WYNDHAM
LEWIS
257
or on Faulkner and Hemingway soon afterwards, shows he had an
eye for the books that mattered. For that very reason, and particularly
in the cases of Pound, Eliot and Joyce, these books needed to be
subjected to a harder, more searching examination than they were
likely to get from book-reviewers. The following manifesto from the
introduction to
Men Without Art
contains nothing to which we don't
immediately assent today, at least at the level of lip-service. Writ–
ten in the early thirties, it reminds us that only through the efforts
of practicing literary critic-sociologists like Lewis, the
Scrutiny
group,
Orwell, Edmund Wilson, has it become the main assumption behind
our own criticism and teaching. The passage's debt to Richards'
Principles
and to Eliot's work in general, hardly needs remarking
upon:
All forms of art of a permanent order are intended not only to
please and to excite ... but to call into play the entire human
capacity - for sensation, reflection, imagination, and will. We judge
a work of art, ultimately, with reference to its capacity to effect this
total mobilization of our faculties.... Implicit in the serious work
of art will be found politics, theology, philosophy - in brief all the
great intellectual departments of the human consciousness; even the
Plain Reader is aware of that in theory. But what is not so clear
to very many people is that the most harmless piece of literary
entertainment ... is at all events politically and morally influential.
But Lewis' main interest was not in exploring what he goes on to call
"the whole barbarous system of conduct and judgment to match,
[that] is
implied
in every flick of the kinetic novelettes," and he turned
instead to the more difficult task of bringing out those subtler implica–
tions found in the serious work of his contemporaries.
THE MEN OF
1914
These qualities of Lewis' literary criticism can
be
noted when it
is at its most genial and flexible - when it deals with the other
members of what he called the "Men of 1914": Pound, Joyce and
Eliot. His remarks about this combination show as much warmth,
loyalty, even pride, as he ever gave to any group.3 An unabashed
3 See his retrospectively mellow essay on Pound (who was in St. Elizabeth's
at the time) in
An Examination of Ezra Pound
(New Directions, 1950) and
the fascinating account of Eliot in
T.
S.
Eliot : Symposium
(Chicago, 1949).
These essays, plus the anecdotes about Pound, Eliot and Joyce in
Blasting and
Bombardiering
(1937), temper but don't negate the earlier and harsher criticism
considered here.
