C. S. Lewis As a Critic of Romanticism Teresa Bela

C. S. LEWIS AS A CRITIC OF ROMANTICISM

TERESA BELA Jagiellonian University, Kraków

C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), a famous Oxford tutor and lecturer, and later Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, made his name in three main fields: as a literary historian and critic, as a Christian apologist and moralist, and as a writer of fiction, both for children and adult readers. As the information from the annual bibliography of the Modern Language Association indicates, the number of articles and books on C. S. Lewis had been steadily growing since the late sixties, and in 1998, the year of the cele- brations of the centenary of his birth, it reached its apogee. Diana Pavlac Glyer’s selected bibliography lists over 100 modern scholarly book publications on the author of Narnia stories (Glyer 1998:283-90). Richard Attenborough’s film Shadowlands (1993), which dealt with Lewis’s love for Joe Gresham and his suffering after her death, was an important sign of the ever-present interest in his life and work. The earlier instances of such consid- erable attention paid to the author of The Screwtape Letters and stories from Narnia are seen in the founding of several C.S.Lewis Societies in the United States and Canada, whose aim was to increase the knowledge and understanding of Lewis’s works and promote a further interest in his life and character. A renewed interest in J. R. R. Tolkien, due to the enthusiastic reception of the film The Lord of the Rings, has also helped to remind the reading public and the viewers of the strong bond of friendship that joined the author of Silmarillion and C. S. Lewis. The interest in C. S. Lewis the critic is much less pronounced than in Lewis the man or Lewis the author of children’s fiction or of Christian apolo- getics. Among the books dealing with his contribution to the literary history and criticism, most attention has been paid to his role as a medievalist and a critic of Renaissance Literature (his most important and lasting contribution to the research in the field of Older English Literature came with The Allegory of Love, A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, The Discarded Image, The Oxford History of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, and many essays). Lewis’s attitude to Romanticism is one of the aspects of Lewis’s criticism that has been dealt with only marginally, in critics’ passing remarks. Therefore, it is the aim of the present paper to provide a more comprehensive description of Lewis’s views on Romantic literature and Romanticism as a B.A.S. vol. XI, 2005 178 movement in European culture and to offer a reflection on the importance of these views for Lewis’s concept of modernity. As can easily be observed, the title: “C. S. Lewis as a Critic of Romanticism” is significantly ambiguous: it may denote either Lewis’s contribution to the criticism of Romantic literature or his critical attitude towards Romanticism. In its first meaning, the title may sound like a provocation to those familiar with Lewis’s critical work. It is generally known among Lewis scholars that he wrote only three articles dealing with Romantic literature: “Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot” (1939), “A Note on Jane Austen” (1954) and “Sir Walter Scott” (1956). In all the three essays the Romantic authors, even Percy Bysshe Shelley, are praised for the virtues that are not obviously ‘romantic’. Thus Jane Austen is described as a novelist who in her subject matter and style should be seen not as a romantic author but as “the daughter of Dr Johnson” (Lewis 1969:186). Shelley is found to be a more classical poet than Dryden and Scott, and although praised in the essay as someone who first taught his readers the sense of a historical period, he is claimed by Lewis to have more in common with the values of the previous age (i.e. the Enlightenment) than with the Romantics. There is a similar dimension to Lewis’s appreciation of Scott’s novels: they are not perceived as romantic texts, but as the works which allow the reader to “breathe the air of sense” (Lewis 1969: 218). The conclusion that can be drawn from such a presenta- tion of these authors confirms the suspicion, already suggested by Lewis’s lim- ited interest in Romantic literature, that he was rather distrustful of the mer- its of the Romantic Movement. However, unlike in the case of his openly pronounced partiality for medieval literature and culture, Lewis’s attitude towards Romanticism is not clearly described, but has to be deduced from a number of statements scat- tered throughout his work as literary historian, as writer of intellectual history and as moralist and Christian apologist. Since the scope of the present paper does not allow any extensive survey of the subject, only two texts are proposed here as material for a scrutiny: Lewis’s Preface to the revised edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism (1943), and his lecture “De Descriptione Temporum”, published separately by Cambridge University Press in 1955 and then included in his Selected Literary Essays (1969). Both texts are, in my opinion, the most repre- sentative statements of C. S. Lewis’s position with reference to Romanticism. As is generally known, the term ‘romantic’ has come to denote so many qualities that it is difficult to come up with one definition of the concept. This has led Arthur Lovejoy to a contention that it is proper to speak of ‘romanticism’ only in the plural, which has been demonstrated in his essay “On 179 VOLATILE ROMANTICS

Discrimination of Romanticisms” (1923). It is not known whether Lewis shared Lovejoy’s skepticism, but he certainly thought the term ambiguous enough to require a new extended explanation. In his Preface to The Pilgrim’s Regress (1943) he defines the term ‘romantic’ in his own way introducing a sevenfold division of the meaning of this word in the literary context. He thinks that ‘romantic’ as a term covers the following qualities and/or literary and cultural phenomena: 1. Stories about dangerous adventure, like those of Alexander Dumas. 2. The marvellous (but not a part of believed religion); hence such characters as magicians, ghosts, fairies, and such authors as Malory, Boiardo, Ariosto, Spenser, Tasso, Shelley, Coleridge and Morris deserve to be called ‘romantic’. 3. Literary works with ‘Titanic’ characters, extreme emotions and idealis- tic codes of honour; another term that Lewis thinks can be used here is ‘Romanesque’. In this meaning such figures as Sidney, Corneille, Michelangelo, and such works as Dryden’s dramas (i.e. his heroic plays) are romantic, too. 4. Indulgence in the abnormal, in the macabre and in torture (this kind of theme is understood as ‘romantic’ by such scholars as Mario Praz and M. D. de Rougemont); therefore, such authors as Poe or Baudelaire are also classed as romantic. 5. Qualities such as egotism and subjectivism are characteristically romantic when they appear as features of the main characters in literary works: therefore Byron and D. H. Lawrence are both ‘romantic’ authors. 6. Every revolt against existing civilization or conventions is considered romantic, therefore such artists as Epstein, Lawrence and Wagner are romantic from this point of view as well. 7. Sensitivity to natural objects, when it is solemn and enthusiastic; in this respect Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, de Vigny, de Musset, Goethe are all perceived by Lewis as romantic. (cf. Lweis 1943:viii) Lewis makes it clear in many places in his work that not all the charac- teristics from such a wide range of ‘romantic’ qualities appealed to him to the same degree. What is more, he was openly hostile to some of them since they contradicted his opinions about the value of art and life in general. Thus, it has been known from his autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955) and from other sources (e.g. his essay ‘On Stories’) that he always had a special liking for the qualities covered by the first and second definitions; he con- B.A.S. vol. XI, 2005 180 firms this in the Preface to The Pilgrim’s Regress and remarks that he came to love the ‘Romanesque’ when he became an adult. In the Preface he mentions that he always detested the fourth and the fifth kind of ‘romantic’ qualities in literature. Indulgence in the abnormal and in the macabre, often found in the literature of the Romantic period, was for him a symptom of ‘bad taste’. It also suggested to him a dangerous morbidity, opposed in every way to ‘the mental health’ which he thought good ‘romantic’ poetry, such as that of Edmund Spenser, was able to offer to the reader. Neither did he appreciate the cult of egotism and subjectivism which he found in the literature of the Romantic period often regarded as typical (e.g. Byron’s poetry). And he had no sympathy with the idea of romanticism as a revolt against existing civilizations and conventions. He considered it as destructive and disintegrating and, in the long run, dangerous to the values of European culture. He accepted, with reservations, the romantic sensitivity to natural objects if this did not turn to a clear deification of nature, i.e. pantheism. The conclusion that can be drawn from Lewis’s own classification and definition presents him as a critic and writer who did not share most of the beliefs and convictions of the period called Romanticism. The romantic qualities he liked were found, first of all, in the literature and art of the Middle Ages and in the greater part of the work of the Renaissance. It is significant that when these qualities appeared in the works of ‘true’ romantics (such as e.g. Shelley or Coleridge) or post-romantics (e.g. William Morris) they were most often referred to as ‘medieval’ or ‘neo-medieval’. In the Preface, Lewis himself does not stress the fact that one of the romantic qualities he mentions (the one listed under seven) is related to the experience that played a very important role in his life and his work. This was the experience of longing (‘Joy’ or ‘Sehnsucht’), the descriptions of which Lewis gave in his autobiographical works — The Pilgrim’s Regress and Surprised by Joy. In The Pilgrim’s Regress (which, unlike Surprised by Joy, is not written in the first person) the narrator refers to these experiences as the boyhood sense of the numinous: All unconscious with this teaching are the fits of strange Desire, which haunt him from his earliest years, for something which cannot be named; something which he can describe only as “Not this”, “Far farther”, or “Yonder” (Lewis 1943:11). Critics have noticed that Lewis’ Joy was related to Goethe’s ‘Blissful longing’, to Matthew Arnold’s ‘wistful, soft, tearful longing’ and to the state of mind which had been a recurrent theme in the literature of the 19th and 20th century, found, for instance, in Blake, Wordsworth, Thomas Wolfe, Dreiser, 181 VOLATILE ROMANTICS

O’Neill et al. (White 1970: 109). Apart from Surprised by Joy and The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis dealt with the theme of Joy in his poetry, science fiction, children’s tales and letters. In Lewis’s case this experience of Joy assumed a religious colouring; it was a longing for the transcendent and numinous, and after his conversion — of which he speaks in his autobiography — it gave a unity and significance to his life. It is also on the strength of this concept of ‘Spiritual Longing’ that Lewis is perceived as ‘a bookish dreamer’ (Adey 1998:23) and neo-romantic in the context of recent theology and aes- thetics (Carnell 1974:148) The other text that is an important source of information about Lewis’s attitude to Romanticism, is a lecture which he read at the inauguration of the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalen College, Cambridge, in 1955. This address, entitled “De Descriptione Temporum”, holds a significant place in Lewis’s work as critic and literary historian. The lecture does not deal directly with Romanticism, in fact it does not even men- tion this term, but it reveals, better than anything else that he wrote, his approach to the Romantic Period. The Latin title, borrowed from Isidorus, the encyclopedist of the 4th century, suggests that the aim of the address is to describe the times, present and past, from the point of view of their importance for a scholar dealing with European (Western) culture, of which English literature formed a significant part. Lewis alludes here to a number of debates among historians and literary historians that had been carried out throughout several decades in the twentieth century and referred to such problems as the periodization of European literary history, division of the past into ancient and modern times, the crisis of humanism, acutely felt after World War I, and the identity of European civilization. Most of these issues were also connect- ed with the controversy concerning the so called “problem of the Renaissance” (Ferguson 1948: 292), which divided Renaissance and medieval scholars in the first half of the 20th century. Was the Renaissance the first ‘modern’ period in the history of Western culture? Did it really constitute a decisive break with the medieval past? What were its constituent characteris- tics ? When exactly can it be said to have begun? Lewis himself was one of those scholars who passionately argued for the Renaissance as a continuation of the Middle Ages, particularly in English literary history. His famous statement, which survives in an anecdote, that “the Renaissance never happened in England, and if it did, it had no importance” (Gibb 1965: 61), sums up his critical position towards a widely spread view of the Renaissance, inherited from Jacob Burckhardt, as the first secular age that initiated the era of modernity. The chair at Cambridge, created specially B.A.S. vol. XI, 2005 182 for Lewis, had in its title both Medieval and Renaissance literature, in recog- nition of his contribution to the bridging of the gap between the two periods. In “De Descriptione Temporum”, Lewis first considers a few traditional divisions, or ‘frontiers’, between the epochs in European history, which — it could be argued — provided radical changes that led eventually to the modern age. In this context he mentions three possible caesuras which can be found the 4th century, the early 12th century and at the end of the 17th century. The first caesura took place between Antiquity and the Dark Ages. It was the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, the barbarian invasions and the acceptance of Christianity in Europe. The second division occurred between the Dark and the Middle Ages and was marked by such important phenomena as the recovery of Aristotle’s work, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and a great development of sophisticated poetry expressing a new romantic sentiment (courtly love). The third ‘frontier’ can be found at the beginning of the Enlightenment and signified the time of the general acceptance of Copernicanism, the dominance of Descartes and the intensive development of science. Lewis agrees that the changes that marked these caesuras may seem radical in the context of the past, but nevertheless he rejects all of them as insignificant from the modern point of view. He perceives another caesura, which he calls “the greatest of all divisions in the history of the West”, at the beginning of the Romantic period, the time of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, and announces its appearance in a dramatic way: “But somewhere between us and the Waverley Novels, somewhere between us and Persuasion the chasm runs” (Lewis 1969:7). Lewis puts forward four claims for this division of periods, for placing the Great Divide at the time of Romanticism. His claims are grounded in four fields: political order, the arts, religion and the technological system. In political order, he stresses the rise of a new, modern style of government, consist- ing in the change from ‘rulers’ to ‘political leaders’, which for us signifies a development of more democratic systems. In the arts, he points out to works “shatteringly and bewilderingly new” in visual arts, such as that of the Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists. He is, however, most emphatic about the “unprecedented novelty of modern poetry — which is new in a new way, almost a new dimension” (Lewis 1969:9), as the novelty cannot be compre- hended even by those who should be ‘in the know’, i.e. the literary critics. To illustrate his point he recalls a recent symposium on T. S. Eliot’s poem “Cooking Egg”: Here we find seven adults (two of them Cambridge men) whose lives have been specially devoted to the study of poetry discussing a very short poem which 183 VOLATILE ROMANTICS

has been before the world for thirty-odd years; and there is not the slightest agreement among them as to what, in any sense of the word, it means. (Lewis 1969:9) He protests that he is not concerned to say whether this state of affairs is a good or a bad thing: I merely assert that this is a new thing. In the whole history of the West, from Homer — I might almost say from the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ — there has been no bend or break in the development of poetry comparable to this. (Lewis 1969:9) The problem that Lewis signals here, without elaborating his point, does not concern the form of modern poetry, but its meaning, or rather the fact that the plurality of possible meanings and relativity of values has replaced the authorial intentions and objective truth of older poetic texts. In his Christian apologetic writings, e.g. in his essay “Modern Man and His Categories of Thought”, he refers to this problem as a typical modern phenomenon, related to the cult of subjectivity and resulting in ‘a denial of the validity of thought’ (Lewis 2000:619) Lewis’s third claim for the Great Divide between the Old Western culture and the culture of modernity concerns the great religious change, which he calls ‘un-christening’. He points out that in modern times religious belief is no longer any kind of norm and modern post-Christians are, in his opinion, cut off from both the Christian tradition and the Pagan past. In spite of his initial declarations of neutrality, Lewis reveals here a deep pessimism about the future of Christianity, also expressed on earlier occasions, for instance in his lecture “The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version” delivered before the University of London in 1950, in which he called the Bible “a dethroned king” (Lewis 1969:144). Lewis’s fourth claim is, as he says, his ‘trump card’, which consists in what he calls ‘the psychological effect of the birth of machines, or the Industrial Revolution.’ He thinks that this imposed on the human mind a new archetypal image — the image of new machines superseding the old ones. He considers this change of mental climate as absolutely revolutionary in Western culture: Our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life, would most shock and bewilder them [our ancestors] if they could visit our world (Lewis 1969:11) B.A.S. vol. XI, 2005 184

At the end of the essay Lewis asserts his position as ‘laudator temporis acti’, humorously using himself as a paradigm of Old Western culture: assert- ing the values from before the Great Divide, he claims he belongs to the extinct species, to the ‘dinosaurs’, which perhaps can be still useful, or at least interesting to the young people he is going to teach to read the literature so different from modern literary texts. “De Descriptione Temporum”, which proposed such a radical shift of boundaries, can be considered as the ‘credo’ of Lewis the literary and intellectual historian. Assuming a position of an objective describer of things (like that of Isidorus), he nevertheless reveals his critical attitude to ‘modernity’. It seems clear to the reader of the essay that Lewis sees modernity as initiated by the changes brought by Romanticism and the political, social and technological phenomena which accompanied the Romantic Movement (i.e. the three revolutions: the American, the French and the Industrial). Thus he ‘blames’ Romanticism for giving a fatal blow to the Old Western Culture embodied to him best in the artistic, intellectual and moral achievement of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. There is no doubt that Lewis’s criticism of the Romantic cult of individ- ualism and subjectivism, both in arts and in ethics, hinted at in his Cambridge address, but explicitly articulated in his Preface to The Pilgrim’s Regress, con- stitutes a very important aspect of his generally negative attitude to Romanticism as a cultural movement. It was obviously related to his view of art and life in which the existence of the objective truth and the belief in the power of human reason to discover that truth were of paramount importance. Lewis the critic and Lewis the Christian apologist met on this ground. His concept of the Great Divide placed at the beginning of Romanticism indicat- ed that in the Romantic Movement he found the germ of modernity of which he disapproved on philosophical, aesthetic and moral grounds and in which he saw the danger of the destruction of West European civilization. That is why in “De Descriptione Temporum”, as well as in other writings, he called for a defence of the Old Western culture: the study and popularization of the greatest literary texts from the past were to help to preserve the values of the European world. As has been reminded above, Lewis’s professed function as critic and scholar was to help the readers to make contact with the tradition of the Old Western Man. He had little sympathy for and little understanding of the literature of the Romantic Period, which he regarded as the first modern epoch. This view lay behind his and his friend Tolkien’s decision to revise the literary canon to be taught at Oxford; the result of this was that the course in literature for the undergraduates ended in 1815! Both famous medievalists did not 185 VOLATILE ROMANTICS regard the literature of the greater part of the 19th century and the 20th century as requiring any special instruction since, in their view, modern students did not require preparation to read modern texts. Lewis’s disregard for the richness and complexity of Romantic and post-Romantic literature may be astonishing to the modern reader, but it clearly was in tune with the tenets of his ‘medieval mission’. On the other hand, as an intellectual historian he was clearly right in placing the most important caesura between the ancient and modern times at the turn of the 18th century, at the beginning of the Romantic period. In its most general meaning, ‘modernity’ does signify the development of the trends initiated by Romanticism in many fields of life and art. Modern critics speak of ‘the persistence of Romanticism’ as a characteristic feature of the literature and art of modern times (Ward 1995:167). Lewis did not live to see the flourishing of the culture of Post-Modernism, but judging by the pop- ularity of his writings at the end of the twentieth century, his critical view of Romanticism and his message about the necessity to assert the values of the Old Western tradition are still important for many modern readers.

References

Adey, L. 1998. C. S. Lewis: Writer, Dreamer, and Mentor. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Pub Co. Carnell, C. S. 1974. Bright Shadow of Reality: Spiritual Longing in C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans. Ferguson, W. K. 1948. The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Cambridge Mass: Houghton Mifflin Company. Gibb, Jocelyn. (ed.) 1965. Light on C. S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Glyer, Diana Pavlac. 1998. “A Reader’s Guide to Books about C. S. Lewis, and other Resources” in David Mills (ed.). The Pilgrim’s Guide: C. S. Lewis and the Art of Witness. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Pub Co pp. 283 — 290. Lewis, C. S. 1943. The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. London: Geoffrey Bles. Lewis, C. S. 1955. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. London. Geoffrey Bles. Lewis, C. S. 1969. Selected Literary Essays. Ed. by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, C. S. 2000. Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. Ed. by Lesley Walmsley. London: HarperCollins Publishers. Lovejoy, A. 1923. “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms”, in PMLA, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 32 (2, June), pp.l 229-353. Ward, G. 1995. “The Persistence of Romanticism” in Marion Wynne-Davies (ed.) The Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature, London: Bloomsbury Publishing Place, pp. 147- 167. White, W. L. 1970. The Image of Man in C. S. Lewis. London: Hodder and Stoughton.