Compelling Reason

by C. S. Lewis

  The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority. At the present moment it would be very unrealistic to overlook the importance of the latter. There is in all men a tendency (only corrigible by good training from without and persistent moral effort from within) to resent the existence of what is stronger, subtler or better than themselves. In uncorrected and brutal men this hardens into an implacable and disinterested hatred for every kind of excellence. The vocabulary of a period tells tales. There is reason to be alarmed at the immense vogue today of such words as ‘high-brow’, ‘up-stage’, ‘old school tie’, academic’, ‘smug’, and ‘complacent’. These words, as used today, are sores: one feels the poison throbbing in them.

  The kind of ‘democratic’ education which is already looming ahead is bad because it endeavours to propitiate evil passions, to appease envy. There are two reasons for not attempting this. In the first place, you will not succeed. Envy is insatiable. The more you concede to it the more it will demand. No attitude of humility which you can possibly adopt will propitiate a man with an inferiority complex. In the second place, you are trying to introduce equality where equality is fatal.

  Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers that to the careless. Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours. Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death.

  A truly democratic education – one which will preserve democracy – must be, in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly ‘high-brow’. In drawing up its curriculum it should always have chiefly in view the interests of the boy who wants to know and who can know. (With very few exceptions they are the same boy. The stupid boy, nearly always, is the boy who does not want to know.) It must, in a certain sense, subordinate the interests of the many to those of the few, and it must subordinate the school to the university. Only thus can it be a nursery of those first-class intellects without which neither a democracy nor any other State can thrive.

  ‘And what,’ you ask, ‘about the dull boy? What about our Tommy, who is so highly strung and doesn’t like doing sums and grammar? Is he to be brutally sacrificed to other people’s sons?’ I answer: dear Madam, you quite misunderstand Tommy’s real wishes and real interests. It is the ‘aristocratic’ system which will really give Tommy what he wants. If you let me have my way, Tommy will gravitate very comfortably to the bottom of the form; and there he will sit at the back of the room chewing caramels and conversing sotto voce with his peers, occasionally ragging and occasionally getting punished, and all the time imbibing that playfully intransigent attitude to authority which is our chief protection against England’s becoming a servile State. When he grows up he will not be a Porson;2 but the world will still have room for a great many more Tommies than Porsons. There are dozens of jobs (much better paid than the intellectual ones) in which he can be very useful and very happy. And one priceless benefit he will enjoy: he will know he’s not clever. The distinction between him and the great brains will have been clear to him ever since, in the playground, he punched the heads containing those great brains. He will have a certain, half amused respect for them. He will cheerfully admit that, though he could knock spots off them on the golf links, they know and do what he cannot. He will be a pillar of democracy. He will allow just the right amount of rope to those clever ones.

  But what you want to do is to take away from Tommy that whole free, private life as part of the everlasting opposition which is his whole desire. You have already robbed him of all real play by making games compulsory. Must you meddle further? When (during a Latin lesson really intended for his betters) he is contentedly whittling a piece of wood into a boat under the desk, must you come in to discover a ‘talent’ and pack him off to the woodcarving class, so that what hitherto was fun must become one more lesson? Do you think he will thank you? Half the charm of carving the boat lay in the fact that it involved a resistance to authority. Must you take that pleasure – a pleasure without which no true democracy can exist – away from him? Give him marks for his hobby, officialize it, finally fool the poor boy into the belief that what he is doing is just as clever ‘in its own way’ as real work? What do you think will come of it? When he gets out into the real world he is bound to discover the truth. He may be disappointed. Because you have turned this simple, wholesome creature into a coxcomb, he will resent those inferiorities which (but for you) would not have irked him at all. A mild pleasure in ragging, a determination not to be much interfered with, is a valuable brake on reckless planning and a valuable curb on the meddlesomeness of minor officials: envy, bleating ‘I’m as good as you’, is the hotbed of Fascism. You are going about to take away the one and foment the other. Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.

  8

  A DREAM (1944)

  I still think (with all respect to the Freudians) that it was the concourse of irritations during the day which was responsible for my dream.

  The day had begun badly with a letter from L. about his married sister. L.’s sister is going to have a baby in a few months; her first, and that at an age which causes some anxiety. And according to L. the state of the law – if ‘law’ is still the right word for it – is that his sister can get some domestic help only if she takes a job. She may try to nurse and care for her child provided she shoulders a burden of housework which will prevent her from doing so or kill her in the doing: or alternatively, she can get some help with the housework provided she herself takes a job which forces her to neglect the child.

  I sat down to write a letter to L. I pointed out to him that of course his sister’s case was very bad, but what could he expect? We were in the midst of a life and death struggle. The women who might have helped his sister had all been diverted to even more necessary work. I had just got thus far when the noise outside my window became so loud that I jumped up to see what it was.

  It was the W.A.A.F.1 It was the W.A.A.F, not using typewriters, nor mops, nor buckets, nor saucepans, nor pot-brushes, but holding a ceremonial parade. They had a band. They even had a girl who had been taught to imitate the antics of a peacetime Drum Major in the regular army. It is not, to my mind, the prettiest exercise in the world for the female body, but I must say she was doing it very well. You could see what endless pains and time had gone to her training. But at that moment my telephone rang.

  It was a call from W. W. is a man who works very long hours in a most necessary profession. The scantiness of his leisure and the rarity of his enjoyments gives a certain sacrosanctity to all one’s engagements with him: that is why I have had an evening with him on the first Wednesday of every month for more years than I can remember. It is a law of the Medes and Persians. He had rung up to say that he wouldn’t be able to come this Wednesday. He is in the Home Guard, and his platoon were all being turned out that evening (all after their day’s work) to practise – ceremonial slow marching. ‘What about Friday?’ I asked. No good; they were being paraded on Friday evening for compulsory attendance at a lecture on European affairs. ‘At least,’ said I, ‘I’ll see you at church on Sunday evening.’ Not a bit of it. His platoon – I happen to know that W. is the only Christian it contains – were being marched off to a different church, two miles away; a church to which W. has the strongest doctrinal objections. ‘But look here,’ I asked in my exasperation, ‘what the blazes has all this tomfoole
ry got to do with the purposes for which you originally joined the old L.D.V?’2 W., however, had rung off.

  The final blow fell that evening in Common Room. An influential person was present and I’m almost sure I heard him say, ‘Of course we shall retain some kind of conscription after the war; but it won’t necessarily have anything to do with the fighting services.’ It was then that I stole away to bed and had my dream.

  I dreamed that a number of us bought a ship and hired a crew and captain and went to sea. We called her the State. And a great storm arose and she began to make heavy weather of it, till at last there came a cry ‘All hands to the pumps – owners and all!’ We had too much sense to disobey the call and in less time than it takes to write the words we had all turned out, and allowed ourselves to be formed into squads at the pumps. Several emergency petty officers were appointed to teach us our work and keep us at it. In my dream I did not, even at the outset, greatly care for the look of some of these gentry; but at such a moment – the ship being nearly under – who could attend to a trifle like that? And we worked day and night at the pumps and very hard work we found it. And by the mercy of God we kept her afloat and kept her head on to it, till presently the weather improved.

  I don’t think that any of us expected the pumping squads to be dismissed there and then. We knew that the storm might not be really over and it was as well to be prepared for anything. We didn’t even grumble (or not much) when we found that parades were to be no fewer. What did break our hearts were the things the petty officers now began to do to us when they had us on parade. They taught us nothing about pumping or handling a rope or indeed anything that might help to save their lives or ours. Either there was nothing more to learn or the petty officers did not know it. They began to teach us all sorts of things – the history of shipbuilding, the habits of mermaids, how to dance the hornpipe and play the penny whistle and chew tobacco. For by this time the emergency petty officers (though the real crew laughed at them) had become so very, very nautical that they couldn’t open their mouths without saying ‘Shiver my timbers’ or ‘Avast’ or ‘Belay’.

  And then one day, in my dream, one of them let the cat out of the bag. We heard him say, ‘Of course we shall keep all these compulsory squads in being for the next voyage: but they won’t necessarily have anything to do with working the pumps. For, of course, shiver my timbers, we know there’ll never be another storm, d’you see? But having once got hold of these lubbers we’re not going to let them slip back again. Now’s our chance to make this the sort of ship we want.’

  But the emergency petty officers were doomed to disappointment. For the owners (that was ‘us’ in the dream, you understand) replied ‘What? Lose our freedom and not get security in return? Why, it was only for security we surrendered our freedom at all.’ And then someone cried, ‘Land in sight.’ And the owners with one accord took every one of the emergency petty officers by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his trousers and heaved the lot of them over the side. I protest that in my waking hours I would never have approved such an action. But the dreaming mind is regrettably immoral, and in the dream, when I saw all those meddling busy- bodies going plop-plop into the deep blue sea, I could do nothing but laugh.

  My punishment was that the laughter woke me up.

  9

  IS ENGLISH DOOMED? (1944)

  Great changes in the life of a nation often pass unnoticed. Probably few are aware that the serious study of English at English Universities is likely to become extinct. The death-warrant is not yet signed, but it has been made out. You may read it in the Norwood Report.1 A balanced scheme of education must try to avoid two evils. On the one hand the interests of those boys who will never reach a University must not be sacrificed by a curriculum based on academic requirements. On the other, the liberty of the University must not be destroyed by allowing the requirements of schoolboys to dictate its forms of study. It is into this second trap that the writers of the Report have fallen. Its authors are convinced that what they mean by ‘English’ can be supplied ‘by any teacher’ (p.). ‘Premature external examination’ in this subject is deprecated (p.); and I am not clear when, if ever, that moment of ‘maturity’ is supposed to arrive. English scholars are not wanted as teachers. Universities are to devise ‘a general honours degree involving English and … some other subject’ (p.); not because English studies will thus flourish, but to suit the schools.

  No instructed person to whom I have talked doubts that these proposals, if accepted, mean the end of English as an academic discipline. A subject in which there are no external examinations will lead to no State scholarships; one in which no school teachers are required will lead to no livelihoods. The door into academic English, and the door out of it, have both been bricked up. The English Faculty in every University thus becomes a faculty without students. At some of the largest Universities, no doubt, there will still be a Professor of English, as there is a Professor of Sanskrit or of Byzantine Greek, and four or five students (in a good year) may attend his lectures. But as an important element in the intellectual life of the country the thing will be dead. We may confidently hope, indeed, that English scholarship will survive abroad, notably in America and Germany; it will not survive here.

  There are some who will welcome this result. English faculties have a habit of being obtrusive. The strongly modernist and radical character of the Cambridge Tripos, and what has been called (with exaggeration) the disquietingly Christian flavour of the Oxford ‘Schools’, may each, in its different way, offend. Taken together, they are certainly a warning that if you want mass-produced orthodoxy you will be ill-advised to let the young study our national literature, for it is a realm where tout arrive; but I do not think the Report was inspired by such considerations. If it kills English scholarship it will probably have done so inadvertantly; its views are the result of honest misunderstanding. It believes that ‘any teacher’ in the course of teaching his own special subject can teach clear and logical English. The view would have been plausible when the oldest of those who made the Report were themselves at school. For them all teachers had been trained in the Classics. The results of the discipline on English style were not, it is true, so good as is often claimed, but it removed at least the worst barbarisms. Since then the Classics have almost been routed. Unless English, seriously studied, succeeds to their place, the English which ‘any teacher’ inculcates in the course of teaching something else will be at best the reflection of his favourite newspaper and at worst the technical jargon of his own subject.

  The danger is lest the views of the Report should be generally approved (as they were possibly formed) under a misunderstanding of the real nature of English scholarship. Many will think it reasonable to examine children in Geography or (Heaven help us!) in Divinity, yet not in English, on the ground that Geography and Divinity were never intended to entertain, whereas Literature was. The teaching of English Literature, in fact, is conceived simply as an aid to ‘appreciation’. And appreciation is, to be sure, a sine qua non. To have laughed at the jokes, shuddered at the tragedy, wept at the pathos – this is as necessary as to have learned grammar. But neither grammar nor appreciation is the ultimate End.

  The true aim of literary studies is to lift the student out of his provincialism by making him ‘the spectator’, if not of all, yet of much, ‘time and existence’. The student, or even the schoolboy, who has been brought by good (and therefore mutually disagreeing) teachers to meet the past where alone the past still lives, is taken out of the narrowness of his own age and class into a more public world. He is learning the true Phaenomenologie des Geistes; discovering what varieties there are in Man. ‘History’ alone will not do, for it studies the past mainly in secondary authorities. It is possible to ‘do History’ for years without knowing at the end what it felt like to be an Anglo-Saxon eorl, a cavalier, an eighteenth-century country gentleman. The gold behind the paper currency is to be found, almost exclusively, in literature. In it lies deliv
erance from the tyranny of generalizations and catchwords. Its students know (for example) what diverse realities – Launcelot, Baron Bradwardine, Mulvaney2 – hide behind the word militarism. If I regard the English Faculties at our Universities as the chief guardians (under modern conditions) of the Humanities, I may doubtless be misled by partiality for studies to which I owe so much; yet in a way I am well placed for judging. I have been pupil and teacher alike in Literae Humaniores, pupil and teacher alike in English; in the History School (I confess) teacher only. If anyone said that English was now the most liberal – and liberating – discipline of the three, I should not find it easy to contradict him.

  ‘In this time, place, and fortune,’ said Sidney’s Musidorus, ‘it is lawfull for us to speake gloriously’ – for he spoke in the condemned cell.3 If England, departing from the practice of Greece and Rome, is about to banish the systematic study of her own literature, it is an honest pride to remember before the blow falls what fruits that study has borne during its short existence. They challenge comparison with those of any discipline whatever. We have lived scarcely a hundred years, we English scholars. In that time we have given our country the greatest dictionary in the world. We have put into print a vast body of mediaeval literature hitherto imprisoned in manuscript. We have established the text of Shakespeare. We have interpreted that of Chaucer. We have transmitted to our most recent poets the influence of our most ancient. We can claim as our own the rich humanity of Raleigh, the more astringent genius of W. P. Ker, the patient wisdom of R. W. Chambers, and (further back) such tough old giants as Skeat, Furnivall, York Powell, Joseph Wright. More recently at Cambridge we have begun an enquiry into the nature of literary experience which has no real precedent later than Aristotle. Most recently of all, at Oxford, we have (first of all Faculties in Universities) conducted an Examination for Englishmen now behind barbed wire in Germany. We felt, as we read and re-read the answers, which told of so many hours usefully and delightedly passed in prison, that the labour had been immensely worthwhile. Here, we thought, was an incontestable witness to the value, not simply of ‘appreciation’, but of a steady march down centuries of changing sentiment, thought, and manners. Here, we thought, was a good augury for the future. We did not yet know that our prize, like Launcelot’s, was death.