A Sitwell Fantasy
THIS is not a single drama, but a series of "shorts "—a h sacrifice in Mexico or at Stonehenge, feathered dancers from Pa islands, a few hundred feet of Balkan peasant ritual, a modern or a Welsh hiring fair. It is as varied as a news reel and clang abruptly from scene to scene. Mr. Sitwell delights in beau buildings and objets d'art and these have set his fancy roving. golden crown or a curiously carved box from the old capital of Cossacks of the Don evokes pictures of the horse cults of Scy peoples, their pastoral rites and wild nomad life. The ruins of lion gate at Mycenae or a bas-relief of a Mayan ball-game stir imagination. A melody from Dvorak or a peasant costume him search for survivals of ancient ritual in Eastern Europe.. tility rites and sacrifices are to him the dominant theme in prum religion as they were to Frazer, but beyond hinting at "the flexion between these smoking altars in all parts of the world' difficult to see any particular shape or purpose to the book. Neve less, two or three of the isolated scenes grip the imagination. The mile procession of victims in the ancient Aztec ritual of Mexico in a terrible blood sacrifice when human hearts are wrenched quivering and thrown on the stones. The oracle of the cooing d at Dodona is another tour de force. The gaiety of the proos of Nola city guilds will fill many a European traveller with no for the colour and noise and mummery of peasant rites in rn Balkan and Italian towns. And besides these historical recons dons, many of the small descriptive details stand out with the b clean colours of a poster painting, and in particular the flowers Sitwell loves to describe. There is a crocus "bright as a jockey and sleeves," with its "china stalk," a beautiful convolvulus, a of rose cyclamen, and, best of all, a rite in a field of bean fie which evokes to the full the peculiar intoxication of their scent hot moonlit night.
The anthropological viewpoint is that of an artist rather historian, and some of the archaeological theories Mr. Sitwell teers from time to time seem little more than odds and ends of assertion, or collections of out of the way information. The Pa of erudition seem in fact to cut across the aesthetic manner book. It will irritate some to pass from the woods of Dodona "in ecstasy" with the crooning of wood-pigeons "with their rolling of r's deep in their doves' throats, and their crooning and cooing, rolling and roocooling " to a twenty-four page account of the names and breeds of different pigeons, wild and tame, taken from two Victorian pigeon books. The list of Pacific islands, including the Japanese mandates, is a similar excrescence in the account of the Areoi society dances, and there are other examples of the footnote paraded across the page. Those who delight in the curious will enjoy this particular mixture of picture and information. Others will wonder whether Mr. Sitwell does not sometimes overstep the fine line that divide% the treasure house from the junk shop.
The book is beautifully produced. AUDREY RICHARDS.
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