The Personal Heresy

by C. S. Lewis

  To communicate that pattern to us is part of the author’s work, and to enjoy it, part of the reader’s privilege. The more distinguished the pattern, the higher the privilege will be.

  The above statement anticipates my more detailed description of the second way in which personality can operate in literature. To that description I will now lead up by referring to Mr Lewis’s admirable account, already mentioned, of the sins of confounding the sphere of life with that of letters. In particular, he judges, austerely and convincingly, those who find in the illicit companionship of authors a compensation for their own social defects. Repelled by the defensive armour of their neighbours, they do the dirty on the defenceless shades of the illustrious dead. A horrible picture, yet let us not be too hasty, but judge an act by its fruit. I came across not long ago an instance of how a not dissimilar act, which by all the rules ought to have been disastrous, actually turned out well. One of the lessons, apparently incontrovertible, we have learnt from recent Shakespeare criticism is that it is illegitimate to allow to a dramatic character a life outside its context. A character exists for the work of art to which it belongs; and to tear it from its setting and then to romance about it is an act of wanton violence its creator could only have resented. Mr Lewis’s remarks on live characters and characters in literature show that he agrees. Nevertheless, from E. T.’s beautiful and restrained memoir of D. H. Lawrence we learn that it was precisely in this heinous way that he and the friends of his early manhood developed what was plainly a passionately felt and mentally fructifying love of literature. Without at all wishing to defend the sentimental debauch held by the maladjusted at the expense of the heroes of literature, I would suggest that such a debauch may have analogies with something legitimate and valuable.

  Mr Lewis, instancing ‘the rich, barren woman who loves her lap-dog too much and her neighbour too little’, makes out a good case for even the dog’s being a better substitute for good living than a dead poet can be. ‘You can do something for the Peke; and it can make some response to you. . . . Unless you hold beliefs which enable you to obey the colophons of the old books by praying for the authors’ souls, there is nothing you can do for a dead poet: and certainly he will do nothing for you.’ To retort that you can read the dead poet is a quibble, but I am not sure that he can do nothing for us. However vicious it may be to use a dead poet to caress yourself on, there may yet be included in most exercises of such vice at least a fraction of a more elevated and a more active feeling. The female failure who uses the idea of Shelley as a substitute husband may in the very act get an inkling of a man who died while in process of making something good out of a gifted but imperfect nature subjected to uncommon mundane difficulties. And from that inkling she may derive a little strength to make a better job of her own particular problems. In other words a poet’s personality may, through its being communicated in his art, exercise the homely function of setting an example. And indeed I believe that such a communication does in actual fact bring comfort and courage to people through this homely means. A recent critic of Milton, for instance, wrote of ‘“the debt of endless gratitude” that from my youth up I owe to Milton, whose property is to fortify the mind against “paralysing terrors” and false admirations; who is himself a far more romantic figure than Napoleon’. Perhaps Mr Lewis deprecates any reader’s romancing thus about Milton; yet, if the impression of Milton’s personality did in fact fortify the mind against paralysing terrors, is it not safer to forgo theory, however cogent apparently, and judge the tree by the fruit?

  It is a simple fact that most of us to-day cannot in the course of ordinary life gain contact with people of the quality of the major poets, or, if we do, that contact is liable to be interrupted or spoiled in a hundred ways. We may look on a great poet as a supreme technician in words or a good watcher of other folk, yet he is in addition one whose

  spirit’s bark is driven,

  Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

  Whose sails were never to the tempest given.

  And Milton spoke for all great poets when he said:

  No man apprehends what vice is as well as he who is truly virtuous; no man knows hell like him who converses most in heaven.

  The great poet is one who has inhabited heavens and hells unbearable by the ordinary man, who has survived his residence, and who, in telling us of his experiences, can by his example help the ordinary man to make a better job of dealing with the smaller heavens and hells through which he must pass.

  We complain of or rejoice in the elusiveness of Shakespeare’s personality. Yet we are quite certain that he dared more than most men in his meditations on human fate, that he went so far as to imperil his mental equilibrium, but that having maintained it he reached a sanity richer than the normal. This personal triumph, so inspiriting to weaker men, can be seen not in this or that character or in this or that play, but emerges from the whole series. Another example of personal daring expressed in poetry is Baudelaire’s. There is no need to approve or condemn the realms he explored; of his courage and control in exploring them there can be no doubt. With Achilles wondering at Priam’s courage in coming to beg Hector’s body we are impelled to say,

  ἆ δείλ’, ἦ δὴ πολλὰ ϰάϰ’ ἄνσχεο σὸν ϰατὰ θυμόν,

  πῶς ἒτλης ἐπὶ νηας ’Αχαιῶν ἐλθέμεν οἶος;

  And though Baudelaire offers little inducement to others to follow his own particular line of exploration, his example may generate courage in other directions.

  This talk of courage reminds me of some of Mr Lewis’s analogies in his first essay. He puts the question of personality in terms of hunting or scouting. Admitting that the courage of the hunter or scout is important, he insists on keeping the quest separate from the courage that urges on the seeker.

  Even the reports of two scouts in war differ, and that with a difference traceable to personality: for the brave man goes farther and sees more; but the value of his report by no means consists in the fact that the intelligence officer, while he receives it, has the pleasure of meeting a brave man.

  We agree in taking account of the courage; but I disagree over the whole analogy. Poetry is more complex than scouting, and what the poet brings back to us is both his report and the assurance of his own courage: the two sometimes inextricably interlocked.

  Nor is it only the great adventurers among the poets who help us, through expressing their personalities. In life we sometimes meet people, not necessarily possessing any special gifts, who have made a quite exceptionally good job of their opportunities. In spite of shortcomings, difficulties, privations, or what not, they have made what we call a success of life. They have used all the material to hand and have arranged it in such a way as to give it the greatest possible significance. Once again the example of such people is very strong; to have known one of them may be a permanent influence on a man’s life. Now some of the poets affect us in that way through their poetry. Andrew Marvell, for instance; writing on whom Mr Eliot ended his essay with the words, c’était une belle âme, comme on ne fait plus à Londres, and that after protesting the impersonality of Marvell’s wit. Herrick, whom we have already discussed in a different context, is another. There is nothing very personal about a great many of Herrick’s poems, yet one of the chief values of his poetry in bulk is the personality it reveals. Herrick did not have a particularly easy life. We are far too ready to assume that he was by instinct the adoring child of the English country-side and to mitigate the brutal rusticity of seventeenth-century Devon with unconscious memories of the comforts of Victorian Torquay. To break himself in to remote Devon after enjoying the best literary society in London was a tough job. But he succeeded in it; and it is this personal triumph, this resolute acquiescence in picking and enjoying the restricted range of rosebuds within his reach without wasting his energies in lamenting those beyond it, that give a general significance to his poetry. One of the main meanings of these apparently
fragile and idyllic creations is a personal triumph of self-adjustment.

  This should suffice to show the second class of thing I mean by personality in literature. And I should be very glad to think that Mr Lewis agreed that something of the sort is expressible in poetry, though I mind very little if he objects to applying the terms personal and personality to it.

  I want now to guard myself against the charge of exaggerating the above element. First, let me admit that there are poets in whom the example of personality counts for very little; and the one that at once occurs to me is Tennyson. Tennyson was neither supremely courageous in meditating on human fate nor supremely skilful in making full use of his own gifts and the accidents of his life. Yet in his greatest work, in The Lady of Shalott, Tithonas, and parts of In Memoriam and Maud for instance, he tells us things that excite us and which we have not heard before. But he appears, as a vehicle of poetry, unusually passive. Or we can say that he had a superb unconscious which insisted from time to time on getting through, thanks of course to the pains he took to acquire a technical skill capable of meeting the demands likely to be made on it. Unfortunately, he came to trust his unconscious too little and he tried to check it rather than to follow its frightening vagaries. The result is that Tennyson did not make a very good job of himself and we tend to shrink from his personality.

  Personality, then, has at least these two functions in literature. (It is the author’s personality I speak of; that of the characters in a play or novel I do not distinguish from other counters or symbols.) It can benefit the reader, first by submitting itself to a special kind of sharing, and second by presenting him with a variety of example. Though personality seems to me to be important in both its functions, the last thing I wish to do is to limit literature to the task of expressing personality, even when it is most successful in just this task.

  I wrote at the beginning of this paper that I thought Mr Lewis and I were beginning to approximate our opinions. But I am afraid that in actual fact I have spent most of my time in differing. All the same it is quite possible that we differ more in phraseology than in substance; and I shall now suggest that the word personality has for us different connotations and that if allowance could be made for these we might end in substantial agreement. But it remains possible that our differences are more fundamental and that they go beyond the question of personality altogether. And I shall end by trying to describe and to face that possibility.

  There is no doubt that for Mr Lewis the word personality is primarily associated with the variegated details of living, while for me it is something more vague and more generalized. The result is that I apply personality to a class of feelings for which Mr Lewis has another name. The mental pattern I have described is something more embryonic than the clear-cut, perfected details he naturally thinks of. Examining that pattern, that set of predispositions, he would probably find all sorts of general impulses which he would consider to belong to the species or to the nation rather than to the person. And I freely admit that to say where group-consciousness leaves off and the individual consciousness begins must be quite impossible. But if in my notion of personality I include a larger share of group-consciousness than he does, that does not mean that we are in serious disagreement. We may have similar notions about literature, only describe them differently.

  I am now curious to know whether Mr Lewis finds my opinions, as restated, any more acceptable and whether he thinks our main subject of dispute can be resolved into no more than a matter of terminology. I hope, naturally, we may find ourselves agreeing after all. But whether or not we intend to approximate, the argument, if it is to continue, ought now, I think, to take another turn. Mr Lewis has said much about what literature is not, little about what it is. If it does not express the author’s personality, should he not tell us what it does express? He has indeed dropped a few hints. I await eagerly his expansion of them.

  V

  In his last essay Dr Tillyard is kind enough to express a hope that our controversy is gradually bringing us into agreement. In certain respects I think it is; and even where agreement may not be possible, the grounds of disagreement are being made clearer. To this second process Dr Tillyard makes an important contribution when he reminds us, as theorists are too seldom reminded, how much our doctrines owe to real differences of imaginative experience rooted in our ‘mental tempers’ (or perhaps even in our physiology) which can be unmasked only by ‘frank personal testimony’.1 At the outset I wish to put on record my personal testimony to a character in my experience which may possibly differentiate it from Dr Tillyard’s. On pp. 91 and 92 above Dr Tillyard invites us to distinguish three possible senses of the word unique. The first means ‘improbability of recurrence’; the second an experience ‘allying us however distantly to the poet and the mystic’. The third, illustrated by a delightful quotation from Jane Austen, means a quality found only in works of art and in people. Now it is a mere matter of fact that I find no such distinction in my own experience. I trust no one will call me a mystic—a name, in its strict theological sense, too high, and in its popular use (I hope) too vague, to describe me; but it appears to me that all sorts of objects, animate and inanimate, natural and artificial, give me just that kind of experience which Dr Tillyard describes under his third species of uniqueness. The rains and sunsets that I spoke of seem to me unique not only by being irrecoverable; they seem, like Jane Austen’s niece, ‘so odd and all the time so perfectly natural’. They respond, like chords of music, to some want within, unnoticed till the moment of its fulfillment. They fit the senses and imagination like an old glove. Momentary as they are, they seem (I hardly know how to say it) to have been prepared from all eternity for their precise place in the symphony of things—to be parts of a score rather than cross-sections of a process. Nor does ‘kinship’ and ‘sharing’ lack, in the only sense in which I find them in works of art. Does not ‘our heart fly into the breast of the bird’? Do we not almost feel the strain of fibres as a tree bends to the wind? I have passed from statements to questions because, as usual, when we actually face it, any fundamental difference between our own experience and that of a fellow man refuses to be believed. There must be some mistake: one or both of us must be saying what he does not mean; and I for my part submit that a false exaltation of poetry has led Dr Tillyard to overlook that downright interestingness in the real world which meets, or even besieges, him daily whenever he is not ill, or tired, or preoccupied. One of my chief grievances against the Personal Heresy and its inevitable attendant Poetolatry, is that disparagement of common things and common men which they induce. If we can open our eyes on poetry only by closing them on the universe, then ‘would we had never seene Wertenberge, never read booke!’

  For this reason I am troubled when Dr Tillyard speaks of the awful or enchanting realities mentioned by the poets as ‘counters or symbols’. ‘Symbols’ I do not object to; but the suggestion is that all symbols are of the same order as counters—that a beautiful woman (or for that matter a glow-worm) has no value in herself, receives all her significance from the poets, as little disks of coloured bone receive their value from the arbitrary agreement of the gamblers. Two kinds of symbol must surely be distinguished. The algebraical symbol comes naked into the world of mathematics and is clothed with value by its masters. A poetic symbol—like the Rose, for Love, in Guillaume de Lorris—comes trailing clouds of glory from the real world, clouds whose shape and colour largely determine and explain its poetic use. In an equation, x and y will do as well as a and b; but the Romance of the Rose could not, without loss, be re-written as the Romance of the Onion, and if a man did not see why, we could only send him back to the real world to study roses, onions, and love, all of them still untouched by poetry, still raw. Of these distinctions I do not for one moment suppose that Dr Tillyard is ignorant; but I think his language encourages us to neglect them.

  These preliminaries are important for the theory of poetry which I am presently going to propound in answer to
the challenge delivered at the end of Dr Tillyard’s essay; but before proceeding to that theory I must deal with a few minor disagreements and agreements. Dr Tillyard has given the poet’s personality two functions: ‘it can benefit the reader by a special kind of sharing and by presenting him with a variety of examples’. About the exemplary function—illustrated by Dr Tillyard in his humorous, yet charitable, picture of the ‘female failure’ and her Shelley—I do not think we need differ. A poet is, of course, a man, and any man may be used as an example by those who admire him. And I will even admit that a poet may be more exemplary, ceteris paribus, than another man; for though I do not think that poetry consists in self-expression, I am far from denying that much may be learnt of the poet’s self from his works and that his example may therefore reach many generations. What I cannot allow is that the poet exercises this function quâ poet; or that to follow his example is to use his poetry, quâ poetry. And this, I contend, is not a straw-splitting distinction. It is clear that many artefacts can be used for purposes for which they were not intended; and it is also clear that the examination of such accidental uses tells us nothing about the specific functions. You can make a poultice out of porridge or use a thin volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets to support a rickety table, but these facts seem to me quite irrelevant to the theory of cookery or the theory of poetry. You can use a poet, not as a poet, but as a saint or hero; and if your poet happens to have been a saintly or heroic man as well as a poet you may even be acting wisely. If there lives any man so destitute of all traditions human and divine and so unfortunate in his acquaintance that he can find no better example among the living or the dead than Shelley or Baudelaire, I no more blame him for following them than we blame a castaway on an island for making shift to use a pen-knife as a saw. But my pity will not induce me to say that pen-knives are made for sawing. That the poet, treated as saint or hero, is similarly used for an alien purpose, may easily be seen by asking whether our submission to his example varies in proportion to our poetical appreciation; and I am sure it does not. If it did, I should think Irene a greater tragedy than Tamburlaine and Lamb a better poet than Coleridge. A young woman, or a young man either, may use Shelley as Dr Tillyard suggests; they may use him also for learning the English language or Greek mythology, or even spelling. But all these uses surely fall outside the theory of poetry.