71 (#ulink_80b771de-fab6-5e8a-9e49-01cdfa601874) I Peter 3:15.
72 (#ulink_80b771de-fab6-5e8a-9e49-01cdfa601874) Matthew 7:20.
73 (#ulink_80b771de-fab6-5e8a-9e49-01cdfa601874) Galatians 5:22–3: ‘But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy. peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.’ (RSV)
74 (#ulink_6554c2af-0c1b-5865-aaaf-14a5b9856027)The Imitation of Christ, a manual of spiritual devotion first put into circulation in 1418 and traditionally ascribed to Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471).
75 (#ulink_6554c2af-0c1b-5865-aaaf-14a5b9856027) Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Rasartus (1836).
76 (#ulink_ee8bcc5f-ae84-5ae0-a096-e9ed1de1d442) William Morris, A Dream of John Ball (1888); Love is Enough (1872); The Wood Beyond the World (1894).
77 (#ulink_ddb289f6-cf52-5a65-901a-f56782f6ac0b) See Martin Lings in the Biographical Appendix.
78 (#ulink_ddb289f6-cf52-5a65-901a-f56782f6ac0b) Adrian Hugh Paterson (1909–401 look his BA from Magdalen in 1934. He lectured on English in the University of Hong Kong, 1934–8, and was a lecturer on English at Cairo University from 1938 until 1940 when he died as a result of an accident that occurred while he and Martin Lings were riding together in the desert.
79 (#ulink_c98c861b-c918-5ce3-b4bf-cd2edecfc5e2) ‘The Cave’ was a group of English dons who met regularly for talks about literary subjects or to discuss matters in the English School. It was named after the Cave of Adullam in which David organized the conspiracy against Saul (1 Samuel 22:1: ‘David…escaped to the cave Adullam: and when his brethren and all his father’s house heard it, they went down thither to him’). The membership, which included Lewis, Tolkien, Nevill Coghill, Hugo Dyson, Leonard Rice-Oxley, H. F. B. Brett-Smith and Maurice Ridley, were opponents of what had been, until 1931, the reigning faction in the School of English. See also note 29 to the letter to Warnie of 24 October 1931.
80 (#ulink_9b620232-0dbd-530f-a72d-2700941c02de) Drinking parties.
81 (#ulink_e6f83794-aa31-5bc1-9f13-64fe3eb7f73b) Edward Maurice Hugh-Jones (1903–97) read History at New College. Oxford, in 1924, after which he read Philosophy. Politics and Economics (PPE) and look a BA in 1925. He was a lecturer at Keble College, 1926–7, and Tutor in Economics. 1927–59. He was Professor of Economics at Keele University. 1959–68. His works include (with E. A. Radice) An American Experiment (1936) and Woodrow Wilson and American Liberalism (1947).
82 (#ulink_f99095da-d454-5cd5-8aaa-68260913a2bc) Molière, Le Tartuffe (1664).
83 (#ulink_f99095da-d454-5cd5-8aaa-68260913a2bc) Molière, Tartuffe, or The Hypocrite, trans. Curtis Hidden Page (1912) Line 58.
84 (#ulink_b663f9f9-4e48-5ec9-873a-99f615dc8af8) This was probably William Taylor, who lived at Shotover Cottage, Old Road, Headington Quarry.
85 (#ulink_bbab3c1d-6089-53d3-ad40-4f4eecfe696a) The 8 a.m. ‘early celebration’ of Holy Communion at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry. This was an important turning point in Lewis’s life. For some time he had been attending matins and evensong in his college chapel and at Holy Trinity, but in participating in the sacrament, Lewis was doing something he knew would be blasphemous unless he was a believer. Jack knew his brother would understand the seriousness of his action.
Warnie, too, went to Holy Communion on Christmas Day 1931. He wrote in his diary that day: ‘I attended the service with very mixed feeling, gladness predominating at once again finding myself a full member of the Church after so many years of indifference or worse…I came away feeling profoundly thankful that I have once again become a communicant, and intend (D.V.) [Deo Volente-“God Willing”] to go regularly at least four times a year in future’ (BF). On receiving the present letter from his brother, Warnie wrote on 17 January 1932: ‘A letter from | today containing the news that he too has once more started to go to Communion, at which I am delighted. Had he not done so, I, with my altered views would have found—hardly a bar between us, but a Jack of a complete identity of interest which I should have regretted’ (ibid.).
86 (#ulink_a47fe88e-ad43-5672-a767-dc8d44b7753f) i.e. the Rev. Edward Foord-Kelcey.
87 (#ulink_b2c5ae42-7324-534b-a625-99982ae617da) Foord-Kelcey would no doubt have thought of donating his letter from Dr Johnson to Mrs Hester Thrale (1741–1821) to Pembroke College, Oxford, because this was the college of both Johnson and Foord-Kelcey himself. When he died in 1934, Foord-Kelcey left the letter to C. S. Lewis, who kept it for the rest of his life. Upon his death in 1963, Warnie gave it to Pembroke College.
88 (#ulink_fb31c5b4-f446-500b-bb3c-5b6ba1680d91) The Somnium Scipiona (‘Dream of Scipio’) is the fable with which Cicero ends his De Republica.
89 (#ulink_6657d92b-374b-54e4-a742-cfcc819a13f9) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847).
90 (#ulink_6657d92b-374b-54e4-a742-cfcc819a13f9) ‘one of those books which are not books’. Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia (1833), ‘Detatched Thoughts on Books and Reading’: ‘I can read anything which I call a book. There are things in that shape which [cannot allow for such. In this catalogue of books which are not books—Biblia A-Biblia—I reckon…all those volumes which “no gentleman’s library should be without.”’
91 (#ulink_6657d92b-374b-54e4-a742-cfcc819a13f9) Rose Macaulay, Mystery at Geneva (1922).
92 (#ulink_8b0b4891-992b-5310-81d6-4a6c9481fef7) Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
1932 (#u9c47d65c-00f5-53d1-b288-9095cdf4355d)
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,
(#ulink_84abc098-10cd-54f6-b7e5-b2f24a2aa2d3) and am now at Kingsley’s Herewardthe Wake.
(#ulink_85592995-65da-53c8-944e-57d053576363) 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?
(#ulink_9bd79ac2-81f3-5751-910d-13076736e96f) 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 Revolution
(#ulink_87efe0c9-9bc4-5e16-bcf0-34e481edee62) 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 Epicurean
(#ulink_a09960d6-89b7-5b1e-91d5-8957c4c0fa2f) 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 Leeburiana
(#ulink_926f1d21-925a-5cb1-85fd-77b085715488) 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.
