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 Lewis’s Approvals

1: “Those who prefer the arts of peace to the arts of war” (it is not said in what circumstances) are such that “we may want to call them wise men”

We’re back with the Utopians. We’ve decided that just calling someone a coward, without pointing out something cowardly they have actually done, is pointless. King and Ketley go on: 

To call the Utopians cowards has told us nothing about them. The “proud northern race” may call them cowards because the Utopians prefer the arts of peace to the arts of war; when we know this, we may want to call them wise men. [Control of Language p65]

King and Ketley are not necessarily saying that peace is to be preferred to war even in the face of Genghis Kahn and Mr Hitler. They have specifically said that we can’t judge a man a coward until we know what he has done, and under what circumstances he has done it. They are quite clearly saying that the same person might be considered a coward or a peacemaker depending on the speaker’s point of view. It might be that the propagandist is calling the Utopians cowards because he saw their soldiers running away from a much weaker opponent; or because he saw them beating up small children and kicking puppy-dogs. But it might equally be that he is calling them cowards because they have sent a wise ambassador to broker an amicable compromise before sending in the army. It might be that they despise farmers and woodcutters on general principles. It might be that they have heard that some Utopians live long enough to die of old age. Without further information, we don’t know. On no possible view are King and Ketley arguing that peace is preferable to war under all circumstances. 

2: The pupil is expected “to believe in a democratic community life”.

CS Lewis frequently asked the question: is democratic behaviour the behaviour that democrats like or the behaviour that will preserve democracy? Screwtape distinguishes between the referential meaning of the word “democracy”—a pretty good system that some countries have adopted for selecting leaders—and the emotive (Screwtape says “invocatory”) use of the word—the false belief that everyone is as good as everyone else, particularly put forward by those who think themselves inferior. 

Lewis thought that democracy was a contingent good—a way of stopping a very bad person getting into power—as opposed to an absolute good in itself. He was a democrat because he thought that humans were so sinful that no individual one ought to be in charge; not because humans are so wonderful that they all deserve a share of running things. He himself may have hankered for a kind of prelapsarian aristocracy in the way Tolkien fantasised about a kind of pastoral anarchy. 

His accusation here, is, I think, that King and Ketley are elevating a local, contingent good into an absolute good. One of Lewis’ central ideas is that you can’t substitute secondary or partial goods for primary or total ones. It’s okay to like a drink, but if you like nothing apart from drink you’ll ruin your liver and also stop enjoying the taste of whisky. There is nothing wrong with preferring hosiery made of artificial fibres to the kind made of cotton; but there is a great deal wrong with desiring them more than you desire fellowship with Aslan. 

King and Ketley are inviting their students to think about how much propaganda is desirable in a democracy. 

To answer this we should ask ourselves other questions: if we believe in a democratic community life, and in freedom to choose for ourselves what is best for ourselves, when is it right for a writer to try to persuade us to believe in or disbelieve in, to like or dislike, what we cannot clearly understand? [p65]

There seems to be literally nothing to object to in this. Is emotional propaganda—which manipulates rather than persuades the listener—justifiable even if it promotes democratic community life? Which is a perfectly good question. 

3: “Contact with the ideas of other people is, as we know, healthy.”

We are back with the Proud Northern Tribe and the pesky Utopians. There is now going to be a referendum about whether or not the PNT should go to war. 

The Utopians, it is true, want peace. But, if we go to war, it will not be in any wanton spirit of self-aggrandisement. We shall be fighting a war of defence, to preserve our homes from the pernicious, if peaceful, penetration of alien ideas. We shall be fighting to prevent the destruction of our nation through the circulation of Utopian heresies. [p85]

King and Ketley suggest that students translate the passage into cold scientific prose, much as they did with Keats’s poem: when shorn of its emotive content, we can see the vacuity of the argument, and would likely reject it: 

If we go to war it will not be because we want to destroy another country, but because we want to keep out of this country the ideas of other peoples, ideas which may not agree with those held in this country.

This is very much what Dr Ransom does to Prof. Weston in Lewis’s science fiction story Out of the Silent Planet: render his propaganda into plain English to reveal that it is literal nonsense. (Lewis wished that Vicars had more practice translating erudite theological ideas into common speech: he regarded his own apologetic works primarily as translations.) 

King and Ketley go on: 

Understanding the real issue with the help of this scientific prose, the intelligent reader would probably decide that war would be absurd, because contact with the ideas of other people and other nations whether acceptable or not, is, as we know, healthy for the individual and the community.

“As we know”. Lewis is right that King and Ketley take for granted the idea that contact with other cultures is a Good Thing; and wanting to stop foreign ideas coming into your country is a Bad Thing. Not everyone would necessarily agree with this. “Multiculturalism is good” is a widely held point of view, but it is not strictly speaking a thing which can be known. We might think it a good thing that there are curry houses and pizza parlous in Leeds, but not such a good thing if a Western missionary started interfering with the culture of a previously undiscovered tribe in New Guinea.

I think Lewis may also be worried about the use of the word “healthy”. Talking to foreigners doesn’t literally improve your physical well-being, and society isn’t an organism and can’t be literally well or sick. And it is circular to say, even by analogy, that it is healthy to know about other ways of doing things, if your definition of health is “a state of affairs where you know about other ways of doing things”. There is some truth to the thought that King and Ketley have replaced “this is good” with “this is good for you”.

4: The reason for bathrooms ("that people are healthier and pleasanter to meet when they are clean") is "too obvious to need mentioning". 

King and Ketley raise the subject of bathrooms in a footnote. They are actually talking about what they call “scientific prose criticism”. They admit that it is hard to dispassionately review a play or a movie according to some objective criteria. You need to know quite a bit about movies and theatre to pull it off. But they think it is worth the effort. If two people have seen the same film and one says “it was simply marvellous,” and the other says “it was simply rotten” then there is nowhere else for the conversation to go. So it is better to be able to discuss the film, not in terms of your feelings, but in terms of “your two standards of good and bad and how they agree together”.

There follows a footnote: 

We feel we have a right to judge things and people “by results.” This judging by results is really scientific prose criticism, in which the reason for the judgment is omitted because it is too obvious to need mentioning. Thus we should judge an architect to be bad, if he omitted to build a bathroom in a new house. Our reason for making this judgment would be that, because people are healthier and pleasanter to meet when they are clean rather than dirty, bathrooms should always be built into new houses. But this reason is too obvious to need mentioning, and so it is omitted. [p142]

Which is, I concede, a really weird analogy. I suppose the point is that a critic doesn’t need to say “I prefer plays where the main actor has learned his lines and where the scenery doesn’t collapse half way through”. He could simply say that the unrehearsed theatrical disaster is bad and still be writing “scientific” criticism. By the same token, if an architect forgot that a house needs to have a toilet, you wouldn’t pay any attention to any other merits his building might have, and would simply call him a bad architect. But it is certainly an odd example for them to have picked. 

In 1943, many people in England still used outside loos and washed in metal baths in front of the kitchen fireplace. And I imagine that this was even more commonplace in Australia and in Ireland when Lewis was growing up. The British government was offering home improvement subsidies to people without bathrooms as late as the 1970s; and comedians of the era were still making jokes about the outside lavatories of their childhood. (And also about the use of repurposed newspapers for toilet paper.) And what does and doesn’t count as “clean” varies across different times and different places: in 21st century England, most people take a shower at least once a day, where Queen Elizabeth I famously took a bath once a month whether she needed it or not. So I suppose that Lewis’s point is that King and Ketley are treating a fairly modern and fairly luxurious innovation as a universal fact; and regarding present-day norms about sweaty smells as a self-evident principle. Perhaps he is also concerned that King and Ketley use “healthy” to mean both “what you are if you learn about other people’s ideas” and “what you are if you take a daily bath”. Cleanliness is a substitute for godliness.

*

In medieval times, there would have been no contradiction in calling someone “a good man and a villain” or “a nice chap and a bastard”: you’d simply have been saying that the one was a morally upright fellow who happened to live in a village, and the other was a likeable chap who’s parents happened not to be married. We could say that words like “villain” and “bastard” used to have referential meaning but are now used primarily for their emotive sense; we might say that they were at one time denotive and are now primarily connotative. CS Lewis, in an essay entitled the Death of Words, says that they are terms of description which have become terms of abuse. They are “words which once had a definable sense and are now mere noises of approval”. He is concerned that the word “Christian” is increasingly used in what he calls a “eulogistic” sense—as a compliment. He wants to use “Christian” to mean “someone who assents to a specific, knowable set of doctrinal beliefs”: other people want to use it to mean “someone who lives up to a particular moral precepts”. “That’s a Christian act” or “He is a good Christian” could end up only meaning that the person or the act was good, or that the speaker approves of them. By the end of the essay, Lewis seems to have gone full Sapir-Whorf. If the word Christian loses its meaning, the concept will be in danger of being “blotted from the human mind….Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.”  

To prove his point, he gives an example of another word which used to have a clear referential meaning and is now only a useless dylogism. 

He makes the same point in the introduction to the 1950 edition of Mere Christianity (which brought together a series of previously published religious booklets, themselves based on radio lectures). He says that some people have complained about his proscriptive use of the word “Christian” on the radio show. He says that people have asked him "May not many a man who cannot believe these doctrines be far more truly a Christian, far closer to the spirit of Christ, than some who do?" He agrees that this is so, but says that using “Christian” to mean “someone close to the spirit of Jesus” renders a perfectly good word hors de combat. 

“In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good man. But that way of using the word will be no enrichment of the language, for we already have the word good. Meanwhile, the word Christian will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it might have served.” [Mere Christianity, preface.]

And he gives an example of another word which used to have a specific denotative meaning and is now simply a term of approval. 

He makes the same point yet again in his much more academic Studies in Words. Words, he says, can acquire a sort of “halo”: they start out referring to something specific and identifiable; they start to be used mainly to express approval (or disapproval) but with the original meaning still implicit. But eventually, only the emotional meaning is left. “The whole word is haloed, and finally there is nothing but halo. The word is then, for all accurate uses, dead.” [p282]

And he gives an example of a word that has been killed off in this way. It’s the same example he gave in the Verbicide essay, and again in Mere Christianity. 

That word is, of course, “gentleman”. 

In its original sense, it referred to someone who was gentil; that is, noble. A gentleman had land and a coat of arms and various other feudal technicalities. (I can’t be the only person who used to think that “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” was about gender: it’s actually about class. In the garden of Eden, everyone worked for a living and there were no nobles.) But it gradually came to mean “a person who behaves in the way in which a gentleman is supposed to behave” and eventually “any person we approve of”:

They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man "a gentleman" in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is "a gentleman" becomes simply a way of insulting him.

But isn’t this precisely the point that King and Ketley made when they said that  “the reference of the word gentleman is very vague”?  And didn’t Lewis blame them for having a narrow, provincial view of morality? When Lewis says that “gentleman” is now a useless word, is he debunking the whole idea of honesty and good manners and refraining from playing the banjo? Or is he simply making a point about language? 

The essay on verbicide, the introduction to Mere Christianity, and Studies in Words are all published after the Abolition of Man: after Lewis has studied the Control of Language. It is tempting to consider the possibility that the book unconsciously influenced his thinking. 

When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object. (A "nice" meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) 

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But how widespread are these civilisation-threatening theories? To find out, Lewis turns his attention to a second text book, which he refers to as Orbilius. Is Orbilius tainted with the same ideological impurities as King and Ketley?

Oddly enough, he is. Like King and Ketley, he invents a terrible piece of writing, this time on the subject of horses, and tries to show what is so terrible about it. And like King and Ketley, his main complaint (according to Lewis) is that it says things which aren’t factually true. From this, asserts Lewis, his students will infer that all figurative, anthropomorphic writing—indeed any expression of affection towards animals—is unreasonable. This will colour, and indeed blight, the rest of their lives.

Orbilius is actually one EG Biaginni, and the book is imaginatively entitled The Reading and Writing of English. Biaginni is another New Critic and the book comes with an introduction by FR Leavis. 

Here is the passage (again, Lewis does not cite it in full):

The horse is a noble animal, and not the least of man’s dumb friends. Without such a willing servant as the horse, civilisation would not have reached its present stage. The early pioneers of this country can bear witness to what has been said. When they first came here, the prospect was a heart-breaking one indeed. There were no roads, in many places the country was rough and well timbered, developmental material was hard to procure, and above all bush devils, tractors, motor-cars and other mechanical inventions had not yet come to the help of man. In these circumstances the horse was invaluable, and without him Australia would certainly not have become the country it is…  [The Reading and Writing of English, page 5]

It goes on to narrate a preposterous story about a horse which smelled burning in a bone-dry farm in summer, broke out of its paddock, trotted to the verandah, and whinnied until the farmer awoke.

Lewis’s complaint is familiar. Yes, certainly, this passage is sentimental and anthropomorphic: but so are many good pieces of writing about animals. Unless this is pointed out, the reader will assume that a rejection of this piece of writing amounts to a rejection of the whole idea of horses.

He contents himself with explaining that horses are not, secundum litteram, interested in colonial expansion. This piece of information is really all that his pupils get from him. Why the composition before them is bad, when others that lie open to the same charge are good, they do not hear…[Abolition of Man, page 6]

But this is disingenuous: the claim that “this is all his pupils get from him” downright dishonest. Lewis is cherry-picking quotes to such an extent that I found myself wondering if he had read the book before opening fire? 

It is technically true that Biaginni doesn’t put this silly passage alongside a piece of great literature. What he does do is put it alongside a mildly amusing piece of writing: a modest write-up of a horse-riding holiday in the New Forest. The writer and his friend have hired a horse to pull a caravan and the beast won’t go at more than three miles an hour. They decide it must be sick, but when they unharness it, it gallops off in the direction of its owner. 

“By Jove” said my friend “That horse knows more about men than we know about horses”. I could not but agree and have since felt that had that horse the gift of speech his observations on his temporary masters would be exceedingly entertaining. [page 5]

Biaginni says that this piece came from his own diary: and he admits that he wrote the other one himself, making it as bad as he possibly could, to see if students could spot the difference. His comparison of the two texts runs to seven or eight pages, and records what his students said about them:

Passage A (The caravan holiday) 

Pros

• Amusing

• Written from life 

• Says something specific about horses 

• Natural and unaffected style

Cons

• Offhand, colloquial style

• Uses slang

• Makes punctuation errors

• Starts sentences with And

Passage B (“willing servants of colonists”) 

Pros

• Serious subject, dignified style 

• Grammatically correct and well punctuated

• Patriotic and interested in history

Cons

• Stimulates stock feelings

• Says nothing specific about horses

• Self-conscious, superior tone

Biaginni says that it is more important for a passage to be engaging, funny and truthful than for it to be technically correct: complaints about punctuation are fault-finding rather than criticism, a bad habit picked up in school. He says that the first passage is the record of a real event and “does by implication tell us something true about the nature of the horse” and that the writer “for good or ill is himself and describes horses as they are”. On the other hand, the story of the horse that consciously woke up its owner during a fire is obviously “twaddle” and has nothing to do with actual equine behaviour. 

He doesn’t directly introduce the concept of emotive and referential meaning that is so central to the Control of Language: but he talks at some length about the difference between what is said and how it is said. He asks the reader to think about the difference between saying “My father has died” (factual) “My family has suffered a bereavement” (factual, with an appeal for sympathy) and “My father has kicked the bucket” (factual, with an implication of callousness). His complaint about the bad passage is that terms like “noble animal” and “dumb friends” produce feelings without actually saying anything.

(The writer) knows from experience, perhaps, as a skilful advertisement writer does, that these were expressions which would evoke a feeling of approval in uncritical people; they have now been doing this for two generations or more [page 12]

He says that this sort of writing treats the reader like a typewriter—hitting a particular key to get a particular response. This is the same criticism which King and Ketley levelled at the travel agent. The target is not emotion, but stock emotional responses. 

And Lewis is right. Biaginni does mention in passing that the joke passage is factually inaccurate. But Lewis’s claim—that this is all he has to say—is simply untrue. What Biaginni actually writes is: 

The horse you will notice, is spoken of as if he had been a conscious and willing agent in the development of a new country. Is this not completely ridiculous? The normal horse, like the normal man, is mostly concerned with a decently comfortable life and has not a passion for well-doing. Since he is referred to as a dumb animal we must not suppose that he could speak, but if he could talk to himself, it seems far more likely that he would say “I have two greenhorns driving me today so I will take things easy” than he would say “here is a country which wants developing so I will cooperate willingly with my master in an attempt to open it up to civilisation.” [page 10]

Anthropomorphism, then, is a literary device. It can be used well or badly. In the first passage it is apt; the second passage it is not. CS Lewis once complained (not entirely seriously) that he couldn’t see how TS Eliot could possibly think that any evening had ever resembled “a patient etherised upon a table”. He was not, I think, debunking the idea of surgery, or anaesthetic, or evening. 

In a footnote, Lewis concedes that Biaginni, unlike King and Ketley, does put the bad piece of animal-writing alongside a supposedly good piece. The fact that it is a footnote makes me suspicious: had someone who heard the original lectures pointed out that Lewis was taking Biaginni out of context? But Lewis doubles down: he says that Biaginni thinks that the diary entry is better than the “colonial expansion” essay because it is “factually accurate” and for no other reason—which is not the case. 

In his second chapter, Biaginni introduces a third piece of horse-writing. I don’t know if it counts as great literature, but the Rev Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborn is sufficiently well-regarded that Penguin Classics have kept it in print down to the present day. He points to an amusing anecdote about a farmer who owned only one horse and one hen: the two animals appeared to form a friendship. 

The passage contains what seem to be well-observed details:

The fowl would approach the quadruped with notes of complacency, rubbing herself gently against his legs: while the horse would look down with satisfaction, and move with the greatest caution and circumspection, lest he should trample on his diminutive companion. [quoted by Biaginni, page 18-19]

Rev. White says that “an apparent regard seemed to develop between these two sequestered individuals”. Biaginni notes that although the animals are certainly individuals and arguably sequestered, “sequestered individual” has a witty, ironic tinge in this context: we’d normally use the term to describe nuns, or possibly hospital patients. He also points out that Rev. White is conscious of using simile—the hen and the horse have an apparent regard for each other and “seem to console the vacant hours of each other”.

Biaginni’s criteria for the legitimate use of anthropomorphic language is in fact perfectly clear. It needs to be concrete; it needs to be apt; it needs to be specific; it needs to imagine a human motivation for something which real animals actually do; and it needs to be aware that it is writing as if animals were human or imagining what they would say if they could talk. 

We noted in our last chapter that the Tay Bridge Disaster is a very bad poem—on the assumption that McGonogal intended it to be heroic and tragic. If he meant it to be funny, it’s a very good poem indeed. By the same argument it would be very silly to tell a story about an intelligent horse who rescues its owner from a fire—if what you were trying to write was a serious, realistic essay about horses. If you were writing a fairy tale, it would be a perfectly sensible thing to do. No-one complains that cats don’t really request footwear or that swallows can’t really communicate with statues. So is Lewis’s point simply that The Story of the Australian Convict and his Loyal Horse” could have been a perfectly good starting point for Walt Disney; or that Aesop could have made something worthwhile of How the Clever Horse Saved the Foolish Farmer? Is his point that Biaginni’s’ readers might conceivably run away with the impression that far-fetched animal tales are always illegitimate, when in fact they are only illegitimate in certain contexts?

Lewis, in fact, thought there were some quite proscriptive rules about how animals could be treated in literature. It was okay for rabbits to wear tam o’shanters and hedgehogs to do laundry; and it was okay to envisage imaginary worlds where mice carried swords: what you were not allowed to do was have real-world animals in the wrong relationships to each other. When a schoolgirl sent him a fable about woodland animals she had written, he protested that “real small animals would not be friends with an owl, nor would it know more astronomy than they”. Which sounds a lot like a complaint that a story about some field mice asking the wise old owl why the sun had suddenly gone dark was not true secundum litteram.

Many people feel close to domestic animals, and they often pretend that they have more human characteristics than they literally do. Could Lewis be saying that “animals and humans are friends” is a rock-bottom fact about the universe, in the same way that it is irreducibly true that waterfalls are sublime? So “horses were the willing servants of the first colonists” and “By Jove, these beasts seem to know a thing or two!” are two expressions of a single truth? Is the claim that literature always and only expresses fundamental intuitions: “Sex is nice”, “It’s horrid growing old”, “I love Mummy”, “Isn’t God brilliant!”? Talking about those intuitions is outside the critic’s remit. The only difference—the only difference that critics qua critics should be talking about—is the purely formal one. 

And 

And 

are three expressions of the same intuition: that it is awfully sad when someone dies. The business of the critic is to demonstrate that Shelly and Shakespeare handle metre and diction better than the pay-per-word newspaper obituary. To talk about anything but meter and diction would be to deny the basic truth that we feel sad when we suffer a bereavement. (Or indeed, when someone we like kicks the bucket.)

I think we can agree that this position would be absurd.

But that leaves me with the uncomfortable alternative thought that Lewis was congenitally unable to be fair to any text tainted with the stench of Leavisism. He disagrees with the principle of “close reading” so vehemently that he starts to see things which just aren’t there. 

One final point.

Seventy Five Prose Pieces by Robert C Rathburn is precisely what it sounds like: yet another collection of texts for students to compare and contrast. Rathburn’s first section is called Discrimination. His first excerpt is Thompson’s commentary on the terrible cruise liner advert. His second is Biaginni’s commentary on the two horse-pieces. 

Anyone who has read Abolition of Man will find it disconcerting to discover these two texts side by side. My first thought was that CS Lewis must have known the anthology but not the sources; but Rathburn was not published until 1960 and I can find no evidence of an earlier edition. I suppose it is possible that Rathburn knew Lewis and wanted to denounce him as an anti-Leavis heretic, but it would be a strange procedure: to critique Lewis, as it were, at arm’s length. I think it has to be written off as a coincidence. 

Rathburn sums up the two passages as follows: 

Biaginni and Thompson stress the desirability of having something to say and saying it simply and unaffectedly. [page 1]

Which rather reminds one of CS Lewis’s own advice to aspiring writers:

The way for a person to develop a style is to know exactly what he wants to say, and to be sure he is saying exactly that.

Well, quite. 

This is the first section of an ongoing critique of C.S Lewis's book The Abolition of Man. (I think that my essays should make sense if you aren't familiar with that tome.) This first section (which runs to six chapters) has already been published in full on my Patreon page, and the second section is being serialised there at present. 

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[2] The Doctor knows about Christmas and positively wants to celebrate it, but has never heard of New Year or cricket. Discuss. 

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