WYNDHAM LEWIS
267
Remarks like this provide the distinctive note of Lewis' critiques and
give them a grace of tone which might even have recommended them
to the writers under fire.
A full account of Lewis' criticism would go on to deal with his
treatment (usually adverse) of modern novelists: Hemingway, Faulk–
ner, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence and others. But it would only confirm
what many no doubt feel to be the major limitation of this criticism
as it can be inferred from the exposures of Pound, Joyce and Eliot:
namely, does it not turn out to be the case that
all
writers but Wynd–
ham Lewis stand condemned as insufficiently classical? A good deal
has been made, rightly so, of Lewis' tendencies toward monomania;
yet he was himself conscious of the monomaniacal aspects of claiming
to be the only really sanely disenchanted author in a deluded world
of shams, illusionists and secret romantics in classical clothing. He
recognized and on one occasion forcefully admitted that the world
of twentieth-century disasters made a mockery of any particular
claims on a novelist or a poet's part to be practicing in the classical
tradition as opposed to his misguided fellow-practitioners: "To be
impersonal rather than personal; universal rather than provincial;
rational rather than a mere creature of feeling - these . . . are very
fine things indeed: but who possesses more than a tincture of them
today? ... With all of us - and to this there is no exception - there
are merely
degrees
of the opposite tendency, at present labeled 'ro–
mantic.''' The admission, from
Men Without Art,
is one of those
fine moments in which a satirist-critic suddenly includes himself in
instead of merely constructing hells for other people. Perhaps in this
light we can recall the sentence from
Paleface
I quoted at the
beginning of this piece: "Yet an art that is 'subjective' and can look
to no common factors of knowledge or feelings, and lean on no tradi–
tion, is exposed to the necessity . . . of instructing itself far morc
profoundly as to the origins of its impulses and the nature and history
of the formulas with which it ·works." Far more profoundly, that is,
than the "objective" CIassicai art no modern writer can pretend to.
The instruction of one's contemporaries, then, may be equally self–
instruction, and if in a sense his critical exposures of other writers
left Lewis high and dry, they may just as truly - on the evidence of
the novels he was to write - have inspired him to come to terms
with the formulas and impulses of his own fiction.
