The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Using language in this way, as a device for discovering how people, in any era, thought and felt about the world around them and within them, leads Barfield to remarkable conclusions. The Middle English word “love-longing,” for example, signals a “new element … [in] human relationships, for which perhaps the best name that can be found is ‘tenderness.’” He hastens to add that this statement may oversimplify the situation, as evidence of tenderness can be found as far back as ancient Egypt. And yet “love-longing” and other newly coined terms tell us that during the Middle Ages humanity made a great leap in self-understanding. “Perhaps,” he suggests, laying all his cards on the table, “it can best be expressed as a new consciousness of the individual human soul.” His argument is now in the open: the Middle Ages marks a new epoch in human consciousness; in effect, a new way of being human. Elsewhere he presents in clear stages the unfolding of this evolutionary scheme. At first, “when our earliest ancestors looked up to the blue vault they felt that they saw not merely a place, whether heavenly or earthly, but the bodily vesture, as it were, of a living Being.” In the “Dark Ages” (by which he seems to mean the early Middle Ages), “there came for the first time into the consciousness of man the possibility of seeing himself purely as a solid object situated among solid objects.” Change followed upon change, leading to the most astonishing transformation of all, for “self-consciousness, as we know it, seems to have first dawned faintly on Europe at about the time of the Reformation.”

  Claims like these, the reader soon realizes, deliver far more than Barfield’s title promises. This is not only history in English words, but the secret history of human nature. In this book, Barfield draws a line between his own thought and that of all the other future Inklings, between himself and almost all his contemporaries, indeed between himself and the self-understanding of Western civilization. For he asserts that through the evolution of consciousness, there has been “a change not only in the ideas people have formed about the world, but a change in the very world they experience.”

  A half century earlier, James George Frazer and Edward Burnett Tylor had advanced evolutionary accounts, akin in some ways to Barfield’s, that describe how humankind had progressed from magical to scientific thinking, and Jacob Burckhardt had identified, in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, the precise moment (Augenblick) in human history when the human being achieved self-awareness of his own individual personhood (eine auf sich selbst gestellte Persönlichkeit). But Burckhardt, Frazer, and Tylor retail no more than cultural history, not ontological change; they recount how certain ideas and social institutions begin, grow, clash, and give birth to new ideas and institutions within a human consciousness that has remained fundamentally unchanged over millennia. They do not contend that the very nature of consciousness—and therefore of the world with which consciousness interacts and, to some extent, creates—evolves over time, sometimes changing dramatically in the course of a few decades. Barfield would spend the rest of his life attempting to place this revolutionary claim on a solid philosophical, historical, literary, and scientific foundation; and all without reference to Hegel, the master architect of evolutionary schemes, whom Barfield did not read extensively until late in life.

  Lewis wrote Barfield a cheerful letter upon receiving a copy of History in English Words, assuring the author that although the book lacked “perfect clearness,” it was “completely and certainly readable,” a work that sets “windows opening in all directions.” His praise was not widely echoed, however, as the book received little attention upon publication, although it was reviewed favorably in The Observer (January 17, 1926). The Times (London) didn’t get around to noticing it for twenty-eight years, when Cyril Connolly, assessing a revised edition in the Sunday paper of January 24, 1954, pronounced it “learned, imaginative, moving and felicitously factual.”

  Salvation by Poetry

  Barfield’s next work, Poetic Diction (1928), expands and deepens the argument formulated in History in English Words. Moving beyond etymology, he scours the history of poetry to bolster his claims about the evolution of language and consciousness, proposing “not merely a theory of poetic diction, but a theory of poetry: and not merely a theory of poetry, but a theory of knowledge.” This grand undertaking began in humble fashion, as a thesis to fulfill the requirements for an Oxford B.Litt. degree, written at a time when Barfield’s main interests lay elsewhere. He and Maud had started a children’s theater, performing skits based on nursery rhymes (“The frog he would a-wooing go” featured Owen as frog, Maud as mouse); he was dancing in Oxford and Cornwall; he was absorbing Steiner’s doctrines with accelerating admiration; and he was warring with Lewis. Still, he squeezed in enough time to propose a thesis on poetic diction (that is, on the way a poet arranges words for artistic effect), only to discover that his examiners couldn’t find an appropriate supervisor. “They decided it wasn’t at all what they were used to,” he remembered; they preferred “the very scholarly sort of question,” such as “whether Coleridge had an unusual number of toenails.” Finally, however, the examiners agreed to let him write his thesis unsupervised.

  By now, Barfield’s evolutionary argument had advanced in complexity and detail. He believed that very early human beings had experienced a profound intimacy with the world, in which thoughts, feelings, and the objects of perception lay in healthy and proper relationship to one another (Barfield would later call this state “original participation”); that over centuries human beings had developed an acute self-awareness in which this primordial unity disappeared, resulting in the philosophical skepticism that afflicts modern times; and that the future (which Barfield had tasted during his Sophia moment) promises a return to our original experience of unity, while retaining the discernment and ability to think abstractly that we have acquired during our evolutionary odyssey. Poetic Diction focuses upon the place of language in this scheme. Primordial man, Barfield contends, possessed a poetic language drenched in meaning. He quotes with approval Shelley’s famous line from “In Defence of Poetry”: “in the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry.” As consciousness evolved, this poetic language, and the poetic experience of reality that it made possible, faded away. This is the crisis in which we find ourselves today.

  Barfield’s most impressive elaboration of his theory comes in his discussion of the Greek word pneuma (Latin spiritus). To Max Müller, the celebrated Victorian philologist—and a principal target of Barfield’s argument—pneuma originally meant “wind”; when the Greeks required an abstract word for the life principle, they simply appropriated the word pneuma and altered its meaning. Not so, counters Barfield; pneuma and the words from which it derived “meant neither breath, nor wind, nor spirit, nor yet all three of these things, but … simply had their own old peculiar meaning, which has since, in the world of the evolution of consciousness, crystallized into the three meanings specified—and no doubt into others also.” The history of language is, then, a history of “crystallization,” of rigor mortis, of death and decay.

  Or so it appears at first glance. But this is illusory; for there exists in the history of language, and thus in the life of human beings, all of whom employ language to apprehend the world, a second, life-giving force. This salvific force is poetry. The world can and will be saved by poets. The lost meaning of primordial language reappears, under the conscious art of the poet, as metaphor, “a re-creating, registering as thought, one of those eternal facts which may already have been experienced in perception.” Poetry induces a “felt change of consciousness” (the “felt” was added at the suggestion of Lewis, who read the work in manuscript). This change is in effect a return, partial though it may be, to the poetic richness of our primordial consciousness, but now in a state of full self-awareness. Metaphor is the catalyst for this felt change of consciousness. Every effective metaphor brings with it a more complete perception of the world and its interrelationships. It reveals more truth, it b
rightens, expands, clarifies—in effect, it helps to create—our understanding of the world. Through metaphor we receive “in addition to the moment or moments of aesthetic pleasure in appreciation … a more permanent boon. It is as though my own consciousness had actually been expanded.” As Barfield promised, his book offers a theory of knowledge. Poetry and its metaphors are means of cognition:

  Now my normal everyday experience, as human being, of the world around me depends entirely upon what I bring to the sense-datum from within; and the absorption of this metaphor into my imagination has enabled me to bring more than I could before. It has created something in me, a faculty or a part of a faculty, enabling me to observe what I could not hitherto observe. This ability to recognize significant resemblances and analogies, considered as in action, I shall call knowledge; considered as a state, and apart from the effort by which it is imparted and acquired, I shall call it wisdom.

  Lewis admired Poetic Diction. Although he never embraced fully Barfield’s view of the imagination as the royal road to truth, he learned to appreciate the power of metaphor, going so far, in his 1939 essay “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” as to assert that a metaphor may be a means, and even the only means, by which we arrive at new ideas and new understandings. Other friends of Lewis also absorbed some of the book’s arguments with pleasure. His pupil Alan Griffiths (the future monk Bede Griffiths) declared that it “had a permanent effect upon my life.” Tolkien, too, felt its impact. “Your conception of the ancient semantic unity ha[s] modified his whole outlook,” Lewis informed Barfield in 1928. It seems likely, as the Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger has proposed, that Barfield’s theories influenced Tolkien’s views on the nature and evolution of language and played a hand in the shaping of his own invented tongues; in The Hobbit, for example, Tolkien writes of Bilbo spying the dragon’s treasure that “there are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful,” a very Barfieldian observation. Still, Tolkien’s and Barfield’s views on language diverged in many ways. For Tolkien, “ancient semantic unity” describes the state of language in Eden, before the metaphysical catastrophe of the Fall and its aftermath, expressed mythically in the story of Babel; for Barfield, the same term describes the state of language at the dawn of the evolution of consciousness, which will conclude in the reacquisition by language of its primordial unity and purity. Tolkien, an orthodox Christian, believed that this second golden age will arrive only when time itself vanishes in the “new heaven and new earth” (Revelation 21:1); it is not a part of human history but an aspect of eternity.

  Outside the circle of future Inklings and their friends, critical reaction to Poetic Diction was lukewarm. This irked Lewis, who wrote to Barfield blasting the Times Literary Supplement review of May 17, 1928, as “marvelously absurd” and its anonymous author as “obviously unable to make anything” of the book’s main argument. In fact, the author of the unsigned piece, Edmund Blunden, winner of the Hawthornden Prize and future professor of poetry at Oxford, understood Barfield’s argument well—without, however, perceiving its Anthroposophical underpinnings—and praised his “careful and sensitive critical talent” while objecting to his colorless academic prose and his misuse of the term “minor poet.” As for the rest of the literary and academic world, the book, like its predecessor, was largely ignored, although possible traces of its argument can be discerned in widely scattered works such as Arthur Waley’s masterful study of Taoism, The Way and Its Power (1934), in which the author argues, “I see no other way of studying the history of thought except by first studying the history of words, and such a study would seem to me equally necessary if I were dealing with the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Hebrews, or any other people. For example, in reading the Bible, whether for edification or literary pleasure, we do not trouble … to ask what the different words rendered by ‘soul,’ ‘spirit,’ and so on really meant to the people who used them. But anyone studying the history of Hebrew thought would be bound to ask himself these questions, and I cannot think it is superfluous to ask them with regard to Chinese.” But Waley remains the exception. Perhaps in reaction to the work’s long cold-shouldering by intellectuals and the academy, its scattered fans lean toward hyperbolic praise; thus the poet Howard Nemerov, who tells us that “among the few poets and teachers of my acquaintance who know Poetic Diction it has been valued not only as a secret book, but nearly as a sacred one.” This assessment, which appeared in Nemerov’s introduction to the 1964 edition of Poetic Diction, may have troubled Barfield, for whom sacred books meant the Bible and, in a weaker sense, the writings of Rudolf Steiner.

  Who won the “Great War”? Both combatants, one is tempted to reply. Lewis said that it had changed him more than his rival. Barfield’s “Great War” arguments, along with History in English Words and Poetic Diction, revealed to Lewis the fallacy of “chronological snobbery,” the assumption, as common now as then, that the present owns more of the truth than the past, that ideas no longer in vogue are most likely false. The “Great War” shook his confidence in materialism and undermined his belief that truth is discoverable exclusively through the senses. At the same time, it did nothing to dent his dislike of Anthroposophy. In The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), as Cecil Harwood points out, Lewis places the land of Anthroposophia next to that of Occultia, and later he would trivialize Steiner’s teachings by seeing in them “a reassuring Germanic dullness.” Anthroposophy, with its astral planes, its Buddha on Mars, and its Spiritual Science, remained always beyond the pale. As for Barfield, he credited the “Great War” with teaching him how to “think responsibly and logically.” Lewis, he believed, was the more agile thinker, the more brilliant debater; what a pity, then, that Lewis’s materialism had led him to reject the higher insights of Anthroposophy and the great secret of the evolution of consciousness.

  6

  A MYTHOLOGY FOR ENGLAND

  “He is improving but requires hardening.” So declared the Hull military medical board upon examining Tolkien on May 1, 1917, six months after his return from England. He was overjoyed to be back in “dear old Blighty” (a trench soldier’s affectionate term for Britain, derived, via the Raj, from the Hindi bilayati, “foreigner”), but the health that young men take for granted, and that he hoped soon would be his—trench fever usually runs its course in a couple of months—proved, despite the military board’s guarded optimism, elusive. He sickened, improved, and relapsed with agonizing regularity, each advance derailed by attacks of fever, headache, weakness, loss of appetite, or joint pain. The military issued him repeated reprieves from active duty, and he spent much of 1917 shuttling between his army unit, hospital, and brief but blissful visits with Edith, now pregnant with their first child.

  Love ripened between the parents-to-be. Tolkien wrote, read, and drew, while Edith enchanted him with her piano playing and, one day in a “small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire,” with her dancing, offering to his exhausted eyes a vision of beauty and grace, a glimpse of paradise. “In those days,” he wrote, “her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and dance.” The forest interlude inspired him to write “Of Beren and Lúthien,” to his mind the narrative heart of The Silmarillion. A quasi-autobiographical tale, it recounts the love of Beren, a man, and Lúthien, an Elven princess he spies dancing in the woods, and their terrible trials in search of a magical jewel, culminating in Lúthien’s fateful decision to become mortal in order to remain with her beloved. Their sufferings, as many critics have noticed, echo the multiple ordeals, including separation, war, and religious hostility, faced by Tolkien and Edith during their youth.

  On November 16, 1917, Edith gave birth in a Cheltenham nursing home to John Francis Reuel, after a painful and dangerous labor. Tolkien, who had been confined to an officers’ hospital in Hull since mid-August, was unable to visit until nearly a week after the birth. John’s
baptism, with Father Francis in attendance, offered a few hours of normalcy, but the respite was illusory. During the next nine months, Tolkien fell prey to recurrent fevers, influenza, and gastritis, dropping nearly thirty pounds by mid-August. Compounding his trials, in late July the War Office erroneously ordered the emaciated young officer back to France. Five tense days later the directive was canceled, and in early September a medical board pronounced him completely disabled and dispatched him to a convalescent institution in Blackpool. This was to be his last prolonged hospital stay; by midautumn, he had returned to Oxford and civilian life, although his official discharge did not arrive for another six months, shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Tolkien left the army with the rank of temporary lieutenant, a fitting title, for he was never, at heart, a warrior; he had done his duty and helped to save England, but his greatest contribution to the war effort would come decades later, when The Lord of the Rings apotheosized, in its account of hobbits battling ultimate evil in a landscape of fantastic redoubts and talking trees, the achievements of ordinary Tommies and Doughboys among the barbed wire, rats, mud, and machine gun fusillades of rural France.