In The Wild Body Mr. Wyndham Lewis finds matter for his savage mirth, his "beast of humour," in the more glaring towns of the Spanish border, and the more brutish spots of Brittany. . . . When he devotes his inordinate vocabulary of scorn to express his Timon-like hatred of mortality by conjuring up the bestial or preposterous figures that give him a painful joy, the noise and fury are too much for me, who fall to thinking with what deadly quietness Swift undertook the assassination of his kind. Mr. Lewis, that hater of the Romantics, here exhibits himself as a Romantic of the worst French kind in his taste for monsters. His Bestre is as much a romantic grotesque as Quasimodo, and obscene as Quasimodo is not. Lashing himself into mirth, Mr. Lewis is a startling spectacle. Since, of course, his is no ordinary mind, one or two of these sketches have a tortured power, like some of the interlinear patterns in his other books that look like scorpions stinging themselves to death.