An Experiment in Criticism

by C. S. Lewis

  When we accuse a work of infantilism we must, therefore, be careful what we mean. If we mean only that the taste for which it caters is one that usually appears early in life, that is nothing against the book. A taste is childish in the bad sense not because it develops at an early age but because, having some intrinsic defect in it, it ought to disappear as soon as possible. We call such a taste 'childish' because only childhood can excuse it, not because childhood can often achieve it. Indifference to dirt and untidiness is 'childish' because it is unhealthy and inconvenient and therefore ought to be speedily outgrown; a taste for bread and honey, though equally common in our salad days, is not.

  A taste for the comics is excusable only by extreme youth because it involves an acquiescence in hideous draughtsmanship and a scarcely human coarseness and flatness of narration. If you are going to call a taste for the marvellous childish in the same sense, you must similarly show its intrinsic badness. The dates at which our various traits develop are not a gauge of their value.

  If they were, a very amusing result would follow. Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility. The eight-year-old despises the six-year-old and rejoices to be getting such a big boy; the schoolboy is very determined not to be a child, and the freshman not to be a schoolboy. If we are resolved to eradicate, without examining them on their merits, all the traits of our youth, we might begin with this-with youth's characteristic chronological snobbery.

  And what then would become of the criticism which attaches so much importance to being adult and instils a fear and shame of any enjoyment we can share with the very young?

  Next Chapter...

  ON MISREADING BY THE LITERARY

  We must now return to the point which I postponed in the last chapter. We have to consider a fault in reading which cuts right across our distinction between the literary and the unliterary. Some of the former are guilty of it and some of the latter are not.

  Essentially, it involves a confusion between life and art, even a failure to allow for the existence of art at all. Its crudest form is pilloried in the old story of the backwoodsman in the gallery who shot the 'villain' on the stage.

  We see it also in the lowest type of reader who wants sensational narrative but will not accept it unless it is offered him as 'news'. On a higher level it appears as the belief that all good books are good primarily because they give us knowledge, teach us 'truths' about 'life . Dramatists and novelists are praised as if they were doing, essentially, what used to be expected of theologians and philosophers, and the qualities which belong to their works as inventions and as designs are neglected. They are reverenced as teachers and insufficiently appreciated as artists. In a word, De Quincey's 'literature of power' is treated as a species within his ' literature of knowledge'.

  We may begin by ruling out of consideration one way of treating fictions as sources of knowledge which, though not strictly literary, is pardonable at a certain age and usually transient. Between the ages of twelve and twenty nearly all of us acquired from novels, along with plenty of misinformation, a great deal of information about the world we live in: about the food, clothes, customs and climates of various countries, the working of various professions, about methods of travel, manners, law, and political machinery. We were getting not a philosophy of life but what is called ' general knowledge'. In a particular case a fiction may serve this purpose for even an adult reader. An inhabitant of the cruel countries might come to grasp our principle that a man is innocent till he is proved guilty from reading our detective stories (in that sense such stories are a great proof of real civilisation). But in general this use of fiction is abandoned as we grow older. The curiosities it used to satisfy have been satisfied or simply died away, or, if they survive, would now seek information from more reliable sources. That is one reason why we have less inclination to take up a new novel than we had in our youth.

  Having got this special case out of the way, we may now return to the real subject.

  It is obvious that some of the unliterary mistake art for an account of real life. As we have seen, those whose reading is conducted, egoistic castle-building will inevitably do so. They wish to be deceived; they want to feel that though these beautiful things have not really happened to them, yet they might. ('

  He might take a fancy to me like that Duke did to that factory girl in the story.') But it is equally obvious that a great many of the unliterary are not in this state at all-are indeed almost safer from it than anyone else. Try the experiment on your grocer or gardener.You cannot often try it about a book, for he has read few, but a film will do just as well for our purpose. If you complain to him about the gross improbability of its happy ending, he will very probably reply 'Ah. I reckon they just put that in to wind it up like.' If you complain about the dull and perfunctory love-interest which has been thrust into a story of masculine adventure, he will say 'Oh well, you know, they usually got to put in a bit of that. The women like it.' He knows perfectly well that the film is art, not knowledge. In a sense his very unliterariness saves him from confusing the two. He never expected the film to be anything but transitory, and not very important, entertainment; he never dreamed that any art could provide more than this. He goes to the pictures not to learn but to relax. The idea that any of his opinions about the real world could be modified by what he saw there would seem to him preposterous. Do you take him for a fool? Turn the conversation from art to life-gossip with him, bargain with him-and you will find he is as shrewd and realistic as you can wish.

  Contrariwise, we find the error, in a subtle and especially insidious form, among the literary. When my pupils have talked to-me about Tragedy (they have talked much less often, uncompelled, about tragedies), I have sometimes discovered a belief that it is valuable, is worth witnessing or reading, chiefly because it communicates something called the tragic 'view' or 'sense' or 'philosophy'

  of 'life'. This content is variously described, but in the most widely diffused version it seems to consist of two propositions: (i) That great miseries result from a flaw in the principal sufferer. (2) That these miseries, pushed to the extreme, reveal to us a certain splendour in man, or even in the universe. Though the anguish is great, it is at least not sordid, meaningless, or merely depressing.

  No one denies that miseries with such a cause and such a close can occur in real life. But if tragedy is taken as a comment on life in the sense that we are meant to conclude from it 'This is the typical or usual, or ultimate, form of human misery', then tragedy becomes wishful moonshine. Flaws in character do cause suffering; but bombs and bayonets, cancer and polio, dictators and road-hogs, fluctuations in the value of money or in employment, and mere meaningless coincidence, cause a great deal more. Tribulation falls on the integrated and well adjusted and prudent as readily as on anyone else. Nor do real miseries often end with a curtain and a roll of drums ' in calm of mind, all passion spent'. The dying seldom make magnificent last speeches. And we who watch them die do not, I think, behave very like the minor characters in a tragic death-scene.

  For unfortunately the play is not over. We have no exeunt omnes. The real story does not end: it proceeds to ringing up undertakers, paying bills, getting death certificates, finding and proving a will, answering letters of condolence. There is no grandeur and no finality. Real sorrow ends neither with a bang nor a whimper.

  Sometimes, after a spiritual journey like Dante's, down to the centre and then, terrace by terrace, up the mountain of accepted pain, it may rise into peace-but a peace hardly less severe than itself. Sometimes it remains for life, a puddle in the mind which grows always wider, shallower, and more unwholesome. Sometimes it just peters out, as other moods do. One of these alternatives has grandeur, but not tragic grandeur. The other two-ugly, slow, bathetic, unimpressive-would be of no use at all to a dramatist. The tragedian dare not present the totality of suffering as it usually is in its uncouth mixture of agony with littleness, all the indignities and (save for pity) the uninte
restingness, of grief. It would ruin his play. It would be merely dull and depressing. He selects from the reality just what his art needs; and what it needs is the exceptional. Conversely, to approach anyone in real sorrow with these ideas about tragic grandeur, to insinuate that he is now assuming that' sceptred pall', would be worse than imbecile: it would be odious.

  Next to a world in which there were no sorrows we should like one where sorrows were always significant and sublime. But if we allow the ' tragic view of life'

  to make us believe that we live in such a world, we shall be deceived. Our very eyes teach us better. Where in all nature is there anything uglier and more undignified than an adult male face blubbered and distorted with weeping? And what's behind it is not much prettier. There is no sceptre and no pall.

  It seems to me undeniable, that tragedy, taken as a philosophy of life, is the most obstinate and best camouflaged of all wish-fulfilments, just because its pretensions are so apparently realistic. The claim is that it has faced the worst. The conclusion that, despite the worst, some sublimity and significance remains, is therefore as convincing as the testimony of a witness who appears to speak against his will. But the claim that it has faced the worst-at any rate the commonest sort of'worst'-is in my opinion simply false.

  It is not the fault of the tragedians that this claim deceives certain readers, for the tragedians never made it. It is critics who make it. The tragedians chose for their themes stories (often grounded in the mythical and impossible) suitable to the art they practised. Almost by definition, such stories would be atypical, striking, and in various other ways adapted to the purpose. Stories with a sublime and satisfying finale were chosen not because such a finale is characteristic of human misery, but because it is necessary to good drama.

  It is probably from this view of tragedy that many young people derive the belief that tragedy is essentially 'truer to life' than comedy. This seems to me wholly unfounded. Each of these forms chooses out of real life just those sorts of events it needs. The raw materials are all around us, mixed anyhow.

  It is selection, isolation, and patterning, not a philosophy, that makes the two sorts of play. The two products do not contradict one another any more than two nosegays plucked out of the same garden. Contradiction comes in only when we (not the dramatists) turn them into propositions such as 'This is what human life is like'.

  It may seem odd that the same people who think comedy less true than tragedy often regard broad farce as realistic. I have often met the opinion that in turning from the Troilus to his faibliaux Chaucer was drawing nearer to reality.

  I think this arises from a failure to distinguish between realism of presentation and realism of content. Chaucer's farce is rich in realism of presentation; not in that of content. Criseyde and Alisoun are equally probable women, but what happens in the Troilus is very much more probable than what happens in the Miller's Tale. The world of farce is hardly less ideal than that of pastoral.

  It is a paradise of jokes where the wildest coincidences are accepted and where all works together to produce laughter. Real life seldom succeeds in being, and never remains for more than a few minutes, nearly as funny as a well-invented farce. That is why the people feel that they cannot acknowledge the comicality of a real situation more emphatically than by saying ' It's as good as a play'.

  All three forms of art make the abstractions proper to them. Tragedies omit the clumsy and apparently meaningless bludgeoning of much real misfortune and the prosaic littlenesses which usually rob real sorrows of their dignity. Comedies ignore the possibility that the marriage of lovers does not always lead to permanent, nor ever to perfect, happiness. Farce excludes pity for its butts in situations where, if they were real, they would deserve it. None of the three kinds is making a statement about life in general. They are all constructions: things made out of the stuff of real life; additions to life rather than comments on it.

  At this point I must take pains not to be misunderstood. The great artist-or at all events the great literary artist-cannot be a man shallow either in his thoughts or his feelings. However improbable and abnormal a story he has chosen, it will, as we say, 'come to life' in his hands. The life to which it comes will be impregnated with all the wisdom, knowledge and experience the author has; and even more by something which I can only vaguely describe as the flavour or 'feel' that actual life has for him. It is this omnipresent flavour or feel that makes bad inventions so mawkish and suffocating, and good ones so tonic.

  The good ones allow us temporarily to share a sort of passionate sanity. And we may also-which is less important-expect to find in them many psychological truths and profound, at least profoundly felt, reflections. But all this comes to us, and was very possibly called out of the poet, as the 'spirit' (using that word in a quasi-chemical sense) of a work of art, a play. To formulate it as a philosophy, even if it were a rational philosophy, and regard the actual play as primarily a vehicle for that philosophy, is an outrage to the thing the poet has made for us.

  I use the words thing and made advisedly. We have already mentioned, but not answered, the question whether a poem 'should not mean but be'. What guards the good reader from treating a tragedy-he will not talk much about an abstraction like 'Tragedy'-as a mere vehicle for truth is his continual awareness that it not only means, but is. It is not merely logos (something said) but poiema (something made). The same is true of a novel or narrative poem. They are complex and carefully made objects. Attention to the very objects they are is our first step. To value them chiefly for reflections which they may suggest to us or morals we may draw from them, is a flagrant instance of'using' instead of'receiving'.

  What I mean by 'objects' need not remain mysterious. One of the prime achievements in every good fiction has nothing to do with truth or philosophy or a Weltanschauung at all. It is the triumphant adjustment of two different kinds of order. On the one hand, the events (the mere plot) have their chronological and causal order, that which they would have in real life. On the other, all the scenes or other divisions of the work must be related to each other according to principles of design, like the masses in a picture or the passages in a symphony. Our feelings and imaginations must be led through 'taste after taste, upheld with kindliest change'. Contrasts (but also premonitions and echoes) between the darker and the lighter, the swifter and the slower, the simpler and the more sophisticated, must have something like a balance, but never a too perfect symmetry, so that the shape of the whole work will be felt as inevitable and satisfying. Yet this second order must never confuse the first. The transition from the 'platform'

  to the court scene at the beginning of Hamlet, the placing of Aeneas' narrative in Aeneid n and in, or the darkness in the first two books of Paradise Lost leading to the ascent in the third, are simple illustrations. But there is yet another requisite. As little as possible must exist solely for the sake of other things. Every episode, explanation, description, dialogue-ideally every sentence-must be pleasure-able and interesting for its own sake. (A fault in Conrad's Nostromo is that we have to read so much pseudo-history before we get to the central matter, for which alone this history exists.)

  Some will discount this as 'mere technique'. We must certainly agree that these orderings, apart from that which they order, are worse than 'mere'; they are nonentities, as shape is a nonentity apart from the body whose shape it is.

  But an 'appreciation' of sculpture which ignored the statue's shape in favour of the sculptor's 'view of life' would be self-deception. It is by the shape that it is a statue. Only because it is a statue do we come to be mentioning the sculptor's view of life at all.

  It is very natural that when we have gone through the ordered movements which a great play or narrative excites in us-when we have danced that dance or enacted that ritual or submitted to that pattern-it should suggest to us many interesting reflections. We have 'put on mental muscle' as a result of this activity. We may thank Shakespeare or Dante for that muscle, but we had better not
father on them the philosophical or ethical use we make of it. For one thing, this use is unlikely to rise very much-it may rise a little-above our own ordinary level. Many of the comments on life which people get out of Shakespeare could have been reached by very moderate talents without his assistance. For another, it may well impede future receptions of the work itself. We may go back to it chiefly to find further confirmation for our belief that it teaches this or that, rather than for a fresh immersion in what it is. We shall be like a man poking his fire, not to boil the kettle or warm the room, but in the hope of seeing in it the same pictures he saw yesterday. And since a text is 'but a cheverel glove' to a determined critic-since everything can be a symbol, or an irony, or an ambiguity -we shall easily find what we want. The supreme objection to this is that which lies against the popular use of all the arts. We are so busy doing things with the work that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves.

  But one of the chief operations of art is to remove our gaze from that mirrored face, to deliver us from that solitude. When we read the 'literature of knowledge'

  we hope, as a result, to think more correctly and clearly. In reading imaginative work, I suggest, we should be much less concerned with altering our own opinions-though this of course is sometimes their effect-than with entering fully into the opinions, and therefore also the attitudes, feelings and total experience, of other men.