Osbert Sitwell

Osbert Sitwell, 1919

Sir Francis Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell, Bt. (6 December 1892 – 4 May 1969) was an English poet, novelist, memoirist and controversialist on behalf of the arts. Osbert Sitwell, his brother Sacheverell and his sister Edith were among the most conspicuous figures in the British artistic world of the 1920s and 1930s.

Quotes

• The British bourgeoisie
  Is not born
  And does not die,
  But, if it is ill,
  It has a frightened look in its eyes.
  • "At the House of Mrs. Kinfoot", line 49 (1919).

• The Daily Herald is unkind.
  It has been horrid
  About my nice new war.
  I shall burn the Daily Herald.
  • "A Certain Statesman", The Daily Herald, July 22, 1919. Written in response to British officials banning British soldiers from reading The Daily Herald newspaper. Quoted in Blythe, Ronald, The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919-1940 Oxford University Press, 1983 (pg. 243).

• Our General
  Had to restore
  "Law-and-Order"
  At Amritsar;
  For he knew
  That if he failed
  To shoot
  Two thousand natives
  They would have laughed at him.
  To laugh at a General,
  Is, of course, very rude.
  • "Shaking Hands With Murder", in Douglas, Noel, (ed.) Poems of Revolt: A Twentieth Century Anthology (1924).

• Heroic figures are now obsolete,
  So Demigod and Devil find retreat
  In minds of children — as rare beasts and men,
  Elsewhere extinct, persist in hill or fen
  From man protected — where each form assumes
  Gigantic stature and intention, looms
  From wind-moved, twilight-woven histories:
  For them each flower teems with mysteries.
  • "When First the Poets Sung", line 34 (1927).

• For Poetry is the wisdom of the blood,
  That scarlet tree within, which has the power
  To make dull words bud forth and burst in flower.
  • "When First the Poets Sung", line 47.
  • These lines were repeatedly drawn on by Sitwell in his later works.

• Educ[ated]: during the holidays from Eton.
  • Entry in Who's Who (1929).

• How simple-minded of the Germans to imagine that we British could be cowed by the destruction of our ancient monuments! As though any havoc of the German bombs could possibly equal the things we have done ourselves!
  • Quoted by George Orwell in Tribune, December 31, 1943.
  • Referring to the Baedeker Blitz: a series of German air raids on English cities of historic and architectural interest.

• Everywhere men have unlocked the prisoners within, and from under the disguising skins the apes have leapt joyfully out.
  • Left Hand, Right Hand!, Introduction (1945).

• They loved him, I think, because, with all his merits, he showed them to be rich: looking at his portraits, they understood at last how rich they really were.
  • Left Hand, Right Hand!, Bk. II, ch. 6.
  • Of the portrait-painter John Singer Sargent's relationship with his clients.

• The Rich Man's Banquet, which was to last for a decade, had now begun: the feast, it was recognised, went to the greediest.
  • Left Hand, Right Hand!, Bk. II, ch. 6.
  • Of the Edwardian age.

• Hell has a climate, but no situation. It lies in the spirit, and not in space.
  • The Scarlet Tree, Bk. IV, ch. 1 (1946).

• The artist, like the idiot or clown, sits on the edge of the world, and a push may send him over it.
  • The Scarlet Tree, Bk. IV, ch. 2.

• The only difference between an artist and a lunatic is, perhaps, that the artist has the restraint or courtesy…to conceal the intensity of his obsession from all except those similarly afflicted.
  • Noble Essences, Bk. IX, ch. 7 (1950).