On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

by C.S. Lewis

‘The trouble with these boys’, said a grim old classical scholar looking up from some milk-and-watery entrance papers which he had been marking: ‘the trouble with these boys is that the masters have been talking to them about the Parthenon when they should have been talking to them about the Optative.’ We all knew what he meant. We had read work like that ourselves. Ever since then I have tended to use the Parthenon and the Optative as the symbols of two types of education. The one begins with hard, dry things like grammar, and dates, and prosody; and it has at least the chance of ending in a real appreciation which is equally hard and firm though not equally dry. The other begins in ‘Appreciation’ and ends in gush. When the first fails it has, at the very least, taught the boy what knowledge is like. He may decide that he doesn’t care for knowledge; but he knows he doesn’t care for it, and he knows he hasn’t got it. But the other kind fails most disastrously when it most succeeds. It teaches a man to feel vaguely cultured while he remains in fact a dunce. It makes him think he is enjoying poems he can’t construe. It qualifies him to review books he does not understand, and to be intellectual without intellect. It plays havoc with the very distinction between truth and error.