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bookishlybeauty's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
leesmyth's review against another edition
5.0
I loved this collection, especially "The Anthropological Approach" and "Variation in Shakespeare and Others."
Throughout, there's nice synergy with his other works (both his fiction and his better-known critical essays). For example, the essay "High and Low Brows" explores some ideas he more fully develops in "An Experiment in Literary Criticism." (Spoiler alert: Lewis considers the terms Lowbrow and Highbrow "odious" – although he recognizes they "bid fair to oust all their rivals" – and debunks many easy assumptions about these purported classifications and their relative qualities.)
He speaks insightfully about literary influence in "The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version" (along the way distinguishing mere 'sources' from 'influence'), delightfully critiques certain strands of contemporary literary criticism (perhaps most strongly in the last two essays).
A few items I happened to note in passing:
* "If female spiders, whose grooms (I am told) do 'coldly furnish forth the marriage tables', wrote love-poetry, it would be like Marlowe's." pp. 61-62
* "Licentious poetry, if it is to remain endurable, must generally be heartless[.] If it attempts pathos or sweetness an abyss opens at the poet's feet." p. 62
* In discussing Donne's less successful love poetry: "What any sensible woman would make of such a wooing it is difficult to imagine – or would be difficult if we forgot the amazing protective faculty which each sex possesses of not listening to the other." p. 118. (This provides some balance and context to the comment in That Hideous Strength about husbands not listening to wives.)
* Lewis identifies "the lure of the 'Inner Ring'" as a core aspect of Kipling's stories, and recognizes it (as Kipling apparently does not) as a morally neutral power which can be used for good or for evil. "The confidential glance or rebuke from a colleague is indeed the means whereby a weak brother is brought or kept up to the standard of a noble profession; it is also the means whereby a new and hitherto innocent member is initiated into the corruption of a bad one." p. 248. (This is a theme Lewis explored more than once in his own works, I believe; the one that leaps most strongly to mind is Mark Studdock in That Hideous Strength.)
* "That She, in her secular loneliness, should have become a sage, is very proper, and indeed essential to Haggard's story, but Haggard has not himself the wisdom wherewith to supply her. A poet of Dante's depth could have given her things really wise to say; a poet of Shakespeare's address would have made us believe in her wisdom without committing himself." p. 269
* "The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are: that good fortune I have enjoyed for nearly twenty years." p. 99
* "And when the plain man has been captured and made into a pathetically willing and bewildered university student he will sometimes praise the great works which he has dutifully read and not enjoyed, for the excellence of their style. [...] He thinks of [style] not as the linguistic means by which the writer produces whatever results he desires but as a sort of extra – an uncovenanted pedantry tacked on to the book proper, to gratify some specifically 'literary' or 'critical' taste which has nothing to do with the ordinary pleasures of the imagination. It is for him a meaningless addition which, by a convention, gives access to a higher rank – like the letters Esq. after a man's name on an envelope." p. 271.
* "Bercilak is as vivid and concrete as any image I have met in literature. He is [...] half giant, yet wholly a 'lovely knight'; as full of demoniac energy as old Karamazov, yet, in his own house, as jolly as a Dickensian Christmas host; now exhibiting a ferocity so gleeful that it is almost genial, and now a geniality so outrageous that it borders on the ferocious; half boy or buffoon in his shouts and laughter and jumpings; yet at the end judging Gawain with the tranquil superiority of an angelic being. There has been nothing really like him in fiction before or since." p. 304. (And yet, except for the very last clause, could this not describe Tom Bombadil? I would note that this essay "was originally published in English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday" in 1962 [p. xix].)
* "Myth is thus like manna; it is to each man a different dish and to each the dish he needs. It does not grow old nor stick at frontiers racial, sexual, or philosophic; and even from the same man at the same moment it can elicit different responses at different levels. But great myth is rare in a reflective age; the temptation to allegorize, to thrust into the story the conscious doctrines of the poet, there to fight it out as best they can with the inherent tendency of the fable, is usually too strong." p. 205.
Throughout, there's nice synergy with his other works (both his fiction and his better-known critical essays). For example, the essay "High and Low Brows" explores some ideas he more fully develops in "An Experiment in Literary Criticism." (Spoiler alert: Lewis considers the terms Lowbrow and Highbrow "odious" – although he recognizes they "bid fair to oust all their rivals" – and debunks many easy assumptions about these purported classifications and their relative qualities.)
He speaks insightfully about literary influence in "The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version" (along the way distinguishing mere 'sources' from 'influence'), delightfully critiques certain strands of contemporary literary criticism (perhaps most strongly in the last two essays).
A few items I happened to note in passing:
* "If female spiders, whose grooms (I am told) do 'coldly furnish forth the marriage tables', wrote love-poetry, it would be like Marlowe's." pp. 61-62
* "Licentious poetry, if it is to remain endurable, must generally be heartless[.] If it attempts pathos or sweetness an abyss opens at the poet's feet." p. 62
* In discussing Donne's less successful love poetry: "What any sensible woman would make of such a wooing it is difficult to imagine – or would be difficult if we forgot the amazing protective faculty which each sex possesses of not listening to the other." p. 118. (This provides some balance and context to the comment in That Hideous Strength about husbands not listening to wives.)
* Lewis identifies "the lure of the 'Inner Ring'" as a core aspect of Kipling's stories, and recognizes it (as Kipling apparently does not) as a morally neutral power which can be used for good or for evil. "The confidential glance or rebuke from a colleague is indeed the means whereby a weak brother is brought or kept up to the standard of a noble profession; it is also the means whereby a new and hitherto innocent member is initiated into the corruption of a bad one." p. 248. (This is a theme Lewis explored more than once in his own works, I believe; the one that leaps most strongly to mind is Mark Studdock in That Hideous Strength.)
* "That She, in her secular loneliness, should have become a sage, is very proper, and indeed essential to Haggard's story, but Haggard has not himself the wisdom wherewith to supply her. A poet of Dante's depth could have given her things really wise to say; a poet of Shakespeare's address would have made us believe in her wisdom without committing himself." p. 269
* "The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are: that good fortune I have enjoyed for nearly twenty years." p. 99
* "And when the plain man has been captured and made into a pathetically willing and bewildered university student he will sometimes praise the great works which he has dutifully read and not enjoyed, for the excellence of their style. [...] He thinks of [style] not as the linguistic means by which the writer produces whatever results he desires but as a sort of extra – an uncovenanted pedantry tacked on to the book proper, to gratify some specifically 'literary' or 'critical' taste which has nothing to do with the ordinary pleasures of the imagination. It is for him a meaningless addition which, by a convention, gives access to a higher rank – like the letters Esq. after a man's name on an envelope." p. 271.
* "Bercilak is as vivid and concrete as any image I have met in literature. He is [...] half giant, yet wholly a 'lovely knight'; as full of demoniac energy as old Karamazov, yet, in his own house, as jolly as a Dickensian Christmas host; now exhibiting a ferocity so gleeful that it is almost genial, and now a geniality so outrageous that it borders on the ferocious; half boy or buffoon in his shouts and laughter and jumpings; yet at the end judging Gawain with the tranquil superiority of an angelic being. There has been nothing really like him in fiction before or since." p. 304. (And yet, except for the very last clause, could this not describe Tom Bombadil? I would note that this essay "was originally published in English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday" in 1962 [p. xix].)
* "Myth is thus like manna; it is to each man a different dish and to each the dish he needs. It does not grow old nor stick at frontiers racial, sexual, or philosophic; and even from the same man at the same moment it can elicit different responses at different levels. But great myth is rare in a reflective age; the temptation to allegorize, to thrust into the story the conscious doctrines of the poet, there to fight it out as best they can with the inherent tendency of the fable, is usually too strong." p. 205.
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