>>24121158
JOHN BUNYAN’S PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

I am reading at present, what do you think? Our own friend Pilgrim’s Progress. It is one of those books that are usually read too early to appreciate, and perhaps not come back to. I am very glad however to have discovered it. The allegory of course is obvious and even childish, but just as a romance it is unsurpassed, and also as a specimen of real English. Try a bit of your Ruskin or Macaulay after it, and see the difference between diamonds and tinsel.

Letter to his father, Albert Lewis, March 11, 1916 (CL 1)

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Chaucer has few rivals, and no masters.

The Allegory of Love

WILLIAM COWPER

Have you ever read the letters of the poet Cowper? He had nothing—literally nothing—to tell anyone about: private life in a sleepy country town where Evangelical distrust of “the world” denied him even such miserable society as the place would have afforded. And yet one reads a whole volume of his correspondence with unfailing interest. How his tooth came loose at dinner, how he made a hutch for a tame hare, what he is doing about his cucumbers—all this he makes one follow as if the fate of empires hung on it.

Letter to his father, Albert Lewis, February 25, 1928 (CL 1)

THOMAS CRANMER

Cranmer writes a prose with which it is difficult to find any fault, but it gives curiously little pleasure. It never drags and never hurries; it never disappoints the ear; and (pace John Foxe) there is hardly a single sentence that leaves us in doubt of its meaning.... The explanation is that Cranmer always writes in an official capacity. Everything he says has been threshed out in committee. We never see a thought growing: his business is to express the agreed point of view. Everyone who has tried to draw up a report knows how fatal such conditions are to good writing.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)

SAMUEL DANIEL

His [sonnet] sequence Delia . . . offers no ideas, no psychology, and of course no story: it is simply a masterpiece of phrasing and melody. To anyone who complains that it is a series of commonplaces we can only reply, “Yes, but listen.” . . . In him, as in Shakespeare, the most ordinary statement turns liquid and delicious . . . . The truth is that while everything Daniel says would be commonplace in a prose abstract, nothing is commonplace as it actually occurs in the poetry. In that medium all the Petrarchan gestures become compulsive invitations to enormous sorrows and delights.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)

lol.

ctrl+w yourself

>>24121162
DANTE (ALIGHIERI)

Dante remains a strong candidate for the supreme poetical honors of the world.

The Allegory of Love

I think Dante’s poetry, on the whole, the greatest of all the poetry I have read: yet when it is at its highest pitch of excellence, I hardly feel that Dante has very much to do . . . . I draw the conclusion that the highest reach of the whole poetic art turns out to be a kind of abdication, and is attained when the whole image of the world the poet sees has entered so deeply into his mind that henceforth he has only to get himself out of the way, to let the seas roll and the mountains shake their leaves or the light shine and the spheres revolve, and all this will be poetry, not things you write poetry about. Dare I confess that after Dante even Shakespeare seems to me a little factitious? It almost sounds as if he were “just making it up.” But one cannot feel that about Dante even when one has stopped reading him.

“Dante’s Similes,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

WALTER DE LA Mare

De la Mare’s poems I have had for a long time and I read them more often than any other book. I put him above Yeats and all the other moderns, and in spite of his fantasy find him nearer than anyone else to the essential truth of life.

Letter to Arthur Greeves, June 26, 1927 (CL 1)

ALL ACTION, NO ATMOSPHERE IN THE THREE MUSKETEERS

One never knows how good Scott is till one tries to read Dumas. Have you noticed how completely Dumas lacks any background? In Scott, behind the adventures of the hero, you have the whole society of the age, with all the interplay of town and country, Puritan and Cavalier, Saxon and Norman, or whatnot, and all the racy humor of the minor characters: and behind that again you have the eternal things—the actual countryside, the mountains, the weather, the very feel of traveling. In Dumas, if you try to look even an inch behind the immediate intrigue, you find just nothing at all. You are in an abstract world of gallantry and adventure which has no roots—no connection with human nature or mother earth. When the scene shifts from Paris to London there is no sense that you have reached a new country, no change of atmosphere. And I don’t think there is a single passage to show that Dumas had ever seen a cloud, a road, or a tree. In a word, if you were asked to explain what you and I meant by “the homely” in literature, you could almost reply, “It means the opposite of The Three Musketeers.” But perhaps I am being too hard on what after all was written only for amusement. I suppose there must be a merit in the speed and verve of the plot, even if I don’t like that kind of thing.

Letter to Arthur Greeves, March 25, 1933 (CL 2)

holy cringe, just tilt your head

WHY LEWIS PREFERRED GEORGE ORWELL’S ANIMAL FARM TO 1984

“Animal Farm is formally almost perfect; light, strong, balanced. There is not a sentence that does not contribute to the whole. The myth says all the author wants it to say and (equally important) it doesn’t say anything else. Here is an objet d’art as durably satisfying as a Horatian ode or a Chippendale chair.”

Here we have two books by the same author which deal, at bottom, with the same subject. Both are very bitter, honest, and honorable recantations. They express the disillusionment of one who had been a revolutionary of the familiar, entre guerre pattern and had later come to see that all totalitarian rulers, however their shirts may be colored, are equally the enemies of man.

Since the subject concerns us all and the disillusionment has been widely shared, it is not surprising that either book, or both, should find plenty of readers, and both are obviously the works of a very considerable writer. What puzzles me is the marked preference of the public for 1984. For it seems to me (apart from its magnificent, and fortunately detachable, appendix on Newspeak) to be merely a flawed, interesting book; but the Farm is a work of genius which may well outlive the particular and (let us hope) temporary conditions that provoked it.

To begin with, it is very much the shorter of the two. This in itself would not, of course, show it to be the better. I am the last person to think so. Callimachus, to be sure, thought a great book a great evil, but then I think Callimachus a great prig. My appetite is hearty and when I sit down to read I like a square meal. But in this instance the shorter book seems to do all that the longer one does, and more. The longer book does not justify its greater length. There is dead wood in it. And I think we can all see where the dead wood comes.

In the nightmare state of 1984 the rulers devote a great deal of time—which means that the author and readers also have to devote a great deal of time—to a curious kind of anti-sexual propaganda. Indeed the amours of the hero and heroine seem to be at least as much a gesture of protest against that propaganda as a natural outcome of affection or appetite . . . .

But this is only the clearest instance of the defect which, throughout, makes 1984 inferior to the Farm. There is too much in it of the author’s own psychology: too much indulgence of what he feels as a man, not pruned or mastered by what he intends to make as an artist. The Farm is work of a wholly different order. Here the whole thing is projected and distanced. It becomes a myth and is allowed to speak for itself. The author shows us hateful things; he doesn’t stammer or speak thick under the surge of his own hatred. The emotion no longer disables him because it has all been used, and used to make something.

>>24121210
One result is that the satire becomes more effective. Wit and humor (absent from the longer work) are employed with devastating effect. The great sentence “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others” bites deeper than the whole of 1984.

Thus the shorter book does all that the longer does. But it also does more. Paradoxically, when Orwell turns all his characters into animals he makes them more fully human. In 1984 the cruelty of the tyrants is odious, but it is not tragic; odious like a man skinning a cat alive, not tragic like the cruelty of Regan and Goneril to Lear.

Tragedy demands a certain minimum stature in the victim; and the hero and heroine of 1984 do not reach that minimum. They become interesting at all only in so far as they suffer. That is claim enough (Heaven knows) on our sympathies in real life, but not in fiction. A central character who escapes nullity only by being tortured is a failure. And the hero and heroine in this story are surely such dull, mean little creatures...

In Animal Farm all this is changed. The greed and cunning of the pigs is tragic because we are made to care about all the honest, well-meaning, or even heroic beasts whom they exploit. The death of Boxer the horse moves us more than all...the other book. And not only moves, but convinces. Here, despite the animal disguise, we feel we are in a real world. This—this congeries of guzzling pigs, snapping dogs, and heroic horses—this is what humanity is like; very good, very bad, very pitiable, very honorable. If men were only like the people in 1984 it would hardly be worthwhile writing stories about them. It is as if Orwell could not see them until he put them into a beast fable.

Finally, Animal Farm is formally almost perfect; light, strong, balanced. There is not a sentence that does not contribute to the whole. The myth says all the author wants it to say and it doesn’t say anything else. Here is an objet d’art as durably satisfying as a Horatian ode or a Chippendale chair.

That is why I find the superior popularity of 1984 so discouraging. Something must, of course, be allowed for mere length. The booksellers say that short books will not sell. And there are reasons not discreditable. The weekend reader wants something that will last till Sunday evening; the traveler wants something that will last as far as Glasgow.

1984 belongs to a genre that is now more familiar than a beast fable; I mean the genre of what may be called dystopias, those nightmare visions of the future which began, perhaps, with Wells’s Time Machine and The Sleeper Awakes... Certainly, it would be alarming if we had to conclude either that the use of the imagination had so decayed that readers demand in all fiction a realistic surface and cannot treat any fable as more than a “juvenile,” or else that the bed scenes in 1984 are the flavoring without which no book can now be sold.

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