dr mohit k ray

oparative Study of the Indian Poetics and the Western Poetics . New Delhi : Sarup & Sons, 2008.

C.S.Lewis : A Preface to Paradise Lost . New Delhi : Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2005.

Introduction:

A Preface to “ParadiseLost” was first delivered as Ballard Matthews Lectures at University College , North Wales in 1941. A revised and enlarged version of the lectures was published in book form by Oxford University Press in 1942.

It will be good to bear in mind some of the basic critical ideas of Lewis before we get down to his Preface. Lewis believes that literature is essentially a public activity through which the poet intends to move his readers by using a language the meanings and interpretations of which he shares with the readers. Lewis also would make a distinction between meaning and significance. Meaning inheres in what the text says or implies while significance is the way we relate the meaning to our other concerns. Accordingly for Lewis proper interpretation must be directed towards recognizing or identifying the original meaning, and criticism as a body of knowledge should ‘enable a reader to enter more fully into the author's intentions'.

Lewis makes a distinction not between good and bad texts but between good and bad reading. The good reader receives the text while the bad reader only uses it. Good reading involves a sympathetic understanding which enables the reader to rise above self-interest and helps him/her to strengthen one of the most difficult of human capabilities. The argument is both Aristotelian and Christian in spirit. According to Aristotle an activity is ‘good' when it brings out the highest qualities of the agent, and the moral virtue , analogous to good reading is compassion or disinterested love which is Christian in spirit. Towards the end of An Experiment of Criticism Lewis writes ; ‘Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three. In love, we escape from ourselves putting ourselves in other person's place and then transcending our own competitive particularity. In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are[…]. Obviously this process can be described as an engagement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But there is an old paradox: ‘he that loseth his life shall save it'.

So, Lewis begins his Preface by reminding us that: ‘[the] first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship 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' (1 emphasis added). This is particularly important because ‘the kind of poem Milton meant to write is unfamiliar to many readers'. So, in order to appreciate Milton it is necessary to put oneself in the place of Milton., as Lewis writes: ‘The possible Lucretius in myself interests me more than the possible C.S.Lewis in Lucretius' Lewis carefully makes a distinction between different kinds of epic – the classical and the romantic, and the Primary and the Secondary and holds that solempne or grandeur is a common aspect of all kinds of epic. Another obvious characteristic of an epic, because of its original oral form is the repetition of common words, stock phrases ,sometimes even whole lines, and Lewis contends that to ‘a limited extent the technique of Beowulf is similar to Homer's'. The Secondary epic which ‘aims at an even higher solemnity than the Primary' overcomes the difficulties arising out of the loss of he external aids to solemnity by an elevation of style and use of sonorous proper names.

In Paradise Lost the very first twenty-six lines give a sensation that ‘some great thing is about to begin.'. Milton uses a very complex syntax, no doubt; but the complexity of syntax is more than compensated by the simplicity of the imaginative effects that Milton is able to achieve.

Lewis believes that in his version of the Fall Milton follows St Augustine and argues that the Fall was due to Disobedience resulting from Pride. This is as much true of Satan as it is true of Eve. There is no point in arguing , as some critics have done, that Milton is a republican on earth but pleads for royalism in heaven, because as a believer in the Elizabethan view of the world order Milton holds that God has no ‘natural superior'. Lewis also very convincingly silences those critics who vociferously point out the differences between Milton's theological views expressed in De Doctrina and ParadiseLost when he insists that ‘the sound course is to judge the poem on its merits , not to pre-judge it by reading doctrinal errors into the text', and there is no doubt that in spite of the differences the poem remains ‘overwhelmingly Christian'.

About Satan Lewis also subscribes to the general critical consensus that ‘Satan is the best drawn of Milton's characters', but he believes that it will , however, be a folly to fall victim to the charms of Satan and warns that to ‘admire Satan is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography'. About the followers of Satan Lewis holds that as in Homer every battle is described better than the previous one so about Satan's followers every character is drawn better than the previous character. About Milton's angels Lewis believes that instead of going into the great changes of philosophical thought from Scholasticism to the Platonic it is better to look upon the angels as ‘poetizations of the glimpses which contemporary scientific imagination thought it had attained of a life going on just above the human level though normally inaccessible to direct observation' ..

Lewis is not very happy about Milton 's treatment of the sexuality of Adam and Eve and feels that Milton possibly was ‘not aware of the magnitude of his own undertaking'.

Lewis , a fine critic and profound Milton scholar as he is, is not blind to the weaknesses of Paradise Lost . He believes, for example, that the poem suffers from structural flaws and that Milton's presentation of God is far from satisfactory, but in his balanced judgment he holds that in many respects it is better than the Iliad and the Aeneid as it ‘records a real, , irreversible, unrepeatable process in the history of the universe'. Lewis concludes with a fine dig at Eliot whose disparagement of Milton , at a particular stage of his critical career was notorious: ‘If Mr. Eliot disdains the eagles and trumpets of epic poetry because the fashion of this world passes away, I honour him. But if he goes on to draw the conclusion that all poetry should have the penitential qualities of his own best work, I believe he is mistaken'. It is really amazing how within a short span of just one hundred and thirty-seven pages Lewis gives a lucid, insightful and succinct exposition to the Paradise Lost ., calling critical attention to all the relevant and debatable aspects of the poem. Once armed with Lewis's Preface one can enter the formidable world of Paradise Lost without any fear or anxiety.

We owe a word of gratitude to Dr K.R.Gupta, Chairman, Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi , for reprinting this invaluable book for the benefit of all the lovers of Milton .

Mohit K. Ray