WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD
I.
A.
Richards' work, the "disbelief" or pseudo-statement theory of
poetry. These theories are related, Lewis argues: both Eliot and
Richards have been preoccupied with the meaning of "sincerity" in
poetry; both are deeply concerned with the problem of personality in
art. Eliot in particular "has paid a good deal of curious attention to
the sanctions required for the expression of the thinking subject in
verse and prose." This concern is understandable since Eliot has
purpose and personality about him; he is not simply exploiting one
style after another with an indifference to what is being said.
The passages quoted from the Tradition essay are two: one says
that the artist must continually extinguish what is idiosyncratic to his
personality and pu t himself in the service of a larger, more valuable
consciousness of the past; the other draws a hard line between art
and life by asserting that when the poet does his job correctly he is
expressing a medium rather than a personality. Lewis detects Pound's
influence in the historical piety of the first remark, but finds the piety
not quite so nobly impersonal or "classical" as it appears on the
surface. At this point he makes the teIIing remark about Pound's
preference of the scuffle in old Siena to the contemporary one in
Detroit ; so, even while Eliot invokes the historical sense which recog–
nizes not onIy the pastness of the past but also its presence, Lewis
makes the following important qualification: "But that past is, at the
best, seeing its proportions, very selective, and its 'presence' is at the
best ideal. You cannot purge it of the glamour of strange lands.
Strange times, after all,
are
strange lands, neither more nor less." It
is the possible alliance of this historical attitude with the romantic
temper that Lewis, still in his
Time and Western Man
mood, speaks
out against. He might well have gone on to mention "The Waste
Land" as a poetic indication of that temper, insofar as one cannot
agree with some commentators that the past
is
treated as skeptically
and disinterestedly as the present. Lewis is equally distrustful of
Eliot's insistence that the poet expresses a medium rather than a
personality.. The "scientist" pretensions of the Tradition essay are
brought out by a mischievous suggestion that it has a good deal in
common with Bertrand Russell's behaviorist account of the psyche
- surely not an account Eliot was anxious to support. More posi–
tively - and here the disagreement expresses itself most simply and
boldly - even in the dark days of the thirties there may still be
