The Personal Heresy

The Personal Heresy is a series of articles, three each by C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. (Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall) Tillyard, first published on 27 April 1939 by Oxford University Press and later reprinted, also by Oxford University Press, in 1965. The book has been reprinted in 2008 by Concordia University Press with an Introduction by Lewis scholar Bruce L. Edwards and a new Preface by the editor, Joel D. Heck. The central issue of the essays is whether a piece of imaginative writing, particularly poetry, is primarily a reflection of the author's personality (Tillyard's position) or is about something external to the author (Lewis's position). The two positions may be summarized briefly as the subjective position (Tillyard) and the objective position (Lewis). In general, Lewis attempts to keep poetry within the reach of the common person, while Tillyard thinks of the poet as a person who is "a cut above the common person."

In the fifth essay in The Personal Heresy, Lewis implied that the personal heresy started when the romantic critics, such as Wordsworth, diverted our attention away from the fruitful question, "What kind of composition is a poem?" to the barren question, "What kind of man is a poet?" But various statements from the letters and diary of Lewis show that this position was held for quite some time before the first essay was published, and there is some evidence of the development of this position in Lewis himself. On 14 February 1923 Lewis recorded his own comment that was made in a conversation with a friend, George Arnold Rink, "I suggest that the object of a work of art is not to be criticized but to be experienced and enjoyed" (All My Road Before Me, 197). This argues for treating a work of art objectively. Then, in 1923 Lewis addressed the Martlets, an undergraduate Oxford literary society to which he belonged, arguing that the personal life of author James Stephens, a popular Irish author, had little to do with understanding his works. On 6 May 1924 Lewis wrote about a conversation with William Bateson, formerly Professor of Biology at Cambridge, disagreeing with Bateson's idea that a poem was mostly about the author: "he observed that as he progressed he found his interest in a poem centered more and more round the author. I said this seemed to me inconsistent with real aesthetic experience." Lewis's views seem well developed already at this point, at least on the basic position. On 20 May 1926 Lewis wrote in his diary about the personal heresy, which includes the idea that poets are special, stating, "Are all our modern poets like this? Were the old ones so? It is almost enough to prove R. Graves’ contention that an artist is like a medium: a neurotic with an inferiority complex who gets his own back by attributing to himself abnormal powers. And indeed I have noticed in myself a ridiculous tendency to indulge in poetical complacency as a consolation when I am ill at ease thro’ managing ordinary life worse than usual" In 1930 Lewis addressed the Martlets, this time as an Oxford Don, developing his thinking more fully. In that same year, E.M.W. Tillyard published a major work on John Milton, in which he wrote, "All poetry is about the poet's state of mind." To understand Paradise Lost correctly, he stated, one must read it as an "expression of Milton's personality." Then, on 14 June 1932, Lewis wrote to his brother Warren about the virtues of Thackeray vs. Trollope after having just finished rereading Thackeray's Pendennis. While he thought of Thackeray as a genius, he also thought that Trollope wrote the better books, books that don't knock you down with their power and depth. He stated, "What I don't care twopence about is the sense (apparently dear to so many) of being in the hands of 'a great man'--you know; his dazzling personality, his lightning energy, the strange force of his mind--and all that. So that I quite definitely prefer Trollope--or rather this re-reading of Pendennis confirms my long standing preference" (Collected Letters, Vol. II, 82). Also in 1932, Essays and Studies published Lewis’ essay, "What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato." The title of the essay explains the content, i.e. that when Chaucer (1343–1400) revised the love poem Il Filostrato by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) in his Troilus and Criseyde he medievalized it, using a medieval rhetoric and didactic style. For example, Chaucer made Troilus less of a “lady-killer,” to use Lewis’ phrase. That shows up both in Chaucer's writing of the story and in his telling of the erotic nature of the story. An aspect of what was becoming Lewis’ contribution to The Personal Heresy showed up near the end of the essay, when Lewis mentioned Lascelles Abercrombie. Abercrombie had written an article, “A Plea for the Liberty of Interpreting,” for The Proceedings of the British Academy (1930). Lewis summarized Abercrombie's position as one that preferred the effect of Chaucer's Troilus on us now over that which it had on its original medieval audience. Lewis’ response demonstrated his conviction that much of the medieval age was closer to the world of universal ideas than the Renaissance was and, therefore, to be preferred and disagreeing with Abercrombie that we must first understand what a text said to its original audience before applying it to our situation today.

Lewis remained consistent on this position, later criticizing F. R. Leavis for accepting a major error of much of literary criticism, namely that writing was largely a function of the writer's personality. On 11 March 1944, Lewis wrote the essay, “The Parthenon and the Optative,” in which he made this criticism ("The Parthenon and the Optative," 111f.). Lewis had not changed his position when, in 1946, he wrote in "Different Tastes in Literature" that "some preferences in art are really better than others" (On Stories, 119).

The first three essays of The Personal Heresy were originally published in the journal Essays and Studies, a periodical of the English Association, in 1934, 1935, and 1936. The first was entitled "The Personal Heresy in Criticism," the second "Rejoinder," and the third "Open Letter to Dr Tillyard." Then three additional essays were added, along with a concluding note by Lewis and a Preface by both authors, and together they comprise The Personal Heresy. The controversy was concluded with a live debate at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 7 February 1939 (Collected Letters, Vol. II, 248, n. 24). Of this debate, former student John Lawlor wrote, "There was a memorable occasion when in the Hall at Magdalen Dr Tillyard met him to round off in debate the controversy begun with the publication of Lewis's indictment of "The Personal Heresy." I am afraid there was no debate. Lewis made rings round Tillyard; in, out, up, down, around back again—like some piratical Plymouth bark against a high-built galleon of Spain" (C. S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections, 4). Lewis's position in this work reflects his conviction that objective values are resident in people, places, events, and things, rejecting the relativistic mindset of that age and subsequent ages. Lewis's position was further developed in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) and reached its culmination in his 1961 work An Experiment in Criticism.

Some of Lewis's letters provide us with additional perspective on this controversy, showing Lewis to be aware of the potential for a negative view of him, but also showing Lewis to be congenial towards Tillyard himself. Lewis seems to discuss his first essay in a letter of 5 April 1935 to Paul Elmer More, aware that he might be pushing More if he sent him a copy of his essay. In a letter to Joan Bennett, February 1937, Lewis jokingly referred to this controversy by calling himself a "professional controversialist and itinerant prize-fighter" (Collected Letters, Vol. II, 210). There seemed to be no acrimony between the two men, for Lewis wrote about joining Tillyard in contributing chapters for a Festschrift to Sir Herbert Grierson (Collected Letters, Vol. II, 211, a letter dated 8 March 1937), and on 25 January 1938 Lewis wrote to Frank P. Wilson about meeting Tillyard in London and lunching together there (Collected Letters, Vol. II, 222). There is evidence that Lewis considered the heresy over, shortly after the publication of The Personal Heresy.

On 23 July 1939, about two months after the publication of the book, Lewis wrote to Owen Barfield, "I quite agree that the Personal Heresy is not important--now! But it was rapidly becoming so. I was just in the nick of time . . ." (Collected Letters, Vol. II, 260). On 12 September 1940 Jack wrote to Eliza Marian Butler, a University of Manchester professor at the time, stating that the kernel of The Personal Heresy was "Don't attribute superhuman qualities to poetry unless you really believe in a superhuman subject to support them" (Collected Letters, Vol. II, 443). In a letter of 14 January 1953, Lewis later wrote to Don Calabria, "The De Imitatione teaches us to 'Mark what is said, not who said it.'" By this comment he demonstrates that he held on to this point of view for many years. If the personal heresy had disappeared by 1940, it has come back in our day^{[citation needed]} which has drunk so deeply of what Lewis called "the poison of subjectivism" (the title of an essay by Lewis in Christian Reflections, published in Religion in Life, Summer 1943). More than two decades later, Lewis would write (posthumously in 1964), "Even today there are those (some of them critics) who believe every novel and even every lyric to be autobiographical" (The Discarded Image, 213).

The two men referred, with respect, to one another in their later published works. "Tillyard was seemingly more affected by the debate, as he makes more references to his opponent than does Lewis" (Beach, 14).

Some publishers are claiming to be able to offer insights into “young soldier poets” that even those soldiers poets do not have. It is as though the publisher were saying, “You might have read their poetry, but we know what they were really saying. We can read between the lines.” Poetry is increasingly believed to be the “expression of personality” rather than writing on a topic, and that is the personal heresy. Lewis disagrees, stating that poetry is not a representation of a personality. This tendency appears not only in poetry, Lewis writes, but also in advertising and in reputable criticism. Tillyard's book Milton is the prime example of this, as are Sir Henry John Newbolt's The Teaching of English in England, Hugh Kingsmill's book on Matthew Arnold, some of T. S. Eliot's writing, and perhaps even H.W. Garrod's book on Wordsworth. Tillyard wrote in his book Milton that such matters as style “have concerned the critics far more than what the poem is really about, the true state of Milton’s mind when he wrote it.”