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But where once he knew all the answers, he is less certain now. The
urgency of the questions is underscored by his hesitation. And although
he is being unfair to himself when he says
Lost the archaic dawn wherein we started,
The appetite for wholeness : now rue prize
Half-loav es, half-truths-enough for the half-hearted,
it is true that he has learned the kind of humility that I find, less moving
becau{e less difficultly won, in Norman Nicholson. The program of action
stated in 'Self-criticism and Answer' may not be world-shaking; but it
might very well become man-making, which I take to be a higher thing.
'Nothing is innocent now but to act for life's sake,' he writes elsewhere.
To act.
In the act of decision only,
In the hearts cleared for action like lovers naked
For love,
speculation and theory seem as irrelevant as games. The 'endemic guilt'
must be purged away; and in the face of this terrible necessity, when
Your politicians pray silence
For the ribald trumpeter,
The falsetto crook, the twitching
Unappeasable dictator,
contemplation is too dear an indulgence. The ·necessary act is self- rec–
ognition, the willingness to 'risk the javelin dive / And pierce reflection's
heart, and come alive.' Nothing is promised; on the contrary, Mr. Lewis,
once so sanguine, seems to have become what Koestler calls a 'short-term
pessimist,' hopeful perhaps of ultimate good, but concerned chiefly with
the immediate evil. His contempt is good for us because it is directed
against those perfunctory virtues of ours which we take for granted: our
liberalism, our tolerance, our easy faith in ourselves as enlightened
people.
Technically these new poems are as competent as the old. It is
easy in reading Mr. Lewis to be fooled by the apparently effortless versi–
fication and the down-to-earth quality of the diction. Of course he has
his lapses : read his poem on Lidice, which is better than Miss Millay's
whooping-among-the-ruins only because there is less of it. But he is a
conscious and even elaborate technician. Indeed, the most ambitious
poem in this book-'The Nabara,' a narrative of the Spanish Civil War
-is ruined by virtuosity: the long stanzas, the intricate rimes, the loving
embellishments of the poet's craft, paralyze the action; the poem is an
expensive failure. But this is exceptional. In general the poems are highly
wrought and cast in a variety of forms-there are even some good
Sapphics on page 88-, and at their best (as in the sonnet sequence
'0 Dreams, 0 Destinations') I do not see how they could be improved.
