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

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СКАЧАТЬ 28th 1936

      My dear Barfield

1. I lent The Silver Trumpet⁵⁹ to Tolkien and hear that it is the greatest success among his children that they have ever known. His own fairy-tales, which are excellent, have now no market: and its first reading—children are so practical!—led to a universal wail ‘You’re not going to give it back to Mr. Lewis, are you?’

      All the things which the wiseacres on child psychology in our circle said when you wrote it turn out to be nonsense. ‘They liked the sad parts’, said Tolkien ‘because they were sad and the puzzling parts because they were puzzling, as children always do.’ The youngest boy liked Gamboy because ‘she was clever and the bad people in books usually aren’t.’ The tags of the Podger have become so popular as to be almost a nuisance in the house. In fine, you have scored a direct hit.

      2. After the sugar, the rhubarb. Can you repeat the poem on the dedication you sent me? I liked it immensely, not only, I hope, for the intimacy, but for the felicity (not hitherto the commonest excellence in your work or mine): but after keeping it on my table for about ten days with the intention of copying it onto the fly leaf of the book, I cannot find it high or low. I am very, very sorry.

3. I wish I could Christianise the Summa⁶⁰ for you—but I dunno, I dunno! When a truth has ceased to be a mistress for pleasure and become a wife for fruit it is almost unnatural to go back to the dialectic ardours of the wooing. There may come a moment—one of those recoveries of virginity, or to speak more suitably to the subject, one of those Nth deaths, and then I’ll try

      4. We must exchange week end visits this Vac: I am ready to begin discussing dates.

5. Cecil now has The Place of the Lion: get it out of him before he returns it to me. And read The Castle by Kafka⁶¹ (Seeker).

      Yours

The Alligator of Love⁶²

      TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford

      [? July 1936]

      My dear Harwood

How nice to get poems again! It was a bit of a shock to find you writing vers libre just as if you were beardless and modern, but that poem is the best of the three all the same: specially the second stanza (‘there is no rainbow’⁶³ ‘light like fine sand’⁶⁴ are lovely[)]. The first doesn’t work with me because I never have resisting lids nor close them consciously and my eyes at bedtime are hungry for darkness not light.⁶⁵

      The Hero etc is also good. The third one is not quite a success to my mind. Makes his room for makes his room here or makes this his room creaks rather, and the rest has the opposite fault—too facile. It is a good subject of course.

      There was a young person of Streatham Who said to his friends when he met ’em ‘Old Lewis is dyin’ For The Place of the Lion But I keep people’s books once I get ‘em.’

      Have a heart!

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

Ubi est leonis locus? Caecilii lar et focus? ⁶⁶

      TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

      [Magdalen College

      28 July 1936]

      My dear Griffiths

      First, about the PS in your letter. I think both your old attitude to poetry (when you looked for religion in it) and your present one (in which you reject it as a bridge you have now finally crossed) are equally based on an error common to all modern critics—that of taking poetry as a substantive thing like chemistry or agriculture.

Surely the truth is that poetry is simply a special kind of speech, a way of saying things, and one can no more talk about poetry in the abstract than about ‘saying’. When what the poet is saying is religious, poetry is simply a part of religion. When what he says is simply entertaining, poetry is a form of entertainment. When what he says is wicked, poetry is simply a form of sin. Whenever one is talking, if one begins to utilize rhythm, metaphor, association etc, one is beginning to use ‘poetry’: but the whole place of that poetry in the scheme of things depends on what you are talking about. In fact, in a sense there is no such thing as poetry. It is not an element but a mode. Of course poetry falls out of sight in the highest levels of devotion; but only in the same way in which other forms of expression (work, gestures etc) also fall out of sight. Most people who talk about Poetry in the abstract are, I think,

.⁶⁷

      I have not made up my mind about Mysticism. Two things give me pause. 1. That the similarity between Christian and non Christian mysticism is so strong. I by no means conclude from this that it is un-Christian in the sense of being incompatible with Christianity; but I am inclined to think that it is not specifically Christian—that it is simply one of those neutral things which the Spirit utilises in a given man when it happens to be there. I.e. it may be a given man’s vocation to approach God mystically because he has the mystical faculty, but only in the same way as it is another man’s duty to serve God by driving a plough because he is a good ploughman. And if any one tried to impose mysticism as the norm of Christian life I suspect he would be making the same mistake as one who said we ought all to be fishermen because some of the apostles were.

      2. I am struck by the absence of much mysticism from the New Testament. I am not, I hope, forgetting which is the first and great commandment—but you would probably agree that the mystic’s way of obeying it is not the only way.

I quite agree with you that the change which even the greatest saint must undergo (how much more, we) in being redeemed is beyond all imagination: I take

⁶⁸ in as serious sense as I am able. But 1. the new man must still be in some sense the same, or else salvation has no meaning. The very ideas of conversion and regeneration are essentially different from the idea of substitution. Also, don’t we actually see it beginning in this life—I mean the turning round of the very same aptitudes which previously determined the kind of sin.

      2. I object to your saying ‘What is of real value in us is that which is hidden from each other and even from ourselves’. I would have said ‘From ourselves and even from each other’. That is, I think that when A loves B, tho’ A’s picture of B is doubtless very unlike the redeemed B, I suppose it to be much less unlike than B’s picture of himself. For we have often agreed, haven’t we, that one can love nothing but good—sin consisting СКАЧАТЬ