Yet this is to run ahead of our narrative. We must now consider the work which established Lewis’s reputation as a serious literary scholar—and which remains widely read to this day—the 1936 classic The Allegory of Love.
The Allegory of Love (1936)
Writing to an old friend in 1935, Lewis summarised his present situation in three short statements: “I am going bald. I am a Christian. Professionally I am chiefly a medievalist.”401 There is little of interest to be said about the first point, except to note that photographs of Lewis from this period confirm his own diagnosis. We have already devoted a chapter to the second point. But what of the third? Lewis’s Allegory of Love is his first major work to deal with his professional field of activity. It fully deserves discussion, not least because it develops literary themes that find religious transposition in so many of Lewis’s subsequent writings.
7.3 Duke Humfrey’s Library, the oldest part of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, in 1902. This reading room, reserved for manuscripts and early printed works, has changed little since Lewis’s time.
Lewis had been planning The Allegory of Love for some time, but had been held back in completing it by his duties as an examiner. He had begun to draft the first chapter of his study of “mediaeval love poetry and the mediaeval idea of love” by July 1928.402 He spent hours in Duke Humfrey’s Library, the oldest part of the Bodleian Library, wishing he were allowed to smoke, which would have helped his faltering concentration. Yet Lewis, like all readers in the Bodleian Library, had been required to promise “not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library.” The project stalled.
By February 1933, however, things were clearly moving apace once more. Lewis wrote to Guy Pocock, asking for a change to his contract with Dent for The Pilgrim’s Regress. He wanted the “option clause” to be revised, so that he could offer his next book to the Clarendon Press, Oxford.403 This, he explained, would be an academic work, dealing with the subject of allegory, which he thought would be of little interest to Pocock or his readership. He suggested that the option clause should refer to his “next work of a popular character,” rather than his “next book.”404
Pocock appears to have agreed to this suggestion. Lewis submitted the typescript of The Allegory of Love to Kenneth Sisam, an English scholar who served as assistant secretary to Oxford University Press. The work was duly accepted by the press, who later sent a proof copy to their Amen House office in London so that one of their editors could develop promotional material for it. The editor entrusted with it—unknown to Lewis—was Charles Williams. Indeed, on the very same day in March 1936 that Lewis decided to write to Williams to tell him how much he liked his novel The Place of the Lion, Williams had resolved to write to Lewis to tell him how much he admired The Allegory of Love. “I regard your book as practically the only one that I have ever come across, since Dante, that shows the slightest understanding of what this very peculiar identity of love and religion means.”405
The Allegory of Love was dedicated to Owen Barfield, who Lewis declares taught him “not to patronise the past” and “to see the present as itself a ‘period.’” Even on the first page of the work, Lewis sets out a theme that recurs throughout his writings:
Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind.406
Where some argue that humanity must embrace a synthesis of contemporary science and social attitudes as “the truth”—to be contrasted with the “superstitions” of the past—Lewis declares that this simply leads to humanity becoming a by-product of its age, shaped by its predominant cultural moods and intellectual conventions. We must, Lewis argues, break free from the shallow complacency of “chronological snobbery,” and realise that we can learn from the past precisely because it liberates us from the tyranny of the contemporaneous.
The focus of The Allegory of Love is the idea of “courtly love,” which Lewis defines as “love of a highly specialised sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love.”407 The emergence of “courtly love” reflects a change in attitude towards women that began in the late eleventh century, and was shaped by the ideals of chivalry emerging around this time. Courtly love is the expression of the noble, knightly worship of a refining ideal, which is embodied in the person of the woman who is loved.
This act of loving was seen as ennobling and refining, allowing expression of some of the deepest values and virtues of human nature. It is possible that the prevalence of arranged marriages in the twelfth century necessitated some means of expressing romantic love. Such a love expressed itself in terms that were simultaneously feudal and religious. Just as a vassal was expected to honour and serve his lord, so a lover was expected to serve his lady with absolute obedience, obeying her commands. Courtly love affirmed the ennobling potential of human love, the elevation of the beloved above the lover, and depicted love as an ever-increasing desire which could never be satisfied.
Yet what Lewis depicted as a historical actuality has come to be seen by others as a literary fiction. During the 1970s, many scholars began to interpret “courtly love” as an essentially nineteenth-century invention, reflecting the aspirations of that later age, which were then read back into the earlier Middle Ages. Lewis, who luxuriated in the writings of Victorian medieval revivalists, such as William Morris (1834–1896), might therefore be seen as reading the works of the Middle Ages through Victorian spectacles.408 However, as more recent studies have made clear, the situation is not quite as straightforward as these critics have suggested.409 In any case, Lewis’s concern is actually with the poetic conventions developed to express “courtly love,” rather than the historical notion itself. Lewis’s book is really about texts, not about history.
The crowning glory of The Allegory of Love is its chapter on the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser (ca. 1522–1599). Lewis’s book radically altered critical perceptions of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, while also reinvigorating discussion and debate about the role and meaning of both “courtly love” and the genre of allegory in the medieval tradition. Lewis shows how the use of allegory is a matter of philosophical necessity, reflecting the nature and limits of human language, rather than representing some conceited desire for stylistic ornamentation or sentimental attachment to the literary conventions of earlier ages. Allegory, Lewis argues, is far better placed to represent such complex notions as “pride” and “sin” than abstract concepts. It provides a handle on such realities, without which discussion of some of the most fundamental themes of life becomes difficult.
From today’s perspective, Lewis’s achievement in The Allegory of Love actually rests more on his highly perceptive discussion of Spenser than his account of courtly love. His analysis of the 34,695 lines of Spenser’s vast poem The Faerie Queene—particularly the nature and status of its imagery—remains both winsome and plausible. As a recent definitive work on the reception of Spenser in the twentieth century remarked, “Lewis’s chapter makes more original observations about the Faerie Queene—sources, prosody, philosophy and design—than all of nineteenth-century criticism laid end to end.”410
Some Lewis biographies suggest that The Allegory of Love won the Hawthornden Prize, the oldest major British literary prize awarded annually to an English writer for “the best work of imaginative literature.” This is not correct; it did, however, win the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Prize in 1937.411 This prestigious prize, administered by the British Academy, was awarded for outstanding published work either “on subjects connected with Anglo-Saxon, Early English Language and Literature, English Philology, or the History of English Language,” or for original “investigations connected with the history of English Literature or the works of English writers, with preference for the earlier period.” This was a considerable accolade for Lewis, marking out The Allegory of Love as a work of distinction from a highly p
romising younger scholar. What stands out in this work is its remarkable ability to summarise, to explain, to synthesise, and to engage. As Lewis’s Oxford colleague Helen Gardner later observed, it is clearly “written by a man who loved literature and had an extraordinary power of stimulating his readers to curiosity and enthusiasm.”412
Perhaps it is this, when taken along with his obvious gifts as a lecturer—his ability to communicate, to enthuse, and to excite—which explains the reason for Lewis’s drawing such large audiences in Oxford lecture rooms in the 1930s and 1940s. Lewis draws his readers along with him as he offers informed and enthusiastic readings of texts (whether familiar or obscure), and attempts to “rehabilitate” authors, texts, and themes which have been ignored through ignorance or marginalised through prejudice.413 Lewis was, quite simply, a champion of literature and its place in human culture and learning.
Lewis on the Place and Purpose of Literature
Throughout his career, Lewis devoted much thought and ink to the place and purpose of literature, whether in relation to the enriching of human culture, the cultivation of religious sensibilities, or the forging of personal wisdom and character. Although some of Lewis’s ideas about literature developed further during the 1940s and 1950s, most of them were firmly in place by 1939.
Lewis’s understanding of how literature is to be approached and understood differs significantly from the dominant viewpoints of contemporary literary theory. For Lewis, the reading of literature—above all, the reading of older literature—is an important challenge to some premature judgements based on “chronological snobbery.” Owen Barfield had taught Lewis to be suspicious of those who declaimed the inevitable superiority of the present over the past.
Lewis makes this point with particular force in his essay “On the Reading of Old Books” (1944). Here Lewis argues that a familiarity with the literature of the past provides readers with a standpoint which gives them critical distance from their own era. Thus, it allows them to see “the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.”414 The reading of old books enables us to avoid becoming passive captives of the Spirit of the Age by keeping “the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.”415
Lewis here clearly has Christian theological debates in mind; he is writing in particular about the importance of past theological resources to enrich and stimulate the present. Yet his argument has a broader significance. “A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it.”416 Since we cannot read the literature of the future, we can at least read the literature of the past, and realise the powerful implicit challenge that this makes to the ultimate authority of the present. For sooner or later, the present will become the past, and the self-evident authority of its ideas will be eroded—unless that authority is grounded in the intrinsic excellence of those ideas, rather than their mere chronological location.
As Lewis pointed out, with the rise of the ideologies of the twentieth century in mind, someone who “has lived in many places” is not likely to be taken in by the “local errors of his native village.” The scholar, Lewis declares, has “lived in many times” and can thus challenge the automatic presumption of finality inherent in present judgements and trends:
We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.417
Lewis insists that to understand the literature of the classical or Renaissance periods, it is necessary to “suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits” that result from “reading modern literature”418—such as an unquestioning assumption of the innate superiority of our own situation. Lewis uses a familiar cultural stereotype to help make his point—the English tourist abroad, so heavily pilloried in works such as E. M. Forster’s Room with a View (1908). Lewis asks us to imagine an Englishman travelling abroad, fully persuaded of the superiority of English cultural values to those of the savages of Western Europe. Instead of seeking out the local culture, enjoying the local food, and allowing his own presuppositions to be challenged, he mixes only with other English tourists, insists on seeking out English food, and sees his “Englishness” as something to be preserved at all costs. He thus takes his “Englishness” that he brought with him, and “brings it home unchanged.”419
There is another way of visiting a foreign country, and a correspondingly different way of reading an older text. Here, the tourist eats the local food and drinks the local wine, seeing “the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourist, but to its inhabitants.” As a result, Lewis argues, the English tourist comes home “modified, thinking and feeling” in different ways. His travel has enlarged his vision of things.
The point Lewis is making here is that literature offers us a different way of seeing things. It opens our eyes, offering new perspectives for evaluation and reflection:
My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. . . . In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.420
Literature, for Lewis, enables us “to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.”421 It offers us an imaginative representation of reality which challenges our own.
To read literature is thus potentially to make ourselves open to change: to open ourselves up to new ideas, or force us to revisit those we once believed we were right to reject. As Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked, “In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”422 Lewis thus insists that texts challenge us as much as they inform us. Insisting that the text conform to our presuppositions, to our way of thinking, is to force it into a mould of our own making, and deny it any opportunity to transform, enrich, or change us. Reading works of literature is about “entering fully into the opinions, and therefore also the attitudes, feelings and total experience” of other people.423 It is about what Plato termed psychagogia—an “enlargement of the soul.”
For Lewis, it is more important to note what has been said than to become preoccupied with who said it. For Lewis, literary “criticism” consisted in understanding the intentions of the writer, receiving the work, and thus experiencing an inner enlargement. We see this best expressed in his Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942), which sets out superbly the background to Milton’s epic poem, and considers its meaning. Lewis argued forcefully that what mattered in poetry was not the poet but the poem. A totally opposing view was set out by the Cambridge scholar E. M. W. Tillyard (1889–1962). For Tillyard, Paradise Lost was “really about the true state of Milton’s mind when he wrote it.”
This led to the famous debate of the 1930s, usually dubbed “The Personal Heresy.” To simplify a complex debate, Lewis argued for an objective, or impersonal, point of view, that poetry is about something “out there”; whereas Tillyard defended a subjective, or personal, point of view, that poetry is about something that is inside the poet. Lewis would later term this view “the poison of subjectivism.” For Lewis, poetry works not by directing attention to the poet, but to what the poet sees: “The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points.” The poet is thus not a “spectacle” to be viewed, but a “set of spectacles” through which things are to be seen.424 The poet is someone who enables us to see things in a different way, who points out things we otherwise might not notice. Or again, the poet is not someone who is to be looked at, but someone who is to be looked through.
We could summarise all this by saying that Lewis understands reading literature as a process of imagining and entering an alternative world, which has the ability to illuminate the empirical worl
d in which we really live. Lewis regularly offers himself as a travel guide to others engaged on such a pilgrimage. For many, he is at his best when he introduces Spenser and Milton to those encountering them for the first time.
Yet Lewis was not merely the recorder of other writers’ imaginary worlds. He himself became a creator of such worlds—worlds that are clearly influenced by the ideas and images of those who went before him. We must never forget that one possible outcome of engaging with great literature is not merely a desire to write such works oneself, but to incorporate the wisdom, wit, and elegance of the past into forms that can engage the present. Lewis turned out to be rather good at that, as we shall see when we explore the creation of Narnia and consider how Lewis uses an imaginary world to illuminate our own.
But Narnia lay in the future. Events in the real world at this point began to take a disturbing turn. On 1 September 1939, German forces invaded Poland. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, initially tried to negotiate peace terms between Germany and Poland. After a parliamentary revolt against this move, Chamberlain presented Hitler with an ultimatum: Adolf Hitler must withdraw his forces from Poland. On 3 September, having failed to secure any response from Adolf Hitler, Britain declared war on Germany. The Second World War had begun.
CHAPTER 8
* * *
1939–1942
National Acclaim: The Wartime Apologist
On Sunday, 22 October 1939, the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, was packed with students and dons. The audience was large and attentive; the mood was subdued and sombre; the preacher’s topic was “None Other Gods: Culture in War Time”; the preacher was C. S. Lewis. By all accounts, it was a powerful defence of the academic life in the face of conflict, uncertainty, and confusion, which made a deep impression on its audience. The outbreak of war made clear the way things really were, Lewis argued, forcing us to abandon optimistic illusions about ourselves and the world. Realism had returned to its throne. “We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it.”425
C. S. Lewis – A Life Page 20