The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Their Friends

Lewis and Barfield often took holidays together, and from 1927 onwards they went on a walking tour with a couple of friends almost every spring.

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It was an idyllic way to spend three or four days. Footpaths were plentiful, motor traffic rarely disturbed the quiet of the countryside, roads were often unmetalled and comfortable to the feet, inns were numerous and cheap, so that reservations for the night were not often necessary, and pots of tea and even full meals could be bought in most villages for the smallest sums. Much of rural England was in fact still as it had been in the nineteenth century.

In April 1927 Lewis and Barfield, together with two friends from undergraduate days, Cecil Harwood and W. O. Field (known as ‘Woff’ from his initials), walked along the Berkshire and Wiltshire downs, through Marlborough and Devizes, and then across the edge of Salisbury Plain to Warminster. A year later their walking tour was across the Cotswolds, and in 1929 they made a four day journey from Salisbury to Lyme Regis. But though the route was different every year their habits were almost unvarying. They did not attempt to cover vast distances each day, in the manner of fanatical hikers – Lewis said he disliked the word ‘hiking’ because it was unnecessarily self-conscious for something so simple as going for a walk – but they certainly set a good pace, and would reckon to do perhaps twenty miles a day, maybe a little more on easy country or rather less if the going was rough. Lewis refused to allow the party to take packed meals, insisting on plenty of stops at pubs. He and his friends always made a mid-morning halt for beer or draught cider, and there was more beer at lunch time as an accompaniment to bread and cheese. Lunch was always concluded by a pot of tea, and more tea was drunk at an inn or cottage in mid-afternoon. Indeed Lewis cared for his tea just as much as for his beer, if not more so. Meals were simple but usually excellent. On Salisbury Plain in 1929 they were ‘given tea by a postmistress, with boiled eggs and bread and jam ad lib., for which she wanted to take only sixpence’, and for supper that night at Warminster they had ‘ham and eggs, cider, bread, cheese, marmalade and tea’.

Sometimes things went wrong. Of the Cotswolds trip in 1928 Lewis reported to his brother: ‘This time we committed the folly of selecting a billeting area for the night instead of one good town: i.e. we said “Well here are four villages within a mile of one another and the map marks an inn in each so we shall be sure to get somewhere.” Your imagination can suggest what this results in by about eight o’clock of an evening, after twenty miles of walking, when one is just turning away from the first unsuccessful attempt and a thin cold rain is beginning to fall. Yet these hardships had their compensations: thin at the time, but very rich in memory. One never knows the snugness and beauty of an English village twilight so well as in the homelessness of such a moment: when the lights are beginning to show up in the cottage windows and one sees the natives clumping past to the pub – clouds meanwhile piling up “to weather” Our particular village was in a deep narrow valley with woods all round it and a rushing stream that grew louder as the night came on. Then comes the time when you have to strike a light (with difficulties) in order to read the maps: and when the match fizzles out, you realise for the first time how dark it really is: and as you go away, the village fixes itself in your mind – for enjoyment ten, twenty, or thirty years hence – as a place of impossible peace and dreaminess.’

Occasionally – very occasionally indeed – Lewis and his friends would abandon a walk because of bad weather. But nothing short of a continuous downpour would stop them. Lewis himself was particularly determined 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.’

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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.

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.

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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 has been a good bargain: how many men are there, who, before they are forty, can struggle free, and begin the business of living?

In 1930 the Lewis-Moore ménage moved to the Kilns, a house at the foot of Shotover Hill not far outside Oxford city and on the edge of the village of Headington Quarry. The house was named after the brick kilns that stood nearby; the garden was the size of a small park, with eight acres of land rising steeply up a wooded hillside, and broken by a lake which could be used for bathing and even punting. Chiefly thanks to funds from the sale of the Belfast house, the Lewis brothers and Mrs Moore were able to raise the sum asked for the property, and it became their home late in 1930. After settling in with Jack and ‘Minto’, Warnie took stock of his new life, of the house in its idyllic setting, of the undeniable domestic tensions, and also of the pleasant daily routine that he envisaged. ‘I reviewed the pros and cons’, he wrote in his diary, ‘and came to the conclusion that on balance, I prefer the Kilns at its worst to army life at its best: the only doubtful part being “Have I seen the Kilns at its worst?”’

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By the beginning of September 1931 eleven years had passed since Jack Lewis had stopped being a dogmatic atheist.

As long ago as 1920 his study of philosophy had led him ‘to postulate some sort of God as the least objectionable theory’, though he added, ‘of course we know nothing’. The notion of an ultimate truth made sense to him because, as he remarked in 1924 when commenting on Bertrand Russell’s free-thinking idealism, ‘our ideas are after all a natural product’, and there must be some objective standard, some ultimate fact to explain them. On the other hand ‘God’ still seemed a crude and nursery-like word, and for several years Lewis used other terms to describe his notion of fundamental truth. During this time he was, like most of those who studied philosophy at Oxford in the early nineteen-twenties, still accepting the work of Hegel and his disciples, and as a result he chose Hegelian expressions such as ‘the Absolute Mind’ or just ‘the Absolute’.

But when he spent the year 1924–5 teaching Philosophy at University College he discovered that this ‘watered Hegelianism’ was inadequate for tutorial purposes. The notion of an unspecified Absolute simply could not be made clear to his pupils. So he resorted to referring to fundamental truth as ‘the Spirit’, distinguishing this (though not really explaining how) from ‘the God of popular religion’, and emphasising that there was no possibility of being in a personal relationship with this Spirit. Meanwhile he adopted a benevolent but condescending attitude to Christianity, which he said was a myth conveying as much of the truth as simple minds could grasp.

This was all very well, but among those ‘simple minds’ were men whose thinking he profoundly admired in other respects: Malory, Spenser, Milton, Donne and Herbert, Johnson, and the author whose romance Phantastes he had discovered in adolescence, George MacDonald. It was annoying to love the writings of these men without being able to accept the central premise of their thought, Christianity. Moreover, many of his friends were Christians. Tolkien was a Catholic, and Greeves and Coghill were Anglicans, while Barfield, though an Anthroposophist, accepted the principal ideas of Christianity. So, in the company of those whom he most liked, Lewis was the outsider.

His ideas changed again when, as a result of their ‘Great War’, Barfield managed to persuade him to accept the experience of ‘Joy’ as relevant to his thinking, and not to dismiss it as merely subjective emotional sensation. ‘Joy was not a deception,’ he now decided. ‘Its visitations were rather the moments of clearest consciousness we had.’

He was going through this stage during 1926 and 1927, and the admission of something as irrational as Joy into his ruthlessly logical thinking threw him into confusion. ‘All my ideas are in a crumbling state at present,’ he wrote in his diary in May 1926. He realised that he had let his rational side dominate his emotions too long, remarking in the diary, ‘One needn’t be asking questions and giving judgments all the time.’ But while this realisation was refreshing, he recorded (in January 1927) that he was frightened of what he called ‘the danger of falling back into the most childish superstitions’, by which he presumably meant belief in God and Christianity. He still had immense resistance to the idea of returning to anything so nursery-like.

Three weeks after this he stopped keeping a diary and never resumed, declaring that it was a foolish waste of time. It was also perhaps because he was unwilling to make public (he often read his diary to Mrs Moore and showed it to Warnie, so it was really a public document) the sensations of the supernatural which he was now experiencing; for he had begun to feel that it was not he himself who was taking the initiative but something outside him. As he expressed it to Owen Barfield, the ‘Spirit’ was ‘showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive’. One day while going up Headington Hill on a bus he ‘became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out’. There was a choice to open the door or keep it shut. Next moment he found that he had chosen to open it. From this, which happened in 1927 or 1928, it was only a matter of time before he ‘admitted that God was God’, a step that he finally took in the summer of 1929. It was then that he ‘gave in and knelt and prayed’. But even so he had done no more than accept Theism, a simple belief in God. He was not able to perceive the relevance of Christ’s death and resurrection, and he told a friend, Jenkin: ‘My outlook is now definitely religious. It is not precisely Christianity, though it may turn out that way in the end.’

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Apart from the last stage, when he had admitted some kind of supernatural experience, Lewis had reached this position entirely through logical argument. Even his acceptance of ‘Joy’ as a factor had only been conceded after elaborate reasoning by Barfield. But now he began to realise that reasoning would not take him any further. The acceptance of God did not lead him automatically to the acceptance of Christianity. He was becoming certain that he wanted to accept it: he examined other religions, but found none that was acceptable; meanwhile his present state of simple Theism was inadequate. On the other hand he did not know how he could argue himself into specifically Christian beliefs. Even if he were to accept the historicity of the Christian story – and he could see no particular barrier to it – he could not understand how the death and resurrection of Christ were relevant to humanity.

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By the time that Lewis had come to believe in God (but not yet in Christ), Owen Barfield had done something for him that would later bear fruit. He had shown Lewis that Myth has a central place in the whole of language and literature.

Barfield’s arguments were printed in Poetic Diction, a short book by him that appeared in 1928 – though by that time Lewis knew its ideas well. Barfield examined the history of words, and came to the conclusion that mythology, far from being (as the philologist Max Müller called it) ‘a disease of language’, is closely associated with the very origin of all speech and literature. In the dawn of language, said Barfield, speakers did not make a distinction between the ‘literal’ and the ‘metaphorical’, but used words in what might be called a ‘mythological’ manner. For example, nowadays when we translate the Latin spiritus we have to render it either as ‘spirit’ or as ‘breath’ or as ‘wind’ depending on the context. But early users of language would not have made any such distinction between these meanings. To them a word like spiritus meant something like ‘spirit-breath-wind’. When the wind blew, it was not merely ‘like’ someone breathing: it was the breath of a god. And when an early speaker talked about his soul as spiritus he did not merely mean that it was ‘like’ a breath: it was to him just that, the breath of life. Mythological stories were simply the same thing in narrative form. In a world where every word carried some implication of the animate, and where nothing could be purely ‘abstract’ or ‘literal’, it was natural to tell tales about the gods who ruled the elements and walked the earth.

This, in greatly simplified form, is what Barfield argued in Poetic Diction. He was not the only person to come to this conclusion: for example in Germany, Ernst Cassirer had said much the same thing independently. But it was said with particular force by Barfield, and his book impressed not just Lewis but also Tolkien. Not long after the book’s publication, Lewis reported to Barfield: ‘You might like to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said à propos of something quite different that your conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified his whole outlook and that he was always just going to say something in a lecture when your conception stopped him in time. “It is one of those things,” he said “that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again.”’ Perhaps it was as a result of reading Barfield’s book that Tolkien made an inversion of Muller’s remark. ‘Languages’, he declared, ‘are a disease of mythology.’

So it was that by 1931 Lewis had come to understand that mythology has an important position in the history of thinking. It was a realisation that helped him across his last philosophical hurdle.

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On Saturday 19 September 1931 Lewis invited two friends to dine with him in Magdalen. One was Tolkien. The other was Hugo Dyson.

Henry Victor Dyson Dyson, always known as ‘Hugo’, lectured in English Literature at Reading University. He was a couple of years older than Lewis. He had been severely wounded in the First World War, had read English at Oxford, and was a practising member of the Church of England. He was also exuberant and witty. Lewis had been introduced to him in July 1930 by Nevill Coghill, and ‘liked him so much that I determined to get to know him better’. On further acquaintance he found Dyson to be ‘a man who really loves truth: a philosopher and a religious man; who makes his critical and literary activities depend on the former – none of your dammed dilettanti’.

On this Saturday night in 1931, after they had dined, Lewis took his guests on a walk through the Magdalen grounds. They strolled along Addison’s Walk (the path which runs beside several streams of the River Cherwell) and here they began to discuss metaphor and myth.

Lewis had never underestimated the power of myth. Far from it, for one of his earliest loves had been the Norse myth of the dying god Balder. Now, Barfield had shown him the crucial role that mythology had played in the history of language and literature. But he still did not believe in the myths that delighted him. Beautiful and moving though such stories might be, they were (he said) ultimately untrue. As he expressed it to Tolkien, myths are ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver’.

No, said Tolkien. They are not lies.

Just then (Lewis afterwards recalled) there was ‘a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We held our breath.’

When Tolkien resumed, he took his argument from the very thing that they were watching.