The Prehistory of Britain
THE many readers of Mrs. Hawkes's A Land, the predecessor to her preSent book, must be on their guard against an unwarrantable sense of disappointment at not finding herein the dazzling spec- tacle of a marriage between scholarship and imagination which transfigured the former into something like a work of genius. This is a guidebook, which, by the paradoxical nature of its confinement and amplitude of topographical range, compels the writer to stick to her last. Her quick apprehension of the human remodelling of the natural landscape and delight in the variation of regional styles in prehistoric monuments give her a measure of latitude. But it is counteracted by the sheer mileage of her geographical savey and the chronology and structural complexity of the vast number of prehistoric remains between the Palaeolithic and the Roman periods that her personal series of tours enforced upon her. So formidable an undertaking might easily have made a dull and congested book, but such a writer is not to be caught napping in the snare of archaeological academics. She moves lightly among the ponderous evidences and enigmas of long-vanished cultures, whose very con- spicuity in mounds and megaliths obscures rather than reveals what ideas erected them, and at the same time has the latest learning at her finger-tips. For all its scientific precision, the character of our own civilisation, obsesSed and cluttered with material production, renders its interpretation of a highly mythological and ritualistic prehistory as often as not suspect. But Mrs„,}lawkes suffers under no such constraint of mind ; she keeps the balance between a pleasurable walking tour of landscapes so well chosen by the ancient mariners and the needs of investigation and analysis.
In a book that confronts such distances of space and time, the reader is bound to ask his questions. It is curious that in her examination of Stonehenge she does not so much as mention the solar cult, but speaks of some provincial Zeus more applicable to the bastard Hellenism of the Celtic Iron Age, And, in estimating the rituals of megalithic monuments, it is surely imperfect reasoning to refer to the Druids' autos da fes in wicker cages as a clue. " Attenuated," too, is not the relevant epithet for the White Horse of Uffington ; the point is that it is the only stylised specimen in the whole stable of downland steeds. I also feel that the folklore of megaliths becomes more intelligible by reference to the tree and pillar cult of the Mediterranean. Occasionally Mrs. Hawkes slips up —as when she writes of the Wylie Valley... " succulent waterside meadows full of human fat," which suggests that the gentry of it are all Falstaffs and the villagers all Fat Boys. But how penetrating this —"They laid their dead in the dark earth-enclosed chamber with something of the same conviction with which they cast the seed corn into the soil " I The 70-odd photographs of prehistoric art in the Cambridge University Press book make the happiest match between the publishers who have produced it so cheaply and so admirably-and the editors who have selected the illustrations so discriminately and introduced them with a taste as sure as their knowledge is profound. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the fallacy of judging the arts by the evolutionary yardstick. We have the more confidence in Professor Piggott and Dr. Glyn Daniel from their sharp dismissal of Roman provincial art as of "a dreary mediocrity." The non- naturalistic Celtic metal-work of the north-east and south-west, so brilliant in intricacy of desiga and device, takes the bulk of the photographs, but it is surprising how well the geometric art of the megalithic builders in pottery„ chalk, stone and gold stands up to them. What is remarkable is that the blend of Greek, Scythian and Irish influences in Celtic feudalism and of Mycenaean upon the megalithic peoples, together with the great differences between the peasant communities of the latter and the heroic society on the Homeric model of The former, did not stifle the emergence of a
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