Streaks of Life

by Ethel Smyth

Excerpt from Streaks of Life



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254 pages, Paperback

First published November 12, 2006

About the author

Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, DBE was an English composer and a leader of the women's suffrage movement.

Reviews

[Rosie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was really rather boring, especially after it reached the half-way point. I enjoyed the chapter on Empress Eugenie, but once Smyth started to move onto talking about more stringently theoretical topics, I grew more and more bored—especially those chapters on the opera and music, as it’s not something I’m particularly interested in, it wasn’t written in a particularly interesting way, and it isn’t particularly relevant anymore today. There were a few quotations within this book that I found clever or insightful into Smyth’s character, but for the most part, this was a significant down-grade from her two-volume memoir. What I found most utterly obnoxious, though, was the French. The many passages or sentences or quotations in French—which were left untranslated. In the chapter on Empress Eugenie, which, mind you, was about 78 pages, I recall, these occur about once every three pages, sometimes more, and as I don’t understand French, I had to keep my computer open on Google Translate and type those sentences in each time I came across one, or otherwise I would have been utterly confused, as the French quotations are oftentimes the point of the paragraph or meant to make some sort of witty comment or joke. I understand that, when this was published, the sort of person who would be reading Smyth’s book would probably be fluent in English and French, but I have read books from this time period which do not do this, and it was annoying and felt…dare I say…pretentious. It does underscore the fact that I would like to learn French, though! A very elegant language, as far as I perceive it. Finally, I noticed while reading this that Smyth is very patriotic (to England), at heart, and I found some of the ways that was expressed distasteful, like her support for the Boer War and her disbelief that British soldiers could be committing atrocities in South Africa. In any case, reading this book didn’t really add to my knowledge of Smyth, and though I don’t regret it, it was almost not worth it. The memoirs suffice and are far more fascinating and clever.

Quotations:

“When Goethe was endeavouring to teach his young friend Edermann to see, he began by showing him none but the choicest engravings of supreme masterpieces. ‘Thus alone can taste be acquired,’ he said, ‘after which you are fit to deal adequately with the second-best, neither over- nor under-rating it. But there must be a standard of reference to start with.’
The creation of this standard is one of the duties the State owes to the nation, or rather the nation to herself, for who but we ourselves have created, under enlightened guidance, our great art collections? But this principle, as I show in both my musical articles, is not acknowledged in music—with consequences that are dealt with in detail in ‘The Opera Fiasco.’” (8)

“Of course, the Empress was an ardent suffragist. During the fight for the vote I saw little of her; I think she took two of her long voyages in successive years. Being ostentatiously law-abiding in her sentiments, she disapproved, theoretically, of militant methods. All the same, I cannot but suspect that certain chords in her nature must have responded sympathetically to Militancy. People have said that women’s services during the war would have won them, the vote without violent methods: the answer to that is, that one could not base one’s tactics on an event which none of our most sapient statesmen foresaw. This the Empress allowed, but none the less continued to say: ‘Moi, je suis contre la violence, vous savez.’ And meanwhile she expressed a strong desire to make the acquaintance of the Militant Leader!” (70)

“Those who have met my mother in ‘Impressions that Remained’ will readily believe that some of her servants were devoted to her. Not all, for she was liable to violent and unreasonable antipathies. But those she liked returned her sentiments with interest—especially a certain young cook who literally adored her, and who had left us under a cloud some months before my mother’s death. She was an exceedingly pretty Devonshire girl named Ford, with wonderful grey eyes, rippling black hair, an exquisite complexion, the smallest and roundest of waists, and both physically and mentally of a suppleness and grace that suggested better breeding than her pedigree would have shown. Her manners, though not those of her class, were perfect; in fact she was neither a servant nor a lady—she was Ford.” (85-6)

“Those were times calculated to put a strain upon English Ambassadors all over Europe, but especially on the one accredited to the Court whence the Kruger telegram had proceeded. Day by day the German newspapers were full of the supposed atrocities committed by the English troops in South Africa, and a faked photograph of an English soldier twirling a Boer baby on his bayonet went the round of them all. To this incident I owe one of those phrases that sum up a perennial state of mind, especially in the Fatherland, and haunt one amusingly to the end of one’s life. ‘Do you really believe,’ I said to my old friend Johanna Rongen, who had come over from Leipzig for the day—-’you, who have English friends, and know English literature—that our soldiers impale little children?’ Johanna’s excited and convincing reply was: ‘Es steht ja in meinem Blatt!’---that is, ‘it is in my newspaper’! And I happened to know that her newspaper was one of the vilest, most heavily subsidized rags in Germany! Further, these stories were officially supported by a remark made in the Reichstag by some responsible person, to the effect that atrocities were only to be expected of undisciplined mercenaries such as our troops. Thereupon Mr. Chamberlain replied in the House of Commons that are troops were as patriotic and highly disciplined as the German or any other army. Then the German Government threw the reins on its own neck, and Bulow begged, furiously and officially, that the German army not be mentioned in the same breath as what he implied were English savages.” (180-1) Here’s what I was speaking of above. And, in historical retrospect, we know that during the Boer war, British soldiers rounded up over 100,000 (primarily) women and children in concentration camps, of which around a fifth died, possibly more. I don’t think bayoneting children is a stretch, knowing what I do of the way men behave during war.

“Murray had given non-classical scholars like myself an insight into Greek thought and poetry such as we had never hoped to obtain, and WIlamowitz’s translations, which Madame de Bulow introduced me to, are quite as fine. Once I dined quietly with Wilamowitz, and he showed me an unknown poem of Sappho’s of the Faynum series, which he had just deciphered. Incidentally he informed me that in his opinion Sappho was the most maligned of women, that she was really a sort of High School Mistress, and the famous passions merely innocent ‘Schwarmerei’ between her and her pupils. Luckily it is open to those who have no Greek to reject this depressing reading of ‘burning Sappho.’” (200)

“The alternative is for the British composer to try his luck abroad. I have spent many years doing it, and on the whole have fared well. English musicians do not rank high on the continent; the guild of operatic composers is a jealous one, and it was trebly difficult for a woman to force the door. On the other hand, once you have done it all was plain sailing, for the foreign critic is free from the no doubt flattering preoccupation with sex that besets his English colleague. None of those eternal allusions to ‘one of the foremost women composers,’ which so delightfully discount encomium, safeguard male susceptibility, and betoken a naivete of spirit to which neither French nor German spirits can aspire!
(Perhaps the latter are too familiar with a certain well-known German story—’I am third in my class, Papa.’ ‘Well done, my boy, and how many are there in your class?’ ‘Three, papa’—to indulge in this particular brand of compliment. Or perhaps they think it sounder to judge a composition on its own merits, more especially since the public cares nothing about your sex—only the quality of your work.” (250)

“I believe Englishmen to be congenitally incapable of judging woman’s work at all. They may try, but this sex-bogey is between them and it. If Selma Lagerlof and Anna de Noasilles, whom the whole civilized world acclaims as two of the greatest living writers, had been Englishwomen, every notice about them would have described them as ‘among our greatest women writers’! And such men as recognized their true dimensions would keep the awful knowledge to themselves. (‘The old girl’s a wonder,’ said Mr. Bagnet, ‘but I never tell her so. Discipline must be maintained.’) (276)