The c s lewis collection, p.73
The C. S. Lewis Collection, page 73
‘The Hobbit’ is Lewis’s review of his friend Tolkien’s book of the same title, and the review is taken from The Times Literary Supplement of 2 October 1937.
‘Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings’ is a combination of two reviews about Tolkien’s great trilogy. The first portion of this piece appeared as ‘The Gods Return to Earth’ in Time and Tide, 14 August 1954, and the second was published as ‘The Dethronement of Power’, also in Time and Tide, 22 October 1955. Professor Tolkien told me that he had been reading various genealogies and appendices to Lewis long before there was any written story. His interests, he told me, were primarily in those aspects of ‘Middle Earth’ and that it was his friend C. S., or ‘Jack’, Lewis who encouraged him to write a story to go with them. ‘You know Jack,’ he said to me. ‘He had to have a story! And that story—The Lord of the Rings—was written to keep him quiet!’ It is, as it was meant to be, a generous and telling tribute.
When his friend Dorothy L. Sayers died in December 1957, Lewis was asked to write a panegyric for the memorial service to be held for her at St Margaret’s Church, London, on the 15th January 1958. Lewis was unable to attend the service, and his composition was read by the Lord Bishop of Chichester (George Bell). Following Lewis’s death, I was one of those who began searching for the unpublished panegyric—a piece of writing which seemed determined to elude discovery. Indeed, it was not until this book was about to go to the printers that Miss Sayers’s son, Anthony Fleming, came to my rescue with the rather messy typescript which had been made for the Bishop to read from. Then, glory of glories, a further search uncovered the ‘real thing’. Finally, best of all was the day when Mr Fleming and I sat in the drawing-room of the Athenaeum Club in London, reading the original manuscript—which Lewis had given him after the memorial service. I am most deeply grateful to Mr Fleming for solving what his talented mother might have called ‘The Case of the Missing Panegyric’—and I hope it will prove as enjoyable found as it was desired when lost.
‘The Mythopoeic Gift of Rider Haggard’ is my title for Lewis’s review of Morton Cohen’s biography of Haggard. It appeared under the title ‘Haggard Rides Again’ in Time and Tide, 3 September 1960.
‘George Orwell’ is taken from Time and Tide of 8 January 1955.
‘The Death of Words’ was originally published in The Spectator, 22 September 1944.
‘The Parthenon and the Optative’ was Lewis’s title for the essay which appeared without one in the section ‘Notes on the Way’, of Time and Tide, 11 March 1944.
‘Period Criticism’ was Lewis’s own title for the essay in ‘Notes on the Way’, Time and Tide, 9 November 1946.
‘Different Tastes in Literature’ is the title I have given Lewis’s ‘Notes on the Way’ as it appeared in two parts in Time and Tide of 25 May 1946 and 1 June 1946.
‘On Criticism’, written fairly late in the author’s life, appeared first in Of Other Worlds.
‘Unreal Estates’ is an informal conversation about science fiction between Lewis, Kingsley Amis, and Brian Aldiss. It was recorded on tape by Brian Aldiss in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalene College, Cambridge, on the 4th December 1962. It was first published as ‘The Establishment Must Die and Rot . . .’ in SF Horizons, Spring 1964, and later as ‘Unreal Estates’ in Encounter, March 1965.
Readers should know that the person to whom this book is dedicated is Lady Collins of Collins Publishers, London. The idea of making the collection was hers, and when the Trustees of the Lewis Estate learned of her plans to retire in October 1981 it seemed right that it should be offered to her. Lady Collins has for many years been in charge of Collins’s Religious Books, and it is primarily through the Fontana Series that she has introduced C. S. Lewis to most of those who now read him. In my long friendship with Lady Collins I have found so much to admire that every effort to praise her falls short of what is adequate. The author of the Proverbs expressed it much better in saying ‘Let her own works praise her’.
Walter Hooper
Oxford
I
ON STORIES
It is astonishing how little attention critics have paid to Story considered in itself. Granted the story, the style in which it should be told, the order in which it should be disposed, and (above all) the delineation of the characters, have been abundantly discussed. But the Story itself, the series of imagined events, is nearly always passed over in silence, or else treated exclusively as affording opportunities for the delineation of character. There are indeed three notable exceptions. Aristotle in the Poetics constructed a theory of Greek tragedy which puts Story in the centre and relegates character to a strictly subordinate place. In the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, Boccaccio and others developed an allegorical theory of Story to explain the ancient myths. And in our own time Jung and his followers have produced their doctrine of Archetypes. Apart from these three attempts the subject has been left almost untouched, and this has had a curious result. Those forms of literature in which Story exists merely as a means to something else—for example, the novel of manners where the story is there for the sake of the characters, or the criticism of social conditions—have had full justice done to them; but those forms in which everything else is there for the sake of the story have been given little serious attention. Not only have they been despised, as if they were fit only for children, but even the kind of pleasure they give has, in my opinion, been misunderstood. It is the second injustice which I am most anxious to remedy. Perhaps the pleasure of Story comes as low in the scale as modern criticism puts it. I do not think so myself, but on that point we may agree to differ. Let us, however, try to see clearly what kind of pleasure it is: or, rather, what different kinds of pleasure it may be. For I suspect that a very hasty assumption has been made on this subject. I think that books which are read merely ‘for the story’ may be enjoyed in two very different ways. It is partly a division of books (some stories can be read only in the one spirit and some only in the other) and partly a division of readers (the same story can be read in different ways).
What finally convinced me of this distinction was a conversation which I had a few years ago with an intelligent American pupil. We were talking about the books which had delighted our boyhood. His favourite had been Fenimore Cooper whom (as it happens) I have never read. My friend described one particular scene in which the hero was half-sleeping by his bivouac fire in the woods while a Redskin with a tomahawk was silently creeping on him from behind. He remembered the breathless excitement with which he had read the passage, the agonised suspense with which he wondered whether the hero would wake up in time or not. But I, remembering the great moments in my own early reading, felt quite sure that my friend was misrepresenting his experience, and indeed leaving out the real point. Surely, surely, I thought, the sheer excitement, the suspense, was not what had kept him going back and back to Fenimore Cooper. If that were what he wanted any other ‘boy’s blood’ would have done as well. I tried to put my thought into words. I asked him whether he were sure that he was not overemphasising and falsely isolating the importance of the danger simply as danger. For though I had never read Fenimore Cooper I had enjoyed other books about ‘Red Indians’. And I knew that what I wanted from them was not simply ‘excitement’. Dangers, of course, there must be: how else can you keep a story going? But they must (in the mood which led one to such a book) be Redskin dangers. The ‘Redskinnery’ was what really mattered. In such a scene as my friend had described, take away the feathers, the high cheek-bones, the whiskered trousers, substitute a pistol for a tomahawk, and what would be left? For I wanted not the momentary suspense but that whole world to which it belonged—the snow and the snow-shoes, beavers and canoes, warpaths and wigwams, and Hiawatha names. Thus I; and then came the shock. My pupil is a very clear-headed man and he saw at once what I meant and also saw how totally his imaginative life as a boy had differed from mine. He replied that he was perfectly certain that ‘all that’ had made no part of his pleasure. He had never cared one brass farthing for it. Indeed—and this really made me feel as if I were talking to a visitor from another planet—in so far as he had been dimly aware of ‘all that’, he had resented it as a distraction from the main issue. He would, if anything, have preferred to the Redskin some more ordinary danger such as a crook with a revolver.
To those whose literary experiences are at all like my own the distinction which I am trying to make between two kinds of pleasure will probably be clear enough from this one example. But to make it doubly clear I will add another. I was once taken to see a film version of King Solomon’s Mines. Of its many sins—not least the introduction of a totally irrelevant young woman in shorts who accompanied the three adventurers wherever they went—only one here concerns us. At the end of Haggard’s book, as everyone remembers, the heroes are awaiting death entombed in a rock chamber and surrounded by the mummified kings of that land. The maker of the film version, however, apparently thought this tame. He substituted a subterranean volcanic eruption, and then went one better by adding an earthquake. Perhaps we should not blame him. Perhaps the scene in the original was not ‘cinematic’ and the man was right, by the canons of his own art, in altering it. But it would have been better not to have chosen in the first place a story which could be adapted to the screen only by being ruined. Ruined, at least, for me. No doubt if sheer excitement is all you want from a story, and if increase of dangers increases excitement, then a rapidly changing series of two risks (that of being burned alive and that of being crushed to bits) would be better than the single prolonged danger of starving to death in a cave. But that is just the point. There must be a pleasure in such stories distinct from mere excitement or I should not feel that I had been cheated in being given the earthquake instead of Haggard’s actual scene. What I lose is the whole sense of the deathly (quite a different thing from simple danger of death)—the cold, the silence, and the surrounding faces of the ancient, the crowned and sceptred, dead. You may, if you please, say that Rider Haggard’s effect is quite as ‘crude’ or ‘vulgar’ or ‘sensational’ as that which the film substituted for it. I am not at present discussing that. The point is that it is extremely different. The one lays a hushing spell on the imagination; the other excites a rapid flutter of the nerves. In reading that chapter of the book curiosity or suspense about the escape of the heroes from their death-trap makes a very minor part of one’s experience. The trap I remember for ever: how they got out I have long since forgotten.
It seems to me that in talking of books which are ‘mere stories’—books, that is, which concern themselves principally with the imagined event and not with character or society—nearly everyone makes the assumption that ‘excitement’ is the only pleasure they ever give or are intended to give. Excitement, in this sense, may be defined as the alternate tension and appeasement of imagined anxiety. This is what I think untrue. In some such books, and for some readers, another factor comes in.
To put it at the very lowest, I know that something else comes in for at least one reader—myself. I must here be autobiographical for the sake of being evidential. Here is a man who has spent more hours than he cares to remember in reading romances, and received from them more pleasure perhaps than he should. I know the geography of Tormance better than that of Tellus. I have been more curious about travels from Uplands to Utterbol and from Morna Moruna to Koshtra Belorn than about those recorded in Hakluyt. Though I saw the trenches before Arras I could not now lecture on them so tactically as on the Greek wall, and Scamander and the Scaean Gate. As a social historian I am sounder on Toad Hall and the Wild Wood or the cave-dwelling Selenites or Hrothgar’s court or Vortigern’s than on London, Oxford, and Belfast. If to love Story is to love excitement then I ought to be the greatest lover of excitement alive. But the fact is that what is said to be the most ‘exciting’ novel in the world, The Three Musketeers, makes no appeal to me at all. The total lack of atmosphere repels me. There is no country in the book—save as a storehouse of inns and ambushes. There is no weather. When they cross to London there is no feeling that London differs from Paris. There is not a moment’s rest from the ‘adventures’: one’s nose is kept ruthlessly to the grindstone. It all means nothing to me. If that is what is meant by Romance, then Romance is my aversion and I greatly prefer George Eliot or Trollope. In saying this I am not attempting to criticise The Three Musketeers. I believe on the testimony of others that it is a capital story. I am sure that my own inability to like it is in me a defect and a misfortune. But that misfortune is evidence. If a man sensitive and perhaps oversensitive to Romance likes least that Romance which is, by common consent, the most ‘exciting’ of all, then it follows that ‘excitement’ is not the only kind of pleasure to be got out of Romance. If a man loves wine and yet hates one of the strongest wines, then surely the sole source of pleasure in wine cannot be the alcohol?
If I am alone in this experience then, to be sure, the present essay is of merely autobiographical interest. But I am pretty sure that I am not absolutely alone. I write on the chance that some others may feel the same and in the hope that I may help them to clarify their own sensations.
In the example of King Solomon’s Mines the producer of the film substituted at the climax one kind of danger for another and thereby, for me, ruined the story. But where excitement is the only thing that matters kinds of danger must be irrelevant. Only degrees of danger will matter. The greater the danger and the narrower the hero’s escape from it, the more exciting the story will be. But when we are concerned with the ‘something else’ this is not so. Different kinds of danger strike different chords from the imagination. Even in real life different kinds of danger produce different kinds of fear. There may come a point at which fear is so great that such distinctions vanish, but that is another matter. There is a fear which is twin sister to awe, such as a man in war-time feels when he first comes within sound of the guns; there is a fear which is twin sister to disgust, such as a man feels on finding a snake or scorpion in his bedroom. There are taut, quivering fears (for one split second hardly distinguishable from a kind of pleasurable thrill) that a man may feel on a dangerous horse or a dangerous sea; and again, dead, squashed, flattened, numbing fears, as when we think we have cancer or cholera. There are also fears which are not of danger at all: like the fear of some large and hideous, though innocuous, insect or the fear of a ghost. All this, even in real life. But in imagination, where the fear does not rise to abject terror and is not discharged in action, the qualitative difference is much stronger.
I can never remember a time when it was not, however vaguely, present to my consciousness. Jack the Giant-Killer is not, in essence, simply the story of a clever hero surmounting danger. It is in essence the story of such a hero surmounting danger from giants. It is quite easy to contrive a story in which, though the enemies are of normal size, the odds against Jack are equally great. But it will be quite a different story. The whole quality of the imaginative response is determined by the fact that the enemies are giants. That heaviness, that monstrosity, that uncouthness, hangs over the whole thing. Turn it into music and you will feel the difference at once. If your villain is a giant your orchestra will proclaim his entrance in one way: if he is any other kind of villain, in another. I have seen landscapes (notably in the Mourne Mountains) which, under a particular light, made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge. Nature has that in her which compels us to invent giants: and only giants will do. (Notice that Gawain was in the north-west corner of England when ‘etins aneleden him’, giants came blowing after him on the high fells. Can it be an accident that Wordsworth was in the same places when he heard ‘low breathings coming after him’?) The dangerousness of the giants is, though important, secondary. In some folk-tales we meet giants who are not dangerous. But they still affect us in much the same way. A good giant is legitimate: but he would be twenty tons of living, earth-shaking oxymoron. The intolerable pressure, the sense of something older, wilder, and more earthy than humanity, would still cleave to him.
But let us descend to a lower instance. Are pirates, any more than giants, merely for threatening the hero? That sail which is rapidly overhauling us may be an ordinary enemy: a Don or a Frenchman. The ordinary enemy may easily be made just as lethal as the pirate. At the moment when she runs up the Jolly Roger, what exactly does this do to the imagination? It means, I grant you, that if we are beaten there will be no quarter. But that could be contrived without piracy. It is not the mere increase of danger that does the trick. It is the whole image of the utterly lawless enemy, the men who have cut adrift from all human society and become, as it were, a species of their own—men strangely clad, dark men with earrings, men with a history which they know and we don’t, lords of unspecified treasure in undiscovered islands. They are, in fact, to the young reader almost as mythological as the giants. It does not cross his mind that a man—a mere man like the rest of us—might be a pirate at one time of his life and not at another, or that there is any smudgy frontier between piracy and privateering. A pirate is a pirate, just as a giant is a giant.
Consider, again, the enormous difference between being shut out and being shut in: if you like, between agoraphobia and claustrophobia. In King Solomon’s Mines the heroes were shut in: so, more terribly, the narrator imagined himself to be in Poe’s Premature Burial. Your breath shortens while you read it. Now remember the chapter called ‘Mr Bedford Alone’ in H. G. Wells’s First Men in the Moon. There Bedford finds himself shut out on the surface of the Moon just as the long lunar day is drawing to its close—and with the day go the air and all heat. Read it from the terrible moment when the first tiny snowflake startles him into a realisation of his position down to the point at which he reaches the ‘sphere’ and is saved. Then ask yourself whether what you have been feeling is simply suspense. ‘Over me, around me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer was the Eternal . . . the infinite and final Night of space.’ That is the idea which has kept you enthralled. But if we were concerned only with the question whether Mr Bedford will live or freeze, that idea is quite beside the purpose. You can die of cold between Russian Poland and new Poland, just as well as by going to the Moon, and the pain will be equal. For the purpose of killing Mr Bedford ‘the infinite and final Night of space’ is almost entirely otiose: what is by cosmic standards an infinitesimal change of temperature is sufficient to kill a man and absolute zero can do no more. That airless outer darkness is important not for what it can do to Bedford but for what it does to us: to trouble us with Pascal’s old fear of those eternal silences which have gnawed at so much religious faith and shattered so many humanistic hopes: to evoke with them and through them all our racial and childish memories of exclusion and desolation: to present, in fact, as an intuition one permanent aspect of human experience.
