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By the death of Charles Williams in 1945 the world sustained the loss of a genuinely original mind. Like many others in this rare kind, he developed slowly, his early work being somewhat uneven, tentative and derivative; but from the moment that he achieved his characteristic style and outlook he set his own stamp upon everything that he touched. There is scarcely a paragraph in his mature work that could conceivably have been written by anybody else, and it is already not hard to recognise, among the younger generation of writers and candidates for the priesthood, those who passed through his hands as students in London and Oxford.

Williams was original—not only in the sense that he was a source, from which others received the waters of truth, but also in the sense that his truth, however strange its savour might seem to the unaccustomed palate, was grounded immutably in its Christian origins. The doctrine was traditional and perennial; his apprehension and presentation of it so individual as at a first encounter to disconcert, perplex, or even antagonise those on whom it did not, on the contrary, break as a sudden light to them that had sat in darkness. He was called from his work at the very moment when it was beginning to reach and influence a wider public. It is now arousing a stir of interest in America and on the Continent of Europe; and in this country his books—many of which have been for some time out of print—are happily again being made available to the increasing band of readers who have been plaintively clamouring for them.

All the works of his maturity—novels, plays, poems, and essays in theology or literary criticism—form a closely connected unity, throwing light upon one another,

si ch’ogni parte ad ogni parte splende.

They illumine one another, and illumine also those other writers of the central tradition from whom their author himself derived illumination. If Williams is a pregnant interpreter of Dante, Dante is equally a pregnant interpreter of Williams. So too, with Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth: they and he are “set on the marble of exchange.” Similarly, that which in one of the novels or plays may seem merely entertaining, romantic, or fantastical is seen to be but the exposition in action of some profound and challenging verity, which, in the theological or critical books, is submitted to the analysis of the intellect; and conversely.

It is therefore most desirable that the complete works of Williams should be obtainable by those who want to study him. Since his death, many volumes which had been squeezed out of print by the exigencies of war have appeared in new editions. The whole series of novels is now again complete, and 1950 saw the reissue in one volume of the two essays He Came Down from Heaven and The Forgiveness of Sins. The former of these, the earliest of the theological works, is in many respects a key-book. Almost all the great themes which Williams made peculiarly his own are here outlined with remarkable lucidity, and in direct relation to the dogmas of the Incarnation and Atonement from which they derive. The book is perhaps chiefly memorable as making comprehensible and actual the nature of that “knowledge of good and evil” which so mysteriously and painfully distinguishes man’s awareness from the innocence of God on the one hand and of the beasts on the other. But it contains also the first exposition of the theology of Romantic Love—later developed in The Figure of Beatrice; the first guidance on the approach to God by the Way of the Affirmation of Images, as also on the Practice of Substituted Love, shown as its most triumphant in the novel Descent into Hell and at its most moving in the poem called The Death of Virgil; the doctrine of the Coinherence of all men, which later received a fuller exposition in The Descent of the Dove; the doctrine of the City. This essay, important in itself, and rich in those epigrams which seem to condense centuries of Christian experience into a single saying, is thus important also as constituting a kind of handbook to Charles Williams. The second, though less satisfactory in its workmanship, remains nevertheless searching and disquieting in its examination of the ever-present and ever-insoluble problem of reconciling the Law with the Gospel, and expands and completes that chapter in the earlier essay which is concerned with “The Mystery of Pardon.”

Of all Charles Williams’s works, the Arthurian cycle known generally as “The Taliessin Poems” is, admittedly, the most “difficult”; it is, indeed, the only part of the Williams country in which the experienced and properly-equipped explorer need ever find himself at a loss. Dr. C. S. Lewis, however, in Arthurian Torso, has cleared away much entanglement and erected many useful signposts—not only by providing help with the symbolism, but also, and chiefly, by the simple process of putting the Taliessin poems into a logical and chronological order. The appearance of this book, together with the recent republication of both parts of the cycle (Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars) has opened up this country to adventurous spirits, who are thus enabled to go forward, map in hand, to the discovery of its noble landscapes and its rich mines of religious and psychological imagery. The interpretation of the poems can be greatly aided by a study of the critical volumes, The English Poetic Mind and Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind. These, stimulating and original in the handling of their own subject-matter, are important also for the light they throw on the writer’s own attitude to poetry and its function, and on the sources of his own poetic inspiration.

By issuing this new edition of James I, Messrs. Barker have reintroduced us to what is, on the whole, the least known and the least considered part of Williams’s output: the purely historical works. It may be left to speak for itself to those who are interested in a crucial transition in the history of Britain, and in an enigmatic personality whom there have been, generally speaking “none to praise, and very few to love.” (It is characteristic of Williams that he should have been able to find both love and praise for his subject.) One thing may strike us in reading this book, as it strikes us also, and most forcibly, in reading that masterpiece of sympathetic interpretation, The Figure of Beatrice. That Charles Williams had an acute sense of the living movement of history is made abundantly plain by his brilliant handling of the development of the Christian church in The Descent of the Dove. But he was singularly free from that hypertrophied “sense of period” on which our generation tends to pride itself rather too much, and which tends to inhibit judgement by turning all action in the past into a kind of “costume-piece.” To make “period” the sole criterion to which human thoughts and deeds can be referred involves the total subjection of actuality to relativity, and opens between ourselves and our forefathers a gulf over which understanding cannot stride. For Charles Williams, that gulf did not exist. He saw a historical situation and human beings in that situation, but he never saw them as the mere creatures of a situation. He would have been quite incapable of that somewhat too-famous passage in which Lytton Strachey sought to build up a romantic mystique of incomprehensibility between us and the men of Elizabeth’s time. “By what art are we to worm our way into those strange spirits, those even stranger bodies?”^[1] It would have needed more than the passage of a few centuries, or the disguise of ruff and bombast, to make either body or spirit strange to him. He observes that Dante “was so touched by the habits of the Middle Ages ... that he believed it to be less important that men should think for themselves than that they should think rightly”; the row of dots indicates the slipping-in of the sly parenthesis “which he, of course, did not think were the Middle Ages; he thought he was a modern.” Williams never forgot that every age is modern to itself, and that this fact, or illusion, links it with our own. Thus to all men in all ages he has the same direct approach; the same readiness to accept their behaviour as human (and not “strange” or “quaint”); the same charity, to which irony gives a certain wholesome and astringent edge.

This freedom of judgement is not to be obtained except from the viewpoint of a theology which postulates an absolute truth, and which, moreover, sees in the material facts of history the symbol and expression of that truth. When Charles Williams died, the lament went up from the Church: “Who will now show us the Way of Affirmation?” That Way—less thoroughly charted by the theologian than the Way of Negation, though more frequented by the artist and poet—possesses few regular doctors: Dante and Charles Williams—it would not be easy to add many more names. The whole of Williams’s work may be seen, from one aspect, as a reconciliation of the two Ways; “This also is Thou; neither is this Thou”; we must still believe that after the rejections the greater affirmations are to return;

“between city and convent, the two great vocations,

the Rejection of all images before the unimaged,

the Affirmation of all images before the all-imaged,

the Rejection affirming, the Affirmation rejecting, the king’s poet

riding through a cloud with a vowed novice,

and either no less than the other the doctrine of largesse.”

That final phrase is possibly the best summary of the doctrine of Charles Williams, now presented to a world which, with greater ease of communications, is rapidly losing its coinherence, and which, while insistently making larger demands upon life, appears at times most singularly lacking in largesse.

DOROTHY L. SAYERS.

[1] Lytton Strachey: Elizabeth and Essex.