Variations on Two Enigmas: Hardy, Elgar and the Muses

Abstract

We must begin with a familiar story. On 2 June, about in the middle of the nineteenth century, in a small cottage just off the heath, a baby boy was born. His father — something of a charmer, a dreamer, we are told — was in trade, his mother a woman of strong character who greatly influenced her children, imbuing at least this son with a love of reading and literature. He soon learnt to play the violin, for his family was much involved with music-making; his childhood memories, and the experience of the English countryside, were to be a lifelong inspiration to him in his art. So, increasingly, was an overwhelming nostalgia for the past. He was a sensitive man who needed constant reassurance; a man who loved life, but who also felt a pervasive melancholy. Thomas Hardy? Yes; but equally, in every detail, Edward Elgar, who was born at Broadheath, Worcestershire, on Hardy’s seventeenth birthday, and whose life, in its external circumstances, bears an uncanny resemblance to the poet’s.