C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ subject with Jenkin. ‘We talked of Troilus,’ he wrote of a walk on 18 October, ‘and this led us to the question of Chivalry. I thought the mere ideal, however unrealized, had been a great advance. He thought the whole thing had been pretty worthless. The various points which I advanced as good results of the Knightly standard he attributed to Christianity. After this Christianity became the main subject.’⁷⁴

There were many such rambles and talks with Jenkin at this time: on a beautiful November day, ‘above the forest ground called Thessaly’, he got ‘the real Joy’ again, between a discussion of The Wanderer and The Seafarer, and ‘Jenkin’s undisguised delight in the more elementary pleasure of a ramble’.⁷⁵ On other such outings they were deciding that of Housman’s Last Poems ‘some are exquisite – some mere sentimental jingle’,⁷⁶ or that Saintsbury’s History of English Literature was ‘a very poor book: his articles on Chaucer and Keats seem designed to prevent anyone reading them’.

The difficulty of finding enough time for reading, with so much whittled away by the exactions of Mrs Moore, led Lewis to develop the habit of reading as he walked. ‘I find that one really sees more of the country with a book than without,’ he decided, ‘for you are always forced to look up every now and then and the scene into which you have blundered without knowing it comes upon you like something in a dream.’⁷⁷

After Christmas 1922, passed with his father at Little Lea, Lewis was back in Oxford revelling in lectures by Strickland Gibson^* on bibliography and C.T. Onions (soon to be a much revered friend at Magdalen)^† on Middle English, and enjoying his Anglo-Saxon studies which he found were much more extensive than he had expected. He was also reading Donne for the first time and finding The Second Anniversary ‘“a new planet”: I never imagined or hoped for anything like it’, but The Soul’s Progress he dismissed as ‘mostly bosh and won’t scan’.⁷⁸

Meanwhile he had begun to attend the English classes organized by George Gordon, who had just become Merton Professor of English Literature in succession to Walter A. Raleigh,^‡ a post which he held until 1928 when he became President of Magdalen and was succeeded by David Nichol Smith.^§ The first meeting, on 26 January, did not impress him very much – ‘Gordon was sensible rather than brilliant’⁷⁹ – but the next, held on 2 February, brought Lewis a new friend: ‘We were a much smaller gathering. This afternoon a good-looking fellow called Coghill from Exeter read a very good paper on “realism” – as defined in his own special sense – “from Gorboduc to Lear”. He seems an enthusiastic sensible man, without nonsense, and a gentleman, much more attractive than the majority. The discussion afterwards was better than last week’s.’⁸⁰

The friendship with Coghill ripened fast, and they were soon going for long walks together, eagerly discussing both literature and life. On the first walk, by the Hinkseys and Thessaly, on 11 February, Lewis ‘found to my relief that he still has an open mind on ultimate questions: he spoke contemptuously of the cheap happiness obtainable by people who shut themselves up in a system of belief’⁸¹ – but, as he recorded in Surprised by Joy, ‘I soon had the shock of discovering that he – clearly the most intelligent and best-informed man in that class – was a Christian and a thoroughgoing supernaturalist.’⁸² Professor Coghill wrote in 1965:

We used to foregather in our rooms, or go off for country walks together in endless but excited talk about what we had been reading the week before – for Wilson [whom they both had as tutor] kept us pretty well in step with each other – and what we thought about it. So we would stride over Hinksey and Cumnor – we walked almost as fast as we talked – disputing and quoting, as we looked for the dark dingles and the tree-topped hills of Matthew Arnold. This kind of walk must be among the commonest, perhaps among the best, of undergraduate experience. Lewis, with the gusto of a Chesterton or a Belloc, would suddenly roar out a passage of poetry that he had newly discovered and memorized, particularly if it were in Old English, a language novel and enchanting to us both for its heroic attitudes and crashing rhythms … his big voice boomed it out with all the pleasure of tasting a noble wine … His tastes were essentially for what had magnitude and a suggestion of myth: the heroic and romantic never failed to excite his imagination, and although at that time he was something of a professed atheist, the mystically supernatural things in ancient epic and saga always attracted him … We had, of course, thunderous disagreements and agreements, and none more thunderous or agreeing than over Samson Agonistes, which neither of us had read before and which we reached, both together, in the same week; we found we had chosen the same passages as our favourites, and for the same reasons – the epic scale of their emotions and their over-mastering rhythmical patterns … Yet when I tried to share with him my discovery of Restoration comedy he would have none of it …⁸³

The brief, concentrated English course drew to an end in June 1923. On 1 June Lewis attended Gordon’s last class held in Nevill Coghill’s rooms at Exeter, when they discussed tragedy: ‘There was some good discussion … Later we drifted to talking of Masefield and then to War reminiscences … Coghill then produced some port to celebrate our last meeting, and we drank Gordon’s health. I for one drank with great sincerity, for he is an honest, wise, kind man, more like a man and less like a don than any I have known. My opinion of him was rather low at first and has gone up steadily ever since.’⁸⁴

The actual examination took place from 14 to 19 June. ‘The English School is come and gone,’ Lewis wrote to his father on 1 July, ‘though I still have my viva to face. I was of course rather hampered by the shortened time in which I took the School and it is in many ways so different from the other exams that I have done that I should be sorry to prophesy.’⁸⁵

The viva took place on 10 July, the oral examiners being W.A. Craigie, the Icelandic scholar,^* and H.F.B. Brett-Smith, the editor of Peacock.^† ‘Most of the vivas were long and discouraging,’ wrote Lewis in his diary. ‘My own … lasted about two minutes … I came away much encouraged, and delighted to escape the language people.’⁸⁶

      The results appeared on 16 July, Nevill Coghill and C.S. Lewis being among the six to obtain ‘First Class Honours in the Honour School of English Language and Literature’.

      ^* Martin Ashworth Somerville became a member of King’s College, Cambridge in 1917. The others were Edward Francis Courtenay ‘Paddy’ Moore of Clifton College, Bristol, and Alexander Gordon Sutton of Repton School. After their training all three served in the Rifle Brigade.

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