A. Arblaster - London Symphony and Tono-Bungay.pdf

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'A London Symphony' and 'Tono-Bungay'

Author(s): Anthony Arblaster

Source:

Tempo,

New Series, No. 163 (Dec., 1987), pp. 21-25

Published by:

Cambridge University Press

Stable URL:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/945688

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'A LONDON SYMPHONY'

AND 'TONO-BUNGAY'

AnthonyArblaster

HIS DEATH

SHORTLY

BEFORE

1958 Vaughan Williams told Michael Kennedy, who was already

committed to writing the composer's 'musical biography', that the coda or Epilogue to the final

movement of his A London Symphonyhad a link with the end of H.G. Wells's novel Tono-

Bungay, in which London is evoked as the book's narratorand centralcharacterpasses down the

Thames through the city to the open sea. 'For actual coda see end of Wells's Tono Bungay'was

the composer's laconic advice. Kennedy then quotes two short passages from the final chapter

of Tono-Bungay,and these have since become a standardpoint of referencefor other writers on

the symphony. They have appearedin record sleeve and programme notes, and in other places,

such as Hugh Ottaway's BBC Music Guide to the Vaughan Williams Symphonies. The most

frequently quoted passage is the following:

Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide

abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass-pass. The river passes-London passes, England passes...

Kennedy comments that 'The poetry of that prose became the poetry of music in the symphonic

Epilogue...'; and many listeners must have felt the rightness of this, once they knew the Wells

passage.

But the passages conventionally quoted do not give us the full meaning of Wells's final

chapter; and neither, curiously, do they include the one passagein the chapterwhich seems most

obviously apposite to Vaughan Williams's symphonic project. I believe that a closer look at

Wells's novel and its conclusion should casta little more light on VaughanWilliams'ssymphony.

The final chapter, 'Night and the Open Sea', is Wells's own epilogue to what he regarded as

his most ambitious novel.2 Tono-Bungay a novel about the English social system and how it

was changing in the late 19th century. It is about the transition from a traditional, feudal class

society, based on land, in which everyone has his or her appointed place, to a society dominated

by money and individual enterprise. Its narrator,George Ponderevo, belongs to the culture of

enterprise and technology, and the book is in some ways a celebration of the energies of the

individual. But it is also a story of fraud, of the exploitation of public gullibility by an

unscrupulous entrepreneur, George's uncle, and of commercial ambition which eventually

overreaches itself and crashes down in ruins.

For all the vigour and energy of George and his uncle, it is ultimately a sad parable:what shall

Williams

(London, 1964). Kennedy's discussion of the Epilogue

Quoted in Michael Kennedy: The Works Ralph Vaughan

and his citation of Tono-Bungayappear on pp. 139-140.

2H.G. Wells:

are

(London, 1966) pp.503 and 639. All quotations from Tono-Bungay taken from

Experiment Autobiography

the final chapter.

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TEMPO

it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? 'I have called it Tono-Bungay,

but I had far better have called it Waste'

says George, in that final chapter. The melancholy mood

in which it concludes is a sadness not only for individuals, but for a whole civilization which

seems to have lost its way or its soul. First published in 1909, it is heavy with foreboding and

uncertainty-the anxious mood which can now been seen as presaging the FirstWorld War and

the end of the age of British and European hegemony. It was a mood which lay not far beneath

the surface confidence of the Edwardian age-as we can see so plainly in the deeply ambivalent

music of Elgar, the age's ostensible laureate.

George is implicated in his uncle's ruin, but finallyturnshis hand to buildingnavaldestroyers.It

is an obviously symbolic turn of events. He is taking one of these destroyers on a speed trialout

in the North Sea when he makes that final reflective journey down the Thames with which the

book concludes. 'As I passed down the Thames I seemed in a new and parallelmanner to be

passing all England in review. I saw it then as I had wanted my readersto see it.' As Kennedy

says, it is 'an idea which would certainly have appealed to Vaughan Williams'. A page or two

later Wells writes: 'To run down the Thames so is to run one's hand over the pages in the book

of England from end to end.'

There are, as it were, three chapters or pages in this book. The first is the England of the

past-traditional, Anglican England, representedin the novel by Bladesover, the great country

house in whose shadow the narrator grew up (as Wells himself grew up in the shadow of

Uppark in West Sussex), and epitomized in this last chapter by the Victorian Gothic of the

Houses of Parliament: 'It is quaint, no doubt, this England-it is even dignified in places-and

full of mellow associations'. The second page is 'the essential London', the commercial

metropolis, bustling and sordid. After that the sight of Saint Paul's, 'the very figure of whatever

fineness the old Anglican culture achieved', recallsonce more the old England. But:

then the traditional and ostensible England falls from you altogether. The third movement begins, the last great movcment

in the London symphony, in which the trim scheme of the old order is altogether dwarfed and swallowed up.

After passing Tower Bridge:

one is in a world of accident and nature. For the third part of the panorama of London is beyond all law, order, and

precedence, it is the seaport and the sea ...Out to the open we go, to windy freedom and tracklessways. Light after light

goes down.

And there follows the passage so frequently quoted.

'This', the narrator/Wells writes,

is the note I have tried to emphasize ... It is a note of crumbling and confusion, of change and seemingly aimless swelling, of

a bubbling up and a medley of futile loves and sorrows.

But beyond these transient things, the narratorreaches out to something which endures:

Sometimes I call this reality Science, sometimes I call it Truth. ... I see it always as austerity, as beauty. This thing we make

clear is the heart of life. It is the one enduring thing. ... the full sense of it was with me all that night as I drove ... out upon the

weltering circle of the sea.

The book's final sentence is:

We are all things that make and pass, striving upon a hidden mission, out to the open sea.

I have quoted at some length because it seems to me that so much more of that last chapter

than is usually cited casts light on the symphony and its ending. It is odd, for a start, that neither

Kennedy nor Ottaway quoted the passage where Wells refers explicitly to 'the London

symphony'. Why not? Given the date of the book's publication, and given the symphony's

period of gestation (1911-1913), it seems at least possible that Wells's novel planted one of the

seeds from which the symphony was soon to grow. Vaughan Williams later recalledthat it was

George Butterworth who suggested to him that he should write a symphony; but Butterworth

did not suggest a theme.3 It would be silly and implausible to suggest too close a correlation

between Wells's 'three movements' and Vaughan Williams's own plan. The composer anyway

3 See Ursula

(London, 1964), p.95.

Vaughan Williams: RVW. A Biography Ralph VaughanWilliams

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'A LONDON SYMPHONY'

put forward his own suggestions for the interpretationof the two middle movements.4 But it

does not seem implausible to suggest that the composer took more from that last chapter than

just the image of London and England sinking below the horizon as one moves down the

Thames and out to sea.

There is more (literal) discord, and more genuine symphonic tension in this symphony than

has sometimes been recognized by those who seem to notice only the picturesque and lyrical

elements. Thus the main allegrorisoluto the first movement opens with a dramaticand urgent

cry:

AUq-re risoluteo.

mtotto

satC.

IO=.

O__i_

j^rw3

jfff

kei

which sets the mood for the whole of the first subject group of themes, and which recurs with

even greater ferocity at the opening of the development section. It is also recalled at the climax

of the last movement recapitulation, immediately before the harp chimes of Big Ben usher in the

Epilogue.

Then there is the even more anguished opening cry of the final movement:

Andante moto

con

appass.

ttI

dim.-

.):

which, as Hugh Ottaway pointed out, is murmuringly anticipatedin the quiet but uneasy coda

to the immediately preceding Scherzo,5 and is still there in the final bars of the whole work.

These darker and more urgent notes are surely designed to 'frame' some of the more colourful

and rumbustious elements in the score, and can be seen as the composer's own 'note of

crumbling and confusion, of change and seemingly aimless swelling'.

Images of the river and the sea, central to Wells's final chapter, are clearly evoked in the

symphony's Epilogue-but also in the Scherzo, for which the composer, on the occasion of one

early performance, invited the hearerto 'imagine himself standingon WestminsterEmbankment

at night, surrounded by the distant sounds of the Strand, with its great hotels on one side, and

the "new Cut" on the other, with its crowded streets and flaring lights ...'6 This is strikingly

close to Wells's evocation of

4 These are

quoted by Kennedy, op.cit, pp.467-8.

s See Hugh Ottaway: VaughanWilliamsSymphonies

(London, 1972) pp.20-21.

Kennedy, op.cit, p.468.

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TEMPO

the essential London: you have Charing Cross railway station, heart of the world, and the Enlbankment on the north side

with its new hotels over-shadowing its Georgian and Victorian architecture,and mud and great warehouses and factories,

chimneys, shot towers, advertisements on the south.

It hardly needed Wells to suggest the use of the chimes of Big Ben, but here too it may be

significant that at the end of the symphony they are heard immediately before the music of the

river which begins the Epilogue, just as Wells's narratorsees Westminster from the river. (In the

following passage the first movement theme is recalledin the bars after letter Q.)

Rkna n"t1 ottn. too.

^.e.

Yyl^rSQ^TTrn

r?494WM

nAadante sostenuto.

EPILOGUE.

FF--

(

IrJ

'- - -''~

-1 L-

;

'iJ1- 1

d ' '.

rr+-Re

VFffR~?~~f

;

,r !

i i i

I F

ielio.C.B.

'----L.

The idea of the sea with its 'windy freedom and trackless ways' as a 'world of accident and

nature' beyond human order is, of course, central to A Sea Symphony,and the Epilogue to the

Londonlinks with the earlier work. But A Sea Symphonyis full of the optimism of its Whitman

texts. The sea has its perils, but they are a challenge, not a deterrent, to the adventurous,

exploratory human spirit: 'steer for the deep waters only... O farther, farther, farthersail'. The

flag of this daring ship is an 'emblem of man elate above death'.

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