The success of the penny gaff, the precursor to variety entertainment, stirred a moral panic in otherwise seasoned mid-Victorian social explorer Henry Mayhew. The prodigal creativity of working-class audiences elicited his alarm and apprehension. Less than a century later, cultured observers appeared certain that music hall acculturated its audiences. Moreover, they found that the form offered a reliable index of national vitality and values, and the most authentic expressive form of native Englishness. Star performers received acclaim by critics as the true curators of their culture, as representatives of English character. Whereas Mayhew proclaims that music hall endangers the moral fiber of the English laborer, T. S. Eliot argues that the death of Marie Lloyd, “the greatest music hall artist of her time in England,” constitutes a decisive crisis for both the working classes and England itself.1 Eliot’s 1923 pronouncement proved durable. In 1940, George Orwell praised comedians like Little Tich and Max Miller as caretakers for English culture, observing that they expressed “something which is valuable in our civilisation which might drop out of it in certain circumstances.”2 Similarly, when John Osborne needs a metaphor for the nation in his 1958 play The Entertainer, he finds it in the music hall, and embodies his sense of national decline in the failing career of an artiste gone to seed.
What exactly caused this sea change in attitudes? How did a decidedly lowbrow practice come to be invested with “deeper” meanings, let alone come to gain the status of national treasure? To produce this shift in critical reception, I argue, professional intellectuals reworked potent metaphors of cultural vitality and decay. The earliest generation of middle-class observers of music hall treated the art form as an alien, threatening “other.” Professional culture criticism of the 1880s and 1890s, on the other hand, provided a structure for the integration of the music hall into the canons of middle-class culture. In fact, the new discourse of professional criticism reflects a novel bourgeois imperative to integrate the popular within its symbolic repertoire.
In contrast, literary professionals ranging from Max Beerbohm to Elizabeth Robins Pennell to T. S. Eliot formulated a well-nigh Manichean opposition between music-hall entertainment and what they cast as middle-class conformist culture. In the process they produced a new genre, the music-hall lament, in which what was most vital and most endangered about the English people could be found in the music hall. Thanks to this genre, the music hall retained its centrality as trope for England long after it ceased to be a privileged entertainment form. The “lament” served as a perennial rhetorical resource from the 1890s, through the generation of Eliot and Orwell, and extending to subculture observers such as Colin MacInnes in the 1950s, as well as 1960s British pop bands such as the Beatles and the Kinks.3 Even those who looked for Englishness in other forms appear to have been compelled to offer an interpretation of the music hall in order to speak credibly for the English public.
The roster of culture producers who endeavored to speak positively on behalf of music hall includes a host of major and minor figures in the arts: Arthur Symons, George Moore, Joseph Pennell, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, and Herbert Horne, in addition to Max Beerbohm, Selwyn Image, Rudyard Kipling, Theodore Wratislaw, and painter Walter Sickert.4 These figures were hardly univocal in their shared music-hall lament. In the case of Symons, for instance, the music-hall account could spiral into complex, reflexive commentaries that suggested a new, self-conscious spectatorship. Max Beerbohm, on the other hand, felt free to send up Symons’s claims to have discovered the deep meaning of the music hall.5 Even so, Beerbohm himself insists that music hall needed perceptive critics to appreciate the aesthetic achievements of its star performers. What these observers shared was a commitment to a stylized experience of patronizing the halls, and an intimation that the form struck at the foundations of middle-class taste.
The music-hall lament bears the stamp of a class-specific ideology. The theatrical entrepreneurs, newspaper writers, theater reviewers, playwrights, and professors who developed the discourse were not only attracted to music hall, but also often directly involved in it as a commercial venture.6 It was in their interest to develop an image of London music hall as an essential adversary to monolithic establishment conformity, forged by consumer capital, supervised by professional critics, and resolute in its hostility to reigning discourses of propriety while at the same time quintessentially English.
Yet music-hall criticism did more than authorize these upstart professionals. It also made explicit basic tensions in the rhetoric of cultural expertise. Should culture critics stake their status on fidelity to core values communicated by a stable canon that could be mastered through education and training, or should they claim a unique capacity to map the shifting territory of the popular? In the 1890s, among English intellectuals, disagreement over the status of music hall amounted to a methodological turf war; it was also a covert debate about the value and possibility of alternative culture practice in an increasingly commercial society.
Consider the notable 1890s argument between drama critic William Archer and the vocal defenders of music hall. Archer, a prestigious drama critic and advocate for the theatrical avant-garde, assumed that theater should have a pedagogic function for the educated public. In his many pieces for the World newspaper, he extolls theater over the halls at every opportunity. In doing so, Archer adopts the function conventionally assumed by intellectuals with respect to popular culture: sorting out good culture from bad, superior achievement from inferior work. Then and now, intellectuals declare what is worth recognizing, and what is best forgotten, in the overcrowded storehouse of cultural production.7
It no doubt seemed to Archer as if the hall’s partisans were bent on rejecting the very standards that should have defined them as intellectuals.8 He draws sharp distinctions between theater, with its rigorous and demanding pleasures, and the broad-based, large-gestured humor and song that constituted music-hall fare. Archer insinuates that music-hall partisans are too self-absorbed and self-interested to be trusted in their preferences. In his 1895 essay “Theatre and Music-Hall,” he seeks to win his public to his more demanding, rational taste, and perhaps win back those writers (and readers) who share his training, his values, but, oddly enough, not his tastes. He hints that defenders of the halls mistook their “physical comfort and mental idleness” for a more genuinely intellectual enjoyment.9 Archer could rely on class-bound tradition to distinguish theater culture from music-hall crudeness. The acolytes of music hall worked to invert those valuations, to blur lines between the cultured and the vulgar, and to challenge the customary relations between critical attention and “cruder” forms of apprehension.10
The music-hall lament was forged in large part by Archer’s intellectual competition. Self-proclaimed aficionados of the music hall made their partisanship of the form public in the same media venues that published Archer and his ilk: prestigious, liberal newspapers and periodicals read by the salaried and college educated. Nonetheless, these popular culture partisans founded their rhetorical authority on different grounds than taste arbiters like Archer. They did not parade their class status, innate sense of cultural authority, or college educations. Instead, this unconventional faction stressed an organic relation or kinship to popular taste, a special ability to assess public needs. They created a discourse that connected a distinctly “popular” culture to nation and history.
To sketch this debate, then, is to show how the music-hall aficionado effected a change in the critical lexicon of the educated class, and made possible a new homology between national vitality and vernacular identity. Music hall mattered among this critical elite precisely because its vulgarity seemed to offer an escape from an established system of critical, cultural, and economic values that, by the 1890s, left little room for new critical work. In praising the form, the music-hall cognoscenti necessarily reified it. The value of music hall, they insisted, resides in its essence as folk culture. Certain that they knew the popular character better than the people themselves, they made of “the people’s culture” an object every bit as static and ahistorical as the tradition that Archer embraced.
Like a later generation of “hip” cognoscenti, music-hall aficionados took pleasure in being populist insiders. They prided themselves on their “advanced knowledge of the illegitimate,” in Andrew Ross’s phrase.11 Yet, as William Archer knew quite well, these adepts were also movers, shakers, and, importantly, managers in the field of cultural production. Rather than a battle of elites versus populists, the tensions in music-hall criticism are better regarded as structural contradictions within managerial ideology.12 Music-hall acolytes observed the same professional protocols as competing intellectuals. The freedom that music-hall devotees had in mocking authority presupposed the prior elaboration of a dominant discourse of taste, produced by morally serious, responsible, and judicious critics, like William Archer himself, for its full intelligibility.
Music-hall partisans thought in terms of the perpetual struggle between two clearly defined and unequal antagonists, capitalism at its most venal and the authentic expression of the folk. In order for the vernacular to have a fighting chance, it had to be made visible and shed its lingering parochialism. This entailed a paradox. The forces that made the halls popular made them susceptible to commercial appropriation, and therefore dilution. Music-hall advocates based their critical authority on their ability to evaluate, and “rescue,” formerly illegitimate cultural expression; but they also believed that this expression faced inevitable doom from larger forces of commodification.
While the contradictory and often flamboyant celebration of the music hall did not in the end supplant Archer’s sober and respectable critical practice, the cult of the halls had a lasting impact on English cultural criticism. Especially significant was their tendency to associate national health with the resistant capacity of popular culture. It was a seductive discourse, based on inside knowledge, but it was also a reductive one, with the students of popular culture often claiming to know more than their instructors. In defending the people, the music-hall cultist often occluded the complexities of music-hall audiences. The myth of the inherently subversive popular, a compressed image of complex vernacular practice, was passed off as a timeless truth of national character. Once abstracted, the general debate over the resistant potential of cultural forms, and the challenges posed and faced by popular culture, flows into a larger discourse on the abiding patterns of Englishness.
As Krishan Kumar observes, the end of the nineteenth century found English intellectuals in different fields working on a common project to “define more closely what was meant by Englishness—and with unmistakable intent, to celebrate it.”13 Historian, poet, novelist, literary critic, and folklorist elaborated Englishness as a secular essence discernible in shared cultural practices. In various intellectual discourses ranging from education reform, to linguistics, to the sociology of rural culture, Englishness was derived from the study of different local practices and linked to different doings of “the people.” However, if the cognoscenti imagined a place for the people within their construction of English character, inclusion was offered on quite specific conditions. As Philip Dodd suggests, late-Victorian intellectuals offered an “invitation to the working class to take its place in the national culture,” but the “acknowledgment” was tied to terms that “fixed” the “identity and nature” of the people.14 Nonetheless, these arguments did not simply bolster the authority of would-be music-hall experts. When music-hall partisans articulated claims of national vitality to the London variety stage, they inevitably raised broad questions concerning the work of institutions and collectives within the nation-state. Music hall came to signify the possibility that an expressive practice outside the leveling impulses of capitalism, urbanism, and modernism could exist and would be desirable. This amounts to an early instance of an oppositional, modernist criticism, despite its late-Victorian trappings.
While a critic of the form, Archer nonetheless assumed that music hall remained a unique reflection of English character, a “mirror” for demotic tastes (as the title of Max Beerbohm’s careful consideration of the music-hall populism, “Demos’ Mirror,” would have it). The music-hall partisan found the essence of the entertainment in formal aspects of the fare: in the celebrated call and response between singers and audience, and the insistent vérité collapse of the fourth wall in comic sketches and songs. These stylistic elements served to convince the halls’ more dedicated defenders that the very essence of the English people was reflected in its variety entertainment.
At moments, Archer himself seemed persuaded by the argument that music hall not only originated in popular ritual, but also still served as a unique, not a stylized, expression of the proletariat. He was accordingly tempted to take music hall as a true transcription of the vernacular voice. Archer read social commentator, art critic, and music-hall defender Elizabeth Robins Pennell and quoted approvingly her history of music hall and her claim that variety theater constituted an art form whose essential character was outside history. Like many of the cultists he decried, Archer relied on historicist arguments to support his points about the character of contemporary variety theater.15 Pennell’s argument that music hall constituted a peerless populist form and existed in counterpoint to mundane commercial culture gave even Archer, who wished to accord theater that status, some pause.16
In Pennell’s influential 1893 account, the defense of music hall develops through an account of the lineage of the form. She locates the essence of music hall in the popular desire for variety. “Variety” itself, broadly understood, constitutes the recognized essence, not only of popular entertainment, but also of popular desire. Pennell’s essay then provides a full inventory of the many different embodiments, but single essence, of popular variety, from medieval times to the present day.
Once Pennell alights on her central analogy, she proceeds boldly, with willful anachronism. The link between the people and variety entertainment blurs the distinction between the two terms while maintaining the character of both as essential truths. “Before the first Miracle play had been invented,” she proclaims, “the people of England had clamored for the variety entertainment, and been given it. There was not a castle throughout the land that had not its own special London Pavilion or Alhambra in miniature” (575). “The Pedigree of the Music-Hall” abounds in clever analogies: “Then as now, the audience were free to go and come; likely enough, free to keep their hats or helmets, if they chose; to join in the chorus, to throw things at the performer who failed to please. . . . No, already in feudal days, the idea of ‘turns’ had been developed: the minstrel gave place to the acrobat, the acrobat to the dancer, the dancer to clever dog.”17 The current charm, or at least the contemporary success, of music hall, she insists, resides precisely in its fidelity to a national essence. The value of the halls rests on their genetic resemblance to rustic comedy like miracle plays and mummers drama.
To convince, Pennell’s essay demands that its readers assume a similarly unchanging essence of the English people: “Acrobats and jugglers, bears and dogs, by the same feats and the same tricks—you can see them in illuminated MSS. And old woodcuts held Saxon and Norman spell-bound, as they hold the Cockney today. Not one number of the programme could be cited which has not its medieval counterpart. More of the past lives in the music hall than in any other institution.”18 Pennell justifies music hall as “heritage culture”; at the same time, the many corresponding faces of variety require from the reader a faith in a static, unchanging, popular character that is also English character.
Pennell’s survey of variety itself expresses an English tradition of thought concerning culture, beginning in Burke and Coleridge, extending through Matthew Arnold and Carlyle, and reaching forward to modernists like T. S. Eliot. These thinkers, as Terry Eagleton observes, tend to “naturalize culture.”19 Pennell follows suit: for all her effort to set cultural forms within a historical context, she shrinks from rupture and discontinuity in the historical record. Like those of her predecessors, Pennell’s essay works on history, ordering its crooked ways, avoiding difference, and constructing, as Eagleton puts it, in a “seamless evolutionary continuum.”20 The music hall emerges as a collective form, endowed, in Eagleton’s words, with “all the stolid inevitability of a boulder.” Pennell sanctifies the desire of the English people to escape “monotony”; stylized folk expression becomes a representative national form.
Thus locating the pedigree of the people, Pennell comes perilously close to claiming that the people’s culture is fully determined by the past. In fact, the English folk share qualities otherwise associated with various cultural and biological primitives abroad (she is hardly unique among leading Victorians in holding fast to this homology). Both the tribesman and the native Englishman are believed to possess an essence that sets them outside of history. Similarly, Pennell’s music-hall apologetic has the paradoxical effect of announcing the vitality of an art form while at the same moment proclaiming it’s nothing new.
The music-hall criticism of Max Beerbohm, wit, caricaturist, and aesthete, takes up many of the themes sounded by music-hall partisans like Pennell. As a critical observer, he was fascinated by the communal circuitry evidenced by the interplay between performer and audience at the halls. Like Pennell, Beerbohm forges links in his essays between music hall and the character of the English people, especially its working class. Beerbohm also echoes Pennell’s reductive analogies between the music hall and English character. In “Demos’ Mirror” (1903), Beerbohm evinces a cockeyed confidence that music hall reflects—or produces—traits of the national character.21 “Indeed,” the critic avows, “there is not one peculiarity of our race, good or bad, that is not well illustrated in the Music Halls.”22
Unlike Pennell, Beerbohm provides a theory behind music-hall evolution: “The entertainments in Music Halls have grown, feature for feature, from the public’s taste. They are things which the public itself has created from its own pleasure; they know no laws of being but those which the public gives them.” The fidelity with which the music hall reflects popular essence suggests that its development obeys a popular logic that transcends its character as commercial enterprise. Beerbohm heralds the music hall both as mirror and coproducer of folk essence, and its various performers emerge as publicists for the singular truth of national character.
However, by 1899, with the publication of “The Blight on Music Hall,” Beerbohm began to question the harmonious relation he supposed between the people and the people’s entertainment. In his most elaborate, programmatic piece on music hall, “The Older and Better Music Hall” (1903), he worries over the growing incongruence between music hall’s origins and its current state. Characteristically, the solution to the contradiction that he proffers exalts the trained, informed evaluator capable of making the necessary distinctions between good and bad music hall. Like “Demos’ Mirror,” written in the same year, the essay attempts to make sense of a perceived change in the content of music-hall performance.23
The essay articulates Beerbohm’s dissatisfaction with the current state of the commercial music hall: as these halls draw more entertainers and audiences outside the working class, so they seem to him necessarily less authentic. Yet, importantly, “The Older and Better Music Hall” declares Beerbohm’s personal allegiance to, and seeming possession of, the “older and better music hall” over against the “clever,” progressive (according to middle-class standards), and more commercial variety theater. Against a shallow, “stripling reader,” who attends music hall and applauds finer conditions, slicker entertainment, “clever poodles, clever conjurers, clever acrobats, clever cinematographs, clever singers and clever elephants,” he pits his own stance as a reactionary, “passionate” for what once was. Why is the older music hall—of less than a decade before—“better” than its newer variants? The conclusion follows from Beerbohm’s premise that the first music halls moved in lockstep with real working-class sentiment. Music hall loses its credibility once it hails other audiences besides the working class; it wins new patrons at the cost of losing its critical cachet as the authentic popular. “This is one of the advantages of the old music hall over the new,” Beerbohm insists; “it does reflect, in however grotesque a way, the characters of the class to which it consciously appeals.” Unlike the “stripling reader”—the youthful music-hall partisan, whom the critic assumes to have been taken in by ersatz culture—Beerbohm remains in touch with the “good old days,” when “an unbroken succession of singers” performed “in accord to certain traditional conventions.”24 In contrast, Beerbohm’s erring readers extol music hall for the wrong reason: for being a merely “clever” approximation of authenticity.
Beerbohm’s distinction between an inauthentic “clever” and a valuable, essential “vulgar” does not explicitly appeal to learning or critical convention for authority. The critic’s definition of folk culture, however, reprises familiar terms—“barbarous,” “stupid,” “outside history,” all serve as binary foils to “clever” variety.25 The resulting image of a barbarous and stupid England that was nonetheless truly English underscores the desirability of class difference. When Beerbohm suggests that the turn away from the older, better music hall means the acceptance of homogenized culture over genuinely free expression he equates popular freedom with ruling-class domination.
Partly as a result of his assumptions, the struggle he posits between authentic expression and commodified entertainment remains a battle the latter has won in advance. Recalling his younger days, Beerbohm presents his memory of the old halls as nothing less than principled nonconformity; nostalgia becomes elevated into an existential imperative. The critic’s youth is associated with a time when nonconformity was still a possibility, when the critical observer might maintain a position one step ahead of the crowd, yet in lockstep with the people. Music hall, too, was “young,” that is, unassimilated. Both the spectator and the culture remember a time of lost, critical potency.
The “older” music hall was “better” but always already vanishing, and this disappearance is proffered as the inevitable fate of adversarial culture in a commercial society. “The Older and Better Music Hall” advances the notion that the lag time between genuine artistic expression and the dilution of this expression was quickening. This all-encompassing logic of appropriation necessarily includes the music hall’s cultivated acolytes, since their recognition speeds on the canonization of dissident forms; the authorized music hall must always signify the twilight of the form as a viable, expressive medium.
In an attempt to dodge his own conclusions regarding the inescapability of middle-class cultural appropriation, Beerbohm engages in subtle play with the key notion used to frame his music-hall observations. The essay leaps from a realist expression of the inevitability of history to a modernist fantasy of a past recaptured. The aficionado becomes uncharacteristically hopeful, even cheeky, about his ability to do the impossible, and claim a lost past that he alone recognizes. At the essay’s close, Beerbohm reassures his readers with his personal discovery of an oasis of cultural purity that remains in the midst of more luxurious, fully commercialized palaces of “variety” (the critic’s own scare quotes, to mark the form’s inauthenticity). Paradise, a haven for the cognoscenti, remains on nightly exhibit: “Can we anywhere recapture the olden pleasures? Indeed, yes. I have found a place. Nothing could seem more brand-new than the front of this Metropolitan Music Hall; but enter, and you will be transported deliciously into the past.”26
“The Older and Better Music Hall” concludes then with a fetish figure, in the form of music-hall singer Harry Freeman. Freeman becomes the object of Beerbohm’s impossible desires: to recapture a vital moment in a popular form, the health of the imagined community that the critic addresses, and indeed, the writer’s own vitality. The singer allows the critic to imagine an escape from mere commerce located, paradoxically, in the heart of the metropolis. Freeman provides the critical spectator with a means of representing his loss and simultaneously denies it. “We tremble lest [Freeman] has truckled to changing fashion. Not he! . . . A thousand memories sweep back to us from that beaming face under the grey bowler hat. That face radiates the whole golden past, and yet, oddly enough seems not a day older than last we looked on it.”27 Freeman’s “face” embodies all the contradictions that have accumulated in the course of the essay. Beerbohm’s observations are, after all, fueled by a loss that has not in fact occurred. “But, certainly, the Metropolitan is a great discovery. Let us go to it often, magically renewing there our youth. And in those dreary other halls let us nevermore set foot.” A vital cultural form clings to life, along with its most authentic practitioners and most trustworthy witness, despite having been lost.
Despite Beerbohm’s subtleties, the differences between his cultivated stance of music-hall appreciation and Pennell’s more academic historicizing are less significant than their common ground. Both must exit history in order to extol the halls. In Pennell’s account, nothing can change the national character, or the popular desire for variety, outlined in her panoptic survey. Since historical change cannot kill an essence, one would assume that nothing could stop the populist advance embodied in “authentic” variety. Importantly, however, Pennell also anticipates Beerbohm’s own doubts as to the durability of popular culture. The music hall that Pennell describes, magically transforming and renewing itself in lockstep with the English people, still develops only so far. She contends that the entertainment is now poised on the brink of disaster through its very success, a triumph that has brought in a mass of experts and entrepreneurs, who serve only to rob the form of its essential working-class qualities.
Music hall developed alongside the English people, the story goes, changing with them along with the mode of production. Yet management and capitalism cannot coexist with a fully popular form; one must give way, and with the onrush of scrutiny, Pennell hints, the hall will inevitably face a total assimilation. Unable or unwilling to imagine the persistence of popular culture within the dominant culture, she conjures up the form’s imminent demise. Her account spills over into a pell-mell rush, with the critic calling down plagues on both sides of the cultural divide; she expresses her distrust of the people’s ability to maintain their own culture and distaste for what a league of competing authorities—managers, artists, legislators—have done to variety. “For centuries,” Pennell laments, “Englishmen have been shaping their variety entertainment into its present form, and now, like a child with the toy it has been crying for, they are doing their best to destroy it.”28 She takes aim at the forces of moral reform that have pressured the halls to clean up their act; she also points fingers at the various entrepreneurs who streamline the entertainment and transform it into a suitably bourgeois venture. Indeed, her closing peroration excuses no one: “patrons” and “managers” are alike to blame. It also argues an impossibility: that the essence of Englishness can pass away while still attracting the people themselves as paying patrons. Try as they may, the people can’t quite see the music hall for what Pennell believes it is. “When too late,” Pennell warns, “when it is no longer studied at first hand, the scholar will learn its value.”
The death knell sounds for music hall at the height of its commercial success. Tabulating deep structural continuities between the popular now and then, Pennell passes on to readers a vague but expansive sense of lost certainties. Her argument for music hall as diminishing cultural resource, praised by the discerning critic just as it disappears, leaves readers with a striking example of the ultimate vulnerability of culture forms. It is an argument meant to make her reading audience nervous, and thus serves as a brief for a managerial elite that might, at least rhetorically, finesse the crisis that this very elite identifies as such.
The defenders of the halls sought new rhetorical figures to express their relation to music hall and, by extension, to the popular. John Stokes notes that the era’s most ardent and self-conscious music-hall devotee, Arthur Symons, used the word “amateur” to encapsulate his unique mix of engaged and critical appraisal of the entertainment.29 In his first full commentary, however, Symons alights on the more apt, because more ambiguous, term of “aficionado.” The primary use of the term “amateur” was, and is, to denote a binary opposite to the professional. It is harder to separate the categories of passion and expertise conveyed by the word aficionado, which makes it a more appropriate signifier for the complex, syncretic stance that Symons adopted toward the music hall.
As Symons describes it in “A Spanish Music-Hall” (1891), the aficionado moves in a critical middle ground, moved by passion but also taking a critical distance. He is something more than the novice and something less than the specialist. The aficionado thus stakes out ground in unstable territory. Symons sought to persuade his readers that his cultural reports were more invested and therefore more legitimate than competing accounts. This, of course, conflicts with a main tenet of the prevailing aesthetic discourse, that disinterested views and orderly appraisal are necessary preconditions for evaluation.
Despite this tension between involvement and disinterest, the aficionado meets several of the criteria of professional criticism. First, the figure defines fields of interest or specialty. By staking out a territory that a portion of Symons’s middle-class audience might not be inclined to map out themselves, the aficionado provides services to the public. Like the professional, the aficionado is open to criticism by other experts. The aficionado seeks the ratification of intellectuals in his class who might not share his tastes. Finally, like the expert, this music-hall partisan seems to exist above mundane concerns and petty wrangling, yet still competes and struggles for his achieved truth with a singular passion that appears aggrandizing.
Aficionados may assume a democratic approach toward matters of taste. Nonetheless, they deploy their rhetoric to convince members of their own class rather than the general public. The internal nature of this taste dispute is evident in a piece of public correspondence in which Symons sets another music-hall critic straight. “As an aficionado of the music halls,” he writes in a letter to the Star newspaper, “allow me to express my feelings of pleasure at ‘Spectator’s’ second visit to the Pavilion, and his admirable eulogy of Miss Jenny Hill.”30 Symons then insists that the Star’s critic has made some fundamental errors of naming and recognition. “But may I also be allowed to protest, in the most convinced way, against his rash assumption that ‘nothing is so much like one music hall as another music hall—that the difference between the Pavilion and the Trocadero, between the Tivoli and the Royal, is doubtless only that ’twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’” Symons adds: “To a discriminating amateur, each music hall has its cachet, as definitely each music-hall artist worthy of the name; one could no more mistake the programme of the Royal for that of the Tivoli than one could mistake Miss Marie Lloyd for Miss Katie Lawrence.” Here Symons’s rhetoric defines a speaker in relation to a specific field of study with flair and a confidence that underscores his authority. The correspondence draws a circle around the speaker that distinguishes the writer from many others, including the Star’s critic. If we accept Symons’s conclusion, we must also grant his premises: namely that the best critical observers defeat their competition by means of their greater accuracy, expertise, and achieved perspective. This contest can have only one winner. On this point, the aficionado plays by the rules of a traditional criticism that saves its greatest scorn for those with other critical axioms. Just so, Symons’s letter to the Star challenges claims made by the Star’s theater critic, A. B. Walkely, that music halls were too uniformly vulgar to differentiate and therefore analyze.31
The contrast between Symons’s critical practice and Pierre Bourdieu’s late-twentieth-century critique of the popular expert is worth remarking. “The dominant in the artistic and intellectual fields,” Bourdieu reminds us, “have always practiced that form of radical chic which consists in rehabilitating socially inferior cultures or the minor genres of legitimate culture. . . . To denounce hierarchy does not get us anywhere. What must be changed are the conditions that make this hierarchy exist, both in reality and in minds.”32 Bourdieu’s charge presumes that social and economic structures of injustice can find a remedy without a prior symbolic resolution. In contrast, Symons’s partisan defense of music hall, a statement of his own expertise, presumes that criticism modifies social practice. He proceeds as if expert attention transforms the objects and practices it scrutinizes, bringing them within the field of legitimation. It seems at least plausible to pit the charmed circle of legitimating energies that the aficionado draws around performers, the critic, and a culture form against Bourdieu’s extreme pessimism as to the outcome of self-interested intellectual labor. Symons’s legitimating claims may not undo hierarchy, by Bourdieu’s too-exacting standards, but they clearly do more than simply leave an established hierarchy intact.
Further, in the hands of its most deliberate practitioners, music-hall fandom could draw mischievous attention to the arbitrary nature of the evaluative game.33 As passionate experts, members of the music-hall cult produced unsettling imitations of professional criticism that appeared to “signify” on the professional ideal.34 The expert rhetoric of music-hall cognoscenti might be said to parody the rules of the critical game through punctilious observance. However, another consequence of this rhetoric is the blurring of lines between cultural mavericks and the establishment, since they both use the same idiom.
The aficionado’s ability to mime the idioms of the cultural conservative incited the fury of competing literati. William Archer found the music hall distasteful, but he never got quite as exercised over working-class vulgarity as he was by the sight of persons with proper training sharing common tastes. It was bad enough that such renegades expressed a liking for music hall, but far worse for the stolid rationalist was their insistence that they possessed more authority to describe it, and better “taste,” than those who were not “in the know.”
Archer takes careful aim at the music-hall champions in “Theatre and Music-Hall” (1895). Here the critic surveys the field of middle-class taste. He pretends that the would-be aficionados of music hall represent the consensus of expert opinion and have in fact convinced the rest of London’s theatergoing audience of the superiority of the halls over the theater. In other words, he casts himself as the renegade in an effort to satirize the aficionados’ rhetoric and turn it against them. To counter their “dominant” preference, he charges it with being covertly elitist. If, as Symons and company assert, differences in taste shouldn’t be managed, then why, Archer asks, do music-hall experts insist on the significance of their own preference for the halls over conventional theater? He thereby implies the excessive self-regard of these quasi-specialists.
I merely wish to inquire why, in a world where tastes proverbially differ, this preference [for music hall] should pass for the mark of a highly enlightened, and truly modern soul, while the contrary preference stigmatises any one who confesses to it as a person quite beyond the pale of culture. Don’t tell me, dear reader, that you are not aware of this fact. Your ignorance merely shows that you are a besotted playgoer, without even the grace to be conscious of the abject inferiority of your tastes. . . . Is it possible you don’t know that the theatre is dead, quite dead, this many a year, and stinketh in the nostrils of the truly refined and aesthetic; while art, real high-toned, all-alive up-to-date Art, has taken up its abode in the Syndicate halls?
Casting himself as the firebrand, Archer audaciously exposes the “real” music hall as “the art of elaborate ugliness, blatant vulgarity, alcoholic humour and rancid sentiment.”35 Although the works of Archer and Symons differ in content they share a rhetorical form. In each, a wry and savvy authority strives to win the hearts and minds of the cultured bourgeois by attempting to place himself on the side of a majority as opposed to a self-regarding elite.
The aficionado, in Archer’s estimation, acts against the public good in the name of an unprincipled devotion to poor culture. Archer turns the music-hall devotee’s predilection for the entertainment into irrational, and proud, affectation. To distinguish himself from this self-serving aesthete, Archer presents himself as the humble, more civic-minded, and ultimately more capable critic. Archer’s critic, unlike the aficionado, is not carried away by fashion, and therefore exercises trustworthy judgment. The “truly refined” youths of Archer’s account emerge as overqualified, oversophisticated, and prodigal about money, reputation, and status, hell-bent on squandering their hard-earned cultural capital. “The music-hall critic is now quite as indispensable to any self-respecting paper as the musical or dramatic critic, and is indeed a vastly superior person,” he sneers, while “the average dramatic critic is of very common journalistic clay, and is apt to live a humdrum suburban and domestic life. Your typical music-hall chronicler is a young blood more or less fresh from the University, who probably has chambers in Piccadilly.”36 The implication that music-hall chroniclers are simply immature versions of men like himself gives Archer some confidence that the rift between the groups can be healed: “The curious thing is that the educated fanatics of the variety-show admit . . . when you catch them singly [that] they have a hearty contempt for the greater part of the music hall entertainment; indeed, they resort to the variety shows for the very purpose of luxuriating in that emotion. It is precisely the vulgarity and the inanity of the ‘comedians’ and ‘serio-comics’ . . . that attracts them to these halls of dazzling light.”37 “Theatre and Music-Hall” closes with a utopian resolution: that the defenders of the vulgar can be made to see the light, and be convinced that their links with popular taste are rooted in snobbery.
For all its polemic, “Theatre and Music-Hall” brandishes an olive branch to those culture workers who have strayed from the path and who refuse to respond to popular forms in a manner befitting their class status. The argument, after all, is productive for Archer—it allows him to set himself off from the traditional snob and confirm his own criticism as professional. Importantly, he cedes to music-hall advocates the authority to define the style of debate. Archer describes his own theater partisanship as a kindred “fanaticism,” adding, “I am far from contending that we theatre-lovers are absolutely right and the fanatics of the variety-show absolutely wrong. . . . All I suggest is, that they might live and let live, recognizing that it is not a love of ‘art,’ in any rational sense of the term, but simply a love of physical comfort and mental idleness, that draws them to the music hall.”38 Archer looks forward to a time when unruly experts recall the salient difference between intellectual distance and the undemanding pleasures that hold suspect sway in popular entertainment, a distinction they have forgotten in practice. The assumption is that this wayward class fraction would then resume the proper roles of experts within the managerial class and tutelary intellectuals. A mass public remains, desiring to be won over and receive the necessary training to achieve Archer’s own critical clarity.
Indeed, we can see just how far music-hall advocates made Archer bend at the time by looking at his return to the subject nearly two decades later, in 1916, reviewing a history of the music hall by H. G. Hibbert. By this time, the aficionados are in retreat, and the judicious critic monopolizes the field. No longer needing to keep the peace, Archer is more bilious in his assessment of the music-hall partisan: “There was a craze in the nineties, among a certain aesthetic set, for exalting the music hall at the expense of the theatre. It was too shallow and factitious to impose on a man of Mr. Hibbert’s shrewdness.”39 Archer finds the craze a “poetic” affectation, “an invasion of the music hall by young poets, who wrote of it in foolish rhapsody.”
Where Archer once insinuated that music-hall partisans were distinguished primarily by their assumed superiority to those who failed to share their taste, he now refuses to concede that their taste is anything more than an intellectual fad.40 The defenders of the music hall deluded themselves that they “discovered genius in red-nosed buffoons whose art consisted in sheer effrontery, and in wearing threadbare clothes five sizes too large for them. . . . Nothing is so incomprehensible to the outside observer as this cult of squalid ugliness.” The error of the music-hall defenders was in following the bad taste demonstrated by the well-meaning but deluded English public: “[M]any people, who in ordinary life are decent and intelligent enough, seem to take a perverted pride in accepting with apparent relish any sort of nauseous trash that is put before them in the guise of entertainment.” Even high-ranking military officers are not immune from infection. Archer finds it especially pathetic that those “who have been living on the brink of death for months have nothing better to do with their scant time of respite than to haunt amusement houses,” a phenomenon that “make[s] it seem very doubtful whether England is worth fighting for.” It is difficult to read irony into such hyperbole. The military officer with bad taste recalls the fear prompted by the aficionado that expert training does not ensure a more informed and capable public. The officer qua aficionado serves as an alarming reminder of the breach between class status and personal taste. Here, Archer stands in a long line of Victorian sages who refuse to acknowledge that the failure of their cultural pedagogy suggests the limitations of their own educational program. The tutelary intellectual requires a perpetually unlearned public, without whom the project of taste tutorials makes no sense. Rather than acknowledge this, the intellectual projects the failure back out onto the public, whose inability to be taught underscores their meager inner resources. Although Archer retreats from the rhetoric of “live and let live” in regard to taste, he remains indebted to the music-hall aficionado for linking music-hall appreciation with national health and state administration—both distinctly professional realms.
As in the 1890s, the music hall in Archer’s review essay provides the key pretext to reiterate the need for a class of authorized evaluators, who respond to the influx of bad entertainment by stepping up their own efforts to legislate taste. He even wishes to give this class fraction of artistic professionals full state sanction. Those with credentials must aid those who lack the time, capital, or capacity to exercise judgment in matters of taste: “I have sometimes wondered whether it might not be possible to adopt in England a modified form of [the American Drama League]. That is, a body which undertakes to supply its members with guidance in the direction of intelligent playgoing. . . . As things stand at present, the ordinary man . . . is wholly without guidance in the selection of a theatre to go to, and can do nothing but follow the crowd.”41 Archer expresses a typical professional desire, for the “ordinary man” to become a client class for a disinterested assembly with the proper credentials and training. The committee members will be distinguished by their expert disinterest and therefore will be above “advanced aestheticism, Puritanism, or critical party spirit of any sort,” responsive solely to “common intelligence and decency of feeling.” With the music-hall partisan gone, Archer sees an opportunity for the ascendancy of a group of cultural managers who can assess intellectual wares based on their professional standards. “[A] great end would be achieved,” he observes, “if some guidance could be supplied to the hundreds of thousands of entertainment seekers, both in London and in the provinces, who flock to imbecile and deleterious shows in total ignorance of what they are going to see, and without anyone to tell them that the relaxation of moral and intellectual fibre involved in the encouragement of such entertainments is a serious national evil.” The choice Archer puts forth is clear, and resembles in this one key respect the point advocated by the aficionado: place the evaluation of art in expert hands, where it will be properly handled, or accept an inevitable decline in cultural standards.
Archer responded to the challenge music-hall acolytes posed to traditional modes of intellectual decorum. However, much of his ire seems motivated by professional jealousy and competition. For most of the 1890s and beyond, it looked as if these “educated fanatics” of music hall might win the battle for the hearts and minds of the managerial class and make “popular culture” the privileged object of critical evaluation. Archer’s many indictments of music hall attest to his faith that art could not survive in a commercial culture absent a full consensus among trained literary specialists as to what constitutes art. Yet while Archer found it possible to attack the music-hall devotee as disruptive, he proved less capable of resisting the concepts of nation and “the people” transmitted by the music-hall lament. Indeed, his criticism of the 1910s reveals that the argument about the music-hall lament in which he earlier participated had wholly revised the terms according to which intellectuals could speak to and for a national public.
Proof of the success of the aficionado in transforming the protocols of professional cultural criticism is also manifest in the persistent treatment of music hall as a prominent mode to figure the temperature of the people and of the nation itself. The new consensus places the music hall at the heart of national discourse, whether or not the professional culture critic speaks from a Conservative or a Radical position.
The most striking paradox of the music-hall lament, its simultaneous aspect as statement of national pride and narrative of cultural decline, was also its most durable feature. G. H. Mair’s 1913 essay “The Music-Hall,” written for the Liberal periodical the English Review, follows Pennell’s trope of the worthy but disappearing music hall point by point. Mair provides a sophisticated native informant account of the entertainment. He singles out the contemporary music hall as a unique return to early English folkways. Mair’s music hall fulfills the desire for a “pure” and purely native kind of entertainment: “The music hall is our one pure-blooded native amusement. It has a pedigree that is clear and undoubted, through the tavern, that great agent of social continuity, back to Elizabethan days—to the days when the theatre did really represent and embody the soul of the nation.”42 In one respect, Mair’s insistence on continuity between various forms and types of the popular introduces a bracing relativism to cultural analysis, assimilating the unique figure of Shakespeare, a fountainhead of legitimate culture, into the broad, inclusive stream of the popular. For Mair, both Renaissance theater audiences and contemporary patrons of music hall share an interest in acting skill for its own sake, a skill “lost beyond recovery” in the contemporary theater. Both sets of patrons, he asserts, “loved the virtuoso; mere skill attracted [them].” In Mair’s account, Shakespeare emerges as a shrewd diagnostician, capable of ascertaining and providing for public taste, rather than as an ingenious wordsmith.
The broadsword combat between Macbeth and Macduff, the rapier duels in a dozen plays, the wrestling between Charles and Orlando, were real tests of skill enjoyed by audiences for their own sake and outside their setting. The bear in the Winter’s Tale, that made its meal off the old gentleman, was doubtless brought from one of the pits of the Bankside; and we know with what effect, in the Two Gentleman of Verona, Shakespeare could use the performing dog.
This analysis provides bold contextualizing of Shakespeare, but it also sets limits on the range permitted to current popular expression. Although both Mair and Pennell invoke a Shakespeare who creates an art that responds to popular taste, neither suggests that contemporary representatives of respectable culture have an obligation to popular feelings or expression. The synthesis of cultural elements these critics read back into the Bard has no contemporary analogue—no current dominant culture figure is praised for a strategic dialogue with popular aesthetics. The present merely repeats an earlier historical moment; Mair and Pennell foreclose the possibility that dynamic interplay between official and popular culture will continue into the future. A pedigree grants the popular a measure of legitimacy but without calling for a change in contemporary aesthetic forms. The result situates the people’s playwright, Shakespeare, in relation to popular history but above contemporary relevance to the masses. For both G. H. Mair and Pennell, cultural history leaves out the struggle of human subjects with necessity.
Nevertheless, there is something productive about these histories. The music-hall interpreter offers readers a new basis on which to ground the history of the halls: the stable foundation of national culture. The links forged between nation and variety theater did not pass away with the high noon of Victorian aestheticism. Nor did the rhetoric of the music-hall devotee, a contradictory lament about the timeless persistence and extreme fragility of English culture, fully disappear. Pennell, Beerbohm, and Mair testify to the felt need of critics to imagine culture forms that set true partisans of the people above other official versions of national culture. They used their immense rhetorical skills to produce a capacious language of loss that could include an entertainment that did not signify English history at midcentury. They express in various modes the fear that capitalizing vernacular culture nullifies its counterhegemonic value. A community of mourning is addressed, imagined, and created in these essays, mobilized as a psychic defense to compensate for the loss of vital music hall, or—it amounts to the same—essential Englishness.
The lament sounds again in T. S. Eliot’s elegy to the most celebrated music-hall singer of the age, Marie Lloyd, upon her death in 1922. While the essay stands at a remove from the turn-of-the-century figure, it compresses in its brief pages the arguments and metaphors circulated in the work of an earlier generation of music-hall devotees. Eliot’s intellectual debts to the late Victorians are now frequently acknowledged in scholarship on the poet. For example, while Eliot may censure Symons in The Sacred Wood (1920), his first major publication of critical essays, he read him closely and with respect as a young man.43 The Marie Lloyd essay has come to stand as a locus classicus of modernist response to “popular art”; however, I believe it may be more accurately described as a document of professional culture that draws on the rhetorical arsenal of the late-Victorian aficionado. Like Pennell and Beerbohm, Eliot conveys a heightened sense of temporal crisis and marshals powerful essentialisms of English character.
Eliot avoids the terms “aficionado” and “amateur.” Nonetheless, he appropriates the stance perfected by the preceding generation of music-hall partisans. Both rely on metaphor rather than propositions to establish their premises. They elaborate a dense texture of associations, presuming that repeating links will establish that disparate subjects or concepts—music-hall performers, audiences, England—in fact share an essence. And indeed, Eliot must have found the music-hall lament attractive for stylistic reasons as well as its content. As Colleen Lamos argues, Eliot’s critical essays proceed “not by logical syllogism” but “through the repetitive and accretive heightening of the same point until the aggregate force of his assertion makes it seem self-evident.”44 The music-hall lament also made its emotive appeal through reiteration and persuaded through the accumulation of associative links.
Marie Lloyd, the singer, initially stands with the working class, but “Marie Lloyd,” the poet’s construct, comes to stand in for the working class. By means of the shift from metonymy to metaphor, Eliot proceeds to his audacious conclusion: the death of the singer is proleptic for the death of the class to whom she stands in essential relation. The extreme nature of Eliot’s claims constitutes a difference in degree but not in kind between his essay and the chronicles of an earlier generation.
“Marie Lloyd” eventually received pride of place in Eliot’s prestigious Selected Essays (1932). The inaugural form of the piece appeared in the poet’s “London Letter” column for the Dial. In this brief letter, we see, as David Chinitz suggests, “Eliot’s feelings before his cautious pen had the opportunity to tone them down.”45 The crisis of Lloyd’s death is figured in stark relief, and the poet expresses barely muted anxiety. Lloyd’s death is not simply “an important event” (the description enshrined in the final version of “Marie Lloyd,” found in Eliot’s Selected Essays), but “the most important event which I have had to chronicle in these pages.”46 Eliot elaborates: “You will see that the death of Marie Lloyd has had a depressing effect, and that I am quite incapable of taking any interest in literary events in England in the last two months, if any have taken place.” (The publication of The Waste Land is among the recent cultural events laid low by the loss of Lloyd.) Despite a more “cautious pen,” a sense of imminent peril still permeates the version of “Marie Lloyd” in the Selected Essays. Indeed, Eliot might be said to have escalated the sense of temporal crisis expressed in the “London Letter.”
The poet emphasizes that Lloyd’s death affects more than a single mourner and means much more than a setback for music-hall audiences; it constitutes a full-blown, national crisis. The essay proceeds to a chilling, inexorable climax, a glimpse of the inevitable extinction of working-class culture. “The lower class exists, but perhaps it will not exist for long. In the music-hall comedians they find the expression and dignity of their own lives; and this is not found in the most elaborate and expensive revue.”47 The music-hall-goer will turn to cinema, meaning that “he will also have lost some of his interest in life”; the change will accelerate the death by boredom that the poet suggests will be the fate made common by middle-class cultural hegemony.48 Characteristic of the music-hall lament, the passage insists on the essential difference between Lloyd’s genuine expression and the commercial “revue,” or the cinema. More to the point, the close of the elegy completes the transfer implied by Eliot’s links among the working class, Lloyd, and the music hall. The loss of the part stands for nothing less than the death of the whole, for the end of working-class essence.
To grasp the nature of the crisis as Eliot presents it, we must first unpack the professional/client metaphor that structures his argument. Lloyd’s songs do not simply entertain her audience but perform a necessary service. Eliot assumes that the singer does for her audience, or clients, what they are unable to do for themselves. In some ineffable manner, she renders the people’s virtues and vices visible. What the people have lost in Lloyd—an objectification of their communal values—is something they are not believed capable of performing themselves.
This is what makes the loss so devastating, as Eliot goes on explain: “My chief point is that I consider her superiority over other performers to be in a way a moral superiority; it was her understanding of the people and sympathy with them, and the people’s recognition of the fact that she embodies the virtues which they genuinely most respected in private life, that raised her to the position she occupied at her death. And her death is itself a significant moment in English history.”49 The relation here is posited as a “moral insight”; Eliot speaks of romantic virtues like “sympathy” and “understanding.”50 Yet the account of Lloyd’s rise makes better sense when conceptualized as a relation between a skilled professional and an untutored populace. She has relatively scarce and necessary skills they are assumed to lack.
The emphasis Eliot sets on the nature of Lloyd’s authority reminds us that Eliot’s music hall broadcast a clear message about the English laborer. Vital and earnest, he had limited capacity for self-governance. Like Pennell and Beerbohm, the poet believed that music hall somehow secreted working-class culture full-blown and enshrined the timeless, quotidian truths embodied in “real,” proletarian life. Unlike Pennell and Beerbohm, Eliot stresses the ability of the performer to objectify this inarticulate mass disposition. Thus, a deep respect and admiration for—even envy of—Lloyd’s achievement and virtues can coexist with a willful ignorance of the poverty, deprivation, and exclusion that mark the working-class private life, which Eliot admires for its moral strength and vitality.
The admiration of the poet for Lloyd blocks off alternative accounts of the meaning of her performance. For Eliot assumes that Lloyd’s emotive ability, not her style but her “sympathy,” stands as the salient factor behind her success. “It was through this sympathy,” he writes, “that she controlled her lower class audience.” Eliot remembers her for representing essential English working-class femininity: losing and loving, facing down the extremes of human existence with a grin. Lloyd’s exemplary nature resides in the emotional hinterland where, it is assumed, her kind always live. Above all, Eliot forecloses the possibility that a performer who lifts working-class expression to an art might herself occupy a critical relation to her own culture as conscious, elaborate, and constructed as the persona that dominates Eliot’s own poetry. Eliot, one might say, borrows Lloyd’s expertise and then disavows it.
In fact, there seems little doubt that the singer’s success stemmed from her ability to represent and clarify certain aspects of her complex identity as a working-class woman, and that, accordingly, both audience and performer must have appreciated this role-playing in ways that Eliot couldn’t. Lloyd began a career in a fiercely competitive profession that became fully capitalized within the span of her career. Her celebrity, moreover, in large part set her apart from her class and coworkers. To imagine Lloyd as working-class emblem requires our assent to the rather incredible notion that she was wholly determined by her origin—or, similarly, that only the “genuine” exemplar of a class can succeed with the home crowd.51 The salient point is that Eliot’s working class unceasingly seeks to find professional help: public folk who can represent their private lives.
Like the works of the previous generation of music-hall partisans, Eliot’s essay closes with a paradox: the music hall is a present absence in the contemporary London scene. The music hall that Eliot imagines is also threatened by the implosion of the class-segregated culture that permitted working-class expression a degree of autonomy by virtue of its distance from regnant, middle-class standards. “The middle classes . . . are morally dependent upon the aristocracy . . . the aristocracy are subordinating the middle-class, which is gradually absorbing and destroying them. The lower class still exists; perhaps it will not exist for long.”52 Eliot’s most expansive claim about the end of class hierarchy is an implied assertion of the need for cultural professionals to take up the function that Lloyd performed. If Lloyd is truly irreplaceable, the working class will no longer be able to fulfill its most basic needs, for the poet assumes lumpen virtue cannot sustain itself without adequate representation. Eliot imagines Lloyd to have served as a wedge separating working-class expression from middle-class absorption. Without her, the bourgeois forces of cultural cooptation will wholly absorb, without digesting, a source of cultural nourishment.
That the working class was able to admire Lloyd sustains Eliot’s populist confidence, but it also marks the decisive limits of his populism. For the relation between expert and client in Eliot’s essay is not reciprocal, nor are the exchanges made between the masterful, forceful Lloyd and the audience she provides for contracted on equal terms. Eliot’s assertions concerning the significance of the singer’s death aid and sustain the most dangerous dynamic of professional culture: the belief that professionals require and produce a servile client class.
“Marie Lloyd” calls forth a new community in consolation for the loss of music hall and its organic intellectual. The essay figures a pop apocalypse, but the end of the world is immediately followed by the reign of the saints: in this case, a community of partisans, based on backward glances and nostalgic recall. Eliot’s elegy takes account of the end of nation, containing, or reterritorializing, a potentially incapacitating fear. There is little of Eliot’s routine urbanity in the prognostications that close the essay: “With the decay of the music hall, . . . the lower classes will tend to drop into the same state of protoplasm as the bourgeoisie.”53 Yet “Marie Lloyd” seems to participate in the ritual behavior modeled by the singer Eliot mourns, and shares her flair for performance. It might be said to enact a small-scale substitution for the cultural disease it describes. The first substitution performed through the essay’s rhetoric is the replacement of “the working class” with “Marie Lloyd”; the second transference is the exchange of “Marie Lloyd” for the category of “the nation.” If the old order as represented by Lloyd stands on the verge of meltdown, then a new, imagined community stands to emerge, organized around shared totems of national identity and spoken for by the poet himself.
“Marie Lloyd” invokes class difference, even as it enlists readers to redefine their sense of belonging to something larger than class: a common, “lost” heritage in English working-class traditions. The elegy suggests that national aspirations and hopes depend on the ability of cultured persons to apprehend the crisis of culture manifest by the loss of the music hall. The poet’s lament provides a unifying fiction. “Marie Lloyd” begins by imagining a bereaved crowd marked by their working-class status, but broadens to include all those who mourn the loss to the nation manifest by the loss of the singer. Like any fantasy of community, the poet’s elegy centers on powerful, and largely exclusive, images of labor and purpose, requiring some hardy essentialisms to maintain coherence and rhetorical appeal. Even with music hall and the working class diagnosed as terminal, the form is nevertheless situated in the pageant of a specifically native history.
Most of all, the ties between Eliot’s memorial and the music-hall lament are seen in the poet’s firm lean toward the past. There is no future tense, and consequently no predictive value, in the intellectual construction of music hall as the salient English popular. Famously for Eliot, the end of music hall is easily confused with the last of England, though, as we’ve seen, the same apocalyptic rhetoric is evident in earlier readings of the halls. Faced with Lloyd’s loss, Eliot abdicates the need for further, collaborative response to the form in favor of a supple and commanding rhetoric. Nation requites these losses with the image of an imagined community of mourners, more luminous because more exclusive. The admission of cultural decline is finally reclaimed as minor-key pleasure.
The music-hall lament was an expression of lost hopes and diminished expectations; it stands at a distance from the imperial hubris or expansionist bravado scholars of nationalism usually analyze and critique. However, the character of the lament both shaped and was shaped by the discourse of English nationalism; the lament expressed a fascination for things “typical,” yet weather-beaten, autumnal, and receding. The music-hall lament is an expressive means of extracting pleasure from the recognition of how very English a particular bit of England was, reminding readers why this difference still matters (to the writer), and how it might be savored despite its decline. Similarly, what might first appear as a provincial instance of culture comes to signify the stuff of national tradition. Once exalted, the halls are set securely within the national trust, where they can, in the realm of imagination and memory, be preserved and displayed as a forever “green and pleasant land.”
The critical practice of music-hall devotee Arthur Symons steered clear of the powerful, resonant, but limiting metaphors of authenticity and the compact images of nationhood projected by most fin-de-siècle partisans of the form. Symons relates accounts of the halls without searching for an authentic expression of the entertainment; he rarely takes up the music-hall lament. He finds in, or imposes on, the halls deep meanings, yet his interpretations tend to be provisional, open to revision, in part because Symons insisted on the accountability of the observer to other patrons and observers. He imagined his music-hall accounts as a form of collaborative effort.
Symons returned again and again to the problem of authority and expertise raised by music-hall performance. He situated his writing on the halls as a passionate amateur’s attempt to provide a theory of the entertainment, which meant for Symons a deliberate, thorough discourse on the conditions and context that provoked his own passionate responses to the form. Symons’s theoretical approach to music hall seemed presumptuous and risible to his contemporaries; however, his reflective method seems to have released him from some essentialist attitudes that beleaguered most music-hall interpreters. As modeled by Symons, the music-hall theorist is less eager to hide or repress the experience of cultural difference in music hall and more skeptical toward the lament’s master categories of the nation and the people. Arthur Symons’s music-hall chronicles explore the possibility that cross-class and cross-gender contact can occur without subjects losing their complex humanity in the process. My next chapter examines Symons’s own escape from the rhetoric of lament elaborated both by his peers and by a subsequent generation of literary intellectuals. I argue that he gains this freedom, not because of his antiprofessionalism, but by articulating an alternative version of the professional.