Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949

Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949 Walter Hooper C. S. Lewis This three-volume collection brings together the best of C.S. Lewis’s letters – some published for the first time. This second volume covers the years from 1931–1949, charting Lewis’ emergence as a great Christian thinker and apologist.C.S. Lewis was a most prolific letter writer and his personal correspondence reveals much of his private life, reflections, friendships and feelings. This collection, carefully chosen and arranged by Walter Hooper, is the most extensive ever published.In this great and important collection are the letters Lewis wrote to J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, Owen Barfield, Arthur C. Clarke, Sheldon Vanauken and Dom Bede Griffiths. To some particular friends, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Lewis wrote over fifty letters alone. The letters deal with all of Lewis’s interests: theology, literary criticism, poetry, fantasy, children’s stories as well as revealing his relationships with family members and friends.The second volume begins with Lewis quietly trying to lead a Christian life and writing his first major work of literary history, The Allegory of Love. He was unknown during the 1930s and at this time wrote some of his finest letters, mainly to his brother Warren and to his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves. Then he is ‘discovered’ by the BBC and the publishers Geoffrey Bles, resulting in the most popular works of Christian apologetics ever written. C.S. Lewis became a household name and from the 1940s onwards some of his greatest theological letters were written. THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF C. S. LEWIS ———VOLUME II——— Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949 EDITED BY WALTER HOOPER Copyright (#u9c47d65c-00f5-53d1-b288-9095cdf4355d) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/) THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF C. S. LEWIS, VOLUME II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949. Copyright © 2004 by C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd. The right of C. S. Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780006281467 Ebook Edition © JUNE 2009 ISBN: 9780007332663 Version: 2017-03-24 CONTENTS Cover (#u633c4518-f86a-5518-8870-a8e26bd21d26) Title Page (#u6b3abd7b-281d-5a79-89cc-c5672a0fda0e) Copyright (#u0d801729-09a1-5d00-bcb0-1ae65191f148) Preface Abbreviations Letters: Chapter 1 - 1931 (#ulink_e58d7830-0253-5865-949d-76d8641b0102) Chapter 2 - 1932 (#ulink_36d0b3f5-e3fb-520f-9883-1b9c5fae58f9) Chapter 3 - 1933 (#ulink_18e5cc4e-5f9f-50e0-b39a-cba20dd1804b) Chapter 4 - 1934 (#ulink_6dfcfe59-afb9-5a85-af7e-21463d415455) Chapter 5 - 1935 (#ulink_550fcee8-3d5f-557f-a4bd-a79b8795a188) Chapter 6 - 1936 (#ulink_073ce712-bce2-5c14-aae9-b2f59f95226e) Chapter 7 - 1937 (#ulink_0949c460-1e52-5fad-a298-0d34dba07d0e) Chapter 8 - 1938 (#ulink_edda5074-ec56-5f47-8c9f-5e85792cd211) Chapter 9 - 1939 (#ulink_84c8ae51-3135-50f8-bbe6-438d9c924e9b) Chapter 10 - 1940 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 11 - 1941 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 12 - 1942 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 13 - 1943 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 14 - 1944 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 15 - 1945 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 16 - 1946 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 17 - 1947 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 18 - 1948 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 19 - 1949 (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Biographical Appendix (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Books By C. S. Lewis (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) PREFACE (#u9c47d65c-00f5-53d1-b288-9095cdf4355d) ‘I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity.’ (#ulink_8bce8f7a-ce18-5fc3-acab-a1b42b6f5840) C. S. Lewis had been an atheist for twenty years, and this was news his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves longed to hear. Arthur pressed him for details, and in the letter of 18 October 1931 with which Volume I of the Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis closed, Lewis described his momentous evening on 19 September when J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson dined with him at Magdalen. They strolled through Addison’s Walk and then sat in Lewis’s rooms until 4 a.m. talking about Christianity and its relation to myth. ‘The story of Christ,’ Lewis concluded, ‘is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.’ (#ulink_45cddbe4-febe-581d-92a2-4d22d2f5332b) This second volume of letters begins at that point, and the reader soon discovers what a ‘tremendous difference’ conversion to Christianity made in Lewis. In the Family Letters Lewis was struggling to find his voice as a poet; in the letters included in this volume he had, it seems, found many voices. He writes on such a wide range of subjects that some readers will wonder if, perhaps, there was more than one C. S. Lewis. Owen Barfield, (#ulink_bbff71b0-c541-547f-964c-77c518eb8409) the intimate friend whose letters from Lewis run through all three volumes, suggested that there was indeed more than one Lewis. In a piece entitled ‘The Five C. S. Lewises’ Barfield wrote: A fairly unsophisticated person who had never had any personal contract with Lewis, but who…had read the whole or most of what has been written about him, might be pardoned for wondering if it were not one writer, but three, with whom he wasbecoming acquainted: three men who just happened to have the same name and the same peculiar vigor of thought and utterance. Such a reader (I will venture to put myself in his shoes) might, to avoid confusion, adopt the nomenclature L1, L2, and L3, L1 being a distinguished and original literary critic, L2 a highly successful author of fiction, and L3 the writer and broadcaster of popular Christian apologetics. (#ulink_c7df613d-958c-5382-ad00-6cd368bee2e7) Barfield went on to point out that one of the first things the ‘unsophisticated person’ would notice is that, while admirers of Lewis the Original Literary Critic usually have little interest in the Lewis the Christian Apologist, readers of both Lewis the Original Literary Critic and Lewis the Christian Apologist are interested in Lewis the Writer of Fiction. Another thing such a person would notice, said Barfield, is that Lewis the Original Literary Critic has received much less attention than the other two Lewises, and that it would hardly be too much to say that the Literary Critic has been ‘swamped’ by the Apologist and the Writer of Fiction. The other two Lewises mentioned by Owen Barfield are ‘the one before and the other after his conversion’. (#ulink_9f6b8834-3cef-56a2-afcc-3f6a64cd0f8c) Given that Lewis was now a Christian, how were these four remaining Lewises related? Again I turn to Owen Barfield who knew them longer and probably thought more about them than anyone: The unity of all these Lewises is to my feeling as impressive, or even more impressive, than their diversity. Others, of course, have drawn attention to it, but I am not sure that anyone has succeeded in locating it. Some have pointed to his ‘style,’ but it goes deeper than that. ‘Consistency?’ Noticeable enough in spite of an occasional inconsistency here or there. His unswerving ‘sincerity’ then? That comes much nearer, but still does not satisfy me. Many other writers are sincere—but they are not Lewis. No. There was something in the whole quality and structure of his thinking, something for which the best label I can find is ‘presence of mind.’ If I were asked to expand on that, I could say only that somehow what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything. (#ulink_8293c45e-984d-547a-a62c-4c03bba4cb6a) While all but the last three letters in Volume I were written by the unconverted Lewis, those in Volume II were written by the convert. As it turns out, the neglected Original Literary Critic is the first C. S. Lewis to appear in this volume. Lewis would have considered it unconscionable to use his tutorials, lectures and letters as a pulpit for his Christian beliefs, but his conversion to the Faith certainly made a difference, not least to the book he began writing in 1928 and which was published in 1936 as The Allegory of Love: A Study of Medieval Tradition. ‘A believed idea,’ he said, ‘feels different from an idea that is not believed.’ (#ulink_a5e7ab90-8421-54a2-b5fc-36e5eaf672de) Or, as he observed in 29 January 1941 to Mary Neylan, once his pupil, ‘One of the minor rewards of conversion is to be able to see at last the real point of all the old literature which we are brought up to read with the point left out!’ (#ulink_1e4cf4b9-b645-521f-941e-41351751c898) Shortly before The Allegory of Love was published, Oxford University Press had announced that it was undertaking the production of The Oxford History of English Literature in twelve volumes, each the work of a single author. Lewis was persuaded to write the volume on the sixteenth century and although English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama would not be published until 1954, he was labouring over this magisterial work during most of the years the letters in this volume were being written. ‘When they asked me to do that,’ he told one of his students, ‘I was tremendously flattered. It’s like a girl committing herself to marrying an elderly millionaire who’s also a duke. In the end she finally has to settle down with the chap, and it’s a hellish long time before he dies.’ (#ulink_0155d176-a773-5ad3-8915-85776750cec1) The next Lewis to appear is Barfield’s Highly Successful Author of Fiction. This volume contains many letters Lewis wrote in response to the wide appeal of his interplanetary trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945). But just when the tone of the letters suggests that Lewis had written all the fiction he would write, the book concludes with an unexpected ‘twist’. To understand the unexpectedness of the ‘twist’ it is necessary to summarize Lewis’s relationship to Mrs Janie King Moore up to the end of this book. (#ulink_5600ba5b-866e-5d1e-8200-f4be29529605) Lewis met Mrs Moore in 1917, shortly after she arrived in Oxford with her eleven-year-old daughter, Maureen. (#ulink_557e1708-abe4-55d6-9a0b-d3841a886a37) Mrs Moore was in Oxford because her son, Edward ‘Paddy’ Moore, was a member of the Officers’ Training Corps billeted in Keble College. (#ulink_853b0e5f-967f-586d-8974-fa2487fdec6d) Lewis began his training with the Officers’ Training Corps at the same time, and he and Paddy shared a room in Keble. Lewis came to know Paddy’s family, and the young men promised each other that if either of them survived the war he would look after Lewis’s father and Paddy’s mother. When their training ended Paddy was sent to France with the Rifle Brigade, and Lewis soon followed with the Somerset Light Infantry. Paddy was killed at Pargny on 24 March 1918, and Lewis was wounded weeks later in the Battle of Arras. When Lewis returned to Oxford in 1919 to continue his studies at University College, he was joined by Mrs Moore and Maureen who took accommodation in Headington. Mrs Moore, forty-seven at this time, had been separated from her husband since 1908. Thereafter, the ‘family’, as Lewis began to refer to himself and the Moores, lived in numerous rented properties until, in 1930, they bought The Kilns in Headington Quarry. Roger Lancelyn Green and I pointed out in our biography of Lewis that while his relationship with Mrs Moore ‘may have started with that incomprehensible passion which middle-aged women seem occasionally able to inspire in susceptible youths…it soon turned from the desire for a mistress into the creation of a mother-substitute.’ (#ulink_dcad0f0a-7485-5b46-a65f-44bb378c818e) Indeed we come across what may be the first reference to Mrs Moore as ‘mother’ in a letter to Sister Penelope of 9 November 1941, in which Lewis asked her to ‘Pray for Jane…She is the old lady I call my mother and live with (she is really the mother of a friend)—an unbeliever, ill, old, frightened, full of charity in the sense of alms, but full of uncharity in several other senses. And I can do so little for her.’ (#ulink_1a801ae4-f6a5-5d53-943b-937903950a3e) By the middle of the 1940s Mrs Moore, in her late seventies, was crippled, often in great pain, and in need of constant care. Lewis divided his time between his duties at Magdalen College and nursing his old friend. ‘My mother is old & infirm, we have little and uncertain help, and I never know when I can, even for a day, get away from my duties as a nurse and a domestic servant’, (#ulink_e9a0ae60-de7f-5dac-b535-23d24bfbc12e) Lewis wrote to Lord Salisbury on 9 March 1947. It was not in Lewis’s nature to abandon anyone and by the spring of 1949 the situation was worse. Mrs Moore could hardly be left alone for a minute and Lewis was worn out. But just when he feared that old age had crept up on him and that his literary impulses were drying up, he began dreaming of lions. Suddenly Aslan, the great royal beast of Narnia, bounded in. ‘Apart from that,’ Lewis said, ‘I don’t know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.’ (#ulink_6a545013-0253-582a-85e8-940ecad5bf11) This volume ends with Lewis writing to Owen Barfield and the illustrator of Narnia, Pauline Baynes, about one of the best-loved books in the world, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There is still another C. S. Lewis—‘the writer and broadcaster of popular Christian apologetics’. Following the publication of The Problem of Pain (1940) the BBC’s Director of Religious Broadcasting, the Reverend James W. Welch, wrote to Lewis on 7 February 1941 asking if he would be willing to give a series of radio talks ‘on something like “The Christian Faith As I See It”’. From this came the four series of talks eventually published as Mere Christianity. There has never been anything like them. Of the many reasons for their success, one must be simply that Lewis believed the Gospel to be true. And because true, therefore important. ‘Christianity is a statement,’ said Lewis, ‘which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.’ (#ulink_91a57e1a-cf8d-55d8-bb54-c6989f0977d2) Everything the three ‘Lewises’ wrote is immensely readable, but the BBC broadcasts taught him to translate complicated truths into the vernacular. ‘Any fool can write learned language,’ Lewis once observed, ‘The vernacular is the real test. If you can’t turn your faith into it, then either you don’t understand it or you don’t believe it.’ (#ulink_76148dd5-5faa-5959-a46c-6132fcee98c3) But Lewis knew that no vernacular lasts forever, and one of the most valuable letters in this book is his reply to Canon John Beddow of 7 October 1945. Beddow, struck by the success of Lewis’s radio broadcasts, asked him to ‘translate’ some writings for the Christian Workers’ Union. ‘People praise me as a “translator”’, Lewis replied, ‘but what I want is to be the founder of a school of “translation”. I am nearly forty-seven. Where are my successors?’ (#ulink_cdcd4cba-2646-5cf5-8058-c69258ecd3d6) Where indeed? While we wait in hope for them to appear, we rejoice in Lewis’s theological legacy. It is breathtaking that during the war, when he had so much else to do, Lewis provided the Western world with its primary body of modern Christian apologetics—The Problem of Pain (1940), The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Abolition of Man (1943), Mere Christianity (1942–4), The Great Divorce (1946) and Miracles (finished in 1945, published in 1947). We may now add to this list Lewis’s theological letters, most of which appear here for the first time, or at least for the first time in their entirety. Lewis was annoyed when he saw how many letters he received as a result of his first radio talks. On 25 February 1942 he complained to Eric Fenn, the director of his broadcasts, ‘I wrote 35 letters yesterday…It “gets one down”—not to mention postage.’ This fretfulness ended as quickly as it began: Lewis realized that if you publish a book you are responsible for its consequences. As more and more people turned to him for help he saw it as a clear duty to help them, and letter-writing thus became a valuable aspect of his apostolate. Thereafter Lewis answered nearly all letters by return of post. When one considers what a large part of the letters in this volume are replies to those who wrote to him about his books it must seem that Lewis spent more time replying to their letters than writing the books themselves. In this he was given great help by his devoted brother, Warnie Lewis. Warnie had acquired a portable Royal typewriter many years before and, while he never advanced beyond the hunt-and-peck system with two fingers, he did it well. He came to the job of being his brother’s secretary well qualified; between 1933 and 1935 he had typed the 3,000-odd pages that make up the unpublished ‘Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930’, or the ‘Lewis Papers’ as they are known. While we cannot be certain when Warnie began helping his brother, the first of his typed letters to appear in the Collected Letters is that to Eric Fenn of 30 November 1942. C. S. Lewis—Jack—did not dictate his letters to Warnie, but using a kind of shorthand the brothers both knew—‘cd’ for ‘could’, ‘wd’ for ‘would’, ‘shd’ for ‘should’ etc.—he scribbled his reply on to whatever letter he was answering, after which Warnie typed it. Lewis used the same abbreviations in many of the letters written in his own hand, but with the difference that he could do it faster if Warnie was his only reader. In Lewis’s correspondence with Dorothy L. Sayers, for instance, a number of his replies are written on her letters. As an example, the typed letter to Sayers of 14 December 1945 is exactly as Lewis wrote it for Warnie to copy. Because Warnie looked after the posting of his brother’s letters, Jack could rely on him to add technical information. On 4 January 1946 Dorothy L. Sayers asked Lewis to return the copy of an essay she had sent him. In his draft reply of 7 February Lewis began, ‘I enclose the MS…’, which words Warnie altered to read: ‘I forward the MS as a registered packet by this post’. The remainder of the letter is exactly as Lewis dashed it off on the letter from Sayers. The typed letters to Sayers of 7 August 1946, 5 June 1947, and 1 January 1949 are exactly as Lewis scribbled them. Warnie was especially useful in replying to some of the many people who sent parcels of food during and after the war. These generous folk had a special place in Warnie’s heart, not least because he and the other Inklings shared that food. Some of Jack’s replies to them, if not written entirely by Warnie, contained passages by him. A number of instances appear in the letters to Edward A. Allen and his mother of Westfield, Massachusetts. This passage in the letter to Mr Allen of 10 August 1948 was almost certainly written by Warnie; as Jack did not read newspapers it is unlikely he would have known that Paul Gray Hoffman was the administrator of the Marshall Plan: I quite agree with you that Mr. Hoffman has a man size job in front of him; he has so far as I can judge, made a good impression so far, which is a big start. And I feel that the task is being tackled in the right way, i.e. insistance on Europe helping itself, not merely standing by to collect American money… (#ulink_0666190e-0645-59f6-bd90-af7f5e6764ff) This did not mean that Jack did not care what went into these letters, but his brother was able to make the replies more interesting and informative. After replying to people like the Allens over a period of years, C. S. Lewis let it be known that the letters were a joint production. On a few occasions Warnie even signed his brother’s name for him, although Jack himself signed all the letters to Edward A. Allen in this volume. Mr Allen was one of the American friends to whom Warnie continued to write after Jack died. In 1944, Warnie began evolving a ‘system’ for dealing with the correspondence, although its workings are not easy to follow and it appears to have changed form more than once over the years. Beginning with the letter to J. S. A. Ensor of 26 February 1944, he gave most letters a reference number, ‘REF. 55/44’. The number probably means this was the 55th letter Warnie typed in 1944, and we later find that ‘55’ has become Mr Ensor’s reference number, one that appears on all correspondence to him. But this did not hold true for all Lewis’s correspondents. His first letters to Dorothy L. Sayers bear the reference number ‘231’, but thereafter the number changed every year. The Lewis brothers were not good spellers. Warnie—who kept a diary for fifty years—joked that he was never sure whether he kept a ‘diary’ or a ‘dairy’. I should mention that his most characteristic error concerned contractions. He spelled, for instance, ‘can’t’ as ‘ca’nt’ and ‘couldn’t’ as ‘could’nt’, although at least he was consistent. His spelling, and that of his brother, has been retained throughout. I mentioned in the Preface to Volume I that, following his brother’s death, Warnie set out to write a biography of Jack to be called ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’. However, instead of an account of his brother’s life containing occasional quotations from his letters, the book was mostly quotation. The publishers objected, and in the end most of Warnie’s narrative was gathered into a ‘Memoir’ attached to what became Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966; revised and enlarged edition, 1988). Warnie was very hurt, not least because the publishers failed to include the dedication—‘To Those Overseas Friends Who Helped Him In the Lean Years’—which was added to the edition of 1988. Shortly after I came to know Warnie in January 1964 I began helping him copy the letters from his brother which people were sending back to him as he prepared his biography. If there was a method of photocopying in Oxford neither of us knew about it, and so we could not make exact copies. Since I feared we might never see the letters again, I copied every word of the letters Warnie assigned me. But because Warnie believed himself to be writing a biography of his brother, he typed only the parts he intended to include in his book, after which he returned the letters to their recipients. It is impossible to imagine a more courteous man than Warnie, and when some female correspondents asked him to keep their identities secret, he more than complied. He provided them with fictitious names which even now, years after their deaths, cannot be penetrated. And with their identities went their addresses. The identities of a few of these correspondents have since been revealed: Mary Neylan let it be known that she was the recipient of some of the letters addressed ‘To a Lady’ in the Letters of 1966, and it has come to light that the late Mrs Mary Van Deusen was ‘Mrs Arnold’ of the 1966 Letters. But we still do not know who ‘Mrs Ashton’ is and cannot discover if her letters from Lewis have survived. The result is that in a few instances the only copy of a letter (or part of a letter) we have is the one found in Letters of C. S. Lewis or in Warnie’s typescript of ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’. When this happens the location of the original letter is given as given as ‘L’—Letters of C. S. Lewis—or ‘WHL’—the unpublished typescript of ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, copies of which are held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. As with Volume I of the Collected Letters, I have provided the name of the person to whom a letter is addressed followed by the place where the reader can consult the original. The list of abbreviations reveals that ‘Bod’ means the Bodleian Library, ‘W’ the Wade Center, and so on. The Bodleian and the Wade Center have a reciprocal arrangement which means that each receives copies of what the other acquires. It was my intention to include in this volume all Lewis’s existing letters from the period 1931–49, but—inevitably-I learned of a few when it was too late for them to go in. However, HarperCollins are making provision for Volume III to include a supplement containing letters omitted from the first two volumes. The letters in Volume I were addressed primarily to family members or close friends, and because most were very important in Lewis’s life I felt I should provide substantial biographies of them in a Biographical Appendix. During the period covered by Volume II Lewis was writing to a greatly enlarged circle of correspondents, and I have included substantial biographies of close friends, such as Sister Penelope, as well as shorter biographies of associates and various prominent or otherwise interesting people whose details were too long to be included merely as footnotes. During the forty years I have been editing the writings of C. S. Lewis I have rarely needed so much help as I have with this volume. It is one thing to edit a single ‘C. S. Lewis’, quite another to edit three! I make the claim Lewis made in The Allegory of Love—that of standing on the shoulders of giants. The first is Dr Francis Warner who was Lewis’s last pupil, and whom Lewis described as ‘the best mannered man of his generation I have ever met’. (#ulink_4720e099-19d5-51b1-93b9-3bdb10bd87ce) Nothing could be truer, and no one has given me as much encouragement as he. Other giants are Professor Emrys Jones and Dr Barbara Everett who are responsible for identifying most of Lewis’s quotations from English literature. Lewis’s friends often asked him to criticize their work, and this volume includes a number of his replies. It is astonishing how generous he was with his time. I was unsure whether to include such letters, especially if, as in the case of that to J. A. Chapman of 6 July 1949, the composition in question was never published. Dr Warner and the others thought I should. Dr Everett opened my eyes to an aspect of Lewis’s generosity I had not considered before. Regarding Lewis’s letter to J. A. Chapman, she wrote in April 2003: (#ulink_db5d85e7-ebe5-599e-a5bc-3b368d20020c) What is remarkable about the letter is his gentlemanly kindness, something more than courtesy, and the fact that he is telling the exact truth. You couldn’t have a better ‘report’ in the sense that it is terribly truthful and terribly gentle with it…This is a sort of model…of how to write nicely about a book which the reader knows is unpublishable, not to say unreadable. You must publish it! Another on whose shoulders I often stand is Dr A. T. Reyes, the Classics scholar, whom I have relied on for helping with Lewis’s Greek and Latin quotations since I began work on the Collected Letters. My debts are very great, and I owe good words to those who have helped in numerous and valuable ways. They include Miss Priscilla Tolkien, Raphaela Schmid, Professor James Como, Professor G. B. Tennyson, Dr John Walsh, Dr Richard Mullen, Dr James Munson, and Dr Robin Darwall-Smith, archivist of Magdalen College and University College, who provided copies of the Lewis letters in Magdalen College Library. Mrs Valerie Eliot graciously supplied me with copies of Lewis’s letters to her husband, while Dr Edwin W. Brown donated copies of the letters to Mary Neylan and others. Laurence Harwood, Lewis’s godson, gave valuable help with the letters to the Harwood family. I am indebted to Mrs Anne Al-Shahi for helping with the biography of her grandfather, E. R. Eddison. Thanks to Madame Eliane Tixier and Dr Ren? Tixier, to Dr David L. Neuhouser and Taylor University, Upland, Indiana, for providing copies of letters to Lady Freud and her mother, and my warmest thanks to Lady Freud for annotating those letters. Mrs Jacquie Kavanagh of the Written Archives Centre of the BBC provided copies of Lewis’s letters to the BBC, Princeton University Library donated copies of the letters to Paul Elmer More, and Professor Brian Murdoch drew my attention to the letters to Eliza Marian Butler in the London University Germanic Institute. I am grateful to Mrs Madeleine F. Stebbins for giving the Bodleian Library the letter to her husband H. Lyman Stebbins, the late Dorothy Robinson who gave the Bodleian the letter to her father, Canon John Beddow, and Lewis’s former pupil, Harry Blamires, for help with Lewis’s letters to him. Thanks to Dr Christopher Mitchell of the Wade Center for providing copies of the Charles Williams letters, and Tracy Fleischman and the University of Texas at Austin for copies of the letters to Herbert Palmer. Dr Andrew Cuneo helped me type the letters in this volume. There seems no end to my debts—which include thanks to William Griffin, Aidan Mackey, Dr C. M. Bajetta, Dr Don W. King, George J. Houl?, Father Robert Byrne of the Oxford Oratory, Dr David Downing, with particular thanks to my friends Michael Ward, Richard Jeffery and Scott Johnson for proof-reading this volume. Dr Judith Priestman and Colin Harris of the Bodleian Library know how many reasons I have to be grateful to them. There would have been no volume of letters without the encouragement of David Brawn of HarperCollinsPublishers, and my copy-editor, Steve Gove, who is responsible for much of the care that has gone into the editing of this second volume of Lewis’s Collected Letters. The best thing of all was getting to know well so many people who share my admiration for the author of this book. Walter Hooper 22 November 2003 Oxford 1 (#ulink_77fe71a9-b24d-5955-a818-81e0e4fa627e)CL I, letter to Arthur Greeves of 1 October 1931, p. 974. 2 (#ulink_77fe71a9-b24d-5955-a818-81e0e4fa627e) ibid., letter to Arthur Greeves of 18 October 1931, p. 977. 3 (#ulink_18bca3a9-653a-5bb5-80ee-176a2a8dcc6f) See Owen Barfield in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 979–82. 4 (#ulink_b3a10fc5-90e6-50e8-a67b-aa081e798526) ‘The Five C. S. Lewises’, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), pp. 120–1. 5 (#ulink_fc415dc8-47c7-5c7f-808d-5c5ea3be6325) ibid., p. 121. 6 (#ulink_cf5d0c65-f15e-5bea-bbc9-c11f2dca0408) ibid., pp. 121–2. 7 (#ulink_1303469c-05a4-582b-b039-612a46f18f70) ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces (London: 1965; Fount, 1998), p. 37. 8 (#ulink_1303469c-05a4-582b-b039-612a46f18f70) Letter to Mary Neylan, 29 January 1941, in this volume. 9 (#ulink_32fc7c59-781e-5eda-9dbe-8709d4908397) Charles Wrong, ‘A Chance Meeting’, C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences, ed. James T. Como (1979; new edn, 1992), pp. 109–10. 10 (#ulink_35f0f34c-0310-5798-9825-e81ca4be2c87) See Janie King Moore in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. 11 (#ulink_35f0f34c-0310-5798-9825-e81ca4be2c87) See Dame Maureen Dunbar of Hempriggs in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. 12 (#ulink_35f0f34c-0310-5798-9825-e81ca4be2c87) See Edward Francis Courtenay ‘Paddy’ Moore in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. 13 (#ulink_4dfe1910-6cd2-5d22-9969-03081b70075a) Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Bles, 1974; rev. edn, 2002), ch. 2, p. 46. 14 (#ulink_4dfe1910-6cd2-5d22-9969-03081b70075a) see p. 496. 15 (#ulink_b70c8095-d532-575c-af3b-d82068fe0373) See p.766. 16 (#ulink_fd4f6ead-8ebc-5dc0-96b9-69e8b826a648) ‘It All began with a Picture…’, Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1984; Fount, 2000), p. 64. 17 (#ulink_36192e02-3509-58e4-9168-aee64ef89d00) ‘Christian Apologetics’,. EC, p. 158. 18 (#ulink_13a0bdfd-6138-5ba5-ad1b-832dc929c264) ‘Version Vernacular’, The Christian Century, Vol. LXXV (31 December 1958), p. 515. Reprinted in EC, p. 779. 19 (#ulink_13a0bdfd-6138-5ba5-ad1b-832dc929c264) Letter to Canon John Beddow of 7 October 1945, p. 674. 20 (#ulink_c58932eb-0731-5af7-850d-1fe88f250fcb) See p. 869. 21 (#ulink_714ec24d-85b3-506f-92cb-aaf08c40ca8d) Letter to Nancy Warner of 26 October 1963 quoted in Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, p. 415. 22 (#ulink_e8b5869d-130b-5f14-90ee-b7cba5240361) Letter to Walter Hooper of 5 April 2003. ABBREVIATIONS (#u9c47d65c-00f5-53d1-b288-9095cdf4355d) AMR = All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1922–1927, edited by Walter Hooper (1991) BBC = Written Archive Centre, British Broadcasting Corporation BF = Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, edited by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (1982) Bod = Bodleian Library, Oxford University CG = Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (1996) CL I = C. S. Lewis, Collected Utters. Vol. I: Family Letters 1905–1931, edited by Walter Hooper (2000) CP = C. S. Lewis, Collected Poems, edited by Walter Hooper (1994) EC = C. S. Lewis, Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, edited by Lesley Walmsley (2000) L = Letters of C. S. Lewis, edited with a Memoir by W. H. Lewis (1966); revised and enlarged edition edited by Walter Hooper (1988) Lambeth Palace = Lambeth Palace Library, Lambeth Palace, London LU = London University Germanic Institute M = Magdalen College, Oxford OUP = Oxford University Press, Oxford P = Private collection Prin = Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey SBJ = C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955) SLE = C. S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, edited by Walter Hooper (1969) T = Taylor University, Upland, Indiana Tex = University of Texas at Austin UC North Wales = University College of North Wales, Bangor V = Congregation of the Poor Servants of Divine Providence, Verona, Italy Vic = University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada W = Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois WHL = W. H. Lewis’s unpublished biography of his brother, ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’. The greater part of the narrative was brought together as a ‘Memoir’ and it was published with most of the letters as Letters to C. S. Lewis, edited with a Memoir by W. H. Lewis (1966). There are two typescripts of ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, one in the Bodleian Library, and one in the Wade Center 1931 (#u9c47d65c-00f5-53d1-b288-9095cdf4355d) Volume I of the Collected Letters ended with a letter of 18 October 1931 in which Lewis described to his friend, Arthur Greeves, what happened on the night of 19 September when J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson dined with him at Magdalen College. The three of them were up until 4 a.m. discussing Christianity and its relation to myth. Lewis wrote: What Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself…I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp…Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened. Volume II opens with a letter to Warnie who had left on 9 October for a second tour of China with the Royal Army Service Corps. He would not reach Shanghai until 17 November. Meanwhile, at Magdalen, Lewis was giving a series of lectures on Textual Criticism and writing The Allegory of Love. He, Mrs Moore and Maureen Moore had been in their new home, The Kilns, for a year. TO HIS BROTHER (W): [Magdalen College) Oct. 24th 1931 My dear W— Your letter from Gibraltar has arrived and my reading aloud of as much as was suitable to the female capacity had something of the air of an event in the household. As you say it seems long ago to our day at Whipsnade and so many things have since followed it into the past that I must write history and get you up to date before I can talk. By a stroke of bad luck for you Mr. Thomas rang up and invited you and me to tea the day after you had left. (#ulink_bd4b372e-46fe-5201-ac3c-808d9b996851) His wife was there at the meal but he took me into his study afterwards and we had quite a long talk. He is, I think, a little shy, or at any rate in a first meeting seemed to be feeling his way with me. He is a moderate conservative, an enemy of the wireless, has travelled a good deal, encourages us ‘not to stand any nonsense’ from the fox-hunters, was bred in Surrey, approves strongly of our afforestation programme, (#ulink_94b0dae1-2b14-5b8e-b80d-41b6b6764471) and knows his Foord Kelsie. (#ulink_bbee8d0a-d08b-50d0-9f2f-1873cadd70c6) I ventured to remark that I noticed how a sermon preached in his Church had reached the honours of print in the Oxford Times. ‘The old rascal!’ said Thomas, bursting into laughter. ‘Do you know the history of that? The Wednesday after he preached it, he met me and asked me if there had been a reporter in the Church, for somehow or the other they had got hold of his sermon. So I taxed him with it. “Yousent it to the papers,” I said; and then he owned up. The old rascal—the old rascal!’ He also gave me the final stages of the footpath quarrel, in which we have practically got our point: at least a route v. nearly the same as the original path has been conceded. (#ulink_eec6aaad-39f4-55c8-b4a2-24b6a730abbd) Apparently old Snow ended, as he had begun, by being the hero of the story. Thomas asked for written statements from as many parishioners as he could get hold of, and Snow produced one the length of your arm—a marvellous and highly autobiographical document which Thomas forwarded to the committee of the Town Council as likely to move anyone who had a sense of humour. But it was embarrassing when the case came into court and Thomas, going down to give evidence, found that old Snow had prepared the second and much longer statement which he proposed to read to the Magistrates from the spectators gallery during the hearing of the case: and since the old man thought that he could give a good account of himself if the police attacked him, Thomas had great difficulty in persuading him that he would be removed if he spoke or that the probability of removal was any reason for not at any rate beginning to read his statement. By the bye, the doury old man who made the speech about women and children turns out to be our local member of the Town Council, in fact one of the enemy: so that Snow’s instinct (‘I want him stopped’) guided him very well. The next important event since you left is that Maureen has been offered and accepted a residential job in a school at Monmouth (#ulink_4a815ade-ff18-596f-bfbc-6fd9948d6442)—a choice of time in which again you might have been more fortunate. I didn’t know whether to approve or disapprove. Minto (#ulink_49898a59-0f36-5075-9240-867c05d82b19) was in favour of it, and I only held back by the greater solitude she would be exposed to. Now that it is all settled, Minto, as I foresaw, fears the loneliness and is a little depressed about the whole thing. One must hope that the actual freedom from the innumerable extra jobs and endless bickerings wh. Maureen’s presence occasions will make up in fact for any feeling of ‘missing’ her. In public works I have made tolerable headway. As soon as I began to choose a site for my first tree in this autumn’s programme, it occurred to me that even if uprooting of all the elders were impracticable, still, there was no reason why each tree should not replace an elder instead of merely supplementing it. The job of digging out a complete elder root proved much easier than I had expected, and does not take much longer than digging an ordinary hole—the extra time you spend on extraction being compensated for by the fact that when once you have got the root out you find little solid digging left to be done. Unfortunately some of the places I chose as sites for the trees did not contain elder stumps, and many elders are in spots where one could hardly hope to make a new tree grow. However of the four tree holes which I have dug in the wood three are vic? elders cashiered. When I came to the problem of afforestation outside the wood I was held up by the necessity of doing a good deal of mowing. I have now scythed a wide open space round the western clump (i.e. the clump containing the ill fated beech) and a more or less continuous strip along past the Wasps nest to where I rejoined my summer’s mowing. General October has proved a complete failure and last week while I was at work near the enemy lines vedettes seemed to be out and as twilight drew on riders or working parties were constantly passing me on their homeward journey. Talking of beeches, Snow (you remember, the Magdalen botanist) (#ulink_6878e475-231c-518c-a228-929c82b6aa99) tells me that beeches will never grow well on a soil of clay and sand: chalk is what they want. I am inclined (if you agree) after one more trial to give up the effort to grow beeches, as Snow certainly knows his stuff: and you remember Johnson ‘Nay Sir, never grow things simply to show that you cannot grow them.’ (#ulink_9f2e9085-c06a-5446-8718-4af35e19c708) And this, in turn, raising the idea of books, I hasten to tell you of a stroke of good luck for us both—I now have the 15 volume Jeremy Taylor, in perfect condition, and have paid the same price of 20/-. (#ulink_a035e5a2-2236-5978-b457-3ebde1146ccb) My old pupil Griffiths (#ulink_7876b0af-dae2-54a0-a718-741ecd19b5a7) spent a night with me last Monday and told me that Saunders (#ulink_afdd0925-8f5c-5abd-8562-e8d216644d08) the bookseller, who is a friend of his, had a copy. He went round next day, got the book reserved and arranged the price: so we have done much better than if Galloway and Porters had had it. It is not indeed the nicest type of book—nineteenth century half leather of the granular and nearly black type, giving the volumes a legal or even commercial appearance. Still the Cambridge copy would probably have been the same plus its admitted dilapidations. On the same visit Griffiths presented me with a poorly bound but otherwise delightful copy (1742) of Law’s An Appeal/To all that doubt, or disbelieve/The Truths of the Gospel/Whether they be Deists, Arians/Socinians or Nominal Christians/. It bears the book plate of Lord Rivers. I like it much better than the same author’s Serious Call, (#ulink_f250833e-3910-5d54-bc09-e51d14e00ab8) and indeed like it as well as any religious work I have ever read. The prose of the Serious Call has here all been melted away, and the book is saturated with delight, and the sense of wonder: one of those rare works which make you say of Christianity ‘Here is the very thing you like in poetry and the romances, only this time it’s true.’ I had nearly forgotten about the Parkin dinner. (#ulink_2b4b678f-1e62-5097-8813-a1caf1b5b363) I think it was a success: at any rate he sat with me till 12.30. We didn’t get much beyond puns, bawdy, and politics, but there is a real friendliness (and an almost embarrassing modesty) about him which makes even ordinary ante-room talk worth while. By a stroke of luck he had Christie next to him at dinner who is one of the few fellows of Magdalen who keeps up the quaint old tradition of being polite to guests. (#ulink_40a21ecf-2f3e-52dd-a5d4-c7f47376c010) He told me your sunset at Southampton had been richly illuminated: you had departed, as Browne would doubtless say, like that unparalleled piece of nature the Phoenix. I am glad you like Browne as far as you got when your letter was written. (#ulink_3cc49fb4-4949-5aa4-8d73-c16284d8e335) Your query ‘Was there anything he didn’t love?’ hits the nail on the head. It seems to me that his peculiar strength lies in liking everything both in the serious sense (Christian charity and so forth) and in the Lambian (#ulink_cbf63702-05d1-5aa3-ae08-1e271a6d6378) sense of natural gusto: he is thus at once sane and whimsical, and sweet and pungent in the same sentence—as indeed Lamb often is. I imagine that I get a sort of double pleasure out of Thomas Browne, one from the author himself and one reflected from Lamb. I always feel Lamb, as it were, reading the book over my shoulder. A lot of nonsense is talked about the society of books, but ‘there’s more in it than you boys think’ in a case of this sort: it is almost like getting into a club. The discomforts of your train journey must have added the finishing touch to that unpleasant evening. Your departure affected Mr. Papworth so much that he retired to his basket as soon as you and I had left the house and refused to take any notice of anyone till the following morning. (#ulink_f8b1a406-cd73-5ef9-af2d-9c135479338f) I am glad the book on the literature of the Grand Siecle proved a success. I owe it one little debt myself, for I have been repeating at odd moments ever since the La Fontaine quatrain—‘j’aime le jeu, l’amour, les livres, la musique’. (#ulink_4bfb4f1b-4886-588a-8403-291f6d9b2e80) Yes indeed: how many essays I have heard read to me on Descartes’ proofs (there are more than one) of the existence of God. (#ulink_c77ab8ef-557f-5e49-8de4-a6999ac33b15) (It was a remark of Harwood’s first suggested to me that God might be defined as ‘a Being who spends his time having his existence proved and disproved’.) (#ulink_72ca91ba-1c6b-50f5-a571-cbda2777fefd) The particular one you quote (‘I have the idea of a perfect being’) (#ulink_c677f892-c389-5b5c-8365-e4c79d3893e2) seems to me to be valid or invalid according to the meaning you give the words ‘have an idea of’. I used to work it out by the analogy of a machine. If I have the idea of a machine which I, being unmechanical, couldn’t have invented on my own, does this prove that I have received the idea from some really mechanical source—e.g. a talk with the real inventor? To which I answer ‘Yes, if you mean a really detailed idea’: but of course there is another sense in which e.g. a lady novelist ‘has an idea’ of a new airship invented by her hero—in the sense that she attached some vague meaning to her words, which proves nothing of the sort. So that if anyone asks me whether the idea of God in human minds proves His existence, I can only ask ‘Whose idea?’ The Thistle-Bird’s (#ulink_2c9a8248-d919-594f-9b8a-84aee5cc69cf) idea, for instance, clearly not, for it contains nothing whereof his own pride, fear, and malevolence could not easily provide the materials (cf. McAndrew’s Hymn ‘Yer mother’s God’s a grasping deil, the image of yourself’). (#ulink_3303eba2-e52d-5d85-b54b-9e8b1b8769d7) On the other hand it is arguable that the ‘idea of God’ in some minds does contain, not a mere abstract definition, but a real imaginative perception of goodness and beauty, beyond their own resources: and this not only in minds which already believe in God. It certainly seems to me that the ‘vague something’ which has been suggested to ones mind as desirable, all ones life, in experiences of nature and music and poetry, even in such ostensibly irreligious forms as ‘The land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ in Morris, (#ulink_a5701045-cc3d-5d5e-acdb-2e54659bad43) and which rouses desires that no finite object even pretends to satisfy, can be argued not to be any product of our own minds. Of course I am not suggesting that these vague ideas of something we want and haven’t got, wh. occur in the Pagan period of individuals and of races (hence mythology) are anything more than the first and most rudimentary forms of the ‘idea of God’. This subject has drawn me into a longer digression (if indeed digression is possible in my type of letter!) than I had intended. I do wish you could see the Kilns now. We have had very cold weather (the last few mornings have been white with frost) and little wind: most of the leaves have become yellow and red without dropping from their branch, and those that have fallen lie in smooth circular carpets at the foot of their tree. The firs in the top wood are getting slowly barer, and working these afternoons in the high countries I begin to get the real autumn beauties. Meanwhile you have been having very different beauties. I was intrigued by your account of the Portugal coast, which sounds both scenically and socially an admirable place: well worthy to be added (it costs nothing) to the lengthening list of places the Pigibudda (#ulink_32779e4e-e89b-57ca-9505-374b6a3ae9d5) must visit some day. I resent more and more these impertinent three years which still divide us from the beginning of a joint rational life. I am at present writing this on a Sunday afternoon in the Common Room, having begun it yesterday in College. Maureen has her usual week end guest, a harmless girl whom we carried to [the] sermon this morning. Our pew felt a little awkward when Thomas, before the text, said ‘We shall be glad if members of the congregation who are absolutely unable to stay for the whole service, will go out during the hymn: but it is very much to be preferred that they should wait till the service is over.’ We went out during the hymn according to our usual practice. I think myself he is a little unfair to try and make it a rule that you must communicate if you want to hear a sermon. Of these (since you mention them among items of news) I have heard two, having skipped on the first Sunday after you left in order to correct my collection papers. This morning’s was on the ‘armour of God’ (#ulink_86fc4038-f24b-5bc3-8873-5040d0e38a48) and not one of his best. Last week’s was on St Luke’s day, (#ulink_cceaf5b4-dc26-51d9-a0fe-0c1cf2b7b99b) from which I learned that St Luke was a painter as well as a doctor and that there is at Rome a painting of the Good Shepherd traditionally attributed to him. The attribution is probably wrong, said Thomas, but the tradition of his being a painter was interesting if we considered the specially artistic character of the 3rd gospel, as against the purely facty nature of the other two synoptics, or the mystical nature of the 4th. (#ulink_07c77afb-6aa3-5a6b-88d0-b9f73cb1730d) I have so many different departments of news, what with sermons and swans, that I could well adopt the different datings of the Tatler ‘fashion from White’s coffee house, politics from Wills’ etc. This is a great feather in my cap, specially as next year is the first exam held under the syllabus which my party and I have forced upon the junto after much hard fighting: so that if I get a good colleague we shall be able to some extent to mould the new tradition. In fact, in English School politics, the anti-junto is in the ascendant—perhaps, from a prejudiced point of view, might be said to have become the junto. How long will it take us to become corrupt in our turn? (#ulink_30ea3406-9036-5070-bd77-0c82f76d6ae9) The General Election takes place on Tuesday next, and the results will be stale long before this reaches you. I had a wonderful conversation about it last Sunday with a Dr Lees whom Kathleen Whitty (#ulink_b8053303-5dbb-58ac-826f-530cd839b041) brought here (or rather he drove her) to tea in the course of a motor drive from Bristol. I said ‘Politics have really become unintelligible to the amateur now. In the old days when it was about votes for women or home rule for Ireland one could have an opinion: now I feel one’s opinion, and therefore one’s vote, is quite worthless’—He replied with emotion ‘I’m so glad to hear you say that, because that is exactly how I feel. What is the good of all these ignorant opinions? That is why we must leave it to the government who really understand, and that is why it is so all important to vote against Labour.’ I tried again. ‘One is rather sickened to see the way the papers are buttering up Macdonald (#ulink_43bfa173-786a-5d03-a2c3-364c5a353ed8) and Snowden (#ulink_f2454ac7-9c8a-598c-a63b-e705482ecf6e) now, while a month ago they couldn’t find anything bad enough to say for them’—‘Yes, indeed. Very sickened’—‘And it is such nonsense all this about Macdonald having “done the big thing”’—‘Ah well there I don’t agree with you. You see no man likes to desert his old friends, but this chap, when he saw the good of the country demanded it etc’—then followed verbatim the whole of the Daily Mail stuff about the big thing. All this from an old blether in a black city coat and streaked trousers and spats introduced by Kathleen as ‘the cleverest doctor in Bristol’. Alas, this description may well be perfectly true! An essay on the conception of ‘cleverness’ would be worth writing. I finished the Wodehouse the day after you left. It is not the best (I think) of his that I have read, but very well worth reading indeed. I also re-read Northanger Abbey (#ulink_273ac6bc-f243-5747-b6eb-cd1f017de3c2) about the same time. Christie well describes it as ‘Jane Austen in high spirits’. It is much nearer farce (or burlesque) than the others, but none the worse on that account. I enclose a formal letter to you on the mortgage. If you will write one to me, the same except for the necessary changes, and return both with your next letter, I will send them to be taken care of by Barfield. (#ulink_e02645ff-4c10-5861-b02a-1094128eb48f) He has not been to see me yet so your will has not yet been regularised. Minto was—to use a trite phrase in its genuine sense—‘overcome’ by your kind provision for Maureen. As I look up (3.30) I see those obscene birds advancing across the lawn, turning their infernal conning towers this way and that. (#ulink_4cdcb0e5-5729-5cdf-b57d-f4f342bcab6c) They are unfed, Tykes unwalked, and I must go out. I suppose this will cross your next letter and so produce a mal-adjustment of question and answer which we shall not right for the whole three years. Meanwhile one quarter of first term of the nine Non-APB terms is gone. Yours Jack TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): [The Kilns] Nov 8, 1931 My dear Arthur, I was sorry to hear of your cold and of your musical disappointment, though I must confess that your beginning your letter with an (unfavourable) account of a concert was pleasantly remeniscent of old times. It is delightful to hear of your reading Endymion (#ulink_bc5e29c4-41ba-5a7e-9118-cff756bd06ce) Funnily enough I had been re-dipping into it the last week end too. I don’t think you can say that either it or Hyperion (#ulink_25f5013d-fb98-5ef1-8e1a-d52c9fe84090) is the better for they are different in kind. The one is a sweet, the other a dry, flavour. It is like comparing Spenser & Milton, or Wagner (at his richest) with Bach (at his most classical). People will tell you that Hyperion is more Greek, but I doubt if that is a good description. As to why the goddess takes on the form of a mortal at the end, he may mean that the mystical love does not complete itself until it has appeared as a human love also, and that the soul, when this happens, may dread as an infidelity to the spiritual what is really its completion. But I am inclined to think that when Keats wrote Endymion he was not v. certain of his own intention: that he faltered between the myth as his imagination set it before him (full of meaning, but not meaning necessarily decipherable by Keats’ intellect) and between various ideas of conscious meanings of his own invention, wh., considering his age and education, were possibly confused and even shallow. There is thus some confusion throughout: and this, along with another fault, prevents it from being a perfect poem. The other fault is the Jack of spiritual experience. He knows about the hunting for ‘it’ (#ulink_9e3bebac-8edc-541f-9ee0-c5495b2c0195) and longing and wandering: but he has, as yet, no real idea of what it wd. be if you found it. Hence while Endymion’s description to Peona of his unrest, and Endymion’s journeying under earth and sea, are wonderful, his actual meetings with Cynthia are (to me) failures: not because they are erotic but because they are erotic in a rather commonplace way—all gasps and exclamations and a sort of suburban flirtatious air. It is horrible to use such words of Keats, but I think he would be the first to agree. My memories of the Phaedrus (#ulink_42d011a2-5da8-5a0c-a1f2-50b7f960accb) are vague—mainly of the beautiful scene in which the discussion takes place and of the procession of the gods round the sky. You must be enjoying yourself no end. I don’t know any greater pleasure than returning to a world of the imagination which one has long forsaken and feeling ‘After all this is my own.’ Be careful of Reid. (#ulink_c2129b38-d08e-577e-b65e-07e3b7e70e5a) I am sure he is in danger of stopping at the purely sensuous side of the Greek stories and of encouraging you to do the same. You, on the other hand, if you are in for a new Greek period, will be able to do him some good. I, like you, am worried by the fact that the spontaneous appeal of the Christian story is so much less to me than that of Paganism. Both the things you suggest (unfavourable associations from early upbringing and the corruption of one’s nature) probably are causes: but I have a sort of feeling that the cause must be elsewhere, and I have not yet discovered it. I think the thrill of the Pagan stories and of romance may be due to the fact that they are mere beginnings—the first, faint whisper of the wind from beyond the world—while Christianity is the thing itself: and no thing, when you have really started on it, can have for you then and there just the same thrill as the first hint. For example, the experience of being married and bringing up a family, cannot have the old bittersweet of first falling in love. But it is futile (and, I think, wicked) to go on trying to get the old thrill again: you must go forward and not backward. Any real advance will in its turn be ushered in by a new thrill, different from the old: doomed in its turn to disappear and to become in its turn a temptation to retrogression. Delight is a bell that rings as you set your foot on the first step of a new flight of stairs leading upwards. Once you have started climbing you will notice only the hard work: it is when you have reached the landing and catch sight of the new stair that you may expect the bell again. This is only an idea, and may be all rot: but it seems to fit in pretty well with the general law (thrills also must die to live) of autumn & spring, sleep and waking, death and resurrection, and ‘Whosoever loseth his life, shall save it.’ (#ulink_f9c24daa-cf1d-5516-aa5d-949d83b52b9c) On the other hand, it may be simply part of our probation—one needs the sweetness to start one on the spiritual life but, once started, one must learn to obey God for his own sake, not for the pleasure. Perhaps we are in the stage Endymion went through on the bottom of the sea. I saw a most attractive review of Uncle Stephen in the T.L.S. (#ulink_5527ab35-d21a-5c45-beaf-e6f445ea7dea) I am glad he stuck to that name after all, though surprised, for I thought he had definitely turned it down. Did I tell you I had bought the complete works of Jeremy Taylor in 15 volumes—half leather (not v. nice—the rather pimply, nearly black, office-looking type of leather but excellent paper and print) for 20/-. I have also been presented by an old pupil with what I think must be a frst editn of Law’s Appeal: much better than the Serious Call, but it will need a letter to itself. I wish you could see the Kilns at present in the autumn colours Yours Jack P.S. Minto says I must have left a suit of pyjamas at Bernagh, and I seem to remember your saying something about it (wh. I didn’t heed) in a previous letter. If so ‘woooo-d’ you please send them. Really Arthur, I am awfully sorry, honestly, really Yrs J. P.P.S. I chust wanted to say, Arthur, how very sorry I am. On 17 November 1931, Warnie arrived in Shanghai where he was to serve as the officer commanding the Royal Army Service Corps. He had been here in 1927–9 as officer in command of the Supply Depot. He wrote in his diary on 23 November: I almost feel as I had never left Shanghai, a feeling accentuated by the fact that I have bought back from Bill Wilson the identical pieces of furniture which I sold him when I went home. I am writing this at the same old desk, and in front of me are my own old curtains and mosquito windows…Now that I have got my pictures up, and bought a $30 Japanese rush carpet, unpacked all my books and the gramophone, I feel I can sit back and breathe. (#ulink_de394cf3-920d-5f81-b66f-1e6558aa458e) TO HIS BROTHER (W): [The Kilns] Nov. 22nd 1931 My dear W, I really think your recent editorial difficulties have impressed upon me the habit of dating my letters! (#ulink_ff0fe845-f5e5-5b4a-b49d-e6b2b607bf07) And talking of the Lewis papers, I looked into the editorial drawer the other day and made a correction, by adding to your note ‘Grace by A.J.L.’ the words ‘On the contrary, traditional Latin Grace translated by C.S.L.’ Such are the traps into which even a careful editor falls. I am sorry I have not been able to write for some weeks. During the week it is out of the question. My ordinary day is as follows. Called (with tea) 7.15. After bath and shave I usually have time for a dozen paces or so in Addison’s walk (#ulink_08373545-51b8-5eea-a5f0-ad7134db9ae4) (at this time of year my stroll exactly hits the sunrise) before chapel at 8. ‘Dean’s Prayers’—which I have before described to you—lasts about quarter of an hour. I then breakfast in common room with the Dean’s Prayers party (i.e. Adam Fox, (#ulink_53d3fb6f-410c-5ac5-88fa-1969aed6f30b) the chaplain, Benecke (#ulink_8bbe4783-68ee-5376-8e24-a5c37eee7345) and Christie) which is joined punctually by J. A. Smith (#ulink_4a976b95-226a-549f-af13-bb2f1906fd6d) at about 8.25. I have usually left the room at about 8.40, and then saunter, go to the stool, answer notes etc till 9. From 9 till 1 is all pupils—an unconscionable long stretch for a man to act the gramaphone in. At one Lyddiatt (#ulink_830b064a-11a7-5f88-8797-0220f1327270) or Maureen is waiting for me with the car and I am carried home. My afternoons you know. Almost every afternoon as I set out hillwards with my spade, this place gives me all the thrill of novelty. The scurry of the waterfowl as you pass the pond, and the rich smell of autumnal litter as you leave the drive and strike into the little path, are always just as good as new. At 4.45 I am usually driven into College again, to be a gramaphone for two more hours, 5 till 7. At 7.15 comes dinner. On Tuesday, which is my really shocking day, pupils come to me to read Beowulf at 8.30 and usually stay till about 11, so that when they have gone and I have glanced round the empty glasses and coffee cups and the chairs in the wrong places, I am glad enough to crawl to bed. Other standing engagements are on Thursday when a man called Horwood (#ulink_958f8096-55f3-5fe8-808b-63508c01daca) (another English don) comes and reads Dante with me, every second Monday when the College literary society meets. When you have thrown in the usual irregular dinner engagements you will see that I am lucky when I have two evenings free after dinner. The only exception to this programme (except of course Saturday when I have no pupils after tea) is Monday when I have no pupils at all. I have to employ a good deal of it in correcting transcripts done by B. Litt. pupils, and other odd jobs. It has also become a regular custom that Tolkien (#ulink_c4b10d21-0437-5f20-9b51-a8d7a3c4b411) should drop in on me of a Monday morning and drink a glass. This is one of the pleasantest spots in the week. Sometimes we talk English school politics: sometimes we criticise one another’s poems: other days we drift into theology or ‘the state of the nation’: rarely we fly no higher than bawdy and ‘puns’. What began as an excuse for not writing has developed into a typical diary or hebdomadal compendium. As to the last two week ends, they have both been occupied. The one before last I went to spend a night at Reading with a man called Hugo Dyson (#ulink_0c47d650-a34a-5417-9912-5e308643594b)—now that I come to think of it, you heard all about him before you left. We had a grand evening. Rare luck to stay with a friend whose wife is so nice that one almost (I can’t say quite) almost regrets the change when he takes you up to his study for serious smoking and for the real midnight talking. You would enjoy Dyson very much for his special period is the late 17th century: he was much intrigued by your library when he was last in our room. He is a most fastidious bookman and made me (that same occasion) take out one of the big folios from the bottom shelf of the Leeboro bookcase because they were too tightly packed. He disapproved strongly of the method (wh. I confess I had always followed) of taking books out of the shelf by putting a finger at the top so—and adopts a different one: which you will find described in ‘Portrait of a Scholar’ in that book of essays you took away with you. (#ulink_9b1020d7-50b4-5054-910a-27629b0728f6) At the same time he is as far from being a dilettante as anyone can be: a burly man, both in mind and body, with the stamp of the war on him, which begins to be a pleasing rarity, at any rate in civilian life. Lest anything should be lacking, he is a Christian and a lover of cats. The Dyson cat is called Mirralls, and is a Viscount. That accounts for one week end. Last Saturday Barfield came down. He arrived unexpectedly for lunch in College—Saturday being my day for a rotatory lunch with Keir (#ulink_adfca1fd-7a44-55d1-96de-c10813cbef3e) and Lawson. (#ulink_4e015d11-abbe-5b15-a82f-c7ada86e6767) As it happened, Keir didn’t turn up, and the bore Lawson was neither here nor there. Barfield remarked afterwards that he went away feeling that Lawson had contributed most valuably to the conversation, though when he came to think it over he could not remember his having made a single rational remark. You know the type—the man who has an air of saying something interesting, which often carries you away. Barfield and I then motored to the Kilns, took our packs (or rather your pack and mine) and set out to walk to the Barley Mow. (#ulink_c955a745-b8d5-591b-90e6-e3b80db6d191) We failed to get any four o’clock [tea] at Marsh Baldon, but being both tired of work, and badly in need of a jaunt, we were too delighted to find ourselves on the road again and in each other’s company, to be dampened even by that. It was dark before we reached the B.M., and after a noble supper of ham and eggs and a little yawning at the fire in that panelled room (shared with the same couple whom you and I saw there) we went to bed. We lay in one room, mighty snug, and had a good deal of talk before it drifted off into prodigious yawns. We didn’t stir till about 9 the Sunday morning, he being delighted with the unaccustomed absence of a restless child (how do married men live?) and I glad enough not to have chapel at 8. That day we walked up Didcot Clumps (Sinodun Hills? Wittenham Clumps?) and crossed the Thames, not at Shillingford but at a ferry near Shillingford. As we reached the bank a torrent of dogs and one cat burst from the ferryman’s house on the far shore and got as near as they could on the bows of a barge: and when finally we were ferried across they all (cat included) leaped aboard us before we were well alongside with the frantic haste of porters or customs officials. The ferryman’s only explanation was the cryptic sentence ‘Brought us all together’ which he repeated about four times. The rest of the day was spent tramping along the route Warborough—Stadhampton-Denton-Cuddesdon-Wheatley-Kilns. It was a colourless autumn day—about a quarter of the leaves still hanging on the trees: you know—just a yellow freckle on the black timber. We had tea at Wheatley, Barfield denouncing birth control. I could not help thinking, though I hardly cared to say, that a man married to an obviously barren woman was in this matter an arm chair critic. We were both home for supper, both feeling enormously the better for our jaunt. It is curious how the actual length of a holiday and the feeling of length are almost in inverse ratio. We had the sensation of having been away from our routine for an almost endless time. Looking back on our own last trip I feel the same. I can believe that we were only a day and two nights at Larne: as for Castlerock, we seem we have been there for weeks, in all kinds of weather and at different seasons of the year. Did we really walk only twice to the tunnel? In retrospect, by the bye, the thing that wears best of all in my mind is the narrow gauge journey: the journey back, of course, is—like a lane by a brickyard on a hot day. Before Barfield went to bed that night (in your room) I gave him your will and he is doubtless now re-writing it in unintelligible language. Which reminds me—I have had a letter from Condlin (#ulink_0c4e194d-dc01-5e4c-aa21-e5b14c091dcd) about the Templeton family: but what he is saying about them, or whether he has found them, I can’t for the life of me make out. Did I tell you that his acknowledgment of the ?100 tip was not very enthusiastic? I don’t say it was definitely chilly—nor, by the way, do I know how far Condlin’s epistolary style is adapted for registering surprise or pleasure—or, for the matter of that, anything whatever on any subject. I have also heard from the Tower of Glass (#ulink_f7712529-524d-5a40-a093-112f7a43c5db) to say that they have at last got the Bishop’s authority (he doesn’t kill himself with work, does he? Prissy prelatical dog!) and also-which pleased me less, that the Rev. Chevasse (#ulink_4bcedcd5-2dce-5126-b14a-7bc1e491a51a) had suggested that St Mark’s Tower should be included somewhere in the window. (#ulink_a67e508f-d074-5d30-8624-6b879f00aacd) Clearly the proper [answer] is ‘Ah such nonsense.’ I actually replied by telling them to consult the artist, and to ask him to consider the proposal on purely aesthetic grounds. Unless the artist is a fool, that ought to safeguard us pretty well, and if he is—why then there is no help for us in any case. It just occurs to me as I write, that Chevasse in this matter is probably the unwilling mouthpiece of the Select Vestry: I daresay even that the monstrous regiment of women, (#ulink_9f5b6c9a-7521-5bf1-a248-73fba1f888a4) incarnated in Lily Ewart, (#ulink_ac8fe1f5-09c3-5949-8062-cdf0311c4720) is really at the bottom of it. Zounds!—I’d like a few minutes at the bottom of her! No ‘thought infirm’ would there ‘stain my cheek’: (#ulink_7821f055-b7a6-5ad0-a2ae-e83b89820904) a firm hand rather would stain both hers. I also sent them the (revised by Christie) inscription. That, I think, is all the business news. As regards books—what time have I to read? Tutorial necessities have spurred me into reading another Carlyle ‘Past and Present’ (#ulink_70246e26-d475-5ef4-8e5a-c31ba8ad2ae6) which I recommend: specially the central part about Abbot Samson. Like all Carlyle it gets a little wearisome before the end—as all listening to these shouting authors does. But the pungency and humour and frequent sublimity is tip-top. It is very amusing to read the 19th century editor’s preface (in our Leeborough edition), (#ulink_6484bb02-a1a2-53a8-9afd-dae3cf4b58c3) obviously by a P’daita: (#ulink_4e790fdc-255f-5785-8d35-8870cac97386) pointing out that, of course, the matter of the book is out of date, but it ‘lives by its style’. ‘We can afford to smile at the pessimism with which the sage approached problems that have since vanished like a dream before the onward march etc. etc’ Actually the book is an indictment of the industrial revolution pointing out precisely the problems we have not solved and prophesying most of the things that have happened since. I get rather annoyed at this endless talk about books ‘living by the style’. Jeremy Taylor ‘lives by the style in spite of his obsolete theology’; Thos. Browne does the same, in spite of ‘the obsolete cast of his mind’: Ruskin and Carlyle do the same in spite of their ‘obsolete social and political philosophy’. To read histories of literature one would suppose that the great authors of the past were a sort of chorus of melodious idiots who said, in beautifully cadenced language that black was white and that two and two made five. When one turns to the books themselves-well I, at any rate, find nothing obsolete. The silly things these great men say, were as silly then as they are now: the wise ones are as wise now as they were then. At this stage in my letter I begin to be haunted by the idea of having read and experienced many interesting things which I meant to tell you but cannot now bring to mind. One un- interesting thing was being preached to in ‘mine own church’ by little ‘Clarkie’ (the m-yes man). (#ulink_90535cf5-4376-550c-be60-9381c564e97f) He is the sort of preacher who calls God ‘gudd’, and soars off into great emotion cadenzas. The matter was good enough, the manner detestable. This morning was the commemoration of the dedication of the church, and why they saw fit to let (or even get) Clark to preach I don’t know: Bathtowel and Thomas being both there. I had to set a paper for School Certificate the other day on the Clarendon Press selections from Cowper—a ridiculous book for schoolboys. (#ulink_c0caeee0-4808-58b3-b257-4f270669e3e3) It includes a large chunk of Bagehot’s Essay on Cowper which makes me think I must read all Bagehot. We have him, haven’t we? Not that I ‘hold with him’, he is too much of a pudaita by half: but he has great fun. ‘Boy—the small pomivorous animal so called.’ How delicious Cowper himself is—the letters even more than the poetry. Under every disadvantage—presented to me as raw material for a paper and filling with a job an evening wh. I had hoped to have free—even so he charmed me. He is the very essence of what Arthur calls ‘the homely’ which is Arthur’s favourite genre. All these cucumbers, books, parcels, tea-parties, parish affairs. It is wonderful what he makes of them. I suppose we may expect a Colombo letter from you soon. I will vary the usual ‘must stop now’ by saying ‘I am going to stop now’. I am writing in the common room (Kilns) at 8.30 of a Sunday evening: a moon shining through a fog outside and a bitter cold night. Yours Jack TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): [The Kilns] Dec 6th 1931 My dear Arthur, Hurrah! I was beginning to feel the want of a word from you. I envy you your stay at Ballycastle, or rather I wish I had been there: I feel I can do so without selfishness because I should have enjoyed the storms better than Reid who doubtless lost through them most of the pleasure he expected to get out of his jaunt. That is a thing you and I have to be thankful for—the fact that we do not only don’t dislike but positively enjoy almost every kind of weather. We had about three days of dense fog here lately. That was enough to tax even my powers of doing without the sun, but though it became oppressive in the end I felt that it was a cheap price to pay [for] its beauties. There was one evening of mist about three feet deep lying on the fields under the moon—like the mist in the first chapter of Phantastes. (#ulink_966443e5-9ef9-55c2-8eab-0266230284bc) There was a morning (up in the top wood) of mist pouring along the ground through the fir trees, so thick and visible that it looked tangible as treacle. Then there were afternoons of fairly thin, but universal fog, blotting out colour but leaving shapes distinct enough to become generalised—silhouettes revealing (owing to the suppression of detail) all sorts of beauties of grouping that one does not notice on a coloured day. Finally there were days of real fog: days of chaos come again: specially fine at the pond, when the water was only a darker tinge in the fog and the wood on the far side only the ghostliest suggestion: and to hear the skurry of the waterfowl but not to see them. Not only was it an exciting time in itself but by the contrast has made to day even more beautiful than it would have been—a clear, stinging, winter sunshine. As to Lucius (#ulink_6f621d9b-f961-5013-80f2-1d8db67ce62e) about the atonement not being in the Gospels, I think he is very probably right. But then nearly everyone seems to think that the Gospels are much later than the Epistles, written for people who had already accepted the doctrines and naturally wanted the story. I certainly don’t think it is historical to regard the Gospels as the original and the rest of the New Testament as later elaboration or accretion-though I constantly find myself doing so. But really I feel more and more of a child in the whole matter. I begin to see how much Puritanism counts in your make up—that both the revulsion from it and the attraction back to it are strong elements. I hardly feel either myself and perhaps am apt to forget in talking to you how different your experience and therefore your feeling is. All I feel that I can say with absolute certainty is this: that if you ever feel that the whole spirit and system in which you were brought up was, after all, right and good, then you may be quite sure that that feeling is a mistake (tho’ of course it might, at a given moment—say, of temptation, be present as the alternative to some far bigger mistake). My reasons for this are 1. That the system denied pleasures to others as well as to the votaries themselves: whatever the merits of self-denial, this is unpardonable interference. 2. It inconsistently kept some worldly pleasures, and always selected the worst ones—gluttony, avarice, etc. 3. It was ignorant. It could give no ‘reason for the faith that was in it’. (#ulink_6f23473d-1926-5d55-95c7-b6c19ec82215) Your relations have been found very ill grounded in the Bible itself and as ignorant as savages of the historical and theological reading needed to make the Bible more than a superstition. 4. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ (#ulink_e34e93a8-544e-5811-b378-f8da6d820fdd) Have they the marks of peace, love, wisdom and humility (#ulink_f8a39cde-8982-5290-bce3-10a9c6317f40) on their faces or in their conversation? Really, you need not bother about that kind of Puritanism. It is simply the form which the memory of Christianity takes just before it finally dies away altogether, in a commercial community: just as extreme emotional ritualism is the form it takes on just before it dies in a fashionable community. Like you I can get very little out of the Imitation? (#ulink_29ccbf51-1a01-5e9f-be74-b69c39ec13b7) Since last writing I have read Carlyle’s Past and Present. One gets rather tired of a certain monotonous stridency, as in Sartor (#ulink_84c487c3-f481-584e-8cda-33801ac71099) but more so, but it is tremendously exciting (often wrong-headed) and very well worth reading, specially the mediaeval part in the middle. I also read the Dream of John Ball, perhaps the most serious of W. Morris’s works, except Love is Enough and the fullest exposition of his whole philosophy of life and The Wood Beyond the World wh. is neither better nor worse than any other of the prose romances. (#ulink_e954a123-b5cd-50d3-b58c-537a92833499) What an achievement his treatment of love is: so undisguisedly physical and yet so perfectly sane and healthy—real paganism at its best, which is the next best thing to Christianity, and so utterly different from the nonsense that passes under the name of paganism in, say, Swinburne or Aldous Huxley. I wish you knew my two pupils. Lings (#ulink_a69e49d1-b9d3-5413-8092-980a468baf02) and Paterson. (#ulink_4cfa7486-1156-54ce-a28f-3bd113f10c7a) Both are poets (quite promising I think) and fast friends of each other. They are just in the state you and I remember so well—the whole world of beauty opening upon them-and as they share the same digs they must have a glorious time. One or other of them often accompanies me on my afternoon walk. Paterson is the wild, and Lings the steady one. Paterson looks very southern, almost an Italian face, and is all moods, and a little effeminate, and is at present in the throes of a terrific quarrel with his father which he poured into my sympathetic ear the other day. Lings is about five feet nothing, very ugly, very dark, and looks a hundred years old, and moves and sits as stiffly as an old man. Paterson truly says that Lings hurrying noiselessly along the cloisters is like nothing so much as a furtive mouse. This doesn’t sound like a poet, does it? But he is the better poet and the better man of the two. What times you and I could have had if we had been up here together as undergraduates! Neither of them knows many other people in College and they only discovered each other after they had been up some time. Paterson spent most of his first two terms sitting in his rooms listening to the feet of people on the staircase, always hoping that it was someone coming to call on him, but it never was. You can imagine how I enjoy them both. Indeed this is the best part of my job. In every given year the pupils I really like are in a minority; but there is hardly a year in which I do not make some real friend. I am glad to find that people become more and more one of the sources of pleasure as I grow older. Not that I agree for a moment about books & music being ‘vanity and vexation’. Really imaginative (or intellectual) pleasure is neither the one or the other: the bad element is the miserly pleasure of possession, the delight in this book because it is mine. Of course it was entirely my own fault about the pyjamas—I only hope that your mother was not worried when you asked about them. Give her my love and if her mind needs setting at rest on the subject—why Sir, set it. Try to write soon again. Yours Jack TO HIS BROTHER (W): [The Kilns] Christmas Day 1931 My dear W– I believe that for the first time I shall be really gravelled for matter in this letter to you, simply because what with examining and lecture writing I have done, read, and heard nothing for a long time that could possibly interest you. Minto has had a letter from you dated from your ‘improved’ hotel in Shanghai, and we were surprised that you found none of ours awaiting you. No doubt you have had several by this [time]. The afforestation programme 1931 has been carried out, successfully, but not according to plan. What I am more pleased to record is that in the wood four new trees have replaced (instead of being added to) four elder stumps. I think I told you before that the uprooting of these is practicable, and I shall make it a rule never to plant a new tree without getting rid of a stump. I hope also, if I am energetic enough, to be able to do a little buckshee uprooting during the rest of the year. What interfered with the design of my afforestation was water. I dug one hole far on the Eastern frontier (‘in the parts over against Phillips-land’) and found it half full of water next day. This I attributed to rain and set to with gum boots and bucket to bail it out. Next morning, although there had been no rain it was fuller than before, so I concluded I had struck a spring. I shifted my ground and dug another a little to the West. This time was even worse. It was not a question of water ‘collecting’—water leaped round my spade as if I had struck a pipe. I hastily filled in what I had dug and tried again. This time my excavation remained dry for a day or so and then began to fill with water. The upshot of it all is that the afforestation this year has been entirely lop sided. I have only managed to plant two at the east end, and the West is overweighted. Next autumn, if we have had a drier summer, the eastern frontier may be practicable again and I shall then restore the balance. If, on the other hand, these springs are permanent, we shall just be unable to plant that side (‘there won’t be any wood there’). After all, regularity is not our aim, and an irregularity, not devised for ornament, but dictated by the nature of the ground, is an honest sort of beauty. Except for the afforestation there have naturally been no public works so far this Vac. An examiner can hardly be expected to occupy his scanty hours off in such a vigorous way. I hope to do a little now that I am free and shall begin this afternoon by finishing off with the sickle the evacuated (at least I hope it is evacuated) strongpoint of the wasps and the piece of nettle and briar which we left—I can’t think why-along the Philipian boundary. The only social diversion I have had lately was the binge of the English ‘Cave’—the anti-junto which, as I said in an earlier letter, is in danger of becoming simply the regular junto. (#ulink_4add47e6-ce23-5564-80a8-7da86ca48464) I mention this because I heard recited there a bawdy ballad which was quite new to me, and which seems to me in its conclusion so ludicrous that I can’t resist handing it on. Perhaps you know it already. (The rimes seem to have degenerated during the process of oral tradition and now are mere assonances—if that). The early stanzas don’t matter: we will begin with the one that ends– Never a word the damsel saidBut roared with laughter when the fun was over.(Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc) Then comes the good part: Hark! I hear a step on the stair!Sounds to me like an angry father, With a pistol in either hand, Looking for the man who screwed his daughter(Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc) I have seized him by the hair of his headAnd shoved it into a bucket of water, And I screwed his pistol up his arseA dam sight harder than I screwed his daughter(Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc) With the r?le of the heavy father properly cast—stumping up the stairs with a desperate expression and his two pistols—this anticlimax, this adding of injury to insult, seems to me irresistible. I also heard at the same binge a very interesting piece of literary history from an unexceptionable source—that the hackneyed ‘A German officer crossed the Rhine’ was being sung at undergraduate blinds (#ulink_0142f461-3180-549d-a406-e0de8affe02d) in 1912. What do you make of that? Can it date from the Franco Prussian war? Or is it a German student song made in anticipation of Der Tag about 1910? The latter would be an interesting fact for the historian. I never heard the ballad as a whole, but think it is poor—in tact, nasty. Bawdy ought to be outrageous and extravagant like the piece quoted. It can, of course, be funny through sheer indefensible insolence, like the following (to the tune of ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May’) The Dean of Balliol sleeps with menSleeps with men, sleeps with men.The Dean of Balliol sleeps with menTill three o’clock in the morning. But any parts I have ever heard of the ‘German Officer’ relate quite possible happenings that have really nothing funny about them. Again, bawdy must have nothing cruel about it, like ‘Old Mother Riley’: it must not approach anywhere near the pornographic like the poem in which every line begins ‘A little’. Within these limits I think it is a good and wholesome genre: though I can’t help feeling sorry that it should be the only living folk-art left to us. If our English binge had been held in a mediaeval university we should have had, mixed with the bawdy songs, tragical and even devotional pieces, equally authorless and handed on from mouth to mouth in the same way, with the same individual variations. I go to Cambridge on New Years Eve for a couple of day’s awarding, not this time to be lodged in Queen’s but in the University Arms: with—would you believe it—the same carte blanche. So, at least, I gather from Hugh-Jones of Keble, (#ulink_73dfabe8-5cfa-58f1-a5f4-219be81c1268) who stayed there on the same job some years ago and wondered till the last night, when he discovered (almost but not quite too late) the explanation—wondered at the lavish orders of his colleagues and concluded them all to be rich men. This same Hugh-Jones has been one of my disappointments. I met him in Cambridge at the Award last year: we discovered a common enthusiasm for Shaw and Chesterton and just an interesting amount of disagreement on the subjects they led on to: sat till after midnight: and parted with a strong desire to continue the acquaintance. A few weeks ago he asked me to dine, not in Keble but at his house. That was the first shock—married! I arrived and got the second shock—not only a wife present, but a sister in law—an Anglo-Indian sister in law. Still I consoled myself with the expectation that he would carry me off to his study after dinner for some talk. Not a bit of it. Not even a temporary separation from the ladies over our wine. He had asked me, apparently, to sit solidly with his wife and sister in law till ten o’clock when I could endure it no longer and went. The sister in law was the sort of woman who, when the talk drifted towards education, remarked that it was astonishing how badly children were taught now a days: she had met a boy of fourteen who didn’t know the principal export of Burma. ‘He thought it was fruit’ she said, and laid down her needles and gazed at me. In fact I was like Lamb, left alone with his sensible, well-informed man. (I could have told her the chief export of Anglo-India all right). The wife was not so bad, and I had seen her a few days before acting the part of the maid in Tartuffe (in English) (#ulink_665f847a-b804-59f1-bf81-3516ff669f61) given by the Magdalen dramatic society. She had ‘done very well’ wh. is surprising, for my pupil Lings (I think you met him) who was producer, as well as playing Organ, had given me an amusing account of her behaviour at rehearsals. In his scene with her he had a speech ending ‘His only care is religion,’ (#ulink_acf0abf5-1fc6-5dd8-b5dd-0b776643bfdd) which he inadvertently altered to ‘Religion is his only care.’ After a long pause she said dreamily ‘Are you waiting for me? I haven’t got to say my speech until you get to “is religion”, you know.’ Tartuffe was really excellently done. I had neither read nor seen it before and enjoyed it thoroughly. To a reader I daresay the savagery is the most striking thing, but on the stage it made me laugh ‘consumedly’. The final scene between Organ and his wife is as funny as anything I know (‘But I tell you, Mother, I saw him with my own eyes. I saw the rascal embracing my wife’—‘Ah, my son, beware of tale-bearers. Without doubt the worthy man has been slandered’—‘I shall go mad! I saw it myself’—‘Ah tongues will wag, to be sure’ etc.) A most maddening type of female P’dayta. By the way doesn’t Tartuffe, specially in the opening scenes, bring out very strongly that Latin dominance of the familia which you have often spoken of?—except that in Tartuffe’s household it is not so much patria potestas as materna potestas: which possibly is very French too. It is now after tea and I have put in a very tolerable afternoon’s walk on the nettles and brambles. A civil gamekeepery kind of man walked up on the Philips side of the boundary—I think he lives in the other house on Philips land—and had a chat about trees. (#ulink_28cfe3f5-41d2-5cda-8645-d6e4838db970) He knows the place very well having originally ploughed up what is now the grass platform before the top wood when Mrs Goodman got rid of the hawthorns. I regretted the loss of the hawthorns less when this man told me that before he ploughed it that part was a mass of undergrowth so that you couldn’t walk through it. I was not so pleased to learn that our new holly is, after all our instructions to Suttons, the bush type and not the tree. He promised to find out for me the real name of the tree kind, which he will be able to do as one of his employers is a Forestry tutor. He also remarked that elder and bramble are the two strongest growing things there are and that, left a free field, each will defeat everything except the other. It was a foggy afternoon, but very warm: really springlike early this morning as I went to ‘the early celebbbrrration’. (#ulink_5124a108-d130-569b-b399-ae6b90360e0d) We had a poorish discourse from Thomas at Matins, but otherwise he has been keeping his end up very well. In one sermon on foreign missions lately he gave an ingenious turn to an old objection. ‘Many of us’ he said ‘have friends who used to live abroad, and had a native Christian as a cook who was unsatisfactory. Well, after all there are a great many unsatisfactory Christians in England too. In fact I’m one myself.’ Another interesting point (in a different sermon) was that we should be glad that the early Christians expected the second coming and the end of the world quite soon: for if they had known that they were founding an organisation for centuries they would certainly have organised it to death: believing that they were merely making provisional arrangements for a year or so, they left it free to live. How odd it is to turn from Thomas to F.K. (#ulink_157d9188-3f9e-5273-b9e2-e1978ad4cf9a) He really surpassed himself the other day when he said that he objected to the early chapters of St Luke (the Annunciation particularly) on the ground that they were—indelicate. This leaves one gasping. One goes on reacting against the conventional modern reaction against nineteenth century prudery, and then suddenly one is held up by a thing like this, and almost pardons all the followers of Lytton Strachey. If you turn up the passage in St Luke the thing becomes even more grotesque. The Middle Ages had a different way with these things. Did I tell you that in one of the Miracle Plays, Joseph is introduced as a typical comic jealous husband, and enters saying ‘This is what comes of marrying a young woman.’ F.K., however, gave me a treat last week by showing a treasure which I never would have guessed that he had—a letter in Johnson’s own hand to Mrs Thrale. He talks of giving it to Pembroke but as he has had it for many years I guess that he will never part with it. (#ulink_f7a54a0d-e001-53b8-b1b0-0982d52ed4f1) Minto has probably told you that we are at present revelling in the unaccustomed luxury of a good maid. (What an ambiguous sentence!) You will hardly imagine the Kilns under the regime of a maid who not only can cook (that is odd enough) but who is actually allowed to cook by Minto—a state of affairs I had long since given up hoping for. Esto perpetua! As I said at the outset I have been able to read very little: and nothing in your line. The Somnium Scipionis (#ulink_169a740f-cae2-5335-9230-5287a7285189) is worth mentioning only because the handiest edition I could get was a school edition, & it was rather delightful to renew ones acquaintance with that highly specialised form of composition-a preface to a school text. You know. ‘Plato, the celebrated Gk. philosopher (500–400 B.C.) thought—’ and then a clear, dogmatic, and misleading sentence. No half lights. Wuthering Heights (#ulink_9148dc3b-c0b1-5ea7-8c74-69a5a4ee6bf8) which I re-read the other day is, I believe, one of your biblia abiblia. (#ulink_db6ca94a-a1ef-5387-af77-9d1a5eba2309) I should not like to make it my constant fare, but I still like it very much. R. Macaulay’s Mystery at Geneva (#ulink_c8223db0-bb06-59f6-9cac-d2cee177931c) I also re-read recently: much the poorest she has written, and a mere repetition of all her favourite tricks. I feel P’daytesque and ask ‘Will she live?’ I have bought The Brothers Karamazov (#ulink_93f79755-4aa7-56b0-ba01-360fb1963c2c) but not yet read it with the exception of some special detachable pieces (of which there are many). Thus read, it is certainly a great religious and poetical work: whether, as a whole, it will turn out a good, or even a tolerable novel I don’t know. I have not forgotten your admirable Russian novel ‘Alexey Poldorovna lived on a hill. He cried a great deal.’ It is pleasant to reflect that one of the nine terms of your exile is now over. Yrs Jack 1 (#ulink_3506bb68-81ea-56a5-8a90-901f74d15d45) The Rev. Wilfrid Savage Thomas (1879–1959) took a BA from Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1900. Ordained in 1903 after a year at Wells Theological College, he was Curate of Great Marlow until 1906 and spent the next two years in Australia as Domestic Chaplain to the Bishop of Adelaide. He returned to Great Marlow, 1909–11, and was assigned Banbury with Grimsbury, 1911–13. After a further spell in Australia in 1915 as priest-in-charge of Mallala Mission, he was Curate of Amersham, 1916–18, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Lambeth, and Chaplain of St Thomas’s Hospital, London, 1918–23. Thomas became Vicar of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, in 1924 and remained there until 1935. He was subsequently Vicar of Adderbury with Milton, 1935–9. 2 (#ulink_3506bb68-81ea-56a5-8a90-901f74d15d45) The grounds of The Kilns covered nine acres, and the Lewis brothers began planting trees and clearing pathways immediately after moving there. 3 (#ulink_3506bb68-81ea-56a5-8a90-901f74d15d45) The Rev. Edward Foord-Kelcey (1859–1934) matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1884. He read Theology at Cuddesdon College and was ordained in 1888. He was Curate of St Saviour, Leicester, 1887–92, Vicar of Quorn (or Quorndon), Leicestershire, 1892–1909, and Rector of Great Kimble, Buckinghamshire, 1909–26. He officiated in the Diocese of Oxford from 1927 until his death. His wife died shortly before the First World War. In a short biography of Foord-Kelcey (LP XI: 24–5), Lewis wrote; ‘A common love of Scott and Johnson was the ground on which we met…These, with Shakespeare and Carlyle, were the constant themes of his talk… As a man of letters his range was not very wide—of poetry, for example, he knew little—nor was his judgement above the ordinary: but he was always worth listening to for the intensity of his gusto, and his chuckles and ecstatic repetition.’ 4 (#ulink_2f579992-c14a-55c8-b095-95c435bce445) There had been a footpath running across a field from Headington to Headington Quarry since 1804. The Oxford City Corporation wished to divert it, but many people who had been using the footpath for the whole of their lives, including Mr J. Snow, managed to have the City’s plan altered. See the letter from Mr Thomas, ‘Closing the Quarry Field Footpath’ in the Oxford Times (7 August 1931), p. 10. 5 (#ulink_2992ac58-036c-5295-943e-7a4b8ef7de60) Maureen Moore, the daughter of Janie King Moore, taught music at the Monmouth School for Girls, Monmouthshire, 1930–3. See Dame Maureen Dunbar of Hempriggs (1906–97) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. 6 (#ulink_2992ac58-036c-5295-943e-7a4b8ef7de60) The nickname of Mrs Janie King Moore (1872–1951). See the Biographical Appendix to CL I. 7 (#ulink_c5ff00cf-ca08-5349-8321-7b148273b5c9) George Robert Sabine Snow (1897–1969) was a Fellow of Magdalen College, 1922–60. 8 (#ulink_c5ff00cf-ca08-5349-8321-7b148273b5c9) James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 6 vols. (1934), 18 April 1783, vol. IV, p. 205. slightly misquoted. 9 (#ulink_f746f939-322a-58d7-8912-e966c29ee191) Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works…With a Life of the Author, and a Critical Examination of His Writings, by Reginald Heber, 15 vols. (1822). 10 (#ulink_f746f939-322a-58d7-8912-e966c29ee191) See Dom Bede Griffiths in the Biographical Appendix. Alan Richard Griffiths became a Catholic on Christmas Eve 1932. He spent much of the following year at Prinknash, the Benedictine priory near Gloucester, testing his vocation as a monk. On 20 December 1933 he was clothed as a novice and took the name Dom Bede Griffiths. 11 (#ulink_f746f939-322a-58d7-8912-e966c29ee191) For the biography of Frank Sanders see note 28 to the letter of 22 March 1941. 12 (#ulink_10e9542c-3822-5063-a53a-3556f4e24775) William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728). 13 (#ulink_237cf8d7-184e-513a-8d9d-53cc8e057498) Major Herbert Denis Parkin (1886–1958) joined the army in 1908 and the Army Service Corps (later Royal Army Service Corps) in 1911. He became captain in 1915 and major in 1918. He served in France during the First World War, in India during 1922, and Egypt, 1927–8. Major Parkin was Warnie’s commanding officer in Shanghai, 1928–9 and they became lifelong friends, but this was the first time Jack had met him. On learning of Parkin’s death, Warnie wrote in his diary of 13 November 1958: ‘He was a friend of almost thirty years standing, and one whose place no one can fill…We shared a stock of memories which were very precious to both of us, and he had a humour that was entirely his own…I shall miss him to the end—the only real friend I ever made in me army’ (BF, p. 246). 14 (#ulink_237cf8d7-184e-513a-8d9d-53cc8e057498) John Trail! Christie (1899–1980) was Fellow and Classical Tutor at Magdalen College, 1928–32, Headmaster of Repton School, 1932–7, Headmaster of Westminster School. 1937–49. and Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, 1950–67. 15 (#ulink_8d5e3061-e01d-5b41-aa1f-27a2f7ca0693) Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), natural historian, antiquary, and moralist, best known for his Religio Medici (1642). 16 (#ulink_8d5e3061-e01d-5b41-aa1f-27a2f7ca0693) i.e. like Charles Lamb. 17 (#ulink_d031ae76-517f-5ab5-8464-0265fa482e06) Mr Papworth, or Baron Papworth as he was also known, was Lewis’s and Mrs Moore’s dog. Of the many pets they had over the years, he was their favourite. He died in 1937. 18 (#ulink_d031ae76-517f-5ab5-8464-0265fa482e06) ‘I love games, love, books, music.’ From Jean de La Fontaine, Les Amours de Psych? et de Cupidon (1669), quoted in The Oxford Book of French Verse, ed. St John Lucas (1920), p. 182. 19 (#ulink_7e8f8451-247d-5a7a-85ca-6596c3029507) Ren? Descartes (1596–1650) was the chief architect of the seventeenth-century intellectual revolution. His philosophical masterpiece, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) contains many of his proofs of the existence of God. 20 (#ulink_7e8f8451-247d-5a7a-85ca-6596c3029507) See Alfred Cecil Harwood (1898–1975) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. After taking his BA from Oxford in 1921 he became a teacher at Michael Hall School in London. 21 (#ulink_7e8f8451-247d-5a7a-85ca-6596c3029507) In the third of his Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes’s argument for the existence of God runs: ‘I have the idea of a perfect being. Whatever caused this idea must have all the perfections that are represented in the idea.’ 22 (#ulink_7e8f8451-247d-5a7a-85ca-6596c3029507) By the ‘Thistle-Bird’ Lewis probably meant the Rev. Henry Edward Bird who, after serving in various London parishes, was Vicar of St Andrew’s, Headington, 1924–46. He sometimes preached at Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry. 23 (#ulink_7e8f8451-247d-5a7a-85ca-6596c3029507) Rudyard Kipling, The Seven Seas (1896), ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, slightly misquoted. 24 (#ulink_8aa9d783-b700-5209-9e5b-15b1b5bce588) ‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ is a story in William Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1868–70). 25 (#ulink_1ed55c17-6c1a-5eb1-b154-b1d64519e387) One of Jack and Warnie’s nicknames for each other. When they were small children their nurse sometimes threatened to smack their ‘pigieboties’ or ‘piggiebottoms’. Over time the brothers decided that Warnie was ‘Archpiggiebotham’ or ‘APB’ and Jack ‘Smallpiggiebotham’ or ‘SPB’, and thereafter they frequently addressed each other by these names or variations of them. In his letter to Warnie of 2 August 1928 (CL I, p. 768), Jack discusses the nature of ‘pigiebotism’—the manners and ideas of young men like Warnie and Jack. 26 (#ulink_e84b5f80-7dce-539c-af37-d09c9f22ba0e) Ephesians 6:13. 27 (#ulink_1be8406f-38ba-5eba-afb8-b875068d7f67) 18 October. 28 (#ulink_1be8406f-38ba-5eba-afb8-b875068d7f67) John is the ‘mystical’ fourth Gospel. The other three Gospels—Matthew, Mark and Luke—are remarkably similar in workings and structure; scholars call these three Gospels synoptic (from the Greek for ‘seeing together or at the same time’, a name derived from the practice of tabulating their similarities in parallel columns for comparison). It is generally believed that Mark was used as a source by Matthew and Luke. 29 (#ulink_31b79e48-b512-5f23-8593-1c4fd0816a76) The English School was divided between those who upheld the primacy of the study of English literature and those advocating the importance of language. Lewis had complained when Professor J. R. R. Tolkien wanted more linguistic courses, these to be based on Old or Middle English literature, but by 1931 he had come to see the merit of Tolkien’s proposals and thereafter gave him his full support. Soon the curriculum of the English School required that students learn the English language of all periods, while the literature syllabus began with Beowulf and ended with the Romantics in 1830. There were murmurings of dissent from the other side about the monopoly of philology and the absence from the curriculum of any modern literary criticism. 30 (#ulink_2a412689-2afd-55ff-ac5c-6a3d1cf19c40) Miss Kathleen Whitty had been Maureen’s music teacher when the Moores lived in Bristol, and she often visited them in Oxford. 31 (#ulink_2a412689-2afd-55ff-ac5c-6a3d1cf19c40) Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), Labour Prime Minister, 1924, 1929–35. 32 (#ulink_2a412689-2afd-55ff-ac5c-6a3d1cf19c40) Philip, Viscount Snowden (1864–1937), Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1924, 1929–31. 33 (#ulink_26dfd916-92e0-5d5e-b726-5f0d70348caf) Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818). 34 (#ulink_440a1541-33be-5157-8ab7-e2ae08188a29) See Owen Barfield (1898–1997) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Barfield, one of Lewis’s closest friends, joined the family law firm in London, Barfield and Barfield, in 1929. After taking a degree of Bachelor of Civil Law from Oxford in 1930, he began preparing for law exams in London. During his many years with Barfield and Barfield he acted as Lewis’s solicitor. 35 (#ulink_4af10e1b-5382-5fb5-9dbb-584622823019) Lewis had been given a pair of swans by the Provost of Worcester College. See Fred W. Paxford, ‘He Should Have Been a Parson’ in We Remember C.S. Lewis, ed. David Graham (2001), p. 122. 36 (#ulink_4344ab48-c8df-58cb-bf69-75fa407adad7) John Keats, Endymion (1818). 37 (#ulink_4344ab48-c8df-58cb-bf69-75fa407adad7) John Keats, Hyperion (1820). 38 (#ulink_36c8d4a3-4faa-5340-81bd-e0d46a127e41) ‘It’ was Lewis’s original name for the inconsolable longing he called ‘Joy’ in SBJ. 39 (#ulink_291158e9-2f65-5308-b367-7c38046c2544) This, one of Plato’s dialogues, is about Persuasion and Eros and their part in our perception of the eternal Forms. 40 (#ulink_291158e9-2f65-5308-b367-7c38046c2544) Arthur’s friend, the novelist Forrest Reid (1875–1947), was living in Belfast at this time. Reid told his story in two autobiographies, Apostate (1926) and Private Road (1940). His novel, Uncle Stephen, was published in October 1931. 41 (#ulink_34c9aa1d-eb5f-5b0e-ac0d-d4f9b61fe16d) Luke 9:24. 42 (#ulink_842f2e52-5113-5dff-a8c2-ec4cdaa32acf)The Times Literary Supplement (29 October 1931), p. 838. 43 (#ulink_1f3f4798-4712-5226-ac14-3e016bbc3c30)BF, p. 89. 44 (#ulink_a38a5530-8250-50d5-a583-1031c4de8fb9) Before he left for Gibraltar Warnie had begun editing the enormous number of family diaries, letters and other memorabilia amassed by Albert Lewis. When he finished in 1933, the ‘Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930’ consisted of eleven volumes of papers with numerous notes by the Lewis brothers. The original of the unpublished ‘Lewis Papers’, as the ‘Memoirs’ are known, is in the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, with microfilm in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Southern Historical Collection, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 45 (#ulink_fc74ff3a-1f9e-509a-b3b6-a948a2c0cca1) This was the favourite walk of the essayist and poet Joseph Addison (1672–1719). When a Fellow of Magdalen he lived in New Buildings and greatly enjoyed the walk which runs northward from the college buildings. Since the nineteenth century it has been known as ‘Addison’s Walk’. On the centenary of Lewis’s birth In 1998 a memorial stone was placed along the walk inscribed with Lewis’s poem ‘What the Bird Said Early in the Year’ in which he mentions Addison’s Walk. 46 (#ulink_fc74ff3a-1f9e-509a-b3b6-a948a2c0cca1) See Adam Fox in the Biographical Appendix. 47 (#ulink_fc74ff3a-1f9e-509a-b3b6-a948a2c0cca1) Paul Victor Mendelssohn Benecke (1868–1944), great-grandson of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, was Classics Tutor at Magdalen College, 1893–1925. He was Lewis’s history tutor when he was an undergraduate at University College. See Lewis’s letter to Albert Lewis of 21 January 1921. 48 (#ulink_fc74ff3a-1f9e-509a-b3b6-a948a2c0cca1) John Alexander Smith (1893–1939), philosopher and classical scholar, was Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen, 1910–36. Born at Dingwall in Cromarty, he came up to Balliol College from Edinburgh University in 1884. After taking a First in Classics in 1887 he was Fellow in Philosophy at Balliol, 1891–1910, before moving to Magdalen. A distinguished scholar of Aristotle, for many years he exercised great influence in the Oxford Aristotelian Society. His translation of De Anima appeared in 1931. He maintained the Idealist tradition of T. H. Green and Edward Caird. A chapter is devoted to him in James Patrick, The Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901–1945 (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1985). 49 (#ulink_fc74ff3a-1f9e-509a-b3b6-a948a2c0cca1) Frederick David Lyddiatt, who lived at 52 Wharton Road, Headington, helped out at The Kilns, sometimes acting as chauffeur. 50 (#ulink_f7caa4a5-51f5-5c0f-9716-832a3005e160) Chesney Horwood (1904–90) came up to Oxford in 1922 as an exhibitioner of the Non-Collegiate Society. After graduating he spent two years as Lektor in English Literature at the University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. On returning to Oxford in 1928 he became Fellow of English and Dean at the Non-Collegiate Society which in 1930 was refounded as St Catherine’s Society, and which in 1962 became St Catherine’s College. Apart from 1940–6, when he served in the Intelligence Service, Horwood spent his entire working life in the service of the society. 51 (#ulink_54180856-2839-5625-ae85-ebbdbe5a01e8) See J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Tolkien and Lewis were just beginning their regular meetings which led to the founding of the Inklings. 52 (#ulink_2d15e3d0-73be-50fa-a79f-a940434a78f1) See Henry Victor Dyson ‘Hugo’ Dyson (1896–1975) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. He was a lecturer and tutor in English in the University of Reading, 1921–45, and Fellow and Tutor in English at Merton College, Oxford, 1945–63. 53 (#ulink_2d15e3d0-73be-50fa-a79f-a940434a78f1) R. W. Chapman, The Portrait of a Scholar & Other Essays Written in Macedonia, 1916–1918 (1922). 54 (#ulink_d843b01f-071d-5d06-b856-26757293239b) David Lindsay Keir (1895–1973) was a Fellow of New College, Oxford, 1921–39, President and Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s College, Belfast, 1939–49, and Master of Balliol College, 1949–65. 55 (#ulink_d843b01f-071d-5d06-b856-26757293239b) Frederick Henry Lawson (1897–1983) was Fellow and Tutor in Law at Merton College, Oxford, 1930–48, and Professor of Comparative Law and a Fellow of Brasenose College, 1948–64. 56 (#ulink_7f882197-b14f-56f7-8251-422b283e96fd) The Barley Mow pub at Blewbury, Oxfordshire. 57 (#ulink_c4b92364-1355-5539-bd5f-1ed00b3e8780) J. W. A. Condlin was Albert Lewis’s managing clerk from 1917 until Albert’s death in 1929. 58 (#ulink_656069b9-f907-5e49-a78c-b3ed3f572d90) ‘The Tower of Glass’ was the Rev. Ernest William Carlisle Hayes (1896–1950). Hayes took his BA from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1889, and was ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1893. After serving in a number of parishes, he was Rector of St Mark’s, Dundela, 1925–35. The Lewis brothers gave him this nickname after the firm of stained-glass artists (see note 60) because he was in charge of installing the window dedicated to their parents. 59 (#ulink_656069b9-f907-5e49-a78c-b3ed3f572d90) The Rev. Claude Lionel Chavasse (1897–1983), of an Anglo-Irish family, took his BA from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1922. He was trained at St Stephen’s House, Oxford, and ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1929. He was Curate of St Mark’s, Dundela, 1928–31, after which he served in a number of parishes in County Cork. He was Vicar of Kidlington, Oxfordshire, 1947–57. 60 (#ulink_656069b9-f907-5e49-a78c-b3ed3f572d90) Jack and Warnie planned to give a stained-glass window to St Mark’s in honour of their parents. The window, erected in 1935, was designed by Michael Healy (1873–1941). He was a member of The Tower of Glass, a group of stained-glass window artists of the time. For information about the window see David Bleakley, C. S. Lewis—At Home in Ireland (Belfast: Strandtown Press, 1998), pp. 182–3. 61 (#ulink_b1ef2db9-c5fe-549c-847c-8a33bb186bd4) John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). 62 (#ulink_b1ef2db9-c5fe-549c-847c-8a33bb186bd4) Mary Elizabeth ‘Lily’ Ewart (1888–1976) was the sister of Arthur Greeves, and the wife of Charles Gordon Ewart (1885–1936). 63 (#ulink_b1ef2db9-c5fe-549c-847c-8a33bb186bd4) John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), V, 384–5: ‘no though! infirm/Altered her cheek’ 64 (#ulink_a62532b8-6a97-53e6-b582-d00ec96b9849) Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843). 65 (#ulink_a62532b8-6a97-53e6-b582-d00ec96b9849) ‘Leeborough’ or ‘Leeboro’ was Jack and Warnie’s private name for their family home, Little Lea. A ‘Leeborough edition’ is a book from Little Lea. 66 (#ulink_a62532b8-6a97-53e6-b582-d00ec96b9849) Since they were boys Jack and Warnie had been amused by their father’s ‘low’ Irish pronunciation of ‘potatoes’ as ‘p’daytas’. As a result, Mr Lewis was nicknamed ‘The P’dayta’ or ‘The P’daytabird’. The term came to be applied to anyone displaying the characteristics of their father, in particular an ignorant dogmatism. Jack eventually discovered this characteristic in himself: ‘I’m afraid I must be a P’dayta,’ he wrote to Warnie on 2 August 1928, ‘for I made a P’daytism the other day: I began talking about the world and how it was well explored by now and, said I “We know there are no undiscovered islands.” It was left for Maureen to point out the absurdity’ (CI I, p. 777). 67 (#ulink_bb1a6c69-7eec-591d-8eaf-8763329eddc5) The Rev, Alured George Clarke was Vicar of All Saints, Highfield, Oxford, 1920–35. 68 (#ulink_cffba674-f2c3-5e72-a3d5-75b38f2f1ce6) William Cowper, Poetry & Prose, With Essays by Hazlitt & Bagehot. introduction and notes by Humphrey S. Milford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 69 (#ulink_22542abf-874f-53d0-9020-ef8a0a908e9d) George MacDonald, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance (1858). 70 (#ulink_a955aa2c-6c35-5ae7-a3f6-41f94d242502) Mr (later Sir) Frederick Lucius O’Brien (1896–1974), a Quaker, was Arthur’s cousin on his mother’s side. During his life he held many civil and governmental positions in Belfast. He and Arthur often travelled together. 71 (#ulink_80b771de-fab6-5e8a-9e49-01cdfa601874) I Peter 3:15. 72 (#ulink_80b771de-fab6-5e8a-9e49-01cdfa601874) Matthew 7:20. 73 (#ulink_80b771de-fab6-5e8a-9e49-01cdfa601874) Galatians 5:22–3: ‘But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy. peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.’ (RSV) 74 (#ulink_6554c2af-0c1b-5865-aaaf-14a5b9856027)The Imitation of Christ, a manual of spiritual devotion first put into circulation in 1418 and traditionally ascribed to Thomas ? Kempis (c. 1380–1471). 75 (#ulink_6554c2af-0c1b-5865-aaaf-14a5b9856027) Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Rasartus (1836). 76 (#ulink_ee8bcc5f-ae84-5ae0-a096-e9ed1de1d442) William Morris, A Dream of John Ball (1888); Love is Enough (1872); The Wood Beyond the World (1894). 77 (#ulink_ddb289f6-cf52-5a65-901a-f56782f6ac0b) See Martin Lings in the Biographical Appendix. 78 (#ulink_ddb289f6-cf52-5a65-901a-f56782f6ac0b) Adrian Hugh Paterson (1909–401 look his BA from Magdalen in 1934. He lectured on English in the University of Hong Kong, 1934–8, and was a lecturer on English at Cairo University from 1938 until 1940 when he died as a result of an accident that occurred while he and Martin Lings were riding together in the desert. 79 (#ulink_c98c861b-c918-5ce3-b4bf-cd2edecfc5e2) ‘The Cave’ was a group of English dons who met regularly for talks about literary subjects or to discuss matters in the English School. It was named after the Cave of Adullam in which David organized the conspiracy against Saul (1 Samuel 22:1: ‘David…escaped to the cave Adullam: and when his brethren and all his father’s house heard it, they went down thither to him’). The membership, which included Lewis, Tolkien, Nevill Coghill, Hugo Dyson, Leonard Rice-Oxley, H. F. B. Brett-Smith and Maurice Ridley, were opponents of what had been, until 1931, the reigning faction in the School of English. See also note 29 to the letter to Warnie of 24 October 1931. 80 (#ulink_9b620232-0dbd-530f-a72d-2700941c02de) Drinking parties. 81 (#ulink_e6f83794-aa31-5bc1-9f13-64fe3eb7f73b) Edward Maurice Hugh-Jones (1903–97) read History at New College. Oxford, in 1924, after which he read Philosophy. Politics and Economics (PPE) and look a BA in 1925. He was a lecturer at Keble College, 1926–7, and Tutor in Economics. 1927–59. He was Professor of Economics at Keele University. 1959–68. His works include (with E. A. Radice) An American Experiment (1936) and Woodrow Wilson and American Liberalism (1947). 82 (#ulink_f99095da-d454-5cd5-8aaa-68260913a2bc) Moli?re, Le Tartuffe (1664). 83 (#ulink_f99095da-d454-5cd5-8aaa-68260913a2bc) Moli?re, Tartuffe, or The Hypocrite, trans. Curtis Hidden Page (1912) Line 58. 84 (#ulink_b663f9f9-4e48-5ec9-873a-99f615dc8af8) This was probably William Taylor, who lived at Shotover Cottage, Old Road, Headington Quarry. 85 (#ulink_bbab3c1d-6089-53d3-ad40-4f4eecfe696a) The 8 a.m. ‘early celebration’ of Holy Communion at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry. This was an important turning point in Lewis’s life. For some time he had been attending matins and evensong in his college chapel and at Holy Trinity, but in participating in the sacrament, Lewis was doing something he knew would be blasphemous unless he was a believer. Jack knew his brother would understand the seriousness of his action. Warnie, too, went to Holy Communion on Christmas Day 1931. He wrote in his diary that day: ‘I attended the service with very mixed feeling, gladness predominating at once again finding myself a full member of the Church after so many years of indifference or worse…I came away feeling profoundly thankful that I have once again become a communicant, and intend (D.V.) [Deo Volente-“God Willing”] to go regularly at least four times a year in future’ (BF). On receiving the present letter from his brother, Warnie wrote on 17 January 1932: ‘A letter from | today containing the news that he too has once more started to go to Communion, at which I am delighted. Had he not done so, I, with my altered views would have found—hardly a bar between us, but a Jack of a complete identity of interest which I should have regretted’ (ibid.). 86 (#ulink_a47fe88e-ad43-5672-a767-dc8d44b7753f) i.e. the Rev. Edward Foord-Kelcey. 87 (#ulink_b2c5ae42-7324-534b-a625-99982ae617da) Foord-Kelcey would no doubt have thought of donating his letter from Dr Johnson to Mrs Hester Thrale (1741–1821) to Pembroke College, Oxford, because this was the college of both Johnson and Foord-Kelcey himself. When he died in 1934, Foord-Kelcey left the letter to C. S. Lewis, who kept it for the rest of his life. Upon his death in 1963, Warnie gave it to Pembroke College. 88 (#ulink_fb31c5b4-f446-500b-bb3c-5b6ba1680d91) The Somnium Scipiona (‘Dream of Scipio’) is the fable with which Cicero ends his De Republica. 89 (#ulink_6657d92b-374b-54e4-a742-cfcc819a13f9) Emily Bront?, Wuthering Heights (1847). 90 (#ulink_6657d92b-374b-54e4-a742-cfcc819a13f9) ‘one of those books which are not books’. Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia (1833), ‘Detatched Thoughts on Books and Reading’: ‘I can read anything which I call a book. There are things in that shape which [cannot allow for such. In this catalogue of books which are not books—Biblia A-Biblia—I reckon…all those volumes which “no gentleman’s library should be without.”’ 91 (#ulink_6657d92b-374b-54e4-a742-cfcc819a13f9) Rose Macaulay, Mystery at Geneva (1922). 92 (#ulink_8b0b4891-992b-5310-81d6-4a6c9481fef7) Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880). 1932 (#u9c47d65c-00f5-53d1-b288-9095cdf4355d) TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): [The Kilns] Jan 10th 1932 My dear Arthur, I was glad to hear from you again, and sorry you are so dull. Perhaps you are suffering from too much turkey and ‘plumb’ pudding—or too many late nights and dances! How did you manage to get your mother’s consent to the introduction of a dog—I thought she was the insuperable difficulty? I quite understand the mood in wh. you fall back upon detective stories, though I have never been able to understand how that mood could lead to detective stories. I mean, I know well from experience that state of mind in which one wants immediate and certain pleasure from a book, for nothing—i.e. without paying the price of that slight persistence, that almost imperceptible tendency not to go on, which, to be honest, nearly always accompanies the reading of [a] good book. Not only accompanies by the way, but (do you agree) actually makes part of the pleasure. A little sense of labour is necessary to all perfect pleasures I think: just as (to my palate at least) there is no really delicious taste without a touch of astringency—the ‘bite’ in alcoholic drinks, the resistance to the teeth in nuts or meat, the tartness of fruit, the bitterness of mint sauce. The apple must not be too sweet, the cheese must not be too mild. Still, I know the other mood, when one wants a book of sheer pleasure. In fact I have been going through such a mood lately. I have had to work v. hard all day this Vac. and in the evenings I have wanted relaxation. I have accordingly read The Wood Beyond the World, Rider Haggard’s The People of the Mist, (#ulink_84abc098-10cd-54f6-b7e5-b2f24a2aa2d3) and am now at Kingsley’s Herewardthe Wake. (#ulink_85592995-65da-53c8-944e-57d053576363) In fact when I am in that state of mind I want not so much a grown-up ‘light’ book (to me usually the hardest of all kinds of reading) as a boy’s book;—distant lands, strange adventures, mysteries not of the American but of the Egyptian kind. Of course what makes detective stories appeal to you is that they were one of your first loves in the days when you used to come round and borrow Sherlock Holmes from my father, and therefore in reading them now you have the sense of return, you step back as into an old easy shoe—and that certainly is one of the essentials for this kind of reading. One would never read a new type of book for pure relaxation: and perhaps re-reading of an old friend—a Scott with much skipping—is the best of all. I don’t think you re-read enough—I know I do it too much. Is it since I last wrote to you that I re-read Wuthering House? (#ulink_9bd79ac2-81f3-5751-910d-13076736e96f) I thought it very great. Isn’t it (despite the improbability) an excellent stroke of art to tell it all through the mouth of a very homely, prosaic old servant, whose sanity and mother-wit thus provides a cooling medium through which the wild, horrible story becomes tolerable? I have also re-read Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution (#ulink_87efe0c9-9bc4-5e16-bcf0-34e481edee62) and find that I had forgotten it nearly all. It is, in the famous words, ‘too long drawn out’ and becomes mere scolding in the end. What wd. perhaps interest you more is Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (#ulink_a09960d6-89b7-5b1e-91d5-8957c4c0fa2f) which I had twice before tried to read without success but have this time reached the end of-and reached it before my desire to punch Marius’ head had become quite unbearable. Do you know it? It is very well worth reading. You must give up all idea of reading a story and treat it simply as a vaguely narrative essay. It interests me as showing just how far the purely aesthetic attitude to life can go, in the hands of a master, and it certainly goes a good deal further than one would suppose from reading the inferior aesthetes like Oscar Wilde and George Moore. In Pater it seems almost to include the rest of the spiritual life: he has to bring in chastity, he nearly has to bring in Christianity, because they are so beautiful. And yet somehow there is a faint flavour of decay over it all. Perhaps it is his patronage of great things which is so offensive—condescending to add the Christian religion to his nosegay of spiritual flowers because it has a colour or a scent that he thinks would just give a finishing touch to the rest. It is all balls anyway-because one sees at a glance that if he really added it it would break up the whole nosegay view of life. In fact that is the refutation of aestheticism: for perfect beauty you need to include things which will at once show that mere beauty is not the sole end of life. If you don’t include them, you have given up aestheticism: if you do, you must give it up Q.E.D. But Pater is valuable just because, being a perfectly honest aesthete, he really tries to follow its theory to the bitter end, and therefore betrays its weakness. I didn’t mean to make this letter a mere catalogue of books read, but one thing has led on to another. About Lucius’ argument that the evangelists would have put the doctrine of the atonement into the Gospel if they had had the slightest excuse, and, since they didn’t, therefore Our Lord didn’t teach it: surely, since we know from the Epistles that the Apostles (who had actually known him) did teach this doctrine in his name immediately after his death, it is clear that he did teach it: or else, that they allowed themselves a very free hand. But if people shortly after his death were so very free in interpreting his doctrine, why should people who wrote much later (when such freedom wd. be more excusable from lapse of memory in an honest writer, and more likely to escape detection in a dishonest one) become so very much more accurate? The accounts of a thing don’t usually get more and more accurate as time goes on. Anyway, if you take the sacrificial idea out of Christianity you deprive both Judaism and Paganism of all significance. Can one believe that there was just nothing in that persistent motif of blood, death, and resurrection, which runs like a black and scarlet cord through all the greater myths—thro’ Balder & Dionysus & Adonis and the Graal too? Surely the history of the human mind hangs together better if you suppose that all this was the first shadowy approach of something whose reality came with Christ—even if we can’t at present fully understand that something. Try and write soon. Yrs Jack TO HIS BROTHER (W): [Magdalen College] Jan 17th 1932. My dear W– Term began yesterday (Saturday) and I am seated this fine Sunday morning in our room in College having finished my collection papers and now about to allow myself an hour’s letter writing before setting out home where I shall be to night. Through the window on my left I see a most beautiful, almost a springlike, sunshine on the pinnacles of the Tower and the delicious sound of Sunday morning bells has just stopped. On an ordinary Sunday morning I should of course be out at the house, or rather at Church, but as you know the first week end of term is sacred to collections, and having finished them rather earlier than I expected—here we are. I am so seldom in College on a Sunday morning that to be there and at leisure in the unaccustomed sounds and silences of Lord’s Day among all the pleasant Leeburiana (#ulink_926f1d21-925a-5cb1-85fd-77b085715488) is quite a holiday. Your welcome letter of Dec 8th arrived a few days ago, and is so full of conversational openings that I shall hardly find room to inaugurate any subject of my own. First, as to the Chinese. As to their language, it is pretty certain that its extreme simplicity is that of second childhood—the simplicity of a fossil and not of a seed. The essence of it is monosyllabic words each expressing an extremely general idea and given its particular meaning by the context and the position—in fact words approaching the function of the Arabic numerals, where it all depends whether you say 201, 102, 120 or 210. How far European language has already advanced towards this fossil condition you can well see if you compare Latin Amavisset with English He would have loved: though even amavisset is well away. A really primitive tongue would have special words for about twenty special kinds of love (sexual, gastronomic, parental, and what not) and no word for the more abstract ‘love’: as French, a stage nearer Chinese than we are, has now only one word for our ‘love’ and ‘like’. In fact I look upon Chinese as upon the Moon—a death’s head or memento mori to nations as the moon is to worlds. It is one of the ‘painful mysteries’ of history that all languages progress from being very particular to being very general. In the first stage they are bursting with meaning, but very cryptic because they are not general enough to show the common element in different things: e.g. you can talk (and therefore think) about all the different kinds of trees but not about Trees. In fact you can’t really reason at all. In their final stage they are admirably clear but are so far away from real things that they really say nothing. As we learn to talk we forget what we have to say. Humanity, from this point of view, is rather like a man coming gradually awake and trying to describe his dreams: as soon as his mind is sufficiently awake for clear description, the thing which was to be described is gone. You see the origin of journalese and of the style in which you write army letters. Religion and poetry are about the only languages in modern Europe—if you can regard them as ‘languages’ which still have traces of the dream in them, still having something to say. Compare ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’ with ‘The supreme being transcends space and time’. The first goes to pieces if you begin to apply the literal meaning to it. How can anything but a sexual animal really be a father? How can it be in the sky? The second falls into no such traps. On the other hand the first really means something, really represents a concrete experience in the minds of those who use it: the second is mere dexterous playing with counters, and once a man has learned the rules he can go on that way for two volumes without really using the words to refer to any concrete fact at all. But perhaps I have let the subject run away with me. Your point about children always finding their nurses language the easiest is, I take it, a complete answer to your author on that score. I suppose Minto has already told you of the outrage in the topwood—the two new Scotch firs planted nearest the lane both stolen, and the rascals have neatly levelled in the holes where they were. Clearly to plant two saplings so eminently suitable for Christmas trees so near the road at that time of the year was asking for trouble. But one somehow does not (or did not) think of trees as things in danger of theft. You who have not put your sweat into the actual planting of them can hardly imagine my fury: though there is a funny side to it. I smile when I remember myself moving along towards the top gate—then pausing to contemplate my latest achievement—then thinking I was looking in the wrong place—then wondering if I was bewitched—finally the very gradual dawn of the truth. We must really get on with some wiring as soon as possible. I suppose you heard that Mrs. Kreyer (#ulink_d6891466-82ec-5dd1-8fbe-44ce78129867) has now planted a few shrubs on our side of the frontier? And further—most exasperating of all—during the Christmas holiday I hardly ever went in or out by our stile on that side without meeting one or both of her whelps in the very article of trespass, and acknowledging the situation no more than to throw me a patronising ‘good afternoon’. What should one do at such a rencontre? But perhaps the offence itself hardly annoys me more than F.K.’s reaction which consists in chuckling and saying, ‘Ah you Irish! I love to listen to dear Mrs. Moore—wouldn’t be happy without a grievance. Its really most remarkable’. He is, I think, in every mental characteristic (not moral, for of course he is no pessimist) the most complete P’daita that ever walked: in some respects he surpasses his original. What a magnificent conversation they could have had, say, in politics! I was out with him this afternoon and he was quite grieved to hear your unfavourable verdict on Tristram Shandy (#ulink_e0cbf955-7172-5ced-a1ab-b41b700ba617) re-read. I certainly did not get very far with my re-reading of it, but that was due to other causes. I still have hopes that I may enjoy it again in toto; and I rather fancy that a long immersion in English Literature has made me more tolerant of that kind of humour by now than you. Oddly enough Barfield has just made your experiment with exactly your result: he agrees with you in excepting Uncle Toby, but thinks most of the book, specially the Wadman parts, revolting. And talking of the revolting, you will hardly believe the following. The junior parrot (you remember) has just got engaged. As soon as the news was out, his friends and owners, in other words the rest of the junto, all made a raid on his rooms—placed copies of ‘Married Love’ and ‘Lasting Passion’ under every cushion—put a large nude india rubber doll in his bed—plastered his walls with lewd good wishes—finished his whisky and beer—and retired. Such is his senility that it was left to him to spread this story as an excellent joke with his own mouth. I should like to be able to argue ‘If the fellows of a college behave like this, how much more will the rest of the world’, but I’m afraid things are so topsy-turvey—or ‘arsie-versy’ as the Elizabethans say—that it is the other way round, and for sheer blockheaded vulgarity our common room is just the place to look. Would a jeu d’esprit of this sort be tolerated in barracks? The reservoir to the West of thee top wood is finished. It has been covered with earth so that the total effect is now that of a big plateau jutting out from the hillside, at present of brown mud, but soon, I hope, of smooth bright grass; and there is a little tile-roofed building on it-I suppose protecting a man hole into the interior. The silhouette which I see every evening against the sunset is therefore roughly as drawn, and on the whole I think it is agreeable. It often gives me an odd sensation as I progress homewards to tea along the cliff edge to look at this very distinctive shape in all its novelty and to reflect that, if God pleases, it will someday be as immemorially familiar to you and me as the contour of the Cave Hill. On such occasions you must picture me equipped with both axe and spade for the standard public work at present is ‘the extraction of roots’—I admit I have been making slow progress, but that is not because the work is turning out impracticable, but because of many interruptions. Thus every Monday there is F.K. Last Saturday (by the way this is now Jan 24th—in fact the following Sunday) I was out for a walk with Lings. I have also missed some afternoons when the state of my health would not support the exertion. But I have little doubt that we shall have every single elder out of it before we have done. Another of my interruptions was a miniature walking tour with Barfield and Harwood just before term—so miniature indeed that it should be called a strolling tour: we just dithered along to Abingdon one day, and then Harwood and I alone (Barfield having had to leave us by bus) sauntered to Oxford all the way by river bank. The jaunt is worth mentioning because you and I have hitherto entirely underrated Abingdon. Their [sic] is a church standing in a quadrangle of almshouses right down on one of those little fresh water wharves on the river wh. is excellent. Also, on our saunter back to Oxford, we saw so many ‘abandoned lashers’ and silver falls that a man who followed the same route in July could ‘make one long bathing of a summer day’ (#ulink_daa1b9bd-3973-504b-bfd3-32cedf45f24f) And talking about Wordsworth, pray Sir, did you ever read the White Doe of Rylstone? (#ulink_75bbb945-02f9-5e5f-a7c3-beeb14ba2f5c) I read the first canto last night and recommend it strongly. I don’t remember what I said about Law’s Serious Call. It is not a book which I would advise anyone to read with great urgency. There is a severity, even a grimness about it which strikes me as excessive. I must also go far to revise the favourable account I gave of The Appeal. (#ulink_de74d99e-e925-5ff9-82a8-157bd1e57052) It did not fulfill the promise of its first passages. An XVIIIth century critic would have complained that it was ‘infected with Enthusiasm’, and would have been right in this sense that the ideas—very valuable ones—which it contains are held by the author with a rather feverish insistence to the exclusion of many other sides of religion. There is a great deal of repetition, and neither the good will which the author won from me at the outset, nor the charm of a delightful edition, nor the literary beauty of many passages (for Law can be really eloquent) prevented me from feeling in the end a sort of discomfort and desire for escape into the open air-as if I had been in a small hot room with a man of genius and piety who was not absolutely sane. It is the same quality that moved Johnson to say of Boehme—Law’s master in these later books—‘If Jacob had seen the unutterable, Jacob should not have tried to utter it’. (#ulink_e6011c70-3ac1-571e-961a-19edc435f2bc) Most of my recent reading, before term, has been of rather a simple and boyish kind. I re-read The People of the Mist-a tip-top yarn of the sort. If someone would start re-issuing all Rider Haggard at 1/-a volume I would get them all, as a permanent fall-back for purely recreational reading. Then I read The Wood Beyond the World-with some regret that this leaves me no more Wm Morris prose romances to read (except Child Christopher (#ulink_dd95a53a-54a0-5267-bfe9-7c34f43027aa) wh. is an adaptation of a mediaeval poem already known to me and therefore hardly counts). I wish he had written a hundred of them! I should like to have the knowledge of a new romance always waiting for me the next time I am sick or sorry and want a real treat. Then I read Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, largely for a naif reason—that I had been wondering all my life who Hereward was and had a special reason in my work for wanting to know. The distinguishing feature of Kingsley’s novel is that the ‘manners and sentiments’ are nowhere near so glaringly anachronistic as they are in most novels of the kind—even in Scott whenever he goes further back than the ’45. It has, however, the opposite fault of sticking too close to history and therefore giving us (what is unpardonable in a tale of adventure) an unhappy ending. The hero betrays the heroine, deserts his followers, and dies miserably. You would want to vet it as you vetted the Life and Death of Jason, (#ulink_46d59681-21f7-571d-864f-f5080f38aa93) and for the same reason. While at Cambridge (staying, as I foretold you in a posh hotel, at the expense of the Board. Four of us had to hold an examiners meeting one evening, and accordingly, just like the heroes of a romance, called for fire, lights, and a bottle of claret in a private room. All that was Jacking was to have prefaced the order by tweaking the landlord’s nose with a ‘Hark’ee, rascal!’ This was in the University Arms which perhaps you know)-while in Cambridge or rather on my long, slow, solitary, first class journey there and back through fields white with frost—I read Pater’s Marius the Epicurean. This is the best specimen extant of the Epicurean-aesthetic business: which one wrongs by reading it in its inferior practitioners such as George Moore and Oscar Wilde. As you probably know it is a novel—or, since the story is so slight, a faintly narrative causerie-laid in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The interesting thing is, that being a really consistent aesthete, he has to bring in the early Christians favourably because the flavour of the early Church-the new music, the humility, the chastity, the sense of order and quiet decorum—appeal to him aesthetically. It is doubtful if he sees that he can only have it in by blowing to bits the whole Epicurean basis of his outlook—so that aestheticism, honestly followed, refutes itself by leading him to something that will put aestheticism in its place—and Pater’s position is therefore, in the long run, all nonsense. But it is [a] very beautiful book—much enriched by a full prose translation of the Cupid and Psyche story from Apuleius who first told it and who is one of the minor characters. I should try it if it is in your library. Gad!—how it would have bowled one over if one had read it at eighteen. One would be only just beginning to recover now. But all these books fade into insignificance beside my really great discovery, Barbour’s Bruce (#ulink_c1ab3a31-eeb0-5f70-a4ab-0dbb4fe2ba7c) (XlVth century). This is ‘The’ modern epic: all that Scott’s poems try to recover: chivalrous sentiment, pawky humour, smell of heather, and all the rest of it—only all real, all done while that world was still there, not a ‘revival’. I am afraid the language is just beyond that thin unmistakable line which divides the readable from the unreadable for those who haven’t learned ‘Middle English’ as a school language. A very little ‘modernising’ would make it alright. I wonder could I persuade Dents to let me modernise it for an Everyman. You would think Scotch patriotism would give it a sale: till quite modern times every ‘cottar’ had a copy of it. (Do Scotch patriots buy books?). It contains, among other things, an account of Bruce landing at Rathlin which suggests that the bathing would not be good there. There seems to be some terrific current ‘Like the straight of Morrak in Spaine’ –if that conveys anything to you, which it doesn’t to me. (From Rathlin, Bruce went on to Carrick Fergus). If your idea of reading Descartes holds, begin with the Discourse on Method. (#ulink_ebf2c461-2d88-51b5-b855-a94998a98a46) This is in biographical form and is on the border-land between philosophy proper and what might be called the ‘history of intellectual manners’. But I’m not at all sure that a man so steeped in the XVIIth century as you would not find his natural starting point in Boethius-I suppose ‘Boece’ is as common in France at that time as he was in England? As he was translated about once a century into every civilised language, you would have no difficulty in finding a well flavoured version. In England he had the remarkable adventure of being rendered successively by K. Alfred, Chaucer, and Q. Elizabeth. As to Thomas’ rap over the knuckles about going out during the hymn—my case is this. Complete neglect of communicating is not tolerated by any Church nor practised by me. But is it within his rights to make it impossible for you to hear a sermon without communicating? Has anyone laid down the exact proportion of the intellectual and ritual elements—roughly symbolised by sermons and sacraments—which is necessary to membership of the Church of England. That is my ‘case’ as a controversialist: but I bear no malice. By the bye, what are your views, now, on the question of sacraments? To me that is the most puzzling side of the whole thing. I need hardly say I feel none of the materialistic difficulties: but I feel strongly just the opposite ones—i.e. I see (or think I see) so well a sense in which all wine is the blood of God—or all matter, even, the body of God, that I stumble at the apparently special sense in which this is claimed for the Host when consecrated. George Macdonald observes that the good man should aim at reaching the state of mind in which all meals are sacraments. Now that is the sort of thing I can understand: but I find no connection between it and the explicit ‘sacrament’ proprement dit. The Presbyterian method of sitting at tables munching actual slices of bread is clearly absurd under ordinary conditions: but one can conceive a state of society in which a real meal might be shared by a congregation in such a way as to be a sacrament without ceasing to be also their actual dinner for that day. Possibly this was so in the very early Church. Don’t bother about this if you are not inclined to discuss the question. I trotted it out because it seemed artificial to mention it at all without saying what I was thinking. How ones range of interests grows! Do you find a sort of double process going on with relation to books—that while the number of subjects one wants to read is increasing, the number of books on each which you find worth reading steadily decreases. Already in your own corner of French history you have reached the point at which you know that most of the books published will be merely re-hashes, but in revenge you are reading Vaughan and thinking of reading Taylor. Ten years ago you would have read eight books on your period (getting only what the one book behind those eight would have given you) and left Vaughan and Taylor out of account. In the same way, on the subject of sacraments, a few years ago I should not have wanted any information, but if I had, shd. have read book after book about it. Now—one knows [in] advance that here in Oxford there are probably 4000 books dealing exclusively with that subject, and that at least 3990 of them would advance your understanding of it precisely nothing. Once the world was full of books that seemed boring because they gave answers to questions one hadn’t asked: every day I find one of these boring books to be really boring for the opposite reason—for failing to answer some question I have asked. Even in things like Anglo Saxon Grammar! ‘Why Sir, the quantity to be known is larger than I supposed; but the quantity of knowledge is less than I had conceived possible.’ Your Cathedral sounds mildly good-architecturally. Now that Maureen is away my week is quite differently arranged in order to give Minto as few solitary nights as possible. I lie here on Sunday and Wednesday: Maureen on Friday and Saturday. I still have the schoolboy’s pleasure in any change of routine and particularly relish the division of my two out nights. I suppose I told you that we have a good maid who really cooks? She doesn’t cook as well as Minto, but that is a bagatelle. What is more serious is the steady reduction in the quantity of meals which she seems to be effecting. If it goes on at the present rate, when you come back it will be a case of ‘I suppose there’s some sort of pot-house in this village where a man could get a biscuit, huh?’ (#ulink_a276a783-c5a2-5452-9ebf-0b9732b1260a) (This had better not be mentioned in your next letter to Minto. I daresay we shall pull through). I have fewer tutorials this term—the Junto is quiet—my lecture is well attended—and all shapes for a much pleasanter term than usual: the second of the nine, as it is pleasing to note. Why don’t you write that paper on Thomas Browne yourself? I’ve no time for it. Yours Jack. P.S. Minto tells me to tell you I like Troddles the puppy because she says if I don’t mention him you’ll think I don’t like him but I say that is not the masculine way of reading letters nor of writing them but she is not quite convinced so here goes;-I like Troddles. So does Papworth. Cham can’t abide him and cuffs him whenever they meet. Jack was very afraid that Warnie, who had been in Shanghai since 17 November 1931, was in danger from a Japanese attack on the Chinese part of that city. On 18 September 1931, in violation of its treaty obligations, Japan occupied Manchuria. On 21 September China appealed to the Council of the League of Nations, and on 30 September the Counciladopted unanimously a resolution taking note of the Japanese representative’s statement that his Government would continue as rapidly as possible the withdrawal of its troops. The Japanese Government failed to carry out the assurances given the Council, but adopted the attitude that a preliminary agreement, binding China to recognize Japan’s treaty rights in Manchuria, was an essential element of security and must be a condition precedent to evacuation. After being rebuffed by the League of Nations, Japan announced its withdrawal from the League to take effect in 1935. To consolidate its gains, Japan landed troops in Shanghai on 28 January 1932 to quell an effective Chinese boycott of Japanese goods. By 5 February the whole of the three provinces of Manchuria were occupied. China was unable to resist the superior Japanese forces and in May 1933 it recognized the Japanese conquest by signing a truce. Writing about it later, Warnie said the Army Service Corps was ‘not involved, but there was thought to be a grave risk that the Japanese, in an endeavour to outflank the Chinese, might violate the International Settlement. Consequently the Settlement garrison had been put on an active service basis, with manned trenches, strong points etc, round our perimeter’. (#ulink_8c9fb930-407a-55fe-b732-fb3ba025a694) TO HIS BROTHER: Feb 15th 1932 The Kilns My dear Warnie– This will be a shortish letter, partly because I am still a convalescent from flu—this being not my first day but my first afternoon up-partly because we don’t really care to bank on the security of any letter reaching you in the present state of Shanghai. Anxiety is of all troubles the one that lends itself least to description. Of course we have been and are infernally bothered about you—probably not more than you have been bothered about yourself! I suppose that about as often as I have stopped myself from repeating the infuriating question ‘Why was he such a fool’ etc, you have abstained from the parallel ‘Why was I such a fool as ever to come out here’. I will refrain from asking you any particular questions because I remember from war experiences that questions from home are always based on a misunderstanding of the whole situation. It will be more useful as a guide to your reply to tell you that we have (from the Times) a map of Shanghai large enough to mark Gt. Western Road, so we should be able to follow your news in some detail. As for the printed news, it is plainly nonsense: the almost daily story being that fierce fighting raged all day in Chapei and the Japanese had one man killed and three wounded. In other parts of the paper the ‘fierce fighting’, I admit, usually turns out to be a heavy Japanese barrage replied to by two trench mortars. You will see at any rate that it is impossible from here to form any idea of the only aspect of the thing that concerns me: viz: the actual and probable distance between the A.P.B. and the firing. It is true that I have to my hand the axiom that the distance will be as great as the A.P.B. has been able to contrive-but that carries me only a very little way. The result is that my fancy plays me every kind of trick. At one time I feel as if the danger was very slight and begin reckoning when your first account of the troubles will reach us: at another I am—exceedingly depressed. All the news is of the sort that one re-interprets over and over again with new results in each new mood. A beastly state of affairs. The last letter we had from you was the one you wrote to Minto immediately after your flu’. I had written to you a few days before that arrived. Since then I don’t know that much to record has happened. I was going on steadily with the ‘extraction of roots’ in the wood: but you’d hardly believe how the doubt about your situation takes the relish out of public works. My term was continuing in a pretty good course. Segar (#ulink_6c85a137-8245-5b40-89f9-39285308a8a4) has been specially attentive in inquiries about you and in his characteristic half comical attempts to put the situation in as favourable a light as possible. I must say I am a little surprised that he is the only person in College who has done so. I have now been in my room for precisely a week. It has been an ideal illness. My little east room, as you know, gives one two views-one over to Philips an t’other up to the top wood—and the grate does not smoke. Most of the week there has been snow falling during some part of the day—wh. is just the finishing touch to a comfortable day’s reading in bed. I have re-read three Scotts. 1. The Monastery (#ulink_731d5ebb-2e6c-5971-b4d7-aca89fda18e3) wh. I had read in the very old days—pre-Wynyard (#ulink_0a20c118-e029-514c-8611-cb45a1fdbd0f) and quite forgotten. I think it the poorest Scott I have yet read, tho worth reading. What really gave me most pleasure was to meet your quotation (in the Capt. Clutterbuck epistle) about the paradise of half-pay and the purgatory of duty. Lord—I wish you were out of the latter this moment. 2. The Abbot- originally read at the same time. This is much better, and I should put it fairly high among the pre-17th century novels, wh. as a whole I find inferior to the others. Still, it shares with Rob Roy the rare advantage of having a natural and even pleasant heroine. Finally The Antiquary for about the fifth time, wh. I have almost fixed on as the Scott novel. (#ulink_4bad3da7-788c-50b2-8584-c275e72a0e82) I have read it so often that I do not remember at which reading I ceased to regard Mr. Oldbuck as ‘a character’ and began to think him (as I now do) simply the one sensible man in the book, living as any rational man would live if he were given peace. I wonder, supposing that the P.O. is working when this reaches you, would you mind letting me have a cable to say that you’re alright? Unless, of course everything is quiet by the end of the next fortnight. It would really cheer us up immensely. I shall resume proper letter writing with the rest of my regular routine as soon as I get back to work. For the moment this is the best I can do. With best wishes, brother, for a speedy removal of your person to some quieter area. Yours Jack. P.S. Your pictures have come. I think hanging them is the safest method of storing them and I shall do so as soon as I am about again: till then I have refused to have them unpacked. TO HIS BROTHER (W): [The Kilns] Feb 21st 1932 My dear W– Since I last wrote to you, four or five days ago, we had two communications from you. First, a message by Bibby Wireless which took exactly a fortnight to reach us. As this is much too short a time for anything but telegraphy, and much too long for any telegraph (wireless or wiry) I don’t know what to make of it: but I’m inclined to think that you expected it to reach us sooner and that its actual date of arrival does shew some dislocation of services. Thanks for sending it. The re-assuring view of the crisis is quite obviously untrue by now, whatever it may have been when you sent it; but thanks all the same. Secondly, I have had your cheering letter of Jan 14th—‘cheering’ for giving one some conversation with you, though of course it bears not at all on the source of anxiety. I must confess I have imbibed enough of that rather specially shabby superstition which cries ‘Touch wood’ etc, to shudder when I read your proposals about walks in Ulster etc. In fact I have two unpleasantly contrasted pictures in my mind. One ‘features’ the two Pigibudda with packs and sticks de-training into the sudden stillness of the moors at Parkmore. (#ulink_97778f24-ef87-5fe5-95c3-ec5333aeaee7) the other is of you progressing from the Bund to Gt. Western Rd. with an eye cocked skyward, just in the old French manner, curse it, and ducking at the old Who-o-o-o-p-Bang! Like Boswell, on that perilous crossing in the Hebrides, I ‘at last took refuge in piety: but was much embarrassed by the various objections which have been raised against the doctrine of special providences’. (#ulink_82e85644-c988-58fd-9a0b-982cee33bb00) Unfortunately I have not at hand the work of Dr. Ogden in which Boswell found this difficulty solved. (#ulink_6d2ccc8e-20b3-54d3-9251-e4c1f5299a6f) I suppose the solution lies in pointing out that the efficacy of prayer is, at any rate no more of a problem then the efficacy of all human acts. i.e. if you say ‘It is useless to pray because Providence already knows what is best and will certainly do it,’ then why is it not equally useless (and for the same reason) to try to alter the course of events in any way whatever—to ask for the salt or book your seat in a train? However, in spite of this discomfort, I cannot help joining you in your day-dream of a Parkmore walk. That is partly because I am now back in bed (nothing serious, just a slight re-rise of temperature owing to having tried to get up too soon). Do you find, during the endless afternoons of a week in bed, that one’s imagination is constantly haunted with pictures of seacoasts and cliffs and such like? Mine has been specially busy with the walk you suggest. I think it would be better to go down to the coast by the second of the two glens to Cushendun (not Cushendall) after a glance down the first, which is better as a view than as a route. The impressive simplicity—one huge fold of land-which makes it so good a view would make it a little monotonous for footing: the other is a perfect paradise of ups and downs and brawling streams, little woods, stone walls, and ruined cottages. The next days walk—on North with Rathlin in view—I did an hour of with Arthur last summer, and it is even better than you can possibly imagine if you haven’t done it. The lunch problem is a pity: but one can never be utterly stranded in a country full of streams—spring water being not only better than nothing with which to wash down a man’s victuals but better than anything except beer or tea. It is the dry dollop of unmitigated sandwich on top of a waterless chalk down in Berkshire that really spoils a day’s walk. But perhaps this is enough of the day dream—the other picture begins to bother me. By the way, if you get through this damned battle next door to you, it will have had one incidental advantage-that of having made me very familiar with Shanghai. I could now draw quite a good map from memory: certainly could get in Chapei Station, Gt. Western Rd, Trinity Cathedral, Cathay Hotel, the Creek, Hongkew fairly correctly. I thoroughly agree with your revised proposals for the Lewis papers. If you remember, I was always to this extent opposed to your first scheme, that I wanted all letters put in together in their chronological order so as to secure the va-et-vient (#ulink_b94d44d6-7ac4-5495-a631-63266c53c626) of actual intercourse, whereas you wanted A’s letters in a block, then B’s letters in a block. But your new idea is better than either. How far will you extend it? It seems to me that all good traditional information (e.g. ‘I thought your father would have gone wild’) now can and ought to go in: and I am not at all sure that the contents of P’daita Pie (#ulink_fed6e68e-5d69-574d-a21c-da57245f49cf) should not find their place in the main narrative. Many pages of Boswell are just such ‘pie’ mosaiced into the biography. You see how impossible it is not to be always counting on the future and then being always pulled up by recollection of those shells and made to feel that any such counting is a positive tempting of fate. However, what is one to do. I shall make this a short letter and try to send you another short one soon, because whatever you say, it is quite obvious that mails are not safe. How can they be when any boat coming up that river may stop a Chinese shell? I was much taken by the photos of the model railway—though his wall-painting scenery seems to have left some problems of perspective unsolved. I doubt if I should care for a toy of that kind now: toy country would be my fancy—i.e. where you wd. have country as a background to a railway, I should have railway as a feature of the country. Perhaps some such complementary difference was already present in our own humbler attic system. But a man could have great fun, you will allow, landscape-building on that same scale. Indeed I fancy you could produce something of which the photos would really deceive. I wonder how I shd. enjoy a performance of The Count of Luxembourg? (#ulink_7e1cc7a4-2212-5f79-a5f3-7f2d5b7cbeb1) I hum over to myself Rootsie-Tootsie and As they pass the gay cafes and of course remember, in a way, all the same things as you: but probably with quite different emotions. I see now that my enjoyment of musical comedy in the old days, though quite real, was largely ‘caught’ from you-or rather from the fashionable world of 1912–14 of which you were in my case the conductor: and it has all passed without going deep enough to make the real remeniscent feeling as they do in you. The sound that I get in our room in college when I pull the study curtains (that unique nimble) releases memories that ‘come home to my business and bosoms’ as the musical comedy tunes do not. Contrariwise, my old Wagner favourites, which are still startlingly evocative for me, wd. probably now not be so for you. This, by the bye, shows the absurdity of the statement often made ‘Well at least a man knows when he’s enjoying himself’. I thought I liked the musical comedy tune in my musical comedy period just as much as I thought I liked the Wagner tune in my next period. Memory shows that I was mistaken. And why should I remember with such delight sitting with you near that fountain on the high Holywood Road that summer evening during the great Row—and remember with such complete coldness going to The Arcadians. (#ulink_25714f9b-5d9e-59ba-ae9a-e03db1330909) The first seemed at the time a most miserable, the second a most pleasurable evening: but the first has ‘kept’ (as they say of meat) and the second has not. Still, I wd. willingly go with you to one of the old musical comedies if the chance came our way. It is a springlike evening here—all the birds twittering—and I am beginning to be tired of bed. I am certainly tired of novels and must get something nutritious fetched from college to morrow. I’m not at all sure that I shan’t, after your remarks, have a cut at the Georgics. (#ulink_24e21a3d-dbb7-5b72-8ceb-15b5c3c5e924) I need not urge you to look after yourself as well as you can. I suppose you are wearing tin-hats—alack the day! All send their love Yrs Jack. TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): [The Kilns] Feb 1932 My dear Arthur, I have been laid up with flu’ for over a fortnight or I shd. have answered you before. As you preferred my last letter to my previous ones, and also took longer to answer it than ever, I suppose if I want a speedy answer to this I had better write a letter you don’t like! Let me see—I must first select all the subjects which are least likely to interest you, and then consider how to treat them in the most unattractive manner. I have half a mind to do it—but on second thoughts it would be almost as big a bore for me to write it as for you to read it. How exasperating to think of you being at Ballycastle with an unappreciative companion, in bad weather, and a lethargic mood: it seems such a waste. I thought we had talked about Naomi Mitchison before. I have only read one (Black Sparta) (#ulink_dcabb14c-b770-56a7-a9eb-f1a0c66a983a) and I certainly agree that it ‘holds’ one: indeed I don’t know any historical fiction that is so astonishingly vivid and, on the whole, so true. I also thought it astonishing how, despite the grimness, she got such an air of beauty—almost dazzling beauty—into it. As to the cruelties, I think her obvious relish is morally wicked, but hardly an artistic fault for she cd. hardly get some of her effects without it. But it is, in Black Sparta, a historical falsehood: not that the things she describes did not probably happen in Greece, but that they were not typical—the Greeks being, no doubt, cruel by modern standards, but, by the standards of that age, extremely humane. She gives you the impression that the cruelty was essentially Greek, whereas it was precisely the opposite. That is, she is unfair as I should be unfair if I wrote a book about some man whose chief characteristic was that he was the tallest of the pigmies, and kept on reminding the reader that he was very short. I should be telling the truth (for of course he would be short by our standards) but missing the real point about the man-viz: that he was, by the standards of his own race, a giant. Still, she is a wonderful writer and I fully intend to read more of her when I have a chance. I am so glad to hear you have started Froissart. (#ulink_7102948b-1fd7-5f7b-809a-d402891664f3) If I had the book here (I am out at the Kilns—only got up yesterday) we could compare passages. What I chiefly remember from the first part is the Scotch wars and the odd way in which just a very few words gave me the impression of the scenery—the long wet valleys and the moors. How interesting too, to find how much of the chivalry in the romances was really practised in the wars of the period—e.g. the scene where Sir Thing-um-a-bob (you see you are not the only one who forgets things) espouses the cause of the lady of Hainault. Or again, at the siege of Hennebont (?) where you actually have a lady-knight fighting, just like Britomart in the Faerie Queene. To enjoy a book like that thoroughly I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs: then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page: finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined. I often wonder-considering how people enjoy themselves developing photos or making scrap-books—why so few people make a hobby of their reading in this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine-nibbed pen in my hand: one is making something all the time and a book so read acquires the charm of a toy without losing that of a book. By the way, when you ask me to ‘pray for you’ (in connection with Froissart) I don’t know if you are serious, but, the answer is, I do. It may not do you any good, but it does me a lot, for I cannot ask for any change to be made in you without finding that the very same needs to be made in me; which pulls me up and also by putting us all in the same boat checks any tendency to priggishness. While I have been in bed I have had an orgy of Scott -The Monastery, The Abbot, The Antiquary and the Heart of Midlothian (#ulink_e737b614-4d04-54f0-a366-3942f5ab3b4d) which I am at present in the middle of. The Monastery and Abbot I have read only once before—long, long ago, long before you and I were friends—so that they were the same as new ground to me. Neither of them is Scott at his best—the Monastery indeed is about the worst I have yet read—but both are worth reading. The Antiquary I have read over and over again, and old Oldbuck is almost as familiar to me as Johnson. What a relish there is about him and his folios and his tapestry room and his paper on Castrametation and his ‘never taking supper: but trusting that a mouthful of ale with a toast and haddock, to close the orifice of the stomach, does not come under that denomination’ (#ulink_37340e3d-b3a2-529c-aea3-99a63d07ce5f) (How like my father and his ‘little drop of the whiskey’). I think re-reading old favourites is one of the things we differ on, isn’t it, and you do it very rarely. I probably do it too much. It is one of my greatest pleasures: indeed I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once. Do try one of the old Scotts again. It will do admirably as a rest in the intervals of something that needs working at, like Froissart. There has been a good deal of snow during my illness. Where I lay in bed I could see it through two windows, and a bit of the wooded hill gradually whitening in the distance. What could be snugger or nicer? Indeed my flu’ this year would have been delightful if I hadn’t been worried about Warnie, who is in Shanghai. When there is something like this wh. forces one to read the papers, how one loathes their flippancy and their sensational exploitation of things that mean life and death. I wish to goodness he had never gone out there. Do try and let me know when you are coming to London and when there is a chance of your coming here. Otherwise you know what it will be: you will turn up unexpectedly on some day when I have 15 hours’ work to do, and I shall be angry with you and you will be angry with me, and we shall meet for a comfortless half hour in a teashop and snap and sulk at each other and part both feeling miserable. Surely it is worth while trying to avoid this. Give my love to your mother and to the dog. I hope we shall have some famous walks with him Yours Jack TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. March 16th/32 My dear Barfield Death and damnation! This will never do. Look here—when you walk I walk. If you are finally forced to take your holiday earlier, make that the walk and Griffiths and I will come with you. A walk with the new Anthroposophical (#ulink_a64591bf-88eb-5681-b55f-b5356791decb) member and without you is not good enough. But I trust you will be able to stick to the original arrangement. Somehow prurient doesn’t seem to be the right word for Spenser. Delicatus- relaxed in will—of course he is. You must have been having a horrible time alternating between bed and exams. (#ulink_d01037b8-cdb1-5281-809f-1c999af9d28a) Condolences! I have written about 100 lines of a long poem in my type of Alexandrine. It is going to make the Prelude (let alone the Tower) (#ulink_ebfc3f5e-ac00-533f-9868-65cc99af1f3d) look silly. Yours C. S. Lewis TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. March 19th 1932 My dear Barfield– R? Walk: (1) I could certainly come earlier, but very strongly deprecate a date too near Easter on account of crowded hotels etc. (2) I would reluctantly agree to changing the terrain to Sussex: but if the date is put near Easter, this reluctance increased to just not being absolute recalcitrance. That country at that time will be a stream of hikers talking about yaffles. Is it, by the way, to any one’s interest besides yours to walk in Sussex. (3) I enclose Griffiths’ letter, to which I have replied telling him all I know (it isn’t much) about dates. It is an alarming and disappointing letter. I am afraid Anthroposophy is his only chance now. He seems to be heading for unmitigated egoism. I wrote him rather a breezy letter trying to give him the feeling, without saying it, that the idea of his being a ‘burden’ on our walk (damn his impudence) was unutterably ridiculous. I’d like to see anyone try? This walk is his last chance. Either we’ll cure him or make an enemy of him for life! Thanks for the Note on Pain. ‘I kan not bult it to the bran’ (#ulink_d39205aa-ce49-5a9a-8f25-2e823810b46a) at all. When you say that the redeemed self can feel no pain, does this mean that the actual sense-data would be different, or only that the self’s attitude to them would be i.e. it would feel what we call pain but would not ‘mind it’—have (#ulink_2dcd4b51-1172-5f6f-9666-583aa396bfed) but not. (#ulink_e191a7b9-3578-5201-ba87-b7b8edfb7d94) Again, is ‘being aware of something as good’ equal to ‘feeling something as pleasurable’. If pain disappears as soon as we find it good, then can’t we be said to find pain good? You see I am all muddled. I will try to get clear and write about it later on: but I think the ‘note’ very important. I am still pleased with my new poem. What Wordsworth didn’t see was that the subjective epic can learn a lot from the structure of the old epic. There need be no flats if you use the equivalent of inlet narrative and hastening in media res. Have you passed your exam? Yours C. S. Lewis TO HIS BROTHER (W): [The Kilns] March 20th 1932 My dear Warnie– We had a few days ago your letter of Jan. 28th and the first written by you during the troubles. The papers had of course relieved our minds some time before we got it: and I have now passed from anxiety to that sulky state in which I feel that you have given us all a great deal of unnecessary trouble. I feel as the P’daitabird did when he replied to a Cherbourg letter of mine, telling him how I had had a nasty fall in a puddle, ‘Please try for my sake to avoid such drenchings in the future.’ I hope you will be equally considerate. By the way, as regards one point in your letter,—there is no question of building a fence instead of building the two rooms. Indeed, considering the comparative cost of the two works, this would be rather like buying a new pair of braces instead of a Rolles-Royce. Next to the good news from China, the best thing that has happened to me lately is to have assisted at such a scene in the Magdalen smoking room as rarely falls one’s way. The Senior Parrot-that perfectly ape-faced man whom I have probably pointed out to you—was seated on the padded fender with his back to the fire, bending down to read a paper, and thus leaving a tunnel shaped aperture between his collar and the nape of his neck [designated P in a drawing of the man]. A few yards in front of him stood MacFarlane. (#ulink_f11f1e10-55d3-5745-9f80-b194da3f8698) Let MacFarlane now light a cigarette and wave the match to and fro in the air to extinguish it. And let the match be either not wholly extinguished or so recently extinguished that no fall of temperature in the wood has occurred. Let M. then fling the match towards the fire in such a way that it follows the dotted line and enters the aperture at P with the most unerring accuracy. For a space of time which must have been infinitesimal, but which seemed long to us as we watched in the perfect silence which this very interesting experiment so naturally demanded, the Senior Parrot, alone ignorant of his fate, continued absorbed in the football results. His body then rose in a vertical line from the fender, without apparent muscular effort, as though propelled by a powerful spring under his bottom. Re-alighting on his feet he betook himself to a rapid movement of the hands with the apparent intention of applying them to every part of his back and buttock in the quickest possible succession: accompanying this exercise with the distention of the cheeks and a blowing noise. After which, exclaiming (to me) in a very heightened voice ‘It isn’t so bloody funny’ he darted from the room. The learned Dr Hope (that little dark, mentally dull, but very decent demi-butty who breakfasted with you and me) (#ulink_e9c12328-c15e-54a7-b00a-f5d4de261741) who alone had watched the experiment with perfect gravity, at this stage, remarked placidly to the company in general, ‘Well, well, the match will have gone out by now’, and returned to his periodical—But the luck of it! How many shots would a man have taken before he succeeded in throwing a match into that tiny aperture if he had been trying? You asked Minto in a recent letter about this Kenchew man. (#ulink_75648e35-d624-5e7e-a57f-089ae1bfa2b2) As a suitor he shows deplorable tendency to hang fire, and I fancy the whole thing will come to nothing. (Ah there won’t be any proposal): as a character, however, 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 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 been 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 haw 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 mustn’t give you too black an impression of him. He is kind, and really courteous (you know the rare quality Id mean) and a gentleman. I imagine he is what women call ‘Such an interesting man. And so clever.’ One day in College lately I had a long browse over Lockhart, (#ulink_5fe67ad9-f2c9-51ab-a646-557cd0f41eeb) using your pencilled index as a guide. It had almost the effect of having a conversation with you. What a good book it is, isn’t it? I must gradually browse through it all. Some baggage called Dame Una Pope-Henessy has just brought out (for the centenary) a real petty, chatty, Strachey-esque Life of Scott which begins by expressing a desire to ‘rescue’ Scott from ‘the solemn nine-volume tomb’ of Lockhart. (#ulink_9f633227-0bb7-5001-99f4-2124a9416d91) This kind of thing is insufferable. Christie reviewed it for the Oxford Magazine and, very happily in my opinion, ended up with the view that this chatty, impudent life was ‘bound to come’ and it was a good thing to have it over. (#ulink_2ff36f3b-0be5-5ea7-828f-a9424e1714e5) Talking about Scott, I finished the Heart of Midlothian shortly after I last wrote to you. It seems to me on the whole one of the best. Dumbiedikes is one of the great lairds—almost as good as Ellangowans, though not quite. I suppose every one has already remarked how wonderfully Jennie escapes the common dulness of perfectly good characters in fiction. Do you think that the fact of her being uneducated helps? Is it that the reader wants to feel some superiority over the characters he reads about, and that a social or intellectual one will give him a sop and induce him to believe in the purely moral superiority? But this sounds rather too ‘modern’ and knowing to be true; I for one not beleiving that we are all such ticks as is at present supposed. I did not read the Georgics after all, but did read the Aeneid. The other day Foord-Kelsie succeeded in carrying out a project that he has been hammering away at for a long time, that of taking me over to see his old village of Kimble where he was rector. I mention it in order to say that you and I have unduly neglected the Chilterns. Of course you have been there, and noticed how completely different they are from the Cotswolds, but one forgets the beauty. We drove for hours through the finest old beech woods—a real forest country where the villages are only clearings. The local industry is chair making, and as beech, apparently, can be worked green, the old method of actually working in the wood, turning the newly felled timber with a primitive lathe, still goes on. At least F.-K.—come, I see for the first time that it won’t do on paper-Foord-Kelsie says so. Perhaps this is no more reliable than the consolations which he offered me when you were in danger at Shanghai, when he pointed out that the combatants were firing at each other not at the Settlement. I replied that shells, once fired, didn’t discriminate on whom they fell. To which he answered ‘Oh but you know modern artillery is a wonderful thing. They can place their shells with the greatest possible nicety.’ This from him to me, considering our relative experience, is worthy of the P’daitabird at his best. By the way, talking of shells, we had a conversation about the next war in College the other night, and the Senior Parrot (the hero of the match episode) who flies in the reserve was treating us to the usual business—modern weapons—capital cities wiped out in an hour-non-combatants decimated—whole thing over in a month. It suddenly occurred to me that after all, these statements are simply the advertisement of various new machines: and the next war will be precisely as like this as the real running of a new car is like the account of it in the catalogue. We had all, of course,—at least people of your and my way of thinking—been skeptical, but I never saw the ‘rationale’ of it before. To return to Foord-Kelsie. I had one magnificent score off him that drive. All the way along, whenever we passed a rash of bungalows or a clutch of petrol pumps, he was at his usual game. ‘How ridiculous to pretend that these things spoiled the beauty of the countryside etc’ Late in the day, and now in his own country, he waved his hand towards a fine hillside and remarked ‘My old friend Lee—a most remarkable man—bought all that and presented it to the nation to save it from being covered with bungalows.’ He saw the pit he had fallen into a moment too late. His old rectory at Kimble is one of the very best places I have ever seen. It is a huge garden sloping down one side and up the other of a little ravine: beyond that divided only by a fence from the almost miniature-mountain scenery of Chekkers park. In this little ravine is a good specimen of a kind of beauty we shall never, I fear, have at the Kilns—that of uneven ground evenly shaved by lawn-mowers. You know the effect (one sometimes gets it on golf links)—rather like the curves on a closely clipped race-horse: an almost sensuous beauty-one wants to stroke the hillside. If you add a few finely clipped yews you will have the picture complete. I have done little reading other than work since the Aeneid, except, of course, the inevitable snippet of Boswell. I began the first epistle to the Corinthians but didn’t make much of it. Lately I have been skimming The Way of All Flesh. (#ulink_e0ed6b4e-a2a7-5908-b769-8f9e833e0dd6) I thought I should probably not like it on a re-reading, but it wears well. Its crudities of satire are so honest and hilarious that one can’t resist them. Elder-rooting in the top wood has begun again, and this afternoon, thanks to a night and morning of delicious soft rain which had softened the earth after a long continued drought, I got up four of them. I wished you were with me. The wood, and, even more, the path to it, smelled deliciously. There were still drops on every branch, and a magnificent chorus of birds. It was one of those days when, in the old phrase, you can almost hear things growing. The catkins (half way up to the topwood) are all out, and the first purple look on the birches is just beginning. There is something unusually pleasant about public works when one is just getting really strong again after being ill: it is nice to sweat again. Thanks for two copies of the North China News. You were really a good deal nearer the front than I supposed. Yours Jack TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): The Kilns, Hdngtn Quarry March 22nd [1932] Dear old chap (Is this a sufficiently untruculent opening?) I have received your incoherent and exasperating letter. You asked me for opinions (‘a short essay’ were your words) on the time and place you proposed for a walk, and I volunteered ‘em. There is no question in my mind of going for a walk with Griffiths and Beckett (preposterous conjunction) without you. When you walk, I walk. I think Sussex a bad place to walk in but shall of course go there if you can’t go anywhere else. And at any time you choose. Now, is that clear? Got it, old bean. Now for another bibfull. Please tell me which Thursday night we are assembling on at Eastbourne (Sorry, I see you have. March 31st) Right, I’ll do that. Where, in Eastbourne? Will you tell Griffiths or shall I? Kent is a perfectly stinking place. Let us go west rather than go there. Bridges (#ulink_9a8ac0f7-d609-5e45-95b3-3de2a6612e49)-what the devil would I imitate Bridges for? I’d as soon think of imitating Tupper. (#ulink_42143f0d-1121-5136-8764-d245ae40d7b8) If you can’t see the joke about Griffiths being a burden-it’s all one. Plague o’ these pickled herrings. Nobody ever said the note on Pain was nonsense. But if you insist, I am prepared to call anything you say nonsense. Well: 31st of March at Eastbourne: at a place to be later arranged. I shan’t tell Griffiths unless ordered to, for I cannot make out from your letter what, whether, and when you have written to him. Ta-ta, old boy Yours C. S. Lewis P.S. Please acknowledge this and confirm details in your next moment of calm. P.P.S. Harwood wants not ‘his bottom kicked’ but, more idiomatically ‘his bottom kicking’. TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): [The Kilns] Easter Sunday [27 March] 1932 My dear Arthur, We are about ‘quits’ this time in lateness of answering. I had to get off a letter to Warnie before I wrote to you, as he had been longer in my debt, and that of course had to be a long one. (By the bye the trouble in China seems to be over, I am glad to see.) And now I find that your last letter is in College, while I am out here at the Kilns, so that I shan’t be able to answer it very definitely. Almost the only thing I remember about it is that you are writing a detective story. After I have spent so much of my life in writing things of the kind that don’t appeal to you, I suppose I should not be surprised at you writing in one of the kinds that doesn’t appeal to me-gradually more of your letter begins to come back to me. You have given up Naomi Mitchison because you find the characters unreal. I didn’t feel that myself. Of course one does not feel the same intimacy in detail with characters from the far past as with those in a novel of contemporary life. I don’t think I mind that. Hamlet or, say, the Baron of Bradwardine-of course one doesn’t in one way know them as well as Soames Forsyte or Kipps: (#ulink_f7b52649-a6ca-5516-a7d4-9573dc47aa14) in another way I feel I know them better. In fact ‘in one way it is, in another way it isn’t’. But then, I think one of the differences between us [is] that you appreciate much more than I do the ‘close-up’ detail—superficial detail I often think-of modern character drawing. There I go in my usual way—expressing an opinion on modern fiction when the real state of the case is that I have read so little of it, and that so carelessly, that I ought to have no opinion on it at all. I must rely mainly on you. Perhaps as time goes on you will drift more to the present and I more to the past and we shall be useful to each other in that way. Fortunately, there is a solid something, neither of the present or of the past, which we shall always have in common. Talking of the past, I had a really delightful experience some weeks ago. An old pupil of mine, one Wood, (#ulink_b2bb2c29-4af7-59ca-ab7f-c3e7758b9e4d) came to spend a night with me. When I was his tutor he had been a curiously na?f, almost neurotic youth, who was always in love and other troubles, and so childish that he once asked me (as if I were his father!) whether one fell in love less often as one grew older, because he hoped so. Altogether an appealing, but somewhat ridiculous young man. When he went down he was compelled against his will to go into his father’s business: and for a year [or] so I got letters from him, and accounts of him from common friends, which seemed to show that he was settling down into a permanent state of self-pity. You can imagine how pleased I was to find that he had got over this: but above all—that is why I am telling the story-to find that his whole support is romantic reading in those precious evening hours ‘after business’ which you remember so well. He quoted bits of Middle English poems which he had read with me for the exam. They were mere drudgery to him at the time, but now, in memory, they delight him. He has just re-read the whole of Malory with more delight than ever, and has bought, but not yet begun, The High History of the Holy Graal. He also writes a bit—in those same precious evenings, and Saturday afternoons. In fact as I sat talking to him, hearing his not very articulate, but unmistakable, attempts to express his pleasure, I really felt as if I were meeting our former selves. He is just in the stage that we were in when you worked with Tom and I was at Bookham. (#ulink_f2306da8-a1c9-5bb2-b8f0-fe2c5983b163) Of course there was an element of vanity on my side—one lilted to feel that one had been the means of starting him on things that now are standing him in such good stead. There was also a less contemptible, and, so to speak, professional, pleasure in thus seeing a proof that the English School here does really do some good. But in the main the pleasure was a spiritual one—a kind of love. It is difficult, without being sentimental, to say how extraordinarily beautiful- ravishing-I found the sight of some one just at that point which you and I remember so well. I suppose it is this pleasure which fathers always are hoping to get, and very seldom do get, from their sons. Do you think a good deal of parental cruelty results from the disappointment of this hope? I mean, it takes a man of some tolerance to resign himself to the fact that his sons are not going to follow the paths that he followed and not going to give him this pleasure. What it all comes to, anyway, is that this pleasure, like everything else worth having, must not be reckoned on, or demanded as a right. If I had thought of it for a moment in the old days when I was teaching Wood, this pleasant evening would probably never have happened. By the way he left a book with me, as a result of which I have lately read, or partially read, one modern novel—The Fountain, by Charles Morgan. (#ulink_149cbe79-79aa-5aa0-96d9-65fe0db44137) It is about a mystic, or would-be mystic, who was interned in Holland. I thought I was going to like it very much, but soon got disappointed. I was just going to say ‘it soon degenerates into an ordinary novel’, but realised only just in time that this wd. show an absurd point of view—as if one blamed an egg for degenerating into a chicken, forgetting that nature intended it for precisely that purpose. Still the fact remains that I personally enjoy a novel only in so far as it fails to be a novel pure and simple and escapes from the eternal love business into some philosophical, religious, fantastic, or farcical region. By the way how did the Macdonald historical novel turn out? I shd. imagine it might suit him better than his modern ones. I had meant to tell you all about my work in the wood these days, and how nice it looked and smelled and sounded: but I am suffering from a disease, rare with me, but deserving your sympathy-namely an extreme reluctance to write, even to my oldest friend about the things I like best. You see I have struggled with this reluctance for three pages. It is your turn now to reply soon and wake me from my lethargy as I have often tried to do you Yrs Jack P.S. I think being up very late last night and up for the early ‘celebrrrration’ this morning may be the cause of my dulness. TO HIS BROTHER (W): [The Kilns] April 8th 1932 My dear W– I have your excellent letter of Feb. 14th. You are right in supposing that this Sino-Japanese war provides us at last with a political subject in which we are on the same side: but in suggesting that it is the law of chances which thus brings me into the line of archipigibotian orthodoxy, you are surely forgetting that, if that is true, you can claim no credit for predicting the fact, since if the phenomenon (my opinion) is purely irrational, there can be no rational prediction of it—you can foretell it only by luck. Indeed your hitting it would, by the rule of chances, be so unlikely, that it is clear there is no chance in the business at all. The truth being that you, having at last, and indeed by chance, found your own prejudices coincident with the dictates of justice and humanity—and feeling something unusual, not to say distressing, in this situation—you foresaw that this time I would be on the same side. To be serious, my main feeling, and yours too, I expect, is an uneasy balance between indignation and the restraining knowledge that we English have of all people most deprived ourself, by our own imperial history, of the right to be indignant. But I don’t know why I have let the whole dam thing waste even this much of my letter. I wonder can you imagine how reassuring your bit about Spenser is to me who spend my time trying to get unwilling hobble-de-hoys to read poetry at all? One begins to wonder whether literature is not, after all, a failure. Then comes your account of the Faerie Queene on your office table, and one remembers that all the professed ‘students of literature’ don’t matter a rap, and that the whole thing goes on, unconcerned by the fluctuations of the kind of ‘taste’ that gets itself printed, living from generation to generation in the minds of the few disinterested people who sit down alone and read what they like and find that it turns out to be just the things that every one has liked since they were written. I agree with all you say about it, except about the distinctions of character. The next time I dip in it I shall keep my weather eye on them. It would be quite in accord with all ones experience to find out one day that the usual critical view (i.e. that Spenser had no characters) was all nonsense. I notice that great men are overshadowed by their own qualities: because Johnson talked so well, it gets about that his writings are poor: because Cowper is ‘homely’ it is assumed that he cannot be anything else. The doctrines of Crabbe’s unbroken gloom, of, Jane Austen’s pure comedy, of Tennyson’s ‘sweetness’ etc etc belong to the same illusion. So very likely it is the same with Spenser. By the way, I most fully agree with you about ‘the lips being invited to share the banquet’ in poetry, and always ‘mouth’ it while I read, though not in a way that would be audible to other people in the room. (Hence the excellent habit which I once formed, but have since lost, of not smoking while reading a poem). I look upon this ‘mouthing’ as an infallible mark of those who really like poetry. Depend upon it, the man who reads verses in any other way, is after ‘noble thoughts’ or ‘philosophy’ (in the revolting sense given to that word by Browning societies and Aunt Lily) (#ulink_8674cdf9-3cb1-548b-bd76-a33a6b2ea42a) or social history, or something of the kind, not poetry. To go back to Spenser—the battles are a bore. I thought I could trace a difference in that point between him and Tasso. (#ulink_2f3a05fb-f18a-5998-a89a-26203a9e2bda) Tasso’s battles—specially the single combats-always sounded real to me, and I had the feeling that if one knew anything about sword-technique one would be able to follow them in detail. Talking of that, if we had money to spare on whims, I should like to have a fencing-master when you come home. Wouldn’t it be a very fine occupation on wet days for the two pigibudda to ‘take their exercise’ in the bam? It would also make many passages in literature, which at present are mere words, start into light. But now that I come to think of it, I suppose ‘singlestick’ is the exercise proper to our humble rank. (#ulink_e835688f-89d9-5869-8485-73de2ece4cc4) (You know the hearty passages about it in books ‘Ralph made his stave ring and rebound again on the bald head of his opponent’). And singlestick would be intolerable-except the sort we used to play with copies of—was it the Spectator or the Law Journal Report? The novel you mention—The Good Earth (#ulink_b7bcc061-df19-5b0f-a605-fea1ac000610)-I think I saw reviewed, and will certainly read if it is in the Union. As for The Countryman (by the way my Malaprop friend was Robson not Robertson-Scott), (#ulink_e78c8c17-efed-5da5-84b2-86cc77b88a22) I have not received [a] specimen copy, but I did happen to see a copy in the Barley Mow during the week end walk I recorded. I thought it a rather praiseworthy undertaking, but was rather disappointed at a later copy I saw on the spring walk last week (of which more anon) in which there was such an increase of advertisement that the text seemed in danger of vanishing altogether. The whole puzzle about Christianity in non-European countries is very difficult. To the statement that only the riff-raff are converted, I suppose the enthusiastic missionary would reply that if you had lived under the Roman empire, at the period of the first conversions of all, you would have said exactly the same. (He could quote St Paul, [l] Cor. 1:26 ‘Not many clever people in the ordinary sense, nor many in important positions, nor many people of quality’). This is a very cold, uncomfortable reflection! I take it we could answer it by saying that, at all events, the same kind of riff-raff which now lives on the missions could not have been attracted by a poor and persecuted Church: so that that explanation is ruled out. Of course one sees, from all history and from ones own circle, that the people who already have a high intellectual and moral tradition of their own, are, of all people, the least likely to embrace Christianity. Fancy converting a man like J. S. Mill! Or again, the really good Stoic emperors of Rome were the most anti-Christian. Even in the Gospels—does one suppose that the Pharisees, the ‘High Church party’ of Judaism, did not contain most of the refined, educated, enlightened population of Palestine—people, by ordinary standards very much nicer than the women of the town and little tax-farmers (that is modern English for ‘publicans and sinners’) who seem to have made up the background of Our Lord’s circle. Still, we would reply that some Pharisees (e.g. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus) did come in: and, on the other hand, none of the riff-raff came in for money, because there ‘was no money in the thing’. So that for this absolute cleavage in the East (if it really is so absolute as you say) we still need an explanation. Sometimes, relying on his remark, ‘Other sheep I have that are not of this fold’ (#ulink_d968ec50-9877-5055-b293-04764623be7a) I have played with the idea that Christianity was never intended for Asia—even that Buddha is the form in which Christ appears to the Eastern mind. But I don’t think this will really work. When I have tried to rule out all my prejudices I still can’t help thinking that the Christian world is (partially) ‘saved’ in a sense in which the East is not. We may be hypocrites, but there is a sort of unashamed and reigning iniquity of temple prostitution and infanticide and torture and political corruption and obscene imagination in the East, which really does suggest that they are off the rails—that some necessary part of the human machine, restored to us, is still missing with them. (My friend’s story about the I.C.S. (#ulink_0601fd61-c340-5e76-9794-1e2c3f0dccd3) regulation ‘No pornographic books or pictures shall be imported except for bona fide religious purposes’ is relevant here). On the whole, my present conclusion is that the difficulty about the Oriental present is really the same as the difficulty about the years B.C. For some reason that we cannot find out they are still living in the B.C. period (as there are African tribes still living in the stone-age) and it is apparently not intended that they should yet emerge from it. I admit that I have myself fallen into an Orientalism, and am giving instead of an explanation, the true eastern platitude ‘God is great’. In fact, like Nettleship, ‘I don’t know, you know, I don’t know, you know.’ (Mind you, there is this to be said for my view, that you wd. hardly expect time to be quite as important to God as it is to us.) Since last writing I have had my usual Easter walk. It was in every way an abnormal one. First of all, Harwood was to bring anew Anthro-posophical member (not v. happily phrased!) and I was bringing a new Christian one to balance him, in the person of my ex-pupil Griffiths. Then Harwood and his satellite ratted, and the walk finally consisted of Beckett, (#ulink_e4be84b8-3c88-500a-bcde-d26e06e24a75) Barfield, Griffiths, and me. As Harwood never missed before, and Beckett seldom comes, and Griffiths was new, the atmosphere I usually look for on these jaunts was Jacking. At least that is how I explain a sort of disappointment I have been feeling ever since. Then, owing to some affairs of Barfield’s, we had to alter at the last minute our idea of going to Wales, and start (of all places!) from Eastbourne instead. All the same, I wd. not have you think it was a bad walk: it was rather like Hodge who, though nowhere in a competition of Johnsonian cats, was, you will remember, ‘a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’ (#ulink_fc2067ae-1069-5fc2-a959-4570fc19da26) The first day we made Lewes, walking over the bare chalky South Downs all day. The country, except for an occasional gleam of the distant sea—we were avoiding the coast for fear of hikers—is almost exactly the same as the Berkshire downs or the higher parts of Salisbury Plain. The descent into Lewes offered a view of the kind I had hitherto seen only on posters—rounded hill with woods on the top, and one side quarried into a chalk cliff: sticking up dark and heavy against this a little town climbing up to a central Norman castle. We had a very poor inn here, but I was fortunate in sharing a room with Griffiths who carried his asceticism so far as to fling off his eiderdown—greatly to my comfort. Next day we had a delicious morning-just such a day as downs are made for, with endless round green slopes in the sunshine, crossed by cloud shadows. The landscape was less like the Plain now. The sides of the hill—we were on a ridgeway—were steep and wooded, giving rather the same effect as the narrower parts of Malvern hills beyond the Wych. We had a fine outlook over variegated blue country to the North Downs. After we had dropped into a village for lunch and climbed onto the ridge again for the afternoon, our troubles began. The sun disappeared: an icy wind took us in the flank: and soon there came a torrent of the sort of rain that feels as if ones face were being tattooed and turns the mackintosh on the weather side into a sort of wet suit of tights. At the same time Griffiths began to show his teeth (as I learned afterwards) having engaged Barfield in a metaphysico-religious conversation of such appalling severity and egotism that it included the speaker’s life history and a statement that most of us were infallibly damned. As Beckett and I, half a mile ahead, looked back over that rain beaten ridgeway we could always see the figures in close discussion. Griffiths very tall, thin, high-shouldered, stickless, with enormous pack: arrayed in perfectly cylindrical knickerbockers, very tight in the crutch. Barfield, as you know, with that peculiarly blowsy air, and an ever more expressive droop and shuffle. For two mortal hours we walked nearly blind in the rain, our shoes full of water, and finally limped into the ill omened village of Bramber. Here, as we crowded to the fire in our inn, I tried to make room for us by shoving back a little miniature billiard table which stood in our way. I was in that state of mind in which I discovered without the least surprise, a moment too late, that it was only a board supported on trestles. The trestles, of course, collapsed, and the board crashed to the ground. Slate broken right across. I haven’t had the bill yet, but I suppose it will equal the whole expences of the tour. Griffiths gave me a surprise equal to that which the Quakers gave Lamb in another inn (#ulink_e3a2c3c4-782a-5497-a415-364fb11dbfa0) —indeed the two stories are closely parallel—by refusing to see that there was any claim against me at all for the damage. From Bramber we ascended again in a lovely evening after rain, through lovely scenes—the downs here assuming rather the character of moors. But it very soon began to drizzle again, and an error in map reading involved us in hours of stumbling and circling up there in the twilight. We lay at Findon. Griffiths was quite intolerable after dinner. Don’t mistake me. I don’t mean that he was rude. But he displayed a perversity and disingenuousness in argument and a cold blooded brutality—religious brutality is the worst kind-which quite revolted us. To expound his position wd. carry us too far: but you would be getting near it if you imagined a Calvinist Jesuit with strong leanings to the doctrine that the elect cannot sin, who had borrowed from metaphysics the view that ‘love’ cannot be predicated of God, and from economics the doctrine that it is no real charity to give anything to the poor. In fact if you mix together all the harshest aspects of every form of religion and irreligion which you know and imagine them delivered with the dryness of a scientist and the intolerance of a verminous monk of the fourth century, you have the recipe. Barfield and I slept in one room and consoled ourselves with chaff and chat in our old manner, recalling happier walking tours. We were very footsore. The next day made amends. We had good weather all day long. Griffiths improved surprisingly. In fact we have all forgiven him, and shall ask him again. His exhibition of the previous day was really, I believe, only the reaction of a solitary on finding himself suddenly at bay among people all older than himself and all disagreeing with him. We refused to let conversation become serious. We laughed away his monstrous positions. Before lunchtime we had him laughing himself and making jokes, even bawdy jokes. We were in quite a different kind of country today: still the Sussex downs, but not like any ‘downs’ you or I have known, being heavily wooded. It is very pleasant to combine the damp, mysterious delights of a forest walk with the hill-feeling which is called up every now and then by a few open fields revealing the real contours. We got to Arundel for tea, where Beckett left us by train. Coddling ourselves after the hardships of the previous day, we went no further. Arundel impressed me as much as any place I have ever seen. The castle (#ulink_2f0cf8b5-49da-5329-9cc8-a42b712ca9d2) has been greatly added to in the XIXth century so that the original Norman kernel is hardly visible: but, provided a castle is big enough and set high enough above the town, it can hardly help being impressive. But it is the surroundings that are the chief beauty, and specially the park. The Magdalen stags are dwarfs compared with the Arundel stags. It contains some of the finest beeches I have ever seen, and hill and dale for miles, and a sheet of water echoing with exotic birds. (There were also some swans to remind me that ‘the rich have their own troubles’) We passed a very pleasant evening here, a great contrast to the night before. Next day we walked to Midhurst, and having slept there, broke up the party after breakfast. I find that the account I have written gives quite an exaggerated idea of the less pleasant aspects of this jaunt (Memo: to read all collections of letters in the light of the fact that a letter writer tends to pick out what is piquant, or unusual. He may tell no lies: but his life is never as odd, either for good or ill, as it sounds in the letters.) We had at least some of the rare fine days of this spring while walking. As you know, I do not hold with the undue importance now attached to weather: but I confess that spring—‘being a thing so comfortable and necessary’ can still disappoint me when day after day is ushered in with driving rain or black east winds, and the primroses are battered into the mud as soon as they show their faces. There are signs of budding on all (I think) the new trees, but of course one cannot say what they will come to. About Miracle Plays—I agree with you. Is it not all part of the perverse modern attempt to behave as if we were younger, simpler, and more ignorant than we really are? It was natural for the populace in the middle ages to accept a man in a gilt mask appearing as God the Father—who sends Gabriel to the Virgin, who tells her to hurry up and agree to the scheme ‘For they (i.e. the Trinity) think long till I come again.’ It is equally natural, I think, for us, reading the old plays, to find this naivet? touching and delightful—as a grown man likes to watch, or to remember childhood. But a grown man getting into pinafores and going off to play red Indians in the shrubbery is intolerable. Nor will he in that way really recover the pleasures of childhood half so well as he can by reminiscence: nor is there any way in which he can be more utterly unlike a real child. For a child surely wants to be as grown up and sophisticated as it can manage: the enjoyment of naivet? for its own sake is the most hopelessly adult enjoyment there is. I suppose the don reading Edgar Wallace, and the civilised man dancing negro dances, are examples of the same thing. I have read very little but middle english texts since I last wrote: specially the Owl and the Nightingale which you must read in Tolkien’s translation some day. I asked old Mr. Taylor (the aged deaf man who once played croquet with us at Hillsborough) (#ulink_1af3d667-9d6b-505e-ba07-6b43e54aea3c) up to supper one night, and went there in return. This, you know, I reckon almost among charities, as he is old, poor, friendless, and surrounded by a beastly family. I mention him here in order to record a super P’daitism, when after an hour or so of talk about life on the other planets, education, Einstein, and other oddments, he suddenly explained ‘Ah, I see you know all about this universe business.’ Further than that one can’t possibly go in that particular kind of P’daitism. I have been reading Tylor’s Anthropology (#ulink_9e3ac984-96a8-50b2-addd-10ac02c05aad) over my morning tea lately having bought it to read in the train. Kirk’s (#ulink_7c613359-0b03-5301-8406-7d1abd4d5702) old friends the Rationalist Press Association are bringing out a series at a 1/-each of works which they conceive to be anti-religious, and which are to be found on every station bookstall. One has no sympathy with the design—nor does one like to read books in an edition called The Thinker’s Library with a picture on the jacket of a male nude sitting thinking. (The whole thing reminds me of Butler’s remark that a priest is a man who disseminates little lies in defence of a great truth, and a scientist is a man who disseminates little truths in defence of a great lie.) Still it is rather nice to be able to pick up on a railway journey a real classic of medium-popular science. I find I am enjoying the Tylor very much: the chapters on Language and Writing particularly. Still no news of the Henry instalment from Condlin. I confess I am worried about it. Isn’t the Everyman Moli?re (#ulink_f489778c-2b4c-5f21-bbf1-f8e35f89129b) one of the very small print Everyman’s? Yours J. P.S. Old Brightman is dead—a great loss. (#ulink_c0d5cd84-e198-5a1f-b33e-b96f11af74b6) When shall we see such a figure again? This reminds me of a conversation I had lately when a very courtly old man was condoling with a certain professor on the death of his brother ‘A charming man your poor brother was—such a dear modest fellow—no speech making or anything of that kind about him—in fact I never remember his saying anything.’ A beautiful epitaph. HIC JACET/N OR M/WHO NEVER SAID ANYTHING./I SAID I WILL TAKE HEED TO MY TONGUE/. Just to fill up the page I add J.A.’s latest;– To all the fowls that wing the airThe Goose is much preferred;There is so much of nourishmentOn that sagacious bird. TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): [The Kilns] May 6 1932 My dear Barfield ‘Very facetious to be sure.’ I have not answered your previous letter (I know of only one) because I have been very busy. I didn’t know I had been asked to stay with you until I got this one-not very long ago: and beyond a single night for the opera I can’t manage it very well. Can’t you come for a night to me? As to operas I should like May 16th (Siegfried). (#ulink_679377c9-48aa-5061-9ce0-1bb36254f821) Monday and Saturday are the only days possible, which rules out the Rheingold. Would this suit you? What wd. be best of all wd. be if you could get off work on Tuesday 17th and we could come back here together during the morning and be here Tuesday night. Do try. I am very sorry (seriously) if I have been rude: but getting the term started immediately after flu’ (did you know I had another bout in the last week of the Vac.) has pretty well boxed my compass. Yours C.S.L. P.S. I send (P.T.O.) the opening of the poem. I am not satisfied with any part I have yet written and the design is ludicrously ambitious. But I feel it will be several years anyway before I give it up. I feel it wd show ill temper if I didn’t use the stamped envelope. I will write down the portion that I understandOf twenty years wherein I went from land to land.At many bays and harbours I put in with joyHoping that there I should have built my second TroyAnd stayed. But either stealing harpies drove me thence, Or the trees bled, or oracles, whose airy senseI could not understand, yet must obey, once moreSent me to sea to follow the retreating shoreOf this land which I call at last my home, where mostI feared to come; attempting not to find whose coastI ranged half round the world, with vain design to shunThe last fear whence the last security is won.Oh perfect life, unquivering, self-enkindled flameFrom which my fading candle first was lit, oh nameToo lightly spoken, therefore left unspoken here, Terror of burning, nobleness of light, most dearAnd comfortable warmth of the world’s beating side.Feed from thy unconsumed what wastes in me, and guideMy soul into the silent places till I makeA good end of this book for after-travellers’ sake.In times whose faded chronicle lies in the roomThat memory cannot turn the key of, they to whomI owe this mortal body and terrestrial years, Uttered the Christian story to my dreaming ears.And I lived then in Paradise, and what I heardRan off me like the water from the water-bird;And what my mortal mother told me in the dayAt night my elder mother nature wiped away;And when I heard them telling of my soul, I turnedAside to read a different lecture when I learnedWhat was to me the stranger and more urgent news, That I had blood and body now, my own, to useFor tasting and for touching the young world, for leapingAnd climbing, running, wearying out the day, and sleeping… (#ulink_9d5dc7fa-2270-5533-b5d4-d1772238d009) TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. [?] 6th May 1932 My dear Bar field I am sorry to hear that you can’t manage Siegfried. I am going to be selfish. I find that my desire—born ‘in painful side’ since 1913-has been so inflated that I would rather not give up the hope. Will you v. kindly at once book me the cheapest bookable seat for Siegfried May 16th. I will go to 20/-if need be, or a bit over. If you don’t put me up in the ‘enormous room’ for that night perhaps you could advise me about a bed elsewhere. Would you accept a seat (Siegfried, not a seat in your own flat!) from me? Schools this summer make me affluent. You will do me a real kindness if you will. For a visit—any week night this term except Mondays I shall be delighted if you will come. If that is impossible make it a week end, but I shd. prefer the former. It really takes a load off my mind to hear that you like the poem. Couplets, however dangerous are needed if one is to try to give to the subjective poem some of the swing and narrative zest of the old epic. Yrs C. S. Lewis P.S. I shall be as anxious as a child till I hear that you have got two seats for Siegfried. TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. Thursday [12 May 1932] Dear Barfield I am in horrors and raptures—if only you wd. have come it wd. be raptures alone. I would like the bed at Swiss Cottage on Monday night if it is convenient—in sending me directions please give me the exact address. (A letter posted by return ought to reach me before Monday morning). If you reconsider your decision and can get an extra seat my offer of course still holds—you would be cheap at the price. I can’t refund you the 15/-by this post, as I am in College. A thousand thanks: I didn’t know till now that I had so much boyish appetite for a show left. Yours C.S.L. P.S. If there is anyway of getting my existing ticket (Amphitheatre Stall 191) changed for two of the 28/-ones and you cd. come. I honestly can afford it this year and it wd. make good better. (#ulink_312b11dd-ed06-5fba-b789-0f6797a3d762) TO HIS BROTHER (W): [Magdalen College] June 14th 1932 Dear W— I have just read your letter of May 15th, but not as you suppose in College. ‘Schools’ has arrived and I am invigilating (#ulink_49d9e980-f6d7-59c1-bc52-35aca81e301d) and although your letter arrived before lunch I deliberately brought it here unopened so that the reading it might occupy at least part of the arid waste of talk-less, smoke-less, exercise-less time between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. Theoretically of course there ought to be no greater blessing than three hours absolutely safe from interruption and free for reading: but somehow or other—everyone has made the discovery—reading is impossible in the Schools. There is a sort of atmosphere at once restless and soporific which always ends in that stage which (for me) is a signal to stop reading—the stage I mean at which you blink and ask yourself ‘Now what was the last page about.’ Whether it will turn out that writing under schools conditions is more possible than reading, the fate of this letter will decide. At any rate thank heaven for grandfather’s black alpacca coat: with this I feel as if I were in bathing things (at any rate from the waist up) while most of my colleagues are sweating in their best blue or brown suitings. You will gather from this that summer has arrived: in fact last Sunday (it is Tuesday to day) I had my first bathe. You will be displeased to hear that in spite of my constant warnings the draining of the swamp has not been carried out without a fall in the level of the pond. I repeatedly told both Lydiatt (who began the job) and Knight (usually a very reliable man, who finished it) that the depth of water in the pond was sacrosanct: that nothing which might have even the remotest tendency to interfere with that must be attempted: that I would rather have the swamp as swampy as ever than lose an inch of pond. But of course I might have known that it is quite vain ever to get anything you want carried out: and the pond is lower. However, don’t be too alarmed. I don’t think it can get any lower than it is now. I don’t know how much of the draining operations Minto has described to you nor whether you understood them. In fact, remembering what a mechanical process described by Minto is like I may assume that the more she has said the less you know about it. The scheme was a series of deep holes filled with rubble and covered over with earth. Into each of these a number of trenches drain: and from each of these pipes lead into the main pipe now occupying the old ditch between the garden and the swamp, which in its turn, by pipes under the lawn, drains into the ditch beside the avenue. It was however useless to do all this as long as the overflow outlet from the pond (you know—the tiny runnel with the tiny bridge over near the Philips end of the pond) was meandering—as it did—over all the lower parts of the swampy bit. Nor was it possible to stop this up and deny the pond any outlet, as it would then have been stagnant and stinking in summer, and overflowing in winter. It was therefore decided to substitute a pipe outlet for the mere channel outlet—wh. pipe could carry the overflow from the pond, through the swampy bit without wetting it, to the rest of the drainage system. When they first laid this pipe I said that its mouth (i.e. at the pond end) was too low and that it would therefore carry off more water than the old channel and so lower the pond. The workmen shortly denied this but I stuck to my point and actually made them raise it. Even after they had raised it I was still not sure that it wasn’t taking off more water than the old channel did: so I have now had a stopper made which is in the mouth of the pipe at this moment. I have also given the spring-tap up beyond the small pond a night turned on, and I trust that by thus controlling in-flow and outflow of water I can soon nurse the pond back to its old level. At any rate I don’t see how it can sink as long as its escape is bunged up. As to the degree of loss at present, as there are no perpendicular banks anywhere it is hard to gauge. I should think that the most pessimistic episode could hardly be more than ? of a foot: i.e. a difference one is unconscious of in bathing. Still I grudge every inch. By the way, it has just occurred to me that the sinking may not be due to the draining at all: for the old ‘channel’ escape, when I looked at it just before the operations began, had certainly widened itself extremely from what I first remembered, and must have been letting out more than it ought. In that case the new pipe may have arrested rather than created a wastage. I have been infernally busy getting ready for Schools and have therefore little to tell you (By the bye Percy Tweedlepippin (#ulink_120da6ed-e3f0-5f9b-87ce-c99d0f74a3bb) is my colleague and his principles as an examiner are perhaps worth recording. In answer to a suggested question of mine he retorted ‘Its no good setting that. They’d know that!’) I have read, or rather re-read, one novel namely Pendennis. (#ulink_37d1d589-68ff-5079-b6a1-36894dd31a34) How pleased the Pdaitabird would have been—why hadn’t I the grace to read it a few years ago. Why I re-read it now I don’t quite know—I suppose some vague idea that it was time I gave Thackeray another trial. The experiment, on the whole, has been a failure. I can just see, mind you, why they use words like ‘great’ and ‘genius’ in talking of him which we don’t use of Trollope. There are indications, or breakings in, all the time of something beyond Trollope’s range. The scenery for one thing (tho’ to be sure there is only one scene in Thackeray—always summer evening—English-garden—rooks crowing) has a sort of depth (I mean in the painting sense) wh. Trollope hasn’t got. Still more there are the sudden ‘depths’ in a very different sense in Thackeray. There is one v. subordinate scene in Pendennis where you meet the Marquis of Steyne and a few of his led captains and pimps in a box at a theatre. It only lasts a page or so—but the sort of rank, salt, urinous stench from the nether pit nearly knocks you down and clearly has a kind of power that is quite out of Trollope’s range. I don’t think these bits really improve Thackeray’s books: they do, I suppose, indicate whatever we mean by ‘genius’. And if you are the kind of reader who values genius you rate Thackeray highly. My own secret is—let rude ears be absent—that to tell you the truth, brother, I don’t like genius. I like enormously some things that only genius can do: such as Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy. (#ulink_825e0a06-0206-5317-9558-1399ce663c1b) But it is the results I like. What I don’t care twopence about is the sense (apparently dear to so many) of being in the hands of ‘a great man’—you know; his dazzling personality, his lightening energy, the strange force of his mind—and all that. So that I quite definitely prefer Trollope—or rather this re-reading of Pen. confirms my long standing preference. No doubt Thackeray was the genius: but Trollope wrote the better books. All the old things I objected to in Thackeray I object to still. Do you remember saying of Thomas Browne in one of your letters ‘Was there anything he didn’t love?’ One can ask just the opposite of Thackeray. He is wrongly accused of making his virtuous women too virtuous: the truth is he does not make them virtuous enough. If he makes a character what he wd. call ‘good’ he always gets his own back by making her (its always a female character) a bigot and a blockhead. Do you think, Sir, pray, that there are many slum parishes which could not produce half a dozen old women quite as chaste and affectionate as Helen Pendennis and ten times more charitable and more sensible? Still—the Major deserves his place in ones memory. So does Foker—surely the most balanced picture of the kindly vulgar young fop that there is. I’m not sure about Costigan. There’s a good deal too much of Thackeray’s habit of laughing at things like poverty and mispronunciation in the Costigan parts. Then, of course there’s ‘the style’—Who the deuce wd. begin talking about the style in a novel till all else was given up. I have had another visit to Whipsnade (#ulink_f1efdc3d-0862-51b7-b590-ef3147389131)—Foord Kelsie motored Arthur and me over on a fine Monday when Arthur was staying here. This was not the best company in the world with whom to revisit Whipsnade as F.K. combines extreme speed of tongue with a very slow walk, which is reduced to a stop when he has a good thing to say. However, after lunch he very wisely went and sat down and left Arthur and me on our own. Arthur was like a child: painfully divided between a desire ‘not to tire himself’ and a desire to see everything. When I tried to construct a harmony between these two aims by suggesting a route which would not make a very long walk and yet not really miss much, he was perfectly intractable because everything, to left, or to right, distracted him and he never cd. be made to believe that it was something we either had seen already or were just going to see. In fact it was a sad contrast to [the] sauntering unanimity of our last trip to the same place. Perhaps however it was just as well that A. drew me out of my course, for the place has been so increased and altered that I should have missed a good deal. The novelties include lions, tigers, polar bears, beavers etc. Bultitude was still in his old place. Wallaby wood, owing to the different season, was improved by masses of bluebells: the graceful faun-like creatures hopping out of one pool of sunshine into another over English wildflowers—and so much tamer now than when you saw them that it is really no difficulty to stroke them—and English wildbirds singing deafeningly all round, came nearer to ones idea of the world before the Fall than anything I ever hoped to see. One other important experience, as experiences go in a retired life, was my first visit to Covent Garden. It suddenly occurred to me this spring that my desire to hear Siegfried dated from 1912, and that 20 years was quite long enough to have waited. So I stood myself 15/-worth of ‘Amphitheatre Stalls’. I mention it here not in order to describe Siegfried (wh. I enjoyed qu? music and drama enormously) but to record my complete disillusionment as regards the Covent Garden level of performance. It was in fact exactly like any other performance of an opera: i.e. one’s inner criticism ran on the familiar lines ‘Ah this is a lovely bit coming now…what a pity that girl hasn’t a really good voice’—in fact I was on the point of saying to myself ‘By Jove its a splendid thing—what wouldn’t I give to hear it done properly at Covent Garden.’ When I say it was just like any other performance of an opera I mean that out of the eight characters two were magnificent, one ‘had been a very fine singer in his young days,’ two were quite adequate but had no v. great passages to sing, and two were frankly bad. The odd thing was that the acting was a great deal better than I had dared to expect. I had always supposed that these ‘head bummers’ were even insolently negligent of it: as a matter of fact they were distinctly good. The Lamb’s letters must surely be a new Everyman—and a very good one too. (#ulink_f063525b-0f63-5609-a728-944255705604) Confound those Tower of Glass people—I will write to them. I have dozens of things to reply to in this letter and your last, but it is now 4.30 and finished papers are beginning to dribble in. Also I am nearly asleep. I shall not be able to write to you again till examining is over—i.e. in August. I don’t think the passage in S. James is really the same as the ‘Touch Wood’ business. I shall try to get down to Ardglass for a day at least when I’m over. (#ulink_70ab0c8c-799b-5b02-900c-92a06d18c6a8) Yours Jack. P.S. I had nearly forgotten to acknowledge the philosophical instrument wh. you so unexpectedly sent. After one or two experiments I am getting a gadget made for fastening it onto my belt as I can find no pocket which will keep it perpendicular. Thanks very much. It is a thing I have been vaguely wanting to possess for many years. I am afraid it will be a long time before I can resume proper letter writing—examining will hold me up till mid August. During Warnie’s first tour of duty in China in 1927–9 he thought of retiring from the army. In a letter to Jack of 5 December 1929 he said: ‘I have had just about enough of the army, which becomes more tedious with every year that passes’ (LP X: 208). He calculated that by December 1932 he would be entitled to a pension of ?200, and so he set his retirement for the end of 1932. In July 1932 he applied for retirement from the Royal Army Service Corps, and it was soon decided that he would sail for home on 22 October. TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford July 29th 1932 My dear Arthur, Thank heavens—at last I have finished examining. I am much too tired to write a letter: and also hungry to get to a morning’s reading—my first since the beginning of last term 18 weeks ago. This is merely to ask whether it will suit you if I come from Aug. 15th to 29th? I am looking forward to it immensely. Thanks for your letter of June 12th. Yrs Jack TO ARTHUR GRIEVES (W): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. Aug 11th 1932 My dear Arthur, I have written to book a berth (#ulink_c9c1276a-7b97-551a-b331-9fbf1cbf614c) for the night of Monday the 15th (which, by the bye, they have not yet acknowledged) and am at present in a fever of pleasing anticipation. I am so tired that our old r?les will be reversed: you will be the one who wants to walk further and sit up later and talk more. The latter probably sounds too good to be true! Yours Jack TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): 2 Princess Villas, Bayview Park, Kilkeel. [Co. Down 30 August 1932] (#ulink_1c095a6f-3da2-59f3-accf-a873fa60c107) My dear Arthur, I am very sorry you did not come down but I quite see your point of view. I don’t think the idea of a meeting half way would be much good. I can’t drive: it would have to be a party of three at least—perhaps a mass meeting—and what should we all do when we had met? There would certainly be no opportunity for walk or talk on our own. Dotty sends profuse thanks for your exertions about her luggage, which has since turned up. I hope your cold will soon be better. I am alright now and have done some good mountain climbs. I quite understand about the cheque—it was quite absurd suggesting such a roundabout method. We shall be crossing (D.V.) on Thursday Sept. 1st. and I shall tell you my train later. I don’t think the meeting halfway would be any good: do you? Yours Jack TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. Oct 29th 1932 My dear Barfield Thanks. I was in some anxiety for your letter;—the whole thing (thanks to the long preparation by failure in the prose ‘It’ and the autobiographical poem) spurted out so suddenly that I have still very little objective judgement of it. Friday is my best day as I have no afternoon pupil. Say next Friday (Nov 4th), and try to arrive in College about 5 p.m. Yrs C. S. Lewis TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. Nov 2nd 1932 My dear Barfield I was already a good deal bothered as to whether the crossing of the Main Road ought not to have been recorded: and it says much for your sagacity that you have guessed it quite right. The map is [Lewis here drew that part of the Mappa Mundi which appears on the end leaves of almost all copies of The Pilgrim’s Regress: to the north of the Grand Canyon is Eschropolis and Claptrap and in the south is Wisdom.] Nov 18th it is—I wish it were sooner. Yours C.S.L. TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. Nov 7th 1932 My dear B. (1.) You are the pilgrims, rot you, as you go always a little further. Let it be Friday the 25th if ’t suits you so—but please don’t make it 1933. (2.) No—you must keep your dental affair till Saturday morning, since that morning I spend piddling in Pinkery pond. (3.) Show the MS. to any one you please provided you bring it with you when you do at last come Yours C.S.L. TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): [The Kilns] Dec 4th 1932 My dear Arthur, Thank you very much for your list of suggestions. I am really grateful for the trouble and interest you have taken. As for the future, I think I cannot ask you to sweat through the rest of the book (#ulink_28e106fc-ca2d-5ff8-914d-e468da259f0a) in quite such detail. What I had in mind was not so much criticisms on style (in the narrower sense) as on things like confusion, bad taste, unsuccessful jokes, contradictions etc., and for a few of these I should be very much obliged. These would be less trouble to you than minute verbal points: and also, if anything, more useful to me. I have not had a free day yet to work through your notes, but from a cursory glance I anticipate that on the purely language side of writing our aims and ideals are very far apart—too far apart for either of us to be of very much help to the other. I think I see, from your criticisms, that you like a much more correct, classical, and elaborate manner than I. I aim chiefly at being idiomatic and racy, basing myself on Malory, Bunyan, and Morris, tho’ without archaisms: and would usually prefer to use ten words, provided they are honest native words and idiomatically ordered, than one ‘literary word’. To put the thing in a nutshell you want ‘The man of whom I told you’ and I want ‘The man I told you of’. But, no doubt, there are many sentences in the P.R. (#ulink_33bbae63-62a8-59c9-b09e-99e9a7359ef7) which are bad by any theory of style. I have just finished the 2nd volume of Lockhart and it fully justifies all the recommendations both of you and of Warnie. After Boswell it is much the best biography I have read: and the subject is in some ways, or at least in some moods, more attractive. Didn’t you enjoy the account of his ballad-hunting journey in Liddesdale? (#ulink_93183904-49e4-5e49-b100-2f9b89fa05ba) It will send me back to the Dandie Dinmont parts of Guy Mannering (#ulink_b58cc08f-9a42-5542-a11a-005fb6b1bab3) with renewed appetite. It is a very consoling fact that so many books about real lives—biographies, autobiographies, letters etc.—give one such an impression of happiness, in spite of the tragedies they all contain. What could be more tragic than the main outlines of Lamb’s or Cowper’s lives? (#ulink_d02845f8-df7c-5969-b1c4-b23e63575a9f) But as soon as you open the letters of either, and see what they were writing from day to day and what a relish they got out of it, you almost begin to envy them. Perhaps the tragedies of real life contain more consolation and fun and gusto than the comedies of literature? I wish you could see this place at present. The birch wood is a black bristly mass with here and there a last red leaf. The lake is cold, cold lead colour. The new moon comes out over the fir trees at the top and a glorious wail of wind comes down from them. I certainly like my garden better at winter than any other time. I hope I shall soon have a letter from you. This, by the bye, is not a letter, but a note of acknowledgement. And I hope you will not think me any less grateful for your criticisms because of what I have said. I do appreciate your pains most deeply. Do you ever take a run down to your cottage in winter. It would be ‘rather lovely’. Yours Jack TO HIS BROTHER (W): The Kilns Dec 12th 1932 My dear W– A thousand welcomes to Havre (of hated memory.) We have had so many alarms about you that I shall hardly believe it till I see you with my own eyes. But on that score, and on all your last six month’s adventures there is so much to be said that it is absurd to begin. You would be amused to hear the various hypotheses that were entertained during your long summer silence—that you had been captured by bandits—were in jail—had gone mad—had married—had married a Chinese woman. My own view of course was ‘Indeed he’s such a fellow etc,’ but I found it hard to maintain this against the riot of rival theories. I think you will find us all pretty ship shape here. The only two things to complain of are, the presence of Vera, (#ulink_4a156e84-87ec-54ef-aed3-3213b0a58497) and the threatened arrival of Lings to pay me a visit—both, of course, arranged before we had any hopes of seeing you this year: indeed, when we were beginning to wonder if we should see you at all or not. However, Lings is not going to be allowed to interfere with any jaunt of yours and mine, having made himself such a friend of the family that I can be away even while he is here. (He shows a tendency to play duets with Maureen which Minto thinks ought to be encouraged.) But how differently all such interruptions will henceforth appear to you—like church going to the Superannuated man—no longer hewing great cantels out of tiny leaves, but punctuating a leisure sine die. It all seems too good to be true! I can hardly believe that when you take your shoes off a week or so hence, please God, you will be able to say ‘This will do for me—for life.’ I have not had any opportunity to reply till now to your questions about money. We shall do very well on what your percentage comes to: the only request I have to make on the bursarial side is that you must wash less (I mean your clothes, not your person)—your present standard of shifting being the one item in which you live beyond our scale. Minto says I ought not to mention this, but I expect you would prefer to know. (Of course if you like to wash any number of clothes yourself, no one will object!) I have just planted a holly tree—the one we got last season being, despite our order, a bush, not a tree. I have also successfully resisted an attempt made by old Jacks to abbotsford (#ulink_218be2dd-d50b-543f-89fa-6f361730f393) us (I owe this delightful verb to you) into going shares with him in buying, if you please, the whole of Phillips’ (deceased—did you hear?) property, on the ground that gypsies wd. otherwise buy it. A ramp, I think. Talking of abbotsfording I am now reading Lockhart through, and am just at the Shetland and Orkney diary: (#ulink_f60355f6-1c80-5bba-8e7c-e64f0944fd18) which you will constantly have been reminded of if you have read The Pirate. (#ulink_d8327f30-629c-565e-bb96-4ff5da60945d) It is a capital book. I am examining at the moment, but lightly as you can see from the fact that I manage about an hour’s Lockhart per diem. I hope to finish my papers on the 21st: but the Award is not till the day after Boxing Day, so that it looks like Jan. 1st for our walk, ‘from which I promise myself more satisfaction, perhaps, than is possible.’ The date will be a good omen. I am so stiff from carrying that infernal tree up that I hardly know what to do with myself. The only thing that can really dash your home coming will be the cold: you will have to ‘cokker’ yourself like anything for the first few weeks, unless this frost breaks. Well—and now to Chaucer’s papers. But even they can hardly depress me at such a moment as this Yours Jack. TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): [The Kilns 17 December 1932] My dear Arthur, You really must forgive me for being a slack correspondent in term time. I think we have talked of this before! However, I was much to blame for not at least letting you have a line about W. who, thank God, turned out to be well though he had been ill, and had had a worreying summer in various ways. He had also warned us, he said, (wh. was quite true, though we all forgot it) that he might not keep up his regular correspondence during the hot weather. We were all greatly relieved. I am sorry to hear about the flu’—one of the few ailments of which I can speak with as large an experience as your own. We have both talked of it and agreed often enough about its pleasures and pains. I hope you are quite set up by now. It was, in any case, almost worth having for its throwing you back on the old favourites. I will make a point of telling Foord-Kelsie—how pleased he will be. I wish I had your early associations with Pickwick: (#ulink_378f818f-d265-5170-bafb-281511288b38) and yet I often feel as if I had. So many scenes come to me with the feel of a long since familiar atmosphere returning after absence—I suppose because even without having read it as a boy one has drunk in so much of the Dickensy world indirectly through quotation and talk and other orders. Certainly what I enjoy is not the jokes simply as jokes—indeed the earlier and more farcical parts like the military review and Mrs Leo Hunter’s party are rather unpleasant to me—but something festive and friendly about D’s whole world. A great deal of it (in a way how different from Macdonald’s!) the charm of goodness—the goodness of Pickwick himself, and Wardle, and both Wellers. Thanks for your criticisms on P.R. The detailed criticisms (the ‘passages where one word less wd. make all the difference’) are what I should like best and could profit by most. Perhaps when you sent the MS back (there is no special hurry) you wd. mark on the blank opposite pages any bits that you think specially in need of improvement and add a note or two in pencil—but don’t let it be a bother to you. As to your major criticisms 1. Quotations. I hadn’t realised that they were so numerous as you apparently found them. Mr Sensible, as you rightly saw, is in a separate position: the shower of quotations is part of the character and it wd. be a waste of time to translate them, since the dialogue (I hope) makes it clear that his quotations were always silly and he always missed the point of the authors he quoted. The other ones maybe too numerous, and perhaps can be reduced & translated. But not beyond a certain point: for one of the contentions of the book is that the decay of our old classical learning is a contributary cause of atheism (see the chapter on Ignorantia). The quotations at the beginnings of the Books are of course never looked at at all by most readers, so I don’t think they matter much. 2. Simplicity. I expect your dissatisfaction on this score points to some real, perhaps v. deep seated, fault: but I am sure it cannot be remedied—least of all in a book of controversy. Also there may be some real difference of conception between you and me. You remember we discussed last summer how much more sympathy you had than I with the Puritan simplicity. I doubt if I interpret Our Lord’s words (#ulink_dc4ca367-243d-5047-9e0d-d2ed7f231f62) quite in the same way as you. I think they mean that the spirit of man must become humble and trustful like a child and, like a child, simple in motive, i.e. disinterested, not scheming and ‘on the look out’. I don’t think He meant that adult Christians must think like children: still less that the processes of thought by wh. people become Christians must be childish processes. At any rate the intellectual side of my conversion was not simple and I can describe only what I know. Of course it is only too likely that much of the thought in P.R. offends against simplicity simply by being confused or clumsy! And where so, I wd. gladly emend it if I knew how. We have had a most glorious autumn here—still, windless days, red sunsets, and all the yellow leaves still on the trees. I wish you could have seen it. This is a Saturday evening after a hard week, so you will excuse me if I close. I will try and write again soon but can’t promise. It was very nice to see your hand again. Your peculier spellinge is indeerd bi long associashuns!* (#ulink_0adcddb4-03de-59cf-8446-c9964e3eb02c) Yours, Jack 1 (#ulink_ff35b98a-6065-5cd4-bc0a-211c4f057143) Henry Rider Haggard, The People of the Mist (1894). 2 (#ulink_ff35b98a-6065-5cd4-bc0a-211c4f057143) Charles Kingsley, Hereward the Wake (1866). 3 (#ulink_ff35b98a-6065-5cd4-bc0a-211c4f057143) i.e. Wuthering Heights. See the letter to Warnie of Christmas Day 1931, pp. 31–2. 4 (#ulink_ff35b98a-6065-5cd4-bc0a-211c4f057143) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). 5 (#ulink_8e1a943e-7e2f-594c-b6c9-d833df42a573) Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (1885). 6 (#ulink_c03dffc3-09df-5ea5-9333-87bf392349ff) The books and papers they had brought over from Little Lea, their family home in Belfast. 7 (#ulink_417432d3-26f0-5d21-a044-ec42e7f3125f) Lieutenant-Colonel and Mrs J, A. C. Kreyer were the Lewises’ closest neighbours. They lived in Tewsfield, a house adjoining the north-west side of The Kilns property. 8 (#ulink_7be35521-5b1b-50d7-8c82-0d84aa9bd5c7) Foord-Kelcey’s favourite book was Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67). 9 (#ulink_53dead42-6e77-5735-a2de-8a4f12d15444) William Wordsworth, The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850), I, i, 290. 10 (#ulink_53dead42-6e77-5735-a2de-8a4f12d15444) William Wordsworth, The White Doe of Rylstone (1815). 11 (#ulink_e3fc44dc-ac62-5e87-b79d-3acf0b2d4490) In his letter of 24 October 1931, p. 5. 12 (#ulink_e3fc44dc-ac62-5e87-b79d-3acf0b2d4490) Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1770, vol. II, p. 123. ‘Law, (said he,) fell latterly into the reveries of Jacob Boehme, whom Law alleged to have been somewhat in the same state with St. Paul, and to have seen unutterable things. Were it even so, (said Johnson,) Jacob would have resembled St. Paul still more, by not attempting to utter them.’ 13 (#ulink_3685e851-88ca-5699-a8aa-6eec556bbe4b) William Morris, Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1893). 14 (#ulink_04022cd7-6980-5da6-8cd3-3a8f6f16597f) William Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867). 15 (#ulink_0a412191-d557-54d0-9ee1-532f72fa522e) John Barbour, The Bruce (1376). 16 (#ulink_cd847f47-d51e-594b-b7e0-3f91e04dbc2f) Ren? Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637). 17 (#ulink_b13fb08f-9363-591d-86a4-da97cb867784) Lewis was giving Warnie an imitation of their father. 18 (#ulink_c5e50ffa-4427-52d9-83b2-60c3e471e879) WHL, p. 200. 19 (#ulink_053f3811-d3bd-5e39-ad73-3c83a6d69fc8) Robert Segar (1879–1961) was a barrister until, at the age of forty, he went to Magdalen College and read Law. He was Lecturer in Jurisprudence at Wadham College and Tutor in Law at Magdalen College, 1919–21, and Fellow of Magdalen, 1921–35. See Lewis’s portrait of him in the Magdalen College Appendix to AMR, in which he says of Segar: ‘He brings about him the air of a bar parlour to sit with him is to be snug and jolly and knowing and not unkindly, and to forget that there are green fields or art galleries in the world. All this is the side he shows us day by day: but there is more behind, for he is i war wreck and spends his nights mostly awake.’ 20 (#ulink_103ee383-c290-5f5f-aaf2-951a88c3f09d) Sir Waller Scott, The Monastery (1820). 21 (#ulink_103ee383-c290-5f5f-aaf2-951a88c3f09d) Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire, was the boys’ preparatory school attended by the Lewis brothers, who both hated their time there. Warnie was a pupil 1905–9, and Jack, who was there 1907–9, referred to it as ‘Belsen’ in SBJ, ch. 2. 22 (#ulink_103ee383-c290-5f5f-aaf2-951a88c3f09d) Sir Walter Scott, The Abbot 0820); Rob Roy (1817); The Antiquary (1816). 23 (#ulink_18fd88b9-5568-54c2-9231-b06c22a1b375) In Co. Antrim. 24 (#ulink_18fd88b9-5568-54c2-9231-b06c22a1b375) Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 3 October 1773. vol. V, p. 382. ‘I upbraided myself, as not having a sufficient cause for putting myself in such danger. Piety afforded me comfort; yet I was disturbed by the objections that have been made against a particular providence, and by the arguments of those who maintain that it is in vain to hope that the petitions of an individual, or even of congregations, can have any influence with the Deity.’ 25 (#ulink_18fd88b9-5568-54c2-9231-b06c22a1b375) Dr Samuel Ogden, Sermons on the Efficacy of Prayers and Intercession (1770). 26 (#ulink_f7b1d6b8-044f-58ea-9ca4-55a0fb6e5ced) ‘to-ing and fro-ing’, 27 (#ulink_f7b1d6b8-044f-58ea-9ca4-55a0fb6e5ced) Over the years Jack and Warnie preserved 100 of their father’s characteristic sayings which they copied into a notebook entitled ‘Pudaita Pie’. This was the source of many of the sayings of Albert found in SBJ. In the end, they decided against including the document in the Lewis Papers. The manuscript of ‘Pudaita Pie’ is found in the Wade Center at Wheaton College. 28 (#ulink_57dfe42a-540e-5813-915e-c5602a8abd30)The Count of Luxembourg is a musical play by Basil Hood, with music by F. Lehar, first performed on 20 May 1911. 29 (#ulink_ff0a4777-b98d-53a2-bf60-d091141656d7)The Arcadians is a musical play by Mark Ambient, with music by Lionel Monkton and Howard Talbot, first performed on 28 April 1909. 30 (#ulink_198d289a-2087-5b8b-90ca-ad4e4f5dfa3f) A didactic poem in four books of hexameters by Virgil on the various forms of rural industry. It was written between 37 and 30 BC. 31 (#ulink_19a68d50-3572-567d-b72d-702479168eeb) Naomi Mitchison, Black Sparta (1928). 32 (#ulink_baf711fa-5e32-57fd-b29d-33b008897650) Jean Froissart’s Chroniques (c. 1373–1400) is a lively, though sometimes inaccurate, record of Europe in the fourteenth century with particular emphasis on the first half of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England. The best-known translation is that by Lord Berners, published 1923–5. Lewis was using the Globe Edition of The Chronicles of Froissart, trans. John Bouchier, Lord Berners. ed. and reduced into one volume by G. M. Macaulay (1924). 33 (#ulink_37ec5c32-dda0-5260-a591-079d1c285257) Sir Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian (1818). 34 (#ulink_37ec5c32-dda0-5260-a591-079d1c285257) Scott, The Antiquary, ch. 35. After remarking that he never tastes anything ‘after sun-set’, Mr Oldbuck says to Lord Glenallan: ‘A broiled bone, or a smoked haddock, or an oyster, or a slice of bacon of our own curing, with a toast and a tankard or something or other of that sort, to close the orifice of the stomach before going to bed, does not fall under my restriction, nor. I hope, under your Lordship’s.’ 35 (#ulink_496cc77b-e004-50df-a7e1-e9572e73de92) Anthroposophy is a religious system founded by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). Steiner’s aim was to develop the faculty of spirit cognition inherent in ordinary people and to put them in touch with the spiritual world from which materialism had caused them to be estranged. Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood became Anthroposophists in 1923. Lewis was later to write in SB/, ch. 13. p. 161: ‘Barfield’s conversion to Anthroposophy marked the beginning of what I can only describe as the Great War between him and me…it was an almost incessant disputation, sometimes by letter and sometimes face to face, which lasted for years.’ Perhaps the most important of the ‘Great War’ documents is Lewis’s unpublished Metaphysices contra Anthroposophos- better known as the Summa after its model by St Thomas Aquinas. For an account of the ‘Great War’ see Lionel Adey, G S. Lewis’s Great War with Owen Barfield (British Columbia, University of Victoria, ELS Monograph Series no. 14, 1978; new edn, Rosley, Ink Books, 2002). Lewis eventually got over his disagreement with Barfield and Harwood. 36 (#ulink_729bcd52-9767-5957-9562-6d60dbe1af2e) Barfield was taking the examinations required for practice as a solicitor. 37 (#ulink_729bcd52-9767-5957-9562-6d60dbe1af2e) ‘The Tower’ is a long poem by Owen Barfield, much admired by Lewis. It has never been published. 38 (#ulink_db3c2848-de0c-5b02-9479-6432f753a83d) Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 474: ‘But I ne kan nat bullet it to the bren’: ‘But I cannot sift the chaff from the grain.’ 39 (#ulink_db3c2848-de0c-5b02-9479-6432f753a83d) ‘pain’. 40 (#ulink_db3c2848-de0c-5b02-9479-6432f753a83d) ‘vexation’. 41 (#ulink_a3d038ca-7e76-59f3-b4cd-9162643e6661) Kenneth Bruce McFarlane (1903–661 took a BA from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1925 and was Tutor in Modern History at Magdalen College, 1927–66. 42 (#ulink_a3d038ca-7e76-59f3-b4cd-9162643e6661) Edward Hope (1866–1953) took a Sc.D. from Manchester and in 1919 was elected Fellow and Tutor in Natural Science at Magdalen and Lecturer in Chemistry. Lewis provides a portrait of him in the Magdalen College Appendix to AMR: ‘This is one of those men in whom knowledge and intellect have taken up their abode without making any difference: they are added on to a decent drab nonentity of character, and the character has not been transformed. If you wiped out his technical knowledge there would be nothing left to distinguish him from any respectable shopkeeper in Tottenham Court Road…’ 43 (#ulink_f39a22cd-1ab1-5641-b87c-7410878a6ea6) Nothing is known of Mr Kenchew except that he was a teacher of geography who failed to win Maureen’s affections. 44 (#ulink_8ca2b61a-78e8-5827-a988-c86559296c30) John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Scott, 10 vols. (1839). 45 (#ulink_8ca2b61a-78e8-5827-a988-c86559296c30) Una Pope-Hennessy, The Laird of Abbotsford; an Informal Presentation of Sir Walter Scott (1932). 46 (#ulink_8ca2b61a-78e8-5827-a988-c86559296c30) John Christie, The Oxford Magazine, L (10 March 1932), pp. 570–1: ‘In truth Dame Una seems less interested in the author of Waverly than, to use her own phrase, in “spicy gossip”…It was bound to come, this bright, inquisitive, anything but intimate portrait of Sir Walter, with his foibles, his snobbery, and his subterfuges touched in with loving care, and most of the deeper traits left out.’ 47 (#ulink_936ee868-555f-5f25-b95e-89e7499c440f) Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903). 48 (#ulink_bb0ef138-94c7-5663-85cf-d8405efc5ce4) Robert Bridges (1844–1930), Poet Laureate from 1913. Lewis had enjoyed his poetry when he was younger. 49 (#ulink_bb0ef138-94c7-5663-85cf-d8405efc5ce4) Martin Tupper (1810–89), whose four series of Proverbial Philosophy 11838–761, maxims and reflections couched in rhythmical form, were the favourite of many who knew nothing about poetry. 50 (#ulink_981ac7fc-3cb0-5aeb-b55d-7e86390bd6f8) The Baron of Bradwardine is a character in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (18141; Soames Forsyte is a character in John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (1922); Arthur Kipps is a character in H. G. Wells’s Kipps (1905). 51 (#ulink_0d8d391c-7f5f-5949-a8ca-2e55f4454d46) Arthur Denis Blackford Wood (1907–92), after liking his BA in 1929, joined the family firm of William Wood & Son Ltd., landscape gardeners, Taplow. He served with the RAF, 1941–5. Later he published a number of books on gardening: Terrace and Courtyard Gardens for Modern Homes (1965], (with Kate Crosby) Grow it and Cook It (1975), and Practical Garden Design (1976). Mr Wood, on being shown this letter, said he was ‘engaged in one, continuing, happy love-affair’ as an undergraduate, and that he thinks Lewis may have confused him with someone else. 52 (#ulink_1f7290b0-c399-5db5-ab5c-5b3d8ac8a276) Arthur worked for his brother Thomas Jackson Greeves (1886–1974), a linen merchant, 1915–17. 53 (#ulink_b7066b6a-3288-5519-b9dc-a8ebded3cef0) Charles Morgan, The Fountain (1932). 54 (#ulink_0f16cd18-a0d8-513c-a922-321c4dcf09ff) Their mother’s sister, Mrs Lilian ‘Lily’ Suffern (1860–1934), the eldest daughter of the Rev. Thomas Hamilton. An ardent suffragette, she quarrelled with everyone in her family. Following the death of her husband. William, in 1913 she was constantly on the move, but wherever she lived she bombarded Jack with books and a pseudo-metaphysical correspondence. After her widowhood the poetry of Robert Browning became her chief intellectual solace. 55 (#ulink_c62463d9-809f-587f-8090-253fece76f34) Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata (1581). 56 (#ulink_c62463d9-809f-587f-8090-253fece76f34) Singlestick was a method of fighting or fencing with a wooden stick provided with a large basket-handle and requiring only one hand. It was used by young boys and people of ‘inferior quality’ or social standing. A good description of it is found in Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). 57 (#ulink_51a5738c-222c-5f6e-9fe0-8ddb1682a80a) Pearl Buck, The Good Earth (1931). 58 (#ulink_51a5738c-222c-5f6e-9fe0-8ddb1682a80a) William Douglas Robson-Scott (1900–80) was at University College, Oxford, at the same time as Lewis. He took his BA in 1923, and went on to teach German Language and Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. Lewis mentions his malapropisms ¦n his letter to Warnie of 18 April 1927 (CL I, p. 694). 59 (#ulink_339e8566-2138-5085-8974-6b4f022ddcff) John 10:16. 60 (#ulink_339e8566-2138-5085-8974-6b4f022ddcff) Indian Civil Service. 61 (#ulink_5d67ab35-ef85-5af0-9bcb-6933fc98949c) (Sir) Eric Beckett (1896–1966), who sometimes walked with Lewis and the others, was a particular friend of Barfield. He was educated at Wadham College, where he took a First in Jurisprudence in 1921. He was a Fellow of All Souls., Oxford, 1921–8. He was called to the Bar in 1922 and was Assistant Legal Adviser to the Foreign Office, 1925–45, and Legal Adviser, 1955–8. 62 (#ulink_5d67ab35-ef85-5af0-9bcb-6933fc98949c) Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1783, vol. IV, p. 197: ‘I shall never forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat…I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, “why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;” and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, “but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.”’ 63 (#ulink_aad72558-c29e-5fab-92f6-82e4f3a0f93f) Charles and Mary Lamb, Letters 1796–1820, vol. I (1912), letter from Charles Lamb to Samuel T. Coleridge of 13 February 1797: ‘1 have had thoughts of turning Quaker…Unluckily I went to [a meeting] and saw a man under all tile agitations and workings of a fanatic, who believed himself under the influence of some “inevitable presence.” This cured me of Quakerism…I detest the vanity of a man thinking he speaks by the Spirit, when what he says an ordinary man might say without all that quaking and trembling’ (p. 97). 64 (#ulink_e3619f08-6719-5921-9fe1-6dce35d3e117) Arundel Castle, the chief seat of the Duke of Norfolk. 65 (#ulink_516bfa28-cc35-56dd-9e01-8d750de41874) Hillsboro-not ‘Hillsborough’—is the house at 14 Holyoake Road, Headington, where Lewis and the Moores lived most of [he time from April 1923 until they moved into The Kilns in October 1930. 66 (#ulink_c5de3c38-a598-5da9-98a1-20a90af7df6c) Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization (1881; Thinker’s Library. 1930). 67 (#ulink_c5de3c38-a598-5da9-98a1-20a90af7df6c) See W. T. Kirkpatrick (1848–1921) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Kirkpatrick, ‘the Great Knock’, was a friend of the Lewis family and prepared Jack for Oxford. He is the subject of SBJ, ch. 9. 68 (#ulink_c5de3c38-a598-5da9-98a1-20a90af7df6c) Moli?re, Comedies, trans. Henry Baker and J. Miller, with an introduction by Frederick C. Green, Everyman’s Library (1929). 69 (#ulink_4b9e0194-a63e-57fc-8ea7-92a4e9f44feb) The Reverend Frank Edward Brightman FBA (1856–1932), who died on 31 March 1932, was a distinguished liturgiologist and a Fellow of Magdalen College since 1902. His publications include The English Rite, 2 vols. (1915). For more on Brightman see note 5 to the letter of 5 January 1926 (CL I, p. 658). 70 (#ulink_7a4e0527-dc13-5bfb-8b58-11e10888dde4) In SBJ, ch. 5, Lewis recalls the moment he came across a reference to Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen. Lewis came to love the entire Ring cycle on gramophone records, but it was not until this occasion (Monday 16 May 1932) that he saw Siegfried performed on stage. 71 (#ulink_81bf35d8-5321-5d4f-9ab7-45935d0347f2) This is the only surviving portion of the autobiographical poem Lewis wrote. 72 (#ulink_da326dfe-fad3-5630-a026-64c579b03aaf) In the end Lewis went to Siegfried alone on 16 May 1932. The cast included Lauritz Melchior as Siegfried, Eduard Habich as Alberich, Frida Leider as Brunhild and Friedrich Schorr as Wotan. An account of the performance was given in The Times (17 May 1932) p. 8. 73 (#ulink_e1a84ca5-e064-5079-9a5e-78686104d1da) When students were taking their final examinations or ‘Schools’ in the Examination Schools building in the High Street, dons took turns ‘invigilating’, that is, keeping watch over the students. 74 (#ulink_79545309-d587-5164-8882-0a5405b51968) This was Lewis’s nickname for Percy Simpson (1865–1962) who with his wife, Evelyn M. Simpson, and C. H. Herford, edited the eleven volumes of Ben Jonson’s Works (1925–52). He was the librarian of the new English faculty library, and a lecturer on textual criticism. 75 (#ulink_424dbc4a-13ba-560d-94c7-9e030cf3f249) William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis (1848–50). 76 (#ulink_894c5e3b-b4c3-5291-bdc0-96beb3904857) Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), The Divine Comedy (comprising Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso). 77 (#ulink_265ef9f3-456f-55f2-8837-b910f7b0962c) Lewis was remembering the visit he and Warnie took to Whipsnade Zoo in Warnie’s motorbike and sidecar on 28 September 1931. The part that visit played in Lewis’s conversion is recounted in the last chapter of SBJ. See CL I, p. 972. 78 (#ulink_5573f4bc-7b55-5985-b137-a32945ab5633) Charles Lamb, Letters, ed. William Macdonald, with notes and illustrations. Introduction by Ernest Rhys (Everyman’s Library, 1909). 79 (#ulink_5573f4bc-7b55-5985-b137-a32945ab5633) Lewis was planning a trip to Ireland in August, and he hoped to visit the village of Ardglass in Co. Down known for its interesting lighthouse. 80 (#ulink_68926f77-c884-5683-a972-d5c3a60f6b9e) A berth on a cross-channel boat. As planned, Lewis crossed over to Ireland on 15 August and was there as Arthur’s guest al Bernagh, Circular Road, Belfast, until 29 August. 81 (#ulink_b5419c18-2236-5ccd-80c1-0de15d5191c6) This letter is undated, but if Lewis’s mention of ‘Thursday Sept. 1st’ is correct it was almost certainly written in 1932. Lewis and the Moores normally had a holiday together in Ireland, and Lewis probably met Mrs Moore, Maureen and their friend Dorothea ‘Dotty’ Vaughan (a close friend of the family who had been at Headington School with Maureen Moore) for a few days in Kilkeel before returning to England. 82 (#ulink_c7e36288-7e83-5690-bcbe-97271b582a7e) For some time Lewis had been trying to write the story of his conversion, and especially of the part ‘Joy’ played in it. While he probably had no intention of attempting this on his holiday, The Pilgrim’s Regress: Art Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933) came quite unexpectedly and was written during the fortnight spent at Bernagh. The manuscript had been sent to Arthur for criticism. For details of his earlier attempts to tell the story of his conversion see the treatment of The Pilgrim’s Regress in CG. 83 (#ulink_c7e36288-7e83-5690-bcbe-97271b582a7e) i.e. The Pilgrim’s Regress. 84 (#ulink_6e2999d9-dfdb-5b26-9432-99564f7d8b5e) Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Scott, vol. II, ch. 10. 85 (#ulink_6e2999d9-dfdb-5b26-9432-99564f7d8b5e) Sir Wilier Scott, Guy Mannering (1815). 86 (#ulink_adc09b55-613e-5a07-9d23-d0dd2bc06d13) Charles Lamb (1775–1834) and William Cowper (1731–1800). 87 (#ulink_58188063-7025-5a37-ae68-b1cd51b94330) Vera Henry, Mrs Moore’s goddaughter, ran a holiday resort at Annagasan, a few miles from Drogheda, where Jack and Warnie sometimes spent holidays. From time to time Vera acted as housekeeper at The Kilns, but inevitably Jack had to act as peacemaker when she and Mrs Moore quarrelled. 88 (#ulink_2c5c932d-0a79-51a0-afef-fd10c2186fbe) Abbotsford is the name of Sir Walter Scott’s house near Melrose on the Tweed in Scotland. 89 (#ulink_27b90e0c-7e41-56b7-9ba7-77ea10a957c1) Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Scott, vol. IV, chs 28–32. 90 (#ulink_27b90e0c-7e41-56b7-9ba7-77ea10a957c1) Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate (1821). 91 (#ulink_b2ac5546-7fa9-5d48-93db-6627891c86be) Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1836–7). 92 (#ulink_08b534ec-1caa-5805-b2e0-2dbd37d31730) Matthew 18:3–4; Mark 10:15; Luke 18:16–17. * (#ulink_84abc098-10cd-54f6-b7e5-b2f24a2aa2d3) I had to make them violent mistakes for feer you wldn’t notis them 1933 (#u9c47d65c-00f5-53d1-b288-9095cdf4355d) TO GUY POCOCK (W): (#ulink_c87fb72a-2f80-5f40-a6e0-53699c0ed54a) Magdalen College, Oxford. Jan 17th 1933 Dear Pocock I have written a new book and should like to know whether it is worth my while sending it to you. After our experiences over Dymer I can hardly suppose that you will be very eager! The new one, however, is in prose. It is called The Pilgrim’s Regress: an allegorical apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism, and is a kind of Bunyan up to date. It is serious in intention but has a good many more comic passages than I originally intended, and also a fair controversial interest (the things chiefly ridiculed are Anglo Catholicism, Materialism, Sitwellism, Psychoanalysis, and T. S. Elliot.) If published, it would be under my own name. Perhaps you could let me know whether, if I sent it, I could rely on its having a fair and moderately early consideration. Yours sincerely C. S. Lewis On 19 January Pocock answered: ‘Yes, indeed…the Firm would be glad to have an opportunity of considering your new book for publication.’ (#ulink_56576008-bbda-583d-8781-8a788b053f26) After reading the manuscript Pocock wrote again on 2 February: I am writing now to say that we shall be very pleased to publish it for you…I look upon it as an important and penetrating book. Now there are one or two important points we want todiscuss with you. First, we all feel that it is a little long for complete success…Secondly, something would have to be done about the Latin in the text. Will you make a suggestion, or shall we? Thirdly, we feel that the book ought to be illustrated. I suggest landscape and figures in the Nosh style. Mr Dent has in mind woodcut figures. What are your views? Lastly, we feel that the present title won’t do. ‘Pilgrim’ or ‘Pilgrimage’ by all means, but not the other part (#ulink_6ea223b0-27c5-5fde-bbf8-633500756d70). TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): The Kilns. Feb 4th 1933 My dear Arthur, I am really penitent for having left you so long without a letter. The reasons are the usual ones—term and its demands, coupled this time with a good deal of laziness for I have been rather less busy than usual and have been in excellent health and form. Warnie has been home since before Christmas and is now retired (Read Lamb’s Essay on The Superannuated Man). (#ulink_5487dc77-d6b7-58dc-872e-a0e50cd715c4) He has become a permanent member of our household and I hope we shall pass the rest of our lives together. He has settled down as easily as a man settles into a chair, and what between his reading and working in the garden finds himself busy from morning till night. He and I are making a path through the lower wood—first along the shore of the pond and then turning away from it up through the birch trees and rejoining at the top the ordinary track up the hill. It is very odd and delightful to be engaged on this sort of thing together: the last time we tried to make a path together was in the field at Little Lea when he was at Malvern and I was at Cherbourg. We both have a feeling that ‘the wheel has come full circuit’, that the period of wanderings is over, and that everything which has happened between 1914 and 1932 was an interruption: tho’ not without a consciousness that it is dangerous for mere mortals to expect anything of the future with confidence. We make a very contented family together. I have had some fine solitary moments too when we have been working in different parts of the wood. You know how intensely silent it is in a thicket on a warm winter afternoon: and how if you are digging sooner or later a robin comes up and hops about for worms—both his eye and his breast looking unnaturally bright among the prevailing greys and greyish greens. I say warm days, for the warm weather has just arrived with a rush: but we had the frost alright. The pond was frozen and we had two days skating. You can imagine how lovely the smooth flow of ice looked as the sun came down onto it through the steep little wood. In the way of reading Lockhart kept me going through the whole vac. and I am still only at Vol. 8. What an excellent book it is, isn’t it?—and what a nice addition. I think Scott is the one of all my favourite authors whom I admire most as a man—though of course there is a side of him that you and I would not have got on with, the rather insolent Tory country-gentleman side with the coursing, hard riding and hard drinking. Also perhaps as a father he was a little heavy—how sententious (and how unlike all his other letters) the letters to young Walter are. Since term began I have had a delightful time reading a children’s story which Tolkien has just written. (#ulink_ea496415-0f3a-5deb-94f9-fadfa5cc2525) I have told of him before: the one man absolutely fitted, if fate had allowed, to be a third in our friendship in the old days, for he also grew up on W. Morris and George Macdonald. Reading his fairy tale has been uncanny—it is so exactly like what we wd. both have longed to write (or read) in 1916: so that one feels he is not making it up but merely describing the same world into which all three of us have the entry. Whether it is really good (I think it is until the end) is of course another question: still more, whether it will succeed with modern children. And, talking of this sort of thing, would you believe it—I am actually officially supervising a young woman who is writing a thesis on G. Macdonald. (#ulink_5dc3bed7-5559-5d8d-90b6-9d07b02fc9bd) It is very odd—and curiously difficult—to approach as work something so old and intimate. The girl is, unfortunately, quite unworthy of her subject: apart from everything else, she is an American. Dent’s has accepted the Pilgrim’s Regress with a number of conditions—shortening, alteration of title etc—which I intend to make some resistance to. (#ulink_fb81cdbf-54d2-5f40-a202-faef2579a267) I have no right to expect a letter after my long silence, but of course I shd. like one. How does the detective story go? It will soon be getting suitable weather for your cottage again: although, as you see, I am having a good time, the memory of the Mournes is still very poignant. Give my love to Mrs Greeves, and to the McNeills (#ulink_7234a0b2-0af4-532b-ae6e-15d0bae980ec) (all three— the one on the hill included) if you see them. Yours, Jack Warnie sends you his greetings and hopes we shall see you this year. TO GUY POCOCK(W): Magdalen College, Oxford. Tuesday [14 February 1933] Dear Pocock I am sending you tomorrow the revised MS. The quotations are translated (I am glad you thought of that—it was great fun) and all the cuts that I can make. I should like you to glance at Bk I. chap. 4 (pp. 15–17). I have cut practically the whole chapter because it is such an easy cut: on the other hand some people like it and the gain in space is not great. I don’t much care myself whether it stays or goes, so I leave you to do what you please with it. I have scored it only in pencil, so that you can remove the scorings if you think fit. After that, the book has had all done to it that I can do and may go straight to the printer as soon as we have signed an agreement. I am still strongly in favour of publication in June if it is still possible, but of course the final decision on that, and on price, rests with you. I have enclosed a map with the MS. A surprising number of people independently asked for one. Ought there to be one?—certainly not, in my view, if it is expensive. (Of course the one I enclose would not do anyway—but with help I could concoct a better one) Yours sincerely C. S. Lewis TO GUY POCOCK(W): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. Feb. 27th 1933 Dear Pocock It is most unfortunate at this moment that I should be laid up with flu’ and practically an idiot. However, some points won’t wait. 1. Could you get the Firm to agree to some wording of the ‘next book’ clause which will leave me free to offer to the Clarendon Press a work now in hand on Allegory from Prudentius to Spenser. (#ulink_b9a80458-b20f-5035-9543-b02fd938fb5f) This is a purely academic work wh. I don’t think you would consider—at least I don’t remember your producing anything of the kind—and it seems rather the duty of a young scholar to give his own university press the first refusal of his first scholarly work. If they will agree (Dents, I mean) they probably have a suitable form of words, or can invent one more easily than I. (‘Next novel, poem, play, or other imaginative work’ or ‘Next work of a popular character’) I don’t much mind, but I fancy they will make no objection. 2. I enclose two alternative ‘blurbs’ for the catalogue as asked. I am so ill that they are probably both hopeless. Hash up anything you can out of the two: if neither any use you’ll have to get a new one done in the office—I can no more at the moment. 3. No objection to picture on jacket—you know, from correspondence about the Dymer decoration what kind of drawing I don’t like! 4. Yes—end leaves a good place for map. I take it no one wd. be such a fool as to work out literally the distances on that map I sent you—they are probably all wrong. 5. Just occurs to me—in the revised MS chapter numberings have not all been corrected since omissions. I suppose printers look after that sort of thing for themselves. By the bye—I suppose these very short chapters will not be given a fresh page each: it wd. be very bothering to the eye apart from waste of paper. If not, what about headings in the margin as in Temple Classics? Very glad to hear you will run down. Let me know in time to collect Coghill (#ulink_44b5cd9b-4cac-5c41-be2a-024b84e22cfd) and we’ll make a feast of it. I hope this is not so incoherent as it feels to me Yours C. S. Lewis P.S. The above address for the next few days PP.S. The blurbs shd. have gone to Department C. TO GUY POCOCK (W): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. March 23rd 1933 Dear Pocock The map has just arrived and is excellent. There is one correction—for TALE MEN read PALE MEN. Am I to send it back (I rather distrust my powers of putting up such an odd parcel) or will you convey this single correction to the cartographer—with my congratulations. I hope you have not abandoned the idea of paying me a visit, Yours sincerely C. S. Lewis TO J. M. DENT PUBLISHERS (W): Dept. B Pilgrim’s Regress The Kilns Headington Quarry, Oxford March 24th 1933 Dear Sir I enclose one correction for Map and suggestion for title etc. on a separate sheet, Yours faithfully C. S. Lewis P.S. I am at this address till May 1st. TO J. M. DENT PUBLISHERS (W): Department B. Correction For TALE MEN read PALE MEN. If a title is wanted I wd. suggest MAPPA MUNDI or MIDDLE-EARTH (The artist may decide between these on decorative grounds). If you merely want something to fill up the corner a [compass drawn in, basically a cross with N, E, S and W around clockwise from the top] might do. C. S. Lewis TO J. M. DENT PUBLISHERS (W): Dept B (Pilgrim’s Regress) The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. March 25th 1933 Dear Sir I have your letter of the 24th about stippling the sea parts of the map. After the very strong and pleasing contour lines with wh. the artist has emphasised the coast line, stippling is certainly not needed for clarity. Whether it would be an improvement decoratively is a question I would leave to the artist. Does it not partly depend on factors which are not before me: e.g. the type of paper, the colour of the cover (of which a rim will probably show) and the size? Yours faithfully C. S. Lewis TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. March 25th. 1933. My dear Arthur, I wonder how you have been getting on this many a day. I am certain I was the last to write, but whoever began it we have both been wrong to keep such a silence. We ought to be ashamed when we remember the weekly letters of the Bookham period. Fortunately each feels sure that the cause of this decline, whatever else it may be, is no diminution of the friendship. I think you pointed out to me once that it was natural we should write more easily in the old days, when everything was new and our correspondence was really like two explorers signalling to one another in a new country. Also—neither of us had any other outlet: we still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way. I think I mentioned the skating in my last letter. Since then life has gone on in a pretty smooth way. Warnie sinks deeper and deeper into the family life: it is hard to believe he was not always here. What a mercy that the change in his views (I mean as regards religion) should have happened in time to meet mine—it would be awkward if one of us were still in the old state of mind. He has an excellent gramophone and is building up a complete set of the Beethoven symphonies, one of which (complete) he often plays us on a Sunday evening. I have quite foresworn the old method of hearing one’s favourite bits played separately, and I am sure one gains enormously by always hearing one symphony as a whole and nothing else. By the way which is the one that contains the beautiful slow movement you played me—the one whose quality you defined as ‘compassion’? I have been waiting for it eagerly but so far W. has not produced it. I am getting back more of my old pleasure in music all the time. I saw Bryson last night. (#ulink_bf5c8d55-5eec-592b-a700-0c03dd8983e0) We were having a little supper for some of the English tutors, at the ‘Golden Cross’, which Bryson ought to have attended and as we knew he was in Oxford we went round to his digs to root him out. We found him sitting nursing a terrific black eye (the result of a very mild motor accident—better not mention this at home) and refusing to join us. I suspect that these little suppers are not really much to his taste: the fare is fried fish, ham and eggs, bread and cheese, and beer, and the whole thing is too homely, too rowdy, and too unluxurious for Bryson. This sounds like malice, but it isn’t. Between ourselves, Bryson’s beautiful clothes and general daintiness are a perfectly friendly and well established joke among some of his colleagues. There must be some real good in him; for though many laugh at his foppery and grumble at his laziness, I have never met any one, even in this hotbed of squabbles, who seriously dislikes him. I had to abandon Lockhart at the beginning of last term and have not yet resumed it. It is most annoying when the last few volumes of a long book have to be left over like that. One somehow feels a disinclination to begin them again and to find how many names and facts one has forgotten: yet it is uncomfortable not to polish the book off. You will have the laugh of me this time. While having a few days in bed recently I tried, at W’s earnest recommendation, to read the Three Musketeers, (#ulink_160fc59a-a5e4-5da3-b767-b9d3bb8a3bcc) but not only got tired of it but also found it disgusting. All these swaggering bullies, living on the money of their mistresses—faugh! One never knows how good Scott is till one tries to read Dumas. Have you noticed how completely Dumas Jacks any background? in Scott, behind the adventures of the hero, you have the whole society of the age, with all the interplay of town and country, Puritan and Cavalier, Saxon and Norman, or what not, and all the racy humour of the minor characters: and behind that again you have the eternal things—the actual countryside, the mountains, the weather, the very feel of travelling. In Dumas, if you try to look even an inch behind the immediate intrigue, you find just nothing at all. You are in an abstract world of gallantry and adventure which has no roots—no connection with human nature or mother earth. When the scene shifts from Paris to London there is no sense that you have reached a new country, no change of atmosphere. And I don’t think there is a single passage to show that Dumas had ever seen a cloud, a road, or a tree. In a word, if you were asked to explain what you and I meant by ‘the homely’ in literature, you could almost reply, ‘It means the opposite of The Three Musketeers.’ But perhaps I am being too hard on what after all was written only for amusement. I suppose there must be a merit in the speed and verve of the plot, even if I don’t like that kind of thing. I was talking about this to Tolkien who, you know, grew up on Morris and Macdonald and shares my taste in literature to a fault. We remarked how odd it was that the word romance should be used to cover things so different as Morris on the one hand and Dumas or Rafael Sabatini on the other—things not only different but so different that it is hard to imagine the same person liking both. We agreed that for what we meant by romance there must be at least the hint of another world—one must ‘hear the horns of elfland’. (#ulink_8f5f1c64-654f-58a4-8cd7-c1214db95d1e) For fear you shd. think I am going too much off the deep end, let me add that I have just read a real modern thriller (Buchan’s Three Hostages) (#ulink_0b2203bd-a862-5222-937e-e4109654f469) and enjoyed it thoroughly. So perhaps I shall be able to enjoy yours. Is it finished, by the way, and am I to see it? I have also read a war book (Landlocked Lake by Hanbury Sparrow) (#ulink_1f5c05dc-4b79-5c34-ad81-f4d5b8f96a54)—but that was because Barfield is introducing him as a new member of our Easter walking party. A ‘regular’ colonel seems an odd fish to come on a walk with my friends and me—I wonder if I shall quarrel with him! Do try to write me a long letter soon. You are constantly in my mind even when I don’t write, and to lose touch with you would be like losing a limb. Dents say they will have Pilgrim’s Regress out by the end of May. I have successfully resisted a foolish idea they had of an illustrated edition—whose price wd. of course have killed any sale it might hope for. But it is going to be decorated by a map on the end leaf which I had great fun in drawing the sketch for. I suppose you have no objection to my dedicating the book to you? It is yours by every right—written in your house, read to you as it was written, and celebrating (at least in the most important parts) an experience which I have more in common with you than anyone else. By the bye, you will be interested to hear that in finally revising the MS I did adopt many of your corrections, or at least made alterations where you objected. So if the book is a ghastly failure I shall always say ‘Ah it’s this Arthur business’ (#ulink_91b6d8e4-1f7a-56b1-95b8-96c90c8fb1f9) Do write. W. in bed with flu’ (mild) but otherwise all well here Yours Jack Give my love to your mother: I hope she is well. TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): [The Kilns], March 28th 1933 My dear Barfield— Thanks for sending me the book. (#ulink_67fd408c-cf5f-5427-92f9-4171499e1df9) Any war-book that is any good at all stirs up my (#ulink_81b29326-777e-5df3-8b28-96d559d787ae) so much that I find it difficult—through the din—to discover what it is really like. But this is, of course, much more than a war book. My chief complaint is that it stops too soon, without pulling the threads (the philosophical ones) together. Is it, by any chance, the first of a trilogy? As that, it would be capital. There are, as it stands, several things I want to know more about, e.g. 1. Courage used to be less conscious, more in the blood: that is why our ancestors did not have to exhaust on keeping brave all the conscious energy needed for the fighting. Good! But does the author’s solution by discipline mean that nature was simply wrong in transferring courage from the blood to the mind? For this discipline (sharply distinguished from regimental spirit etc) is just a method of putting the courage-problem back on the unconscious: i.e. he says to nature ‘I don’t want this freedom. All you have done is to put me to the trouble of inventing an elaborate machinery for making myself again un-free in this matter—freedom in this matter having turned out to be such a job that if I attend to it I have no time to attend to anything else.’ Is this what H-S’s position comes to? And does he know that it does? 2. One wants emphatically to know more about those Australians and Canadians. We are told that they were braver than the English. If, as I surmise, they were not subjected to the martinettery, then they cast doubt on the whole thesis. If they were, then still, since it did not produce the same effect on them and on the English, why then, (by the ‘method of difference’) discipline can’t be the whole secret. 3. How much weight does he give to the discovery made at the end of the book that martinettery can be applied by anyone who has learned the trick i.e. it depends on no spiritual quality in the applier? (#ulink_9e515744-e29f-5541-b85d-95f6713fe90a) Wd. he admit that this is the same as saying it is mechanical. When I got to the end, where this discovery is made, I at once connected it with the early passage ‘Spirit wept…’ (that bit is splendid) (#ulink_b47bff12-6be4-5ccd-9430-398224982a02) and saw discipline related to courage precisely as the mechanical battle of heavy guns is related (by H-S) to ‘the noble end of war.’ In fact, all my three points come to one—an uncertainty how far the author has faced his own growing discovery of the bad element in discipline and how far he has seen the resulting problem. For the position he leaves us in is this. Discipline is the only way of making it at all probable that your men will win battles: and therefore without discipline the cause of freedom and virtue, so far as it lies with you, will be lost. On the other hand, discipline is unfree, can be applied mechanically like a trick, there is no warrant that it will fall justly etc etc: so that it looks as if discipline itself may be just as fatal to the cause as defeat. This is where one would like the next book to take up the problem. (It is the old damnable fix—efficiency at the cost of the values for whose sake only you wish to be effective, or justice, liberty, and equality preserved only to be knocked on the head by your efficient neighbour. All this bears acutely on the problem of the college junto—of wh. we must discuss). There were places in the book where one felt the old hatred. . (#ulink_646c2900-ff76-5f70-97e0-74879106ab07) Still, he seems to share them himself. On the purely literary side, I think it good: vivid without the journalese that usually accompanies these vivid war books. Some of the battles are not v. easy to visualise, but that is almost unavoidable: they are certainly easier than Blunden’s. (#ulink_4290e2a2-f399-5bd6-8e71-c4b3fae295b3) One really glorious bit is the description of the gusto he feels even for the filthy air and Stygian landscape of the front when expecting death: the preciousness of matter as such. I don’t think that’s been done before. I am a good deal worried by my inability to understand some of your article on Coleridge. (#ulink_6bac071a-3ceb-5c93-ad3f-1a2292dd2c52) It is all exciting, but I can’t really find much to correspond with the diagrams, except the first. Things I do get are a. The explanation of C’s apparent incoherence. (#ulink_ab493e42-02ac-5ef3-83e7-0151ba428c76)b. The privileged position of the vb. to be (#ulink_82b740e7-1153-59bd-b47d-69485731f2cf) (By the bye, Sadism and Masochism are both over-emphases of the Difference element, but the first as verb and the second as Noun. Will that do?) (#ulink_62c23f43-0e9b-5584-aa4f-be860c3acf2c)c. The insect as externalised consciousness. (#ulink_f4e98ffd-3624-53ce-b72f-58db531f4398) All the rest you must explain on the walk. Both poems improve on re-reading, but the first one still remains the better, for the reasons given before. The selection of imagery in it is almost perfect and the effect all one like a taste. HAVE YOU BOOKED THOSE SEATS FOR THE RHEINGOLD? Have the venue where you like: but with such a large party—and in Easter week—some room-booking shd. be done at once Yours C. S. Lewis Last Saturday was the anniversary of the Creation of the World! TO DAPHNE HARWOOD (BOD): (#ulink_35f021fc-d8b9-5067-b2c3-7452eed0d4a0) Magdalen College, Oxford. March 28th 1933 Dear Mrs. Harwood, I hope it was not only literary vanity that made me enjoy so much your very kind and very discriminating letter. Thank you very much indeed. I was much interested in the account of your journey. I was never myself up against anything quite so bad as I take Ogden to be, but I can quite imagine him on the St. Theresa theme. (#ulink_2a5ef462-ad5e-5cde-af56-dc95c0825b08) I am glad you never read my Summa, (#ulink_91f5d533-6206-53cd-9188-f0903fe42783) for all that is dead as mutton to me now. and the points chiefly at issue between the Anthroposophists and me then were precisely the points on which anthroposophy is certainly right—i.e. the claim that it is possible for man, here and now, in the phenomenal world, to have commerce with the world beyond—which is what I was denying. The present difference between us is quite other. The only thing that I now wd. object eagerly to [in] anthroposophy is that I don’t think it can say ‘I believe in one God the Father Almighty.’ My feeling is that even if there are a thousand orders of beneficent being above us, still, the universe is a cheat unless at the back of them all there is the one God of Christianity. But I did not mean to raise controversial points: there is certainly quite a lot for us to agree on as against nearly the whole contemporary world! I would quite agree, for instance, with your discovery that it is Will wh. lets the cat out of the bag—and also with your refusal to rest in Croce. (#ulink_e8a88eaf-c59b-5698-9c75-c5ee98f9feec) His is the kind of idealism that for all practical purposes is indistinguishable from materialism. What a ghastly pun that his name should mean ‘Blessed Cross’! I don’t understand the part about the eternal feminine (and masculine) in your letter, and look forward to hearing more about it when next we meet. Cecil was looking grand when he came down to us—he is the most-un-ageing of my friends. We are all disappointed that your father has abandoned the idea of buying Tewsfield. (#ulink_09dd3f29-33a8-57d4-8073-e40e1ffc6269) With very many thanks, yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis TO GUY POCOCK (W): The Kilns Headington Quarry, Oxford March 31st 1933 Dear Pocock This is unfortunate! Since I last wrote family arrangements have been maturing which will take me out of Oxford from the 6th onwards—so that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week are the only days (until the 23rd and after). I don’t want to be a nuisance: on the other hand I should very much like to see you. So just do as you would like. If you want to get me at short notice my Telephone number is 6963 Oxford—preferably after dinner. So sorry. Yours C. S. Lewis TO J. M. DENT PUBLISHERS (W): Department B Flint Hall Hambledon, Bucks April 12th 1933 Dear Sir I return corrected proof of the Pilgrim’s Regress. Would you kindly direct the special attention of the printer to the following points 1. Greek quotations pp 101–107. Make quite sure of the correction in several places: i.e. read ? (= ‘Delta,’ 4th letter of the Gk. alphabet) for ?. 2. On p. 228 my note may not be perfectly clear. I want the poem to be spaced like this: [series of eight lines close together, the final one separated by a line or two] 3. Quotations on pp 11, 31 etc. Ought these to have stops after them? And if so, ought the dashes to be removed? I have put in the stops and not removed the dashes, but am ready to be guided by the printer’s decision as to what is usual in such cases. Yours faithfully C. S. Lewis Address after Monday next, Magdalen College, Oxford. TO GUY POCOCK (W): Magdalen College. Oxford. May 4th 1933 Dear Pocock Yes—I heartily approve Derrick’s jacket: but should prefer to see the legend ‘Reason set…up’ omitted, Photo will be sent as soon as taken. In haste, Yours C. S. Lewis It really is good: quite beyond my hopes. The legend under it however must be omitted, because nothing less like a spurring rider could well be imagined. Anyway it is not needed. The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism was published by J. M. Dent on 25 May 1933. TO GUY POCOCK (W): MAGDALEN COLLEGE. Oxford. June 9th 1933 Dear Pocock Could you let me have 4 more copies of P. R. and tell me what I owe you for them? I recommend the underlined passage in the enclosed for advertisement use as soon as we get anything on the other side to set beside it, Yours C. S. Lewis TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. June 13th. 1933 My dear Arthur, You ought to have had a copy of Pilgrim’s Regress from me before now and a letter long before. My six complementary copies turned out to have so many unexpected claimants that I had exhausted them before I knew where I was: some new ones are now on order and I will send you one as soon as they arrive. As for letters, they have been rather out of the question. I have never had a busier term—9 to 1 and 5 to 7 every week day and two Sundays completely filled with extra work in the middle of the term: not to mention exams which have now set in and which will keep my nose to the grindstone till the end of July. However I have kept very well and have therefore nothing to complain of—except that I am rather hungry for reading and don’t know when I shall get a few uninterrupted hours again. ‘Invigilating’ in exams last week I did manage to read one novel (I find that anything harder than novels is too much for me in the Schools) which I can recommend—Tom’s a-cold by John Collier. (#ulink_051feedc-7d56-5ae1-800f-78ce192a3061) The theme is one not uncommon now-a-days: that of a barbaric ‘heroic’ society growing up on the ruins of the present civilisation. But it has two great advantages over most such books. 1. It doesn’t waste time telling you how civilisation collapsed but starts a 100 years on. 2. It lays the scene in the South of England and is very topographical, so that you can actually see the Berkshire downs and Savernake Forest turning into the fortresses, the greenwoods, and the valley communities of a world at about the same stage of development as that in The Roots of the Mountains. (#ulink_20dd75c6-0246-55cd-9db0-7372056e3f62) One gets v. well the idea of how much larger England would seem under those conditions. I must announce with regret that I shall not be paying you a visit this summer (Perhaps this is premature as I have not yet been asked!) I have come to the decision with considerable doubt, but I think on the whole I am right. Warnie and I want to go and see the Scotch uncles (#ulink_d6a134a4-dfcf-5b42-bf88-21ba5810a9f2) and as they are getting on it ought to be done this year. This will sound an odd programme to you. It is not all ‘duty’—curiosity, desire to revive childish memories, and the anticipation of an amused yet affectionate pleasure in seeing our father in them, all come in to it. We shall then go back from Glasgow by the Clyde Shipping Company boat—and I admit I shall be such a rag by the time exams are over that I rather look forward to some lazy days at sea as the best, if not the only, holiday I shall be capable of. I am sorry to disappoint you (if I may flatter myself that it is a disappointment). At any rate don’t think that this is a precedent or that it means the end of my appearances at Belfast! I was up to London for the Rheingold, which I enjoyed less than Siegfried—chiefly I think because we had very bad seats (We is Barfield and I). (#ulink_c1f58e77-2856-50c2-a453-4431864274c6) MacFarlane—who has had a nervous breakdown since, poor chap—says he saw you* (#ulink_d24325d9-2efb-5af4-bc08-ec67d3f5d50a) at one of the other operas: what a pity we hadn’t known and gone together. I had an extremely kind letter from Reid about the book. I think it is going to be at least as big a failure as Dymer, and am consequently trying to take to heart all the things I wrote you when you were bowled over by Reid’s decision on your first novel—not entirely without success. How goes the detective story? I hardly deserve a letter, but hope you will treat me better than my deserts Yours Jack TO T. R. HENN (P): (#ulink_edfe3744-dcf8-5b76-9e1f-cd86c4de1e97) Magdalen College, Oxford. July 2nd 1933. Dear Henn If you like this, (#ulink_3b5aeca9-def8-5a0d-8383-90151beecb3b) accept it as a peace offering. If you think it worth disliking heartily, then have at me in print or private—dismount your tuck, be yare in your preparing. (#ulink_49a4ae03-46ba-5336-9dc8-c786b7c54025) If it is simply a bore, then pass it on to your second hand bookseller. Yours C. S. Lewis TO MARY SHELLEY (T): (#ulink_083df618-1d82-5649-9324-18d6444799f0) Magdalen July 21st [1933] Dear Miss Shelley, If you are not, at the moment, too sick of me and all my kind to read further, it may be worth saying that you must not run away with the idea that you are a Fourth Class mind. What really ruined you was an NS and a ? on language, which would of course have spoiled even very good work elsewhere. (#ulink_28e96184-818f-5516-b354-95f2abc7a18b) In the Lit. your highest mark was ?+ (XIXth century). Why your literature papers were not better I do not understand. I blame myself for not having exhorted more essays from you—but I doubt if that was the whole cause. You were very short and general. But I am quite clear in my own mind that you have not done yourself justice and that your real quality is far beyond the work you did in Schools. This is cold comfort to you with the world to face!—but at least it is said quite sincerely and not merely for the sake of consoling you. Try to forgive me both as an examiner and as a tutor. If there should at any time be any way in which I can be of use to you, let me know at once. Till then, good-bye and good luck. Yours very sincerely C. S. Lewis TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. Aug. 17th. 1933. My dear Arthur, I have been silent for a terribly long time, I know, but it has not really been my fault. I had a solid month’s examining after term ended, and then I went away for my sea holiday. I had pictured myself writing to you on the boat, but this turned out to be practically impossible: so that I am really writing if not on the first possible day, at any rate on the second or third. Before I go on to anything else I must answer one point in your last letter:—you comment on my saying nothing about your having come so near me without visiting me. The fact is I deliberately said nothing about it because I feared that, if I did, it might seem that my intention of not visiting you this year was a kind of tit-for-tat—that I was offended and was thus taking my revenge, or, at least, was excusing my intention by your action. I would have liked you to come and see me, of course: but I never thought that England ought to be forbidden ground to you if you were not seeing me for any reason. I have no wish to reduce you to stealing past Oxford with a false beard on—like you and me stealing past Leeborough from Bernagh in the old days. I did not enjoy the Rheingold this year nearly as much as I enjoyed Siegfried last year—neither at the time nor in memory. Oddly enough the hammer passage which you mention I actually disliked. I had enjoyed it on your gramophone, but at Covent Garden it seemed to me so much cruder and, before it ended (and I thought it would never end) nearly ridiculous. You must not think that my loyalty to the Ring is wavering. The main causes of my disliking the Rheingold were (a) Our having very bad seats (b) My not liking the man who sang Alberich. (#ulink_c40dcf8f-4889-5ebd-bd79-e9c3a34bc628) I admit that Alberich must sometimes shout instead of singing—but that man seemed to shout unnecessarily. Next year I hope to go to the Valkyrie. While I am on these things, I might add that I have actually been to the films today!—to see Cavalcade!! (#ulink_732f9e9d-eb5f-5836-a897-493da4b21876) This is one of the most disgraceful confessions I have ever made to you. I thought it would be interesting historically, and so I suppose it was: and certainly very clever. But there is not an idea in the whole thing from beginning to end: it is a mere brutal assault on one’s emotions, using material which one can’t help feeling intensely. It appeals entirely to that part of you which lives in the throat and chest, leaving the spirit untouched. I have come away feeling as if I had been at a debauch. The sea holiday was a success. We went first by train to Arrochar where we slept a night (#ulink_a0fd3f0e-cd6d-5729-95c3-82136f451970) and had one glorious day’s walking on the shores of Loch Long and Loch Lomond and across the mountains between them. I forget if you have been in those parts. They seemed to me to excell all other mountains in one respect—the curiously fantastic, yet heavy shapes of rock into which the summits are formed. They realise one’s idea of mountains as the fastnesses of the giants. The actual beach of Loch Lomond also pleased me very much—an ordinary pebbly beach such as you might find at the sea with the unusual addition that it had trees on it and that you could drink the water. Up in the mountains we had a glorious hour at a stream—a golden brown stream, with cataracts and deep pools. We spread out all our clothes (sweat-sodden) to dry on the flat stones, and lay down in a pool just under a little waterfall, and let the foam come down the back of our heads and round our necks. Then when we were cool, we came out and sat naked to eat our sandwiches, with our feet still in the rushing water. Why have you and I never done this? (Answer—because we never came to a suitable stream at a suitable time) This glorious day was followed by a very tiring and trying, but extremely interesting, week end chez l’oncle at Helensburgh. It was uncannily like being at home again—specially when Uncle Bill announced on the Sunday evening ‘I won’t be going into town tomorrow’, and we with well-feigned enthusiasm replied ‘Good!’. But to describe the whole thing would take a book. On the Monday afternoon (#ulink_c0e7039d-d07a-5f49-b1c2-7165a69607c9) we sailed from Glasgow. The journey down the Clyde was beautiful, despite some rain, and tho’ there were more passengers on board than I would have chosen, there was usually a quiet corner to read in. I liked—you would probably not—the homely feeling on these boats, with dinner at 1 and ‘High Tea’ at 6. It was very strange coming into Belfast next morning. I had made up my mind that it was no good trying to arrange a meeting with you. The time—we were sailing again at one o’clock—was much too long for a three-handed talk of you and W. and me, and too short for sending him off anywhere so that I could have you tete-?-tete. Our programme was simple. We trammed to Campbell and thence walked up the hills round the Shepherd’s hut. The sight of all those woods and fields made me regret very much that I was not having an Irish holiday with you: and the new house (near Kelsie’s new house) made me wonder how much more might be altered by next year. We walked down by the ordinary, poignantly familiar, route, stopped to look at Leeborough—how the trees are growing!—and then went down the Circular Rd. to St Marks to see the window which W. had never yet seen. (#ulink_5054c175-6a52-5849-95ba-dbfaa118fbfb) He was delighted with it. Here we had a conversation with the verger—who referred to Gordon (#ulink_a4b1db9d-6453-5dcc-bd4f-b0a5e664152a) as ‘Gordon’! Then, after a drink in the reformed pub at Gelson’s corner, we got back into town. The rest of the tour I shall not describe in detail. The bit I should most like to have shared with you was the departure from Waterford. The sail down the river, peppered with v. early Norman castles, was good, but what was better was the next three hours out to sea. Imagine a flat French grey sea, and a sky of almost the same colour: between these a long fish-shaped streak of pure crimson, about 20 miles long, and lasting, unchanged or changing imperceptibly, for hours. Then add three or four perfectly transparent mountains, so extraordinarily spiritualised that they absolutely realised the old idea of Ireland as the ‘isle of the saints’. Like this—I do not remember that I have ever seen anything more calm and spacious and celestial. Not but what we had some wonderful sunsets at other times in the voyage. You with your dislike of the sea will hardly admit it, but from a boat out of sight of land one does get effects hardly to be got elsewhere. For one thing the sky is so huge and the horizon is uninterrupted in every direction, so that the mere scale of the sky-scenery is beyond anything you get ashore: and for another, the extreme simplicity of the design—flat disk and arched dome and nothing else—produces a kind of concentration. And then again to turn suddenly from these huge sublimities as one passes a staircase head and hear the sound of plates being laid or the laugh of a boy coming up on the warmer air from below, gives that delicious contrast of the homely and familiar in the midst of the remote, which is the master-stroke of the whole thing. I am re-reading Malory, and am astonished to find how much more connected, more of a unity, it is man we used to see. I no longer lose myself in the ‘brasting’. There is still too much of it, to be sure, but I am sustained by the beauty of the sentiment, and also the actual turns of phrase. How could one miss ‘He commanded his trumpets to blow that all the earth trembled and dindled of the sound.’ (#ulink_20431946-18f2-50e8-a1e4-195a42c564ca) Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years. It now seems to me that my Bookham reading of Malory was almost worthless. Did you ever realise that it is full of pathos? I never did until a pupil pointed it out to me a few months ago—wh. is what set me re-reading it. I hope I shall be able to be a fairly regular correspondent again for the rest of the summer. Bad luck about the book! Yours, Jack TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): [The Kilns] Sept 1st. 1933 My dear Arthur, I have no right to complain that I have not yet heard from you. Nor have I much to say on my own account: but I think I will write a little just to feel that we are keeping the channel open. W. and I are heartily sick of the summer, the others not. The pond is sinking lower and lower and all sorts of stones and roots that ought to be covered are projecting—it seems almost an indecency. The water is getting dirtier and warmer and bathing has been abandoned. Flowers and vegetables are withering and the ground is so hard that a short walk leaves you footsore as if you had been walking on pavements. This morning we woke to coolness and thick mist and spangled cobwebs. I thought it was the first day of autumn and felt the old excitement. But it was all a cheat and by the time we came out of church it was another blazing day—pitiless blue sky, sun hammering bleached white grass, wasps buzzing, dragon flies darting, and Mr Papworth panting in the shade with his tongue out. Which reminds me—I am so sorry to hear about your Paddy. I couldn’t lay my hands on your letter when I was writing last—I knew there was something in it I hadn’t dealt with but couldn’t remember what. How heartless you must have thought me. I now have your letter and can fully sympathise. It is always hard luck when you feel that other people have hidden facts from you till it is too late. I don’t now agree—how heartily I once would have—with any idea of ‘trying to forget’ things and people we have lost, or indeed with trying always and on principle to exclude any kind of distressing thought from one’s mind. I don’t mean one ought to sentimentalize a sorrow, or (often) scratch a shame till it is raw. But I had better not go on with the subject as I find my ideas are all in disorder. I know I feel very strongly that when in a wakeful night some idea which one ‘can’t stand’—some painful memory or mean act of ones own or vivid image of physical pain—thrusts itself upon you, that you ought not to thrust it away but look it squarely in the face for some appreciable time: giving it of course an explicitly devotional context. But I don’t fully know why and am not prepared to work the thing out. Anyway, this only very faintly arises out of what you said—and it won’t bring the poor beast back to life! I have just re-read Lilith (#ulink_6b47268e-3d41-58c8-9764-abbe0c1cbf6c) and am much clearer about the meaning. The first thing to get out of the way is all Greville Macdonald’s nonsense about ‘dimensions’ and ‘elements’—if you have his preface in your edition. (#ulink_dc9ed52e-2cbd-532d-b5fc-8bdb7f5dfd49) That is just the sort of mechanical ‘mysticism’ which is worlds away from Geo. Macdonald. The main lesson of the book is against secular philanthropy—against the belief that you can effectively obey the 2nd command about loving your neighbour without first trying to love God. The story runs like this. The human soul exploring its own house (the Mind) finds itself on the verge of unexpected worlds which at first dismay it (Chap. I-V). The first utterance of these worlds is an unconditional demand for absolute surrender of the Soul to the will of God, or, if you like, for Death (Chap. VI). To this demand the soul cannot at first face up (VI). But attempting to return to normal consciousness finds by education that its experiences are not abnormal or trivial but are vouched for by all the great poets and philosophers (VII My Father’s MS). It repents and tries to face the demand, but its original refusal has now rendered real submission temporarily impossible (IX). It has to face instead the impulses of the subconscious (X) and the slightly spurious loyalties to purely human ‘causes’—political, theological etc (XI). It now becomes conscious of its fellow men: and finds them divided into ‘Lovers’ (= ‘Hearts’ in our old classification) and ‘Bags’ or ‘Giants’ (= ‘Spades’). But because it is an unconverted soul, has not yet died, it cannot really help the Lovers and becomes the slave of the Bags. In other words the young man, however amiably disposed towards the sweet and simple people of the world, gets a job or draws a dividend, and becomes in fact the servant of the economic machine (XII—XIII). But he is too good to go on like this, and so becomes a ‘Reformer’, a ‘friend of humanity’—a Shelley, Ruskin, Lenin (XIV). Here follows a digression on Purgatory (XV-XVII). With the next section we enter on the deepest part of the book which I still only v. dimly understand. Why do so many purely secular reformers and philanthropists fail and in the end leave men more wretched and wicked than they found them? Apparently the unconverted soul, doing its very best for the Lovers, only succeeds first in waking (at the price of its own blood) and then in becoming the tool of, Lilith. Lilith is still quite beyond me. One can trace in her specially the Will to Power—which here fits in quite well—but there is a great deal more than that. She is also the real ideal somehow spoiled: she is not primarily a sexual symbol, but includes the characteristic female abuse of sex, which is love of Power, as the characteristic male abuse is sensuality (XVIII-XXIX). After a long and stormy attempt to do God’s work in Lilith’s way or Lilith’s work in God’s way, the soul comes to itself again, realises that its previous proceedings are ‘cracked absolutely’ and in fact has a sort of half-conversion. But the new powers of will and imagination which even this half conversion inspires (symbolised in the horse) are so exhilarating that the soul thinks these will do instead of ‘death’ and again shoots off on its own. This passage is v. true and important. Macdonald is aware how religion itself supplies new temptations (XXX-XXXI). This again leads to another attempt to help the Lovers in his own way, with consequent partial disaster in the death of Lona (XXXII-XXXVII). He finds himself the jailer of Lilith: i.e. he is now living in the state of tension with the evil thing inside him only just held down, and at a terrible cost—until he (or Lilith—the Lilith-part of him) at last repents (Mara) and consents to die (XXXVIII-end) I hope this has not bored you. I am so excited about it myself that for the moment I can hardly imagine anyone else being bored: but probably I have done it so badly that in the result nothing survives to be excited about. For one thing, I have emphasised the external side too much. Correct everything above by remembering that it is not only helping the Lovers outside against the Bags, but equally the Lover in himself against the Bag in himself. You will be surprised to hear that I have been at the Cinema again! Don’t be alarmed, it will not become a habit. I was persuaded into going to King Kong (#ulink_68a2bb14-6f9a-5c6f-9779-d3de67b49eff) because it sounded the sort of Rider Haggardish thing that has always exercised a spell over me. What else I have done I hardly know. Read Plato’s Gorgias, and am reading a long Histoire de la Science Politique (!!) by Janet (#ulink_a0fa2a95-0acb-530d-ba4b-c27d81109c1b)—surprisingly interesting. Almost everything is, I find, as one goes on. You say nothing about Harrogate—was it nice? I have missed our annual meeting a good deal. I remember you at least once a day whatever happens and often in between, and wish we could see more of one another. I wonder if the time will ever come when we shall? And would it work if we did? I often feel that you are the one who has changed. This seems absurd when I have changed from atheism to Christianity and from The Crock of Gold (#ulink_f0e38200-bac3-58ad-a021-43177ff90bb8) to, say, the history of political science! But I feel all my changes to be natural developments of the original thing we had in common, and forget that of course they seem natural to me because they are mine, while yours, doubtless equally natural, can never seem so to me to the same extent. I don’t know how I come to be writing about this and writing it so badly. I had better stop. Any news of your MS yet? I have tried to keep myself this time from getting too wrapped up in my own book’s success and think I have partially succeeded—just as well, too! Yours Jack TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): Hotel Victoria, Milford-on-Sea, Hants. Sept 12 1933 My dear Arthur, It was a delightful surprise to get your long and interesting letter: certainly the longest and one of the most interesting letters I have ever had from you. I have been thinking all morning over your question about God and evil which is very far from being ‘elementary’ to me—or for that matter, I suppose, to the angels. If I understand you rightly you are not primarily concerned with the sort of logical problem as to how the All-Good can produce evil, or produce a world in which there is evil, but with a more personal, practical, and intimate problem as to how far God can sympathise with our evil will as well as with our good—or, to draw it milder, whether he does. I should begin, I think, by objecting to an expression you use: ‘God must have a potentiality of His opposite—evil.’ For this I would substitute the idea which someone had in the Middle Ages who defined God as ‘That which has no opposite’ i.e. we live in a world of clashes, good and evil, true and false, pleasant and painful, body and spirit, time and eternity etc, but God is not simply (so to speak) one of the two clashes but the ultimate thing beyond them all—just as in our constitution the King is neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of the Opposition, but the thing behind them which alone enables these to be a lawful government and an opposition—or just as space is neither bigness or smallness but that in which the distinctions of big and small arise. This then is my first point. That Evil is not something outside and ‘over against’ God, but in some way included under Him. My second point seems to be in direct contradiction to this first one, and is (in scriptural language) as follows: that God ‘is the Father of Lights and in Him is no darkness at all’. (#ulink_02538f73-4843-5659-b709-d2adbfd530eb) In some way there is no evil whatever in God. He is pure Light. All the heat that in us is lust or anger in Him is cool light—eternal morning, eternal freshness, eternal springtime: never disturbed, never strained. Go out on any perfect morning in early summer before the world is awake and see, not the thing itself, but the material symbol of it. Well, these are our two starting points. In one way (our old phrase!) God includes evil, in another way he does not. What are we to do next? My beginning of the ‘next’ will be to deny another remark of yours—where you say ‘no good without evil’. This on my view is absolutely untrue: but the opposite ‘no evil without good’ is absolutely true. I will try to explain what I mean by an analogy. Supposing you are taking a dog on a lead through a turnstile or past a post. You know what happens (apart from his usual ceremonies in passing a post!). He tries to go the wrong side and gets his lead looped round the post. You see that he can’t do it, and therefore pull him back. You pull him back because you want to enable him to go forward. He wants exactly the same thing—namely to go forward: for that very reason he resists your pull back, or, if he is an obedient dog, yields to it reluctantly as a matter of duty which seems to him to be quite in opposition to his own will: tho’ in fact it is only by yielding to you that he will ever succeed in getting where he wants. Now if the dog were a theologian he would regard his own will as a sin to which he was tempted, and therefore an evil: and he might go on to ask whether you understand and ‘contained’ his evil. If he did you cd. only reply ‘My dear dog, if by your will you mean what you really want to do, viz. to get forward along the road, I not only understand this desire but share it. Forward is exactly where I want you to go. If by your will, on the other hand, you mean your will to pull against the collar and try to force yourself forward in a direction which is no use—why I understand it of course: but just because I understand it (and the whole situation, which you don’t understand) I cannot possibly share it. In fact the more I sympathise with your real wish—that is, the wish to get on—the less can I sympathise (in the sense of ‘share’ or ‘agree with’) your resistance to the collar: for I see that this is actually rendering the attainment of your real wish impossible.’ I don’t know if you will agree at once that this is a parallel to the situation between God and man: but I will work it out on the assumption that you do. Let us go back to the original question—whether and, if so in what sense God contains, say, my evil will—or ‘understands’ it. The answer is God not only understands but shares the desire which is at the root of all my evil—the desire for complete and ecstatic happiness. He made me for no other purpose than to enjoy it. But He knows, and I do not, how it can be really and permanently attained. He knows that most of my personal attempts to reach it are actually putting it further and further out of my reach. With these therefore He cannot sympathise or ‘agree’: His sympathy with my real will makes that impossible. (He may pity my misdirected struggles, but that is another matter.) The practical results seem to be two. 1. I may always feel looking back on any past sin that in the very heart of my evil passion there was something that God approves and wants me to feel not less but more. Take a sin of Lust. The overwhelming thirst for rapture was good and even divine: it has not got to be unsaid (so to speak) and recanted. But it will never be quenched as I tried to quench it. If I refrain—if I submit to the collar and come round the right side of the lamp-post—God will be guiding me as quickly as He can to where I shall get what I really wanted all the time. It will not be very like what I now think I want: but it will be more like it than some suppose. In any case it will be the real thing, not a consolation prize or substitute. If I had it I should not need to fight against sensuality as something impure: rather I should spontaneously turn away from it as something dull, cold, abstract, and artificial. This, I think, is how the doctrine applies to past sins. 2. On the other hand, when we are thinking of a sin in the future, i.e. when we are tempted, we must remember that just because God wants for us what we really want and knows the only way to get it, therefore He must, in a sense, be quite ruthless towards sin. He is not like a human authority who can be begged off or caught in an indulgent mood. The more He loves you the more determined He must be to pull you back from your way which leads nowhere into His way which leads where you want to go. Hence Macdonald’s words ‘The all-punishing, all-pardoning Father’. You may go the wrong way again, and again He may forgive you: as the dog’s master may extricate the dog after he has tied the whole lead round the lamp-post. But there is no hope in the end of getting where you want to go except by going God’s way. And what does ‘in the end’ mean? This is a terrible question. If endless time will really help us to go the right way, I believe we shall be given endless time. But perhaps God knows that time makes no difference. Perhaps He knows that if you can’t learn the way in 60 or 70 years on this planet (a place probably constructed by Divine skill for the very purpose of teaching you) then you will never learn it anywhere. There may be nothing left for Him but to destroy you (the kindest thing): if He can. I think one may be quite rid of the old haunting suspicion—which raises its head in every temptation—that there is something else than God—some other country (Mary Rose…Mary Rose) (#ulink_590fa0f3-3bc8-5770-a3ac-3b7ca9aedd12) into which He forbids us to trespass—some kind of delight wh. He ‘doesn’t appreciate’ or just chooses to forbid, but which wd. be real delight if only we were allowed to get it. The thing just isn’t there. Whatever we desire is either what God is trying to give us as quickly as He can, or else a false picture of what He is trying to give us—a false picture wh. would not attract us for a moment if we saw the real thing. Therefore God does really in a sense contain evil—i.e. contains what is the real motive power behind all our evil desires. He knows what we want, even in our vilest acts: He is longing to give it to us. He is not looking on from the outside at some new ‘taste’ or ‘separate desire of our own’. Only because he has laid up real goods for us to desire are we able to go wrong by snatching at them in greedy, misdirected ways. The truth is that evil is not a real thing at all, like God. It is simply good spoiled. That is why I say there can be good without evil, but no evil without good. You know what the biologists mean by a parasite—an animal that lives on another animal. Evil is a parasite. It is there only because good is there for it to spoil and confuse. Thus you may well feel that God understands our temptations—understands them a great deal more than we do. But don’t forget Macdonald again—‘Only God understands evil and hates it.’ (#ulink_a7a54b49-ea70-50e6-be1f-e9d452919fc3) Only the dog’s master knows how useless it is to try to get on with the lead knotted round the lamp-post. This is why we must be prepared to find God implacably and immovably forbidding what may seem to us very small and trivial things. But He knows whether they are really small and trivial. How small some of the things that doctors forbid would seem to an ignoramus. I expect I have said all these things before: if so, I hope they have not wasted a letter. Alas! they are so (comparatively) easy to say: so hard, so all but impossible to go on feeling when the strain comes. I have not time left for the rest of your letter. It was bad luck getting ill at the cottage: an illness at home has its pleasures, but on a holiday it is—well ‘disconsolate’ is the word that best fits my feeling about it. We have had a spate of unwanted and mostly uninvited visitors all summer and have (all four of us) come down here to give Minto a rest. It is opposite the Isle of Wight, and quite pleasant. We went to Beaulieu Abbey this afternoon—which would well deserve a letter in itself. I have since I came down read Voltaire’s Candide, (#ulink_a8c0b5bb-3b51-5fa8-bd93-fe724f7daeac) and Gore’s Jesus of Nazareth (Home University Library) (#ulink_256c1015-bf3c-5927-b1d8-3b2bdbad14f0) which I most strongly advise you to get at once. It is perhaps the best book about religion I have yet read—I mean of the theological kind—not counting books like Lilith. I am particularly pleased at having at last found out what Sadducees and Pharisees really were: tho’ it is an alarming bit of knowledge because most of the religious people I know are either one or the other. (Warnie is a bit of a Sadducee, and I am a good bit of a Pharisee.) I am now going to tackle a John Buchan. When I suggested that you had changed, I didn’t mean that you had changed towards me. I meant that I thought the centre of your interests might have shifted more than mine. This leads on to what you say about being a mere mirror for other people on which each friend can cast his reflection in turn. That certainly is what you might become, just as a hardened bigot shouting every one down till he had no friends left is what I am in danger of becoming. In other words sympathy is your strong point, as stability is mine—if I have a strong point at all, which is doubtful: or weakness is your danger, as Pride is mine. (You have no idea how much of my time I spend just hating people whom I disagree with—tho’ I know them only from their books—and inventing conversations in which I score off them.) In other words, we all have our own burdens, and must do the best we can. I do not know which is the worse, nor do we need to: if each of us could imitate the other. The woods are just beginning to turn here—the drive was exquisite this afternoon. Love from all. Yours, Jack TO GUY POCOCK (W): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford Sept. 18th 1933. Dear Pocock Would you kindly tell the right department to send a copy of the Regress to A. Griffiths, Prinknash Priory, Gloucester, and debit me accordingly, Yours C. S. Lewis TO J. M. DENT PUBLISHERS (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. Oct. 16th 1933 Dear Sir Please forward a copy of my Pilgrim’s Regress to Miss Whitty, 7 Cherlsey Rd, Bristol 6. I enclose cheque for 8/2 to cover this and previous copies. Yours faithfully C. S. Lewis TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): [The Kilns] Nov 5th 1933 My dear Arthur, I was glad to see your hand again. In spite of the remarks at the beginning of your letter, which tempt me to further discussion I must try to prevent this also from becoming an essay in amateur Theology. I am glad to hear that Tchainie (#ulink_51cbfb8c-bc85-5088-ba90-2c763f83f84c) is once more sufficiently my friend to ask about my mediaeval book. (#ulink_f4f81d4c-7cb9-5700-ab9d-03c591fa735e) You can tell her that it is not finished yet, though it might have been if I had not been made English Examiner which has devoured a good deal of my last two long Vacs. As one holds the job only for two years I am now free again and hope to get on with it. By the way has she read the Regress— I don’t mean ‘Ask her if she has read the Regress’! To answer the next point in your letter, MacFarlane is back at work again and seems alright: but that perhaps does not count for much as he seemed alright to me up to the moment when he went sick. I have no eye for health. ‘How much better he is looking’—‘How ill he is looking’ people say to me as a visitor leaves the room, and I have never noticed any difference. I hope mere selfishness is not the cause. The news of your learning to ride was surprising, amusing (as you foresaw!) and on the whole good. Perhaps you will be a ‘huntin’ man’ when I next meet you, slapping your leggings with a crop, and drinking whiskies with the county families’ fast daughters and hard-riding sons. What a fine sight it would be to see Bob, Janie, and you, altogether and all in full hunting kit (Janie wd. look fine in a tall hat and breeches) taking a fence together. What would attract me most about riding, viz. the unity of man and beast, is, I suppose, largely spoiled by having to use hired horses. But if you find you like it I suppose you could easily afford a horse of your own, if Lea knows anything about the care of a horse. Certainly I should enjoy very much strolling round with you to visit it in its stable. I haven’t read the new De La Mare, (#ulink_c460bb30-c78e-502f-be5e-cf304bdd7d53) but probably shall. Galsworthy, though I fully acknowledge his merits, I somehow never feel any desire to return to. Warnie feels quite differently and the original Saga (#ulink_907c00c9-837b-58ad-9276-446c8acc8365) is one of his old favourites which he can always read again. I forget whether I mentioned to you Collier’s Poor Tom’s A-cold (#ulink_407f5093-eb60-588a-b6c3-680eb8231aff) as the new book I have enjoyed most for a long time. Did I (also) tell you that Warnie has complete sets of all the Beethoven symphonies, and that we have a whole symphony each Sunday evening? This is one of the best hours of the week. Maureen who is (to be frank) the difficult one of the household has by then returned to Monmouth from her week end at home: the rush and crowd of visitors and continual flurry of the week end subsides and after a quiet supper Minto, Warnie, Mr Papworth and myself sit down in the study and have our music. In this way we have worked through the first Seven, and it was my recollections of the Seventh (last Sunday) which made me mention the matter—just to let you know that I had once more been enjoying what I still think the best slow movement there is, and, of course, enjoying it all the more because of the associations. I don’t however think the Seventh quite satisfactory as a whole: the final movement is by no means one of the best, and still less is it fit to follow the other. So far I think the Fifth quite easily the best, thus agreeing with the orthodox view: tho’ I differ from it in finding the Eroica the poorest of the lot. (#ulink_9fbcb4e0-7d89-517e-a7ee-9a78848f1875) The Eroica (the connection is Napoleon) leads me to what you say about Germany. I might agree that the Allies are partly to blame, but nothing can fully excuse the iniquity of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, or the absurdity of his theoretical position. Did you see that he said ‘The Jews have made no contribution to human culture and in crushing them I am doing the will of the Lord.’ Now as the whole idea of the ‘Will of the Lord’ is precisely what the world owes to the Jews, the blaspheming tyrant has just fixed his absurdity for all to see in a single sentence, and shown that he is as contemptible for his stupidity as he is detestable for his cruelty. For the German people as a whole we ought to have charity: but for dictators, ‘Nordic’ tyrants and so on—well, read the chapter about Mr Savage in the Regress (#ulink_981920fe-531c-5853-b35a-e165c7be27db) and you have my views. I wish you didn’t always choose summer for your visits here. The place is to day at its best: the pond a smooth almost black sheet, sprinkled, or rather paved with bright leaves: the little birch wood flaming on the far side, and the hill and fir wood beyond fading into mist. Yes—the weather is alright now and I am getting all those fine feelings of revival—beginning to take longer walks again, remembering how much mere branch and sky and hedge ought to mean to one, and noticing suddenly for how long one has been only half awake. Write again soon. Love to Mrs Greeves. Yours, Jack TO DAPHNE HARWOOD (BOD): Magdalen College, Oxford. Dec 28th 1933 Dear Mrs Harwood I don’t know when I have been so rude to anyone as I have been to you after my long silence since I stayed with you. The truth is that if Cecil had not lent me Popelbaum’s book, (#ulink_fdb9a46e-3d06-57b7-bd3a-d7fbf9c591a7) I should have behaved better. I followed the ignis fatuus (#ulink_b0ecd6ec-e14b-5c73-b6ca-3cc9fedf0179) of postponing my letter until I could include some remarks on reading the book—then the time for reading the book did’nt come as soon as I expected—and so here we are. I have now read it and am very much impressed. A good deal of it, of course, is difficult to one so ignorant of science as I am, but it is all interesting and, I expect, deserves most serious consideration. Has any notice been taken of it in ‘orthodox’ scientific circles? What particularly stuck in my mind—more as a tragedy than as a theorem—is the illustrated ‘rake’s progress’ of the Chimpanzee. What a subject for a poem! By the bye I have met a young philosophical tutor at New College (Crossland) (#ulink_62c5e3cd-1029-5272-b6e2-6fda24cfa91f) who seems—which is rare at Oxford—to be well informed about Anthroposophy, and sympathetic tho’ not converted. I think that is really more important for you than an out and out convert would be: it is a great point gained when a movement begins to be treated with respect by those who are not members of it. Incidentally, he is in several ways the most intelligent new acquaintance I have made for several years. I hope you have not misinterpreted my long silence. I have the most grateful memories of my last week end with you and value the novel honour of my God-sibbe (#ulink_4c746efb-aa40-524d-84e3-c20f6a19bc44) very much. How is my godson? I hope his laughing all through the service does not mean that he is going to grow up an esprit fort: but as soon as he is old enough I shall try to collaborate with you in preventing this. How is Stein?—a man I would like to meet again. And how is yourself and the guideman (#ulink_63523b0b-fe93-5800-bcde-1fa058176af1) and the children? We are all pretty well, though Mrs. Moore is almost worn out with the Christmas charities, which ‘an autumn ’twas that grew the more by reaping.’ (#ulink_f0720c38-d43b-5529-a225-ffb91401869e) We would all very much like to see you at the Kilns again when you can manage it. I have been disgustingly busy for a long long time: each year jobs seem to increase on one—as no doubt you find. Please give Cecil my love and accept all our best wishes for the new year. Yours (penitent) C. S. Lewis 1 (#u0af1236a-33e8-53a9-9eb8-26f2d9251311) See Guy Noel Pocock in the Biographical Appendix. Pocock was the editor for J. M. Dent of The Pilgrim’s Regress. 2 (#ulink_3f1de02d-13e7-5489-a8bc-56a2e363cfe1) Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. d. 297, fol. 27. 3 (#ulink_1a8ec310-c347-51d4-9ee1-7b409fbbb3ad) ibid., fol. 28. Lewis’s original title, which appeared on the proofs, was The Pilgrim’s Regress, or Pseudo-Bunyan’s Periplus: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. 4 (#ulink_3422dfab-bef2-59c4-9ac6-2a31148ccac5) In Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia (1823). ‘Elia’ was a name Lamb adopted for himself. 5 (#ulink_f1a39b8a-bf1a-5342-8f59-88bf8e830804) This was J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit: or There and Back Again, parts of which were probably rewritten before it was published in 1937. 6 (#ulink_c27c439a-5f00-5baa-9b5a-bffcd7f407ba) Mary McQueen McEldowney, ‘The Fairy Tales and Fantasies of George MacDonald’ (1934). A copy is in the Bodleian Library, MSS B. Litt. d. 257. 7 (#ulink_98dcb92c-9b35-570e-a62e-331fa067315e) The title was shortened to The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. 8 (#ulink_98dcb92c-9b35-570e-a62e-331fa067315e) James Adams McNeill (1853–1907), who had been Lewis’s mother’s leather at the Methodist College, Belfast, was Headmaster of Campbell College, 1890–1907. He and his wife, Margaret Cunningham McNeill, lived in Strandtown with their daughter Jane (‘Tchainie’) McNeill, a close friend of Lewis and Arthur Greeves. 9 (#ulink_e92b32c3-db89-5a55-aa0a-15c593dec778) Lewis is referring to the book eventually published as The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936). 10 (#ulink_0fa61b0c-dd9a-5d38-ba1e-0d52aab5c147) See Nevill Coghill (1899–1980) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Coghill, a member of the Inklings, was Fellow of English at Exeter College, Oxford, 1924–57, and Merton Professor of English Literature, 1957–66. 11 (#ulink_a6e8277c-9787-5dda-a4e7-ed1de2acc230) John Norman Bryson (1896–1976) was born in Portadown, Co. Armagh, and educated at the Queen’s University, Belfast, and at Merton College, Oxford, taking his BA from Oxford in 1922. He was a lecturer in English at Balliol, Merton and Oriel College, 1923–1940, and Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Balliol College, 1940–63. 12 (#ulink_8f22bb7e-6ad0-5571-85d3-d954d247c9a4) Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (1844). 13 (#ulink_d16110df-bc73-5b5e-91bb-bd8a99fcdd79) Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess (1847), part 4, song (added 1850): ‘The horns of elfland faintly blowing!’ 14 (#ulink_ed565504-f7e5-5c19-ae68-77263fb72bc8) John Buchan, The Three Hostages [1924]. 15 (#ulink_ed565504-f7e5-5c19-ae68-77263fb72bc8) Arthur Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, The Land-Locked Lake [1932]. 16 (#ulink_91114ae3-04f6-5631-b7fc-9f8dc26b8bea) He is imagining a comment his father might make. 17 (#ulink_eff88a19-a84c-5a67-bd5a-d0b18dc59c41) He is referring to Hanbury-Sparrow’s The Land-Locked Lake, mentioned in the letter to Arthur Greeves of 25 March 1933. 18 (#ulink_eff88a19-a84c-5a67-bd5a-d0b18dc59c41) There is no true English equivalent. Essentially Lewis meant ‘sympathy for the living’ (more literally is a desire to encourage growth or nourishment). 19 (#ulink_3bde71a8-ea9e-529e-b6ec-c4a14d1012c9) Hanbury-Sparrow, The Land-locked Lake, Part I, ch. 3, p. 287: ‘Sometimes it frightened you, this terrific power that discipline held over modern men. We’d get our drafts of reluctant but sensible conscripts, and of returned wounded undergoing God alone knew what agonies of fear, and in a few weeks we’d turn them into troops as brave, if not as skilful, as any the battalion had ever had. Once an officer knew the trick of it, it was all so terribly easy.’ 20 (#ulink_3bde71a8-ea9e-529e-b6ec-c4a14d1012c9) ibid., Part I, ch. 5, p. 60: ‘Spirit wept, for it knew that the reign of materialism, of metal against flesh, would henceforth have to rule.’ 21 (#ulink_b65d0092-e985-5471-9cde-8a191e3990bc) ‘a commander hateful to the gods’. Aristophanes Peace, line 1172. 22 (#ulink_b65d0092-e985-5471-9cde-8a191e3990bc) Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928). 23 (#ulink_0c088cb9-b4a9-5bb4-949e-43e7b09f7f41) Owen Barfield, ‘The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, Anthroposophy, 7 (Christmas 1932), pp. 385–404. Reprinted in Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age (1944). 24 (#ulink_0c088cb9-b4a9-5bb4-949e-43e7b09f7f41) Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age, p. 149: ‘His extraordinarily unifying mind was too painfully aware that you cannot really say one thing correctly without saying everything. He was rightly afraid that there would not be time to say everything before going on to say the next thing, or that he would forget to do so afterwards. His incoherence of expression arose from the coherence of what he wanted to express. It was a sort of intellectual stammer.’ 25 (#ulink_0c088cb9-b4a9-5bb4-949e-43e7b09f7f41) ibid., pp. 155–6. In his Treatise on Logic, says Barfield, Coleridge ‘points out how the world of grammar subsists between the two poles of verb and noun, the one expressing activity and the other passivity, the one an action and the other a state… We may think of grammar as a sort of world revolving about an axis. Only in the axis itself do the two poles coincide. And what is this axis? It is the verb “to be” itself.’ 26 (#ulink_0c088cb9-b4a9-5bb4-949e-43e7b09f7f41) ibid., p. 57: ‘Sameness and Difference are the positive and negative aspects—of what? Of Likeness.’ 27 (#ulink_0c088cb9-b4a9-5bb4-949e-43e7b09f7f41) ibid., p. 162: ‘Coleridge points out the startling metamorphosis of outward form which characterizes nature’s transition to the next stage of animal existence. The exuberant complexity of structure typical of the insect disappears altogether from the surface, having been withdrawn to the interior parts of the body…Nature sinks back exhausted from the line which she has hitherto been following and in her repose gathers strength for her newest creation—consciousness.’ 28 (#ulink_12f8fe3b-66b5-533e-8f8f-25ba2a420fae) See Daphne Harwood in the Biographical Appendix. 29 (#ulink_214d28ec-1136-5539-958a-217fdf6d6e7c) This was Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957), whose works include (with I. A. Richards) The Meaning of Meaning (1923), Basic English (1930) and The Basic Words (1932). Lewis disliked The Meaning of Meaning for reasons given in his essay ‘Bluspels and Flalansferes’ in SLE. 30 (#ulink_9d85a7a4-bfa4-5aba-8e29-6a6d9f8bad15) Lewis is referring to his ‘Great War’ with Owen Barfield over Anthroposophy, and the document into which Lewis put many of his arguments, known as the ‘Summa’. See footnote 35 to the letter to Barfield of 16 March 1932. 31 (#ulink_9d85a7a4-bfa4-5aba-8e29-6a6d9f8bad15) Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), Italian philosopher and critic, whose aesthetics were profoundly influential in Italy before the Second World War. Lewis was probably referring to Croce’s most important work. Aesthetics as the Science of Expression and General Linguistics (1902). 32 (#ulink_bd5a6f59-0b48-5e82-8b26-71ada9c1097a) Daphne Harwood’s father had thought of buying the house, Tewsfield, which almost adjoined The Kilns. The house was bought shortly after this by Mrs Alice Griggs. See note 123 to the letter to Warnie of 2 October 1939. 33 (#ulink_0a47b16c-a430-5cb2-9215-bf5277336451) John Collier, Tom’s A-Cold: A Tale (1933). 34 (#ulink_0a47b16c-a430-5cb2-9215-bf5277336451) William Morris, The Roots of the Mountains (1890). 35 (#ulink_c8b655a5-a9ec-5369-95b7-9af280e121fa) The ‘Scotch uncles’ were the two brothers of Albert Lewis, William Lewis (1859–1946) and Richard Lewis (b. 1861). After William lost his job with the Belfast Ropeworks, in 1883 he and his brother went to Glasgow where they entered into partnership as W. & R. Lewis, Rope and Twine Manufacturers. The two brothers lived close together in the coastal town of Helensburgh, north-west of Glasgow. See The Lewis Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. 36 (#ulink_6dff029d-af97-502c-a3a7-16ae196bbb34) They saw Wagner’s Das Rheingold at Covent Garden on 2 May. There is an account of the performance in The Times (3 May 1933), p. 12. * (#ulink_6dff029d-af97-502c-a3a7-16ae196bbb34) Sounds as if this were the cause of the breakdown! 37 (#ulink_9b183604-3a51-5702-84c6-3f14e4230c1d) Thomas Rice Henn (1901–74) was educated at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he took a BA in 1922. He was Fellow of English at St Catharine’s College, 1926–69 and Reader in Anglo-Irish Literature. His books include Longinus and English Criticism (1934) and The Bible as Literature (1970). 38 (#ulink_e48c0cdd-4baa-5ba8-89e8-79c0b33943f1) A copy of The Pilgrim’s Regress. Professor Henn kept this letter inside the cover of that book. 39 (#ulink_e48c0cdd-4baa-5ba8-89e8-79c0b33943f1) William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (1623), III, iv, 247–9: ‘Dismount thy tuck, be yare in thy preparation, for thy assailant is quick, skilful, and deadly.’ 40 (#ulink_6ed4ba73-d6d7-5fbc-affd-163e74beb67c) See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix. Lewis was her tutor in English although Mary Shelley was a member of St Hugh’s College. This letter of 21 July 1933 was written after she had taken a Fourth in English. 41 (#ulink_fc6b6d3f-b391-5c96-ac6d-a4f8cae009fb) The language paper was on Anglo-Saxon which was marked with an ‘NS’ (‘non satis’ meaning ‘not satisfactory’ and a ? (D) which is the lowest grade that can be given. Clearly, Anglo-Saxon was her undoing. 42 (#ulink_567e04ac-a689-5340-8e13-14eef092fc89) Eduard Habich. 43 (#ulink_9fedecb5-a615-597a-b964-dcb045da32bd) The stage play, Cavalcade, about contemporary British history, was written by No?l Coward and first performed in 1932. It was made into a film by Frank Lloyd in 1933, and was so popular that a command performance was given at Windsor Castle before King George V and Queen Mary on 2 May 1933. 44 (#ulink_81e11583-1cf2-5e24-8621-e21084ab2ae8) 4 August. 45 (#ulink_a4153f42-ee1a-5980-b69c-96479d5fca3d) 7 August. 46 (#ulink_14832e1e-04fb-5db3-9ef5-ce79572a1bb0) The stained-glass window designed for St Mark’s, Dundela, which Jack and Warnie had erected in memory of their parents. See note 60 to the letter to Warnie of 22 November 1931. 47 (#ulink_14832e1e-04fb-5db3-9ef5-ce79572a1bb0) i.e. Charles Gordon Ewart (1885–1936) who married Lily Greeves, sister of Arthur Greeves. He was the second son of Lewis’s mother’s cousins. Sir William Quartus Ewart (1844–1919) and Lady Ewart (1849–1929) who lived near Little Lea in a house named Glenmachan. They are referred to in SBJ, ch. 3 and elsewhere as ‘Cousin Quartus’ and ‘Lady E’. They had four other children: Robert Heard ‘Bob’ Ewart (1879–1939); Hope Ewart (1882–1934); Kelso ‘Kelsie’ Ewart (1886–1966); and Gundreda ‘Gunny’ Ewart (1888–1978). See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. 48 (#ulink_ce64bdd6-0a15-5547-baf4-6d20660dcf07) Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, book V, ‘Arthur’s War with Lucius’. 49 (#ulink_1ee55b50-2e50-5ffb-853f-a7f7e3bd6d24) George MacDonald, Lilith: A Romance (1895). 50 (#ulink_1ee55b50-2e50-5ffb-853f-a7f7e3bd6d24) MacDonald, Lilith: A Romance, with introductory key, a paraphrase of an earlier manuscript version, and explanation of notes by Greville MacDonald (1924). 51 (#ulink_a40452e8-11c4-58ce-915d-3f4249805221)King Kong (1933), in which a film producer goes on safari and brings back a giant ape which causes terror to New York. 52 (#ulink_a40452e8-11c4-58ce-915d-3f4249805221) Paul-Alexandre Janet, Histoire de la Science Politique dans ses Rapports avec la Morale (1872). 53 (#ulink_a707edd4-f007-54c9-84dc-f05ce6d6eb0e) James Stephens, The Crock of Gold (1912). 54 (#ulink_1e6b9f2f-138e-5e02-b5ec-281d6b938db5) John 1:5. 55 (#ulink_94beba99-5a25-5249-b051-18d3b1682b5f) In J. M. Barrie’s play, Mary Rose (1920), Mary Rose while visiting the Hebrides is spirited away by Elvish voices calling her name, although angel voices try to counteract them. 56 (#ulink_daba607c-7cfb-5754-8fdf-a77d9baf82ee) MacDonald, Lilith, ch. 39. 57 (#ulink_ea53f9c8-a96c-54a7-be2f-73d5414e4c96) Voltaire, Candide (1759). 58 (#ulink_ea53f9c8-a96c-54a7-be2f-73d5414e4c96) Charles Gore, Jesus of Nazareth, Home University Library (1929). 59 (#ulink_fc889df9-200c-5eff-83ae-a7e2cd6ec0cd) Jane (‘Janie’ or ‘Tchainie’) McNeill (1889–1959), the daughter of James and Margaret McNeill, would have liked to go to university, but remained at home to look after her widowed mother. See the biography of Jane McNeill in CG. 60 (#ulink_fc889df9-200c-5eff-83ae-a7e2cd6ec0cd) Lewis had been working on The Allegory of Love since 1928. See the letter to Albert Lewis of 10 July 1928 (CL I, pp. 766–7). 61 (#ulink_70a10e8b-aa9f-5349-aef2-3aa72ea0e9a7) Walter de la Mare, The Fleeting, and Other Poems (1933). 62 (#ulink_70a10e8b-aa9f-5349-aef2-3aa72ea0e9a7) John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (1922). 63 (#ulink_70a10e8b-aa9f-5349-aef2-3aa72ea0e9a7) i.e. Collier, Tom’s A-Cold. 64 (#ulink_163fbc84-1367-5406-8495-2fe7302d24b4) Of the nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), the ‘Eroica’, composed to celebrate the memory of Napoleon, is No. 3. 65 (#ulink_1f6d1add-3c65-5269-8a90-737b22097a3b) The Pilgrim’s Regress, book VI, ch. 6. 66 (#ulink_a0e2f2c3-9176-517e-a337-a18740520b20) Hermann Poppelbaum, Man and Animal: Their Essential Difference, trans. Edith Rigby and Owen Barfield (1931). 67 (#ulink_a0e2f2c3-9176-517e-a337-a18740520b20) ‘will-o’-the-wisp’, lit. ‘the foolish fire’. 68 (#ulink_888cee58-b652-50b2-9977-f5ca04fb0cd7) Richard Howard Stafford Crossman (1907–74), who took a double First in Classics at New College, Oxford, was Fellow and Tutor of Philosophy at New College, 1930–7. He became the assistant editor of the New Statesman and Nation in 1938 but in 1940 was drafted into the Ministry of Economic Warfare to organize the British propaganda effort against Hitler’s Germany. He was elected MP for Coventry East in 1945, holding the seat until 1974, and was appointed Minister for Housing and Local Government by Harold Wilson in 1964. His three-volume Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (1975–7), the first of which was published shortly after his death, were followed by The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman (1981). 69 (#ulink_48b7e4e5-c0b8-5468-97bd-6d8d99b682f5) His position as godfather to the Harwoods’ son, Laurence. See Laurence Hardy Harwood in the Biographical Appendix. 70 (#ulink_9ab8e38c-d6b5-5759-8766-7bc461bcb7ee) The ‘guideman’, ‘gudeman’ or ‘goodman’ means husband or head of the house. 71 (#ulink_9ab8e38c-d6b5-5759-8766-7bc461bcb7ee) William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1606–7), V, ii, 87–8. 1934 (#ulink_6b2302c3-ba9b-5d39-8480-6df29b8b9f74) Maureen Moore had acquired a car and in April 1934 she took Lewis and her mother on a motor tour of parts of England and Ireland, stopping to visit Arthur Greeves in Belfast. TO HIS BROTHER (W): [2 Princess Villas, Bayview Park, Kilkeel, Co. Down] April 3rd 1934 My dear W., This is turning out a great success. Even the journey was pleasant as far as Chester. There Maureen discovered that she still had far too much petrol, and time, so we used up both by going round through Warrington and Runcorn—the most hideous Morlockheim (#ulink_f329f4dc-433a-5a45-aa03-59b6c41b4851) you can imagine. Lime Street Hotel, where we had hoped to lounge for a few hours, is now shut up, all except the Grill: another landmark gone. On the way to Bernagh next morning I noticed a new big house half way up the hill, in the field by the Glenmachan quarry. I had an excellent morning with Arthur, who at last has something wrong with him: an internal narrowing, poor man, almost amounting to a stoppage. His mother does not know about it, I think: and, paradoxically, tho’ not unprecedently, he is taking it with fortitude. Lunch, for which Minto and Maureen arrived, was enlivened by Minto upsetting a tumbler, but was not otherwise so amusing as I had anticipated—tho’ Maureen dropped a brick at the outset by saying that ‘Of course, Co. Down isn’t real Ireland.’ The drive down from town was a pure joy. I took them by Comber, Downpatrick, Dundrum, and Newcastle. Maureen rather affected to sniff at the countryside for the first few miles, but the Mournes knocked all that out of her. Kilkeel itself is, I think, among the two or three most beautiful places I have ever been. It is on a point or flat tongue which spreads out almost eight miles from the foot hills of the mountains. This distance is a positive advantage as it saves you from the darkness and obtrusiveness of mountains too near and also gives you a huge panorama of blue and jagged shapes which you couldn’t have closer. The coup d’oeil (#ulink_c0b37f84-82b0-5a55-b59f-c9411adec2b0) suggests the Tyrol rather than anything else: if it were not for the middle distance of white cottages, fir clumps, stone walls & flax ponds—and the foreground of Fakerty’s Spirit Grocery, Orange Hall etc—I should hardly believe I was in Ulster. In a word, for varied pleasure (the scale runs from a mountain like a castle ten miles off to a silent harbour full of apparently dead schooners and one puffer half a mile off) this is just the best place I have struck for years. I very much wish we were not moving to Rostrevor tomorrow. I am strongly upholding this house as a place for a family holiday in August. It is a dingy, faded place with the indescribable smell of all Irish lodging houses, but all the important things are right, i.e. light that you can really read by, comfortable chairs, very good beds, hot baths, and a capital chapter house round the corner. The landlady was rather too talkative at the beginning but we see less of her now. (Memo—Canon Hayes was rector of Kilkeel before he went to St Marks ‘He was a very queer man. He did awfully crazy things’) You were wrong in supposing that I would be attending the Easter celebration at the same time as you: they have it at 8.30 instead of 8, which is an excellent idea. We had quite a good congregation. At the 11.30 service we had a very large one. I had quite forgotten the most unpleasant feature of an Irish service—the large number of people present who have obviously no interest in the thing, who are merely ‘good prodestants’. You know what one is supposed to find—‘the spirit of worship which burns all the brighter in the stark simplicity of the service etc.’ (#ulink_c83d2e06-ae42-5ee6-82a7-692b5271d6e0) In fact, one finds something that to my present eyes looks like studied indifference. I am sure the English practice of not going unless you believe is a much better one. The Rector, ‘the Reverend Belton’ is a poor creature. (#ulink_1cff5b50-0f16-5a43-8d9e-db32ac8ddbc7) I saw a lovely thing done yesterday on the lines of ‘Give me a bottle of soda water.’ (#ulink_fbe53c65-564c-52b8-a0c3-bcc2eb6fcb69) An elderly labourer had been standing for several minutes with his back to the bar on which rested his empty tumbler. Without moving, or even turning his eyes from the window, he whispered reflectively ‘Anither pint.’ The barman instantly filled his glass with porter and added a large tot from a bottle of spirits. The customer never looked round during the whole transaction. Minto is frightfully sorry about Vera. It is not a practical joke nor was it intended. Yours Jack P.S. Leeboro’ garden is a paradise of daffodils: it has never looked so well before, I must confess TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W): Rostrevor, Co. Down [4 April 1934] My dear Griffiths, A wet day—and a cold—and this delightful sea and mountain village where I have been spending my holiday, seems a good occasion for answering your most welcome letter. I think our positions about Pantheism are exactly the same: for we both, in places, travelled the same road to Christianity, and the result of the arrival is certainly not any ingratitude or contempt to the various signposts or hostelries that helped on the journey. On the contrary, it is only since I have become a Christian that I have learned really to value the elements of truth in Paganism and Idealism. I wished to value them in the old days; now I really do. Don’t suppose that I ever thought myself that certain elements of pantheism were incompatible with Christianity or with Catholicism. What I did think—and still do think—was that an influential school of thought both in your church and mine—were very antagonistic to Idealism, (#ulink_ee3992c3-f226-5a5f-9507-8df85ba38d33) and in fact were availing themselves of a general secular reaction against 19th century thought, to run something which they call Neo-Scholasticism (#ulink_48633bd0-40a6-5c0c-b75f-0a46c256a1b3) as the cure for all our evils. The people I mean are led by Maritain (#ulink_a601c1b9-4c86-5885-86bb-7b25984716cb) on your side and by T. S. Eliot on ours. Perhaps I over-rate their importance. I hope I do, for I confess there is no section of religious opinion with which I feel less sympathy. Indeed I consider that it is no overstatement to say that your Church and mine are, at the moment, closest to each other where each is at its worst. God forgive me if I do them wrong, but there are some of this set who seem to me to be anxious to make of the Christian faith itself one more of their high brow fads. Then their ignorance! As if there ever was any such thing as ‘scholasticism’ as a doctrine! But enough of this. The question of ‘generality’ in prayer is not so simple. The doctrine held by your own Church about the position of the virtuous heretic or pagan—I need hardly say that I use both the word virtuous and the word heretic positionis causa—is, you will find, far from crude. Is it not held that many who have lived and died outside the visible Church are finally saved, because Divine Grace has guided them to concentrate solely on the true elements in their own religions? (#ulink_63f320bf-92d7-5531-af98-91bbcb11b020) And if so, must one not admit that it was the mysterious will of God that these persons should be saved in that peculiar way? I use this argument to point out that even such a comparatively general prayer as that for a man’s conversion, may yet be too particular. And while I am on the subject, I had better say once and for all that I do not intend to discuss with you in future, if I can help it, any of the questions at issue between our respective churches. It would have the same unreality as those absurd conversations in which we are invited to speak frankly to a woman about some indelicate matter—wh. means that she can say what she likes and we can’t. I could not, now that you are a monk, use that freedom in attacking your position which you undoubtedly would use in attacking mine. I do not think there is any thing distressing for either of us in agreeing to be silent on this matter: I have had a Catholic among my most intimate friends for many years (#ulink_5fc24e1e-9128-52e9-bfcf-e94d9fdc493a) and a great deal of our conversation has been religious. When all is said (and truly said) about the divisions of Christendom, there remains, by God’s mercy, an enormous common ground. It is abstaining from one tree in the whole garden. I should rather like to attend your Greek class, for it is a perpetual puzzle to me how New Testament Greek got the reputation of being easy. St Luke I find particularly difficult. As regards matter—leaving the question of language—you will be glad to hear that I am at last beginning to get some small understanding of St Paul: hitherto an author quite opaque to me. I am speaking now, of course, of the general drift of whole epistles: short passages, treated devotionally, are of course another matter. And yet the distinction is not, for me, quite a happy one. Devotion is best raised when we intend something else. At least that is my experience. Sit down to meditate devotionally on a single verse, and nothing happens. Hammer your way through a continued argument, just as you would in a profane writer, and the heart will sometimes sing unbidden. I think I agree with you that ‘historical research’ as now understood, is no work for a monk, nor for a man either. To all that side of my own work I attach less and less importance: yet I become each year more contented in the actual teaching and lecturing. I have very little doubt now that the work is worth doing. It is true that neither the terms of my appointment nor my own stature allow me to teach the most important things: but on the lower level there is honest work to be done in eradicating false habits of mind and teaching the elements of reason herself, and English Literature is as good a subject as any other. I should be in a bad way by now if I had been allowed to follow my own desire and be a research fellow with no pupils. As it is, nearly every generation leaves me one permanent friend. Please accept my thanks, and convey them to the Prior, for your offered hospitality. Some week end in the long Vacation would suit me best, and I should like to come. Yours C. S. Lewis P.S. This has some relevance both to the questions of Prayer and Idealism. I wrote it over a year ago. They tell me, Lord, that when I seemTo be in speech with You, Since You make no replies, it’s all a dream—One talker aping two. And so it is, but not as theyFalsely believe. For ISeek in myself the things I meant to say, And lo!, the wells are dry. Then, seeing me empty, You forsakeThe listener’s part, and throughMy dumb lips breathe and into utterance wakeThe thoughts I never knew. Therefore You neither need replyNor can: for while we seemTwo talking, Thou art one forever; and INo dreamer, but Thy dream. (#ulink_5156b3a4-2e32-501e-8d76-caa20c81a58a) For months Jack, Warnie, Tolkien, Barfield and Harwood had been planning to attend a festival of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung at Covent Garden in London. Cecil Harwood was appointed to book tickets for the party, and in preparation jack and Warnie were meeting regularly with Tolkien to read the operas in German. The opportunity of seeing the whole Ring cycle meant so much to Lewis that he reminded Harwood of the important commission placed upon him: TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): Magdalen College Oxford [April 1934] Dear Harwood It is vain to conceal from you the solicitude we feel for our seats at Co. Garden. Pray, pray, Sir, exert yourself. Reflect that no small part of the satisfaction of five persons depends upon your conduct: that the object of their desires is rational and innocent: and that their desires are fervent and of long standing. Omit no manly degree of importunity and complaisance that may achieve our object, and thus, my dear Sir, give me one more reason to subscribe myself your most obliged most obedient servant C. S. Lewis For some reason Harwood failed to book seats for the Ring of the Nibelung. On learning of this Lewis sent him the following letter: TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): Magdalen College Oxford May 7th 1934 Sir, I have read your pathetical letter with such sentiments as it naturally suggests and write to assure you that you need expect from me no ungenerous reproach. It would be cruel, if it were possible, and impossible, if it were attempted, to add to the mortification which you must now be supposed to suffer. Where I cannot console, it is far from my purpose to aggravate: for it is part of the complicated misery of your state that while I pity your sufferings, I cannot innocently wish them lighter. He would be no friend to your reason or your virtue who would wish you to pass over so great a miscarriage in heartless frivolity or brutal insensibility. As the loss is irretrievable, so your remorse will be lasting. As those whom you have betrayed are your friends, so your conduct admits of no exculpation. As you were once virtuous, so now you must be forever miserable. Far be it from me that ferocious virtue which would remind you that the trust was originally transferred from Barfield to you in the hope of better things, and that thus both our honours were engaged. I will not paint to you the consequences of your conduct which are doubtless daily and nightly before your eyes. Believe, my dear Sir, that I forgive you. As soon as you can, pray let me know through some respectable acquaintance what plans you have formed for the future. In what quarter of the globe do you intend to sustain that irrevocable exile, hopeless penury, and perpetual disgrace to which you have condemned yourself? Do not give in to the sin of Despair: learn from this example the fatal consequences of error and hope, in some humbler station and some distant land, that you may yet become useful to your species. Yours etc C. S. Lewis TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): [Magdalen College] May 16th 1934 Sir Your resolution of seeing me and receiving my forgiveness face to face before you forever quit these shores does not displease me. As you have rightly judged, to admit you to my house would now be an offence against the grand Principle of Subordination, but you will be welcome to the grounds—flumina ames silvasque inglorius. (#ulink_4c6f4dbc-c530-5c0e-a004-64c928bb4952) You will please to observe the strictest propriety of behaviour while you remain there, and to be guided in everything by the directions of Mr. Barfield. Under his protection I doubt not that you will be able to achieve the journey without any great disaster or indecency. Do not hold any communication with your fellow travellers in the steam-train without his approval: where you bait, (#ulink_04c9b736-ba36-5d80-88ab-d15d83557cb0) you had best abstain from all use of fermented liquours. Many things lawful in themselves are to be denied to one who dare not risk a further miscarriage. Above all, do not attempt to save your guinea by travelling under the seat, nor to shorten your journey by any approaches to familiarity with your female fellow passages. Do not bring with you any musical instrument. Your obedient servant C. S. Lewis TO SISTER MADELEVA (W): (#ulink_05359fda-05c6-55a4-8c24-cd81c3d4112d) Magdalen College, Oxford. June 6th [1934] Dear Madam, This is just to let you know that I have your letter and will answer it in the course of the next few days. But I should warn you that what you apparently expect to lie behind the lecture is both more and other than is really there. In lecturing to students who know nothing about the middle ages I have had to be clear and brief, therefore dogmatic: and I have probably—tho’ I hope this was not my intention—appeared much more learned than I am. Yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis TO SISTER MADELEVA (W): Magdalen College, Oxford, June 7th 1934 Dear Madam, In answer to your first question, there are probably such printed bibliographies as you mention but I have no knowledge of them. The history of my lecture is this. After having worked for some years on my own subject (which is the medieval allegory), I found that I had accumulated a certain amount of general information which, tho far from being very recondite, was more than the ordinary student in the school could gather for himself. I then conceived the idea of my ‘prolegomena’. (#ulink_98bd1ab8-fd29-5fc5-b8ea-f498f23fa62b) There were however several gaps in the general knowledge which I had accidentally got. To fill these up I adopted the simple method of going through Skeat’s notes on Chaucer and Langland, (#ulink_70774f6a-596f-5a1a-9742-4472bba99efd) and other similar things, and followed these up to their sources when they touched on matters that seemed to me important. This led me sometimes to books I already knew, often to new ones. This process explains why I inevitably appear more learned than I am. E.g. my quotations from Vincent of Beauvais (#ulink_018be8ef-b52e-5c11-b9a1-7bd361051d7f) don’t mean that I turned from a long reading of Beauvais to illustrate Chaucer, but that I turned from Chaucer to find explanations in Vincent. In fine, the process is inductive for the most part of my lecture: tho’ on allegory, courtly love, and (sometimes) in philosophy, it is deductive—i.e. I start from the authors I quote. I elaborate this point because, if you are thinking of doing the same kind of thing (i.e. telling people what they ought to know as the prius of a study of medieval vernacular poets) I think you would be wise to work in the same way—starting from the texts you want to explain. You will soon find of course that you are working the other way at the same time, that you can correct current explanations, or see things to explain where the ordinary editors see nothing. I suppose I need not remind you to cultivate the wisdom of the serpent: there will be misquotations, and misunderstood quotations in the best books, and you must always hunt up all quotations for yourself and find what they are really in situ. But of course, I do not know what it is you propose to do. I have therefore mentioned all the more important ‘sources’ in my note-book without any attempt at selection. You will see at once that this is the bibliography of a man who was following a particular subject (the love-allegory), and this doubtless renders the list much less useful to you, who are hardly likely to be after the same quarry. In the second part, texts, I have been more selective, and have omitted a certain amount of low or lowish Latin love poetry which is useful only for my own special purpose. You will observe that I begin with classical authors. This is a point I would press on anyone dealing with the middle ages, that the first essential is to read the relevant classics over and over: the key to everything—allegory, courtly love etc—is there. After that the two things to know really well are the Divine Comedy and the Romance of the Rose. (#ulink_ab82c67e-d4b4-5eb3-9e30-8f2355d27ff4) The student who has really digested these,* (#ulink_e965522e-66a3-5b2f-b1a4-64c001c58ea9) with good commentaries, and who also knows the Classics and the Bible (including the apocryphal New Testament) has the game in his hands, and can defeat over and over again those who have simply burrowed in obscure parts of the actual middle ages. Of scholastic philosophy and theology you probably know much more than I do. If by any chance you don’t, stick to Gilson (#ulink_4a176694-c244-5931-9b93-709ffc9e8452) as a guide and beware of the people (Maritain in your Church, and T. S. Eliot of mine) who are at present running what they call ‘neo-scholasticism’ as a fad. Of Periodicals you will find Romania, Speculum and Medium Aevum useful. Remember (this has been all important to me) that what you want to know about the Middle Ages will often not be in a book on the Middle Ages, but in the early chapters of some history of general philosophy or science. The accounts of your period in such books will, of course, usually be patronizing and ill-informed, but it will mention dates and authors whom you can follow up and thus put you in the way of writing a true account for yourself. If there is any way in which I can assist you, or if you would care to call and discuss anything with me, do not hesitate to let me know. Yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis TO SISTER MADELEVA (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. June 11th [1934] Dear Madam, Thanks for your letter. You make too much of a very trifling service. If I am ever in those parts (which is unlikely) I will certainly brave the ‘terrors of convents’ and accept your kind hospitality. Yours sincerely C. S. Lewis TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): [The Kilns] Oct 1st. 1934 My dear Arthur, I am sending you back Pope Hadrian. (#ulink_3f5cadd6-eb2a-572b-8fc1-7b51951cfe78) Warnie and I have both read it with a good deal of amusement and enjoyment. The latter is due, I suppose, entirely to the subject—for everyone likes to imagine what a man could do if he were a dictator, or Pope, or Caliph-; the amusement is mainly at the author’s expence. The style is one of the most preposterous I have ever read, and I doubt if I ever saw so much pedantry combined with so much ignorance. Almost every one of his numerous and unnecessary Greek quotations contains some mistake: and in English he seems to think that euphuism means euphemism and that verisimilar means very similar. He is a queer fish—a man with a grievance, obviously: a sincere Catholic who hates almost everything and everybody with which Catholicism is associated: specially France and Ireland. He must have been a most disagreeable man. We had a most interesting journey back. We drove from Heysham across the back of England to Lincoln. A great deal of this route was spoiled by big industrial towns, but the first stages were lovely: very big, pale hills with many cliffs of that silvery-white rock-it is limestone. It is very different when you get down into Lincolnshire, which is as flat as a pancake. Lincoln itself is quite the best cathedral city I have ever seen. The centre of the town, where the cathedral stands, is on the only hill for miles, and the cathedral consequently dominates the whole countryside. The surroundings of the cathedral are magnificent—a beautiful close, a castle, and a Roman wall. What would specially have appealed to you was that after dinner as we strolled round it, we had the accompaniment of a little summer lightning and very distant gentle thunder. Do you know the kind of thunder which has almost a tinkle in it, like a musical sound? I don’t know that much has happened since we got back. My reading has been of a most miscellaneous order—Rider Haggard, Thomas Aquinas, Trollope, the Old Testament. Do you remember the passage in the latter where Moses sends spies into Canaan and they come back and say ‘We have seen the giants, the sons of Anak; and we were in our own eyes as grasshoppers.’ (#ulink_31b62565-5216-5389-bd8e-f6e5c8fc365f) Isn’t that perfect? It brings out the monstrosity of the giants so well, because one thinks of the grasshopper as being not only small, but fragile, light and even flimsy. ‘Beetles’, for example, would not have done nearly so well. Summer still drags on—far outstaying its welcome with me—and the pond shows no sign of rising to its normal level, though we have had a fairish amount of rain. Everyone is well—that is to say, we have all recovered from our holiday and are nearly as fit as if we had never been away. Of how few holidays can this be said! Give my love to your mother, and—write soon. Yours, Jack TO PAUL ELMER MORE (PRIN): (#ulink_08c35d48-08f1-5c0b-89b6-9b227cea7ce5) Magdalen College, Oxford. Oct 25th 1934 Dear Mr. More It is a long time since I have got so much out of any book as I have got out of your Sceptical Approach. (#ulink_683e1df0-0fc4-5ac3-b3bd-9cfedb848004) The sixth chapter especially will entitle you to a place in an American Patrologia if such a collection is ever made. What is of most importance to me as an individual is that you have made me understand for the first time why most of the representatives of the present Christian renaissance so hate Idealism-perhaps you will have made them understand too. To you it may be a matter of surprise that I could ever have found this hatred unintelligible: but you would not wonder if you had travelled the same route as I, which was from materialism to idealism, from idealism to Pantheism, from pantheism to theism, and from theism to Christianity. Our different views are natural enough. A field which seems a high place to one ascending the mountain, seems almost part of the valley to one descending. Idealism is suspect to you as a door out of Christianity: for me it was the door in. Clearly a door, ex vi termini, (#ulink_2b597a24-eaa4-5bd1-a962-cdd4e59559e5) has this double aspect. I do not think I should be disrespectful in urging to you remember the ‘door in’ aspect—to remember that in shutting the door to keep the faithful in, as you do so very firmly, you are inevitably, by the same act, shutting out those who might return. I am bold to do this because my whole case rests on mere experience—this is the door by which, as a mere matter of fact, I entered and it will always be dear to me on that account. Contrariwise I most freely acknowledge that your whole treatment of the subject has reminded me of the ‘door out’ aspect, which I had certainly unduly neglected hitherto. And now I am wondering just how far I can go with you. Not the whole way, I think. Fully realising the danger of the ‘Illusion of Reason’ (so much I owe to your book), I still find it not so much a philosophical as a religious impossibility quite to relinquish the Absolutist view of God. For one thing I am not quite clear how far your ‘teleology’ will go. Does it imply that God can be better, more blessed, wiser, tomorrow than He is from of old? Does it involve that He may fail, that the (#ulink_4825576b-e722-52df-b8ce-7238f757cbbc) (I dare put no accents, writing to you!) might win—a Twilight of the Gods? If so, I am afraid it would be as great a blow to my ‘intuitions’ as materialism itself. My ‘wish-belief’ demands the eternal, even, in a sense, the necessary: while also not wanting the immobile, the unanswering. In fine, I want to have it both ways: and this would be the flimsiest self indulgence, but for the huge historic fact of the doctrine of the Trinity. For surely that doctrine is just the doctrine that we are to give up neither of those conceptions of God of which you accept one and (most convincingly, yet in the long run dismayingly) reject the other. Is the traditional Christian belief not precisely this; that the same being which is eternally perfect,purus actus, (#ulink_3997af22-da61-58ed-ab11-b2968c1415fc) already at the End etc etc, yet also, in some incomprehensible way, is a purposing, feeling, and finally crucified Man in a particular place and time? So that somehow or other, we have it both ways? I wish you could visit England more often. My spiritual fathers are many and scattered, but I left you, on the two occasions we met, with the sensation of having been with a spiritual uncle-and appropriately enough, in your avuncular character, you have sent me a spiritual tip. Very many thanks for the book. There is a lot more to say about it, but that would reach the scale of an article rather than a letter. I have an obituary of Irving Babbitt also to thank you for. With my kindest regards and thanks, Yours sincerely C. S. Lewis TO JANET SPENS (BOD): (#ulink_3790a6d1-eb33-5e79-b2df-107cf382c968) Magdalen College, Oxford. Nov. 16th 1934. Dear Miss Spens I had envisaged this as a letter of discussion, but I am finding so few disagreements with you that I have less to discuss, and more to re-echo, than I had supposed. The only thing I almost regret in your book (#ulink_d3f1606e-2995-5988-9a00-06410fe2615c) is the inevitable prominence of the thesis developed in Chap 1: not because I dissent from it (indeed without a careful re-reading of the whole F.Q. (#ulink_d1761182-4e1a-5fc5-8467-72b9dea1341e) I hardly could) but because I foresee that it will draw off attention from succeeding chapters which seem to me very much more important, and that the question ‘What do you think of Miss Spens’ book?’ will come among careless people to mean simply and solely ‘Do you agree with this theory about the composition of the F.Q.?’ However, there is no help for this. As regards the thesis itself I certainly think you have made a good prima fade case; the part about Orgoglio’s castle (pp. 24, 25) seems to me very strong—so strong that here at any rate the onus probandi (#ulink_24ee8062-2548-5d23-8894-949d81b28072) now almost rests on the supporters of the traditional view. But chap 2 really interests me more, and I have learned a good deal from your analysis of the Mutability cantos. Can you tell me something more about Professor Nygren’s Eros and Agape? (#ulink_bf8beeee-a570-57d3-bacc-a0274b39c4f1) I haven’t heard of it. But chap 3 is the best of all. It was the second paragraph on p. 55 that delivered me from an old error: incredible as it now seems to me I had never before realised that the figures were to the Elizabethans what the landscape was to the 19th century. (#ulink_b2023a7a-9327-5a55-b9a8-01f3014007c8) For this and for the four pages that follow I cannot thank you enough: they open doors, and your treatment of Una and Superstition (pp. 58, 59) is that rare sort of criticism which, as I believe, does truly and substantially create new qualities in the poem criticised. (Whom are you quoting at the bottom of p. 61?) The explanation of the importance of the clothes of Spenser’s figures (62, ad fin.) must, I think, be right, and ought to silence a deal of misguided censure. Addisonian on p. 68 is delicious: the one right epithet out of a score of possibles. (#ulink_34b63348-efdf-5b87-8f21-162fed8594be) And I’m glad you have inserted a cooling card for the ‘new poet’ business on p. 71. Personally I find the whole of Renwick’s treatment curiously antipathetic. (#ulink_1dfe5d39-301c-52c6-88a7-294301f49728) Chap 5, I think, stands next in importance. The main contention that the predominance of the love theme is mainly due to the allegory—i.e. that it is ever-present in the symbols precisely because it is not the thing symbolised-convinced me at once: and this again opens doors, gives me the feeling of being more free within the world of the F.Q. than I was. I am not at all sure where, in detail, your interpretation of Busyrane is right, but of course I must wait till I have re-read the poem. (#ulink_22907b70-9dd0-5980-984f-d3f8f5fd774a) But ought not the conflicts to be mainly those of the Soul herself rather than those of one soul against another in particular human relationships? By the bye I disagree with you about ‘an unconvincing attempt’ to distinguish the two people called Genius (top of p. 22). Although Lewis & Short (#ulink_a30f33e3-8495-5be6-aa88-6c62c042de2e) do not distinguish, I am pretty certain that Genius always did mean two quite distinct people: 1 Genius (still retaining his connection with gigno) the spirit of Reproduction or Generation (cf. ‘torus genialis’ etc). This is the ‘Genius’ of Alanus De Planctu, (#ulink_9d479558-27bc-5e7d-8507-bfec61713229) the Rom. of the Rose, the Confessio Amantis, (#ulink_f185378b-636b-5586-bd56-128cbd7c96be) and the Garden of Adonis. (#ulink_25232f2e-9fee-5597-a54b-ece3318fc145) 2 Genius (as translation of Gk. ??????) guardian spirit of a place or person > guardian angel > higher self > ‘genius’ of a poet. This is the ‘genius’ of Shakespeare’s Troil. IV. iv. 50 etc, (#ulink_eff6fb19-3be1-53fb-ad1c-2f2c7d1a8e5a) and of the bower of bliss. (#ulink_4016fc9c-da94-5e83-8046-2977cfcdc1e5) On p. 65 at the top, might one add Deut. XXXIII 2, (#ulink_6a306a76-6d04-569b-adfb-bb09fd1cbabc) as a common influence on both? But it is time I stopped. I have no other points even of trivial disagreement, and if I continued I should only pile up praises in a way you might reasonably dislike. I will only say that you have left me longing to re-read the F.Q.—and all previous books on Spenser have produced just the opposite effect. I suppose you got my second note agreeing to take one pair of gaseous but intelligent scholars? Yours sincerely C. S. Lewis TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W): [The Kilns] 26th Dec. 1934 My dear Griffiths There was nothing to apologise for. My friendship with you began in disagreement and matured in argument, and is beyond the reach of any dangers of that kind. If I object at all to what you said, I object not as a friend or as a guest, but as a logician. If you are going to argue with me on the points at issue between our churches, it is obvious that you must argue to the truth of your position, not from it. The opposite procedure only wastes your time and leaves me to reply, moved solely by embarrassment, tu sei santo ma tu non sei filosofo! (#ulink_57973cfe-f294-5ac4-9336-c722b76d287d) But I still think it more profitable to adhere to our former agreement and to keep off the question. But I enjoyed my visit very much and so, I hope, did de Peyer-anima candida, (#ulink_ae060882-fda1-5b5b-abe6-c6697da4d98c) a man whom I prize more every time I see him. (#ulink_dc3ae0d1-19c4-5723-bafe-dded6df8717a) Please thank the Prior for his hospitality and accept my best wishes (my prayers you may be sure you have) for every success both spiritual and natural. Yours C. S. Lewis TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): [The Kilns] Dec. 26th. 1934 My dear Arthur, I have carried your letter about in a pocket all this term with the intention of answering it, and here goes at last! I wonder how much of its news is still up to date. For example, if I had replied when the letter came I should have said ‘I am so glad to hear that you have settled down in a comfortable routine’—but I can’t do so now because you may have got unsettled since! I wish you had told me a little more about Voyage to Arcturus. (#ulink_22ec7466-c17b-53dd-8ba2-8a95210c8358) Even if you can’t describe it, you could at least give me some idea what it is about: at least whether it is about a voyage to Arcturus or not. I haven’t come across the book yet, but will certainly read it if I do. Which reminds me have you read ‘Gape Row’ by Agnes Romilly White? (#ulink_986f6926-2e8a-5a74-b880-20aadccdfeed) Gape Row is the name of a village which turns out with absolute certainty to be Dundonald, if you work out all the geographical indications. It is not a very good novel—indeed I am not sure it isn’t a definitely bad novel (tho’ several reviewers seem to have thought otherwise), but fancy reading of characters in a book looking down on the Lough from above Holywood Barracks, or, again, nearer Dundonald, looking over to the Castlereagh Hills! The scenery is quite well described, and it is probably the only chance you and I will ever have of seeing that landscape described in fiction—except our own fiction, of course! The characters [are] all of the cottage class, and the dialect is well done—not that that kind of thing interests me after a few pages. If you want a New Year’s Gift for any one like Gundrede (#ulink_715c34f0-e0a4-5f7b-bdcd-8e63e303148c) or Janie (I mean like them in love of dialect) this would do admirably. Now I come to think of it, is Janie the author? (Don’t let this raise false expectations in your mind. I don’t mean what you mean.) We had this term a concert which I enjoyed more than any I have ever heard. (#ulink_e2339124-89bd-5f3f-bc04-594e09c719aa) Beecham conducted and the bill of fare was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, (#ulink_a63c4c3e-f4cd-5a75-b058-3e92452730cf) a Debussy suite, Sibelius’ Tapiola (forest-god of the Finns) (#ulink_86e56e81-6973-5e21-a2ef-42eb84de3961) and Elgar’s Enigma Variations. (#ulink_672f267a-9b65-50d2-b35e-b2792e896dfa) For one thing, I have hardly ever before been at a concert where I liked all the items. The Elgar (do you know it?) I had never heard before and did not fully understand, but I understood enough to admire it greatly. For another thing, the playing was marvellous. I thought I knew the symphony from Warnie’s records, but Beecham brought things out of it that I’d never dreamed of. Apart from this, very little has happened to me. I have addressed societies at Manchester and Birmingham and am doing one at Cambridge next term, which, I suppose, is a step in one’s career. I have had lunch and spent the afternoon at a monastery in the Cotswolds, where a former pupil of mine is a monk. (#ulink_7e292c6c-1eac-5593-9a1b-b0f49b11e7af) Funny to have a silent lunch (except that a book is read aloud) amidst rows of white robed figures and then to file out behind them—chanting—down the long, dark corridor. One of them was a fine old man with a white beard, which just added the last touch. Don’t be alarmed: the effect on me was purely aesthetic, not religious, and during the afternoon my host talked nonsense enough to put me off the conventual life for ever and a day. Give my love to your mother and let me have a letter when you can. Yours Jack 1 (#ulink_18a7700d-3a11-500e-a55d-64818f29356d) The Morlocks are the subterranean workers in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). 2 (#ulink_c61c1d52-4cce-5364-85aa-6bf3c9ba439c) ‘quick survey’. 3 (#ulink_51a5fe9b-8d0b-5721-87a6-709d591530be) Lewis was here mimicking evangelical clergymen such as his maternal grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Robert Hamilton (1826–1905), Rector of St Mark’s, Dundela. 1874–1900. See The Hamilton Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. 4 (#ulink_51a5fe9b-8d0b-5721-87a6-709d591530be) The Rev. John Thomas Belton (1899–1966) took his BA from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1917 and was ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1920. He was Curate of Aghalee, Co. Down, 1919–20, Vicar of Shankill, 1921–5, and Rector of Kilkeel, 1925–57. 5 (#ulink_6b5bd69b-e554-5522-9a80-629406d47f3d) He is referring to their father’s way of ordering whisky. When he wrote to Warnie on 7 August 1921 about a family holiday in England, Jack said their father told the waitress: ‘I’ll have a bottle of soda water…and if you’d just put a little Scotch whiskey in it’ (CL I. p. 573). 6 (#ulink_cd577c26-426a-5a4a-9782-3a7d3760bdc8) Idealism in this context is a metaphysical theory about the nature of reality, maintaining that matter does not exist in its own tight but is related to the contents of our minds. Thus, all objects, even the world, are mental creations. In SBJ, ch. 13, Lewis explained the place of Idealism in his conversion, describing how he reached the point where he accepted Idealism and admitted ‘that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos’. 7 (#ulink_cd577c26-426a-5a4a-9782-3a7d3760bdc8) Scholasticism was originally a teaching device developed in the schools and universities of Western Europe from the end of the eleventh century and largely associated with the methods of three major philosophers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—St Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. It proceeded by questioning ancient and authoritative texts. A favoured method was to draw up lists of contradictory statements in the texts, applying to them the rules of logic in order to reveal their underlying agreement. Its purpose was to get to the inner truth of things to which the texts bore witness. The method flourished until the sixteenth century when it came under attack from humanist scholars. An attempt to restore scholasticism began in Rome about 1830. The most important of several theologians who wanted to extend this ‘neo-Scholasticism’ to the universal Church was Pope Leo XIII; in his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), he recommended that scholasticism be the only philosophy and theology used in Catholic seminaries. The Pope enjoined the study of St Thomas Aquinas on all theology students as a clear, systematic philosophy capable of defending Christian tradition from contemporary attack. 8 (#ulink_cd577c26-426a-5a4a-9782-3a7d3760bdc8) Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), French philosopher. Following his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1906 he turned to the study of St Thomas Aquinas whose philosophy he sought to relate to modern culture. He held professorial chairs at the Institut Catholique in Paris, 1914–33, the Institute for Medieval Studies in Toronto, 1933–45, and Princeton University, 1948–52. 9 (#ulink_bfbf95a1-1d4f-53d3-940c-387acb8aa0df) The salvation of the virtuous infidel was to become an increasingly important issue to Lewis. He was familiar with the fact that in The Divine Comedy Dante put the Emperor Trajan in Paradise (see Purgatorio X, 74–93; Paradiso XX, 44–5) because of the legend that Pope Gregory the Great, through his prayers, brought Trajan back from Hell and baptized him to salvation. Of greater importance was Aquinas’s teaching on ‘baptism by desire’, e.g. Summa Theologica, Part III, Question 68: ‘when a man wishes to be baptized, but by some ill-chance he is forestalled by death before receiving Baptism…such a man can obtain salvation without being actually baptized, on account of his desire for Baptism, which desire is the outcome of faith that worketh by charity…’ Lewis came to believe that virtuous heretics or pagans could be saved through Christ. ‘I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god or to a very imperfectly conceived true God,’ he wrote to Mrs Ashton on 8 November 1952, ‘is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him’ (WHL, p, 428). He provided an illustration of this in The Last Battle (1956), ch. 15. On meeting Asian in the heavenly Narnia, Emeth the Calormene explains that he had been seeking Tash all his life. ‘Beloved,’ said Asian, ‘unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.’ 10 (#ulink_0e5521aa-8baf-5122-bf82-5774a8e3f037) i.e. J. R. R. Tolkien. 11 (#ulink_153b91ea-5fd8-5954-a7a1-a0dfbaa4d291) Lewis published this ‘anonymously’ with slight variations in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964). It is included under the title ‘Prayer’ in CP, pp. 136–7. 12 (#ulink_e0fb8315-b829-5b25-ab27-c8dd8fc3f533) ‘May you humbly love the rivers and woods’, adapting Virgil, Georgics 2. 486. 13 (#ulink_65146e2c-2b64-5805-981f-cc4fcd288685) i.e. stop to obtain food or drink. 14 (#ulink_982f55f0-44a3-524b-ae58-070a3d873d13) Sister M. Madeleva CSC (1887–1964), a member of the Congregation of Sisters of the Holy Cross, was a teacher of English at St Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. While staying in Oxford during Trinity Term 1934 she attended Lewis’s lectures on medieval poetry, and had a particular interest in the lecture devoted to Boethius. Besides lending Sister Madeleva his notebooks giving details of the works mentioned in his lectures, Lewis invited her to visit him in Magdalen. On her return to Notre Dame in 1934, Sister Madeleva was made President of St Mary’s College, a post she held until her retirement in 1961. Her numerous books include Knights Errant and other Poems (1923), Chaucer’s Nun and Other Essays (1925), Pearl: A Study in Spiritual Dryness (1925), Penelope and Other Poems (1927), Selected Poems (1939), A Lost Language (1951), The Four Last Things (1959) and an autobiography, My First Seventy Years (1959). See Gail Porter Mandell, Madeleva: A Biography (1997). 15 (#ulink_33293399-3e22-54ed-acc3-0b9ce07bd73a) During the Trinity Term of 1934 (22 April-16 June) Lewis gave a series of lectures entitled ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Poetry’, later adapted into The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964). For a detailed list of Lewis’s lectures see Walter Hooper, ‘The Lectures of C. S. Lewis in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge’, Christian Scholar’s Review, XXVII, no. 4 (Summer 1998). pp. 436–53. 16 (#ulink_6ea6d6dd-732b-55e2-8dd4-bb1d9e01379b) Walter William Skeat, The Chaucer Canon (1900). William Langland (c. 1330-c. 1386) is the author of Piers Plowman, which Lewis discussed in The Allegory of lent, ch. 4, pp. 158–61. 17 (#ulink_6ea6d6dd-732b-55e2-8dd4-bb1d9e01379b) One ‘Prolegomena’ lecture had discussed the connection between Vincent of Beauvais (fl. 1250) and Chaucer’s ballad. Famine. In The Discarded Image Lewis wrote (p. 84); ‘Adversity has the merit of opening our eyes by showing which of our friends are true and which are feigned. Combine this with Vincent of Beauvais’ statement that hyena’s gall restores the sight (Speculum Maturate, xix, 62), and you have the key to Chaucer’s cryptic line “Thee nedeth nat the gall of noon hyene” (Fortune, 35).’ 18 (#ulink_b9f448e7-7fe5-5596-9d36-ef04e55598e4)The Romance of the Rose is a thirteenth-century French allegorical romance by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, It is discussed in chapter 3 of The Allegory of love * (#ulink_b9f448e7-7fe5-5596-9d36-ef04e55598e4) I don’t claim to be such a person myself! 19 (#ulink_1578f066-b86a-5890-8216-d5d1e7edef71) Etienne Gilson (1884–1978), French authority on medieval philosophy, is the author of La Philosophie au Moyen Age (1922), Moral Values and the Moral Life: The System of St Thomas Aquinas, trans. Leo Richard Ward (1931), and many other works. 20 (#ulink_867a29d5-ad7d-5483-a3e6-ae9c28ec44ce) Frederick Rolfe (‘Baron Corvo’), Hadrian the Seventh (1904). 21 (#ulink_e10fbacd-0a53-57b5-be69-4aa9ac517bd6) Numbers 13:33. 22 (#ulink_be9db6f8-8b12-53d2-8be5-80e604bb1086) Paul Elmer Mote (1864–1937), American critic and philosopher, was born in St Louis, Missouri, He taught Sanskrit at Harvard, 1894–5, and Bryn Mawr, 1895–7, and was a newspaper editor for twelve years. During 1919 he lectured on Plato at Princeton University. More was associated with Irving Babbitt, champion of humanism and founder of the modern humanistic movement. His major works are the Shelburne Essays (11 vols., 1904–21), The Greek Tradition (5 vols., 1921–31), and the New Shelburne Essays (3 vols., 1928–36). Princeton University Library has in its Department of Rare Books and Special Collections the three letters from Lewis to More published in this volume, and also copies (in Lewis’s hand) of three letters from More to Lewis. 23 (#ulink_779440eb-5999-56e4-b0be-82d55be03cca) Paul Elmer More, The Sceptical Approach to Religion (1934). 24 (#ulink_d3b14037-1b95-5c68-8926-54cbe359f0b7) ‘by the force of the term’. 25 (#ulink_51f357e3-708f-5db2-8d78-d9ff6091c0ba) ‘necessity’. The reference here is to the old proverb: ‘Against necessity not even the gods may fight.’ 26 (#ulink_51f357e3-708f-5db2-8d78-d9ff6091c0ba) ‘a pure act’, in the sense of the pure actuality of God. The phrase is standard in some later Latin literature (St Bonaventure uses it, as does Aquinas to describe ‘the Divine Being’). 27 (#ulink_a3a525e2-e3ae-52f6-8e17-b9d86b853b82) Dr Janet Spens (1876–1963) was born in Lanarkshire and educated at Glasgow University. She was joint founder and co-headmistress of Laurel Bank School, Glasgow, 1903–8, then returned to Glasgow University as Lecturer and Tutor, 1908–11. She was afterwards Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 1911–36. Her books include Spenser’s Faerie Queene: An Interpretation (1934), Two Periods of Disillusion (19091, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Relation to Tradition (1916) and Elizabethan Drama (1922). 28 (#ulink_427d8f83-bc90-528a-b156-697eb6231b7f) Spens, Spenser’s Faerie Queene. 29 (#ulink_427d8f83-bc90-528a-b156-697eb6231b7f) i.e. The Faerie Queene. 30 (#ulink_b06fecb6-4eb3-5f6b-8b0b-5b193260953d) ‘burden of proof’. 31 (#ulink_b06fecb6-4eb3-5f6b-8b0b-5b193260953d) Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros: A Study of the Christian Idea of Love, authorized trans. A. G. Hebert (London: SPCK, 1932–9). 32 (#ulink_bcbfb105-5281-52ac-8f5e-0f52c6eb6d79) Spens, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, p. 55: ‘Spenser is essentially an Elizabethan, and the Elizabethans tended to utter their more intense emotions through the imagery of human figures; the men of the nineteenth century had been trained to accept the expression of theirs through the imagery of inanimate nature.’ 33 (#ulink_5fc7e898-db04-5a4b-8e85-e33ffad59042) ibid., p. 68: ‘The description here [Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), I, xii, 10, line 9] is almost Addisonian in its delineation of the mixture of superficiality and pose with na?ve self-revelation and vacant wonder characteristic of an English crowd. It gives the dragon concrete reality as nothing else could do.’ 34 (#ulink_5fc7e898-db04-5a4b-8e85-e33ffad59042) William Lindsay Renwick, Complaints: Edmund Spenser (1928). 35 (#ulink_7d2396a4-714b-5b55-a3b7-6ee9feb52438) In Spenser’s Faerie Queene Dr Spens staled of Busyrane (or Busirane); ‘There has been some discussion of the meaning of Amoret’s experience, but there can, I think, be little doubt. Her tortures at the hands of Busyrane in the House of Cupid represent the mental sufferings of the young wife in consequence of the too lustful element in Sir Scudamour’s passion for her’ (p. 105). Cf., however, The Allegory of Love, ch. 12: ‘To find the real foe of Chastity, the real portrait of false love, we must turn to Malecasta and Busirane. The moment we do so we find that Malecasta and Busirane are nothing else than the main subject of this study-Courtly Love; and that Courtly Love is in Spenser’s view the chief opponent of Chastity. But Chastity for him means Britomart, married love. The story he tells is therefore part of my story; the final struggle between the romance of marriage and the romance of adultery.’ 36 (#ulink_69a36b92-6bfb-5f2f-9db3-906dd0895221)A Latin Dictionary founded on Andrews’ edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary, rev. and enlarged edn by C. T. Lewis and C. Short (1879). 37 (#litres_trial_promo) Alanus ab Insulis (c. 1128–1203) mentions ‘Genius’ in De Planctu Naturae, Prosa V, 40ff. See The Allegory of Love, p. 106. 38 (#litres_trial_promo) John Cower (1330–1408) wrote about ‘Genius’ in Confessio Amantis, Prologue, 881ff. 39 (#litres_trial_promo) The Garden of Adonis is described in Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II, vi, 34ff. 40 (#litres_trial_promo) William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (1609), IV, iv, 50; ‘Some say the Genius so/Cries “Come” to him that instantly must die.’ 41 (#litres_trial_promo) In Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II, xii. 42 (#ulink_0efa02ca-f469-58a0-8de0-86c030057390) Deuteronomy 33;2: ‘The Lord came from Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto them; he shined forth from mount Paran, and he came with ten thousands of saints: from his right hand went a fiery law for them.’ 43 (#ulink_7bc31837-4a74-5006-b2dd-9b3c05968a65) ‘You are a holy one, but you are no philosopher!’ It is not known why Lewis wrote this in Italian. 44 (#ulink_bc89b2c0-9a3f-5a46-923c-aa449e193fa3) ‘(speaking) in a sincere spirit’. 45 (#ulink_bc89b2c0-9a3f-5a46-923c-aa449e193fa3) This was probably Charles Hubert Sebastian de Peyer (1905–83), one of three brothers who went to Magdalen College. He was educated at Cheltenham School, after which he read PPE at Magdalen and took his BA in 1929. He was a civil servant with the Ministry of Power and a member of the UK Delegation to the High Authority in the European Coal and Steel Community, with rank of minister in the Labour Party, 1953–7. He served as borough councillor for West Hertfordshire, 1964–75. 46 (#ulink_f1d9059c-55d0-53aa-99cd-c4d113a9daa0) David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus (London: Methuen, 1920). This book was to have an important influence on Lewis’s science fiction novels; see the letters to Charles A. Brady of 29 October 1944 and to Ruth Pitter of 4 January 1947. 47 (#ulink_79eeb97d-da5d-5176-934c-605d5cf5f95d) Agnes Romilly White, Gape Row [1934]. 48 (#ulink_79eeb97d-da5d-5176-934c-605d5cf5f95d) i.e. Gundreda Ewart. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL 1. 49 (#ulink_e042f191-5dac-52fa-8663-d69b5ed33334) The concert by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Sir Thomas Beecham, was performed in the Sheldonian Theatre on 15 November 1934. 50 (#ulink_e042f191-5dac-52fa-8663-d69b5ed33334) Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, first performed in 1808. 51 (#ulink_e042f191-5dac-52fa-8663-d69b5ed33334) Jean Sibelius, Tapiola, a symphonic poem first performed in 1926. 52 (#ulink_e042f191-5dac-52fa-8663-d69b5ed33334) Edward Elgar, Enigma Variations, first performed in 1899. 53 (#ulink_55dcdb80-c396-52b2-9cc2-b42e00fe549e) i.e. Dom Bede Griffiths. 1935 (#ulink_7164c826-e391-5d26-89b6-463dd64cbcb4) TO JANET SPENS (BOD): The Kilns, Headington Quarry. Jan 8th 1935 Dear Miss Spens You will have begun to wonder if your Agape & Eros (#ulink_14e4a890-d27a-5e20-adba-4a3f9d0c3cbc) was lost forever! It is an intensely interesting book. I am inclined to think I disagree with him. His central contrast—that Agape is selfless and Eros self-regarding—seems at first unanswerable: but I wonder if he is not trying to force on the conception of love an antithesis which it is the precise nature of love, in all its forms, to overcome. Then again, is the contrast between Agape (God active coming to man passive) and Eros (man by desire ascending to God qu? passive object of desire) really so sharp? He might accuse me of a mere play upon words if I pointed out that in Aristotle’s ‘He moves as the beloved’ ( ) there is, after all, an active verb, . (#ulink_e7ce8923-afba-5c7a-a730-55600eefa73d) But is this merely a grammatical accident—is it not perhaps the real answer? Can the thing really be conceived in one way or the other? In real life it feels like both, and both, I suspect, are the same. Even on the human level does any one feel that the passive voice of the word beloved is really exclusive—that to attract is a—what do you call it—the opposite of a deponent? However, I must tackle him again. He has shaken me up extremely. (#ulink_86435d53-8108-5f59-bd42-a539e1de175c) I was one of a party of four some weeks ago who discussed your parallel between those passages from F.Q. and the Prelude, (#ulink_ac61e6ea-9678-5704-9a90-1d4ec9323586) and divided—two agreeing with you in finding an important similarity-in-dissimilarity between them, and the other two failing to find any reason why you had brought them together at all. Now for the interesting point. We all gave analyses of the effect which both passages had on us, which disclosed the fact that the opposition were attending exclusively to the things mentioned in the passages, and had apparently no sensation of the immediate all pervading imaginative flavour-and no idea that they ought to look for it, or that there was such a thing. I was astonished and was led on to wonder whether many people read poetry in the same way. If so, no wonder we hear such odd judgements. Yes—the passage about Genius in the Bower of Blisse (#ulink_47ab3e5a-cdfe-5b5e-bbff-6cb0576edf57) is more difficult than I had remembered. I will tell you sometime how I was trying to take it (I haven’t the book handy)—but I now think my way involves almost impossible syntax. And what on earth does he mean by ‘good Agdistes’ (#ulink_39270c0b-c87d-590a-863d-a2d2f09037d3)-the only Agdistes story I can find is a long nightmare of meaningless cruelties and obscenities. Why ‘good’? I shall have to work at this rather hard. My own work is a book on medieval allegory which will end with a chapter on Spenser, and it is towards that that you have helped me so much. By the bye, one of my party of four (the one who sided with us) maintains that Spenser’s great fault is his prosaic style, but that his stories are so good that they save him. This is not such nonsense as it sounds! Yours sincerely C. S. Lewis TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): Magdalen College, Oxford. Feb 5th 1935. My dear Harwood, The poem is very good-perfect except for the rather clumsy end of stanza one. I note your position about the walk you and Beckett are about equally problematical, but for different dates. A pretty tangle! Yours C.S.L. TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. [March 1935] My dear Barfield What a glorious relief—I thought I was done for. No, I don’t transfer non philosophical letters straight to the W.P.B.: (#ulink_4b96e401-7e58-53eb-9a9a-87e616b29d0d) contrariwise, as soon as [I] see that they deal with contingent, empirical matter of fact, I transfer them to my pocket to note and deal with later: but sometimes (specially if I change my coat) the second part of the plan does not get carried out. I know I am a guiter. (#ulink_6ce82e45-574a-5255-9c68-da15590d7d4f) Yes- I would love to go with Beckett & you on the Tuesday and return on Sunday night. Where is the Venue? I don’t think I can come and stay this Vac. If I find I can I shall just ask myself and you can refuse me if The Christmas poem is a complete success. The other is perfectly satisfactory stuff but too uncoloured to stand alone: in a context it would come out alright. Why don’t you send Tertium Quid (#ulink_a0231bf8-b561-5a3b-aee0-5cad15f9c680) to a publisher? Now that P.R. (#ulink_e6c28982-1d8d-50b6-a4e0-6ae43185a5e3) has gone through so easily, I am sure T.Q. would—and they’d make a pretty pair. I have done about 200 lines of the Aeneid into riming alexandrines: it goes like fun into that metre, and you can reproduce the effect of the hexameter, getting nearly a prose rhythm in the middle and pulling itself together at the end. Harwood was down for the week end. He gets better and better-not to talk to, you know (in (that respect he gets worse) but just better. Apparently Sparrow is a great man in military circles. (#ulink_7b993c5c-9153-5ecb-842d-64bb35b42c4d) My brother is quite impressed at our venturing to walk with him. We are devils of fellows aren’t we? Did you ever read Jeckyll & Hyde? (#ulink_b5ee2ccf-e594-5114-bc64-eaebef6f5b1b) It is a . (#ulink_33a59760-89b7-5d3c-a222-789f418671d0) Yours C. S. Lewis TO PAUL ELMER MORE (PRIN): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. April 5th 1935 My dear Mr. More Your letter gave me a great deal of pleasure. I had thought of sending you that essay as some return for the books you have sent me: but then again I thought that what was kind from you to me would be merely ‘pushing’ from me to you. (#ulink_37601166-0397-50cd-9c19-c12c81a39066) But I always regretted my decision for I really wanted to know whether we were of one mind on this subject. I am ‘continuing the work’ as best I can. The Criterion (the only likely periodical on other grounds) is closed to me, (#ulink_ebade919-fd65-59e0-a347-09f6d87cb108) so I am coming back to the lecture for its original purpose, i.e. a method of publication, I give two or three a year on this kind of subject and get a very good audience-sometimes am even applauded, wh. is rare here. I mention this, partly no doubt from vanity, but partly because it proves that there is a demand for some literary theory not based, like the prevailing ones, on materialism. (You rightly fixed on that as the real point). In a few years I hope to collect these and publish them: I shall call it a ‘Realistic’ theory of literature, explaining of course that I mean the word in the sense of Plato not of Zola. I wish I knew how many of us there are. Sometimes I suspect that we are more numerous than each of [us] supposes, and that if we can only get together we may blow the whole composite fog (French Symbolism cum Croce cum Eliot with, oddly enough Karl Marx and Neo-Scholasticism somewhere in the background) away by 1950. I am not ready yet to say anything about your book on Plato’s religion. (#ulink_3327c2c2-4d2b-524d-8ddd-7e0b9b041c28) The immediate reaction is an irrelevant one—a groan at discovering how much less Plato I remember than I thought I did. The main point at issue doubtless is this: are we to continue the Bosanquet (#ulink_ae97a200-d3a8-578a-a232-157b58a7e407) and Archer Hind (#ulink_bf735a81-7581-5fb2-ae5d-9d7356fdcd87) tradition of subtilising the Ancients, or embrace your view that the great thing is to leave uncontaminated their ‘invaluable na?vety’. On the whole I am with you: at least I’m with you as against Archer Hind. But I’m dreadfully muddled, just as I am about the ‘Absolute’ kind of God and your kind. I remain like Boethius in the song ‘stupens de hac lite’. (#ulink_2fd9a616-4f89-5077-b0b0-2b34697cf577) The view I am not holding for the moment always seems unanswerable. Have you read Nygren’s Bros and Agape? It is a closely related problem and leaves me equally puzzled. With many thanks, Yours sincerely C. S. Lewis TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): [The Kilns] April 5th 1935 I hope to arrive at Rudyard (wh. on nearer acquaintance with guidebooks turns out to be Rudyard Lake) at 3.13 on Monday. (#ulink_18c7cd3a-4862-5443-ab9a-88cfe887d2ac) Where reservoys rippleAnd sun-shadows stippleThe beard of the corn.We’ll meet and we’ll kippleWe’ll camp and then kippleAt Rudyard we’ll kippleFrom evening to morn. And then we’ll set off, yes!, Discussing your Orpheus (#ulink_6c6b4813-85db-52ae-b0b9-2a6e2008f1f8)His meaning and myth, Till fettered by Morpheus, The leaden maced Morpheus, Inaccurate MorpheusAt Chapel-en-le Frith. Good about Field. Find out in Manchester how to pronounce Chapel-en-le Frith and Edale. I have got all necessary maps. I shall be in fine form for yr poem as I am just examining the Newdigate! (#ulink_8aea2d1e-fc90-592d-a661-aae9451fed5e) Can it really come off? Yrs C. S. Lewis TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. April 23d 1935 My dear Arthur It is a weary time since I heard from you and I ought to have answered you before: but though I am in your debt I doubt if my silences are longer than yours. The immediate object of this letter is to ask if I can come and stay a week with you this summer, please. As at present advised any date between July 1st and Oct. 5th will suit me. Now if you could within the next few weeks fix on any date between these two (preferably quand tu seras seul!) (#ulink_0eee6611-7296-5125-bafa-3126402e307f) it would be a great advantage: for though all that period is at present free I do not know when engagements may begin to creep in. Of course it may not be convenient to have me at all, but I am assuming you would have no scruple about telling me if that were so. I am only anxious that if you are able and willing to have me we shd. not let the thing slip through our fingers as we did last year. If you can’t arrange so far ahead, of course you can’t (what it is to have a brain!) and there we are: but no doubt you see the advantage of so doing if it is possible. I had seen the reviews of the Powys book (#ulink_63560665-5487-5034-979e-70a4bb9298f9) and also heard (by an accident) what you hint about its contents: therefore I shall not read it. I do not always win even when the enemy attack me in my own lines, (#ulink_0cb76c73-1602-522b-aee4-1670a8098732) but the one thing I can do is to make sure that at least I never go out of my way to seek him. What an extraordinary profile Powys has—I suppose you saw the pictures in several papers. I take it he is almost a lunatic? The most interesting story I have read recently is Land Under England by one O’Neill: (#ulink_cb1a659f-65b3-5914-8bd9-8e188c3d2ac8) you should try it. I am just back from my Easter walking tour with Barfield and co., this year in Derbyshire. (#ulink_28b268ea-eb9f-5399-8ad6-7d91f91cea4c) Have you been there? It is appreciably more like my ideal country than any I have yet been [to]. It is limestone mountains: which means, from the practical point of view, that it has the jagg’d sky lines and deep values of ordinary mountainous country, but with this important difference, that owing to the paleness of the rock and the extreme clarity of the rivers, it is light instead of sombre—sublime yet smiling—like the delectable mountains. (#ulink_53ebe163-4cf8-569d-ac4b-98242701cc1b) It gives you something the same sensation as Blake’s songs. (#ulink_5fea7dce-1715-5b62-86bb-a1181b6d8ecd) This place is being ruined by building and what was Kiln Lane is turning into a street of council houses. (#ulink_7ad47ccb-bae3-5f5c-8e5e-0c2d7e5827fc) Where will it end? If we live to be old there will hardly be any real country left in the South of England. Give my love to your mother and any other of my friends whom you may meet: and let me have an answer as soon as possible to my question. Yours Jack TO LEO BAKER (BOD): (#ulink_548689a0-1749-5a22-ba87-ffc1c9844dfe) Magdalen College, Oxford. April 28th 1935 My dear Baker I was very distressed on meeting Barfield this year for a walk (a ghost of its old self for he and I were the only participants) to hear of your illness. It stimulated an impulse that has been hovering in my mind for some time to write to you and to try and pick up some of the old links. That they were ever dropped was, I imagine, chiefly my fault-at least even self-love on my part cannot find any substantial respect in which it could have been yours. Will you forgive me? I think I have learned a little since those days and can promise not to serve you so again. You must not bother yourself with letter writing while you are unwell, nor need you: for I trust that any news of your state will trickle to me in the end by one channel or another. The last I heard from Barfield was a little more encouraging. Beyond wishing you well, I cannot enlarge on the subject: almost anything said from a well man to a sick man seems an impertinence. My father is dead and my brother has retired from the army and now lives with us. I have deep regrets about all my relations with my father (but thank God they were best at the end). I am going bald. I am a Christian. Professionally I am chiefly a medievalist. I think that is all my news up to date. I suppose you have heard from, or at least of, the others fairly regularly. I don’t know if you met the new addition to our party before you left—namely Hanbury Sparrow, a Lt. Colonel and all that. Barfield picked him up somewhere on the continent: he has written a good book called ‘The Landlocked Gate’ and a bad one called ‘Gilt-Edged Insecurity’. (#ulink_debb149b-288f-5aaf-8f01-b7a485f6661a) I mention him to boast of our power of assimilation, for tho’ an Anthroposophist and an author he remains very much a colonel and a man of the world—so that when on the last walk but one we heard him and Beckett agreeing that ‘you could now get quite a decent suit for fifteen guineas’, the rest of us felt this element in the firm was at last adequately represented. Beckett, by the way, I am a little nervous about: he is becoming a real bureaucrat—but I trust his very delightful family (whom I recently met for the first time) will save him. But you can imagine the whole scene of him and Sparrow together: and how that bursts on the unconscious pin-point of Field or passes unobserved over the rustic, almost parochial, solidity of Cecil. Barfield is writing a play—or a masque or a ballet rather—on Orpheus and Eurydice. You shd. get him to send it to you if you are well enough to care for such things. It is excellent and ultra poetical in matter (poetry itself), plain to baldness in style. A funny change from the Barfield of the Tower. But how archaic that sounds now! I hardly write anything these days except things proper to a don. I suppose we have all lived to discover that we are not great men, and not to mind: there are better things than that in the world, and out of it. All this may be silly chat—as letters from home so often were to a man in the front line, which, I know, is where you are at present. We have so spoiled language that I cannot even say God bless you without pausing to try and explain that I mean the words in their literal sense. Don’t attempt to reply unless some day you feel quite up to it and apt for it. Yours, C. S. Lewis TO PAUL ELMER MORE (PRIN): Magdalen College, Oxford. May 23rd 1935 Dear Mr. More Very many thanks for the American Review. (#ulink_35578064-8aed-5832-bcc2-bbe259c4ef93) It contains only one of the articles you mention, the other, I suppose, having been postponed. I am pretty sure I should agree with you about Joyce if I had read him, but I never have, and would as soon choose a treadmill for my recreation. There may be many reasons why you do not share my dislike of Eliot, but I hardly know why you should be surprised at it. On p. 154 of the article on Joyce you yourself refer to him as ‘a great genius expending itself on the propagation of irresponsibility’. To me the ‘great genius’ is not apparent: the other thing is. Surely it is natural that I should regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil. He is the very spear head of that attack on (#ulink_954a1f39-75b1-59cc-917f-dacde3a44b26) which you deplore. His constant profession of humanism and his claim to be a ‘classicist’ may not be consciously insincere, but they are erroneous. The plea that his poems of disintegration are all satiric, are intended as awful warnings, is the common plea of all these literary traitors to humanity. So Juvenal, Wycherley, Byron excuse their pornography: so Eliot himself excuses Joyce. His intention only God knows. I must be content to judge his work by its fruits, and I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading the Waste Land, (#ulink_ed2af826-471f-5160-8bc4-be498ab03c60) but that most men are by it infected with chaos. The opposite plea rests on a very elementary confusion between poetry that represents disintegration and disintegrated poetry. The Inferno is not infernal poetry: the Waste Land is. His criticism tells the same tale. He may say he is a classicist, but his sympathy with depraved poets (Marlowe, Jonson, Webster) is apparent: but he shows no real love of any disciplined, and magnanimous writer save Dante. Of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton, Racine he has nothing to say. Assuredly he is one of the enemy: and all the more dangerous because he is sometimes disguised as a friend. And this offence is aggravated by attendant circumstances, such as his arrogance. And (you will forgive me) it is further aggravated for an Englishman by the recollection that Eliot stole upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, while we were at war—obtained, I have my wonders how, a job in the Bank of England—and became (am I wrong) the advance guard of the invasion since carried out by his natural friends and allies, the Steins and Pounds and hoc genus Omne, (#ulink_3cc91fe5-9516-54cb-905f-995dc51c8dbb) the Parisian riff-raff of denationalised Irishmen and Americans who have perhaps given Western Europe her death wound. Enough. You see my views; and may answer them as bluntly as I have put them. Of the man himself I know nothing and will do my best to believe any good that I may hear from you or other authorised sources. As for your story—it is an amusing comment on human vanity that other peoples’ conversation about oneself always pleases if it is not directly insulting: and so did this. (#ulink_b4a33c6a-94b5-52e5-888b-7cc07145cb74) Of Nygrens, another time. I don’t fully agree—Protestant is not for me a dyslogistic term. (#ulink_51810557-b174-533c-ad84-f297ec7836c1) A Mr. Shafer has sent me a long book, (#ulink_aee97534-af92-5b4a-ab80-989fa32256bd) nominally about you but actually de omnibus rebus, (#ulink_3a398490-6a7f-526f-a15e-855dfcadda26) which I am enjoying. Yours very sincerely C. S. Lewis TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. June 17th. 1935 My dear Arthur, ‘Will you come Sunday or Monday?’ says the host. ‘No, I’ll come Saturday,’ says the guest. ‘Oh Lord,’ says the host (as it might be my father) or ‘Why do you do these things?’ (as it might be another). On second thoughts I am booking a berth for Monday night, July 1st by Liverpool—leaving you Mon 8th. There is just one cloud on the horizon. Minto’s sister is seriously ill (in Dublin) and if Minto has to go over for a funeral she may want me to stay and run the house. Let us hope this won’t happen. If it does, I suppose we shall be able to fix on a week that will suit both you and me later. In the meantime I thought it better to let the arrangement stand, and hope for the best—I hate putting off anything so nice. Give my love to your mother and many, many thanks. Yours, Jack TO EUG?NE VINAVER (W): (#ulink_6894c5cd-417e-56e6-9af2-fb89d5240d6f) Magdalen College, Oxford. Sept 19th. 1935 Dear Vinaver Thank you very much for the copy of your lecture. (#ulink_9a34d32e-bbfd-54f0-a316-9aaaae74428c) Ever since I heard it at the Arthurian (#ulink_14437239-210d-519f-9aa1-4a6e75afbe92) I have wished for more of it than memory could carry—as it is now a sine qu? non for any reading of Malory. About holes in VI vi, it may interest you to note that my own MS. note on the passage gives ‘Hole = fenestra’ (Catholicon Anglicum 1483) (#ulink_6367092d-8e4f-554d-946f-345a92a16da7)-a reference I probably got from the N. E. D. (#ulink_d0780b21-b99b-579a-8079-44fee25722b4) But can you throw any light on ‘hole of the tree’ in VI ii? Your knowledge of ‘F’ will enable you to say at once whether this is merely an error for ‘bole’, or whether we must consider further. (Tolkien showed me O. E. Health = angulus > fork (of a tree) but this is difficult phonologically.) Thanks also for your very kind reference in a footnote to my somewhat pert review. (#ulink_8bca59de-0777-5576-abf9-42c285699cb4) I do wish you could see your way to give us a commentary as well as a text when you bring out the W. MS.—it is badly needed for all aspects of the work and whose business is it if not yours? With many thanks. Yours C. S. Lewis In the winter of 1935 the Delegates of the Oxford University Press conceived the idea of the Oxford History of English Literature, and in March 1935 they appointed as general editors the distinguished scholars, F. P. Wilson (#ulink_e4d64cbe-95b2-5c10-ad88-040a8f49bb3c) and Bonamy Dobr?e. (#ulink_58d2d6ce-5a3b-5d7d-9ba1-cc1d4851c1b5) They were to work in close co-operation with Kenneth Sham (1887–1971), who was assistant secretary to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press at this time. In October 1935 the Press announced that it had undertaken the production of this daunting task, which was to consist of twelve volumes, each volume the work of a single author. While each volume would, in the main, begin and end at a definite date, there would have to be a certain degree of dovetailing and authors were expected to consult with those writing the volumes on either side of them so as to avoid overlapping. Shortly before making this announcement, F. P. Wilson wrote to Lewis, explaining who had been invited to write which volume, and asking if he would write the one on the sixteenth century. (#ulink_e9ee2074-ca02-5d0f-89be-6852dbf143e8) There followed this reply from Lewis: TO FRANK PERCY WILSON (OUP): Magdalen College, Sept. 23rd 1935 My dear Wilson Really, really! In other words you have missed the chance of Tolkien on O.E. (#ulink_9dd044ad-0579-5b4b-844d-07850f46e5b8) and R. W. Chambers (#ulink_8237a3e6-6a6e-5c42-839c-15ff137f5e61) on the XVIth century. For heaven’s sake, if it is still possible, do that, and either check me out or give me the XVth. The Allegory book is done and I am now in communication with Sisam about it. But, really– Yours ever C. S. Lewis No answer, forsooth! Marry, come up! (#ulink_a6e7421d-25c3-5c84-81a8-70f6805f5414) The planning of the Oxford History of English Literature—‘O Hell!’ as Lewis called it—continued. The task of writing a volume in this series was so onerous that a number of those who originally agreed to write for the series either opted out of the programme or died before the work was done. F. P. Wilson continued firm in his belief that the sixteenth-century volume was right for Lewis, and Lewis agreed to write it. However, Lewis did not want to include drama in his work, and Wilson agreed to write a separate volume entitled English Drama 1485–1585 (1969). TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): [The Kilns] Dec 7th 1935 My dear Arthur, I am sorry you have had to haul this letter out of me by the scruff of its neck. It’s not that I have nothing to say to you and don’t want to hear what you have to say. I believe I could still make a fair attempt at a regular correspondence, but you yourself vetoed that, and odd letters, like odd bills, I do find it hard to meet when I’m busy. Minto told you about our present bother. The guests are still here, and will be, so far as I can see, until the end of January. (#ulink_1fa357af-9150-5afe-969d-3a391e3cdbad) Oh Arthur, what a snag it is that the people who are pitiable are not necessarily likeable. Molly Askins is emphatically one of those people of whom old Foord-Kelsie said ‘We must learn to love those whom we can’t like.’ She’s what you would call an encroaching person—do you know the type of small, dark woman with big gentle eyes and soft voice, who just gently and softly and even pathetically gets her own way in everything and really treats the house as a hotel? However, the thing’s a duty and there’s an end of it: tho’, by the bye, as W. and I were saving the other day, the New Testament tells us to visit the widows, not to let them visit us! (#ulink_34751fb2-b04c-5f49-b465-9c3713c0b18a) I have finished my book, which is called The Allegorical Love Poem, and is dedicated to Barfield. The Clarendon Press have accepted it and hope to have it out by May. (#ulink_c0ed27b0-ba28-5f01-923e-30dd89138b68) As I am to get 12 free copies (Dents only give one 6) you and Tchanie shall each have one and save your silver: and whatever you think of the matter, I hope, from experience of the Clarendon Press, that binding, paper etc will be-in our old formula—excellent, exquisite, and admirable. In other words, if you can’t read it, you will enjoy looking at it, smelling it, and stroking it. If not a good book, it will be a good pet! It will be about 400 pp, they say. (It will be very funny, after this, if they do it in double columns and a paper cover.) My other bit of literary news is that Sheed and Ward have bought the Regress from Dent. I didn’t much like having a book of mine, and specially a religious book, brought out by a Papist publisher: but as they seemed to think they could sell it, and Dents clearly couldn’t, I gave in. I have been well punished: for Sheed, without any authority from me, has put a blurb on the inside of the jacket which says ‘This story begins in Puritania (Mr Lewis was brought up in Ulster)’-thus implying that the book is an attack on my own country and my own religion. (#ulink_0014d5fe-fe78-5f46-b35a-0ac016ce60b8) If you ever come across any one who might be interested, explain as loudly as you can that I was not consulted & that the blurb is a damnable lie told to try and make Dublin riff-raff buy the book. I didn’t mean to spend so much of this letter on egoism. I have tried in vain to buy Voyage to Arcturus but it is out of print. For reading, lately, I have re-read the Faerie Queene with enormous enjoyment. It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it—and that to my mind is one of the best tests. I am at present engaged with Sir Thomas More’s English works (#ulink_b32d7287-5ed3-5651-ab3f-ca366ffff44d) (i.e. everything except the Utopia) (#ulink_9c0d08a1-b829-5a9e-a9d4-9faf5c4f3f7e) which are necessary to a job I’m doing. They are quite interesting, and sometimes really helpful in religious aspects, but not so good as they have lately been made out to be. The worst of these letters at long intervals is that I can never remember how much has happened since I wrote last. e.g. did I tell you how much I was moved by seeing A Winter’s Tale? (#ulink_85570046-0dcd-551c-879f-c2d01f592db8) I can’t have told you about the magnificent philharmonic performance of me Ninth Symphony we were at a few weeks ago. (#ulink_bfa420d8-357a-5309-bdc4-e1e3ce58f71d) You know I used to dislike the choral part of it. I was completely converted and have seldom enjoyed anything more. How tonic Beethoven is, and how festal—one has the feeling of having taken part in the revelry of giants. By the way, the Siegfried Idyll, (#ulink_59430fb9-2286-5cbb-99d0-8eea56c0593c) which we had in the same programme seems to me the dullest thing Wagner ever wrote: do you agree? The only successor to Wagner (since we’ve got onto that subject), the only man who has exercised the same enchantment over me since the old days, is Sibelius. This bent to ‘Northern’ things is quite real and one can’t get over it-not that I ever thought of trying! You would like this day. Behind the hill there is yellow early morning light and small clouds racing. Then, the bit of wood, bare and brown, and furiously agitated. Then, the pond half skinned with ice—the swans both ashore. And round the house a terrific wind is roaring-‘Arthur O’Bower has broken his band.’ (#ulink_ab567028-3942-5634-ac8b-c09fe3a22a69) In fact I have enjoyed the whole of this winter—especially after the really tropical summers. The only member of the visiting family whose society we like is the boy, Michael, about 5. You will be interested to hear that W. gets on with him much better than I do. That is, I theoretically hold that one ought to like children, but am shy with them in practice: he theoretically dislikes them, but is actually the best of friends. (So many new sides to his character have appeared in the last few years.) Minto reads him the Peter Rabbit books every evening, and it is a lovely sight. She reads very slowly and he gazes up into her eyes which look enormous through her spectacles—what a pity she has no grandchildren. Would you believe it, that child had never been read to nor told a story by his mother in his life? Not that he is neglected. He has a whole time Nurse (an insufferable semi-lady scientific woman with a diploma from some Tom-fool nursing college), a hundred patent foods, is spoiled, and far too expensively dressed: but his poor imagination has been left without any natural food at all. I often wonder what the present generation of children will grow up like (how many middle aged men in all generations have said this). They have been treated with so much indulgence yet so little affection, with so much science and so little mother-wit. Not a fairy tale nor a nursery rhyme. Please thank your mother for her kind and forgiving letter; I was very rude to her. I should like to be at home in these gales. I am sure there are waves in the Lough, and the firs are lifting the earth in our old wood. I must stop now and do a little work. A happy Christmas to you all, and from all. Yours, Jack TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. [9? December 1935] In the crescendo of horror at the end of the myth you have done what v. few people could now do. (#ulink_593f30b1-725c-5ec6-8f53-b382ef2aa784) About the greatness and truth of that part I have no doubts. In the earlier parts of the myth I had not been prepared for so large a satiric element and therefore had to make rapid re-adjustments: but of course the ordinary reader will not be in that position. There are lovely things all about the place—the honest Caliban, Ariel, Bottom, the luring voice that all old civilisations hear. (By the bye, you have been re-imbursing yourself pretty freely for ‘sheep dotted downs’!—or else Dymer and English People have a common source). (#ulink_9ccbc1e9-c128-525c-b832-e5d88f9d49d3) The Diary of an Old Soul is magnificent. (#ulink_82b65080-c6ea-52f2-b3ea-dcb8717e8269) You placed the moment of giving it to me admirably. I remember with horror the absurdity of my last criticism of it, and with shame the vulgarity of the form in which I expressed it. He knows all about the interplay between the religious and metaphysical aspects of the One. I see now (since I began this letter) that these two are opposite only with the fruitful opposition of male & female (how deep the old erotic metaphor of the proelia veneris is) and what they beget is the solution. Incidentally, since I have begun to pray, I find my extreme view of personality changing. My own empirical self is becoming more important and this is exactly the opposite of self love. You don’t teach a seed how to die into treehood by throwing it into the fire: and it has to become a good seed before its worth burying. As to my own book—the question whether notes shd. come at the end of the chapter or the bottom of the page is partly for publisher & printer. (#ulink_00e6f452-6eb0-5c0e-a9d7-757ced601ce9) Personally I loathe a book where they come at the end—and I am writing mainly for people who will want to know where they must look to verify my facts. Your other criticism about the two classes of readers whom I conflate, I don’t understand. I meant this to be only a note. Yours C. S. Lewis TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): [Magdalen College 12? December 1935] My dear Barfield What a drivelling letter I wrote you a few days ago. A day in bed has given me the chance to re-read Pt IV and my opinions are revised. In every way the merits are far greater than I had seen, specially the myth of wh. the ‘crescendo of horror’ tho’ perfectly adequate is, as I now perceive, the least excellence. You have done what you wanted-how you could get so much good tenderness & so much good sensuousness into prose is a mystery. There is of course a lot I don’t follow-has the extraordinary jumble of Hindu with Mohameddan accessories any significance? But the whole thing is a real evocation. Yrs CSL P.S. The ‘Ah woe…kiss…ah woe’ is astonishing. It’s not like a passage in a book at all: it’s a thing. TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): [The Kilns] 29th. Dec. 1935 My dear Arthur, I am staying at home from Church this morning with a cold on the chest, so it seems a good occasion to answer your letter. As regards your news—sympathy and congratulations. Sympathy on the wrench of parting and the gap it will leave: congratulations on having done the right thing and made a sacrifice. The chief consolation at such times, I think, is that the result, however unpleasant, must be a kind of relief after the period of saying ‘Shall I really have to-no I won’t—and yet perhaps I’d better.’ There is always some peace in having submitted to the right. Don’t spoil it by worrying about the results, if you can help it. It is not your business to succeed (no one can be sure of that) but to do right: when you have done so, the rest lies with God—and Will! I don’t think you exaggerate at all in your account of how it feels. After all—tho’ our novels now ignore it-friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’ I know I am v. fortunate in that respect, and you much less so. But even for me, it wd. make a great difference if you (and one or two others) lived in Oxford. I am correcting the first bunch of proofs for my book and am (as we wd. have said in the old days) tearing my hair because it doesn’t look at all the size of page I expected. It will not be as tall a book as I had pictured—and what is the good of a scholarly work if it does not rise like a tower at the end of a shelf?! I fear it may even be thickish and stumpy. Mon Dieu! quel douleur, o rage, o desespoir! (What on earth would we have done if either of us had succeeded in publishing a book in the old days—I imagine we might have gone literally out of our minds with horrors and ecstasies.) I’m sorry you didn’t have our weather. We had about a week of snow with frost on top of it—and then rime coming out of the air and making thick woolly formations on every branch. The little wood was indescribably beautiful. I used to go and crunch about on the crusted snow in it every evening—for the snow kept it light long after sunset. It was a labyrinth of white—the smallest twigs looking thick as seaweed and building up a kind of cathedral vault overhead. One thing the snow showed me was the amazingly high population of rabbits-usually concealed among the greens and greys. On the snow one cd. see them scuttling. W. and I have been much puzzled by some of the footprints. There seem to be a great many more and larger animals than we had supposed. Bears, Arthur, bears—at least it looks like it. I wish you cd. have had a couple of strolls with me round this place in the snow: it would have charmed away all your sorrows. No, no, I never meant that Sibelius had the tonic quality of Beethoven. Do you remember our once talking about B. and Wagner & agreeing that B. was Olympian, W. titanic—B spiritual, W. natural? Well Sibelius is definitely like W. not like B. in that respect. He is not noble like Beethoven: he is inarticulate, intimate, enthralling, and close to one, like Nature itself. Very, very Northern: he makes me think of birch forests & moss and salt-marshes and cranes and gulls. I mean the symphonies. You needn’t be busied for music while you have a gramophone. Set aside a portion of your money for buying big works (symphonies etc): never play them except in their entirety—but perhaps I’ve given you all this good advice before. I never finished Gape Row. But the descriptions of our own walks & hills were v. interesting. I thinkk yourr neww methodd of sspellingg bby ddoubbllingg alll cconnssonnanntts ssavvess a ggreatt ddeall off ttroubblle! Please give my love to Mrs Greeves and remember me to all our friends. Yours, Jack When I said you had vetoed the idea of regular correspondence, I meant that you had vetoed the idea of your taking part in it. I didn’t mean you had actually forbidden me to write to you!! 1 (#ulink_81a18393-4f00-59f3-9db4-0873d5a42b8e) Nygren, Agape and Eros. 2 (#ulink_2fdb3c6f-1759-57b1-b496-489707147818) Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072b. means ‘moves’. In The Discarded Image (1964), Lewis mentioned Aristotle’s teachings about God as Unmoved Mover: ‘We must not imagine Him moving things by any positive action, for that would be to attribute some kind of motion to Himself and we should then not have reached an utterly unmoving Mover. How then does He move things? Aristotle answers, , “He moves as beloved”. He moves other things, that is, as an object of desire moves those who desire it’ (ch. 5, p. 113). 3 (#ulink_2fdb3c6f-1759-57b1-b496-489707147818) Lewis went on considering the relation of Agape and Eros for years, and in The Four loves (London, 1960; Fount, 1998) he discusses them under the names ‘gift-love’ and ‘need-love’ (using ‘Eros’ to mean sexual love). 4 (#ulink_3fcff1b4-822b-59e9-ad9a-f4eb50357b4a) In Spens, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, pp. 57–9. 5 (#ulink_3bcf5981-4746-5c2d-b88a-728581719a79) Spenser, The Faerie Queene. II, xii, 46–9. 6 (#ulink_3bcf5981-4746-5c2d-b88a-728581719a79) ibid., II, xii, 48. 7 (#ulink_68c2b940-142b-57b2-a1f4-78e5f4998969) i.e. the waste paper basket, 8 (#ulink_68c2b940-142b-57b2-a1f4-78e5f4998969) Barfield, Harwood and Lewis planned a walking-tour for April 1936, but at the last minute Lewis was unable to go. As a joke Barfield and Harwood decided Lewis must sit for a re-examination—based on the old School Certificate—before he could be readmitted to their ‘College of Cretaceous Perambulators’. The questions and answers were published as Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis, A Cretaceous Perambulator (The Re-examination of) ed. Waller Hooper (Oxford: The Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society, 1983, limited to 100 copies). One of the questions was ‘Give the (long) semantic history of the word “Guiting”.’ Lewis did not attempt this question, but the editor supplied the following explanation (p. 14): ‘The semantic history of the word “Guiting” is, that it became for the perambulators a convenient expletive for anything they didn’t like. A “guiter” was, for instance, a bad person. It may have been suggested by the inconveniences caused them on the 1928 walk when they passed the villages of Temple Guiting and Guiting Power in Gloucestershire.’ 9 (#ulink_faa5d727-5d8a-51ec-86be-d72be64891b7) This was probably one of Barfield’s poems. It has not been published. 10 (#ulink_faa5d727-5d8a-51ec-86be-d72be64891b7)The Pilgrim’s Regress. 11 (#ulink_b7316303-5201-5bdc-878f-468811da2d61) i.e. Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, author of The Land-Locked Lake. 12 (#ulink_730ec1a8-e20f-5a20-88e9-f819f0dab3db) Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). 13 (#ulink_730ec1a8-e20f-5a20-88e9-f819f0dab3db) ‘catharsis’. 14 (#ulink_5477bdc5-a6e4-5684-8ff2-693b63549f5e) Lewis was probably referring to his essay ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’ in which he argued that the ‘concealed major premise’ in E. M. W. Tillyard’s Milton (1930) was ‘plainly the proposition that all poetry is about the poet’s state of mind’. ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’ was eventually published in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XIX (1934). It then became the first chapter of a joint work between Lewis and T?llyard, The Personal Heresy. A Controversy, published in 1939. 15 (#ulink_5477bdc5-a6e4-5684-8ff2-693b63549f5e) In November 1930 Lewis sent ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’ to The Criterion, an influential literary periodical edited by T, S. Eliot. Six months later, in May 1931. Eliot turned it down. Lewis wrote to Eliot again on 2 June 1931 with the proposal that Eliot publish not only ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’ but four other essays. It is proposed to publish that important letter, not included in CL I, in the Addendum to CL III. See Thomas Steams Eliot in the Biographical Appendix. 16 (#ulink_b08156e0-fc3d-5ab4-b539-f8ead04d7b03) Paul Elmer More, Platonism (1931). 17 (#ulink_b08156e0-fc3d-5ab4-b539-f8ead04d7b03) Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), Fellow of Philosophy at University College, Oxford, 1870–81, whose works include Knowledge and Reality (1885) and A History of Aesthetic (1892). 18 (#ulink_b08156e0-fc3d-5ab4-b539-f8ead04d7b03) Richard Dacre Archer-Hind (1849–1910), Greek scholar and Platonist, who was a Fellow of Trinity College. Cambridge. He published editions of Plato’s Phaedo (1883) and Timaeus (1888). 19 (#ulink_b08156e0-fc3d-5ab4-b539-f8ead04d7b03)‘Assidet Boetius stupens de hac lite’- ‘Boethius sits nearby bewildered by this dispute,’ 20 (#ulink_091e7bb5-0121-50ea-b2d7-5fcb05346747) In the end Lewis and Barfield, who met at Rudyard, Derbyshire, were the only ones on this Easter walk which began on 8 April. 21 (#ulink_ef085985-557c-5535-8f82-f9ef76655a1d) This suggests that Barfield, even if he had not written any part of his poetic drama, Orpheus, was thinking and talking about it. See Lewis’s criticism of the finished work in his letter to Barfield of 28 March 1938. 22 (#ulink_26cf8689-8243-552e-b3b4-c39fdb831c40) Lewis was one of the examiners for the Newdigate Prize. This annual prize for English verse, founded in 1806 by Sir Roger Newdigate, is the most widely known of university prizes. 23 (#ulink_2d0f30dc-872f-546d-884b-9ea47c4be65f) ‘when you are alone’. 24 (#ulink_7a6ac169-354a-5a54-9f13-2fc970f0e5f1) Llewelyn Powys, Damnable Opinions (1935). 25 (#ulink_7a6ac169-354a-5a54-9f13-2fc970f0e5f1) Powys did not mention Lewis by name in Damnable Opinions, but he attacked orthodox Christianity, especially as practised and written about at Oxford. On p. 5 he said: ‘True religion is simple—it is to worship life, to bow down before life, beating our heads upon the grass in jubilant acquiescence.’ 26 (#ulink_7a6ac169-354a-5a54-9f13-2fc970f0e5f1) Joseph O’Neill, Land Under England (1935). 27 (#ulink_e2a60d94-66f3-5257-9c9f-b893d24efaac) After retracing the walk with Owen Barfield, Walter Hooper gave the following account in Through joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of C. S. Lewis (1982), pp. 76–7: ‘They entered (Derbyshire) from Staffordshire by Rudyard Lake. Then after lunch down the Goyt Valley to Chapel-en-le-Frith and so next day to Kinder Downfall, where the shallow river Kinder plunges off the edge of the peaty moor. Here on windy days when the sun warms the moorside the water is blown into myriad droplets of rainbowed light. Crossing the Kinder Scout and down Grindsbrook they came to Edale and at last stopped the night in Castleton. Next day they walked up the Winnat Pass and across Tideswell Moor to Wardlow and Monsal Dale. It’s just a short way now to Ashford in the Water and Bakewell and on again the fourth day to Ashbourne and Dovedale.’ 28 (#ulink_e2a60d94-66f3-5257-9c9f-b893d24efaac) John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That which is to Come, ed. James Blanton Wharey, 2nd edn rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), First Part, p. 119: ‘They went then, till they came to the delectable Mountains, which Mountains belong to the Lord of that Hill…so they went up to the Mountains, to behold the Gardens, and Orchards, the Vineyards, and Fountains of water, where also they drank, and washed themselves, and did freely eat of the Vineyards.’ 29 (#ulink_e2a60d94-66f3-5257-9c9f-b893d24efaac) William Blake, Songs of Innocence (1789). 30 (#ulink_db740a92-b161-5285-bf08-ddec78b918ec) This was due to the expansion of Morris Motors Ltd. In 1912 William Richard Morris (1877–1963), created 1st Baron Nuffield in 1934 and 1st Viscount Nuffield in 1938, opened his first car factory at Cowley, halfway between Oxford and Headington Quarry. In 1926 he started the Pressed Steel Company, employing more than 10,000 people, alongside the car factory. Morris Motors is only about a mile from The Kilns, and by 1935 it had expanded so much that, whereas The Kilns had been one of only a few houses for miles around, a rash of small houses now almost surrounded it. 31 (#ulink_187c17b9-727a-5187-a5fe-e02ae07cffd5) See Leo Baker in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Leo Baker was for a long time in an Austrian clinic with suspected cancer. It later proved to be a false alarm. 32 (#ulink_7627b305-9c84-5616-8029-8eeab4284274) Arthur Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, Gilt-Edged Insecurity (1934). 33 (#ulink_c2c0dd48-2653-54ed-ac17-d87a338a2df4) In his letter to Lewis of 26 April 1935 More wrote: ‘I have directed the publisher of the American Review to send you a copy of the May Issue, which contains an article of mine on James Joyce. I hope and believe, that you will approve of my treatment of that gentleman, though you may perhaps think I have credited him with too much native genius. In the June issue I shall have an article on the modernist movement in French poetry’. 34 (#ulink_42c63993-0dbb-5a33-8736-67aead0c3567) ‘limit’. More had been arguing for a return to Christian humanism as exemplified by limit and order—an idea which Eliot’s Waste Land explodes by its repeated emphasis on chaos. 35 (#ulink_42c63993-0dbb-5a33-8736-67aead0c3567) T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land (1922). This complex poem, praised for its sense of depression and futility, was the epitome of what lewis hated in modern poetry. 36 (#ulink_dfdc1fb4-3294-5ca0-b7b8-6a40142b9257) ‘and all that sort’. Horace, Satires, I. ii, 2. 37 (#ulink_c4cf2ca1-05d2-586b-ada4-d0273385b553) In his letter of 26 April 1935 More wrote: ‘Eliot is a dear friend of mine, and on the whole I do not like to see him placed among the enemies. He started out wrong, under the influence of the French notion of “pure art”, but he has been…moving away from that nasty heresy. Naming him, I am tempted to tell you a story—I hope not committing an indiscretion. It was after I had first met you and had read The Pilgrim’s Regress. Eliot was visiting me at Oxford, and [John Wolfenden (1906–85), Magdalen’s Tutor in Philosophy] invited us to luncheon at Magdalen, I asked W, about you, and particularly what you meant by return to “Mother Kirk”, whether you had turned Roman Catholic, or Anglo Catholic, or Scotch Presbyterian, or what. W. avowed that he didn’t know, but was pretty sure you had not become R.C. And then he added: “The other day several of us were together when X (I don’t recall the name) burst into the room in a state of great excitement. ‘Do you know,’ he shouted, ‘what that man Lewis is up to? Y (another forgotten name) says he saw him in the College chapel, and that on inquiry he finds the fellow has been going to chapel for weeks unbeknownst to any of us. What’s it all mean?’” So Wolfenden. And then Eliot with that sly smile of his: “Why, it’s quite evident that if a man wishes to escape detection at Oxford, the one place for him to go is the college chapel”’ (Princeton University Library). 38 (#ulink_c69aad0e-84ca-5eab-bc5b-c9011bacbcdb) ibid.: ‘Yes, I have read Agape and Eros, and I don’t like it at all, indeed I very heartily dislike it. It seems to me the last word of the most abominable form of Protestantism in a straight line from Luther through Barth.’ 39 (#ulink_a598f5ca-fa05-5ffb-95f1-ba6582177a6e) Robert Shafer, Paul Elmer More and American Criticism (1935). 40 (#ulink_a598f5ca-fa05-5ffb-95f1-ba6582177a6e) ‘about all matters’. 41 (#ulink_d03cb6dc-933c-57fd-8b49-f76d10949223) Professor Eug?ne Vinaver (1899–1979) was born in St Petersburg, and was educated in Paris and Oxford. He was a lecturer in French Language and Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford, 1924–8, and lecturer in French, 1928–31. He was appointed a Reader in French Language and Literature at Oxford in 1931, and was Professor of French Language and Literature at the University of Manchester, 1933–66. His many works include Malory (1929), The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3 vols. (1947), The Tale of the Death of King Arthur (1955) and The Rise of Romance (1971). 42 (#ulink_396aa0ce-5a21-5660-a805-b9cb8f86ed0d) Eug?ne Vinaver, ‘Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the Light of a Recent Discovery’ (1935). The ‘discovery’ referred to here is that of a manuscript of Malory’s Arthurian romances roughly contemporary with Caxton’s edition and independent of it, found in Winchester College in 1934. See the passage from Lewis’s review of Professor Vinaver’s edition of the Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947) that follows the letter to Ruth Pitter of 6 June 1947. 43 (#ulink_396aa0ce-5a21-5660-a805-b9cb8f86ed0d) The Arthurian Society. 44 (#ulink_a275f61f-cc87-5431-8014-2735fc2aad33)Catholicon Anglicum: An English-Latin Wordbook, dated 1483, introduction and notes by Sidney J. H. Heritage (Early English Text Society, 1881). 45 (#ulink_a275f61f-cc87-5431-8014-2735fc2aad33)The New English Dictionary. 46 (#ulink_c74008b7-e4c8-551e-89c5-3bee14d92672) In his review of E. K. Chambers’ Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (1933) in Medium Aevum, III, No. 3 (October 1934), pp. 237–40, Lewis criticized Vinaver for the importance he attached to ‘sources’. ‘It is possible for our reading of an author to become what we may call ‘source-ridden’, so that we no longer see his book as it is in itself, but only as it contrasts with its sources. This is clearly an injustice to the author, for we are preserving in their original form elements which he has transmuted, and even elements which he rejected. It is as though we ate all the ingredients of a pudding along with the pudding itself; such an eating is emphatically not the pudding’s proof’(p. 238). In note 1 of ‘Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the Light of a Recent Discovery’, Vinaver responded: ‘I do not feel with Mr Lewis that those who see too much of Malory’s sources are apt to overlook the book “as it is in itself”. We must obviously avoid eating “all the raw ingredients of a pudding along with the pudding itself” for “such eating is emphatically not the pudding’s proof”…but literature is one of the few things to which the metaphor of the pudding does not apply. Knowledge of the recipe may spoil the caste of a pudding but it need not distort our immediate impression from a literary work. It is of course possible to read Malory “as if we knew nothing about his sources”, but our understanding of him will be deepened, not spoilt, by the knowledge of what is peculiar and unique in his work.’ 47 (#ulink_f7db1fbf-8110-56d0-9803-4efcf7cf8dff) Frank Percy Wilson (1889–1963), who had been Lewis’s tutor in English, took a B. Litt. from Lincoln College, Oxford. After serving in the First World War, he returned to Oxford as a university lecturer. He was Professor of English at the University of Leeds, 1929–36, and Merton Professor of English at Oxford, 1947–57. Wilson contributed the volume on English Drama 1485–1585 (1969), ed. G. K. Hunter, to the Oxford History of English Literature. 48 (#ulink_f7db1fbf-8110-56d0-9803-4efcf7cf8dff) Bonamy Dobr?e (1891–1974), distinguished scholar and lecturer, went to Christ’s College, Cambridge, after serving in the First World War. In 1936 he was appointed to the Chair of English Literature at the University of Leeds, a post he held until his retirement in 1955. His books include the volume on The Early Eighteenth Century (1959) in the Oxford History of English Literature. 49 (#ulink_f047873d-8e2d-5b3b-ab11-03cff70646b0) See the ‘Background’ to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century in CG, pp. 474–82. 50 (#ulink_6edb86e8-0b0a-5ecd-a90d-8c7b50e637c9) J. R. R. Tolkien had too many other commitments to write a volume on Old English literature, and in the end the series began with Middle English literature. 51 (#ulink_6edb86e8-0b0a-5ecd-a90d-8c7b50e637c9) Raymond Wilson Chambers (1874–1942) graduated in English from University College, London, in 1894 and spent his entire professional life at University College. He became a Fellow of English in 1900, Assistant Professor in 1904, and Professor of English, 1922–41. His works include Beowulf (1914) and Thomas More (1935). 52 (#ulink_1e4d82ee-8554-56f0-96e7-2153148b3c53) William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), II, v, 64: ‘Are you so hot? Many, come up, I trow.’ 53 (#ulink_4f896610-678e-581d-b66d-4d2f0bbb1118) The guests were Molly Askins and her son Michael. Molly was the widowed daughter-in-law of Mrs Moore’s brother, Dr Robert Askins (1880–1935) who, while practising medicine in Southern Rhodesia died at sea on I September 1935. 54 (#ulink_4f896610-678e-581d-b66d-4d2f0bbb1118) James 1:27: ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ 55 (#ulink_b9e4d636-3579-5887-8f2d-baaee0c1f8d4) In the end Lewis was persuaded to call his book The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. 56 (#ulink_8edb84a0-b12c-581d-9a71-571ba77b8143) Sheed and Ward of London published their edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress in October 1935. Lewis had been worried about obscurity in the work, and this edition differs from the first in having a short ‘Argument’ at the beginning of each of the ten books. 57 (#ulink_047021b2-3896-5417-9a6f-1f9e742ac1f8)The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, sometyme Lorde Chauncellour of England, wrytten by him in the Englysh tonge, ed. William Rastell (1557). 58 (#ulink_047021b2-3896-5417-9a6f-1f9e742ac1f8)Utopia (1516), in Latin, is the principal literary work of Sir Thomas More. 59 (#ulink_ec047683-d083-5925-8816-8bbab5aedeb5) William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (1623). 60 (#ulink_ec047683-d083-5925-8816-8bbab5aedeb5) This concert, conducted by Malcolm Sargent, was given by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the Sheldonian Theatre on 28 November 1935, For details see The Oxford Magazine, LIV (5 December 1935), pp. 244, 246. 61 (#ulink_ec047683-d083-5925-8816-8bbab5aedeb5) Richard Wagner, Siegfried Idyll, first performed in 1870. 62 (#ulink_0e1c7111-1f76-58b3-b641-e2ce78eb959d) Beatrix Potter, Squirrel Nutkin (1903): ‘Arthur O’Bower has broken his band,/He comes roaring up the land.’ 63 (#ulink_239fb3ed-6667-58d7-af3a-e9bc1b9faa48) Barfield had sent Lewis a copy of a verse-drama he had written, and which remains unpublished. 64 (#ulink_239fb3ed-6667-58d7-af3a-e9bc1b9faa48) The words ‘sheep-dotted downs’ are found in Canto V, stanza 32 of Lewis’s poem. Dymer (1926), and he discovered them in Barfield’s unpublished novel, ‘English People’. 65 (#ulink_2550c803-9d20-5cf7-9337-94ffd68e78a6) Barfield gave Lewis a copy of George MacDonald’s The Diary of an Old Soul (1885). 66 (#ulink_985d4cd4-f1cd-534b-9fa6-dc8602ad62bd) As Lewis mentions in the letter to Arthur Greeves of 29 December 1935, he was correcting the proofs of The Allegory of Love. 1936 (#ulink_b987470c-a57c-5194-97c8-bdcfb1bfba49) TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. Jan 8th 1936 My dear Griffiths, Thank you for your kind and interesting letter. It must be nice to know some Aristotle, and it is a relief to hear that kind of philosophy praised by you who have a right to judge: for in the Oxford world ‘Neo-Scholasticism’ has become such a fashion among ignorant undergrads. that I am sick of the sound of it. A man who was an atheist two terms ago, and admitted into your Church last term, and who had never read a word of philosophy, comes to me urging me to read the Summa (#ulink_793558fc-9bc6-538c-af3e-04880b50bd36) and offering to lend me a copy! By the way, I hope that the great religious revival now going on will not get itself too mixed up with Scholasticism, for I am sure that the revival of the latter, however salutary, must be as temporary as any other movement in philosophy. Of things on the natural level, now one, now another, is the ally or the enemy of Faith. The scientists have got us in such a muddle that at present rationalism is on our side, and enthusiasm is an enemy: the opposite was true in the 19th century and will be true again. I mean, we have no abiding city even in philosophy: all passes, except the Word. I should be interested to see your Review of my little book. (#ulink_5663011b-5e8b-5734-8c92-2ec1dbd3a32b) I am afraid it will have misled you into thinking my position more catholic than it really is, and that not for a spiritual reason but a merely literary one. I did not want to keep introducing the Lord Himself, and ‘Christianity’ is not a plausible name for a character. Hence the name, and some of the functions, of my Mother Kirk—adopted clumsily for convenience, without my realising till I began to read my reviewers, that I had given a much more ecclesiastical bent to the whole thing than I had intended. You may say ‘All the better’; but I tell you the facts to defend my honesty. (#ulink_62d73ef3-68f9-53fc-95fa-871d1d4275e7) And by the same token, I fear Mr. Sheed is a rascal. That blurb on his jacket, insinuating that the book contains an attack on my own religious upbringing, was printed without my knowledge or authority, and he must have known it was a suggestio falsi: at least he took good care not to know! Thank you for your prayers: you know mine too, little worth as they are. Have you found, or is it peculiar to me, that it is much easier to pray for others than for oneself. Doubtless because every return to ones own situation involves action: or to speak more plainly, obedience. That appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace—the cross and the crown in one. Did you ever notice a beautiful touch in the Faerie Queene ‘a groom them laid at rest in easie bedd, His name was meek Obedience.’ (#ulink_a2b73364-263d-5ae7-abae-bcd9e82f9daa) What indeed can we imagine Heaven to be but unimpeded obedience. I think this is one of the causes of our love of inanimate nature, that in it we see things which unswervingly carry out the will of their Creator, and are therefore wholly beautiful: and though their kind of obedience is infinitely lower than ours, yet the degree is so much more perfect that a Christian can see the reason that the Romantics had in feeling a certain holiness in the wood and water. The Pantheistic conclusions they sometimes drew are false: but their feeling was just and we can safely allow it in ourselves now that we know the real reason. Remember me to the Prior. Did I tell you that I have met both Waterman (#ulink_d8b88543-f717-5ce2-970a-57dc8c63d9e2) & Skinner (#ulink_f0a48f0d-a264-52ce-8f93-3e7bf4717ce6) and liked them v. much. Yours C. S. Lewis TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. Feb 20th 1936 Dear Griffiths Thanks very much for the copy of Pax and the too kind review of my little book. One sentence in your letter has kept me chuckling ever since: ‘you have no reason to fear that anything you say can have any serious effect on me’. The underlying assumption that anyone who knew you would feel such a fear is not only funny but excruciatingly funny…ask the Prior if he sees the joke: I rather think he will. As to the main issue I can only repeat what I have said before. One of the most important differences between us is our estimate of the importance of the differences. You, in your charity, are anxious to convert me: but I am not in the least anxious to convert you. You think my specifically Protestant beliefs a tissue of damnable errors: I think your specifically Catholic beliefs a mass of comparatively harmless human tradition which may be fatal to certain souls under special conditions, but which I think suitable for you. I therefore feel no duty to attack you: and I certainly feel no inclination to add to my other works an epistolary controversy with one of the toughest dialecticians of my acquaintance, to which he can devote as much time and reading as he likes and I can devote very little. As well—who wants to debate with a man who begins by saying that no argument can possibly move him? Talk sense, man! With other Catholics I find no difficulty in deriving much edification from religious talk on the common ground: but you refuse to show any interest except in differences. It was a great shock to learn that Thomism is now de fide for your Church—if that is what you mean. But is that really so? I should welcome a letter clearing the matter up—I don’t mean clearing up the content of Thomism but the degree to which it has been made necessary to salvation. (#ulink_e95b146d-e0f7-59e1-8e71-27f836a07c89) With continued good wishes. Yours C. S. Lewis TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. Feb 26th 1936 My dear Arthur, I see to my consternation that it is over a month since your letter came. It certainly deserved an earlier answer but you must forgive me. I was very sorry indeed to hear about ‘Tommy’. I am particularly sorry for John. (#ulink_cc06b266-81e0-50b5-9e3d-d5e9e3325dd6) You know I crossed with the pair of them last time I left home: and I should like to say as impressively as I can—and you to take note—that I was very much impressed by seeing them together and by the fine, almost the spiritual atmosphere of their whole world of mountain climbing. It gave me a new and most favourable sidelight on John: and I am afraid it is most unlikely that he will find any one to take Tommy’s place. I am very sorry for him. Try to be as nice to him as you can—but I have no doubt you are doing that already. For yourself I expect days are pretty dim at present. Do you hear good news of the boy? As I said before, I am sure you have done the right thing, and I’m afraid that is all the comfort I can offer. I quite understand what you say about the comfort derived from all a dog’s ‘little affairs’, and enjoyed reading that passage as much as any in your letter. They are a busy folk. And talking of dogs, poor old Mr Papworth has been gathered to his fathers. He had been ailing for some time and finally got a bad ulcer on his chin. He was given a strong sleeping draught. When I went to bed he was asleep in his basket and breathing as gently as a child: in the morning he was dead. Minto has been very badly upset—almost as if for a human being. I don’t feel it as badly as that myself and would discourage the feeling (I think) if I had it. But it is a parting, and one sometimes remembers his old happy days, especially his puppyhood, with an ache. I have just read what I think a really great book, ‘The Place of the Lion’ by Charles Williams. (#ulink_e25d0aeb-a3e7-5043-b501-32e244042762) It is based on the Platonic theory of the other world in which the archtypes of all earthly qualities exist: and in the novel, owing to a bit of machinery which doesn’t matter, these archtypes start sucking our world back. The lion of strength appears in the world & the strength starts going out of houses and things into him. The archtypal butterfly (enormous) appears and all the butterflies of the world fly back into him. But man contains and ought to be able to rule all these forces: and there is one man in the book who does, and the story ends with him as a second Adam ‘naming the beasts’ and establishing dominion over them. It is not only a most exciting fantasy, but a deeply religious and (unobtrusively) a profoundly learned book. The reading of it has been a good preparation for Lent as far as I am concerned: for it shows me (through the heroine) the special sin of abuse of intellect to which all my profession are liable, more clearly than I ever saw it before. I have learned more than I ever knew yet about humility. In fact it has been a big experience. Do get it, and don’t mind if you don’t understand everything the first time. It deserves reading over and over again. It isn’t often now-a-days you get a Christian fantasy. My own book will be 15/-, so if you can sell it it will be 15/-clear! I am sick of proof correcting which has had to go on concurrently with all my other work this whole term. (#ulink_35486637-fd49-5955-9176-ccde22d9968c) Our visitors, thank God, are gone. They have left Minto very worn out but not, so far as I can see, actually ill. We have had such a severe winter that even I, with all my polar bear instincts am tired of it. But the snow drops are up now and we have had one or two of those very early fine days which excite me more than the real spring. You know—that thin, tingling, virginal weather. Most of Sibelius’ symphonies are recorded and are glorious. I agree with you about the Old Curiosity Shop (#ulink_1d756028-d1c2-5b47-9d73-cea25d94f5c3)—one of the most homely and friendly of all Dickens. With love to you all. Yours Jack Since the early 1930s a group of Christian friends had been meeting in Lewis’s Magdalen College rooms every Thursday evening to talk and usually to read aloud whatever they might be writing. The group had its origins in J. R. R. Tolkien’s weekly visits to Lewis’s rooms in 1929 where he read aloud his stories of Middle-Earth. Shortly afterwards, Edward Tangye Lean (1911–74), (#ulink_fa5f6dc5-f10b-5b9b-8614-d6de1757cc33) a brilliant young student and one of Lewis’s pupils, founded a society of undergraduates and dons who met in his rooms to read unpublished manuscripts aloud, after which there would be comments and criticism. Lewis and Tolkien both became members. Lean christened the group ‘The Inklings’—suggesting someone who dabbles in ink. The club founded by Lean died when he took his degree and left Oxford. But, wrote Professor Tolkien, Its name was transferred (by C.S.L.) to the undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered about C.S.L., and met in his rooms in Magdalen. Although our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!), this association andits habit would in fact have come into bang at this time, whether the original short-lived club had ever existed or not. C.S.L. had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism, none of which were shared (especially not the last) in anything like the same degree by his friends. (#ulink_609e0670-89ec-5ee9-bd3f-e4df391f6fe1) By 1936 this informal group included Lewis, Tolkien, Warnie Lewis, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, Nevill Coghill, Lord David Cecil, (#ulink_9552a2bb-69c7-54a4-8a1f-1b36419e2e53) Dr Robert E. Havard (#ulink_c4ac63df-5329-54d3-aba6-e21c990847ed) and Charles Wrenn. (#ulink_4d5b5fab-d131-58d6-94e5-786d01d13d49) Besides the Thursday meetings in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen, they met on Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and Child (‘Bird and Baby’) pub. Lewis’s next letter was to a man he was keen to introduce to these friends. TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W): (#ulink_5db7b1b7-3f6b-5064-be30-bbb6044c2cd1) [Magdalen College] March 11th 1936 [Dear Mr Williams,] I never know about writing to an author. If you are older than I, I don’t want to seem impertinent: if you are younger, I don’t want to seem patronizing. But I feel I must risk it. A book sometimes crosses ones path which is so like the sound of ones native language in a strange country that it feels almost uncivil not to wave some kind of flag in answer. I have just read your Place of the Lion and it is to me one of the major literary events of my life—comparable to my first discovery of George Macdonald, G. K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris. There are layers and layers—first the pleasure that any good fantasy gives me: then, what is rarely (tho’ not so very rarely) combined with this, the pleasure of a real philosophical and theological stimulus: thirdly, characters: fourthly, what I neither expected nor desired, substantial edification. I mean the latter with perfect seriousness. I know Damaris very well: in fact I was in course of becoming Damaris (but you have pulled me up). That pterodactyl…I know all about him: and wanting not Peace, but (faugh!) ‘peace for my work’. Not only is your diagnosis good: but the very way in which you force one to look at the matter is itself the beginning of a cure. Honestly, I didn’t think there was anyone now alive in England who could do it. Coghill of Exeter put me on to the book: I have put on Tolkien (the Professor of Anglo Saxon and a papist) and my brother. So there are three dons and one soldier all buzzing with excited admiration. We have a sort of informal club called the Inklings: the qualifications (as they have informally evolved) are a tendency to write, and Christianity. Can you come down some day next term (preferably not Sat. or Sunday), spend the night as my guest in College, eat with us at a chop house, and talk with us till the small hours. Meantime, a thousand thanks. [C. S. Lewis] On 12 March Charles Williams wrote to Lewis from Oxford University Press, Amen House, London: My dear Mr Lewis, If you had delayed writing another 24 hours our letters would have crossed. It has never before happened to me to be admiring an author of a book while he at the same time was admiring me. My admiration for the staff work of the Omnipotence rises every day. To be exact, i finished on Saturday looking—too hastily—at proofs of your Allegorical Love Poem. had been asked to write something about it for travellers and booksellers and people so I read it first…I admit that I fell for the Allegorical Love Poem so heavily because it is an aspect of the subject with which my mind has always been playing; indeed I once wrote a little book called An Essay in Romantic Theology, which the Bishop of Oxford (between ourselves) shook his head over. So Amen House did not publish it, and I quite agree now that it was a good thing. For it was very young and rhetorical. But I still toy with the notion of doing something on the subject, and I regard your book as practically the only one that I have ever come across, since Dante, that shows the slightest understanding of what this very peculiar identity of love and religion means. I know there is Coventry Patmore, but he rather left the identity to be deduced. After vacillating a good deal I permit myself to believe in your letter and in the interests of the subject so far as to send you a copy of one of my early books of verse, (#ulink_e760a5fd-0f61-537b-89f3-0f5798fe79b6) because the Poems from page 42—page 81 may interest you… You must be in London sometimes. Do let me know and come and have lunch or dinner…I should like very much to come to Oxford as you suggest; the only thing is that I am a little uncertain about next term because I may be at Canterbury offand on to see the rehearsals of the Play (#ulink_75b82630-5617-550b-919c-8abc47e22453) I have written for the Friends of the Cathedral to do in June…You will conceive Cranmer as coming under a similar danger to that from which Damaris was saved by the Mercy. Do forgive this too long letter, but after all to write about your Love Poem and my Lion and both our Romantic Theology in one letter takes some paragraphs…P.S.2. And I am 49-so you can decide whether that is too old or too young. (#ulink_382f17b0-226d-5540-bab4-4a95d587aefa) TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W): [Magdalen College] March 23rd 1936 [Dear Williams,] This is going to be a complicated matter. To make a clean breast of it, that particular species of romanticism which you found in my book and which is expressed in the poems (#ulink_fa12289f-51a4-5d5c-9564-a1ee731753c0) you send me, is not my kind at all. I see quite clearly why you think it is—the subject of the book, the at any rate respectful treatment of the sentiment, the apparently tell-tale familiarity with Coventry Patmore—it all fits in perfectly and must seem to you almost like a trap: while it shows me for the first time how paradoxical it is that I, of all men, should have elected, or been elected, to treat such a subject. I trust, however, that there has been no writing with (horror of horrors!) my tongue in my cheek. I think you will find that I nowhere commit myself to a definite approval of this blend of erotic and religious feeling. I treat it with respect: I display: I don’t venture very far. And this is perhaps what one ought to expect from a man who is native in a quite distinct, though neighbouring, province of the Romantic country, and who willingly believes well of all her provinces, for love of the country herself, though he dare not affirm except about his own. I hope you will find that where I talk of the value of the gods and, above all, of their death and resurrection, I speak much more confidently than I ever do of the Celestial and Terrestrial Cupids: there I am on my own ground. That’s where I live. I don’t know how far I am making myself clear…the matter, at this stage in our knowledge of each other, is not easy. Put briefly, there is a romanticism which finds its revelation in love, which is yours, and another which finds it in mythology (and nature mythically apprehended) which is mine. Ladies, in the one: gods in the other—the bridal chamber, or the wood beyond the world—a service incensed with rich erotic perfume, a service smelling of heather, salt water etc. But this distinction is a little complicated by two facts. 1. While writing about Courtly Love I have been so long a student of your province that I think, in a humble way, I am nearly naturalised. 2. In the book I am sending you (don’t read it unless it interests) you will find lots about the frontier between sexual and religious experience. (#ulink_400a7066-d2d4-5e42-bffd-58d9b6685d58) But look to your feet, here. It really has nothing to do with your province: it is simply about desire, longing, the impersonal tiling: which oddly enough can be diverted from the wood beyond the world (are you still following me?) into lust just as quickly as ‘love’ can. We shall have a great deal to talk about when we meet. After this you will not be surprised to learn that I found your poems excessively difficult. I think I have followed Ascension. (#ulink_cacbf244-03f6-59e7-afec-ef04b001006c) I take it this deals with the death of passion into matrimonial routine and the discovery that this death is also a birth—the birth of something which is to passion as the Church is to the earthly life of Our Lord. Am I right? If so it is because we touch here: the death and re-birth motive being of the very essence of my kind of romanticism. If so, it is a good poem, specially stanzas 2 and 7. The Christian Year (#ulink_69f102ec-a759-5f76-9430-f1c2b1a85e9d) I take to be on the same theme, but there are a lot of gaps in my understanding. What I liked best was the bit about the Shepherds at the top of page 73. This may quite possibly be even a great poem—I’ll tell you in a year or so, if I find out. (And talking of years, I’m 37.) Churches I didn’t like, except that dear duplicity of love and Love—which I suppose is the thing we’re talking about. Presentation I liked, and the bit in Gratia Plena about the provincial dialect. Orthodoxy and Ecclesia Docens I definitely disliked. (I embrace the opportunity of establishing the precedent of brutal frankness, without which our acquaintance begun like this would easily be a mere butter bath!) But the thing I liked best of all came outside the ‘pages prescribed for special study’-notably Endings, The Clerk, and Ballade of a Street Door (tho’ I can’t construe line 2). I have read Many Dimensions (#ulink_a73c12aa-7415-512e-8411-da68918c5e6c) with an enormous enjoyment—not that it’s as good as the Lion, but then in a sense it hardly means to be. By Jove, it is an experience when this time-travelling business is done by a man who really thinks it out. I believe all your conclusions do really follow—and I never thought of being caught in that perpetual to-and-fro. The effect which that first idea of a really possible hell has on Lord Thingummy is excellent. I shouldn’t dream of coming to London without visiting you, but I can and do dream of not being in London for a long time. But Canterbury can’t claim you all the time, and there are others besides me who want to meet you. The fourth week of next term (May 18th-May 22nd) would be a good time. Could we nail you now for a week day night between those dates? Of course, I realise that this letter, for more than one cause, may have quenched all wish for a meeting: but acting on the pleasanter hypothesis— [C. S. Lewis] P.S. Thanks for the very kind and intelligent blurb (#ulink_4e5c67ed-c687-508d-a98f-e7cd36c5698b)-a relief, after the nonsensical one put out from Walton Street! But not a word, he (#ulink_959b58d2-e97e-52c2-b605-5b737a585565) may have been doing his best. TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W): [Magdalen College] April 24th [1936] My dear Griffiths— I was more than usually glad to hear from you this time because I had been feeling that my last letter was somewhat ill tempered. If so, forgive me. The truth is that I have a constant temptation to over asperity as soon as I get a pen in my hand, even when there is no subjective anger to prompt me: it comes, I think, simply from the pleasure of using the English language forcibly—i.e. is not a species of Ira but of Sapientia. (#ulink_d3c77782-6dfb-5a99-b63d-dd55d6f20668) This problem of the pleasure in what Aristotle called an ‘unimpeded activity’ is one that exercises me very much—not of course in an instance like the one I have just been discussing where it is plainly abused, but when the work done is a duty, or at least innocent. On the one hand, Nature, whether we will or know [not], attaches pleasure to doing as well as we can something we can do fairly well: and as it is a clear duty to practise all virtuous activities until we can do them well—possess the Habit of doing them—it is a sort of duty to increase such pleasures. On the other hand, they are pleasures of a particularly urgent, absorbing sort, very apt to become idols, and very closely allied to Pride. I heard it recently said in a Lenten sermon that even self-denial can become a kind of hobby—and in a way it is true. Put in another form, the question is how you decide whether an ability and strong propensity for some activity is a temptation or a vocation. You will answer that it all depends whether we can and do offer it to God. But frankly—and I want your answer very much—have you made any approaches to a state in which the conscious offering to God can be maintained concurrently with the actual donkey work of doing the job? I find that I can do those things (even) which I believe that God wills me to do (such as writing this letter) by forgetting God while I do them. I don’t mean forgetting intellectually (which wd. be absurd in the present instance) but turning away—not offering. Is this due to sin or to the very nature of human consciousness? About the Scholastics, I must have expressed myself very badly if you thought I held that one system of philosophy was as good as another or that pure reason was mutable. All I meant was that no philosophy is perfect: nor can be, since, whatever is true of Reason herself, in the human process of reasoning there is always error and even what is right, in solving one problem, always poses another. I therefore reject the idea of any real philosophia perennis. (#ulink_37cbd4c8-f34b-5aa4-aefe-d1def7904a29) The dominance (and revival) of particular philosophy does seem to me to have historical causes. In any age, foolish men want that philosophy whose truths they least need and whose errors are most dangerous to them: and wise men want the opposite. In the next age neither fools nor wise want the same. My original point was that Scholasticism could hardly have had its present prestige in an age like the 19th century when hard thinking seemed to be on the side of materialism: then the business of Christian philosophy was to remind people that there is something which escapes discursive thought. For the moment, the collapse of scientific dogmatism and the growth of a kind of spurious mysticism among anti-Christian thinkers (Heavens! you ought to know all about it) has reversed the situation. But don’t think this state of affairs will be more permanent than any other. Reason, no doubt, is always on the side of Christianity: but that amount and kind of human reasoning which gives an age its dominant intellectual tone, is surely sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other. Again, we must believe that there is no real conflict between the Rational and the Mystical: but in a given period now one, now the other, will be what the world actually needs to be most reminded of—I mean the unbelieving world: and one or the other will usually be the bridge to faith. Thus you and I came to it chiefly by Reason (I don’t mean, of course, that any one comes at all but by God’s grace—I am talking about the route not the motive power) but dozens of other converts, beginning with St. Paul, did not. I have often wished I had time to learn Hebrew, but I think it would be for me more an indulgence than a duty. I should like to hear more about your doctrine of sophistication: I am inclined to think you may be right, but one would have to define ‘sophistication’ carefully. I certainly suppose (but this may be ignorance) that the Hebrew scriptures are the only document of religion carried to the very highest sub-Christian height, while remaining as anthropomorphic as primitive polytheism…What a bugbear ‘anthropomorphism’ used to be! How long it repelled me from the truth! Yet now that one has submitted to it how easy is the burden, how light the yoke. (#ulink_94b58b83-d6a1-5bdd-84db-c8120e04aa8b) Odd too, that the very things we thought proofs of our humility while we were philosophers, now turn out to be forms of pride. Sayer—pray for Sayer. (#ulink_cbd38850-8db4-542f-9851-b503ff2c8379) He is just what I was at a slightly earlier age than his: at the mercy of something which is innocent in itself (the desire to be liked) but which, unresisted, leads to ludicrous vanity, pretentiousness, and direct, pitiful lying. Yet he is likable because of the one redeeming trait that he really knows himself to be (at present) rather a little tick: oh, and the good side of his ruling passion, which is a peculiar accessibility to shame. All this, of course, is very much in confidence. I re-read St. Augustine’s Confessions during Lent, and found it better than I remember, tho’ still it is the explicitly devotional parts that edify me least. I’ll see if I can let you have a copy of my book if you want it. But the main subject is the rise of a romantic conception of sexual love and the transition from adultery to marriage as the normal channel for it: i.e. it would be an odd book to find in a monastery. Write again. Write at the end of every term when I shall have a bright new Vac. to answer in. Yours, C.S.L. TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. May 1st 1936 My dear Arthur, I must confess it would not have been a good time for you to turn up. Why will you insist on coming to England in vacations and summers? If you would only come in the Autumn term (Oct 11th-Dec. 5th) I would try to make you comfortable in college: and I don’t need to breakfast so early now. About the Kilns, I am sorry: I know that for many reasons it can never be a comfortable house for you to stay in. I shall be free on and after June 27th and would come any time you suggested. I look forward to it with enormous pleasure—tho’ rather ashamed that I can make so little return. I trust you won’t be packing all the time I’m with you! Oddly enough I read Aerial (#ulink_45c7398f-f217-5ff5-827b-41f660506ac4) too, and in the same edition a few weeks ago—good fun. I don’t know how far it is reliable. No time to write now. Please let me have a line saying which dates after the 27th wd. suit you. Is the enclosed good?—I can’t help hoping not. I shall be sending you my book in a week or so. Love to all Yours, Jack The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition was published by the Clarendon Press of Oxford on 21 May 1936. TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W): [Magdalen College] May 23rd 1936 Dear Griffiths I am very surprised that your old anti-intellectual ism should be so active—and yet perhaps I should not be since it is often said that conversion alters only the direction not the character of our minds. (This, by the bye, is very important and explains how personal and affectional relations between human souls can recognisably survive even in the full blaze of the beatific vision: and that if we are both saved I shall find you to all eternity in one sense still the same old Griffiths—indeed more the same than ever). I don’t agree. In the first place, I question your account of Our Lord, when you say ‘He is essentially a poet and not at all a philosopher.’ Surely the ‘type of mind’ represented in the human nature of Christ (and in virtue of His humanity we may, I suppose, neither irreverently nor absurdly speak of it as a ‘type of mind’) stands at just about the same distance from the poetic as from the philosopher. The overwhelming majority of His utterances are in fact addressed neither to thought nor to the imagination, but to the ‘heart’—i.e. to the will and the affections: that is, the type is that of the (#ulink_b3f152fe-9ea6-5864-9a33-12388b95d6ae) (as opposed to the ), (#ulink_c6a78ce9-d6c0-57a6-b6dd-87fa6fc332b8) the hortatory and advisory practical moralist. I shudder to use so bleak a word as ‘moralist’, but I think it less untrue than ‘poet’ or ‘philosopher’. You will say that it approaches the poetic in the parables. But this is only an approach: it would (on my view) be an entirely misdirected reverence that would on that basis call him a poet. The parables approach poetry just about as much [as] His argumentative utterances approach philosophy. And it is easy to make too little of these latter. After all, how full of argument, of repartee, even of irony, He is. The passage about the denarius (‘whose image and superscription’); (#ulink_98c32e19-f15f-541e-a5eb-e8173e617c56) the dilemma about John’s baptism; (#ulink_ec03ba3e-6592-5b0c-a1f1-e1c1f5c5c44c) the argument against the Sadducees from the words ‘I am the God of Jacob etc’; (#ulink_27a04f87-5b09-5cd3-a713-4687f4c9f423) the terrible, yet almost humorous, trap laid for his Pharisaic host (‘Simon, I have something to say to you’); (#ulink_99eb5272-861c-5b2a-a46b-6cae887d33a0) the repeated use of the ? fortiori (‘If…, how much more’); (#ulink_cf8632a6-e369-5bd6-aa3a-536e186a681f) and the appeals to our reason (‘Why do not ye of yourselves judge what is right?’) (#ulink_8ab049df-b928-5199-84ba-a89c040fcc21)—surely in all these we recognise as the human and natural vehicle of the Word’s incarnation a mental complexion in which a keen-eyed peasant shrewdness is just as noticeable as an imaginative quality—something in other words quite as close (on the natural level) to Socrates as to Aeschylus. Even about the parables I want to make a point. It is a commonplace that Our Lord, in them, often paradoxically chooses to illustrate the ways of God by the acts not of good men, but of bad men. But surely this means that the mode in which the fable represents its truth is intellectual rather than imaginative—like a philosopher’s illustration rather than a poet’s simile. The unjust judge, (#ulink_a0237b4a-d426-580f-a0b5-2268831a0721) to the imagination, presents no likeness of God—carries into the story no divine flavour or colour (as the Father of the Prodigal Son, (#ulink_965f83e6-9aa2-52f8-8a1b-e8b6b34c4332) for instance, does). His likeness to God is purely for the intellect. It is a kind of proportion sum—A:B::C:D. I therefore on the whole reject any divine authority which your anti-intellectualism seems to draw from the person of Our Lord. I also deny that the ordinary man, with his mind full of images and poor in concepts, is really any nearer to the poet than to the philosopher. For the poet uses images as such, because they are images: the ordinary man (that is, all of us from most of our waking hours) uses them faute de mieux (#ulink_4b183a25-c103-524a-a15a-58df353968f0) to attain knowledge, i.e. his end is the same as the philosopher’s. What is functional in the poet is merely an accidental imperfection in the plain man. Surely the process of mistaking an image for a concept is quite different from that of using images for their proper purposes: processes are distinguished teleologically. Should I be a surgeon because, lacking a knife, I one day used a lancet to cut up my dinner? To be a surgeon means to use a surgeon’s tools not anyhow but surgically—you can find all this in Aristotle. Nor does any sane man, however ‘plain’, use images for thought quite as much as you suggest. His thought is accompanied by images but he is quite well aware that it is not about them he thinks—e.g. he knows perfectly well that the things he believes about London are not true of his image of London, which may be a mere huddle of roofs. Again, if you are suggesting that the Hebrew consciousness was just right and the Greek just wrong, this seems to me to be quite foreign to the tenor of St. Paul’s teaching. He seems to hold quite definitely (a) That Our Lord has ‘broken down the middle wall of partition and made one Man’, (#ulink_41c46143-b4b1-572d-a14e-1d4ee31d65e3) wh. is quite different from simply bringing errant Hellenism back to Hebraic rectitude (b) That the ‘reasonings’ of the Pagans (see Romans) are related to the new Faith much as the Jewish Law is. (#ulink_9a113161-667d-5cec-8521-b9eb120966e7) In Galatians he even seems to equate the Pagan bondage to the with Jewish bondage to the Law. (#ulink_2fa8698f-35b9-50b8-9853-a07605e95c5b) I know they dispute what : means, whether elemental powers (gods, angels) or ‘rudiments’ in the educational sense: but surely it is clear that it means both, that St. Paul is using a double entendre. For the ‘rudiments’ meaning is demanded by III 25, IV 1–3: and the other by IV 3 ( ) and 8. In fact the whole relation between Paganism and Judaism wh. I hinted [at] in my Regress is quite Pauline—more so than I really knew at the time. (#ulink_f5bfe151-c514-5906-8af0-8dff5e8163ba) The great thing is to stick to the ‘one Man’. That is why I have a great objection to any theory that would set parts of us at loggerheads with one another. It is a kind of . (#ulink_55887491-98be-5fe0-bfcb-4625838c1ec7) The Pagans, by their lights, may wisely have constructed a hierarchical scheme of Man, Reason ruling Passion politically and Soul ruling body despotically. But in Christ there is neither male nor female, bond nor free. (#ulink_e8fe27b2-461d-549f-a443-9682a5d4a9ff) If the whole man is offered to God, all disputes about the value of this or that faculty are, as it were, henceforward out of date. You said in your letter (going further than some would go) that every natural desire per se shd. be regarded as an attraction of grace. But if so, how much more every natural faculty! This view of yours about desire is, I suppose, Augustinian. Habe caritatem et fac quod vis. (#ulink_b802315e-6ef7-53fc-bca8-530de5638e91) This is certainly sound, but not perhaps very practical: for it implies Donec caritatem habens, noli facere quod vis. (#ulink_b484032e-77f9-599e-8be5-cbe45ee0a1c5) I wholly agree with what you say about escaping from the circle of morality into the love of God: in fact you have written an excellent commentary on St. Paul’s view of the ‘Law’. But in the meantime? This letter is getting too long: the subject has endless ramifications, but I will wait for your next. Rejoice with me—timidly, for it is only the first streak of dawn and may be false dawn-there are faint signs of a movement away from Anthroposophy in Barfield. Yours C. S. Lewis TO LEO BAKER (BOD): Magdalen College June 24th /36 My dear Baker I should have hesitated to send you the book (#ulink_c152cedb-c864-58bd-9923-c52d5eec80a6) if I had known that it would find you in pain and by the need to acknowledge it lay a new burden on you. The book itself, I fear, is more than a grasshopper—as I find from this dialogue between myself and the Merton Professor of English (#ulink_da379ba4-20f4-5d42-9fe7-e2bc1adba1aa)—more or less my ‘chief’ as they would say in the disciplined professions. P. Well, Lewis, you’ve certainly gone beyond the whole English school with your new book.L. (Blushing at the supposed extremity of the compliment) Oh, really-P. Oh clearly. Much the longest book any of us has written.L. (With ghastly laughter) Oh surely not. I can understand it seeming the longest.P. No, no, there’s no seeming about it. It is a very long book. (Pause) A very long book indeed.L. Come, it’s not as long as X.P. X? It’s half as long again. Far longer than X. Far longer. (And so on) I am greatly distressed to hear that you are still suffering. Is it possible that the doctors can have a man so long in their hands and find out so little about him. It is indeed a comfort that the number of serious diseases which you know you have not got must be higher—far higher than anything the ordinary person in health could boast of. I take it, if the arthritis diagnosis is correct, the pain is the main thing i.e. that it hurts out of all proportion to the harm it will do. Am I right? I must confess I have not myself yet got beyond the stage of feeling physical pain as the worst of evils. I am the worst person in the world to help anyone else to support it. I don’t mean that it presents quite the intellectual difficulties it used to, but that my nerves even in imagination refuse to move with my philosophy. In my own limited experience the sufferer himself nearly always towers above those around him: in fact, nothing confirms the Christian view of this world so much as the treasures of patience and unselfishness one sees elicited from quite commonplace people when the trial really comes. Age, too—nearly everyone improves as he gets old, if this is a ‘vale of soul making’, (#ulink_3d7181aa-f793-580a-a55f-6d1dd6fccd01) it seems to, by round and by large, to be working pretty well. Of course I can’t hazard a guess why you should be picked out for this prolonged suffering. I am told that the great thing is to surrender to physical pain—I mean not to do what’s commonly called ‘standing’ it, above all not to brace the soul (which usually braces the muscles as well) not to try to ignore it: to be like earth being ploughed not like marble being cut. But I have no right to discuss such things on the basis of my very limited experience. You were talking about Peele (#ulink_2f302786-fa02-5be0-805f-4f67584e1159) when you last wrote. Personally I find Renaissance poetry on the whole less and less attractive as time goes on. When it succeeds (‘His thunder is entangled in my hair’—‘Take but thy lute and make the mountains dance’) (#ulink_797eabf8-307b-5666-adf6-2e513d843151) it has a wonderful gloss on; but even then I prefer the dull finish—something either humbler or harder. When it fails-! Did you notice how Peele allows Venus to describe Helen in the Arraignement of Paris? If not look on p. 319 of my book (the very long one). (#ulink_b3048c20-0618-5167-936e-cdc8ea521099) I think probably the greatest influence on my purely literary taste since the old days has been old Germanic poetry, which, as a friend says, sometimes makes everything else seem a little thin and halfhearted. There is a metre in Icelandic called the Drapa which goes like this: Wildest brunt of winterWoke amidst the oak-wood (This isn’t meant to make sense) First you have the three alliterations (wild—wint—woke). Then you have the half-rhyme (consonantal but not vocalic) of-unt and-int. Then you have the full rhyme woke-oak. All these features are required to make a couplet. And note well—the beats must be long in quantity as well as accented: i.e. Wildest broth of weather would be unmetrical. This sounds mere puzzle poetry. In fact it works up a storm of sound which, when combined, as it usually is, with a tragic theme, and contrasting its rock-like form with the vain liquidity of sorrow, produces an almost unbearable tension of stoical pathos-‘iron tears down Pluto’s cheek.’ (#ulink_5350a5bd-0a12-589b-8901-f9328a0b4504) W. H. Auden (one of the few good young poets) has caught something of it in places. You might try hammering one out some night when sleep is denied: but the thing is so difficult to our metrical habits, that you won’t finish it by morning. But I don’t know why I have digressed into Icelandic prosody. More to the points—read any of Charles Williams’ novels (Gollancz) which you can get hold of—specially The Place of the Lion and ManyDimensions. In the rare genre of ‘theological shocker’ which Chesterton (I think) invented, these are superb. On the first level they are exciting stories: beyond that, the philosophical implications are extremely interesting: finally he has the power (absolutely unknown in our generation) of painting virtue. His morally best characters are his artistically best. The fact that Gollancz publishes them (in lurid covers) suggests that all this substantial edification—for it is nothing less—must be reaching the ordinary thriller-reader. If so, I may be telling you about a historical event of the first moment. I think it is hospitality heroical on your own part and that of your wife to ask guests to a sick-house. Do accept my real (not conventional) thanks for this very great kindness. But I can’t well come. I am busy this vac. with work undertaken at haste and now to be repented—not heaven knows, at leisure, but at length: and such breaks as I shall take have to be concerted with a good many other people’s plans. But I hope some lawful occasion will take me your way sooner or later. Till then, better health, Yours truly, C. S. Lewis TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): [The Kilns] June 28th 1936 My dear Barfield 1. I lent The Silver Trumpet (#ulink_fcf96ef4-0d27-5ade-94e6-2075af1febbb) to Tolkien and hear that it is the greatest success among his children that they have ever known. His own fairy-tales, which are excellent, have now no market: and its first reading—children are so practical!—led to a universal wail ‘You’re not going to give it back to Mr. Lewis, are you?’ All the things which the wiseacres on child psychology in our circle said when you wrote it turn out to be nonsense. ‘They liked the sad parts’, said Tolkien ‘because they were sad and the puzzling parts because they were puzzling, as children always do.’ The youngest boy liked Gamboy because ‘she was clever and the bad people in books usually aren’t.’ The tags of the Podger have become so popular as to be almost a nuisance in the house. In fine, you have scored a direct hit. 2. After the sugar, the rhubarb. Can you repeat the poem on the dedication you sent me? I liked it immensely, not only, I hope, for the intimacy, but for the felicity (not hitherto the commonest excellence in your work or mine): but after keeping it on my table for about ten days with the intention of copying it onto the fly leaf of the book, I cannot find it high or low. I am very, very sorry. 3. I wish I could Christianise the Summa (#ulink_b00e67a7-b01a-5346-a472-5d27af163b35) for you—but I dunno, I dunno! When a truth has ceased to be a mistress for pleasure and become a wife for fruit it is almost unnatural to go back to the dialectic ardours of the wooing. There may come a moment—one of those recoveries of virginity, or to speak more suitably to the subject, one of those Nth deaths, and then I’ll try 4. We must exchange week end visits this Vac: I am ready to begin discussing dates. 5. Cecil now has The Place of the Lion: get it out of him before he returns it to me. And read The Castle by Kafka (#ulink_47c6e65f-e8d0-55a6-8692-a5745807dfb8) (Seeker). Yours The Alligator of Love (#ulink_e7250e58-37c7-51db-8e05-5e2d16e91cf4) TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): Magdalen College Oxford [? July 1936] My dear Harwood How nice to get poems again! It was a bit of a shock to find you writing vers libre just as if you were beardless and modern, but that poem is the best of the three all the same: specially the second stanza (‘there is no rainbow’ (#ulink_e973b35a-9465-5b4e-99dc-4f3ac8fef620) ‘light like fine sand’ (#ulink_7d418f81-47ef-54f8-a775-928f8243878b) are lovely[)]. The first doesn’t work with me because I never have resisting lids nor close them consciously and my eyes at bedtime are hungry for darkness not light. (#ulink_1f0674f5-2579-5ae7-b669-acea55deb093) The Hero etc is also good. The third one is not quite a success to my mind. Makes his room for makes his room here or makes this his room creaks rather, and the rest has the opposite fault—too facile. It is a good subject of course. There was a young person of Streatham Who said to his friends when he met ’em‘Old Lewis is dyin’For The Place of the Lion But I keep people’s books once I get ‘em.’ Have a heart! Yours C. S. Lewis Ubi est leonis locus?Caecilii lar et focus? (#ulink_2acf9f13-2fc5-5e11-ac37-4d512ab31cc2) TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W): [Magdalen College 28 July 1936] My dear Griffiths First, about the PS in your letter. I think both your old attitude to poetry (when you looked for religion in it) and your present one (in which you reject it as a bridge you have now finally crossed) are equally based on an error common to all modern critics—that of taking poetry as a substantive thing like chemistry or agriculture. Surely the truth is that poetry is simply a special kind of speech, a way of saying things, and one can no more talk about poetry in the abstract than about ‘saying’. When what the poet is saying is religious, poetry is simply a part of religion. When what he says is simply entertaining, poetry is a form of entertainment. When what he says is wicked, poetry is simply a form of sin. Whenever one is talking, if one begins to utilize rhythm, metaphor, association etc, one is beginning to use ‘poetry’: but the whole place of that poetry in the scheme of things depends on what you are talking about. In fact, in a sense there is no such thing as poetry. It is not an element but a mode. Of course poetry falls out of sight in the highest levels of devotion; but only in the same way in which other forms of expression (work, gestures etc) also fall out of sight. Most people who talk about Poetry in the abstract are, I think, . (#ulink_9b7112db-57da-5042-a66a-18c3d150cb85) I have not made up my mind about Mysticism. Two things give me pause. 1. That the similarity between Christian and non Christian mysticism is so strong. I by no means conclude from this that it is un-Christian in the sense of being incompatible with Christianity; but I am inclined to think that it is not specifically Christian—that it is simply one of those neutral things which the Spirit utilises in a given man when it happens to be there. I.e. it may be a given man’s vocation to approach God mystically because he has the mystical faculty, but only in the same way as it is another man’s duty to serve God by driving a plough because he is a good ploughman. And if any one tried to impose mysticism as the norm of Christian life I suspect he would be making the same mistake as one who said we ought all to be fishermen because some of the apostles were. 2. I am struck by the absence of much mysticism from the New Testament. I am not, I hope, forgetting which is the first and great commandment—but you would probably agree that the mystic’s way of obeying it is not the only way. I quite agree with you that the change which even the greatest saint must undergo (how much more, we) in being redeemed is beyond all imagination: I take (#ulink_f53fe453-fc1a-5ab8-94b0-bb49b2e0e0c7) in as serious sense as I am able. But 1. the new man must still be in some sense the same, or else salvation has no meaning. The very ideas of conversion and regeneration are essentially different from the idea of substitution. Also, don’t we actually see it beginning in this life—I mean the turning round of the very same aptitudes which previously determined the kind of sin. 2. I object to your saying ‘What is of real value in us is that which is hidden from each other and even from ourselves’. I would have said ‘From ourselves and even from each other’. That is, I think that when A loves B, tho’ A’s picture of B is doubtless very unlike the redeemed B, I suppose it to be much less unlike than B’s picture of himself. For we have often agreed, haven’t we, that one can love nothing but good—sin consisting in the love of the inferior good at the expense of the superior. And if so, what we really love in our friend (in so far as we do love him, not the pleasure he gives us) must be the good in him. Would it not follow that the redeemed B will differ from B as we now know him not by being simply strange but by being that of which we should say ‘Ah—he is himself at last’? By the way (tho’ it is a little irrelevant), I am astonished at the reward in knowledge given here and now to even very feeble attempts at obedience. I have found once or twice lately that whenever I succeed in beating down my selfish point of view and make an approach to charity, the motives and feelings of all the other people concerned become transparent: and things about them which one didn’t know a moment before, stare one in the face. Is this self deception? If not, I would put it this way. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner is a false maxim with a strong tendency to promote the wrong kind of forgiveness: the really true and fruitful maxim is the converse—tout pardonner c’est tout comprendre. (#ulink_418e631b-eaa5-5d24-bc34-c86618ae4aff) I can’t go into your questions about prayer. I don’t find that thinking about prayer (I mean in that introspective way) helps me to pray. Of course philosophical thought about it with a view to answering the common objections is another matter. On the whole, you know, I feel that self-examination should be confined to examining one’s conduct. One’s state in general I don’t think one knows much about. But this is all very tentative. Yours C. S. Lewis P.S. I had a long talk with Barfield who admits that his views are in ‘a very liquid condition’. Perhaps our wish is going to be granted. TO R. W. CHAPMAN (T): (#ulink_1acc361c-2036-5316-b878-a67298eba19c) [The Kilns] Aug 20th 1936 My dear Chapman Thanks for both letters. After wondering whether the best reply to the ‘pinpricks’ would not be ‘Ah yes—that’s the worst of depending on these local printers!’, I accept them all except sheows (#ulink_e588c9c9-ac84-515b-ad65-8b0fc12dc543) which is Spenser’s own spelling. I will also add two more, worse, p 96 quotation 15. for ye read He. p 331 5 lines before the first quotation for pictures read pictured. Yes—Cissie and Flossie do appear in Tasso and I trust it doesn’t matter though I’d just as soon they didn’t. (#ulink_0916afc7-a16e-5d4b-868a-e42e6402d32e) But I don’t mind about the lovely lay—it is just the sort of enervating Omar Khyyam stuff you ought to find there. ‘Puryfying complexities’—the next time you come across a real commercial pornogram in a French bookshop read a page or two and note how it all depends on isolating one nerve in a way quite impossible in real life—in fact is just as conventional (tho’ for a worse purpose) as roaring farce. Smoky rain is alright seasoned with sufficient usquebaugh—see Waverley! (#ulink_79489ffe-b18e-5082-8b27-72f3f540f844) Yours C. S. Lewis Congratulations to the ‘local printer’ on giving us a translation of Otto’s Das Heilige at 3/6—very nice. (#ulink_1e49fc61-434b-582b-bf84-debf5aba8d8b) TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W): [Magdalen College] Postmark: 14 September 1936 My dear Griffiths— Excuse me for having left your letter so long unanswered. One thing that delayed it was the more imperative task of answering an other ex-pupil (much junior to you) who is trying to convert me to Hindooism, or at least has sent me three long books by a Frenchman called Gu?non (#ulink_2718bde3-076b-55e2-b87d-ca7dac2a58b6)—as obvious a quack as ever I smelled out. My wretched man, mark you, is embarking on this without having given the least attention to Christianity or even to secular European philosophy: consequently to write to him is a double battle against the man and against my own impatience. However, since he was up till this a person of exclusively literary interests, I daresay even Hindooism is a step upwards (at least if it is better to worship false gods than not even to care whether gods exist or not) and—who knows—by some long way round he may be led home in the end. The more one sees the confusion in which young men’s minds grow up now-a-days, the more cause we have to be thankful on our own part. Now for our affair— 1. I am sorry we should have been fogged by what is really a purely linguistic difficulty about rationalism and intellectualism. Surely I drew your attention in the old days, to the fact that these two words have swapped meanings, so that ‘intellect’ in mod. English means the lower faculty (ratio) and ‘reason’ the higher (intellectus). An exactly similar change has effected fancy and imagination: and both are due to Coleridge. (#ulink_c3071da8-afc5-5f1f-a575-34f76558047b) Don’t let us allow this to confuse us again. 2. I never meant to give you the idea that I would rule a book out because it was scholastic. I denied your view that scholasticism is the philosophia perennis and I expressed distrust of many moderns who call themselves scholastics: quite a different thing. 2. [sic] Before going on to consider the higher mode of knowledge in the Thomist system, I want to ask you does Aquinas himself connect it with poetry? Is there any reason to suppose that he would have allowed us to do so? Does the word poetria (#ulink_0de99e24-13f1-5a26-9116-d8a7e417228e) occur anywhere in the Summa? (#ulink_b9da3487-693d-50ab-9537-b34010d0aa3b) I ask this because one of my objections to some ‘neo-scholastics’ is that they often pick out Thomist texts and string them together with little regard to their real position in Aquinas’ thought, thus producing an account of ‘Thomist aesthetics’, ‘St. Thomas on representative government’ etc etc which really corresponds to nothing their master ever thought or could have thought. If you could give me a few references (I now have both Summae) I could look up the passages in situ: but till then I cannot judge their real significance. I have a strong suspicion that if I did look them up I should find they had nothing to do with poetry, and we could then be clear which we were discussing—the nature of intellectus or the nature of poetry. If one had asked the Doctor to define poetria, do you suppose he wd. have said any more than p. est ars dictandi in versibus. Quaest I. Utrum rhythmus sit versus modus (#ulink_380f2202-8efd-59dc-92b4-d4ac2b9d5232)—or something of that sort. 3. Prior to all discussion about the form of knowledge you describe, I must make a logical point. Since this knowledge is admittedly prayer and love, and could be shown, from what you say, to be also painting and music, I do not see what is gained by calling it poetry or ‘poetic experience’: for it clearly covers two things higher than poetry, and two things different. At best it would be one of the pre-conditions of poetry. And other conditions which you have left out (e.g. one of language) are surely the differentia of poetry? 4. The various things said about this higher knowledge rather puzzle me. Thus the criteria since discursu, per contactum, quasi ex habitu (#ulink_51931c4b-cf9a-5ae1-a50f-17114b2c1920) seem to me to apply to a great many experiences of what I would call sensuous acquaintance (by acquaintance I mean the French connaitre as opp. to savoir)—e.g. my ‘knowledge’ of toothache or cheese. On this level I would agree that all the arts depend on turning savoir into connaitre as far as possible. But the same criteria also apply to something quite different—knowledge of axioms. As to per viam voluntatis (#ulink_9074fa01-2465-547b-8dac-ae928925c0f2)—when you say ‘The will (in mystical prayer) goes out beyond all abstract and conceptual knowledge’, would the proposition remain equally true, or not, if for ‘mystical prayer’ we substituted (a) prayer, (b) every attempt however rudimentary to do the will of God (c) every action of whatever kind (d) every moment of consciousness (e) error. I am afraid this will sound like carping, but do you see my real difficulty? I can’t feel sure from your account whether we are dealing with a special kind of experience or with one aspect of nearly all experience—in fact of all except thought made deliberately abstract for scientific purposes. All day long my experience is going outside ratio in directions wh. cd. quite well be described in the words you quote. And, of course, poetry is nearly always based on that normal experience rather than on the specially and artificially purified moments of ratio. But that is a very different thing from a special ‘poetic experience’. It is rather that there is a special unpoetic experience. 5. When we come to the religious life it seems that we are still, up to a point, in the realm of this normal (and if you will ‘poetic’, but only in the sense ‘not antipoetic’) experience. Thus the soul is not ‘content with an external and superficial knowledge or attachment’. True: but the soul is equally discontent with these in its sensual and affectional life. So far, have we not merely the normal experience, exercised on a much higher object? ‘Love takes up where knowledge leaves off’ (#ulink_c816319b-216a-5280-bd2f-a47f27dc1d22)—is not this true of my knowledge of a friend, an animal, a garden—nay even of a sensual pleasure. E.g. surely my liking for sleep goes far beyond my knowledge of it. At this point it suddenly occurs to me that perhaps we are really in agreement: that while you are saying ‘As above, so below’ I am replying ‘As below, so above’. And if you say that the former is to be preferred since the higher explains the lower and not vice-versa, I agree with you. The points I want to make clear are a. That I don’t wish to deny (how could I) that really supernatural experience can be and is conferred on the soul—some souls—by God even in this life. But, b. That most of the descriptions you give seem to me to refer to an essentially normal experience, which is not specifically religious or poetic or anything but concrete and human. 6. I hope the discussion about primitive man will go on though I cannot do more than make a few comments here—or ask a few questions. a. By primitive do you mean unfallen man or early fallen man? b. If he was ‘unable to distinguish between God and Nature and himself’ he was a Pantheist. Therefore fallen? You can’t mean God created Adam heretical? For God and Nature and Man are distincts (as you and I believe), and not to feel the distinction is a defect. Mind you, I don’t say they are necessarily distinct to just the degree and in just the way the modern mind instinctively assumes. c. Surely the mystic’s inability to recall or distinguish is not per se good. It may be a price well worth paying for supernatural experiences: but it is the defect of the patient not the excellence of the grace that produces the unconsciousness etc. It would be better still to have these experiences and not to lose the power of distinguishing etc. That is, if there are distinctions in the Object. If not, of course, our distinguishing would be disease. But we believe that the real is full of distinctions. To begin with it is not the blank One of Pantheists, but One in Three—distinction straight away. To go on with it is not, but creates nature—a nature not consubstantial with itself. We are not even allowed to say that human souls are naturally sons of God, but ‘to as many as believe He gave power to become sons of God’. (#ulink_c2bcbed3-1af0-5515-88f5-9fa89a95585c) But I can’t go on: I have a headache and am tired. I will try another time. Yours C. S. Lewis As usual, discussion obliterates the elements of agreement. I should have agreed with nearly all you say if you hadn’t brought in Poetry. What you call Poetry I call simply ‘life’ or ‘concrete experience’. In fact I think you give poetry too high a place, in a sense. 1 (#ulink_b7fa7a4f-860d-591e-9a11-c75866289b8f) The Summa Theologica, the chief dogmatic work of St Thomas Aquinas. See also note 7 to the letter to Griffiths of 4 April 1934. 2 (#ulink_1ae1e0a8-1977-53e9-8097-f1a9d73a0599) Dom Bede’s review of The Pilgrim’s Regress is found in Pax: The Monthly Review of the Benedictines of Prinknash, Glos., no. 172 (February 1936), pp. 262–3. 3 (#ulink_1ae1e0a8-1977-53e9-8097-f1a9d73a0599) Lewis did not know it at the time but Dom Bede criticized his use of ‘Mother Kirk’ in his review; ‘unhappily his Mother Kirk is not in fact the true Mother Church. If we may be allowed to adopt his own allegory we would say that his Mother Kirk is an elder daughter of the old Mother Kirk, who ran away from her mother and eloped with one of the sons of Mammon nearly 400 years ago now, and though she fortunately retained many things with her which she took from Mother Kirk’s household, and has since shown many signs of repentance and some desire to return, yet she still remains unreconciled and in bondage to the Spirit of the Age’ (ibid.). 4 (#ulink_c0fdc95c-1f38-54aa-ae8e-b75b081bd857) Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 1, x, 17, adapted from lines 6–9. 5 (#ulink_025c8c02-9dab-547d-8f87-54ad7c64e2eb) Hugh Waterman (1906-), who had been to Marlborough, matriculated al Magdalen in 1925 and, with Martyn Skinner, was Griffiths’s closest friend at Oxford. After taking his BA in 1928 he spent his life as a farmer. For more about this charming man see Dom Bede Griffiths, The Golden Siring (1954). 6 (#ulink_025c8c02-9dab-547d-8f87-54ad7c64e2eb) Martyn Skinner (1906–93) and Lewis were to become friends a few years later. See Lewis’s letter to Skinner of 23 April 1942. 7 (#ulink_65908ba3-5f3f-598a-93d4-56e811be5dee) Lewis had misunderstood. In Catholic theology a proposition is said to be de fide (‘of faith’) if it has been expressly declared and defined by the Church to be true; there are, however, different degrees of certainty in Catholic theology. The highest order of certainty, de fide catholica, appertains to those truths, such as the inerrancy of the Bible, that are revealed by God and taught by the Church. When such a truth is solemnly defined by the pope or by a council it may also take the notation de fide definita, an example of this being the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Lewis had in mind Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). However, one cannot apply ‘de fide’ certainty to every word contained in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas: rather, it was the wisdom of St Thomas that Leo XIII wished to restore, as he said in Aeterni Patris, paragraph 31: ‘We exhort you, venerable brethren, in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas…The wisdom of St. Thomas, We say; for if anything is taken up with too great subtlety by the Scholastic doctors, or too carelessly stated—if there be anything that ill agrees with the discoveries of a later age, or, in a word, improbable in whatever way—it does not enter Our mind to propose that for imitation to Our age.’ 8 (#ulink_901059db-fa40-5104-bfd7-6166d8d61c0c) Tommy and John were Arthur’s dogs. 9 (#ulink_1a6454e5-c243-553e-83ce-f95493452b92) Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion (1931). 10 (#ulink_c000132b-1f3e-5e19-b457-c01770f6ba41) Lewis’s ‘own book’ was The Allegory of Love. 11 (#ulink_395469ec-c191-5dc8-b38d-793628cdea48) Charles Dickens. The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). 12 (#ulink_265a3faa-d92c-51de-83c7-95ab68eaa402) See the biography of Edward Tangye Lean in CG. 13 (#ulink_066dbd42-9684-5a91-9f44-0f5264bc7cdd)The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (1981), letter to William Luther White of 11 September 1967, p. 388. 14 (#ulink_37ee6f3e-5e02-5384-b69a-a19c08e6d511) Lord David Cecil (1902–86), second son of the fourth Marquess of Salisbury, taught Modern History and English Literature at Wadham College, 1924–30, leaving Oxford in 1930 to pursue literary work in London. He returned in 1939 to become Fellow of English at New College, a position he held until he became Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature in 1949. His numerous writings include a biography of William Cowper, The Stricken Deer (1929), as well as biographies of Lord Melbourne and lane Austen. See his biography in CG. 15 (#ulink_37ee6f3e-5e02-5384-b69a-a19c08e6d511) Dr Robert Emlyn Havard (1901–85) took a First in Chemistry at Keble College in 1921. He became a Catholic shortly afterwards, and because of Keble’s ban on Catholics, moved to Queen’s College, Oxford, where he received a degree of Bachelor of Medicine. He practised at London Hospital and the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, and then taught in the Biochemistry Department of Leeds University. He returned to Oxford in 1934 to take over a surgery in Headington and St Giles. Lewis became his patient in 1934 and soon afterwards Havard joined the Inklings. Lewis gave him the nickname ‘Humphrey’ after the doctor in Perelandra. See his biography in CG. 16 (#ulink_37ee6f3e-5e02-5384-b69a-a19c08e6d511) Charles Leslie Wrenn (1895–1969) became a lecturer in English Language at Oxford in 1930, where he helped J. R. R. Tolkien with the teaching of Anglo-Saxon. In 1939 he was appointed Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of London, where he remained until 1946. When Tolkien became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, Wrenn returned to Oxford to replace him as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, a post he held until his retirement in 1963. His writings include an edition of Beowulf (1940), The Poetry of Caedmon (1947) and A Study of Old English Literature (1967). See his biography in CG. 17 (#ulink_5b1006c9-f28e-5f24-9abe-d44da35cbece) See Charles Williams in the Biographical Appendix. Williams, the author of seven ‘supernatural thrillers’ and numerous other works, was an employee of the Oxford University Press in London. All Lewis’s letters to Charles Williams, with the exception of the one dated 22 February 1939, are transcripts believed to have been made by Williams from the originals, which are lost. These transcripts, as well as Williams’s letter to Lewis of 12 March 1936, appear to have been typed on the same typewriter. 18 (#ulink_41190f78-849d-5b8b-a89f-984b2c584180) Charles Williams, Poems of Conformity (1917). 19 (#ulink_70da45eb-fefd-5e53-8789-c4ff27263d15) Charles Williams. Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, acting edn (Canterbury: H. J. Goulden, 1936). 20 (#ulink_70da45eb-fefd-5e53-8789-c4ff27263d15) Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 6825, fols. 48–9. 21 (#ulink_a3726257-c6b8-5697-948a-111c0767a421) i.e. Williams’s Poems of Conformity. 22 (#ulink_36540751-23b6-5cfb-88f9-337e06023a63) It was probably The Pilgrim’s Regress. 23 (#ulink_e1e794a6-a768-51ed-bb38-6d6ab2eb12d5) Williams, Poems of Conformity, p. 78. 24 (#ulink_e1e794a6-a768-51ed-bb38-6d6ab2eb12d5) ibid. 25 (#ulink_2e0aad43-0b37-511e-bfae-b8f83ff81512) Charles Williams, Many Dimensions (1931). 26 (#ulink_890c2e7c-9321-541c-8bec-b2a935122c65) On the cover of The Allegory of Love. 27 (#ulink_890c2e7c-9321-541c-8bec-b2a935122c65) Sir Humphrey Milford. 28 (#ulink_ed250fdf-4ef3-51f3-97d3-c565e3bc9364)Ira is the Latin word for anger or wrath, one of the seven deadly sins; Sapientia is the Latin word for wisdom. 29 (#ulink_85f63414-2e07-58b4-9cbd-b961add51050) ‘enduring’ or ‘perennial philosophy’. The expression comes from the sixteenth-century theologian, Augustine Steuch (1497–1548), and was popularized by the German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). 30 (#ulink_a27b9f3f-1cae-52cf-a3d5-4b8052dce306) Matthew 11:29–30: ‘Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’ 31 (#ulink_630a3594-91fe-567c-bedc-a15383761e58) George Sayer (1914-) read English with Lewis, and took his BA from Magdalen in 1938. He served in the Army during the Second World War, and in 1949 became the senior English master at Malvern College. He retired in 1974. Over the years he became a close friend of Lewis, and is the author of Jack: C. S. Lewis and his Times (1988). See his biography in CG. 32 (#ulink_664605ba-f5f5-51df-b33c-612c0309b200) John H. Bone, The Aerial: A Comedy in One Act (1932). 33 (#ulink_3e815819-cbbf-58d7-8ef2-004dde5c77c6) ‘prudent’. 34 (#ulink_3e815819-cbbf-58d7-8ef2-004dde5c77c6) ‘clever’. 35 (#ulink_5a3b1993-1bfb-5838-b3d0-7e59ce7c1979) Matthew 22:20. 36 (#ulink_5a3b1993-1bfb-5838-b3d0-7e59ce7c1979) ibid., 21:25: ‘The baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven, or of men?’ 37 (#ulink_5a3b1993-1bfb-5838-b3d0-7e59ce7c1979) ibid., 22:32. 38 (#ulink_5a3b1993-1bfb-5838-b3d0-7e59ce7c1979) Luke 7:40. 39 (#ulink_5a3b1993-1bfb-5838-b3d0-7e59ce7c1979) Matthew 6:30, Luke 12:28. 40 (#ulink_5a3b1993-1bfb-5838-b3d0-7e59ce7c1979) Luke 12:56–7: ‘Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time? Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?’ 41 (#ulink_b4ca0481-2e76-536a-8b24-0584db1a97a9) ibid., 18:2–6. 42 (#ulink_b4ca0481-2e76-536a-8b24-0584db1a97a9) ibid., 15:11–32. 43 (#ulink_2eb99976-dfcc-5214-9d79-1cef7ff479fc) ‘for want of any better alternative’, 44 (#ulink_d1f3bdc2-c014-5c3c-9fe7-7b2937f8bb20) Ephesians 2:14–15. 45 (#ulink_d1f3bdc2-c014-5c3c-9fe7-7b2937f8bb20) Romans 2. 46 (#ulink_d1f3bdc2-c014-5c3c-9fe7-7b2937f8bb20) Galatians 4. 47 (#ulink_57271a9d-6dd4-51d1-876f-42092a9742c8)The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933; Fount, 1998), book 8, ch. 8, pp. 191–2. ‘The Pagans couldn’t read…but they had pictures…And then the Pagans made mistakes. They would keep on trying to get the same picture again: and if it didn’t come, they would make copies of it for themselves…They went on malting up more and more stories for themselves about the pictures, and then pretending the stories were true…The Shepherds could read: that is the thing to remember about them. And because they could read, they had from the Landlord, not pictures but Rules.’ 48 (#ulink_57271a9d-6dd4-51d1-876f-42092a9742c8) ‘respect of persons’. 49 (#ulink_57271a9d-6dd4-51d1-876f-42092a9742c8) Galatians 3:28. 50 (#ulink_936fe535-a426-53ff-97d8-b1057b82b620) ‘Have charity, and do as you will.’ St Augustine nowhere uses this sentence in precisely these words. The words Habe caritatem are taken from his Sermon 78, ch. 6, The phrase et fac quod vis seems to be a conflation taken from Augustine’s Commentary en the First Letter of John, Book 10, ch. 8, where he writes, ‘dilige et quod vis fac’-‘Cherish, and do as you will.’ The conflation of these two components is probably the product of St Thomas Aquinas’s faulty memory, since he says precisely what Lewis quotes and attributes this to Augustine in his sermon on the Beatitudes. Lewis may have been remembering a quotation from St Thomas, who, in turn, had misquoted Augustine. 51 (#ulink_936fe535-a426-53ff-97d8-b1057b82b620) ‘Until you have charity, do not do as you will.’ This is Lewis’s gloss and expansion of the Augustinian phrase. 52 (#ulink_c0d11e0c-8131-5f58-93a2-215015744288) Lewis had sent Baker a copy of The Allegory of Love. 53 (#ulink_c0d11e0c-8131-5f58-93a2-215015744288) David Nichol Smith (1875–1962) was educated at the University of Edinburgh. He was appointed to a readership at Oxford in 1908 where he gave valuable help in organizing the English School. In 1921 he became a Fellow of Merton College and was Merton Professor of English Literature, 1929–46. Much of his work was turned towards the eighteenth century, and included Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (1928) and Some Observations on Eighteenth Century Poetry (1937). 54 (#ulink_750d36e9-cebf-5d87-9665-ce8fd73a2353) John Keats, Letters, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (1931; 4th edn 1952), Letter 123 to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 Febniary-3 May 1819, pp. 334–5: ‘Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making”. Then you will find out the use of the world…There may be intelligences or sparks of divinity in millions—but they are not souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.’ 55 (#ulink_aa3ab458-c8e6-59bc-974e-8a932aba040d) George Peele (1556–961 of London was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. He wrote pageants, plays and verse. His Life and Works were edited by C. T. Prouty (3 vols., 1952–70). 56 (#ulink_aa3ab458-c8e6-59bc-974e-8a932aba040d) George Peele, David and Bethsabe (1599), 1169, 1648. 57 (#ulink_aa3ab458-c8e6-59bc-974e-8a932aba040d)The Allegory of Love, pp. 318–19: ‘[Spenser] wrote in an age when English poetry had reached its stylistic nadir, the age of “hunting the letter”, of violent over-emphasis and exquisitely bad taste, the age in which that most ignoble metre, the Poulter’s measure, was popular… It was an age in which even Peele could make Venus speak thus to Paris in description of Helen; “A gallant girl, a lusty minion trull,/That can give sport to thee thy bellyful.”’ 58 (#ulink_b68d9faf-cb18-5244-8eb1-c2412b4b9df2) John Milton, Il Penseroso (1645), 105. 59 (#ulink_1ba13e03-0964-58df-a08d-1f94468d3f79) Owen Barfield’s fairy tale, The Silver Trumpet, was published in 1925. 60 (#ulink_bfb4adef-c754-56f2-848f-6cb45c46cb0a) i.e. Lewis’s unpublished ‘Great War’ document. See note 35 to the letter to Barfield of 16 March 1932. 61 (#ulink_ac465f2d-9150-5a6d-aa77-1de55dc9da78) Franz Kafka, The Castle (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1926). 62 (#ulink_f4359612-28c7-50a8-b626-22bb1e48d208) Playing on the title of The Allegory of Love, which is dedicated to Barfield, this signature is accompanied by the drawing of an alligator serenading a young lady in a castle. The word-play is based on the malapropism ‘allegories in the Nile’. 63 (#ulink_e5b30e72-5399-5355-b0b5-e3fd6b3c6bef)The Voice of Cecil Harwood: A Miscellany, ed. Owen Barfield (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1979), ‘Day and Night’, stanza 2, 2. 64 (#ulink_e5b30e72-5399-5355-b0b5-e3fd6b3c6bef) ibid., 6. 65 (#ulink_e5b30e72-5399-5355-b0b5-e3fd6b3c6bef) ibid., stanza 1, 4–6: ‘I shut consciously the lids of my eyes,/I spiritually close the gates of the sense of hearing,/I forget all touch and taste and the intake of breath and I wait.’ 66 (#ulink_47f8c2df-0dea-56b5-926b-3353fbc69608) ‘Where is “The Place of the Lion”? The home and hearth of Cecil!’ 67 (#ulink_8644735c-571f-5f39-b12d-da16d1e47f7d) ‘saying nothing’. The phrase is a catch-phrase in Plato, as in Apology 18, b, 2. 68 (#ulink_604c3a0a-f07d-5746-856c-7f9b7bb87249) ‘a new foundation’. The reference is to 2 Corinthians 5:17 and Galatians 6:15. 69 (#ulink_ac25b7ae-8951-5d1a-87db-1ad355dc82c2) In his letter to Arthur Greeves of 14 February 1920 (CL I, p. 475), Lewis wrote: ‘When a thing is explained it loses half its nastiness, “tout comprende [sic] c’est tout pardonner.”’ The expression comes from Madame de Sta?l (1766–1817), who said in Corinne (1807), book 18, ch, 5, ‘Tout comprendre rend tr?s indulgen’ (‘To understand everything makes one very indulgent’). The first expression used by Lewis, ‘tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner’ (‘to understand everything is to forgive everything’) is also attributed to Madame de Sta?l, while ‘tout pardonner c’est tout comprendre’ means ‘to forgive everything is to understand everything’. 70 (#ulink_cc5aff91-6c86-549f-b95d-2a1fd8816e40) Robert William Chapman (1881–1960), secretary to the delegates of Oxford University Press, 1920–42, was the editor of The Allegory of Love. He took a First in Literae Humaniores from Oriel College, Oxford, in 1906, after which he began working for the Clarendon Press. He was the editor of Jane Austen’s novels and letters, and his many distinguished books include Jane Austen—A Critical Bibliography (1953) and an edition of The Letters of Samuel Johnson with Mrs Thrale’s Genuine Letters to Him, 3 vols. (1952). 71 (#ulink_e7a01e19-be8d-5ef6-9420-24d6c44d3c51)The Allegory of Love, p. 336. The reference is to Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III, vii, 29. 72 (#ulink_c6b3e2ed-d6d6-5c29-b347-bdd3aebbced0) ibid., p. 331: ‘Acrasia’s two young women (their names are obviously Cissie and Flossie) are ducking and giggling in a bathing-pool for the benefit of a passer-by: one does not need to go to fairy land to meet them.’ 73 (#ulink_29dd03d3-5b78-5dfb-ab8f-9eb53da77572) Scott, Waverley. ch. 6: ‘The laird was only rejoiced that his worthy friend, Sir Everard Waverley of Waverley-Honour, was reimbursed of the expenditure which he had outlaid on account of the house of Bradwardine…A yearly intercourse took place, of a short letter and a hamper or a cask or two, between Waverley-Honour and Tully-Veolan, the English exports consisting of mighty cheeses and mightier ale, pheasants, and venison, and the Scottish returns being vested in grouse, white hares, pickled salmon, and usquebaugh.’ 74 (#ulink_46b15200-624b-5b41-8b2c-ca3d4711b715) Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1923; 7th impression, 1936). 75 (#ulink_e5a4ee6e-483c-56b4-aa75-6302e9baa9af) Ren? Gu?non (1886–1950), Sufi and founder of the Traditionalist School. The ‘ex-pupil’ was Martin Lings, a member of Gu?non’s household in Egypt and a convert to Traditionalism. See Martin Lings in the Biographical Appendix, and Lings’ essay, ‘Ren? Gu?non’, Sophia: The journal of the Traditional Studies, I, no. 1 (Summer 1995). 76 (#ulink_d21b5f9e-2650-59cd-9e74-2cc1e6d90d61) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (1825), Aphorism VIIIb: ‘Understanding is discursive; Reason is fixed. The Understanding in all its judgments refers to some other faculty as its ultimate authority; The Reason in all its decisions appeals to itself as the ground and substance of their truth. Understanding is the faculty of reflection; Reason [the faculty] of contemplation.’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 13: ‘The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime Agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of Its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation…Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word choice’. 77 (#ulink_6947a27c-d865-5ddb-a8d2-bf90357e87d1) The medieval term for ‘poetry’. 78 (#ulink_6947a27c-d865-5ddb-a8d2-bf90357e87d1) Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 1, Article 9, ‘Whether Holy Scripture Should Use Metaphors’: Objection 1. ‘It seems that Holy Scripture should not use metaphors. For that which is proper to the lowest science seems not to befit this science, which holds the highest place of all. But to proceed by the aid of various similitudes and figures is proper to poetry, the least of all the sciences. Therefore it is nut fitting that this science should make use of such similitudes.’ Reply: ‘Poetry makes use of metaphors to produce a representation, for it is natural to man to be pleased with representations. But sacred doctrine makes use of metaphors as both necessary and useful.’ ibid., Part I, Question 115, Article 5: ‘We know by experience that many things are done by demons, for which the power of heavenly bodies would in no way suffice: for instance, that a man in a state of delirium should speak an unknown tongue, recite poetry and authors of whom he has no previous knowledge.’ 79 (#ulink_6947a27c-d865-5ddb-a8d2-bf90357e87d1) ‘poetry is the art of speaking in verses. Question 1: Whether rhythm is a type of verse.’ 80 (#ulink_45661db7-6329-5539-bc99-8311c687f6f5) ‘by its activity, through contact, as from its appearance’. These are the criteria St Thomas Aquinas uses in the Summa Theologica, Part I. Question 75, Article 1 to discuss whether the soul has a body. 81 (#ulink_45661db7-6329-5539-bc99-8311c687f6f5) ‘through the path of the will’. This was a standard concern of the Church Fathers. 82 (#ulink_af5f9244-5ce5-53ab-93ff-389fc6447100) Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part II, Question 27, Article 5. 83 (#ulink_f328659a-6ffd-547e-8e3d-948d5f541e44) John 1:12. 1937 (#ulink_645d359a-3391-5402-9374-adebc0d1a14b) TO JOAN BENNETT (L): (#ulink_6501ac14-90b3-58cd-bd4f-ca2d03bdaf07) [Magdalen College] 13 January 1937 A foul copy of an essay (which now that I re-read it doesn’t seem as good as I had hoped) is a poor return for the delightful, the champagne holiday you gave me. But you asked for it and here it is. (#ulink_32110967-4695-50f8-ac6b-7a488d1ca27e) What splendid talk goes on in your house!—and what a wonderful thing…your English Faculty is. If only we and you could combine into a single teaching body (leaving out your freaks and nonentities) we could make ‘English’ into an education that would not have to fear any rivalries. In the meantime we have lots to exchange. I am sure you practise more ‘judgement’; I suspect we have more ‘blood’. What we want is to be well commingled. The Lucas book proves disappointing as you go on. (#ulink_131153ff-cdc6-588e-9b8a-4240e3d3dc00) His attack on Richards (#ulink_5c77d8f4-2981-5de0-84c8-7951ee4a9db7) for splitting up poetic effects which we receive as a unity, is silly; that is what analysis means and R. never suggested that the products of analysis were the same as the living unity. Again, he doesn’t seem to see that Richards is on his side in bringing poetry to an ethical test in the long run; and his own ethical standard is so half-hearted—he’s so afraid of being thought a moralist that he tries to blunt it by gas about ‘health’ and ‘survival’. As if survival can have any value apart from the prior value of what survives. To me especially it is an annoying book; he attacks my enemies in the wrong way…and a good deal of mere ‘superiority’ too… TO JOAN BENNETT (L): [Magdalen College February 1937] I also have been having ’flu or you should have heard from me sooner. I enclose the article: pray make whatever use you please of it (#ulink_33d11c72-6e90-5f3a-9f95-e30930be3e70)…It is a question (for your sake and that of the Festschrift, not mine) whether a general pro-Donne paper called Donne and his critics—a glance at Dryden and Johnson and then some contemporaries including me—wouldn’t be better than a direct answer. C.S.L. as professional controversialist and itinerant prize-fighter is, I suspect, becoming already rather a bore to our small public, and might in that way infect you. (#ulink_e1804a11-f70b-526d-9af2-12a4bb821645) Also, if you really refute me, you raise for the editor the awkward question, ‘Then why print the other article?’ However, do just as you like…and good luck with it whatever you do. I’ve had a grand week in bed—Northanger Abbey, The Moonstone, (#ulink_e5916d32-b63d-53db-8fb8-cee73a92847e) The Vision of judgement, (#ulink_61cbb22a-a15d-5e21-b744-8a7735b62b34) Modern Painters (Vol. 3), (#ulink_4d357885-9d9d-5100-a6d8-08f7c232470f)Our Mutual Friend, (#ulink_6000d9e6-572a-5b31-8bfa-6ef1f46f7437) and The Egoist. (#ulink_3e2fe3c4-a1c2-5016-a974-6fe85d5d1e28) Of the latter I decided this time that it’s a rare instance of the conception being so good that even the fantastic faults can’t kill it. There’s a good deal of the ass about Meredith—that dreadful first chapter—Carlyle in icing sugar. And isn’t the supposedly witty conversation much poorer than much we have heard in real life? Mrs Mounstuart is a greater bore than Miss Bates (#ulink_ec3c5ac8-eaea-5725-920c-255600f09457)—only he didn’t mean her to be. The Byron was not so good as I remembered: the Ruskin, despite much nonsense, glorious. TO MARY NEYLAN (T): (#ulink_0cb00c20-8025-5907-9fc4-7721667e22aa) Magdalen College Oxford March 8th 1937 Dear Mrs. Neylan What a nice letter! To be read is nice enough: but to have led anyone back to the poets themselves is more what critics dream of than what usually happens. I ought to be able to reward you with a good list of books, as desired, but you know bibliographies are my Waterloo: in my own reading I always sacrifice critics to the poets, which is unkind to my own trade. However, let’s try. I haven’t yet got Grierson’s new book Milton and Wordsworth, (#ulink_c62a94c2-a3fa-5dfa-bb2e-ce6639329f29) but I’m going to: it ought to kill two of your birds with one stone. Have you read F. L. Lucas’ Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal? Hideously over-written in parts, but well worth reading: he has grasped what seems to be a hard idea to modern minds, that a certain degree of a thing might be good and a further degree of the same thing bad. Elementary, you will say—yet a realisation of it would have forbidden the writing of many books. These are new. A few years old—but you may not have read it—is E. K. Chambers’ Sir Thomas Wyatt and other studies. (#ulink_c94e82cd-eff6-5b45-935f-bf3fb4170362) Some of the essays are medieval, but most of it is 16th century. I can’t think of anything much on ‘general tendencies of the 17th century’ since one you almost certainly read when you were up, Grierson’s Cross Currents of XVIIth c. Lit, (#ulink_37160c8a-ee48-53a3-b362-b3ac6bf3bf23) very good indeed. By the bye a festschrift to Grierson shortly appearing (Tillyard, Nichol Smith, Joan Bennett and myself are among the contributors) might contain something of what you want. The book on the 17th c. by Willy (#ulink_39318056-940e-5a0f-a892-24b0d27b3afc) (I have forgotten the title) is more on the thought background than the poets, rather doing for that century what my Prolegomena tried to do for the middle ages. I don’t know of anything general on the 18th century. Sherburn’s Early Life of Pope (#ulink_5c6c296d-cf6c-5931-a9a7-60a0ec086381) tho’ good is hardly what you want. You don’t say how you or your husband are: I hope all is well. Yours sincerely C. S. Lewis TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): The Kilns Easter Sunday [28 March] 1937 My dear Arthur, I have been meaning to write to you for some time, and had partly excused myself because I was waiting to send you a story of Tolkien’s which is to be published soon and which I think you may like: (#ulink_4e0b5a8d-cb8e-521b-ad49-db6e7311f2cc) but Uncle Gussie (#ulink_bbf9bf97-d0c5-5046-bf11-bec3a8c33f84) turned up on Thursday (the coolest and most characteristic visit—merely a wire to announce his arrival!) and jogged my conscience with a message from you. Thanks for your letter. I suppose I shall hear more from you about America when we meet. Am I right in concluding from your mere list of towns that on the aesthetic side—as regards mountains, rivers and woods etc.—it made no impression? (#ulink_5b4b1364-8be9-5fd9-98cb-8d5141726b28) I am glad to hear that you think of risking another visit to us and will do my best to make you less uncomfortable than you usually are. I suppose it must be in the summer term? I have often told you that this is an injudicious (lovely adjective!) time to choose, but I know you are not entirely free. By the bye, I should warn you that you will find the Kilns changed much for the worse—which you might have thought impossible—by a horrible rash of small houses which has sprung up all round us. All thanks to Lord Nuffield, I suppose: it would take a good deal more than a million pounds to undo the harm he has done to Oxford. (#ulink_f9bece7f-a24b-53df-8fca-082c795f601d) We have had rather an unfortunate spring. First of all a maid got flu’ just before she was leaving and had to be kept on as a patient for several weeks. Then I got flu’. Then as I was getting better Paxford (that is our indespensable fac-totum, like your Lea, you know) got flu’. (#ulink_71ea50e1-6f3b-5e03-9689-d7a53278a077) Then I had a grand week end doing as much as I could of his work and the maid’s until I got flu’ again. Then Minto’s varicose ankles broke down. Then Warnie got flu’ and was rather bad. However, we have come through it all and seem pretty cheery now. The ‘dreadful weather’ I have been rather enjoying: I quite like seeing the primroses one day and the snow the next. I have not read anything you would be likely to care for lately except a Vie de J?sus by a Frenchman called Mauriac, (#ulink_e622dd7a-e24d-52e2-8196-2e23f07ccae8) which I strongly recommend: it is papist, of course, and contains what English and Protestant taste would call lapses, but it is very good in spite of them. I suppose you noticed about Christmas time that someone has republished the complete Adventures of Tim Pippin by Roland Quiz. (#ulink_f68c8d9c-d7b1-5c3d-a41c-1ddad47e6377) I half thought of getting it, but have satisfied myself with assuming that you have done so. I hope you have not satisfied yourself with a similar assumption about me! I have been progressing all this lent through the first volume of a v. nice edition of St Augustine’s City of God only to find that the other volume has been so wrongly bound that it begins and ends in the middle of sentences. What a tragedy this would once have been! We have got (vice Mr. Papworth, now gathered to his fathers) a golden retriever puppy who is about the size of a calf and as strong as a horse: has the appetite of a lion, the manners of a hurricane, the morals of a gangster, and an over salivated mouth. Please give my love to your mother, and remember me to Reid. I saw Bryson about a fortnight ago and I think he said he was going home this Vac. Will you be able to have me this summer? It is a very bright spot in the year, but don’t hesitate to say if it is inconvenient. Yours Jack TO DANIEL NEYLAN (T): (#ulink_80892826-85e5-5391-b2de-91c158484816) Magdalen College, Oxford. May 5th 1937 Dear Neylan, I am sorry your wife has been ill—give her my sympathy. Your offer is attractive to the hot-gospeller in me, but after a lot of thought I feel I must refuse. I have no notion how to handle such an audience nor what to say to them: but many thanks. I am in the middle of a scholarship exam, or I shd. write more. Yours C. S. Lewis TO JOAN BENNETT (WHL): Magdalen College, Oxford. May 7th 1937. Dear Mrs Bennett Will this do? (#ulink_a79333cb-1017-50f3-8827-bdaa11561a3b) Don’t hesitate to let me know if there is an expression in it which you think unfortunate or obscure, or any emphasis in dangerous directions. About the imaginary chronology (by which I mean the sorting out of the love poems into cynical and idealistic periods), I find it nearly so embedded in everyone’s mind that I am haunted by the fear that there may be some real evidence for it which I don’t know; my jibe was made in the hope of eliciting this. All I meant about the book was that it is not nearly so exciting as a book by you ought to be. Of course I disagree with the phonetic criticism, but very respectable people agree with you… TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): Magdalen College. Oxford. June 10th 1937 My dear Arthur, In my diary I have down ‘cross to Arthur’ for July 12th not July 5th and as I have arranged everything on this basis I trust it will be alright. Your suspicion that I was fuming with wrath during the lunch is a sad commentary on my previous character, and coming from one who knows me so well, it must (I fear) be correct. This time, however, tho’ of course I would have preferred to see you alone, I quite liked it. Stamps…I can’t understand the attraction: but I send all I have.* (#ulink_1051c121-52b7-5b27-8f4a-0f64738b499b) Yours Jack TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): Magdalen College Oxford June 19th 1937 My dear Harwood I had a quite unexpected windfall the other day as a result of which I am able to make Lawrence a present. My idea is that you should lodge it in a deposit account and let the trifle of interest accumulate, the whole to be used for or by him when he reaches the costly age (18–20). But you probably understand such matters better than I—at least a professional Bursar ought to—so dispose it for Godson’s future use as you think best. Is there any chance of seeing you this summer? Give my love to Daphne. Yours C. S. Lewis TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. [27] June 1937 Dear Griffiths Your reply about the body leaves all my questions unanswered. I’d better tell you how it arose. I was talking the other day to an intelligent infidel who said that he pinned all his hopes for any significance in the universe on the chance that the human race by adapting itself to changed conditions and first planet jumping, then star jumping, finally nebula jumping, could really last forever and subject matter wholly to mind. When I said that it was overwhelmingly improbable, he said Yes, but one had to believe even in the 1000th chance or life was mockery. I of course asked why, feeling like that, he did not prefer to believe in the other and traditional ‘chance’ of a spiritual immortality. To that he replied—obviously not for effect but producing something that had long been in his mind—‘Oh I never can believe that: for if that were true our having a physical existence wd. be so pointless.’ He’s a nice, honest chap, and I have no doubt at all that this is one of the things standing between him and Christianity. Your remarks seem to me to leave the question much where they found it. Whatever you hold about the blessed in the state of separation, the resurrection either makes some change in it or none. If none, why does it occur? If change, then either for the worse or for the better. For the worse?—nefas credere. (#ulink_55362631-c720-57f2-890b-507b36d9ede4) If for the better…well there the question stands. As to the rest of your letter—the question of Divine Presence was introduced rather for example: but, of course, I have no wish to discuss with you anything you don’t want to discuss with me. I received your statement that you do not think I am acting ‘in bad faith’ with some puzzlement: as if, in a conversation that had no apparent connection with money, you suddenly remarked ‘I am not saying you are bribed’. One is of course glad to be acquitted: but quite in the dark as to how one came to be on trial. I also am doing a lot of rustic work at present but more with a scythe than a spade. Yours C. S. Lewis TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. Sept 2nd 1937 Instrument approved with the exception of ‘were reduced to’ which hardly seems the right style Malory—Morris—are you preparing a chapter on Quellen for a book about me. ‘Curiously comfortless stuff in the background’ is the criticism of a sensible man just emerging from the popular errors about Morris. Not so curiously, nor quite in the background—that particular discomfort is the main theme of all his best work, the thing he was born to say. The formula is ‘Returning to what seems an ideal world to find yourself all the more face to face with gravest reality without ever drawing a pessimistic conclusion but fully maintaining that heroic action in, or amelioration of, a temporal life is an absolute duty though the disease of temporality is incurable.’ (#ulink_e0d727f9-d3dc-5acd-9a67-76f9f36af849) Not quite what you expected, but just what the essential Morris is. ‘Defeat and victory are the same in the sense that victory will open your eyes only to a deeper defeat: so fight on.’ (#ulink_1110328f-7fe4-501d-8485-c20510a8f781) In fact he is the final statement of good Paganism: a faithful account of what things are and always must be to the natural man. Cf. what are in comparison the ravings of Hardy on the one hand and optimistic Communists on t’other. But the Earthly Paradise after that first story is inferior work. Try Jason, House of the Wolfings, Roots of the Mts, Well at the World’s End. (#ulink_4e231360-f1a2-5256-80d9-5c02bd03b94e) The thriller is finished and called ‘Out of the Silent Planet.’ Yes, another next term, certainly. Yrs C.S.L. If you want my sonnets, I’ve a very good one beginning ‘The Bible says Sennacherib’s campaign was spoiled.’ (#ulink_b6c147b2-f5d6-584a-a11f-0a2d6cb54e26) TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W): [Magdalen College] Sept. 23rd, 1937 [Dear Williams] Many thanks for the book; (#ulink_87178ea7-323f-59da-a0a1-a62241f5b0d3) fortunately I had seen it announced and ordered a copy before it arrived, so that both of us have it both ways. I think this is much the best book you have given us yet. In the first place I find the form of evil that you are dealing with much more real than the Evil (with a big E) that appears in the other books and which, though I enjoy it, (like pantomime red fire) in a story, I do not believe in. But your Gomorrah is the real thing, and Wentworth a truly tragic study. Of course he can’t in the nature of things be as good fun as Sir Giles Tumulty, (#ulink_b9ac4474-e725-57e5-93b8-3b114e5e6c58) but he’s more important. And Mrs Sammile is excellent too. In the second place I’m glad to have got off the amulet or ‘sacred object’ theme. Thirdly—I hope this doesn’t sound patronising—in sheer writing I think you have gone up, as we examiners say, a whole class. Chapter II is in my opinion your high water mark so far. Your have completely overcome a certain flamboyance which I always thought your chief danger: this is crisp as grape nuts, hard as a hammer, clear as glass. I am a little worried in the Wentworth part by the tendency to Gertrude Steinisms (eaves eves, guard card, etc.). (#ulink_8476bb94-6f5f-57d3-892c-1bbe723588bd) I agree, of course, that if there is any place for this kind of writing, the descent into Hell is the place. But I believe this representative style, this literary programme music in which the writer writes as if he were in the predicament he describes, to be a false trail. I would rather see you becoming or remaining rigidly sober and classic as you describe chaos, your limit emphasizing nearly all good, except in the conversations between Stanhope and Pauline. I fancy the rift between us is here pretty wide. I know you would talk that way when most serious and most sincere: but most people wouldn’t. I’m afraid that the interchange of formulae like ‘Under the Mercy’ (#ulink_0c1f1c35-67fb-5dd9-a891-e07fdb758acc) may sound like a game to people who don’t know you. The L.C.M. (#ulink_b43e28f3-c172-5e6e-bf76-5a304a481d00) between Dante and P. G. Wodehouse is a difficult thing to hit and I’m not sure if it’s a good thing to aim at. The worst of trying to explain one’s minor objections to a book one has very much liked is that they don’t sound minor enough when the inevitably lengthy explanation has been made. This is a thundering good book and a real purgation to read. I shall come back to it again and again. A thousand thanks for writing it—without prejudice to thanks on a different level for the presentation copy. I want you to be at the next Inklings probably on 20 or 27 October. Can you keep yourself fairly free about the time? This sounds a large order, but the others are not get-at-able yet. I have written a thriller about a journey to Mars on which I urgently want your opinion: also you’d be able to take your revenge! [C. S. Lewis] TO E. F. CARRITT (P): (#ulink_e4cc9ea2-f1f4-5ccc-9034-59c44b221245) Magdalen College, Oxford. Oct. 29th [1937] Dear Carritt Alas—I have no Saturdays now! The B. Litt work which I do involves correcting of transcripts which can be done only when Bodley is open, so that Saturday afternoon has become one of my busiest times. (#ulink_9efac6d8-457e-55be-ada1-2a7f0be20afe) I should have loved to come. If any time in the Vac. you feel you have a free afternoon and a permit for Wytham eating their heads off, I’m your man. Where are the walks? Where are the woods? Where is Wytham gone?Leisure and literature are lost underThe night’s helmet as tho never they had been! (#ulink_ec498aa9-d549-5fe9-8c7d-72b2e94cae6b) Yrs C.S.L. * (#ulink_1a6dd0f5-281a-57ff-bb25-eebed932dca1) Of course there are many more in number, but only duplicating what I enclose 1 (#u41185bc1-b197-5209-a81f-50534564bebf) Joan Bennett (1896–1986) was born in London, the daughter of novelist Arthur Frankau who wrote under the pseudonym Frank Danby. In 1920 she married Stanley Bennett (1889–1972), Librarian of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Mrs Bennett was a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and a lecturer in English at Cambridge University, 1936–64, Her books include Sir Thomas Browne (1962) and Five Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Marvell (1965). Lewis was a frequent visitor to the home of Stanley and loan Bennett, and his Studies in Words (1960) was dedicated to them. The original letters to Bennett have disappeared, and the only copies that survive are found in L. 2 (#ulink_1c60d202-934f-5d86-9b03-58d9edf70162) Bennett was helping to edit a Festschriftt—a collection of writings—entitled Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (1937), to which Lewis contributed ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’. 3 (#ulink_d776cbd6-f42d-5f03-a785-441d883f1108) Frank Laurence Lucas, The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1936). 4 (#ulink_d776cbd6-f42d-5f03-a785-441d883f1108) I. A. Richards (1893–1979), literary critic, and Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. His works include Principles of Literary Criticism (1925) and Practical Criticism (1929). It was the former of these that Lucas was criticizing. 5 (#ulink_7d9665f3-b5df-5f0f-8655-855c7bae215e) i.e. ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’. 6 (#ulink_7d9665f3-b5df-5f0f-8655-855c7bae215e) He and E. M. W. Tillyard were halfway through their debate over ‘The Personal Heresy’. Lewis’s most recent contribution, an ‘Open Letter to Dr Tillyard’, was published in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XXI (1936). 7 (#ulink_c4be1135-f573-55c6-a4b0-27cddd2eeffc) Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868). 8 (#ulink_c4be1135-f573-55c6-a4b0-27cddd2eeffc) George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Vision of Judgement (1822). 9 (#ulink_c4be1135-f573-55c6-a4b0-27cddd2eeffc) John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III (1856). 10 (#ulink_c4be1135-f573-55c6-a4b0-27cddd2eeffc) Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864–5). 11 (#ulink_c4be1135-f573-55c6-a4b0-27cddd2eeffc) George Meredith, The Egoist (1879). 12 (#ulink_c4be1135-f573-55c6-a4b0-27cddd2eeffc) A character in Jane Austen, Emma (1816). 13 (#ulink_4c66c122-f6bb-5bb8-9735-a0edaa57fd4c) i.e. the former Mary Shelley, who had married Daniel Neylan in 1934. See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix. 14 (#ulink_35186ebf-e91b-5c47-9b5b-656868ef2c94) Sir Herbert Grierson, Milton and Wordsworth, Poets and Prophets: A Study of the Reactions to Political Events (1937). 15 (#ulink_ba3796a4-162c-57b2-8a3b-946c71091b67) E. K. Chambers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (1933). 16 (#ulink_ba3796a4-162c-57b2-8a3b-946c71091b67) Sir Herbert Grierson, Cross Currents in English Literature of the XVIIth Century: or, The World, the Flesh and the Spirit, Their Actions and Reactions (1929). 17 (#ulink_ba3796a4-162c-57b2-8a3b-946c71091b67) Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (1934). 18 (#ulink_ba3796a4-162c-57b2-8a3b-946c71091b67) George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1934). 19 (#ulink_f198105e-d9ad-5e7a-a11b-45a2d5ac61f4) J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was published on 21 September 1937. 20 (#ulink_f198105e-d9ad-5e7a-a11b-45a2d5ac61f4) Lewis’s mother’s brother, Augustus Warren ‘Gus’ Hamilton (1886–1945). See The Hamilton Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. 21 (#ulink_1b400871-3992-5e45-ab32-97a8824294d1) Arthur’s trip to the United States was at the invitation of William Moncrief McClurg (1907-) of Belfast. The two young men met in the 1920s and, though unlike in many ways, they delighted in one another’s company and took a number of trips together. Arthur’s visit to America, presumably in the summer of 1936, was described by Dr McClurg in a letter to Walter Hooper of 25 April 1978: ‘We drove up to the Adirondack Mountains in New York state and stayed in Hurricane Lodge, a delightful place—chalets with balcony and main building and dining room: the air was so fresh after the City…We drove through Vermont state and visited some friends there, then we started on our trip to Cape Cod…There is quite an artists colony there and of interest to Arthur to see some paintings by local artists.’ 22 (#ulink_1b400871-3992-5e45-ab32-97a8824294d1) He was referring to William Richard Morris, later Lord Nuffield, who had built Morris Motors about a mile from The Kilns. See note 30 to the letter to Arthur Greeves of 23 April 1935. 23 (#ulink_240109b6-abea-5aa0-8bac-8a59bec1ccb9) Frederick William Calcutt Paxford (1898–1979), gardener and handyman at The Kilns. Mrs Moore hired him shortly after they moved into The Kilns and he remained there until after Lewis’s death in 1963. Over the years he became an indispensable member of the family, lending the nine acres of ground, growing vegetables, managing an orchard, driving a car and often serving as cook. He never married. This inwardly optimistic, outwardly pessimistic man became the model for Puddleglum in The Silver Chair (1953). See his biography in CG. 24 (#ulink_c6a1d115-2edc-513a-bba3-432f2669b12c) Fran?ois Mauriac, Vie de J?sus (1936). 25 (#ulink_c6a1d115-2edc-513a-bba3-432f2669b12c) Richard M. H. Quittenton, ‘Roland Quiz’ (1833–1914), Giant-land: or the Wonderful Adventures of Tim Pippin (London: [1874]; new edn, 1936). 26 (#ulink_17b94c1f-fc4c-5164-b7ac-b5c6edbe44a8) Daniel Neylan (1905–69) was the husband of Lewis’s former pupil, Mary (Shelley) neylan. 27 (#ulink_aa2b73a0-7b23-5bf9-a4bb-e89556be0211) Mrs Bennett had applied for a lectureship in Cambridge University and Lewis was supplying a letter of reference. The rest of the letter refers to her book, Four Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw (1934). 28 (#ulink_4fd577af-636f-56bf-b583-9acda838004d) ‘It is forbidden to believe this.’ 29 (#ulink_7e28c3be-b246-5100-8228-9c050654ac4a) These thoughts echo those found in Lewis’s essay ‘William Morris’ in SLE. 30 (#ulink_a040bacf-72d7-5f0d-a0e2-ea1d7254dadb)Bhagavad-Gita, ch. 2. 31 (#ulink_a040bacf-72d7-5f0d-a0e2-ea1d7254dadb) William Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1868–70); The House of the Wolfings (1889); The Well at the World’s End (1896). 32 (#ulink_cc6fe07d-3318-5a92-8fd1-0a178f41067d) This poem, entitled ‘Sonnet’, was published in The Oxford Magazine, vol. LIV (14 May 1936) under the pseudonym, ‘Nat Whilk’. It is reprinted in Poems and CP. 33 (#ulink_02a848db-2d66-5c18-8f50-b91a367fae0f) Charles Williams’s new supernatural thriller, Descent into Hell (1937). 34 (#ulink_03d244ad-0eb3-5d60-85a7-758745b6ed1b) A character in one of Williams’s other supernatural thrillers, War in Heaven (1930). 35 (#ulink_e0f69d84-5991-5178-b051-ac58d8b56b71) Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), American author who lived in Paris and turned her home into a salon for the avant-garde. Lewis disliked her idiosyncratic poems such as Tender Sultans (1914) which carried fragmentation and abstraction to the point of idiocy. 36 (#ulink_76485530-6d3c-501d-8b8a-91f28e7311eb) ‘Under the Mercy’ was perhaps Williams’s favourite formula. It appeared in ch. 10 of Descent into Hell, at the end of many of his letters, and even on his gravestone. 37 (#ulink_76485530-6d3c-501d-8b8a-91f28e7311eb) i.e. lowest common multiple. 38 (#ulink_d4e506c2-d5dc-5e59-b1ed-be3171da8819) Edgar Frederick Carritt (1876–1964), Lewis’s tutor in Philosophy, was Fellow of Philosophy at University College, 1898–1941. See his biography attached to the letter to Albert Lewis of 1 May 1920 (CL I, pp. 485–6). 39 (#ulink_66bef4eb-4018-5444-841e-558e9d2a3671) During this time the Bodleian Library was open every day from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., but on 1 July 1938 it began closing at 1 p.m. on Saturdays and all day Sunday. 40 (#ulink_1051c121-52b7-5b27-8f4a-0f64738b499b) Lewis was imitating lines 92 and 95–6 of the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer, which may be translated: Where went the horse, where went the hero? Where went the hoard-giver?……How the time has gone, Has darkened under night’s helmet as if never had been! 1938 (#ulink_1f4bf8b5-8d8c-5b5c-9551-85773ae161f0) As mentioned earlier, the editors of the Oxford History of English Literature, F. P. Wilson and Bonamy Dobr?e, knew that the individual volumes of this history would require some dovetailing, and it was up to them to see that there was no overlapping of periods. The American scholar, Douglas Bush, (#ulink_731822eb-9d5b-580d-8fa7-d6080aa912ba) agreed to write to ‘The Early Seventeenth Century, From c. 1600 to c. 1660’ and in January 1938 Wilson informed Lewis of this, asking if he wanted to include William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas in his sixteenth-century volume. TO FRANK PERCY WILSON (OUP): Magdalen College Oxford Jan 25th 1938 My dear Wilson No, I don’t want Dunbar: and I don’t cleave to Douglas even, if anyone wants him. And at the other end of the principle is a simple one—the sooner Bush can begin and I leave off, the better I shall be pleased. The O HELL lies like a nightmare on my chest ever since I got your specimen bibliography: I shan’t try to desert—anyway, I suppose the exit is thronged with dreadful faces and fiery arms (#ulink_8cade237-41bb-5129-a1bb-7853ee72427f)—but I have a growing doubt if I ought to be doing this. Mind you, I’d sooner have Dunbar than Donne: sooner, in general, come early on the scene than linger late. Let the others choose. I hoped we should all meet at the Aldwych and set out to find it with Tillyard who proved to know no more about London than I do. We got to a thing called Bush House in the end where we lunched in a barber’s shop, served by tailors, off sponges. I was sorry not to see you again. Do you think there’s any chance of the world ending before the O HELL appears? Yours, in deep depression, C. S. Lewis TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): [The Kilns] March 28th 1938 My dear Barfield– Thanks for letter: I have written to Tolkien. ‘Omit no manly degree of importunity’ (#ulink_6f4ed944-c9dc-516e-9b4a-47349b63fa72) towards Harwood. I begin to realise how much the quidity of the walks depended on him. I love your part in him as Lamb said. Can nothing be done about it. I am ready for feudal arrangements if they are any good. Also, I must warn you that something seems to be wrong with my left foot. I shall come, of course, D.V., (#ulink_948836c7-eeb4-5803-ba70-28b7ece8d6cc) but how much I’ll be able to walk, I don’t know. (Memo: I can’t drive a car) and H.J. (#ulink_5af233ed-bf73-5d92-ab8d-926384357fbf) said ‘I hope you are not the sort of people who walk 12 or 15 miles a day.’ (That’s where the Sadism will come in!) So there’ll be much more tour than walking. I suppose you know Bournemouth is about 20 miles long. Orpheus goes back tomorrow. (#ulink_259550f3-2a6c-5931-b953-f77dbaf6f216) I can’t pretend to have anything like taken it in yet: think what one would make of the Ring under similar conditions—and this presents difficulties of the same kind. I like the matter of I i as much as I always did and am more reconciled to the style. I ii is excellent, though I’d like more (and better) variations in the Hiawatha metre. I iii I’m still not quite sure about: I expect it wd. act well. Act II is simply superb. It brought tears to my eyes. III i also very good—until the scene with Persephone which I don’t understand. IV i Aristaeus’s opening speech does not get me at all. The ‘thing’ may be good. I begin to see my way a little more in the scene between O. and the satyr, but this needs more re-reading. IV ii very good: Cyrene’s ritual goes off admirably. IV iii—I don’t know. Mostly above my head. The lyrical part at the end: that is very unlike you. A sort of Swinburne-Morris-Kipling style (I deemed that I had good hunting…Have I used well, Demeter, the man’s good gift of his breath—the high gods etc). Is there some point in this that I’m missing? This is rotten criticism: but it’s not an easy poem. Yours C.S.L TO JANET SPENS (BOD): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. April 18th 1938 Dear Miss Spens Thanks for your kind and interesting letter. You are right of course about the silliness of dragging in Mason: that was merely (as sillinesses so often are) the intrusion of a favourite hobby horse of mine in a place where it was not wanted—my belief, namely, that the continuity between the Romantics and the XVIIIth c. needs to be stressed more than it usually is. Yes, the Dynasts is very queer: the invention of a whole pantheon to symbolise the non existence of God. I think it is not uncommon to find atheists perpetually angry with God for not being there. Perhaps it is a laudable trait! I hadn’t noticed the parallel between Urania and Cymoent. (#ulink_2919f09b-314e-5896-b115-df327e399b1d) But I still think there is an important difference. Marinell is, in the story, Cymoent’s literal son, and Cymoent is a character not a personification only. But Adonais and the Muse are ‘a poet’ and ‘the spirit of poetry’ and I don’t count the latter to break down like a bereaved human being. Shelley seems to be taking his symbols too seriously in one way and not seriously enough in another. It is like making the sun weep because a candle has gone out. I must re-read The Witch. (#ulink_3a1de405-f685-5067-a108-0d40c9fc0ab1) The chief reason why I can’t read Godwin is that I have never got hold of a copy of Political Justice; (#ulink_dea74eb4-552f-54ec-b22d-7511805c763f) but I intend to ‘one of these days’. I shall be very interested to hear what you think of him. My own growing suspicion is that he can’t be so bad as our critical tradition (a very flippant, elegant, belle-lettristic tradition) makes out. If Shelley likes an author (#ulink_12b7f642-7161-5659-8a38-713ed7e427db) and the Saintsburies and Raleighs and Garrods sneer at him—well, it makes one wonder. I hope you will find time to let me know how he struck you. With many thanks. Yours sincerely C. S. Lewis TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. 29th April 1938 Dear Griffiths It was nice to hear from you again and of course I read the articles with interest. (#ulink_cd499cad-bf00-5929-bcbe-9f61480d473c) I think at the top of p. 8 in the first you might have expressed more clearly the actually antimoral side of romanticism you were in when we first met. (#ulink_9f600c3c-5f0c-5ffc-845f-08ef3916c086) Have you forgotten that in our fiercest arguments you were actually defending cruelty and lechery. On p. 9—is it your considered view that Berkeleyian idealism is to be found in the Confessions? I shd. doubt it. (#ulink_21383767-964f-5f71-a8f4-4a3340eaf819) ‘Strange as it may seem’ a few lines lower is ambiguous. I take it you mean it was strange that this shd. have been a discovery. (#ulink_75048cd8-9dd2-52e2-8c5b-4a75f5a1d055) In next para. I shd. have liked an explicit statement of the view you then expressed to me, in words that I have never forgotten ‘The choice in the long run is between Christianity and Hinduism’. In the second article your account of the night of prayer (p. 31) (#ulink_f0ef2c44-90ca-5f1f-a012-d9fa3f97feb1) omits a v. interesting fact you told me shortly after it—that what started you off was the consciousness of sin in some religious writer you were reading which you could not share tho’ you were satisfied on objective grounds that you were more sinful than the writer. They are nice, plain articles and very clear. I have been in considerable trouble over the present danger of war. Twice in one life—and then to find how little I have grown in fortitude despite my conversion. It has done me a lot of good by making me realise how much of my happiness secretly depended on the tacit assumption of at least tolerable conditions for the body: and I see more clearly, I think, the necessity (if one may so put it) which God is under of allowing us to be afflicted—so few of us will really rest all on Him if He leaves us any other support. About our differences: I feel that whenever two members of different communions succeed in sharing the spiritual life so far as they can now share it, and are thus forced to regard each other as Christians, they are really helping on re-union by producing the conditions without which official reunion would be quite barren. I feel sure that this is the layman’s chief contribution to the task, and some of us here are being enabled to perform it. You, who are a priest and a theologian, are a different story: and on the purely natural & temperamental level there is, and always has been, a sort of tension between us two which prevents our doing much mutual good. We shall both be nicer, please God, in a better place. Meanwhile you have my daily prayer and good wishes. Yours C. S. Lewis TO JOHN BETJEMAN (VIC): (#ulink_e5919f24-43a3-567a-b718-28aa89e64fd8) Magdalen College, Oxford. May 28th 1938 Dear Betjeman Mea culpa! I don’t like to think how long these two books of yours have been on my shelves and my conscience. Not that I’ve been reading them—I’m afraid the mere reluctance to let books go—and a still greater reluctance to put up a parcel—has been the main factor. Your pardon. Why do you never drop in and see me? Yours C. S. Lewis TO JOHN BETJEMAN (VIC): Magdalen College, Oxford. June 3rd 1938 Dear Betjeman Sorry, I couldn’t manage Whit Monday, but very many thanks. Pay my respects to that very great man Dawkins. (#ulink_6817c3bd-8142-5e1b-bd7c-e7ba4ebcf637) Yours C. S. Lewis TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W): [Magdalen College] June 7th 1938. [Dear Williams] Though I have not yet finished it I feel I must write and congratulate you on producing a really great book in your He Came Down from Heaven. (#ulink_0718cb22-5ce5-56d5-912f-272f289c4009) It is thickly inlaid with patins of bright gold—‘He does not exist primarily for us’ (p. 3)—‘All that could be said would be that they had not yet happened’ (p. 6). (#ulink_c95dfb6e-0344-57dd-993b-c56c5c8124b2) (This is really overwhelming. I honestly think it quite likely that when we are in our graves this may become one of the sentences that straddle across ages like the great dicta of Plato, Augustine, or Pascal)—on Bible-worship of the odious new ‘literary’ sort (7, 8.) (#ulink_bf9c4d8d-21c8-5b51-a710-2e1aabb11bba)—and every word on p. 25. (#ulink_2890542b-da85-5d0c-998f-53b551a5faa3) And it’s so clear, which at one time I should never have expected a book of yours to be. Damn you, you go on getting steadily better ever since you first crossed my path: how do you do it? I begin to suspect that we are living in the ‘age of Williams’ and our friendship with you will be our only passport to fame. I’ve a good mind to punch your head when we next meet. [C. S. Lewis] TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): Magdalen College, Oxford. June 10th 1938 My dear Barfield What frightfully bad luck. (This would have been really an ideal week end as, in addition to having papers to correct so that I couldn’t talk, I have run a needle into my foot so that I can’t walk: you could have concentrated on Orpheus with almost no interruption). I hope the measles will soon go over, and it’ll go hard but we’ll fix up another time in the long vac. I’m afraid the lyric is not very appropriate, now! Think not the doom of man reversed for thee. Apropos of Johnson, isn’t this good, from the Rambler, from a man who decided not to marry a blue-stocking on finding her an atheist and a determinist. ‘It was not difficult to discover the danger of committing myself forever to one who might at any time mistake the dictates of passion, or the calls of appetite, for the decree of fate; or consider cuckoldom as necessary to the general system, as a link in the everlasting chain of successive causes.’ (#ulink_81c6349a-35d4-5b2b-a79c-7609d1805d5b) And, in another way, isn’t this splendid ‘Whenever, after the shortest relaxation of vigilance, reason and caution return to their charge, they find hope again in possession.’ (#ulink_04f93340-4491-5f4b-ac2d-3d9ea2689899) What is the betting I forget to put that lyric in after all?—They keep sheep in Magdalen grove now and I hear the fleecy care bleating all day long; I am shocked to find that none of my pupils, though they are all acquainted with pastoral poetry, regards them as anything but a nuisance: and one of my colleagues has been heard to ask why sheep have their wool cut off. (Fact) It frightens me almost. And so it did the other night when I heard two undergrads. giving a list of pleasures which were (a) Nazi, (b) Leading to homosexuality. They were, feeling the wind in your hair, walking with bare feet in the grass, and bathing in the rain. Think it over: it gets worse the longer you look at it. More cheering is the true report from Cambridge of a conversation 1 What is this Ablaut that K. keeps on talking about in his lectures? 2 Oh don’t you know, he was in love with Eloise. I must fix my Irish visit before I can make a new date with you, but we’ll manage one before or after your holidays. When are you going away? You note that hope is once again in possession. Yours C. S. Lewis TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): Sept 6th 1938 My dear B. (1.) As at present advised I can come on 23rd, but no date is so safe as the 30th. I am sure Cecil said he could not come before the end of Sept. but a I may be wrong and ? the fixture between you and me was prior and he is merely appenditical and agglutinative. All the same I’d much prefer the 30th if you can possibly do it. (2.) Some believe the slumber Of trees is in December When timber’s naked under star And the squirrel keeps his chamber. But I believe their fibre Awakes to life and labour When turbulence comes roaring up The land in loud October, And charges, and enlarges The beach, and long besieges, And scourges trees till, like the bones Of thought, their shape emerges. Form is soul. In warmer Seductive days, disarming Its firmer will, the wood grows soft And spreads its dreams to murmur; Into earnest winter, Like souls awaked, it enters. The hunter frost and the cold light Have quelled the green enchanter. (#ulink_eb790efc-b056-5b21-9ddb-58c8db039ff3) (3.) Isn’t Jupiter splendid these nights? C.S.L. Lewis had already mentioned in his letter to Griffiths of 29 April theimpending danger of war; in the next two he explores his increasing and justified concern. For this was the time of the Munich crisis. In March 1938 Germany had invaded Austria. By the end of May, encouraged by the lack of reaction to the invasion on the part of Britain and France, Hitler began to threaten Czechoslovakia, and especially the Sudetenland-a tiny section of the Czech Republic that lay on the border of Germany. In June 1938 Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, said ‘off the record’ that Britain favoured turning over the Sudetenland to Germany ‘in the interest of peace’. He sent a representative to Czechoslovakia to mediate between that country and the Sudeten Germans. Finally, on 5 September, the Czech president agreed to accept the German demands. That was not at all what Hitler wanted, and he used his own propaganda machine to cause outbreaks of fighting in the Sudetenland. This, in turn, led Czechoslovakia to declare martial law. Britain and its allies were very keen to avoid war, and on 29 September 1938 representatives from Germany, England, France and Italy met in Munich to decide Czechoslovakia’s fate. An agreement was signed stating that Germany would take over the Sudetenland. On 1 October German troops began occupying the region. After that similar settlements were made over Hungary and Poland. Hitler had succeeded and by 15 March 1939 he was to occupy the whole of Czechoslovakia. TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): Magdalen College Oxford Sept 12th 1938 My dear Barfield What awful quantities of this sort of thing seem necessary to break us in, or, more correctly, to break us off. One thinks one has made some progress towards detachment, some , (#ulink_cb57c1bf-718b-53a6-8f6d-c1f890566326) and begin[s] to realise, and to acquiesce in, the rightly precarious hold we have on all our natural loves, interests, and comforts: then when they are really shaken, at the very first breath of that wind, it turns out to have been all a sham, a field-day, blank cartridges. This is how I was thinking that night, about the war danger. I had so often told myself that my friends and books and even brains were not given me to keep: that I must teach myself at bottom to care for something else more (and also of course to care for them more but in a different way) and I was horrified to find how cold the idea of really losing them struck. An awful symptom is that part of oneself still regards troubles as ‘interruptions’ as if (ludicrous idea) the happy bustle of ones personal interests was our real , (#ulink_9d7dfca0-28dc-57cc-8694-a62ff1df0298) instead of the opposite. I did in the end see (I dare not say ‘feel’) that since nothing but these forcible shakings will cure us of our worldliness, we have at bottom reason to be thankful for them. We force God to surgical treatment: we won’t (mentally) diet. This morning comes your letter, and I know you at least (I cd. hardly depend on any one else for so much) will not think me heartless for connecting it in this way with what I was already thinking, for the subjects really flowed together—indeed they are the same subject. Well, well: you know all I am thinking about at least as well as I do. As you said in that essay of yours one cannot in the Simon of Cyrene moment see the cross from the Joseph of Arimathea point of view, but one can remember that the other side is real: hence that apparently naked will, stripped of its emotional motives, which, on your view, is alone free. I have a lot more to say on this (I’ve just read the Theologia Germanica) (#ulink_ba557856-e0e6-5f6e-9599-9f4714a1fb59) when we meet. That is, if we meet, for of course our whole joint world may be blown up before the end of the week. I can’t feel in my bones that it will, but my bones know dam’ all about it. If we are separated, God bless you, and thanks for a hundred good things I owe to you, more than I can count or weigh. In some ways we’ve had a corking time these 20 years. Be thankful you have nothing to reproach yourself about in your relations with your father (I had lots) and that it is not some disease. The horror of a stroke must be felt almost entirely by the spectators. (#ulink_dd3aab1f-dba6-536b-8789-f5a5032edacd) I’ll fix with Cecil. Yours C. S. Lewis Out of the Silent Planet was published by John Lane, the Bodley Head on 23 September 1938. TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W): Magdalen College Oxford Oct 5th 1938 Dear Dom Bede I am afraid I have forgotten most of the things I said in my last letter. The opinion of my friend about the end of life was not, I should suppose, quoted with any approval of mine. As to whether reason can rigorously prove God and immortality, what is one to say? I do not remember to have seen a proof that appeared to me absolutely compelling, but that may be only my reason or the writer’s reason: At any rate it is obvious that pure reason, in human beings, is very often in fact not convinced. I shd. suppose that the truths imbedded in Paganism owe at least as much to tradition and divine guidance as to ratiocination. About war—I have always believed that it is lawful for a Christian to bear arms in war when commanded by constituted authority unless he has very good reason (which a private person rarely has) for believing the war to be unjust. I base this 1. On the fact that Our Lord does not appear to have regarded the Roman soldiers as ex officio sinners. 2. On the fact that the Baptist told soldiers not to leave the army, but to be good soldiers. (#ulink_b1183e60-02e5-56d9-be6a-1e0abf6ed1f7). On the opinion of St Augustine (somewhere in De Civitate). (#ulink_663aab20-988f-5e49-a73b-0bf07e110a68) 4. On the general agreement of all Christian communities except a few sects—who generally combine pacifism with other odd opinions. I take the dicta in the Sermon on the Mount to be prohibitions of revenge, not as a counsel of perfection but as absolutely binding on all Christians. (#ulink_65b446cd-b015-58a1-a48d-6915e799db87) But I do not think punishment inflicted by lawful authorities for the right motives is revenge: still less, violent action in the defence of innocent people. I cannot believe the knight errant idea to be sinful. Even in the very act of fighting I think charity (to the enemy) is not more endangered than in many necessary acts wh. we all admit to be lawful. (#ulink_57a4513f-7e90-5eef-a258-199a8d53417e) On reunion I have no contribution to make: it is a matter quite above my sphere. (#ulink_4712e173-b9be-5fdb-a228-f613737b5c63) I was terrified to find how terrified I was by the crisis. Pray for me for courage. Yours C. S. Lewis TO MRS STUART MOORE (EVELYN UNDERHILL) (M): (#ulink_af6a099b-72d6-53b9-ae98-94f5729f0267) As from Magdalen College, Oxford. Oct 29th 1938 Dear Madam Your letter is one of the most surprising and, in a way, alarming honours I have ever had. I have not been for very long a believer and have hitherto regarded the great mystical writers as a man in the foothills regards the glaciers and precipices: to find myself noticed from regions which I scarcely feel qualified to notice is really quite overwhelming. In trying to thank you, I find myself regretting that we have given such an ugly meaning to the word ‘Condescension’ which ought to have remained a beautiful name for a beautiful action. I am glad you mentioned the substitution of heaven for space as that is my favourite idea in the book. (#ulink_085db9c8-d913-5c0f-9ffc-c59538888c50) Unhappily I have since learned that it is also the idea which most betrays my scientific ignorance: I have since learned that the rays in interplanetary space, so far from being beneficial, would be mortal to us. However, that, no doubt, is true of Heaven in other senses as well! Again thanking you very much, Yours very truly, C. S. Lewis During the course of 1938 the Delegates of the Oxford University Press asked F. P. Wilson to prepare a ‘progress report’ on the Oxford History of English Literature. In his Report to the Delegates, dated 20 December 1938, Wilson said that C. S. Lewis had written to him thus: I go on reading and write on each subject while it is fresh in mind. Out of these scattered sheets, perhaps after much correction, I hope to build up a book. The subjects so treated already are Platonism, Douglas, Lyndsay, Tottel, Mulcaster’s Elementarie, Sir Thomas More, Prayer-book, Sidney, Marlowe (non-dramatic), Nashe, Watson, Barclay, Googe, Raleigh (poems), Shakespeare (poems), Webbe; and among other sources Petrarch and Machiavelli. I am at present hard at work not directly on the book but on a lecture entitled ‘Prolegomena to Renaissance Poetry’: a similar Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry which I have and still give proved to be a useful buttress to the other book. (#ulink_5137c8c2-c51b-5537-9c5c-b4a9ce3774f6) I can give no indication of when it will be done. I find the work to be got through is enormous and would be delighted for an honourable pretext to withdraw: excessive pressure from the delegates might come to constitute an honourable pretext. (#ulink_eb7deff8-9ef1-5432-ab85-560744f93341) TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): (#ulink_f63b3aa1-fd87-5d02-8a40-bd89c93aa8c6) [The Kilns] Dec. 28th 1938 Thanks for kind letter. I don’t think letters to authors in praise of their works really require apology for they always give pleasure. You are obviously much better informed than I about this type of literature and the only one I can add to your list is Voyage to Arcturus by David Lyndsay (Methuen) wh. is out of print but a good bookseller will prob. get you a copy for about 5 to 6 shillings. It is entirely on the imaginative and not at all on the scientific wing. What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (Penguin Libr.) (#ulink_6018de38-7480-5c96-9b25-6c2e36d19d60) and an essay in J. B. S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds (#ulink_7a06f706-5e5e-53d7-8fee-4f7a1be19854) both of wh. seemed to take the idea of such travel seriously and to have the desperately immoral outlook wh. I try to pillory in Weston. I like the whole interplanetary idea as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) pt. of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side. I think Wells’ 1st Men in the Moon (#ulink_29745ccf-63df-5843-a342-0c5f7a126303) the best of the sort I have read. I once tried a Burroughs (#ulink_989093fe-e30f-5cb9-b398-59ce40b87f8d) in a magazine and disliked it. The more astronomy we know the less likely it seems that other planets are inhabited: even Mars has practically no oxygen. I guessed who you were as soon as you mentioned the lecture. I did mention in it, I think, Kircher’s Iter Celestre, (#ulink_ba2c689b-59e3-5063-9659-f598d6e0f794) but there is no translation, and it is not v. interesting. There’s also Voltaire’s Microm?gas (#ulink_19c5bd2f-6d3a-5fda-a0fb-bef2c055d1aa) but purely satiric. Yrs. C. S. Lewis 1 (#ulink_a35f07f1-4554-58ac-9b25-412f405fd428) Professor Douglas Bush (1896–1983), born in Morrisburg, Ontario, Canada, was educated at the University of Toronto and Harvard University. An instructor in English at Harvard, 1924–7, he taught in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, 1927–36. In 1936 he returned to Harvard as Professor of English, a position he held until his retirement in 1966. He and Lewis were both writing volumes for the Oxford History of English Literature, Bush’s contribution being English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (1945). His other boob include Classical Influences in Renaissance Literature (1952), John Milton (1964) and Pagan Myth and Christian Tradition in English Poetry (1968). 2 (#ulink_0a45268e-7573-5ba4-a91c-1c2ff139e081) Milton, Paradise Lost, XII, 641–4: ‘They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld/Of Paradise, so late their happy seat./Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate/With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.’ 3 (#ulink_61c6c09b-3152-5f37-ac94-d0dc0f0c0569) Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. 1,1759, letter to Joseph Simpson, p. 347: ‘Omit no decent nor manly degree of importunity.’ 4 (#ulink_61c6c09b-3152-5f37-ac94-d0dc0f0c0569)Deo volente— ‘God willing’. 5 (#ulink_61c6c09b-3152-5f37-ac94-d0dc0f0c0569) This was probably his friend of undergraduate days, Alfred Kenneth Hamilton Jenkin. See note 3 to the letter to Hamilton Jenkin of 11 January 1939. 6 (#ulink_50a68956-883c-5d98-ad48-3c3a43fdd8d9) Barfield had finally completed his poetic drama, Orpheus, which is first mentioned in the poem Lewis included in his letter to Barfield of 5 April 1935. The play was performed on stage in 1948 and was eventually published as Orpheus: A Poetic Drama, ed., with an afterword by John C. Ulreich, Jr (West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Lindisfarne Press, 1983). In the foreword to the published work Barfield wrote: ‘I had casually mentioned to my friend C. S. Lewis that I seemed to be feeling an impulse to write a play in verse and was wondering about a subject…He said in effect: “Why not take one of the myths and simply do your best with it—Orpheus for instance?”…Apart from the actual writing, the “getting down to it” consisted almost exclusively of a careful re-reading, with a classical dictionary beside me, of Virgil’s presentation of the myth in the fourth Georgic.’ 7 (#ulink_fe17354e-b65b-5ee0-b0ae-edfe5cbf8458) A character in Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III, iv. 8 (#ulink_fe17354e-b65b-5ee0-b0ae-edfe5cbf8458) Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Witch of Atlas (1824). 9 (#ulink_1aef572d-6ed5-5707-ba2f-dae402c0463b) William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). 10 (#ulink_1aef572d-6ed5-5707-ba2f-dae402c0463b) Percy Bysshe Shelley married Godwin’s daughter, Mary. 11 (#ulink_b98438e9-a651-5661-a1e0-5ce997aee2a6) Griffiths published the two-part story of his conversion to Catholicism in the Benedictine periodical, Pax. nos. 198 and 199 (April/May 1938). 12 (#ulink_b98438e9-a651-5661-a1e0-5ce997aee2a6)Pax, no. 198, p. 8: ‘[At Oxford] found friends who were of a like mind with myself, and the love of nature and poetry became the ruling passion of our lives. We sought out the solitude of the hills and the sea, whenever it was possible, and passed whole days, and weeks in the vacation, in reading and walking, in silent communion with nature. All out philosophy was to live according to nature, and all our religion was the worship of nature.’ 13 (#ulink_b98438e9-a651-5661-a1e0-5ce997aee2a6) ibid., p. 9: ‘I…found in them [St Augustine’s Confessions) the idealism of Berkeley taken up into a magnificent system of Christian philosophy, and the “intellectual love” of Spinoza transformed into a deep passion of religious love.’ 14 (#ulink_b98438e9-a651-5661-a1e0-5ce997aee2a6) ibid.: ‘The discovery, strange as it may seem, that another [Lewis] had been led to the Christian faith by the path of philosophy which I was pursuing, and had found the fulfilment of his philosophy in his faith, was an inspiration which was destined never to fade.’ 15 (#ulink_d20e3563-d01e-5174-9903-f78fca4d3c9c)Pax, no. 199, p. 31: ‘I decided that Anglicanism represented as pure a form of Christianity as I could find…But nothing could bring me any peace…I went up into a chapel at the top of the mission house, in which I was staying, one evening to pray, and there the thought came to me that I must make an effort to break with this world, which was destroying the peace of my soul. I formed a resolution that I would not go to bed that night, but would spend the whole night in prayer. It is difficult to describe the agony which 1 endured.’ 16 (#ulink_607f52eb-0bac-5ac5-b4c3-921240d2251f) See Sir John Betjeman in the Biographical Appendix. 17 (#ulink_d053f5a7-b3a4-5561-a776-a1a0baa63afd) White at Oxford Betjeman had become friends with Professor Richard MacGillivray Dawkins (1871–1955), Director of the British School of Archaeology, Athens, 1906–14, and Bywater and Southby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at Oxford, 1922–39. Lewis and Dawkins had been members of Tolkien’s Icelandic Society. 18 (#ulink_d9dc52e6-b534-5bc5-ba92-f276b7b58c8a) Charles Williams, He Came Down From Heaven (London: Heinemann, 1938). 19 (#ulink_d9dc52e6-b534-5bc5-ba92-f276b7b58c8a) ibid., ch. 1, pp. 5–6: ‘it might be said that the Bible, up to and including the Acts of the Apostles, is concerned rather with what happened, the Rituals with what is happening. The Epistles belong to both. It is true that all that did happen is a presentation of what is happening; all the historical events, especially of this category, area pageant of the events of the human soul. But it is true also that Christendom has always held that the two are indissolubly connected; that the events in the human soul could not exist unless the historical events had existed. If, per impossibile, it could be divinely certain that the historical events upon which Christendom reposes had not yet happened, all that could be said would be that they had not yet happened.’ 20 (#ulink_d9dc52e6-b534-5bc5-ba92-f276b7b58c8a) ibid., pp. 7–8: ‘It is the habit nowadays to talk of the Bible as great literature; the Bible-worship of our forefathers has been succeeded by a more misguided and more offensive solemnity of conditioned respect, as accidentally uncritical as deliberately irreligious. Uncritical, because too often that literary respect is oddly conditioned by an ignoring of the book’s main theme.’ 21 (#ulink_d9dc52e6-b534-5bc5-ba92-f276b7b58c8a) ibid., ch. 2, p. 25: ‘The distinction between necessary belief and unnecessary credulity is as necessary as belief; it is the heightening and purifying of belief. There is nothing that matters of which it is not sometimes desirable to feel: “this does not matter.” “This also is Thou; neither is this Thou.” But it may be admitted also that this is part of the technique of belief in our present state; not even Isaiah or Aquinas have pursued to its revelation the mystery of self-scepticism in the divine. The nearest, perhaps, we can get to that is in the incredulous joy of great romantic moments—in love or poetry or what else: “this cannot possibly be, and it is”. Usually the way must be made ready for heaven, and then it will come by some other; the sacrifice must be made ready, and the fire will strike on another altar,’ 22 (#ulink_21bbe057-123b-5e7d-9cce-80d0783cbb2f)The Rambler was a twice-weekly periodical in 208 numbers issued by Dr Samuel Johnson between 20 March 1750 and 14 March 1752. The quotation comes from no. 113 (16 April 1751), ‘The History of Hymenaeus’s Courtship’ (The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. IV (1969), p. 239). 23 (#ulink_d84d53ee-9f5e-5353-acd7-9c156e9f0af6) ibid, no. 123 (21 May 1751), ‘The Young Trader Turned Gentleman’, p. 291. 24 (#ulink_795787ef-35af-505b-adfa-b1fc01e64f23) This poem was published with slight variations as ‘Experiment’ in The Spectator, CLXI (9 December 1939), p. 998. It was further revised, and retitled ‘Pattern’, before it appeared in Poems and CP. 25 (#ulink_f399f221-beef-5cff-921d-5f91d878a943) ‘awareness of death’. Plato, Phaedo, 81a. 26 (#ulink_09853409-1582-5759-82d7-5d995735d870) ‘task’ or ‘work’. 27 (#ulink_31e8805d-d235-534c-882e-ce4fbb8bfa18) The Theologia Germanica is an anonymous fourteenth-century German spiritual treatise counselling radical poverty of spirit and renunciation of self as a way of union with God. Martin Luther published an incomplete text in 1516 and the full text in 1518, giving it the tide Deutsch Theologia. The edition Lewis used was Theologia Germanica, trans, from the German by Susanna Winkworth, with a preface by the Rev. Charles Kingsley and a letter to the translator by the Chevalier Bunsen (London: Macmillan, 1907). 28 (#ulink_d7188f14-7a0b-5094-af80-7b0152a5233e) Owen’s father, Arthur Edward Barfield, died at his home, Red Roofs, Burtons Lane, Chalfont St Giles, on 15 September 1938, aged seventy-four. 29 (#ulink_de6c2bb0-c785-5404-865e-1627c2200e42) Luke 3:14. 30 (#ulink_de6c2bb0-c785-5404-865e-1627c2200e42) St Augustine, The City of God (De Civitate Dei), trans. John Healey (London: Everyman’s Library, 1945), book XIX, ch. 12: ‘War’s aim is nothing but glorious peace. For what is victory but a suppression of resistants, which being done, peace follows? And so peace is war’s purpose, the scope of all military discipline, and the limit at which all just contentions aim. All men seek peace by war, but none seek war by peace.’ The same idea is expressed in some of his other writings. 31 (#ulink_de6c2bb0-c785-5404-865e-1627c2200e42) Matthew 5:39: ‘But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ 32 (#ulink_de6c2bb0-c785-5404-865e-1627c2200e42) In 1940 Lewis addressed an Oxford pacifist society on ‘Why I Am Not a Pacifist’, which is published in Timeless at Heart (1987) and EC. 33 (#ulink_374ade1d-0873-580f-9228-6f6745ae6d38) Lewis was eventually persuaded to devote a short paper to ‘Christian Reunion’. It was published in Christian Reunion and Other Essays (1990) and is reprinted in EC. 34 (#ulink_2f81c46b-06fb-5e03-865c-798c6790b08e) Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), who was married to Hubert Stuart Moore, was famous for her works on mysticism. She converted to Christianity in 1907, and to Anglicanism in 1921. Profoundly influenced by Friedrich von H?gel, she devoted herself to giving spiritual direction, retreats, and writing. Her books include Mysticism (1911), The Life of the Spirit and the Life of today (1922) and Worship (1936). Lewis was replying to Underhill’s letter of 26 October 1938: ‘May I thank you for the very great pleasure which your remarkable book “Out of the Silent Planet” has given me? It is so seldom that one comes across a writer of sufficient imaginative power to give one a new slant on reality: & this is just what you seem to me to have achieved. And what is more, you have not done it in a solemn & oppressive way but with a delightful combination of beauty, humour & deep seriousness. I enjoyed every bit of it, in spite of starting with a decided prejudice against “voyages to Mars”. I wish you had felt able to report the conversation in which Ransom explained the Christian mysteries to the eldil, but I suppose that would be too much to ask. We should be content with the fact that you have turned “empty space” into heaven!’ (Bodleian Library. MS. Eng. c. 6825, fol. 68). 35 (#ulink_8707592b-7605-52b6-b387-fb2283e3810a) Inch. 5 of Out of the Silent Planet (London: 1938; HarperCollins, 2000), Ransom is in the spaceship on the way to Mars: ‘He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds…now…the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for the empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam…it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even from the earth with so many eyes—and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens’ (p. 29). 36 (#ulink_bbdacaf5-69c8-5cf8-b645-5ec0117bcf69) i.e. The Allegory of Love. 37 (#ulink_f0616b80-d1f9-5fda-8ce2-3df1a48f58e4)CG, p. 477. 38 (#ulink_9488c974-e525-57f7-b17a-b3d86f378e4c) See Roger Lancelyn Green in the Biographical Appendix. Green was reading English Literature and had been attending Lewis’s ‘Prolegomena’ lectures. He had written to thank Lewis for Our of the Silent Planet. 39 (#ulink_8ecc309a-f13f-5c6a-bc82-5757540a0f7d) Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (1930; Penguin, 1937). 40 (#ulink_8ecc309a-f13f-5c6a-bc82-5757540a0f7d) J. B. S. Haldane, ‘Last Judgement’, Possible Worlds and Other Essays (1927). John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892–1964), geneticist, was Professor of Genetics at University College, London, 1933–57. For most of his life he was a disillusioned Marxist. Haldane hated Lewis’s science fiction novels and attacked them in his essay ‘Auld Hornie, F.R.S.’ in the Modern Quarterly (Autumn 1946). Lewis’s ‘Reply to Professor Haldane’ is published in Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1982; Fount, 2000). 41 (#ulink_8ecc309a-f13f-5c6a-bc82-5757540a0f7d) H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901). 42 (#ulink_8ecc309a-f13f-5c6a-bc82-5757540a0f7d) Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950), American novelist remembered principally for his Tarzan stories and who wrote a number of stories set on other planets. 43 (#ulink_2c4336d2-9073-51d6-b280-197e1061e832) Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), Iter Exstaticum Coelestre (1656). 44 (#ulink_731822eb-9d5b-580d-8fa7-d6080aa912ba) Voltaire, Microm?gas (1753). 1939 (#ulink_c421bd3d-7fa4-5169-bcdb-4f5cdcd46abf) TO DAPHNE HARWOOD (BOD): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. Jan. 6th 1939. Dear Daphne Thanks very much for your nice long letter—I hope I have not thereby stolen time which ought to have been employed in the best of all occupations, and by you, perforce, the most neglected-doing nothing. As a bachelor who has seldom even talked to children I should be very foolish if I gave any advice as to books for Lawrence: if I felt qualified to choose books I should send books—not tokens. But John is right about rum. It has a romantic interest. It is one of those things which give us a sensuous and an imaginative pleasure at once. And the only reason why I am going to refuse your very tempting offer of a bottle (or was it a keg? do say it was a keg—or a noggin) of rum is that it is your positive wifely duty to see that Cecil drinks it all. If he turns coy and altruistic and says (as men will say anything) that he doesn’t care for rum, you may reply lightly in the Latin tongue Hoc est omnis meus oculus, or Nonne narrabis ista marinis equestribus? (#litres_trial_promo) He has not forgotten dancing through the streets of Caerleon with the bottle of white rum in one hand and his cutlass in the other. Of course for domestic purposes the question shd. not be put in a nakedly convivial form: some proper pretext about wet feet, overwork, or the like will do gentle violence to his coyness. But ye maun ablains give it to the guideman, ma’am. (#litres_trial_promo) I don’t remember anything you said that day which could possibly offend anyone. All here sent their loves, and best wishes for the New Year. I hope it will be less exciting than the last but not with much confidence: one is reduced to the last form of hope now (I mean as regards this world) which consists in remembering that creaking gates hang long and things expected never happen. However, the prospect of leaving * (#litres_trial_promo) this planet gets daily less terrible. Tell Cecil to write to me some time. Yours Jack Lewis TOA. K. HAMILTON JENKIN (BOD): (#litres_trial_promo) The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. Jan 11th 1939 My dear Jenkin— I had hoped to be dining somewhere in London to-night with you and Barfield and Harwood (who had, by the way, announced that he was bringing a bottle of Jamaica rum), but I heard yesterday that the arrangement was breaking down as far as they were concerned and to day the much worse news that you were smitten with a fell disease. Very bad luck!-and I suppose you have, in addition, hated every minute of this fine old English winter: unless, at least, your tastes in weather have changed very much since the old days. I who profess the predilections of a polar bear tried to make believe that I was enjoying it, but the week before Christmas wore the pretence pretty thin: it wasn’t so much the snow underfoot that depressed me as the vast clot of lentil soup which had replaced the sky. The second fall in the first week of the New Year spoiled my annual January walking tour with my brother. We had one glorious day crossing Wenlock Edge (our course was from Church Stretton to Ludlow) (#litres_trial_promo) with new snow on the ground and cloudless sunshine from end to end of the skies—beautiful shadows. And out in the country snow is a great betrayer. Rabbits and squirrels became as easy to see as bushes. The tracks are rather exciting, too, aren’t they? To climb up some unearthly lane to a hill crest far from any house, still early in the morning, and find from the innumerable paw-prints how long ago the animals’ day has begun. But on the second day we had to give it up before noon and make the rest of the way by train. Which, by the way, on those remote railways took us nearly as long as it would have done on foot and was rather fun. We had pleasant hours sitting by roaring fires with the combined station-master, porter, and ticket clerk of tiny stations: and one specially good talk with a little Welsh porter about four feet tall (probably a leprechaun disguised as a porter) who praised Balfour’s Foundations of Belief. (#litres_trial_promo) What things any twenty square miles of country contains if a man can only find them. Still, I confess that even I am tired of this winter. The truth is I am tired of so many things—of weather, of work, of reading, of writing, above all of News. In other words I have a cold: to complain of which to you in your present state is rather carrying colds to Newcastle. As to News and ‘the state of the nation’ what worries me sometimes more than the dangers is our reaction to them, beginning, of course, with my own reaction. To be faced with wars and ruins is I suppose the normal state of humanity: did any people before He shivering under it as we do? Just after the September crisis I sat next to old Powick (#litres_trial_promo) the professor of history and asked him how it had compared with what people felt in 1914: he said at once ‘The difference is that this time one missed the note of exaltation that one felt then.’ Exaltation begad! Yes: I know they were ignorant of some things we have learned, but I can’t believe that is the only difference. Something has slipped. This is a grand cheery letter to write to a sick man, isn’t it? The mention of snow, I now realise, was a fatal blunder, for you once told me that when you woke up cold and ill in the middle of the night one of your main troubles was that you couldn’t even imagine warm and pleasant places—that nothing would arise before your inner eye except cold rocks with rain falling on them and ice-fringed ponds. Something of the same kind occasionally happens to me. But talking of places, has Barfield yet suggested to you that you should try to join us on our Easter walk this year? I know he wanted you to be asked. You needn’t be afraid of the distances. There is often a car in attendance and, failing that, by judicious bus-hopping you can always manage to have all the fun and little of the fatigue. We will make you billeting officer and send you on ahead by wheels to book rooms. So you will be sitting with a pipe and a pint in some cheery bar, with a stuffed pike in a glass case on one wall and a tradesman’s calendar on the other, and a loud-ticking clock, and a board for shove-halfpenny, and through the window you’ll see us wearily limping up to the door—and you’ll come out fresh as a new pin and say ‘Wherever have you been? I expected you two hours ago.’ At least that is what you’ll feel like saying but after a glance at our faces you will change it to ‘What will you have?’ We’ll make it a southern walk, Dorset perhaps. Somewhere, at any rate, where the spring will be surprisingly far on, the woods almost green, and great cushiony clumps of primroses, and a view of the sea: and we’ll have glorious mid-morning halts lying in barns or on the sunny side of hills. Make a note of it. (You’ll probably be the only atheist present, by the way, but we will respect your susceptibilities—‘Leave thou thy sister when she fails to pray/Her simple unbelief, for that’s her way.’* (#litres_trial_promo) (Give the context of and add any explanatory note that seems necessary)). (#litres_trial_promo) What did you think of Snowwhite and the vii Dwarfs? (#litres_trial_promo) I saw it at Malvern last week on that holiday. And talking of Malvern, what an exquisite, unchanging place that is. Hardly a sound in the streets after eight o’clock: such nice, warm, quiet, carpeted immemorial hotels: such comfort, such bright, quiet cheerfulness with no silly luxury or novelty. ‘I design to end my days’ in Malvern. Let me especially recommend the Tudor Hotel for a bottle of really excellent burgundy. They also have a splendid idea that ‘gentlemen’, being noisy, tobacco-smelling animals, should be segregated, which means that as soon as you arrive a fire is lit in a little, dark, warm, cushioned smoking-room miles away from anywhere, and it’s as good as a private sitting room. But about Snow-White. Leaving out the tiresome question of whether it is suitable for children (which I don’t know and don’t care) I thought it almost inconceivably good and bad—I mean, I didn’t know one human being could be so good and bad. The worst thing of all was the vulgarity of the winking dove at the beginning, and the next worst the faces of the dwarfs. Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent society? If you’d care for a copy of my story (a journey to Mars) let me know and I’ll send you one. But I rather think it is not a genre you care for: and I know that if people don’t like stories of that kind they usually dislike them very much indeed. These sharp frontiers of taste are a very interesting literary fact which I’ve never seen discussed by any critic, and which are far more important in dividing readers than any of the formal divisions, even that of verse and prose. ‘Do you like stories about other planets—or hunting stories—or stories of the supernatural—or historical novels?’—surely these are questions which elicit an unalterable Yes or No from the very depth of a reader’s heart: but Aristotle, Johnson, and Coleridge have nothing to say about them. (#litres_trial_promo) (By the way, why is North’s Plutarch (#litres_trial_promo) such very dull reading?) I hope you’ll be mending by the time you get this. If you are unable to write, then,** (#litres_trial_promo) as soon as you conveniently can, let me have word through someone else, how you are getting on and whether there is anything of any kind I can do for you. Yours C. S. Lewis TO ALEC VIDLER (BOD): (#litres_trial_promo) Magdalen College, Oxford Ian 17th 1939 Dear Mr. Vidler I fear I am a very bad salesman, but I enclose the names of those people who might be induced to take Theology) (#litres_trial_promo) On the question of reviewing—would it be a good thing sometimes to review books which had not been sent for review? I am thinking chiefly of infamous and ill informed books. Review copies of what you specially want to refute are not likely to be sent you, and that is one of the ways in which nonsense circulates uncontradicted. The reviewer wd. presumably, in such cases, pay for his own copy. (I have no particular book in view at the moment). yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis TOA. K. HAMILTON JENKIN (BOD): [The Kilns] Ian 22nd 1939. My dear Jenkin– I was delighted to hear from Barfield that you are quite markedly better though not yet well enough for writing. I have, thank God, no experience of your ailment so I don’t know what the recovery is like-whether as after fever you suddenly wake up after the first good night feeling ravenous with hunger (oh those first slices of bread and butter: angel’s food!)—or itch as after chickenpox—or (I hope not) whether you pass into a state of melancholy as after flu. On the assumption of melancholy, let me cheer you up. I don’t think it is likely we shall enjoy that walk much as we shall be so hard up after the capital levy in February (you heard about that I suppose): even if we do go you will have seen in the papers that a spring of unprecedented rains and sleet is prophesied. Still we must make a push for it. I shouldn’t get maps and plan out a tour: those ordinance survey maps are so unreliable that its not much use. I’m told Prohibition will probably be brought in as soon as Parliament meets. Never mind: we must drink the pure element, Adam’s wine (tho’ by the bye you will have noticed warnings lately against drinking any water south and west of a line drawn from London to Carlisle). Milk, of course, there will be none. And whatever happens don’t worry about your feet on a first walk-newcomers are nearly always quite alright again by Xmas. So you see, dear friend, how our little troubles melt away if only they are faced in the right spirit. Ripeness is all. (#litres_trial_promo) You would (seriously) like it here to day. The Cherwell is up almost to a level of Addison’s walk and running (so Salters (#litres_trial_promo) told my brother yesterday) 10 miles an hour, the speed being very visible by the endless procession of big mats or flakes of froth that go shooting by. The meadow enclosed within Addison’s walk (you remember?) is flooded and under a greyish, fine, morning sky gives pleasant reflections of trees and upward lights in unexpected places. Several birds are singing. There is always a specially fresh and poignant quality about them at this time of the year—like voices in a big empty ball-room the day before the ball—perhaps because they are few, or perhaps only because ones ears have grown unused to them in the winter. Which reminds me, I heard an explanation the other day of why the stars look so unnaturally bright if one wakes up at night from really deep sleep and looks out: viz. because one’s eyes are rested and completely on top of their job. Talking of jobs, did you see that D. L. Keir of Univ. has been made Principal of Queen’s University Belfast. A little galling to me because he will now become such a great man in my home town that whenever I go there I shall find people regarding it as the very peak of my career to have known him. I have just been writing a review of Charles Williams’ new poem Taliessin through Logres, (#litres_trial_promo) and wonder if you have read his novels. The two I recommend most strongly are The Place of the Lion and Descent into Hell (#litres_trial_promo) They are ‘shockers’ in a sense, but of a peculiar sort. The first is of special interest to chaps like you (a B. Litt.!) and me (a don) because it is about a perfect bitch of a female researcher called Damaris who is writing a doctorate thesis on the relation between ‘ideas’ in Plato and Angels in Abelard, without the slightest idea that it ever really meant anything, and all the time treating Plato and Aristotle and Dionysius and Abelard like ‘the top form of a school in which she was an inspector.’ Then, suddenly, owing to a piece of supernatural machinery which needn’t be described, she wakes up to find that the things she is studying are really there-one such primal energy looking in at her study window in the form of a gigantic pterodactyl. The novels are also interesting as the only modern ones I know which contain convincing ‘good’ characters. I have a theory why the ‘good’ characters in literature are so often dull. To make an interesting character you have to see him from the inside, all agree. Now to imagine from within a person morally inferior to yourself you don’t need to do anything, you only need to stop doing something-to take the brake off and give all your usually suppressed vanity, or greed, or cruelty, or envy a delightful holiday. But how to make one better than yourself? Well, you can make him a little better by making him actually do what you only try to do, or do often what you only do seldom. That is, you can give him the sort of virtue in full which you have in some degree yourself. But for anything beyond that you simply haven’t got the material. Not only do you not actually behave as a hero would, you don’t even know what he feels like. Hence in most literature ideally good characters have to be made ‘from outside’ and accordingly look like puppets. (#litres_trial_promo) From which silly readers draw the conclusion that good people are dull in real life—as if there were anything particularly delectable in the society of bullies, cheats, egoists and drug-addicts, or as if the same qualities which made a man an egoist did not normally make him a bore. Moral—beware of putting ‘good’ characters into a book for that’s where you give yourself away, as Richardson (to my mind) is given away by Pamela. (#litres_trial_promo) I said ‘to my mind’ not only because of my habitual modesty and temperance (you will remember that of old) but because Dr. Johnson thought differently. (#litres_trial_promo) I go to Cambridge to lecture once a week this term, so if you have any commissions in Bletchley now is your time. Did I tell you I have discovered the Renaissance never occurred—that is what I’m lecturing on. (#litres_trial_promo) Do you think it is reasonable to call the lecture ‘The Renaissance’ under the circumstances? ‘Absence of the Renaissance’ sounds so odd, and ‘What was happening while the Renaissance was not taking place’ is inaccurate because, of course, if the Renaissance never occurred, then all times were times at which it did not occur, and therefore everything that ever happened happened ‘while the Renaissance was not taking place’. Alas, as Wordsworth said, ‘I fear/That I am trifling.’ (#litres_trial_promo) So, I hope, are you by now. Don’t bother writing for ages yet: I look to hear good news of you from Owen Barfield from time to time. I forget whether I told you last time that all of us here were very concerned to hear of your illness and Mrs. Moore particularly. But you’d have guessed that. Yours C. S. Lewis TO ALEC VIDLER (BOD): Magdalen College Oxford Feb 1st 1939 Dear Mr Vidler I enclose MS. (#litres_trial_promo) It has in the end worked out to less than 4000 words but I dare say you will be glad of the extra room. If not Williams or Mr. Eliot might give you a poem of the right length. In the unlikely event of your being stuck, I cd. let you have about 1500 words on Christianity and War in continuation of the discussion begun in the last number. I thought it all good—except perhaps Mr. Roberts on poetry. (#litres_trial_promo) Yours C. S. Lewis TO OWEN BARFIELD (W): [The Kilns] Feb 8th [1939] My dear Barfield– I am recovering (at least they tell me I am recovering) from an unusually bad attack of flu’. Two weekends of Feb. fall in term: the 5th-8th and the 12–15th. If you choose the former you will be able to hear Tillyard and me finishing our controversy viva voce, (#litres_trial_promo) but as I have to give him a bed perhaps the 12th wd. be better. No doubt I shall be defeated in the controversy. (#litres_trial_promo) I don’t know if Plato did write the Phaedo: the canon of those ancient writers, under the surface, is still quite chaotic. It is also a very corrupt text. Bring it along by all means, but don’t pitch your hopes too high. We are both getting so rusty that we shall make very little of it—and my distrust of all lexicons and translations is increasing. Also of Plato—and of the human mind. I suppose for the sake of the others we must do something about arranging a walk. Those maps are so unreliable by now that it is rather a farce—but still ‘Try lad, try! No harm in trying.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Of course hardly any districts in England are unspoiled enough to make walking worth while: and with two new members—I have very little doubt it will be a ghastly failure. I haven’t seen C.W.’s play: it is not likely to be at all good. (#litres_trial_promo) As for Orpheus—again it’s no harm trying. If you can’t write it console yourself by reflecting that if you did you wd. have been v. unlikely to get a publisher. (#litres_trial_promo) I am more and more convinced that there is no future for poetry. Nearly everyone has been ill here: I try to prevent them all croaking and grumbling but it is hard being the only optimist. Let me know which week end: whichever you choose something will doubtless prevent it. I hear the income-tax is going up again. The weather is bad and looks like getting worse. I suppose war is certain now. I don’t believe language is a perpetual Orphic song. The Cheedle reader is dead, I suppose you saw. (#litres_trial_promo) Yours C.S.L. P.S. Even my braces are in a frightful condition. ‘Damn braces’ said Blake. (#litres_trial_promo) TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W): (as from) Magdalen Feb 22nd 1939. Dear Williams, I don’t press my criticisms. I thought we’d done with dummies and when they turned up (I was in bed with flu’) and I found I’d got to send one back and one to Tillyard, I took the line ‘If they insist on having opinions, opinions by gum (blessed be he) they shall have!’ I still think that Re habilitations (#litres_trial_promo) wd. be tolerable, but I’m not making a stand: so whatever happens don’t send me any more dummies but fire ahead and get the book out. (You see, in this house one is never allowed to buy large envelopes because ‘There are lots in that drawer’: so that returning a dummy means a domestic crisis and the dinner is spoiled and the cats’ tails are trodden and charity is imperilled). I’ve finished the review. (#litres_trial_promo) My opinion of the poem, except for The Coming of Galahad wh. I think mannered, went up and up. A great work, full of glory. I also re-read the Place of the Lion and Many D. while I was ill, with undiminished enjoyment. But hurry up and write another for I shall soon know them all too well. I also tried to read Don Quixote (#litres_trial_promo) and failed: it seems to me a wretched affair. I suppose I must be wrong. Yours C. S. Lewis TO THE EDITOR OF THEOLOGY(EC): (#litres_trial_promo) Magdalen College, Oxford. February 27, 1939. Sir, In your January number Mr Mascall mentions six conditions for a just war which have been laid down by ‘theologians.’ I have one question to ask, and a number of problems to raise, about those rules. The question is merely historical. Who are these theologians, and what kind or degree of authority can they claim over members of the Church of England? The problems are more difficult. Condition 4 lays down that ‘it must be morally certain that the losses, to the belligerents, the world, and religion, will not outweigh the advantages of winning’; and 6, that ‘there must be a considerable probability of winning.’ It is plain that equally sincere people can differ to any extent and argue for ever as to whether a proposed war fulfils these conditions or not. The practical question, therefore, which faces us is one of authority. Who has the duty of deciding when the conditions are fulfilled, and the right of enforcing his decision? Modern discussions tend to assume without argument that the answer is ‘The private conscience of the individual,’ and that any other answer is immoral and totalitarian. Now it is certain, in some sense, that ‘no duty of obedience can justify a sin,’ as Mr Mascall says. Granted that capital punishment is compatible with Christianity, a Christian may lawfully be a hangman; but he must not hang a man whom he knows to be innocent. But will anyone interpret this to mean that the hangman has the same duty of investigating the prisoner’s guilt which the judge has? If so, no executive can work and no Christian state is possible; which is absurd. I conclude that the hangman has done his duty if he has done his share of the general duty, resting upon ail citizens alike, to ensure, so far as in him lies, that we have an honest judicial system; if, in spite of this, and unknowingly, he hangs an innocent man, then a sin has been committed, but not by him. This analogy suggests to me that it must be absurd to give to the private citizen the same right and duty of deciding the justice of a given war which rests on governments; and I submit that the rules for determining what wars are just (#litres_trial_promo) were originally rules for the guidance of princes, not subjects. This does not mean that private persons must obey governments commanding them to do what they know is sin; but perhaps it does mean (I write it with some reluctance) that the ultimate decision as to what the situation at a given moment is in the highly complex field of international affairs is one which must be delegated. No doubt we must make every effort which the constitution allows to ensure a good government and to influence public opinion; but in the long run, the nation, as a nation, must act, and it can act only through its government. (It must be remembered that there are risks in both directions: if war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.) What is the alternative? That individuals ignorant of history and strategy should decide for themselves whether condition 6 (‘a considerable probability of winning’) is, or is not, fulfilled?—or that every citizen, neglecting his own vocation and not weighing his capacity, is to become an expert on all the relevant, and often technical, problems? Decisions by the private conscience of each Christian in the light of Mr Mascall’s six rules would divide Christians from each other and result in no clear Christian witness to the pagan world around us. But a clear Christian witness might be attained in a different way. If all Christians consented to bear arms at the command of the magistrate, and if all, after that, refused to obey anti-Christian orders, should we not get a clear issue? A man is much more certain that he ought not to murder prisoners or bomb civilians than he ever can be about the justice of a war. It is perhaps here that ‘conscientious objection’ ought to begin. I feel certain that one Christian airman shot for refusing to bomb enemy civilians would be a more effective martyr (in the etymological sense of the word) than a hundred Christians in jail for refusing to join the army. Christendom has made two efforts to deal with the evil of war-chivalry and pacifism. Neither succeeded. But I doubt whether chivalry has such an unbroken record of failure as pacifism. The question is a very dark one. I should welcome about equally refutation, or development, of what I have said. I am, sir, Your obedient servant, C. S. Lewis For some years Lewis had been concerned about what he regarded as the ‘inordinate esteem of culture’ (#litres_trial_promo) by such unbelieving literary critics as Matthew Arnold, Benedetto Croce, I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis. The latter wanted to see culture made the basis of a humane society, and to this end he founded Scrutiny. The editors of this periodical, which ran from 1932 to 1953, expressed a belief in ‘a necessary relationship between the quality of the individual’s response to art and his general fitness for a humane existence’. (#litres_trial_promo) Lewis was appalled to find this ‘inordinate esteem’ expressed in the pages o/Theology. In an essay entitled ‘The Necessity of Scrutiny’, published in the issue of March, 1939, the Anglican monk Brother George Every SSM, (#litres_trial_promo) after paying tribute to the literary beliefs of Leavis, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, asked: ‘What are Mr Eliot’s admirers to think of a church where those who seem to be theologically equipped prefer the late Professor Housman, Mr Charles Morgan, and Miss Dorothy Sayers, to Lawrence, Joyce and Mr E. M. Forster?’ This essay would eventually lead Lewis to write one of his most valuable works of literary criticism, ‘Christianity and Culture’. TO ALEC VIDLER (BOD): Magdalen College Oxford March 11th 1939 Dear Mr. Vidler I enclose (1) Corrected proof of article on Taliessin. (2) A letter about Christianity and war for your consideration. (#litres_trial_promo) If you think it worth printing (and I am not sure that it is) I believe the MS. will be clear enough for the printer: but if not, get it typed and tell me how much I owe you for the job. I have been ill or I would before now have answered your letter suggesting an early meeting of the ‘literary collaborators’. I should have great pleasure in attending this if it takes place. At the same time I ought to warn you that each number makes it clear to me that my only use to you in literary matters can be that of permanent opposition, for I find myself in sharp disagreement with Mr Roberts and Brother Every. It will be for you to decide when the limits of useful disagreement have been passed—if you eject me I shall not feel in the least ill used. The hint in Brother Every’s paper that good taste is essential to salvation seemed to me precisely one of our greatest enemies in this age of intellectual converts-there is a danger of making Christianity itself appear as one more highbrow fad. Don’t bother answering this at present. I write it only because I don’t want you to buy a pig in a poke. Yours sincerely C. S. Lewis Dr Vidler nevertheless replied to Lewis on 14 March: I am grateful for your warning…There seems a danger that Theology may be falling into the hands of a certain literary clique, but I am determined to avoid that, if possible. It so happens that George Every was one of the first to urge upon me the importance of giving attention in Theology to literary matters, and he made many suggestions…While I wish Every and his friends to have an opportunity of saying what they want to say, I do not intendthat Theology shall be an exclusive organ for their views, and I shall welcome any opportunity of making this clear. The best way no doubt will be to publish articles from other points of view. TO ALEC VIDLER (BOD): Magdalen College Oxford March 16th 1939 Dear Mr Vidler Sorry to have imposed such a long letter on you: this one will need no answer. As long as I can occasionally contribute an article on the opposite side, I am quite content. Yours sincerely C. S. Lewis TO MARY NEYLAN (T): The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford. March 21st 1939. Dear Mrs Neylan Miss Moore and I are both very much obliged to you: she looks forward with great pleasure to seeing the school under such privileged conditions. (#litres_trial_promo) Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/c-s-lewis-3/collected-letters-volume-two-books-broadcasts-and-war-1931-194/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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