The Inner Ring by C.S.Lewis
Abridged by David
Eastway. February, 2012
The Inner Ring was delivered by
C.S.Lewis as the memorial Oration at King’s College, the University of London,
1944. I have sought to abridge the original full
text of this address, so that the powerful and significant message may be more
accessible to the modern reader. The full text may still be found in the
published collections of C.S.Lewis’ addresses.
* * * * * *
When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old
general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey,
with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please
wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which
he used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped
listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be
heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of
the head. Boris now clearly understood—what he had already guessed—that side by
side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in
the Army Regulations, there existed a different and more real system—the system
which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully
for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second
lieutenant like Boris. Boris decided at once that he would be guided not by the
official system but by this other unwritten system.
In the passage I have
just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers
that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is
printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It remains
constant. A general is always superior to a colonel, and a colonel to a
captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised
secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had
been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You
discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are
outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.
There are what
correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A
particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of
conversation, are the marks. But it is not constant. It is not easy at a given
moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in
and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline.
There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after
they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in:
this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed
name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by
different names. It may be called “You and Tony and me.” When it is very secure
and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself “we.” When it has to be
expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself “all the sensible
people at this place.” From outside, if you have despaired of getting into it,
you call it “That gang” or “they” or “So-and-so and his set” or “The Caucus” or
“The Inner Ring.” If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call
it anything.
I hope you will all have
recognised the thing I am describing -
the phenomenon of an Inner Ring. You discovered one in your house at
school before the end of the first term. And when you had climbed up to
somewhere near it by the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that
within the ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was the
fringe of the great school Ring to which the house Rings were only satellites.
It is even possible that the school ring was almost in touch with a Masters’
Ring. You were beginning, in fact, to pierce through the skins of an onion. And I can assure you that in whatever
hospital, diocese, school, business, or college you arrive, you will find the
Rings—what Tolstoy calls the second or unwritten systems. I believe that in all
men’s lives at certain periods, one of the most dominant elements is the desire
to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.
This desire has had
ample justice done to it in literature in the form of snobbery. Victorian
fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside
that particular Ring called Society. But it must be clearly understood that
“Society,” in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and
snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside. People who are
free, from snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil
superiority, may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very
intensity of their desire to enter some quite different Ring which renders them
immune from all the allurements of high life. An invitation from a duchess would
be very cold comfort to a man smarting under the sense of exclusion from some
artistic or communistic côterie. Poor man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or
champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it
is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of
tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five —are the
people who know. Often the desire conceals itself so well that we hardly
recognize the pleasures of fruition. Men tell their wives that it is a hardship
to stay late at the office on some bit of important extra work because they and
the two others are the only people left in the place who really know how things
are run. But it is not quite true. It is a terrible bore, of course, when old
Fatty Smithson draws you aside and whispers, “Look here, we’ve got to get you
in on this examination somehow” or “Charles and I saw at once that you’ve got
to be on this committee.” A terrible bore… ah, but how much more terrible if
you were left out! It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons:
but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.
Freud would say, no
doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder
whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, in ages
of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus
than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is
the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that
other people know. They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the number
of people who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar reason is probably
very large.
I must now make a
distinction. I am not going to say that the existence of Inner Rings is an
Evil. It is certainly unavoidable. There must be confidential discussions: and
it is not only a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal
friendship should grow up between those who work together. But the desire which draws us into Inner Rings
is another matter. A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that
thing may be dangerous. Let Inner Rings be unavoidable and even an innocent
feature of life, though certainly not a beautiful one: but what of our longing
to enter them, our anguish when we are excluded, and the kind of pleasure we
feel when we get in?
My main purpose in this
address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great
permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to
make up the world as we
know it—this whole
pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and
advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be
quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is
going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which
you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will
be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any
other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and
continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream,
you will in fact be an “inner ringer. I have already made it fairly clear that
I think it better for you not to be that kind of man. But you may have an open
mind on the question. I will therefore suggest two reasons for thinking as I
do.
It would be polite and charitable to suppose that none of you is
yet a scoundrel. On the other hand, by the mere law of averages it is almost
certain that at least two or three of you before you die will have become
something very like scoundrels. There must be in this room the makings of at
least that number of unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists. The choice
is still before you: and I hope you will not take my hard words about your
possible future characters as a token of disrespect to your present characters.
The prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice
which could lead to scoundrelism will come in no very dramatic colours.
Obviously bad men, threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear.
Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched
between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently
been getting to know rather better — just at the moment when you are most
anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig — the hint will come. It will be
the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would
never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are
apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and
at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure — something “we always
do.” And you will be drawn in not by desire for gain or ease, but simply
because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to
be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see
the other man’s face — that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated
face — turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for
the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will
be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further
still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a
scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the
prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel. That is my first
reason. Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in
making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.
My second reason is
this. The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of
attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all
vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be
had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long
as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are
trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you
conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
If, say, you want to
join a musical society because you really like music — then there is a
possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a quartet and you
may enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in the know, your pleasure will be
short lived. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic. Once the
first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more
interesting than your old friends. Why should they be? You were not looking for virtue or kindness or
humour or learning or any
of the things that can
really be enjoyed. You merely wanted to be “in.” The rainbow’s end will still
be ahead of you. The old ring will now be only the drab background for your
endeavor to enter the new one.
In any wholesome group
of people which holds together for a good purpose, the exclusions are in a
sense accidental. Three or four people who are together for the sake of some
piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because
the others can’t in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers
because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner Ring
exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The
invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side
of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.
The quest of the Inner
Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a
surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your
end, you will find yourself inside the only circle in your profession that
really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound
craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with
the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not
shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which
fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to
those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will
do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be
responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which
the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. And if in your spare time you
consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come
unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of
something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But
the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a
by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is
only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they
like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes
perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have
it.
To a young person, just
entering on adult life, the world seems full of “insides,” full of delightful
intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he
follows that desire he will reach no “inside” that is worth reaching. The true
road lies in quite another direction.
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