C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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Any fears of the result he may have had were groundless, for shortly after reaching Belfast for his Christmas holidays Lewis received a letter from Reginald W. Macan, Master of University College, informing him that ‘This College elects you to a Scholarship (New College having passed you over)’; and The Times of 14 December listed among the successful candidates, besides ‘Clive S. Lewis, University College’, ‘Alfred C. Harwood, Christ Church’,^* and ‘Arthur Owen Barfield, Wadham College’,^† who were soon to be among his closest friends.¹⁰⁹

      Although now a Scholar of Univ., Lewis was not yet officially a member of Oxford University, as he had still to pass Responsions, the entrance examination. This included elementary mathematics as a compulsory subject, and at the end of January 1917 he returned to Bookham for another term to see if Kirkpatrick could instil a sufficient amount of ‘the low cunning of Algebra’ into him, mathematics being a subject that he seemed eternally incapable of mastering.

On the way he visited Oxford again, this time for an interview with the Master of Univ., who, he reported to his father on 28 January, ‘was a clean-shaven, white-haired, jolly old man, and was very nice indeed. He treated me to about half an hour’s “Oxford manner” and then came gradually round to my own business. Since writing last, he has made inquiries, and it seems that if I pass Responsions in March I could “come up” in the following term and join the O.T.C.’¹¹⁰

At Bookham, besides the hated algebra, Lewis extended his studies to German and Italian. The former he found difficult – Chamisso and Fouqué he enjoyed, but Goethe was still beyond him. Italian, on the other hand, came easily to so proficient a Latinist. By 8 February, he was confident that ‘by the end of term I should be able to read it as easily as French’.¹¹¹

The weekly letters to Arthur Greeves continued as before, full of what he was reading, writing and thinking. A prose romance called Bleheris had been on the stocks the previous term, but this was now cast aside in favour of a new idea which was to take final form ten years later as Dymer. This was at first also in prose, but in modern English as opposed to the archaic style devised by Morris in which his previous efforts had been couched. There was also a narrative poem, ‘The Childhood of Medea’, which, he promised Arthur on 15 February, ‘will leave off where most poems about her begin – shortly after her meeting with Jason. It will describe her lonely, frightened childhood away in a castle with the terrible old king her father, and how she is gradually made to learn magic against her will.’¹¹²

      Greeves was also planning stories (which he seems never to have written) and was discussing the charms of actual women who were the prototypes of his heroines; but Lewis was still more interested in

      The land where I shall never be,

      The love that I shall never see,

and went on to disclaim authorship of the couplet (which was later to appear, still anonymously, on the title page of Spirits in Bondage): ‘a beauty, isn’t it,’ he wrote to Greeves on 28 February, ‘but NOT by me – I wish it were. Andrew Lang quotes it somewhere, but I have never been able to discover the author. Whoever it be, he deserves immortality for these two lines alone.’¹¹³ The lines, slightly misquoted, were in fact from a poem by Lang himself, inspired by a prose passage from Baudelaire, which he quotes in his History of English Literature (1912).

Religion was also discussed occasionally, though only Arthur, who was a Christian, raised the subject. It bothered Jack’s conscience in later years that he had allowed himself to be confirmed in St Mark’s on 6 December 1914 merely to please his father and to avoid argument. But at the moment Jack was still a determined atheist, and when challenged took up his stand in the anthropological field, citing ‘dying gods’ and ‘fertility rites’ from Lang’s Myth, Ritual and Religion (1899) and Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915). ‘All religions, that is all mythologies, to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention – Christ as much as Loki’, he wrote to Arthur on 12 October 1916.¹¹⁴ When Arthur complained, Jack distinguished between Jesus and Christ, as he wrote on 18 October:

When I say ‘Christ’, of course I mean the historical being into whom he was afterwards converted by popular imagination … That the man Yeshua or Jesus did actually exist, is as certain as that the Buddha did actually exist … But all the tomfoolery about virgin birth, magic healings, apparitions and so forth is on exactly the same footing as any other mythology … As to the immortality of the soul, though it is a fascinating theme for day-dreaming, I neither believe nor disbelieve: I simply don’t know anything at all, there is no evidence either way.¹¹⁵

      This agnosticism was enshrined in a poem written in 1917 which ends:

       I think, if it be truth, as some have taught

       That these frail seeds of being are not caught

       And blown upon the cosmic winds in vain

       After our death, but bound in one again

       Somewhere, we know not how, they live and thrive

       Forever, and the proud gods will not give

      The comfortable doom of quiet sleep,

       Then doubt not but that from the starry deep

       And utmost spaces lit by suns unknown

      We should return again whence we were flown,

      Leaving the bauble of a sainted crown,

To walk and talk upon the hills of Down.¹¹⁶

^* In later years they talked of their ‘Pigiebotie’ philosophy. ‘A pigiebotie,’ Jack wrote to Warnie on 2 August 1928, ‘must be conscious of idling and approve of it. He must not merely like to sit still, but he must also like to think of himself sitting still, or even like to think of himself liking to sit still … He is the only true “Quietist”. He sitteth down like a giant and rejoiceth not to run his course. He eateth all things, neglecteth all things, moveth not himself, is not waked up.’ (FL, p. 776)

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