The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Properties
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.
His qualities are other than were mentioned; in reality he makes little appeal to the senses. His magic is almost purely verbal. He keeps a hundred bright words in the air at the same time, like one of his own harlequins juggling. For this purpose he likes words which have been worn smooth, words which slip through the fingers and leave no impression. In opposition to the Georgians he avoids too-definite phrases: he will mention ripe field, but never rye fields; tall trees, but never ash trees or sycamores. And he runs interminably on, piling one faint image over another till they cease to convey any image whatever, and never once abrading the wall of sense.
"And so, while smaller men may make
the soft singing and the golden shake
with which the ripe fields greet the sun,
into the joys for which they run
tired lives into a broken mould,
and then renounce the joy and fold . . ."
And so for 268 lines, and this in a poem which is far from being his longest. The Neptune Hotel has twice this bulk. He writes with a fatal ease which leads him to dilate the matter of fifty or sixty lines into the three or four hundred verses of a poem as vast and as cluttered as an afternoon in a department store. His epics are crumbly and diffuse. There is only one of them—The Hochzeit of Hercules—which is held tightly together by the vigour of its fantasy. And good as this poem is, it lacks the qualities of his shorter pieces.
Here, where he confines himself to a page or two, there is no question of glibness or being diffuse. Week-end, Fables, Mrs H… the Lady from Babel. His poems like these are so frugal and so complete that it is impossible to dissect them into quotations. Their metres and images are fresh, their movement vigorous; they have a strangeness which is not according to the formula of Mr X, and hence they are more effective weapons against the Georgians than a dozen volumes of polemic.
However, these latter are unaware of the attack. Having finished their act they quit the stage in a dignified manner. Mr Sitwell rushes in to make a great bundle of their properties: moons, trees, rivers in spate, a cage of nightingales, with all of which he staggers into the wings. He returns with his own accessories, which include italianate landscapes, a hundred and one pasteboard harlequins, and a stuffed unicorn suitable for a hat rack. Press on the horn and he will stamp his silver hooves. The stage is too full of furniture and well-dressed people, most of whom are bores. A conversation dies in euphuisms. . . . Now Mr Sitwell grows excited. He leaps into the wings and drags out new properties: clowns, billboards, subways. The play continues. It has flashes of a new brilliance, but it is "talky and unreal"; in general it bears a surprising resemblance to the comedy of the Georgians. The audience yawns. There is too much scenery which, though freshly painted, remains painted scenery. The more it changes the more it stays the same. . . . A man is the stature of his enemies. Nobody calls the Georgian poets gigantic. By force of combatting them Mr Sitwell has assumed their likeness, but not in all respects. The Georgians were dull, and yet with an effort they were readable. It takes someone more clever to be profoundly boring.