The Personal Heresy

by C. S. Lewis

  First, I retain my distinction between the kinds of sharing we experience when we have to do with inanimate nature and animals on the one hand and with authors on the other. When we ‘almost feel the strain of fibres as a tree bends to the wind’, it is a case not of sympathy but of empathy; it is the ‘old, old tale of Narcissus’. We are not playing a game with another player, but, like a child, with ourselves. Often, too, the experience contains elements that are the very opposite of sharing. We rejoice because the world we view is so separate from us, because we feel how little its business has to do with us, how admirably it can get on without us. This is the ruling factor in a discriminating delight in cats. I fancy, too (against the views of more learned critics of Hopkins), that when the poet’s ‘heart in hiding stirred for a bird’, he does at that moment see the windhover in precisely this detached manner. He is in hiding, and the bird’s utter unconsciousness of his admiring gaze is a part of the experience. But unlike bending trees, cats, and kestrels, poems invite us to share their authors’ feelings. And, if we comply, we get something that trees, cats, and kestrels cannot give. Of course this is not to decry trees, cats, and kestrels, or to imply that the two different experiences are mutually exclusive.

  Mr Lewis (p. 120) agrees that poets may be examples, but pleads that this is not the thing by which they are poets. ‘You can use a poet, not as a poet, but as a saint or hero’, but, he argues, that is not his true function. Here, I agree as regards poets, yet I would quote Mr Lewis’s words from a later page (p. 136) to the effect that ‘though it is convenient to define things per differentiam, it is a logical blunder to suppose that the point of maximum differentiation between them always coincides with the greatest value’. Precisely; the poet is not a poet because he sets an example, but the setting of an example may be of more value than the thing which makes him a poet and not something else. In passing I must protest against the implication that saints are saints and heroes heroes through their exemplary function. On the contrary, saints are saints because they achieve holiness, heroes heroes because they do brave deeds. They are strictly parallel to the poets, and in all three the exemplary function is something added to and not inherent in their specific natures.

  I welcome Mr Lewis’s comments on Marvell’s Mower to the Glow-worms, and his distinction between two kinds of poetry; that which seems to appeal to what is already there in ourselves, and that which introduces something alien (pp. 124–27)—and partly because in the course of them he reveals that we do in fact, as I had suspected, still mean different things by personality. ‘Personality’, he writes, ‘must surely be a principium individuationis, that which distinguishes one man from another.’ And it is only this second exceptional kind of poetry that deals with personality. Mr Lewis has every right to define personality in this way if he wishes, and I admit with regret that several statements in my first essay might seem to imply a similar definition. But the personality I think literature deals with is more complicated. When Mr Lewis speaks of personality being ‘that which distinguishes one man from another’, he seems to mean something that one personality has and no other has. But surely that is a false simplification. What distinguishes one man from another is often the degree of excellence in which he has a common human quality, or the way in which several common human qualities are blended. Even the very exceptional man will be so because he gives a new turn to the old rather than because he produces a genuine novelty. His main function is to infuse new life into the already familiar, to make wonderful once more those common human feelings which human apathy and the ‘lethargy of custom’ are apt to blur and to deaden. Thus Marvell’s conceit of the nightingale reading the score of an air by the light of the glow-worms is his own property, no one else’s, but at the same time it is inseparable from the feeling, common to any sentient human being, that life is paradoxical, full of strange absurdities, and that this very absurdity is what makes life worth living. In other words, the general truth and the personality are simply not to be separated.

  In sum, though I like Mr Lewis’s double division of poetry, and though I may refer to his second division later on, I do not believe personality (in my sense) to be lacking from the first kind.

  I now come to Mr Lewis’s attack on the Romantics for concentrating on the poet rather than on the activity of poetry. As a matter of practical policy, I agree with him heartily. The exaltation of poets into demigods is all part of the modern tendency to live vicariously; to watch semidivine sportsmen giving exhibitions instead of playing yourself; to listen to professionals making music on the air instead of yourself acquiring a personal skill; to buy ready-cooked food in tins instead of using the domestic oven. And the wider the distance interposed between the great poet and his readers, the more inclined are the readers to be passive merely and to despair of any creative power in themselves. Poetolatry in the end can only damage the cause of poetry.

  On the other hand Mr Lewis is not quite fair to the Romantics when he implies that they put the poets into a class apart. Some of them may have done; but at least Landor thought fit to include among his great men of antiquity statesmen and philosophers as well as poets, and Shelley expressly coupled the great poets and the great legislators. It would be fairer to assert that the Romantics were interested in great men (a legacy of the Renaissance), and that they directed a lot of attention to those great men who were also poets. And they may have carried the exaltation of the great individual too far. But it is unfair to say that their theory (‘Naturalism’, as Mr Lewis calls it) ‘wants poets to be a separate race of great souls or mahatmas’. Separate from the man in the street, yes: but not separate from other important individuals. It was only with the rise of the Art for Art’s sake theory that poets were segregated into their peculiar Holy of Holies. And to-day the Art for Art’s sake school is pretty well dead.

  To range ourselves against the champions of the Plain Man and to be in apparent opposition to the sound Johnsonian trust in the rightness of general opinion is distasteful and embarrassing. But I am bound to oppose Mr Lewis’s protest that the ordinary man and the poet are not on different levels of feeling. Nor should I despair of Dr Johnson’s support. There may be such a thing as a Plain Man ramp (see the advertisements that appeal to the Many) as there is the ramp of the Few, the Select, or the Right People (again see the advertisements and remember that the makers of a certain luxury for the Few were pleased to discover that of the Few there were so many). Disembarrassing ourselves as best we can from the opposed panics of being snobbish and of being uncritically vulgar, let us ask in what way a poet’s feelings differ from those of the ordinary man. (And let me make it quite clear that poets form only a small proportion of the not-ordinary men.) First his feelings are much more interesting. The poet is Hamlet to the ordinary man’s Horatio. Mr Lewis speaks of the poor show some poets have apparently made of their lives. But, to continue my analogy, the disasters which Hamlet occasioned or which befell him do not affect the matter of interest. He did far more damage than Horatio, but his feelings are much more interesting. And Dr Johnson (who after all was interested enough to write the life of that disastrous man Savage) could not deny it. It would, of course, be blasphemous to doubt the heroic potentialities in the breast of every man (I think of Arnold Bennett’s remarks in the Old Wives’ Tale on the fanatical heroism of the otherwise commonplace Mr Povey in trying to get a reprieve for his brother); but it is more often in fiction than in fact that these potentialities are allowed to take shape. The Hamlets are of a different order. Their share of the universal human potentialities has been realised in an unusual way. They make themselves available to us without the unwonted concatenation of events that forced Mr Povey’s latent heroism to show itself.

  Take in the second place the matter of courage. Here Mr Lewis thinks that I exalt the poet at the expense of the ordinary man. Certainly I do not wish to decry the ordinary man’s courage. To watch a labourer walking coolly on a naked girder a hundred feet above the ground or to read an
account of rescue work after a mine accident should fill us with astonishment. Yet the ordinary man’s courage differs from the poet’s. The first takes what comes his way and makes the best of the tricks of chance; the second does something different and, I think, harder. He anticipates, he ‘envisages circumstance’. Shelley said that for a man to be greatly good the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. Quite rightly he did not apply his remark to poets alone, but he sufficiently indicates the burden which the poetic imagination imposes on its owner and the resulting difference between the poet and the common man. Mr Lewis suggests that the experience of war should teach another lesson about courage, but I fancy it was this very thing that most taught me to respect the kind of courage the poets possess. Most combatants, gifted with a slightly more lively imagination than the ordinary, had to suppress it and live, without reflection or anticipation, in the moment; they merged themselves, for self-protection, with the common man, and they put up, as common men, a decent show. But to keep the imagination unimpaired was a rare and difficult achievement. It may be that no combatant achieved it fully, but a very few succeeded partially, and in so doing deserved an admiration different from that which we accord the generality. And their grade of courage was the poet’s. It is true enough, as Mr Lewis says, that the ordinary man is put through it as drastically as any one else. But the point is, how does he bear the experience? It may be ‘tragedy enough to be a man’; but of that tragedy different men make different things; and that is where the courage comes in.

  I am not so strongly opposed to Mr Lewis as I may seem, because I have been speaking of the more considerable and consistent poets, those who approach his class of ‘great men who are also poets’. And I admit that there are indeed men of very unsatisfactory lives who may, having written a few poems, go by the name of poet; and they are in an unfortunate position, lacking both the sober virtues of the ordinary man and the mental fortitude of the more considerable artist. Endowed with some imagination but deficient in stamina, they collapse under the strain of an intolerable burden. Even the more considerable poets may approximate to this class. Coleridge, the ‘archangel, slightly damaged’, may be the most eminent. But that description suggests the truth that angels, however damaged or debauched, may yet retain something of the angelic, which, though it may fail to make them better than the run of mankind, yet distinguishes them from it.

  I have already agreed with Mr Lewis in condemning poetolatry; and I should like to repeat the condemnation to counteract any suggestion of it in the above reference to angels. On the other hand, if we refrain from thinking considerable poets the only considerable people, I cannot see much harm in paying respect to those qualities they possess in an eminent degree.

  Mr Lewis (pp. 131 ff.) defines the provinces of science and poetry delightfully, and I need start no controversy on this section. I agree that the line between a poetical utterance in ordinary life and a poem is impossible to draw. But Mr Lewis appears to allow the word poet to be valid at a lower stage of mental distinction than I should. A skill of words giving eminence in the field of the crossword is insufficient to qualify a man for the name of poet. Further, the notion that a man can be a great technician in words and at the same time a commonplace person is false. The words great technician are of course ambiguous. Mr Lewis might call a very good imitator of another’s verbal mastery by this name. I should not, nor should I call him a poet either. Until a man is exceptionally skilful, not only in his range of vocabulary, his readiness at rhyming, his resourcefulness in putting things shortly or in amplifying but in his power over the sounds of words, I should not call him a ‘great technician’. And if Coleridge was right in holding that the power of music could not be acquired by mere industry, its presence must imply some superiority in the person who wields it. In other words, a ‘great technician’ will have some claim to be in Mr Lewis’s class of great men who have also written poetry.

  It is the same process of thought that makes me think that Mr Lewis’s definition of poetry as an art or a skill is deficient. An art or a skill is a false abstraction and does not exist apart from the stuff on which it is exercised and the person who exercises it. And to admit it as the differentia of the poet does not give it any stronger claim to independent existence. To give it an existence apart from the exerciser and the stuff on which it is exercised postulates a divine act. With those who look on art as god-given I have no quarrel, but Mr Lewis does not go so far as that.

  I come now to the theme in which I am most interested and about which I am least competent to speak. At the end of my second contribution I suggested to Mr Lewis that if he thinks poetry is not concerned with the poet’s personality he should tell us the things poetry is concerned with. His reply is that poetry

  being a skill of utterance, can be used to utter almost anything: to draw attention to (though not, of course, to demonstrate) a fact, to tell lies, to tell admitted fictions, to describe your own real or feigned emotions, to make jokes.

  Later he warns us against identifying what the poet ‘says’ with the apparent propositions in his poem. ‘The poet is not “saying” that his soul is an enchanted boat . . . what poetry “says” is the total, concrete experience it gives to the right reader.’

  Mr Lewis does not appear to find anything difficult to reconcile in these two passages. But to me it is the most puzzling matter in the world, once you have jettisoned, as an affirmation, the statement that the poet’s soul is an enchanted boat, to be certain that some of the items in the earlier passage, the facts, the lies, the fictions, the jokes, must not, as affirmations, be jettisoned likewise. Now it is notorious that when we speak of the subject-matter of poetry, ‘the things said’, or ‘what poetry is about’ we tend to be ambiguous. And one simple and often-made distinction may help the discussion. The phrase ‘what poetry is about’ may mean ‘what poetry can include’ or ‘what it properly concerns’. That poetry may include all the items in Mr Lewis’s list I freely admit, but the soul’s resemblance to the enchanted boat would have to be included too. All these have their place, as means, if not on any other plea. But when these items are treated as ‘what poetry properly concerns’, as ends, they have a most awkward tendency to evaporate. It would be much less awkward if they evaporated altogether, but they sometimes behave like the Cheshire Cat and leave their grin behind them. One of the poems we have had occasion to discuss will illustrate well enough. This is the second verse of Marvell’s Mower to the Glow-Worms:

  Ye country comets, that portend

  No war nor prince’s funeral,

  Shining unto no higher end

  Than to presage the grass’s fall,

  and it contains a fact, namely, that the appearance of the glow-worms in the long grass indicates the approach of the hay-harvest. How far, we may ask, are these lines about this fact? Not at all far. To begin with, the fact can be stated in language remote from the poetical. Even if the poetry is about it, it is not so quâ poetry. Secondly, the fact is significant almost entirely through its relation to other things. There is an analogy between a glow-worm foretelling the fall of the grass by the scythe of the mower and a comet foretelling the fall of a king by the scythe of death; and there is a contrast between the miniature, rural setting of the first fall, and the celestial and political setting of the second. But these analogies and contrasts take us away from the unrelated fact of a time-congruity between appearance of glow-worms and the hay-harvest. There is yet another job of work this fact may perform through its relation to other things. The very correctness of the fact stands out against the patent falsity of the preceding and following verses, in which the nightingales read their song-books, and the mowers are rescued from will-o’-the-wisps, by the glow-worms’ illumination. And once again the fact evaporates and is absorbed into something bigger, a contrast. In the end the only sense in which the poetry can be said to be ‘about’ the fact of a certain time-congruity as an end (the only evidence of the Cheshire Cat’s grin) is that the
poet may for a brief instant have been interested in it and have welcomed the opportunity of introducing it for its own sake. But even so much is doubtful, and in any case the ends which the fact serves are immensely more important to the poet than the fact in itself.

  However, it would be unfair to stop at so trivial an instance. I will go on to something bigger. Mr Lewis likes stories and says that they are ‘the most characteristic contents of literary utterances’.2 I, too, can enjoy narrative verse and hope that it will not die as a literary form. But I am far from certain that even a narrative poem is about the story it narrates, in the sense of the story being the poem’s end. We do not doubt that Vasco da Gama sailed round the Cape to India or that Camoens wrote an epic on that subject. And as a matter of policy it was expedient that Camoens should write under the impression that his first job was to tell a story. To have had qualms about the solidity of the story, to know that it was in danger of evaporating would have been fatal to the kind of concentration necessary to poetic composition. Even so, we have no use in ordinary action for the discoveries of the physicists about the constitution of matter. In trying to remove the mass of atoms that constitute one’s body from an approaching motor-car, one does not, if one is wise, translate the physical world into terms of probability. But we do not thereby confute the physicists. Mr E. M. Forster’s attack on the story element in the novel (in his Aspects of the Novel) is founded on this truth (that the story is insubstantial), but he applies the truth where it does not belong. It belongs to critical theory, but it need not apply to the practical realm of literary means. The idea that by using in fiction means that are apparently in closer proximity to ends, that by talking about feelings rather than exhibiting action, you are nearer perfection or closer to the true nature of the novel is chimerical. Unless fiction is a glorified essay, those feelings talked about need be no nearer the end, the total experience, than is the story element; feelings and story will have the same insubstantiality. Moll Flanders’s adventures perform the same function as Lily Briscoe’s yearnings over her picture in To the Lighthouse. And which method is right is a question not of truth but of expediency. Mr Somerset Maugham in The Summing Up has recently defined the nature of the story element in literature very neatly, through a comparison with the methods of painting. He pleads for the story element in the novel, but adds: