C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ mother’s death, the miseries of Wynyard, and his father’s exaggerated statements as to the difficulty of managing ‘to avoid the workhouse’.

      Another cause had its roots in the very brilliance of Lewis’s mind, which began suddenly to blossom under the influence of the excellent teaching at Cherbourg, and in particular the classical authors:

Here, especially in Virgil, one was presented with a mass of religious ideas; and all teachers and editors took it for granted from the outset that these religious ideas were sheer illusion. No one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled Paganism or Paganism prefigured Christianity. The accepted position seemed to be that religions were normally a mere farrago of nonsense, though our own, by a fortunate exception, was exactly true … But on what grounds could I believe in this exception? … I was very anxious not to.⁴⁹

      Other influences were also at hand to shake his faith. In May 1912 a new master came to Cherbourg – ‘Pogo’, whose evil effects on the adolescent mind are well described in Surprised by Joy. Percy Gerald Kelsal Harris was to distinguish himself a few years later as a war hero. When Lewis met Harris, however, the latter had just dropped out of Oxford and was far too youthful to be in charge of boys not much younger than himself. At the same time came the sudden upsurge of puberty and an easy surrender to sexual temptation:

      But this is amply accounted for by the age I had then reached and by my recent, in a sense deliberate, withdrawal of myself from Divine protection. I do not believe Pogo had anything to do with it … What attacked me through Pogo was not the Flesh (I had that of my own) but the World: the desire for glitter, swagger, distinction, the desire to be in the know … I began to labour very hard to make myself into a fop, a cad, and a snob.

Pogo’s communications, however much they helped to vulgarize my mind, had no such electric effect on my senses as the dancing mistress, nor as Bekker’s Charicles, which was given me for a prize.^* I never thought that dancing mistress as beautiful as my cousin G.,^† but she was the first woman I ever ‘looked upon to lust after her’; assuredly through no fault of her own.⁵⁰

      Side by side with the awakening of carnal and worldly desires came what Jack described as the real romantic passion of his life. It arrived with the sudden, overwhelming return of ‘Joy’ – that ‘unsatisfied desire more desirable than any other satisfaction’ – when he chanced upon the Christmas number of the Bookman for December 1911 with a coloured supplement reproducing several of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods in a loosely poetic version made the same year by Margaret Armour. As Lewis records in Surprised by Joy,

      A moment later, as the poet says, ‘The sky had turned round.’ I had never heard of Wagner, nor of Siegfried. I thought the Twilight of the Gods meant the twilight in which the gods lived. How did I know, at once and beyond question, that this was no Celtic, or silvan, or terrestrial twilight? But so it was. Pure ‘Northernness’ engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity … and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago (it hardly seems longer now) in Tegner’s Drapa, that Siegfried (whatever it might be) belonged to the same world as Balder and the sunward-sailing cranes.

And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss … At once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to ‘have it again’ was the supreme and only important object of desire.⁵¹

      The craze for all things ‘Northern’ that followed this great moment of revelation and the rediscovery of Joy became the most important thing in Lewis’s life for the next two or three years. He describes it as almost a double life, particularly during the unpleasant year at Malvern College (1913–14), when mental ecstasy and physical purgatory alternated with dizzying rapidity.

By the summer of 1912 Jack had discovered the works of Wagner by means of gramophone records. He and Warnie now had a gramophone and ‘gramophone catalogues were already one of my favourite forms of reading; but I had never remotely dreamed that the records from Grand Opera with their queer German or Italian names could have anything to do with me’.⁵² But a magazine called the Soundbox was doing synopses of great operas week by week, and it now did the whole Ring. ‘I read in a rapture and discovered who Siegfried was and what was the “twilight” of the gods.’⁵³ On the strength of this he began to write a poem on the Wagnerian version of the Nibelung story, and to collect records of the operas.

Later that summer Lewis came across an actual copy of the illustrated Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods on the drawing-room table of his cousin Hope Ewart (now Mrs George Harding) during a visit to her home at Dundrum near Dublin, and found that the Rackham pictures, ‘which seemed to me then to be the very music made visible, plunged me a few fathoms deeper into my delight. I have seldom coveted anything as I coveted that book’⁵⁴ – and he was able to buy the cheaper edition shortly afterwards.

      This visit to Dundrum seems to have merged in his memory with one the following August when he and Warnie were bicycling ‘via Glendalough and the Vale of Avoca through the most glorious scenery possible’, after which he came to record how

this imaginative Renaissance almost at once produced a new appreciation of external nature. At first, I think, this was parasitic on the literary and musical experiences. On that holiday at Dundrum, cycling among the Wicklow mountains, I was almost involuntarily looking for scenes that might belong to the Wagnerian world … But soon (I cannot say how soon) nature ceased to be a mere reminder of books, became herself the medium of the real joy.⁵⁵

In this great Northern Renaissance Lewis found everything else dwarfed in proportion. ‘If the Northernness seemed then a bigger thing than my religion, that may partly have been because my attitude towards it contained elements which my religion ought to have contained and did not.’⁵⁶ Years later, in a lecture to the Socratic Club at Oxford, he confessed that ‘If Christianity is only a mythology, then I find that the mythology I believe in is not the mythology I like best. I like Greek mythology much better: Irish better still: Norse best of all.’⁵⁷ And in another lecture he described himself as one who loved Balder before he loved Christ.⁵⁸

      Meanwhile Lewis was progressing well at school. His first printed works, two undistinguished essays, appeared in the Cherbourg School Magazine; he began to take an interest in the Shakespearean productions of Frank Benson’s company whenever it visited Malvern; and he was becoming a likely candidate for a scholarship to the College.

He was to take the entrance examination in June 1913, but ‘was obliged to retire to bed with СКАЧАТЬ