On Stories

by C. S. Lewis

  There are two Books in each volume and now that all six are before us the very high architectural quality of the romance is revealed. Book I builds up the main theme. In Book II that theme, enriched with much retrospective material, continues. Then comes the change. In III and V the fate of the company, now divided, becomes entangled with a huge complex of forces which are grouping and re-grouping themselves in relation to Mordor. The main theme, isolated from this, occupies IV and the early part of VI (the latter part of course giving all the resolutions). But we are never allowed to forget the intimate connection between it and the rest. On the one hand, the whole world is going to the war; the story rings with galloping hoofs, trumpets, steel on steel. On the other, very far away, miserable figures creep (like mice on a slag heap) through the twilight of Mordor. And all the time we know the fate of the world depends far more on the small movement than on the great. This is a structural invention of the highest order: it adds immensely to the pathos, irony, and grandeur of the tale.

  Yet those Books are not in the least inferior. Of picking out great moments (such as the cock-crow at the Siege of Gondor) there would be no end; I will mention two general (and totally different) excellences. One, surprisingly, is realisms. This war has the very quality of the war my generation knew. It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when ‘everything is now ready’, the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground, and such heaven-sent windfalls as a cache of choice tobacco ‘salvaged’ from a ruin. The author has told us elsewhere that his taste for fairy tale was wakened into maturity by active service;8 that, no doubt, is why we can say of his war scenes (quoting Gimli the Dwarf), ‘There is good rock here. This country has tough bones’.9 The other excellence is that no individual, and no species, seems to exist only for the sake of the plot. All exist in their own right and would have been worth creating for their mere flavour even if they had been irrelevant. Treebeard would have served any other author (if any other could have conceived him) for a whole book. His eyes are ‘filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking’.10 Through those ages his name has grown with him, so that he cannot now tell it; it would, by now, take too long to pronounce. When he learns that the thing they are standing on is a hill, he complains that this is but ‘a hasty word’11 for that which has so much history in it.

  How far Treebeard can be regarded as a ‘portrait of the artist’ must remain doubtful; but when he hears that some people want to identify the Ring with the hydrogen bomb, and Mordor with Russia, I think he might call it a ‘hasty’ word. How long do people think a world like his takes to grow? Do they think it can be done as quickly as a modern nation changes its Public Enemy Number One or as modern scientists invent new weapons? When Professor Tolkien began there was probably no nuclear fission and the contemporary incarnation of Mordor was a good deal nearer our shores. But the text itself teaches us that Sauron is eternal; the war of the Ring is only one of a thousand wars against him. Every time we shall be wise to fear his ultimate victory, after which there will be ‘no more songs’. Again and again we shall have good evidence that ‘the wind is setting East, and the withering of all woods may be drawing near’.12 Every time we win we shall know that our victory is impermanent. If we insist on asking for the moral of the story, that is its moral: a recall from facile optimism and wailing pessimism alike, to that hard, yet not quite desperate, insight into Man’s unchanging predicament by which heroic ages have lived. It is here that the Norse affinity is strongest; hammer-strokes, but with compassion.

  ‘But why,’ (some ask), ‘why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?’ Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterisation. Much that in a realistic work would be done by ‘character delineation’ is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale? In the book Eomer rashly contrasts ‘the green earth’ with ‘legends’. Aragorn replies that the green earth itself is ‘a mighty matter of legend’.13

  The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity’. The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it the real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly. I do not think he could have done it in any other way.

  The book is too original and too opulent for any final judgement on a first reading. But we know at once that it has done things to us. We are not quite the same men. And though we must ration ourselves in our re-readings. I have little doubt that the book will soon take its place among the indispensables.

  XII

  A PANEGYRIC FOR DOROTHY L. SAYERS

  The variety of Dorothy Sayers’s work makes it almost impossible to find anyone who can deal properly with it all. Charles Williams might have done so; I certainly can’t. It is embarrassing to admit that I am no great reader of detective stories: embarrassing because, in our present state of festering intellectual class consciousness, the admission might be taken as a boast. It is nothing of the sort: I respect, though I do not much enjoy, that severe and civilised form, which demands much fundamental brain work of those who write in it and assumes as its background uncorrupted and unbrutalised methods of criminal investigation. Prigs have put it about that Dorothy in later life was ashamed of her ‘tekkies’ and hated to hear them mentioned. A couple of years ago my wife asked her if this was true and was relieved to hear her deny it. She had stopped working in that genre because she felt she had done all she could with it. And indeed, I gather, a full process of development had taken place. I have heard it said that Lord Peter is the only imaginary detective who ever grew up—grew from the Duke’s son, the fabulous amorist, the scholar swashbuckler, and connoisseur of wine, into the increasingly human character, not without quirks and flaws, who loves and marries, and is nursed by, Harriet Vane. Reviewers complained that Miss Sayers was falling in love with her hero. On which a better critic remarked to me, ‘It would be truer to say she was falling out of love with him; and ceased fondling a girl’s dream—if she had ever done so—and began inventing a man.’

  There is in reality no cleavage between the detective stories and her other works. In them, as in it, she is first and foremost the craftsman, the professional. She always saw herself as one who has learned a trade, and respects it, and demands respect for it from others. We who loved her may (among ourselves) lovingly admit that this attitude was sometimes almost comically emphatic. One soon learned that ‘We authors, Ma’am’,1 was the most acceptable key. Gas about ‘inspiration’, whimperings about critics or public, all the paraphernalia of dandyisme and ‘outsidership’ were, I think, simply disgusting to her. She aspired to be, and was, at once a popular entertainer and a conscientious craftsman: like (in her degree) Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, or Molière. I have an idea that, with a very few exceptions, it is only such writers who matter much in the long run. ‘One shows one’s greatness’, says Pascal, ‘not by being at an extremity but by being simultaneously at two extremit
ies.’ Much of her most valuable thought about writing was embodied in The Mind of the Maker: a book which is still too little read. It has faults. But books about writing by those who have themselves written viable books are too rare and too useful to be neglected.

  For a Christian, of course, this pride in one’s craft, which so easily withers into pride in oneself, raises a fiercely practical problem. It is delightfully characteristic of her extremely robust and forthright nature that she soon lifted this problem to the fully conscious level and made it the theme of one of her major works. The architect in The Zeal of Thy House is at the outset the incarnation of—and therefore doubtless the Catharsis from—a possible Dorothy whom the actual Dorothy Sayers was offering for mortification. His disinterested zeal for the work itself has her full sympathy. But she knows that, without grace, it is a dangerous virtue: little better than the ‘artistic conscience’ which every Bohemian bungler pleads as a justification for neglecting his parents, deserting his wife, and cheating his creditors. From the beginning, personal pride is entering into the architect’s character: the play records his costly salvation.

  As the detective stories do not stand quite apart, so neither do the explicitly religious works. She never sank the artist and entertainer in the evangelist. The very astringent (and admirable) preface to The Man Born to Be King, written when she had lately been assailed with a great deal of ignorant and spiteful obloquy, makes the point of view defiantly clear. ‘It was assumed’, she writes, ‘that my object in writing was “to do good”. But that was in fact not my object at all, though it was quite properly the object of those who commissioned the plays in the first place. My object was to tell that story to the best of my ability, within the medium at my disposal—in short, to make as good a work of art as I could. For a work of art that is not good and true in art is not true and good in any other respect.’2 Of course, while art and evangelism were distinct, they turned out to demand one another. Bad art on this theme went hand in hand with bad theology. ‘Let me tell you, good Christian people, an honest writer would be ashamed to treat a nursery tale as you have treated the greatest drama in history: and this in virtue, not of his faith, but of his calling.’3 And equally, of course, her disclaimer of an intention to ‘do good’ was ironically rewarded by the immense amount of good she evidently did.

  The architectonic qualities of this dramatic sequence will hardly be questioned. Some tell me they find it vulgar. Perhaps they do not quite know what they mean; perhaps they have not fully digested the answers to this charge given in the preface. Or perhaps it is simply not ‘addressed to their condition’. Different souls take their nourishment in different vessels. For my own part, I have re-read it in every Holy Week since it first appeared, and never re-read it without being deeply moved.

  Her later years were devoted to translation. The last letter I ever wrote to her was in acknowledgement of her Song of Roland, and I was lucky enough to say that the end-stopped lines and utterly unadorned style of the original must have made it a far harder job than Dante. Her delight at this (surely not very profound) remark suggested that she was rather starved for rational criticism. I do not think this one of her most successful works. It is too violently colloquial for my palate; but, then, she knew far more Old French than I. In her Dante4 the problem is not quite the same. It should always be read in conjunction with the paper on Dante which she contributed to the Essays Presented to Charles Williams.5 There you get the first impact of Dante on a mature, a scholarly, and an extremely independent mind. That impact determined the whole character of her translation. She had been startled and delighted by something in Dante for which no critic, and no earlier translator, had prepared her: his sheer narrative impetus, his frequent homeliness, his high comedy, his grotesque buffoonery. These qualities she was determined to preserve at all costs. If, in order to do so, she had to sacrifice sweetness or sublimity, then sacrificed they should be. Hence her audacities in both language and rhythm.

  We must distinguish this from something rather discreditable that has been going on of recent years—I mean the attempt of some translators from Greek and Latin to make their readers believe that the Aeneid is written in service slang and that Attic Tragedy uses the language of the streets. What such versions implicitly assert is simply false; but what Dorothy was trying to represent by her audacities is quite certainly there in Dante. The question is how far you can do it justice without damage to other qualities which are also there and thus misrepresenting the Comedy as much in one direction as fussy, Miltonic old Cary had done in the other.6 In the end, I suppose, one comes to a choice of evils. No version can give the whole of Dante. So at least I said when I read her Inferno. But, then, when I came to the Purgatorio, a little miracle seemed to be happening. She had risen, just as Dante himself rose in his second part: growing richer, more liquid, more elevated. Then first I began to have great hopes of her Paradiso. Would she go on rising? Was it possible? Dared we hope?

  Well. She died instead; went, as one may in all humility hope, to learn more of Heaven than even the Paradiso could tell her. For all she did and was, for delight and instruction, for her militant loyalty as a friend, for courage and honesty, for the richly feminine qualities which showed through a port and manner superficially masculine and even gleefully ogreish—let us thank the Author who invented her.

  XIII

  THE MYTHOPOEIC GIFT OF RIDER HAGGARD

  I hope Mr Morton Cohen’s excellent Rider Haggard: His Life and Works will move people to reconsider the whole Haggard question. For there really is a problem here. The vices of his style are inexcusable; the vapidity (and frequency) of his reflections, hard to bear. But it is no longer any good pretending that his best work was merely an ephemeral and commercial success. It has not passed away like the works of Ouida, Mrs Oliphant, Stanley Weyman, or Max Pemberton. It has survived the whole climate of opinion which once made its imperialism and vague pieties acceptable. The promised time ‘when the Rudyards cease from Kipling and the Haggards ride no more’1 has failed to arrive. Obstinately, scandalously, Haggard continues to be read and re-read. Why?

  The significant fact for me is the feeling we have as we close King Solomon’s Mines, or, still more, She. ‘If only . . .’ are the words that rise to our lips. If only we could have had this very same story told by a Stevenson, a Tolkien, or a William Golding. If only, faute de mieux, we were even allowed to re-write it ourselves!

  Note, the very same story. It is not the construction that is faulty. From the move of his first pawn to the final checkmate, Haggard usually plays like a master. His openings—what story in the world opens better than She?—are full of alluring promise, and his catastrophes triumphantly keep it.

  The lack of detailed character-study is not a fault at all. An adventure story neither needs nor admits it. Even in real life adventures tend to obliterate fine shades. Hardship and danger strip us down to the bare moral essentials. The distinction between shirker and helper, brave and cowardly, trusty and treacherous, overrides everything else. ‘Character’ in the novelist’s sense is a flower that expands fully where people are safe, fed, dry, and warmed. That adventure stories remind us of this is one of their merits.

  The real defects of Haggard are two. First, he can’t write. Or rather (I learn from Mr Cohen) won’t. Won’t be bothered. Hence the clichés, jocosities, frothy eloquence. When he speaks through the mouth of Quatermain he makes some play with the unliterary character of the simple hunter. It never dawned on him that what he wrote in his own person was a great deal worse—‘literary’ in the most damning sense of the word.

  Secondly, the intellectual defects. No one after reading Mr Cohen can believe that Haggard was out of touch with reality. Apparently his agricultural and sociological works are a solid meal of hard-won facts and of conclusions firmly drawn. When he decided that the only hope for the land lay in a scheme which flouted all his political preferences and shattered all his treasured hopes for his own class and his own family, h
e recommended that scheme without flinching.

  Here lies the true greatness of the man; what Mr Cohen calls his ‘overall sturdiness’. Even as an author he can sometimes be shrewd—as when in She Allan Quatermain neither succumbs to the charms of Ayesha nor believes her ‘tall’ autobiographical stories. By making Quatermain keep his head Haggard shows that he can keep his own.

  But though Haggard had sense, he was ludicrously unaware of his limitations. He attempts to philosophise. Again and again in his stories we see a commonplace intelligence, armed (or hampered) with an eclectic outfit of vaguely Christian, theosophical, and spiritualistic notions, trying to say something profound about that fatal subject, ‘Life’. This is seen at its embarrassing worst whenever Ayesha speaks. If she was really Wisdom’s daughter, she did not take after her parent. Her thought is of the regrettable type called ‘Higher’.

  What keeps us reading in spite of all these defects is of course the story itself, the myth. Haggard is the text-book case of the mythopoeic gift pure and simple—isolated, as if for inspection, from nearly all those more specifically literary powers with which it so fortunately co-exists in, say, The Ancient Mariner, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or The Lord of the Rings. To make matters even clearer, in Haggard himself the mythopoeic power seems to have grown less as the literary art improved. Ayesha is not such good myth as She, but it is better written.

  This gift, when it exists in full measure, is irresistible. We can say of this, as Aristotle said of metaphor, ‘no man can learn it from another’. It is the work of what Kipling called ‘the daemon’. It triumphs over all obstacles and makes us tolerate all faults. It is quite unaffected by any foolish notions which the author himself, after the daemon has left him, may entertain about his own myths. He knows no more about them than any other man. It was silly of Haggard to treasure a belief that there was, in a factual sense, ‘something in’ his myths. But we, as readers, need not concern ourselves with that at all.