The Personal Heresy

by C. S. Lewis

  On the question of ‘sharing’ there is almost complete agreement between us. When I first threw the apple of discord in 1933 I already welcomed the view that ‘we approach the poet by sharing his consciousness, not by studying it’, that we ‘look with his eyes, not at him’.2 Whatever difference still separates us here is one of emphasis. I am still anxious, as I was anxious in 1933, to stress the distinction between two relations which tend to be confused—that of sharing, co-operation or companionship on the one hand, and that of reciprocity on the other. We speak of lovers as being in sympathy, and so, of course, they usually are on a variety of topics. But if we take the word sympathy in its strict sense (a ‘feeling together’, a joint or shared experience) it must be remembered that mutual love is the very opposite of sympathy. The man is attending to the woman and ignoring himself, the woman is attending to the man and ignoring herself. So far from sharing a feeling, they are having opposite feelings; feelings as unlike and as mutually exclusive as their physical functions in the act of union. ‘My true love has my heart and I have his’: in proportion to the degree of love, the one mind is occupied with just that which the other excludes. Real sympathy, on the other hand—as of two boys sailing a boat or two men looking at a sunset—implies a common interest; the parties forget themselves not in each other but in a third thing. In this sense, paradoxically enough, it may even be said that two rivals who love the same woman are more in ‘sympathy’ than two lovers. No doubt, in human life the relations are constantly mixed. The lovers, in the ordinary course of nature, pass on from interest in each other to a common interest in their children: the two boys learn to like each other because they both like sailing boats. And so, as I have already admitted,3 our imaginative sharing of the poet’s eyes will sometimes throw up in its course an emotion directed towards the poet. There is no difference here between Dr Tillyard’s view and mine, provided always that we both regard the reading of poetry as essentially a co-operation, sharing or sympathy between the poet and ourselves, which, like all truly sympathetic or co-operative experiences, is directed towards a third thing. We lose ourselves not in the poet but in that wherein he is lost—in the adventures of Crusoe, the flowing of the Oxus, or the rotundity of Falstaff.

  But even when this has been freely admitted, I still feel myself obliged to ask, as I asked in my first essay, what precisely we are sharing, and whether it can be unambiguously described as the poet’s personality. Marvell’s poem The Mower to the Glow-worms will here serve very well, and the precise force of my question can be brought out by a dilemma. In the poem it is feigned that a lover goes about addressing some rather defeatist advice to a number of insects. Now this is either true or false in the plain historical sense. If it is true, if the man Marvell actually behaved as the lover is feigned to behave, then that man is a lunatic, his experience is shared, if at all, only by other lunatics, and is interesting only to alienists. If it is false, then the merit of the poem lies in the success with which these fictions communicate to us a mood which in itself involved no lunacy, no conversations with glow-worms, and perhaps—if we accept Dr Tillyard’s suggestion that Julia has only the function of a corset—no love. But since we, the readers, find this mood congenial and accept it, it follows that the difference between Marvell and ourselves does not lie in the capacity for such moods; or, in other words, that what we share is not Marvell’s idiosyncrasy but that part of Marvell which is common to us and him; perhaps to all men. What differentiates us from Marvell is something we do not necessarily share in reading the poem—the skill, namely, and invention which enable him to communicate. But personality must surely be a principium individuationis, that which distinguishes one man from another. It would seem, therefore, that the reading of poetry usually involves not a sharing of the poet’s personal or idiosyncratic experience but of his merely human experience. What is peculiar to the poet is not the thing he communicates, nor even the symbols whereby he communicates, but his power of finding and using them—in fact, as we might have anticipated, the art of poetry.

  This, I have said, is the ‘usual’ situation. I have been forced to qualify my doctrine in this way, because I believe there are two kinds of poetry. The commonest, and by wide human agreement the greatest, kind operates as I have described; it communicates such experiences as all men have had, so that simple readers exclaim ‘How true’, and classicists call it a ‘just representation of general nature’, and realists say that the poet is stripping off the mask of convention and facing ‘the facts’. But I must admit that there are also poems which seem to give me a new and nameless sensation, or even a new sense, to enrich me with experience which nothing in my previous life had prepared me for. When this happens, I do not deny that we are sharing something peculiar to the poet. But if this is a condition present in some poems and absent from others, it cannot be brought into our definition of poetry. Still less can we say that it is a necessary character of the greatest poetry. Complexionally, I like this second kind very much: to the natural man in me it is at times more congenial than any other. But the weight of critical opinion forbids me to call it the better of the two. I do not find it in Homer, Sophocles, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, or (pace the Abbé Brémond) in Racine: I find it seldom in Virgil, and only in the very latest works of Shakespeare; but I find it abundantly in Blake, in the early Morris, in Mr De la Mare and Miss Sitwell, in Mr Eliot, and even in Poe. I find it most of all in the prose work of George Macdonald, where literary competence is often so to seek that any of us could improve even the best passages very materially in half an hour. Clearly such a quality must not be identified with poetry; and indeed it is so troublesome that I am glad to have it out of the argument on almost any terms. For my own part I am sure that I do not care for these things because they introduce me to the men Morris and Macdonald: I care for the books, and the men, because they witness to these things, and it is the message not the messenger that has my heart. But for our present purpose it is enough to have shown that such peculiarity is not essential to poetry. It is simply one of the things that poetry can be used for.

  I have been challenged by Dr Tillyard to produce my own theory of poetry, and it is now time to begin doing so with the proposition (not, surely, very paradoxical) that poetry is an art or skill—a trained habit of using certain instruments to certain ends. This platitude is no longer unnecessary; it has been becoming obscured ever since the great romantic critics diverted our attention from the fruitful question, ‘What kind of composition is a poem?’ to the barren question, ‘What kind of man is a poet?’ The second question is barren, because the only true answer (‘A poet is a man who makes poems’) immediately throws us back on the first question which we ought to have asked at the outset. The romantic critics, however, were not content with the true answer. Wordsworth begins by saying that a poet ‘is a man speaking to men’, which unfortunately includes all men not mad or dumb: to confine it to poets we need an account of that special mode of speaking which poets use and others do not. Instead of supplying this he goes on to attribute to the poet a superiority over other men in a number of qualities such as ‘tenderness’, ‘enthusiasm’, and ‘sensibility’. Such a theory of poetry I call Naturalistic, because it is concerned not with a human and voluntary activity called poetry, but with ‘poethood’ conceived as an intrinsic, natural superiority in certain favored individuals, like beauty or stature. This would be more tolerable if the superiority claimed were any of those really relevant to poetical composition. If it were said, ‘A poet is a man who can invent stories or at least fill in other people’s stories with plausible and interesting detail’, or again, ‘A poet is a man with a taste for words, a man more than ordinarily sensible to their associations, flavours and sounds’, the theory would be less objectionable. We should only have to add to it the caution that these bents or talents, even if they be as natural in the first instance as the hand of the future surgeon or the ear of the future piano-tuner, can reach poethood only by training, industry, and th
e method of trial and error. But full-blown Naturalism defines the poet by qualities no more connected with literary composition than with many other activities. It wants poets to be a separate race of great souls or mahatmas. Poetolatry is its natural result, for if there were such a race of supermen among us, those who know no higher deity would do well to worship them.

  The simplest answer to Naturalism is that it cannot, from the very nature of the case, be proved. When Dr Tillyard says that the poet ‘has inhabited heavens and hells unbearable by the ordinary man’, we may reply, ‘How do you know?’ The poet can tell: the ordinary man cannot. Even those who think that the poet expresses only himself, at least admit that expression is his job. But if so, what fair comparison can there be between the experiences of the professional expressor and those of the inarticulate many? It is like saying, ‘All discovered islands have better harbours than all undiscovered islands.’ I admit that some writers have told me for the first time of heavens and hells I never met before; but many, equally great or greater, have told me only of those we all have to bear whether we choose to call them ‘unbearable’ or not. What hells can be harder to bear than those in which many of our unpoetic fellow creatures live? What man, after forty years in the world, has not experience enough (if that were all that was needed) to be raw material for all the tragedies of Shakespeare? Once again, the view I am fighting depends on a gross under-estimation of common things and common men. ‘To be a man’, as Professor Tolkien recently reminded us, ‘is tragedy enough.’ Yes, and comedy enough too. The Naturalistic doctrine is a mere assumption, first made by the arrogance of poets and since accepted by the misdirected humility of an irreligious age. When once the instinct for reverence is ‘To Let’, plenty of tenants will offer themselves: with this ‘all Europe rings from side to side’.

  But our answer to Naturalism is more than a plea of ‘Not proven’. The rude, but inevitable, retort to Wordsworth’s definition is ‘go and look at a few poets’. Courtesy to our contemporaries must not forbid us to point out that a poet, an admitted and unmistakable poet, is sometimes (in certain periods, often) a man inferior to the majority in ‘tenderness’, ‘enthusiasm’, and ‘knowledge of human nature’—not to speak of information, common-sense, fortitude, and courtesy. The ‘Dirty Twenties’ of our own century produced poems which succeeded in communicating moods of boredom and nausea that have only an infinitesimal place in the life of a corrected and full-grown man. That they were poems, the fact of communication and the means by which it was effected, are, I take it, sufficient proof. But the experience communicated was certainly not that of spiritual supermen; if it truly reflected the personality of the poets, then the poets differed from the mass, if at all, only by defect. We do well to praise the art and show charity to the men. But they are not great souls. Wash their feet, and I will praise your humility: sit at their feet, and you will be a fool. Yet they made poems.

  Finally, if there were no other ground for condemning Naturalism, the results it produces in criticism are ground enough. It leads Dr Tillyard to ask me whether a man with a stammer or a wrinkle produces it afresh every time I meet him, as I believe that a poet makes poetry afresh whenever he achieves a poem. The question shows how completely the distinctions between art and nature, act and event, deliberate and involuntary, have been obliterated. The wrinkle remains because it is nature, something that happens to a man; the poetry does not, because it is something a man has to do. Thus again, Naturalism leads Dr Tillyard into something very like ranking poets according to their ‘Courage’ in ‘meditating on human fate’. Indeed, indeed, a soldier ought not to have written thus. I know that we hear much of this kind of courage in publishers’ advertisements: there every scribbler is ‘daring’ when he defies gods whom he does not believe in, or conventions that have no authority in the only circles he frequents. But had not ‘courage’ of this sort better be left to blurb-writers? For, to tell the truth, literary composition is not an employment that makes very heavy demands on this arduous virtue. What meditation on human fate demands so much ‘courage’ as the act of stepping into a cold bath? I should be glad to hear of it, for I know no path to heroism which sounds so suited to my own capacities.

  Rejecting Naturalism, then, I turn to the small number of tentative opinions which constitute my own theory of poetry; and by poetry I mean, as the renaissance critics meant, imaginative literature whether in prose or verse. In the first place, I believe poetry to be an art or skill. A skill is usually defined by its instruments. I suppose we shall all agree that the instrument of poetry is language. But since language is used for other purposes, such as philosophy and commerce, we now need the differentia of the poetical use of language. Taking conversation as the common base, I would say that scientific or philosophical language, on the one hand, and poetical language on the other, are alternative improvements of this in the direction of two different kinds of efficiency. Thus if we take the sentence ‘This is cold’ we can make it more precise either by saying, ‘This is twice as cold as that’, or by saying, ‘Ugh! It’s like a smack in the face’. The first proceeds by turning a qualitative sensation into a quantity; the second, by communicating with the aid of an emotive noise and a simile just that quality which the other neglects. Following the first process further you will come to science, which escapes from the sensuous altogether into that world of pure quantities which is so much more useful for what Bacon called ‘operation’. Following the second far enough, you will come to poetry, that is, to a skill or trained habit of using all the extra-logical elements of language—rhythm, vowel-music, onomatopoeia, associations, and what not—to convey the concrete reality of experiences. The ideal limit of the one process is actually reached in pure arithmetic; whether the ideal of the other has been reached—whether ‘pure poetry’ exists or not—need not now be discussed. The vast majority of human utterances fall between the two extremes. It is therefore not usually possible, and it is never necessary, to say of a composition in any absolute sense, ‘This is poetry’: what we can say is, ‘This is further in the poetical direction than that’. But as, in ordinary terminology, we mean by a tall man or a rich man one who is taller or richer than most, so by a poem we mean a composition which communicates more of the concrete and qualitative than our usual utterances do. A poet is a man who produces such compositions more often and more successfully than the rest of us.

  In a stricter terminology, however, nearly all men are poets, in the sense that they can and do exploit the extra-logical properties of language to produce utterances of the concrete which have a value higher than zero. We do not usually call them poets: just as I am not called a carpenter though I could, at a pinch, put up some sort of a shelf, nor a doctor, though I know the use of a few common drugs. Even when such compositions use verse and are committed to writing and have a value quite sensibly higher than zero, we do not usually call their authors poets, reserving that name, as utility bids us, for those who do the thing specially well. Thus a man might be a ‘poet’ by the standards of one society and not by those of another—as a man might be ‘tall’ among the Japanese, and ‘short’ among the Norwegians.

  The difference between scientific or philosophical language and poetical language is emphatically not that the first utters truths and the second fancies. On the contrary everything that is concrete is real,4 and some suspect that everything real is concrete. The abstractions used by science and philosophy may or may not be the names of universals which are timeless realities as Plato thought; but they are not the names of ‘real things’ in the popular sense—things that occur in space and time. In space and time there is no such thing as an organism, there are only animals and vegetables. There are no mere vegetables, only trees, flowers, turnips, &c. There are no ‘trees’, except beeches, elms, oaks, and the rest. There is even no such thing as ‘an elm’. There is only this elm, in such a year of its age at such an hour of the day, thus lighted, thus moving, thus acted on by all the past and all the present, and affor
ding such and such experiences to me and my dog and the insect on its trunk and the man a thousand miles away who is remembering it. A real elm, in fact, can be uttered only by a poem. The sort of things we meet in poetry are the only sort we meet in life—things unique, individual, lovely, or hateful. Unfortunately, however, poetry does not, as poetry, tell us whether the particular ones she describes do, in fact, exist. That is where science comes in. In order to assert facts, i.e., to predict experiences, she must infer: in order to infer she must abstract. Only science can tell you where and when you are likely to meet an elm: only poetry can tell you what meeting an elm is like. The one answers the question Whether, the other answers the question What. We abstract to inquire whether God exists: Dante shows you what it would be like if He did, or, in other words, gives a meaning to the mere abstraction ‘existence of God’, and though he cannot, as a poet, foretell the conclusion of your debate, tells you what it is you are really debating about. Abstraction is very like money. Neither gold nor paper is real wealth, but it is more convenient than real wealth for purposes of exchange. Poetry has the real wealth which the abstractions represent, but this is too cumbersome for the commerce of thought.