TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Jan 10th 1931
My dear Arthur,
I am writing this in the principle sitting room of the new house, which we call the common room, at my Mother’s desk which you remember in the drawing room at Little Lea. I wonder when last it was written at? The others are all out: I have come in from my walk–a beautiful pearl grey winter sky–and it is now half past three.
I was delighted to get your letter. Next term, which begins next week, promises to be not quite so hectic as last, so I will do my very level best to get back to our weekly interchange: but you know what my difficulties are in term time and you will not be surprised if I have to give up.
As regards my giving all the reasons but the right one for sending a book–I suppose the right one is friendship. But that can only be a reason for gifts in general: what I was explaining was my reasons for sending this particular book at this particular time. As regards the latter, I gave special reasons because I did not want it to be a Christmas present since you and I don’t give them. Your complaint therefore, my dear Sir, is as if a man said ‘We’d better lunch here, because it will be too late when we get to London, and they give you an excellent meal here for 2/6’ and you had replied ‘Ah but those are not the right reasons for eating lunch. The right reason is that the vital processes are attended by a wastage of the tissues and certain organic substances if introduced into the stomach have the power of repairing this wastage.’ In other words, for any action there is usually a. A general reason for doing it at all. b. A particular reason for selecting to do it at such and such a time and place and in such and such a way. We usually take a. for granted, and explain b. You are the sort of man who would try to persuade a girl to marry you by reading her all the general reasons for marriage out of the prayer book (‘procreation of children & prevention of sin’ etc) Again, the actual presence of a W.-C. cd. never to you be a reason for emptying your bladder: for you deal only in generalities: and as the general reason for this operation (i.e. the fact that the bladder is finite in size) always holds good, you on your principles, I suppose, think it a matter of indifference where and when it is performed. But come–my pen runs away with me (I am afraid I can never resist a ludicrous piece of logic) and I shall have wasted my whole letter on foolery.
The most important thing since I last wrote is a three days walking tour wh. Warnie and I took.1 We trained to Chepstow, breaking our journey at Gloucester for a couple of hours to see the cathedral. Got to Chepstow that evening & went out for a stroll after dinner. It was brilliant moonlight and freezing hard. Having reached a bridge over the Wye–the cliffs of the far bank shining in front of us and the little huddled town behind–we looked back and saw on our left, rising above a grassy sweep of hill, the ruins of a big castle.2 We came back with only a very faint hope of getting near it, when as if by magic a lane led us out of the main street into fields and up without hindrance to the great gate of the castle itself. The doors were shut, but through the chinks and under them a bright light seemed to be streaming ‘What is this?’ said I. ‘A witches’ Sabbath’ said he. We looked through the key hole and saw nothing but moonlight. The whole thing was an optical delusion: we had been in the shadow of the castle as we came up and the moonlight within, thro the cracks had somehow looked exactly like artificial light. We then walked all round it. The space is empty for a long way from the walls–just grass and a few seats–and you can walk in the bottom of the former moat wh. is very deep. I never saw so huge a castle. The circuit is not much smaller than the town hall at home: tower after tower, and battlements with ivy falling over them like a cascade, and even little wild bushes growing out of crannies, and above them all the roofless gables of what must have been the great hall, not much smaller than a cathedral. Imagine all this under a cloudless moon and the grass, stiff with frost, crunching under our feet.
Next day we walked to Monmouth, passing Tintern about eleven A.M. Have you seen it? It is an abbey practically intact except that the roof is gone, and the glass out of the windows, and the floor, instead of a pavement is a trim green lawn. Anything like the sweetness & peace of the long shafts of sunlight falling through the windows on this grass cannot be imagined. All churches should be roofless. A holier place I never saw.3 We lunched at St Briavels where there is another castle inhabited by the Aunt of a pupil of mine who is ‘worreyed’ by ‘the ghosts’, but won’t ‘do anything’ about them because she doesnt like ‘to be unkind’4 (This is the pupils account. A very queer fellow indeed: it was he who put me onto the End of the World). That night to Monmouth, after a lovely walk: not on roads more than half an hour all day. Next day to Ross, and then next to Hereford I can’t describe it all. We had two days of pure winter sunlight, and one of mist: the latter luckily was spent almost entirely in woods whose delicious feeling of confusion it served only to increase.
This was W’s first experience of a walking tour. I had been a little nervous as to whether he would really care for it, & whether his selfish habits wd. really accomodate themselves to the inevitable occasional difficulties. My fears however were quite unfounded. He has been with us all the month here and everyone says how greatly he is improved. He and I even went together to Church twice: and–will you believe it–he said to me in conversation that he was beginning to think the religious view of things was after all true. Mind you (like me, at first) he didn’t want it to be, nor like it: but his intellect is beginning to revolt from the semi-scientific assumptions we all grew up in, and the other explanation of the world seems to him daily more probable. Of course I have not had and probably never shall have any real talks on the heart of the subject with him. But it is delightful to feel the whole lot of us gradually beginning to move in that direction. It has done me good to be with him: because while his idea of the good is much lower than mine, he is in so many ways better than I am. I keep on crawling up to the heights & slipping back to the depths: he seems to do neither. There always have been these two types.
About Dennis:5 I doubt whether the kind of effects he aims at could be attained by a simpler style, tho’ an effect you and I prefer probably could be. Still, one mustn’t be dogmatic about simplicity. It may be our favourite style–but the pomps and sonorities are good in their different way none the less.
I have read Alec Forbes–good things in it, but not by any means a good book. The more I read his novels the more I rage at the tragedy of his being forced to write for money and thus diverted from his true sphere, so that we get only as much of the real Macdonald as he can smuggle in by the way. It is, I really think, a loss as irreparable as the early death of Keats.
Glad to hear you are at Tristram Shandy. What good company! Isn’t Uncle Toby, seriously and morally, one of the loveliest characters ever created.
Must stop now. When are you coming to see me? I have no chance of visiting you till the summer at earliest.
Yours
Jack
At present reading the Autobiography of Keat’s friend the painter Haydon6–quite good. W. has finished Lockhart’s Scott 7 & pronounces it excellent.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Jan 17, 1931
My dear Arthur,
I am much divided in my mind as to whether I should devote this after tea hour–the first free one of the day–to starting a new book or to writing you a letter. The fact that you are in my debt is strong for the first alternative: on the other hand when I hear from you during the week (as I hope I shall) I shall probably be too busy to reply. Then again I have been in a bad temper to day over trifles: and it is too much to face bedtime with the added knowledge of having neglected you as well–so here goes. Perhaps this sounds unflattering, and you may retort that you wd. rather not have a letter on these terms. However, I am sure you understand how a momentary disinclination to begin is quite compatible with a real interest in going on.
I have read a new Macdonald since I last wrote, which I think the very best of the novels. I would put it immediately below Phantastes, Lilith, the Fairy Tales, & the Diary of an Old Soul. It is called What’s Mine’s Mine.8 It has very little of the bad plot interest, and quite frankly subordinates story to doctrine. But such doctrine. Some of the conversations in this book I hope to re-read many times. The scene and the characters are Highland Celtic, as opposed to the Lowland Scots of most of the novels: highly idealised. Yet somehow they convince me. Or if they don’t quite convince me as real people, they differ from most ideal characters in this, that I wish they were real. A young chief of a decaying clan is the hero: and the chief contrast is between the clansmen and a vulgar rich Glasgow family who have come to live in the neighbourhood. These are, like most of Macdonald’s worshippers of Mammon, over-drawn. I venture to think that there was some moral, as well as some literary, weakness in this. I mean in characters like the baronet in Sir Gibbie etc. I observe that M. is constantly praying against anger
Keep me from wrath, let it seem never so right.
I wonder did he indulge (day-dreamily) an otherwise repressed fund of indignation by putting up in his novels bogeys to whom his heroes could make the stunning retorts and deliver the stunning blows which he himself neither could nor would deliver in real life. I am certain that this is morally as well as artistically dangerous and I’ll tell you why. The pleasure of anger–the gnawing attraction which makes one return again and again to its theme–lies, I believe, in the fact that one feels entirely righteous oneself only when one is angry. Then the other person is pure black, and you are pure white. But in real life sanity always returns to break the dream. In fiction you can put absolutely all the right, with no snags or reservations, on the side of the hero (with whom you identify yourself) and all the wrong on the side of the villain. You thus revel in unearned self-righteousness, which wd. be vicious even if it were earned.
Haven’t you noticed how people with a fixed hatred, say, of Germans or Bolshevists, resent anything wh. is pleaded in extenuation, however small, of their supposed crimes. The enemy must be unredeemed black. While all the time one does nothing and enjoys the feeling of perfect superiority over the faults one is never tempted to commit:
‘Compound for sins we are inclined to
By damning those we have no mind to.’9
I suppose that when one hears a tale of hideous cruelty anger is quite the wrong reaction, and merely wastes the energy that ought to go in a different direction: perhaps merely dulls the conscience wh., if it were awake, would ask us ‘Well? What are you doing about it? How much of your life have you spent in really combatting this? In helping to produce social conditions in which these sort of things will not occur!?
Term began yesterday. Yesterday afternoon & evening and this morning I spent in correcting papers: not only a hard but a depressing job, for ones pupils always seem to do worse than you expect. That, by the way, is the angle from which to understand (instead of being self-righteous about) the cruelty of schoolmasters. One can’t gauge the temptation to cruelty for a man who is trying to keep his wife and family on the profits of a decaying private school, and who sees the boys getting fewer & fewer scholarships each year and can never, even if honest, be quite sure that it is not the boys fault. ‘God help everyone’ as you say.
The night before last (my last night of Vac) we had the most glorious storm: trees plunging like terrified but tethered horses, leaves eddying, chimneys howling, and under all the lesser and lighter noises a great solid roar above the house. I lay in bed and revelled in it–tho’ it is partly spoiled for me by the fact that Minto hates it and hears in it only a sound of death and desolation. Odd, what different notes we different souls draw from the organ of nature. Some people hate the cry of an owl at night: I love it.
Oh, by the bye, our new maid says she has been kept awake at night this week by the squirrels! Asked what kind of noise they make she replied ‘I don’t know’–wh. I think is her way of saying ‘I can’t describe it.’ But what a lovely idea. And what a lovely sentence for the Witch of Endor–‘Please, Mr Lewis, the squirrels–’
You say Reid is reading his new book10 to ‘some of us’. Who are the others? Give him my kind regards.
I find this cold weather desperately trying to the bladder.
Yrs
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Feb 1st 1931
My dear Arthur,
This will probably be a short, and certainly a dull letter, for I am tired. Minto has been in bed all week with flu’ which means a good deal of bustle and extra work: I am recovering from a baddish cold myself and have had a pretty tough week. I was glad to get your letter.
I haven’t read Jeans’ book11 and it is unlikely I will–there are so many things I want to read more. One of the blessings of your life is that you ought to be able to read fairly well nearly everything that interests you. As a matter of fact–apart from time–I am not now greatly attracted to that kind of book: though you will remember that astronomy, fed on H. G. Wells’ romances, was almost my earliest love. I don’t know why it has not lasted, nor why it now interests me much less than I should expect. Partly I think, because one knows that all the really interesting things about other planets and systems can’t be found out: partly, too, I suspect that philosophy and religion (in a person of my limited range) rather take the shine out of curiosity about the material universe. It seems like having new bits of a curtain described to one, when one is all agog for hints of what lies behind the curtain. Now that I come to think of it, it is not quite true to say that I don’t feel any interest in these things now: rather they rouse a very intense, impatient interest for a very short time, which quite suddenly leaves one at once sated & dissatisfied. Mind I am not recomending this state of mind–only recording it.
I liked very much your account of the party who meet to hear Reid’s novel. It reminded me of Tristram Shandy–just such an ideally inappropriate conjunction of minds as he delights to bring together. Don’t you think the great beauty of that book is its picture of affection existing across unbridgeable gulfs of intellect? My Father & Uncle Toby never understand one another at all, and always love one another. It is the true picture of home life: far better than the modern nonsense in wh. affection (friendship is a different thing) is made to depend on mental affinities.
I am almost shocked to find from more than one passage that Geo. Macdonald hated Sterne. The coarseness apparently revolted him: but I cannot understand how he was not attracted by the overflowing goodness at the heart of the book. One must remember that the wayward Highland temperament, with its reserve and delicacy, may find coarseness a greater trial than our rougher Saxon grain.
I had a lovely ten minutes the afternoon before last in a wood of fir trees in the snow. The wood comes down to within a few yards of the top of a small cliff, from which direction the snow was coming. Just as the flakes got near this edge, some current of air caught them and whirled them upwards so that in the wood they were flying skywards as if the earth was snowing. I am often in this bit of wood, and have seen a great many fine winter sunsets–very pale, you know–through (first) the tall straight firs and then some twisted beechtrees which form the border of the wood. I have also had some fine hours of storm in it when all the trees were groaning and swaying.
I hope you won’t be disappointed by What’s Mine’s Mine. Of course it has not the fantastic charm of Phantastes: nor the plot excitement of Wilfrid Cumbermede. It is just the spiritual quality with some beautiful landscape–nothing more.
I wonder how your tea with the McNeils went off. Give them my love when next you meet.
The O.U.D.S.12 are doing Hassan13 this term and I think I shall go to it. I can’t remember whether we have talked of this play or not, but I imagine you know it. However badly the O.U.D.S. do it, at least they will not turn it into a Chu Chin Chow14 as (I am told) the London actors did. Which reminds me of Kismet15 (one of my early thrills) which reminds me of lying on the beech at Donaghadee reading to each other out of the Arabian Nights.
Do or die for it–I must manage to get over to Ireland in the summer and revisit some of the old haunts with you. Once more to spend one of our delightful banjo evenings with Jimmy Thompson–to have another of our old rousing evenings at the Hippodrome–once more to dance the Black Bottom at midnight with Sir Robert Ewart & the Witch of Endor–whether-her-mother-will-let-her-or-no–I’m too tired for anything but foolery. Bryson is to marry the Princess Elizabeth: poor chap, it is a pity he was castrated by the Vice Chancellor and Proctors last week for riding a bicycle in St Mary’s. I suppose you have heard about Warnie’s peerage–for gallantry during the recent manoeuvres. I have grown a beard–Good night
Yrs
Jack
P.S. In that fir wood I suddenly got a terrific return the other day of my earliest Wagner mood–the purely Nibelung, Mime, mood before the Valkyries rose on my horizon. You know–very earthy, and smith-y, and Teutonic. How inexhaustible these things are. You think you have done with a thing and–whoop!–it’s all back again, strong as ever.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Feb 23rd 1931
My dear Arthur,
I was glad to hear from you again, despite the fact that your letter, specially towards the end, appears to have been written in a state of intoxication.
I was almost relieved to hear that you shared my views of What’s Mine’s Mine. Yes, you are right in saying that it is good not despite, but because of, its preaching–or rather (preaching is a bad word) its spiritual knowledge. So many cleverer writers strike one as quite childish after Macdonald: they seem not even to have begun to understand so many things.
On Saturday I went to the matinee of Flecker’s Hassan done by the O.U.D.S. I can’t remember whether you saw it in London, but I suppose you read it. It was not very well done, but well enough for me: indeed to see it really well acted would be too much for me. In reading it the cruelty is just about balanced by the extreme beauty of the lyrics and much of the dialogue, so that the total effect, tho’ sinister, like a too-bright dream which is sure to turn into nightmare before the end, yet is bearable. On the stage, where one has less time to dwell on the cadence or suggestion of the individual words, the cruelty is unendurable. Warnie went out half way through. I felt quite sick but thought it almost a duty <for one afflicted in my way to remain, saying to myself ‘Oh you like cruelty do you? Well now stew in it!’>–the same principle on which one trains a puppy to be clean–‘rub their noses in it’. It has haunted me ever since.
On its merits as a work of art I am very undecided. The intense effect which it produces is not, in itself, proof of greatness, for it is easy to produce an effect by the suggestion of physical pain: and such an effect, reaching the spectator through his nerves rather than his imagination, is perhaps as much outside art in one direction, as pornography is in another. On the other hand, the whole of the ending seems to me almost great. You remember how Ishak finds Hassan fainting after being compelled to witness the torture of the lovers, and how, when Hassan begins to stammer out some of the horrible details, Ishak says ‘You are still full of devils. Wake up! STOP DREAMING!!’16–and that, flashing ones mind back to what Pervaneh says in the Diwan scene about this world’s being an illusion,17 and leading straight on to the caravan for Samarkand–the broad moonlit desert stretching away and swallowing up the nightmare city in its clean solitude–all that does give one the true tragic feeling of having been brought, thro horrors, right out of the ordinary illusion of life into some higher world. Another thing that is good is the scene in which all the adventures begin–where they are taken up in the basket into the house with no doors whence they heard the sounds of dancing. This is the only place which strikes the note of the real Arabian nights–the midnight possibilities of an Eastern city full of magicians. It is a pity he didn’t work it out on those lines. As it stands it is too morbid: and one sees Flecker in places not feeling it as tragic at all but licking his lips (you remember his horrible face–it is the frontispiece of the Poems) 18 and gloating. Still, his powers were extraordinary and one is sorry that he didn’t live to grow out of consumption and Parnassianism and decadence: he would have been a great writer in the end I believe.
As a contrast to my nightmare afternoon at the theatre I spent most of Sunday with W. and Dorothea Vaughan19 (did you meet her?) digging holes for planting trees for what W. calls ‘the Kilns Afforestation Scheme’. A lovely afternoon of early spring sunlight–the distance very pale blue, primroses out, and birds trilling and chuckling in abundance. All the better for the contrast with Hassan.
Did I tell you I was reading Ruskin’s Praeterita20 i.e. his autobiography? Contains an account of his boyhood which wd. particularly interest you, R’s mother having had a great deal in common with your father. The good thing about it is that while not disguising the narrowness & pride at all, the final impression he leaves with you is one of peace & homeliness: the dateless, timeless peace of childhood in a really regular household. Later on there is some of the best description of travel wh. I have ever read.
I have had a baddish cold but am otherwise well. Any sign of the new people moving into Little Lea? How strange it will be to you. Try to reply in less time than last!
Yours
Jack
I was just going to put
C. S. Lewis again
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns,
Kiln Road,
Headington Quarry,
Headington, Oxford
Sunday, March 29th 1931
My dear Arthur,
I am afraid I am badly behind hand with this letter. I am afraid I cannot honestly plead that I have been too busy to write. The trouble is rather that when once the end of term has set me free from my compulsory work, I am so hungry for my real, private work,21 that I grudge every moment from my books. This is a bad, selfish reason for not writing and I only give it because it happens to be true.
By the bye–I spoke some time ago about coming to visit you for a week in the summer, and you suggested fixing a date. If you still want to have me, how would the second or third week in August do? I should like it because I shall have finished my examining then wh. usually leaves me rather knocked up, and a holiday with you would be just the right tonic. Let me know how it would suit you. If this won’t do, I should then–as a second choice–take my week with you as a preparation for examining instead of a cure, and come about the second week of July. But of course it is nicer to take the medicine first and the sweet after, than vice-versa. I try not to spoil this visit by thinking too much about it, but every now and then it comes over me with a delicious whiff of anticipation.
The most interesting thing that has happened to me since I last wrote is reading War and Peace22–at least I am now in the middle of the 4th and last volume so I think, bar accidents, I am pretty sure to finish it. It has completely changed my view of novels.
Hitherto I had always looked on them as rather a dangerous form–I mean dangerous to the health of literature as a whole. I thought that the strong ‘narrative lust’–the passionate itch to ‘see what happened in the end’–which novels aroused, necessarily injured the taste for other, better, but less irresistible, forms of literary pleasure: and that the growth of novel reading largely explained the deplorable division of readers into low-brow and high-brow–the low being simply those who had learned to expect from books this ‘narrative lust’, from the time they began to read, and who had thus destroyed in advance their possible taste for better things. I also thought that the intense desire which novels rouse in us for the ‘happiness’ of the chief characters (no one feels that way about Hamlet or Othello) and the selfishness with which this happiness is concerned, were thoroughly bad (I mean, if the hero and heroine marry, that is felt to be a happy ending, tho every one else in the story is left miserable: if they don’t that is an unhappy ending, tho it may mean a much greater good in some other way). Of course I knew there were tragic novels like Hardy’s–but somehow they were quite on a different plane from real tragedies.
Tolstoy, in this book, has changed all that. I have felt everywhere–in a sense–you will know what I mean–that sublime indifference to the life or death, success or failure, of the chief characters, which is not a blank indifference at all, but almost like submission to the will of God. Then the variety of it. The war parts are just the best descriptions of war ever written: all the modern war books are milk and water to this: then the rural parts–lovely pictures of village life and of religious festivals in wh. the relations between the peasants and the nobles almost make you forgive feudalism: the society parts, in which I was astonished to find so much humour–there is a great hostess who always separates two guests when she sees them getting really interested in conversation, who is almost a Jane Austen character. There are love-passages that have the same sort of intoxicating quality you get in Meredith: and passages about soldiers chatting over fires which remind one of Patsy Macan: and a drive in a sledge by moonlight which is better than Hans Andersen. And behind all these, and uniting them, is the profound, religious conception of life and history wh. is beyond J. Stephens and Andersen, and beside which Meredith’s worldly wisdom–well just stinks, there’s no other word.
I go on writing all this because my pen runs away with me: meanwhile perhaps you have read the book long ago and even advised me to read it! If you have not, I strongly advise you to try it. Its length, which deters some people, will not frighten you: you will only rejoice, when the right time comes,–say after tea some day next autumn when fires are still a novelty–at that old, delicious feeling of embarkation on a long voyage, which one seldom gets now. For it takes a book nearly as long as War and Peace to seem as long now as a Scott did in boyhood.
And talking of boyhood–I recently re-read (being out-of-sorts) both She and the sequel Ayesha,23 and found the story good in both: what troubles one is the v. silly talk put into She’s mouth, which is meant to be profound. You feel that she has made very ill use of her opportunities. In re-reading them I re-visited one of the very few parts of my past which is not associated with you–tho’ if I remember rightly we once discussed together the pictures in my editn. of Ayesha.
About Flecker’s face–I don’t think it is just sensuality that’s the trouble. There is a sort of slyness and knowingness, tipping-the-wink-ness with it. Some sensuality one pities: other kinds one admires–full, Pagan magnificence. But there is a kind at once furtive and self-satisfied, at once secret and defiant that seems peculiar to very highly educated people in very big cities, which makes me shudder. You know–the atmosphere of the whispered confidence and the leer–one eye always watching to see how you take it and the whole face ready, at a moment’s notice, either to take you into full conspiratorial confidence (if the man sees you like it) or else to turn up his nose and sneer at you (if you don’t). In Barfield’s long poem it is well described: the man who tells stories
Purring with female, strutting in the puddle
Of his great naughtiness.24
We had a fine burst of spring last week and I have sat and worked in the garden: one morning I saw a rabbit come out and wash its face not fifteen yards away from me. To-day I was only just warm enough while sawing wood in the shed in a gale that sent the sawdust whirling round me and covered Mr Papworth like snow.
You wd. have been so amused if you’d been here last week end. Mrs Armitage is a sort of blend of Kelsie and Tchanie and often comes to call. I had had a pupil to tea and took him out for a walk after. Coming back at 7 I found Mrs A. still there, seated on the same sofa with Warnie, and conducting a feverish conversation with him about married life, women, and kindred subjects, and under the impression (she is a widow) that she was making great headway. I wish she cd. have seen W., a few minutes later when she had left (for of course my return broke up the party), coming out of the front door into the twilit garden, drawing his hand across his brow, and remarking with great solemnity ‘I’m going down to “the Checkers” to have a LARGE whisky and soda.’
Perhaps this doesn’t sound funny as I tell it: at the time it reminded me so of the lady and the man (both of whose names I’ve forgotten) in your ‘Trees’. Let me hear soon. How delightful our old hills will be in a week or two now.
Yrs
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns,
Kiln Rd.,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford. [26? April 1931]
My dear Arthur,
No time for a proper letter. Minto is laid up with pleurisy. She is past the worst and I hope all is now on the right path: but tho’ our anxiety is less, of course we are still very busy and tired. I had hoped to be giving you an account of my usual spring walking tour, but of course that’s off.
I don’t think I shall be able to come for more than a week in the summer–and in a way, wouldn’t it be rather a waste to spend any time of our precious holiday except in the old haunts? You can hardly imagine how I pine for our wood, and our new wood, and the shepherds hut, and Divis. I can hardly look forward to it without dancing.
I don’t think Barton25 is insincere–at any rate as far as you are concerned. Maureen met him last summer while staying with her uncle26 in Cavan and said ‘He seemed to think a great deal of Arthur.’ The worst of a Parson’s life is that the duty of being pleasant to people is bound to give a certain taint of insincerity to the manner.
I see this is too late for your address.27If they don’t forward it, let me know at once.
Yrs
Jack
P.S. I do hope you will come and see us on your way back. I’m dying to show you some of my new haunts.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns,
Kiln Rd.,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
May 18th (Monday) [1931]
My dear A,
Come on the day you suggest rather than not coming at all–a thousand times rather, but this week is a bad one. I am staying out here recovering from flu: therefore I can’t have you in College. We are threatened with two week end visitors: therefore I can’t have you here. So there is hardly any week when I should miss so much of your society–specially those odd evening hours which are good for talking. What I should like would be for you to come on Monday next–if you can amuse yourself in London till then. In that case we could be in college together.
I shall not book the room without hearing from you again. I am longing to see you. Reply at once.
Yours
Jack
P.S. Yes I have read Wm. Law28–a v. severe but wholesome draught! It may save trouble if you bring a dinner jacket, but not absolutely essential. (But a razor and clean handkerchief you must bring)
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns,
Kiln Rd.,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
Wednesday. [20 May 1931]
My dear Arthur,
I have just got your letter and am rather disappointed. Do you mean that you may possibly not come at all? I should be very sorry if that were so. At the same time I am acutely conscious that I have not much to offer in my busy life and chaotic days to such a lover of tranquility as you: and I certainly don’t wish to press a visit on you as a duty. All the same–(I don’t think this is making a duty of it) I would remind you that there is a good case for coming to see me even at the cost of some discomfort; because it is important to the continuance of a friendship that each should have some experience of the other’s life. I have always specially prized those few pleasant walks we had last time you were here, on that ground. Our sitting in the little thicket by that stream is an important addition to our stock of memories shared. And now that I am in quite new surroundings I shall never feel at ease till you have shared them with me. How can I write to you about places you have never seen?
As to your doubt whether you can stay in London till Monday–I quite realise that it is a bore to you just to mark time there for my convenience, when your mind is beginning to turn pleasantly towards books and home. You will admit that I (on whom your letter fell without warning very late in the day) could hardly have made plans to avoid this. And then, is there not perhaps a special reasonableness in asking you to do this? I mean being one of the very, very few who can live without a profession and having therefore so few demands on your time, ought you not to yield the more readily to such rare demands as do turn up?
As to staying in College, I take it the real objection is the early rising. I can offer you breakfast at 8.45; not later, for I have a pupil at 9 most mornings. But you will remember that last time, after trying it, you became a complete convert and swore always to be an early bird in future–so little terrible did it prove in actual practice. Of course you must please yourself: but I feel v. strongly that to spend our evenings hanging about in public rooms or in a bedroom at a hotel will be as it always has been, a miserable makeshift. Surely last time was much the most successful time we’ve had? Surely our snug evenings together (you can go to bed as early as you like) are worth having. The other arrangement is not only inconvenient, but (I find) rather depressing. Conversation does not flow in those conditions, and neither of us is himself.
Well, I have trotted out all my arguments. I wish I could believe they wd. all seem as strong to you as to me: but, as I say, I haven’t much to offer. I can only moralise and plead the claims of friendship: but perhaps these will weigh as heavily with you as the more solid claims of comfort and convenience wd. weigh with a more selfish man. I await your reply eagerly
Yrs
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[Swiss Cottage, 16 Buckland Crescent,
London]
26th(?) June 1931
My dear Arthur,
My conscience accuses me of laziness. I have done nothing since term ended but sit in deck chairs in the shade, bathe twice a day in the pond, and talk. A little pottering about with Donne and Beowulf which I have done hardly deserves the name of work. The truth is that I am not only lazy but tired. I still can’t walk a mile without aching legs. Whether I can write a page without aching hand is an experiment now to be tried. I am writing this in London where I am spending a day or two with Barfield–splendid talks and reading of Dante, but of course our nights tend to be late so that perhaps it is not a very judicious kind of holiday. However, it is short.
During this spell of hot weather the Kilns has been delightful. I know the pond looks dirty, but as a matter of fact one comes out perfectly clean. I wish you could join me as I board the punt in the before-breakfast solitude and push out from under the dark shadow of the trees onto the full glare of the open water, usually sending the moor hens and their chicks scudding away into the reeds, half flying and half swimming, with a delicious flurry of silver drops. Then I tie up to the projecting stump in the middle and dive off the stern of the punt. There is one thing in which fresh water bathing surpasses the sea–the beauty of broken ground and trees and flowers seen from an unfamiliar angle as you swim.
Thanks for your account of the fox. I don’t see why a fox shouldn’t be as happy as a dog in captivity if he is properly treated–but I certainly shudder for one whose owners contemplate such drastic dental treatment!
No–I didn’t feel the earthquake and am rather sorry to have missed what must have been (and what we hope will remain) so rare a sensation.
You cannot have enjoyed your time in Oxford more than I did–it seemed to me quite one of the best times we have ever had together. Our stroll on the roof, our window seat at the bonfire, our good long talks on one or two evenings, are still in my mind–though of course memory has not yet done its real work in transfiguring them.
It is a long time since I read Peacock:29 I remember him as having something of the whimsical charm of Lewis Carroll’s minor works, and have always meant to go back to him.
Warton’s History of Poetry30 marks the beginning of our modern interest in mediaeval literature. Being pioneer work, it is quite unreliable and some of the theories he develops are grotesque: but what it lacks in accuracy it amply makes up in enthusiasm. He is discovering all the charm of the old writers for the first time, and infects you with his feeling, and sends you back to the feelings you had yourself as a boy. In fact, though not a great authority, it is a great book: and its very plentiful quotations will supply you with thousands of lines of old poetry which you will probably never meet elsewhere. If it is a nice edition it would make a really sound purchase for your library: and, besides being a great, it is an eminently ‘dippable’ book.
I am reading Inge’s ‘Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion’31 (Longmans)–one of the best books of the kind I have yet struck.
I am at Hampstead which gives me quite a new idea of the suburbs of London. There is a little quiet court of Georgian houses here which might come out of any beautiful English country town–besides immense views from the Heath. Distant ‘townscapes’ have a peculiar dreamy beauty of their own which makes one feel it ungrateful to blame them for not being landscapes.
Forgive me for a short letter–even this much has been done with some effort. I hope I shall wake up properly in a week or so.
Yours
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
26th [July 1931]
My dear Arthur,
I am in the midst of the annual examining. I propose to cross to Ireland on Saturday night August the 8th and stay with you till Saturday morning August 15th when I will join W. for breakfast on the Liverpool boat. If I can possibly get away from Cambridge on the Friday I will do so, but it is not likely. If any of these arrangements don’t suit please let me have a line at once. I am looking forward to it almost unbearably!
Yours
Jack
P.S. In the event of a hitch about W’s times can I come the following week instead? i.e. from the 15th.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns
30? July 1931]
My dear Arthur,
Why do you do (or rather leave undone) these things? Owing to a variety of circumstances I now choose the second of the two periods you offer in your wire–i.e. from the 18th. That will be Tuesday and I shall come to you in the evening at about 9. The advantage of the second period is that I can give you a full week (Perhaps this may not seem advantageous to you?)
I shall turn up (D.V) on that evening unless I hear to the contrary–unless you’d like to come in and fetch me from the Liverpool boat where I shall be seeing W. off.
Yours
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Queen’s College,
Cambridge.
Aug 6th [1931]
My dear Arthur,
I have your letter of the second August. I don’t quite understand, as in my wire I said the 2nd period–19th–26th was preferred (or didn’t I?) At any rate I now intend to come to Bernagh on the evening of the 20th (Thursday) and stay till the 27 (following Thursday). If you cared to come in and meet me at the Liverpool boat (where I shall be seeing W. off) at about 8 and bring me out, that would be admirable. Have you and I ever brought off a scheme without these intense complications. However I have some excuse. I now shall arrive on the 20th whatever you say, so there’s no good trying to prevent me!
I am here examining but having quite a good time–a lot of nice people, and I think this College the most beautiful in either University
Yours
C.S.L.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Golf Hotel,
Castlerock,
Co. Derry.32
Aug. 19th [1931]
My dear Arthur,
Thanks for letter. W. says he would love to come and dine on Thursday night. We want, for sentimental reasons, to make the railway journey from town to Sydenham, so if you wd. meet us at Sydenham that would be capital. As I don’t know the exact times of the rail motors I will ring you up from the Co. Down Ry. station at about 6.45 to 7. Isn’t this going to be great! I still feel a great fear of something happening to prevent it: perhaps the world will end before to-morrow night!
Yours
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Sept 5th 1931
My dear Arthur,
How long ago it seems since I left you. I had a delightful evening, though tinged with melancholy, on the Liverpool boat, watching first the gantries and then the Down coast slipping past and picking out, more by imagination than sight, our favourite woods. I did not go to bed till we were off the Copelands. I felt and still feel that I was returning from one of the very best holidays I have ever had. Please thank your Mother (who was in one sense my hostess) and tell her how I enjoyed myself. I probably enjoyed the time more than you did, for the hills cannot have quite the same feeling for you who have never left them. What sticks in my mind most of all is the walk on which we visited Mrs McNeil. We were both in exactly the right mood. In another kind I have very fine memories of Croob and our session on top of it: as also of our homely and familiar evenings.
Meanwhile, as tangible mementoes of your almost excessive hospitality I have Hooker33 and Taylor.34 I did not thank you nearly enough for them at the time. The Taylor has been to the binders and returned very neatly mended yesterday. I started him after church this morning. He is severe and has little of the joyous side of religion in him: and some of his incentives (e.g. where he reminds you that there will be different degrees of glory in Heaven and would have you aim at getting as high a degree as possible) seem to me unspiritual or at least highly dangerous. But his painstaking, practical attitude has the charm of an old family doctor: beautifully homely and sincere. I have dipped into Hooker again and reread some of my favourite passages.
On Thursday W. motored me over to Bulford (his station) on Salisbury plain, where he wanted to get some of his things, and we visited the village of Boscombe where Hooker was vicar and saw (from without) the parsonage in which he wrote most of his book. The church is the smallest one I have ever been in and contains some of the old square pews. It is very primitive and lit by oil lamps and candles. It has not much real architectural beauty, but being honestly and unaffectedly built and now having the charm of antiquity it is very pleasant. I love these little old parish churches more and more: even the stuffiness delights me, and a sort of cosiness and friendliness in which the dead under their brasses seem to share. It all speaks of a life in which everyone knew every one else, and of real neighbourliness. What a nice word neighbour is–don’t you like ‘Well, neighbour So-and-So’ in Bunyan.35 I forget whether you know Salisbury plain or not? I love it–all chalky downs and little beech woods and fir woods: a most excellent air.
As for reading–in the train I bought and read Yeats-Brown’s ‘Bengal Lancer’.36 Unless you remember the reviews of it (which were what made me buy it) you will wonder at my opening a book with such a title. It is the autobiography of a man who began as an ordinary Cavalry officer in the Indian army and ended up by becoming a Yogi–a mystic on the Hindu pattern. A strange story and in its latter stages told with real beauty. One can’t help feeling that if he had been more educated he could have found what he wanted in traditions more hereditary to him than that of the Yogis–but judge not.
I have also been studying the Winters Tale. You remember the last scene–where Hermione is introduced as a statue and then comes to life.37 Hitherto I had thought it rather silly: this time, seeing that the absurdity of the plot doesn’t matter, and is merely the scaffolding whereby Shakespeare (probably unconsciously) is able to give us an image of the whole idea of resurrection, I was simply overwhelmed. You will say that I am here doing to Shakespeare just what I did to Macdonald over Wilfrid Cumbermede. Perhaps I am. I must confess that more and more the value of plays and novels becomes for me dependent on the moments when, by whatever artifice, they succeed in expressing the great myths.
This afternoon W. and I have been at work in the wood clipping the undergrowth, he with shears and I with a sickle. I hope you can see the whole scene–the light slanting through the fir trees, the long elder branches swaying and then swooping down with a rustle of leaves, the click-click of the shears, and the heavy odour of crushed vegetation. What pleasures there are in the world. I seem to have more than anyone could deserve–a fortnight ago with you on our own hills, and now woodcutting on a fine autumn day in this delightful place.
Minto is well and sends her love. I met Baxter, the professor of English at Belfast,38 last night. The only common acquaintance we discovered was–Dr Leslie!!
Yours
Jack
Jack had given the smaller of his rooms at Magdalen to Warnie, who had now turned it into a kind of new ‘little end room’. The family papers were there, and Warnie was putting them in order, and typing them out, with editorial notes, on his little Royal typewriter. ‘It is one of the most engrossing tasks I have ever undertaken,’ he wrote in his diary of 9 January 1931, ‘and I look forward with more eagerness than ever to my days of retirement in order to finish it’ (BF, p. 75). This massive task, undertaken over a number of years, would result in the 11 volumes of ‘Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family 1850–1930’. About the middle of the year Warnie re-enlisted for a second tour of duty in China so he could retire earlier than originally planned. He went on embarkation leave on 26 August, and sailed for China on 9 October, not to return home until 14 December 1932.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Sept 22nd /31
My dear Arthur,
Thanks for your letter of the 11th. I couldn’t write to you last Sunday because I had a week end guest–a man called Dyson39 who teaches English at Reading University. I meet him I suppose about four or five times a year and am beginning to regard him as one of my friends of the 2nd class–i.e. not in the same rank as yourself or Barfield, but on a level with Tolkien or Macfarlane.
He stayed the night with me in College–I sleeping in in order to be able to talk far into the night as one cd. hardly do out here. Tolkien came too, and did not leave till 3 in the morning: and after seeing him out by the little postern on Magdalen bridge Dyson and I found still more to say to one another, strolling up and down the cloister of New Building, so that we did not get to bed till 4. It was really a memorable talk. We began (in Addison’s walk just after dinner) on metaphor and myth–interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would. We continued (in my room) on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot: then discussed the difference between love and friendship–then finally drifted back to poetry and books.40
On Sunday he came out here for lunch and Maureen and Minto and I (and Tykes) all motored him to Reading–a very delightful drive with some lovely villages, and the autumn colours are here now.
I am so glad you have really enjoyed a Morris again. I had the same feeling about it as you, in a way, with this proviso–that I don’t think Morris was conscious of the meaning either here or in any of his works, except Love is Enough where the flame actually breaks through the smoke so to speak. I feel more and more that Morris has taught me things he did not understand himself. These hauntingly beautiful lands which somehow never satisfy,–this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality–these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris’s world that desire cannot be satisfied.
The Macdonald conception of death41–or, to speak more correctly, St Paul’s42–is really the answer to Morris: but I don’t think I should have understood it without going through Morris. He is an unwilling witness to the truth. He shows you just how far you can go without knowing God, and that is far enough to force you (tho’ not poor Morris himself) to go further. If ever you feel inclined to relapse into the mundane point of view–to feel that your book and pipe and chair are enough for happiness–it only needs a page or two of Morris to sting you wide awake into uncontrollable longing and to make you feel that everything is worthless except the hope of finding one of his countries. But if you read any of his romances through you will find the country dull before the end. All he has done is to rouse the desire: but so strongly that you must find the real satisfaction. And then you realise that death is at the root of the whole matter, and why he chose the subject of the Earthly Paradise, and how the true solution is one he never saw.
I have finished the Taylor, and enjoyed it much from the purely literary point of view. As a religious writer I put him low and still think as I did when I last wrote.
I have been studying Hamlet very intensively, and never enjoyed it more. I have been reading all the innumerable theories about him, and don’t despise that sort of thing in the least: but each time I turn back to the play itself I am more delighted than ever with the mere atmosphere of it–an atmosphere hard to describe and made up equally of the prevalent sense of death, solitude, & horror and of the extraordinary graciousness and lovableness of H. himself.43 Have you read it at all lately? If not, do: and just surrender yourself to the magic, regarding it as a poem or a romance.
I don’t think I left any pyjamas at Bernagh, but I’m afraid I want you to send me something else, W. is editing (i.e. arranging and typing) all the letters we brought from home (don’t mention this to any one) so as to give a continuous history of the family.44 We have just got to 1915 and it is maddening to have all my Bookham letters to my father (wh. tell nothing) and to know that all my Bookham letters to you are eating their heads off at Bernagh. Also, once I had them in type, I could renew those glorious years whenever I read them. Would it be a great bother to you to let me have the lot. If you want, you can have them back when they have been edited: and I promise faithfully that he will see nothing wh. gives you away in any respect, for I will go through them all first by myself. If you wd. let me have them as soon as possible and tell me what I owe you for registered postage, I shd. be very much obliged.
It is perfect autumn here–splashes of yellow on every other tree and delicious smells. We have been up in the wood clipping all afternoon.
I think I know the walk at the back of Stormont and may have done it oftener than you. This is a bad business about the rum. Give my love to your Mother. Tell Forrest I ask every one I meet about the human tendency to represent oneself as a daring sinner (untruly) and have met no one yet who doesn’t regard it as being too obvious to be worth talking about
Yrs
Jack
About a week after the above letter was written, Monday 28 September, Warnie took Jack to Whipsnade Zoo in the sidecar of his motorbike, and it was during this outing that Jack took the final step in his conversion. ‘As I drew near the conclusion,’ he wrote in the last chapter of SBJ,
I felt a resistance almost as strong as my previous resistance to Theism. As strong, but short-lived, for I understood it better. Every step I had taken, from the Absolute to ‘Spirit’ to ‘God’, had been a step towards the more concrete, the more imminent, the more compulsive…I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. ‘Emotional’ is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Oct. 1st /31
My dear Arthur,
Very many thanks for the letter and enclosure that arrived this morning. Now, as to their return. I confess that I had not supposed you often read them, and had in view merely an ultimate return when W. had finished his editing, that is, in about 4 years’ time. If however you want them at once, they are of course your property and will be returned by registered post whenever you wish. I shall follow absolutely your directions. In the meantime you can feel quite confident about their safe keeping. I have spent this morning on them and established a pretty good order for all except about eight. (How maddening my habit of not dating them now becomes! And how ridiculous the arguments by wh. I defended it!)
All the ones that deal with what we used to call ‘It’ I am suppressing and will return to you in a day or two. I am surprised to find what a very large percentage of the whole they are. I am now inclined to agree with you in not regretting that we confided in each other even on this subject, because it has done no harm in the long run–and how could young adolescents really be friends without it? At the same time, the letters give away some of your secrets as well as mine: and I do not wish to recall things of that sort to W’s mind, so that in every way they had better be kept out of the final collection. I am also sending back some others in which my replies to you imply that you have said foolish things–you will see what I mean when I return them. Finally, I am suppressing (i.e. sending back at once and keeping from W.–that is what the word ‘suppressing’ means throughout) all letters that refer to my pretended assignation with the Belgian.45 I am not at all sure that if J. Taylor were at my elbow he would not tell me that my repentance for that folly was incomplete if I did not submit to the ‘mortification’ of having them typed and laid open to posterity. I hope, however, this is not really necessary in the case of a sin so old and (I hope) so fully abandoned.
Thanks for all you say about the letters in general. You see mine with too friendly eyes. To me, as I re-read them, the most striking thing is their egotism: sometimes in the form of priggery, intellectual and even social: often in the form of downright affectation (I seem to be posturing and showing off in every letter): and always in the form of complete absorption in ourselves. I have you to thank that it was at least ‘ourselves’ and not wholly ‘myself’. I can now honestly say that I envy you the much more artless letters you were writing me in those days: they all had at least the grace of humility and of affection. How ironical that the very things wh. I was proud of in my letters then should make the reading of them a humiliation to me now!
Don’t suppose from this that I have not enjoyed the other aspect of them–the glorious memories they call up. I think I have got over wishing for the past back again. I look at it this way. The delights of those days were given to lure us into the world of the Spirit, as sexual rapture is there to lead to offspring and family life. They were nuptial ardours. To ask that they should return, or should remain is like wishing to prolong the honeymoon at an age when a man should rather be interested in the careers of his growing sons. They have done their work, those days and led on to better things. All the ‘homeliness’ (wh. was your chief lesson to me) was the introduction to the Christian virtue of charity or love. I sometimes manage now to get into a state in wh. I think of all my enemies and can honestly say that I find something lovable (even if it is only an oddity) in them all: and your conception of ‘homeliness’ is largely the route by wh. I have reached this. On the other hand, all the ‘strangeness’ (wh. was my lesson to you) has turned out to be only the first step in far deeper mysteries.
How deep I am just now beginning to see: for I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ–in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.
I am so glad you liked the Seasons.46 I agree with you that some parts are frankly boring, and some (e.g. the bathing episode in Summer) are in a false taste. I don’t myself think that any of it is as good as the opening of The Castle of Indolence: the second canto everyone gives up as hopeless. It is delightful to hear of your thinking of having another try at Spenser. I have read nothing that would interest you since my last letter and am engaged on the Poetical Works of Skelton47 (XVIth century)–a very bad poet except for the half dozen good things I knew already.
W. and I are busy still clearing the undergrowth in the top wood. This place gets more beautiful every day at present, with yellow leaves and crimson leaves and a more and more autumnal smell. I do hope you will some time make an opportunity of visiting it in winter.
Did it strike you in reading those letters how completely both of us were wrong in most of our controversies, or rather in the great standing controversy about ‘sentiment’ wh. was the root of most of our quarrels? If anyone had said ‘There is good feeling and bad: you can’t have too much of the first, and you can’t have too little of the second’ it wd. have blown the gaff on the whole argument. But we blundered along–my indiscriminate hardness only provoking you into a more profound self pity (wh. is the root of all bad sentiment) and that bad sentiment in return making me harder and more willing to hurt.
Term begins next Friday.
Yours
Jack
P.S. I have just finished The Epistle to the Romans, the first Pauline epistle I have ever seriously read through. It contains many difficult and some horrible things, but the essential idea of Death (the Macdonald idea) is there alright. What I meant about the Earthly Paradise was simply that the whole story turns on a number of people setting out to look for a country where you don’t die.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Oct. 18th 1931
My dear Arthur,
I must have expressed myself rather confusedly about the letters. When I asked you for them I did not think that you would want them back except ‘ultimately’–that is, the question of time was not seriously in my mind at all. Besides this, as people usually do in such circumstances, I was half consciously fooling myself about the length of time W. had still here. You know how ‘He’s not going just yet’ leads one to plan and feel as if there was a month more when there is really 10 days. Then came your letter, showing your wish (a very flattering one to me) to have the letters back quite soon: and on top of that the fact (now unconcealable) that W. was actually packing and wd. be off in a day to two. It was therefore impossible that he should finish his editing of the family letters and get them all typed before he went: if I had known that you wanted them back soon, and if I had faced the real date of his departure, I would not have raised the question of the letters with you till after his return, 3 years hence. That indeed is what I ought to have done.
As things are, the four years I mentioned consist of 1 year’s editing preceded by 3 years during wh. W. will be in China and the letters will be lying neatly in a drawer–safe, but idle. You see what a fool I have made of myself! The matter is now entirely in your hands, for of course they are your property not mine. If you want them seriously I will send them back: if you don’t, they will be perfectly safe where they are, and safer indeed without the risk of a second postal journey. Still, the next move is to you and I will obey any orders you give.
This has filled up nearly a page so that I don’t know whether I should now start to try and explain what I meant about Christianity. For one thing, reading your reply, I began to feel that perhaps I had said too much in my previous letter, that perhaps I was not nearly as clear on the subject as I had led you to think. But I certainly have moved abit, even if it turns out to be a less bit than I thought.
What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ ‘saved’ or ‘opened salvation to’ the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary: one could see from ordinary experience how sin (e.g. the case of a drunkard) could get a man to such a point that he was bound to reach Hell (i.e. complete degradation and misery) in this life unless something quite beyond mere natural help or effort stepped in. And I could well imagine a whole world being in the same state and similarly in need of miracle. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now–except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (‘propitiation’–‘sacrifice’–‘the blood of the Lamb’)–expressions wh. I cd. only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.
Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself (cf. the quotation opposite the title page of Dymer) 48 I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened.
No time for more now. I hope to have some literary chat in my next letter.
Yours
Jack