by Brett Vaden

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis introduces his subject by discussing the contents of a textbook on his shelf, which he calls “The Green Book.” To protect the authors’ real names, he refers to them as Gaius and Titius. Rather than accomplish their stated purpose, to teach upper school boys and girls the art of English composition, Gaius and Titius’s efforts mainly serve to implant a dangerous idea into their young readers’ minds.

Lewis writes:

In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it ‘sublime’ and the other ‘pretty’; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: ‘When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall… Actually … he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word “Sublime”, or shortly, I have sublime feelings’ Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: ‘This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.’

Here, Gaius and Titius have subtly impressed upon their readers the notion that statements made about the value of something (e.g., ‘The waterfall is sublime’) actually only describe the feelings of the person making the statement, and so such statements are of minimal importance.

In another example, Lewis relates how Gaius and Titius quote a tawdry cruise boat ad:

The advertisement tells us that those who buy tickets for this cruise will go ‘across the Western Ocean where Drake of Devon sailed’, ‘adventuring after the treasures of the Indies’, and bringing home themselves also a ‘treasure’ of ‘golden hours’ and ‘glowing colors’. It is a bad bit of writing, of course: a venal and bathetic exploitation of those emotions of awe and pleasure which men feel in visiting places that have striking associations with history or legend.