Polish sculptor and luthier Marian Styrczula-Maśniak (1935-) at work on a hand-made musical instrument in his workshop. Dr Smyth likened writing to a craftsman’s art, and careless quotationing (as she dubbed it) to using a borrowed hammer instead of acquiring your own set of bespoke tools.
Part 1 of 2
IN my humble opinion the impulse to build some one else’s remark into your text is begotten of lacking self-confidence, of laziness, or worse, of stagnation. No doubt other writers have often put a thing more brilliantly, more subtly than even a very cunning artist in words can hope to emulate, a supreme phrase being a bit of luck that only happens now and again.* And inasmuch as certain psychological moments must ever and ever recur, what more tempting than to pin down such a moment with the blow of a borrowed hammer?
I say the writer must resist this temptation and do his best with his own tools. It would be most convenient for us musicians if, arrived at a given emotional crisis in our work, we could simply stick in a few bars of Brahms or Schubert. Indeed many composers have no hesitation in so doing. But I have never heard the practice defended; possibly because that hideous symbol of petty larceny, the inverted comma, cannot well be worked into a musical score.
Smyth stresses that she is not criticising those who bring out others’ words for study or acknowledgement, but those who scatter about careless clichés, often unattributed, ‘the halfpennies and farthings of cultured provincial journalism.’
Précis
Composer Dame Ethel Smyth took issue with those literary men who scattered well-worn quotations around their writings; it smacked, she said, of laziness, adding that musicians could hardly insert a few measures from the great composers whenever they were at a loss, if only because there was no convention equivalent to the inverted comma. (54 / 60 words)
Part Two
‘Polonius behind the curtain’, by Jean-Georges Vibert (1840-1902). Smyth cites Polonius’s sigh “’Tis pity, ’tis true” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an example of a much-abused cliché — not inappropriately, for Polonius himself described it as ‘a foolish figure’.
“That he is mad, ’tis true. ’Tis true, ’tis pity,
And pity ’tis ’tis true — a foolish figure,
But farewell it, for I will use no art.”
OFTEN and often I turn over in my mind the excuses, the justification of their evil practices, put forward by quotationers — if in this painful connection a painful word may be invented. A good quotation, so they maintain, is a shaft of light thrown into the dark places of memory — a welding of one’s own humble thought with that of great ones in the past — a free present to lovers of literary beauties and curiosities. These and many other things do they maintain.
But all this seems to me as nothing compared with the vital necessity of doing your job yourself. To seek, and not rest till you find an individual and adequate garment for your elusive vision is bracing to the brain whereas the other procedure is enervating. And though your own wording may give you less satisfaction than the perfect phrase you are tempted to borrow, the general quality of your work will certainly gain in the end.
Précis
Dr Smyth gave examples of the various defences offered by those she dubbed the ‘quotationers’, but made it clear she was far from convinced. However superior another’s words might be, Smyth said, it was the writer’s duty to try to find his own; the challenge would stimulate his creativity, and raise the overall standard of his work. (57 / 60 words)
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