hope to collect these and publish them: I shall call it a ‘Realistic’ theory of literature, explaining of course that I mean the word in the sense of Plato not of Zola. I wish I knew how many of us there are. Sometimes I suspect that we are more numerous than each of [us] supposes, and that if we can only get together we may blow the whole composite fog (French Symbolism cum Croce cum Eliot with, oddly enough Karl Marx and Neo-Scholasticism somewhere in the background) away by 1950.
I am not ready yet to say anything about your book on Plato’s religion.16 The immediate reaction is an irrelevant one—a groan at discovering how much less Plato I remember than I thought I did. The main point at issue doubtless is this: are we to continue the Bosanquet17 and Archer Hind18 tradition of subtilising the Ancients, or embrace your view that the great thing is to leave uncontaminated their ‘invaluable naïvety’. On the whole I am with you: at least I’m with you as against Archer Hind. But I’m dreadfully muddled, just as I am about the ‘Absolute’ kind of God and your kind. I remain like Boethius in the song ‘stupens de hac lite’.19 The view I am not holding for the moment always seems unanswerable. Have you read Nygren’s Bros and Agape? It is a closely related problem and leaves me equally puzzled. With many thanks,
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
[The Kilns]
April 5th 1935
I hope to arrive at Rudyard (wh. on nearer acquaintance with guidebooks turns out to be Rudyard Lake) at 3.13 on Monday.20
Where reservoys ripple And sun-shadows stipple The beard of the corn. We’ll meet and we’ll kipple We’ll camp and then kipple At Rudyard we’ll kipple From evening to morn.
And then we’ll set off, yes!, Discussing your Orpheus21 His meaning and myth, Till fettered by Morpheus, The leaden maced Morpheus, Inaccurate Morpheus At Chapel-en-le Frith.
Good about Field. Find out in Manchester how to pronounce Chapel-en-le Frith and Edale. I have got all necessary maps. I shall be in fine form for yr poem as I am just examining the Newdigate!22
Can it really come off?
Yrs
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
April 23d 1935
My dear Arthur
It is a weary time since I heard from you and I ought to have answered you before: but though I am in your debt I doubt if my silences are longer than yours. The immediate object of this letter is to ask if I can come and stay a week with you this summer, please. As at present advised any date between July 1st and Oct. 5th will suit me. Now if you could within the next few weeks fix on any date between these two (preferably quand tu seras seul!)23 it would be a great advantage: for though all that period is at present free I do not know when engagements may begin to creep in. Of course it may not be convenient to have me at all, but I am assuming you would have no scruple about telling me if that were so. I am only anxious that if you are able and willing to have me we shd. not let the thing slip through our fingers as we did last year. If you can’t arrange so far ahead, of course you can’t (what it is to have a brain!) and there we are: but no doubt you see the advantage of so doing if it is possible.
I had seen the reviews of the Powys book24 and also heard (by an accident) what you hint about its contents: therefore I shall not read it. I do not always win even when the enemy attack me in my own lines,25 but the one thing I can do is to make sure that at least I never go out of my way to seek him. What an extraordinary profile Powys has—I suppose you saw the pictures in several papers. I take it he is almost a lunatic? The most interesting story I have read recently is Land Under England by one O’Neill:26 you should try it.
I am just back from my Easter walking tour with Barfield and co., this year in Derbyshire.27 Have you been there? It is appreciably more like my ideal country than any I have yet been [to]. It is limestone mountains: which means, from the practical point of view, that it has the jagg’d sky lines and deep values of ordinary mountainous country, but with this important difference, that owing to the paleness of the rock and the extreme clarity of the rivers, it is light instead of sombre—sublime yet smiling—like the delectable mountains.28 It gives you something the same sensation as Blake’s songs.29
This place is being ruined by building and what was Kiln Lane is turning into a street of council houses.30 Where will it end? If we live to be old there will hardly be any real country left in the South of England.
Give my love to your mother and any other of my friends whom you may meet: and let me have an answer as soon as possible to my question.
Yours
Jack
TO LEO BAKER (BOD):31
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
April 28th 1935
My dear Baker
I was very distressed on meeting Barfield this year for a walk (a ghost of its old self for he and I were the only participants) to hear of your illness. It stimulated an impulse that has been hovering in my mind for some time to write to you and to try and pick up some of the old links. That they were ever dropped was, I imagine, chiefly my fault-at least even self-love on my part cannot find any substantial respect in which it could have been yours. Will you forgive me? I think I have learned a little since those days and can promise not to serve you so again.
You must not bother yourself with letter writing while you are unwell, nor need you: for I trust that any news of your state will trickle to me in the end by one channel or another. The last I heard from Barfield was a little more encouraging. Beyond wishing you well, I cannot enlarge on the subject: almost anything said from a well man to a sick man seems an impertinence.
My father is dead and my brother has retired from the army and now lives with us. I have deep regrets about all my relations with my father (but thank God they were best at the end). I am going bald. I am a Christian. Professionally I am chiefly a medievalist. I think that is all my news up to date.
I suppose you have heard from, or at least of, the others fairly regularly. I don’t know if you met the new addition to our party before you left—namely Hanbury Sparrow, a Lt. Colonel and all that. Barfield picked him up somewhere on the continent: he has written