The Silent Populace of London
The People's Album of London Statues. Described by Osbert Sitwell ; drawn by Nina Hamnett. (Duckworth. 12s. 6d.)
How few of us could suddenly name a score or so of the figUres of stone or lead that hi the squares, or gardens, or curved corners of London sombrely challenge our abstracted eyes ! King Charles, serenely riding in Whitehall-, his comely head victorious over death, is ever gratefully saluted as a thing of grace. That Nelson and the Duke of York descry heaven from their tall columns is an article of faith. The white bulk of the Victoria Memorial, the Cenotaph, the Cavell monument, and other war groups, Rima, and Peter Pan all awake incon- gruous emotions of varying intensity. The flying shape of Eros sending his wild ironic arrows down Piccadilly is still acutely remembered and desired. But of the host of worthy gentlemen, in toga or trouser, bequeathed by the narcissism of the Industrial and' Victorian age, we are aware only as images made freakish by a shaft of mischievous light, or as shadows thickening in the grey London dusk.
Miss Nina Hamnett and Mr. Osbert Sitwell, by concentrating their bright astonished gaze on these proud and pathetic relics of a period gravely convinced of its greatness, have made of these dismal matters a most original book. The lady has drawn the stereotyped warriors and statesmen with such brio,- sympathy, and sardonic romance, has set so many of them, by light suggestion of cloud and tree, in an atmo- sphere of gay 'spring weather, that in two dimensions they acquire 'a vitality for ever denied to them in three. Mr. Sitwell supplies the unexpected yet always apposite comment. He is at his best, circling round these graven images, mostly of the Victorian yesteryear. His power of satire has now developed a lightness of foot and a suppleness of gesture, and plants a deadlier dagger with an elegantly casual air. This is a volume to take up when the frosty weather has stiffened and stupefied and bored the brain." One glance; and you smile : read a little "way, and some artfully artless statement, made with melancholy gravity, betrays you into audible mirth.
Undoubtedly sculpture is-not an art in which the English genius excels. Nornian and Italian influences stirred up a race of -Mediaeval imagers whose' work ran blithely over and about the Cathedrals and cloisters. But when the Italian Re- naiasance came to 'England, late and wayworn, it raised no throng of carvers as in its own Greece-drunken land, or as in luturious France. The' young Elizabethans, ruffed and jelelled, • were not' guiltless of Narcissus' frailty ; • but their pride of life expressed itself in stone only in their tombs. The Tudors were greedy and brutal despots, fonder of shows than arts, though Henry VIII. liked a little music, and Elizabeth had 'an appetite for masks. The later dynasties of England haVe not shaped well for sculpture ; the Stuart opportunity was too brief. But climate is probably the chief reason for our failure in this great art—climate, and the consequent identification of clothes with morality. The sad thing is that the -generation' least- fitted for statuary developed a craze for
it. ".Not in entire forgetfulness, nor yet in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory," in the shape of the toga, did they come into the perpetuity of stone and lead. And pre- sently the disgracious lines of the trouser forced themselves into Art, even while through green leaves the vast bulk of Achilles exposed to derision the gentlewomen of England. •
Mr. Osbert Sitwell, besides his comments; writes three Essays—on Statues in General, on Statues in London, cn the Present and the Future. He does not cease to be amusing, even when most in earnest. His social diagnosis is sometimes acute. If occasionally you disagree, the difference of opinion does not outwear your smile. His range is wide. Visions flash past you—Cellini's Ascanio hidden with his- love in the head of the colossal Mars, a workman with his toe planted in Queen Victoria's nose as he tends her august eyelid, shapes of Venus and her kin rising from the soft earth of Renaissance vineyards, the clanking figure of the Commander mounting to the clear cries of Mozartian music; Nell Gwynn in the piazza of Covent Garden. There is a pretty description of the growth of the London Squares—those squares where the trees droop like Naiads and all the branches flute into the myriad patterns of the Spring. But he is at his wittiest in his account of the• eighteenth-century sculptors, and of the rise of the " whiskered and fantastic sept " of statues left by the wealthiest of all Ages, the Industrial, instead of ordered cities and great gardens. The savage passage that discerns the future archaeologist discovering the forms of British heroes in the Indian jungle has a fine imaginative frenzy ; and his "Ingenious Proposals " for dealing with the statues of the future are diabolically and destructively polite.
Miss Hamnett's drawings are " delighting and delighted." It may be said of the statues that " Nothing in them but cloth change into something rich and strange " under her brilliant regard. Even the trousered Victorian " has a leg," often a very fanciful one. Her line ripples and carves and curves and breaks into swallow flights. King Charles seems incredibly refined on his patrician horse ; but Cromwell treads so forcibly against his crocketed background as to appear no prosaic antagonist. Lyonell Lockyer reposes in Southwark Cathedral with such sinister and rococo languor, with such a sad yet debonair air de prince that I am shocked to learn that he was the great pillmaker of his time. The Fat Boy at Pie Corner is a wild surprise to me. James II. in an enchanting drawing figures as a delicate Roman prince out of French eighteenth- century romance. The Shakespeare of Leicester Square, seen from an unusual angle, looks urbane and enigmatic. (Mr. Sitwell is caustically recondite in his history of Leicester Square.) The two figureheads in Waterloo Road are drawn with a noble excitement. The Duke of Kent, ineffably bland and stupid, seems to grasp a draft of the marvellous statement he made to Creevy. With a wicked joy, the artist's pen caracoles about the contours of Achilles, whose one visible eye glowers at "the ladies of England." Fain would I linger over the spirited lawn sleeves of Bishop Middleton, the adventurous and insolent poise of Lord Palmerston, looking like the hero of a baroque political novel, the picturesque piratical apparition of Sir Charles Napier, with a Nose---. But they are all Olympian and superb. I wish only that Mr. Sitwell's iridescent commentary did not fail beside the demure and charming girl who pours her pitcher opposite the vainly lamented Foundling Hospital. She is humble but lovable ; and one would fain know what brought her to Guilford Street.
RACHEL ANNAND TAYLOR.
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