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Title: On Stories
Author: Lewis, C. S. [Clive Staples] (1898-1963)
Date of first publication: 1947
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Oxford University Press, 1947
   ["Essays Presented to Charles Williams", pp. 90-105]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 24 October 2014
Date last updated: 24 October 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1212

This ebook was produced by
Marcia Brooks, Mark Akrigg, Stephen Hutcheson
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Nonstandard spellings (which presumably reflect the author's
intent) have been left unchanged.






                               ON STORIES

                              C. S. Lewis




It is astonishing how little attention critics have paid to Story
considered in itself. Granted the story, the style in which it should be
told, the order in which it should be disposed, and (above all) the
delineation of the characters, have been abundantly discussed. But the
Story itself, the series of imagined events, is nearly always passed
over in silence, or else treated exclusively as affording opportunities
for the delineation of character. There are indeed three notable
exceptions. Aristotle in the _Poetics_ constructed a theory of Greek
tragedy which puts Story in the centre and relegates character to a
strictly subordinate place. In the Middle Ages and the early
Renaissance, Boccaccio and others developed an allegorical theory of
Story to explain the ancient myths. And in our own time Jung and his
followers have produced their doctrine of Archtypes. Apart from these
three attempts the subject has been left almost untouched, and this has
had a curious result. Those forms of literature in which Story exists
merely as a means to something else--for example, the novel of manners
where the story is there for the sake of the characters, or the
criticism of social conditions--have had full justice done to them; but
those forms in which everything else is there for the sake of the story
have been given little serious attention. Not only have they been
despised, as if they were fit only for children, but even the kind of
pleasure they give has, in my opinion, been misunderstood. It is the
second injustice which I am most anxious to remedy. Perhaps the pleasure
of Story comes as low in the scale as modern criticism puts it. I do not
think so myself, but on that point we may agree to differ. Let us,
however, try to see clearly what kind of pleasure it is: or rather, what
different kinds of pleasure it may be. For I suspect that a very hasty
assumption has been made on this subject. I think that books which are
read merely 'for the story' may be enjoyed in two very different ways.
It is partly a division of books (some stories can be read only in the
one spirit and some only in the other) and partly a division of readers
(the same story can be read in different ways).

What finally convinced me of this distinction was a conversation which I
had a few years ago with an intelligent American pupil. We were talking
about the books which had delighted our boyhood. His favourite had been
Fenimore Cooper whom (as it happens) I have never read. My friend
described one particular scene in which the hero was half-sleeping by
his bivouac fire in the woods while a Redskin with a tomahawk was
silently creeping on him from behind. He remembered the breathless
excitement with which he had read the passage, the agonized suspense
with which he wondered whether the hero would wake up in time or not.
But I, remembering the great moments in my own early reading, felt quite
sure that my friend was misrepresenting his experience, and indeed
leaving out the real point. Surely, surely, I thought, the sheer
excitement, the suspense, was not what had kept him going back and back
to Fenimore Cooper. If that were what he wanted any other 'boy's blood'
would have done as well. I tried to put my thought into words. I asked
him whether he were sure that he was not over-emphasizing and falsely
isolating the importance of the danger simply as danger. For though I
had never read Fenimore Cooper I had enjoyed other books about 'Red
Indians'. And I knew that what I wanted from them was not simply
'excitement'. Dangers, of course, there must be: how else can you keep a
story going? But they must (in the mood which led one to such a book) be
Redskin dangers. The 'Redskinnery' was what really mattered. In such a
scene as my friend had described, take away the feathers, the high
cheek-bones, the whiskered trousers, substitute a pistol for a tomahawk,
and what would be left? For I wanted not the momentary suspense but that
whole world to which it belonged--the snow and the snow-shoes, beavers
and canoes, war-paths and wigwams, and Hiawatha names. Thus I; and then
came the shock. My pupil is a very clear-headed man and he saw at once
what I meant and also saw how totally his imaginative life as a boy had
differed from mine. He replied that he was perfectly certain that 'all
that' had made no part of his pleasure. He had never cared one brass
farthing for it. Indeed--and this really made me feel as if I were
talking to a visitor from another planet--in so far as he had been dimly
aware of 'all that', he had resented it as a distraction from the main
issue. He would, if anything, have preferred to the Redskin some more
ordinary danger such as a crook with a revolver.

To those whose literary experiences are at all like my own the
distinction which I am trying to make between two kinds of pleasure will
probably be clear enough from this one example. But to make it doubly
clear I will add another. I was once taken to see a film version of
_King Solomon's Mines_. Of its many sins--not least the introduction of a
totally irrelevant young woman in shorts who accompanied the three
adventurers wherever they went--only one here concerns us. At the end of
Haggard's book, as everyone remembers, the heroes are awaiting death
entombed in a rock chamber and surrounded by the mummified kings of that
land. The maker of the film version, however, apparently thought this
tame. He substituted a subterranean volcanic eruption, and then went one
better by adding an earthquake. Perhaps we should not blame him. Perhaps
the scene in the original was not 'cinematic' and the man was right, by
the canons of his own art, in altering it. But it would have been better
not to have chosen in the first place a story which could be adapted to
the screen only by being ruined. Ruined, at least, for me. No doubt if
sheer excitement is all you want from a story, and if increase of
dangers increases excitement, then a rapidly changing series of two
risks (that of being burned alive and that of being crushed to bits)
would be better than the single prolonged danger of starving to death in
a cave. But that is just the point. There must be a pleasure in such
stories distinct from mere excitement or I should not feel that I had
been cheated in being given the earthquake instead of Haggard's actual
scene. What I lose is the whole sense of the deathly (quite a different
thing from simple danger of death)--the cold, the silence, and the
surrounding faces of the ancient, the crowned and sceptred, dead. You
may, if you please, say that Rider Haggard's effect is quite as 'crude'
or 'vulgar' or 'sensational' as that which the film substituted for it.
I am not at present discussing that. The point is that it is extremely
different. The one lays a hushing spell on the imagination; the other
excites a rapid flutter of the nerves. In reading that chapter of the
book curiosity or suspense about the escape of the heroes from their
death-trap makes a very minor part of one's experience. The trap I
remember for ever: how they got out I have long since forgotten.

It seems to me that in talking of books which are 'mere stories'--books,
that is, which concern themselves principally with the imagined event
and not with character or society--nearly everyone makes the assumption
that 'excitement' is the only pleasure they ever give or are intended to
give. _Excitement_, in this sense, may be defined as the alternate
tension and appeasement of imagined anxiety. This is what I think
untrue. In some such books, and for some readers, another factor comes
in.

To put it at the very lowest, I know that something else comes in for at
least one reader--myself. I must here be autobiographical for the sake of
being evidential. Here is a man who has spent more hours than he cares
to remember in reading romances, and received from them more pleasure
perhaps than he should. I know the geography of Tormance better than
that of Tellus. I have been more curious about travels from Uplands to
Utterbol and from Morna Moruna to Koshtra Belorn than about those
recorded in Hakluyt. Though I saw the trenches before Arras I could not
now lecture on them so tactically as on the Greek wall, and Scamander
and the Scaean Gate. As a social historian I am sounder on Toad Hall and
the Wild Wood or the cave-dwelling Selenites or Hrothgar's court or
Vortigern's than on London, Oxford, and Belfast. If to love Story is to
love excitement then I ought to be the greatest lover of excitement
alive. But the fact is that what is said to be the most 'exciting' novel
in the world, _The Three Musketeers_, makes no appeal to me at all. The
total lack of atmosphere repels me. There is no country in the book--save
as a storehouse of inns and ambushes. There is no weather. When they
cross to London there is no feeling that London differs from Paris.
There is not a moment's rest from the 'adventures': one's nose is kept
ruthlessly to the grindstone. It all means nothing to me. If that is
what is meant by Romance, then Romance is my aversion and I greatly
prefer George Eliot or Trollope. In saying this I am not attempting to
criticize _The Three Musketeers_. I believe on the testimony of others
that it is a capital story. I am sure that my own inability to like it
is in me a defect and a misfortune. But that misfortune is evidence. If
a man sensitive and perhaps over-sensitive to Romance likes least that
Romance which is, by common consent, the most 'exciting' of all, then it
follows that 'excitement' is not the only kind of pleasure to be got out
of Romance. If a man loves wine and yet hates one of the strongest
wines, then surely the sole source of pleasure in wine cannot be the
alcohol?

If I am alone in this experience then, to be sure, the present essay is
of merely autobiographical interest. But I am pretty sure that I am not
absolutely alone. I write on the chance that some others may feel the
same and in the hope that I may help them to clarify their own
sensations.

In the example of _King Solomon's Mines_ the producer of the film
substituted at the climax one kind of danger for another and thereby,
for me, ruined the story. But where excitement is the only thing that
matters kinds of danger must be irrelevant. Only degrees of danger will
matter. The greater the danger and the narrower the hero's escape from
it, the more exciting the story will be. But when we are concerned with
the 'something else' this is not so. Different kinds of danger strike
different chords from the imagination. Even in real life different kinds
of danger produce different kinds of fear. There may come a point at
which fear is so great that such distinctions vanish, but that is
another matter. There is a fear which is twin sister to awe, such as a
man in war-time feels when he first comes within sound of the guns;
there is a fear which is twin sister to disgust, such as a man feels on
finding a snake or scorpion in his bedroom. There are taut, quivering
fears (for one split second hardly distinguishable from a kind of
pleasureable thrill) that a man may feel on a dangerous horse or a
dangerous sea; and again, dead, squashed, flattened, numbing fears, as
when we think we have cancer or cholera. There are also fears which are
not of _danger_ at all: like the fear of some large and hideous, though
innocuous, insect or the fear of a ghost. All this, even in real life.
But in imagination, where the fear does not rise to abject terror and is
not discharged in action, the qualitative difference is much stronger.

I can never remember a time when it was not, however vaguely, present to
my consciousness. _Jack the Giant-Killer_ is not, in essence, simply the
story of a clever hero surmounting danger. It is in essence the story of
such a hero surmounting _danger from giants_. It is quite easy to
contrive a story in which, though the enemies are of normal size, the
odds against Jack are equally great. But it will be quite a different
story. The whole quality of the imaginative response is determined by
the fact that the enemies are giants. That heaviness, that monstrosity,
that uncouthness, hangs over the whole thing. Turn it into music and you
will feel the difference at once. If your villain is a giant your
orchestra will proclaim his entrance in one way: if he is any other kind
of villain, in another. I have seen landscapes (notably in the Mourne
Mountains) which, under a particular light, made me feel that at any
moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge. Nature has that
in her which compels us to invent giants: and only giants will do.
(Notice that Gawain was in the north-west corner of England when 'etins
aneleden him', giants came _blowing_ after him on the high fells. Can it
be an accident that Wordsworth was in the same places when he heard 'low
breathings coming after him'?) The dangerousness of the giants is,
though important, secondary. In some folk-tales we meet giants who are
not dangerous. But they still affect us in much the same way. A _good_
giant is legitimate: but he would be twenty tons of living,
earth-shaking oxymoron. The intolerable pressure, the sense of something
older, wilder, and more earthy than humanity, would still cleave to him.

But let us descend to a lower instance. Are pirates, any more than
giants, merely a machine for threatening the hero? That sail which is
rapidly overhauling us may be an ordinary enemy: a Don or a Frenchman.
The ordinary enemy may easily be made just as lethal as the pirate. At
the moment when she runs up the Jolly Roger, what exactly does this do
to the imagination? It means, I grant you, that if we are beaten there
will be no quarter. But that could be contrived without piracy. It is
not the mere increase of danger that does the trick. It is the whole
image of the utterly lawless enemy, the men who have cut adrift from all
human society and become, as it were, a species of their own--men
strangely clad, dark men with ear-rings, men with a history which they
know and we don't, lords of unspecified treasure buried in undiscovered
islands. They are, in fact, to the young reader almost as mythological
as the giants. It does not cross his mind that a man--a mere man like the
rest of us--might be a pirate at one time of his life and not at another,
or that there is any smudgy frontier between piracy and privateering. A
pirate is a pirate, just as a giant is a giant.

Consider, again, the enormous difference between being shut out and
being shut in: if you like between agoraphobia and claustrophobia. In
_King Solomon's Mines_ the heroes were shut in: so, more terribly, the
narrator imagined himself to be in Poe's _Premature Burial_. Your breath
shortens while you read it. Now remember the chapter called 'Mr. Bedford
Alone' in H. G. Wells's _First Men in the Moon_. There Bedford finds
himself shut out on the surface of the Moon just as the long lunar day
is drawing to its close--and with the day go the air and all heat. Read
it from the terrible moment when the first tiny snowflake startles him
into a realization of his position down to the point at which he reaches
the 'sphere' and is saved. Then ask yourself whether what you have been
feeling is simply suspense. 'Over me, around me, closing in on me,
embracing me ever nearer was the Eternal . . . the infinite and final
Night of space.' That is the idea which has kept you enthralled. But if
we were concerned only with the question whether Mr. Bedford will live
or freeze, that idea is quite beside the purpose. You can die of cold
between Russian Poland and new Poland, just as well as by going to the
Moon, and the pain will be equal. For the purpose of killing Mr. Bedford
'the infinite and final Night of space' is almost entirely otiose: what
is by cosmic standards an infinitesimal change of temperature is
sufficient to kill a man and absolute zero can do no more. That airless
outer darkness is important not for what it can do to Bedford but for
what it does to us: to trouble us with Pascal's old fear of those
eternal silences which have gnawed at so much religious faith and
shattered so many humanistic hopes: to evoke with them and through them
all our racial and childish memories of exclusion and desolation: to
present, in fact, as an intuition one permanent aspect of human
experience.

And here, I expect, we come to one of the differences between life and
art. A man really in Bedford's position would probably not feel very
acutely that sidereal loneliness. The immediate issue of death would
drive the contemplative object out of his mind: he would have no
interest in the many degrees of increasing cold lower than the one which
made his survival impossible. That is one of the functions of art: to
present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real
life exclude.

I have sometimes wondered whether the 'excitement' may not be an element
actually hostile to the deeper imagination. In inferior romances, such
as the American magazines of 'scientifiction' supply, we often come
across a really suggestive idea. But the author has no expedient for
keeping the story on the move except that of putting his hero into
violent danger. In the hurry and scurry of his escapes the poetry of the
basic idea is lost. In a much milder degree I think this has happened to
Wells himself in the _War of the Worlds_. What really matters in this
story is the idea of being attacked by something utterly 'outside'. As
in _Piers Plowman_ destruction has come upon us 'from the planets'. If
the Martian invaders are merely dangerous--if we once become mainly
concerned with the fact that they can _kill_ us--why, then, a burglar or
a bacillus can do as much. The real nerve of the romance is laid bare
when the hero first goes to look at the newly fallen projectile on
Horsell Common. 'The yellowish-white metal that gleamed in the crack
between the lid and the cylinder had an unfamiliar hue.
_Extra-terrestrial_ had no meaning for most of the onlookers.' But
_extra-terrestrial_ is the key word of the whole story. And in the later
horrors, excellently as they are done, we lose the feeling of it.
Similarly in the Poet Laureate's _Sard Harker_ it is the journey across
the Sierras that really matters. That the man who has heard that noise
in the caon--'He could not think what it was. It was not sorrowful nor
joyful nor terrible. It was great and strange. It was like the rock
speaking'--that this man should be later in danger of mere murder is
almost an impertinence.

It is here that Homer shows his supreme excellence. The landing on
Circe's island, the sight of the smoke going up from amidst those
unexplored woods, the god meeting us ('the messenger, the slayer of
Argus')--what an anti-climax if all these had been the prelude only to
some ordinary risk of life and limb! But the peril that lurks here, the
silent, painless, unendurable change into brutality, is worthy of the
setting. Mr. de la Mare too has surmounted the difficulty. The threat
launched in the opening paragraphs of his best stories is seldom
fulfilled in any identifiable event: still less is it dissipated. Our
fears are never, in one sense, realized: yet we lay down the story
feeling that they, and far more, were justified. But perhaps the most
remarkable achievement in this kind is that of Mr. David Lindsay's
_Voyage to Arcturus_. The experienced reader, noting the threats and
promises of the opening chapter, even while he gratefully enjoys them,
feels sure that they cannot be carried out. He reflects that in stories
of this kind the first chapter is nearly always the best and reconciles
himself to disappointment; Tormance, when we reach it, he forbodes, will
be less interesting than Tormance seen from the Earth. But never will he
have been more mistaken. Unaided by any special skill or even any sound
taste in language, the author leads us up a stair of unpredictables. In
each chapter we think we have found his final position: each time we are
utterly mistaken. He builds whole worlds of imagery and passion, any one
of which would have served another writer for a whole book, only to pull
each of them to pieces and pour scorn on it. The physical dangers, which
are plentiful, here count for nothing: it is we ourselves and the author
who walk through a world of spiritual dangers which makes them seem
trivial. There is no recipe for writing of this kind. But part of the
secret is that the author (like Kafka) is recording a lived dialectic.
His Tormance is a region of the spirit. He is the first writer to
discover what 'other planets' are really good for in fiction. No merely
physical strangeness or merely spatial distance will realize that idea
of otherness which is what we are always trying to grasp in a story
about voyaging through space: you must go into another dimension. To
construct plausible and moving 'other worlds' you must draw on the only
real 'other world' we know, that of the spirit.

Notice here the corollary. If some fatal progress of applied science
ever enables us in fact to reach the Moon, that real journey will not at
all satisfy the impulse which we now seek to gratify by writing such
stories. The real Moon, if you could reach it and survive, would in a
deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else. You would find cold,
hunger, hardship, and danger; and after the first few hours they would
be _simply_ cold, hunger, hardship, and danger as you might have met
them on Earth. And death would be simply death among those bleached
craters as it is simply death in a nursing home at Sheffield. No man
would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort of
man who could find it in his own back garden. 'He who would bring home
the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.'

Good stories often introduce the marvellous or supernatural, and nothing
about Story has been so often misunderstood as this. Thus, for example,
Dr. Johnson, if I remember rightly, thought that children liked stories
of the marvellous because they were too ignorant to know that they were
impossible. But children do not always like them, nor are those who like
them always children; and to enjoy reading about fairies--much more about
giants and dragons--it is not necessary to believe in them. Belief is at
best irrelevant; it may be a positive disadvantage. Nor are the marvels
in good Story ever mere arbitrary fictions stuck on to make the
narrative more sensational. I happened to remark to a man who was
sitting beside me at dinner the other night that I was reading Grimm in
German of an evening but never bothered to look up a word I didn't know,
'so that it is often great fun' (I added) 'guessing what it was that the
old woman gave to the prince which he afterwards lost in the wood'. 'And
specially difficult in a fairy-tale,' said he, 'where everything is
arbitrary and therefore the object might be anything at all.' His error
was profound. The logic of a fairy-tale is as strict as that of a
realistic novel, though different.

Does anyone believe that Kenneth Grahame made an arbitrary choice when
he gave his principal character the form of a toad, or that a stag, a
pigeon, a lion would have done as well? The choice is based on the fact
that the real toad's face has a grotesque resemblance to a certain kind
of human face--a rather apoplectic face with a fatuous grin on it. This
is, no doubt, an accident in the sense that all the lines which suggest
the resemblance are really there for quite different biological reasons.
The ludicrous quasi-human expression is therefore changeless: the toad
cannot stop grinning because its 'grin' is not really a grin at all.
Looking at the creature we thus see, isolated and fixed, an aspect of
human vanity in its funniest and most pardonable form; following that
hint Grahame creates Mr. Toad--an ultra-Jonsonian 'humour'. And we bring
back the wealth of the Indies; we have henceforward more amusement in,
and kindness towards, a certain kind of vanity in real life.

But why should the characters be disguised as animals at all? The
disguise is very thin, so thin that Grahame makes Mr. Toad on one
occasion 'comb the dry leaves out of his _hair_'. Yet it is quite
indispensable. If you try to rewrite the book with all the characters
humanized you are faced at the outset with a dilemma. Are they to be
adults or children? You will find that they can be neither. They are
like children in so far as they have no responsibilities, no struggle
for existence, no domestic cares. Meals turn up; one does not even ask
who cooked them. In Mr. Badger's kitchen 'plates on the dresser grinned
at pots on the shelf'. Who kept them clean? Where were they bought? How
were they delivered in the Wild Wood? Mole is very snug in his
subterranean home, but what was he living _on_? If he is a _rentier_
where is the bank, what are his investments? The tables in his forecourt
were 'marked with rings that hinted at beer mugs'. But where did he get
the beer? In that way the life of all the characters is that of children
for whom everything is provided and who take everything for granted. But
in other ways it is the life of adults. They go where they like and do
what they please, they arrange their own lives.

To that extent the book is a specimen of the most scandalous escapism:
it paints a happiness under incompatible conditions--the sort of freedom
we can have only in childhood and the sort we can have only in
maturity--and conceals the contradiction by the further pretence that the
characters are not human beings at all. The one absurdity helps to hide
the other. It might be expected that such a book would unfit us for the
harshness of reality and send us back to our daily lives unsettled and
discontented. I do not find that it does so. The happiness which it
presents to us is in fact full of the simplest and most attainable
things--food, sleep, exercise, friendship, the face of nature, even (in a
sense) religion. That 'simple but sustaining meal' of 'bacon and broad
beans and a macaroni pudding' which Rat gave to his friends has, I doubt
not, helped down many a real nursery dinner. And in the same way the
whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life.
This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure
to the actual.

It is usual to speak in a playfully apologetic tone about one's adult
enjoyment of what are called 'children's books'. I think the convention
a silly one. No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is
not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of
fifty--except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative
works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better
not to have read at all. A mature palate will probably not much care for
_crme de menthe_: but it ought still to enjoy bread and butter and
honey.

Another very large class of stories turns on fulfilled prophecies--the
story of Oedipus, or _The Man who would be King_, or _The Hobbit_. In
most of them the very steps taken to prevent the fulfilment of the
prophecy actually bring it about. It is foretold that Oedipus will kill
his father and marry his mother. In order to prevent this from happening
he is exposed on the mountain: and that exposure, by leading to his
rescue and thus to his life among strangers in ignorance of his real
parentage, renders possible both the disasters. Such stories produce (at
least in me) a feeling of awe, coupled with a certain sort of
bewilderment such as one often feels in looking at a complex pattern of
lines that pass over and under one another. One sees, yet does not quite
see, the regularity. And is there not good occasion both for awe and
bewilderment? We have just had set before our imagination something that
has always baffled the intellect: we have _seen_ how destiny and free
will can be combined, even how free will is the _modus operandi_ of
destiny. The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be
'like real life' in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an
image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.

It will be seen that throughout this essay I have taken my examples
indiscriminately from books which critics would (quite rightly) place in
very different categories--from American 'scientifiction' and Homer, from
Sophocles and _Mrchen_, from children's stories and the intensely
sophisticated art of Mr. de la Mare. This does not mean that I think
them of equal literary merit. But if I am right in thinking that there
is another enjoyment in Story besides the excitement, then popular
romance even on the lowest level becomes rather more important than we
had supposed. When you see an immature or uneducated person devouring
what seem to you merely sensational stories, can you be sure what kind
of pleasure he is enjoying? It is, of course, no good asking _him_. If
he were capable of analysing his own experience as the question requires
him to do, he would be neither uneducated nor immature. But because he
is inarticulate we must not give judgement against him. He may be
seeking only the recurring tension of imagined anxiety. But he may also,
I believe, be receiving certain profound experiences which are, for him,
not acceptable in any other form.

Mr. Roger Green, writing in _English_ not long ago, remarked that the
reading of Rider Haggard had been to many a sort of religious
experience. To some people this will have seemed simply grotesque. I
myself would strongly disagree with it if 'religious' is taken to mean
'Christian'. And even if we take it in a sub-Christian sense, it would
have been safer to say that such people had first met in Haggard's
romances elements which they would meet again in religious experience if
they ever came to have any. But I think Mr. Green is very much nearer
the mark than those who assume that no one has ever read the romances
except in order to be thrilled by hair-breadth escapes. If he had said
simply that something which the educated receive from poetry can reach
the masses through stories of adventure, and almost in no other way,
then I think he would have been right. If so, nothing can be more
disastrous than the view that the cinema can and should replace popular
written fiction. The elements which it excludes are precisely those
which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world.
There is death in the camera.

As I have admitted, it is very difficult to tell in any given case
whether a story is piercing to the unliterary reader's deeper
imagination or only exciting his emotions. You cannot tell even by
reading the story for yourself. Its badness proves very little. The more
imagination the reader has, being an untrained reader, the more he will
do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched
material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly
making what he enjoys. The nearest we can come to a test is by asking
whether he often _re-reads_ the same story.

It is, of course, a good test for every reader of every kind of book. An
unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is
hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or _Tristram Shandy_
or Shakespeare's _Sonnets_: but what can you do with a man who says he
'has read' them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this
settles the matter? Yet I think the test has a special application to
the matter in hand. For excitement, in the sense defined above, is just
what must disappear from a second reading. You cannot, except at the
first reading, be really curious about what happened. If you find that
the reader of popular romance--however uneducated a reader, however bad
the romances--goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you
have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.

The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only
once) but for a certain ideal surprisingness. The point has often been
misunderstood. The man in Peacock thought that he had disposed of
'surprise' as an element in landscape gardening when he asked what
happened if you walked through the garden for the second time. Wiseacre!
In the only sense that matters the surprise works as well the twentieth
time as the first. It is the _quality_ of unexpectedness, not the _fact_
that delights us. It is even better the second time. Knowing that the
'surprise' is coming we can now fully relish the fact that this path
through the shrubbery doesn't _look_ as if it were suddenly going to
bring us out on the edge of the cliff. So in literature. We do not enjoy
a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer
narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at
leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great
wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The
children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and
over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the
'surprise' of discovering that what seemed Little-Red-Riding-Hood's
grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming:
free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the
intrinsic surprisingness of the _peripeteia_.

I should like to be able to believe that I am here in a very small way
contributing (for criticism does not always come later than practice) to
the encouragement of a better school of prose story in England: of story
that can mediate imaginative life to the masses while not being
contemptible to the few. But perhaps this is not very likely. It must be
admitted that the art of Story as I see it is a very difficult one. What
its central difficulty is I have already hinted when I complained that
in the _War of the Worlds_ the idea that really matters becomes lost or
blunted as the story gets under way. I must now add that there is a
perpetual danger of this happening in all stories. To be stories at all
they must be series of events: but it must be understood that this
series--the _plot_, as we call it--is only really a net whereby to catch
something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something
that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more
like a state or quality. Giantship, otherness, the desolation of space,
are examples that have crossed our path. The titles of some stories
illustrate the point very well. _The Well at the World's End_--can a man
write a story to that title? Can he find a series of events following
one another in time which will really catch and fix and bring home to us
all that we grasp at on merely hearing the six words? Can a man write a
story on Atlantis--or is it better to leave the word to work on its own?
And I must confess that the net very seldom does succeed in catching the
bird. Morris in the _Well at the World's End_ came near to success--quite
near enough to make the book worth many readings. Yet, after all, the
best moments of it come in the first half.

But it does sometimes succeed. In the works of the late E. R. Eddison it
succeeds completely. You may like or dislike his invented worlds (I
myself like that of _The Worm Ouroboros_ and strongly dislike that of
_Mistress of Mistresses_) but there is here no quarrel between the theme
and the articulation of the story. Every episode, every speech, helps to
incarnate what the author is imagining. You could spare none of them. It
takes the whole story to build up that strange blend of renaissance
luxury and northern hardness. The secret here is largely the style, and
especially the style of the dialogue. These proud, reckless, amorous
people create themselves and the whole atmosphere of their world chiefly
by talking. Mr. de la Mare also succeeds, partly by style and partly by
never laying the cards on the table. Mr. David Lindsay, however,
succeeds while writing a style which is at times (to be frank)
abominable. He succeeds because his real theme is, like the plot,
sequential, a thing in time, or quasi-time: a passionate spiritual
journey. Charles Williams had the same advantage, but I do not mention
his stories much here because they are hardly pure story in the sense we
are now considering. They are, despite their free use of the
supernatural, much closer to the novel; a believed religion, detailed
character drawing, and even social satire all come in. _The Hobbit_
escapes the danger of degenerating into mere plot and excitement by a
very curious shift of tone. As the humour and homeliness of the early
chapters, the sheer 'Hobbitry', dies away we pass insensibly into the
world of epic. It is as if the battle of Toad Hall had become a serious
_heimskn_ and Badger had begun to talk like Njal. Thus we lose one
theme but find another. We kill--but not the same fox.

It may be asked why anyone should be encouraged to write a form in which
the means are apparently so often at war with the end. But I am hardly
suggesting that anyone who can write great poetry should write stories
instead. I am rather suggesting what those whose work will in any case
be a romance should aim at. And I do not think it unimportant that good
work in this kind, even work less than perfectly good, can come where
poetry will never come.

Shall I be thought whimsical if, in conclusion, I suggest that this
internal tension in the heart of every story between the theme and the
plot constitutes, after all, its chief resemblance to life? If story
fails in that way does not life commit the same blunder? In real life,
as in a story, something must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp
at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is
never quite embodied. The grand idea of finding Atlantis which stirs us
in the first chapter of the adventure story is apt to be frittered away
in mere excitement when the journey has once been begun. But so, in real
life, the idea of adventure fades when the day-to-day details begin to
happen. Nor is this merely because actual hardship and danger shoulder
it aside. Other grand ideas--home-coming, reunion with a
beloved--similarly elude our grasp. Suppose there is no disappointment;
even so--well, you are here. But now, something must happen, and after
that something else. All that happens may be delightful: but can any
such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we
wanted? If the author's plot is only a net, and usually an imperfect
one, a net of time and event for catching what is not really a process
at all, is life much more? I am not sure, on second thoughts, that the
slow fading of the magic in _The Well at the World's End_ is, after all,
a blemish. It is an image of the truth. Art, indeed, may be expected to
do what life cannot do: but so it has done. The bird has escaped us. But
it was at least entangled in the net for several chapters. We saw it
close and enjoyed the plumage. How many 'real lives' have nets that can
do as much?

In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch
in our net of successive moments something that is not successive.
Whether in real life there is any doctor who can teach us how to do it,
so that at last either the meshes will become fine enough to hold the
bird, or we be so changed that we can throw our nets away and follow the
bird to its own country, is not a question for this essay. But I think
it is sometimes done--or very, very nearly done--in stories. I believe the
effort to be well worth making.






[End of On Stories, by C. S. Lewis]
