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TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[The Kilns]

Jan 10th 1932

My dear Arthur,

I was glad to hear from you again, and sorry you are so dull. Perhaps you are suffering from too much turkey and ‘plumb’ pudding—or too many late nights and dances! How did you manage to get your mother’s consent to the introduction of a dog—I thought she was the insuperable difficulty?

I quite understand the mood in wh. you fall back upon detective stories, though I have never been able to understand how that mood could lead to detective stories. I mean, I know well from experience that state of mind in which one wants immediate and certain pleasure from a book, for nothing—i.e. without paying the price of that slight persistence, that almost imperceptible tendency not to go on, which, to be honest, nearly always accompanies the reading of [a] good book. Not only accompanies by the way, but (do you agree) actually makes part of the pleasure. A little sense of labour is necessary to all perfect pleasures I think: just as (to my palate at least) there is no really delicious taste without a touch of astringency—the ‘bite’ in alcoholic drinks, the resistance to the teeth in nuts or meat, the tartness of fruit, the bitterness of mint sauce. The apple must not be too sweet, the cheese must not be too mild. Still, I know the other mood, when one wants a book of sheer pleasure.

In fact I have been going through such a mood lately. I have had to work v. hard all day this Vac. and in the evenings I have wanted relaxation. I have accordingly read The Wood Beyond the World, Rider Haggard’s The People of the Mist,¹ and am now at Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake.² In fact when I am in that state of mind I want not so much a grown-up ‘light’ book (to me usually the hardest of all kinds of reading) as a boy’s book;—distant lands, strange adventures, mysteries not of the American but of the Egyptian kind. Of course what makes detective stories appeal to you is that they were one of your first loves in the days when you used to come round and borrow Sherlock Holmes from my father, and therefore in reading them now you have the sense of return, you step back as into an old easy shoe—and that certainly is one of the essentials for this kind of reading. One would never read a new type of book for pure relaxation: and perhaps re-reading of an old friend—a Scott with much skipping—is the best of all. I don’t think you re-read enough—I know I do it too much. Is it since I last wrote to you that I re-read Wuthering House?³ I thought it very great. Isn’t it (despite the improbability) an excellent stroke of art to tell it all through the mouth of a very homely, prosaic old servant, whose sanity and mother-wit thus provides a cooling medium through which the wild, horrible story becomes tolerable? I have also re-read Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution⁴ and find that I had forgotten it nearly all. It is, in the famous words, ‘too long drawn out’ and becomes mere scolding in the end.

What wd. perhaps interest you more is Pater’s Marius the Epicurean⁵ which I had twice before tried to read without success but have this time reached the end of-and reached it before my desire to punch Marius’ head had become quite unbearable. Do you know it? It is very well worth reading. You must give up all idea of reading a story and treat it simply as a vaguely narrative essay. It interests me as showing just how far the purely aesthetic attitude to life can go, in the hands of a master, and it certainly goes a good deal further than one would suppose from reading the inferior aesthetes like Oscar Wilde and George Moore. In Pater it seems almost to include the rest of the spiritual life: he has to bring in chastity, he nearly has to bring in Christianity, because they are so beautiful. And yet somehow there is a faint flavour of decay over it all. Perhaps it is his patronage of great things which is so offensive—condescending to add the Christian religion to his nosegay of spiritual flowers because it has a colour or a scent that he thinks would just give a finishing touch to the rest. It is all balls anyway-because one sees at a glance that if he really added it it would break up the whole nosegay view of life. In fact that is the refutation of aestheticism: for perfect beauty you need to include things which will at once show that mere beauty is not the sole end of life. If you don’t include them, you have given up aestheticism: if you do, you must give it up Q.E.D. But Pater is valuable just because, being a perfectly honest aesthete, he really tries to follow its theory to the bitter end, and therefore betrays its weakness. I didn’t mean to make this letter a mere catalogue of books read, but one thing has led on to another.

About Lucius’ argument that the evangelists would have put the doctrine of the atonement into the Gospel if they had had the slightest excuse, and, since they didn’t, therefore Our Lord didn’t teach it: surely, since we know from the Epistles that the Apostles (who had actually known him) did teach this doctrine in his name immediately after his death, it is clear that he did teach it: or else, that they allowed themselves a very free hand. But if people shortly after his death were so very free in interpreting his doctrine, why should people who wrote much later (when such freedom wd. be more excusable from lapse of memory in an honest writer, and more likely to escape detection in a dishonest one) become so very much more accurate? The accounts of a thing don’t usually get more and more accurate as time goes on. Anyway, if you take the sacrificial idea out of Christianity you deprive both Judaism and Paganism of all significance. Can one believe that there was just nothing in that persistent motif of blood, death, and resurrection, which runs like a black and scarlet cord through all the greater myths—thro’ Balder & Dionysus & Adonis and the Graal too? Surely the history of the human mind hangs together better if you suppose that all this was the first shadowy approach of something whose reality came with Christ—even if we can’t at present fully understand that something.

Try and write soon.

Yrs

Jack

TO HIS BROTHER (W):

[Magdalen College]

Jan 17th 1932.

My dear W–

Term began yesterday (Saturday) and I am seated this fine Sunday morning in our room in College having finished my collection papers and now about to allow myself an hour’s letter writing before setting out home where I shall be to night.

Through the window on my left I see a most beautiful, almost a springlike, sunshine on the pinnacles of the Tower and the delicious sound of Sunday morning bells has just stopped. On an ordinary Sunday morning I should of course be out at the house, or rather at Church, but as you know the first week end of term is sacred to collections, and having finished them rather earlier than I expected—here we are. I am so seldom in College on a Sunday morning that to be there and at leisure in the unaccustomed sounds and silences of Lord’s Day among all the pleasant Leeburiana⁶ is quite a holiday.

Your welcome letter of Dec 8th arrived a few days ago, and is so full of conversational openings that I shall hardly find room to inaugurate any subject of my own.

First, as to the Chinese. As to their language, it is pretty certain that its extreme simplicity is that of second childhood—the simplicity of a fossil and not of a seed. The essence of it is monosyllabic words each expressing an extremely general idea and given its particular meaning by the context and the position—in fact words approaching the function of the Arabic numerals, where it all depends whether you say 201, 102, 120 or 210. How far European language has already advanced towards this fossil condition you can well see if you compare Latin Amavisset with English He would have loved: though even amavisset is well away. A really primitive tongue would have special words for about twenty special kinds of love (sexual, gastronomic, parental, and what not) and no word for the more abstract ‘love’: as French, a stage nearer Chinese than we are, has now only one word for our ‘love’ and ‘like’. In fact I look upon Chinese as upon the Moon—a death’s head or memento mori to nations as the moon is to worlds.

It is one of the ‘painful mysteries’ of history that all languages progress from being very particular to being very general. In the first stage they are bursting with meaning, but very cryptic because they are not general enough to show the common element in different things: e.g. you can talk (and therefore think) about all the different kinds of trees but not about Trees. In fact you can’t really reason at all. In their final stage they are admirably clear but are so far away from real things that they really say nothing. As we learn to talk we forget what we have to say. Humanity, from this point of view, is rather like a man coming gradually awake and trying to describe his dreams: as soon as his mind is sufficiently awake for clear description, the thing which was to be described is gone. You see the origin of journalese and of the style in which you write army letters.

Religion and poetry are about the only languages in modern Europe—if you can regard them as ‘languages’ which still have traces of the dream in them, still having something to say. Compare ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’ with ‘The supreme being transcends space and time’. The first goes to pieces if you begin to apply the literal meaning to it. How can anything but a sexual animal really be a father? How can it be in the sky? The second falls into no such traps. On the other hand the first really means something, really represents a concrete experience in the minds of those who use it: the second is mere dexterous playing with counters, and once a man has learned the rules he can go on that way for two volumes without really using the words to refer to any concrete fact at all. But perhaps I have let the subject run away with me. Your point about children always finding their nurses language the easiest is, I take it, a complete answer to your author on that score.

I suppose Minto has already told you of the outrage in the topwood—the two new Scotch firs planted nearest the lane both stolen, and the rascals have neatly levelled in the holes where they were. Clearly to plant two saplings so eminently suitable for Christmas trees so near the road at that time of the year was asking for trouble. But one somehow does not (or did not) think of trees as things in danger of theft. You who have not put your sweat into the actual planting of them can hardly imagine my fury: though there is a funny side to it. I smile when I remember myself moving along towards the top gate—then pausing to contemplate my latest achievement—then thinking I was looking in the wrong place—then wondering if I was bewitched—finally the very gradual dawn of the truth. We must really get on with some wiring as soon as possible.

I suppose you heard that Mrs. Kreyer⁷ has now planted a few shrubs on our side of the frontier? And further—most exasperating of all—during the Christmas holiday I hardly ever went in or out by our stile on that side without meeting one or both of her whelps in the very article of trespass, and acknowledging the situation no more than to throw me a patronising ‘good afternoon’. What should one do at such a rencontre?

But perhaps the offence itself hardly annoys me more than F.K.’s reaction which consists in chuckling and saying, ‘Ah you Irish! I love to listen to dear Mrs. Moore—wouldn’t be happy without a grievance. Its really most remarkable’. He is, I think, in every mental characteristic (not moral, for of course he is no pessimist) the most complete P’daita that ever walked: in some respects he surpasses his original. What a magnificent conversation they could have had, say, in politics!

I was out with him this afternoon and he was quite grieved to hear your unfavourable verdict on Tristram Shandy⁸ re-read. I certainly did not get very far with my re-reading of it, but that was due to other causes. I still have hopes that I may enjoy it again in toto; and I rather fancy that a long immersion in English Literature has made me more tolerant of that kind of humour by now than you. Oddly enough Barfield has just made your experiment with exactly your result: he agrees with you in excepting Uncle Toby, but thinks most of the book, specially the Wadman parts, revolting.

And talking of the revolting, you will hardly believe the following. The junior parrot (you remember) has just got engaged. As soon as the news was out, his friends and owners, in other words the rest of the junto, all made a raid on his rooms—placed copies of ‘Married Love’ and ‘Lasting Passion’ under every cushion—put a large nude india rubber doll in his bed—plastered his walls with lewd good wishes—finished his whisky and beer—and retired. Such is his senility that it was left to him to spread this story as an excellent joke with his own mouth. I should like to be able to argue ‘If the fellows of a college behave like this, how much more will the rest of the world’, but I’m afraid things are so topsy-turvey—or ‘arsie-versy’ as the Elizabethans say—that it is the other way round, and for sheer blockheaded vulgarity our common room is just the place to look. Would a jeu d’esprit of this sort be tolerated in barracks?

The reservoir to the West of thee top wood is finished. It has been covered with earth so that the total effect is now that of a big plateau jutting out from the hillside, at present of brown mud, but soon, I hope, of smooth bright grass; and there is a little tile-roofed building on it-I suppose protecting a man hole into the interior. The silhouette which I see every evening against the sunset is therefore roughly as drawn, and on the whole I think it is agreeable. It often gives me an odd sensation as I progress homewards to tea along the cliff edge to look at this very distinctive shape in all its novelty and to reflect that, if God pleases, it will someday be as immemorially familiar to you and me as the contour of the Cave Hill. On such occasions you must picture me equipped with both axe and spade for the standard public work at present is ‘the extraction of roots’—I admit I have been making slow progress, but that is not because the work is turning out impracticable, but because of many interruptions.

Thus every Monday there is F.K. Last Saturday (by the way this is now Jan 24th—in fact the following Sunday) I was out for a walk with Lings. I have also missed some afternoons when the state of my health would not support the exertion. But I have little doubt that we shall have every single elder out of it before we have done. Another of my interruptions was a miniature walking tour with Barfield and Harwood just before term—so miniature indeed that it should be called a strolling tour: we just dithered along to Abingdon one day, and then Harwood and I alone (Barfield having had to leave us by bus) sauntered to Oxford all the way by river bank. The jaunt is worth mentioning because you and I have hitherto entirely underrated Abingdon. Their [sic] is a church standing in a quadrangle of almshouses right down on one of those little fresh water wharves on the river wh. is excellent. Also, on our saunter back to Oxford, we saw so many ‘abandoned lashers’ and silver falls that a man who followed the same route in July could ‘make one long bathing of a summer day’⁹ And talking about Wordsworth, pray Sir, did you ever read the White Doe of Rylstone?¹⁰ I read the first canto last night and recommend it strongly.

I don’t remember what I said about Law’s Serious Call. It is not a book which I would advise anyone to read with great urgency. There is a severity, even a grimness about it which strikes me as excessive. I must also go far to revise the favourable account I gave of The Appeal. ¹¹ It did not fulfill the promise of its first passages. An XVIIIth century critic would have complained that it was ‘infected with Enthusiasm’, and would have been right in this sense that the ideas—very valuable ones—which it contains are held by the author with a rather feverish insistence to the exclusion of many other sides of religion. There is a great deal of repetition, and neither the good will which the author won from me at the outset, nor the charm of a delightful edition, nor the literary beauty of many passages (for Law can be really eloquent) prevented me from feeling in the end a sort of discomfort and desire for escape into the open air-as if I had been in a small hot room with a man of genius and piety who was not absolutely sane. It is the same quality that moved Johnson to say of Boehme—Law’s master in these later books—‘If Jacob had seen the unutterable, Jacob should not have tried to utter it’.¹²

Most of my recent reading, before term, has been of rather a simple and boyish kind. I re-read The People of the Mist-a tip-top yarn of the sort. If someone would start re-issuing all Rider Haggard at 1/-a volume I would get them all, as a permanent fall-back for purely recreational reading. Then I read The Wood Beyond the World-with some regret that this leaves me no more Wm Morris prose romances to read (except Child Christopher ¹³ wh. is an adaptation of a mediaeval poem already known to me and therefore hardly counts). I wish he had written a hundred of them! I should like to have the knowledge of a new romance always waiting for me the next time I am sick or sorry and want a real treat.

Then I read Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, largely for a naif reason—that I had been wondering all my life who Hereward was and had a special reason in my work for wanting to know. The distinguishing feature of Kingsley’s novel is that the ‘manners and sentiments’ are nowhere near so glaringly anachronistic as they are in most novels of the kind—even in Scott whenever he goes further back than the ’45. It has, however, the opposite fault of sticking too close to history and therefore giving us (what is unpardonable in a tale of adventure) an unhappy ending. The hero betrays the heroine, deserts his followers, and dies miserably. You would want to vet it as you vetted the Life and Death of Jason,¹⁴ and for the same reason.

While at Cambridge (staying, as I foretold you in a posh hotel, at the expense of the Board. Four of us had to hold an examiners meeting one evening, and accordingly, just like the heroes of a romance, called for fire, lights, and a bottle of claret in a private room. All that was Jacking was to have prefaced the order by tweaking the landlord’s nose with a ‘Hark’ee, rascal!’ This was in the University Arms which perhaps you know)-while in Cambridge or rather on my long, slow, solitary, first class journey there and back through fields white with frost—I read Pater’s Marius the Epicurean. This is the best specimen extant of the Epicurean-aesthetic business: which one wrongs by reading it in its inferior practitioners such as George Moore and Oscar Wilde. As you probably know it is a novel—or, since the story is so slight, a faintly narrative causerie-laid in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The interesting thing is, that being a really consistent aesthete, he has to bring in the early Christians favourably because the flavour of the early Church-the new music, the humility, the chastity, the sense of order and quiet decorum—appeal to him aesthetically. It is doubtful if he sees that he can only have it in by blowing to bits the whole Epicurean basis of his outlook—so that aestheticism, honestly followed, refutes itself by leading him to something that will put aestheticism in its place—and Pater’s position is therefore, in the long run, all nonsense. But it is [a] very beautiful book—much enriched by a full prose translation of the Cupid and Psyche story from Apuleius who first told it and who is one of the minor characters. I should try it if it is in your library. Gad!—how it would have bowled one over if one had read it at eighteen. One would be only just beginning to recover now.

But all these books fade into insignificance beside my really great discovery, Barbour’s Bruce¹⁵ (XlVth century). This is ‘The’ modern epic: all that Scott’s poems try to recover: chivalrous sentiment, pawky humour, smell of heather, and all the rest of it—only all real, all done while that world was still there, not a ‘revival’. I am afraid the language is just beyond that thin unmistakable line which divides the readable from the unreadable for those who haven’t learned ‘Middle English’ as a school language. A very little ‘modernising’ would make it alright. I wonder could I persuade Dents to let me modernise it for an Everyman. You would think Scotch patriotism would give it a sale: till quite modern times every ‘cottar’ had a copy of it. (Do Scotch patriots buy books?). It contains, among other things, an account of Bruce landing at Rathlin which suggests that the bathing would not be good there. There seems to be some terrific current

‘Like the straight of Morrak in Spaine’

–if that conveys anything to you, which it doesn’t to me. (From Rathlin, Bruce went on to Carrick Fergus).

If your idea of reading Descartes holds, begin with the Discourse on Method.¹⁶ This is in biographical form and is on the border-land between philosophy proper and what might be called the ‘history of intellectual manners’. But I’m not at all sure that a man so steeped in the XVIIth century as you would not find his natural starting point in Boethius-I suppose ‘Boece’ is as common in France at that time as he was in England? As he was translated about once a century into every civilised language, you would have no difficulty in finding a well flavoured version. In England he had the remarkable adventure of being rendered successively by K. Alfred, Chaucer, and Q. Elizabeth.

As to Thomas’ rap over the knuckles about going out during the hymn—my case is this. Complete neglect of communicating is not tolerated by any Church nor practised by me. But is it within his rights to make it impossible for you to hear a sermon without communicating? Has anyone laid down the exact proportion of the intellectual and ritual elements—roughly symbolised by sermons and sacraments—which is necessary to membership of the Church of England. That is my ‘case’ as a controversialist: but I bear no malice.

By the bye, what are your views, now, on the question of sacraments? To me that is the most puzzling side of the whole thing. I need hardly say I feel none of the materialistic difficulties: but I feel strongly just the opposite ones—i.e. I see (or think I see) so well a sense in which all wine is the blood of God—or all matter, even, the body of God, that I stumble at the apparently special sense in which this is claimed for the Host when consecrated. George Macdonald observes that the good man should aim at reaching the state of mind in which all meals are sacraments. Now that is the sort of thing I can understand: but I find no connection between it and the explicit ‘sacrament’ proprement dit. The Presbyterian method of sitting at tables munching actual slices of bread is clearly absurd under ordinary conditions: but one can conceive a state of society in which a real meal might be shared by a congregation in such a way as to be a sacrament without ceasing to be also their actual dinner for that day. Possibly this was so in the very early Church. Don’t bother about this if you are not inclined to discuss the question. I trotted it out because it seemed artificial to mention it at all without saying what I was thinking.

How ones range of interests grows! Do you find a sort of double process going on with relation to books—that while the number of subjects one wants to read is increasing, the number of books on each which you find worth reading steadily decreases. Already in your own corner of French history you have reached the point at which you know that most of the books published will be merely re-hashes, but in revenge you are reading Vaughan and thinking of reading Taylor. Ten years ago you would have read eight books on your period (getting only what the one book behind those eight would have given you) and left Vaughan and Taylor out of account. In the same way, on the subject of sacraments, a few years ago I should not have wanted any information, but if I had, shd. have read book after book about it. Now—one knows [in] advance that here in Oxford there are probably 4000 books dealing exclusively with that subject, and that at least 3990 of them would advance your understanding of it precisely nothing. Once the world was full of books that seemed boring because they gave answers to questions one hadn’t asked: every day I find one of these boring books to be really boring for the opposite reason—for failing to answer some question I have asked. Even in things like Anglo Saxon Grammar! ‘Why Sir, the quantity to be known is larger than I supposed; but the quantity of knowledge is less than I had conceived possible.’

Your Cathedral sounds mildly good-architecturally. Now that Maureen is away my week is quite differently arranged in order to give Minto as few solitary nights as possible. I lie here on Sunday and Wednesday: Maureen on Friday and Saturday. I still have the schoolboy’s pleasure in any change of routine and particularly relish the division of my two out nights. I suppose I told you that we have a good maid who really cooks? She doesn’t cook as well as Minto, but that is a bagatelle. What is more serious is the steady reduction in the quantity of meals which she seems to be effecting. If it goes on at the present rate, when you come back it will be a case of ‘I suppose there’s some sort of pot-house in this village where a man could get a biscuit, huh?’¹⁷ (This had better not be mentioned in your next letter to Minto. I daresay we shall pull through). I have fewer tutorials this term—the Junto is quiet—my lecture is well attended—and all shapes for a much pleasanter term than usual: the second of the nine, as it is pleasing to note. Why don’t you write that paper on Thomas Browne yourself? I’ve no time for it.

Yours

Jack.

P.S. Minto tells me to tell you I like Troddles the puppy because she says if I don’t mention him you’ll think I don’t like him but I say that is not the masculine way of reading letters nor of writing them but she is not quite convinced so here goes;-I like Troddles. So does Papworth. Cham can’t abide him and cuffs him whenever they meet.

Jack was very afraid that Warnie, who had been in Shanghai since 17 November 1931, was in danger from a Japanese attack on the Chinese part of that city. On 18 September 1931, in violation of its treaty obligations, Japan occupied Manchuria. On 21 September China appealed to the Council of the League of Nations, and on 30 September the Council adopted unanimously a resolution taking note of the Japanese representative’s statement that his Government would continue as rapidly as possible the withdrawal of its troops.

The Japanese Government failed to carry out the assurances given the Council, but adopted the attitude that a preliminary agreement, binding China to recognize Japan’s treaty rights in Manchuria, was an essential element of security and must be a condition precedent to evacuation. After being rebuffed by the League of Nations, Japan announced its withdrawal from the League to take effect in 1935. To consolidate its gains, Japan landed troops in Shanghai on 28 January 1932 to quell an effective Chinese boycott of Japanese goods. By 5 February the whole of the three provinces of Manchuria were occupied. China was unable to resist the superior Japanese forces and in May 1933 it recognized the Japanese conquest by signing a truce.

Writing about it later, Warnie said the Army Service Corps was ‘not involved, but there was thought to be a grave risk that the Japanese, in an endeavour to outflank the Chinese, might violate the International Settlement. Consequently the Settlement garrison had been put on an active service basis, with manned trenches, strong points etc, round our perimeter’. ¹⁸

TO HIS BROTHER:

Feb 15th 1932

The Kilns

My dear Warnie–

This will be a shortish letter, partly because I am still a convalescent from flu—this being not my first day but my first afternoon up-partly because we don’t really care to bank on the security of any letter reaching you in the present state of Shanghai.

Anxiety is of all troubles the one that lends itself least to description. Of course we have been and are infernally bothered about you—probably not more than you have been bothered about yourself! I suppose that about as often as I have stopped myself from repeating the infuriating question ‘Why was he such a fool’ etc, you have abstained from the parallel ‘Why was I such a fool as ever to come out here’. I will refrain from asking you any particular questions because I remember from war experiences that questions from home are always based on a misunderstanding of the whole situation.

It will be more useful as a guide to your reply to tell you that we have (from the Times) a map of Shanghai large enough to mark Gt. Western Road, so we should be able to follow your news in some detail. As for the printed news, it is plainly nonsense: the almost daily story being that fierce fighting raged all day in Chapei and the Japanese had one man killed and three wounded. In other parts of the paper the ‘fierce fighting’, I admit, usually turns out to be a heavy Japanese barrage replied to by two trench mortars. You will see at any rate that it is impossible from here to form any idea of the only aspect of the thing that concerns me: viz: the actual and probable distance between the A.P.B. and the firing. It is true that I have to my hand the axiom that the distance will be as great as the A.P.B. has been able to contrive-but that carries me only a very little way. The result is that my fancy plays me every kind of trick. At one time I feel as if the danger was very slight and begin reckoning when your first account of the troubles will reach us: at another I am—exceedingly depressed. All the news is of the sort that one re-interprets over and over again with new results in each new mood. A beastly state of affairs.

The last letter we had from you was the one you wrote to Minto immediately after your flu’. I had written to you a few days before that arrived. Since then I don’t know that much to record has happened. I was going on steadily with the ‘extraction of roots’ in the wood: but you’d hardly believe how the doubt about your situation takes the relish out of public works.

My term was continuing in a pretty good course. Segar¹⁹ has been specially attentive in inquiries about you and in his characteristic half comical attempts to put the situation in as favourable a light as possible. I must say I am a little surprised that he is the only person in College who has done so.

I have now been in my room for precisely a week. It has been an ideal illness. My little east room, as you know, gives one two views-one over to Philips an t’other up to the top wood—and the grate does not smoke. Most of the week there has been snow falling during some part of the day—wh. is just the finishing touch to a comfortable day’s reading in bed. I have re-read three Scotts. 1. The Monastery²⁰ wh. I had read in the very old days—pre-Wynyard ²¹ and quite forgotten. I think it the poorest Scott I have yet read, tho worth reading. What really gave me most pleasure was to meet your quotation (in the Capt. Clutterbuck epistle) about the paradise of half-pay and the purgatory of duty. Lord—I wish you were out of the latter this moment. 2. The Abbot- originally read at the same time. This is much better, and I should put it fairly high among the pre-17th century novels, wh. as a whole I find inferior to the others. Still, it shares with Rob Roy the rare advantage of having a natural and even pleasant heroine. Finally The Antiquary for about the fifth time, wh. I have almost fixed on as the Scott novel.²² I have read it so often that I do not remember at which reading I ceased to regard Mr. Oldbuck as ‘a character’ and began to think him (as I now do) simply the one sensible man in the book, living as any rational man would live if he were given peace.

I wonder, supposing that the P.O. is working when this reaches you, would you mind letting me have a cable to say that you’re alright? Unless, of course everything is quiet by the end of the next fortnight. It would really cheer us up immensely.

I shall resume proper letter writing with the rest of my regular routine as soon as I get back to work. For the moment this is the best I can do. With best wishes, brother, for a speedy removal of your person to some quieter area.

Yours

Jack.

P.S. Your pictures have come. I think hanging them is the safest method of storing them and I shall do so as soon as I am about again: till then I have refused to have them unpacked.

TO HIS BROTHER (W):

[The Kilns]

Feb 21st 1932

My dear W–

Since I last wrote to you, four or five days ago, we had two communications from you. First, a message by Bibby Wireless which took exactly a fortnight to reach us. As this is much too short a time for anything but telegraphy, and much too long for any telegraph (wireless or wiry) I don’t know what to make of it: but I’m inclined to think that you expected it to reach us sooner and that its actual date of arrival does shew some dislocation of services. Thanks for sending it. The re-assuring view of the crisis is quite obviously untrue by now, whatever it may have been when you sent it; but thanks all the same.

Secondly, I have had your cheering letter of Jan 14th—‘cheering’ for giving one some conversation with you, though of course it bears not at all on the source of anxiety. I must confess I have imbibed enough of that rather specially shabby superstition which cries ‘Touch wood’ etc, to shudder when I read your proposals about walks in Ulster etc. In fact I have two unpleasantly contrasted pictures in my mind. One ‘features’ the two Pigibudda with packs and sticks de-training into the sudden stillness of the moors at Parkmore.²³ the other is of you progressing from the Bund to Gt. Western Rd. with an eye cocked skyward, just in the old French manner, curse it, and ducking at the old Who-o-o-o-p-Bang! Like Boswell, on that perilous crossing in the Hebrides, I ‘at last took refuge in piety: but was much embarrassed by the various objections which have been raised against the doctrine of special providences’.²⁴ Unfortunately I have not at hand the work of Dr. Ogden in which Boswell found this difficulty solved.²⁵ I suppose the solution lies in pointing out that the efficacy of prayer is, at any rate no more of a problem then the efficacy of all human acts. i.e. if you say ‘It is useless to pray because Providence already knows what is best and will certainly do it,’ then why is it not equally useless (and for the same reason) to try to alter the course of events in any way whatever—to ask for the salt or book your seat in a train?

However, in spite of this discomfort, I cannot help joining you in your day-dream of a Parkmore walk. That is partly because I am now back in bed (nothing serious, just a slight re-rise of temperature owing to having tried to get up too soon). Do you find, during the endless afternoons of a week in bed, that one’s imagination is constantly haunted with pictures of seacoasts and cliffs and such like? Mine has been specially busy with the walk you suggest. I think it would be better to go down to the coast by the second of the two glens to Cushendun (not Cushendall) after a glance down the first, which is better as a view than as a route. The impressive simplicity—one huge fold of land-which makes it so good a view would make it a little monotonous for footing: the other is a perfect paradise of ups and downs and brawling streams, little woods, stone walls, and ruined cottages. The next days walk—on North with Rathlin in view—I did an hour of with Arthur last summer, and it is even better than you can possibly imagine if you haven’t done it. The lunch problem is a pity: but one can never be utterly stranded in a country full of streams—spring water being not only better than nothing with which to wash down a man’s victuals but better than anything except beer or tea. It is the dry dollop of unmitigated sandwich on top of a waterless chalk down in Berkshire that really spoils a day’s walk. But perhaps this is enough of the day dream—the other picture begins to bother me.

By the way, if you get through this damned battle next door to you, it will have had one incidental advantage-that of having made me very familiar with Shanghai. I could now draw quite a good map from memory: certainly could get in Chapei Station, Gt. Western Rd, Trinity Cathedral, Cathay Hotel, the Creek, Hongkew fairly correctly.

I thoroughly agree with your revised proposals for the Lewis papers. If you remember, I was always to this extent opposed to your first scheme, that I wanted all letters put in together in their chronological order so as to secure the va-et-vient²⁶ of actual intercourse, whereas you wanted A’s letters in a block, then B’s letters in a block. But your new idea is better than either. How far will you extend it? It seems to me that all good traditional information (e.g. ‘I thought your father would have gone wild’) now can and ought to go in: and I am not at all sure that the contents of P’daita Pie²⁷ should not find their place in the main narrative. Many pages of Boswell are just such ‘pie’ mosaiced into the biography. You see how impossible it is not to be always counting on the future and then being always pulled up by recollection of those shells and made to feel that any such counting is a positive tempting of fate. However, what is one to do.

I shall make this a short letter and try to send you another short one soon, because whatever you say, it is quite obvious that mails are not safe. How can they be when any boat coming up that river may stop a Chinese shell? I was much taken by the photos of the model railway—though his wall-painting scenery seems to have left some problems of perspective unsolved. I doubt if I should care for a toy of that kind now: toy country would be my fancy—i.e. where you wd. have country as a background to a railway, I should have railway as a feature of the country. Perhaps some such complementary difference was already present in our own humbler attic system. But a man could have great fun, you will allow, landscape-building on that same scale. Indeed I fancy you could produce something of which the photos would really deceive.

I wonder how I shd. enjoy a performance of The Count of Luxembourg?²⁸ I hum over to myself Rootsie-Tootsie and As they pass the gay cafes and of course remember, in a way, all the same things as you: but probably with quite different emotions. I see now that my enjoyment of musical comedy in the old days, though quite real, was largely ‘caught’ from you-or rather from the fashionable world of 1912–14 of which you were in my case the conductor: and it has all passed without going deep enough to make the real remeniscent feeling as they do in you. The sound that I get in our room in college when I pull the study curtains (that unique nimble) releases memories that ‘come home to my business and bosoms’ as the musical comedy tunes do not. Contrariwise, my old Wagner favourites, which are still startlingly evocative for me, wd. probably now not be so for you.

This, by the bye, shows the absurdity of the statement often made ‘Well at least a man knows when he’s enjoying himself’. I thought I liked the musical comedy tune in my musical comedy period just as much as I thought I liked the Wagner tune in my next period. Memory shows that I was mistaken. And why should I remember with such delight sitting with you near that fountain on the high Holywood Road that summer evening during the great Row—and remember with such complete coldness going to The Arcadians.²⁹ The first seemed at the time a most miserable, the second a most pleasurable evening: but the first has ‘kept’ (as they say of meat) and the second has not. Still, I wd. willingly go with you to one of the old musical comedies if the chance came our way.

It is a springlike evening here—all the birds twittering—and I am beginning to be tired of bed. I am certainly tired of novels and must get something nutritious fetched from college to morrow. I’m not at all sure that I shan’t, after your remarks, have a cut at the Georgics.³⁰ I need not urge you to look after yourself as well as you can. I suppose you are wearing tin-hats—alack the day! All send their love

Yrs

Jack.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[The Kilns]

Feb 1932

My dear Arthur,

I have been laid up with flu’ for over a fortnight or I shd. have answered you before. As you preferred my last letter to my previous ones, and also took longer to answer it than ever, I suppose if I want a speedy answer to this I had better write a letter you don’t like! Let me see—I must first select all the subjects which are least likely to interest you, and then consider how to treat them in the most unattractive manner. I have half a mind to do it—but on second thoughts it would be almost as big a bore for me to write it as for you to read it. How exasperating to think of you being at Ballycastle with an unappreciative companion, in bad weather, and a lethargic mood: it seems such a waste.

I thought we had talked about Naomi Mitchison before. I have only read one (Black Sparta)³¹ and I certainly agree that it ‘holds’ one: indeed I don’t know any historical fiction that is so astonishingly vivid and, on the whole, so true. I also thought it astonishing how, despite the grimness, she got such an air of beauty—almost dazzling beauty—into it. As to the cruelties, I think her obvious relish is morally wicked, but hardly an artistic fault for she cd. hardly get some of her effects without it. But it is, in Black Sparta, a historical falsehood: not that the things she describes did not probably happen in Greece, but that they were not typical—the Greeks being, no doubt, cruel by modern standards, but, by the standards of that age, extremely humane. She gives you the impression that the cruelty was essentially Greek, whereas it was precisely the opposite. That is, she is unfair as I should be unfair if I wrote a book about some man whose chief characteristic was that he was the tallest of the pigmies, and kept on reminding the reader that he was very short. I should be telling the truth (for of course he would be short by our standards) but missing the real point about the man-viz: that he was, by the standards of his own race, a giant. Still, she is a wonderful writer and I fully intend to read more of her when I have a chance.

I am so glad to hear you have started Froissart.³² If I had the book here (I am out at the Kilns—only got up yesterday) we could compare passages. What I chiefly remember from the first part is the Scotch wars and the odd way in which just a very few words gave me the impression of the scenery—the long wet valleys and the moors. How interesting too, to find how much of the chivalry in the romances was really practised in the wars of the period—e.g. the scene where Sir Thing-um-a-bob (you see you are not the only one who forgets things) espouses the cause of the lady of Hainault. Or again, at the siege of Hennebont (?) where you actually have a lady-knight fighting, just like Britomart in the Faerie Queene.

To enjoy a book like that thoroughly I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs: then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page: finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined. I often wonder-considering how people enjoy themselves developing photos or making scrap-books—why so few people make a hobby of their reading in this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine-nibbed pen in my hand: one is making something all the time and a book so read acquires the charm of a toy without losing that of a book.

By the way, when you ask me to ‘pray for you’ (in connection with Froissart) I don’t know if you are serious, but, the answer is, I do. It may not do you any good, but it does me a lot, for I cannot ask for any change to be made in you without finding that the very same needs to be made in me; which pulls me up and also by putting us all in the same boat checks any tendency to priggishness.

While I have been in bed I have had an orgy of Scott -The Monastery, The Abbot, The Antiquary and the Heart of Midlothian³³ which I am at present in the middle of. The Monastery and Abbot I have read only once before—long, long ago, long before you and I were friends—so that they were the same as new ground to me. Neither of them is Scott at his best—the Monastery indeed is about the worst I have yet read—but both are worth reading. The Antiquary I have read over and over again, and old Oldbuck is almost as familiar to me as Johnson. What a relish there is about him and his folios and his tapestry room and his paper on Castrametation and his ‘never taking supper: but trusting that a mouthful of ale with a toast and haddock, to close the orifice of the stomach, does not come under that denomination’³⁴ (How like my father and his ‘little drop of the whiskey’).

I think re-reading old favourites is one of the things we differ on, isn’t it, and you do it very rarely. I probably do it too much. It is one of my greatest pleasures: indeed I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once. Do try one of the old Scotts again. It will do admirably as a rest in the intervals of something that needs working at, like Froissart.

There has been a good deal of snow during my illness. Where I lay in bed I could see it through two windows, and a bit of the wooded hill gradually whitening in the distance. What could be snugger or nicer? Indeed my flu’ this year would have been delightful if I hadn’t been worried about Warnie, who is in Shanghai. When there is something like this wh. forces one to read the papers, how one loathes their flippancy and their sensational exploitation of things that mean life and death. I wish to goodness he had never gone out there.

Do try and let me know when you are coming to London and when there is a chance of your coming here. Otherwise you know what it will be: you will turn up unexpectedly on some day when I have 15 hours’ work to do, and I shall be angry with you and you will be angry with me, and we shall meet for a comfortless half hour in a teashop and snap and sulk at each other and part both feeling miserable. Surely it is worth while trying to avoid this. Give my love to your mother and to the dog. I hope we shall have some famous walks with him

Yours

Jack

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

March 16th/32

My dear Barfield

Death and damnation! This will never do. Look here—when you walk I walk. If you are finally forced to take your holiday earlier, make that the walk and Griffiths and I will come with you. A walk with the new Anthroposophical³⁵ member and without you is not good enough. But I trust you will be able to stick to the original arrangement.

Somehow prurient doesn’t seem to be the right word for Spenser. Delicatus- relaxed in will—of course he is.

You must have been having a horrible time alternating between bed and exams.³⁶ Condolences! I have written about 100 lines of a long poem in my type of Alexandrine. It is going to make the Prelude (let alone the Tower)³⁷ look silly.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

March 19th 1932

My dear Barfield–

Rê Walk: (1) I could certainly come earlier, but very strongly deprecate a date too near Easter on account of crowded hotels etc. (2) I would reluctantly agree to changing the terrain to Sussex: but if the date is put near Easter, this reluctance increased to just not being absolute recalcitrance. That country at that time will be a stream of hikers talking about yaffles. Is it, by the way, to any one’s interest besides yours to walk in Sussex.

(3) I enclose Griffiths’ letter, to which I have replied telling him all I know (it isn’t much) about dates. It is an alarming and disappointing letter. I am afraid Anthroposophy is his only chance now. He seems to be heading for unmitigated egoism. I wrote him rather a breezy letter trying to give him the feeling, without saying it, that the idea of his being a ‘burden’ on our walk (damn his impudence) was unutterably ridiculous. I’d like to see anyone try? This walk is his last chance. Either we’ll cure him or make an enemy of him for life!

Thanks for the Note on Pain. ‘I kan not bult it to the bran’³⁸ at all. When you say that the redeemed self can feel no pain, does this mean that the actual sense-data would be different, or only that the self’s attitude to them would be i.e. it would feel what we call pain but would not ‘mind it’—have ³⁹ but not. ⁴⁰ Again, is ‘being aware of something as good’ equal to ‘feeling something as pleasurable’. If pain disappears as soon as we find it good, then can’t we be said to find pain good? You see I am all muddled. I will try to get clear and write about it later on: but I think the ‘note’ very important.

I am still pleased with my new poem. What Wordsworth didn’t see was that the subjective epic can learn a lot from the structure of the old epic. There need be no flats if you use the equivalent of inlet narrative and hastening in media res.

Have you passed your exam?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HIS BROTHER (W):

[The Kilns]

March 20th 1932

My dear Warnie–

We had a few days ago your letter of Jan. 28th and the first written by you during the troubles. The papers had of course relieved our minds some time before we got it: and I have now passed from anxiety to that sulky state in which I feel that you have given us all a great deal of unnecessary trouble. I feel as the P’daitabird did when he replied to a Cherbourg letter of mine, telling him how I had had a nasty fall in a puddle, ‘Please try for my sake to avoid such drenchings in the future.’ I hope you will be equally considerate. By the way, as regards one point in your letter,—there is no question of building a fence instead of building the two rooms. Indeed, considering the comparative cost of the two works, this would be rather like buying a new pair of braces instead of a Rolles-Royce.

Next to the good news from China, the best thing that has happened to me lately is to have assisted at such a scene in the Magdalen smoking room as rarely falls one’s way. The Senior Parrot-that perfectly ape-faced man whom I have probably pointed out to you—was seated on the padded fender with his back to the fire, bending down to read a paper, and thus leaving a tunnel shaped aperture between his collar and the nape of his neck [designated P in a drawing of the man]. A few yards in front of him stood MacFarlane.⁴¹ Let MacFarlane now light a cigarette and wave the match to and fro in the air to extinguish it. And let the match be either not wholly extinguished or so recently extinguished that no fall of temperature in the wood has occurred. Let M. then fling the match towards the fire in such a way that it follows the dotted line and enters the aperture at P with the most unerring accuracy. For a space of time which must have been infinitesimal, but which seemed long to us as we watched in the perfect silence which this very interesting experiment so naturally demanded, the Senior Parrot, alone ignorant of his fate, continued absorbed in the football results. His body then rose in a vertical line from the fender, without apparent muscular effort, as though propelled by a powerful spring under his bottom. Re-alighting on his feet he betook himself to a rapid movement of the hands with the apparent intention of applying them to every part of his back and buttock in the quickest possible succession: accompanying this exercise with the distention of the cheeks and a blowing noise. After which, exclaiming (to me) in a very heightened voice ‘It isn’t so bloody funny’ he darted from the room. The learned Dr Hope (that little dark, mentally dull, but very decent demi-butty who breakfasted with you and me)⁴² who alone had watched the experiment with perfect gravity, at this stage, remarked placidly to the company in general, ‘Well, well, the match will have gone out by now’, and returned to his periodical—But the luck of it! How many shots would a man have taken before he succeeded in throwing a match into that tiny aperture if he had been trying?

You asked Minto in a recent letter about this Kenchew man.⁴³ As a suitor he shows deplorable tendency to hang fire, and I fancy the whole thing will come to nothing. (Ah there won’t be any proposal): as a character, however, he is worth describing, or seems so to me because I had to go for a walk with him. He is a ladylike little man of about fifty, and is to-a-tee that ‘sensible, well-informed man’ with whom Lamb dreaded to be left alone. My troubles began at once. It seemed good to him to take a bus to the Station and start our walk along a sort of scrubby path between a factory and a greasy strip of water—a walk, in fact, which was as good a reproduction as Oxford could afford of our old Sunday morning ‘around the river bank’. I blundered at once by referring to the water as a canal. ‘Oh-could it be possible that I didn’t know it was the Thames? I must be joking. Perhaps I was not a walker?’ I foolishly said that I was. He gave me an account of his favourite walks; with a liberal use of the word ‘picturesque’. He then called my attention to the fact that the river was unusually low (how the devil did he know that?) and would like to know how I explained it. I scored a complete Plough, and was told how he explained it.

By this time we were out in Port Meadow, and a wide prospect opened before him. A number of hills and church spires required to be identified, together with their ‘picturesque’, mineral, or chronological details. A good many problems arose, and again I did very badly. As his map, though constantly brought out, was a geological map, it did not help us much. A conversation on weather followed, and seemed to offer an escape from unmitigated fact. The escape, however, was quite illusory, and my claim to be rather fond of nearly all sorts of weather was received with the stunning information that psychologists detected the same trait in children and lunatics.

Anxious to turn my attention from this unpleasing fact, he begged my opinion of various changes which had recently been made in the river: indeed every single lock, bridge, and stile for three mortal miles had apparently been radically altered in the last few months. As I had never seen any of the places before (‘But I thought you said you were a walker…’) this bowled me middle stump again. The removal of a weir gave us particular trouble. He could not conceive how it had been done. What did I think? And then, just as I was recovering from this fresh disgrace, and hoping that the infernal weir was done with, I found that the problem of haw it had been removed was being raised only as the preliminary to the still more intricate problem of why it had been removed. (My feelings were those expressed by Macfarlane at dinner one night last term, in an answer to someone’s question. ‘Yes. He is studying the rhythms of mediaeval Latin prose, and it is a very curious and interesting subject, but it doesn’t interest me.’)

For a mile or so after the weir we got on famously, for Kenchew began ‘I was once passing this very spot or, no, let me see—perhaps it was a little further on—no! It was exactly here—I remember that very tree—when a very remarkable experience, really remarkable in a small way, happened to me.’ The experience remarkable in a small way, with the aid of a judicious question or two on my part, was bidding fair to last out the length of the walk, when we had the horrible misfortune of passing a paper mill (You see, by the bye, what a jolly walk it was even apart from the company!). Not only a paper mill but the paper mill of the Clarendon Press. ‘Of course I had been over it. No? Really etc’ (The great attraction was that you could get an electric shock.)

But I must stop my account of this deplorable walk somewhere. It was the same all through—sheer information. Time after time I attempted to get away from the torrent of isolated, particular facts: but anything tending to opinion, or discussion, to fancy, to ideas, even to putting some of his infernal facts together and making something out of them—anything like that was received in blank silence. Once, while he was telling me the legendary foundation of a church, I had a faint hope that we might get onto history: but it turned out that his knowledge was derived from an Edwardian Oxford pageant. Need I add that he is a scientist? A geographer, to be exact. And now that I come to think of it he is exactly what one would have expected a geographer to be. But I mustn’t give you too black an impression of him. He is kind, and really courteous (you know the rare quality Id mean) and a gentleman. I imagine he is what women call ‘Such an interesting man. And so clever.’

One day in College lately I had a long browse over Lockhart,⁴⁴ using your pencilled index as a guide. It had almost the effect of having a conversation with you. What a good book it is, isn’t it? I must gradually browse through it all. Some baggage called Dame Una Pope-Henessy has just brought out (for the centenary) a real petty, chatty, Strachey-esque Life of Scott which begins by expressing a desire to ‘rescue’ Scott from ‘the solemn nine-volume tomb’ of Lockhart.⁴⁵ This kind of thing is insufferable. Christie reviewed it for the Oxford Magazine and, very happily in my opinion, ended up with the view that this chatty, impudent life was ‘bound to come’ and it was a good thing to have it over.⁴⁶

Talking about Scott, I finished the Heart of Midlothian shortly after I last wrote to you. It seems to me on the whole one of the best. Dumbiedikes is one of the great lairds—almost as good as Ellangowans, though not quite. I suppose every one has already remarked how wonderfully Jennie escapes the common dulness of perfectly good characters in fiction. Do you think that the fact of her being uneducated helps? Is it that the reader wants to feel some superiority over the characters he reads about, and that a social or intellectual one will give him a sop and induce him to believe in the purely moral superiority? But this sounds rather too ‘modern’ and knowing to be true; I for one not beleiving that we are all such ticks as is at present supposed. I did not read the Georgics after all, but did read the Aeneid.

The other day Foord-Kelsie succeeded in carrying out a project that he has been hammering away at for a long time, that of taking me over to see his old village of Kimble where he was rector. I mention it in order to say that you and I have unduly neglected the Chilterns. Of course you have been there, and noticed how completely different they are from the Cotswolds, but one forgets the beauty. We drove for hours through the finest old beech woods—a real forest country where the villages are only clearings. The local industry is chair making, and as beech, apparently, can be worked green, the old method of actually working in the wood, turning the newly felled timber with a primitive lathe, still goes on. At least F.-K.—come, I see for the first time that it won’t do on paper-Foord-Kelsie says so. Perhaps this is no more reliable than the consolations which he offered me when you were in danger at Shanghai, when he pointed out that the combatants were firing at each other not at the Settlement. I replied that shells, once fired, didn’t discriminate on whom they fell. To which he answered ‘Oh but you know modern artillery is a wonderful thing. They can place their shells with the greatest possible nicety.’ This from him to me, considering our relative experience, is worthy of the P’daitabird at his best.

By the way, talking of shells, we had a conversation about the next war in College the other night, and the Senior Parrot (the hero of the match episode) who flies in the reserve was treating us to the usual business—modern weapons—capital cities wiped out in an hour-non-combatants decimated—whole thing over in a month. It suddenly occurred to me that after all, these statements are simply the advertisement of various new machines: and the next war will be precisely as like this as the real running of a new car is like the account of it in the catalogue. We had all, of course,—at least people of your and my way of thinking—been skeptical, but I never saw the ‘rationale’ of it before.

To return to Foord-Kelsie. I had one magnificent score off him that drive. All the way along, whenever we passed a rash of bungalows or a clutch of petrol pumps, he was at his usual game. ‘How ridiculous to pretend that these things spoiled the beauty of the countryside etc’ Late in the day, and now in his own country, he waved his hand towards a fine hillside and remarked ‘My old friend Lee—a most remarkable man—bought all that and presented it to the nation to save it from being covered with bungalows.’ He saw the pit he had fallen into a moment too late.

His old rectory at Kimble is one of the very best places I have ever seen. It is a huge garden sloping down one side and up the other of a little ravine: beyond that divided only by a fence from the almost miniature-mountain scenery of Chekkers park. In this little ravine is a good specimen of a kind of beauty we shall never, I fear, have at the Kilns—that of uneven ground evenly shaved by lawn-mowers. You know the effect (one sometimes gets it on golf links)—rather like the curves on a closely clipped race-horse: an almost sensuous beauty-one wants to stroke the hillside. If you add a few finely clipped yews you will have the picture complete.

I have done little reading other than work since the Aeneid, except, of course, the inevitable snippet of Boswell. I began the first epistle to the Corinthians but didn’t make much of it. Lately I have been skimming The Way of All Flesh.⁴⁷ I thought I should probably not like it on a re-reading, but it wears well. Its crudities of satire are so honest and hilarious that one can’t resist them.

Elder-rooting in the top wood has begun again, and this afternoon, thanks to a night and morning of delicious soft rain which had softened the earth after a long continued drought, I got up four of them. I wished you were with me. The wood, and, even more, the path to it, smelled deliciously. There were still drops on every branch, and a magnificent chorus of birds. It was one of those days when, in the old phrase, you can almost hear things growing. The catkins (half way up to the topwood) are all out, and the first purple look on the birches is just beginning. There is something unusually pleasant about public works when one is just getting really strong again after being ill: it is nice to sweat again.

Thanks for two copies of the North China News. You were really a good deal nearer the front than I supposed.

Yours

Jack

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

The Kilns,

Hdngtn Quarry

March 22nd [1932]

Dear old chap

(Is this a sufficiently untruculent opening?) I have received your incoherent and exasperating letter. You asked me for opinions (‘a short essay’ were your words) on the time and place you proposed for a walk, and I volunteered ‘em. There is no question in my mind of going for a walk with Griffiths and Beckett (preposterous conjunction) without you. When you walk, I walk. I think Sussex a bad place to walk in but shall of course go there if you can’t go anywhere else. And at any time you choose. Now, is that clear? Got it, old bean.

Now for another bibfull. Please tell me which Thursday night we are assembling on at Eastbourne (Sorry, I see you have. March 31st) Right, I’ll do that. Where, in Eastbourne? Will you tell Griffiths or shall I?

Kent is a perfectly stinking place. Let us go west rather than go there.

Bridges⁴⁸-what the devil would I imitate Bridges for? I’d as soon think of imitating Tupper.⁴⁹

If you can’t see the joke about Griffiths being a burden-it’s all one. Plague o’ these pickled herrings.

Nobody ever said the note on Pain was nonsense. But if you insist, I am prepared to call anything you say nonsense.

Well: 31st of March at Eastbourne: at a place to be later arranged. I shan’t tell Griffiths unless ordered to, for I cannot make out from your letter what, whether, and when you have written to him. Ta-ta, old boy

Yours

C. S. Lewis

P.S. Please acknowledge this and confirm details in your next moment of calm.

P.P.S. Harwood wants not ‘his bottom kicked’ but, more idiomatically ‘his bottom kicking’.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[The Kilns]

Easter Sunday [27 March] 1932

My dear Arthur,

We are about ‘quits’ this time in lateness of answering. I had to get off a letter to Warnie before I wrote to you, as he had been longer in my debt, and that of course had to be a long one. (By the bye the trouble in China seems to be over, I am glad to see.) And now I find that your last letter is in College, while I am out here at the Kilns, so that I shan’t be able to answer it very definitely.

Almost the only thing I remember about it is that you are writing a detective story. After I have spent so much of my life in writing things of the kind that don’t appeal to you, I suppose I should not be surprised at you writing in one of the kinds that doesn’t appeal to me-gradually more of your letter begins to come back to me. You have given up Naomi Mitchison because you find the characters unreal. I didn’t feel that myself. Of course one does not feel the same intimacy in detail with characters from the far past as with those in a novel of contemporary life. I don’t think I mind that. Hamlet or, say, the Baron of Bradwardine-of course one doesn’t in one way know them as well as Soames Forsyte or Kipps:⁵⁰ in another way I feel I know them better. In fact ‘in one way it is, in another way it isn’t’. But then, I think one of the differences between us [is] that you appreciate much more than I do the ‘close-up’ detail—superficial detail I often think-of modern character drawing.

There I go in my usual way—expressing an opinion on modern fiction when the real state of the case is that I have read so little of it, and that so carelessly, that I ought to have no opinion on it at all. I must rely mainly on you. Perhaps as time goes on you will drift more to the present and I more to the past and we shall be useful to each other in that way. Fortunately, there is a solid something, neither of the present or of the past, which we shall always have in common.

Talking of the past, I had a really delightful experience some weeks ago. An old pupil of mine, one Wood,⁵¹ came to spend a night with me. When I was his tutor he had been a curiously naïf, almost neurotic youth, who was always in love and other troubles, and so childish that he once asked me (as if I were his father!) whether one fell in love less often as one grew older, because he hoped so. Altogether an appealing, but somewhat ridiculous young man. When he went down he was compelled against his will to go into his father’s business: and for a year [or] so I got letters from him, and accounts of him from common friends, which seemed to show that he was settling down into a permanent state of self-pity.

You can imagine how pleased I was to find that he had got over this: but above all—that is why I am telling the story-to find that his whole support is romantic reading in those precious evening hours ‘after business’ which you remember so well. He quoted bits of Middle English poems which he had read with me for the exam. They were mere drudgery to him at the time, but now, in memory, they delight him. He has just re-read the whole of Malory with more delight than ever, and has bought, but not yet begun, The High History of the Holy Graal. He also writes a bit—in those same precious evenings, and Saturday afternoons.

In fact as I sat talking to him, hearing his not very articulate, but unmistakable, attempts to express his pleasure, I really felt as if I were meeting our former selves. He is just in the stage that we were in when you worked with Tom and I was at Bookham.⁵² Of course there was an element of vanity on my side—one lilted to feel that one had been the means of starting him on things that now are standing him in such good stead. There was also a less contemptible, and, so to speak, professional, pleasure in thus seeing a proof that the English School here does really do some good. But in the main the pleasure was a spiritual one—a kind of love. It is difficult, without being sentimental, to say how extraordinarily beautiful- ravishing-I found the sight of some one just at that point which you and I remember so well. I suppose it is this pleasure which fathers always are hoping to get, and very seldom do get, from their sons.

Do you think a good deal of parental cruelty results from the disappointment of this hope? I mean, it takes a man of some tolerance to resign himself to the fact that his sons are not going to follow the paths that he followed and not going to give him this pleasure. What it all comes to, anyway, is that this pleasure, like everything else worth having, must not be reckoned on, or demanded as a right. If I had thought of it for a moment in the old days when I was teaching Wood, this pleasant evening would probably never have happened.

By the way he left a book with me, as a result of which I have lately read, or partially read, one modern novel—The Fountain, by Charles Morgan.⁵³ It is about a mystic, or would-be mystic, who was interned in Holland. I thought I was going to like it very much, but soon got disappointed. I was just going to say ‘it soon degenerates into an ordinary novel’, but realised only just in time that this wd. show an absurd point of view—as if one blamed an egg for degenerating into a chicken, forgetting that nature intended it for precisely that purpose. Still the fact remains that I personally enjoy a novel only in so far as it fails to be a novel pure and simple and escapes from the eternal love business into some philosophical, religious, fantastic, or farcical region.

By the way how did the Macdonald historical novel turn out? I shd. imagine it might suit him better than his modern ones.

I had meant to tell you all about my work in the wood these days, and how nice it looked and smelled and sounded: but I am suffering from a disease, rare with me, but deserving your sympathy-namely an extreme reluctance to write, even to my oldest friend about the things I like best. You see I have struggled with this reluctance for three pages. It is your turn now to reply soon and wake me from my lethargy as I have often tried to do you

Yrs

Jack

P.S. I think being up very late last night and up for the early ‘celebrrrration’ this morning may be the cause of my dulness.

TO HIS BROTHER (W):

[The Kilns]

April 8th 1932

My dear W–

I have your excellent letter of Feb. 14th. You are right in supposing that this Sino-Japanese war provides us at last with a political subject in which we are on the same side: but in suggesting that it is the law of chances which thus brings me into the line of archipigibotian orthodoxy, you are surely forgetting that, if that is true, you can claim no credit for predicting the fact, since if the phenomenon (my opinion) is purely irrational, there can be no rational prediction of it—you can foretell it only by luck. Indeed your hitting it would, by the rule of chances, be so unlikely, that it is clear there is no chance in the business at all. The truth being that you, having at last, and indeed by chance, found your own prejudices coincident with the dictates of justice and humanity—and feeling something unusual, not to say distressing, in this situation—you foresaw that this time I would be on the same side.

To be serious, my main feeling, and yours too, I expect, is an uneasy balance between indignation and the restraining knowledge that we English have of all people most deprived ourself, by our own imperial history, of the right to be indignant. But I don’t know why I have let the whole dam thing waste even this much of my letter.

I wonder can you imagine how reassuring your bit about Spenser is to me who spend my time trying to get unwilling hobble-de-hoys to read poetry at all? One begins to wonder whether literature is not, after all, a failure. Then comes your account of the Faerie Queene on your office table, and one remembers that all the professed ‘students of literature’ don’t matter a rap, and that the whole thing goes on, unconcerned by the fluctuations of the kind of ‘taste’ that gets itself printed, living from generation to generation in the minds of the few disinterested people who sit down alone and read what they like and find that it turns out to be just the things that every one has liked since they were written. I agree with all you say about it, except about the distinctions of character. The next time I dip in it I shall keep my weather eye on them. It would be quite in accord with all ones experience to find out one day that the usual critical view (i.e. that Spenser had no characters) was all nonsense.

I notice that great men are overshadowed by their own qualities: because Johnson talked so well, it gets about that his writings are poor: because Cowper is ‘homely’ it is assumed that he cannot be anything else. The doctrines of Crabbe’s unbroken gloom, of, Jane Austen’s pure comedy, of Tennyson’s ‘sweetness’ etc etc belong to the same illusion. So very likely it is the same with Spenser. By the way, I most fully agree with you about ‘the lips being invited to share the banquet’ in poetry, and always ‘mouth’ it while I read, though not in a way that would be audible to other people in the room. (Hence the excellent habit which I once formed, but have since lost, of not smoking while reading a poem). I look upon this ‘mouthing’ as an infallible mark of those who really like poetry. Depend upon it, the man who reads verses in any other way, is after ‘noble thoughts’ or ‘philosophy’ (in the revolting sense given to that word by Browning societies and Aunt Lily)⁵⁴ or social history, or something of the kind, not poetry.

To go back to Spenser—the battles are a bore. I thought I could trace a difference in that point between him and Tasso.⁵⁵ Tasso’s battles—specially the single combats-always sounded real to me, and I had the feeling that if one knew anything about sword-technique one would be able to follow them in detail. Talking of that, if we had money to spare on whims, I should like to have a fencing-master when you come home. Wouldn’t it be a very fine occupation on wet days for the two pigibudda to ‘take their exercise’ in the bam? It would also make many passages in literature, which at present are mere words, start into light. But now that I come to think of it, I suppose ‘singlestick’ is the exercise proper to our humble rank.⁵⁶ (You know the hearty passages about it in books ‘Ralph made his stave ring and rebound again on the bald head of his opponent’). And singlestick would be intolerable-except the sort we used to play with copies of—was it the Spectator or the Law Journal Report?

The novel you mention—The Good Earth⁵⁷-I think I saw reviewed, and will certainly read if it is in the Union. As for The Countryman (by the way my Malaprop friend was Robson not Robertson-Scott),⁵⁸ I have not received [a] specimen copy, but I did happen to see a copy in the Barley Mow during the week end walk I recorded. I thought it a rather praiseworthy undertaking, but was rather disappointed at a later copy I saw on the spring walk last week (of which more anon) in which there was such an increase of advertisement that the text seemed in danger of vanishing altogether.

The whole puzzle about Christianity in non-European countries is very difficult. To the statement that only the riff-raff are converted, I suppose the enthusiastic missionary would reply that if you had lived under the Roman empire, at the period of the first conversions of all, you would have said exactly the same. (He could quote St Paul, [l] Cor. 1:26 ‘Not many clever people in the ordinary sense, nor many in important positions, nor many people of quality’). This is a very cold, uncomfortable reflection! I take it we could answer it by saying that, at all events, the same kind of riff-raff which now lives on the missions could not have been attracted by a poor and persecuted Church: so that that explanation is ruled out.

Of course one sees, from all history and from ones own circle, that the people who already have a high intellectual and moral tradition of their own, are, of all people, the least likely to embrace Christianity. Fancy converting a man like J. S. Mill! Or again, the really good Stoic emperors of Rome were the most anti-Christian. Even in the Gospels—does one suppose that the Pharisees, the ‘High Church party’ of Judaism, did not contain most of the refined, educated, enlightened population of Palestine—people, by ordinary standards very much nicer than the women of the town and little tax-farmers (that is modern English for ‘publicans and sinners’) who seem to have made up the background of Our Lord’s circle. Still, we would reply that some Pharisees (e.g. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus) did come in: and, on the other hand, none of the riff-raff came in for money, because there ‘was no money in the thing’.

So that for this absolute cleavage in the East (if it really is so absolute as you say) we still need an explanation. Sometimes, relying on his remark, ‘Other sheep I have that are not of this fold’⁵⁹ I have played with the idea that Christianity was never intended for Asia—even that Buddha is the form in which Christ appears to the Eastern mind. But I don’t think this will really work. When I have tried to rule out all my prejudices I still can’t help thinking that the Christian world is (partially) ‘saved’ in a sense in which the East is not. We may be hypocrites, but there is a sort of unashamed and reigning iniquity of temple prostitution and infanticide and torture and political corruption and obscene imagination in the East, which really does suggest that they are off the rails—that some necessary part of the human machine, restored to us, is still missing with them. (My friend’s story about the I.C.S.⁶⁰ regulation ‘No pornographic books or pictures shall be imported except for bona fide religious purposes’ is relevant here).

On the whole, my present conclusion is that the difficulty about the Oriental present is really the same as the difficulty about the years B.C. For some reason that we cannot find out they are still living in the B.C. period (as there are African tribes still living in the stone-age) and it is apparently not intended that they should yet emerge from it. I admit that I have myself fallen into an Orientalism, and am giving instead of an explanation, the true eastern platitude ‘God is great’. In fact, like Nettleship, ‘I don’t know, you know, I don’t know, you know.’ (Mind you, there is this to be said for my view, that you wd. hardly expect time to be quite as important to God as it is to us.)

Since last writing I have had my usual Easter walk. It was in every way an abnormal one. First of all, Harwood was to bring anew Anthro-posophical member (not v. happily phrased!) and I was bringing a new Christian one to balance him, in the person of my ex-pupil Griffiths. Then Harwood and his satellite ratted, and the walk finally consisted of Beckett,⁶¹ Barfield, Griffiths, and me. As Harwood never missed before, and Beckett seldom comes, and Griffiths was new, the atmosphere I usually look for on these jaunts was Jacking. At least that is how I explain a sort of disappointment I have been feeling ever since. Then, owing to some affairs of Barfield’s, we had to alter at the last minute our idea of going to Wales, and start (of all places!) from Eastbourne instead. All the same, I wd. not have you think it was a bad walk: it was rather like Hodge who, though nowhere in a competition of Johnsonian cats, was, you will remember, ‘a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’⁶²

The first day we made Lewes, walking over the bare chalky South Downs all day. The country, except for an occasional gleam of the distant sea—we were avoiding the coast for fear of hikers—is almost exactly the same as the Berkshire downs or the higher parts of Salisbury Plain. The descent into Lewes offered a view of the kind I had hitherto seen only on posters—rounded hill with woods on the top, and one side quarried into a chalk cliff: sticking up dark and heavy against this a little town climbing up to a central Norman castle. We had a very poor inn here, but I was fortunate in sharing a room with Griffiths who carried his asceticism so far as to fling off his eiderdown—greatly to my comfort.

Next day we had a delicious morning-just such a day as downs are made for, with endless round green slopes in the sunshine, crossed by cloud shadows. The landscape was less like the Plain now. The sides of the hill—we were on a ridgeway—were steep and wooded, giving rather the same effect as the narrower parts of Malvern hills beyond the Wych. We had a fine outlook over variegated blue country to the North Downs. After we had dropped into a village for lunch and climbed onto the ridge again for the afternoon, our troubles began.

The sun disappeared: an icy wind took us in the flank: and soon there came a torrent of the sort of rain that feels as if ones face were being tattooed and turns the mackintosh on the weather side into a sort of wet suit of tights. At the same time Griffiths began to show his teeth (as I learned afterwards) having engaged Barfield in a metaphysico-religious conversation of such appalling severity and egotism that it included the speaker’s life history and a statement that most of us were infallibly damned. As Beckett and I, half a mile ahead, looked back over that rain beaten ridgeway we could always see the figures in close discussion. Griffiths very tall, thin, high-shouldered, stickless, with enormous pack: arrayed in perfectly cylindrical knickerbockers, very tight in the crutch. Barfield, as you know, with that peculiarly blowsy air, and an ever more expressive droop and shuffle.

For two mortal hours we walked nearly blind in the rain, our shoes full of water, and finally limped into the ill omened village of Bramber. Here, as we crowded to the fire in our inn, I tried to make room for us by shoving back a little miniature billiard table which stood in our way. I was in that state of mind in which I discovered without the least surprise, a moment too late, that it was only a board supported on trestles. The trestles, of course, collapsed, and the board crashed to the ground. Slate broken right across. I haven’t had the bill yet, but I suppose it will equal the whole expences of the tour. Griffiths gave me a surprise equal to that which the Quakers gave Lamb in another inn⁶³ —indeed the two stories are closely parallel—by refusing to see that there was any claim against me at all for the damage.

From Bramber we ascended again in a lovely evening after rain, through lovely scenes—the downs here assuming rather the character of moors. But it very soon began to drizzle again, and an error in map reading involved us in hours of stumbling and circling up there in the twilight. We lay at Findon. Griffiths was quite intolerable after dinner. Don’t mistake me. I don’t mean that he was rude. But he displayed a perversity and disingenuousness in argument and a cold blooded brutality—religious brutality is the worst kind-which quite revolted us. To expound his position wd. carry us too far: but you would be getting near it if you imagined a Calvinist Jesuit with strong leanings to the doctrine that the elect cannot sin, who had borrowed from metaphysics the view that ‘love’ cannot be predicated of God, and from economics the doctrine that it is no real charity to give anything to the poor. In fact if you mix together all the harshest aspects of every form of religion and irreligion which you know and imagine them delivered with the dryness of a scientist and the intolerance of a verminous monk of the fourth century, you have the recipe. Barfield and I slept in one room and consoled ourselves with chaff and chat in our old manner, recalling happier walking tours. We were very footsore.

The next day made amends. We had good weather all day long. Griffiths improved surprisingly. In fact we have all forgiven him, and shall ask him again. His exhibition of the previous day was really, I believe, only the reaction of a solitary on finding himself suddenly at bay among people all older than himself and all disagreeing with him. We refused to let conversation become serious. We laughed away his monstrous positions. Before lunchtime we had him laughing himself and making jokes, even bawdy jokes.

We were in quite a different kind of country today: still the Sussex downs, but not like any ‘downs’ you or I have known, being heavily wooded. It is very pleasant to combine the damp, mysterious delights of a forest walk with the hill-feeling which is called up every now and then by a few open fields revealing the real contours.

We got to Arundel for tea, where Beckett left us by train. Coddling ourselves after the hardships of the previous day, we went no further. Arundel impressed me as much as any place I have ever seen. The castle⁶⁴ has been greatly added to in the XIXth century so that the original Norman kernel is hardly visible: but, provided a castle is big enough and set high enough above the town, it can hardly help being impressive. But it is the surroundings that are the chief beauty, and specially the park. The Magdalen stags are dwarfs compared with the Arundel stags. It contains some of the finest beeches I have ever seen, and hill and dale for miles, and a sheet of water echoing with exotic birds. (There were also some swans to remind me that ‘the rich have their own troubles’) We passed a very pleasant evening here, a great contrast to the night before. Next day we walked to Midhurst, and having slept there, broke up the party after breakfast.

I find that the account I have written gives quite an exaggerated idea of the less pleasant aspects of this jaunt (Memo: to read all collections of letters in the light of the fact that a letter writer tends to pick out what is piquant, or unusual. He may tell no lies: but his life is never as odd, either for good or ill, as it sounds in the letters.) We had at least some of the rare fine days of this spring while walking. As you know, I do not hold with the undue importance now attached to weather: but I confess that spring—‘being a thing so comfortable and necessary’ can still disappoint me when day after day is ushered in with driving rain or black east winds, and the primroses are battered into the mud as soon as they show their faces. There are signs of budding on all (I think) the new trees, but of course one cannot say what they will come to.

About Miracle Plays—I agree with you. Is it not all part of the perverse modern attempt to behave as if we were younger, simpler, and more ignorant than we really are? It was natural for the populace in the middle ages to accept a man in a gilt mask appearing as God the Father—who sends Gabriel to the Virgin, who tells her to hurry up and agree to the scheme ‘For they (i.e. the Trinity) think long till I come again.’ It is equally natural, I think, for us, reading the old plays, to find this naiveté touching and delightful—as a grown man likes to watch, or to remember childhood. But a grown man getting into pinafores and going off to play red Indians in the shrubbery is intolerable. Nor will he in that way really recover the pleasures of childhood half so well as he can by reminiscence: nor is there any way in which he can be more utterly unlike a real child. For a child surely wants to be as grown up and sophisticated as it can manage: the enjoyment of naiveté for its own sake is the most hopelessly adult enjoyment there is. I suppose the don reading Edgar Wallace, and the civilised man dancing negro dances, are examples of the same thing. I have read very little but middle english texts since I last wrote: specially the Owl and the Nightingale which you must read in Tolkien’s translation some day.

I asked old Mr. Taylor (the aged deaf man who once played croquet with us at Hillsborough)⁶⁵ up to supper one night, and went there in return. This, you know, I reckon almost among charities, as he is old, poor, friendless, and surrounded by a beastly family. I mention him here in order to record a super P’daitism, when after an hour or so of talk about life on the other planets, education, Einstein, and other oddments, he suddenly explained ‘Ah, I see you know all about this universe business.’ Further than that one can’t possibly go in that particular kind of P’daitism.

I have been reading Tylor’s Anthropology⁶⁶ over my morning tea lately having bought it to read in the train. Kirk’s⁶⁷ old friends the Rationalist Press Association are bringing out a series at a 1/-each of works which they conceive to be anti-religious, and which are to be found on every station bookstall. One has no sympathy with the design—nor does one like to read books in an edition called The Thinker’s Library with a picture on the jacket of a male nude sitting thinking. (The whole thing reminds me of Butler’s remark that a priest is a man who disseminates little lies in defence of a great truth, and a scientist is a man who disseminates little truths in defence of a great lie.) Still it is rather nice to be able to pick up on a railway journey a real classic of medium-popular science. I find I am enjoying the Tylor very much: the chapters on Language and Writing particularly. Still no news of the Henry instalment from Condlin. I confess I am worried about it. Isn’t the Everyman Molière⁶⁸ one of the very small print Everyman’s?

Yours

J.

P.S. Old Brightman is dead—a great loss.⁶⁹ When shall we see such a figure again?

This reminds me of a conversation I had lately when a very courtly old man was condoling with a certain professor on the death of his brother ‘A charming man your poor brother was—such a dear modest fellow—no speech making or anything of that kind about him—in fact I never remember his saying anything.’ A beautiful epitaph. HIC JACET/N OR M/WHO NEVER SAID ANYTHING./I SAID I WILL TAKE HEED TO MY TONGUE/.

Just to fill up the page I add J.A.’s latest;–

To all the fowls that wing the air The Goose is much preferred; There is so much of nourishment On that sagacious bird.

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

[The Kilns]

May 6 1932

My dear Barfield

‘Very facetious to be sure.’ I have not answered your previous letter (I know of only one) because I have been very busy. I didn’t know I had been asked to stay with you until I got this one-not very long ago: and beyond a single night for the opera I can’t manage it very well. Can’t you come for a night to me?

As to operas I should like May 16th (Siegfried).⁷⁰ Monday and Saturday are the only days possible, which rules out the Rheingold. Would this suit you? What wd. be best of all wd. be if you could get off work on Tuesday 17th and we could come back here together during the morning and be here Tuesday night. Do try.

I am very sorry (seriously) if I have been rude: but getting the term started immediately after flu’ (did you know I had another bout in the last week of the Vac.) has pretty well boxed my compass.

Yours

C.S.L.

P.S. I send (P.T.O.) the opening of the poem. I am not satisfied with any part I have yet written and the design is ludicrously ambitious. But I feel it will be several years anyway before I give it up.

I feel it wd show ill temper if I didn’t use the stamped envelope.

I will write down the portion that I understand Of twenty years wherein I went from land to land. At many bays and harbours I put in with joy Hoping that there I should have built my second Troy And stayed. But either stealing harpies drove me thence, Or the trees bled, or oracles, whose airy sense I could not understand, yet must obey, once more Sent me to sea to follow the retreating shore Of this land which I call at last my home, where most I feared to come; attempting not to find whose coast I ranged half round the world, with vain design to shun The last fear whence the last security is won. Oh perfect life, unquivering, self-enkindled flame From which my fading candle first was lit, oh name Too lightly spoken, therefore left unspoken here, Terror of burning, nobleness of light, most dear And comfortable warmth of the world’s beating side. Feed from thy unconsumed what wastes in me, and guide My soul into the silent places till I make A good end of this book for after-travellers’ sake. In times whose faded chronicle lies in the room That memory cannot turn the key of, they to whom I owe this mortal body and terrestrial years, Uttered the Christian story to my dreaming ears. And I lived then in Paradise, and what I heard Ran off me like the water from the water-bird; And what my mortal mother told me in the day At night my elder mother nature wiped away; And when I heard them telling of my soul, I turned Aside to read a different lecture when I learned What was to me the stranger and more urgent news, That I had blood and body now, my own, to use For tasting and for touching the young world, for leaping And climbing, running, wearying out the day, and sleeping…⁷¹

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

[?] 6th May 1932

My dear Bar field

I am sorry to hear that you can’t manage Siegfried. I am going to be selfish. I find that my desire—born ‘in painful side’ since 1913-has been so inflated that I would rather not give up the hope. Will you v. kindly at once book me the cheapest bookable seat for Siegfried May 16th. I will go to 20/-if need be, or a bit over. If you don’t put me up in the ‘enormous room’ for that night perhaps you could advise me about a bed elsewhere. Would you accept a seat (Siegfried, not a seat in your own flat!) from me? Schools this summer make me affluent. You will do me a real kindness if you will.

For a visit—any week night this term except Mondays I shall be delighted if you will come. If that is impossible make it a week end, but I shd. prefer the former.

It really takes a load off my mind to hear that you like the poem. Couplets, however dangerous are needed if one is to try to give to the subjective poem some of the swing and narrative zest of the old epic.

Yrs

C. S. Lewis

P.S. I shall be as anxious as a child till I hear that you have got two seats for Siegfried.

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Thursday [12 May 1932]

Dear Barfield

I am in horrors and raptures—if only you wd. have come it wd. be raptures alone. I would like the bed at Swiss Cottage on Monday night if it is convenient—in sending me directions please give me the exact address. (A letter posted by return ought to reach me before Monday morning).

If you reconsider your decision and can get an extra seat my offer of course still holds—you would be cheap at the price. I can’t refund you the 15/-by this post, as I am in College. A thousand thanks: I didn’t know till now that I had so much boyish appetite for a show left.

Yours

C.S.L.

P.S. If there is anyway of getting my existing ticket (Amphitheatre Stall 191) changed for two of the 28/-ones and you cd. come. I honestly can afford it this year and it wd. make good better.⁷²

TO HIS BROTHER (W):

[Magdalen College]

June 14th 1932

Dear W—

I have just read your letter of May 15th, but not as you suppose in College. ‘Schools’ has arrived and I am invigilating⁷³ and although your letter arrived before lunch I deliberately brought it here unopened so that the reading it might occupy at least part of the arid waste of talk-less, smoke-less, exercise-less time between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Theoretically of course there ought to be no greater blessing than three hours absolutely safe from interruption and free for reading: but somehow or other—everyone has made the discovery—reading is impossible in the Schools. There is a sort of atmosphere at once restless and soporific which always ends in that stage which (for me) is a signal to stop reading—the stage I mean at which you blink and ask yourself ‘Now what was the last page about.’ Whether it will turn out that writing under schools conditions is more possible than reading, the fate of this letter will decide. At any rate thank heaven for grandfather’s black alpacca coat: with this I feel as if I were in bathing things (at any rate from the waist up) while most of my colleagues are sweating in their best blue or brown suitings.

You will gather from this that summer has arrived: in fact last Sunday (it is Tuesday to day) I had my first bathe. You will be displeased to hear that in spite of my constant warnings the draining of the swamp has not been carried out without a fall in the level of the pond. I repeatedly told both Lydiatt (who began the job) and Knight (usually a very reliable man, who finished it) that the depth of water in the pond was sacrosanct: that nothing which might have even the remotest tendency to interfere with that must be attempted: that I would rather have the swamp as swampy as ever than lose an inch of pond. But of course I might have known that it is quite vain ever to get anything you want carried out: and the pond is lower. However, don’t be too alarmed. I don’t think it can get any lower than it is now.

I don’t know how much of the draining operations Minto has described to you nor whether you understood them. In fact, remembering what a mechanical process described by Minto is like I may assume that the more she has said the less you know about it. The scheme was a series of deep holes filled with rubble and covered over with earth. Into each of these a number of trenches drain: and from each of these pipes lead into the main pipe now occupying the old ditch between the garden and the swamp, which in its turn, by pipes under the lawn, drains into the ditch beside the avenue.

It was however useless to do all this as long as the overflow outlet from the pond (you know—the tiny runnel with the tiny bridge over near the Philips end of the pond) was meandering—as it did—over all the lower parts of the swampy bit. Nor was it possible to stop this up and deny the pond any outlet, as it would then have been stagnant and stinking in summer, and overflowing in winter. It was therefore decided to substitute a pipe outlet for the mere channel outlet—wh. pipe could carry the overflow from the pond, through the swampy bit without wetting it, to the rest of the drainage system. When they first laid this pipe I said that its mouth (i.e. at the pond end) was too low and that it would therefore carry off more water than the old channel and so lower the pond. The workmen shortly denied this but I stuck to my point and actually made them raise it. Even after they had raised it I was still not sure that it wasn’t taking off more water than the old channel did: so I have now had a stopper made which is in the mouth of the pipe at this moment. I have also given the spring-tap up beyond the small pond a night turned on, and I trust that by thus controlling in-flow and outflow of water I can soon nurse the pond back to its old level.

At any rate I don’t see how it can sink as long as its escape is bunged up. As to the degree of loss at present, as there are no perpendicular banks anywhere it is hard to gauge. I should think that the most pessimistic episode could hardly be more than ½ of a foot: i.e. a difference one is unconscious of in bathing. Still I grudge every inch. By the way, it has just occurred to me that the sinking may not be due to the draining at all: for the old ‘channel’ escape, when I looked at it just before the operations began, had certainly widened itself extremely from what I first remembered, and must have been letting out more than it ought. In that case the new pipe may have arrested rather than created a wastage.

I have been infernally busy getting ready for Schools and have therefore little to tell you (By the bye Percy Tweedlepippin⁷⁴ is my colleague and his principles as an examiner are perhaps worth recording. In answer to a suggested question of mine he retorted ‘Its no good setting that. They’d know that!’)

I have read, or rather re-read, one novel namely Pendennis.⁷⁵ How pleased the Pdaitabird would have been—why hadn’t I the grace to read it a few years ago. Why I re-read it now I don’t quite know—I suppose some vague idea that it was time I gave Thackeray another trial. The experiment, on the whole, has been a failure. I can just see, mind you, why they use words like ‘great’ and ‘genius’ in talking of him which we don’t use of Trollope. There are indications, or breakings in, all the time of something beyond Trollope’s range. The scenery for one thing (tho’ to be sure there is only one scene in Thackeray—always summer evening—English-garden—rooks crowing) has a sort of depth (I mean in the painting sense) wh. Trollope hasn’t got. Still more there are the sudden ‘depths’ in a very different sense in Thackeray. There is one v. subordinate scene in Pendennis where you meet the Marquis of Steyne and a few of his led captains and pimps in a box at a theatre. It only lasts a page or so—but the sort of rank, salt, urinous stench from the nether pit nearly knocks you down and clearly has a kind of power that is quite out of Trollope’s range. I don’t think these bits really improve Thackeray’s books: they do, I suppose, indicate whatever we mean by ‘genius’. And if you are the kind of reader who values genius you rate Thackeray highly.

My own secret is—let rude ears be absent—that to tell you the truth, brother, I don’t like genius. I like enormously some things that only genius can do: such as Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy.⁷⁶ But it is the results I like. What I don’t care twopence about is the sense (apparently dear to so many) of being in the hands of ‘a great man’—you know; his dazzling personality, his lightening energy, the strange force of his mind—and all that. So that I quite definitely prefer Trollope—or rather this re-reading of Pen. confirms my long standing preference. No doubt Thackeray was the genius: but Trollope wrote the better books.

All the old things I objected to in Thackeray I object to still. Do you remember saying of Thomas Browne in one of your letters ‘Was there anything he didn’t love?’ One can ask just the opposite of Thackeray. He is wrongly accused of making his virtuous women too virtuous: the truth is he does not make them virtuous enough. If he makes a character what he wd. call ‘good’ he always gets his own back by making her (its always a female character) a bigot and a blockhead. Do you think, Sir, pray, that there are many slum parishes which could not produce half a dozen old women quite as chaste and affectionate as Helen Pendennis and ten times more charitable and more sensible? Still—the Major deserves his place in ones memory. So does Foker—surely the most balanced picture of the kindly vulgar young fop that there is. I’m not sure about Costigan. There’s a good deal too much of Thackeray’s habit of laughing at things like poverty and mispronunciation in the Costigan parts. Then, of course there’s ‘the style’—Who the deuce wd. begin talking about the style in a novel till all else was given up.

I have had another visit to Whipsnade⁷⁷—Foord Kelsie motored Arthur and me over on a fine Monday when Arthur was staying here. This was not the best company in the world with whom to revisit Whipsnade as F.K. combines extreme speed of tongue with a very slow walk, which is reduced to a stop when he has a good thing to say. However, after lunch he very wisely went and sat down and left Arthur and me on our own. Arthur was like a child: painfully divided between a desire ‘not to tire himself’ and a desire to see everything. When I tried to construct a harmony between these two aims by suggesting a route which would not make a very long walk and yet not really miss much, he was perfectly intractable because everything, to left, or to right, distracted him and he never cd. be made to believe that it was something we either had seen already or were just going to see. In fact it was a sad contrast to [the] sauntering unanimity of our last trip to the same place.

Perhaps however it was just as well that A. drew me out of my course, for the place has been so increased and altered that I should have missed a good deal. The novelties include lions, tigers, polar bears, beavers etc. Bultitude was still in his old place. Wallaby wood, owing to the different season, was improved by masses of bluebells: the graceful faun-like creatures hopping out of one pool of sunshine into another over English wildflowers—and so much tamer now than when you saw them that it is really no difficulty to stroke them—and English wildbirds singing deafeningly all round, came nearer to ones idea of the world before the Fall than anything I ever hoped to see.

One other important experience, as experiences go in a retired life, was my first visit to Covent Garden. It suddenly occurred to me this spring that my desire to hear Siegfried dated from 1912, and that 20 years was quite long enough to have waited. So I stood myself 15/-worth of ‘Amphitheatre Stalls’. I mention it here not in order to describe Siegfried (wh. I enjoyed quâ music and drama enormously) but to record my complete disillusionment as regards the Covent Garden level of performance. It was in fact exactly like any other performance of an opera: i.e. one’s inner criticism ran on the familiar lines ‘Ah this is a lovely bit coming now…what a pity that girl hasn’t a really good voice’—in fact I was on the point of saying to myself ‘By Jove its a splendid thing—what wouldn’t I give to hear it done properly at Covent Garden.’ When I say it was just like any other performance of an opera I mean that out of the eight characters two were magnificent, one ‘had been a very fine singer in his young days,’ two were quite adequate but had no v. great passages to sing, and two were frankly bad. The odd thing was that the acting was a great deal better than I had dared to expect. I had always supposed that these ‘head bummers’ were even insolently negligent of it: as a matter of fact they were distinctly good.

The Lamb’s letters must surely be a new Everyman—and a very good one too.⁷⁸ Confound those Tower of Glass people—I will write to them. I have dozens of things to reply to in this letter and your last, but it is now 4.30 and finished papers are beginning to dribble in. Also I am nearly asleep. I shall not be able to write to you again till examining is over—i.e. in August. I don’t think the passage in S. James is really the same as the ‘Touch Wood’ business. I shall try to get down to Ardglass for a day at least when I’m over.⁷⁹

Yours

Jack.

P.S. I had nearly forgotten to acknowledge the philosophical instrument wh. you so unexpectedly sent. After one or two experiments I am getting a gadget made for fastening it onto my belt as I can find no pocket which will keep it perpendicular. Thanks very much. It is a thing I have been vaguely wanting to possess for many years.

I am afraid it will be a long time before I can resume proper letter writing—examining will hold me up till mid August.

During Warnie’s first tour of duty in China in 1927–9 he thought of retiring from the army. In a letter to Jack of 5 December 1929 he said: ‘I have had just about enough of the army, which becomes more tedious with every year that passes’ (LP X: 208). He calculated that by December 1932 he would be entitled to a pension of £200, and so he set his retirement for the end of 1932. In July 1932 he applied for retirement from the Royal Army Service Corps, and it was soon decided that he would sail for home on 22 October.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

July 29th 1932

My dear Arthur,

Thank heavens—at last I have finished examining. I am much too tired to write a letter: and also hungry to get to a morning’s reading—my first since the beginning of last term 18 weeks ago. This is merely to ask whether it will suit you if I come from Aug. 15th to 29th? I am looking forward to it immensely. Thanks for your letter of June 12th.

Yrs

Jack

TO ARTHUR GRIEVES (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

Aug 11th 1932

My dear Arthur,

I have written to book a berth⁸⁰ for the night of Monday the 15th (which, by the bye, they have not yet acknowledged) and am at present in a fever of pleasing anticipation. I am so tired that our old rôles will be reversed: you will be the one who wants to walk further and sit up later and talk more. The latter probably sounds too good to be true!

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

2 Princess Villas,

Bayview Park,

Kilkeel.

[Co. Down

30 August 1932]⁸¹

My dear Arthur,

I am very sorry you did not come down but I quite see your point of view. I don’t think the idea of a meeting half way would be much good. I can’t drive: it would have to be a party of three at least—perhaps a mass meeting—and what should we all do when we had met? There would certainly be no opportunity for walk or talk on our own. Dotty sends profuse thanks for your exertions about her luggage, which has since turned up. I hope your cold will soon be better. I am alright now and have done some good mountain climbs.

I quite understand about the cheque—it was quite absurd suggesting such a roundabout method. We shall be crossing (D.V.) on Thursday Sept. 1st. and I shall tell you my train later.

I don’t think the meeting halfway would be any good: do you?

Yours

Jack

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Oct 29th 1932

My dear Barfield

Thanks. I was in some anxiety for your letter;—the whole thing (thanks to the long preparation by failure in the prose ‘It’ and the autobiographical poem) spurted out so suddenly that I have still very little objective judgement of it.

Friday is my best day as I have no afternoon pupil. Say next Friday (Nov 4th), and try to arrive in College about 5 p.m.

Yrs

C. S. Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Nov 2nd 1932

My dear Barfield

I was already a good deal bothered as to whether the crossing of the Main Road ought not to have been recorded: and it says much for your sagacity that you have guessed it quite right. The map is [Lewis here drew that part of the Mappa Mundi which appears on the end leaves of almost all copies of The Pilgrim’s Regress: to the north of the Grand Canyon is Eschropolis and Claptrap and in the south is Wisdom.]

Nov 18th it is—I wish it were sooner.

Yours

C.S.L.

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Nov 7th 1932

My dear B.

(1.) You are the pilgrims, rot you, as you go always a little further. Let it be Friday the 25th if ’t suits you so—but please don’t make it 1933.

(2.) No—you must keep your dental affair till Saturday morning, since that morning I spend piddling in Pinkery pond.

(3.) Show the MS. to any one you please provided you bring it with you when you do at last come

Yours

C.S.L.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[The Kilns]

Dec 4th 1932

My dear Arthur,

Thank you very much for your list of suggestions. I am really grateful for the trouble and interest you have taken. As for the future, I think I cannot ask you to sweat through the rest of the book⁸² in quite such detail. What I had in mind was not so much criticisms on style (in the narrower sense) as on things like confusion, bad taste, unsuccessful jokes, contradictions etc., and for a few of these I should be very much obliged. These would be less trouble to you than minute verbal points: and also, if anything, more useful to me. I have not had a free day yet to work through your notes, but from a cursory glance I anticipate that on the purely language side of writing our aims and ideals are very far apart—too far apart for either of us to be of very much help to the other. I think I see, from your criticisms, that you like a much more correct, classical, and elaborate manner than I. I aim chiefly at being idiomatic and racy, basing myself on Malory, Bunyan, and Morris, tho’ without archaisms: and would usually prefer to use ten words, provided they are honest native words and idiomatically ordered, than one ‘literary word’. To put the thing in a nutshell you want ‘The man of whom I told you’ and I want ‘The man I told you of’. But, no doubt, there are many sentences in the P.R.⁸³ which are bad by any theory of style.

I have just finished the 2nd volume of Lockhart and it fully justifies all the recommendations both of you and of Warnie. After Boswell it is much the best biography I have read: and the subject is in some ways, or at least in some moods, more attractive. Didn’t you enjoy the account of his ballad-hunting journey in Liddesdale?⁸⁴ It will send me back to the Dandie Dinmont parts of Guy Mannering⁸⁵ with renewed appetite.

It is a very consoling fact that so many books about real lives—biographies, autobiographies, letters etc.—give one such an impression of happiness, in spite of the tragedies they all contain. What could be more tragic than the main outlines of Lamb’s or Cowper’s lives?⁸⁶ But as soon as you open the letters of either, and see what they were writing from day to day and what a relish they got out of it, you almost begin to envy them. Perhaps the tragedies of real life contain more consolation and fun and gusto than the comedies of literature?

I wish you could see this place at present. The birch wood is a black bristly mass with here and there a last red leaf. The lake is cold, cold lead colour. The new moon comes out over the fir trees at the top and a glorious wail of wind comes down from them. I certainly like my garden better at winter than any other time.

I hope I shall soon have a letter from you. This, by the bye, is not a letter, but a note of acknowledgement. And I hope you will not think me any less grateful for your criticisms because of what I have said. I do appreciate your pains most deeply.

Do you ever take a run down to your cottage in winter. It would be ‘rather lovely’.

Yours

Jack

TO HIS BROTHER (W):

The Kilns

Dec 12th 1932

My dear W–

A thousand welcomes to Havre (of hated memory.) We have had so many alarms about you that I shall hardly believe it till I see you with my own eyes. But on that score, and on all your last six month’s adventures there is so much to be said that it is absurd to begin. You would be amused to hear the various hypotheses that were entertained during your long summer silence—that you had been captured by bandits—were in jail—had gone mad—had married—had married a Chinese woman. My own view of course was ‘Indeed he’s such a fellow etc,’ but I found it hard to maintain this against the riot of rival theories.

I think you will find us all pretty ship shape here. The only two things to complain of are, the presence of Vera,⁸⁷ and the threatened arrival of Lings to pay me a visit—both, of course, arranged before we had any hopes of seeing you this year: indeed, when we were beginning to wonder if we should see you at all or not. However, Lings is not going to be allowed to interfere with any jaunt of yours and mine, having made himself such a friend of the family that I can be away even while he is here. (He shows a tendency to play duets with Maureen which Minto thinks ought to be encouraged.) But how differently all such interruptions will henceforth appear to you—like church going to the Superannuated man—no longer hewing great cantels out of tiny leaves, but punctuating a leisure sine die. It all seems too good to be true! I can hardly believe that when you take your shoes off a week or so hence, please God, you will be able to say ‘This will do for me—for life.’

I have not had any opportunity to reply till now to your questions about money. We shall do very well on what your percentage comes to: the only request I have to make on the bursarial side is that you must wash less (I mean your clothes, not your person)—your present standard of shifting being the one item in which you live beyond our scale. Minto says I ought not to mention this, but I expect you would prefer to know. (Of course if you like to wash any number of clothes yourself, no one will object!)

I have just planted a holly tree—the one we got last season being, despite our order, a bush, not a tree. I have also successfully resisted an attempt made by old Jacks to abbotsford⁸⁸ us (I owe this delightful verb to you) into going shares with him in buying, if you please, the whole of Phillips’ (deceased—did you hear?) property, on the ground that gypsies wd. otherwise buy it. A ramp, I think.

Talking of abbotsfording I am now reading Lockhart through, and am just at the Shetland and Orkney diary:⁸⁹ which you will constantly have been reminded of if you have read The Pirate.⁹⁰ It is a capital book.

I am examining at the moment, but lightly as you can see from the fact that I manage about an hour’s Lockhart per diem. I hope to finish my papers on the 21st: but the Award is not till the day after Boxing Day, so that it looks like Jan. 1st for our walk, ‘from which I promise myself more satisfaction, perhaps, than is possible.’ The date will be a good omen. I am so stiff from carrying that infernal tree up that I hardly know what to do with myself.

The only thing that can really dash your home coming will be the cold: you will have to ‘cokker’ yourself like anything for the first few weeks, unless this frost breaks. Well—and now to Chaucer’s papers. But even they can hardly depress me at such a moment as this

Yours

Jack.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[The Kilns

17 December 1932]

My dear Arthur,

You really must forgive me for being a slack correspondent in term time. I think we have talked of this before! However, I was much to blame for not at least letting you have a line about W. who, thank God, turned out to be well though he had been ill, and had had a worreying summer in various ways. He had also warned us, he said, (wh. was quite true, though we all forgot it) that he might not keep up his regular correspondence during the hot weather. We were all greatly relieved.

I am sorry to hear about the flu’—one of the few ailments of which I can speak with as large an experience as your own. We have both talked of it and agreed often enough about its pleasures and pains. I hope you are quite set up by now. It was, in any case, almost worth having for its throwing you back on the old favourites. I will make a point of telling Foord-Kelsie—how pleased he will be. I wish I had your early associations with Pickwick:⁹¹ and yet I often feel as if I had. So many scenes come to me with the feel of a long since familiar atmosphere returning after absence—I suppose because even without having read it as a boy one has drunk in so much of the Dickensy world indirectly through quotation and talk and other orders. Certainly what I enjoy is not the jokes simply as jokes—indeed the earlier and more farcical parts like the military review and Mrs Leo Hunter’s party are rather unpleasant to me—but something festive and friendly about D’s whole world. A great deal of it (in a way how different from Macdonald’s!) the charm of goodness—the goodness of Pickwick himself, and Wardle, and both Wellers.

Thanks for your criticisms on P.R. The detailed criticisms (the ‘passages where one word less wd. make all the difference’) are what I should like best and could profit by most. Perhaps when you sent the MS back (there is no special hurry) you wd. mark on the blank opposite pages any bits that you think specially in need of improvement and add a note or two in pencil—but don’t let it be a bother to you. As to your major criticisms

1. Quotations. I hadn’t realised that they were so numerous as you apparently found them. Mr Sensible, as you rightly saw, is in a separate position: the shower of quotations is part of the character and it wd. be a waste of time to translate them, since the dialogue (I hope) makes it clear that his quotations were always silly and he always missed the point of the authors he quoted. The other ones maybe too numerous, and perhaps can be reduced & translated. But not beyond a certain point: for one of the contentions of the book is that the decay of our old classical learning is a contributary cause of atheism (see the chapter on Ignorantia). The quotations at the beginnings of the Books are of course never looked at at all by most readers, so I don’t think they matter much.

2. Simplicity. I expect your dissatisfaction on this score points to some real, perhaps v. deep seated, fault: but I am sure it cannot be remedied—least of all in a book of controversy. Also there may be some real difference of conception between you and me. You remember we discussed last summer how much more sympathy you had than I with the Puritan simplicity. I doubt if I interpret Our Lord’s words⁹² quite in the same way as you. I think they mean that the spirit of man must become humble and trustful like a child and, like a child, simple in motive, i.e. disinterested, not scheming and ‘on the look out’. I don’t think He meant that adult Christians must think like children: still less that the processes of thought by wh. people become Christians must be childish processes. At any rate the intellectual side of my conversion was not simple and I can describe only what I know. Of course it is only too likely that much of the thought in P.R. offends against simplicity simply by being confused or clumsy! And where so, I wd. gladly emend it if I knew how.

We have had a most glorious autumn here—still, windless days, red sunsets, and all the yellow leaves still on the trees. I wish you could have seen it. This is a Saturday evening after a hard week, so you will excuse me if I close. I will try and write again soon but can’t promise. It was very nice to see your hand again. Your peculier spellinge is indeerd bi long associashuns!*

Yours,

Jack

1 Henry Rider Haggard, The People of the Mist (1894).

2 Charles Kingsley, Hereward the Wake (1866).

3 i.e. Wuthering Heights. See the letter to Warnie of Christmas Day 1931, pp. 31–2.

4 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

5 Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (1885).

6 The books and papers they had brought over from Little Lea, their family home in Belfast.

7 Lieutenant-Colonel and Mrs J, A. C. Kreyer were the Lewises’ closest neighbours. They lived in Tewsfield, a house adjoining the north-west side of The Kilns property.

8 Foord-Kelcey’s favourite book was Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67).

9 William Wordsworth, The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850), I, i, 290.

10 William Wordsworth, The White Doe of Rylstone (1815).

11 In his letter of 24 October 1931, p. 5.

12 Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1770, vol. II, p. 123. ‘Law, (said he,) fell latterly into the reveries of Jacob Boehme, whom Law alleged to have been somewhat in the same state with St. Paul, and to have seen unutterable things. Were it even so, (said Johnson,) Jacob would have resembled St. Paul still more, by not attempting to utter them.’

13 William Morris, Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1893).

14 William Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867).

15 John Barbour, The Bruce (1376).

16 René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637).

17 Lewis was giving Warnie an imitation of their father.

18 WHL, p. 200.

19 Robert Segar (1879–1961) was a barrister until, at the age of forty, he went to Magdalen College and read Law. He was Lecturer in Jurisprudence at Wadham College and Tutor in Law at Magdalen College, 1919–21, and Fellow of Magdalen, 1921–35. See Lewis’s portrait of him in the Magdalen College Appendix to AMR, in which he says of Segar: ‘He brings about him the air of a bar parlour to sit with him is to be snug and jolly and knowing and not unkindly, and to forget that there are green fields or art galleries in the world. All this is the side he shows us day by day: but there is more behind, for he is i war wreck and spends his nights mostly awake.’

20 Sir Waller Scott, The Monastery (1820).

21 Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire, was the boys’ preparatory school attended by the Lewis brothers, who both hated their time there. Warnie was a pupil 1905–9, and Jack, who was there 1907–9, referred to it as ‘Belsen’ in SBJ, ch. 2.

22 Sir Walter Scott, The Abbot 0820); Rob Roy (1817); The Antiquary (1816).

23 In Co. Antrim.

24 Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 3 October 1773. vol. V, p. 382. ‘I upbraided myself, as not having a sufficient cause for putting myself in such danger. Piety afforded me comfort; yet I was disturbed by the objections that have been made against a particular providence, and by the arguments of those who maintain that it is in vain to hope that the petitions of an individual, or even of congregations, can have any influence with the Deity.’

25 Dr Samuel Ogden, Sermons on the Efficacy of Prayers and Intercession (1770).

26 ‘to-ing and fro-ing’,

27 Over the years Jack and Warnie preserved 100 of their father’s characteristic sayings which they copied into a notebook entitled ‘Pudaita Pie’. This was the source of many of the sayings of Albert found in SBJ. In the end, they decided against including the document in the Lewis Papers. The manuscript of ‘Pudaita Pie’ is found in the Wade Center at Wheaton College.

28 The Count of Luxembourg is a musical play by Basil Hood, with music by F. Lehar, first performed on 20 May 1911.

29 The Arcadians is a musical play by Mark Ambient, with music by Lionel Monkton and Howard Talbot, first performed on 28 April 1909.

30 A didactic poem in four books of hexameters by Virgil on the various forms of rural industry. It was written between 37 and 30 BC.

31 Naomi Mitchison, Black Sparta (1928).

32 Jean Froissart’s Chroniques (c. 1373–1400) is a lively, though sometimes inaccurate, record of Europe in the fourteenth century with particular emphasis on the first half of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England. The best-known translation is that by Lord Berners, published 1923–5. Lewis was using the Globe Edition of The Chronicles of Froissart, trans. John Bouchier, Lord Berners. ed. and reduced into one volume by G. M. Macaulay (1924).

33 Sir Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian (1818).

34 Scott, The Antiquary, ch. 35. After remarking that he never tastes anything ‘after sun-set’, Mr Oldbuck says to Lord Glenallan: ‘A broiled bone, or a smoked haddock, or an oyster, or a slice of bacon of our own curing, with a toast and a tankard or something or other of that sort, to close the orifice of the stomach before going to bed, does not fall under my restriction, nor. I hope, under your Lordship’s.’

35 Anthroposophy is a religious system founded by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). Steiner’s aim was to develop the faculty of spirit cognition inherent in ordinary people and to put them in touch with the spiritual world from which materialism had caused them to be estranged. Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood became Anthroposophists in 1923. Lewis was later to write in SB/, ch. 13. p. 161: ‘Barfield’s conversion to Anthroposophy marked the beginning of what I can only describe as the Great War between him and me…it was an almost incessant disputation, sometimes by letter and sometimes face to face, which lasted for years.’ Perhaps the most important of the ‘Great War’ documents is Lewis’s unpublished Metaphysices contra Anthroposophos- better known as the Summa after its model by St Thomas Aquinas. For an account of the ‘Great War’ see Lionel Adey, G S. Lewis’s Great War with Owen Barfield (British Columbia, University of Victoria, ELS Monograph Series no. 14, 1978; new edn, Rosley, Ink Books, 2002). Lewis eventually got over his disagreement with Barfield and Harwood.

36 Barfield was taking the examinations required for practice as a solicitor.

37 ‘The Tower’ is a long poem by Owen Barfield, much admired by Lewis. It has never been published.

38 Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 474: ‘But I ne kan nat bullet it to the bren’: ‘But I cannot sift the chaff from the grain.’

39 ‘pain’.

40 ‘vexation’.

41 Kenneth Bruce McFarlane (1903–661 took a BA from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1925 and was Tutor in Modern History at Magdalen College, 1927–66.

42 Edward Hope (1866–1953) took a Sc.D. from Manchester and in 1919 was elected Fellow and Tutor in Natural Science at Magdalen and Lecturer in Chemistry. Lewis provides a portrait of him in the Magdalen College Appendix to AMR: ‘This is one of those men in whom knowledge and intellect have taken up their abode without making any difference: they are added on to a decent drab nonentity of character, and the character has not been transformed. If you wiped out his technical knowledge there would be nothing left to distinguish him from any respectable shopkeeper in Tottenham Court Road…’

43 Nothing is known of Mr Kenchew except that he was a teacher of geography who failed to win Maureen’s affections.

44 John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Scott, 10 vols. (1839).

45 Una Pope-Hennessy, The Laird of Abbotsford; an Informal Presentation of Sir Walter Scott (1932).

46 John Christie, The Oxford Magazine, L (10 March 1932), pp. 570–1: ‘In truth Dame Una seems less interested in the author of Waverly than, to use her own phrase, in “spicy gossip”…It was bound to come, this bright, inquisitive, anything but intimate portrait of Sir Walter, with his foibles, his snobbery, and his subterfuges touched in with loving care, and most of the deeper traits left out.’

47 Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903).

48 Robert Bridges (1844–1930), Poet Laureate from 1913. Lewis had enjoyed his poetry when he was younger.

49 Martin Tupper (1810–89), whose four series of Proverbial Philosophy 11838–761, maxims and reflections couched in rhythmical form, were the favourite of many who knew nothing about poetry.

50 The Baron of Bradwardine is a character in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (18141; Soames Forsyte is a character in John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (1922); Arthur Kipps is a character in H. G. Wells’s Kipps (1905).

51 Arthur Denis Blackford Wood (1907–92), after liking his BA in 1929, joined the family firm of William Wood & Son Ltd., landscape gardeners, Taplow. He served with the RAF, 1941–5. Later he published a number of books on gardening: Terrace and Courtyard Gardens for Modern Homes (1965], (with Kate Crosby) Grow it and Cook It (1975), and Practical Garden Design (1976). Mr Wood, on being shown this letter, said he was ‘engaged in one, continuing, happy love-affair’ as an undergraduate, and that he thinks Lewis may have confused him with someone else.

52 Arthur worked for his brother Thomas Jackson Greeves (1886–1974), a linen merchant, 1915–17.

53 Charles Morgan, The Fountain (1932).

54 Their mother’s sister, Mrs Lilian ‘Lily’ Suffern (1860–1934), the eldest daughter of the Rev. Thomas Hamilton. An ardent suffragette, she quarrelled with everyone in her family. Following the death of her husband. William, in 1913 she was constantly on the move, but wherever she lived she bombarded Jack with books and a pseudo-metaphysical correspondence. After her widowhood the poetry of Robert Browning became her chief intellectual solace.

55 Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata (1581).

56 Singlestick was a method of fighting or fencing with a wooden stick provided with a large basket-handle and requiring only one hand. It was used by young boys and people of ‘inferior quality’ or social standing. A good description of it is found in Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857).

57 Pearl Buck, The Good Earth (1931).

58 William Douglas Robson-Scott (1900–80) was at University College, Oxford, at the same time as Lewis. He took his BA in 1923, and went on to teach German Language and Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. Lewis mentions his malapropisms ¦n his letter to Warnie of 18 April 1927 (CL I, p. 694).

59 John 10:16.

60 Indian Civil Service.

61 (Sir) Eric Beckett (1896–1966), who sometimes walked with Lewis and the others, was a particular friend of Barfield. He was educated at Wadham College, where he took a First in Jurisprudence in 1921. He was a Fellow of All Souls., Oxford, 1921–8. He was called to the Bar in 1922 and was Assistant Legal Adviser to the Foreign Office, 1925–45, and Legal Adviser, 1955–8.

62 Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1783, vol. IV, p. 197: ‘I shall never forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat…I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, “why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;” and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, “but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.”’

63 Charles and Mary Lamb, Letters 1796–1820, vol. I (1912), letter from Charles Lamb to Samuel T. Coleridge of 13 February 1797: ‘1 have had thoughts of turning Quaker…Unluckily I went to [a meeting] and saw a man under all tile agitations and workings of a fanatic, who believed himself under the influence of some “inevitable presence.” This cured me of Quakerism…I detest the vanity of a man thinking he speaks by the Spirit, when what he says an ordinary man might say without all that quaking and trembling’ (p. 97).

64 Arundel Castle, the chief seat of the Duke of Norfolk.

65 Hillsboro-not ‘Hillsborough’—is the house at 14 Holyoake Road, Headington, where Lewis and the Moores lived most of [he time from April 1923 until they moved into The Kilns in October 1930.

66 Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization (1881; Thinker’s Library. 1930).

67 See W. T. Kirkpatrick (1848–1921) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Kirkpatrick, ‘the Great Knock’, was a friend of the Lewis family and prepared Jack for Oxford. He is the subject of SBJ, ch. 9.

68 Molière, Comedies, trans. Henry Baker and J. Miller, with an introduction by Frederick C. Green, Everyman’s Library (1929).

69 The Reverend Frank Edward Brightman FBA (1856–1932), who died on 31 March 1932, was a distinguished liturgiologist and a Fellow of Magdalen College since 1902. His publications include The English Rite, 2 vols. (1915). For more on Brightman see note 5 to the letter of 5 January 1926 (CL I, p. 658).

70 In SBJ, ch. 5, Lewis recalls the moment he came across a reference to Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen. Lewis came to love the entire Ring cycle on gramophone records, but it was not until this occasion (Monday 16 May 1932) that he saw Siegfried performed on stage.

71 This is the only surviving portion of the autobiographical poem Lewis wrote.

72 In the end Lewis went to Siegfried alone on 16 May 1932. The cast included Lauritz Melchior as Siegfried, Eduard Habich as Alberich, Frida Leider as Brunhild and Friedrich Schorr as Wotan. An account of the performance was given in The Times (17 May 1932) p. 8.

73 When students were taking their final examinations or ‘Schools’ in the Examination Schools building in the High Street, dons took turns ‘invigilating’, that is, keeping watch over the students.

74 This was Lewis’s nickname for Percy Simpson (1865–1962) who with his wife, Evelyn M. Simpson, and C. H. Herford, edited the eleven volumes of Ben Jonson’s Works (1925–52). He was the librarian of the new English faculty library, and a lecturer on textual criticism.

75 William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis (1848–50).

76 Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), The Divine Comedy (comprising Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso).

77 Lewis was remembering the visit he and Warnie took to Whipsnade Zoo in Warnie’s motorbike and sidecar on 28 September 1931. The part that visit played in Lewis’s conversion is recounted in the last chapter of SBJ. See CL I, p. 972.

78 Charles Lamb, Letters, ed. William Macdonald, with notes and illustrations. Introduction by Ernest Rhys (Everyman’s Library, 1909).

79 Lewis was planning a trip to Ireland in August, and he hoped to visit the village of Ardglass in Co. Down known for its interesting lighthouse.

80 A berth on a cross-channel boat. As planned, Lewis crossed over to Ireland on 15 August and was there as Arthur’s guest al Bernagh, Circular Road, Belfast, until 29 August.

81 This letter is undated, but if Lewis’s mention of ‘Thursday Sept. 1st’ is correct it was almost certainly written in 1932. Lewis and the Moores normally had a holiday together in Ireland, and Lewis probably met Mrs Moore, Maureen and their friend Dorothea ‘Dotty’ Vaughan (a close friend of the family who had been at Headington School with Maureen Moore) for a few days in Kilkeel before returning to England.

82 For some time Lewis had been trying to write the story of his conversion, and especially of the part ‘Joy’ played in it. While he probably had no intention of attempting this on his holiday, The Pilgrim’s Regress: Art Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933) came quite unexpectedly and was written during the fortnight spent at Bernagh. The manuscript had been sent to Arthur for criticism. For details of his earlier attempts to tell the story of his conversion see the treatment of The Pilgrim’s Regress in CG.

83 i.e. The Pilgrim’s Regress.

84 Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Scott, vol. II, ch. 10.

85 Sir Wilier Scott, Guy Mannering (1815).

86 Charles Lamb (1775–1834) and William Cowper (1731–1800).

87 Vera Henry, Mrs Moore’s goddaughter, ran a holiday resort at Annagasan, a few miles from Drogheda, where Jack and Warnie sometimes spent holidays. From time to time Vera acted as housekeeper at The Kilns, but inevitably Jack had to act as peacemaker when she and Mrs Moore quarrelled.

88 Abbotsford is the name of Sir Walter Scott’s house near Melrose on the Tweed in Scotland.

89 Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Scott, vol. IV, chs 28–32.

90 Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate (1821).

91 Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1836–7).

92 Matthew 18:3–4; Mark 10:15; Luke 18:16–17.

* I had to make them violent mistakes for feer you wldn’t notis them