An Experiment in Criticism

by C.S. Lewis

What is more surprising and disquieting is the fact that those who might be expected ex officio to have a profound and permanent appreciation of literature may in reality have nothing of the sort.

The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive.

Every art is itself and not some other art. Every general principle we reach must, therefore, have a peculiar mode of application to each of the arts.

A true lover of literature should be in one way like an honest examiner, who is prepared to give the highest marks to the telling, felicitous and well-documented exposition of views he dissents from or even abominates.

We must risk being taken in, if we are to get anything. The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good;

The real way of mending a man’s taste is not to denigrate his present favourites but to teach him how to enjoy something better.

what damns a book is not the existence of bad readings but the absence of good ones.

‘The great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way and to let humanity decide.’4 We are to show others the work they claim to admire or despise as it really is; to describe, almost to define, its character, and then leave them to their own (now better informed) reactions.

If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him.

This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature considered as Logos; it admits us to experiences other than our own. They are not, any more than our personal experiences, all equally worth having. Some, as we say, ‘interest’ us more than others.