SUPPLEMENT

This Supplement contains letters not included in Volumes I and II. The letters to Owen Barfield were omitted from Volume I for reasons of space. It was later decided to include in the Collected Letters as many of Lewis’s letters as possible.

After three unhappy years at Wynyard School, Watford, Hertfordshire–the ‘Belsen’ of Surprised by Joy –Warnie Lewis won his freedom and in 1909 he became a student at Malvern College, Malvern, Worcestershire. He was very happy there, and in May 1913 he became a school prefect. Jack Lewis, after two equally unhappy years at Wynyard School (1908–10), spent one term at Campbell College in Belfast, after which he was sent in January 1912 to Cherbourg School, a preparatory school in Malvern. It was only yards from Malvern College, and besides having his elder brother close by, he made a great deal of progress. At the time Jack wrote the following letter to his father, Albert Lewis was worried about Warnie who in May 1913 had been degraded from being a prefect after he was caught smoking.

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 36):¹

Cherbourg.
22/6/13.

My dear Papy,

I am sorry you should be so worried about Warnie: I think I knew about it a day or two before you. However, I hope he will be more cautious in future.

On Wednesday, in consideration of the scholarship we went for a sort of an expedition to a place near here, which was rather enjoyable. We had a match, which we won, against the Old Boys on Tuesday. It is rather a pity that the Parents Match scheme has fallen through. Much as I admire the spirit of true and generous humour which has led you to spare neither physical exertion nor cab windows for the edification, instruction, and recreation of the people of Malvern, I cannot but think that you would add in no small degree to your own reputation as a comedian, and the pleasure of the spectators, by joining in a cricket match. The weather is still very hot here. Thank you very much for the 10 shillings. Only about 5 more weeks now.

your loving

son Jacks.

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 40–1):

Cherbourg.

Gt. Malvern.

29/6/13.

My dear Papy,

We–that is the top form–went to Worcester to see a county match the other day: and, although I am not interested in county cricket, we had a very pleasant outing. The weather is still very oppressive here.

I am glad, very glad, to hear that you have got rid of our offensive friend Harry. ² Perhaps, as you say, the new men are worse, but as long as they don’t always work in front of the windows, I shall prefer them. There are only four more weeks on Tuesday. We had two matches this week, one of which we won and the other lost. I am afraid there is no more news.

your loving

son Jack

 

Warnie left Malvern College in June 1913. He was followed home by Jack, who before leaving Cherbourg won a scholarship to Malvern College. Warnie hoped to enter the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and pass from there into the Army Service Corps. For this he would need to pass the entrance examination, and Albert Lewis decided to have him tutored by his old headmaster, William T. Kirkpatrick,³ who was now living at Great Bookham, Surrey, and taking a few private pupils. Warnie reported to Gastons, Mr Kirkpatrick’s house, on 10 September, and Jack arrived at Malvern College on 18 September, expecting to be very happy at a place his brother liked so much. He was given a room in School House.

TO HIS BROTHER (LP IV: 72):⁴

[Malvern College

20 September 1913]

My dear W.,

The new pres. ⁵ this term are Stone, ⁶ Browning, ⁷ and Bourne. ⁸ We have got study 24, the one next the pres. room. In it are Hardman II, ⁹ whose brother you knew, Anderson, Lodge (whom I detest), and myself.

This letter is being written only to stave off Jacks. ¹⁰ I shall write to you more fully at my leisure. Tassel, ¹¹ on hearing my name, inquired angrily if I were the brother of ‘that other one’. Is not recruit drill a great game? You must be having a pretty plugging time at Kirk’s? ¹² Cheer up however, it is only for a short time. Smugy¹³ inquires more tenderly for you, and I hear from home that Kirk writes of you with great affection. I shall have to stop now as it is Hall. ¹⁴ So far Malvern has gone well.

your affect.

brother Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 73):

[Malvern College]

22/9/13.

My dear P.,

I am very sorry to have to write for so many things, but it can’t possibly be helped. Could you please send me 7/-, as we have just had to pay for a study 5/6 each, and games and other subscriptions which will amount to about 3/-when all paid. How are things at home?

your loving

son Jack

TO HIS BROTHER (LP IV: 74):

[Malvern College

September 1913]

Dear W.,

Thanks for the letter which reached me during Monday breakfast. I am writing this in the seclusion of a newly bought study, and am consequently very bucked. I have asked Jacks about the pictures and he’s going to ‘see about’ them. I left 12/6 at home for the ‘History’. ¹⁵ On the last day of the hols. P. forced me to tell him where the attic key was. I really had no alternative but to comply. So far everything has gone quite well here. There are a good many enquiries about you and your estate. Can’t write more now.

your affect.

brother Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 80):

[Malvern College

5 October 1913]

My dear Papy,

I was very glad to get a second letter from you last week. I think it would be best if you were to write to the Old Boy¹⁶ about my giving my drawing.

The winter has set in here already, and we have had heavy rain yesterday at a match against the Aston Old Edwardians¹⁷ which we won. I am writing the account of it which will appear under Hichen’s¹⁸ name in the Malvernian¹⁹–a curious but not disagreeable duty.

I have heard again from W. very cheerfully. I do hope he will get through this exam all right. However, even if he does’nt pass now, he will have another chance in the summer.

I have not heard from Tubbs²⁰ yet this term, but I suppose I shall later on. Jimmy made rather a good speech to the school on the first Monday morning re his leaving. However, I don’t think he will be a great loss to us. I wonder whom we will get to replace the Old Boy? That will be rather a case of ‘after a well grace actor leaves’. ²¹

We had a long Mission meeting in the Gym. last Sunday, in which some person whose name I could not catch, spoke remarkably well. You must have had an intolerable time of it that Sunday. Poor W. complains bitterly that his only afternoon off is taken away from him by ‘kind’ people who force him to play tennis. If I had my way, every ‘kind’ person in Europe would be broken on the wheel.

your loving

son Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 85):

[Malvern College]

13/10/13

My dear P.,

I should have liked very much to be an intelligent fly on the wall during R. Ponsonby’s²² visit to Leeborough. ²³ How much did your amusement cost you? ²⁴

Yesterday there was an entertainment in the Gym, a dramatic recital by W.’s friend who did the Jew scene from the ‘School for scandal’. ²⁵ This time he was very good in a Jacobs story, ²⁶ some bits of Kipling, and a satire on the trials of modern travelling. On the whole it was a very good show, although he overdid the thing in his serious bit, the ‘Ballad of John Nicholson’ by Newbolt. ²⁷

In our form this week we had a most exciting thing; one of the questions in our weekly exam was to draw a picture illustrating an incident in the book of Cicero which we’re reading. My picture was marked top and pinned up on the form room door for several days. The James²⁸ came down and said it was ‘spirited’–which may mean anything. This week we have got to make a translation of an ode of Horace into English verse. I ought to be able to do something there. ²⁹

‘Antony and Cleopatra’ is a hopeless play when you get into it. Smugy thinks so too; but ‘Romeo and Juliet’ which we are reading out of school for the Lea Shakespeare is good. ³⁰ I cannot write any more now as we have got to go to chapel.

your loving

son Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 94):

Gt. Malvern.

Postmark: 2/11/13.

My dear P.,

Yesterday we had an event of great interest, the match of the Cherbourg Old Boys against Cherbourg. It was, of course, very pleasant to see the place and the people again, and I enjoyed it very much.

There has been another event this week also which pleased me, in the form of the classical orchestral concert, which was really exceedingly good. Among other items was a thing of Handel’s from ‘Berenice’, ³¹ which I had never heard before and which I liked, and the flower song from Carmen. ³² The singer, Hubert Eisdel³³ broke down in the middle of the concert and could’nt go on. I felt very sorry for the man, as one must feel awful under such circumstances.

I suppose my half term report will reach you some time during this week. Write and tell me what it is like. I think Smugy knows that I am working, although I am very weak on some points. I cannot write more now as it is time for Chapel.

your loving

son Jack

TO HIS BROTHER (LP IV: 116):

Sunday,

Dec. 14th [1913]

Dear W.,

Write soon please and tell me when exactly you are coming down. I have’nt yet heard whether you passed your exams or not, but I should think you have. ³⁴ Anyway don’t despair. Come down as soon as possible, say Wednesday. Can’t write more now.

your loving

brother Jack

 

P.S. Don’t be impatient about the sound box. I’ll explain my plans later on.

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 120):

Saturday.

Postmark: 20/12/13

My dear P.,

I am very sorry that you got worried about me this week. I really have not had twenty minutes to myself since Sunday: we have been busy with exams etc. W. says he is coming down here on Saturday, and we are travelling on Tuesday.

Thanks for the questions about the books. The only thing I can think of at the moment is Gray. ³⁵ He is the only English poet of any standing that we have’nt got, and so will ‘fill a long felt want’.

I am very glad this term is over and am looking forward hugely to Wednesday morning. When shall we know about W’s. exam? This suspense becomes tedious. I can’t really write any more now, but I hope soon to talk with you in person soon. So good bye for a few days.

your loving

son Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 141–2):

[Malvern College]

Postmark: 24/2/14

My dear Papy,

Judging by the descriptions enclosed lately in your letters of the social whirlwind at home, things are more than usually ‘merry and bright’. Perhaps I am better off in that way now than in the holydays–now that that fact compensates for the various other disadvantages of life in England.

Well, the poem³⁶ was duly shown up. Although not ‘sent up for good’, it came out top, Smugy observing that he was tired of that metre; ³⁷ so that you see my fears were not without foundation. However he shall not have the same complaint to make again, and it is to be hoped that ‘our muse’ flows in other rhythms as well.

Last night one Dr. Levick, who had chased the pole with Captain Scott, ³⁸ came to lecture upon that subject. ³⁹ Among other interesting facts we heard of their cutting up their dinner of seal meat with a geological hammer, because it was frozen so hard. And each fragment, as it was cut, leaped across the hut: behaving, in short, just as stone would under the circumstances. Carving in their latitudes has many aspects of art and difficulty unknown to us. But, on the whole, it was not a good lecture. He had a good many interesting things to tell, but could not tell them, and what is more, did not seem to be interested in his own story. The slides were excellent.

Last Sunday I think I told you that I was asked to go up to Cherbourg. At the risk of repeating myself I must tell you that I accepted and had quite a pleasant afternoon. But while I was there, I suddenly realised that it wouldn’t do to go back, although I have often felt wishes in that line. It is funny to think that you can quite drop out of the atmosphere of a place in a few months.

your loving

son Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 184–5):

[Malvern College]

Postmark: 14/6/14

My dear Papy,

Thanks very much for the postal order which I was glad to get. But I had little pleasure from the sight of that alarming and disagreeable type written letter. I hope that there is nothing serious the matter, and that if there has been, it is now on the mend. ⁴⁰ Mind that you see a really competent doctor if the thing keeps on being troublesome, not Squeaky. ⁴¹ What exactly is the trouble? As soon as you are able to write, don’t forget to let me know all the particulars of the case, as master Willy’s type is not a very comforting or reassuring missive. ⁴² Here, next morning ushers in Speech Week, with its gaiety and ‘patriotic’ rejoicings: we shall soon be singing sentimental songs about the ‘dear old limited company’, while some of us pretend and others are actually made to imagine that we like being here. What artificial nonsense it all is! I have read the ‘Prologue’ for speech day (composed by Smugy), a neat, epigrammatic poem of some 50 English heroic coup-lets. ⁴³ But after that, how can anyone read these eulogies of our late headmaster with feelings other than contempt? Also the warm welcome to Preston? ⁴⁴ Would they not have bestowed them with equal cordiality on anyone else if he had been our headmaster? Even if he had practically ruined the school, we should still go on talking complimentary drivel and telling lies about the great things he never did.

This week you will get the half term report. And I think I may say with confidence that there will be a considerable improvement. The Greek Grammar and other ‘bêtes noirs’ have been going much better this term, and Smugy waxed quite complimentary on the subject. ⁴⁵

I do hope that by the time you read this you will be a good deal better: in any case, take care of yourself and don’t be rash.

your loving

son Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 202):

[Malvern College]

Postmark: 20/7/14.

My dear Papy,

I need hardly say how very sorry I was to hear from Aunt Annie⁴⁶ that you had got a relapse of your illness and were again confined to bed. I suppose the cause of it was that you were worried about business affairs, and went back to the office before you should have. You must be more careful next time: no matter what the state of affairs is. For as you yourself have often said, we shall always have enough to keep the wolf from the door: ‘and after friends have done with hunger’ as the shepherd says in Euripides, ‘if they have but each other and the good green earth, who is happier than they?’ ⁴⁷ Annie has again written me a very kind and useful letter about your health: she is really very good over this business, both, as you tell me, doing all she can for you at home and at the same time trying to do her best for Warnie and me abroad.

On Thursday night Preston invited myself and two other people to dinner, and it was really quite a pleasant function: Mrs. Preston especially, is a remarkably nice woman. Of course the usual questions about the political crisis in Ulster. ⁴⁸ I must confess that I am getting tired of playing the journalist to every one I meet in England. One is always more or less on trial on such occasions and it is hard at a moment’s notice to make any adequate answer to such a wholesale question as ‘What do you think about the Ulster business?’ And the most difficult part is that you know that the people to whom you are talking are not really in sympathy with our party at all, but merely spying out the nakedness of the land.

The ordinary work of term ends this week and we begin the eternal nuisance of exams. I feel that they are really very inefficient tests of one’s knowledge, since I have often done very well on a subject that I have made a mess of in the term and vice versa. But, whatever their intrinsic worth, they are always very welcome as a signal of the end of term. I am glad to say I shall see you again, all being well, on Wednesday week. So will you please book the berth for the night of Tuesday week. I hear you will have W. home this week, so we shall all be together again.

Hoping that you are a good deal better,

I remain,

your loving

son Jack

 

Lewis was so unhappy at Malvern that his father agreed he should leave at the end of July 1914. On 19 September 1914 he arrived at Great Bookham to be tutored by William T. Kirkpatrick.

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Hillsboro, ⁴⁹

Western Rd,

Headington

Jan. 24th 1926

My dear Barfield,

It was a kind, if uneconomic, thought to send a copy to a certain purchaser. ⁵⁰ Many thanks. I have now read it through. Prior to any other criticism, you will be glad to know that I found it all interesting and enjoyable, I was nowhere inclined to skip, or anxious to get on to the next chapter. In other words it fulfils the first elementary condition of a good book: the basis without which higher merits are of no avail. It is completely and certainly readable.

Perfect clearness, at a first reading, I cannot claim for it: but this was hardly to be expected. I shall be able to say more about this when I have read it again. I don’t mean, of course, any serious ambiguity or culpable difficulty: certainly no obscurity in any particular passage–only the parts are much clearer than the whole. By the bye, a good deal of this may be due to my knowing more about your outlook than I have (quâ reader) a right to know, and getting muddled because I am always trying to link up your statements with that background: almost all of it may be due to that. Or perhaps I want to end up with a unity (of mental growth) which the knowledge we possess does not really admit. In a way, too, this slight inconclusiveness or ‘higgle-de-piggledyosity’ of one’s final impression, is not a drawback: it leaves me very anxious to go further: and possibly this power of suggestion has to be purchased by some little weakening of statement.

Suggestive it is nearly everywhere. No one can fail to get the feeling you had when you wrote it or feel windows opening in all directions. You have quite definitely succeeded in that way. The occasional levities (so dangerous) have all ‘come off’: specially the one about ‘the oldest and safest of human occupations’. ⁵¹ The passage about early Christianity and the significance of persecution is admirable, and perhaps the best ‘episode’ (epic sense) in the book. The advance of the Aryans was well done, too, but we all expected it to be. Of course I disagree with your account of Plato and Aristotle and may have to explode it in a footnote some day, but there’s no good thinking about that now. ‘I said it very loud and clear, I went and shouted in your ear’ ⁵²hellip;and you wouldn’t listen–. ⁵³

I have seen only one review (a good one) in The Observer, ⁵⁴ but you probably have them all thro your agency. Dymer⁵⁵ goes to the typist this week. Kindest regards to Mrs. Barfield.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM FORCE STEAD (W):⁵⁶

Hillsboro

[1926]

Dear Stead–

I found your gallies this afternoon when I went into College and have just finished reading the book. ⁵⁷ I have been forced to deal with it more hastily than I should wish and I feel in many ways incompetent to deal with it.

There is first the temperamental difference: and then the difficulty of a literary method which I have never practiced and have hardly studied at all. I hardly know by what canons to judge this sort of loosely connected and highly subjective mixture of anecdote and description: I don’t care for it as done by Yeats & others and yours seems to me about as good as theirs. I am afraid this will seem less a compliment than a testimony to my utter incompetence.

I am much more interested in the philosophical part: it seems a very good gathering together in a popular form of several of the more wholesome trends of contemporary thought. It was a pity that determinism had to come in: because on the popular level both ‘determinism’ and ‘free will’ are nonsense, aren’t they, and both really the same in the end. But you couldn’t help that. ⁵⁸

I am more worried by an apparent inconsistency wh. you seem to remain in–like most of us. On the one hand the spirit is (to you) out of time: on the other, evolution in time is (to you) a thing of real spiritual significance. You say, indeed, that the spirit itself does not evolve, and I’m glad you do. But I don’t feel that you have done very much towards reconciling the timelessness of the spirit with the value of its apparent adventures in time. Mind, I don’t say they are incompatible, only that you have not reconciled them.

Again, in your pantheistic conclusion, should you not show that you are aware of some of the moral difficulties? I mean, if the spirit grows in the grass etc, and in the cancer and the murderer, if it does everything, must it not be simply the neutral background of good and evil? ⁵⁹ Of course if you held that the spirit was in time you might make some play with the notion that the bad processes represented less developed grades of her activity–but you are debarred from that. I take it your spirit has no history. However, we all end in difficulties. On this side I think the book will be useful as a channel by which the Bergsonian evolutionism and idealistic metaphysic (even if you have rather tied them up in a bag together than fused them) may reach the weaker brethren and protect them against ‘astronomical intimidation’. ⁶⁰

Thinking it over again tho’, I am a little startled at the various ingredients of the cordial you are giving them: Bergson, Croce, ⁶¹ Roman Catholicism-up-to-a-point, and ‘High Thoughtism’ as represented by Coué. ⁶² But I daresay it’s alright.

As to the narrative and descriptive passages with wh. you sweeten discourse, I can’t say much. I don’t understand this method, as I said, and can only humbly warn you of the dangers. It is dreadfully hard to convince a reader (tho’ of course your personal assurance would convince me as a man) that you kept on feeling appropriate and significant things at the rightful places. If a malignant reviewer wrote

‘Who is the happy tourist, who is he

That every globe-trotter would wish to be’,

could you defend yourself? Don’t be offended: I am not saying that: but I feel you are on terribly thin ice in Notre Dame, at Lourdes and at St. Peters’

The only particular (i.e. the only useful) criticisms I have to offer, are these

1. I shd. like all the passages about ‘this age’ or ‘our own time’ excised. Don’t sneer at contemporary thought, when your great merit is to be a representative of some of its most characteristic tendencies. Particularize on contemporary vices and follies if you like: but don’t talk as if you were ‘born out of due time‘⁶³ while you are writing a book that couldn’t have been written except in the C 20th.

2. I shd. like the passage about the French kings cut out. I suggest that it is merely a re-emergence of something you legitimately felt at sixteen: at your age, talking about serious subjects, it only awakens distrust and alienates the reader.

3. Your barque on Oxford canal I can’t accept. Once again, if as a man, you tell me this happened, far be it from me to give you the lie in the throat. But if as an artist you tell me as reader that you arrived independently at the argument of the Kantian deduction of the categories, all in a flash, because someone asked you the time–incredulus odi. ⁶⁴

Please neglect anything wh. I have said if it is based on misunder standing. So much for the book on the higher level, as a serious bit of thinking. On the⁶⁵

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Hillsboro,

Western Rd,

Headington,

Oxford

[April 1926]

Dear Barfield,

Oh heavenly! I’ve no business to come and it means leaving in the lurch a brother who will be here, but damn it, this once, come what may–I’m going to take a moral holiday and come.

From 9th April (i.e. arriving at rendezvous on evening of 8th I hope) to the 11th, (i.e. leaving you on Monday) will be the best I can do. ⁶⁶ From the 2nd–4th wd. be much better for me, but I suppose you can’t manage that? I vote for Newbury etc. as against the Cotswolds–and the more Savernake you can put into it the better.

I have ‘puffed’ your work in a lecture. Dymer has been accepted by Dents. Said it gave them ‘extraordinary pleasure’. Let me know about all arrangements as soon as possible.

Yrs

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM FORCE STEAD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Wednesday

[9 June 1926]

Dear Stead

Thank you very much for the book. ⁶⁷ Your publishers deserve a word of thanks for something which will make such a handsome addition to my shelves. I have not, of course, had time to read it through again, but I have looked at some of the poems which, pursuing the argument, I rather neglected when you showed me the proofs. I think Thames Valley in Winter⁶⁸ and the Graveyard Among Mountains⁶⁹ are my favourites, tho’ the blank verse Ponte Santa Trinita⁷⁰ ends with a very fine image. ⁷¹ Perhaps it is only my home-staying ignorance that guides my preferences to those that deal with England or (as in the Graveyard) with things that everyone can imagine in his own terms.

I will certainly do what little I can for the book but there are very few among my friends who are not either too hard up to buy any new books except by those who are already their favourite authors, or too utterly remote from your point of view to come within skirmishing distance. I enclose a parody which I am thinking of sending as a leg pull to T. S. Elliot’s paper. ⁷² Please let me know if it would do. Yours, with very many thanks & best wishes for success

C.S.L.

 

P.S. Please return the enclosed, after judgment, and don’t give me away.

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Hillsboro,

Western Rd,

Headington

24th Aug. 1926

My dear Barfield,

This is splendid. I shall be free on Thursday (probably) and after Thursday (certainly). If, as I suppose, you are both at Long Crendon⁷³ we all hope you will both come over and lunch and tea here. Choose your day and let us know. If you are alone, come alone.

Harwood first told me of Mrs. Dewey’s⁷⁴ death–you know I don’t read the papers. Please tell your wife how sorry I am. One says that the death of the old is no tragedy and so on, but I fancy they were great friends, more than parents and children usually are. It must have been a nasty knock.

We have had a wonderful walk beyond the end of the known world. I have seen the baby and met the omniscient baron. It will be delightful to see you: on top of the walk it seems almost more luck than I can digest.

Yrs

C. S. Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Sept. 15th [1926]

My dear Barfield,

The meet will be at Beckley pub–the one at the bottom of the hill–on Friday next at 1.0. p.m. ⁷⁵ You had better pick me up at Hillsboro in the morning and we can go to the rendez-vous together. Please notify. The passage re cats was ‘They say I rub their fur the wrong way, but I say why can’t the cats turn round.’ ⁷⁶

As for that feeling of not being a great man always remember

1. Guid sheltrom is in humilitie⁷⁷

2. Even so, all language etc.

Yrs

C.S.L.

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen

[October 1926]

My dear Barfield–

How tiresome about the letter. I had trusted to acquire fame by it. The chief points were;–

(a) That this is, so far, a great poem⁷⁸–in the unequivocal sense–the sense which those words ordinarily bear in literary criticism. It challenges comparison with the Prelude, ⁷⁹ and keeps its end up. I think spiritually it is not as high as the Prelude (it does not cover so large nor so momentous an experience): on the other hand it is more consistently poetical. I noted only one passage where you came near prose. ‘Trivial reasoning won his grave assent Provided only its conclusion mocked etc’. I have no doubt at all that you are engaged in writing one of the really great poems of the world. All this was accompanied in the letter with all sorts of devices to convince you that I really meant what I was saying: but I can’t bother to do them all again and you’ll have to take it neat. Of course I know I am saying a v. big thing, and one can’t be sure that I am not mistaken.

(b) What I particularly admired–what makes it unique–is the success with which you have combined res olim dissociabiles. ⁸⁰ You have contrived to keep all the time within the labyrinthine fidgety world of the inner mind, and yet not lost the soaring, winged movement–the cantabile, as of Milton or Marlowe. I don’t know anything else where this is so fully attained. The whole of the love section, the change from sunrise to noon (no more singing Osirian secrets), the climax at ‘not climbing in But falling out: henceforth seek earth on earth, Heaven in heaven’, and the finale about personal passion like a creature that lives after its back is broken–all this is wonderful in its songfulness maintained thro’ philosophical matter. That section alone puts you, for me, among the very great people. But indeed you gave me the authentic thrill all over the place. There are things I shall never get out of my head: such as ‘If discs of gold should lie, Never so far between, along the floor Of that infernal pilgrimage’–‘His soul in him like a seagull’s cry’–‘Nailed stoutly to the hopes of little joys’–‘Their mineral passion’.

(c) Two parts as a whole seem inferior. The first is the opening section. I can’t feel you have entirely solved the problem of dealing with emotions at once primitive and reticent without being mawkish. Need the man think of his child (whether born or unborn) primarily as ‘my image’? Again it opens with a picture–the sky etc. Pictures (I mean the more completely picturable kind of image) are not really your long suit: and this, with its aureole etc. remains to me literary and uninteresting. And the fact that it is a leitmotif wh. has to reappear in a later section makes it more unfortunate. I should advise a complete breaking up and rewriting of this section with the powers you now have. The next is (I am sorry to say) the peqipéseia⁸¹ of the whole poem: his enlightenment in the reading room of the B.M. ⁸² The first paragraph about there being no Eureka cry but ‘Sun Turns himself over’ is excellent. So is the third about the man who ‘moves about Within the quiddity of light and sees Seeing itself, and that our eyes are veils Not windows’. But just in between those the thing itself has to come–and it doesn’t. The old and not v. profound image of the light in a dark cave is inadequate. You see, the discovery that consciousness is a voyage of exploration, on the purely logical level, needn’t lead to any spiritual consequences at all. Apparently it meant something to that man at that moment wh. it needn’t mean universally to any philologist who happens to agree with it. That something you have, I am afraid, just left out. This sounds extremely disappointing, I know: and I have no idea what you can do. Some really living metaphor or simile–something suggestive and mythopoeic, still hovering just outside your consciousness, must come in here and flood the thing with light. You had better fast and pray.

After this week I shall be in College, and of course delighted to see you. I can put you up for a night but I am afraid our monastic system will not allow your lady wife. Let me know what day you think of coming. Dymer is out about three weeks. I have had no good reviews yet, but a letter from l’Anton Fausset saying that he has reviewed it for the T.L.S. and as the review may not be printed for some weeks he thought he would write and tell me etc. He is v. eulogistic. ⁸³ So is Quiller Couch (whose opinion, between ourselves, is valueless) in a letter to Dents. I suppose you are too much out of the journalistic world to help me now? Hoping to hear from you about your visit,

Yrs

C. S. Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb. 2nd 1927.

My dear Barfield–

Advice wanted urgently. Do you know anything of a thing called the Panton Arts Club? They want me to join over the head of Dymer. Now ten to one this is merely a catchpenny stunt for gulls. On the other hand they say they allow only 100 members in the literary section, admitted on the value of work published. So it may, for all I know, be a real honour. If you know or can find out which it is, please send me a line as soon as possible. I have been having a heavenly time since–the bogies are in full retreat and I have been almost dizzy with real joy several times a day. In fact, a sort of remarriage of the Spirit. I have also got the poetic and the other mind settled now. It all comes in Aristotle De Anima III v. 2. There are two elements the ⁸⁴ and the . ⁸⁵ . ⁸⁶

Yrs

C. S. Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Hillsboro.

Sept. 10th [1927]

My dear Barfield–

I have finished a first re-reading of the Tower. The great passages–VI, VII, X–stand absolutely where they did. The later cantos I have enjoyed much more than I did before: but of course this is chiefly due to my increased understanding of and sympathy with the matter.

As to the poem as a whole, I am afraid I feel now a rather serious break between the two periods of composition. Oddly enough it seems much shorter than I remembered, and much less of a ‘just’ narrative–more a series of impassioned lyrical monologues loosely connected by the identity of the hero. In fact it is only with the love affair that the unity begins. I don’t know how far you are thinking of ever working on it again. If you do, I shd. (reluctantly) chuck II, III and IV right out. V and the danceable duet wd. have to be saved: but I shd. like the bristles of mechanic thought etc. to come after the love-tragedy. I quite realize the reply that if they hadn’t been there before the tragedy wd. not have effected him as they did. But the masses of the design wd. be much better grouped if they emerged into consciousness only after it: one must simplify a bit or the reader gets the impression that wherever he opens the poem the hero will be always in some damned ‘situation’ or other, and gets into the ‘What is it this time’ state of mind. I shall read it again–some things I liked seem to have disappeared. (I don’t think it wd. be at all admirable to work it up into ‘just’ narrative. A few prose glosses at the beginnings of cantos, if really well written, wd. be admirable. In the text, I think a single week’s work could introduce a lot more clarity & make an enormous improvement).

Tolkien says ‘any day’ after the 13th–so reply fixing me as soon as possible. I read the Livingstone Lowes at a gulp–it is really excellent, including the scholia. It wd. have been worth reading for ‘Why don’t the cats turn round?’ alone. I have just read Edith Sitwell’s Sleeping Beauty. ⁸⁷ Without any attempt to place her exactly, I say she is clearly one of the English poets in the general sense wh. includes Milton, Longfellow, Hood⁸⁸ & Southey. ⁸⁹ There’s no good denying it,

yrs

C.S.L.

 

At nihil eorum quae superscripsi prohibet quin constet inter ompnes humanam sermonem esse Orphicum carmen. ⁹⁰

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

[1928]

You might like to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said à-propos of something quite different that your conception of the ancient semantic unity⁹¹ had modified his whole outlook and that he was always just going to say something in a lecture when your conception stopped him in time ‘It is one of those things,’ he said ‘that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again.’ We went on to observe on the paradox that tho’ you knew much poetry and little philology the philological part of your book was much the sounder.

Jam and powder you see

C.S.L.

 

Beside the fact that Barfield’s literary works were not providing sufficient income, in 1929 his father, Arthur Barfield, lost the services of his brother in their London law office, Barfield & Barfield. Pressure was put on Owen to help, and after reading for a degree in law he moved with his wife to London where, for the next thirty years, he worked as a solicitor.

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

[1929]

My dear Barfield–

There’s one thing about your novel⁹²–you do really succeed in producing the atmosphere of real conversation among young men of the thoughtful type–specially those revealing moments after the fire has gone out. I have never seen this or anything remotely like it in a novel. It is as if reality was actually thinking itself in the pages of the book. These are the best parts by miles.

I am more concerned than ever about John. He seems to me too improbable. His sensibilities are so dam fine that when he hears something he disapproves on the wireless he smacks the set. On the other hand they are so blunt that he hasn’t the vaguest glimmering how a woman like Margaret feels after being disappointed of motherhood, and supposes, in the conversation that reveals her agony, that she is considering his feelings. He is so keen on liberty that he writes your Ioldobaoth poem (your John could not have written it) and also so brutally tyrannical that in the same conversation he sweeps aside his wife’s claim to elementary spiritual privacy. His life is turned upside down by a ceremony with a candle–and he has almost forgotten the child a few days after the birth. He is so unselfish that he never stops talking about the fate of humanity: and he is so selfish that at the v. moment when the possibility of his wife’s death is brought before him, his reply to the suggestion that Gerald shd. take her away is ‘We shan’t have much time to talk.’ That this grumble should cross his mind at such a moment is bad enough, but intelligible. Peccavimus omnes. ⁹³ But the man in whom it would not be strangled at birth–in whom it would reach the stage of words–is surely intolerable.

Then his mere behaviour! People who have been brought up as he has do not really violently shake their wives (shortly after childbirth) and smash the furniture–unless you mean him to be definitely in a nervous breakdown. Have you yourself ever met anyone who acted at all like this? And what value remains in the noble aspirations about the world in general when you have shown us his savage egoism towards those parts of the world wh. he is immediately in touch with? Surely the sort of character whose heart is always bleeding for Europe and who can’t reach even the forbearance of common civility towards his wife is more proper for bitter comedy (like Tartuffe)⁹⁴ than for your novel?

Excuse haste, but I am really v. deeply bothered about this.

Yrs

C.S.L.

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Oct. 21st 1929.

My dear Barfield

Thanks for letter. I wolfed Part IV of the novel with great excitement and must, of course, re-read it before my criticism can be of much value. What I think I can be pretty certain of is that it is thick strewn with evidences of real greatness and that (at least) Humphery, Janet and Gerald must remain in the mind of any fair reader as entirely original and living characters. Whether besides having greatness in it it is part of an actually great novel, I am not prepared to say: and the disjoined fashion in which I have read it wd. make it absurd for me to judge it as a whole.

On the bad side, as you probably feel itself, there is in this last part a problem you have not (I think) completely solved. You hold a belief about the world, invoking big secret powers in the background: most of your readers don’t. That in itself wouldn’t matter. Unfortunately, however, your readers are familiar with the use of secret & satanic societies as machines either in good semi-fantastic recreational fiction (e.g., Sard Harker)⁹⁵ or in frankly commercial shockers. As a result the average reader will complain that Part IV transfers to a different convention what began as a v. serious naturalistic novel. Your problem was how to show that for you at any rate such things were on the same level of reality as ordinary London life. You have not completely failed, but I doubt if you have completely succeeded.

It is v. unfortunate that we are introduced to that side of the story by the device of unintentional eavesdropping–very usé and associated with fiction of quite a different type. It also depends on two improbabilities a. A moon light enough to read by, wh. is rare in England. b. A man who feels afraid lest a face shd. look in through the window & then immediately sits down to read in the window with his back to it–surely the last thing you’d do in that mood. I think these improbabilities in mere mechanism don’t as a rule matter much to anyone but professional critics: but they do matter when your whole difficulty is to persuade the reader that the scenes which they serve to introduce are as serious as the rest of the book. But perhaps this just has to be faced…I wonder could you have let it in more gradually, so that the reader found himself accepting it before he realised what he was in for? Perhaps when I read the whole I shall find that you have done this.

You understand that my criticism here is not concerned with the truth of these things. Assuming them true, remembering that they are already frequent in fiction of a certain type, how are you to convince readers–that is the whole question.

Long at lectures

On Monday morning

I work till one! Hoihe!!

Piddling pupils

I in taking am engaged!!

Can your car

So swiftly over

Earth’s back wander

From Oxford to London between one and 5.45?

Walawei! Hoo-ruddy-rah!!!!

Ho-hai!!!!!

!!

?!!!!

If so, call

For me at Magdalen

Were wisest rune

On Monday at one!

If you lie

On Tuesday night

In Magdalen’s ancient College

You will meet Dyson

Dining with me

Of men the justest!!

[The whole scene explodes]⁹⁶

I’m afraid my car is no go. I feel so much pleasure that I doubt if it can be innocent

C.S.L.

TO A. M. DAVISON:⁹⁷

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sept. 29th 1929

My dear Nurse Davison

Excuse me. I cannot address you by any other name. Remember you? I should think I do. Do you remember the night Warnie and I came home very late and got into trouble and were sent to bed without supper, and you brought us in bread and jam in our little room–opposite my father’s bedroom? Do you remember the night you went to the Mikado with Warnie and I wasn’t allowed to go? Do you remember the first night before my poor mother’s operation when you both sat and talked about operations and I said ‘Well you are gloomy people.’ And now it has all happened again with my father. I thought of you a lot during his illness and wished you could have been with him. He constantly mentioned you and your photo has been on the mantelpiece at Little Lea for a great many years.

Thank you for your sympathy. I thought I had perhaps got a bit used to people I cared for dying while I was at the front, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference. He was such a very strong personality and had been the background of my life for so long that I can hardly believe its all over. One keeps on thinking ‘I must tell him that’ when some little episode happens, and then [one] remembers. I suppose we get used to these changes in time. Thanks awfully for writing. It is really comforting to be taken back to those old days. The time during which you were with my mother–and I remember that much better than my own little operation–seemed very long to a child and you became part of home. We must try to meet when I’m in Ireland again. Probably we have often passed each other in the street without knowing.

Yours very sincerely

Jack Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Jan 16th [1930]

My dear Barfield

(1) Thanks for letter: I can’t undertake correction alone, and as long as Ficino & Fichte are hanging over us we can’t send it to Blackwell.

(2) All our labour about ⁹⁸ has been thrown away as that chump Harwood had never heard ‘King Stephen was a worthy peer. ‘⁹⁹So much for the facile assumption that one’s friends have as much literature as oneself. However it is some consolation to know that he puzzled his head over the poem for several hours and could not construe it.

(3) Addendum:

Et Pterodactylium par nobile, parque draconem,

Et dinus saurus, dinaque saura sua.¹⁰⁰

(4) ‘The imagination knows no proportion.’ Whose imagination?

(5) I got really bothered about your attack on Ogden & Richards. ¹⁰¹ Do you really mean that all thought is bound by the original ‘metaphors’ in the words? If so–Tantamne rem tam negligenter. ¹⁰² So as I had to write a paper for the Junior Linguistic I took this subject, and it has come out to the conclusion that in speaking of mogsa

¹⁰³ the only alternatives area. To revive the buried ‘metaphors’. i.e. really to think of breath when you say spirit.

b. To invent conscious, new metaphors all the time. c. To talk without meaning. (6) I have had a cut at Jacob Boehme. ¹⁰⁴ Chapter II of the Signatura Rerum is the most serious attempt ever to show the Many coming out of the One. Unfortunately I can’t understand it. I don’t like it entirely. But we must worry it out. You can buy it in Everyman and had better get to work at once. ¹⁰⁵ Love to all, and respects to any who won’t have love–such as Sandy & Basil. ¹⁰⁶

Yrs

C. S. Lewis

 

When Albert Lewis died on 25 September 1929, Warnie was in China and did not return to England until 16 April 1930. This left Jack to deal with the contents of the family home, ‘Little Lea’, in Belfast. Jack wrote to Warnie on 12 January 1930 that their aunt, Mary Tegart Lewis (1868–1941), had heard that Little Lea was to be sold and

that she supposed I knew about the two book cases of Uncle Joe’s that P. has ‘stored’ for me: that she very much wanted to have them: could she send and have them taken away at once…The minute I read it I knew in my bones that it was our little end room bookcases. I replied: that I should certainly not hold a sale without giving my relations the chance of mentioning to me any articles which did not belong to you and me…but that I should very much prefer not to start dismembering the house before you returned.¹⁰⁷

In the end, the bookcases were overlooked, and were shipped to Oxford with other items from Little Lea.

TO JOSEPH TEGART LEWIS (P):¹⁰⁸

Hillsboro,

Western Rd.,

Headington,

Oxford.

[January 1930]

My dear Ted

We were considerably dismayed at the arrival of the two bookcases on this side, which was the result of a misunderstanding of our orders. The cost of returning them was rather a poser: and since our own library is already overflowing, this charge would have to be followed immediately by a further outlay of two new bookcases.

Consequently, since hearing from Condlin¹⁰⁹ that they are wanted for your own house and not for Sandycroft, ¹¹⁰ we have been wondering whether we could not come to some less costly arrangement that might suit equally well. We understand that you owe us (i.e. my Father’s estate) some money. Would you feel disposed to cry quits with us over that and the bookcases? I need hardly say that if we thought the real market value of the bookcases equal, or nearly equal, to the money, we should not make such a proposal: for we very gratefully and gladly acknowledge our heavy debt to you, in another kind, for all your goodness last summer. ¹¹¹ Let me take this opportunity of thanking you on Warnie’s behalf and my own. I should be glad if you would let me know, as the Americans say, your ‘reactions’ to this idea.

Please give our love to Aunt Mary and to all our cousins of all generations. I hope that your wife and you are keeping well. The fair librarian, no doubt, has long since outgrown both me and her last year’s library–things change so quickly at that age. If not, give her my profoundest salaams. Wretched weather here and plenty of work.

Yours ever

Jack Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

[April 1930]

No–to-morrow would be a bad day–a most inconvenient, footling, scarcely possible occasion–for a walk. But I could manage Saturday if you could come then. In the meantime may I tender ‘brief thanksgiving’ for your labours–rather say your father’s labours–in the matter of the mortgage.

Hope my walking stick is proving in your walks a good companion, serving (though indeed you stole it–boned it, bagged it, scrounged it, stole it) serving as a stout reminder of the beautiful Quirinal painted like the vault of heaven and the lovely derivation and the history semantic and the long phonetic story of the mystic word caboodle–Dum-de Dum-de Dum-de Lewis. ¹¹²

TO T. S. ELIOT (P):¹¹³

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 21st 1930

Dear Sir

I am requested by the Michaelmas Club of this College–a society for literary, philosophical and political discussion–to invite you to read a paper before it this term. Any date which you choose before June 5th we will endeavour to conform to: and we hope that, in spite of such short notice, this may make it possible for you to come.

If you are able to do so, it will give me great pleasure if you will dine with me in hall before the meeting and be my guest in College for the night.

Yours faithfully

C. S. Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 18th 1930

My dear Barfield,

I approach you with some fear. Last week Griffiths spent a night with me and, of course, asked about you. I told him that you were thinking of editing Coleridge. As Griffiths has recently been turned inside out by Coleridge he was naturally very interested and hoped very much that it would materialise. Now comes the occasion of my fear. I said that the scheme depended partly on endowment by an American University, and that if that failed you would probably seek more remunerative employment. ¹¹⁴

Was this a breach of confidence? The trouble is that what follows makes the whole conversation so much more important than it seemed at the time. I very much hope that you will not think I deserve to be ‘avoided as a blab’: ‘the mark of fool set on my front‘¹¹⁵ I can face with more composure. At the time, in its context, it seemed a harmless thing to say–but I suppose that is what blabs all feel after the event. If you think I was wrong, I can only offer an ad misericordiam¹¹⁶ appeal for pardon.

Anyway, in a few days, came the enclosed, which you will deal with as you think fit. What ever view you take of my action, I hope you will feel as I do at discovering the race of Calverts is not extinct. A third of £800 a year is not an income wh. most men wd. feel moral scruples about.

I shall be extremely anxious till I hear from you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S. I suppose you got Death with covering letter? ¹¹⁷

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

[1930]

My dear Barfield,

If you don’t know it already I think this will interest you. Had you, like me, always been struck with the oddity of the Greeks having a craft-conception for ‘raw material’ (, forest > timber > what you make things of) whereas the Latins have what seems a vital one–materies? Well, apparently, the claims of materies to vitalism are v. shaky: for the possibilities are

(a.) That it is older ‘Dmater’ < –to build, make

(b.) If from mater, then according to one school (which seems incredible) mater itself is not vital. For if it comes from m (v. Monier Williams Sanskrit Lexicon)¹¹⁸ m means to measure > to divide up > to prepare > to make. Thence mtri (nomen agentis) = measurer (and as such a name for the moon) also maker. J-mtri = offspring maker, hence merely mtri, mother. It wd. be v. strange if a fact like mother had so early been given an ahrimanic twist. Another school refuses to connect mtri with m at all (but then what do they make of mtri = moon?). J.A. thinks the-tri is not nomen agentis at all but the mark of one-of-a-pair, as in ,¹¹⁹ other etc. As Humpty-Dumpty says, there’s glory for you.

Yrs

C.S.L.

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

[1930]

My dear Barfield

Alas!–I’m in bed: so our meeting will have to be put off. What about Friday week?–or next Wednesday? Please let me know. The Essay was terrifically exciting & really fine in places, but I think needs a little more dovetailing & riveting–some of the transitions of thought are not at all easy.

This present trouble is only a bad cold with temperature. In spirit I’m on the pig’s back & am trying to read the Hymns to the Night. ¹²⁰ What on earth is the meaning of ‘riss das Band der Geburt des Lichtes Fessel’. ¹²¹ The Crab couplet is fine. I’m glad you liked the lyric.

What with one thing and another I feel the earth might go up in sky rockets any moment. The bit about Schlaf gegentritting out of alten Geschichten in the article of himmelöffning struck me–as you may imagine. ¹²² But I don’t fully understand all your (& Novalis) view about Sleep–I remember your poem long ago about the Sister.

About the Essay–don’t think it has failed either per se or in its effect on me. It is bathed in a golden cloud & drips with honey–well worth doing a good bit more on. Damn it all you can’t utter things that have been kept hid from the foundation in a parenthesis. But I often feel that having a talk with you is not like going up in a balloon but like trying to hold a captive balloon.

I’ve re-read Middlemarch.

yrs

C. S. Lewis

 

Isn’t it ex vi termini¹²³ not vi termini? Where does that remark from Pythagoras come from? (Ans: from Pythagoras. Ans: Ass!)

TO T. S. ELIOT (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

April 19th 1931

Dear Sir

It is now some six months since I submitted to you the MS of an article entitled ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’. ¹²⁴ In this article I contended that poetry never was nor could be the ‘expression of a personality’ save per accidens, and I advanced a formal proof of the position. As I believed that you had some sympathy with the contention, and that, though often asserted, it had not before been proved, I had anticipated a fairly early reply. I supposed that if the proof seemed to you invalid you would immediately reject the paper: if it seemed valid, you would think it worth publishing. I still think that your decision on such a purely argumentative piece of work would be a matter of very little time, if once you read it: and as my MS has never yet been acknowledged, accepted, or rejected, I conclude that it has–no doubt very naturally and venially–been submerged in the inevitable silt of a busy office. I hope it will not strike you as an impatience if I now remind you of it. I do not–naturally–wish by any pressure on you to reduce my own chances of reaching a public on a subject about which current views exasperated me beyond bearing: but equally naturally I should welcome a decision of some sort in the near future.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

P. S. Owen Barfield offered some time ago to remind you of the MS, but we decided to try the effect of more waiting–with the result of my present letter!

TO T. S. ELIOT (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 2nd 1931

Dear Sir

Thank you for your letter. My own position is as follows: I have very little doubt that I could get my essay printed in some much more academic publication, but as, in such a publication, it would be merely entombed, I prefer to reach the periodical public, and I do not know of any audience more likely to be affected by it than that of the Criterion. I should therefore have no objection to waiting nine months: what I should like to be more assured of is the prospect I have at the end of the nine months. I do not mean that it would be reasonable for you to bind yourself to accept, at that time, an article which you may not by then clearly remember, and about which you may legitimately change your mind. In other words I am quite prepared for the risk of your ‘corrected impressions’. What I am less ready to be at the mercy of is the mere richness or poverty of suitable contributions–the fulness or emptiness of your drawer–nine months hence, which nobody can predict. That is, if you will keep a place for it (subject, of course, to special emergencies) I am quite prepared to wait and to abide by your second, and unfettered, decision as to my suitability to fill that place. Perhaps you would let me hear from you on the subject. ¹²⁵ The essay does, as you have divined, form the first of a series of which I have all the materials to hand. ¹ The others would be

2. Objective Standards of Literary merit.

3. Literature and Virtue (This is not a stylistic variant of ‘Art & Morality’: that is my whole point).

4. Literature and Knowledge 5. Metaphor and Truth

The whole, when completed, would form a frontal attack on Crocean aesthetics and state a neo-Aristotelian theory of literature (not of Art, about which I say nothing) which inter alia will re-affirm the romantic doctrine of imagination as a truth-bearing faculty, though not quite as the romantics understood it.

I am sorry to burden you with another letter to answer

yours faithfully

C. S. Lewis

 

(1) It is mainly a question of giving them a less technically philosophical form.

TO MARY SHELLEY (T):¹²⁶

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 18th [1931]

Dear Miss Shelley

Yes, rather. When I got the letter from Miss Seaton¹²⁷ I did not know that the pupil mentioned was the Dysonian one–nor, I think, did Mr Dyson mention your name when he spoke about you to me.

Now as to work. If you are staying up over the week end and could call on me on Saturday morning we could discuss this. If this is impossible my present advice is;–

Doing Chaucer and Shakespeare in the same term seems to me a hazardous experiment, unless there is some special reason which I don’t yet know. Our usual plan here is to spend a term on Chaucer and his contemporaries.

As regards reading for the Vac, my general view is that the Vac. should be given chiefly to reading the actual literary texts, without much attention to problems, getting thoroughly familiar with stories, situation, and style, and so having all the data for aesthetic judgement ready: then the term can be kept for more scholarly reading. Thus, if you were doing Chaucer and contemporaries next term I shd. advise you to read Chaucer himself, Langland (if you can get Skeat’s Edtn: ¹²⁸ the selection is not much good) Gower (again Macaulay’s big edtn if possible, not so that you may read every word of the Confessio but so that you may select yourself–not forgetting the end wh. is one of the best bits)¹²⁹ Gawain (Tolkien & Gordon Edtn)¹³⁰ Sisam’s XIVth Century Prose & Verse (all the pieces of any literary significance). ¹³¹ If you can borrow Ritson’s Metrical Romances, ¹³² so much the better.

But perhaps you have read all these before. If so, and if there are other special circumstances, we must try to meet. If Saturday is impossible ring me up on Friday and I will squeeze in a time somehow or other.

It is I who shd. apologise for my muddle rather than you for your ‘importunity’–the latter, being in any case, the more flattering offence. I shd. be obliged if you would explain all to Miss Seaton. The (unnamed) ‘Dysonian’ pupil was one of the people I was leaving room for by my refusal to take ‘a pupil’ from her. In fact you were being crowded out by yourself among other people.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO HIS BROTHER (BOD):¹³³

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Oct. 26th 1931

My dear Warnie

With regard to the Transfer to ourselves of the mortgage on ‘The Kilns’ which Mrs. Moore executed on October 2nd, this confirms our verbal agreement that in spite of anything to the contrary that may seemed to be implied thereby, your interest in the said mortgage is of the value of £500 and my interest is of the value of £1000.

Yours

Jack

TO EDMUND BLUNDEN (TEX):¹³⁴

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

[1933]

Dear Blunden–

Thank you for your kind note. ¹³⁵ I am particularly gratified at your liking that poem for, though it is not my own favourite, you are the first reader to notice at all! Dents agreed with you about the title being bad, and no doubt it is: but as the periodical press on which alone sales depend is managed entirely by Mr. Sensible and young Mr. Halfways between them, I don’t think a mere trifle like a title will interfere with my success. There are some things (Icelandic snakes, for example) beyond the reach of interference.

What do you think of the possibilities of my new kind of alexandrine without a break in the middle (see p. 253 etc)? ¹³⁶ I don’t mean what do you think of the poems written in it: but (a.) Does it seem to you to be verse at all? (b.) Do you think it wd. be a good metre for translating Virgil. Don’t bother to reply–we can discuss it when we meet.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

Thanks. I have made a date with ‘little Musgrove’

C.S.L.

TO EDMUND BLUNDEN (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

March 26th 1935

Dear Blunden

The examiner sits into Quarrie

Using the blude-red ink

‘Now who ill tae fair Edinboro’ gae

A’ o’er the text to swink?’

Then up and spake child Blunden

Ane harper guid was he

‘Oh I ill tae fair Edinboro’ goe

Those manuscripts to see‘¹³⁷

But perhaps this is optimistic. But short of going to see the MSS, I agree there is nothing to do yet.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT:¹³⁸

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sir,–

Every student must have read with delight those opening pages of Dr. J. Dover Wilson’s ‘Manuscript of Hamlet’ ¹³⁹ in which the author drives us back from the temptation of immediate tinkering with the texts to more and more fundamental problems in bibliography. We have hardly had in modern times a more beautiful example of what might be called . ¹⁴⁰ It is no criticism, it is rather a eulogy, of this process to follow the impetus thus given, and to ask whether we can stop even where Dr. Wilson stops. It appears to me that we ought to raise an even more abstract question which is prior to all the bibliographical questions. What do we mean by the genuine texts of an Elizabethan play?

When the author defines his ‘main purpose’ as being ‘to recover Shakespeare’s manuscript’ (Vol. I, p. 51) no such question need arise; for this remains a legitimate object whether we regard the playwright’s manuscript as the genuine text or not: but we have the whole question on our hands when he says (p. 5) that the genuine text is that which corresponds with ‘what Shakespeare intended to write.’

It will be allowed that the meaning of ‘genuine text’ varies according to the kind of work under discussion. Thus the genuine text of ‘Paradise Lost’ is certainly ‘what Milton intended to write,’ for we know that Milton’s intention was to write a new poem of which he was the sole author. The genuine text of a traditional ballad, however, means something quite different; for here we cannot be certain that any individual ever intended to ‘write’ a poem for which he would be exclusively responsible, and if there has been a succession of authors, the lines made by the last are just as ‘genuine’ as those made by the first: nothing, in fact, is ‘corruption’ except errors of transcription and printing. I submit, therefore, that we do not know what we mean by the genuine text of Hamlet until we have decided between the two following alternatives. Did Shakespeare primarily ‘intend’ to ‘write’ a dramatic poem, or did he ‘intend’ to ‘write’ to take part in the composite activity of producing a play–i.e., a show? In other words, was the end which he set before him a book (for which he would be solely responsible) or a show (for which he would necessarily share responsibility with actors, ‘producer,’ manager, prompt man, musicians and even audience)?

Now Dr. Dover Wilson, as it seems to me, has answered this question quite clearly. He tells us (on p. 9) that Shakespeare ‘always thought in terms of the stage and never so far as we know contemplated any other kind of publication for his plays than that which stage performance gives.’ If this is admitted, it follows that Shakespeare’s manuscript, so far from being the genuine text, is, so to speak, an ‘ante-text,’ an embryo: one of the elements (though doubtless the most important) out of which, when it has been combined with others and modified to any extent that may prove necessary, the play or show will be made. It is, as Dr. Dover Wilson says on Chapter 1, a ‘draft.’

If that is so, we must be very critical in our reading of such a statement as the following: ‘Mommsen demonstrates that the FI¹⁴¹ Hamlet displays unmistakable signs of having been deformed and contaminated by playhouse influences, that it contains a number of small verbal additions made by the actors, that it has been moulded throughout to suit the purposes of some particular theatre.’ The danger here is lest we should treat everything whereby the concrete performance differs from the playwright’s ‘draft’ as ‘contamination’: for, on the view which has been expressed above, the concrete performance is the play, and it no more ‘contaminates’ the draft than birth ‘contaminates’ a baby. The real question is which peculiarities (if any) of the prompt-book version can be called corruptions.

Certainly not those peculiarities which fit it to ‘some particular theatre.’ If Dr. Dover Wilson is right in his picture of Shakespeare at work (Chapter 2), then we may assume that Shakespeare never had any end in view except performance in a particular theatre. If he intended such performance, he must also have intended such performance to be possible; he must therefore, in general, have intended such modifications of the draft as would render it possible, however much he may have neglected the detail of those conditions in the heat of composition. And this would seem to apply, if we follow Dr. Dover Wilson, not only to the reduction of man power but even to the straightening out of verbal tangles. ‘Shakespeare,’ he well says, ‘probably troubled his head very little about his tangles. If he remembered them, he might go back and straighten them out himself; if not, there was always the prompter to clean up after him, and it was part of his job to do so’ (page 24, italics mine). The process here described is plainly not corruption but delegation; and every such cleaning up by the prompter, unless it can be shown that Shakespeare explicitly rejected it, surely becomes part of the ‘genuine text.’ The actors’ additions are really in the same position. Shakespeare intended performance, and not even performance simpliciter but performance by these actors: the detail of their treatment he could not fully foresee, but toleration (or, for all we know, approval) of their interpretation in general must have been implicit from the moment he put pen to paper. We have no evidence that would entitle us to say ‘If Burbage groaned in his death scene, the groan was a corruption.’

It would be tempting to say that those modifications which Shakespeare himself first thought of are genuine, while those suggested by any other member of his company are spurious. But such a criterion would be arbitrary. Shakespeare produces a ‘draft’ which is too long. If he and another experienced man (or three others) look it over, surely the places for cuts will be fairly obvious, and it is largely a matter of chance who first condemns a given passage. The ‘genuineness’ or ‘spuriousness’ cannot depend on the accident. We cannot even say that those changes which Shakespeare agreed to reluctantly (supposing we can identify them) are corruptions: no man, perhaps, ever finishes a work of art without omitting much that he would gladly have retained, nor does the knife always hurt less in the author’s own hand than in another’s.

The conclusion would seem to be that we must do one of two things. We must either reject the conception of a Shakespeare who ‘thought in terms of the stage’ and replace it with that of a literary author to whom performance was as accidental as to Milton or Tennyson: or we must define the ‘genuine text’ to be ‘the whole performance in so far as Shakespeare did not explicitly disclaim it.’ If we do the first, then the manuscript is the genuine text: if we do the second, we must cease to talk of theatrical ‘contamination’: we must start with the assumption that the prompt-book is genuine, and the onus will lie on anyone who says that it is corrupt. I need not add that I am not attempting to criticize Dr. Dover Wilson’s history of the text–a task which gratitude and discretion equally forbid–but to criticize a fundamental assumption which he sometimes countenances and sometimes implicitly rejects, as is natural in a writer intent on much more difficult and concrete problems.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT:¹⁴²

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sir,–

Dr. Dover Wilson in his kind notice of my letter has really settled the question. If the identity of the genuine text is a problem that ‘can only be decided on aesthetic grounds’–that is, on what Dr. Dover Wilson calls ‘no other principle than that furnished by the good taste and judgement of the editor’ (Manuscript of Hamlet, Vol. I, p. 7)–then we are thrown back here, as in other departments of thought, on the testimony of the uqó milof. ¹⁴³ And that is a role which no one, least of all myself, will dispute Dr. Wilson’s right to fill. My own concern in the matter is not the defence of F, but the (implicit) defence of certain private propositions about literary theory which need not be stated here. I embrace gladly the doctrine that the ‘genuine text’ can be identified with the (aesthetically) best text; and my satisfaction would be complete if I felt sure that Dr. Dover Wilson would agree to two corollaries:–

(a) That the methods of the bibliographical school, of which he is such a distinguished member, are primarily useful not for finding the genuine text (which can be found only by taste), but for other purposes: e.g., dating?

(b) That certain excellent emendations (such as et tua conjunx or a’ babbled of green fields)¹⁴⁴ are parts of the genuine text in virtue of their aesthetic merits whether Virgil and Shakespeare wrote them or not.

The second corollary may seem audacious; but I think it can be avoided only by the following distinguo: ‘Best text does not equal genuine text, but best is presumptive evidence of genuine.’ But this conceals the premises, ‘The author always wrote the best’–a proposition which is neither certain nor probable and which, in its negative application, will force us upon the methods of Pope, who ‘by a very compendious criticism’ (says Johnson) ‘rejected whatever he disliked. ‘¹⁴⁵

I am, Sir, yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO ELIZABETH HOLMES (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Nov 6th 1936

Dear Miss Holmes

I have already ordered your book¹⁴⁶ and should have done so before but for an inability to read the Lit. Sup¹⁴⁷ (once my delight) which–with increasing baldness and a double chin–is the most distressing symptom of vanished youth. If I have any comments at all likely to be helpful after reading it, I shall take the liberty of writing.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ELIZABETH HOLMES (P):

Magdalen

Nov 10th [1936]

Dear Miss Holmes–

Well: I have now read Margaret, all with interest and a good deal with keen enjoyment. It does not, I think, begin well. The death of the brother on p. 4–unless I have missed the point–has no poetical significance, being one of those things which would be important in a real biography only because it was true, & is therefore otiose in a poem.

On the bottom of p. 6 and the top of p. 7 comes the passage that really engaged my whole imagination. On p. 8 the bit beginning o whip ship is good. Suburb-house on p. 9 I think bad. It is not real prose English (wh. would be suburban house) nor is it ‘poetical’ in the other style: i.e. it makes the worst of both worlds. p. 11, this island fact–at length is v. nice. The fluting ray on p. 11 is excellent–a truly poetic, and not merely fashionable, use of the Sitwellian technique.

I think the Love lies bleeding poem is good, but can’t be sure till I’ve read it several times: but I’m sure about the yellow drops of tree’s wine etc on p. 15: that’s fine–and almost the whole of p. 16.

On p. 19, try to excuse me for saying ‘Souls–Ideas–Universals’ is thoroughly bad. I fear you were among the Clevers when you wrote that. Don’t you see that you are merely asking us to write your poem for you–giving us the conceptual skeleton instead of presenting the concrete imaginative and emotional experience. Of course on that skeleton I can reconstruct the experience: but when I buy a poem I expect to have something more done for me than I could do alone whenever I chose. I want to be forced.

Bottom of p. 20 is nice: bottom of 21 (Until--reach) I happen to know the experience so well that I can hardly judge whether you have brought it off. ¹⁴⁸ P. 22 last line but one e’en. Do you like this? The Oratory v. good, I think, specially the part on p. 26: and the part about brass in cots and brass in Hyperion is interesting and new. First paragraph of The Book is excellent, except for the line of beauty: but more of that anon. P 32 Repeat children still will be three times aloud before an imagined audience and see how you like it! Not only the sound but the false archaism of still for always and the whole apologetic air. P 35 For sleep…God’s memorably said. The whole of the Apple Tree poem is good. The Capture, good: but is it good enough? The Prospect: I wonder would you agree that At mystery and all that follows it is a failure. I wish you would banish words like Mystery & Beauty. The Lure tho’ a good piece is crippled by ‘Beauty’.

Surely Beauty is an abstract universal, a comparatively new inhabitant of the mind: it has no roots like such universals as Death or Love: it is a fatal non conductor to the imagination. As well–are you at all certain that what you are talking about is ‘beauty’?–surely that is not part of your experience but only a theory about your experience, and not a very profound or stimulating theory at that. It makes you write like Masefield (not that he can’t be good–but that is when he is writing about ships or foxes or something real–not about ‘Beauty’). P. 44 the second poem, very good. P. 45. dead Desdemon: the same penitential exercise as for children still will may be advised here! Prince of Darkness all good. Congratulations. P 50 dredged…desiring splendid: so also nearly all The Surrender: and the bird symbol on p 54.

Part II opens v. well: it may even be great, but I’d never say that of any poem till I had lived with it. p. 59 lovely and the para. She heard-without fire (p 61) bites like anything: then on to The Retreat. You are really getting going here: the whole thing from p 57 to 64 is most moving. What a falling off in New Heaven & Earth. The top of p 66 (versified literary history) is (forgive me) just dreadful: and all the similar bits henceforward. You are doing so very little more imaginatively, and so much less intellectually, than a good prose critic.

Part III begins magnificently. The Miltonic adaptation on p 74 (a bit of modern technique used really well) and ‘She walked…were one’ particularly went home. The Dream excites and moves me: but I’m easy prey to that sort of poetry so don’t take my word for it that it’s good! Bottom of p 87 and top of 88 a very good simile. Bottom of 88: something very prosaic in the midst of poetry often works, but not always. ¹⁴⁹ The moderns are getting into the habit of thinking they can use this device instead of poetry. I think you have fallen into this trap. ‘Nothing seems to matter’ will pass in conversation: but I know nothing more from it in your poem than I should know from it in conversation: it has none of the divine precision of poetry. In the Middle of the Night, first stanza, good. Now on p. 98 This door’s shut fast. It cannot be undone is a good example of the prosaic rightly used, and very moving (Because, this time, it is not the substitution of conversation for poetry but merely conversational syntax applied to something really imagined) The dream of Andrew Marvell doesn’t, to me, come to life at all until the middle of p. 121. Perhaps I am missing the whole point. Oh–I’d nearly forgotten The Retreat, which I liked.

This letter is too long and, I fear, possibly too frank. But I shall await your next book with great interest, and I think I should certainly have liked this even if I’d picked it up by accident: i.e., I don’t think I’m being deceived by one’s wish (both thro’ gratitude and vanity!) to like the books of those who like one’s own books. The best things in it are really very good, and tho’ many ‘influences’ can be traced you have made them all your own. Your short lines are a danger: it needs almost superhuman skill to give them real metrical vitality (that is the one really good thing in Eliot)

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY NEYLAN (L):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

[1938?]

Dear Mrs Neylan

…Of course Shaw is not a scientist and the attack is not on science as such. But there is a sort of creed which might be called ‘scientific humanism’, tho’ many of its votaries know very little science (just as some people go to Church who know very little theology), and which is shared by people so different as Haldane, Shaw, Wells, and Olaf Stapledon…cf. Shaw’s Lilith’s ‘Beyond’ with Haldane p. 309. ‘It is possible that under the conditions of life on the outer planets the human brain may alter in such a way as to open up possibilities inconceivable to our own minds.’ ¹⁵⁰ (On p. 30 one of these alterations, the elimination of pity, had already occurred). All tarred with the same brush in fact…

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):¹⁵¹

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 15th 1938

My dear Arthur

I agree that it’s risky to put it off till September, specially if you may be going to America.

I propose therefore, if I may, to cross on Monday July 18th and leave you on Monday July 25th. Thanks very much, and please convey my thanks and love to Mrs Greeves. I look forward to it immensely.

Yours

Jack

 

‘Oh my dear Miss Woodhouse, what do you think? Such a singular thing has happened–Jane Fairfax’s letter to my mother has crossed my mother’s letter to Jane Fairfax. As soon as I began reading Jane’s letter to my mother, I had to lay it down. “My dear Madam”, I said “You will never believe it. Such a singular thing has happened. I protest our letters have crossed.”’

Well, what shall we do. You see my fixtures are not in favour of any date before July 12th. Can I come in September–or in the latter part of July and lump your not being so free?

TO I. A. RICHARDS (MC):¹⁵²

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

March 11th 1939

Dear Richards

Thanks for the very delightful surprise packet¹⁵³–an unexpected present of a book is one of the things that still gives me the kind of pleasure that all presents gave in childhood. I have nearly finished it, with more agreement than I anticipated and with absorbed interest whether I agreed or not.

On p 126 I think we need a little more explanation about the Hopkins passage. I am afraid that many readers who don’t know O. E. Hse and have forgotten unhousel’d in Hamlet¹⁵⁴ will think that you think–or that you think that Hopkins thought–that housel is a newly coined diminutive of house: whereas I suppose the most you claim is that he availed himself of the resemblance between the two words, helping it out with ‘low-latched’. Yet I’m not sure what he means (in the dictionary sense) by ‘latched’. Too much of this.

We all enjoyed your visit very much. Thanks for the book and remember me to your wife.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO FRANK KENDON (CAM):¹⁵⁵

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 14th 1940

Dear Sir

Please forgive my childish inability to read your signature!–and I can’t get your name from Blunden because he’s ill.

I am afraid most of the poems I have which might suit you are earlier than 1935. I don’t know their dates, but I think the ones I would have sent you are about 1930 to 1933. I suppose this rules them out?

I approve very strongly of your proposed anthology without names: it will be good for people to have to read a poem just as a poem. Wishing the venture every success, I remain

yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

Dec. 27th 1940

My dear Arthur–

I’m afraid I am in your debt this long time and I don’t even remember how up to date with our news you will be. The main items are (1.) That W. is back ever since August i.e. they decided they didn’t need officers of his seniority in the R.A.S.C. ¹⁵⁶ and put him back on the retired list, greatly, of course, to his delight and ours.

(2.) Maureen got married in August to a music master called Blake, ¹⁵⁷ a very small, dark, ugly, silent man who hardly ever utters a word–wh. is perhaps just as well for anyone married to such a chatterbox as Maureen. You will laugh at the idea of her being married, and indeed so do I, for she is as childish as ever.

(3.) We have not so far had any bombs in Oxford, though we got a good many alerts. At first we used to go out to the dug out and sit and freeze in the dark and the cold, but we now take no notice of them.

(4.) I am, save the mark!, a Home Guard and spend one night in nine mooching about the most depressing and malodorous parts of Oxford with a rifle. Otherwise I am living a normal life. I think a great deal of nonsense is talked about the food shortage: at least I have never yet had a meal from wh. I rose unsatisfied.

(5.) I have published another book, only a little thing called the Problem of Pain. At least I thought it little, but I expect you’d find it ‘too long drawn out’!

I had a long and most interesting letter from Janie McNeill: please thank her and tell her I will reply in the next few days. I quite agree with the contrast you drew in your last letter between our complete indifference during the last war (parts of wh. were probably among the happiest days in our lives) and our present hanging on the news. Is it because this is so much more serious, or because we are older?

Janie says you are not very well–nothing serious, I hope? I often picture you going the old walks and living the old life (But I suppose you are now usually to be found splitting a bottle or having a game of billiards with the present master of Glenmachan. He must be a great addition to the neighbourhood–quite carries on the fine old roistering tradition of Bob!)¹⁵⁸

Minto bears up pretty well, tho’ terribly overworked. I don’t know that I’ve read anything you wd. care about lately except (what I started yesterday) Charlotte M. Yonge’s Heir of Redclyffe wh. is a good old fashioned novel about large families in nice houses in the good old settled, pious, comfortable days.

Oh Arthur, why didn’t we live a century earlier? Still, we must console ourselves by being glad that we didn’t live any later, that we had at least acquired our habits of mind before everything went bust. How is Reid? I was re-reading Apostate not long ago, with real enjoyment. ¹⁵⁹

It is an exquisite frosty morning. Please remember me to your Mother and Chahn. ¹⁶⁰

Yours

Jack

TO THE EDITOR OF THEOLOGY (EC):¹⁶¹

Sir,

In an admirable letter contributed to your October number Canon Quick remarks, “‘Moderns” of every kind have one characteristic in common: they hate Liberalism.’ ¹⁶² Would it not be equally true to say, more shortly, “‘Moderns” of every kind have one characteristic in common: they hate?’ The matter deserves, perhaps, more attention than it has received.

Yours faithfully,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY NEYLAN (L):

Magdalen.

Jan. 4th 1941

Dear Mrs Neylan

Congratulations…on your own decision. I don’t think this decision comes either too late or too soon. One can’t go on thinking it over for ever; and one can begin to try to be a disciple before one is a professed theologian. In fact they tell us, don’t they, that in these matters to act on the light one has is almost the only way to more light. Don’t be worried about feeling that, or about feeling at all. As to what to do, I suppose the normal next step, after self-examination repentance and restitution, is to make your Communion; and then to continue as well as you can, praying as well as you can…and fulfilling your daily duties as well as you can. And remember always that religious emotion is only a servant…This, I say, would be the obvious course. If you want anything more e.g. Confession and Absolution which our church enjoins on no-one but leaves free to all–let me know and I’ll find you a directeur. If you choose this way, remember it’s not the psychoanalyst over again: the confessor is the representative of Our Lord and declares His forgiveness–his advice or ‘understanding’ tho’ of real, is of secondary importance.

For daily reading I suggest (in small doses) Thomas à Kempis’ ‘Imitation of Christ’ and the ‘Theologia Germanica’ (Golden Treasury series, Macmillan) and of course the Psalms and N.T. Don’t worry if your heart won’t respond: do the best you can. You are certainly under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, or you wouldn’t have come where you now are: and the love that matters is His for you–yours for Him may at present exist only in the form of obedience. He will see to the rest.

This has been great news for me I need hardly say. You have all my prayers (not that mine are worth much).

TO DEREK BREWER (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

April 8th 1941

Dear Mr. Brewer

Congratulations on your Demyship. ¹⁶³ The answer to your question depends a little on whether, as is most likely, you are liable to Military Service and what the calling-up age is likely to be by October. In the meantime, however, as a basis for any English studies, the following cd. hardly be wrong.

1. Greek is largely irrelevant, but if you know any Latin keep it up. I shd. make large use of the Loeb Library (you know–with Lat. & Eng. on opposite pages) getting the hang of things from the Eng. & turning to the Latin for the important bits. The most relevant books are the Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae, & Cicero De Republica (the part at the end about Scipio’s Dream). If you can’t scan hexameters, learn how to.

2. A fairly sound biblical background is assumed by most of the older Eng. writers: if you lack this, acquire it. The most relevant books are the historical books of the O.T., the Psalms, & the Gospel of (say) St Luke. (The Vulgate is very easy Lat. & reading it is a good way of keeping up the language & getting knowledge at the same time.)

3. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton are certainties whatever shortened course or ordinary course you take. Next to these in importance come Malory, Spenser, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Wordsworth. After that it becomes more a matter of taste. The great thing is to be always reading but not to get bored–treat it not like work, more as a vice! Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.

Write freely again if I can help.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR HAZARD DAKIN (PRIN):¹⁶⁴

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Aug 3rd 1941

Dear Mr. Dakin–

I have sent under a separate cover copies of the three letters I had from Paul E. More. ¹⁶⁵ Please forgive me the delay. I have been so busy for many months now that I hardly know whether I am on my head or my heels. Now for such recollections as I can furnish.

I once told Paul Elmer More that while it would be an exaggeration to call him my spiritual father, I might call him my spiritual uncle. By this I meant, in the first place, that one had in his presence that sense of comfort and security and well-being which a child has in the presence of grown up relatives whom it likes. I began to feel it almost at once. It was something I am not sure we would gather from his books–a real homeliness, almost an affectionateness, the very reverse of that rarefied quality which some people may associate with American ‘Humanism’.

In the second place, I meant that quality which a good uncle often has of giving, without the slightest offence, advice and even correction which the child would resent if it came from the father. In our very first conversation he corrected a false Greek accent, and the misuse of a scientific term, which I had perpetrated in print, in a way which ought to be common among old men but is actually rather rare. On the other hand it was so done that even the vainest young author could not have objected to it: on the other, there was no nonsense about all being in the same boat, or ‘you don’t mind my mentioning it’ or anything of that kind. It was quite definitely and undisguisedly the ripe speaking to the unripe–authority without egoism.

At this distance of time I cannot remember much of our conversation. He found that I agreed with him about the futility of much academic ‘research’, and this led him to tell with great humour, and also great tenderness, the story of a young woman he knew who had refused to marry a man she loved because her ‘work’ (a thesis on some unspeakably obscure poet) ‘must come first’. Apparently More had saved the situation and got the little fool to the altar alright. (By the bye, ‘Pandarus moralised’–I mean Chaucer’s Pandarus¹⁶⁶–wouldn’t be a bad description of one side of More’s personality. He had a good deal of Pandarus’s shrewd humour and avuncular playfulness). He talked also of a ‘fundamentalism’ to which, in his opinion, the Church of Rome was committed.

But most of our time together was spent in close argument. You saw at once he was the sort of man who welcomed attacks on his own favourite beliefs and who was ready to give his whole attention to what you said without any irrelevant consideration of who you were. He was very fair and patient in discussion and talked for truth not victory. And all the time, however abstract the theme, the homely and human quality–sometimes manifested in the choice of an illustration, sometimes in the mere twinkle of his eye–was always in evidence, making one quite sure that his philosophy had roots in the earth. It is not, I think, what I should have expected. My impression is that the man was bigger than his books–there was more of him. Anything less like the popular idea of a ‘don’ or a ‘philosopher’ would be hard to find. Perhaps the extremely rich and flexible voice (he spoke from the chest) had something to do with it.

With renewed apologies for the inconvenience I must have caused you by my delay.

Yours faithfully

C. S. Lewis

TO CHRISTOPHER DAWSON (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Aug 30th 1941

Dear Dawson (if we might both drop the honorific now?)–I am working at absolutely full pressure lecturing the R.A.F. and fear I can’t review Williams’s excellent little pamphlet. ¹⁶⁷ Also, he and I have reviewed each other once and if it goes on it is not easily distinguished from that species of collusion by wh. most of the big bubble reputations of our day have been produced! Would Fr Darcy (who is also a member of the Dante Society) do it?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MR COLQUHOUN (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

March 2nd ’42

Dear Mr Colquhoun

The Talks will be published as a little book in due course, but it is too early for me to be able to give date or price. ¹⁶⁸ Thanks for kind letter.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO THEODORA BOSANQUET (HAR):¹⁶⁹

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Aug 27th 1942

Dear Miss Bosanquet–

Yes. The one right man to review this is A. O. BARFIELD, who lives at RED ROOFS, BURTON’S LANE, CHALFONT ST. GILES, BUCKS. He will say that he hasn’t time and has quite got out of the way of reviewing: but tell him why I refused and that I say he must (salus populi suprema lex). ¹⁷⁰ Thanks for the verse about Shanks & Squire.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

Not Eliot at any price. He couldn’t understand one word of C.W.’s book. ¹⁷¹

 

P.S Are you kin to the philosopher? ¹⁷²

TO ROSAMUND RIEU (P):¹⁷³

As from Magdalen,

Oxford

Sept 28th 42

Dear Miss Rieu–

Speaking in a Church I assumed: (1.) Belief in the divinity of Jesus. (2.) Belief in the general historicity of the New Testament and hence: (3.) That if any miracles could be true, these ones would be. ¹⁷⁴

My argument only attempted to prove that the existence of the supernatural was certain and its irruption into the Natural Order not improbable. If the argument was valid you could quite logically accept it while reserving judgment on the question whether the New Testament miracles were facts or not, since their particular probability depends on my (1.) and (2.) which you don’t grant. Just as a person might admit in principle that a miraculous birth is not an absurdity and yet, if the housemaid has a baby and claims to be a virgin, disbelieve it. Of course, if evidence for the housemaid’s virtue and angelic sanctity were overwhelming and if the child turned out to be like no other child–why, then, one would be well advised to reconsider one’s first view and ask the girl’s pardon for your misunderstanding.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV (BOD):

[The Kilns]

Dec 22nd 1942

Dear Sister Penelope

I have been an unconscionable time answering your last letter, half hoping we might have seen more of St Athanasius by now. ¹⁷⁵ I am so glad the cognoscenti approve of it: you will have done a most useful work and, so far as I could judge, done it rather better than well.

Perelandra will reach you, I hope, early in January: I have deterred the artist from putting his idea of Tinidril (you can imagine!) on the cover. ¹⁷⁶ I have been very busy with one thing and another: there aren’t the days and hours there used to be, are there? The minute hand used to go as the hour hand goes now!

How does one feel thankful? I am thinking of the improvement in the war news, and I don’t mean (rhetorically) ‘How can one be thankful enough?’ but just what I say. It seems to be something which disappears or becomes a mere word the moment one recognises one ought to be feeling it. I always tell people not to bother about ‘feelings’ in their prayers, and above all never to try to feel, but I’m a bit puzzled about Gratitude: for if it is not a feeling, what is it?

A funny thing how merely formulating a question awakes the conscience! I hadn’t a notion of the answer at the bottom of the last sheet, but now I know exactly what you are going to say: ‘Act your gratitude and let feelings look after themselves.’ Thank you. (Do all theoretical problems conceal shirkings by the will?)

Commend me to Reverend Mother and Mother Annie Louie and my special Mother (the ‘cube’) and to Sister Janet about whom I feel guilty, though I didn’t see how to help it at the time. ¹⁷⁷ I hope you are well.

I have ‘sinitis’ ¹⁷⁸ (it feels like toothache but isn’t) but not very badly and it is, I think, going away. I have to sit for 20 min. every evening with my face in a jug of Friars Balsam, like a horse with a nose-bag, and the family say all sorts of things and I can’t answer, tho’ it is ‘pain and grief to me’! ¹⁷⁹

God bless you all for Christmas: you are in my daily prayers as I know I am in yours.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO HELEN TYRRELL (P):¹⁸⁰

Magdalen College

Oxford

March 1st [1943]

Dear Miss Tyrrell

I have got back from Newcastle¹⁸¹ so knocked up with lecturing and travelling on a bad cold and cough that I must ‘rat’ again to night. ¹⁸² Please make my apologies.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS SACHER (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 13th 1943

Dear Mrs. Sacher

Thank you for your most kind and encouraging letter–nothing could have given me more pleasure. Find room for me sometimes in your prayers.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

Jan 30th/44

My dear Arthur,

(1.) I’m afraid I don’t know anything about theatrical agencies, nor indeed agencies of any kind. Nor do I know any theatrical people.

(2.) Probably the best single book of modern comment on the Bible is A New Commentary on Holy Scripture edited by Gore, Goudge and Guillaume, and published by the S.P.C.K. (Northumberland Avenue, W.C.2.)–a very fat, ugly volume in double columns, but quite readable print. ¹⁸³ Of course for separate commentaries on particular books of the Bible, their name is legion. ¹⁸⁴ The Clarendon Bible (Clarendon Press) is not bad. ¹⁸⁵

(3.) The starting point for interpreting Chas. Williams is He Came Down from Heaven (Methuen) where Florence will find some of his main ideas explained directly–i.e. not in imaginative form. If either Florence or you wd. like a copy of his book on Dante (The Figure of Beatrice) I have a spare copy wh. I wd. gladly give. It might help.

As for the man, he is about 52, of humble origin (there are still traces of cockney in his voice), ugly as a chimpanzee but so radiant (he emanates more love than any man I have ever known) that as soon as he begins talking whether in private or in a lecture he is transfigured and looks like an angel. He sweeps some people quite off their feet and has many disciples. Women find him so attractive that if he were a bad man he cd. do what he liked either as a Don Juan or a charlatan. He works in the Oxford University Press. In spite of his ‘angelic’ quality he is also quite an earthy person and when Warnie, Tolkien, he and I meet for our pint in a pub in Broad Street, ¹⁸⁶ the fun is often so fast and furious that the company probably thinks we’re talking bawdy when in fact we’re v. likely talking Theology. He is married and, I think, youthfully in love with his wife still. That’s about all I can think of.

You needn’t ask me to pray for you, Arthur–I have done so daily ever since I began to pray, and am sure you do for me.

Yours

Jack Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

22 Feb./44

My dear Arthur–

I wonder does your cousin¹⁸⁷ differ from me as much as she thinks? I don’t want to deny the sense in wh. Heaven enters wherever Xt enters, even in this life: and I don’t suppose she wants to deny the resurrection of the dead and the full & final ‘redemption of the body’ ¹⁸⁸ wh. so obviously has not yet occurred.

About unselfishness, whatever dictionaries say, you know perfectly well what I mean, and I expect we’ve often talked about it–people going about making martyrs of themselves and annoying everyone else by doing things nobody wants under pretext of ‘unselfishness’. ¹⁸⁹ But we cd. explain it better in conversation.

Yes, I will indeed pray for ‘yours’ as well as you.

All best wishes.

Yours

Jack

TO MR OFFER (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 9th 44

Dear Mr. Offer

I think I shd. answer thus.

The words from the Cross ‘Why hast thou forsaken me’ ¹⁹⁰ suggest that Our Lord entered into the human experience to the degree of complete dereliction and at one point no longer realised His own Deity nor foresaw His own Resurrection.

The gift was never withdrawn. Christ is still Man. Human nature has been taken up into the Divine Nature (see Athanasian Creed) and remains there. ¹⁹¹ Our bridgehead is secure.

What do these people want? Do they actually visualise Him for 3 hours nailed to a stake–flayed back glued to unplaned wood–Palestinian sun–cloud of insects round head, hands, & feet–the face a mask of bruises, pus, spittle, blood, tears & sweat–the lungs gradually tearing owing to the position–and then complain ‘This doesn’t hurt enough?’ If so…!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO CECIL HARWOOD (P): PC

[13 May 1944]

Thanks for letter tho’ I fear many most judicious remarks are embedded in the mysteries of your handwriting. Now when can you come and spend a week night in April? Days that won’t do are

2nd

3rd

5th

17th

18th

26th

‘Even Steiner,’ addressed to people who wd. take the orthodox scientific view means of course ‘and (what you wd. think less likely) Steiner.’

Love to all

C.S.L.

TO JOHN ROWLAND (TEX): TS

REF. 299/44

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

9th June 1944.

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your courteous letter. I think the lie which took you in was made (it is certainly often repeated) by an anonymous scribbler. What I really said was that I became an atheist at the age of fourteen! No offense.

Yours faithfully,

C. S. Lewis

TO HELEN TYRRELL (P):¹⁹²

[Magdalen College

Oxford]

July 24th 1944

Miss Tyrrell was my pupil while reading for the Final Honour School of English in this university. She was a sound scholar and (what perhaps is more important) had a most penetrating intelligence. I have seldom met a woman of her age who was so lucid, cogent, and resourceful in discussion–in fact a real ‘sparring partner’. I think she ought to prove a most stimulating teacher, specially for upper forms where the pupils are ready to be waked to a spirit of inquiry. She has a sound sense of humour and no conceit.

C. S. Lewis

Fellow & Tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford.

TO MARGARET DENEKE (BOD):¹⁹³

As from Magdalen Col.

Oct 3rd 1944

Dear Miss Deneke

It will give me great pleasure to come to lunch at one o’clock on Oct. 30th. I will not try to express my sympathy to Miss Benecke¹⁹⁴ when we meet–such things are often merely embarrassing. You, I am sure, will not doubt that she has it The gap in College is terrible. Already (and yet it is only a few days) I have twice found myself setting aside a problem ‘to ask Benecke about it’ and then realised with a pang that there is no more of that. His image haunts every room in Magdalen. I hear his imagined voice again and again: so vividly, when crossing Magdalen bridge this morning, that I almost wondered if there were not some objective reality in the experience. I can hardly explain how his funeral affected me. I have heard that service read in that chapel so often for those who have not believed a word of it and who (had they been alive) wd. have mocked, that my feeling was almost one of relief. Here at last was a dead man not unworthy of the service. ¹⁹⁵ In some queer way it enormously strengthened my faith, and before we filed out of chapel I really felt (do not misunderstand me) a kind of joy–a feeling that all was well, just as well as it cd. be.

I count it among my great good fortunes to have known him. As far as human eyes can judge he was–is–a saint: but oh!, we still need him here so very badly.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: ¹⁹⁶

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sir,–

Is there not some danger that fine stylistic questions about the Basic English version of the New Testament¹⁹⁷ may distract attention from something much more obvious? The first thing we demand of a translator is that he should translate: questions of elegance come later. In Colossians I, 15 the Basic version renders    by ‘all living things.’ ¹⁹⁸ Whence came the word ‘living’? Obviously not from the Greek; and if it came from the Authorised Version (‘every creature’) it suggests a rather elementary mistake. Critics are in one sense unkind, and, in another, too kind by half, when they apply the highest standards of translation to work which does not satisfy the lowest.

Yours, etc.

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

Dec. 11th 1944

My dear Arthur–

I was delighted to hear from you. The statement you read in the papers about the Cambridge professorship was untrue; so far from having accepted it, I haven’t even been offered it! Which just shows what newspapers are.

Your view of the divinity of Christ was an old bone of contention between us, wasn’t it? ¹⁹⁹ But I thought when we last met you had come down on the same side as me. I don’t think I can agree that the Churches are empty because they teach that Jesus is God. If so, the ones that teach the opposite, i.e. the Unitarians, would be full wouldn’t they? Are they? It seems to me that the ones which teach the fullest and most dogmatic theory are precisely the ones that retain their people and make converts. While the liberalising and modernising ones lose ground every day. Thus the R.C.’s are flourishing and growing, and in the C. of E. the ‘high’ churches are fuller than the ‘low’. Not of course that I wd. accept popularity as a test of truth: only since you introduced it, I must say that as far as it is evidence at all it points the other way.

And in history too. Your doctrine, under its old name of Arianism, was given a chance: ²⁰⁰ in fact a v. full run for its money for it officially dominated the Roman Empire at one time. But it didn’t last.

I think the great difficulty is this: if He was not God, who or what was He? In Mat 28.19 you already get the baptismal formula ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, & the Holy Ghost.’ Who is this ‘Son’? Is the Holy Ghost a man? If not does a man ‘send’ Him (see John 15.26)? In Col. 1.12 Christ is ‘before all things and by Him all things consist’. What sort of man is this? I leave out the obvious place at the beginning of St John’s Gospel. Take something much less obvious. When He weeps over Jerusalem (Mat. 23) why does He suddenly say (v. 34) ‘I send unto you prophets and wise men’? Who cd. say this except either God or a lunatic? Who is this man who goes about forgiving sins? Or what about Mark 2.18–19. What man can announce that simply because he is present acts of penitence, such as fasting, are ‘off’? Who can give the school a half holiday except the Headmaster?

The doctrine of Christ’s divinity seems to me not something stuck on which you can unstick but something that peeps out at every point so that you’d have to unravel the whole web to get rid of it. Of course you may reject some of these passages as unauthentic, but then I cd. do the same to yours if I cared to play that game! When it says God can’t be tempted I take this to be an obvious truth. ²⁰¹ God, as God, can’t, any more than He can die. He became man precisely to do and suffer what as God he cd. not do and suffer. And if you take away the Godhead of Christ, what is Xtianity all about? How can the death of one man have this effect for all men which is proclaimed throughout the New Testament?

And don’t you think we shd. allow any weight to the fruits of these doctrines? Where are the shining examples of human holiness wh. ought to come from Unitarianism if it is true? Where are the Unitarian ‘opposite numbers’ to St Francis, George Herbert, Bunyan, Geo. Macdonald, and even burly old Dr Johnson? Where are the great Unitarian books of devotion? Where among them shall I find ‘the words of life’? ²⁰² Where have they helped, comforted, & strengthened us?

I’m glad our prayers have been answered and things are a bit better with you. They’re pretty bad with us. Minto had a v. slight stroke some months ago. Maureen (her husband teaches at Worksop) is going to have a baby²⁰³ and is staying with us. I long to see you again. Remember me to all our friends. Tell Jane her book is in the printer’s hands but prob. won’t appear till June. ²⁰⁴ All good wishes.

Yours

Jack

TO MISS WALKER (P): TS

REF. 531/45.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

1st February 1945.

Dear Miss Walker,

Thank you for your kind and encouraging letter of the 28th January:–

I have a new novel, ‘That Hideous Strength’ which will shortly be published by John Lane, and ‘The Grand Divorce’, now appearing serially in the ‘Guardian’, will eventually be produced in book form by Geoffrey Bles. ²⁰⁵

With all best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: ²⁰⁶

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sir,–

If Mr. Hooke assures us that the Basic translation of has an origin quite different from that which I conjectured, I accept his word. But I do not think that the opposite interpretation was, in me, gratuitous, for even now that Mr. Hooke has explained the Basic rendering, I do not in the least understand his explanation. Young’s Concordance²⁰⁷ shows no restriction of bara to the creation of animate beings. To what end did the Basic translators introduce the word living into Colossians 1, 15? From what error were they trying to guard their readers? To what truth were they trying to lead them? The end of verse 16 ()²⁰⁸ makes it quite clear that St. Paul regards Christ as prior to all beings, both animate and inanimate. Readers who do not understand that all things includes all living things will not be helped by anything we can do for them; and in view of verse 16 I do not know what Mr. Hooke means by saying, that ‘the inanimate creation was not in question.’ Even if it were not, why was it so important to induce English readers to exclude the inanimate creation by interpolating the word living?–an exclusion which, if it did anything, would be likely to make them attribute to the author some idea of an ‘emergent’ Christ coming into existence later than the inorganic world.

Yours, etc.

C. S. Lewis

TO STELLA ALDWINCKLE (W): PC

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb 5th [1945]

Sorry!–I’m just trying to stave off what looks like turning into flu’ so I think I had better make it an early night to-night and cut the Socratic

Yours

C.S.L.

TO SARAH NEYLAN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Feb. 11th 1945

My dear Sarah–

Please excuse me for not writing to you before to wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year and to thank you for your nice Card which I liked very much: I think you have improved in drawing cats and these were very good, much better than I can do. I can only draw a cat from the back view like this. I think it is rather cheating, don’t you? because it does not show the face which is the difficult part to do. It is a funny    thing that faces of people   are easier to do than most animals’ faces except perhaps elephants, and owls.   I wonder why that should be!

The reason I have not written before is that we have had a dreadfully busy time with people being ill in    the house and visitors and pipes getting frozen in the frost. All the same I liked the frost (did you?): the woods looked really lovely with all the white on the trees, just like a picture to a story. But perhaps you were in London. I suppose it was not so nice there.

We now have a Baby, about 6 weeks old, living in the house. It is a very quiet one and does not keep any of us awake at night. It is a boy.

We still have our old big dog, he is eight years old. I think this is as much for a dog as 56 is for a man–you find this out by finding what is seven times the dog’s age. So he is getting rather grey and very slow and stately. He is great friends with the two cats, but if he sees a strange cat in the garden he goes for it at once. He seems to know at once whether it is a stranger or one of our own cats even if it is a long way off and looks just like one of them. His name is Bruce. The two cats are called ‘Kitty-Koo’ and ‘Pushkin’. Kitty-Koo is old and black and very timid and gentle but Pushkin is gray and young and rather fierce. She does not know how to velvet her paws. She is not very nice to the old cat.

I wonder how you are all getting on? Are you at school now and how do you like it? It must be about half way through term by now, I should think. Do you keep a ‘calendar’ and cross off the days till the end of term?

I am not going to post this till to-morrow because I want to put in a ‘book-token’. You take it to a bookshop and they give you a book instead of it. This is for a kind of Christmas present, only it is very late.

Now I have written you a letter you must write me one–that is, if you like writing letters but not otherwise. I used to like it once but I don’t much now because I have so many to write but my Brother does some of them for me on his typewriter which is a great help.

Have you seen any snow-drops yet this year? I saw some two days ago. Give my love to the others–and to yourself

Yours affectionate god-father

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN RICHARDS (BOD): TS

REF. 113/1/45.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

5th March 1945.

Dear Mr. Richards,

Thank you for your kind and encouraging letter of the 3rd:–

I can’t say I have reached the stage of loving that passage: but as all the wise (including even the Pagans) agree on the point, I suppose I shall have to lump it! All the best.

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO EDITH GATES (W): TS

REF. 492/45.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

2nd May 1945.

Dear Miss Gates,

Thank you for your kind and encouraging letter:–

I believe my doctrine about troughs to be true because every good writer on the spiritual life says the same. ²⁰⁹ (See ‘Theologica Germanica’, the ‘Imitation’, Walter Hilton, Geo. MacDonald’s Sermons etc). And don’t forget that Our Lord Himself experienced troughs: to the point of saying ‘Why hast Thou forsaken me?’ ²¹⁰

Thanks for the Presbyterian, and all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT:²¹¹

Sir,–

In ‘Comus’ 977 the spirit announces that he is going to fly to happy climes which are ‘up in the broad fields of the sky’ ²¹² indeed so far up that they enjoy perpetual day, doubtless by being beyond ‘the circling canopy of Night’s extended shade.’ (P.L. III, 556). ²¹³ But in 981 he proceeds to locate those climes amidst ‘the gardens fair of Hesperus.’ ²¹⁴ This apparent confusion is not accidental, for it occurs also in the opening speech as originally written in the Trinity MS.: ²¹⁵ there also the spirit claims to have come both from the sky (‘regions mild of calm and serene air’)²¹⁶ and from the gardens of Hesperus.

I suggest the following explanation. The connexion between ‘Comus’ and the Platonic Theology of Milton’s day is now generally recognised. The spirit is an aerial genius or daemon (he is called Daemon in the Trinity MS.) of the kind described by Henry More and others. The words aerial and air in ll. 3 and 4 emphasize the fact. These aerial beings are distinguished from the aetherial beings who live in a higher region. Their airy bodies require nourishment. But how are they nourished? More (Immortality of the Soul, III, p. 9)²¹⁷ answers: ‘In the tranquillity of those upper Regions, that Promus-Condus of the Universe, the Spirit of Nature, may silently send forth whole gardens and orchards of most delectable fruits and flowers, of an equilibrious ponderosity to the parts of the air they grow in, to whose shape and colours the transparency of these Plants may adde particular lustre as we see it is in precious Stones.’

In the light of this passage I take Milton to mean that his ‘Spirit’ comes from the upper air at the beginning of ‘Comus’ and returns thither at the end, but that in the upper air is to be found that reality which the myth of the Hesperian garden erroneously located beyond the ‘ocean’ (926) at the ‘green earth’s end.’ But ‘far above’ (1003) in the aetherial region dwells that Divine Love (celestial Cupid) who is the goal of the Platonic quest.

Yours faithfully,

C. S. Lewis

TO DEREK BREWER (P):²¹⁸ TS

REF. 337/1/45

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19th September 1945.

Dear Brewer,

I think, in view of the book famine, most of your spare time had better be spent in secondhand bookshops picking up all the major English writers you can lay your hands on. If you’ve sold or lost your original O.E. books, try to replace them at once (Wardale’s Grammar, ²¹⁹ Sweet’s Primer, and Reader, ²²⁰ Klaeber’s Beowulf²²¹ or, failing that, Chambers’). ²²² For the rest, just read as much as you can. I’m delighted to hear that you are coming back.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARGARET ‘PEGGY’ POLLARD (P) TS

REF. 363/1/45.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

4th October 1945.

Dear Miss Pollard,

Many thanks for your kind and encouraging letter of the 2nd.

I love both goats and Camembert, and am much moved by what you say.

With best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

 

I’m v. intrigued by the pious ungulate. ²²³ ’Tis the cloven hoof itself redeemed. You’re sure it is a goat and not a converted satyr in disguise? Try piping to him or read a little Theocritus. ²²⁴

TO MARGARET ‘PEGGY’ POLLARD (P): TS

REF. 363/1/45.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

11th October 1945.

Dear Mrs. Pollard,

I begin to be rather nervous about this ungulate. Is rationality about to descend on a new species, and, if so, what will become of us? Perhaps we shall be kept as pets.

Its really too bad about the 73 bus: I just gave any number that came into my head, never reflecting that there are Londoners who carried the whole bus service in their heads. ²²⁵ N.B. Higher Critics will use this a thousand years hence to prove that the book is a forgery written far later than the 20th Century, because any real 20th Century author would be bound to have known.

My dreams are full of Camembert.

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT²²⁶

Sir,–

I hope my letter about Comus did not give the impression that I was seeking the ‘source’ of Comus in Henry More’s Immortality of the Soul which was published twenty-two years later! Mr. Wright’s suggestion that the machinery of the Mask comes from the Phaedo²²⁷ is certainly worth consideration and might, perhaps, receive additional support from Il Penseroso 89, et seq.

The real question seems to me to be how seriously Milton took his machinery. The Phaedo as it stands is obviously inconsistent with Christian Theology and with the science of Milton’s day. If, therefore, his machinery is that of the Phaedo we must conclude it to be wholly fanciful and allegorical. If, on the other hand, he had in it a more than poetic faith it is incredible that he should be ignoring that vast work on the reconciliation of Plato with Christianity and scientific discovery which was done not, of course, by the ‘Cambridge Platonists’ in particular, but the whole body of ‘Platonic Theologians’, Greek, Jewish, Italian and English.

I think (a) that there are clear traces of their influence in Paradise Lost; (b) that the longer a man studies our older poets in relation to the thought of their times the more chary he will be of pronouncing anything whatever to be ‘purely’ allegorical or fantastic or metaphorical. Consider how different Donne’s Air and Angels²²⁸ becomes after one has read about the relations between a sphere and an intelligence in Abrabanel’s Dialoghi d’Amore; ²²⁹ or how Henry IV, Part I, iii, I 27 (on earthquakes)²³⁰ changes when one reads in Kepler that the earth is an ingens animal²³¹ and per montium crateres ceu os et nares expirat. ²³² Such passages are, of course, metaphorical and fanciful: the point is that they are not purely so.

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER (W):

Magdalen

April 10th 46

My dear Sayer–

Your ‘tiger’ of a monk must come from Riga, he has such a smile on his face. ²³³ I’d like to go and talk at Ampleforth but things are so tight now that I am refusing nearly everything, and what little I can do must be reserved for the infidel who is my special target.

I am much cheered by what you tell me about Hideous Strength for the reviewers have unanimously damned it. But you’re right: Perelandra is much the best book I’ve written. When can we meet? Cd. you come & dine & sleep on Tue. April 30th? Do!

Yours

C. S. Lewis

On 16 September 1946 Warnie wrote to Jill Flewett:²³⁴

Magdalen College,
16th September 1946.

My dear June,

Many thanks for your letter of the 11th. The Irish holiday is, alas, one of those pious hopes–a thing that is going to happen ‘next year’. But I am none the less very grateful for your kind offer, which I will pigeonhole for future reference.

What is much more to the point is the good news that you propose to come down here; when? I shall look forward to it greatly. I was much interested to hear about the Guildford Repertory Theatre; Guildford used to be a nice place, but I have’nt seen it since the war. What about the Oxford Rep? They tell me it has a good reputation, but you know more about this than I do; it would be grand if you could get a billet with them.

Anyway I hope you really intend to come down here; the Blakes leave tomorrow if that has any bearing on the point.

Yours,

Warnie

 

Later that year, Lewis was one of those who signed a letter to the editor of The Times: ²³⁵

Sir,–

We ask the hospitality of your columns, believing that many of your readers would be interested to hear of the existence of the Jane Austen Society and its aim. This society was founded in May, 1940, with the object of getting possession of the house formerly known as Chawton Cottage. In this house Jane Austen lived with her mother and her sister Cassandra from 1808 until her death in 1817. All the novels except ‘Northanger Abbey’ were written here in the form in which we have them.

The cottage, besides being of unique interest to lovers of Jane Austen’s work, is well worth preserving in itself. It is an L-shaped brick building of early Georgian date, standing at the junction of the London, Winchester, and Portsmouth roads. A description of it in Jane Austen’s day is found in Chapter IV of the Memoir by J. E. Austen-Leigh. It has long been divided into three tenements, but apart from a few minor alterations it remains structurally as it was during the Austens’ occupation.

It would not be possible to obtain vacant possession of the whole house, nor is it desired; the present tenants would not, under the society’s plan, be in any way disturbed; but immediate possession would be assured of a large room on the ground floor which (identified from its blocked-up window) was the Austens’ drawing-room. This would house some very interesting relics which have been promised, and form the nucleus of the place of pilgrimage the society hopes to see established.

The society’s aim, therefore, is to buy and repair this house, to establish a caretaker, to keep the rest of the premises as living accommodation, but to make certain rooms, particularly associated with Jane Austen, accessible to the public. The owner has agreed to a price of £3,000. Thorough-going repairs are urgently needed. The society therefore has set itself to raise at least £5,000. Further information may be had from the hon. Secretaries, Jordans, Alton, Hampshire. Subscriptions should be sent to Messrs. Sheen, Stickland and Co., 71, High Street, Alton, Hampshire.

We are yours faithfully,

R. A. Austen-Leigh²³⁶

Elizabeth Bowen²³⁷

David Cecil²³⁸

R. W. Chapman

W. Hugh Curtis²³⁹

Dorothy Darnell²⁴⁰

Beecher Hogan²⁴¹

Elizabeth Jenkins²⁴²

G. L. Keynes²⁴³

Mary Lascelles²⁴⁴

C. S. Lewis

Wilmarth S. Lewis²⁴⁵

Edward Marsh²⁴⁶

C. B. Tinker²⁴⁷

Wellington²⁴⁸

Clough Williams-Ellis²⁴⁹

Mervyn Winton

 

The Jane Austen Memorial Trust bought Chawton Cottage in 1947 and the Jane Austen Society helped with its preservation. It is administered by the Trust and open to the public. As a museum it has a matchless collection of books, furniture, pictures and other memorabilia associated with Jane Austen and the Austen family.

TO THE HEADMASTER OF BANCROFT’S SCHOOL (P):²⁵⁰ TS

REF. 46/666.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19th December 1946.

Dear Headmaster,

Thank you for your letter about Reed. ²⁵¹ If he is reading English here the main things I should like him to do are,

(a). Keep up any foreign language he knows, especially Latin.

(b). Read as much English in his spare time as he can. Nobody wants him to think of the syllabus yet.

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO THEODORA BOSANQUET (HAR): TS

REF. 234/47.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th April 1947.

Dear Miss Bosanquet,

I have received a kind invitation to a cocktail party on 8th May from your fellow-host (or hostess?), and am replying to you because I cannot make out the signature. I should much have liked to come, but the summer term in post war Oxford does’nt give tutors any chance of breaking away like that.

With regret, and many thanks,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO T. H. WHITE (TEX):²⁵²

Magdalen College

Oxford

April 29th 1947

Sir

Tho’ very ill supplyed by Nature with that Address which is commonly look’d for in those who solicit the Acquaintance of the great, I find I cannot be easie without communicating to you the infinite deal of satisfaction wherewith I have perused your late admirable Work Mrs. Masham’s Repose. ²⁵³ I’m sure ’tis no Flatterie (which I disdaine) to say that for the gaiety and invention of the Fable, the justness of the Sentiments, and the Elegance of the Style, I have not read its Equal in late years.

The ludicrous and the Poetical part support and vary each other without any Discord, and it was a very particular Pleasure to me to observe that while the whole Platform of your Tale is in a maner a compliment to the late ingenious Dean yet you are so judicious as not to spare the Follies in which he allowed himself concerning Laputa. ²⁵⁴ Where you make merry with my own Profession in the excellent place about Mr. Pope’s letter habetis confitentem reum, ²⁵⁵ and I fairly rolled in my great chair while I read it.

Yet I am not sure that I should have made bold to trouble you with this letter neither if I had not been put out of Patience by the silly, halting notices of Mrs. M. in the Press. I will not condole with you, being very sure that you despise ’em and know that amid the disgusting Seriousness of the Age nothing witty and Phantasticall will be truly satisfied and nothing that does not please either government or Fashion be honestly praised.

If your occasions should lead you to these Academick Groves I shall beg leave to make you acquainted with half a dozen Magdalen Fellows that have a freer and more masculine taste. Till then, Sir, may you accept my Gratefull thanks for the Entertainment you have given me and believe me

your oblig’d obedient servant

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): TS

REF. 177/47.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

13th May 1947.

My dear Green,

Heartiest congratulations on your engagement and all such good wishes as an old bachelor can give. ²⁵⁶ I’m tied to a house full of sickness and a Sunday party is out of the question for me: you will not think it is because I am indifferent.

You’ve never turned up to fetch your MS, but I suppose you are not much thinking of it at present.

Thanks for asking me. I hope you’ll live happily ever after.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO R. W. CHAPMAN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

14/6/47

Dear Chapman

The ominous date had by no means escaped the notice of several of us and I have thought and even acted a good deal about it. I found no one even among the barbarians who did not regret our coming loss: but the general feeling that you were tolerably provided for in other ways was too strong and I had to desist. I daresay if your subject had been Stinks, Sedition, or Pornography the result might have been better. Eheu. ²⁵⁷

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO THEODORA BOSANQUET (HAR):

Magdalen College

Oxford

15/6/47

Dear Miss Bosanquet–

Thank you for drawing my attention to this. I doubt, however, if it cd. be properly dealt with within the compass of a letter.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO J. O. REED (P): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

July 8th 1947

Dear Mr. Reed

The important thing before coming up is not a ‘course’ but as much reading and book-buying as you can possibly afford without getting tired or bankrupt. Anything between 1400 and 1830 is grist to your mill, and now is the time for any of the long authors: Chaucer, Malory, Sidney, Spenser, Marlow, Shakespeare, B. Johnson, Thos. Browne, Burton, Walton, Donne, Bunyan, Dryden, Addison, Pope, Swift, Thomson, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson, Boswell, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Jane Austen, Lamb, Hazlitt, de Quincey.

Keep up any foreign language you know, especially Latin. If you are ignorant of the Bible, read it (the Latin Vulgate will kill two birds with one stone). Buy all texts you can, and borrow critical books. For literary history, all W. P. Ker’s books are good on the mediaeval period, ²⁵⁸ and all Oliver Elton’s on the later. ²⁵⁹ On Shakespeare E. K. Chambers, ²⁶⁰ Stoll, ²⁶¹ Caroline Spurgeon, ²⁶² and Bethell. ²⁶³ Write freely again if you wish.

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

 

I am assuming you chose Course 3 which is mainly modern. If you prefer No 1. (mainly philological & medieval) or 2 (a half way house between 1 and 3) let me know.

TO JOSEPH LEWIS COPPACK (P):²⁶⁴

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Aug 19th 1947

Dear Cousin Coppack

Your letter gave me unusual pleasure, fully shared by my (elder) brother who is a keen genealogist and family historian. Naturally, we have no personal recollections of the ‘Bishop’: ²⁶⁵ the furthest we can remember back to is our grandfather and grandmother²⁶⁶ whom you must often have seen. You probably know that my Father’s brothers are all dead now. I always regret that our branch of the family had drifted so far away from Wales for I love the country and always feel at home when I got here.

I remember at a tiny station in central Wales having a philosophical argument with a Welsh porter and thinking how impossible such a thing would be in England and when in 1941 I gave a course of lectures at a College in Bangor²⁶⁷ I was much haunted by speculations as to whether the great old man might also have spoken in those parts.

I shall be 49 in November and I am unmarried, also going bald and beginning to be a little deaf–a failing which, I think runs in our blood. My life has been a very fortunate one on the whole–much more so than I deserve and all the successes of my last ten years came as a sudden surprise. Probably the greatest difference between us is that I was for many years a total unbeliever and was not reclaimed till my late thirties–a sad waste of time (and something worse) tho’ it has perhaps enabled me to understand the atheist’s point of view better than I cd. have done otherwise and thus to be of more use to others in that position.

I enclose the Recorder. ²⁶⁸ My brother joins me in greetings and good wishes and I remain your

affectionate cousin

Clive Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

Magdalen

Aug 19/47

My dear Arthur–

I agree that we don’t know what a spiritual body is. ²⁶⁹ But I don’t like contrasting it with (your words) ‘an actual, physical body’. This suggests that the spiritual body wd. be the opposite of ‘actual’–i.e. some kind of vision or imagination. And I do think most people imagine it as something that looks like the present body and isn’t really there. Our Lord’s eating the boiled fish²⁷⁰ seems to put the boots on that idea, don’t you think? I suspect the distinction is the other way round–that it is something compared with which our present bodies are half real and phantasmal.

When I say that certain graces are ‘offered’ us only through certain physical acts I mean that is the ordinary public offer certified by scripture & supported by unbroken Xtian experience. ²⁷¹ I don’t of course (heaven forbid!) mean to limit what God may please to do in secret & special ways. In fact ‘offer’ is the operative word. No doubt He gives more than He offers: but the offer was as I describe.

I feel the better for our meeting still.

Yours

Jack

TO THE EDITOR OF TIME AND TIDE:²⁷²

Magdalen College

Oxford

Sir:

Mr Heyworth’s letter on the value of ‘Old English’, ²⁷³ or Anglo-Saxon, deserves a hearty welcome and underlines a truth not generally known: the truth that while many theorists among the dons of many universities (especially among those who do not teach, or even know, Anglo-Saxon) agitate for the removal of this language from the syllabus, the better students almost invariably find in it both profit and pleasure.

I have only one point to add. Mr Heyworth mentions (though, wisely, he does not accept) the belief that Scotch poverty explains the scarcity of great Scotch artists. Is it not worth while pointing out that at the end of the Middle Ages when English was becoming rich and Scotland was both very poor and mangled with civil war, English poets were writing rubbish while Scotland boasts Douglas, Dunbar, and Lyndsay?

It is only one of the innumerable proofs that economic and political conditions are merely the materials both for the art of poetry and for the art of life itself. And the best work in both is often done in the hardest materials. Difficult metres, short rations, rugged language and bad rules, can all be turned to account if the artist knows his job.

I am, etc.

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF TIME AND TIDE:²⁷⁴

Magdalen College

Oxford

Sir:

I should like the anonymous ‘undergraduate’ who dislikes his Anglo-Saxon to understand that my letter which, by implication, relegates him to the class of inferior students, was written before I had seen his. I would not like him to think that I intended to mortify him.

One point of his I would like to take up. He says that Anglo-Saxon is easy to mark in exams. I wonder how much examining he has done. My own experience is that translation is more troublesome to mark than any other kind of work: it tests both the examiner and the candidate most severely and discovers more about the literary judgement of both than work which seems to be far more directly concerned with this elusive factor.

I am, etc.

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCH TIMES:²⁷⁵

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sir,–

The author of an article entitled ‘Old School Ties for All’ in your last issue, speaks with confidence of the religious training given at English public schools. I hope he is right; but if he is, his position is so important that it deserves to be defended in some detail against the rather different conclusions (based on wide, immediate observation) in Mr. B. G. Sandhurst’s ‘How Heathen is Britain.’ ²⁷⁶ May we hope that this will be done in a second article?

C. S. Lewis

TO T. C. BAIRD (P): TS

REF. 658/47.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

24th November 1947.

My dear Mr. Baird,

Hurrah! That’s my favourite bit in the whole book, ²⁷⁷ and you are the first person to notice it.

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT:²⁷⁸

Sir,–

I would like to express my agreement, if not with the language which Dr. F. R. Leavis holds about your review (Nov. 1) of Mr. Waldock’s Paradise Lost and Its Critics, ²⁷⁹ yet with his general contention that it deserves much more favourable treatment than your reviewer gave it. I agree with very little that Mr. Waldock says, but I think he has given us a strong and clear presentation of a view that should be seriously considered. The tone and temper of his book deserve the praise which Dr. Leavis gives them.

C. S. Lewis

TO DEREK BREWER (P):²⁸⁰

Dec. 21/47

Dear Brewer

Oh Lor!–I never but once saw anything like this year’s class list…but that way madness lies. It has not in the least altered my opinion either of you or of…, ²⁸¹ nor I think will it affect your chances in the Fellowship.

There may be something still to do on Gower tho’ I’m not quite sure what. But go on nosing a bit. I enclose the formal testimonial wh. is all that is needed. All the best.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARGARET DOUGLAS (W): TS

REF. 735/47.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

31st December 1947.

Dear Miss Douglas,

Accept my deepest sympathy on the death of your mother: for I think the bond between you was unusually close. You have one great consolation which few bereaved people have–a clear conscience towards the dead. It was apparent that you were spending yourself largely upon her. I remember her very vividly, and much admired that blend of the playful and the stately, of which only old ladies have the secret.

I am so glad that you approved of the memoir. ²⁸² Professor Tolkien’s second Hobbit²⁸³ is still unfinished: he works like a coral insect you know!

With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO KENNETH HOPKINS (PRIN):²⁸⁴ TS

REF. 736/47.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

31st December 1947.

Dear Sir,

Such a number of people seem, in various undefined ways, to be competing for the post of Charles Williams’ literary executor that I think the only safe plan is to begin with Mrs. Williams. Her address is 23, Antrim Mansions, London, N.W.3. Thank you for your kind reference to my little memoir.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO HELEN CALKINS (W): TS

Ref. 48/276.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29th March 1948.

Dear Miss Calkins,

No. I’m very sorry, but I can’t. ²⁸⁵ I have almost no leisure already, and I get requests like yours very often, so I have had to make a rule never to do it. The merit of the MS (I am perfectly ready to believe all good of it) has nothing to do with this decision. When you lay the last straw on a camel’s breaking back, it is no good assuring him that it is the best straw! I return Harper’s letter. Forgive me, and all best wishes.

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO CHARLES EDE (W): TS

REF. 48296.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

9th April 1948.

Dear Mr. Ede,

Thanks for your letter of the 7th:–

I’m sorry, but I’m suffering under such an accumulation of professional work and private duties that it is impossible for me to undertake anything more for a long time to come.

With regret, and best wishes for the success of the publications,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE OXFORD MAGAZINE:²⁸⁶

Sir,–

In his more than usually kind review of Essays Presented to Charles Williams J.M.T. has, no doubt inadvertently, included a sentence which may mislead. He writes ‘What he (i.e. Charles Williams) thought was at constant issue with what he believed.’ ²⁸⁷ J.M.T. is here drawing on sources known to himself. Unfortunately the sentence is so placed that a reader might take J.M.T. to be asserting that this contrast between Williams’s ‘thought’ and ‘belief’ was derived from me. It is not.

Yours, etc.,

C. S. Lewis

TO JONATHAN FRANCIS ‘FRANK’ GOODRIDGE (P):²⁸⁸

[Magdalen College

1948]

Dear Goodridge

This is all I can manage to-day. Are you going to try it on the Club? p. 3. ‘Choice…may be just appetite’. ‘Naked will power…is naked desire.’ Nego. Choice may be no (morally) better than appetite or will power than desire. But if anyone says they’re the same, then [I] wd. have to say that a man dying of thirst, with no possibility of getting a drink, chooses a glass of water or wills to drink. Appetite and desire may exist to the Nth where there is no question of will or choice. (You bring morals into the question prematurely. Best rule them out at this stage for simplicity’s sake)

p. 5. His organs’ obedience consisted in the fact that they didn’t pester his reason but waited to ‘speak when they were spoken to’. The judgement wd. be necessary even if there were no bad passions, if only because one can’t do everything at once. Even innocent impulses must wait their turn. You keep on identifying the antithesis Desire><Will with the antithesis Evil><Good. When I control my desire for sleep in order to fornicate, or my laziness in order to plan revenge, I am controlling innocent desire by evil will. The real distinction is between what happens in & to me (Desire) and what I do (Will).

p. 7. The middle term between total freedom & impossibility is surely difficulty. Surely the amount of pain or fear attendant on what one does may gradually increase thus rendering the doing hard and finally impossible?

p. 8. A man with no food can hardly choose to starve, can he? In ‘resignation’ what he chooses (or does) is to silence his resentment, self-pity etc.

General. Read the introd. Chapter to Alexander’s Space, Time & Deity. ²⁸⁹ I think you’re trying (in his sense) to ‘contemplate’ what can only be ‘enjoyed’. You are really quite aware, aren’t you, of the difference between doing (acts) and feeling (desires)? ²⁹⁰

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: ²⁹¹

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sir,–

Critics have disputed the meaning of ‘her motion blushed at herself’ in Othello, I, iii, 95. It is perhaps worth asking whether Shakespeare had remembered the description of Pygmalion’s statue in Ovid:

Virginis est verae facies quam vivere credas,

Et si non obstet reverentia velle moveri.

(Met. X 250)²⁹²

It is relevant that Bentley (ad loc) quotes from Shirach the common Virgines bene educatae prae pudore in virorum conspectu vix audent se movere. ²⁹³ Compare also Dante (Par xxv, 111) where Beatrice stands Pur come sposa tacita e immota.²⁹⁴

C. S. Lewis

TO MISS JONES (P):

Magdalen College

Oxford

24/7/48

Dear Miss Jones

So far from being as you say ‘a nuisance’ it is Mr. Bles and I who are being nuisances and you who have been helpful. Thank you very much indeed. The volume will be restored to you in due course, and I hope you will not think it the worse for my correcting one or two misprints. With much appreciation.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO CHRISTOPHER DAWSON (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sept. 27th 1948

Dear Dawson

Thank you very much for having a copy of your Giffords sent to me. ²⁹⁵ I embarked on it at once and indeed by greedily reading it at lunch and splashing it with gravy have already deprived the copy of some of its freshness.

I have now finished it (for the first time). It was exactly what I wanted, going, of course, far beyond my knowledge but often linking up with the little I do know–always the most exciting kind of reading, I think. It also was strangely ‘corroborating’–I don’t quite know how or why. So much for subjective reactions. What makes me feel that it must also be good (simpliciter²⁹⁶ as well as mihi)²⁹⁷ is that on the Humanists, where I am least out of my depth, it seems to me particularly sound. What a lot of error about them is still in circulation! The bit on p. 17 about the secret relation between Hegelianism and Darwinism is most important. ²⁹⁸ How many people notice that the two great mythical or poetic expressions of Developmentalism (Keat’s Hyperion and Wagner’s Ring) are both pre-Darwinian? ²⁹⁹ P. 31 about the most primitive and most sophisticated minds (and the gap in between) is new to me and excellent. ³⁰⁰ P. 93 is a magnificent ending. But I mustn’t go on regurgitating plums from your own cake. Thanks very much: you have given me a great treat.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MR PEACOCK (OUP):³⁰¹ TS

REF. 48/14.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

6th October 1948.

Dear Mr. Peacock,

Thank you for Arthurian Torso, which arrived today. I think it would be wiser not to send a Review copy to the Oxford Magazine, as I am in such bad odour there that they will make no scruple of black-guarding C.W. on my account.

As for complimentary copies, I presume you are sending one to Mrs. W. anyway. I should like one to go to the Librarian, Magdalen College: one to Miss McNeill, Lisnadene, 191 Belmont Rd. Strandtown, Belfast; one to Miss S. Stokes, ³⁰² c/o of the preceeding: and to A. O. Barfield, Polvean, Belmont Rd. Uckfield: and one to Brother George Every S.S.M., ³⁰³ House of the Sacred Mission, Kelham, Newark, Notts.

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY NEYLAN (W):

As from Magdalen

3/4/49

Dear Mrs Neylan

The enclosed is a desperate attempt to do what I am v. ill qualified for. ³⁰⁴ After writing it it occurred to me that I might have said all the things that you (knowing Sarah) might know to be particularly disastrous. So I thought you’d better vet it before passing it on. I’m so clumsy.

Blessings on all three–and I’m sorry I can’t come. But I’d only have behaved like as ass if I had!

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO SARAH NEYLAN (W):

3/4/49

My dear Sarah

I am sorry to say that I don’t think I shall be able to be at your Confirmation on Saturday. For most men Saturday afternoon is a free time, but I have an invalid old lady to look after and the weekend is the time when I have no freedom at all, and have to try to be Nurse, Kennel-Maid, Wood-cutter, Butler, Housemaid, and Secretary all in one.

I had hoped that if the old lady were a little better than usual and if all the other people in the house were in good tempers I might be able to get away next Saturday. But the old lady is a good deal worse than usual and most of the people in the house are in bad tempers. So I must ‘stick to the ship’.

If I had come and we had met, I am afraid you might have found me very shy and dull. (By the way, always remember that old people can be quite as shy with young people as young people can be with old. This explains what must seem to you the idiotic way in which so many grown-ups talk to you). But I will try to do what I can by a letter.

I think of myself as having to be two people for you. (1. The real, serious, Christian godfather (2) the fairy godfather. As regards (2) I enclose a bit of the only kind of magic (a very dull kind) which I can work. Your mother will know how to deal with the spell. I think it will mean one or two, or even five, pounds for you now, to get things you want, and the rest in the Bank for future use. As I say, it is a dull kind of magic and a really good godfather (of type 2) would do something much more interesting: but it is the best an old bachelor can think of, and it is with my love.

As for No 1, the serious Christian godfather, I feel very unfit for the work–just as you, I dare say, may feel very unfit for being confirmed and for receiving the Holy Communion. But then an angel would not be really fit and we must all do the best we can. So I suppose I must try to give you advice. And the bit of advice that comes into my head is this: don’t expect (I mean, don’t count on and don’t demand) that when you are confirmed, or when you make your first Communion, you will have all the feelings you would like to have. You may, of course: but also you may not. But don’t worry if you don’t get them. They aren’t what matter. The things that are happening to you are quite real things whether you feel as you wd. wish or not, just as a meal will do a hungry person good even if he has a cold in the head which will rather spoil the taste. Our Lord will give us right feelings if He wishes–and then we must say Thank you. If He doesn’t, then we must say to ourselves (and Him) that He knows best.

This, by the way, is one of the very few subjects on which I feel I do know something. For years, after I had become a regular communicant I can’t tell you how dull my feelings were and how my attention wandered at the most important moments. It is only in the last year or two that things have begun to come right–which just shows how important it is to keep on doing what you are told.

Oh–I’d nearly forgotten–I have one other piece of advice. Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1.) Things we ought to do (2.) Things we’ve got to do (3.) Things we like doing. I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of the three reasons, things like reading books they don’t like because other people read them. Things you ought to do are things like doing one’s school work or being nice to people. Things one has got to do are things like dressing and undressing, or household shopping. Things one likes doing–but of course I don’t know what you like. Perhaps you’ll write and tell me one day.

Of course I always mention you in my prayers and will most especially on Saturday. Do the same for me.

Your affectionate godfather

C. S. Lewis

TO ALEC CRAIG (TEX):

Magdalen College

Oxford

15/5/49

Dear Mr. Craig–

How very kind of you to send me a copy of your Voice of Merlin: ³⁰⁵ especially kind since you must have reckoned me a possible purchaser and who wants to waste copies on them?!

The summer term is a whirlwind for tutors now-a-days and it wd. be idle to pretend I have done more than dip or shall be able to for some weeks. But it is clearly all about the things I want to know. I’m glad to find there is still someone who doesn’t think poetry shd. be confined to the same sort of matter we find in leading articles.

With v. many thanks.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCH TIMES (EC):³⁰⁶

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Sir,–

If it is not harking back too far, I would like to make two layman’s comments on the liturgical articles in your issue of May 6. Firstly, I would underline the necessity for uniformity, if in nothing else, yet in the time taken by the rite. We laymen may not be busier than the clergy but we usually have much less choice in our hours of business. The celebrant who lengthens the service by ten minutes may, for us, throw the whole day into hurry and confusion. It is difficult to keep this out of our minds: it may even be difficult to avoid some feeling of resentment. Such temptations may be good for us but it is not the celebrant’s business to supply them: God’s permission and Satan’s diligence will see to that part of our education without his assistance.

Secondly, I would ask the clergy to believe that we are more interested in orthodoxy and less interested in liturgiology as such than they can easily imagine. Dr Mascall rightly says that variations are permissible when they do not alter doctrine. ³⁰⁷ But after that he goes on almost casually to mention ‘devotions to the Mother of God and to the hosts of heaven’ as a possible liturgical variant. That the introduction of such devotions into any parish not accustomed to them would divide the congregation into two camps, Dr Mascall well knows. But if he thinks that the issue between those camps would be a liturgical issue, I submit that he is mistaken. It would be a doctrinal issue. Not one layman would be asking whether these devotions marred or mended the beauty of the rite; everyone would be asking whether they were lawful or damnable. It is no part of my object to discuss that question here, but merely to point out that it is the question.

What we laymen fear is that the deepest doctrinal issues should be tacitly and implicitly settled by what seem to be, or are avowed to be, merely changes in liturgy. A man who is wondering whether the fare set before him is food or poison is not reassured by being told that this course is now restored to its traditional place in the menu or that the tureen is of the Sarum pattern. We laymen are ignorant and timid. Our lives are ever in our hands, the avenger of blood is on our heels, and of each of us his soul may this night be required. Can you blame us if the reduction of great doctrinal issues to merely liturgical issues fills us with something like terror?

C. S. Lewis

TO DEREK BREWER (P): TS

REF. 284/49

Magdalen College

13th June 1949

Dear Brewer,

Hurrah! I’m glad. ³⁰⁸ Yes, I have had a very heavy cold.

Yours,

W. H. Lewis

(for C. S. Lewis ill).

TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCH TIMES(EC):³⁰⁹

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sir,–

I agree with Dean Hughes that the connection of belief and liturgy is close, but doubt if it is ‘inextricable’. ³¹⁰ I submit that the relation is healthy when liturgy expresses the belief of the Church, morbid when liturgy creates in the people by suggestion beliefs which the Church has not publicly professed, taught, and defended. If the mind of the Church is, for example, that our fathers erred in abandoning the Romish invocations of saints and angels, by all means let our corporate recantation, together with its grounds in scripture, reason and tradition be published, our solemn act of penitence be performed, the laity re-instructed, and the proper changes in liturgy be introduced.

What horrifies me is the proposal that individual priests should be encouraged to behave as if all this had been done when it has not been done. One correspondent compared such changes to the equally stealthy and (as he holds) irresistible changes in a language. But that is just the parallel that terrifies me, for even the shallowest philologist knows that the unconscious linguistic process is continually degrading good words and blunting useful distinctions. Absit omen! Whether an ‘enrichment’ of liturgy which involves a change of doctrine is allowable, surely depends on whether our doctrine is changing from error to truth or from truth to error. Is the individual priest the judge of that?

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCH TIMES(EC):³¹¹

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sir,–

Mr Every (quite legitimately) gives the word invocation a wider sense than I. ³¹² The question then becomes how far we can infer propriety of devotion from propriety of invocation? I accept the authority of the Benedicite³¹³ for the propriety of invoking (in Mr Every’s sense) saints. But if I thence infer the propriety of devotions to saints, will not an argument force me to approve devotions to stars, frosts and whales? ³¹⁴

I am also quite ready to admit that I overlooked a distinction. Our fathers might disallow a particular medieval doctrine and yet not disallow some other doctrine which we laymen easily confuse with it. But if the issue is so much finer than I thought, this merely redoubles my anxiety that it should be openly and authoritatively decided.

If I feared lest the suggestions of liturgy might beguile us laymen on a simple issue, I am not likely to be comforted by finding the issue a subtle one. If there is one kind of devotion to created beings which is pleasing and another which is displeasing to God, when is the Church, as a Church, going to instruct us in the distinction?

Meanwhile, what better opportunity for the stealthy insinuation of the wrong kind than the unauthorised and sporadic practice of devotions to creatures before uninstructed congregations would our ghostly foe desire? Most of us laymen, I think, have no parti pris³¹⁵ in the matter. We desire to believe as the Church believes.

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCH TIMES(EC):³¹⁶

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sir,–

I hope Mr Every has not misunderstood me. ³¹⁷ There is, I believe, a prima facie case for regarding devotions to saints in the Church of England as a controversial question (see Jewel, Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, Pt. II, ch. xxviii, Homilies, Bk. II, Peril of Idolatry, Pt. III; ³¹⁸ Laud, Conference with Fisher, Sect. XXIII; ³¹⁹ Taylor, Dissuasive from Popery, Pt. I, ch. ii, sect. 8). ³²⁰ I merely claim that the controversy exists. I share Mr Every’s wish that it should cease. But there are two ways in which a controversy can cease: by being settled, or by gradual and imperceptible change of custom. I do not want any controversy to cease in the second sense.

I implore priests to remember what Aristotle tells us about unconscious revolution (, Politics 1303 a 22). ³²¹ When such unconscious revolution produces a result we like, we are all tempted to welcome it; thus I am tempted to welcome it when it leads to prayers for the dead. But then I see that the very same process can be used, and is used, to introduce modernist dilutions of the faith which, I am sure, Mr Every and I equally abominate. I conclude that a road so dangerous should never be trodden, whether the destination to which it seems to point is in itself good or bad. To write ‘No Thoroughfare’ over that road is my only purpose.

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE AND MOIRA SAYER (W):

Magdalen etc.

Aug 15th 1949

Dear Moira and George

There’s no disguising a Roofer, is there, by any device known to literary skill. So we may we well go straight–

Thank you very much for my lovely visit.

I enjoyed it very much. It was very nice–

but then it really was very nice to which this ingenuous style seems hardly adequate.

I came back with rather a bump (‘the first touch of the earth went nigh to kill’ ³²²–give the context of?) to a world where hills are smaller, beds harder, discourse duller: in fact generally more like that very over-rated arrangement called REAL LIFE by modern critics. (What’s there so laudable about being real? A microbe is real, a toothache is real, and the wilderness of houses by which I live surrounded is Real Estate). Well–it was all delightful and it is all past and I am very grateful both to you and to the Higher Authorities.

Meanwhile you dream of glaciers and incredible green valleys–how is George getting on with the Forms?

Valete! ³²³

‘Bless’d pair of Syrens’ ³²⁴

Yours obliged

Jack L.

TO MR SWIFT (P): TS

REF. 452/49

Magdalen College.

Oxford.

23rd. November 1949.

Dear Mr Swift

Thanks for your kind letter of the 21st:–Though it seems ungracious to refuse the compliment of a second request, I am afraid the answer must still be No; the situation this year is if anything less favourable than it was last, and I am overwhelmed with work.

And furthermore, the bucket has gone to the well too often; I must lie fallow for a considerable time before I again have anything to say.

With regret, and all best wishes for the success of the magazine.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

In 1958 Lewis agreed to become a member of the Commission to Revise the Psalter. The following letters regarding the Commission, part of a correspondence which began with Lewis’s reply to Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher of 14 November 1958, arrived too late to fit into the main body of letters. Lewis’s letters to various members of the Commission are found in the Church of England Record Centre, Bermondsey, London.³²⁵

TO DORIS ALLAN:³²⁶

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

3 July 1960

Dear Miss Allen

I must very regretfully ‘rat’ for the meeting at Selwyn. My wife’s present condition puts any idea of an absence from home out of the question. Please make my apologies to all.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MISS BARKER:³²⁷

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

27 June 1963

Dear Miss Barker

I very strongly approve the end Mr Eliot has in view, i.e. that Coverdale’s Psalter should continue to be available and, if possible, to be widely known. ³²⁸ I think the latter will hardly be achieved unless the edn. of Coverdale is very cheap and handy so that parishes which disliked ours would actually use it in church (with characteristic Anglican disobedience). How far this would be commercially possible I don’t know. Or wd. there be any chance of a CPB³²⁹ de luxe in addition to the ‘popular price’ one, which included both Coverdale’s Psalter and ours as some old edns. include the Paraphrases and Coverdale’s.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO DORIS ALLAN:³³⁰

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

7 August 1963

Dear Miss Allan

This is my final and official resignation from the Commission. The red light appeared a few weeks ago in the form of a prolonged coma and I am ordered to give up all my occupations. Please make my farewells to His Grace and all my fellow Commissioners and add my cordial thanks for the great kindness they have always shown me.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis