An Experiment in Criticism

by C. S. Lewis

  In calling the book bad we are claiming not that it can elicit bad reading, but that it can't elicit good. This negative proposition can never be certain.

  I may say 'If I were to take pleasure in this book it could be only the pleasure of transitory thrills, or wishful reverie, or agreement with the author's opinions'.

  But others may be able to do with it what I can't.

  By an unfortunate paradox the most refined and sensitive criticism is as exposed as any other to this particular hazard. Such criticism (quite rightly) ponders every word and judges an author by his style in a sense very different from that of the Style-monger. It is on the look-out for all the implications or overtones by which a word or a phrase may betray faults of attitude in the author.

  Nothing, in itself, could be more just. But then the critic needs to be certain that the fine shades which he detects are really current beyond his own circle.

  The more refined the critic is, the more likely it is that he lives in a very small circle of litterateurs who constantly meet and read one another and who have developed what is almost a private language. If the author is not himself in the same set-and he could be a man of letters and a man of genius without knowing of its existence-his words will have all manner of overtones for such critics which simply did not exist for him or for anyone he ever talked to.

  I was lately accused of facetiousness for putting a phrase in inverted commas.

  I did so because I believed it to be an Americanism not yet Anglicised even for colloquial use. I used inverted commas just as I would have used italics for a scrap of French; italics I could not use, because readers might have thought they were meant for emphasis. If my critic had said this was clumsy he might have been right. But the charge of facetiousness revealed that he and I were at cross purposes. Where I come from no one has ever thought inverted commas funny; unnecessary, wrongly used perhaps, but not funny. My guess is that where my critic comes from they are invariably used to imply some sort of derision; and also, perhaps, that what to me was a bit of foreign language is to him perfectly current. And this sort of thing, I fancy, is not unusual. The critics assume that the use of English common in their own set-a use which is really very esoteric, not always very convenient, and always in rapid change-is common to all educated men. They find symptoms of the author's hidden attitudes where there are in reality only symptoms of his age or his remoteness from London. He fares among them like a stranger who quite innocently says something by which, in the college or the family where he is dining, there hangs a tale-a joke or a tragedy he could not possibly know. 'Reading between the lines' is inevitable, but we must practise it with great caution, or we may find mares' nests.

  It is not to be denied that the system I propose, and the whole spirit of that system, must tend to moderate our belief in the utility of strictly evaluative criticism, and especially of its condemnations. Evaluative critics, though they alone have an etymological right to the name, are not the only people called critics. Evaluation plays a minor part in Arnold's conception of criticism.

  Criticism is for him 'essentially' the exercise of curiosity, which he defines as the ' disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all subjects for its own sake'. [Function of Criticism.]

  The important thing is 'to see the object as in itself it really is'. [On Translating Homer, 11.] It matters more to see precisely what sort of poet Homer is than to tell the world how much it ought to like that sort of poet. The best value judgement is that 'which almost insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear mind, along with fresh knowledge '. [Function of Criticism.] If criticism in Arnold's sense has been adequate both in quantity and quality, criticism in the sense of evaluation will hardly be needed. Least of all is it the critic's function to press his evaluations upon others. 'The great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way and to let humanity decide.' [Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment.] We are to show others the work they claim to admire or despise as it really is; to describe, almost to define, its character, and then leave them to their own (now better informed) reactions. In one place the critic is even warned not to adopt a ruthless perfectionism. He' is to keep his idea of the best, of perfection, and at the same time to be willingly accessible to every second best which offers itself'. [Last Words on Translating Homer.] He is, in a word, to have the character which Mac-Donald attributed to God, and Chesterton, following him, to the critic; that of being 'easy to please, but hard to satisfy'.

  Criticism as Arnold conceived it (whatever we may think of his own practice) I take to be a very useful activity. The question is about the criticism which pronounces on the merits of books; about evaluations, and devaluations. Such criticism was once held to be of use to authors. But that claim has on the whole been abandoned. It is now valued for its supposed use to readers. It is from that point of view that I shall consider it here. For me it stands or falls by its power to multiply, safeguard, or prolong those moments when a good reader is reading well a good book and the value of literature thus exists in actu.

  This drives me to a question which I never asked myself until a. few years ago. Can I say with certainty that any evaluative criticism has ever actually helped me to understand and appreciate any great work of literature or any part of one?

  When I inquire what helps I have had in this matter I seem to discover a somewhat unexpected result. The evaluative critics come at the bottom of the list.

  At the top comes Dryasdust. Obviously I have owed, and must continue to owe, far more to editors, textual critics, commentators, and lexicographers than to anyone else. Find out what the author actually wrote and what the hard words meant and what the allusions were to, and you have done far more for me than a hundred new interpretations or assessments could ever do.

  I must put second that despised class, the literary historians; I mean the really good ones like W. P. Ker or Oliver Elton. These have helped me, first of all, by telling me what works exist. But still more by putting them in their setting; thus showing me what demands they were meant to satisfy, what furniture they presupposed in the minds of their readers. They have headed me off from false approaches, taught me what to look for, enabled me in some degree to put myself into the frame of mind of those to whom they were addressed. This has happened because such historians on the whole have taken Arnold's advice by getting themselves out of the way. They are concerned far more with describing books than with judging them.

  Thirdly, I must in honesty place various emotive critics who, up to a certain age, did me very good service by infecting me with their own enthusiasms and thus not only sending me but sending me with a good appetite to the authors they admired. I should not enjoy rereading most of these critics now, but they were useful for a while. They did little for my intellect, but much for my 'corage'.

  Yes, even Mackail.

  But when I consider those (I exclude the living) who have ranked as the great critics I come to a standstill. Can I, honestly and strictly speaking, say with any confidence that my appreciation of any scene, chapter, stanza or line has been improved by my reading of Aristotle, Dry den, Johnson, Lessing, Coleridge, Arnold himself (as a practising critic), Pater, or Bradley? I am not sure that I can.

  And how indeed could it be otherwise since we invariably judge a critic by the extent to which he illuminates reading we have already done? Brunetiere's aimer Montaigne, c'est aimer soi meme seems to me as penetrating a remark as I have ever read. But how could I know it was penetrating un less I saw that Brunetiere had laid his finger on an element in my enjoyment of Montaigne which I recognise as soon as it is mentioned but had not sufficiently attended to?

  Therefore my enjoyment of Montaigne comes first. Reading Brunetiere does not help me to enjoy Montaigne; it is my reading of Montaigne that alone enables me to enjoy Brunetiere. I could have enjoyed Dryden's prose without knowing Johnson's description of it; I could not at all fully enjoy Johnson's description without having read Dryden's prose. The same holds, mutatis mutandis,
for Ruskin's magnificent description of Johnson's own prose in Praeterita. [Cap.

  12, para. 251. 123] How should I know whether Aristotle's ideas about a good tragic plot were sound or silly unless I were able to say 'Yes, that is exactly how the Oedipus Tyrannus produces its effect'? The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics.

  Criticism normally casts a retrospective light on what we have already read.

  It may sometimes correct an over-emphasis or a neglect in our previous reading and thus improve a future rereading. But it does not often do so for a mature and thoroughgoing reader in respect of a work he has long known. If he is stupid enough to have misread it all these years, it is probable that he will go on misreading it. In my experience a good commentator or a good literary historian is more likely, without a word of praise or blame, to set us right. And so is an independent rereading in a happy hour. If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer, again than to read a new criticism of him.

  I am far from suggesting that a retrospective light on literary experiences we have already had is without value. Being the sort of people we are, we want not only to have but also to analyse, understand, and express, our experiences.

  And being people at all-being human, that is social, animals-we want to 'compare notes', not only as regards literature, but as regards food, landscape, a game, or an admired common acquaintance. We love to hear exactly how others enjoy what we enjoy ourselves. It is natural and wholly proper that we should especially enjoy hearing how a first-class mind responds to a very great work. That is why we read the great critics with interest (not often with any great measure of agreement). They are very good reading; as a help to the reading of others their value is, I believe, overestimated.

  This view of the matter will not, I am afraid, satisfy what may be called the Vigilant school of critics. To them criticism is a form of social and ethical hygiene. They see all clear thinking, all sense of reality, and all fineness of living, threatened on every side by propaganda, by advertisement, by film and television. The hosts of Midian 'prowl and prowl around'. But they prowl most dangerously in the printed word. And the printed word is most subtly dangerous, able 'if it were possible, to deceive the very elect', not in obvious trash beyond the pale but in authors who appear (unless you know better) to be 'literary'

  and well within the pale. Burroughs and the Westerns will snare only the mob; a subtler poison lurks in Milton, Shelley, Lamb, Dickens, Meredith, Kipling, or De La Mare. Against this the Vigilant school are our watchdogs or detectives.

  They have been accused of acrimony, of Arnold's ' obduracy and over-vehemence in liking and disliking-a remnant, I suppose, of our insular ferocity'. [Last Words on Translating Homer.] But this is perhaps hardly fair.

  They are entirely honest, and wholly in earnest. They believe they are smelling out and checking a very great evil. They could sincerely say like St Paul, 'Woe to me if I preach not the gospel': Woe to me if I do not seek out vulgarity, superficiality, and false sentiment, and expose them wherever they lie hidden.

  A sincere inquisitor or a sincere witch-finder can hardly do his chosen work with mildness.

  It is, obviously difficult to find any common literary ground on which we could decide whether the Vigilants help or hinder good reading. They labour to promote the sort of literary experience that they think good; but their conception of what is good in literature makes a seamless whole with their total conception of the good life. Their whole scheme of values, though never, I believe, set out en regie, is engaged in every critical act. All criticism, no doubt, is influenced by the critic's views on matters other than literature. But usually there has been some free play, some willingness to suspend disbelief (or belief) or even repugnance while we read the good expression of what, in general, we think bad. One could praise Ovid for keeping his pornography so free from the mawkish and the suffocating, while disapproving pornography as such. One could admit that Housman's ' Whatever brute and blackguard made the world' hit off a recurrent point of view to a nicety, while seeing that in a cool hour, on any hypothesis about the actual universe, this point of view must be regarded as silly. One could, in a measure, enjoy-since it does 'get the feeling'-the scene from Sons and Lovers where the young pair copulating in the wood feel themselves to be 'grains' in a great 'heave' (of 'Life'), while clearly judging, as if with some other part of the mind, that this sort of Bergsonian bio-latry and the practical conclusion drawn from it are very muddled and perhaps pernicious.

  But the Vigilants, finding in every turn of expression the symptom of attitudes which it is a matter of life and death to accept or resist, do not allow themselves this liberty. Nothing is for them a matter of taste. They admit no such realm of experience as the aesthetic. There is for them no specifically literary good.

  A work, or a single passage, cannot for them be good in any sense unless it is good simply, unless it reveals attitudes which are essential elements in the good life. You must therefore-accept their (implied) conception of the good life if you are to accept their criticism. That is, you can admire them as critics only if you also revere them as sages. And before we revere them as sages we should need to see their whole system of values set out, not as an instrument of criticism but standing on its own feet and offering its credentials-commending itself to its proper judges, to moralists, moral theologians, psychologists, sociologists or philosophers. For we must not run round in a circle, accepting them as sages because they are good critics and believing them good critics because they are sages.

  Meantime we must suspend judgement as to the good this school can do. But even in the meantime there are signs that it can do harm. We have learned from the political sphere that committees of public safety, witch-hunters, Ku Klux Klans, Orangemen, Macarthyites et hoc genus omne can become dangers as great as those they were formed to combat. The use of the guillotine becomes an addiction.

  Thus under Vigilant criticism a new head falls nearly every month. The list of approved authors grows absurdly small. No one is safe. If the Vigilant philosophy of life should happen to be wrong, Vigilance must already have prevented many happy unions of a good reader with a good book. Even if it is right we may doubt whether such caution, so fully armed a determination not to be taken in, not to yield to any possibly meretricious appeal-such ' dragon watch with unenchanted eye'-is consistent with the surrender needed for the reception of good work.

  You cannot be armed to the teeth and surrendered at the same moment.

  To take a man up very sharp, to demand sternly that he shall explain himself, to dodge to and fro with your questions, to pounce on every apparent inconsistency, may be a good way of exposing a false witness or a malingerer. Unfortunately, it is also the way of making sure that if a shy or tongue-tied man has a true and difficult tale to tell you will never learn it. The armed and suspicious approach which may save you from being bamboozled by a bad author may also blind and deafen you to the shy and elusive merits-especially if they are unfashionable-of a good one.

  I remain, then, sceptical, not about the legitimacy or delightfulness, but about the necessity or utility of evaluative criticism. And especially at the present. Everyone who sees the work of Honours students in English at a university has noticed with distress their increasing tendency to see books wholly through the spectacles of other books. On every play, poem, or novel, they produce the view of some eminent critic. An amazing knowledge of Chaucerian or Shakespearian criticism sometimes co-exists with a very inadequate knowledge of Chaucer or Shakespeare. Less and less do we meet the individual response. The all-important conjunction (Reader Meets Text) never seems to have been allowed to occur of itself and develop spontaneously. Here, plainly, are young people drenched, dizzied, and bedevilled by criticism to a point at which primary literary experience is no longer possible. This state of affairs seems to me a far greater threat to our culture than any of those from which the Vigilants
would protect us.

  Such a surfeit of criticism is so dangerous that it demands immediate treatment.

  Surfeit, we have been told, is the father of fast. I suggest that a ten or twenty years' abstinence both from the reading and from the writing of evaluative criticism might do us all a great deal of good.

  Next Chapter...

  EPILOGUE

  In the course of my inquiry I have rejected the views that literature is to be valued (a) for telling us truths about life, (b) as an aid to culture. I have also said that, while we read, we must treat the reception of the work we are reading as an end in itself. And I have dissented from the Vigilants'

  belief that nothing can be good as literature which is not good simply All this implies the conception of a specifically literary 'good' or 'value'. Some readers may complain that I have not made clear what this good is. Am I, they may ask, putting forward a hedonistic theory and identifying the literary good with pleasure?

  Or am I, like Croce, setting up 'the aesthetic' as a mode of experience irreducibly distinct both from the logical and the practical? Why do I not lay the cards on the table?

  Now I myself don't think that in a work of this sort I am under any very clear obligation to do so. I am writing about literary practice and experience from within, for I claim to be a literary person myself and I address other literary people. Are you and I especially obliged or especially qualified to discuss what, precisely, the good of literature consists in? To explain the value of any activity, still more to place it in a hierarchy of values, is not generally the work of that activity itself. The mathematician need not, though he may, discuss the value of mathematics. Cooks and bans viveurs may very properly discuss cookery; it is not for them to consider whether, and why, it is important, and how important it is, that food should be deliciously cooked. That sort of question belongs to what Aristotle would call 'a more architectonic' inquiry; indeed to the Queen of the Knowledges, if there were now any undisputed pretendress to that throne. We must not' take too much upon ourselves'. There may even be a disadvantage in bringing to our experience of good and bad reading a fully formed theory as to the nature and status of the literary good. We may be tempted to fake the experiences so as to make them support our theory. The more specifically literary our observations are, the less they are contaminated by a theory of value, the more useful they will be to the architectonic inquirer. What we say about the literary good will help most to verify or falsify his theories when it is said with no such intention.