The Personal Heresy

by C. S. Lewis

  Having grasped this truth, I proceed to a second question. What is the nature of this consciousness which I come to share but not to study, to look through but not look at, in appreciating a poem? The personal theory will hold that the consciousness in question is that of the poet, considered as an individual, contingent, human specimen. Mr Smith sees things in one way; Mr Jones sees them in another; Mr Wordsworth sees them in a third. What we share in reading Wordsworth is just Wordsworth’s point of view as it happens to exist in him as a psychological fact; and that is why modern criticism attends so willingly to psychology and biography. And as long as we are dealing with romantic poets not far removed from us in time, this view of the matter is not unplausible. It cannot, however, have escaped any one’s attention that there is a whole class of poetical experiences in which the consciousness that we share cannot possibly be attributed to any single human individual. Let us consider an example.

  And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces.

  It does not greatly matter how highly the reader values the imaginative impression produced upon him by these words: that they produce some imaginative impression, that he comes to enjoy a new and heightened mode of consciousness in reading them, will not be denied. The question arises whose consciousness it is. Who was the man to whom this mode belonged, the man whose personality or temperament we are coming to share?

  Very little argument suffices to show that it cannot have been the original author. The mood to which we are introduced by these lines was not only not normal in the Hebrew writer; it did not and could not exist in him at all. To begin with ‘doleful creatures’, ‘owls’, ‘satyrs’, ‘wild beasts of the islands’, and ‘dragons’ are mere mistranslations. Whatever they evoke or express was wholly absent from the mind of the author, and, what is worse, other things were there in its place. Only the crudest view of the relations between language and imagination could lead us to suppose that the experience which lacked these words and used others in their place was at all like the experience of the modern reader. But that is not all. The theme of the whole passage is Babylon and the fall of Babylon. Now the sound Babylon did not exist in the original: yet that sound counts for a great deal in our experience of the passage. Babylon: the very word is like a bell. But Isaiah—or whoever it was—never heard that bell toll. He may have heard a better bell, but that is nothing to the purpose. If we turn from the sound to the idea—we may grant that false abstraction for the argument’s sake—the rift between our mood and that of the original becomes even wider. For us Babylon is far away and long ago; it comes to us through the medium of centuries of poetry about the East and about antiquity; it comes to us as descendants of those Germanic poets who had from the first a romantic and elegiac delight in the ruin and decay of greatness. We have read of Troy, too, and perhaps, in our salad days, we loved the courts where Jamshid gloried and drank deep. Now Babylon, to the writer, was neither long ago nor far away. Its greatness was not the cloudy greatness of old empires fallen in the past, but the oppressive greatness of an enemy and a neighbour. He felt about Babylon not as we feel about Troy and Nineveh, but as some Indian nationalists may feel about London. The poetry of Babylon, for us, belongs to the same world as

  But all about the rugged walls were hung

  With riven moniments of time forepast.

  The poetry, for him, belonged rather to the world of

  When we’ve wound up the watch on the Rhine.

  And with this, presumably, analysis may rest. It is obvious that no two experiences could be more grotesquely unlike than that of the writer, and that of the modern reader, of this passage. Nor shall we fare much better if we turn from the original writer to the translator. No one who has himself ever tried to translate will doubt that what was uppermost in the mind of the translator as he wrote was the problem of translation itself. When he wrote ‘dragons’ he was not inquiring whether this completed the picture or expressed his emotion, but whether it rendered the Hebrew. Nor did he look at the Hebrew itself aesthetically; he worked in fear and trembling to transmit without loss what he believed to be the literal record of the word of God. Even if some imaginative element crept in amidst his philological and theological preoccupations, it must have differed essentially from that which we enjoy; for as his English version grew he had the Hebrew always before him, and was thus inevitably involved in a work of comparison which has no parallel in our experience of the passage.

  The result, then, is this. Such a passage gives us imaginative experience. In having that experience we do come to share or enjoy a new kind of consciousness, but that consciousness is not the consciousness of any single individual. And it will be plain that the passage I have chosen is only one of a very large class. Wherever we have traditional poetry there will be epithets and metrical devices which are the offspring of no single human temperament; wherever we have ancient poetry at all, there will be language which was commonplace to the writers but which time has turned into beauty; wherever we get misunderstanding—as in the common, beautiful, mistranslation of Virgil’s lacrimae rerum—there will be poetry that no poet wrote. Every work of art that lasts long in the world is continually taking on these new colours which the artist neither foresaw nor intended. We may, as scholars, detect, and endeavour to exclude, them. We may, as critics, decide that such adventitious beauties are in a given case meretricious and trivial compared with those which the artist deliberately wrought. But all that is beside the purpose. Great or small, fortunate or unfortunate, they have been poetically enjoyed. And that is enough for my purpose. There can be poetry without a poet. We can have poetic experience which does not consist in sharing the ‘personality’ of a poet. To be encrusted with such poetless poetry is the reward, or the penalty, of every poem that endures. Miratur non sua poma.

  It will be said that in such cases it is we who make the poetry. It is our own temperament that we enjoy. But surely not our normal or daily temperament? I do not perceive the fall of Babylon in that way whenever I think of it. The kind of seeing that we enjoy in reading ancient poetry arises only when the stimulus of the right word is applied. That it is mine while I enjoy it no one will deny. Even on the personal view, when I come to share, or to look through, the mind of the poet, his mind becomes mine, in so far as, and as long as, I succeed in appreciating his poem. What else do we mean by ‘sharing’? We shall all agree that when my way of seeing things is altered by reading a poem, it is my way of seeing them that is altered. The real question is whether this alteration always (or ever) consists in my coming to share the personal point of view of the man whom we call the poet. And our examples show that this is at any rate not always the case. It does at least sometimes happen that the new ‘personality’ or ‘point of view’ whereby we respond to the poem never existed in the poet. Whether it is ‘ours’ or not is largely a question of words. It is certainly not ‘ours’ in the sense of being normal to us, or typical of us. No less certainly it is ‘ours’ while we read: that is what is meant when we say that the poem creates it in us. But this is beside the purpose.

  What now remains of the personal dogma? We have seen reason to reject the view that in reading poetry we were presented with some object that could be described as ‘the poet’s personality’. At best we ‘shared’ or ‘looked through’ his personality at something else. But even this would not serve as a description of poetry in general; for we saw that in many cases the personality—if you still want to call it so—which we came to share was not that of any single human being. It
was not, in fact, the personality of a person. More explicitly, it was not a personality at all. It was a mood, or a mode of consciousness, created temporarily in the minds of various readers by the suggestive qualities which certain words and ideas have taken on in the course of human history,8 and never, so far as we know, existing normally or permanently—never constituting the person—in any one. We will postpone for a moment all inquiry into the nature of this abnormal mode of consciousness. We have seen that in the case of poetless poetry it cannot be personal. It remains to show that it is equally impersonal even when we have a single, conscious poet to deal with.

  Once again I will take a familiar example. We must choose old, uncontroverted poetry for our laboratory work, or we shall darken counsel. The more exciting application of our views to our own favourites, or to contemporary work, may come later. Let us take a piece of Keats.

  As when, upon a tranced summer-night,

  Those green-rob’d senators of mighty woods,

  Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,

  Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,

  Save from one gradual solitary gust

  Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,

  As if the ebbing air had but one wave.

  After what has been said I need not repeat that the object presented to us while we read these lines is not the man Keats. It is a wood: but a wood seen with other eyes than those we enjoy every day. As to the means by which we gain these new eyes, I take it there is no great mystery in principle, though there may be some dispute as to the details. We have, in the first place, the names of familiar sensibilia—summer, night, wood, oak, stars, gust, air—each of which, simply as it stands, calls up its proper associations. But these groups of association—these clusters of incipient imagery—affect one another. To take what is most obvious, ‘night’ is changed by its proximity to ‘summer’, and vice versa. It is not ‘summer’ plus ‘night’ plus ‘oaks’, &c. Each is what it is in virtue of its place among all the rest; and the mere placing of these words would in itself amount to a rough-and-ready suggestion of the total object to be presented. The poet might conceivably stop at the string of names. But notice, even at this level, what he would be doing. He would be selecting elements of common experience and arranging them in a special order, an order in which each transformed and coloured each. It is absolutely essential that each word should suggest not what is private and personal to the poet but what is public, common, impersonal, objective.9 The common world with its nights, its oaks, and its stars, which we have all seen, and which mean at least something the same to all of us, is the bank on which he draws his cheques. But the arrangement—the experiencing them together in that particular order—this at least, you may argue, is his own. To be sure the arrangement is his own in some sense: we shall see in a moment what to make of that. Let us first finish our analysis. If we turn to the more obviously ‘poetical’ elements we find the same principle at work. ‘Tranced’ goes beyond the sensible. What is here placed in juxtaposition with the ‘summer night’ is not another fragment from the visible world, but a fragment from the world of religious history, or psychology. Such power as it has depends again on the publicity of that world; and ‘tranced’ fails, if it does fail, precisely because its world is not sufficiently common. Trance is not a phenomenon whose meaning is quite sufficiently established; it does not mean the same to us all. In the next line (‘green-rob’d senators’) the whole idea of republican Rome, another common possession of the educated world, is called up, in order that these senators may bring the sudden flavour of their silence and grandeur out of Plutarch and Livy, and that this, set for a moment beside the trees, may make them a little different. What the idea of senator happens to mean to Keats and Keats only, or to me and me only, in virtue of our several psychological accidents, is precisely what does not count. What is used for the poem is the significance which they have for every one; their objective characteristics as real elements in the drama of history—in other words their place not in any individual’s memory but in the memory of Europe. It is not relevant that Keats first read about senators (let us say) in a little brown book, in a room smelling of boiled beef, the same day that he pulled out a loose tooth; it is relevant that the senators sat still when the invading Gauls entered the Senate House; it is relevant that Rome really established an empire. With ‘branch-charmed by the earnest stars’ the sources are more complex. ‘Charmed’ brings in the idea of magic. There, again, we are on common ground. We have dipped again into the storehouse of public history. But this is instantly modified by the word branch. Here we are thrown back on sense. We have seen the trees with branches stretched up in intense stillness towards the stars. We have imagined or been told of people compelled by magical charms to stand as still as the trees. Lay the two side by side and add the word earnest—which is exactly the point where the sensible image and the idea of insensible ‘magic’ merge beyond hope of distinction—and the whole, like meeting drops of quicksilver, becomes a single perception. We see the thing in a new way; because the poet has found the proper scraps of ordinary seeing which, when put together, will unite into a new and extraordinary seeing.

  Now these scraps or atoms of common experience, before they were united, were, as we have seen, no more personal to the poet than to any other man who has grown up in modern Europe. No doubt they are not quite the same in one man as in another. But it is just in so far as they approach sameness that they are useful for poetry. It is the resemblances between my stars and trees and senators and those of Keats, not the difference, that matters. In the elements, therefore, we should seek in vain the ‘personality’ of the poet. Let us ask, then, whether this personality is to be found in their arrangement. In other words, is the poet a man who sees each sensible object thus set off and illuminated by those contexts which they have in the poem?

  In one sense the answer is plainly ‘Yes’. While he is writing the poem, Keats certainly does see the trees modified by the senators and the charms of the earnest stars. But then so do we, while we read. But to say that Keats is capable of attaining such perception for a few moments by the exercise of his art is hardly to say that it is personal to him, that it makes part of his nature or temperament. Certainly, what the exponents of the personal dogma have in mind is something very much more than this. There is a widely spread belief that the poet is a man who habitually sees things in a special way, and that his metaphor and other technique are simply means by which he admits us to share for a moment what is normal with him. Now this is really quite untenable. The dilemma is as follows: are senators normally present to Keats whenever he sees, or thinks of, oaks? If they are not, then his normal consciousness of oaks is other than that which we come to enjoy in reading his poem. It is quite impossible that a perception which did not include the senators should be the same with one that did. We deceive ourselves if we suppose that Keats’s ‘senators’ or Herrick’s ‘liquefaction’ are mere substitutes for something else, un-senatorial and un-liquid, which was present in the poet’s original perception and which he conveys to us by these, as by mere devices. It is a principle in architecture that nothing is great or small save by position. It is a principle of decoration that every colour is what it is only in virtue of the surrounding colours. It is a principle of thought that every proposition depends for its value upon the context. No less certainly every perception is what it is by virtue of its context; and without that context the single perception is an abstraction. To see trees and to think of the price of timber means seeing trees in one way; to think of the forests in romance means to see trees in a second way; and to think of senators in a third. Keats could not have seen his trees as we see them in reading Hyperion before he thought of the senators. To ask, then, whether he normally saw them thus is simply to ask whether he normally associated them with the senatorial idea. To ask in general if poets express their personality in their poetry is to ask whether they habitually live clothed in all that pano
ply of metaphor and rhythm which they use for their work: whether the dancer, as Sir Toby suggested, goes to church in a sink-a-pace and comes home in a coranto. The poets themselves supply the answer. From Homer invoking the Muse down to Herrick prosaically noting that every day is not good for verses—from the romantic talking of his ‘genius’ to Emerson declaring that there was a great deal of inspiration in a chest of good tea—they all unequivocally declare that the words (and a perception expressed in other words is another perception) will not come for the asking, are rare and wooed with hard labour, are by no means the normal furniture of the poet’s mind, are least of all his own possession, his daily temper and habitual self. And even if the poets did not tell us this in so many words, they have betrayed themselves by their rough copies. The very passage which I have just quoted from Keats did not always exist in its present perfection. Keats had to grope for his