PROPERTIES
The Hundred and One Harlequins. By Sacheverell Sitwell. 8vo. 96 pages. Boni and Liveright. $1.75.
IN England to-day, where the majority of poets are subjected to the same literary and social influences, their verse has acquired an irritating sameness. Virtues recur and faults recur, of which the greatest is to lack distinction. Other poets, a minority, observe this fault, and seeing the herd rush past them down a highroad, they turn off deliberately into a lane. Their direction is determined by that of the majority, being exactly opposite. They are apt to reach a similar destination. Except in reference to the majority they cannot be understood; they throw themselves to the other tip of a balance; they aim to be corrective instead of total, and they persist in this course even when it involves the suicide of their career. Sacheverell Sitwell belongs to such a minority.
Imagine the background and his reaction. . . . The room is too full of furniture, too full of well-dressed people. Most of them are bores. To escape them he conducts a conversation with his friends, entirely in euphuisms, under the glare of a hundred electric lights. Suddenly the butler draws back the curtain and you discover sunlight falling, "on far roofs, a sheaf of arrows." The landscape is italianate, with arbours, fountains, trees, and a blue, blue sky. It is ruled into squares by tight-ropes, over which harlequins perform. Looking closer you discover that the window is not a window, but an oil painting. In a brief silence is heard the conversation of the bores. To escape, to horrify them, to do everything in their opposite is Mr Sitwell's principal aim.
The bores are Georgian poets or people who write for magazines and praise the Georgian poets. To contradict them is to be modern. To be modern is to be obscure. To be obscure is to be superior to critics, who, failing to comprehend one's work, are reduced to making remarks like the following: "Strange, rare, and subtly intriguing . . . real, though brittle magic . . . one's sense is snared . . . the mind is drugged: the senses get their pleasure." Mr Sitwell is really not half so bad as that.
