The Personal Heresy

by C. S. Lewis

  Mr Lewis objects to my connecting the uniqueness of the Delphic Charioteer with the sculptor’s personality on the ground that this very sense of uniqueness can be felt in apprehending ‘a sunset, a flight of birds past the window, the gesture of an athlete, or the sudden onset of rain’, none of which are works of art. ‘The experience occurs both when there is no known artist and when there is.’ Personality cannot account for all the instances. What reason then for allowing it to account for the uniqueness of the Charioteer? The argument is good, but I dispute the premises. I do not in fact allow to all the phenomena under review (pardon the phrase) the same quality of uniqueness. They are indeed phenomena of different kinds which we should expect a person to enjoy in different ways. We may legitimately couple the sunset and the rain. I don’t mind including with them the birds, although I would remind Mr Lewis that we have it on the authority of one who was both poet and scientist that

  Birds are of all animals the nearest to men

  for that they take delight in both music and dance,

  and gracefully schooling leisure to enliven life

  wer the earlier artists.

  But the gesture of an athlete I cannot allow in the list unless it is more narrowly defined; because such a gesture, if the result of long training and much joy, may be allied to the mimetic dance, may be indistinguishable from a work of art; to be classed with the Delphic Charioteer. Anyhow I postulate at least two classes for the things or acts Mr Lewis enumerates; and correspondingly in enjoying them we get different sensations. And it remains to be seen whether the sense of uniqueness we talk of is single or follows the different sensations proper to each class.

  Trying to recapture and analyze any feelings I have had in the matter, I differ from Mr Lewis in that I find this sense of uniqueness to be a rough account of more than one state of mind. It may imply in the main that here is something very well worth our attention, something we must on no account miss. A natural consequence of such a thought is that perhaps the present chance of enjoyment may not recur; so quite easily, though truncatedly, we sum up the whole process by expressing the last phase alone—the improbability of recurrence—using some word like unique. Secondly, there is Mr Lewis’s use, which he describes too well for me not to use his words. He says of the sunset, the flight of birds, &c., that

  any of these, at a favoured moment, may come over us with just that sense of unity and individuality which you describe and extort from us a verweile doch.

  The last phrase implies pretty much what I have just described. But the ‘sense of unity’ is surely another and separate sensation. We may witness many events or objects and think them unique without having any sense of unity: such as a royal funeral, or our first play, or Etna in eruption. If mere interest reaches a certain pitch we attribute uniqueness to those experiences. But a sense of unity is of a different order, allying us however distantly to the poet and the mystic. And if we describe this sense of unity as unique, as we may easily do, it is, as I said, a very rough and inadequate account indeed.

  Now both these meanings of unique can be applied to all the objects (the Delphic Charioteer included) enumerated by Mr Lewis. But, culpable as I was in applying so vague a word as unlikeness (for which I would quite readily have used uniqueness instead) to the effect produced by that statue, I did not mean by it either of the two qualities above described. But I did mean something both different from them and inapplicable to sunsets and showers. What I said fumblingly about the Charioteer was said much better (naturally) by Jane Austen in answering a letter from her niece:

  You are so odd, and all the time so perfectly natural! so peculiar in yourself, and yet so like everybody else!

  The sensation of unlikeness, or uniqueness, is here combined with that of kinship and recognition. Jane Austen at once feels her niece very alien and yet recognizes herself and all women in her. Similarly, in spite of its apparent remoteness, its solitary existence in a strange and antique world, the Delphic Charioteer can awaken the sense of kinship and of sharing. And this paradox is so striking that the experience stands out as exceedingly interesting and significant; and we are again tempted to call it unique. I fancy that some such experience is described by Longinus when in his seventh chapter of On the Sublime he says,

  For, as if instinctively, our soul is uplifted by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard.

  The above may give some notion of the feelings I had in mind when I spoke of the ‘unlikeness’ of the Delphic Charioteer to any other work of art. I do not wish to imply that the feelings Mr Lewis attaches to unique may not apply also, or that ‘personality’ is the only ground of appeal possessed by the statue. And now, having opened the question of sharing or recognition, I will say something more of it in general.

  It is highly probable that in matters of literary criticism our own mental temper dictates both the kind of things we say and the satisfaction we get from this or that way of speaking by others. And no amount of argument will alter such a dictation. This does not mean that one person cannot profit by the opinions of another; but it may mean that frank personal testimony is often more profitable than argument, because the latter can so easily be but the personal bent pretending to a ridiculously unjustified universality. I should therefore like to interpose a very simple piece of testimony, presenting it as apparent experience and as nothing more.

  Adequate enjoyment of works of art seems to depend on chance. We happen, we cannot guess why, to be in the right mood; and the obstacles usually interposed between us and the artistic object disappear. By some chance the obstacles chose to remove themselves when I was surveying one (and probably not the best) of a number of romanesque churches I was in the course of visiting in the Auvergne. Among other feelings experienced there presented itself to me with considerable emphasis and apparent spontaneity the one that I was sharing something with the man who had designed the church. The feeling seemed not particularly different in quality from that intimacy that can subsist or can be imagined to subsist in ordinary life between lovers or other people united in uncommon sympathy. It was certainly very different in circumstances, because I had no idea who the architect was or even whether he was known. Nor did I feel the least curiosity to find out. All that matters to me is that the feeling referred to appeared both personal and valuable.

  Mr Lewis is free to be utterly sceptical of the truth of the above personal impression and to think me gravely deluded. On the other hand, the episode may reassure him that I refrain from those grosser confoundings of the feelings proper to art with those proper to life which he so eloquently describes and condemns. With most of that condemnation I heartily agree. Yet I believe that he presses the distinction between art and life too far. To treat a dead artist with the social technique proper to dealing with a generous employer, a troublesome neighbour, or an admired parliamentary candidate is a wild abuse. Yet I would maintain that my relations with the Auvergne architect were free from that abuse, yet personal; outside the sphere of action, yet of a kind to be found in ordinary life. Which brings me to another of Mr Lewis’s dilemmas:

  You maintain that we do well to respond to the poet’s personality while we read. But if this is the response really proper to personality—the practical, affective response of love or hatred made by one man to another—then it overwhelms poetry in matters more important, though poetically irrelevant. If it is anything less than this, if it is some surely contemplative, appraising, criticizing gaze, then it is a mere insult.

  To this I reply that though the ‘practical, affective response of love or hatred made by one man to another’ may be the usual rule of human relations, it is not invariably so. There are times of sympathy between human beings when anything ‘practical’ is as grossly inappropriate as ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’ would be towards a man with a broken leg calling for first aid. Normally, such times of sympathy are arrived at through familiarity and
much practical traffic. Nevertheless that tragic is irrelevant to the moment when it comes. Moreover, the experience can occur between comparative strangers, between people of widely different natures, to whom the normal familiarities would be impossible. It certainly occurred in the late War, and is likely to occur at any crisis. The experience is personal in the sense under review because it cannot happen to a man alone and consists largely in the act of sharing; yet it reduces the sharers, and that without insult and inappropriateness, to all the stripping of personality their natures can bear.

  One of the results of any successful sharing of this sort is a heightened sensibility. If I look at a sunset or a cloud that’s dragonish with a sympathetic companion, and we are successful in sharing the experience, I am likely to see the scene with keener eyes. Mr Lewis would have it that good sunset-gazing mainly concerns the sunset alone; I, on the other hand, distinguish between solitary gazing and gazing in company. In both acts there will be a heightened apprehension; and both will be good, but not in the same way. That the act in company is likely to be a ticklish business does not shut out its few successful consummations. And these, as well as other feelings, contain some that have to do with companionship—feelings for instance of the common lot of man in good and ill, or of the mysterious truth that the enisled beings can at times at least imagine themselves part of the single continent—and their force is conditioned by, is inseparable from, the flow of sympathy to and from the other person.

  In describing this experience in life I have been simultaneously pointing to one value of personality in literature. One immediately apparent difference can quickly be explained. A flow of sympathy backwards and forwards is conceivable in life; how is it possible in art, between a dead writer and a living reader? I reply that all expression in a medium comprehensible to a public constitutes in itself an invitation at least to share, sometimes to sympathize. Even a riddle has little point if it is too difficult ever to admit a solver. It may invite a very select company but invite it does.

  From the poet’s point of view Wordsworth expresses this notion of sharing in the section of his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, What Is a Poet? The poet himself is

  a man speaking to men; a man . . . endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind. . . . The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of science is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow-beings. . . . The Man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion.

  I find the whole of this section of the preface very difficult, but I believe Wordsworth to be expressing the notion of sharing. Though the poet says things the reader could never say, part of the point of his saying those things is that the reader can share them. And part of the reader’s benefit is that he is privileged to share something with a superior person whose utterance is quite beyond the power of the reader’s mouth. And it is no small privilege.

  The sensation of sharing will be most obvious when the author deals with the most centrally human themes. Hamlet’s soliloquies, the end of Paradise Lost, or, according to some readings, the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels.

  I should now naturally go on to set forth the second way in which personality can find valuable expression in literature. But, in setting forth the first, the relation between personality in art to personality in life has perforce been touched on; and I had better say now what I have to say on the matter. I can at the same time say more about something I called a ‘mental pattern’, an entity about which Mr Lewis is very sceptical and which I described all too vaguely. I contrasted a man’s practical or everyday personality with his more general and important ‘mental pattern’; and in so doing appeared to belittle the former. Mr Lewis truly pointed out that in personality it is precisely the little things that count for so much. ‘Where personality is in question I will not give up a wrinkle or a stammer.’ And for Mr Lewis the very word personality suggests ‘warmth and humanity, intimacy, the real rough and tumble of human life’.

  I entirely concur with Mr Lewis’s sentiments about wrinkles and stammers, and I think that his suspicion that I do not concur rests partly on my own vagueness of wording but partly on a confusion of two classes of things that should be separated. Our dispute began as follows. Mr Lewis speaking of a passage in Hyperion said it was not relevant that Keats should have first read about senators ‘in a little brown book in a room smelling of boiled beef, the same day that he pulled out a loose tooth’. I agreed that these matters were accidents and I suggested that a man had a personality apart from them. Mr Lewis retorts that it is precisely these accidents that largely constitute the value to us of a personality in real life. And he instances wrinkles and stammers; but in so doing he is introducing into the discussion a new element, about which I had in no wise committed myself. Let me explain, taking the stammer as a convenient starting-point. Writing on a literary topic I cannot help thinking of the author with the most memorable stammer, Charles Lamb. Well, take Lamb’s stammer as one kind of personal accident. But take the following imaginary happening, to which the word accident could be very properly applied. Lamb was once witnessing Othello with his favorite Bensley acting Iago. It is the middle of the third scene of the third act; and Lamb is keyed up to listen. Othello re-enters, and as Iago begins saying: ‘Nor poppy, nor mandragora . . .’, Lamb realises that his nose has begun violently to bleed. Holding his handkerchief to it he tries to get out. In his hurry he trips over the feet of a lady; he stumbles, he drops his handkerchief on her white dress with the worst possible results. Indignation in the neighbourhood at the commotion. He escapes humiliated. No well-constituted human being could consider such an accident as equivalent to Lamb’s stammer. It is not a part of the person and it is something which decent feelings prompt us to ignore; anyhow quite trivial. Contrasted to this accident, Lamb’s stammer is very important indeed, simply not to be put in the same class with it. Now Keats’s hypothetical tooth, the brown book, and the smell of beef, are all trivialities, unrelated to anything essential in him. In fact it is doubtful if they should be included in ‘personality’ at all. This was the class of thing I meant by ‘practical or everyday personality’. That I should have dismissed them from essential personality was no proof that I dismissed Lamb’s stammer likewise.

  What then is the nature of the wrinkles and stammers? They are valuable (and of course Mr. Lewis and I must agree here) because in spite of apparent triviality they express so much. They are indeed the minuter streaks of the human tulip we most of us delight to number, on the theory that the general is best expressed through the particular. They are to the man’s life what the characteristic minutiae of his style are to his art. Far from rejecting or belittling them, I welcome them not only in themselves but as confirming my analogy between the personality expressed in life and that expressed in art.

  I have reached the position of dismissing from any personal significance certain minutiae and of retaining others. It now remains for me to explain, if I can, how a ‘mental pattern’ is related to these significant minutiae. So far I have been speaking of personality in life, not in art, except when I made the smaller habits of style a parallel in art to the wrinkles and stammers in life. In speaking now of a ‘mental pattern’ I refer to something equally valid in both spheres, something allowing of expression in both life and art. I can describe it best through an analogy.

  Conrad’s Typhoon is the story of a middle-aged sea captain, who, till the time of the story, had never had his character fully tried. The trial comes in a typhoon, and he is eq
ual to it. We are led to believe that the qualities that saved Conrad’s captain had existed in some sort before the actual trial; it was no sudden and alien inspiration that helped him through. We know their existence only because of the trial, yet we know that they had been there all along in spite of our necessary ignorance should the trial never have taken place. In the same way a mental pattern consists of certain predispositions susceptible of many decrees of fulfillment or expression.

  Of course these predispositions, as I call them, could not have been established without some acts of expression, acts which were not only expression but a creative agency. But any new act of expression is largely governed by the existing predispositions. It is this simple fact which makes Mr Lewis’s dilemma, posed in his first essay, innocuous. Speaking of the passage in Hyperion, already much discussed, where Keats compares oaks to senators, Mr Lewis writes:

  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.

  And again about another passage in the same poem:

  Keats had to grope for his

  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.

  To these statements I reply: When Keats thought of his senators and his solitary gust, he certainly made something new, going beyond his old self. But it is equally true that there was something established in his mind ready to welcome the senators when they presented themselves to him. Present senators to a million other people, and they will not associate them with oaks; just because their cast of mind is not adjusted to make the creative effort to associate them. Keats made the association because among other reasons he was partly prepared to make it. It is the sum of Keats’s preparednesses that constituted his mental pattern when he wrote Hyperion, part of which pattern he actually expressed in writing the poem. Of course in addition he altered those preparednesses by the very act of writing, and emerged a somewhat different person. Mr Lewis insists so strongly on the novelty of the perception in art and sets so little store by the accumulated predispositions that I am tempted to ask him whether in the sphere of life the man with the expressive wrinkle manufactures it afresh every time we notice it, having quite smoothed it away in the intervals. A question which brings up our problem: what is the relation of the wrinkles and stammers to the mental pattern? And here at once a distinction must be made. Speaking of stammers, do we mean an accident or a permanent characteristic? If we mean a single stammer that befell a man not prone to stammering, it has no connexion with the mental pattern; if a permanent proneness to stammer, it may have a very definite connexion. There are many ways of stammering or of manipulating wrinkles. If a man has accepted his stammers and wrinkles and made the best use of them (as a wise man does), they will show a general correspondence to that man’s set of predispositions. And if that man is a writer, though he will not write stammeringly or make wrinkles the subject of his writings—stammers and wrinkles will make no apparent entry into his works—yet his style of writing will correspond to the style in which both stammers and wrinkles are manipulated. And helping to condition all three—style, stammers, and wrinkles—there lies behind them the mental pattern.