The Purple Wig

Readers of these pages are quite aware of my antipathy to inherited status – be it wealth or honorific titles that pollute the fine white of a business card – which might suggest that my own family hails from modest means.  I cannot confirm or deny this last sidelight, nor does it merit further speculation.  Suffice it to say that lords and ladies and the appalling smugness they display to a world who would gladly extinguish their wasteful habits should not garner any admiration.  And yet, as we peruse British literature throughout the centuries, we may well become besotted with precisely such an existence.  English manor houses in late Victorian times and then again in the interbellum period have remained in the creative imagination because there, life was smooth and fancy and free.  It takes a story such as this one to set us straight.

Our initial yet thankfully not our sole protagonist is a certain Mr. Nutt, who edits a paper appropriately called The Daily Reformer.  More specifically, he edits out all wit, political incorrectness, and genius because, as he gently admonishes one of his offending correspondents, "you must keep your eye on the suburbs" (a better epithet for bourgeois complacency could probably not be devised).  His combattant is a worthy one, Francis Finn, chronicler of the shocking details that all good writers find fascinating.  His initial report to Nutt attends to their differences in an unsurprisingly direct manner:

Of course I don't believe in the old legend about James I; and as for you, you don't believe in anything, not even in journalism.  The legend, you'll probably remember, was about the blackest business in English history – the poisoning of Overbury by that witch's cat Frances Howard, and the quite mysterious terror which forced the King to pardon the murderers. There was a lot of alleged witchcraft mixed up with it; and the story goes that a man-servant listening at the keyhole heard the truth in a talk between the King and Carr; and the bodily ear with which he heard grew large and monstrous as by magic, so awful was the secret.  And though he had to be loaded with lands and gold and made an ancestor of dukes, the elf-shaped ear is still recurrent in the family .... The point is that there really is something queer about Exmoor and his family; something quite natural, I dare say, but quite abnormal.  And the Ear is in it somehow, I fancy; either a symbol or a delusion or disease or something.  Another tradition says that Cavaliers just after James I began to wear their hair long only to cover the ear of the first Lord Exmoor.  This also is no doubt fanciful. 

This passage predicates the notion that while the elite do have a jolly good time, "we surrender too much when we admit that aristocracy has made even aristocrats happy."  I don't know whether that's really ours to judge; that is to say, if you don't feel bad that you have piles of money and practically unlimited possibilities of use of that money, what moral teaching could you possibly derive from a prolonged existence pondering your privileges?  Nevertheless, Nutt is the consummate Philistine and such a story means excellent circulation and a small feather in his small, plain cap.  And Finn does him and the reader a great service by dropping his initial philosophical pretensions and adopting a much more riveting plot.

Finn comes upon an inn called the Blue Dragon "consisting really of a cottage and two barns," where three men of varied shape and appearance sit in the natural fairy-tale triptych.  And Finn half-expects a fairy tale even if he knows that the final printed product will more greatly resemble an editorial.  The men are clearly distinguishable in such a way that while the first two men wear extensive black, they are perhaps a foot apart in height (never mind that they do not at all resemble one another and the shorter one is a Catholic priest).  Yet it is the third man, in keeping with our familiar structure, that will most greatly attract attention:   

Perhaps the third man, at the other end of the table, had really more to do with it than the rest, though he was both slighter in physical presence and more inconsiderate in his dress.  His lank limbs were clad, I might also say clutched, in very tight grey sleeves and pantaloons; he had a long, sallow, aquiline face which seemed somehow all the more saturnine because his lantern jaws were imprisoned in his collar and neck-cloth more in the style of the old stock; and his hair (which ought to have been dark brown) was of an odd dim, russet colour which, in conjunction with his yellow face, looked rather purple than red.  The unobtrusive yet unusual colour was all the more notable because his hair was almost unnaturally healthy and curling, and he wore it full.

This color will seem far less odd when we consider the neighborhood elderly women whose hair is strikingly lavender in some lights (I am also reminded of that fabulous phenomenon, the "blue chin," but these are minor objections).  Our third man then begins to narrate a confrontation between the Duke of Exmoor and a young attorney by the name of Isaac Green that dovetails with some rumors Finn had already mentioned.  And what is the upshot of such a discussion?  That while Isaac Green may have a repugnantly bald head, there could be nothing more horrific than having the Duke remove his wig to reveal his own, and we will smartly not go any further.

The magic of Chesterton is evident in so many ways in The Purple Wig that it seems silly to list them in some kind of triumphant scroll.  If you can imagine that, in maybe four thousand faultless words, a reader can behold a whole moral code, a sinister countryside of emerald hue, an old legend revived perhaps only for the sake of greed, and still smirk heartily at the sardonic portrayal of Nutt, who is a work in and of himself, then this is the type of stuff with which you should populate your shelves.  Unless, of course, you think irony also governs how we treat one another at our weakest hours.  In which case you also probably think that morality is only a device stuck in books to arouse a sensation of guilt within us regarding crimes we could not have possibly committed.  Or, as Nutt might say, a mild seasonal fever.      

Casting the Runes

I have spent some time in Denmark – not enough time for my taste, alas, but sufficient to speak at length with an amateur's zeal – and when Scandinavia appeals to you, few things will be able to supplant this interest.  Even those who know little about the region will confess that the countries and people of the North are incomparably beautiful, their landscapes as tranquil as their attitude towards the vicissitudes of life.  Native speakers of English, however, are also drawn to the affinities of language: we may love our classical etymologies, but ours is a Viking tongue, and in the vast majority of our basic words we hear the echoes of berserkers, sagas, and longships.  Before the Cross came to vanquish these pagans and find its way onto each of their banners, albeit in different shades, these were some of the most mysterious and obscurist peoples on our planet.  Their intentions may have been to plunder, and their worship and combat ideals just as ferocious, yet amidst this violence came their alphabet, named after the Gothic word for "secret" or "whisper."  My Danish host mother happened to have written a monograph on the odd hieroglyphs called the Runes, with the requisite asides as to their alleged mystic power.  My enthusiasm for her pet project and occasional comments regarding the origin of these old symbols led her to believe I knew much more than I did about the subject – which was not quite untrue.  As it were, this knowledge is primarily owed to a very famous English story.

We begin at the turn of the century with three letters, one not quite finished, dismissing the work of a man called Karswell who intended to publish an ominous tome entitled The Truth of Alchemy (notably, the book was not meant as a work of fiction).  More than ten years before, the same mysterious gentleman brought out a History of Witchcraft – to scathing reviews:

It was written in no style at all – split infinitives, and every sort of thing that makes an Oxford gorge rise.  Then there was nothing that the man didn't swallow: mixing up classical myths, and stories out of the Golden Legend with reports of savage customs of today – all very proper, no doubt, if you know how to use them, but he didn't; he seemed to put the Golden Legend and the Golden Bough exactly on a par, and to believe both: a pitiable exhibition, in short.  Well, after the misfortune, I looked over the book again.  It was no better than before, but the impression which it left this time on my mind was different .... now his book seemed to me to be a very sinister performance indeed.

The speaker is Henry Harrington, and the misfortune in question befell his brother John, who deemed the History of Witchcraft the afflatus of a lesser god, perhaps one dwelling beneath the earth, and a literary mediocrity.  Within weeks of his caustic comments, he was at a concert where a "stout, clean-shaven man" handed him a program that John had supposedly dropped.  This program was nothing more than "a strip of paper with some very odd writing on it in red and black – most carefully done," which seemed to Henry to resemble "Runic letters [more] than anything else."  The Runes were cast and three months to the day of this fateful handover, John Harrington was scared enough one night to clamber up a tree, only to fall and be crushed by a huge dead branch; he was found the next morning "with the most dreadful face of fear on him that could be imagined."  All this narrative prefaces the fact that The Truth of Alchemy was refused by an expert on the subject, a man by the name of Dunning, with whom our real story begins. 

Dunning also happens to come into contact with a "stout, clean-shaven man," and the reader is duly aware of the consequences of such interaction.  Karswell is at present the Abbot of Lufford – that is to say, he is the proprietor of Lufford Abbey – and his mettle is shown in brief descriptions at the onset of the story, unbeknownst, of course, to poor Dunning:

Just at present Mr. Karswell is a very angry man. But I don't know much about him otherwise, except that he is a person of wealth, his address is Lufford Abbey, Warwickshire, and he's an alchemist, apparently, and wants to tell us all about it .... Nobody knew what he did with himself; his servants were a horrible set of people; he had invented a new religion for himself, and practiced no one could tell what appalling rites; he was very easily offended and never forgave anybody; he had a dreadful face ... he never did a kind action, and whatever influence he did exert was mischievous.

What Karswell embodies should be clear to even the uninitiated reader; his aims, however, remain vague.  A person of wealth should be able to have his works published without batting so much as an eyelid, especially when a self-effacing editor and hefty contribution to the publishing house can ensure a better product.  Yet Karswell's quest for publication in the finest journals reminds one of his apparent need for another person to accept his Runic drawings: only through active acceptance can his black magic be implemented.  This important point will come to bear on the dénouement of the story, one that, unlike many of James's miniatures of horror, has a cinematic flavor to it (indeed, the tale has been filmed more than once).  Yet before we reach the end, we must endure the tortures of Mr. Dunning, who one day just so happens to notice "some way ahead a man with a handful of leaflets such as are distributed to passers-by by agents of enterprising firms."  A leaflet is thrust into his hand as he passes, and the hand of the giver seems "unnaturally rough and hot."  He is unable to get a good look at the remainder of the man's shape, although he will become very familiar with it in time.  And soon a change comes over him that he shall not soon forget:

More than once on the way home that day Mr. Dunning confessed to himself that he did not look forward with his usual cheerfulness to a solitary evening.  It seemed to him that something ill-defined and impalpable had stepped in between him and his fellow-men.

Impalpable at times, yes, but very palpable at others, especially when Dunning decides to reach under his pillow one night for a matchbox – and perhaps the rest should be left to more daring souls.

Behind a Mask

One April thirteen years ago on a day of commemoration in my second of many semesters in graduate school, I was approaching the university library when I noticed a group of shivering students (this was Massachusetts, after all) standing on its steps and reading names off a list.  The reading was mechanical but heartfelt; in other words, they were trying not to get too emotionally involved as excessive thought about their tribute would have probably made it impossible to get through the day.  They all took turns: walking near and in and out of the library that day, I saw at least twelve undergraduates rapidly passing the baton and solemnizing as well as their youth might permit.  Further along in my studies my adviser, the chair of Yiddish and Hebrew letters, told me about this great library destroyed in times of horror, with priceless and unique manuscripts kept alive only by their faint memory and secondary literature.  After the destruction of human lives, it is our memories which suffer most greatly when evil reigns (one Czech writer even detailed examples of early photo shop techniques to erase unwanted former leaders from famous pictures).  Yet we all have this tendency to want perfect memories: all writers who began with the usual throwaway juvenilia devote many more mature days to their abjuration.  We want life to be a series of events both planned and fortunate, the precise combination of ability and luck that justifies our decisions over time's endless horizon.  And it is equally satisfying when we learn of works that would have perished but remained miraculously preserved (often thanks to very brave people, such as this widow's memorization of all her incarcerated husband's poems).  Which brings us to a hundred-year-old short story found in this collection.       

The time is 1909 and the place is the small, predominantly Jewish town of V– in what is now this country.  The three young men who will be target of the villagers' scorn reside in "Anton Kovadle's ramshackle house in the gentile section."  Kovadle has many young men as lodgers, and they all seem to pursue activities that do not befit the holy life that their parents have wished for them – they do not study the Torah, they smoke on the Sabbath, and they consume swine.  Kovadle is one of those literary creations that has no purpose other than introducing an alternative point of view, a nexus for contradictions and dislike that will allow other characters to violate whatever laws the plot wants them to violate without assuming responsibility.  As such, we are told something about Kovadle and his boorish habits and then he disappears entirely from our ken.  We are left with three Jewish men, all young and unsung: Krantz, who is the main lodger, Braines, a skinny, nerdy fellow from very humble origins, and Shekhtl, who will pivot the story in the necessary direction.  Although Krantz as a pseudo-revolutionary and Braines as a delicate intellectual are old chestnuts in both literature and life, the description of the soft-spoken Braines could not be more insightful:

Ill-suited by temperament to the frivolous merrymaking of the group, he nonetheless tried to show an interest in all that interested them, taking active part in their pranks and disputes.

Among the college students of today you will be able to identify many Braineses.  They will invariably be the terminal and least funny link on a chain of joking oneupmanship, inviting the mockery of all the witsters who are quick to make their irony known.  They are too strong to buy into fraternity mores but too weak (often owing to a lack of success with romantic interests) to do without companionship.  As it were, the two fellows have a peaceful series of habits.  Braines devotes his energies to studying for exams to try to get into university and Krantz, the son of a distinguished Orthodox rabbi, spends his time fostering an image of "a fiery heretic, seized with the passion of the Enlightenment."  Krantz is notoriously known (and shunned) as a maskil, a freethinker or adherent to Enlightenment (Haskalah) ideals who finds those of faith provincial and backward, trapped in a past that could never consider progress.  While aware of the Enlightenment's many advantages, Braines is far too intelligent to give in to these silly rebellious urges, and properly regards Krantz and the third lodger, Shekhtl, with a "smile on his lips [that] remained ironic and pitying."

Shekhtl's arrival marks a period of great indigence for the men who neither work nor derive any allowance from their disappointed families.  They may indeed have intellectual ambitions, but nothing is more oppressive than the banality of poverty.  Since Braines often starved as a child he seems to deal better with their misery.  But not so for Krantz and even worse for the seventeen-year-old Shekhtl:

His fantasies now began to take a new turn.  Instead of broad plans for religious and social reform or geological transformation, his mind turned to the simple dream of finding a wallet stuffed with money or an easy way of making a bar of silver: if you took ten thousand silver coins and filed a little off each of them .... The only trouble was, he didn't know where to find the ten thousand silver coins.

Pressed into service because there is no other option, Shekhtl never develops a plan for his own betterment or that of his fellow lodgers; rather, he convinces Krantz to go back to Shekhtl's village in disguise (hence the title of the story) and sing his praises as a pious and dedicated student of theology so that his parents might send them enough money to live on.  And Krantz, whose ego has few limitations, does exactly that.  He poses as a teacher of Russian and orthography, whereas his secondary plan is to link up with the other maskilim in the town to see what else can be done in terms of support.  But he is warned: Shekhtl's parents, especially his mother, are not fools.  He will have to be particularly convincing and manipulative and is briefed accordingly about other people in the town who might prove dangerous.  Krantz arrives, meets the parents as if by chance, and ingratiates himself as rapidly as can be expected – and here, of course, is where the meat of the tale can be found.  The lovely similarity of mask and maskil is probably not extant in Yiddish, but Ansky's prose has bite and superb detail at every turn.  Consider Krantz's first night in disguise:

That night, Krantz lay awake for a long time in a state of high excitement, like an actor after a particularly brilliant performance.  Going over in his mind the many incidents and conversations of the day, he buried his head in the pillow and giggled madly.  Had anyone told him that in fact he had spent the day cheating and lying with more malice and treachery than a thief, Krantz would simply have been incredulous, so intoxicated was he by the artistry of his performance. 

There is also the repeated motif of a test, here to mean one of integrity although cloaked in more pedestrian terms.  Yet for all his wit and talent, Krantz is a bad listener doomed by his own success.  He would have done better to listen to Shekhtl's father when he claims that "a woman is afraid of everything and believes no one" – except perhaps when a person tries to be exactly what she desires.  But that, we know, is not feasible for all of eternity.

Pelagia and the Black Monk

Priests and nuns have long since made very credible detectives precisely because they are people of principle: there are some unacceptable things in their world, and those things must be combated and bludgeoned by courage and intelligence.  What is often not underscored, however, is their curiosity.  Those who believe may indeed be cordoned off in some small corner like a wildebeest on protected territory where no one will harm or near them; the ground beneath their feet may even be so tender as to blind them to all externalities except that of their faith.  Such souls, however, while oftentimes well-meaning, will inevitably be crippled by their parochialism should they encounter adversity or an outsider.  In a strange way, the true believer exposed to as much difference and change as possible has a distinct advantage.  While little should be said against the anchorite who chooses piety over the secular hedonism that has pervaded our planet, a man of faith should aspire to being a rootless cosmopolitan, because then he can behold the multifarious wonders forged by his Creator.  And if not entirely deracinated, then at least open-minded to the material mysteries that surround us, as depicted in this novel.  

Our time is late Imperial Russia, and our heroine is a fetching, thirtyish redhead lightly coated in freckles; she has also seen enough of life to know that she will spend the rest of it married to her Savior.  The task that we know she will eventually assume is the investigation of New Ararat, a northern oasis of spiritual bliss built around the great Hermitage monastery and its twelfth-century saint, Saint Basilisk.  Now if you happen to know something about the Moscovian coat of arms as well as modern herpetology, you might be able to surmise why the name basilisk was chosen.  Nevertheless, even without the presumption of such knowledge, we may easily understand the stratagem.  A tall, thin, hooded figure in the garb of one of the hermits – that is, in a sealed black cowl – has been spotted walking across the waters leading to Outskirts Island and the impregnable monastery.  The matter is brought to the attention of Zavolzhsk Bishop Mitrofanii, who dispatches in sequence three men: Alexei Lentochkin, an atheist and acerbic wit with a taste for nasty revenge; Felix Lagrange, a non-believer, head of the Zavolzhsk police and a swashbuckling cad; and then finally Matvei Berdichevsky, a convert from Judaism, a father expecting his thirteenth child, and an attorney of little imagination.  Each is sent on the heels of the other's failure; what these failures involve should not be revealed here.  Suffice it to say that all three men are betrayed by their weaknesses, overreliance on their own abilities, and some truly malevolent skulduggery that leaves Mitrofanii only one choice.  He must send his beloved "spiritual daughter" Pelagia to learn the fate of those three brazen emissaries.  Or, I should say, when Mitrofanii is suddenly struck down in ill health, Pelagia decides to send herself.

St. Basilisk lends us one clue as to the story's provenance, while the opulent psychotherapist Korovin and the titular villain cannot but suggest this well-known story (Korovin may ultimately remind English readers of another Doctor and another island of wayward experiments).  These experiments, a clear counterweight to the spiritual authority of the novel, are conducted on an eclectic bunch of scientists, artists and other persons of prominence suffering from some kind of mental obstacle, even if that obstacle is merely society's ignorance of their genius.  It is here that we find, inter alios: Yoshihin, the master painter whose tableaus triumph over reality; a nymphomaniac society lady who takes no liking to poor Pelagia; a mysophobe who walks around on stilts; and a physicist convinced of the existence of colored emanations nimbed around each person's head.  What will be initially unclear to us given Korovin's open-door policy is which of these persons is actually a patient and which is just a pilgrim come to New Ararat to dine on the hearty food, take in the "healthful air" and cleanse himself of his past indiscretions.  For that reason Pelagia opts to travel incognito, enduring a series of discomfiting episodes that never really challenge her faith but do make her think twice about having taken the veil at so young an age.  Even if, for investigative purposes, her veil is shed about a third of the way through the novel for a more exciting and worldly habit.     

About five years ago I received as a gift two of Akunin's novels which, while well-written, I could not find exceptional (I later discovered they were his first).  Mysteries are pleasant adventures, surely, and perhaps the most natural of all narratives; yet the vast majority of whodunits, thrillers and the like suffer by virtue of the need to explain how they operate.  Not only are all loose ends tied up, they are bound in the neatest of bows.  Each plot fits together like a perfectly crafted jigsaw puzzle, each character's motivations reflect his acts and words, and however horrible or confounding the crime might have initially appeared, everything that happened dissolves into a bland watercolor of childlike simplicity.  Pelagia and the Black Monk undoubtedly contains many such moments more typical of an action thriller or those Romantic and Victorian serials that had to end every chapter on what we now call a cliffhanger; we even encounter that unfortunate conceit of historical fiction of presciently announcing now-contemporary phenomena and events.  Nevertheless, Akunin's style and learning are not as shallow as the waters surrounding New Ararat, and with every step we graze against shelves of literary history, some of it maudlin, others more promising in their philosophies.  There are also Pelagia's jeremiads against men that are completely not in character, but befit a much older and more jaded Mother Superior.  But then again, men rule the world, so why shouldn't New Ararat be nothing more than a male version of Eden?  Because in Eden one doubts there would be either nun or friar.  

An Experiment in Criticism

The inherent problem with evaluative criticism is that the evaluator is often a mouse and his subject just as often an elephant.  While we cannot simply have literati rank their ilk – they have, as it were, better things to do – the problem becomes magnified by the insecure critic who knows full well he is a mediocrity who could not even write a worthwhile sonnet.  From these herds most of modern literary criticism has sprung.  The postmodernist fraud who decides that he may analyze any text on his own ignorant terms is the most egregious violator, and he will rightly become the most forgotten by history.  Those who pursue very slanted agendas – especially on such topics as gender and colonialism, which can be derived from literature as diverse as cooking recipes and museum pamphlets – will not be castigated quite as severely, as their research often serves a sociological purpose and is occasionally fascinating, even if as literary criticism it remains a moribund, bitter cobweb of narrow passageways.  How are all these things distinguished?  The twentieth century's abundance of solipsistic rubbish shows us that it is the reader not the work that should be discussed.  After all, haven't we heard of soup cans as brilliant, avant-garde art?  Which brings us to this fine book.

Our author pushes an agenda that one has to admire, firstly because it is consistent and secondly because it is surely correct.  The agenda does laterally involve Lewis's Christian beliefs, and he understands and implies (without explicit condemnation) that a bad reader is as morally reprehensible as a murderer.  Who are bad readers?  Most of us, alas.  And for reasons that will become persuasively obvious, a bad reader does not like bad literature as much as let himself be carried away by his own private sentiments.  Indeed, the initial portrait of a bad reader could not really be any more accurate:

The majority, though they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading.   They turn to it as a last resource.  They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up.  It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called 'reading oneself to sleep.'  They sometimes combine it with desultory conversation; often, with listening to the radio.  But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention.  When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.

I include the last two sentences because I modestly admit to living and breathing them (how amusing that Lewis a half-century ago inculpates train travel, and now we have "airport novels"), but they also pave the path for the introduction of the good reader.  The good reader, we are informed, receives the work rather than projects into it.  In other words, if a bad reader may read a work by this master of plots and imagine himself and some loved ones as the cast, a good reader will understand that while wholesome entertainment, Dickson Carr is best left with the fondest memories of adolescence on a dusty shelf (I devoured all his works during my fifteenth summer and remember them with great joy).  Bad readers are drawn to the feelings that works – any works, from masterpieces to pulp – evoke within them, hence those of a prurient bent seeing sex in every fold and phrase, and others who hate inequality noting, and quite rightly that, with the possible exception of some wordless extras, in the history of literature no two characters in the same work have ever been truly equal.  That is enough, in the eyes of many, to see injustice at every retort and more and crueler injustice at every assent.

Extended to myth and realism, these reasonable conclusions do just as well.  Myth has been debased to the point of meaninglessness, so we are all the more delighted to see Lewis give it the brief yet succulent definition it merits:

The pleasure of myth depends hardly at all on such usual narrative attractions as suspense or surprise.  Even at a first hearing it is felt to be inevitable .... [What is more] human sympathy is at a minimum.  We do not project ourselves at all strongly into the characters.  They are like shapes moving in another world.  We feel indeed that the pattern of their movements has a profound relevance to our own life, but we do not imaginatively transport ourselves into theirs.  The story of Orpheus makes us sad; but we are sad for all men rather than vividly sympathetic with him, as we are say, with Chaucer's Troilus ... Myth is always, in one sense of the word, 'fantastic.'  It deals with impossibles and preternaturals ... The experience may be sad or joyful but it is always grave.  Comic myth ... is impossible ... The experience is not only grave but awe-inspiring.  We feel it to be numinous.  It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us.  The recurrent efforts of the mind to grasp – we mean, chiefly, to conceptualize – this something are seen in the persistent tendency of humanity to provide myths with allegorical explanations.  And after all allegories have been tried, the myth itself continues to feel more important than they.

Despite my minor omissions (mostly owing to Lewis's numerated layout), this is most likely the finest summation of myth's significance in the English language.  I had always thought this unforgettable film a modern myth, and it just so happens to meet all the criteria mentioned above: it is solemn, inevitable, and all-powerful, the dénouement and twists so perfect as to seem less like fiction and more like destiny.  But isn't myth rather the playing field of children, with their fairy tales and intuitive sense of omnipotence?  When we close our eyes and lay back our heads in repose, dreaming of kingdoms and princesses, are we not pandering to our most puerile instincts?  We are only if our aim is to return to the hearths of our childhood in search of comfort (unfortunately, such memories should be enjoyed outside the study of serious literature).  If we wish, however, to recapture the wonder with which such tales once afflicted us, then we have every right to think of the fairy tale as a realism:

The process of growing-up is to be valued for what we gain, not what we lose.  Not to acquire a taste for the realistic is childish in the bad sense; to have lost the taste for marvels and adventures is no more a matter for congratulation than losing our teeth, our hair, our palate, and finally, our hopes.  Why do we hear so much about the defects of immaturity and so little about those of senility?

Not that we should all be deemed senile in the strict sense of the term (perhaps Lewis should have used "senescence"), but the matter is elucidated by the dichotomy of good and bad readers that our author prefers to judgments on the works themselves.  The irony being that anyone with his senses about him would not comment on An Experiment in Criticism but just desire its viability deep within his heart – and I have made enough confessions for one entry.    

Lewis, like this even greater writer, found his truth around the beginning of his fourth decade and utilized this truth to discover all other truths.  As a theologian, he made his points even if they were not always shod in the leather of prior workmen; but as an essayist and artist, he was undoubtedly a magnificent being.  Yet one must disagree, and vehemently, about Lewis's willingness to receive texts whose points of view he finds abominable.  We should not be willing to do so, nor indeed should we expect from them the slightest elucidation.  But we should also not rummage for affirmations of our own opinions as confronted by their opposites, because this is the easiest of all reading-related tasks.  The good reader, if we wish to continue with such terminology, will have very staunch values that will develop with the absorption of good writers; bad writers will show him nothing apart from the global preponderance and even thronging majority of mediocre authors.  His other claim that the denigrated of one generation may become the extolled of the next also must be repudiated.  A careless student of literature will wonder out loud as to why there are so few good works published today and so many good ones in the past.  What he may not realize is that there has always been a greedy market for the vile pulp and mindless romances that invade most bookstore shelves, but they have fallen into well-deserved oblivion (only to be replaced, I might add, with updated versions).  Curiously enough, and Lewis does not discuss this phenomenon, modern pictorial art and music have indeed gone the way of the trash heap, and no one really bothers to ask himself why.  I suspect the culprit is democratization taken to the unpleasant extreme of an equalization of tastes.  But then again, I am not looking over any other reader's shoulder.