Some Books of the Week
ALL those who appreciate the more reticent and aristocratic forms of art will be enchanted with A Book of Towers and Other Buildings of Southern Europe. (The Heslewood Books.
Frederick Etchells and Hugh Macdonald. 23 13s. 6d.)—a cool and delicate book of dry-points. Form and subject make a double appeal. Of all builded things towers are most charged with symbolic significance. With sure lines Mr. Wyndham conveys not only the accurate but the essential impression of many towers, and also of some secret assemblies of roofs and streets. A fastidious, a slightly disdainful, but a crystalline note seems to prevail through this imagery that, refusing all colour and heavy chiaroscuro, creates a pearly and insub- stantial world. Romanesque towers in Provence, roofs of Avignon curling in the sun, still unisons of bridge and steeple in Venice, pink and yellow tower of Rapallo, discoloured into ghostly grace, Saracenic tower of Amalfi, lovely composition of Atrani awaiting strange things, sleeping house at Taormina, enclosing strange things, ramparts of beautiful Ragusa, blithe bell tower of La Giralda, hushed excitement of involuted pillars in Cordova Mosque, ethereal faint brede of the Alhambra suspended at the vanishing-point of vision—these are some of Mr. Wyndham's fabrics of vibrating light, and silence, and superfine line. Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell writes a harmonious introduction, in which he accords a just word of appreciation to Gautier, who certainly was a divining connoisseur of visible beauty ; and makes a brief sufficient comment on each picture. The decorations of swags and masks are acutely alive, as with a fine derision ; and the printing, with its eighteenth-century tricks of italics and capitals, is of a complete elegance.
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