The Personal Heresy

by C. S. Lewis

  Each of these two kinds of language is admirable for what it does, not for what it fails to do. It is no advantage to philosophic language that it fails to reach the concrete, and no advantage to poetry that it cannot prove the existence of anything—any more than a man’s inability to suckle children is an advantage, or a woman’s inability to bowl overarm. The fact that we cannot be philosophic and poetic in any high degree at the same moment is, I take it, an unmitigated evil. If there exist anywhere in the universe creatures as far above us as we are above the dogs, presumably their language combines at every moment the clarity and cogency of Euclid with the warmth and solidity of Shakespeare. They can always in the same breath demonstrate that a thing is and present to you what it is. Again, though it is convenient to define things per differentiam, it is a logical blunder to suppose that the point of maximum differentiation between them always coincides with the greatest value. Of course, in a given treatise a poetical element of the wrong sort may spoil the argument, and an argument may spoil a given poem; but it is not true in general that the two kinds of composition are best when they are most unlike. The worst philosophers are often the most jejune, and the worst poets the most unreasonable. Locke and Poe are further apart than Plato and Dante.

  Hitherto we have succeeded only in defining poetic language; but language must be about something. You cannot just ‘say’, you must say this or that. It is time, therefore, to set down what little I can about the content of poetry. It will be convenient to remind ourselves that we took conversation as the common base on which all improved uses of language were raised. Returning to this, we can now proceed by elimination. Whatever in ordinary conversation is concerned with proving anything is clearly embryonic science or philosophy, and will not be part of the content of poetry. Again, whatever in a conversation has a practical purpose conditioned by the proximity of the speakers in space and time (‘Hand me the salt’—‘Don’t be angry’) will not find a place in that written and lasting poetry to which we usually give the name; though dramatic or fictional imitations of such speech may well occur in it. But when these obvious eliminations have been made, I fear that we can make no more. These two forms of conversation excepted, the truth seems to be that the number of things you can write poetry about is the same as the number of things you can talk about. Being a skill of utterance, it can be used to utter almost anything; to draw attention to (though not, of course, to demonstrate) a fact, to tell lies, to tell admitted fictions, to describe your own real or feigned emotions, to make jokes.

  For this reason many discussions about ‘Literature’—as if literature were a single homogeneous thing like water—are discussions about a nonentity. Poetry is not a low nor a lofty, a useful or a mischievous, a grave or a trivial, a ‘true’ or a ‘false’ activity, any more than ‘saying’ is. In that sense there is really no such thing as literature—only a crowd of people using concrete language as well as they can to talk about anything that happens to interest them. It differs sharply in this respect from an art like Music. You can, if you like, both make and hear a sonata without thinking of anything but sounds. But you cannot write or read one word of a poem by thinking only about poetry. The first note of the sonata has no necessary reference to anything beyond music; the first word of Paradise Lost (of) is from the very beginning the sign of a relation which exists outside that poem and outside poetry altogether. This is the necessary condition of an art of ‘saying’: you must say something.

  It follows that, in a certain sense, poetry is not an ‘Art’ at all. It is by art or skill that the poets contrive to utter concretely what they want to say; but the thing said is not ‘Art’—it is something more like a remark. The skill which went to the utterance of it has all the privileges of art; it is exempt (like plumbing or boot-blacking) from moral and logical criticism, and it is best judged by fellow artists. To claim similar immunities for the thing said is a confusion. I will let the plumber tell me how culpable his predecessor was in allowing my scullery to get flooded; I will not let him decide whether it is flooded, still less whether it ought to be.

  On the other hand, while it is thus useful to remember that poetry is an art of ‘saying’ we must beware of a misunderstanding. What the poet ‘says’ must not be identified with the apparent (i.e., the grammatical) propositions in his poem. This is the error which Dr I. A. Richards has so long and usefully combated—the error under which the late Professor Babbitt, though wise, wrote much of his Rousseau and Romanticism. The poet is not ‘saying’ that his soul is an enchanted boat. Poetry is an exploitation of language to convey the concrete; one of the means by which it does this is a free use of propositions which have logically only the remotest connexion with its real utterance. What it ‘says’ is the total, concrete experience it gives to the right reader—the πεπαιδευμένος. The means are art; the thing conveyed, said, or uttered is not. It is everybody’s business.

  It follows that there is an ambiguity in the expression ‘a great poet’. The skill of concrete utterance, as we have seen, can be used for almost any purpose. Fools use it to utter folly, wise men to utter wisdom, humorous men to make jokes, and vermin to utter poison. It can be used (like the telephone) by great men and little—by any one who can acquire the skill. This skill is, of course, a very difficult one but it can be acquired by men whose general level of capacity is low. The same is true of other highly difficult skills—a great surgeon, a great chess player, a great calculator, a great financier, may be by no means a great man. By a ‘great poet’ we may therefore mean one of two things. We may mean a great man—a man excelling others in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue—who is also a poet and who uses his poetical skill for the utterance of great things. On the other hand we may mean merely a man who is greatly a poet, who possesses this skill in a high or ‘great’ degree—as we speak of a great cricketer, a great walker, or even a great bore. A great bore need not be a great man, he need only be greatly boring. A man may show himself greatly poetical by using all the resources of the art of utterance to communicate something that is of no general interest at all. I say of ‘general’ interest because many worthless experiences may be as difficult to convey in their concrete entirety as valuable ones, and their conveyance may therefore be of technical interest to other artists.

  The reverence for ‘great poets’—pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti—is natural in periods when the art of poetry attracts great men. Every art, however, has its ups and downs. The schoolmaster was a slave in Rome and a potentate in Victorian England; the prostitute, an abject in the eighteenth century, was sometimes honoured in ancient Greece; the actor’s profession in the last years of Paganism reached depths from which it took centuries to recover. Similarly there are periods when poetry falls into inferior hands. Its practitioners, using their skill for trivial, perverse, or merely imbecile purposes, may nevertheless possess that skill in a high degree—may be ‘greatly poetical’. There is then a danger that they will claim and enjoy that reverence and authority which are due only to great men using poetry.

  It will naturally be asked, what, in my view, the true value of poetry is, and who the right judges are. Indeed, my admission that ‘great poetry’ means, in one of its senses, poetry by great men, may seem to lead us back to the personal heresy. But we have already explained that poetry does not take over from ordinary conversation any of those utterances whose value depends on the proximity of the speakers in space and time. It shares with conversation those utterances, and those only, whose value can survive detachment from their original social context: not the love-making and quarrelling, not the ‘contacts’, the friendships, and the affections, but on the contrary the stories, the jokes, the reflections. It preserves not primarily what excites love, but what contributes to amusement, entertainment, wisdom, or edification; in fact those parts of conversation which are worth repeating.

  It follows that the best judge of poetry is he who can best judge of human utterances, who can best say what is dull or inter
esting, what is stale or fresh, what edifies or corrupts, what gives delight or disgust. Of this ideal judge we can give no definition. He is simply Aristotle’s πεπαιδευμένος. This lame conclusion will, I fear, provoke a storm of derision, but we must not allow ourselves to be moved by it. For behind this derision lurks an absolutely fatal demand; the demand that there should be professional experts to classify poetry as there are professional chemists to classify chemicals. It is an attempt to strip the creature Man of one more prerogative, to hand something more over to his permanent civil servants. Whether we regard it as fortunate or unfortunate, the fact is that there is no essential qualification for criticism more definite than general wisdom and health of mind. To make such wisdom effective, many conditions may be necessary, such as a really good knowledge of the language and a wide experience of poetry.

  It is in virtue of the latter that poets—who are usually readers of poetry—may sometimes have a better chance, ceteris paribus, of being good critics than other men have. But they are exposed to their own dangers. The professional will ‘smell of the shop’; he will have the lop-sided sensibility of the expert and the expert’s tendency to consider the value of the thing done too little and the difficulty of the doing too much. It would, moreover, be a false delicacy to overlook the common interests, and also the disinterested cameraderie, which inevitably attach him to his own profession. This must specially be taken into account in an age when the old balance of power between poets, booksellers, critics, and readers has been overthrown—when 90 per cent of the readers are themselves poets, anxious candidates for admission to the dominant group, when poets are also anonymous reviewers, and perhaps editors and publishers. I do not mean to insult any one; I am not suggesting that poets are less scrupulous than any other profession, but only (in the light of much historical evidence) that they are not more scrupulous. Encouraged by poetolatry from without, and from within by the universal modern tendency to trusts and combines, to increasing efficiency, solidarity, and secrecy of organization, they would be men of heroic virtue if they remained perfectly unbiased critics. It is here that the much-abused academic critic can supply a corrective. He may have his own prejudices, but he is exempt from some temptations.

  Where the πεπαιδευμένoς is to be found may be indicated by the contrasted stories of Mr A and Mr B. Mr A had never read a line of poetry till he came to Oxford. There he suddenly found himself, on the strength of a few introductions, in a literary set. A world of first editions, ‘movements’, periodicals, and gossip about great contemporaries, burst on him with the suddenness of a tropic dawn. He became a reader of poetry in three weeks and a poet in six. He met one of the great. He saw himself in print. He is now a free-lance journalist, living in the heart of the movement, keeping well up to date, reading every one, meeting every one, reviewing every one, being reviewed by every one; and he knows, if possible, even more about the future of literature than about its present. Mr B, on the other hand, has never, I am afraid, read anything beyond the first page except because he liked it. He developed this habit at about the age of ten, and he had discovered most of the English poets, on wet days, before he was fifteen. He lived in an unliterary family and never dreamed that his taste for poetry was a ground for commendation. He has learned to like some of the moderns, but he reads only the ones he likes. I never could drive into his head the concept of ‘importance’ in poetry. He always wants to know if it is good, and whether I think he would enjoy it. He can’t read many reviews; indeed—if it is not incredible—he once found a favourable review of a book of his own too dull to finish. He is very ill informed. If I wanted to find out what is going on I should certainly ask Mr A. But in sheer criticism, Mr B is the man for my money.

  So much for the judges; what of the value? The truth is that the value of literature, as of other utterances, has always been pretty well understood by the great mass of readers. Of any utterance, whether conversational or poetical, our first demand is that it should be interesting. I am afraid we cannot make it more definite than that. It may be interesting for all sorts of reasons; because it is so funny, because it is so true, because it is so unexpected, or because it does just what we were expecting so well, because it carries us away from daily life into such fine regions of fantasy, or because it brings us back to our immediate surroundings with such a home-felt sense of reality. I know that different things interest different people. It cannot be helped. That is interesting simpliciter which interests the wise man. And in the second place, we demand that an utterance, besides entertaining, charming, or exciting us for the moment should have a desirable permanent effect on us if possible—should make us either happier, or wiser, or better. There is nothing ‘moral’ in the narrower sense about this, though morals come into it. It is all of a piece with what we want in other departments of life: a man wants his food to be nourishing as well as palatable, his games to be healthy as well as enjoyable, his wife to be a good companion and housekeeper as well as a pleasing sexual mate. I conclude, then, that the old critics were perfectly right when they demanded of literature the utile and the dolce, solas and doctryne, pleasure and profit. All attempts to produce a neater or more impressive scheme have, in my opinion, failed. The only two questions to ask about a poem, in the long run, are, firstly, whether it is interesting, enjoyable, attractive, and secondly, whether this enjoyment wears well and helps or hinders you towards all the other things you would like to enjoy, or do, or be.

  The value of a poem consisting in what it does to the readers, all questions about the poet’s own attitude to his utterance are irrelevant. The question of his ‘sincerity’ or ‘disinterestedness’ should be forever banished from criticism. The dyslogistic terms insincere, spurious, bogus, sham, &c., are mere emotive noises, signifying that the speaker is unwilling to keep silence, but has not yet discovered what is wrong with the poem. Unable to answer the real question, ‘What, in this series of words, excites a feeling of hostility which prevents enjoyment?’ he invents answers to the irrelevant question, ‘What was the poet’s state of mind when he wrote?’

  The most characteristic contents of literary utterances are stories—accounts of events that did not take place. The primary value of these is that they are interesting. But why they interest, and in what different ways, and what permanent results they produce in the reader, I do not profess to know. Oddly enough, criticism has discussed this very little. Between Aristotle and the modern mythographical school of Miss Maud Bodkin, Professor Wilson Knight, and Professor D. G. James, we find almost nothing. It is in this direction, I suggest, that critical effort can be most profitably expended.

  It will be seen that the tendency of my theory is, in some degree, to lower the status of the poet as poet. But that is because I think the only hope for poetry now lies in lowering his status. Unless he speedily returns to the workmanlike humility of his great predecessors and submits to the necessity of interesting and pleasing as a preliminary to doing anything else, the art of poetry will disappear from among us altogether. It may be that in the past we took too little pains to hear the difficult tune that some new poets were playing; but we have now learnt our lesson too well. The Ugly Duckling has stuck too deep in our minds, and we are afraid to condemn any abortion lest it should prove in the end to be a swan. It is high time to remember another story in Hans Andersen which teaches a lesson at least equally important. It is called The Emperor’s New Clothes.

  VI

  I had hoped, after writing my second contribution, that my third might be relatively free from controversial argument and consist mainly of statement. But on reading Mr Lewis’s last instalment I see that controversy cannot be avoided. Although I am sorry to be contradictious when my opponent has agreed to say no more, I am glad to find refuge in controversy from the obligation of conducting a prolonged soliloquy on the question of what poetry is about. A soliloquy; for though Mr Lewis has said at length what poetry is, he is brief on the question of what poetry is about.1 That
baby, after a very cursory fondling, he has handed me to make the best of. He commits himself to saying that poetry is characteristically concerned with interesting stories and can be concerned with almost anything, but he refrains from detailed treatment. In fact, I have failed to draw him on this topic; and perhaps he has been wise, for it is very forbidding. And I am not sorry if, before having to face it, I cannot avoid joining issue with him on several others.