The Gothick North : a study of mediæval life, art, and thought

Front matter

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SACHEVERELL SITWELL

$5.00

Contents

PREFACE I BOOK I. THE VISIT OF THE GYPSIES I. CuHoosinc A SUBJECT 7 II. Across THE ComMMon 20 Ill. A First Sketcu 37 IV. A CasTLE AND AN ABBEY 71 V. THe Visit oF THE GYPSIES 98 NotTEs 151 BOOK II. THESE SAD RUINS I. DIALOGUE IN THE APPLE-Woop 157 II. THese Sap Ruins 225 III. Sresta 241 IV. Ar tHE Pray 246 V. CasEMENT AND GUITAR 257 VI. Love Scene 264 VII. Eprtocure 281 VIII. Lire 1n tHE Dean STREET 296 Notes 305 BOOK III. THE FAIR-HAIRED VICTORY I. MonasTERIES 309 II. Tue Farr-Harrep Victory 390 III. Finae 430 Notes 445

INDEX 451 i, a aH dy a h ive

4) me nd ae py

Preface

Tue subject of this book has so vast a complexity that two principles have been easy to satisfy: that the things discussed should be non-Italian, and that they should be remote from ordinary experience and not too painfully present to the eyes. But this book, which does not pretend to be a treatise upon mediaeval art, has at least other intentions than that it should merely extol the strange and the unfamiliar.

The trend of taste has now altogether set in against the period in which my scenes are placed. So many books of a purely technical interest have been written upon churches that it is nearly impossible to consider their merit away from the massed opinions and facts in which they are embedded. Indeed, the strained and fidgety bulk of these huge affairs has made their beauty a little repellent in the eyes of our contemporaries. Such familiarities of France and England have been scrupulously avoided in these pages. But even the Moorish Alhambra, that typical instance of the elder discrimination, is denied its beauty by this present generation, and poet, or painter, is more likely to tread in his fancy the banks of the Congo than those filigree courts and coffered cloisters of Granada.

“¢ At length burst in the argent revelry, With plume, tiara, and all rich array, Numerous as shadows haunting fairtly The brain new stuff’d, in youth, with triumphs gay Of old romance.”

Now this shock, this revelation, bursts upon the poet’s brain from some other quarter. Empty shrines and deserted fanes have nearly lost any hold they ever had upon the imagination.

Perhaps the motive of my pages has been sufficiently set

2 PREFACE forth in these opening words, but the method and manner employed may call for some explanation. The writing of this book entailed a delightful, if terrible, imprisonment in the past, and it is notoriously difficult to give life to any antiquity older than living memory. To take the supreme masterpiece of historical reconstruction, Flaubert’s ‘‘ Salammbo,” it can be argued that the author’s intentions and genius would have been better suited if the book had lacked characters. Matho and Spendius are nonentities ; Salammbo has purposely, inevitably, no individuality ; only Hanno has force and personality. The book would have been better kept as an essay; and, best of all, as a film. The persons with whom Flaubert enlivened his study and seclusion in that African past meant little to him; they had no contingency to himself.

In my book, then, I have called into being characters from our own present lives, using them to give argument to my purpose. But their old-fashioned point of view, and their association with my childhood, places them half-way into the past, for, after all, someone living only two years before one’s birth is as distant from one as Pharaoh. This problem of what is dead and what is alive prompted all contemporary incident in this book, and led me to write its fictional and imagined chapters.

It has fallen easily and naturally into three volumes. First of all, a preliminary survey of what subjects suggested themselves to me shows my eventual choice out of those many possibilities. Then follow the history and introduction of my two characters. After this I am shown at work on the first shaping of my facts and ideas, and in the course of this investigation I catch up with the characters and meet them again while travelling round on my search for material. Finally, the last chapter of this volume represents the fruits of the journey on which I met them. This constitutes, in fact, part of the kernel and principle of the whole book.

The second volume, soon to be published, is separate and divisible, taking the form, practically, of a novel. In the third volume, the final instalments of my Gothick subject are given, and the characters are assembled for me to say farewell to them.

PREFACE 3

The Notes at the end of each volume give further information, where required, upon any buildings, pictures, or tapestries, mentioned.

In those chapters where the book deals with tapestries and miniatures the wealth of examples to choose from is so overwhelming that the most practicable course has been to select for discussion a very few instances of particular beauty. In the latter case the Library of the British Museum has been the most easily available centre of study. With tapestries, were it not for three books, my remarks could never have taken their present form, for lack of information. These books are ‘‘ The History of Tapestry,” by W. J. Thomson, London, 1906, and two books by George Leland Hunter, “ Tapestries: their Origin, History and Renaissance,” John Lane, 1912, and “ The Practical Book of Tapestries,” Lippincott, 1925. It is also necessary to explain my spelling of the word “‘ Gothic ” as “ Gothick.” This has been because the former word has now become so hackneyed as no longer to possess the character it originally implied, and so I have reverted to the older spelling of Walpole’s time. In the last place, I must plead poetic licence for appearing in person, during Chapter IV, on one and the same day, at such widely separate places as the Chateau d’O, near Falaise in Normandy, and the Abbey of Vézelay in Burgundy.

In the chapter called “ The Visit of the Gypsies,” which is meant to be an interpretation of tapestry, its beauties, its subjects, and the admirations of both maker and client, the concluding episode is an attempt to show the effect that music would have on a world full of every kind of beauty except this. For such purpose a tapestry called ‘The Visit of the Gypsies” is made use of by me, but it has also been the occasion for an act of literary homage on my part. Something like eight, or ten, pages of my narrativ e are copied down from “ Die Zigeuner und Thre Musik in Ungarn,” a book on Gypsy music by Liszt. I have taken them directly from the English version of Mr. Edwin Evans, senior, lately published by William Reeves, of London. This book, by the greatest virtuoso who ever lived, has passages of extraordinary interest and literary value, separated, since he

4 PREFACE did not know how to put a book together, by many tedious and dreary paragraphs. I have tried to group together his finest passages, at the same time giving them a coherent form which the author has not quite achieved. I am a fervent partisan of this master, and my fantasy upon his themes has been the most delightful labour to me, for, not having the gift of music, I am unable to lay hands upon any of the rest of his Protean output.

Having made these few necessary remarks, it only remains, now, to qualify the personal attitude of this book. In the writer’s opinion the direction of public affairs in the arts has lately been usurped to the exclusion of everyone else by the painter and the picture-critic. Undue prominence has been given to a profession that does not deserve it, as anyone will agree who saw a certain retrospective exhibition held in London last summer. The foremost English artists of our day showed their finest work, chosen from a decade of achievement, and the result would have disgraced an annual exhibition of Swiss art in the capital of a canton.

Dr. Burney, in his “ Musical Tour,” describes an encounter with Voltaire in the garden at Verney. Voltaire’s first remark, on learning that he was addressing an Englishman, was an inquiry as to what new poets there were. The same question, in the same words, was put to me at Fiume, in 1920, by the greatest literary artist of our time. So I am not alone in my conviction that what poets think, in the foremost land of poetry, is of more importance than the opinions of painters in a land that has hardly produced one. The truth is that, not painters, but architects and musicians are what the future needs, and what the future will produce, and the nearly cancelled réle of poet has its necessity where these two latter are concerned.

In all, I have been occupied upon this book for some two to two and a half years. The two characters who appear in it had an authentic existence and may still, for all I know, be living somewhere under their true names, which I have naturally not divulged to the public. Their presence was necessary in order to give the right perspective to this view of a writer engaged, over many months, upon a long book of this nature. By their pre-

PREFACE 5 sence, real or imagined, some of the hardships of living for too long in the dead past have been mitigated, if only by the deeper pathos of their own attitude of unquestioning reverence towards it. There would be no hardship if only that particular environment and no other was admired, but for one interested in many more bygone histories, and, above all, in the present lying before his eyes, that Frankish, or Gothick, Age had its imperfections. These, as well as its beauties, were the more easily realized in their company, or its supposition.

A preface, coming at the beginning of a book, is always the last part of it written. I believe, though, that anyone who reads only the first few pages of it will accept my statement that it has been written, not as a concatenation of facts, or to confute the learned, but for the exercise of other faculties, which not even the most prolific of poets can expect perpetually to bear fruit. If there is some hint of this, and a foreshadowing of the harvest I hope for, my delight in this toil will be sufficiently rewarded.

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