An Experiment in Criticism

by C.S. Lewis

Especially poisonous is the kind of teaching which encourages them to approach every literary work with suspicion. It springs from a very reasonable motive. In a world full of sophistry and propaganda, we want to protect the rising generation from being deceived, to forearm them against the invitations to false sentiment and muddled thinking which printed words will so often offer them.

Unfortunately, the very same habit which makes them impervious to the bad writing may make them impervious also to the good.

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

A growing number of those who are in other respects literary do not read poetry.

To read the old poetry involved learning a slightly different language; to read the new involves the unmaking of your mind, the abandonment of all the logical and narrative connections which you use in reading prose or in conversation. You must achieve a trance-like condition in which images, associations, and sounds operate without these. Thus the common ground between poetry and any other use of words is reduced almost to zero. In that way poetry is now more quintessentially poetical than ever before; ‘purer’ in the negative sense. It not only does (like all good poetry) what prose can’t do: it deliberately refrains from doing anything that prose can do.

The more any instrument is refined and perfected for some particular function, the fewer those who have the skill, or the occasion, to handle it must of course become.

Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can do; but this turns out to be something which not many people want done. Nor, of course, could they receive it if they did. Modern poetry is too difficult for them. It is idle to complain; poetry so pure as this must be difficult. But neither must the poets complain if they are unread.

After enjoying what I made of it, why not go back to the text, this time looking up the hard words, puzzling out the allusions, and discovering that some metrical delights in my first experience were due to my fortunate mispronunciations, and see whether I can enjoy the poet’s poem, not necessarily instead of, but in addition to, my own one?

Admittedly, we can never quite get out of our own skins. Whatever we do, something of our own and of our age’s making will remain in our experience of all literature. Equally, I can never see anything exactly from the point of view even of those whom I know and love best. But I can make at least some progress towards it. I can eliminate at least the grosser illusions of perspective. Literature helps me to do it with live people, and live people help me to do it with literature.

It is a pity if a glazed picture is so placed that you see in it only your own reflection; it is not a pity when a mirror is so placed.

Normally we judge men’s literary taste by the things they read. The question was whether there might be some advantage in reversing the process and judging literature by the way men read it.

defining good literature as that which permits, invites, or even compels good reading; and bad, as that which does the same for bad reading.

the accepted valuation of literary works varies with every change of fashion, but the distinction between attentive and inattentive, obedient and wilful, disinterested and egoistic, modes of reading is permanent; if ever valid, valid everywhere and always.

make sure that his contempt had in it no admixture of merely social snobbery or intellectual priggery.

if I now visit it seldom, that is not because my taste has improved but because the province has changed, being now covered with new building estates, in a style I don’t care for. But in the good old days I noticed that whenever critics said anything about it, they betrayed great ignorance.

In that way, the judgement that someone is unliterary is like the judgement ‘This man is not in love’, whereas the judgement that my taste is bad is more like ‘This man is in love, but with a frightful woman’. And just as the mere fact that a man of sense and breeding loves a woman we dislike properly and inevitably makes us consider her again and look for, and sometimes find, something in her we had not noticed before, so, in my system, the very fact that people, or even any one person, can well and truly read, and love for a lifetime, a book we had thought bad, will raise the suspicion that it cannot really be as bad as we thought. Sometimes, to be sure, our friend’s mistress remains in our eyes so plain, stupid and disagreeable that we can attribute his love only to the irrational and mysterious behaviour of hormones; similarly, the book he likes may continue to seem so bad that we have to attribute his liking to some early association or other psychological accident. But we must, and should, remain uncertain. Always, there may be something in it that we can’t see. The prima facie probability that anything which has ever been truly read and obstinately loved by any reader has some virtue in it is overwhelming. To condemn such a book is therefore, on my system, a very serious matter. Our condemnation is never quite final.

The distinctions we draw between better and worse within the pale are not at all like that between ‘trash’ and ‘real’ literature. They all depend on precarious and reversible judgements.

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.

Where there is passionate and constant love of a book and rereading, then, however bad we think the book and however immature or uneducated we think the reader, it cannot.

You may ask whether we should take so much trouble with a work which is almost certainly bad on the bare hundredth chance that it may have some goodness in it. But there is no reason at all why we should, unless of course we are going to pass judgement on it.

Book club!

in order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault. In calling the book bad we are claiming not that it can elicit bad reading, but that it can’t elicit good. This negative proposition can never be certain. I may say ‘If I were to take pleasure in this book it could be only the pleasure of transitory thrills, or wishful reverie, or agreement with the author’s opinions’. But others may be able to do with it what I can’t.

‘Reading between the lines’ is inevitable, but we must practise it with great caution, or we may find mares’ nests.

‘to see the object as in itself it really is’.

If criticism in Arnold’s sense has been adequate both in quantity and quality, criticism in the sense of evaluation will hardly be needed.

‘The great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way and to let humanity decide.’

multiply, safeguard, or prolong those moments when a good reader is reading well a good book

far more to editors, textual critics, commentators, and lexicographers than to anyone else. Find out what the author actually wrote and what the hard words meant and what the allusions were to, and you have done far more for me than a hundred new interpretations or assessments could ever do.

the literary historians;

These have helped me, first of all, by telling me what works exist. But still more by putting them in their setting; thus showing me what demands they were meant to satisfy, what furniture they presupposed in the minds of their readers. They have headed me off from false approaches, taught me what to look for, enabled me in some degree to put myself into the frame of mind of those to whom they were addressed. This has happened because such historians on the whole have taken Ar...

various emotive critics who, up to a certain age, did me very good service by infecting me with their own enthusiasms and thus not only sending me but sending me wit...

we invariably judge a critic by the extent to which he illuminates reading we have already done? Brunetière’s aimer Montaigne, c’est aimer soi même seems to me as penetrating a remark as I have ever read. But how could I know it was penetrating unless I saw that Brunetière had laid his finger on an element in my enjoyment of Montaigne which I recognise as soon as it is mentioned but had not sufficiently attended to? Therefore my enjoyment of Montaigne comes first. Reading Brunetière does not help me to enjoy Montaigne; it is my reading of Montaigne that alone enables me to enjoy Brunetière.

Criticism normally casts a retrospective light on what we have already read. It may sometimes correct an over-emphasis or a neglect in our previous reading and thus improve a future rereading. But it does not often do so for a mature and thoroughgoing reader in respect of a work he has long known. If he is stupid enough to have misread it all these years, it is probable that he will go on misreading it. In my experience a good commentator or a good literary historian is more likely, without a word of praise or blame, to set us right. And so is an independent rereading in a happy hour. If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him.

We love to hear exactly how others enjoy what we enjoy ourselves.

especially enjoy hearing how a first-class mind responds to a very great work. That is why we read the great critics with interest (not often with any great measure of agreement).

To them criticism is a form of social and ethical hygiene.

To take a man up very sharp, to demand sternly that he shall explain himself, to dodge to and fro with your questions, to pounce on every apparent inconsistency, may be a good way of exposing a false witness or a malingerer. Unfortunately, it is also the way of making sure that if a shy or tongue-tied man has a true and difficult tale to tell you will never learn it. The armed and suspicious approach which may save you from being bamboozled by a bad author may also blind and deafen you to the shy and elusive merits—especially if they are unfashionable—of a good one.