Holiness is lovely. Of course, it opposes and exposes sin. Holiness is opposed to sin, just as a doctor is opposed to disease—but with the aim of making the patient whole. What hope has God of making us holy? The answer is that, because of Christ’s death, His resurrection, and His return to His Father, all who repent toward God and put faith in Jesus Christ have the experience of the Holy Spirit’s entering their lives. Satan’s ultimate intention, to block Christ’s work of making sinners holy, is thus defeated. That same Holy Spirit was convicting Jack Lewis, and He used George MacDonald’s writing to show him that the Enemy had sold him erotic and mystical perversions of joy. It was a profound revelation that would continue to influence him for the rest of his life. As he later stated, C. S. Lewis never concealed the fact that he regarded George MacDonald as his master.
Towards the time of his death, George MacDonald suffered acutely. At that time he wrote the following verses. Though the original verses were left in an unpolished state, they show the heart that forty years later spoke to Jack’s heart. As Jack was to learn, George MacDonald saw that Christ was truly the “heart of all joy below, above.” These verses are amongst the most precious anyone could read:
Come through the gloom of clouded skies,
The slow dim rain and fog athwart,
Through East winds keen and wrong and lies,
Come and make strong my hopeless heart.
Come through the sickness and the pain,
The sore unrest that tosses still,
The aching dark that hides the gain –
Come and arouse my fainting will.
Through all the fears—that spirits bow –
Of what hath been or may befall,
Come down and talk with me, for thou
Canst tell me all about them all
Come, Lord of Life—here is thy seat,
Heart of all joy below, above –
One minute let me kiss thy feet
And name the names of those I love.1
Chapter Eight
OXFORD IN MANTLING SNOW
THE BUTTERFISH WRIGGLED AND THE mustard-coloured lichens continued to roughen the black rocks along the County Down coast. The salt air, the summer sun, and the sandy soil of the coast were favourable to the flourishing wild rhododendrons. The bees hummed in the veronica and among the fuchsia hedges, so profuse along the roadsides of the Ards Peninsula. Above the town of Newtownards on Scrabo Hill stood Scrabo Tower. Charles Lanyon designed and built it in 1857 in memory of the third Marquis of Londonderry, who had been kind to the people during the potato famine. Lord Londonderry had commanded a brigade of hussars under the famous Sir John Moore in the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon.
The tower looked away to Strangford Lough, with its seventy islets just as the glaciers had left them. The area was a haven for brent geese, dunlins, oystercatchers, mallards and widgeons, gulls and cormorants. The streams of County Down were the habitat of the busy water spider, who knew the concept of the diving bell long before man had ever conceived of the idea. The water spider carries air bubbles on the short downy hairs of its body, beneath the surface of water to a tiny store moored to the stalks of water plants. It is there that he makes his home and raises his family. In the pools of the county, water spiders, water beetles, and water crickets were about in their myriads; interestingly, almost every insect on land had its counterpart in water. Dragonflies, once grubs in the mud of the pools, were now flashing their incredible colours amongst the flowers of summer. The air was heavy with the scents of honeysuckle and pollen. And the tower looked away to what Jack Lewis called “the thing itself, utterly irresistible, the way to the world’s end, the land of longing, the breaking and blessing of hearts.” It was “the plain of Down, and seeing beyond it the Mourne Mountains.”1
It was the summer of 1916, and Jack relished every minute of it. On this, as on other recent summers, he had traversed his main haunt, the Holywood Hills. These stood in an irregular line drawn from Stormont to Comber, Comber to Newtownards, Newtownards to Scrabo, Scrabo to Craigantlet, Craigantlet to Holywood, Holywood to Knocknagoney and back to Stormont. Often Jack walked with his new companion, Arthur Greeves, a man who was to be his friend for half a century.
Arthur lived at Bernagh, directly across the road from Little Lea. For years he had tried unsuccessfully to make friends with Warren and Jack. But shortly before starting his last term at Malvern, Jack received a message saying that Arthur was in bed convalescing and would be glad to see him. Jack responded to the invitation and went over to Bernagh to find Arthur sitting up in bed. On a table beside him lay a copy of the book Myths of Norsemen by H. A. Grueber. To their delight, Jack and Arthur discovered that they had a mutual passion for Scandinavian folklore. Jack was not the only boy on the Circular Road with a sense of Northerness. The grand and tragic mythology of Scandinavia was the bridge that the boys crossed to friendship. Arthur encouraged Jack to read classic English novels, including those by Jane Austen, the Brontës, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Sir Walter Scott. Jack, in turn, encouraged Arthur’s artistic talent. It was because of Jack’s influence that Arthur studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1921 to 1923. Arthur proved to be an outstandingly loyal friend to Jack. He wisely kept secret the problems Jack shared with him concerning Jack’s struggles during his adolescence.
Arthur and Jack loved to share walks together in the Holywood Hills area. With an artist’s eye for detail and perspective, Arthur would point out, through a hole in a hedge, a farm in the mid-morning sunshine. He would point out drills of cabbages, or a grey cat squeezing under a barn door, or local characters going about their work. Arthur and Jack walked together in sunlight and moonlight, relishing the perfume of newly mown hay or watching the gulls wheeling and screaming around the furrows left by a ploughman. As far as they were concerned, their haunt was acre after acre of beauty, delight, and goodness.
Unquestionably, County Down is a county that deeply influenced Jack’s imagination. It is a county of wildflowers, hips, haws, and wild mushrooms. In season, it is saturated with blackberries and hawthorns, all growing against a background of butterflies; the cooing of pigeons is in its forests and dragonflies are on the surface of its streams and lakes. Here was a county covered with the white dots of cottages which, Jack said, “laughed.” And it all flowed on to the Mourne Mountains: to Slieve Donard, to Deer’s Meadow and the Hare’s Gap, to the Brandy Pad, the Cock and Hen, Butter Mountain, the Rowan Tree River, to Crocknafeola and Slievemageough. Up near Lough Shannagh rose the River Bann, making its way past Rathfriland, Banbridge, Gilford, and Portadown, to Lough Neagh, and on to reach the sea at Castlerock under those Northern skies of Jack’s early childhood. On the other side of the Mournes, of course, lay the enchanting Rostrevor-Carlingford area, which was to be the inspiration for Narnia. Its mixture of sea, woods, and mountains comprised what Jack reckoned to be the loveliest spot he had ever seen.2
It is significant now to realise that while Jack walked the inspiring hills of County Down with Arthur Greeves in the summer of 1916, a disastrous loss of the finest manhood in Great Britain and Ireland was taking place at the Somme in France. The Somme offensive began on the morning of 1 July 1916, in which the British Expeditionary Force and the French Army attempted to take the strong defensive position held by the Germans in the Somme Valley. Before the offensive was over, it is estimated, the British suffered 420,000 casualties, the French 200,000, and the Germans 500,000. It was one of the greatest tragedies in British history.
In the first two days of the battle, the thirty-sixth Ulster Division suffered 5,104 casualties, out of which approximately 2,069 died. The British troops had confidently set out into “no man’s land” expecting to meet little resistance from their battered opponents, who had suffered one and a half million shells raining down on them in the eight days before the attack. But the German concrete bunkers were deep; their razor wire was unaffected by the bombardment; and their machine guns and ri
fles covered the entirety of “no man’s land” in an arc. The Germans mowed their enemy down like grass. When the thirty-sixth Ulster Division was demobilised in 1919, it had suffered 32,000 casualties.
The effect of this holocaust on Ulster life was never better caught than in Rev. W. F. Marshall’s poem The Lad. It tells the story of the orphaned son of a poor Linen scutcher.3 As the little boy grew to manhood under the care of the ploughman who raised him, he kept the heart of a child who has a huge affinity with nature. But the war called. The ploughman’s soliloquy is haunting:4
I’m feelin’ oul’ since he went away,
An’ my sight is gettin’ dim;
I niver axed for to keep him back
When they needed men like him.
He’s sleepin’ now where the poppies grow,
In a coat that the bullets tore,
An’ what’s a wheen of medals to me
When my own wee lad’s no more?5
How did Jack respond to the unfolding slaughter in Europe? He made a decision. In Ireland there was no compulsory enlistment to the British Army; Jack could have gone to an Irish university and escaped fighting in the war. But he decided to serve when he reached military age and to seek to enter Oxford University. If he were successful there, he knew, he would become eligible for military service one month after entering the University. Until then, he would treat the matter of military service much as he treated the necessity of returning to unhappy school days after school holidays: he would avoid letting the thought infiltrate his mind. He decided not to follow the news of battles in the newspaper, but simply to fight in them when the hour came. He didn’t trust newspapers, and he disliked their vulgarity and sensationalism. He believed their battle information to be third-hand, and therefore distorted.
Arthur began a correspondence with Jack in June 1914, and for a number of years they wrote to each other every week. Few subjects escaped comment. Arthur saved nearly all of Jack’s letters, which were published in 1979 as the book They Stand Together. Despite their differences—and there were many—Jack and Arthur certainly stood together. Arthur—somewhat dull, with a tendency to self-pity—was deeply artistic, though verbally inarticulate. Jack, the man with ideas and concepts, was garrulous, with an argumentative turn of mind. He was also often arrogant. Arthur, though, was full of charity. In these years, one of them had rejected the Christian message; the other had held to it. Throughout most of his life, Arthur was to paint his beloved County Down; and Jack was to write about it for his millions of readers. It is very heartening to note that their loyalty to each other never faltered.
In the summer of 1916, Jack left County Down once more for Great Bookham. From there, on 4 December, he travelled to Oxford to take an entrance scholarship exam in classics. Here was what Matthew Arnold called “that sweet City with her dreaming spires,” famous across the world for her university and unique place in history. The River Thames could be safely forded here; indeed, the name of the city comes from the Oxon Forde that crossed the river at today’s Folly Bridge. Within the city of Oxford, the River Thames becomes the River Isis. Oxford was an established town in the ninth century; and for over eight hundred years it has been the home of scholars. Here stands the Bodleian Library, one of the Copyright Libraries. By law, a copy of every newspaper and even leaflet that is printed in the United Kingdom must be sent here. This tradition goes back to 1610. Books cannot be borrowed here, for it is only a reading library. Even King Charles I was refused permission to borrow a book from the Bodleian. Surprisingly, there is no university campus as such to visit, because Oxford University is in fact made up of over thirty-five separate colleges, each with its own distinct history and tradition.
Here, for example, is Christ Church College, arguably the most famous college in Oxford University. The main entrance is the archway of Tom Tower, one of the most famous landmarks in Oxford. The bell in the tower is rung 101 times at 9.05 every evening. The tradition dates from the foundation of the college, when the bell rang once for each of the college’s original students, to tell them to return to the college before the gates were locked. Here John Wesley studied, as well as Lewis Carroll, Albert Einstein, and more than a dozen British prime ministers. Inside the college is Christ Church Cathedral, the smallest cathedral in England.
Just off the High Street is Brasenose College, named after the College’s original doorknocker, which was nicknamed “The Brazen Nose.” In the twelfth century, anyone using it would be provided sanctuary if he were escaping from the law.
Here, too, is Merton College, famous for its medieval buildings, some of which are the oldest in the university. In Jack’s day J. R. R. Tolkien was a student here.
Here at the eastern end of the High Street is St. Edmund Hall. Dating from 1190, it is the oldest academic building in the whole city. The Mohawk Chief Oronhyatekha studied medicine here in the 1860’s. Here hangs art by one of Jack’s favourite prose writers, William Morris.
Here is New College, which is certainly not new, because it was founded in 1379! Here studied William Spooner, inventor of spoonerisms (sentences with the sounds transposed to create a new and amusing meaning). He once said to a student, “You have hissed your mystery lectures and tasted a whole worm!”
On St. Aldate’s Street, opposite Christ Church College, stands Pembroke College, with its beautiful renaissance-style chapel dating from the eighteenth century. Here studied the great lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, who published the first Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. Here is the spire of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, where the first university meetings were held in the twelfth century; and here is the tower of Magdalen College, famous because the Magdalen College Choir sings here at dawn every May Day.
When Jack stepped off the train in Oxford for the first time, however, he was disappointed with the scenery. As he walked farther, things got worse. As mean shop followed mean shop one after another, Jack began to wonder where all the fabled spires and towers of Oxford could be. As the city quickly began to recede, and he saw the open countryside ahead, he turned around and looked back. There it stood in all its glory: a cluster of spires and towers, virtually unequalled anywhere on earth as an icon of learning. After drinking it all in he walked back to the railway station, took a hansom cab, and asked the driver to take him some place where he could get rooms for a week. He found such a place on Mansfield Road.
Jack called his first walk in Oxford an allegory of his life. It seems to me that, just as he turned the wrong way at the railway station and walked away from the glory of Oxford, so he had turned the wrong way at what John Bunyan called “The Wicket Gate” that would have set him on the way to “The Celestial City.” Jack had read Pilgrim’s Progress and the famous conversation between Christian and Evangelist:
Then said Evangelist, pointing with his finger over a very wide field, “Do you see yonder wicket-gate?” (Matthew 7:14). The man said “no.” Then said the other, “Do you see yonder shining light?” (Psalm 119:105; 2 Peter 1:19). He said, “I think I do.” Then said Evangelist, “Keep that bright light in your eye and go directly thereto, so shalt thou see the gate: at which, when thou knockest, it shall be told thee what thou shalt do.”
Various people—including Mr. Pliable, Mr. Obstinate and, of course, Mr. Worldly Wise Man—tried to persuade Christian to turn aside. But he got to the Wicket Gate, and it led him to the Cross of Christ, where his burden rolled out of sight forever. The road to the Celestial City now stretched before him. On Jack’s spiritual journey, he had made a wrong turning. These wrong turns were to lead him down many a mean street, on which he met many a persuader who would have been delighted with Jack’s first prose work, The Pilgrim’s Regress. Here Jack would point up characters like Mr. Enlightenment (representing nineteenth-century rationalism), Mr. Sensible (representing cultured worldliness), Mr. Broad (who is on the pilgrimage, but is friends with the world), and, of course, Mr. Humanist. In the book we come across the shires of Orgiastica, Behmenheim,
Occultica, and Aesthetica. There is a straight path, which guides pilgrims past the City of Claptrap6 (a distinctly useful Ulster word for “nonsense”!).
The day after his arrival in Oxford, mantling snow began to fall on the fabled city. Wearing a great coat and muffler, the eighteen-year-old Jack Lewis headed to the Hall of Oriel College, whose alumni include Sir Walter Raleigh and Cecil Rhodes. The young Ulsterman sitting his exam in the cold hall, his left hand in a glove, was busy writing an essay based on a quotation from one of the illustrious alumni of Pembroke College, Samuel Johnson. “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure,” Johnson had once commented. As for Jack, he gained no pleasure from what he had written, for he felt he had almost certainly failed.
When after a week of examinations he left the snow-covered Oxford and eventually headed home to Belfast for Christmas, he admitted to his father his fears over his exams. Albert Lewis sought to comfort his son with tender and kindly words. The Great Knock, on hearing the questions set for Jack, also presumed that he had done badly. His tutor felt the questions had not been suited to him. But both men were wrong. On 19 December, the Master of University College Oxford wrote to say that the College had awarded him the second of three open scholarships for classics.
There was one problem, though. Jack would have to pass a separate examination called Responsions that included one of Jack’s weakest subjects, mathematics. He returned to The Great Knock for one final golden term and sat the examination in March. He failed, but he was allowed to enter his college at Oxford in April, with another Responsions examination in view. He entered his name in University College’s books on 28 April 1917; and he also entered the University Officers’ Training Corps. He failed Responsions again in June. In fact, he was never to pass it. Except for the fact that Oxford University later exempted ex-servicemen from taking the examination, Jack Lewis would never have been able to stay at Oxford.
A Shiver of Wonder Page 9