And did those feet? How Jerusalem got up and running.
We all know Jerusalem: “and did those feet” …. And we all know some of its history. However, perhaps the most remarkable thing about our alternative national anthem is not simply that it is now so ingrained in our collective imagination, but rather just how quickly it became ingrained. It swiftly transcended its immediate origins to take its distinctive place in the national psyche. Here I shall tell a little its history somewhat obliquely but, I hope, tellingly.
The poem Milton, from the preface to which Jerusalem is taken, was written by William Blake in 1804, that is, about fifty years after the industrial revolution got started and eighty years before the pioneering environmentalism of John Ruskin’s lectures on The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884). Both Blake and Ruskin were commenting on the industrial revolution – one (apparently) on the buildings, the other on the pollution they caused. Whether that was all that Blake was doing is a moot point. And did those feet: did Jesus’s feet touch England’s green and pleasant land, creating a paradise before it was ruined, centuries later, either by the Church of England (mills = churches) or by the industrial revolution (mills = mills)? Either way, it appears that the poem is enjoining us to create a paradise whether one was created here before or not. But, of course, it does not specify what sort of ideal was to be created. Perhaps therein lies the secrets of its success.
Blake’s poem was little known until it was included in an anthology, The Spirit of Man, edited by the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, and published in January 1916. The volume was expressly designed to counter declining morale concerning the prospects of victory. The preface is explicit about responsibility for the war, and that, given the nature of the enemy, it was a fight for right:
The progress of mankind on the path of liberty and humanity has been suddenly arrested and its promise discredited by the apostasy of a great people, who, casting off as a disguise their professions of Honour, now openly avow that the ultimate faith of their hearts is in material force. … Prussia’s scheme for the destruction of her neighbours was long-laid, and scientifically elaborated to the smallest detail … she will shrink from no crime that may further its execution.
It was all very timely. In the summer of 1915, the “imperial adventurer” Sir Francis Younghusband set up an organisation called “Fight for Right”. In August of that year he published a letter in the Daily Telegraph under the headline “A Holy war” in which he stated that ‘we are fighting that the ordinary human rights of defenceless women and children be preserved. We are engaged in a spiritual conflict – a holy war – the Fight for Right’ (French, 295). He proposed that meetings be held regularly around the country each Sunday, “on ground common to the whole community” and that the spirit of the people would be aroused by music, speech and song. At the end of each meeting patriots who wished to serve their country would be asked to present themselves (French, 295). In Cardiff shortly after it was apparent that he had tapped into a wave of national sentiment, Younghusband put the motion that they should “fight for right till right is won” and persuaded those present to “rise and with uplifted hand say Aye” (French, 295).
And now Younghusband thought the movement needed a good rallying song. An early (rather blunt) offering, “Fight for Right till Right be Won!” had fallen flat. At this point Robert Bridges[1] offered to help out in advance of a meeting at the Queen’s Hall in March 1916. He was a friend of the composer Sir Hubert Parry and decided to seek his help. First he sent him a copy of the Preface to William Blakes’s Milton, with the suggestion that Parry should write “suitable, simple music to Blake’s stanzas – music that an audience could take up and join in” (French, 302).
However, Parry needed some persuading. He was not comfortable with the political cause asking for his help and implicit support. Parry was a left-leaning liberal humanist, and thus not the obvious person to approach for this task. “Fight for Right” was essentially a propaganda enterprise seeking to raise money for anti-German propaganda and to lobby the government against seeking peace with Germany. Nonetheless, Bridges left him a copy of the words and eventually Parry acquiesced and wrote the music. He gave it to Walford Davies, saying “Here’s a tune for you old chap. Do what you like with it.” Davies was an organist at the Temple Church and trialled the piece with his school boy choristers. The piece was set for unison voices with organ: this was done deliberately to facilitate mass singing. Davies gives us this account:
Sir Hubert Parry gave me the manuscript of this setting of Blake’s Jerusalem one memorable morning in 1916 … We looked at it long together in his room at the Royal College of Music, and I recall vividly his unwonted happiness over it. One momentary act of his should perhaps be told here. He ceased to speak, and put his finger on the note D in the second stanza where the words O clouds unfold break his rhythm. I do not think any word passed about it, yet he made it perfectly clear that this was the one note and one moment of the song which he treasured ... I copyrighted it in the composer’s name and published it in 1916. We needed it for the men at that time ... I know Dr Bridges specifically wanted every one of us to sing it, and this is happily coming true. (Dibble, 483-4).
The singability of Jerusalem is intrinsically bound up with the bold sweeping pentatonic opening phrase in D major: it is hard for even a poor singer to go wrong. There are two brief modulations (to A and to G) but both seem inevitable and intrinsic to the flowing drama of the song. The final phrase is a descending pentatonic phrase mirroring the opening phrase – equally dramatic and singable.
Davies’s choir, with other choirs and choral societies in London, sang Jerusalem in public for the first time at a “Fight for Right” meeting at Queen’s Hall on 28th March 1916. Davies announced that he had ‘asked Sir Hubert Parry to compose a setting of Blake’s poem for us. He has done so, and we shall hear it to-night for the first time.’ It was a great triumph. (French, 302-3). Thus were the unlikely origins of Jerusalem and its long life as both a protest, aspirational and patriotic anthem.
Hubert Parry, however, soon became uneasy about the jingoistic nature of the cause and withdrew his support for Fight for Right.
The appeal generated by Jerusalem bolstered the cause of ‘Fight for Right’; they were proud of their new song. Soon Parry found himself being approached by other organizations requesting similar unison settings for patriotic purposes. In August 1916 James Frazer, the renowned social anthropologist and supporter of ‘Fight for Right’, asked if Parry might set ‘Pour un chiffon de papier’ by Lieutenant Paul Loyson, but he declined. Evidently he felt unhappy about both the purpose and sentiment of the piece. … he intensely disliked jingoism and the half-truths of propaganda machines. Supporting ‘Fight for Right’ unsettled him; blatant, unthinking patriotism made him uncomfortable. In consequence in March 1917 he decided to write to Sir Francis Younghusband withdrawing his support for an organization with whose causes he could no longer wholeheartedly identify. (Dibble, 484-5).
In 1917, Parry conducted Jerusalem for the women of the Albert Hall choir as part of a concert supporting a call for National Service for Women. This led to the development of ties with the women’s suffrage movement which Parry supported. A year later, Jerusalem was again sung at a suffrage demonstration concert and it later became the official hymn of the Women Voters. Parry was delighted by the prospect and wrote to Millicent Garrett Fawcett and wrote “Thank you for what you say about the ‘Jerusalem’ song. I wish indeed it might become the Women Voters’ Hymn as you suggest. People seem to enjoy singing it. And having the vote ought to diffuse a good deal of joy too. So they would combine happily.” He agreed to make an orchestral version to be introduced at a Suffrage Demonstration Concert on 13 March 1918, which he conducted. Ultimately, as we all know, it was adopted by the Women’s Institute (in 1924) as their anthem. In 1928, when all women were finally granted the vote, Parry’s estate gave the copyright to the Women’s Institutes.
So, within a year or two of its premier, Jerusalem was a palpable hit. But it was not yet at all well known to the general public outside these particular contexts and performances. I shall conclude the story by telling one story of how it was taken up and sung both nationally and locally.
In a letter to his father written on 9th May 1919, R.G. Collingwood wrote that:
That Trafalgar Square show was really very good fun.[2] To stand, five hundred of you, on the steps of the Nelson column and shout Spanish Ladies to an assembled crowd of anything over five thousand seems to me to satisfy almost all the primitive instincts of mankind. I really doubt if I ever got more satisfaction out of anything. It would have been a striking success even without the final triumph: but that really was rather interesting. I think you don’t know “Jerusalem”. Parry wrote it shortly[3] before he died: and for the first time he absolutely succeeded in carrying out what he wanted. He was always brilliant at the pure setting of words: he understood what a pure melodic line ought to be, and when he wrote such things as the Lamentation in Job he could always be great. But Jerusalem is even better than Job’s monologue. It is just right. Well, while we were singing our chanteys and folk-songs the crowd enjoyed it all very much, but they took it as rather an amusement: the little boys larked about and jigged in time to the tunes, and it was altogether rather a beer-gardenish effect. But when Jerusalem began everybody suddenly stood still and watched, and at the end there was a queer sort of silence. Kennedy Scott turned to them and saw what they looked like, and said “Do you want that again?” There was a “yes” from the crowd that came in a single clap, like the shutting of a door: not loud, but rather low and hoarse and uncannily simultaneous. So we sang Jerusalem again. Fortunately we knew it too well to need to see Scott, because by then we were mostly in tears. A thousand or so of the crowd were in tears too, for that matter. And then they say, bless their souls, that the English aren’t interested in good music. It was really very odd. You see the crowd didn’t know this was by a great man: they had never heard it before: it is doubtful if they could pick up the words. It just took them like that. I shall have to write my book about music now, in order to put that incident in. Anyhow, it justified the existence of the League of the Arts.”
Collingwood says nothing of the lyrics, nothing of the song’s origins in the ‘Fight for Right.’ Its Trafalgar Square hearers responded directly to the immediate emotional impact of the song. Parry had tapped into something deeper and more profound than the jingoism of ‘Fight for Right’ and this enable Jerusalem to transcend and outlive its origins. We noted earlier the different interpretations of Blake’s lyrics. But little of that matters. The power of the song (should we think of it as a hymn?) does not seem to derive from a literal interpretation of the lyrics but from a powerful combination of the lyrics with the music sung in unison with each singer or hearer choosing those aspects or interpretation of the song which appeals to them. Collingwood’s account clearly shows the emotional impact the music and the sentiments had – and perhaps also shows that the sentiments are indeterminate and hence taken up by each hearer or singer into their own aspirations and sense of community and solidarity. Collingwood’s experience of Jerusalem caught it in the moment of transition from a commissioned piece of jingoism to the expression of yearning for an idealised patriotism, accessible to, and with meaning for, all classes of opinion and people.
Shortly after the Trafalgar Square performance we find Jerusalem being sung at the centenary conference on the life and works of John Ruskin held in Coniston, August 1919. I strongly suspect that, following his experience in Trafalgar Square, Collingwood was responsible for the decision to conclude the Ruskin conference with a collective singing of Jerusalem. His mother notes in her diary that they had ‘practiced Jerusalem at the Institute’ and Collingwood notes that on the last day of the conference (a hot day giving way to a full moon in the evening), they sang Jerusalem in the churchyard. Jerusalem, with its complex and ambiguous sentiments, was perhaps the perfect way to commemorate the complex Tory, socialist, environmentalist, John Ruskin. Blake would perhaps have appreciated it too, for it was Ruskin who once wrote of his poetry as “the words of a great and wise mind … sometimes giving forth in fiery aphorism some of the most precious words of existing literature” (Ruskin, The Eagle’s Nest, §21).
References
Blake, W. Preface to Milton, in Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Edited by Geoffrey Keynes, Nonesuch Press, 1946, pp.374-5.
Bridges, R. (Ed) The Spirit of Man, London: Longmans, 1916.
Collingwood, E.M.D. Diary, 1919
Collingwood, R.G. Diary, 1919
Collingwood, R.G. Letter to W.G. Collingwood, May 9th, 1919.
Dibble, J. C. Hubert H. Parry, His Life and Music, Oxford University Press, 1992.
French, P. Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer, Flamingo, 1995.
Ruskin, J. The Eagle’s Nest, in The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook and A.
Wedderburn, Vol. 22, London: George Allen, 1906.
Ruskin, J. The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, in The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, Vol. 34, London: George Allen, 1908.
[1] For those interested in connections, his daughter Margaret married the philosopher H.W.B. Joseph; she was the best friend in Oxford of Ethel Collingwood.
[2] This was a concert held on Tuesday, May 6 in aid of Lifeboats and organised by the League of the Arts, led by Charles Kennedy Scott. Scott was the founder of the Oriana Madrigal Society which Collingwood had joined in November 1917. The short-lived League of Arts was devoted to popularisation and participation of music among the general public. Parry had died in October 1918, a victim of influenza.