2. Sawles Warde'

2. SAWLES WARDE'

I now turn to the early thirteenth-century Sawles Warde. Its history begins with a well-known passage in the New Testament: 'If the master of the house knew at what time the thief was going to come he would no doubt keep watch and not allow his house to be broken into.' This passage is then used as the peg on which to hang an allegory in chapters 13-15 of a Latin prose treatise De Anima, possibly by Hugo of St Victor (1096-1146). It is at once twisted into an almost entirely new meaning. In Our Lord's saying the 'thief' had represented Himself, and the unknown hour was the date of the Second Coming and the Day of Judgement. In the De Anima, however, the principalis. fur, the master thief, is the Devil, supported by a gang of Vices, and what the master of the house (the soul) has to keep watch against is temptation. It is unbelievable that the Latin author misunderstood or forgot or did not reverence the sense of the original. He obviously feels perfectly free to transform it in any way that suits his purpose, provided that, thus transformed, it is still orthodox and edifying. Very possibly he regarded himself as choosing one, instead of another, from among its multiple senses. In his allegory the master of the house is Animus. He rules, with the aid of Fortitudo, Temperantia, and Justitia, a familia of thoughts, senses, and volitions. Prudentia, as doorkeeper, admits a messenger called Timor Mortis who describes the pains of Hell. His words move the virtues to several wholesome resolutions. Then comes another messenger called Amor vitae aeternae et Desiderium coelestis patriae who of course describes the joys of Heaven. The author concludes by drawing, in few words, the obvious moral.

On this modest text an English Johan, of whom we know nothing except that he asks our prayers for his soul, gets to work. He produces something considerably longer than his original, and it cannot, by our standards, be classified either as a new book or as a translation. At the very outset he quotes the Dominical words from Matt.xxiv. 43; the Latin had quoted them from Luke xii. 39. It is hard to see any reason for this change and I suspect that Johan did not even know he had made it. He gives Wit (his equivalent for animus) a silly wife called Wil. It is she who sets the whole familia wrong if she is not carefully watched. The four virtues are daughters of God. Mea6 (Temperantia) is described as teaching meosure which is the middle point between two evils (Note: My references are to the lines in the excellent edn. of Sawles Warde by R. M. Wilson, Leeds School of English Language Texts and Monographs, 1938.) (Editor’s Note: Wilson's edition contains three separate texts of Sawles Warde, MSS Bodley 34, Royal and Cotton. Lewis's references are to MS Bodley 34. Printed in this same volume are the corresponding chapters (XIII, XIV, XV) of Hugo of St Victor's De Anima. The entire De Anima is found in Migne's Patrologia Latina (1854), vol. 177.)) - the golden middle way between much and little' (184). This scrap of Aristotle's ethical system had not occurred in the Latin. Nor had the clear Virgilian echo at 124, where the first visitant says of the torments of Hell, as the Sibyl had said of the same subject, that he would not tell all though he had a thousand tongues of steel and spoke till they were all worn out (cf. Aeneid, VI, 625). Thus what Johan adds to his original is not necessarily original itself. His loathsomely vivid account of the reptilian horrors in Hell goes far beyond anything in the De Anima, but is indebted to earlier vision literature.

But while Johan is ready to use anything that comes to hand, he also uses continuously - perhaps does not know that he is using, and cannot help using - his own imagination. The De Anima is not very imaginative; at point after point Johan touches it into life. In the Latin Timor Mortis is not described at all. In Johan, he is let in and looked at very hard by them all, for lank he is and lean and his face deathlike and pale and of a strange colour. Every hair seems to be standing erect on his head' (62-5). He gives his name not as Fear of Death but simply as Fear (68) - a change which, for me at any rate, makes him far more formidable. He tells how the devils will one day bring to us books in which all our sins are written; it is Johan who adds in black, small letters'. We learn how the damned, as in Milton, will be hurried from the extreme of heat to that of cold; Johan adds And they never know which of these two feels (þunche6) the worse' (110-11). He adds (not without precedent) that if there were no other pains in Hell the very sight of the devils, their faces, their voices, the torrent of insult (schen6lac ) that they utter, would be torment enough (131-5). He rises at last into an apostrophe, all his own, which I should weaken by modernizing: O helle, dea6es hus, wununge of wanunge of grure ant of granunge, heatel ham , ant heard wan of alle wontrea6es, buri of bale ant bold of eauereuch bitternesse, þu la6est lont of alle, þu dorc stude... (138-41). Such a passage may have originated the fancy - for I think it is nothing more - that Sawles Warde is intended as verse, not prose.

Of the second messenger we learn from the Latin only that he is pulcher et hilaris: in Johan we see Dea6es Sonde actually entering and greeting the master with laughing cheer, and the whole house shining and gleaming with the light that comes from him (227-30). Later, when he is describing Heaven, a small change makes, if I may trust my own reactions, a big difference. The Latin said that the sweet smell of those regions surpasses all kinds of perfumes'. Johan says A man could live forever in the sweetness of it' (298-9). The first leaves our imagination in the barber's shop: the second suggests another world.

I believe any fair reader will find Sawles Warde a sappy and lively little work. As often, we must be careful to get the right view of what seem to be, or actually are, its naiveties. When Johan says that the blessed will behold God nebbe to nebbe (318), the daring and homely quality which we find in his words probably did not exist for him. He is simply translating the Pauline facie ad faciem (I Cor . xiii. 12) and might have been hard put to it to find any other rendering. Later (298-300) he tells us that God remains seated as He receives the prayers of all other saints, but stands up when addressed by the virgins. We may smile with pleasure and rejoice to find that not only the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman; or we may say, as someone said to me, that it is a pleasant piece of silliness'. Both reactions perhaps miss the point. It is possible to disagree with, even to hold for silliness', the medieval exaltation of virginity as the supreme virtue. But granted that exaltation, Johan's image is a good symbol. If he had met a real anthropomorphist, I expect he would have been quite able to explain that God was incorporeal and therefore would not really sit down or stand up. It would not, of course, follow that in the heat of composition he consciously attended to this.

3

It will be clear that La3amon is not the author of the Brut, nor Johan of Sawles Warde, in the sense in which Jane Austen is the author of Persuasion. On the other hand, neither is simply a translator. Nor is it quite satisfactory to regard Wace (in whatever text) and the De Anima as their sources' if by a source' we mean something that stands to their work as a novella or a Plutarchan Life stand to a play by Shakespeare. They are not changing the genre nor the structural outlines. The truth is that these Middle English texts have come into existence by a process which is quite foreign to modern literature. The scholar's ideal of accuracy in translation, the historian's ideal of fidelity to a document, and the artist's ideal of originality, are all alike absent from the minds of La3amon and Johan. In one way they seem enslaved to their originals; it never occurs to them to break these up and melt the slivers down and forge out of them an essentially new work. But in another way their treatment of them is very cavalier. They do not hesitate to supplement them from their own knowledge and, still more, from their own imagination - touching them up, bringing them more fully to life. The impulse to do this is obviously irrepressible; I get the impression that it is not always fully conscious or voluntary. In that way it might even be true that they are sometimes most indebted to the originals where they most improve them; that the more completely they are carried away by the story or the doctrine, the more of their own they mix with it. I think we can understand this in the light of those occasions when we have remembered a good passage from a book as being even better than it was. We look it up, perhaps in order to quote it; and find that what we had seemed to remember as the master touch was never there at all. We have added it. But it was the vitality of the passage which enabled, and forced, us to do so. The author's imagination has fertilized ours. Similarly, perhaps, it is just because Wace's narrative has taken complete possession of La3amon's mind that he sees - and may even believe that it was Wace who showed him - Arthur's changes of colour when they came to offer him the crown.

Now even the student who has only begun his medieval reading will have met already some instances of this very curious relation between a Middle English text and an original. His attention will almost certainly have been drawn to Chaucer's handling of Boccaccio, whether in The Knights Tale or the Troilus; perhaps also to Malory's handling of his French book'. But he will be very mistaken if he thinks he has been learning something merely about Chaucer or Malory. He must understand how typical, in this respect, they are. Their procedure is, if not the universal, at any rate the normal, medieval procedure. The characteristic activity of the medieval - perhaps especially the Middle English - author is precisely touching up' something that was already there. And this 'something’ may itself be the touching up' of something earlier: as we see in the sequence Geoffrey-Wace-La3amon. The beginning of this process - if it had a beginning any more definite than daylight has each morning - is often lost to us. Hence we might equally well call our medieval authors the most unoriginal or the most original of men. They are so unoriginal that they hardly ever attempt to write anything unless someone has written it before. They are so rebelliously and insistently original that they can hardly reproduce a page of any older work without transforming it by their own intensely visual and emotional imagination, turning the abstract into the concrete, quickening the static into turbulent movement, flooding whatever was colourless with scarlet and gold. They can no more leave their originals intact than we can leave our own earlier drafts intact when we fair-copy them. We always tinker and (as we hope) improve. But in the Middle Ages you did that as cheerfully to other people's work as to your own. And the tinkering very often really improved them.

In my opinion all criticism should be of books, not of authors. But when we are treating the Middle Ages it often must be. For many of the texts there is no one human being who can really be called the author in the full sense. You may sometimes be able to pick out the bits added by the last writer and separate them from those, which were already there in the text he touched up. You may decide that his are the best bits. But of course this does not make him responsible for that complex organization which the whole book now is. If a great painter adds a few square feet (or even inches) of his own work to the canvas of a good, but less good, artist, he certainly modifies everything else that the picture contains; but then everything else modifies what he has added. His own work, if he really is a master, presupposes all the rest, is calculated to improve this picture. It would not improve any other. For the total result we cannot exclusively thank either painter. So for the Brut we cannot exclusively thank La3amon; nor Chaucer for the Troilus. In other words, what we may call 'the Author-Book unit' will not always work for the Middle Ages. Sometimes we begin to doubt whether even the Book is the unit; when we are presented with something constantly retold, which never remains exactly the same in the retellings yet never becomes wholly new, it is hard to say where one Book ends and another begins.

The Ballad, which is such a troublesome phenomenon to those who approach it with the modern idea of single authorship in their minds, can thus be seen as no more than an extreme instance of that shared authorship' - shared is a safer word than communal which was widespread in the Middle Ages. The Prologue and Links in the Canterbury Tales are probably not an instance at all. The Troilus and the prose Morte are good, central examples.

Those who find this state of affairs repellent may be reminded that we tolerate it quite easily in another art. A cathedral often contains Saxon, Norman, Early English and Perpendicular work. The effect of the whole may be deeply satisfying. Yet we have no one artist to thank for it. None of the successive architects foresaw or intended it. One suspects indeed that most of these would have prevented it if they could, that each generation left the work of its predecessors standing only because funds for demolition and total rebuilding in the new style were not forthcoming. It may be difficult, according to some theories, to call the cathedral as we now have it a work of art'. But it is certainly not a work of nature (though nature has by now added some beauties and destroyed others). It is the work of men, though not of a man. We may find it helpful to regard some medieval literature as we regard such cathedrals. Indeed the books may be in one way easier to accept than the buildings. Each reviser may improve or correct (and of course misunderstand) his predecessor. But at least he is not, as the architects may have been, in revolt against him. The shared authorship is more voluntarily shared.

But while this often makes criticism of authors impossible it leaves criticism of books untouched. The text before us, however it came into existence, must be allowed to work on us in its own way and must be judged on its own merits. I agree wholeheartedly with a recent critic (Note: J. Speirs, Medieval English Poetry: the Non-Chaucerian Tradition (1957), pp. 217-18.) that “it is what is made of the "story", how it is realized, the kind of significance it is made to bear, what the poem totally communicates or does, that is our object'. As historians, as critics of authors, we may want to know whether some simile in the Brut came first from Wace or La3amon; whether some speech in Troilus came first from Boccaccio or Chaucer. But as readers we are concerned only to receive, as critics of books we are concerned only to diagnose and evaluate, what this simile or speech contributes to the whole communicating and doing' of the work before us. And while we are reading or criticizing we must be on our guard against a certain elliptical mode of expression which may be legitimate for some other purpose but is deadly for us. We must not say that the Grail is' a Celtic cauldron of plenty, or that Malory's Gawain is' a solar deity, or that the land of Gome in Chrestien's Lancelot is' the world of the dead. Within a given story any object, person, or place is neither more nor less nor other than what that story effectively shows it to be. The ingredients of one story cannot be' anything in another story, for they are not in it at all. These supposedly identical ingredients are the abstract products of analysis. Within concrete literary experiences we never meet them.

123 THE GRAND MIRACLE

One is very often asked at present whether we could not have a Christianity stripped, or, as people who ask it say, 'freed' from its miraculous elements, a Christianity with the miraculous elements suppressed. Now, it seems to me that precisely the one religion in the world, or, at least, the only one I know, with which you could not do that is Christianity. In a religion like Buddhism, if you took away the miracles attributed to Gautama Buddha in some very late sources, there would be no loss; in fact, the religion would get on very much better without them because in that case the miracles largely contradict the teaching. Or even in the case of a religion like Mohammedanism, nothing essential would be altered if you took away the miracles. You could have a great prophet preaching his dogmas without bringing in any miracles; they are only in the nature of a digression, or illuminated capitals. But you cannot possibly do that with Christianity, because the Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle. If you take that away there is nothing specifically Christian left. There may be many admirable human things which Christianity shares with all other systems in the world, but there would be nothing specifically Christian. Conversely, once you have accepted that, then you will see that all other well-established Christian miracles - because, of course, there are ill-established Christian Miracles; there are Christian legends just as much as there are heathen legends, or modern journalistic legends - you will see that all the well-established Christian miracles are part of it, that they all either prepare for, or exhibit, or result from the Incarnation. Just as every natural event exhibits the total character of the natural universe at a particular point and space of time; so every miracle exhibits the character of the Incarnation.

Now, if one asks whether that central grand miracle in Christianity is itself probable or improbable, of course, quite clearly you cannot be applying Hume's kind of probability. You cannot mean a probability based on statistics according to which the more often a thing has happened, the more likely it is to happen again (the more often you get indigestion from eating a certain food, the more probable it is, if you eat it again, that you will again have indigestion). Certainly the Incarnation cannot be probable in that sense. It is of its very nature to have happened only once. But then it is of the very nature of the history of this world to have happened only once; and if the Incarnation happened at all, it is the central chapter of that history. It is improbable in the same way in which the whole of nature is improbable, because it is only there once, and will happen only once. So one must apply to it a quite different kind of standard.

I think we are rather in this position. Supposing you had before you a manuscript of some great work, either a symphony or a novel. There then comes to you a person, saying, 'Here is a new bit of the manuscript that I found; it is the central passage of that symphony, or the central chapter of that novel. The text is incomplete without it. I have got the missing passage which is really the centre of the whole work.' The only thing you could do would be to put this new piece of the manuscript in that central position, and then see how it reacted on the whole of the rest of the work. If it constantly brought out new meanings from the whole of the rest of the work if it made you notice things in the rest of the work which, you had not noticed before, then I think you would decide that it was authentic. On the other hand, if it failed to do that then however attractive it was in itself, you would reject it.

Now, what is the missing chapter in this case, the chapter which Christians are offering? The story of the Incarnation is the story of a descent and resurrection. When I say 'resurrection' here, I am not referring simply to the first few hours, or the first few weeks of the Resurrection. I am talking of this whole, huge pattern of descent, down - down, and then up again. What we ordinarily call the Resurrection being just, so to speak, the point at which it turns. Think what that descent is. The coming down, not only into humanity, but into those nine months which precede human birth, in which they tell us we all recapitulate strange pre-human, sub-human forms of life, and going lower still into being a corpse, a thing which, if this ascending movement had not begun, would presently have passed out of the organic altogether, and have gone back into the inorganic, as all corpses do. One has a picture of someone going right down and dredging the sea-bottom. One has a picture of a strong man trying to lift a very big, complicated burden. He stoops down and gets himself right under it so that he himself disappears; and then he straightens his back and moves off with the whole thing swaying on his shoulders. Or else one has the picture of a diver, stripping off garment after garment, making himself naked, then flashing for a moment in the air, and then down through the green, and warm, and sunlit water into the pitch black, cold, freezing water, down into the mud and slime, then up again, his lungs almost bursting, back again to the green and warm and sunlit water, and then at last out into the sunshine, holding in his hand the dripping thing he went down to get. This thing is human nature; but, associated with it, all nature, the new universe. That indeed is a point I cannot go into tonight, because it would take a whole sermon - this connexion between human nature and nature in general. It sounds startling, but I believe it can be fully justified.

Now, as soon as you have thought of this, this pattern of the huge dive down to the bottom, into the depths of the universe and coming up again into the light, everyone will see at once how that is imitated and echoed by the principles of the natural world; the descent of the seed into the soil and its rising again in the plants. There are also all sorts of things in our own spiritual life where a thing has to be killed, and broken, in order that it may then become bright, and strong, and splendid. The analogy is obvious. In that sense the doctrine fits in very well, so well in fact that immediately there comes the suspicion, Is it not fitting in a great deal too well? In other words, does not the Christian story show this pattern of descent and reascent because that is part of all the nature religions of the world? We have read about it in The Golden Bough (Note By Sir James George Frazer). We all know about Adonis, and the stories of the rest of those rather tedious people; is not this one more instance of the same thing, 'the dying God'? Well, yes it is. That is what makes the question subtle. What the anthropological critic of Christianity is always saying is perfectly true. Christ is a figure of that sort. And here comes a very curious thing. When I first, after childhood, read the Gospels, I was full of that stuff about the dying God, The Golden Bough, and so on. It was to me then a very poetic, and mysterious, and quickening idea; and when I turned to the Gospels never will I forget my disappointment and repulsion at finding hardly anything about it at all. The metaphor of the seed dropping into the ground in this connexion occurs (I think) twice in the New Testament (Note John xii. 24; I Corinthians xv. 36) and for the rest hardly any notice is taken; it seemed to me extraordinary. You had a dying God, Who was always representative of the corn: you see Him holding the corn, that is, bread, in His hand, and saying, 'This is My Body' (Note Matthew xxvi. 26; Mark xiv. 22; Luke xxii. 19; I Corinthians xi. 24) and from my point of view, as I then was, He did not seem to realize what He was saying. Surely there, if anywhere, this connexion between the Christian story and the corn must have come out; the whole context is crying out for it. But everything goes on as if the principal actor, and still more, those about Him, were totally ignorant of what they were doing. It is as if you got very good evidence concerning the sea-serpent, but the men who brought this good evidence seemed never to have heard of sea-serpents. Or to put it in another way, why was it that the only case of the 'dying God' which might conceivably have been historical occurred among a people (and the only people in the whole Mediterranean world) who had not got any trace of this nature religion, and indeed seemed to know nothing about it? Why is it among them the thing suddenly appears to happen?

The principal actor, humanly speaking, hardly seems to know of the repercussions His words (and sufferings) would have in any pagan mind. Well, that is almost inexplicable, except on one hypothesis. How if the corn king is not mentioned in that Book, because He is here of whom the corn king was an image? How if the representation is absent because here, at last, the thing represented is present? If the shadows are absent because the thing of which they were shadows is here? The corn itself is in its far-off way an imitation of the supernatural reality; the thing dying, and coming to life again, descending, and re-ascending beyond all nature. The principle is there in nature because it was first there in God Himself. Thus one is getting in behind the nature religions, and behind nature to Someone Who is not explained by, but explains, not, indeed, the nature religions directly, but that whole characteristic behaviour of nature on which nature religions were based. Well, that is one way in which it surprised me. It seemed to fit in a very peculiar way, showing me something about nature more fully than I had seen it before, while itself remaining quite outside and above the nature religions.

Then another thing. We, with our modern democratic and arithmetical presuppositions would so have liked and expected all men to start equal in their search for God. One has the picture of great centripetal roads coming from all directions, with well-disposed people, all meaning the same thing, and getting closer and closer together. How shockingly opposite to that is the Christian story! One people picked out of the whole earth; that people purged and proved again and again. Some are lost in the desert before they reach Palestine; some stay in Babylon; some becoming indifferent. The whole thing narrows and narrows, until at last it comes down to a little point, small as the point of a spear - a Jewish girl at her prayers. That is what the whole of human nature has narrowed down to before the Incarnation takes place. Very unlike what we expected, but, of course, not in the least unlike what seems, in general, as shown by nature, to be God's way of working. The universe is quite a shockingly selective, undemocratic place out of apparently infinite space, a relatively tiny proportion occupied by matter of any kind. Of the stars perhaps only one has planets: of the planets only one is at all likely to sustain organic life. Of the animals only one species is rational. Selection as seen in nature, and the appalling waste which it involves, appears a horrible and an unjust thing by human standards. But the selectiveness in the Christian story is not quite like that. The people who are selected are, in a sense, unfairly selected for a supreme honour; but it is also a supreme burden. The People of Israel come to realize that it is their woes which are saving the world. Even in human society, though, one sees how this inequality furnishes an opportunity for every kind of tyranny and servility. Yet, on the other hand, one also sees that it furnishes an opportunity for some of the very best things we can think of - humility, and kindness, and the immense pleasures of admiration. (I cannot conceive how one would get through the boredom of a world in which you never met anyone more clever, or more beautiful, or stronger than yourself. The very crowds who go after the football celebrities and film-stars know better than to desire that kind of equality!) What the story of the Incarnation seems to be doing is to flash a new light on a principle in nature, and to show for the first time that this principle of inequality in nature is neither good nor bad. It is a common theme running through both the goodness and badness of the natural world, and I begin to see how it can survive as a supreme beauty in a redeemed universe.

And with that I have unconsciously passed over to the third point. I have said that the selectiveness was not unfair in the way in which we first suspect, because those selected for the great honour are also selected for the great suffering, and their suffering heals others. In the Incarnation we get, of course, this idea of vicariousness of one person profiting by the earning of another person. In its highest form that is the very centre of Christianity. And we also find this same vicariousness to be a characteristic, or, as the musician would put it, a leit-motif of nature. It is a law of the natural universe that no being can exist on its own resources. Everyone, everything, is hopelessly indebted to everyone and everything else. In the universe, as we now see it, this is the source of many of the greatest horrors: all the horrors of carnivorousness, and the worse horrors of the parasites, those horrible animals that live under the skin of other animals, and so on. And yet, suddenly seeing it in the light of the Christian story, one realizes that vicariousness is not in itself bad; that all these animals, and insects, and horrors are merely that principle of vicariousness twisted in one way. For when you think it out, nearly everything good in nature also comes from vicariousness. After all, the child, both before and after birth, lives on its mother, just as the parasite lives on its host, the one being a horror, the other being the source of almost every natural goodness in the world. It all depends upon what you do with this principle. So that I find in that third way also, that what is implied by the Incarnation just fits in exactly with what I have seen in nature, and (this is the important point) each time it gives it a new twist. If I accept this supposed missing chapter the Incarnation, I find it begins to illuminate the whole of the rest of the manuscript. It lights up nature's pattern of death and rebirth; and, secondly, her selectiveness; and, thirdly, her vicariousness.

Now I notice a very odd point. All other religions in the world, as far as I know them, are either nature religions, or antinature religions. The nature religions are those of the old, simple pagan sort that you know about. You actually got drunk in the temple of Bacchus. You actually committed fornication in the temple of Aphrodite. The more modern form of nature religion would be the religion started, in a sense, by Bergson (Note Henri Bergson (1859-1941). His 'nature religion' is particularly evident in his Matière et Mémoire (1896) and L'Evolution Créatrice (1907)) (but he repented, and died Christian), and carried on in a more popular form by Mr Bernard Shaw. The antinature religions are those like Hinduism and Stoicism, where men say, 'I will starve my flesh. I care not whether I live or die.' All natural things are to be set aside: the aim is Nirvana, apathy, negative spirituality. The nature religions simply affirm my natural desires. The antinatural religions simply contradict them. The nature religions simply give a new sanction to what I already always thought about the universe in my moments of rude health and cheerful brutality. The antinature religions merely repeat what I always thought about it in my moods of lassitude, or delicacy, or compassion.

But here is something quite different. Here is something telling me - well, what? Telling me that I must never, like the Stoics, say that death does not matter. Nothing is less Christian than that. Death which made Life Himself shed tears at the grave of Lazarus (Note John xi. 35) and shed tears of blood in Gethsemane (Note Luke xxii. 44). This is an appalling horror; a stinking indignity. (You remember Thomas Browne's splendid remark: 'I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed of it.') (Note Browne's actual words are 'I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof.' Religio Medici, First Part, Section 40) And yet, somehow or other, infinitely good. Christianity does not simply affirm or simply deny the horror of death; it tells me something quite new about it. Again, it does not, like Nietzsche, simply confirm my desire to be stronger, or cleverer than other people.

On the other hand, it does not allow me to say, Oh, Lord, won't there be a day when everyone will be as good as everyone else?' In the same way, about vicariousness. It will not, in any way, allow me to be an exploiter, to act as a parasite on other people; yet it will not allow me any dream of living on my own. It will teach me to accept with glad humility the enormous sacrifice that others make for me, as well as to make sacrifices for others.

That is why I think this Grand Miracle is the missing chapter in this novel, the chapter on which the whole plot turns; that is why I believe that God really has dived down into the bottom of creation, and has come up bringing the whole redeemed nature on His shoulder. The miracles that have already happened are, of course, as Scripture so often says, the first fruits of that cosmic summer which is presently coming on (Note Romans viii. 23; xi. 16; xvi. 5; I Corinthians xv. 20; James i.18; Revelation xiv. 4). Christ has risen, and so we shall rise. St Peter for a few seconds walked on the water (Note Matthew xiv. 29); and the day will come when there will be a re-made universe, infinitely obedient to the will of glorified and obedient men, when we can do all things, when we shall be those gods that we are described as being in Scripture. To be sure, it feels wintry enough still: but often in the very early spring it feels like that. Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale. A man really ought to say, 'The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago' in the same spirit in which he says, 'I saw a crocus yesterday.' Because we know what is coming behind the crocus. The spring comes slowly down this way; but the great thing is that the corner has been turned. There is, of course, this difference, that in the natural spring the crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not. We can. We have the power either of withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on into those 'high mid-summer pomps' in which our Leader, the Son of man, already dwells, and to which He is calling us. It remains with us to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.

The publishers claim that The Hobbit, though very unlike Alice, resembles it in being the work of a professor at play. A more important truth is that both belong to a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own - a world that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him. Its place is with Alice, Flatland, Phantastes , The Wind in the Willows .

To define the world of The Hobbit is, of course, impossible, because it is new. You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have gone. The author's admirable illustrations and maps of Mirkwood and Goblingate and Esgaroth give one an inkling - and so do the names of the dwarf and dragon that catch our eyes as we first ruffle the pages. But there are dwarfs and dwarfs, and no common recipe for children's stories will give you creatures so rooted in their own soil and history as those of Professor Tolkien - who obviously knows much more about them than he needs for this tale. Still less will the common recipe prepare us for the curious shift from the matter-of fact beginnings of his story ('hobbits are small people, smaller than dwarfs - and they have no beards - but very much larger than Lilliputians') to the saga-like tone of the later chapters ('It is in my mind to ask what share of their inheritance you would have paid had you found the hoard ungarded'). You must read for yourself to find out how inevitable the change is and how it keeps pace with the hero's journey. Though all is marvellous, nothing is arbitrary: all the inhabitants of Wilderland seem to have the same unquestionable right to their existence as those of our own world, though the fortunate child who meets them will have no notion - and his unlearned elders not much more - of the deep sources in our blood and tradition from which they spring.

For it must be understood that this is a children's book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. Alice is read gravely by children and with laughter by grown-ups; The Hobbit, on the other hand, will be funniest to its youngest readers, and only years later, at a tenth or a twentieth reading, will they begin to realise what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true. Prediction is dangerous: but The Hobbit may well prove a classic.

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