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.
Please consider joining the Patreon if you would like to read them, and to support the writer.
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