BOOKS.
aff,SS ET1:1 W. SMYTH'S MEMOIRS.* Miss ETHEL Sierra is in equipment probably the most remark- able woman musician living. Of the vitality of her creative work itis too early to speak, but one may safely hazard the pre- diction that she has established at least as enduring a title to remembrance in these remarkable volumes, in which the "impressions that remained" of the first half of her life are set down
with a candour, a gift of literary expression, and an " okeot- ivity " which are rarely combined in an autobiographer. She writes of herself for the most part as if sheerer° writing of another person, with a detachment that is almost uncanny. And although music naturally plays a large part in the narrative, these memoirs can be read with the,keenest interest by those to whom muaie is a sealed book. For it is at once a family chronicle, a lively picture of a Victorian household , in the " sixties " and "seventies," a brilliant social study of Germany as yet unspoiled and -vulgarized by Imperialism ; above all, to use a hackneyed but useful phrase, a " human document " of engrossing interest. Music was her idle fire ; she worked harder at that than at anything else, but throughout the period under review this ambition was constantly in conflict with the rival claims of sport and pastime and of a passion rather than &genius for Mend- ship. The conflict of these three main strains, of which the third was the strongest, removes this record from the category of a .mere chronicle of the development of the artistic tempera- ment. No votary of "art for art's sake" could be capable of the frank acknowledgment, a propos of her early resentment of smart Philistines, "since then I have come to the conclusion that the best sort of Englishmen we breed nowadays, however it may have been in Shakespeare's days, is 'the man that hath not music in his soul' or indeed artistic proclivities of any kind, There are exceptions of course, such as my dear Major Ewing and others I could name, but I fear the rule holds .good."
Without labouring the point of heredity, Miss Smyth dwells on the predominance of the Irish strain in her paternal forbears, who settled in Ireland in 1626, and later were engaged in banking in Liverpool. Her grandfather served in the cavalry in the Peninsular War, returned to the bank, and, though a confirmed port-drinker, lived to be ninety-six. Her bachelor grand-uncle, tutor to Sheridan's son Tom, the friend of Jane Austen and Mrs. Opie, and finally Master of Peterhouse, was the only outstanding intellectual figure in her ancestry, and she takes pride in not inheriting an exhausted nervous system. There is certainly no sign of exhaustion in these pages ! Her father served with
• Impressions that Remained. Memoirs by Ethel Smyth. 2 vols., with Illustrations. London : Louguiann. [283. not.] distinction in India, and for many years held the Artillery command at Aldershot : he was a martinet and an autocrat, not without a tincture of letters, though he looked upon all artists as people "who were out to break the Ten Commandments " ; honourable, God-fearing, with a strong sense of " dooty," who regarded Gladstone as the Devil, was addicted to "Spoonerisms," and, in principle, was a pioneer of Woman Suffrage. Her mother had been brought up in France, and reluctantly, but on the whole loyally, conformed to English conventions. She was a natural but untrained musician, with a gift for languages and great personal charm and vivacity, but was the slave of an undisciplined heart, a self-tormentor, who combined great capacities for affection and suffering. Ethel Smyth, the third child of a family of six daughters and two sons, born in this military atmosphere, where Spartan methods of parental rule alternated with a curious laxity in regard to guests and Mends, soon justified her name of the "Stormy Petrel" or "Pocket Niagara," as Mrs. Ewing called her. She adored her mother and admired her father, but viewed them both with the relentless scrutiny of the child critic. But though a rebel from the outset, there is this grand difference between her and other and later rebels, that her attitude in compiling these reminiscences is void of bitterness or resentment. The pitilessness of her raw youth is here mel- lowed .by the comprehension of middle age, and, in regard to her mother, by a compassion for the lot of a woman with little scope for her, great social gifts, "who had nothing definite to do and overmuch time for brooding." The young Smyths were a turbulent and high-spirited crew, always in the wars, encouraged by guests and snubbed by their parents, and proved the torment of a succession of transient and generally embarrassed governesses. Mies Ethel Smyth's first recollection is of a carriage accident. Later on the rode a pig (with disastrous results), fought with knives and forks with her sisters and remained very good friends with them all the same, stoned railway trains, learned to smoke and skate, and to drive donkeys four in hand. She had her weaknesses, however, in a fear of the dark, of getting lost and the mingled awe and morbid curiosity excited in her by churchyards. Incidentally she read and loved Mrs. Markham, developed a loathing for Low Churchmen in general and Lord Radstook in. particular, took an intense interest in the early love affairs of her eldest, and sang duets in public: with her second, sister ; realized that her musical.equipment was already greater than her mother's, though she refrained from rubbing it in ; composed chants and hymns ; and was bracketed by her father with Lord John Russell for her overweening conceit in herself. Also we may note that she was frightened into veracity by the ease and perils of romancing, and straightway registered a vow to adopt a line of strict truthfulness in future, which she "has stuck to ever since, possibly with more zeal than discretion." Another "iron resolve," which dates from her twelfth year, was inspired by a German governess, a pupil of the Conservatoriuni at Leipzig, who opened Elysium to her, and by a friend who presented her with Beethoven's sonatas. The seven years that elapsed before that resolve—to go and study at Leipzig—was fulfilled were years of a stormy inner life and great social, athletic, and, intellectual activity. Alike during her schooldays at Putney and at-home she was conscious of her difference from others. Her Confirmation is one of the "impressions that remained" ; but the root difficulty, how to keep the balance between passion and perfection, and to realize the Greek ideal in modern life, she still finds insoluble. Of her early literary efforts, poems and plays, she is ruthlessly self -critical, but the productions of the Home Theatre, to judge from one specimen, were certainly not wanting in wit. Meanwhile she learned Italian from her mother, 'read Shakespeare with delight, and pursued pleasure with avidity. But in spite of divergent ideals—marriage, travel, and entering a nunnery—the ides fire hardened, and after the marriage of her two elder sisters, the clash of wills between her and her father grew more and more acute. She found a champion, a friend, and a teacher in Major Ewing, a thorough musician and the gifted husband of &gifted wife, of whom we are given a somewhat acidulated though not unappreciative portrait. But General Smyth disliked and most ,nnjustly distrusted Major Ewing ; the lessons were broken off, and the Ewings left Aldershot. For a short while visits and belle and hunting filled the void, but the spell of music returned with invincible force on her introduction to Mine. Schumann, on hearing the Lithealieder at the "Pops," and on making the acquaintance of three of the performers. The announcement of her resolve met with a fiat refusal ; but her mother espoused her cause, and she found potent allies in three woman friends: Still, the General-did not capitulate 'until I campaign of passive resistance had led to daily scenes. Her early years in Germany, for which she started "madly happy" at the end of July, 1877; were a golden time, mainly spent "in a lingering bit of the old Germany of Heine and Goethe." She became a pupil at the Conservatorium, but derived little stimulus from professors and teachers who traded on the old Mendelssohn tradition. What really counted were the Opera and the Gewand- haus concerts, the musical atmosphere, above all friendship with musicians and artists who were human and interesting outside their art. .Herzogenberg was her best master, and inoculated her with a life-long devotion to Bach ; his wife, an aristocrat, brilliantly gifted, handsome, fascinating, and fastidious, mothered her and adopted her as her child, and for seven years, during which Miss Smyth was one of the household, was her greatest woman friend.- Next in intimacy came Mme. Wach, Mendels- sohn's youngest daughter, "the only absolutely normal and satisfactory specimen I have ever met of a much to be pitied genus, the children of celebrated personalities," and Frau Livia Frege, a great lady with a distinguished artistic- past. Mr. Henschel acclaimed her as of the elect., and the great Brahma, a frequent visitor and intimate friend of the Herzogenbergs, in whose nature she recognized the gold as well as the clay, was uniformly friendly and fatherly, if not appreciative of her talent. Miss Smyth worked hard and played hard. Her greatest home- sickness was for hunting ; but she skated and danced to her heart's content, enjoyed to the full the romance and adventure of mountaineering, and spent two momentous winters in Italy. Music was her metier, but friendship lent her life its savour. Unfortunately her inveterate knack of forming new ties led inevitably, if by slow stages, to the tragic rupture with her greatest woman friend, and it is in the record of the growth, the fervour, and the final severance of this attachment that the interest of a remarkable book culminates. The whole of this strange story is not told ; few women would have ventured to reveal so much of their inner lives ; fewer still could have carried out so extraordinarily difficult and delicate a task with such disarming candour. No stranger or more poignant situation has been dealt with in any modern problem-play, nor has any biography of our times thrown more light on the psychology of feminine friend- ship. The root of the trouble, so far as one can judge, was not in any acute ethical disapproval, but in that not ignoble in- firmity, the exacting devotion of a pure but jealous affection. The story ends sonic thirty-five years ago ; Elizabeth von Herzogenberg died in 1892; the fatal breach was never repaired in her lifetime ; though the writer clings to the hope of an ultimate reunion behind the veil.
The story of the years that followed the great estrangement does not partake of an anticlimax ; the interest is maintained to the end ; and the fascinations of the devil of games and the demon of sport, which Liar sought in vain . to exorcise, recurred with each return to England. These later chapters abound in incisive portraits of those whom she loved or liked or distrusted—the Empress Eugenie, Crieg, Mine. Schumann, Hildebrand the sculptor, and Joachim. The:most moving refer- ences are those to her friend Rhoda Garrett, whose death removed "the. one blessed and as I believed unchangeable thing in a cruel, ehangeful world," and of whom she says in a memorable phrase, "nothing wrings the heart more sharply than remember- ing the jokes of a recently lost friend " ; the most amusing reminiscences are those of Archbishop Benson and his family. In music she has no recantations to make. Schubert was der einzige to her from the beginning ; Bach became and remained her chief divinity ; while Handel reminded her of a mothers' meeting. (A Plutarellian " parallel " between Miss Smyth and Samuel Butler, both rebels with some convergences and much more acute divergences, would be a fascinating subject.) Her taste is truly catholic, for she could admire Offen- bach and Sullivan as well as Bach and Bra.hms. The fulfilment of her early ambition—the performance of an opera from her pen in Germany before she was forty—was yet to come, but successes and disappointments, "ardour's and endurances" and felicities, crowd the pages of the second volume. Whether Miss Smyth gives us a sequel or not, the work as it stands is a marvel of self-expression, admirably written, and in general on heroic lines which excuse occasional lapses from conventional standards of good taste. The method of printing letters addressed to or about or from herself as an appendix to each section is skilfully, and on the whole generously, carried out, for as a letter-writer she is eclipsed by "Lid" and Major Ewing.
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