The Personal Heresy Read online

  So much for the internal incoherence of Essay I; now for the relation between I and V. I do not myself think there is a contradiction here: but to make the threatened contradiction quite plain I will aggravate it into the form ‘I. Poetry brings into existence a mode of consciousness, that is, an experience, quite new to humanity, and otherwise inaccessible. II. Poetry merely communicates the existing experience of humanity.’ The first description gives poetry a creative function, the second makes it a mere recorder.

  We need not here discuss the claim that poetry is ‘creative’ in the strict (theological) sense of the word, for no one really believes that the poet facit e nihilo. But even when we have dismissed this, there remains a sharp contrast between that which develops a new experience and that which merely records an old one.

  My own way out of the difficulty is as follows. The distinction between making and reporting was framed for the life of ‘operation’, and we are here trying to intrude it on a plane where its common-sensible meaning disappears. To make a table is one thing: to tell about it is another. Well and good. But suppose you are asked to go and look at the new table and tell us how you like it. This is a little harder. Do you just find your liking for the table standing there in the room like the table itself? Or is the liking slightly modified by the efforts preparatory to ‘telling’? Is it in some degree produced by the desire to tell? For perhaps you would not have thought about the table at all, would neither have liked nor disliked it, if we had not asked you. Already, you see, the attempt to tell or report is partly making the thing to be told. Now go a step farther. Suppose you already like (or dislike) the table: we now ask you to give us the best account you possibly can of this like or dislike. That is, we ask you to summon up and hold steady what is naturally fugitive, to disentangle what is naturally mixed up with a mass of other experiences, to cleanse of incommunicable personal features what seems at first to have its whole being in such features, to regard disinterestedly what is attached in a hundred ways to your passions. We are, clearly, at the same moment, asking you to describe a given experience, and also to have a new experience.

  We can now restate what seemed contradictory. Poetry does record ordinary experiences, in the sense that it expresses in their concreteness the sort of things that are happening to us all the time. But then we do not ordinarily attend to their concreteness: we are content to take most of them as mere signposts to the gratification of our appetites. To attend to them disinterestedly, to replace them in a less personal context, to correct our personal perspective, not (like the scientist) by making abstraction of hopes and fears but by turning on hope and fear themselves an impartial eye—that is to have a very new experience indeed. More briefly, poetry presents concrete experience (which we have every day) and, in so doing, gives us an experience of the concrete,2 which is a very different matter. To find out what our experience has, all along, been really like, is to remake experience.

  If this solution is not accepted—and I feel very far from certain about it myself—I do not think the next step is to scrap one or other of the apparently contradictory propositions. I think it would be better to go on working in the hope that we shall find a reconciliation. Each seems to me to contain something that can hardly be doubted. I cannot cease to believe either that poets paint ‘the light that never was’ or that they are full of ‘images which find a mirror in every mind and sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo’.

  In conclusion, it may be well to add that the ‘novelty’ or ‘remaking’ of experience here referred to does not mean that obvious novelty (‘creation’ in the sense of feigning, or invention) which is present in The Ancient Mariner and absent from Vanity Fair. I am assuming that the fictional element in poetry, the marvellous or feigned, is in some way or other a recording (though also a remaking) of actual experience. In what way, I do not now attempt to determine; the subject has been greatly neglected.

  C.S.L.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and have been transformed into three major motion pictures.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  ALSO BY C. S. LEWIS

  A Grief Observed

  George MacDonald: An Anthology

  Mere Christianity

  Miracles

  The Abolition of Man

  The Great Divorce

  The Problem of Pain

  The Screwtape Letters (with “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”)

  The Weight of Glory

  The Four Loves

  Till We Have Faces

  Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

  Reflections on the Psalms

  Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer

  The Personal Heresy

  The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays

  Poems

  The Dark Tower: And Other Stories

  Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories

  Narrative Poems

  A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis

  Letters of C. S. Lewis

  All My Road Before Me

  The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis

  Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

  Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics

  On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM HARPERCOLLINS

  The Chronicles of Narnia

  The Magician’s Nephew

  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

  The Horse and His Boy

  Prince Caspian

  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

  The Silver Chair

  The Last Battle

  CREDITS

  Cover design and illustration: Kimberly Glyder

  FURTHER READING

  COPYRIGHT

  THE PERSONAL HERESY. Copyright © 1939 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Originally published in the United Kingdom in 1939 by Oxford University Press.

  EPub Edition February 2017 ISBN 9780062565587

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963, author. | Tillyard, E. M. W. (Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall), 1889-1962, author.

  Title: The personal heresy : a controversy / C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : HarperOne, 2017. | “Originally published as The Personal Heresy in the United Kingdom in 1939 by Oxford University Press” | 1939 edition had author E. M. W. Tillyard’s name presented first on the title page.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016030647 | ISBN 9780062565624 (paperback) | ISBN 9780062565587 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Poetry. | Criticism. | Authors and readers. | BISAC: RELIGION / Spirituality. | RELIGION / Christianity / Litera
ture & the Arts. | RELIGION / Christianity / General.

  Classification: LCC PN1031 .T455 2017 | DDC 808.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030647

  * * *

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  1 The Teaching of English in England, 1921, p. 15.

  2 Milton, E. M. W. Tillyard, 1930, p. 1.

  3 Milton, E. M. W. Tillyard, 1930, p. 237.

  4 Matthew Arnold, Hugh Kingsmill, 1928, p. 127. Italics mine.

  5 Selected Essays, T. S. Eliot, 1923, p. 137. Italics mine.

  6 Wordsworth, H. W. Garrod, 2nd edition, 1927, p. 9.

  7 Throughout this discussion I use words such as seeing or perception to mean the genus of which sensation, knowing, opining, imagining, and the like are species. Apprehension would in some ways have been preferable, but it has intellectual implications. My own usage has, at any rate, the sanction of our ordinary habits of speech. Having would be the best of all, but would have required explanation.

  8 I limit myself to what most concerns our present purpose. A full account would have to deal with the evocative qualities of word-order and construction, and also with sounds. The former are habitually neglected; the latter as habitually exaggerated. Critics without a phonetic training, being quite unable even to hear accurately the sound of their mother-tongue, are naturally most prone (omne ignotum pro magnifico) to attribute to mere sound all sorts of powers which it does not possess.

  9 I am speaking of what is imagined, not of the image or mental picture. That the two are distinct is proved by the fact that very adequate, or even fine, imagining may go with very inadequate images. We all enjoy Hero and Leander, and this implies that we all succeed in imagining beautiful human bodies; but only extreme visualists, and, among them, only persons of considerable artistic training, have images of the human body which would stand examination. Those who share with the present writer a lively visualizing power can testify that this unruly faculty is as often the enemy as the servant of imagination; just as elaborate and ‘realistic’ toys hinder rather than help children in their play. The poet may give all his readers a common imaginatum: he is not to aim at giving them identical imagines.

  10 In order to avoid misunderstanding, I had better say that by ‘accidental’ I do not mean contingent, but ‘undesigned’.

  1 p. 42.

  2 p. 42.

  3 p. 48.

  4 p. 49.

  5 p. 51.

  6 p. 55.

  7 p. 38.

  8 p. 42.

  9 p. 46.

  10 p. 46.

  11 p. 49.

  12 p. 26.

  13 p. 54.

  14 p. 56.

  15 p. 42.

  16 p. 44.

  1 p. 94.

  2 p. 14.

  3 p. 82.

  4 i.e., is a real something, though not necessarily the thing it pretends to be: e.g., what pretends to be a crocodile may be a (real) dream; what pretends at the breakfast-table to be a dream may be a (real) lie.

  1 Because, in my view, this is like the question, ‘What do people talk about?’ Infinity must be represented by brief symbols. C.S.L.

  2 No preference was expressed. The words quoted were intended as a purely historical statement that in fact most of the imaginative literature in the world is story-telling. It is a question of statistics, not of aesthetics. Why this is so, and how stories please, are questions to which I have offered no answer. Dr Tillyard’s answer, which occupies the following pages, falls, therefore, outside the controversy. He is expending critical effort in the very direction that I advise. C.S.L.

  3 I omitted programme music not because I do not like it myself but, (a) Because I have been given to understand that my liking for it simply proves that I am much more of a literary than a musical man. (b) Because it complicates the argument, when we are distinguishing literature from music, to introduce that species of music which approximates most nearly to literature. C.S.L.

  4 I agree. Notice the appearance of the Evolutionary Idea in Hyperion and The Niblung’s Ring before the spread of Darwinism. C.S.L.

  5 I do not intend to identify the πεπαιδευμένὁς (the perfect reader) with ὁ τυ´χων (the common reader). C.S.L.

  1 p. 29.

  2 Readers may be helped by remembering how important the distinction between a Succession of Perceptions and a Perception of Successions has proved in some philosophies.