Reviews of the Week
Sermons in Stones
A Land. By Jaequetta Hawkes. (Cresset Press. 2is.) SERMON is an equivocal term for this remarkable book. For its absorption is entirely with earth, and, if the author crowns this earth with stars, they are the radiance from the consciousness of an artist rather than from a supernatural source flowing from some far-off divine event. Yet sermon is appropriate if those of John Donne, voyaging through strange seas of thought alone, be brought to mind. Something of their imaginative range, their recondite knowledge, their passion of exploration, their visionary sense of integration and even power of imagery seeps into the poetic earthi- ness of Mrs. Hawkes's unclassifiable book; which to describe and estimate sets the reviewer a Beecher's Brook to jump. And the last part of it is sermon pur sang, that which expounds and exposes the effects of the Industrial Revolution in prizing man Out of his organic environment, in destroying his regional groupings, closing down his traditional skills, surrendering his individual responsibilities and leaving him naked and helpless, for all his protective gadgets, to the sterility of the Nature he has violated. The book is sermon, too, in the sense recently outlined by Mr. Edwin Muir as the protest of the creative imagination against the forces of analytic science which have enthroned the specialised intellect developed by urban conglomeration at the expense of the intuitive faculties which draw their nourishment from the earth. " Export and die," writes the author, and that is sermon enough for anybody.
But the sermons are in stones: that is the whole point of them. They, or their equivalent in the artist's perception of Nature's groan- ings and travailings to evoke order, beauty and consciousness, rise out of the stone—like spiritual man out of the block, as in Rodin's sculptures ; or purposeful man wrestling with fate, foreknowledge and free will, as in Michelangelo's ; or earth-woman sinking back and resolved into stone, as in Henry Moore's. In this primordial picture of earth undergoing the birth-pangs of creation out of chaos or starry collision, Mrs. Hawkes makes the fullest possible use of scientific investigation, but for her own end of imaginative recrea- tion or, as she calls it, recollection. In the projection of her personal vision down into the depths of the earth's stony matrix, there is. no hint of theoretic Darwinism ;.the earth's succession of changing faces in the crumpling, buckling, folding, subsiding and upheaving of the rocks from their Titanic-struggles with fire and water is occupied by a succession of life-forms so perfectly fitted to their particular. environments that they seem to prefigure that harmonious co-opera- tion between man and nature expressed, before the modern oblitera- tion of them, in the arts of husbandry, regional architecture, landscape-painting and pastoral poetry. When Palaeolithic Man appears, it is indeed as heir of all the ages, detached in his con- sciousness of earth but partaking in her rhythms. Mrs. Hawkes might perhaps have made more of the suggestion that the various grotesque types of sub-men, so far from being "missing links," were over-specialised aberrations from the true type, primitive in his physical characters, especially the hand and thereby the human form divine It was a natural transition to what to me—because I have given some thought to it over a number of years—was the most delightful portion of the book. This is an intimate consideration of man's manifold but regional use in Britain of the variety localised surface-stone for his habitations, worship, crafts and agriculture. The correlations between rock, soil, locality and the shaping power of the human hand reflect, on a higher turn of the spiral, those aboriginal accommodations between life and substance that precede them in the author's pictorial narrative. All this section is beauti- fully done ; indeed, it goes to the heart of her matter ; and in the middle of the eighteenth century she finds the peak moment of poise between huma. achievement and filial stewardship of the earth when man (like the earth) accomplished the prodigious feat of producing nothing ugly. But the poise was a precarious one ; the crack appeared, the rift in the lute, and the coupling of iron and coal spawned domination instead of partnership and with it the delusion, which may well be the death of us, that predatory man can get along on his own steam alone.
Equally illuminating is the historical digest from the first settle- ment of down and wold onwards to megalopolis. It is impossible to do justice to this rare and fecund book`in my space. It is a germinal book and may %■ell herald a change in cultural orientation that bitter experience has made tragically overdue.
H. J. MASSINGHAM.
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