a select group of other writers – formed a literary and musical network.
Due to a lack of evidence in biographies and letters, it is not possible to know the intimate details of the many and varied ways through which all the writers for the WCR were connected, but one brief example suggests at least one way that a connection occurred. At some point, James Huneker (who lived in London from 1890 to 1895) became friends with Symonds,Footnote 29 and it appears that Huneker came to know Ernest Newman and John F. Runciman through their association with the Musical Courier, for which the three critics wrote in the late 1890s.Footnote 30 Although Newman and Runciman were fierce rivals (this conflict will be discussed below) the three men had in common a love of Wagner’s music and a commitment to improving the quality of music criticism in England. Runciman and Newman, in particular, had written many articles on this matter before the WCR was established. However, even though the music critics knew each other, this is not to say they knew their literary colleagues.
The WCR published on a broad range of topics, as Figure 1 shows, and the print run was 10,000 copies, which was significant for its time.Footnote 31 In addition to original essays, the journal reprinted articles from other newspapers, such as John F. Runciman’s ‘The modern orchestra’ from the New York Musical Courier. Summaries of news (including musical news) were reported from other journals such as Connoisseur, the Nineteenth Century, Harper’s Magazine and Pall Mall Magazine. News of major appointments and exhibitions in London and Paris was also published. Although the review had an unnamed Berlin correspondent, Germany’s musical news was not extensively reported.
Fig. 1 Contents pages of the Weekly Critical Review, volume 1, 1903.
Fig. 1 (Continued)
The contributors to WCR included Charles Capus, the archiviste de l’opera and various members of the French Institute. French composers whose work was discussed in the WCR included Camille Saint-Saëns, Vincent d’Indy, César Franck and Ernest Chausson. There were also a number of female writers, English and French, who contributed, including Countess Royer de Courson and Alys Hallard. Other contributors included, from England, Havelock Ellis, Arthur Symons and the mystic Aleister Crowley, who wrote a series of poems on the work of his friend Auguste Rodin. W.B Yeats was also a contributor.
The journal’s editor, Arthur Bles, was also a contributor. He turned his hand to translations of poems, and his serialization of James Huneker’s biography of Chopin (written in French) was published in the WCR.Footnote 32 Competitions were established for new musical works, presumably to add novelty and to interest potential readers. In March–April 1903 a competition was announced for a first movement of a piano sonata in F sharp minor not exceeding 75 bars. The prize was 100 francs and publication in the journal. Ravel was the only entrant, with a Sonatine, and the competition was cancelled.Footnote 33 Another competition was for a song including the genre of song, which was won by the bass singer and composer H. Murray McDonald Davey.Footnote 34 His song, entitled ‘He Came Like a Dream’ (with words by Shelley), suggested a homosexual theme because its use male pronouns.Footnote 35 The employment of an unnamed Berlin correspondent brought occasional concert reviews to the journal. According to one of its contributors, M.D. Calvocoressi, who knew Bles before the WCR was founded, Bles ‘was very keen on music’ and gave it ‘a lion’s share in the paper’.Footnote 36 Calvocoressi also wrote in his biography that the fees paid to contributors of the journal were ‘far in excess of anything paid by French periodicals’, which may have been one of the reasons the periodical survived only for such a short time and sent Bles into bankruptcy.Footnote 37
Bles does not appear to have issued a prospectus for the journal, nor did he articulate its aims in an opening editorial. This task fell to the eminent critic and historian Louis de Fourcaud (1851–1914) who wrote the following letter in the first issue of the Weekly Critical Review published on 22 January 1903:
Dear Sir
You are starting a paper with the object of bringing together intellectually two great nations which were made to understand each other, each having a rich heritage of works and ideas. Your generous initiative is well calculated to bring into contact their minds and languages, their conceptions, their arts, the highest expression of their lives, so that they may know one another as it were fundamentally, and no longer merely with a prejudiced superficiality.Footnote 38
Ironically, politics did not play a large part in any content of the WCR and the entente cordiale was invoked only twice as the explicit subject matter for articles. The first such article, by Bles, was published on 1 October 1903, and detailed the recent trip to Paris of King Edward VII. It was the king’s first visit to France, and Bles discussed its importance for British–French relations. The article described and analysed other visits by businessmen and dignitaries between France and England including one Robert Barclay and diplomat (and Nobel Peace Prize Recipient for 1909) Paul Henri d’Estournelles de Constant. The second article pertaining to the entente cordiale was unsigned; it reported the recent visit to Paris of Edmund Gosse who gave a lecture (in English) on ‘The influence of French literature on English poetry’ at the Société des Conférences. In emphasizing warm relations between the two countries Gosse noted that
I cannot help nourishing a confident belief that in the future, as well as in the past, the magnificent literatures of France and of England will continue to interest, that each will at the right psychological moments flash colour and radiance which will find reflection on the polished service of the other. To facilitate this, in ever so small and so humble a degree, must be the desire of every lover of England and of France. … That entente cordiale which we value so deeply, and which some of us have so long laboured to promote, must not be confined to the merchants and to the politicians. The poets must also insist upon their share of it.Footnote 39
In addition to writing his own articles and translating the work of some of his contributors, Bles took his role as editor seriously and collegially. For example, writing in the 18 June 1903 issue he declared that ‘The Editor of the WCR desires it to be understood that he is no way responsible for statements published in the Review if the articles containing them are signed with the name of the author in full’. This statement perhaps refers to undisclosed tension between editor and contributor. Bles also provided a service to his readers:
The Editor of the ‘Weekly Critical Review’ begs to inform his readers that he will be delighted to assist them in the procuring of tickets for the different concerts. It is a known fact that strangers and even foreign residents in Paris continually miss the Sunday orchestral concerts through being too late to find seats. By making a request at the office of this paper two days before the date of the concert, all such annoyances can be avoided.Footnote 40
From this announcement we can glean that readers of the WCR included music-lovers and ‘foreign residents’. How the journal was sold in England and France is unclear, though it was probably purchased through subscription to individuals and to reading rooms or cabinets de lecture. For example, in the 12 March issue on page 21, subscriptions were offered to readers in France, UK, USA and Germany. From time to time the journal published a list of contact details of foreign embassies in Paris and consulates for America, Britain, Italy, Russia and Spain, as diplomatic employees and their families were presumably either potential customers or key distributors or both.
Remington typewriters and Neal’s English Library Tea and Reading Rooms regularly placed advertisements in the WCR, strongly suggesting a highly literate and bookish consumer. The printing of train timetables for the Chemin de fer du nord (its terminus known today as Gare du Nord) was evidently an attempt to harness an Anglo-French readership.
Musical Networks in the Weekly Critical Review
In her 2011 article, ‘“Time’s Turbulence”: Mapping Journalism Networks’, Laurel Brake theorizes and conceptualizes the sorts of networks that journalists formed in the nineteenth century and the ways these networks were mediated by what she terms ‘interlocking structures’ and governed, to an extent, by editors and publishers.Footnote 41 She writes that networking ‘can be understood as part of the structure of journalism’ (her emphasis) but that ‘networks are everywhere and [are] seldom discussed’.Footnote 42 She goes on to argue that even when a particularly large network has been established there can be a sub-set of a network and that networks of journalists can exist even in circumstances where the network is based on merely a loose professional or social connection or association. She also writes that some journalistic structures, while ostensibly interlocking, may also be invisible to today’s readers.Footnote 43
A study of the network that journalists formed in the WCR could be conducted in various ways. It could, for instance, examine the intellectual and social links of the decadents who wrote for the journal. Another angle would be to look for evidence of the literary and social connections established between Bles and the individuals of French learned societies, examining the ways in which they volunteered, or were coerced, to lend their names, if not always their pens, to the journal. A study might also consider the homosexuality (and alleged homosexuality) or Roman Catholicism of some of the contributors, to establish personal as well as professional links. However, in the remainder of the article I will consider the ways in which the main writers on music for the WCR – Ernest Newman, Alfred Kalisch, John F. Runciman and Michel D. Calvocoressi (1877–1944) – were associated, demonstrating their unlikely connections. Although we are hindered by a lack of biographical information on Kalisch, Runciman and Calvocoressi (and, to a lesser extent, on Newman) it is nevertheless possible to speculate about the various ways they were connected to each other and to the journal.
The circumstances in which these authors first knew each other is unknown. We do know that Huneker (resident in the United States) and Newman were correspondents for a time (see above), and that Kalisch wrote the Foreword to Newman’s 1908 biography of Richard Strauss, so it can be assumed that they may have known each other reasonably well, even if possibly never having met.Footnote 44 On the other hand, Newman and Runicman knew each other very well, having battled in the press since as early as the 1890s, so they were well known to each other at least in print, if not in person. We do not know if Calvocoressi had any personal links with his colleagues, but we know from his 1925 book on criticism that he shared a strong intellectual connection to Newman and to some of the subjects on which Newman wrote for the WCR. By way of case studies I will first examine the connections between Newman and Runciman, then Newman and Calvocoressi.
Newman and Runciman first encountered each other, in print at least, in 1896 after the publication of Newman’s first book, Gluck and the Opera, in 1895. The aim of this book was to lend a scientific or historical methodology to music history, which Newman had discussed in the opening chapter in considerable detail. The most probing review of Gluck and the Opera was written by Runciman in the January 1896 edition of Saturday Review.Footnote 45 In his column for this journal Runciman, like Newman, had occasionally complained about old critical ways and the need for a fresh style of music criticism.Footnote 46 Although both men had the reform of music criticism set firmly in their sights, they did not always sympathize with each other’s work, something that Runciman’s review demonstrates. Yet even though Runciman finds many faults with Newman’s book, his review is encouraging to the emerging writer and suggests how his craft might be improved. In commenting on the task Newman set himself, Runciman writes:
The design is laudable as well as daring, and I sincerely wish I could add that the execution is equal to the design, for any effort to bring music within the range of ordinary human interests should be welcomed and encouraged. Unfortunately at times the execution falls a good deal beneath the design, and for obvious reasons. Three qualifications were indispensable. First, a knowledge of Gluck’s music; second a highly developed critical faculty … last, a power of entering into the inner essential life of the eighteenth century. That last Mr. Newman has to a considerable degree; but in the first and second he is more than a little weak.Footnote 47
Runciman’s specific complaints were that Newman drew so heavily from Marx’s biography of Gluck that Runciman ‘felt suspicious as to the amount of original Gluck study he [Newman] may have done’.Footnote 48 He further admonished Newman for the ‘scantiness and wrongness’ of his account of Gluck’s predecessors and for his ‘cold intellectual analysis’.Footnote 49 Runciman agreed to disagree with Newman on some points, but says:
I am glad to acknowledge that he [Newman] has brought brains and a good deal of knowledge to a difficult task, and has produced a book which will certainly rank as the best Gluck study extant until some one – let us hope it will be Mr. Newman himself – writes one which is more complete, and free from errors which undoubtedly exist in this.Footnote 50
Newman took exception to parts of Runciman’s review, writing to his publisher, Bertram Dobell, within a few days of its publication, saying that his neglect in studying the earlier opera was a criticism ‘really beside the question’.Footnote 51 As Newman explained, the operas were not printed ‘
but simply exist in score at Vienna & elsewhere, and I couldn’t go all over the world to examine them, even if I had wished to do so. Runciman is an impressionist critic, not a scientific one, & what he wants is a dramatic biography in the Carlyle style. That sort of thing doesn’t interest me however. When I want to write fiction I will do a novel.Footnote 52
Runciman’s impressionistic criticism (i.e., criticism based on opinion or emotional responses) irked Newman, and he had already written a careful and veiled critique of it in 1893 in an article entitled ‘The Culture of the Emotions’.Footnote 53 Impressionistic critics (sometimes also labelled ‘expressionist’ or ‘associationist’Footnote 54 ) were those who ‘substitute for a sound interpretation or judgment of a work of art his own purely personal impressions’.Footnote 55 Newman argued that the question of what constituted ‘sound criticism’ ought to be based on historical or comparative context, not merely the relaying of an impression. The advent of impressionistic criticism, in England at least, was attributed to Walter Pater, who outlined this method, also called ‘aesthetic criticism’ in the preface to his 1873 book, The Renaissance.Footnote 56 In Pater’s words:
‘To see the object as in itself it really is’, has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; an in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s subject as it really is, is to know one’s impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly … What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book to me? Does it give me pleasure? And if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, or morals, of number, one must realise such primary data for one’s self, or not at all … The aesthetic critic, then regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations.Footnote 57
Newman was to take Runciman to task again over the ideals of criticism in an article published in WCR on 22 January 1904, which consisted of an open letter to Runciman on the same subject. This dispute arose over criticism Runciman had made in the Saturday Review of some articles Newman had recently published in the WCR. In these articles Newman had argued for a scientific approach to criticism rather than criticism depending upon the critic relaying his own opinions impressions. Just as he had defended a scientific approach to history in Gluck and the Opera, in 1895, Newman extended the claim and ambit of impartiality to journalistic criticism, articulating a need for distance and a wide knowledge of subject matter through reading, coupled with logical or deductive reasoning. These attributes defined the so-called scientific critic, and they were the hallmarks of Sainte-Beuve’s work as we saw earlier. Newman criticized Runciman for his opinionated criticism: ‘You do not like my ideal of the scientific critic, and you declaim passionately, that “all good criticism is purely an expression of the critic’s nature”’. Newman would have none of it, writing later in the article
When you say ‘there has never been a critic of the slightest use to humanity who was not himself first, and above all an artist’, I have the honour to agree with you … But when you say ‘the inquirers into the facts of a life have nothing to do with art They are scientists and should leave art alone’ – you only dogmatise madly. I take it that art is one of the facts of life; and though it needs to be judged by aesthetic criteria, these criteria are inextricably interwoven with the roots of other things.Footnote 58
Newman agreed with Runciman that the best critic is
first a thorough musician, a man who is educated, and dares to say bluntly what he has experienced. The critic needs, beyond this, to have had some training in correct and consistent thinking, and in guarding against flinging his first crude impressions before us as if they were divinely inspired messages’.Footnote 59
The need for informed, reliable, educated and ethical musical criticism had long been a concern in Britain and had been championed by many critics, including Newman, but also by the Musical Association and journals such as the Musical Times.Footnote 60 Since the 1870s calls had been made to regulate and reform musical criticism, including the establishment of principles for the profession. In 1924, Michael D. Calvocoressi published a book on the subject, providing another link to the network of critics in Weekly Critical Review.
Calvocoressi’s interest in objective and rational criticism (as opposed to subjective and thus irrational criticism), specifically in relation to publications by John M. Robertson, suggests an ‘invisible’ network that Brake describes – that is, a network that would not be immediately apparent to the reader but one that relates to a critic’s connections beyond the journal or newspaper for which they write. In a number of articles in WCR Newman makes reference to John Robertson and Bertram Dobell, both of whom were close friends and publishers of his work in the 1890s. Robertson was editor of the National Reformer and, later, the founder and editor of the Free Review. Newman was his protégé and it was Robertson who first gave Newman his break as a writer. Robertson was the leader of a rationalist faction called the ‘Academic Freethinkers’ of whom Newman was a member.Footnote 61 And Dobell was also a freethinker (an appellation that described radical atheists and humanists), a literary critic of modest accomplishment of his own means and the publisher of Newman’s first two biographies, Gluck and the Opera (1895) and A Study of Wagner (1899).
Newman’s link to the freethought movement is manifested in two ways in the WCR. The first is his recycling of ideas, and parts of essays, from previously published material, including articles on George Meredith and Zola.Footnote 62 The second is his reviewing of books by Robertson and Dobell. In an article entitled ‘Mr John M. Robertson’s Essays’ on 19 March 1903, Newman wrote in praise of Robertson’s then recently republished Essays Towards a Critical Method.Footnote 63 It is a glowing review of Robertson’s book and literary criticism generally and in particular of his skill at critical interpretation and his thought, which Newman described as ‘emotionally and intellectually well-balanced, vigorous, deep-probing, stimulating’: the sort of qualities of criticism that Newman articulated in his duels with Runciman.Footnote 64 Nowhere in this article did Newman disclose his very close and personal friendship with Robertson.
In another article, Newman reviewed a book of poems by Thomas Traherne, compiled, edited and published by his fellow freethinker and publisher, Bertram Dobell.Footnote 65 Once more Newman waxed lyrical about the merits of Traherne and the quality of the editing:
Mr. Dobell has laid all scholars and lovers of literature under a heavy debt of gratitude to him for bringing out this volume. He speaks, in his preface, of an intention to publish later on the prose works of Traherne in their entirety. I earnestly hope he will do so; for in my mind, at any rate, Traherne the prose writer is even finer than Traherne the poet. But even now Mr. Dobell has rescued from oblivion the work of a singularly original and beautiful spirit, who has earned a distinctive place for himself in the story of English literature.Footnote 66
Newman’s review of Dobell’s edition particularly, and his writings in the WCR generally, may seem a long way from the mission of the WCR, a publication that, ostensibly, was set up to celebrate the entente cordiale. But as we have seen above, there were very few articles that engaged with Anglo-French relations in detail, let alone the entente cordiale. Newman’s work was also ideologically far removed from that of many of his peers writing in the WCR, but that is precisely the source of the richness of the WCR that throws up, in Laurel Brake’s words, ‘the unexpected range of connections’ that potentially besets many studies of journalism networks.Footnote 67 Newman’s work in the WCR also bears out Brake’s supposition that within journals there are interlocking structures of connections that are seemingly ‘invisible’, at least at first glance.Footnote 68
But what else did Newman’s writings in the WCR represent? I suggest that his work on the journal was a textbook case of the little magazine genre. Eric Bentley has argued that one of the defining points of little magazines was their support for academic criticism over the work of the hack journalist, or the impressionist, as a means to combat provincialism and the stuffiness of a nationalist and specialist intellectual outlook.Footnote 69 Newman’s battle with Runciman fits this description of the little magazines genre perfectly. For other scholars, the little magazine was also a platform where writers were required to be both good writers as well as ‘academic’, a writer of ‘advanced sensibilities’.Footnote 70 The little magazines were also aimed at publishing works by critics who were both critics and historians, and who aimed to break down the barriers of such ‘neat’ compartmentalization of genre.Footnote 71 The little magazine has also been described as a generally political rather than literary enterprise and, rather ungratefully, many of those who established and wrote for it have been described as ‘humanitarians masquerading as proletarians’.Footnote 72 Little literary or musical criticism in the WCR was the mere reporting of news. The style of its contributors’ prose was formal and academic, and the British critics who wrote for it all wrote both articles and books in a variety of areas including biography, criticism and history. As a little magazine, the WCR was a success if judged by the standards of scholars who wrote a generation and more after its demise. Newman’s serious-minded essays for the WCR fitted this mould, and met the aspirations he set for himself and his English colleagues. Newman’s articles were historically (or scientifically) grounded, soberly written and serious in tone, and they were not the product of impressionist thinking, which had raised his ire in the preface to his Gluck biography and confrontations with Runciman. The WCR was a platform on which quality criticism – of a decidedly French flavour represented in the works of many nineteenth-century French writers – found expression. As Robertson wrote to Newman in 1898, British critics needed to be ‘a little more French’ in their craft. Through his association with the WCR Newman was able to act on this instruction.Footnote 73
Conclusion
Ernest Newman’s contribution to the WCR brought with it multiple networks and associations: interests in music and literature and connections to publishers, freethinkers and academic criticism. That the journal was established to celebrate the entente cordiale seems to have become lost in the narrative of the journal’s life; instead, it is more accurate to describe what the journal published as a focus on music, literature and theatre. The WCR does not figure significantly in any of the autobiographies, biographies, letters or other personal testimonies of most of the writers studied in this article, but I argue that its significance lies not in its prominence within an individual’s biography, but in both the obvious and not so obvious ways it was a reflection of an eclectic range of its contributors’ intellectual interests and associations and today stands – amongst other things – as an expression of an English reverence for French criticism of many and varied hues.
