Commentators continued to rail against both the neglect of native composers and the poor taste of English audiences, seeing the two as linked. But whereas earlier critics had conceded that much foreign music was deservedly preferred to English music, it became increasingly common to ascribe this preference to ‘Fashion’, which compelled English composers to imitate foreign music or go unheard. In 1831 a new periodical carried a substantial article on the rule of fashion; it claimed that Henry Bishop was the only English composer to have acquired a reputation, but that his decline set in after he had made adaptations of Don Giovanni and Figaro, and English opera lost all appeal when Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Weber’s Der Freischütz entranced the public. The Athenæum extended its criticism of neglect to the Philharmonic Society, which had failed to support native composition. However, although the Philharmonic’s programmes were dominated by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber and other foreign composers, it was willing to trial native compositions: for example, a symphony by Cipriani Potter was trialled in 1829, and another was trialled and performed in 1833 and received high praise from the Literary Gazette.

The Belgian critic F.-J. Fétis contributed a view from abroad. He noted a combination of undeveloped taste and commercial pressure to meet expectations, by, for example, mixing opera with farce and melodrama. Many of his criticisms were still being echoed by English critics fifty years later: the short opera season patronised by the upper classes, the rule of fashion and the fixation of audiences on star singers who were able to demand high fees.

The desire for a national school was focused on opera. Hopes of progress were ignited in 1833 by a plan for an English national opera. The proposal was put forward in the hope that it would not be impeded by ‘idle jealousies’ – an indication of what was often to bedevil efforts to get composers to work together for the common good. The scheme, which prompted much comment in periodicals, advanced to the point where a committee was formed and a petition prepared. But eventually it came to nothing. Critics thought there was little chance of success as the public preferred foreign works.

In September 1780 two pampered pussies exchanged letters which were hand delivered to their respective residences. The Persian cat Snow Grimalkin, who lived in Cathedral Close, Lichfield, explained to his fellow feline, Miss Po Felina of the Bishop’s Palace, that he had spied her in her ‘stately’ abode washing her ‘beautiful round face’ and ‘elegantly brinded ears’ with her ‘velvet paws’ while swishing her ‘meandering tail’ with ‘graceful sinuosity’. The ‘treacherous’ Cupid had, however, hidden himself behind her ‘tabby beauties’, leading Snow Grimalkin to long for more sights of his beautiful amour, watching ‘day and night’ from his balcony and serenading her with songs echoing through the ‘winding lanes and dirty alleys’ of Lichfield, hoping that the still ‘starlight evenings’ might induce her to ‘take the air’ on the palace leads. However, despite these efforts, Po Felina sat ‘wrapped in fur’, ‘purring with contented insensibility’ and sleeping ‘with untroubled dreams’; nevertheless, Snow Grimalkin hoped that the offering of numerous mice ‘for your food or your amusement’ and ‘an enormous Norway rat’ that covered his ‘paws with its gore’ might just be the present to secure the object of his attentions. Unfortunately, while Po Felina admired the ‘spotless ermine’ and ‘tyger strength’ of Snow’s ‘commanding form’ and ‘wit and endowments’, she was too wary of his ‘fierceness’ to return his affections.

While, of course, the exchange of letters between Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward on behalf of their cats was meant to be playful and witty, in the Augustan tradition of mock-heroic and humorous writing, with each pet assuming something of the character of their owners, it also demonstrates the importance of pets in the Georgian household and the extent to which, as we shall see in this chapter, Darwin was a close observer of animal behaviour and a strong believer in animal agency and intelligence. As portrayed by Darwin, with his blood-stained paws and smooth white fur, Snow Grimalkin combined bestial behaviours that were vestiges of a natural state with the advantages of birth, breeding and beauty. This was a miniature tiger who was ‘rough and hardy, bold and free’, whose ‘nervous paw’ could take ‘My Lady’s lapdog by the neck’ or ‘with furious hiss assault the hen and snatch a chicken from the pen’, rather than a cosseted cat.

The challenges exchanged in 1608 show Edward Morgan and John Egerton to have been among the growing number of gentlemen drawn to the culture of the duel. Formal challenges and duels were not exclusive to the gentry and nobility, but the culture of the duel as it developed in England and Wales during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was modelled primarily on elite interactions. The governors of Jacobean England and Wales were particularly exercised about the issue of duelling which was seen as becoming dangerously prevalent among elites. They argued that gentlemen and nobles were spilling their precious blood, which should be esteemed as of greater value than that of ‘ordinary’ persons, on trifling matters of small moment. The Morgan– Egerton challenges and the duel which followed in 1610, then, occurred at a moment of particular interest in and concern about this practice in England and Wales. This was also a time when the homicide rate was climbing; the 1610 duel was part of a crisis of violence which affected England and Wales during the early seventeenth century. This chapter considers the growing popularity of duelling among youthful elites such as John Egerton and Edward Morgan in Elizabethan and Jacobean England and Wales. It reviews some of the historiography on the subject and suggests how the Morgan–Egerton duel, examined in detail in the next chapter, fits in to this picture. The chapter also suggests that a culture of aggressive honour which encouraged duelling may have been prevalent in the northern Welsh Marches in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. It considers in some detail the example of another duel emerging from the Cheshire–Wales border area in 1593 between members of the Salusbury family which has echoes of the confrontation between the Morgans and Egertons. The chapter also considers the potential relationship between Catholicism and duelling in these episodes and reviews duelling's complex and contested relationship with contemporary ideas of elite honour.

Duelling became increasingly popular in Britain from the last third of the sixteenth century, particularly among elite young men. As we have discussed, there has been a debate over its nature, origins and contemporary significance, although most scholars now acknowledge that duelling was a Renaissance import rather than some recrudescence of medieval chivalric culture.

Introduction

For more than a decade after the toppling of President Traoré in 1991, scholars of Mali portrayed the Malian transition to multiparty democracy as a watershed event that marked a departure from a highly centralized and authoritarian single-party system to one granting room for public debate, associational life, and other forms of civil society participation (e.g. Bingen et al. 2000; Bratton et al. 2002; Wing 2008; Baudais 2016; see Schulz 2012: ch. 1). Stressing the legitimacy-enhancing effects of these institutional transformations, authors tended to take the actions and demands of an educated segment of Mali's urban populations as representative of ‘widespread political will’ and of the perceptions of ‘many Malian citizens’ (Wing and Kassibo 2014: 113; see also Bratton et al. 2002; Hetland 2007: 96–7; Wing 2008: 3, 6, 79). Against such sweeping generalizations about Malian popular opinion, and optimistic views on how swiftly institutional reform might bring about a change in people's constructions of political legitimacy, this chapter probes whether constitutional and institutional changes introduced in Mali in the 1990s did indeed prompt substantial transformations first, in popular perceptions of the legitimacy of the political system and its key representatives; and second, in the rationale and forms of political decision making, influence taking, and control.

The forms and nature of political practice in Africa have been a favourite subject of political and social science scholarship on Africa. In an effort to decide whether one can speak of a specific character in African politics (Médard 1982) or of ‘the African state’ (Bayart et al. 1997; Mbembe 1992a, b), authors have examined what rationale informs the actions of state officials and those who solicit the services of the state bureaucracy, or alternatively seek to evade its regulatory efforts. The results of these analyses have remained somewhat inconclusive, as authors have generated different, sometimes even opposed typologies of ‘the African state’ and ‘politics in Africa’ (see Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014).

As I brought this book manuscript to completion, the seismic reverberations of the coronavirus pandemic started to hit Africa's already seriously strained domestic economies. Within months, in August 2020, Mali was to experience another upheaval, with a coup forcing the resignation of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita. The implications of this latest turn of events are too early to predict, even if one could clearly see it coming during the preceding months.

The social, economic, and political crisis surrounding the coronavirus only accentuated long-standing fissions and tensions within the Malian body politic, with regard to people's apprehensions about the political system's brittle legitimacy, and also in the precarious power balance both between Keita's government and religious opinion leaders and within the highly divided field of Muslim activism. When the government imposed curfew measures in late March and multiplied its efforts to stage, discursively and materially, the state's capacity to provide the infrastructure necessary for the containment of Covid-19, responses oscillated between evasion, disapproval, verbal humour, and open resistance. As people's resentment of governmental efforts to contain the spread of the virus grew over the weeks, their responses put into relief a seething general discontent with President Keita's government. The tense political and economic situation was compounded by the uproar following the highly contested ruling of Mali's Constitutional Court on 30 April that reversed the results of the second turn of legislative elections held on19 April. The Court ruling increased the forty-three seats in the National Assembly won by the ruling RPM party in several urban areas according to the results published by the Ministry of Interior, to fifty-four seats. The report in the newspaper Le Guindo in response to the court decision, whose title translates as ‘Constitutional Court: Rest in peace, democracy’, mirrored the exasperation felt by many observers. Yet national media response was divided, with a majority of voices expressing indig-nation, cynicism, and undiluted fury, and a few isolated voices defending the court ruling. In the streets of Bamako and towns where electoral results had also been affected by the court ruling, violent protests erupted, with angry youth playing a leading role in venting frustration about both the court ruling and the Covid-19-related lockdown measures. Banners reading ‘die of coronavirus or die of hunger?’ reflected the dilemma felt by many, a dilemma that fuelled the rising protest against the stay-at-home orders and the call for ending them.

THE LATE MEDIEVAL poem Pearl, considered to have been written by an anonymous male author at the end of the fourteenth century, lays claim to hermeneutic patterns often identical to those I have identified in the previous chapter, particularly those presenting themselves as female-coded challenges to entrenched and ‘rooted’ exegetical traditions within necrophilic thought. In this chapter, I trace some of these compelling patterns and posit the possibility that the Pearl-poet may well have been familiar with Mechthild's work in some of its many manifestations and drew upon it in his construction of his own female-focused and female-coded representation of the verdant route to the new Jerusalem.

The words quoted above are spoken by the Pearl-Maiden to her earthly father towards the end of the poem and point not only towards her perspective on her newly transcendent status as sponsa Christi in the heavenly city of Jerusalem, but also to her entry into a holy lineage – Christ's parage – that begins with Adam and his sons and culminates in the figure of Christ himself. Reminiscent of the genealogical trees we saw in the Auchinleck Life and the Canticum, as well as the enormous trees bearing saints and patriarchs rooted in Helfta's church, within the medieval imaginary this lineage was traditionally patriarchal and articulated visually by means of the binary ‘arborescent schema’ of the so-called Tree of Jesse. As we have also seen, this tree was often depicted as having its roots buried within the soil of Adam's burial or, sometimes, rooted in his breast or under his tongue, and always ready for its re-emergence at Golgotha as the reborn Tree of Life. As such, as Warren Ginsberg has pointed out, the term parage is, on the surface of it, a male-inflected term that is multi-evocative of the bounded Garden of Eden with its ‘rooted’ trees of knowledge grasping at its soil. In addition, it substitutes for the equally ‘bounded’ line of patrilinear descent directly from Adam to Christ.

IN THE EARLY summer of 2016, a report commissioned by the National Gardens Scheme on the links frequently posited between gardens and human health was published in Britain. Its author, David Buck, presented this report's intention as making an important contribution to ‘the understanding, assessment and development of the links between gardens, gardening and health’, adding that it was also purposed at demonstrating how ‘gardens and gardening can make a strong contribution to keeping us well and independent’. One of the report's primary recommendations was that local governments work to ensure the sustainability of civic green spaces so that they may ‘continue to deliver positive health benefits’ on an equitable basis, particularly for those who may not have access to such spaces in a private capacity. This work, moreover, brings together much of what we have suspected but which has frequently remained unproven: as humans we are far more dependent on the so-called ‘natural’ world around us and its cyclical changeability than we have come to imagine. Indeed, considered within a time of a desperate climate emergency when the givens of that ‘natural’ world are being upended by human denial of its own global impact, the need to understand the importance of horticultural landscapes and their role within the human imaginary realm is, perhaps, even more pressing than ever.

For the purposes of this volume, my use of the term ‘imaginary’ follows the accepted Lacanian view of the world and human responses to it, as refracted through image and imagination rather than through the actual conditions of existence (the ‘real’). It operates according to the premise, moreover, that, under patriarchy, such a constructed imaginary is both phallic and masculine, forming a hegemonic system of understanding that has traditionally rendered its expression (the ‘symbolic’) as male-dominated and ultimately comprehensible only via the male gaze. Post-Lacanian analysis goes further, suggesting that the patriarchal imaginary is ultimately dependent upon the feminine (and other subordinates) for its hegemony, rendering the possibility of a female imaginary within such cultural contexts all but impossible.

Despite the profound importance of Erasmus Darwin’s many different encounters with trees and the numerous scholarly studies of his botany and his literary portrayals of the natural world, evolutionary ideas and the midlands social, agricultural and industrial milieu, there has never been a study of his work on trees and the impact of arboriculture upon his ideas. In many ways this is equally true for his grandson Charles Darwin (1809–1882), whose analyses of trees have also been neglected, even in studies of the place of botany in his evolutionary theories, despite the long section on trees and fruits in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1875). Tom Williamson has emphasised how much work has been undertaken on aristocratic perspectives on arboriculture in the ‘long’ eighteenth century compared with those of the ‘wider population’, and a consideration of Darwin’s approach to silviculture and that of his close circle of friends and tree admirers will help to address this gap in our understanding. Like his Nottinghamshire contemporary Major Hayman Rooke (1723–1806), many of Erasmus Darwin’s tree encounters were inspired by the economic utility of agricultural and horticultural improvement as well as a love of arboriculture; however, Darwin was able to unite, as his friend Anna Seward claimed, practical botany with picturesque landscapes by creating and experiencing both planted and poetical botanic gardens. Darwin’s romantic appreciation of landscape beauty was founded upon the interrelationship between a picturesque understanding of trees and plants and his botanical, psychological and physiological theories, which he utilised to weave value and meaning into local environments. Hence it was local tree places (and amorous joy) that inspired him to express himself poetically for the first time since his student days as he personified the spirits of a grove in his garden under threat from the axe. Just as Seward was motivated by threats to Lichfield trees to intervene to try and save them, so similar circumstances provided an opportunity and impetus for her friend Darwin to assert their centrality in defining layers of landscape beauty, value and meaning as animate beings of fixity and longevity. However, Darwin’s arbophilia also stemmed from a general interest in tree botany and physiology within his literary circle, represented by the work of close friends such as Brooke Boothby, Thomas Gisborne and Francis Noel Clarke Mundy.

Sometime in early May 1945, Cardinal Bertram, the Archbishop of Breslau, wrote a note to the priests of his archdiocese, instructing them

As Scholder commented, in an essay from which the extract above has been taken, some traditions were deeply ingrained. It is not clear whether in the chaotic state of Europe in May 1945 the instruction was ever carried out, or indeed if the instruction was even sent. Breslau had been encircled by Soviet troops since February 1945 and finally surrendered on 6 May. Bertram had left the city in late February or early March 1945 and spent the rest of the war at his summer residence at Johannesberg Castle in the Czechoslovak part of the diocese. It seems unlikely that anyone in SHAEF would have been aware of its existence of the instruction. Had they been it might have caused them to be even more suspicious of the Catholic Church in Germany than many already may have been. One of the questions which faced those who were to be responsible for the future oversight of religious matters in Germany was how to react to a Catholic Church which many believed had, with only isolated exceptions, rarely displayed much obvious opposition to the Nazi regime. Bertram may have been more percipient, in coupling prayers for the future of the Church in his diocese with the other petitions in his intention for the service, than he fully recognised. The archdiocese would eventually become part of the Catholic Church in Poland as the diocese of Wrocƚaw. Commenting on the state of the Catholic clergy, Kuber has written:

The Mosquito Coast or Shore, as it was often called, fits uneasily into the conventional historiography of the eighteenth-century Caribbean and Latin America. The Coast belongs to what is now Atlantic Honduras and Nicaragua, a jagged coastline of some 400 miles stretching from Cape Gracias à Dios to the San Juan river in Costa Rica. Geographically it is part of the Caribbean Rim; jurisdictionally, it was part of Hispanic Central America. Yet the Mosquito Coast was not part of the central plantation zone. It did not import large numbers of African slaves to harvest the products that were found there. Nor was the Shore under effective Spanish rule for much of the eighteenth century. Whereas the Spanish stamped their presence upon the Pacific region of Central America, where the rich soils of the tropical savanna provided sustenance for over a million people at the onset of conquest and good ranch land for the Spanish, the region on the other side of the mountain range that divided Central America proved largely inaccessible. The Shore was a disputed territory for much of the eighteenth century, with the British establishing an informal superintendence over the area from 1740 onwards. Until quite recently, it was only in relation to Belize, the strip of forest that the British carved out of Spanish Honduras in exchange for the Shore, that the Mosquito Coast entered the political history of the Central American isthmus.

And yet the very marginality of the Mosquito Coast has now become its principal attraction. In recent years, in the wake of renewed globalization and new waves of mass migration, historical attention has shifted away from the master narratives of nationhood and liberation, colonialism and dependency, towards more mobile concepts, whether diasporas, travelling cultures, or hybridities. And historians have become more attentive to the ‘entangled worlds’ in which people lived in the Americas where borderlands bypassed and sometimes subverted official sovereignties. Within this context, the Shore seems a fitting site of exploration. For if the Mosquito Coast was not central to the plantation complex, it was very much a part of the maritime Atlantic.

On 21 January 1924 Lenin died of a massive stroke, having spent the last year of his life as a chronic invalid. His death prompted a nationwide outpouring of grief – in no small part, a displaced catharsis for a traumatised population that had endured almost a decade of armed conflicts and social upheaval, and the protracted ravages of hunger and disease. For several days, hundreds of thousands of mourners gathered outside the House of Unions in Moscow where his body lay in state, braving blizzards and temperatures as low as -40°C as they patiently waited their turn to process past the scarlet catafalque. Theatres closed; newspapers were wholly given over to coverage of reactions to the leader's demise. On 26 January, the day of his funeral, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad by official decree. At countless meetings convened in workplaces and institutions around the country, citizens made solemn vows to cherish Lenin's memory and devote themselves to building socialism.

How best to accomplish that aim remained a moot issue. Marxist theory held that its successful realisation depended on transforming the new state into a major industrial power – but that would require a substantial investment in infrastructure, and capital was in short supply. Grain exports were one of the few viable means of accumulating sufficient hard currency to purchase the necessary equipment abroad. But as Lenin himself acknowledged in a speech of 31 October 1921, the Bolsheviks’ attempt to remodel the economic basis of the state by ‘storm tactics’ had failed, causing a precipitous drop in agricultural outputs. The government was consequently left with little choice, he argued, but to attempt to rebuild the shattered economy by abandoning the draconian requisitioning of foodstuffs and partially revoking the enforced nationalisation of private enterprise. If the state re-incentivised the peasantry to produce a surplus by permitting them to retain a portion in which they could trade, it would allow grain exports to resume and create disposable income that farmers could spend on goods. This would in turn help to revive the re-privatised domestic manufacturing and services sectors, causing money to circulate around the economy and generate badly needed tax revenues for the exchequer. In effect, this had begun to happen by the time of his death.

WITHDRAWAL FROM LEIPZIG AND ARRIVAL IN PARIS

By the spring of 1888 Delius was impatient to move on; moreover, the coterie of Norwegians was about to fragment. ‘Our wonderful time in Leipzig has now melted away into the past’, he later wrote to Grieg from Bradford; ‘I have never lived through such a congenial time. It has been a cornerstone in my life’. Halvorsen was the first to depart and Delius followed a fortnight later and had no intention of returning. The Griegs left in April, leaving only Sinding to languish in solitude. Delius's withdrawal from Leipzig, as Philip Jones has argued, was entirely voluntary (which somewhat contradicts the assertion that his father had only granted him a limited period of eighteen months of study). His letter to Gertrude Rueckert of December 1886 makes it clear that he expected to be in Leipzig for three years like other fellow students, but given that he attended few of the classes for which he was registered (with the exception of those with Reinecke, Jadassohn and Sitt), it is not surprising that he saw little point in continuing. The wonder is that Leipzig granted him a diploma at all. Delius's later disparagement of Leipzig, the ‘Double Fugue Institution’ as Sinding sarcastically described it, is well known. At a time when he made these comments, autodidacticism was deeply fashionable; likewise, popular ‘anti-intellectualism’ in composition and criticism deemed the word ‘academic’ (especially in the hands of Bernard Shaw) a pejorative term. Yet, Delius's experiences there, whether in the classroom, at the opera or in the concert hall, inculcated a sense of professionalism in his work and, more significantly, his later methods, with an incisive degree of self-criticism. However, possessed with youthful arrogance and (more importantly) belief in his own abilities, like many of his peers, he undoubtedly felt that he could make more progress on his own without Jadassohn's watchful eye. In January 1889, in a letter to Delius, Sinding ruefully commented: ‘it is queer how Jadassohn impresses the stamp of his own personality on his pupils, if they cannot emancipate themselves from it’. Emancipating himself clearly was Delius's desire. As he declared to the much younger Heseltine: ‘Harmony is only a means of expression which is gradually developing. I don't believe in learning harmony and counterpoint’.

GESTATION

Even before the opportunity to hear parts of Koanga in London in 1899, Delius had embarked on yet another work for the stage, as if he was anxious to move on from the aesthetic world of his third opera to pastures new. In fact, it appears that the ink of Koanga was barely dry before Delius approached Keary with a request for a libretto based on the Swiss author Gottfried Keller’s short story ‘Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe’ from the collection Die Leute von Seldwyla written between 1856 and 1874. Keller was associated with the German-speaking literary movement of ‘Bourgeois’ or ‘Poetic’ Realism, one which promoted virtue in ordinary, local people, customs, events and morals. As Christopher Palmer has commented, it ‘implied the statistical norm, the social generality; subject matter was drawn from the unexceptional rather than from the phenomenal, and settings tended to restrict themselves to the provincial and homespun’. Keller, along with his contemporaries, Theodor Storm, Adalbert Stifter, Eduard Friedrich Mörike and Nikolaus Lenau, sought refuge in the settled order, observing value and honesty in rural, peasant life rather than in urban reality, and essentially represented a reaction to the insidious influences of materialism and industrialisation (just as Romanticism had earlier reacted to the starker truths of the Age of Reason) which threatened to overwhelm it. In one of his most famous stories, ‘Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe’, which was based on a newspaper report of a local tragedy, Keller tells of pauper lovers who commit suicide by drowning together. The progeny of two feuding farmers, Manz and Marti, who fall out over a coveted strip of land separating their fields, Sali and Vreli (Vreli) are forbidden to see each other (hence the reference to Shakespeare's famous drama). Riven with hate, the two fathers are impoverished by the cost of futile litigation – Manz becomes a humble publican, Marti sells all except his dilapidated cottage – and the families become homeless beggars; yet, with poetic irony, the ruinous process brings Sali and Vreli closer together and they grow up to fall in love.

Criticisms of contemporary composition continued to be couched in strongly ethical terms (see below, pp. 193–200). The music of Tchaikovsky remained hugely popular, much to the dismay of critics for whom displays of excessive emotion were to be deplored on ethical grounds. Some critics denounced the ‘Pathétique’ and by implication the taste of audiences. The Musical Times described it as ‘Mr [Robert] Newman’s hobby-horse’ which was ‘once more ridden to the admiration of a crowded house’. The critic stayed away on this occasion: ‘We cannot endure this nerve-shattering music any more.’ Tchaikovsky’s sensationalism was also deprecated by Charles Maclean in a paper given to the Musical Association in 1898; however, his opinion was by no means endorsed in the discussion that followed. C. Fred Kenyon held that Tchaikovsky showed most clearly how the objectivity found in Bach and Beethoven had given way to extreme subjectivity, which he attributed to ‘selfishness, or the cultivation of self pity’. Kenyon feared that subjectivity would eventually displace objectivity and result in ‘the annihilation of all that is most noble and most pure in the noblest and purest of all arts’. This view was strongly contested by Ernest Newman, who defended Tchaikovsky against English critics who peddled an ignorant caricature of Russian semi-barbarity and had scant knowledge of the range of the composer’s works.

However, another ethical denunciation, similar to Kenyon’s, came from Arthur Symons, who was known mainly as a literary critic and poet. Symons found savagery in the ‘Pathétique’: ‘Tchaikovsky is a debauch, not so much passionate as feverish.’

Symons also found a ‘touch of unmanliness’ that he believed to be characteristic of modern art: ‘There is a vehement and mighty sorrow in the Passion Music of Bach, by the side of which the grief of Tchaikovsky is like the whimpering of a child. He is unconscious of reticence, unconscious of self-control.’ (The charge of unmanliness is discussed further in Chapter 9 below.)

In earlier times, Wagner’s music had been the target of ethical condemnation. Symons thought that Tchaikovsky’s blatant self-obsession eclipsed any reservations about Wagner, whose expression of emotion had an elemental and universal dimension, whereas Tchaikovsky was entirely focused on self-pity. In unmistakably ethical terms Symons contrasted the attitude of ‘loving obedience’ that he attributed to composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the excessive emotion and ‘selfishness of desire’ found in modern music.