Borrowed Tools
Ethel Smyth encouraged writers to try to find their own words before deciding to borrow someone else’s.
1921
King George V 1910-1936
© Andrzej Kuros, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.
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.
Introduction
In her book of essays ‘Streaks of Life’, composer Dame Ethel Smyth (rhymes with Forsyth) was unusually severe on the Quotation Freak, the writer who borrows phrases from more famous authors simply to save himself the trouble of turning his own.
abridged
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.’
