Primitive Scenes and Festivals

Abstract

IF any reader should take this for a book of anthropology or archæology, aiming at completeness of treatment and full references to authorities, and feel himself rather upset by the general discursiveness of the whole, the author is not to blame. He tells us very plainly that he writes of what he has studied “with the eyes of the poet or the artist ;” the matter of the book is “a subject for a composition, to be judged by intrinsic, not by literal truth”. We have in fact a book in which a poet has set down the reactions he has had from his reading and one suspects from his travels, and the reader has only to ask himself if this aim of beauty has been achieved. The appeal is personal: to me it seems that Mr. Sitwell has here scored a fresh success in this very individual kind of writing which he had tried in several other of his books: the series, I think, began with “The Gothick North” in 1929. These “Primitive Scenes and Festivals” are culled over the widest range possible: in time from the days of Stonehenge to the present ; in space we are led by our guide from our own islands to Greece and North

Primitive Scenes and Festivals

By Sacheverell Sitwell. Pp. xii + 283 + 16 plates. (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1942.) 21s. net.