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EZRA POUND 123
Sir Edmund neglected to add that the English critics of weight
and judgment at that time consisted of Arnold Bennett, AE
(George Russell), and himself. Of these three dictators, dead set
against the tide in one of the most brilliant periods of literary
history, T. S. Eliot wrote in Horizon, March, 1941, "None of them
could lay claim to any authority as a critic."
By this he meant that not one of the three had written any body
of work that stated a system or theory of literary effort. Gosse's
reviews show a limitation of taste that is a parody of the term
"Victorian" when used in its derogatory sense.
When Oscar Wilde was sent to prison, not only was Gosse
among his loudest detractors, but he forbade his house to Robert
Ross, one of the few Wilde acquaintances who refused to denounce
his friend. Yet Gosse represented the final word in English criticism
for many years. With his associates, AE and Arnold Bennett, he
could make or break any writer. Pound saw that he was facing
the same situation that had driven him from the United States,
where The Blue Flower was the poetic gospel of the time.
Wyndham Lewis recounts the story of an expedition on which
Pound sent him and Eliot in the summer of 1920. Eliot was entrusted
with a mysterious bundle, heavily wrapped, which he was
admonished to deliver personally into Joyce's hands, and to no
one else. Although the emissaries were curious as to what the
package might contain, they did not open it. When they arrived in
Paris, and delivered it, they sat back impatiently while it was being
unwrapped. As he delved through many layers of paper, Joyce was
as mystified as the couriers. At last he brought up from the considerable
debris a pair of dilapidated brown shoes, which Pound
had thought he could wear.
At the time, says Lewis, Joyce was wearing a new pair of patent
leather pumps, which had been polished to a mirror-like smoothness.
7
Despite his life-long poverty, he had expensive tastes, and
whenever he obtained any money, he spent it on living well, a not
altogether reprehensible trait. His reputation for extravagance
sometimes hindered his friends from helping him, or at least
afforded them an excuse.
From 1914 through 1924, Pound's name was mentioned in al-