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A PREFACE TO

PARADISE LOST

by C. S. LEWIS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON OXFORD NEW YORK

DEDICATION

To CHARLES WILLIAMS

DEAR wJLLIAMS, When I remember what kindness I received and what pleasure I had in delivering these lectures in the strange and beautiful hillside College at Bangor, I feel almost ungrateful to my Welsh hosts in offering this book not to them, but to you. Yet I cannot do otherwise. To think of my own lecture is to think of those other lectures at Oxford in which you partly anticipated, partly confirmed, and most of all clarified and matured, what I had long been thinking about Milton. The scene was, in a way, medieval, and may prove to have been historic. You were a vagus thrown among us by the chance of war. The appropriate beauties of the Divinity School pro vided your bac'cground. There we elders heard (among other things) what he had long despaired of hearing-a lecture on Comus which placed its importance where the poet placed it and watched 'the yonge fresshc folkes, he or she', who filled the benches listening first with incredulity, then with tolera tion, and finally with delight, to something so strange and new in their experience as the praise of chastity. Reviewers, who have not had time to re-read Milton, have failed for the most part to digest your criticism of him ; but it is a reasonable hope that of those who heard you in Oxford many will understand henceforward that when the old poets made some virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and that what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted. It gives me a sense of security to remember that, far from loving your work because you are my friend, I first sought your friendship because I loved your books. But for that, I should find it difficult to believe that your short Preface 1 to Milton is what it seems to me to be-the recovery of a true critical tradition 1 The Poetical Works of Milton. The World's Classics, 1940. v

Vl D E D I C A T I O N

after more than a hundred years of laborious misunderstand ing. The ease with which the thing was done would have seemed inconsistent with the weight that had to be lifted. As things are, I feel entitled to trust my own eyes. Apparently, �he door of the prison was really unlocked all the time ; but it was only you who thought of trying the handle. Now we can all come out. Yours, c. s. LEWIS

Innumerabili immortali Disegualmente in lor Ietizia eguali: Tasso, Gier. Lib, IX, 57·

How so many learned heads should so far forget their Metaphysicks, and destroy the ladder and scale of creatures. BROWNE, Rel. Med. 1, xxx.

I

EPIC POETRY

A perfect judge will read each work of wil With the same spirit that its author writ. POPE..

The first qualification for judging any piece of workman ship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. After that has bee.n discovered the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about the cathedral. But such questions come later. The first thing is to understand the ob ject before you : as long as you think the corkscrew was meant for opening tins or the cathedral for entertaining tourists you can say nothing to the purpose about them. The first thing the reader needs to know about Paradise Lost is what Milton meant it to be. This need is specially urgent in the present age because the kind of poem Milton meant to write is unfamiliar to many readers. He is writing epic poetry which is a species of narrative poetry, and neither the species nor the genus is very well under stood at present. The misunderstanding of the genus (narra tive poetry) I have learned from looking into used copies of our great narrative poems. In them you find often enough a num ber of not very remarkable lines underscored with pencil in the first two pages, and all the rest of the book virgin. It is easy to see what has happened. The unfortunate reader has set out expecting 'good lines'-little ebullient patches of delight such as he is accustomed to find in lyrics, and has thought he was finding them in things that took his fancy for accidental reasons during the first five minutes ; after that, finding that the

E PIC P O ETRY 3

opinions and emotions ; from the other, it is an organization ofwords which exist to produce a particular kind of patterned experience in the readers. Another way of stating this duality would be to say that every poem has two parents-its mother being the mass of experience, thought, and the like, inside the poet, and its father the pre-existing Form (epic, tragedy, the novel, or what not) which he meets in the public world. By studying only the mother, criticism becomes one-sided. It is easy to forget that the man who writes a good love sonnet needs not only to be enamoured of a woman, but also to be en amoured of the Sonnet. It would, in my opinion, be the great est error to suppose that this fertilization of the poet's internal matter by the pre-existing Form impairs his originality, in any sense in which originality is a high literary excellence. (It is the smaller poets who invent forms, in so far as forms are invented.) Materia appetit formam ut virum femina. The matter inside the poet wants the Form : in submitting to the Form it becomes really original, really the origin of great work. The attempt to be oneself often brings out only the more conscious and super ficial parts of a man's mind ; working to produce a given kind of poem which will present a given theme as justly, delightfully, and lucidly as possible, he is more likely to bring out all that was really in him, and much of which he himself had no sus picion. That concentration on the male parent of Paradise Lost, the Epic Form, which I intend to practise is the more desirable because excellent helps to the study of the raw material inside the poet-the experiences, character, and opinions of the man Milton-already exist in the work of Miss Darbishire and Dr. Tillyard. Milton's own approach is to be learned from a passage in the Preface to the Reason of Church Government, Book II (Bohn's Edn., Vol. II, p. 478). The question before him is whether to write (A) an Epic ; (B) a Tragedy; (C) a Lyric. The discussion of (A) begins with the words 'whether that epic form': the discussion of (B) with 'or whether those dramatic constitu tions' ; that of (C) with 'or if occasion shall lead'. The whole scheme may be set out as follows :

4 A P R E F A C E TO PARAD ISE LOST

(A) Epic. I. (a) The diffuse Epic [Homer, Virgil, and Tasso]. (b) The brief Epic [the Book of Job]. II. (a) Epic keeping the rules of Aristotle. (b) Epic following Nature. III. Choice of subject ['what king or knight before the conquest']. (B) Tragedy. (a) On the model of Sophocles and Euripides. (b) On the model of Canticles or the Apocalypse. (C) Lyric. (a) On the Greek model ['Pindarus and Callimachus']. (b) On Hebrew models ['Those frequent songs throughout the Law and the Prophets']. (A), the Epic, is our primary concern, but before we con sider it in detail one feature which runs through the whole scheme demands our attention. It will be noticed that Clas sical and Scriptural models are mentioned under each of the three heads, and under one head, that of tragedy, the Biblical model seems to be dragged in, as they say, 'by the heels'. This is less true of the Biblical model for epic. Milton's classi fication of Job as a sub-species of epic (with the differentia 'brief') may be novel, but it is reasonable, and I have no doubt at all that this is the form he believed himself to be practising in Paradise Regained, which has affinities to Job in its theme as well as in its lay-out. Under the third heading (Lyric) the Hebrew models come in with perfect propriety, and here Mil ton has added an interesting note. Almost as if he had foreseen an age in which 'Puritanism' should be the bear seen in every bush, he has given his opinion that Hebrew lyrics are better than Greek 'not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition'. That is, he has told us that his preference for the Hebrew is not only moral and religious, but aesthetic also.1 I once had a pupiI, innocent alike of the Greek 1 The unpopular passage in P.R. iv, 347 ('Sion's songs to all true tasts excelling') is better understood if we remember that it reflects a literary opinion which Milton had, in some form or other, held all his life.

6 A PRE F A C E TO PARAD I S E LOST

Boiardo, Ariosto, and Spenser. This differs from the ancient works, firstly by its lavish use of the marvellous, secondly by the place given to love, and thirdly by the multiple action of inter woven stories. The third characteristic is the most immediately noticeable of the three, and I believe that it is what Milton is mainly referring to. It is not at first apparent why he should call it a following of nature. I am pretty sure that the com plete answer to the question is to be found somewhere in the Italian critics ; but in the meantime something like an answer I have found in Tasso. In his Discourses on the Heroic Poem Tasso raises the whole problem of multiplicity or unity in an epic plot, and says that the claims of unity are supported by Aristotle, the ancients, and Reason, but those of multiplicity by usage, the actual taste of all knights and ladies, and Ex perience (op. cit., m). By 'experience' he doubtless means such unhappy experiences as that of his father who wrote an Amadis in strict conformity to the rules of Aristotle, but found that the recitation of it emptied the auditorium, from which 'he concluded that unity of action was a thing affording little pleasure'. Now usage and experience, especially when con trasted with precedent and reason, are concepts not very far from 'Nature'. I believe, therefore, with very little doubt, that Milton's hesitation between 'the rules of Aristotle' and 'fol lowing Nature' means, in simpler language, 'shall I write an epic in twelve books with a simple plot, or shall I write some thing in stanzas and cantos about knights and ladies and en chantments ?' The importance of this explanation, if true, is threefold.

1. Connecting it with his ideas of a possible theme ('what king or knight before the conquest'), we may surmise that the romantic subject was rejected at about the same time as the romantic form, the Spenserian or Italian type of epic. We tend perhaps to assume that if Milton's Arthuriad had been written it would have been the same sort of poem as Paradise Lost, but surely this is very rash? A much more Spenserian Milton-the Milton of L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Comus-had to be partially repressed before Paradise Lost could be written: if you choose

E PI C PO E T R Y 7

the rockery you must abandon the tennis court. It is very likely that if Arthur had been chosen the Spenserian Mil ton would have grown to full development and the actual Milton, the 'Miltonic' Milton, would have been repressed. There is evidence that Milton's ideas for an Arthuriad were very 'romantic' indeed. He was going to paint Arthur etiam sub terris bella moventem (Mansus 8 1 ) , Arthur's wars 'beneath the earth'. I do not know whether this means strange adventures experienced by Arthur in some other world between his dis appearance in the barge and his predicted return to help the Britons at their need, or adventures in fairyland before he be came king, or some even wilder Welsh tale about the caldron of Hades. But it certainly does not suggest the purely heroic and military epic which we are apt to think of when Milton's Arthurian projects are mentioned.

2. Milton's hesitation between the classical and the ro mantic types of epic is one more instance of something which runs through all his work ; I mean the co-existence, in a live and sensitive tension, of apparent opposites. We have already noted the fusion of Pagan and Biblical interests in his very map of poetry. We shall have occasion, in a later section, to notice, side by side with his rebelliousness, his individualism, and his love of liberty, his equal love of discipline, of hierarchy, of what Shakespeare calls 'degree'. From the account of his early reading in Smectymnuus we gather a third tension. His first literary loves, both for their style and their matter, were the erotic (indeed the almost pornographic) elegiac poets of Rome : from them he graduated to the idealized love poetry of Dante and Petrarch and of 'those lofty fables which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood' : from these to the philo sophical sublimation of sexual passion in 'Plato and his equal (i.e. his contemporary) Xenophon'. An original voluptuous ness greater, perhaps, than that of any English poet, is pruned, formed, organized, and made human by progressive purifica tions, themselves the responses to a quite equally intense aspiration-an equally imaginative and emotional aspiration -towards chastity. The modern idea of a Great Man is one

I I

IS CRITICIS M POSS IBLE?

Amicus Plato, 17!JI father would say, construing the words to my uncle Toby as he went along, Amicus Plato; that is, Dinah was 17!JI aunt-sed magis arnica veritas -but truth is my sister. Tristram Shantfy, Vol. 1, cap. 21.

But, first, a necessary digression. A recent remark of Mr. Eliot's poses for us at the outset the fundamental question whether we (mere critics) have any right to talk about Milton at all. Mr. Eliot says bluntly and frankly that the best con temporary practising poets are the only 'jury of judgement' 1 whose verdict on his own views of Paradise Lost he will accept. And Mr. Eliot is here simply rendering explicit a notion that has become increasingly prevalent for about a hundred years the notion that poets are the only judges of poetry. If I make Mr. Eliot's words the peg on which to hang a discussion of this notion it must not, therefore, be assumed that this is, for me, more than a convenience, still less that I wish to attack him qua Mr. Eliot. Why should I? I agree with him about matters of such moment that all literary questions are, in comparison, trivial. Let us consider what would follow if we took Mr. Eliot's view seriously. The first result is that I, not being one of the best contemporary poets, cannot judge Mr. Eliot's criticism at all. What then shall I do? Shall I go to the best contem porary poets, who can, and ask them whether Mr. Eliot is right? But in order to go to them I must first know who they are. And this, by hypothesis, I cannot find out ; the same lack of poethood which renders my critical opinions on Milton worth less renders my opinions on Mr. Pound or Mr. Auden equally 1 A Note on the Verse of John .'\Jilton. &says and Studies, Vol. xxi, 1 936.

10 A P R E F A C E TO P A R A D I S E L O S T

worthless. Shall I then go t o Mr. Eliot and ask him to tell me who the best contemporary poets are? But this, again, will be useless. I personally may think Mr. Eliot a poet-in fact, I do -but then, as he has explained to me, my thoughts on such a point are worthless. I cannot find out whether Mr. Eliot is a poet or not; and until I have found out I cannot know whether his testimony to the poethood of Mr. Pound and Mr. Auden is valid. And for the same reason I cannot find out whether their testimony to his poethood is valid. Poets become on this view an unrecognizable society (an Invisible Church) , and their mutual criticism goes on within a closed circle which no out sider can possibly break into at any point. But even within the circle it is no better. Mr. Eliot is ready to accept the verdict of the best contemporary poets on his criticism. But how does he recognize them as poets? Clearly, because he is a poet himself; for if he is not, his opinion is worthless. At the basis of his whole critical edifice, then, lies the judgement 'I am a poet.' But this is a critical judgement. It therefore follows that when Mr. Eliot asks himself, 'Am I a poet ?' he has to assume the answer 'I am' before he can .find the answer 'I am' ; for the answer, being a piece of criticism, is valuable only if he is a poet. He is thus compelled to beg the question before he can get started at all. Similarly Mr. Auden and Mr. Pound must beg the question before they get started. But since no man of high intellectual honour can base his thought on an exposed petitio the real result is that no such man can criticize poetry at all, neither his own poetry nor that of his neighbour. The republic of letters resolves itself into an aggregate of uncommunicating and unwindowed monads; each has unawares crowned and mitred himself Pope and King of Pointland. In answer to this Mr. Eliot may properly plead that the same apparently vicious circle meets us in other maxims which I should find it less easy to reject : as when we say that only a good man can judge goodness, or only a rational man can judge reasonings, or only a doctor can judge medical skill. But we must beware of false parallels. ( I ) In the moral sphere,