Reviews of the Week
Time Regained
Noble Essences. By Osbert Sitwell. (Macmillan. 21s.) •
THE concluding volume of Sir Osbert Sitwell's enormous, uneven and majestic autobiography is cast in the form of ten portraits, preceded by a prologue, and terminated by a " colophon " or tail-piece. This" Book of Characters," as it is described by the author, rolls and rambles as widely as its four predecessors, exploring by digressions, sometimes in highly unlikely places, almost any subject on which Sir Osbert holds views, and yet doing this in such a way that the whole is informed by a distinctive character which, as with the preceding volumes, makes it more than a mere continu- ation of a life-story. The climax of the entire undertaking was, I believe, Great Morning. This is the finale, somewhat in the style of a diminuendo in music, though the passage on Sickert in the centre of the book is written with all the intense passion of the third movement.
The characters are Sir Edmund Gosse, Ronald Firbank, Wilfred Owen, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Ada Leverson, Walter Richard Sickert, William Davies the poet, Violet Gordon Woodhouse, Rex Whistler aud Arnold Bennett. They are all described from the author's own knowledge and obser- vation with the exception of d'Annunzio, who gives his name to what is 'more an essay on the Fiume episode than an account of his grotesque and wondrous personality. This particular essay has signal importance to the book, being placed with admirable artistic skill, so that by reason of its separateness of character it serves to break what might otherwise have been a monotonous effect of portraits succeed- ing one another.
One of the best things Sir Osbert Sitwell has ever written is the opening portrait of Sir Edmund Gosse, in which that strange high priest's many and conflicting characteristics are brought together into a credible one-ness. His noble love of poetry, the delicate artistry which made him the author of Father and Son, and the absurd conventionality which made him see E. M. Forster's novels in terms of "lurid sentiment- ality, preposterous morals, turgid and sickly style," the impish humour, the vanity and tile good humour of this fascinating and complex man are all conveyed with masterly ease in a space of only thirty-three pages.
The central essay, a little longer than the others, and devoted to Sickert, is the most exciting part of the book. The author here has recourse once more to that device, more familiar in musig than writing, of the " restatement " of a theme (in this case the theme of Sickert standing outside a house in a street) which he used with such extraordinary effect in Great Morning, where, it will be remembered, the opening image of the officers on early morning duty at the Tower of London suddenly reappeared amid the later passages. In this book the description of the great painter provides a centre of gravity to the whole mass of this volume, a curious reflection on the character of this man of genius whose eccentricities were so extreme ; but one important truth about Sickert this record makes clear. It is that his numerous extravagances of conduct could never disgtise an essential and impregnable sanity ; not even when he took perverse delight in unpopular views, even to the extent of applauding the destruction of French pictures by prudish officers of the British Customs.
The eighth portrait, of Violet Gordon Woodhouse, provides with the Sickert essay the strongest contrast in the book. It is a valuable and moving record of an artist who despite immense accomplishments never became widely known. In her time she was probably the best living player of the harp- sichord and clavichord. Her fame was restricted on account of. her reluctance to perform in public. She, overcame this distaste with great effort, and gave first-class concerts, but perhaps it is true, as people who knew her playing intimately used to say, that she never played so well as in a room in a house, either her own house or one,of her friends'. All this sensitiveness and withdrawal was liable to suggest an absurd preciosity, but Sir Osbert in portraying her overcomes this suspicion (an entirely libellous one, I must insist) by depicting her with Bernard Shaw and Picasso as the formidable back- ground figures. The juxtaposition of these with her gives what is perhaps best described as a comic strength to this lovely evocation of Mrs. Woodhouse, and for some there must be the joy of remembering that adorable woman with the zest which comes of seeing again a familiar figure in unlikely surroundings.
The book begins to- draw to an end with a portrait of Rex Whistler where, so it seemed to me, massive art has somewhat obscured this elusive subject. This penultimate portrait is followed, as though by a final fanfare of trumpets, by the delectable figure of Arnold Bennett, whom we see in all his brilliance, sweetness, absurdity, and in the quality which was nearly genius, and made him nearly great. The brief lovely " colophon " follows on the strings, and this immense work, one of the most fascinating of our times, is brought to an end.
CHRISTOPHER SYKES.
Previous page
