The Personal Heresy

by C. S. Lewis

  gradual solitary gust

  Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,

  As if the ebbing air had but one wave.

  But to grope for the words was to grope for the perception, for the one lives only in the other. Keats lacked this perception when he began to write. It was therefore no permanent element in his psychology, nor even in his poetic psychology. He had to bring it into existence; and what created it in him was the very same cause that creates it in us—the words, incarnating common experiences and juxtaposed so as to make new experience. Both for Keats and for us the heightened consciousness is something foreign, something won from without, from the boundless ocean of racial, not personal, perception. There is indeed a momentous difference between him and us. He actually won it; we only enjoy and applaud the conquest. But this difference must not mislead us. There is a great difference between a skilled hunter who can catch the game and a hungry cripple who can only eat it. But you must not on that account mistake the hunter for the hart; still less for Pan.

  A critic on whom I was pressing this doctrine once replied to me, ‘But if one hunter always brought back hart, and another always boar, I should begin to suspect a difference’. The objection warns me of a possible misunderstanding. What game the hunter kills is indeed determined by his time and place of hunting, by his skill and by his choice, and thus by the whole scheme of things—within which scheme his personality finds an important, though not an all-important, place. If the Personal Dogma asserted only that the poets hunt diverse game, and that this diversity is determined inter alia by their personalities, I should have no quarrel with it. But when the hunter is held to create the game, when the qualities of the venison set before me are traced all to the hunter and none to Pan, when I am advised to eat, not because it is good food according to the universal rules of human nourishment, but because I may thus become better acquainted with the huntsman, it is then that I must tell my hosts roundly that they know neither how to feed a man nor how to reverence the gods. I do not ask that those who agree with me should deny the essential difference between the poetry of Shakespeare and the poetry of Racine. I do not even object to their talking of it, when convenience so dictates, as a difference of personality. I will even consent to speak of the Racinity of Racine, and the Shakespearianity of Shakespeare: only, let us remember what we mean. Let us remember that their poethood consists not in the fact that each approached the universal world from his own angle (all men do that), but in their power of telling us what things are severally to be seen from those angles. To use their poetry is to attend to what they show us, to look, as I have said before, not at them, but through them at the world. To say that they show us different things is not to say that they are creating what they show us, out of their personalities, but only that they are both finite. Even the reports of two scouts in war differ, and that with a difference traceable to personality: for the braver man goes farther and sees more; but the value of his report by no means consists in the fact that the intelligence officer, while he receives it, has the pleasure of meeting a brave man. Even two opposite windows in my room will give me two different landscapes; and you may say, in a sense, that the landscape ‘expresses’ the nature and position of the window. But windows are not put there that you may study windows; rather that you may forget windows. And if you find that you are forced to attend to the glass rather than the landscape, then either the window or your eye is faulty.

  A poet does what no one else can do: what, perhaps, no other poet can do; but he does not express his personality. His own personality is his starting-point, and his limitation: it is analogous to the position of the window or the degree of courage in the scout. If he remains at his starting-point he is no poet: as long as he is (like the rest of us) a mere personality, all is still to do. It is his business, starting from his own mode of consciousness, whatever that may happen to be, to find that arrangement of public experiences, embodied in words, which will admit him (and incidentally us) to a new mode of consciousness. He proceeds partly by instinct, partly by following the tradition of his predecessors, but very largely by the method of trial and error; and the result, when it comes, is for him, no less than for us, an acquisition, a voyage beyond the limits of his personal point of view, an annihilation of the brute fact of his own particular psychology rather than its assertion.

  The objects, then, which we contemplate in reading poetry are not the private furniture of the poet’s mind. The mind through which we see them is not his. If you ask whose it is, I reply that we have no reason to suppose that it is any one’s. It comes into existence, here and there, for moments, in varying degrees: that it exists anywhere permanently and as a whole—that it anywhere forms a person—is an unnecessary hypothesis. But if it did, that person would not be a human being. A mind which habitually saw as synthetically—which saw each single object with so vast a context—as we are made to see for moments by poetry, would be as far removed from us as we are from the brutes. It would not, indeed, be the Divine Mind, for it apprehends only the what and ignores the that; whereas God must be a permanent philosopher no less than a permanent poet. But it would be a mind, none the less, greatly beyond the human. The ancients called it the Muse. That she exists is a needless hypothesis, though, for all I know, not an absurd one. At all events, only in her will personal critics find the haven they seek. Much criticism is faced with this dilemma. It asserts of poetry superhuman attributes: it believes in no superhuman subjects to support them. But with these speculations as to what the poetic consciousness would be if it existed anywhere as a permanent whole, criticism is not at all concerned. The personal dogma can be refuted without any inquiry into the nature of that mode of consciousness which it mistook for the poet’s personality. And it will add faith to the refutation if we can ascribe causes for the error. One cause is not far to seek. In an age when many have to talk of poetry, this personal view offers obvious advantages. Very few care for beauty; but any one can be interested in gossip. There is always the great vulgar anxious to know what the famous man ate and drank and what he said on his deathbed; there is always the small vulgar greedy to lick up a scandal, to find out that the famous man was no better than he should be. To such people any excuse for shutting up the terrible books with all the lines and lines of verse in them and getting down to the snug or piquant details of a human life, will always be welcome. But there is a deeper reason than this. The personal dogma springs from an inability which most moderns feel to make up their minds between two alternatives. A materialist, and a spiritual, theory of the universe are both equally fatal to it; but in the coming and going of the mind between the two it finds its opportunity. For the typical modern critic is usually a half-hearted materialist. He accepts, or thinks he accepts, that picture of the world which popularized science gives him. He thinks that everything except the buzzing electrons is subjective fancy; and he therefore believes that all poetry must come out of the poet’s head and express (of course) his pure, uncontaminated, undivided ‘personality’, because outside the poet’s head there is nothing but the interplay of blind forces. But he forgets that if materialism is true, there is nothing else inside the poet’s head either. For a consistent materialism, the poetless poetry for which I contend, and the most seemingly self-expressive ‘human document’, are equally the accidental10 results of impersonal and irrational causes. And if this is so, if the sensation (Professor Housman has told us about it) which we call ‘enjoying poetry’ in no case betokens that we are really in the presence of purpose and spirituality, then there is no foothold left for the personal heresy. All poetry will indeed suggest something more than the collision of blind forces; but the suggestion will, in every case alike, be false. And why should this false suggestion arise from the movements in the things we call brains rather than from any other movements? It is just as likely to arise from historical accidents of language, or from printers’ errors. If, on the other hand, something like Theism or Platonism or Absolute Idealism i
s true—if the universe is not blind or mechanical, then equally the human individual can have no monopoly in producing poetry. For on this view all is designed, all is significant. The poetry produced by impersonal causes is not illusory. The Muse may speak through any instrument she chooses.

  Surely the dilemma is plain. Either there is significance in the whole process of things as well as in human activity, or there is no significance in human activity itself. It is an idle dream, at once cowardly and arrogant, that we can withdraw the human soul, as a mere epiphenomenon, from a universe of idiotic force, and yet hope, after that, to find for her some faubourg where she can keep a mock court in exile. You cannot have it both ways. If the world is meaningless, then so are we; if we mean something, we do not mean alone. Embrace either alternative, and you are free of the personal heresy.

  II

  In his brilliant essay on The Personal Heresy in Criticism printed in last year’s Essays and Studies of the English Association, Mr C. S. Lewis mentioned my Milton as a book in which poetry was treated as the expression of personality. And up to a point he may have been right. But as he is hostile to my supposed way of thinking, and as I agree with a good deal of his essay, it seems either that I did not make myself clear or that Mr Lewis is not entirely right. So I welcome this opportunity of saying what I mean by personality in literature. However, though certain cross-purposes may be straightened by further discussion, I do not say that much of Mr Lewis’s essay is not extremely provocative and controversial. With some of it I disagree; and as the matters of disagreement seem to me well worth dwelling on, I offer the comments that follow. I hope that my being stirred to argue the point with Mr Lewis may be taken as my warm tribute to his essay’s excellence.

  As a preliminary, I must express surprise that Mr Lewis considers the personal heresy, as he calls it, a sign of modernity. I should have thought it slightly shop-soiled. Mr Lewis quotes an ambiguous passage from Mr T. S. Eliot as supporting it: yet what weight can this passage have in the face of so uncompromising an attack on the personal heresy as that author’s essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent? Here Mr Eliot says that ‘the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’, and that ‘honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry’. And he comes to the conclusion that for the poet the mind of Europe and of his own country is much more important than his own private mind. Now these sentiments are not only close to Mr Lewis’s but they agree with a strong modern tendency, whose limits are not easily drawn, to belittle the individual in comparison with the race, the personal in comparison with the abstract, the Renaissance in comparison with Byzantium. Whatever the fate of this tendency—it may peter out in a few years for all we can tell—at the moment it is modern, and the opposite tendency to cling to the personal, even if fated shortly to prevail, just fails to be modern.

  As a second preliminary let me say I entirely accept Mr Lewis’s contention that in the matter of personality you can draw no line between lyric and dramatic poetry. I believe with him that there is a difference between (for example) the poet’s feeling towards personal pain and towards pain pictured in his poetry; but within the latter category it makes no difference whether the pain is pictured as happening to the poet speaking for himself in a lyric or to a fictitious personage in a drama.

  To turn now to the words personal and personality, it is plain how easy misunderstanding may be if we consider the following sentence of Mr Lewis’s. In commenting on the passage from Keats’s Hyperion beginning—

  As when, upon a tranced summer-night,

  Those green-rob’d senators of mighty woods,

  Tall oaks . . .

  he writes:

  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.

  In this passage Mr Lewis implies that ‘personal’ as a critical term includes every accident however trivial connected with the author. No one can complain that he does so, but I should guess that not a few supporters of the ‘personal heresy’ would simply ignore such trivialities in their conception of personality. They would attach them to the sphere of literary gossip, not to that of criticism. Certainly I should never dream of giving them any critical value in themselves and I should agree that to recall such things when reading poetry would be grossly inappropriate. The most that literary gossip can do in the way of criticism is to keep people off a wrong track. There is a story about Milton that once after his blindness, hearing a lady sing, he said, ‘Now I swear this lady is handsome’. Such an anecdote might have had a critical use at the time when Milton was imagined to be insusceptible to female charm. Now that this error has been generally discarded, the anecdote has no critical value—it is no more than a pleasant piece of literary gossip, and to be conscious of it when we read, for instance, the Chorus’s description of Dalila entering like a ship with streamers flying is to abuse both the anecdote and the poetry. If Mr Lewis in attacking the personal heresy is wishing to point out that some of the labour spent in recent years on Johnson and Lamb, for instance, is anecdotal rather than critical, and that to confound the two spheres is a heresy, then he has my support.

  Of course Mr Lewis does not confine ‘personal’ to this trivial or accidental sense. He grants that it is possible through poetry to come into contact with a poet’s temperament in the most intimate way. The reader shares the poet’s consciousness. But, according to Mr Lewis, even so the personal contact involved is relatively unimportant: first, because the personality with which the reader achieves contact is not the poet’s normal personality but a heightened, temporary, perhaps alien, personality; secondly, because that personality is a means of vision rather than the thing ultimately seen. The personal heresy consists in the reader’s seeing the poet’s normal personality in his poetry, and in focusing his eyes on that personality instead of letting them contemplate the universe in a particular way.

  Now if it is heretical to hold that part of the value of poetry consists in gaining contact with the normal personality of the poet, then I am a heretic. But I shall probably be using the word normal in a way Mr Lewis would disclaim. When he imagines Keats reading about senators in a little brown book in a room smelling of boiled beef he attaches these supposed facts to Keats’s normal personality. I should do nothing of the sort, but call them as irrelevant to his normal personality as to the passage of Hyperion under discussion. In other words by ‘personality’ or ‘normal personality’ I do not mean practical or everyday personality, I mean rather some mental pattern which makes Keats Keats and not Mr Smith or Mr Jones. (Pattern is of course a bad word because it implies the static, whereas personality cannot remain fixed: the poet’s personality is in the pattern of the sea rather than in that of a mosaic pavement.) And I believe we read Keats in some measure because his poetry gives a version of a remarkable personality of which another version is his life. The two versions are not the same but they are analogous. Part of our response to poetry is in fact similar to the stirring we experience when we meet some one whose personality impresses us. Such a person may startle us by the things he does, but quite outside anything he does there will be a distinction about him which, though difficult to define, we prize and which has the faculty of rousing us to some extent from our quotidian selves. This person may be subject to accidents, such as toothache, irregular habits, or an uncertain temper, which interfere with our enjoying this distinguished mental pattern of his; yet we know that the pattern is there. Though subject to change it is definite enough to be called habitual; it can indeed be looked on as his normal self underlying the accidents of quotidian existence.

  One of the readiest ways of pointing to the function of personality in poetry is by means of the word style. Style read
ily suggests the mental pattern of the author, the personality realised in words. Style in poetry is partly a matter of rhythm; and rhythm, Dr Richards says very truly in Science and Poetry, ‘is no matter of tricks with syllables, but directly reflects personality’. Mr Lewis would probably define style as the poet’s credentials certifying him a person whom you can trust in the quest of bringing back true reports on the universe; and consider the report far more important than the credentials. But I should assert myself that experience shows how directly personality revealed through style can constitute the major appeal of poetry. It is pleasant to choose an example from a modern poet who considers poetry an escape from personality rather than an expression of it. In Mr T. S. Eliot’s latest work, The Rock, the most successful passages are those where the author’s characteristic rhythms and word-arrangements have freest scope, where his style is most obviously recognizable, in other words when he is most himself.

  A Cry from the North, from the West and from the South:

  Whence thousands travel daily to the timekept City;

  Where My Word is unspoken,

  In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels

  The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,