19 APRIL 1930, Page 26

The Fair-Haired Victory

Tins volume concludes the trilogy in which Mr. Sacheverell: Sitwell has applied his keen poetic sensibility (and the industry of a more modern and more cultivated Baedeker) to the atudy of the life, art and thought of the Middle Ages. It is now possi- ble to estimate his achievement, and• few will be found to deny that it is a notable one. Mr. Sitwell has taken the Middle Ages, divested them of false glamour without exaggerating their dirt and drainlessness, and recreated them in a highly palatable form.

In his present volume Mr. Sitwell is concerned, first, with monasticism, "the greatest manifestation of mediaeval energy." He examines Dominicans, Franciscans and Benedic- tines with an eye that is humorous and critical as well as appreciative. When he writes of a manuscript, a tapestry,. a cathedral, he is a poet : he is the twentieth-century man a letters when he says, "the effect of seeing so many tonsures together is, to be frank, rather repugnant—like an outbreak of ringworm in a boys' school."

The second section of this volume contains Mr. Sitwell's main thesis-the'- Fair-Haired Victory. According to him, the Italian predilection for the Northern type, and its conse- quent fixation as the ideal,' first became definitely established at Venice, a town which has always had among its inhabitants

a certain proportion of fair or red-headed people. He attri- butes the fixation of this ideal to Veronese and -Palma

Vecchio, and supports his view that it was an ideal, and not the representation of reality, by allusion to the dark-haired models employed by Caravaggio, who shows no direct Venetian influence.

But it is his exquisite word-painting, rather than his exposition of theses, that makes Mr. Sitwell so essentially enjoyable a writer. One characteristic passage may. be

quoted : -

'The haunting of the woods was after this nature, for what the sleepless dreaded to hear was the winding of ahorn in the moonlight. No adventure by day could explain this terror from the hanging wood. . . . Then the moon climbed above that bank of frees and the walls Of the castle shone out at once, as does marble if water is dashed upon it. But the shadows became more sombre still from this milk of the moonlight poured upon their flesh of black. A high tower could have topped the tree-cliff, and its bells would sound out clearly over the forest . . -. This was one side of life, and for the other steep doorways, -borrowed from the church, rose to a point in their height as though to allow passage to plume and tiara. These brushed against, or clattered upon, the Gothick arch, while those more familiar figures from playing-card and chess-board reached only to the 'breadth of' the door before it narrowed into character. This is our universal ancestry, and who has not shared in it has. at any rate, seen these things with his unborn eyes, scaled through many incarnations till the present realities Of touch arid sound

have been reached." .

This is such stuff as dreams—and memories, and an enduring literary reputation—are made of. . It only remains to add that this volume, like its twO predeeessors, is illustrated by admirably chosen plates ; and that in it we say farewell to those endearing Edwardian ghosts, the eOraeis."