1930
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On the seven deadly sins.
10 FEBRUARY 1930
When I said that your besetting sin was Indolence and mine Pride I was thinking of the old classification of the seven deadly sins: They are Gula ( Gluttony), Luxuria ( Unchastity), Accidia ( Indolence), Ira ( Anger), Superbia ( Pride), Invidia ( Envy), Avaritia ( Avarice). Accidia, which is sometimes called Tristitia ( despondence) is the kind of indolence which comes from indifference to the good—the mood in which though it tries to play on us we have no string to respond. Pride, on the other hand, is the mother of all sins, and the original sin of Lucifer—so you are rather better off than I am. You at your worst are an instrument unstrung: I am an instrument strung but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician.
TO A. K. HAMILTON JENKIN, a friend Lewis made in Oxford in 1919, known for his books on Cornwall and loved by Lewis for his ability to enjoy everything: On Lewis’s sense of his coming conversion to Christianity.
21 MARCH 1930
How extremely disappointing!…Is there no chance of your ever being able to do as I suggested and coming to spend a couple of nights with me in College in term?…
There will be many changes to take stock of. I can hardly imagine you as a married man of several years standing….
On my side there are changes perhaps bigger: you will be surprised to hear that my outlook is now definitely religious. It is not precisely Christianity, though it may turn out that way in the end. I can’t express the change better than by saying that whereas once I would have said ‘Shall I adopt Christianity’, I now wait to see whether it will adopt me: i.e., I now know there is another Party in the affair—that I’m playing poker, not Patience, as I once supposed.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On melancholy and solitude; on masturbation; on temptation; and on reading Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection and the Gospel of Saint John.
1 JUNE 1930
On the day you left I went our usual walk, through Old Headington, past that little isolated house which you admired, across the brook, and then over two fields to our soaking machine. It was just such another glorious summer day with a kind of mist that made the grass and buttercups look watery. I felt that sort of melancholy (you probably know it) which comes from going through the same scenes through which you walked with a friend a few hours ago, when he has gone. Now that I come to think of it, you must have had this experience much more often than I: so often in your old letters do I find you describing how you went this or that old walk…. Mixed with this melancholy, however, (you will not be offended) there was the freshness of solitude which itself, on such occasions, feels like a friend revisited, and what between the two I fell into an extremely receptive state of mind—a sort of impersonal tenderness, which is the reason why I am mentioning this walk, as one of my good ones which was valuable in itself and will, I hope, become even more so in memory.
Just to give you the other side of the picture (I shall not often tell you these things)—I have ‘ fallen’ twice since you left after a long period of quite untroubled peace in that respect. Serves me right, for I was beginning to pat myself on the back and even (idiotically) beginning to fancy that I had really escaped, if not for good, at any rate for an indefinite time. The interesting thing was that on both occasions the temptation arose when I was almost asleep, quite suddenly, and carried me by storm before I really had my waking mind fully about me. I don’t mean to disclaim responsibility on this account: but I feel grateful that the enemy has been driven to resort to stratagems (not by me, but by God) whereas he used to walk boldly up to me for a frontal attack in the face of all my guns. I hope I don’t delude myself in thinking that this is an improvement….
Lying on the study sofa and hearing these old favourites I had sensations which you can imagine. And at once (here is the advantage of growing older) I knew that the enemy would take advantage of the vague longings and tendernesses to try and make me believe later on that he had the fulfilment which I really wanted: so I baulked him by letting the longings go even deeper and turning my mind to the One, the real object of all desire, which (you know my view) is what we are really wanting in all wants….
In reading I have of course little to record, and never shall have much in term time. I read in two evenings a little book…called The Practice of the Presence of God which I picked up and put in the study when I was there last because it seemed to me a promising title. It is by a Seventeenth century monk. It is full of truth but somehow I didn’t like it: it seemed to me a little unctuous. That sort of stuff, when it is not splendid beyond words, is terribly repulsive, or can be, can’t it? No doubt it depends very largely on one’s mood. I had just finished the fourth Gospel in Greek (as I think you know) before you came, and after that most other things are a come down.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On how imagination differs from mere fancy and how holiness differs from mere morality; on Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House; on asceticism and marriage; on good humiliation; and on love for one’s own father. Lawson and Keir are Oxford dons Lewis’s age.
7 JUNE 1930
I have managed to get a few evenings free this week and have read two new books. The first was Kingsley’s Water Babies. It was one of the books belonging to my mother which my father had locked up at her death and I only recovered at the recent clearance. It was strange—after the first few pages the most incredibly faint memories began to come about me: she must have read it, or started to read it, to me when I was very small indeed. I had even a curious sense of bringing my mother to life—as if she were reading it through me. The feeling was impressive, but not entirely pleasant. (I don’t mean that it was at all unpleasant in the commonplace ghostie sense.) The book itself seems to me not very good. There is some fancy, and I don’t object to the preaching: but after MacDonald it is tasteless. Put the two side by side and see how imagination differs from mere fancy, and holiness from mere morality. Have you ever read it? As I say it is not very good: but well worth reading.
The other was Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House. As you know, it is a long poem in a very strict and even monotonous metre, describing a very simple story of love and marriage, interspersed with half philosophic, half religious odes on the author’s theory of marriage as a mystical image of and approach to divine love. The story parts are deliberately prosaic and hum-drum, and would be very easy to parody…though it is surprising how one feels less and less inclined to sneer as you go on. But the bits in between are really often sublime….
He is extremely down on people who take the ascetic view. These will be shut without the fold as ‘too good’ for God. The whole poem has raised a lot of difficulties in my mind. Even if it were true that marriage is what he says, what help does this give as regards the sexual problem for the innumerable people who can’t marry? Surely for them asceticism remains the only path? And if, as he suggests, marriage and romantic love is the real ascent to Spirit, how are we to account for a world in which it is inaccessible to so many, and are we to regard the old saints as simply deluded in thinking it specially denied to them? As a matter of fact he does seem to suggest in one passage that romantic love is one ascent, and imagination the other—At all events the book has left me with an extraordinary renewal of my appetite for poetry.
I had an interesting and humiliating experience to-day (Saturday). I had to go out to tea on Boars’ Hill and a man I had been lunching with, Lawson, offered to drive me. I used to know him at [University College] and I lunch with him and Keir once a week for old sake’s sake, though Lawson is a most terrible bore. As soon as he got me in the car he decided that we had a good deal of spare time and said he would drive me first to see his old father, recently widowed, whom he has just set up in a little house at the neighbouring village of Holton. On the way I bitterly regretted having been let in for this. Lawson is a tiny little man with puffed out cheeks, a pursed in mouth, and a bristly moustache: very bright staring eyes: and rolls the eyes, jerking his head this way and that, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, while he talks, talks, talks, all about himself: or else talks big of university politics, retailing opinions which I know not to be his own and which in any case I despise. I thought ‘Now he is going to show me over this house and tell me how he arranged this and why he did that—reams of it.’
When we arrived we found a lovely wild garden with a little red cottage in it. We met an old man speaking with a broad Yorkshire accent and plainly in the technical sense ‘not a gentleman’. Point No. I in favour of Lawson—he is not ashamed of his origins: he rose enormously in my eyes. Then Lawson shut up completely and let the old man talk, which he did, describing all he was doing in the garden. He was just like Lawson, only in an old man it was different: and the courage of him setting to work to build up a new life here in his old age was impressive. When we had been round the whole place and into the house, and when I saw so many things out of Lawson’s rooms in Merton [College]brought out here, and saw the affection between them, and realised how Lawson had busied himself about the whole—and then remembered how abominably I had treated my father—and worst of all how I had dared to despise Lawson, I was, as I said, humiliated. Yet I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. It does one good to see the fine side of people we’ve always seen the worst of. It reminded me very much of the clerk in Bleak House (or is it Great Expectations) who takes the hero out to see his father and has a cannon on the roof. Do you remember?
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On MacDonald’s Curdie books; on the dangers of the imagination; and on Mary Webb’s Precious Bane.
15 JUNE 1930
I envy you your shelf of MacDonalds and long to look over them with your guidance. I have read both The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. In fact I read the former (the other is a sequel to it) for about the third time when I was ill this spring. Read it at once if you have it, it is the better of the two. There is the fine part about the princess discovering her godmother in the attic spinning…. Another fine thing in The Pr. and the Goblin is where Curdie, in a dream, keeps on dreaming that he has waked up and then finding that he is still in bed. This means the same as the passage where Adam says to Lilith ‘Unless you unclose your hand you will never die and therefore never wake. You may think you have died and even that you have risen again: but both will be a dream.’
This has a terrible meaning, specially for imaginative people. We read of spiritual efforts, and our imagination makes us believe that, because we enjoy the idea of doing them, we have done them. I am appalled to see how much of the change which I thought I had undergone lately was only imaginary. The real work seems still to be done. It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself—to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed, and then to find yourself still in bed….
This afternoon I have lounged in the garden and began Mary Webb’s Precious Bane. I can’t remember whether you recommended it to me or not. If it goes on as well as it has begun I shall put it very high indeed. In fact I hardly know a book which has given me such a delicious feeling of country—homely yet full of eeriness, as in real life.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On Samuel Johnson and Mary Webb.
22 JUNE 1930
I am delighted to hear that you have taken to Johnson. Yes, isn’t it a magnificent style—the very essence of manliness and condensation—I find Johnson very bracing when I am in my slack, self pitying mood. The amazing thing is his power of stating platitudes—or what in anyone else would be platitudes—so that we really believe them at last and realise their importance…. I personally get more pleasure from the Rambler than from anything else of his and at one time I used to read a Rambler every evening as a nightcap. They are so quieting in their brave, sensible dignity.
…I have finished Precious Bane and think I have enjoyed it more than any novel since the Brontës.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On the necessity of charity beginning “at home,” through one’s own friends and neighbors.
1 JULY 1930
As to the business about being ‘rooted’ or ‘at home everywhere’, I wonder are they really the opposite, or are they the same thing. I mean, don’t you enjoy the Alps more precisely because you began by first learning to love in an intimate and homely way our own hills and woods? While the mere globe-trotter, starting not from a home feeling but from guide books and aesthetic chatter, feels equally at home everywhere only in the sense that he is really at home nowhere? It is just like the difference between vague general philanthropy (which is all balls) and learning first to love your own friends and neighbours which makes you more, not less, able to love the next stranger who comes along. If a man loveth not his brother whom he hath seen—et cetera. In other words doesn’t one get to the universal (either in people or in inanimate nature) thro’ the individual—not by going off into a mere generalised mash.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On the true way to chastity; on Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations; on Dante’s Paradiso; and on diving as preparation for conversion. Prudence Sarn is the heroine of Precious Bane and has an experience of God alone in the attic.
8 JULY 1930
You have I think misunderstood what I said about the return from austerity. I never meant for a moment that I was beginning to doubt whether absolute chastity was the true goal—of that I am certain. What I meant was that I began to think that I was mistaken in aiming at this goal by the means of a stern repression and even a contemptuous distrust of all that emotional and imaginative experience which seems to border on the voluptuous: whether it was well to see in certain romances and certain music nothing but one more wile of the enemy: whether perhaps the right way was not to keep always alive in one’s soul a certain tenderness and luxuriousness always reaching out to that of which (on my view) sex must be the copy. In other words, whether, while I was right in seeing that a copy must be different from an original, I ought not to have remembered that it must also be like it—else how would it be a copy? In the second place, what I feared was not lest this mood should be temporary but lest it should turn out to be another wile. What I also ought to have said in my last letter but didn’t is that the whole thing has made me feel that I have never given half enough importance to love in the sense of the affections….
Almost ever since the Vac. began I have been reading a little every evening in Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations…. I forget whether we have talked of it or not. I think he suffers by making out everything much too easy and really shirking the problem of evil in all its forms: at least, as far as I have got, for it is unfair to say this of a book not yet finished. But apart from this he has extraordinary merits. What do you think of the following;—‘The world…is the beautiful frontispiece to Eternity’—‘You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars…till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God as misers do in gold’
‘I must lead you out of this into another world to learn your wants. For till you find them you will never be happy’—‘They (i.e., Souls) were made to love and are dark and vain and comfortless till they do it. Till they love they are idle or misemployed. Till they love they are desolate.’ But I could go on quoting from this book forever….
Barfield and I finished the Paradiso when I was with him. I think it reaches heights of poetry which you get nowhere else: an ether almost too fine to breathe. It is a pity that I can give you no notion what it is like. Can you imagine Shelley at his most ecstatic combined with Milton at his most solemn and rigid? It sounds impossible I know, but that is what Dante has done….
I also had some lovely bathes with Barfield in a reach of the little river…. Picture us lounging naked under the pollards on a flat field: mowers in the next field: and tiny young dragon flies—too small to be frightful yet—darting among the lilies. Here I learned to dive which is a great change in my life and has important (religious) connections. I’ll explain that later. They are still very ungraceful dives but I do get in head first.
…So glad you approve of Precious Bane. Isn’t Wizard Beguildy a lovely character: also the scene of Prue Sarn alone in the attic.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On what we get to keep in the life of the world to come.
29 JULY 1930
It is an interesting and rather grim enquiry—how much of our present selves we could hope to take with us if there were another life. I take it that whatever is merely intellectual, mere theory, must go, since we probably hold it only by memory habit, which may depend on the matter of the brain. Only what has gone far deeper, what has been incorporated into the unconscious depths, can hope to survive. This often comes over me when I think of religion: and it is a shock to realise that the mere thinking it may be nothing, and that only the tiny bit which we really practice is likely to be ours in any sense of which death can not make hay.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On MacDonald’s novels; on worldliness; on hindrances as the raw material of spiritual life; and on the causes of feelings of lack of faith.
24 DECEMBER 1930
I have of course read very little apart from work. One more MacDonald Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood, which went far to restore my faith in him: badly shaken by an unsuccessful attempt to read the Seaboard Parish. Yesterday I picked up…Alec Forbes…. Do you know it? One reason I enjoyed the Quiet Neighbourhood so much was that I read it immediately after Trollope’s Belton Estate: quite a good book, but all the time one was making excuses for the author on the moral side: saying that this bit of uncharitableness and that bit of unconscious cynicism, and, throughout, the bottomless worldliness (not knowing itself for such) belonged to the period. Then you turned to MacDonald, also a Victorian, and after a few pages were ashamed to have spent even an hour in a world so inferior as that of Trollope’s.
Have you had glorious fogs—frost-fogs? We have had some of the finest I have ever seen. In fact we have had all sorts of beauty—outside. Inside myself the situation has been quite the reverse. I seem to go steadily downhill and backwards. I am certainly further from self control and charity and light than I was last spring. Now that W. is with us I don’t get enough solitude: or so I say to myself in excuse, knowing all the time that what God demands is our solution of the problem set, not of some other problem which we think he ought to have set: and that what we call hindrances are really the raw material of spiritual life. As if the fire should call the coal a hindrance! (One can imagine a little young fire, which had been getting on nicely with the sticks and paper, regarding it as a mere cruelty when the big lumps were put on: never dreaming what a huge steady glow, how far surpassing its present crackling infancy, the Tender of the Fire designed when he stoked it.)
I think the trouble with me is lack of faith. I have no rational ground for going back on the arguments that convinced me of God’s existence: but the irrational deadweight of my old sceptical habits, and the spirit of this age, and the cares of the day, steal away all my lively feeling of the truth, and often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existent address. Mind you I don’t think so—the whole of my reasonable mind is convinced: but I often feel so. However, there is nothing to do but to peg away. One falls so often that it hardly seems worth while picking oneself up and going through the farce of starting over again as if you could ever hope to walk. Still, this seeming absurdity is the only sensible thing I do, so I must continue it. And all the time, on the other side, the imaginative side, (the fairy angel) I get such glimpses and vanishing memories as often take my breath away: as if they said ‘Look what you’re losing’—as if they were there just to deprive one of all excuse.
How well I talk about it: how little else I do. I wonder would it be better not to speak to one another of these things at all? Is the talking a substitute for the doing?