About our differences: I feel that whenever two members of different communions succeed in sharing the spiritual life so far as they can now share it, and are thus forced to regard each other as Christians, they are really helping on re-union by producing the conditions without which official reunion would be quite barren. I feel sure that this is the layman’s chief contribution to the task, and some of us here are being enabled to perform it. You, who are a priest and a theologian, are a different story: and on the purely natural & temperamental level there is, and always has been, a sort of tension between us two which prevents our doing much mutual good. We shall both be nicer, please God, in a better place. Meanwhile you have my daily prayer and good wishes.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOHN BETJEMAN (VIC):16
Magdalen College, Oxford. May 28th 1938
Dear Betjeman
Mea culpa! I don’t like to think how long these two books of yours have been on my shelves and my conscience. Not that I’ve been reading them—I’m afraid the mere reluctance to let books go—and a still greater reluctance to put up a parcel—has been the main factor. Your pardon.
Why do you never drop in and see me?
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOHN BETJEMAN (VIC):
Magdalen College, Oxford. June 3rd 1938
Dear Betjeman
Sorry, I couldn’t manage Whit Monday, but very many thanks. Pay my respects to that very great man Dawkins.17
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W):
[Magdalen College] June 7th 1938.
[Dear Williams]
Though I have not yet finished it I feel I must write and congratulate you on producing a really great book in your He Came Down from Heaven.18 It is thickly inlaid with patins of bright gold—‘He does not exist primarily for us’ (p. 3)—‘All that could be said would be that they had not yet happened’ (p. 6).19 (This is really overwhelming. I honestly think it quite likely that when we are in our graves this may become one of the sentences that straddle across ages like the great dicta of Plato, Augustine, or Pascal)—on Bible-worship of the odious new ‘literary’ sort (7, 8.)20—and every word on p. 25.21 And it’s so clear, which at one time I should never have expected a book of yours to be.
Damn you, you go on getting steadily better ever since you first crossed my path: how do you do it? I begin to suspect that we are living in the ‘age of Williams’ and our friendship with you will be our only passport to fame. I’ve a good mind to punch your head when we next meet.
[C. S. Lewis]
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
June 10th 1938
My dear Barfield
What frightfully bad luck. (This would have been really an ideal week end as, in addition to having papers to correct so that I couldn’t talk, I have run a needle into my foot so that I can’t walk: you could have concentrated on Orpheus with almost no interruption). I hope the measles will soon go over, and it’ll go hard but we’ll fix up another time in the long vac. I’m afraid the lyric is not very appropriate, now!
Think not the doom of man reversed for thee. Apropos of Johnson, isn’t this good, from the Rambler, from a man who decided not to marry a blue-stocking on finding her an atheist and a determinist. ‘It was not difficult to discover the danger of committing myself forever to one who might at any time mistake the dictates of passion, or the calls of appetite, for the decree of fate; or consider cuckoldom as necessary to the general system, as a link in the everlasting chain of successive causes.’22
And, in another way, isn’t this splendid ‘Whenever, after the shortest relaxation of vigilance, reason and caution return to their charge, they find hope again in possession.’23
What is the betting I forget to put that lyric in after all?—They keep sheep in Magdalen grove now and I hear the fleecy care bleating all day long; I am shocked to find that none of my pupils, though they are all acquainted with pastoral poetry, regards them as anything but a nuisance: and one of my colleagues has been heard to ask why sheep have their wool cut off. (Fact)
It frightens me almost. And so it did the other night when I heard two undergrads. giving a list of pleasures which were (a) Nazi, (b) Leading to homosexuality. They were, feeling the wind in your hair, walking with bare feet in the grass, and bathing in the rain. Think it over: it gets worse the longer you look at it. More cheering is the true report from Cambridge of a conversation
1 What is this Ablaut that K. keeps on talking about in his lectures?
2 Oh don’t you know, he was in love with Eloise.
I must fix my Irish visit before I can make a new date with you, but we’ll manage one before or after your holidays. When are you going away? You note that hope is once again in possession.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
Sept 6th 1938
My dear B.
(1.) As at present advised I can come on 23rd, but no date is so safe as the 30th. I am sure Cecil said he could not come before the end of Sept. but a I may be wrong and Β the fixture between you and me was prior and he is merely appenditical and agglutinative. All the same I’d much prefer the 30th if you can possibly do it.
(2.)
Some believe the slumber Of trees is in December When timber’s naked under star And the squirrel keeps his chamber.
But I believe their fibre Awakes to life and labour When turbulence comes roaring up The land in loud October,
And charges, and enlarges The beach, and long besieges, And scourges trees till, like the bones Of thought, their shape emerges.
Form is soul. In warmer Seductive days, disarming Its firmer will, the wood grows soft And spreads its dreams to murmur;
Into earnest winter, Like souls awaked, it enters. The hunter frost and the cold light Have quelled the green enchanter. 24
(3.) Isn’t Jupiter splendid these nights? C.S.L.
Lewis