Prose for Convalescents

THE HUNTERS AND THE HUNTED (314 pp.)--Sacheverell Sitwell--Macmillan ($4).

"It takes so little to be happy. . . . Now all I would wish, in this winter of the spirit, is to fall asleep and wake up in a luxury of light and warmth; not to have every morsel of coal dragged unwillingly from the bowels of the coal mine; not to have all food weighed and balanced up in calories, with so many million deaths anticipated, calmly, from cold and starvation; but to pass on to the light and warmth of life. . . ."

It is Sacheverell Sitwell, the youngest (he is 50) of England's three literary Sitwells, in melancholy mood.

"As I write, the winter owl is hooting; the grass is numb and cold. No. The light and warmth must come from within now, more than ever before. . . . There are but few who have saved their matches. And they are poets, painters, writers, not men of science. . . ."

There were times when the world was happier, when there was a carefree intentness, an untroubled devotion to labor or play or art, and when such scenes and thoughts had no great place in life. The years before World War I seem to Sacheverell Sitwell to have been such a period--children playing at the seashore, a "goat-carriage" drawn up beside the bandstand, waking in the morning with the music of a new waltz ringing in one's ears.

Kindly, Cynical. Seven years ago Sacheverell Sitwell and his brother Osbert and sister Edith sued for libel (and won) when London's Reynolds News declared that oblivion had claimed them and "they are remembered with kindly, if slightly cynical, smiles." Sacheverell Sitwell's latest reminiscences make it clear that the comment hurt. But it is a whole school of writing, or even a whole civilization, that is remembered with a kindly and cynical smile, and The Hunters and the Hunted suggests that there were values within it which the present might consider before consigning it to oblivion.

The Hunters and the Hunted is a quiet book of comment on art and literature and history and birds--on whatever comes to Sacheverell Sitwell's well-stocked mind, in this winter of the spirit, that summons up recollections of richer creative times. It is an intellectual banquet like one of those he describes at the court of Constantine, where the dessert was brought in three chariots and raised to the table by ropes which descended from a ceiling of golden foliage.

Past & Present. It begins with an essay on Byzantine art and history, goes on to discuss the crowns of the Visigoth kings, "the most wonderful relics of the barbaric art," moves on to a thorough examination of medieval hunting, proceeds to a brilliant essay on Picasso, followed by a brief recollection of London literary and artistic life after World War I.

Much of this is wonderful in its learning and in the visions that it evokes. A theme links it together, a masque of some sort, but it is never very clear, and if readers do not puzzle over it they will find Sacheverell Sitwell's essays independently interesting, regardless of the thread by which he links them together. His writing is for a world that is exhausted and convalescent; it has something of the quality of the touch of fingers to the eyelid to soothe a headache.

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