Chapter 4: The Voyage of the Italic

King and Ketley stand accused of teaching young Australians that all value judgements are subjective and insignificant. Based on their remarks about grammar, there appears to be a case to answer. 

The prosecution will now demonstrate what effect their buried assumptions have on their teaching practice. When King and Ketley come to talk about actual texts, do they say the kinds of things you would expect people who disbelieved in values to say? 

Yes, says the accuser, as a matter of fact they do. As an example of bad emotive writing, King and Ketley cite a piece of advertising copy. But they fail to demonstrate why the writing is bad, or to contrast it with a piece of good writing. Instead of showing why the bad emotional writer describes emotions badly, they debunk the emotions themselves—primarily by pointing out that the advert contains statements which are not literally true. 

At which point, the prosecution rests. Those very same debunking techniques could be applied to a lot of very good writing: to any writing which includes a value judgement, in fact. Ketley and King’s theory is thus proved to be pernicious. It remains to be established whether or not it is false: Lewis concedes that a philosophy could be bad for society but nevertheless true. (The corollary, incidentally, is that to preserve society it might be necessary to disseminate a falsehood.) 

But before sentence is passed we need to hear the case for the defence. 

1: King and Ketley do not, in fact, say that the advertisement is a piece of bad writing. As a matter of fact, they draw attention to its skilful  (they say “cunning”) use of vocabulary and rhythmic devices. They present it as an example of how emotional writing can be used to a bad purpose.

2: King and Ketley do not, in fact, say that the emotions roused by the advertisement are contemptible in themselves. Their complaint is that the advertiser is evoking emotions and illegitimately transferring them onto his product.

3: King and Ketley do as a matter of fact, point out that two of the claims made in the advertisement are factually untrue, and that one is only true metaphorically. But this is not the central plank of their criticism. In fact, it is only an aside—a literal parenthesis. 

Here is the advertisement. (Lewis does not quote it in full.) 

Away across the western ocean where Drake of Devon sailed, the Italic will carry you. You too will go adventuring after the treasures of the Indies. In golden hours, in glowing colours, in new fitness of body, and new delight of mind, your treasure will be counted to you. No galleon of Spain ever brought home such great store of good things as you will bring back from your six weeks’ luxurious cruise in this most modern motor vessel. [Control of Language, page 52-53]

If I had to write a critical review of the passage, I would be hard-pushed to say that it is outright bad. The writer understands that Latinate sentence-construction gives English sentences a certain gravitas; partly because Milton used them and partly because delaying the verb creates a slight tension in the sentence.  (“Holding the heavy shopping basket, as fast as his legs could carry him, back to his house he ran” has slightly more punch than “He ran back to his house as fast as his legs could carry him, holding the heavy shopping basket.”) He knows that metrical prose can sound dramatic, but that too much of it sounds silly. He knows about using parallel clauses (“in golden hours/ in glowing colours”) and about saying the same thing twice in different words (“new fitness of body/new delight of mind”). If we had encountered the first sentence in a nautical adventure story it would not strike us as particularly terrible writing:  (“‘Across the Western Ocean where Drake of Devon sailed, the Italic will carry you’ my father said to me as we stood on the dock at Portsmouth.”)

The problem with the text is bathos: that after a perfectly serviceable five-line build up about the romance of sea travel, we are brought clunking down to earth with a line about a holiday on a cruise liner. I was reminded of the occasion when an entire cinema audience groaned because a perfectly good drama about the 1914 Christmas armistice turned out to be an advertisement for chocolate biscuits. If the conclusion had been placed at the beginning (“The Italic is a modern motor vessel which will carry you…”) the effect would have been far less comical. 

As Lewis says, it is very difficult to say why a bad piece of writing is bad. Most of us would say that Dan Brown and JK Rowling were terrible stylists: but millions of people have found their stories compelling and engrossing, so they must be doing something right. Umberto Eco makes the nice point that the Count of Monte Cristo is written in dreadful French; but since it is one of the best adventure stories ever written; and since it wouldn’t work nearly so well as a yarn if the language were  “improved”, the writing must, in fact, be very good indeed. 

Or consider what many believe to be the worst poem ever written: 

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember'd for a very long time…

A newspaper dispatch which said “We are very sorry to report that ninety nine lives were lost on the last Sunday of 1879” wouldn’t strike you as irredeemably dreadful. It’s the tonal changes—from a mock epic invocation to a news dispatch; and the contrast between strong rhymes and prosaic diction that make it legendarily bad. Unless, of course, William McGonogal was doing it deliberately for comic effect, which I am now quite certain that he was. In which case, it is very good writing indeed. 

Ketley and King found the text of the cruise liner advert in another English textbook, Reading and Discrimination by Denys Thompson. Thompson is another of the New Critics: he cites IA Richards in his introduction, and went on to co-author a book with FR Leavis. Reading and Discrimination substantially consists of a series of prose-extracts for students to critique. New Critics naturally like “unseen criticism” because it removes writing from its historical and biographical context and forces the student to attend to the words themselves. The advertisement isn’t one of his extracts: it’s simply used as an illustration in his introductory section about—again—emotional writing. He says that he found it in a Sunday paper, but it illustrates his point so perfectly that I think we can safely assume that he made it up. 

Thompson’s objection to the passage is that it doesn’t say anything. It uses words and phrases to evoke a mood—a mood which the advertiser hopes will be conducive to splurging money on a big holiday. But the passage is devoid of content. 

The professional copywriter of this is not arguing the merits of travel—the sense of what he says is unimportant—so much as playing upon the feelings of his reader, tired by a weeks work in Winter, to induce in him a comforted or receptive frame of mind in which he will be likely to act on the suggestion of a cruise. One notices immediately it’s literary pretension—as if to say this is a special occasion no ordinary work a day affair—and the fact that it employs the romantic feelings and a vocabulary with which most of us have been familiar since we first learned history. The dreamy rhythm of the first two sentences helps to lull the reader and causes him to suspend rational judgement while he abandons himself to the illusion roused by the associations of “Drake” “Devon” “adventure” “treasure” “Galleons” and “Spain”. [Reading and Discrimination, 1934 edition, page 15]

King and Ketley’s critique is much longer than Thompson’s but goes over substantially the same ground. When Thompson says that the sense and meaning of the words is irrelevant, they say: 

Now what exactly has the prospective buyer of a ticket for this pleasure cruise been told? Only that the voyage will be somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean, that the name of the ship is the Italic, that it is a motor not a steam ship, and that the voyage will last six weeks. [Page 53, emphasis in original]

Thompson talks about the advert playing upon the romantic feelings of the reader, which Ketley and King paraphrase as: 

What is the rest of the pother about Drake and the treasure of the Indies, the golden hours and glowing colours, put in for? Merely to rouse in the prospective buyer feelings of romantic excitement and pleasure at the thought of going in the Italic.

Where Thompson talks about suspending rational judgement, Ketley and King are fairly specific about how a rational man chooses his vacation: 

The Englishman or woman who read it and had thirty pounds to spend might probably decide, if he thought about it calmly and unemotionally, that he could get all the pleasure and rest he required by having a holiday at Margate or in the Lake District, and still have fifteen precious pounds over to buy things he needed. 

£30—about £2,500 in today’s money—seems excellent value for a six week cruise; but £15 rather steep for a trip to the Lake District.

But the idea behind the advertisement is that it should rouse a quantity of extremely pleasurable emotion which will make the reader unthinkingly prefer a holiday cruise on the Italic to any other kind of holiday. [Emphasis in original]

None of this is remotely controversial. Every good salesman is told to sell the sizzle rather than the sausage. In 1971, the Coca-Cola company famously and successfully made a short film which evoked the feelings of youth and optimism which were in the air in 1971, and persuaded people that they were somehow connected to their product. Drinking sparkling carbonated fizzy sugar water won’t really make the world a happier place—and certainly not more so than bonding with a stranger over an unbranded soda. But that is not the same as saying that the ideals of youth, peace, and internationalism are in themselves absurd. No-one in their right mind would say “You shouldn’t believe in living in perfect harmony, because it will give you diabetes and rot your teeth.”

King and Ketley are again trying to illustrate the distinction between reference and emotive meaning. “Galleon”, on their terms, doesn’t have a reference: it is there to trigger a feeling that the salesman thinks will make you well-disposed to his product. One could say the same thing about apple trees, honey bees, and snow-white turtle doves.  

What has the reference of “Drake of Devon,” namely, his personality, his clothes, his actions, his appearance, to do with sitting in a liner in the twentieth century? And so with “galleon of Spain,” “treasure,” and so on. The reference of these words is very largely neglected. And the reference of most of the other words, such as “luxurious” “glowing,” “golden,” “adventuring,” “delight,” is extremely vague. [Page 57]

In that sense, they reasonably say, advertisements work like poetry—where, as you may recall, seventy five per cent of the meaning comes from the emotive content. In the previous chapter, they tried to “translate” the Eve of St Agnes into “scientific” prose, so “casement” becomes “window” and “warm gules” becomes “red light”. If you tried out the same experiment on the advertisement, you would swiftly find that when you take out the emotion, there is nothing left at all. (“The ship will take you across the sea. You will have a nice time. You will have a nice time. You will have a very nice time. It is better to have a nice time than to loot precious metals from indigenous populations.”) The political sketch writer Simon Hoggart once said that you could tell when an advert or political speech was claptrap because the opposite statement would be meaningless. (“This government will stand up for lazy single people”; “It’s a pedestrians car: so push it.”)

Thompson lists the words “Drake”, “Devon”, “adventure”, “treasure”, “galleons” and “Spain” as having strong emotional associations. King and Ketley explain, at rather too much length, what they think those emotional associations might be. 

Notice how cunningly the piece is constructed… not  just “across the Atlantic,” but “away  (a word arousing  feelings of escape, perhaps from drudgery or disappointment or ill health) across the western ocean (“west” is connected with many romantic emotions, sunset feelings, Westward Ho! feelings and so on;)“ocean” is connected with feelings of vastness, of escape from the small and the confined), “where Drake of Devon sailed” (the Italic won’t of course sail exactly where Drake sailed, but the words “Drake of Devon” call up romantic feelings with regard to the “free, roistering, spacious,” days of Elizabeth and the gentlemen buccaneers—again feelings of escape from the routine, narrow life of to-day). “You too will go adventuring” (in actual fact, sailing, or rather living, in a modern floating hotel, like the Italic, is hardly an adventure; there is little danger or discomfort or difficulty; but the word “adventure” is connected  with escape feelings, hardy-dardy feelings, hero feelings, all pleasant to experience)….[page 54]

But this is where, according to C.S Lewis, they go a step too far. Instead of putting the terrible advert alongside a decent piece of travel writing, they take it to task for inaccuracy. The ship won’t, as a matter of simple fact, retrace the Golden Hind’s route. But, says Lewis, plenty of good travel writing is guilty of the same offence. 

What they actually do is to point out that the luxurious motor-vessel won’t really sail where Drake did, that the tourists will not have any adventures, that the treasures they bring home will be of a purely metaphorical nature, and that a trip to Margate might provide “all the pleasure and rest” they required. All this is very true: talents inferior to those of Gaius and Titius would have sufficed to discover it. What they have not noticed, or not cared about, is that a very similar treatment could be applied to much good literature which treats the same emotion. [Abolition of Man, page 4]

This is, I submit, a deliberate misreading. 

• The Green Book says that even though the holiday is not really retracing Drake’s steps, the name “Drake” is irrelevantly used because the reader will associate his name with escapism. 

• The Green Book  says that even though the holiday will not really be dangerous or uncomfortable, the word “adventure” is irrelevantly used because the reader will associate it with escapism, and other pleasant feelings. 

• The Green Book says that the word “treasure” is  used metaphorically because the reader will associate it with romance and excitement. 

For Lewis, this amounts to a denunciation of the whole idea of treasure and adventure. But it isn’t. King and Ketley don’t say that it is wrong to associate Francis Drake and Spanish Galleons with Good Queen Bess’s Golden Days. They say that it is wrong to exploit people’s feelings about Good Queen Bess to induce them to buy holidays they can’t afford.

Lewis wished King and Ketley had compared the advert with a good piece of travel writing. But no-one is claiming that the Sunday Paper listing is a piece of bad travel writing. It is, if anything, presented as a good piece of advertising. The correct procedure would have been to contrast it with an advert written by a more honest or honourable travel agent. 

It would be trivially easy to write an advertisement which makes honest use of history: 

“Have you thrilled since boyhood to tales of piracy and derring do along the Spanish Main?Imagine your excitement when you sail through those waters; walk around the ruins of real seventeenth century castles, and visit the wrecks of actual pirate ships…”

Or we could dispense with the sizzle altogether and simply sell the sausage: 

“Our cabins have been highly commended by the Hotel Journal; our chef has worked at some of the top restaurants in Paris; our gym instructor has twice been to the Olympic Games…”

The trouble is, what you end up with in both cases is a demonstrably less effective advertisement than the one we are deconstructing. Salesmen use emotional soft-sell because it works. 

The passages that Lewis suggests King and Ketley might have used for contrast are from Samuel Johnson and William Wordsworth. Both writers say they experienced very strong emotions in particular places. Both say that the feelings may not have been very sensible or very rational; but that they nevertheless had value. They both think that the feelings brought them closer to their Christian God. 

For Johnson, it is visiting the ruins of Iona, which make him think about St Columbia converting the pagan Scots in the fifth century. Some people might think it better to look at the ruins dispassionately, as scientific or archaeological data, but he wouldn’t want to be one of those people: 

 Far from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue.  That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona! [Samuel Johnson, “Journey to the Western Islands”]

William Wordsworth is naturally more romantic—more interested in recording the minute qualia of subjective experience. He says that he was in a perfectly ordinary carriage surrounded by perfectly ordinary people, but at the precise moment he entered London (it was more clearly delineated in his day) he felt an emotion that he couldn’t describe, but connected in some way with heaviness. It only took a second; he didn’t attach much significance to it at the time, but he now sees it as the action of God. Like Wordsworth, he admits that other people might not find the emotion very sensible:

Great God!

That aught external to the living mind

Should have such mighty sway, yet so it was:

A weight of ages did at once descend

Upon my heart—no thought embodied, no

Distinct remembrances, but weight and power,

Power growing with the weight. [William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 8]

Now, I think I see what CS Lewis is driving at here. The emotions—about Iona, London or the Spanish Main—are real. And the emotions, like Coleridge’s feeling about the waterfall, are appropriate to the places: they are exactly what a sensitive person ought to feel there, because the place is such as to merit those feelings. Such emotions can be used to sell holidays; they can also be the literal voice of God. If you are going to give your students examples of emotion being put to bad use, you ought to give a counterexample of it being put to good use: otherwise they might get the wrong end of the stick and think that it’s emotions themselves that you have an issue with. If you are going to review a terrible pantomime, tell your reader that there are good pantomimes as well. If you are going to pillory an awful atheist, remind us that some atheists are much less awful.

But this isn’t what he says. Rather he says that King and Ketley’s whole case against the advert is that it uses figurative expressions which aren’t literally true; and since Wordsworth and Johnson also use figurative language, Johnson’s Christianity and Wordsworth’s pantheism could just as easily be debunked. 

What, after all, can the history of early British Christianity, in pure reason, add to the motives for piety as they exist in the eighteenth century? Why should Mr. Wordsworth’s inn be more comfortable or the air of London more healthy because London has existed for a long time? [page 5]

But this is word salad. No-one has mentioned Wordsworth’s inn. You can’t get from “It is misleading to use the romance of English history to sell holidays” to “Wordsworth was wrong to think that the pang of joy which surprised him when he came to London was theologically significant”. If you said that, wouldn’t you also have to say that if Wordsworth truly felt that his emotions of weighty heaviness when he came to London were meaningful, it follows that there is a meaningful analogy between six weeks lolling in a deck chair in the Caribbean and a chest of Spanish doubloons? Lewis thinks it was a Good Thing that the Scottish landscape made Dr Johnson want to be a better Christian: but he would presumably have thought it a Bad Thing if it had been used by an advertiser to persuade him to buy a more expensive brand of porridge. 

Unless…  Could Lewis possibly be arguing that if an Englishman who had read the right books were to sail from modern Cartagena to modern Caracas, he might very well feel thrilled and liberated? And that those feelings would be ordinate and appropriate? And although he is really only on holiday, the dinners and the sightseeing might really feel special because he loves stories of the Spanish Main? That pint of beer I had in the Cavern Club was special to me because I had spent forty years reading about Merseybeat; and that remains true, even though it wasn’t the original Cavern, I hadn’t travelled back to the 1960s, and the guy playing Beatles covers wasn’t much good. 

But that would amount to a defence of the advert. We’d be reduced to saying that the 1935 newspaper was inferior to Wordsworth’s Prelude only insofar as there was a certain inelegance to the prose. And I am not even quite certain about that. I am far from sure that in purely formal terms, I could show that “a weight of ages did at once descend upon my heart” is superior to “ in new fitness of body, and new delight of mind, your treasure will be counted to you.”.

Thompson and King and Ketley have a wider point; and it is not one that Lewis seems to have noticed. We have just seen how easy it is for a salesman to use trigger words to make you suspend rational judgement: but it is just as easy for politicians and newspaper leader-writers to do the same trick. The message is not “emotions associated with places are contrary to reason”. The message is “since it is so easy to use emotions to sell boat trips, be very careful when demagogues use them to sell you dictatorships.”

One last point.

Thompson’s first chapter is a perfectly good introduction to literary criticism, albeit from a clearly Leavisite perspective. He is particularly good on the question of taste. Do we even need to criticise books, he asks: why can’t we just read them? And yes, he says, there are lots of books that you can just read, and enjoy as easily as “oysters and champagne”. But they are not likely to give lasting satisfaction. The more serious writers, that Mr Shakespeare for example, need to be read several times and contemplated; but they repay that additional work. You can’t prove that a book is good or bad with scientific rigour: taste does come into it. Some people might conclude that there is no accounting for taste and therefore no point in discussing literary merit to begin with.

Against this conclusion it must be argued that in the arts there are standards of truth and of value, but they are not hard and fast measures to be automatically applied. This argument will be readily accepted by anyone who holds that religious or philosophic beliefs supply the individual with a scale of values which he must apply for himself, and even those who do not hold any such beliefs must see that in every hour of our waking lives we are making choices on the assumption that one course of action is “better” than another. This is to say,  we are constantly operating a scale of values whether we are conscious of it or not. [page 14]

Ketley and King had definitely read Reading and Discrimination because they quote from it. They can’t radically disagree with it, or they wouldn’t use it. So here is one of the Green Book’s sources, taking it for granted that there is a system of value that all philosophies and religions hold in common and that even people who don’t have a faith tacitly accept. 

Perhaps we should give this scale of values a name. 

Maybe we should call it the Tao? 

Chapter 3, continued: The Poet, The Tourist and the Waterfall

In his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, A.J Ayer argued that all philosophical problems were really grammatical misunderstandings. If I say "Dogs are loyal" and "Unicorns are fictitious", you could be deceived into thinking that "dogs" and "unicorns" are entities of the same kind, and that "loyalty" and "fictitiousness" are qualities that they respectively possess. St Anselm very famously made this kind of mistake when he took the question “Does God exist?” to mean “Does entity A, God, possess quality B, existence?”; and to treat it as if it were the same kind of question as “Does entity C, a frog, possess quality D, greeness.”

It seems likely that King and Ketley had been reading Ayer. They warn readers that the phrases “this is brown” and “this is sublime” are grammatically similar, and that this could give rise to a misunderstanding. It is on this point that C.S Lewis’s case against the Control of Language chiefly rests: if this passage doesn’t precipitate the apocalypse, nothing will: 

We must, at this point, clear up a confusion which may already have puzzled you. We construct our sentences, our written or spoken speech, as if this distinction between emotive meaning and reference did not exist. When the man said, "That is sublime," he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall. The form of the sentence is exactly similar to the form of "That is brown," a sentence which does make a remark about the waterfall, about its colour. Actually, when the man said, "That is sublime," he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was, really, "I have feelings associated in my mind with the word “sublime," or, shortly, "I have sublime feelings." There is the same confusion, also, in the sentence, "It was a wonderful, beautiful, fire." And you will find that this confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something; and, actually, we are only saying something about our own feelings. We continually use emotive words, words with emotive meaning, as if they had a definite reference. [The Control of Language, page 19]

Lewis hyper-focuses on the phrase “sublime feelings". Before we have got to the bottom of page 1, he has told us that "the emotions which prompt the projections are the correlatives and therefore almost the opposites of the qualities projected" but that this is a pons asinorum of the subject.

The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration. If “This is sublime” is to be reduced at all to a statement about the speaker's feelings, the proper translation would be “I have humble feelings”. If the view held by Gaius and Titus were consistently applied it would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them to maintain that “You are contemptible” means “I have contemptible feelings", in fact that “Your feelings are contemptible” means “My feelings are contemptible." [Abolition of Man, page 1]

It is this kind of thing that makes as intelligent a writer as Alistair McGrath warn that Abolition of Man is a difficult book. It's probably forty years since I first read it, and I think I have come to see what Lewis was getting it. Suppose I was invited to a wedding, and suppose one of the other guests was a wheelchair user. Suppose I caught myself thinking “I hope I won’t be seated next to that disabled man at dinner”. I might very well then say to myself  "That is a despicable feeling". But if I wanted to describe the feeling itself, then I would have to say "I have superior feelings" or "I have bigoted feelings" or “I have feelings of irrational revulsion”. “Those are despicable feelings” actually means  "It is despicable that I am having those feelings" or "I despise myself for feeling that way" or, if you insist “I have self-contemptuous feelings”.  

If you showed me a photograph of your new pet, I might very well say “That kitten is cute”. I would not, on Lewis’s terms, be saying “I have cute feelings". I suppose that what I would be having would be maternal or affectionate or patronising feelings. If, on the other hand, I observed a small child presenting their schoolfellow with a Valentine card expressing life-long devotion, I might possibly say that the feelings the child was having were “cute feelings”—meaning that I felt that it was cute that the child felt that way. My own feelings would be those of motherliness or affection (towards what the child was feeling): the child’s feelings would be passionate or devoted or romantic. 

Lewis says that if you translate “This is sublime” into subjective language, it comes out as "I have feelings of veneration" or "I have humble feelings." King and Ketley say that Coleridge was describing  "feelings of awe, deeply felt pleasure, and a kind of profound and calm excitement". Bradley goes with  "astonishment, rapture, awe, even self-abasement”. The difference between the two viewpoints doesn’t seem insurmountable. But it’s the grammatical point which troubles Lewis. 

 Ketley and King's language certainly invites several possible misunderstandings. 

1: "I have feelings associated in my mind with the word sublime”

This could be taken to imply that Coleridge is being vague and inexact—as if he was waving his hands and gesturing towards some inchoate sublime vibes. But on King and Ketley's view all words derive significance from being "associated in the mind" with objects, concepts or feelings. “Associated in my mind” is a technically precise way of saying “represents”, “refers to” or simply “means”. 

2: "We use words with emotive meaning as if they had a definite reference" 

 “Those words don't have a definite reference" could be taken to mean “those words don’t have a clear meaning” or “those words are meaningless”—which again, would imply vagueness or lack of rigour. But “emotive meaning” and “definite reference” are being used in a defined technical sense. The claim is “the two kinds of meaning, referential and emotive, can sometimes be confused.”

3: "Actually we are only saying something about our own feelings" 

We use “only” to indicate that something is not very important: “It is only a minor injury” or  “He is only an amateur”. But we also use it to mean “one thing in particular and not anything else”: “Vegetarians only eat plants”;  “I only smoke on special occasions”; “Only kings live in palaces”. So “We are only talking about our feelings" does not necessarily mean "We are talking about feelings, as opposed to something important.” It might mean “Some words in some context refer solely to feelings and not to anything else as well.”

4 "We appear to be saying something… about something, we are really only saying something about our own feelings."

The opposite of something is “nothing”. King and Ketley don't mean that when we say the fire is wonderful, we are saying nothing. And they don’t mean that when Coleridge said that he was experiencing deep pleasure and awe, he was saying nothing. I think that when they say “something” they may really mean some thing—some physical object rather than some intangible concept. "We appear to be saying something about some thing but we are really only talking about our feelings" means  “Some words appear to refer to an object and also to a feeling, when in fact, they refer to a feeling alone.”

But Lewis isn’t particularly interested in what the text means. He doesn’t care what Ketley and King intended it to mean. What worries him is the way it is likely to be misunderstood. He may, indeed, be deliberately misunderstanding it himself to demonstrate how easy it would be for someone less clever than him to get caught out. (He does that sometimes: addressing theology students on the subject of modernist Biblical criticism, he says directly “Though I may have nothing but misunderstandings to lay before you, you ought to know that such misunderstandings exist.” It is clear from the lecture that he actually understood Bultman very well.) 

His allegation is that a student reading the sentence “We appear to be saying something very important about something; and, actually, we are only saying something about our own feelings” will understand it to mean “All value judgements are subjective and therefore insignificant.”

The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant. It is true that Gaius and Titius have said neither of these things in so many words. They have treated only one particular predicate of value (sublime) as a word descriptive of the speaker's emotions. The pupils are left to do for themselves the work of extending the same treatment to all predicates of value: and no slightest obstacle to such extension is placed in their way. The authors may or may not desire the extension: they may never have given the question five minutes’ serious thought in their lives. I am not concerned with what they desired but with the effect their book will certainly have on the schoolboy's mind. In the same way, they have not said that judgements of value are unimportant. Their words are that we "appear to be saying something very important" when in reality we are "only saying something about our own feelings". No schoolboy will be able to resist the suggestion brought to bear upon him by that word “only”. [page 3] 

An English text book might contain buried assumptions. King and Ketley might be trying to plant the seeds of logical positivism and moral relativism into kids’ heads while teaching them essay technique. Evangelicals used to complain that text books which were meant to be teaching the science of evolution said things like “evolution proves that human beings are really only monkeys” or “evolution teaches that humans are insignificant”: they felt  that religious and philosophical ideas unrelated to science were being smuggled in under the radar.

A co-religionist once told Lewis that it was a Christian critic's job to “lay bare the false values of contemporary culture”. Lewis said this might mean "to expose the falsity of the values of contemporary culture" or alternatively  "to reveal what the values of contemporary culture actually are, and by the way, I personally think those values false”. Lewis agreed that an expert in Lit Crit might be particularly good at revealing what the underlying values of a text actually were; but that he was no more qualified than anyone else to say if they were true values or false values. And it was dishonest to be paid as a professional critic and offer your services as an amateur moralist. On another occasion, he said that what the world needed most was not more books of Christian apologetics, but more good books about science and history and architecture written by people who happened to be Christians: with their Christianity implicit, or, as he put it, latent. 

It is perfectly valid to assert that a text book has latent values or buried assumptions or unexamined premises. But Lewis offers no close reading of the Control of Language. He doesn’t summarise the book’s main argument. If you have only read CS Lewis, you would have no way of knowing that Ketley and King are trying to explain the semantic triangle in the language of fifth formers; or that they believe in the  associative theory of language, or that the distinction between reference and emotive meaning is at the heart of their argument. 

Elsewhere, talking about dirty books and scary stories, Lewis said that it is notoriously difficult to predict what will inflame or terrify a child. But he claims that he can know with certainty the effect that a particular sentence in a text book will have on the readers, in the same way that he knows that educating children according to Ketley and King’s precepts ”must”—not “might” or “could” but “must—lead to the extinction of human civilisation.  

It is tempting to say that Lewis was trying to invent deconstruction twenty years early. Take a marginal, secondary, word or phrase. Make that the centre of the text. Interpret the text on the basis of this new centre. Demonstrate that the text now contradicts itself. Rinse and repeat.  

 "We appear to be saying something very important about something; and, actually, we are only saying something about our own feelings." 

Appear/important/only. 

Checkmate.

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.

www.patreon.com/rilstone

Arts Diary: Shadowlands

Arts Diary: Shadowlands:  Aldywich, London

Chapter 3: The Poet, The Tourist, and the Waterfall

In 1943, C.S Lewis published a series of four lectures on the subject of moral realism. His point of departure was a school textbook which he accuses of promoting moral relativism. To avoid upsetting its authors unduly, he refers to it as The Green Book.

"The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book" he warns “Must be the destruction of the society which accepts it." 

[C.S Lewis, The Abolition of Man, page 1]

Readers may not be entirely surprised to learn that Lewis's Green Book and my Australian English Textbook are one and the same. The book is actually called The Control of Language, and the authors, who Lewis cryptically refers to as Gaius and Titus, were named Alec King and Martin Ketley. Both were British by birth and both were Oxford graduates; but both had spent their adult lives in Australia. King was a professor of English at Monash University near Melbourne; and Ketley taught English at a prestigious private school in Adelaide. 

Lewis's quarrel with King and Ketley may be fairly simply stated. According to Lewis, The Control of Language takes for granted that if you say that something is "pretty" you are not talking about the thing itself, but stating how you feel about it. If this is correct, then it must apply in all cases. Whenever we call something pretty or ugly or beautiful or good, we are only projecting our own emotions on to the object. "Murder is wicked" means no more than "I personally dislike murder" —no more, indeed, than "When I read about murder I experience feelings which I happen to dislike." So why not raise children to believe that murder is good? What is to stop future educators, if it ever becomes convenient, from training infants in such a way that they had beautiful, happy thoughts when they contemplated Jack the Ripper?

*

The first thing that Lewis takes issue with is Ketley and King's treatment of an anecdote concerning the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

Here is Lewis's opening salvo: 

In their second chapter Gaius and Titus quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it “sublime” and the other “pretty”; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust.

[C.S Lewis, Page 1]

Here are King and Ketley themselves: 

This is a story told by Coleridge: he was standing with a group of tourists beside a waterfall, and, after a silence, one of the men in the party said, "That is sublime." Coleridge felt that “sublime" was exactly the right word. And then one of the women in the party added "Yes, it is pretty," and Coleridge turned away in disgust, feeling that "pretty" was exactly the wrong word.

[Alex King and Martin Ketley, The Control of Language, page 17]

Ketley and King have just introduced their readers to the distinction between reference and emotive meaning: that is the title of this second chapter. Reference is for them a technical word: they tell their students that it is part of an “official jargon”. They argue that expostulations ("wow!"), swearwords ("damn!") and gesture words ("good morning") have emotive meaning but no reference. Scientific and technical words, on the other hand, have reference but no emotive meaning, although they may acquire the latter with use. 

They then turn to a problematic case. There are, they think, two kinds of adjectives. Words like "big" and "green" have a reference: they refer to a quality in the object, and can therefore be judged "correct" or "incorrect". (It would be simply incorrect to say that the sky was green.) Words like  "pretty" and "good", on the other hand do not have a reference because they do not refer to a quality. You might think that I was wrong to say that the sky was beautiful today, but you couldn’t say that I was, in the defined sense, incorrect. The claim is that “sublime” and “pretty”  are in the second category. 

The waterfall story comes originally from Dorothea Wordsworth's diary: and her version differs substantially from King and Ketley's paraphrase. 

A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. 

“Yes, sir," says Coleridge, "it is a majestic waterfall." 

“Sublime and beautiful," replied his friend.

 Poor Coleridge could make no answer, and, not very desirous to continue the conversation, came to us and related the story, laughing heartily.

[Dorothea Wordsworth, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, AD 1803, first published 1874. Second Week, Sunday August 21s.]

In this original version, it isn’t Coleridge who thinks the waterfall is sublime, it is the tourist. The lady doesn’t participate in the conversation; no one mentions the word “pretty”; and Coleridge isn’t disgusted with the tourist's opinion—he finds it funny.

Eighteenth and nineteenth century aesthetes spent a great deal of time worrying about the precise distinction between these kinds of words. Edmund Burke wrote an entire book, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Sublime and Beautiful, explaining the distinction. This is why Coleridge laughs at the tourist's howler. He and William Wordsworth (the poet, Dorothea's brother) have spent all afternoon trying to establish a philosophical distinction between the very words which the tourist has used interchangeably. 

The disagreement, then, is about the use of language. Coleridge had been considering "the precise meaning of the words" and felt that the tourist had first of all chosen an "accurate epithet" to describe the waterfall. Ketley and King's "exactly the right word" is a perfectly good paraphrase. 

Why do the details of Ketley and King's version of the story differ from Wordsworth's original: and why doesn’t Lewis point this out? In 1909, an Oxford Poetry professor named A.C Bradley, had published an essay which, like Burke, sought to draw fine distinctions between words like  “pretty”, “beautiful” and “sublime”. Like Ketley and King, he takes the Coleridge story as his jumping off point: 

Coleridge used to tell a story about his visit to the Falls of Clyde; but he told it with such variations that the details are uncertain, and without regard to truth I shall change it to the shape that suits my purpose best.

[AC Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, “The Sublime”]

The "used to tell" part is a little puzzling. Coleridge died some twenty years before Bradley was born, so he can't be relying on oral testimony; but I can't track down any written source outside Dorothea Wordsworth's journals.  

After gazing at the Falls for some time, he began to consider what adjective would answer most precisely to the impression he had received; and he came to the conclusion that the proper word was “sublime”. Two other tourists arrived, and, standing by him, looked in silence at the spectacle. Then, to Coleridge's high satisfaction, the gentleman exclaimed, "It is sublime”. To which the lady responded, "Yes, it is the prettiest thing I ever saw”.

So Bradley also thinks that the story is about vocabulary. Coleridge is looking for the "precise" adjective; and the "proper" word. “Exactly the right word” would be another way of putting it. And the problem, again, is that the lady thinks she is agreeing with Coleridge. She thinks that “pretty” and “sublime” are synonyms; just as the man in the original story thought that “sublime” meant the same thing as “majestic”.  

It is worth summarising how the story mutates: 

What was Coleridge looking for?

Wordsworth: "The accuracy of the epithet" "the precise meaning of the word"

Bradley: "Which adjective would answer most precisely the impression which he had received" "the proper word"

Ketley/King: "Exactly the right word" 

What was the difference of opinion?

Wordsworth: "Yes, it is a Majestic waterfall" / “Sublime and beautiful."

Bradley: "It is Sublime" / "Yes, it is the prettiest thing I ever saw."

Ketley & King: "That is sublime" / "Yes it is pretty"

Lewis: "One called it sublime"/"The other called it pretty"

How did Coleridge react? 

Wordsworth: “He related the story, laughing heartily"

Bradley: “Her incapacity was ludicrous"

Ketley and King: “He turned away in disgust"

Lewis: “He rejected the judgment with disgust"

When Lewis says that the story of the waterfall is well-known, I think he means that Bradley's essay is well known. Very few general readers in 1943 would have been familiar with Dorothea Wordsworth’s journals; but Bradley's lectures would have been widely read. (His Shakespearean Tragedy is a standard work even today.) It seems clear that The Control of Language relies on Bradley’s lecture, not on Wordsworth’s diaries. (There are two tourists, the words at issue are pretty and sublime.) And it seems equally clear that Lewis is following King and Ketley without going back to Bradley. (Lewis says that Coleridge felt disgust, a word that Ketley and King have introduced.) 

But Lewis makes one substantive change to the story. The three other versions are agreed that the dispute is about vocabulary; about choosing “exactly the right word.” In Lewis’s version, what Coleridge disputes is the lady’s judgment. He thought, in King and Ketley’s sense, that she had said something incorrect. 

Here is the first part of Ketley and King's commentary on the  story. 

Why did Coleridge think the one word was exactly right, and the other exactly wrong? Obviously not because the one adjective described correctly, as we say, a quality of the water or the rocks or the landscape, and the other adjective described this quality incorrectly. It is not as if the man had said "That is brown" (referring, say, to the water) and the woman (also referring to the water) had added, "Yes, it is green”. No, Coleridge thought “sublime" exactly the right word, because it was associated in his mind with the emotion he was himself feeling as he looked at the waterfall in its setting of rock and landscape; and he thought "pretty" exactly the wrong word, because it was associated with feelings quite different from those he was actually feeling at the time, and with feelings that, to his way of thinking, no sensitive person would ever have while looking at such a sight.

[Page 17]

So: objects have qualities, such as size and colour; and statements about those qualities can be correct or incorrect. This is a perfectly coherent claim. If I said "the elephant is small" you might say that I was incorrect.  But if I said "the elephant is funny" you could only say that you disagreed with me; that the elephant was not funny to you. 

And here, I think, is the whole of Lewis's quarrel with the Green Book.

King and Ketley do not think that "prettiness" or "funniness" or "wonderfulness" or “sublimity" are (in their technical sense) qualities. Lewis thinks they are. King and Ketley think that "Elephants are big" and "Elephants are funny" are different kinds of statement. Lewis thinks they are statements of the same kind. 

Ketley and King equivocate on this point. When they first tell the story, they say that Coleridge “felt that pretty was exactly the wrong word”. When they repeat it, they said that he “thought that pretty was exactly the wrong word” and add that the lady’s feelings are “feelings which to his way of thinking no sensitive person would ever feel.” If you are going to draw a philosophical distinction between thoughts and feelings, it would be better not to use “feel” as a synonym for “think”. 

And the anecdote is not, in fact, very apt for the point they are making. When philosophers and aesthetes wrote about sublimity, they did, in fact, write about emotion. According to Edmund Burke, humans have two basic needs—for sex and companionship, and for self-preservation. We have one set of feelings when we see an attractive lady (or, presumably, a handsome gentleman) and a different set of feelings when we see a ferocious tiger. Objects which are analogous to pretty ladies—flowers and birds and delicate paintings—make us feel nice feelings; big things like mountains and volcanoes and waterfalls that could potentially hurt us make us feel nasty feelings. But the sensations we experience when we look at a dangerous thing from a safe distance can, in fact, be pleasantly exciting or thrilling. Things which give us one kind of feeling (e.g oil paintings) we call “beautiful”; things which give us the other kind (e.g waterfalls) we call “sublime” 

This raises philosophical questions about whether we call objects sublime because we experience pleasantly terrifying sensations when we look at them; or whether we happen to experience pleasantly terrifying sensations when we look at things which have the innate quality of sublimity.  The hymn writer Joseph Addison argued that God so created humans that they would take pleasure in looking at things which did in fact have the quality of "beauty"—and would have had that quality even if no humans had ever existed to look at them. He thought that human beings were created to take pleasure in the contemplation of God, who is the biggest and most terrifying thing that it is possible to imagine; and that God kindly put waterfalls and volcanoes onto the earth as a means for them to experience an analogous numinous awe. 

Andrew Wilton’s catalogue for a 1981 exhibition called “Turner and the Sublime” is concerned with neither C.S Lewis nor S.T Coleridge, although it does contain several paintings of waterfalls. Quoting a 1805 essay by one Payne-Knight, he writes: 

“All sublime feelings are…feelings of exultation and expansion of the mind tending to rapture and enthusiasm.”  

[Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime, p10.]*

Now, that is an interesting turn of phrase: “sublime feelings”. 

King and Ketley's second example (which Lewis doesn’t quote) makes their point rather more clearly. They ask the reader to compare the phrases "a big, red fire" and "a wonderful, beautiful fire”. Most of us would agree that “red” describes a quality that the fire itself may or may not have; but “wonderful” refers to the speaker's feelings about the fire. 

But they also acknowledge a difficulty. If I speak of a "wonderful fire" you will probably think of the kind of fire that you think that I would think is wonderful: say, one that's giving off a lot of heat, is under control and not too smoky. And you, like me, are very probably imagining a camp fire, complete with sausages, boy scouts and guitars. A 1940s Australian student would have been more likely to think of a roaring coal fire in a domestic house. If I were a psychotic arsonist (which, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not) then a "wonderful, beautiful fire" might mean something very different indeed! 

So, on King and Ketley’s terms, "wonderful" does have both a reference and an emotive meaning. If I call a horse "beautiful" I am probably saying that the horse has a set of measurable qualities that people who know about horses regard as desirable; and also that I myself am experiencing pleasure from looking at them. 

But now we come to a difficulty which has, I think, up to now been overlooked. King and Ketley say that when the lady declared the waterfall to be pretty, Coleridge “turned away in disgust”. And Lewis repeats this. Coleridge “rejected the judgement with disgust”. 

But disgust is an emotion. 

It is, in fact, a gut feeling. It bypasses the brain altogether. We don't feel disgusted by a pile of dog mess because we think it is unhealthy: if anything, we know that it is unhealthy because we find it physically repellent. It requires some intellectual effort to override the feeling: I feel that rotting food is disgusting, but I think that it is my duty to do the recycling and I believe I will suffer no ill-effect if I wash my hands afterwards. Dog owners and people with babies are particularly good at suppressing feelings of disgust towards human and animal waste. The feeling is distinct from the belief.

Do the authors of the Control of Language envisage Coleridge recoiling from the insensitive lady as he might have recoiled from something a cow had deposited in the adjoining field? Do they say "Coleridge appeared to be saying something about the lady's feelings towards the waterfall: really he was only describing the state of his own gut?" Come to that, does Lewis accuse them of reducing a subtle distinction between beauty and sublimity to the level of a nasty smell? Or did he think that the lady's aesthetic misjudgement had the objective quality of disgustingness in the same way the sky has the objective quality of blueness?

Lewis states that 

The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more “just” or “ordinate” or “appropriate” to it than others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same. The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions.

[page 9]

But King and Ketley have stated: 

 Pretty was exactly the wrong word, because it was associated with feelings quite different from those he was actually feeling at the time, and with feelings that, to his way of thinking, no sensitive person would ever have while looking at such a sight.

[page 17]

How, exactly, do these claims differ? For King and Ketley, Coleridge felt disgust because he thought that what the lady felt about the waterfall was inappropriate. Lewis says that Coleridge and the tourist both believed that the waterfall was such that it deserved particular feelings more than others; that some feelings were “just” or “appropriate” and some were “unjust” and “inappropriate”.

I suppose “no sensitive person would have those feelings when looking at this thing” is a weaker claim than “this thing is such that those emotions are appropriate to it.” I suppose that “he felt this was the wrong word” and “to his way of thinking the feelings were wrong” are weaker claims than “the word and the feelings were in fact, objectively, wrong.” 

But it’s a very fine distinction: not one likely to lead to the end of human civilisation.

But C.S Lewis hasn’t yet deployed his biggest guns.

[*] The quotes from Addison also come from the Turner catalogue.

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.

www.patreon.com/rilstone

Arts Diary: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Arts Diary: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: So: I saw the new Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy stage show, at the Riverside Theatre in Hammersmith. I didn’t know quite what to make of i...

Arts Diary: Wuthering Heights

Arts Diary: Wuthering Heights: I have seen the future of cinema, and it is Jacob Elordi, looking sexy and simmering; and Owen Cooper looking winsome, forever. It is classi...

Chapter 2: The Meaning of the Meaning of Meaning

The Australian Textbook that I am reading for no particular reason begins, rather ambitiously, by explaining “what language is”.

It is easy to think that words are a kind of telepathy: when I speak, a thought is magically transferred from my mind into your mind. And for centuries, most people uncritically assumed that particular words had simple one-to-one correspondences with particular things. Something in the nature of a lion required it to be called “lion”; the study or contemplation of the word “lion” could uncover truths about leonine nature. We would now call that kind of thinking magical, or indeed, superstitious. 

What actually happens is that we associate a particular sound or a particular written sign with a particular thing because we have learned to do so. And the symbol doesn’t refer directly to the thing; it refers to a concept or idea in our mind. 

I think of a “cat”, and I make the sound that I have learned to associate with that thought. You hear the sound, and you have the thought that you have learned to associate with that sound. Your thought and my thought won’t necessarily be precisely the same. I might be thinking of a scraggy alley cat and you might be thinking of a smart siamese. I might be thinking of a fierce creature that lives in the jungle and bites people’s legs off, while you are thinking of a small domestic pet that lives on the sofa and meows for milk. And it is just possible that (due to some terrible defect in your education) you’ve learned to associate the “cat” sound with an animal which barks, catches sticks and needs to be taken for walkies. But most of the time, the cat in my head and the cat in your head are similar enough to the particular small furry mammal that we are discussing that tolerably good communication can occur. 

But sounds and symbols aren’t only associated with thoughts: they are also associated with feelings. When I hear “cat” I might feel the warm, fuzzy emotions associated with a cute fluffy house pet; but you might feel the unpleasant, fearful emotions associated with the scary jungle predator. 

Words, therefore, have both a reference and an emotive content. “Cat”, “moggie” and “puss” refer to the same, or very nearly the same, creature; but they are associated with different feelings. If I say “The moggie sat on the Axminster” I am not only telling you what I am thinking of; I am also telling you how you should feel about it. If I say “A Felix catus individual reposed on a domestic floor covering” I am telling you to feel something else.  

Some words, like expostulations and expletives, are primarily emotional: they express what the speaker is feeling and how they want the listener to feel and nothing else. Some words, like scientific words, endeavour to exclude emotional resonances. But it is never, in fact, possible to exclude them altogether. “Half-inch reversible ratchet socket driver” might have strong emotional associations if you happened to know that one was used as a murder weapon. Or if you recently dropped one on your foot. 

This is not a glitch or a bug, but a basic truth about how language works. Words are not like road signs or military trumpet calls that can be simply decoded; they are fuzzy packages of multiple thoughts and multiple feelings.

According to the Australian Textbook: 

In general, it may be said that the more a word is used in all kinds of contexts, the larger becomes the cluster of ideas and feelings associated with it; that is to say, the richer become its reference and its emotive meaning. [page 22]

Reading and writing are therefore not passive activities, but things you have to engage in actively.  A good reader has to consciously apply his mind to a text “so that his mind will automatically neglect the irrelevant associations and emotive meanings of the words [the writer] uses” [p37] . A good writer has to put words together in such a way that the reader will pick the correct ideas and feelings from the cluster which hover around the symbols. 

It is possible, in fact, to control the meaning of a word by the context we put it into; or, to put it more accurately, it is possible to rouse, in the reader’s mind, only the relevant part of the meaning of a word with wide and vague reference, by putting the word in a certain place in a sentence and associating with it certain other words.[p38]

Meaning is not something that words intrinsically have, but something that the writer must actively control. A good writer thinks about his subject “with active concentration” and a good reader “concentrates on what [the writer] is writing about”. 

Far from magically transferring thoughts from one head to another, reading and writing start to sound like awfully hard work. 

The writers of the Australian School Textbook acknowledge that their “associative” theory of language derives from The Meaning of Meaning by CK Ogden and IA Richards. It’s a famously obscure text: the story goes that another don tried to elucidate it in a series of lectures entitled “The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of Meaning”. Inevitably, some undergrads produced a crib sheet called “The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of “The Meaning of Meaning”’”. Along with Richard’s equally impenetrable Practical Criticism, the book was a cornerstone of what became known as New Criticism. For New Critics, reading a poem was not a matter of decoding it to arrive at a singular meaning; nor a matter of ascertaining what the author intended by it. Rather, the job of the critic is to attentively study the words on the page, and try to understand what they mean in that particular context. The ideal New Critic eschewed historical and biographical context, and attempted a close reading of the text, the whole text and nothing but the text. The Australian Textbook is a valiant attempt to translate the ideas of Ogden and Richards into the language of contemporary Australian fifth formers, and to initiate schoolboys into the mysteries of close reading. 

But the authors are not Gradgrindians. They don’t claim that the referential meaning of a word is its only meaning, or even its primary meaning. They don’t tell students to exclude emotional elements from their essays. They don’t suggest that a factual paraphrase of a poem is what the poem really means. At no point do they say that figures of speech are valueless because they are not factually correct. But they do say that it is important to distinguish between reference and emotional content and that purely emotional writing is likely to be content-free.

The point is that, in some kinds of writing, the words with clearest reference and little emotive meaning are the most useful; whereas, in other kinds of writing, the words with as rich an emotive meaning as possible are the most useful. In some kinds of writing it is important to emphasise the emotive meaning of the words; in other kinds of writing it is important to suppress it as much as possible.[p24]

Their examples are pretty sound. They imagine a technical manual written in strongly emotional language: “Take a piece of wire coloured a delightful warm red, in size about the height of a dear little child of two…” and rightly say that if you came across that kind of thing in real life you’d think the writer had gone crazy. But they also invite the student to translate a passage of Keats’ poetry into scientific language so that “Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, and threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast” becomes “right through the window shone the moon and made red spots on Jane’s uncoloured chest.” 

Some people might regard this as an improvement. Some people—my O level English teacher, for one—might even say that the paraphrase is what the poem really means. The Australian Textbook is quite clear that the whole point of poetry (or, at any rate “seventy five per cent of its meaning”) comes from the emotive content of the words. That’s what you would expect disciples of Ogden and Richards to say. Another New Critic, Cleanthe Brooks, famously wrote an essay entitled The Heresy of Paraphrase. You can’t say exactly the same thing in different words. Poetry is what gets lost in translation. 

The Australian Textbook is particularly concerned about the use of language in advertising and propaganda. Of course, such writing arouses feelings on the part of the reader: that is the point of it. The problem is when writers use language which has an emotive meaning but no reference: language which sets out to make the reader feel good about a candidate or a product without saying anything about them. 

So, they quote a (fictional) election pamphlet: 

“The freedom of the citizen is what we aim at, freedom from enemies abroad, freedom from the dictatorship of a bureaucracy at home, freedom from wanton force, freedom of speech and thought, freedom of action. Only by voting for us will you secure for yourselves that liberty without which life is stifled in the chains of tyranny.”[p58]

And they quote an equally hypothetical letter to a newspaper: 

“The building of this cinema is an exasperating piece of futility. It is an outrage, an insult. The design of the proposed building is atrociously ugly, a design which no decent-minded citizen could possibly accept….”[p79]

And finally, an actual newspaper report of a riot: 

“As the representative proceeded by car ahead of the libertines he saw a foreign establishment being closed—as a precaution against the maddened mob, intoxicated by their excesses and hoarse in voice by the shouting of the night.” [p113]

In each case, they assert that the passage tells the reader what emotions to feel without telling them why they should feel that way; or indeed, what they should feel them about. 

The political pamphlet depends heavily on the word “freedom”. But freedom can mean lots of different things. Does the candidate mean that everyone should be allowed to do exactly what they want at all times? When he talks about “freedom of speech” does he mean that he wants to abolish the laws of libel, blasphemy and obscenity? If so, why doesn’t he say that, and explain why he thinks it would be a good idea? The writers of the textbook make a valid argument that in the context of the pamphlet, “freedom” has no reference: it is there only because it has positive emotional associations. Possibly a trifle cynically they say that if the party had a coherent programme, the candidate would lay it out without recourse to emotional language: indeed, if political parties differed from each other on substantive points, there would be no need for political pamphlets in the first place.

They make essentially the same criticism about the bad letter to the newspaper. We can tell that the writer is cross, but not what he is cross about. Presumably, they have particular objections to this particular cinema being built in this particular place, but they haven’t told anyone what those objections are. They have merely “called the cinema names”.

The writers of the textbook propose the following improvement: 

The building of this cinema is an insult to the community, and to each member as a democratic citizen and as a lover of orderly civic convenience. The design of the Proposed building, with its exasperating false facade, its futile “birthday cake” decoration, and its mean, ill-proportioned structure, is in ugly contrast to the plain, unpretentious, houses that will surround it with their gardens and lawns and trees. This suburb has always been one of the most attractively quiet and orderly suburbs in the city; and to plant in the middle of it a preposterous building of this sort, with its irritating noise and confusion of traffic, is outrageous.[p80]

They haven’t translated the letter into scientific prose: this isn’t anything like the poetry-free Keats exercise. The indignation is very much part of the meaning of the text. But in their new version, the anger arises from, and applies to, something in particular. And there is some hope that this ire will be transferred to the person reading it. 

Turning to the report of the riot, they don’t complain that the journalist is factually inaccurate. And they don’t object to the use of figurative or hyperbolic language. (Presumably, the rioters are not literally mad; and they may not even be literally intoxicated.) Their problem is with the lack of “clear, particular, and individual feelings” and the presence of “vague, general, commonplace sentiments”. 

The reporter did not see anything in particular or feel anything in particular. If you really see a certain building, you do not call it a ‘foreign establishment’; but (say) “a ham and beef shop kept by a perspiring Greek.” [p113]

They contrast this report with an article in the Left Review describing a skirmish in the Spanish civil war:

The door collapses, and the bedrooms, saloons and corridors are choked with frenzied men, swinging at Fascists with chairs, bars of iron, knives and rifle-butts. Fascists are flung bodily out of windows, or down lift shafts, or driven into a lavatory; a bomb is pitched in after them.[p114]

If anything, the journalist’s bad writing is a moral or personal defect. If the reporter at the riot scene had known his job, he would have observed specific details, like the war reporter, who bothers to observe that the fascists are blown up in a toilet rather than, say, a kitchen. 

And, if you are a good reporter and can really see things in particular, there is really no need for you to pepper “sensational” (sensation-rousing) words, for the picture of the “things in particular” will itself rouse, in your reader, the appropriate feelings. [p114]

To its credit, the textbook doesn’t turn this principle into a dogma. The authors put Shakespeare’s lines about the Princes in the Tower alongside Hollinshed’s chronicle, and note that both are very effective pieces of emotional writing, even though Hollinshed shows the reader what happened, where Shakespeare tells the reader how to feel about it. 

The proportion of emotive words in the first passage is small, and yet the description is intensely moving. Shakespeare, on the other hand, does not give us a picture of the incident; he moves our pity and anger by means of the highly emotive words he uses.[p108]

And they don’t even rule language that is purely emotional out of court. They cite a wonderful piece of invective by George Bernard Shaw telling the world why Shakespeare is rubbish:  

“It is for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and judged in point of thought by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all endurance.”

Shaw hasn’t, in fact, given any particular reason why he doesn’t think much of Cymbeline. But he doesn’t need to: Shakespeare is such a sacred cow; and Shaw such a famous contrarian, that pure invective may make the point better than rational argument.

As long as Shakespeare is an object of idolatry and not of understanding, a person to be reverently talked about, not passionately enjoyed, so long will it be necessary for people like Bernard Shaw to knock him off his pedestal. And perhaps calling Shakespeare names is as good a method as any other of doing this. [p82]

I carry no particular brief for the Australian Textbook. It was published in 1939 and is very clearly of its time. Some of the asides feel as if they have been fossilised in amber. “That Shirley Temple is a duck” is given as an example of a simile (and a legitimate use of slang). Assembling a wireless set is repeatedly used as an example of a commonplace practical task. “The Jews should be expelled from Germany” and “Corporal punishment should be abolished” are both treated as subjects that students might try to write both-sides pros-and-cons essays about. A passage which says that Japanese people are like ants is critiqued for its use of mixed metaphor, but not for its racism. The tone veers from the rather-too-academic to the positively patronising, as if the writers were being forced to talk down to schoolboys when they really wanted to be back at Oxford doing close readings with Dr Richards. 

I am not entirely sure that the distinction between reference and emotive meaning is sufficient to carry a whole thesis. I think that close reading is on the whole a good thing; but that if you read too closely, you can start seeing things which aren’t there. Apparently, when Edmund Burke wrote about “the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult, to the shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty” the “thumping and laboured rhythm” suggested what was described by the words. When he says “they are the display of inconsiderate and presumptuous, because unresisted and irresistible authority” “the rhythm and sound of the… sentence lend weight to the feelings of angry disgust which the words are communicating.”[p73] I am not sure if they do. And even if they do, I am not quite sure whether students will be able to reverse-engineer good writing from this kind of ultra-close critical analysis. “I must try to make the rhythm of my words reflect the emotions I am feeling” could be an excellent way of inducing writers’ block. 

The Australian English Textbook tends to depict writers and poets as a special class of person, a person you can aspire to be as opposed to a skill you can learn. If you want to write good journalism, become the sort of person who notices things; and if you want to be a poet; be sensitive to your own feelings. Maybe. I tend to think of writers and poets as chaps with a knack for putting words in interesting orders. But the Australian writers are probably following their mentor: for all his quasi-scientific rigour, I.A Richards was also inclined to talk about Poets with a capital P, and Poems as a special kind of object that invoke unique and uniquely valuable psychological states in the reader.

The wide range of texts used as examples seems to be wholly admirable. Hollinshed, Lawrence, Burke, Auden, Shakespeare are put alongside passages from the Left Review and the New Statesmen and newspaper movie review columns. The literary judgments, though sometimes reductive and repetitive, seem valid and useful. And the questions for discussion seem genuinely challenging. There is a certain affable pedagogic personality in the narrative voice, which I rather enjoyed. I was quite sorry to say goodbye to the writers when I came to the end.

It is not a great book by any means; but it is not a terrible book either. I would not be talking about it at all if, in 1943, a fellow of Magdalene College Oxford had not accused the authors of disseminating an ideology which, left unchecked, would literally lead to the annihilation of the human race. 

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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