You would (seriously) like it here to day. The Cherwell is up almost to a level of Addison’s walk and running (so Salters14 told my brother yesterday) 10 miles an hour, the speed being very visible by the endless procession of big mats or flakes of froth that go shooting by. The meadow enclosed within Addison’s walk (you remember?) is flooded and under a greyish, fine, morning sky gives pleasant reflections of trees and upward lights in unexpected places. Several birds are singing. There is always a specially fresh and poignant quality about them at this time of the year—like voices in a big empty ball-room the day before the ball—perhaps because they are few, or perhaps only because ones ears have grown unused to them in the winter.
Which reminds me, I heard an explanation the other day of why the stars look so unnaturally bright if one wakes up at night from really deep sleep and looks out: viz. because one’s eyes are rested and completely on top of their job.
Talking of jobs, did you see that D. L. Keir of Univ. has been made Principal of Queen’s University Belfast. A little galling to me because he will now become such a great man in my home town that whenever I go there I shall find people regarding it as the very peak of my career to have known him.
I have just been writing a review of Charles Williams’ new poem Taliessin through Logres, 15 and wonder if you have read his novels. The two I recommend most strongly are The Place of the Lion and Descent into Hell16 They are ‘shockers’ in a sense, but of a peculiar sort. The first is of special interest to chaps like you (a B. Litt.!) and me (a don) because it is about a perfect bitch of a female researcher called Damaris who is writing a doctorate thesis on the relation between ‘ideas’ in Plato and Angels in Abelard, without the slightest idea that it ever really meant anything, and all the time treating Plato and Aristotle and Dionysius and Abelard like ‘the top form of a school in which she was an inspector.’ Then, suddenly, owing to a piece of supernatural machinery which needn’t be described, she wakes up to find that the things she is studying are really there-one such primal energy looking in at her study window in the form of a gigantic pterodactyl. The novels are also interesting as the only modern ones I know which contain convincing ‘good’ characters.
I have a theory why the ‘good’ characters in literature are so often dull. To make an interesting character you have to see him from the inside, all agree. Now to imagine from within a person morally inferior to yourself you don’t need to do anything, you only need to stop doing something-to take the brake off and give all your usually suppressed vanity, or greed, or cruelty, or envy a delightful holiday. But how to make one better than yourself? Well, you can make him a little better by making him actually do what you only try to do, or do often what you only do seldom. That is, you can give him the sort of virtue in full which you have in some degree yourself. But for anything beyond that you simply haven’t got the material. Not only do you not actually behave as a hero would, you don’t even know what he feels like. Hence in most literature ideally good characters have to be made ‘from outside’ and accordingly look like puppets.17
From which silly readers draw the conclusion that good people are dull in real life—as if there were anything particularly delectable in the society of bullies, cheats, egoists and drug-addicts, or as if the same qualities which made a man an egoist did not normally make him a bore. Moral—beware of putting ‘good’ characters into a book for that’s where you give yourself away, as Richardson (to my mind) is given away by Pamela.18 I said ‘to my mind’ not only because of my habitual modesty and temperance (you will remember that of old) but because Dr. Johnson thought differently.19
I go to Cambridge to lecture once a week this term, so if you have any commissions in Bletchley now is your time. Did I tell you I have discovered the Renaissance never occurred—that is what I’m lecturing on.20 Do you think it is reasonable to call the lecture ‘The Renaissance’ under the circumstances? ‘Absence of the Renaissance’ sounds so odd, and ‘What was happening while the Renaissance was not taking place’ is inaccurate because, of course, if the Renaissance never occurred, then all times were times at which it did not occur, and therefore everything that ever happened happened ‘while the Renaissance was not taking place’. Alas, as Wordsworth said, ‘I fear/That I am trifling.’21
So, I hope, are you by now. Don’t bother writing for ages yet: I look to hear good news of you from Owen Barfield from time to time. I forget whether I told you last time that all of us here were very concerned to hear of your illness and Mrs. Moore particularly. But you’d have guessed that.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ALEC VIDLER (BOD):
Magdalen College
Oxford
Feb 1st 1939
Dear Mr Vidler
I enclose MS.22 It has in the end worked out to less than 4000 words but I dare say you will be glad of the extra room. If not Williams or Mr. Eliot might give you a poem of the right length. In the unlikely event of your being stuck, I cd. let you have about 1500 words on Christianity and War in continuation of the discussion begun in the last number. I thought it all good—except perhaps Mr. Roberts on poetry.23
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
[The Kilns]
Feb 8th [1939]
My dear Barfield–
I am recovering (at least they tell me I am recovering) from an unusually bad attack of flu’. Two weekends of Feb. fall in term: the 5th-8th and the 12–15th. If you choose the former you will be able to hear Tillyard and me finishing our controversy viva voce, 24 but as I have to give him a bed perhaps the 12th wd. be better. No doubt I shall be defeated in the controversy.25
I don’t know if Plato did write the Phaedo: the canon of those ancient writers, under the surface, is still quite chaotic. It is also a very corrupt text. Bring it along by all means, but don’t pitch your hopes too high. We are both getting so rusty that we shall make very little of it—and my distrust of all lexicons and translations is increasing. Also of Plato—and of the human mind. I suppose for the sake of the others we must do something about arranging a walk. Those maps are so unreliable by now that it is rather a farce—but still ‘Try lad, try! No harm in trying.’26 Of course hardly any districts in England are unspoiled enough to make walking worth while: and with two new members—I have very little doubt it will be a ghastly failure. I haven’t seen C.W.’s play: it is not likely to be at all good.27 As for Orpheus—again it’s no harm trying. If you can’t write it console yourself by reflecting that if you did you wd. have been v. unlikely to get a publisher.28 I am more and more convinced that there is no future for poetry. Nearly everyone has been ill here: I try to prevent them all croaking and grumbling but it is hard being the only optimist. Let me know which week end: whichever you choose something will doubtless prevent it. I hear the income-tax is going up again. The weather is bad and looks like getting worse. I suppose war is certain now. I don’t believe language is a perpetual Orphic song. The Cheedle reader is dead, I suppose you saw.