A BOOK OF THE MOMENT.
FANTASTIC ART.
Southern Baroque Art. By Sacheverell Sitwell. (Grant Richards. 20s. net.) TILE upside down world of the fantastic is as complete as the real world, if less substantial, and, for some of us, floats with it—shadow for shadow—in endless perspective, not a detail Yost despite the ripples and crinkles, just as you may see a Venetian palace begin a second time at its foundations. We in England are very well accustomed to what is stern and Wild in the fantastic ; to Poor Tom's " Through the hawthorn blows the cold wind . .," or to Webster's Dance of Sundry Sorts of Madmen, or the gold-haired' corpse in The Ancient Mariner. Flying buttresses, too, we arc used to or the egg- shell walls of cathedrals, or,again, the buffooneries of a Falstaff and a Rabelais. All these we know, and perhaps like in our hearts better than the square Hanoverian reasonableness with which it is More usual to associate the English character. But with one exception, all these types of the fantastic to which we are used can be expressed in words, the special English medium. It seems as though there must be some expertness and familiarity, some almost " nudge and wink " bond between artist and public before the fantastic can flower. So it is only briefly, at the height of the two great periods. of building in England, that we get in this country even a hint of the fantastic in architecture. One or two late Gothic cathedrals and a work or so of Vanbrugh's must stand . for our only native efforts at the fantastic in this medium. In Turner we shall again find the rare exception to the reasonable plainness of English painting. Here, in fact, arc two arts with which we have never familiarized ourselves.
The aspects of the fantastic at which the Latin races excelled—the magnificent and courtly fantastic of late Baroque and Rococo art—have hardly found a place in England. A Dryden dedication or so is practically all we have to match against the cloud-born ecstasies, the billowing robes, the upturned eye, the gestural fling, which were evoked for angel, king or Virtue by a hundred Latin painters, sculptors and architects.
It is Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell's aim in his remarkable and delightful Southern Baroque Art not exactly to re-create this art for us—for it has never faded—but to lend us his eyes, and enable us once more to see that world of vigorous and surprising life. In writing this book he fulfils one of the most clearly recognized and delightful of the critic's unctions, he acts as an intermediary between a group of artists and a public out of sympathy with their work. But the need of such a critic can be so great as to be embarrassing. The late neglect of his period is such that in his character of intermediary Mr. Sitwell has been obliged to fulfil a double function. He has not only to be evocative, to create sympathy and comprehension, but he has also to impart fact, and he must further calculate on a public which must be constantly led on and amused. This contradiction then involves him in difficulty. He will start off in a narrative vein with an account of some fantastic Fesla with fireworks and Farinelli to sing, or some gorgeous progress of the Spanish or Neapolitan Courts from summer to winter quarters, and then will have to interrupt himself to explain the persons of his drama, to give dates, to explain influences, and with his natural instinct for enrichment, all this information has to be given with handsomeness and ornament. The consequence is that to follow any narrative in the book involves an effort com- parable to that with which we follow the scrolling lines of what sets out to be a broken pediment over a Rococo door- way. We meet with so many enrichments of spirals, shells, Mowers, Chinese bells, flamingoes and acanthus leaves on the way that we are diverted from our purpose. The reality in Mr. Sitwell's book is more confusing than in the analogy we have suggested, for a pediment is a static thing, a narra- tive unrolls itself, and to go back is subtly to reverse the current and change the flow._
Mr. Sitwell's set passages are often masterly,, producing an effect of extraordinary gorgeousness. He corrects any cloying richness that may be felt by the sharpness and glitter of hig''faiitastie element, or by the formal rigidities of some
description of Court etiquette. His writing has now the soft architectural harmonies of a tapestry, now the hardness of Southern sunlight, now the eloquence of a trill or a roulade.
The real object of the book being to re-create if not exactly the life, at any rate the state of taste and emotions which made it natural to paint like Tiepolo, or to build like Clmr- riguera, or to sing coloratura like Farinelli, the space of these four essays is fairly evenly divided between archi- tecture, painting, music, and the dreams, lives and ambitions of seventeenth and eighteenth century Spaniards, Mexicans, Neapolitans and Portuguese. And here again the book's wide range makes for a certain confusing quality. Not, of course, that such a book could be crystal-clear, or formed on a plan dependent on logic, cause and effect. In this sort of book one of the author's bites noires must be to find himself proving something.
Here is a description which is typical of Mr. Sitwell's style. Though not as charming as are many of the others, it will yet give the reader a compact idea of the " courtly fantastic " element of which I spoke. The scene is the Spanish colony of Mexico :—
" With an appalling rumble a great gilded coach would lurch along, While the postilions cracked their whips as though to disperse the evening mists and restore the air. The horses had broken into a wild gallop in their attempts to get free from the coach they were dragging, which had the appearance of being about to topple over, at any moment, on to the horses' backs. Behind the windows the residents in this glass palace were glittering with such a• steady fire from their jewels, that to see them through the window as they passed was like leaning over the side of a boat to watch 'the stars reflected in the sea below ; for however much the water shook and trembled, the stars were still there a moment later, blazing away through the glassy depths."
If such was the appearance of an ordinary country landowner, the splendour and terror of the Spanish Viceroy's progress can be imagined. His coming would be accompanied by " a tragic blare of trumpets," and travelling over the country- side, " you were continually meeting with these traces of the peculiar terror with which Spaniards have always contrived to invest their public ceremonies."
" In every big town, and all along the chief roads, you met companies of travelling matadors, like a small army in per- petual readiness for a campaign." Or a day or two later you might see very different travelling companions, as was the experience of an English traveller of the period,
" who Complains that, by he knows not what, accident, the whole Country was covered with a deluge of monks, who took up all the easy carriages, so that it was impossible for him to travel any further in one of the Mexican mulecarts, but he had to ride the rest of the way on a slow and famished-looking horse."
Taken as a whole, the book is an extraordinary tour de force, a truly remarkable achievement for so young an author. Indeed . its faults appear to arise solely from his incomplete mastery of particularly difficult material, and to be faults which experience may well enable the author to remedy in subsequent work. The book is delightful to read, and its strangeness, originality and richness cannot be praised sufficiently. A. WthmAms-Eraas.
Previous page
