in the New Testament’.
‘What’, he asked, ‘are the key-words of modern criticism? Creative, with its opposite derivative; spontaneity, with its opposite convention; freedom, contrasted with rules. We certainly have a general picture of bad work flowing from conformity and discipleship, and of good work bursting out from certain centres of explosive force – apparently self-originating force – which we call men of genius.’ This, he said, was in conflict with the New Testament, where (he claimed) it is often implied that all ‘creation’ by men is at its best no more than imitation of God, and in no sense ‘original’ at all. From this he concluded that the duty of a Christian writer lies not in self-expression for its own sake, but in reflecting the image of God. ‘Applying this principle to literature,’ he said, ‘we should get as the basis of all critical theory the maxim that an author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom. Our criticism would therefore from the beginning group itself with some existing theories of poetry against others. It would have affinities with the primitive or Homeric theory in which the poet is the mere pensioner of the Muse. It would have affinities with the Platonic doctrine of a transcendent Form partly imitable on earth; and remoter affinities with the Aristotelian doctrine of μιμησις and the Augustan doctrine about the imitation of Nature and the Ancients. It would be opposed to the theory of genius as, perhaps, generally understood; and above all it would be opposed to the idea that literature is self-expression.’
The argument of Lewis’s ‘Christianity and Literature’ was paralleled by Tolkien’s lecture on Fairy-Stories, delivered the same year (1939) that Lewis’s essay was published. In this lecture Tolkien declared – as he had told Lewis on that September night eight years earlier – that in writing stories man is not a creator but a sub-creator who may hope to reflect something of the eternal light of God. In the lecture he quoted from the poem that he had written for Lewis, recording something of their talk that night under the trees in Addison’s Walk:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
With Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons – ’twas our right
(used or misused), That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we’re made.
Something of the same view was held by Hugo Dyson. In a British Academy lecture on Shakespeare’s tragedies – not delivered until 1950 but presumably expressing ideas that he had held for some years – Dyson said: ‘Man without art is eyeless; man with art and nothing else would see little but the reflections of his own fears and desires.’ And Owen Barfield in Poetic Diction had expressed a similar notion when he said that in studying great poetry, ‘our mortality catches for a moment the music of the turning spheres’.
These views could hardly have been more different from those held by one of the major and most influential literary critics of the time, F. R. Leavis. Indeed, Leavis and the contributors to his periodical Scrutiny were the group of critics whom Lewis was by implication attacking in The Personal Heresy and ‘Christianity and Literature’. From the beginning of his work at Cambridge, Leavis campaigned for the recognition of ‘culture’ as the basis of a humane society, but did not believe that this culture should be based on any one objective standard, least of all Christianity. He declared that there was among educated persons ‘sufficient measure of agreement, overt and implicit, about essential values to make it unnecessary to discuss ultimate sanctions, or to provide a philosophy, before starting to work’.
In answer to this, Lewis declared that Leavis and one of the other great critics of the period, I. A. Richards, were part of a ‘tradition of educated infidelity’ which could be traced to Matthew Arnold, were even indeed ‘one phase in that general rebellion against God which began in the eighteenth century’. He also said that Leavis’s position as a critic was fundamentally based on subjective judgement and nothing more, which he said was ‘like trying to lift yourself by your own coat collar’; and he declared: ‘Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.’ He said too that the ‘personal heresy’ in Leavis’s and Richards’s work could be traced to this subjectivism: ‘Since the real wholeness is not, for them, in the objective universe, it has to be located inside the poet’s head. Hence the quite disproportionate emphasis laid by them on the poet.’ And he summed up the differences between them when he said: ‘Leavis demands moral earnestness; I prefer morality.’
*
While Lewis was widening his reputation as a literary critic, Owen Barfield was tied to an office job in London. He had found that he could not make a living from literary work – he now had a wife and children to support – so he entered his father’s legal firm in London and became a solicitor, hoping to continue writing in his spare time. But this proved to be a mirage. First there was the challenge of learning a new discipline, and then simply the exhaustion of the job. Though he still wrote poetry, none of it got into print, and for some years the total of his published works was a children’s story, The Silver Trumpet, a short book entitled History in English Words, and Poetic Diction. Lewis often referred to this book and to Barfield’s notions about myth and language in his lectures and in his own published writings, so often indeed that it became a jest among his pupils that Barfield was actually an alter ego, a figment of Lewis’s imagination to whom Lewis chose to ascribe some of his own opinions.
To Barfield, the jest was perhaps rather hollow. He had not wanted to slide into this obscurity. Nor was there in his friendship with Lewis quite the same richness as there had once been. They still went on walking tours, until the increasing suburbanisation of the countryside and the outbreak of war brought that annual event finally to a halt. But they did not argue as before, at least not about fundamentals, for now that he had become a Christian Lewis ceased to discuss his beliefs with his old friend. This was rather to Barfield’s regret, for he had found few people of weighty intellect in the Anthroposophical movement, and he would have been glad of a rational exchange of views. But Lewis shied away from real argument; he had made up his mind.
Meanwhile Barfield was obliged to continue in his London office, even when war seemed imminent, dealing with the petty grind of routine legal work. As he expressed it in a moment of fury:
How I hate this bloody business,
Peddling property and strife
While the pulse of Europe falters –
How I hate this bloody life!
*
The Hobbit was published in 1937. It had come to the notice of a London publisher, and Tolkien was persuaded to finish it in time for it to be issued in the autumn of that year. Lewis was delighted, and he helped the book on its way by giving it two glowing reviews, both in The Times and in The Times Literary Supplement. In the first he wrote: ‘All who love that kind of children’s book which can be read and re-read by adults should take note that a new star has appeared in this constellation. To the trained eye some characters will seem almost mythopoeic.’ And he concluded by saying of Tolkien that he ‘has the air
