On Other Writers
JOSEPH ADDISON
All we can justly say is that his essays are rather small beer; there is no iron in them as in Johnson; they do not stir the depths . . . . Addison is, above all else, comfortable. He is not on that account to be condemned. He is an admirable cure for the fidgets.
“Addison,” Selected Literary Essays
JANE AUSTEN
Her books have only two faults and both are damnable. They are too few and too short.
Letter to R. W. Chapman, September 6, 1949 (CL 2)
FRANCIS BACON
It is a shock to turn to the Essays. Even the completed Essays of 1625 is a book whose reputation curiously outweighs any real pleasure or profit that most people have found in it, a book (as my successor admirably says) which “everyone has read but no one is ever found reading.” The truth is, it is a book for adolescents.
Epilogue, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)
EMILY BRONTË’S JANE EYRE
This week I have reread Jane Eyre. It is quite prodigiously better than the other Brontë books. I know you have never gone back to it, but I think if one omits (as I did this time) the early chapters about the school days—a senseless recording of miseries which have no effect upon the main story—it is very well worth reading. Part of the interest lies in seeing in the most (apparently) preposterous male characters how quite ordinary people look through the eyes of a shy, naive, inflexibly upright, intelligent little woman of the mouse-like governessy type . . . . Particularly delicious is her idea of conjugal bliss when she says almost on the last page, “We talk, I believe, all day.” Poor husband!
Letter to his brother, Warren Lewis, November 19, 1939 (CL 2)
JOHN BUNYAN’S PILGRIM’S PROGRESS
I am reading at present, what do you think? Our own friend Pilgrim’s Progress. It is one of those books that are usually read too early to appreciate, and perhaps not come back to. I am very glad however to have discovered it. The allegory of course is obvious and even childish, but just as a romance it is unsurpassed, and also as a specimen of real English. Try a bit of your Ruskin or Macaulay after it, and see the difference between diamonds and tinsel.
Letter to his father, Albert Lewis, March 11, 1916 (CL 1)
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Chaucer has few rivals, and no masters.
The Allegory of Love
WILLIAM COWPER
Have you ever read the letters of the poet Cowper? He had nothing—literally nothing—to tell anyone about: private life in a sleepy country town where Evangelical distrust of “the world” denied him even such miserable society as the place would have afforded. And yet one reads a whole volume of his correspondence with unfailing interest. How his tooth came loose at dinner, how he made a hutch for a tame hare, what he is doing about his cucumbers—all this he makes one follow as if the fate of empires hung on it.
Letter to his father, Albert Lewis, February 25, 1928 (CL 1)
THOMAS CRANMER
Cranmer writes a prose with which it is difficult to find any fault, but it gives curiously little pleasure. It never drags and never hurries; it never disappoints the ear; and (pace John Foxe) there is hardly a single sentence that leaves us in doubt of its meaning . . . . The explanation is that Cranmer always writes in an official capacity. Everything he says has been threshed out in committee. We never see a thought growing: his business is to express the agreed point of view. Everyone who has tried to draw up a report knows how fatal such conditions are to good writing.
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)
SAMUEL DANIEL
His [sonnet] sequence Delia . . . offers no ideas, no psychology, and of course no story: it is simply a masterpiece of phrasing and melody. To anyone who complains that it is a series of commonplaces we can only reply, “Yes, but listen.” . . . In him, as in Shakespeare, the most ordinary statement turns liquid and delicious . . . . The truth is that while everything Daniel says would be commonplace in a prose abstract, nothing is commonplace as it actually occurs in the poetry. In that medium all the Petrarchan gestures become compulsive invitations to enormous sorrows and delights.
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)
DANTE (ALIGHIERI)
Dante remains a strong candidate for the supreme poetical honors of the world.
The Allegory of Love
I think Dante’s poetry, on the whole, the greatest of all the poetry I have read: yet when it is at its highest pitch of excellence, I hardly feel that Dante has very much to do . . . . I draw the conclusion that the highest reach of the whole poetic art turns out to be a kind of abdication, and is attained when the whole image of the world the poet sees has entered so deeply into his mind that henceforth he has only to get himself out of the way, to let the seas roll and the mountains shake their leaves or the light shine and the spheres revolve, and all this will be poetry, not things you write poetry about. Dare I confess that after Dante even Shakespeare seems to me a little factitious? It almost sounds as if he were “just making it up.” But one cannot feel that about Dante even when one has stopped reading him.
“Dante’s Similes,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
WALTER DE LA Mare
De la Mare’s poems I have had for a long time and I read them more often than any other book. I put him above Yeats and all the other moderns, and in spite of his fantasy find him nearer than anyone else to the essential truth of life.
Letter to Arthur Greeves, June 26, 1927 (CL 1)
ALL ACTION, NO ATMOSPHERE IN THE THREE MUSKETEERS
One never knows how good Scott is till one tries to read Dumas. Have you noticed how completely Dumas lacks any background? In Scott, behind the adventures of the hero, you have the whole society of the age, with all the interplay of town and country, Puritan and Cavalier, Saxon and Norman, or whatnot, and all the racy humor of the minor characters: and behind that again you have the eternal things—the actual countryside, the mountains, the weather, the very feel of traveling. In Dumas, if you try to look even an inch behind the immediate intrigue, you find just nothing at all. You are in an abstract world of gallantry and adventure which has no roots—no connection with human nature or mother earth. When the scene shifts from Paris to London there is no sense that you have reached a new country, no change of atmosphere. And I don’t think there is a single passage to show that Dumas had ever seen a cloud, a road, or a tree. In a word, if you were asked to explain what you and I meant by “the homely” in literature, you could almost reply, “It means the opposite of The Three Musketeers.” But perhaps I am being too hard on what after all was written only for amusement. I suppose there must be a merit in the speed and verve of the plot, even if I don’t like that kind of thing.
Letter to Arthur Greeves, March 25, 1933 (CL 2)
T. S. ELIOT’S “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK”
I don’t believe one person in a million, under any emotional stress, would see evening like that. And even if they did, I believe that anything but the most sparing admission of such images is a very dangerous game. To invite them, to recur willingly to them, to come to regard them as normal, surely, poisons us?
Letter to Katharine Farrer, February 9, 1954 (CL 3)
T. S. ELIOT’S “THE WASTE LAND”
[T. S. Eliot’s] intention only God knows. I must be content to judge his work by its fruits, and I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading “The Waste Land,” but that most men are by it infected with chaos.
The opposite plea rests on a very elementary confusion between poetry that represents disintegration and disintegrated poetry. The Inferno is not infernal poetry: “The Waste Land” is.
Letter to Paul Elmer More, May 23, 1935 (CL 2)
T. S. ELIOT AS A CRITIC
Oh Eliot! How can a man who is neither a knave nor a fool write so like both? Well, he can’t complain that I haven’t done my best to put him right—I hardly ever write a book without showing him one of his errors. And still he doesn’t mend. I call it ungrateful.
Letter to Dorothy Sayers, October 23, 1942 (CL 2)
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
You are quite right about Emerson. I often pick him up here for an odd quarter of an hour, and go away full of new ideas. Every sentence is weighty: he puts into paragraphs what others, seeking charm, expand into whole essays or chapters. At the same time his tense concentration makes him painful reading, he gives you no rest. I don’t know why you object to his style—it seems to me admirable. Quel dommage [What a pity] that such a man should be an American.
Letter to Arthur Greeves, September 12, 1918 (CL 1)
ROBERT FROST
[Robert Frost] is one of the few living poets for whom I feel something like reverence.
Letter to Basil Willey, May 23, 1957 (CL 3)
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES
Although by experience I am somewhat shy of recommending books to other people, I think I am quite safe in earnestly advising you to make “the Gables” your next purchase. By the way I shouldn’t have said “mystery,” there is really no mystery in the proper sense of the word, but a sort of feeling of fate and inevitable horror as in [Charlotte Brontë’s] Wuthering Heights. I really think I have never enjoyed a novel more. There is one lovely scene where the villain—Judge [Pyncheon]—has suddenly died in his chair, all alone in the house, and it describes the corpse sitting there as the day wears on and the room grows darker—darker—and the ticking of his watch. But that sort of bald description is no use! I must leave you to read that wonderful chapter to yourself . . . .
I intend to read all Hawthorne after this. What a pity such a genius should be a beastly American!
Letter to his father, Albert Lewis, November 19, 1916 (CL 1, 258–59)
RICHARD HOOKER
Every system offers us a model of the universe; Hooker’s model has unsurpassed grace and majesty . . . . Few model universes are more filled—one might say, more drenched —with Deity than his . . . . God is unspeakably transcendent; but also unspeakably immanent . . . . The style is, for its purpose, perhaps the most perfect in English.
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)
A. E. HOUSMAN
I also glanced through A. E. Housman’s Shropshire Lad for the hundredth time. What a terrible little book it is—perfect and deadly, the beauty of the gorgon.
Letter to Arthur Greeves, October 6, 1929 (CL 1)
HENRY JAMES
I have just finished Volume 1 of Henry James’s letters. An interesting man, though a dreadful prig: but he did appreciate Stevenson. A phantasmal man, who had never known God, or earth, or war, never done a day’s compelled work, never had to earn a living, had no home and no duties.
Letter to Roger Lancelyn Green, October 21, 1952 (CL 3)
SAMUEL JOHNSON
There is no subject on which more nonsense has been talked than the style of Johnson. For me his best sentences in writing have the same feeling as his best conversation—“Pop! It was so sudden.” I don’t know anyone who can settle a thing so well in half a dozen words.
Letter to his brother, Warren Lewis, August 2, 1928 (CL 1)
KING JAMES BIBLE
I am not convinced that its rhythms (they are various) are very different from those of any good prose that is written for the most part in short sentences, nor that they would strike us as noticeably fine if divorced from their matter. “After the cocktail, a soup—but the soup was not very nice—and after the soup a small, cold pie.” It is not a bad sentence: but it is very different from its rhythmical equivalent “After the earthquake, a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12).
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)
RUDYARD KIPLING
Kipling is intensely loved and hated. Hardly any reader likes him a little . . . . One moment I am filled with delight at the variety and solidity of his imagination; and then, at the very next moment, I am sick, sick to death, of the whole Kipling world.
“Kipling’s World,” Selected Literary Essays
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley has made short work of a prosecution by the Crown. It still has to face more formidable judges. Nine of them, and all goddesses.
“Four-Letter Words,” Selected Literary Essays
THE “GREAT LITERARY EXPERIENCE” OF GEORGE MACDONALD’S PHANTASTES
I have had a great literary experience this week. I have discovered yet another author to add to our circle—our very own set. Never since I first read The Well at the World’s End [by William Morris] have I enjoyed a book so much—and indeed I think my new “find” is quite as good as Malory or Morris himself. The book, to get to the point, is George MacDonald’s “faerie romance,” Phantastes, which I picked up by hazard in a rather tired Everyman copy—by the way, isn’t it funny, they cost 1/1d. now—on our station bookstall last Saturday . . . .
Of course it is hopeless for me to try and describe it, but when you have followed the hero Anodos along that little stream to the fairy wood, have heard about the terrible ash tree and how the shadow of his gnarled, knotted hand falls upon the book the hero is reading, when you have read about the fairy palace . . . and heard the episode of Cosmo, I know that you will quite agree with me. You must not be disappointed at the first chapter which is rather conventional fairy tale style, and after it you won’t be able to stop until you have finished.
Letter to Arthur Greeves, March 7, 1916 (CL 1)
SPIRITUAL HEALING IN GEORGE MACDONALD
I know nothing that gives me such a feeling of spiritual healing, of being washed, as to read G. MacDonald.
Letter to Arthur Greeves, August 31, 1930 (CL 1)
MACHIAVELLI
It would be unreasonable . . . to pass over in silence The Prince (1513) of Machiavelli, for there the repudiation of medieval principles goes farthest. But for that very reason Machiavelli is not very important. He went too far. Everyone answered him, everyone disagreed with him. The book’s success was a success of scandal. To readers who seriously sought instruction in the art of tyranny he could, after all, reveal only the secrets which all men knew. Not to be, but to seem, virtuous—it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)
MODERN AMERICAN POETS
I feel as you do about modern English poetry. American is better. Lee Masters, Frost, and Robinson Jeffers all really have something to say and some real art.
Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, April 22, 1954 (CL 3)
MODERN NOVELS
I have read nothing lately, except a foolish modern novel which I read at one sitting—or rather one lying on the sofa—this afternoon in the middle of a terrible thunderstorm.
I think that if modern novels are to be read at all, they should be taken like this, at one gulp, and then thrown away—preferably into the fire . . . .
Letter to Arthur Greeves, June 28, 1916 (CL 1)
MODERNISM IN LITERATURE AND ART
Many modern novels, poems, and pictures, which we are browbeaten 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.
“Good Work and Good Works,” The World’s Last Night
MODERNISM AS THE WHINING AND MUMBLING PERIOD
Can it be—dare we hope—that the ghastly mumbling and whining period in which you and I have lived nearly all our lives, is really coming to an end? Shall we see gold and scarlet and flutes and trumpets come back?
Letter to Daphne Harwood, February 20, 1950 (CL 3)
SIR THOMAS MORE
Great claims have in modern times been made for More’s English prose; I can accept them only with serious reservations . . . . The man who sits down and reads fairly through fifty pages of More will find many phrases to admire; but he will also find an invertebrate length of sentence, a fumbling multiplication of epithets, and an almost complete lack of rhythmical vitality . . . . Its chief cause is the fact that More never really rose from a legal to a literary conception of clarity and completeness. He multiplies words in a vain endeavor to stop up all possible chinks, where a better artist forces his conceptions on us by the light and heat of intellect and emotion in which they burn. He thus loses the advantages both of full writing and of concise writing. There are no lightning thrusts: and, on the other hand, no swelling tide of thought and feeling. The style is stodgy and doughlike. As for the good phrases, the reader will already have divined their nature. They come when More is in his homeliest vein: their race and pith and mere Englishry are the great redeeming feature of his prose . . . . Nearly all that is best in More is comic or close to comedy.
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)
WHY LEWIS PREFERRED GEORGE ORWELL’S ANIMAL FARM TO 1984
“Animal Farm is formally almost perfect; light, strong, balanced. There is not a sentence that does not contribute to the whole. The myth says all the author wants it to say and (equally important) it doesn’t say anything else. Here is an objet d’art as durably satisfying as a Horatian ode or a Chippendale chair.”
Here we have two books by the same author which deal, at bottom, with the same subject. Both are very bitter, honest, and honorable recantations. They express the disillusionment of one who had been a revolutionary of the familiar, entre guerre pattern and had later come to see that all totalitarian rulers, however their shirts may be colored, are equally the enemies of man.
Since the subject concerns us all and the disillusionment has been widely shared, it is not surprising that either book, or both, should find plenty of readers, and both are obviously the works of a very considerable writer. What puzzles me is the marked preference of the public for 1984. For it seems to me (apart from its magnificent, and fortunately detachable, appendix on Newspeak) to be merely a flawed, interesting book; but the Farm is a work of genius which may well outlive the particular and (let us hope) temporary conditions that provoked it.
To begin with, it is very much the shorter of the two. This in itself would not, of course, show it to be the better. I am the last person to think so. Callimachus, to be sure, thought a great book a great evil, but then I think Callimachus a great prig. My appetite is hearty and when I sit down to read I like a square meal. But in this instance the shorter book seems to do all that the longer one does, and more. The longer book does not justify its greater length. There is dead wood in it. And I think we can all see where the dead wood comes.
In the nightmare state of 1984 the rulers devote a great deal of time—which means that the author and readers also have to devote a great deal of time—to a curious kind of anti-sexual propaganda. Indeed the amours of the hero and heroine seem to be at least as much a gesture of protest against that propaganda as a natural outcome of affection or appetite . . . .
But this is only the clearest instance of the defect which, throughout, makes 1984 inferior to the Farm. There is too much in it of the author’s own psychology: too much indulgence of what he feels as a man, not pruned or mastered by what he intends to make as an artist. The Farm is work of a wholly different order. Here the whole thing is projected and distanced. It becomes a myth and is allowed to speak for itself. The author shows us hateful things; he doesn’t stammer or speak thick under the surge of his own hatred. The emotion no longer disables him because it has all been used, and used to make something.
One result is that the satire becomes more effective. Wit and humor (absent from the longer work) are employed with devastating effect. The great sentence “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others” bites deeper than the whole of 1984.
Thus the shorter book does all that the longer does. But it also does more. Paradoxically, when Orwell turns all his characters into animals he makes them more fully human. In 1984 the cruelty of the tyrants is odious, but it is not tragic; odious like a man skinning a cat alive, not tragic like the cruelty of Regan and Goneril to Lear.
Tragedy demands a certain minimum stature in the victim; and the hero and heroine of 1984 do not reach that minimum. They become interesting at all only in so far as they suffer. That is claim enough (Heaven knows) on our sympathies in real life, but not in fiction. A central character who escapes nullity only by being tortured is a failure. And the hero and heroine in this story are surely such dull, mean little creatures that one might be introduced to them once a week for six months without even remembering them.
In Animal Farm all this is changed. The greed and cunning of the pigs is tragic (not merely odious) because we are made to care about all the honest, well-meaning, or even heroic beasts whom they exploit. The death of Boxer the horse moves us more than all the more elaborate cruelties of the other book. And not only moves, but convinces. Here, despite the animal disguise, we feel we are in a real world. This—this congeries of guzzling pigs, snapping dogs, and heroic horses—this is what humanity is like; very good, very bad, very pitiable, very honorable. If men were only like the people in 1984 it would hardly be worthwhile writing stories about them. It is as if Orwell could not see them until he put them into a beast fable.
Finally, Animal Farm is formally almost perfect; light, strong, balanced. There is not a sentence that does not contribute to the whole. The myth says all the author wants it to say and (equally important) it doesn’t say anything else. Here is an objet d’art as durably satisfying as a Horatian ode or a Chippendale chair.
That is why I find the superior popularity of 1984 so discouraging. Something must, of course, be allowed for mere length. The booksellers say that short books will not sell. And there are reasons not discreditable. The weekend reader wants something that will last till Sunday evening; the traveler wants something that will last as far as Glasgow.
Again, 1984 belongs to a genre that is now more familiar than a beast fable; I mean the genre of what may be called dystopias, those nightmare visions of the future which began, perhaps, with Wells’s Time Machine and The Sleeper Awakes. I would like to hope that these causes are sufficient. Certainly, it would be alarming if we had to conclude either that the use of the imagination had so decayed that readers demand in all fiction a realistic surface and cannot treat any fable as more than a “juvenile,” or else that the bed scenes in 1984 are the flavoring without which no book can now be sold.
“George Orwell,” On Stories
BEATRIX POTTER
I only wish I could come and see you, especially if it included the chance of meeting Miss Potter. It was the professor of Anglo-Saxon [J. R. R. Tolkien] who first pointed out to me that her art of putting about ten words on one page so as to have a perfect rhythm and to answer just the questions a child would ask, is almost as severe as that of lyric poetry. She has a secure place among the masters of English prose.
Letter to Delmar Banner, November 30, 1942 (CL 2)
TO DOROTHY L. SAYERS ON HER TRANSLATION OF DANTE
One thing (though it now hinders me from writing as precisely about the work as I should like) will, I believe, please you—and Dante too. I set out with the intention of judging it as a translation: but in a few cantos I’d forgotten all about that and was thinking only of Dante. And then, a few cantos later, I forgot all about Dante and thought only about purgatory. In a word, the double mechanism worked and therefore made no noise. It is a novel form of praise to say, when asked about your share in the performance, “I didn’t notice it.” But I think it’s perhaps the highest one can give a translation. Bene olet ubi nihil olet. [(A woman) smells right when nothing smells.]
Letter to Dorothy L. Sayers, July 31, 1955 (CL 3)
THE CIVILIZED HEART IN SCOTT, DICKENS, AND TOLSTOY
I have a taste for Dickens but don’t think it a low one. He is the great author on mere affection: only he and Tolstoy (another great favorite of mine) really deal with it. Of course his error lies in thinking it will do instead of agape [self-giving, godlike love]. Scott, as D. Cecil said, has not the civilized mind, but the civilized heart. Unforced nobility, generosity, liberality, flow from him.
Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, January 23, 1954 (CL 3)
TWO SPECIES OF EXCELLENCE IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The mark of Shakespeare (and it is quite enough for one mortal man) is simply this: to have combined two species of excellence which are not, in a remarkable degree, combined by any other artist, namely the imaginative splendor of the highest type of lyric and the realistic presentation of human life and character.
“Variation in Shakespeare and Others,” Selected Literary Essays
SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET AS A FAILURE BETTER THAN SUCCESS
“Most certainly an artistic failure.” All argument is for that conclusion—until you read or see Hamlet again. And when you do, you are left saying that if this is failure, then failure is better than success. We want more of these “bad” plays. From our first childish reading of the ghost scenes down to those golden minutes which we stole from marking examination papers on Hamlet to read a few pages of Hamlet itself, have we ever known the day or the hour when its enchantment failed? . . . It has a taste of its own, an all-pervading relish which we recognize even in its smallest fragments, and which, once tasted, we recur to. When we want that taste, no other book will do instead.
“Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?,” Selected Literary Essays
SHAKESPEARE ON THE LASTING MYSTERY OF THE HUMAN SITUATION
I believe that we read Hamlet’s speeches with interest chiefly because they describe so well a certain spiritual region through which most of us have passed and anyone in his circumstances might be expected to pass . . . .
The real and lasting mystery of our human situation has been greatly depicted.
“Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?,” Selected Literary Essays
PERCY SHELLEY’S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND
The resulting whole [Prometheus Unbound] is the greatest long poem in the nineteenth century, and the only long poem of the highest kind in that century which approaches to perfection . . . .
For my own part I believe that no poet has felt more keenly, or presented more weightily the necessity for a complete unmaking and remaking of man, to be endured at the dark bases of his being. I do not know the book (in profane literature) to which I should turn for a like expression of what von Hügel would have called the “costingness” of regeneration . . . .
The fourth act I shall not attempt to analyze. It is an intoxication, a riot, a complicated and uncontrollable splendor, long, and yet not too long, sustained on the note of ecstasy such as no other English poet, perhaps no other poet, has given us. It can be achieved by more than one artist in music: to do it in words has been, I think, beyond the reach of nearly all.
“Shelley, Dryden, and Mr. Eliot,” Selected Literary Essays
PHILIP SIDNEY’S ARCADIA
I have just had the pleasure of reading Sidney’s Arcadia . . . . The book itself is a glorious feast: I don’t know how to explain its particular charm, because it is not at all like anything I ever read before: and yet in places like all of them. Sometimes it is like Malory, often like Spenser, and yet different from either. For one thing, there is a fine description of scenery in it (only one so far, but I hope for more) which neither of them could have done. Then again the figure of the shepherd boy “piping as though he would never be old” rather reminds me of The Crock of Gold [by James Stephens, 1912]. But all this comes to is that Sidney is not like anyone else, but is just himself.
Letter to Arthur Greeves, June 20, 1916 (CL 1)
EDMUND SPENSER’S THE FAERIE QUEENE
From the time of its publication down to about 1914 it was everyone’s poem—the book in which many and many a boy first discovered that he liked poetry; a book which spoke at once, like Homer or Shakespeare or Dickens, to every reader’s imagination. Spenser did not rank as a hard poet like Pindar, Donne, or Browning. How we have lost that approach I do not know. And unfortunately The Faerie Queene suffers even more than most great works from being approached through the medium of commentaries and “literary history.” . . . The poem is a great palace, but the door into it is so low that you must stoop to go in. No prig can be a Spenserian. It is of course much more than a fairy tale, but unless we can enjoy it as a fairy tale first of all, we shall not really care for it.
“Edmund Spenser,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
LAURENCE STERNE’S TRISTRAM SHANDY
I have read today . . . some ten pages of Tristram Shandy and am wondering whether I like it. It is certainly the maddest book ever written . . . . It gives you the impression of an escaped lunatic’s conversation while chasing his hat on a windy May morning.
Letter to Arthur Greeves, October 25, 1916 (CL 1)
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The trouble with Thackeray is that he can hardly envisage goodness except as a kind of good-heartedness: all his “good” people are not only simple, but simpletons. That is a subtle poison which comes in with the Renaissance: the Machiavellian (intelligent) villain presently producing the idiot hero. The Middle Ages didn’t make Herod clever and knew the devil was an ass. There is really an unfaith about Thackeray’s ethics: as if goodness were somehow charming and “seelie” [silly] and infantile. No conception that the purification of the will (ceteris paribus [other things being equal]) leads to the enlightenment of the intelligence.
Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, January 30, 1954 (CL 3)
LEWIS’S REVIEW OF J. R. R. TOLKIEN’S THE HOBBIT
“To define the world of The Hobbit is, of course, impossible, because it is new. You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have gone.”
The publishers claim that The Hobbit, though very unlike Alice, resembles it in being the work of a professor at play. A more important truth is that both belong to a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own—a world that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him. Its place is with Alice, Flatland, Phantastes, The Wind in the Willows.
To define the world of The Hobbit is, of course, impossible, because it is new. You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have gone . . . .
You must read for yourself to find out how inevitable the change is and how it keeps pace with the hero’s journey. Though all is marvelous, nothing is arbitrary: all the inhabitants of Wilderland seem to have the same unquestionable right to their existence as those of our own world, though the fortunate child who meets them will have no notion—and his unlearned elders not much more—of the deep sources in our blood and tradition from which they spring.
For it must be understood that this is a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. Alice is read gravely by children and with laughter by grown-ups; The Hobbit, on the other hand, will be funniest to its youngest readers, and only years later, at a tenth or a twentieth reading, will they begin to realize what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true. Prediction is dangerous: but The Hobbit may well prove a classic.
“The Hobbit,” On Stories and Other Essays on Literature
LEWIS’S REVIEW OF J. R. R. TOLKIEN’S THE LORD OF THE RINGS
This book is like lightning from a clear sky; as sharply different, as unpredictable in our age as Songs of Innocence were in theirs. To say that in it heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism is inadequate. To us, who live in that odd period, the return—and the sheer relief of it—is doubtless the important thing. But in the history of romance itself—a history which stretches back to The Odyssey and beyond—it makes not a return but an advance or revolution: the conquest of new territory.
Nothing quite like it was ever done before. “One takes it,” says Naomi Mitchison, “as seriously as Malory.” But then the ineluctable sense of reality which we feel in Le Morte d’Arthur comes largely from the great weight of other men’s work built up century by century, which has gone into it. The utterly new achievement of Professor Tolkien is that he carries a comparable sense of reality unaided. Probably no book yet written in the world is quite such a radical instance of what its author has ere called “subcreation.” The direct debt (there are of course subtler kinds of debt) which every author must owe to the actual universe is here deliberately reduced to the minimum. Not content to create his own story, he creates, with an almost insolent prodigality, the whole world in which it is to move, with its own theology, myths, geography, history, paleography, languages, and orders of beings—a world “full of strange creatures beyond count.” The names alone are a feast, whether redolent of quiet countryside (Michel Delving, Southfarthing), tall and kingly (Boromir, Faramir, Elendil), loathsome like Sméagol, who is also Gollum, or frowning in the evil strength of Barad-dûr or Gorgoroth; yet best of all (Lothlórien, Gilthoniel, Galadriel) when they embody that piercing, high elvish beauty of which no other prose writer has captured so much.
Such a book has of course its predestined readers, even now more numerous and more critical than is always realized. To them a reviewer need say little, except that here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart. They will know that this is good news, good beyond hope. To complete their happiness one need only add that it promises to be gloriously long: this volume is only the first of three. But it is too great a book to rule only its natural subjects. Something must be said to “those without,” to the unconverted. At the very least, possible misunderstandings may be got out of the way.
First, we must clearly understand that though The Fellowship in one way continues its author’s fairy tale, The Hobbit, it is in no sense an overgrown “juvenile.” The truth is the other way round. The Hobbit was merely a fragment torn from the author’s huge myth and adapted for children; inevitably losing something by the adaptation. The Fellowship gives us at last the lineaments of that myth “in their true dimensions like themselves.” Misunderstanding on this point might easily be encouraged by the first chapter, in which the author (taking a risk) writes almost in the manner of the earlier and far lighter book. With some who will find the main body of the book deeply moving, this chapter may not be a favorite.
Yet there were good reasons for such an opening; still more for the prologue (wholly admirable, this) which precedes it. It is essential that we should first be well steeped in the “homeliness,” the frivolity, even (in its best sense) the vulgarity of the creatures called Hobbits; these unambitious folk, peaceable yet almost anarchical, with faces “good-natured rather than beautiful” and “mouths apt to laughter and eating,” who treat smoking as an art and like books which tell them what they already know. They are not an allegory of the English, but they are perhaps a myth that only an Englishman (or, should we add, a Dutchman?) could have created. Almost the central theme of the book is the contrast between the Hobbits (or “the Shire”) and the appalling destiny to which some of them are called, the terrifying discovery that the humdrum happiness of the Shire, which they had taken for granted as something normal, is in reality a sort of local and temporary accident, that its existence depends on being protected by powers which Hobbits dare not imagine, that any Hobbit may find himself forced out of the Shire and caught up into that high conflict. More strangely still, the event of that conflict between strongest things may come to depend on him, who is almost the weakest.
What shows that we are reading myth, not allegory, is that there are no pointers to a specifically theological, or political, or psychological application. A myth points, for each reader, to the realm he lives in most. It is a master key; use it on what door you like. And there are other themes in The Fellowship equally serious.
That is why no catchwords about “escapism” or “nostalgia” and no distrust of “private worlds” are in court. This is no Angria, no dreaming; it is sane and vigilant invention, revealing at point after point the integration of the author’s mind. What is the use of calling “private” a world we can all walk into and test and in which we find such a balance? As for escapism, what we chiefly escape is the illusions of our ordinary life. We certainly do not escape anguish. Despite many a snug fireside and many an hour of good cheer to gratify the hobbit in each of us, anguish is, for me, almost the prevailing note. But not, as in the literature most typical of our age, the anguish of abnormal or contorted souls: rather that anguish of those who were happy before a certain darkness came up and will be happy if they live to see it gone.
Nostalgia does indeed come in; not ours nor the author’s, but that of the characters . . . . Our own world, except at certain rare moments, hardly seems so heavy with its past. This is one element in the anguish which the characters bear. But with the anguish there comes also a strange exaltation. They are at once stricken and upheld by the memory of vanished civilizations and lost splendor. They have outlived the second and third ages; the wine of life was drawn long since. As we read we find ourselves sharing their burden; when we have finished, we return to our own life not relaxed but fortified.
But there is more in the book still. Every now and then, risen from sources we can only conjecture and almost alien (one would think) to the author’s habitual imagination, figures meet us so brimming with life (not human life) that they make our sort of anguish and our sort of exaltation seem unimportant. Such is Tom Bombadil, such the unforgettable Ents. This is surely the utmost reach of invention, when an author produces what seems to be not even his own, much less anyone else’s. Is mythopoeia, after all, not the most, but the least, subjective of activities?
Even now I have left out almost everything—the sylvan leafiness, the passions, the high virtues, the remote horizons. Even if I had space, I could hardly convey them. And after all the most obvious appeal of the book is perhaps also its deepest: “There was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great valor, and great deeds that were not wholly vain.” Not wholly vain—it is the cool middle point between illusion and disillusionment.
When I reviewed the first volume of this work I hardly dared to hope it would have the success which I was sure it deserved. Happily I am proved wrong. There is, however, one piece of false criticism which had better be answered: the complaint that the characters are all either black or white. Since the climax of Volume 1 was mainly concerned with the struggle between good and evil in the mind of Boromir, it is not easy to see how anyone could have said this. I will hazard a guess. “How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” asks someone in Volume 2. “As he has ever judged,” comes the reply. “Good and ill have not changed . . . nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men.”
This is the basis of the whole Tolkienian world. I think some readers, seeing (and disliking) this rigid demarcation of black and white, imagine they have seen a rigid demarcation between black and white people. Looking at the squares, they assume (in defiance of the facts) that all the pieces must be making bishops’ moves which confine them to one color. But even such readers will hardly brazen it out through the two last volumes. Motives, even in the right side, are mixed. Those who are now traitors usually began with comparatively innocent intentions. Heroic Rohan and imperial Gondor are partly diseased. Even the wretched Sméagol, till quite late in the story, has good impulses; and (by a tragic paradox) what finally pushes him over the brink is an unpremeditated speech by the most selfless character of all . . . .
Of picking out great moments (such as the cockcrow at the Siege of Gondor) there would be no end; I will mention two general (and totally different) excellences. One, surprisingly, is realisms. This war has the very quality of the war my generation knew. It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when “everything is now ready,” the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground, and such heaven-sent windfalls as a cache of choice tobacco “salvaged” from a ruin. The author has told us elsewhere that his taste for fairy tale was wakened into maturity by active service; that, no doubt, is why we can say of his war scenes (quoting Gimli the Dwarf), “There is good rock here. This country has tough bones.” The other excellence is that no individual, and no species, seems to exist only for the sake of the plot. All exist in their own right and would have been worth creating for their mere flavor even if they had been irrelevant. Treebeard would have served any other author (if any other could have conceived him) for a whole book. His eyes are “filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking.” Through those ages his name has grown with him, so that he cannot now tell it; it would, by now, take too long to pronounce. When he learns that the thing they are standing on is a hill, he complains that this is but “a hasty word” for that which has so much history in it.
How far Treebeard can be regarded as a “portrait of the artist” must remain doubtful; but when he hears that some people want to identify the Ring with the hydrogen bomb, and Mordor with Russia, I think he might call it a “hasty” word. How long do people think a world like his takes to grow? Do they think it can be done as quickly as a modern nation changes its public enemy number one or as modern scientists invent new weapons? When Professor Tolkien began there was probably no nuclear fission and the contemporary incarnation of Mordor was a good deal nearer our shores. But the text itself teaches us that Sauron is eternal; the war of the Ring is only one of a thousand wars against him. Every time we shall be wise to fear his ultimate victory, after which there will be “no more songs.” Again and again we shall have good evidence that “the wind is setting East, and the withering of all woods may be drawing near.” Every time we win we shall know that our victory is impermanent. If we insist on asking for the moral of the story, that is its moral: a recall from facile optimism and wailing pessimism alike, to that hard, yet not quite desperate, insight into man’s unchanging predicament by which heroic ages have lived. It is here that the Norse affinity is strongest: hammer strokes, but with compassion.
“But why,” (some ask), “why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?” Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterization. Much that in a realistic work would be done by “character delineation” is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And man as a whole, man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale? In the book Éomer rashly contrasts “the green earth” with “legends.” Aragorn replies that the green earth itself is “a mighty matter of legend.”
The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by “the veil of familiarity.” The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it the real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly. I do not think he could have done it in any other way.
The book is too original and too opulent for any final judgment on a first reading. But we know at once that it has done things to us. We are not quite the same men. And though we must ration ourselves in our rereadings, I have little doubt that the book will soon take its place among the indispensables.
“Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” On Stories
LEO TOLSTOY
The most interesting thing that has happened to me since I last wrote is reading War and Peace—at least I am now in the middle of the fourth and last volume so I think, bar accidents, I am pretty sure to finish it. It has completely changed my view of novels.
Hitherto I had always looked on them as rather a dangerous form—I mean dangerous to the health of literature as a whole. I thought that the strong “narrative lust”—the passionate itch to “see what happened in the end”—which novels aroused, necessarily injured the taste for other, better, but less irresistible, forms of literary pleasure: and that the growth of novel reading largely explained the deplorable division of readers into low-brow and high-brow—the low being simply those who had learned to expect from books this “narrative lust” from the time they began to read, and who had thus destroyed in advance their possible taste for better things. I also thought that the intense desire which novels rouse in us for the “happiness” of the chief characters (no one feels that way about Hamlet or Othello) and the selfishness with which this happiness is concerned, were thoroughly bad . . . .
Tolstoy, in this book, has changed all that. I have felt everywhere, in a sense—you will know what I mean—that sublime indifference to the life or death, success or failure, of the chief characters, which is not a blank indifference at all, but almost like submission to the will of God. Then the variety of it. The war parts are just the best descriptions of war ever written: all the modern war books are milk and water to this: then the rural parts—lovely pictures of village life and of religious festivals in which the relations between the peasants and the nobles almost make you forgive feudalism; the society parts, in which I was astonished to find so much humor—there is a great hostess who always separates two guests when she sees them getting really interested in conversation, who is almost a Jane Austen character. There are love passages that have the same sort of intoxicating quality you get in Meredith—and passages about soldiers chatting over fires which remind one of Patsy Macan, and a drive in a sledge by moonlight which is better than Hans Andersen.
Letter to Arthur Greeves, March 29, 1931 (CL 1)
THOMAS TRAHERNE’S CENTURIES OF MEDITATIONS
At present I’m rereading [Thomas] Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations, which I think almost the most beautiful book (in prose, I mean, excluding poets) in English.
Letter to Arthur Greeves, December 23, 1941 (CL 2)
H. G. WELLS’S MARRIAGE
You will be surprised when you hear how I employed the return journey—by reading an H. G. Wells novel called Marriage [1912], and perhaps more surprised when I say that I thoroughly enjoyed it; one thing you can say for the man is that he really is interested in all the big, outside questions—and the characters are intensely real, especially a Mr. Pope who reminds me of Excellenz [Lewis’s father]. It opens new landscapes to me—how one felt that on finding that a new kind of book was waiting for one, in the old days—and I have decided to read some more of his serious books. It is funny that I—and perhaps you—read the old books for pleasure and always turn to contemporaries with the notion of “improving my mind.” With most, I fancy, the direct opposite is so.
Letter to Arthur Greeves, February 3, 1920 (CL 1)
T. H. WHITE’S THE SWORD IN THE STONE
The Sword in the Stone [is] one of the most deeply vulgar books I’ve ever read. Its humor is exactly on the level of an urchin with a lead pencil drawing a mustache on the lip of a classical statue . . . . It is the work of a sad, shabby little mind.
Letter to George Every, December 11, 1940 (CL 2)
WALT WHITMAN
The poetic species to which they belong—which might be called the rhapsodical—is one to which I am very insensitive: I can’t bear Walt Whitman.
My feeling is that the more vast and supersensible a poem’s subject is, the more it needs to be fixed, founded, incarnated in regular meter and concrete images.
Letter to Robert Longacre, June 19, 1952 (CL 3)
NOTE TO CHARLES WILLIAMS ON HIS NOVEL DESCENT INTO HELL
I hope this doesn’t sound patronizing—in sheer writing I think you have gone up, as we examiners say, a whole class. Chapter 2 is in my opinion your high-water mark so far. You have completely overcome a certain flamboyance which I always thought your chief danger: this is crisp as grape nuts, hard as a hammer, clear as glass. I am a little worried in the Wentworth part by the tendency to Gertrude Steinisms (“eaves”/“eves,” “guard”/“card,” etc.).
Letter to Charles Williams, September 23, 1937 (CL 2)