Читать книгу The Neglected C. S. Lewis - Mark Neal - Страница 19

We come now to Tillyard’s work on Milton, and what specifically led Lewis to enter into the debate as it is preserved in The Personal Heresy. As we’ve said, Tillyard wrote that Paradise Lost was about the state of Milton’s mind at the time he wrote the poem.⁴³ Lewis said that Milton’s work was actually about the content of the story Milton wanted to tell. It was a story about creation, the nature and fall of man, and the story of redemption. Therefore, it was not at all about the state of the author’s mind.⁴⁴ Lewis argued that an attempt to analyze the author’s mind would be an exercise in unverifiable judgments. It would likely amount to nothing more than the critic’s own projection onto the author, rather than an analysis of the text itself. Such criticism of the author’s mind, which is not present, removes the discussion away from the text, which is present. Attention is diverted from the objective and directed toward the hypothetical. Lewis asserts that criticism must be about texts themselves if a critic’s judgment is ever to be validated or rendered invalid. The work is the necessary object.

Lewis’s essay was published in 1934, making it one of his earliest public presentations of critical judgment (only three years after his conversion and two years before the publication of The Allegory of Love).