He was becoming known as an expert in medieval literature, and his ‘Prolegomena’ lectures, setting out the background required for a study of the medieval period, were soon regarded as indispensable. In his spare time from teaching he was still at work on his study of the allegorical love-poetry of the Middle Ages. When it was published in 1936 as The Allegory of Love it was greatly admired, not least for Lewis’s beautifully apt translations of medieval Latin and French poems into mock-medieval English verse of his own composition. Lewis did this to preserve the flavour of the originals, and also because he enjoyed writing pastiche. But fine as was the achievement of The Allegory of Love, he did not regard himself exclusively as a specialist in that period of literature. Indeed, as early as 1931 he had begun to take arms over a critical issue affecting the whole of English literature, an issue that was profoundly involved with his conversion to Christianity.
He believed that he saw a characteristic in literary criticism which was becoming more marked, and which disturbed him. This was the tendency for critics to discuss the personality of the writer as it could be deduced from his work, rather than the character of the writing. At best, Lewis believed, this produced a kind of pseudo-biography, at worst sheer psychological muck-raking. For example he quoted E. M. W. Tillyard saying that Paradise Lost ‘is really about the true state of Milton’s mind when he wrote it’. Lewis thought this was nonsense, and he wrote an essay attacking what he called ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’, declaring: ‘A poet does what no one else can do: what, perhaps, no other poet can do; but he does not express his personality.’ The essay was published in an academic journal; Tillyard replied, and a public controversy began between them.
Lewis’s attack was partially justified. In its extreme form this ‘biographical’ tendency in criticism is objectionable. Yet there are also grounds for supposing that Lewis’s attitude to it grew from something deep-seated in his own personality. In saying this one is of course falling into the very Personal Heresy that he attacked. Nevertheless it needs to be said.
He had always been shy of the emotions. He was aware of this himself, and he said it was because in his childhood he had been embarrassed by his father’s ups and downs of mood. In reaction he tried to cultivate a detachment from passing shades of sorrow and happiness, and to maintain a calmly cheerful exterior. Taking this one stage further, he also abstained from speculations about his own psychological make-up and that of his friends. There was of course no reason why he should speculate about his own personality. On the other hand, given his strange and perhaps inexplicable attachment to Mrs Moore, there were perhaps reasons why he should not.
This attitude was held even more deeply by him after his conversion. He managed to incorporate it into his Christianity, declaring that it was a Christian’s duty to get on with doing the will of God and not to waste time tinkering with his own psychology. ‘To know how bad we are’, he said, ‘is an excellent recipe for becoming much worse.’ His own motto for the conducting of his life was
Man, please thy Maker and be merry,
And set not by this world a cherry.
Was this deliberate lack of interest in his own personality the cause of an alteration in Lewis’s manner after his conversion? At all events Owen Barfield gradually became aware that something was happening to Lewis during this period. ‘Looking back over the last thirty years,’ Barfield wrote shortly after Lewis’s death, ‘it appears to me that I have throughout all that time been thinking, pondering, wondering, puzzling over the individual essence of my old friend. The puzzlement has had to do above all with the great change that took place in him between the years 1930 and 1940 – a change which roughly coincided with his conversion but which did not appear, and does not appear in retrospect, to be inevitably or even naturally connected with it.’
In particular Barfield noticed that, once this change had occurred, Lewis had ‘deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals’. He also observed that something a little strange was happening to Lewis’s manner as a writer.
One example in particular stuck in Barfield’s memory. After Tillyard’s rejoinder to the ‘Personal Heresy’ essay had been published, Lewis wrote a reply to that rejoinder which he called ‘An Open Letter to Dr Tillyard’. Barfield was staying at the Kilns at the time and, when Lewis handed it to him, he read it with admiration, but also (he said) ‘with a certain underlying – what is the word? – restlessness, malaise, bewilderment – that gradually increased until, when I came to the passage at the end:
As I glance through the letter again I notice that I have not been able, in the heat of argument, to express as clearly or continuously as I could have wished my sense that I am engaged with “an older and a better soldier”. But I have little fear that you will misunderstand me. We have both learnt our dialectic in the academic arena where knocks that would frighten the London literary coteries are given and taken in good part; and even where you may think me something too pert you will not suspect me of malice. If you honour me with a reply it will be in kind; and then, God defend the right!
I am, my dear Sir, with the greatest respect,
Your obedient servant,
C. S. Lewis.
‘I slapped down the book’ (Barfield continued) ‘and shouted: ‘I don’t believe it! It’s pastichel”’
It may of course have been deliberate pastiche, something that Lewis always enjoyed writing. Yet on that occasion he had no ready answer to Barfield’s accusation – or at least none that Barfield could recall thirty years later – and all through the ‘Personal Heresy’ controversy there was something in his tone that seemed just subtly artificial. He attacked the tendency of critics to exalt poets because he said it disparaged what he called ‘common things and common men’. He declared that the modern verse of the nineteen-twenties only succeeded in communicating a boredom and nausea that had little place in ‘the life of the corrected and full-grown man’. And, laughing at the notion that poets are in any sense braver than ordinary men, he asked: ‘What meditation on human fate demands so much “courage” as the act of stepping into a cold bath?’
This last remark seems more appropriate to G. K. Chesterton than to Lewis. It would not have been voiced by Lewis as a young man; he had taken the writing of poetry very seriously. But after his conversion this came more and more to be the kind of thing he said and the kind of attitude he took. Or rather, it was the kind of attitude he thought he took, or had decided to take. As Barfield expressed it, ‘It left me with the impression, not of “I say this”, but of “This is the sort of thing a man might say”.’1
It was naturally a little disturbing, not least because sometimes the old Lewis would appear again. ‘From about 1935 onwards I had the impression of living with, not one, but two Lewises,’ said Barfield. ‘There was both a friend and the memory of a friend; sometimes they were close together and nearly coalesced; sometimes they seemed very far apart.’
*
If Barfield thought that Lewis’s contribution to The Personal Heresy had something of a pose or posture about it, others observed that in the controversy Lewis took up a position that was specifically Christian. In his initial essay he declared that one of the reasons why he disliked paying too much attention to a poet’s personality was that this implied that the personality mattered, which, he said, was the sort of view held by ‘a half-hearted materialist’. He said that the modern critic failed to realise that if the materialistic view of the universe was true, then ‘personality’ was as meaningless as everything else.