WYNDHAM
LEWIS
255
else. He wrote no measured essays in literary appreciation for its own
sake, and he had no interest in evaluating or ranking writers and
their books unless
it
was (as in his famous Taxi-Cab Driver Test for
"Fiction") to make a rough distinction between Art (Henry James)
and Banality (Huxley is his example). Nor was
his
criticism addressed
to
writers of the past. With the exception of
The Lion and the Fox,
a book in part about Shakespeare, though not really "on" Shake–
speare, and a chapter on Henry James in
Men Without Art,
he deals
exclusively with contemporaries, and even James is evoked mainly for
the light he throws on the novel in 1930. Indeed Lewis' criticism is
devoted almost entirely to the novel or other prose. He felt, one
gathers, that poetry was an admirable enough affair,
if
a good deal
less in touch with modern life than was prose; the result is that the
only modern poem he ever criticizes, and that only to point out Pound–
ian mannerisms, is
The Cantos.
Lewis was eager to close-read a
page from an Eliot essay, but had no interest in subjecting Eliot's
poetry to comparable scrutiny.
It
may well have been that he was
conservative (and self-protective) enough to feel that the critic of
a medium should be an interested practitioner in the medium he
criticizes, and he was hardly a poet,
One-Way Song
notwithstanding.
If
at first glance there seems to be a lack of disinterestedness
in this criticism, the lack doesn't seem so great when we look for
such disinterestedness in the work of his best critical contemporaries.
Admittedly there is an idea, a principle to advance or condemn, lying
behind (usually not very far behind) every paragraph Lewis wrote
about Pound, Joyce or Eliot. But in anyone's list of the most valuable
critics of modern literature - a short one would include Eliot and
Leavis, perhaps Pound and D. H. Lawrence - where is the pure
intelligence operating with Arnoldian objectivity to see the object as
in itself it really is? Instead, we find powerful convictions about what
constitutes a healthy art and civilization, and a resultant concern with
whether a specific book or writer promotes that art and that civiliza–
tion. Lewis, if added to this group, takes his place in the unlikely
company of Pound and Lawrence, rather than Eliot and Leavis. The
critical achievement of the latter two is immense and indisputable;
compared to them, Pound and Lawrence sound like wild men, in–
clined on occasion to rant and to
mix
in foolish pronouncements with
their brilliantly unsystematic perceptions about literature. It is prob-
