to carry on through all but impossible conditions, maintaining stoutly that every kind of weather has its attractions. On Exmoor in 1930 the companions woke up in the morning to find a thick fog. ‘Some of the others were inclined to swear at it,’ wrote Lewis, ‘but I (and I soon converted Barfield) rejoiced to meet the moor at its grimmest. In the afternoon the fog thickened but we continued in spite of it to ascend Dunkery Beacon as we had originally intended. There was of course not a particle of view to be seen.’
He was similarly determined to enjoy every kind of landscape, however dull it might seem to other people. His brother Warnie recorded of a journey they made near Plymouth in 1933: ‘We had a long, tiresome, and very hot walk of about ten miles in hot sunken lanes, from which one occasionally got a glimpse of a dull, commonplace countryside, peppered with bungalows. J. and I argued briskly about the country we had walked through, J. contending that not to like any sort of country argues a fault in oneself: which seems to me absurd. He also said that my description of what we had seen – “lacking in distinction” – was “almost blasphemous”. But I suspect that he was talking for victory.’
There was a certain amount of this ‘talking for victory’ on the walking holidays, for Lewis liked to argue with his companions as they walked. They were all of them well matched. Lewis, writing to ‘Woff’ Field, defined their characteristics as ‘Owen’s dark, labyrinthine pertinacious arguments, my bow-wow dogmatism, Cecil’s unmoved tranquillity, your needle-like or greyhound keenness’. But too much serious talk was discouraged. One year when Lewis’s pupil Griffiths (later Dom Bede Griffiths) joined them, he offended protocol by engaging Barfield in a lengthy and profoundly serious theological battle. Equilibrium was badly upset, nor was it restored until the party had him cracking jokes along with the rest of them. The kind of day they really liked was one such as in Dorset when they ‘got through the serious arguments in the ten miles before lunch and came down to mere fooling and school-boy jokes as the shadows lengthened.’
*
Lewis and Barfield were at this time engaged in a battle of ideas.
Barfield had for several years been a disciple of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, a form of religious philosophy which offers a very idiosyncratic account of the nature of the world and of the relationship between God and Man.1 Lewis was at first alarmed at his friend’s enthusiasm for Steiner’s teachings, with their occasional use of the word ‘occult’ and their inclusion of such doctrines, as a belief in reincarnation. But he discovered that at close quarters Anthroposophy radiated, at least in his opinion, what he called ‘a re-assuring Germanic dullness which would soon deter those who were looking for thrills’. However, he was still disturbed that Barfield should adopt any kind of supernaturalism, for he himself was trying to be utterly rational in his philosophical outlook and to exclude any notion of the ‘other’ from his view of the universe. He was prepared to admit the existence of the imaginative thrill or romantic longing which he had experienced since childhood, and which he called ‘Joy’; but he refused to admit that it had anything to do with objective truth. He declared to Barfield: ‘Imaginative vision cannot be invoked as a source of certainty – for any one judgment against another.’ In other words, it was splendid to have sensations of delight when you saw a sunset or read a poem, but this told you nothing objective about the world. The imaginative must be kept strictly apart from the rational.
Barfield disagreed utterly. Besides following Steiner’s teachings, he had for many years admired and studied Coleridge’s writings on the Imagination; and he began to argue this point with Lewis, both on the walking tours and in a correspondence that they soon named ‘The Great War’. In particular, Barfield tried to persuade Lewis that purely rational argument of the kind that he had used since he was tutored by Kirkpatrick often depended on artificial terms and had little to do with the actual business of life. Barfield also did his best to convince Lewis that imagination and aesthetic experience did lead, if not automatically to objective truth, then at least to a better understanding of the world.
Lewis did not accept all Barfield’s points. But as a result of the ‘Great War’ he ceased to separate his emotional experiences from his intellectual process, and came to regard ‘Joy’ and poetic vision, in their way, as truthful as rational argument and objective fact.
*
If Greeves and Barfield were one degree higher than Tolkien in Lewis’s hierarchy of friends, his brother Warnie was above even them.
After leaving school, Warnie had become an army cadet, and served in the Royal Army Service Corps for the entire First World War. After the war he remained in the army as a regular officer, serving in England and overseas, and using the Lewis family house in Belfast as a home base – for like Jack he had remained unmarried. In 1929 their father died, and the Belfast house was sold. As a result, Warnie needed another home, especially as he was approaching his middle thirties and planned to leave the army soon on retirement pay, which, together with small private means, would be sufficient to keep him. Jack and Mrs Moore invited him to make his home with them, and Warnie accepted readily, though privately there were feelings of caution on both sides. Warnie knew that ‘Minto’ could be very demanding, while she and Jack felt in their turn that it was a sacrifice of their privacy. But the two brothers were chiefly delighted at the prospect of each other’s company.
Warnie and Jack were fairly similar physically, both being heavily built with broad faces, though Warnie was more thickset and was tanned from his years abroad. They dressed similarly in baggy flannel trousers and tweed jackets, and they shared a liking for pipe tobacco and beer and country walks. Warnie’s formal education had stopped far short of Jack’s, but he kept up his reading and was widely knowledgeable in English literature and even more so in French history, particularly of the seventeenth century. In English literature he regarded himself as a mere amateur, but his sheer enthusiasm, uncomplicated by any preconceived notions of what he ought or ought not to like, made him a discerning critic. Jack much appreciated this quality in his brother. After receiving a letter from Warnie on service abroad, enthusing about The Faerie Queene, he wrote to him: ‘I wonder can you imagine how reassuring your bit about Spenser is to me who spend my time trying to get unwilling hobble-de-hoys to read poetry at all? One begins to wonder whether literature is not, after all, a failure. Then comes your account of the Faerie Queene on your office table, and one remembers that all the professed “students of literature” don’t matter a rap.’ In the next few years Jack Lewis was to develop a persona as the ‘plain man’ of literary criticism. Perhaps that role was influenced by the unaffectedly ‘plain’ qualities of his brother’s taste.
Not that Warnie Lewis was in any sense intellectually crude. But there was something ‘simple’ about him in the best and most positive sense of the word. ‘Dear Warnie,’ Jack remarked to Arthur Greeves, ‘he’s one of the simplest souls I know in a way: certainly one of the best at getting simple pleasures.’
It was largely this quality of getting the best out of ordinary life that made Warnie Lewis a first-rate diarist. He kept a record of daily events intermittently throughout his adult years. Here, for example, is his entry for 21 December 1932, shortly after he had come from foreign service and had at last retired from the army:
To-day, I got up early, and went to the hall door where I found The Times containing the announcement which I have been dreaming of for years – ‘Capt. W. H. Lewis retires on ret. pay (Dec. 21)’. And so, after eighteen years, two months, and twenty days, my sentence comes to an end, and I am able to say, like Wordsworth, that I have
shaken off
The heavy weight of many a weary day
Not mine, and such as were not made for me.
But so far from grousing, I am deeply, and I hope devoutly thankful.
It
