Greeves was also planning stories (which he seems never to have written) and was discussing the charms of actual women who were the prototypes of his heroines; but Lewis was still more interested in
The land where I shall never be,
The love that I shall never see,
and went on to disclaim authorship of the couplet (which was later to appear, still anonymously, on the title page of Spirits in Bondage): ‘a beauty, isn’t it,’ he wrote to Greeves on 28 February, ‘but NOT by me – I wish it were. Andrew Lang quotes it somewhere, but I have never been able to discover the author. Whoever it be, he deserves immortality for these two lines alone.’113 The lines, slightly misquoted, were in fact from a poem by Lang himself, inspired by a prose passage from Baudelaire, which he quotes in his History of English Literature (1912).
Religion was also discussed occasionally, though only Arthur, who was a Christian, raised the subject. It bothered Jack’s conscience in later years that he had allowed himself to be confirmed in St Mark’s on 6 December 1914 merely to please his father and to avoid argument. But at the moment Jack was still a determined atheist, and when challenged took up his stand in the anthropological field, citing ‘dying gods’ and ‘fertility rites’ from Lang’s Myth, Ritual and Religion (1899) and Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915). ‘All religions, that is all mythologies, to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention – Christ as much as Loki’, he wrote to Arthur on 12 October 1916.114 When Arthur complained, Jack distinguished between Jesus and Christ, as he wrote on 18 October:
When I say ‘Christ’, of course I mean the historical being into whom he was afterwards converted by popular imagination … That the man Yeshua or Jesus did actually exist, is as certain as that the Buddha did actually exist … But all the tomfoolery about virgin birth, magic healings, apparitions and so forth is on exactly the same footing as any other mythology … As to the immortality of the soul, though it is a fascinating theme for day-dreaming, I neither believe nor disbelieve: I simply don’t know anything at all, there is no evidence either way.115
This agnosticism was enshrined in a poem written in 1917 which ends:
I think, if it be truth, as some have taught
That these frail seeds of being are not caught
And blown upon the cosmic winds in vain
After our death, but bound in one again
Somewhere, we know not how, they live and thrive
Forever, and the proud gods will not give
The comfortable doom of quiet sleep,
Then doubt not but that from the starry deep
And utmost spaces lit by suns unknown
We should return again whence we were flown,
Leaving the bauble of a sainted crown,
To walk and talk upon the hills of Down.116
* In later years they talked of their ‘Pigiebotie’ philosophy. ‘A pigiebotie,’ Jack wrote to Warnie on 2 August 1928, ‘must be conscious of idling and approve of it. He must not merely like to sit still, but he must also like to think of himself sitting still, or even like to think of himself liking to sit still … He is the only true “Quietist”. He sitteth down like a giant and rejoiceth not to run his course. He eateth all things, neglecteth all things, moveth not himself, is not waked up.’ (FL, p. 776)
* Robert Capron (‘Oldy’ or ‘Oldie’) (1851–1911) was born in Brampton, Devon, and received a BA and a BSc from the University of London in 1873 and 1875 respectively. In 1878 he was ordained as curate of Wordsley, Staffordshire, and in 1881 he founded Wynyard School at what is now 99 Langley Road, Watford. In 1882 he married Ellen Barnes (1849–1909) and they had three daughters, Nora, Dorothy, and Eva, as well as one son, John Wynyard, all of whom helped with the teaching while Jack and Warnie Lewis were there. Capron was very successful in teaching the classics in the beginning. However, his increasing mental instability and eventual insanity resulted in his becoming very cruel. Reduced to a handful of students, the school closed in April 1910. Capron died in the Camberwell House Asylum, Peckham, Kent, on 18 November 1911. See his biography in CG.
* Sir William Quartus Ewart (1844–1919), the head of a remarkable family, was the director of the family business, Wm Ewart & Son Ltd., Flax Spinners and Linen Manufacturers. In 1876 he married Mary Heard (1849–1929), who was the niece of C.S. Lewis’s maternal grandmother. Lady Ewart was, then, Flora Lewis’s first cousin. The Ewarts had five children: (1) Robert Heard Ewart (1879–1939) who succeeded to the baronetcy; (2) Charles Gordon Ewart (1885–1936) who married Lily Greeves, sister of Arthur Greeves; (3) Hope Ewart (1882–1934) who in 1911 married George Harding and moved to Dublin; (4) Kelso ‘Kelsie’ Ewart (1886–1966), who lived near Glenmachan; and (5) Gundreda ‘Gunny’ Ewart (1888–1978) who married John Forrest. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix of FL.
* Dr Richard Whytock Leslie (1862–1931) was the Lewis family doctor.
† Arthur Clement Allen (1868–1957), the headmaster of Cherbourg School, read Classics at New College, Oxford. He founded Cherbourg in 1907, and in 1925 he moved it to Woodnorton, Evesham. It closed when he retired in 1931.
* This was Charicles, or Illustrations of the Private Life of the Ancient Greeks (1840) by the German archaeologist Wilhelm Becker (1769–1846), written in fictional form, with a scholarly ‘excursus’ following each chapter and footnotes citing his original Greek authorities. The passage in question was probably the scene in Corinth with accompanying excursus on the Heterae.
† Gundreda Ewart, one of the daughters of Sir William and Lady Ewart. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix to FL.
* The Rev. Canon Sydney Rhodes James (1855–1934) was headmaster of Malvern College from 1897 until 1914. See his autobiography, Seventy Years: Random Reminiscences and Reflections (1926).