One Way Song
Men Without Art. By Wyndham Lewis. (Cassell. 10s. W.) IN the first two chapters of this book Mr. Wyndham Lewis, as a critic, is at his best. Messrs. Hemingway and Faulkner are evidently writers for whom he has respect and whom be can attack without losing his sense of .their proportions. Various sanitary and necessary ideas are ventilated through the other chapters, with all the draughtiness of Mr. Lewis's style. None is better than his analysis of a Hemingway hero, the character who lives a violent life in violent surroundings but who is essentially acted upon by events, and is incapable of acting or of thinking for himself. The essay entitled " The Greatest Satire is Non-Moral " should be read by everyone who imagines that a satiric writer should be a moralist, and the chapter on the " Terms Classical and Romantic " is a genuine contribution to that argument.
Moreover, the book is full of brilliant hits and amusing skirmishes. Two sentences on D. H. Lawrence have the air of tying Lawrence in a knot. " My objections to Mr. D. IL Lawrence were chiefly concerned with that regrettable habit of his incessantly to refer to.the intestinal billowing of ' dark' --subterranean passion. In his devotion to that romantic abdominal Within- he abandoned the sunlit pagan surface of the earth." His account of Mr. Eliot's attitude towards his own works—" Did the author of The Waste Land believe in 'God ? " " How can I say ? " drawls Mr. Eliot testily—is amusing. So is the burlesque account of Mrs. Woolf's essay " Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown."
' One would have little but admiration for Mr. Lewis's habit of successfully tying people into .knots were his own- criticism ' as rigid as one might expect from a writer with such high standards of taste, and such contempt for both the taste and the work of others. But it is distressing to find that Mr. Lewis himself occasionally, as it were, midi round, and makes a knot as fantastic as any of his victims. An excellent example of the Lewis knot is provided in the essay on Mrs. Woolf. Twelve well-filled pages of malice and ill-temper—often amusing examples of both—are devoted to attacking Mrs. Woolf for her remark that " we must reconcile ourselves to a season of • failures and fragments." It may be remembered that Mrs. Woolf, in her essay, " Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," attributes this fragmentariness of imaginative fiction to the .false lead given by her three great contemporaries—Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. Mr. Lewis quite pertinently (though not alto- . gether justly) remarks : " Anyone would suppose from what she says that at the time in question Trollope, Jane Austen,
Flaubert, Maupassant . &c., &c., &c., were- entirely inaccessible to this poor lost `Georgian' would-be novelist: it is as though she, Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy had been the only people in the world at the time." This common-sense point of view is doubtless salubrious, though it provides no real answer to Mrs. Woolf. But the end of the chapter is really surprising. After more hits at Miss . Sitwell, Mrs. Woolf, Mr. E. M. Forster and everything he labels Blooms- bury, Mr. Lewis concludes : " It has been with considerable shaking in my shoes that I have taken the cow by the horns. in this chapter. . . . For fifteen years I have subsisted in this to me suffocating atmosphere. I have felt very much a fish out of water." This is totally unexpected. Why should Mrs. Woolf seem to suffocate Mr. Lewis ? And, if he feels suffocated by Mrs. Woolf, why should he object to her being suffocated by Messrs. Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy ? He ought to be pleased. And where now are Tolstoy, Mau- passant, Flaubert, &e., &c. ?
The more one reads of this book the more such knots are tied, and do such questions occur to the reader. For instance, why, if Mr. Lewis makes violence a criterion of badness in novels, does he show such an admiration, in a later chapter, for the extremely violent novels of Mr. Wyndham Lewis ? Why, when in one chapter he ridicules the criticism of Mr. T. S. Eliot, is he content in later chapters to appropriate his critical conclusions ?
Except in the first two chapters, this book is almost lacking in any serious critical appraisement of any writer. Apart from his vigorous enemy attack, in the names of satire and the great without, there seems almost no constructive side to Mr. Lewis's criticism. He will occasionally throw a bouquet to some author—a few are thrown to Mr. Auden—but to say that Mr. Auden is " brilliant and interesting," and to misquote a line is not criticism. It would be easiest to assume that Mr. Lewis has no good opinion of any other living writer, but unfortunately there is one high light in ,this book which does little credit to his taste : " Mr. Roy Campbell,- in his Georgiad has produced a masterpiece of the satiric art, which may be placed beside the eighteenth-century pieces without its suffering by that proxi- mity." This in a book in which The Waste Land is referred to with contempt, as are also the novels of Mr. E. M. Forster, and in which Mrs. Woolf is attacked with a great deal of malice and without any show of evidence that Mr. Lewis has read either of her best works, The Wares or To the Lighthouse.
STEPHEN SPENDER.
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