The Personal Heresy Read online

  It is sometimes asked whether Shakespeare was like this or that character in his plays. I do not know the answer. But there is one difference between Shakespeare and all his characters which I do know. Shakespeare was a real person: they are all imaginary people. When I read the plays I prepare myself for feigning—they do but jest, poison in jest. My objection to the poet’s personality is that it is an intruder in this imagined world—an intruder, I may add, from a much higher realm—and that his presence amidst his own creations, if it occurred, would demand from me, at the same moment, two incompatible responses. For Shakespeare was a real man. My response to the real both is and ought to be quite distinct from my response to the imaginary. Every child knows that we do well to watch, and, in a sense, to enjoy, the murder of Desdemona; and every child knows that if we so watched and so enjoyed the like in real life, we should be villains.

  You, Sir, have said that ‘part of our response to poetry is similar to the stirring we experience when we meet some one whose personality impresses us’.15 It is indeed. The greatest of all similarities exists between a face and that face reflected in a mirror, between a body and a shadow, between a thing and the same thing imagined. Long ago Hume found how hard it is to define the difference between an ‘idea’ and an ‘impression’. But are we therefore to identify them? Does any one doubt that this similarity is consistent with the most important of all differences? And if so, how can I offer to the poet the same response which I offer to his poetry? The poet is a man, a real man. I exclude him not because I think meanly of personality but because I reverence it. There is something to make the blood run cold in the very idea of offering to a man, even to a dead man like Keats, that same ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, that impartial, unhelping, uninterfering, acquiescent contemplation which I offer to Hyperion or Enceladus. The poet is my fellow creature—a traveller between birth and death—one of us. My response to him is not on the plane of imagination at all. The appeal of real personality is to the heart—to the will and the affections. The proper pleasure of it is called love, the proper pain, hatred. I do not owe the poet some aesthetic response: I owe him love, thanks, assistance, justice, charity—or, it may be, a sound thrashing.

  The last alternative is important. When the personality of the poet happens to be one we like, there is some excuse for confusing imaginative delight in the work with social or affectional delight in the man. But what of the poets whose personality we dislike? There is a strong personality in Dryden, and I happen to dislike it very much. But I delight in the boisterousness and bravura of his scenes, as in the sweetness of his verse. Am I wrong to disregard the personal antipathy while I read, in order to enjoy the poetry? If you say that I ought to correct the antipathy, then you lift me at once out of the imaginative into the ethical. For to decide that question we must start investigating historical data and moral principles, and Absalom and Achitophel meanwhile will have to wait. It is the very nature of a real personality, once seriously considered, to force us out of the world of poetry.

  Perhaps this is best seen when we are dealing with a contemporary poet. Your quotation from Mr Eliot here comes to hand. We are in some disagreement about its merits—I would not call the mixture of golf balls and biblical reference ‘startling’,16 and would scarcely have called it startling ten years ago—but it is certainly good enough for our purpose. Now to read these lines as poetry surely means to see the ‘land of lobelias and tennis flannels’, suspending (if need be) my disbelief, and to derive from that vision such pleasure or profit as I may. To attempt this is my debt to Mr Eliot’s poetry. And if, instead, I surrender myself to the ‘feel’ of Mr Eliot’s personality (as indeed I easily can), if I allow myself to attend to the kind of man thus speaking of the suburbs, then I find myself carried into realms of thought and feeling which are fatal to the reception of poetry. For Mr Eliot, thus dismissing some tens of thousands of my fellow citizens, is something even more important than a poet. He is a man: and, being a widely influential man, he is either friend or foe—either a vox clamantis at which I should tremble, or a proud, misunderstanding detractor whom I should strive to silence, if I can, and then pardon. And this not only happens to me but happens with my approval. Mr Eliot is my fellow creature: those whose necessities make them live in the suburbs are also my fellow creatures. When I think of him (which in this context involves thinking of them too) I not only am carried, but ought to be carried, out of poetic attention into that larger world where literary laws must yield to laws logical and ethical.

  I hope it is now apparent that my doctrine depends as much on my respect for men as on my respect for things. If I regard Mr Eliot as a friend, well. If I regard him as an enemy, then by so doing I honour his personality much more than by treating him as a doll or a picture, or an object of contemplation. I will try another dilemma. 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 purely contemplative, appraising, criticizing gaze, then it is an insult. It is to make of a man a mere thing, a spectacle. We do not wish to be thus treated ourselves. Is there, in social life, a grosser incivility than that of thinking about the man who addresses us instead of thinking about what he says? For my own part, I feel that I should use a dog rather ill if I regarded it with that detached observation which we accord to Hamlet and Imogen.

  But there is yet another way in which the personal heresy offends against personality; and it is one which all members of our profession must ponder. I am referring to the growth of what may be called Poetolatry. Some time ago Matthew Arnold prophesied that poetry would come to replace religion; and the personal heretics have made this true in a sense which he probably did not foresee. Poetry has, naturally enough, not yet attempted the salvation of souls or the enlightenment of the understanding; but the cult of poetry is taking on some secondary religious characteristics—notably the worship of saints and the traffic in relics. Every teacher of English has had pupils to whom the study of literature principally meant a series of acts of devotion to various dead men who wrote poetry. We have biographies of Keats and even (I believe) of D. H. Lawrence which are almost exercises in hagiography. We have even had such tangled trinities as ‘Christ, Shakespeare, and Keats’ proposed to us. If we have also our ‘debunking’ biographies, that is but the reverse side of the same medal: blasphemy is the child of religion. I have no doubt, Sir, that you agree with me, simply as a man of letters and a teacher, in lamenting this collapse from criticism into cult. But there are deeper reasons for condemning it. If personality is among the noblest modes of being, as you and I believe, then it is important that our response to personality should not be side-tracked or perverted. And that response is essentially a social and affective one. It is called love—whether ἔϱως, θιλία, or στoϱγή. As there is no other way of enjoying beer but by drinking it, or of enjoying colour but by looking at it, so there is no other way of enjoying personality but by loving it. For veneration, pity, and the like are species of love.

  Now it is clearly not desirable that too much of this response should, in any event, be directed towards the dead. But when the dead are really lovable and loved by us for that reason, this extension of our affective life into the past is not unnatural. The recorded personalities of Socrates, Johnson, and Scott compel such affection. Our love of them is an extension, not a misdirection, of the impulse: the object, though distant and unresponsive, is still a personality in the full sense, with all its quotidian trivialities about it. But the case is altered if we are dealing with that ‘mental pattern’ which exists in a good book, and specially in a good poem. The nobility of Johnson is a real thing, and so is the nobility of the Aeneid; but the nobility of Virgil is a mere snare for self-deception, because we can (within very wide limits
indeed) fashion that idol any shape we want. Johnson, because his personality survives—because he affects us as a man and not merely as an author—is obstinate and resistant. We converse with him, being men ourselves, under ‘the mutual awe of equal condition’. Virgil is malleable: he will never pull you up short, as Johnson, even across the centuries, so often does. It is no good pretending that Johnson would have listened sympathetically to an account of my repressions: it is quite easy (if one likes) to imagine Virgil doing so. The excellence of Donne’s pornographic elegies is a fact: so is the excellence of his devotional poetry. But the ‘personality’ constructed to explain their coexistence (as if it needed any explanation!) may well be a mere projection on which modern adolescents can lavish any kind of familiarity they choose. The real absurdity of the triad I mentioned above—Christ, Shakespeare, and Keats—lies in the heterogeneity of its members. From the Christian point of view there are other objections; but for my present purpose it is enough to notice that while the first member exists for us as a man, even as Johnson exists, the second does not exist at all, and the third only to a limited degree. The injunction to obey Christ has a meaning: the injunction to obey Shakespeare is meaningless. Attention to Shakespeare’s ‘personality’ can have no influence on any human action: it is a misdirection of feelings properly social and active to an object which admits of no action and no true society.

  There is a reaction at present going on against the excessive love of pet animals. We have been taught to despise the rich, barren woman who loves her lap-dog too much and her neighbour too little. It may be that when once the true impulse is inhibited, a dead poet is a nobler substitute than a live Peke, but this is by no means obvious. You can do something for the Peke, and it can make some response to you. It is at least sentient; but most poetolaters hold that a dead man has no consciousness, and few indeed suppose that he has any which we are likely to modify. Unless you hold beliefs which enable you to obey the colophons of the old books by praying for the authors’ souls, there is nothing that you can do for a dead poet: and certainly he will do nothing for you. He did all he could for you while he lived: nothing more will ever come. I do not say that a personal emotion towards the author will not sometimes arise spontaneously while we read; but if it does we should let it pass swiftly over the mind like a ripple that leaves no trace. If we retain it we are but cosseting with substitutes an emotion whose true object is our neighbour. Hence it is not surprising that those who most amuse themselves with personality after this ghostly fashion often show little respect for it in their parents, their servants, or their wives. You, Sir, know far more psychology than I. There is no need for me to tell you how such substitutions work upon a man; how such facile satisfactions of a vital impulse, allayings spun from our own inwards and therefore never inaccessible, never resistant, never to be paid for in cash, disable and (as it were) drive out of the market that difficult and fruitful obedience to the same impulse which can be learnt only in the real world. For the sake of personality, therefore, we must reject the personal heresy. We must go to books for that which books can give us—to be interested, delighted, or amused, to be made merry or to be made wise. But for the proper pleasure of personality, that is, for love, we must go where it can be found—to our homes or our common rooms, to railway carriages and public houses, or even (for you see I am one of the vulgar) to the ‘land of lobelias and tennis flannels’.

  And with this, my case is ended. As I glance through the letter again I notice that I have not been able, in the heat of argument, to express as clearly or continuously as I could have wished my sense that I am engaged with ‘an older and a better soldier’. But I have little fear that you will misunderstand me. We have both learnt our dialectic in the rough academic arena where knocks that would frighten the London literary coteries are given and taken in good part; and even where you may think me something too pert you will not suspect me of malice. If you honour me with a reply it will be in kind; and then, God defend the right!

  I am, my dear Sir, with the greatest respect,

  Your obedient servant,

  C. S. Lewis.

  IV

  In my Rejoinder I said that I agreed with a good deal of what Mr Lewis said. From his Open Letter it is clear to me that our positions are beginning to approximate and that controversy has been fulfilling one of its proper functions: that of clearing away misconceptions. With some people it is a pleasure to differ, and total agreement must always be dull; but I should be seriously perturbed if I found myself utterly opposed to Mr Lewis, for whose work I have so high a regard. Anyhow, my present task will partly consist in showing how I agree with Mr Lewis in spite of appearances to the contrary. After that I may be able to narrow the field of dispute still further and restate my position. Whether Mr Lewis will accept that position as restated, I do not know. If he does not, I think our differences will have been sufficiently defined to make further discussion superfluous. On the other hand, I am anxious to tempt Mr Lewis to prolong the argument in another direction.

  First, let us get rid of a few details. I certainly never meant, when I spoke of a modern tendency to ‘belittle the personal in comparison with the abstract, the Renaissance in comparison with Byzantium’, to insinuate that the personal was the only concrete. The word abstract was badly chosen; substitute, if you will, impersonal (but this is very weak), or ideal (but this may also be ambiguous).

  Secondly, we are still at cross-purposes over Herrick’s Julia poem. When I charged Mr Lewis with being ‘too rigidly concerned with things and too little heedful of states of mind’, I didn’t mean that I thought him oblivious of Julia, and I was quite aware that Julia was among those things a too rigid concern with which I deprecated. But, Mr Lewis having spoken of silk, I found it more emphatic to follow his lead and to stick to silk as typifying all the external objects which poetry is free to describe. What I meant was that I sometimes find that the criticism which tries to explain the author’s state of mind instead of talking about the counters used in the poem (‘things’) gives me satisfaction. And I suggested that a certain detail of form, indicating a state of mind in the poet, a sense of balance or decorum, was, in the poem under review, important. That the poet when he writes poetry does not put his reactions in subjective terms I of course agree (‘Poetry’, says Mr Lewis, ‘must give the green to the tree and not to our eyes’); but this does not prove that the poet’s main concern is not a state of mind or that Julia and her clothes (‘things’ or ‘counters’ as I deliberately called them) are necessarily more than vehicles for some emotion not usually or at first sight attached to them. ‘Herrick’, says Mr. Lewis, ‘has awakened to the miracle that Julia is; but it is the miracle, not the fact of his awakening, that interests both him and us.’ That is possible, but there is no a priori impossibility in Julia being, rather, one of several convenient symbols contributing to express the sense of order or decorum the poet is primarily expressing. My point will be clearer if I turn from Herrick’s Julia to Marvell’s Juliana.

  The Mower to the Glow-worms.

  Ye living lamps, by whose dear light

  The nightingale does sit so late,

  And studying all the summer night,

  Her matchless songs does meditate;

  Ye country comets, that portend

  No war nor prince’s funeral,

  Shining unto no higher end

  Than to presage the grass’s fall;

  Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame

  To wandering mowers shows the way,

  That in the night have lost their aim,

  And after foolish fires do stray;

  Your courteous lights in vain you waste,

  Since Juliana here is come;

  For she my mind hath so displaced

  That I shall never find my home.

  To one passage at least of this poem Mr Lewis’s way of approach seems to me appropriate; that is to the glow-worms presaging the fall of the grass. The poet’s genius does indeed seem to
heighten our apprehension of the literal fact that the glow-worms or fire-flies haunt the fully ripe hay fields. And because I find Mr Lewis’s method so appropriate here, I care the less whether or not I find it ‘true’. But what of the nightingales? Does the fancy of the bird reading the score of an air by the light of the glow-worms’ midnight oil in the least heighten our apprehension of the actual nightingale’s song? I cannot think it. Even if you disagree with me, what of the third verse? The picture of an agricultural labourer saved from will-o’-the-wisps by the kindly solicitude of the glow-worms cannot by any mental effort be made to help us appreciate rural life more intensely; on the contrary it queers that particular appreciation. And what finally of Juliana? Herrick’s Julia and her dress may well be related to actuality. Juliana is clearly no more than a convenience for pulling the poem’s shape together: nearer allied to a corset than to a woman. This being so, I fail to see how it does much good to discuss the complete poem and most of its details in terms of ‘things’. The more profitable method is to be more personal, to discuss the poem in terms of the poet’s feelings, to involve oneself, in fact, in the personal heresy.

  I must now turn from dispute to rehearsing a list of apologies due to Mr Lewis. I admit that my accusing him of seeing only one-half of a certain paradox amounted to no more than accusing him of not agreeing with me on the main point at issue. I withdraw my charge that in speaking of Hyperion he confused communication with the thing communicated. And I plead guilty of vagueness when citing the ‘unlikeness’ of the Delphic Charioteer to any other statue and the connexion of that unlikeness or uniqueness with the sculptor’s personality. But I do not surrender what I had in mind, however imperfectly put on paper, to the formidable battery of Mr Lewis’s dialectic. To this uniqueness I will turn, but not before thanking Mr Lewis for his keen probings, some of which have revealed what was unsound, others helped me to mend my thoughts.