by Sue Corbett
During her married life she could give only a divided allegiance to the women’s cause. Her blind husband, who never saw her with his bodily eyes, was very closely dependent on her. Without the aid which the entire community of opinion and sympathy between them enabled her to give, he could scarcely have so succeeded in his political life as to earn the title of “Member for India” and become a remarkably successful Postmaster-General. A portrait of Mrs Fawcett and her husband, painted by Ford Madox Brown a few years before this appointment to office, is to be seen in the National Portrait Gallery. For years after his death it was noted by one of her intimates that any allusion to him in her presence caused a pallor and rigidity which showed that the wound was still too deep for even the gentlest handling. She did not, however, even at the first, allow herself to fall into a selfish lethargy.
During her residence at Cambridge, in her husband’s lifetime, they both worked hard for the extension of University education to women. Through her sister, Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, she was also associated with the movement to open the medical profession to women, and her own passionate conviction enlisted her under the banner of Mrs Josephine Butler in the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts. But her special task — said to have been assigned to her by her elder sisters while she was still a schoolgirl — was that of political enfranchisement. The atmosphere of hopefulness with which it began is shown by the assurance given by a prominent supporter, Mr Davenport Hill, to a meeting in 1868, that “He was asking them to help a great cause which, unlike all other great causes, would only require their support for a very short time. The claim was so clear and reasonable; it had but to be brought before Parliament to be granted.”
Yet a few years later the mere appearance of Mrs Fawcett on a public platform to speak for “votes for women” caused her and a fellow speaker, also an MP’s wife, to be described in the House as “Two ladies, wives of members of this House, who have disgraced themselves.” The speaker added that he would not further disgrace them by mentioning their names. Shortly afterwards Mrs Fawcett found herself being taken into dinner by this gentleman and amused herself by offering to get their hostess to find him a partner who had not disgraced herself. After this exchange of amenities they got on very well. After all, commented Mrs Fawcett, what he had said was mild compared to Horace Walpole’s description of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin as “a hyena in petticoats.”
It was lucky for her that she was always able to find entertainment in the excesses of her opponents. For some forty years after its hopeful beginnings the movement to which she had dedicated herself made but a slow upward progress, broken by many successive disappointments. After the death of Lydia Becker she became its recognized leader until the invention of militant tactics by the Pankhursts divided it into two (later three) independent forces. Thanks to the good sense of all concerned, they never turned their arms against each other, even when, as happened in 1912, Mrs Fawcett and her followers believed that the renewal of militant tactics, in a more violent and dangerous form than before, had helped to turn the tide of public feeling and led to the defeat of the Conciliation Bill. Even then she maintained her belief that the responsibility rested, not on the women infuriated by what they believed deliberate treachery, but upon the politicians whose levity and contempt were more galling than open hostility.
Mrs Fawcett herself was never goaded into losing either her balance, her courage, her faith, her temper, or her sense of humour. But, as she often said of herself, she was “not a forgiving person.” She never forgave Mr Gladstone for his vacillations and inconsistencies on the subject of women’s suffrage, nor Mr Asquith for the determined hostility which for some years was the chief impediment to the progress of the cause. She has described with humour and malice his gradual change of front, from contemptuous to respectful hostility, and so to a support which, though she never quite admitted it, became really understanding and helpful. On her last meeting with him she “could not resist saying to him that she had never seen a man so improved.”
During the years of militant suffragism it seemed to many a spiritless leadership that kept Mrs Fawcett’s followers to the long, uphill stretches of constitutional propaganda. But it is questionable which is the greater — the courage which braves ridicule, odium, and imprisonment, or that which plants seeds which require a generation to grow to maturity and then spends a life-time in fostering them. It requires perhaps something better than courage to resist all temptation to quicken the pace by succumbing to the dangerous doctrine that the end justifies the means, and to hold fast to the Kantian maxim of statesmanship: “Act so that the maxim of thy actions might become law universal.” One of Mrs Fawcett’s favourite quotations was the message said to have been sent by General Foch to General Joffre at a critical moment in the battle of the Marne:—
“My centre is giving way; my right is falling back; situation excellent; I attack.”
It was that spirit which she inculcated on her followers when one Suffrage Bill after another during a campaign of 50 years was talked out, laughed out, read a second time (always a second time, never a third), till even Punch put into the mouth of the woman suffragist the saying, “Don’t talk to me of Sisyphus; he wasn’t a woman.” She was rewarded by ultimate success and by a devotion which, to the very end of her life, brought every woman’s meeting to its feet the moment that little figure, crowned by its coils of abundant russet hair, appeared on the platform.
No account of her would be complete which did not note two other characteristic traits. One was her thoughtful kindness, especially to obscure people. An office typist who had scarcely realized that Mrs Fawcett knew her by sight, and the lift man of some buildings she occasionally visited, have recorded how, when taken ill, they found themselves recipients of a steady stream of little kindnesses — visits, letters, books which showed her knowledge of their special tastes. The other trait was her inarticulate but passionate patriotism. The instant the South African War broke out she insisted on the abandonment of suffragist agitation, and probably no public honour ever shown her gratified her so much as being chosen with her daughter to investigate the charges against the administration of the concentration camps for Boer women and children. She has recorded that the day when the Great War broke out was perhaps the blackest of her life. The still-running deep waters of her devotion to individuals, to the cause of women, and to her country were, indeed, the springs which fed all her manifold activities.
In 1919 Mrs Fawcett retired from the presidency of the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies, which then became the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. Since then she lived a quiet but far from inactive life, writing, occasionally speaking at meetings, and actually undertaking a journey to Ceylon in the spring of the present year. She was created a Dame of the Order of the British Empire in 1925. For many years she had lived with her elder sister, Miss Agnes Garrett, and with her only child, Miss Philippa Fawcett, now principal assistant in the Education Department of the LCC, whose success at Newnham, where she achieved the honour of being placed “above the Senior Wrangler,” had been so great a joy to her. Her death took place at 2, Gower-street, which had been her home for many years.
The funeral will be at Golders Green Crematorium on Thursday at 11.30. An announcement will be made later of a memorial service to be held in the autumn.
Dame Millicent Fawcett, GBE, campaigner for women’s suffrage, was born on June 11, 1847. She died on August 5, 1929, aged 82
ANNA PAVLOVA
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RUSSIAN PRIMA BALLERINA WHO CREATED THE ROLE OF THE DYING SWAN FOR FOKINE
JANUARY 23, 1931
Mme Pavlova appeared first on the London stage on April 18, 1910. All adored, and rightly, the memory of Mme Adeline Genée, who had not long ceased dancing at the Empire. Isadora Duncan, with a fine artistic severity, had lately brought some hint of ancient Greece back to the art of the dance; and Miss Maud Allan, with no artistic severity at all, had made a pu
blic for her “impressionist” gestures and postures. And now before a London which was still prone to think of high kicking as proof of accomplishment in dancing, there came two unknown Russians, Anna Pavlova and Michael Mordkin, who (with a little company of eight to support them) seemed to do all that Mme Genée had done, all that Isadora Duncan had done, all that Miss Maud Allan had done well, and a great deal that none of them had done, and that none of the audience had ever seen done before. Mme Pavlova danced as Columbine, and she and M. Mordkin did pirouettes that equalled Mme Genée’s for technical accuracy and bewildering speed. They danced to Rubinstein’s “Valse Caprice”; and we got a new idea of rhythm and grace and the play of light and shade over the face and the whole body of the dancer. They danced an “Automne Bacchanale” by Glazounov and infected the whole house with the mad gaiety, the luxurious ecstasy, of that passionate poem in movement.
This was not actually the first time that Mme Pavlova had danced in London: two summers before she had come over from Paris to dance at a private house before King Edward and Queen Alexandra. But this was the first time that any section of the London public had seen the strictest technique of the Imperial Russian Ballet flowering into individual expression, and “impressionism” beaten hollow at its own game through the mastery of the traditional forms.
Mme Pavlova had been through the school of the Imperial Russian Ballet, that “cloister,” as she called it, “where inflexible rule obtains,” had left it at 16 with the official title of première danseuse, and had since become one of the five officially entitled ballerinas. Daughter of a poor widow and born in St Petersburg in 1885, she had determined to be a dancer on that day in her childhood when her mother took her to see Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. She would dance the Sleeping Beauty — nothing less; and in years to come she often did. From 10 to 16 she worked in the school of the Imperial Ballet; and after a few years at the Marinsky Theatre, which was the ballet’s home, she started in 1907 on the first of those many tours which have made her famous all over the civilized world.
She had joined Diaghilev’s company in 1908. In 1911 the full glory of the Russian Ballet broke upon London, when Pavlova, Nijinsky, and many another came to Covent Garden, and we saw Pavillon d’Armide and Les Sylphides and The Spectre of the Rose and much else that was a revelation of beauty. But the story of Mme Pavlova belongs rather to her special visits, with M. Novikoff or M. Volinine, or both, and a small corps de ballet, mostly of her own training. At ballet on large lines she was not supreme. Whoever designed them for her, her bigger productions lacked certainty and cohesion of movement; and audiences would resign themselves to wait patiently till Pavlova came on again to dance a solo or a duet. She was inventive and adventurous in her subjects. She made a ballet of Don Quixote, and as time went on she turned more and more to the East, to India, Japan, China, for her plots and scenes. But it was in dancing that she was unmatched; and in the little divertissements — the Dying Swan, the Blue Danube, a waltz by Chopin, and, most wonderful of all, the Papillons — she showed the purity and power of her genius.
To say that she founded her individual expression on her mastery of the traditional technique, uniting the old and the new, is to explain some of her art; and a little more may be explained by saying that she knew how to dance not only with her face and her head and every part of her body, but with all at once and in tune with each other, so as to reveal new wonders of significant movement, making the dance a revelation of the body through the spirit, and the body seem somehow a medium for the play of light and shade, an instrument of music, a field of colour, a thing to be apprehended and enjoyed with every sense at once. But in the end there is no explaining a beauty which was made up of knowledge, accomplishment, imagination, grace — so many elements combined in a particular person and personality. There can never be another Pavlova.
Mme Pavlova may be said to have lived for her art, although after her marriage to M. Victor Dandré she loved her home in Hampstead. A law suit brought against her last year showed her to be a strict disciplinarian where her company was concerned; and the best of her many pupils caught from her the old spirit of the school in St Petersburg, where they knew better than to suppose that dancing was easy and the dancer’s life a soft one.
Anna Pavlova, Russian prima ballerina, was born on February 12, 1881. She died on January 23, 1931, aged 49
DAME NELLIE MELBA
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AUSTRALIAN OPERATIC SOPRANO WHO STUDIED ROLES WITH VERDI AND PUCCINI
FEBRUARY 24, 1931
Melba, to use the name by which she was universally known until the prefix of Dame Nellie was attached to it, was born near Melbourne in 1859, and began her career as Helen Porter Mitchell. Her Scottish parents, who had settled in Australia, had themselves some musical proclivities. But it was not until after her early marriage to Mr Charles Armstrong that it became clear that her gifts must be taken seriously.
It was largely by her own efforts that she came to England in 1886 with the intention of cultivating her voice. When she arrived the experts to whom she appealed in London did not realize her possibilities. It is amusing to record that she was refused work in the Savoy Opera Company by Sullivan, though probably he did her and the world at large the greatest service by his refusal. She went to Paris, and to Mme Mathilde Marchesi belongs the credit of having instantly recognized that, to quote her own phrase, she “had found a star.”
A year of study and of close companionship with this great teacher was all that was needed to give Nellie Armstrong a brilliant début at “La Monnaie” in Brussels as Mme Melba. She made her first appearance there on October 13, 1887, in the part of Gilda in Rigoletto. Her second part was Violetta in La Traviata, so that from the first she was identified with the earlier phases of Verdi, in which she has been pre-eminent ever since. Although, contrary to the traditions of the Brussels theatre, she sang in Italian, she aroused such enthusiasm that when a little later she was to sing Lakmé, and the question arose as to whether her French accent was sufficiently secure, the composer, Delibes, is said to have exclaimed, “Qu’elle chante Lakmé en français, en italien, en allemand, en anglais, ou en chinois, cela m’est égal, mais qu’elle la chante.”
Her first appearance at Covent Garden on May 24, 1888, in Lucia di Lammermoor, was a more qualified success. Curiously enough, she was more commended at first for some supposed dramatic power than for the only two things which have ever really mattered in her case — the exquisite voice and the perfect use of it. From London she returned to the more congenial atmosphere of Brussels, and in the following year, 1889, proceeded to the conquest of Paris, where she triumphed as Ophélie in Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet. In Paris Mme Melba had the advantage of studying the parts of Marguerite in Faust and of Juliette with Gounod, and she took part in the first performance of Roméo et Juliette in French at Covent Garden in 1889.
From this time onward Mme Melba had only to visit one country after another to be acclaimed. From St Petersburg, where she sang before the Tsar in 1891, to Chicago, where in 1893 her singing with the de Reszkes was one of the features of the “World’s Fair,” the tale of her triumphs was virtually the same. But from the musical point of view a more important episode was her prolonged visit to Italy between these two events. Here she met the veteran Verdi and the young Puccini. Verdi helped her in the study of Aïda and of Desdemona (Otello). She made the acquaintance of Puccini’s Manon, but La Bohème, the only one of his operas with which she was to be identified, was not yet written. Another young composer who begged leave to be presented was Leoncavallo. She sang Nedda in the first London performance of I Pagliacci a little later.
Mme Melba’s early American appearances recall her few experiments with Wagner. She sang Elisabeth in Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, during her first season there, and it was later in America that she made her single appearance as Brünnhilde. She had previously sung Elsa (Lohengrin) at Covent Garden, but she quite rightly realized that Wagner’s mus
ic was not for her. The only pity, when one recalls her repertory, is that either lack of opportunity or of inclination prevented her from turning to Mozart instead.
Her actual repertory amounted to 25 operas, of which, however, only some 10 parts are those which will be remembered as her own. La Bohème was the last of these to be added, and she first sang in it at Philadelphia in 1898, having studied it with the composer in Italy earlier in the year. She was so much in love with the music that she would not rest until she had brought it to London, and it was largely by her personal influence that it was accepted at Covent Garden. Indeed, she persuaded the management to stage La Bohème with the promise to sing some favourite scena from her repertory in addition on each night that she appeared in it until the success of the opera was assured. She kept the promise, though the rapid success of the opera soon justified her faith. To most of the present generation of opera-goers “Melba nights” meant La Bohème nights, and, for several seasons before the War and when Covent Garden reopened after it, there could not be too many of them for the public. She bade farewell to Covent Garden on June 8, 1926, when, in the presence of the King and Queen, she sang in acts from Roméo et Juliette, Otello, and La Bohème. Actually her last appearance in London was at a charity concert in 1929.
It is difficult now to realize that 30 years or so ago La Bohème seemed to offer few opportunities for the special characteristics of Mme Melba’s art, intimately associated as it then was with Donizetti, the earlier Verdi, and Gounod. But those characteristics in reality had full play in all music based on the expression of a pure vocal cantilena, and could appear in the simply held note at the end of the first act of La Bohème as completely as in the fioritura of “Caro nome” or “The Jewel Song.” The essence of her power was due to such an ease in the production of pure tone in all parts of the voice and in all circumstances that there was no barrier between the music and the listener.
