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Saturday, October 13, 2007

Today's Random Wilde

Again, this time not so random in fact, since this is a longish excerpt from the essay "The Decay of Lying," which I taught on Thursday, and enjoyed so much I thought I would share a chunk of this improbable beauty on Amor Mundi.

Facts are not merely finding a footing place in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarising mankind. The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature...

I assure you it is the case, and the amusing part of the whole thing is that the story of the cherry-tree is an absolute myth....

Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based on memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar. Who he was who first, without ever having gone out to the rude chase, told the wondering cavement at sunset how he had drugged the Megatherium from the purple darkness of its jasper cave, or slain the Mammoth in single combat and brought back its gilded tusks, we cannot tell, and not one of our modern anthropologists, for all their much-boasted science, has had the ordinary courage to tell us. Whatever his name or race, he certainly was the true founder of social intercourse. For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society, and without him a dinner party, even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society...

Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style; while Life -- poor, probable, uninteresting human life -- tired of repeating herself for the benefit of Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him, and try to produce, in her own simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks...

1 comment:

jimf said...

From _The Letters of C. S. Lewis_, pp. 299-302

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns
20 March 1932

. . .

You asked. . . about this Kenchew man. . .
[A]s a character, he is worth describing, or seems
so to me because I had to go for a walk with him.
He is a ladylike little man of about fifty, and is
to-a-tee that "sensible, well-informed man" with whom
Lamb dreaded to be left alone.

My troubles began at once. It seemed good to him to
take a bus to the Station and start our walk along
a sort of scrubby path between a factory and a greasy
strip of water -- a walk, in fact, which was as good
a reproduction as Oxford could afford of our old Sunday
morning "around the river bank." I blundered at once
by referring to the water as a canal. "Oh -- could it
be possible that I didn't know it was the Thames?
I must be joking. Perhaps I was not a walker?" I
foolishly said that I was. He gave me an account of his
favourite walks; with a liberal use of the word
"picturesque." He then called my attention to the fact
that the river was unusually low (how the devil did he
know that?) and would like to know how **I** explained
it. I scored a complete Plough, and was told how
**he** explained it.

By this time we were out in Port Meadow, and a wide prospect
opened before him. A number of hills and church spires
required to be identified, together with their "picturesque",
mineral, or chronological details. A good many problems
arose, and again I did very badly. As his map, though
constantly brought out, was a **geological** map, it did
not help us much. A conversation on weather followed, and
it seemed to offer an escape from unmitigated fact.
The escape, however, was quite illusory, and my claim to
be rather fond of nearly all sorts of weather was received
with the stunning information that psychologists detected
the same trait in children and lunatics.

Anxious to turn my attention from this unpleasing fact, he
begged my opinion of various changes which had recently been
made in the river: indeed every single lock, bridge, and
stile for three mortal miles had apparently been radically
altered in the last few months. As I had never seen **any**
of the places before ("But I thought you said you were a
walker. . .") this bowled me middle stump again. The removal
of a weir gave us particular trouble. He could not conceive
how it had bee done. What did I think? And then, just as
I was recovering from this fresh disgrace, and hoping that
the infernal weir was done with, I found that the problem
of **how** it had been removed was being raised only as the
preliminary to the still more intricate problem of **why**
it had been removed. (My feelings were those expressed
by Macfarlane at dinner one night last term, in an answer to
someone's question. "Yes. He is studying the rhythms of
mediaeval Latin prose, and it is a very curious and interesting
subject, but it doesn't interest me.") For a mile or so after
the weir we got on famously, for Kenchew began "I was once
passing this very spot or, no, let me see -- perhaps it was
a little further on -- no! It was exactly here -- I remember
that very tree -- when a very remarkable experience, really
remarkable in a small way, happened to me." The experience
remarkable in a small way, with the aid of a judicious
question or two on my part, was bidding fair to last out the
length of the walk, when we had the horrible misfortune
of passing a paper mill (You see, by the bye, what a jolly
walk it was even apart from the company!). Not only **a**
paper mill but **the** paper mill of the Clarendon Press.
"Of course I had been over it. No? Really etc."
(The great attraction was that you could get an electric
shock.)

But I must stop my account of this deplorable walk somewhere.
It was the same all through -- sheer information. Time after
time I attempted to get away from the torrent of isolated,
particular facts: but anything tending to opinion, or discussion,
to fancy, to ideas, even to putting some of his infernal
facts together and making something out of them -- anything
like that was received in blank silence. Once, while he
was telling me the legendary foundation of a church, I had
a faint hope that we might get onto history: but it turned
out that his knowledge was derived from an Edwardian Oxford
**pageant**. Need I add that he is a scientist? A geographer,
to be exact. And now that I come to think of it he is
exactly what one would have expected a geographer to be.
But I musn't give you too black an impression of him.
He is kind, and **really** courteous (you know the rare
quality I mean) and a gentleman. I imagine he is what
women call "**Such** an interesting man. And **so** clever" . . .