4. The Arts
The pother about ‘originality’ all comes from the people who have nothing to say; if they had, they’d be original without noticing it.
Letters (c. August 1942)
I am afraid that some vainglorious writers may be encouraged to forget that they are called ‘creative’ only by a metaphor. . . . All the ‘creative’ artists of the human race cannot so much as summon up the phantasm of a single new primary colour or a single new dimension. . . . Nor do artists give their so-called creatures substantial existence.
Book review, Theology (October 1941)
Many modern novels, poems, and pictures, which we are brow-beaten into ‘appreciating’, are not good work because they are not work at all. They are mere puddles of spilled sensibility or reflection. When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing taste, interests, and capacity of his audience. These, no less than the language, the marble, or the paint, are part of his raw material; to be used, tamed, sublimated, not ignored nor defied. Haughty indifference to them is not genius nor integrity; it is laziness and incompetence.
The World’s Last Night, ch. 5
I think the only hope for poetry now lies in lowering [the poet’s] status. Unless he speedily returns to the workmanlike humility of his great predecessors and submits to the necessity of interesting and pleasing as a preliminary to doing anything else, the art of poetry will disappear from among us altogether.
The Personal Heresy, ch. 5
When every one feels it natural to attempt the same kind of writing, that kind is in danger. Its characteristics are formalised. A stereotyped monotony, unnoticed by contemporaries but cruelly apparent to posterity, begins to pervade it.
The Allegory of Love, ch. 6, sec. 1
When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, ‘Would that she were.’ For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is, essentially, the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our own day differs from his as much as a divorcée differs from a virgin. The Christian and the Pagan have much more in common with one another than either has with the writers of the New Statesman; and those writers would of course agree with me.
‘Is Theism Important? A Reply’, God in the Dock
Before leaving the Tree [Eve, in Paradise Lost] does ‘low Reverence’ before it ‘as to the power that dwelt within’, and thus completes the parallel between her fall and Satan’s. She who thought it beneath her dignity to bow to Adam or to God, now worships a vegetable. She has at last become ‘primitive’ in the popular sense.
A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, ch. 18
It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. . . . Keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through your mind . . . by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. . . . Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.
Introduction to St Athanasius’s The Incarnation of the Word of God
When the old poets made some virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted . . . that imaginary quarrel between the ethical and the poetic which moderns often unhappily read into the great poets . . . supposing that the poet was inculcating a rule when in fact he was enamoured of a perfection.
A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, Dedication
Admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature which never deceives at all. Children are not deceived by fairy tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in the women’s magazines. None of us are deceived by the Odyssey, the Kalevala, Beowulf, or Malory. The real danger lurks in sober-faced novels where all appears to be very probable but all is in fact contrived to put across some social or ethical or religious or anti-religious ‘comment on life’.
An Experiment in Criticism, ch. 7
The typical modern critic is usually a half-hearted materialist. He accepts, or thinks he accepts, that picture of the world which popularised science gives him.
The Personal Heresy, ch. 1
Of course the converted Intellectual is a characteristic figure of our times. But this phenomenon would be more hopeful if it had not occurred at a moment when the Intelligentsia (scientists apart) are losing all touch with, and all influence over, nearly the whole human race. Our most esteemed poets and critics are read by our most esteemed critics and poets (who don’t usually like them much) and nobody else takes any notice. An increasing number of highly literate people simply ignore what the ‘Highbrows’ are doing. It says nothing to them. The Highbrows in return ignore or insult them. Conversions from the Intelligentsia are not therefore likely to be very widely influential. They may even raise a horrid suspicion that Christianity itself has become a part of the general ‘Highbrow racket’, has been adopted, like Surrealism and the pictures painted by chimpanzees, as one more method of ‘shocking the bourgeois’.
‘Revival or Decay?’, God in the Dock
It is perhaps worth emphasizing what may be called the hardness—at least the firmness—of Jane Austen’s thought. . . . The great abstract nouns of the classical English moralists are unblushingly and uncompromisingly used: good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, ‘some duty neglected, some failing indulged’, impropriety, indelicacy, generous candour, blamable, distrust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason. These are the concepts by which Jane Austen grasps the world. In her we still breathe the air of the Rambler and Idler. All is hard, clear, definable; by some modern standards, even naïvely so. The hardness is, of course, for oneself, not for one’s neighbours. . . . Contrasted with the world of modern fiction, Jane Austen’s is at once less soft and less cruel.
‘A Note on Jane Austen’, Selected Literary Essays
That, perhaps, is where Scott differs most from the type of artist dear to the modern psychological critic. The blue devils do not haunt his work; they leave no trail of laudanum, drink, divorce, tantrums, perversions, or paranoia across his life.
‘Sir Walter Scott’, Selected Literary Essays
[In Milton’s time] men still believed that there really was such a person as Satan, and that he was a liar.
A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, ch. 13
Now the organisation of mass excitement seems to be almost the normal organ of political power. We live in an age of ‘appeals’, ‘drives’, and ‘campaigns’. Our rulers have become like schoolmasters and are always demanding ‘keenness’. And you notice that I am guilty of a slight archaism in calling them ‘rulers’. ‘Leaders’ is the modern word. I have suggested elsewhere that this is a deeply significant change of vocabulary. Our demand upon them has changed no less than theirs on us. For of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash, initiative, and (I suppose) what people call ‘magnetism’ or ‘personality’.
‘De Descriptione Temporum’, Selected Literary Essays
All men at times obey their vices: but it is when cruelty, envy, and lust of power appear as the commands of a great super-personal force that they can be exercised with self-approval. The first symptom is in language. When to ‘kill’ becomes to ‘liquidate’ the process has begun. The pseudoscientific word disinfects the thing of blood and tears, or pity and shame, and mercy itself can be regarded as a sort of untidiness.
‘A Reply to Professor Haldane’, Of Other Worlds
If towering memory in our glance
Reveals its pride, they call it names
Like ‘fantasy’ or ‘outworn romance’.
So tireless propaganda tames
All but the strong whose hearts they break,
All but the few whose faith is whole.
Stone walls cannot a prison make
Half so secure as rigmarole.
‘The Romantics’, The New English Weekly
The percentage of mere syntax masquerading as meaning may vary from something like 100 per cent in political writers, journalists, psychologists, and economists, to something like forty per cent in the writers of children’s stories. . . . A good metaphysical library contains at once some of the most verbal, and some of the most significant literature in the world. . . . I doubt if we shall find more than a beggarly five per cent of meaning in the pages of some celebrated ‘tough minded’ thinkers, and how the account of Kant or Spinoza stands, none knows but heaven. But open your Plato, and you will find yourself among the great creators of metaphor, and therefore among the masters of meaning.
‘Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare’, Selected Literary Essays
Compare ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’ with ‘The supreme being transcends space and time’. The first goes to pieces if you begin to apply the literal meaning to it. . . . The second falls into no such traps. On the other hand the first really means something, really represents a concrete experience in the minds of those who use it; the second is mere dexterous playing with counters, and once a man has learnt the rule he can go on that way for two volumes without really using the words to refer to any concrete fact at all.
Letters (17 January 1932)
The value we have given to that word [‘Puritanism’] is one of the really solid triumphs of the last hundred years? By it we rescue annually thousands of humans from temperance, chastity, and sobriety of life.
The Screwtape Letters, ch. 10
The history of all arts tells the same miserable story of progressive specialisation and impoverishment.
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ch. 4
If I have read the New Testament aright, it leaves no room for ‘creativeness’ even in a modified or metaphorical sense. Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours. . . . An author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom. . . . And always, of every idea and of every method the Christian will ask not ‘Is it mine?’ but ‘Is it good?’
‘Christianity and Literature’, Christian Reflections
The patrons of sentimental poetry, bad novels, bad pictures, and merely catchy tunes are usually enjoying precisely what is there. And their enjoyment. . . . is not in any way comparable to the enjoyment that other people derive from good art.
It is tepid, trivial, marginal, habitual. It does not trouble them, nor haunt them. To call it, and a man’s rapture in great tragedy or exquisite music, by the same name, enjoyment, is little more than a pun. I still maintain that what enraptures and transports is always good. . . .
The experiences offered by bad art are not of the same sort.
‘Different Tastes in Literature’, On Stories
All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
The Four Loves, ch. 6