Shorter Notices
The True Story of Dick Whittington. By Osbert Sitwell. (Home and Van Thal. 5s.) A MEDLEY of satire, fantasy and poetic description is provided by the new Dick Whittington " long short " story, published in " Horizon" some months ago and now revised. It is a tale running from past to future, for the hero lives as long as Virginia Woolf's " Orlando " and we begin (though' clues to dates are vague) in the Middle Ages and end after super-wars have wiped out a large proportion of mankind. The theme is human ingratitude. Dick's cat makes his fortune, and Dick and his wife, becoming successful, banish her. The tale follows the usual lines, but Dick is shown as a modern business-man, then a maker of armaments, and finally as the founder of charitable institu- tions—for cats so that he may rid himself of his benefactor. Many aspects of modern life—" blood and sweat" war speeches, the arma- ment race, newspaper gossip, wives' snobbery, Colonial government —are satirised in Sir Osbert Sitwell's suave prose, but satire is inter- spersed with all the ancient romance of wild heaths, bags of jewels and the bells that ring out, calling " Turn again," and with sudden flashes of description as when the faces of newspaper boys are-turned to the sky ar the angle of ships' figureheads and " varnished " with rain or when the full moon shines into Dick's garret, " showing a world of roofs." Man and his works are belittled with graceful irony, but the earth remains beautiful. This new legend offers mixed pleasures —not 'the least a fine prose style.
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