Iconography
The Queens and the Hive. By Edith Sitwell. (Macmillan, 42s.) ICONS are not portraits. They are not intended, as portraits are, to be human. They are tinted images of beings held sacred or in some way supernatural, designed to express not their personality but their power. This is conveyed by extreme formalising of the features, by exaggeration of them into relief with putty, enamel or papier mdche, as well as by gilding, haloing and ornate, begemmed framing. Icons are symbols in the strictest sense: emblems intended to transmit an impression not of life but a mana in which they participate. Thus they themselves become sacred, and objects of reverence. Icons may be given things—candles, money, incense; may be dressed up, like dolls, with coronets, costly fabrics and pendant jewellery. In Byzantium, where they originated, it was sacrilege to pull an icon by the nose.
The difficulty many modern readers, myself particularly, find with the work of Dame Edith Sitwell is, I think, a matter of definitions. We have come, since the Renaissance, to define poetry and art as in some sense a rendering of reality. Since Romanticism, of course, 'reality' has been extended to include subjective impressions, moods and imagery of the mind, which admits both surrealism and abstraction; but we have lost touch entirely with the medixval tradition of art as a representation, sacred in itself, of sacredness. To this older definition Dame Edith's creations belong. She is a maker not of art as we know it, but of icons.
At least, I can find no other explanation of the two prose volumes she has devoted to Elizabeth the First. Like Fanfare for Elizabeth, its prede- cessor, The Queens and the Hive cannot be classified as historiography. History may be written to explain the past or to recall it—to single out, as Gibbon attempted, the thread of causality from the flux of circumstance; or to recapture, as Carlyle endeavoured, that flux entire, recreated as a chunk of living experience. The Queens and the Hive does neither. It makes no effort to explain: events swim up like dreams from the subconscious, unpredictable and ineffable as pantomime transformations. Characters perform evil because they 'carry a darkness within them'; they behave magnani- mously because they look like 'pale, thin flames.' The Armada looms inexplicably from the mists of Biscay as if conjured overnight out of Philip tion; why else the rhapsodic, costume-novel icon-makers.
Robert was the husband of another woman. Still, she must have told herself, often, 'It will always be like this . . we shall always be young, happy . . . Tomorrow will never come.'
Why else, but to recreate the murky tangle of time, to recapture how it felt without trying to make sense of it, revive impossible rumours and superstitions—that Catherine of Aragon's heart, after her death, was found black and swollen with poison, that Catherine de Medici had a
reach a reality still undiscovered, to go behind 21s.) the standard versions. There is little sign in Dame Edith's text of original research: the majority of her references are to familiar accounts—Hakluyt, Neale, Miss Jenkins, Stefan Zweig, Froude; particularly Froude, from whom she quotes copiously. Such original documents as she cites are notable more for sonority than for illumination. No, it becomes clear that Dame Edith's intention is to heighten, not re-interpret, the traditional picture: her documents are the papier mache to achieve this, What she has to add is the gilding, the jewellery of Style. Adjectives encrust her figures richly— 'glittering,' pale,"fox-coloured,"lion-coloured' (the very pigmentation of hair is made heraldic). The words 'gold' and 'golden' spatter her pages like references to champagne in the Daily Express. There are such rococo curlicues as the spelling, each time it appears, of Robert Dudley's title as `Leycester.' The salient impression left by her Armada chapter is of the clothes, the silks and white satin worn by the Spanish grandees.
What results, in fact, is the traditional legend of Elizabeth formalised, mythologised, glazed with language. Presumably this is the intention Dame Edith describes when she speaks, in the preface to her ten new poems, of poetry as 'the deification of reality.' It is not an intention or method which can corhmand much sympathy to- day or, as displayed in the poems—an image or event (the photograph of a Korean orphan, the wedding of the Duke of Kent) embossed with mythological reference, framed in a cosmic analogy, festooned with more or less arbitrary symbols—startle, shall I say, with a sense of felt
This of course may be a theory of history: history was the legend of its monarchs; they ha,d RONALD Baroft`i
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