5 - LITERARY CULTURE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Summary
Wyndham Lewis, A Discursive Exposition, by Hugh Gordon Porteus (Desmond Harmsworth)
Mr Porteus is a disciple. The worship of Wyndham Lewis is his (inferior?) religion; and one must not expect a devotee to be too critical of his divinity. He finds adequate praise difficult. Mr Lewis's satire is better than Dry den's: his style as good as Shakespeare's (p. 118). ‘I claim’, he says, ‘for Lewis, purely on the strength of his vision, a place in art beside the greatest masters of all time.’One can't say fairer than that.
But though criticism of Mr Lewis is too much to expect from the ecstatic Mr Porteus, we may test his standard of values, perhaps, by his remarks about less divine persons. For example: ‘Dr I. A. Richards, with tremendous ingenuity and patience, is attempting to reduce art to a set of scientific formulae.’ Joyce has ‘no central vision and a very limited field of invention’. These two remarks are, I think, sufficient to show the quality of Mr Porteus's sensibility.
Lewis's admirers usually admit that the master is careless. But, say they, how much he knows. His carelessness doesn't really matter. Mr Garman in the last number of Scrutiny implies that ‘slap-dash carelessness …mere transcription of other people's views,…and a proclivity to follow …any red herring’ are ‘inevitable adjuncts of a uniquely vigorous style and a mind more than usually well stocked and inquiring’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Selection from Scrutiny , pp. 131 - 159Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1968