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Maureen Moore had acquired a car and in April 1934 she took Lewis and her mother on a motor tour of parts of England and Ireland, stopping to visit Arthur Greeves in Belfast.

TO HIS BROTHER (W):

[2 Princess Villas,

Bayview Park,

Kilkeel, Co. Down]

April 3rd 1934

My dear W.,

This is turning out a great success. Even the journey was pleasant as far as Chester. There Maureen discovered that she still had far too much petrol, and time, so we used up both by going round through Warrington and Runcorn—the most hideous Morlockheim¹ you can imagine. Lime Street Hotel, where we had hoped to lounge for a few hours, is now shut up, all except the Grill: another landmark gone.

On the way to Bernagh next morning I noticed a new big house half way up the hill, in the field by the Glenmachan quarry. I had an excellent morning with Arthur, who at last has something wrong with him: an internal narrowing, poor man, almost amounting to a stoppage. His mother does not know about it, I think: and, paradoxically, tho’ not unprecedently, he is taking it with fortitude. Lunch, for which Minto and Maureen arrived, was enlivened by Minto upsetting a tumbler, but was not otherwise so amusing as I had anticipated—tho’ Maureen dropped a brick at the outset by saying that ‘Of course, Co. Down isn’t real Ireland.’

The drive down from town was a pure joy. I took them by Comber, Downpatrick, Dundrum, and Newcastle. Maureen rather affected to sniff at the countryside for the first few miles, but the Mournes knocked all that out of her. Kilkeel itself is, I think, among the two or three most beautiful places I have ever been. It is on a point or flat tongue which spreads out almost eight miles from the foot hills of the mountains. This distance is a positive advantage as it saves you from the darkness and obtrusiveness of mountains too near and also gives you a huge panorama of blue and jagged shapes which you couldn’t have closer. The coup d’oeil² suggests the Tyrol rather than anything else: if it were not for the middle distance of white cottages, fir clumps, stone walls & flax ponds—and the foreground of Fakerty’s Spirit Grocery, Orange Hall etc—I should hardly believe I was in Ulster.

In a word, for varied pleasure (the scale runs from a mountain like a castle ten miles off to a silent harbour full of apparently dead schooners and one puffer half a mile off) this is just the best place I have struck for years. I very much wish we were not moving to Rostrevor tomorrow. I am strongly upholding this house as a place for a family holiday in August. It is a dingy, faded place with the indescribable smell of all Irish lodging houses, but all the important things are right, i.e. light that you can really read by, comfortable chairs, very good beds, hot baths, and a capital chapter house round the corner. The landlady was rather too talkative at the beginning but we see less of her now. (Memo—Canon Hayes was rector of Kilkeel before he went to St Marks ‘He was a very queer man. He did awfully crazy things’)

You were wrong in supposing that I would be attending the Easter celebration at the same time as you: they have it at 8.30 instead of 8, which is an excellent idea. We had quite a good congregation. At the 11.30 service we had a very large one. I had quite forgotten the most unpleasant feature of an Irish service—the large number of people present who have obviously no interest in the thing, who are merely ‘good prodestants’. You know what one is supposed to find—‘the spirit of worship which burns all the brighter in the stark simplicity of the service etc.’³ In fact, one finds something that to my present eyes looks like studied indifference. I am sure the English practice of not going unless you believe is a much better one. The Rector, ‘the Reverend Belton’ is a poor creature.⁴

I saw a lovely thing done yesterday on the lines of ‘Give me a bottle of soda water.’⁵ An elderly labourer had been standing for several minutes with his back to the bar on which rested his empty tumbler. Without moving, or even turning his eyes from the window, he whispered reflectively ‘Anither pint.’ The barman instantly filled his glass with porter and added a large tot from a bottle of spirits. The customer never looked round during the whole transaction.

Minto is frightfully sorry about Vera. It is not a practical joke nor was it intended.

Yours

Jack

P.S. Leeboro’ garden is a paradise of daffodils: it has never looked so well before, I must confess

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

Rostrevor,

Co. Down

[4 April 1934]

My dear Griffiths,

A wet day—and a cold—and this delightful sea and mountain village where I have been spending my holiday, seems a good occasion for answering your most welcome letter.

I think our positions about Pantheism are exactly the same: for we both, in places, travelled the same road to Christianity, and the result of the arrival is certainly not any ingratitude or contempt to the various signposts or hostelries that helped on the journey. On the contrary, it is only since I have become a Christian that I have learned really to value the elements of truth in Paganism and Idealism. I wished to value them in the old days; now I really do. Don’t suppose that I ever thought myself that certain elements of pantheism were incompatible with Christianity or with Catholicism.

What I did think—and still do think—was that an influential school of thought both in your church and mine—were very antagonistic to Idealism,⁶ and in fact were availing themselves of a general secular reaction against 19th century thought, to run something which they call Neo-Scholasticism⁷ as the cure for all our evils. The people I mean are led by Maritain⁸ on your side and by T. S. Eliot on ours. Perhaps I over-rate their importance. I hope I do, for I confess there is no section of religious opinion with which I feel less sympathy. Indeed I consider that it is no overstatement to say that your Church and mine are, at the moment, closest to each other where each is at its worst. God forgive me if I do them wrong, but there are some of this set who seem to me to be anxious to make of the Christian faith itself one more of their high brow fads. Then their ignorance! As if there ever was any such thing as ‘scholasticism’ as a doctrine! But enough of this.

The question of ‘generality’ in prayer is not so simple. The doctrine held by your own Church about the position of the virtuous heretic or pagan—I need hardly say that I use both the word virtuous and the word heretic positionis causa—is, you will find, far from crude. Is it not held that many who have lived and died outside the visible Church are finally saved, because Divine Grace has guided them to concentrate solely on the true elements in their own religions?⁹ And if so, must one not admit that it was the mysterious will of God that these persons should be saved in that peculiar way? I use this argument to point out that even such a comparatively general prayer as that for a man’s conversion, may yet be too particular.

And while I am on the subject, I had better say once and for all that I do not intend to discuss with you in future, if I can help it, any of the questions at issue between our respective churches. It would have the same unreality as those absurd conversations in which we are invited to speak frankly to a woman about some indelicate matter—wh. means that she can say what she likes and we can’t. I could not, now that you are a monk, use that freedom in attacking your position which you undoubtedly would use in attacking mine. I do not think there is any thing distressing for either of us in agreeing to be silent on this matter: I have had a Catholic among my most intimate friends for many years¹⁰ and a great deal of our conversation has been religious. When all is said (and truly said) about the divisions of Christendom, there remains, by God’s mercy, an enormous common ground. It is abstaining from one tree in the whole garden.

I should rather like to attend your Greek class, for it is a perpetual puzzle to me how New Testament Greek got the reputation of being easy. St Luke I find particularly difficult. As regards matter—leaving the question of language—you will be glad to hear that I am at last beginning to get some small understanding of St Paul: hitherto an author quite opaque to me. I am speaking now, of course, of the general drift of whole epistles: short passages, treated devotionally, are of course another matter. And yet the distinction is not, for me, quite a happy one. Devotion is best raised when we intend something else. At least that is my experience. Sit down to meditate devotionally on a single verse, and nothing happens. Hammer your way through a continued argument, just as you would in a profane writer, and the heart will sometimes sing unbidden.

I think I agree with you that ‘historical research’ as now understood, is no work for a monk, nor for a man either. To all that side of my own work I attach less and less importance: yet I become each year more contented in the actual teaching and lecturing. I have very little doubt now that the work is worth doing. It is true that neither the terms of my appointment nor my own stature allow me to teach the most important things: but on the lower level there is honest work to be done in eradicating false habits of mind and teaching the elements of reason herself, and English Literature is as good a subject as any other. I should be in a bad way by now if I had been allowed to follow my own desire and be a research fellow with no pupils. As it is, nearly every generation leaves me one permanent friend.

Please accept my thanks, and convey them to the Prior, for your offered hospitality. Some week end in the long Vacation would suit me best, and I should like to come.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

P.S. This has some relevance both to the questions of Prayer and Idealism. I wrote it over a year ago.

They tell me, Lord, that when I seem To be in speech with You, Since You make no replies, it’s all a dream —One talker aping two.

And so it is, but not as they Falsely believe. For I Seek in myself the things I meant to say, And lo!, the wells are dry.

Then, seeing me empty, You forsake The listener’s part, and through My dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake The thoughts I never knew.

Therefore You neither need reply Nor can: for while we seem Two talking, Thou art one forever; and I No dreamer, but Thy dream. ¹¹

For months Jack, Warnie, Tolkien, Barfield and Harwood had been planning to attend a festival of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung at Covent Garden in London. Cecil Harwood was appointed to book tickets for the party, and in preparation jack and Warnie were meeting regularly with Tolkien to read the operas in German. The opportunity of seeing the whole Ring cycle meant so much to Lewis that he reminded Harwood of the important commission placed upon him:

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

[April 1934]

Dear Harwood

It is vain to conceal from you the solicitude we feel for our seats at Co. Garden. Pray, pray, Sir, exert yourself. Reflect that no small part of the satisfaction of five persons depends upon your conduct: that the object of their desires is rational and innocent: and that their desires are fervent and of long standing. Omit no manly degree of importunity and complaisance that may achieve our object, and thus, my dear Sir, give me one more reason to subscribe myself

your most obliged most obedient servant

C. S. Lewis

For some reason Harwood failed to book seats for the Ring of the Nibelung. On learning of this Lewis sent him the following letter:

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

May 7th 1934

Sir,

I have read your pathetical letter with such sentiments as it naturally suggests and write to assure you that you need expect from me no ungenerous reproach. It would be cruel, if it were possible, and impossible, if it were attempted, to add to the mortification which you must now be supposed to suffer. Where I cannot console, it is far from my purpose to aggravate: for it is part of the complicated misery of your state that while I pity your sufferings, I cannot innocently wish them lighter. He would be no friend to your reason or your virtue who would wish you to pass over so great a miscarriage in heartless frivolity or brutal insensibility. As the loss is irretrievable, so your remorse will be lasting. As those whom you have betrayed are your friends, so your conduct admits of no exculpation. As you were once virtuous, so now you must be forever miserable. Far be it from me that ferocious virtue which would remind you that the trust was originally transferred from Barfield to you in the hope of better things, and that thus both our honours were engaged. I will not paint to you the consequences of your conduct which are doubtless daily and nightly before your eyes. Believe, my dear Sir, that I forgive you.

As soon as you can, pray let me know through some respectable acquaintance what plans you have formed for the future. In what quarter of the globe do you intend to sustain that irrevocable exile, hopeless penury, and perpetual disgrace to which you have condemned yourself? Do not give in to the sin of Despair: learn from this example the fatal consequences of error and hope, in some humbler station and some distant land, that you may yet become useful to your species.

Yours etc

C. S. Lewis

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

[Magdalen College]

May 16th 1934

Sir

Your resolution of seeing me and receiving my forgiveness face to face before you forever quit these shores does not displease me. As you have rightly judged, to admit you to my house would now be an offence against the grand Principle of Subordination, but you will be welcome to the grounds—flumina ames silvasque inglorius.¹²

You will please to observe the strictest propriety of behaviour while you remain there, and to be guided in everything by the directions of Mr. Barfield.

Under his protection I doubt not that you will be able to achieve the journey without any great disaster or indecency. Do not hold any communication with your fellow travellers in the steam-train without his approval: where you bait,¹³ you had best abstain from all use of fermented liquours. Many things lawful in themselves are to be denied to one who dare not risk a further miscarriage. Above all, do not attempt to save your guinea by travelling under the seat, nor to shorten your journey by any approaches to familiarity with your female fellow passages. Do not bring with you any musical instrument.

Your obedient servant

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER MADELEVA (W):¹⁴

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 6th [1934]

Dear Madam,

This is just to let you know that I have your letter and will answer it in the course of the next few days. But I should warn you that what you apparently expect to lie behind the lecture is both more and other than is really there. In lecturing to students who know nothing about the middle ages I have had to be clear and brief, therefore dogmatic: and I have probably—tho’ I hope this was not my intention—appeared much more learned than I am.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER MADELEVA (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford,

June 7th 1934

Dear Madam,

In answer to your first question, there are probably such printed bibliographies as you mention but I have no knowledge of them. The history of my lecture is this. After having worked for some years on my own subject (which is the medieval allegory), I found that I had accumulated a certain amount of general information which, tho far from being very recondite, was more than the ordinary student in the school could gather for himself. I then conceived the idea of my ‘prolegomena’.¹⁵

There were however several gaps in the general knowledge which I had accidentally got. To fill these up I adopted the simple method of going through Skeat’s notes on Chaucer and Langland,¹⁶ and other similar things, and followed these up to their sources when they touched on matters that seemed to me important. This led me sometimes to books I already knew, often to new ones. This process explains why I inevitably appear more learned than I am. E.g. my quotations from Vincent of Beauvais¹⁷ don’t mean that I turned from a long reading of Beauvais to illustrate Chaucer, but that I turned from Chaucer to find explanations in Vincent. In fine, the process is inductive for the most part of my lecture: tho’ on allegory, courtly love, and (sometimes) in philosophy, it is deductive—i.e. I start from the authors I quote. I elaborate this point because, if you are thinking of doing the same kind of thing (i.e. telling people what they ought to know as the prius of a study of medieval vernacular poets) I think you would be wise to work in the same way—starting from the texts you want to explain. You will soon find of course that you are working the other way at the same time, that you can correct current explanations, or see things to explain where the ordinary editors see nothing. I suppose I need not remind you to cultivate the wisdom of the serpent: there will be misquotations, and misunderstood quotations in the best books, and you must always hunt up all quotations for yourself and find what they are really in situ.

But of course, I do not know what it is you propose to do. I have therefore mentioned all the more important ‘sources’ in my note-book without any attempt at selection. You will see at once that this is the bibliography of a man who was following a particular subject (the love-allegory), and this doubtless renders the list much less useful to you, who are hardly likely to be after the same quarry. In the second part, texts, I have been more selective, and have omitted a certain amount of low or lowish Latin love poetry which is useful only for my own special purpose.

You will observe that I begin with classical authors. This is a point I would press on anyone dealing with the middle ages, that the first essential is to read the relevant classics over and over: the key to everything—allegory, courtly love etc—is there. After that the two things to know really well are the Divine Comedy and the Romance of the Rose.¹⁸ The student who has really digested these,* with good commentaries, and who also knows the Classics and the Bible (including the apocryphal New Testament) has the game in his hands, and can defeat over and over again those who have simply burrowed in obscure parts of the actual middle ages.

Of scholastic philosophy and theology you probably know much more than I do. If by any chance you don’t, stick to Gilson¹⁹ as a guide and beware of the people (Maritain in your Church, and T. S. Eliot of mine) who are at present running what they call ‘neo-scholasticism’ as a fad.

Of Periodicals you will find Romania, Speculum and Medium Aevum useful.

Remember (this has been all important to me) that what you want to know about the Middle Ages will often not be in a book on the Middle Ages, but in the early chapters of some history of general philosophy or science. The accounts of your period in such books will, of course, usually be patronizing and ill-informed, but it will mention dates and authors whom you can follow up and thus put you in the way of writing a true account for yourself.

If there is any way in which I can assist you, or if you would care to call and discuss anything with me, do not hesitate to let me know.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER MADELEVA (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 11th [1934]

Dear Madam,

Thanks for your letter. You make too much of a very trifling service. If I am ever in those parts (which is unlikely) I will certainly brave the ‘terrors of convents’ and accept your kind hospitality.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[The Kilns]

Oct 1st. 1934

My dear Arthur,

I am sending you back Pope Hadrian.²⁰ Warnie and I have both read it with a good deal of amusement and enjoyment. The latter is due, I suppose, entirely to the subject—for everyone likes to imagine what a man could do if he were a dictator, or Pope, or Caliph-; the amusement is mainly at the author’s expence. The style is one of the most preposterous I have ever read, and I doubt if I ever saw so much pedantry combined with so much ignorance. Almost every one of his numerous and unnecessary Greek quotations contains some mistake: and in English he seems to think that euphuism means euphemism and that verisimilar means very similar. He is a queer fish—a man with a grievance, obviously: a sincere Catholic who hates almost everything and everybody with which Catholicism is associated: specially France and Ireland. He must have been a most disagreeable man.

We had a most interesting journey back. We drove from Heysham across the back of England to Lincoln. A great deal of this route was spoiled by big industrial towns, but the first stages were lovely: very big, pale hills with many cliffs of that silvery-white rock-it is limestone. It is very different when you get down into Lincolnshire, which is as flat as a pancake. Lincoln itself is quite the best cathedral city I have ever seen. The centre of the town, where the cathedral stands, is on the only hill for miles, and the cathedral consequently dominates the whole countryside. The surroundings of the cathedral are magnificent—a beautiful close, a castle, and a Roman wall. What would specially have appealed to you was that after dinner as we strolled round it, we had the accompaniment of a little summer lightning and very distant gentle thunder. Do you know the kind of thunder which has almost a tinkle in it, like a musical sound?

I don’t know that much has happened since we got back. My reading has been of a most miscellaneous order—Rider Haggard, Thomas Aquinas, Trollope, the Old Testament. Do you remember the passage in the latter where Moses sends spies into Canaan and they come back and say ‘We have seen the giants, the sons of Anak; and we were in our own eyes as grasshoppers.’²¹ Isn’t that perfect? It brings out the monstrosity of the giants so well, because one thinks of the grasshopper as being not only small, but fragile, light and even flimsy. ‘Beetles’, for example, would not have done nearly so well.

Summer still drags on—far outstaying its welcome with me—and the pond shows no sign of rising to its normal level, though we have had a fairish amount of rain. Everyone is well—that is to say, we have all recovered from our holiday and are nearly as fit as if we had never been away. Of how few holidays can this be said!

Give my love to your mother, and—write soon.

Yours,

Jack

TO PAUL ELMER MORE (PRIN):²²

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Oct 25th 1934

Dear Mr. More

It is a long time since I have got so much out of any book as I have got out of your Sceptical Approach.²³ The sixth chapter especially will entitle you to a place in an American Patrologia if such a collection is ever made.

What is of most importance to me as an individual is that you have made me understand for the first time why most of the representatives of the present Christian renaissance so hate Idealism-perhaps you will have made them understand too. To you it may be a matter of surprise that I could ever have found this hatred unintelligible: but you would not wonder if you had travelled the same route as I, which was from materialism to idealism, from idealism to Pantheism, from pantheism to theism, and from theism to Christianity.

Our different views are natural enough. A field which seems a high place to one ascending the mountain, seems almost part of the valley to one descending. Idealism is suspect to you as a door out of Christianity: for me it was the door in. Clearly a door, ex vi termini,²⁴ has this double aspect. I do not think I should be disrespectful in urging to you remember the ‘door in’ aspect—to remember that in shutting the door to keep the faithful in, as you do so very firmly, you are inevitably, by the same act, shutting out those who might return.

I am bold to do this because my whole case rests on mere experience—this is the door by which, as a mere matter of fact, I entered and it will always be dear to me on that account. Contrariwise I most freely acknowledge that your whole treatment of the subject has reminded me of the ‘door out’ aspect, which I had certainly unduly neglected hitherto. And now I am wondering just how far I can go with you. Not the whole way, I think. Fully realising the danger of the ‘Illusion of Reason’ (so much I owe to your book), I still find it not so much a philosophical as a religious impossibility quite to relinquish the Absolutist view of God.

For one thing I am not quite clear how far your ‘teleology’ will go. Does it imply that God can be better, more blessed, wiser, tomorrow than He is from of old? Does it involve that He may fail, that the ²⁵ (I dare put no accents, writing to you!) might win—a Twilight of the Gods? If so, I am afraid it would be as great a blow to my ‘intuitions’ as materialism itself. My ‘wish-belief’ demands the eternal, even, in a sense, the necessary: while also not wanting the immobile, the unanswering. In fine, I want to have it both ways: and this would be the flimsiest self indulgence, but for the huge historic fact of the doctrine of the Trinity. For surely that doctrine is just the doctrine that we are to give up neither of those conceptions of God of which you accept one and (most convincingly, yet in the long run dismayingly) reject the other. Is the traditional Christian belief not precisely this; that the same being which is eternally perfect,purus actus,²⁶ already at the End etc etc, yet also, in some incomprehensible way, is a purposing, feeling, and finally crucified Man in a particular place and time? So that somehow or other, we have it both ways?

I wish you could visit England more often. My spiritual fathers are many and scattered, but I left you, on the two occasions we met, with the sensation of having been with a spiritual uncle-and appropriately enough, in your avuncular character, you have sent me a spiritual tip. Very many thanks for the book. There is a lot more to say about it, but that would reach the scale of an article rather than a letter. I have an obituary of Irving Babbitt also to thank you for.

With my kindest regards and thanks,

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JANET SPENS (BOD):²⁷

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Nov. 16th 1934.

Dear Miss Spens

I had envisaged this as a letter of discussion, but I am finding so few disagreements with you that I have less to discuss, and more to re-echo, than I had supposed.

The only thing I almost regret in your book²⁸ is the inevitable prominence of the thesis developed in Chap 1: not because I dissent from it (indeed without a careful re-reading of the whole F.Q.²⁹ I hardly could) but because I foresee that it will draw off attention from succeeding chapters which seem to me very much more important, and that the question ‘What do you think of Miss Spens’ book?’ will come among careless people to mean simply and solely ‘Do you agree with this theory about the composition of the F.Q.?’ However, there is no help for this.

As regards the thesis itself I certainly think you have made a good prima fade case; the part about Orgoglio’s castle (pp. 24, 25) seems to me very strong—so strong that here at any rate the onus probandi³⁰ now almost rests on the supporters of the traditional view. But chap 2 really interests me more, and I have learned a good deal from your analysis of the Mutability cantos. Can you tell me something more about Professor Nygren’s Eros and Agape?³¹ I haven’t heard of it.

But chap 3 is the best of all. It was the second paragraph on p. 55 that delivered me from an old error: incredible as it now seems to me I had never before realised that the figures were to the Elizabethans what the landscape was to the 19th century.³² For this and for the four pages that follow I cannot thank you enough: they open doors, and your treatment of Una and Superstition (pp. 58, 59) is that rare sort of criticism which, as I believe, does truly and substantially create new qualities in the poem criticised. (Whom are you quoting at the bottom of p. 61?) The explanation of the importance of the clothes of Spenser’s figures (62, ad fin.) must, I think, be right, and ought to silence a deal of misguided censure.

Addisonian on p. 68 is delicious: the one right epithet out of a score of possibles.³³ And I’m glad you have inserted a cooling card for the ‘new poet’ business on p. 71. Personally I find the whole of Renwick’s treatment curiously antipathetic.³⁴

Chap 5, I think, stands next in importance. The main contention that the predominance of the love theme is mainly due to the allegory—i.e. that it is ever-present in the symbols precisely because it is not the thing symbolised-convinced me at once: and this again opens doors, gives me the feeling of being more free within the world of the F.Q. than I was.

I am not at all sure where, in detail, your interpretation of Busyrane is right, but of course I must wait till I have re-read the poem.³⁵ But ought not the conflicts to be mainly those of the Soul herself rather than those of one soul against another in particular human relationships?

By the bye I disagree with you about ‘an unconvincing attempt’ to distinguish the two people called Genius (top of p. 22). Although Lewis & Short³⁶ do not distinguish, I am pretty certain that Genius always did mean two quite distinct people:

1 Genius (still retaining his connection with gigno) the spirit of Reproduction or Generation (cf. ‘torus genialis’ etc). This is the ‘Genius’ of Alanus De Planctu,³⁷ the Rom. of the Rose, the Confessio Amantis,³⁸ and the Garden of Adonis.³⁹

2 Genius (as translation of Gk. δαιμων) guardian spirit of a place or person > guardian angel > higher self > ‘genius’ of a poet. This is the ‘genius’ of Shakespeare’s Troil. IV. iv. 50 etc,⁴⁰ and of the bower of bliss.⁴¹

On p. 65 at the top, might one add Deut. XXXIII 2,⁴² as a common influence on both?

But it is time I stopped. I have no other points even of trivial disagreement, and if I continued I should only pile up praises in a way you might reasonably dislike. I will only say that you have left me longing to re-read the F.Q.—and all previous books on Spenser have produced just the opposite effect.

I suppose you got my second note agreeing to take one pair of gaseous but intelligent scholars?

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

[The Kilns]

26th Dec. 1934

My dear Griffiths

There was nothing to apologise for. My friendship with you began in disagreement and matured in argument, and is beyond the reach of any dangers of that kind.

If I object at all to what you said, I object not as a friend or as a guest, but as a logician. If you are going to argue with me on the points at issue between our churches, it is obvious that you must argue to the truth of your position, not from it. The opposite procedure only wastes your time and leaves me to reply, moved solely by embarrassment, tu sei santo ma tu non sei filosofo!⁴³ But I still think it more profitable to adhere to our former agreement and to keep off the question.

But I enjoyed my visit very much and so, I hope, did de Peyer-anima candida,⁴⁴ a man whom I prize more every time I see him.⁴⁵

Please thank the Prior for his hospitality and accept my best wishes (my prayers you may be sure you have) for every success both spiritual and natural.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[The Kilns]

Dec. 26th. 1934

My dear Arthur,

I have carried your letter about in a pocket all this term with the intention of answering it, and here goes at last! I wonder how much of its news is still up to date. For example, if I had replied when the letter came I should have said ‘I am so glad to hear that you have settled down in a comfortable routine’—but I can’t do so now because you may have got unsettled since!

I wish you had told me a little more about Voyage to Arcturus.⁴⁶ Even if you can’t describe it, you could at least give me some idea what it is about: at least whether it is about a voyage to Arcturus or not. I haven’t come across the book yet, but will certainly read it if I do.

Which reminds me have you read ‘Gape Row’ by Agnes Romilly White?⁴⁷ Gape Row is the name of a village which turns out with absolute certainty to be Dundonald, if you work out all the geographical indications. It is not a very good novel—indeed I am not sure it isn’t a definitely bad novel (tho’ several reviewers seem to have thought otherwise), but fancy reading of characters in a book looking down on the Lough from above Holywood Barracks, or, again, nearer Dundonald, looking over to the Castlereagh Hills! The scenery is quite well described, and it is probably the only chance you and I will ever have of seeing that landscape described in fiction—except our own fiction, of course! The characters [are] all of the cottage class, and the dialect is well done—not that that kind of thing interests me after a few pages. If you want a New Year’s Gift for any one like Gundrede⁴⁸ or Janie (I mean like them in love of dialect) this would do admirably. Now I come to think of it, is Janie the author? (Don’t let this raise false expectations in your mind. I don’t mean what you mean.)

We had this term a concert which I enjoyed more than any I have ever heard.⁴⁹ Beecham conducted and the bill of fare was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,⁵⁰ a Debussy suite, Sibelius’ Tapiola (forest-god of the Finns)⁵¹ and Elgar’s Enigma Variations.⁵² For one thing, I have hardly ever before been at a concert where I liked all the items. The Elgar (do you know it?) I had never heard before and did not fully understand, but I understood enough to admire it greatly. For another thing, the playing was marvellous. I thought I knew the symphony from Warnie’s records, but Beecham brought things out of it that I’d never dreamed of.

Apart from this, very little has happened to me. I have addressed societies at Manchester and Birmingham and am doing one at Cambridge next term, which, I suppose, is a step in one’s career. I have had lunch and spent the afternoon at a monastery in the Cotswolds, where a former pupil of mine is a monk.⁵³ Funny to have a silent lunch (except that a book is read aloud) amidst rows of white robed figures and then to file out behind them—chanting—down the long, dark corridor. One of them was a fine old man with a white beard, which just added the last touch. Don’t be alarmed: the effect on me was purely aesthetic, not religious, and during the afternoon my host talked nonsense enough to put me off the conventual life for ever and a day. Give my love to your mother and let me have a letter when you can.

Yours

Jack

1 The Morlocks are the subterranean workers in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895).

2 ‘quick survey’.

3 Lewis was here mimicking evangelical clergymen such as his maternal grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Robert Hamilton (1826–1905), Rector of St Mark’s, Dundela. 1874–1900. See The Hamilton Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

4 The Rev. John Thomas Belton (1899–1966) took his BA from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1917 and was ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1920. He was Curate of Aghalee, Co. Down, 1919–20, Vicar of Shankill, 1921–5, and Rector of Kilkeel, 1925–57.

5 He is referring to their father’s way of ordering whisky. When he wrote to Warnie on 7 August 1921 about a family holiday in England, Jack said their father told the waitress: ‘I’ll have a bottle of soda water…and if you’d just put a little Scotch whiskey in it’ (CL I. p. 573).

6 Idealism in this context is a metaphysical theory about the nature of reality, maintaining that matter does not exist in its own tight but is related to the contents of our minds. Thus, all objects, even the world, are mental creations. In SBJ, ch. 13, Lewis explained the place of Idealism in his conversion, describing how he reached the point where he accepted Idealism and admitted ‘that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos’.

7 Scholasticism was originally a teaching device developed in the schools and universities of Western Europe from the end of the eleventh century and largely associated with the methods of three major philosophers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—St Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. It proceeded by questioning ancient and authoritative texts. A favoured method was to draw up lists of contradictory statements in the texts, applying to them the rules of logic in order to reveal their underlying agreement. Its purpose was to get to the inner truth of things to which the texts bore witness. The method flourished until the sixteenth century when it came under attack from humanist scholars.

An attempt to restore scholasticism began in Rome about 1830. The most important of several theologians who wanted to extend this ‘neo-Scholasticism’ to the universal Church was Pope Leo XIII; in his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), he recommended that scholasticism be the only philosophy and theology used in Catholic seminaries. The Pope enjoined the study of St Thomas Aquinas on all theology students as a clear, systematic philosophy capable of defending Christian tradition from contemporary attack.

8 Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), French philosopher. Following his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1906 he turned to the study of St Thomas Aquinas whose philosophy he sought to relate to modern culture. He held professorial chairs at the Institut Catholique in Paris, 1914–33, the Institute for Medieval Studies in Toronto, 1933–45, and Princeton University, 1948–52.

9 The salvation of the virtuous infidel was to become an increasingly important issue to Lewis. He was familiar with the fact that in The Divine Comedy Dante put the Emperor Trajan in Paradise (see Purgatorio X, 74–93; Paradiso XX, 44–5) because of the legend that Pope Gregory the Great, through his prayers, brought Trajan back from Hell and baptized him to salvation. Of greater importance was Aquinas’s teaching on ‘baptism by desire’, e.g. Summa Theologica, Part III, Question 68: ‘when a man wishes to be baptized, but by some ill-chance he is forestalled by death before receiving Baptism…such a man can obtain salvation without being actually baptized, on account of his desire for Baptism, which desire is the outcome of faith that worketh by charity…’

Lewis came to believe that virtuous heretics or pagans could be saved through Christ. ‘I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god or to a very imperfectly conceived true God,’ he wrote to Mrs Ashton on 8 November 1952, ‘is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him’ (WHL, p, 428). He provided an illustration of this in The Last Battle (1956), ch. 15. On meeting Asian in the heavenly Narnia, Emeth the Calormene explains that he had been seeking Tash all his life. ‘Beloved,’ said Asian, ‘unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.’

10 i.e. J. R. R. Tolkien.

11 Lewis published this ‘anonymously’ with slight variations in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964). It is included under the title ‘Prayer’ in CP, pp. 136–7.

12 ‘May you humbly love the rivers and woods’, adapting Virgil, Georgics 2. 486.

13 i.e. stop to obtain food or drink.

14 Sister M. Madeleva CSC (1887–1964), a member of the Congregation of Sisters of the Holy Cross, was a teacher of English at St Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. While staying in Oxford during Trinity Term 1934 she attended Lewis’s lectures on medieval poetry, and had a particular interest in the lecture devoted to Boethius. Besides lending Sister Madeleva his notebooks giving details of the works mentioned in his lectures, Lewis invited her to visit him in Magdalen. On her return to Notre Dame in 1934, Sister Madeleva was made President of St Mary’s College, a post she held until her retirement in 1961. Her numerous books include Knights Errant and other Poems (1923), Chaucer’s Nun and Other Essays (1925), Pearl: A Study in Spiritual Dryness (1925), Penelope and Other Poems (1927), Selected Poems (1939), A Lost Language (1951), The Four Last Things (1959) and an autobiography, My First Seventy Years (1959). See Gail Porter Mandell, Madeleva: A Biography (1997).

15 During the Trinity Term of 1934 (22 April-16 June) Lewis gave a series of lectures entitled ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Poetry’, later adapted into The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964). For a detailed list of Lewis’s lectures see Walter Hooper, ‘The Lectures of C. S. Lewis in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge’, Christian Scholar’s Review, XXVII, no. 4 (Summer 1998). pp. 436–53.

16 Walter William Skeat, The Chaucer Canon (1900). William Langland (c. 1330-c. 1386) is the author of Piers Plowman, which Lewis discussed in The Allegory of lent, ch. 4, pp. 158–61.

17 One ‘Prolegomena’ lecture had discussed the connection between Vincent of Beauvais (fl. 1250) and Chaucer’s ballad. Famine. In The Discarded Image Lewis wrote (p. 84); ‘Adversity has the merit of opening our eyes by showing which of our friends are true and which are feigned. Combine this with Vincent of Beauvais’ statement that hyena’s gall restores the sight (Speculum Maturate, xix, 62), and you have the key to Chaucer’s cryptic line “Thee nedeth nat the gall of noon hyene” (Fortune, 35).’

18 The Romance of the Rose is a thirteenth-century French allegorical romance by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, It is discussed in chapter 3 of The Allegory of love

* I don’t claim to be such a person myself!

19 Etienne Gilson (1884–1978), French authority on medieval philosophy, is the author of La Philosophie au Moyen Age (1922), Moral Values and the Moral Life: The System of St Thomas Aquinas, trans. Leo Richard Ward (1931), and many other works.

20 Frederick Rolfe (‘Baron Corvo’), Hadrian the Seventh (1904).

21 Numbers 13:33.

22 Paul Elmer Mote (1864–1937), American critic and philosopher, was born in St Louis, Missouri, He taught Sanskrit at Harvard, 1894–5, and Bryn Mawr, 1895–7, and was a newspaper editor for twelve years. During 1919 he lectured on Plato at Princeton University. More was associated with Irving Babbitt, champion of humanism and founder of the modern humanistic movement. His major works are the Shelburne Essays (11 vols., 1904–21), The Greek Tradition (5 vols., 1921–31), and the New Shelburne Essays (3 vols., 1928–36). Princeton University Library has in its Department of Rare Books and Special Collections the three letters from Lewis to More published in this volume, and also copies (in Lewis’s hand) of three letters from More to Lewis.

23 Paul Elmer More, The Sceptical Approach to Religion (1934).

24 ‘by the force of the term’.

25 ‘necessity’. The reference here is to the old proverb: ‘Against necessity not even the gods may fight.’

26 ‘a pure act’, in the sense of the pure actuality of God. The phrase is standard in some later Latin literature (St Bonaventure uses it, as does Aquinas to describe ‘the Divine Being’).

27 Dr Janet Spens (1876–1963) was born in Lanarkshire and educated at Glasgow University. She was joint founder and co-headmistress of Laurel Bank School, Glasgow, 1903–8, then returned to Glasgow University as Lecturer and Tutor, 1908–11. She was afterwards Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 1911–36. Her books include Spenser’s Faerie Queene: An Interpretation (1934), Two Periods of Disillusion (19091, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Relation to Tradition (1916) and Elizabethan Drama (1922).

28 Spens, Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

29 i.e. The Faerie Queene.

30 ‘burden of proof’.

31 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros: A Study of the Christian Idea of Love, authorized trans. A. G. Hebert (London: SPCK, 1932–9).

32 Spens, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, p. 55: ‘Spenser is essentially an Elizabethan, and the Elizabethans tended to utter their more intense emotions through the imagery of human figures; the men of the nineteenth century had been trained to accept the expression of theirs through the imagery of inanimate nature.’

33 ibid., p. 68: ‘The description here [Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), I, xii, 10, line 9] is almost Addisonian in its delineation of the mixture of superficiality and pose with naïve self-revelation and vacant wonder characteristic of an English crowd. It gives the dragon concrete reality as nothing else could do.’

34 William Lindsay Renwick, Complaints: Edmund Spenser (1928).

35 In Spenser’s Faerie Queene Dr Spens staled of Busyrane (or Busirane); ‘There has been some discussion of the meaning of Amoret’s experience, but there can, I think, be little doubt. Her tortures at the hands of Busyrane in the House of Cupid represent the mental sufferings of the young wife in consequence of the too lustful element in Sir Scudamour’s passion for her’ (p. 105). Cf., however, The Allegory of Love, ch. 12: ‘To find the real foe of Chastity, the real portrait of false love, we must turn to Malecasta and Busirane. The moment we do so we find that Malecasta and Busirane are nothing else than the main subject of this study-Courtly Love; and that Courtly Love is in Spenser’s view the chief opponent of Chastity. But Chastity for him means Britomart, married love. The story he tells is therefore part of my story; the final struggle between the romance of marriage and the romance of adultery.’

36 A Latin Dictionary founded on Andrews’ edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary, rev. and enlarged edn by C. T. Lewis and C. Short (1879).

37 Alanus ab Insulis (c. 1128–1203) mentions ‘Genius’ in De Planctu Naturae, Prosa V, 40ff. See The Allegory of Love, p. 106.

38 John Cower (1330–1408) wrote about ‘Genius’ in Confessio Amantis, Prologue, 881ff.

39 The Garden of Adonis is described in Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II, vi, 34ff.

40 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (1609), IV, iv, 50; ‘Some say the Genius so/Cries “Come” to him that instantly must die.’

41 In Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II, xii.

42 Deuteronomy 33;2: ‘The Lord came from Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto them; he shined forth from mount Paran, and he came with ten thousands of saints: from his right hand went a fiery law for them.’

43 ‘You are a holy one, but you are no philosopher!’ It is not known why Lewis wrote this in Italian.

44 ‘(speaking) in a sincere spirit’.

45 This was probably Charles Hubert Sebastian de Peyer (1905–83), one of three brothers who went to Magdalen College. He was educated at Cheltenham School, after which he read PPE at Magdalen and took his BA in 1929. He was a civil servant with the Ministry of Power and a member of the UK Delegation to the High Authority in the European Coal and Steel Community, with rank of minister in the Labour Party, 1953–7. He served as borough councillor for West Hertfordshire, 1964–75.

46 David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus (London: Methuen, 1920). This book was to have an important influence on Lewis’s science fiction novels; see the letters to Charles A. Brady of 29 October 1944 and to Ruth Pitter of 4 January 1947.

47 Agnes Romilly White, Gape Row [1934].

48 i.e. Gundreda Ewart. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL 1.

49 The concert by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Sir Thomas Beecham, was performed in the Sheldonian Theatre on 15 November 1934.

50 Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, first performed in 1808.

51 Jean Sibelius, Tapiola, a symphonic poem first performed in 1926.

52 Edward Elgar, Enigma Variations, first performed in 1899.

53 i.e. Dom Bede Griffiths.