The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  By evolving, Life is solving

  All the questions we perplexed.’

  ‘Good,’ says Havard. ‘But I’m not clear whether it’s scientific progress you’re attacking, or Darwin. The objectives seem to have got a little muddled.’

  ‘That’s the whole point of the poem,’ Lewis answers. ‘What I’m saying isn’t that Darwin was wrong – though incidentally I believe biologists are already contemplating a withdrawal from the Darwinian position – but that Evolution as popularly imagined, the modern concept of Progress, is simply a fiction supported by no evidence whatever. It’s an older fiction than Darwin, in fact: you can find it in Keats’s Hyperion and in Wagner’s Ring, and it turns up in all sorts of forms, such as Shaw’s Life-Force; and for most people it has now taken the place of religion.’

  ‘But I still don’t see precisely what you’re attacking.’ Havard says.

  ‘Quite simply the belief that the very formula of universal process is from imperfect to perfect, from small beginnings to great endings. It’s probably the deepest-ingrained habit of mind in the contemporary world. It’s behind the idea that our morality springs from savage taboos, adult sentiment from infantile sexual maladjustment, thought from instinct, mind from matter, organic from inorganic, cosmos from chaos. It always seems to me immensely implausible, because it makes the general course of nature so very unlike those parts of it we can observe. You remember the old puzzle as to whether the first owl came from the first egg or the first egg from the first owl? Well, the modern belief in universal evolution is produced by attending exclusively to the owl’s emergence from the egg. From childhood we’re taught to notice how the perfect oak grows from the acorn; we aren’t so often reminded that the acorn itself was dropped by a perfect oak. We’re always remarking that the express engine of today is the descendant of the Rocket, but we don’t equally remember that the Rocket didn’t come from some even more rudimentary engine, but from something much more perfect and complicated than itself – a man of genius.’

  ‘All right,’ answers Havard. ‘I understand your objection to the fact that progress is based on a misunderstanding of the process of development in nature. But does that mean that all progress is of necessity bad? I notice that you have no hesitation (nor does Tolkien for that matter) in using trains and cars when they’re offered. (Though I note you usually prefer a slow local train to a main line express.) But surely you must allow some good in mechanical science, such as the invention of printing? Didn’t that greatly expand culture and scholarship?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Lewis replies. ‘But have I too fanciful an imagination when I say that I suspect that the flood of so-called “learned” books which was beginning to overwhelm us before the war (and which will undoubtedly return with peace) must inevitably mean recent inferior work pushing good old books out of the way? That is what we shall see, I’m sure.’

  ‘And what about literature?’ Warnie asks. ‘You must allow of some improvement in that over the centuries.’

  ‘Not at all, not as a general statement. Barfield proved years ago that what we have actually experienced is a decay, a breaking-up of the ancient unity in which myth could not have any “meaning” separated from it, into allegory, where the meaning can be distinguished and detached; and the ultimate result of this process is of course a literature that has no meaning at all! The other day I read a symposium on T. S. Eliot’s “Cooking Egg” poem. There were seven contributors, all of them men whose lives have been devoted to the study of poetry for thirty years or so, and do you know there wasn’t the slightest agreement between any of them as to what the poem meant!’

  ‘I can well believe it,’ says Tolkien.

  ‘Yet to be fair, can you tell us what Tolkien’s story means?’ asks Havard.

  ‘But that’s the whole point!’ Lewis answers. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, in the sense of abstracting a meaning from it. Tollers may regard it fundamentally as “about” the Fall and Mortality and the Machine, but that may not be how I read it. Indeed it seems to me (with due respect) a great mistake to try and attach any kind of abstract meaning to a story like his. Story – or at least a great Story of the mythical type – gives us an experience of something not as an abstraction but as a concrete reality. We don’t “understand the meaning” when we read a myth, we actually encounter the thing itself. Once we try to grasp it with the discursive reason, it fades. Let me give you an example. Here I am trying to explain the fading, the vanishing of tasted reality when the reasoning part of the mind is applied to it. Probably I’m making heavy weather of it.’

  ‘You are,’ says Warnie.

  ‘All right. Let me remind you instead of Orpheus and Eurydice, how he was supposed to lead her by the hand but, when he turned round to look at her, she disappeared. Now what was merely a principle should become imaginable to you.’

  ‘I never thought of applying that meaning to the Orpheus story,’ Warnie says.

  ‘Of course not. You weren’t looking for an abstract “meaning” in it at all. You weren’t knowing, but tasting. But what you were tasting turns out to be a universal principle. Of course the moment we state the principle, we are admittedly back in the world of abstractions. It’s only while receiving the myth as a story that you experience a principle concretely. Let’s take an example from quite a different sort of story. Consider Mr Badger in The Wind in the Willows – that extraordinary amalgam of high rank, coarse manners, gruffness, shyness and goodness. The child who has once met Mr Badger has got ever afterwards, in its bones, a knowledge of humanity and English social history which it certainly couldn’t get from any abstraction. Now do you see what I mean?’

  ‘This talk of “tasted reality”,’ says Tolkien, ‘reminds me of an experience I had the other day, in which I think I encountered the same thing in a different fashion. It sounds rather ridiculous, but I was riding along on my bicycle past the Radcliffe Infirmary when I had one of those sudden clarities, the kind that sometimes come in dreams. I remember saying aloud with absolute conviction, “But of course! Of course that’s how things really do work.” But I couldn’t reproduce the argument that had led to this, although the sensation was the same as having been convinced by reason (though without any reasoning). And I’ve since thought that one of the explanations as to why one can’t recapture the wonderful argument or secret when one wakes up is simply that there wasn’t one, but there was some kind of direct appreciation by the mind without any chain of argument as we know it in our time-serial life.’

  ‘I think that’s fascinating,’ Warnie says, ‘and I’m sure I’ve experienced something of the same kind myself. But I’m a little worried still whether the people who read Tollers’s new Hobbit story are going to appreciate all this. I’m sure that some critics will talk about it as simply “escapist” and “wish-fulfilment” and that sort of thing. You know the way these people go on.’

  ‘Very probably they will,’ answers Tolkien. ‘Though anyone who in real life actually found himself, say, journeying through the Mines of Moria would, I imagine, wish to escape from that, to exchange it for almost any other place in the world! You see, I think that if there is any “escapism” involved, it’s in being able to survey danger and evil (when we read a story) without any disturbance of our spiritual equilibrium. We’re escaping from the limitations of our own personality, which wouldn’t allow us to have any adventures because we’d be too frightened! And really, you know, these critics who are so sensitive to the least hint of “escapism” – well, what class of men would you expect to be so worked up about people escaping?’ The company waits for an answer. ‘Jailers!’ says Tolkien.

  ‘Yes,’ adds Lewis, laughing. ‘They’re afraid that any glimpse of a remote prospect would make their own stuff seem less exclusively important.’

  ‘But you must be aware’, Havard remarks, ‘that some people will find a story like Tolkien’s to be deficient in the kind of detailed studies of complex human personalities that you find in Tolstoy or Ja
ne Austen.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lewis answers. ‘But that isn’t a criticism. It’s merely saying that the Hobbit story is different. A critic who likes Tolstoy and Jane Austen and doesn’t like Tolkien should stick to novels of manners and not attack the Hobbit book. His own taste doesn’t qualify him to condemn a story which is primarily not about human behaviour. We mustn’t listen to Pope’s maxim about the proper study of mankind: the proper study of man is everything, everything that gives a foothold to the imagination and the passions.’

  ‘Including elves and goblins?’ asks Havard.

  ‘Of course. They do the same thing that Mr Badger does: they’re an admirable hieroglyphic which conveys psychology and types of character much more briefly and effectively than any novelistic presentation could do. Now, I know that Tolkien’s story does lie on (or beyond) one of the frontiers of taste; what I mean is, if you ask someone, “Do you like stories about other worlds – or hunting stories – or stories of the supernatural – or historical novels?”, you will always get an unalterable “yes” or “no” from the very depth of the heart. I don’t know why; it’s a very interesting literary fact which I’ve never seen discussed by any critic of merit, certainly not by Aristotle or Johnson or Coleridge. Anyway there it is, and Tollers’s book will undoubtedly provoke that “yes” or “no” response. But the point is that the people who say “no” shouldn’t try to stop other people from saying “yes”. For a start, they may be proved entirely wrong by history: the book that they scorn today may be a classic for the intelligentsia of the twenty-third century. Very odd things may happen: our age may be known not as the age of Eliot and Pound and Lawrence but as the age of Buchan and Wode-house, and perhaps Tolkien. You see, the trouble is that our map of literature is always drawn up to look like a list of examination results, with the honour candidates above that line and the pass people below. But surely we ought to have a whole series of vertical columns, each representing different kinds of work, and an almost infinite series of horizontal lines crossing these to represent the different degrees of goodness in each. For instance in the “Adventure Story” column you’d have the Odyssey at the top and Edgar Wallace at the bottom, and Rider Haggard and Stevenson and Scott and William Morris – and of course Tollers – placed on horizontal lines crossing “Adventure Story” at whatever heights we decide. But look, Tollers never answered Warnie’s criticism about “wish-fulfilment”.’

  ‘It wasn’t a criticism,’ Warnie answers. ‘I was merely suggesting that some people might say it.’

  ‘Most certainly they will,’ Tolkien says. ‘But one can only ask, is the wish itself such a bad one? And in what sense is it fulfilled? Of course there are certain books which do arouse and imaginatively satisfy certain wishes which ought to be left alone – pornography is the obvious example. But I’m quite certain that the longing for fairy-land is fundamentally different in character. As I’ve already suggested, we don’t actually want to experience all the dangers and discomforts of the Mines of Moria, in the way that somebody susceptible to pornography wants to experience the things it describes. We don’t want to be in Moria: but the story (I hope) does have an effect on us. It stirs us and troubles us.’

  ‘That’s right,’ says Lewis. ‘Far from dulling or emptying the actual, of reducing it to something very low as pornography does, it gives it a new dimension. Look, a child doesn’t despise real woods just because he’s been reading about enchanted woods. What he’s read makes all real woods a little enchanted. And a boy who has any imagination enjoys eating cold meat, which he’d otherwise find dull, by pretending that it’s buffalo-meat, which he’s just killed with his own bow and arrow. As a result, the real meat tastes more savoury. In fact you might say that only then is it the real meat. This isn’t a retreat from reality. It’s a rediscovery of it.’

  The Magdalen clock chimes the quarter. Warnie looks at his watch. ‘Eleven-fifteen. We shan’t be seeing Charles tonight, I’m afraid.’ He turns to Tolkien. ‘There’s one thing I meant to ask. What actually happens at the end of that chapter? It seemed to stop a bit abruptly.’

  ‘The Company discovers a great book,’ Tolkien answers, ‘in which is written the history of the reoccupation of Moria by the dwarves, under the leadership of Balin (you may remember him from my first hobbit story). I’ve delayed writing that bit because there are a number of linguistic problems relating to the text which they find. And they also discover a tomb, in which lies the body of Balin, slain by – well, we shall be coming to that.’

  ‘Tomb?’ asks Lewis doubtfully. ‘Surely a pyre would be more likely?’

  ‘No,’ answers Tolkien. ‘They buried their dead. Or rather, they laid them in tombs of stone, never in earth (as might be expected, considering their origins). Only in the most dire necessity did they resort to burning their dead – it happened once, after the great battle at Azanulbizar, when more were slain than they could possibly have entombed, and then they made pyres, but only reluctantly.’

  ‘It does seem a little odd,’ muses Lewis, ‘or at least a little out of character with what you must admit is the Teutonic nature of your dwarves. Are we to take it from this that they believed in the resurrection of the body?’

  ‘A difficult question,’ Tolkien answers. ‘But really, you know, it must be a tomb.’

  ‘Why, Tollers?’ Warnie asks. ‘You don’t object to cremation, do you?’

  ‘Generally speaking, the Catholic Church forbids it,’ says Havard, who has been a Catholic for about ten years. ‘There are exceptions, I believe, when there is any special reason – a plague, for instance. But in general it is not allowed, because (of course) it rather goes against belief in bodily resurrection.’

  ‘Oh, come now,’ says Lewis. ‘Your Church is perfectly entitled to practise what it chooses, but you can’t say that cremation denies the resurrection of the body. Why should the resurrection of a cremated body be any less plausible than that of a decayed body?’

  ‘That may be true,’ says Tolkien, ‘but you would find in fact that cremation is far more widely accepted by atheists than by adherents to any form of Christianity. It may not logically contradict the resurrection of the body, but it clearly goes with disbelief in it.’

  ‘But why on earth should it?’ asks Warnie. ‘I just don’t see that you’re putting up any case against cremation whatever.’

  ‘A corpse is a temple of the Holy Ghost,’ Tolkien says.

  ‘But you must admit, a vacated temple,’ Lewis answers.

  ‘Yes,’ Havard says. ‘But does that mean that it is right to destroy it? If a church has to be vacated for some reason, you don’t immediately blow it up or burn it to the ground.’

  ‘You would do,’ Warnie answers, ‘to prevent it being used, shall we say, by Communists. You’d surely rather see it destroyed then?’

  ‘No,’ Tolkien answers, ‘I would not.’

  Warnie persists: ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s very difficult to explain.’ Tolkien shifts uncomfortably in his chair. (‘I have no skill in verbal dialectic,’ he has remarked to one of his sons, adding, ‘I tend to lose my temper in arguments touching fundamentals, which is fatal.’) He says: ‘Take a slightly different example: if you knew that a chalice was going to be used by black magicians – as in that story of Williams’s – you wouldn’t regard it as therefore being your duty to destroy it, would you?’

  ‘I think I would,’ Warnie answers.

  ‘Then you would be mentally guilty if you did so. It would be your business simply to reverence it, and what the magicians did to it afterwards would be theirs.’

  ‘With due respect to your beliefs, Tollers,’ declares Lewis, ‘I think you are entirely missing the point.’ He is uncomfortably aware that the two Anglicans and the two Catholics have ranged themselves rather belligerently against each other, but he cannot by his nature drop an argument half-way through. ‘Surely the Incarnation is a key to what we should believe about the body? You remember the words of the Athanasian
Creed: One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh …’

  Another voice, with a London accent, takes up his words from the doorway: ‘… but by taking of the Manhood into God.’ Charles Williams has arrived after all. ‘One altogether,’ he continues to chant, ‘not by confusion of Substance; but by unity of Person.’ He crosses the room with brisk movements and throws himself down in the middle of the Chesterfield. ‘For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man; so God and Man is one Christ.’

  ‘We have been discussing,’ says Lewis a little lamely, ‘the subject of cremation.’

  ‘“Those are pearls that were his eyes …”’ Williams replies. ‘O, don’t you think that would be the best sort of burial? “Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.”’ He closes his eyes and tilts his head back, crossing his legs, so that his grey suit becomes a little creased. (Eliot’s description of Williams at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s seems fitted to Williams among the Inklings: ‘One retained the impression that he was pleased and grateful for the opportunity of meeting the company, and yet that it was he who had conferred a favour – more than a favour, a kind of benediction, by coming.’)

  ‘You’re frightfully late, Charles,’ says Warnie. ‘I expect you’d like some tea. Where have you been?’

  Williams sighs. ‘I was asked by some undergraduates to address them on Malory. I assented. I did not quite like not to. But it was – to be frank …’ He leaves the sentence unfinished.

  ‘Well, I’m sure they were enthralled,’ says Warnie. ‘I know your lectures are being greatly valued.’

  ‘That’s an understatement,’ adds his brother. ‘It’s a long time since anyone dropped on Oxford with such a cometary blaze.’

  ‘O, but yes,’ answers Williams. ‘Yet – one does not live by reputations. I’m always a trifle worried by Our Lord’s dictum, “Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you.”’ He turns to Lewis. ‘By the way, your Mr Sampson has been talking to me on the telephone. He has in mind a book for his “Christian Challenge” series; and would I be open to a proposal? I would, of course. There is a novel that I feel I ought to be doing, but I do not know what it is to be about, and for the moment …’ (Ashley Sampson is the publisher who commissioned Lewis’s The Problem of Pain.)