On Stories

by C. S. Lewis

  The mythical status of She is indisputable. As we all know, Jung went to it for the embodiment of an archetype. But even Jung did not, I think, get to the centre. If his view were right, the myth ought to function only for those to whom Ayesha is a powerfully erotic image. And she is not so for all who love She. To myself, for example, Ayesha or any other tragedy Queen—any tall, crowned, stormy, deep-breasted contralto with thunder in her brow and lightnings in her eye—is one of the most effective anti-aphrodisiacs in the world. Ultimately the life of the myth is elsewhere.

  The story of Ayesha is not an escape, but it is about escape; about an attempt at the great escape, daringly made and terribly frustrated. Its closest relative, perhaps its child, is Morris’s The Well at the World’s End, which came ten years later. Both stories externalise the same psychological forces; our irreconcilable reluctance to die, our craving for an immortality in the flesh, our empirical knowledge that this is impossible, our intermittent awareness that it is not even really desirable, and (octaves deeper than all these) a very primitive feeling that the attempt, if it could be made, would be unlawful and would call down the vengeance of the gods. In both books the wild, transporting, and (we feel) forbidden hope is aroused. When fruition seems almost in sight, horrifying disaster shatters our dream. Haggard’s version is better than Morris’s. Morris makes his heroine too human, too wholesome. Haggard, truer to our feeling, surrounds the lonely she-Prometheus with terror and misery.

  Haggard’s best work will survive because it is based on an appeal well above high-water mark. The fullest tides of fashion cannot demolish it. A great myth is relevant as long as the predicament of humanity lasts; as long as humanity lasts. It will always work, on those who can receive it, the same catharsis.

  Haggard will last, but so will the hatred of Haggard. The vindictiveness with which adverse critics attacked him in his own day had, no doubt, some local and temporary causes. His own truculence was one. Another was the natural jealousy of the Gigadibs who can produce only a succès d’estime for the writer who produces ‘popular’—but also living and viable—work. The author of a Gorboduc always has a keen eye for the faults of a Tamburlaine. But there was, and there always will be, a deeper cause. No one is indifferent to the mythopoeic. You either love it or else hate it ‘with a perfect hatred’.

  This hatred comes in part from a reluctance to meet Archetypes; it is an involuntary witness to their disquieting vitality. Partly, it springs from an uneasy awareness that the most ‘popular’ fiction, if only it embodies a real myth, is so very much more serious than what is generally called ‘serious’ literature. For it deals with the permanent and inevitable, whereas an hour’s shelling, or perhaps a ten-mile walk, or even a dose of salts, might annihilate many of the problems in which the characters of a refined and subtle novel are entangled. Read James’s letters and see what happened to him for some weeks after the war broke out in 1914. He presently builds up the Jamesian world again; but for a time it seemed to have ‘left not a wrack behind’.

  XIV

  GEORGE ORWELL

  Now that the rumpus about the performance of Orwell’s 1984 on television is dying down, it may be opportune to raise a question which has exercised my mind for a considerable time.1 Why is it that, even before the recent spate of publicity, I met ten people who knew 1984 for one who knew Animal Farm?

  Here we have two books by the same author which deal, at bottom, with the same subject. Both are very bitter, honest, and honourable recantations. They express the disillusionment of one who had been a revolutionary of the familiar, entre guerre pattern and had later come to see that all totalitarian rulers, however their shirts may be coloured, are equally the enemies of Man.

  Since the subject concerns us all and the disillusionment has been widely shared, it is not surprising that either book, or both, should find plenty of readers, and both are obviously the works of a very considerable writer. What puzzles me is the marked preference of the public for 1984. For it seems to me (apart from its magnificent, and fortunately detachable, Appendix on ‘Newspeak’) to be merely a flawed, interesting book; but the Farm is a work of genius which may well outlive the particular and (let us hope) temporary conditions that provoked it.

  To begin with, it is very much the shorter of the two. This in itself would not, of course, show it to be the better. I am the last person to think so. Callimachus, to be sure, thought a great book a great evil, but then I think Callimachus a great prig. My appetite is hearty and when I sit down to read I like a square meal. But in this instance the shorter book seems to do all that the longer one does; and more. The longer book does not justify its greater length. There is dead wood in it. And I think we can all see where the dead wood comes.

  In the nightmare State of 1984 the rulers devote a great deal of time—which means that the author and readers also have to devote a great deal of time—to a curious kind of anti-sexual propaganda. Indeed the amours of the hero and heroine seem to be at least as much a gesture of protest against that propaganda as a natural outcome of affection or appetite.

  Now it is, no doubt, possible that the masters of a totalitarian State might have a bee in their bonnets about sex as about anything else; and, if so, that bee, like all their bees, would sting. But we are shown nothing in the particular tyranny Orwell has depicted which would make this particular bee at all probable. Certain outlooks and attitudes which at times introduced this bee into the Nazi bonnet are not shown at work here. Worse still, its buzzing presence in the book raises questions in all our minds which have really no very close connection with the main theme and are all the more distracting for being, in themselves, of interest.

  The truth is, I take it, that the bee has drifted in from an earlier (and much less valuable) period of the author’s thought. He grew up in a time of what was called (very inaccurately) ‘anti-Puritanism’; when people who wanted—in Lawrence’s characteristic phrase—‘to do dirt on sex’2 were among the stock enemies. And, wishing to blacken the villains as much as possible, he decided to fling this charge against them as well as all the relevant charges.

  But the principle that any stick is good enough to beat your villain with is fatal in fiction. Many a promising ‘bad character’ (for example, Becky Sharp) has been spoiled by the addition of an inappropriate vice. All the passages devoted to this theme in 1984 ring false to me. I am not now complaining of what some would call (whether justly or not) a ‘bad smell’ in the erotic passages. At least not of bad smells in general only of the smell of red herring.

  But this is only the clearest instance of the defect which, throughout, makes 1984 inferior to the Farm. There is too much in it of the author’s own psychology: too much indulgence of what he feels as a man, not pruned or mastered by what he intends to make as an artist. The Farm is work of a wholly different order. Here the whole thing is projected and distanced. It becomes a myth and is allowed to speak for itself. The author shows us hateful things; he doesn’t stammer or speak thick under the surge of his own hatred. The emotion no longer disables him because it has all been used, and used to make something.

  One result is that the satire becomes more effective. Wit and humour (absent from the longer work) are employed with devastating effect. The great sentence ‘All animals are equal but some are more equal than others’ bites deeper than the whole of 1984.

  Thus the shorter book does all that the longer does. But it also does more. Paradoxically, when Orwell turns all his characters into animals he makes them more fully human. In 1984 the cruelty of the tyrants is odious, but it is not tragic; odious like a man skinning a cat alive, not tragic like the cruelty of Regan and Goneril to Lear.

  Tragedy demands a certain minimum stature in the victim; and the hero and heroine of 1984 do not reach that minimum. They become interesting at all only in so far as they suffer. That is claim enough (Heaven knows) on our sympathies in real life, but not in fiction. A central character who escapes nullity only by being tortured is a failure. And
the hero and heroine in this story are surely such dull, mean little creatures that one might be introduced to them once a week for six months without even remembering them.

  In Animal Farm all this is changed. The greed and cunning of the pigs is tragic (not merely odious) because we are made to care about all the honest, well-meaning, or even heroic beasts whom they exploit. The death of Boxer the horse moves us more than all the more elaborate cruelties of the other book. And not only moves, but convinces. Here, despite the animal disguise, we feel we are in a real world. This—this congeries of guzzling pigs, snapping dogs, and heroic horses—this is what humanity is like; very good, very bad, very pitiable, very honourable. If men were only like the people in 1984 it would hardly be worth while writing stories about them. It is as if Orwell could not see them until he put them into a beast fable.

  Finally, Animal Farm is formally almost perfect; light, strong, balanced. There is not a sentence that does not contribute to the whole. The myth says all the author wants it to say and (equally important) it doesn’t say anything else. Here is an objet d’art as durably satisfying as a Horatian ode or a Chippendale chair.

  That is why I find the superior popularity of 1984 so discouraging. Something must, of course, be allowed for mere length. The booksellers say that short books will not sell. And there are reasons not discreditable. The weekend reader wants something that will last till Sunday evening; the traveller wants something that will last as far as Glasgow.

  Again, 1984 belongs to a genre that is now more familiar than a beast-fable; I mean the genre of what may be called ‘Dystopias’, those nightmare visions of the future which began, perhaps, with Wells’s The Time Machine and The Sleeper Wakes. I would like to hope that these causes are sufficient. Certainly, it would be alarming if we had to conclude either that the use of the imagination had so decayed that readers demand in all fiction a realistic surface and cannot treat any fable as more than a ‘juvenile’, or else that the bed-scenes in 1984 are the flavouring without which no book can now be sold.

  XV

  THE DEATH OF WORDS

  I think it was Miss [Rose] Macaulay who complained in one of her delightful articles (strong and light as steel wire) that the dictionaries are always telling us of words ‘now used only in a bad sense’; seldom or never of words ‘now used only in a good sense’. It is certainly true that nearly all our terms of abuse were originally terms of description; to call a man villain defined his legal status long before it came to denounce his morality. The human race does not seem contented with the plain dyslogistic words. Rather than say that a man is dishonest or cruel or unreliable, they insinuate that he is illegitimate, or young, or low in the social scale, or some kind of animal; that he is a ‘peasant slave’, a bastard, a cad, a knave, a dog, a swine, or (more recently) an adolescent.

  But I doubt if that is the whole story. There are, indeed, few words which were once insulting and are now complimentary—democrat is the only one that comes readily to mind. But surely there are words that have become merely complimentary—words which once had a definable sense and which are now nothing more than noises of vague approval? The clearest example is the word gentleman. This was once (like villain) a term which defined a social and heraldic fact. The question whether Snooks was a gentleman was almost as soluble as the question whether he was a barrister or a Master of Arts. The same question, asked forty years ago (when it was asked very often), admitted of no solution. The word had become merely eulogistic, and the qualities on which the eulogy was based varied from moment to moment even in the mind of the same speaker. This is one of the ways in which words die. A skilful doctor of words will pronounce the disease to be mortal at that moment when the word in question begins to harbour the adjectival parasites real or true. As long as gentleman has a clear meaning, it is enough to say that So-and-So is a gentleman. When we begin saying that he is a ‘real gentleman’ or ‘a true gentleman’ or ‘a gentleman in the truest sense’ we may be sure that the word has not long to live.

  I would venture, then, to enlarge Miss Macaulay’s observation. The truth is not simply that words originally innocent tend to acquire a bad sense. The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition. As old horses go to the knacker’s yard, or old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad. And as long as most people are more anxious to express their likes and dislikes than to describe facts, this must remain a universal truth about language.

  This process is going on very rapidly at the moment. The words abstract and concrete were first coined to express a distinction which is really necessary to thought; but it is only for the very highly educated that they still do so. In popular language concrete now means something like ‘clearly defined and practicable’; it has become a term of praise. Abstract (partly under the phonetic infection of abstruse) means ‘vague, shadowy, unsubstantial’; it has become a term of reproach. Modern, in the mouths of many speakers, has ceased to be a chronological term; it has ‘sunk into a good sense’ and often means little more than ‘efficient’ or (in some contexts) ‘kind’; medieval barbarities, in the mouths of the same speakers, has no reference either to the Middle Ages or to those cultures classified as barbarian. It means simply ‘great or wicked cruelties’. Conventional can no longer be used in its proper sense without explanation. Practical is a mere term of approval; contemporary, in certain schools of literary criticism, is little better.

  To save any word from the eulogistic and dyslogistic abyss is a task worth the efforts of all who love the English language. And I can think of one word—the word Christian—which is at this moment on the brink. When politicians talk of ‘Christian moral standards’ they are not always thinking of anything which distinguishes Christian morality from Confucian or Stoic or Benthamite morality. One often feels that it is merely one literary variant among the ‘adorning epithets’ which, in our political style, the expression ‘moral standards’ is felt to require; civilised (another ruined word) or modern or democratic or enlightened would have done just as well. But it will really be a great nuisance if the word Christian becomes simply a synonym for good. For historians, if no one else, will still sometimes need the word in its proper sense, and what will they do? That is always the trouble about allowing words to slip into the abyss. Once turn swine into a mere insult, and you need a new word (pig) when you want to talk about the animal. Once let sadism dwindle into a useless synonym for cruelty, and what do you do when you have to refer to the highly special perversion which actually afflicted M. de Sade?

  It is important to notice that the danger to the word Christian comes not from its open enemies, but from its friends. It was not egalitarians, it was officious admirers of gentility, who killed the word gentleman. The other day I had occasion to say that certain people were not Christians; a critic asked how I dared say so, being unable (as of course I am) to read their hearts. I had used the word to mean ‘persons who profess belief in the specific doctrines of Christianity’; my critic wanted me to use it in what he would (rightly) call ‘a far deeper sense’—a sense so deep that no human observer can tell to whom it applies.

  And is that deeper sense not more important? It is indeed; just as it was more important to be a ‘real’ gentleman than to have coat-armour. But the most important sense of a word is not always the most useful. What is the good of deepening a word’s connotation if you deprive the word of all practicable denotation? Words, as well as women, can be ‘killed with kindness’. And when, however reverently, you have killed a word you have also, as far as in you lay, blotted from the human mind the thing that word originally stood for. Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.

  XVI

  THE PARTHENON AND THE OPTATIVE

  ‘The trouble with these boys’, said a grim old classical scholar looking up from some milk-and-watery entrance papers which he had been marking: ‘the t
rouble with these boys is that the masters have been talking to them about the Parthenon when they should have been talking to them about the Optative.’ We all knew what he meant. We had read work like that ourselves.

  Ever since then I have tended to use the Parthenon and the Optative as the symbols of two types of education. The one begins with hard, dry things like grammar, and dates, and prosody; and it has at least the chance of ending in a real appreciation which is equally hard and firm though not equally dry. The other begins in ‘Appreciation’ and ends in gush. When the first fails it has, at the very least, taught the boy what knowledge is like. He may decide that he doesn’t care for knowledge; but he knows he doesn’t care for it, and he knows he hasn’t got it. But the other kind fails most disastrously when it most succeeds. It teaches a man to feel vaguely cultured while he remains in fact a dunce. It makes him think he is enjoying poems he can’t construe. It qualifies him to review books he does not understand, and to be intellectual without intellect. It plays havoc with the very distinction between truth and error.

  And yet, education of the Parthenon type is often recommended by those who have and love real learning. They are moved by a kind of false reverence for the Muses. What they value, say, in Literature, seems to them so delicate and spiritual a thing that they cannot bear to see it (as they think) degraded by such coarse, mechanic attendants as paradigms, blackboards, marks, and examination papers. They point to the questions examiners set, ‘Give the context of any five of the following and add any necessary explanation.’ What has that to do with the real quality of The Tempest? Would it not be better just to teach the boys to appreciate it?