Lion and Wizard
Light on C. S. Lewis. Edited by Jocelyn Gibb (Bles, 16s.) Anyone today who proposes to take education seriously will inevitably find himself thinking of the problem as one of resisting the bent of civilisation in our time—of trying to move against the stream.
All that you can say about my taste is that
it is old-fashioned; yours will soon be the same. THE apparent similarity of these two passages conceals a profound difference. The first is from Dr. Leavis (1943); the second from C. S. Lewis (1961). But Lewis moved against the stream in a special sense of his own. He joked about him self as the last representative of 'Old Western Order'; but, in fact, his fine intelligence was sometimes used to defend the eccentric or the marginal. There were,. indeed, three Lewises. He was best known in his time as the Lion: his roar in argument was loud, and he had a carnivorous appetite for opposition. As the Wizard he con- jured up strange, sometimes compelling, some- time prosy fantasies at various age-levels. But it is his Wardrobe that will last, stuffed with curious as well as with essential learning, dis- played with brilliant showmanship; and, as in his own fairy-story, the wardrobe led to places of wonder.
These are the three Lewises: but do 'these three agree in one'? I think they increasingly came to do so, through the operation of sheer grace. But this new book about him does not show it. , Indeed, I think much of it likely to be disastrous for his reputation, for it tends to confirm all the worst things that the Scrutineers used to say, not merely about Lewis, but about Oxford Greats as a discipline for humane studies, about the value-systems of dons, about the quality of Oxford conversation at High Table. (Lewis's 'big voice boomed out' an Anglo-Saxon poem `with all the pleasure of tasting noble wine,' says Mr. Nevill Coghill; and speaks of a College Rector's 'friendly freshets of conversation and new gambits of gossip.') Mr. Owen Barfield is frank about Lewis's limitations—his bluster concealing shyness, his histrionic defences—in early days; but he does not sufficiently reassure us of Lewis's rachievement of wholeness towards the end, his abandonment of the buskin. Dr. Austin Farrer, who is incapable of writing ill or without wit, finely discusses Lewis as Christian apologist. Yet Perhaps he shrinks from the unstated conclusion
that, since all apologetics shares in the obsoles- cence of its opponents' weapons, this portion of Lewis's work cannot last. Miss Stella Gibbons defends Lewis's imaginative books with convic- tion and verve. Yet she astonishingly wishes, on the strength of the 'character drawing' in Till We Have Faces, that Lewis had written a straight novel of our time. Character drawing?
The Goodies and Baddies of Lewis's fiction, those Morality Tales plus SF told in the style of C. P. Snow, have about the subtlety of a Walt Disney cartoon. That is why it is only the children's tales, the Narnia sequence, that suc- ceed in this genre. Did Lewis's imagination fixate at that stage? Miss. Kathleen Raine has a nice, short piece 'from a poet': nice, because the Lewis she met was the mellowed Lewis. the three-in-one. It is the last item in the book that really saves it: a painstaking, daunting bibliography by Lewis's secretary, Mr. W. Hooper. He tells us that Lewis put all his own books into the waste- paper basket. But Lewis's dislike of the Personal Heresy should have put him in there rather than his works—this book on him certainly would have gone in. Actually Lewis's own growing humility did tend to put himself into the waste- paper basket: the humility that produced the serene though grimly achieved integrity of A Grief Observed and Letters to Malcolm. It is these works, along with the classic Allegory of Love and some of the `sermons,' that will live —not books about him.
MARTIN JARRETT-KERR, CR
Previous page
