The c s lewis collection, p.96
The C. S. Lewis Collection, page 96
Everyone asks me what I think about religion at the two universities, so I suppose I must now say something of this subject. As it happens, I have formed a very definite and a very strange impression which may well, as I fully recognise, be premature. I give it for what it may be worth. On the one hand, I think the percentage both of dons and of undergraduates who accept, or even practise, some kind of Christianity is higher at Cambridge than at Oxford. It would be less safe here than there to assume that any man you happened to be talking to was an unbeliever. On the other hand, when unbelief does occur here it seems to be incomparably more militant, more self-conscious, more organised, more interested (even excited) than at Oxford. Over there I know scores of people who did not believe in the existence of God. But they were no more on their toes about it than about their disbelief in leprechauns or flying saucers. The subject hardly ever came up. Their scepticism was relaxed, unemphatic, taken for granted. I doubt if you could there have founded a society or ‘Movement’ based on agreement in that single negative proposition. If I am right in thinking that atheists are more numerous at Oxford, this might of course explain their attitude; they are strong enough to be careless. But I don’t feel that this is the whole truth. I can’t help thinking that Oxford scepticism and Cambridge scepticism have different genealogies. I suspect that the Oxonian unbeliever is the son of a privately unbelieving, externally conforming, nineteenth-century member of the Church of England; his grandfather was possibly an archdeacon. Behind his counterpart at Cambridge I suspect a Unitarian, beyond him a dissenter, then a Cromwellian, and finally a Puritan of Cartwright’s stamp.3 He broods (more ambivalently than he suspects) on persecution—‘stern to inflict and stubborn to endure’. He is (very properly) much concerned about freedom. He is a keen anti-clerical. Sometimes he seems really to believe that Laud or Mary4 might at any moment turn up again. To a newcomer from Oxford it is at first a little embarrassing; yet after all, in its way, rather admirable. If ever all this zeal could be directed against those who now really endanger our liberties, it would be of high value. Meanwhile I prefer the fierce to the flippant, who used to be (but is less so now) the characteristically Oxonian plague. For there is a bottomless urbanity that can be very boring.
In ‘the manners’ as our ancestors would have said—the social climate—I think I begin to discern some differences. But it would be quite misleading to describe these unless I said first, and with all possible emphasis, that they are, on a wide view, infinitesimal. Five minutes’ talk with anyone from Redbrick, or from an American or Continental university, will usually make it quite clear that Cambridge and Oxford are far more like one another than either is like anything else in the world. Only an eye long familiar with both could see any difference at all; they are like twins whom only their fond parents can tell apart. This is proved by the fact that I now hear told of famous Cambridge ‘characters’ some of the very same stories I used to hear told of famous Oxford ‘characters’; perhaps with equal falsehood, but clearly with equal plausibility, or both. And then there are the characters I have actually met, the ‘aged and great’ dons—crusty, fruity, ‘humourists’ (in the old sense), fathomlessly learned, and amidst all their kindness (there’s no perfect dish without some sharpness) merciless leg-pullers. This was what I feared I might lose by my migration. I must apologise for my fear; yet what Cambridge man, migrating in the opposite direction, would not have felt it too? It has proved gloriously false; quod quaeritis hic est,5 the pure, cool Oxbridge, the fine flower of humane studies, the thing England has done supremely well.
After the great likeness, the small differences. I think (but this may be accidental and illusory) that the Oxford don, whether in fact married or single, lives more en garçon than the Cambridge. You can meet him for a long time in pubs and at High Tables before you are asked to his house. (I have known young foreigners at Oxford who were puzzled and hurt by this.) Oxford has no University Combination Room. Until quite lately—I think I may claim some tiny share in breaking down the tradition—it was unlikely you would meet your female colleagues anywhere except at the Board of the Faculty or at a full dress dinner party. In undergraduate life I think the Junior Common Room counts for more than the Junior Combination Room; but this may vary from college to college.
Of course, not all the similarities between the two universities are desirable ones. I left behind me two evils (or such I think them) at Oxford which I meet again here.
The first needs to be handled with some delicacy, perhaps with more delicacy than I possess, but it is too grave to be passed over in silence. At both places the majority of undergraduates seem to me to be very nice people; much nicer than the pre-1914 vintage as depicted by Sir Compton Mackenzie.6 But at both there is a minority of unhappy young men really very like the ‘malcontents’ who provide villains for Jacobean drama. They seem to have some grudge or grievance; tense, tight-lipped, hot-eyed, beatle-browed boys, with cheeks as drab, but not so smooth, as putty. They are rude, not with the forgivable gaucherie of inexperienced youth (I hate an oldster who is querulous about that; we have all been cubs in our time) but, as it seems, on principle; in the cause of ‘integrity’ or some other equally detestable virtue. They matter for two reasons. First, they raise a fear that there may be something wrong about our method of intake, or its quantity (academic overproduction is possibly a real danger) or the structure of the educational ladder—in itself an admirable thing. Secondly, I fear that if this type continues it will in the next thirty years prove an extremely disastrous element in our national life. These are future schoolmasters and journalists or, worse still, unemployables with degrees. They could do great harm.
The other evil (in my view) is the incubus of ‘Research’. The system was, I believe, first devised to attract the Americans and to emulate the scientists. But the wisest Americans are themselves already sick of it; as one of them said to me, ‘I guess we got to come to giving every citizen a Ph. D. shortly after birth, same as baptism and vaccination.’ And it is surely clear by now that the needs of the humanities are different from those of the sciences. In science, I gather, a young student fresh from his First in the Tripos can really share in the work of one of his seniors in a way that is useful to himself and even to the subject. But this is not true of the man who has just got his First in English or Modern Languages. Such a man, far from being able or anxious (he is by definition no fool) to add to the sum of human knowledge, wants to acquire a good deal more of the knowledge we already have. He has lately begun to discover how many more things he needs to know in order to follow up his budding interests; that he needs economics, or theology, or philosophy, or archaeology (and always a few more languages). To head him off from these studies, to pinfold him in some small inquiry whose chief claim often is that no one has ever made it before, is cruel and frustrating. It wastes such years as he will never have again; for an old proverb says that ‘All the speed is in the morning’. What keeps the system going is the fact that it becomes increasingly difficult to get an academic job without a ‘research degree’. Can the two ancient universities do anything by combining to break down this bad usage?
There are other things . . . but I call to mind Stevenson’s twelfth Fable. It ends, you remember, ‘They buried the stranger at the dusk.’
XVIII
IS HISTORY BUNK?
The historical impulse—curiosity about what men thought, did, and suffered in the past—though not universal, seems to be permanent. Different justifications have been found for the works which gratify it. A very simple one is that offered in Barbour’s Bruce;1 exciting stories are in any case ‘delitabill’ and if they happen to be true as well then we shall get a ‘doubill pleasance’. More often graver motives are put forward. History is defended as instructive or exemplary: either ethically (the lasting fame or infamy which historians confer upon the dead will teach us to mind our morals) or politically (by seeing how national disasters were brought on in the past we may learn how to avoid them in the future).
As the study of history develops and becomes more like a science these justifications are less confidently advanced. Modern historians are not so ready to classify kings as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The lessons to be learned by statesmen from past errors become less obvious the more we know. The uniqueness of every historical situation stands out more clearly. In the end most of those who care about history find it safer and franker to admit that they are seeking knowledge of the past (as other men seek knowledge of the nebulae) for its own sake; that they are gratifying a ‘liberal’ curiosity.
The conception of a ‘liberal’ curiosity and of the ‘liberal’ studies which exist to satisfy it is one we owe to Aristotle. ‘We call a man free whose life is lived for his own sake, not for that of others. In the same way philosophy is of all studies the only free one: because it alone exists for its own sake’ (Metaphysics 982b). Of course philosophy does not here mean, as now, the rump or residuum left by the specialisation of the various sciences. And perhaps Aristotle would not, in any case, have allowed the word to cover history (cf. Poetics 1451b). That hardly matters. In his conception of a study pursued not for some end beyond itself but for its own sake he has provided most of the activities we carry on at universities with their charter.
Of course this conception (Aristotle meant it only for freemen) has always been baffling and repellent to certain minds. There will always be people who think that any more astronomy than a ship’s officer needs for navigation is a waste of time. There will always be those who, on discovering that history cannot really be turned to much practical account, will pronounce history to be Bunk. Aristotle would have called this servile or banausic; we, more civilly, may christen it Fordism.
As the study of history progresses it is almost inevitable, and surely not unreasonable, that partial or departmental histories should arise. The whole past, even within a limited period, becomes too large. Thus we get histories of particular human activities—of law, of shipbuilding, of clothes, of cookery, architecture, or literature. Their justification is the same as that of history simpliciter (which, after all, usually meant in effect the history of war and politics). They exist to gratify a liberal curiosity. The knowledge of how men dressed or built or wrote in the past, and why, and why they liked doing it that way, and what it felt like to like that sort of thing, is being sought for its own sake.
Clearly a Fordist view might be taken of these partial histories. It might be maintained that the history of law was legitimate in so far as it yielded practical results: that it studied, or ought to study, ‘the valuable’ and therefore should notice bad laws and unjust modes of trial only because, and in so far as, those taught us to appreciate more fully the practise of the nineteenth century and therefore to resist more obstinately what seems likely to come upon us in the latter part of the twentieth. This of course is a worthy object. But the claim that legal history depends for its whole right to exist on the performance of such a corvée will be granted only by a thorough-going Fordist. We others feel that we should like to know and understand the legal behaviour and legal thought of our ancestors even if no practical gains follow from it.
The departmental history which seems most liable to such attack just at present is the history of literature. Mr Mason said recently in the Review, ‘It is the study of what is valuable; study of minor figures is only justified if it contributes to the understanding of what is meant by major’.2 Now of course, if we grant that the discipline of literary history is, or can be, or ought to be, merely ancillary to the art of literary criticism, we shall agree with Mr Mason. But why should we grant this?
Let us be quite clear what the question is. If a man says, ‘I have no interest in the history of literature simply as history’, one would have no controversy with him. One would reply, ‘Well, I dare say not; don’t let me detain you.’ If he says, ‘I think criticism twenty times more important than any knowledge of the past’, one would say, ‘No doubt that is quite a reasonable view.’ If he said, ‘Literary history is not criticism’, I should heartily agree. That indeed is my point. The study of the forms and styles and sentiments of past literature, the attempt to understand how and why they evolved as they did, and (if possible) by a sort of instructed empathy to re-live momentarily in ourselves the tastes for which they catered, seems to me as legitimate and liberal as any other discipline; even to be one without which our knowledge of man will be very defective. Of course it is not a department of criticism; it is a department of a department of history (Kulturgeschichte). As such it has its own standing. It is not to be judged by the use it may or may not happen to have for those whose interests are purely critical.
Of course I would grant (and so, I expect, would Mr Mason) that literary history and criticism can overlap. They usually do. Literary historians nearly always allow themselves some valuations, and literary critics nearly always commit themselves to some historical propositions. (To describe an element in Donne’s poetry as new commits you to the historical proposition that it is not to be found in previous poetry.) And I would agree (if that is part of what he means) that this overlap creates a danger of confusions. Literary (like constitutional) historians can be betrayed into thinking that when they have traced the evolution of a thing they have somehow proved its worth; literary critics may be unaware of the historical implications (often risky) which lurk in their evaluative criticism.
But if Mr Mason is denying literary history’s right to exist, if he is saying that no one must study the past of literature except as a means of criticism, I think his position is far from self-evident and ought to be supported. And I think he is denying that. For if one values literary history as history, it is of course very clear why we study bad work as well as good. To the literary historian a bad, though once popular, poem is a challenge; just as some apparently irrational institution is a challenge to the political historian. We want to know how such stuff came to be written and why it was applauded; we want to understand the whole ethos which made it attractive. We are, you see, interested in men. We do not demand that everyone should share our interests.
The whole question invites further discussion. But I think that discussion will have to begin further back. Aristotle’s (or Newman’s) whole conception of the liberal may have to be questioned. Fordism may admit of some brilliant defence. We may have to ask whether literary criticism is itself an end or a means and, if a means, to what. But till all this has been canvassed I was unwilling that the case for literary history should go by default. We cannot, pending a real discussion, let pass the assumption that this species of history, any more than others, is to be condemned unless it can deliver some sort of ‘goods’ for present use.
XIX
SEX IN LITERATURE
I am told that one of the causes which led to the abandonment of our older penal code was the fact that as juries grew more humane they simply refused to convict. The evidence showed beyond doubt that the famished girl in the dock had stolen a handkerchief. But they didn’t want her to be hanged for that, so they returned a verdict of Not Guilty.
That people were no longer hanged for trivial offences was obviously a change for the better. But patently false verdicts were not the best way of bringing that change about. It is a bad thing that the results of trials should depend on the personal moral philosophy of a particular jury rather than on what has been proved in court. For one thing, that procedure, though it may lead to mercy in one case, may have the opposite effect in another.
The moral seems to me to be clear. When the prevalent morality of a nation comes to differ unduly from that presupposed in its laws, the laws must sooner or later change and conform to it. And the sooner they do so the better. For till they do we inevitably have humbug, perjury, and confusion.
This applies equally whether prevalent morality is departing from that embodied in the laws for the better or for the worse. The law must rise to our standards when we improve and sink to them when we decay. It is a lesser evil that the laws should sink than that all judicial procedure should become a travesty.
If we ceased to disapprove of murder, we should, no doubt, be fools and villains. But it would be better to admit the fact and alter the law accordingly than to go on acquitting of murder those who had certainly committed it.
But this, I believe, is the actual situation as regards ‘obscene’ or ‘corrupting’ literature. The older law—for compromise has now begun—embodied a morality for which masturbation, perversion, fornication, and adultery were great evils. It therefore, not illogically, discountenanced the publication of books which seemed likely to encourage these modes of behaviour.
The morality of the modern intelligentsia—who supply ‘expert witnesses’—is different. If it were fully and frankly stated it would, I believe, run as follows: ‘We are not sure that these things are evils at all, and we are quite sure that they are not the sort of evils the law ought to be concerned with.’
My own view—just to get it out of the way—is that they are evils, but that the law should be concerned with none of them except adultery. Adultery is an affair for law because it offends the Hobbesian principle ‘that men perform their covenants’. The fact that this particular breach of covenant involves the sexual act is (in the logical sense) an accident.
But I am not here arguing my own view. What I want is a straight fight between the new morality and that of the law. Do not be alarmed, my fellow authors; your side will almost certainly win.
