WYNDHAM LEWIS
265
something
to say for that much-maligned entity, the personality, at
least so far as artist rather than scientist is concerned:
I do not mean an individualist abortion, bellowing that it wants
at all costs to "express" itself, and feverishly answering the advertise–
ment of the quack who promises to develop such things overnight.
I mean only a constancy and consistency in being, as concretely as
possible,
one thing
-
at peace with itself, if not with the outer
world, though that is likely to follow after an interval of struggle....
Such a defense seems in part prophetic of the kind of coming to
terms with self Eliot was to achieve in
Four Quartets.
Lewis' defense of the self is of a piece with his rejection of what
he terms the "disbelief" theory of reading poetry as developed by
1.
A. Richards. As might be expected, the imaginative ability to con–
vert a poem's "truths" into mere "attitudes" and thus to enter into
a poem no matter what it
says,
accepting or at least obediently enter–
taining its doctrine, was a notion of the ideal reader that held no
interest for Lewis. Though he does not say it, one might speculate
that both Richards' disbelief theory and Eliot's impersonal one make
their strongest appeal to youthful readers, excited by the variety of
literature and not very sure about what their own selves look like,
or whether they even have selves. As the lines are drawn more firmly
(Lewis was fifty-one when he wrote this critique ) such imaginative
tolerance may begin to look like diffusion or dilettantism. Both Eliot
and Richards are expounding theories that do not promote the dif–
ficult attempt to be oneself, or to find out what that self may be.
For this reason Lewis must argue that Eliot's insistence on imperson–
ality
is really a trick, that there are only ways and ways of being
personal, and that one of them - a very subtle one - is to pretend
your poems have nothing to do with your "real" personality. Eliot's
position is a result, in Lewis' shrewd guess, of a theologically sensitive
poet'~
effort to separate the admirable from the unsatisfactory in his
personality, giving the former to art and perhaps - we may conjec–
ture - asking to be forgiven for the latter in life.
In a revealing passage of summary Lewis both articulates his
difference from Eliot and, incidentally, prefigures the increasingly
free-swinging character of his own fiction:
The personality is not, I think, quite the pariah it becomes in the
pages of Mr. Eliot: I do not believe in the anonymous, "imper-
