The Gothick North
by Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1929. $5.00
To Ralph Adams Cram, architect and leading Gothic-American of our day, we are indebted for this graceful miniature of an attractive book.
THIS is a curious book and very original in its method. A shadowy but highly colored presentment of something of the real (or probable) quality of the mediaeval life of the fair-haired peoples of Northern Europe and England, interpreted, not through cathedrals and other works of art, but through tapestries, miniature painting, heraldry, which is of course a much better way of getting at the actual norm of a culture. Mr. Sitwell is deft, sympathetic, almost in a way psychic. The reading of a tapestry becomes a sort of descriptive poem shot with music. The vision reveals itself, spacious, leisurely, unrolling like a slow-moving panorama evoked by some magic of Merlin or some other old enchanter out of Sir Thomas Malory or Chrétien de Troyes. Like Henry Adams in his Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, he has an almost passionate sympathy with the beauty and romance of mediævalism, while quite without any real sympathy for the energizing forces or their material embodiment in Church and State and the social fabric. Passing through the warp and woof of an old tapestry or the yellow parchment of an illuminated Book of Hours, he strolls through a magic country of castles and churches and cloisters in the midst of faint figures of knights and ladies, gypsies and huntsmen. And the reader goes with him and is refreshed by the journey. There are interludes, all more or less symbolic (one imagines this, otherwise some of them would be hard to explain), but there is always the return to the tapestry pattern with its faded figures and a curious sense as of horns faintly blowing and far away.
Of course it is all of the North, the accomplishments of the fair-haired race untouched by Mediterranean influence. This is why the book is ‘Gothick,’ with an explicit k; but, this being so, there is less of England than one would suppose, and nothing of the Rhineland or Scandinavia. Indeed, almost the most engaging part is the chapters devoted to Catalar Gothic and that amazing and almost unknown Manoelino style of Portugal.
If there is fault to be found with this rather opulent book it may be couched in Mr. Sitwell’s own phrase, where he speaks parenthetically of English country churches: ‘For the subject suffers from its profusion.’ Not that we would willingly lose any of it, ‘there being,’ as he continues, ‘so much work of first-rate quality that the second best is difficult to choose.’ Still it is hard to see how the book would suffer by a little condensation. Certainly the chapters ‘These Sad Ruins,’ ‘Siesta,’ ‘At the Play,’ ‘Casement and Guitar,’ and ‘Love Scene’ seem like a curious and alien interlude between very significant events — or does one wholly miss the subtlety of Mr. Sitwell’s art? It is quite probable. Still, they cover some seventy-five pages out of four hundred and fifty. Without them the book would have been a little more handy to hold, while, for this reviewer at least, there would have been an added grace of unity.
These criticisms may be captious. In any case, they do not militate against the charm and the distinction of a most unusual and welcome book, while they quite drop out of mind before so perfect a thing as the first ten pages of the concluding chapter, ‘Finale.’ It is many a long day since we have had as exquisite a piece of writing.
RALPH ADAMS CRAM