TARR.

The fact that Mr Wyndham Lewis is known as a draughtsman and painter is not of the least consequence to his standing as a prose writer. To treat his writing as an outlet for his superabundant vitality or a means on his part of satisfying intellectual passions and keeping his art healthy cannot lead to accurate criticism. His prose must be judged quite independently of his painting, he must be allowed the hypothesis of a dual creative personality. It would be quite another thing, of course, to find in his writing the evidences of a draughtsman's training - the training to respond to an ocular impression with the motion of a line on paper; the special xix reaction to vision and especially the development of the tactile sense, recognition of emotion by the physical strains and movements which are its basis.

It is already a commonplace to compare Lewis to Dostoevski, analogy fostered by Mr Lewis's explicit admiration for Dostoevski. The relationship is so apparent that we can all the more easily be mistaken in our analysis of it. To find the resemblance is nothing; several other contemporary novelists have obviously admired Dostoevski and the result is of no importance. Lewis has made such good use of Dostoevski, has commandeered him so efficiently for his purposes, that his differences from the Russian must be insisted upon. His mind is different, his method is different, his aims are different.

The method of Mr Lewis is in fact no more like that of Dostoevski, taking "Tarr" as a whole, than it is like that of Flaubert. The book does not comply with any of the accepted categories of fiction. It is not the extended conte (Cantelman's Spring Mate" is not on the pattern of either Turgenev or Mau-passant). It is not the elaboration of a double datum, as "Madame Bovary". From the standpoint of a Dostoevski novel "Tarr" needs filling out: so much of

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conscious
Dostoevski's effect is due to apparent pure receptivity, lack of selection,
to the irrelevances which merely happen and contribute imperceptibly to a
total impression. In contrast to Dostoevski, Lewis is impressively delib-
reate, frigid; his interest in his own personages is wholly intellectual.
This is a peculiar intellectuality, not kin to Flaubert; and perhaps inhu-
man would be a better word than frigid. Intelligence, however, is only a
part of Lewis's quality; it is united with a vigorous physical organism
which interests itself directly in sensation for its own sake. The direct
contact with the senses, perception of the world of immediate experience
with its own scale of values, is like Dostoevski; but there is always the
suggestion of a purely intellectual curiosity in the senses which will
disconcert many readers of the Russian novelist. And there is another
important quality, neither French nor Russian, which may disconcert them
still more. This is Humour.

Humour is distinctively English. No one can be so aware of the en-
vironment of Stupidity, as the Englishman; no other nationality perhaps
XXX provides so dense an environment as the English. The _intelligent_ &
Englishman is more aware of loneliness, has more reserves, than the man
of intelligence of any other nation. Wit is public, it is in the object;
humour (I am speaking only of real humour), is the instinctive attempt of
a sensitive mind to protect beauty against ugliness; and to protect itself
against stupidity. The older British humour is of this sort; in that great
but decadent humourist Dickens, and in some of his contemporaries it is on
the way to the imbecilities of "Punch". Mr Lewis's humour is near to Dick-
ens, but on the right side, for it is not too remote from Ben Jonson. In
"Tarr" it is by no means omnipresent. It XXXXXXXXXXXX turns up when
the movement is relaxed, it disappears when the action moves rapidly. The
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

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action is in places very rapid indeed; from the **kakka>kakka** blow given by Kreisler in the Cafe to the suicide is one uninterrupted movement. The awakening of Kreisler by the alarum-clock is as good as anything of the sort by Dostoevski; the feverish haste of the suit-case episode proceeds without a smile.

Bertha's impression of Kreisler is good in the same way:

> She saw side by side and unconnected the silent figure drawing her and the other one full of blindness and violence. Then there were two other figures, one getting up from the chair, yawning, and the present lazy one at the window - four in all, that she could not bring together somehow, each in a complete compartment of time of its own.

It is always with the appearance of Tarr, a very English figure, that Humour is apt to enter; whenever the situation is seen from Tarr's point of view. Humour invests him. He impressed you "as having inherited himself last week, and as under a great press of business to grasp the details and resources of the concern". Bertha's apartment, with the "repulsive shades of Islands of the Dead" is as it appeared to Tarr. Humour indeed *protects* Tarr from Bertha, from the less important Anastasya, from the Lipmann circle.

As a figure in the book, indeed, he is protected too well: "Tarr exalts life into a Comedy", but it remains *his* (private) comedy. In one scene, and that in contact with Kreisler, Tarr is *moved from* and *forced out of* his reserve into reality: the scene in which Tarr is forced out of Kreisler's bedroom. Here there is another point of contact with Dostoevski, in a variation on one of Dostoevski's best themes: Huniliation. This is one of the most important elements in human life, and one little exploited. Kreisler is a study in humiliation.

> I do not understand the "Times" when it remarks that the book "is a very brilliant *reductio ad absurdum* not only of its own characters, but of its own method". I am not sure that there is one method at all; or that there is not a different method for Tarr, for Kreisler, and for Bertha. It is absurd to attack the method which produces Kreisler and Bertha; they are permanent

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for literature. But there is an invisible conflict in progress all the time; between Tarr and Kreisler, to impose two different methods upon the book. We cannot say, therefore, that the form is perfect. In form, and in the actual writing, it is surpassed by "Cantelman's Spring Mate". And "Inferior Religions" remains in my opinion the most indubitable evidence of genius, the most powerful piece of imaginative thought, of anything Mr Lewis has written.

There can be no question of the importance of "Tarr". But it is only in part for a novel; *xxdxthe rest, Mr Lewis is a magician who compels our interest in himself; he is xxxxxx the most fascinating personality of our time, rather than a novelist. The artist, I believe, is more primitive as well as more civilised than his contemporaries, his experience is deeper than civilisation, and he only uses the phenomena of civilisation in expressing it. Primitive instants and the acquired habits of ages are confounded in the ordinary man. In the work of Mr Lewis we recognise the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave-man.