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

One wants emphatically to know more about those Australians and Canadians. We are told that they were braver than the English. If, as I surmise, they were not subjected to the martinettery, then they cast doubt on the whole thesis. If they were, then still, since it did not produce the same effect on them and on the English, why then, (by the ‘method of difference’) discipline can’t be the whole secret.

3. How much weight does he give to the discovery made at the end of the book that martinettery can be applied by anyone who has learned the trick i.e. it depends on no spiritual quality in the applier?¹⁹ Wd. he admit that this is the same as saying it is mechanical. When I got to the end, where this discovery is made, I at once connected it with the early passage ‘Spirit wept…’ (that bit is splendid)²⁰ and saw discipline related to courage precisely as the mechanical battle of heavy guns is related (by H-S) to ‘the noble end of war.’

      In fact, all my three points come to one—an uncertainty how far the author has faced his own growing discovery of the bad element in discipline and how far he has seen the resulting problem. For the position he leaves us in is this. Discipline is the only way of making it at all probable that your men will win battles: and therefore without discipline the cause of freedom and virtue, so far as it lies with you, will be lost. On the other hand, discipline is unfree, can be applied mechanically like a trick, there is no warrant that it will fall justly etc etc: so that it looks as if discipline itself may be just as fatal to the cause as defeat. This is where one would like the next book to take up the problem. (It is the old damnable fix—efficiency at the cost of the values for whose sake only you wish to be effective, or justice, liberty, and equality preserved only to be knocked on the head by your efficient neighbour. All this bears acutely on the problem of the college junto—of wh. we must discuss).

There were places in the book where one felt the old hatred.

.²¹ Still, he seems to share them himself. On the purely literary side, I think it good: vivid without the journalese that usually accompanies these vivid war books. Some of the battles are not v. easy to visualise, but that is almost unavoidable: they are certainly easier than Blunden’s.²² One really glorious bit is the description of the gusto he feels even for the filthy air and Stygian landscape of the front when expecting death: the preciousness of matter as such. I don’t think that’s been done before.

I am a good deal worried by my inability to understand some of your article on Coleridge.²³ It is all exciting, but I can’t really find much to correspond with the diagrams, except the first. Things I do get are a. The explanation of C’s apparent incoherence.²⁴ b. The privileged position of the vb. to be²⁵ (By the bye, Sadism and Masochism are both over-emphases of the Difference element, but the first as verb and the second as Noun. Will that do?)²⁶ c. The insect as externalised consciousness.²⁷ All the rest you must explain on the walk.

      Both poems improve on re-reading, but the first one still remains the better, for the reasons given before. The selection of imagery in it is almost perfect and the effect all one like a taste.

       HAVE YOU BOOKED THOSE SEATS FOR THE RHEINGOLD?

      Have the venue where you like: but with such a large party—and in Easter week—some room-booking shd. be done at once

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      Last Saturday was the anniversary of the Creation of the World!

TO DAPHNE HARWOOD (BOD): ²⁸

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford.

      March 28th 1933

      Dear Mrs. Harwood,

      I hope it was not only literary vanity that made me enjoy so much your very kind and very discriminating letter. Thank you very much indeed.

I was much interested in the account of your journey. I was never myself up against anything quite so bad as I take Ogden to be, but I can quite imagine him on the St. Theresa theme.²⁹

I am glad you never read my Summa,³⁰ for all that is dead as mutton to me now. and the points chiefly at issue between the Anthroposophists and me then were precisely the points on which anthroposophy is certainly right—i.e. the claim that it is possible for man, here and now, in the phenomenal world, to have commerce with the world beyond—which is what I was denying. The present difference between us is quite other. The only thing that I now wd. object eagerly to [in] anthroposophy is that I don’t think it can say ‘I believe in one God the Father Almighty.’ My feeling is that even if there are a thousand orders of beneficent being above us, still, the universe is a cheat unless at the back of them all there is the one God of Christianity. But I did not mean to raise controversial points: there is certainly quite a lot for us to agree on as against nearly the whole contemporary world! I would quite agree, for instance, with your discovery that it is Will wh. lets the cat out of the bag—and also with your refusal to rest in Croce.³¹ His is the kind of idealism that for all practical purposes is indistinguishable from materialism. What a ghastly pun that his name should mean ‘Blessed Cross’!

      I don’t understand the part about the eternal feminine (and masculine) in your letter, and look forward to hearing more about it when next we meet. Cecil was looking grand when he came down to us—he is the most-un-ageing of my friends.

We are all disappointed that your father has abandoned the idea of buying Tewsfield.³² With very many thanks,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

       TO GUY POCOCK (W):

      The Kilns

      Headington Quarry,

      Oxford

      March 31st 1933

      Dear Pocock

      This is unfortunate! Since I last wrote family arrangements have been maturing which will take me out of Oxford from the 6th onwards—so that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week are the only days (until the 23rd and after). I don’t want to be a nuisance: on the other hand I should very much like to see you. So just do as you would like. If you want to get me at short notice my Telephone number is 6963 Oxford—preferably after dinner. So sorry.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

       TO J. M. DENT PUBLISHERS (W):

      Department B

      Flint Hall

      Hambledon,

      Bucks

      April 12th 1933

      Dear Sir

      I return corrected proof of the Pilgrim’s Regress.