The Personal Heresy

by C. S. Lewis

  Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story: his view of life, though he may be unconscious of it, his personality, exist as a series of human actions.

  What kind of existence the voyage of da Gama has when told by Camoens is far too abstruse a question for me to answer. But I feel fairly confident that for a rough description of Camoens’s real, though unadmitted, ends in the poem the phrase, ‘What it felt like to be alive in Portugal and its empire about the middle of the sixteenth century’, would be far closer the truth than ‘Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India’. The notion, then, that poets tell stories is a fiction, even though it is most expedient they should act on it. It seems to me truer to describe stories in poetry somewhat in this way. The Erewhonian World of the Unborn was full of disembodied souls pestering to be allowed embodiment; and they pestered till they got two parents to consent to put up with them. So the artist’s mind, when he wishes to create, is full of energy seeking an embodiment. If he is lucky he will find a story or a set of ideas that consents to perform the parental function. It is true that certain stories have a greater aptitude than others to perform that function; yet I fancy that chance plays a very important part in the choice of theme; and a poet will choose his theme not so much because it is better than a dozen others as because it happened to present itself when he was feeling creative.

  Criticism can of course busy itself with the way certain stories are treated by different writers. Yet the extraordinary differences of treatment make us doubt the solidity of the stories themselves. The Trojan Women and the second book of The Aeneid both deal with the fall of Troy, but this gives them little more kinship than does the fact that they are both in verse. And that is one reason why criticism is constantly being driven to examine states of mind rather than apparent subject-matter.

  How much in this I differ from Mr Lewis can be seen by his remarks on poetry and music. Poetry, he says,

  differs sharply . . . from an art like Music. You can, if you like, both make and hear a sonata without thinking of anything but sounds. But you cannot write or read one word of a poem by thinking only about poetry.

  This contrast is partial, not fundamental. As regards means it is, on the whole, valid. Music need not go beyond sounds, though ‘programme’ music will use sounds to suggest objects or events, in life;3 while poetry must go beyond poetry for its means. But as regards ends, music does not confine itself to sounds. The musician’s brain is peopled with unborn souls just like the poet’s, and they have nothing specifically to do with sounds; they owe their existence to the musician’s total experience of life. Indeed, I should assert that poetry is most about just those things which music is most about. Not that Pater was right in saying that all art aspires towards the condition of music: for his remark implies that poetry should try to approximate its means to music’s; and for poetry to fight against the heterogeneous character of its means is pure waste of energy.

  For good or ill, then, although poetry is basically like music, it differs in that it shows us much more of the works. And as it is far easier to talk about the works than to define the basic experience for which those works exist, there has been, and there will be, far more literary than musical criticism. Criticism of the means of music is bound to be mainly technical, and thus to appeal to a small public. Criticism of the means of literature can range over all sorts of general interest, and can enjoy a considerable popularity. But the criticism, whether in poetry or in music, that deals with ends, with the experiences or states of mind for which these means exist, is smaller in bulk than that of means, and is exceedingly conjectural. Aristotle is typical in saying only a few words about the states of mind appropriate to tragedy, but much about the means of expressing them. Now the question of personality in poetry is a department of this difficult kind of criticism that deals with ends: and I had hoped to draw Mr Lewis on to commit himself more generally on this kind; partly because I was curious to know his views and partly because I thought I should fare better in this (as it seems to me) necessarily complementary part of our controversy, if I could induce my antagonist to commit himself first. Seeing things a different way round, Mr Lewis has (very naturally) not committed himself very far. So, since I was responsible for starting the topic, I suppose I must resign myself to saying something on it, however lamely.

  And first let me repeat and have done with the notion that poetry concerns the author’s personality. To render his mental pattern can be an author’s object; he can need to do so; and that need is a sufficient end. (Such a rendering is valuable to many readers because, through it, they have access to important people; an access which, without it, they might be denied. This value may come from an act of sharing—it is stimulating to share something with a distinguished mind. Or the example of what a distinguished mind has made of itself may help the person who has access to it.) Exactly what percentage personality accounts for in those things which poetry is most truly about I do not feel called on to conjecture. All I can say is that personality accounts for only a part, and that it is usually interwoven with other elements.

  Secondly, poetry is concerned with large general states of mind. There are many equally vague ways of putting this: universal ideas, great commonplaces, &c. Some of these states of mind recur so regularly through the ages that they appear timeless and are always easy of apprehension. The poet is bound to meet them and to want to give his version of them. And the reader enjoys it because it makes what he already knows live more intensely in his mind. We all know the class of feeling that impelled Achilles to sulk and Dido to hate Aeneas.

  But not all these large general states of mind are so near to us as Achilles’s anger of Dido’s hatred. There are (making, if we wish, a third category) areas of feeling, near enough to the poet and felt by a number of people, which because of their remoteness from other ages, are in a different class and set to work a different part of the reader’s mind; for instance, the feelings of Spenser about the house of Tudor, or of the early Icelanders about revenge, or of the early eighteenth century about enthusiasm’. All these feelings are within the compass of the normal human imagination, but they are not always equally present at all periods of history. But the poet who is contemporary with their vogue is apt to experience them with a great intensity, probably not bothering to distinguish them from feelings whose vogue is less fluctuating; and he is not content till he has given his version of them. Thus it is that the poet is also an historian, in that he can express (and this can be expressed only by artistic means) what his contemporaries felt about certain events and ideas, and what it felt like to be alive just then. That this function, though partly historical, has nothing specifically to do with the facts of history and cannot be called in the ordinary sense informative, can be seen by considering the case of music. For music can fulfill both functions of poetry last enumerated. Of course it does not specify the wrath of Achilles or the hatred of Dido, but it can include such feelings within itself. The music of Gregorian and Byzantine hymns or the Restoration music written for royal funerals and coronations has, in addition to a generally human, an historical interest. It tells us something of what it was like to be alive in epochs different from our own.

  But there are states of mind expressed in poetry which appear remoter or stranger than anything mentioned hitherto. And here I have Mr Lewis’s support; for he admits

  that there are also poems which seem to give me a new and nameless sensation or even a new sense, to enrich with experience which nothing in my previous life had prepared me for.

  It is when he goes on to suggest, ‘when this happens . . . we are sharing something peculiar to the poet’ that I feel doubtful. Anyhow, I think we may get further with this type of poetry, without bringing in personality.

  I would suggest that when poetry appears very strange it does so because it is about something either very new or very old. (And again, if we want them, we have two more, fourth and fifth, categories.) It is not easy to s
peak of either kind without opening oneself to ridicule; and of the poetry that is about something very new I speak with the greatest hesitation. However, let it be said (and with Professor Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas as a reference) that it might happen that new ways of feeling, destined to become widespread, appear first in spasmodic fashion among the artists.4 To the general public they must at first appear strange: to many people both fascinating and repulsive; fascinating because suggesting adventure, repulsive because dangerous and unfamiliar. More often than not the new will appear alongside the known. Indeed, many great works of art, in other ways dealing with the familiar, may contain bits of genuine novelty. Shakespeare’s last plays (which Mr Lewis mentions for their strangeness) may do so, and in our own time Joyce’s Ulysses. Music could furnish examples in this category also.

  Poetry which is about something very old brings us into the region of the psychologists, and especially of those who are influenced by Jung. The phrase, ‘very old’, however, is ambiguous. If in our infancy we do indeed pass through all the stages of human evolution we have the option of preferring the supposed feelings of infants to the supposed feelings of prehistoric man. But whichever option we choose, or if we choose both (as we may), we can reasonably speak of great antiquity. Not that all the feelings of a remote antiquity are unfamiliar to us. On the contrary, the experience of rebirth which Miss Bodkin describes as the pattern of tragedy is both primitive and very present to us; belonging mainly to the category of Achilles’s wrath. But just as certain ‘psychic’ people are held to retain gifts once common to mankind as a whole, so it is possible for certain poets to express feelings once widespread, but giving the appearance of peculiarity. These feelings, once powerful, but dimmed by time, are analogous to those in my third category, to the feelings of Spenser about the house of Tudor, or of the early eighteenth century about ‘enthusiasm’; but being so far remoter, they are felt and expressed and then recognized with greater rareness and difficulty. And in the recognition there is a greater chance of self-deception, not only because we are in a region where fact is scanty but because many of us to-day find the primitive a quick intoxicant. But though I recognize the heavy odds against being right in detecting any specific instance of primitive feelings reappearing in poetry of historical times, I feel confident of the probability that such a process does often take place. Simply as an example of the kind of thing that might happen and not with any confidence that I am not imagining what just is not there, I should like to repeat an observation made elsewhere. The following is a possible example of how feelings which must have been very widespread but which with the physical changes of the earth’s surface cannot have remained in their early vivid state, reappear in the lines of a comparatively modern poet. When mankind was numerically scanty, and when the natural odds against him were large, he may have feared the wilderness in a way unknown to the Mesopotamian peasant or the medieval burgher, not to speak of a modern town-dweller. The pressure of this fear over long ages would modify mankind’s cast of mind. But later this fear would recede far into the background; not so far, however, but certain men, sensitive in that direction, could resuscitate it. Such a resuscitation I have imagined I have seen in two passages of Milton, passages which strike me as more ‘primitive’ than anything in the Romantics, in whose poetry one would naturally look first for such a manifestation. These passages come from the Lady’s description of her fears in Comus and Michael’s account of what happened to the mount of Paradise after the Flood. The Lady says:

  What might this be? A thousand fantasies

  Begin to throng into my memory

  Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,

  And airy tongues, that syllable men’s names

  On Sands, and Shoars, and desert Wildernesses.

  And the mount of Paradise becomes

  An Iland salt and bare,

  The haunt of Seales and Orcs, and Sea-mews clang.

  It may well be objected that even if the poets do resuscitate the primitive they do no good by so doing. Let man’s early fears disappear like the back teeth which modern man has learnt to do without. It might be answered that we cannot afford to dispense utterly with any feeling the race has been through. Mixed with other feelings this primitive fear may enrich the total capacity of a human being: and the poets who recall it and similar feelings may be making an inestimable contribution to the fullness of life.

  The states of mind described in the four last categories are universal to man, or racial, or communal, or characteristic of a particular age. Anyhow they concern many men. But when they appear in the work of the poet they will help and will be helped by the personal element. We trust what a great poet makes us feel about the age he lived in because he impresses us as a distinguished person; and we trust his own distinction partly because he is so sensitive to what goes on around him. The ever-varying interplay of the personal and the communal is one of the first attractions of poetry.

  This ends my enumeration and brief discussion of some of the things poetry can be about. I hope that through them I have at least cleared myself from any suggestion that I confine the scope of poetry to personality.

  Finally, I must record a very hearty agreement with Mr Lewis in his plea for the πεπαιδευμένος (as he calls him after Aristotle) or the Common Reader (as I might call him after Dr Johnson and Mrs Virginia Woolf) as the ultimate judge of poetry.5 The principle here is like that of refusing to allow the General Practitioner to be bullied by the Specialist, and like the magnificent statement I got from the lips of a French business man that the ultimate direction of business should be in the hands of other than business men. I need say no more, since Mr Lewis has made his point so well.

  It is a pleasure to have ended on a note of agreement. Yet Mr Lewis is an admirable person to disagree with; and I incline to admire his arguments as much when they seem wrong as when they seem right. He is, indeed, the best kind of opponent, good to agree with when one can, and for an enemy as courteous as he is honest and uncompromising; the kind of opponent with whom I should gladly exchange armour after a parley, even if I cannot move my tent to the ground where his own is pitched.

  NOTE

  On re-reading my share of this book I am disquieted by the apparent lack of connexion between the accounts of poetry given in the First Essay (pp. 25, 32) and in the Fifth (pp. 131–36). In the First we are told that the poet puts together ‘scraps of ordinary seeing’ in such a way as to produce a new mode of consciousness. This new mode sees objects more ‘synthetically’, and with a ‘vaster context’ than we are usually able to attain. It is described as being ‘racial’;1 and a subject who enjoyed it habitually would be superhuman. In the Fifth Essay poetry consists in a special use of language which exploits its extra-logical properties so as to convey the concrete.

  The trouble about these two descriptions is not that they contradict, but that they do not seem to come near enough even for contradiction; it is difficult to bring them into any relation at all. But as I am not prepared to give up either (in its entirety), I must try to do so.

  In a certain sense the earlier account may be said to deal with the poetical consciousness or vision, and the later with the poetic language. But the later deals very cursorily with the nature of that language and is more concerned with the objects which such language is fitted to present; i.e., with the concrete. And the first account warns us that language and perception cannot here be separated, the poetic consciousness being incarnate in the poetic words, syntax, &c. It would therefore be truer to say that the first account treats of the poetic process (‘seeing’ and ‘saying’) and the second of the poetic object or content (the thing ‘seen’ and ‘said’).

  When modern scientists find it convenient, they stop talking of space and time and begin to talk of space-time. My two accounts can be combined if you will allow me to talk of seeing-saying or language-consciousness, or, for brevity, speechthought. You must understand that ‘thought’ here carries no sp
ecially intellectual connotation.

  The unified description would then run as follows. The poetic speechthought does not exist permanently and as a whole in the poet, but is temporarily brought into existence in him and his readers by art. Its differentia is to be ‘synthetic’, to include objects in unusually rich, or wide, contexts, and to attain the concrete; and all these three mean the same.

  So far, all is well. Inconsistencies begin when I go on, rashly enough, to speculate on its essential nature; I should have confined myself to its actual occurrence in our experience. As it is, the First Essay identifies it (i) with ‘racial’, and (ii) with angelic, consciousness. In the Fifth Essay it seems to be on a much lower plane. Here it looks as if the concrete were accessible to all men at all times, except when they were proving something, and poetry merely succeeded in uttering what all experienced.

  Now the First Essay is clearly self-contradictory—at least only a very odd idea of ‘races’ and ‘angels’ will identify ‘racial’ and ‘angelic’ consciousness. To speak more plainly, I have assumed (i), what now seems to me very unlikely, that large groups of human individuals possess a common consciousness; and (ii) that if they do, this common consciousness would be so superior to that of the individuals that it might be called ‘angelic’. In fact, I have exaggerated. All I have a right to say is that poetic speechthought uses such memories, associations, and values as are widely distributed among the human family in space and time, and rejects what is merely idiosyncratic; and that no human being permanently enjoys poetic speechthought. Perhaps I can still say that if any being did, he, or it, would be an angel. At any rate, a Corker.