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

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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.

www.patreon.com/rilstone

Chapter 1: War: What is It Good For?

 Chapter 1 - War: what is it good for?

For no particular reason, I have been reading a 1939 Australian school English text book. 

At the end of the first chapter I found the following:

EXERCISES AND SUBJECTS FOR DISCUSSION

Beverley Nichols has suggested that if we are to think properly about war as it waged today, we should drop the word "war" and substitute the word "mass-murder" because the meaning of "war" for most people is inappropriate to what is actually done by armies to-day. Do you agree with this? And what is the meaning you give to the word "war"? [p12]

I don't know how I would have tackled the question at the age of 15, but this is what I would say about it today.

*

If the word "murder" means "killing", then "mass murder" simply means the killing of a lot of people at the same time (as opposed to "serial murder" which means the killing of a lot of people one after the other). So to say that war is synonymous with mass murder is to say that many people are killed in wars. This is true, but so obvious as to be hardly worth saying. 

But if "murder" means "unlawful killing" then we run into problems. A soldier who kills another soldier under orders from a superior officer is not acting unlawfully: indeed, he would be committing an offence if he refused to do so. So the claim that "war is unlawful killing on a large scale" is simply false.

So perhaps when Mr Nichols wrote "war is mass murder" he meant "war ought to be mass murder": a soldier who kills another soldier (in a just and lawful war under orders from a legitimate superior) ought to be subject to the same criminal penalties as a private citizen who kills another citizen in a private quarrel. But to the best of my knowledge, no-one has ever proposed this. There are such things as war-crimes; and there are often demands for reparations at the end of hostilities; but I have never heard anyone argue that individual enemy combatants should be tried in civilian courts. 

I don't think Mr Nichols was using the word figuratively. I don't think he was suggesting that we say "The Battle of the Somme was murder" in the way a motorist might say "The M25 was murder this afternoon!" Nor do I think he was saying "The soldiers in the next war are going to murder each other" in the sense that a teenager might say "When Dad finds I took his cigarettes, he's going to murder me."

Vegetarians occasionally wear badges saying "Meat is murder!" I am pretty sure they are not saying that they think that eating meat involves the premeditated unlawful killing of human beings. They don't literally think that non-vegetarians are cannibals. Neither do I think they are seriously proposing that meat ought to be murder. Even the extremist does not say that anyone who has at any time wrung the neck of a chicken ought to get twenty years to life in prison, and that a customer who frequents KFC should be charged as an accessory. 

After the exoneration of Derek Bentley, his surviving relatives proposed carving "Murdered by the British government" on his gravestone. I don't think that they literally thought that the judge, the home secretary or the hangman ought to have been charged and jailed in a court of law. It is theoretically possible that if individual police officers could be shown to have given false testimony under oath at a capital trial, they could have been charged with murder, but I don't think that was the point the survivors wanted to make.

It is possible that some anti-abortion activists do, in fact, think that a woman who takes an emergency contraceptive pill, a doctor who prescribes it and a pharmacist who supplies it are literally guilty of the same offence that Lucy Letby was convicted of, and should be punished by life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Donald Trump has used the term "execution" to refer to late-term abortion although he wouldn't apply the word “murder” to actual executions.

But in general "abortion is murder", "meat is murder", and "capital punishment is murder" are vivid ways of saying “we do not approve of abortion”, “we do not approve of meat eating" and “we do not approve of the death penalty”. So perhaps “War is mass murder" is nothing more than a vivid way of saying "I disapprove of war." 

As a matter of fact, the authors of the 1939 Australian School English text book which I happened to be reading for no particular reason have misquoted Beverley Nichols. .The phrase he actually suggested adopting when we have deleted the word "war" from the dictionary is “the mass murder of civilians." 

But if anything, this makes matters worse. If by "civilians" he means "people" then all he is saying is that many people are killed in war. Which we already knew. But if by "civilians" he means "people who are not soldiers" then he is trying to have his cake and eat it. The distinction between soldiers and civilians is a matter of great legal and moral significance—in war. From the medieval law of arms to the Geneva conventions it has been generally agreed that soldiers may lawfully kill each other in lawfully declared and just wars; but they may not lawfully kill anyone else. 

To say that war is murder is to say that there is no such category as war: an English soldier stabbing an SS officer with a bayonet on the field of battle is no different from a Mod stabbing a Rocker with a flick-knife on the seafront at Southend; or Miss Scarlet stabbing Mr Black in the kitchen with the breadknife. But if there is indeed no such category as war, then the distinction between civilians and soldiers does not exist. An Englishman in uniform opening fire on a group of Germans in uniform in a trench is doing exactly the same thing as an Englishman in civvies who opens fire on a group of German gentlemen enjoying some hofbrau in a bierhalle. 

You can't have it both ways. You can say that war involves killing lots of civilians, or you can say that war involves murdering lots of people, but you can't logically say both. 

*

Speaking personally, I would be very happy to stop talking about war—and also to stop talking about genocide, terrorism, pogroms and massacres —and instead adopt the neutral word "killing". It would then be necessary to distinguish between "OK-killing" and "not-OK-killing". Most of us would agree that the shooting of an armed terrorist by a law enforcement officer would be in the "OK-killing" category. Some of us think that strapping a person who carried out a not-OK-killing in 1994 to a chair and forcing them to inhale cyanide gas in 2024 would be "OK-killing"; some of us think that it would definitely not be. The British House of Commons is currently deciding whether the killing by a physician of a terminally ill patient who has positively asked them to do so is in the "OK" or "not-OK" category. 

Such a usage would massively simplify our deliberations around the ongoing Middle-east Crisis. We would be obliged to say that Israeli bombardment of Gaza is OK-killing, because it comes in response to the October 7th attacks on Israel by Hamas, which were very definitely not-OK. Although unfortunately, we would also have to explain why the October 7th attacks were not rendered OK by the (presumably not-OK) killing of Palestinians by Israel prior to October 7th, or why those earlier killings were not, in fact not-OK. 

Some of us might be inclined to say that none of this killing is OK and could both sides stop it as soon as conveniently possible. 

*

The assertion that the word "war" ought to be dropped comes in Beverly Nichols’ 1933 book Cry Havoc. Nichols is an interesting figure; extremely famous in his time, but almost entirely forgotten today. He ghost wrote Nellie Melba's autobiography and was one of the few newsmen at the late Queen's coronation in 1953. He may also briefly have been Siegfried Sassoon's boyfriend. (Biographies still rather quaintly describe actor/playwright Cyril Butcher as his "lifelong companion".) Although he wrote plays, religious books, children's stories and murder mysteries, he was best known for his columns and broadcasts on the controversial subject of gardening. His writing is florid, self-deprecating, and rather witty; a little like Jerome K Jerome transposed to a minor key. 

For I know that unless I write a gardening book now...swiftly and spread it before the last bud outside my window has spread its tiny fan...It will be too late to write it at all. For shortly I will know too much; will dilate, with tedious prolixity of the root formation of the winter aconite, instead of trying to catch on paper the glint of its gold through the snow, as I remember it last winter, like a fist full of largesse thrown over a satin quilt. [Down the Garden path, page viii]

Overwritten, of course, but overwriting was a fashion of the era. We'd now probably call it a "humblebrag": he's making a virtue out of the fact that he is not going to write a technical volume while making it quite clear that he knows a lot more about horticulture than you do. The book it comes from (Down the Garden Path) was sufficiently famous that Sellar and Yateman (authors of 1066 and All That) wrote a parody of it, lampooning Nichols as "Knachbull Twee". ("If one is a real garden lover it isn't necessary to definitely read gardening books....")

In 1932, Nichols had written a pamphlet stating that in any future war he intended to be a conscientious objector. No less a person than HG Wells disagreed. Wells argued that refusing to serve in the army didn't advance the cause of peace; and didn't in fact absolve the conscientious objector from blame for any bad things his country might do in the war. Every citizen contributes to the war effort and every citizen shares the fruits of victory. One recalls AA Milne's assertion that a pacifist was like the starving man who said that his conscience would not allow him to steal food—but was perfectly happy to sit down to dinner with someone who's conscience did. Being a CO, says Wells, is simply a sacrifice to the God of Peace; it may satisfy your own conscience but it does no good. Today he would probably have called it Virtue Signalling.

Beverley thinks this is a fair point. He thinks that the average pacifist "rails against the horrors of war and says he will have none of this nasty business". But refusing to fight doesn't go far enough: a consistent pacifist would refuse to pay his income tax, or at any rate, that part of it which goes to buy arms, and not support the war effort in any way at all

An out and out pacifist is therefore ipso facto an anarchist. It may be that he is right to be an anarchist—it may be that this denial of systems is the one system which would work. That is not the point. The point is that you cannot be an anarchist on some things and a constitutional liberal on others. [Cry Havoc, p15]

I don't know about you, but that paragraph made me catch my breath and make a mental note to donate £5 to the Beverley Nichols Preservation Society, should such an organisation exist. (There is certainly a trust which maintains his cottage in Huntingdonshire.) There is a bracing clarity and specificity to it, and a genuine anger as well. He is quite clear what point he is making and what point he is not making. And he seems to care about what the word "anarchist" actually means.

He doesn't think that the mere fact that war is horrible is sufficient to prove that pacifism is right; but he does think that is where the discussion should start. He also thinks that discussions about social justice should take the privations of individual poor people as their jumping off point. 

If that sounds involved, I would merely explain, humbly, that I am trying to say that I should like to see a model of a hideously wounded soldier on the respectable tables of disarmament conferences, and I should like all parliamentary debates on unemployment relief to be carried out in the somber and foetid atmosphere of a Glasgow slum.  [p15] 

He goes on: 

I am not trying to back out of the extreme pacifist attitude of complete non-resistance. It may be right after all... I shall not have made up my mind until I have written this book, which is the reason why I am writing it. [p14]

Writing a book about a question he doesn't know the answer to in order to help him make up his mind? This particular blogger wants to embrace the fellow and call him "brother". 

*

In 1914, a British general is alleged to have said that although the new flying machines were terribly clever, they would never be widely used in warfare because they would frighten the horses.[*] Nichols  likewise sees the introduction of air warfare as marking a decisive break with the past. The battle of Mons in August 1914 was one of the first engagements in which aircraft were deployed: 

"That Saturday was one of the last Saturdays, on this planet, when the word 'war' was still invested with a certain morality. It was also one of the last Saturdays when it still bore the remotest resemblance to the wars of the past.” [p24]

He claims that the beginning of the battle was not very different from Waterloo and Agincourt: organised groups of soldiers fighting each other, with even a certain amount of sportsmanship. "The enemy" he says "was largely composed of Bavarian ploughboys in German uniforms". The British dragoons decently refused to charge them with bayonets while their backs were turned. But this old fashioned sense of decency and fair play was obliterated by the arrival of the impersonal and indiscriminate bi-planes. It is presumably not a coincidence that a legend developed that on the night before the battle, the soldiers had seen a vision of ghostly archers or angels. 

Nichols couldn't know, of course, that twelve years after he wrote, allied aircraft would be dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese cities. Like HG Wells, he assumed that World War II would be fought with poisoned gas. But he was quite correct in thinking that the new warplanes would inevitably be deployed against civilians. His remark that it was now possible to "blow up babies in Baghdad by pushing a button in Birmingham" is disturbingly prescient. 

At any rate, after 1914, he believed that you could no longer talk about the morality or the nobility of war.

(Chivalry) died inevitably, a little later, and for ever, on the poisoned fields of Flanders. That there was magnificent and incredible individual sacrifice and heroism, on both sides, no man in his senses will deny. But chivalry, as a unifying, purifying spirit fled affrighted from all the armies at last, whether of the Allies or of the central powers. [p23]

He says that if he is going to write a book about war, the word "war" needs to be clearly defined "unless we are going to argue at cross-purposes". Someone who used language in such a flowery way would naturally be concerned with finding the mot juste. 

As soon as the first shot in the air was fired the word “war” became obsolete. It should have been struck out of the dictionaries of the world, and a new word should have been put in its place…. [p24]

But he is not really talking about clarity and definitions. He wasn't, like Private Baldrick, suggesting that the 1914-18 conflict was only "a sort of a war." He didn't think that if the Prime Minister were to come on the BBC and announce that a state of war existed between England and Germany, the people listening to their wireless sets would be in the slightest doubt as to what he was talking about. And he's not like one of those pedants who chips in and says that, actually, I think you'll find, a conflict fought in the air is not a war but merely a sparkling white wine. He's not talking about lexical meaning at all. 

What he is talking about are the emotional associations of the word war. When children who have learned about history in English schools hear the word 

Across their young brains there flashes the silver of ancient swords, over the shallow waters of their understandings there flutters the reflected gold of flags flying in forgotten winds... [p25]

Even if they have seen supposedly realistic war movies, they will have picked up the sense that war is a "grand and inspiring affair"

We want another word. What is it to be? It must be a word devoid of decency, a word devoid of sense....A word with no historical associations, carrying no sonorous echoes of tragic beauty. A word trailing no clouds of glory. There is no such word. And the only phrase which truly expresses the situation is ‘mass murder of civilians. [p26]

You might think that there is sometimes some excuse for the mass murder of civilians. You could be perfectly sane and still believe that the large-scale unlawful killing of noncombatants is a lesser evil than Hitler's Thousand Year Reich would have been. But that isn't the point. The person who takes that view needs to justify his position, rather than hide behind the normalising word "war". 

If instead of the phrase “we shall not sheathe the sword" [Prime Minister Asquith] had used the phrase “we shall not desist from gassing babies” the emotions of his audience might not have been so exalted. [p26]

This is hardly an original insight. You can't name a thing without also saying how you feel about that thing. A person who lets off a bomb may be a "terrorist" or a "freedom fighter" depending on how you feel about his politics. A person who strikes a child might be "smacking" or "hitting" (or even "beating") depending on how you feel about that particular form of punishment. We evangelise; you proselytise; they are religious fanatics. Chaucer spotted it six hundred years ago: a rich woman and a poor woman may both go to bed with man who is not her husband:

But that the gentile in hire estaat above

She shal be cleped his lady as in love,

And that oother is a povre womman

She shal be cleped his wenche or his lemman

And god it wood, myn owene deer brother

Men leyn that oon as lowe as lith oother

The word "war" has a reference ("armed conflict between nations") and also emotive content ("noble heroes fighting with honour"). What Nichols wants is a word with the same reference, but which invokes different emotions. 

And this is presumably why the authors of the Australian text book which I am reading for no particular reason asked their students to think about Mr Nichols. They believe that the distinction between reference and emotive content is the whole key to literary appreciation, English composition, and the control of language.

*Mrs Patrick Campbell is alleged to have made the same remark about homosexuals. 

This is the first section of an ongoing critique of C.S Lewis's book The Abolition of Man. (I think that my essay should make sense if you aren't familiar with that tome.) This first section 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