Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ But in Christ there is neither male nor female, bond nor free.⁴⁹ If the whole man is offered to God, all disputes about the value of this or that faculty are, as it were, henceforward out of date.

      You said in your letter (going further than some would go) that every natural desire per se shd. be regarded as an attraction of grace. But if so, how much more every natural faculty!

This view of yours about desire is, I suppose, Augustinian. Habe caritatem et fac quod vis.⁵⁰ This is certainly sound, but not perhaps very practical: for it implies Donec caritatem habens, noli facere quod vis.⁵¹ I wholly agree with what you say about escaping from the circle of morality into the love of God: in fact you have written an excellent commentary on St. Paul’s view of the ‘Law’. But in the meantime?

      This letter is getting too long: the subject has endless ramifications, but I will wait for your next. Rejoice with me—timidly, for it is only the first streak of dawn and may be false dawn-there are faint signs of a movement away from Anthroposophy in Barfield.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      TO LEO BAKER (BOD):

      Magdalen College

      June 24th /36

      My dear Baker

I should have hesitated to send you the book⁵² if I had known that it would find you in pain and by the need to acknowledge it lay a new burden on you. The book itself, I fear, is more than a grasshopper—as I find from this dialogue between myself and the Merton Professor of English⁵³—more or less my ‘chief’ as they would say in the disciplined professions.

      P. Well, Lewis, you’ve certainly gone beyond the whole English school with your new book. L. (Blushing at the supposed extremity of the compliment) Oh, really- P. Oh clearly. Much the longest book any of us has written. L. (With ghastly laughter) Oh surely not. I can understand it seeming the longest. P. No, no, there’s no seeming about it. It is a very long book. (Pause) A very long book indeed. L. Come, it’s not as long as X. P. X? It’s half as long again. Far longer than X. Far longer. (And so on)

      I am greatly distressed to hear that you are still suffering. Is it possible that the doctors can have a man so long in their hands and find out so little about him. It is indeed a comfort that the number of serious diseases which you know you have not got must be higher—far higher than anything the ordinary person in health could boast of. I take it, if the arthritis diagnosis is correct, the pain is the main thing i.e. that it hurts out of all proportion to the harm it will do. Am I right?

I must confess I have not myself yet got beyond the stage of feeling physical pain as the worst of evils. I am the worst person in the world to help anyone else to support it. I don’t mean that it presents quite the intellectual difficulties it used to, but that my nerves even in imagination refuse to move with my philosophy. In my own limited experience the sufferer himself nearly always towers above those around him: in fact, nothing confirms the Christian view of this world so much as the treasures of patience and unselfishness one sees elicited from quite commonplace people when the trial really comes. Age, too—nearly everyone improves as he gets old, if this is a ‘vale of soul making’,⁵⁴ it seems to, by round and by large, to be working pretty well. Of course I can’t hazard a guess why you should be picked out for this prolonged suffering.

      I am told that the great thing is to surrender to physical pain—I mean not to do what’s commonly called ‘standing’ it, above all not to brace the soul (which usually braces the muscles as well) not to try to ignore it: to be like earth being ploughed not like marble being cut. But I have no right to discuss such things on the basis of my very limited experience.

You were talking about Peele⁵⁵ when you last wrote. Personally I find Renaissance poetry on the whole less and less attractive as time goes on. When it succeeds (‘His thunder is entangled in my hair’—‘Take but thy lute and make the mountains dance’)⁵⁶ it has a wonderful gloss on; but even then I prefer the dull finish—something either humbler or harder. When it fails-! Did you notice how Peele allows Venus to describe Helen in the Arraignement of Paris? If not look on p. 319 of my book (the very long one).⁵⁷

      I think probably the greatest influence on my purely literary taste since the old days has been old Germanic poetry, which, as a friend says, sometimes makes everything else seem a little thin and halfhearted. There is a metre in Icelandic called the Drapa which goes like this:

       Wildest brunt of winter Woke amidst the oak-wood

      (This isn’t meant to make sense) First you have the three alliterations (wild—wint—woke). Then you have the half-rhyme (consonantal but not vocalic) of-unt and-int. Then you have the full rhyme woke-oak. All these features are required to make a couplet. And note well—the beats must be long in quantity as well as accented: i.e.

       Wildest broth of weather

would be unmetrical. This sounds mere puzzle poetry. In fact it works up a storm of sound which, when combined, as it usually is, with a tragic theme, and contrasting its rock-like form with the vain liquidity of sorrow, produces an almost unbearable tension of stoical pathos-‘iron tears down Pluto’s cheek.’⁵⁸ W. H. Auden (one of the few good young poets) has caught something of it in places. You might try hammering one out some night when sleep is denied: but the thing is so difficult to our metrical habits, that you won’t finish it by morning.

      But I don’t know why I have digressed into Icelandic prosody. More to the points—read any of Charles Williams’ novels (Gollancz) which you can get hold of—specially The Place of the Lion and Many Dimensions. In the rare genre of ‘theological shocker’ which Chesterton (I think) invented, these are superb. On the first level they are exciting stories: beyond that, the philosophical implications are extremely interesting: finally he has the power (absolutely unknown in our generation) of painting virtue. His morally best characters are his artistically best. The fact that Gollancz publishes them (in lurid covers) suggests that all this substantial edification—for it is nothing less—must be reaching the ordinary thriller-reader. If so, I may be telling you about a historical event of the first moment.

      I think it is hospitality heroical on your own part and that of your wife to ask guests to a sick-house. Do accept my real (not conventional) thanks for this very great kindness. But I can’t well come. I am busy this vac. with work undertaken at haste and now to be repented—not heaven knows, at leisure, but at length: and such breaks as I shall take have to be concerted with a good many other people’s plans. But I hope some lawful occasion will take me your way sooner or later. Till then, better health,

      Yours truly,

      C. S. Lewis

      TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

      [The СКАЧАТЬ